Bureaucrats

Charlotte zings Reid from beyond the grave – John L. Smith – ReviewJournal.com

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Chances are good you never met Charlotte McCourt during her 84 years, but I’m willing to bet you’ll be hearing about her in the coming days now that her obituary has taken Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to task. It’s the kind of small story that has the potential to ricochet like a bullet through the campaign showdown between incumbent Reid and Republican challenger Sharron Angle.

Not because McCourt, who died July 8 after a long illness, was a political player or business powerbroker, but precisely because she was neither of those things. She was a homemaker, proud mother and grand mother and wife of 67 years to Patrick McCourt.

via Charlotte zings Reid from beyond the grave – John L. Smith – ReviewJournal.com.

Investors.com – A U.S. ClimateGate?

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E. Michael Smith, a computer programming expert who worked with D’Aleo, said he found “patterns in the input data from NCDC that looked liked dramatic and selective deletions of thermometers from cold locations.” The more he looked, the more he found “patterns of deletion that could not be accidental.”

Stations in places such as the Andes and Bolivia have virtually vanished, meaning, according to D’Aleo, temperatures from these areas are now “determined by interpolation from stations hundreds of miles away on the coast or in the Amazon.” He says it’s as if Minneapolis stopped reporting and its average temperature was extrapolated from readings in St. Louis and Kansas City.

read the rest here… Investors.com – A U.S. ClimateGate?.

In Iowa, euphoria gives way to doubts about Obama – San Jose Mercury News

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One year after winning the election, Obama has seen his pledge to transcend partisanship in Washington give way to the hardened realities of office. A campaign for the history books, filled with a sky-high sense of possibility for Obama not just among legions of loyal Democrats but also among converts from outside the party, has descended to an unfamiliar plateau for a president whose political rise was as rapid as it was charmed.

Interviews with voters across Iowa offer a window into how the president’s standing has leveled off, especially among the independents and Republicans who contributed not just to his

margin of victory in the caucuses here but also to the optimism among his supporters that his election would be a break from standard-issue politics.

McAreavy fears that the president’s health care plan will shortchange her Medicare benefits. And she said that she believes that too many of Obama’s actions are rooted in Democratic politics.

read the rest here… In Iowa, euphoria gives way to doubts about Obama – San Jose Mercury News.

The Real Flaw: Fox Is a No-Fawn Zone – Rasmussen Reports™

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Such scruples, you may marvel, from the office of a president who just spent quality time on CBS’s “The Late Show” with David Letterman. President Obama quipped that he appeared on the show to sneak a peak at a “heart-shaped potato.” I know because I read about it on the CBS News Web page.

OK, so Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., went too far in suggesting that Obama was drafting an “enemies list.” White House aides have a right to criticize a news organization, even question its credibility.

In the same vein, pundits are free to mock the administration’s risible attempts to dress up its thin-skinned ways as love for unbiased reportage.

Note: This phony act has backfired. It set the stage for conservative critics at WorldNetDaily to post a January video of Dunn telling a Dominican government conference that the 2008 Obama campaign strategy focused on “making the press cover what we were saying” — often by not talking to reporters. “It was very much, we controlled it,” said Dunn, “as opposed to the press controlled it.”

Dunn’s idea of a good journalist then would be: a zombie.

read the rest here… The Real Flaw: Fox Is a No-Fawn Zone – Rasmussen Reports™.

Poll: Only 34 percent of Californians approve of Pelosi’s performance – The Hill’s Blog Briefing Room

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Empty head speaker of the house, empty head president of Obamica. So proud of our first woman speaker and semi-black president. How could you not be?

A poll released over the weekend shows that only 34 percent of Californians approve of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) job performance, down 14 points from March.

read the rest here… Poll: Only 34 percent of Californians approve of Pelosi’s performance – The Hill’s Blog Briefing Room.

Video: Escaped The Plantation, Voting McCain

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Perhaps the best speech given during this entire campaign cycle.

The O-Team
More genius by ZO. See more great clips here

Would the Last Honest Reporter Please Turn On the Lights?

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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.

READ IT HERE

Obama Votes Present on Fannie/Freddie

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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.

READ IT HERE

Why Do Our Taxes Go To ACORN?

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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.”

READ THE ARTICLE