Good View of Europe's Descent into The Maelstrom

Bruce Bawer is the author of While Europe Slept and has a terrific article in Pajamas Media on how EU-nuchland and its choirboy chorus of castrati in the US is steadfastly ignoring the creeping advance of Islam as it infects inner cities in the Midlands & Yorkshire dales and the banlieux of Paris, not to mention a couple of hundred other French cities where thousands of cars were torched a summer ago by rioting reactionary nutjobs who are as French as couscous & kebabs. [Of course, EU-nuchs in high positions in govt & media are also ignoring "Vlad the Empoisoner" Putin on the energy front, but that's a subject for another day.]

I was a US diplomat who learned Arabic to a high level of proficiency in reading & speaking and was posted to two Arab countries where I served as a political officer. One of them is no longer a country [Lebanon, which was a member of the Arab League until it was hijacked by Hezbollah, an Iranian Shi'ite group of militias with no real "Arab" ties] and might serve as an object lesson of what happens when a political system breaks down—the majority becomes a slave to a violent reactionary militant minority. [As a footnote, when western travellers reached remote parts of the Sanjuk of Al Quds in the late 18th c., the use of the wheel had been abandoned/forgotten & natives used the native American travois to haul their produce to whatever markets existed, this 5000 yrs after their forebears had invented the wheel!]

The other, Saudi Arabia, has a family whose profession was robbing caravans on pilgrimages to Mecca before a religious zealot named Wahhab made a pact with them to be Koran & sword to a land totally asleep for centuries. They haven’t changed a bit between the ears, though they profess otherwise, and are basically a rentier economy. And instead of pilgrimage caravans, they hold up EU-nuchland and the US for trillions in oil money derived from technology we virtually handed them while saying sorry for the invasion of your privacy.

I've visited every Arab League member save Djibouti, Iraq, and Libya [and was invited to the latter two, but declined!] I've visited Pakistan in three of its four provinces, including Azad Kashmir and have visited Indonesia for several weeks. Although Obama is listed as a Muslim on a school form his father, a Mr. Soetoro, filled out, I discount this as not counting much because when I was there [perhaps at the same time Barry Soetoro was in an Islamic school, there was nothing toxic about the local brand of Islam, which lay in dormition. It's not a real issue, although BHO was sponsored for Harvard Law by a fellow who later switched his name to Khalid Mohammed [LNU]. And Louis Farrakhan's brand of islam, which young Barry was exposed to, is basically a self-help program with anti-Semitic overtones. Being in the Million Man March doesn't make BHO a bad dude.

I simply resent the ostrich-like posture of the left, so afraid to offend noisy new arrivals and so eager to discount or mock loyal Americans with a legitimate concern that their Constitution and Bill Of Rights will slowly, as the EU-nuch representative from Sweden to a conference Bawer attended said, disappear from neglect and forgetting how the US became the greatest country in the world.

Which it will remain unless and until it is hijacked by high-minded highbrows who disdain the hard-working majority of Americans and pander/cater/submit to the screeching riffraff [Sarkozy called them "racaille," a variation of canaille, who reflect what one belle etudiante francaise held up on a placard during the student strikes a few years ago "No matter how much you give us, it will never be enough and we'll demand much much more."

Pretty much sums up the mentality of the left.

As Donald Trump noted yesterday, the only silver lining in the US meltdown is that oil prices are slumping and will continue to slump until we wring out the bloated inflammation that infests the US economic GI tract.

Carter/Clinton began the Avalanche

Terry Jones sums up how Clinton conspired to inflate Fannie-Freddie into a Ponzi Scheme and brought down the entire Wall Street superstructure balanced on bad loans. Here's how Carter started the process and Clinton piled up enough to begin the makings of a cascade:

While President Carter in 1977 signed the Community Reinvestment Act, which pushed Fannie and Freddie to aggressively lend to minority communities, it was Clinton who supercharged the process. After entering office in 1993, he extensively rewrote Fannie's and Freddie's rules.
In so doing, he turned the two quasi-private, mortgage-funding firms into a semi-nationalized monopoly that dispensed cash to markets, made loans to large Democratic voting blocs and handed favors, jobs and money to political allies. This potent mix led inevitably to corruption and the Fannie-Freddie collapse.
Despite warnings of trouble at Fannie and Freddie, in 1994 Clinton unveiled his National Homeownership Strategy, which broadened the CRA in ways Congress never intended.
Addressing the National Association of Realtors that year, Clinton bluntly told the group that "more Americans should own their own homes." He meant it.
Clinton saw homeownership as a way to open the door for blacks and other minorities to enter the middle class.
Though well-intended, the problem was that Congress was about to change hands, from the Democrats to the Republicans. Rather than submit legislation that the GOP-led Congress was almost sure to reject, Clinton ordered Robert Rubin's Treasury Department to rewrite the rules in 1995.
The rewrite, as City Journal noted back in 2000, "made getting a satisfactory CRA rating harder." Banks were given strict new numerical quotas and measures for the level of "diversity" in their loan portfolios. Getting a good CRA rating was key for a bank that wanted to expand or merge with another.
Loans started being made on the basis of race, and often little else.
"Bank examiners would use federal home-loan data, broken down by neighborhood, income group and race, to rate banks on performance," wrote Howard Husock, a scholar at the Manhattan Institute.
But those rules weren't enough.
Clinton got the Department of Housing and Urban Development to double-team the issue. That would later prove disastrous.
Clinton's HUD secretary, Andrew Cuomo, "made a series of decisions between 1997 and 2001 that gave birth to the country's current crisis," the liberal Village Voice noted. Among those decisions were changes that let Fannie and Freddie get into subprime loan markets in a big way.
Other rule changes gave Fannie and Freddie extraordinary leverage, allowing them to hold just 2.5% of capital to back their investments, vs. 10% for banks.
Since they could borrow at lower rates than banks due to implicit government guarantees for their debt, the government-sponsored enterprises boomed.
With incentives in place, banks poured billions of dollars of loans into poor communities, often "no doc" and "no income" loans that required no money down and no verification of income.
By 2007, Fannie and Freddie owned or guaranteed nearly half of the $12 trillion U.S. mortgage market — a staggering exposure.
Worse still was the cronyism.
Fannie and Freddie became home to out-of-work politicians, mostly Clinton Democrats. An informal survey of their top officials shows a roughly 2-to-1 dominance of Democrats over Republicans.
Then there were the campaign donations. From 1989 to 2008, some 384 politicians got their tip jars filled by Fannie and Freddie.
Over that time, the two GSEs spent $200 million on lobbying and political activities. Their charitable foundations dropped millions more on think tanks and radical community groups.
Did it work? Well, if measured by the goal of putting more poor people into homes, the answer would have to be yes.
From 1995 to 2005, a Harvard study shows, minorities made up 49% of the 12.5 million new homeowners.
The problem is that many of those loans have now gone bad, and minority homeownership rates are shrinking fast.
Fannie and Freddie, with their massive loan portfolios stuffed with securitized mortgage-backed paper created from subprime loans, are a failed legacy of the Clinton era.

And then Fannie-Freddie got looted by the likes of Raines [$90 million], serial criminal Gorelick[$75 million] and Jim Johnson[tens of millions].

And of course, BDS requires that it was all GWB's fault, as brain-dead Pelosi said just before the vote!.

Sadly, the solidly Dem core constituency is too stupid or sunk in utter corruption to be influenced---a self-inflicted penal colony.

Maybe enuf independents will figure out what went on.

Sabathia To Dodgers Who Will Ditch Slacker Manny?

The NY Post has an interesting article on CC Sabathia, who can write his own ticket and should get the NL MVP just for making the compleat difference for the Brew Crew to get to the playoffs. He's a free agent with cred, unlike the dreadlocked Ramirez who has demonstrated that once he gets five years in the bank, it's a day off whenever he wants it and not running out groundballs.

CC is Joe Torre's type of guy, a team player who loves the Left Coast and the Dodgers should take the occasion to buy five years of high performance rather than slackerball.

Manny is Tyrell in spikes---all about Manny.

Can McCain rise to the challenge?

Victor Davis Hanson sums up the quandry facing the country.

The stage is set for someone to play Washington, Lincoln, or Churchill. An entire generation of leadership is failing, as the world watches aghast.

Paulson was more or less discredited when the word that when the FedNY Bank was considering a bailout of AIG, which Goldman Sachs had a $20 billion stake in, the only non-govt. participant in a closed meeting was the Chairman of Goldman, who succeeded Paulson in the job. Two weeks later, AIG got an $80 billion line of credit from Paulson. Hmmm........

Frank and Dodd are, as Hanson notes, for all intents and purposes what I would call "unindicted co-conspirators" and should be under investigation by the FBI [while not forgetting Obama advisors Raines & Johnson].

GWB is in hedgehog mode, and is remiss in that when he proposed reforms in '04-05, he didn't go to the country against the utterly corrupt DNC mafia that was using FanFred as an ATM. Instead, he courted "popularity" by plumping for Social Security reform, and was drowned out by a corrupt old bitch in the House who said he was trying to wreck SS. The same corrupt hag is now the worst Speaker in US history and demonstrates why Congress has a 10% approval rating, soon to plunge to low single digits.

As a WSJ writer noted yesterday, Chile worked its way out of its collapse using the U of Chicago economist Milton Friedman's nostrums.

Is a "workout" rather than a "bailout" the answer?

Can McCain rise to the challenge?

Serial Moron Al Gore Takes Aim at Coal

The WSJ outs the criminal conspiracy that the Dems are hatching with the greenie tree-hugger mafia to shut down the construction of new clean coal plants. The USA is the Saudi Arabia of coal, with enuf to sustain economic prosperity in an environmentally friendly fashion for the next century---if the Leftist Luddites can be stopped. Their obvous goal is a nihilistic destruction of any advanced industrial development and they are the ghost in the economic machine conspiring to throw an iron bar into its gears:

The greens loathe coal because of greenhouse gases -- and have succeeded in making new coal plants nearly impossible to build. More than 60 have been canceled in the last year alone. Democratic Governor Kathleen Sebelius is waging a high-profile campaign against new coal plants in Kansas, and only last week Joe Biden seemed to endorse a coal ban.

Perhaps James Hansen has also paid Mr. Gore a visit at Walden Pond. The NASA scientist and influential global warming swami recently testified on behalf of the "Kingsnorth Six," Greenpeace activists who caused £30,000 of criminal damage at an English coal utility while attempting to shut it down. Mr. Hansen argued they had a "lawful excuse" because of the imminence of climate doom; they were acquitted. Coming from figures who hold the public trust, such rhetoric is wildly irresponsible, not least for the fanaticism and even violence it could incite.

Mr. Gore's blessing is even more bizarre because it defeats the cause that it claims to champion on its own terms. New U.S. coal plants use modern scrubbing technology, which means less traditional air pollution. They're also far more efficient -- that is, they get more energy out of the same amount of coal (i.e., carbon) compared to older models. Often this results in power companies mothballing parts of a more carbon-intensive fleet.

Of course, the WSJ is either naive or tongue-in-cheek if they don't read between the lines and discern the nihilistic anarchists' recipes for the poisonous brew that witless crones like Pelosi and Sebelius in Kansas lap up like the bitch-puppies they are.

Gore is a guy who got a D+ in the only science grade investigative journalists can glean from his college transcripts!

Gore is leading another "childrens' crusade" into certain criminality, such as the insanity in the UK.

And Gore is proving again what a great favor the state of Florida [guided by Swamp-Thing Reno in her exportation of Elian Gonzales to the People's Paradise of Cuba] did for the USA did to keep this blundering fool from the presidency.

God bless and thank Florida for Now and Forever Amen!

NYT Parallel Universe in Sarah Chronicles

TV in the NYT is part of the stern nanny mentality and feminist universe guiding the NYT this era. Take for instance the 9/21 article in the Arts & Leisure section on "Terminator: The Sarah Conner Chronicles" and its comparison of the TV heroine "who is to a hockey mom what a hyena is to a potted fern" to another Sarah. Read the link for the so-called evangelical tone of the series to be elucidated, but the clueless aspect comes at the end of the article.

Ms.Bellafante notes that "the name of the Skynet brain [Skynet is trying to exterminate the human race & convert the planet to cyborg rule, ed. note] is not geopolitically neutral: it's called the Turk. So the machine endangering mankind is symbolically Ottoman."

Perhaps, but perhaps also the screenwriters might have a more playful trope in mind. The name of the guy who knocks on the door of an aspiring NFL candidate-player in the middle of the night in training camp to inform him to pack up and get out because he's been cut from the team: "The Turk."

It's been 100 years since the demise of the Ottoman Empire, counting from the "Young Turk" movement. The NFL cuts happen weekly. It's a better metaphor for what Skynet's brain is trying to accomplish.

Some NYT editor in that girlie-paper might know this, but I doubt it.

Hope-O-Crisy or How Obama Helped Create the Meltdown

Sen. Jim Demint os S.C. has a dynamite video that has great graphics and greater logic demonstrating the reason that FanFred led to an utter catastrophe through Democrat RICO schemes.

Here's the lead of a New York Times story on Sept. 11, 2003: 'The Bush administration today recommended the most significant regulatory overhaul in the housing finance industry since the savings and loan crisis a decade ago.'

'These two entities — Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — are not facing any kind of financial crisis,' said Rep. Barney Frank, then ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee. 'The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.'

Barney is the chief culprit and kept blocking reform all along when other proposals were made to stop a Ponzi pile of rubbish paper from toppling----Barney should be frog-marched in shackles except he'd enjoy it too much! No one else would enjoy hard time in a penitentiary as much as Mr. Frank.

Seriously, Chris Dodd's father was a crook & was censured by the Senate; Chris is a crook & is given broad authority to create a RICO government oversight program. Can you imagine how much will be skimmed off the top by these serial legalized felons?

Harry "The War is Lost" Reid competes with the two above for stiff sentences in a Fed facility raking sandtraps, and Pelosi should be sent to that WV camp where Martha Stewart cooled her heels for a few months. In a world where Dems were accountable and when people like Dodd actually were penalized for malfeasance, this would be fair and balanced.

Hope and 'small change' are all we're going to get from a Dem administration, which will rob the 'rich' to pay off their own investment bank partners at Goldman Sachs. And pocket much of the rest.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were just warm-up exercises for the heist of the millenium.

'Nuff Said. Don't Put the Foxes in Charge of the Chicken Coop

Here's the lead of a New York Times story on Sept. 11, 2003: 'The Bush administration today recommended the most significant regulatory overhaul in the housing finance industry since the savings and loan crisis a decade ago.'

'These two entities — Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — are not facing any kind of financial crisis,' said Rep. Barney Frank, then ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee. 'The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.'

Now we see this perv specimen of Elmer Fudd telling Lou Dobbs to stop interrupting him when Dobbs politely pointed out some Dem responsibility for the Meltdown of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Dobbs and Frank should be frog-marched off to prison in shackles---or at least censured like Dodd's father was when peculation and criminal malfeasance were actually accountable offenses in the Senate.

Just Asking Why Biden Gets a Pass While Palin is Getting Red-lined

This morning I got a box of books from my parents' house basement. I came to a book I enjoyed in grad school by the famous [leftist]writer James Agee and opened the book randomly to page 212. I thought to myself, the area code for Manhattan. Noting the top lines underlined by myself long ago, I read:

"[I do] not accuse or despise journalism for anything beyond its enormous power to poison the public with the... delusion that it is telling the truth.........The very blood and semen of journalism...is a broad and successful lying. Remove this form of lying and you no longer have journalism."

Which succinctly sums up what every thinking individual has known for quite a while now in this election season.

The signs of adherence to some sort of mass psychosis are starting to pop up in the "highbrow" publications. The New Yorker had an article on Alec Baldwin in which he whined that calling his 11-year old daughter "a selfish little pig" might hurt his chances for the high office he believes he is qualified for, though he intends to offer himself to the people anyway. If he fails, perhaps he could be appointed to an appropriate post.
Ditto, Chris Matthews, who believes he can beat Senator Spector in PA due to his wide name recognition & reputation. The MSM treat these two as serious, without any serious speculation by their writers as to the possible drawbacks they could bring to a ticket with them on it.

James Fallows is pushing The Atlantic's credibility more than a bit and The Atlantic should have cashiered Andrew Sullivan immediately on the question of the candidate's pregnancy. [This strange specimen of morphing from conservative to fleck-mouthed Robert Fisk took a few days off with his 'husband' to let things cool down.]

Drudge, Fox, and the Wall Street Journal try to stem the hemorrhaging, but no indication of any sense of non-partisan neutrality at all is evident on the left side of the spectrum, which is about 90% now of the national media. But high-handed entitlement and presumption of infallibility pervade a lot of Dem politicians. Watching Lou Dobbs interviewing Barney Frank on CNN this afternoon, Lou tried to correct him when Frank inaccurately claimed that Reagan was the primary cause of the problem today when he started deregulating the markets.

When Dobbs interjected that Carter actually was the first to do so, Frank indignantly exclaimed that Dobbs was breaking the rules for a civil conversation! Dobbs for once appeared chastened and instead of continuing to contest the out-and-out partisan misrepresentations of Frank towards the Repubs, denying any Dem wrongdoing, Lou meekly backed down.

I know Lou was loaded for bear on the fact that Barney Frank impeded any investigation of FanFred's flagrant disregard of all known rules of lending a couple of years ago and its outrageous use of FanFred as an ATM for high-ranking Dems like Raines, Johnson, and Gorelick. That would have been partisan, I suppose, in BFrank's parallel universe.

And Hank Paulson was treating Chris Dodd, who has been outed as the biggest beneficiary in Congress from FanFred donations, as a respectable senior statesman. Chris also got a sweetheart loan from Countrywide that has not been noted by anybody in the mainstream media. Of course, FanFred donated $109,000 to its number two favorite Congressional beneficiary, a Senator starting his first term named Barack Obama. Good grief, it took nine years for Dodd to get $130K!
[The fact that Chris Dodd's daddy was censured by the Senate for dipping into campaign funds in the '50s has never been brought up, even though it's obvious that this apple fell very close to the tree!]

Double Standard

Just to natter on a bit, it's quite evident that a compleat and total double standard is in play with the mainstream media in regard to this election. The facts are that Obama has never been vetted about a number of serious associations. If his resume weren't so thin, thinner than the other three candidates, the little we know about him would be troubling.

He has kept his transcripts hidden from his years at Columbia U. No Problem, says the press.
His senior thesis on Soviet relations has "disappeared." Not a peep of questioning by the NYT or any NY based media.

His attitude toward his mother was so conflicted that he did not go to her deathbed in 1996 because of "scheduling problems." Not a problem for the sycophantic press.

His Chicago relations with a convicted felon like Rezko who largely raised the financing for his run for the State Senate [the records for which "have been lost," hasn't raised any eyebrows among the watchpuppies in the national media[the Chicago local media are virtually part of the Daley Machine or in fear of its retribution].

An unconvicted felon [by his own admission], Bill Ayers, made Obama the chair of a $100 million [how did this SDS mad bomber get that kind of money?] "project" called The Annenberg Challenge. Not a shred of curiosity since Sean Hannity made this relationship front and center [and earned five public rebukes from Obama, a rare occurrence]. The press ain't interested.

Ditto for a notorious racist pastor whose affiliation with anti-Semites like Farrakhan go back a long way[and who got a mysterious $10 million "line of credit" upon retirement----nothing for Letterman to joke about there.

Okay, just another day at Rick's bar in the moral sewer of Chicago politics. But Obama probably was at The Million Man March and HAS NEVER BEEN QUERIED about this.

The interviews of Obama by Brian Williams & Charlie Gibson were puff-balls that Obama didn't need to respond to seriously. Couric was the only one who made a [half-hearted] attempt to draw him out on some serious issues. When Palin was nominated, BHO did do an interview with Bill O'Reilly, but B O'R did not get beneath the smooth carapace of this slick hustler.

Then BHO went on the unwatched MSNBC counterpart's show and was showered with metaphorical confetti in an embarrassing demonstration of why the interviewer should have stayed on ESPN.

McCain/Palin Standard

To sum up what everyone knows, it's completely obvious there is another standard for McCain and especially Sarah Palin, where gotcha questions are the rule. t's getting clearer every day, if not completely obvious, that the media is setting up a very high standard for McCain and extremely high for Sarah Palin, where gotcha questions are the rule. Indeed, her unavailability to the press is being treated as high treason. The "delusion" Agree talked about then is now becoming evident in the media's self-referential decision to move beyond being a referee to becoming the home-team zebra and that team is Obama/Biden.

In fact, the NYT article on Ms. Iseman was almost certainly libelous and under UK law would probably be actionable. But the entire phalanx comprised of Hollyweird/TV/Academicide/Educational & other Unions's leftish foot soldiers and celebritards are marching lockstep to accomplish the goal of Eastern & Left Coast elites, with nary a twinge of conscious or sign of compunction.

The Palin Derangement Syndrome surpasses even the hyperventilating hysteria of the BDS loons & with almost no substance behind ridiculous speculations and false assertions. This is an election that is turning into a food fight.

As for Biden, he keeps making endless silly mistakes, much like Obama's "57 states" remark, on a near-daily basis. [Personal note: My wife served as an LA under a left-wing Dem Senator [who will remain unnamed] who regarded Joe Biden as an amiable second-rater. He has risen to prominence by being re-elected many times, just like Alaska's Ted Stevens or WV's Harry Byrd.]

We don't know much about Palin, but her admittedly thin resume is on the executive side of the separation of powers and she deserves more than the instant disdain the media poured on her. Bill Clinton to his credit says that he "gets" why Palin is popular, as she is authentic, the first such candidate ever in the last five decades. Hillary remains silent.

Unless you count Geraldine, who was authentically dizzy......or ditzy, in a likable way.

Oprah has shown that she is more of a black than she is a female. The list of out-and-out media partisanship is becoming longer every day. The unwatched Emmys demonstrated how "inappropriate remarks" have morphed into "standard DNC talking points" across the entire spectrum.

There is no Zola, or Whittaker Chambers, or even McCarthy [Joe or Gene] to stand up and say things are wrong. Not on the right anyway, as Mitch McConnell sidles over to the insufferable ["The war is already lost"] Senator Majority Leader who in turn misrepresents McCain's conversation with him.

If John McCain should possibly win, there will be a million DNC paid lawyers scurrying under rocks and across the 50 states to look for Repub iniquity.

Maybe the terrorist honored by the UN yesterday is right about the USA. Let's work to make the Iranian mini-me monster wrong.
UPDATEToday Obama said that someone else will be responsible for the Medltdown Mess in "40 days."

Is it just me under a delusion that the new president isn't sworn in until January 20th, almost four months from now? That's almost 120 days. GWB will be president until then and "responsible," unless BHO AKA Soetoro has never read the Constitution.

The MSM just swallows anything this no-CV fraud puts out there.

Crony Capitalism As Perfected by the Democrats

"Crony Capitalism" is the bugbear of a free market economic system, as this extremely lucid, cogent, well-written narrative of how we got from prosperity to a looming WTC collapse [metaphorically speaking]:

In the past couple of weeks, as the financial crisis has intensified, a new talking point has emerged from the Democrats in Congress: This is all a "crisis of capitalism," in socialist financier George Soros' phrase, and a failure to regulate our markets sufficiently.
Well, those critics may be right — it is a crisis of capitalism. A crisis of politically driven crony capitalism, to be precise.
Indeed, Democrats have so effectively mastered crony capitalism as a governing strategy that they've convinced many in the media and the public that they had nothing whatsoever to do with our current financial woes.
Barack Obama has repeatedly blasted "Bush-McCain" economic policies as the cause, as if the two were joined at the hip.
Funny, because over the past 8 years, those who tried to fix Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — the trigger for today's widespread global financial meltdown — were stymied repeatedly by congressional Democrats.
This wasn't an accident. Though some key Republicans deserve blame as well, it was a concerted Democratic effort that made reform of Fannie and Freddie impossible.
The reason for this is simple: Fannie and Freddie became massive providers both of reliable votes among grateful low-income homeowners, and of massive giving to the Democratic Party by grateful investment bankers, both at the two government-sponsored enterprises and on Wall Street.
The result: A huge taxpayer rescue that at last estimate is approaching $700 billion but may go even higher.
It all started, innocently enough, in 1994 with President Clinton's rewrite of the Carter-era Community Reinvestment Act.
Ostensibly intended to help deserving minority families afford homes — a noble idea — it instead led to a reckless surge in mortgage lending that has pushed our financial system to the brink of chaos.
Subprime's Mentors
Fannie and Freddie, the main vehicle for Clinton's multicultural housing policy, drove the explosion of the subprime housing market by buying up literally hundreds of billions of dollars in substandard loans — funding loans that ordinarily wouldn't have been made based on such time-honored notions as putting money down, having sufficient income, and maintaining a payment record indicating creditworthiness.
With all the old rules out the window, Fannie and Freddie gobbled up the market. Using extraordinary leverage, they eventually controlled 90% of the secondary market mortgages. Their total portfolio of loans topped $5.4 trillion — half of all U.S. mortgage lending. They borrowed $1.5 trillion from U.S. capital markets with — wink, wink — an "implicit" government guarantee of the debts.
This created the problem we are having today.
As we noted a week ago, subprime lending surged from around $35 billion in 1994 to nearly $1 trillion last year — for total growth of 2,757% as of last year.
No real market grows that fast for that long without being fixed.
And that's just what Fannie and Freddie were — fixed. They became a government-run, privately owned home finance monopoly.
Fannie and Freddie became huge contributors to Congress, spending millions to influence votes. As we've noted here before, the bulk of the money went to Democrats.
Dollars To Dems
Meanwhile, Fannie and Freddie also became a kind of jobs program for out-of-work Democrats.
Franklin Raines and Jim Johnson, the CEOs under whom the worst excesses took place in the late 1990s to mid-2000s, were both high-placed Democratic operatives and advisers to presidential candidate Barack Obama.
Clinton administration official Jamie Gorelick also got taken care of by the Fannie-Freddie circle. So did top Clinton aide Rahm Emanuel, among others.
On the surface, this sounds innocent. Someone has to head the highly political Fannie and Freddie, right?
But this is why crony capitalism is so dangerous. Those in power at Fannie and Freddie, as the sirens began to wail about some of their more egregious practices, began to bully those who opposed them.
That included journalists, like the Wall Street Journal's Paul Gigot, and GOP congressmen, like Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan, whom Fannie and Freddie actively lobbied against in his own district. Rep. Cliff Stearns, R-Fla., who tried to hold hearings on Fannie's and Freddie's questionable accounting practices in 2004, found himself stripped of responsibility for their oversight by House Speaker Dennis Hastert — a Republican.
Where, you ask, were the regulators?
Congress created a weak regulator to oversee Freddie and Fannie — the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight — which had to go hat in hand each year to Capitol Hill for its budget, unlike other major regulators.
With lax oversight, Fannie and Freddie had a green light to expand their operations at breakneck speed.
Fannie and Freddie had a reliable coterie of supporters in the Senate, especially among Democrats.
"We now know that many of the senators who protected Fannie and Freddie, including Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Christopher Dodd, have received mind-boggling levels of financial support from them over the years," wrote economist Kevin Hassett on Bloomberg.com this week.
Buying Friends In High Places
Over the span of his career, Obama ranks No. 2 in campaign donations from Fannie and Freddie, taking over $125,000. Dodd, head of the Senate Banking panel, is tops at $165,000. Clinton, ranked 12th, has collected $75,000.
Meanwhile, Freddie and Fannie opened what were euphemistically called "Partnership Offices" in the districts of key members of Congress to channel millions of dollars in funding and patronage to their supporters.
In the space of a little more than a decade, Fannie and Freddie spent close to $150 million on lobbying efforts. So pervasive were their efforts, they seemed unassailable, even during a Republican administration.
Yet, by 2004, the crony capitalism had gone too far. Even OFHEO issued a report essentially criticizing Fannie and Freddie for Enron-style accounting that let them boost profits in order to pay their politically well-connected executives hefty bonuses.
It emerged that Clinton aide Raines, who took Fannie Mae's helm as CEO in 1999, took in nearly $100 million by the time he left in 2005. Others, including former Clinton Justice Department official Gorelick, took $75 million from the Fannie-Freddie piggy bank.
Even so, Fannie and Freddie were forced to restate their earnings by some $3.5 billion, due to the accounting shenanigans.
As we noted, those who tried to halt this frenzy of activity found themselves hit by a political buzz saw.
President Bush, reviled and criticized by Democrats, tried no fewer than 17 times, by White House count, to raise the issue of Fannie-Freddie reform. A bill cleared the Senate Banking panel in 2005, but stalled due to implacable opposition from Democrats and a critical core of GOP abettors. Rep. Barney Frank, who now runs the powerful House Financial Services Committee, helped spearhead that fight.

Terry Jones wrote this excellent piece for Investor's Business Daily and promises more elucidation as this unravels further.

And Dennis Hastert adds another notch on his pistol as Turncoat Democrat Mole Extraordinaire.

Carter has already retired the cup as Feckless Ninny POTUS of the twentieth century. Bubba Jeff was merely an "enabler," Mr. Cross-Addicted to Chicanery of every sort, kind and specimen.

But Franklin Raines, Jim Johnson and Chris Dodd should be frog-marched in shackles across the floor of the NYSE.

Barney Frank should too, but he would probably enjoy it!!!

Last, but not least. Jamie Gorelick now has the distinction of being intimately involved in causing the two greatest American disasters of this decade: 9/11 with her hobbling of the counter-terrorism efforts of the CIA/FBI through her "firewall..."

And now, the Great Meltdown of 2008, for which this consummate swindler in a pantsuit helped stoke the fire at Fan/Fred while skimming $75 million as her share of the Dem RICO scheme.

Shackles are too good for her---bring back the electric chair! If it was good enough for the Rosenbergs, it's good enough for this 21st century equivalent!

Palin Outs Obama as 'Community Organizer' Right out of Alinsky Playbook

IBD has an excellent editorial on Saul Alinsky's "rules for radicals" that Hillary Clinton did her thesis on at Wellesley and Obama soaked through his skin nursing grievances at Columbia. Actually, it started with Marx on economics and Nietzsche on ressentiment and continues to this day through traitors like Bill Ayers who somehow got $100 million for The Annenberg Project and persuaded Barack Obama to be its chair.

Barack is a sort of Stealth-CheGuevara---a specimen of a sportsman connoisseur radical sneaking into the presidency under the radar by following the Chicago-tough Alinsky's road rules. Of which IBD gives a handy-dandy summary:

• Rule: "Rub raw the resentments of the people; search out controversy and issues." In the mortgage meltdown, for instance, Obama vows to prosecute "predatory lenders" for "abusing" minority borrowers. He's also stoking class resentment by painting Wall Street and other executives as villains.
• Rule: "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it." In an ad to woo Hispanic voters, Obama demonized Rush Limbaugh by falsely claiming he made racist statements against immigrants.
• Rule: "A mass impression can be lasting and intimidating." This explains why Obama moved his acceptance speech to a football stadium and bussed in 85,000 supporters. Alinsky's son was so impressed, he praised Obama for learning his father's "lesson well."
• Rule: "Multiple issues mean constant action and life" for the cause. This is why Obama never harps on one issue, as Hillary did with health care. His platform is packed with grievances from "economic justice" to "reproductive justice" to "environmental justice."

But thanks be to God there's some people who are on to Obama's trickster head fakes:

Obama is following almost to the letter the blueprint for socialist revolution drafted by the father of community organizing.
While Alinsky may help him behind the scenes, however, he becomes a liability when brought out of the shadows. Sarah Palin proved this in St. Paul when she ridiculed his community organizing. Within hours, Obama surrogates whined about how just bringing up the phrase was racist code for "black."
No, it's code for communist. And McCain should make that point instead of legitimizing such radicalism, as he did recently when he said, "I respect community organizers; and Sen. Obama's record there is outstanding" — which contradicted his running mate.
There's nothing to respect about such anti-American radicals, even if they have traded their tie-dye for business ties.

Alinsky of course, dedicated his book to his patron "saint:"

Obama doesn't look or talk like an angry radical. He speaks in measured tones and is rarely seen out of business attire. That, too, is borrowed from Alinsky's playbook. "Don't scare" the middle class, he guides urban revolutionaries in his 1970s manual, "Rules for Radicals" (which he dedicated to mankind's "first radical, Lucifer").

"Dare to cheat, dare to win" is what my houseguest at an Ann Arbor SDS conference told me in '69, a guy named Mark Rudd who was the chief agitator at Columbia U. in '68 and made the cover of Time magazine.

I'll bet that could be Obama's motto in '08, one he learned while he was [ostensibly, as we have no transcript or thesis] at Columbia U. during the Reagan years---his own little Communist renaissance in the making.

Sarah should ask him about his mystery days on Morningside Heights---maybe he was just a ghost hanging out, a sort of Shining...........

Hitchens Compares Obama to Dukakis

Christopher H. is evolving into one of the most astute analysts of the American Political Condition, analogous to a mild but irritating disease, of presidential elections repeating themselves:

Why is Obama so vapid and hesitant and gutless? Why, to put it another way, does he risk going into political history as a dusky Dukakis? Well, after the self-imposed Jeremiah Wright nightmare, he can't afford any more militancy, or militant-sounding stuff, even if it might be justified. His other problems are self-inflicted or party-inflicted as well. He couldn't have picked a gifted Democratic woman as his running mate, because he couldn't have chosen a female who wasn't the ever-present Sen. Clinton, and so he handed the free gift of doing so to his Republican opponent (whose own choice has set up a screech from the liberals like nothing I have heard since the nomination of Clarence Thomas). So the unquantifiable yet important "atmospherics" of politics, with all their little X factors, belong at present to the other team.
The Dukakis comparison is, of course, a cruel one, but it raises a couple more questions that must be faced. We are told by outraged Democrats that many voters still believe, thanks to some smear job, that Sen. Obama is a Muslim. Yet who is the most famous source of this supposedly appalling libel (as if an American candidate cannot be of any religion or none)? Absent any anonymous whispering campaign, the person who did most to insinuate the idea in public—"There is nothing to base that on. As far as I know"—was Obama's fellow Democrat and the junior senator from New York. It was much the same in 1988, when Al Gore brought up the Dukakis furlough program, later to be made infamous by the name Willie Horton, against the hapless governor of Massachusetts who was then his rival for the nomination.
By the end of that grueling campaign season, a lot of us had got the idea that Dukakis actually wanted to lose—or was at the very least scared of winning. Why do I sometimes get the same idea about Obama?.......

Dukakis was famously done in by William "Billy" Bulger, the Democratic Mass State Senate Chair, brother of the still-on-the-lam Whitey, who alerted the Bush campaign about Boston Harbor's long-standing pollution problem after Duke had promised years before to fix it. And Bolger helped elucidate the Horton furlough affair again for Bush's operatives after another fellow-Dem, the then-clubfooted Al Gore [who has graduated to mental quadraplegic], pointed out the problem.

Bulger ["Billy"] was subsequently made president of UMass, whose Boston campus lies just up the beach where his brother Whitey used to bury his girlfriends once he got tired of them. Just another memorable milestone in big city Dem political machines. Sort of like Obama's alma mater in politics, the Cook County Crime Spree run from the mayor's office?

I wonder which Democrats might be trying to trip up The Magic Negro, as the Los Angeles Times called him?

Hmmm....... A real puzzle.

Anyway, as always....Hitchens gives the reader an interesting perspective on American politics---sort of an amped-up Economist writer with a memory like an elephant.
UPDATE
By a strange coincidence, my wife called from Cape Cod and informed me just a few minutes ago that my father-in-law has a roommate in his recovery room in a rehab center. The roommate is a former high-ranking member of the Boston Police whm my wife had a very revealing conversation with this evening. This gentleman, who has to remain anonymous for obvious reasons, told my spouse that William "Billy" Bulger knew everything that"Whitey,"Billy's serial killer brother on the Top Ten Most Wanted list by the FBI, was up to and that not only convicted FBI Boston Special Agent Connelly, but other agents even above Connelly in seniority---"all the way to the very top"---helped protect Whitey, because Billy "had the goods on" so many prominent Mass politicians and FBI Agents that if Whitey was harmed, Billy would bring down the Mass Democrats [including possibly Kerry & Kennedy] and some highly-placed Repubs as well. FWIW, but Mass politics is as seamy and dirty as Chicago machine politics, though I doubt as many murder victims have gone without justice in Chicago, due to Whitey's nasty habit of killing young women. Since they were hookers or drifters, yadda, yadda, yadda.

Someone, someday, is going to write a sequel to Black Mass, a book that outlines the incredible all-embracing corruption that thrives in the Boston political machine, including among some national political personae. According to this source, Gov. Dukakis was so clean and "straight," they couldn't trust him and he had to go. Hence, ratting out "Duke" to GHWB would benefit the Mass Dems, some compromised FBI agents, and who knows whomelse!?! Stranger than fiction, some of the stuff my wife told me---hearsay, but mind-boggling.

Axelrod Caught Astroturfing Smear Video on YouTube

Roy Robison at the National Defense Examiner has the best summary of the Axelrod smear job on Palin unmasked:

A series of videos designed to spread lies about the Republican Vice Presidential nominee, Governor Sarah Palin has been connected to a professional Public Relations firm. Those videos also share production qualities used in pro-Obama videos produced by Obama media campaign strategist David Axelrod.
Axelrod is considered by many to be a master of planting campaign messages on the internet to look like they did not originate from an organized campaign, a practice know as “astroturfing” (because of the fake grass-roots nature of the message). The smear videos have been connected to a professional PR firm, the kind of firm Axelrod would turn to in order to disseminate his message. No direct evidence of such a link has been established but to do so would be very difficult for any outside investigation.
Company employees and family members of Winner & Associates have been connected to the placement of these videos on Youtube. In addition, they have been shown to have sent notice of these videos to the fringe left-wing websites, the Democratic Underground and Daily Kos. Those smear machine websites then urged their readers - hundreds of thousands of them - to spread word about the smear videos.
Bloggers at the website “The Jawa Report” have used their collective investigative talent to expose the smear campaign. Normally, the blog specializes in tracking down and stopping sources of internet-based Islamic extremism, also known as jihadist propaganda. The bloggers recently turned their abilities to finding the source of the Palin smear videos. They present strong evidence linking Winner & Associates to the videos including an email from one of the postings that is assigned to the domain name for the company's website.
The “Jawans” also compared the smear videos to videos known to have been produced by David Axelrod's media company in support of the Obama campaign. The Jawa Report presents strong evidence that the female voice-over used in the smear videos is the same voice used in all of the Obama campaign videos from Axelrod's company. In addition, the investigators who routinely review jihadist videos for clues have determined that the video and production quality of the smear videos was high and likely done by a professional production company, not a “grassroots” effort.
The connections provide a clear, although yet to be fully proven, scenario. Based upon the evidence it appears that Axelrod likely orchestrated the smear campaign providing his media company resources to create the smear videos for the PR firm which launched the viral campaign. It was all meant to look like it came from some where other than the Obama campaign, a prime example of “astroturfing”.

Update: With in minutes of the revelation of this information at The Jawa Report the smear videos were taken down by the poster on Youtube. Anticipating this, the Jawans made a copy and reposted it.

Click on the link to see the pernicious video.

Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda....Dems Collapse FannieMae/FreddieMac to Cause Panic

Bloomberg has the most cogent description of how a Dem party-line vote to stop reform of the FanFred Ponzi Scheme was headed by criminals like Rangel and Dodd [oh, yeah, Obama was #2 on the FanFred donations list].

Hitchens on Bernard-Henri Levi [And Vice Versa]

BHL is a well-known French intellectual---a sort of new Raymond Aron or Henri Servan-Schrieber---who has become more than just another dreary bore on the French left.

This article has enough meat for more than just gnawing. I do like Hitchens' pointing out "Orwell’s remark that it’s not enough to be antifascist; one must also be in principle antitotalitarian."

The same paper has a clown named Victor Navasky claim that evidence that the Rosenbergs were guilty isn't important, but that government is to blame. With "useful idiots" like Navasky around, it is comfortable to see that the US can support a totalitarian even when he lies about the USG----oh, BTW, this clown is editor of The Nation & on the CSJ Pulitzer Committee, in case you ever believe Pulitzers might be awarded for actual investigative reporting.

Rangel, Bernhardt & other NY Women Exhibit Palin Derangement Syndrome

Rangel says Sarah Palin is "disabled," adding insult after the injury of robbing taxpayers of his due taxes on many different residences and illegal use of same for political goals. Of course, there was another Vice Presidential Candidate who had no foreign policy experience, and as a President was disabled---FDR!!!

Sandra Bernhardt & Woody Allen, renowned incestuous child molester both weigh in among others to spew their various versions of nonesensical over-the-top verbiage---the word Sarah would use---to disgrace themselves and ruin what little cred feminazis had in remaining in the gas tank.

Thunder-Muffin RINO Brooks Inveighs [Again] About Sarah Palin

David Brooks is desperately eager to prove to his NYT paymasters & PBS that he is taken with Sarah Palin & along with other Upper West Side stalwarts of the RINO elite [Frum, Noonan, Murphy, et al.] isn't taken with this small town Mrs. Smith Goes to Washington trope.

The elitists favor sophistication, but the common-sense folk favor simplicity. The elitists favor deliberation, but the populists favor instinct.

This populist tendency produced the term-limits movement based on the belief that time in government destroys character but contact with grass-roots America gives one grounding in real life. And now it has produced Sarah Palin.

Palin is the ultimate small-town renegade rising from the frontier to do battle with the corrupt establishment. Her followers take pride in the way she has aroused fear, hatred and panic in the minds of the liberal elite. The feminists declare that she’s not a real woman because she doesn’t hew to their rigid categories. People who’ve never been in a Wal-Mart think she is parochial because she has never summered in Tuscany.

Look at the condescension and snobbery oozing from elite quarters, her backers say. Look at the endless string of vicious, one-sided attacks in the news media. This is what elites produce. This is why regular people need to take control.

And there’s a serious argument here. In the current Weekly Standard, Steven Hayward argues that the nation’s founders wanted uncertified citizens to hold the highest offices in the land. They did not believe in a separate class of professional executives. They wanted rough and rooted people like Palin.

But Brooks is having none of it. He now has become a true RINO standard bearer, another Lincoln Chafee or Chuck Hagel and spends the rest of his column in a soft-shoe Bush-Derangement-Syndrome rant. All of which points out the DNC talking points about Sarah Palin's inexperience.

He is a true Upper West Sider in his absolute silence about the colossal inexperience of Barack Obama, whose resume is, if anything, thinner than Palin's. On energy issues, Palin is truly the most knowledgeable governor. Not a word from Thunder Muffin. On most issues, Barry is woefully untested, and cannot participate in town hall meetings with McCain because he is routinely flummoxed without a teleprompter. Obama needs to shout fire in a crowded room about the economy, hoping it will sink further. Why not note that, Thunder Muffin?

While noting the condescension and snobbery, TM joins it in his unreasoned rejection of Palin---let's face it, he's probably a closet-sexist himself or perhaps diligent about keeping his unracist credentials burnished and buffed.

How else to explain not a word about the colossal hoax that is Barack Obama & his invisible resume---the magic negro, as the Los Angeles Times famously put it---and BHO's long-time associations with racists and criminal leftists [Ayers, Dohrn, et al.]?

Thunder Muffin wants to keep his NYT day job something fierce.

Laura Ingraham versus Conservative Elitist David Brooks

Laura has my vote on this eloquent encomium to to populist good sense of the American voter:

In today's New York Times, David Brooks launches a critique of Sarah Palin, essentially concluding that her populist appeal is dangerous and ill-conceived. He yearns for the day when "conservatism was once a frankly elitist movment," one that stressed "classical education, hard-earned knowledged, experience, and prudence." Brooks, like a handful of other conservative intellectuals, believes Palin "compensates for her lack of experience with brashness and excessive decisiveness."

Well, at the risk of appearing brash, let me say that I am glad to see my old friend finally pushed to the point where he has to make an overt defense of elitism, after years of demonstrating covert support for elitism. We conservatives who believe Governor Palin represents a solid vice-presidential pick should be extremely comfortable engaging this issue.

Brooks's main argument against Palin is that she lacks the type of experience and historical understanding that led President Bush to a 26 percent approval rating in his final months in office. Yet the notion that the Bush Administration got into trouble because it didn't have enough "experience" is absurd. George W. Bush was governor of Texas for six years. His father was president. His primary advisors on matters of foreign policy were Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, and Colin Powell. In 2000, it could hardly have been possible to find a more experienced team to head up a GOP administration. Brooks's notion that the Bush Administration was "the anti-establishment attitude put into executive practice" is simply ludicrous. Does anyone believe that Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld count as "anti-establishment"?

Laura deconstructs the Brooks/Frum/Noonan/Murphy mindset slowly & with devastating sarcasm:

Of course, we could also consider the Nixon Administration. Who had more experience than Richard Nixon? How'd that work out? What about George H.W. Bush? How did his administration do? What about Herbert Hoover — who had vast experience both in terms of dealing with foreign countries during World War I and in terms of dealing with the U.S. economy as secretary of Commerce? How did he do? The truth is that Brooks's basic claim — that experienced leaders are necessarily better than inexperienced leaders — simply doesn't hold water.

Laura has got the bit in her teeth and the woman makes an excursion through the last thirty-five years to demonstrate the feckles Bobbsey-Twin sameness of the Republican and Democrat elites:

Now let's look at the broader issue of elitism versus populism. For Brooks to be right, his elites have to make better policy judgments than average Americans. But he overlooks the fact that in America we have a particularly bad elite, an elite that holds most Americans in contempt and has no sympathy for the history and traditions that make us great. And that elite has been wrong on issue after issue for most of the last 40 years. Who was more right about the Soviet Union, the elites or the people? Who was more right about the need to cut taxes in the 1970s, the elites or the people? Who was more right about the need to get tough on crime, the elites in black robes with life tenure, or the folks cheering for Dirty Harry? Who would Brooks trust to decide critical issues regarding the War on Terror today, the voters or the inside-the-Beltway types who lose sleep over tough interrogation tactics? Elites — particularly our American elite — are much more likely to go for the latest fad, for seek to apply whatever notion is currently trendy in the salons of Europe. To find true Burkean conservatism in this country — to find citizens who are both respectful of our country's traditions and anxious to see our country remain a world leader — you have to turn to the voters.

Laura enunciates the central truth in American politics today---Flyover Country is the Real America which keeps arrogant mindless lemming-like group-think from morphing the USA into another satrapy of the EU-nuch mandarinate's Hyper-Nanny authoritarian statist monster that is destroying that continent demographically, spiritually, and politically:

The truth is that it is no longer possible to govern this country through a conservative elite. We have a radical elite, an elite that believes in climate change, gay marriage, unrestricted abortions, and the United Nations. We have an elite that intends to make massive, liberal changes to every aspect of American life. This elite ruins almost everything it touches — from the schools, to the media, to the universities. Giving more power to the elites means watching the United States become more and more like Europe.

We've al seen what EU-nuch appeasement and self-referential inversion has done to that continent---an outward based economy which taxes its citizens to support vast programs that destroy the family, the church and any semblance of national cohesion:

Populism rests on two great insights. First, it understands that the people (taken as a whole) are often wiser and more prudent than the elites. Average people are almost always respectful of tradition, while elites tend to act like an angry mob trying to tear down the old idols. Second, populism understands that it's not enough to actually have the right policy ideas, you have to have the will to take on the elites who will try to prevent those ideas from going into place. In order to get anything accomplished, the GOP is going to have to use public opinion to override the objections of liberals, including liberals in the media.

Does Sarah Palin have the political skills to successfully govern this country from a populist perspective? It's far too early to say. She is certainly the most promising such figure to come along since the elites were denouncing Ronald Reagan. And therefore we should all wish her well. It is silly to criticize her at this early stage until we know a lot more about her abilities as a leader. I am glad to say that her instincts appear to be sound.

To me, Sarah Palin's instincts, like those of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, are far sounder than the epigonies GHWB & his well-meaning, but feckless son GWB. Her great heart is conjoined with charisma and the ability to communicate that matches Reagan in timing and nuanced understatement. She reminds me of a young Teddy Rooseveldt who burst onto the national scene in 1900 under much the same circumstances to pull Republican chestnuts out of the fire.

I don't know if she's Rushmore material yet, but her spectacular debut augurs a brilliant career if she can avoid the slings and arrows aimed by the pygmies and Uruk-Hais of the ultra-left degenerates while ignoring the sneers of the New Yorkey Brooks/Noonan/Frum triad.

What's the Difference between a Journalist & a Watchdog? RABIES!i

The NYT begins the quadrennial bugle call to signal retreat. [h/t: Taranto at WSJ]. Here's the lede that is so stupid that they should throw in the towel now & spare the country a lot of money & bs:

Mr. Obama and his campaign have seemed flummoxed in trying to figure out how to deal with [Sarah Palin]. His aides said they were looking to the news media to debunk the image of her as a blue-collar reformer.

A colossal open-zipper revelation that Obama is a scaredy-cat of strong females---as if we already didn't know that!!!

Mickey Kaus has the nut flush draw on the river:

Mark Halperin's three pieces of advice for Obama seem sound. (They are 1. Ignore Palin; 2. Get in McCain's head the way McCain's getting in Obama's; and 3. Refocus on the economy in an accessible way.) ... To which I'd add:
4. It's a good week for point 3!

5. The current lib blog-MSM-campaign tack--getting outraged by McCain's "lies"--is a total loser strategy. Why?
a) MSM outrage doesn't sway voters anymore. It didn't even back in 1988, when the press tried to make a stink about George H.W. Bush's use of "flag factories," etc. After this year's failed MSM Palin assault, it certainly won't work;
b) When Dems get outraged at unfairness they look weak. How can they stand up to Putin if they start whining when confronted with Steve Schmidt? McCain's camp can fake umbrage all it wants--the latest is that an Atlantic photographer took some nasty photos that the mag didn't run!--and nobody will accuse MCain of being weak. That's so unfair. A double standard. Dems can learn to live with it or complain about the unfairness for another 4 years. Their choice.
c) It's almost always impossible to prove that a Republican attack is a 100% lie. Either there's a germ of truth (Kerry did hype his wartime heroism at least a bit) or the truth is indeterminate (i.e., there's no way of knowing what Obama meant by "lipstick"--just because he and McCain used the word earlier doesn't mean he didn't think using it now, after Palin's speech, didn't add a witty resonance).
d) Lecturing the public on what's 'true" and what's a "lie" (when the truth isn't 100% clear) plays into some of the worst stereotypes about liberals--that they are preachy know-it-alls hiding their political motives behind a veneer of objectivity and respectability.
e) Inevitably the people being outraged on Obama's behalf will phrase their arguments in ways well-designed to appeal to their friends--and turn off the unconverted. ('This is just what they did to John Kerry and Michael Dukakis!' As if the public yearns for the lost Kerry and Dukakis Presidencies. 'Today's kindergarteners need some sex education. Just because Republicans are old fashioned ...' etc. Or 'These are Karl Rove tactics,' which signifies little to non-Dem voters except a partisan rancor they'd like to put behind them.)

Lots of people like bad Disney movies, and don't like the kind of people who sneer at bad Disney movies. [Hollyweird weasels, please note[/sarc]

6. There must be some way to disillusion the conservative base with McCain, at least a bit. I know the CW--Palin has locked in the base, freeing McCain to move left. But jeez, McCain isn't moving to the left just on immigration, and he isn't moving subtly. Listen to this new radio ad, which might as well be titled "Stem Cell Research, Stem Cell Research, Stem Cell Research, Stem Cell Research." That's how often the phrase is repeated. How much more Screw-You-I'm-Taking-You-for-Granted can McCain get? Are conservatives complete suckers?

7. McCain's made great progress with independents by going against his party. Obama can do the same thing. Obvious areas of potential anti-Dem apostasy: Charter schools, firing incompetent teachers, class-based affirmative action, welfare. At least express some doubts about liberal legalism or the headlong rush to immigrant semi-amnesty. Last Tuesday Obama may have tried to make waves by talking about "schools filled with poor teachers"--a Dem no-no if there ever was one. It got buried by the lipstick pig. So don't complain. Say it again! ...

And Kaus is an Obama supporter, albeit a sane one.

Commentary's Jennifer Rubin expatiates:

They are preparing their excuses for defeat. No matter how foolhardy the Democratic primary voters in selecting a high risk candidate, no matter how bizarre the policy choices of that candidate, no matter how outlandishly wrong the conventional press wisdom and no matter how inept the campaign operation there is a cure-all excuse: McCain lied, our hopes died.

I am not saying Barack Obama is going to lose; I am saying the Obama Gang of Three (i.e. the mind-melded bloggers/MSM/campaign operation) now thinks that is a distinct possibility. So how to explain how they all messed up? When in doubt, revive the Lee Atwater/Karl Rove/Gore v. Bush/Swiftboat rationale which is “It is never our fault.”

The problem, of course, is that doesn’t work if the aim is to win elections. In fact the opposite occurs: the cures (e.g. violent partisan counterpunches, media whining) usually turn off key Independent voters. But if the aim is to save face with your peer groups (e.g. fellow journalists, campaign donors, political operatives) who want to know what the heck went wrong, it works as well as anything.

Finally, Tarantohas the last word too:

Can it really be true that the Democrats and the media are concentrating on assigning blame for a defeat that hasn't even happened yet?

Come to think of it, that was the approach they took to the Iraq war.

[my emphasis: H/T: Harry Reid]

Gibson Demonstrated to be a Total Two-Faced Hypocrite

Ed Morrissey quotes The Anchoress to show just what a go-fer stockboy Gibson was in his interviews with Barack Obama, whom he threw a bunch of billets doux and air kisses compared to his barely civil interrogation of Sarah Palin [marred by his own misinterpretaion of and outright distorting of a couple of gotcha questions.] Here's the comparison: [h/t: The Anchoress]

Obama interview:

How does it feel to break a glass ceiling?
How does it feel to “win”?
How does your family feel about your “winning” breaking a glass ceiling?
Who will be your VP?
Should you choose Hillary Clinton as VP?
Will you accept public finance?
What issues is your campaign about?
Will you visit Iraq?
Will you debate McCain at a town hall?
What did you think of your competitor’s [Clinton] speech?

Palin interview:
-Do you have enough qualifications for the job you’re seeking? Specifically have you visited foreign countries and met foreign leaders?
-Aren’t you conceited to be seeking this high level job?
Questions about foreign policy
-territorial integrity of Georgia
-allowing Georgia and Ukraine to be members of NATO
-NATO treaty
-Iranian nuclear threat
-what to do if Israel attacks Iran
-Al Qaeda motivations
-the Bush Doctrine
-attacking terrorists harbored by Pakistan
-Is America fighting a holy war? [misquoted Palin]

I'd like to see the Golden One's answer on public financing [which he often said he would accept, until he flipped & decided to raise his own campaign cache---not that changing his "mind" seems to bother any of his DNC affiliates in the MSM. Or the town hall answer, which the unaccountable Oprah protege probably dodged with his usual hemming & hawing.

Of course, Gibson had an insufferable patronizing air during the Palin interview which demonstrated the media elite's disdain for people who actually worked with their hands [first mate on her husband's fishing boat] or had a small business [she licensed a consulting firm before running for mayor.]

Somehow, the MSM seems to think that being a lawyer and passing the bar exempts candidates [like John Edwards] from tough questions. The flagrante delicto $400 haircut VP was cosseted and verbally fondled by Gibson in '04:

Newsbusters, meanwhile, has Gibson’s interview with John Edwards in 2004 after being selected as John Kerry’s running mate. Edwards had less than a full term in the Senate as his entire political background, and no foreign-policy, military, or executive experience at all. Yet Gibson didn’t press Edwards on these points at all. In fact, the entire interview consisted of a hard-hitting interrogation … on how mean Republicans are:

GIBSON: You speak with such equanimity this morning. Didn’t they make you mad last night?

EDWARDS: Oh, I thought they were over the top, completely over the top. And, and actually what bothered me more than anything was in the midst of -I mean, there was, if you, if you got up and went to your refrigerator to get a Diet Coke, you would -you would miss everything Dick Cheney had to say about health care and everything he had to say about jobs. I mean, this is the first, we’ve had 11 straight presidents in this country, Charlie, who have created jobs. This is, until George Bush. You know, we’ve got all these folks who are having trouble with their health care premiums going up, 26, 27 hundred dollars, and what do they have to say about it? Nothing. I mean, don’t people deserve to know from their president and vice president what it is they’ve done and what it is they’re going to do? And instead, all we hear is a lot of rhetoric about, about their opponent. I mean, I just think leaders in this country, the American people deserve leaders who are better than that and do better than that.

GIBSON: Did you get mad, though?

EDWARDS: Oh, yeah. I was, I was, especially about the personal attacks against John Kerry, because they’re false. I know this guy and I know what he’s made of inside and he’s ready to lead this country.

"Angry" would have been the better term, as John Hair-and-Makeup was mad about Rielle [oops, that came later!]

Newsbusters is one of my daily reads and keeps the fire to the feet of the fawning obsequious pandering the MSM does to all Democrats on an hourly basis. Accountability is something only Repubs need to worry about.

Libtard MSM in complete tizzy about Sarah Palin

Bill Kristol has a nice short piece in The Weekly Standard which promotes the obvious idea that liberal lies and exaggerations and misleading statements are found out almost immediately in the current internet-drenched Ocean of Ideas & Emotions. Kristol spanks pathetic ddwwb Howie Kurtz, who used to be a sensible reporter, for starters:

he liberal media are angry. Very, very angry. How do we know? Howard Kurtz, the Washington Post's chronicler of all things media, says so:

The media are getting mad. Whether it's the latest back-and-forth over attack ads, the silly lipstick flap or the continuing debate over Sarah and sexism, you can just feel the tension level rising several notches. Maybe it's a sense that this is crunch time, that the election is on the line, that the press is being manipulated (not that there's anything new about that).

Of course, politicians are always trying to manipulate the media. And the liberal media are always allowing themselves to be manipulated by liberal politicians. So why the foot-stamping snit by liberal journalists? Not because "the press is being manipulated." Rather, because the American people are resisting manipulation by the media.

For, as Kurtz goes on to say, the media "are increasingly challenging false or questionable claims by the McCain campaign." In other words, the media are going after McCain. In his piece Kurtz cites two allegedly false claims from McCain ads that are in fact basically true--or, at least, no more one-sided than dozens of other campaign ads. Back when Barack Obama was coasting toward victory, normal campaign exaggerations ("You know, John McCain wants to continue a war in Iraq perhaps as long as 100 years") didn't fill the media with loathing for Obama. Now the McCain camp's exaggerations do.

Why? Because McCain is doing well. And because Sarah Palin is surviving--even flourishing--in the midst of

the liberal media onslaught.

When the media get mad, they don't just pout. They pounce. How? By any means necessary. The day of Kurtz's article, September 11, ABC's Charlie Gibson conducted his first interview of Sarah Palin. Gibson asked: "You said recently, in your old church, 'Our national leaders are sending U.S. soldiers on a task that is from God.' Are we fighting a holy war?"

Palin responded, "You know, I don't know if that was my exact quote."

"Exact words," Gibson triumphantly retorted.

Not so fast. As Palin explained, quite eloquently, what she was saying was in the spirit of Lincoln: "Let us not pray that God is on our side in a war or any other time, but let us pray that we are on God's side." The tape of Palin's church appearance bore out her interpretation and revealed Gibson's mischaracterization. "Pray for our military men and women," she had said, "who are striving to do what is right. Also, for this country, that our leaders, our national leaders, are sending [U.S. soldiers] out on a task that is from God." Gibson had made it sound as if Palin were claiming to know God's will, rather than praying that U.S. actions might be in accord with God's will and in a cause worthy of God's blessing.

No doubt the mere fact of Palin's asking for any kind of blessing on our troops and our national leaders at some backwoods Alaska church was sufficiently distracting to the scripters of Gibson's questions that they didn't look closely at the wording. God knows (so to speak) what they believe at a place like that! Why, their kids probably even enlist in the Army to fight our enemies.

In the culture war, the libtard version of "reality" in the "Reality Based Community" is that normal people with traditional values exist to be taxed and shut up about the policies their intellectual betters & elitist political mentors instruct them are best for them, like a parent in the past telling a child to swallow cod-liver oil. It'll all be over shortly. But the libtards have a problem with national security issues and are flummoxed when confronted with the universe beyond our borders where very real enemies of the USA exist and are working tirelessly to attack us overseas and right here at home. When Charlie Gibson asked [in a donnish tweedy patronizing way] about the Bush Doctrine, then talked down to her as he elaborated on which version of the Doctrine he was inquiring about, Sarah's first response might have been to refer to Pearl Harbor, as that was an occasion when a preemptive move of some sort might have caused the militarist regime in Nippon to reassess. Anyhow, she passed the interview with a minimum of less-than-magic moments. Kristol ends his comments on the MSM & their palpable appetite to deconstruct Sarah this way:

Within hours of the ABC interview, the Washington Post distorted straightforward remarks made by Palin that same day to U.S. soldiers deploying to Iraq. She praised them for going over to help "defend the innocent from the enemies who planned and carried out and rejoiced in the death of thousands of Americans." Palin clearly meant that our soldiers would be fighting Al Qaeda in Iraq--a group connected to the al Qaeda central command responsible for 9/11. The Post claimed to believe that Palin was asserting a connection between Saddam Hussein and 9/11--as if she thought soldiers now heading to Iraq were going to fight Saddam's regime--and triumphantly noted that even the Bush administration no longer asserted such a connection (it never did, in fact).
Palin's remarks should have been unexceptional: We've been fighting Al Qaeda in Iraq for several years now. But the media are desperate to try to make her look foolish. In the same interview, she praised Ronald Reagan for having won the Cold War. What a gaffe, some media watchdogs barked. The Soviet Union didn't collapse until three years after Reagan left office! Gotcha!

Not a chance. Sarah Palin is quickly proving to be more than a match for the mad, mad media. Having foolishly started a war with her that they can't win, the liberal media would be well advised, for once, to implement their own favorite war-fighting strategy: cut and run.

To ask the ravers and demented arrogant collection of agenda-driven libtards to cease & desist probably is like King Canute commanding the tides to stop coming in---but it is important to remember that the majority of Americans still seem "normal" and fair-minded enough that McCain/Palin have a chance to pull an amazing upset November 4th.

Obama A Creature of the Drive-By Media

The Media Research Center has done an extensive report on how Barack Obama soared past presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton to win the Democrat 's nomination for president. The exhaustive study came up with startling conclusions from its research:

It was the closest nomination contest in a generation, with just one-tenth of a percentage point — 41,622 votes out of more than 35 million cast — separating Barack Obama from Hillary Clinton when the Democratic primaries ended in June. Obama’s margin among elected delegates was almost as thin, just 51 to 48 percent.

Why did this young man vault from relative obscurity to a stunning victory over the hither-to thought impregnable Clinton "Machine?" You know the answer already---a total and complete media bias in favor of Obama & against any opponents:

Barack Obama had a crucial advantage over his rivals this year: the support of the national media, especially the three broadcast networks. At every step of his national political career, network reporters showered the Illinois Senator with glowing media coverage, building him up as a political celebrity and exhibiting little interest in investigating his past associations or exploring the controversies that could have threatened his campaign.

This study will be relegated to the non-news section if at all, but it does bear very much attention because it is so thorough:

the key findings of the Media Research Center’s exhaustive analysis of ABC, CBS and NBC evening news coverage of Barack Obama — every story, every soundbite, every mention — from his first appearance on a network broadcast in May 2000 through the end of the Democratic primaries in June 2008, a total of 1,365 stories..... found that the networks’ coverage — particularly prior to the formal start of Obama’s presidential campaign — bordered on giddy celebration of a political "rock star" rather than objective newsgathering.

Although any sentient being with an IQ over 80 might have noticed the same conclusion, the actual numbers are mind-boggling:

# The three broadcast networks treated Obama to nearly seven times more good press than bad — 462 positive stories (34% of the total), compared with only 70 stories (just 5%) that were critical.

# NBC Nightly News was the most lopsided, with 179 pro-Obama reports (37%), more than ten times the number of anti-Obama stories (17, or 3%). The CBS Evening News was nearly as skewed, with 156 stories spun in favor of Obama (38%), compared to a mere 21 anti-Obama reports (5%). ABC’s World News was the least slanted, but still tilted roughly four-to-one in Obama’s favor (127 stories to 32, or 27% to 7%).

# Barack Obama received his best press when it mattered most, as he debuted on the national scene. All of the networks lavished him with praise when he was keynote speaker at the 2004 Democratic Convention, and did not produce a single negative story about Obama (out of 81 total reports) prior to the start of his presidential campaign in early 2007.

# The networks downplayed or ignored major Obama gaffes and scandals. Obama’s relationship with convicted influence peddler Tony Rezko was the subject of only two full reports (one each on ABC and NBC) and mentioned in just 15 other stories. CBS and NBC also initially downplayed controversial statements from Obama’s longtime pastor Jeremiah Wright, but heavily praised Obama’s March 18 speech on race relations.

# While Obama’s worst media coverage came during the weeks leading up to the Pennsylvania primary on April 22, even then the networks offered two positive stories for every one that carried a negative spin (21% to 9%). Obama’s best press of the year came after he won the North Carolina primary on May 6 — after that, 43 percent of stories were favorable to Obama, compared to just one percent that were critical.

# The networks minimized Obama’s liberal ideology, only referring to him as a "liberal" 14 times in four years. In contrast, reporters found twice as many occasions (29) to refer to Obama as either a "rock star," "rising star" or "superstar" during the same period.

# In covering the campaign, network reporters highlighted voters who offered favorable opinions about Obama. Of 147 average citizens who expressed an on-camera opinion about Obama, 114 (78%) were pro-Obama, compared to just 28 (19%) that had a negative view, with the remaining five offering a mixed opinion.

The Executive Summary merely tells us what a colossal mountain of factitious and tendentious dishonesty was committed by the broadcast networks:

Perhaps if he had faced serious journalistic scrutiny instead of media cheerleading, Barack Obama might still have won his party’s nomination. But the tremendously positive coverage that the networks bestowed upon his campaign was of incalculable value. The early celebrity coverage helped make Obama a nationally-known figure with a near-perfect media image. The protectiveness that reporters showed during the early primaries made it difficult for his rivals to effectively criticize him. And when it came to controversies such as the Wright affair, network reporters acted more as defenders than as journalists in an adversarial relationship. If the media did not actually win the Democratic nomination for Barack Obama, they surely made it a whole lot easier.

I'm going to dive into the PDF version later when I get a little spare time, but right now I must go to worship at my Sarah Palin altar in a corner of my house, where the candles and incense & print-outs from my Apple allow me to contemplate the MSM's humiliation while listening & reading to the gnashing of teeth in their outer darkness.

Life is good, but Sarah has made it much much better.

Why Palin [Short Putts] the Democrats Bat Guano Caa-raazy

Morris & McGann have a great little NYPost piece on the current hysterical hyperventilating frenzy the Dems are experiencing imitating a grand mal seizure.[h/t: Clayton Cramer]

Democrats can't stomach seeing the feminist movement's impetus for greater female political participation and empowerment "hijacked" by a pro-life woman who espouses traditional values. They must obliterate her, lest her popularity eat away at their party's core.

So the Democrats are hysterical in their attacks on her. South Carolina's Democratic Party chairwoman, Carol Fowler (wife of a national party chairman), said that the only qualification Palin had for vice president was that she hadn't had an abortion. Tabloids are digging up dirt on Palin's children. And liberal bloggers have suggested that Palin would neglect her children if she were elected (while the Democratic candidate has young children at home, too).

That liberals would resort to such blatant sexism shows their desperation.

But the Fox News poll of Sept. 8-9 indicates a deeper reality of Palin's popularity. On the question of which of the four candidates best understands what day-to-day life is like in America, Palin finished first, with 33 percent. (Obama drew 32 percent, McCain 17 percent and Biden 10 percent.)

She's not popular because she's a radical feminist or pro-choice advocate. It's because she understands what it's like to be a woman in 21st century America.

The elitist snobs in the limousine liberal leftist Dems are trying to sell [that word again!] America a "pig in a poke."
Obama's record has been airbrushed or ignored unless it fits the Anointed One's too-good-to-be-true sanitized bio. They hate Hannity because he has brought Ayers & Rev. Wright out from the shadows---Obama seems to bring up Sean inordinately often. The fact that Obama has less executive [or even business] experience than Sarah Palin grates on them. He is truly an "Invisible Man" of the Ralph Ellison novel. His transcripts & thesis at Columbia U. have "disappeared," like the Rose Law Firm re cords in Little Rock. His legal work for Rezko has been kept under wraps, although the convicted felon does not now have any need for privacy---why can't the country know how Obama was financed by Rezko. Oops, turns out most of Obama's State Senate race records are also "lost." And the records of the Annenberg Project which Obama & Ayers worked on are "unavailable. Who's kidding whom? As for Sarah:

She's never ascended to the elite, so she doesn't need to stoop to conquer as most well-heeled feminist leaders must. She lives far from the plastic pseudoreality where a fossilized ideology substitutes for human compassion and empathy. As such, she rises above the slogans of both the left and the right and proposes to bring to Washington a dose of reality - a taste of real life.

She may become the first woman in national office - yet the Democrats, feminists and liberals can't control her, and that burns them up.

Elections come and go, but Palin is a far more fundamental threat to the Democratic Party. And that's why they fear her so.

Sarah is the breath of fresh air this country needs, not a confection invented by the MSM with more hidden records [remember Kerry's promise to release his Navy records?] than any previous candidate, and a paper-thin resume of a two-year Senate term before he ran for POTUS.

The Dems' carefully crafted applecart and the dirty tricks that got them Congress in '06, all unexamined by the MSM, are also unexamined in '08. Not one major MSM outlet has done more than a cursory nod toward digging into Obama's past, yet Wasilla is crawling with Dem operatives.

Sarah has saved the country from buying a pig in a poke, and for that we should hold her in high regard.

Sarah Threatens Adversarial Feminism---Off With Her Head!

Jeff Bell has a succinct explanation for the collective grand mal seizure that the left has suffered as it flails writhing on the ground with saliva-flecked lips---ever since Sarah Palin got McCain's Veep nod:

It was the turbulent 1960s that proved a strategic turning point for the left. The worldwide social and cultural upheavals that culminated in 1968 were felt as a crisis of confidence by institutions in the West. Some institutions (universities, for example) defected to the rebels, while others saw their centuries-long influence on the population greatly weaken or drain away virtually overnight.

In the short run, most political elites weathered the storm. A big reason, the left gradually realized, was that socialist economics had become an albatross. Increasingly, the democratic parties of the left in Western countries downplayed socialism or even decoupled from it, leaving them free to pursue the anti-institutional, relativistic moral crusade that has been in the DNA of the left all along.

This newly revitalized social and cultural agenda made it possible for the left to shrug off the collapse of European communism and the Soviet Union nearly two decades ago. Even in countries like China where the Communist party retained dictatorial power, socialist economics became a thing of the past. Attempts to suppress religion and limit the autonomy of the family did not.

For the post-1960s, post-socialist left, the single most important breakthrough has been the alliance between modern feminism and the sexual revolution. This was far from inevitable. Up until around 1960, attempts at sexual liberation were resisted by most educated women. In the wake of the success of Playboy and other mass-circulation pornographic magazines in the 1950s, men were depicted as the initiators and main beneficiaries of sexual liberation, women as intolerant of promiscuity as well as potential victims of predatory "liberated" men.

With the introduction of the Pill around 1960, things abruptly began to change. Fears of overpopulation legitimated a contraceptive ethic throughout middle-class society in North America, Europe, Japan, and the Soviet bloc. China, which discouraged contraception and welcomed population gains under Mao Zedong, flipped to the extreme of the One Child policy in 1979, shortly after pro-capitalist reformers took charge and fixed on strict population control as an integral and unquestioned part of the package of Western-style development.

The fact that the Pill was taken only by women gave them a greater feeling of control over their sexual activity and eroded their social and psychological resistance to premarital sex. "No fault" divorce, a term borrowed from the field of auto insurance, in reality amounted to unilateral divorce and began to undermine the idea of marriage as a binding mutual contract oriented toward the procreation and nurturing of children. Contrary to nearly every prediction, the ubiquity of far more reliable methods of contraception and the growing ideological separation of sex from reproduction, coincided with a huge increase in unwed pregnancies.

Though earlier versions of feminism tended to embrace children and elevate motherhood, the more adversarial feminism that gained a mass base in virtually every affluent democracy beginning in the 1970s preached that children and childbearing were the central instrumentality of men's subjugation of women. This more than anything else in the menu of the post-socialist left raised toward cultural consensus a vision in which the monogamous family was what prevented humanity from achieving a Rousseau-like "natural" state of freedom from all laws and all bonds of mutual obligation.

If this analysis is correct, the single most important narrative holding the left together in today's politics and culture is the one offered--often with little or no dissent--by adversarial feminism. The premise of this narrative is that for women to achieve dignity and self-fulfillment in modern society, they must distance themselves, not necessarily from men or marriage or childbearing, but from the kind of marriage in which a mother's temptation to be with and enjoy several children becomes a synonym for holding women back and cheating them out of professional success.[emphasis mine]

Sarah Palin's success in scaling the political ladder to the top while having a "normal" family makes her a walking talking rebuke to the barren crones like Jong, Steinem, Dowd et al who are specimens of a busted paradigm, sports of nature whose lives have been rendered meaningless by Sarah's having it all, her way, the traditional way of Kirche, Kinder, Kuche plus political and professional success as the first female Republican VP candidate.

One can hear the gnashing of teeth in the outer darkness [and read the feminist despair between the lines on the lib Op-Ed pages.]

Obama & Biden Voted For The Bridge to Nowhere---Palin Dropped it From State Budget

Council for Citizens Against Government Waste (CCAGW) a non-partisan citizens-action group, finally clears away the garbage & lies the MSM/DNC/Obamaniacs have been putting forward to slime Sarah Palin concerning The Bridge to Nowhere. Indeed, Obama & Biden voted FOR the bridge before Palin after election DROPPED it from the State Budget:

There has been much debate and even more speculation about how funds for the Bridge to Nowhere were first provided, Congress's role in changing the nature of the funding, and the various options the state of Alaska had to build the bridge," said CCAGW President Tom Schatz. "Many in the media and the public are providing an opinion when they should be providing the facts. We intend to continually update this document on our website as additional verifiable information becomes available."
The Bridge to Nowhere was first funded in August 2005 through the 2005 SAFETEA-LU Act through a $223 million earmark inserted by then-House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman Don Young (R-Alaska). In October, 2005, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) offered an amendment to the fiscal 2006 Transportation Appropriations Act to transfer $75 million in funding for the Bridge to Nowhere, along with money for the Knik Arm Bridge in Alaska, to support the rebuilding of the Twin Spans Bridge in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. His amendment was defeated by a vote of 15-82. Senators Biden (D-Del.) and Obama (D-Ill.) voted against the amendment; Sen. McCain (R-Ariz.) was not present for the vote. Get that?
Senators Biden (D-Del.) and Obama (D-Ill.) voted against the amendment; Sen. McCain (R-Ariz.) was not present for the vote. IN OTHER WORDS, BIDEN & OBAMA VOTED AGAINST AN AMENDMENT TO TRANSFER THE BRIDGE TO NOWHERE MONEY TO NOLA.
In November, 2005, Congress included language in the final version of the fiscal 2006 Transportation Appropriations Act that allowed the state of Alaska to either spend money on the two bridges or on other surface transportation projects. In October, 2006, Alaska Governor Frank Murkowski included $91 million for the Gravina Island Bridge in his budget submission for fiscal year 2007. As a candidate for governor, Sarah Palin expressed a mixture of support and doubt about the bridge, particularly about how the project would be funded. As governor, she submitted her budget on January 17, 2007 without any money for the bridge. On July 17, 2007, the Associated Press reported that "The state of Alaska on Friday officially abandoned the 'bridge to nowhere' project that became a nationwide symbol of federal pork-barrel spending." Governor Palin said in a statement that "Ketchikan desires a better way to reach the airport, but the $398 million bridge is not the answer."
"Media reports that Congress killed the Bridge to Nowhere are not accurate," said Schatz. "The 2006 transportation appropriations bill allowed Alaska to decide whether or not to move forward. Governor Murkowski said yes; Governor Palin said no. Any discussion about the project should begin with facts."

The Council for Citizens Against Government Waste is the lobbying arm of Citizens Against Government Waste, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to eliminating waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement in government.
SOURCE: Council for Citizens Against Government Waste (CCAGW)

The monstrous prevarication machine of Obamaniac MSM/DNC hacks and ink-stained wretches will predictably ignore the above and spew their poisonous drivel non-stop---following their mentors Joseph Goebbels and his great admirer, Joe Stalin. Stalin's politics were different, but he did like Hitler's BIG LIE, BIG SMEAR agitprop & had Beria & his underlings mimic the German Communications czar.

The left likes authoritarian dictatorial means to achieve their idyllic end of government becoming a giant ATM that equalizes income rather than opportunity. The lies go right past what used to be their consciences because they actually believe what they are saying----psychologically & clinically, this is a manifestation of a mass psychosis.

But Mark Steyn explains it much better than me.

Obama's "Lost Years"

The Wall Street Journal might have asked the question: Why do we know more about Trig Palin, a six-month old, than we do about Obama's years at Columbia U.?

I do believe that the McCain camp has a lot of potentially "fissile" material in the "lost" Obama Columbia U. thesis on confronting the Soviets on nuclear issues. The WSJ mentions the "lost" thesis & Obama's missing academic records [while the leftist MSM trumpets far and wide McCain's position near the bottom of his Annapolis class].

The WSJ doesn't ask about the "lost" records of his race for State Senate in Illinois, the sequestered Annenberg Project materials in which he worked with Bill Ayers & B. Dohrn, the legal work Obama did for his convicted felon friend and financier Rezko.

Also, while supersleuths in Wasilla & Juneau & Anchorage pore through archives and dumpster-dive for any stuff on Sarah & Famly, the Chicago Trib & Sun-Times have unearthed zilch, nada, rien de tout, zippo about the mentoring of Michelle by B. Dohrn at Kirkland & Ellis, a brownshoe lawfirm in Chicago, and Michelle's bringing Barack to the same firm, with Dohrn still supervising the "interns" as a "paralegal" a year later. [So Michelle & Barack were "mentored" by a convicted felon in their internship in a law firm, though the media hasn't managed to find that out in 19 months!]

There are a lot of missing pieces in Obama's background the pliant and complicit MSM have "overlooked."

On purpose.

Why not investigate these things instead of Track Palin's alleged abuse of oxycontin & cocaine?

And six-month old Trig's resume is about as thick as Obama's, as an opaque veil continues to hang over large chunks of his past. Indeed, nobody at Columbia in '81-83 [when I was a monthly member of The Columbia Middle East Seminar] seems to remember him. Does he have something to hide or was he merely a C-student like GWB, Kerry, & Al Gore [GWB had the highest GPA of these three academic mediocrities.]

We won't find out from questioning by the MSM. Bill O'Reilly gave it a good shot on some subjects, but softballs are all anyone else lobs at BHO. Lil SNL Brian, Keith-O, Tweety & Wolf-man & Larry Stillalive sure won't probe at all.

Maybe Katie Couric has the balls to ask him about "the lost years!!"