ACORN, Obama, and the mortgage mess.

The financial markets were teetering on the edge of an abyss last week. The secretary of the Treasury was literally on his knees begging the speaker of the House not to sabotage the bailout bill. The crash of falling banks made the earth tremble. The Republican presidential candidate suspended his campaign to deal with the crisis. And amid all this, the Democrats in Congress managed to find time to slip language into the bailout legislation that would provide a dandy little slush fund for ACORN.

ACORN stands for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, a busy hive of left-wing agitation and “direct action” that claims chapters in 50 cities and 100,000 dues-paying members. ACORN is where Sixties leftovers who couldn’t get tenure at universities wound up. That the bill-writing Democrats remembered their pet clients during such an emergency speaks volumes. This attempted gift to ACORN (stripped out of the bill after outraged howls from Republicans) demonstrates how little Democrats understand about what caused the mess we’re in.

ACORN does many things under the umbrella of “community organizing.” They agitate for higher minimum wages, attempt to thwart school reform, try to unionize welfare workers (that is, those welfare recipients who are obliged to work in exchange for benefits) and organize voter registration efforts (always for Democrats, of course). Because they are on the side of righteousness and justice, they aren’t especially fastidious about their methods. In 2006, for example, ACORN registered 1,800 new voters in Washington. The only trouble was, with the exception of six, all of the names submitted were fake. The secretary of state called it the “worst case of election fraud in our state’s history.” As Fox News reported: “The ACORN workers told state investigators that they went to the Seattle public library, sat at a table and filled out the voter registration forms. They made up names, addresses, and Social Security numbers and in some cases plucked names from the phone book. One worker said it was a lot of hard work making up all those names and another said he would sit at home, smoke marijuana and fill out the forms.”

ACORN explained that this was an “isolated” incident, yet similar stories have been reported in Missouri, Michigan, Ohio, and Colorado — all swing states, by the way. ACORN members have been prosecuted for voter fraud in a number of states. (See www.rottenacorn.com.) Their philosophy seems to be that everyone deserves the right to vote, whether legal or illegal, living or dead.

ACORN recognized very early the opportunity presented by the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) of 1977. As Stanley Kurtz has reported, ACORN proudly touted “affirmative action” lending and pressured banks to make subprime loans. Madeline Talbott, a Chicago ACORN leader, boasted of “dragging banks kicking and screaming” into dubious loans. And, as Sol Stern reported in City Journal, ACORN also found a remunerative niche as an “advisor” to banks seeking regulatory approval. “Thus we have J.P. Morgan & Co., the legatee of the man who once symbolized for many all that was supposedly evil about American capitalism, suddenly donating hundreds of thousands of dollars to ACORN.” Is this a great country or what? As conservative community activist Robert Woodson put it, “The same corporations that pay ransom to Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton pay ransom to ACORN.”

ACORN attracted Barack Obama in his youthful community organizing days. Madeline Talbott hired him to train her staff — the very people who would later descend on Chicago’s banks as CRA shakedown artists. The Democratic nominee later funneled money to the group through the Woods Fund, on whose board he sat, and through the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, ditto. Obama was not just sympathetic — he was an ACORN fellow traveler.

Now you could make the case that before 2008, well-intentioned people were simply unaware of what their agitation on behalf of non-credit-worthy borrowers could lead to. But now? With the whole financial world and possibly the world economy trembling and cracking like a cement building in an earthquake, Democrats continue to try to fund their friends at ACORN? And, unashamed, they then trot out to the TV cameras to declare “the party is over” for Wall Street (Nancy Pelosi)? The party should be over for the Democrats who brought us to this pass. If Obama wins, it means hiring an arsonist to fight a fire.

NRO

 New, working link here.

Life without electricity is causing considerable Ike Fatigue for people who are accustomed to roofs over their heads, electricity, and drinkable water. Hundreds of thousands stayed put and now live by candlelight, while hundreds of thousands more returned to darkened and damaged dwellings. Daylight means an extended commute into the city for people expected to be in their places with bright, shiny faces, but who operate on little sleep and an abundance of anxiety.

Journalists never fully report on the logistics of disaster recovery. It’s too big of a story and doesn’t lend itself easily to quick sound bites. But consider that search and rescue personnel conducted 470 missions, rescuing 1,900 storm victims; officials authorized up to 7,500 Guard personnel to active duty; FEMA distributed 2.5 million liters of water, 2 million meals, and 100,000 tarps in the first week after Ike; Domino's Pizza gave away 1,000 pizzas to recovery workers and displaced people in one day; Comcast called in 500 extra technicians to bring customers back online; CenterPoint Energy gathered more than 1,000 trucks and maybe twice as many people from around the country just to clear away trees so 14,000 linemen from Texas and other states could restore power to a 15,000-square-mile area just in Texas.

Here’s a small list of things we’ve not seen: rampant looting; reports of assaults and rapes; bullets fired at helicopters and rescue workers; people standing around complaining about FEMA; a general meltdown of society.

Here’s a small list of things we have seen: people clearing their property and repairing their homes; neighbors pooling resources; thousands of volunteers collecting food and clothing with thousands more distributing water and food from social service agencies, churches, and FEMA; a strong and immutable spirit that is Texas, and in reality, that is America.

Very telling.

Townhall Blog

Soledad Aviles, an immigrant from Mexico with a 6th grade education who can't read or write English and makes $9 an hour, was approved for a mortgage of $615, 000 by Washington Mutual. It should be noted off the bat that Washington Mutual is one of many banks that accept the Matricula Consular ID card as proof of identity and which is easily forgable. I assume Aviles is not an illegal alien (but who knows considering the source of this story and the fact that they like to omit those little tidbits all of the time).

The LA Times gives us his sad story below as he is forced to then rent out his house to illegal aliens to make the payments and sleep on a couch.

Washington Mutual should be brought up on charges along with all of the people who touched this mortgage and put it through. All those living at the residence who are illegal, including Aviles and his wife if found to be so, should be deported and the house should be seized and sold off at auction with all proceeds going towards the border fence, interior enforcement and the prosecution of businesses who hire and make loans to illegal aliens. The government also in no way should allow any bailout money for these sub-prime mortgages to go to companies that have actively courted illegal aliens, like Washington Mutual, Wells Fargo and Bank of America. Money that - need I remind you - is actually your money as a US citizen, since it comes straight out of your taxes.

What this story doesn't note is that many of these so called "Spanish speaking" people they are referring to are actually illegal aliens.

But guess what, they intend to win out in the end as another shark in the water that feeds off of illegal aliens, lawyers, are suing for millions and million on their behalf.

Soledad Aviles dreamed for years of owning a home, with a plot of land where he could grow corn and chiles as he did in his native Mexico. So he felt blessed last year when he learned he could buy a three-bedroom, single-story stucco house on West La Verne Avenue in Santa Ana.

Referred to a local loan broker by a trusted friend, he borrowed the entire purchase price of $615,000 from Washington Mutual at a high interest rate typical of sub-prime loans. The monthly payment, as he says he understood it, would be $3,600 -- steep for a glass cutter who made $9 an hour -- but Aviles counted on his wife and three of his six daughters, who also worked low-paying jobs, to contribute.

"We took out our pencils, figured out our take-home pay and figured out that if we all pitched in, it would work," said Aviles, 54, a stoop-shouldered, soft-spoken man with a sixth-grade education from Mexico.

Relying on the broker's word, he signed loan documents written in English, a language he neither speaks nor reads, Aviles said. He was shocked to learn afterward that the monthly payment would not be $3,600, but $4,800 -- a price that forced him to rent out bedrooms, the garage and an enclosed porch while he and his wife slept on the couch. He fed his family with food from friends and corn he grew.

...

"We think this is just the tip of the iceberg, in terms of the breadth and depth," said Steve Harding, Santa Ana's deputy city manager. Apart from the language barrier, he said, many first-generation immigrants might have been especially vulnerable to sub-prime lending because they avoided checking accounts and credit cards, which prevented them from qualifying for regular loans.

Let me just break here and point out that the only types who avoid checking accounts and credit cards are illegal aliens and those being paid under the table who avoid taxes. Legal immigrants don't have this issue because they have proper legal documents.

The state Department of Real Estate, nonprofits and the Mexican consulate also have reported a rise in mortgage complaints, many of them from homeowners saying they signed documents they didn't understand.

The nonprofits they mention are most certainly those in favor of illegal immigration and the ones who were pushing for these loans to be granted to illegal aliens in the first place. As for the Mexican Consulate... what the hell are they doing sticking their nose in our banking business now?

... Kerstin Arusha, a directing attorney at the nonprofit Law Foundation of Silicon Valley, said that Spanish speakers, along with the elderly, "seem to be hardest hit by both sub-prime lending and predatory lending. There are many borrowers out there that were misled about the terms of the loan."

The Law Foundation is suing a broker, real estate agent and lender in federal court on behalf of nine Santa Clara County families, many of whom speak only Spanish

...

in Orange County, the district attorney's office has not reported an increase in prosecutions for fraudulent lending. Elizabeth Henderson, a prosecutor in the county's fraud unit, said many such crimes go unreported in immigrant communities because of a distrust of law enforcement and confusion over what had occurred.

A distrust of law enforcement? As we know every law abiding legal immigrant mistrusts law enforcement don't they?

[Aviles is] sitting in his Santa Ana home, waiting for the bank to kick him out or for his kidney to kill him... Aviles took out two loans, one for $492,000 at 8.5% interest and another for $123,000 at 11.1% interest. But he and his family struggled to meet the payments, even after the house was crammed with renters.

Tipped by: Immigration Watchdog where one commenter, Eddie B., makes this well made point.

WHERE DO YOU START HERE? THE FACT THAT HE IS AN INVADER? THE FACT THAT HE CAN’T READ ENGLISH AND IS TAKING OUT A LOAN FOR $600,000 AND MAKES $9.00 AN HOUR ($18,000 A YEAR…)? THE FACT THAT HE IS NOW RUNNING A FLOP HOUSE FOR INVADERS AND BREAKING FIRE MARSHAL CODES, HEALTH CODES, LOCAL COMMUNITY CODES? I MEAN, WHERE DO YOU START?

Diggers Realm

Speaker Nancy Pelosi has the plenary power to bring a bill to the floor of the House, and no parliamentary procedure can help a minority to block a majority will to pass it.  That’s one fact that has to be remembered while Pelosi and Barney Frank blame the House GOP over the collapse of the bailout bill:

“I didn’t know I was going to be the referee for an internal G.O.P. ideological civil war,” Mr. Frank said, according to The A.P.Thursday, in the Roosevelt Room after the session, the Treasury secretary, Henry M. Paulson Jr., literally bent down on one knee as he pleaded with Nancy Pelosi, the House Speaker, not to “blow it up” by withdrawing her party’s support for the package over what Ms. Pelosi derided as a Republican betrayal.

“I didn’t know you were Catholic,” Ms. Pelosi said, a wry reference to Mr. Paulson’s kneeling, according to someone who observed the exchange. She went on: “It’s not me blowing this up, it’s the Republicans.”

Mr. Paulson sighed. “I know. I know.”

If Pelosi has her entire caucus in line to support the Paulson plan, then she has the vote to pass it.  Some estimates have as many as 50 Republicans ready to support the plan in defiance of Boehner.  If that’s true, Pelosi could lose all of her Blue-Dog Democrats and still pass the bill.

So why not just call a vote?  Pelosi doesn’t want to get married to George Bush, that’s why.  She wants to spread the political risk and get consensus on a bailout plan so that the responsibility for any failure doesn’t rest solely on her shoulders, at least in the House.  Both Pelosi and Harry Reid wanted John McCain to deliver both GOP caucuses to cover their own butts on the bailout bill, and McCain — at least thus far — hasn’t convinced Boehner to do so.

It appears that Reid has enough Republicans on board to survive a filibuster.  George Bush will happily sign the bill as soon as he gets it from Capitol Hill.  Pelosi could deliver that bill with plenty of votes to spare simply by scheduling a vote.  She lacks the courage to do so.  That’s not the fault of the House GOP.

Update (AP): All of this is true but it’s also why McCain’s going to take the blame if they can’t pass it. Pelosi doesn’t need votes, she needs political cover; Maverick can’t give her the former but, as the GOP’s nominee, he can singlehandedly give her the latter by endorsing the deal. If he doesn’t, the consequences will be laid at his feet.

Hot Air

We've heard much from the media about CDOs, CDSs, and other previously obscure abbreviations. But we should be hearing more about this acronym: ACORN.

ACORN, as National Review readers will know, is a "community-organizin g" outfit with which Senator Obama was once closely allied, and for which he did work. ACORN has made a cottage industry out of leaning on banks and government to extend credit to house buyers who were bad risks for mortgages, i.e. subprime borrowers.

Americans for Limited Government calls them out today:

Americans for Limited Government President Bill Wilson today called upon Congressional leaders in a letter not to help people stay in homes they could never afford in the first place, and who would have never qualified for loans if the government had not encouraged loose lending.

The letter was addressed to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), House Republican Leader John Boehner (R-OH), Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Senator Barack Obama (D-IL), and Senator John McCain (R-AZ).

“The tens of millions of American families who have played by the rules and paid their bills must not be forced to bear the burden for reckless decisions made by the government,” wrote Wilson in his letter.

In a statement, Wilson laid the blame for loose lending at the government’s feet. “Thanks to the federal government artificially setting low interest rates and using the so-called Government Sponsored Enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as a housing welfare program, the bad loans made now threaten the greater economy.”

Wilson explained in more detail, “The government encouraged risky loans to low-income individuals via laws like the Community Reinvestment Act, plus with Clinton administration regulations of 1995 overseen by then-HUD Director Andrew Cuomo that made Fannie and Freddie the leaders in the subprime mortgage market.”

... As a result, Wilson believes that the Community Reinvestment Act and the 1995 regulations must be permanently repealed. According to the letter, “The government should not be encouraging loose credit to help low-income individuals to purchase homes. Instead, it must encourage honest credit so that there is not a repeat of the current mistakes. Only then will the true market demand for housing be known. The loose lending practices, and housing welfare programs administered by federal regulations and laws must be repealed.”

... In his statement, Wilson implored Congress not to repeat the same mistakes again: “The root cause of this problem was the government-created loose lending standards. If Congress should address anything, it should be to put an end, once and for all, to the ACORN-inspired housing welfare program that has pulled the nation’s economy into the most turbulent waters it has seen since the Great Depression.”

Imagine if the housing bubble hadn't burst, but there hadn't been all those dodgy subprime loans made and then securitized. We'd be reading stories about how America is having a wonderful housing boom but the poor and minorities are being left out. There's lots of greed and stupidity in this story, but we shouldn't ignore the fact that a big part of what is wrong comes from bad public policy designed to encourage homeownership, particularly among the poor. Unintended consequences are not to be denied.

But we're not going to hear much about ACORN's role in all this, or, by extension, Senator Obama's.

NRO

$100,000 DEAL | State to charity: What happened to garden money, other cash?

A $100,000 state grant for a botanic garden in Englewood that then-state Sen. Barack Obama awarded in 2001 to a group headed by a onetime campaign volunteer is now under investigation by the Illinois attorney general amid new questions, prompted by Chicago Sun-Times reports, about whether the money might have been misspent.

The garden was never built. And now state records obtained by the Sun-Times show $65,000 of the grant money went to the wife of Kenny B. Smith, the Obama 2000 congressional campaign volunteer who heads the Chicago Better Housing Association, which was in charge of the project for the blighted South Side neighborhood.

Smith wrote another $20,000 in grant-related checks to K.D. Contractors, a construction company that his wife, Karen D. Smith, created five months after work on the garden was supposed to have begun, records show. K.D. is no longer in business.

Attorney General Lisa Madigan -- a Democrat who is supporting Obama's presidential bid -- is investigating "whether this charitable organization properly used its charitable assets, including the state funds it received," Cara Smith, Madigan's deputy chief of staff, said Wednesday.

In addition to the 2001 grant that Obama directed to the housing association as a "member initiative," the not-for-profit group got a separate $20,000 state grant in 2006.

Madigan's office has notified Obama's presidential campaign of the probe, which was launched this week. But Obama's actions in awarding the money are not a focus of the investigation, Smith said.

Questions about the grant, though, come as spending on local pet projects has become an issue in Obama's campaign against John McCain.

Sun Times

Whether he knew it or not, Clinton was going against virtually all press outlets that have been pointing fingers at Republicans since this crisis began, and likely much to the dismay of such folk actually agreed with a Fox News segment aired on Tuesday's "Special Report" (video embedded right):

BRIT HUME, HOST: In the recent spate of government bailouts, buyouts and rescues, the federal takeovers of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are arguably the biggest of them all. And those two firms are also arguably the biggest reason for the credit crisis in the first place. So the question arises -- how did this come to be? Chief Washington correspondent Jim Angle reports.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JIM ANGLE, CHIEF WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): There is one nagging question behind all the debate over how to get out of this mess.

CHRIS DODD (D-CT), SENATE BANKING COMMITTEE CHMN: American taxpayers are angry and they demand to know how we arrived at this moment.

ELIZABETH DOLE (R), NORTH CAROLINA SENATOR: My constituents, and indeed taxpayers across the nation are asking how we arrived at this crisis. It is infuriating.

ANGLE: But Senator Dole and others think they know the answer, and it's something the Senate tried to fix three years ago but was thwarted.

DOLE: To the mismanagement of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which was made possible by weak oversight and little accountability.

MEL MARTINEZ (R), FLORIDA SENATOR: A lot of what we're dealing with today has its origins in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

ANGLE: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, backed by the federal government, buy mortgage loans from the lenders who make them. But four years ago, both were in trouble over shoddy accounting. Fannie Mae Chief Franklin Raines, President Clinton's former budget director, was fired. To placate those in Congress who watched over them, Fannie and Freddie promised to do more to help poor people get mortgages. That led them to buy riskier and riskier home loans from private lenders creating incentives for everyone to make shakier loans.

PETER WALLISON, AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE: The problem is that they encouraged very bad mortgages to be made by banks and other institutions, because Fannie and Freddie would buy them.

ANGLE: Eventually, they bought trillions of dollars worth of mortgages, a substantial portion of them based on poor credit, then resold many of them to financial institutions who thought they were safe because the federal government was behind them.

WALLISON: As a result of this appearance that they were backed by the government, people never paid very much attention to the assets they were acquiring or the risks they were taking.

ANGLE: And so shaky mortgages spread throughout the system. But in 2005, the Senate Banking Committee, then chaired by Republican Richard Shelby, tried to rein in the two organizations bypassing some strong new regulations.

WALLISON: Which would have prevented Fannie and Freddie from acquiring this bad -- these bad mortgages. It actually gave a new regulator for Fannie and Freddie the kinds of powers that a bank regulator had.

ANGLE: All the Republicans voted for it. All the Democrats, including the current chairman, Senator Chris Dodd, voted against it, and that was after Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan had issued a stark warning to senators that Fannie and Freddie were playing with fire. Greenspan said without stronger regulations, "We increase the possibility of insolvency and crisis. Without restrictions on the size of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, we put at risk our ability to preserve safe and sound financial markets in the United States."

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ANGLE: Which turned out to be exactly right, but because Democrats blocked it, those new regulations never got consideration by the full Senate and died. So that's how we got into this mess, and how we missed a chance to avoid it. Getting out of it now, of course, will be a lot more difficult -- Brit.

HUME: Oh, boy. Thanks, Jim.

Two days later, former President Clinton agreed:

CHRIS CUOMO, ABC NEWS: A little surprising for you to hear the Democrats saying, "This came out of nowhere, this is all about the Republicans. We had nothing to do with this." Nancy Pelosi saying it. She signed the '99 Gramm Bill. She knew what was going on with the SEC. They're all sophisticated people. Is that playing politics in this situation?

BILL CLINTON: Well, maybe everybody does that a little bit. I think the responsibility the Democrats have may rest more in resisting any efforts by Republicans in the Congress or by me when I was President to put some standards and tighten up a little on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Imagine that!

Kudos to Cuomo for asking the question, and kudos to Clinton for being so honest, especially in an election year.

The only question remains whether other news outlets will follow suit and begin telling the American people just how many proposals Republicans have made in the past decade to impose tighter regulations and oversight on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and how such efforts were routinely thwarted by Democrats.

Stay tuned.

NewsBusters

Sarah Palin, Mrs. Nobody know-it-all shreiking cow from Alaska, the joke of American politics, plied with a couple of vodkas ... cheap little guttersnipe ... suppose you shut up ... you pith-headed little bimbo from the back of beyond ... So next time suppose you keep your mouth shut and while you're at it, make sure the members of your family keep their legs shut too. ... "

"...have contemptuously rejected the values and way of life of the middle class. They have stigmatized it as materialistic, decadent, bourgeois, degenerate, imperialistic, war-mongering, brutalized and corrupt ... They are right ... " 

1. Failure to conform to social norms ...

2. Deceitfulness ... or conning others for personal profit or pleasure;

3. Impulsivity or failure to plan ahead;

4. Irritability and aggressiveness ... ;

5. Reckless disregard for safety of self or others;

6. Consistent irresponsibility ... ;

7. Lack of remorse, as indicated by being indifferent to or rationalizing having hurt, mistreated, or stolen from another.

"Lenin was a pragmatist; ... he said that the Bolsheviks stood for getting power through the ballot box but would reconsider after they got the guns!" 

"... to the very first radical . . . who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom - Lucifer."

AS panicked politicians prepare to fork over $1 trillion in taxpayer funding to rescue Wall Street, they've fingered regulation, deregulation, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the Community Reinvestment Act, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, both Bushes, greedy banks, greedy borrowers, greedy short-sellers and minority-home-ownership promoters for blame.

But there's one villain that has slipped notice: how illegal immigration, crime-enabling banks and open-borders Bush policies fueled the mortgage crisis. It's no coincidence that the areas hardest hit by the foreclosure wave - Loudoun County, Va., California's Inland Empire, Stockton and San Joaquin Valley, and Las Vegas and Phoenix - also happen to be some of the nation's largest illegal alien sanctuaries. Half of the mortgages to Hispanics are subprime. A quarter of all those subprime loans are in default and foreclosure.

Regional reports across the country have decried the subprime meltdown's impact on illegal-immigrant "victims." A July report showed that in seven of the 10 metro areas with the highest foreclosure rates, Hispanics were at least one-third of the population; in two of those areas - Merced and Salinas-Monterey, Calif. - Hispanics comprised half the population. The National Council of La Raza and its Development Fund have received millions in federal funds to "counsel" their constituents on obtaining mortgages with little to no money down; the group almost succeeded in attaching a $10 million earmark for itself in one of the housing bills passed this spring.

For the last five years, I've reported on the rapidly expanding illegal-alien home-loan racket. The top banks clamoring for their handouts as their profits plummet, led by Wachovia and Bank of America, launched aggressive campaigns to woo illegal-alien homebuyers. The quasi-governmental Wisconsin Housing and Economic Development Authority guaranteed home loans to illegal immigrants.

The Washington Post noted in 2005: "Hispanics, the nation's fastest-growing major ethnic or racial group, have been courted aggressively by real-estate agents, mortgage brokers and programs for first-time buyers that offer help with closing costs. Ads proclaim: "Sin verificacion de ingresos! Sin verificacion de documento!" - which loosely translates as, 'Income tax forms are not required, nor are immigration papers.' "

Fraudsters also have engaged in house-flipping rings using illegal aliens as straw buyers. Among many examples the FBI cites: a conspiracy in Las Vegas involving a former Nevada First Residential Mortgage Company branch manager who directed loan officers and processors in the origination of 233 fraudulent Federal Housing Authority loans valued at over $25 million. The defrauders made and submitted false employment and income documentation for borrowers; most were illegal immigrants from Mexico. To date, the FBI reported, "Fifty-eight loans with a total value of $6.2 million have gone into default, with a loss to the Housing and Urban Development Department of over $1.9 million."

It's the tip of the iceberg. Thanks to lax Bush administration policies allowing illegal aliens to use "matricula consular cards" and taxpayer-identification numbers to open bank accounts, mortgage fraud has grown. Money-lenders still have no access to a verification system to check Social Security numbers before approving loans.

In an interview about rampant illegal-alien home-loan fraud, a spokeswoman for the US General Accounting Office told me five years ago: "Considering the size of Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Houston and other large cities throughout the United States known to be inundated with illegal aliens, I don't think the federal government is willing to expose this problem for financial reasons as well as for fear of political repercussions."

The chickens are coming home to roost. Law-abiding taxpayers are going to pay for it.

New York Post

Barack Obama's political career was born in the gutter of Chicago's South Side, and there's an old saying that the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.

Old sayings seem appropriate given Obama's use of one on Tuesday, September 9, 2008 when he said referring to Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska: "You know, you can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig".

The type of people who support him got a good laugh out of that. In fact, in the Virginia audience they started laughing half-way through the line because they knew exactly what he meant.

In an ad-lib line during her speech to the Republican National Convention Palin had referred to herself as a hockey mom and said: "They say that the only difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull is lipstick".

Of course, Obama and his crew denied that they were referring to the Governor. It was just an old joke, they claimed.

Interestingly, however, while introducing Obama's running mate Sen. Joe Biden on the same day in St. Louis, Rep. Russ Carnahan referred to Sarah Palin's record by saying: "There's no way you can dress up that record even with a lot of lipstick".

Lipstick was the Democrats' talking point of the day, and it was no accident.

While John McCain and his running mate were giving speeches about their maverick records to adoring throngs, the Obama thugs were panicking at the latest Gallup Poll showing McCain/Palin ahead by fifteen points with independent voters, and now getting 46% of the female vote.

The Obama campaign is in free-fall and in full panic mode. The rock star's career is being eclipsed by a newer, younger act. Worse, she's a female with an actual record of performance.

Suddenly, the Obama campaign's once vaunted money machine is struggling to keep up with its goals. Perhaps it wasn't such a good idea for Obama to have broken his promise to the American people about accepting public financing.

True to character, Obama sent his minions forth to do his bidding. On the liberal blogs they spread rumors about the parentage of Palin's infant son. They have no compunction about using a five-month old, Down Syndrome afflicted baby as a punch line to smear the reputation of a candidate who is adored by the working women of America.

It shouldn't be surprising of course. These are the same characters who praised Obama for defeating a bill in the Illinois State Senate designed to provide medical care to babies who survive botched abortions. From that moral ground it's a minor transition to using a helpless infant in their political games.

Then they aired an ad calling John McCain and Sarah Palin liars.

To top off the day, they trotted out the governor of New York to call John McCain a racist. This would be the same John McCain whose wife brought home a critically ill black baby girl from Bangladesh, and nurtured her to adulthood.

After nineteen months of media adoration for the slick, stage-managed, supposedly post-racial, new-politics candidate, we now see his true character.

The Financial Skinny

(CNN) – Rep. Alcee Hastings told an audience of Jewish Democrats Wednesday that they should be wary of Republican VP nominee Sarah Palin because “anybody toting guns and stripping moose don’t care too much about what they do with Jews and blacks.”

“If Sarah Palin isn’t enough of a reason for you to get over whatever your problem is with Barack Obama, then you damn well had better pay attention,” Rep. Alcee Hastings of Florida said at a panel about the shared agenda of Jewish and African-American Democrats Wednesday. Hastings, who is African-American, was explaining what he intended to tell his Jewish constituents about the presidential race. “Anybody toting guns and stripping moose don’t care too much about what they do with Jews and blacks. So, you just think this through,” Hastings added as the room erupted in laughter and applause.

You liberals are absolute asses.

CNN

"The fact that human adults consume huge quantities of dairy products made from milk that was meant for a baby cow just doesn't make sense," says PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman. "Everyone knows that 'the breast is best,' so Ben & Jerry's could do consumers and cows a big favor by making the switch to breast milk."In a statement Ben and Jerry's said, "We applaud PETA's novel approach to bringing attention to an issue, but we believe a mother's milk is best used for her child."

You libs are completely mental.

WNBC

Remember when the Democrats improperly released that big file on Palin containing much of her personal information? Including most of her Social Security number?

They released Palin's Yahoo account identification, and the Washington Post printed it. On September 10th.

Whoops: Actually, the WaPo printed the very close address gov.sarah@yahoo.com -- and it only takes a minor guess to then try gov.palin@yahoo.com, which was the hacked account.

Mary Katharine Ham actually alerted me to this two minutes after I posted, but I've been working on something else and said, "Meh, I don't give a fuck. Close enough." (I never lied to you -- much.)

Now I see Allah is mentioning my error, so I guess I have to note it.

What am I working on?

Oh, I'm not working on anything per se. I am in the loop, though, on a moderately sized story which will likely be picked up by the MSM. Done by one of the blogosphere's own. It's not Rathegate II, as I first thought, but it's big-ish.

Someone, somewhere, is going to have to answer some questions.

Developing...

Ace of Spades HQ

LAS VEGAS, NV -- Barack Obama stepped up his attacks on Republican rival John McCain today during a campaign stop in Nevada, telling supporters to "get in the faces" of waivering voters with his message of hope, change, and "brass fisties."

"Righty right, me malenky droogs," said Obama, nonchalantly spinning a steel baton while pacing the stage before a packed audience at a Las Vegas baseball stadium. "Come with uncle and hear all proper! Hear angel trumpets and devil trombones. You are all invited. I want you to talk to them whether they are independent or whether they are Republican. I want you to argue with them and get in their faces, with bootsie-woots if thou it suits."

Obama said his new gloves-off campaign strategy was prompted by what he described as a coordinated effort by McCain and talk radio to distract from his message of national unity.

"One thing I could never stand was to hear a filthy, dirty old partisan bushie, howling away his filthy songs and going blurpy blurp," said Obama. "Naughty, naughty, naughty! You filthy old soomkas!"

"So great bolshy yarblockos to you, Johnny brother," he added in a stern warning to the McCain camp, "We'll meet you with chain or britva or Dailykos anytime, not having you aiming factchecks at us reasonless. Well, it stands to reason we won't have it."

Obama urged rally attendees to "organize the community" and "sharpen up with Moloko Vellocet" and respond to McCain's anti-unity message through direct dialog and beatings.

"Me fine droogies, what we are after now is the old surprise visit," explained Obama. "A real kick and good for laughs and lashings of the old ultracampaigning. Stomp some hope and change into their filthy little rassoodocks for a nice, warm vibraty feeling all through your guttiwuts."

"But enough of words, actions speak louder than," said Obama, pulling a bowler-clad campaign volunteer to the stage by his suspenders for a demonstration. "Action now. Observe all."

After swinging a hobnailed boot into the aide's yarbles, the stadium crowd erupted in cheers.

"I'm siii-inging in the rain, just siii-inging in the rain," noted Obama, cheerfully dancing around the hunched-over aide. "Welly welly well what have we here? A naughty neighborman what has him a McCain yard sign?"

"Looks like a job for me old woodly comrades Hope and Change," he added, gleefully drubbing the man with his trademark twin baseball bats to the crowd's rhythmic chants of "Yes We Can, Yes We Can."

"We are the Droogs we've been waiting for," he concluded as the P.A. system struck up Beethoven's 9th Symphony, the new official campaign song.  "Lets get 'em boys!"

Obama's new message of national unity through community stompings appeared to resonate with the crowd. Josh Gilbertson, a volunteer with Nevada Nadsats for Obama, said the speech and free Drencrom-laced 'Hope Milk' had inspired him to travel to Alaska to canvas the family of Sarah Palin.

"The first thing that flashed into my gulliver was that I'd like to have them right down there on the floor," said Gilbertson, 20. "The old hacky-hack, real savage."

"Palipubs! I would like... to smash them!" agreed Alex Martin, 21.

Rebecca McCloskey, 23, president of UNLV Devotchkas for Obama, enthusiastically endorsed the new strategy, and said she and her campus.club was already putting it into action.

"Oh bliss! Bliss and heaven! Oh, it was gorgeousness and gorgeousity made flesh, like a bird of rarest-spun heaven metal or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now," said McCloskey, describing their tire-iron beating of an elderly man in a Ralph's parking lot.

While the new strategy seems to have re-energized Obama volunteers, some observers said it may carry some risk.

"Certainly, violence and nihilism is to be expected during a campaign, but when the election is over these young people will ultimately have to go back to classes and work, or staff jobs in the Obama Administration," said Dr. Nigel Brodsky, president of the Brodsky Institute for Behavioral Modification. 

To reintegrate Obama supporters back into society, he suggested the 'Brodsky Treament,' his controversial operant conditioning method where subjects are induced to vomit while strapped down and forced to view progressive websites and MSNBC.

Brodsky defended his techniques as "humane."

"I'm not sure why it's so cruel to have these people puke at the sight of their own behavior," he said. "Everybody else has."

Iowahawk

Daily Article by Thomas J. DiLorenzo

"Liberal" economists are overjoyed by the bursting of the housing bubble, for it provides them with what they believe is another "market failure" story. "Most analysts see the sub-prime crisis as a market failure," Robert Gordon gleefully declared in the April 7 online edition of The American Prospect magazine, edited by Robert Kuttner.

Gordon does not define what an "analyst" is, and does not cite any survey to support his claim. One suspects that his opinion is based on an informal survey of his like-minded, left-wing friends.

Gordon is a defender of the federal government's 1977 Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) under which the Fed and other financial regulators have pressured/extorted banks into making more loans to less-than-creditworthy borrowers than they would normally be willing to risk. As such, Gordon believes in the following propositions:

1. runaway greed ("market failure") on the part of lenders is the cause of the subprime crisis;

2. these same greedy lenders routinely ignore billions of dollars in potential profits in lower-income communities because of their systemic racism, stupidity, or both — hence the need for the CRA; and

3. no government agency, especially not the Fed, had anything to do with either the creation or bursting of the housing market bubble and the subprime crisis.

(If you think I'm establishing a straw-man argument, read Gordon's article for yourself.)

The first two propositions flatly contradict each other, whereas the third is unequivocally false. Fed policy — which is not even mentioned by Gordon in an article that is ostensibly about the cause of the subprime crisis — is the cause of the boom-and-bust cycle that has caused the housing bubble and its bursting. Not "market failure" but Fed policy.

Gordon is incensed that a few "analysts," including myself and Professor Stan Liebowitz of the University of Dallas, have argued that the bursting of the housing bubble has caused the chickens to come home to roost, so to speak, after thirty years of government policy pressuring banks to make tens of billions of dollars in bad loans to people with low (or nonexistent) credit ratings. Neither Liebowitz nor I have argued that every last bad loan out there is a CRA loan, but Gordon implies that we do in a rather feeble attempt to construct a straw-man argument.

Gordon cites Fed bureaucrat Janet Yellen as the source of a "killer statistic" that absolves the government of all guilt: "Independent mortgage companies" which are not covered by the CRA made many more "high-priced loans" to borrowers with bad credit than did CRA-regulated banks, she says. Well, so what? Even if Yellen is correct, that does not mean that CRA-regulated loans have not caused tens of billions of dollars in defaults.

Moreover, Yellen and Gordon don't seem to understand what an "independent mortgage company" is. Many of these companies are like the one in which my next-door neighbor is employed: they are middlemen who arrange mortgage loans for borrowers — including "subprime" borrowers — with banks, including CRA-regulated banks. Some killer statistic.

By ignoring the role of the Fed in creating the whole housing-market mess, Gordon's pronouncement that it is entirely a result of "market failure" is laughable on its face. He also flatly denies that CRA lending has had anything to do with why so many uncreditworthy borrowers have defaulted now that the Fed-generated housing bubble has burst. This, too, is an untenable position.

When the CRA was created during the Carter administration, the administration also funded with tax dollars numerous "community groups" that have helped the Fed, the Comptroller of the Currency, and other federal regulatory agencies to enforce the act. Under the CRA, if a bank wants to make virtually any change in its business operations — merging, opening up a new branch, getting into a new line of business — it must first prove to regulators that it has made "enough" loans to the government's preferred borrowers. The (partially) tax-funded "community groups" like ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) can file petitions with regulators that stop the bank's activities in their tracks, perhaps defeating them altogether. The banks routinely buy off ACORN and other "community groups" by giving them millions of dollars as well as promising to make even more dubious loans.

In order to try to diversify the risk of these loans, the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Company ("Freddie Mac") pioneered the "securitization" ; of bundles of these high-risk loans so that they could be sold on secondary markets. Such "securitization" ; exploded during the 1990s as a result of government regulation. As Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke himself stated in a March 30, 2007 speech entitled "The Community Reinvestment Act: Its Evolution and New Challenges" (published online by the Fed),

Securitization of affordable housing loans expanded, as did the secondary market for these loans, in part reflecting a 1992 law that required the government-sponsored enterprises, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, to devote a large percentage of their activities to meeting affordable housing goals. (p. 3)

In 1994 the Riegle-Neal Interstate Banking and Branching Efficiency Act loosened up the regulatory barriers to bank mergers. Consequently, said Bernanke, "As public scrutiny of bank merger and acquisition activity escalated, advocacy groups [like ACORN] increasingly used the public comment process to protest bank applications on CRA grounds." In other words, there was a burst of additional legalized extortion perpetrated by the Fed and its pet "activist organizations" beginning in the mid-1990s. As a result, says Bernanke, "banks began to devote more resources to their CRA programs." What an understatement.

Also in 1995, the US Treasury Department created the multibillion-dollar "Community Development Financial Institutions" fund to "provide banks with access [i.e., taxpayers' dollars] to new opportunities to finance community economic development" as "encouraged" by the CRA, said the Fed chairman.

The government also "streamlined" the regulatory requirements for CRA loans in 1995, allowing — and indeed pressuring — banks to make such loans without the benefit of many traditional credit-worthiness criteria, such as the size of the mortgage payment relative to income, savings history, and even income verification! Instead, the Fed told banks that participation in a credit-counseling program, many of which are federally funded, could be used as "proof" of a low-income applicant's ability to make his mortgage payments. In other words, federal bank regulators required banks to make bad loans based on nonexistent credit standards.

In his April 26 New York Post article on the CRA entitled "The Real Scandal," Professor Liebowitz explains how the government's Fannie Mae Foundation singled out one bank in particular as the role model for all other banks in America in terms of its commitment to CRA lending: Countrywide, the nation's largest mortgage lender, had committed to $600 billion in low-income or "subprime" loans as of 2003. Today, Countrywide is essentially bankrupted and has been merged with Bank of America.

The myth that the CRA would not be harmful to bank-industry profits was hidden for years by the Fed-created housing bubble, which allowed for easy refinancing of all the bad debt. "[The] CRA increased lending and homeownership in poor communities without undermining banks' profitability," Robert Gordon proudly proclaims. But now that the bubble has burst, all those unqualified borrowers — whom the government calls "subprime," as though their credit ratings are only a tiny, tiny smidgen below "prime" borrowers with the very best credit ratings — are defaulting on their mortgages in droves.

Bank profitability has been extremely "undermined," to put it mildly. The bursting of the Fed-generated housing bubble is the reason why the CRA scam was not exposed until now, despite having been in operation for some thirty years.

Mises Institute

Who hacked the e-mail of Sarah Palin?  Right now it appears that authorities are looking at David Kernell. Tennessee state Rep. Mike Kernell became nationally known this afternoon. He can thank his son, David.  Look out as this just got very partisan and this does not bode well for Democrats who now appear they will do anything to try and defeat John McCain and Sarah Palin including breaking the law.

Gateway Pundit asked late last night, "Does anyone else find it odd that 8 hours after this news broke on the internet and 7 hours after it was first reported at Knox News that the mainstream media is still keeping quiet on this major crime?"

The Associated Press reported on the crime, but they ripped into Sarah Palin and accused her of using her personal e-mail for government purposes and dismissed the crime in their report.   Can you imagine the outrage from the elite media types of a Republican operative hacked into Joe Biden's e-mail?  Pictures are here of David and dad Mike.

There is tons of information on David Kernell (He's a student at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville) here from Gateway Pundit including lots of photos of the young man.  The most stunning development so far, "There is a connection between David Kernell and David Plouffe--- Barack Obama's Campaign Manager!"  Stay tuned.

National Ledger

My party has slipped its moorings. It’s time for a true pragmatist to lead the country.

THE MORE I LISTEN TO AND READ ABOUT “the most liberal member of the U.S. Senate,” the more I like him. Barack Obama strikes a chord with me like no political figure since Ronald Reagan. To explain why, I need to explain why I am a conservative and what it means to me.

In 1964, at the age of 16, I organized the Dallas County Youth for Goldwater. My senior thesis at the University of Texas was on the conservative intellectual revival in America. Twenty years later, I was invited by William F. Buckley Jr. to join the board of National Review. I later became its publisher.

Conservatism to me is less a political philosophy than a stance, a recognition of the fallibility of man and of man’s institutions. Conservatives respect the past not for its antiquity but because it represents, as G.K. Chesterton said, the democracy of the dead; it gives the benefit of the doubt to customs and laws tried and tested in the crucible of time. Conservatives are skeptical of abstract theories and utopian schemes, doubtful that government is wiser than its citizens, and always ready to test any political program against actual results.

Liberalism always seemed to me to be a system of “oughts.” We ought to do this or that because it’s the right thing to do, regardless of whether it works or not. It is a doctrine based on intentions, not results, on feeling good rather than doing good.

But today it is so-called conservatives who are cemented to political programs when they clearly don’t work. The Bush tax cuts—a solution for which there was no real problem and which he refused to end even when the nation went to war—led to huge deficit spending and a $3 trillion growth in the federal debt. Facing this, John McCain pumps his “conservative&rdquo ; credentials by proposing even bigger tax cuts. Meanwhile, a movement that once fought for limited government has presided over the greatest growth of government in our history. That is not conservatism; it is profligacy using conservatism as a mask.  [OK, that's true enough, except for the tax cut B.S.  --ed.]

Today it is conservatives, not liberals, who talk with alarming bellicosity about making the world “safe for democracy.” It is John McCain who says America’s job is to “defeat evil,” a theological expansion of the nation’s mission that would make George Washington cough out his wooden teeth.

This kind of conservatism, which is not conservative at all, has produced financial mismanagement, the waste of human lives, the loss of moral authority, and the wreckage of our economy that McCain now threatens to make worse.  [Uh, hello?  The Fannie/Freddy debacle was caused directly by B.J. Clinton...  --ed.]

Barack Obama is not my ideal candidate for president. (In fact, I made the maximum donation to John McCain during the primaries, when there was still hope he might come to his senses.) But I now see that Obama is almost the ideal candidate for this moment in American history. I disagree with him on many issues. But those don’t matter as much as what Obama offers, which is a deeply conservative view of the world. Nobody can read Obama’s books (which, it is worth noting, he wrote himself) [Riiiight..  --ed.] or listen to him speak [Um, er, uh, um...  --ed.] without realizing that this is a thoughtful, pragmatic, and prudent man. It gives me comfort just to think that after eight years of George W. Bush we will have a president who has actually read the Federalist Papers.

Most important, Obama will be a realist. I doubt he will taunt Russia, as McCain has, at the very moment when our national interest requires it as an ally. The crucial distinction in my mind is that, unlike John McCain, I am convinced he will not impulsively take us into another war unless American national interests are directly threatened.

“Every great cause,” Eric Hoffer wrote, “begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” As a cause, conservatism may be dead. But as a stance, as a way of making judgments in a complex and difficult world, I believe it is very much alive in the instincts and predispositions of a liberal named Barack Obama.

Lord.

D Magazine

I guess you have to be "nuanced"...

"I need you to go out and talk to your friends and talk to your neighbors. I want you to talk to them whether they are independent or whether they are Republican. I want you to argue with them and get in their face," he said.

A new kind of politician, indeed.

Federal Review

This criminal behavior reflects poorly on the hackers themselves but also is more more event in a rather disturbing trend of radical, invasive, and occasionally violent behavior of Obama supporters.  (For more on why I say violent, please refer to the violent protests that ‘Anonymous’ participated in during the GOP Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota earlier this month)

What I find fascinating is this type of behavior emanates from the same crowd who oppose Domestic surveillance of terrorists, and the Patriot Act — but when they can utilize technology to invade the privacy of a Republican — they see that as an act of public service.

McCain-Palin 2008 Campaign Manager Rick Davis just issued the following statement concerning reports about Governor Palin’s email and an invasion of privacy:

“This is a shocking invasion of the Governor’s privacy and a violation of law. The matter has been turned over to the appropriate authorities and we hope that anyone in possession of these emails will destroy them. We will have no further comment.”

—Media Lizzy

All right, class.  Everyone put away their books and their Google searches.  I want to test you to see whether you’ve been paying attention, and whether you’re properly prepared for your November 4th examinations.  Today’s subject is economics — stop playing with that GameBoy, Cannonball! – and your assignment is to identify the presidential adviser who wrote these analyses of the subprime lending that has crashed the credit sector.

Anyone who fails this has to stay afterwards and help form and then ridicule commissions.  Ready?

• March 29, 2007, New York Times: “[The Center for Responsible Lending] estimated that in 2005, a majority of home loans to African-Americans and 40 percent of home loans to Hispanics were subprime loans. The existence and spread of subprime lending helps explain the drastic growth of homeownership for these same groups. Since 1995, for example, the number of African-American households has risen by about 20 percent, but the number of African-American homeowners has risen almost twice that rate, by about 35 percent. For Hispanics, the number of households is up about 45 percent and the number of homeowning households is up by almost 70 percent.”And do not forget that the vast majority of even subprime borrowers have been making their payments. Indeed, fewer than 15 percent of borrowers in this most risky group have even been delinquent on a payment, much less defaulted. When contemplating ways to prevent excessive mortgages for the 13 percent of subprime borrowers whose loans go sour, regulators must be careful that they do not wreck the ability of the other 87 percent to obtain mortgages.”
• September 23, 2007, Slate: “If you want to make money off the housing bubble, you’ll have to do it the old-fashioned way: Buy a place with a no-money-down mortgage and then flip it.”
• September 23, 2007, New York Times: “[P]eople who refuse to sell their houses for less than they paid for them are violating a cardinal rule of the market: stuff is worth what it’s worth. It doesn’t matter what you paid for it…”(B)y being hung up about whether your condominium will sell for what you paid for it, you aren’t just driving yourself crazy trying to get a buyer. You may be threatening the very performance of the economy and driving up the unemployment rate — provided that many others behave in a similar way.”

So who wrote these defenses of the subprime market and the advice that people have to handle their own losses?  Oh, let’s not always have the same hands ….

The answer, as Jake Tapper notes, is Austan Goolsbee — presidential adviser on economics to Barack Obama.  This should come as no shock, class.  After all, had you paid attention to your lessons over this term, you’d already know that Obama has Franklin Raines as one of his advisers, the former CEO of Fannie Mae who had to return some of the money he made by overstating Fannie Mae’s earnings.  Obama also had James Johnson as an adviser, who chaired Fannie Mae and hid up to $19 million of his compensation package from regulators during his tenure — until the Fannie Mae connection got too embarrassing for Obama.

Your essay question, class, is this: Which presidential campaign represents change and reform on economic policy, and which represents more of the same?

Extra credit: Write a 100-word essay on the previous Obama double-talk scandal in which Goolsbee was involved.

Hot Air

Where is Al Gore when you need him? Three years ago, the former vice president blasted "digital brownshirts" who "harass and hector any journalist who is critical of the president." He meant the mortal threat to the Republic of bloggers and angry Republican e-mailers. But times change, and the digital legions are greater nowadays on Mr. Gore's side. Thus we don't hear much fretting at all about the Obama Action Wire, which, unlike the brownshirts of yore, is actually managed by Barack Obama's campaign to muzzle critical media.

Here's how it works. A message goes out over Barack Obama's Web site with the names, phone numbers and e-mails of editors and producers foolish enough to host Obama critics. With Mr. Obama's extensive digital following, and his extensive fund-raising and contact lists, shutting up the Democratic nominee's critics with a fraction of Mr. Obama's millions of supporters is relatively simple. The digital legions plug phone lines, crash servers and intimidate the advertisers of these media outlets. This must be another instance of the "new" politics that Mr. Obama frequently talks about.

The latest incident, reported in the Chicago Tribune, "orchestrated a massive stream of complaints on the phone lines of Tribune Co.-owned WGN-AM in Chicago. "The offense: The station hosted National Review's David Freddoso, author of 'The Case Against Barack Obama: The Unlikely Rise and Unexamined Agenda of the Media's Favorite Candidate,' a fair and rigorous but adversarial examination of Mr. Obama's record. Surely, we can't have any of that.

"The Action Wire serves as a means of arming our supporters with the facts to take on those who spread lies about Barack Obama and respond forcefully with the truth, whether it's an author passing off fiction as biography, a Web site spreading baseless conspiracy theories or a TV station airing an ad that makes demonstrably false claims," Obama spokesman Ben LaBolt told the Tribune.

How Orwellian. Mr. LaBolt defends the very actions that prevent WGN-AM and others from airing the facts, as though obstructionism is an "airing of facts."

Note to the Obama campaign: Informed observers don't get "the facts" only from a political campaign. They read and listen to the independent media outlets - the same outlets the thin-skinned Mr. Obama is currently trying to quash.

Washington Times

Democratic state Senator Hollis French, the lead investigator in the smear campaign against Governor Palin, promised his party that the results of the Troopergate probe would be an "October surprise" that would "likely be damaging to the administration."

French is one of the 20%'ers in Alaska who does not approve of Governor Sarah Palin.
He also is a staunch Obama supporter:

Hollis French (fifth from left) and fellow Troopergate hack Kim Elton (on left with beard) who has donated to the Obama Campaign sit on the panel investigating popular governor Sarah Palin.

Governor Palin fired former public safety director Walt Monegan for several incidents of insubordination.
Hollis French and Monegan are close friends.
On his resume French states that he served in the Marine Corps:

However, this does not appear to be accurate.

Hollis "Gunny" French (D)-- is guilty of misrepresenting that he served in the Marine Corps - when in fact his ONLY exposure to the Marine Corp was attending a Marine ROTC PLC - from which he was DISMISSED and granted a "Discharge" as a Private.
--He NEVER attended, much less graduate from either of the USMC Boot Camps.
--He FAILED to pass the ROTC Platoon Leader Course - thus failing to make the grade to become a Marine Officer.
--Hardly service as a Marine, and the folks in Alaska caught up with French's claims....
--Folks in Alaska to this day, still jokingly refer to the jackass poseur as "Gunny French" and he hates the reminder of his lie -Free Republic.

Patriot Files reported this last week:

The lead dog on the Troopergate smear campaign has a little explaining to do himself. On his official State of Alaska website he claims to have been in the Marine Corps Reserve in 1977-78 as a private. There is also a reference to PLC or Platoon Leader's Course. As a former Marine, this smells fishy. In another story French claims he spent six weeks at Quantico, VA. As every Marine knows, Quantico is where Marine officer training occurs. For French to have been a Marine private he would have had to complete basic training at either Parris Island or San Diego, which takes about three months. I also did a military.com search of Hollis French and came up empty. For Hollis French to claim to have been a Marine Reservist is stretching the truth and an insult to all Marines, past and present.

French listed his service as "USMC (ROTC) 1977-1978," which he later explained was six weeks training at the Quantico, Va., Marine Corps base. French said most people saw his military record as a non-issue and he never tried to make it out as anything more or less than was stated in the pamphlet.

INFLATED-FALSE POLITICAL RESUME

Paul A. Bauer, Jr.
Anchorage, AK
Oct. 6, 2002

To All Concerned,

I take special note of those politicians and candidates that inflate or add false information to their resume by misrepresenting themselves to the public just for a vote.

The political resume of Hollis French that was listed in the Sunday Anchorage Daily News said that he has military service in the U.S. Marine Corps ROTC, 1977-78. This is misleading. A student in the ROTC program is not in the military, nor is it counted as any such service. I am guessing, the most Mr. Hollis did in ROTC was to take a few ROTC college courses, maybe he was washed out after a year, and he wants the public to believe that ROTC constitutes as military service. It is not.

The ROTC program is also available to students in high schools around the nation. Does Mr. French want the public to believe that those students also had service in the military?

A military member in the service who is caught inflating their military record is "busted" and would never have a chance of promotion. In a similar situation, one top-ranking officer in the Navy committed suicide when he was caught inflating his military record.

Hollis's misrepresentation is a dishonor and disservice to all servicemen and women that truly served, as well as to the public he wishes to serve.

The media has the responsibility to inform the public of the truth. When gathering information, media reporters should understand what constitutes military service and report it accurately

Paul Bauer Jr.

Hollis French is not just a liberal political hack with an ax to grind and an Obama supporter...
French is a phony soldier.

Gateway Pundit

IN Monday's Post, I discussed how Barack Obama, during his July trip, had asked Iraqi leaders not to finalize an agreement vital to the future of US forces in Iraq - and how the effect of such a delay would be to postpone the departure of the US from Iraq beyond the time Obama himself calls for.

The Obama campaign has objected. While its statement says my article was "filled with distortions," the rebuttal actually centers on a technical point: the differences between two Iraqi-US accords under negotiation - the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA, to set rules governing US military personnel in Iraq) and the Strategic Framework Agreement (SFA, to settle the legal basis for the US military presence in Iraq in the months and years ahead).

The Obama camp says I confused the two. It continues: "On the Status of Forces Agreement, Sen. Obama has always said he hoped that the US and Iraq would complete it - but if they did not, the option of extending the UN mandate should be considered.

"As to the Strategic Framework Agreement, Sen. Obama has consistently said that any security arrangements that outlast this administration should have the backing of the US Congress - especially given the fact that the Iraqi parliament will have the opportunity to vote on it."

If there is any confusion, it's in Obama's position - for the two agreements are interlinked: You can't have any US military presence under one agreement without having settled the other accord. (Thus, in US-Iraqi talks, the aim is a comprehensive agreement that covers both SOFA and SFA.)

And the claim that Obama only wanted the Strategic Framework Agreement delayed until a new administration takes office, and had no objection to a speedy conclusion of a Status of Forces Agreement, is simply untrue.

Here is how NBC reported Obama's position on June 16, after his conversation in the US with Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari: "Obama also told Zebari, he said, that Congress should be involved in any negotiations regarding a Status of Forces Agreement with Iraq. He suggested it may be better to wait until the next administration to negotiate such an agreement."

In other words, Obama wanted a delay on the Status of Forces Agreement, not on the Strategic Framework Agreement - as his rebuttal now claims.

The NBC report continues: "Asked by NBC's Lee Cowan if a timetable for the Status of Forces Agreement was discussed, Obama said, 'Well he, the foreign minister, had presented a letter requesting an extension of the UN resolution until the end of this year. So that' s a six-month extension.'"

That Obama was aware that the two accords couldn' t be separated is clear in his words to NBC:

"Obviously, we can't have US forces operating on the ground in Iraq without some sort of agreement, either a further extension of the UN resolution or some sort of Status of Forces agreement, some strategic framework agreement. As I said before, my concern is that the Bush administration -- in a weakened state politically -- ends up trying to rush an agreement that in some ways might be binding to the next administration, whether it was my administration or Sen. McCain' s administration." (Emphasis added.)

Obama also told NBC: "The foreign minister agreed that the next administration should not be bound by an agreement that's currently made, but I think the only way to assure that is to make sure that there is strong bipartisan support, that Congress is involved, that the American people know the outlines of this agreement.

"And my concern is that if the Bush administration negotiates, as it currently has, and given that we're entering into the heat of political season, that we're probably better off not trying to complete a hard-and-fast agreement before the next administration takes office, but I think obviously these conversations have to continue.

"As I said, my No. 1 priority is making sure that we don't have a situation in which US troops on the ground are somehow vulnerable to, are made more vulnerable, because there is a lack of a clear mandate."

This confirms precisely what I suggested in my article: Obama preferred to have no agreement on US troop withdrawals until a new administration took office in Washington.

Obama has changed position on another key issue. In the NBC report, he pretends that US troops in Iraq do not have a "clear mandate." Now, however, he admits that there is a clear mandate from the UN Security Council and that he'd have no objection to extending it pending a bilateral Iraq-US agreement.

The campaign's rebuttal adds other confusions to the mix. It notes that Obama (along with two other senators who accompanied him) also stated in July: "We raised a number of other issues with the Iraqi leadership, including our deep concern about Iranian financial and material assistance to militia engaged in violent acts against American and Iraqi forces; the need to secure public support through our respective legislatures for any long term security agreements our countries negotiate; the importance of doing more to help the more than 4 million Iraqis who are refugees or internally displaced persons; and the need to give our troops immunity from Iraqi prosecution so long as they are in Iraq."

Note that in this part of the statement, the term "security agreements" is used instead of SOFA and SFA - another sign that the two can' t be separated.

In any case, I never said Obama didn't raise other issues with the Iraqis. Yet all those issues have been the subject of US-Iraqi talks between the US and Iraq (and of conferences attended by Iraq's neighbors) for the last five years. Simply repeating them isn' t enough to hide the fact that Obama' s policy on Iraq consists of little more than a few contradictory slogans.

My account of Obama's message to the Iraqis was based on a series of conversations with Iraqi officials, as well as reports and analyses in the Iraqi media (including the official newspaper, Al Sabah) on the senator's trip to Baghdad. It is also confirmed by Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari.

Barry O., you are a dirty, loathsome pice of shit.  Go read the rest.

Washington Post

The latest "Real Time with Bill Maher" show erupted into a vicious 4-against-1 bashfest of conservative columnist John Fund and Republicans in general, culminating in one left-leaning guest on the panel calling for all Republicans to be "jailed."

From the start of the HBO show, Hollywood activist Janeane Garofalo, a Barack Obama supporter, expressed agitation over the overnight national popularity of GOP vice presidential nod Gov. Sarah Palin, who has helped running mate John McCain pull within the statistical margin of error of Obama in many polls.

Garofalo ridiculed her as an empty pantsuit who lacks a firm grasp of the issues.

Fund defended Palin and her experience and warned that such Palin-bashing will only create a backlash in the heartland against Democrats. "Keep it up," he taunted Garofalo and other critics on the panel.

"You guys are the kings of petty, nasty rhetoric," Garofalo snapped at Fund, who writes for the Wall Street Journal.  [She said in a petty, nasty, rhetorical voice . . .  --ed.]

She then slammed the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn., as a gathering of "small-minded, very petty (and) mean" delegates and speakers who simply grinded out "red meat" for the "dopes" in the red states.

"It's all limbic brain stuff," she said.

Continuing her rant, Garofalo asserted that Republicans believe in nothing decent and should all be locked up.  [There's that trademark Liberal "tolerance"...  --ed.]

"There is no evidence to support that the current incarnation of the Republican Party-hyphen-conservative movement has any tethering to decency, kindness, tolerance (or) open-mindedness," she said. "What do they stand for? Torture as a policy. They stand for homophobia. They stand for no reproductive justice. They stand for denying global warming."  [Well, to be fair, I deny Anthropogenic Global Warming.  It IS horseshit.  --ed.]

A flabbergasted Fund, who was sitting next to her, asked: "So what should we do, jail them?"

"That would be great!" Garofalo exclaimed with a straight face.

After host Maher winced and offered, "That wasn't helpful," Garofalo claimed she was only joking.

Still, she claimed that compared to Republicans, "Democrats as people are fundamentally more decent."

Maher accused Fund of being "cynical" for suggesting he believes Palin has the qualifications to assume the presidency in a crisis.

Another panel guest, Salman Rushdie, joined in the Republican-bashing, saying, "They've been running the country into the ground the last eight years."

He then launched into a personal attack on Fund: "Smugness is an unattractive characteristic."

The debate got so heated that at one point, Fund knocked over his coffee mug, spilling liquid across the table. Garofalo proceeded to make fun of his mishap.

Astonishingly, Rushdie, who only recently has come out of hiding after a decades-long fatwah on his life, described the Islamic attacks on 9/11 as "brilliant."

Osama "bin Laden made a brilliant ... statement," he contended.

Garofalo drew cheers from the Los Angeles studio audience when she proclaimed Republicans stole the previous two presidential elections.

"George Bush didn't win either election," she said, suggesting Republicans tampered with "touch-screen voting" machines in 2004 to deny Democrat Sen. John Kerry victory.

"Democracy was hacked in 2004," she said.

The weekly HBO show also featured Democratic operative Paul Begala by remote feed and actress Roseanne Barr as a late panel arrival, both of whom also took the opportunity to rip McCain, Palin and Republicans.

There you have it folks, the "enlightened,"& nbsp; Marxist, Left.

WND

By Michael R.Fox Ph.D., 9/12/2008 8:59:42 AM

Recalling that people such as Robert F. Kennedy have called climate skeptics “traitors”, David Suzuki calls for their jailing, the Grist website called for Nuremburg trials for them, NASA’s Dr. Jim Hansen calling for their trials for treason, along with the habitual insults from Al Gore, its been difficult for anyone to respectfully dissent. It’s been difficult to stick to the rules of hard science, by demanding evidence and replication, both of which require questioning but are often followed by insults and threats.

The world owes a lot to many climate scientists who are closely studying and reviewing the claims of the global warming lobby. They are also attempting to replicate some of these findings without the traditional support of the originating authors. Ordinarily, in the world of hard nosed science, such scrutiny and replication has been historically welcomed. No longer. The well-known name calling, the dismissiveness, the ad hominem attacks, is regrettably now the standard level of discourse. Additionally, these include many laboratory directors, media editors, and Ph.D.s who for whatever reasons adopt the same low roads of discourse and the abandonment of science.

These are difficult times for traditional climate scientists who do practice good science, serious peer review, welcome scrutiny, replication, and the sharing of data. Thanks to the whole world of the global warm-mongers and indentured PhDs, the integrity of the entire world of science is being diminished, followed by a loss of trust and respect.

Among the giants challenging the global warming dogma has been Christopher Monckton. He has been a strong international leader, spokesman, and expert in unraveling the complexities of the man-made warming hypothesis.

The greatest drivers behind the hypothesis have not been the actual evidence, but computer models. Relative to the largely unknown climate complexities, these are still known to be primitive and incapable of replicating climate data as measured from observations. If a hypothesis can’t explain actual evidence and climate observations, it is wrong, and needs to be modified or abandoned.

In a recent exchange with an expert modeler and believer of global warming, Monckton responded in incredible detail by identifying many of the problems found with the computer models themselves. Monckton is impressively expert in the minutiae of computer modeling, a skill which applies directly to the analyses of the computer climate models. Monckton has performed a detailed analysis of the IPCC’s hypothesis of global warming and identified a long list of failings. They deserved much wider distribution, with an understanding of the serious implications. They and literature references can be found here (http://tinyurl.com/6edjzo" title="http://tinyurl.com/6edjzo" target="_blank"http://tinyurl.com/6edjzo).

Monckton is not alone in his concerns with computer modeling. Tens of thousands of scientists and engineers who have taken basic mathematics know of the problems and complexities with modeling even simple situations. This author has met a fellow scientist (a bit nerdy admittedly) who carried a long multi-variable multi-term equation on a paper kept in his wallet, which was the equation of the outline of his wife’s face. The modeling problem is delightfully defined by atmospheric physicist Dr. James Peden, who recently said Climate Modeling is not science, it is computerized Tinkertoys, with which one can construct any outcome he chooses.. And for my nerdy modeler above, it’s easy to change his wallet equation if he gets a new wife!

Monckton’s analyses are summarized in a number of points below, which are devastating to the hypothesis and computer modeling. These have profound implications for policy makers and the energy and economic future of our country. We’d better learn these: Point 1: There are… serial, serious failures of the computer models of climate

….the computer models upon which the UN’s climate panel unwisely founds its entire case have failed and failed and failed again to predict major events in the real climate.

More info and references at the link.

Hawaii Reporter

• Assure Americans and the world that America's economy is fundamentally strong; or
• Suggest that America's economy is fundamentally weak?

John McCain chose the former path; Barack Obama the latter. WaPo editorial writer Jonathan Capehart believes Obama got the better of the exchange because he came closer to channeling Americans' anxiety. But is that leadership?

View video here of McCain and Obama on the stump day, addressing the state of the economy, and Capehart's comment.

JOHN MCCAIN: Before I continue with too many of my remarks, you know that there's been tremendous turmoil in our financial markets and Wall Street.  People are frightened by these events. Our economy, I think, still, the fundamentals of our economy are strong.  But these are very, very difficult times, and I promise you we will never put America in this position again.  We will clean up Wall Street.

BARACK OBAMA: Senator McCain, what economy are you talking about? What's more fundamental than the ability to find a job that pays the bills and that can raise a family.

JONATHAN CAPEHART: Given the battle going back and forth between McCain and Obama today, in terms of who has a better finger on the pulse of the American people when it comes to the economic crisis that we're finding ourselves in, it looks as though Senator Obama is the one who comes closest to expressing at least the anxiety around kitchen tables around the country.

Even in the depths of the Great Depression, FDR assured his fellow Americans, in his first inagural speech, that "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself."  But on a day that calls for courage, Barack Obama was willing to talk the American economy down for the sake of short-term political gain.  What does that say about his qualities as a leader?  What does it predict about how he would handle a crisis were he to become president?  Is expressing America's anxiety leadership?

Will the MSM take note, or will it simply agree with Capehart that Obama won the day for having his finger on America's nervous pulse?

NewsBusters

Prominent NASA climatologist James Hansen, a close ally of global-warming activist Al Gore and one of the world’s leading scientific voices warning of a global climate crisis, has endorsed eco-vandalism.

Hansen’s controversial turn stems from testimony he gave this month in a London criminal trial against Greenpeace supporters who were accused of defacing — at a cost of $60,000 in property damage — Kingsnorth, an English coal plant. Hansen testified in support of the defense’s assertion that the Greenpeace members had a “lawful excuse” because they were acting to protect property around the world “in immediate need of protection” from the impacts of global warming — caused in part, they allege, by coal burning.

By crossing the line to the side of destructive violence, Hansen — often hailed as the “the world’s leading climate scientist” by green organizations and praised by Time magazine as one of the world’s “100 Most Influential People” — has seriously damaged the credibility of a movement that has struggled to separate its apocalyptic rhetoric from more extreme environmentalists who demand violent action to match that rhetoric.

It is as if Dr. C. Everett Koop, a prominent anti-abortion physician, had testified in favor of vandalizing abortion clinics.

The Sierra Club — one of the world’s leading green organizations and which just last year teamed with Hansen and the American Solar Energy Society on a new report laying out a plan for dramatically reducing the nation’s greehouse-gas emissions — would not comment on Hansen but distanced itself from eco-vandalism. Said a Sierra Club spokesperson: “We don’t advocate destruction of property.”

According to The Independent newspaper in London, Hansen “asserted that emissions of carbon dioxide from Kingsnorth (power station) would damage property through the effects of the climate change they would help to cause.” But, although “there’s just barely still time,” said Hansen, mankind needs an immediate moratorium on the construction of all new coal fired power plants. Somebody, he concluded to the jury, needs “to stand up.”

The jury ruled in favor of the defendants, the so-called Kingsnorth Six. The Independent reported the news under the headline: “Jury decides that threat of global warming justifies breaking the law.”

The ruling shocked British industry, set a precedent for more eco-vandalism, and will likely complicate Hansen’s tenure at NASA.

Hansen’s endorsement is likely to embolden radicals in the United Kingdom and possibly in the U.S., where members of the Earth Liberation Front have torched suburban homes, SUVs, logging trucks, ranger stations, and a ski resort in Vail, Colo., causing many millions of dollars in damage.

“The ramifications are huge,” writes Iain Murray, an environmental-science expert with the Competitive Enterprise Institute. “Operators of coal-fired power stations in the U. K. have just been stripped of legal protection from the criminal actions of the environmental lobby.”

Lovely.  Typical liberal reaction to criticism.  Go postal.

NRO

“Progressive” harpy Randi Rhodes — who was too vulgar even for Air America — now claims John McCain’s time in Hanoi was just peachy:

Of course he (McCain) became very friendly with the Vietnamese. They called him the Prince. He was well treated actually. And he was well treated because he traded these propaganda interviews for good treatment.

Rhodes, of course, is a lying scumbag. McCain’s “good treatment” in North Vietnam included the following:

• Breaking both arms and a leg upon hitting the ground
• Being stabbed with a bayonet
• Losing 50 pounds and having his hair turn white (he was 31)
• Enduring two years of solitary confinement
• Having his teeth broken off at the gumline

When Rhodes busted out her teeth in a drunken faceplant, her fellow travelers claimed she was a martyr of the “right-wing hate machine.”

But when a fighter pilot is tortured for years, it’s suddenly “very friendly.”

Lone Star Times

The latest disgusting stunt by anti-Palin lefties, featured proudly at the sewer known as Democratic Underground: eBay listing found.

Whether it’s really a Chinese curse or not, you can’t say we don’t live in interesting times.

Two weeks ago, I was reporting from the Democratic National Convention; the Obama bounce looked solid, and on Thursday night, following the Mile High Annunciation, things were looking pretty grim for the Grumpy Old Man and the GOP.  Of course, by Friday morning, things were looking rather different — Sarah Palin was announced as the vice presidential choice, political junkies were seeing their chiropractors about their whiplash injuries, and suddenly a new fresh face was in a free-fire zone.

Now, make no mistake, I like Sarah Palin a lot; in many ways she’s closer to my politics than anyone I’ve seen in a long while.  I voted for her in the PJM Veepstakes, multiple times.  That was all based on what I’d read, at Beldar’s blog and others, and a little bit I’d heard from my relatives in Alaska.  Of course, most people know that what immediately followed the Palin announcement was a prodigious swarm of new rumors; it seemed that, failing any useful opposition research, people were just making things up about Palin. After I had received thirty or so of them from left-leaning friends, I got a little tired of it, and wrote an email with a bullet list of some of the things I’d read, true, false, and simply ludicrous.  I sent this to a private mailing list of some friends, and then it occurred to me to create a post on the Palin rumors.

And, as Bart said, “The rest was history.”

So this is the complete list of Palin rumors, at least as it stands about midnight Mountain Time on September 7, 2008.  (The link will take you back to the complete and current list on my blog Explorations.)  I make a point of the time because the list has been growing by around seven rumors a day; there’s at least one in my queue that I haven’t been able to completely track down yet.

Warning: some parts of this are jokes.  On purpose.

Sarah Palin Rumors

• Yes, she is governor of Alaska. No, she’s not the lieutenant governor. No, she’s not currently mayor of Wasilla. Yes, she was mayor of Wasilla, some years ago.
• Yes, as governor of Alaska, she’s the commander in chief of the Alaska National Guard. And yes, her professional military subordinate is quite impressed with her in that role.
• And yes, the New York Times says the job of governor of Alaska is one of the harder, and more powerful, jobs in state government.
• Yes, there are people in Alaska who think she’s too liberal.
• Yes, she did giggle when someone called Lyda Green a “bitch.” Yes, Lyda Green is a cancer survivor. Yes, it was the same Lyda Green who tried to force a scheduling conflict that would make Palin miss her son’s high school graduation. Yes, this would also be the Lyda Green who complained no one had asked her about Palin during the vetting process.
• Yes, she did push for and approve the Wasilla Sports Center. Yes, it did cost a lot of money. (People keep saying $20 million, that article says $14.5 million, but then they also added a $1.2 million dollar food service/kitchen piece. This year, after Palin was out of office as mayor.) Yes, the city went into debt to do it (how did you buy your house, bunkie?) and raised the city sales tax from 2 percent to 2.5 percent to pay for it. Yes, the city is paying it off early. Yes, there is an ongoing dispute about title (following a struggle with the Nature Conservancy and another buyer. And yes, at the time it was built, Wasilla had a federal judge’s decision that they had title to the land.
• Yes, she did want authority to have wolves culled from the air, because they were taking too many moose and caribou. Which people hunt for food in the back country in Alaska. No, she isn’t shooting them herself. I mean, not that she couldn’t, but I’m sure she doesn’t have time.

Go read the rest.

Pajamas Media

CHRIS MATTHEWS: If you were watching last night, here was a funny moment.  I have to tell you: I love Andrea. Look at this crazy moment. For some reason: I don't know if it was foul play or what it was, a billion balloons went right into her when she was trying to do a report from the floor. She was getting absolutely buried in that post-speech balloon drop.

How credible is the charge, if Matthews was seriously making it?  Ask yourself what would have been easier:

a. for some Red Baron of the Balloons to hit Andrea; or

b. for Mitchell to have created a memorable TV moment for herself by moving into the line of balloon fire?

Link

One of the best moments of Wednesday’s GOP convention — and there were many — was Rudy Giuliani’s jab at Barack Obama’s days as a “community organizer.” The follow-up from Gov. Sarah Palin was icing on the cake.

On cue, Team Obama and its satellites in the blogosphere reacted with ginned-up outrage. The Obama camp sent not one, but two, missives to its worshipers claiming grave offense and asking for donations to help fight the meanie Republicans. Kos posted an e-mailing likening Obama to the community organizer Jesus and Palin to Pontius Pilate. And the Atlantic suggested it was…RACIST!

My second syndicated column of the week patiently explains the joke the Left doesn’t seem to get. Adding to the punchline: After I filed my column yesterday afternoon, ACORN issued a press release condemning the “condescending attacks” on all the good-hearted community organizers like them.

Laughing out loud.

(**Check this out: Obama’s leftist claptrap on community organizing.**)

More fun: Here and here.

***

Why Obama’s “community organizer” days are a joke
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Priceless.

Link

Fecund in command   [Mark Steyn]

As National Review's in-house demography bore, I've been struck this last week by the left's fierce hostility to Sarah Palin's fecundity. One gentleman - well, okay, maybe not a "gentleman" but certainly an impeccably sensitive progressiv e new male - wrote to me from Shelton, Washington:

This abortion prohibitionist hag won’t cut it among women with brains.And BTW she is a good example of reproduction run amok. 5 kids; 1 retard. I wonder if the bitch ever heard of getting spayed. 

Each to her own, Mister Sensitive. You can be a 44-year old mother of five expecting her first grandchild and serving as Governor of Alaska. Or you can be, like Martha Stewart's daughter Alexis, a 43-year old single "career woman" hosting a satellite radio show and spending $28,000 a month on "intracytoplasmic sperm injection" in hopes of becoming pregnant. Every woman has the "right to choose" her own path through life, but it's a lazy assumption to take for granted that most Americans find Sarah Palin's choices as freakish as our metropolitan elites do.

What was it the feminists used to say? "You can have it all." Sarah Palin is a mom, and the first female governor of her state. But the enforcers at the National Organization of Women dismiss her as "more a conservative man than she is a woman".

Golly. These days, NOW seems to have as narrow and proscriptive a view of what women are permitted to be as any old 1950s sitcom dad.

Man I miss this guy...

The Corner

He's the governor's ex-brother-in-law, and his job as an Alaska State Trooper is drawing scrutiny in a way rarely seen except in cases of killings by officers.

Legislators are seriously considering hiring an independent investigator to examine whether Gov. Sarah Palin, her aides or her husband pressured commanders to fire Trooper Mike Wooten, and whether she then fired the state's top cop when Wooten stayed on the job. Palin denies anything like that happened.

All that aside, what kind of trooper is Mike Wooten?

The picture painted by the Palins is pretty bad. The trooper brass isn't saying one way or another, citing personnel rules that protect his files. Union leaders defend him as a dedicated trooper who was already punished for his mistakes.

Efforts to speak with Wooten were unsuccessful. He did not return phone calls when the controversy first began two weeks ago. He now is out of the country on a long-planned vacation, said John Cyr, executive director of the Public Safety Employees Association, the union for troopers. They are not in touch. An e-mail to Wooten was answered with an out-of-the-office auto reply.

Wooten is 35, a state trooper since March 2001 and an Air Force veteran. He's a father of young children who has been married and divorced four times. [Obviously a model of domestic stability...  --ed.]

The accusations are detailed in two thick binders, the result of a nearly yearlong investigation by troopers. When the investigation appeared to stall, Palin -- more than a year before she was elected governor, and about two months before launching her campaign -- pushed trooper commanders to take action against Wooten. At one point, Palin and her husband, Todd, hired a private investigator.

Wooten recently gave his union permission to release the entire investigative file, all 482 pages and hours of recorded interviews.

"The record clearly indicates a serious and concentrated pattern of unacceptable and at times, illegal activity occurring over a lengthy period, which establishes a course of conduct totally at odds with the ethics of our profession," Col. Julia Grimes, then head of Alaska State Troopers, wrote in March 1, 2006, letter suspending Wooten for 10 days. After the union protested it, the suspension was reduced to five days.

'... NOT WITHOUT A BLEMISH'

As the investigation got under way in 2005, Wooten was in the midst of a bitter divorce from Palin's sister, Molly McCann. The couple was fighting over custody of their two young children. Accusations flew from both sides.

Troopers eventually investigated 13 issues and found four in which Wooten violated policy or broke the law or both:

• Wooten used a Taser on his stepson.

• He illegally shot a moose.

• He drank beer in his patrol car on one occasion.

• He told others his father-in-law would "eat a f'ing lead bullet" if he helped his daughter get an attorney for the divorce.

Beyond the investigation sparked by the family, trooper commanders saw cause to discipline or give written instructions to correct Wooten seven times since he joined the force, according to Grimes' letter to Wooten.

Those incidents included: a reprimand in January 2004 for negligent damage to a state vehicle; a January 2005 instruction after being accused of speeding, unsafe lane changes, following too closely and not using turn signals in his state vehicle; a June 2005 instruction regarding personal cell phone calls; an October 2005 suspension from work after getting a speeding ticket; and a November 2005 memo "to clarify duty hours, tardiness and personal business during duty time."

"Mike is not without a blemish," the union's Cyr said. But some of the problems noted by Grimes were small matters, he said. Many troopers were told to reimburse the state for personal cell phone calls, he said. Wooten had to miss work for court during the divorce, he said.

The union president, Rob Cox, is a 17-year trooper veteran who worked alongside Wooten in the Valley. Cox said he never thought of him as a rogue cop.

It's significant that Wooten served for a while on the Special Emergency Reaction Team -- like a SWAT team, Cox said. Officers have to be especially cool-headed to perform in crisis situations, Cox said.

Wooten was the first backup officer to arrive at the scene of a standoff in 2006 at the Valley trailer home of Donald Voorhis.

More at the link.

Teaching Law, Testing Ideas, Obama Stood Slightly Apart

By JODI KANTOR

July 30, 2008

CHICAGO — The young law professor stood apart in too many ways to count. At a school where economic analysis was all the rage, he taught rights, race and gender. Other faculty members dreamed of tenured positions; he turned them down. While most colleagues published by the pound, he never completed a single work of legal scholarship…

Mr. Obama marched students through the thickets of campaign finance law. Before he helped redraw his own State Senate district, making it whiter and wealthier, he taught districting as a racially fraught study in how power is secured. And before he posed what may be the ultimate test of racial equality — whether Americans will elect a black president — he led students through African-Americans’ long fight for equal status…

The Chicago faculty is more rightward-leaning than that of other top law schools, but if teaching alongside some of the most formidable conservative minds in the country had any impact on Mr. Obama, no one can quite point to it…

Mr. Obama had other business on his mind, embarking on five political races during his 12 years at the school. Teaching gave him satisfaction, along with a perch and a paycheck…

The school had almost no black faculty members, a special embarrassment given its location on the South Side…

At the school, Mr. Obama taught three courses, ascending to senior lecturer, a title otherwise carried only by a few federal judges. His most traditional course was in the due process and equal protection areas of constitutional law. His voting rights class traced the evolution of election law, from the disenfranchisement of blacks to contemporary debates over districting and campaign finance. Mr. Obama was so interested in the subject that he helped Richard Pildes, a professor at New York University, develop a leading casebook in the field.

His most original course, a historical and political seminar as much as a legal one, was on racism and law. Mr. Obama improvised his own textbook, including classic cases like Brown v. Board of Education, and essays by Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Dubois, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, as well as conservative thinkers like Robert H. Bork.

Mr. Obama was especially eager for his charges to understand the horrors of the past, students say. He assigned a 1919 catalog of lynching victims, including some who were first raped or stripped of their ears and fingers, others who were pregnant or lynched with their children, and some whose charred bodies were sold off, bone fragment by bone fragment, to gawkers…

For all the weighty material, Mr. Obama had a disarming touch. He did not belittle students; instead he drew them out, restating and polishing halting answers, students recall. In one class on race, he imitated the way clueless white people talked. “Why are your friends at the housing projects shooting each other?” he asked in a mock-innocent voice…

Liberals flocked to his classes, seeking refuge. After all, the professor was a progressive politician who backed child care subsidies and laws against racial profiling, and in a 1996 interview with the school newspaper sounded skeptical of President Bill Clinton’s efforts to reach across the aisle.

“On the national level, bipartisanship usually means Democrats ignore the needs of the poor and abandon the idea that government can play a role in issues of poverty, race discrimination, sex discrimination or environmental protection,” Mr. Obama said…

For one thing, Mr. Obama’s courses chronicled the failure of liberal policies and court-led efforts at social change: the Reconstruction-era amendments that were rendered meaningless by a century of resistance, the way the triumph of Brown gave way to fights over busing, the voting rights laws that crowded blacks into as few districts as possible. He was wary of noble theories, students say; instead, they call Mr. Obama a contextualist, willing to look past legal niceties to get results…

In his voting rights course, Mr. Obama taught Lani Guinier’s proposals for structuring elections differently to increase minority representation. Opponents attacked those suggestions when Ms. Guinier was nominated as assistant attorney general for civil rights in 1993, costing her the post…

While students appreciated Mr. Obama’s evenhandedness, colleagues sometimes wanted him to take a stand. When two fellow faculty members asked him to support a controversial anti-gang measure, allowing the Chicago police to disperse and eventually arrest loiterers who had no clear reason to gather, Mr. Obama discussed the issue with unusual thoughtfulness, they say, but gave little sign of who should prevail — the American Civil Liberties Union, which opposed the measure, or the community groups that supported it out of concern about crime.

“He just observed it with a kind of interest,” said Daniel Kahan, now a professor at Yale.

Nor could his views be gleaned from scholarship; Mr. Obama has never published any. He was too busy, but also, Mr. Epstein believes, he was unwilling to put his name to anything that could haunt him politically, as Ms. Guinier’s writings had hurt her. “He figured out, you lay low,” Mr. Epstein said…

Soon after, the faculty saw an opening and made him its best offer yet: Tenure upon hiring. A handsome salary, more than the $60,000 he was making in the State Senate or the $60,000 he earned teaching part time. A job for Michelle Obama directing the legal clinic.

Your political career is dead, Daniel Fischel, then the dean, said he told Mr. Obama, gently. Mr. Obama turned the offer down…

So even some former students who are thrilled at Mr. Obama’s success wince when they hear him speaking like the politician he has so fully become.

“When you hear him talking about issues, it’s at a level so much simpler than the one he’s capable of,” Mr. Rodriguez said. “He was a lot more fun to listen to back then.”

Mr. Obama’s courses picked at the wounds of racism?

What a shock.

In one class on race, he imitated the way clueless white people talked. “Why are your friends at the housing projects shooting each other?” he asked in a mock-innocent voice…

Oops. So much for Mr. Obama being post-racial.

Liberals flocked to his classes, seeking refuge. After all, the professor was a progressive politician who backed child care subsidies and laws against racial profiling, and in a 1996 interview with the school newspaper sounded skeptical of President Bill Clinton’s efforts to reach across the aisle.

“On the national level, bipartisanship usually means Democrats ignore the needs of the poor and abandon the idea that government can play a role in issues of poverty, race discrimination, sex discrimination or environmental protection,” Mr. Obama said…

Oops. So much for Mr. Obama’s bi-partisan claims. (Which of course were never believable since he has never done so ever in his career.)

Soon after, the faculty saw an opening and made him its best offer yet: Tenure upon hiring. A handsome salary, more than the $60,000 he was making in the State Senate or the $60,000 he earned teaching part time. A job for Michelle Obama directing the legal clinic.

Gee, it almost sounds like Mr. Obama was getting sinecures for his wife. (Which of course he eventually did.)

How very Chicago-like.

Sweetness & Light

 New York Times

By CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER
WASHINGTON POST

Nothing wrong or even terribly odd about that, except that he is laying claim to the job of crafting the coming history of the United States. A leap of such audacity is odd.

The air of unease at the Democratic convention last week was not just a result of the Clinton psychodrama. The deeper anxiety was that the party was nominating a man of many gifts but precious few accomplishments -- bearing even fewer witnesses.

When John Kerry was introduced at his convention four years ago, an honor guard of a dozen mates from his Vietnam days surrounded him on the podium attesting to his character and readiness to lead.

Such personal testimonials are the norm. The roster of fellow soldiers or fellow senators who could from personal experience vouch for John McCain is rather long. At a less partisan date in the calendar, that roster might even include Democrats Russ Feingold and Edward Kennedy, with whom John McCain has worked to fashion important legislation.

Eerily missing at the Democratic convention this year were people of stature who were seriously involved at some point in Obama's life standing up to say: I know Barack Obama. I've been with Barack Obama. We've toiled/endured together. You can trust him. I do.

Hillary Clinton could have said something like that. She and Obama had, after all, engaged in a historic, utterly compelling contest for the nomination. During her convention speech, you kept waiting for her to offer just one line of testimony: I have come to know this man, to admire this man, to see his character, his courage, his wisdom, his judgment. Whatever. Anything.

Instead, nothing. She of course endorsed him. But the endorsement was entirely programmatic: We're all Democrats. He's a Democrat. He believes what you believe. So we must elect him -- I am currently unavailable -- to get Democratic things done. God bless America.

Clinton's withholding the "I've come to know this man" was vindictive and supremely self-serving -- but jarring, too, because you realize that if she didn't do it, no one else would. Not because of any inherent deficiency in Obama's character. But simply as a reflection of a young life with a biography remarkably thin by the standard of presidential candidates.

Who was there to speak about the real Barack Obama? His wife.

She could tell you about Barack the father, the husband, the family man in a winning and perfectly sincere way. But that only takes you so far. It doesn't take you to the public man, the national leader.

Who is to testify to that? Hillary's husband on night three did aver that Obama is "ready to lead." However, he offered not a shred of evidence, let alone personal experience with Obama. And although he pulled it off charmingly, everyone knew that, having been suggesting precisely the opposite for months, he meant not a word of it.

Obama's vice presidential selection, Joe Biden, naturally advertised his patron's virtues, such as the fact that he had "reached across party lines to . . . keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of terrorists." But securing loose nukes is as bipartisan as motherhood and as uncontroversial as apple pie. The measure was so minimal that it passed by voice vote and received near zero media coverage.

Thought experiment. Assume John McCain had retired from politics. Would he have testified to Obama's political courage in reaching across the aisle to work with him on ethics reform, a collaboration Obama boasted about in the Saddleback debate? "In fact," reports the Annenberg Political Fact Check, "the two worked together for barely a week, after which McCain accused Obama of 'partisan posturing' " -- and launched a volcanic missive charging him with double cross.

So where are the colleagues? The buddies? The political or spiritual soul mates? His most important spiritual adviser and mentor was Jeremiah Wright. But he's out. Then there's William Ayers, with whom he served on a board. He's out. Where are the others? The oddity of the Democratic convention is that its central figure was the ultimate self-made man, a dazzling mysterious Gatsby. The palpable apprehension is that the anointed is a stranger -- a deeply engaging, elegant, brilliant stranger with whom the Democrats had a torrid affair. Having slowly woken up, they see the ring and wonder who exactly they married last night.

Hammer.  Nail.  Contact.

PressDemocrat.com

The Page - Time

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the Republican vice-presidential nominee who revealed Monday that her 17-year-old daughter is pregnant, earlier this year used her line-item veto to slash funding for a state program benefiting teen mothers in need of a place to live.

After the legislature passed a spending bill in April, Palin went through the measure reducing and eliminating funds for programs she opposed. Inking her initials on the legislation -- "SP" -- Palin reduced funding for Covenant House Alaska by more than 20 percent, cutting funds from $5 million to $3.9 million. Covenant House is a mix of programs and shelters for troubled youths, including Passage House, which is a transitional home for teenage mothers.

As for why he should consider joining DailyKos instead, Kane didn't endeavor to find out why she did that. And, of course, there are many explanations.

One explanation is that Palin is a sociopath who wants teen moms to suffer. However, I believe that explanation can be discarded.

So, we have to search further, and notably, Kane didn't contact the campaign for an explanation. Perhaps she believes that private rather than state monies should be used? Perhaps, if that's the reason, her beliefs are correct; did Kane endeavor to find out whether that could be correct? Perhaps she thought it would discourage teen pregnancies? Perhaps she doesn't come with the set of assumptions Kane obviously has that there must be a state program for everything? Perhaps she has evidence that Covenant House misspends money? Perhaps there are other programs available? All those possibilities Kane does not even broach.

Please contact the WaPo's ombudsman: ombudsman *at* washpost.com

UPDATE: It's even worse than I suspected. According to their site (covenanthouseak.org/involved.htm), "Approximately 90% of our funding comes from the generous donations of friends like you". And, according to this state document (PDF link), they were only to get $155,000 in 2007. It's not clear whether that was their only source of state funding, and their executive director wasn't available.

UPDATE 2: The $3.9 million was part of a grant for a facilities expansion; see this PDF (you might need to change the extension to "PDF" after downloading).

And, Covenant House's IRS Form 990 (link) shows the funds that Paul Kane describes as "slashed" was over a threefold increase from the government funds they received from all sources in 2006 (FY2006 ending 12/31/06). In 2006, they received:

Contributions $1,667,796
Government Grants $1,194,788
Program Services $0
Investments $67,947
Special Events $271,980
Sales $0
Other $11,139
Total Revenue $3,213,650

Note that they also get money from the feds, including on the facilities expansion.

Please use the address above to send a message to the WaPo about their "reporting".

UPDATE 3: This post earlier said it was "almost a fourfold", but I changed it to "over a threefold" to be mathematically precise. Also, there's a round-up of those sites that simply followed the WaPo's lead without even considering they might be wrong here.

Link

Been dumpster Diving this morning, looking for Moonbat responses to Fred Thompson's speech last night at the RNC, and ran across this:

One of the theories that I have heard kicked around was that the government has a way to control the government. First let me say that the words that are chosen are used on purpose. Of course no one can CONTROL the weather. The idea is ludicrous and it makes people who even examine the issue look like we are kooks. However there is mounting evidence that the government can INFLUENCE the weather. Consider the facts:

1. Hurricane Katrina suddenly became powerful within a short period of time preventing Mayor Nagin from evacuating people from New Orleans as he had planned. Saying that the Mayor was negligent or planned poorly is just stupid. He knew what he had to do and had the school buses ready. The problem was that he didn't get to use the buses because they were "suddenly" flooded. Hmmmm?

2. Eye witnesses report that levees were blown up at the exact moment when it would have done the most harm to the city. The greatest amount of damage was done in heavily black neighborhoods where the storm seemed to go directly to. Hmmmm?

3. Katrina was a category 2 storm that became a category 5 storm faster than any hurricane in the history of weather. No scientists can explain it. Hmmmm?  [But let me guess, Anthropogenic Global Warming is an established fact, right?  ed.]


4. Hurrican Gustav was heading toward Louisiana when it suddenly weakened and did little damage. It made landfall the same day that the Republicans announced that Sarah Palin's daughter was pregnant. It gave them enough time to redirect the media's attention and to the storm. It also made the Republican Governor look good since not as many people were killed. Hmmmm?
5. Hurricane Hanna was on a similar track to hit during the Republican convention and it suddenly weakened and slowed down. Hmmmm?

People who just ignore the evidence are fooling themselves.

And from his About Me:

I am a man who fights against the injustices that he sees all around him. I fight to support Barack Obama and stand opposed to all of those who spread hate against the Dr. King's pick to head the country.

You Dems have completely gone around the bend.

Inside White America

Cohen begins his WaPo column of today by dismissing Palin as "a sitcom of a vice presidential choice and a disaster movie if she moves up to the presidency."  After noting Newt's defense of her nomination, Cohen continues [emphasis added]:

It's a pity Gingrich was not around when the Roman Emperor Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, better known by his nickname Caligula, reputedly named Incitatus as a consul and a priest. Incitatus was his horse.

Cohen goes on to accuse GOP spokesmen of lying in Palin's defense, and to claim the McCain campaign made "fools of themselves" by choosing her.  Cohen, on a comic note, observes that the Russians haven't invaded since Palin took over as the head of the Alaska National Guard.

Let the liberal media mock.  We'll see who's laughing come Election Day.

NewsBusters

 From Texas Darlin'

John McCain's selection of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as vice-presidential running mate is proving more shrewd by the hour. As Blackfive points out, Governor Palin, as Alaska's chief executive, has shared strategic command of the 49th Missile Defense Battalion of the Alaska National Guard:

One area of Sarah Palin's background that may help her is Alaska's unique role in our national security and homeland defense. Several folks have have mentioned this but Tom W. was specific and his info jibes with the record.

Alaska is the first line of defense in our missile interceptor defense system. The 49th Missile Defense Battalion of the Alaska National Guard is the unit that protects the entire nation from ballistic missile attacks. It’s on permanent active duty, unlike other Guard units.

As governor of Alaska, Palin is briefed on highly classified military issues, homeland security, and counterterrorism. Her exposure to classified material may rival even Biden's.

She's also the commander in chief of the Alaska State Defense Force (ASDF), a federally recognized militia incorporated into Homeland Security's counterterrorism plans.

Palin is privy to military and intelligence secrets that are vital to the entire country's defense. Given Alaska's proximity to Russia, she may have security clearances we don't even know about.

According to the Washington Post, she first met with McCain in February, but nobody ever found out. This is a woman used to keeping secrets.

She can be entrusted with our national security, because she already is.

This really is too much!

Barack Obama would kill to have had that much access to classified defense information as a member of the U.S. Senate!

Meanwhile, the radical left contingents are mucking themselves up with more sexist allegations and totally unhinged anti-Palin smears.

Of course, both rigorous polling data and home town reactions indicate that the Obama campaign's treading water on the eve of the Republican National convention. Note though, with Hurricane Gustav bearing down on the Gulf Coast, the Republicans plan to scale back first-day convention activities. Plus, the Bush adminstration and Senator McCain will focus their attention on protecting people in the storm's path. A successful response to the storm raises the possibility of a boost in public relations, which will help innoculate the GOP from Democratic attacks on Republican incompetence following Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

The whole episode, handled well, will allow the McCain camp the opportunity to burnish its image of putting people first.

American Power Blog