LQQKING's Newsroom

DO FACTS MATTER

Source:Townhall.com

by Thomas Sowell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yet, today, what are we hearing? That it was the Bush administration "right-wing ideology" of "de-regulation" that set the stage for the financial crisis. Do facts matter?

We also hear that it is the free market that is to blame. But the facts show that it was the government that pressured financial institutions in general to lend to subprime borrowers, with such things as the Community Reinvestment Act and, later, threats of legal action by then Attorney General Janet Reno if the feds did not like the statistics on who was getting loans and who wasn't.

Is that the free market? Or do facts not matter?

Then there is the question of being against the "greed" of CEOs and for "the people." Franklin Raines made $90 million while he was head of Fannie Mae and mismanaging that institution into crisis.

Who in Congress defended Franklin Raines? Liberal Democrats, including Maxine Waters and the Congressional Black Caucus, at least one of whom referred to the "lynching" of Raines, as if it was racist to hold him to the same standard as white CEOs.

Even after he was deposed as head of Fannie Mae, Franklin Raines was consulted this year by the Obama campaign for his advice on housing!

The Washington Post criticized the McCain campaign for calling Raines an adviser to Obama, even though that fact was reported in the Washington Post itself on July 16th. The technicality and the spin here is that Raines is not officially listed as an adviser. But someone who advises is an adviser, whether or not his name appears on a letterhead.

The tie between Barack Obama and Franklin Raines is not all one-way. Obama has been the second-largest recipient of Fannie Mae's financial contributions, right after Senator Christopher Dodd.

But ties between Obama and Raines? Not if you read the mainstream media.

Facts don't matter much politically if they are not reported.

The media alone are not alone in keeping the facts from the public. Republicans, for reasons unknown, don't seem to know what it is to counter-attack. They deserve to lose.

But the country does not deserve to be put in the hands of a glib and cocky know-it-all, who has accomplished absolutely nothing beyond the advancement of his own career with rhetoric, and who has for years allied himself with a succession of people who have openly expressed their hatred of America.

An ACORN Falls from the Tree

SOURCE: National Review

By Ken Blackwell

As negotiations over Congress’s emergency rescue bill continued over the weekend, repeated rumors leaked out that the Democrats were trying to funnel money to a hyper-partisan organization involved in criminal voter fraud. I’m speaking of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now — known by its acronym, ACORN. Although ACORN was cut from the final legislation, it’s important to understand this organization and its long history with, of all people, Barack Obama. And it’s important to see how partisan this emergency legislation has become

As the weekend progressed, reports were constantly emerging of the sticking points preventing a final agreement. One of these reputed points of contention was whether 20 percent of the profit proceedings for asset sales in the future would go to what is called the Housing Trust Fund, subsidizing certain groups for ostensibly nonpartisan activity. One of these groups that this trust supports is ACORN.

ACORN has often been in the news since 2004. Officially, they work to register voters and support housing. In reality, everyone in public life knows that they are hardcore supporters for the Democratic Party, and employ bare-knuckle tactics. Their organization is plagued by repeated investigations of voter fraud and other crimes.

In Ohio, where as secretary of state I oversaw elections for eight years, ACORN has been busy. One ACORN man in Reynoldsburg was indicted on two felony counts of voter fraud, and another was indicted in Columbus. Other such problems surfaced in Cuyahoga County, where criminal investigations are ongoing.

It’s not just Ohio. ACORN personnel are facing criminal charges in over a dozen states. In Washington State, for example, seven ACORN leaders had felony charges filed against them for voter fraud.

And there’s an unexpected twist. One of the organizations accused of pushing banks into making many of the unwise loans at the heart of the current crisis is … ACORN. Now that’s ironic. An organization that possibly contributed to our current financial profits is now being considered to make money off of it. And by “money,” I’m referring to your tax money.

Twice already this year Congress has funneled money to ACORN. Some report that February’s economic stimulus included funds for ACORN, as did the bill to help people struggling with mortgages passed this April.

What deserves closer scrutiny is Barack Obama’s history with ACORN. Obama cites Saul Alinsky, a self-acknowledged radical who advocated extreme acts to achieve social goals, as one of his inspirations. ACORN follows the Saul Alinsky model. After Obama graduated from Harvard, he went to work for ACORN in Chicago. Mr. Obama then became a trainer for ACORN, teaching others how to employ ACORN tactics in voter registration drives.

This ACORN involvement coincides with the increasing partisanship of this situation.

Congressional Democrats, and specifically Mr. Obama, are now saying that the problem underlying all this is “deregulation,” pushed by the Republicans. There are two fundamental flaws with this allegation.

First, this is not deregulation. This is not the private sector. Fannie and Freddie are government creations, that pay their executives millions of dollars but are shielded with your tax money from suffering the downside risk of the market. Engage in racetrack-style financing, they must be strictly controlled. Deregulation is about keeping government from hobbling the private sector and hamstringing its ingenuity and productivity. Deregulation does not apply.

Second,  Republicans have tried to rein in Fannie and Freddie. Republican attempts to reform them in 1999 failed. In 2003, when Alan Greenspan testified about how Fannie and Freddie’s loose practices could endanger our financial system, it was Democrat Barney Frank who said these institutions were fundamentally sound, and should be more aggressive in getting loans to low-income people. In 2005, a Republican reform passed the Senate Banking Committee on a party-line vote, only to be blocked by Democrats from passing the full Senate. And in 2006 when John McCain spoke on the Senate floor of the need to reform Fannie and Freddie immediately, Democrats (including Barack Obama) would not respond.

You can also see where Fannie and Freddie look for protection by where they direct their money. Public records show that the top two recipients of Fannie/Freddie campaign contributions are Sens. Chris Dodd and Barack Obama, taking $165,000 and $126,000, respectively. Dodd, who chairs the Senate Banking Committee, and Mr. Obama, who says he’s going to remedy the whole situation.

It suddenly seems so clear why Democrats want ACORN to get some of the taxpayers’ money. I have unapologetically criticized Republicans, some by name, for out-of-control spending, lack of accountability, and other inexcusable actions that have tarnished the GOP and disserved the nation. And there are other issues that are either both parties’ fault, or no one’s fault.

But here, the Democrats are squarely to blame. They have resisted all attempts at reforming Fannie and Freddie, and pushed those organizations to become ever more reckless in their policies. This made the investments on Wall Street carrying those tainted mortgages go from bad to worse, and now we’re in a crisis and on the verge of a meltdown.

This is inexcusable. And if independent voters figure this out, their outrage over this situation will suddenly be directed against the party that pushed these disastrous policies. So Democrats want ACORN to get as much funding as possible, because they might need some new votes in their column on Election Day.

Voter fraud is in one sense the worst crime against democracy. The sole means of democratically choosing leaders is through voting. Every voter gets an equal vote. Every citizen who is a law-abiding adult has an equal voice in who will govern us. Our vote is sacred. Those engaging in voter fraud are in one sense no different than who intimidated voters at the polls in years past. Voter fraud may not be attended by the suffering that accompanied the beatings and water hoses of those days, but the assault on democracy is no less real.

ACORN is a discredited organization, and far too many of its leaders and workers have been prosecuted for felonies against democracy. The idea that a single dime of taxpayer money would ever go to such a group is an outrage.

And Mr. Obama needs to explain his involvement with them.

— Ken Blackwell, a former Ohio secretary of state, is a senior fellow at the American Civil Rights Union.  He has also served as an undersecretary at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

The Financial Mess: How We Got Here

SOURCE: The American Thinker

by: Abraham H. Miller

"How can you vote Republican when they so messed up the economy?" a liberal friend screams at me with such vehemence that I had to put the phone a full arms length from my ear. Of course, my friend never heard of the Community Reinvestment Act. He is one of those mindless liberals who thinks that George Bush and the Republicans are responsible for everything from Global Warming to Hurricane Katrina to the attempted genocide of the entire black population of New Orleans.

He claims to be informed but he doesn't remember those dire warnings going back nine years ago that the Community Reinvestment Act would eventually cause a major financial and banking crisis in this country.

The Community Reinvestment Act was pushed hard by Bill Clinton, although it originated under Jimmy Carter. Asked about it the other day on one of the morning TV talk shows, Clinton said times back then were different. Fannie and Freddie had lots of money and he (in his infinite wisdom) decided that the money should not go to share holders or to executive compensation, but should be used to put the poor into homes.

As you can imagine, wonderful things happen when the government strong arms corporations as to how they should spend their money and, better yet, how they should assess the qualifications of home buyers. So the country's biggest buyers of mortgages were pressured into lowering the qualifications of applicants, in order to increase the percentage of poor that got mortgages. By 2006, 30% of all mortgages went to people who in any other circumstances wouldn't qualify.

Now the political left would like you to know that the CRA-controlled institutions did not lend the largest percentage of sub-prime mortgages. But that's information by deception, because the mortgage business is a competitive business. If the government strong arms one part of the business, the other part will respond. And strong arm was what the Clinton administration did, even using the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to pressure banks to lend more money to the disadvantaged. Caught in the act, a spokesman for the office noted that its abuse of power was "for the best of intentions:" the same inclination used to pave the road to hell.

In the short run, all sorts of money was to be made by lowering standards and processing sub-prime loans for the poor. The Wall Street Journal raised concerns about Fannie's and Freddie's capital requirements. Senator Phil Gramm (R, TX) raised issues about community pressure groups, such as Barack Obama's ACORN, extorting money from banks by holding their feet to the CRA fire, and threatening to militate against mergers and acquisitions unless the banks entered into preferential agreements with community groups.

The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act cut down on CRA reporting requirements and upped the ante for groups such as ACORN, forcing them to disclose their relationships with local banks.

Fannie and Freddie became big contributors to the Democratic Party. The sub-prime business paid off-at least while the bubble was growing. And the Kerry, Hillary and Obama campaigns have numbered among the leading recipients of the largess of the two mortgage lenders.

Franklin Raines, the Fannie Mae C.E.O. from 1999 to 2004, had been budget director in the Clinton administration. The left would not like you to be reminded that Raines has been a consultant to the Obama campaign, according to the Washington Post, and that Freddie and Fannie number among the top 5 contributors to Obama's run for the presidency. Raines is being sued for the recovery of 50 million in compensation acquired by the alleged manipulation of Fannie's books. Now, that's not change we can believe in. That's Washington as we have come to know and "love" it.

The Bush administration in 2003 tried to change the system, to no avail. Congressman Barney Frank, (D, MA ) was in the forefront of stopping the Bush proposal to take control out of Fannie and Freddie and put it into a third overseeing organization. Frank too has emerged in the current crisis as one of the major critics of the administration.

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan continued to raise the alarm over Fannie's and Freddie's weak capitalization. His concerns were ignored. Former Congressman Michael Oxley (R,OH), then chairman of the House Financial Services Committee and co-author of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, introduced a bill in 2005 in response to the growing problem, but Fannie and Freddie put their lobbyists to work and the bill died.

Democratic Senator Chris Dodd, who is now Chairman of the Banking Committee and who appears along side Majority Leader Harry Reid on television to discuss the current bailout negotiations, has had harsh words for the Bush administration for its alleged role in the crisis.

But the rest of us should have some harsh words for Senator Dodd. After all, the Bush administration in 2003 and Senator Phil Gramm even earlier, in 1999, had been working to change the system. Dodd, like Obama, has been a big recipient of campaign funds from Fannie and Freddie, organizations that Dodd oversees. Dodd has apparently been more consumed with campaign contributions from the mortgage giants than the responsibilities of oversight.

When I point out the long trail of Obama's corruption stretching back to his days in the Illinois legislature, my liberal friends invoke moral equivalence, "They're all corrupt."

There is no shame among the left. When they think Bush is responsible for the collapse of the banking system, they scream at you. When you point out that the Community Reinvestment Act created a pattern of abuse that now threatens the entire financial system, without hesitation liberals say, "They're all corrupt."

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation even has a web site so you could see how well your bank is meeting its obligations under the CRA. Those of you who had money in Washington Mutual, which just went belly up, will be happy to know that WaMu, over the five individual reporting periods, had almost exemplary ratings on its commitment to CRA. That should give WaMu depositors great joy, to compensate for the financial mess they may be in. If WaMu had been less responsive to the CRA and more responsive to the market, maybe it wouldn't be insolvent.

I am not suggesting that the CRA by itself led to the current crisis, but the CRA was the first and most important part of the food chain. The CRA caused the expansion in the number of questionable loans that lending institutions made, but Wall Street and insurance underwriters were all to willing to package these loans, enhance their ratings through convenient exercises in fantasy, sell them, and insure them with reserves that were more inadequate than the incomes of the people who got the loans in the first place..

The best thing that can emerge from the current financial crisis is the realization that the government needs to stop directing economic decision making. In a sense, the government is putting out a fire it started when it both created the CRA and assessed lending institutions by how well they were doing in response to the program. When Clinton decided, in his usual arrogance, that he knew better than the market how banks should lend money, the seeds were sown for the current financial disaster.

If you want to blame Bush for the current crisis, it might make you feel good, reinforce your sense of how the world works, enable you to find a meeting of the minds when you next engage your liberal friends over wine and quiche, but like so many things you believe and which make you feel good, it has no correspondence to reality.

Source: The American Thinker

Clowns in the Cockpit

By Herbert E. Meyer

As you've probably noticed by now, the twenty-first century has gotten off to a rocky start.  In 2001, on September 11, we were attacked.  And now our country's financial system is collapsing.  This makes for two "unimaginable" events within a decade.

How could 19 hijackers succeed against the world's greatest military power?  And how could history's strongest and most productive economy seize up virtually overnight?  Of course, there are complicated and highly technical explanations for each of these disasters.  Some books have already been written about the causes of 9-11, and others are sure to come along in the years and decades ahead.  No doubt publishers are already signing contracts for books about how today's financial meltdown happened.

But if you put both "unimaginable" events together, you'll see something that the experts won't ever see -- or won't say out loud because it sounds too simplistic and unsophisticated.  Let me use an analogy to illuminate the common thread - what liberals would call the "root cause" -- that runs through both these "unimaginable" events:

Most of us fly from time to time, and the airplanes that carry us around the country, and the world, are marvelous pieces of equipment.  Today's jetliners are the products of centuries of science, technology, business acumen and financial prowess.  They are big, powerful -- and remarkably safe; the back-up systems have back-up systems.

The Pilots Pay Attention

These jetliners are also complicated pieces of equipment, which is why the pilots who fly them are not only technically competent but intellectually capable of concentrating on doing their jobs well.  These pilots aren't sitting in the cockpit working on The New York Times crossword puzzle, or playing music on their iPods, or fooling around with the flight attendants.  They are paying absolute, total attention to bringing their plane and its passengers safely to their destinations.  If they see the plane drifting just one degree off course, or if they see the oil pressure in an engine dropping even slightly, they deal swiftly and effectively with this very minor problem before it becomes a major problem -- or perhaps a problem too big to resolve without catastrophe.  It's hard work, and this is why pilots are exhausted even after an uneventful flight.

A modern country is like a jetliner.  It's the product of centuries of human development, and it's a marvelous piece of equipment.  In a sense, even the back-up systems have back-up systems.  But a modern country is also a very complicated piece of equipment.  Managing it successfully -- in other words, bringing its citizens safely into the future -- takes both technical competence and, perhaps even more important, intense concentration.  You've got to spot little problems quickly, then deal with them effectively before they become too big to deal with.

Read the U.S. constitution, and you'll see that our country's "cockpit" isn't the White House; it's Congress.  It's the Congress, not the President, which controls the money by raising taxes and enacting the federal budget.  It's the Congress that makes our laws and oversees the executive departments and agencies that implement these laws and write the regulations that support them.

My fellow Americans: We've been putting clowns in the cockpit.

I don't mean this to be rude -- and I certainly don't mean this to be partisan -- but isn't it obvious that most of the people we've elected to the House and Senate haven't got the technical knowledge and the intellectual firepower to guide our country safely through the turbulent skies?  And isn't it obvious that most of these preening buffoons spend nearly all their time lining their own pockets, showboating, raising money for their re-elections or running for higher offices -- in short, concentrating their energies and attention on everything except doing the jobs for which we've elected them?

Of course there are exceptions in both political parties.  Every so often, you're watching some television news talk show and suddenly there's a member of Congress on camera you've never heard of before who actually knows what he or she is talking about.  But the blond news anchorette with teeth like Chiclets keeps interrupting -- and by the time your spouse comes running into the room to see what you're shouting about the interview is over even before you've gotten the House or Senate member's name.  And chances are you'll never see this splendid lawmaker on television again.  There just aren't enough of these talented and dedicated lawmakers in Congress to get the job done.

We've let this go on for too long, and now we're in a real jam: Our economy is teetering on the edge of a cliff, we're in the midst of a war -- and we're relying on the people who got us into these unimaginable disasters to get us out of them. Fat chance.

A New Kind of Congress

We need to re-think the role of Congress, and fast.  Given the inherent complexity of our country, and the world's political turbulence, we've got to start electing a different kind of person to the House and Senate.  Whether we prefer candidates who are Republicans, Democrats, liberals, conservatives, independents, libertarians, or who subscribe to any other party or philosophy, we've got to be sure that these individuals have the competence to cope with the issues that confront us, and the willingness to concentrate their total attention on doing the job.  And if this leaves them with insufficient time for enriching themselves, or for raising a re-election war chest, or planning campaigns for higher office -- so be it. 

Candidates who don't want the job under these conditions shouldn't be running for them.  And those who already have these jobs and don't like the new criteria should get out of the way -- or he shoved out of the way by us -- to make room for better men and women.  Our lives and our fortunes -- literally, in both cases -- depend on getting this right.

I used to be in the intelligence business, and when we sent our projections to the President we always told him whether we were "uncertain" or "reasonably certain" or "highly confident" that whatever we were projecting actually would happen.  For the first time in my life, I'm going to make a political projection in which I have total, 100-percent confidence:
If we keep putting clowns in the cockpit, at some time down the road -- two years from now, or five years, or in a decade -- there's going to be a third unimaginable" event.

Herbert E. Meyer served during the Reagan Administration as Special Assistant to the Director of Central Intelligence and Vice Chairman of the CIA's National Intelligence Council.  He is host and producer of The Siege of Western Civilization and author of How to Analyze Information.

Pig= The vilest nastiest insult in the World of Islam

Obama= Islamic ties both past and present

Lipstick on a pig= innocent comment or unintended slip

Right.................... uh huh...........just a mistake right obama

The Culture War's Decisive Battle has Begun

Source: The American Thinker

By Hebert E Meyer

In every war there is one decisive battle.  This battle doesn't end the war; a great deal of hard fighting lies ahead.  But in retrospect it's the moment when one side's ultimate victory -- and the other side's ultimate defeat -- were sealed.  In our Civil War this decisive battle was Gettysburg.  In World War II, it was Midway.
Unexpectedly -- perhaps even astonishingly -- this year's presidential campaign is shaping up as the decisive battle in the Culture War that's been tearing apart our country for decades.
On one side are the Traditionalists.  We believe that church and State should be separate, but that religion should remain at the center of life.  We are a Judeo-Christian culture, which means we consider those ten things on a tablet to be commandments, not suggestions.  We believe that individuals are more important than groups, that families are more important than governments, that children should be raised by their parents rather than by a village, and that marriage is a sacred relationship between a man and a woman.  We believe that rights must be balanced by responsibilities, that personal freedom is a privilege we must be careful not to abuse, and that the rule of law cannot be set aside when it becomes inconvenient.
We believe in economic liberty, property rights, and in giving purposeful and industrious entrepreneurs the elbowroom they need to start and run their businesses -- and thus create jobs for all the rest of us -- with a minimum of government interference.  We recognize that people in other countries see things differently, and we are tolerant of their views.  But we believe that despite its imperfections the United States is history's most blessed country, and when attacked we will defend this country with our lives.
Tuning Out, then Tuning In
On the other side of this culture war are the Left-Wing Liberals.  They are uncomfortable with our traditions, with the inevitable inequalities of our free-market economy, and with our military power.  They dislike our values, our morality, and our unabashed displays of patriotism.  At first -- back in the 1960s -- they were content merely to develop and pursue their own radical culture within ours.  They tuned out, turned to drugs, and pushed the level of sexual license to a point our country had never known.  They were so distressed by our imperfections that they refused to recognize or celebrate our achievements.
Then they tuned in, and developed a political agenda whose logical outcome would be the overthrow of the American Revolution itself.  While we believe that power flows from God to the people, they believe the supreme power is the State, which decides what rights, if any, should be allowed to the people.  And because there is no God above the State, there also is no truth; no such thing as right or wrong, good or evil.  Since they are working to do good -- by their definition of the word -- whatever crimes they commit along the way don't matter.  But if we are bent on doing what they define as harm, they will use any legal trick in the book to stop us.  In short, the rule of law means whatever they want it to mean at any given moment.
They believe that rights are more important than responsibilities, that groups are more important than individuals, and that one's stand on public issues is more important than one's private actions or morality.  And while they are careful never to condone the tactics of our country's foreign enemies, they always see some justification in our enemies' cause.  They don't actually want us to be defeated by our foreign enemies; they wish merely to see us humbled and humiliated by them.
So great is this gulf between the Traditionalists and the Left-Wing Liberals -- and so irreconcilable are the differences -- that our decades-long political struggle has amounted to a kind of second Civil War.  And for several years now, it's been a stalemate.  This is why so many elections are so close, why so many Supreme Court decisions are split 5-4, and why we've been unable to act decisively on any of the issues that confront us - the war, the economy, energy, healthcare, border control, immigration, and all the rest.
One way or the other, the Culture War's stalemate is about to be broken.
Study history, and you will learn that there are two kinds of wars:  There are short military ones, such as World Wars I and II, in which armies and navies collide until one side wins and the other loses.  And there are long ideological wars, such as the Cold War, in which short bursts of fighting are separated by long periods of political maneuvering.  In these long ideological wars, the outcome isn't determined by firepower but by will.  That's because the aggressor's objective isn't to kill the defenders, but to wear them down until they no longer have the courage and stamina to keep resisting.
The defenders win only when they stop merely resisting -- in other words, trying just to not lose -- and start playing offense.  For example, by the late 1970s the Free World's will to resist the Soviet Union's endless challenges had nearly evaporated.  Détente was just a palatable word for surrender.  And then -- unexpectedly and virtually at the same moment -- three individuals most people had never before heard of exploded onto the scene and into power.  They were Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Pope John-Paul II - none of whom, by the way, had any foreign policy experience before taking office.  Their objective wasn't to "not lose" the Cold War, but rather to end it with victory for the Free World.  Together they threw the switch from playing defense to playing offense, stunning the Kremlin's over-confident leaders who believed that history was on their side.  Within a decade, the Cold War was over and the Soviet Union had ceased to exist.
McCain Throws the Switch
By choosing Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate -- and by staking his own claim to the presidency on "Country First" more than on any specific policy initiative -- John McCain has thrown the switch and put us Traditionalists onto the offense.  By doing so he has unleashed the energy and the will to victory among Traditionalists that have been dormant for so long the Left-Wing Liberals mistakenly assumed we'd lost.  And by taking the over-confident Left-Wing Liberals so completely by surprise, McCain has stunned them into revealing themselves for the vicious phonies that they are.
As a result, what started out as a typical campaign between Republicans and Democrats -- each party trying to hold its base while attracting enough independent voters to win -- has exploded into the Culture War's decisive battle.
Commanding the Traditionalist armies is a war hero whose personal courage and patriotism have overwhelmed any disagreements within the coalition about specific policies and issues.  His second-in-command is a pro-life hockey mom with genuine executive talent, star quality, and the most valuable asset of all in politics: a common touch.  Commanding the Left-Wing Liberal armies is an elegant, eloquent cosmopolitan whose most striking talent is his ability to push past everyone else to the front of the line.  His second-in-command is the U.S. Senate's leading plagiarist, whose only undeniable talent is his ability to use Senate confirmation hearings as a platform from which to trash honorable Republican appointees such as Bill Clark, Robert Bork, and Clarence Thomas.
In the coming weeks we're going to hear a lot from these four candidates and their surrogates about the war, the economy, energy, healthcare, border control, immigration, and all the other issues that confront us.  And we'll be talking and arguing about these issues among ourselves - at the dinner table, with our colleagues at work, with our friends and neighbors at barbeques and at the kids' ball games.
But this election isn't really about these issues.  This election is about who we are.

Herbert E. Meyer served during the Reagan Administration as Special Assistant to the Director of Central Intelligence and Vice Chairman of the CIA's National Intelligence Council.  He is host and producer of The Siege of Western Civilization and author of How to Analyze Information.

Palin Accused Of Being A Babe

SOURCE The Daily Redundency

"The Standard of Excellence in Pseudojournalism"

CHICAGO, IL - In yet another startling revelation regarding Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin, sources close to the campaign of Democrat nominee Barack Obama have discovered that Palin is good looking, and has been most of her adult life. The news underscores Obama's claim that Palin is not suited for Washington politics, and raises further questions about McCain's decision-making abilities.

Democratic leaders were quick to respond to the discovery. "She's much too attractive to be a serious politician." said Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. "And quite frankly it's an insult to all women for her to look like that after having five children."

"One look will tell you how inexperienced she is." said California Senator Dianne Feinstein, a long time advocate for unappealing women. "It's not hard to distinguish those of us who have been here in Washington for decades."

The news also resurrects questions about McCain's vetting process during the selection of Palin for his running mate. When asked directly if he knew Palin was a babe, McCain replied that he "hadn't really noticed." Aides privately concede that the question was never even raised during the interview process.

Obama, speaking to a group of unattractive gender study professors at UC Berkley, summed up the predicament faced by McCain's campaign. "They [Republicans] want to put her one heartbeat away from the presidency. Is America ready for a President with hot librarian good looks? I don't think so."

About That Trooper

Source: Investor's Business Daily

By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY

Politics: You'll be hearing a lot in coming weeks about Sarah Palin's "abuse of power" in trying to get a state cop fired. Here's the back story you won't be hearing.

Palin's political enemies have a stink bomb set to go off late in October, just before the election. That's when voters will see fruits of a legislative investigation into the charge that the governor fired Alaska's Public Safety Commissioner Walter Monegan because he wouldn't get rid of Mike Wooten, a state trooper and Palin's ex-brother-in-law.

We can see where this is headed. Palin will be found to have done nothing illegal in firing Monegan, since public safety commissioners serve at the governor's pleasure. But the media will frame this case in vague but sinister terms: Think "abuse of power." It will also bury the back story that explains why Palin was so concerned.

So here are some key facts to keep on file (for a full report on Wooten, see adn.com/front/story/476430.html). You may not be seeing much of them from here on:

• Mike Wooten, 35, has been a trooper since 2001. He has been married and divorced four times. One of his marriages was to Palin's sister, Molly McCann, with whom he had two children. That marriage ended in 2006. His behavior leading up to the divorce led Palin's and McCann's father, Chuck Heath, to file a formal complaint about him to the state police.

• Heath and Sarah Palin, who was not yet governor, said that Wooten had threatened to kill Heath — telling McCann that Heath "would eat a BLEEP lead bullet" if he hired a lawyer for her. They also charged that he had used a Taser on his own 11-year-old stepson, had drunk beer in his patrol car and had shot a cow moose without a license (the latter a crime in Alaska, where such licenses are not easy to come by).

• The state police investigated these charges and substantiated all of them. Col. Julia Grimes, then head of the Alaska State Troopers, suspended Wooten for 10 days and wrote, "The record clearly indicates a serious and concentrated pattern of unacceptable and at times, illegal activity occurring over a lengthy period, which establishes a course of conduct totally at odds with the ethics of our profession." She warned him he would be fired if he didn't shape up. The troopers' union got the suspension cut to five days.

Now ask yourself this: If you were Sarah Palin and had such a revealing look at Mike Wooten, would you have wanted him on the force? Palin was acting as any concerned citizen should after a close encounter with an unfit cop. If there's abuse of power in this story, it lies on the side of bureaucrats and unions protecting officers whose behavior makes them a danger to the public.

Sen. Biden’s Daughter Arrested in Altercation

Source The Los Angeles Times

The daughter of Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) was arrested on a misdemeanor charge of obstructing a police officer outside a Chicago bar. Ashley Blazer Biden, 21, of Wilmington, Del., was with a group of people on a North Side street where several bars are located when someone else threw a bottle at an officer, police said.

When police tried to arrest another person, Biden blocked the officer’s path and made intimidating statements, officer JoAnn Taylor said.

Biden was later released and is scheduled to appear in court Sept. 20.

Sen. Biden’s spokeswoman, Margaret Aitken, declined to comment, calling it a private, family matter.

How come the democrats get to have a "private, family matter." and yet they want Palins DNA to check on parentage

--LQQKING--

http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1828310

11 year old girl field strips and reasembles an AR-15 (Civilian M-16)

in just under 1 minute

Enough to make a liberal cry

LQQKING

So you see, it's funny. That New Orleans will get a hurricane. That's funny because it is due to hit when President Bush is scheduled to speak. Isn't that cool? Fowler isn't the only one who thinks so, just ask Michael Moore. We all know Democrats used and use Katrina as a political football as callously as possible. Here's a candid moment showing some can hardly wait for another one.

All Class.

I don't know for sure what he was trying to do with these comments but I know both former National Chairman of the Democratic National Committee Don Fowler and Congressman John Spratt of South Carolina ought to be ashamed.........Obama Too

You'd think Spratt at least would be more sympathetic with Hanna knocking on S. Carolina's door

Farewell, NATO

America's Cold War alliance with Europe has ceased to be a fruitful one.

By Victor Davis Hanson

Source National Review

When I was growing up in the 1960s, we had a majestic Santa Rosa plum orchard on my family’s farm. The trees were 40 years old and had grown to over 20 feet high. My grandfather would proudly recall how its once-bumper crops of big, sweet plums had helped him survive the Depression and a postwar fall in agricultural prices.

But by the 1960s, the towering, verdant trees were more a park than a profitable orchard. The aged limbs had grown almost too high to pick, the fruit there too few and too small to pack profitably. Yet my grandfather simply could not bring himself to bulldoze the money-losing, unproductive old orchard.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is like that noble Santa Rosa orchard. We all remember how NATO once saved Western Europe from the onslaught of global communism. Its success led to the present European Union. The Soviets were kept at bay. The Americans were engaged, while the postwar German colossus remained peaceful. A resurgent Europe followed, secure enough to prosper while complacent enough to slash defense expenditures and expand entitlements.

After the victory of the Cold War, NATO’s raison d’etre became more problematic — even as its theoretical reach now extended all the way to the old borders of the Soviet Union. Yet, without the Soviet menace that had prompted the alliance, what justified the continued need for transatlantic collective defense?

We saw NATO’s paralysis in the European inaction over Serbia’s ethnic cleansing in the 1990s. When NATO finally acted to remove Slobodan Milosevic in 1999, the much-criticized intervention proved little more than a de facto American air campaign.

Article Five of NATO’s charter requires its members to come to the aid of any fellow nation that is attacked. But when it was invoked after 9/11 for the first time, NATO didn’t risk much — other than a few European gestures such as sending surveillance planes to fly above America — to fight Islamic terrorists abroad.

Australia, a non-NATO member, is doing far more to fight the Taliban than either Germany or Spain. Many Western European countries have national directives that prevent aggressive offensives against the Taliban and other Afghan insurgents, overriding NATO military doctrine.

Take away Canada, the United Kingdom, and the U.S. from Afghanistan and the collective NATO force would collapse in hours.

The enemy in Afghanistan knows this. The savvy and sinister Taliban just targeted the French contingent. It figured the loss of ten French soldiers might have a greater demoralizing effect on French public opinion than Verdun did in 1916, when France suffered nearly a half-million casualties in heroically stopping the German advance. But 90 years ago, France kept on fighting to win a war. Now, the French parliament may meet to discuss withdrawal altogether.

There is much talk that, had Georgia been a NATO member, Russia might not have attacked it. The truth is far worse. Even if Georgia had belonged to NATO, no European armed forces would have been willing to die for Tbilisi. Remember the furor in 2003 when some NATO countries — angry at the United States — tried to preempt support to member Turkey had Saddam’s Iraq retaliated against Ankara for the American invasion to remove him?

The well-intended but ossified alliance keeps offering promises to new members that are weaker, poorer, and in more dangerous and distant places — while its old, smug founding states are ever more unlikely to honor them In the last two decades, the safety of a rich Western Europe also spawned a new continental creed of secularism, socialism, and anti-Americanism that embraced the untruth that the United Nations kept the peace while the United States endangered it. But if a disarmed continent counted on continued expensive American protection, then it was suicidal to mock its protector.

If NATO dissolves, Europe will at least receive a much-needed reality check. It might even re-learn to invest in its own defense. European relations with America would be more grounded in reality, and the United States could still forge individual ties with countries that wished to be true partners, not loud caricatures of allies.

That stately Santa Rosa orchard? When it finally was toppled, uprooted, and cut up, we all nearly wept — but my grandfather had new varieties of plum trees planted in its place by the next spring.

Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a recipient of the 2007 National Humanities Medal and the 2008 Bradley Prize.

Obama’s Friend, America’s Enemy

Source: National Review

The Editors

August 28, 2008

Have you ever been a friend or business associate of a terrorist? Not someone who, to your shock and horror, turned out secretly to have bombed government buildings. No, the question is whether you’ve ever befriended an unreconstructed radical whose past was well known to you when you entered his orbit and walked through doors he opened for you. Have you been chummy with an unapologetic terrorist who, years after you’d known and worked closely with him, was still telling the New York Times he regretted only failing to carry out more attacks — and that America still “makes me want to puke”?

Barack Obama has.

An organization called the American Issues Project, backed by Dallas investor Harold Simmons, is running a campaign ad which highlights Obama’s troubling relationship with William Ayers. Ayers is a former member of the Weathermen terrorist organization that bombed the Pentagon, the U.S. Capitol, various police headquarters, and other targets in the early 1970s.

The Obama campaign’s rejoinder is three-pronged: The first shot was an Obama response ad, which fails to offer any substantive explanation of why Obama maintains ties to Ayers. Obama’s second move was to launch a heavy-handed effort to pressure television stations into rejecting the ad by promising financial retaliation against the stations and their advertisers — which effort has apparently succeeded in intimidating Fox and CNN. The capper is a desperate call for the Justice Department to muzzle political speech through the prospect of a criminal investigation — a demand that provides a disturbing sneak peak into what life would be like under an Obama Justice Department.

Needless to say, none of this is justified. If Obama has a good explanation for his ties to Ayers, he ought to give it. In the meantime, raising questions about that relationship is entirely legitimate.

Obama’s campaign has acknowledged that the candidate and Ayers are friends. Though Obama has more recently minimized Ayers as “just a guy who lives in my neighborhood,” it is clear that the relationship was much deeper than that. Ayers and his fellow-terrorist wife, Bernadine Dohrn (who has spoken admiringly of the infamous Manson Family murders), are icons in Chicago’s hard-left circles, to which Obama sought entrée as a young “community organizer.” In 1995, they hosted a fundraiser that helped launch his career in Chicago politics.

Ayers has never abandoned his indictment of America as an imperialist hotbed of racism and economic exploitation. He has merely shifted methods from violent extortion to academic indoctrination. Through his perch as a professor of education at the University of Illinois, he has been a ceaseless critic of the criminal-justice system (he is essentially opposed to imprisoning even the most violent criminals) and a proponent of what he calls “education reform” but what is actually the use of the classroom to proselytize for the Left’s political agenda.

Writing in the Chicago Tribune in 1997, Obama called A Kind and Just Parent, Ayers’ polemic on the Chicago court system, “a searing and timely account.” Michelle Obama, then a dean at the University of Illinois, invited Ayers to participate in a panel with her husband, then a state senator who, the program explained, was “working to block proposed legislation that would throw more juvenile offenders into the adult system.”

Obama apologists dismiss all this as “guilt by association” based on a single joint appearance. But it was far from the only one.

In fact, by 1997 Obama and Ayers were collaborators on a far more significant level. They sat together for several years on the board of the Woods Fund, a left-wing Chicago charitable organization. There, they doled out tens of thousands of dollars to such beneficiaries as the Trinity Church (where Obama was a longtime member and where another Obama mentor, Jeremiah Wright, preached a radical, anti-American brand of Black Liberation Theology) and the Arab American Action Network (co-founded by Rashid Khalidi, a Yasser Arafat apologist who has supported attacks against Israel and now directs Columbia University’s notorious Middle East Institute, founded by Edward Said).

Even more intriguing, in 1995 Ayers won a $49.2 million grant from the Annenberg Foundation — matched two-to-one by public and private contributions — to promote “reform” in the Chicago school system. He quickly brought in Obama, then all of 33 and bereft of any executive experience, to chair the board. With Ayers directing the project’s operational arm and Obama overseeing its financial affairs until 1999, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge distributed more than $100 million to ideological allies with no discernible improvement in public education.

Until this week, moreover, the University of Illinois at Chicago, where Ayers works, was blocking access to the project’s files (examination of which was being sought by frequent National Review contributor Stanley Kurtz), until finally relenting under public pressure. Less than three months from Election Day, analysis of the records from Barack Obama’s only significant executive experience is just beginning.

The mainstream media has been derelict on the Obama/Ayers relationship. Perhaps now, finally, it will get the scrutiny it deserves.

Immigration mess is Congress' fault

SOURCE The St. Petersburg Times

In print: Wednesday, August 27, 2008

In the wake of a violent crime spree that authorities say was the work of three illegal immigrants, U.S. Rep. Ginny Brown-Waite is asking a reasonable question about why the alleged ringleader was previously released from custody. But to ask "who dropped the ball" with deportation is to point the finger back at Congress. This is a problem of staggering dimensions.

Just look at the numbers in Hillsborough County alone. Last year, jail officials notified Immigration and Customs Enforcement of 11,930 adult and juvenile inmates who were born outside the United States. ICE responded with retainers for only 700. Of those 700, jail officials don't know many were picked up or deported.

"This is an issue a lot of sheriffs across the nation have been screaming about," says Hillsborough Sheriff David Gee, "and I don't think people get it. ... If you don't do a better job on the border, in the meantime you're going to have these collateral issues that are going to be very difficult to control."

In this case, St. Petersburg police had targeted Rigoberto Moron Martinez, 20, as a suspect in an Aug. 3 robbery and rape at a downtown restaurant. Hoping to get a DNA sample, they asked Hillsborough deputies to pick him up for failure to appear in court for an old domestic violence charge. Martinez was released on bail on Aug. 6, after spending only five hours in jail. Ten days later, say sheriff's officials, Martinez and two accomplices raped and robbed two women in Apollo Beach.

The three men are now in custody, and miscommunication between St. Petersburg police and Hillsborough deputies seems to be a contributing factor in this tragedy. But Brown-Waite, a member of the Homeland Security Committee, is raising the larger issue of immigration enforcement: If ICE can't keep up with all the estimated 12-million undocumented immigrants, can't it at least put the clamps on the ones who are thrown in jail?

In ICE's defense, Martinez was booked on a misdemeanor, not a violent felony. But that is little consolation. The reality is that ICE has neither the manpower, the technology nor the inclination to begin deporting illegal immigrants who are arrested by local law enforcement.

In turn, most local law enforcement agencies don't have the database access or training to determine whether jail inmates are in fact illegal immigrants. (As one expert told the Times: "I've been an immigration lawyer for 25 years and sometimes I can't figure out someone's immigration status.")

In other words, Martinez didn't really walk free on Aug. 6 because someone "dropped the ball." The ball was never in play to begin with. Brown-Waite wants answers, and she deserves them. But she and her congressional colleagues need to be willing accept the whole truth. When ICE can't even deal with illegal immigrants who land in jail, immigration law becomes a parody.

No Options? Nonsense.

Source National Review

By: Michael Ledeen

Over and over again, in tones ranging from annoyance to paternalistic, the pundits tell us that “there is no military option” with regard to the Russian invasion of Georgia. And in case you missed the point, they will tell you that we’re not going to war with Russia over this particular crisis. Not for little Georgia, so unimportant, so far away. It’s very hard to find any of the leading commentators who thinks otherwise.

It’s an odd way to formulate the issue, since Russia has gone to war with us. Georgia is our ally. As of the time of the invasion, there were more than 150 American military men and women in Georgia, training the locals for self-defense. We are sponsoring Georgian entry into NATO, along with Ukraine. It sure looks like an attack against us. And it’s conjoined to an ultimatum from the Russian foreign minister, who said that the United States would have to choose between good relations with Russia and friendship with our “virtual ally” Georgia.

If you expand your vision of the strategic board from the Caucasus to include the Middle East, you see that the Russians are working in close tandem with other countries that are waging war on us. Syria uses Russian weapons and is installing Russian anti-aircraft systems, as is Iran. And the Iranian nuclear program, which the leaders of the West have elevated to the number one issue in the region, is essentially a Russian program, involving Russian nuclear physicists and Russian nuclear technology. But there, too, the pundits and the policy makers have concluded that there is no military option, that we’re not going to war over this particular crisis. Not to stop Iran from going nuclear. Others have the bomb, after all. And Iran is so far away.

Many others have noticed the grim similarity between such comments and Chamberlain’s historic remarks about the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia. Few have quoted Churchill, whose words should be posted on every computer in the National Security Council: “(Chamberlain) had a choice between war and dishonor. He chose dishonor, and he got war.”

We’ve got war already, and it was a big war, long before the invasion of Georgia. The battlefield runs from Afghanistan into Somalia, Iraq, Lebanon, and Israel, across northern Africa, and deep into Europe. The latest Russian gambit is part of that big war, as any of our friends and allies in the war zone will tell you. Insofar as America is seen as weak, our enemies will redouble their actions and our friends will hold back, fearing that association with us will not protect them, and single them out for attack. Those consequences are immediate, traveling across the airwaves of the BBC and al Jazeera and the other propaganda outlets favored by our enemies. The Chinese, who will feel free to bare their fangs after their Potemkin Olympics, may be emboldened to move against Taiwan, another small place very far away.

Once you grasp the full dimensions of the war, it becomes easier to conceive useful options, military and other. We are well placed to demonstrate that this is not a one-way street. The Russians think they have shown that it’s costly to be a friend of the United States. We need to show that there can be a high price for friendship with the bear. It is long past time for us to strike at the terrorist training camps inside those two nasty Russian allies, Syria and Iran. Moreover, we have political weapons the Russians can’t use, namely support for freedom. Their friends and allies are tyrants, and their subjects are on our side of the political divide. Support for the repressed peoples of Russia’s buddies — also long overdue — can, at a minimum, compel the tyrants to worry about their own survival rather than the destruction of our security interests. And we have every chance of success, without firing a shot or dropping a bomb. The Syrian and Iranian people are a more powerful weapon than anything the Russians used against the Georgian people. I dare say that Saakashvili’s support is much greater today than it was a week ago, while the dictators in Tehran and Damascus know well that if their people had a free choice, they’d be headed for safe havens outside the Middle East.

So instead of the incantation “we won’t go to war over this,” serious people in the West must accept the fact that the war is on, and we must find ways to win it. We have enormous advantages, there’s no excuse for the years of dithering.

— Michael Ledeen is Freedom Scholar at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.