October Surprise

Obamamania - Catch it

Why Ayers Matters

I just happened to catch a segment of Rush and he really hits the Ayers thing right on the head.

Paraphrasing, he noted that it's not enough to frame Ayers as a "domestic terrorist". Instead we need to compare Bill Ayers with Timothy McVeigh. Both are unrepentant, both sought out to destroy government institutions, both we're willing to kill innocent citizens who's only crimes we're to be American (McVeigh just killed more).

Bill Ayers was the Timothy McVeigh of his era.

Now imagine McVeigh getting off on a technicality. If he lived in your neighborhood would you associate with him? Sit on a board with him? Would you want him educating your child about the America he hates? Do you think you'd vote for some conservative candidate who did these things?

In fact, time has inoculated just how violent Ayers was. The fact that he's never publicly renounced any of his group's activities despite the impact this has had on Obama only makes his hatred of America clearer.

At first, Obama claimed he didn't know anything of Ayers activities. I could buy that since I'm Obama's age and I don't remember Ayers specifically (But I do remember Patti Hearst and the SLA).

But then Obama claims that he thought Ayers was "rehabilitated".

How could you think he was rehabilitated when you never knew of his crimes to begin with?

Was that New York Times article where Ayers was stepping on the flag? I know nothing says repentance like saying you wish you could have done more.

Once again, Obama has been surrounded by people who have been outspoken American haters. You don't hear Ayers, Pfleger, Wright ever say "I was taken out of context".

Well the context of Obama's associations is that he's an American hating marxist.

Give this kid a kick in the butt

If you are a regular reader, you know that I'm no fan of public schools.

One of the reasons is that they have to put up with this kind of BS. From Paul Daugherty.

Much discussion the past few days about the Loveland mother who sued the school district so her son could play football his senior year. The edited version:

Kid nabbed by Loveland cops over the summer, for underage drinking. Cops report it to the school.

Per the school's conduct policy, kid suspended for 40 pct of the season, 4 games.

Mom hires lawyer, gets a judge to grant her son an injunction. Son who broke the conduct policy hasn't missed a game.

Loveland Schools' biggest concern, understandably, is what sort of teeth does its policy have, now that a judge has decided to take over school discipline? If your conduct code is challenged by every misguided parent out there, what's the use of having a conduct policy?

More....

Now it seems to me that schools have enough problems without having to go to court each and every time they enforce a rule on a kid.

There's probably a reason this kid is a giant turd and she lives in his household.

Obama - ACORN - Fannie Mae - Mortgage Crisis

A great and thorough piece on the link between Obama - ACORN - Fannie Mae - Mortgage Crisis.

America waits with bated breath while Washington struggles to bring the U.S. economy back from the brink of disaster. But many of those same politicians caused the crisis, and if left to their own devices will do so again.

Despite the mass media news blackout, a series of books, talk radio and the blogosphere have managed to expose Barack Obama's connections to his radical mentors -- Weather Underground bombers William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, Communist Party member Frank Marshall Davis and others. David Horowitz and his Discover the Networks.org have also contributed a wealth of information and have noted Obama's radical connections since the beginning.

Yet, no one to my knowledge has yet connected all the dots between Barack Obama and the Radical Left. When seen together, the influences on Obama's life comprise a who's who of the radical leftist movement, and it becomes painfully apparent that not only is Obama a willing participant in that movement, he has spent most of his adult life deeply immersed in it.

But even this doesn't fully describe the extreme nature of this candidate. He can be tied directly to a malevolent overarching strategy that has motivated many, if not all, of the most destructive radical leftist organizations in the United States since the 1960s.

If this guy was looking for someone to connect the dots he should have read this post.

Thanks to Andy for the link.

We're #47

Ohio continues to make it's way to the top state with the worst business climate; moving from 46th to 47th.

Look out California, New York and New Jersey, with the likes of Progress Ohio and their surrogate politicians in the state house, we'll be taking your spot soon.

McCain finally drills congress

Link:

Ayers

Louis Farrakhan Calls Obama the messiah!

So you're voting for Obama. Now you get to line yourself up with this guy.

Is he a New Party candidate?

From Powerline....

This may be a case of the irresistible force meeting the immovable object. The political, media, cultural and social establishments are determined to elect the pro-status quo, anti-change candidate, Barack Obama, as President. The power and money arrayed behind Obama seem unbeatable. At the same time, it is inconceivable that the American people would elect a socialist President. So, if this report is correct, something's got to give.

In June sources released information that during his campaign for the State Senate in Illinois, Barack Obama was endorsed by an organization known as the Chicago "New Party". The 'New Party' was a political party established by the Democratic Socialists of America (the DSA) to push forth the socialist principles of the DSA by focusing on winnable elections at a local level and spreading the Socialist movement upwards. ...

After allegations surfaced in early summer over the 'New Party's' endorsement of Obama, the Obama campaign along with the remnants of the New Party and Democratic Socialists of America claimed that Obama was never a member of either organization. The DSA and 'New Party' then systematically attempted to cover up any ties between Obama and the Socialist Organizations. However, it now appears that Barack Obama was indeed a certified and acknowledged member of the DSA's New Party.

On Tuesday, I discovered a web page that had been scrubbed from the New Party's website. The web page which was published in October 1996, was an internet newsletter update on that years congressional races. Although the web page was deleted from the New Party's website, the non-profit Internet Archive Organization had archived the page.

Here it is:

More.....

If this is true and makes the mainstream media, this should be the end for one B. Obama.

Vice President John McCain? oops

I'm surprised Biden didn't say it.

Are there really undecideds?

According to Karl Rove the voters haven't decided yet....

I'm just curious as to the number of these undecideds who will end up not voting at all. If you haven't made up your mind as to which of these two ding dongs you will vote for, what's going to happen in the next 20 plus days to change that?

Will you just decide to be undecided and not vote at all?

Will you decide when you get into the poll booth?

It seems to me that by now most voters have decided something. Maybe they're like myself, lining up with McCain although the gag effect has me wondering.

Maybe they've decided on Obama but the thought of actually pulling the lever for "PRESIDENT OBAMA" just doesn't have a good ring to it.

Maybe all these undecideds will just decide to stay home.

Obama treats the press badly.... boo hoo

Let me get out the world's smallest violin for this one....

If so, I would love to have someone from Obama's campaign explain why the entire press corps, the Secret Service, and the local police idled for two hours in a Miami hotel parking lot recently because there was nothing to do and nowhere to go. It was not an isolated case.

The national headquarters in Chicago airily dismisses complaints from journalists wondering why a schedule cannot be printed up or at least e-mailed in time to make coverage plans. Nor is there much sympathy for those of us who report for a newscast that airs in the early evening hours. Our shows place a premium on live reporting from the scene of campaign events. But this campaign can often be found in the air and flying around at the time the "CBS Evening News with Katie Couric" is broadcast. I suspect there is a feeling within the Obama campaign that the broadcast networks are less influential in the age of the internet and thus needn't be accomodated as in the days of yore. Even if it's true, they are only hurting themselves by dissing audiences that run in the tens of millions every night.

The McCain folks are more helpful and generally friendly. The schedules are printed on actual books you can hold in your hand, read, and then plan accordingly. The press aides are more knowledgeable and useful to us in the news media. The events are designed with a better eye, and for the simple needs of the press corps. When he is available, John McCain is friendly and loquacious. Obama holds news conferences, but seldom banters with the reporters who've been following him for thousands of miles around the country. Go figure.

The McCain campaign plane is better than Obama's, which is cramped, uncomfortable and smells terrible most of the time. Somehow the McCain folks manage to keep their charter clean, even where the press is seated.

I've never understood the press infatuation with the Obama's and the Clinton's prior to that.

Both have reputations for treating the media horribly. Yet there they go with tongue hanging out like a dog dying for a belly rub.

The other thing that I've always found interesting is how the media loves the left yet when the marxist and commies take over who are the first people they jail..... the journalists.

Barack Obama and The New Black Panther Party

Will they vet this?

Obama was a member of the New Party, a marxist organization

In 1995, the New Ground, the newsletter of the Chicago Chapter of Democratic Socialists of America, noted, “In Chicago, the New Party's biggest asset and biggest liability is ACORN.

“Like most organizations, ACORN is a mixed bag. On one hand, in Chicago, ACORN is a group that attempts to organize some of the most depressed communities in the city. Chicago organizers for ACORN and organizers for SEIU Local 880 have been given modest monthly recruitment quotas for new New Party members. On the other hand, like most groups that depend on canvassing for fundraising, it's easy enough to find burned out and disgruntled former employees. And ACORN has not had the reputation for being interested in coalition politics -- until recently and, happily, not just within the New Party.”

Naturally, Barack Obama was an active part of ACORN at the time, helping it legally in court and helping it organize voters. By 1996, ACORN and the New Party were essentially the same body. Along with the Democratic Socialists of America, the New Party endorsed Barack Obama in his State Senate bid.

Obama began seeking the New Party endorsement in 1995. He had been running in a four way primary against his former boss, Senator Alice Palmer, herself a far left radical, and two other individuals. But an election law quirk gave Obama the upper hand. In order to get on the ballot, candidates had to collect signatures of voters. Printed names were not allowed. Obama challenged the petitions of his rivals and was able to get every one of them thrown off the ballot. By the time the ballot was drawn up for the 1996 election, Obama’s was the only name in the race.

Nonetheless, Obama still coveted the New Party endorsement. The New Party required candidates who received the endorsement sign a pledge of support for the party. Obama did not need to support a party that was, in effect, a front group for communists; yet he still chose to. The July issue of the New Ground noted that 15% of the New Party consisted of Democratic Socialists of America members and a good number of Committee of Correspondence members.

Barack Obama, not needing to, chose to affiliate himself with this band of quasi-communists. As the nation moves closer to the election, it is clear that Obama chose to affiliate with assorted anti-American radicals. Machiavelli once noted that we can know a leader by the people he surrounds himself with. What does that say about Barack Obama, who chose to surround himself with people committed to overthrowing the United States and capitalism?

More here and here.

Maybe Newsweek can move a reporter on this story as soon as they write the story on Sarah Palin coloring her hair.

What a difference a couple of months make

From James Taranto....

• "Iceland was 80 percent dependent on imported coal and oil in the 1970s and was among the poorest economies in Europe. Today, Iceland is 100 percent energy independent, and according to the International Monetary Fund is now the fourth most affluent nation on Earth."--Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in a CNN.com commentary, Aug. 25

• "Iceland Teeters on the Brink of Bankruptcy: This volcanic island near the Arctic Circle is on the brink of becoming the first 'national bankruptcy' of the global financial meltdown."--headline and lead paragraph, Associated Press, Oct. 7

That keeps the "progressive" streak of being wrong at 100%

Why the Grinch stole Christmas

Because he went into a Kroger's grocery store on October 9 and saw this.....

Plant that little ACORN

Stanley Kurtz in a must read piece on how a young man named Obama and his activities with a Chicago ACORN affiliate has a direct line to our current economic meltdown.

You’ve got only a couple thousand bucks in the bank. Your job pays you dog-food wages. Your credit history has been bent, stapled, and mutilated. You declared bankruptcy in 1989. Don’t despair: You can still buy a house.” So began an April 1995 article in the Chicago Sun-Times that went on to direct prospective home-buyers fitting this profile to a group of far-left “community organizers” called ACORN, for assistance. In retrospect, of course, encouraging customers like this to buy homes seems little short of madness.

Militant ACORN
At the time, however, that 1995 Chicago newspaper article represented something of a triumph for Barack Obama. That same year, as a director at Chicago’s Woods Fund, Obama was successfully pushing for a major expansion of assistance to ACORN, and sending still more money ACORN’s way from his post as board chair of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. Through both funding and personal-leadership training, Obama supported ACORN. And ACORN, far more than we’ve recognized up to now, had a major role in precipitating the subprime crisis.
I’ve already told the story of Obama’s close ties to ACORN leader Madeline Talbott, who personally led Chicago ACORN’s campaign to intimidate banks into making high-risk loans to low-credit customers. Using provisions of a 1977 law called the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), Chicago ACORN was able to delay and halt the efforts of banks to merge or expand until they had agreed to lower their credit standards — and to fill ACORN’s coffers to finance “counseling” operations like the one touted in that Sun-Times article. This much we’ve known.

Yet these local, CRA-based pressure-campaigns fit into a broader, more disturbing, and still under-appreciated national picture. Far more than we’ve recognized, ACORN’s local, CRA-enabled pressure tactics served to entangle the financial system as a whole in the subprime mess. ACORN was no side-show. On the contrary, using CRA and ties to sympathetic congressional Democrats, ACORN succeeded in drawing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into the very policies that led to the current disaster.

More....

You'd think that the AP might send a reporter to Chicago to vet some of Kurtz's claims. But they find it more interesting to send a reporter to vet the John McCain/Iran-Contra connection.

The cult of personality

You want an objective viewpoint on Obamunists, you have to go to Canada and read this....

The great discomfort for many Americans as they watch the current presidential contest is that the scent of such totalitarianism hangs heavy in the air; the pattern so familiar in European dictatorships seems eerily present in Barak Obama’s presidential campaign. Senator Obama, obviously intelligent and gifted with enviable powers of communication, has for all of his eloquence, done very little in the real world other than campaign for office. His supporters can not tell you what he has done that qualifies him to run the most powerful nation the world has ever known, but they know he was born for the job – they were there at the convention; they heard the speech; they felt the magic; chills ran up their legs, and they cried their eyelashes off as Mr. Obama stood tall between the ivory columns of a Greek temple to accept his party’s nomination for President of the United States.

If there was any remaining question of his revolutionary greatness, scattered around the nation are tri-color campaign posters of Mr. Obama, bearing a striking resemblance to the larger than life representations of Lenin, Marx, and Engels used by soviet propagandists in the glory days of Mother Russia. These communist styled knock-offs featuring Mr. Obama staring nobly – if melodramatically – into the distance and emblazoned with one-word utopian mantras such as “Change,” “Progress,” or “Hope,” were designed by Shepard Fairey whose obsession with communist propaganda overflows in his “OBEY” brand website which brandishes a Cyrillic-styled banner that reads “Propaganda Engineering” and boasts the company motto “Manufacturing Quality Dissent Since 1989.”

The nod to Chomsky notwithstanding, Fairey, like any good propagandist, denies the obvious message of the Obama campaign posters. He claims the art is “patriotic” and prefers to let it speak for itself as it joins his growing portfolio of romanticized communist plagiarisms of such other “patriotic” works as Demitry Moor’s famous 1920 Soviet Red Army recruitment poster Have You Volunteered?, Vladimir Kozlinsky’s 1919 poster Meeting, and the 1968 Chinese Proletarian Cultural Revolution poster Political Power Comes from the Barrel of a Gun. Least the fascists feel slighted, Fairey also produced an exact copy of the Nazi Gestapo “death’s head” logo which he placed on t-shirts and rebranded as a part of his OBEY clothing line.

Whatever else may be said, Mr. Obama’s personality cult campaign has been an unmitigated success, creating, almost ex nihilo, a “beloved leader” out of a largely inexperienced and unknown man, void of business, executive, and foreign policy credentials. This fact alone is cause for substantial concern, but, unfortunately for the American people, what has been true of the form of the Obama campaign is now materializing in its function as individuals cloaked in the appearance of state authority seek to silence dissent and indoctrinate the masses.

More....

We're in for a bad ride

After last weekend, I thought McCain had decided to go both barrels on Obama and start educating our electorate on the current economic and Obama's role in it.

Unfortunately, from what I've read about the debate last night, not only did McCain not go after the corruption in congress and their role in this mess, he decided to become a democrat.

As early as ten years ago, democrats had to code their language to avoid sounding overly socialistic. Today, we have Maxine Waters openly discussing nationalizing the oil business.

We have a congress telling Americans "we don't care how much you pay for gasoline, we're saving sea otters in San Fransisco Bay".

We have a presidential candidate openly associating with American hating race baiters and communists.

Frankly, McCain's made it perfectly clear that he wants to play ball with democrats and "get things done". Yeah that's the attitude that has us in the predicament we're in today.

Liberals want to chastise Sarah Palin as parochial and "small town" but what exactly has the intelligensia in Washington brought us?

It looks like this election is between a communist and a socialist. With republicans like McCain, who needs, well republicans?

ACORN - vegas style

Obamamania's Las Vegas branch office aka ACORN is subject to a criminal investigation for vote fraud.

Nevada state authorities seized records and computers Tuesday from the Las Vegas office of an organization that tries to get low-income people registered to vote, after fielding complaints of voter fraud.

Bob Walsh, spokesman for the Nevada secretary of state's office, told FOXNews.com the raid was prompted by ongoing complaints about "erroneous" registration information being submitted by the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, also called ACORN.

The group was submitting the information through a voter sign-up drive known as Project Vote.

"Some of them used nonexistent names, some of them used false addresses and some of them were duplicates of previously filed applications," Walsh said, describing the complaints, which largely came from the registrar in Clark County, Nev.

Secretary of State Ross Miller said the fraudulent registrations included forms for the starting lineup of the Dallas Cowboys football team.

So T.O. is registered in Vegas. I'm sure he'd be glad to know that.

Nuts 2 Be Bullish

The next trillion dollar bailout

It's coming. Will the states do anything today to ebb the tide of the coming state pension collapse?

The value of pension promises already made by US state governments will grow to approximately $7.9 trillion in 15 years. We study investment strategies of state pension plans and estimate the distribution of future funding outcomes. We conservatively predict a 50% chance of aggregate underfunding greater than $750 billion and a 25% chance of at least $1.75 trillion (in 2005 dollars). Adjusting for risk, the true intergenerational transfer is substantially larger. Insuring both taxpayers against funding deficits and plan participants against benefit reductions would cost almost $2 trillion today, even though governments portray state pensions as almost fully funded.

More.....

News from the most ethical congress...

Today's corrupt congress person is Robert Wexler.

Why is Bobby in the news....

Florida congressman and Barack Obama Florida campaign chairman Robert Wexler has allegedly filed 25 amended FEC reports in the days immediately following Bill O'Reilly busting him in front of his Maryland home on camera.

As some might remember, Bill O'Reilly caught Florida Congressman Robert Wexler on tape admitting that he claimed a home owned by his in-laws as his primary residence (in Florida) while he lived in Maryland. Florida has no state income tax.

This was discovered on 7/22/08.

Wexler's opponent seems to have a very compelling argument that there is much more on Wexler needing to be revealed (see link below). Wexler's campaign allegedly submitted 25 amended FEC reports between 7/23/08 (one day after O'Reilly busted him) and 7/30/08.

The one common thread running through all of the amended reports? Any contributions shown to come from a company called Newbridge Securities were re-assigned to other companies, some of which were OUT OF BUSINESS at the time they supposedly now contributed.

If these allegations are true, the Wexler campaign could be guilty of money laundering and multiple FEC violations.

More...

Sowell on Obamamania

Thomas Sowell on Obamamania...

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.

Jeremiah Wright, Father Michael Pfleger, William Ayers and Antoin Rezko are not just people who happened to be at the same place at the same time as Barack Obama. They are people with whom he chose to ally himself for years, and with some of whom some serious money changed hands.

Some gave political support, and some gave financial support, to Obama's election campaigns, and Obama in turn contributed either his own money or the taxpayers' money to some of them. That is a familiar political alliance-- but an alliance is not just an "association" from being at the same place at the same time.

Obama could have allied himself with all sorts of other people. But, time and again, he allied himself with people who openly expressed their hatred of America. No amount of flags on his campaign platforms this election year can change that.

More....

Barack Obama:

From the man who transcends race

News Flash - Media love affair with McCain is over

Over at Slate...

He's Lost Alter! New York's John Heilemann, as evidence of a media shift against McCain, offers this:

Jonathan Alter, Joe Klein, Richard Cohen, David Ignatius, Jacob Weisberg: all former McCain admirers now turned brutal critics. Equally if not more damaging, the shift has been just as pronounced, if less operatic, among straight-news reporters. Suddenly, McCain is no longer being portrayed as a straight-talking, truth-telling maverick but as a liar, a fraud, and an opportunist with acute anger-management issues.

I know Jon Alter. Jon Alter is a friend of mine. He's very good at what he does--I couldn't do it. He wrote an excellent book, has a lot to say. But he's not exactly someone you look to as a political weather vane. Alter is totally for Obama and has been since the beginning of the campaign. If Jon has "turned" brutally against McCain in the final weeks of the campaign that is as predictable as the Giants going into a prevent defense with a two touchdown lead and a minute to go.** ... But of course he hasn't "turned"--missing from Heilemann's piece is any evidence of Alter favoring McCain at any earlier point in the campaign, let alone evidence of Alter favoring McCain once he was the nominee running against Obama. The same goes, to a lesser extent, for his fellow Chicago Dem (and head of the Slate Group) Jacob Weisberg. Nor is it exactly surprising that Klein, Cohen and Ignatius would be on Obama's side in the end. ...

All these libs loved McCain when he was a democratic boot licker, now that he threatens the coronation of The Messiah, these Obamunists love affair of McCain has somehow ceased.

Say it ain't so....

The Obamunists

Mark Levin on the Obamunist associations....

As someone who has written critically of John McCain on a host of issues, including the Keating Five, none of it compares to the life that Barack Obama has led and his belief system. Obama is not merely associated with domestic terrorists, Palestinian radicals, Marxists, and black liberation ideologues — he was their favorite candidate. They groomed him. They befriended him. He befriended them. He socialized with them. In other words, these people saw Obama as representing their views and aspirations and he saw them the same way. I am not among those who raise Obama's associations but add "of course, it doesn't mean Obama shares their views." Oh really? These miscreants include Obama's former pastor, political mentors and allies, and friends. Obama attempts to downplay and distance himself from his own circle of allies now that he is running for president. But he is one of them. Obama is getting a pass that no other candidate in my memory has ever received.

If John McCain had belonged to a church for 20 years and that church advocated white supremacy and the pastor of the church spewed racist propaganda wrapped in Biblical verses — much of which was caught on video-tape — what would we say? If McCain's good friends included people involved in blowing up abortion clinics instead of the Capitol Building, the Pentagon, and police stations, what would we say? If McCain was socially close to a professor with ties to neo-Nazi groups in Berlin, as opposed to a professor who had ties to the PLO, what would we say? If McCain spent his formative years schooled in fascism as opposed to Marxism, what would we say?

Every time Obama's life experiences and character are raised, the response is a diversionary tactic. Today, we're supposed to be impressed with the moral equivalency argument (Ayers = Keating Five), or Obama's associations and friendships aren't what they appear to be, or Obama really isn't like all those people he drew around him, or those raising these issues are guilty of McCarthyism. There are 30 days left in this election. It's high time the Obama fan-dance ended.

Levin hits on a point I've made several time about the life and times of Obamamania. The media looks at Ayers as a small dot on a white board. But if you put the dots of Ayers, Wright, Pfleger, Alinsky, his wife, you see a very clear portrait of a man who's been surrounded by Marxists.

Then you add on the additional dots of people hanging a Che Gueverra flag in a campaign office, children being videoed like a chairman Mao propaganda stunt and the Stalin like Obama posters, you start to see a clear picture of a marxist; plain and simple.

The media's failure in reporting this is disgusting.

Lehman Brothers loves democrats

From the American Thinker....

Henry Waxman waxed righteously indignant, as the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee grilled Richard Fuld of Lehman Brothers, deploring his $480 million in pay the last 8 years. One Democrat even said, "I wonder how he sleeps at night."

Now let's go over to Open Secrets and look up this same Mr. Fuld, shall we? It turns out Richard Fuld of Lehman Brothers gave $151,300 in disclosed political donations in recent years . How does it break down?

• $45,000 to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.
• $10,000 to the Democratic National Committee Services Corp.
• $4,600 to Hillary Clinton, $4,600 to Chris Dodd and $2,300 to Barack Obama.
• Other contributions to Democrats: Dick Gephardt, Joe Lieberman, Jack Reed, Erskine Bowles, Joseph Driscoll, Nita Lowey, Bob Torricelli, Frank Lautenberg, Brendan Byrne, Jon Corzine, Bill Bradley, Chuck Schumer, Ted Kennedy, Ed Markey, and Dianne Feinstein.

And what about Republicans?

• John McCain ($2,300), George W. Bush ($2,000), Bob Dole ($2,000), Jon Christenson ($1,000), Mike Crapo ($1,000), Phil Gramm ($1,000), Arlen Specter ($1,000), and Jack Fields ($500).

Looks like democrats made out large.....

Sen. John McCain in Albuquerque, NM

HT Darke Blog

Government run healthcare

From USA Today....

Home health care costs charged to Medicare in the Miami area have risen 20 times the national average in the past five years, prompting a federal investigation of suspected fraudulent billing.

Miami-Dade County is on track to cost Medicare a projected $1.3 billion for home health care services this fiscal year, up 1,300% in just five years, government data show.

SLEUTHS: Going door to door to sniff out fraud

Investigators suspect that fraud is helping to drive the increase because the population of Medicare beneficiaries in the county grew only 10.2% between 2004 and 2007, the latest government data show.

"You definitely have a problem down here," says Randall Culp, an FBI supervisory special agent who oversees a team that works with a Medicare Fraud Strike Force in Miami.

So this is government health care?

What's so "progressive" about medical fraud?

Do we have an intelligent, independent media?

Howard Kurtz on the media's (liberals) complicity in the financial collapse...

The shaky house of financial cards that has come tumbling down was erected largely in public view: overextended investment banks, risky practices by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, exotic mortgage instruments that became part of a shadow banking system. But while these were conveyed in incremental stories -- and a few whistle-blowing columns -- the business press never conveyed a real sense of alarm until institutions began to collapse.

"Did we not accent that enough? Put it above the fold, or on the cover of Fortune, or lead off the television shows?" asks Fortune Managing Editor Andy Serwer. "Yeah, that's probably true." At the same time, he says, "if we had written stories in late 2000 saying this whole thing's going to collapse, people would have said, 'Ha ha, maybe,' and gone about their business."

After being burned by years of cheerleading before the dot-com collapse, the media warned repeatedly that the surge in housing prices might turn out to be a bubble. But the emphasis was generally on the potential toll on homeowners, not the banks that would be left holding bagfuls of bad loans. As in the savings-and-loan scandal of the late 1980s, the press was a day late and several dollars short.

More.....

The fact is, the major media outlets in this country are filled with idiots; which probably explains why they are democrats. They can't or won't be bothered with reporting an issue unless it can be consumed in a 20 word sound bite.

Econ 103

From Greg Mankiw's blog...

We have been learning about elasticity in ec 10. One of the students emails me this clip from The Wire (a great TV show, by the way) on the concept. For those who have not seen the show, the main character in the clip, Stringer Bell, runs a drug operation but wants to go legit and has an apparent interest in economics. The person spying on Bell is Jimmy McNulty, a police officer who in a later episode finds a copy of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations in Stringer's apartment.

How is it that a drug dealer understands this but members of congress do not?

Caring for the least of us

Here's a chart showing the income and charitable contributions of the pertinent candidates.

So much for caring for the "the least of us"....

Out of curiosity, I wonder if part of Joe's $380 in charitables includes the aluminum cans the homeless guys yank from his recycle bin.


HT TaxProf

Do facts matter?

To a "progressive", the answer is probably no. Nonetheless, Thomas Sowell with a poignant piece on the bailout.

Abraham Lincoln said, "You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you can't fool all the people all the time."

Unfortunately, the future of this country, as well as the fate of the Western world, depends on how many people can be fooled on election day, just a few weeks from now.

Right now, the polls indicate that a whole lot of the people are being fooled a whole lot of the time

The current financial bailout crisis has propelled Barack Obama back into a substantial lead over John McCain-- which is astonishing in view of which man and which party has had the most to do with bringing on this crisis.

It raises the question: Do facts matter? Or is Obama's rhetoric and the media's spin enough to make facts irrelevant?

Fact Number One: It was liberal Democrats, led by Senator Christopher Dodd and Congressman Barney Frank, who for years-- including the present year-- denied that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were taking big risks that could lead to a financial crisis.

It was Senator Dodd, Congressman Frank and other liberal Democrats who for years refused requests from the Bush administration to set up an agency to regulate Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

It was liberal Democrats, again led by Dodd and Frank, who for years pushed for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to go even further in promoting subprime mortgage loans, which are at the heart of today's financial crisis.

Alan Greenspan warned them four years ago. So did the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers to the President. So did Bush's Secretary of the Treasury, five years ago.

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Dangerous

Let's go to Katie's Diner

Towards the end of last night's Joe Biden/Sarah Palin debate, Joe Biden said this: "All you have to do is to go down Union Street with me in Wilmington and go to Katie's restaurant..."

From Delaware Online...

It caughtme off guard, as well as our food guru Patty Talorico.

She investigated a bit and realized Biden was referring to the long-closed Katie's Italian restaurant, which is actually two blocks away from Union Street.

The establishment is now a Wings to Go.

Talorico's blog post has been picked up by the John McCain campaign, along with The National Review, New York magazine and others.

For a guy running as an in-touch-with-the-real-people candidate, it's hard to believe he not only referenced a restaurant that has been closed for nearly 20 years, but also got the location wrong!

Obama advisor calls for a military invasion of Israel

Do you think the Jewish voters in South Florida might find this video interesting?

Obama's Terrorist Buddy

Weathermen for Obama

More Obama connections with terrorists.

From Doug Ross...

At least four top leaders of the Weathermen terrorist organization have signed on as members of a "grassroots effort" to support the election of Barack Obama.

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Maybe CNN will vet this story after they finish their expose on Sarah Palin wearing white shoes after Labor Day 2000.

2007 Obama speech on Sub Prime Mortgages

Who will she vote for? #72

Meet Sharon Stone, celebrity, Mensa member and adoptive mother in the middle of a child custody case.....

A judge in Sharon Stone's child custody case said that the actress has overreacted "to many medical issues" regarding her young son's health issues -- to the point that she wanted to get Botox treatments for his smelly feet, according to TMZ.com.The revelations were made by a Superior Court judge in San Francisco, who released a "Tentative Statement of Decision" in the case, which was detailed on the celebrity gossip Web site. The "Basic Instinct" star is in the midst of a custody battle with ex-husband Phil Bronstein over their 8-year-old adopted son, Roan. The couple adopted the boy in 1997, married in 1998 and divorced in 2004.

This one is an easy one since she's been an out spoken fan of The Messiah.

But what cracks me up is the person who accused conservatives of voting for "parochial" candidates like Sarah Palin.

Do you know why conservatives like Palin? Because even though she's no Mensa member, she knows enough to know that you don't give your kid Botox for smelly feet. You have them wear clean socks and use foot powder.

What an idiot.

Another lib with their hand out

First, blue state California came in begging for money, now it's blue state Massachusetts crying poverty....

The treasurer of Massachusetts has asked the federal government about lending Massachusetts money under the same favorable terms it has given banks and firms during the financial crisis.

Treasurer Timothy Cahill's requests to the U.S. Treasury and Federal Reserve Bank of Boston this week were prompted by the state's inability to borrow from the short-term debt markets, The Boston Globe reported Saturday. The financial turmoil has caused credit markets to stop lending, or to charge prohibitive rates.

California has made a similar request, saying it would run out of money by the end of the month if the short-term debt markets do not ease. The state asked whether it could not obtain loans from the Fed.

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What's so "progressive" about a bankrupt state?

Political correctness run amok

IBD on how political correctness created our current credit crisis....

One of the hottest sessions explained how journalists could replicate stories that other papers had done locally using computer tools, including one especially popular project to determine if banks in your community were discriminating against minority borrowers in making mortgages.

One newspaper, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, had won a Pulitzer Prize for its computer-assisted series on the subject, and others, including the Washington Post and Detroit Free Press, had also weighed in with their own analyses based on government loan data. Everyone sounded keen to learn if their local banks were guilty, too.

Although academic researchers leveled substantial criticisms against these newspaper efforts (namely, that they relied on incomplete data and did not take into account lower savings rates, higher debt levels and higher loan default rates for many minority borrowers), bank lending to minority borrowers still became an enormous issue — mostly because newspaper reporters and editors in this pre-talk-radio, pre-blogging era were determined to make it so.

Editorialists called for the government to force banks to end the alleged discrimination, and they castigated federal banking regulators who said they saw no proof of wrongdoing in the data.

Eventually the political climate changed, and Washington became a believer in the story. Crucial to this change was a Federal Reserve Bank of Boston study concluding that although lender discrimination was not as severe as suggested by the newspapers, it nevertheless existed.

This, then, became the dominant government position, even though subsequent efforts by other researchers to verify the Fed's conclusions showed serious deficiencies in the original work.

For instance, one economist for the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. who looked more deeply into the data found that the difference in denial rates on loans for whites and minorities could be accounted for by such factors as higher rates of delinquencies on prior loans for minorities, or the inability of lenders to verify information provided to them by some minority applicants.

Ignoring the import of such data, federal officials went on a campaign to encourage banks to lower their lending standards to make more minority loans. One result of this campaign is a remarkable document produced by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston in 1998 titled "Closing the Gap: A Guide to Equal Opportunity Lending."

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