HAS THERE EVER BEEN A PRESIDENT AS CROOKED AND CORRUPT AS BARACK OBAMA?

President Barack Hussein Obama has raised more money than any candidate ever. Much it has come from overseas, according to the Government Accountability Institute, a private think tank. 

It’s illegal to solicit contributions from foreigners, but citizens of China, Azerbaijan, Vietnam, Japan, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway and Egypt have been asked to contribute to Obama, the GAI found.  According to the leading Web analytics site, 43 percent of BarackObama.com’s traffic comes from foreign IP addresses.

The largest of "thousands" of foreign Web sites which link to President Obama’s official site is Obama.com, based in Shanghai. It’s owned by Robert Roche, an American businessman with ties to the Chinese government, and a frequent guest at the White House.

Contributions from Americans living in China are legal.  But, according to Markosweb,68 percent of Obama.com’s traffic is from foreigners.  The Web site is mostly in Chinese characters.

The Obama campaign doesn’t require online donors to provide a CVV (the three digit number on the back of your credit card), as the Romney campaign and nearly all businesses and charities do.  The fraud protection measure was omitted because the Obama campaign doesn’t want to discourage small donors, a spokesman said.

Since Obama for America requires a CVV for purchases from its campaign store, this probably isn’t the real reason.  CVVs protect against "robo-donations" made to evade reporting requirements.  (The Federal Elections Commission doesn’t require campaigns to disclose the names of donors who give less than $200, or keep records on those who give less than $50.) 

When FEC records indicated Mary Biskup of Manchester, Missouri had contributed $174,800 to Mr. Obama’s 2008 campaign, the Washington Post called her, because it is illegal to give more than $2,300.  She hadn’t ever given to Mr. Obama, Ms. Biskup said.  "Her credit card was never billed for the donations, meaning someone appropriated her name and made the contributions with another card," the Post noted.  The CVV also guards against that.

If you pay taxes, you, like Mary Biskup, are contributing to the Obama campaign, whether you want to or not.

*The administration plans to gut Medicare Advantage to help fund Obamacare.  The cuts begin in January, so the law requires the 11.7 million seniors enrolled in Medicare Advantage be told what’s going to happen when "open enrollment" begins Oct. 15.  The Department of Health and Human Services is spending $8.3 billion on a "demonstration" project to delay the bad news until after the election.

The demonstration won’t demonstrate anything, and you don’t have the legal authority to order it, the Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan arm of Congress, told HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.

*Massive cuts in the defense budget will be made in January if a deal isn’t made before then to reduce the deficit.  The cuts will force defense contractors to lay off workers.  Employers are required by a 1989 law to give employees 60 days notice of mass layoffs.  So notices should go out before the election. 

Don’t comply, the Obama administration told defense contractors. We’ll pay your fines for violating the law.  "Given that hundreds of thousands of employees may be affected, taxpayers could be on the hook for billions," said attorney Peter Kirsanow. 

Illegal contributions, facilitated by probably deliberate lax security, have flooded into the Obama campaign.  The administration is spending billions on schemes of dubious legality to conceal the impact of its policies on Medicare Advantage and on employment in defense industries. 

All three would rank among the greatest campaign finance scandals ever. But if you get your news from ABC, NBC, CBS or CNN, you may not have heard of any of them. Nor would you know Obama campaign aides in four states have helped people register to vote illegally.

Guns the Justice Department deliberately let "walk" to Mexican drug cartels were used to murder 14 students at a party just across the border from Texas.  The only tv network to think that’s a big deal is Spanish language Univision.

NBC thinks public funding for Sesame Street is a bigger story than the burgeoning scandal over administration efforts to cover up lax security in Libya. For all broadcast networks, Mr. Romney’s criticism of President Obama’s foreign policy was bigger news than the collapse of that policy on 9/11/2012.

If a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound?

Not if the president is a Democrat, say the "mainstream" media. Has there ever been in our nation’s history a more crooked and corrupt president than the one we are suffering under today?  The answer is no.  Not even close.

Let’s hope the voters make a sound, a deafening, crashing sound, on November 6.

Jack Kelly is a former Marine and Green Beret and a former deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration. He is national security writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.