:: October ::
Yesterday on my way to lunch at Olive Garden, I passed one of the homeless guys in that area, with a sign that read "Vote Obama! I need the money!."
Once in Olive Garden my waiter had on a "Obama 08" tee shirt.
When the bill came, I decided not to tip the waiter and explained to him while he had given me exceptional service, that his tee shirt made me feel he obviously believes in Senator Obama's plan to redistribute the wealth. I told him I was going to redistribute his tip to someone that I deemed more in need--the homeless guy outside. He stood there in disbelief and angrily stormed away.
I went outside, gave the homeless guy $5 and told him to thank the waiter inside, as I had decided he could use the money more. The homeless guy looked at me in disbelief but seemed grateful.
As I got in my truck, I realized this rather unscientific redistribution experiment had left the homeless guy quite happy for the money he did not earn, but the waiter was ticked that I gave away the money he did earn. [nb]
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Don't Let the Polls Affect Your Vote
[wsj] There has been an explosion of polls this presidential election. Through yesterday, there have been 728 national polls with head-to-head matchups of the candidates, 215 in October alone. In 2004, there were just 239 matchup polls, with 67 of those in October. At this rate, there may be almost as many national polls in October of 2008 as there were during the entire year in 2004.
Some polls are sponsored by reputable news organizations, others by publicity-eager universities or polling firms on the make. None have the scientific precision we imagine. [...]
On election night in 2000 Al Hunt -- then a columnist for this newspaper and a commentator on CNN -- was the first TV talking head to erroneously declare that Florida's polls had closed, when those in the Panhandle were open for another hour. Shortly before 8 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, Judy Woodruff said: "A big call to make. CNN announces that we call Florida in the Al Gore column."
Mr. Hunt and Ms. Woodruff were not only wrong. What they did was harmful. We know, for example, that turnout in 2000 compared to 1996 improved more in states whose polls had closed by the time Ms. Woodruff all but declared the contest over. The data suggests that as many as 500,000 people in the Midwest and West didn't bother to vote after the networks indicated Florida cinched the race for Mr. Gore.
I recall, too, the media's screwup in 2004, when exit-polling data leaked in the afternoon. It showed President Bush losing Pennsylvania by 17 points, New Hampshire by 18, behind among white males in Florida, and projected South Carolina and Colorado too close to call. It looked like the GOP would be wiped out.
Bob Shrum famously became the first to congratulate Sen. John Kerry by addressing him as "President Kerry." Commentators let the exit polls color their coverage for hours until their certainty was undone by actual vote tallies.
Polls have proliferated this year in part because it is much easier for journalists to devote the limited space in their papers or on TV to the horse-race aspect of the election rather than its substance. And I admit, I've aided and abetted this process.
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Stand by for another Joes' personal records being rifled and rousted?
'Joe' The Guitarist
[bh] : Aerosmith has generally left the politics to bands like U2 and the Dixie Chicks, but axeman Joe Perry says national security and economic woes have prompted him to split from the rest of the entertainment world and throw his support behind John McCain.
“We pretty much stay out of it, but seeing so many people come out for Obama, I just felt like ‘What the hell, I might as well raise my hand for this side,” Perry said from his Duxbury home.
The Bay State rockers have done a few fund-raisers for the Kennedy family over the years, but Perry’s endorsement of McCain marks a first for the platinum-selling guitarist/songwriter. A lifelong Republican, he said he was inspired to come forward because of ringing McCain endorsements from Rudy Giuliani and California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.
“I’ve been a hardcore Republican my whole life,” he told the Herald. “My mother and father drilled into me from the very start that if you work hard and be positive, you’ll get what you’re working for. I guess I’m living proof of that.”
Of criticism about McCain’s age, Perry said: “My mother’s in her 80s and she does aerobics. My manager’s 70 and he’s right there. That doesn’t bother me.”
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A week after his last money plea, 5 days to go, Obama asks everyone for another $5
[lat] : It seems like only a week ago that The Ticket was whining about Barack Obama whining that after raising $605 million through September to buy the presidency, he was asking all of us one last time for just $10 more for some reason.
And we figured out that, October money aside, he'd have to spend $12.5 million a day just to unload September's haul by Nov. 4.
The Democrat is already outspending the Republican by three Political button for bitter gun ownerand four-to-one, which if it was the other way around would surely be unconscionable.
So last night Obama dumped several million bucks on several TV networks, which they don't mind, to talk at us slickly for 27 minutes about his change that we need.
And when that was over, pingo, here comes another e-mail from Windy City HQ. You'll never guess what. He wants more money. More. Still.
It was a blessedly short message. He called us by our first name and signed only his first name; so we must be pals. He put the entire fate of his historic campaign in our hands. "The campaign is in your hands," he wrote.
Which is a pretty big responsibility, on top of adjusting to a Pennsylvania team winning a World Series.
The good news is he only wants $5 from each of us this time. (But, alas, no car magnet this time.)
$605 million here. And $605 million there. Pretty soon, this change business is getting kinda expensive. And we haven't even gotten to the increased taxes part of any new administration.
Barack calls this money pitch "a donation for the Final Push," which we were kinda thinking or hoping was last week. So next week we'll probably get a plea for the First Push for the Next Drive.
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Spin vs. Facts
[ap] Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama was less than upfront in his half-hour commercial Wednesday night about the costs of his programs and the crushing budget pressures he would face in office.
Obama's assertion that "I've offered spending cuts above and beyond" the expense of his promises is accepted only by his partisans. His vow to save money by "eliminating programs that don't work" masks his failure throughout the campaign to specify what those programs are - beyond the withdrawal of troops from Iraq.
A sampling of what voters heard in the ad, and what he didn't tell them:
THE SPIN: "That's why my health care plan includes improving information technology, requires coverage for preventive care and pre-existing conditions and lowers health care costs for the typical family by $2,500 a year."
THE FACTS: His plan does not lower premiums by $2,500, or any set amount. Obama hopes that by spending $50 billion over five years on electronic medical records and by improving access to proven disease management programs, among other steps, consumers will end up saving money. He uses an optimistic analysis to suggest cost reductions in national health care spending could amount to the equivalent of $2,500 for a family of four. Many economists are skeptical those savings can be achieved, but even if they are, it's not a certainty that every dollar would be passed on to consumers in the form of lower premiums.
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Checks on Citizen 'Joe Plumber' More Extensive Than Thought
[cd] : A state agency has revealed that its checks of computer systems for potential information on "Joe the Plumber" were more extensive than it first acknowledged.
Helen Jones-Kelley, director of the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services, disclosed today that computer inquiries on Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher were not restricted to a child-support system.
The agency also checked Wurzelbacher in its computer systems to determine whether he was receiving welfare assistance or owed unemployment compensation taxes, she wrote.
Jones-Kelley made the revelations in a letter to Ohio Senate President Bill M. Harris, R-Ashland, who demanded answers on why state officials checked out Wurzelbacher.
Harris called the multiple records checks "questionable" and said he awaits more answers. "It's kind of like Big Brother is looking in your pocket," he said.
If state employees run checks on every person listed in newspaper stories as buying a business, "it must take a lot of people a lot of time to run these checks," he said. "Where do you draw the line?"
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Media's Presidential Bias and Decline
[abc] The traditional media are playing a very, very dangerous game -- with their readers, with the Constitution and with their own fates.
The sheer bias in the print and television coverage of this election campaign is not just bewildering, but appalling. And over the last few months I've found myself slowly moving from shaking my head at the obvious one-sided reporting, to actually shouting at the screen of my television and my laptop computer.
But worst of all, for the last couple weeks, I've begun -- for the first time in my adult life -- to be embarrassed to admit what I do for a living. A few days ago, when asked by a new acquaintance what I did for a living, I replied that I was "a writer," because I couldn't bring myself to admit to a stranger that I'm a journalist.
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Eternal Return
[pjm] : [...] If the pundits are to be believed, the American people are just about to elect as President a man who espouses in concentrated form just about every bad, discredited, and exploded social and economic idea of the last fifty years.
For example, as has been pointed out by many commentators, what people call Obama’s “tax plan” is really a tax and welfare plan. Far from granting a tax cut on “95 percent” of taxpayers, as he claims, it will raise a whole suite of taxes:
– marginal tax rates
– estate taxes
– taxes on dividends
– capital gains taxes
And that is before breakfast. Just wait till Obama, together with a Congress led by Nancy Pelosi and Henry Reid, really get going. [...]
What I find depressing about this–as, indeed, about the whole Obama juggernaut–is the extent to which it represents a return of bad ideas that have already been tried time and again, have failed and made people poorer and less stalwart, and yet seem poised to make a sorry comeback once again. I’ve written about the “déjà-vu-all-over-again” phenomenon before in this space. Bill Ayers? Haven’t we done that? Jeremiah Wright? Haven’t we done that, too? Haven’t we tried Obama’s “soak the rich,” anti-business economic policies? Haven’t we tried his “can’t-we-all-just-get-along” foreign policy? Don’t we know that economics is about the creation rather than the redistribution of wealth, and that low taxes and strategies that encourage productivity and investment are best calculated to make the entire society, including the less fortunate, more prosperous? Don’t we know where appeasement and capitulation get us in foreign affairs? Don’t we remember Jimmy Carter? Haven’t we learned anything?
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Nothing Vague About It
[nro] Speaking on a call-in radio show in 2001, you can hear Senator Obama say things that should profoundly shock any American — or at least those who have not taken the time to dig deeply enough into this man’s beliefs and affiliations. [...]
There is nothing vague or ambiguous about this. Nothing.
“…The Supreme Court never entered into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society. And uh, to that extent, as radical as I think people tried to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn’t that radical.”
If the second highlighted phrase had been there without the first, Obama’s defenders would have bent over backwards trying to spin the meaning of “political and economic justice.” We all know what political and economic justice means, because Barack Obama has already made it crystal clear a second earlier: It means redistribution of wealth. Not the creation of wealth and certainly not the creation of opportunity, but simply taking money from the successful and hard-working and distributing it to those whom the government decides “deserve” it.
This redistribution of wealth, he states, “essentially is administrative and takes a lot of time.” It is an administrative task. Not suitable for the courts. More suitable for the chief executive.
Now that’s just garden-variety socialism, which apparently is not a big deal to may voters. So I would appeal to any American who claims to love the Constitution and to revere the Founding Fathers… I will not only appeal to you, I will beg you, as one American citizen to another, to consider this next statement with as much care as you can possibly bring to bear: “And uh, to that extent, as radical as I think people tried to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution — at least as it’s been interpreted, and [the] Warren Court interpreted it in the same way, that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties: [it] says what the states can’t do to you, says what the federal government can’t do to you, but it doesn’t say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf.
The United States of America — five percent of the world’s population — leads the world economically, militarily, scientifically, and culturally — and by a spectacular margin. Any one of these achievements, taken alone, would be cause for enormous pride. To dominate as we do in all four arenas has no historical precedent. That we have achieved so much in so many areas is due — due entirely — to the structure of our society as outlined in the Constitution of the United States.
The entire purpose of the Constitution was to limit government. That limitation of powers is what has unlocked in America the vast human potential available in any population.
Barack Obama sees that limiting of government not as a lynchpin but rather as a fatal flaw: “…One of the, I think, the tragedies of the Civil Rights movement was because the Civil Rights movement became so court-focused, uh, I think that there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change. And in some ways we still suffer from that.”
There is no room for wiggle or misunderstanding here. This is not edited copy. There is nothing out of context; for the entire thing is context — the context of what Barack Obama believes. You and I do not have to guess at what he believes or try to interpret what he believes. He says what he believes.
** read the entire article
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CBS : The Obama Campaign's Financing
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Krauthammer : McCain for President
[wapo] : Contrarian that I am, I'm voting for John McCain. I'm not talking about bucking the polls or the media consensus that it's over before it's over. I'm talking about bucking the rush of wet-fingered conservatives leaping to Barack Obama before they're left out in the cold without a single state dinner for the next four years. [...]
First, I'll have no truck with the phony case ginned up to rationalize voting for the most liberal and inexperienced presidential nominee in living memory. The "erratic" temperament issue, for example. As if McCain's risky and unsuccessful but in no way irrational attempt to tactically maneuver his way through the economic tsunami that came crashing down a month ago renders unfit for office a man who demonstrated the most admirable equanimity and courage in the face of unimaginable pressures as a prisoner of war, and who later steadily navigated innumerable challenges and setbacks, not the least of which was the collapse of his campaign just a year ago.
McCain the "erratic" is a cheap Obama talking point. The 40-year record testifies to McCain the stalwart. [...]
The case for McCain is straightforward. The financial crisis has made us forget, or just blindly deny, how dangerous the world out there is. We have a generations-long struggle with Islamic jihadism. An apocalyptic soon-to-be-nuclear Iran. A nuclear-armed Pakistan in danger of fragmentation. A rising Russia pushing the limits of revanchism. Plus the sure-to-come Falklands-like surprise popping out of nowhere.
Who do you want answering that phone at 3 a.m.? A man who's been cramming on these issues for the past year, who's never had to make an executive decision affecting so much as a city, let alone the world? A foreign policy novice instinctively inclined to the flabbiest, most vaporous multilateralism (e.g., the Berlin Wall came down because of "a world that stands as one"), and who refers to the most deliberate act of war since Pearl Harbor as "the tragedy of 9/11," a term more appropriate for a bus accident?
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Brrrrrrr....
[np] : In early September, I began noticing a string of news stories about scientists rejecting the orthodoxy on global warming. Actually, it was more like a string of guest columns and long letters to the editor since it is hard for skeptical scientists to get published in the cabal of climate journals now controlled by the Great Sanhedrin of the environmental movement.
Still, the number of climate change skeptics is growing rapidly. Because a funny thing is happening to global temperatures -- they're going down, not up.
On the same day (Sept. 5) that areas of southern Brazil were recording one of their latest winter snowfalls ever and entering what turned out to be their coldest September in a century, Brazilian meteorologist Eugenio Hackbart explained that extreme cold or snowfall events in his country have always been tied to "a negative PDO" or Pacific Decadal Oscillation. Positive PDOs -- El Ninos -- produce above-average temperatures in South America while negative ones -- La Ninas -- produce below average ones.
Dr. Hackbart also pointed out that periods of solar inactivity known as "solar minimums" magnify cold spells on his continent. So, given that August was the first month since 1913 in which no sunspot activity was recorded -- none -- and during which solar winds were at a 50-year low, he was not surprised that Brazilians were suffering (for them) a brutal cold snap. "This is no coincidence," he said as he scoffed at the notion that manmade carbon emissions had more impact than the sun and oceans on global climate. [...]
Other international scientists have called the manmade warming theory a "hoax," a "fraud" and simply "not credible."
While not stooping to such name-calling, weather-satellite scientists David Douglass of the University of Rochester and John Christy of the University of Alabama at Huntsville nonetheless dealt the True Believers a devastating blow last month.
For nearly 30 years, Professor Christy has been in charge of NASA's eight weather satellites that take more than 300,000 temperature readings daily around the globe. In a paper co-written with Dr. Douglass, he concludes that while manmade emissions may be having a slight impact, "variations in global temperatures since 1978 ... cannot be attributed to carbon dioxide."
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Bolton
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Japan's young turn to Communist Party
[telegraph] : a wave of discontent among its younger workers is fuelling a change in the nation's political landscape: communism is suddenly back in fashion.
What many young Japanese view as an erosion of their economic security and employment rights, combined with years of political stagnation, are propelling droves of them into the arms of the Japanese Communist Party (JCP), the nation's fourth largest political party.
New recruits are signing up at the rate of 1,000 a month, swelling its ranks to more than 415,000. Meanwhile a classic proletarian novel is at the top of the best-seller lists, and communist-themed "manga" comics are enjoying soaring success.
A further sign of disaffection among young Japanese - who in recent years have been more renowned for their political apathy than their revolutionary zeal - is the increasing frequency of rallies by workers on the streets of the capital.
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Open Letter from The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley to Senator John McCain about Climate Science and Policy
[at] : Dear Senator McCain, Sir,
You chose a visit to a wind-farm in early summer 2008 to devote an entire campaign speech to the reassertion of your belief in the apocalyptic vision of catastrophic anthropogenic climate change - a lurid and fanciful account of imagined future events that was always baseless, was briefly exciting among the less thoughtful species of news commentators and politicians, but is now scientifically discredited.
With every respect, there is no rational basis for your declared intention that your great nation should inflict upon her own working people and upon the starving masses of the Third World the extravagantly-pointless, climatically-irrelevant, strategically-fatal economic wounds that the arrogant advocates of atmospheric alarmism admit they aim to achieve. [...]
Science and the climate: the facts.............
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[yahoo] Yahoo launched their new profile product last week as part of their big plan to social networkize the entire Yahoo world. Every Yahoo profile was reset, and users were asked to go through a process of recreating it.
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Democrats Continue to Cover up Relationship with Fannie Mae : Media Plays Along.
[wsj] This past week I appeared on Bill Maher's HBO show Real Time with Representative Maxine Waters of California. Ms. Waters fibbed on the air about her connections to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
It all began when Mr. Maher tried to the lay blame for the credit meltdown on inadequate regulation of Wall Street. I pointed out that among the biggest failures this year were Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and that Democrats had protected them against tougher regulation. I said to Ms. Waters: "You said [the system for regulating the mortgage giants] wasn't broke five years ago at a Congressional hearing, and you took $15,000 of campaign contributions from Fannie and Freddie."
Responded Ms. Waters: "That is a lie and I challenge you to find $15,000 that I took from Fannie PAC."
Naturally, on hearing such a categorical insistence from Ms. Waters that my facts were wrong, I double-checked the numbers on the Center for Responsive Politics' OpenSecrets.org Web site. CRP had listed all the political contributions from the Fannie Mae Pac after the federal bailout of Fannie and Freddie late in the summer. Sure enough, the report confirms that Maxine Waters was recipient of $15,000 in Fannie Mae Pac dollars since 1989. Altogether, some 354 current members of Congress had received a total of $4.8 million from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
This has become a pattern of congressional Democrats, who deny their incestuous relationship with Fannie and Freddie, even when it means strangling the truth on national TV.
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OK. We liked the w.e.update segment, rap thing. Take it as you might. Sarah clearly has the beat. Yoz. Without a doubt the viewing audience must have been higher due to her appearance, like her or not. Prior to Palin arriving on the scene and delivering them a refreshed lease, what really is the demographic? Who even talked about the show, let alone actually watched this program anymore? Couldn't watch the program here, tried for a couple minutes. Granted, we do go way back, but eh....sorry, it's just such refuse.
It does remind us of our very missed 'Professor' and conversations and how she, a lingering fan of the program, would try to implement mental force tactics upon us to make us view it. We do miss the conversations greatly, dear She. Always in our thoughts.
One, two, three
My name is Sarah Palin
You all know me
Vice President nominee of the G-O-P.
Gonna need ya vote
In the next election
Can I get a "What What" from the senior section?
McCain got experience,
McCain got style,
But don't let him freak you out
When he tries to smile.
'Cause that smile be creepy,
But when I'm V-P,
All the leaders in the world gonna finally meet me!
Howz it go Eskimos?
(Eskimos!)
Tel me, tell me what you know, Eskimos!
(Eskimos!)
How you feel Eskimos?
(Ice cold!)
Tell me, tell me what you feel Eskimos
(Supa' cold!)
I'm Jeremiah wright
'Cause tonight I'm the preacha
I got a bookish look and ya all hot fo' teacha
Todd lookin' fine on his snow machine,
So hot for each other need a go-between.
In Wasilla we just chill, baby chilla,
But when I see oil it's "Drill, baby, drilla!"
My country 'tis of thee,
From my porch I can see,
Russia and such
All the mavericks in the house put ya hands up!
All the mavericks in the house put ya hands up!
All the plumbers in the house pull ya pants up!
All the plumbers in the house pull ya pants up!
When I say Obama you say Ayers
Obama!
(Ayers!)
Obama!
(Ayers!)
I built me a bridge it ain't going nowhere!
Ohhhhhhhhhh!
McCain/Palin gonna put the nail in
The coffin, of the media elite
(She likes red meat!)
Shoot a motherhumpin' moose eight days of the week!
[gunshots]
Now ya dead!
Now ya dead 'cause I'm an animal!
And I'm bigga than you!
'Hold of a shot gun, walk in the pub
Everybody party, we're goin' on a hunt
La-la-la-la
la-la
la-laaaaaa
[gunshots]
Yo, I'm Palin, I'm out!
[via]
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Spread Your Own Wealth Around
[powerline] When Barack Obama responded to the Ohio plumber who didn't want his taxes raised that Obama wanted to "spread the wealth around," I wanted to tell him to spread his own wealth around. It was in any event a rare moment of candor on the part of Senator Obama.
Obama all but told the plumber that his wealth should be seized in the name of equity. The encounter played out one of the old themes of democratic politics: the appeal to the many to take from the few. It's traditionally an easy sell in democratic regimes.
Despite Obama's implication to the contrary, however, It doesn't represent much in the way of change. According to the most recent (2006) data released by the IRS, the top 1 percent of filers paid nearly 40 percent of all income taxes; the top 5 percent paid 60 percent of all income taxes. The bottom 50 percent paid virtually no income taxes (3 percent of all income taxes paid).
The personal income tax, the federal government's main source of revenue, is collected overwhelmingly from a relative handful of Americans. The large majority of all Americans pay little or no income tax.
Given that poorer citizens always outnumber the rich, political philosophers have long worried that government based on majority rule could lead to organized theft from the wealthy by the democratic masses. "If the majority distributes among itself the things of a minority, it is evident that it will destroy the city," warns Aristotle.
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Tribune Co. Newspapers : Give Notice To Drop AP
[e&p] : Tribune Company has given a two-year notice to the Associated Press that its daily newspapers plan to drop the news service, becoming the first major newspaper chain to do so since the recent controversy over new rates began.
Tribune, which owns nine daily papers including the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune, joins a growing list of newspapers that have sought to end AP contracts, or given notice of that, following plans to introduce a new controversial rate structure in 2009. The notice was given earlier this week.
AP Spokesman Paul Colford confirmed the cancellation notice, but said he had no more specifics. He issued the following statement about it:
"We understand that in this climate a lot of newspapers are re-examining their strategies. The Associated Press will continue to work with all members of the cooperative to ensure that we are providing the most efficient, valued and essential news service for them." [...]
"I think many editors are concerned about the new financial rate model that AP has rolled out," Earl Maucker, editor of the Sun Sentinel, said about the notice. "It is a natural approach for us to take a hard look at that. Are there other alternatives out there that would provide the depth and breadth of coverage we need?"
In recent months, other non-Tribune papers have also given the required two-year's notice to drop AP. Those include: The Star Tribune of Minneapolis, The Bakersfield Californian, The Post Register of Idaho Falls, and The Yakima Herald-Republic and Wenatchee World, both of Washington.
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Obama Voted 'Present' on Mortgage Reform
The only banking 'deregulation' in recent years was that of Fan and Fred
[wsj] In each of the first two presidential debates, Barack Obama claimed that "Republican deregulation" is responsible for the financial crisis. Most viewers probably accepted this idea, especially because Republicans generally do favor deregulation.
But one essential fact was missing from the senator's narrative: While there has been significant deregulation in the U.S. economy during the last 30 years, none of it has occurred in the financial sector. Indeed, the only significant legislation with any effect on financial risk-taking was the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Improvement Act of 1991, adopted during the first Bush administration in the wake of the collapse of the savings and loans (S&Ls). FDICIA, however, substantially tightened commercial bank and S&L regulations, including prompt corrective action when a bank's capital declines below adequate levels and severe personal fines if management violates laws or regulations. [...]
In each of the first two presidential debates, Barack Obama claimed that "Republican deregulation" is responsible for the financial crisis. Most viewers probably accepted this idea, especially because Republicans generally do favor deregulation.
But one essential fact was missing from the senator's narrative: While there has been significant deregulation in the U.S. economy during the last 30 years, none of it has occurred in the financial sector. Indeed, the only significant legislation with any effect on financial risk-taking was the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Improvement Act of 1991, adopted during the first Bush administration in the wake of the collapse of the savings and loans (S&Ls). FDICIA, however, substantially tightened commercial bank and S&L regulations, including prompt corrective action when a bank's capital declines below adequate levels and severe personal fines if management violates laws or regulations.
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Obama 'Rescue' Plan
[ibd] Obama's idea of letting people deplete 15% of their 401(k) investment holdings is indicative of the candidate we have come to know, who wants ordinary people to look to the government for money — and not, as has been the trend in recent years, to their investment portfolios. Encourage novice investors to get out and stay out of the stock market right after a historic decline? Only a socialist mind-set would exploit the financial crisis in such a way.
Obama's campaign likes to call the middle class "the economic engine of America." But that engine's fuel is private-sector investment, most of which, naturally, comes from those with higher incomes. This community organizer from Chicago's South Side, whose career was launched with the help of unrepentant Weather Underground terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, will not accept that.
The Illinois senator might be one of the shrewdest presidential candidates ever, but he does slip. For instance, he promises to end capital gains taxes on investments for small businesses and start-ups.
But on a campaign stop in Toledo, he couldn't assure self-employed 34-year-old plumber Joe Wurzelbacher to his face that he would get a tax cut. Poised to buy a $250,000-a-year firm, the working-class plumber of 15 years confronted Obama.
"Your new tax plan is going to tax me more, isn't it?" he asked.
Obama responded with the promise of a 50% tax credit for health care, but the senator conceded that Wurzelbacher's income taxes would indeed rise.
"It's not that I want to punish your success," Obama told him. "I just want to make sure that everybody who is behind you — that they've got a chance at success too."
Wurzelbacher, who would shoulder all the responsibility and risk of such an investment, did not look impressed. Obama then let the cat out of the bag, saying:
"I think when you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody."
He certainly does, and his unguarded statement to a voter in a key swing state is socialist economics distilled to its simplest terms.
Eliminating small business capital gains taxes — whatever the details would be (and you can bet it would be a fraction of total private investment) — will not rescue the middle class from the job losses of a high-tax Obama administration planning to spend an extra $293 billion annually. It does, however, cunningly deaden charges that Obama is camouflaging a socialist agenda.
The other components of his so-called rescue, lovingly described by the New York Times as "proposals to spur new jobs, to give Americans penalty-free access to retirement savings to help them through the downturn, to urge a 90-day moratorium on home foreclosures and to lend money to strapped local and state governments" are worded to sound equally innocuous. But a close look tells another story.
His $3,000 income-tax credit for each new full-time employee hired by businesses is an obvious anti-outsourcing incentive likely to increase business costs, of which we can expect plenty more — of a directly punitive nature — in an Obama administration. He would replace the judgment of banks with that of the federal government regarding when or if to foreclose. And he wants the Federal Reserve and the Treasury to bail out spendthrift state and local governments.
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Contrast
[spectator] : The contrast between, on the one hand, the huge amount of material about Obama’s radical associations that has been published in on-line journals and in a few brave newspapers, and on the other the refusal by big media to address it and to vilify those who do, becomes more astounding by the day. The Obamaniacs are spinning the relationship between Obama and William Ayers, former of Weather Undergound Terrorism Inc, as of no consequence because this was supposedly a chance acquaintance and because the educational project they worked on, the Annenberg Challenge, was a worthy one.
Stanley Kurtz now nails that canard by showing how, through the Annenberg Challenge, Obama and Ayers channelled funds to extremist anti-American Afrocentric ‘educational’ programmes which were a carbon-copy of the world view of Pastor Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s black racist mentor who, under pressure, Obama was forced to repudiate. These programmes promoted, amongst other radical ideas, the ‘rites of passage’ philosophy which attempted to create a ‘virtually separate and intensely anti-American black social world’ in order to ‘counter the potentially detrimental effects of a Eurocentrically oriented society.’
[...] Meanwhile, it turns out that not only did Obama do favours for convicted Chicago fraudster Tony Rezko, but as this story reports Alexi Giannoulias, who reputedly bankrolled Michael ‘Jaws’ Giorango, a Chicagoan twice convicted of bookmaking and promoting prostitution, became Illinois state treasurer last year after Obama vouched for him, and has now has pledged to raise $100,000 for Obama’s campaign.
You have to pinch yourself – a Marxisant radical who all his life has been mentored by, sat at the feet of, worshipped with, befriended, endorsed the philosophy of, funded and been in turn funded, politically promoted and supported by a nexus comprising black power anti-white racists, Jew-haters, revolutionary Marxists, unrepentant former terrorists and Chicago mobsters, is on the verge of becoming President of the United States. And apparently it’s considered impolite to say so.
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Talk-radio hosts, Dennis Prager vs Stephanie Miller, debate the results of the televised McCain-Obama Debate- before a live audience of their listeners from KRLA and KTLK in Los Angeles, Oct 7, 2008.
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Mafia wants "Gomorra" author dead by Christmas
[reuters] : Police in Italy are looking into reports that the Naples mafia plans to carry out its threat to kill the author of the best-selling book "Gomorra," which has been made into a hit movie about mafia brutality, by Christmas.
Roberto Saviano, 29, has lived in hiding with 24-hour police protection for the past two years since the "Camorra," as the mob in his hometown is known, decided to punish him for the huge success of his book, which is based on his own investigations.
It has sold 1.2 million copies in Italy and been translated into 42 languages. Now that it has hit the big screen and is a candidate for the Oscars, the mafia is even angrier and wants Saviano and his bodyguards killed as soon as possible.
"We've launched in inquiry to verify the truth behind this news," Franco Roberto, a coordinator of the local anti-mafia squad for Naples, told Reuters.
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Canada Votes : 2008
The "rollercoaster" campaign/election period, as some tv people described it, all 37 days of it, for Canada is over. Another minority Conservative government. A stronger one, but close, sans cigar, not what the party in power hoped for.
The Liberals were laced a beating (from 95 to 76 seats - worst in their history?), however you might find that opinion low keyed and down-played and with the tone more along the lines of blaming the Harper contingent for wasting money on having the election. The Bloc, of course, the 'spoilers', will bleat further on of no respect, 'nation of Quebec,' taking their ball and going home tantrum bilge while then receiving billions from the Feds. The NDP broke the Conservatives' total domination of Alberta by winning one seat in that province and ending with a gain of seven seats in total. The Green Party's leader, E. May, sheerly void of a shred of dignity during relevant debate, made apt summation : "We ran an exuberant and joyful campaign. If kids five years and up could have voted, I would have won by a landslide," declared Ms. May, who lost by several thousand votes.
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Harper's second minority
[nationalpost] : [...] The traditional ballot paper, that homely old device that is both the symbol and apparatus of mass democracy, lets us declaim in favour of either one candidate or none. (And let us digress for a moment, since it is surely an appropriate time to do so, to give thanks for our own common sense in refusing to abandon paper ballots. Anyone who has followed the last decade in American politics knows we have spared ourselves a great deal of grief and uncertainty by turning our backs on more "advanced" methods.)
Anyway, we aren't allowed to make our mark next to "Whoever gets in, let it be a minority government." But through unconscious co-ordination, that is the result our efforts have yielded once again. As we go to press, it appears that Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper has been given another plurality of seats in the House of Commons. Barring the sudden appearance of a progressive popular front of the sort that the Opposition parties have continually disavowed, Mr. Harper will continue in power, confronted with much the same tactical situation he has faced since the election of January 2006.
[click for full size]
It is the least surprising of the possible outcomes contemplated at the beginning of the campaign, and in many ways the one that suits the national mood and the times best. Mr. Harper is the most trusted and respected of the political party leaders, and his politics are well within the Canadian mainstream. But his united Conservative movement, which required a strong hand to stitch together a rowdy regional protest faction and the corpse of a dead national party, has not yet proven capable of producing a front-rank team that Canadians are ready to trust with unfettered majority power. It is usually regarded as a weakness of the Liberals that there are always three or four credible successors loitering around the prime minister with hidden daggers, and the perception that Stephane Dion was campaigning with a noose around his neck certainly didn't help his cause in this election, but we rarely consider how long it takes a party to mature to the point at which it can count on having a class of credible leaders-in-waiting on hand.
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Compared to the U.S., which now seems to be in a state of perpetual campaign, Canada spits out their entire event - from the dropping of the writ to campaigning to vote tally in now, usually, the legal minimum amount of time : 36 days. Wham, bam...thank you ma'am.
Canada currently has a minority conservative government and it appears by all accounts that the end result will be again a minority conservative body.
Oddly, a couple of the sites that I've looked at this morning read as if the event is over and past tense. The [cbc] already begins : "Canadians flocked to the polls Tuesday to elect the next government after a five-week campaign that culminated Thanksgiving weekend with party leaders bounding across the country in an effort to sway undecided voters."
I assume the crystal ballers were hard at work writing this type of passage yesterday or the day before. The polls in the eastern-most time zone provinces have only been open 1.5 hours of 12, but no doubt people have "flocked" to the polls. Like usual. The standard voter turnout being less than 50% of eligible voters taking the time to do so.
[wiki] The length of election campaigns can vary, but under the Canada Elections Act the minimum length of a campaign is 36 days. There is no explicit maximum length for a campaign, although section 5 of the Charter requires that the Parliament sit at least once every twelve months, and thus a campaign would have to conclude in time for returns to be completed and parliament to be called into session within twelve months of the previous sitting. The federal election date must be set on a Monday (or Tuesday if the Monday is a statutory holiday).
The longest election campaign was the 1926 election following the King-Byng Affair which lasted 74 days. Prior to the adoption of the minimum of 36 days in law, there were six elections that lasted shorter periods of time. The last of these was the 1904 election which occurred many decades before the time limit was imposed.
In practice, the Prime Minister will generally keep a campaign as brief as is legal and/or feasible, because spending by parties is strictly limited by the Elections Act, a law which contains no provisions that would allow for increased spending in a lengthy campaign. The 1997, 2000 and 2004 elections were all of the minimum 36 days in length which has led to a common misconception that elections must be 36 days long. However, prior to 1997, elections averaged much longer: aside from the 47 day campaign for the 1993 election, the shortest election period after World War II was 57 days and many were over 60 days in length.
[breitbart] The 37-day campaign focus on who would be the best manager in troubled economic times intensified with the global turmoil, and polls showed voters sticking with Harper though his support came off the highs it reached a few weeks ago.
The last poll of the campaign, by Ekos, projected that he would increase his seat count in Parliament at the expense of the main opposition Liberal Party but would still be almost 20 short of the 155 needed for a majority.
Harper had offered only modest tax breaks and spending initiatives, arguing that a steady hand would get Canada through the turbulence that has hit world markets.
Liberal leader Stephane Dion, a bookish francophone who hesitates in English, found it difficult at a time of relatively high energy prices to sell his plan for a new carbon tax to fight climate change, accompanied by income tax cuts and subsidies for the poor.
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The Acorn (huh?) Doesn't Fall Far From The Tree
[wsj] [...] According to a 2006 report from the Employment Policies Institute (EPI), Acorn has been on the federal take since 1977. For instance, Acorn's American Institute for Social Justice claimed $240,000 in tax money between fiscal years 2002 and 2003. Its American Environmental Justice Project received 100% of its revenue from government grants in the same years. EPI estimates the Acorn Housing Corporation alone received some $16 million in federal dollars from 1997-2007. Only recently, Democrats tried and failed to stuff an "affordable housing" provision into the $700 billion bank rescue package that would have let politicians give even more to Acorn.
All this money gives Acorn the ability to pursue its other great hobby: electing liberals. Acorn is spending $16 million this year to register new Democrats and is already boasting it has put 1.3 million new voters on the rolls. The big question is how many of these registrations are real.
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On the '95% Tax Cut'
[wsj] One of Barack Obama's most potent campaign claims is that he'll cut taxes for no less than 95% of "working families." He's even promising to cut taxes enough that the government's tax share of GDP will be no more than 18.2% -- which is lower than it is today.
It's a clever pitch, because it lets him pose as a middle-class tax cutter while disguising that he's also proposing one of the largest tax increases ever on the other 5%. But how does he conjure this miracle, especially since more than a third of all Americans already pay no income taxes at all? There are several sleights of hand, but the most creative is to redefine the meaning of "tax cut."
For the Obama Democrats, a tax cut is no longer letting you keep more of what you earn. In their lexicon, a tax cut includes tens of billions of dollars in government handouts that are disguised by the phrase "tax credit."
Also : TaxProf [tpb]
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Thug
Regarding this [article] foretelling of what is to come, [EM]writes that it has already arrived: "....We’ve already dumbed down the First Amendment to the point where it protects nude dancing but no longer protects political advertising in an election cycle. The most liberal of all environments, Academia, teems with “speech codes” that create thought police in ways that Soviet political commissars would find commendable.
The national media bears some of the blame for this. When a national campaign explicitly sets up an attack on a critic the way Team Obama did on Stanley Kurtz and David Freddoso, those who make their living under the auspices of the First Amendment might have been expected to take notice. Instead, they seem too enraptured in their own political biases to notice that one candidate for the highest office seems to endorse the notion that mobs should be able to silence critics. It doesn’t take a psychic to consider the future of a Department of Justice under the control of such a candidate, or its implications for a free press.
The best solution for bad speech is more speech, not speech codes, mobs shouting down critics, and legislative control of political speech in the public square. Yet we’re inexorably moving in that direction, thanks to the so-called defenders of free speech who only can muster any passion for it when they see a political benefit for themselves and their allies."
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Dodgy Digits
[ars] : If you pay any attention to the endless debates over intellectual property policy in the United States, you'll hear two numbers invoked over and over again, like the stuttering chorus of some Philip Glass opera: 750,000 and $200 to $250 billion. The first is the number of U.S. jobs supposedly lost to intellectual property theft; the second is the annual dollar cost of IP infringement to the U.S. economy. These statistics are brandished like a talisman each time Congress is asked to step up enforcement to protect the ever-beleaguered U.S. content industry. And both, as far as an extended investigation by Ars Technica has been able to determine, are utterly bogus.
~
Copyright Law Has to Catch Up
[wsj] In early February 2007, Stephanie Lenz's 13-month-old son started dancing. Pushing a walker across her kitchen floor, Holden Lenz started moving to the distinctive beat of a song by Prince, "Let's Go Crazy." He had heard the song before. The beat had obviously stuck. So when Holden heard the song again, he did what any sensible 13-month-old would do -- he accepted Prince's invitation and went "crazy" to the beat. Holden's mom grabbed her camcorder and, for 29 seconds, captured the priceless image of Holden dancing, with the barely discernible Prince playing on a CD player somewhere in the background.
Ms. Lenz wanted her mother to see the film. But you can't easily email a movie. So she did what any citizen of the 21st century would do: She uploaded the file to YouTube and sent her relatives and friends the link. They watched the video scores of times. It was a perfect YouTube moment: a community of laughs around a homemade video, readily shared with anyone who wanted to watch.
Sometime over the next four months, however, someone from Universal Music Group also watched Holden dance. Universal manages the copyrights of Prince. It fired off a letter to YouTube demanding that it remove the unauthorized "performance" of Prince's music. YouTube, to avoid liability itself, complied. A spokeswoman for YouTube declined to comment.
This sort of thing happens all the time today. Companies like YouTube are deluged with demands to remove material from their systems. No doubt a significant portion of those demands are fair and justified. Universal's demand, however, was not. The quality of the recording was terrible. No one would download Ms. Lenz's video to avoid paying Prince for his music. There was no plausible way in which Prince or Universal was being harmed by Holden Lenz. [...]
How is it that sensible people, people no doubt educated at some of the best universities and law schools in the country, would come to think it a sane use of corporate resources to threaten the mother of a dancing 13-month-old? What is it that allows these lawyers and executives to take a case like this seriously, to believe there's some important social or corporate reason to deploy the federal scheme of regulation called copyright to stop the spread of these images and music? "Let's Go Crazy" indeed!
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So much for mending conservatives with the Palin pick, Sen. McCain. The good will that that action brought you from those in your own party (who really didn't care much for many of your positions to begin with) has been squandered, and as seems more and more likely, your bid for president. Your refusal to actually call out and inform about your opponent, has clearly re-soured a group that should be, however reluctantly, yours beyond question. People don't expect to agree with you on every issue. They do, however, expect you to deliver the goods in a campaign regarding things that need to be said.
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Nothing New About ACORN
[politico] It’s the newest charge against Sen. Barack Obama in the presidential campaign: that he worked, as a young community organizer, with a group now involved in voter registration fraud.
But while this particular accusation may be new, the group in question, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, is one of the oldest political targets around.
The latest wave of ACORN investigations has provided Republicans with both an opening to assail an old foe, and a new line of criticism to use against the Democratic presidential nominee, who represented ACORN in a lawsuit in the 1990s.
Nevada authorities raided the group's state headquarters Tuesday in connection with a voter-fraud probe. [...]
During the Democratic primaries, Obama was endorsed by ACORN’s political action committee. And in the early 1990s, according to the McCain campaign, Obama was involved in teaching community organizing classes for the organization.
Obama’s campaign has also shelled out about $800,000 to an ACORN subsidiary, Citizens Services Inc., to help with voter registration efforts. Although ACORN says it is nonpartisan, its registration efforts tend to be focused among groups friendly to Democratic candidates. [...]
...Republicans have clashed with ACORN for decades, regularly arguing that the group engages in questionable voter registration practices and pointing to the group’s activities as a reason for concern about voter fraud.
The organization, founded in Arkansas in 1970, describes itself as a coalition of local groups advocating for issues related to economic and social equity. But it’s also known for supporting Democratic candidates, and employing a confrontational political style that has often put it at odds with conservative leaders
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Maclean's wins third round of hate fight
[national] The British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal ruled yesterday that a controversial article about Islam in Maclean's magazine did not violate the province's hate speech law, marking the third time this year the Canadian Islamic Congress has failed in its efforts to force the magazine to print a rebuttal.
In dismissing the complaint, the three-member tribunal ruled that the article by Mark Steyn, which was published in 2006 and described the demographic and ideological dangers posed by a growing Muslim population in the West, was not likely to expose Muslims to hatred or contempt.
It ruled that the article, an excerpt from Mr. Steyn's book America Alone, contained historical, religious and factual inaccuracies, relied on common Muslim stereotypes and tried to "rally public opinion by exaggeration and causing the reader to fear Muslims."
"But fear is not synonymous with hatred and contempt," the tribunal wrote. "With all its inaccuracies and hyperbole, [the article] has resulted in political debate which, in our view, [B. C.'s hate speech human rights law] was never intended to suppress. In fact, as the evidence in this case amply demonstrates, the debate has not been suppressed and the concerns about the impact of hate speech silencing a minority have not been borne out," the tribunal wrote.
Nearly identical complaints by the CIC were dismissed this year by human rights commissions in Ontario, which did not have jurisdiction over print journalism, and federally, where it was judged to be without merit.
:: BACK STORY
Human rights commissions are quasi-judicial bodies that seek to promote and enforce human rights law in their jurisdictions and resolve disputes of discrimination based on certain prohibited grounds, such as race, gender or religion.
There is a federal commission in Ottawa, and provincial bodies, each with their own enabling legislation. Some commissions act as a gatekeeper for complaints, vetting them on behalf of a separate tribunal that decides them, often with the commission acting in the role of prosecutor. But some, such as Ontario and British Columbia, allow complaints to go directly to a tribunal.
If discrimination is proved, tribunals have the power to issue legally binding orders, and to impose relatively modest financial penalties. Their rulings can be appealed to fully fledged courts of law. Originally envisioned as a less severe remedy than civil court for discrimination complaints in housing or employment, human rights commissions also have a legislative mandate to hear complaints of hate messages.
Largely due to the hate speech cases against magazine and former Western Standard publisher Ezra Levant, they have recently been criticized for taking an overly broad interpretation of that mandate, targetting mainstream journalism as well as hate propaganda and discriminatory advertising.
At the federal commission, an independent review of its Internet hate speech mandate is in the final stages.
Steyn :
[nro] : Mark Hemingway is right to say that free speech in Canada "does not exist in any meaningful way". As the British Columbia "Human Rights" Tribunal's rambling and incoherent decision makes plain, Maclean's and I were acquitted of "flagrant Islamophobia" for essentially political reasons - because neither the court nor its travesty of a "human rights" code could withstand the heat of a guilty verdict. Jay Currie puts it well:
The way I read this decision is that it imposes a two part test: a) are your words offensive and hurtful? b) are you a major media organization with deep pockets represented by serious lawyers. If “a” and not “b” you are a hate monger; if “a” and “b” you are engaged in political debate.
Just so. Because we spent a ton of money and had a bigshot Queen's Counsel and exposed the joke jurisprudence and (at the federal "human rights" commission) systemic corruption, the kangaroo courts decided that discretion was the better part of valor. The Ontario "Human Rights" Commission ruled they weren't able to prosecute the case because of a technicality - I offered to waive the technicality, but the wimps still bailed out. If you have the wherewithal to stand up to these totalitarian bullies, they stampede for the exits. But, if you're just an obscure Alberta pastor or a guy with a widely unread website or a fellow who writes a letter to his local newspaper, they'll destroy your life.
I sympathize with the Canadian Islamic Congress, whose mouthpiece feels that, if the British Columbia pseudo-judges had applied the logic of previous decisions, we'd have been found guilty. He's right: Under the ludicrous British Columbia "Human Rights" Code, we are guilty. Which is why the Canadian Islamic Congress should appeal, and why I offered on the radio an hour ago to chip in a thousand bucks towards their costs.
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What Is a Right and How Do We Know?
[nro] During the presidential debate Tuesday night, Barack Obama was asked if he thought health care was a “right.”
He said he thought it was a right. Well, if you accept that premise, I think you can ask some logical follow-up questions: Food is more important than health care. You die pretty quickly without food. Do we have a “right” to food in America? What about shelter? Do we have a “right” to housing? And if we do have a right to housing, what standard of housing do we have a right to? And if it is a right, due to all Americans, wouldn’t that mean that no one should have to accept any housing, or health care, which is inferior to anyone else’s… since it’s a right?
Do we have a right to be safe? Do we have a right to be comfortable? Do we have a right to wide-screen televisions? Where does this end? [...]
Constitutional rights protect us from things: intimidation, illegal search and seizure, self-incrimination, and so on. The revolutionary idea of our Founding Fathers was that people had a God-given right to live as they saw fit. Our constitutional rights protect us from the power of government.
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Officials suspect fake voter registration
[yahoo] Officials in Missouri, a hard-fought jewel in the presidential race, are sifting through possibly hundreds of questionable or duplicate voter-registration forms submitted by an advocacy group that has been accused of election fraud in other states.
Charlene Davis, co-director of the election board in Jackson County, where Kansas City is, said the fraudulent registration forms came from the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN. She said they were bogging down work Wednesday, the final day Missourians could register to vote.
"I don't even know the entire scope of it because registrations are coming in so heavy," Davis said. "We have identified about 100 duplicates, and probably 280 addresses that don't exist, people who have driver's license numbers that won't verify or Social Security numbers that won't verify. Some have no address at all."
The nonpartisan group works to recruit low-income voters, who tend to lean Democratic.
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Rovian Lense
[wsj] Tuesday night's presidential debate was good entertainment. Both candidates were animated and loose throughout a wide-ranging discussion. Sen. Barack Obama did well in Sen. John McCain's favorite format. [...]
Mr. McCain was most effective on taxes and spending. He argued now is not the time to raise taxes and hit Mr. Obama's proposal to hike small business taxes: three out of four filers in the top 5% report small-business income. Mr. McCain called for a spending freeze and attacked earmarks, including Mr. Obama's $3 million for a Chicago planetarium's "overhead projector." Mr. Obama weakly replied earmarks were only $18 billion.
Advocates of Mr. Obama, on the other hand, saw him scoring points on style and connecting with questioners. He patiently explained to one how the Wall Street rescue package would help him and his neighbors on Main Street. He had the night's emotional high point when he talked about his dying mother fighting her insurer over whether her cancer was a pre-existing condition. He called for dramatic change and tied Mr. McCain to the Bush administration, though not too often to be obnoxious.
Mr. Obama also offered his villain responsible for the current crisis: "the deregulation of the financial system." Many voters will accept Mr. Obama's designation, despite it being both wrong and a slap at President Bill Clinton, who signed the 1999 deregulation legislation that Mr. Obama seems to object to, and Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin and Undersecretary Larry Summers, who helped fashion it. What do these Obama advisers think of being blamed for the credit-market meltdown? [...]
Each faces a big challenge. Mr. McCain's is that events have tilted the field towards Mr. Obama. To win, Mr. McCain must demonstrate he stands for responsible conservative change, while portraying Mr. Obama as an out-of-the-mainstream liberal not ready to be president.
Mr. Obama's test is that voters haven't shaken deep concerns about his lack of qualifications. Having accomplished virtually nothing in his three years in the Senate except to win the Democratic nomination, Mr. Obama must show he is up to the job. Voters like him, conditions favor him, yet he has not closed the sale. He may be approaching the finish line with that mixture of lassitude and insouciance he displayed in the spring against Mrs. Clinton.
But here's a warning sign for Mr. Obama. Of recent candidates, only Michael Dukakis in 1988 has had a larger percentage of voters tell pollsters they believe he lacks the necessary qualifications to be president.
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McCain - Obama - Debate: October 7th, 2008
Senator John McCain and Senator Barack Obama debate in a Town Hall format from Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee on October 7th, 2008. [video]
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Sowell : Real Obama
[rcp] Critics of Senator Barack Obama make a strategic mistake when they talk about his "past associations." That just gives his many defenders in the media an opportunity to counter-attack against "guilt by association."
We all have associations, whether at the office, in our neighborhood or in various recreational activities. Most of us neither know nor care what our associates believe or say about politics.
Associations are very different from alliances. Allies are not just people who happen to be where you are or who happen to be doing the same things you do. You choose allies deliberately for a reason. The kind of allies you choose says something about you.
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Biden's Fantasy World
[wsj] In the popular media wisdom, Sarah Palin is the neophyte who knows nothing about foreign policy while Joe Biden is the savvy diplomatic pro. Then what are we to make of Mr. Biden's fantastic debate voyage last week when he made factual claims that would have got Mrs. Palin mocked from New York to Los Angeles?
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Biden : Less Than Key Role in Bosnia Legislation
[wapo] : [...]During last week's debate with his counterpart on the Republican ticket, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, Biden twice gave himself credit for shifting U.S. policy on Bosnia. The senator from Delaware declared that he "was the catalyst to change the circumstance in Bosnia led by President Clinton." At another point he noted: "My recommendations on Bosnia -- I admit I was the first one to recommend it. They saved tens of thousands of lives."
But, despite the bravado, Biden was not a key player in the legislation that ultimately forced Bill Clinton to lift an arms embargo imposed by the United Nations on Bosnian Muslims fighting the Serbs, according to congressional officials involved in the issue and a review of Biden's speeches and voting record.
In his autobiography, "Promises to Keep," Biden says that the pivotal Senate vote came "nearly three years after I called for the plan" to unilaterally lift the embargo. But the charge actually was led by then-Senate Minority Leader Robert J. Dole (R-Kan.) and Democratic Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (Conn.), who has since become an independent.
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It's more than a little breathless, but of course attention should be given to this, and frankly, about time. How could any think otherwise? Inform yourself and draw whatever conclusions you will. That's what it's all about - and impossible if you don't ever hear about it.
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Ayers? Huh? Fuggedabout it
Of course, the idea that saying crimes occurred 'when O' was eight' is a nonsensical defense and if anything, is indicting, not an absolution of association. Knowing of these things prior to association. No one says he had association with Ayers when he was eight, rather, that he had the lack of judgement to do so when he was an adult. Factor to this, that Ayers is now a forty-year old man that still considers his criminal actions as just fine a feat as back then and you have the glaring point.
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No Regrets
[cmag] From our August 2001 issue: "Kill your parents!" urged sixties leftist Bill Ayers, whose father was the chairman of Commonwealth Edison here. In Ayers's new memoir, Fugitive Days, he reconciles his militant past with his present identity: father of three, esteemed professor at UIC—and unabashed patron of the great bourgeois coffee chain, Starbucks...
Fire in the Night
[cjournal] The Weathermen tried to kill my family. During the April 16 debate between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, moderator George Stephanopoulos brought up “a gentleman named William Ayers,” who “was part of the Weather Underground in the 1970s. They bombed the Pentagon, the Capitol, and other buildings. He’s never apologized for that.”
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RIAA v. The People: Five Years Later
[eff] On September 8, 2003, the recording industry sued 261 American music fans for sharing songs on peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing networks, kicking off an unprecedented legal campaign against the people that should be the recording industry’s best customers: music fans. Five years later, the recording industry has filed, settled, or threatened legal actions against at least 30,000 individuals. These individuals have included children, grandparents, unemployed single mothers, college professors—a random selection from the millions of Americans who have used P2P networks. And there’s no end in sight; new lawsuits are filed monthly, and now they are supplemented by a flood of "pre-litigation" settlement letters designed to extract settlements without any need to enter a courtroom.
But suing music fans has proven to be an ineffective response to unauthorized P2P file-sharing. Downloading from P2P networks is more popular than ever, despite the widespread public awareness of lawsuits. And the lawsuit campaign has not resulted in any royalties to artists. One thing has become clear: suing music fans is no answer to the P2P dilemma. [...]
The RIAA’s lawsuit campaign against individual American music fans has failed. It has failed to curtail P2P downloading. It has not persuaded music fans that sharing is equivalent to shoplifting. It has not put a penny into the pockets of artists. It has done little to drive most filesharers into the arms of authorized music services. In fact, the RIAA lawsuits may well be driving filesharers to new technologies that will be much harder for the RIAA’s investigators to infiltrate and monitor.
This failure should not come as a surprise. The conflict between copyright owners and new ways of distributing music is not new, but is rather the historical norm. Every new innovation from the past century – moving pictures, player pianos, radio, and television, to name a few – has sparked a new conflict between those in a better position under the old scheme and those who stand to benefit by updating copyright law in light of new technologies. However, these compromises take a long time to form and build into legislation, and even then the negotiations often omit the most important interests: those of the fans. [...]
Five years into the RIAA’s campaign, it has become all too clear (if there were ever any doubt) that suing music fans is not a viable business model for the recording industry. With courts, state watchdogs and the RIAA’s own members questioning the tactics of the campaign, it is time for the industry to embrace a new model that can help artists get paid and help fans access and share the music they love.
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Context is Everything
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Ifill dismisses questions of partisanship
[msnbc] [...] Ifill said Wednesday that she hasn’t even written her chapter on Obama for the book “The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama,” which is to be published by Doubleday on Jan. 20, 2009, the day a new president is inaugurated. [...]
The host of PBS’ “Washington Week” and senior correspondent on “The NewsHour” said she did not tell the Commission on Presidential Debates about the book. The commission had no immediate comment when contacted by The Associated Press.
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VP Debate Moderator Gwen Ifill : Releasing pro-Obama Book
[wnd] : The moderator of Thursday's vice-presidential debate is writing a book to come out about the time the next president takes the oath of office that aims to "shed new light" on Democratic candidate Barack Obama and other "emerging young African American politicians" who are "forging a bold new path to political power."
Gwen Ifill of the Public Broadcasting Service program "Washington Week" is promoting "The Breakthrough," in which she argues the "black political structure" of the civil rights movement is giving way to men and women who have benefited from the struggles over racial equality.
::
Brilliant. How anyone can suggest 'no problem' is laughable. Spare the pretense. Conflict of interests. As always, if the scenario were reversed, you'd have screaming hostility, weeping and whining and a boycott of the debate by the ever enlightened.
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Why should anyone trust Joe Biden?
[independent] : As part of his Presidential campaign 20 years ago, he lifted verbatim and without attribution Neil Kinnock's celebrated remarks: "Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to a University ... was it because all our predecessors were thick, those people who could work eight hours underground and then come up to play football?"
Biden told an audience at an Iowa fairground: "I started thinking as I was coming over here, why is it that Joe Biden's the first in his family ever to go to University ... is it because our fathers and mothers were not bright... who worked in the coal mines of Northeast Pennsylvania and would come up after 12 hours and play football?"
Note the overt claim to spontaneity at the outset of the plagiarism; but it wasn't just that which left his run for the Presidency buried under an avalanche of ridicule. It rapidly emerged that Biden was not the first member of his family to go to university, and that the closest any ancestral Bidens came to working underground was a grandfather who was a mining engineer – and during the campaign Biden also told a number of gratuitous untruths about his own academic record. [...]
For all the longevity of his tenure, Biden does not deserve the description lavished on him last month by the Los Angeles Times (among others) as "an acknowledged foreign policy sage". He voted against using American military force to remove Saddam Hussein's army from occupied Kuwait, but voted for the American invasion of sovereign Iraq in 2003. Later, he voted against the "surge" which has brought a degree of stability to that benighted country, proposing instead that it be allowed to break up along ethnic lines – the now discredited "Biden Plan". Experience is a wonderful thing, of course – but only if you learn the right lessons from it.
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Barney Frank's Fingerprints All Over Financial Fiasco
[bg] : [...] The roots of this crisis go back to the Carter administration. That was when government officials, egged on by left-wing activists, began accusing mortgage lenders of racism and "redlining" because urban blacks were being denied mortgages at a higher rate than suburban whites.
The pressure to make more loans to minorities (read: to borrowers with weak credit histories) became relentless. Congress passed the Community Reinvestment Act, empowering regulators to punish banks that failed to "meet the credit needs" of "low-income, minority, and distressed neighborhoods." Lenders responded by loosening their underwriting standards and making increasingly shoddy loans. The two government-chartered mortgage finance firms, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, encouraged this "subprime" lending by authorizing ever more "flexible" criteria by which high-risk borrowers could be qualified for home loans, and then buying up the questionable mortgages that ensued.
All this was justified as a means of increasing homeownership among minorities and the poor. Affirmative-action policies trumped sound business practices. A manual issued by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston advised mortgage lenders to disregard financial common sense. "Lack of credit history should not be seen as a negative factor," the Fed's guidelines instructed. Lenders were directed to accept welfare payments and unemployment benefits as "valid income sources" to qualify for a mortgage. Failure to comply could mean a lawsuit.
As long as housing prices kept rising, the illusion that all this was good public policy could be sustained. But it didn't take a financial whiz to recognize that a day of reckoning would come. [...]
Time and time again, Frank insisted that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were in good shape. Five years ago, for example, when the Bush administration proposed much tighter regulation of the two companies, Frank was adamant that "these two entities, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, are not facing any kind of financial crisis." When the White House warned of "systemic risk for our financial system" unless the mortgage giants were curbed, Frank complained that the administration was more concerned about financial safety than about housing.
Now that the bubble has burst and the "systemic risk" is apparent to all, Frank blithely declares: "The private sector got us into this mess." Well, give the congressman points for gall. Wall Street and private lenders have plenty to answer for, but it was Washington and the political class that derailed this train. If Frank is looking for a culprit to blame, he can find one suspect in the nearest mirror.
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Yesterday on my way to lunch at Olive Garden, I passed one of the homeless guys in that area, with a sign that read "Vote Obama! I need the money!."
Once in Olive Garden my waiter had on a "Obama 08" tee shirt.
When the bill came, I decided not to tip the waiter and explained to him while he had given me exceptional service, that his tee shirt made me feel he obviously believes in Senator Obama's plan to redistribute the wealth. I told him I was going to redistribute his tip to someone that I deemed more in need--the homeless guy outside. He stood there in disbelief and angrily stormed away.
I went outside, gave the homeless guy $5 and told him to thank the waiter inside, as I had decided he could use the money more. The homeless guy looked at me in disbelief but seemed grateful.
As I got in my truck, I realized this rather unscientific redistribution experiment had left the homeless guy quite happy for the money he did not earn, but the waiter was ticked that I gave away the money he did earn. [nb]
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Don't Let the Polls Affect Your Vote
[wsj] There has been an explosion of polls this presidential election. Through yesterday, there have been 728 national polls with head-to-head matchups of the candidates, 215 in October alone. In 2004, there were just 239 matchup polls, with 67 of those in October. At this rate, there may be almost as many national polls in October of 2008 as there were during the entire year in 2004.
Some polls are sponsored by reputable news organizations, others by publicity-eager universities or polling firms on the make. None have the scientific precision we imagine. [...]
On election night in 2000 Al Hunt -- then a columnist for this newspaper and a commentator on CNN -- was the first TV talking head to erroneously declare that Florida's polls had closed, when those in the Panhandle were open for another hour. Shortly before 8 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, Judy Woodruff said: "A big call to make. CNN announces that we call Florida in the Al Gore column."
Mr. Hunt and Ms. Woodruff were not only wrong. What they did was harmful. We know, for example, that turnout in 2000 compared to 1996 improved more in states whose polls had closed by the time Ms. Woodruff all but declared the contest over. The data suggests that as many as 500,000 people in the Midwest and West didn't bother to vote after the networks indicated Florida cinched the race for Mr. Gore.
I recall, too, the media's screwup in 2004, when exit-polling data leaked in the afternoon. It showed President Bush losing Pennsylvania by 17 points, New Hampshire by 18, behind among white males in Florida, and projected South Carolina and Colorado too close to call. It looked like the GOP would be wiped out.
Bob Shrum famously became the first to congratulate Sen. John Kerry by addressing him as "President Kerry." Commentators let the exit polls color their coverage for hours until their certainty was undone by actual vote tallies.
Polls have proliferated this year in part because it is much easier for journalists to devote the limited space in their papers or on TV to the horse-race aspect of the election rather than its substance. And I admit, I've aided and abetted this process.
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Stand by for another Joes' personal records being rifled and rousted?
'Joe' The Guitarist
[bh] : Aerosmith has generally left the politics to bands like U2 and the Dixie Chicks, but axeman Joe Perry says national security and economic woes have prompted him to split from the rest of the entertainment world and throw his support behind John McCain.
“We pretty much stay out of it, but seeing so many people come out for Obama, I just felt like ‘What the hell, I might as well raise my hand for this side,” Perry said from his Duxbury home.
The Bay State rockers have done a few fund-raisers for the Kennedy family over the years, but Perry’s endorsement of McCain marks a first for the platinum-selling guitarist/songwriter. A lifelong Republican, he said he was inspired to come forward because of ringing McCain endorsements from Rudy Giuliani and California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.“I’ve been a hardcore Republican my whole life,” he told the Herald. “My mother and father drilled into me from the very start that if you work hard and be positive, you’ll get what you’re working for. I guess I’m living proof of that.”
Of criticism about McCain’s age, Perry said: “My mother’s in her 80s and she does aerobics. My manager’s 70 and he’s right there. That doesn’t bother me.”
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A week after his last money plea, 5 days to go, Obama asks everyone for another $5
[lat] : It seems like only a week ago that The Ticket was whining about Barack Obama whining that after raising $605 million through September to buy the presidency, he was asking all of us one last time for just $10 more for some reason.
And we figured out that, October money aside, he'd have to spend $12.5 million a day just to unload September's haul by Nov. 4.
The Democrat is already outspending the Republican by three Political button for bitter gun ownerand four-to-one, which if it was the other way around would surely be unconscionable.
So last night Obama dumped several million bucks on several TV networks, which they don't mind, to talk at us slickly for 27 minutes about his change that we need.
And when that was over, pingo, here comes another e-mail from Windy City HQ. You'll never guess what. He wants more money. More. Still.
It was a blessedly short message. He called us by our first name and signed only his first name; so we must be pals. He put the entire fate of his historic campaign in our hands. "The campaign is in your hands," he wrote.
Which is a pretty big responsibility, on top of adjusting to a Pennsylvania team winning a World Series.
The good news is he only wants $5 from each of us this time. (But, alas, no car magnet this time.)
$605 million here. And $605 million there. Pretty soon, this change business is getting kinda expensive. And we haven't even gotten to the increased taxes part of any new administration.
Barack calls this money pitch "a donation for the Final Push," which we were kinda thinking or hoping was last week. So next week we'll probably get a plea for the First Push for the Next Drive.
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Spin vs. Facts
[ap] Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama was less than upfront in his half-hour commercial Wednesday night about the costs of his programs and the crushing budget pressures he would face in office.
Obama's assertion that "I've offered spending cuts above and beyond" the expense of his promises is accepted only by his partisans. His vow to save money by "eliminating programs that don't work" masks his failure throughout the campaign to specify what those programs are - beyond the withdrawal of troops from Iraq.
A sampling of what voters heard in the ad, and what he didn't tell them:
THE SPIN: "That's why my health care plan includes improving information technology, requires coverage for preventive care and pre-existing conditions and lowers health care costs for the typical family by $2,500 a year."
THE FACTS: His plan does not lower premiums by $2,500, or any set amount. Obama hopes that by spending $50 billion over five years on electronic medical records and by improving access to proven disease management programs, among other steps, consumers will end up saving money. He uses an optimistic analysis to suggest cost reductions in national health care spending could amount to the equivalent of $2,500 for a family of four. Many economists are skeptical those savings can be achieved, but even if they are, it's not a certainty that every dollar would be passed on to consumers in the form of lower premiums.
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Checks on Citizen 'Joe Plumber' More Extensive Than Thought
[cd] : A state agency has revealed that its checks of computer systems for potential information on "Joe the Plumber" were more extensive than it first acknowledged.
Helen Jones-Kelley, director of the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services, disclosed today that computer inquiries on Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher were not restricted to a child-support system.
The agency also checked Wurzelbacher in its computer systems to determine whether he was receiving welfare assistance or owed unemployment compensation taxes, she wrote.
Jones-Kelley made the revelations in a letter to Ohio Senate President Bill M. Harris, R-Ashland, who demanded answers on why state officials checked out Wurzelbacher.
Harris called the multiple records checks "questionable" and said he awaits more answers. "It's kind of like Big Brother is looking in your pocket," he said.
If state employees run checks on every person listed in newspaper stories as buying a business, "it must take a lot of people a lot of time to run these checks," he said. "Where do you draw the line?"
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Media's Presidential Bias and Decline
[abc] The traditional media are playing a very, very dangerous game -- with their readers, with the Constitution and with their own fates.
The sheer bias in the print and television coverage of this election campaign is not just bewildering, but appalling. And over the last few months I've found myself slowly moving from shaking my head at the obvious one-sided reporting, to actually shouting at the screen of my television and my laptop computer.
But worst of all, for the last couple weeks, I've begun -- for the first time in my adult life -- to be embarrassed to admit what I do for a living. A few days ago, when asked by a new acquaintance what I did for a living, I replied that I was "a writer," because I couldn't bring myself to admit to a stranger that I'm a journalist.
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Eternal Return
[pjm] : [...] If the pundits are to be believed, the American people are just about to elect as President a man who espouses in concentrated form just about every bad, discredited, and exploded social and economic idea of the last fifty years.
For example, as has been pointed out by many commentators, what people call Obama’s “tax plan” is really a tax and welfare plan. Far from granting a tax cut on “95 percent” of taxpayers, as he claims, it will raise a whole suite of taxes:
– marginal tax rates
– estate taxes
– taxes on dividends
– capital gains taxes
And that is before breakfast. Just wait till Obama, together with a Congress led by Nancy Pelosi and Henry Reid, really get going. [...]
What I find depressing about this–as, indeed, about the whole Obama juggernaut–is the extent to which it represents a return of bad ideas that have already been tried time and again, have failed and made people poorer and less stalwart, and yet seem poised to make a sorry comeback once again. I’ve written about the “déjà-vu-all-over-again” phenomenon before in this space. Bill Ayers? Haven’t we done that? Jeremiah Wright? Haven’t we done that, too? Haven’t we tried Obama’s “soak the rich,” anti-business economic policies? Haven’t we tried his “can’t-we-all-just-get-along” foreign policy? Don’t we know that economics is about the creation rather than the redistribution of wealth, and that low taxes and strategies that encourage productivity and investment are best calculated to make the entire society, including the less fortunate, more prosperous? Don’t we know where appeasement and capitulation get us in foreign affairs? Don’t we remember Jimmy Carter? Haven’t we learned anything?
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Nothing Vague About It
[nro] Speaking on a call-in radio show in 2001, you can hear Senator Obama say things that should profoundly shock any American — or at least those who have not taken the time to dig deeply enough into this man’s beliefs and affiliations. [...]
There is nothing vague or ambiguous about this. Nothing.
“…The Supreme Court never entered into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society. And uh, to that extent, as radical as I think people tried to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn’t that radical.”
If the second highlighted phrase had been there without the first, Obama’s defenders would have bent over backwards trying to spin the meaning of “political and economic justice.” We all know what political and economic justice means, because Barack Obama has already made it crystal clear a second earlier: It means redistribution of wealth. Not the creation of wealth and certainly not the creation of opportunity, but simply taking money from the successful and hard-working and distributing it to those whom the government decides “deserve” it.
This redistribution of wealth, he states, “essentially is administrative and takes a lot of time.” It is an administrative task. Not suitable for the courts. More suitable for the chief executive.
Now that’s just garden-variety socialism, which apparently is not a big deal to may voters. So I would appeal to any American who claims to love the Constitution and to revere the Founding Fathers… I will not only appeal to you, I will beg you, as one American citizen to another, to consider this next statement with as much care as you can possibly bring to bear: “And uh, to that extent, as radical as I think people tried to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution — at least as it’s been interpreted, and [the] Warren Court interpreted it in the same way, that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties: [it] says what the states can’t do to you, says what the federal government can’t do to you, but it doesn’t say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf.
The United States of America — five percent of the world’s population — leads the world economically, militarily, scientifically, and culturally — and by a spectacular margin. Any one of these achievements, taken alone, would be cause for enormous pride. To dominate as we do in all four arenas has no historical precedent. That we have achieved so much in so many areas is due — due entirely — to the structure of our society as outlined in the Constitution of the United States.
The entire purpose of the Constitution was to limit government. That limitation of powers is what has unlocked in America the vast human potential available in any population.
Barack Obama sees that limiting of government not as a lynchpin but rather as a fatal flaw: “…One of the, I think, the tragedies of the Civil Rights movement was because the Civil Rights movement became so court-focused, uh, I think that there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change. And in some ways we still suffer from that.”
There is no room for wiggle or misunderstanding here. This is not edited copy. There is nothing out of context; for the entire thing is context — the context of what Barack Obama believes. You and I do not have to guess at what he believes or try to interpret what he believes. He says what he believes.
** read the entire article
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CBS : The Obama Campaign's Financing
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Krauthammer : McCain for President
[wapo] : Contrarian that I am, I'm voting for John McCain. I'm not talking about bucking the polls or the media consensus that it's over before it's over. I'm talking about bucking the rush of wet-fingered conservatives leaping to Barack Obama before they're left out in the cold without a single state dinner for the next four years. [...]
First, I'll have no truck with the phony case ginned up to rationalize voting for the most liberal and inexperienced presidential nominee in living memory. The "erratic" temperament issue, for example. As if McCain's risky and unsuccessful but in no way irrational attempt to tactically maneuver his way through the economic tsunami that came crashing down a month ago renders unfit for office a man who demonstrated the most admirable equanimity and courage in the face of unimaginable pressures as a prisoner of war, and who later steadily navigated innumerable challenges and setbacks, not the least of which was the collapse of his campaign just a year ago.
McCain the "erratic" is a cheap Obama talking point. The 40-year record testifies to McCain the stalwart. [...]
The case for McCain is straightforward. The financial crisis has made us forget, or just blindly deny, how dangerous the world out there is. We have a generations-long struggle with Islamic jihadism. An apocalyptic soon-to-be-nuclear Iran. A nuclear-armed Pakistan in danger of fragmentation. A rising Russia pushing the limits of revanchism. Plus the sure-to-come Falklands-like surprise popping out of nowhere.
Who do you want answering that phone at 3 a.m.? A man who's been cramming on these issues for the past year, who's never had to make an executive decision affecting so much as a city, let alone the world? A foreign policy novice instinctively inclined to the flabbiest, most vaporous multilateralism (e.g., the Berlin Wall came down because of "a world that stands as one"), and who refers to the most deliberate act of war since Pearl Harbor as "the tragedy of 9/11," a term more appropriate for a bus accident?
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Brrrrrrr....[np] : In early September, I began noticing a string of news stories about scientists rejecting the orthodoxy on global warming. Actually, it was more like a string of guest columns and long letters to the editor since it is hard for skeptical scientists to get published in the cabal of climate journals now controlled by the Great Sanhedrin of the environmental movement.
Still, the number of climate change skeptics is growing rapidly. Because a funny thing is happening to global temperatures -- they're going down, not up.
On the same day (Sept. 5) that areas of southern Brazil were recording one of their latest winter snowfalls ever and entering what turned out to be their coldest September in a century, Brazilian meteorologist Eugenio Hackbart explained that extreme cold or snowfall events in his country have always been tied to "a negative PDO" or Pacific Decadal Oscillation. Positive PDOs -- El Ninos -- produce above-average temperatures in South America while negative ones -- La Ninas -- produce below average ones.
Dr. Hackbart also pointed out that periods of solar inactivity known as "solar minimums" magnify cold spells on his continent. So, given that August was the first month since 1913 in which no sunspot activity was recorded -- none -- and during which solar winds were at a 50-year low, he was not surprised that Brazilians were suffering (for them) a brutal cold snap. "This is no coincidence," he said as he scoffed at the notion that manmade carbon emissions had more impact than the sun and oceans on global climate. [...]
Other international scientists have called the manmade warming theory a "hoax," a "fraud" and simply "not credible."
While not stooping to such name-calling, weather-satellite scientists David Douglass of the University of Rochester and John Christy of the University of Alabama at Huntsville nonetheless dealt the True Believers a devastating blow last month.
For nearly 30 years, Professor Christy has been in charge of NASA's eight weather satellites that take more than 300,000 temperature readings daily around the globe. In a paper co-written with Dr. Douglass, he concludes that while manmade emissions may be having a slight impact, "variations in global temperatures since 1978 ... cannot be attributed to carbon dioxide."
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Bolton
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Japan's young turn to Communist Party
[telegraph] : a wave of discontent among its younger workers is fuelling a change in the nation's political landscape: communism is suddenly back in fashion.
What many young Japanese view as an erosion of their economic security and employment rights, combined with years of political stagnation, are propelling droves of them into the arms of the Japanese Communist Party (JCP), the nation's fourth largest political party.
New recruits are signing up at the rate of 1,000 a month, swelling its ranks to more than 415,000. Meanwhile a classic proletarian novel is at the top of the best-seller lists, and communist-themed "manga" comics are enjoying soaring success.
A further sign of disaffection among young Japanese - who in recent years have been more renowned for their political apathy than their revolutionary zeal - is the increasing frequency of rallies by workers on the streets of the capital.
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Open Letter from The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley to Senator John McCain about Climate Science and Policy
[at] : Dear Senator McCain, Sir,
You chose a visit to a wind-farm in early summer 2008 to devote an entire campaign speech to the reassertion of your belief in the apocalyptic vision of catastrophic anthropogenic climate change - a lurid and fanciful account of imagined future events that was always baseless, was briefly exciting among the less thoughtful species of news commentators and politicians, but is now scientifically discredited.
With every respect, there is no rational basis for your declared intention that your great nation should inflict upon her own working people and upon the starving masses of the Third World the extravagantly-pointless, climatically-irrelevant, strategically-fatal economic wounds that the arrogant advocates of atmospheric alarmism admit they aim to achieve. [...]
Science and the climate: the facts.............
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[yahoo] Yahoo launched their new profile product last week as part of their big plan to social networkize the entire Yahoo world. Every Yahoo profile was reset, and users were asked to go through a process of recreating it.
The comments were unambiguous - they were pissed off. [...]
Communication with users was definitely poorly executed, and users should have had a message on their profile page telling them what was going on. But the team is clearly trying to fix that. VP Communities Jim Stoneham, who just joined Yahoo six weeks ago to lead the project (Welcome to Yahoo, Jim!), has a single message on his: “listening.” And Yahoo has at least kept a copy of the old profile information for users who want it back:
We also know lots of you worked hard on your old profiles and want your data. If you feel like you’re missing data, we’ve saved a copy of your old profile (and alias) and our Customer Care team can retrieve this information. You won’t, however, be able to revert back to your old profile format, but you will be able to get any data that you think is missing. To do this, please go here http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/profiles/general.html to contact Customer Care.
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Democrats Continue to Cover up Relationship with Fannie Mae : Media Plays Along.
[wsj] This past week I appeared on Bill Maher's HBO show Real Time with Representative Maxine Waters of California. Ms. Waters fibbed on the air about her connections to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
It all began when Mr. Maher tried to the lay blame for the credit meltdown on inadequate regulation of Wall Street. I pointed out that among the biggest failures this year were Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and that Democrats had protected them against tougher regulation. I said to Ms. Waters: "You said [the system for regulating the mortgage giants] wasn't broke five years ago at a Congressional hearing, and you took $15,000 of campaign contributions from Fannie and Freddie."
Responded Ms. Waters: "That is a lie and I challenge you to find $15,000 that I took from Fannie PAC."
Naturally, on hearing such a categorical insistence from Ms. Waters that my facts were wrong, I double-checked the numbers on the Center for Responsive Politics' OpenSecrets.org Web site. CRP had listed all the political contributions from the Fannie Mae Pac after the federal bailout of Fannie and Freddie late in the summer. Sure enough, the report confirms that Maxine Waters was recipient of $15,000 in Fannie Mae Pac dollars since 1989. Altogether, some 354 current members of Congress had received a total of $4.8 million from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
This has become a pattern of congressional Democrats, who deny their incestuous relationship with Fannie and Freddie, even when it means strangling the truth on national TV.
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OK. We liked the w.e.update segment, rap thing. Take it as you might. Sarah clearly has the beat. Yoz. Without a doubt the viewing audience must have been higher due to her appearance, like her or not. Prior to Palin arriving on the scene and delivering them a refreshed lease, what really is the demographic? Who even talked about the show, let alone actually watched this program anymore? Couldn't watch the program here, tried for a couple minutes. Granted, we do go way back, but eh....sorry, it's just such refuse.It does remind us of our very missed 'Professor' and conversations and how she, a lingering fan of the program, would try to implement mental force tactics upon us to make us view it. We do miss the conversations greatly, dear She. Always in our thoughts.
One, two, three
My name is Sarah Palin
You all know me
Vice President nominee of the G-O-P.
Gonna need ya vote
In the next election
Can I get a "What What" from the senior section?
McCain got experience,
McCain got style,
But don't let him freak you out
When he tries to smile.
'Cause that smile be creepy,
But when I'm V-P,
All the leaders in the world gonna finally meet me!
Howz it go Eskimos?
(Eskimos!)
Tel me, tell me what you know, Eskimos!
(Eskimos!)
How you feel Eskimos?
(Ice cold!)
Tell me, tell me what you feel Eskimos
(Supa' cold!)
I'm Jeremiah wright
'Cause tonight I'm the preacha
I got a bookish look and ya all hot fo' teacha
Todd lookin' fine on his snow machine,
So hot for each other need a go-between.
In Wasilla we just chill, baby chilla,
But when I see oil it's "Drill, baby, drilla!"
My country 'tis of thee,
From my porch I can see,
Russia and such
All the mavericks in the house put ya hands up!
All the mavericks in the house put ya hands up!
All the plumbers in the house pull ya pants up!
All the plumbers in the house pull ya pants up!
When I say Obama you say Ayers
Obama!
(Ayers!)
Obama!
(Ayers!)
I built me a bridge it ain't going nowhere!
Ohhhhhhhhhh!
McCain/Palin gonna put the nail in
The coffin, of the media elite
(She likes red meat!)
Shoot a motherhumpin' moose eight days of the week!
[gunshots]
Now ya dead!
Now ya dead 'cause I'm an animal!
And I'm bigga than you!
'Hold of a shot gun, walk in the pub
Everybody party, we're goin' on a hunt
La-la-la-la
la-la
la-laaaaaa
[gunshots]
Yo, I'm Palin, I'm out!
[via]
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Spread Your Own Wealth Around
[powerline] When Barack Obama responded to the Ohio plumber who didn't want his taxes raised that Obama wanted to "spread the wealth around," I wanted to tell him to spread his own wealth around. It was in any event a rare moment of candor on the part of Senator Obama.
Obama all but told the plumber that his wealth should be seized in the name of equity. The encounter played out one of the old themes of democratic politics: the appeal to the many to take from the few. It's traditionally an easy sell in democratic regimes.
Despite Obama's implication to the contrary, however, It doesn't represent much in the way of change. According to the most recent (2006) data released by the IRS, the top 1 percent of filers paid nearly 40 percent of all income taxes; the top 5 percent paid 60 percent of all income taxes. The bottom 50 percent paid virtually no income taxes (3 percent of all income taxes paid).
The personal income tax, the federal government's main source of revenue, is collected overwhelmingly from a relative handful of Americans. The large majority of all Americans pay little or no income tax.
Given that poorer citizens always outnumber the rich, political philosophers have long worried that government based on majority rule could lead to organized theft from the wealthy by the democratic masses. "If the majority distributes among itself the things of a minority, it is evident that it will destroy the city," warns Aristotle.
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Tribune Co. Newspapers : Give Notice To Drop AP
[e&p] : Tribune Company has given a two-year notice to the Associated Press that its daily newspapers plan to drop the news service, becoming the first major newspaper chain to do so since the recent controversy over new rates began.
Tribune, which owns nine daily papers including the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune, joins a growing list of newspapers that have sought to end AP contracts, or given notice of that, following plans to introduce a new controversial rate structure in 2009. The notice was given earlier this week.
AP Spokesman Paul Colford confirmed the cancellation notice, but said he had no more specifics. He issued the following statement about it:
"We understand that in this climate a lot of newspapers are re-examining their strategies. The Associated Press will continue to work with all members of the cooperative to ensure that we are providing the most efficient, valued and essential news service for them." [...]
"I think many editors are concerned about the new financial rate model that AP has rolled out," Earl Maucker, editor of the Sun Sentinel, said about the notice. "It is a natural approach for us to take a hard look at that. Are there other alternatives out there that would provide the depth and breadth of coverage we need?"
In recent months, other non-Tribune papers have also given the required two-year's notice to drop AP. Those include: The Star Tribune of Minneapolis, The Bakersfield Californian, The Post Register of Idaho Falls, and The Yakima Herald-Republic and Wenatchee World, both of Washington.
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Obama Voted 'Present' on Mortgage Reform
The only banking 'deregulation' in recent years was that of Fan and Fred
[wsj] In each of the first two presidential debates, Barack Obama claimed that "Republican deregulation" is responsible for the financial crisis. Most viewers probably accepted this idea, especially because Republicans generally do favor deregulation.
But one essential fact was missing from the senator's narrative: While there has been significant deregulation in the U.S. economy during the last 30 years, none of it has occurred in the financial sector. Indeed, the only significant legislation with any effect on financial risk-taking was the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Improvement Act of 1991, adopted during the first Bush administration in the wake of the collapse of the savings and loans (S&Ls). FDICIA, however, substantially tightened commercial bank and S&L regulations, including prompt corrective action when a bank's capital declines below adequate levels and severe personal fines if management violates laws or regulations. [...]
In each of the first two presidential debates, Barack Obama claimed that "Republican deregulation" is responsible for the financial crisis. Most viewers probably accepted this idea, especially because Republicans generally do favor deregulation.
But one essential fact was missing from the senator's narrative: While there has been significant deregulation in the U.S. economy during the last 30 years, none of it has occurred in the financial sector. Indeed, the only significant legislation with any effect on financial risk-taking was the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Improvement Act of 1991, adopted during the first Bush administration in the wake of the collapse of the savings and loans (S&Ls). FDICIA, however, substantially tightened commercial bank and S&L regulations, including prompt corrective action when a bank's capital declines below adequate levels and severe personal fines if management violates laws or regulations.
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Obama 'Rescue' Plan[ibd] Obama's idea of letting people deplete 15% of their 401(k) investment holdings is indicative of the candidate we have come to know, who wants ordinary people to look to the government for money — and not, as has been the trend in recent years, to their investment portfolios. Encourage novice investors to get out and stay out of the stock market right after a historic decline? Only a socialist mind-set would exploit the financial crisis in such a way.
Obama's campaign likes to call the middle class "the economic engine of America." But that engine's fuel is private-sector investment, most of which, naturally, comes from those with higher incomes. This community organizer from Chicago's South Side, whose career was launched with the help of unrepentant Weather Underground terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, will not accept that.
The Illinois senator might be one of the shrewdest presidential candidates ever, but he does slip. For instance, he promises to end capital gains taxes on investments for small businesses and start-ups.
But on a campaign stop in Toledo, he couldn't assure self-employed 34-year-old plumber Joe Wurzelbacher to his face that he would get a tax cut. Poised to buy a $250,000-a-year firm, the working-class plumber of 15 years confronted Obama.
"Your new tax plan is going to tax me more, isn't it?" he asked.
Obama responded with the promise of a 50% tax credit for health care, but the senator conceded that Wurzelbacher's income taxes would indeed rise.
"It's not that I want to punish your success," Obama told him. "I just want to make sure that everybody who is behind you — that they've got a chance at success too."
Wurzelbacher, who would shoulder all the responsibility and risk of such an investment, did not look impressed. Obama then let the cat out of the bag, saying:
"I think when you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody."
He certainly does, and his unguarded statement to a voter in a key swing state is socialist economics distilled to its simplest terms.
Eliminating small business capital gains taxes — whatever the details would be (and you can bet it would be a fraction of total private investment) — will not rescue the middle class from the job losses of a high-tax Obama administration planning to spend an extra $293 billion annually. It does, however, cunningly deaden charges that Obama is camouflaging a socialist agenda.
The other components of his so-called rescue, lovingly described by the New York Times as "proposals to spur new jobs, to give Americans penalty-free access to retirement savings to help them through the downturn, to urge a 90-day moratorium on home foreclosures and to lend money to strapped local and state governments" are worded to sound equally innocuous. But a close look tells another story.
His $3,000 income-tax credit for each new full-time employee hired by businesses is an obvious anti-outsourcing incentive likely to increase business costs, of which we can expect plenty more — of a directly punitive nature — in an Obama administration. He would replace the judgment of banks with that of the federal government regarding when or if to foreclose. And he wants the Federal Reserve and the Treasury to bail out spendthrift state and local governments.
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Contrast
[spectator] : The contrast between, on the one hand, the huge amount of material about Obama’s radical associations that has been published in on-line journals and in a few brave newspapers, and on the other the refusal by big media to address it and to vilify those who do, becomes more astounding by the day. The Obamaniacs are spinning the relationship between Obama and William Ayers, former of Weather Undergound Terrorism Inc, as of no consequence because this was supposedly a chance acquaintance and because the educational project they worked on, the Annenberg Challenge, was a worthy one.
Stanley Kurtz now nails that canard by showing how, through the Annenberg Challenge, Obama and Ayers channelled funds to extremist anti-American Afrocentric ‘educational’ programmes which were a carbon-copy of the world view of Pastor Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s black racist mentor who, under pressure, Obama was forced to repudiate. These programmes promoted, amongst other radical ideas, the ‘rites of passage’ philosophy which attempted to create a ‘virtually separate and intensely anti-American black social world’ in order to ‘counter the potentially detrimental effects of a Eurocentrically oriented society.’
[...] Meanwhile, it turns out that not only did Obama do favours for convicted Chicago fraudster Tony Rezko, but as this story reports Alexi Giannoulias, who reputedly bankrolled Michael ‘Jaws’ Giorango, a Chicagoan twice convicted of bookmaking and promoting prostitution, became Illinois state treasurer last year after Obama vouched for him, and has now has pledged to raise $100,000 for Obama’s campaign.
You have to pinch yourself – a Marxisant radical who all his life has been mentored by, sat at the feet of, worshipped with, befriended, endorsed the philosophy of, funded and been in turn funded, politically promoted and supported by a nexus comprising black power anti-white racists, Jew-haters, revolutionary Marxists, unrepentant former terrorists and Chicago mobsters, is on the verge of becoming President of the United States. And apparently it’s considered impolite to say so.
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Talk-radio hosts, Dennis Prager vs Stephanie Miller, debate the results of the televised McCain-Obama Debate- before a live audience of their listeners from KRLA and KTLK in Los Angeles, Oct 7, 2008.
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Mafia wants "Gomorra" author dead by Christmas
[reuters] : Police in Italy are looking into reports that the Naples mafia plans to carry out its threat to kill the author of the best-selling book "Gomorra," which has been made into a hit movie about mafia brutality, by Christmas.
Roberto Saviano, 29, has lived in hiding with 24-hour police protection for the past two years since the "Camorra," as the mob in his hometown is known, decided to punish him for the huge success of his book, which is based on his own investigations.
It has sold 1.2 million copies in Italy and been translated into 42 languages. Now that it has hit the big screen and is a candidate for the Oscars, the mafia is even angrier and wants Saviano and his bodyguards killed as soon as possible.
"We've launched in inquiry to verify the truth behind this news," Franco Roberto, a coordinator of the local anti-mafia squad for Naples, told Reuters.
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Canada Votes : 2008The "rollercoaster" campaign/election period, as some tv people described it, all 37 days of it, for Canada is over. Another minority Conservative government. A stronger one, but close, sans cigar, not what the party in power hoped for.The Liberals were laced a beating (from 95 to 76 seats - worst in their history?), however you might find that opinion low keyed and down-played and with the tone more along the lines of blaming the Harper contingent for wasting money on having the election. The Bloc, of course, the 'spoilers', will bleat further on of no respect, 'nation of Quebec,' taking their ball and going home tantrum bilge while then receiving billions from the Feds. The NDP broke the Conservatives' total domination of Alberta by winning one seat in that province and ending with a gain of seven seats in total. The Green Party's leader, E. May, sheerly void of a shred of dignity during relevant debate, made apt summation : "We ran an exuberant and joyful campaign. If kids five years and up could have voted, I would have won by a landslide," declared Ms. May, who lost by several thousand votes.
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Harper's second minority
[nationalpost] : [...] The traditional ballot paper, that homely old device that is both the symbol and apparatus of mass democracy, lets us declaim in favour of either one candidate or none. (And let us digress for a moment, since it is surely an appropriate time to do so, to give thanks for our own common sense in refusing to abandon paper ballots. Anyone who has followed the last decade in American politics knows we have spared ourselves a great deal of grief and uncertainty by turning our backs on more "advanced" methods.)
Anyway, we aren't allowed to make our mark next to "Whoever gets in, let it be a minority government." But through unconscious co-ordination, that is the result our efforts have yielded once again. As we go to press, it appears that Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper has been given another plurality of seats in the House of Commons. Barring the sudden appearance of a progressive popular front of the sort that the Opposition parties have continually disavowed, Mr. Harper will continue in power, confronted with much the same tactical situation he has faced since the election of January 2006.
[click for full size]
It is the least surprising of the possible outcomes contemplated at the beginning of the campaign, and in many ways the one that suits the national mood and the times best. Mr. Harper is the most trusted and respected of the political party leaders, and his politics are well within the Canadian mainstream. But his united Conservative movement, which required a strong hand to stitch together a rowdy regional protest faction and the corpse of a dead national party, has not yet proven capable of producing a front-rank team that Canadians are ready to trust with unfettered majority power. It is usually regarded as a weakness of the Liberals that there are always three or four credible successors loitering around the prime minister with hidden daggers, and the perception that Stephane Dion was campaigning with a noose around his neck certainly didn't help his cause in this election, but we rarely consider how long it takes a party to mature to the point at which it can count on having a class of credible leaders-in-waiting on hand.
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Compared to the U.S., which now seems to be in a state of perpetual campaign, Canada spits out their entire event - from the dropping of the writ to campaigning to vote tally in now, usually, the legal minimum amount of time : 36 days. Wham, bam...thank you ma'am.Canada currently has a minority conservative government and it appears by all accounts that the end result will be again a minority conservative body.
Oddly, a couple of the sites that I've looked at this morning read as if the event is over and past tense. The [cbc] already begins : "Canadians flocked to the polls Tuesday to elect the next government after a five-week campaign that culminated Thanksgiving weekend with party leaders bounding across the country in an effort to sway undecided voters."
I assume the crystal ballers were hard at work writing this type of passage yesterday or the day before. The polls in the eastern-most time zone provinces have only been open 1.5 hours of 12, but no doubt people have "flocked" to the polls. Like usual. The standard voter turnout being less than 50% of eligible voters taking the time to do so.
[wiki] The length of election campaigns can vary, but under the Canada Elections Act the minimum length of a campaign is 36 days. There is no explicit maximum length for a campaign, although section 5 of the Charter requires that the Parliament sit at least once every twelve months, and thus a campaign would have to conclude in time for returns to be completed and parliament to be called into session within twelve months of the previous sitting. The federal election date must be set on a Monday (or Tuesday if the Monday is a statutory holiday).
The longest election campaign was the 1926 election following the King-Byng Affair which lasted 74 days. Prior to the adoption of the minimum of 36 days in law, there were six elections that lasted shorter periods of time. The last of these was the 1904 election which occurred many decades before the time limit was imposed.
In practice, the Prime Minister will generally keep a campaign as brief as is legal and/or feasible, because spending by parties is strictly limited by the Elections Act, a law which contains no provisions that would allow for increased spending in a lengthy campaign. The 1997, 2000 and 2004 elections were all of the minimum 36 days in length which has led to a common misconception that elections must be 36 days long. However, prior to 1997, elections averaged much longer: aside from the 47 day campaign for the 1993 election, the shortest election period after World War II was 57 days and many were over 60 days in length.
[breitbart] The 37-day campaign focus on who would be the best manager in troubled economic times intensified with the global turmoil, and polls showed voters sticking with Harper though his support came off the highs it reached a few weeks ago.
The last poll of the campaign, by Ekos, projected that he would increase his seat count in Parliament at the expense of the main opposition Liberal Party but would still be almost 20 short of the 155 needed for a majority.
Harper had offered only modest tax breaks and spending initiatives, arguing that a steady hand would get Canada through the turbulence that has hit world markets.
Liberal leader Stephane Dion, a bookish francophone who hesitates in English, found it difficult at a time of relatively high energy prices to sell his plan for a new carbon tax to fight climate change, accompanied by income tax cuts and subsidies for the poor.
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The Acorn (huh?) Doesn't Fall Far From The Tree
[wsj] [...] According to a 2006 report from the Employment Policies Institute (EPI), Acorn has been on the federal take since 1977. For instance, Acorn's American Institute for Social Justice claimed $240,000 in tax money between fiscal years 2002 and 2003. Its American Environmental Justice Project received 100% of its revenue from government grants in the same years. EPI estimates the Acorn Housing Corporation alone received some $16 million in federal dollars from 1997-2007. Only recently, Democrats tried and failed to stuff an "affordable housing" provision into the $700 billion bank rescue package that would have let politicians give even more to Acorn.
All this money gives Acorn the ability to pursue its other great hobby: electing liberals. Acorn is spending $16 million this year to register new Democrats and is already boasting it has put 1.3 million new voters on the rolls. The big question is how many of these registrations are real.
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On the '95% Tax Cut'
[wsj] One of Barack Obama's most potent campaign claims is that he'll cut taxes for no less than 95% of "working families." He's even promising to cut taxes enough that the government's tax share of GDP will be no more than 18.2% -- which is lower than it is today.
It's a clever pitch, because it lets him pose as a middle-class tax cutter while disguising that he's also proposing one of the largest tax increases ever on the other 5%. But how does he conjure this miracle, especially since more than a third of all Americans already pay no income taxes at all? There are several sleights of hand, but the most creative is to redefine the meaning of "tax cut."
For the Obama Democrats, a tax cut is no longer letting you keep more of what you earn. In their lexicon, a tax cut includes tens of billions of dollars in government handouts that are disguised by the phrase "tax credit."
Also : TaxProf [tpb]
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Thug
Regarding this [article] foretelling of what is to come, [EM]writes that it has already arrived: "....We’ve already dumbed down the First Amendment to the point where it protects nude dancing but no longer protects political advertising in an election cycle. The most liberal of all environments, Academia, teems with “speech codes” that create thought police in ways that Soviet political commissars would find commendable.
The national media bears some of the blame for this. When a national campaign explicitly sets up an attack on a critic the way Team Obama did on Stanley Kurtz and David Freddoso, those who make their living under the auspices of the First Amendment might have been expected to take notice. Instead, they seem too enraptured in their own political biases to notice that one candidate for the highest office seems to endorse the notion that mobs should be able to silence critics. It doesn’t take a psychic to consider the future of a Department of Justice under the control of such a candidate, or its implications for a free press.
The best solution for bad speech is more speech, not speech codes, mobs shouting down critics, and legislative control of political speech in the public square. Yet we’re inexorably moving in that direction, thanks to the so-called defenders of free speech who only can muster any passion for it when they see a political benefit for themselves and their allies."
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Dodgy Digits
[ars] : If you pay any attention to the endless debates over intellectual property policy in the United States, you'll hear two numbers invoked over and over again, like the stuttering chorus of some Philip Glass opera: 750,000 and $200 to $250 billion. The first is the number of U.S. jobs supposedly lost to intellectual property theft; the second is the annual dollar cost of IP infringement to the U.S. economy. These statistics are brandished like a talisman each time Congress is asked to step up enforcement to protect the ever-beleaguered U.S. content industry. And both, as far as an extended investigation by Ars Technica has been able to determine, are utterly bogus.
~
Copyright Law Has to Catch Up
[wsj] In early February 2007, Stephanie Lenz's 13-month-old son started dancing. Pushing a walker across her kitchen floor, Holden Lenz started moving to the distinctive beat of a song by Prince, "Let's Go Crazy." He had heard the song before. The beat had obviously stuck. So when Holden heard the song again, he did what any sensible 13-month-old would do -- he accepted Prince's invitation and went "crazy" to the beat. Holden's mom grabbed her camcorder and, for 29 seconds, captured the priceless image of Holden dancing, with the barely discernible Prince playing on a CD player somewhere in the background.
Ms. Lenz wanted her mother to see the film. But you can't easily email a movie. So she did what any citizen of the 21st century would do: She uploaded the file to YouTube and sent her relatives and friends the link. They watched the video scores of times. It was a perfect YouTube moment: a community of laughs around a homemade video, readily shared with anyone who wanted to watch.
Sometime over the next four months, however, someone from Universal Music Group also watched Holden dance. Universal manages the copyrights of Prince. It fired off a letter to YouTube demanding that it remove the unauthorized "performance" of Prince's music. YouTube, to avoid liability itself, complied. A spokeswoman for YouTube declined to comment.
This sort of thing happens all the time today. Companies like YouTube are deluged with demands to remove material from their systems. No doubt a significant portion of those demands are fair and justified. Universal's demand, however, was not. The quality of the recording was terrible. No one would download Ms. Lenz's video to avoid paying Prince for his music. There was no plausible way in which Prince or Universal was being harmed by Holden Lenz. [...]
How is it that sensible people, people no doubt educated at some of the best universities and law schools in the country, would come to think it a sane use of corporate resources to threaten the mother of a dancing 13-month-old? What is it that allows these lawyers and executives to take a case like this seriously, to believe there's some important social or corporate reason to deploy the federal scheme of regulation called copyright to stop the spread of these images and music? "Let's Go Crazy" indeed!
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So much for mending conservatives with the Palin pick, Sen. McCain. The good will that that action brought you from those in your own party (who really didn't care much for many of your positions to begin with) has been squandered, and as seems more and more likely, your bid for president. Your refusal to actually call out and inform about your opponent, has clearly re-soured a group that should be, however reluctantly, yours beyond question. People don't expect to agree with you on every issue. They do, however, expect you to deliver the goods in a campaign regarding things that need to be said.::::
Nothing New About ACORN
[politico] It’s the newest charge against Sen. Barack Obama in the presidential campaign: that he worked, as a young community organizer, with a group now involved in voter registration fraud.
But while this particular accusation may be new, the group in question, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, is one of the oldest political targets around.
The latest wave of ACORN investigations has provided Republicans with both an opening to assail an old foe, and a new line of criticism to use against the Democratic presidential nominee, who represented ACORN in a lawsuit in the 1990s.
Nevada authorities raided the group's state headquarters Tuesday in connection with a voter-fraud probe. [...]
During the Democratic primaries, Obama was endorsed by ACORN’s political action committee. And in the early 1990s, according to the McCain campaign, Obama was involved in teaching community organizing classes for the organization.
Obama’s campaign has also shelled out about $800,000 to an ACORN subsidiary, Citizens Services Inc., to help with voter registration efforts. Although ACORN says it is nonpartisan, its registration efforts tend to be focused among groups friendly to Democratic candidates. [...]
...Republicans have clashed with ACORN for decades, regularly arguing that the group engages in questionable voter registration practices and pointing to the group’s activities as a reason for concern about voter fraud.
The organization, founded in Arkansas in 1970, describes itself as a coalition of local groups advocating for issues related to economic and social equity. But it’s also known for supporting Democratic candidates, and employing a confrontational political style that has often put it at odds with conservative leaders
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Maclean's wins third round of hate fight
[national] The British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal ruled yesterday that a controversial article about Islam in Maclean's magazine did not violate the province's hate speech law, marking the third time this year the Canadian Islamic Congress has failed in its efforts to force the magazine to print a rebuttal.
In dismissing the complaint, the three-member tribunal ruled that the article by Mark Steyn, which was published in 2006 and described the demographic and ideological dangers posed by a growing Muslim population in the West, was not likely to expose Muslims to hatred or contempt.
It ruled that the article, an excerpt from Mr. Steyn's book America Alone, contained historical, religious and factual inaccuracies, relied on common Muslim stereotypes and tried to "rally public opinion by exaggeration and causing the reader to fear Muslims."
"But fear is not synonymous with hatred and contempt," the tribunal wrote. "With all its inaccuracies and hyperbole, [the article] has resulted in political debate which, in our view, [B. C.'s hate speech human rights law] was never intended to suppress. In fact, as the evidence in this case amply demonstrates, the debate has not been suppressed and the concerns about the impact of hate speech silencing a minority have not been borne out," the tribunal wrote.
Nearly identical complaints by the CIC were dismissed this year by human rights commissions in Ontario, which did not have jurisdiction over print journalism, and federally, where it was judged to be without merit.
:: BACK STORY
Human rights commissions are quasi-judicial bodies that seek to promote and enforce human rights law in their jurisdictions and resolve disputes of discrimination based on certain prohibited grounds, such as race, gender or religion.
There is a federal commission in Ottawa, and provincial bodies, each with their own enabling legislation. Some commissions act as a gatekeeper for complaints, vetting them on behalf of a separate tribunal that decides them, often with the commission acting in the role of prosecutor. But some, such as Ontario and British Columbia, allow complaints to go directly to a tribunal.
If discrimination is proved, tribunals have the power to issue legally binding orders, and to impose relatively modest financial penalties. Their rulings can be appealed to fully fledged courts of law. Originally envisioned as a less severe remedy than civil court for discrimination complaints in housing or employment, human rights commissions also have a legislative mandate to hear complaints of hate messages.
Largely due to the hate speech cases against magazine and former Western Standard publisher Ezra Levant, they have recently been criticized for taking an overly broad interpretation of that mandate, targetting mainstream journalism as well as hate propaganda and discriminatory advertising.
At the federal commission, an independent review of its Internet hate speech mandate is in the final stages.
Steyn :
[nro] : Mark Hemingway is right to say that free speech in Canada "does not exist in any meaningful way". As the British Columbia "Human Rights" Tribunal's rambling and incoherent decision makes plain, Maclean's and I were acquitted of "flagrant Islamophobia" for essentially political reasons - because neither the court nor its travesty of a "human rights" code could withstand the heat of a guilty verdict. Jay Currie puts it well:
The way I read this decision is that it imposes a two part test: a) are your words offensive and hurtful? b) are you a major media organization with deep pockets represented by serious lawyers. If “a” and not “b” you are a hate monger; if “a” and “b” you are engaged in political debate.
Just so. Because we spent a ton of money and had a bigshot Queen's Counsel and exposed the joke jurisprudence and (at the federal "human rights" commission) systemic corruption, the kangaroo courts decided that discretion was the better part of valor. The Ontario "Human Rights" Commission ruled they weren't able to prosecute the case because of a technicality - I offered to waive the technicality, but the wimps still bailed out. If you have the wherewithal to stand up to these totalitarian bullies, they stampede for the exits. But, if you're just an obscure Alberta pastor or a guy with a widely unread website or a fellow who writes a letter to his local newspaper, they'll destroy your life.
I sympathize with the Canadian Islamic Congress, whose mouthpiece feels that, if the British Columbia pseudo-judges had applied the logic of previous decisions, we'd have been found guilty. He's right: Under the ludicrous British Columbia "Human Rights" Code, we are guilty. Which is why the Canadian Islamic Congress should appeal, and why I offered on the radio an hour ago to chip in a thousand bucks towards their costs.
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What Is a Right and How Do We Know?
[nro] During the presidential debate Tuesday night, Barack Obama was asked if he thought health care was a “right.”
He said he thought it was a right. Well, if you accept that premise, I think you can ask some logical follow-up questions: Food is more important than health care. You die pretty quickly without food. Do we have a “right” to food in America? What about shelter? Do we have a “right” to housing? And if we do have a right to housing, what standard of housing do we have a right to? And if it is a right, due to all Americans, wouldn’t that mean that no one should have to accept any housing, or health care, which is inferior to anyone else’s… since it’s a right?
Do we have a right to be safe? Do we have a right to be comfortable? Do we have a right to wide-screen televisions? Where does this end? [...]
Constitutional rights protect us from things: intimidation, illegal search and seizure, self-incrimination, and so on. The revolutionary idea of our Founding Fathers was that people had a God-given right to live as they saw fit. Our constitutional rights protect us from the power of government.
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Officials suspect fake voter registration
[yahoo] Officials in Missouri, a hard-fought jewel in the presidential race, are sifting through possibly hundreds of questionable or duplicate voter-registration forms submitted by an advocacy group that has been accused of election fraud in other states.
Charlene Davis, co-director of the election board in Jackson County, where Kansas City is, said the fraudulent registration forms came from the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN. She said they were bogging down work Wednesday, the final day Missourians could register to vote.
"I don't even know the entire scope of it because registrations are coming in so heavy," Davis said. "We have identified about 100 duplicates, and probably 280 addresses that don't exist, people who have driver's license numbers that won't verify or Social Security numbers that won't verify. Some have no address at all."
The nonpartisan group works to recruit low-income voters, who tend to lean Democratic.
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Rovian Lense
[wsj] Tuesday night's presidential debate was good entertainment. Both candidates were animated and loose throughout a wide-ranging discussion. Sen. Barack Obama did well in Sen. John McCain's favorite format. [...]
Mr. McCain was most effective on taxes and spending. He argued now is not the time to raise taxes and hit Mr. Obama's proposal to hike small business taxes: three out of four filers in the top 5% report small-business income. Mr. McCain called for a spending freeze and attacked earmarks, including Mr. Obama's $3 million for a Chicago planetarium's "overhead projector." Mr. Obama weakly replied earmarks were only $18 billion.
Advocates of Mr. Obama, on the other hand, saw him scoring points on style and connecting with questioners. He patiently explained to one how the Wall Street rescue package would help him and his neighbors on Main Street. He had the night's emotional high point when he talked about his dying mother fighting her insurer over whether her cancer was a pre-existing condition. He called for dramatic change and tied Mr. McCain to the Bush administration, though not too often to be obnoxious.
Mr. Obama also offered his villain responsible for the current crisis: "the deregulation of the financial system." Many voters will accept Mr. Obama's designation, despite it being both wrong and a slap at President Bill Clinton, who signed the 1999 deregulation legislation that Mr. Obama seems to object to, and Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin and Undersecretary Larry Summers, who helped fashion it. What do these Obama advisers think of being blamed for the credit-market meltdown? [...]
Each faces a big challenge. Mr. McCain's is that events have tilted the field towards Mr. Obama. To win, Mr. McCain must demonstrate he stands for responsible conservative change, while portraying Mr. Obama as an out-of-the-mainstream liberal not ready to be president.
Mr. Obama's test is that voters haven't shaken deep concerns about his lack of qualifications. Having accomplished virtually nothing in his three years in the Senate except to win the Democratic nomination, Mr. Obama must show he is up to the job. Voters like him, conditions favor him, yet he has not closed the sale. He may be approaching the finish line with that mixture of lassitude and insouciance he displayed in the spring against Mrs. Clinton.
But here's a warning sign for Mr. Obama. Of recent candidates, only Michael Dukakis in 1988 has had a larger percentage of voters tell pollsters they believe he lacks the necessary qualifications to be president.
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McCain - Obama - Debate: October 7th, 2008
Senator John McCain and Senator Barack Obama debate in a Town Hall format from Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee on October 7th, 2008. [video]
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Sowell : Real Obama
[rcp] Critics of Senator Barack Obama make a strategic mistake when they talk about his "past associations." That just gives his many defenders in the media an opportunity to counter-attack against "guilt by association."
We all have associations, whether at the office, in our neighborhood or in various recreational activities. Most of us neither know nor care what our associates believe or say about politics.
Associations are very different from alliances. Allies are not just people who happen to be where you are or who happen to be doing the same things you do. You choose allies deliberately for a reason. The kind of allies you choose says something about you.
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Biden's Fantasy World
[wsj] In the popular media wisdom, Sarah Palin is the neophyte who knows nothing about foreign policy while Joe Biden is the savvy diplomatic pro. Then what are we to make of Mr. Biden's fantastic debate voyage last week when he made factual claims that would have got Mrs. Palin mocked from New York to Los Angeles?
::
Biden : Less Than Key Role in Bosnia Legislation
[wapo] : [...]During last week's debate with his counterpart on the Republican ticket, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, Biden twice gave himself credit for shifting U.S. policy on Bosnia. The senator from Delaware declared that he "was the catalyst to change the circumstance in Bosnia led by President Clinton." At another point he noted: "My recommendations on Bosnia -- I admit I was the first one to recommend it. They saved tens of thousands of lives."
But, despite the bravado, Biden was not a key player in the legislation that ultimately forced Bill Clinton to lift an arms embargo imposed by the United Nations on Bosnian Muslims fighting the Serbs, according to congressional officials involved in the issue and a review of Biden's speeches and voting record.
In his autobiography, "Promises to Keep," Biden says that the pivotal Senate vote came "nearly three years after I called for the plan" to unilaterally lift the embargo. But the charge actually was led by then-Senate Minority Leader Robert J. Dole (R-Kan.) and Democratic Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (Conn.), who has since become an independent.
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It's more than a little breathless, but of course attention should be given to this, and frankly, about time. How could any think otherwise? Inform yourself and draw whatever conclusions you will. That's what it's all about - and impossible if you don't ever hear about it.
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Ayers? Huh? Fuggedabout it
Of course, the idea that saying crimes occurred 'when O' was eight' is a nonsensical defense and if anything, is indicting, not an absolution of association. Knowing of these things prior to association. No one says he had association with Ayers when he was eight, rather, that he had the lack of judgement to do so when he was an adult. Factor to this, that Ayers is now a forty-year old man that still considers his criminal actions as just fine a feat as back then and you have the glaring point.::
No Regrets
[cmag] From our August 2001 issue: "Kill your parents!" urged sixties leftist Bill Ayers, whose father was the chairman of Commonwealth Edison here. In Ayers's new memoir, Fugitive Days, he reconciles his militant past with his present identity: father of three, esteemed professor at UIC—and unabashed patron of the great bourgeois coffee chain, Starbucks...
Fire in the Night
[cjournal] The Weathermen tried to kill my family. During the April 16 debate between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, moderator George Stephanopoulos brought up “a gentleman named William Ayers,” who “was part of the Weather Underground in the 1970s. They bombed the Pentagon, the Capitol, and other buildings. He’s never apologized for that.”
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RIAA v. The People: Five Years Later
[eff] On September 8, 2003, the recording industry sued 261 American music fans for sharing songs on peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing networks, kicking off an unprecedented legal campaign against the people that should be the recording industry’s best customers: music fans. Five years later, the recording industry has filed, settled, or threatened legal actions against at least 30,000 individuals. These individuals have included children, grandparents, unemployed single mothers, college professors—a random selection from the millions of Americans who have used P2P networks. And there’s no end in sight; new lawsuits are filed monthly, and now they are supplemented by a flood of "pre-litigation" settlement letters designed to extract settlements without any need to enter a courtroom.
But suing music fans has proven to be an ineffective response to unauthorized P2P file-sharing. Downloading from P2P networks is more popular than ever, despite the widespread public awareness of lawsuits. And the lawsuit campaign has not resulted in any royalties to artists. One thing has become clear: suing music fans is no answer to the P2P dilemma. [...]
The RIAA’s lawsuit campaign against individual American music fans has failed. It has failed to curtail P2P downloading. It has not persuaded music fans that sharing is equivalent to shoplifting. It has not put a penny into the pockets of artists. It has done little to drive most filesharers into the arms of authorized music services. In fact, the RIAA lawsuits may well be driving filesharers to new technologies that will be much harder for the RIAA’s investigators to infiltrate and monitor.
This failure should not come as a surprise. The conflict between copyright owners and new ways of distributing music is not new, but is rather the historical norm. Every new innovation from the past century – moving pictures, player pianos, radio, and television, to name a few – has sparked a new conflict between those in a better position under the old scheme and those who stand to benefit by updating copyright law in light of new technologies. However, these compromises take a long time to form and build into legislation, and even then the negotiations often omit the most important interests: those of the fans. [...]
Five years into the RIAA’s campaign, it has become all too clear (if there were ever any doubt) that suing music fans is not a viable business model for the recording industry. With courts, state watchdogs and the RIAA’s own members questioning the tactics of the campaign, it is time for the industry to embrace a new model that can help artists get paid and help fans access and share the music they love.
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Context is Everything
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Ifill dismisses questions of partisanship
[msnbc] [...] Ifill said Wednesday that she hasn’t even written her chapter on Obama for the book “The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama,” which is to be published by Doubleday on Jan. 20, 2009, the day a new president is inaugurated. [...]
The host of PBS’ “Washington Week” and senior correspondent on “The NewsHour” said she did not tell the Commission on Presidential Debates about the book. The commission had no immediate comment when contacted by The Associated Press.
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VP Debate Moderator Gwen Ifill : Releasing pro-Obama Book
[wnd] : The moderator of Thursday's vice-presidential debate is writing a book to come out about the time the next president takes the oath of office that aims to "shed new light" on Democratic candidate Barack Obama and other "emerging young African American politicians" who are "forging a bold new path to political power."
Gwen Ifill of the Public Broadcasting Service program "Washington Week" is promoting "The Breakthrough," in which she argues the "black political structure" of the civil rights movement is giving way to men and women who have benefited from the struggles over racial equality.
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Brilliant. How anyone can suggest 'no problem' is laughable. Spare the pretense. Conflict of interests. As always, if the scenario were reversed, you'd have screaming hostility, weeping and whining and a boycott of the debate by the ever enlightened.::::
Why should anyone trust Joe Biden?
[independent] : As part of his Presidential campaign 20 years ago, he lifted verbatim and without attribution Neil Kinnock's celebrated remarks: "Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to a University ... was it because all our predecessors were thick, those people who could work eight hours underground and then come up to play football?"
Biden told an audience at an Iowa fairground: "I started thinking as I was coming over here, why is it that Joe Biden's the first in his family ever to go to University ... is it because our fathers and mothers were not bright... who worked in the coal mines of Northeast Pennsylvania and would come up after 12 hours and play football?"
Note the overt claim to spontaneity at the outset of the plagiarism; but it wasn't just that which left his run for the Presidency buried under an avalanche of ridicule. It rapidly emerged that Biden was not the first member of his family to go to university, and that the closest any ancestral Bidens came to working underground was a grandfather who was a mining engineer – and during the campaign Biden also told a number of gratuitous untruths about his own academic record. [...]
For all the longevity of his tenure, Biden does not deserve the description lavished on him last month by the Los Angeles Times (among others) as "an acknowledged foreign policy sage". He voted against using American military force to remove Saddam Hussein's army from occupied Kuwait, but voted for the American invasion of sovereign Iraq in 2003. Later, he voted against the "surge" which has brought a degree of stability to that benighted country, proposing instead that it be allowed to break up along ethnic lines – the now discredited "Biden Plan". Experience is a wonderful thing, of course – but only if you learn the right lessons from it.
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Barney Frank's Fingerprints All Over Financial Fiasco
[bg] : [...] The roots of this crisis go back to the Carter administration. That was when government officials, egged on by left-wing activists, began accusing mortgage lenders of racism and "redlining" because urban blacks were being denied mortgages at a higher rate than suburban whites.The pressure to make more loans to minorities (read: to borrowers with weak credit histories) became relentless. Congress passed the Community Reinvestment Act, empowering regulators to punish banks that failed to "meet the credit needs" of "low-income, minority, and distressed neighborhoods." Lenders responded by loosening their underwriting standards and making increasingly shoddy loans. The two government-chartered mortgage finance firms, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, encouraged this "subprime" lending by authorizing ever more "flexible" criteria by which high-risk borrowers could be qualified for home loans, and then buying up the questionable mortgages that ensued.
All this was justified as a means of increasing homeownership among minorities and the poor. Affirmative-action policies trumped sound business practices. A manual issued by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston advised mortgage lenders to disregard financial common sense. "Lack of credit history should not be seen as a negative factor," the Fed's guidelines instructed. Lenders were directed to accept welfare payments and unemployment benefits as "valid income sources" to qualify for a mortgage. Failure to comply could mean a lawsuit.
As long as housing prices kept rising, the illusion that all this was good public policy could be sustained. But it didn't take a financial whiz to recognize that a day of reckoning would come. [...]
Time and time again, Frank insisted that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were in good shape. Five years ago, for example, when the Bush administration proposed much tighter regulation of the two companies, Frank was adamant that "these two entities, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, are not facing any kind of financial crisis." When the White House warned of "systemic risk for our financial system" unless the mortgage giants were curbed, Frank complained that the administration was more concerned about financial safety than about housing.
Now that the bubble has burst and the "systemic risk" is apparent to all, Frank blithely declares: "The private sector got us into this mess." Well, give the congressman points for gall. Wall Street and private lenders have plenty to answer for, but it was Washington and the political class that derailed this train. If Frank is looking for a culprit to blame, he can find one suspect in the nearest mirror.
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