The Palin Truth files
http://www.johnmccain.com/palintruthfiles/

new Ad for McCain Palin
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2RZ0sUcVcE

good (and funny) advice for Gov. Palin Thursday

It’s not that I expected a fair shake, Heaven knows. I realize that there’s a deep-seated emotional investment among liberal commentators in the candidacy of Barack Obama. I watched them chew up and spit out one of their perennial darlings — Hillary Clinton — when she stood in the way of their group hug. I heard Senator Clinton called a “big f — -ing whore” by an Air America host; I heard one MSNBC host accuse her of  “pimping out” her daughter, another call her a “she-devil,” and a third suggest that she needed to be taken into a backroom and beaten senseless to convince her to drop out of the primary race. And I heard a CBS News anchor — yes, the same one who turned a recent interview with me into a pop quiz — ask Sen. Clinton if she remembered being nicknamed “Miss Frigidaire” in school. Ugly stuff, isn’t it? So it’s no surprise that when Senator McCain began to surge in the polls after he selected me as his running mate, the liberal media would come loaded for bear every time I made a public statement.

the rest of the advice here.

now this is completely creepy.

and this is how “we’re going to change the world” check this out…

The Barack Obama campaign is getting help from local prosecutors, both Democrats, to clarify TV ads the campaign believes are misleading.

and for my finale tonight I bring you this IowaHawk video – this is just plain Funny.  Obama’s teleprompter has a non negotiable deal.

g’night.

O’S DANGEROUS PALS
BARACK’S ‘ORGANIZER’ BUDS PUSHED FOR BAD MORTGAGES
By STANLEY KURTZ
Posted: 3:53 am
September 29, 2008

WHAT exactly does a “community organizer” do? Barack Obama‘s rise has left many Americans asking themselves that question. Here’s a big part of the answer: Community organizers intimidate banks into making high-risk loans to customers with poor credit.

In the name of fairness to minorities, community organizers occupy private offices, chant inside bank lobbies, and confront executives at their homes – and thereby force financial institutions to direct hundreds of millions of dollars in mortgages to low-credit customers.

In other words, community organizers help to undermine the US economy by pushing the banking system into a sinkhole of bad loans. And Obama has spent years training and funding the organizers who do it.

THE seeds of today’s financial meltdown lie in the Community Reinvestment Act – a law passed in 1977 and made riskier by unwise amendments and regulatory rulings in later decades.

CRA was meant to encourage banks to make loans to high-risk borrowers, often minorities living in unstable neighborhoods. That has provided an opening to radical groups like ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) to abuse the law by forcing banks to make hundreds of millions of dollars in “subprime” loans to often uncreditworthy poor and minority customers.

Any bank that wants to expand or merge with another has to show it has complied with CRA – and approval can be held up by complaints filed by groups like ACORN.

In fact, intimidation tactics, public charges of racism and threats to use CRA to block business expansion have enabled ACORN to extract hundreds of millions of dollars in loans and contributions from America’s financial institutions.

Banks already overexposed by these shaky loans were pushed still further in the wrong direction when government-sponsored Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac began buying up their bad loans and offering them for sale on world markets.

Fannie and Freddie acted in response to Clinton administration pressure to boost homeownership rates among minorities and the poor. However compassionate the motive, the result of this systematic disregard for normal credit standards has been financial disaster.

ONE key pioneer of ACORN’s subprime-loan shakedown racket was Madeline Talbott – an activist with extensive ties to Barack Obama. She was also in on the ground floor of the disastrous turn in Fannie Mae’s mortgage policies.

Long the director of Chicago ACORN, Talbott is a specialist in “direct action” – organizers’ term for their militant tactics of intimidation and disruption. Perhaps her most famous stunt was leading a group of ACORN protesters breaking into a meeting of the Chicago City Council to push for a “living wage” law, shouting in defiance as she was arrested for mob action and disorderly conduct. But her real legacy may be her drive to push banks into making risky mortgage loans.

In February 1990, Illinois regulators held what was believed to be the first-ever state hearing to consider blocking a thrift merger for lack of compliance with CRA. The challenge was filed by ACORN, led by Talbott. Officials of Bell Federal Savings and Loan Association, her target, complained that ACORN pressure was undermining its ability to meet strict financial requirements it was obligated to uphold and protested being boxed into an “affirmative-action lending policy.” The following years saw Talbott featured in dozens of news stories about pressuring banks into higher-risk minority loans.

IN April 1992, Talbott filed an other precedent-setting com plaint using the “community support requirements” of the 1989 savings-and-loan bailout, this time against Avondale Federal Bank for Savings. Within a month, Chicago ACORN had organized its first “bank fair” at Malcolm X College and found 16 Chicago-area financial institutions willing to participate.

Two months later, aided by ACORN organizer Sandra Maxwell, Talbott announced plans to conduct demonstrations in the lobbies of area banks that refused to attend an ACORN-sponsored national bank “summit” in New York. She insisted that banks show a commitment to minority lending by lowering their standards on down payments and underwriting – for example, by overlooking bad credit histories.

By September 1992, The Chicago Tribune was describing Talbott’s program as “affirmative action lending” and ACORN was issuing fact sheets bragging about relaxations of credit standards that it had won on behalf of minorities.

And Talbott continued her effort to, as she put it, drag banks “kicking and screaming” into high-risk loans. A September 1993 story in The Chicago Sun-Times presents her as the leader of an initiative in which five area financial institutions (including two of her former targets, now plainly cowed – Bell Federal Savings and Avondale Federal Savings) were “participating in a $55 million national pilot program with affordable-housing group ACORN to make mortgages for low – and moderate – income people with troubled credit histories.”

What made this program different from others, the paper added, was the participation of Fannie Mae – which had agreed to buy up the loans. “If this pilot program works,” crowed Talbott, “it will send a message to the lending community that it’s OK to make these kind of loans.”

Well, the pilot program “worked,” and Fannie Mae’s message that risky loans to minorities were “OK” was sent. The rest is financial-meltdown history.

IT would be tough to find an “on the ground” community organizer more closely tied to the subprime-mortgage fiasco than Madeline Talbott. And no one has been more supportive of Madeline Talbott than Barack Obama.

When Obama was just a budding community organizer in Chicago, Talbott was so impressed that she asked him to train her personal staff.

He returned to Chicago in the early ’90s, just as Talbott was starting her pressure campaign on local banks. Chicago ACORN sought out Obama’s legal services for a “motor voter” case and partnered with him on his 1992 “Project VOTE” registration drive.

In those years, he also conducted leadership-training seminars for ACORN’s up-and-coming organizers. That is, Obama was training the army of ACORN organizers who participated in Madeline Talbott’s drive against Chicago’s banks.

More than that, Obama was funding them. As he rose to a leadership role at Chicago’s Woods Fund, he became the most powerful voice on the foundation’s board for supporting ACORN and other community organizers. In 1995, the Woods Fund substantially expanded its funding of community organizers – and Obama chaired the committee that urged and managed the shift.

That committee’s report on strategies for funding groups like ACORN features all the key names in Obama’s organizer network. The report quotes Talbott more than any other figure; Sandra Maxwell, Talbott’s ACORN ally in the bank battle, was also among the organizers consulted.

MORE, the Obama-supervised Woods Fund report acknowledges the problem of getting donors and foundations to contribute to radical groups like ACORN – whose confrontational tactics often scare off even liberal donors and foundations.

Indeed, the report brags about pulling the wool over the public’s eye. The Woods Fund’s claim to be “non ideological,” it says, has “enabled the Trustees to make grants to organizations that use confrontational tactics against the business and government ‘establishments’ without undue risk of being criticized for partisanship.”

Hmm. Radicalism disguised by a claim to be post ideological. Sound familiar?

The Woods Fund report makes it clear Obama was fully aware of the intimidation tactics used by ACORN’s Madeline Talbott in her pioneering efforts to force banks to suspend their usual credit standards. Yet he supported Talbott in every conceivable way. He trained her personal staff and other aspiring ACORN leaders, he consulted with her extensively, and he arranged a major boost in foundation funding for her efforts.

And, as the leader of another charity, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, Obama channeled more funding Talbott’s way – ostensibly for education projects but surely supportive of ACORN’s overall efforts.

In return, Talbott proudly announced her support of Obama’s first campaign for state Senate, saying, “We accept and respect him as a kindred spirit, a fellow organizer.”

IN short, to understand the roots of the subprime-mortgage crisis, look to ACORN’s Madeline Talbott. And to see how Talbott was able to work her mischief, look to Barack Obama.

Then you’ll truly know what community organizers do.

Stanley Kurtz is a senior fellow with the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, DC.

If Obama wins, it means hiring an arsonist to fight a fire.

September 30, 2008, 0:00 a.m.

Bailout Politics -The Congressional Democrats who enabled this crisis are now being trusted to fix it?

By Thomas Sowell

Nothing could more painfully demonstrate what is wrong with Congress than the current financial crisis.

Among the Congressional “leaders” invited to the White House to devise a bailout “solution” are the very people who have for years created the risks that have now come home to roost.

Five years ago, Barney Frank vouched for the “soundness” of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and said “I do not see” any “possibility of serious financial losses to the treasury.”

Moreover, he said that the federal government has “probably done too little rather than too much to push them to meet the goals of affordable housing.”

Earlier this year, Senator Christopher Dodd praised Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for “riding to the rescue” when other financial institutions were cutting back on mortgage loans. He too said that they “need to do more” to help subprime borrowers get better loans.

In other words, Congressman Frank and Senator Dodd wanted the government to push financial institutions to lend to people they would not lend to otherwise, because of the risk of default.

The idea that politicians can assess risks better than people who have spent their whole careers assessing risks should have been so obviously absurd that no one would take it seriously.

But the magic words “affordable housing” and the ugly word “redlining” led to politicians directing where loans and investments should go, with such things as the Community Reinvestment Act and various other coercions and threats.

The roots of this problem go back many years, but since the crisis to which all this led happened on George W. Bush’s watch, that is enough for those who think in terms of talking points, without wanting to be confused by the facts.

In reality, President Bush tried unsuccessfully, years ago, to get Congress to create some regulatory agency to oversee Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

N. Gregory Mankiw, his Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, warned in February 2004 that expecting a government bailout if things go wrong “creates an incentive for a company to take on risk and enjoy the associated increase in return.”

Since risky investments usually pay more than safer investments, the incentive is for a government-supported enterprise to take bigger risks, since they get more profit if the risks pay off and the taxpayers get stuck with the losses if not.

The government does not guarantee Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, but the widespread assumption has been that the government would step in with a bailout to prevent chaos in financial markets.

Alan Greenspan, then head of the Federal Reserve System, made the same point in testifying before Congress in February 2004. He said: “The Federal Reserve is concerned” that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were using this implicit reliance on a government bailout in a crisis to take more risks, in order to “multiply the profitability of subsidized debt.”

Chairman Greenspan added his voice to those urging Congress to create a “regulator with authority on a par with that of banking regulators” to reduce the riskiness of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, a riskiness ultimately borne by the taxpayers.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac do not deserve to be bailed out, but neither do workers, families and businesses deserve to be put through the economic wringer by a collapse of credit markets, such as occurred during the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Neither do the voters deserve to be deceived on the eve of an election by the notion that this is a failure of free markets that should be replaced by political micro-managing.

If Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were free market institutions they could not have gotten away with their risky financial practices because no one would have bought their securities without the implicit assumption that the politicians would bail them out.

It would be better if no such government-supported enterprises had been created in the first place and mortgages were in fact left to the free market. This bailout creates the expectation of future bailouts.

Phasing out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would make much more sense than letting politicians play politics with them again, with the risk and expense being again loaded onto the taxpayers.

— Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.

another interesting read:   psychology_and_the_economy.pdf

All Others Pay Cash....

.

All Hail Nancy Pelosi – the crazy lady who insults people as a leadership tactic, then blames republicans when more than 90 Democrats jumped ship.  click–>REMEMBER THIS

Democrats believe in a free market. We know that it can create jobs, it can create wealth, many good things in our economy. But in this case, in this unbridled form, as encouraged and supported by the Republicans — some Republicans, not all — it has created not jobs, not capital, it has created chaos.

With that statement, as final remarks before the vote – she ruined her case for more Republican support of this bill.  smooth…

95 DEMOCRATS voted against this bill that was defeated 205-228.  Twelve votes (Democrat or Republican) would have passed this bill.  This was a BIPARTISAN DEFEAT.

I still do not know if this is a good or bad thing – the Stock Market fell 777 points today, but I still need to understand why we need to protect businesses that do stupid things from failing.  (but personally I would have voted a grudging YES – and threw my lunch at the speaker as she was speaking in that vile manner)

This ain’t over.

Barry and ACORN

West Virginia

Charleston, WV (HNN) – Preliminary investigations have revealed hundreds of fraudulent voter registrations , Secretary of State Betty Ireland told a Thursday, Sept. 25 press conference. The United States Attorney’s Office, the FBI, United States Postal Service and Kanawha County Prosecutor’s Office are investigating crimes that may have been committed by filing fraudulent voter registration forms. ….
 

Florida

TALLAHASSEE — Two suspicious Seminole County voter registration cards became a flash point Wednesday in the Republican effort to suggest the community group ACORN is committing fraud in its historic Florida get-out-the vote efforts.

An ACORN spokesman said the group spotted what appeared to be forged registration cards weeks ago and fired a worker over them. Seminole’s election chief, Mike Ertel, said he was still “tremendously concerned,” but stopped well short of calling the incident “fraud.” The Republican National Committee, though, leveled the accusation and blasted the housing and wage advocacy group in a nationwide conference call with reporters, saying this wasn’t an isolated incident.

In Orange County, ACORN staffers submitted multiple, duplicate registrations on behalf of six separate voters this summer. One individual had 21 duplicate applications. Election Supervisor Bill Cowles and his staff protested, noting in a June memo that ACORN had been submitting sloppy forms as well.

ACORN, or the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, changed procedures, disciplined some staffers and improved relations with Orange. ACORN has signed up 135,000 new Florida voters since January in just three counties: Orange, Broward and Miami-Dade.   …

Colorado

Election officials are investigating about a dozen cases of apparent voter-registration fraud in El Paso County, Clerk and Recorder Bob Balink said Monday.

The cases involve voter-registration forms submitted to the election office that contain false information such as inaccurate driver’s license numbers, Balink said. Investigators for the 4th Judicial District Attorney’s Office are also participating in the inquiry.

One explanation could be political activists submitted the registration forms, pretending to be the people identified on the forms, Balink said.  …

Ohio

Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner has a reputation as the most partisan state official in Ohio. And she works hard to earn it. The Democrat’s latest stunt rejected absentee ballots for thousands of Republicans.

But it’s not her first rodeo. Almost as soon as Brunner was elected in 2006, she tried to remove several Republican county elections officials, including Ohio Republican Party Chairman Robert Bennett. They accused her of “storm trooper tactics” to silence critics.

Then Brunner spread an alarm that Ohio’s electronic voting machines were vulnerable to tampering – a favorite claim of the paranoid left. Elections officials who participated in Brunner’s study called her conclusions over-hyped “leaps in logic” and said, “The report itself could be viewed as an attack on the elections system … (that) planted seeds in the mind of the public to mistrust those who oversee elections.”   …

New Mexico

ALBUQUERQUE — The Bernalillo County clerk has notified prosecutors that some 1,100 possibly fraudulent voter registration cards have been turned in to her office.

Some cards in New Mexico’s most populous county have the same name as a voter who’s already registered, but carry a different birth date or Social Security number; some list someone else’s Social Security number; some have addresses that don’t exist, Clerk Maggie Toulouse Oliver said Wednesday.

In one case, a series of about nine cards appears to have been taken directly from the phone book, she said.   …

Michigan

Several municipal clerks across the state are reporting fraudulent and duplicate voter registration applications, most of them from a nationwide community activist group working to help low- and moderate-income families.

The majority of the problem applications are coming from the group ACORN, Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, which has a large voter registration program among its many social service programs. ACORN’s Michigan branch, based in Detroit, has enrolled 200,000 voters statewide in recent months, mostly with the use of paid, part-time employees.   …

30% of voters will have voted before election day.  One vote at a time – we can make a difference.

The Clinton Administration – architect of the  0% down, quick turn mortgage market; all to make affordable housing available to everyone.
ooops  guess not.  -pf

LINK

How A Clinton-Era Rule Rewrite Made Subprime Crisis Inevitable

TERRY JONES
INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY
Posted Wednesday, September 24, 2008 4:30 PM PT

One of the most frequently asked questions about the subprime market meltdown and housing crisis is: How did the government get so deeply involved in the housing market?

What Caused The Loan Crisis? The answer is: President Clinton wanted it that way.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, even into the early 1990s, weren’t the juggernauts they’d later be.

While President Carter in 1977 signed the Community Reinvestment Act, which pushed Fannie and Freddie to aggressively lend to minority communities, it was Clinton who supercharged the process. After entering office in 1993, he extensively rewrote Fannie’s and Freddie’s rules.

In so doing, he turned the two quasi-private, mortgage-funding firms into a semi-nationalized monopoly that dispensed cash to markets, made loans to large Democratic voting blocs and handed favors, jobs and money to political allies. This potent mix led inevitably to corruption and the Fannie-Freddie collapse.

Despite warnings of trouble at Fannie and Freddie, in 1994 Clinton unveiled his National Homeownership Strategy, which broadened the CRA in ways Congress never intended.

Addressing the National Association of Realtors that year, Clinton bluntly told the group that “more Americans should own their own homes.” He meant it.

Clinton saw home ownership as a way to open the door for blacks and other minorities to enter the middle class.

Though well-intended, the problem was that Congress was about to change hands, from the Democrats to the Republicans. Rather than submit legislation that the GOP-led Congress was almost sure to reject, Clinton ordered Robert Rubin’s Treasury Department to rewrite the rules in 1995.

The rewrite, as City Journal noted back in 2000, “made getting a satisfactory CRA rating harder.” Banks were given strict new numerical quotas and measures for the level of “diversity” in their loan portfolios. Getting a good CRA rating was key for a bank that wanted to expand or merge with another.

Loans started being made on the basis of race, and often little else.

“Bank examiners would use federal home-loan data, broken down by neighborhood, income group and race, to rate banks on performance,” wrote Howard Husock, a scholar at the Manhattan Institute.

But those rules weren’t enough.

Clinton got the Department of Housing and Urban Development to double-team the issue. That would later prove disastrous.

Clinton’s HUD secretary, Andrew Cuomo, “made a series of decisions between 1997 and 2001 that gave birth to the country’s current crisis,” the liberal Village Voice noted. Among those decisions were changes that let Fannie and Freddie get into subprime loan markets in a big way.

Other rule changes gave Fannie and Freddie extraordinary leverage, allowing them to hold just 2.5% of capital to back their investments, vs. 10% for banks.

Since they could borrow at lower rates than banks due to implicit government guarantees for their debt, the government-sponsored enterprises boomed.

With incentives in place, banks poured billions of dollars of loans into poor communities, often “no doc” and “no income” loans that required no money down and no verification of income.

By 2007, Fannie and Freddie owned or guaranteed nearly half of the $12 trillion U.S. mortgage market — a staggering exposure.

Worse still was the cronyism.

Fannie and Freddie became home to out-of-work politicians, mostly Clinton Democrats. An informal survey of their top officials shows a roughly 2-to-1 dominance of Democrats over Republicans.

Then there were the campaign donations. From 1989 to 2008, some 384 politicians got their tip jars filled by Fannie and Freddie.

Over that time, the two GSEs spent $200 million on lobbying and political activities. Their charitable foundations dropped millions more on think tanks and radical community groups.

Did it work? Well, if measured by the goal of putting more poor people into homes, the answer would have to be yes.

From 1995 to 2005, a Harvard study shows, minorities made up 49% of the 12.5 million new homeowners.

The problem is that many of those loans have now gone bad, and minority homeownership rates are shrinking fast.

Fannie and Freddie, with their massive loan portfolios stuffed with securitized mortgage-backed paper created from subprime loans, are a failed legacy of the Clinton era.

I have a bracelet too!

The tale of two bracelets

National Review – click here to read more

“I think Senator McCain’s absolutely right that we need more responsibility…”

“Senator McCain is absolutely right that the earmarks process has been abused…”

“He’s also right that oftentimes lobbyists and special interests are the ones that are introducing these…requests…”

“John mentioned the fact that business taxes on paper are high in this country, and he’s absolutely right…”

“John is right we have to make cuts…”

“Senator McCain is absolutely right that the violence has been reduced as a consequence of the extraordinary sacrifice of our troops and our military families…”

“John — you’re absolutely right that presidents have to be prudent in what they say…”

“Senator McCain is absolutely right, we cannot tolerate a nuclear Iran…”

Add it all up, and Obama was undeniably, and surprisingly, deferential to a man who in the past Obama has said “doesn’t get it.” Moments after the debate ended, I asked David Axelrod, Obama’s chief strategist, whether Obama had simply been too nice (not a question one often gets to ask in these situations). “The bottom line is, I don’t think the American people want us to disagree just for the sake of being disagreeable,” Axelrod told me. “I think he made a very strong case, absolutely.”

Well, you wouldn’t expect Axelrod to admit that his guy messed up. But here’s a prediction: The next time McCain and Obama meet in debate, on October 7 in Nashville, start a drinking game in which you take a big swig every time Obama says, “John is absolutely right.” I’ll bet you get to the end of the debate without ever lifting a glass.

Hot Air – click here to read more

I did have a moment of frustration with McCain on the first question, a round I think Obama won.  He never challenged Obama’s assumptions that the current credit crisis came from too little regulation.  I kept expecting McCain to talk about the disaster of the Community Reinvestment Act, and the mandates from Congress that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac encourage bad lending by buying up bad paper.  Instead, he tried to out-populist Obama, and Obama sounds more authentic as a populist.

LINK

Rescuing ACORN

INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY

Posted Friday, September 26, 2008 4:20 PM PT

Election ’08: Democrats want to use profits from the bailout as a slush fund for liberal activist groups, even those involved in vote fraud to help elect Barack Obama.

Prior financial bailouts, or “rescues,” such as those involving savings and loan failures, and Chrysler, have over time actually made money for the government. It may be the case here as well, as assets bought by the government at bargain prices return to marketable values and are auctioned off.

One of the sticking points in resolving the crisis was a poison pill in the Dodd/Paulson compromise that would move 20% of profits from the bailout into the Housing Trust Fund, a slush fund for political action groups such as ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) and the National Council of La Raza.

Sen. Lindsey Graham told Greta Van Susteren of Fox News that Democrats had other priorities than just solving this crisis: “And this deal that’s on the table now is not a very good deal. Twenty percent of the money that should go to retire debt that will be created to solve this problem winds up in a housing organization called ACORN that is an absolute ill-run enterprise, and I can’t believe we would take money away from debt retirement to put it in a housing program that doesn’t work.”

Groups such as ACORN and La Raza lobby to secure government-funded services for their members and seek to move them to the voting booth. The housing bill President Bush signed in July contained a similar funding mechanism for the HTF — a tax on mortgages backed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

The tax was designed to channel upwards of $600 million annually in grants for developing and restoring housing, mostly as low-income rentals, available to ACORN and other groups. ACORN gets 40% of its revenues from the American taxpayers and not all of it finds its way into housing.

A new whistle-blower report from the Consumer Rights League claims that ACORN routinely commingles funds from its housing arm into political projects such as voter registration and get-out-the-vote drives. Money is fungible. Any taxpayer money that ACORN gets for housing makes it easier for the group to put its other funds into voter drives.

“These are taxpayer funds, in an indirect method, being used to subsidize political activism,” says Rep. Jeb Hensarling, a Texas Republican and chairman of the conservative House Republican Study Committee. “I’m sure they’re not going out and registering any Republicans.”

Obama cut his community organizer teeth with ACORN. As a young lawyer he represented the group in a suit against the state of Illinois, which was concerned that postcard registration and a new motor voter law might invite fraud. ACORN later invited Obama to train its staff in leadership seminars.

ACORN has a political arm that endorsed Barack Obama for president in February and has stepped up its registration efforts to help elect a future benefactor. The Obama campaign admits to failing to report $800,000 in campaign payments to ACORN. They were disguised as payments to a front group called “Citizen Services Inc.” for “advance work.”

Consumer Rights League official Jim Terry says: “ACORN has a long and sordid history of employing convoluted Enron-style accounting to illegally use taxpayer funds for their own political gain. Now it looks like ACORN is using the same type of convoluted accounting scheme for Obama’s political gain.”

A major part of ACORN’s sordid history is vote fraud. ACORN has been implicated in voter fraud and bogus registration schemes in Missouri, Ohio and at least 12 other states. Last July, ACORN settled the largest case of voter fraud in Washington state history, involving nearly 2,000 bogus voter forms. In Ohio in 2004, ACORN submitted forms for the likes of Mary Poppins, Dick Tracy and someone named Jive Turkey.

ACORN uses taxpayer money to elect people like Barack Obama who will work to get them more taxpayer money. Democrats are willing to rip off taxpayers in a national crisis to make it happen.

Link

Rewriting History: Lies that Hurt Us All
William Wilson
Tuesday, September 23, 2008

As Congress and the Administration work to prevent the crisis in the financial sector from spilling over into the larger economy, the vultures are swarming. In an Associated Press article yesterday, the following quote is made by Barney Frank, ultra-liberal Democrat of Massachusetts:

“The private sector got us into this mess…The government has to get us out of it. We do want to do it carefully.”

This is obscene. This “mess”, as Congressman Frank so eloquently put it, is the fault of government pure and simple. And, it is the personal fault of Barney Frank. For him to now hide his near-criminal behavior by pointing a finger at the entire private sector is the height of arrogance.

Consider the facts.

Under rules implemented by the Clinton Administration in 1995, banks and mortgage companies were required to give loans to people who could not afford them. This scheme was welfare pure and simple—hand over money to people everyone knew would not be able to pay it back. The banks and mortgage companies did as required. Otherwise they would face stiff penalties and possibly lose their license to operate. So, they gave out the money to put people in homes they could not afford.

But the banks had to get the money from somewhere. They got it from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two failed quasi-government organizations. Fannie and Freddie urged, encouraged and bullied banks to give out more and more high-risk loans. They then bought these bogus mortgages and sold them to investors, again with the implied backing of the U.S. Government.

So, why wouldn’t an investment firm not buy these securities? After all, they were marketed as having the backing of the U.S. taxpayers.

The Wall Street Journal detailed Barney Frank’s sorted history of defending the scammers:

• In 2000, then-Rep. Richard Baker proposed a bill to reform Fannie and Freddie’s oversight. Mr. Frank dismissed the idea, saying concerns about the two were “overblown” and that there was “no federal liability there whatsoever.”

• Two years later, Mr. Frank was at it again. “I do not regard Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as problems,” he said in response to another reform push. And then: “I regard them as great assets.”

• Again in June 2003, the favorite of the Beltway press corps assured the public that “there is no federal guarantee” of Fan and Fred obligations.

• A month later, Freddie Mac’s multibillion-dollar accounting scandal broke into the open. But Mr. Frank was sanguine. “I do not think we are facing any kind of a crisis,” he said at the time.

Three months later he repeated the claim that Fannie and Freddie posed no “threat to the Treasury.” Even suggesting that heresy, he added, could become “a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

• In April 2004, Fannie announced a multibillion-dollar financial “misstatement” of its own. Mr. Frank was back for the defense. Fannie and Freddie posed no risk to taxpayers, he said, adding that “I think Wall Street will get over it” if the two collapsed.

Pretty clear. It was not the “private sector” failing as Congressman Frank declared. It was government that failed. Specifically, it was people like Barney Frank that failed the American people. Moreover, he committed these acts for a pure ideological reason—to advance his warped left-wing vision.

But it goes deeper still. By attacking the entire “private sector”, Frank is declaring his opposition to small business and to tens of millions of people who labor for the betterment of their families by saving and investing.

The central issue of the proposed bailout proposed by the Bush Administration—the issue that prompted Barney Frank’s childish and insulting remark—is how to get billions of dollars securities based on the mortgages held by people who cannot afford them out of the system. You can argue over whether to do it or how to do it—but that is the aim of the proposal.

And what does Comrade Frank now insist is a deal-breaker? More money has to be made available to keep these people in the homes they couldn’t afford in the first place! Oh, and of course, many on his side are demanding that state and local governments who have been spending at double-digit increases every year for a decade be bailed out as well. No, they shouldn’t have to cut the feather-bedding or cut back on the silly-expensive union contracts. Barney Frank wants the American taxpayers to bail them out too.

Taking the global view, here is what happened and this is where we are. Knowing the American people were sick and tired of the welfare handouts, the liberals devised a backdoor way to funnel billions of dollars to their welfare clients. It was based on a Ponzi scheme that finally went broke. A lot of people made money along the way but the central rationale was always to transfer hundreds of billions of dollars in welfare to low income citizens.

And now that the game is exposed, the first thing these thieves do is blame the “private sector.” They are using the destruction they have caused to justify giving them more power to do even more damage.

That is what is at stake. Will we hand our country over to a group of devious, venal socialists who hate private enterprise, individual responsibility and personal freedom? Or, will we step back from the abyss, clean up the mess and set our house in order?

If he has done nothing else, Barney Frank has at least clarified the issues and made the choice clear for all willing to observe the facts. As valuable a service as this is, it should not be enough to keep him out of a well-deserved jail cell.

A Partisan Paper of Record

Today the New York Times launched its latest attack on this campaign in its capacity as an Obama advocacy organization. Let us be clear about what this story alleges: The New York Times charges that McCain-Palin 2008 campaign manager Rick Davis was paid by Freddie Mac until last month, contrary to previous reporting, as well as statements by this campaign and by Mr. Davis himself.

In fact, the allegation is demonstrably false. As has been previously reported, Mr. Davis separated from his consulting firm, Davis Manafort, in 2006. As has been previously reported, Mr. Davis has seen no income from Davis Manafort since 2006. Zero. Mr. Davis has received no salary or compensation since 2006. Mr. Davis has received no profit or partner distributions from that firm on any basis — weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, bi-monthly, quarterly, semi-annual or annual — since 2006. Again, zero. Neither has Mr. Davis received any equity in the firm based on profits derived since his financial separation from Davis Manafort in 2006.

Further, and missing from the Times‘ reporting, Mr. Davis has never — never — been a lobbyist for either Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac. Mr. Davis has not served as a registered lobbyist since 2005.

Though these facts are a matter of public record, the New York Times, in what can only be explained as a willful disregard of the truth, failed to research this story or present any semblance of a fairminded treatment of the facts closely at hand. The paper did manage to report one interesting but irrelevant fact: Mr. Davis did participate in a roundtable discussion on the political scene with…Paul Begala.

Again, let us be clear: The New York Times — in the absence of any supporting evidence — has insinuated some kind of impropriety on the part of Senator McCain and Rick Davis. But entirely missing from the story is any significant mention of Senator McCain’s long advocacy for, and co-sponsorship of legislation to enact, stricter oversight and regulation of both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — dating back to 2006. Please see the attached floor statement on this issue by Senator McCain from 2006.

To the central point our campaign has made in the last 48 hours: The New York Times has never published a single investigative piece, factually correct or otherwise, examining the relationship between Obama campaign chief strategist David Axelrod, his consulting and lobbying clients, and Senator Obama. Likewise, the New York Times never published an investigative report, factually correct or otherwise, examining the relationship between Former Fannie Mae CEO Jim Johnson and Senator Obama, who appointed Johnson head of his VP search committee, until the writing was on the wall and Johnson was under fire following reports from actual news organizations that he had received preferential loans from predatory mortgage lender Countrywide.

Therefore this “report” from the New York Times must be evaluated in the context of its intent and purpose. It is a partisan attack falsely labeled as objective news. And its most serious allegations are based entirely on the claims of anonymous sources, a familiar yet regretful tactic for the paper.

We all understand that partisan attacks are part of the political process in this country. The debate that stems from these grand and sometimes unruly conversations is what makes this country so exceptional. Indeed, our nation has a long and proud tradition of news organizations that are ideological and partisan in nature, the Huffington Post and the New York Times being two such publications. We celebrate their contribution to the political fabric of America. But while the Huffington Post is utterly transparent, the New York Times obscures its true intentions — to undermine the candidacy of John McCain and boost the candidacy of Barack Obama — under the cloak of objective journalism.

The New York Times is trying to fill an ideological niche. It is a business decision, and one made under economic duress, as the New York Times is a failing business. But the paper’s reporting on Senator McCain, his campaign, and his staff should be clearly understood by the American people for what it is: a partisan assault aimed at promoting that paper’s preferred candidate, Barack Obama.

Statement by Senator John McCain, May 25, 2006:

Mr. President, this week Fannie Mae’s regulator reported that the company’s quarterly reports of profit growth over the past few years were “illusions deliberately and systematically created” by the company’s senior management, which resulted in a $10.6 billion accounting scandal.

The Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight’s report goes on to say that Fannie Mae employees deliberately and intentionally manipulated financial reports to hit earnings targets in order to trigger bonuses for senior executives. In the case of Franklin Raines, Fannie Mae’s former chief executive officer, OFHEO’s report shows that over half of Mr. Raines’ compensation for the 6 years through 2003 was directly tied to meeting earnings targets. The report of financial misconduct at Fannie Mae echoes the deeply troubling $5 billion profit restatement at Freddie Mac.

The OFHEO report also states that Fannie Mae used its political power to lobby Congress in an effort to interfere with the regulator’s examination of the company’s accounting problems. This report comes some weeks after Freddie Mac paid a record $3.8 million fine in a settlement with the Federal Election Commission and restated lobbying disclosure reports from 2004 to 2005. These are entities that have demonstrated over and over again that they are deeply in need of reform.

For years I have been concerned about the regulatory structure that governs Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac–known as Government-sponsored entities or GSEs–and the sheer magnitude of these companies and the role they play in the housing market. OFHEO’s report this week does nothing to ease these concerns. In fact, the report does quite the contrary. OFHEO’s report solidifies my view that the GSEs need to be reformed without delay.

I join as a cosponsor of the Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act of 2005, S. 190, to underscore my support for quick passage of GSE regulatory reform legislation. If Congress does not act, American taxpayers will continue to be exposed to the enormous risk that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pose to the housing market, the overall financial system, and the economy as a whole.

I urge my colleagues to support swift action on this GSE reform legislation.

Link

Sept. 22 (Bloomberg) — The financial crisis of the past year has provided a number of surprising twists and turns, and from Bear Stearns Cos. to American International Group Inc., ambiguity has been a big part of the story.

Why did Bear Stearns fail, and how does that relate to AIG? It all seems so complex.

But really, it isn’t. Enough cards on this table have been turned over that the story is now clear. The economic history books will describe this episode in simple and understandable terms: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac exploded, and many bystanders were injured in the blast, some fatally.

Fannie and Freddie did this by becoming a key enabler of the mortgage crisis. They fueled Wall Street’s efforts to securitize subprime loans by becoming the primary customer of all AAA-rated subprime-mortgage pools. In addition, they held an enormous portfolio of mortgages themselves.

In the times that Fannie and Freddie couldn’t make the market, they became the market. Over the years, it added up to an enormous obligation. As of last June, Fannie alone owned or guaranteed more than $388 billion in high-risk mortgage investments. Their large presence created an environment within which even mortgage-backed securities assembled by others could find a ready home.

The problem was that the trillions of dollars in play were only low-risk investments if real estate prices continued to rise. Once they began to fall, the entire house of cards came down with them.

Turning Point

Take away Fannie and Freddie, or regulate them more wisely, and it’s hard to imagine how these highly liquid markets would ever have emerged. This whole mess would never have happened.

It is easy to identify the historical turning point that marked the beginning of the end.

Back in 2005, Fannie and Freddie were, after years of dominating Washington, on the ropes. They were enmeshed in accounting scandals that led to turnover at the top. At one telling moment in late 2004, captured in an article by my American Enterprise Institute colleague Peter Wallison, the Securities and Exchange Comiission’s chief accountant told disgraced Fannie Mae chief Franklin Raines that Fannie’s position on the relevant accounting issue was not even “on the page” of allowable interpretations.

Then legislative momentum emerged for an attempt to create a “world-class regulator” that would oversee the pair more like banks, imposing strict requirements on their ability to take excessive risks. Politicians who previously had associated themselves proudly with the two accounting miscreants were less eager to be associated with them. The time was ripe.

Greenspan’s Warning

The clear gravity of the situation pushed the legislation forward. Some might say the current mess couldn’t be foreseen, yet in 2005 Alan Greenspan told Congress how urgent it was for it to act in the clearest possible terms: If Fannie and Freddie “continue to grow, continue to have the low capital that they have, continue to engage in the dynamic hedging of their portfolios, which they need to do for interest rate risk aversion, they potentially create ever-growing potential systemic risk down the road,” he said. “We are placing the total financial system of the future at a substantial risk.”

What happened next was extraordinary. For the first time in history, a serious Fannie and Freddie reform bill was passed by the Senate Banking Committee. The bill gave a regulator power to crack down, and would have required the companies to eliminate their investments in risky assets.

Different World

If that bill had become law, then the world today would be different. In 2005, 2006 and 2007, a blizzard of terrible mortgage paper fluttered out of the Fannie and Freddie clouds, burying many of our oldest and most venerable institutions. Without their checkbooks keeping the market liquid and buying up excess supply, the market would likely have not existed.

But the bill didn’t become law, for a simple reason: Democrats opposed it on a party-line vote in the committee, signaling that this would be a partisan issue. Republicans, tied in knots by the tight Democratic opposition, couldn’t even get the Senate to vote on the matter.

That such a reckless political stand could have been taken by the Democrats was obscene even then. Wallison wrote at the time: “It is a classic case of socializing the risk while privatizing the profit. The Democrats and the few Republicans who oppose portfolio limitations could not possibly do so if their constituents understood what they were doing.”

Mounds of Materials

Now that the collapse has occurred, the roadblock built by Senate Democrats in 2005 is unforgivable. Many who opposed the bill doubtlessly did so for honorable reasons. Fannie and Freddie provided mounds of materials defending their practices. Perhaps some found their propaganda convincing.

But we now know that many of the senators who protected Fannie and Freddie, including Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Christopher Dodd, have received mind-boggling levels of financial support from them over the years.

Throughout his political career, Obama has gotten more than $125,000 in campaign contributions from employees and political action committees of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, second only to Dodd, the Senate Banking Committee chairman, who received more than $165,000.

Clinton, the 12th-ranked recipient of Fannie and Freddie PAC and employee contributions, has received more than $75,000 from the two enterprises and their employees. The private profit found its way back to the senators who killed the fix.

There has been a lot of talk about who is to blame for this crisis. A look back at the story of 2005 makes the answer pretty clear.

Oh, and there is one little footnote to the story that’s worth keeping in mind while Democrats point fingers between now and Nov. 4: Senator John McCain was one of the three cosponsors of S.190, the bill that would have averted this mess.

Full article here

Watch the money flow. Obama dollars can tell us a lot.

1.         $120,349.   Other People’s Money.
Senator Obama received more political contribution money from now-collapsed mortgage banks Fannie Mae [Federal National Mortgage Association] and Freddie Mac [Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corp] than all but one of the 353 other senators and congressmen who received political contributions from these two entities which were recently taken over by the federal government. 
Even more dramatic is the fact that 19 years (from 1989 – 2008) of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac political contribution statistics show Senator Obama received his $120,349 despite having been in the U.S. Senate for just three years.  Only Senator Chris Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut — who has been in Congress for 33 years (1975-81, House of Representatives; 1981-Present, Senate) — received more.[1] 
2.         $195,000.   Other People’s Money.
Soon after her husband was elected to the U.S. Senate, his wife Michelle Obama received a $195,000 raise (to $316,962 in 2005 from $121,910 in 2004).
3.         $1,000,000.   Other People’s Money. 
Subsequently after her husband was elected Senator, Senator Obama requested a $1,000,000 earmark for Mrs. Obama’s employer, the University of Chicago Hospitals, where she handles “community outreach”[3]  - which is apparently akin to being a handsomely paid “community organizer” but with better contacts.   
4.         $250,000.  Other People’s Money.
When asked during the Democrat presidential nomination race how much money Chicago slumlord and now-convicted felon Tony Rezko had raised in contributions to his campaign, Senator Obama waffled and wafted like the slim timber he is and said his “best guesstimate” was $10,000 to $15,000.  In fact, it was $250,000.[4]  Mr. Rezko is a long-time associate of Senator Obama and was his first substantial financial backer.  Also, “when Obama bought his $1.65 million South Side home, there was an adjacent landscaped lot, which Rezko’s wife purchased on the same day for the full asking price of $625,000.”  [see #5 below].
5.         $625,000.  Other People’s Money. 
While wealthy Syrian-born Chicago slumlord Tony Rezko was already known to be under federal investigation, the senator approached Mr. Rezko about purchasing the two adjoining properties.  Soon after Senator Obama bought the mansion for $300,000 less than the asking price.[5]  On the same day, Mr. Rezko’s wife purchased the adjoining vacant lot for the full asking price of $625,000.[6] 
6.         $75,000.  Other People’s Money.
Senator Obama served as a paid director to a “progressive” Chicago-area non-profit organization, the Woods Fund, from 1999 until almost 2003.  William C. Ayers — who, despite the senator’s protestations to the contrary, is a long-time friend and political ally — served with Senator Obama on the organization’s board of directors. 
Mr. Ayers is an unrepentant and unpunished American terrorist.  Mr. Ayers and his now-wife, Bernadine Dohrn, were leaders of the radical Left, terrorist group, the Weather Underground which was responsible for 25 bombings in the 1960′s and 70′s including bombings of the New York City police headquarters, the Capitol in Washington, and the Pentagon.  After successfully fleeing to avoid prosecution for ten years, Ayers and Dohrn turned-in themselves in 1980 but were never prosecuted due to improper police investigatory actions.  “Dohrn was once on the FBI’s Top 10 Most Wanted List and was described by J. Edgar Hoover as the ‘most dangerous woman in America.’”[7]
7.         $325,000.   Other People’s Money.
As a state senator Obama directed $225,000 of Illinois taxpayers’ money, and later as a U.S. Senator earmarked another $100,000 in federal tax money, for programs run by radical political activist and Catholic priest (now removed from his church), Father Michael Pfleger of St. Sabina Roman Catholic Church on Chicago’s South Side.[10]  Senator Obama identified Father Pfleger, with whom he has been involved for 20 years, as “a key source of spiritual guidance.”[11]
Father Pfleger’s Catholic parish, like that of Obama spiritual mentor and advisor Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s church, espouses a brand of black exclusivity based in the “black liberation theology” of James Cone and has done so, also like Reverend Wright’s church, for two decades. 

8.         $15,000,000.   Other People’s Money (yes, you read that right, $15 million)

Over the past 15 years Senator Barack Obama’s church, Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, Illinois, and its pastor, Senator Obama’s “spiritual mentor” Reverend Jeremiah Wright has received $15,000,000 in grant money from the federal government.[18]  Senator Obama has been a church member for 20 years.

9.         $100,000,000.  Other People’s Money (and again, yes, you read that right, $100 million).
The Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC) was established in 1995 after a $49.2 million grant proposal by Obama friend and unrepentant-terrorist-bomber-now-educator William Ayers [see #6 above] was awarded.  Both Senator Obama and Mr. Ayers were deeply involved – Senator Obama as founding Chairman – in the failed, five-year CAC educational “reform” fiasco, which wasted over $100 million of other people’s money on Mr. Ayers’ pet authoritarian educational theories.[21] 
Senator Obama, with the help of such people, attempted to radically change the entire Chicago, Illinois education system.  Fortunately, he failed.  If elected President, he might not.
10.       $0 , at last,… Obama Dollars
Now remember, Senator Obama’s campaign theme is “Hope” and “Change You Can Believe In,” nevertheless, the senator’s half-brother, George Hussein Onyango Obama, lives in dire poverty in a tiny, collapsing, dirt-floored hut on the outskirts of Nairobi, Kenya.  According to Kenyan-born George Obama (who is pictured outside his hut in the Telegraph U.K. newspaper as well as Vanity Fair magazine (Italian edition) and the Chicago Sun-Times) he exists on approximately $1 a month.  Senator Barack Obama met with him in 2006, and had already been a United States Senator for at least a year.[27] 
Other people’s money is one thing. Obama dollars are something else. There is a lesson here on the man’s friends and family, and most importantly, his character.

Well it’s obvious the Democrats are going to confuse this issue right up through the elections.  Let’s sort this out. Remember McCain is not defending the Administration here – he has gone against the administration on many issues, where Democrats and Obama are in lock step.

I will continue to update this page with documentation and additional information as I have time.

In other posts I’ve noted:

(1) The warnings President Bush noted in 2003 on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -

(2) The dismissal of said warnings by Barney Frank.

(3) The warnings Senator McCain noted in 2006 on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -

(4) Congress has oversight of FM*2 not the President.

(5) CRA Community Reinvestment Act – encouraged “no down payment” loans to people who could not afford to repay the loan.

Now I will bold the Democrats (mostly Clinton Administration or Obama supporters) below as we will continue to sort this out.

Senators Chris Dodd (D) and Barack Obama (D), Christopher Dodd received $165,400 in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac campaign contributions, including contributions from PACs and individuals, followed by Obama, who received $126,349 in such contributions since being elected to the Senate in 2004.  We will also look at “sweetheart deals” from Countrywide.

Barney Frank

James A. Johnson

Angelo Mozilo – Countrywide

David Sambol – Countrywide

Fannie Mae Chairman and CEO Franklin D. Raines

The Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO), the division of the Department of Housing and Urban Development charged with regulating Fannie Mae and its sister organization Freddie Mac, issued a scathing report on Fannie’s financial manipulations, stating outright that some of the motivation was to protect those executive bonuses. The report stated that Raines had earned more than $52 million in performance and other bonuses from 1998 through 2003. This was in addition to some $38 million in salaries and other compensation.

Chief Financial Officer J. Timothy Howard

Interim chief executive Daniel H. Mudd, who was the company’s chief operating officer

Interim chief financial officer Robert J. Levin, who was an executive vice president

Jamie S. Gorelick, a Fannie vice chairman and former deputy attorney general who left the company in 2003.

Freddie Mac Chairman and Chief Executive Richard Syron

I’ve been thinking a lot about my Mom today, and not just because I was at a reunion where her name, recipes and demeanor seeped out of conversations that I overheard or was part of today.

I just read an article that talked about how much of America has a hard time thinking Sarah Palin is qualified to be Vice President of these United States when they accept that Barack Obama is.  Is it a guy thing?

Each day I understand more why my CD2 Candidate Mariannette Miller-Meeks is so very excited about Sarah Palin’s nomination.  It’s even becoming clearer why Geraldine Ferraro is being so generous in her comments about Palin’s candidacy, or that Hillary is watching her step in discussions about Palin.

In 1964 my mother helped me write a nominating speech for Barry Goldwater for my 6th grade class (probably would not surprise you to note that Barry won – in my class).  It was my Mom who wrote letters to the editor when the price of sugar rose for no real reason; it was my Mother who was told she could no longer be engaged at the level she was in Church Sunday education activities because she only had a high school education.  It was my Mother who was so much smarter and capable of leading.

Sarah Palin is a pioneer woman who respects the land, who is not afraid of hard work or to work with her hands. [I love this] She can “field dress a moose”; she is a woman who can take care of herself and was raised to do just that.  Palin has a mind of her own and has forged a solid family with shared responsibility with her husband – something that shows balance and maturity – a quality of spirit.

What are people afraid of?  That she doesn’t know the potholes of DC?  That she’s not smart enough for the job?  Are they saying that only someone from a big city or with an Ivy League education can lead America?

I respectfully disagree.

Some people on the side that likes her, are comparing her to Ronald Reagan.  There was only one “Ronald Maximus” and that comparison is not fair.  In the 90′s and even more so after RWR died a few years ago – I started reading the papers he wrote during his “wilderness years” – when he was out of public service.  It was ridiculous how much smarter he was and how he “GOT IT” so much better than many of his age.  Ronald Reagan was a born politician.

Sarah Palin’s world is not complicated; she is not a politician; nor did she strive for public service.  She just knows what’s right, what’s wrong – how to mow over someone to get what she believes is right for her constituents and has lived in their world.  Many of today’s politicians have not.

As I’m thinking of these qualities some of the words of Teddy Kennedy’s eulogy for his Brother Bobby come to mind.  He wanted Bobby to be remembered…

… as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it.

Those of us who loved him and who take him to his rest today, pray that what he was to us and what he wished for others will some day come to pass for all the world.

As he said many times, in many parts of this nation, to those he touched and who sought to touch him:
“Some men see things as they are and say why.
I dream things that never were and say why not.”

Watch Sarah’s spirit soar over the next weeks. Why not? She has what it takes; and may God continue to bless people like my Mother who helped push us all in the right direction.

Country First

I just read an article on the Politico blog that I simply do not like.

Race (or gender) has no place in politics; to even bring it up incites.

If I read this blog post right, this dialog appears to be started anew by the media, and the Obama campaign is parsing how to use it to their advantage.

Black, white, male, female, the discussion must be about policies, and and leadership – most especially what the candidate has DONE to “walk their talk”.  Say what you will about Sarah Palin; Obama has done almost NOTHING.  NOTHING at all – could be argued (relative to the opportunities he’s had in the Illinois legislature and US Senate) to indicate what he SAYS he wants to do is what he will do as President.

This to me, appears to be a desperate tactic if used and is just plain wrong.

Talk about your vision and tell us what you’ve done in the past to cause us to believe in that vision, Barry.  McCain has a history or standing between the two parties doing what he believes is the right thing for America.

And remembering your history at this time is useful. Martin Luther King was in fact a Republican.

COUNTRY FIRST

and I feel like I need to keep repeating this – Bush (in 2003) and McCain (in 2006) warned about this happening and put forward legislation that would move us away from these failed policies. you can find this in older blog posts. -pf

Link to full story above

YouTube video – Covering Your Fannie, Who Really Caused Our Economic Crisis?

corptaxrates_usstates_vs_oecdcountries-20080813.pdf

Jim Johnson’s trouble with Fannie Mae that allowed him to rake in almost 100 million dollars.   High pay while company was sowing the seeds of failure and hiding it?  key-member-of-obamas-vp-co.pdf

Senator Dodd runs the Banking Committee, and is the only one who received more $ from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mack than Barry did. And he got a sweetheart deal from Country Wide.  dodd-deserves-financial-scr.pdf

Next! Franklin Delano Raines fd-raines-wapost.pdf

don’t forget this post where there are documents to show that McCain warned about this in 2006.

How much of this is going to hit the MSM in the next days?  Nothing?

and I feel like I need to keep repeating this – Bush (in 2003) and McCain (in 2006) warned about this happening and put forward legislation that would move us away from these failed policies.  you can find this in older blog posts. -pf

Link to original article  (article in full posted below)

Welcome to History   [Jim Manzi]

It’s helpful to think of how to address the current financial crisis (and I don’t use that word casually) in terms of the end-state we want to achieve, and the transition plan to get there.

The problem we face is often described as mind-bendingly complex, but in its essentials, it is simple.

It is well known, in retrospect, that we had a classic speculative bubble in home prices. As is typical in a bubble, its later stages were characterized by reckless investment, excess debt and shady-tending-to-illegal business practices. As cheap credit pushed up the market price of houses, homeowners began to incur lots of debt (i.e., promises to pay other people on Tuesday for a hamburger today), which they were comfortable doing because they believed that they had sufficient equity value in their homes to make good on the debt if required. Some of this debt was mortgage debt. Many people who previously would not have received mortgages got them. Simultaneously, many homeowners were offered and accepted mortgages that approached all-debt at floating interest rates, rather than the traditional 20% down 30-year fixed rate mortgage. In the worst instances, these mortgages had payments that were all-but-certain to rise in the future. These homeowners were betting that they would get raises, inherit money, or, more likely, would be bailed out by an increasing home price that would allow them to roll over the debt. Other debt was incurred by existing homeowners for the purpose of consumer expenditures, which had the net effect of hollowing out the equity they had in their homes. All these effects are just examples of greater levels of debt secured against the market prices of homes.

Here’s the problem with having lots and lots of debt and no savings, whether in the form of passbook savings or equity in your house: Sooner or later Tuesday comes around when you happen to have had a bad week, and the guy who sold you your hamburger wants his money, but you don’t have it. Once home prices began to decline (or for the most over-leveraged homeowners, simply stopped rising fast enough), therefore, it was a big problem when Tuesday started to come around and lenders and vendors started to ask to get paid for the hamburgers.

Normally this would have been bad for both the homeowner and the guy who wanted to get paid for his hamburger, which might very well be the mortgage lender, but not really a big deal for you or me. (If enough of this occurred, of course, it could lead to a general slowdown and hurt pretty much everybody.) But this impact was magnified by the fact that most of the mortgage lenders sold the right to the payments under the mortgage to third parties. These third parties broke up the rights to the payments from the mortgages into lots of little pieces, combined these pieces with the rights to payments for little pieces of lots of other mortgages, repacked these in “creative” ways, and re-sold them to fourth, fifth and sixth parties. Four, five and six then used these promises as their own equity in order to raise further debt of their own. This would be like you using an IOU from your neighbor as your down payment for a mortgage. So when lots of these over-leveraged homeowners started to miss mortgage payments, parties four, five and six had less money than they expected, and they had problems making their own debt payments if they themselves had taken out enough debt. Oh yeah, many of these debt contracts are in fact between parties four, five and six.

Unfortunately for you and me, parties four, five and six are the financial institutions where we have our life savings deposited.

The end state that we want to get to is pretty clear.

The price of the average home in America has fallen a lot, and is likely to fall further (although there will be huge regional differences). Some very over-leveraged homeowners are going to declare bankruptcy. Others are going to sell the boat and eat out less in order to avoid this. We need prices to mark to market (which they will eventually do anyway), as rapidly as possible consistent with not causing a depression caused by a collapse of consumer activity.

Many financial institutions have both profitable commercial businesses, and financial instruments that are wildly unprofitable, housed under one roof. We want the executives of these companies to lose their jobs, and the shareholders and bondholders in them to lose their money, while preserving the productive parts of the businesses and preventing a depression caused by a collapse of credit.

The trick, of course, is how we get these excesses purged from the system without tanking the economy worse than anything we have seen at least since the 1930s. What makes this especially tricky is that we don’t have a lot of visibility into how exposed each of parties four, five and six are to collapse.

This is what Paulson and Bernanke are trying to manage. They have done three big things in the past couple of days:

1. Proposed a huge RTC-like government “bad bank” that banks can dump all their bad loans into. (Apparently, though, unlike the case with the RTC, they will not need to declare bankruptcy to do it.)

2. Provided a federal guarantee on money-market accounts.

3. Promulgated a temporary ban on naked shortselling for about 800 financial stocks (in related news, the new recommended medical practice when you discover that you have a fever is to smash the thermometer against the wall, since this makes the problem go away).

All of these things are, in theory, bad. In practice, all will have very negative consequences over time. Here are some of the problems:

1. We’re getting pretty close to nationalizing (hopefully temporarily) a reasonably big piece of the U.S. housing finance market, as well as other financial sectors that are put at risk by it.

2. Time will tell, but likely medium-term implications include higher government interest payments, worse deficits and higher taxes. This certainly reduces the probability of making the Bush tax cuts permanent in a couple of years, no matter who is in the White House.

3. This is obviously unfair. It bails out irresponsible behavior, and by implication, punishes responsible behavior. Longer-term, unless there is a lot of pain felt by financial company executives — who, remember, don’t look like they have to go bankrupt to dump their bad loans on taxpayers — this creates a massive moral hazard problem. Further, if such a situation develops, it won’t be lost on voters, who will likely demand greater socialization of consequences of reasonably-foreseeable bad behavior by people who don’t make a million dollars per year. The ideological consequences of the last few weeks will take many years to play out, and conservatives are unlikely to happy about them.

4. It’s also unclear how much of the problem, and what problem, this really solves until home prices hit bottom. As the market price of the underlying assets keeps dropping, more and more debt instruments become “bad,” with cascading effects. Though not likely, it is a lot more plausible than it was five days ago that the federal government may become a buyer of the actual housing assets. In that case, welcome to the introduction of large-scale public housing for middle-class Americans.

These all sit on one side of the scale. Against all of this we have one huge consideration. If investors lose confidence in the safety of money market funds, mutual funds, demand deposit accounts and the other storehouses of value in the modern economy, we would have a problem that would make somewhat higher taxes and moral hazard seem like child’s play. Trust me — you do not want to experience a full-scale bank run in contemporary America. I’m not sure how many people realize how close we were to the wheels coming off at about noon yesterday, as major commercial-paper processing banks like State Street lost 30% – 60% of their value in about 2 hours. Want evidence: When was the last time you heard of the U.S. government identifying a problem, developing a multi-hundred-billion-dollar program and announcing it within about 48 hours?

It seems to me that these are prudent actions as temporary, emergency measures. What will be essential is that:

1. These are temporary, and these positions be unwound as rapidly as possible. This includes not just the actions of the past two days, but also getting the federal government out of the insurance business (AIG) and the home lending business (Freddie and Fannie) as rapidly as is consistent with orderly unwinding of these positions.

2. The ultimate resolution assures that prior investors in these financial institutions and their executives bear very large financial penalties. Irresponsible homeowners should as well. Expect big political battles over the definition of “irresponsible.”

If done in this way, we can (in the hopeful case) work through the problem with limited actual costs to the taxpayers as assets are sold off, while limiting moral hazard and long-run government control of financial assets. But there are many very bad downside cases.

——–

Another good article on the Greenspan debacle is here in the Financial Times. -pf

Bush recommends oversite of Fanny Mae Freddie Mac in 2003

[from 2003] ”These two entities — Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — are not facing any kind of financial crisis,” said Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee.

defeated by Congress

McCain alerted the Senate to potential problems with Fanny Mae Freddie Mac in 2006

[from 2006] In this speech, McCain managed to predict the entire collapse that has forced the government to eat Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, along with Bear Stearns and AIG.  He hammers the falsification of financial records to benefit executives, including Franklin Raines and Jim Johnson (received $21,000,000 in one year] both of whom have worked as advisers to Barack Obama this year.

defeated by Congress

Obama received the 2nd most contributions from Fannie/Freddy in a 10 year summary (and Barry has only been a senator for 4 years!).  Top contribution goes to Christopher Dodd (the D from CONN) who has oversight of the Senate Banking Committee.

Obama’s VP vetting was initially assigned to former Fannie Mae CEO James Johnson.

YES, Madame  Speaker, an investigation is welcome.

House Democrats plan to aggressively look at the administration’s role in the meltdown over the weekend and to explore further regulation and government structures that would be taken up under the new president.

Be careful what you ask for…

I HAVE AN IDEA!!!

Let’s start with Jamie Gorlick who walked away with $26,000,000 from Fannie Mae and also played a major part in the Clinton Administration and the destruction of … well take the link and read it all yourself.  yeesh.  yep, Bush’s fault.

46 days to go.  (pix provided by mf- thanks)

A busy day with McCain/Palin in Cedar Rapids and spending time with CRs at HDQs on their assignments.

Got to love these guys; they are trying to keep democracy vital.

Is it too late?

Check out the video here.  My hearing of the speeches real time was disrupted three times by crazies. You only really see one disruption in the video.

I’m beat, but I settled in to read my RSS feeds and this one is worth some discussion:  Link to American Thinker Article.

I cringe when I see the word Conservative over and over again. I don’t want to be known as a Conservative I want to own and be proud of the Republican label again.  If you read the article I linked to above I’d be interested in some thoughts of where this country is going.  I read a foreign article yesterday that said that said (my words) that (with the economic turmoil in the US this week) the American Experiment is dead.  I wouldn’t go that far, but it’s certainly on a precipice which is why I find myself so active in this political season.

Change is an easy message.  What attracts me to both McCain, Palin and yes Miller-Meeks is that they are proven change agents.  Do they, will they, make mistakes?  sure.  Are they smooth talkers?  Miller-Meeks was on her game as I’ve never seen her today. 

Spend some time on her website http://millermeeksforcongress.com there is a new note up there almost every day now… 

Miller-Meeks was the last Iowa political speaker, then a new citizen of Bettendorf, Iowa, a former citizen of Palin’s home town of Wassilla, Alaska introduced the Governor – a great talk…

These all are “country first, party second” people.  Obama and Dave Loebsack (aka PAC-Man) are so far away from that it’s scary.

A friend called to wrap up the day and told me he watched the 6pm news to see them report that the Iowa contingent was upset that McCain/Palin only flew in and out of the area.  The news reported they did not visit the flood damage that has still not been cleaned up into the 4th month after water ravaged Cedar Rapids (among other towns).   Well they did visit the area in more detail and my friend was right to call and correct that misinformation.  (the station told him there were others who had called in and it would be corrected in the next broadcast – whatever – you can’t undo the news)

[10:30 update - I watched the local news and they did correct the story by adding a sentence to the 30 second piece "McCain and Palin toured..." without noting the reporting error in the 6pm show.  And this 30 second piece was not in the first 10 minutes, but at 10:26 after Sports.  - make of that what you will ]

It seems like we all need to change.

I think it’s time to bring a real outsider in to shake things up in DC.  And don’t get me wrong, McCain has been a real outsider for the majority of his career in DC.  The corruption and manipulation not to speak of the greed of those who run our home loan system is nothing more than disgraceful.  That is only one example.  McCain tried to bring this to our attention a few years ago; he was ignored.

It’s time to give McCain a try.  McCain is right when he says he has fought both parties. Me first Country second (or never) in DC has GOT to stop.  Now.  The same old politics as usual has put us in this mess.  It’s really Obama that will provide more of the same – and Obama’s “Change” policies are little more than income redistribution and weakening of American’s National Defense.

Vote for Real Change.

Vote McCain/Plain and also for Dr. Miller-Meeks for Congress.

It’s your future.

.

“One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.”  — Plato

Link

DENVER — This week, The Foundry is reporting on all the sights, sounds and flavors of the Democratic National Convention. And one of the first “sights”  for those arriving by airplane is a video on the catastrophic dangers of global warming. You don’t really have much of a choice of whether to watch: The video blares as you wait for the tram to take you to the main terminal. At the main terminal, you’re greeted by the face of Gov. Bill Ritter (D) on a banner extolling the virtues of Colorado’s “New Energy Economy.”

The message is clear: Coloradans (or at least those controlling the airport) hate fossil fuels. That’s why, when the Bureau of Land Management recently auctioned off leases to drill for natural gas on what environmentalists call “pristine backcountry” 54,631 acres, Ritter called it a “a sad day for Colorado.”

As much as Ritter and other environmentalists may hate natural gas, it’s big business in Colorado. In 2006, over $7 billion worth was produced from more than 20,000 wells.

The governor may not like the fact that his state remains a big producer of “old” energy like natural gas, but at least he knows where it comes from. Defending the fact that she is presiding over energy legislation in the U.S. House of Representatives while investing $50,000 in billionaire T. Boone Pickens’ energy scheme, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi yesterday said on “Meet the Press“:

I’m, I’m, I’m investing in something I believe in. I believe in natural gas as a clean, cheap alternative to fossil fuels. … These investments in wind, in solar and biofuels and focus on natural gas, these are the real alternatives.

Natural gas is a “cheap alternative to fossil fuels”? According to the “Energy Kids Page“ of the Energy Information Administration (EIA), here’s how natural gas  is created:

Millions of years ago, the remains of plants and animals decayed and built up in thick layers. This decayed matter from plants and animals is called organic material — it was once alive. Over time, the mud and soil changed to rock, covered the organic material and trapped it beneath the rock. Pressure and heat changed some of this organic material into coal, some into oil (petroleum), and some into natural gas — tiny bubbles of odorless gas.

In other words, contra Nancy, natural gas is every bit the fossil fuel that oil is. And just like oil, it has to be extracted from the ground — often from “pristine” areas that wealthy San Franciscans don’t like to see touched by drills. The U.S. currently is a net importer of natural gas. Not only is there 18.7 billion barrels of oil in the Outer Continental Shelf that Pelosi wants to keep off limits, there is also more than 77 trillion cubic feet of natural gas that we could be producing domestically.

Throughout convention week, liberal interest groups will present policy discussions in a “Big Tent” outside Pepsi Center. One such panel is called “Faces from the Front: Western Perspectives on the Drilling Boom” and promises to address “the toll that this administration’s ‘drill everywhere’ policies are having on the people and communities of the West.”

We’ll be sure to ask the panelists what they think about Nancy Pelosi’s coming out in favor of domestic production of  one “alternative” — natural gas.

Quick Hits:

• Celebrities from Bruce Springsteen and Ben Affleck to Darryl Hannah are swarming Denver in anticipation of Barack Obama’s Thursday evening speech at the 75,000-seat Invesco Field.
• Nebraska joined Colorado as one of two places where voters will decide whether to end affirmative action programs.
• President Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia yesterday said he will rebuild his country’s shattered army.
• In the wake of Russia’s invasion of Georgia, the White House may pull a civil nuclear co-operation agreement with Russia from Congress.
• Despite noticing an epidemic of mortgage fraud as early as 2004, the FBI failed to step in.

Link to source document 

Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama was quick to blame the bankruptcy of Wall Street giant Lehman Brothers on Republicans’ “failed philosophy”. Obama’s September 15 comments were repeated throughout the media–yet reporters have not noted Obama’s glaring conflict of interest—the Lehman debt owed to a bank owned by the financier who loaned millions of dollars to Tony Rezko.

Jockeying among the other debtors seeking repayment under Chapter 11 bankruptcy rules is BNP Paribas, a large French bank whose largest single private shareholder is Nadhmi Auchi’s General Mediterranean Holdings (GMH). BNP Paribas is owed $250 million by Lehman.

Nadhmi Auchi is an Iraqi whose Baathist ties go back to 1959. A formerly high-ranking official in Iraq’s Oil Ministry, Auchi left Iraq at the end of the 1970s. His wealth then grew exponentially as a procurer of arms for Saddam Hussein’s government during the Iran–Iraq war. He is now one of the richest men in Britain. Saddam Hussein in 1995 selected BNP, which later merged with Paribas, as the sole conduit bank handling Oil-for-Food transactions. This Clinton-era arrangement was changed in 2001 by the incoming Bush administration.

Auchi was also a key financial backer for Chicago political fixer and dual US-Syrian citizen Tony Rezko. This writer explained the complex web of relationships in an August 24 article titled, “Iraqi Billionaire Threatens Reporters Investigating Rezko Affair”:

A secret$3.5 million loan from an Auchi company to key early-money Barack Obama fundraiser Antoin Rezko was exposed while Rezko was awaiting trial on fraud and money-laundering charges earlier this year. Rezko’s bail was revoked and police showed up banging on the doors of his Wilmette Chicago mansion to drag him off to jail early in the morning of January 28th. Auchi’s loan to Rezko had come on May 23, 2005 but had not been disclosed to the Court as required in his bail agreement. Three weeks later, on June 15, 2005, Rezko’s wife assisted the Obamas in the purchase of their South Chicago mansion by purchasing a next-door undeveloped lot being sold with the house. 

According to the Times of London, “Mr. Rezko’s lawyer said his client had ‘longstanding indebtedness’ to Mr. Auchi’s General Mediterranean Holding (GMH). By June 2007 he owed it $27.9 million. Under a Loan Forgiveness Agreement described in court, M. Auchi lent Mr. Rezko $3.5 million in April 2005 and $11 million in September 2005, as well as $3.5 million transferred in April 2007. That agreement provided for the outstanding loans to be ‘forgiven’ in return for a stake in the 62-acre Riverside Park development.”

Rezko’s relationship with Barack Obama goes back to at least 1990, when Obama’s law firm did work relating to thousands of now-decaying Rezko apartment units in South Chicago. Rezko was a key early-money fundraiser in Obama’s state Senate campaigns and his failed run at the U.S. Congress.

According to The Times of London, “Mr. Auchi first met Mr. Rezko after the 2003 Iraq war and they have a business relationship.” At the time Auchi was facing the possibility of extradition to France. The Times of London explains: “Mr Auchi was convicted of corruption, given a suspended sentence and fined £1.4 million in France in 2003 for his part in the Elf affair, described as the biggest political and corporate scandal in post-war Europe. He, in a statement from his media lawyers, claims he is appealing against the sentence.”

In 2003, Nick Cohen of the UK Guardian wrote:
Allow me to introduce you to Nadhmi Auchi. He was charged in the 1950s with being an accomplice of Saddam Hussein, when the future tyrant was acquiring his taste for blood. He was investigated in the 1980s for his part in alleged bribes to the fabulously corrupt leaders of post-war Italy. In the 1990s, the Belgium Ambassador to Luxembourg claimed that Auchi’s bank held money Saddam and Colonel Gadaffi had stolen from their luckless peoples. In 2002, officers from the Serious Fraud Squad raided the offices of one of Auchi’s drug companies as part of an investigation of what is alleged to be the biggest swindle ever of the (British National Health Service). With allegations, albeit unproven, like these hanging over him, wouldn’t you think that British MPs would have the sense to stay away?

One might think Obama would also stay away, but in truth it is only the US media who are ducking this story. While ideological bias and a predisposition towards inanity might explain some of the media ignorance, the August 24 article cites another cause:

Working for Auchi… attorneys from London law firm Carter-Ruck have for several months been flooding American and British newspapers and websites with letters demanding removal of material they deem “defamatory” to their client. 

In its June 28 edition, British satirical magazine Private Eye explains: “Until Carter-Ruck and Partners and England’s stifling libel laws got to work, the few American journalists not caught up in Obama-mania were turning to the archives of the British press to answer an intriguing question: who is Nadhmi Auchi?”

What is so “stifling” about English libel law? In the U.K., as Carter-Ruck explains on its own website, “A libel claimant does not have to prove that the words are false or to prove that he has in fact suffered any loss. Damage is presumed.”

The Obama campaign recently issued a non-denial denial in response to claims that Obama met with Auchi―contained in Jerome Corsi’s bestseller, The Obama Nation. They cited only two references.  One is, “Mr. Auchi’s lawyer” who told the February 27, 2008 London Evening Standard, “As far as he can remember he has had no direct contact with Mr. Obama.” Another is, “A lawyer for Auchi, Alasdair Pepper” who says, according to the April 16, 2008 Washington Post, “Auchi Had ‘No Recollection’ Of Meeting Obama or Michelle.” Alasdair Pepper is the attorney whose name appears on the Carter-Ruckdemand letters.

Here are some questions reporters should be asking Barack Obama:

Senator Obama: Lehman Brothers owes over $250 million to a bank owned in part by Nadhmi Auchi’s holding company. Auchi was a key financial backer of Tony Rezko. Sources indicate you met Auchi twice when he visited Chicago in 2004. If elected, how will your relationship with Rezko and Auchi affect your policy towards Lehman Brothers?

Senator Obama: There are reports that Nadhmi Auchi was in 2004-2005 seeking US residency while appealing his French court conviction in the ELF-Aquitaine case. If elected, would you look favorably on a US residency application from Auchi?

Senator Obama: You stated that the Lehman bankruptcy shows that Americans cannot afford four more years of the Republicans’ “failed philosophy”. Can Americans afford a President whose home was purchased with the assistance of now-convicted-felon Tony Rezko, a man characterized as having “permanent indebtedness” to Nadhmi Auchi?

Earlier this month, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid made a personal appeal to Barack Obama: Help me grow the Democrats’ Senate majority by sharing some of the $77 million you’ve got in the bank.

Obama’s campaign said no.

———-

Monday’s New York Post included a revealing column by Amir Taheri, a respected commentator on the Middle East. The piece, bolstered by firsthand reporting, provided a troubling glimpse into Senator Barack Obama’s trip to Iraq in July.

According to Taheri, Sen. Obama used the trip to press Iraqi leaders to delay negotiations with a “weak” and “politically confused” Bush administration. Calling the U.S. presence in Iraq “illegal,” Sen. Obama also tried to press General Petraeus & Co. for a realistic withdrawal date, to no avail.

———-

Many were skeptical of Taheri’s report that Barack Obama had asked Iraqi officials to delay a security agreement until after the elections, and the Obama campaign denied it—but their denial is actually a confirmation of Taheri’s article.

Obama’s national security spokeswoman Wendy Morigi said Taheri’s article bore “as much resemblance to the truth as a McCain campaign commercial.”

In fact, Obama had told the Iraqis that they should not rush through a “Strategic Framework Agreement” governing the future of US forces until after President George W. Bush leaves office, she said.

———-

Barack Obama is the second biggest recipient of political money from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the last ten years. And he’s only been in Washington for four.

———–

Barack Obama, meet your nightmare? On Monday night, BornAliveTruth.org, a new 527 released an ad starring Gianna Jessen, a 31-year-old woman who survived a saline abortion.

“I’m a survivor, as are many others . . . but if Barack Obama had his way, I wouldn’t be here,” Jessen says in the ad. “Four times, Barack Obama voted to oppose a law to protect babies left to die after a failed abortion. Senator Obama, please support born alive infant protections. I’m living proof these babies have a right to live.”

———-

(CNN) — It appears Barack Obama’s teleprompter is hitting the campaign trail.

The Democratic presidential nominee has never tried to hide the fact he delivers speeches off the device, though normally he doesn’t use one at standard campaign rallies and town hall events.

But the Illinois senator used a teleprompter at both his Colorado events Monday — making for a particularly peculiar scene in Pueblo, where the prompter was set up in the middle of what is normally a rodeo ring.

———-

“Let’s have some straight talk,” McCain said in Vienna, Ohio. “Sen. Obama is not interested in the politics of hope. He’s interested in his political future, and that is why he is hurling in insults and making up facts about his record. Today he claimed that the congressional stimulus package was his idea. That’s news to those of us in Congress who supported it. Sen. Obama didn’t even show up to vote.

“He talks a tough game on the financial crisis, but the facts tell a different story. Sen. Obama took more money from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac than anyone but the chairman of the committee they answer to. And he put Fannie Mae’s CEO, who helped create this problem, in charge of finding his vice president. That’s not change, that’s what’s broken in Washington.”

———-
Barry Donors
Goldman Sachs $691,930
University of California $611,207
Citigroup Inc $448,599
JPMorgan Chase & Co $442,919
Harvard University $435,769
Google Inc $420,174
UBS AG $404,750
National Amusements Inc $389,140
Microsoft Corp $377,235
Lehman Brothers $370,524
Sidley Austin LLP $350,302
Moveon.org $347,463
Skadden, Arps et al $340,264
Time Warner $338,527
Wilmerhale Llp $335,398
Morgan Stanley $318,070
Latham & Watkins $297,400
Jones Day $289,476
University of Chicago $278,885
Stanford University $276,038

in honor of my friend, who’s favorite president is Harry S Truman

Like Truman, a natural-born executive.

by Steven F. Hayward
09/22/2008, Volume 014, Issue 02

Lurking just below the surface of the second-guessing about Sarah Palin’s fitness to be president is the serious question of whether we still believe in the American people’s capacity for self-government, what we mean when we affirm that all American citizens are equal, and whether we tacitly believe there are distinct classes of citizens and that American government at the highest levels is an elite occupation.

It is incomplete to view the controversy over Palin’s suitability for high office just in ideological or cultural terms, as most of the commentary has done. Doubts about Palin have come not just from the left but from across the political spectrum, some of them from conservatives like David Frum, Charles Krauthammer, and George Will. Nor is this a new question. To the contrary, Palin’s ascent revives issues and arguments about self-government that raged at the time of the American founding and before. Indeed, the basic problems of the few and the many, and the sources of wisdom and virtue in politics, stretch back to antiquity.

American political thought since its earliest days has been ambiguous or conflicted about the existence and character of a “natural aristocracy” of governing talent. If the ghosts of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams are watching the storm over Palin, they must surely be revisiting their famous dialogue about America’s governing class. Adams’s widely misunderstood argument that there should perhaps be an explicit recognition and provision for an aristocratic class finds its reprise in the snobbery that greeted Palin’s arrival on the scene. It’s not just that she didn’t go to Harvard; she’s never been on Meet the Press; she hasn’t participated in Aspen Institute seminars or attended the World Economic Forum. She hasn’t been brought into the slipstream of the establishment by which we unofficially certify our highest leaders.

The issue is not whether the establishment would let such a person as Palin cross the bar into the certified political class, but whether regular citizens of this republic have the skill and ability to control the levers of government without having first joined the certified political class. But this begs an even more troublesome question: If we implicitly think uncertified citizens are unfit for the highest offices, why do we trust those same citizens to select our highest officers through free elections?

In his reply to Adams, Jefferson expressed more confidence that political virtue and capacity for government were not the special province of a recognized aristocratic class, but that aristoi (natural aristocrats) could be found among citizens of all kinds: “It would have been inconsistent in creation to have formed man for the social state, and not to have provided virtue and wisdom enough to manage the concerns of the society.” Jefferson, moreover, trusted ordinary citizens to recognize political virtue in their fellow citizens: “Leave to the citizens the free election and separation of the aristoi from the pseudo-aristoi, of the wheat from the chaff. In general they will elect the really good and wise.”

Today’s establishment doubts this. The establishment is affronted by the idea that an ordinary hockey mom–a mere citizen–might be just as capable of running the country as a long-time member of the Council on Foreign Relations. This closed-shop attitude is exactly what both Jefferson and Adams set themselves against; they wanted a republic where talent and public spirit would find easy access to the establishment.

Part of what bothers the establishment about Palin is her seeming insouciance toward public office. Her success with voters, and in national office, would be n affront and a reproach to establishment self-importance. Anyone who affects making it look easy surely lacks gravitas and must not grasp the complexity or depth of modern political problems. Partly this is the self-justification for establishment institutions and attitudes, but partly it represents the substantive view that the size and complexity of modern government require a level of expertise beyond the reach of ordinary citizens. Some of the doubts about Palin are doubts about self-government itself.

So far no one has picked up on the significance of Palin’s invocation of Harry Truman in her convention speech. Her reference was more than just a bridge to a heartland-versus-Beltway theme. Truman, recall, was the only president of the 20th century who was not a college graduate. Less than two months after abruptly taking over from FDR with no preparation, Truman wrote his wife Bess describing his quick progress in taking the reins:

It won’t be long before I can sit back and study the whole picture and tell ‘em what is to be done in each department. When things come to that stage there’ll be no more to this job than there was to running Jackson County and not any more worry.

In retrospect it is clear that Truman “got it.” He didn’t need any more “experience” to master the job. “Well I’m facing another tall day as usual,” he ended that letter to Bess; “But I like ‘em that way.”

Ronald Reagan evinced the same attitude toward office as Truman and Palin. In fact, on closer inspection, one can hear in the criticism of Palin the echo of the same kind of complaint made against Ronald Reagan throughout his political career. Never mind that he’d been governor of California. That this graduate of Eureka College–where?–had made his career in Hollywood, a place as exotic and peculiar as Alaska, was decisive with the establishment. “Reagan’s election,” John P. Roche, a former head of Americans for Democratic Action, wrote in 1984, “was thus an 8-plus earthquake on the political Richter scale, and it sent a number of eminent statesmen–Republican and Democratic–into shock.” It wasn’t only liberals who found Reagan incomprehensible. “No previous president of the United States,” Rowland Evans and Robert Novak wrote shortly after Reagan’s election in 1980, “had so bizarre a preparation for political office.”

John Sears, whom Reagan had unceremoniously fired from his campaign in 1980, later put his finger on a key aspect of Reagan’s strength:

Since the primary prerequisite for handling the presidency is to ignore the immensity of it, a president must find the confidence to do so in self-knowledge.   .  .  .   Reagan knows himself better than most presidents and has kept his identity separate from politics. Reagan knows who he is and therefore he possesses the first prerequisite for being a good president.

In his third summit meeting with Gorbachev, Reagan wondered aloud what would happen if the two of them closed the doors to their office and just quietly slipped away: “How long would it be before people missed us?” Can one imagine Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton (or John McCain for that matter) wondering such a thing?

For Truman and Reagan the key ingredient to successful statecraft was simplicity. “I say there are simple answers to many of our problems–simple but hard,” Reagan liked to say; “It’s the complicated answer that’s easy, because it avoids facing the hard moral issues.” Churchill wrote that he immediately liked Truman when they met for the first time in Berlin in 1945 because he could see that Truman possessed the “obvious power of decision.” We can see already from Palin’s record–unseating a governor of her own party, delivering a long-blocked pipeline deal–that she shares this trait; another six years in the governor’s office isn’t likely to tell us anything we can’t already discern if we don’t let status bias get in the way.

Reagan and Truman forced their way into grudging acceptance and eventual recognition by the establishment through genuine and hard-earned political success, and Palin too will have to prove herself. She shows signs of sharing their humility, power of decision, and simplicity toward self-government.

In her first innings, Palin has offered a unique display of the capacity that John Adams described as the essence of a “natural aristocrat” in America: “By an aristocrat I mean every man who can command two votes–one besides his own.” Here Adams was reminding us of the centrality of substantive persuasion in political life, something Republicans haven’t been very good at of late. The talking heads of the establishment deprecated Palin’s debut. “Sure, she gives a good speech, but  .  .  .” They should be saying to Palin, “Welcome to the aristocracy, governor.”

Steven F. Hayward is F. K. Weyerhaeuser Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and the author of The Age of Reagan: The Conservative Counter-Revolution, 1980-1989, to be published in early 2009.

this is very close to being very wrong… Senators do not drive foreign policy, even if they are running for President.

I just spent an enjoyable day with my candidate for Congress at the Iowa-Iowa State “Battle for the CyHawk trophy” game yesterday.

Iowa won a close game, much closer than the final score of 17-5 would indicate.  And where it was a wet and windy day in Iowa City – we settled into the cozy comfort of a sky box with no less dignitaries than State Auditor David Vaudt to watch the game. 

Vaudt is a favorite of mine – as the “watch dog” of the State’s money (hmmm I mean OUR money) with the statehouse filled with Democrats who can’t spend that money fast enough, he regularly sends out pithy reminders of what that spending does to us Iowans.

The Presidential Race is not far from my mind, as McCain and Palin are scheduled to make a quick stop in Cedar Rapids on THURSDAY AM.  I plan to be there. The biggest news of course on the presidential front has been the Palin interview with Charles Gibson – I would simply encourage you to watch the full unedited interview which you can find easily on youtube.  Also I find the desperation of the Obama campaign to be amusing; it reminds me of the “boggarts” in the Harry Potter series.  (for you non Potter-heads a boggart is a shape shifter that changes based on your worst fears – and disappears when you can find it in yourself to laugh at it)  The funny thing is that a boggart can actually look like something dreadful, but it’s not. 

Ok, I’m not sure that is a useful analogy, but I’m leaving it in anyway.

The Obama campaign is failing at anything they can to de-legitimize McCain – the latest ad is a pathetic play on the fact that McCain has quite honestly said he does not do his own email.  Obama is trying to make that into a slam on McCain’s lack of technical savvy at a time when the McCain campaign is running a more savvy campaign that Obama.

There are all kinds of rebuttals to that ad – not the least of which was this one (Jonah Goldberg):

Lord knows I think the chicken-hawk arguments are stupid. And I don’t think the fact that Obama never served in the military should count against him in and of itself. But how stupid is it for the Obama campaign to claim that McCain is unqualified to be president because he can’t grasp cyber-security issues based on the fact he has never sent an email when the McCain campaign can just as easily say Obama can’t understand first order national security issues because he’s never fired a rife, flown a plane, commanded men in battle, or faced an enemy? I mean which prepares someone to be commander in chief better, hitting “send” on AOL or fighting a war?

more from Jonah here 

In reality McCain has been in the center of the cyber revolution which, if Senator Obama would have spent more time in the Senate rather than campaigning – never mind – it helped McCain.

And, there are valid reasons why McCain doesn’t find typing on a keyboard comfortable.

On another point I will flesh out in a post when I have time – is the audacity of Alan Greenspan introducing himself as a viable pundit on the economy.  This is the man who managed us TO the mess we’re in by not sounding alarms loud enough (or much at all?) on the housing “bubble” and financial institutions lax loan guidelines. 

A few days ago, I heard someone say, “my money was worth more when a Democrat was in charge”.  REALLY? 

Really, it was all a mirage.  Starting with the collapse of the .com bubble – my Dad always said “if it’s too good to be true, it probably isn’t” – why aren’t people saving rather than spending like there is no tomorrow?  I know.  It’s Bush’s Fault – just Google it - I believe everything I read on the internet.  :::smile:::

September 12, 2008

Probe into how Google mix-up caused $1 billion run on United Airlines

Mike Harvey, Technology Correspondent

The US Securities and Exchange Commission has opened a “preliminary inquiry” into how an outdated bankruptcy story sparked a $1 billion run on an airline’s stock value.

The article about how United Airlines filed for bankruptcy in 2002 was revived when it showed up on a newspaper site’s “most viewed” section on Monday.

From there it was picked up by Google News and later seen by alarmed stockholders. The stock plunged from around $12 to just $3 a share before trading was halted.

The Chicago-based company’s shares did not fully recover once trading resumed on Monday, and were still down at just over $11 dollars at close of trading yesterday.

With the possiblity of legal action in the air, those involved have been hotly disputing who was to blame.

The errors provide a salutary lesson for investors of the power and perils of computer automation and throw a spotlight on Google’s News search technology which, using “Googlebot” algorithms, scours web pages in search of news articles.

To many, the episode has been a reminder that computer programs, no matter how sophisticated, can be a poor substitute for human beings.

The comedy of errors began with just one reader who went to the South Florida Sun Sentinel’s website and viewed a 2002 article on United Airlines’ bankruptcy.

That single visit in the early hours of Sunday morning, a period of low traffic, apparently bumped it into a “Popular Stories” in the business section.

At 1:37am, an electronic Google program swept through the paper’s website for new stories and spotted the link.

Google says its program scanned the piece and, seeing there was no 2002 dateline, indexed the article for inclusion on its news pages.

Three minutes and two seconds later, Google News readers started viewing the story on the Sun Sentinel’s Web site.

A Florida investment firm found the story on Monday morning with a Google search and posted a summary on the Bloomberg financial information service.

That visibility – Bloomberg is seen by thousands of investment managers and traders – sparked the run on United shares.

What is in dispute between Tribune, the owners of the Sun Sentinel, and Google is whether the Googlebot should have known it was an old story.

Tribune said the story was not republished, and the link was simply a link to the archive version of the story.

Google spokesman Gabriel Stricker said that the only date the automated Google News software found on the Sun Sentinel site was from early Sunday eastern time.

“In the same way that the reader was unable to determine the original date, our search algorithm was similarly misled by that date,” Mr Stricker said.

Tribune spokesman Gary Weitman said other clues would have made it clear to a human reader that the story was old, including a reference to UAL’s 97-cent share price (it was trading around $12 on Monday) and comments from readers further down the page that were posted in 2002.

“It appears that no one who passed this story along actually bothered to read the story itself,” he said.

“Despite the company’s earlier request and the confusion caused by Googlebot and Google News earlier this week, we believe that Googlebot continues to misclassify stories,” Tribune said.

The investment newsletter that posted a summary of the story to Bloomberg, Income Securities Advisors Inc. in Florida, has also said there was nothing on the Sun Sentinel website to indicate that the story was old.

The page also fooled Bloomberg. Bloomberg News staffers posted headlines noting first the UAL share price drop, and then, at 11:06 a.m. EDT, a bankruptcy denial from United.

A different Bloomberg News staffer working the story found the bankruptcy story on the Sun Sentinel site and, at 11:07a.m., posted a headline about the bankruptcy.

Investors then dumped the stock at a huge rate and here algorithms again played their part.

Experts said the automated trading programs were applied to the trading of shares based on market-moving information trawled from the internet.

Last year, algorithms handled some 30 percent of all equity trading volume, according to a recent study by Aite Group.

The study projected that algorithms would grow to handle half of equity trading by 2010, and noted similar growth in derivatives and other asset classes as a hunger for faster trading grows.

The lack of confidence investors have in the troubled US airline industry also undoubtedly played its part in the stock drop.

Investors mistakenly figured that United Airlines, having filed for bankruptcy once, was more likely to do it again.

United is still considering what, if anything, to do about the affair.

It’s sad to watch the rush to attempt to destroy the first female republican on a Presidential ticket.

Many journalists quoting bad sources without attribution – the silliest is watching the changes made in text or headlines as online copy is posted.

journalist=bloggers       bloggers=journalists       crap=crap

you have to weed through a lot of data to find the truth.  I believe NOTHING I read unless I have a history of trusting the source.

Powerlineblog has been among the best, and is run by three lawyers.

Littlegreenfootballs blog was part of the group that uncovered some lies about BUSH in 2004 which lead to the “retirement” of Dan Rather.

here is Weekly Standard blog post on “The Bush Doctrine” dialog in the interview yesterday

well I have to get to work – but read this post from powerlineblog.com today

As part of its campaign to discredit Governor Sarah Palin, the Washington Post carries a front page article this morning by Anne Kornblut that headlines, falsely: “Palin Links Iraq to Sept. 11 In Talk to Troops in Alaska.” The article begins:

Gov. Sarah Palin linked the war in Iraq with the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, telling an Iraq-bound brigade of soldiers that included her son that they would “defend the innocent from the enemies who planned and carried out and rejoiced in the death of thousands of Americans.”The idea that the Iraqi government under Saddam Hussein helped al-Qaeda plan the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, a view once promoted by Bush administration officials, has since been rejected even by the president himself.

News flash to Ms. Kornblut: the Alaska National Guard isn’t going to Iraq to fight “the Iraqi government under Saddam Hussein.” Saddam is dead, and the government of Iraq is now our ally. The only organized opposition these troops will encounter in Iraq comes precisely, as Palin said, from “the enemies who planned and carried out and rejoiced in the death of thousands of Americans,” al Qaeda.

Kornblut’s claim that the Bush administration “once promoted” the assertion that Saddam “helped plan the [September 11 attacks]” is false, too.

The Post apparently realized that its page one story was dead wrong at some point, because it belatedly added this sentence to Kornblut’s text, as noted by Jennifer Rubin:

But it is widely agreed that militants allied with al-Qaeda have taken root in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion.

Of course, once the Post acknowledges that Governor Palin was talking about fighting al Qaeda, not Saddam’s defunct regime, the entire logic of its article (not to mention the headline) disappears, and the only remedy is to yank the article entirely. Evidently it was too late for that.

So what emerges is yet another false hit-job on Governor Palin. It is a continuation of a false hit-job that the Post and other media outlets perpetrated against President Bush over a period of years. Notwithstanding its now obvious falsity, the Post continues to crank out the same old attack, like a frog that has died but whose legs continue to kick, mindlessly.

http://redstate.com

there’s a lot more.

Palin’s memory better than Gibson’s research skills?

Ah, he relied on the AP. Silly, silly man.

Let’s set the scenario:

GIBSON: You said recently, in your old church, “Our national leaders are sending U.S. soldiers on a task that is from God.”

PALIN: You know, I don’t know if that was my exact quote.

GIBSON: Exact words.

PALIN: But the reference there is a repeat of Abraham Lincoln’s words when he said — first, he suggested never presume to know what God’s will is, and I would never presume to know God’s will or to speak God’s words.

See also Hot Air, which keeps going; and ABC News for the partial transcript. Anyway, her comment actually makes perfect sense, given that what she originally said was (via HuffPo):

“Pray for our military men and women who are striving to do what is right. Also, for this country, that our leaders, our national leaders, are sending [U.S. soldiers] out on a task that is from God,” she exhorted the congregants. “That’s what we have to make sure that we’re praying for, that there is a plan and that that plan is God’s plan.”

It was the AP that turned it into this:

“Our national leaders are sending them out on a task that is from God,” she said. “That’s what we have to make sure that we’re praying for, that there is a plan and that plan is God’s plan.”

Ahh, the Dread Ellipsis – not to mention, Big Oops on ABC News’ part. Come on, guys: we gave you first dibs on the interview everyone was going for. The least that you can do is do some prep work ahead of time for it. Particularly since Hot Air corrected the mistake a week ago. This was pretty much an unforced error.

I mean, AP? Nobody blindly relies on AP anymore.

Moe Lane

PS: I would like to thank Charlie Gibson, by the way: seldom do we get such an obvious tell as this. Anybody spouting this particular exchange as a reason for not voting for the Big Scary Woman can be safely written off as a mindlessly robotic idiot with minimum fuss and muss all around.

Flood Damage “stuns” Pelosi  amazing how out of touch politicians can be

“Miller-Meeks wondered whether he’s even relevant in the debate.”              NOW that’s GOT to leave a mark. Tell it like it is Mariannette!

Opponent blasts Loebsack on flood response
By James Q. Lynch
The Gazette

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s tour of Eastern Iowa flood damage only served to highlight the ineffectiveness of Democratic Rep.  Dave Loebsack in helping flood victims, his Republican challenger has charged.

Second District Republican candidate Mariannette Miller-Meeks said that, rather than take prompt action as Congress did after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, the Democratic-controlled Congress has “waited months now to do anything for Iowans who have suffered at least as much.”

“Three months is a long, long, long time for Nancy Pelosi to do something,” said Miller-Meeks, an  Ottumwa ophthalmologist.

Pelosi toured Iowa flood damage Monday with Loebsack and other Iowa Democrats, three months after the worst natural disaster in Iowa history. She promised more aid for Iowa flood victims. Pelosi expects Congress to begin work on that aid next week.

In addition to questioning Loebsack’s effectiveness, Miller-Meeks wondered whether he’s even relevant in the debate.

Rather than be a leader on getting aid to Iowans, Miller-Meeks said, Loebsack has chosen “the go-along-to-get-along path of least resistance so that the House leadership and its special interests will keep pouring money into his re-election campaign.” Loebsack defended his record on flood aid, pointing out that Congress approved a $2.65 billion emergency supplemental appropriation June 19. And, he said, he voted against Congress adjourning for its August recess because he wanted to see more flood aid approved.

“Iowans need our help, and I am disappointed that Congress is looking to adjourn be fore passing a second disaster relief  
package,” he said in late July.

Despite that, Loebsack has been missing in action in terms of obtaining Iowa disaster relief and has been “lackluster and  
lazy” since the initial appropriation, Miller-Meeks said.

“Loebsack has gone AWOL — Absent Without Leadership — when Iowans needed him most,” Miller-Meeks said. “He has now devolved to the level of a bureaucratic paper-pusher, sending letters and pointing the blame elsewhere even as damage estimates now top $7 billion.”

Bringing Pelosi to Iowa for a firsthand view of the damage should help get action on flood relief, Loebsack said Monday.

■ Contact the writer: (319) 398-8375 or at james.lynch@gazcomm.com

My name is Dan Gee, I am a lifelong resident of Cedar Rapids and the President of Gee Asphalt Systems, Inc. My business was affected by the June floods.

As you know, Cedar Rapids was ravaged by flooding in June of this year. At that time, elected leaders at every level of government pledged their cooperation to help our city recover. Our state’s governor, Chet Culver, spoke about the possible need for a special session of the legislature in order to help speed recovery efforts by getting aid to the people that need it.

While news cycles move fast, and many people probably don’t know, I can tell you that three months later, Cedar Rapids still remains a disaster area.

There is still a curfew at night in downtown Cedar Rapids.

There are areas in Cedar Rapids that lack electricity, phones or even common public works like street lights.

And there are people that still lack housing.

In Cedar Rapids there are people that are sleeping in makeshift tents in their front yards.

It is disgusting that three months after this disaster, this same kind of mess remains.

This is another abject failure of our state government.

Certainly, the biggest failure of our state government during my lifetime. I fail to understand why if Iowa has a “Rainy Day Fund” that Governor Culver has not used it. If this disaster does not qualify for its use, what does?

People in Cedar Rapids are hurting. It is not acceptable to blame another part of government or point fingers. The time is now for real solutions and real action. I was disappointed when I learned something today that you should know about Chet Culver.

In June when Culver came to Cedar Rapids during the floods he promised to help, then returned in July for a press event with Democrat nominee for President Barack Obama and again promised to help. Yesterday, Culver and U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi came to Cedar Rapids to promise to help. This is the same House Speaker that recessed the congress for 5 weeks of vacation while people in Cedar Rapids continued to suffer.

The same day Culver promised to help Eastern Iowans, he hosted a $10,000 dollar a plate dinner with Vice Presidential hopeful Joe Biden in Des Moines, the same day he spoke of the suffering flood victims he raised thousands of dollars for a political event, and none for the residents suffering here in Cedar Rapids.

I can’t help but feel that the pain and suffering of the people of Cedar Rapids is only good enough for stumping and press conferences for these politicians – but not good enough for them to quit the politics and DO SOMETHING.

I would like to encourage Chet Culver to spend less time campaigning for Barack Obama and Joe Biden raising money for their campaign for president – and spend more time getting money for people and constituents in Cedar Rapids.

I encourage you to call Chet Culver and ask him to do the work he was hired (elected) to do. Iowans don’t need politicians raising money for campaigns. Iowans need leadership from their governor and other elected officials. 

Sincerely,

Dan Gee, President
Gee Asphalt Systems, Inc.
4715 6th St. SW
Cedar Rapids, Iowa 52404

Click here to read the entire email from Dan Gee.

To learn more about the Iowa Progress Project visit www.IowaProgressProject.com

Below find a list of lies debunked by a liberal group (to show you how screwy some of them are) posted from the Newsweek site
sliming-palin-newsweek.pdf

And by the way news is today for your information, the rest of the world is voting for Obama… like they had a vote.  I suppose the MSM just had to say something positive about the BO campaign with the surge for McCain Palin that they are witnessing first hand.  Must be frustrating for all the BO champions to see someone that they see as having “charisma only” take over the political season :::snicker:::

Apparently they are decending on Alaska to go over the Governor’s office travel expenses with a fine tooth comb – asking questions why she is charging some of her family travel and housing costs.  Seems petty when she’s spending much less than half of what the previous Governor spent on the same.  I’m sure they’ll find something to talk about – but it sure seems desperate to me.

My understanding of the story below is that the gent who was “fired” was placed in another job and has said publicly that he was not pressured to terminate the former brother in law of the governor and the former brother in law is still working after a 5 day suspension.  Just Don’t get the hysteria, other than Palin ain’t Obama.  This is getting very odd.

Here’s another link to sort through the lies.  if it comes up with an error, try it again – he’s either dealing with a lot of traffic or someone is killing the site for another reason…  intro to this link from another site:

 Charles Martin has established a clearinghouse for all the existing rumors about Sarah Palin, and any new ones you want to make up, if you want to try your hand at being a professional journalist like Elizabeth Bumiller.

http://explorations.chasrmartin.com/2008/09/06/palin-rumors/

The Hunt for Sarah October

City slickers invade Wasilla
September 9, 2008

Democrats understand Sarah Palin is a formidable political force who has upset the Obama victory plan. The latest Washington Post/ABC Poll shows John McCain taking a 12-point lead over Barack Obama among white women, a reversal of Mr. Obama’s eight-point lead last month.

It’s no surprise, then, that Democrats have airdropped a mini-army of 30 lawyers, investigators and opposition researchers into Anchorage, the state capital Juneau and Mrs. Palin’s hometown of Wasilla to dig into her record and background. My sources report the first wave arrived in Anchorage less than 24 hours after John McCain selected her on August 29.

The main area of interest to the Democratic SWAT team is Mrs. Palin’s dismissal in July of her public safety commissioner. Mrs. Palin says he was fired for cause. Her critics claim he was fired because he wouldn’t bend to pressure to get rid of a state trooper, Mike Wooten, who had been involved in a bitter divorce battle with Mrs. Palin’s sister. Mr. Wooten is certainly a colorful character. He served a five-day suspension after the Palin family filed a complaint against him alleging he had threatened Mrs. Palin’s father. They also accused him of using a Taser on his 10-year-old stepson, drinking in his patrol car and illegally shooting a moose.

Mrs. Palin will return to Alaska for the first time in nearly two weeks on Wednesday night, when she is scheduled to arrive in Fairbanks. Local Republicans will hold a “Welcome Home” rally for her. You can bet some of the Democratic opposition research contingent will be in the audience taking notes. They’ll be the ones arriving in rental cars and wearing fancy dress shoes from back east.

– John Fund

powerlineblog.com article 

A highly knowledgeable source writes to comment on “Not just the most liberal senator.” He writes:

It would be nice if the press would bring just one reporter back from Alaska to look into Senator Obama’s legislative claims. If you’ll bear with me, I think a few details on “signature” Lugar-Obama legislation bear fleshing out because The One is being an out-and-out fabulist.

In one of Obama’s television ads, and in countless press interviews, Obama claims that he “reach[ed] out to Senator Lugar…to help lock down loose nuclear weapons.” Not true.

A little background::

The Soviet-Nuclear Threat Reduction Act passed in 1991(!) and was signed by George H.W. Bush. It was renamed the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction ACT in 1993. It was meant to secure Russia’s nuclear stockpile and to help pay for eliminating Russia’s excess strategic weapons. By the time that Obama entered the Senate the legislation had mostly accomplished its main goals (securing Soviet nuclear warheads and destroying delivery systems). In fact, Russia had long since begun building new nuclear weapons and delivery systems.What Obama’s legislation did was extend and amend this already wildly successful legislation. But the real substance of amendment had nothing to do with nuclear weapons. Just the opposite. The new authorities in Obama’s amendment dealt only with conventional weapons.

Here are his amendments to section 11 of the State Department Authorization Act of 2006:

(a) In General- The Secretary of State is authorized to secure, remove, or eliminate stocks of man-portable air defense systems (MANPADS), small arms and light weapons, stockpiled munitions, abandoned ordnance, and other conventional weapons, including tactical missile systems (hereafter in this section referred to as ‘MANPADS and other conventional weapons’), as well as related equipment and facilities, located outside the United States that are determined by the Secretary to pose a proliferation threat.

And Section 12:

a) Statement of Policy – Congress declares that it should be the policy of the United States to hold foreign governments accountable for knowingly transferring MANPADS to state-sponsors of terrorism or terrorist organizations.

This amendment didn’t start any work on securing nukes, nor did it finish it. It doesn’t even mention nuclear weapons. In fact, you could argue that it diverted us from securing “loose nukes.”

And look at that Section 12 statement of policy, again. It’s vintage Obamian bunny rabbits and rainbows. Keep in mind that the largest manufacturer of MANPADS is Russia. And the country that most often transfers them to terrorists is Iran. Just how did Obama want to “hold them accountable”? Tickle them to death? Write them a very nasty letter? He doesn’t say.

This legislation that Obama claims as his own was couched in the annual State Department Authorization…he wasn’t even a cosponsor of that larger bill. His amendment had been folded into the larger authorization much earlier (yes, by unanimous consent).

But we can actually take this one step further. After the bill’s passage, the US went on a worldwide hunt to buy up MANPADs. Unable to get the MANPADs out of the hands of real enemies, we twisted the arms of allies to give up air defense stockpiles we deemed superfluous. One of the easiest targets? Georgia. We browbeat Georgia into giving us its MANPAD stockpile, which was their only air defense. We all know the rest of the story. Georgia was smart enough to go buy a few new MANPADs from places like Poland (against our loud protestations), but when Russia invaded last month they didn’t have nearly enough to protect themselves against Russia’s onslaught.

Obama shouldn’t be allowed to get away with this.

It’s too bad the big boys at the Washington Post can’t be bothered to look seriously into Obama’s tall tales of bipartisan accomplishment. You’d think this story might be up their alley. Unfortuntately, they’re busy at the moment checking up on Governor Palin’s per diem as governor of Alaska.

I’m not on the same side as M. Malkin on many issues, but her research on issues is always spot on.  The more BO and his team hipes the Community Organizer work BO did the more blog space these types of articles will get (no one cares about researching anything about BO in the MSM – when they have College transfers and hair dos of Palin to talk about).  It’s important to understand for the most part these Community Organizers are using federal, state or local funds – sometimes for good purposes, frequently for not so good purposes (like voter fraud and embezzlement).  Jesse Jackson has made a living and a carreer of bribery and coercion and that’s where the politics of community organizers can go bad.

THIS is the challenge of the 2008 election.  I have confidence we can get out the vote – if there is only limited voter fraud.  I remember thinking that WISCONSIN votes were close enough last election and fraud that bad - WISCONSIN could have gone red without the fraud. 

I’ve bolded what I think are important segments, but the entire article is worth your time.  -pf

Return to the Article

here are more articles on BO’s past as an Organizer:

Byron York

Steven Malanga (City Journal)

September 05, 2008

Why Obama’s “Community Organizer” Days Are a Joke

By Michelle Malkin
Rudy Giuliani had me in stitches during his red-meat keynote address at the GOP convention. I laughed out loud when Giuliani laughed out loud while noting Barack Obama’s deep experience as a “community organizer.” I laughed again when VP nominee and Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin cracked: “I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a ‘community organizer,’ except that you have actual responsibilities.”

Team Obama was not amused. (Neither were the snarky left-wingers on cable TV who are now allergic to sarcasm.) They don’t get why we snicker when Obama dons his Community Organizer cape. Apparently, the jibes rendered Obama’s advisers sleepless. In a crack-of-dawn e-mail to Obama’s followers hours after Giuliani and Palin spoke, campaign manager David Plouffe attempted to gin up faux outrage (and, more importantly, donations) by claiming grave offense on the part of community organizers everywhere. Fumed Plouffe:

“Both Rudy Giuliani and Sarah Palin specifically mocked Barack’s experience as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago more than two decades ago, where he worked with people who had lost jobs and been left behind when the local steel plants closed. Let’s clarify something for them right now. Community organizing is how ordinary people respond to out-of-touch politicians and their failed policies.”

Let me clarify something. Nobody is mocking community organizers in church basements and community centers across the country working to improve their neighbors’ lives. What deserves ridicule is the notion that Obama’s brief stint as a South Side rabble-rouser for tax-subsidized, partisan nonprofits qualifies as executive experience you can believe in.

What deserves derision is “community organizing” that relies on a community of homeless people and ex-cons to organize for the purpose of registering dead people to vote, shaking down corporations and using the race card as a bludgeon.

As I’ve reported previously, Obama’s community organizing days involved training grievance-mongers from the far-left ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now). The ACORN mob is infamous for its bully tactics (which they dub “direct actions”); Obama supporters have recounted his role in organizing an ambush on a government planning meeting about a landfill project opposed by Chicago’s minority lobbies.

With benefactors like Obama in office, ACORN has milked nearly four decades of government subsidies to prop up chapters that promote the welfare state and undermine the free market, as well as some that have been implicated in perpetuating illegal immigration and voter fraud. Since I last detailed ACORN’s illicit activities in this column in June (see “The ACORN Obama knows,” June 19, 2008), the group continues to garner scrutiny from law enforcement:

Last week, Milwaukee’s top election official announced plans to seek criminal investigations of 37 ACORN employees accused of offering gifts to sign up voters (including prepaid gas cards and restaurant cards) or falsifying driver’s license numbers, Social Security numbers or other information on voter registration cards.

Last month, a New Mexico TV station reported on the child rapists, drug offenders and forgery convicts on ACORN’s payroll. In July, Pennsylvania investigators asked the public for help in locating a fugitive named Luis R. Torres-Serrano, who is accused “of submitting more than 100 fraudulent voter registration forms he collected on behalf of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now to county election officials.” Also in July, a massive, nearly $1 million embezzlement scheme by top ACORN officials was exposed.

ACORN’s political arm endorsed Obama in February and has ramped up efforts to register voters across the country. In the meantime, completely ignored by the mainstream commentariat and clean-election crusaders, the Obama campaign admitted failing to report $800,000 in campaign payments to ACORN. They were disguised as payments to a front group called “Citizen Services, Inc.” for “advance work.”

Jim Terry, an official from the Consumer Rights League, a watchdog group that monitors ACORN, noted: “ACORN has a long and sordid history of employing convoluted Enron-style accounting to illegally use taxpayer funds for their own political gain. Now it looks like ACORN is using the same type of convoluted accounting scheme for Obama’s political gain.” With a wave of his magic wand, Obama amended his FEC forms to change the “advance work” to “get-out-the-vote” work.

Now, don’t you dare challenge his commitment to following tax and election laws. And don’t you even think of entertaining the possibility that The One exploited a nonprofit supposedly focused on helping low-income people for political gain.

He was just “organizing” his “community.” Guffaw.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/09/why_obamas_community_organizer.html

at September 05, 2008 – 06:23:42 AM CDT

I always like looking at quotes that are preserved for posterity because they make me think – especially those from “my guy” President Harry Truman.  The following list is mostly from QuotationsPage.com and the last one from ThinkExist.com.  Of course I did put commentary on most of the quotes to clarify why I thought it was appropriate to share.

~Libra Girl 

It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.
Harry S. Truman

Hmmm — didn’t one of the candidates recently say something quite similar?  (McCain)

My choice early in life was either to be a piano-player in a whorehouse or a politician. And to tell the truth, there’s hardly any difference.
Harry S. Truman

No commentary needed

 The atom bomb was no “great decision.” It was merely another powerful weapon in the arsenal of righteousness.
Harry S. Truman

Hmmm — didn’t a candidate recently come under fire for invoking the concept of “righteousness” ?  (Palin)

The President is always abused. If he isn’t, he isn’t doing anything.
Harry S. Truman

Hmmm – at least President Bush can’t claim he wasn’t doing anything!

The reward of suffering is experience.
Harry S. Truman

One of the candidates has this “reward” in spades.  And from such – he has gained tremendous insight and wisdom (In my opinion – McCain)

 “You can’t get rich in politics unless you’re a crook.”

Harry S. Truman

Hmmm … FDR, JFK — both rich and they so they didn’t need to “sell out.”  McCain is already rich thanks to wife Cindy’s family fortune.   Maybe this isn’t as bad a thing as people would like to think.  Look at Bloomberg in NYC.  He doesn’t have to answer to anyone!  Perhaps, just perhaps McCain could actually accomplish reform.

In my personal opinion – McCain is running because he loves his country.  Obama needed more seasoning — more time in the trenches.  Perhaps he should have run for IL governor to gain executive experience.  Certainly being Governor gives a candidate a better shot of winning the Presidency.

What do you all think?

HUH? check out the bold – yeh taunted, that’s why she’s talking to Charlie…  geez.

Palin to Sit Down With ABC News’ Charlie Gibson

Veep Pick Is Elusive Target for the Democrat

Sept. 7, 2008

Gov. Sarah Palin will sit down with ABC News’ Charlie Gibson for her first interview since winning the Republican vice presidential nomination, the network’s news division confirmed today.

Palin accepted the nomination to be Sen. John McCain’s running mate 10 days ago, but has yet to submit to questions from reporters covering the election.

The Alaskan governor was taunted by the spokesman of her Democratic counterpart, Delaware Sen. Joe Biden, for not submitting to a grilling by the press.

Reporters covering Biden gave the candidate a cardboard cutout of McCain, and Biden spokesman David Wade promptly used the gag to take a poke at Palin.