I got this from a friend of mine and it’s worth sharing.   -pf

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I am not happy about the outcome of this recent election. My wife wisely tells me that I need to get over it – and that if I don’t like it, to do something about it.  I’m exercising my right to free speech (while I still can) to tell you how I plan to “redistribute” my hard earned dollars.

We live in a small town and do a lot of shopping either by mail order catalogs or by internet. Today I emptied a stack of catalogs out of the mailbox and happened to be looking at Fox News website at Noon. There is an interactive map here (http://elections.foxnews.com/states_map/index.html ) that shows how the election turned out in the United States.

All the states are either blue for Democrat or red for Republican. By clicking on a state you can see how the counties in each state voted. By entering a zip code you can see how that area voted. Out of curiosity I entered a zip code off the back of a catalog. Blue state, blue county – into the trash it went. Hmmm…I may be onto something here.

I’m choosing to spend my money in the areas of the country that didn’t vote for socialism, redistribution of wealth, erosion of civil rights and tossing out the Constitution of the United States of America.

I need a new coat: LL Bean – Freeport, ME (blue county in a blue state – trash) Cabelas – Sidney, NE (red county in a red state) My favorite microbrewery is New Belgium in Ft Collins, CO (blue county in a blue state) but I also like Shiner in Shiner, TX (red county in a red state).

My daughter is having a birthday and Christmas is coming up: I have toy catalogs from VA (blue), MO (mostly red but still counting), MA (blue), VA (blue) & TX (Red) Howdy y’all!

Vacations: Colorado and New Mexico are out for weekend trips. Maybe we’ll check out Oklahoma this next year. I was planning on taking my family to Disney World in Dec 2009. (Orlando, FL – blue county in a blue state) I’ll have to weigh my values against the promise I’ve made my daughter here… maybe I can talk her into Six Flags Over Texas.

Movies and the liberal media? Don’t get me started.

Obama had the largest political donations EVER. He has not published his donor list (or birth certificate, resume, college transcripts, bar exam…) but, Liberals gave him that money. I found a searchable website that gives names, amounts and to which party the donation was made. www.newsmeat.com

And another site is www.followthemoney.org – be informed.

If I buy something from a liberal, some of that money may go to Obama 2012, the DNC, the PLO, ACORN, the Karl Marx Appreciation Society or any other bunch of left wing boneheads. If I buy from conservatives maybe the GOP or the NRA get some money.

My guess is that conservatives have more disposable income than the college kids and the unemployed that elected him. But probably not as much as Oprah.

I’m just one guy and my small amount of cash doesn’t mean much. Together we can make a difference.

Be sure to let those blue companies know why they aren’t getting your business or they’ll blame their economic down turn on President Bush.

I’m still buying from Americans; I’m just choosing which Americans to buy from now.

If you agree with me, tell your friends.    God bless America!

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

Link to video

There’s enough blame to share, but these bad policies started in the Carter Administration in the 70′s and were made worse in the Clinton Administration in the 90′s.

A methodical breakdown of a financial crisis is contained in the video link above.  If you have 15 minutes to spare, you’ll book mark this and recommend this to others.

And when it comes to pushing us out of this problem – we need to remember this.  The government doesn’t HAVE any money.  What money it HAS is from taxes paid by us.  So all these new jobs programs?  The money has to come from somewhere.

The next President has promised a lot already but has yet to say where he’ll get the money to pay for it.

We need to think more about pretty simple things too, moving forward – Like where credit card companies get all their money for fancy buildings and salaries…  they certainly have never made a penny on me. I should have paid more attention in ECON classes in school, I guess.  But my Parents advice of “if it looks too go to be true, it probably is” or “live within your means”…  always worked for me.  Although I did break a mold and bought my first “foreign” car this year.  But that can be another post later…

Just watched Sen. Corker, (R-Tenn) on CSPAN with Brian Lamb this evening.  I like his sense….

BTW – I’m old enough and remember Dinah singing that song in Black and White on an American Made TV.   But holy crap, I did not know some of this stuff.  96000 workers and provides health benefits to 1 million?  what the HECK business sense does THAT make!

BTW II  – relating to or having sclerosis; hardened (“A sclerotic patient”) I had to look it up.  -pf

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LINK

Can You Still See the USA in Your Chevrolet?
Route 66 is looking ever more like a one-way dead-end street to Bailoutistan.

By Mark Steyn

‘See the USA in your Chevrolet!” trilled Dinah Shore week after week on TV.

Can you still see the USA in your Chevrolet? Through a windscreen darkly.

General Motors now has a market valuation about a third of Bed, Bath And Beyond, and no one says your Swash 700 Elongated Biscuit Toilet Seat Bidet is too big to fail. GM has a market capitalization of just over two billion dollars. For purposes of comparison, Toyota’s market cap is one hundred billion and change (the change being bigger than the whole of GM). General Motors, like the other two geezers of the Old Three, is a vast retirement home with a small loss-making auto subsidiary. The UAW is the AARP in an Edsel: It has three times as many retirees and widows as “workers” (I use the term loosely). GM has 96,000 employees but provides health benefits to a million people.

How do you make that math add up? Not by selling cars: Honda and Nissan make a pre-tax operating profit per vehicle of around 1600 bucks; Ford, Chrysler and GM make a loss of between $500 and $1,500. That’s to say, they lose money on every vehicle they sell. Like Henry Ford said, you can get it in any color as long as it’s red.

In the 20th century, most advanced nations made automobiles but only America made them mythic: “Drive the USA in your Chevrolet!” sang Dinah. “America’s the greatest land of all!” America had road movies. With car chases. Thelma and Louise drove their vehicle off the cliff and, unlike the Old Three, they didn’t demand American taxpayers come along for the ride. But, if you didn’t want to hit the open road, you could just hang around being cool. In Chuck Berry’s immortal quatrain:

Riding along in my automobile

My baby beside me at the wheel

Cruising and playing the radio

With No Particular Place To Go…

Not if you were a European teen. Cruising was an American activity. A Saturday night out for a Brit meant hanging around at a rain-streaked bus shelter hoping the night service would show up. Even if you had a particular place to go, you had no means of getting there.

So many areas of endeavor that once embodied the youth and energy of this great land are now old and sclerotic. I include, naturally, my own industry. I loved the American newsrooms you saw in movies like The Front Page, full of hardboiled, hard-livin’ newspapermen. By the time I got there myself, there were no hardboiled newspapermen, just bland anemic newspaperpersons turning out politically correct snooze sheets of torpid portentousness. The owners of The Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune recently filed for bankruptcy protection. The New York Times is mortgaging its office to fund debt repayment. The Detroit Free Press is cutting out home delivery except on Thursdays, Fridays and Sundays, thereby further depressing sales of delivery trucks in the Motor City.

The newspapers blame the Internet, just as Detroit blames Japan. But the Japanese have problems of their own. One day they’ll get theirs. That’s the beauty of capitalism. Nothing is forever. The big railroad barons smoking cigars and enjoying pheasant under glass in the dining car on the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe thought Henry Ford was a schmuck. Who’d want to ride around in that thing? Next thing you know everyone’s getting their kicks on Route 66:

You’ll see Amarillo

Gallup, New Mexico

Flagstaff, Arizona

Don’t forget Winona

Kingman, Barstow, San Bernadino…

Ah, California. The Golden State! To a penniless immigrant called Arnold Schwarzenegger, it was a land of plenty. Now Arnold is an immigrant of plenty in a penniless land. What’s the motto on the license plates? “Ah’ll be back …for more of your money!” In California you don’t have to be an orange to have your pips squeezed. The Terminator makes Gray Davis look like Calvin Coolidge. Care to terminate a government program, Governor? Hey, great idea! We’ll hire 200 people to do an impact study on terminating the Department of Impact Study Regulation and get back to you in a decade. And when Governor Girlyman has run out of state taxpayers to fleece for his ever more bloated bureaucracy, he’ll go to Washington to plead for a federal bailout of Cantaffordya.

California! The state that symbolizes the American Dream! If you can make it there, you’ll make it anywhere! No, wait, that’s New York. “This is the worst fiscal downturn since the Great Depression,” announced Governor Paterson. So what’s he doing? Why, he’s bringing in the biggest tax hike in New York history. If you can make it there, you’ll be paying state tax on it, sales tax, municipal tax, a doubled beer tax, a tax on clothing, a tax on cab rides, an “iTunes tax” on downloads from the Internet, a tax on haircuts, 137 new tax hikes in all. Call Albany today and order your new package of tax forms, for just $199.99, plus 12% tax on tax forms and 4% tax-form application fee partially refundable upon payment of the 7.5% tax-filing tax. If you can make it there, you’ll certainly have no difficulty making it in Tajikistan.

Hey, and who needs to make it there when you can just get appointed there? Governor Paterson is said to be considering appointing Princess Caroline of Kennedy to Hillary Clinton’s vacant Senate seat. After two and a third centuries of republican experiment, America has finally worked its way back to the House of Lords. “Friends Say Kennedy Has Long Wanted Public Role”, Anne Kornblut assured readers in an in-depth Washington Post tongue-bath. She hasn’t “long wanted” it to the extent of, you know, running for dog catcher in Lackawanna and getting — what’s the word? — “elected”, but, if you have a spare Senate seat, she’s graciously indicated that she’d be prepared to consider accepting it. As lady-in-waiting Anne Kornblut pointed out, she is highly qualified, being “the author of several books”. It’s true! She’s an experienced poetry editor. She edited The Best-Loved Poems Of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Jackie Kennedy wrote poems? Of course! She wrote so many poems that some are better loved than others.

See the USA from your Chevrolet: An hereditary legislature, a media fawning its way into bankruptcy, its iconic coastal states driving out innovators and entrepreneurs, the arrival of the new Messiah heralded only by the leaden dirge of “We Three Kings Of Ol’ Detroit Are/Seeking checks we traverse afar”, and Route 66 looking ever more like a one-way dead-end street to Bailoutistan. Boy, I sure could use a poem by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis right now, even one of the lesser-loved ones.

“I feel like I lost my country,” said the Hudson Institute’s Herbert London the other day, wondering whatever happened to the land of opportunity and dynamism. But I’m more of an optimist. Maybe Princess Caroline will be appointed CEO of GM and all will be well. Or maybe Bed, Bath And Beyond will put wheels on the Swash 700 Elongated Biscuit Toilet Seat Bidet.

And on that cheery note let me wish you a very Hopey Changemas.

This is a piece of James Taranto’s “Best of the Web” 12/17/08 produced by the Wall Street Journal online – a particularly good day – and good read…

Foot in Mouth
In the twilight of his presidency, George W. Bush gave Iraqis a final opportunity to thank him for liberating their country. But as Agence France-Presse reports, one Iraqi “journalist,” Muntazer al-Zaidi, seems to have preferred the old regime:

Zaidi jumped up as Bush was holding a press conference with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki on Sunday, shouted “It is the farewell kiss, you dog” and threw two shoes at the US leader.

The shoes missed after Bush ducked and Zaidi was immediately wrestled to the ground by security guards and frogmarched from the room.

Zaidi seems to have borrowed the idea from some hippie in Oregon, who in February 2005, as the Associated Press reported at the time, tossed a shoe at Richard Perle, a former assistant defense secretary. Perle was debating Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic National Committee and a proponent of the Iraqi status quo ante, at Portland’s Pacific University. The unidentified footwear-flinging freak shouted “Liar! Liar!” at Perle.

As for Zaidi’s heel-hurling, AFP reports it was “hailed by many in the Arab world as an ideal parting gift to the unpopular US president,” and it actually quotes Arabs praising this silly action:

“Throwing the shoes at Bush was the best goodbye kiss ever . . . it expresses how Iraqis and other Arabs hate Bush,” wrote Musa Barhoumeh, editor of Jordan’s independent Al-Gahd Arabic newspaper. . . .

“All US soldiers who have used their shoes to humiliate Iraqis should be brought to justice, along with their US superiors, including Bush,” said Ali Qeisi, head of a Jordan-based Iraqi rights group, calling for Zaidi’s release.

“The flying shoe speaks more for Arab public opinion than all the despots/puppets that Bush meets with during his travels in the Middle East,” said Asad Abu Khalil, a popular Lebanese-American blogger and professor at Stanislaus University in California at angryarab.blogspot.com.

If these comments are representative, they tell you something about the intellectual impoverishment of Arab culture (and of the culture of American higher education, habitat of both Asad Abu Khalil and, one presumes, the Portland Perle projectile perpetrator). Zaidi is a hero in the view of these men for his childish, impotent and potentially (though not actually) harmful expression of unreasoning rage.

Meanwhile, AFP reports that “Saddam Hussein’s former lawyer Khalil al-Dulaimi said he was forming a team to defend Zaidi and that around 200 lawyers, including Americans, had offered their services for free.” Of course Dulaimi did not end up doing all that well by his last high-profile client, who as far as we know is still dead. If Zaidi is smart, he’ll hold out for a white-shoe firm.

Uday and the Lions
Don’t get Thomas Schaller wrong. He misses Saddam Hussein as much as the next Salon writer does:

Look: Bush has wreaked havoc on Iraq. Death, dismemberment, disfiguring, displacement and political disarray are all part of his tragic legacy. Al-Zaidi has many legitimate reasons to be angry.

Yet there is this caveat:

But his actions and the subsequent lionizing of him are not helpful.

Somehow this reminded us of a July 2003 report in the Times of London:

A chief executioner to one of Saddam’s sons has revealed how he helped drag two victims into a cage to be devoured by lions.

The executioner said that he was ordered to seize two 19-year-old students and take them to a farm of Uday Hussein, Saddam’s oldest son who was killed by American forces last week.

As soon as they arrived the students were dragged to a cage containing the lions and forced inside. “I saw the head of the first student literally come off his body with the first bite,” he said. He then had to stand and watch the animals devour the two young men: “By the time they were finished there was little left but for the bones and bits and pieces of unwanted flesh.”

He was told later that the two young men “had competed with Uday where some young ladies were concerned.”

“Lionizing” meant something quite different back when Saddam was in power.

The Neediest Cases
It’s easy to think of the economic downturn in abstract terms: the rising unemployment rate, the falling Dow Jones Industrial Average. But behind these numbers is a great deal of human suffering, and reporters at the New York Times have been laboring heroically to tell the stories of the people who are hurting. Here is one such story:

Jodi Hamilton began her senior year of high school in Woodcliff Lake, N.J., this fall on the usual prosperous footing. Her parents were providing a weekly allowance of $100 and paying for private Pilates classes, as well as a physics tutor who reported once a week to their 4,000-square-foot home.

But in October, Jodi’s mother lost her job managing a huge dental practice in the Bronx, then landed one closer to home that requires more hours for less money. Pilates was dropped, along with takeout sushi dinners, and Jodi’s allowance, which covers lunch during the week, slipped to $60. Instead of having a tutor, Jodi has become a tutor, earning $150 a week through that and baby-sitting.

“I just thought it would be responsible to get a job and have my own money so my parents didn’t have to pay for everything,” said Jodi, who is 17. “I always like to be saving up for something that I have my eye on–a ring, a necklace, a handbag.”

We cried because we had no Kobe beef until we met a girl who had no sushi.

Accountability Journalism
This is what now passes for “news” at the Associated Press:

When Bill Clinton took office in 1993, global warming was a slow-moving environmental problem that was easy to ignore. Now it is a ticking time bomb that President-elect Barack Obama can’t avoid.

Since Clinton’s inauguration, summer Arctic sea ice has lost the equivalent of Alaska, California and Texas. The 10 hottest years on record have occurred since Clinton’s second inauguration. Global warming is accelerating. Time is close to running out, and Obama knows it. . . .

Mother Nature, of course, is oblivious to the federal government’s machinations. Ironically, 2008 is on pace to be a slightly cooler year in a steadily rising temperature trend line. Experts say it’s thanks to a La Nina weather variation. While skeptics are already using it as evidence of some kind of cooling trend, it actually illustrates how fast the world is warming.

USA Today has a smart op-ed piece today noting the similarity between global warmism and religious myths of apocalypse. There seems to be a basic human need to believe the end is nigh. Perhaps it somehow diverts us from contemplating our own inevitable demise.

Biden Brings Back the Bucket
If the idea of having Joe Biden a heartbeat away from the presidency worries you, this report from Politico will offer some reassurance–at least as long as Barack Obama’s heart continues to beat:

Joe Biden is laying plans to significantly shrink the role of the vice presidency in Barack Obama’s White House, according to an official familiar with his thinking. . . .

Biden will not begin every day with his own intelligence briefing before sitting in on the president’s. He will not always be the last person Obama speaks to before making a decision.

He also will not, as a transition official calls it, operate a “shadow government” within an Obama administration. . . .

Biden’s goal of restoring the office to its “traditional role” is something he and Obama agreed on before the Delaware senator was named to the Democratic ticket, the transition official said.

As part of that understanding, Biden is unlikely to have a specific docket of issues.

The traditional role of the vice presidency was best described by John Nance “Cactus Jack” Garner, vice president during Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first two terms, who said the position was “not worth a bucket of warm spit.” (Actually, rather than “spit,” FDR’s No. 2 used a vulgar term for No. 1.)

Although it may be that Obama is looking to uphold another tradition, from his hometown of Chicago: no-show jobs.

LINK to source

not too far away, you know

did you hear there was going to be a train?

Philly to WASH D.C. so the common folk could see him.

States in trouble

WAIT!!! the Dems said in the elections in NOVEMBER that we in IOWA were fine – flush – balanced!!!

Why are we bbblllluuueee

The Other American Auto Industry
Plenty of car makers make a go of it in this country–they’re just non-union and not headquartered in Detroit.
by Fred Barnes
12/22/2008, Volume 014, Issue 14
West Point, Georgia

Drew Ferguson IV is a 42-year-old dentist whose family has lived in this town, population 3,300, “since God put us here.” To be precise, the family arrived eight generations ago. Ferguson went off to the University of Georgia, then on to dental school, after which he came back to West Point. He and his wife, whom he met in college, have four kids. A year ago, Ferguson was elected mayor. “There’s a reason I live in West Point,” he says. “I love it. There’s a sense of place here.” No doubt, but West Point is located in what might also be considered the middle of nowhere. It’s pinched between I-85 and the Alabama border. Atlanta is a good hour’s drive away.

West Point today isn’t the same town Ferguson grew up in. Textile company executives used to live here. But when the textile industry collapsed in the 1980s, the victim of foreign competition, they moved away. Thousands of jobs were lost. A few small technology firms took up some of the slack. But the high-tech bust of the late 1990s proved to be another job killer. “We survived without a federal bailout,” Ferguson says sarcastically. Now, while much of America wallows in the gloom of a recession, there’s great joy in West Point. “West Point will have more economic growth in the next 24 months than anywhere else in the country,” Ferguson boasts. And he may be right.

KIA has come to town. The Korean automobile manufacturer is building a huge assembly plant, which will employ 2,900 workers when it begins turning out cars a year from now. KIA suppliers will employ thousands more nearby. When KIA accepted applications last winter–only online, not in person–43,000 people applied. Just last week, a 2.5-mile, four-lane road that runs along the 2,200-acre plant site was completed. Naturally it’s called KIA Parkway. A Korean barbecue restaurant opened a year ago, as Koreans began moving into West Point. It was formerly a Pizza Hut.

KIA donated one of its cars to Georgia governor Sonny Perdue, who is said to drive it occasionally. Ferguson drives a KIA Sorento. “I had to buy mine,” he says. In the election last year, Ferguson ousted Billy Head, who is 30 years older and was a two-term incumbent. Ferguson says the voters in West Point “were ready to take a new direction. We have a chance to completely reinvent this town. For an old textile town, we’ve really done pretty well.” Ferguson recently hired a second dentist to join his practice.West Point has entered the auto industry’s alternative universe. Foreign car manufacturers, the so-called transplants, have been setting up shop in the South for a quarter century now, starting with the plant that Nissan opened in Smyrna, Tennessee, in 1983. It’s still operating. Nissan added a second plant in Canton, Mississippi, in 2003. Two years ago, Nissan moved its American headquarters from southern California to Cool Springs, Tennessee, just south of Nashville.

The auto production numbers in the South are staggering. A dozen years ago, Alabama produced zero cars. Now it turns out 750,000 annually at Mercedes, Honda, and Hyundai plants. Three years after Mercedes opened its SUV factory near Tuscaloosa in 1996, it doubled the size and output. A Honda plant halfway between Birmingham and Atlanta went on line in 2001, and the next year the company spent $450 million to expand it, adding 2,000 more workers.

The southern auto industry mocks Detroit. The transplants make money and aren’t asking for help from Washington. The recession has curtailed car sales temporarily, causing the transplants to slow production. But they are expected to expand again once the economy recovers. Volkswagen is currently building a plant outside of Chattanooga, which will produce 150,000 cars a year. But VW, with ambitious plans to increase its American sales, obtained an environmental permit that allows it to make 512,000 autos at the site. Volkswagen, by the way, has moved its main American office from Auburn Hills, Michigan, to Herndon, Virginia.

Embarrassed by the success of the foreigners, the Big 3 car makers and the United Auto Workers (UAW) claim the tax and other “incentives” the transplants get from state and local governments in the South are no different from the subsidies they’re seeking in Washington. But that’s not quite true. “There’s a big difference between a subsidy and an incentive,” says Michael Randle, president of Southern Business and Development and an expert on the southern auto industry. “A subsidy pays to keep jobs. An incentive pays to bring them. If you’re paying to keep them, it means somebody wants to leave.”

Southern officials don’t apologize for luring foreign companies, nor should they. “The distinction between foreign and domestic cars is totally gone now,” Democratic governor Phil Bredesen of Tennessee told me. “Most Volkswagens are just as American as a Chevy. They’re built here. They’re built by Americans. The management at the [Chattanooga] plant is largely American. They’re not bringing in parts from Germany.” The plant manager happens to be a Texan named Don Johnson.

It’s no longer politically risky for a governor to offer transplants costly incentives. Alabama’s Democratic governor Jim Folsom Jr. was criticized for the $250 million package the state gave Mercedes, and the issue contributed to his defeat in the 1994 election. But when Bredesen and other Tennessee officials, including Republican senators Lamar Alexander and Bob Corker, attracted VW with $577 million in tax breaks and other enticements, they drew cheers.

Government payouts aren’t the only inducement to automakers or even the most important one. There’s also the attraction of a pro-business political community, relatively cheap labor, inexpensive or free land, lower cost of living and of doing business, warm climate, and the big one that the auto companies are wary of talking about–no UAW.

The southern auto belt from South Carolina to Texas, home to eight German, Japanese, or Korean plants (plus three more under construction), is right-to-work country. In these states, workers can’t be compelled to join a union or pay dues, and not many are inclined to sign a union card anyway. The result: The UAW has failed miserably to organize workers. No Mercedes, VW, Honda, Toyota, Hyundai (KIA’s parent), BMW, or Nissan plant in the South is unionized.

There’s a simple explanation. It’s what I call the progressive anti-unionism of the transplants. It consists of one factor: They pay well. Workers not only make far more than the prevailing wage in the rural areas where most plants are located but also considerably more than every state’s average wage. With overtime, they can earn $70,000 or more a year at some plants. Average pay and benefits: roughly $45 an hour.

Unlike the timid auto executives, politicians in the right-to-work states are quite candid in crediting the enormous appeal of their non-union status. “If you don’t have right-to-work laws, you end up like those guys [the Big 3] are today” in Detroit, Corker says. “Right to work,” says another top state official, “is a huge issue.”

“We don’t have a culture that values union organizing,” says Haley Barbour, the Republican governor of Mississippi who persuaded Toyota to locate a Prius plant in Blue Springs in northern Mississippi. “Our workers like overtime and pay for performance. They feel like they get a better deal without the union.”

The UAW, of course, is partly responsible for lofty non-union wages, though the threat of a successful UAW organizing drive is remote. A union workforce doesn’t fit the business model pursued by the transplants. They dislike inflexible union work rules, grievances, an adversarial relationship between management and labor, indeed any intermediary between plant managers and workers at all. And they especially hate strikes.

Michigan, though a union state, made an aggressive bid for the Volkswagen plant that wound up in Tennessee. It was one of three finalists. But when a VW site selection team made its final visit in May, a UAW local in Michigan was striking against a Big 3 supplier. “Fear of the UAW probably drove the final decision,” a local business leader told the Detroit Free Press.

In truth, the transplants don’t have much to worry about from organized labor. The UAW has been able to force only three elections at the foreign-owned plants. The union lost overwhelmingly at Nissan’s Tennessee plant in 1989, failed in another election there, and lost at the Mercedes plant in Alabama. The UAW might fare better if “card check” is approved by Congress next year, allowing organizers to succeed without the need to win a secret ballot election. But the transplants should still have little trouble thwarting UAW organizers.

The UAW’s problem is that it has little to offer. High pay? The workers have that. “If you’re making $50 an hour, what do you need a union for?” says Randle. Job security? Workers tend to rate a successful company as a better security bet than a union whose members are losing jobs by the tens of thousands. A voice on the assembly line? Transplant workers have that, just not through a third-party like the UAW.

So the UAW is left with a handful of weak arguments about on-the-job accidents, overworked employees, and sweatshop conditions. “Why would a worker in Alabama or Texas making far and away the best wages he ever could want to join the UAW?” says Washington attorney Richard Wyatt, who specializes in labor issues. “The UAW has no story to tell these people that makes any sense.”

In courting transplants, southern states have another great advantage besides right-to-work laws and lucrative incentive packages. They try harder because their need–especially to raise the South’s standard of living–has been greater. They are better at beckoning business because they’ve been doing it for decades, first to attract textiles and furniture, now autos. They treat campaigns to capture transplants like military exercises. Georgia’s plan to win over KIA was dubbed Project Pine Tree. Also, nearly all elected officials, Republicans and Democrats, are favorable to business. The efforts are bipartisan.

And they put far more time and ingenuity into charming foreign auto chiefs. When Tennessee officials negotiated with Nissan over shifting its headquarters to Nashville, they learned the wife of the top Nissan executive in the United States was a fancier of African violets. So they arranged to have a new type of the flower named after her. To meet with KIA’s chief executive in West Point, Georgia officials replaced their Fords with a fleet of rented KIAs to drive around the proposed plant site.

Since Tennessee’s Nissan breakthrough in 1983, states in the southern auto corridor have been willing to up the ante to attract the transplants. Nissan got $66 million in incentives. Two years later, Toyota accepted $125 million to put a plant near Lexington, Kentucky. That included $35 million for buying and preparing the site. The latest was Tennessee’s $577 million package for VW this year.

So far, these investments have paid off handsomely. Michael Randle points to the case of Alabama, which has delivered $1.2 billion in incentives to four automakers. The companies, in turn, have spent $20 billion in salaries alone to their employees. “If Warren Buffett took $1.2 billion and turned it into $20 billion in 10 years, he’d be called a genius.”

Randle argues that the “sum of the southern auto industry is so much greater than its parts.” The auto plants have a multiplier effect on local economies. They usually hire younger workers who might not be able to buy a home until their 40s if they worked at WalMart. “With these [auto] jobs, they buy a house at 28 or 29.” At least that’s Randle’s theory.

Drew Ferguson is a believer. He initially got an inkling that KIA was coming from his father, Drew Ferguson III, a banker in West Point who heads the town’s economic development commission. “Son, I’ve got some good news,” he said several years ago. “But I can’t tell you.” The news was KIA’s interest in West Point. Georgia officials, it turned out, had tried in vain to sell KIA on a fully developed site outside Savannah. But a member of KIA’s site selection team had picked out the West Point site as he drove between Atlanta and Montgomery, Alabama, home of a Hyundai plant.

Once KIA announced its decision, excitement in West Point bubbled over. But there was a problem with the site. It was divided among 35 separate landowners. The elder Ferguson had the job of buying out all of them. It took him just 35 days. The town itself has put $80 million into the KIA project.

The mayor talked optimistically last week about West Point’s future as he drove me around the town and down the new four-lane parkway past the half-built plant. “This community was able to survive when the textile industry went away,” he told me. “At the height of the tech boom, we had 2,000 jobs, but we lost a lot of those. Now we have a remarkable opportunity to turn this old textile town into the largest economic development in Georgia’s history.”

Fred Barnes is executive editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.

The Pilgrims’ Short Lived Experiment in Communism

Many have credited Karl Marx with inventing what we now know as communism in the middle of the 19th century. The concept of communal living and dependence, however, came long before The Communist Manifesto. Over the centuries, the concept has been applied by different people in different places. While the reasons for applying the communal approach varied as widely as the people who attempted it, one thing did remain constant: failure. From Roman latifundiae to the Soviet Union, communism time and again proved the failure inherent in its concept. Americans do not need to look to distant lands and little known peoples for evidence of the failure of communism. They simply need to look back at one of the most celebrated groups of people in their history: the Pilgrims.

As most educated Americans know, Puritan Separatists, or Pilgrims, landed in Massachusetts in 1620. What many don’t realize is that the original economic system of their colony, Plymouth Plantation, was a form of communism. There was neither private property nor division of labor. Food was grown for the town and distributed equally amongst all. The women who washed clothes and dressed meat did so for everyone and not just for their own families. This sounds like the perfect agrarian utopia envisioned by Marx and Lenin. What happened to it? To find the answer to that question, one must turn to Of Plymouth Plantation by William Bradford. Bradford served as Governor of Plymouth Colony from 1620 to 1647 and chronicled in great detail everything that happened in the colony.

By 1623, it was obvious the colony was barely producing enough corn to keep everyone alive. Fresh supplies from England were few and far between. Without some major change, the colony would face famine again. In his chronicle, Bradford described what was going wrong and how it was solved (pardon the King James English):

All this while no supply was heard of, neither knew they when they might expect any. So they began to think how they might raise as much corn as they could, and obtain a better crop than they had done, that they might not still thus languish in misery. At length, after much debate of things, the Governor (with the advise of the chiefest among them) gave way that they should set corn every man for his own particular, and in that regard trust to themselves; in all other things to go in the general way as before. And so assigned to every family a parcel of land, according to the proportion of the number, for that end, only for present use (but made no division for inheritance) and ranged all boys and youth under some family. This had very good success, for it made all hands industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been by any means the Governor or any other could use, and saved him a great deal of trouble, and gave far better content. The women now went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to set corn; which before would allege weakness and inability; whom to have compelled would have been thought great tyranny and oppression.

With weak crops and little hope of supply, the Pilgrims divided the parcels among the families and told them to grow their own food. They found that those who would pretend they couldn’t work due to infirmity, weakness or inability (sound familiar?) gladly went to work in the fields. Corn production increased dramatically and famine was averted because communism was eliminated. Bradford’s account doesn’t end here; he goes on to describe why he believed the communal system failed. Understanding the reasons for the failure is just as important, if not more important, than learning about the failure itself. Governor Bradford wrote:

The experience that was had in this common course and condition, tried sundry years and that amongst godly and sober men, may well evince the vanity of that conceit of Plato’s and other ancients applauded by some of later times; that the taking away of property and bringing in community into a commonwealth would make them happy and flourishing; as if they were wiser than God. For this community (so far as it was) was found to breed much confusion and discontent and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort. For the young men, that were most able and fit for labour and service, did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men’s wives and children without any recompense. The strong, or man of parts, had no more division of victuals and clothes than he that was weak and not able to do a quarter than the other could; this was thought injustice. The aged and graver men to be ranked and equalized in labours, victuals, clothes, etc., with the meaner and younger sort, thought it some indignity and disrespect unto them. And for men’s wives to be commanded to do service for other men, as dressing their meat, washing their clothes, etc., they deemed it a kind of slavery, neither could many husbands well brook it.

The communal system failed because it treated the older and wiser the same way as the young and brash. It failed because it rewarded the less productive as much as the more productive. It failed because members of the community found that they could do less and still get the same benefit. All of these problems arose in a very religious community in which gluttony and laziness were considered sins and drunkenness was rare. How much more would communism fail in a larger society where such problems are rampant! By returning to a system in which the older and wiser are respected, and by reorganizing so that one’s benefit was directly tied to his production, the Pilgrims ensured the survival of their colony. Governor Bradford, however, ultimately attributes the failure of the “common cause” to something much deeper:

Upon the point all being to have alike and to do alike, they thought themselves in the like condition, and one as good as another; and so, if it did not cut off those relations that God hath set amongst men, yet it did at least much diminish and take off the mutual respects that should be preserved amongst them. And would have been worse if they had been men of another condition. Let none object this is men’s corruption, and nothing to the course itself. I answer, seeing all men have this corruption in them, God in His wisdom saw another course fitter for them.

Governor Bradford is saying that communism failed because of the corrupt nature of humans. People are imperfect and sinful. The utopia Marx and Lenin dreamed of could only work if it were filled with perfect people- and no such infallible people can be found in this world. Furthermore, the communal system undermines the relations God instituted among men- marriage and family. With husbands growing food for other people’s children, wives washing other men’s clothes, and children doing chores for other families, the basic foundational social unit of society is undermined. Without that, no society can hope to survive.

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?

Worst Year Ever for Stocks: ‘Irrational Exuberance’ of 1990s Being Unwound

Any way you slice it, the 2008 is shaping up to annus horribilis for the U.S. stock market. Heading into Friday’s session, in which an early rally effort quickly faded, the S&P was down 49% year-to-date and on track for its worst year ever. Down 43% year to date, the Dow is heading for its second worst year in history, the WSJ reports, trailing only the 53% decline in 1931.

While the major averages tell a grim tale, the action in components of the S&P 500 speak to the extent of the devastation. Heading into Friday’s session:

• 115 S&P stocks were trading under $10
• 41 were trading under $5
• 204 were trading with a market cap of less than $4 billion

These are not the only criteria used for inclusion in the index, but S&P 500 companies typically have market caps above $4 billion and stock prices above $5. Furthermore, many institutional fund managers are prohibited from owning stocks that trade below $10 or $5, depending on the firm.

In other words, a lot of companies currently in the S&P 500 may not be eligible for membership or, more importantly, ownership by major institutions. That, in turns, may mean more selling ahead, even though stocks are “cheap” based on a variety of metrics. For example, 163 stocks in the S&P 500 are trading below book value, or assets minus liabilities, including non-financials like Alcoa and Duke Energy.

One way to look at what’s happened this year is the stock market is going back to what used to constitute “normal” valuations before the go-go 1990s.

Of course, “cheap” stocks can get cheaper and if we’re really going to wiped out that age of excess, I’ll point out the Dow was around 6400 in December 1996, when Alan Greenspan made his infamous “irrational exuberance” comment.

The real tragedy is that’s about the only thing Greenspan ever got right. Unfortunately, “the Maestro” not only didn’t do anything to prevent future “exuberance” after that speech, but quite a lot to encourage it.

there was a recount in the 2nd district primary for my candidate this year, and after the counts were certified by the auditors there was very little movement.  These events bother me a lot – is this one of the changes we expect to see in future elections?  -pf

Link to Wall Street Journal article 

Minnesota this week began its official statewide recount, and Mr. Franken isn’t hanging on the outcome. Instead, he’s trying to conjure up enough other, previously disqualified, ballots to overturn Mr. Coleman’s 215-vote lead. The Democrat needs to invent votes because he knows it will be tough to win a normal recount. Minnesota uses optical scanning machines, which are far more accurate than the punchcard paper ballots of the 2000 Florida recount. Prior recounts in Minnesota have resulted in few vote changes.

So off to court he goes, with Mr. Franken demanding that the state canvassing board delay certifying the initial election results. His campaign claims that absentee votes may have been wrongly rejected by election judges. Team Franken filed a lawsuit in Ramsey County (the state’s second largest, and an area Mr. Franken won decisively) demanding a list of these absentee voters, so that the Democrat can contact them, get them to declare their ex post facto preference, and, presto, he wins.

The state attorney general’s office ruled against a canvassing board delay, finding that certification was purely an administrative function and that any question of absentee ballots ought to be left to the courts. The problem is that at least one court has entertained this Franken ploy. Ramsey County Judge Dale Lindman this week ordered county officials to give Mr. Franken a list of voters who had cast rejected absentee ballots.

Put aside that these ballots have already been ruled on by trained election judges. Put aside, too, the invasion of voter privacy. The real problem of allowing Mr. Franken to conduct his own voter discovery operation is that this is changing the rules after the election has been held. The gambit introduces subjective judgment and political pressure into a voting process that is supposed to be immune to both.

Opening up the rejected-ballot question is also a recipe for potential fraud. When the Franken campaign filed its initial lawsuit demanding access to the voter lists, it used as an example an 84-year-old woman in Beltrami County whose vote was supposedly rejected because she’d had a stroke, and therefore her signature on her absentee ballot did not match the one on file. After some outside investigation, the Franken campaign admitted that the story was not true, and that her ballot had been rejected for entirely different (and legitimate) reasons.

Mr. Franken is also trying to raise public doubt about an “undervote” — suggesting that only machine error can explain why he received 12.2 percentage points fewer votes than did Barack Obama. But the Senate race had three serious candidates, not two. Maybe fewer Minnesotans liked a left-wing candidate who ran a nasty campaign. In any case, the same Democrats who claimed Florida was “stolen” by faulty ballot machines are now trying to discredit the optical-scanners that they have demanded — all in order to sway the human judges who’ll rule on Mr. Franken’s legal challenges.

The joker’s goal is to sow enough doubt about the vote so that if he loses the recount he can attract public support to challenge the final result in court. This is a slap at Minnesota, which, so far at least, appears to be doing all it can to make the recount open and transparent. Minnesota should respond by telling Mr. Franken that even a celebrity has to play by the rules.

Return to the Article

November 15, 2008

Waltzing on the Titanic

By Larrey Anderson

America’s young people helped elect Barack Obama. Way to go kids! This article is for you. Let’s take a look at your future.

We won’t need a time machine. We will just need to visit Europe and talk to the youth of France, Italy, and Greece. Don’t worry. They won’t mind. They have plenty of time to talk. They don’t have jobs.

Young people in Western Europe tend to sit around, smoke Marlboro cigarettes, drink espresso (and Coca Cola), and (at least until this election) bitch about America.

They have been taught, since their first day in school, that capitalism is evil — that the government can, and should, provide health care, employment, and eventually, guaranteed retirement benefits for everyone.

In their leisurely conversations when they have finished condemning capitalism, they go on to praise the idea of socialism. They do not praise their own countries. They are not stupid. The health care stinks. (Young people don’t care much about that.) There are no jobs. (But there are unemployment benefits.) And the retirement systems are bankrupt. (But old age is way, way, way in the future.)

So, they argue, in the next election they are going to replace the loser socialists who currently run their countries with some real socialists — politicians who will finally keep their promises. I heard this discussion in France thirty years ago. I heard it the last time I was in Italy. It is taking place in Greece right now.

The last time I was in Rome I listened as a very bright young man explained to his friends, over lunch at a sidewalk café, what was really going on: Most European countries have become, essentially, plutocracies. The socialist governments give lip service to wealth redistribution but they are tightly interwoven with the “old money” in the banking system and in big business.

This came as no surprise to his educated friends. Their response was (same as it always is): Of course the system is corrupt. We will throw out the old socialists and put in some new ones. It played in their minds like a broken record. I have heard it for years and years and years.

The only thing that stopped the conversation from becoming a perpetual loop was that one of the conversationalists eventually proclaimed, “Ah. But at least we are not America!” The Marlboros got lit up. The espresso and Coca Cola were sipped. And they got back to the serious business of bashing capitalism.

Well, not all of them. It turned out that the bright young man who had so eloquently described the current corruption was the bus boy at the café. He had a university education … and a job!

I had the opportunity to speak with one of these young people alone. Actually, this fellow was not so young anymore. He was thirty-four. He still lived with his parents.

He could not afford his own place. His family was having problems even paying their electrical bills.

The reason the price of electricity was so high was that the “greens” had for years stopped the Italian government from building nuclear power plants.

He drove a taxi a few days a week (the only job he could find). He had a girlfriend but could not afford to marry her. He was not planning on having children. But in the next election, he assured me, a brand new socialism was coming. He started to rattle off the names of the experts he had read in the newspapers (and he had studied in the university) who had told him so.

I felt sorry for him. I had had this exact conversation many times before. He was brim full of hope and change.

Listen up young Americans: What is coming to the United States is what has been happening in Europe for decades. The ships of state have smashed into an iceberg called socialism and they are sinking.

This is not a Republican versus Democrat thing. Republicans had ten years to clean up the mess. They made it worse. I don’t blame you for wanting to throw the bums out. I did too.

But putting in a new and improved and ever more aggressive socialist like Obama is not the answer. (Don’t argue about his socialism. Go to his website and show me some free market proposals.) They have been trying this in Europe for three generations. It has not worked.

That trillion-dollar “bi-partisan” bailout passed by our Congress did not go to the people who cannot make their house payments. It is being handed out to the big bankers and to big business.

That is how socialism works. Politicians, bankers, and big businessmen do an age-old dance in triple time. There is no trickle down economics in socialism. Almost all of the money stays at the top.

America will soon be, like Europe has been, waltzing on the Titanic. Thanks for the dance.

Link
Obama’s Dictionary – Definition of Transparent = Conceal

Posted on 12 November 2008

The hot topic in the blogsphere today is the news that the FEC is going to audit McCains Campaign Finances and that Obama’s will most likely not be audited due to the ridiculous rules currently on the books.

The story within the story is about Obama’s campaign pledges about being “open, transparent, and accountable to the American people” and yet Obama refuses to disclose the names of donors under $200.  Not only will he not disclose those names his campaign went to extreme lengths to ensure the addresses of all internet donations were not validated ensuring the donors could be anonymous and thus immune to campaign finance laws. There has been no answer to why they went to the extraordinary effort to disable the computerized address verification systems for their internet donations.

At the very minimum his campaign could provide the ip addresses of all donations which his credit card processors could easily provide.  Dumping that data into a spreadsheet could show us in just a few short minutes:

- How many contributions were placed from foreign countries

- How many contributions were placed from the same ip address.

Why are these two questions important?  If there are a significant number of contributions placed from foreign countries it should raise a red flag for the FEC to investigate possible illegal foreign donations.  In the same vein if there are many contributions from the same ip address then the FEC should also investigate.  For example hypothetically – What if there were a high number of contributions made from an ip address lets say 5,000 contributions and that just so happens to be the address of an Obama campaign office?  Or what if there were 10,000 contributions all made from the same ip address in the Cayman Islands?

The Obama campaign could provide their “claimed” transparency with a miniscule amount of effort that could almost instantly remove any significant doubt of possible campaign fraud.  On the other hand it could almost instantly show significant potential campaign finance violations.  Is his total lack of transparency on this issue part of his plan to restore “faith in our government”?

CIA Agents Confirm: Al Queda WAS In Iraq in Before Invasion

Posted by: Scott @ 5:27 am

Eclipsed by the election campaigning, this story slipped under the radar. Much has been said about the invasion of Iraq. Often there are claims that there were no weapons of mass destruction and no ties to Al Queda. In fact, most of the WMD claims that were made before the invasion turned out to be true. Iraq was not clean and innocent in regards to WMD, and the ties to Al Queda were wrongly dismissed.

One of those ties regard Saddam’s involvement with Al Queda groups like Ansar al Islam which no one disputes was present and active in the northern section of Saddam’s Iraq. Opponents of the war dismiss that tie by saying that if they weren’t in the part of Iraq that Saddam controlled, then they weren’t under his control. That’s a nice piece of rhetoric, and it’s good spin, but it’s ignorant of the fact that Ansar was the ONLY means of influence Saddam had in the North (that, and the threat of invading the north). He used Ansar as his proxy guerrilla force to attack his Kurdish enemies and impose his will in the North.

The point remains, Ansar and other Al Queda groups were inside Iraq in 2002, and the CIA knew it. They knew it because they sent extremely brave people there-into Iraq, and those people monitored the Al Queda until the Pentagon blew the opportunity to destroy the camps.

Charles “Sam” Faddis, who led a CIA team into northern Iraq following the 9/11 attacks, says the Pentagon’s “endless planning and delays” foiled a chance to wipe out a band of al Qaeda leaders who were fleeing American bombs in Afghanistan.

Faddis says the delays, beginning in 2002, also facilitated the escape of some “key” al Qaeda figures, including terrorist scientists who were working on chemical and biological weapons.

“Some died, some are still on the run,” Faddis said in a telephone interview Tuesday, following his appearance on NPR’s Diane Rehm Show to promote a new book, Operation Hotel California: The Clandestine War Inside Iraq.

“The site was physically destroyed … but certainly the research wasn’t destroyed.”

link

To argue that the Pentagon “botched” this is to argue that there was something substantial to be botched. Admitting the US missed an opportunity to attack Al Queda in Iraq before 2002 is admitting that there was enough of an Al Queda presence in Iraq before the invasion to warrant military action.

Today, Ansar al Islam’s remnants and other Al Queda groups are lumped into the term AQI for Al Queda in Iraq groups as if they are all the same. Like all Al Queda groups, they are affiliated-not the same. They have great differences, but bear common themes, objectives, tactics, and alliance.

Why is this important today? America is looking at two more years of war in Iraq under President Obama. To accomplish anything, Americans must support efforts to succeed. It’s time to put away the anti-war, political opposition rhetoric, finally recognize facts such as this one, and support not only the troops, but the hard work, the good work that they are doing.

This is a post from a blog you should bookmark — our Canadian friends “get this”.   I have a slight variation on this story though, I don’t think the rich kids would complain that their parents paid for everything.  They just don’t “get it” either, and neither does most of the American Electorate.  -pf

The Coming War Between Producer and Taker

by Ron Ewart
Thursday, November 13, 2008

There is a story floating around the Internet about a teacher who decided to hold a mock election for president in her 5th grade classroom.  The gist of the story is that she instructed the class to pick several possible candidates for president on each side, as a kind of primary election.  Then the class voted for one candidate out of each of the two groups of candidates.  The names of the two finalists were Johnny and Mary. 

The teacher then told Johnny and Mary to give a speech about what they would do as president.  Johnny got to go first.  He gave a long speech about how he would follow his principles and always do a good job.  Mary gave a very short speech in which she said as president, she would give everyone in the classroom an ice cream cone.  Mary won hands down. 

When Mary was pressed for how she was going to pay for the cones, she said she would require that each kid with rich parents would have to pay because the poor kids didn’t have any money; to which the kids with the rich parents yelled, “….. why do our parents have to pay?” One little kid in the back of the room, rose from his desk and told the teacher in a plain, emotionless voice, ” such a plan is in violation of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.” The teacher was stunned.  She and Mary were speechless.  The class didn’t care who paid.  They wanted their ice cream cones.

The fact is, when a politician promises “goodies” like ice cream cones to get votes, their promises are made with Other People’s Money, or OPM.  The crux of the matter is, that seems to escape everyone’s attention, the candidate or politician doesn’t own what they are promising to give.  Some might call that theft or fraud and those who make a practice of “stealing” OPM, usually go to jail when caught.  But it is perfectly OK for a politician or a candidate for public office, to promise or steal OPM in order to “buy” votes to stay in office, or get elected.

But let’s go back to the little kid that stated that Mary’s plan for supplying the ice cream cones was in violation of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.  Section 1 of the 14th Amendment reads as follows:  (We have underlined the appropriate passage)

Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

First of all, there is no mention in the U. S. Constitution regarding the government’s authority to “TAKE” from those with the greatest capability, and give it to those with the greatest need.  The government has just assumed that authority by perverting the “……… and promote the general welfare” clause in the preamble.  Then, when the government forces those with the greatest capability to pay those with the greatest need, they deny the person with the greatest capability, equal protection of the laws. When someone with more, pays or gives something to someone with less, it is called charity and it is an act of selflessness.  In a free country, under liberty, charity is supposed to be the “FREE” choice of the giver, as to whom gets the gift and how much they are to receive.  Americans are the most generous people on Earth and give more to national and international charities than any other culture or country on Earth. 

When government forces people to be “generous” with a gun to their head under tax law, they make a mockery out of the charity of free choice.  But worse, what they have done, is created a system of government as described by Karl Marx in his Communist Manifesto.  A recent candidate for President of the United States has endorsed just such a system of government and the candidate’s wife totally agrees with him.  They are now the president elect and first lady in waiting. Two important questions arise in government’s enforced wealth re-distribution scheme.  Who decides who gets the charity and who decides what those with the greatest capability (the producer) have to pay?  In other words, what is the producer’s fair share?  The producer’s fair share is what government decides and is anything but free-choice charity.  It is instead, enforced charity, which isn’t charity at all.  This system operates on the false premise that someone in need is owed a debt by someone who is productive.  That’s not liberty, that’s government-induced slavery.

What happens over time is the producer starts realizing his “fair” share is anything but fair and the producer starts thinking very hard about either not producing any more, or hiding what he produces.  Or, he takes his wealth, his ideas, his skills, or his company that employs a lot of people, offshore.  It’s called brain and money drain and occurs often in socialist countries.  What happens is the wealth, creativity and production is removed from the country and it descends into mindless mediocrity.  This was the basis, or plot if you will, of Ayn Rand’s novel, “Atlas Shrugged”.

Far too many of “those supposedly with the greatest need” and who are receiving enforced charity from the producers, are more than capable of taking care of themselves.  Should the producer ever wise up, we predict that there will be a silent war of resistance.  Charity by choice will decrease, enforced charity may go down as more producers secretly opt out of the mandatory program and those on welfare might have to look for a job and become self-reliant and responsible, as they are supposed to be.  Those in true need may have to look to private, family or church charity for their subsistence.  Meanwhile, the producers will get even more creative about avoiding their “fair” share.

Americans are a funny lot.  When you tell an American he HAS to do something, he usually gets very creative on finding ways not to do it, unless of course a pay check or his freedom is at risk.  We wonder, how long he will take it before he finally rebels?  The answer is, he is rebelling already and the rebellion will just increase.  The silent war between the producers and the takers has already started and is in full swing.  And it is an unnecessary war, created by government socialist policies; policies that are totally designed to keep certain politicians in a particular party, in office, by playing on the weakness of man.

Long live the Socialist Republic of America under Pelosi, Reid, Frank, Dodd, Schumer, Kennedy and Clinton; Democrats all, the party that has bankrupted America and drove a knife into the heart of America’s solvency, sovereignty and freedom!  And whom did we select to be the new captain of the Titanic, Barack Hussein Obama, a candidate for which the Communist Party of America and our enemies, are jumping for joy!

Obama surfs through

http://www.salon.com/opinion/paglia/2008/11/12/palin/print.html  take link for full article

The Obamas are a warm vision for the White House — but he should strive toward full transparency. Plus: Yes, I still like Sarah Palin!
By Camille Paglia
Nov. 12, 2008 |

..Eat dirt, you sour Clintons, who said Obama was “unelectable.” ..

Yes, it’s true we know relatively little about Barack Obama, and his triumph is a roll of the dice. …In debate, McCain was always pugnacious but too often bland or rambling, and he often missed glaring opportunities to score off Obama’s vagueness or contradictions.

…No one knows whether Obama will move to the center .. . …The big question will be how patient the Democratic left wing is in demanding drastic changes in social policy, particularly dicey with a teetering economy.

As I’ve watched Obama gracefully step up to podiums or move through crowds, I’ve been reminded not of basketball, with its feints and pivots, but of surfing, that art form of his native Hawaii. .. Obama’s ability to stay on his feet and outrun the most menacing waves that threaten to engulf him seems to embody the breezy, sunny spirit of the American surfer.

In the closing weeks of the election, however, I became increasingly disturbed by the mainstream media’s avoidance of forthright dealing with several controversies that had been dogging Obama — even as every flimsy rumor about Sarah Palin was being trumpeted as if it were engraved in stone on Mount Sinai. For example, I had thought for many months that the flap over Obama’s birth certificate was a tempest in a teapot. But simple questions about the certificate were never resolved to my satisfaction. Thanks to their own blathering, fanatical overkill, of course, the right-wing challenges to the birth certificate never gained traction.

But Obama could have ended the entire matter months ago by publicly requesting Hawaii to issue a fresh, long-form, stamped certificate and inviting a few high-profile reporters in to examine the document and photograph it. (The campaign did make the “short-form” certificate available to Factcheck.org, a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.) And why has Obama not made his university records or thesis work widely available? The passivity of the press toward Bush administration propaganda about weapons of mass destruction led the nation into the costly blunder of the Iraq war. We don’t need another presidency that finds it all too easy to rely on evasion or stonewalling. I deeply admire Obama, but as a voter I don’t like feeling gamed or played.

Another issue that I initially dismissed was the flap over William Ayers, the Chicago-based former member of the violent Weather Underground. Conservative radio host Sean Hannity began the drumbeat about Ayers’ association with Obama a year ago — a theme that most of the mainstream media refused to investigate or even report until this summer. I had never heard of Ayers and couldn’t have cared less. I was irritated by Hillary Clinton’s aggressive flagging of Ayers in a debate, and I accepted Obama’s curt dismissal of the issue.

Hence my concern about Ayers has been very slow in developing. The mainstream media should have fully explored the subject early this year and not allowed it to simmer and boil until it flared up ferociously in the last month of the campaign. Obama may not in recent years have been “pallin’ around” with Ayers, in Sarah Palin’s memorable line, but his past connections with Ayers do seem to have been more frequent and substantive than he has claimed. …

Pursuing the truth about Ayers, I recently rented the 2002 documentary “The Weather Underground,” from Netflix. It was riveting.

Although the film seems to waver between ominous exposé and blatant whitewash, the full extent of the group’s bombing campaign is dramatically demonstrated. It’s not for everyone: The film uses gratuitous cutaways of horrifying carnage, from the Vietnam War to the Manson murders (such as Sharon Tate’s smiling corpse, bathed in blood). But the news footage of the Greenwich Village townhouse destroyed in 1970 by bomb-making gone wrong in the basement still has enormous impact. Standing in the chaotic street, actor Dustin Hoffman, who lived next door, seems like Everyman at the apocalypse.

Ayers comes off in the film as a vapid, slightly dopey, chronic juvenile with stunted powers of ethical reasoning. The real revelation is his wife, Bernardine Dohrn (who evidently worked at the same large Chicago law firm as Michelle Obama in the mid-1990s). Of course I had heard of Dohrn — hers was one of the most notorious names of our baby-boom generation — and I knew her black-and-white police mug shot. But I had never seen footage of her speaking or interacting with others. Well, it’s pretty obvious who wears the pants in that family!

The mystery of Bernardine Dohrn: How could such a personable, attractive, well-educated young woman end up saying such things at a 1969 political rally as this (omitted in the film) about the Manson murders: “Dig it. First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them. They even shoved a fork into a victim’s stomach. Wild!” And how could Dohrn have so ruthlessly pursued a decade-long crusade of hatred and terrorism against innocent American citizens and both private and public property?

“The Weather Underground” never searches for answers, but it does show Dohrn, then and now, as a poised, articulate woman of extremely high intelligence and surprising inwardness.

The audio extra of her reading the collective’s first public communiqué (”Revolutionary violence is the only way”) is chilling.

But the tumultuous footage of her 1980 surrender to federal authorities is a knockout. Mesmerized, I ran the clip six or seven times of her seated at a lawyer’s table while reading her still defiant statement. The sober scene — with Dohrn hyper-alert in a handsome turtleneck and tweedy jacket — was tailor-made for Jane Fonda in her “Klute” period, androgynous shag. Only illegalities by federal investigators prevented Dohrn from being put away on ice for a long, long time.

Given that Obama had served on a Chicago board with Ayers and approved funding of a leftist educational project sponsored by Ayers, one might think that the unrepentant Ayers-Dohrn couple might be of some interest to the national media. But no, reporters have been too busy playing mini-badminton with every random spitball about Sarah Palin, who has been subjected to an atrocious and at times delusional level of defamation merely because she has the temerity to hold pro-life views.

How dare Palin not embrace abortion as the ultimate civilized ideal of modern culture? How tacky that she speaks in a vivacious regional accent indistinguishable from that of Western Canada! How risible that she graduated from the State University of Idaho and not one of those plush, pampered commodes of received opinion whose graduates, in their rush to believe the worst about her, have demonstrated that, when it comes to sifting evidence, they don’t know their asses from their elbows.

Liberal Democrats are going to wake up from their sadomasochistic, anti-Palin orgy with a very big hangover.

The evil genie released during this sorry episode will not so easily go back into its bottle. A shocking level of irrational emotionalism and at times infantile rage was exposed at the heart of current Democratic ideology — contradicting Democratic core principles of compassion, tolerance and independent thought. One would have to look back to the Eisenhower 1950s for parallels to this grotesque lock-step parade of bourgeois provincialism, shallow groupthink and blind prejudice.

I like Sarah Palin, and I’ve heartily enjoyed her arrival on the national stage. As a career classroom teacher, I can see how smart she is — and quite frankly, I think the people who don’t see it are the stupid ones, wrapped in the fuzzy mummy-gauze of their own worn-out partisan dogma.

So she doesn’t speak the King’s English — big whoop! There is a powerful clarity of consciousness in her eyes.

She uses language with the jumps, breaks and rippling momentum of a be-bop saxophonist. I stand on what I said (as a staunch pro-choice advocate) in my last two columns — that Palin as a pro-life wife, mother and ambitious professional represents the next big shift in feminism. Pro-life women will save feminism by expanding it, particularly into the more traditional Third World.

As for the Democrats who sneered and howled that Palin was unprepared to be a vice-presidential nominee — what navel-gazing hypocrisy!

What protests were raised in the party or mainstream media when John Edwards, with vastly less political experience than Palin, got John Kerry’s nod for veep four years ago?

And Gov. Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas, for whom I lobbied to be Obama’s pick and who was on everyone’s short list for months, has a record indistinguishable from Palin’s.

Whatever knowledge deficit Palin has about the federal bureaucracy or international affairs (outside the normal purview of governors) will hopefully be remedied during the next eight years of the Obama presidencies.

The U.S. Senate as a career option? What a claustrophobic, nitpicking comedown for an energetic Alaskan — nothing but droning committees and incestuous back-scratching.

No, Sarah Palin should stick to her governorship and just hit the rubber-chicken circuit,.. Step by step, the mainstream media will come around, wipe its own mud out of its eyes, and see Palin for the populist phenomenon that she is. …

— By Camille Paglia
Camille Paglia’s column appears on the second Wednesday of each month. Every third column is devoted to reader letters. Please send questions for her next letters column to this mailbox. Your name and town will be published unless you request anonymity.

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.”

The Congressional bail-out and stimulus package is a band-aid on a gaping wound. There are natural laws that govern the economy, but too many self-anointed government illuminati believe they have the answers. They don’t even know the question! God help us.

LINK 

Obama Not Garnering Financial Confidence Internationally
Donald Lambro
Wednesday, November 12, 2008

WASHINGTON — The U.S. economy is shrinking, unemployment is at its highest level since 1994, manufacturing is at its lowest point in 26 years — and Barack Obama is pushing a stimulus bill to rebuild bridges and roads.

Whatever the long-term infrastructure needs of the nation may be, we are not going to pull this economy out of its hole with a bunch of government public-works projects. The question is, did Obama’s economic advisers tell him that?

If they did, that wasn’t what he told the American people last Saturday after meeting with his 20-member advisory team. Instead, he went before the TV cameras and called on Congress to move ahead on a so-called “stimulus” package hatched by House Democrats that has very little, if any, economic stimulus in it. A better name for it would be a “status quo” plan.

Here’s some of what this plan contains: a 13-week extension of unemployment benefits, more money for food stamps and billions in federal infrastructure projects and funding for state Medicaid costs to help poor-to-low-income people. There was also maybe $50 billion for cash-strapped automakers to encourage them to build more fuel-efficient vehicles.

Let’s say all of these things need to be done. They will not, in and of themselves, create a single job, expand production or boost U.S. exports in the global economy.

Infrastructure spending has failed just about everywhere it’s been tried. Ask the Japanese who poured billions into public works to pull itself out of its last long recession, without much success.

Ask Obama’s chief economic adviser, Jason Furman, who told Congress in January that infrastructure spending was a very inefficient and ineffective economic-stimulus tool. Why? Because by the time the money that is appropriated makes its way through the government’s bureaucracy, through state channels to contractors and toward implementation, the recession is usually over or ending.

And who will decide which infrastructure spending will get funded? You can bet the farm lawmakers will have a long laundry list of local pork-barrel projects of dubious value will get added under the guise of “stimulus.”

If any of Obama’s advisers told him the stimulus plan, along the lines of the one the House approved Sept. 26, wouldn’t produce any short-term stimulus, no one would say. But then, his advisers are the last people on Earth you would seek out for financial advice.

There is Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm standing to Obama’s right. She is not a doctor but practices the economic equivalent of bleeding the patient — like when she raised taxes on her state’s anemic economy (where unemployment is 8 percent) as it was sinking into recession.

Nearby was former House Democratic Whip David Bonior, a fierce foe of any trade agreement, especially NAFTA, who could become Obama’s secretary of Labor, handing the AFL-CIO just about everything it wants.

Still, in the pantheon of anti-trade desperadoes, Obama is second to none. He opposed trade agreements with South Korea and Colombia, voted “no” on the Dominican Republic-Central America Trade Agreement and sought to impose tariffs on goods from China if it didn’t readjust its currency exchange rate.

But others on Obama’s “team of economists can explain why these positions were wrong-headed. Economic nationalism is not in the national interest,” writes Harvard economist N. Gregory Mankiw, an adviser to Mitt Romney in the GOP primary campaign.

Indeed it isn’t. Economic recovery will require having all our oars in the water, pulling in the same direction at once. It won’t be fixed with a stimulus package that does not create any new jobs in the months to come, or that raising taxes on the engines of job growth: businesses, investors, venture capital and entrepreneurial risk-takers — and certainly not by slamming the brakes on opening new trading markets for America’s manufacturers.

But this is what Obama ran on doing and what he intends to do once he takes office. Back-peddling on NAFTA with our two best trading partners and killing additional trade agreements is not a recipe for growth.

The pivotal question in the president-elect’s economic strategy is simply this: how can you stimulate a $14 trillion economy that is plunging into a recession when you’ve taken so many proven fast-growth initiatives off the table? You can’t.

The White House has signaled that President Bush will not sign an infrastructure spending package with projects that are at best “very limited and very … long range,” taking years to complete, his spokesman says.

So this is where matters stand as financial markets here and abroad turn increasingly bearish about the future — a sign of declining confidence that Obama understands what is needed to put the nation on a long-term growth path.

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? 

SAY NO TO BAILOUTS!!! 

this is nuts – can I have a billion? 

Let’s see if I have this right. I, and millions of my fellow citizens, in addition to our other burdens, will now be asked to bail out the American automobile industry, which has fallen on hard times. No less a pair of automotive authorities than Nancy Hot Rod Pelosi and Harry “High Octane” Reid have said so.

Now wait. Did I miss something? I don’t see where Honda, Toyota or Nissan are begging for salvation. Mercedes seems to be in business. BMW is still moving cars. Even Rolls continues to transport the Saudi royals. This seems to involve the American companies only – GM, Ford, and what’s left of Chrysler.

read more at this Link 

It is the story of our lifetimes: a financial crisis is underway and getting worse. As the recession deepens, our jobs and savings are threatened, and our children and grandchildren will probably live in a country with lower living standards and fewer opportunities than what we have enjoyed. America may be reduced to the status of a second- or third-rate economic power, dependent on international agencies like the International Monetary Fund and Arab governments for investment dollars and foreign aid handouts.

However, the looting of the taxpayers, which was initially $700 billion for Wall Street and has now ballooned to an estimated $1.8 trillion and is not over yet, was not labeled as corruption by our media. Instead, it was called a “rescue” and was demanded by many anchors and reporters. We were told it would stabilize the markets and help ordinary people. It didn’t.

Kevin Howley, Associate Professor of Communication at DePauw University, says this was deliberate propaganda on their part. He comments that “…the phrase ‘bailout’―with its connotation that the government is letting Wall Street off the hook for questionable business practices―has given way to a far more agreeable term― ‘rescue plan.’ This phrasing appeals to the basic decency of the American people and suggests that we’re all in this thing together.”

read more at this link

oh my god, they’ll confiscate my 401k over my dead body.

particularly offensive statement below:

“humans often lack the foresight, discipline, and investing skills required to sustain a savings plan.”

this is sick. – I’m writing Grassley right now. -pf

Democratic leaders in the U.S. House discuss confiscating 401(k)s, IRAs

Karen McMahan
November 04, 2008

RALEIGH — Democrats in the U.S. House have been conducting hearings on proposals to confiscate workers’ personal retirement accounts — including 401(k)s and IRAs — and convert them to accounts managed by the Social Security Administration.

Triggered by the financial crisis the past two months, the hearings reportedly were meant to stem losses incurred by many workers and retirees whose 401(k) and IRA balances have been shrinking rapidly.

The testimony of Teresa Ghilarducci, professor of economic policy analysis at the New School for Social Research in New York, in hearings Oct. 7 drew the most attention and criticism. Testifying for the House Committee on Education and Labor, Ghilarducci proposed that the government eliminate tax breaks for 401(k) and similar retirement accounts, such as IRAs, and confiscate workers’ retirement plan accounts and convert them to universal Guaranteed Retirement Accounts (GRAs) managed by the Social Security Administration.

Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., chairman of the House Committee on Education and Labor, in prepared remarks for the hearing on “The Impact of the Financial Crisis on Workers’ Retirement Security,” blamed Wall Street for the financial crisis and said his committee will “strengthen and protect Americans’ 401(k)s, pensions, and other retirement plans” and the “Democratic Congress will continue to conduct this much-needed oversight on behalf of the American people.”

Currently, 401(k) plans allow Americans to invest pretax money and their employers match up to a defined percentage, which not only increases workers’ retirement savings but also reduces their annual income tax. The balances are fully inheritable, subject to income tax, meaning workers pass on their wealth to their heirs, unlike Social Security. Even when they leave an employer and go to one that doesn’t offer a 401(k) or pension, workers can transfer their balances to a qualified IRA.

Mandating Equality

Ghilarducci’s plan first appeared in a paper for the Economic Policy Institute: Agenda for Shared Prosperity on Nov. 20, 2007, in which she said GRAs will rescue the flawed American retirement income system (www.sharedprosperity.org/bp204/bp204.pdf).

The current retirement system, Ghilarducci said, “exacerbates income and wealth inequalities” because tax breaks for voluntary retirement accounts are “skewed to the wealthy because it is easier for them to save, and because they receive bigger tax breaks when they do.”

Lauding GRAs as a way to effectively increase retirement savings, Ghilarducci wrote that savings incentives are unequal for rich and poor families because tax deferrals “provide a much larger ‘carrot’ to wealthy families than to middle-class families — and none whatsoever for families too poor to owe taxes.”

GRAs would guarantee a fixed 3 percent annual rate of return, although later in her article Ghilarducci explained that participants would not “earn a 3% real return in perpetuity.” In place of tax breaks workers now receive for contributions and thus a lower tax rate, workers would receive $600 annually from the government, inflation-adjusted. For low-income workers whose annual contributions are less than $600, the government would deposit whatever amount it would take to equal the minimum $600 for all participants.

In a radio interview with Kirby Wilbur in Seattle on Oct. 27, 2008, Ghilarducci explained that her proposal doesn’t eliminate the tax breaks, rather, “I’m just rearranging the tax breaks that are available now for 401(k)s and spreading — spreading the wealth.”

All workers would have 5 percent of their annual pay deducted from their paychecks and deposited to the GRA. They would still be paying Social Security and Medicare taxes, as would the employers. The GRA contribution would be shared equally by the worker and the employee. Employers no longer would be able to write off their contributions. Any capital gains would be taxable year-on-year.

Analysts point to another disturbing part of the plan. With a GRA, workers could bequeath only half of their account balances to their heirs, unlike full balances from existing 401(k) and IRA accounts. For workers who die after retiring, they could bequeath just their own contributions plus the interest but minus any benefits received and minus the employer contributions.

Another justification for Ghilarducci’s plan is to eliminate investment risk. In her testimony, Ghilarducci said, “humans often lack the foresight, discipline, and investing skills required to sustain a savings plan.” She cited the 2004 HSBC global survey on the Future of Retirement, in which she claimed that “a third of Americans wanted the government to force them to save more for retirement.”

What the survey actually reported was that 33 percent of Americans wanted the government to “enforce additional private savings,” a vastly different meaning than mandatory government-run savings. Of the four potential sources of retirement support, which were government, employer, family, and self, the majority of Americans said “self” was the most important contributor, followed by “government.” When broken out by family income, low-income U.S. households said the “government” was the most important retirement support, whereas high-income families ranked “government” last and “self” first (www.hsbc.com/retirement).

On Oct. 22, The Wall Street Journal reported that the Argentinean government had seized all private pension and retirement accounts to fund government programs and to address a ballooning deficit. Fearing an economic collapse, foreign investors quickly pulled out, forcing the Argentinean stock market to shut down several times. More than 10 years ago, nationalization of private savings sent Argentina’s economy into a long-term downward spiral.

Income and Wealth Redistribution

The majority of witness testimony during recent hearings before the House Committee on Education and Labor showed that congressional Democrats intend to address income and wealth inequality through redistribution.

On July 31, 2008, Robert Greenstein, executive director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, testified before the subcommittee on workforce protections that “from the standpoint of equal treatment of people with different incomes, there is a fundamental flaw” in tax code incentives because they are “provided in the form of deductions, exemptions, and exclusions rather than in the form of refundable tax credits.”

Even people who don’t pay taxes should get money from the government, paid for by higher-income Americans, he said. “There is no obvious reason why lower-income taxpayers or people who do not file income taxes should get smaller incentives (or no tax incentives at all),” Greenstein said.

“Moving to refundable tax credits for promoting socially worthwhile activities would be an important step toward enhancing progressivity in the tax code in a way that would improve economic efficiency and performance at the same time,” Greenstein said, and “reducing barriers to labor organizing, preserving the real value of the minimum wage, and the other workforce security concerns . . . would contribute to an economy with less glaring and sharply widening inequality.”

When asked whether committee members seriously were considering Ghilarducci’s proposal for GSAs, Aaron Albright, press secretary for the Committee on Education and Labor, said Miller and other members were listening to all ideas.

Miller’s biggest priority has been on legislation aimed at greater transparency in 401(k)s and other retirement plan administration, specifically regarding fees, Albright said, and he sent a link to a Fox News interview of Miller on Oct. 24, 2008, to show that the congressman had not made a decision.

After repeated questions asked by Neil Cavuto of Fox News, Miller said he would not be in favor of “killing the 401(k)” or of “killing the tax advantages for 401(k)s.”

Arguing against liberal prescriptions, William Beach, director of the Center for Data Analysis at the Heritage Foundation, testified on Oct. 24 that the “roots of the current crisis are firmly planted in public policy mistakes” by the Federal Reserve and Congress. He cautioned Congress against raising taxes, increasing burdensome regulations, or withdrawing from international product or capital markets. “Congress can ill afford to repeat the awesome errors of its predecessor in the early days of the Great Depression,” Beach said.

Instead, Beach said, Congress could best address the financial crisis by making the tax reductions of 2001 and 2003 permanent, stopping dependence on demand-side stimulus, lowering the corporate profits tax, and reducing or eliminating taxes on capital gains and dividends.

Testifying before the same committee in early October, Jerry Bramlett, president and CEO of BenefitStreet, Inc., an independent 401(k) plan administrator, said one of the best ways to ensure retirement security would be to have the U.S. Department of Labor develop educational materials for workers so they could make better investment decisions, not exchange equity investments in retirement accounts for Treasury bills, as proposed in the GSAs.

Should Sen. Barack Obama win the presidency, congressional Democrats might have stronger support for their “spreading the wealth” agenda. On Oct. 27, the American Thinker posted a video of an interview with Obama on public radio station WBEZ-FM from 2001.

In the interview, Obama said, “The Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and of more basic issues such as political and economic justice in society.” The Constitution says only what “the states can’t do to you. Says what the Federal government can’t do to you,” and Obama added that the Warren Court wasn’t that radical.

Although in 2001 Obama said he was not “optimistic about bringing major redistributive change through the courts,” as president, he would likely have the opportunity to appoint one or more Supreme Court justices.

“The real tragedy of the civil rights movement was, um, because the civil rights movement became so court focused that I think there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalition of powers through which you bring about redistributive change,” Obama said.

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

————-

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.

Is Obama Swiping the Tax Cut Issue?
Voters seem to think he’s the Ronald Reagan tax-cutter of the 2008 election.

By Larry Kudlow

Wouldn’t it be the height of irony if Barack Obama wins this election as the Ronald Reagan tax-cutter? His tax plans are severely flawed and his campaign narrative to support them is all wrong. And yet a recent Rasmussen poll shows that 31 percent of voters believe Obama is the real tax cutter, while only 11 percent choose McCain.

Believe it or not, Obama seems to have swiped the tax-cut issue from the Republican party. How can this be?

Well, for almost two years Obama has talked about cutting taxes for 95 percent of the people. McCain has no such record. And even though McCain has launched a strong Joe the Plumber investor-class tax-cutting surge in the last days of the campaign, it may not be enough to significantly impact Tuesday’s voting results.

This is bad news since Obama has some pretty strange views on taxes. Just look at his recent explanation for the decline in third-quarter GDP. He calls it “a direct result of the Bush administration’s trickle-down, Wall Street first, Main Street last policies that John McCain has embraced for the last eight years and plans to continue for the next four.”

Is Obama really blaming the Bush tax cuts for this recession?

After the bursting of the tech bubble and the 9/11 attacks, George Bush lowered tax rates across-the-board for individuals and investors. For five years the stock market rallied without interruption — the longest bull market without a correction in post-WWII history — while the economy expanded for six years, a bit longer than the average post-war recovery cycle.

And Obama wants folks to believe that tax cuts caused this downturn? Not the credit shock? Not the Obama-supported government mandate to sell unaffordable homes to low-income people and the pressure on Fannie and Freddie to securitize these loans? Not the oil shock?

No self-respecting Keynesian would buy into this. Yet Obama was at it again in Monday’s Wall Street Journal, saying, “It’s not change to come up with a tax plan that doesn’t give a penny of relief to more than 100 million middle-class Americans.”

Regrettably, not even John McCain has contradicted this. But the facts speak otherwise.

For example, the nonpartisan Tax Foundation says the Bush tax cuts — which McCain would maintain — provided substantially more relief than middle-class Clinton-era tax rates: A single earner making $30,000 will pay $2,756 under 2008 Bush tax law compared with $3,157.50 under Clinton tax law (in 1999). That’s a larger Bush tax cut by 8.7 percent. A married couple earning $50,000 will pay $4,012 under Bush compared with $5,085 under Clinton. That’s a bigger Bush tax cut by 21 percent.

So the facts of a middle-class tax cut are far different from what Obama claims. Obama also says his tax rates will be below those of Ronald Reagan. Wrong. Obama will raise the top rate to 39.6 percent, whereas Reagan left taxpayers with only two brackets of 15 and 28 percent.

Incidentally, the income cap for Social Security and Medicare taxes was about $42,000 when Reagan left office, compared with $104,000 today and the threat that Obama will raise that cap significantly.

It’s also worth noting that the Reagan tax-reform bill of 1986 mistakenly allowed the capital-gains tax rate to move up to 28 percent from 20 percent. Many believe this was a significant factor in the stock market crash of 1987.

Similarly, Obama intends to raise the cap-gains tax rate from 15 to at least 20 percent. It’s a risky move. Of course, Obama says only rich people will pay the higher cap-gains rate. But the reality is that a cap-gains tax hike will raise the after-tax cost of all capital, which will depress the future value of all equity assets.

McCain has recently proposed a reduction in the capital-gains tax rate from 15 to 7.5 percent. With 100 million-plus investors out there, and nearly two of every three votes in national elections being made by shareholders, this is right on target. Last Friday, McCain told me in an interview that a “low capital-gains tax is probably the greatest incentive for investment that we have in America today.”

In the frenetic final hours of the campaign McCain is also talking up his corporate tax cut, which would be a tremendous boost to plunging stock prices since corporate profits are the mother’s milk of stocks. Indeed, McCain’s overall tax-cut plan is far more powerful than Obama’s when it comes to creating jobs and stimulating economic growth. But his marketing effort appears to be too little, too late.

These things do, however, have a way of balancing out: If Obama and the Democrats go on a tax-hiking spree to penalize successful earners and investors, they will pay for it dearly in 2010 and beyond.    [ I pray it's that simple.  -pf ]
— Larry Kudlow, NRO’s Economics Editor, is host of CNBC’s Kudlow & Company and author of the daily web blog, Kudlow’s Money Politic$.

The PUMA and the Elephant – we can DO this.

http://www.puma08.com

http://democrats-against-obama.org/

VOTE McCain/Palin -
and if  you’re in CD2 Iowa
vote Miller-Meeks for Congress!

Link to original article

Obama vs. Clinton Running against prosperity.

By John Berlau

Ever since the economy emerged as the top campaign issue, Barack Obama has developed two basic messages. One is that the deregulation John McCain voted for is to blame. The second is that former rivals Bill and Hillary Clinton deserve credit for the prosperity and economic growth in the 1990s.

In the presidential debates, Obama charged that McCain “believes in deregulation in every circumstance,” and claimed “that’s what we’ve been going through for the last eight years.” As a contrast to the Bush II years, Obama said in a speech, his administration would go back to the “shared prosperity . . . when Bill Clinton was president.”

But these two messages are inherently contradictory: Bill Clinton signed nearly all the deregulatory measures John McCain backed. Clinton administration officials have even credited these policies for contributing to the ’90s economic boom — the very “shared prosperity” to which Obama says he wants to return.

Late in Clinton’s tenure, the Clinton White House put forth a document celebrating “Historic Economic Growth” during the administration and pointing to the policy accomplishments it deemed responsible for this growth. Among the achievements on Clinton’s list was none other than “Modernizing for the New Economy through Technology and Consensus Deregulation.”

“In 1993,” the document explained, “the laws that governed America’s financial service sector were antiquated and anti-competitive. The Clinton-Gore Administration fought to modernize those laws to increase competition in traditional banking, insurance, and securities industries to give consumers and small businesses more choices and lower costs.”

The document neglected to credit the GOP-controlled Congress for passing these policies, but the Clinton administration indeed deserves praise for signing and advocating this deregulation. These bipartisan financial policies are the very ones Obama, Joe Biden, and other Democrats attack. “Let’s, first of all, understand that the biggest problem in this whole process was the deregulation of the financial system,” Obama proclaimed in the second presidential debate.

In the financial area, Clinton was actually more deregulatory then Bush II has been. As James Gattuso of the Heritage Foundation points out, while there may have been flawed oversight, there really was no financial deregulation under Bush. Indeed, Bush’s signature achievement in the financial area was the costly and counterproductive Sarbanes-Oxley Act. My CEI colleague Wayne Crews notes in his study “10,000 Commandments” that the Bush administration has set records for the ten of thousands of pages it put in the Federal Register.

To be sure, Obama usually isn’t too specific on what exactly he would re-regulate. But to the extent he is specific, he’s running against not only McCain, and not only Clinton, but also people like Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, and virtually all the Clinton administration economic officials now surrounding, um, Barack Obama.

Take Gramm-Leach-Bliley, the 1999 law Clinton signed repealing the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act that strictly separated traditional commercial banking from investment banking. Obama supporters claim that getting rid of Glass-Steagall led to the credit blowup. They seize on the first name on the law, that of former senator Phil Gramm, to bash it as a piece of Republican deregulation. Never mind that the Senate passed the legislation 90-8, with many Democrats voting for the final bill, including Joe Biden.

Obama specifically bashed this bipartisan achievement in a March speech on the economy in New York. There he said, “By the time the Glass-Steagall Act was repealed in 1999, the $300 million lobbying effort that drove deregulation was more about facilitating mergers than creating an efficient regulatory framework.” But then-Clinton Treasury secretary and now-Obama adviser Summers had a different view. Summers told the Wall Street Journal in 1999 that the law would spur economic growth “by promoting financial innovation, lower capital costs, and greater international competitiveness.”

What’s more, Clinton himself defends the law to this day. In a recent Business Week interview with CNBC personality Maria Bartiromo, Clinton said plainly, “I don’t see that signing that bill had anything to do with the current crisis.” He even added that its lifting of barriers to financial-service mergers may have lessened the crisis’s impact, pointing out, “Indeed, one of the things that has helped stabilize the current situation as much as it has is the purchase of Merrill Lynch by Bank of America, which was much smoother than it would have been if I hadn’t signed that bill.”

Summers and Clinton were, and are, correct. The law benefited the economy through more choice and competition, and there is little evidence of Glass-Steagall’s repeal playing a role in the mortgage crisis. As the American Enterprise Institute’s Peter Wallison noted in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, “None of the investment banks that have gotten into trouble — Bear, Lehman, Merrill, Goldman or Morgan Stanley — were affiliated with commercial banks.” He also pointed out that “the banks that have succumbed to financial problems — Wachovia, Washington Mutual and IndyMac, among others — got into trouble by investing in bad mortgages or mortgage-backed securities, not because of the securities activities of an affiliated securities firm.”

Even stranger than the Obama camp’s attack on Gramm-Leach-Bliley is their slap at a bill that cleared barriers to interstate banking. This law, the Riegle-Neal Interstate Banking and Branching Efficiency Act, was passed in 1994, before Republicans even took Congress. And the Clinton White House’s “historic economic growth” document boasts that “in 1994, the Clinton-Gore Administration broke another decades-old logjam by allowing banks to branch across state lines.”

Riegle-Neal finally allowed the U.S. to have nationwide banking chains, as virtually every other developed country does. And anyone who remembers the inconvenience of not being able to access your own bank’s ATM can attest to the benefits this law brought. Federal Reserve governor Randall Kroszner has credited the law for a myriad of economic benefits including “higher economic and employment growth, spurred by more-efficient and more-diverse banks” and “more entrepreneurial activity, as the more bank-dependent sectors of the economy, such as small businesses and entrepreneurs, achieve greater access to credit.”

Yet when McCain advocated letting individuals purchase insurance across state lines and wrote in a journal article that “opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products,” the Obama campaign hit the roof. “McCain just published an article praising Wall Street deregulation,” Obama’s attack ad exclaimed. “Said he’d reduce oversight of the health insurance industry, too.”

FactCheck.org lambastes this ad for quoting McCain “out of context on health care.” But the greater worry is that the attacks on bipartisan deregulation that led to prosperity appear to be quite in context for Obama. Deregulation has never meant non-regulation, and indeed, updating laws for some of the new challenges we face will be an urgent task of any new administration. A good updating would also take into account existing regulations that encourage perverse incentives, such as Clinton’s expansion of the Community Reinvestment Act.

But when attacked today for supporting general financial deregulation, candidates can respond that they are simply being faithful to GOP-Clinton legacy of prosperity.

— John Berlau is director of the Center for Entrepreneurship at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

an exchange from the movie The American President

Lewis Rothschild: …. People want leadership, Mr. President, and in the absence of genuine leadership, they’ll listen to anyone who steps up to the microphone. They’re so thirsty for it they’ll crawl through the desert toward a mirage, and when they discover there’s no water, they’ll drink the sand.

President Andrew Shepherd: Lewis, … People don’t drink the sand because they’re thirsty. They drink the sand because they don’t know the difference.

-LG found this article below – I’m just pasting it -
you decide its impact on you. -pf

When the stock market collapsed on Wall Street on Tuesday,  October 29, 1929, it sent financial markets worldwide into a tailspin with disastrous effects.

The German economy was especially vulnerable since it was built out of foreign capital, mostly loans from America and was very dependent on foreign trade. When those loans suddenly came due and when the world market for German exports dried up, the well oiled German industrial machine quickly ground to a halt.

As production levels fell, German workers were laid off. Along with this, banks failed throughout Germany.  Savings accounts, the result of years of hard work, were instantly wiped  out. Inflation soon followed making it hard for families to purchase expensive necessities with devalued money.

Overnight, the middle class standard of living so many German families enjoyed was ruined by events outside of Germany, beyond their control. The Great Depression began and they were cast into poverty, deep misery and began looking for a solution, any solution.

Adolf Hitler knew his opportunity had arrived. 

In the good times before the Great Depression the Nazi party experienced slow growth, barely reaching 100,000 members in a country of over sixty million. But the Nazi party, despite its tiny size, was a tightly  controlled, highly disciplined organization of fanatics poised to spring  into action.

Since the failed Beer Hall Putsch in 1923, Hitler had changed tactics and was for the most part playing by the rules of democracy.  Hitler had gambled in 1923, attempting to overthrow the young German  democracy by force, and lost. Now he was determined to overthrow it legally by getting elected while at the same time building a Nazi shadow government  that would one day replace the democracy.

Hitler began his career in politics as a street brawling revolutionary appealing to disgruntled World War One veterans redisposed to violence. By 1930 he was quite different, or so it seemed. Hitler counted among his supporters a number of German  industrialists, and upper middle class socialites, a far cry from the semi-literate toughs he started out with.

He intentionally broadened his appeal because it was necessary. Now he needed to broaden his appeal to the great mass of voting Germans. His chief assets were his speech making ability and a keen sense of what the people wanted to hear.

By mid-1930, amid the economic pressures of the Great Depression, the German democratic  government was beginning to unravel.

Gustav Stresemann, the outstanding  German Foreign Minister, had died in October 1929, just before the Wall  Street crash. He had spent years working to restore the German economy and stabilize the republic and died, having exhausted himself in the process. 

The crisis of the Great Depression brought disunity to the political  parties in the Reichstag. Instead of forging an alliance to enact desperately need legislation, they broke up into squabbling, uncompromising groups. In March of 1930, Heinrich Bruening, a member of the Catholic Center  Party, became Chancellor.

Despite the overwhelming need for a financial  program to help the German people, Chancellor Bruening encountered stubborn opposition to his plans. To break the bitter stalemate, he went to President Hindenburg and asked the old gentleman to invoke Article 48 of the German constitution which gave emergency powers to the president to rule by decree.  This provoked a huge outcry from the opposition, demanding withdrawal of the decree.

As a measure of last resort, Bruening asked Hindenburg in July 1930 to dissolve the Reichstag according to parliamentary rules and call for new elections.

The elections were set for September 14. Hitler and the Nazis sprang into action. Their time for campaigning had arrived.

The  German people were tired of the political haggling in Berlin. They were tired of misery, tired of suffering, tired of weakness.

These were desperate times and they were willing to listen to anyone, even Adolf Hitler. 

NEXT SECTION – Germans Elect Nazis _ (http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/riseofhitler/elect.htm) _The Rise of Hitler Index 

very scary stuff. -pf

Link to original article

Larry King:  Concerning spreading the wealth, isn’t the graduated income tax spreading the wealth? ….

Senator McCain:  Well, that’s spreading the wealth in the respect that we do have a graduated income tax.  That’s a far cry from taking from one group of Americans and giving to another.  I mean, that’s dramatically different.
- “Larry King Live,” October 29, 2008

John McCain put his finger on an important point:  we currently have an extraordinarily progressive income tax, which requires the wealthy (and the relatively wealthy) to bear virtually the entire burden of the income tax.  Obama wants to spread the wealth not because the wealthy do not currently bear their fair share of supporting the government.  He wants to spread the wealth because he views the wealth itself as unfair.
.
According to the latest IRS statistics, released this summer, we have an extremely progressive income tax system.  For 2006 (the latest year for which statistics are available), the share of the federal income tax paid by the top 1 percent of tax returns reached an all-time high — 40% of all federal income taxes.  The top 50% paid 97% of the tax.  The bottom 50% paid only 3% of it.
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In addition, there were 43 million tax returns filed by people who had gross income but who — after deductions, exemptions and credits — had no tax liability at all.  Many of these people got free money from the federal government, via “refundable credits” such as the Earned Income Tax Credit.  They got “refunds” even though they did not pay any income tax in the first place.
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Even more importantly, the statistics demonstrated that the Bush tax cuts actually increased the share of taxes paid by the “rich” (however they are defined).  In 2000 (the last year of the Clinton administration), the top 1% paid 37% of the federal income tax; by 2006, the figure was 40%.  In 2000, the top 25% paid 84% of the tax — by 2006 it had increased to 86%.  In 2000, the bottom 50% paid 4% — in 2006 the percentage had dropped to 3% (a 25% drop in the relative tax burden on the lower half of the country).
So after the Bush tax cuts the burden the “rich” bear is significantly up and the burden on the rest of society is dramatically down.  That’s great news, right?
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Well, no — not if your goal is “redistributive change” (and if you don’t think the courts, shackled as they are by their “interpretation” of the rights in the Constitution, can do it for you).  If the change you believe in is “redistributive change,” increasing the burden of government borne by the rich is nice, but it does not get you where you really want to go.

Robin Hood was not upset at the relative costs among the citizenry of supporting the Sheriff of Nottingham.  He did not think the rich should bear a greater burden in helping the Sheriff create an ordered society.  He wanted the money for his chosen beneficiaries, not for the government.  He didn’t want tax increases on the rich; he wanted their income.
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For progressives, the above IRS statistics simply prove that, under the Bush tax cuts (which were across the board to all taxpayers), the “rich” made more money (since they were allowed to keep more of it and invest it, which produced even more income for them).  The “rich” thus paid more taxes, and bore a greater burden of financing government, but for progressives, the Bush tax cuts have to be rescinded even if they demonstrably shifted more of the tax burden to the rich.
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For progressives, the goal is not ultimately to create more tax revenue for the government, but to equalize the income of the citizenry.  So increased taxes from the rich are not a solution if they mean the rich made more money compared to others.  In fact, even if the tax cuts end up making the tax system more progressive, that simply exacerbates the problem:  the “gap” between rich and poor.
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That is why Obama had this exchange earlier this year with Charlie Gibson about increasing the capital gains tax rate:

GIBSON:  . . . [You] said you would favor an increase in the capital gains tax. As a matter of fact, you said on CNBC, and I quote, “I certainly would not go above what existed under Bill Clinton,” which was 28 percent.  It’s now 15 percent.  That’s almost a doubling, if you went to 28 percent.
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But actually, Bill Clinton, in 1997, signed legislation that dropped the capital gains tax to 20 percent.
OBAMA:  Right.
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GIBSON:  And George Bush has taken it down to 15 percent.
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OBAMA:  Right.
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GIBSON:  And in each instance, when the rate dropped, revenues from the tax increased; the government took in more money.  And in the 1980s, when the tax was increased to 28 percent, the revenues went down.
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So why raise it at all, especially given the fact that 100 million people in this country own stock and would be affected?
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OBAMA:  Well, Charlie, what I’ve said is that I would look at raising the capital gains tax for purposes of fairness. . . .
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We saw an article today which showed that the top 50 hedge fund managers made $29 billion last year – $29 billion for 50 individuals.  And part of what has happened is that those who are able to work the stock market and amass huge fortunes on capital gains are paying a lower tax rate than their secretaries. That’s not fair.
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And what I want is not oppressive taxation.  I want businesses to thrive, and I want people to be rewarded for their success.  But what I also want to make sure is that our tax system is fair and that [blah, blah, blah for another 155 words].
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GIBSON:  But history shows that when you drop the capital gains tax, the revenues go up.
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OBAMA:  Well, that might happen, or it might not. It depends on what’s happening on Wall Street and how business is going. . . .  [Emphasis added].

Obama does not appreciate the fact that tax incentives for investment and business expansion have a direct effect on “what’s happening on Wall Street and how business is going.”  One does not simply increase the tax on capital gains, and on investors, and assume that the same amount of investment and capital gains will still occur.
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Obama believes the main thing is to make the capital gains tax “fair,” regardless of what history shows about the relationship between rates and revenue.  He does not appreciate that tax incentives for investing increases the amount of investing, which in turn expands business, creates more jobs and produces more income – and thus more tax.

The JFK tax cuts proved it; the Reagan tax cuts proved it; the capital gains tax cut that a Republican Congress forced on Bill Clinton proved it; and the Bush tax cuts proved it again.  It is not a theoretical argument.  The latest cold, dry IRS statistics demonstrate it once again.
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If Obama is elected next week, we will all be treated to another history lesson about why societies that sought “fairness” by taking massive amounts of money from one part of society to give to another (not simply to fulfill a governmental duty of providing a safety net, but for the affirmative purpose of “redistributive change”), not only did not create “fairness,” but in fact made matters significantly worse for everyone.

 what are we going to see – where arer we going to be on November 5? -pf

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link to article

Miss., Ala. counties have more voters than adults

By EMILY WAGSTER PETTUS – Oct 24, 2008

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — More than a third of Mississippi counties have more registered voters than residents old enough to cast a ballot, according to an Associated Press analysis.

In addition to providing ammunition for people who say the voting system is vulnerable to fraud, the flabby voting rolls may make it difficult to accurately determine turnout for the Nov. 4 presidential election.

“There is no reason in the world why some of these counties should have more registered voters than they have living, breathing people,” Mississippi Senate Elections Committee Chairman Terry Burton said.

Despite the inflated voter rolls, “it’s important not to leap to the conclusion that this means there have been many illegitimate voters,” said Adam Skaggs, an attorney at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law.

He said the bigger problem — in Mississippi and across the U.S. — is that people have not registered at all or don’t know they have been purged from the rolls.

In Mississippi, AP’s county-by-county analysis compared voter registration figures released Thursday by the Secretary of State’s office with Census figures from 2000, which provide the latest and most detailed information for the entire state.

Twenty-nine of Mississippi’s 82 counties had more registered voters than people of voting age. Alabama has a similar problem — The Birmingham News found that six of 67 counties there have more registered voters than people of voting age.

Mississippi and Alabama are heavily Republican states expected to choose John McCain over Democrat Barack Obama, though they have U.S. House and Senate races that could be close.

“The opportunity for fraud exists certainly if people are on the rolls that shouldn’t be there,” Burton said. “If there’s one case of fraud, there’s one too many.”

He said people could theoretically vote, then go back and try to pass themselves off as people who have died, though he does not expect that. In Mississippi, only first-time voters who registered by mail must show identification. Without an ID requirement, election officials must rely on poll workers and voters to be honest.

In five Mississippi counties with inflated rolls, the discrepancy can be explained by rapid population growth. In the rest, the population has grown slowly or remained stagnant.

Larry Gardner, chairman of the Election Commissioners Association of Mississippi, attributed some inflated voter rolls to commissioners who “are not doing their job.”

Gardner said in some counties, personality conflicts have led to power struggles between the circuit clerk and election commissioners. The circuit clerk, the county’s chief elections officer, is supposed to help election commissioners purge the voter rolls. Gardner said some clerks have blocked commissioners from using county computers.

Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann’s office compiled its own list of 24 counties with more registered voters than people of voting age. All are also on AP’s list.

Hosemann said his staff has been working with election commissioners, showing them, for example, how to check Health Department records so they can purge dead voters’ names.

But because of Mississippi’s history of trying to suppress minority voting decades ago, the U.S. Justice Department must clear any changes in election laws or procedures. Some commissioners say they’re reluctant to purge names because they don’t want to run afoul of the department.

In the Jackson suburb of Madison County earlier this year, election commissioner Sue Sautermeister put more than 10,000 names on a list of inactive voters, a step short of purging. After complaints from other county and state officials, Hosemann’s office restored them.

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.

I never thought things would get so bad that I would have welcomed another Clinton Candidacy – but here we are… 

by the way there are a ton of these sites out there, the one that is formatted the best (IMO) but not most populated, is http://puma08.com  on the other hand, and there IS always another hand…  I’ve found a lot of these sites completely vacant, like someone started them but never posted ANYTHING. 

We still do not know the strength of this movement – it has been estimated as high as 4 million.  But the stars are staring to align…  Barry is getting angry, the stock market is up – and if there are suprises there will be November surprises, not October.  Say a prayer for our Republican friends this weekend. 

This is a post from a Democrat that was asked to speak at a McCain rally.  IMO it’s worth reading, and grab a tissue. -pf

Link 

As a supporter of Sen. Hillary Clinton, I recently had the opportunity to give a speech at a McCain rally as to why I have now switched my support to Sen. McCain. In private e-mails with friends and forum members I have been encouraged to post the text of my speech here for everyone to read.

I can honestly say it was well received by the target audience and I was completely shocked to receive a standing ovation. What I spoke of that day was spoken in truth and from my heart. I hope all here will find it inspirational. Here is the text of my speech.

Good morning! I am so honored to be here today, and to speak to you about why I am supporting Sen. John McCain for President.

A supporter of Democrats my entire life, I was an avid supporter of Sen. Hillary Clinton. But, when she suspended her campaign in June, I knew I would throw my support behind Sen. John McCain. Not out of anger or spite, but because Sen. Hillary Clinton was right when she said she would bring a lifetime of experience to the White House, Sen. McCain would bring a lifetime of experience to the White House, and Sen. Obama would bring a speech.

It was a simple decision and now I am the State Chair for “Citizens for McCain,” an organization founded by Sen. Joe Lieberman for Democrats and Independents who put their country first and support the candidate for president who has a proven record of bipartisanship politics.

I agree with Sen. McCain on many issues – the important issues. I trust in his plans for energy independence, tax cuts, creating jobs for Americans, better health care, and as a mother of a soldier who has served in Iraq I trust him to bring our troops home safely and in victory. I trust him to get the government’s spending under control and I trust him to implement policies that will return the strength to our economy and ease the burdens so many Americans carry each day. I trust him to do those things because he has promised those things.

And Sen. McCain says what he means and he means what he says. He is a man of character and those seem to be in short supply in Washington these days. But, Sen. McCain has lead the way in character for many, many years.

I want to relay a story to you that was first presented in the New York Times Magazine in 1997.

In 1982 when Sen. McCain was first elected to the House, Arizona Democratic Congressman Morris “Mo” Udall took him in hand and Sen. McCain has said Mo reached out to him in 50 different ways. Four years later when he was elected to the Senate, Sen. McCain said he felt his greatest debt of gratitude was to Congressman Udall, saying “There was no way Mo could have been more wonderful and there was no reason for him to be that way.”

In the late 1990’s, Sen. McCain made the trip every few weeks to a veteran’s home not far from our nation’s capitol to visit Congressman Udall, who by then lay ill and crippled with Parkinson’s Disease, twisted and disfigured. Udall was rarely conscious and even when he was, showed no signs of recognition.

On one particular day, a nurse entered and said “Almost no one visits anymore.” Once one of the most sought-after men in the Democratic Party, Udall lay dying and was visited regularly by only one single old political friend – Sen. John McCain.

Sen. McCain has reflected on how it affected him when Mo Udall took him in hand all those years ago. Sen. McCain said it was one man saying to another that while they may disagree in politics they didn’t disagree in life. That party political differences only cut so deep. It was the reason Sen. McCain continued to visit Mo Udall, long after Udall lost his political influence. You see, the politics were never all that important. It was the friendship. Congressman Mo Udall died in December 1998.

But, Sen. McCain didn’t forget Mo Udall’s kindness and he carried it forward. When Sen. Hillary Clinton arrived on the Senate floor in 2000, she wasn’t warmly welcomed by the good-old boys club. But, there was one man who was there to welcome her – Sen. John McCain. He reached out his hand, welcomed her, and showed her around, much like Mo Udall had done for him so many years ago.

That, my friends is character and if character is the measure of a man then I would say Sen. John McCain far exceeds the measure.

I want a president with character. I don’t want a president who has to hold repeated press conferences to apologize for and explain his lack of judgment in his personal, business, and religious associations; and I don’t want a president who spent 143 days in the Senate before he decided he was experienced enough to lead this country.

I want a president with proven experience. I want a president who learned long ago that there is great value in bipartisanship politics. I want a president who loves his country and will fight for it. I want a president I can trust.

And I want a president who isn’t afraid to be a maverick, to shake things up, and stand their ground. Known as a maverick for years, Sen. McCain cemented his status when he chose Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate. He sent a clear message not only to Washingtonians but to the world. Change is coming to the White House and it isn’t the false and empty change being touted by his Democratic opponent.

That change is coming in the form of Maverick McCain and Sarah Barracuda Palin and we’ve all been put on notice – the face of Washington politics is going to change – for the better. Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin are proven reformers and they’re going to march that reform right into Washington together, and starting on day one that reform is going to begin to heal this nation’s troubles.

So today, I am here to ask you do to what Sen. McCain asked in his acceptance speech at the Republican Convention – stand up with him and fight.

Stand up and fight to bring real change, proven change to Washington that will change the course of this country for the better.

So, let’s stand up together, work together, and fight together, regardless of political party, and let’s elect Sen. John McCain as the next President of the United States.

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

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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

have you heard radio spots in Iowa with ”sportsman for Obama” saying Barry supports the 2nd Amendment?  Not so fast… 

The NRA vs. Obama by A.W.R. Hawkins (more by this author) Posted 10/28/2008 ET With the 2008 presidential election upon us, the National Rifle Association is making their case against Barack Obama. They unflinchingly describe him as “the most anti-gun presidential candidate in American history” and have dedicated large sums of money to exposing his anti-gun agenda. An in-depth look at his record justifies their position. Not only is Obama the economic socialist Rush Limbaugh has said he is, he is also a gun-banning associate of 1960s radicals who cannot wait to take away one of America’s greatest freedoms – - the right to keep and bear arms. The NRA points out the fact that Obama supports handgun bans while Obama frequently excuses himself by saying he supports the Second Amendment but believes states, cities, and municipalities should be able to regulate types of handguns and implement local restrictions. (This convolution is an example of the type of reasoning he uses to explain how he can both find handgun bans and the Heller case, which banned handgun bans, to be “reasonable.”) But Obama has missed the NRA’s point on this one. They are not simply saying he supports the kind of bans we’ve seen in D.C. and Chicago; they are saying he supports a complete ban on the manufacture, sale, and possession of a handgun. And they are right. On March 31, 2008, the Politico revealed that “Obama endorsed a complete ban on all handguns” in a general candidate questionnaire he filled out on September 9, 1995. This is why the NRA keeps telling people that Obama talks out of both sides of his mouth. On one hand, he says, “I have always believed that the Second Amendment protects the right of individuals to bear arms,” while on the other he supports a complete ban on the arms they would bear. In the same questionnaire he said he supported mandatory waiting periods for handgun purchases. “Waiting periods” mean that when you go to buy a gun you have to fill out paperwork, go through an FBI background check, and then after passing that, return to the store five days later to pick up your new gun. If you’re a woman being pursued by a potential rapist, you just have to hope the would-be rapist will lie low for five days while you wait to pick up your new means of self-defense. Speaking of self-defense, Obama is completely opposed to that as well. In the decades before the Heller decision, many parts of Chicago put handgun bans in place that necessitated making the use of a handgun for self-defense illegal. (Think about it — how could you legally use an illegal tool to protect yourself?) Proving he meant it when he said states, cities, and municipalities should be able to regulate and restrict the Second Amendment, Obama supported these unconstitutional bans when a 2003 case in Wilmette, Ill. provided him the opportunity to stand up for the “individual right” he also claims to support. What happened in Wilmette was simple: a citizen “used a handgun to defend himself from a dangerous repeat offender.” He killed the attacker, and although the killing was ruled an act of self-defense, the innocent man faced jail time for having used a handgun to defend himself. Many Illinois lawmakers realized that such a charge was illogical and moved to change the law so as to allow the use of a handgun for self-defense. And guess what? — Obama opposed the change in legislation (four times). Did you get that? — OBAMA OPPOSED LAWS THAT ALLOWED USING HANDGUNS FOR SELF-DEFENSE. It appears Obama would have us rely upon the government, via the police force, for our protection. And this is why the pro-gun organization, “Students for Concealed Carry on Campus,” is concerned about an Obama presidency. While writing this article I talked to their president, Michael Guzman, who cited the Wilmette self-defense case and said: “Senator Obama’s time in the Illinois legislature has shown his belief in full reliance upon the government to provide for one’s protection against criminals. We hope he comes to the realization that the police cannot be everywhere at once and that the individual is his or her own first line of defense against a would-be assailant.” But if Obama’s record is any indication of things, he’s not going to come to the realization Guzman hopes for. Just think about other aspects of his record as an Illinois senator: He supported a proposal to ban gun stores within 5 miles of a school or park (which is tantamount to banning gun stores period); he supported H.B. 2579, which prohibited law-abiding individuals from purchasing more than one gun a month; he opposed laws that permitted law-abiding citizens to carry firearms for self-defense (i.e., he opposed concealed carry permits); he supported a ban on “junk guns” (cheaper guns that poor people could actually afford to buy and use for self defense); and he voted not to inform gun owners when the state of Illinois did records searches on them (S.B. 1936). His U.S. Senate record is just as dismal: He supports the reintroduction of the assault weapons ban; he favors a ban on high capacity magazines; he voted with Ted Kennedy on ammunition bans (that included hunting ammunition); and most troubling of all, he voted against the confirmation of Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito. Roberts and Alito are two of the five justices who upheld the Second Amendment in the Heller case. Just think, if Obama had gotten his way, they wouldn’t have been there, and the Second Amendment wouldn’t be there either. The NRA is right to go after this gun grabber. And while political pundits continue to highlight Obama’s dangerous associations with vile humans like Jeremiah Wright and William Ayers, the NRA will be one of the few outlets reminding you that Obama has some equally dangerous anti-gun associations as well. They’ll trumpet the fact that “the Brady Campaign (formerly Handgun Control, Incorporated), [has] endorsed Obama for president.” Which means he can now boast of being endorsed by the same gun control organization that also endorsed “Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.), Jack Reed (D-R.I.), Carolyn McCarthy (D-N.Y.), John Conyers (D-N.Y.), Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas), and, of course, John Kerry (D-Mass.), to name [but] a few.” Those of us who love freedom need to vote McCain/Palin on November 4, and we need go to the NRA website and add our voices to that organization’s cause by joining today. We have to remember that freedom is not just something others give us: it’s something that we sometimes have to defend individually.

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.

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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 ]