Cartoons By Michael Ramirez
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Politicians
More Meltdown Back Story
Clinton Promised Middle Class Tax Cuts Too…
Yet another piece in the Wall Street Journal worth a read…
Clinton’s campaign before his first term was full of promises similar to Obama’s rhetoric.
“Now, I’ll tell you this,” [Clinton] said. “I will not raise taxes on the middle class to pay for these programs. If the money does not come in there to pay for these programs, we will cut other government spending, or we will slow down the phase-in of the programs.”
Mr. Clinton, of course, won that election. And as the inauguration approached, he began backtracking from his promise. At a Jan. 14, 1993, press conference in New Hampshire, he claimed that it was the media that had played up a middle-class tax cut, not him. A month later, he announced his actual plan before a joint session of Congress.
On page one of the New York Times, the paper described the fate of the middle-class tax cut this way: “Families earning as little as $20,000 a year — members of the ‘forgotten middle class’ whose taxes he promised during his campaign to cut — will also be asked to send more dollars to Washington under the President’s plan.”
In some ways, we are today reliving the campaign of 1992. As in 1992, the Democrat is promising a middle-class tax cut. As in 1992, the Democrat is hammering the Republican as a tool of the rich…
and…
Barring divine intervention, a President Obama would not have a Republican Congress to worry about. Instead, he would be working with a Democratic speaker of the House who loaded billions in pork onto a bill meant to fund our troops; with a Democratic Senate majority leader who promised to change the way Congress spent but fought earmark reform; and with committee leaders such as Sen. Chris Dodd and Rep. Barney Frank, who did so much to bring us the financial implosion of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
Post VP Debate: Biden’s Fantasy World
There’s a great piece in the Wall Stree Journal about the VP debate and Biden’s falsehoods.
Speaking of which, Mr. Biden also averred that “Our commanding general in Afghanistan said the surge principle in Iraq will not work in Afghanistan.” In trying to correct him, Mrs. Palin mispronounced the general’s name — saying “General McClellan” instead of General David McKiernan. But Mr. Biden’s claim was the bigger error, because General McKiernan said that while “Afghanistan is not Iraq,” he also said a “sustained commitment” to counterinsurgency would be required. That is consistent with Mr. McCain’s point that the “surge principles” of Iraq could work in Afghanistan.
and…
Then there’s the Senator’s astonishing claim that Mr. Obama “did not say he’d sit down with Ahmadinejad” without preconditions. Yet Mr. Biden himself criticized Mr. Obama on this point in 2007 at the National Press Club: “Would I make a blanket commitment to meet unconditionally with the leaders of each of those countries within the first year I was elected President? Absolutely, positively no.”
And…
Closer to home, the Delaware blarney stone also invited Americans to join him at “Katie’s restaurant” in Wilmington to witness middle-class struggles. Just one problem: Katie’s closed in the 1980s. The mistake is more than a memory lapse because it exposes how phony is Mr. Biden’s attempt to pose for this campaign as Lunchbucket Joe.
We think the word “lie” is overused in politics today, having become a favorite of the blogosphere and at the New York Times. So we won’t say Mr. Biden was deliberately making events up when he made these and other false statements. Perhaps he merely misspoke. In any case, Mrs. Palin may not know as much about the world as Mr. Biden does, but at least most of what she knows is true.
Burning down the house – what caused the financial crisis
Watch and rate the video on YouTube to keep it in front of the fence-sitters who don’t know this information.
Video: Democrats And Fannie Mae = “Family”
Reasons To Vote Democrat: A Quick List
There’s another email going around that contains some very valuable truths…
WHY I’VE DECIDED TO VOTE DEMOCRAT
I’m voting Democrat because I believe the government will do a better job of spending the money I earn than I would.
I’m voting Democrat because freedom of speech is fine as long as nobody is offended by it.
I’m voting Democrat because when we pull out of Iraq I trust that the bad guys will stop what they’re doing because they now think we’re good people.
I’m voting Democrat because I believe that people who can’t tell us if it will rain on Friday can tell us that the polar ice caps will melt away in ten years if I don’t start driving a Prius.
I’m voting Democrat because I’m not concerned about the slaughter of millions of babies so long as we keep all death row inmates alive.
I’m voting Democrat because I believe that business should not be allowed to make profits for themselves. They need to break even and give the rest away to the government for redistribution as the Democrats see fit.
I’m voting Democrat because I believe three or four pointy headed elitist liberals need to rewrite the Constitution every few days to suit some fringe kooks who would never get their agendas past the voters.
I’m voting Democrat because I believe that when the terrorists don’t have to hide from us over there, they’ll come over here, and I don’t want to have any guns in the house to shoot them with.
(I’m so Democrat that I have a big sign on the door of my house: There are no guns in this home! That, I am quite sure, will deter criminals. I think all Democrats should be required to display this sign on their home.)
I’m voting Democrat because I believe oil companies’ profits of 4% on a gallon of gas are obscene but the government taxing the same gallon of gas at 15% isn’t.
I’m voting Democrat because I love the fact that I can now marry whatever I want. I’ve decided to marry my horse.
I really wonder why anyone would ever vote Republican.
Rant on Leftists: Any New Leaf Will Do
For the Dems any empty new leaf will do. Why not take a random opportunist community organizer with a unjustifiably giant self-concept and desperate aspirations for power and notoriety (two largely fictional autobiographies justified by what, …a convention speech?), throw in a 26 year-old speech writer with rousing but empty rhetoric infused with frequent but ambiguous references to “hope” and “change” and you have a brand that apparently can sucker half the country. Truly inspirational.
Hitler also wrote a self-obsessed book about ‘his struggle’, and also rose to power with shocking ease and speed. Perhaps there was no more land of opportunity than Germany in the ’20s , aside from 2007-2008’s USA, where the Party of Misfit Toys have waged a successful war on the embattled George W. Bush’s name and office. Enter the very real possibility of a truly empty suit with no experience “a heart-beat from the presidency” in this election. Now that’s scary.
True. Obama’s no Hitler. But not too differently, he came up with an inferiority complex that defends and confirms itself in wild arrogance and an attitude of entitlement, while playing every dishonest note to the fears of the fence-sitters and the poor and uneducated in the country. These issues made 2004’s Obama an easy target for those who want to use him to push left-specific and minority agendas by promising him power and feeding his ego with everything he wanted to hear, while he dutifully reads on the teleprompter what his puppet-masters want the country to hear — truth, fairness, and reality aside. No room in left politics for truth, and no room on the left for any form of absolute truth. It’s inconvenient and frankly scary to the left to allow the consideration of absolute truth, and it’s not hip with the freshly brainwashed on college campuses. At least Hitler knew what he wanted, knew what he was doing, and the consequences of it. Obama can only claim to be naive and ill-informed by anarchists and hippies about the feasibility of socialist policies.
Hillary at least took a stand from time to time. Voting “present” doesn’t cut it.
Clinton & Dems Mandated Bad Credit Housing
READ THIS vintage 1999 L.A. Times article, “Minorities’ Home Ownership Booms Under Clinton but Still Lags Whites”, and thank Clinton and and his administration for coaxing into homes those who didn’t need, and obviously couldn’t afford, them. Cheer for the democrats, who let massaging their voting base of minorities cloud their already embarrassingly poor natural judgment about the economic stability of the country as a whole.
The one thing the democrats are doing that they may not expect, is making the case that the poor are just as greedy to live beyond their means and aren’t ready for responsibility, even when you make it easy. The article points out…
It’s one of the hidden success stories of the Clinton era. In the great housing boom of the 1990s, black and Latino homeownership has surged to the highest level ever recorded. The number of African Americans owning their own home is now increasing nearly three times as fast as the number of whites; the number of Latino homeowners is growing nearly five times as fast as that of whites.
These numbers are dramatic enough to deserve more detail. When President Clinton took office in 1993, 42% of African Americans and 39% of Latinos owned their own home. By this spring, those figures had jumped to 46.9% of blacks and 46.2% of Latinos.
That’s a lot of new picket fences. Since 1994, when the numbers really took off, the number of black and Latino homeowners has increased by 2 million. In all, the minority homeownership rate is on track to increase more in the 1990s than in any decade this century except the 1940s, when minorities joined in the wartime surge out of the Depression.
and…
All of this suggests that Clinton’s efforts to increase minority access to loans and capital also have spurred this decade’s gains. Under Clinton, bank regulators have breathed the first real life into enforcement of the Community Reinvestment Act, a 20-year-old statute meant to combat “redlining” by requiring banks to serve their low-income communities. The administration also has sent a clear message by stiffening enforcement of the fair housing and fair lending laws. The bottom line: Between 1993 and 1997, home loans grew by 72% to blacks and by 45% to Latinos, far faster than the total growth rate.
Lenders also have opened the door wider to minorities because of new initiatives at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac–the giant federally chartered corporations that play critical, if obscure, roles in the home finance system. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac buy mortgages from lenders and bundle them into securities; that provides lenders the funds to lend more.
and…
In 1992, Congress mandated that Fannie and Freddie increase their purchases of mortgages for low-income and medium-income borrowers. Operating under that requirement, Fannie Mae, in particular, has been aggressive and creative in stimulating minority gains. It has aimed extensive advertising campaigns at minorities that explain how to buy a home and opened three dozen local offices to encourage lenders to serve these markets. Most importantly, Fannie Mae has agreed to buy more loans with very low down payments–or with mortgage payments that represent an unusually high percentage of a buyer’s income. That’s made banks willing to lend to lower-income families they once might have rejected.
and…
The top priority may be to ask more of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The two companies are now required to devote 42% of their portfolios to loans for low- and moderate-income borrowers; HUD, which has the authority to set the targets, is poised to propose an increase this summer. Although Fannie Mae actually has exceeded its target since 1994, it is resisting any hike. It argues that a higher target would only produce more loan defaults by pressuring banks to accept unsafe borrowers. HUD says Fannie Mae is resisting more low-income loans because they are less profitable.
Barry Zigas, who heads Fannie Mae’s low-income efforts, is undoubtedly correct when he argues, “There is obviously a limit beyond which [we] can’t push [the banks] to produce.” But with the housing market still sizzling, minority unemployment down and Fannie Mae enjoying record profits (over $3.4 billion last year), it doesn’t appear that the limit has been reached.
You could almost smell the invitation to crash in the second to last paragraph above. Almost as if the L.A. Times, high on the powder of a Clinton White House and Democrat Congress, even smelled the rotten fish.
EVEN more damning is this New York Times (currently dba Obama Campaign PR consultancy) article written in the last year of the evil reign of Clinton. READ IT HERE
Fannie Mae, the nation’s biggest underwriter of home mortgages, has been under increasing pressure from the Clinton Administration to expand mortgage loans among low and moderate income people…
In moving, even tentatively, into this new area of lending, Fannie Mae is taking on significantly more risk, which may not pose any difficulties during flush economic times. But the government-subsidized corporation may run into trouble in an economic downturn, prompting a government rescue similar to that of the savings and loan industry in the 1980’s.
”From the perspective of many people, including me, this is another thrift industry growing up around us,” said Peter Wallison a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. ”If they fail, the government will have to step up and bail them out the way it stepped up and bailed out the thrift industry…”
In July, the Department of Housing and Urban Development proposed that by the year 2001, 50 percent of Fannie Mae’s and Freddie Mac’s portfolio be made up of loans to low and moderate-income borrowers. Last year, 44 percent of the loans Fannie Mae purchased were from these groups.
Fannie Mae officials stress that the new mortgages will be extended to all potential borrowers who can qualify for a mortgage. But they add that the move is intended in part to increase the number of minority and low income home owners who tend to have worse credit ratings than non-Hispanic whites.
And here we are.
Publish on the rooftops… Bill (I feel your pain) Clinton, Barney (Buddy Hackett’s less intelligent twin brother) Frank, Chris Dodd, etc. can claim this victory for the poor and disenfranchised. Well done!
And the Surrender Poodle from San Francisco has the guts to blame Republicans!?
CBS Intentionally/Unintentionally Mistranscribes Palin
Katie (aren’t her squirrel cheeks so cute!) Couric hacked her cute little way through a cute little string of interviews with future VPOTUS Sarah Palin. But something happened on the way back to the audience. A little error in transcription here and there, strangely at the times when the meaning is critical to her answers. I found it irresponsibly sloppy at best and outright crooked if intended to cause reader confusion on Palin’s positions.
| Katie Couric’s “CBS for Obama Victory” team transcription | Palin’s actual words |
| My understanding is that Rick Davis recused himself from the dealings of the firm. I don’t know how long ago, a year or two ago that he’s not benefiting from that. And you know, I was – I would hope that’s not the case. | My understanding is that Rick Davis recused himself from the dealings of the firm. I don’t know how long ago, a year or two ago that he’s not benefiting from that. And you know, I was – I would hope that’s the case. |
| I’m all about the position that America is in and that we have to look at a $700 billion bailout. | I’m ill about the position that America is in and that we have to look at a $700 billion bailout. At the same time we know that inaction is not an option. |
Don’t you find that fascinating? I do. I find it very curious.
It’s really hard to justify dropping the ball like this, obviously when the video that conflicts with your poor transcription is on the same page.
You can look at it one of two ways.
First, it was unintentional; the dense CBS News team couldn’t understand “that thick Alaskan accent”, even though I had no trouble at all picking out what she said with perfect clarity. CBS News must be employing a really unqualified transcriber.
Second, it was intentional; while much more devious if true, it certainly wouldn’t be beyond any common expectations of liberal CBS to play with the text a little to subtly shake credibility with very plausible deniability. CBS has been playing that game for decades.
Either way, it’s irresponsible to take words out or put words into the mouth of a candidate weeks before an election. Especially when the horse your money’s on is the other one. Shame on you CBS. Please correct the copy and fake-spank the lackey who was just following orders.