Family Security Matters Briefings - Week of 10/27/08

Former FBI In Charge of Operations: FBI 'Would Not Have Hired' Someone with Obama's Associations

Recently, FSM sat down with Buck Revell, former Associate Deputy Director of the FBI who was in charge of all FBI operations before his retirement in 1994. What he has to say about the idea of a security clearance for Barack Obama, a man who could be our next president, is stunning and sobering, to say the least. [Go here for the complete interview.]


Obama's Pet Conservatives: Do They Stand with Obama, Bush on Appeasing North Korea?
By Joel Himelfarb

As the presidential campaign enters the home stretch, one of the more bizarre developments has been the decision of a tiny group of conservatives, including Kenneth Adelman, talk-show host Michael Smerconish and former Reagan Justice Department official Douglas Kmiec, to endorse Barack Obama. To be sure, conservatives have reason to be leery of John McCain, but those are tiny by comparison with the honest differences that most people on the right have with Barack Obama, an orthodox left-wing Democrat. [more...]


Bolton: 'World Leaders See Obama as Soft, Untested, Weak and Very Naive'
By Carol Taber, President of FamilySecurityMatters.org

Don't point the finger at us. The title of this piece is taken from statements by John Bolton, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, who's spent much of his professional life - and certainly all of his tenure at the UN - negotiating and working with these very same world leaders. He merely repeats their opinions here for our convenience. And, to be clear, the collective opinion of world leaders is that, in contemplating Barack Obama for the office of President of the United States, he is seen as "soft, untested, weak and very naïve." No wonder Sen. Joe Biden guaranteed that America will face an international crisis within six months if Obama takes office on November 4th. [more...]


Polls, Smolls, Just Vote
By Harvey Kushner

The most glaring example of unintentional polling abuse was the 1936 Literary Digest poll that predicted that ALF Landon would trounce FDR. The outcome, of course, was that Roosevelt won all but two states and many of them by a landslide. The Digest had made its error when it chose a sample from telephone directories and its own list of subscribers. But this sample was not random with respect to the population of voters; those voters who had no telephone and did not subscribe to the magazine had no chance of being included in the sample. The poor were more or less systematically excluded from the Digests poll and overwhelmingly voted Democratic. Some years later, pollsters observed the Digest's blunders and developed stratified sampling techniques to make sure that future samples would be more representative; however, are they? [more...]