After several weeks of a Manchester United winning streak, Fulham was able to put the Red Devils back in their place. For a long time now, the players over at Manchester United have thought that their style of soccer was untouchable and unbeatable. Little did they know that Fulham, the 9th seated team in the Barclay's Premiership, was going to beat them 2-0. This is a great day for Man. U. haters because it confirms that the Red Devils are nowhere near a level of perfection. Ronaldo, Rooney, Berbatov, Tevez, and Giggs can continue to think that they live in an ivory tower or on cloud nine, but they should be weary of the more dedicated and motivated teams in the league.
Manchester's defeat is also good news for Liverpool fans. Even though Man. U. has a game in hand, Liverpool remains one point behind the Red Devils with their 5-0 win this week against Aston Villa. This difference will create excitement and great levels of competitiveness in the remaining games.
Unfortunately Chelsea could not use Man. United's loss to their advantage as they lost their recent game to the Tottenham Hotspurs. Their loss leaves them behind Liverpool.
Now with Chelsea out of the picture, I hope Liverpool can find the strength to surpass Manchester United in the Premiership. I also hope an English team wins the Champion's league this year.
On Monday, President Obama decided to expand embryonic stem cell research. FINALLY! It has long overdue since the past eight years. Thank you former President Bush.
For those that are not familiar with stem cell research, allow me to explain the process and its benefits. Stem cells are found in most multi-cellular organism and have the ability to renew themselves through mitotic cell division. Doctors believe that stem cells have the potential to change the treatment to human disease for the better. In fact, many doctors and scientists believe that stem cells can help with Alzheimer's, diabetes, Parkinson's, cancer, leukemia, muscle damage, multiple sclerosis, and spinal diseases and disorders.
Embryonic cells, on the other hand, are derived from embryos, and are not taken from embryos already developed in a woman's body. If these were redirected in a specific way, scientists could use them to treat diseases more effectively than regular stem cells. Hopefully with the lifting of the ban, things will change.
This means that hopefully in a few more years doctors may find a way to successfully treat herniated discs. I have been suffering from a herniated disc for about three years now and the pain is debilitating. What bothers me the most is the opposition stem cell research faced from religious conservatives. Do they know how much pain I have been experiencing? How such constant pain can change a man? If only people knew than they might understand. Similar to how in 24 the Senator does not understand why Jack Bauer sees torture as a means to a greater end.
An article released before Obama took office states that stem cells are already being used and implanted on discs. Here is the link. Here is what article has to say:
"Doctor Kleiner said a disc loses its ability to be a shock absorber after surgery because it no longer produces a spongy substance that can hold water.
"The stem cells should take on the properties of the cells within the disc and ultimately improve the hydration of the disc - and prevent the progression of degeneration," Kleiner said."
I cannot wait to give it a couple of more years to see what advancements they are going to produce. I hope science can save my back because so far nothing has.
During the time all of these accusations were thrown around, the Obama campaign did everything they could to counter the Republican argument. In fact, no one in Obama’s campaign seemed to have questioned the amount, and many had taken pride in the amount they had accumulated. For instance, Bill Burton, an Obama spokesperson at the time stated: “Our campaign has shattered fund-raising records with donations from more than 2.5 million Americans. We have gone above and beyond the transparency requirements.” Burton assured the press that no campaign is completely protected from Internet-fraud, and confirms that Obama’s campaign will continue to examine any donation that seems capable of breaking a campaign finance law.
The Obama campaign has also seemed to have been willing to fix any wrongdoing that may have been caused by their website. For instance, the Obama campaign was accused, again, of retrieving funds from three brothers in Gaza. The story goes as follows: Three brothers from Palestine, considered of being associated to the Hamas group, have provided the Obama campaign with $33,500 in exchange for several Obama T-Shirts. The Edwan brothers, as they are called, love Obama, and wanted to sell the T-Shirts in Gaza to retrieve a profit. The Obama campaign has yet to make a reimbursement, even when they alleged they will. Pamela Gellar, who has done extensive research on the matter, writes this in her op-ed article:
" The Palestinians allegedly claimed “they were American citizens,” so said Obama's people. They listed their address zip code 972 (ironically the area code for Israel) and they input “GA,” the state abbreviation for Georgia. They actually lived in a Hamas controlled refugee camp. So, if Obama's people thought it was “Georgia,” why did they ship the tee shirts to the correct address in Gaza? Shipping overseas to a Gaza refugee camp is vastly different than the state next door."
The Obama campaign was willing to give the funds back. However, according to the WorldNetDaily (WND) interview with the Edwan brothers, the donation has not been given back.
Even though the Democrats were responsive and willing to refund any type of illegal contribution, we, as consumers and readers, must be aware of the Republican smear campaign that has been going on since the advent of the 2008 election. Here are some reasons why I think this whole incident is simply another version of Republican trash-talk:
1) Aaron Klein was the reporter who interviewed the Edwan brothers in Gaza, and he is viewed by his peers and by many others as being a conservative anti-Obama reporter who works for the right-wing WorldNetDaily.
2) Also, the allegations were reported the same time Senator John McCain let Sarah Palin off her leash. Palin’s unsupported accusations of Barack Obama made the Democrats question whether or not the Republican’s claim was the latest of a smear campaign against Obama.
3) There are no articles that claim the FEC is actually investigating the Obama campaign. The campaign has yet to been charged for retrieving illegal contributions and foreign funds. Also, it has been several months since these allegations surfaced and no one has been penalized for a wrongdoing.
4) The sources are questionable. For example, Kenneth R. Timmerman, according to his bio on wikipedia, is a Republican reporter who has been accused of yellow journalism, and who has been accused of stoking conflict with Iran. Also, Michael Isikoff is an investigative journalist who works with Newsweek. According to his bio, he loves breaking sensational news. In fact, he was the first one to reveal Bill Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky to his executives at Newsweek. I believe that all investigative journalists search hard enough for the news that will satisfy their purpose or story. Other investigative journalists that have reported on this incident were Sarah Cohen and Matthew Mosk from the Washington Post. The Washington Post has been viewed as a pro-Republican newspaper.
5) Finally, everyone should not believe what is written on blogs. Even this one! For instance, Pamela Geller's information seemed as though it came from a blog and was posted on American Thinker. And, if you look at the sources from where I retrieved my information, most of them are from blog sites. The reason why I was constricted to these sites was the fact that there was not a lot of information from more valid and serious sources on this topic. This also plays as another factor on why I believe the Republican argument against Obama is weak.
The verdict is simple and clear: Republicans are trash talkers and we see this once again in their attempt to accuse Obama of retrieving illegal and foreign funds. And, this example serves Dr. Levinson's theory, or fact, well that Republicans are MEAN! Why isn't there much talk about Obama's supposed wrongdoings now? Oh that's right. There is no need to bring it up now because Republicans lost. Anyway, let us say everything that reporters and Republicans stated in their articles were true. Is it that bad if Democrats finally decided to play dirty? Its about time, if they did. Republicans have been doing it for so long. I wonder if there is a Democrat version of Karl Rove out there somewhere.
The bottom line is that Republicans knew that the White House was slipping out of their grasp. With this in mind they decided to go on a rampage and trash the presidential candidate in every way possible. Maybe his Internet site did lack an AVS or maybe he did allow prepaid credit cards. The campaign will reimburse those who contributed illegally. There was no reason to escalate the situation to an extent where Republicans seemed desperate and helpless.
According to a vast amount of sources, Obama’s campaign can be accused of violating all of the aforementioned campaign finance laws (see previous blog here). According to Kenneth R. Timmerman, a journalist for Newsmax.com, “more than half of the whopping $426.9 million Barack Obama has raised has come from small donors whose names the Obama campaign would not disclose.” In the beginning of the race, the Obama campaign and the Democratic National Committee began with $95 million after spending several million in the primary election against Hillary Clinton. The Republican National Committee and the McCain campaign, which accepted public funding, started off with $84 million. And, before Election Day, Obama’s campaign was able to raise hundreds of millions more than the McCain campaign all thanks to a number of small contributors whose names and addresses have been kept secret. Up until now, the Obama campaign was not required by law to disclose any contribution under the $200 limit, however, “the FEC breakdown of the Obama campaign has identified a staggering $222.7 million as coming from contributions of $200 or less; and, only $39.6 million of that amount comes from donors the Obama campaign has identified.” The remaining $183.1 million has drawn great suspicion, since such an amount seems unlikely and questionable in nature. According to Timmerman, “it is the largest pool of unidentified money that has ever flooded into the U.S. election system, before or after BCRA.”
Furthermore, the Obama campaign, according to many investigators such as Matthew Mosk and Michael Isikoff, has not gone above and beyond the transparency requirements. This is where most believe that Obama’s campaign is at fault. Obama’s accumulation of more than $400 million owes its thanks to the Internet because nearly half of Obama’s contributions were through Internet donations. In fact, “of the $150 million Obama raised in September of 2008, nearly $100 million came in over the Internet.” Newsweek says that the Obama campaign did not shield its Internet contribution page from illegal donations. An online investigator discovered that Obama’s campaign turned their website’s Address Verification System (AVS) off. The AVS service checks to see that the billing address given by the customer matches the credit card. Since Obama’s website did not contain such a protection, donations from anonymous individuals were accepted. This negligence makes it impossible to determine if one individual surpassed the $200 limit because the background information given did not have to match the credit card. Thus, Obama’s campaign was able to receive donations from individuals who may have exceeded the spending limit by using several different names and addresses. This makes it harder for the campaign to disclose and identify those contributors who gave more than $200 and to reimburse those who gave more than $4,600. Unlike Obama’s site, Hillary Clinton’s and John McCain’s websites used an address verification system. In addition to disregarding an AVS, the Obama campaign is accused of accepting prepaid credit cards, which has never been done before. According to Matthew Mosk from Newsweek, “Obama’s presidential campaign allowed donors to use largely untraceable prepaid credit cards that could potentially be used to evade the limits on how much an individual is legally allowed to give or mask a contributor’s identity.” An untraceable prepaid credit card only frustrates the FEC in determining where the money is coming from. Such an investigation would take months to complete. Campaign finance lawyers claim that “the problem with such cards is that they make it impossible to tell whether donors who have exceeded the limits and government contractors who are barred from giving to a federal campaign are making contributions.”
Reporters claim that by turning off the AVS and accepting prepaid credit cards, the Obama campaign has allowed several anomalies to occur, all of which break campaign finance laws. For example, one contributor was able to identify themselves as “Will, Good” from Austin, Texas. Mr. Good Will listed his employer as “Loving” and his profession as “You.” Timmerman notes that “a Newsmax analysis of the 1.4 million individual contributions in the latest master file for the Obama campaign discovered 1,000 separate entries for Mr. Good Will, most of them for $25.” In total, Mr. Good Will has given Obama $17,375, an amount well above the limit for a single contributor. The Obama campaign claims that they have given the amount of 330 contributions back to Mr. Good Will, but an amount of $8,950 still remains. The FEC flagged Mr. Good Will and has forced the Obama campaign to return the excess amount back to the donor.
Newsweek makes it clear in their articles on this topic that Obama’s campaign finance tactics have opened the gate for identity theft problems. Using the Mr. Good Will case, the donor supplied as his address 1015 Northwood Park Boulevard, which matches the location of the Goodwill Industry located in Austin, Texas. According to the Newsweek article, Suzanna Burmeister, the marketing director for Goodwill Industries, said “the group had no clue who the donor was and that the institution received five puzzling thank you letters from the Obama campaign for their generous contributions.” These letters forced the company to send an e-mail to the campaign to inform it of the fraudulent use of its name. In addition, several contributors have identified themselves as Saddam Hussein, Osama Bin Laden, and Bill Ayers. The most heard of case of identity theft due to Obama’s unprotected website is the case of Mary T. Biskup, a retired insurance manager from Manchester, Montana. Mrs. Biskup turned up on Obama’s contribution list as giving a whopping $178,000, which is $175,700 more than what one person can give to a candidate in the general election. In an interview, Biskup stated that she never made those transactions, and that her credit card was never billed for the donations, meaning someone appropriated her name and made a contribution with a different card.
The most talked about anomaly caused by the Obama campaign’s lack of security and protection for their Internet website is the concern of illegal foreign donations. The problem of not having an AVS on an Internet payment page and the acceptance of prepaid credit cards make it impossible to tell whether foreign nationals have donated to the Obama campaign. However, there is proof out there that does indicate that foreigners have donated to Obama. For instance, Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff was talking about this issue on MSNBC and he noted that many of the Internet contributions have come in obviously fictitious characters from many Islamic countries around the world in strange denominations less than $200, like $14.23, $56.21, and $18.98. These amounts indicate that a foreign transaction fee took place causing the few additional cents to show up in the donation. Pamela Geller from American Thinker conducted an extensive research and discovered the same exact thing. She writes that “Thousand of Obama’s foreign donations ended in cents; and, we compared McCain’s donations to Obama’s and McCain’s are so clean: no cents, all even dollar amounts.”
Even when such a speculation does not warrant the claim that Obama has been receiving illegal foreign donations, more proof somehow emerges. Timmerman claims that the FEC is questioning a pool of donations they think came from overseas. The pool contains about 11,500 contributions that total $3.38 million. More than 50 of these contributions listed their “state” as “UK,” which stands for the United Kingdom. Also, Timmerman states in July and August, the Nigerian stock market held a series of pro-Obama fundraisers that raised an estimated $900,000 in donations. The sponsors of the fundraiser claimed that the money was going to be used to help Nigerians attend the Democratic convention in Denver. Due to the rise of skepticism on where the money was going to be spent, the Nigerian public anti-fraud commission investigated (and still is investigating) the matter.
I know what I am writing has already occurred and has probably been forgotten. However, I want to bring the topic back into discussion because it has a point to prove and should not be buried away as a forgettable memory. I know most of my followers or classmates have written about more current events. However, I believe we can view things more clearly in retrospect.
During this election process, President Barack Obama has been accused by many as using the Internet in both a good and bad way. In fact, about a decade ago, candidates did not see much use in using the Internet as a helpful tool for their campaigns. Today, Obama’s campaign—as compared to Senator John McCain’s—has come the closest to achieving the Holy Grail of politics on the Internet—converting online enthusiasm to offline action. Even so, Obama and his campaign are found guilty in the eyes of a few Republicans, Republican newspapers and websites, and gullible bloggers. The accusation is that President Obama engaged in Internet fraud during his presidential campaign. According to several reports, Obama’s campaign did not undertake the necessary security measures to shield themselves from illegal online contributions. This supposed mistake from Obama’s campaign is one that deserves further scrutiny because it presents to the political arena two possible outcomes: 1) another form of Republican trash talk; or 2) a possible attempt from Democrats to play dirty.
The best way to start this discussion is to address the most important federal laws pertaining to campaign contributions, and then to address how others think Pres. Obama’s campaign has violated these rules.
After McCain and Feingold established the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act in 2002 (BCRA), the regulation of the financing behind political campaigns became far stricter than the laws constituted by the Federal Election Campaign Act in 1971. For instance, under BCRA, federal law does not require campaigns to disclose any background information of those donors who have given less than $200. However, it does require that campaigns calculate running totals for each contributor, and disclose their information when their contributions pass the $200 mark. In addition, the Federal Election Commission (FEC), which was created under the Federal Election Campaign Act, requires all campaigns to reimburse any contribution that has exceeded the limit. Under campaign finance laws, an individual is allowed to contribute $2,300 to a candidate in both the primary and general elections, for a total of $4,600. When a donor exceeds the limit in a primary, the campaign has the capability of “redesignating” the excess amount over to the general election on its books. Furthermore, campaigns are not permitted to receive any contribution from a foreign institution or individual. In other words, no campaign is allowed to accept any donation from a non-U.S. citizen and a non-U.S. based corporation or institution. This is considered by many campaign financers to be the most important campaign finance law.
This Blog will review and comment on political issues, new and upcoming PC hardware, games, movies, TV shows and episodes, the English Soccer Premier League games, and health related issues. This is a place where you can discuss and comment on political, health, and entertaining topics.
I am a full time student at Fordham University at Rose Hill in the Bronx. I have two B.A. degrees in Political Science and Communication and Media Studies. I am currently completing my M.A. in Communications. I will be attending Law School around September of this year. I graduated summa cum laude and have an unquenchable thirst for knowledge and discussion. I live in Queens. I am Greek-American. I am very athletic and enjoy playing volleyball, basketball, and SOCCER! My favorite English Soccer team is Chelsea and my second is Liverpool.
After several weeks of a Manchester United winning streak, Fulham was able to put the Red Devils back in their place. For a long time now, the players over at Manchester United have thought that their style of soccer was untouchable and unbeatable. Little did they know that Fulham, the 9th seated team in the Barclay's Premiership, was going to beat them 2-0. This is a great day for Man. U. haters because it confirms that the Red Devils are nowhere near a level of perfection. Ronaldo, Rooney, Berbatov, Tevez, and Giggs can continue to think that they live in an ivory tower or on cloud nine, but they should be weary of the more dedicated and motivated teams in the league.
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