For a news media obsessed about the progeny of the Republican vice presidential nominee, you’d think they’d do some sleuthing around in the affairs of the Democratic presidential nominee.

Yesterday, Powerline’s Scott Johnson linked Tony Blankiey’s excellent article on the media’s “collaboration with Barack Obama:”

The mainstream media ruthlessly and endlessly repeat any McCain gaffes while ignoring Obama gaffes. You have to go to weird little Web sites to see all the stammering and stuttering that Obama needs before getting out a sentence fragment or two. But all you see on the networks is an eventually clear sentence from Obama. You don’t see Obama’s ludicrous gaffe that Iran is a tiny country and no threat to us. Nor his 57 American states gaffe. Nor his forgetting, if he ever knew, that Russia has a veto in the U.N. Nor his whining and puerile “come on” when he is being challenged. This is the kind of editing one would expect from Goebbels’ disciples, not Cronkite’s.

If the MSM were truly interested in reporting the news, we might see the media doing the following:

• Citing efforts by John McCain & other Republicans to reform Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in order to prevent a meltdown like the one taking place now on Wall Street.
• Asking why Democrats led by Barney Frank and Christopher Dodd thwarted those reform efforts.
• Reporting that Obama was one of the top recipient’s of Fannie Mae largesse.
• Pointing out that Obama has run more negative ads than has John McCain and has misrepresented (i.e., lied about) John McCain’s record in many of them (as well as in his stump speeches).
• Probing Barack Obama misrepresentations of his relationship with unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers. [UPDATE:  Peter Kirsanow writes that the "attempt to cover-up the extent of Sen. Obama's ties to William Ayers should have journalists salivating. This is a big story that, so far, the press seems determined to avoid."]
• Investigating that relationship.
• Making as much ruckus ties between a PR firm with ties to Democratic Party and anti-Palin “hit” videos as they did about ties between Karl Rove and the Swift Boat Veterans in 2004.
• Covering the ethics problems of Democratic House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charlie Rangel.  (Okay, okay, I realize this isn’t related to Obama, bt it’s a big story which hurts the Democrats and which the MSM is all but ignoring.)

These stories would help Americans get a better picture of the Democratic nominee, so that we might better choose the right man to preside over this nation for the next four years.

Please me know if you think there are other stories which the media should be reporting and, if appropriate, I’ll add them to the list.

UPDATE: Other stories the media should cover about Obama-Biden:

• Requesting that Biden release more than one year of his earmark requests.
• Exploring why Obama hasn’t released “paperwork related to grants to distributed by then-state-legislator Obama (records from 1997 to 2000 aren’t available); his state legislative office records (which he says may have been thrown out); . . .  a specific list of law clients.”  (Jim Geraghty has more questions at that link.)
• Exposing his threats to TV stations which run ads critical of him.
• Asking him how his campaign succeeded in removing all the names from the Democratic primary ballot in his first bid for state Senate.
• Looking into his relationship with the radical group ACORN.
• Pointing out the former Fannie Mae chairman Jim Johnson still plays a “behind-the-scenes role” in the Obama campaign.

UP-UPDATE:

• Asking Obama if he did anything to prevent his campaign’s national finance chair from  allowing religious leaders to fete “world’s leading Islamic terrorist and Jew-hater” in a hotel she owns.

Andrew Sullivan called Obama’s acceptance speech to the Democratic National Convention a “transformative event.”  Other Obama acolytes are similar gaga every time the Illinois Senator speaks before a large crowd.

And with good reason, the man is a gifted public speaker.  Yet, does that make him a good public servant?

This man enjoys in public success in large measure not because of things he had accomplished but because of words he has spoken.  His stirring speech four years ago to his party’s quadrennial confab moved millions, yet read that speech yourself and you’ll find an empty address, full of uplifting platitudes, devoid of substance.

In the past week, largely by exercising his rhetorical gifts and playing it cool on the financial crisis, Obama capitalized on John McCain’s campaign errors and reversed his Republican rival’s standing in the polls.  And yet, while the Arizona Senator flailed around a bit before offering a concrete statement of policy proposals, the Illinois Democrat offered no original proposal of his own.

He yielded to congressional Democrats, relying on them to come up with a solution to the mess on Wall Street.

With Obama’s inaction in mind, Carol Platt Liebau takes the Democrat to task for preferring words to action:

It’s shocking that someone who believes himself ready to lead the free world would so brazenly try to dodge any participation in what could be a defining moment in our history.  That’s not leadership — it’s cowardice.  It’s attempting to stay out of the way of any of the tough choices so that one is free to criticize them after others have stepped up.  You can fault John McCain for a lot of things, but lack of leadership and shrinking from the hard choices isn’t one of them.

(Via the Jewish Athena.)

Instead of making hard choices himself, Barack Obama just follows the lead of congressional Democrats. No wonder he has a near-perfect record of party loyalty.

This indicates that should he win this fall, he’ll let congressional Democrats set the agenda. With increased Democratic majorities in both Houses of Congress expected , it looks like Nancy Reid and Harry Pelosi will be running the show in an Obama Administration.

Given the mess they’ve made of Congress, the prospect of them in charge is not pretty.

I have had a completely crappy week.  It seems as though the “macro” world and my “micro” world are in complete collapse.  I tend to personalize and worry more than I probably should about the state of the nation and the world around us.  But this week has been a collision of bad news all around it seems.

My first reaction to the news of the bailout last weekend was — “No way should responsible, honest and timely mortgage owners and taxpayers shoulder the burden of those institutions and Americans who bit off more than they could chew.”   Sure, tough love — but $700 BILLION dollars?!?

Over the past week, I have listened to all sides of the issue — and paid special attention to folks like Jack Welch and Larry Kudlow.  And I have to say that I can’t stray away from my initial default decision on this:  “NO WAY.”

I understand the issue, I understand the need to unfreeze the credit markets.  But what I think most pundits are missing is that I do not trust our government and business institutions any more.  Not one bit.  I don’t trust them to do anything anymore.  I certainly don’t trust them to responsibly handle $700 BILLION dollars.

Our national government cannot even control our own border, manage its own spending, and execute a worldwide war on Islamism without major mistakes.   For the most part, our public school systems are turning out politically-correct, self-absorbed kids that don’t know the first thing about our government and why the USA was born 200 years ago.

This is not confined to the Bush Administration.  Simply put, the US Federal Government has demonstrated sheer and continued incompetence from the Oval Office to Capitol Hill to every dumb-ass mediocre bureaucrat throughout every agency of the Federal Government for the past two decades.

I fear our nation and perhaps what we think of “normal” is on the verge of changing radically. 

For now, I am calling my US Senators and Congresswoman and urging them (for now) to VOTE NO on the bailout — without major changes to satisfy We, The People.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

Recall how the national media swarmed to Anchorage after John McCain tapped Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate.  They were looking into every nook and cranny of the Last Frontier to find anything this good woman had done in her sixteen years on the public stage–and even before.

They’ve made an issue of her lunch receipts and lost their own lunches when they found out that just after her first mayoral election in 1996, she inquired about removing books for the local public library.  Of course, they neglect to point out that she never banned a single book, even after the librarian who responded unfavorably to her inquiry stepped down.

So, why isn’t the national media showing as much interest in Barack Obama’s past?   They’re silent when an Obama fundraiser appears in court on charges of fraud.  And they don’t seem interested in his long-time association with an unrepentant terrorist.

Now, the Illinois attorney general is investigating whether an $100,000 earmark “then-state Sen. Barack Obama awarded in 2001 to a group headed by a onetime campaign voluntteer” was used improperly:

state records obtained by the [Chicago] Sun-Times show $65,000 of the grant money went to the wife of Kenny B. Smith, the Obama 2000 congressional campaign volunteer who heads the Chicago Better Housing Association, which was in charge of the project for the blighted South Side neighborhood.

(Via Instapundit.)

Now, there is no evidence right now that Obama, the politician responsible for the earmark, was responsible for his supporter’s spouse pocketing the money. But, there’s more to this story relevant to what kind of leader Obama is than the story of the Republican vice presidential nominee’s husband’s 22-year-old drunk driving conviction. And the national media took an interest in that.

A google news search of “investigation Obama botanical garden” (without quotation marks) yielded only 3 hits, one to the Chicogo Sun-Times article quoted above, the other to a post on the blog Hot Air and the third to a UPI piece.  (“Todd Palin drunk driving” yields 751.)

No other national media picked up on this. They sure did spill a lot of ink (and waste a lot of pixels) on Sarah Palin’s earmark history. Why not Barack’s?

If you’re in New York this afternoon, try to make it to mid-town Manhattan for a protest across the street from the Grand Hyatt Hotel, East 42nd St between Park and Lexington Avenues at 6 PM today.

There, a group of fifty prominent Jewish and Christian leaders, and public policy groups will protest a dinner meeting between Iranian president Ahmadinejad, anti-American U.N. officials and American religious leaders.

Yeah, you read that right, American religious leaders, including representatives of The American Friends Service Committee, Mennonite Central Committee, Quaker UN Office, Religions for Peace, and the World Council of Churches-UN Liaison Office will be breaking bread with a man who murders his own people.

He executes gay people too. I wonder if national gay organizations will question these groups for dining with the tyrant. I’d bet good money they’d be demanding apologies if these groups honored James Dobson in a similar manner.  I could find nothing on the web-sites of the Human Rights Campaign or the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF).  

Log Cabin Republicans, however, are co-sponsoring this protest.  At least one national gay group is standing up to the most anti-gay regime on the planet.

Not just that U.N. officials will also be there, honoring a man who threatens the destruction of U.N. member state, something which violates the organization’s charter:

Top U.N. officials are scrambling to figure out how to stop the president of the General Assembly, Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann, from dining with and honoring Mr. Ahmadinejad, who has violated an assembly resolution against denying the Holocaust and broken one of the cardinal rules of the U.N. Charter by calling for the elimination of a member state, Israel.

Why do so many Western élites embrace the most hateful anti-American leaders?  Why do they assume that if we just sit down and talk to our enemies, we’ll make everything better? As if it’s our intransigence that’s the cause of our adversaries’ angry attitudes, brutal policies and despotic acts.

If you think it’s wrong to honor a tyrannical world leader and question the naivete of these religious leaders and are in the New York City area, make sure to join this protest today!

Over at CampaignSpot, Jim Geraghty noticed something that Bruce first drew to my attention two weeks ago: independent voters are breaking for John McCain.

In two successive posts yesterday, Geraghty observed that both the Wall Street Journal poll and the LA Times poll had McCain beating Obama among independents by margins of thirteen points and fifteen points respectively.

Yet, while McCain has slipped in the polls in the past two weeks, the Journal‘s Laura Meckler observes:

The survey finds that Sen. Obama has lost ground with the independent voters who will be crucial to the outcome of the election. They now favor Sen. McCain by 13 percentage points, up from eight points two weeks ago. In early September, just after both parties’ conventions, half of independent voters had a positive image of Sen. Obama; now it’s just 39%. Independents were also less likely to say they could identify with his background and values than they were in early September.

If Obama has lost ground among independents, how has he managed to gain ground among the general electorate? Has there been a stampede of voters away from the GOP and toward the Democrats? Or have the pollsters been oversampling Democrats?

UPDATE:  Just received an e-mail from a politically independent acquaintance who tends to vote Democratic, but leans toward McCain this year.

Yesterday, we had one candidate talk like a president. The other acted like a president.

In the morning, Barack Obama contacted his Republican rival’s campaign and proposed the two candidates issue a “joint statement outlining their shared principles and conditions for the Treasury proposal.”  John McCain responded by saying they should also both suspend their campaigns return to Washington and get something done.

The Democrat offered words.  The Republican proposed action.  Each candidate seems to have the same recurring theme to his career.

In his eloquent initial response to McCain’s proposal, Obama may have offered his best line of the campaign, ““Presidents are going to have to deal with more than one thing at a time,” but like most of his great achievements in life, it was pure rhetoric.  McCain said they would have to deal with this one most pressing issue.  Once again, he tackles a tough issue head-on.

While initially rebuffing McCain’s proposal to return to Washington to hammer out a Wall Street bailout, Obama finally capitulated and agreed to President Bush’s invitation to come to the White House with the Republican nominee and congressional leaders to work out a deal.

What seemed to some a reckless move at first turned out to be one of the boldest moves of the campaign. And it paid off.  Obama may deliver better speeches, but his rival is driving the action now.  

On Wednesday, John McCain looked like a leader.  Only he didn’t appear so at first, like a general who makes what appears to be a foolhardy move, but when the enemy takes the bait, proves to be a brilliant tactic.

Not only was this good politics for John McCain, but it was good politics for the nation.  Getting all major parties together means we should come up with the “least worst” solution to this mess.  No wonder John McCain is looking pretty presidential right now.

THURSDAY MORNING UPDATE:  Below the jump, I reference other bloggers and pundits who have weighed in on this matter: (more…)

When blogger Dirty Harry came over to my place so we could drive together to Simi Valley to see the Gipper’s Hellcats of the Navy on the big screen, I was still ambivalent about McCain’s decision to suspend his campaign.  I shared my post on the topic with him.

In the car, he read me his from the blackberry:  ”This could look like a a serious act of leadership on McCain’s part or the act of a candidate up against the wall hoping to shake things up in his favor.”  I remarked that despite our difference in styles, we reached similar conclusions.  (Read the whole thing; it’s short and to the point.)

As we drove to Simi Valley, we started discussing how independent voters would perceive it.  He read some poll on the internet which suggested it would play well.  We began to feel increasingly despondent. When a Democratic friend called, I told him (via blue tooth of course) I thought the move was “foolhardy” and would likely work to Obama’s advantage.

A few moments later, D.H. started reading Ed Morrissey’s post on how John McCain called Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s bluff by agreeing to come to Washington.  That Democrat had abruptly changed his tune when the Arizona Republican said he would do just that.  (Again, read the whole thing.)

Maybe this move was as shrewd as it had occasionally appeared to me this afternoon.  We became cautiously optimistic (note that accent on the adverb.)

Then, D.H.’s  wife, the Hot Little Number, called him to inform him that Obama had capitulated and agreed to come to Washington for a summit organized by President Bush.

McCain’s gambit had paid off.  That we knew by the Hot Little Number’s description of the talking heads at CNN:  they looked like kids who just had their bicycles taken away.  Even Mark Halperin agreed that only McCain could have pulled off such a thing.

We were exuberant.  From despondency to exuberance in the space of an hour.  How quick the landscape shifts in this election.  

I don’t think this will be the last time in 2008 we experience such campaign whiplash.