:: September ::
2004 - Freddie / Fanny
Excerpts from the 2004 hearing. Parse as inclined.
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Commentary: Ron Paul : Bailouts will lead to rough economic ride
[cnn] [...] Unfortunately, the government's preferred solution to the crisis is the very thing that got us into this mess in the first place: government intervention.
Ever since the 1930s, the federal government has involved itself deeply in housing policy and developed numerous programs to encourage homebuilding and homeownership.
Government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were able to obtain a monopoly position in the mortgage market, especially the mortgage-backed securities market, because of the advantages bestowed upon them by the federal government.
Laws passed by Congress such as the Community Reinvestment Act required banks to make loans to previously underserved segments of their communities, thus forcing banks to lend to people who normally would be rejected as bad credit risks.
These governmental measures, combined with the Federal Reserve's loose monetary policy, led to an unsustainable housing boom. The key measure by which the Fed caused this boom was through the manipulation of interest rates, and the open market operations that accompany this lowering.
When interest rates are lowered to below what the market rate would normally be, as the Federal Reserve has done numerous times throughout this decade, it becomes much cheaper to borrow money. Longer-term and more capital-intensive projects, projects that would be unprofitable at a high interest rate, suddenly become profitable.
Because the boom comes about from an increase in the supply of money and not from demand from consumers, the result is malinvestment, a misallocation of resources into sectors in which there is insufficient demand.
In this case, this manifested itself in overbuilding in real estate. When builders realize they have overbuilt and have too many houses to sell, too many apartments to rent, or too much commercial real estate to lease, they seek to recoup as much of their money as possible, even if it means lowering prices drastically.
This lowering of prices brings the economy back into balance, equalizing supply and demand. This economic adjustment means, however that there are some winners -- in this case, those who can again find affordable housing without the need for creative mortgage products, and some losers -- builders and other sectors connected to real estate that suffer setbacks.
The government doesn't like this, however, and undertakes measures to keep prices artificially inflated. This was why the Great Depression was as long and drawn out in this country as it was. [...]
Using trillions of dollars of taxpayer money to purchase illusory short-term security, the government is actually ensuring even greater instability in the financial system in the long term.
The solution to the problem is to end government meddling in the market. Government intervention leads to distortions in the market, and government reacts to each distortion by enacting new laws and regulations, which create their own distortions, and so on ad infinitum.
It is time this process is put to an end. But the government cannot just sit back idly and let the bust occur. It must actively roll back stifling laws and regulations that allowed the boom to form in the first place.
The government must divorce itself of the albatross of Fannie and Freddie, balance and drastically decrease the size of the federal budget, and reduce onerous regulations on banks and credit unions that lead to structural rigidity in the financial sector.
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Bunk
[slate] : It looks like the Sarah Palin rape-kit myth is still alive and flourishing. A reader sent along this editorial in the New York Times today by Dorothy Samuels decrying the policy and asking Palin to give voters an explanation.
Unfortunately, all this piece does is help perpetuate the myth.
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Covering Freddie's Fanny : Banking Crisis
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Where's Joe? Oh, There He Is
[politico] Joe Biden's denunciation of his own campaign's ad to Katie Couric got so much attention last night that another odd note in the interview slipped by.
He was speaking about the role of the White House in a financial crisis.
"When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn't just talk about the princes of greed," Biden told Couric. "He said, 'Look, here's what happened.'"
As Reason's Jesse Walker footnotes it: "And if you owned an experimental TV set in 1929, you would have seen him. And you would have said to yourself, 'Who is that guy? What happened to President Hoover?'"
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Obama : Executive Experience
[wsj] Despite having authored two autobiographies, Barack Obama has never written about his most important executive experience. From 1995 to 1999, he led an education foundation called the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC), and remained on the board until 2001. The group poured more than $100 million into the hands of community organizers and radical education activists.
The CAC was the brainchild of Bill Ayers, a founder of the Weather Underground in the 1960s. Among other feats, Mr. Ayers and his cohorts bombed the Pentagon, and he has never expressed regret for his actions. Barack Obama's first run for the Illinois State Senate was launched at a 1995 gathering at Mr. Ayers's home. [...]
Mr. Ayers's defenders claim that he has redeemed himself with public-spirited education work. That claim is hard to swallow if you understand that he views his education work as an effort to stoke resistance to an oppressive American system. He likes to stress that he learned of his first teaching job while in jail for a draft-board sit-in. For Mr. Ayers, teaching and his 1960s radicalism are two sides of the same coin.
Mr. Ayers is the founder of the "small schools" movement (heavily funded by CAC), in which individual schools built around specific political themes push students to "confront issues of inequity, war, and violence." He believes teacher education programs should serve as "sites of resistance" to an oppressive system. (His teacher-training programs were also CAC funded.) The point, says Mr. Ayers in his "Teaching Toward Freedom," is to "teach against oppression," against America's history of evil and racism, thereby forcing social transformation.
The Obama campaign has cried foul when Bill Ayers comes up, claiming "guilt by association." Yet the issue here isn't guilt by association; it's guilt by participation. As CAC chairman, Mr. Obama was lending moral and financial support to Mr. Ayers and his radical circle. That is a story even if Mr. Ayers had never planted a single bomb 40 years ago.
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Depressing
[nro] The Great Depression is being invoked a lot these days, and I understand there's a reasonable real fear of a total meltdown out there. But some points are worth making. Even if we entered a serious depression, we will not experience time travel. America is a different place than it was in the 1930s. As Lawrence Lindey notes:
"In 1929, Americans had the per capita GDP of people now living in the Balkans. Today it is five times higher. So even if we have a depression, there won't be any Hoovervilles or soup lines. There may be a massive increase in demands for public assistance and rental housing, but this is hardship, not the privations of the 1930s."
I don't know how to quantify some of the improvements, but it's also worth keeping in mind much of the increased prosperity cannot be repealed. Our medical technology won't get worse. Our agricultural skills will not unravel (and, unless you believe Al Gore, there's no dust bowl heading our way). The internet will not vanish, forcing us to sit around the radio like they did in the 1930s (or around the TV if you believe Joe Biden).
But the real point I wanted to make is that we shouldn't let invocation of the Great Depression — and our fear of it — justify all of this New Deal talk. Say it with me: The New Deal prolonged the Great Depression. In fact, if anything it was the New Deal itself that made the Great Depression "Great." By 1938 one in six Americans were still without jobs. It wasn't until WWII, when FDR started describing himself as "Dr. Win the War" instead of "Dr. New Deal" that America finally started to lift itself out of its state-imposed economic stupor.
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Russia deploys warships to the Caribbean
[telegraph] : In a display meant to show off Russia's military resurgence and to provoke the United States, four vessels from the Northern Fleet set sail on a mission replete with an atmosphere of Soviet-era bombast and brinksmanship.
Symbolically at least, the manoeuvres represent the Kremlin's boldest challenge yet to US military hegemony. By sailing so close to the American coastline for a series of exercises with Washington's principal detractor in Latin America, Russia seems to be deliberately attempting to irritate the White House.
The flotilla that left the northern port of Serveromosrk on Russia's Arctic coast was lead by the guided missile cruiser Peter the Great, one of the largest warships of its kind. The Kirov-class warship is equipped with cruise missiles that can be armed with nuclear warheads.
It was accompanied by the Admiral Chabanenko, an anti-submarine destroyer, and two support vessels.
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Russia threatens to seize swathe of Arctic
[telegraph] : President Dmitry Medvedev said that Russia should unilaterally claim part of the Arctic, stepping up the race for the disputed energy-rich region.
"We must finalise and adopt a federal law on the southern border of Russia's Arctic zone," Mr Medvedev told a meeting of the Security Council, in remarks carried by Interfax news agency.
"This is our responsibility, and simply our direct duty, to our descendents," he said. "We must surely, and for the long-term future, secure Russia's interests in the Arctic."
Global warming has stepped up the fight for the disputed Arctic, believed to be laden with vast reserves of oil and gas. Russia has pitted itself against Canada, Denmark, Norway and the United States to fight for a greater part of the region, arguing that most of it is Russian territory since an underwater ridge links Siberia to the North Pole's seabed.
Last August, a Russian mini-submarine carrying politicians and scientists plunged to the depths of the Arctic and claimed to plant a Russian flag to mark Moscow's stake in the territory.
Footage of the alleged planting was widely broadcast on Russian television – but later turned out to be images taken from the Hollywood blockbuster Titanic.
Under international law, each of the five countries that lay claim to the Arctic own a 320-kilometre zone that extends north from their shores. That arrangement is up for UN review in May next year.
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Obama votes 'present' on new economic rescue plan
[latimes] : Sen. Barack Obama today met with some of his many economic advisors and made an announcement that he was not going to make an announcement about any new plan to plan plans.
Obama did suggest a bipartisan effort to deal with the financial crisis wreaking havoc on Wall Street, always a good idea for any candidate after the primaries because it sounds good and costs nothing.
But Obama did not present any detailed proposal of his own for how to resolve the monetary situation that has roiled world markets in recent days.
Obama's inaction prompted Jay Leno in his opening monologue tonight on "The Tonight Show" to point out an essential presidential campaign unfairness, that Obama has criticized McCain's economic plan but the Republican can't respond because "nobody knows" what Obama's is yet.
After meeting with his top economic advisers, the Democratic presidential candidate said this was not the time to present specific details for how to fix the immediate problem, a reversal from what he had said a day earlier. Nor did he explain when a good time would be to explain such a rescue from the current financial crisis.
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European Anti-Americanism Fueled by Ignorance
[pjm] : [...] Seventy percent of Britons think the United States has done a worse job than the European Union in reducing carbon emissions since 2000; in fact, America’s rate of growth of carbon emissions has decreased by almost ten percent since 2000, while that of the EU has increased by 2.3 percent.
Eighty percent of Britons believe that “from 1973 to 1990, the United States sold Saddam Hussein more than a quarter of his weapons.” In fact, the United States sold just 0.46 percent of Saddam’s arsenal to him; Russia, France, and China supplied 57 percent, 13 percent, and 12 percent, respectively.
The majority of Britons believe that since the Second World War, the United States has more often sided with non-Muslims than with Muslims. In fact, in 11 out of 12 major conflicts between Muslims and non-Muslims, Muslims and secular forces, or Arabs and non-Arabs, the United States has sided with Muslims and/or Arabs.
Indeed, a new opinion poll finds that British attitudes towards the United States are governed by ignorance of the facts on key issues such as crime, health care, and foreign policy. The survey was commissioned by America in the World, a London-based group that hopes to push back against rampant anti-Americanism in the United Kingdom by dispelling widely held myths about the United States.
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Struggling with who to vote for? Then maybe you better just forget it. Or you could use this device.
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Canada : A Little Chill On Public Discourse...'Tolerable'
[ntnlpost] : Canada's top legal precedent on hate speech may now be unworkable because of the Internet's transformation of public discourse, according to Athanasios Hadjis, the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal member hearing the case against far-right propagandist Marc Lemire.
In an exchange Monday with a government lawyer, Mr. Hadjis said Section 13 of Canada's Human Rights Act, which was written to target the operators of racist telephone hotlines, and extended to the Internet after the 9/11 terror attacks, now captures "anyone who puts the written word down in digital form," including countless bloggers and the entirety of the mainstream press.
"It has an effect on the citizens of Canada who may be near that line [of hate speech] but not crossing it," Mr. Hadjis said. These people can nevertheless find themselves "dragged through the process" of a human rights complaint, he said.
As an example, he questioned whether the CHRC is fair to hold the operators of online message boards accountable for hateful messages posted by other people. He said the Internet has expanded the "grey zone" of hate speech such that "maybe the scale is tipping the other way."
Mr. Hadjis' comments, while not legally binding, suggest he is sympathetic to the arguments of Mr. Lemire, who has brought a constitutional challenge of human rights hate speech law as part of his defence against a hate speech complaint brought in 2003 by activist lawyer Richard Warman.
They also come as Richard Moon, a University of Windsor law professor, is in the final stages of an independent review of the Canadian Human Rights Commission's hate speech mandate, which the CHRC itself initiated in response to a growing controversy over freedom of expression.
Several groups, from hard-right free speech activists to liberal Jewish organizations, have expressed concern over the CHRC's application of Section 13 of Canada's Human Rights Act, and its potential abuse by complainants as a political platform.
By far the most determined critics, however, have been Mr. Lemire and his legal team, who once represented Holocaust-denier Ernst Zundel. Among Mr. Lemire's supporters Monday was Tomasz Winnicki, a prominent white supremacist and convicted hatemonger.
Section 13 applies to messages "likely to expose" an identifiable group to hatred or contempt. [...]
"Suddenly all these declarations that may have legitimately been made on paper, in the age of Taylor, will be caught by Section 13."
Mr. Fothergill answered that if Section 13 puts a chill on public discourse, it is only to be around the fringes of hate speech, and that this is not "a terribly bad outcome."
"A little bit of chilling ... is tolerable," he said. [...]
Mr. Hadjis questioned whether it is fair, in general, to hold Web site owners accountable for what others may write in their comment sections, possibly without their knowledge, consent or endorsement.
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Surprise! Problems With Rangel : Has To Go
[nyt] Mounting embarrassment for taxpayers and Congress makes it imperative that Representative Charles Rangel step aside as chairman of the Ways and Means Committee while his ethical problems are investigated.
This recommendation does not come easily, considering the New York Democrat’s four decades of service in Congress. But Mr. Rangel himself has felt obliged to request three separate House ethics inquiries of his behavior. While denying serious improprieties, Mr. Rangel concedes that he has not lived up to the “higher standard” expected of members of Congress.
Transcript Reveals ABC Hatchet Job - As If That Were Necessary
[newsbusters] : A transcript of the unedited interview of Sarah Palin by Charles Gibson clearly shows that ABC News edited out crucial portions of the interview that showed Palin as knowledgeable or presented her answers out of context. [...]
I urge everybody to see just how the unedited version of the first interview compared to what we saw on television by checking out the [full transcript].
It is a fascinating look into media manipulation via skillful editing.
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Obama Backs Off 50-State Strategy
[wshtimes] : Despite the talk about a changing electoral map and new strategies, Barack Obama is pulling back from his 50-state plan as John McCain has solidified Republican support, turning November's presidential election into a contest for the same handful of states that have swung the last two contests.
The first round of post-convention polling shows Mr. McCain, in picking Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate, has enthused Republicans. Meanwhile Mr. Obama, the Democrats' nominee, is pulling back resources from Georgia, a state he once boasted he would flip Democratic; is stepping up efforts to hold Democrats in Pennsylvania and Michigan; and is showering attention on Ohio, the lynchpin in Republicans' 2004 victory.
"The Republican brand has been revived, and the conservative base has been solidified," said pollster John Zogby. "McCain has had a few good weeks, so now what we have to do is see if Obama can come back because it is still very competitive."
And once again, as so often in past elections, Ohio and its 20 electoral votes, may be the decisive prize.
No Republican has won the presidency since Abraham Lincoln without carrying Ohio, but a Quinnipiac University Poll showed Thursday that Mr. Obama had lengthened his lead in Ohio by 49 percent to 44 percent, compared with a narrow 1 point lead in its Aug. 26 survey. That's the reverse of a Fox News/Rasmussen poll earlier this week that found Mr. McCain with a seven percentage point lead.
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Canada Votes : 2008
[cbc] The Conservatives have continued to gain ground after the first several days of the Oct. 14 federal election campaign, according to a newly released poll.
Nationally, the Conservatives lead with 41 per cent of the public's support, followed by the Liberals at 26 per cent, while the NDP are at 14 per cent support, said the Canadian Press-Harris/Decima rolling survey, in partnership with the CBC.
The Green party trails with nine per cent support, while eight per cent of respondents said they favoured the Bloc Québécois.
"This snapshot that we have here will be good news for the Conservative Party," the CBC's David Taylor said Friday following the release of the results.
Harris/Decima president Bruce Anderson described the Conservative momentum as "remarkable," saying the party has gained ground in key subgroups that have eluded them in the past, including urban Canada and women. [...]
Harper has repeatedly downplayed talk of a majority during the campaign, saying he still believed the result of the Oct. 14 vote would be a minority government.
Despite the positive numbers, Conservative strategist Lisa Samson said her party was taking nothing for granted.
"Every vote counts on Oct. 14," Samson told CBC News on Friday from Ottawa.
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Palin 'Governed from the Center'
[usatoday] : Weeks after taking office as Alaska's governor in December 2006, Sarah Palin vetoed a bill that sought to ban benefits for the same-sex partners of state workers. It was unconstitutional, she said.
This year, she rebuffed religious conservatives who wanted her to add two abortion restriction measures to a special legislative session on oil and gas policy, even though she supported the bills. Former aide Larry Persily said she didn't want to risk offending Democrats, whose votes she needed on energy legislation. [...]
...in her 21 months as governor, Palin has taken few steps to advance culturally conservative causes. Instead, after she knocked off an incumbent amid an influence-peddling scandal linked to the oil industry, Palin pursued a populist agenda that toughened ethics rules and raised taxes on oil and gas companies.
And she did so while relying on Democratic votes in the Legislature.
"She has governed from the center," says Rebecca Braun, author of Alaska Budget Report, a non-partisan political newsletter. "She has in some small ways supported her religious views — for example, proposing money to continue the office of faith-based and community initiatives — but she has actually been conspicuously absent on social issues. She came in with a big oil and gas agenda, which really required Democratic allies to get through."
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This is the kind of thing that draws a dividing line. The whining and clear cut attempts to silence people. What is that? How can anyone really not see this offence? It's not a political 'Left or Right' thing. Turn the station off or better yet never turn it on if you disagree with it. Find a different one. Create your own. It's absolutely pathetic and something I would never be able to get behind. That and the incessant whining from one direction.
Radio Station Sued Over Content
[gnp] : A Los Angeles man has filed a lawsuit against a conservative talk radio station — which broadcasts from the city — claiming the station and its media company misrepresented their federal license agreement by serving the interest of the Republican Party rather than the public.
David Birke and his attorney Johnny Birke filed a complaint Aug. 27 against seven talk show hosts of KRLA-AM (870), Salem Communications Corporation and its owner Edward Atsinger III, alleging that they use the public airwaves to push Republican beliefs. David and Johnny Birke would not say whether they were related, citing attorney-client privilege. [...]
Radio hosts Laura Ingraham, Dennis Prager, Michael Medved, Hugh Hewitt, Dennis Miller, Mike Gallagher and Kevin James are named as defendants in the suit.
“My client saw a need to address something that has gone unquestioned for so many years,” Johnny Birke said. “He lost his interest in the public radio airwaves.”
David Birke is a longtime registered Democrat, according to the complaint.
“He’s not doing this for publicity,” Johnny Birke said. “My client’s case can be proven.”
Salem Communications’ attorney did not return calls seeking comment.
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Exploding Spending
[wsj] Here's a prediction: The media will report today that the federal budget deficit is big and getting bigger. What most of them won't report, alas, is that the cause of these deficits is an explosion in federal spending. [...]
The real news in yesterday's Congressional Budget Office semiannual report is that federal expenditures on everything from roads to homeland security to health care will on present trends reach 21.5% of GDP next year. That's a larger share of national output than at anytime since 1992. If the cost of the federal takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac prove to be large and are taken into account, next year federal outlays could be higher as a share of the economy than at anytime since World War II. In this decade alone, federal spending has increased by almost $1.2 trillion, or 57%.
The federal deficit is expected to hit $407 billion for fiscal 2008 (which ends at the end of this month) and $438 billion next year. Still, the deficit is expected to be only 3% of GDP, which is in line with the average of the last 30 years. We hope Congress and the Presidential candidates don't obsess over the deficit per se, because the real fiscal drag from government comes from how much it spends, not how much it borrows.
The Bush tax cuts also aren't the budget problem. Until this year federal tax collections have been surging. In the four years after the 2003 tax cuts become law, tax receipts exploded by $785 billion. This year revenues have declined by 0.8%, but a major reason is the $150 billion bipartisan tax rebate that has hit the Treasury without spurring the economy. Without these nonstimulating rebates, federal tax payments would have climbed another 2.5%, according to CBO. Revenue is expected to be a healthy 18.5% of GDP next year without any tax increase.
Another myth is that the war on terror has busted the budget. While operations in Iraq and Afghanistan are expensive, defense spending is $605 billion this year, or about 4.5% of GDP. That only seems large by comparison to the holiday from history of the 1990s, when defense fell to 3% of GDP. As recently as 1986, defense spending was 6.2% of GDP.
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AFF national television ad encouraging Americans to call on Congress to pass S. 3202, the 'Gas Price Reduction Act'.
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Polls Stir Angst in Dems
[politico] [...] Yet still, the Obama campaign seems to be struggling to find a consistent, cohesive economic message. One can understand why aides would not want to muddy his mantra of change and his image as a post-partisan, revolutionary figure. But blue-collar voters in Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia and Michigan likely won’t vote for Obama because of some meta-narrative or a series of fabulous speeches.
“The [Obama] campaign is beginning to look like other campaigns,” said a former top strategist for past Democratic presidential campaigns, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “Obama is struggling with working-class whites just like John Kerry, Al Gore, Bill Clinton, Michael Dukakis did, and Walter Mondale. He’s struggling with voters in the border-state South. And he’s struggling with an enormous wind at his back, a hatred for George Bush and a mainstream media that is little short of a chorus for his campaign.” [...]
Anyone who thinks the presidential election should be a layup for Obama should remember that Democrats have broken the 50 percent barrier in presidential elections only twice since 1944.
Did Obama himself forget?
Even if he didn’t, he let a narrative take hold in the news media and among many of his own supporters that led to expectations that he should be far ahead, leading to disappointment when he isn’t.
“A lot of Democratic elites thought this was a slam-dunk. And I thought, no it’s not,” said Lake, the pollster. “People in this town were already measuring drapes. And I was thinking, have you been in the real world lately?
“If you have been involved in campaigns, you thought it was going to be close for a year,” she added. “And I think a lot of Democratic elites are waking up to that.”
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McCain/Palin camp: For the love of Pete, please pen some new things to say. Yes, these days cycles are short, 24 hr. news blabber and it's only been a little over week etc, but seriously. Get on that. At least re-write it to say the same thing with different words. Surely someone on staff is capable of that.
Media: Keep on saying and having endless guests on saying how everyone needs to stop talking about Sarah Palin...while you continue to do so all day and night, barely stopping for breath. Keep talking 24/7 to each other about how you have to stop talking about her. Sheer quality.
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In Politics, Words Are Cheap.
[wsj] [...] Let's compare.
Mrs. Palin used her veto pen to slash more local projects than any other governor in the state's history. She cut nearly 10% of Alaska's budget this year, saving state residents $268 million. This included vetoing a $30,000 van for Campfire USA and $200,000 for a tennis court irrigation system. She succinctly justified these cuts by saying they were "not a state responsibility."
Meanwhile in Washington, Mr. Obama voted for numerous wasteful earmarks last year, including: $12 million for bicycle paths, $450,000 for the International Peace Museum, $500,000 for a baseball stadium and $392,000 for a visitor's center in Louisiana.
Mrs. Palin cut Alaska's federal earmark requests in half last year, one of the strongest moves against earmarks by any governor. It took real leadership to buck Alaska's decades-long earmark addiction.
Mr. Obama delivered over $100 million in earmarks to Illinois last year and has requested nearly a billion dollars in pet projects since 2005. His running mate, Joe Biden, is still indulging in earmarks, securing over $90 million worth this year.
Mrs. Palin also killed the infamous Bridge to Nowhere in her own state. Yes, she once supported the project: But after witnessing the problems created by earmarks for her state and for the nation's budget, she did what others like me have done: She changed her position and saved taxpayers millions. Even the Alaska Democratic Party credits her with killing the bridge.
When the Senate had its chance to stop the Bridge to Nowhere and transfer the money to Katrina rebuilding, Messrs. Obama and Biden voted for the $223 million earmark, siding with the old boys' club in the Senate. And to date, they still have not publicly renounced their support for the infamous earmark.
Mrs. Palin has proven courageous by taking on big spenders in her own party. In March of this year, the Anchorage Daily News reported that, "Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens is aggravated about what he sees as Gov. Sarah Palin's antagonism toward the earmarks he uses to steer federal money to the state."
Mr. Obama had a chance to take on his party when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid offered a sham ethics bill, which was widely criticized by watchdog groups such as Citizens Against Government Waste for shielding earmarks from pubic scrutiny. But instead of standing with taxpayers, Mr. Obama voted for the bill. Today, he claims he helped write the bill that failed to clean up Washington.
Mr. Obama has shown little restraint on earmarks until this year, when he decided to co-sponsor an earmark moratorium authored by Mr. McCain and myself. Mr. Obama is vulnerable on this issue, and he knows it. That is why he is lashing out at Mrs. Palin and trying to hide his own record.
Mrs. Palin is one of the strongest antiearmark governors in America. If more governors around the country would do what she has done, we would be much closer to fixing our nation's fiscal problems than we are.
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Now That's Entertainment
Sept.1/08 radio interview with former Democratic Senator from Alaska and 2008 Presidential candidate Mike Gravel. The Senator doesn't quite give the radios hosts what they clearly wanted or hoped for.
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Fresh Blood
[salon] [...] Over the Labor Day weekend, with most of the big enchiladas of the major media on vacation, the vacuum was filled with a hallucinatory hurricane in the leftist blogosphere, which unleashed a grotesquely lurid series of allegations, fantasies, half-truths and outright lies about Palin. What a tacky low in American politics -- which has already caused a backlash that could damage Obama's campaign. When liberals come off as childish, raving loonies, the right wing gains. I am still waiting for substantive evidence that Sarah Palin is a dangerous extremist. I am perfectly willing to be convinced, but right now, she seems to be merely an optimistic pragmatist like Ronald Reagan, someone who pays lip service to religious piety without being in the least wedded to it. I don't see her arrival as portending the end of civil liberties or life as we know it. [...]
It is certainly premature to predict how the Palin saga will go. I may not agree a jot with her about basic principles, but I have immensely enjoyed Palin's boffo performances at her debut and at the Republican convention, where she astonishingly dealt with multiple technical malfunctions without missing a beat. A feminism that cannot admire the bravura under high pressure of the first woman governor of a frontier state isn't worth a warm bucket of spit.
Perhaps Palin seemed perfectly normal to me because she resembles so many women I grew up around in the snow belt of upstate New York. For example, there were the robust and hearty farm women of Oxford, a charming village where my father taught high school when I was a child. [...]
The witch-trial hysteria of the past two incendiary weeks unfortunately reveals a disturbing trend in the Democratic Party, which has worsened over the past decade. Democrats are quick to attack the religiosity of Republicans, but Democratic ideology itself seems to have become a secular substitute religion. Since when did Democrats become so judgmental and intolerant? Conservatives are demonized, with the universe polarized into a Manichaean battle of us versus them, good versus evil. Democrats are clinging to pat group opinions as if they were inflexible moral absolutes. The party is in peril if it cannot observe and listen and adapt to changing social circumstances.
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Canada : One Big Happy Family : Election Oct.14
[rcp] : [...] Regardless of his political persuasions, I doubt any reader is himself in doubt about the views of McCain and Palin on, say, abortion, or same-sex marriage, or the ramifications of the U.S. First Amendment. Messrs Obama and Biden have more "nuanced" views -- i.e. more likely to say one thing and do another -- and yet their own positions are clear enough, when the lights are trained on them.
If I were a woman, and the most important issue to me were the preservation of my unfettered legal right to kill my unborn children, I would have no difficulty in choosing the Democrat ticket. Whereas, up here in Canada, it really wouldn't matter if I voted Conservative, Liberal, New Democrat, Bloc, or Green.
That is an extreme case, but the same goes for every other issue I can think of, including all the routine ones touching our daily lives.
For instance, all parties are committed to preserving Canada's dysfunctional socialist health care system. All are committed to the continued heavy regulation of private enterprise generally, and to choking small business in particular with red tape. All are committed to maintaining a crippling tax burden, and a tax collection system with arbitrary and unaccountable powers of search and seizure. Moreover, in the name of the "global warming" imposture, all are committed to significantly extending the leaden hand of government micro-mismanagement into every aspect of our daily lives that may touch even tangentially on "the environment."
And to take a subject of special interest to me, none is prepared to defend our country's common-law heritage, and due process in our courts (especially our family courts). None will vindicate the most elementary rights of free speech and free press. None will lift a finger when journalists and many others are hauled before "human rights" kangaroo courts, and put under star chamber inquisitions, as if Canada were exactly the sort of country our fathers fought in two World Wars.
The debates are seldom if ever about which direction we should be going, but rather, how far and how fast we should proceed along the pre-determined highway. This is the "Canadian consensus," shared by the various self-appointing and self-regulating elites in government, law, media, and academia. And it is a "consensus" they enforce, with ever-increasing restrictions on our ability to discuss, publicly, the various activist agendas they are pushing.
To be fair to many who hold all the conventional "Canadian consensus" views, there is seldom much malice in them. As products of our ideologized schools and universities, living all their lives deep within urban conurbations, in spiritually "gated" communities where they mix only with their own kind, they have never been exposed to contrary ideas. And they are sincerely aghast when anything that challenges their profoundly settled views is set before them. The notion that deviation must be suppressed comes as naturally to them, as the notion that anything unIslamic must be suppressed, to a Wahabi fundamentalist in Arabia.
The idea that, for instance, a man could own a gun for any other purpose than to commit violent crimes, is not easily communicated to a person who has no ability whatever to visualize life outside the confines of an urban neighbourhood.
More subtly, the dweller in an urban apartment complex cannot imagine a life in which everything he does is not bound by fussy rules and regulations, and in which any act of non-conformity (lighting a cigarette, for instance) must be greeted with hysterical alarm. In this sense, our vast modern cities, not only in Canada but everywhere, breed Pavlovian conformity to their own physical requirements, and systematically replace moral imperatives with bureaucratic ones.
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Obama / Bon Jovi Event at $30,800 Per Person Event: 'We Won't Be Bullied'
[wcbstv] Unlike his Republican opponent, Democrat Barack Obama is still raising money for his presidential campaign, and he turned Friday to rock legend Jon Bon Jovi for help.
Bon Jovi and his wife, Dorothea, hosted more than 100 people for dinner on their mansion lawn by the Navesink River in Middletown, N.J. The price was $30,800 a person, to be divided between the Obama campaign and the Democratic National Committee. [...]
Obama spoke for about eight minutes before greeting guests individually. He vowed to fight Republican attacks on his character and background more fiercely than John Kerry did in his losing campaign four years ago.
"We're not going to be bullied, we're not going to be smeared, we're not going to be lied about," Obama said. "I don't believe in coming in second."
Earlier in the evening, Obama attended a $2,300-per-person reception at the nearby home of veteran party fundraiser Phil Murphy. About 200 people, including the Bon Jovis and New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine, attended.
Republican nominee John McCain can raise no more campaign money because he accepted about $84 million in public funding and the restrictions that go with it.
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GOP Convention Through The Whittle Lens
[nro] [...] I think the magic of Sarah Palin speaks to a belief that so many of us share: the sense that we personally know five people in our immediate circle who would make a better president than the menagerie of candidates the major parties routinely offer. Sarah Palin has erupted from this collective American Dream — the idea that, given nothing but classic American values like hard work, integrity, and tough-minded optimism you can actually do what happens in the movies: become Leader of the Free World, the President of the United States of America. (Or, well, you know, vice president.)
Sarah Palin has done more than unify and electrify the base. She’s done something I would not have thought possible, were it not happening in front of my nose: Sarah Palin has stolen Barack Obama’s glamour. She’s stolen his excitement, robbed his electricity, burgled his charisma, purloined his star power, and taken his Hope and Change mantra, woven it into a cold-weather fashion accessory, and wrapped it around her neck. [...]
. . . what of John McCain?
As for the speech: yes, it was stilted. Awkward in places, true. Ugly background, cheesy flagpole, lack of polish — got it. But as the northerners said of Abraham Lincoln in the first days of the war, when he was mockingly compared to the effortless grace of Jefferson Davis: “We didn’t get him for ballroom purposes.” Damn right we didn’t.
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123 People Shot in Chicago Over Summer : Nearly Double The Number of Soldiers Killed In Iraq Over Same Period
[cbs2] : An estimated 123 people were shot and killed over the summer. That's nearly double the number of soldiers killed in Iraq over the same time period.
In May, cbs2chicago.com began tracking city shootings and posting them on Google maps. Information compiled from our reporters, wire service reports and the Chicago Police Major Incidents log indicated that 123 people were shot and killed throughout the city between the start of Memorial Day weekend on May 26, and the end of Labor Day on Sept. 1.
According to the Defense Department, 65 soldiers were killed in combat in Iraq. About the same number were killed in Afghanistan over that same period.
In the same time period, an estimated 245 people were shot and wounded in the city.
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Sarah Delivers The Mail
"There is much to like and admire about our opponent... But... it's easy to forget that this is a man who has authored two memoirs but not a single major law or reform."
"I’ve learned quickly, these past few days, that if you’re not a member in good standing of the Washington elite, then some in the media consider a candidate unqualified for that reason alone," she said. "But here’s a little news flash for all those reporters and commentators: I’m not going to Washington to seek their good opinion—I’m going to Washington to serve the people of this country."
"This is a man who can give an entire speech about the wars America is fighting, and never use the word victory except when he's talking about his own campaign."
"I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a ‘community organizer,’ except that you have actual responsibilities."
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[politico] In her first national address, vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin wowed the Republican convention using wit, sarcasm, charm and ridicule in a full scale assault on a now familiar cast of GOP targets — an elitist adversary, a biased media and high taxes.
Without mentioning Democrat Barack Obama’s name and rarely losing a smile, the Alaska governor delivered one riposte after another.
“We’ve all heard his dramatic speeches before devoted followers,” she said. “But when the cloud of rhetoric has passed, when the roar of the crowd fades away, when the stadium lights go out and those styrofoam Greek columns are hauled back to some studio lot — what exactly is our opponent’s plan?
“The answer is to make government take more of your money, give you more orders from Washington and to reduce the strength of America in a dangerous world,” Palin concluded.
Palin’s poised and flawless performance evoked roars of applause from delegates who earlier this week might have worried that the surprise pick and newcomer to the national stage may not be up to the job.
When the nearly 40-minute address came to a close, however, all doubts were doused and Democrats were on notice that Palin will not flinch from the fight.
Palin’s speech so delighted some Republicans that they suggested it may instantly elevate her to GOP rock-star status and diminish presidential contenders who ran this year who may hope to seek the White House again.
“Who's most bummed?” asked one veteran Republican consultant. “Obama? Biden? Mitt? Huck? Damn that was good.” [...]
The Democrats are hoping it won’t. Nominee Barack Obama’s campaign issued a response that looked straight past Palin and linked her rhetoric to President Bush.
“The speech that Gov. Palin gave was well delivered, but it was written by George Bush’s speechwriter and sounds exactly like the same divisive, partisan attacks we’ve heard from George Bush for the last eight years,” said campaign spokesman Bill Burton
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Did Obama give a speech recently? Goodbye Hillary
Suffice to say that the Sarah Palin speech was up to task. The lady does seem to bring "authenticity" to the table. Buzzword? Slice it as you might, this is undeniable. That does seem to be the best word and is already in danger of overuse. She articulately and clearly deflated the magic balloon that is being offered by the Democrats and Obama. She made the manufactured Obama and Slo' Joe Biden look like the 'same old' and very ordinary.
Hope. That's a good idea for that camp because if this woman decides she wants to play, beyond this election and regardless of outcome, your lives just got a little less smooth.
If this lady so chooses, she will become a great force for her politics and at times during her speech it was easy to forget that she wasn't actually at the top of the ticket. I think that many would have no problem with this in the future (many, even now) and the clear spirit that she seems to possess, should appeal to many. Goodbye Hillary.
It's a marked difference between this and the inescapable feeling that Obama, Biden, Pelosi, Reid et al are feeding you a line and tap dancing and waving at the same time.
Another notable difference, aside from not being talked down to from the podium and absence of doom and gloom bellowing, was that the entire crowd wasn't crying or hyperventilating.
It should be said that we were definitely not in the McCain camp, rather, we were staunchly in the zone of the 'no chance will JMac be the nominee' and simply could not see how it would occur nor do we agree with many of his previous policy positions. So much for our political acumen. The Mac machine has played the game astonishingly well.
Without a doubt, the election is important, but it seems that as many have suggested, should McCain win and for any variety of reasons, he would hold office for only one term. A safe assumption as far as assumptions go. His mother, at 96, might feel differently. Some have even posited that he should proclaim this ahead of time. That's a good one.
Whatever the end result, the McCain campaign has altered the game. I'll walk out on the limb and say that, should Obama win ( and I still don't see how he won't and was amazed that Bush was re-elected ) the prospect of his being a single term have been strengthened.
That there is an infusion of younger power-people in the choices of Obama and Palin represented on the ticket is important and bodes well for the process. Manufactured on both sides? Is it ever not?
People on both sides of the political fence, each a clear offering of stark policy differences, have been given a looking glass into the future of the game. John McCain, agree or disagree with him, deserves credit for many things and he can add changing the face of the future with his VP choice among those things.
Nice job there on the days of nonstop coverage regarding the crucial issue of Palin's 17 year old daughter being pregnant. It was all exceptional. If there wasn't an MSNBC to scour the dregs and float on the bottom, you guys would have a lock. Oh yea, thanks too for the breathless 'make the reporter stand outside in the wind and rain, a hurricane is coming!' shtick. Come on, it's so tired and '360 Cooper' pwnd that stepping stone play years ago.
As for the post Palin speech commentary, thanks again. No shortage of 'Obamaesque, uh, uh,' level speaking from the Democrat talking heads and guests trotted out by CNN, which was the only coverage that I had available.
"Uh, uh, well, uh." Lots of stammering and scrambling incoherence. Always the feature of a speaker of the upper echelon. Laughably, some actually said "well, she's good at reading a teleprompter," with a straight face. Priceless. Blitzer did accurately note that 'a star is born.'
I am consistently astonished at the people that are brought out to vouch for leftist policy and garner favour. There has to be sensible types on that side of the isle. No? I'm waiting to see them and I've been waiting for years. The end result of the election, whatever outcome, doesn't change that. Empty rhetoric is the skill set most prominently displayed and applauded by the left.
The faces of the Democrat fabulists and mouthpieces were grand. Sputter out some cliche, throw out a rote innuendo or insinuation. Smile and muster a feigned laugh. Retreat to your list of talking points and ignore whatever the interviewer has just asked you. They all wore those smiles, the smile of the grasping phony. Call people liars - conveniently never indicating what exactly the lies are. Maybe you'll come up with something today (while the media try to avoid and downplay the previous night), but no matter, the big trick seems to be in just pushing a meme and then repeat and repeat. Follow up with the good old woe-is-me victim - we're all victims! and when they have their own words quoted back to them, be offended and scream that it's an attack! It's amusing to see being called out transposed and being confused with 'an attack.' Big meanies. Prepare for days of whining, word play and evasion.
Another glaring 'not-quite-a-revelation' would be that Larry King has become dreadful, even if I did enjoy the prospect of having an entire panel of one political persuasion on for a whole night during the conventions and alternating as they did. There certainly is a difference between the selected guests representing the parties and how they carry themselves. I think I enjoyed the segments more than Larry seemed to. If it's painful Lar,' maybe don't do it. I have defended Larry in years past, though now I wonder how. He seems to favour being cute in his questioning, if not flat out silly. I suppose he considers this intellectual, but when he tries this lame tact with the likes of Prager, well, Mr. King, you expose what little you bring to the table of discourse these days.
I should note that old Blitzer has always seemed an ok sort and Anderson Cooper has surprisingly grown into a reasonable sort as well. However, it remains that any reasoned attempts they might make to offer thoughtful insight is tarnished by the wheeling out Jack Cafferty under the banner of 'best political team,' and makes a mockery of itself. I feel a little sorry for Blitzer when he has to share the screen and make play time small talk with this clown.
That said, without a doubt, John King is and has been for a long time, their best. The guy offers always cogent thoughts, insight and comments. He should actually have his own show along the lines of Meet The Press or such. Maybe someday he might.
- The Cynical Bastard
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What's So Special About Sarah?
[wsj] In a less crazed world, the Sarah Palin story -- hunter and snowmobiling mom becomes Alaska governor and routs old-boy political machine in bed for years with energy industry -- would be celebrated. Of course, they have to demolish her.
Sarah's story is the stuff of Erin Brockovich movies and full-page newspaper spreads. Except: She's "pro-life," is a "Christian," and unlike all the white guys who came in second, Sarah looks like she might help get a Republican elected.
It may be possible to pack more downward spin in what is being written about her, but modern media records are being set. Sarah has to be stopped because Sarah looks like trouble. [...]
One can't subtract politics from a woman who is running for vice president, but Sarah Palin's manifest appeal at the moment is about something larger than retail politics. If it holds up, the Democrats have a problem.
The Sarah Palin story doesn't fit the standard liberal model the past 30 years of what defines a high-achieving woman. The impulse in acceptable political society to condescend to lovely, ebullient Sarah is palpable. If the TV commentators tried to sound any smarter dismissing her qualifications, their big brains would burst.
Who is she? I mean after all, prior to whatever passes for politics up there in Alaska, all she seems to have done was play sports, go to a no-name university and have lots of babies? She's a beauty queen! This isn't even close to your standard East Coast über-woman. Sarah didn't go to Harvard Law and clerk for some legendary judge; her first job was as an Alaskan sportscaster! A great roar has arisen this week from Manhattan (New York, not Kansas): "Look at her standing there with John McCain, thinking she's Little Miss Perfect. My God, she almost sounds like an Alaskan Valley Girl. This can't possibly work, can it??!!!"
We'll find out. For starters, a lot of women voters don't live in New York, Boston, L.A. or San Francisco. Maybe Sarah Palin from Wasilla is a lot closer to the way many women today see themselves than the standard feminist model. Gloria Steinem, one of the many mothers of that ideal, is 74. Sarah Palin is 44. Times change.
Many younger women didn't learn what it means to be an achieving woman from dormitory feminism. She didn't abandon her hometown for the big city. She stayed home, had babies, helped her snowmobiling husband with his commercial fishing business and with him, tried to assemble a life.
She got into politics in Wasilla with zero connections -- no famous father, no financing husband, no mentor, nothing. She got elected mayor. She got into politics to improve her community, not to launch herself on some career path she had figured out while in college.
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A Tale of Moose Stew and Beauty
[nro] : [...] What other country in the developed world produces beauty queens who hunt caribou and serve up a terrific moose stew? As an immigrant, I'm not saying I came to the United States purely to meet chicks like that, but it was certainly high on my list of priorities. And for the gun-totin' Miss Wasilla then to go on to become Governor while having five kids makes it an even more uniquely American story. Next to her resume, a guy who's done nothing but serve in the phony-baloney job of "community organizer" and write multiple autobiographies looks like just another creepily self-absorbed lifelong member of the full-time political class that infests every advanced democracy. [...]
Sarah Palin and Barack Obama are more or less the same age, but Governor Palin has run a state and a town and a commercial fishing operation, whereas (to reprise a famous line on the Rev Jackson) Senator Obama ain't run nothin' but his mouth. She's done the stuff he's merely a poseur about. Post-partisan? She took on her own party's corrupt political culture directly while Obama was sucking up to Wright and Ayers and being just another get-along Chicago machine pol (see his campaign's thuggish attempt to throttle Stanley Kurtz and Milt Rosenberg on WGN the other night).
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Drop In Solar Activity : Potential Effect On Climate
[dt] : The sun has reached a milestone not seen for nearly 100 years: an entire month has passed without a single visible sunspot being noted.
The event is significant as many climatologists now believe solar magnetic activity – which determines the number of sunspots -- is an influencing factor for climate on earth.
According to data from Mount Wilson Observatory, UCLA, more than an entire month has passed without a spot. The last time such an event occurred was June of 1913. Sunspot data has been collected since 1749.
When the sun is active, it's not uncommon to see sunspot numbers of 100 or more in a single month. Every 11 years, activity slows, and numbers briefly drop to near-zero. Normally sunspots return very quickly, as a new cycle begins.
But this year -- which corresponds to the start of Solar Cycle 24 -- has been extraordinarily long and quiet, with the first seven months averaging a sunspot number of only 3. August followed with none at all. The astonishing rapid drop of the past year has defied predictions, and caught nearly all astronomers by surprise.
[...] In the past 1000 years, three previous such events -- the Dalton, Maunder, and Spörer Minimums, have all led to rapid cooling. One was large enough to be called a "mini ice age". For a society dependent on agriculture, cold is more damaging than heat. The growing season shortens, yields drop, and the occurrence of crop-destroying frosts increases.
Article Update, Sep 1 2008: After this story was published, the NOAA reversed their previous decision on a tiny speck seen Aug 21, which gives their version of the August data a half-point. Other observation centers such as Mount Wilson Observatory are still reporting a spotless month. So depending on which center you believe, August was a record for either a full century, or only 50 years.
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Thompson Speech Excerpt
To deal with these challenges the Democrats present a history-making nominee for president.
History-making in that he is the most liberal, most inexperienced nominee to ever run for president. Apparently they believe that he would match up well with the history-making, Democrat-controlled Congress. History-making because it's the least accomplished and most unpopular Congress in our nation's history.
Together, they would take on these urgent challenges with protectionism, higher taxes and an even bigger bureaucracy. And a Supreme Court that could be lost to liberalism for a generation. This is not reform. And it's certainly not change.
It is basically the same old stuff they've been peddling for years. America needs a president who understands the nature of the world we live in. A president who feels no need to apologize for the United States of America.
We need a president who understands that you don't make citizens prosperous by making Washington richer, and you don't lift an economic downturn by imposing one of the largest tax increases in American history.
Now our opponents tell you not to worry about their tax increases. They tell you they are not going to tax your family.
No, they're just going to tax "businesses"! So unless you buy something from a "business," like groceries or clothes or gasoline ... or unless you get a paycheck from a big or a small "business," don't worry ... it's not going to affect you.
They say they are not going to take any water out of your side of the bucket, just the "other" side of the bucket! That's their idea of tax reform.
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Dangerous to Washington Power
[wsj] Even as the Obama camp ponders how best to handle John McCain's veep pick of Sarah Palin, the high priests and priestesses of the media have marked her as an apostate. The Beltway class is in full-throated rebellion against a nondomesticated conservative who might pose a threat to their coronation of Barack Obama and the return of Camelot-on-the-Potomac. [...]
They want a VP to be a kind of parliamentary choice, someone they have already vetted, someone who's made them laugh with insider jokes at the Gridiron dinner. The Beltway class whines constantly about how it wants fresh voices in politics, but we guess this means a first-term Democratic Senator rather than a first-term Republican Governor from some godforsaken U.S. state few of them have ever been to.
We are instructed that Mrs. Palin isn't qualified, because she lacks Washington experience. But until recently that was said to be a virtue in Mr. Obama, who is at the top of his ticket. Meanwhile, there's hardly a peep of media notice that the Obama campaign is preposterously trying to remake Joe Biden into a poor scrapper from Scranton when he's been in the Senate for 36 years. They all know Joe. But when Mr. McCain picks an authentic middle-class mother who is also a Governor, we are told she's not up to the job. [...]
There is nothing more dangerous to entrenched Washington power than a populist conservative who looks unlikely to buy into Washington's creature comforts. Take a close look at Governor Palin's record on ethics and energy in Alaska, and it becomes clear what this Beltway outburst is actually about. The irony is that while Senator Obama is running on change, his acceptance speech made explicit that he's promising only more power and money for Washington. Sarah Palin's history of taking on the career politicians of a corrupt Alaskan GOP machine -- her own party -- shows that she's the more authentic change agent.
* * *
If Sarah Palin succeeds as a national candidate, she could help John McCain proceed to a reform Presidency. Even if he loses while she does well, she could emerge as a major figure in GOP politics for years to come. This is why the media and political classes are so eager to discredit her. They can't let it happen.
We hope Mr. McCain and the GOP are prepared to fight back. On the evidence this week, it looks like an army of volunteers is forming up to help them.
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Which is It?
[americanspectator] Is this a country where a single mom could raise a son who could go on to attend Columbia and Harvard, or have the programs and conditions that propelled Obama and his wife to fame and fortune changed in some way? In his acceptance speech he said:
For over two decades, he [John McCain] has subscribed to that old, discredited Republican philosophy -- give more and more to those with the most and hope that prosperity trickles down to everyone else. In Washington, they call this the Ownership Society, but what it really means is, you're on your own.
Out of work? Tough luck. No health care? The market will fix it. Born into poverty? Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, even if you don't have boots. You're on your own.
But it was in the "decade of greed" that he and his wife flourished; two minority students garnering four Ivy League degrees between them in the 1980s. If "the dream" could survive the horrors of the Reagan years, surely it is still attainable now. Yet, listening to Obama, the answer is that it can only revive if he and his party "take back America." Correct me if I'm wrong, but haven't they controlled both chambers of Congress for the past two years?
I was further confused -- though I really shouldn't be -- that despite all his talk of "change," Obama adheres to the same old liberal game plan that seems to suggest that, once Americans achieve their dreams of success through hard work and entrepreneurship, they then become the enemy. After all, if we are to despise corporate America and only cut taxes for small businesses, what happens when they succeed and become big businesses? If we should over-tax the rich, even until death, why in the world would anyone aspire to wealth? Liberals give me a headache.
Another thing that confounded me: Do the Democrats think that their whole audience is comprised of history-challenged dolts? It seems so. If not, why oh why did they keep invoking Abraham Lincoln, the founder of the modern Republican Party? I mean, the media and our school system have done a great job erasing the fact that it was Southern Democrats who nearly scuttled the Civil Rights Act, but Abraham Lincoln? Color me confused.
Speaking of dolts, imagine how in the world someone who picked Joe Biden as a running mate can possibly be caught on the national stage saying, "For eighteen long months, you have stood up, one by one, and said enough to the politics of the past. You understand that in this election, the greatest risk we can take is to try the same old politics with the same old players and expect a different result."
And how, after penning such witty and timely barbs as "eight is enough," could his speech writers have allowed the following to escape Obama's mouth: "If you don't have a record to run on, then you paint your opponent as someone people should run from"?
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Biden's pro-RIAA, pro-FBI tech voting record
[cnet] By choosing Joe Biden as their vice presidential candidate, the Democrats have selected a politician with a mixed record on technology who has spent most of his Senate career allied with the FBI and copyright holders, who ranks toward the bottom of CNET's Technology Voters' Guide, and whose anti-privacy legislation was actually responsible for the creation of PGP.
[...] back to the Delaware senator's tech record. After taking over the Foreign Relations committee, Biden became a staunch ally of Hollywood and the recording industry in their efforts to expand copyright law. He sponsored a bill in 2002 that would have make it a federal felony to trick certain types of devices into playing unauthorized music or executing unapproved computer programs. Biden's bill was backed by content companies including News Corp. but eventually died after Verizon, Microsoft, Apple, eBay, and Yahoo lobbied against it.
A few months later, Biden signed a letter that urged the Justice Department "to prosecute individuals who intentionally allow mass copying from their computer over peer-to-peer networks." Critics of this approach said that the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America, and not taxpayers, should pay for their own lawsuits.
Last year, Biden sponsored an RIAA-backed bill called the Perform Act aimed at restricting Americans' ability to record and play back individual songs from satellite and Internet radio services. (The RIAA sued XM Satellite Radio over precisely this point.)
All of which meant that nobody in Washington was surprised when Biden was one of only four U.S. senators invited to a champagne reception in celebration of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act hosted by the MPAA's Jack Valenti, the RIAA, and the Business Software Alliance.
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2004 - Freddie / Fanny
Excerpts from the 2004 hearing. Parse as inclined.
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Commentary: Ron Paul : Bailouts will lead to rough economic ride
[cnn] [...] Unfortunately, the government's preferred solution to the crisis is the very thing that got us into this mess in the first place: government intervention.
Ever since the 1930s, the federal government has involved itself deeply in housing policy and developed numerous programs to encourage homebuilding and homeownership.
Government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were able to obtain a monopoly position in the mortgage market, especially the mortgage-backed securities market, because of the advantages bestowed upon them by the federal government.
Laws passed by Congress such as the Community Reinvestment Act required banks to make loans to previously underserved segments of their communities, thus forcing banks to lend to people who normally would be rejected as bad credit risks.
These governmental measures, combined with the Federal Reserve's loose monetary policy, led to an unsustainable housing boom. The key measure by which the Fed caused this boom was through the manipulation of interest rates, and the open market operations that accompany this lowering.
When interest rates are lowered to below what the market rate would normally be, as the Federal Reserve has done numerous times throughout this decade, it becomes much cheaper to borrow money. Longer-term and more capital-intensive projects, projects that would be unprofitable at a high interest rate, suddenly become profitable.
Because the boom comes about from an increase in the supply of money and not from demand from consumers, the result is malinvestment, a misallocation of resources into sectors in which there is insufficient demand.
In this case, this manifested itself in overbuilding in real estate. When builders realize they have overbuilt and have too many houses to sell, too many apartments to rent, or too much commercial real estate to lease, they seek to recoup as much of their money as possible, even if it means lowering prices drastically.
This lowering of prices brings the economy back into balance, equalizing supply and demand. This economic adjustment means, however that there are some winners -- in this case, those who can again find affordable housing without the need for creative mortgage products, and some losers -- builders and other sectors connected to real estate that suffer setbacks.
The government doesn't like this, however, and undertakes measures to keep prices artificially inflated. This was why the Great Depression was as long and drawn out in this country as it was. [...]
Using trillions of dollars of taxpayer money to purchase illusory short-term security, the government is actually ensuring even greater instability in the financial system in the long term.
The solution to the problem is to end government meddling in the market. Government intervention leads to distortions in the market, and government reacts to each distortion by enacting new laws and regulations, which create their own distortions, and so on ad infinitum.
It is time this process is put to an end. But the government cannot just sit back idly and let the bust occur. It must actively roll back stifling laws and regulations that allowed the boom to form in the first place.
The government must divorce itself of the albatross of Fannie and Freddie, balance and drastically decrease the size of the federal budget, and reduce onerous regulations on banks and credit unions that lead to structural rigidity in the financial sector.
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Bunk
[slate] : It looks like the Sarah Palin rape-kit myth is still alive and flourishing. A reader sent along this editorial in the New York Times today by Dorothy Samuels decrying the policy and asking Palin to give voters an explanation.
Unfortunately, all this piece does is help perpetuate the myth.
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Covering Freddie's Fanny : Banking Crisis
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Where's Joe? Oh, There He Is
[politico] Joe Biden's denunciation of his own campaign's ad to Katie Couric got so much attention last night that another odd note in the interview slipped by.
He was speaking about the role of the White House in a financial crisis.
"When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn't just talk about the princes of greed," Biden told Couric. "He said, 'Look, here's what happened.'"
As Reason's Jesse Walker footnotes it: "And if you owned an experimental TV set in 1929, you would have seen him. And you would have said to yourself, 'Who is that guy? What happened to President Hoover?'"
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Obama : Executive Experience
[wsj] Despite having authored two autobiographies, Barack Obama has never written about his most important executive experience. From 1995 to 1999, he led an education foundation called the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC), and remained on the board until 2001. The group poured more than $100 million into the hands of community organizers and radical education activists.
The CAC was the brainchild of Bill Ayers, a founder of the Weather Underground in the 1960s. Among other feats, Mr. Ayers and his cohorts bombed the Pentagon, and he has never expressed regret for his actions. Barack Obama's first run for the Illinois State Senate was launched at a 1995 gathering at Mr. Ayers's home. [...]
Mr. Ayers's defenders claim that he has redeemed himself with public-spirited education work. That claim is hard to swallow if you understand that he views his education work as an effort to stoke resistance to an oppressive American system. He likes to stress that he learned of his first teaching job while in jail for a draft-board sit-in. For Mr. Ayers, teaching and his 1960s radicalism are two sides of the same coin.
Mr. Ayers is the founder of the "small schools" movement (heavily funded by CAC), in which individual schools built around specific political themes push students to "confront issues of inequity, war, and violence." He believes teacher education programs should serve as "sites of resistance" to an oppressive system. (His teacher-training programs were also CAC funded.) The point, says Mr. Ayers in his "Teaching Toward Freedom," is to "teach against oppression," against America's history of evil and racism, thereby forcing social transformation.
The Obama campaign has cried foul when Bill Ayers comes up, claiming "guilt by association." Yet the issue here isn't guilt by association; it's guilt by participation. As CAC chairman, Mr. Obama was lending moral and financial support to Mr. Ayers and his radical circle. That is a story even if Mr. Ayers had never planted a single bomb 40 years ago.
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Depressing
[nro] The Great Depression is being invoked a lot these days, and I understand there's a reasonable real fear of a total meltdown out there. But some points are worth making. Even if we entered a serious depression, we will not experience time travel. America is a different place than it was in the 1930s. As Lawrence Lindey notes:
"In 1929, Americans had the per capita GDP of people now living in the Balkans. Today it is five times higher. So even if we have a depression, there won't be any Hoovervilles or soup lines. There may be a massive increase in demands for public assistance and rental housing, but this is hardship, not the privations of the 1930s."
I don't know how to quantify some of the improvements, but it's also worth keeping in mind much of the increased prosperity cannot be repealed. Our medical technology won't get worse. Our agricultural skills will not unravel (and, unless you believe Al Gore, there's no dust bowl heading our way). The internet will not vanish, forcing us to sit around the radio like they did in the 1930s (or around the TV if you believe Joe Biden).
But the real point I wanted to make is that we shouldn't let invocation of the Great Depression — and our fear of it — justify all of this New Deal talk. Say it with me: The New Deal prolonged the Great Depression. In fact, if anything it was the New Deal itself that made the Great Depression "Great." By 1938 one in six Americans were still without jobs. It wasn't until WWII, when FDR started describing himself as "Dr. Win the War" instead of "Dr. New Deal" that America finally started to lift itself out of its state-imposed economic stupor.
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Russia deploys warships to the Caribbean
[telegraph] : In a display meant to show off Russia's military resurgence and to provoke the United States, four vessels from the Northern Fleet set sail on a mission replete with an atmosphere of Soviet-era bombast and brinksmanship.
Symbolically at least, the manoeuvres represent the Kremlin's boldest challenge yet to US military hegemony. By sailing so close to the American coastline for a series of exercises with Washington's principal detractor in Latin America, Russia seems to be deliberately attempting to irritate the White House.
The flotilla that left the northern port of Serveromosrk on Russia's Arctic coast was lead by the guided missile cruiser Peter the Great, one of the largest warships of its kind. The Kirov-class warship is equipped with cruise missiles that can be armed with nuclear warheads.
It was accompanied by the Admiral Chabanenko, an anti-submarine destroyer, and two support vessels.
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Russia threatens to seize swathe of Arctic
[telegraph] : President Dmitry Medvedev said that Russia should unilaterally claim part of the Arctic, stepping up the race for the disputed energy-rich region.
"We must finalise and adopt a federal law on the southern border of Russia's Arctic zone," Mr Medvedev told a meeting of the Security Council, in remarks carried by Interfax news agency.
"This is our responsibility, and simply our direct duty, to our descendents," he said. "We must surely, and for the long-term future, secure Russia's interests in the Arctic."
Global warming has stepped up the fight for the disputed Arctic, believed to be laden with vast reserves of oil and gas. Russia has pitted itself against Canada, Denmark, Norway and the United States to fight for a greater part of the region, arguing that most of it is Russian territory since an underwater ridge links Siberia to the North Pole's seabed.
Last August, a Russian mini-submarine carrying politicians and scientists plunged to the depths of the Arctic and claimed to plant a Russian flag to mark Moscow's stake in the territory.
Footage of the alleged planting was widely broadcast on Russian television – but later turned out to be images taken from the Hollywood blockbuster Titanic.
Under international law, each of the five countries that lay claim to the Arctic own a 320-kilometre zone that extends north from their shores. That arrangement is up for UN review in May next year.
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Obama votes 'present' on new economic rescue plan
[latimes] : Sen. Barack Obama today met with some of his many economic advisors and made an announcement that he was not going to make an announcement about any new plan to plan plans.
Obama did suggest a bipartisan effort to deal with the financial crisis wreaking havoc on Wall Street, always a good idea for any candidate after the primaries because it sounds good and costs nothing.
But Obama did not present any detailed proposal of his own for how to resolve the monetary situation that has roiled world markets in recent days.
Obama's inaction prompted Jay Leno in his opening monologue tonight on "The Tonight Show" to point out an essential presidential campaign unfairness, that Obama has criticized McCain's economic plan but the Republican can't respond because "nobody knows" what Obama's is yet.
After meeting with his top economic advisers, the Democratic presidential candidate said this was not the time to present specific details for how to fix the immediate problem, a reversal from what he had said a day earlier. Nor did he explain when a good time would be to explain such a rescue from the current financial crisis.
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European Anti-Americanism Fueled by Ignorance
[pjm] : [...] Seventy percent of Britons think the United States has done a worse job than the European Union in reducing carbon emissions since 2000; in fact, America’s rate of growth of carbon emissions has decreased by almost ten percent since 2000, while that of the EU has increased by 2.3 percent.
Eighty percent of Britons believe that “from 1973 to 1990, the United States sold Saddam Hussein more than a quarter of his weapons.” In fact, the United States sold just 0.46 percent of Saddam’s arsenal to him; Russia, France, and China supplied 57 percent, 13 percent, and 12 percent, respectively.
The majority of Britons believe that since the Second World War, the United States has more often sided with non-Muslims than with Muslims. In fact, in 11 out of 12 major conflicts between Muslims and non-Muslims, Muslims and secular forces, or Arabs and non-Arabs, the United States has sided with Muslims and/or Arabs.
Indeed, a new opinion poll finds that British attitudes towards the United States are governed by ignorance of the facts on key issues such as crime, health care, and foreign policy. The survey was commissioned by America in the World, a London-based group that hopes to push back against rampant anti-Americanism in the United Kingdom by dispelling widely held myths about the United States.
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Struggling with who to vote for? Then maybe you better just forget it. Or you could use this device.
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Canada : A Little Chill On Public Discourse...'Tolerable'
[ntnlpost] : Canada's top legal precedent on hate speech may now be unworkable because of the Internet's transformation of public discourse, according to Athanasios Hadjis, the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal member hearing the case against far-right propagandist Marc Lemire.
In an exchange Monday with a government lawyer, Mr. Hadjis said Section 13 of Canada's Human Rights Act, which was written to target the operators of racist telephone hotlines, and extended to the Internet after the 9/11 terror attacks, now captures "anyone who puts the written word down in digital form," including countless bloggers and the entirety of the mainstream press.
"It has an effect on the citizens of Canada who may be near that line [of hate speech] but not crossing it," Mr. Hadjis said. These people can nevertheless find themselves "dragged through the process" of a human rights complaint, he said.
As an example, he questioned whether the CHRC is fair to hold the operators of online message boards accountable for hateful messages posted by other people. He said the Internet has expanded the "grey zone" of hate speech such that "maybe the scale is tipping the other way."
Mr. Hadjis' comments, while not legally binding, suggest he is sympathetic to the arguments of Mr. Lemire, who has brought a constitutional challenge of human rights hate speech law as part of his defence against a hate speech complaint brought in 2003 by activist lawyer Richard Warman.
They also come as Richard Moon, a University of Windsor law professor, is in the final stages of an independent review of the Canadian Human Rights Commission's hate speech mandate, which the CHRC itself initiated in response to a growing controversy over freedom of expression.
Several groups, from hard-right free speech activists to liberal Jewish organizations, have expressed concern over the CHRC's application of Section 13 of Canada's Human Rights Act, and its potential abuse by complainants as a political platform.
By far the most determined critics, however, have been Mr. Lemire and his legal team, who once represented Holocaust-denier Ernst Zundel. Among Mr. Lemire's supporters Monday was Tomasz Winnicki, a prominent white supremacist and convicted hatemonger.
Section 13 applies to messages "likely to expose" an identifiable group to hatred or contempt. [...]
"Suddenly all these declarations that may have legitimately been made on paper, in the age of Taylor, will be caught by Section 13."
Mr. Fothergill answered that if Section 13 puts a chill on public discourse, it is only to be around the fringes of hate speech, and that this is not "a terribly bad outcome."
"A little bit of chilling ... is tolerable," he said. [...]
Mr. Hadjis questioned whether it is fair, in general, to hold Web site owners accountable for what others may write in their comment sections, possibly without their knowledge, consent or endorsement.
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Surprise! Problems With Rangel : Has To Go
[nyt] Mounting embarrassment for taxpayers and Congress makes it imperative that Representative Charles Rangel step aside as chairman of the Ways and Means Committee while his ethical problems are investigated.
This recommendation does not come easily, considering the New York Democrat’s four decades of service in Congress. But Mr. Rangel himself has felt obliged to request three separate House ethics inquiries of his behavior. While denying serious improprieties, Mr. Rangel concedes that he has not lived up to the “higher standard” expected of members of Congress.
His latest admission is that as chief of Congress’s tax-writing committee, he was “irresponsible” in failing to disclose $75,000 in rental income and pay federal and state taxes on a villa in the Dominican Republic.
His temporary yielding of the gavel is an urgent necessity for a Democratic Congress elected two years ago on promises of an ethical housecleaning. The villa dealings only add momentum to the investigations of two earlier controversies — Mr. Rangel’s favored treatment in occupying four rent-stabilized apartments in Manhattan, and his improper use of official letterheads to solicit support from charities and corporations for an academic center to memorialize his career in public service.
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Journalistic Embarrassment - Canada Tax Payer Funded
[cbc]
I assume John McCain chose Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential partner in a fit of pique because the Republican money men refused to let him have the stuffed male shirt he really wanted. She added nothing to the ticket that the Republicans didn't already have sewn up, the white trash vote, the demographic that sullies America's name inside and outside its borders yet has such a curious appeal for the right. [...]
Palin has a toned-down version of the porn actress look favoured by this decade's woman, the overtreated hair, puffy lips and permanently alarmed expression. Bristol has what is known in Britain as the look of the teen mum, the "pramface." Husband Todd looks like a roughneck; Track, heading off to Iraq, appears terrified. They claim to be family obsessed while being studiously terrible at parenting. What normal father would want Levi "I'm a fuckin' redneck" Johnson prodding his daughter?
fr. comments:
Heather Mallick sophomoric exercise in salacious sophistry in her Governor Sarah Palin essay accomplished what the emotionally challenged “writer” apparently sought in attracting attention to herself. However, it illustrates vividly the lack of rational argument so often reflected in the works of radical neo-humanists. The moral-relativist justification for her smug smear of Palin is that any venomous inanity justifies the end. It also points to a woman seething with anger and resentments that have disabled her from civil intercourse. [Of course, she writes us from Canada, that glowing center of “free expression” where conservative writers who dare question Islam’s practices often find themselves hauled before Human Rights Commissions.]
Stop using my money to fund hate on the CBC
[national] [...] I used to make a point of tracking Mallick’s hysterical anti-American, anti- conservative ravings when she worked at the Globe, because her swill was unavoidable. It was a happy day for me when she burned her bridges at the Globe and Mail. I suppose for those who are familiar with what clicks at the higher reaches of the CBC hierarchy, it is needless to say that Mallick’s frenzied, hate-filled diatribes against George Bush, Republicans, pro-life women and anyone else she’d like to see barred from entering Canada is exactly what they consider daring and courageous.
So you and I are now paying to read such choice musings as these, picked at random from her column: Sarah Palin ... the white trash vote ... Republican men, sexual inadequates ... [Palln] isn't even female really ... Alaska hillbilly ... white trash ... ... rural, loud, proudly unlettered ... toned-down version of the porn actress ... overtreated hair, puffy lips ... "pramface" (of pregnant daughter)... prodding his daughter ... ratboy ... fizzing with rage and revenge ... the hick vote ... white female marginals ...” [...]
Mallick is a national embarrassment that we all have to pay for. I have found my election issue.
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Where's Joe Biden? Joe Who? Oh, There He Is
[politico] Joe Biden will deliver a high-profile first attack in a sustained anti-McCain offensive in a speech called "Bush 44" Monday in the key battleground state of Michigan.
While the lines of attack have long been drawn, Biden will assert — as the title indicates — that a McCain presidency would amount to a third Bush term and will focus, in a detailed, comprehensive and aggressive way, onJohn McCain's domestic policies and harsh campaign tactics, a campaign aide told Politico.
Biden will deliver the speech in St. Clair Shores, Mich., in Macomb County, the area whose voters inspired Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg to coin the term “Reagan Democrats.” The RealClearPolitics polling average shows Barack Obama with a 2-point lead in Michigan, which Democrats won by slim margins in the last two elections.
The speech is touted as matching the aggressive new strategy the Obama campaign has promised to unleash in the remaining days of the campaign to counter the recent poll gains of McCain and his running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.
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Yawning Gulf Between What Obama Says and How He Has Acted
[uktimes]
: [...] The essential problem coming to light is a profound disconnect between the Barack Obama of the candidate's speeches, and the Barack Obama who has actually been in politics for the past decade or so.
Speechmaker Obama has built his campaign on the promise of reform, the need to change the culture of American political life, to take on the special interests that undermine government's effectiveness and erode trust in the system itself,
Politician Obama rose through a Chicago machine that is notoriously the most corrupt in the country. As David Freddoso writes in a brilliantly cogent and measured book, The Case Against Barack Obama, the angel of deliverance from the old politics functioned like an old-time Democratic pol in Illinois. He refused repeatedly to side with those lonely voices that sought to challenge the old corrupt ways of the ruling party.
Speechmaker Obama talks about an era of bipartisanship, He speaks powerfully about the destructive politics of red and blue states.
Politician Obama has toed his party's line more reliably than almost any other Democrat in US politics. He has a near-perfect record of voting with his side. He has the most solidly left-wing voting history in the Senate. His one act of bipartisanship, a transparency bill co-sponsored with a Republican senator, was backed by everybody on both sides of the aisle. He has never challenged his party's line on any issue of substance.
Speechmaker Obama talks a lot about finding ways to move beyond the bloody battlegrounds of the “culture wars” in America; the urgent need to establish consensus on the emotive issue of abortion.
Politician Obama's support for abortion rights is the most extreme of any Democratic senator. In the Illinois legislature he refused to join Democrats and Republicans in supporting a Bill that would require doctors to provide medical care for babies who survived abortions. No one in the Senate - not the arch feminist Hillary Clinton nor the superliberal Edward Kennedy - opposed this same humane measure.
Here's the real problem with Mr Obama: the jarring gap between his promises of change and his status quo performance. There are just too many contradictions between the eloquent poetry of the man's stirring rhetoric and the dull, familiar prose of his political record.
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Chuck Gibson's 'first interview of Sarah!' (the hysteria surrounding it hardly short of Beatlemaniacal) and the selective editing points aside, the actual cuts that were done to the interview appeared to be done by someone functioning in a work experience program, not a 'professional' news agency. Come on. Even that's much too polite. Forget conversations of 'tone,' 'bias,' out and out misrepresentations and so on, although that is rife and Charlie's done some damage to his 'rep,' it was technically a shamble.
It's good that this hackery, not new in practice, has brought to the forefront a sharp example of techniques often employed. People are aware of it, but it's not so often so glaring. Statements may have context removed, key points limited or omitted, and perception of what someone says. How about positioning and camera technique?
[ht] : I'm a Director in Hollywood. I've also created visual effects for movies and commercials for 23 years [...] I caught a commercial teaser for the Charlie Gibson interview of Sarah Palin and something caught my attention as a Director immediately: The use of the position and choice of lenses to minimalize Governor Palin. To be objective to see if I was jumping to conclusions, I immediately reviewed Mr. Gibson's interview with Senator Obama. [...]
While it's true that Governor Palin is of less stature than Mr. Gibson, the deliberate choice of the camera's height, framing and the use of telephoto lenses all serve to make Mr. Gibson look overpowering and Governor Palin the weak prey. This is common shooting technique we use to make a villain appear more ominous.
Indeed.
Without a doubt this suggestion below is the not long to be reality. The technology that the consumer has to do the job is now the norm and principled reasoning of objection seems slim.
Bring Your Own Camera
[nypost] :
Charlie Gibson's ABC interview with Republican veep candidate Sarah Palin produced a lot of complaints from Palin fans. There's not much anyone in the campaign can do about journalists like Gibson misstating candidates' "exact words," but there is something that candidates - and anyone else interviewed by a possibly hostile media - can do to make sure that things get played straight in the editing process.
You just have to break the camera monopoly. [...]Of course, the knowledge that this will happen is likely to be enough to keep people honest - but if anything is edited unfairly, the full video will tell the tale. No need to wait for Groundskeeper Willie to appear.
TV journalists won't be happy with this, of course, but it's hard to see a principled basis for objecting.
In the past, the tools for broadcast newsgathering were expensive and specialized, and much of the media's power came from the fact that no one else had them. Those times are long gone, and candidates, and journalists, are going to have to adapt.
Transcript Reveals ABC Hatchet Job - As If That Were Necessary
[newsbusters] : A transcript of the unedited interview of Sarah Palin by Charles Gibson clearly shows that ABC News edited out crucial portions of the interview that showed Palin as knowledgeable or presented her answers out of context. [...]
I urge everybody to see just how the unedited version of the first interview compared to what we saw on television by checking out the [full transcript].
It is a fascinating look into media manipulation via skillful editing.
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Obama Backs Off 50-State Strategy
[wshtimes] : Despite the talk about a changing electoral map and new strategies, Barack Obama is pulling back from his 50-state plan as John McCain has solidified Republican support, turning November's presidential election into a contest for the same handful of states that have swung the last two contests.
The first round of post-convention polling shows Mr. McCain, in picking Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate, has enthused Republicans. Meanwhile Mr. Obama, the Democrats' nominee, is pulling back resources from Georgia, a state he once boasted he would flip Democratic; is stepping up efforts to hold Democrats in Pennsylvania and Michigan; and is showering attention on Ohio, the lynchpin in Republicans' 2004 victory.
"The Republican brand has been revived, and the conservative base has been solidified," said pollster John Zogby. "McCain has had a few good weeks, so now what we have to do is see if Obama can come back because it is still very competitive."
And once again, as so often in past elections, Ohio and its 20 electoral votes, may be the decisive prize.
No Republican has won the presidency since Abraham Lincoln without carrying Ohio, but a Quinnipiac University Poll showed Thursday that Mr. Obama had lengthened his lead in Ohio by 49 percent to 44 percent, compared with a narrow 1 point lead in its Aug. 26 survey. That's the reverse of a Fox News/Rasmussen poll earlier this week that found Mr. McCain with a seven percentage point lead.
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Canada Votes : 2008[cbc] The Conservatives have continued to gain ground after the first several days of the Oct. 14 federal election campaign, according to a newly released poll.
Nationally, the Conservatives lead with 41 per cent of the public's support, followed by the Liberals at 26 per cent, while the NDP are at 14 per cent support, said the Canadian Press-Harris/Decima rolling survey, in partnership with the CBC.
The Green party trails with nine per cent support, while eight per cent of respondents said they favoured the Bloc Québécois.
"This snapshot that we have here will be good news for the Conservative Party," the CBC's David Taylor said Friday following the release of the results.
Harris/Decima president Bruce Anderson described the Conservative momentum as "remarkable," saying the party has gained ground in key subgroups that have eluded them in the past, including urban Canada and women. [...]
Harper has repeatedly downplayed talk of a majority during the campaign, saying he still believed the result of the Oct. 14 vote would be a minority government.
Despite the positive numbers, Conservative strategist Lisa Samson said her party was taking nothing for granted.
"Every vote counts on Oct. 14," Samson told CBC News on Friday from Ottawa.
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Palin 'Governed from the Center'
[usatoday] : Weeks after taking office as Alaska's governor in December 2006, Sarah Palin vetoed a bill that sought to ban benefits for the same-sex partners of state workers. It was unconstitutional, she said.
This year, she rebuffed religious conservatives who wanted her to add two abortion restriction measures to a special legislative session on oil and gas policy, even though she supported the bills. Former aide Larry Persily said she didn't want to risk offending Democrats, whose votes she needed on energy legislation. [...]
...in her 21 months as governor, Palin has taken few steps to advance culturally conservative causes. Instead, after she knocked off an incumbent amid an influence-peddling scandal linked to the oil industry, Palin pursued a populist agenda that toughened ethics rules and raised taxes on oil and gas companies.
And she did so while relying on Democratic votes in the Legislature.
"She has governed from the center," says Rebecca Braun, author of Alaska Budget Report, a non-partisan political newsletter. "She has in some small ways supported her religious views — for example, proposing money to continue the office of faith-based and community initiatives — but she has actually been conspicuously absent on social issues. She came in with a big oil and gas agenda, which really required Democratic allies to get through."
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This is the kind of thing that draws a dividing line. The whining and clear cut attempts to silence people. What is that? How can anyone really not see this offence? It's not a political 'Left or Right' thing. Turn the station off or better yet never turn it on if you disagree with it. Find a different one. Create your own. It's absolutely pathetic and something I would never be able to get behind. That and the incessant whining from one direction.Radio Station Sued Over Content
[gnp] : A Los Angeles man has filed a lawsuit against a conservative talk radio station — which broadcasts from the city — claiming the station and its media company misrepresented their federal license agreement by serving the interest of the Republican Party rather than the public.
David Birke and his attorney Johnny Birke filed a complaint Aug. 27 against seven talk show hosts of KRLA-AM (870), Salem Communications Corporation and its owner Edward Atsinger III, alleging that they use the public airwaves to push Republican beliefs. David and Johnny Birke would not say whether they were related, citing attorney-client privilege. [...]
Radio hosts Laura Ingraham, Dennis Prager, Michael Medved, Hugh Hewitt, Dennis Miller, Mike Gallagher and Kevin James are named as defendants in the suit.
“My client saw a need to address something that has gone unquestioned for so many years,” Johnny Birke said. “He lost his interest in the public radio airwaves.”
David Birke is a longtime registered Democrat, according to the complaint.
“He’s not doing this for publicity,” Johnny Birke said. “My client’s case can be proven.”
Salem Communications’ attorney did not return calls seeking comment.
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Exploding Spending
[wsj] Here's a prediction: The media will report today that the federal budget deficit is big and getting bigger. What most of them won't report, alas, is that the cause of these deficits is an explosion in federal spending. [...]
The real news in yesterday's Congressional Budget Office semiannual report is that federal expenditures on everything from roads to homeland security to health care will on present trends reach 21.5% of GDP next year. That's a larger share of national output than at anytime since 1992. If the cost of the federal takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac prove to be large and are taken into account, next year federal outlays could be higher as a share of the economy than at anytime since World War II. In this decade alone, federal spending has increased by almost $1.2 trillion, or 57%.
The federal deficit is expected to hit $407 billion for fiscal 2008 (which ends at the end of this month) and $438 billion next year. Still, the deficit is expected to be only 3% of GDP, which is in line with the average of the last 30 years. We hope Congress and the Presidential candidates don't obsess over the deficit per se, because the real fiscal drag from government comes from how much it spends, not how much it borrows.
The Bush tax cuts also aren't the budget problem. Until this year federal tax collections have been surging. In the four years after the 2003 tax cuts become law, tax receipts exploded by $785 billion. This year revenues have declined by 0.8%, but a major reason is the $150 billion bipartisan tax rebate that has hit the Treasury without spurring the economy. Without these nonstimulating rebates, federal tax payments would have climbed another 2.5%, according to CBO. Revenue is expected to be a healthy 18.5% of GDP next year without any tax increase.
Another myth is that the war on terror has busted the budget. While operations in Iraq and Afghanistan are expensive, defense spending is $605 billion this year, or about 4.5% of GDP. That only seems large by comparison to the holiday from history of the 1990s, when defense fell to 3% of GDP. As recently as 1986, defense spending was 6.2% of GDP.
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AFF national television ad encouraging Americans to call on Congress to pass S. 3202, the 'Gas Price Reduction Act'.
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Polls Stir Angst in Dems
[politico] [...] Yet still, the Obama campaign seems to be struggling to find a consistent, cohesive economic message. One can understand why aides would not want to muddy his mantra of change and his image as a post-partisan, revolutionary figure. But blue-collar voters in Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia and Michigan likely won’t vote for Obama because of some meta-narrative or a series of fabulous speeches.
“The [Obama] campaign is beginning to look like other campaigns,” said a former top strategist for past Democratic presidential campaigns, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “Obama is struggling with working-class whites just like John Kerry, Al Gore, Bill Clinton, Michael Dukakis did, and Walter Mondale. He’s struggling with voters in the border-state South. And he’s struggling with an enormous wind at his back, a hatred for George Bush and a mainstream media that is little short of a chorus for his campaign.” [...]
Anyone who thinks the presidential election should be a layup for Obama should remember that Democrats have broken the 50 percent barrier in presidential elections only twice since 1944.
Did Obama himself forget?
Even if he didn’t, he let a narrative take hold in the news media and among many of his own supporters that led to expectations that he should be far ahead, leading to disappointment when he isn’t.
“A lot of Democratic elites thought this was a slam-dunk. And I thought, no it’s not,” said Lake, the pollster. “People in this town were already measuring drapes. And I was thinking, have you been in the real world lately?
“If you have been involved in campaigns, you thought it was going to be close for a year,” she added. “And I think a lot of Democratic elites are waking up to that.”
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McCain/Palin camp: For the love of Pete, please pen some new things to say. Yes, these days cycles are short, 24 hr. news blabber and it's only been a little over week etc, but seriously. Get on that. At least re-write it to say the same thing with different words. Surely someone on staff is capable of that.Media: Keep on saying and having endless guests on saying how everyone needs to stop talking about Sarah Palin...while you continue to do so all day and night, barely stopping for breath. Keep talking 24/7 to each other about how you have to stop talking about her. Sheer quality.
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In Politics, Words Are Cheap.
[wsj] [...] Let's compare.
Mrs. Palin used her veto pen to slash more local projects than any other governor in the state's history. She cut nearly 10% of Alaska's budget this year, saving state residents $268 million. This included vetoing a $30,000 van for Campfire USA and $200,000 for a tennis court irrigation system. She succinctly justified these cuts by saying they were "not a state responsibility."
Meanwhile in Washington, Mr. Obama voted for numerous wasteful earmarks last year, including: $12 million for bicycle paths, $450,000 for the International Peace Museum, $500,000 for a baseball stadium and $392,000 for a visitor's center in Louisiana.
Mrs. Palin cut Alaska's federal earmark requests in half last year, one of the strongest moves against earmarks by any governor. It took real leadership to buck Alaska's decades-long earmark addiction.
Mr. Obama delivered over $100 million in earmarks to Illinois last year and has requested nearly a billion dollars in pet projects since 2005. His running mate, Joe Biden, is still indulging in earmarks, securing over $90 million worth this year.
Mrs. Palin also killed the infamous Bridge to Nowhere in her own state. Yes, she once supported the project: But after witnessing the problems created by earmarks for her state and for the nation's budget, she did what others like me have done: She changed her position and saved taxpayers millions. Even the Alaska Democratic Party credits her with killing the bridge.
When the Senate had its chance to stop the Bridge to Nowhere and transfer the money to Katrina rebuilding, Messrs. Obama and Biden voted for the $223 million earmark, siding with the old boys' club in the Senate. And to date, they still have not publicly renounced their support for the infamous earmark.
Mrs. Palin has proven courageous by taking on big spenders in her own party. In March of this year, the Anchorage Daily News reported that, "Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens is aggravated about what he sees as Gov. Sarah Palin's antagonism toward the earmarks he uses to steer federal money to the state."
Mr. Obama had a chance to take on his party when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid offered a sham ethics bill, which was widely criticized by watchdog groups such as Citizens Against Government Waste for shielding earmarks from pubic scrutiny. But instead of standing with taxpayers, Mr. Obama voted for the bill. Today, he claims he helped write the bill that failed to clean up Washington.
Mr. Obama has shown little restraint on earmarks until this year, when he decided to co-sponsor an earmark moratorium authored by Mr. McCain and myself. Mr. Obama is vulnerable on this issue, and he knows it. That is why he is lashing out at Mrs. Palin and trying to hide his own record.
Mrs. Palin is one of the strongest antiearmark governors in America. If more governors around the country would do what she has done, we would be much closer to fixing our nation's fiscal problems than we are.
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Now That's Entertainment
Sept.1/08 radio interview with former Democratic Senator from Alaska and 2008 Presidential candidate Mike Gravel. The Senator doesn't quite give the radios hosts what they clearly wanted or hoped for.
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Fresh Blood
[salon] [...] Over the Labor Day weekend, with most of the big enchiladas of the major media on vacation, the vacuum was filled with a hallucinatory hurricane in the leftist blogosphere, which unleashed a grotesquely lurid series of allegations, fantasies, half-truths and outright lies about Palin. What a tacky low in American politics -- which has already caused a backlash that could damage Obama's campaign. When liberals come off as childish, raving loonies, the right wing gains. I am still waiting for substantive evidence that Sarah Palin is a dangerous extremist. I am perfectly willing to be convinced, but right now, she seems to be merely an optimistic pragmatist like Ronald Reagan, someone who pays lip service to religious piety without being in the least wedded to it. I don't see her arrival as portending the end of civil liberties or life as we know it. [...]
It is certainly premature to predict how the Palin saga will go. I may not agree a jot with her about basic principles, but I have immensely enjoyed Palin's boffo performances at her debut and at the Republican convention, where she astonishingly dealt with multiple technical malfunctions without missing a beat. A feminism that cannot admire the bravura under high pressure of the first woman governor of a frontier state isn't worth a warm bucket of spit.
Perhaps Palin seemed perfectly normal to me because she resembles so many women I grew up around in the snow belt of upstate New York. For example, there were the robust and hearty farm women of Oxford, a charming village where my father taught high school when I was a child. [...]
The witch-trial hysteria of the past two incendiary weeks unfortunately reveals a disturbing trend in the Democratic Party, which has worsened over the past decade. Democrats are quick to attack the religiosity of Republicans, but Democratic ideology itself seems to have become a secular substitute religion. Since when did Democrats become so judgmental and intolerant? Conservatives are demonized, with the universe polarized into a Manichaean battle of us versus them, good versus evil. Democrats are clinging to pat group opinions as if they were inflexible moral absolutes. The party is in peril if it cannot observe and listen and adapt to changing social circumstances.
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Canada : One Big Happy Family : Election Oct.14
[rcp] : [...] Regardless of his political persuasions, I doubt any reader is himself in doubt about the views of McCain and Palin on, say, abortion, or same-sex marriage, or the ramifications of the U.S. First Amendment. Messrs Obama and Biden have more "nuanced" views -- i.e. more likely to say one thing and do another -- and yet their own positions are clear enough, when the lights are trained on them.If I were a woman, and the most important issue to me were the preservation of my unfettered legal right to kill my unborn children, I would have no difficulty in choosing the Democrat ticket. Whereas, up here in Canada, it really wouldn't matter if I voted Conservative, Liberal, New Democrat, Bloc, or Green.
That is an extreme case, but the same goes for every other issue I can think of, including all the routine ones touching our daily lives.
For instance, all parties are committed to preserving Canada's dysfunctional socialist health care system. All are committed to the continued heavy regulation of private enterprise generally, and to choking small business in particular with red tape. All are committed to maintaining a crippling tax burden, and a tax collection system with arbitrary and unaccountable powers of search and seizure. Moreover, in the name of the "global warming" imposture, all are committed to significantly extending the leaden hand of government micro-mismanagement into every aspect of our daily lives that may touch even tangentially on "the environment."
And to take a subject of special interest to me, none is prepared to defend our country's common-law heritage, and due process in our courts (especially our family courts). None will vindicate the most elementary rights of free speech and free press. None will lift a finger when journalists and many others are hauled before "human rights" kangaroo courts, and put under star chamber inquisitions, as if Canada were exactly the sort of country our fathers fought in two World Wars.
The debates are seldom if ever about which direction we should be going, but rather, how far and how fast we should proceed along the pre-determined highway. This is the "Canadian consensus," shared by the various self-appointing and self-regulating elites in government, law, media, and academia. And it is a "consensus" they enforce, with ever-increasing restrictions on our ability to discuss, publicly, the various activist agendas they are pushing.
To be fair to many who hold all the conventional "Canadian consensus" views, there is seldom much malice in them. As products of our ideologized schools and universities, living all their lives deep within urban conurbations, in spiritually "gated" communities where they mix only with their own kind, they have never been exposed to contrary ideas. And they are sincerely aghast when anything that challenges their profoundly settled views is set before them. The notion that deviation must be suppressed comes as naturally to them, as the notion that anything unIslamic must be suppressed, to a Wahabi fundamentalist in Arabia.
The idea that, for instance, a man could own a gun for any other purpose than to commit violent crimes, is not easily communicated to a person who has no ability whatever to visualize life outside the confines of an urban neighbourhood.
More subtly, the dweller in an urban apartment complex cannot imagine a life in which everything he does is not bound by fussy rules and regulations, and in which any act of non-conformity (lighting a cigarette, for instance) must be greeted with hysterical alarm. In this sense, our vast modern cities, not only in Canada but everywhere, breed Pavlovian conformity to their own physical requirements, and systematically replace moral imperatives with bureaucratic ones.
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Obama / Bon Jovi Event at $30,800 Per Person Event: 'We Won't Be Bullied'
[wcbstv] Unlike his Republican opponent, Democrat Barack Obama is still raising money for his presidential campaign, and he turned Friday to rock legend Jon Bon Jovi for help.
Bon Jovi and his wife, Dorothea, hosted more than 100 people for dinner on their mansion lawn by the Navesink River in Middletown, N.J. The price was $30,800 a person, to be divided between the Obama campaign and the Democratic National Committee. [...]
Obama spoke for about eight minutes before greeting guests individually. He vowed to fight Republican attacks on his character and background more fiercely than John Kerry did in his losing campaign four years ago.
"We're not going to be bullied, we're not going to be smeared, we're not going to be lied about," Obama said. "I don't believe in coming in second."
Earlier in the evening, Obama attended a $2,300-per-person reception at the nearby home of veteran party fundraiser Phil Murphy. About 200 people, including the Bon Jovis and New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine, attended.
Republican nominee John McCain can raise no more campaign money because he accepted about $84 million in public funding and the restrictions that go with it.
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GOP Convention Through The Whittle Lens
[nro] [...] I think the magic of Sarah Palin speaks to a belief that so many of us share: the sense that we personally know five people in our immediate circle who would make a better president than the menagerie of candidates the major parties routinely offer. Sarah Palin has erupted from this collective American Dream — the idea that, given nothing but classic American values like hard work, integrity, and tough-minded optimism you can actually do what happens in the movies: become Leader of the Free World, the President of the United States of America. (Or, well, you know, vice president.)
Sarah Palin has done more than unify and electrify the base. She’s done something I would not have thought possible, were it not happening in front of my nose: Sarah Palin has stolen Barack Obama’s glamour. She’s stolen his excitement, robbed his electricity, burgled his charisma, purloined his star power, and taken his Hope and Change mantra, woven it into a cold-weather fashion accessory, and wrapped it around her neck. [...]
. . . what of John McCain?
As for the speech: yes, it was stilted. Awkward in places, true. Ugly background, cheesy flagpole, lack of polish — got it. But as the northerners said of Abraham Lincoln in the first days of the war, when he was mockingly compared to the effortless grace of Jefferson Davis: “We didn’t get him for ballroom purposes.” Damn right we didn’t.
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123 People Shot in Chicago Over Summer : Nearly Double The Number of Soldiers Killed In Iraq Over Same Period
[cbs2] : An estimated 123 people were shot and killed over the summer. That's nearly double the number of soldiers killed in Iraq over the same time period.
In May, cbs2chicago.com began tracking city shootings and posting them on Google maps. Information compiled from our reporters, wire service reports and the Chicago Police Major Incidents log indicated that 123 people were shot and killed throughout the city between the start of Memorial Day weekend on May 26, and the end of Labor Day on Sept. 1.
According to the Defense Department, 65 soldiers were killed in combat in Iraq. About the same number were killed in Afghanistan over that same period.
In the same time period, an estimated 245 people were shot and wounded in the city.
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Sarah Delivers The Mail
"There is much to like and admire about our opponent... But... it's easy to forget that this is a man who has authored two memoirs but not a single major law or reform."
"I’ve learned quickly, these past few days, that if you’re not a member in good standing of the Washington elite, then some in the media consider a candidate unqualified for that reason alone," she said. "But here’s a little news flash for all those reporters and commentators: I’m not going to Washington to seek their good opinion—I’m going to Washington to serve the people of this country."
"This is a man who can give an entire speech about the wars America is fighting, and never use the word victory except when he's talking about his own campaign."
"I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a ‘community organizer,’ except that you have actual responsibilities."
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[politico] In her first national address, vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin wowed the Republican convention using wit, sarcasm, charm and ridicule in a full scale assault on a now familiar cast of GOP targets — an elitist adversary, a biased media and high taxes.
Without mentioning Democrat Barack Obama’s name and rarely losing a smile, the Alaska governor delivered one riposte after another.
“We’ve all heard his dramatic speeches before devoted followers,” she said. “But when the cloud of rhetoric has passed, when the roar of the crowd fades away, when the stadium lights go out and those styrofoam Greek columns are hauled back to some studio lot — what exactly is our opponent’s plan?
“The answer is to make government take more of your money, give you more orders from Washington and to reduce the strength of America in a dangerous world,” Palin concluded.
Palin’s poised and flawless performance evoked roars of applause from delegates who earlier this week might have worried that the surprise pick and newcomer to the national stage may not be up to the job.
When the nearly 40-minute address came to a close, however, all doubts were doused and Democrats were on notice that Palin will not flinch from the fight.
Palin’s speech so delighted some Republicans that they suggested it may instantly elevate her to GOP rock-star status and diminish presidential contenders who ran this year who may hope to seek the White House again.
“Who's most bummed?” asked one veteran Republican consultant. “Obama? Biden? Mitt? Huck? Damn that was good.” [...]
The Democrats are hoping it won’t. Nominee Barack Obama’s campaign issued a response that looked straight past Palin and linked her rhetoric to President Bush.
“The speech that Gov. Palin gave was well delivered, but it was written by George Bush’s speechwriter and sounds exactly like the same divisive, partisan attacks we’ve heard from George Bush for the last eight years,” said campaign spokesman Bill Burton
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Did Obama give a speech recently? Goodbye Hillary
Suffice to say that the Sarah Palin speech was up to task. The lady does seem to bring "authenticity" to the table. Buzzword? Slice it as you might, this is undeniable. That does seem to be the best word and is already in danger of overuse. She articulately and clearly deflated the magic balloon that is being offered by the Democrats and Obama. She made the manufactured Obama and Slo' Joe Biden look like the 'same old' and very ordinary.Hope. That's a good idea for that camp because if this woman decides she wants to play, beyond this election and regardless of outcome, your lives just got a little less smooth.
If this lady so chooses, she will become a great force for her politics and at times during her speech it was easy to forget that she wasn't actually at the top of the ticket. I think that many would have no problem with this in the future (many, even now) and the clear spirit that she seems to possess, should appeal to many. Goodbye Hillary.It's a marked difference between this and the inescapable feeling that Obama, Biden, Pelosi, Reid et al are feeding you a line and tap dancing and waving at the same time.
Another notable difference, aside from not being talked down to from the podium and absence of doom and gloom bellowing, was that the entire crowd wasn't crying or hyperventilating.
It should be said that we were definitely not in the McCain camp, rather, we were staunchly in the zone of the 'no chance will JMac be the nominee' and simply could not see how it would occur nor do we agree with many of his previous policy positions. So much for our political acumen. The Mac machine has played the game astonishingly well.
Without a doubt, the election is important, but it seems that as many have suggested, should McCain win and for any variety of reasons, he would hold office for only one term. A safe assumption as far as assumptions go. His mother, at 96, might feel differently. Some have even posited that he should proclaim this ahead of time. That's a good one.
Whatever the end result, the McCain campaign has altered the game. I'll walk out on the limb and say that, should Obama win ( and I still don't see how he won't and was amazed that Bush was re-elected ) the prospect of his being a single term have been strengthened.
That there is an infusion of younger power-people in the choices of Obama and Palin represented on the ticket is important and bodes well for the process. Manufactured on both sides? Is it ever not?
People on both sides of the political fence, each a clear offering of stark policy differences, have been given a looking glass into the future of the game. John McCain, agree or disagree with him, deserves credit for many things and he can add changing the face of the future with his VP choice among those things.
Nice job there on the days of nonstop coverage regarding the crucial issue of Palin's 17 year old daughter being pregnant. It was all exceptional. If there wasn't an MSNBC to scour the dregs and float on the bottom, you guys would have a lock. Oh yea, thanks too for the breathless 'make the reporter stand outside in the wind and rain, a hurricane is coming!' shtick. Come on, it's so tired and '360 Cooper' pwnd that stepping stone play years ago.As for the post Palin speech commentary, thanks again. No shortage of 'Obamaesque, uh, uh,' level speaking from the Democrat talking heads and guests trotted out by CNN, which was the only coverage that I had available.
"Uh, uh, well, uh." Lots of stammering and scrambling incoherence. Always the feature of a speaker of the upper echelon. Laughably, some actually said "well, she's good at reading a teleprompter," with a straight face. Priceless. Blitzer did accurately note that 'a star is born.'
I am consistently astonished at the people that are brought out to vouch for leftist policy and garner favour. There has to be sensible types on that side of the isle. No? I'm waiting to see them and I've been waiting for years. The end result of the election, whatever outcome, doesn't change that. Empty rhetoric is the skill set most prominently displayed and applauded by the left.
The faces of the Democrat fabulists and mouthpieces were grand. Sputter out some cliche, throw out a rote innuendo or insinuation. Smile and muster a feigned laugh. Retreat to your list of talking points and ignore whatever the interviewer has just asked you. They all wore those smiles, the smile of the grasping phony. Call people liars - conveniently never indicating what exactly the lies are. Maybe you'll come up with something today (while the media try to avoid and downplay the previous night), but no matter, the big trick seems to be in just pushing a meme and then repeat and repeat. Follow up with the good old woe-is-me victim - we're all victims! and when they have their own words quoted back to them, be offended and scream that it's an attack! It's amusing to see being called out transposed and being confused with 'an attack.' Big meanies. Prepare for days of whining, word play and evasion.Another glaring 'not-quite-a-revelation' would be that Larry King has become dreadful, even if I did enjoy the prospect of having an entire panel of one political persuasion on for a whole night during the conventions and alternating as they did. There certainly is a difference between the selected guests representing the parties and how they carry themselves. I think I enjoyed the segments more than Larry seemed to. If it's painful Lar,' maybe don't do it. I have defended Larry in years past, though now I wonder how. He seems to favour being cute in his questioning, if not flat out silly. I suppose he considers this intellectual, but when he tries this lame tact with the likes of Prager, well, Mr. King, you expose what little you bring to the table of discourse these days.
I should note that old Blitzer has always seemed an ok sort and Anderson Cooper has surprisingly grown into a reasonable sort as well. However, it remains that any reasoned attempts they might make to offer thoughtful insight is tarnished by the wheeling out Jack Cafferty under the banner of 'best political team,' and makes a mockery of itself. I feel a little sorry for Blitzer when he has to share the screen and make play time small talk with this clown.
That said, without a doubt, John King is and has been for a long time, their best. The guy offers always cogent thoughts, insight and comments. He should actually have his own show along the lines of Meet The Press or such. Maybe someday he might.
- The Cynical Bastard
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What's So Special About Sarah?
[wsj] In a less crazed world, the Sarah Palin story -- hunter and snowmobiling mom becomes Alaska governor and routs old-boy political machine in bed for years with energy industry -- would be celebrated. Of course, they have to demolish her.
Sarah's story is the stuff of Erin Brockovich movies and full-page newspaper spreads. Except: She's "pro-life," is a "Christian," and unlike all the white guys who came in second, Sarah looks like she might help get a Republican elected.
It may be possible to pack more downward spin in what is being written about her, but modern media records are being set. Sarah has to be stopped because Sarah looks like trouble. [...]
One can't subtract politics from a woman who is running for vice president, but Sarah Palin's manifest appeal at the moment is about something larger than retail politics. If it holds up, the Democrats have a problem.
The Sarah Palin story doesn't fit the standard liberal model the past 30 years of what defines a high-achieving woman. The impulse in acceptable political society to condescend to lovely, ebullient Sarah is palpable. If the TV commentators tried to sound any smarter dismissing her qualifications, their big brains would burst.
Who is she? I mean after all, prior to whatever passes for politics up there in Alaska, all she seems to have done was play sports, go to a no-name university and have lots of babies? She's a beauty queen! This isn't even close to your standard East Coast über-woman. Sarah didn't go to Harvard Law and clerk for some legendary judge; her first job was as an Alaskan sportscaster! A great roar has arisen this week from Manhattan (New York, not Kansas): "Look at her standing there with John McCain, thinking she's Little Miss Perfect. My God, she almost sounds like an Alaskan Valley Girl. This can't possibly work, can it??!!!"
We'll find out. For starters, a lot of women voters don't live in New York, Boston, L.A. or San Francisco. Maybe Sarah Palin from Wasilla is a lot closer to the way many women today see themselves than the standard feminist model. Gloria Steinem, one of the many mothers of that ideal, is 74. Sarah Palin is 44. Times change.
Many younger women didn't learn what it means to be an achieving woman from dormitory feminism. She didn't abandon her hometown for the big city. She stayed home, had babies, helped her snowmobiling husband with his commercial fishing business and with him, tried to assemble a life.
She got into politics in Wasilla with zero connections -- no famous father, no financing husband, no mentor, nothing. She got elected mayor. She got into politics to improve her community, not to launch herself on some career path she had figured out while in college.
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A Tale of Moose Stew and Beauty
[nro] : [...] What other country in the developed world produces beauty queens who hunt caribou and serve up a terrific moose stew? As an immigrant, I'm not saying I came to the United States purely to meet chicks like that, but it was certainly high on my list of priorities. And for the gun-totin' Miss Wasilla then to go on to become Governor while having five kids makes it an even more uniquely American story. Next to her resume, a guy who's done nothing but serve in the phony-baloney job of "community organizer" and write multiple autobiographies looks like just another creepily self-absorbed lifelong member of the full-time political class that infests every advanced democracy. [...]
Sarah Palin and Barack Obama are more or less the same age, but Governor Palin has run a state and a town and a commercial fishing operation, whereas (to reprise a famous line on the Rev Jackson) Senator Obama ain't run nothin' but his mouth. She's done the stuff he's merely a poseur about. Post-partisan? She took on her own party's corrupt political culture directly while Obama was sucking up to Wright and Ayers and being just another get-along Chicago machine pol (see his campaign's thuggish attempt to throttle Stanley Kurtz and Milt Rosenberg on WGN the other night).
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Drop In Solar Activity : Potential Effect On Climate
[dt] : The sun has reached a milestone not seen for nearly 100 years: an entire month has passed without a single visible sunspot being noted.
The event is significant as many climatologists now believe solar magnetic activity – which determines the number of sunspots -- is an influencing factor for climate on earth.
According to data from Mount Wilson Observatory, UCLA, more than an entire month has passed without a spot. The last time such an event occurred was June of 1913. Sunspot data has been collected since 1749.When the sun is active, it's not uncommon to see sunspot numbers of 100 or more in a single month. Every 11 years, activity slows, and numbers briefly drop to near-zero. Normally sunspots return very quickly, as a new cycle begins.
But this year -- which corresponds to the start of Solar Cycle 24 -- has been extraordinarily long and quiet, with the first seven months averaging a sunspot number of only 3. August followed with none at all. The astonishing rapid drop of the past year has defied predictions, and caught nearly all astronomers by surprise.
[...] In the past 1000 years, three previous such events -- the Dalton, Maunder, and Spörer Minimums, have all led to rapid cooling. One was large enough to be called a "mini ice age". For a society dependent on agriculture, cold is more damaging than heat. The growing season shortens, yields drop, and the occurrence of crop-destroying frosts increases.
Article Update, Sep 1 2008: After this story was published, the NOAA reversed their previous decision on a tiny speck seen Aug 21, which gives their version of the August data a half-point. Other observation centers such as Mount Wilson Observatory are still reporting a spotless month. So depending on which center you believe, August was a record for either a full century, or only 50 years.
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Thompson Speech Excerpt
To deal with these challenges the Democrats present a history-making nominee for president.History-making in that he is the most liberal, most inexperienced nominee to ever run for president. Apparently they believe that he would match up well with the history-making, Democrat-controlled Congress. History-making because it's the least accomplished and most unpopular Congress in our nation's history.
Together, they would take on these urgent challenges with protectionism, higher taxes and an even bigger bureaucracy. And a Supreme Court that could be lost to liberalism for a generation. This is not reform. And it's certainly not change.
It is basically the same old stuff they've been peddling for years. America needs a president who understands the nature of the world we live in. A president who feels no need to apologize for the United States of America.
We need a president who understands that you don't make citizens prosperous by making Washington richer, and you don't lift an economic downturn by imposing one of the largest tax increases in American history.
Now our opponents tell you not to worry about their tax increases. They tell you they are not going to tax your family.
No, they're just going to tax "businesses"! So unless you buy something from a "business," like groceries or clothes or gasoline ... or unless you get a paycheck from a big or a small "business," don't worry ... it's not going to affect you.
They say they are not going to take any water out of your side of the bucket, just the "other" side of the bucket! That's their idea of tax reform.
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Dangerous to Washington Power
[wsj] Even as the Obama camp ponders how best to handle John McCain's veep pick of Sarah Palin, the high priests and priestesses of the media have marked her as an apostate. The Beltway class is in full-throated rebellion against a nondomesticated conservative who might pose a threat to their coronation of Barack Obama and the return of Camelot-on-the-Potomac. [...]
They want a VP to be a kind of parliamentary choice, someone they have already vetted, someone who's made them laugh with insider jokes at the Gridiron dinner. The Beltway class whines constantly about how it wants fresh voices in politics, but we guess this means a first-term Democratic Senator rather than a first-term Republican Governor from some godforsaken U.S. state few of them have ever been to.We are instructed that Mrs. Palin isn't qualified, because she lacks Washington experience. But until recently that was said to be a virtue in Mr. Obama, who is at the top of his ticket. Meanwhile, there's hardly a peep of media notice that the Obama campaign is preposterously trying to remake Joe Biden into a poor scrapper from Scranton when he's been in the Senate for 36 years. They all know Joe. But when Mr. McCain picks an authentic middle-class mother who is also a Governor, we are told she's not up to the job. [...]
There is nothing more dangerous to entrenched Washington power than a populist conservative who looks unlikely to buy into Washington's creature comforts. Take a close look at Governor Palin's record on ethics and energy in Alaska, and it becomes clear what this Beltway outburst is actually about. The irony is that while Senator Obama is running on change, his acceptance speech made explicit that he's promising only more power and money for Washington. Sarah Palin's history of taking on the career politicians of a corrupt Alaskan GOP machine -- her own party -- shows that she's the more authentic change agent.
If Sarah Palin succeeds as a national candidate, she could help John McCain proceed to a reform Presidency. Even if he loses while she does well, she could emerge as a major figure in GOP politics for years to come. This is why the media and political classes are so eager to discredit her. They can't let it happen.
We hope Mr. McCain and the GOP are prepared to fight back. On the evidence this week, it looks like an army of volunteers is forming up to help them.
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Which is It?
[americanspectator] Is this a country where a single mom could raise a son who could go on to attend Columbia and Harvard, or have the programs and conditions that propelled Obama and his wife to fame and fortune changed in some way? In his acceptance speech he said:
For over two decades, he [John McCain] has subscribed to that old, discredited Republican philosophy -- give more and more to those with the most and hope that prosperity trickles down to everyone else. In Washington, they call this the Ownership Society, but what it really means is, you're on your own.Out of work? Tough luck. No health care? The market will fix it. Born into poverty? Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, even if you don't have boots. You're on your own.
But it was in the "decade of greed" that he and his wife flourished; two minority students garnering four Ivy League degrees between them in the 1980s. If "the dream" could survive the horrors of the Reagan years, surely it is still attainable now. Yet, listening to Obama, the answer is that it can only revive if he and his party "take back America." Correct me if I'm wrong, but haven't they controlled both chambers of Congress for the past two years?
I was further confused -- though I really shouldn't be -- that despite all his talk of "change," Obama adheres to the same old liberal game plan that seems to suggest that, once Americans achieve their dreams of success through hard work and entrepreneurship, they then become the enemy. After all, if we are to despise corporate America and only cut taxes for small businesses, what happens when they succeed and become big businesses? If we should over-tax the rich, even until death, why in the world would anyone aspire to wealth? Liberals give me a headache.
Another thing that confounded me: Do the Democrats think that their whole audience is comprised of history-challenged dolts? It seems so. If not, why oh why did they keep invoking Abraham Lincoln, the founder of the modern Republican Party? I mean, the media and our school system have done a great job erasing the fact that it was Southern Democrats who nearly scuttled the Civil Rights Act, but Abraham Lincoln? Color me confused.
Speaking of dolts, imagine how in the world someone who picked Joe Biden as a running mate can possibly be caught on the national stage saying, "For eighteen long months, you have stood up, one by one, and said enough to the politics of the past. You understand that in this election, the greatest risk we can take is to try the same old politics with the same old players and expect a different result."
And how, after penning such witty and timely barbs as "eight is enough," could his speech writers have allowed the following to escape Obama's mouth: "If you don't have a record to run on, then you paint your opponent as someone people should run from"?
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Biden's pro-RIAA, pro-FBI tech voting record
[cnet] By choosing Joe Biden as their vice presidential candidate, the Democrats have selected a politician with a mixed record on technology who has spent most of his Senate career allied with the FBI and copyright holders, who ranks toward the bottom of CNET's Technology Voters' Guide, and whose anti-privacy legislation was actually responsible for the creation of PGP.
[...] back to the Delaware senator's tech record. After taking over the Foreign Relations committee, Biden became a staunch ally of Hollywood and the recording industry in their efforts to expand copyright law. He sponsored a bill in 2002 that would have make it a federal felony to trick certain types of devices into playing unauthorized music or executing unapproved computer programs. Biden's bill was backed by content companies including News Corp. but eventually died after Verizon, Microsoft, Apple, eBay, and Yahoo lobbied against it.
A few months later, Biden signed a letter that urged the Justice Department "to prosecute individuals who intentionally allow mass copying from their computer over peer-to-peer networks." Critics of this approach said that the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America, and not taxpayers, should pay for their own lawsuits.
Last year, Biden sponsored an RIAA-backed bill called the Perform Act aimed at restricting Americans' ability to record and play back individual songs from satellite and Internet radio services. (The RIAA sued XM Satellite Radio over precisely this point.)
All of which meant that nobody in Washington was surprised when Biden was one of only four U.S. senators invited to a champagne reception in celebration of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act hosted by the MPAA's Jack Valenti, the RIAA, and the Business Software Alliance.
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