A series of interesting links

Sometime this week I will post about why I'm not voting for Dear Leader (ooops, there goes one full paragraph) and a breakdown of the California state-wide ballot initiatives and the San Francisco ballot initiatives. But this posting, I just want to link to a number of articles.

From Michael Malone at ABC News:

The traditional media are playing a very, very dangerous game -- with their readers, with the Constitution and with their own fates.

The media have covered this presidential campaign with a bias and that ultimately could lead to its downfall.The sheer bias in the print and television coverage of this election campaign is not just bewildering, but appalling. And over the last few months I've found myself slowly moving from shaking my head at the obvious one-sided reporting, to actually shouting at the screen of my television and my laptop computer.

But worst of all, for the last couple weeks, I've begun -- for the first time in my adult life -- to be embarrassed to admit what I do for a living. A few days ago, when asked by a new acquaintance what I did for a living, I replied that I was "a writer," because I couldn't bring myself to admit to a stranger that I'm a journalist. .....

If the current polls are correct, we are about to elect as president of the United States a man who is essentially a cipher, who has left almost no paper trail, seems to have few friends (that at least will talk) and has entire years missing out of his biography.

That isn't Sen. Obama's fault: His job is to put his best face forward. No, it is the traditional media's fault, for it alone (unlike the alternative media) has had the resources to cover this story properly, and has systematically refused to do so.

This article from the Wall Street Journal:

What a difference an election makes. "The choice you'll have," Mr. Obama warned of the McCain plan during one of the debates, "is having your employer no longer provide you health care." Sounds terrible. But wait, let's consult another one of Mr. Obama's advisers. David Cutler, the Otto Eckstein Professor of Applied Economics at Harvard, put it this way: "Health insurance is not something that is made better by tying it to employment. As a result, essentially all economists believe that universal coverage should be done outside of employment."

Indeed. . .the article above notes that the fundamentals of John McCain's health care proposal is essentially the same as two of Obama's health care advisors' from before joining the Obama campaign. As the WSJ puts it, "These advisers know that Mr. Obama's claim that Mr. McCain will tax health benefits "for the first time in history" is particularly disingenuous."

Another one from the WSJ (at this point, I expect a comment about relying on right-wing newspapers, well, I bet they're getting this stuff out now before Congress passes laws to silence them), this one by Robert Carroll, who I've referenced previously: "[T]he McCain tax credit for the purchase of health insurance exceeds the value of the current exclusion for all income levels shown. Indeed, it generally provides more resources to purchase health insurance than the existing exclusion."

Since fraud has been an ongoing theme this month, there's this article on the differences on on-line campaign donations between the Obama campaign and the McCain campaign.

To test the campaigns' practices, this author bought two pre-paid American Express gift cards worth $25 each to donate to the Obama and McCain campaigns online. As required by law, the campaigns' Web sites asked for, and National Journal provided, the donor's correct name, location and employment. The cards were purchased with cash at a Washington, D.C., drugstore, and the campaigns' Web sites were accessed through a public computer at a library in Fairfax County, Virginia.

The Obama campaign's Web site accepted the $25 donation, but the McCain campaign's Web site rejected it.

Then, there's this article from the New York Post:

All of which prompted an enterprising citizen to test the controls put in place to enforce compliance with federal campaign law by the Obama and McCain campaigns. Last Thursday, he decided to conduct an experiment.

He went to the Obama campaign Web site and made a donation under the name "John Galt" (the hero of Ayn Rand's novel "Atlas Shrugged"). He provided the equally fictitious address "1957 Ayn Rand Lane, Galts Gulch, CO 99999."

He checked the box next to $15 and entered his actual credit-card number and expiration date. He was then taken to the next page and notified that his donation had been processed.

He then tried the same experiment on the McCain site, which rejected the transaction. He returned to the Obama site and made three more donations using the names Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and Bill Ayers, all with different addresses but the same credit card. The transactions all went through. By Saturday, he'd reported that the transactions had all posted to his credit-card account.

Finally, to prove that I do read other sources of information, there's this from the New York Times:

Economists believe the cost of health benefits is ultimately shifted to employees through lower wages. When wages cannot be lowered, layoffs may result. Katherine Baicker of Harvard and Helen G. Levy of the University of Michigan have projected that play-or-pay might push 224,000 workers into that category.

This article compares Obama's health care penalty to what is going on Massachusetts, and how businesses there have borne the brunt of the state's filling in of a deficit though these health care penalties. As the Times notes-

But the penalty in Massachusetts is picayune compared with what some health experts believe Senator Barack Obama, the Democratic presidential nominee, might impose as part of his plan to provide affordable coverage for the uninsured. Though Mr. Obama has not released details, economists believe he might require large and medium companies to contribute as much as 6 percent of their payrolls.
.....
That, Mr. Ratner said, would be catastrophic to a low-margin business like his, which has 90 employees, 29 of them full-time workers who are offered health benefits.

“To all of a sudden whack 6 to 7 percent of payroll costs, forget it,” he said. “If they do that, prices go up and employment goes down because nobody can absorb that.”

Yet, somehow, despite all but declaring ala Walter Mondale that you're taxes going up, he's somehow winning. I guess, despite what Dear Leader has said, words in fact don't matter.