Perhaps the best speech given during this entire campaign cycle.
The O-Team
More genius by ZO. See more great clips here
Politicians
Voter Intelligence
Would the Last Honest Reporter Please Turn On the Lights?
In a piece entitled “Would the Last Honest Reporter Please Turn On the Lights?” columnist and novelist Orson Scott Card chastises members of the liberal media for failing to report on the sources of the financial crisis we’re suffering through right now…
This housing crisis didn’t come out of nowhere. It was not a vague emanation of the evil Bush administration.
It was a direct result of the political decision, back in the late 1990s, to loosen the rules of lending so that home loans would be more accessible to poor people. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were authorized to approve risky loans.
What is a risky loan? It’s a loan that the recipient is likely not to be able to repay.
The goal of this rule change was to help the poor – which especially would help members of minority groups. But how does it help these people to give them a loan that they can’t repay? They get into a house, yes, but when they can’t make the payments, they lose the house – along with their credit rating.
They end up worse off than before.
This was completely foreseeable and in fact many people did foresee it. One political party, in Congress and in the executive branch, tried repeatedly to tighten up the rules. The other party blocked every such attempt and tried to loosen them.
Gavin Newsom Marries Two Women on First-Grader Field Trip
The money’s flying on both sides of the Marriage Protection proposition
While the No on 8 side has gotten big donations from Hollywood luminaries like Brad Pitt, Steven Spielberg and Knight, the Yes on 8 side has a media star, too, and not an expected one: San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom.
Mining snippets of an enthusiastic Newsom speech where he proclaims, “this door’s wide open now” for gay marriage, “whether you like it or not,” the Yes on 8 campaign has turned him into a figurehead of TV and radio ads that are “picture perfect” for their audience, said David McCuan, a Sonoma State University political science professor who specializes in California ballot initiatives. The Newsom spots have been such a good foil for the Yes on 8 campaign that opponents may be forced to raise even more money to counter them, McCuan said.
Newsom was in the headlines again over the weekend, as conservative groups pointed out that a San Francisco first-grade class went on a field trip from school because their teacher was marrying another woman at City Hall — a ceremony officiated by the mayor. The class didn’t attend the actual ceremony, but waited outside on the steps of City Hall to congratulate their teacher.
I like to call that indoctrination and frankly child-abuse.
California, vote YES on proposition 8. Yes on 8, Yes on 8.
“Just Bad Luck? All of Obama’s People Hate America…”
Glenn Beck’s got a hilarious piece on the bad luck Obama’s had in being surrounded by those who hate, or at the very least aren’t proud of America.
Then Barack is like, “Hey, I want to be a state senator. Where should I have it? I mean, I could launch it from a park, you know, I could go to like a cool podium some place, maybe I can go to Pizza Hut. Where could I possibly — and somebody says, hey, I know, you can go do it at my house. And he’s like, really? Now, you would think to yourself, well, that’s lucky. And I’m sure that’s what Barack Obama was thinking, “I don’t know if I have a place to do it, I don’t know if I can get a park and a podium, I don’t know if I can get into Pizza Hut and we’ll have room for all the cameras. And this guy seems to have a big house. I mean, I don’t know him, we live in the same neighborhood but we don’t really talk.” Okay, so he launches at his house, and it’s this beautiful house. Turns out — ready for this one? Turns out the guy is a home grown terrorist.
Obama Votes Present on Fannie/Freddie
Again, the WSJ is on the ball today…
If Sen. Obama were truly looking for a kind of deregulation that might be responsible for the current financial crisis, he need only look back to 1998, when the Clinton administration ruled that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac could satisfy their affordable housing obligations by purchasing subprime mortgages. This ultimately made it possible for Fannie and Freddie to add a trillion dollars in junk loans to their balance sheets. This led to their own collapse, and to the development of a market in these mortgages that is the source of the financial crisis we are wrestling with today.
Finally, on the matter of deregulation and the financial crisis, Sen. Obama should consider his own complicity in the failure of Congress to adopt legislation that might have prevented the subprime meltdown.
In the summer of 2005, a bill emerged from the Senate Banking Committee that considerably tightened regulations on Fannie and Freddie, including controls over their capital and their ability to hold portfolios of mortgages or mortgage-backed securities. All the Republicans voted for the bill in committee; all the Democrats voted against it. To get the bill to a vote in the Senate, a few Democratic votes were necessary to limit debate. This was a time for the leadership Sen. Obama says he can offer, but neither he nor any other Democrat stepped forward.
Instead, by his own account, Mr. Obama wrote a letter to the Treasury Secretary, allegedly putting himself on record that subprime loans were dangerous and had to be dealt with. This is revealing; if true, it indicates Sen. Obama knew there was a problem with subprime lending — but was unwilling to confront his own party by pressing for legislation to control it. As a demonstration of character and leadership capacity, it bears a strong resemblance to something else in Sen. Obama’s past: voting present.
Why Do Our Taxes Go To ACORN?
You might ask, as I did when I found out the Democrat shell company ACORN is federally funded, why this is the case. A Wall Street Journal piece today lays out some detail we didn’t know, and now we feel like being militant ourselves.
“But the organization’s real genius is getting American taxpayers to foot the bill. According to a 2006 report from the Employment Policies Institute (EPI), Acorn has been on the federal take since 1977. For instance, Acorn’s American Institute for Social Justice claimed $240,000 in tax money between fiscal years 2002 and 2003. Its American Environmental Justice Project received 100% of its revenue from government grants in the same years. EPI estimates the Acorn Housing Corporation alone received some $16 million in federal dollars from 1997-2007. Only recently, Democrats tried and failed to stuff an “affordable housing” provision into the $700 billion bank rescue package that would have let politicians give even more to Acorn.
All this money gives Acorn the ability to pursue its other great hobby: electing liberals. Acorn is spending $16 million this year to register new Democrats and is already boasting it has put 1.3 million new voters on the rolls. The big question is how many of these registrations are real.”
CNN Chasing Down Obama on ACORN
The Nobel Prize of Obliviousness
Third time’s the charm…
First there was Jimmy Carter… sorry, just got back up from the floor. Jimmy freaking Carter got the Nobel Prize for his bang up job of bringing peace to the middle east. We should give him credit, it lasted thirty seconds longer than the previous cease fire. Not to oversimplify, but this is a former president who has broken with history and openly and repeatedly criticized a sitting president. It would matter if he had a single proud moment in office himself.
As if Carter wasn’t enough, next there came one of this generation’s greatest opportunist hypocrites, Albert Gore, inventor of Al-Gore-Tex, the fabric that allows abject failure in the political arena and a running and disturbingly accurate imitation of everyone’s grandmother (wonder if there’s more to that) to bead up and slide right off his career.
Taking a page from his own rain shedding fabric days, he figured there would be serious money in global warming (or is it global cooling this decade?) The smart thing his advisers came up with (we know he didn’t come up with it because he’s just a card reader like Obama) is the idea that instead of actually doing something about the “crisis” — like creating a green energy company or simply reducing the energy footprint of his mansion in Tennessee, or maybe leaving the private jet at home, or maybe dropping his convoy to a skeletal 10 gas-guzzling SUVs and Towncars burning ozone to and from every possible speaking engagement his handlers can schedule — anyway, instead of doing anything real about the “crisis”, his sage advisors said “hey, you could try your hand in the scary and accountable private sector for the first time since that 5 year stint at The Tennessean newspaper after college, or you could turn this lemon stretch of the natural environmental cycle into hysterically sweet solid gold lemonade in the bank.” And rain gold it has for the sweet talker from Tennessee. But a funny thing happened on the way to selling the Brooklyn Bridge…
Even Gore never imagined the clueless in Norway, adorned with nose rings of popular hysteria, could possibly be taken in by the shameless and insincere opportunism he embodied with the acting talent of, well, Al Gore. But they did. And those of us who thought that the Jimmy Carter prize was the last straw, certainly lost faith entirely in the judgment of the Norwegian Nobel Committee.
Which bring us to the third of the infamous leftists: Paul (“Bush would be Satan, if there was a God”) Krugman. He’s the nerdy kid who used to cry just being near a fight in school, let alone being in one. He’s a lone beacon to the dwindling pseudo-intellectual self-obsessed New York readership, and the formerly somewhat respectable paper that prints his vile bile. I imagine him at his desk, crying at the violence of his blind fury (because fury is scary) and yet smiling through his tears for the self-congratulatory vengeance he feels his words get him on the conservative that stomped his frailty or stole his girl in some former time. His bully pulpit provides a thick network of flaming and smoldering leftists to insulate his frantic and desperate anger, so he’s safe to blather on, reciting the socialist and leftist talking points like a male version of Surrender Poodle Pelosi but without the stones.
I imagine Alfred Nobel would certainly take his mighty invention and blow all of Scandinavia to the judgment seat of the Almighty if he were alive to be ashamed of the state to which this prize has devolved: prizes awarded to a forgettable president, a transparent money-grubber, and the poster child of desperately shrill.
With these offenses, the Nobel Prize is certainly less fair and reasonable but closely resembling an Oscar these days, as Oscars are won solely on crony or agenda popularity, rather than by merit as awards should be.
I guess that’s why Gore’s won both.
Krugman could win an oscar for crying on cue, but for him it wouldn’t be acting.