Political Football

Under Obama plan, tax burden shifts to the wealthy

- Link
How biased a headline is that. Finally the Rich are Taxed their fair share.  Seriously? That is sick; and it is wrong.

Yes. What Larry Kudlow says. Read here a bit posted here:

Study after study over the past several decades has shown how countries that spend more produce less, while nations that tax less produce more. Obama is doing it wrong on both counts.

Many people making in the $250,000-$500,000 (lower) range of what will see increased taxes are the local store or business owners you see hiring people (or not if they have to pay more taxes).  The higher brackets? Oh they just create more jobs… What don’t Democrats get?  You tax you lose businesses.

The share of the richest 1% jumped to 20.8% of total income in 2000, from 14% in 1990, but increased only slightly to 21.2% in 2005. This makes it hard to pin their claim of “rising inequality” on the Bush tax cuts, though the income redistributionists are trying. By this measure, the Clinton years were far worse for “inequality.”

Notably, however, the share of taxes paid by the top 1% has kept climbing this decade — to 39.4% in 2005, from 37.4% in 2000. The share paid by the top 5% has increased even more rapidly. In other words, despite the tax reductions of 2001 and 2003, the rich saw their share of taxes paid rise at a faster rate than their share of income. How could this be?

LINK to rest of article

to me, the President is trying to start some type of class warfare.

Attributed to Margaret Thatcher:

“The problem with Socialism is that eventually, you run out of other people’s money.”

Maggie where are you!

Well, certainly one can not miss all the coverage and hoopla about the upcoming Presidential Inauguration on Tuesday, Jan. 20th, 2009.

I’ve barely responded to PF’s topics nor have I written a new one myself since the election because I been so upset about how wrong I figured people’s thinking and how wrong I was about people’s perceptions and thought processes.

I haven’t been a slave to the news coverage in the past few weeks but I can not get away from it either although I have tried to fast forward or change the channel during more egregious Bush bashing and Obama worship.

I attended Church this morning; I grew up in the Methodist faith and believe in worshiping the one true God – although in 3 forms – The Father, Son and Holy Ghost.  I state here that I adamantly do not believe that Barack Obama is the Son.  While I adore my minister and usually agree with her sermons I was saddened to know that on this Human Relations Sunday I did not 100% agree with her assessment that she believed that BO’s election was the dream coming true of Martin Luther King, Jr.  MLK, Jr. (who was a registered Republican) believed that people should be judged by the content of their character and not by their skin.  While I agree with that hope … I disagree that BO was not judged by his skin…he was voted by many because he calls himself an African American == the first Black President.

Personally I would have been ready for our first Black president to have been Colin Powell way back when.

I have always been suspect of BO’s experience not his skin color. 

AND I have said from the get – go about BO — that I was torn — that I was indeed happy that people were excited about the election and could rally around an exciting candidate.  BUT — I was horribly disappointed by the lack of credible and unbiased journalism that ushered Obama into the Presidency at such a critical time.  It could be Obama is the right man to be President — only time will tell.  And though it may be tough …I will certainly admit “I was wrong” if/when the time comes.

So on Tuesday — when normally I am the Yankee Doodle Dork and love all American Pageantry … I am feeling a little lost, a little detached and little like I am holding myself back from letting myself from getting all misty eyed and euphoric.  Again, I repeat that this feelign does not stem from perhaps my guy not winning…but because I feel like this election was pre-determined.

Chuck Todd of NBC News just released a book about how BO won.  How possibly could he have written this book in less than 2 months unless he had written it all along?  So obviously he wanted BO to win so his book would be publishable!

So yes, I want our Country to do better and I want Americans to be proud of our country and not be ashamed and our want our Media to do its part to be fair and unbiased…I want our country to do better economically, socially and personally…

If BO can inspire people then so be it…I want to be inspired and normally I am easily so…yet I still have a heavy heart…

 Libra Girl

Myths and Facts About the Real Bush Record

By Ed Gillespie
As the year draws to an end and President Bush enters his final month in office, there is much commentary about the Administration’s record over the past eight years. Unsurprisingly, many of these stories assail and distort the President’s record and recycle myths and unfounded allegations that have been leveled for the better part of his two terms. Historical accuracy requires a response to the litany of attacks leveled against President Bush, and while there’s not enough space to respond to all of them, here are five of the most egregious:

Myth 1: The last eight years were awful for most Americans economically and President Bush’s deregulatory policies caused the current financial crisis.

Reality: President Bush’s time in office is ending as it began, with our economy under stress. The recession President Bush inherited as he entered office ran through the attacks of September 11, 2001, but during the recovery that followed, and due in no small part to the tax relief President Bush worked with Congress to provide, this country experienced its longest run of uninterrupted job growth – 52 straight months, with 8.3 million jobs created.

This reflected six consecutive years of economic growth from the Fourth Quarter of 2001 until the Fourth Quarter of 2007. From 2000 to 2007, real GDP grew by more than 17 percent, a remarkable gain of nearly 2.1 trillion dollars. This growth was driven in part by increased labor productivity gains that have averaged 2.5 percent annually since 2001, a rate that exceeds the averages of the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s. In the same period, real after-tax income per capita increased by more than 11 percent, and there was a 4.7 percent increase in the number of new businesses formed. The current economic challenges, which the President and his Administration have responded to aggressively, threaten to reverse some of these gains – but the gains cannot be denied.

As for the current crisis, the President and his economic team have taken unprecedented actions to stabilize the financial sector and avert a collapse. While there are a number of causes of the housing and credit crises that are at the root of our current economic troubles, deregulation by the Bush Administration is simply not one of them. In fact, one of the circumstances that contributed to the crisis was the failure of the government sponsored enterprises (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which President Bush long tried to subject to greater regulation. In April 2001, three months after taking office, the President warned in his first budget that the size of the two GSEs were a “potential problem” that “could cause strong repercussions in financial markets, affecting Federally insured entities and economic activity.” In 2003, the Administration began calling for a new GSE regulator, and over the next five years, the Administration continued to call for GSE reform only to be accused by Democrats in Congress of creating artificial fears and advocating for ill-advised proposals. By the time Congress finally acted in 2008 to provide the oversight the President requested, it was too late to prevent systemic consequences. Had the Administration’s initial reform proposals been adopted, some of today’s turmoil in our financial markets may have been averted.

Myth 2: President Bush’s tax cuts only benefitted the wealthy and were paid for by sacrificing investments in health care and education.

Reality: There are not 116 million “wealthy Americans,” but that’s how many taxpayers benefited from the President’s tax relief. The across-the-board tax cuts provided tax relief to every American who pays income taxes, created a new bottom 10 percent bracket rate, doubled the child tax credit to $1,000, and actually increased the share of the Federal income tax burden paid by the top 10 percent of individual earners from 67 percent in 2000 to 70 percent in 2005. Furthermore, this Administration removed 13 million low-income earners from the income tax rolls completely.The economic growth spurred by tax relief also spurred growth in Federal tax receipts. In fact, the Federal Treasury realized the largest three-year increase of revenue in 26 years, and tax receipts grew more than $542 billion between 2000 and 2007. And yes, much of that money went to investments in health care and education.

President Bush provided more than 40 million Americans with better access to prescription drugs by creating the market-based Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit. And it is one of the rare government programs that actually costs less than expected. Projected overall program spending between 2004 and 2013 is approximately $240 billion lower, nearly 38 percent, than originally estimated, thanks to the market-oriented principles included at President Bush’s insistence.

Despite the heated rhetoric over children’s health insurance (S-CHIP) legislation last year, estimates from a 2007 Federal survey show that the number of uninsured children under the age of 18 actually declined by 800,000 from 2001 to 2007. From 2007 to 2008, the number of people covered by affordable and portable Health Savings Account-eligible plans increased 35 percent. Additionally, since President Bush took office, more than 1,200 community health centers have opened or expanded nationwide, which has helped provide treatment to nearly 17 million people.

Federal spending on education has increased nearly 40 percent under President Bush. Additionally, Pell Grant funding nearly doubled during the Administration, which is expected to help more than 5.5 million students attend college in the 2008-09 school year, 1.2 million more students than were assisted by Pell Grants in the 2001-02 school year. This financial aid assistance also helps account for the fact that 66 percent of high school graduates from the class of 2006 enrolled in colleges, compared to 63 percent in 2000.

Perhaps more importantly, the President’s No Child Left Behind Act has delivered tangible results to students. Since the law was enacted, fourth-grade students have achieved their highest reading and math scores on record, eighth-grade students have achieved their highest math scores on record, and African-American and Hispanic students have posted all-time high scores in a number of categories, narrowing the gap between minority students and white students.

Myth 3: The President’s “go it alone” foreign policy ruined America’s standing in the world.

Reality: Rarely can one see revisionist history occurring in the present, but this charge is nothing short of that. The United States acted with a multilateral coalition of partner nations to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq after he failed to comply with the will of the international community, including numerous United Nations Security Council Resolutions. To ignore this fact is not only a distortion of history, but it is also an insult to the service members of our coalition partners who sacrificed their lives to contribute to the success we are now witnessing in Iraq. And in Afghanistan, approximately forty countries are currently deployed with American forces, including every one of our NATO allies.The President also created a worldwide coalition of more than 90 nations to combat terrorist networks by sharing information, drying up their financing, and bringing their leaders to justice. To date, we have captured or killed hundreds of al-Qaeda leaders and operatives with the help of partner nations. Furthermore, the Administration established the Proliferation Security Initiative, which now includes more than 90 nations, and other multilateral coalitions to stop the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

The President successfully pushed for expanding NATO membership, generated international pressure on Iran to stop it from developing nuclear weapons, and organized the Six-Party Talks, which have resulted in North Korea committing to give up its nuclear weapons and abandon its nuclear programs. Verifying North Korea’s commitment will be a challenge, but at the most recent Six-Party Talks meeting, there was strong consensus among the five parties that North Korea must submit to a comprehensive verification regime that accords with international standards.

U.S. ties in Asia have been strengthened over the past eight years, and the Administration has built strong relationships with China, Japan, and South Korea, among others. We have signed an historic civilian nuclear power agreement with India, reflecting a fundamental change in our relationship. Pro-American leaders have been elected in Germany, France, and Italy. Eastern European countries such as Georgia, Ukraine, and Kosovo treasure their relationships with the United States, and no president has done more to improve health and security in the nations of Africa. We have also strengthened cooperation with Latin America, including initiatives with Brazil on biofuels and with Mexico and Central America on fighting organized crime. Finally, when the President took office, America had trade agreements in force with only three countries, versus 14 today – with three additional agreements approved by Congress but not yet in force and agreements with three countries that are awaiting Congressional approval.

Myth 4: The war in Iraq caused us to “take our eye off the ball” in Afghanistan and with al Qaeda.

Reality: Iraq and Afghanistan are two fronts in the same war, and while the success of the surge in Iraq has been visible, we have also had a quiet surge in Afghanistan. The U.S. has continuously and aggressively fought side-by-side with Afghans and our allies to defeat the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan. The United States has provided nearly $32 billion for security, political, and economic development assistance and the international community has provided more than $55 billion to Afghanistan since 2001.An additional U.S. Marine battalion deployed to Afghanistan in November and they will be followed by an Army combat brigade of about 3,400 troops in early 2009. U.S. forces now total approximately 31,000, and are joined by nearly as many coalition troops. The United States and our allies are working with Afghanistan to help it nearly double the size of the Afghan National Army over the next five years, from 79,000 now trained to 134,000 in 2014.

We have also deployed Provincial Reconstruction Teams to ensure security gains are followed by real improvements in daily life, and we have helped local communities strengthen their economies and create jobs, deliver basic services, improve governance and fight corruption, and build or repair key infrastructure such as roads, bridges, hospitals, and schools. More than six million children, approximately two million of them girls, are now in Afghan schools, compared to fewer than one million in 2001.

In this Global War on Terror, we do not have the luxury to fight on one battlefront at a time. To defeat the terrorists, we must fight them overseas so we don’t have to fight them here at home. Since 9/11, we have successfully captured or killed dozens of al-Qaeda’s senior leadership and hundreds of al-Qaeda operatives in two dozen countries, removed al-Qaeda’s safe-haven in Afghanistan and crippled al-Qaeda in Iraq, and disrupted numerous al Qaeda terrorist plots against the U.S., including a 2006 plot to blow up passenger planes traveling from London.

Myth 5: This Administration has been bad for the environment and ignored the problem of global warming.

Reality: Given the liberal media’s failure to acknowledge this Administration’s true record on alternative energy, conservation, and climate change, it’s not surprising this charge has stuck. But here are some irrefutable data points: From 2001 to 2007, air pollution decreased by 12 percent, and fine particulate matter pollution is down 17 percent since 2001. Ethanol production quadrupled from 1.6 billion gallons in 2000 to 6.5 billion gallons in 2007, wind energy production has increased by more than 400 percent, and solar energy capacity has doubled. In 2007, solar installations increased more than 32 percent and the U.S. produced 96 percent more biodiesel (490 million gallons) than in 2006. The Administration also provided nearly $18 billion to research, develop, and promote alternative and more efficient energy technologies such as biofuels, solar, wind, clean coal, nuclear, and hydrogen.This Administration has improved and protected the health of more than 27 million acres of Federal forest and grasslands, protected, restored, and improved more than three million acres of wetlands, and established the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument, the world’s largest fully protected marine conservation area (nearly 140,000 square miles).

Much of the misperception about the President’s environmental record is born out of the President’s withdrawing the United States from the Kyoto Protocol, which did not include the effective participation of major developing countries such as India and China. Instead, the President worked to address climate change by launching the Major Economies Process, which convened the leaders of the world’s major economies, both developed and developing, to work on ways to further reduce greenhouse gas emissions and improve energy security without harming our economies or giving any nation a free ride. Finally, the President set the country on course to stop the growth of greenhouse gas emissions below projected levels by 2025 and invested more than $44 billion in climate change-related programs.

Some other items that are infrequently mentioned about the real record of the Bush Administration but are worth noting: Teenage drug use has declined 25 percent; in 2007, the violent crime rate was 43 percent lower than the rate in 1998; between 2005 and 2007, the chronically homeless population decreased approximately 30 percent; funding for veterans’ medical care has increased more than 115 percent; and as of 2005, the most recent abortion rate is at its lowest since 1974.

And one last fact: Our homeland has not suffered another terrorist attack since September 11, 2001. That, too, is part of the real Bush record.

Ed Gillespie is the Counselor to President George W. Bush.

Page Printed from: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/12/myths_and_facts_about_the_real.html at December 22, 2008 – 06:45:33 AM PST

Fox News anchor Brit Hume reported today:

The president-elect isn’t shy about his penchant for exercise. He begins most mornings with a visit to a gym and frequently discusses his love for sports. Associated Press reporter Deanna Bellandi describes the incoming first couple as “fabulously fit.” Back in June, Men’s Fitness magazine ranked Obama the candidate as one of the 25 fittest guys in America.

So if this virtue of exercise is praised, how, you ask, have reporters referred to President Bush’s workout routine? They have used words such as “obsession,” “indulgence” and even “creepy” to describe the President’s exercise habit.

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It is enough that the people know there was an election. The people who cast the votes decide nothing.  The people who count the votes decide everything.….Joseph Stalin

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Interesting article here (clip below)
Did Democrats Have Something to Do with the Economic Troubles?
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
By Mike Baker

…..

Citigroup deftly showed other big companies how to play bailout bingo earlier this week. They got theirs in record time even though most of the nation didn’t know they were in trouble until a few minutes before the check was written. By the way, lost in the back pages of the Citi story is an interesting sidebar about former Citi director and senior advisor Robert Rubin.

In case you’re not familiar with Robert Rubin, he was treasury secretary during the Clinton Administration and joined Citi in 1999 as a trusted smart guy. How smart? Reporting shows he made somewhere in the region of $100 million while working with the organization. Rubin claims that he studiously avoided any daily management issues, in part because Citi over the past few years has had some bad management issues. So that $100 million wasn’t for management, it was for things like schmoozing, making big picture pronouncements, pondering and muttering smart things in the CEO’s ear while glancing furtively side to side.

He left in August of this year after helping to fill the bucket of poo but before it was thrown at the fan. Rubin’s also been working as an economic advisor to Obama’s transition team. It appears that several Rubin protégés, proponents of Rubinomics, are being positioned within the new Obama administration.

So here’s what I find amusing, in a curl-up-in-a-fetal-position-and-scream-loudly kind of way.

Remember during the campaign how this whole economic mess, according to the Obama camp, was the fault of the Bush administration and the past 8 years? They had all those excellent slogans… we can’t afford four more years of the same… remember? I don’t want to say that a lot of people bought that crap, but anytime you tried to talk about actual economic history and how this mess evolved, most people glazed over and muttered “past 8 years… more of same… must change.”

Well, just this Sunday while enjoying a piping hot cup of joe and a danish, I was reading through the Sunday papers. Being desirous of news from all sides, I always start with the New York Times. Eventually I finish up with Guns & Ammo. The Times had a story on the front page entitled Citigroup Pays for a Rush to Risk.

The story continued on the inside pages and on page 34, paragraph 15 of the story I came dangerously close to throwing myself off my deck. Here’s paragraph 15:

“When he (Robert Rubin) was Treasury secretary during the Clinton administration, Mr. Rubin helped loosen Depression-era banking regulations that made the creation of Citigroup possible by allowing banks to expand far beyond their traditional role as lenders and permitting them to profit from a variety of financial activities. During the same period he helped beat back tighter oversight of exotic financial products, a development he had previously said he was helpless to prevent.”

Is the New York Times now suggesting that the Democrats might have had something to do with our current economic troubles?

Now.  Since November 2007 this new process (described in the article below) has made harvesting of any type of stem cells, unnecessary.   Why is Stem Cell Research still a political football?

Here is a article by DR. Charles Krauthammer, written in 2007.

THINK PEOPLE!!!   -pf

Stem Cell Vindication

By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, November 30, 2007; A23

“If human embryonic stem cell research does not make you at least a little bit uncomfortable, you have not thought about it enough.”
– James A. Thomson

A decade ago, Thomson was the first to isolate human embryonic stem cells. Last week, he (and Japan’s Shinya Yamanaka) announced one of the great scientific breakthroughs since the discovery of DNA: an embryo-free way to produce genetically matched stem cells.

Even a scientist who cares not a whit about the morality of embryo destruction will adopt this technique because it is so simple and powerful. The embryonic stem cell debate is over.

Which allows a bit of reflection on the storm that has raged ever since the August 2001 announcement of President Bush’s stem cell policy. The verdict is clear: Rarely has a president — so vilified for a moral stance — been so thoroughly vindicated.

Why? Precisely because he took a moral stance. Precisely because, to borrow Thomson’s phrase, Bush was made “a little bit uncomfortable” by the implications of embryonic experimentation. Precisely because he therefore decided that some moral line had to be drawn.

In doing so, he invited unrelenting demagoguery by an unholy trinity of Democratic politicians, research scientists and patient advocates who insisted that anyone who would put any restriction on the destruction of human embryos could be acting only for reasons of cynical politics rooted in dogmatic religiosity — a “moral ayatollah,” as Sen. Tom Harkin so scornfully put it.

Bush got it right. Not because he necessarily drew the line in the right place. I have long argued that a better line might have been drawn — between using doomed and discarded fertility-clinic embryos created originally for reproduction (permitted) and using embryos created solely to be disassembled for their parts, as in research cloning (prohibited). But what Bush got right was to insist, in the face of enormous popular and scientific opposition, on drawing a line at all, on requiring that scientific imperative be balanced by moral considerations.

History will look at Bush’s 2001 speech and be surprised how balanced and measured it was, how much respect it gave to the other side. Read it. Here was a presidential policy pronouncement that so finely and fairly drew out the case for both sides that until the final few minutes of his speech, you had no idea where the policy would end up.

Bush finally ended up doing nothing to hamper private research into embryonic stem cells and pledging federal monies to support the study of existing stem cell lines — but refusing federal monies for research on stem cell lines produced by newly destroyed embryos.

The president’s policy recognized that this might cause problems. The existing lines might dry up, prove inadequate or become corrupted. Bush therefore appointed a President’s Council on Bioethics to oversee ongoing stem cell research and evaluate how his restrictions were affecting research and what means might be found to circumvent ethical obstacles.

More vilification. The mainstream media and the scientific establishment saw this as a smoke screen to cover his fundamentalist, obscurantist, anti-scientific — the list of adjectives was endless — tracks. “Some observers,” wrote The Post’s Rick Weiss, “say the president’s council is politically stacked.”

I sat on the council for five years. It was one of the most ideologically balanced bioethics commissions in the history of this country. It consisted of scientists, ethicists, theologians, philosophers, physicians — and others (James Q. Wilson, Francis Fukuyama and me among them) of a secular bent not committed to one school or the other.

That balance of composition was reflected in the balance in the reports issued by the council — documents of sophistication and nuance that reflected the divisions both within the council and within the nation in a way that respectfully presented the views of all sides. One recommendation was to support research that might produce stem cells through “de-differentiation” of adult cells, thus bypassing the creation of human embryos.

That Holy Grail has now been achieved. Largely because of the genius of Thomson and Yamanaka. And also because of the astonishing good fortune that nature requires only four injected genes to turn an ordinary adult skin cell into a magical stem cell that can become bone or brain or heart or liver.

But for one more reason as well. Because the moral disquiet that James Thomson always felt — and that George Bush forced the country to confront — helped lead him and others to find some ethically neutral way to produce stem cells. Providence then saw to it that the technique be so elegant and beautiful that scientific reasons alone will now incline even the most willful researchers to leave the human embryo alone.

link to article 

Wednesday, November 12, 2008

WASHINGTON NEWS

Did Obama Spin Bush Meeting Details?

Yesterday’s news outlets emphasized the apparent good will between President Bush and President-elect Obama during their meeting. The White House described the discussions as “constructive, relaxed, and friendly.” Twenty-four hours later, however, things have changed.

AFP notes that yesterday’s New York Times “cited unnamed sources as saying the president may agree to new funding for troubled US automakers and a new economic stimulus package if Democrats pass a Colombia free trade pact which is stalled in Congress.” The CBS Evening News detected “signs of possible bad blood between the Bush and Obama camps.” Fox News’ Special Report reported, “What started out as a courtesy call has developed into a controversy. … White House aides were fuming over the Obama camp’s description of the private Oval Office meeting Monday.

Leaks to several reporters made for front page headlines characterizing…Obama as urging…Bush to help struggling automakers and…Bush replying that he might consider it if Democrats dropped their opposition to a Colombia free trade agreement the administration supports. Senior White House aides told Fox the leaks were ‘flat wrong’ and ‘disappointing,’ saying the private meeting should have remained private.”

Roll Call, in a story headlined “Obama Camp Looks To Avoid Bush Rift,” says “the White House today heatedly denied that the statement was made, and Bush administration officials are said to be unhappy that details of the conversation were leaked — seemingly by the Obama camp.” Yesterday’s Washington Post, in its print edition, “cited a senior Obama aide as the source, but by this afternoon the Web site version was quoting knowledgeable sources.”

CNN’s The Situation Room reported, “We are told by both sides, there was no explicit tit for tat. The Financial Times notes White House press secretary Dana Perino “acknowledged trade was discussed during the meeting…but denied that any ‘quid pro quo’ was offered.” ABC World News also said “Obama’s team spent some of the day in a dispute with the White House over details of yesterdays meeting.”

The Washington Times quotes John Podesta, “who is overseeing the Obama transition,” as saying that “while the topic of Colombia came up, there was no quid pro quo in the conversation. … The president did not try to link the issue of Colombia to an economic recovery package.” Podesta “called White House chief of staff Joshua Bolten on Tuesday to discuss a leak from within the Obama camp that gave details of a conversation between Mr. Obama and Mr. Bush.” The Detroit News also notes Podesta said the Columbia Free Trade Agreement “should be dealt with on its own merits.” The Financial Times and The Hill run similar reports.

Bush “Very Pleased” CNN’s The Situation Room yesterday aired CNN’s Heidi Collins’ “exclusive interview” with President Bush. Bush, describing his meeting with Obama, was shown saying, “To the extent he asked my advice, and he may want to ask it again, and the best way to make sure he feels comfortable asking it again is for me not to tell you in the first place what I advised him. We had a very private conversation. It was relaxed. It was interesting to watch a person who is getting ready to assume the office of the President. … He didn’t need my advice about supporting the military. He knows he must do that. We had a good conversation. I was very pleased.”

Obama Wants Detroit Reform Point Person According to The Politico, Obama “wants a high-profile point person to oversee reforms in the ailing auto industry, according to members of Obama’s transition team.” His transition team says Obama “suggested to…Bush…that aid to the auto industry could be coupled with the appointment of ’someone in charge of the auto issue who would have the authority’ to push for reforms. The details came from a more extended readout of the White House meeting provided Tuesday.” The Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, reports Obama has “ordered his transition team to look at ways to aid the car industry even before his inauguration.”

Return to the Article

September 19, 2008

Mistress of Disaster: Jamie Gorelick

By C. Edmund Wright

Ken Lay and Jack Abramoff must be green with envy over the all the mischief that has been accomplished by Jamie Gorelick, with scarcely any demonization in the press.

Imagine playing a central role in the biggest national defense disaster in 50 years. Imagine playing a central role in one of the biggest economic disasters in your country’s history. Imagine doing both as an un-elected official.

Imagine getting filthy rich in the process, and even being allowed to sit self-righteously on a commission appointed to get to the bottom of the first disaster, which of course did not get to the bottom of that disaster or anything else for that matter. 

Imagine ending, ruining or at least causing signficant quality deterioration in the lives of millions of people, most of whom will never know your name. Imagine counting your millions of dollars while people who tried to stop you from causing all this mayhem were getting blamed for most of the ills you actually contributed to. 

Well, as un-imagineable as this is, there is one American who doesn’t have to imagine it. One Jamie Gorelick is this American. And without pretending that she caused the loss of countless thousands of lives and countless billions of dollars of wealth by herself, she certainly did push some of the early domino’s in catastrophic chain events that are a major factors in life in America today.

This is not a bad millineums’s work, when you think about it. Gorelick, an appointee of Bill Clinton, is the one who constructed the wall of separation that kept the CIA and the FBI from comparing notes and therefore invading the privacy of nice young men like, say, Muhammed Atta and Zacarius Moussaoui. While countless problems were uncovered in our intelligence operations in the wake of 9-11, no single factor comes close to in importance to Jamie Gorelick’s wall. 

In fact, it was Gorelick’s wall, perhaps more than any other single factor, that induces some people to blame Clinton himself for 9-11 since he appointed her and she acted  consistent with his philosophy of “crime fighting.” She put the wall into place as Deputy Attorney General in 1995.

And for good measure, she was appointed by Tom Daschle to serve on the “non partisan” 9-11 Commission. And we thought the fox in the henhouse was simply a metaphor. Of course, in a splendid example of “reaching across the aisle,” feckless Republican Slade Gorton of Washington did all he could to exonerate Gorelick in the commission. Thanks, Slade. God forbid the nation actually knows the truth. 

But for Ms. Gorelick, one earth shaking catastrophe is just not enough. You might think that she caused enough carnage to us infidels on 9-11 as to qualify her for the 72 virgins upon her death. (this would also keep her consistent with several of Clinton’s philosophies). 

Alas, that’s only part of her resume. Her fingerprints are all over the Fannie Mae-Freddie Mac mess, which is to say the mess that is central in the entire mortgage-housing crisis. Without so much as one scintilla of real estate or finance experience, she was appointed as Vice Chairman of Fannie Mae in 1997 and served in that role through 2003, which is when most of the systemic cancers that came home to roost today happened. She was instrumental in covering up problems with Fannie Mae while employed there and took multiple millions in bonuses as she helped construct this house of cards.
From Wikipedia:

One example of falsified financial transactions that helped the company meet earnings targets for 1998, a “manipulation” that triggered multimillion-dollar bonuses for top executives.  On March 25, 2002, Business Week  Gorelick is quoted as saying, “We believe we are managed safely. Fannie Mae is among the handful of top-quality institutions.” One year later, Government Regulators “accused Fannie Mae of improper accounting to the tune of $9 billion in unrecorded losses”

As we know, the financial damage done by the housing related problems in this country are still incalculable. Ms. Gorelick’s evil tab is still growing. 

But it doesn’t stop there. She managed to be on the wrong side of the Duke LaCrosse case, working for Duke University to protect that school from it’s damaging knee jerk reactions to the spectacularly unbelievable charges filed by a stripper. (excuse me, exotic dancer). So, even on a smaller scale, she continues to make money while working to ruin the lives of innocent Americans in defense of liberal dogma. At the Department of Defense, when she served as legal counsel there in 1993, she drafted the “Don’t ask /don’t tell” policy. 

From what can be gleaned, it all comes from being well connected. She was educated (is that what they call it?) at Harvard undergrad and Harvard Law. From there, she kept getting appointed to positions above her experience level where she could flex her liberal muscles, add a resume item, and move upward.

Sound familiar? 

Link

According to recent Gallup polls, the president’s average approval rating is below 30% — down from his 90% approval in the wake of 9/11. Mr. Bush has endured relentless attacks from the left while facing abandonment from the right.

This is the price Mr. Bush is paying for trying to work with both Democrats and Republicans. During his 2004 victory speech, the president reached out to voters who supported his opponent, John Kerry, and said, “Today, I want to speak to every person who voted for my opponent. To make this nation stronger and better, I will need your support, and I will work to earn it. I will do all I can do to deserve your trust.”

Those bipartisan efforts have been met with crushing resistance from both political parties.

The president’s original Supreme Court choice of Harriet Miers alarmed Republicans, while his final nomination of Samuel Alito angered Democrats. His solutions to reform the immigration system alienated traditional conservatives, while his refusal to retreat in Iraq has enraged liberals who have unrealistic expectations about the challenges we face there.

It seems that no matter what Mr. Bush does, he is blamed for everything. He remains despised by the left while continuously disappointing the right.

Yet it should seem obvious that many of our country’s current problems either existed long before Mr. Bush ever came to office, or are beyond his control. Perhaps if Americans stopped being so divisive, and congressional leaders came together to work with the president on some of these problems, he would actually have had a fighting chance of solving them.

Like the president said in his 2004 victory speech, “We have one country, one Constitution and one future that binds us. And when we come together and work together, there is no limit to the greatness of America.”

To be sure, Mr. Bush is not completely alone. His low approval ratings put him in the good company of former Democratic President Harry S. Truman, whose own approval rating sank to 22% shortly before he left office. Despite Mr. Truman’s low numbers, a 2005 Wall Street Journal poll found that he was ranked the seventh most popular president in history.

Just as Americans have gained perspective on how challenging Truman’s presidency was in the wake of World War II, our country will recognize the hardship President Bush faced these past eight years — and how extraordinary it was that he accomplished what he did in the wake of the September 11 attacks.

The treatment President Bush has received from this country is nothing less than a disgrace. The attacks launched against him have been cruel and slanderous, proving to the world what little character and resolve we have. The president is not to blame for all these problems. He never lost faith in America or her people, and has tried his hardest to continue leading our nation during a very difficult time.

Our failure to stand by the one person who continued to stand by us has not gone unnoticed by our enemies. It has shown to the world how disloyal we can be when our president needed loyalty — a shameful display of arrogance and weakness that will haunt this nation long after Mr. Bush has left the White House.

Mr. Shapiro is an investigative reporter and lawyer who previously interned with John F. Kerry’s legal team during the presidential election in 2004

Here we go – waiting to decide how things end up today.

first news on a private deal against Israel, then the Black Pathers disrupting polling in Philadelphia, and NY Senator Schumer already talking about ending the reign of conservative talk radio.

Obama camp denies Jerusalem promised to Abbas

full article here

Dennis Ross vehemently denies report by Lebanese newspaper saying Democratic presidential hopeful told Abbas, Fayyad he would support their right to stable sovereign state  

Sources in Ramallah told the al-Akhbar daily that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad are expecting Obama to win, “despite his leaning towards which they said was aimed at gaining the support of the Israel and the Jewish lobby in the United States.”

According to the report, the Democratic senator told Abbas and Fayyad that he “supports the rights of the Palestinians to east Jerusalem, as well as their right to a stable, sovereign state”, but asked them to keep the remarks a secret.

————–

Fraud in Philly

Link to entire story

GOP Election Board members have been tossed out of polling stations in at least half a dozen polling stations in Philadelphia because of their party status.

A Pennsylvania judge previously ruled that court-appointed poll watchers could be NOT removed from their boards by an on-site election judge, but that is exactly what is happening, according to sources on the ground.

It is the duty of election board workers to monitor and guard the integrity of the voting process.

Denying access to the minority (in this case Republican) poll watchers and inspectors is a violation of Pennsylvania state law. Those who violate the law can be punished with a misdemeanor and subjected to a fine of $1,000 and sent to prison between one month and two years.
————-

Fraud in Philly #2 

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCeD1RcJjAg

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Fairness doctrine reinstated?

oh, the plans, the plans.

“Schumer’s comments echo other Democrats’ views on reviving the Fairness Doctrine, which would require radio stations to balance conservative hosts with liberal ones. ”

[Conservative talk radio is a revenue winner for radio stations, and liberal talk radio is not.  Stations required to carry a liberal message will cut down on Conservative talk radio - which gives the MSM the only clear voice to the public.  I don't like a lot of conservative talk radio - but guy's - let's let the market place sort this out.  -pf]

link to article

————–

Link

ATLANTA — Georgia’s Secretary of State has launched a full investigation and may seek criminal charges against three Georgia men who appear to have early-voted twice.

…..  For the larger list of 112,000 voters, WSB-TV Channel 2 was only able to verify their first, middle and last name and dates of birth; some of them could turn out to be different people with the exact same information.

The Secretaries of State can match them by social security number and if they wait until after the election, they will have a complete list of how many of them voted and how many times.

East Germany Had Its Charms, Crushed by Capitalism

an actual headline from the NYTimes.
woah…  I categorized this as media bias, because I didn’t want to start a new category of media idiocy.

read the article here if you want to reminisce about good ole days behind the iron curtain…

yes, those were the days, my friend.

You have GOT to be kidding.  AP has gone round the bend.

It’s almost Nov 1.  3 days of campaigning left – here is an AP headline, and it seems like a surprise, an investigation that is revealing stunning new data…  “Media coverage has favored Obama campaign”  seriously.  That’s the headline. Now stop laughing.  Stop!  read the article.  Yes it’s a real article.  -pf

Link to original article

Oct 31 08:28 PM US/Eastern By DAVID BAUDER AP Television Writer

NEW YORK (AP) – John McCain supporters who believe they haven’t gotten a fair shake from the media during the Republican’s candidacy against Barack Obama have a new study to point to. Comments made by sources, voters, reporters and anchors that aired on ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts over the past two months reflected positively on Obama in 65 percent of cases, compared to in 31 percent of cases with regards to McCain, according to the Center for Media and Public Affairs. ABC’s “World News” had more balance than NBC’s “Nightly News” or the “CBS Evening News,” the group said.

Meanwhile, the first half of Fox News Channel’s “Special Report” with Brit Hume showed more balance than any of the network broadcasters, although it was dominated by negative evaluations of both campaigns. The center didn’t evaluate programs on CNN or MSNBC.

“For whatever reason, the media are portraying Barack Obama as a better choice for president than John McCain,” said Robert Lichter, a George Mason University professor and head of the center. “If you watch the evening news, you’d think you should vote for Obama.”

The center analyzed 979 separate news stories shown between Aug. 23 and Oct. 24, and excluded evaluations based on the campaign horse race, including mention of how the candidates were doing in polls. For instance, when a voter was interviewed on CBS Oct. 14 saying he thought Obama brought a freshness to Washington, that was chalked up as a pro-Obama comment.

When NBC’s Andrea Mitchell reported Oct. 1 that some conservatives say that Sarah Palin is not ready for prime-time, that’s marked in the negative column for McCain.

ABC recorded 57 percent favorable comments toward the Democrats, and 42 percent positive for the Republicans. NBC had 56 percent positive for the Democrats, 16 percent for the Republicans. CBS had 73 percent positive (Obama), versus 31 percent (McCain).

Hume’s telecast had 39 percent favorable comments for McCain and 28 percent positive for the Democratic ticket.

It was the second study in two weeks to remark upon negative coverage for the McCain-Palin ticket. The Project for Excellence in Journalism concluded last week that McCain’s coverage has been overwhelmingly negative since the conventions ended, while Obama’s has been more mixed.

Meanwhile, another survey issued Friday by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press showed that television continues to be Americans’ main source for campaign news, particularly the cable news networks.

But there were clear partisan differences in where people turned.

For instance, of the people who said they got most of their campaign news from Fox News Channel, 52 percent identified themselves as Republican, 17 percent as Democrats and 30 percent as independents, the Pew center said.

MSNBC viewers interested in campaign news identified themselves at 11 percent Republican, 50 percent Democratic and 36 percent independent. The breakdown for CNN: 13 percent Republican, 45 percent Democrat, 38 percent independent.

The study was based on a survey of 2,011 people taken Oct. 17-20 and 24-27. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.5 percent.

first a little humor for the day: Newsweek’s Howard Fineman observes:

Much of the media coverage of Obama has been fawning to say the least, and with good reason. He is one of the most winsome, charismatic candidates to have appeared on the scene in decades.

That’s just how they taught it in journalism school. A reporter’s job is to comfort the winsome and afflict the uncharismatic.  (from the WSJ Online “Best of the Web”)

Heritage Calls on Obama to Pull False Ads

.

The Heritage Foundation today asked Barack Obama to immediately pull two ads that misrepresent the views of Heritage’s Rea Hederman. The campaign has released a 30-second TV ad with false information and repeats it on the campaign website. The following letter was sent by Heritage lawyer Alan P. Dye to the Obama campaign.

Dear Senator Obama:

Two recent campaign advertisements seriously misrepresent the views of my client, The Heritage Foundation. They suggest, quite falsely, that The Heritage Foundation and one of its analysts support your tax plan.

The print ad on your Website as well as your ad entitled “Try This” reference a quote from policy analyst Rea Hederman. In fact, Mr. Hederman never said what is quoted there. Rather, the words you quote are from a New York Sun reporter who interviewed Mr. Hederman and summarized his views erroneously.

That the reporter’s summary is erroneous is evident from the actual quotes from Mr. Hederman presented in the article, which make it quite clear that Mr. Hederman believes your tax plan would be bad not only for the country, but for the middle class. By omitting the direct quotes from Heritage that are contained in the article and attributing to Heritage a conflicting statement not made by its analyst, the advertisement appears to be an intentional attempt to mislead.

Surely there can be no doubt within your campaign as to how Heritage truly views your tax plan. When one of your economic advisors, Jeffrey Liebman, made this same misrepresentation in a September 4, 2008 letter to The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Hederman promptly sent a corrective and very public letter. It appeared in the September 16 issue of The Wall Street Journal under the title: “A Bad Plan That Is Less Bad Is Still Not A Very Good Plan.” In it, Mr. Hederman strenuously decried Mr. Liebman’s blatant misrepresentation and set the record straight.

The Heritage Foundation believes that your advertisements’ use of its name is not only not a fair use of its intellectual property, but is an intentional attempt to mislead and misinform voters. As a responsible candidate, you should insist that your campaign cease to run these false advertisements immediately.

Very truly yours,
Alan P. Dye

Mosk does not provide the rationale for the “1 percent” number that he provides. How was it calculated? Did Mosk even ask? Among other things, Mosk never mentions the basic AVS mechanism that automatically prevents such fraud. He appears not to have asked the Obama campaign why they don’t use it.

10/27 update –  powerlineblog (blurb above) has more on this today.  go HERE to read it all.  From what I understand the AVS system actually has to be disabled – the AVS system is enabled when installed.  This just begs the question – “are they knowingly enabling campaign finance fraud” where someone is setting off shore with a “bucket-o-money” and dumps it into the campaign in less than $200 increments, using goofy names?

then there is also this – I have NEVER heard of a campaign “accidentally” charging $2300 on a credit card for a candidate. HERE.

——————–

the question remains, why would the BO campaign set up a credit card donation system that is highly, highly irregular (not require a name check validation with the card number) unless they wanted to skirt the law.  I mean really… think about it.  And I do not believe the total represents 1% of the “staggering haul”; I believe it represents much more. There should also be investigations on how much of this money was donated by foreign sources.

I have bolded and annotated my irritations below inside the text of the Wapo article.  This is the first time the MSM has bothered to cover this unusual issue; and the fact that Obama was the first to say he would sign on for federal financing (which requires more oversight) then backed away from it, only adds to my concern.  Reading through the article – it seems more like a “Defense of the Obama campaign scheme”, rather than simple reporting.

read better non-MSM reporting here and here.

and here is another reason for off shore contributions. -pf

Link to washington post article

Campaign Finance Gets New Scrutiny
Obama’s Take Raises Questions About Web
By Matthew Mosk
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, October 26, 2008; A01

Sen. Barack Obama’s record-breaking $150 million fundraising performance in September has for the first time prompted questions about whether presidential candidates should be permitted to collect huge sums of money through faceless credit card transactions over the Internet.

Lawyers for both the Republican and Democratic parties have asked the Federal Election Commission to examine the issue, pointing to dozens of examples of what they say are lax screening procedures by the presidential campaigns that permitted donors using false names or stolen credit cards to make contributions.

“There is so much money coming in and yet very little ability to say with certainty that you know who is giving it,” said Sean Cairncross, the Republican National Committee’s chief counsel.

While the potentially fraudulent or excessive contributions represent about 1 percent of Obama’s staggering haul, the security challenge is one of several major campaign-finance-related questions raised by the Democrat’s fundraising juggernaut.

Concerns about anonymous donations seeping into the campaign began to surface last month, mainly on conservative blogs. Some bloggers described their own attempts to display the flaws in Obama’s fundraising program, donating under such obviously phony names as Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, and reported that the credit card transactions were permitted.

Obama officials said it should be obvious that it is as much in their campaign’s interest as it is in the public’s interest for fake contributions to be turned back, and said they have taken pains to establish a barrier to prevent them. Over the course of the campaign, they said, a number of additional safeguards have been added to bulk up the security of their system.  [huh? what and how please... -pf]

In a paper outlining those safeguards, provided to The Washington Post, the campaign said it runs twice-daily sweeps of new donations, looking for irregularities. Flagged contributions are manually reviewed by a team of lawyers, then cleared or refunded. Reports of misused credit cards lead to immediate refunds.

In September, according to the campaign, $1.8 million in online contributions was flagged, and $353,000 was refunded. Of the contributions flagged because a foreign address or bank account was involved, 94.1 percent were found to be proper. One-tenth of one percent were marked for refund, and 5.77 percent are still being vetted.

But clearly invented names have been used often enough to provoke an outcry from Republican critics. Donors to the Obama campaign using false names such as Doodad Pro and Good Will gave $17,375 through 1,000 separate donations, with no sign that they immediately tripped alarms at the campaign. Of more concern, Cairncross said, are reports that the campaign permitted money from 123 foreign nationals to enter its accounts.

Obama officials said they have identified similar irregularities in the finance records of their Republican rival, Sen. John McCain. “Every campaign faces these challenges — John McCain’s campaign has refunded more than $1.2 million in contributions from anonymous, excessive and fraudulent contributors — and we have reviewed and strengthened our procedures to ensure that the contributions the campaign accepts are appropriate,” said Ben LaBolt, an Obama spokesman.  [but every donation to the McCain campaign has gone through the minimum credit card security check and is on file, there are no files to check on the Obama campaign. -pf]

McCain’s contributor database shows at least 201 donations from individuals listing themselves as “anonymous” or “anonymous anonymous,” according to Obama’s campaign. In one particularly embarrassing episode, the McCain campaign mistakenly sent a fundraising solicitation to the Russian ambassador to the United Nations.

Rather than relying primarily on a network of wealthy and well-connected bundlers — as candidates have since President Bush pioneered that technique in 2000 — Obama also tapped a list of 3 million ordinary donors, many of whom who gave in increments of $25 and $50.

Obama’s success with these kitchen-table contributors has set up one of the most lopsided financial advantages in modern presidential campaigning. [this is the author's opinion of what is going on, not mine. -pf] During the first two weeks of October, Obama spent four times more than McCain, including for an unprecedented $82 million saturation-advertising campaign that blanketed the airwaves in key battleground states.

Campaign finance experts have already classified this contest as one of the transformational elections that will dramatically change the way politicians pay for campaigns in coming cycles.

“It’s the model of the future,” said Rick Hasen, an election law specialist at Loyola Law School. “Gone will be the $2,300-a-plate dinner. That will be replaced by the $30,000-a-plate dinner, the kind of select event Obama had hosted by folks like Warren Buffett. And the rest will be the micro-donors — entirely Internet-based.”

Hasen said the 2008 campaign is a mirror of other races that led to major shifts in fundraising. The Watergate scandal of 1972 led Congress to create a public financing system for presidential bids. Ronald Reagan harnessed the power of direct-mail solicitation in 1980. [and this has WHAT to do this this issue? LOL!!!] In 1996, political parties opened the door to runaway donations in the form of unregulated “soft money.”

One immediate result of Obama’s fundraising showing this fall is that it may render obsolete the current system of public financing for presidential campaigns. Because McCain opted into the system, he was limited to spending the $84.1 million provided to his campaign by the Treasury once he claimed the GOP nomination. Obama, who chose to remain outside the system after initially suggesting that he would participate in it, is expected to raise and spend at least three times that amount in the general election campaign.

Obama’s advantage, said FEC Chairman Donald F. McGahn II, makes it likely that Congress will rethink whether the program still makes sense.

To many, Obama’s fundraising success is good news — it shows that a White House bid can be financed largely without donors who have ulterior motives or agendas, and diminishes the role of the special interests and large institutional givers that were once the backbone of presidential fundraising.  [to many, Barry's financing is BAD news, as it is impossible to track and is not subject to any required audits, and shows a white house bid can be financed largely with off shore or other contributions that would be deemed illegal if auditable. -pf]

“When you have that many contributors,” McGahn said, “it does in a weird way cleanse the system.”   [it also fits perfectly with BO's strategic plan to dump chaos into the system - confusing the system then crying "disenfranchisement". -pf]

Bradley A. Smith, a former FEC chairman, in an essay in today’s Outlook section of The Post, agreed that Obama’s effort would “put to rest all the shibboleths about campaign finance reform — that it is needed to prevent corruption, that it equalizes the playing field, or that tax subsidies are needed to prevent corruption.”

There are already signs that runaway fundraising efforts built on small donors have the potential to create an entirely new set of problems.

Scott Thomas, another former FEC chairman, said the potential for these types of security breaches has been looming for more than a decade, since the commission first allowed donors to use a credit card when making a contribution.

“The problem itself has been lurking,” Thomas said. “What’s changed is the sheer volume of donations. At some point that causes enough of a clog that campaigns cannot do all of the vetting and research that would be necessary to figure out if they’re looking at a real name.”

How the FEC might attempt to tackle these problems is unclear. Both parties have filed formal complaints calling on the agency to investigate their rival. Only McCain will automatically be subjected to an audit, because his campaign accepted funds from the Treasury. There is no requirement that Obama’s books be audited, and FEC-watchers predicted that it could be tough to find the four votes needed to approve an audit, given that the panel comprises three Republican and three Democratic appointees.

Under current law, there is also very little policing of small-dollar contributions. The false donations uncovered by news outlets or by rival campaigns have all involved more than $200, because those contributions must be disclosed in published reports. The campaigns are not required to share any information about donors who give less than $200. And they are not required to even keep records of donors who give less than $50 — they can even give cash.

“Maybe the answer is to revisit [those disclosure thresholds], given that the levels were put in in the ’70s, long before the Internet,” McGahn said. “This may bring it to the fore.”

[all too late, folks, all too late.  they were smarter than the system this time.   We  only need to wait a week to see if it worked.  -pf ]

A look at the current RSS headlines from ABC’s The Blotter:

Troopergate Probe OK, AK Supremes Say

Todd Palin Pushed Firing for Years, Probe Told

Let’s Get Ready to Rumble!

Todd Speaks! (Kind of)

Palin Aides to Testify

Troopergate Heads to High Court

Troopergate Suits Tossed

Another Private Palin Email Account?

Probe Challenges Head to Court

Troopergate Suit “Political, Not Legal,” Lawmakers Charge

I’ve got a lot of work to do this weekend, yard signs, events, prepping for events and work work – so I won’t be writing much. thought this was good when I ran into it though, bolding/mine.   read the last paragraph first – this never occurred to me.  -pf

Editing Their Way to Oblivion: Journalism Sacrificed For Power and Pensions

By Michael S. Malone

The traditional media is playing a very, very dangerous game.  With its readers, with the Constitution, and with its own fate.

The sheer bias in the print and television coverage of this election campaign is not just bewildering, but appalling.  And over the last few months I’ve found myself slowly moving from shaking my head at the obvious one-sided reporting, to actually shouting at the screen of my television and my laptop computer.

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

You need to understand how painful this is for me.  I am one of those people who truly bleeds ink when I’m cut.  I am a fourth generation newspaperman.  As family history tells it, my great-grandfather was a newspaper editor in Abilene, Kansas during the last of the cowboy days, then moved to Oregon to help start the Oregon Journal (now the Oregonian).  My hard-living – and when I knew her, scary – grandmother was one of the first women reporters for the Los Angeles Times.  And my father, though profoundly dyslexic, followed a long career in intelligence to finish his life (thanks to word processors and spellcheckers) as a very successful freelance writer.  I’ve spent thirty years in every part of journalism, from beat reporter to magazine editor.  And my oldest son, following in the family business, so to speak, earned his first national by-line before he earned his drivers license.

So, when I say I’m deeply ashamed right now to be called a “journalist”, you can imagine just how deep that cuts into my soul.

Now, of course, there’s always been bias in the media.  Human beings are biased, so the work they do, including reporting, is inevitably colored.  Hell, I can show you ten different ways to color variations of the word “said” – muttered, shouted, announced, reluctantly replied, responded, etc. – to influence the way a reader will apprehend exactly the same quote.  We all learn that in Reporting 101, or at least in the first few weeks working in a newsroom.  But what we are also supposed to learn during that same apprenticeship is to recognize the dangerous power of that technique, and many others, and develop built-in alarms against their unconscious.

But even more important, we are also supposed to be taught that even though there is no such thing as pure, Platonic objectivity in reporting, we are to spend our careers struggling to approach that ideal as closely as possible.  That means constantly challenging our own prejudices, systematically presenting opposing views, and never, ever burying stories that contradict our own world views or challenge people or institutions we admire.  If we can’t achieve Olympian detachment, than at least we can recognize human frailty – especially in ourselves.

For many years, spotting bias in reporting was a little parlor game of mine, watching TV news or reading a newspaper article and spotting how the reporter had inserted, often unconsciously, his or her own preconceptions.  But I always wrote it off as bad judgment, and lack of professionalism, rather than bad faith and conscious advocacy.  Sure, being a child of the ‘60s I saw a lot of subjective “New” Journalism, and did a fair amount of it myself, but that kind of writing, like columns and editorials, was supposed to be segregated from ‘real’ reporting, and at least in mainstream media, usually was.  The same was true for the emerging blogosphere, which by its very nature was opinionated and biased.

But my complacent faith in my peers first began to be shaken when some of the most admired journalists in the country were exposed as plagiarists, or worse, accused of making up stories from whole cloth.  I’d spent my entire professional career scrupulously pounding out endless dreary footnotes and double-checking sources to make sure that I never got accused of lying or stealing someone else’s work – not out any native honesty, but out of fear: I’d always been told to fake or steal a story was a firing offense . . .indeed, it meant being blackballed out of the profession.

And yet, few of those worthies ever seemed to get fired for their crimes – and if they did they were soon rehired into an even more prestigious jobs.  It seemed as if there were two sets of rules:  one for us workaday journalists toiling out in the sticks, and another for folks who’d managed, through talent or deceit, to make it to the national level.

Meanwhile, I watched with disbelief as the nation’s leading newspapers, many of whom I’d written for in the past, slowly let opinion pieces creep into the news section, and from there onto the front page.  Personal opinions and comments that, had they appeared in my stories in 1979, would have gotten my butt kicked by the nearest copy editor, were now standard operating procedure at the New York Times, the Washington Post, and soon after in almost every small town paper in the U.S.

But what really shattered my faith – and I know the day and place where it happened – was the War in Lebanon three summers ago.  The hotel I was staying at in Windhoek, Namibia only carried CNN, a network I’d already learned to approach with skepticism.  But this was CNN International, which is even worse.  I sat there, first with my jaw hanging down, then actually shouting at the TV, as one field reporter after another reported the carnage of the Israeli attacks on Beirut, with almost no corresponding coverage of the Hezbollah missiles raining down on northern Israel.   The reporting was so utterly and shamelessly biased that I sat there for hours watching, assuming that eventually CNNi would get around to telling the rest of the story . . .but it never happened.

But nothing, nothing I’ve seen has matched the media bias on display in the current Presidential campaign.  Republicans are justifiably foaming at the mouth over the sheer one-sidedness of the press coverage of the two candidates and their running mates.  But in the last few days, even Democrats, who have been gloating over the pass – no, make that shameless support – they’ve gotten from the press, are starting to get uncomfortable as they realize that no one wins in the long run when we don’t have a free and fair press.  I was one of the first people in the traditional media to call for the firing of Dan Rather – not because of his phony story, but because he refused to admit his mistake – but, bless him, even Gunga Dan thinks the media is one-sided in this election.

Now, don’t get me wrong.  I’m not one of those people who think the media has been too hard on, say, Gov. Palin, by rushing reportorial SWAT teams to Alaska to rifle through her garbage.  This is the Big Leagues, and if she wants to suit up and take the field, then Gov. Palin better be ready to play.  The few instances where I think the press has gone too far – such as the Times reporter talking to Cindy McCain’s daughter’s MySpace friends – can easily be solved with a few newsroom smackdowns and temporary repostings to the Omaha Bureau.

No, what I object to (and I think most other Americans do as well) is the lack of equivalent hardball coverage of the other side – or worse, actively serving as attack dogs for Senators Obama and Biden.  If the current polls are correct, we are about to elect as President of the United States a man who is essentially a cipher, who has left almost no paper trail, seems to have few friends (that at least will talk) and has entire years missing out of his biography.  That isn’t Sen. Obama’s fault:  his job is to put his best face forward.  No, it is the traditional media’s fault, for it alone (unlike the alternative media) has had the resources to cover this story properly, and has systematically refused to do so.

Why, for example to quote McCain’s lawyer, haven’t we seen an interview with Sen. Obama’s grad school drug dealer – when we know all about Mrs. McCain’s addiction?  Are Bill Ayers and Tony Rezko that hard to interview?  All those phony voter registrations that hard to scrutinize?  And why are Senator Biden’s endless gaffes almost always covered up, or rationalized, by the traditional media?

The absolute nadir (though I hate to commit to that, as we still have two weeks before the election) came with Joe the Plumber.  Middle America, even when they didn’t agree with Joe, looked on in horror as the press took apart the private life of an average person who had the temerity to ask a tough question of a Presidential candidate.  So much for the Standing Up for the Little Man, so much for Speaking Truth to Power, so much for Comforting the Afflicting and Afflicting the Comfortable, and all of those other catchphrases we journalists used to believe we lived by.

I learned a long time ago that when people or institutions begin to behave in a matter that seems to be entirely against their own interests, it’s because we don’t understand what their motives really are.  It would seem that by so exposing their biases and betting everything on one candidate over another, the traditional media is trying to commit suicide – especially when, given our currently volatile world and economy, the chances of a successful Obama presidency, indeed any presidency, is probably less than 50:50.

Furthermore, I also happen to believe that most reporters, whatever their political bias, are human torpedoes . . .and, had they been unleashed, would have raced in and roughed up the Obama campaign as much as they did McCain’s.  That’s what reporters do, I was proud to have been one, and I’m still drawn to a good story, any good story, like a shark to blood in the water.

So why weren’t those legions of hungry reporters set loose on the Obama campaign?  Who are the real villains in this story of mainstream media betrayal?

The editors.  The men and women you don’t see; the people who not only decide what goes in the paper, but what doesn’t; the managers who give the reporters their assignments and lay-out the editorial pages.  They are the real culprits.

Why?  I think I know, because had my life taken a different path, I could have been one:  Picture yourself in your 50s in a job where you’ve spent 30 years working your way to the top, to the cockpit of power . . . only to discover that you’re presiding over a dying industry.  The Internet and alternative media are stealing your readers, your advertisers and your top young talent.  Many of your peers shrewdly took golden parachutes and disappeared.  Your job doesn’t have anywhere near the power and influence it did when your started your climb.  The Newspaper Guild is too weak to protect you any more, and there is a very good chance you’ll lose your job before you cross that finish line, ten years hence, of retirement and a pension.

In other words, you are facing career catastrophe -and desperate times call for desperate measures.  Even if you have to risk everything on a single Hail Mary play.  Even if you have to compromise the principles that got you here.  After all, newspapers and network news are doomed anyway – all that counts is keeping them on life support until you can retire.

And then the opportunity presents itself:  an attractive young candidate whose politics likely matches yours, but more important, he offers the prospect of a transformed Washington with the power to fix everything that has gone wrong in your career.  With luck, this monolithic, single-party government will crush the alternative media via a revived Fairness Doctrine, re-invigorate unions by getting rid of secret votes, and just maybe, be beholden to people like you in the traditional media for getting it there.

And besides, you tell yourself, it’s all for the good of the country . . .

Link

Yesterday, I referred to the “dishonest, but facially highly effective, ads” Barack Obama has employed against John McCain. The most persistent of these dishonest ads, at least in the Northern Virginia area, pertain to McCain’s health care plan. They follow the line taken by Lyin’ Joe Biden in his debate with Sarah Palin, where Biden claimed that McCain’s plan effectively gives Americans $5,000 and then takes away $12,000.

Yuval Levin, in the Weekly Standard, has exposed the multiple liberties Obama-Biden have taken with the truth on this subject:

Senators Obama and Biden both mentioned the taxation of health benefits in recent debates, and their campaign has run ads pointing to it as well, but all have failed to note the tax credit that more than makes up for it. The net tax burden on middle class families declines under the McCain plan, while insurance options improve. If they do mention the tax credit, they suggest it is all that families would have if they left their employer coverage–as Joe Biden put it in his debate with Sarah Palin, you would have to “replace a $12,000 plan with a $5,000 check you just give to the insurance company.” But that ignores the simple fact that employer-purchased health care is purchased with employee wages. Right now, employers pay workers less in cash wages because they pay so much in premiums. With McCain’s reform, workers who opt out of coverage will get more take home pay and a tax credit to more than make up for lost employer contributions to health care.But perhaps the most dishonest charge concerns the prospects for the employer-based system itself. The Obama campaign has implied that McCain’s plan would unravel the system and cause workers to be dropped from their employers’ health plans. “Twenty million of you will be dropped,” Joe Biden said in the vice presidential debate. In fact, the McCain plan does not alter the basic financial incentives facing employers. Workers might choose to leave employer coverage, but the McCain plan would not force them out.

Indeed, it is Barack Obama’s health care plan that raises the prospect of masses being dropped from the employer-based insurance system, and his vulnerability on this crucial front may explain some of his intense defensiveness on health care. In the second presidential debate, Obama sought to address this concern through a brazenly misleading depiction of his own plan. “If you’ve got a health care plan that you like, you can keep it,” he said. “All I’m going to do is help you to lower the premiums on it.” But you can only keep your plan if your employer doesn’t eliminate it, and Obama’s health care proposal, unlike John McCain’s, gives your employer a powerful incentive to do just that.

Where McCain seeks to address the problems of our health insurance system by building a market for private individuals, Obama seeks to do so by building a public-insurance system. His plan would force all but the very smallest businesses to either provide insurance coverage that meets the plan’s requirements (which the Obama campaign has not specified, but would surely involve extensive particular coverage mandates like those in the federal employee health plan, which exceed what most popular employee plans provide today), or pay a tax to the government. Many employers would thus face the choice of increasing their insurance costs to comply with the new coverage requirements or dropping their workers’ coverage. Obama, meanwhile, would create a new government-run insurance program (funded by the new tax on employers who don’t offer coverage) that would compete with private companies to cover people who are not insured by employers.

In effect, the Obama plan creates an incentive to drop employees from existing plans, and then takes private insurers out of the race to cover them by using price controls to make the public option cheaper. The plan’s goal is to drive Americans into a public Medicare-like insurance system by default.

Unfortunately, Obama’s dishonest attacks on McCain’s plan are perfect for use by an unscrupulous politician in a negative ad. For although McCain’s health care plan isn’t terribly complex, it can’t be explained effectively in 30 seconds. For that reason and because, in any event, McCain lacks the resources to air the truth about his plan with anything like the frequency that Obama is able to tell falsehoods about it, the Obama attack has gone unanswered.

This disparity in the candidates’ resources points to perhaps the greatest irony of this campaign: Obama’s ability to misrepresent facts about substantive issues largely without response is predicated on another Obama falsehood — his promise that, if his opponent agreed to do the same (as McCain did), he would finance his campaign through public funding.

Link to WSJ online article

It is disingenuous to channel cash into an operation with a history of fraud and then claim you’re shocked to discover reports of fraud. As with Rev. Jeremiah Wright and William Ayers, Mr. Obama was happy to associate with Acorn when it suited his purposes. But now that he’s on the brink of the Presidency, he wants to disavow his ties.

At the recent Emmy Awards, historian Laura Linney averred that America’s Founders had been “community organizers” — like Barack Obama. Too bad they aren’t like that any more. Mr. Obama’s kind of organizers work at Acorn, the militant advocacy group that is turning up in reports about voter fraud across the country.

Acorn — the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now — has been around since 1970 and boasts 350,000 members. We’ve written about them for years, but Acorn is now getting more attention as John McCain’s campaign makes an issue of the fraud reports and Acorn’s ties to Mr. Obama. It’s about time someone exposed this shady outfit that uses government dollars to lobby for larger government.

Acorn uses various affiliated groups to agitate for “a living wage,” for “affordable housing,” for “tax justice” and union and environmental goals, as well as against school choice and welfare reform. It was a major contributor to the subprime meltdown by pushing lenders to make home loans on easy terms, conducting “strikes” against banks so they’d lower credit standards.

But the organization’s real genius is getting American taxpayers to foot the bill. According to a 2006 report from the Employment Policies Institute (EPI), Acorn has been on the federal take since 1977. For instance, Acorn’s American Institute for Social Justice claimed $240,000 in tax money between fiscal years 2002 and 2003. Its American Environmental Justice Project received 100% of its revenue from government grants in the same years. EPI estimates the Acorn Housing Corporation alone received some $16 million in federal dollars from 1997-2007. Only recently, Democrats tried and failed to stuff an “affordable housing” provision into the $700 billion bank rescue package that would have let politicians give even more to Acorn.

All this money gives Acorn the ability to pursue its other great hobby: electing liberals. Acorn is spending $16 million this year to register new Democrats and is already boasting it has put 1.3 million new voters on the rolls. The big question is how many of these registrations are real.

The Michigan Secretary of State told the press in September that Acorn had submitted “a sizeable number of duplicate and fraudulent applications.” Earlier this month, Nevada’s Democratic Secretary of State Ross Miller requested a raid on Acorn’s offices, following complaints of false names and fictional addresses (including the starting lineup of the Dallas Cowboys). Nevada’s Clark County Registrar of Voters Larry Lomax said he saw rampant fraud in 2,000 to 3,000 applications Acorn submitted weekly.

Officials in Ohio are investigating voter fraud connected with Acorn, and Florida’s Seminole County is withholding Acorn registrations that appear fraudulent. New Mexico, North Carolina and Missouri are looking into hundreds of dubious Acorn registrations. Wisconsin is investigating Acorn employees for, according to an election official, “making people up or registering people that were still in prison.”

Then there’s Lake County, Indiana, which has already found more than 2,100 bogus applications among the 5,000 Acorn dumped right before the deadline. “All the signatures looked exactly the same,” said Ruthann Hoagland, of the county election board. Bridgeport, Connecticut estimates about 20% of Acorn’s registrations were faulty. As of July, the city of Houston had rejected or put on hold about 40% of the 27,000 registration cards submitted by Acorn.

That’s just this year. In 2004, four Acorn employees were indicted in Ohio for submitting false voter registrations. In 2005, two Colorado Acorn workers were found to have submitted false registrations. Four Acorn Missouri employees were indicted in 2006; five were found guilty in Washington state in 2007 for filling out registration forms with names from a phone book.

Which brings us to Mr. Obama, who got his start as a Chicago “community organizer” at Acorn’s side. In 1992 he led voter registration efforts as the director of Project Vote, which included Acorn. This past November, he lauded Acorn’s leaders for being “smack dab in the middle” of that effort. Mr. Obama also served as a lawyer for Acorn in 1995, in a case against Illinois to increase access to the polls.

During his tenure on the board of Chicago’s Woods Fund, that body funneled more than $200,000 to Acorn. More recently, the Obama campaign paid $832,000 to an Acorn affiliate. The campaign initially told the Federal Election Commission this money was for “staging, sound, lighting.” It later admitted the cash was to get out the vote.

The Obama campaign is now distancing itself from Acorn, claiming Mr. Obama never organized with it and has nothing to do with illegal voter registration. Yet it’s disingenuous to channel cash into an operation with a history of fraud and then claim you’re shocked to discover reports of fraud. As with Rev. Jeremiah Wright and William Ayers, Mr. Obama was happy to associate with Acorn when it suited his purposes. But now that he’s on the brink of the Presidency, he wants to disavow his ties.

The Justice Department needs to treat these fraud reports as something larger than a few local violators. The question is whether Acorn is systematically subverting U.S. election law — on the taxpayer’s dime.

Please add your comments to the Opinion Journal forum.

NRO blog

I’ve been out of pocket since Thursday, but turned on the Sunday shows and nearly hurled. John Lewis plays the race card like no one else. The idea that he would use George Wallace’s name to describe the McCain/Palin campaigning is sickening. John Lewis is not to be criticized given the abuse against him during the civil-right marches, but John McCain can be compared to Wallace despite his heroic service to this country and torture as a POW.

Barack Obama’s campaign has managed to paint Geraldine Ferraro, Bill Clinton, John McCain, and Sarah Palin as racists. Meanwhile, how dare anyone suggest that Obama’s voluntary association with a racist pastor for 20 years, and his lame defense of the association, raises character questions.

Will the lib media be upset if we quote Aristotle, whose insight seems useful in this context?

“Those, then, are friends to whom the same things are good and evil; and those who are, moreover, friendly or unfriendly to the same people; for in that case they must have the same wishes, and thus by wishing for each other what they wish for themselves, they show themselves each other’s friends.” (Aristotle, Rhetoric, Book II, Chapter)

We choose our own friends and associates. And this is significant in Obama’s case in particular as we are trying to get a sense of who he is and what informs him. Obama is asking the nation to honor him with its highest office. Yet, during most of his adulthood, he has befriended some of the worst kind of people — many of whom detest the nation Obama seeks to lead. And when combined with Obama’s own extremism on issue after issue (is there a left-wing position he does not embrace?), there can be no doubt that an Obama administration working with a Democrat majority in Congress will fundamentally alter the nation’s character in ways that will be very difficult to unravel.

As for Obama’s commercials, they are deceitful even by the Washington Post’s standards. They flat out lie about McCain’s health-care plan and the tax consequences. Indeed, one of the sources he cites for the truthfulness of his ad is the Center for America’s Progress, which is John Podesta’s group. But Obama doesn’t care. He is spending a fortune on the ads, hoping to scare people into believing McCain will take their health care away. Obama’s ad about McCain’s position on corporate taxes is another flat out lie. McCain isn’t proposing a $4 billion tax for oil companies or loopholes for corporations. He opposes letting the Bush tax cuts lapse and wants to further reduce corporate tax rates across the board. Obama has been called on the ad as well, but he is running them non-stop.

And then there is ACORN. Obama worked for them, represented them, and has now given them $800,000 from his campaign. Is Obama unaware of what a fraudulent operation this is? Of course not. He rejects any responsibility for their actions. And what of Obama’s thuggish tactics in intimidating those with whom he disagrees? He asked the Justice Department to prosecute a private group that was running ads about his ties to William Ayers — and later sought tax information from them to file complaints with the IRS. He tried to silence our own Stanley Kurtz by using his campaign e-mail list to encourage calls to the management of a radio station on two separate occasions to keep Kurtz off the air. And then they flooded the show with calls when Kurtz was on.

The vast majority of conservative intellectuals and grassroots activist comprehend what’s at stake in the election, even if David Brooks, Christopher Buckley, Doug Kmiec, and other eccentrics do not. Obama and David Axelrod know exactly what they are doing, and so do most of the media anchors and reporters. And they hope to alter this country in ways we should all find revolting.

Powerlineblog  the fraud continues

This is one of those news stories you can hardly believe. In Lake County, Indiana, ACORN turned in 5,000 new registrations. The authorities there started reviewing them, and quit after they found that the first 2,100 were all fraudulent. The mind boggles: ACORN turns in thousands of new registrations, and not a single one represents a legitimate voter. Here is CNN’s report:

watch you tube video here

News reports have suggested that Indiana, traditionally a Republican state, may be in play. We’re beginning to understand why.

UPDATE: I forgot to say this this is via InstaPundit. One of Glenn’s readers writes: “I watched the clip you linked. Couldn’t tell from the report. Does ACORN work more closely with one party/candidate than another? Heh.”

Good point. There are some things you need to know, and others you don’t. The connection between ACORN’s voter fraud and the Democratic Party? Forget about it.

Guilty Party: ACORN, Obama, and the mortgage mess
Mona Charen, September 30, 2008
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=Mzk4MmVkNzA1NGQ2NGRkZjQ2YjNmYjdlODZkMmQ4N2I=
_________________________________________________________An ACORN Falls from the Tree: A congressional outrage
Ken Blackwell, September 29, 2008
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=N2Y5MTc0ZTAyMmE1Mjk3NGE3OWRiY2FkMjZlN2YxYzc=
_________________________________________________________

Inside Obama’s Acorn:
By their fruits ye shall know them
Stanley Kurtz, May 29, 2008

“What if Barack Obama’s most important radical connection has been hiding in plain sight all along? Obama has had an intimate and long-term association with the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (Acorn), the largest radical group in America. If I told you Obama had close ties with MoveOn.org or Code Pink, you’d know what I was talking about. Acorn is at least as radical as these better-known groups, arguably more so. Yet because Acorn works locally, in carefully selected urban areas, its national profile is lower. Acorn likes it that way. And so, I’d wager, does Barack Obama.”
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NDZiMjkwMDczZWI5ODdjOWYxZTIzZGIyNzEyMjE0ODI
_________________________________________________________

2004 Video: Democrats Defend Fannie/Freddie from Regulation:
“We’ve been through nearly a dozen hearings where frankly we were trying to fix something that wasn’t broke. Mr. Chairman we do not have a crisis at Freddie Mac and in particular at Fannie Mae under the outstanding leadership of Mr. Frank Raines.”-Rep. Maxine Waters, 2004
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YL36nwCSYUM
_________________________________________________________

History of Fannie Mae scandal
Associated Press, December 7, 2006
“Fannie Mae announces its long-awaited restatement, erasing $6.3 billion in profit from 2001 through June 30, 2004.”
http://www.boston.com/business/articles/2006/12/07/history_of_fannie_mae_scandal/?page=1
_________________________________________________________

Bailout Politics: The Congressional Dems who enabled this crisis are now being trusted to fix it?
Thomas Sowell, September 30, 2008
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=OWE3OWU3OTExYzNlNTUzMzY2YmJmOWZjMzcwN2M1NjU=

I don’t know much about guns – but I do know this:

VP candidate 2008

Correct

VP Candidate 1992

Uh…. no.

So, which of these things did you NOT think would happen when you woke up this morning:

A) The markets would plummet 700+ points.

B) CNN would call Bill Ayers a terrorist.

Me too.

============= 

Link to AP smear

But while Ayers and Obama are acquainted, the charge that they “pal around” is a stretch of any reading of the public record. And it’s simply wrong to suggest that they were associated while Ayers was committing terrorist acts. Obama was 8 years old at the time the Weather Underground claimed credit for numerous bombings and was blamed for a pipe bomb that killed a San Francisco policeman.

HUH?  That’s NOT what Palin is saying. This writer is an idiot.

A comment from LGF blog:

I wonder what the time limit is?

Osama bin Hidin hasn’t committed a terrorist attack on American soil for more than 7 years. Does he only have 25 years so to go before prospective Presidents can pal around with him?

Ayers went from being an unsuccessful terrorist to using his family’s wealth to warp the minds of youth. He’s FAR more dangerous now than he was then.

http://powerlineblog.com

powerline blog is always on top of events and below they lay out their opinion of an AP article today covering Palin’s statements about Bill Ayers yesterday.

Let’s learn more about Bill Ayers, then read what powerline has to say about AP’s analysis. Below – a quote from Hillary last Spring:

The Ayers-Obama relationship became a hot topic in Wednesday’s Democratic presidential debate. It is “an issue certainly Republicans will be raising” should Obama be the Democratic nominee for president, Obama rival Hillary Clinton said.  LlNK

HERE – he says he is sorry, but wasn’t a terrorist – you decide; I have.  It’s a slippery slope to say it’s great, fine should not be talked about, when a fellow running for the leader of the free world (can we still say that?) thinks we can only take selective life events to judge character.

This only seems to me that Ayers is altering his history as Obama is trying to hide his.  What’s there Barry?

The quote from Hillary above tells me there is a relationship.  He is a neighbor, he’s not a neighbor, whatever – you can google all kinds of answers to that question… But what we know is that he was a fugitive from justice, an anti-war protester – but no – he also formed a group that bombed state and federal buildings and hurt and killed Americans.  hmm…   sounds like the definition of a terrorist to me.  You?

Then, my biggest problem is Ayres seems to wear that terrorist activity as a badge of honor by saying he should have done more not less, and allowing to be photographed standing on an American flag in 2001.   No amount of collegiate or business contribution would allow me to sit on a board or associate with Bill Ayers or his wife (better known as) Bernardine Dohrn.

Obama et al cannot dismiss this as racism nor can they keep from explaining this relationship.  But – if McCain Palin can get no traction from the MSM or the public we could be doomed in this election to a very far left Democrat with a veto proof congress.  We’ll be starting to look more like France every day…  sigh…

———–

The Associated Press claims that Sarah Palin’s criticism of Barack Obama’s relationship with Bill Ayers was racist!

The AP’s article is an “analysis” by one Douglass K. Daniel, described as “a writer and editor with the Washington bureau of The Associated Press.” It has to be read to be believed:

Link to full AP article

When the McCain campaign ran an ad that had a white woman in it, it was denounced as racist. When it ran an ad that had an African-American man (Franklin Raines) in it, it was denounced as racist. Now the McCain campaign links Obama to a white man, the former terrorist, and still anti-American, Bill Ayers. That’s racist too. I think we’ve exhausted just about all the possibilities. The only non-racist thing McCain can do, apparently, is concede the election.

There once was a time when the Associated Press was a respected news-gathering agency. Some years ago, it began to abandon that mission in order to transform itself into a liberal advocacy organization. That transformation is now pretty much complete.

2008 will be remembered, I think, as the year in which the collapse of traditional American media became irreversible. The AP has plenty of company.

surprising and some strange news today

—-

First Alec Baldwin blames Clinton and Democrats (Barney Frank) for economic problems.  Yes A L E C  Baldwin.

—-

OJ has been saved from the stress of continuing to look for Nicole’s murderer, as he will soon have a new home – finally. Never thought this day would arrive.

—-

Head of LA chapter of NOW  is rumored to endorse McCain/Palin

—-

from the AP (!) (on Palin’s statements about the Obama / Ayres relationship)

In 1970, the group was blamed for a pipe bomb in San Francisco that killed a police officer and injured another. Three members of the group were killed in 1970 in an accidental explosion of a bomb in their Greenwich Village basement.

but then the story devolves is a complete hit piece on Palin – but what else is new…  read more here

but McCain/Palin feel this is the problem: Ayres says:  ”I don’t regret setting bombs,” Ayres told the New York Times in 2001 upon publication of his memoir about that era, “Fugitive Days.” ”I feel we didn’t do enough.”

uh huh… sweet.

Mr. Ayres in 2001 (standing on the American Flag)

—-

from the NY TIMES (!)

  …  Whenever competitors asked Congress to rein in the company, lawmakers were besieged with letters and phone calls from angry constituents, some orchestrated by Fannie itself. One automated phone call warned voters: “Your congressman is trying to make mortgages more expensive. Ask him why he opposes the American dream of home ownership.”    ….

Regulators, spurred by the revelation of a wide-ranging accounting fraud at Freddie, began scrutinizing Fannie’s books. In 2004 they accused Fannie of fraudulently concealing expenses to make its profits look bigger.

Mr. Howard and Mr. Raines resigned. Mr. Mudd was quickly promoted to the top spot…

Lawmakers, particularly Democrats, leaned on Fannie and Freddie to buy and hold those troubled debts, hoping that removing them from the system would help the economy recover. The companies, eager to regain market share and buy what they thought were undervalued loans, rushed to comply.   ….

Mr. Raines and Mr. Howard, who kept most of their millions, are living well.   Mr. Raines has improved his golf game. Mr. Howard divides his time between large homes outside Washington and Cancun, Mexico, where his staff is learning how to cook American meals.

Link to entire article  (BTW Mudd is broadcaster Roger Mudd’s son)

I’d make this the quote of the week, except it was from 2003:

“I want to roll the dice a little bit more in this situation towards subsidized housing…”  -Barney Frank September 25, 2003

—-

video – How did this happen?

Link – LGF – “Biden Lies ignored by the Media

Link - “nothing to say”  [hat tip libragirl who is apparently tired of posting herself...]

this is hysterical – from http://realclearpolitics.com all you really need to know.   when the nyt says the debate proves little – you KNOW Gov. Palin did well.

I’ll just post links to good notes about the debate below – later – got to get to work.

Binden on the constitution

Townhall report

cnn.com

Weekly Standard

Wall Street Journal (Peggy Noonan finally caves

New York Times (David Brooks)

update -here is another article (take the links too) that notes more factual errors from Biden.

Biden’s 14 Lies

Fresh from the McCain people.

JOE BIDEN’S 14 LIES TONIGHT

1. TAX VOTE: Biden said McCain voted “the exact same way” as Obama to increase taxes on Americans earning just $42,000, but McCain DID NOT VOTE THAT WAY.

2. AHMEDINIJAD MEETING: Joe Biden lied when he said that Barack Obama never said that he would sit down unconditionally with Mahmoud Ahmedinijad of Iran. Barack Obama did say specifically, and Joe Biden attacked him for it.

3. OFFSHORE OIL DRILLING: Biden said, “Drill we must.” But Biden has opposed offshore drilling and even compared offshore drilling to “raping” the Outer Continental Shelf.”

4. TROOP FUNDING: Joe Biden lied when he indicated that John McCain and Barack Obama voted the same way against funding the troops in the field. John McCain opposed a bill that included a timeline, that the President of the United States had already said he would veto regardless of it’s passage.

5. OPPOSING CLEAN COAL: Biden says he’s always been for clean coal, but he just told a voter that he is against clean coal and any new coal plants in America and has a record of voting against clean coal and coal in the U.S. Senate.

6. ALERNATIVE ENERGY VOTES: According to FactCheck.org, Biden is exaggerating and overstating John McCain’s record voting for alternative energy when he says he voted against it 23 times.

7. HEALTH INSURANCE: Biden falsely said McCain will raise taxes on people’s health insurance coverage — they get a tax credit to offset any tax hike. Independent fact checkers have confirmed this attack is false

8. OIL TAXES: Biden falsely said Palin supported a windfall profits tax in Alaska — she reformed the state tax and revenue system, it’s not a windfall profits tax.

9. AFGHANISTAN / GEN. MCKIERNAN COMMENTS: Biden said that top military commander in Iraq said the principles of the surge could not be applied to Afghanistan, but the commander of NATO’s International Security Assistance Force Gen. David D. McKiernan said that there were principles of the surge strategy, including working with tribes, that could be applied in Afghanistan.

10. REGULATION: Biden falsely said McCain weakened regulation — he actually called for more regulation on Fannie and Freddie.

11. IRAQ: When Joe Biden lied when he said that John McCain was “dead wrong on Iraq”, because Joe Biden shared the same vote to authorize the war and differed on the surge strategy where they John McCain has been proven right.

12. TAX INCREASES: Biden said Americans earning less than $250,000 wouldn’t see higher taxes, but the Obama-Biden tax plan would raise taxes on individuals making $200,000 or more.

13. BAILOUT: Biden said the economic rescue legislation matches the four principles that Obama laid out, but in reality it doesn’t meet two of the four principles that Obama outlined on Sept. 19, which were that it include an emergency economic stimulus package, and that it be part of “part of a globally coordinated effort with our partners in the G-20.”

14. REAGAN TAX RATES: Biden is wrong in saying that under Obama, Americans won’t pay any more in taxes then they did under Reagan.

I needed this.
you will recognize this set of events and actions in the parody below as something that BIDEN did or said, not Palin.  0bama has had his gaffes too.  just google Obama Gaffes – I’m too tired tonight…

BTW – I am not watching the debate – need to work, but will be watching the blogs http://littlegreenfootballs.com probably.

October 02, 2008, 6:30 a.m. 

Sarah Biden
Vice-Presidential meltdown.

By Victor Davis Hanson 

Journalists continue to ask, “What was John McCain thinking in selecting the gaffe-prone Gov. Sarah Palin?”

In what has now become a disturbing pattern, the Alaska governor seems either unable or unwilling to avoid embarrassing statements that are often as untrue as they are outrageous. Recently, for example, in an exclusive interview with news anchor Katie Couric, Palin gushed, “When the stock market crashed, Franklin D. Roosevelt got on the television and didn’t just talk about the, you know, princes of greed. He said, ‘Look, here’s what happened.’ ” Apparently the former Alaskan beauty queen failed to realize that in 1929 there was neither widespread television nor was Franklin Roosevelt even President.

Sometimes the Idaho-native Palin seems to confuse and embarrass her own running mate. Shortly after her nomination, she introduced a “John McAmerica;” then she referred to the Republican ticket as the “Palin-McCain administration;” and finished by calling Sen. Obama, “Senator George Obama.” The Palin gaffes seem to be endless: on her way to Washington to meet the national press corps, Palin, the mother of five, once again stumbled — this time characterizing Senator Biden as “Congressman Joe Biden,” who, she chuckled, was “good looking.”

But then Palin only compounded that growing image of shallowness when introducing her own snow-mobiling husband Todd, “as drop-dead gorgeous!” And when asked about the controversial McCain ad suggesting that Barack Obama had introduced explicit sex education classes to pre-teenagers, the Christian fundamentalist Palin scoffed that it was “terrible” and that she would have never had allowed such an unfair clip to run — before retracting that apology under pressure from the now exasperated McCain campaign staff. But then, according to press reports, wild Sarah only made things worse still by announcing that paying higher taxes was the “patriotic” thing for Americans to do.

This week, the gun-owning, moose-hunting Palin also promised blue-collar Virginians that she would protect their firearm rights — even, if need be, from her own running-mate: “I guarantee you, John McCain ain’t taking my shotguns, so don’t buy that malarkey. Don’t buy that malarkey. They’re going to start peddling that to you. I got two. If he tries to fool with my Beretta, he’s got a problem. I like that little over and under, you know? I’m not bad with it. So give me a break. Give me a break.”

Palin may have had some experience in Alaskan politics, but at times the former small-town mayor seems unaware of the pressures of running a national campaign in a diverse society. For example, Palin — who has had past associations with reactionary groups — caused a storm earlier when she characterized Democratic Presidential nominee Barack Obama in seemingly racialist terms: “I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.” Such stereotyping suggested that the Alaskan was not aware of the multiracial nature of American politics — an impression confirmed when in her earlier gubernatorial run, she had once suggested that to enter a donut shop was synonymous with meeting an Indian immigrant.

The recently-elected Governor Palin was further rattled by media scrutiny, when, in a moment of embarrassing candor, she confessed, “Mitt Romney is as qualified or more qualified than I am to be vice president of the United States of America. Quite frankly he might have been a better pick than me.” That confession followed an earlier deer-in-the-headlights moment, when the nearly hysterical Palin urged a wheel-chair bound state legislator to rise: “Sally, stand up, let the people see you!”

The Palin gaffes are no surprise to those who have followed closely her previous races. They cite her aborted governor campaign, when she was forced to pull out after fraudulently claiming that her working-class family had been Idaho coal miners — in an apparent case of plagiarism of British Prime Minister candidate Neal Kinnock’s stump speech. Palin once boasted: “I started thinking as I was coming over here, why is it that Sarah Palin’s the first in his family ever to go to University . . . is it because our fathers and mothers were not bright . . . who worked in the coal mines of Northeast Idaho and would come up after 12 hours and play volleyball?” It did not help Palin that reporters quickly discovered that while as a student at the University at Idaho she had been caught plagiarizing and also misrepresented her undergraduate transcript.

Most recently on the campaign trail, Governor Palin apparently promised a vocal supporter that the United States would certainly not burn coal to produce electricity — even though roughly half of current U.S. power production is coal-fired. The same uncertainty seems to extend to foreign policy. Under cross-examination, Palin appeared confused about her own recent trips abroad, first claiming that her helicopter had “been forced down” in Afghanistan, although other passengers suggested the landing was a routine cautionary measure to avoid a possible snowstorm. Palin likewise had alleged that she was shot at while in Baghdad’s Green Zone, although there was no evidence from her security detail that she had, in fact, come under hostile fire.

The Obama campaign has lost no time in hammering at the former hockey-mom Palin’s foreign-policy judgment, alleging that shortly after September 11 she once suggested sending $200 billion to Iran as a “good will” gesture, and reminding journalists that in repeated interviews, Palin had called for dividing Iraq into three separate nations, despite Iraqi resistance to such outside interference. Palin, the nominal head of the Alaskan National Guard, has also falsely insisted that Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Mullen had once suggested that we were losing the war in Iraq and that the Bush administration had sent Undersecretary of State William Burns to Teheran to meet with Iranian officials.

In response to Palin’s unbridled misstatements, journalists have coined the term “Palinism” — the serial voicing of sweeping declarations that are either insulting, or untrue — or both. No wonder rumors mount that Sen. McCain is now seeking a possible graceful exit for the gaffe-prone Palin, even as the Obama campaign continues to make the contrast with their own sober and circumspect Joe Biden.

— This parody is by NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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