With all of B. Hussein Obama’s ties to domestic terrorists and radical organizations, you’d think the DOJ would have had that little nihilist in their crosshairs a while ago.
Sen. Barack Obama has launched an all-out effort to block a Republican billionaire’s efforts to tie him to domestic and foreign terrorists in a wave of negative television ads.
Obama’s campaign has written the Department of Justice demanding a criminal investigation of the “American Issues Project,” the vehicle through which Dallas investor Harold Simmons is financing the advertisements. The Obama campaign — and tens of thousands of supporters — also is pressuring television networks and affiliates to reject the ads. The effort has met with some success: CNN and Fox News are not airing the attacks.
Obama has also launched his own response ad, directly addressing Simmons’ attempt to link him to domestic terror.
The project is “a knowing and willful attempt to violate the strictures of federal election law,” Obama general counsel Bob Bauer wrote to Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Keeney last week in a letter provided to Politico. Bauer argued that by advocating Obama’s defeat, the ad should be subject to the contribution limits of federal campaign law, not the anything-goes regime of issue advocacy.
Bauer’s letter called on the Justice Department to open “an investigation of the American Issues Project; its officers and directors; and its anonymous donors, whoever they may be.”
“This is a sad ploy to circumvent the First Amendment by a campaign who has no arguments with the merits of our ad. It’s the classic maneuver: If you can’t win on the merits, file a lawsuit,” said a spokesman for the American Issues Project, Christian Pinkston, who said his group’s non-profit status allowed it to participate in elections as long as it does a majority of policy work, which it plans to do.
……The Obama campaign plans to punish the stations that air the ad financially, an Obama aide said, organizing his supporters to target the stations that air it and their advertisers.
But the ad continues to air widely. Evan Tracey, who tracks campaign advertising at TNS Media Intelligence, said it has been broadcast 150 times in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Michigan. Federal Election Commission reports indicate that Simmons has spent more than $2.8 million buying ads.
Obama’s campaign has written a pair of letters to station managers carrying the ads.
The letter calls the ad’s attempt to link Obama to terrorism “an appalling lie, a disgraceful smear of the lowest kind on the senator’s patriotism and commitment to the rule of law.”
Airing the ad “is inconsistent with your station’s obligations under Federal Communications Commission regulations,” the letter continues, saying Simmons’ group lacks formal incorporation.
……The ad focuses on Obama’s relationship with Bill Ayers, a Hyde Park acquaintance at whose home Obama attended a gathering early in his political career. Ayers is a complicated figure: professor and adviser to the mayor of Chicago despite not having repented his past as a domestic terrorist with the Weather Underground.
“How much do your really know about Barack Obama? What does he really believe?” asks the ad, which also uses imagery from the Al-Qaeda terror attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.
“Why would Barack Obama be friends with someone who bombed the Capitol and is proud of it?” asks the ad’s narrator.
Its financier, Simmons, who made his first fortune in chain pharmacies, was a major donor to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the group that damaged Kerry in 2004 by questioning his patriotism. He has raised more than $50,000 for Obama’s rival, Sen. John McCain, though there’s no evidence that his anti-Obama effort has McCain’s explicit blessing.
Obama has launched a response ad, which addresses McCain directly, and will air in Ohio, Tracey said.
“With all our problems, why is John McCain talking about the ’60s, trying to link Barack Obama to radical Bill Ayers?” says Obama’s ad. “McCain knows Obama denounced Ayers’ crimes, committed when Obama was just 8 years old.”
Yeah, but as an adult, Obama linked up with the unrepentent, radical sonofabitch and became a political partner and associate.
A background on Obama-Ayers relationship from previous posts:
William Ayers, he was part of the Weather Underground in the 1970s. They bombed the Pentagon, the Capitol and other buildings. He’s never apologized for that. And in fact, on 9/11, he was quoted in the New York Times, saying, “I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.”
Link: http://sfcmac.wordpress.com/2008/04/22/obamas-terrorist-freinds/
The problem of Barack Obama’s relationship with Bill Ayers will not go away. Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn were terrorists for the notorious Weather Underground during the turbulent 1960s, turning fugitive when a bomb — designed to kill army officers in New Jersey — accidentally exploded in a New York townhouse. Prior to that, Ayers and his cohorts succeeded in bombing the Pentagon. Ayers and Dohrn remain unrepentant for their terrorist past. Ayers was pictured in a 2001 article for Chicago magazine, stomping on an American flag, and told the New York Times just before 9/11 that the notion of the United States as a just and fair and decent place “makes me want to puke.” Although Obama actually launched his political career at an event at Ayers’s and Dohrn’s home, Obama has dismissed Ayers as just “a guy who lives in my neighborhood,” and “not somebody who I exchange ideas from on a regular basis.” For his part, Ayers refuses to discuss his relationship with Obama.
Link: http://sfcmac.wordpress.com/2008/08/22/obamas-annenberg-papers/
The sponsors of the ad, The American Issues Project, responded in a concise, strongly worded letter to the DOJ. They are not intimidated.
“The Obama campaign knows it can’t argue the facts of the link between Obama and Ayers, so it is instead resorting to a desperate campaign of intimidation and legal threats,” said Ed Martin, American Issues Project’s president. “The scary question this raises is if Barack Obama demonstrates this little regard for free speech from his opponents during the campaign, what could the American people expect from him as a president?”
“The tremendous amount of time, money and effort the campaign is expending to run its own ads on the Ayers controversy and dispatch its hired guns all over the country – during the Democratic convention – speaks to the fear they must have that this issue is resonating with American voters.”
Link: http://michellemalkin.com/2008/08/26/fighting-back-against-obamas-thugs/
An excerpt from the letter:
AIP is organized as a qualified nonprofit corporation as that term is defined in the regulations of the Federal Election Commission (“FEC”) 11 C.F.R. §114.10. As such, AIP enjoys the protections of the provisions of the Supreme Court’s decision more than twenty years ago in FEC v. Massachusetts Citizens for Life, Inc., 589 F. Supp. 646 (D. Mass. 1984), aff’d, 769 F.2d 13 (1st Cir. 1985), aff’d, 479 U.S. 238 (1986)…
AIP complies with each and every one of the provisions outlined by the Supreme Court in the MCFL case, as well as the regulations of the FEC promulgated subsequently…
Read the full response here: http://www.americanissuesproject.org/images/docs/new4793438_1.pdf
Obama’s historical association with Ayers is a well established. He can’t deny, so he’ll try to bully opponents into keeping quiet about the undesirable cretins he hangs with.
Keep trying, Barack.
I’m old enough to remember CONELRAD (640 and 1240 on the AM dial, and so marked [red triangle inside a white circle]) on every radio, duck-and-cover drills in school, and seeing formations of B-36s flying way up there in the contrail layer.
I remember Nikita pounding his shoe on his desk at the UN and telling the West that they would be hanged with rope they sold to the USSR. Also the infamous walkout.
I remember the Soviets accusing the West of exactly what they were doing at the time the they made the accusations.
What truly scares the snot out of me is how terrifyingly similar the rhetoric of today’s Democrat Party is to that coming out of the Kremlin in the ’50s and early ’60s.
Anyone who doesn’t understand and acknowledge that BHO is a Stalinist needs to get a case of Windex to clean his plexiglas belly button so he can at least see where he’s going — which is straight into slavery if that idiot gets elected.
I used to think that Nehemiah Scudder was pure fiction (read Robert A. Heinlein). I was wrong. He is here. Now. Today. His name is Barak Hussein Obama.
This man will do, or say, anything in his monomaniacal quest to destroy the United States of America. Can/will anyone tell me just exactly into what he intends to change the USA? I am afraid. I am very afraid.