Mark Levin and Laura Ingraham aren't defending the campaign to the hilt because they are McCain people, or even McCain/Palin people. It is because they are Palin people. They believe Palin is the only smart move McCain has made. And events since since Palin faded from the spotlight haven't exactly disproven their point.
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Hands Off Palin | The Next Right
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
The Indefinable Barack Obama by Mark Steyn on National Review Online
Gaze into the giant zero of the Obama logo, the hole in the star-spangled donut, the vast fathomless nullity that is the gaping keyhole to the door of utopia. To a sad shriveled Republican cynic, there's nothing there but the wide open spaces of Obama's blank resume. But a believer will see therein the healing of the planet and the receding of the oceans. The black hole of Obama will suck you in through the awesome power of its totally cool suckiness.
Toopergate report
The following facts about Sarah Palin's brother in-law, Mike Wooten, were confirmed by a 2005 State Police investigation:He used a Taser on his stepson.
He shot a moose without a license, violating a law he has responsibility for enforcing.
He drank beer in his patrol car on one occasion.
He told others his father-in-law would "eat a [expletive]ing lead bullet" if he helped his daughter get an attorney for the divorce.
Wooten's tenure with the Alaska State Police also includes a reprimand in January 2004 for negligent damage to a state vehicle; a January 2005 instruction after being accused of speeding, unsafe lane changes, following too closely and not using turn signals in his state vehicle; a June 2005 instruction regarding personal cell phone calls; an October 2005 suspension from work after getting a speeding ticket; and a November 2005 memo "to clarify duty hours, tardiness and personal business during duty time."
At the conclusion of the 2005 investigation, the State Police concluded Wooten exhibited "a significant pattern of judgment failures," and decided the appropriate discipline was… a ten-day suspension.
You would never know it, but the 268-page report to the state legislature found "Governor Palin's firing of Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan was a proper and lawful exercise of her constitutional and statuatory authority to hire and fire executive branch department heads." So note that the firing of Monegan was not the abuse of power; the series of contacts about Wooten was.
Complaint against Steyn dismissed [Mark Steyn]
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.
Christopher Buckley: Sorry, Dad, I'm Voting for Obama
Dear Pup once said to me sighfully after a right-winger who fancied himself a WFB protégé had said something transcendently and provocatively cretinous, "You know, I've spent my entire life time separating the Right from the kooks." Well, the dear man did his best. At any rate, I don't have the kidney at the moment for 12,000 emails saying how good it is he's no longer alive to see his Judas of a son endorse for the presidency a covert Muslim who pals around with the Weather Underground. So, you're reading it here first.
Thomas Sowell : Negative Advertising
In words, Obama is a uniter instead of a divider. In deeds, he has spent years promoting polarization. That is what a "community organizer" does, creating a sense of grievance, envy and resentment, in order to mobilize political action to get more of the taxpayers' money or to force banks to lend to people they don't consider good risks, as the community organizing group ACORN did.
After Barack Obama moved beyond the role of a community organizer, he promoted the same polarization in his other roles.
Obama's 95% Illusion - WSJ.com
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." Mr. Obama is proposing to create or expand no fewer than seven such credits for individuals...
Here's the political catch. All but the clean car credit would be "refundable," which is Washington-speak for the fact that you can receive these checks even if you have no income-tax liability. In other words, they are an income transfer -- a federal check -- from taxpayers to nontaxpayers. Once upon a time we called this "welfare," or in George McGovern's 1972 campaign a "Demogrant." Mr. Obama's genius is to call it a tax cut.
Acorn epidemic [Mark Steyn]
Apropos my earlier post, a reader responds:By federal law, ACORN field reps are required to turn in EVERY registration form that is filled out whether they think it is fraudulent or not.
But that's the point - like the fellow in Ohio yesterday who said he registered to vote 72 different times because the Acorn reps told him otherwise they wouldn't get paid. If you swamp small county offices with a gazillion registrations a month before the election, you cripple the system, you make it impossible to do basic background checks, and you make it easier for all kinds of monkey business to go on.
This is why giving groups like Acorn quasi-official status is wrong. If Fred Smith wants to register to vote, Fred Smith should go to the Town Clerk's office and do it himself. The "CO" in Acorn stands for "community organizers". We should be grateful to these guys for bringing to light what a phoney-baloney Orwellian concept Obama's much vaunted "community organizing" is. Like most people, I have no wish to live in a community organized by community organizers.
Friday, October 10, 2008
Re: The Markets & Paulson [John Hood]
I think the case against Treasury's plan remains persuasive. Forcing taxpayers to buy assets at prices above what investors would voluntarily shell out for them — which is the most clearcut definition of the plan — transfers scarce resources from people who made better decisions to people who made worse decisions. It doesn't solve the capitalization problem, and proposing such a massive new federal power over the economy is likely to — and probably has already worked to — spook investors far more about current conditions and the future market environment than whatever confidence Treasury expected to build. Indeed, more generally the series of bailouts can themselves be seen as repeated signals to international investors that policymakers are panicked and desperate. Would you want to invest in such a place?
For all the talk about market psychology, there seems to be little appreciation of the fact that when public officials say reassuring things but do death-defying things, investors learn to ignore what is said and treat every new "remedy" as additional tests confirming a terminal diagnosis. That's why central bankers can slash interest rates in concert and then see investors get more jittery.
I remain convinced that the best response to the initial panic was to propose policies, such as changes in accounting regulation and tax relief, that we wouldn't have come to regret and that signaled clearly to worldwide investors that America would be a more attractive place to earn returns in the future. If intervention in the mortgage markets was warranted, something to reduce the severity of the underyling problem — risk of mortgage defaults, not housing prices per se — would have been preferable, essentially a temporary bailout of homeowners via tax credit or a renegotiation program on steriods. And if intervention in the banking system was warranted, working through existing institutions such as FDIC and the Fed was preferable to creating a new entity at Treasury with unclear intentions and clear long-term risks.
Thursday, October 09, 2008
George Will: Is This It?
In 1987, on the eve of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's third victory, the head of her Conservative Party told a visiting columnist: "Someday, Labour will win an election. Our job is to hold on until they are sane." Republicans, winners of seven of the last 10 presidential elections, had better hope they have held on long enough.
Wednesday, October 08, 2008
Black and Right
If you like that video that Jay Nordlinger recommended, you can find more here:
Hi ya'll! My friends have come to know me by a few names: Macho Sauce Productions, Twenty Pound Sledge, or Zo! Thanks for rollin' through my Cyborhood! House of Christian, Conservative, Republicans, and if you ain't, well you're still welcome!
Celebration [Jay Nordlinger]
Friends, have you seen this video? Maybe you have. Maybe I'm the last person to have seen it (I've been a little out of the campaign loop). Maybe it has been presented, celebrated, picked over, celebrated again. If so, forgive me — or celebrate some more. The fellow in this video is unbelievably refreshing, joyous, and gratifying. You'll hear some of your own beliefs and emotions echoed back at you, in an entertaining, fearless way. Check him out — and sign him up for political office.
Snoozer in Nashville [Andy McCarthy]
McCain's only shot is/was to show that Obama cannot be trusted with the presidency. If Obama is plausible, McCain loses. And McCain, unfailingly, treats Obama as if he is totally plausible. Ballgame.
Camille Paglia on Sarah Palin
The mountain of rubbish poured out about Palin over the past month would rival Everest. What a disgrace for our jabbering army of liberal journalists and commentators, too many of whom behaved like snippy jackasses. The bourgeois conventionalism and rank snobbery of these alleged humanitarians stank up the place. As for Palin's brutally edited interviews with Charlie Gibson and that viper, Katie Couric, don't we all know that the best bits ended up on the cutting-room floor? Something has gone seriously wrong with Democratic ideology, which seems to have become a candied set of holier-than-thou bromides attached like tutti-frutti to a quivering green Jell-O mold of adolescent sentimentality.
Tuesday, October 07, 2008
Planting Seeds of Disaster by Stanley Kurtz on National Review Online
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.
In one of the first book-length scholarly studies of ACORN, Organizing Urban America, Rutgers University political scientist Heidi Swarts describes this group, so dear to Barack Obama, as "oppositional outlaws." Swarts, a strong supporter of ACORN, has no qualms about stating that its members think of themselves as "militants unafraid to confront the powers that be." "This identity as a uniquely militant organization," says Swarts, "is reinforced by contentious action." ACORN protesters will break into private offices, show up at a banker's home to intimidate his family, or pour protesters into bank lobbies to scare away customers, all in an effort to force a lowering of credit standards for poor and minority customers. According to Swarts, long-term ACORN organizers "tend to see the organization as a solitary vanguard of principled leftists...the only truly radical community organization."
Up to now, conventional wisdom on the financial meltdown has relegated ACORN and the CRA to bit parts. The real problem, we've been told, lay with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. In fact, however, ACORN is at the base of the whole mess. ACORN used CRA and Democratic sympathizers to entangle Fannie and Freddie and the entire financial system in a disastrous disregard of the most basic financial standards. And Barack Obama cut his teeth as an organizer and politician backing up ACORN's economic madness every step of the way.
Monday, October 06, 2008
Thomas Sowell: Do Facts Matter?
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.
Yet, today, what are we hearing? That it was the Bush administration "right-wing ideology" of "de-regulation" that set the stage for the financial crisis. Do facts matter?
We also hear that it is the free market that is to blame. But the facts show that it was the government that pressured financial institutions in general to lend to subprime borrowers, with such things as the Community Reinvestment Act and, later, threats of legal action by then Attorney General Janet Reno if the feds did not like the statistics on who was getting loans and who wasn't.
Is that the free market? Or do facts not matter?
Main Street vs. Wall Street
Harvard finance professor Robert Merton, a Nobel laureate, notes that one of the problems at large financial institutions is the gap between the executives and the financial engineers, or what I call the "suits" and the "geeks." The geeks possess knowledge that is highly specialized and extremely technical. Many suits have never even taken a course in the fundamentals of valuing complex financial instruments, even though the health of their firms depends crucially on that very issue.
Today, the suits are saying that mortgage-backed securities are undervalued, and that if the government just holds them to maturity it will make a profit. But the geeks will tell you that we cannot be certain these securities are undervalued.
The valuation of mortgage-backed securities is marked by an enormous asymmetry. If house prices rise, the security holder gains little. He or she is happy to be relieved of the risk of default, but he or she cannot share in the homebuyer's profit. On the other hand, each drop in house prices lowers the value of the security further.
Sunday, October 05, 2008
Franks Accused of Fannie Mae Conflict of Interest
Unqualified home buyers were not the only ones who benefitted from Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank's efforts to deregulate Fannie Mae throughout the 1990s.So did Frank's partner, a Fannie Mae executive at the forefront of the agency's push to relax lending restrictions.
Now that Fannie Mae is at the epicenter of a financial meltdown that threatens the U.S. economy, some are raising new questions about Frank's relationship with Herb Moses, who was Fannie's assistant director for product initiatives. Moses worked at the government-sponsored enterprise from 1991 to 1998, while Frank was on the House Banking Committee, which had jurisdiction over Fannie.
Both Frank and Moses assured the Wall Street Journal in 1992 that they took pains to avoid any conflicts of interest. Critics, however, remain skeptical.
"It's absolutely a conflict," said Dan Gainor, vice president of the Business & Media Institute. "He was voting on Fannie Mae at a time when he was involved with a Fannie Mae executive. How is that not germane?
"If this had been his ex-wife and he was Republican, I would bet every penny I have - or at least what's not in the stock market - that this would be considered germane," added Gainor, a T. Boone Pickens Fellow. "But everybody wants to avoid it because he's gay. It's the quintessential double standard."
A top GOP House aide agreed.
"C'mon, he writes housing and banking laws and his boyfriend is a top exec at a firm that stands to gain from those laws?" the aide told FOX News. "No media ever takes note? Imagine what would happen if Frank's political affiliation was R instead of D? Imagine what the media would say if [GOP former] Chairman [Mike] Oxley's wife or [GOP presidential nominee John] McCain's wife was a top exec at Fannie for a decade while they wrote the nation's housing and banking laws."
Frank's office did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Friday, October 03, 2008
Rich Lowry on the VP Debate
I'm sure I'm not the only male in America who, when Palin dropped her first wink, sat up a little straighter on the couch and said, "Hey, I think she just winked at me." And her smile. By the end, when she clearly knew she was doing well, it was so sparkling it was almost mesmerizing. It sent little starbursts through the screen and ricocheting around the living rooms of America. This is a quality that can't be learned; it's either something you have or you don't, and man, she's got it.
Wednesday, October 01, 2008
Michelle Malkin » A debate “moderator” in the tank for Obama
In an imaginary world where liberal journalists are held to the same standards as everyone else, Ifill would be required to make a full disclosure at the start of the debate. She would be required to turn to the cameras and tell the national audience that she has a book coming out on January 20, 2009 – a date that just happens to coincide with the inauguration of the next president of the United States.The title of Ifill's book? "Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama." Nonpartisan my foot.
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