Who is "Good Will"?

Holy F** S*

whoisgoodwil — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 22:26:05 +0000

So the Denver Post writes a story that misses the point on address verification by a good mile or six. The story focuses on the somewhat tangential issue of “untraceable credit cards” and the larger issue — that the Obama, Murtha, and Udall campaigns have turned off address verification software that would prevent fake names and addresses.

Okay, so the media misses the mark. Big deal, right? But being my happy and well-mannered self, I had to point out the reporter in question that he’d missed the real story.

The response has to be read to be believed:

I believe your facts are a little off, but it’d make a better story if you were correct. I don’t do journalism that way, or with the invective you prefer, so I’m afraid I’m obtuse, if that’s your definition..

I don’t know who “Good Will” is, or care.

Let’s go over that in slow motion. The political reporter from the Denver Post has just told you that he does not care that the probable next President has mysterious anonymous donors. He does not care that the Obama campaign has raised hundreds of millions of dollars in a suspect fashion and he does not care who is really behind his campaign.

Now can I question his patriotism?

Harrassing news media more annoying than working, still more fulfilling

whoisgoodwil — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 23:29:46 +0000

KMBZ in the Kansas City area makes a big deal out of being “conservative talk.” That said, try getting them to notice the Obama Address Verification scandal. I just got off the phone with the call screener who said, “I can’t put you on the air to talk about this becuase I can’t find a reputable news account that verifies what you’re saying.”

How about Michelle Malkin? Nope. Not reputable.

National Review? Nope. Also not reputable.

New York Post? No, sirree bob.

Numerous first hand eye-witness accounts of actually seeing fake names go through? Don’t be silly.

So, let’s review. If the New York Times and Washington Post don’t say it’s a problem, then it’s not a problem, no matter how many people raise their hands to say it is. Trying to explain to a call screener that the reason this is an important story is precisely because the national media isn’t carrying it is like trying to explain to a dog what a color tv looks like.

By the way, the Obama campaign is actively fundraising in France. Guess that couldn’t have anything to do with address verification being disabled.

Asking why papers won’t cover a story more fun than working

whoisgoodwil — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 21:12:17 +0000

Well, I could have spent the day working. But where’s the entertainment factor in that?

So instead, I spent the day sending out emails to various newspaper editors across the country. The email read:

Will your paper cover the story of how Obama, Murtha, and other Democratic Party candidates have turned off Address Verification on their websites? It’s been well established now that people can make contributions to these campaigns using phoney names and addresses that don’t match the billing addresses and account names for the credit cards being used.

These verification systems are a normal part of doing business on the net. Not having them means that they got turned off as a decision.

Enabling anonymous and/or disguised contributions, helping people evade campaign contribution limits, seems like a rather important story. Do you plan on covering this story? Or is the fix really in?

Not surprisingly, I received little response, except from one Virginia paper — and yes, I was targeting swing states, thanks — who wrote:

We’ll look for such a story from our various wire services. Thanks.

Well. There’s no message there, right. There’s no way anyone could read that as anything other than “SIT DOWN AND GO BACK TO WORK, YOU MORON!”.

So I wrote back:

So if a news story is lying there on the ground for you, but AP or Reuters don’t carry it, it doesn’t exist? That’s too bad. I remember reading about Woodward and Bernstein and imagining that journalists pursued stories.

Here’s the brave new world response I got:

The press corps covering the national election is vast, including many independent online watchdogs. Our wire services are broad. If the Obama campaign is encouraging or enabling contributors to skirt campaign finance limits, it will out.

We don’t assign local staff to the national campaign, with the exception of local appearances and other stories of special local relevance.

So let’s reiterate: the AP and Reuters will protect us. If Obama has a campaign finance secret, the wire services, who of course have no rooting interest whatsoever, will find out. And it’s not the place of a little regional paper and presumably, much less a reader’s) to do otherwise.

Remind me again why newspapers are supposed to be better than bloggers?

Why has the Obama campaign disabled anti-fraud software?

whoisgoodwil — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 15:02:07 +0000

As mentioned previously, the Obama campaign is telling America a puzzling story when they say they don’t know the identities of people giving money via credit card. After all, the software I’ve used will tell you the names as soon as you issue a rebate.

Well now it gets more puzzling and a little more disturbing. The Obama campaign’s website will let you donate under a false name.

Internet credit card transaction obviously have a high potential for fraud. So in every case I’ve seen, if you submit a mailing address that doesn’t match the billing address of the card in question, the transaction will kick out and fail to complete.

Why isn’t this true of the Obama campaign? This would require someone to go in and change the script to allow pseudonyms and false addresses.

That $600 million is looking spookier all the time.

More here and here.

Why did Michelle Obama surrender her license?

whoisgoodwil — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 13:16:45 +0000

Law school degrees, even from the third tier schools, are not cheap. They represent years of effort and, at a minimum, tens of thousands of dollars in tuition, books, and other fees.

So isn’t it a touch curious that Michelle Obama, four years after being admitted to the bar, became “voluntarily inactive” according to the State of Illinois?

Many attorneys who are out of the field still keep up their licenses, just to have it handy. After three years of law school, Michelle Obama dropped hers completely.

The New York Times will cover Cynthia McCain and make allegations of marital infidelity. America’s paper of record is devoid of information on why a lawyer would surrender her license without a peep.

Google ratio: 1,010,000 to 53,800, on the search string ” ‘Michelle Obama’ law license”. A happy healthy 19:1 ratio.

What happened at the Ayers house in 1995?

whoisgoodwil — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 03:56:39 +0000

On the surface it’s an absolutely unremarkable story: a retiring state politician has a coffee at the house of a supporter to introduce and endorse her successor. Something like this happens every election cycle somewhere in the United States.

The only things that really stands out about this story: one is that it was held at the house of former terrorist William Ayers, and two: ain’t no one saying nothin’ about it.

Now, that last part is the really interesting part. If it was just a garden variety local politics fundraiser, the hosts might say “yeah, we raised a few hundred bucks”. But when you read the Politico story, what’s impressive is the party discipline being shown: the wall of silence is down.

At the official campaign website, the Obama campaign decries “guilt by association”. However, that’s not the point. The point is that there was an objective verifiable association, and that no one involved is talking about the association.

Google ratio: 1,010,000 to 324, 000, using the string “Obama ayers 1995.” A relatively tame 3.11 to 1.

What is Obama’s relationship with Rashid Khalidi?

whoisgoodwil — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 03:21:07 +0000

Dr. Rashid Khalidi is a professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University, and if you guessed from that one piece of information that his scholarship is of the “Arabs good, Jews and Europeans bad” tradition, you wouldn’t be wrong. Dr. Khalidi isn’t just any ordinary professor in academia, however — he’s the former spokesman of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, having spent 1976 to 1982 as the one of the directors of the PLO’s news agency, WAFA.

That Senator Obama and Dr. Khalidi do have a relationship is undebatable. At a farewell dinner given for Dr. Khalidi before he was to take up his post at Columbia, then State Senator Obama talked about sharing meals with the Khalidis:

His many talks with the Khalidis, Obama said, had been “consistent reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases. . . . It’s for that reason that I’m hoping that, for many years to come, we continue that conversation — a conversation that is necessary not just around Mona and Rashid’s dinner table,” but around “this entire world.”

So that sounds like a pretty well-established friendship. Many talks, meals shared around the dinner table, a testimonial at a farewell dinner — wouldn’t you say that sounds like a good friend?

Barack Obama seems at pains to say exactly the opposite. From his own campaign’s site, Obama is quoted as saying:

To pluck out one person who I know and who I’ve had a conversation with (nb: emphasis added)… is a very problematic stand to take.

So how many conversations was it?

Google Ratio: 1,010,000 to 61,100 — 16.5 to 1.

We never did find out about Mr. Good Will….

whoisgoodwil — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 02:06:57 +0000

Senator Obama has raised over 600 million dollars during the course of his Presidential campaign. That’s an impressive achievement. In less than two years on the national scene, the junior Senator from Illinois has hit fundraising heights the Clintons, with their vastly greater network and lead time, never came close to hitting.

My question: do we know where this money actually came from? Is there a good audit trail? What is your confidence level that all of this money has been raised legally and from United States citizens?

Mine is fairly low. We never did learn much about Mr. Good Will of Austin, Texas. If you don’t remember this story, the Obama campaign had an oopsie when the Feds discovered a Mr. “Good Will” with an occupation off “Loving You” had donated over $11,000 to the Obama campaign. Similarly “Doodad Pro” donated a shade over $17,000. That’s just a bit over the legal limit of $2,300.

No problem, says the Obama campaign. They just gave the money back:

Obama spokesman Ben LaBolt said the campaign has no idea who the individuals are and has returned all the donations, using the credit-card numbers they gave to the campaign.

Huh. I don’t know about you, but in any credit card machine I’ve ever used as a merchant, when you credit an account, you get a receipt back for your paper trail. And once you put in a card number, when you get the receipt, it comes back with the name of the cardholder.

So let’s review. Either the Obama campaign is incompetent and using bad software, and walked away leaving $28,000 on the table — or they know exactly who Messrs. Pro and Will are, and probably gave them instructions on how to donate legally. I will leave it to you as to which one seems more likely.

Unaddressed by Mr. LaBolt: why would someone give money to the Obama campaign and try to hide its source? Doesn’t that seem to be a bit odd?

If you haven’t heard about this story, it’s not surprising: The Google Ratio on this story (using the string “Obama ‘Good Will’ ‘Loving You’ ” is 1,010,000 to 2,350, for a fairly astonishing 429: 1 ratio.

Introducing our metric: The Google News Ratio

whoisgoodwil — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 02:04:44 +0000

The support for the allegation that John McCain has had an affair with a lobbyist is vanishingly small. Yet there are 1,201 entries on Google News for the strong ” ‘John McCain’ affair lobbyist.” On Google itself, that same string returns 1,010,000 hits.

That’s quite a lot.

So that seems an acceptable benchmark for a comparison as to whether a story’s been under reported. If you have another metric, feel free to shout it out in the comments.

Welcome to “Who is Good Will?”

whoisgoodwil — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 15:26:07 +0000

While national media outlets are sending teams to dig through Sarah Palin’s garbage or root through the exact licensing status of a man who asks a pointed question of Senator Brack Obama, there are some very large and mysteriously unexplored questions about America’s next President.

The point of this blog is not to advocate for wild conspiracy theories — you’re not going to read about Obama’s birth certificate or speculation as to his “secret Muslim faith.” The mission is to simply point out the real verifiable and troubling questions that our media has shown little interest in.

Have a hot tip? A question about Obama that our media hasn’t vetted? Please feel free to participate. Leave your comments, and most of all, get others participating. Send your favorite entries in this blog to anyone and everyone who you feel needs to ask themselves some hard questions.