Nary an Original Thought

“You didn’t endorse Obama? Find your own ride.”

That was the message Obama had for reporters from three major newspapers who didn’t give him their endorsement. Reporters from The Washington Times, The New York Post, and Dallas Morning News, some of whom have been traveling with the Obama campaign since 2007, were notified last night that they were no longer welcome on Obama’s campaign plane. The Washington Times gave their endorsement to McCain just two days ago.

This is the sort of change we can expect from Obama. If you refuse to bow down before the ObaMessiah, there will be consequences.

Read the full story here, here, and here.

Go read this article: Would the Last Honest Reporter Please Turn On the Lights?

Two of the best parts:

Isn’t there a story here? Doesn’t journalism require that you who produce our daily paper tell the truth about who brought us to a position where the only way to keep confidence in our economy was a $700 billion bailout? Aren’t you supposed to follow the money and see which politicians were benefiting personally from the deregulation of mortgage lending?

I have no doubt that if these facts had pointed to the Republican Party or to John McCain as the guilty parties, you would be treating it as a vast scandal. “Housing-gate,” no doubt. Or “Fannie-gate.”

Instead, it was Senator Christopher Dodd and Congressman Barney Frank, both Democrats, who denied that there were any problems, who refused Bush administration requests to set up a regulatory agency to watch over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and who were still pushing for these agencies to go even further in promoting sub-prime mortgage loans almost up to the minute they failed.

As Thomas Sowell points out in a TownHall.com essay entitled “Do Facts Matter?” ( http://snipurl.com/457townhall_com] ): “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.”

These are facts. This financial crisis was completely preventable. The party that blocked any attempt to prevent it was … the Democratic Party. The party that tried to prevent it was … the Republican Party.

[...]

Your job, as journalists, is to tell the truth. That’s what you claim you do, when you accept people’s money to buy or subscribe to your paper.

But right now, you are consenting to or actively promoting a big fat lie — that the housing crisis should somehow be blamed on Bush, McCain, and the Republicans. You have trained the American people to blame everything bad — even bad weather — on Bush, and they are responding as you have taught them to.

If you had any personal honor, each reporter and editor would be insisting on telling the truth — even if it hurts the election chances of your favorite candidate.

Because that’s what honorable people do. Honest people tell the truth even when they don’t like the probable consequences. That’s what honesty means . That’s how trust is earned.

Seriously, go read the article.

HT: Jeff Meyers

If you watched or listened to the debate Wednesday night, you’ll remember Barry taking McCain to task, saying that 100% of his ads have been negative. McCain refuted this allegation, and BHO asserted that “It absolutely is true.”

Sorry, Barack. It isn’t. According to politifact.com, your $3,000 pants are on fire. The Wisconsin Advertising Project reports that, to date, 73% of McCain’s ads have been negative, compared to 61% of Obama’s. If you count the nightly news’ coverage of McCain as negative ads (how could you not?), I’d say we’re about even.

Here’s an ad McCain ran during the DNC, on the night when Barry accepted the party’s nomination:

Unless “Job well done” is some sort of coded racial slur (and I’m sure many of his zealots would be able to construe it as such), that ad didn’t sound negative to me. They say you’re not supposed to use words like “always” and “never” during arguments, and I would guess that “100%” is synonymous with “always” in this case. Certainly Barack knew of at least this one ad, meaning that his 100% claim was false.

So, here’s a question for the class. Why did Obama say that 100% of McCain’s ads had been negative when he knew it wasn’t true? Did he think he could just get away with it? Is this the sort of *change* we need in D.C.?

Yogi over at Red Planet Cartoons put into pictures what I said yesterday:

With the way The Media is, we won’t see any real accountability on this one. It’s W’s fault, stupid. No reason to ask whether the policies of Big Government, aimed at helping the poor to buy houses in this case, actually worked. They *tried* to help, and that’s the important thing. So what if Big Government now has to decide on whether a trillion dollar rescue strategy will save us all? These guys *care* about the poor, and they’re happy to take your money from you to prove it.

Keep this in mind if, God forbid, Barry wins the election and then tries to tell you he can solve the nation’s health care problems by putting Big Government in charge. If lenders were willing to make reckless decisions when they knew Big Brother had their back, what makes you think doctors and hospitals would be any different? Under that arrangement, “sub-prime” will likely mean ending up on the wrong side of the grass, if you catch my drift.

In 2003, President Bush proposed a “significant regulatory overhaul” of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, in order to “determine whether the two are adequately managing the risks of their ballooning portfolios.” It didn’t go anywhere. Why?

Among the groups denouncing the proposal today were the National Association of Home Builders and Congressional Democrats who fear that tighter regulation of the companies could sharply reduce their commitment to financing low-income and affordable housing.

”These two entities — Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — are not facing any kind of financial crisis,” said Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee. ”The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.”

The Democrats’ priority on maintaining “affordable housing” is laughable. “Affordable housing” means low property values, which equates to smaller mortgages and, thereby, smaller mortgage payments. Under the banner of anti-discrimination and “war on poverty” policies, Democrats in the Nineties encouraged lenders (in the form of government backing) to loan money to people who were highly unlikely to pay it back. From Investor’s Business Daily Editorials:

It was the Clinton administration, obsessed with multiculturalism, that dictated where mortgage lenders could lend, and originally helped create the market for the high-risk subprime loans now infecting like a retrovirus the balance sheets of many of Wall Street’s most revered institutions.

Tough new regulations forced lenders into high-risk areas where they had no choice but to lower lending standards to make the loans that sound business practices had previously guarded against making. It was either that or face stiff government penalties.

Adding more home buyers into the market, thanks to artificially lax lending guidelines, drove up home prices. In order to keep housing “affordable”, interest rates were suppressed (underpricing the risk associated with them), which drove more home owners into the market, which increased prices. This is how a bubble is created. Bush wisely saw that this cycle would eventually lead to major financial problems (like the ones in the papers today), but the Dems didn’t want to put any “pressure” on Fannie or Freddie.

Jump forward a couple of years to when John McCain co-sponsored the Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act of 2005. McCain warned us that “If Congress does not act, American taxpayers will continue to be exposed to the enormous risk that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pose to the housing market, the overall financial system, and the economy as a whole.” It appears that his prediction was accurate, as the tab for the recent bailouts comes to more than $1,000 for every man woman and child in the country.

McCain’s bill died in committee, under the leadership of Sen. Chris Dodd, a Democrat from Connecticut and chairman of the Banking Committee. Oddly enough, a scandal unearthed this summer involved Dodd receiving discounts and preferential treatment through Countrywide’s V.I.P. program during 2003 and 2004. According to wikipedia, “in 2006 Countrywide financed 20% of all mortgages in the United States, at a value of about 3.5% of United States GDP, a proportion greater than any other single mortgage lender.” Countrywide would have been directly affected by increased regulations, but thankfully they had a friend in high places looking out for them.

Speaking of Countrywide, during the primaries Obama accused Countrywide of “infecting the economy” and helping to create the home foreclosure crisis we are now in the middle of. However, when it came time to look for a running mate, Obama turned to James Johnson to help with the search. According to the New York Sun, Johnson received more than $7 million from the same Countrywide sweetheart program as Dodd.

You can tell a lot about a man by the friends he keeps, but if Obama’s link to Johnson and Johnson’s link to Countrywide isn’t enough for you, consider this from John Gibson of Fox News:

Lehman Brothers’ collapse is traced back to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two big mortgage banks that got a federal bailout a few weeks ago. Freddie and Fannie used huge lobbying budgets and political contributions to keep regulators off their backs. A group called the center for responsive politics keeps track of which politicians get Fannie and Freddie political contributions. The top three U.S. Senators getting big Fannie and Freddie political bucks were democrats and number two is Senator Barack Obama.

Now, remember, he has only been in the Senate four years but still managed to grab the number two spot ahead of John Kerry, decades in the senate, and Chris Dodd who is chairman of the senate banking committee.

So now Obama and Joe Biden, the running mate James Johnson picked for him, are telling us that Republicans are to blame for the current economic problems.

My lord, take a look at what — who got us in this hole, whose policies. This has been a Republican philosophy of letting Wall Street do what they want and the middle class be damned. It’s about time we change it. If I sound like I’m angry, I am fighting mad for middle-class people who have been the scapegoat of this economy because of the policies of the McCains and the Bushes.

Obama is singing the same song, mocking McCain for stating that “the fundamentals of our economy are still strong” (they are), and claiming that “what we need now is leadership that gets us out. I’ll provide it. John McCain won’t. And that’s the choice for Americans in this election.”

Yes, Americans have a choice this election. On the one hand is a leader who has decades of leadership experience and that warned us all about this problem years before it came to fruition. On the other hand is a politician with less than half a decade of leadership experience, whose party directly contributed to this problem while his historical revisionism has led him to blame everyone but those who are truly responsible for the crisis at hand. I don’t think it’s too tough to see which brand of “leadership” this nation needs.

This should come as no surprise. Reeling from the announcement of Sarah Palin, a certified Obama-killer, as McCain’s VP nominee, The Media are in closet-snooping mode. Some of the juiciest morsels (with the first two having been self-disclosed by the Palins) are listed below:

Palin’s 17 year old daugher, Bristol, is pregnant

To use Obama’s words, Palin’s daughter has made a mistake, and is now being punished with a baby. If Bristol were Obama’s daughter, she would have the choice of terminating her pregnancy at any time in the next 10 months or so. Tough bounce, Bristol.

Todd Palin was arrested for DUI in ‘86

More than two decades ago, a 22 year old Todd Palin spent a night in jail after being pulled over for driving under the influence with a few friends in his truck. For a dash of perspective, Top Gun and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off were in theaters in 1986.

Troopergate

John Washburn has addressed this issue in detail over at When Evil Prospers. Walter Monegan, former Public Safety Commissioner, was fired for not filling vacant positions, and for usurping the Governor’s authority by going directly to the State Legislature to request funding that would directly violate the Governor’s budget guidelines. Monegan says he was fired because Palin pressured him to fire her sister’s ex-husband, State Trooper Mike Wooten, and he refused. According to Wooten’s file from the Alaska State Trooper’s office, Wooten was “suspended for threatening to kill Palin’s father, for tasering (yes, he tasered) his 11 year old stepson, for drinking beer in his squad car and for violating wild game laws. The suspension was for 10 days and was later reduced to 5 days after a union protest.” One of Alaska’s finest, to be sure. Why would anyone, including the Governor, think he should be fired?

—

By the way, wasn’t it The Media who reminded us over and over again in the Nineties that a politician’s personal life shouldn’t matter at all, as long as they do a good job while “in office”? Either way, an objective media (I wonder what would that look like) would have a tough time focusing on a pregnant daughter when our dear Obamessiah voted against a law that would prevent infanticide on three separate occasions, and that he served on a committee with (and even launched his political career from the home of) a domestic terrorist that bombed the Pentagon.

Look for more objective, hard-hitting journalism over the next two months.

Liberal/Socialist 1: I don’t like the way things are going lately. We need to find a way to increase our political power.

Liberal/Socialist 2: Yeah, I agree. We need to think of a way to raise taxes and increase people’s dependence on government intervention in every aspect of their lives.

Liberal/Socialist 3: But how can we convince people that *we* know what’s best for them better than they know themselves? Don’t you think that people will resent the idea of us taking more of their money away from them, keeping a little for ourselves and giving the rest to someone else?

L/S 1: Good point. This could be tricky.

L/S 2: Wait. I’ve got it! Remember that movie, Canadian Bacon? You know, the one with John Candy and Alan Alda? The President of the United States (Alda) needs to raise his opinion polls and jump start the economy. So, he starts a “Cold War” (get it?) with Canada. Of course, there’s no real threat to the U.S., but the people buy into it and start burning their ice skates and dumping out bottles of maple syrup.

L/S/1: Where are you going with this?

L/S 2: What I’m saying is that we need to create some kind of common enemy. An enemy so frightening that people will think the very world will come to an end if we don’t do something to stop it. Then, we ride in on white horses and promise to “SAVE THE WORLD,” for the small price of higher taxes and a little bit of freedom sacrificed on the altar of international government.

L/S 3: Do you think people are really so ignorant that they would believe something like that?

L/S 2: Well, we’ll need a little help from The Media, and our friends in Hollywood.

L/S 1: They’ve always helped us in the past.

L/S 2: And, it will have to be something complicated enough that nobody can prove that it *isn’t* a threat. I’ve been around the Internet long enough to know that if you can’t prove it wrong, it MUST be true.

(more…)

While The Media has been spoon feeding us every detail about Brittney Spears’ latest hair style and wondering where Anna Nicole’s body would be buried (and even more news-worthy, who the father of her 4 month old daughter was), several U.S. Marines were saving the life of an Iraqi baby named Mariam.

This probably comes as a surprise to you, since all you’ve heard from Democrats and their lackeys in the dinosaur media is that Iraq is an unmitigated disaster. The Iraqis, the insurgents, and the Democrats (and an embarrassingly large number of “moderate” Republicans) all want us out of there before we make things any worse. The mainstream media are all too willing to play along, finding the air time and/or newspaper real estate to report U.S. troops body counts or the latest Hollywood scandals, then making excuses that they can only cover so many stories whenever our troops make any progress in Iraq.

Of course, they do have time to remind us that these troops are only in Iraq because they were too stupid or too poor to have any other options. The same media elite who coined the term “baby killers” during the Vietnam war era frequently remind us that they are the ones who support the troops. Of course, what they mean is they support the idea of rescuing these hapless rejects who stumbled into the armed forces by surrendering as quickly as possible so they can come back home and get back to their mediocre lives.

Chris Walsh was one such “reject.” Walsh had been an EMT in St. Louis, and he joined the Navy reserves after 9/11. He was deployed to Iraq, where he served as a Medic alongside the Marines. You can read his story here, and the details that follow are taken from that article.

While out on patrol, Walsh would often set up impromptu clinics on the streets of Fallujah while his buddies set up cover positions. At great risk to himself, he would provide medical care to suffering Iraqis in the middle of an insurgent hotbed.

On one such patrol, a roadside bomb exploded just in front of the Humvee he was riding in. He and the Marines he was with set out after the triggerman, but stopped when the reached one particular doorway. A woman held an infant out to Walsh, repeating, “Baby. Baby sick.” Walsh halted the pursuit and took out a digital camera. Her name was Mariam, and she had a rare condition in which her bladder had developed on the outside of her body. Walsh showed the pictures to a doctor back at base camp, Captain Sean Donovan. Donovan knew that the baby would die if she wasn’t operated on soon, but such a procedure could not be done in Iraq. (more…)

From a post on SlashDot:
Note: DMCA stands for Digital Millennium Copyright Act

On ‘Larry King Live’ Wednesday night, Bill Maher said many of ‘the people who really run the underpinnings of the Republican Party are gay… Ken Mehlman, OK, there’s one I think people have talked about. I don’t think he’s denied it.’ When CNN re-aired the interview, the mention of Mehlman was edited out with no indication anything was missing. When a minute-long video of the original vs. censored clips was posted on YouTube, a DMCA takedown removed it (the original poster plans to resubmit a shorter clip he hopes will qualify as fair use ? good luck, since the DMCA doesn’t recognize fair use). Relatedly, the Washington Post today was caught silently editing its published stories to make them less informative. Unnamed GOP officials are also saying that Mehlman will step down from his post when his term ends in January.

You know it’s bad when they are now policing themselves in order to send exactly the right message about whatever it is they are supposedly reporting “objectively” about.

Just in time for the elections, Rush Limbaugh is on the hot seat again. In an article on MSNBC.com, David Montgomery reports that Limbaugh made fun of Michael J. Fox, accusing him of faking his Parkinson’s disease for political ads:”(By the way, it’s interesting how the story is reported. Limbaugh is labeled as a ‘conservative,’ and the headline is that Rush accused Fox of ‘faking Parkinson’s disease,’ which is a pretty bad mischaracterization of what Limbaugh actually said. Ah, The Media!)”:. Rush is quoted in the article as having said, “He is exaggerating the effects of the disease… He’s moving all around and shaking and it’s purely an act… This is really shameless of Michael J. Fox. Either he didn’t take his medication or he’s acting.” (more…)