Video from www.no-libs.com.
Thursday, October 2, 2008
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
Bail Bill Upholds Unreality - Kill It
Here is an article by Robert Tracinski who writes the TIA Daily column. I'm copying it whole as it is great to get your feet on the ground in terms of free market principles. Also, I must say that I am shocked regarding Bernake's complete disregard for what has the free market work. After reading this and his attempt at Czardom, I'm persuaded the guy is a psychopath.
TIA Daily • October 1, 2008
Kill the Bailout
The Government Can't Rewrite Reality
The House of Representatives deserves praise for taking swift action to avert a growing economic crisis—by not approving the trillion-dollar financial bailout plan.
The bailout bill was blocked Monday by a rebellion among House Republicans, who voted two-to-one against a plan they consider a step down the "slippery slope to socialism," in the words of Texas Representative Jeb Hensarling.
They are absolutely correct, and the 133 Republicans who voted to stop this coup against the financial markets—not to mention some of the 95 Democrats who may have balked for similar reasons—need to find the courage to stand firm. That's especially true since the Senate is likely to vote today to approve the bailout.
The Senate is supposed to serve, in James Madison's analogy, as the "cooling saucer" for the hot tea served up by the House—but in this case, it is the House that has remained cool and refused to panic. That's because the hysterical demand for a bailout didn't come up from the people; it came down from the elites in Washington and Manhattan. The House is reflecting the sensible skepticism coming up from the folks on Main Street who don't want to pay the bills for bailing out Hank Paulson's former colleagues on Wall Street.
Some cold, realistic scrutiny of the bailout is desperately needed because this plan is not just an attack on the free market. It is an attack on reality. The financial crisis was caused by more than a decade of using government power to rewrite the facts of reality and override the judgment of the market, and the bailout just offers more of the same fantasy economics.
Congress wanted everyone to be able to get a mortgage to buy a home, regardless of income, credit history, or ability to save for a down payment. The name for this contradiction was "affordable housing," an initiative aimed at providing the benefits of home ownership to those who could not, in fact, afford it. So when the market concluded that low-income borrowers could not meet the credit requirements for mortgages, the Clinton administration invoked trumped-up charges of racism to expand enforcement of the Community Reinvestment Act, bullying banks into dropping as "arbitrary" such old-fashioned credit standards as proof of income. And when the market balked at the increased credit risk created by these loans, Congress backed the expansion of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, government-sponsored enterprises that used federally guaranteed money to buy up the increasingly risky mortgages.
At every point, when the market sent the message that reality would not support the higher level of risk being taken on by mortgage lenders, the government used its power to override this message.
The vigorous government-created market for riskier "sub-prime" loans masked the real dangers, creating the illusion that increased profits could be obtained without increased risk—an illusion that encouraged some private lenders to follow Fannie and Freddie's lead. To be sure, some of this private risk-taking was part of the normal process of failure in a capitalist economy. A large part of the current financial upheaval originated with high-risk investment banks and hedge funds that held large amounts of mortgage-backed securities. These securities were carefully balanced against one another according to mathematical formulas that were calculated to cancel out their risks. But the mathematical formulas were new and hadn't been tested in a bear market. When the downturn came, they failed.
This is a normal part of the rough and tumble of capitalism. All of the current talk about the "failure" of the free market ignores the fact that the process of failure is a crucial benefit of the free market. In a capitalist system, high-risk firms are always trying out new and untested ideas, and failure is the messenger that tells the market which strategies work and which strategies don't. It is also an indispensable corrective mechanism that moves capital from enterprises with failing strategies to those with successful strategies.
But the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve have repeatedly short-circuited this mechanism by trying to outlaw failure. When the market sent the message that too many bad loans had been made and that this needed to be corrected by a contraction in the amount of available credit, the government wanted to avoid the unpleasant consequences of such a contraction. So the Federal Reserve papered over the facts—with a flurry of paper money—by artificially reducing interest rates and loosening up credit just when it needed to be tightened.
But that didn't change the underlying facts, and the bad investments still went bad. Yet as the market has sent the message that some firms have become over-extended and are no longer solvent, the government has still tried to avoid letting the market face the facts. The Treasury and the Fed kept trying to rewrite reality by orchestrating a series of government-backed bailouts.
Over at RealClearMarkets, Joseph Calhoun points out a crucial part of this assault on facts:
There has always been a stigma attached to borrowing directly from the Fed and for good reason. If a bank can’t get other banks to lend it money, that tells the market something about the condition of the bank in question.
Last August, Bernanke convinced three large banks to borrow at the discount window in an effort to remove that stigma. When that didn’t work, he concocted a scheme to allow banks to borrow from the Fed in anonymity via a mechanism he called the Term Auction Facility. When Bear Stearns blew up, he added the Term Securities Lending Facility for investment banks. By removing the stigma of borrowing from the Fed and hiding the identity of the borrowers, Bernanke removed important information from the market.
So the Fed's approach to potential bank failures was to try to help failing banks pretend that they weren't failing.
Or consider the SEC's ban on short sales for a list of about 700 stocks—with more companies lobbying to get themselves put on the list. Again, the whole approach of the SEC is not to prevent companies from failing, but to help them pretend that they are not failing, by outlawing trades that would tend to drive their stock prices down.
In fact, all that this sort of policy has achieved is to expand business failures. When Lehman Brothers went bankrupt, for example, it had been in negotiations with several major financial institutions who were considering investing billions in a private buy-out of the firm. But they balked at making the deal because they were waiting for the Fed to offer incentives and guarantees. Thus, the Fed's yelping about how each bankruptcy of a Wall Street firm poses a risk of "systemic failure" turns out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy, because the prospect of an open-ended series of bailouts is blocking all of the mechanisms by which a free market actually prevents widespread failure.
The bailout package would have the government buy out up to $700 billion worth of bad loans. But this is merely delaying the re-pricing of those loans to their proper value. Left to themselves, the holders of these loans would eventually find it necessary to sell them at pennies on the dollar; Merrill Lynch sold its bad loans at 22 cents on the dollar. Private companies could then recognize the magnitude of the loss and start to rebuild their businesses with the remaining assets they possess. But now no firm has an incentive to sell off its bad loans. Why dump them for 22 cents on the dollar when the government might buy them, a few weeks later, at 50 or 80 cents?
So instead what is going to happen is that the federal government is going to go into the financial markets and dictate which securities are worth how much. It is still unclear exactly which loans the government will buy or how much it will pay for them, so no private investor can say whether an investment will pay off or not. This is how the prospect of a government bailout blocks the private buyouts that would actually clean all of the bad debt out of the system.
Instead, this plan transforms the US Treasury into a trillion-dollar hedge fund, making investments in securities whose proper market value is unknown and promising its shareholders—us—that unlike the best Wall Street investment banks, Treasury bureaucrats really know how to make a profit on sub-prime mortgage loans. That's why probably the best comment on the bailout is an e-mail making the rounds on Capitol Hill presenting Paulson's pitch for the bailout deal—in the style of a Nigerian banking scam. "I need to ask you to support an urgent secret business relationship with a transfer of funds of great magnitude," it begins. Time to hit the "delete" button.
The bailout represents more of the same problems that got us here because it is backed by all of the same people who created those problems. And I'm not just talking about Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, who organized the series of ad hoc bailouts that spread uncertainty through the financial industry. Much worse is the fact that a chief negotiator for the bailout is House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank, the chief sponsor of the "affordable housing" scam. And as for Barack Obama, Stanley Kurtz exposes the role played by ACORN, Obama's former employer as a "community organizer." It turns out that a big part of ACORN's "community organizing" was to use thug tactics and the threat of government regulation to intimidate banks into making high-risk mortgage loans.
Fortunately, the public has the good sense to smell that something is rotten. I just got an e-mail recounting what Virginia Representative Jim Moran told Fox News: that calls from constituents commenting on the bailout were running 50-50—50% "no" and 50% "hell, no."
The House should not simply delay the bailout bill or mitigate its worst features; that will prolong the uncertainty in the financial markets. Instead, they need to make sure that the bailout meets with firm and repeated rejection over the next week, preferably by a growing margin of votes.
It is time for the House to kill the bailout and kill it decisively.
It is time for Congress to stop the government from rewriting reality, so that the market can be free to recognize the facts, pick up the pieces of failing firms, and begin rebuilding.
TIA Daily • October 1, 2008
Kill the Bailout
The Government Can't Rewrite Reality
The House of Representatives deserves praise for taking swift action to avert a growing economic crisis—by not approving the trillion-dollar financial bailout plan.
The bailout bill was blocked Monday by a rebellion among House Republicans, who voted two-to-one against a plan they consider a step down the "slippery slope to socialism," in the words of Texas Representative Jeb Hensarling.
They are absolutely correct, and the 133 Republicans who voted to stop this coup against the financial markets—not to mention some of the 95 Democrats who may have balked for similar reasons—need to find the courage to stand firm. That's especially true since the Senate is likely to vote today to approve the bailout.
The Senate is supposed to serve, in James Madison's analogy, as the "cooling saucer" for the hot tea served up by the House—but in this case, it is the House that has remained cool and refused to panic. That's because the hysterical demand for a bailout didn't come up from the people; it came down from the elites in Washington and Manhattan. The House is reflecting the sensible skepticism coming up from the folks on Main Street who don't want to pay the bills for bailing out Hank Paulson's former colleagues on Wall Street.
Some cold, realistic scrutiny of the bailout is desperately needed because this plan is not just an attack on the free market. It is an attack on reality. The financial crisis was caused by more than a decade of using government power to rewrite the facts of reality and override the judgment of the market, and the bailout just offers more of the same fantasy economics.
Congress wanted everyone to be able to get a mortgage to buy a home, regardless of income, credit history, or ability to save for a down payment. The name for this contradiction was "affordable housing," an initiative aimed at providing the benefits of home ownership to those who could not, in fact, afford it. So when the market concluded that low-income borrowers could not meet the credit requirements for mortgages, the Clinton administration invoked trumped-up charges of racism to expand enforcement of the Community Reinvestment Act, bullying banks into dropping as "arbitrary" such old-fashioned credit standards as proof of income. And when the market balked at the increased credit risk created by these loans, Congress backed the expansion of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, government-sponsored enterprises that used federally guaranteed money to buy up the increasingly risky mortgages.
At every point, when the market sent the message that reality would not support the higher level of risk being taken on by mortgage lenders, the government used its power to override this message.
The vigorous government-created market for riskier "sub-prime" loans masked the real dangers, creating the illusion that increased profits could be obtained without increased risk—an illusion that encouraged some private lenders to follow Fannie and Freddie's lead. To be sure, some of this private risk-taking was part of the normal process of failure in a capitalist economy. A large part of the current financial upheaval originated with high-risk investment banks and hedge funds that held large amounts of mortgage-backed securities. These securities were carefully balanced against one another according to mathematical formulas that were calculated to cancel out their risks. But the mathematical formulas were new and hadn't been tested in a bear market. When the downturn came, they failed.
This is a normal part of the rough and tumble of capitalism. All of the current talk about the "failure" of the free market ignores the fact that the process of failure is a crucial benefit of the free market. In a capitalist system, high-risk firms are always trying out new and untested ideas, and failure is the messenger that tells the market which strategies work and which strategies don't. It is also an indispensable corrective mechanism that moves capital from enterprises with failing strategies to those with successful strategies.
But the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve have repeatedly short-circuited this mechanism by trying to outlaw failure. When the market sent the message that too many bad loans had been made and that this needed to be corrected by a contraction in the amount of available credit, the government wanted to avoid the unpleasant consequences of such a contraction. So the Federal Reserve papered over the facts—with a flurry of paper money—by artificially reducing interest rates and loosening up credit just when it needed to be tightened.
But that didn't change the underlying facts, and the bad investments still went bad. Yet as the market has sent the message that some firms have become over-extended and are no longer solvent, the government has still tried to avoid letting the market face the facts. The Treasury and the Fed kept trying to rewrite reality by orchestrating a series of government-backed bailouts.
Over at RealClearMarkets, Joseph Calhoun points out a crucial part of this assault on facts:
There has always been a stigma attached to borrowing directly from the Fed and for good reason. If a bank can’t get other banks to lend it money, that tells the market something about the condition of the bank in question.
Last August, Bernanke convinced three large banks to borrow at the discount window in an effort to remove that stigma. When that didn’t work, he concocted a scheme to allow banks to borrow from the Fed in anonymity via a mechanism he called the Term Auction Facility. When Bear Stearns blew up, he added the Term Securities Lending Facility for investment banks. By removing the stigma of borrowing from the Fed and hiding the identity of the borrowers, Bernanke removed important information from the market.
So the Fed's approach to potential bank failures was to try to help failing banks pretend that they weren't failing.
Or consider the SEC's ban on short sales for a list of about 700 stocks—with more companies lobbying to get themselves put on the list. Again, the whole approach of the SEC is not to prevent companies from failing, but to help them pretend that they are not failing, by outlawing trades that would tend to drive their stock prices down.
In fact, all that this sort of policy has achieved is to expand business failures. When Lehman Brothers went bankrupt, for example, it had been in negotiations with several major financial institutions who were considering investing billions in a private buy-out of the firm. But they balked at making the deal because they were waiting for the Fed to offer incentives and guarantees. Thus, the Fed's yelping about how each bankruptcy of a Wall Street firm poses a risk of "systemic failure" turns out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy, because the prospect of an open-ended series of bailouts is blocking all of the mechanisms by which a free market actually prevents widespread failure.
The bailout package would have the government buy out up to $700 billion worth of bad loans. But this is merely delaying the re-pricing of those loans to their proper value. Left to themselves, the holders of these loans would eventually find it necessary to sell them at pennies on the dollar; Merrill Lynch sold its bad loans at 22 cents on the dollar. Private companies could then recognize the magnitude of the loss and start to rebuild their businesses with the remaining assets they possess. But now no firm has an incentive to sell off its bad loans. Why dump them for 22 cents on the dollar when the government might buy them, a few weeks later, at 50 or 80 cents?
So instead what is going to happen is that the federal government is going to go into the financial markets and dictate which securities are worth how much. It is still unclear exactly which loans the government will buy or how much it will pay for them, so no private investor can say whether an investment will pay off or not. This is how the prospect of a government bailout blocks the private buyouts that would actually clean all of the bad debt out of the system.
Instead, this plan transforms the US Treasury into a trillion-dollar hedge fund, making investments in securities whose proper market value is unknown and promising its shareholders—us—that unlike the best Wall Street investment banks, Treasury bureaucrats really know how to make a profit on sub-prime mortgage loans. That's why probably the best comment on the bailout is an e-mail making the rounds on Capitol Hill presenting Paulson's pitch for the bailout deal—in the style of a Nigerian banking scam. "I need to ask you to support an urgent secret business relationship with a transfer of funds of great magnitude," it begins. Time to hit the "delete" button.
The bailout represents more of the same problems that got us here because it is backed by all of the same people who created those problems. And I'm not just talking about Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, who organized the series of ad hoc bailouts that spread uncertainty through the financial industry. Much worse is the fact that a chief negotiator for the bailout is House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank, the chief sponsor of the "affordable housing" scam. And as for Barack Obama, Stanley Kurtz exposes the role played by ACORN, Obama's former employer as a "community organizer." It turns out that a big part of ACORN's "community organizing" was to use thug tactics and the threat of government regulation to intimidate banks into making high-risk mortgage loans.
Fortunately, the public has the good sense to smell that something is rotten. I just got an e-mail recounting what Virginia Representative Jim Moran told Fox News: that calls from constituents commenting on the bailout were running 50-50—50% "no" and 50% "hell, no."
The House should not simply delay the bailout bill or mitigate its worst features; that will prolong the uncertainty in the financial markets. Instead, they need to make sure that the bailout meets with firm and repeated rejection over the next week, preferably by a growing margin of votes.
It is time for the House to kill the bailout and kill it decisively.
It is time for Congress to stop the government from rewriting reality, so that the market can be free to recognize the facts, pick up the pieces of failing firms, and begin rebuilding.
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
At the Bottom There is But One Kind of Greed
Pelosi is dissembling so fast that she is almost making stuff up before it happens. (Pic above is she following the demise of the bailout bill.) She blamed this whole crisis on the Bush Administration (I blame the Bush Adminisitration for plenty in how they have handled the problem after it manifested itself too) while we watch the King Buffoons of Frank and Dodd play "cover my ass" with any new bill they could approve. (pic above is Frank and Dodd "'splaining" the bill.) Rove mentions below that he heard first hand the plan to pin this debacle on the Republicans. If that was the plan, it can get hard to keep the future and the past separate.
But along side the Fannie & Freddie problem is another one: ACORN. Now this is one hell of a story. ACORN is a criminal voter registration organization. State after state finds fraud after fraud sourced by ACORN's voter registration drives. And guess who "luuuvs" ACORN: O-BAM-A. He loves ACORN so much that he trained those community organizers how to go into a community, sweet talk them for a while until they find the right grievance and then rub that damn grievance in their faces until they are raw with rage.
That's the plan. By that time they are so solidified in their hatred of someone or some institution they feel they must vote for the Savior who will deliver them from this righteous, erroneous evil. And that is how Obama gets the votes.
On the other hand, dear Obama is sweetness and light and affability. He always seeks to calm the waters in public. Now he is creating his children's choir core to win your heart. At least Hitler had the decency to teach the kids songs about their country.
The only problem is that he violates your rights in order to do it. Obama is a crook. A very big crook by my standard of individual rights and justice based on those rights. He has the government force you to pay tax so that he can grow his voter registration machine. (Go here to register on Obama's website. Tell me, do you think this is a secure means of valid, truthful voter registration?) Never mind that you wouldn't advocate nor vote for that in a zillion years, you have to pay up anyway. This is how crooks work. They don't give you a choice. Your First Amendment rights are passe.
The advocacy of "helping the poor and powerless" is so lame that it is laughable. (Obama has left the poor and powerless in worse condition by his actions in every single project he has touched and acted on.) By our values and our ethics those who seek power over us have us by the balls. We have to let that ethic go, as a primary value, and fight for freedom more fundamentally - the right of every man to his life and the freedom to use his mind, his basic means of survival, to live it. Men will help their neighbors as they can. It is our history.
The Democrats (and McCain and Bush) are charging Wall Street's GREED as the cause of this mess. You and I know that whatever opportunity the Wall Street guys saw in the law that said they had to write sub-prime mortgages, could bundle them and sell them as securities, it originated in Washington. Without the laws and the government paying if something happened, thereby reducing the risk to zero, there never could have been this boom and now bust.
I am not saying that the "businessmen" who profited by the Government's laws are good men. Obviously their values are false when they seek money at the expense of their customers. But still, were it not for Dodd, Frank, Obama and his ACORN, and all the other hangers-on and profiteers - be it through business or campaign contributions this could not have happened. Without these politicians and their law, there would have been no cause for this effect.
Therefore, the people who have pushed people out of their homes, caused the collapse of investments that people were counting on for retirement and their kid's college educations and untold damage far greater than any "li'l ole Enron," are in Halls of Congress in Washington DC. They parade their crooked smiles and crooked asses around like they know exactly what we should do and how they are going to lead us out of this mess. There is nothing in the world that could make me believe that this is about anything beyond a little personal redemption or a big "cover my ass." In the meantime, the jackassery continues unabaited - as it must. (By the way, if I find a better explanation for the vast array of facts surrounding Obama and ACORN and the politicians who sourced this that has many people wonder what is going on, I promise you I will publish it here.)
It must continue because so far there is not one leader in that Congress that is big enough to see that they have a major credibility problem. No calls for investigation. No plans for taking responsibility. They think if they get a bill out of Congress "fixing" the financial crisis, that will be it. Integrity is never mentioned. Of course they have no idea what they are doing. Whatever it turns out to be is at best bailing wire on a jaloppy. They cannot fix it. Government planning of the economy can NEVER and WILL NEVER fix the economy. They can only VIOLATE the economy which, at root, is men being rational in offering and pursuing their values.
And, the reason this is not going to get resolved is because the entire Obama presidential possibility requires that the Democrats not be responsible for this mess. They dare not because if they were exposed, the real story would be over and so would Obama - forever. The only crook left on the grand stage would be that wooden one shepherds use pulling Obama off the stage.
The stakes are too big. After all Obama is the candidate that represents the radical Alinsky Left's moment in the sun - that moment when it finally takes down America and replaces it with a totalitarian socialist state. His name for it is SERVICE to the community or the state. That, is, after all, the plan. See here. ACORN provides the foot soldiers. Later that will be ballooned into the required Domestic Security Organization to provide for domestic tranquility. Maybe a better word is obedience.
There is but one kind of GREED at the bottom of this "bloodless" coup, which is exactly what it is: The GREED for Power and the LUST to deliver America, the beacon of individual rights and freedom for the whole world, to the dustbin of failed socialist states. This coup won't remain bloodless for long for this GREED will not hesitate to walk over corpses to achieve its aim. History instructs.
Here is a video of Karl Rove, that Republican, along with Bush, upon whom the Alinsky Left has focused its hatred, wondering what the hell is going on.
But along side the Fannie & Freddie problem is another one: ACORN. Now this is one hell of a story. ACORN is a criminal voter registration organization. State after state finds fraud after fraud sourced by ACORN's voter registration drives. And guess who "luuuvs" ACORN: O-BAM-A. He loves ACORN so much that he trained those community organizers how to go into a community, sweet talk them for a while until they find the right grievance and then rub that damn grievance in their faces until they are raw with rage.
That's the plan. By that time they are so solidified in their hatred of someone or some institution they feel they must vote for the Savior who will deliver them from this righteous, erroneous evil. And that is how Obama gets the votes.
On the other hand, dear Obama is sweetness and light and affability. He always seeks to calm the waters in public. Now he is creating his children's choir core to win your heart. At least Hitler had the decency to teach the kids songs about their country.
The only problem is that he violates your rights in order to do it. Obama is a crook. A very big crook by my standard of individual rights and justice based on those rights. He has the government force you to pay tax so that he can grow his voter registration machine. (Go here to register on Obama's website. Tell me, do you think this is a secure means of valid, truthful voter registration?) Never mind that you wouldn't advocate nor vote for that in a zillion years, you have to pay up anyway. This is how crooks work. They don't give you a choice. Your First Amendment rights are passe.
The advocacy of "helping the poor and powerless" is so lame that it is laughable. (Obama has left the poor and powerless in worse condition by his actions in every single project he has touched and acted on.) By our values and our ethics those who seek power over us have us by the balls. We have to let that ethic go, as a primary value, and fight for freedom more fundamentally - the right of every man to his life and the freedom to use his mind, his basic means of survival, to live it. Men will help their neighbors as they can. It is our history.
The Democrats (and McCain and Bush) are charging Wall Street's GREED as the cause of this mess. You and I know that whatever opportunity the Wall Street guys saw in the law that said they had to write sub-prime mortgages, could bundle them and sell them as securities, it originated in Washington. Without the laws and the government paying if something happened, thereby reducing the risk to zero, there never could have been this boom and now bust.
I am not saying that the "businessmen" who profited by the Government's laws are good men. Obviously their values are false when they seek money at the expense of their customers. But still, were it not for Dodd, Frank, Obama and his ACORN, and all the other hangers-on and profiteers - be it through business or campaign contributions this could not have happened. Without these politicians and their law, there would have been no cause for this effect.
Therefore, the people who have pushed people out of their homes, caused the collapse of investments that people were counting on for retirement and their kid's college educations and untold damage far greater than any "li'l ole Enron," are in Halls of Congress in Washington DC. They parade their crooked smiles and crooked asses around like they know exactly what we should do and how they are going to lead us out of this mess. There is nothing in the world that could make me believe that this is about anything beyond a little personal redemption or a big "cover my ass." In the meantime, the jackassery continues unabaited - as it must. (By the way, if I find a better explanation for the vast array of facts surrounding Obama and ACORN and the politicians who sourced this that has many people wonder what is going on, I promise you I will publish it here.)
It must continue because so far there is not one leader in that Congress that is big enough to see that they have a major credibility problem. No calls for investigation. No plans for taking responsibility. They think if they get a bill out of Congress "fixing" the financial crisis, that will be it. Integrity is never mentioned. Of course they have no idea what they are doing. Whatever it turns out to be is at best bailing wire on a jaloppy. They cannot fix it. Government planning of the economy can NEVER and WILL NEVER fix the economy. They can only VIOLATE the economy which, at root, is men being rational in offering and pursuing their values.
And, the reason this is not going to get resolved is because the entire Obama presidential possibility requires that the Democrats not be responsible for this mess. They dare not because if they were exposed, the real story would be over and so would Obama - forever. The only crook left on the grand stage would be that wooden one shepherds use pulling Obama off the stage.
The stakes are too big. After all Obama is the candidate that represents the radical Alinsky Left's moment in the sun - that moment when it finally takes down America and replaces it with a totalitarian socialist state. His name for it is SERVICE to the community or the state. That, is, after all, the plan. See here. ACORN provides the foot soldiers. Later that will be ballooned into the required Domestic Security Organization to provide for domestic tranquility. Maybe a better word is obedience.
There is but one kind of GREED at the bottom of this "bloodless" coup, which is exactly what it is: The GREED for Power and the LUST to deliver America, the beacon of individual rights and freedom for the whole world, to the dustbin of failed socialist states. This coup won't remain bloodless for long for this GREED will not hesitate to walk over corpses to achieve its aim. History instructs.
Here is a video of Karl Rove, that Republican, along with Bush, upon whom the Alinsky Left has focused its hatred, wondering what the hell is going on.
Monday, September 29, 2008
The Obama and ACORN Strategy
This article at American Thinker is a must read to understand the strategy behind Obama. It really explains a lot. Now I can see why Obama went to Germany to appear international and why he created his own "Presidential" seal and all of it. It is a purposeful effort to break down American institutions and create a totalitarian socialist state. Don't take my word for it. I've put a lot of Obama history in this blog and this article shows even more than I have been able to learn.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/09/barack_obama_and_the_strategy.html
I now think Obama is the bloodless coup. But it won't be bloodless for long.
I have a family member who lost $25,000 bond overnight when Lehman's collapsed. There are millions of hard-working people who are losing their life savings and retirement savings because of the dastardly deeds of the likes of Dodd, Frank, Obama and Raines. These bastards need to be put behind bars. Otherwise, we are going down if this kind of corruption and criminality is allowed to go free and run the country. This entire mess is primarily Democrat-constructed and Democrat-maintained.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/09/barack_obama_and_the_strategy.html
I now think Obama is the bloodless coup. But it won't be bloodless for long.
I have a family member who lost $25,000 bond overnight when Lehman's collapsed. There are millions of hard-working people who are losing their life savings and retirement savings because of the dastardly deeds of the likes of Dodd, Frank, Obama and Raines. These bastards need to be put behind bars. Otherwise, we are going down if this kind of corruption and criminality is allowed to go free and run the country. This entire mess is primarily Democrat-constructed and Democrat-maintained.
Sunday, September 28, 2008
Request for Moral Action
I have written my Congressmen - two Senators, Chambliss and Isakson, and one Representative, John Lewis - in the US Government regarding the Crisis of Confidence in the US Government. I urge you to write yours.
Dear Senator,
We may have a financial problem that is great. But there is a far greater problem that you have than that. You have a CRISIS OF CONFIDENCE in the US Government. When you stand idly by and allow Barney Frank and Chris Dodd go on national TV and represent what is going on in the name of the US Government, you may as well put the mafia up there. Don’t you get it?
You need to call for the IMMEDIATE RESIGNATION of both Frank and Dodd in the halls of Congress and on national TV now. Can you not be ACCOUNTABLE for the damage they have caused and are now causing?
We know that Frank and Dodd were at cause in the failure of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. They have been the flag wavers of more destruction than any free market institution ever could be or has been. And yet, you don’t root out the problem and take a stand for what is right.
Further ACORN, charged and prosecuted with many voter fraud crimes, is a Far Left radical organization. To think that you would violate the First Amendment of the US Constitution, forcing people to pay for an organization that is clearly political and does not represent their views is a crime in itself. There can be NO TAXPAYER MONEY go to ACORN.
Sincerely yours,
Principlex
Atlanta, Georgia
Dear Senator,
We may have a financial problem that is great. But there is a far greater problem that you have than that. You have a CRISIS OF CONFIDENCE in the US Government. When you stand idly by and allow Barney Frank and Chris Dodd go on national TV and represent what is going on in the name of the US Government, you may as well put the mafia up there. Don’t you get it?
You need to call for the IMMEDIATE RESIGNATION of both Frank and Dodd in the halls of Congress and on national TV now. Can you not be ACCOUNTABLE for the damage they have caused and are now causing?
We know that Frank and Dodd were at cause in the failure of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. They have been the flag wavers of more destruction than any free market institution ever could be or has been. And yet, you don’t root out the problem and take a stand for what is right.
Further ACORN, charged and prosecuted with many voter fraud crimes, is a Far Left radical organization. To think that you would violate the First Amendment of the US Constitution, forcing people to pay for an organization that is clearly political and does not represent their views is a crime in itself. There can be NO TAXPAYER MONEY go to ACORN.
Sincerely yours,
Principlex
Atlanta, Georgia
The Crisis of Confidence
The great crisis is not the financial crisis although that is bad enough. It is The Crisis of Confidence in the US Government.
The two men in Congress who were the big players in the horrendous con game of Fannie and Freddie and who are as upside down as all hell when it comes to these two institutions are Chris Dodd and Barney Frank. Every news program clip I see, these two are still speaking and talking as if they are the authorities on this new "bailout" bill. They are not. All we know is that they are the authorities on how to make sure their ass is covered.
Every time one of them says anything, the confidence meter goes lower and lower. Since apparently the Congress has no idea what the cause of this is, I think it is time for some individual in the Congress who has some clout - perhaps Maverick McCain - should go on national TV and clear up this matter.
He should state: "We have a crisis of confidence in the US Government." This must be corrected now. Therefore I am calling for the stepping down of both Dodd and Frank. Their voices at this time given they are they major cause of the problem we are dealing with are doing nothing except lowering the people's evaluation of our work. From now on, no more."
Then he should go on to Part II of how to generate confidence. The bill is to have NO EARMARKS and NO PROVISIONS FOR ACORN!!!
That would spark plenty of fireworks and some real soul searching on Capitol Hill. And this is EXACTLY what is needed!
The two men in Congress who were the big players in the horrendous con game of Fannie and Freddie and who are as upside down as all hell when it comes to these two institutions are Chris Dodd and Barney Frank. Every news program clip I see, these two are still speaking and talking as if they are the authorities on this new "bailout" bill. They are not. All we know is that they are the authorities on how to make sure their ass is covered.
Every time one of them says anything, the confidence meter goes lower and lower. Since apparently the Congress has no idea what the cause of this is, I think it is time for some individual in the Congress who has some clout - perhaps Maverick McCain - should go on national TV and clear up this matter.
He should state: "We have a crisis of confidence in the US Government." This must be corrected now. Therefore I am calling for the stepping down of both Dodd and Frank. Their voices at this time given they are they major cause of the problem we are dealing with are doing nothing except lowering the people's evaluation of our work. From now on, no more."
Then he should go on to Part II of how to generate confidence. The bill is to have NO EARMARKS and NO PROVISIONS FOR ACORN!!!
That would spark plenty of fireworks and some real soul searching on Capitol Hill. And this is EXACTLY what is needed!
Saturday, September 27, 2008
Democrat Rebuff of Fannie & Freddie Clean-up
This video speaks for itself. Caught red-handed!
And I'm supposed to think the Democrat Party is the best Party (maybe that should be a small "p") for the economy?
In the bailout bill being hammered out and festooned with earmarks right now, a huge grant of any profit (20%) is scheduled to go to ACORN, supposedly a low-end housing organization. What it really is a voter registration organization and its purpose it to register Democrats. It has been charged with illegal activities in a number of states. This is more corruption - pure and simple. Definitely it is an infringement of your right to free speech. Tax money extracted from you by force and given to an organization that may not express your views is a whopping injustice. By what Right? This is "Taxation without Representation!!"
!! N O P A S S !! N O P A S S !!
The CRISIS IN CONFIDENCE in the US Government worsens!
And I'm supposed to think the Democrat Party is the best Party (maybe that should be a small "p") for the economy?
In the bailout bill being hammered out and festooned with earmarks right now, a huge grant of any profit (20%) is scheduled to go to ACORN, supposedly a low-end housing organization. What it really is a voter registration organization and its purpose it to register Democrats. It has been charged with illegal activities in a number of states. This is more corruption - pure and simple. Definitely it is an infringement of your right to free speech. Tax money extracted from you by force and given to an organization that may not express your views is a whopping injustice. By what Right? This is "Taxation without Representation!!"
!! N O P A S S !! N O P A S S !!
The CRISIS IN CONFIDENCE in the US Government worsens!
Friday, September 26, 2008
Is Alinsky's Principle Turning on Obama?
Saul Alinsky is Obama's primary mentor. He was powerful because he had a specific plan of action for gaining power. Alinsky was a psychopath, pure and simple. He appeals to people who want power and are angry. Hillary liked him and so does Obama.
"Teaching hatred for the normal majority is the key to power for radicals. But Alinsky taught that you can't easily hate millions of people. To do that effectively you need a one-person scapegoat to focus all your hatred on. 'Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.' (Saul Alinsky) That is the politics of personal destruction, and it doesn't matter if the target is black like Clarence Thomas, or a woman like Sarah Palin, or a severely wounded war veteran like John McCain." (or a President, George Bush - SCB) (This quote from here.)
The internet is abuzz with articles about Obama's underhanded dealings and being the thug behind the scenes. This was mentioned a few weeks ago related to other people and organizations but had died down. Now it is back.
And what a perfect place to put all the frustration and outrage over the general government incompetance. It's clear to me there is a crisis of confidence in the US Government. Two of the biggest crooks, Frank and Dodd, at the heart of the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac fiasco are making pronouncements, yelling in response to every question, as if they have moral authority - which they don't.
McCain supporters are increasingly frustrated. Their hope has been that given all the mess maybe McCain would have enough belief in freedom to at least forestall the complete capitulation of our relatively free society to liberal fascism and the socialist state.
All of this is now accentuating Obama's fascism and willingness to operate via threats of force. What follows is a list of links that I gleaned from the internet, thanks to a friend sending them to me. Further most of these links came from http://www.instapundit.com/, a middle-of-the-road website written by a law professor.
Start with this one about Alinsky and his tactics.
Then read this from the UK on how Obama undermined our government's negotiations with Iraq leaving them confused.
Then how about this one on how Obama is silencing the voice of Gun Owners. Also here.
One comment on a blog: "I fear that under the Obama administration, the lawyers sending these letters will be government employees."
And here is evidence of that already. Two elected officials are protecting the Obama campaign and only the Obama campaign. How unjust is that?
And here is a video showing how prosecutors and sheriffs are becoming part of the Obama's truth squad. And even the Justice Department is working for Obama.
Here in Reason Magazine's website is an article explaining why Obama is vulnerable on the Second Amendment. Notice how, in Obama's world, you have no rights. That means that you are not and independent human being who gets to live his life as he chooses. You are the property of the Government and the politicians get to decide. Your life is to be negotiated by someone else. Whatever that is, it ain't American and individual rights.
Or how about this Alinsky tactic to undermine free speech?
Here's an article regarding the NRA's response.
Obama's attempt to interrupt and silence a Chicago radio show back in August when Stanley Kurtz who investigated the Chicago Annenberg Challenge was featured.
And just a couple days before that stories were run on how Obama threatened the major TV stations who might run the ad produced by the American Issues Project. I detailed that here.
Although the Left may have overriden your voice at the US Justice Department, if you want to file a complaint, the numbers are at the link.
"Teaching hatred for the normal majority is the key to power for radicals. But Alinsky taught that you can't easily hate millions of people. To do that effectively you need a one-person scapegoat to focus all your hatred on. 'Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.' (Saul Alinsky) That is the politics of personal destruction, and it doesn't matter if the target is black like Clarence Thomas, or a woman like Sarah Palin, or a severely wounded war veteran like John McCain." (or a President, George Bush - SCB) (This quote from here.)
The internet is abuzz with articles about Obama's underhanded dealings and being the thug behind the scenes. This was mentioned a few weeks ago related to other people and organizations but had died down. Now it is back.
And what a perfect place to put all the frustration and outrage over the general government incompetance. It's clear to me there is a crisis of confidence in the US Government. Two of the biggest crooks, Frank and Dodd, at the heart of the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac fiasco are making pronouncements, yelling in response to every question, as if they have moral authority - which they don't.
McCain supporters are increasingly frustrated. Their hope has been that given all the mess maybe McCain would have enough belief in freedom to at least forestall the complete capitulation of our relatively free society to liberal fascism and the socialist state.
All of this is now accentuating Obama's fascism and willingness to operate via threats of force. What follows is a list of links that I gleaned from the internet, thanks to a friend sending them to me. Further most of these links came from http://www.instapundit.com/, a middle-of-the-road website written by a law professor.
Start with this one about Alinsky and his tactics.
Then read this from the UK on how Obama undermined our government's negotiations with Iraq leaving them confused.
Then how about this one on how Obama is silencing the voice of Gun Owners. Also here.
One comment on a blog: "I fear that under the Obama administration, the lawyers sending these letters will be government employees."
And here is evidence of that already. Two elected officials are protecting the Obama campaign and only the Obama campaign. How unjust is that?
And here is a video showing how prosecutors and sheriffs are becoming part of the Obama's truth squad. And even the Justice Department is working for Obama.
Here in Reason Magazine's website is an article explaining why Obama is vulnerable on the Second Amendment. Notice how, in Obama's world, you have no rights. That means that you are not and independent human being who gets to live his life as he chooses. You are the property of the Government and the politicians get to decide. Your life is to be negotiated by someone else. Whatever that is, it ain't American and individual rights.
Or how about this Alinsky tactic to undermine free speech?
Here's an article regarding the NRA's response.
Obama's attempt to interrupt and silence a Chicago radio show back in August when Stanley Kurtz who investigated the Chicago Annenberg Challenge was featured.
And just a couple days before that stories were run on how Obama threatened the major TV stations who might run the ad produced by the American Issues Project. I detailed that here.
Although the Left may have overriden your voice at the US Justice Department, if you want to file a complaint, the numbers are at the link.
Sunday, September 21, 2008
When is the US Government Going To Take Repsonsibility?
The US Government has nationalized AIG and the debt of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. This amounts to the nationalization of the financial sector of our economy.
And - We are dismayed, despairing and angry. All that is talked about is the taxpayer covering everything. With a stroke of the pen, each of us were enslaved more. Because of the government we all work harder to get ahead or we suffer a loss in our standard of living. Why aren't those "criminals" and the Congressmen who fostered this in jail and destitute? They did far, far more damage than Enron ever did. Thank's Uncle Sam, you bastard!
What we need is Justice. And one thing we can count on is that we will never get it from the US Government.
The US Government is choking on paper. Debt. Where is its responsibility in the matter? Why aren't we hearing plans to sell off vast tracks of the land it lays claim too? Why aren't we hearing plans to sell off g-zillions of its assets to pay what it has committed itself to?
This is what a normal person has to do if income slows or stops and he comes up short. He has to generate it some way. But not the US Government. Oh no, no, no! It passes a law which means one thing: Get out the gun, point it at the heads of the taxpayers and tell them they got to pay up. Why? "We have to have it. It's an emergency."
This is worse than disgusting. Now we have a criminal at every single US citizen's door. The government is the primary initiator of force in this country, bar none. All criminals are petty by comparison.
The only agreement you and I have with the government is that they guarantee my and your right to life, my and your liberty, my and your property and my and your right to live for our own happiness. Inside that everything gets taken care of.
So the agreement is broken. And it was the US Government that broke it. And don't tell me that people don't get it. They do. Many know exactly what is going on and there is not a single person in the Government with a voice that can be trusted. This is how bad it is.
So what do I do if a client breaks an agreement? I stop work. There has to be a new agreement between the two of us otherwise it is over forever.
Isn't it now obvious that there is nothing that the government touches that it doesn't wreck? Why? Force. It forced Fannie and Freddie to loan to people who couldn't afford it. They lowered their underwriting standards to do it. I bet you would like your mechanic to lower his standards when fixing your car. Or the airline mechanic to lower his standards. Or your surgeon to lower his standards. What kind of insanity is this?
And now McCain and Obama are calling for more oversight? Give me a break! Oversight from the government when it comes to business is the worst affliction any honest businessman can have happen. Don't believe for a second it is worth a tinker's damn. It isn't. If you have any standards based on knowledge and truth, you have to get out of business otherwise you become one of them. You become their apologist. "I'm sorry, I had to do it because the government requires me to." Oversight has as much relevance as Marie Antoinette's prouncement, "Let the eat cake." With a flick of the wrist, "Let them have oversight and stricter regulation."
The best you can get if you become successful is being branded "greedy." That's the government's and their apologists' payment. Nice huh? If you fall for this tripe, you deserve it.
Now what? Who knows. I guess it is every man for himself. And it won't change until the government lives by the same laws of human nature that govern all of us and puts down that goddammed gun except to catch or hold a person who has initiated force.
And - We are dismayed, despairing and angry. All that is talked about is the taxpayer covering everything. With a stroke of the pen, each of us were enslaved more. Because of the government we all work harder to get ahead or we suffer a loss in our standard of living. Why aren't those "criminals" and the Congressmen who fostered this in jail and destitute? They did far, far more damage than Enron ever did. Thank's Uncle Sam, you bastard!
What we need is Justice. And one thing we can count on is that we will never get it from the US Government.
The US Government is choking on paper. Debt. Where is its responsibility in the matter? Why aren't we hearing plans to sell off vast tracks of the land it lays claim too? Why aren't we hearing plans to sell off g-zillions of its assets to pay what it has committed itself to?
This is what a normal person has to do if income slows or stops and he comes up short. He has to generate it some way. But not the US Government. Oh no, no, no! It passes a law which means one thing: Get out the gun, point it at the heads of the taxpayers and tell them they got to pay up. Why? "We have to have it. It's an emergency."
This is worse than disgusting. Now we have a criminal at every single US citizen's door. The government is the primary initiator of force in this country, bar none. All criminals are petty by comparison.
The only agreement you and I have with the government is that they guarantee my and your right to life, my and your liberty, my and your property and my and your right to live for our own happiness. Inside that everything gets taken care of.
So the agreement is broken. And it was the US Government that broke it. And don't tell me that people don't get it. They do. Many know exactly what is going on and there is not a single person in the Government with a voice that can be trusted. This is how bad it is.
So what do I do if a client breaks an agreement? I stop work. There has to be a new agreement between the two of us otherwise it is over forever.
Isn't it now obvious that there is nothing that the government touches that it doesn't wreck? Why? Force. It forced Fannie and Freddie to loan to people who couldn't afford it. They lowered their underwriting standards to do it. I bet you would like your mechanic to lower his standards when fixing your car. Or the airline mechanic to lower his standards. Or your surgeon to lower his standards. What kind of insanity is this?
And now McCain and Obama are calling for more oversight? Give me a break! Oversight from the government when it comes to business is the worst affliction any honest businessman can have happen. Don't believe for a second it is worth a tinker's damn. It isn't. If you have any standards based on knowledge and truth, you have to get out of business otherwise you become one of them. You become their apologist. "I'm sorry, I had to do it because the government requires me to." Oversight has as much relevance as Marie Antoinette's prouncement, "Let the eat cake." With a flick of the wrist, "Let them have oversight and stricter regulation."
The best you can get if you become successful is being branded "greedy." That's the government's and their apologists' payment. Nice huh? If you fall for this tripe, you deserve it.
Now what? Who knows. I guess it is every man for himself. And it won't change until the government lives by the same laws of human nature that govern all of us and puts down that goddammed gun except to catch or hold a person who has initiated force.
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Is Free Enterprise Over?
The free market is under attack on every flank. In the minefield of opinions, it is essential to define the free market and capitalism.
"In a free economy, where no man or group of men can use physical coercion against anyone, economic power can be achieved only by voluntary means: by the voluntary choice and agreement of all those who participate in the process of production and trade. In a free market, all prices, wages, and profits are determined -- not by the arbitrary whim of the rich or of the poor, not by anyone's 'greed' or by anyone's need -- but by the law of supply and demand." - - Ayn Rand, Capitalism the Unknown Ideal, 1966.
Right now, the free market does not exist in America in any of the major markets: Education, medicine, building and planning, energy, money and finance, transportation and the legal profession to name a few. Even small businesses are increasingly regulated and licensed. And beyond that political correctness has made it illegal in many cases to even express a thought. We definitely do not have a free market.
Whatever we have been living in for the last 90+ years is the afterglow of a free market, not a free market. With the formulation of the Federal Reserve Bank and the passing of the income tax law, the free market took a body blow and it has never returned to the realm of American human affairs. Certainly the increase in the unfree market has been more or less gradual. The other body blows were in the 30s, the 60s and increasingly this century.
Today, September 17, 2008, in the Atlanta Journal Constitution Cynthia Tucker, editor, published her editorial: "Private enterprise worship exposed."
"The high priests of capitalism are in sackcloth and ashes, their belief in markets shattered, their catechism of risk-taking renounced. From Wall Street to Detroit, once-devout believers in unfettered private enterprise are running from their religion. Now that their greed has brought the economy to the brink of depression, they want government help.
"What happened to those masters of the universe? What happened to their handmaidens, the Republican politicians who denounced government regulation and read from the holy scriptures as recorded by Ayn Rand?
"This week, sensing shifting political winds, John McCain took to criticizing those Wall Street schemers, imbuing his speeches with a populist rhetoric intended to make you believe he’s always been a firm supporter of government regulation. On Monday, as the Dow was plummeting, McCain was the change agent, the reformer:
"In a free economy, where no man or group of men can use physical coercion against anyone, economic power can be achieved only by voluntary means: by the voluntary choice and agreement of all those who participate in the process of production and trade. In a free market, all prices, wages, and profits are determined -- not by the arbitrary whim of the rich or of the poor, not by anyone's 'greed' or by anyone's need -- but by the law of supply and demand." - - Ayn Rand, Capitalism the Unknown Ideal, 1966.
Right now, the free market does not exist in America in any of the major markets: Education, medicine, building and planning, energy, money and finance, transportation and the legal profession to name a few. Even small businesses are increasingly regulated and licensed. And beyond that political correctness has made it illegal in many cases to even express a thought. We definitely do not have a free market.
Whatever we have been living in for the last 90+ years is the afterglow of a free market, not a free market. With the formulation of the Federal Reserve Bank and the passing of the income tax law, the free market took a body blow and it has never returned to the realm of American human affairs. Certainly the increase in the unfree market has been more or less gradual. The other body blows were in the 30s, the 60s and increasingly this century.
Today, September 17, 2008, in the Atlanta Journal Constitution Cynthia Tucker, editor, published her editorial: "Private enterprise worship exposed."
"The high priests of capitalism are in sackcloth and ashes, their belief in markets shattered, their catechism of risk-taking renounced. From Wall Street to Detroit, once-devout believers in unfettered private enterprise are running from their religion. Now that their greed has brought the economy to the brink of depression, they want government help.
"What happened to those masters of the universe? What happened to their handmaidens, the Republican politicians who denounced government regulation and read from the holy scriptures as recorded by Ayn Rand?
"This week, sensing shifting political winds, John McCain took to criticizing those Wall Street schemers, imbuing his speeches with a populist rhetoric intended to make you believe he’s always been a firm supporter of government regulation. On Monday, as the Dow was plummeting, McCain was the change agent, the reformer:
"'The regulatory system is broken … We’ve got to catch up the regulatory bodies to make sure that there is the proper oversight and regulation and transparency. That is vital.'
"Actually, that is laughable. In March, McCain told The Wall Street Journal, “I am fundamentally a deregulator. I’d like to see a lot of the unnecessary government regulations eliminated.”
"In a speech a few weeks later, he argued that our approach “should include encouraging increased capital in financial institutions by removing regulatory, accounting and tax impediments to raising capital.”
. . . . .
"So are the masters of the universe who created the vast Ponzi scheme that has entangled Wall Street, Main Street and markets around the world. After decades of fighting off government as intrusive, rigid, bureaucratic and downright dumb, financial titans are begging for taxpayer-backed bailouts.
"After the quasi-bailout of Bear Sterns, they were aghast when Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson refused to bail out Lehman. And they're still betting that the government will come to the rescue whenever another giant company is about to collapse, as it apparently is poised to do in the case of AIG.
"Wall Street kings are not the only ones begging for bailouts. Detroit automakers have also stuck their hands out, proposing that government fork over $50 billion to prop them up. They spent decades fending off efforts from Congress to improve fuel efficiency, insisting that American motorists only wanted huge gas-guzzlers. Now that they can’t sell those SUV-ehemoths, they’re staring at the possibility of financial collapse.
"Perhaps the pendulum is finally swinging back to a widespread recognition that government has a role to play in regulating markets, protecting consumers and providing a social safety net. That lesson comes at a very high cost: lost jobs, ruined retirement portfolios and added taxpayer debt to pay for bailouts.
"Unfortunately, many experts believe the end is not yet in sight; it may be many months before the markets hit bottom and the economy starts a vigorous recovery. But there may be a small benefit in this burgeoning catastrophe: The worship of unfettered private enterprise has been exposed for what it is — just another cult."
Miss Tucker is a very second rate mind for sure. In the world of concepts, one must always define his terms and distinguish what he is writing about from what it is not. Given that Miss Tucker does not do this, she turns out to be nothing but a hack with an opinion. So what! Welcome to the multitudes, Cynthia.
The truth is what is happening with Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, AIG and others proves the unfree market is a colossal failure. It proves nothing about the free market. Those who should be in "sackcloth and ashes" are those who think you can get away with regulating markets. "Mother Nature," meaning the eternal nature of human being in this case, simply won't allow it.
What Cynthia does not realize is that free markets and free minds are corollaries. When she leaps atop the heap of the jeering crowd, she is advocating the regulation of her mind too.
Another thing she doesn't realize is that markets go with being human. All you can do is allow them via political freedom or drive them underground to a black market. This woman definitely loves slavery!!!
Neither of the candidates advocate freedom in its essentials. It is an idea that is barely known in America let alone the rest of the world at this time. It has never fully existed here or anywhere. The basics underlying it have not been learned and realized as workable yet. But they have been discovered and formulated and interest in them is growing.
Saturday, September 13, 2008
Community Service
Listen to both campaigns this season. My, oh my, oh my.
Up to this time, Community Service, often along with a fine, is a punishment, a restriction on your freedom that you receive if you commit a low level crime. The punishment amounts to the time and effort you spend and the fact that you HAVE to do it in order to fulfill the sentence the judge handed you.
Are we now supposed to believe that Community Service is something else if required by the government? How can anything you HAVE to do be a service? Even it is voluntary and you are shamed into it, wouldn't that be the same thing as HAVING to do it?
No one is going to have to wait until the end of life to see if they went to hell, they will be living it soon.
On Friday, Whoopi Goldberg asked John McCain, when he talked about interpreting the Constitution intended by the Founding Fathers, if she should be worried about slavery. Little did she realize at the time that we all better be worried about slavery. Government instituted Community Service, along with a zillion other mandates, is slavery.
Which part of your day or weekend do you want to give up? What kind of corruption is going to ensue as everyone tries to get around this one?
Given this talk, in four years or less we won't have an immigration problem. We will have an emigration problem.
Up to this time, Community Service, often along with a fine, is a punishment, a restriction on your freedom that you receive if you commit a low level crime. The punishment amounts to the time and effort you spend and the fact that you HAVE to do it in order to fulfill the sentence the judge handed you.
Are we now supposed to believe that Community Service is something else if required by the government? How can anything you HAVE to do be a service? Even it is voluntary and you are shamed into it, wouldn't that be the same thing as HAVING to do it?
No one is going to have to wait until the end of life to see if they went to hell, they will be living it soon.
On Friday, Whoopi Goldberg asked John McCain, when he talked about interpreting the Constitution intended by the Founding Fathers, if she should be worried about slavery. Little did she realize at the time that we all better be worried about slavery. Government instituted Community Service, along with a zillion other mandates, is slavery.
Which part of your day or weekend do you want to give up? What kind of corruption is going to ensue as everyone tries to get around this one?
Given this talk, in four years or less we won't have an immigration problem. We will have an emigration problem.
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
Theft in America
Theft is rampant in America. With the exception of petty thieves, some con-artists and hustlers (although I think that distinction is being lost as political parties place them at the top of their lists of people who can win public office) people who steal are considered good.
A thief for the common good, the public good, the poor and least among us, the good of the environment, so-called public safety, anything too important for some individual to control and a host of other justifications is a GOOD man. How could this be?
About three weeks ago, I ordered Inherit the Wind from Netflix. It didn't come within the short turn-around time they normally provide so I told them I hadn't received it. Netflix graciously sent another copy. The day after I told them, I received Inherit the Wind in the mail. Two days later I received Inherit the Wind again.
After a day passed, I sent the first Inherit the Wind back to Netflix. I hadn't watched it, but I still had the second copy they sent. In the meantime they continued sending me movies from my queue.
Yesterday I viewed Inherit the Wind . Good movie. The movie was so good that I started thinking of the friends I would like to have see it. I thought about sending them this copy that I had. Netflix wouldn't notice, I thought, since I had already returned Inherit the Wind and they had resumed business as usual with me.
I basked in the pleasure I could cause in another. I thought of the "thank you" and good will I would receive from my friend. We could share our thoughts and feelings about the movie. What fun that would be. Further, I could advance the principle of the right to free speech and thinking that is soooo important to me. What a lovely world I would create.
Then I remembered. The movie isn't mine. I'm able to conveniently rent movies from my home and for less than Blockbusters because someone invested his money to buy these movies so I could rent them. And because he makes a profit, my tax money isn't required to make sure he has a place to sleep and some food to eat.
I proudly sent the movie back.
There are a couple points to make from this story.
1. If I thought being "good" to be what I did for others, being a thief in this case would be acceptable behavior. In fact, it might be so acceptable that I wouldn't even notice that I was stealing. If I thought creativity, production of values, an independent mind taking risks and my agreements/contracts with others important I would send the movie back. Since I possess volition, I get to decide. A man is known for his choices and we call this character.
Where in our culture does this "doing good for others" ethic come from? I'm not talking about giving someone you value a hand. I'm not talking about giving someone something in order that they give you or your product consideration. I'm talking about doing good for others as an end, a good, in itself. I'm talking about doing good for others in order to show yourself and others that you are a good person - so you think highly of yourself. If you really want to reach the apotheosis of being good, you do good for others at your own expense. You sacrifice. You sacrifice yourself.
Where is self-sacrifice good? Well, Jesus sacrificed his life on the cross for others. The poor woman of the Bible gave her last pennies for the good of others. This is the primary source of this ethic - Christianity. Because of the ethic of self-sacrifice theft is considered good and made possible. Whole states are formed and justified on this basis.
2. What if you had a thief in the house where you lived. Every time you went to use that which is yours, you couldn't be sure that it would be there. Maybe the thief would have stolen it. You had used the energy of your life earning the money to buy the things you have, but you had no guaranteed use and disposal of these things.
What would this do to your life? How would you feel? What would you decide about life? About people? What actions would you take if you lived in this condition?
Today, our culture in America condones theft bigtime. People wonder why Americans are mad as hell. Disapproval of the President and Congress is breaking records. Is it any wonder?
And it is not just theft of your money. Your children are stolen and sent to public schools where they are inculcated in the justification of theft. E.g., multiculturalism is good. Why? Because of ethnicity and skin color and because all cultures are declared equally valid and healthy. Character, an individual attribute, is not mentioned. Sacrificing your values is what is important.
Your intelligence and thinking is stolen and bent to the dictates and regulations of the government agencies. How many times have I provide parking for the handicapped when a handicapped person would never come to or have use for a particular type of business - a ballroom dance club, e.g.
Your future is stolen. Your life is stolen. All because of this single ethic - self-sacrifice.
Listen to the politicians. Who among them isn't fully righteous that they have the right to steal and keep stealing from you? Not a paragraph passes from their lips, the lips of Obama, McCain, Biden, Palin, Hillary, Bill, Bush, on and on and on, that is not based on justified theft - sacrifice. They count on your self-sacrifice otherwise none of this could, by virtue of cause and effect, be happening. Truly we have inherited the wind.
You simply wouldn't buy most of their products and program if you had a choice. If you had a choice, you could only blame yourself if you let such a critter in your house.
If theft has such a corrosive power in human relationships and society in general, then institutionalized theft is a supreme evil. We really have no choice, if we choose life, but to reduce government to its essentials and extirpate institutionalized theft.
There is no doubt in my mind that government provides something fundamentally important to human life. Protection from invaders, police to stop initiations of force and fraud and courts in which to settle disputes.
The government exists by agreement, not by force. The agreement is the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution - the only agreement anyone has with the government so long as they stay within America's borders.
Like all of us, the government has to EARN its right to exist every day of its life. Theft in America is turning us into devils and ruining our lives. It must stop!
A thief for the common good, the public good, the poor and least among us, the good of the environment, so-called public safety, anything too important for some individual to control and a host of other justifications is a GOOD man. How could this be?
About three weeks ago, I ordered Inherit the Wind from Netflix. It didn't come within the short turn-around time they normally provide so I told them I hadn't received it. Netflix graciously sent another copy. The day after I told them, I received Inherit the Wind in the mail. Two days later I received Inherit the Wind again.
After a day passed, I sent the first Inherit the Wind back to Netflix. I hadn't watched it, but I still had the second copy they sent. In the meantime they continued sending me movies from my queue.
Yesterday I viewed Inherit the Wind . Good movie. The movie was so good that I started thinking of the friends I would like to have see it. I thought about sending them this copy that I had. Netflix wouldn't notice, I thought, since I had already returned Inherit the Wind and they had resumed business as usual with me.
I basked in the pleasure I could cause in another. I thought of the "thank you" and good will I would receive from my friend. We could share our thoughts and feelings about the movie. What fun that would be. Further, I could advance the principle of the right to free speech and thinking that is soooo important to me. What a lovely world I would create.
Then I remembered. The movie isn't mine. I'm able to conveniently rent movies from my home and for less than Blockbusters because someone invested his money to buy these movies so I could rent them. And because he makes a profit, my tax money isn't required to make sure he has a place to sleep and some food to eat.
I proudly sent the movie back.
There are a couple points to make from this story.
1. If I thought being "good" to be what I did for others, being a thief in this case would be acceptable behavior. In fact, it might be so acceptable that I wouldn't even notice that I was stealing. If I thought creativity, production of values, an independent mind taking risks and my agreements/contracts with others important I would send the movie back. Since I possess volition, I get to decide. A man is known for his choices and we call this character.
Where in our culture does this "doing good for others" ethic come from? I'm not talking about giving someone you value a hand. I'm not talking about giving someone something in order that they give you or your product consideration. I'm talking about doing good for others as an end, a good, in itself. I'm talking about doing good for others in order to show yourself and others that you are a good person - so you think highly of yourself. If you really want to reach the apotheosis of being good, you do good for others at your own expense. You sacrifice. You sacrifice yourself.
Where is self-sacrifice good? Well, Jesus sacrificed his life on the cross for others. The poor woman of the Bible gave her last pennies for the good of others. This is the primary source of this ethic - Christianity. Because of the ethic of self-sacrifice theft is considered good and made possible. Whole states are formed and justified on this basis.
2. What if you had a thief in the house where you lived. Every time you went to use that which is yours, you couldn't be sure that it would be there. Maybe the thief would have stolen it. You had used the energy of your life earning the money to buy the things you have, but you had no guaranteed use and disposal of these things.
What would this do to your life? How would you feel? What would you decide about life? About people? What actions would you take if you lived in this condition?
Today, our culture in America condones theft bigtime. People wonder why Americans are mad as hell. Disapproval of the President and Congress is breaking records. Is it any wonder?
And it is not just theft of your money. Your children are stolen and sent to public schools where they are inculcated in the justification of theft. E.g., multiculturalism is good. Why? Because of ethnicity and skin color and because all cultures are declared equally valid and healthy. Character, an individual attribute, is not mentioned. Sacrificing your values is what is important.
Your intelligence and thinking is stolen and bent to the dictates and regulations of the government agencies. How many times have I provide parking for the handicapped when a handicapped person would never come to or have use for a particular type of business - a ballroom dance club, e.g.
Your future is stolen. Your life is stolen. All because of this single ethic - self-sacrifice.
Listen to the politicians. Who among them isn't fully righteous that they have the right to steal and keep stealing from you? Not a paragraph passes from their lips, the lips of Obama, McCain, Biden, Palin, Hillary, Bill, Bush, on and on and on, that is not based on justified theft - sacrifice. They count on your self-sacrifice otherwise none of this could, by virtue of cause and effect, be happening. Truly we have inherited the wind.
You simply wouldn't buy most of their products and program if you had a choice. If you had a choice, you could only blame yourself if you let such a critter in your house.
If theft has such a corrosive power in human relationships and society in general, then institutionalized theft is a supreme evil. We really have no choice, if we choose life, but to reduce government to its essentials and extirpate institutionalized theft.
There is no doubt in my mind that government provides something fundamentally important to human life. Protection from invaders, police to stop initiations of force and fraud and courts in which to settle disputes.
The government exists by agreement, not by force. The agreement is the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution - the only agreement anyone has with the government so long as they stay within America's borders.
Like all of us, the government has to EARN its right to exist every day of its life. Theft in America is turning us into devils and ruining our lives. It must stop!
Friday, September 5, 2008
This Woman's Character Inspires Me
From the Women in Leaderhip Forum recorded by Newsweek and published on YouTube, August 29, 2008
Palin: Motherhood, Childhood Influences and Gender as an Issue
Palin: Hillary and the Perceived Whine
Palin: The Reluctant Beauty Queen
Palin: Alaska Corruption 'Embarrassing'
Palin: Motherhood, Childhood Influences and Gender as an Issue
Palin: Hillary and the Perceived Whine
Palin: The Reluctant Beauty Queen
Palin: Alaska Corruption 'Embarrassing'
Wednesday, September 3, 2008
An Integrated Republic
They tell you they are not going to tax your family.
No, they're just going to tax "businesses"! So unless you buy something from a "business", like groceries or clothes or gasoline ... or unless you get a paycheck from a big or a small "business", don't worry ... it's not going to affect you.
They say they are not going to take any water out of your side of the bucket, just the "other" side of the bucket! That's their idea of tax reform.
My friends, we need a leader who stands on principle.
-- Fred Thompson, Keynote speaker, RNC, September 2, 2008
This metaphor says it all - in economics, in justice, in cultural values - whatever takes root in our society.
Just as slavery in the 1800s exacted its toll on the whole country, anyone who is not free to forge his purpose out of hardship or out of success cannot rise far abiding slavery. All live in and dance around the diminished possibility and spirit of one of their kind. When one man is not allowed by force to be a man in the fullest sense of the word - in the sense that he is the captain of his soul - no man can.
The idea that one can take from the freedom of the people in one half of the bucket to increase the freedom of the other half of the bucket is folly - pure and simple. It can't be done
How, is it said, can it be done? By instituting slavery. Taxation is Forced Labor for multitudes of programs you never chose nor would ever choose. It didn't work in the 1800s and it won't work in the 2000s.
Political freedom, including economic freedom, is how you fill the bucket. But some think with small minds.
No, they're just going to tax "businesses"! So unless you buy something from a "business", like groceries or clothes or gasoline ... or unless you get a paycheck from a big or a small "business", don't worry ... it's not going to affect you.
They say they are not going to take any water out of your side of the bucket, just the "other" side of the bucket! That's their idea of tax reform.
My friends, we need a leader who stands on principle.
-- Fred Thompson, Keynote speaker, RNC, September 2, 2008
This metaphor says it all - in economics, in justice, in cultural values - whatever takes root in our society.
Just as slavery in the 1800s exacted its toll on the whole country, anyone who is not free to forge his purpose out of hardship or out of success cannot rise far abiding slavery. All live in and dance around the diminished possibility and spirit of one of their kind. When one man is not allowed by force to be a man in the fullest sense of the word - in the sense that he is the captain of his soul - no man can.
The idea that one can take from the freedom of the people in one half of the bucket to increase the freedom of the other half of the bucket is folly - pure and simple. It can't be done
How, is it said, can it be done? By instituting slavery. Taxation is Forced Labor for multitudes of programs you never chose nor would ever choose. It didn't work in the 1800s and it won't work in the 2000s.
Political freedom, including economic freedom, is how you fill the bucket. But some think with small minds.
LIMITED
I am riding on a limited express,
one of the crack trains of the nation.
Hurtling across the prairie into blue
haze and dark air go fifteen
all-steel coaches holding a thousand people.
(All the coaches shall be scrap and rust
and all the men and women laughing
in the diners and sleepers shall
pass to ashes.)
I ask a man in the smoker where
he is going and he answers: "Omaha."
Carl Sandberg, The Chicago Poems, 1916
Monday, September 1, 2008
Referendum on One's Sense of Life
This election is coming down to a referendum on the candidates' "sense of life." A sense of life is a sub-conscious appraisal of man and of existence.
Which do you choose?
The candidate that whines and parades his own and other people's sores as a virtue and offers excuses when he doesn't accomplish the results he said he was going to accomplish, or the candidate who takes what life deals him/her in stride and accomplishes real results?
The candidate who obfuscates on everything and works hard to not let you know who he is or the one that clarifies and is willing to let you know everything about who he/she is?
The candidate who deals with people to be manipulated and used, or the candidate who will offer herself for investigation if you think she did something wrong?
The candidate who is afraid of what you will think of his past such that he has thrown overboard his supporters and "friends" and isolated himself, or the one who is not afraid of his/her past and has plenty of real support and is not isolated?
The candidate who has to seek the support of unthinking mobs counting on their numbers to affirm his validity, or the candidate who is willing for you to judge him/her on his merits?
The candidate who has trouble conveying his patriotism by his actions and his past when there should be no doubt about the issue, or the candidate who without a doubt is patriotic?
Given that the candidates are so starkly different in this issue, one’s vote this year is also a referendum on one’s own sense of life.
We get to choose. Which will it be?
Which do you choose?
The candidate that whines and parades his own and other people's sores as a virtue and offers excuses when he doesn't accomplish the results he said he was going to accomplish, or the candidate who takes what life deals him/her in stride and accomplishes real results?
The candidate who obfuscates on everything and works hard to not let you know who he is or the one that clarifies and is willing to let you know everything about who he/she is?
The candidate who deals with people to be manipulated and used, or the candidate who will offer herself for investigation if you think she did something wrong?
The candidate who is afraid of what you will think of his past such that he has thrown overboard his supporters and "friends" and isolated himself, or the one who is not afraid of his/her past and has plenty of real support and is not isolated?
The candidate who has to seek the support of unthinking mobs counting on their numbers to affirm his validity, or the candidate who is willing for you to judge him/her on his merits?
The candidate who has trouble conveying his patriotism by his actions and his past when there should be no doubt about the issue, or the candidate who without a doubt is patriotic?
Given that the candidates are so starkly different in this issue, one’s vote this year is also a referendum on one’s own sense of life.
We get to choose. Which will it be?
Sunday, August 31, 2008
Who Among Us Cannot Respond to This Spirit
This from the London Times Online. This woman has people jumping to their feet as their positive response to values. Now there is something to fight for. This is the spirit I know as America. It's the fuel of all of life. Viva Palin!! Viva Life!! Viva America!!
When Sarah Palin stepped into the spotlight as John McCain’s running mate in Dayton, Ohio, and promised that women could “shatter that glass ceiling once and for all”, it was an electrifying moment in a presidential election that had already produced its share of upsets and surprises.
History was on the march again the morning after Barack Obama became the first African-American to accept his party’s White House nomination. After the fireworks, the 80,000-strong crowd who had cheered Obama to the skies at the Mile High stadium in Denver woke up with a hangover.
“We may be seeing the first woman president. As a Democrat, I am reeling,” said Camille Paglia, the cultural critic. “That was the best political speech I have ever seen delivered by an American woman politician. Palin is as tough as nails.”
With her beehive hairdo and retro specs, Palin, 44, has a “naughty librarian vibe”, according to Craig Ferguson, the Scottish comedian who stars on late-night US television. However, the selection of Palin, the governor of Alaska and a mother of five, as the first female Republican vice-presidential nominee is no joke for the Democrats.
Rush Limbaugh, the conservative radio chat show host, exulted, “We’re the ones with a babe on the ticket” — one, moreover, with a reputation as a tax-cutter and corruption buster in her job as the first woman governor of Alaska.
Palin’s selection on the eve of the Republican convention in St Paul, Minnesota, has set the stage for an epic battle for the votes of women, African-Americans, evangelical Christians and the young. The demographic wars that dominated the contest between Obama and Hillary Clinton are now set to be replicated in the national election.
Will America fall in love with Palin or will she fizzle, like Dan Quayle, the vice-president to George Bush Sr who could not spell “potatoe”? Can she help McCain to defeat Obama, a modern political phenomenon, who drew a record-shattering television audience of nearly 40m — more than the Olympics opening ceremony in Beijing — to watch his convention speech?
“Good Lord, we had barely 12 hours of Democrat optimism,” said Paglia. “It was a stunningly timed piece of PR by the Republicans.”
Whether Palin’s selection is more than a political stunt depends on how she handles the electoral pressure cooker. With the election in November, there is no time for on-the-job training. Karl Rove, Bush’s former aide, offered a guarded welcome to the “gun-packing, hockey-playing” governor, sayhing: “We’ll get a taste in the next five days of how well she does in the 62 days that follow.”
After Obama’s acceptance speech was wiped from the front pages, even he was forced to acknowledge that she “seems like a compelling person . . . with a terrific personal story”. Republicans are hailing their potential new vice-president as the all-American girl of their dreams.
Palin is gunning for the 18m women who voted for Hillary Clinton — a third of whom have not made up their mind to back Obama, according to the latest polls. McCain specifically deployed the language of feminism and civil rights when announcing her candidacy. “She stands up for what’s right and she doesn’t let anyone tell her to sit down,” he said.
Palin’s parents learnt that she had been selected by McCain while they were heading for a remote camp in Alaska to hunt caribou. “I was speechless,” her father said. The skin of a grizzly bear that he shot drapes the sofa in her office.
The more Republicans examined Palin’s record, the more they liked it, although some are fearful of buyer’s remorse. She was born in the conservative heartland of Idaho before moving to Alaska as a baby. At school she was nicknamed Sarah Barracuda on the basketball court because she was so competitive and she led the prayers before each game.
She was a “hockey mom” who cut her teeth at the parent-teacher association before becoming mayor of Wasilla, a suburb of Anchorage with a population under 7,000. In 2006 she beat the corrupt male establishment in Alaska to win the governorship. She opposes same-sex marriage, but one of her first acts in office was to veto a bill blocking health benefits for gay lovers of public employees.
She hunts, ice-fishes and is a crack shot who knows how to fire an M16 rifle. “I was raised in a family where gender was not going to be an issue,” she said. “The girls did what the boys did. Apparently in Alaska that’s quite commonplace.” No softy, she sued to stop the federal government making polar bears an endangered species and favours drilling for oil in the Arctic wildlife refuge. However, she also levied a windfall tax on oil companies.
Palin was glamorous enough to have entered beauty contests to earn money for college. She was crowned Miss Wasilla in her home town and was runner-up in the 1984 Miss Alaska contest. “They made us line up in bathing suits and turn our backs so the male judges could look at our butts. I couldn’t believe it,” she told Vogue, more amused than outraged.
Counterbalancing McCain’s reputation as a political dinosaur, Palin smoked pot when it was legal in Alaska, admitting, “I can’t claim a Bill Clinton and say I never inhaled”, and her children, Track, 19, Bristol, 17, Willow, 13, Piper, 7, and Trig, four months, have hippie-sounding names. Track, who joined the US infantry in September last year, is about to be deployed to Iraq. “It has really opened my eyes to international events and how war impacts everyday Americans like us,” she said.
On stage in Ohio, the Palin family looked every bit as photogenic as the Obamas on their big night in Denver. Todd, her rugged husband, is part Yupik Eskimo and is four-time champion of the 2,000-mile Iron Dog snowmobile race. If that is not macho enough, he is a member of the steelworkers’ union and a seasonal oil production operator for BP, from which he earned $93,000 last year. He also helps to run the family’s commercial fishing business. They eloped in 1988 to avoid the cost of a wedding. “We had a bad fishing year so we didn’t have any money,” he said.
Like his wife, he is able to swap the traditional roles. “My husband loves being a dad as much as I love being a mom,” Palin said. “I’ve got great help there.”
She needs it. They “wanted enough kids for a basketball team”, she once said, but Trig was born this year with Down’s syndrome. Palin knew there were complications while she was pregnant but never considered an abortion. When he was born, she said, “I’m looking at him right now and I see perfection. Yeah, he has an extra chromosome. I keep thinking: in our world, what is normal and what is perfect?” Undaunted, she held a meeting as governor three days after giving birth. “I just put down the BlackBerrys and pick up the breast pump,” she said of her life as a working mother.
Left-wing websites such as the Daily Kos are leading the chorus of disapproval for now. “Having had two children at home at the age of four months, I know how much help they need even without unfortunate medical conditions,” said one tut-tutter.
Republican women, however, are delighted by Palin’s example. Kellyanne Conway, 41, a Republican pollster and mother of three, said, “I really feel mother knows best without the peanut gallery giving unsolicited advice. She strongly conveys to women today that you don’t have to choose between a successful career and motherhood. You do have to make sacrifices, but you can have it all.”
Evangelical Christians could turn out in droves for Palin, a member of Feminists for Life who opposes abortion even in cases of rape or incest, if she maintains her promise.
Deborah Fikes, a board member of the National Association of Evangelicals, said: “I would just trust that the child is not neglected in any way. There are millions of women who work. Why is it that the father cannot provide the same standard of care? There has been an evolving view of working women even in conservative Christian circles.”
Fikes said Palin was an inspiring choice: “I didn’t think the Republicans would pick a female candidate for another decade, but John McCain is not a typical conservative leader.”
Other conservative women have pointed out that Palin was a much more effective counterweight to the super-competent and glamorous Michelle Obama than Cindy McCain, wife of the Republican candidate.
Cindy, a beer industry heiress who bought the seven homes that McCain cannot remember and once said the only way to travel around her home state of Arizona was by private plane, was under fire last week from her own half-sister. She said she was voting for Obama after Cindy had repeatedly claimed to be an “only child” and never expressed regret that her father had ignored her half-sister in his will.
In fact, even though the Clinton aides could barely conceal their satisfaction when she was chosen, the woman who Palin upstages most of all is Hillary. If Obama wins the election, Hillary will have to wait until 2016 to stand again. And if he loses, Palin will be first in line to become America’s first woman president.
Sarah Palin: conservatives find the girl of their dreams
The Alaskan governor’s family life and political views press the right’s buttons
Sarah Baxter - August 31, 2008
When Sarah Palin stepped into the spotlight as John McCain’s running mate in Dayton, Ohio, and promised that women could “shatter that glass ceiling once and for all”, it was an electrifying moment in a presidential election that had already produced its share of upsets and surprises.History was on the march again the morning after Barack Obama became the first African-American to accept his party’s White House nomination. After the fireworks, the 80,000-strong crowd who had cheered Obama to the skies at the Mile High stadium in Denver woke up with a hangover.
“We may be seeing the first woman president. As a Democrat, I am reeling,” said Camille Paglia, the cultural critic. “That was the best political speech I have ever seen delivered by an American woman politician. Palin is as tough as nails.”
With her beehive hairdo and retro specs, Palin, 44, has a “naughty librarian vibe”, according to Craig Ferguson, the Scottish comedian who stars on late-night US television. However, the selection of Palin, the governor of Alaska and a mother of five, as the first female Republican vice-presidential nominee is no joke for the Democrats.
Rush Limbaugh, the conservative radio chat show host, exulted, “We’re the ones with a babe on the ticket” — one, moreover, with a reputation as a tax-cutter and corruption buster in her job as the first woman governor of Alaska.
Palin’s selection on the eve of the Republican convention in St Paul, Minnesota, has set the stage for an epic battle for the votes of women, African-Americans, evangelical Christians and the young. The demographic wars that dominated the contest between Obama and Hillary Clinton are now set to be replicated in the national election.
Will America fall in love with Palin or will she fizzle, like Dan Quayle, the vice-president to George Bush Sr who could not spell “potatoe”? Can she help McCain to defeat Obama, a modern political phenomenon, who drew a record-shattering television audience of nearly 40m — more than the Olympics opening ceremony in Beijing — to watch his convention speech?
“Good Lord, we had barely 12 hours of Democrat optimism,” said Paglia. “It was a stunningly timed piece of PR by the Republicans.”
Whether Palin’s selection is more than a political stunt depends on how she handles the electoral pressure cooker. With the election in November, there is no time for on-the-job training. Karl Rove, Bush’s former aide, offered a guarded welcome to the “gun-packing, hockey-playing” governor, sayhing: “We’ll get a taste in the next five days of how well she does in the 62 days that follow.”
After Obama’s acceptance speech was wiped from the front pages, even he was forced to acknowledge that she “seems like a compelling person . . . with a terrific personal story”. Republicans are hailing their potential new vice-president as the all-American girl of their dreams.
Palin is gunning for the 18m women who voted for Hillary Clinton — a third of whom have not made up their mind to back Obama, according to the latest polls. McCain specifically deployed the language of feminism and civil rights when announcing her candidacy. “She stands up for what’s right and she doesn’t let anyone tell her to sit down,” he said.
Palin’s parents learnt that she had been selected by McCain while they were heading for a remote camp in Alaska to hunt caribou. “I was speechless,” her father said. The skin of a grizzly bear that he shot drapes the sofa in her office.
The more Republicans examined Palin’s record, the more they liked it, although some are fearful of buyer’s remorse. She was born in the conservative heartland of Idaho before moving to Alaska as a baby. At school she was nicknamed Sarah Barracuda on the basketball court because she was so competitive and she led the prayers before each game.
She was a “hockey mom” who cut her teeth at the parent-teacher association before becoming mayor of Wasilla, a suburb of Anchorage with a population under 7,000. In 2006 she beat the corrupt male establishment in Alaska to win the governorship. She opposes same-sex marriage, but one of her first acts in office was to veto a bill blocking health benefits for gay lovers of public employees.
She hunts, ice-fishes and is a crack shot who knows how to fire an M16 rifle. “I was raised in a family where gender was not going to be an issue,” she said. “The girls did what the boys did. Apparently in Alaska that’s quite commonplace.” No softy, she sued to stop the federal government making polar bears an endangered species and favours drilling for oil in the Arctic wildlife refuge. However, she also levied a windfall tax on oil companies.
Palin was glamorous enough to have entered beauty contests to earn money for college. She was crowned Miss Wasilla in her home town and was runner-up in the 1984 Miss Alaska contest. “They made us line up in bathing suits and turn our backs so the male judges could look at our butts. I couldn’t believe it,” she told Vogue, more amused than outraged.
Counterbalancing McCain’s reputation as a political dinosaur, Palin smoked pot when it was legal in Alaska, admitting, “I can’t claim a Bill Clinton and say I never inhaled”, and her children, Track, 19, Bristol, 17, Willow, 13, Piper, 7, and Trig, four months, have hippie-sounding names. Track, who joined the US infantry in September last year, is about to be deployed to Iraq. “It has really opened my eyes to international events and how war impacts everyday Americans like us,” she said.
On stage in Ohio, the Palin family looked every bit as photogenic as the Obamas on their big night in Denver. Todd, her rugged husband, is part Yupik Eskimo and is four-time champion of the 2,000-mile Iron Dog snowmobile race. If that is not macho enough, he is a member of the steelworkers’ union and a seasonal oil production operator for BP, from which he earned $93,000 last year. He also helps to run the family’s commercial fishing business. They eloped in 1988 to avoid the cost of a wedding. “We had a bad fishing year so we didn’t have any money,” he said.
Like his wife, he is able to swap the traditional roles. “My husband loves being a dad as much as I love being a mom,” Palin said. “I’ve got great help there.”
She needs it. They “wanted enough kids for a basketball team”, she once said, but Trig was born this year with Down’s syndrome. Palin knew there were complications while she was pregnant but never considered an abortion. When he was born, she said, “I’m looking at him right now and I see perfection. Yeah, he has an extra chromosome. I keep thinking: in our world, what is normal and what is perfect?” Undaunted, she held a meeting as governor three days after giving birth. “I just put down the BlackBerrys and pick up the breast pump,” she said of her life as a working mother.
Left-wing websites such as the Daily Kos are leading the chorus of disapproval for now. “Having had two children at home at the age of four months, I know how much help they need even without unfortunate medical conditions,” said one tut-tutter.
Republican women, however, are delighted by Palin’s example. Kellyanne Conway, 41, a Republican pollster and mother of three, said, “I really feel mother knows best without the peanut gallery giving unsolicited advice. She strongly conveys to women today that you don’t have to choose between a successful career and motherhood. You do have to make sacrifices, but you can have it all.”
Evangelical Christians could turn out in droves for Palin, a member of Feminists for Life who opposes abortion even in cases of rape or incest, if she maintains her promise.
Deborah Fikes, a board member of the National Association of Evangelicals, said: “I would just trust that the child is not neglected in any way. There are millions of women who work. Why is it that the father cannot provide the same standard of care? There has been an evolving view of working women even in conservative Christian circles.”
Fikes said Palin was an inspiring choice: “I didn’t think the Republicans would pick a female candidate for another decade, but John McCain is not a typical conservative leader.”
Other conservative women have pointed out that Palin was a much more effective counterweight to the super-competent and glamorous Michelle Obama than Cindy McCain, wife of the Republican candidate.
Cindy, a beer industry heiress who bought the seven homes that McCain cannot remember and once said the only way to travel around her home state of Arizona was by private plane, was under fire last week from her own half-sister. She said she was voting for Obama after Cindy had repeatedly claimed to be an “only child” and never expressed regret that her father had ignored her half-sister in his will.
In fact, even though the Clinton aides could barely conceal their satisfaction when she was chosen, the woman who Palin upstages most of all is Hillary. If Obama wins the election, Hillary will have to wait until 2016 to stand again. And if he loses, Palin will be first in line to become America’s first woman president.
Saturday, August 30, 2008
Sarah Palin!
A fresh breeze blew in from the north. It came from Alaska. Is this oxygen at last? Can we now be free of the coils and calculations of Machievelli and Alinsky?
Sarah Palin is a brand new face. I immediately was taken with her can-do attitude and spirit. She's fun, funny, and down to earth. Elitism is not her style.
Her breadth of knowledge of the issues surrounding energy production is impressive. Her willingness to clean up Alaska's corrupt government, including members of her own Republican Party, is totally refreshing, even astonishing given the corruption to which we have become accustomed in the lower 48.
She is naturally enrolling and doesn't need a teleprompter to make a good impression. She is funny, charming and straight forward. She doesn't weave, dodge, hedge nor artfully straddle the fence. There is no mask. This is the source of the oxygen.
Listening to her I found myself laughing - that joyous laughter of the unexpected. My first thought? Thank God!
She actually used the word capitalism. She wants it, depends on it for the State of Alaska.
She is married to a "sloper," a person who goes to the North Slope to work for an oil company for a week at a time and then comes home for a week. She has five children, one of which has Down's Syndrome and is not in this picture.
McCain refreshed the political landscape and I find myself hungry to learn more about this candidate - the one with loads of vitality.
Friday, August 29, 2008
An Angry Avenger
My concern is for the spirit, the motor of a man’s existence. I hold that the possibility exists for man, by embracing sound values and good premises and by discarding the false values and fallacious premises, to accomplish what he wants and enjoy his personal power in whatever situations he may encounter. In this vein I offer my comment on Obama’s acceptance speech.
Obama's speech was the clearest, most vehement attack on the American Sense of Life that I've ever seen at this level of politics. That speech was grounded in a hatred of the human spirit - the creative, productive, rational, success-oriented, loving life spirit – that is hard to fathom.
Maybe this will give you the idea. A man who gets up, doesn’t like his job much (at best) and goes to work anyway out of necessity is on the right track. If he has nothing to show for it, that adds stars on his chest. An even "greater" garnishment is if he is sick or has as a "heavenly" host of sick relatives. This man is clearly headed for heaven and has already made it into Obama’s heaven. These are his heroes.
What is wrong with this picture?
Anyone who succeeds and is happy knows that regardless of whether the government gives you money, pays for your doctor, puts food on your table or even flies you around the country there is no spiritual redemption there nor sense of being a hero. In fact except in rare cases these benefits completely eclipse the possibly of ever discovering your own power. They most often seal your fate as a walking dead man.
Obama is the quintessential expression of a self-imposed victim status as a way of life. Now he advocates this spiritual ideal as the American way of life.
By the grace of his own hand, which the American electorate may grant him, he is going to avenge the poor in spirit by exacting punishment from all those who are in the way.
From whom? Ultimately every American who creates his life and seeks authentic values.
You see, a victim never trusts a non-victim, an achiever. The achiever engenders anger in the victim by virtue of his existence. Mostly the achiever is busy achieving values for his life. The victim, on the other hand, thinks no one cares. The victim, in line with his view of the world, transforms himself at some point in his life into the dominator to make the achiever, another victim or himself a victim. This is the motivation of criminals and thugs the world over. It is the motivation of dictators and can be the motivation of Presidents.
Obama’s major attack is against those EVIL corporations and RICH people. Notice he does not distinguish between those who exist on government handouts and protective regulation and those who don't. He doesn't distinguish between the parasites and the providers. He doesn't distinguish between the choices leading to resignation and death and the choices leading to life. He doesn’t distinguish any of this. He assumes HIS world view is right. And Obama was oh so righteous last night. I thought I had gone to a fundamentalist church.
He doesn't care about choices - at least not yours. The subtext of Obama's message is COERCION - PHYSICAL FORCE. He is going to force HIS way on each and every citizen of this country at the point of a gun, the only means the government has to force people to do anything, and cancel out the principles that have distinguished us.
He doesn’t recognize that today, the largest criminal among us – in the sense of using force on people which has nothing to do with the purpose for which it was founded – is the government. Instead of removing all of those government devices and releasing the people to rise as far as their talent and productivity will take them, he is going to be THE ONE. THE ONE we are waiting for. He will be the enforcer! He will bring those bastards to their knees. For what? HIS ideal.
His record for taking by government means stands unblemished. His record for producing results for those he claims to care about does not. All the people he cites as worthy of our utmost concern are only a means to his end, POWER. By his own hand he has shown this to be true.
If you buy his line, then I have a bridge to sell you.
I've pointed out in this blog how carefully Obama has constructed a facade which covers his true purpose. Last night gave us a glimpse behind his mask. Last night it was easy to see him speaking from the pulpit of Reverend Wright, glossing over the terror of his associate William Ayers and uniting with the anti-life dictums of the philosophers he has taken to heart.
You have a man here who wants to exact by FORCE the products of the creators and producers of jobs, big businessmen and small. Don’t be fooled by his pandering to small business. By the time he gets done enacting his programs, a small businessman won’t be able to afford an employee. He cannot see that when he cripples men at the root of why they would create and produce, he also kills the opportunity for the very people he says he wants to help.
I couldn't help wondering if Michael Phelps has too many gold medals. How many of those does Obama want? Does Michael Jordan have too many physical characteristics and too much determination to excel that he needs to be punished too?
Should Einstein have been partially lobotomized? Or Bill Gates forced to work out of nothing more than the garage he began in? Should Wall-Mart be forced to give up their earned power to bring products to the American consumer at a lower price? And what about Henry Ford. He must have been horribly evil given the current global warming hysteria.
What about those evil pharmaceutical companies who produce life saving drugs? Or brain surgeons who put in years of long hours to do what they so love that benefits people all over the world? The list is endless. Obama never mentioned one jot of this achievement. Nada.
He will take it all in service of his hatred of success – the source of all suffering for the poor. Cannot it be seen how his whole idea depends on envy? He is counting on the envy of the "have-nots" and the guilt of the "haves."
He projects no shining city on the hill - no place in American life great to achieve. No place where a man can be acknowledged for a job well done. It can never be said because he must be kept off balance in case he shall be used. And this is true of himself as well.
Obama bristles when anyone questions his patriotism. He did that again last night when he spurted lightning bolts from his eyes and forceful words from his mouth ("Don't you or anyone ever question my patriotism!") at John McCain over their recent bout over patriotism.
I'm absolutely clear that Barack Obama is an enemy of the success spirit of the United States at its root. It is clear to me that he is attacking this: "That all men are created equal (in their eternal nature as a human being) endowed with the unalienable rights to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness."
My conclusion? Choosing this angry avenger is going to cost all of us.
All picks from yahoo.com.
Thursday, August 28, 2008
Showboat Obama Loves Mobs
This image says to me that Obama loves crowds - not mobs. But given the way he and his campaign is operating to quash The American Issues Project's video and Stanley Kurtz, contributing editor to the National Review who is now revealing the relationship of William Ayers and Barack Obama, I'm now persuaded he loves the mob.Why?
Because he must! A man who does not deal in facts must get you to accept him by relating personal evaluations which you cannot argue with OR he must appeal to masses who eschew critical thinking - a mob.
(This last is Argument from Popularity, a logical fallacy. Yes, millions of people can be wrong. Both of the above techniques are a subset of Appeals to Emotion, a larger category of non-reason.)
The article below by the Chicago Tribune is about Obama's response to WGN's scheduling of an interview with Stanley Kurtz. WGN called the Obama Campaign for a spokesman and it declined the request. And this is not their first action against the charges now being constructed regarding Obama's lying regarding his relationship with the unrepentant domestic terrorist, William Ayers. Obama's Campaign has sent letters implying the loss of broadcast license to intimidate all the major TV stations who might show the American Issues Project video.
The one thing the Obama Campaign and Obama himself is unwilling to do is tell the truth. Notice the language of the emails sent to WGN. Below that notice how there are no facts provided in Obama's countervideo, directed erroneously to McCain rather than AIP.
This is a battle that promises to become huge because Obama is willing to quash our Individual Right of the Freedom of Speech - the First Ammendment to the Constitution of the United States. (And Bill Clinton said Obama is now ready to defend the Constitution? I don't think so!)
Obama campaign confronts WGN radio
by John McCormick and Steve Schmadeke
Chicago Tribune Washington Bureau
Posted August 27, 2008 11:02 PM
DENVER -- Sen. Barack Obama's campaign organized its supporters Wednesday night to confront Tribune-owned WGN-AM in Chicago for having a critic of the Illinois Democrat on its air.
"WGN radio is giving right-wing hatchet man Stanley Kurtz a forum to air his baseless, fear-mongering terrorist smears," Obama's campaign wrote in an e-mail to supporters. "He's currently scheduled to spend a solid two-hour block from 9:00 to 11:00 p.m. pushing lies, distortions, and manipulations about Barack and University of Illinois professor William Ayers."
Kurtz, a conservative writer, recently wrote an article for the National Review that looked at Obama's ties to Ayers, a former 1960s radical.
The magazine had been blocked in its initial attempts to obtain records from the University of Illinois at Chicago regarding the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, which Obama chaired and Ayers co-founded. The school later reserved its position and made the records available Tuesday.
Obama's campaign urged supporters to call the radio station to complain.
"Tell WGN that by providing Kurtz with airtime, they are legitimizing baseless attacks from a smear-merchant and lowering the standards of political discourse," the note said.
"It is absolutely unacceptable that WGN would give a slimy character assassin like Kurtz time for his divisive, destructive ranting on our public airwaves," the note continued. "At the very least, they should offer sane, honest rebuttal to every one of Kurtz's lies."
Zack Christenson, executive producer of "Extension 720 with Milt Rosenburg," said the response was strong.
"I would say this is the biggest response we've ever got from a campaign or a candidate," he said. "This is really unprecedented with the show, the way that people are flooding the calls and our email boxes."
Christenson said the Obama campaign was asked to have someone appear on the show and declined the request.
"He got into the files just yesterday, so we wanted to have him on to find out what he found. And, if at all possible, we wanted to get the Obama campaign, to get their side of the story," Christenson said. "That's why the uproar is kind of amazing, because we wanted the Obama campaign's take as well."
The show's producer said the calls dropped off after the show's first hour. He did not have a count of calls, but said it was "non-stop."
Obama's campaign has launched similar offensives against stations that have run campaign ads that it did not like.
Here is Obama's video response to AIP aired August 25, 2008.
I can see the bumper stickers now.
We are now going to see the proof that Obama lied. The only defense to a charge is to either counter it with facts or smear it. See my ** (footnote) on "Swiftboating".
Obama not only lied, he is a vicious systematic liar. Lying, shading, obfuscating, and pooh-poohing is everywhere in his telling of his past. Everywhere. And this is why Obama loves mobs. They, and the relating of his personal experiences which we cannot argue with, are his defense against reason, purposeful evasion, and the only thing you and I have in common with any other human being: the real world.Monday, August 25, 2008
The "Piercing" Has Begun
Obama has carefully crafted a story about his life and associations; one that leeks like a sieve. The mystery has been so great and so deep that many people, myself included, have been drawn to learn the truth. There are too many clues that something is amiss from his grandiose attempt to configure his politics as spiritual symbolism, metaphor and ideals; his inordinate opinion of himself; his moral equivocation on values regarding the country's very founding and survival; his inability to stand for many of the most important people in his life; and his parrying of Muslims - be they in his family, among his friends or simply fans that would happen to be in a picture of Obama taken at a rally. People are traveling the globe to glean these facts in order to sort out this mystery.
Now a backlash has occurred that threatens Obama's facade. The piercing of this fraud has begun. Here's the first video I've seen.*
Now a backlash has occurred that threatens Obama's facade. The piercing of this fraud has begun. Here's the first video I've seen.*
This was produced by http://www.americanissuesproject.org/.
Naturally the Obama campaign was outraged. They responded by having its lawyers send a threatening letter to all the major TV stations in the country. They demanded the Department of Justice to stop the ads.** They also produced a counter ad. (Obama is also calling for the same against McCain's ads.)
The lawyers for American Issue Project (AIP) were ready since AIP had done its research and written a 160 page report documenting every aspect of their ad before they aired it. The lawyers responded to Obama's letter to the TV stations with their own letter to those stations by showing that the Obama campaign had not proved its claim that the AIP ad was false or misconstrued in any way.
If this story interests you, go to No Quarter. Or Politico.com.
Obama prefers to quash the Individual Right to Free Speech than to blow his created cover. He is simply unwilling to confront the question asked and answer it with verifiable facts. What we are seeing is a Dictator in the making. Not willing to use reason and facts as the final arbiter of his claims, he has no choice but to use force. And he will. If he doesn't get it done now, he will if he is President. Count on it.
* There have also been books, the most extensive documented one that I have run across being Obama Nation by Jerome Corsi, Ph.D. Obama thought it worthy to attempt destruction of this salvo. He published a rebuttal of 40 pages on his campaign website.
**This action is an attempt to prevent Swiftboating. The Swiftboat ads sunk John Kerry in 2004. The Democrats have tried to turn the Swiftboat ads into some kind of evil campaign technique which they call Swiftboating. It was nothing of the kind. It was a group of fellow soldiers of Kerry who knew him and his character and did not think he was of a quality that would be a good President. They exercised their freedom of speech and put together the ads.
The truth is Kerry could have answered the Swiftboat ads with verifiable countervailing facts. He never did. The best he could do was smear the Swiftboaters. The Swiftboat claims stood and Kerry's showboat sunk like a stone. Swiftboating is the most fearsome technique a person can use. It amounts to an assertion based on facts and authenticity that requires countervailing facts to stop its power. Without verifiable facts as the basis for rebuttal, the rebuttal gains no traction.
See "'Extremism' or the Art of Smearing" by Ayn Rand in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal published by The New American Library, 1967, for an analysis of this method of "warfare."
The smear does its damage by initiating a story that is not supported by the facts. By the time the facts disproving the story are assembled, the story has reached a wide audience. On the other hand, if a story is grounded in fact in the first place, it is not a smear. Further if some minor and non-essential facts are discovered to be incorrect, it does not change the essential point of the story.
A smear does not work in the first place nor as a defense against a real story. Although it may do damage, ultimately it destroys the "smearer's" credibility.
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