Originally published by Mike "gamecock" DeVine as Charlotte Law and Civil Rights Examiner for Examiner.com

What is the big hurry in “declaring” the winner of North Carolina’s electoral votes in the presidential election? Especially since the outcome will not slow down the transition of President-Elect Barack Obama?

The day after the election, AP reported:

“In the unofficial returns, Obama led Republican John McCain by 13,746 votes. Gary Bartlett, the state elections director, said Obama should be considered the unofficial victor. Bartlett said an estimated 40,000 provisional ballots still must be counted, but based on experience, the outcome is not likely to change when the State Board of Elections certifies the results on Nov. 25.”

Electors don’t meet until December 15th, the Joint Session of Congress to count the votes isn’t until January 6th and Inauguration Day isn’t until January 20th.

The Tar Heel state’s election official responsible for carrying out the law gives the AP license to report what “should” be, based on “experience”? After Florida 2000? And just what is the “experience” Bartlett relies upon: that “history suggests that “about 65%” of provisional ballots will be eligible.

The math: Sixty-Five percent of 40,000 equals 26,000, which just happens to be about twice as many votes John McCain needs to win North Carolina.

On Wednesday, the AP and Charlotte Observer (in none of these stories would any actual reporter attack their name to such incompetence) declared “Obama's bid to win North Carolina – now only symbolic” with provisional ballots “holding up” a decision.

What happened to McCain’s “bid”? And how dare those voters hold up a rush to coronate Obama by voting provisionally?

And the outcome is “only” symbolic? If symbolism didn’t matter to Bartlett and his agent, the Associated Press, there would have been no rush to judgment on Friday:

“The Associated Press declared Obama the winner after canvassing counties in North Carolina to determine the number of outstanding provisional ballots. That survey found there aren't enough remaining ballots for Republican John McCain to close a 13,693-vote deficit.”

Clearly AP should replace Johnny, as in “Johnny can’t count.”

Symbols matter, and the AP, aided and abetted by a North Carolina government official, has prematurely foisted a symbol they prefer upon the history books.

That is, until their “history” was examined by DeVine Law.

And this does not even account for all the millions of absentee ballots. For that story check fellow Charlotte political examiner, Caleb Howe.

It seems the process is being carried out and reported by monkeys that don’t want to see or hear anything they don’t want to say about the only bid they care about, i.e. Obama's bid.

Mike DeVine’s Examiner.com and Charlotte Observer columns.

"One man with courage makes a majority." -  Andrew Jackson

[For links to AP stories cited in this article see original story at Examiner.com]

“Small businesses should be making business decisions, not tax decisions.”

So declared John McCain’s friendliest vanquished rival for the Republican presidential nomination during a campaign rally in Charlotte last week that skewered Barack Obama for change small businesses can’t believe in.

Former Governor of Arkansas Mike Huckabee minced no words in his condemnation of changes the Democratic presidential nominee proposes that would raise taxes on small businesses.

Adam Barrington, an ordained minister and former homeless shelter administrator (pictured right with Huckabee), served as our eyes and ears during the McCain-Palin rally last Wednesday at Hef’s Bar & Grill:

“[Huckabee delivered] a general stump speech for McCain, but the one thing that stuck out was [that] he talked about how small businesses are going to get screwed under Obama.  He talked about a mom and pop pizza place…that employs 45 people… [that], with rising energy and fuel costs [and] their profit margins…shrinking, [would] have to lay people off to pay their tax bill (under Obama’s tax plan).”

Huckabee’s indictment of Obama’s policies concerning existing businesses comes on the heels of Joe “The Plumber” Wurzelbacher’s concerning disincentives to start new businesses. When confronted by Joe, the junior Senator from Illinois declared that it was “good for everybody” to “spread the wealth around.”

One wonders how much wealth won’t be available for spreading around if Obama has his way, since he would:

1) allow the Bush income tax rate cuts to expire in 2010, costing families of four making as little as $60K, up to $2000 per year;
2) raise the level of income against which Social Security Payroll (FICA) taxes apply;
3) increase the “death tax”; and
4) increase income and capital gains taxes for families earning more than $250K per year.

Most jobs in this country are created by small businesses. Obama touts his policies as friendly to small business since “most” would not be affected by numbers (3) and (4) above, never mind the devastating effect of number (2) on them. But Obama’s law changes would apply to more than half of all income produced by such businesses, earned by the very ones that are the large job producers.

All of the above is proposed amidst an unprecedented financial crisis and negative GDP growth, despite Obama’s admission that he would consider suspending his tax law changes, IF the economy was bad.

If?

One is reminded of his criticism of President Clinton’s capital gains tax cuts during a debate last spring with Hillary Clinton in which, despite being informed by moderator Charlie Gibson that revenues increased after the rate cuts, Obama still favored higher rates due to concerns of “fairness”. What is “fair” about such policies that result in less wealth to spread around and less revenue to the government was not addressed.

By contrast, John McCain would lower the U.S. corporate tax rate, which is one of the highest in the industrialized world; make the Bush tax rate cuts permanent and lower the capital gains rate.

Calvin Coolidge famously said that “The business of America is business.”

One would hope!

But the results of this examination conclude that if we want more business, we had best hope we don’t get the tax “fairness” changes Obama believes in.
 

As usual the mainstream media, and that includes Fox News, misses the big story while they act out their roles on "game-changers" and their historically ignorant and discredited "Debate Moment" theory of Presidential election outcomes.

The game changer is not a debate moment. Its that liberals rarely win this game.

But they did manage to miss a major gaffe by Obama and the major message he sent that puts him in the unelectable liberal category.

America saw a man that thinks that plumbers, and, by implication, those small business owners economically equal to and better off than plumbers, should pay higher taxes. That he says 95% of taxpayers will get a tax cut loses its power when middle class people that think themselves akin to plumbers or better off, see that Obama puts them in the 5% that will get a tax hike.

Then, Obama contradicts himself by saying that the plumber is too poor to be subject to a fine for not providing health care. Clearly he was flustered by McCain demanding he state the amount the government would fine small business owners for not buying government prescribed health care for employees.

So, as he often does, when corner like a rat by a cat, Obama lied.

His tax plan and health care plans both consider one rich at the same income level.

Obama will always have trouble getting a low price for plumbing services given his desire to plumb the depths of their profits to spread their hard earned wealth around to others that didn't crawl thru the mud to fix pipes, but the leak in his message that he is a champion of the middle class is now huge flood that can't be plugged at any price.

Originally published By Mike DeVine, as Legal Editor for The Minority and HinzSight Reports

"This new information about Barack Obama's relationships with ACORN and William Ayers raises a lot of questions." - (insert TV political talking head's name here)

Wrong.

The information coming out now, during the "attentive voter season" before Election Day, answers all the questions voters have before they vote every four years.

Does this candidate share the Judeo-Christian values that have defined our Nation and have served us so well for so long? Does he have the character worthy of occupying the most powerful position on Earth? And would enemies of the United States fear that he would aggressively defend us?

To listen to TV talking heads, even those named Hannity and Gingrich, from whose Thursday night discussion I culled the above paraphrase, no questions are ever answered. Rather, what are, in deed, revelations, only reveal to a brain dead media another line of questioning that Obama could theoretically trump with some glib retort, on their television shows. For you see, if questions are ever definitively answered, there would no reason to tune in and listen to them any more!

Moreover, even our conservative pundits, like ourselves if we don't be careful, can be just as guilty of elitist tunnel vision as liberals. Add to that, the all too common, "the world was just invented this election cycle", of so many of the poll-obsessed yutes in the blogosphere, egged on by a media that sells the idea that past election losses by, leading in the polls until the end, Democrats were decided by debate moments or clever ads late in the campaign, and you witness the rampant defeatism of so many conservatives for whom McCain can never attack aggressively enough.

I heard all this from 1980-1988 and 2000-2008. Absent a known leftist and a Perot, we win.

The only slightly credible argument advanced by the defeatists is that Obama is not a "known" leftist. But even on this, a certain kind of elitism blinds the defeatist.

The defeatist knows Obama is a far left appeasing, Marxist that is unfit for the office of President of the United States. He sees it oh so clearly and, due to historical ignorance, allows his emotions to be manipulated by polls. Moreover, and more importantly, he thinks that the average, mostly inattentive for the past four years, mostly non-political potential voter, does not see Obama for what he is, and that he won't see Obama for the extremist he is unless John McCain and Charlie Gibson say exactly what the defeatist thinks ought be said in just the way our defeatist hero wants.

I say, get over yourselves.

One mistake the defeatists make is that they watch the news in a different way than the average voter. We political junkies watch news reports about the Obama revelations to see how the media spins the revelations. The average voter, on the other hand, sees and hears the revelations. They are new to the average voter. And they are about the business, NOW, of getting attentive to make their choice on Election Day. They know that they get to vote on that day. They have lived through other election days and remember that they made the right choice then. They will this time.

The now attentive voters were already jolted into noticing Obama by the God-damned America sermons Obama sat thru for 20 years. Their common sense prevents any glib excuses to drown out the din of his pew-parked butt on that matter, nor on the fact of the new video of Farrakhan dubbing him the Messiah. They understand that it would not be appropriate for any candidate to hang with a less competent Timothy McVeigh that got off on a legal technicality and serve on boards to craft an "education reform" on radicalism short of bombing government buildings in Oklahoma, just because they were wetting diapers in the 90s. Same with Ayers.

The public sees and hears, just like us. Yes, we saw and heard months ago. It’s our life. These "swing" voters have real lives. They had real lives in the past as well, and looked up just in time to see what we knew and elect Reagan twice, Bush 41, and Bush 43 twice.

Why? Because they saw that Mondale would raise taxes; abandon the conservative economic policies that were working; and not be feared by the USSR. They saw that Dukakis would do the same and that he didn't share our values with respect to crime, criminals and the appropriateness of the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance by school children. That Gore lacked character as revealed by his three characters and would abandon Bill Clinton's Reaganite economic policies and that Kerry would turn over US sovereignty to Kofi Annan.

They saw the liberal and rejected the liberal, just in time.

This past week these people, wracked by economic crisis, saw a slick lawyer that claimed he never represented the far left ACORN vote fraud community organizers as a lawyer.

Gamecock asked the question months ago if it were too much to ask Obama to name one client and one member of a community he organized. We already knew that he tried to hide the hopelessly audacious racist pastor/mentor praying in a church basement as he announced his candidacy. We, and even the usually inattentive American, have seen the wife he can't hide preach her un-proud of America cynicisms.

And this week we found out why Obama has never volunteered a satisfied client because his clients are vile. But more than that, this is not a case of a lawyer defending a criminal as part of his duty to the bar in our justice system. No. This is a case of his representation of his ideological brethren.

He was caught in a flat out lie could not possibly have been un-covered because of the "whole truth" compilations of appellate case reporting going back to US Reporter Volume One from 1790!

Obama is listed in federal reports as a lawyer for ACORN. For the non-legal, do you recall seeing those endless rows of identically bound thick volumes in courtrooms and law libraries? Those are books of ALL of the opinions of appellate cases in all courts of the United States and the states. They cannot be refuted.

Obama is caught in a brazen lie. And the beauty of it is that the lie ties him to not only ACORN, but also to Ayers "education" minutes on Annenberg, Obama's book review of Ayers book, and all the lies about their supposedly neighbor waving a neighbor thru a stop sign in the morning relationship. An ad of Obama and the nervous crowd laughter when he said teaching sex ed in grammar school and kindergarten is "the right thing to do" is on the air.

Palin has been attacking Obama for all this and for what it says about Obama in explicit terms. McCain has ads up doing the same, one of which has Bill Clinton blaming the dems in congress for the Fannie Mae caused economic crisis. Palin is all over the Obama votes against saving babies that survive abortions.

And, for all you ostriches, Rush, Levin and others played numerous clips this week of McCain himself calling out dems by name, including Obama for the crisis.

In short, the questions are being answered before our eyes and yet so many politically correct TV talking heads continue with the refrain that Obama needs to answer questions. One wonders if these people asked that question after the confession in To Kill a Mockingbird as the credits rolled after The End!

Obama's actions of the past 20 years are the answers, not any non sequiturs he might belch out during a "debate.'

No amount of psychoanalysis will change what he DID. No words from his mouth will make it all ok for him to hold the nukes for four seconds, much less four years.

Defeatist poll obsessors, lend me your ears!

The American people can connect the dots, and are, in fact doing so now. They can see through the voice-overs by a liberal in the tank media they viscerally distrust.

There is nothing new under the sun. The conversations on conservative websites I frequent are the same as I had with nervous nellies in quadrennial Leap Year Octobers past while a Republican, and the flip-side of too confident libs when I was democrat and knew that the gray-haired old lady in the second row of the Baptist choir was a better predictor of the aftermath of Election Day than the latest hurling from Gallup.

And hey, Newt and Hannity, don't let answers to questions pass you by. And hey, fellow members of the conservative chattering class: Lower your snobbish noses a bit and you will see the knowing looks in the eyes of the non-chatterers, as Obama's 20-year mask is removed just in time for Halloween.

Mike DeVine’s Charlotte Observer columns

Race 4 2008

By Mike DeVine

As I get up off my knees from thanking Nature’s God for our first and latest Treasury Secretaries, I see the current state of economic affairs in dimes not spared, gardens not grown and three non-filing stations near my Carolina home.

I ran out of gas today when none of the three closest stations to my home were selling any. But I didn’t run out of food despite the fact I don’t grow it and no brother asked me if I could spare a dime.

1929 it ain’t, and, despite our problems, it won’t be, unless We the People commit historical mass suicide and turn the Indispensable Nation’s affairs over to Nancy, Harry and Barack’s 21^st Century version of Herbert Hoover.

Given that Obama and Pelosi have not learned the lesson of the Quaker State’s first oil well and our delivery from riding Donkeys, it should not surprise us they from the party of that stubborn like a mule donkey, have also failed to learn the lessons of Hoover, for they want to repeat his post-1929 crash trade tariffs and tax hikes.

The Hoovercrats blame the current financial crisis on a lack of regulation, despite the fact that it was Clinton Era regulations that directed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to guarantee mortgage loans to credit risky borrowers in the name of fighting supposed “institutional white racism.” So the loans flowed, egged on by an overabundance of non-salaried realtors and loan officers whose universe of potential customers were mostly credit challenged. The Hoovercrats now label the fruits of their regulations, “predatory lending” and were successful in enacting a major bailout of ARM mortgagees a few months ago.

For their part, McCain-Palin are out there blaming the Housing/Credit Crunch driven financial market crisis on “corruption on Wall Street.” This is too simplistic an explanation and too shallow a justification for “more regulation”.

While I would denounce Michael Douglas’s “greed is good” declaration in the movie Wall Street, greed is, and always has been since Eve bit the apple. And our system has been and is the best at channeling same for good and mitigating the bad as has ever existed.

The fact is that no amount of regulation can prevent speculative bubbles in a free society. And the alternative to a free society is the biggest bubble of all: tyranny and its attendant deprivation that makes one long for our relatively puny bubbles.

This is a basic lesson from that early Babylonian garden: without free choice, there can be no real prosperity. The Founders understood that for wealth to be created, people would have to risk failure, with the prize for success being to get to keep the fruits of one’s labor.

After man left gardens and started hiring them out to Winn Dixies, it became necessary for government to grow, so the argument of big vs. small government is moot. The issue is how big and whether governed by basic principles or moral hazard.

Clearly, Fannie and Freddie guaranteed too large a percentage of mortgage loans and their failure, combined with other factors including a weak dollar and high energy prices, has caused a crisis that we remain in the midst of. But I am confident that President Bush’s genius at Treasury, Henry Paulson, who lately has eschewed Sunday rest, based on Christ’s adage that the Sabbath was made for man, and not vice versa, to do the yeoman’s work of adjusting the Hamilton edifice for a changing world.

But one thing has not changed, as evidenced by the recent spectacular rise in the dollar: The United States is THE indispensable nation. The world can’t thrive without selling their wares here and investing their money here. The rise in the dollar started soon after Putin over-reached in Georgia. A dying mafia nation flush with lottery oil money counted on western euro weenies to counsel their eastern neighbors on surrender. But Bush put the US military on land and sea in Russia’s path to Tbilisi while the former slave states flew their Presidents to the Caucasus to give Putin the middle finger.

Russia’s stock market crashed. But they have Ossetia and the North Pole.

The world is voting with their money on America, while the Hoovercrats want to take money from Americans while denying them their own oil on the hope for a wind driven alchemy even Merlin the Magician couldn't conjure.

President Bush twice tried to get Congress to limit Fannie and Freddie. Pelosi refused.

John McCain tried to do the same. John McCain wants to drill offshore. Obama does not. McCain wants you and the businesses you work for and shop at to keep more of the fruits of their labor. Obama wants to raise taxes.

One day, the USA will fall. Greece and Rome fell. Eventually we will fall, and eventually I will die. But I’m not throwing my body in front of a semi to hasten the day.

For the world, we are too big to fail, but for Obama, despite the role of non-accountability in the current crisis, wants to sell the idea that the government should ensure no one can fall. The last great such experiment ended with a wall falling near where his campaign began its descent in Berlin. For Pelosi and Obama, the government is still too small to satisfy their gargantuan egos. But they are blind to America’s greatness, greatness too big to indulge their historical ignorance.

Mike DeVine’s Charlotte Observer columns

Legal Editor for The Minority and HinzSight Reports

"The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race." - The Chief Justice

Race 4 2008

"One man with courage makes a majority." - Andrew Jackson