David Drake

President Obama, in a pivot from some of his harshest campaign rhetoric, told Democratic senators yesterday that he is willing to consider taxing employer-sponsored health benefits to help pay for a broad expansion of coverage.

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White House officials moved quickly to clarify that taxing the health insurance provided by businesses is not Obama's first choice, but aides refused to rule out the possibility.

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Nevertheless, the issue represents treacherous politics for Obama, given his attacks on Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who advocated a similar approach during the campaign.

"For the first time in American history, he wants to tax your health benefits," Obama said in September. "Apparently, Senator McCain doesn't think it's enough that your health premiums have doubled. He thinks you should have to pay taxes on them, too."

...the Obama spending bill would stimulate the government, not the economy.

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First, there are two ways you can put money into the economy, by spending more or by taxing less. But if it's stimulus you want, taxing less works best. That's why permanent tax cuts should be the centerpiece of the economic stimulus.

Iran's president said on Thursday the new U.S. administration must change Washington's approach to the Islamic Republic, which is embroiled in a row with the United States over its nuclear program.

Asked about President-elect Barack Obama, who has promised to engage more with Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told a news conference:

"Any administration in America that takes office should at least make two changes in its behavior, the first change is in the field of America's interference ... The circle of interference should be limited to within American borders."

Gunshots and an anti-tank missile were fired at IDF troops near the UN compound that was attacked by the IDF on Thursday, senior defense officials told The Jerusalem Post.

According to the officials, the IDF responded by firing artillery shells at the location of the gunmen, causing damage to the UN installations.

I believe Obama has an ace in the hole among Senate Republicans. This unlikely ace can deliver not only the GOP moderates needed to break a filibuster, but also the stamp of bipartisanship: the 2008 GOP standard bearer, John McCain.

...some East Coast ministers and conservative activists, who took to the streets in front of a downtown Salt Lake City theater on the eve of Robert Redford's Sundance Film Festival to accuse the actor of holding down low-income Americans with his opposition to oil and gas drilling near national parks in Utah.

"Spending billions of additional federal tax dollars with no promises to reform the root causes crippling automakers' competitiveness around the world is neither fair to taxpayers nor sound fiscal policy."

Senate Democrats, who support the measure, would need 12 to 15 Republican votes to reach the 60 votes needed to overcome an expected GOP filibuster.

The only Republican so far to publicly support an auto bailout is Sen. George Voinovich of Ohio, a state with several auto plants and manufacturers of auto supplies.

In an attempt to garner more support for the bill, Reid said an extension of unemployment benefits would also be added to the legislation.

"These two provisions [auto loans and unemployment extension] both address especially urgent needs and seem most likely to win your support and the support of your caucus," Reid wrote in a letter Friday to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky.

McConnell, who has auto industry manufacturing in his state, has not said if he supports the bill.

McCain: "I'll do anything...ANYTHING...I can to help you, to work with you and to poke Conservatives in the eye with a sharp stick just as I've done so many times in the past. I'll be only too happy to side with Democrats on a myriad of issues. You just tell me how you want me to vote and I'll be only to happy to obey."

Pbama: "Thank you, John. I was hoping you'd say that and I am not disappointed."

The op-ed page ran far more laudatory opinion pieces on Obama, 32, than on Sen. John McCain, 13. There were far more negative pieces about McCain, 58, than there were about Obama, 32, and Obama got the editorial board's endorsement.

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The number of Obama stories since Nov. 11 was 946, compared with McCain's 786.

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...from June 9, when Clinton dropped out of the race, until Nov. 2, 66 percent of the campaign stories were about Obama compared with 53 percent for McCain; some stories featured both.

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...from June 4, Obama was in 311 Post photos and McCain in 282. Obama led in most categories. Obama led 133 to 121 in pictures more than three columns wide, 178 to 161 in smaller pictures, and 164 to 133 in color photos.

The McCain campaign has already filed a lawsuit in Virginia to ensure that all absentee ballots from overseas military voters are counted. Late Tuesday, a judge set a hearing for Nov. 10 and ordered election officials to keep late-arriving military ballots.

"Because many counties in Virginia failed to mail absentee ballots in time to our men and women in uniform stationed overseas, service members are being disenfranchised because they are unable to return their ballots before the November 4 deadline," campaign spokeswoman Gail Gitcho said in a written statement about the suit, which is scheduled to be heard in Williams' courtroom at 1:30 p.m. today.

Chesapeake, Suffolk and Virginia Beach are among the localities cited in the lawsuit as those that mailed absentee ballots overseas in late September. The suit argues that service members didn't have enough time to cast their votes and return them stateside.

Black Panther party members in full uniform are stationed at some 300 polling places in battleground states. Are they trying to intimidate voters who would be voting for John McCain?

Well you can judge for yourself. This video shows two Black Panther members, one carrying a nightstick, at a Philadelphia polling place. How many people were intimidated by these two before police made the one with the nightstick leave the premises? The other one is still there. Are any of you who voted for Obama having second thoughts yet?

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It really is obvious that Democrats are trying to steal this election. They have been aided by a media who refuses to investigate these things and in fact has tried to aid them by trying to suppress McCain voting by indicating that the outcome is inevitable.

In 2000, there were over 50 different investigations trying to prove that Gore actually won Florida. None were able to do so. Bush won again in 2004 despite the efforts of the Kerry campaign to suppress the military vote and again more voters than actual people in parts of Ohio. There were claims of problems with voting machines but Kerry declined an investigation possibly because he was worried that improprieties of his own campaign might be brought to light.

A state personnel board said Monday Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin did not abuse her office as governor of Alaska in the "Troopergate" case, rejecting the findings of an earlier probe by the state legislature.

The report was released the day before the US presidential elections in which Palin's role in the case became political fodder in the campaign.

"There is no probable cause to believe that Governor Palin violated the Alaska Executive Ethics Act by making the decision to dismiss Department of Public Safety Commissioner (Walt) Monegan and offering him instead the position of Director of the Alaska Beverage Control Board," the board said.

Last month an investigation commissioned by the state legislature found Palin had violated ethics rules when she dismissed Monegan in July, allegedly because he refused to fire a state trooper, her former brother-in-law.

Palin requested the second investigation be conducted by the state personnel board after alleging the legislature's probe was politically motivated.

The board's report, posted on the Anchorage Daily News website, also found that no other state official had violated ethics rules and that there was no need to hold a hearing on "reputational harm" done to Monegan, which he requested.

The board did say that the use of "private e-mails for government work" needed to be addressed, an apparent reference to Palin at times using her personal e-mail account for state business.

Monegan claimed he was fired because of his refusal to sack Wooten, who had been involved in an acrimonious divorce with Palin's younger sister in 2005.

The legislature's inquiry, carried out by a special counsel, found that while Palin was within her rights as Alaska governor to dismiss Monegan, she had breached ethics rules by allowing her husband to badger officials into firing Wooten.

Palin refused to testify in the first investigation but cooperated with the second probe.

The personnel board's report said there was no evidence to show the governor was pushing to have her former brother-in-law sacked.

The report said that "absent from the evidence reviewed is any assertion that the Governor directed anyone in the Department of Public Safety to terminate Trooper Wooten, or directed anyone on her staff to seek the termination of Trooper Wooten."

* Comments made by sources, voters, reporters and anchors that aired on ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts over the past two months reflected positively on Obama in 65 percent of cases, compared to 31 percent of cases with regards to McCain.

* ABC's "World News" had more balance than NBC's "Nightly News" or the "CBS Evening News," the group said.

* Meanwhile, the first half of Fox News Channel's "Special Report" with Brit Hume showed more balance than any of the network broadcasters, although it was dominated by negative evaluations of both campaigns. The center didn't evaluate programs on CNN or MSNBC.

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"For whatever reason, the media are portraying Barack Obama as a better choice for president than John McCain," said Robert Lichter, a George Mason University professor and head of the center. "If you watch the evening news, you'd think you should vote for Obama."

The center analyzed 979 separate news stories shown between Aug. 23 and Oct. 24, and excluded evaluations based on the campaign horse race, including mention of how the candidates were doing in polls.

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ABC recorded 57 percent favorable comments toward the Democrats, and 42 percent positive for the Republicans. NBC had 56 percent positive for the Democrats, 16 percent for the Republicans. CBS had 73 percent positive (Obama), versus 31 percent (McCain).

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The Project for Excellence in Journalism concluded last week that McCain's coverage has been overwhelmingly negative since the conventions ended, while Obama's has been more mixed.

Back in 2001, Barack Obama gave an interview to a Chicago public radio station in which he talked about using the Supreme Court, the most undemocratic of the three branches of government (nonelected, lifetime terms), to "spread the wealth." Some rough excerpts:

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"...the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and the more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society, and to that extent, as radical as, I think, people try to characterize the Warren court, it wasn't that radical; it didn't break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers and the Constitution..."

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"You can craft theoretical justification for it legally, and any three of us sitting here could come up with a rationale for bringing about economic change through the courts."

WND has learned that Hawaii's Gov. Linda Lingle has placed the candidate's birth certificate under seal and instructed the state's Department of Health to make sure no one in the press obtains access to the original document under any circumstances.

The governor's office officially declined a request made in writing by WND in Hawaii to obtain a copy of the hospital-generated original birth certificate of Barack Obama.

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In searching through the birth notices of the Honolulu Advertiser for 1961, WND found many birth notices were published between one and two weeks after the date of birth listed.

The notice in the Honolulu Advertiser does not list the hospital where the Obama son was born or the doctor who delivered the baby.

In a startling development, Obama's Kenyan grandmother has reportedly alleged she witnessed Obama's birth at the Coast Provincial Hospital in Mombasa, Kenya.

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In Kenya, WND was told by government authorities that all documents concerning Obama were under seal until after the U.S. presidential election on November 4.

A Philadelphia lawyer who has alleged Barack Obama is ineligible for the presidency will immediately appeal his case to the Supreme Court after a district court ruled that the potential harm posed by the presidential candidate's ineligibility is "too vague" to allow voters standing to bring charges.

Philip J. Berg, esq., former deputy attorney general of PA and avowed lifelong Democrat, alleges that Sen. Obama is ineligible to run for president based on the claim that he is not a natural-born citizen of the United States. According to the Constitution, only natural-born citizens are allowed to become President of the United States.

While the Obama campaign has dismissed the claims as false, Berg points out that Obama has failed to publicly release a birth certificate that could prove he was born in the United States.

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"This is a question of who has standing to uphold our Constitution," said Berg in response to the decision. "If I don't have standing, if you don't have standing, if your neighbor doesn't have standing to question the eligibility of an individual to be President of the United States - the Commander-in-Chief, the most powerful person in the world - then who does?

"So, anyone can just claim to be eligible for congress or the presidency without having their legal status, age or citizenship questioned," he complained.

Democrat Barack Obama's lead over Republican rival John McCain has dropped to 5 points, according to a Reuters/C-SPAN/Zogby poll released on Sunday.

Obama leads McCain by 49 percent to 44 percent among likely U.S. voters in the daily tracking poll, which has a margin of error of 2.9 points. Obama's lead has dropped over the last three days after hitting a high of 12 points on Thursday.

"Things are trending back for McCain. His numbers are rising and Obama's are dropping on a daily basis. There seems to be a direct correlation between this and McCain talking about the economy," pollster John Zogby said.

A young woman campaigning for John McCain was recently robbed by a man who was then infuriated when he saw her McCain bumper sticker. He then carved the letter "b" (for Barack) into her face.

After telling his supporters last month to get in their neighbour's faces, it appears that one of Barack Obama's supporters may have taken his words, well way too far.

According to one report, the 20-year-old woman is a "campaign staffer for John McCain" from Texas. The young woman, was taking money out of an ATM in Bloomfield, a suburb of Pittsburgh, was approached and robbed by a man wielding a knife. After taking $60 from the terrified woman, it is being reported that the robber became enraged when he saw a McCain bumper sticker on the woman's car and he allegedly attacked the woman by kicking and punching her. He then took his knife and carved the letter "B" into her face.

The robber is described as a dark-skinned black man, 6 feet 4 inches tall, 200 pounds with a medium build, short black hair and brown eyes. The man was wearing dark colored jeans, a black undershirt and black shoes.

The assault happened outside of the view of the bank's video camera system.

Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell wants Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., back in the Keystone State. He's worried Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., could still pull off a victory there.

"I don’t want to be selfish,” Rendell told CNN. “But I’m still a little nervous, so I have asked Obama to come back. We understand he’s got demands from 20 different states, but we’d like to see him here.”

Sarah Palin used a heavy dose of sarcasm Tuesday to suggest that Barack Obama is unprepared to serve as commander in chief, laying out scenarios she said made the country vulnerable to an international crisis under his watch.

Palin fed off the words of Obama’s running mate, Joe Biden, who suggested Sunday that Obama would be challenged by an international crisis in his first six months of office. At a rally at the Reno Convention Center Tuesday, Palin described four scenarios “that would place our country at risk in an Obama administration,” including sitting down with dictators and sending American troops to Pakistan over the objections of the country’s leader.

“But I guess the looming crisis that most worries the Obama campaign right now is Joe Biden’s next speaking engagement,” Palin said. “Let’s call that crisis scenario number five.”

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But it was her comments about Pakistan that were most striking. Palin said that Obama advocates for “invading the sovereign territory of a troubled partner in the war against terrorism.”

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“See, the real problem is that these warnings from Joe Biden are similar to his earlier assessment,” Palin said Tuesday. “It wasn’t that long ago that he said Barack Obama wasn’t up to the job, he’s not ready to be president. He said, I quote, ‘the presidency is not something that lends itself to on-the-job training.’”

Biden, who was speaking at a fundraiser in Seattle on Sunday night, said: “Mark my words, it will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. The world is looking. We’re about to elect a brilliant 47-year-old senator president of the United States of America. Remember I said it standing here . . . we’re gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy.”

Mr Biden cited Russia and the Middle East as possible places that may cause problems, as well as the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan – “crawling with al-Qaeda” – as being of concern.

“He’s gonna need help,” the senator added, “Because it’s not gonna be apparent, initially, that we’re right.”

He added: “I probably shouldn’t have said all this because it dawned on me that the press is here.”

Both campaigns have been briefed by the Bush Administration on intelligence amid warnings that terrorists and rogue states will seek to exploit the three-month transition period after the election in November.