L'Shana Tovah!!

Happy New Year! Celebrating 5,769 Years With The Same Management...

Tonight at sundown, the Jewish New Year kicks in, traditionally a time for reflection and spiritual self-examination, as it starts the Days of Awe that proceed through Yom Kippor, the Jewish Day of Atonement.

My very best wishes for the coming year....may you be inscribed.

How I'd Cure The Credit Crisis And Save US Taxpayers $600 Billion

As you've noticed, this proposed rape of the US Treasury has my dander up.

Listening to a number of Conservative pundits and commentators, you definitely have to think of Chicken Little, screaming because the Dow took a big hit, even though in terms of percentage we've seen and survived far worse. They don't realize that they are playing into the Democrat's hands, as they want to make this election about the economy and are thus exacerbating a 'crisis', just as they did with oil prices by refusing to allow any domestic drilling.

One thing I agree with them on is that what's mainly causing the decline is a drying up of credit, as lenders panic and pull their horns in.

So, as a public service, I'm offering to completely solve this problem, at a fraction of the cost of the proposed grand larceny now being proposed on Capitol Hill.

All we have to do is do what we do best, which is allow the normal motivations of fear and greed to work for us.

Since the Feds seem determined to go into the private sector, here's my proposition:

Give me $100 billion or so to work with, and a small staff to answer inquiries and underwrite and process the paperwork. I'll lend it out as credit lines at market rates to small and medium sized businesses and homeowners with at least 70% equity in their properties as security, and take no salary but a mere two points on what I originate.

I give it a month - at most - before the usual suspects get back into the game and start scrambling to lend money to consumers and businesses again...since paper money earns zip when it's sitting somewhere and not working earning money for the people that control it, and the last thing they'd want to do is be left out of the market.

And, with no bail out or government largess in prospect, those companies holding hyper-inflated mortgage debt would be forced to foreclose and sell off those assets at fair market prices to investors...and what losses these companies incur would be treated the way they should be - as tax writedowns against their profits,just as they are for any other business .

Yes, I know, common sense and capitalism.

I'm sure the White House will be in touch with me shortly, no?

Okay, sarcasm off. But what I proposed would save the taxpayers a fortune.

The Crap Sandwich

Ali Baba and the forty thieves - AKA Pelosi, Chris Dodd, Barney Frank and Harry Reid


"It's a crap sandwich, but I'll still vote for it"- Republican House minority leader John Boehner.

Something absolutely astounding is going on in Washington today, as debate begins on the modified bailout bill in the US House of Representatives.

This is unbelievably bad, and I got closer and took a putrid whiff so you wouldn't have to....

- The essential problem here is that the decline in American home prices has forced a $500 billion in write-downs of bank capital as I write this, and the banks have only raised $350 billion in new capital to cover what amounts to their margin. Since the private sector, AKA prudent investors are not going to pony up new capital to the banks and investment organs unless the federal government underwrites the risk to shareholders, hence the reason for Paulson's plan, the Federal bailout.

What's wack (to put it mildly) is that this giddy little ex-Goldman-Sachs shill proposes to use your money not just to buy these mortgages and unidentified `other assets' but to buy them at inflated prices no investor with an IQ above double digits would pay. Fed chairman Ben Bernanke has displayed an unexpected talent for stand up comedy by referring to this as the "hold to maturity price". Rather than a bailout, this is a wholesale raid on the US treasury. And it gets worse.

- The bill gives Paulson the sole discretion to use your money to identify and purchase other 'troubled assets' at whatever price Paulson's decides is a 'hold to maturity price' - junk bonds, mortgage securities, auto loans, bogus venture capital scams, even shares in WC Field's famed One Penny Beefsteak Mine. And because it's at Paulson's sole discretion,he can bail out anyone he chooses to and eliminate competition to his pals on Wall Street.

- In Section 110, the Feds, after purchasing these mortgages at inflated prices have a mandate to `rewrite' the terms of these loans, including a reduction in interest rates, a reduction in the amount owed and changes in the loan terms.

So...guess what? Congress is going to use your money to gift deserving homeowners - translate that as 'likely Democrat voters' - some more unearned equity to tap to pay off their credit card bills. And if these deserving homeowners are determined as being unable to pay the home loan payments, Paulson wants to use your money to change the interest rate and the terms on their loans at your expense. If you scrimped and saved to put ten percent down to buy that modest home within your means and paid say, one point to bring your interest rate down to 5.5%, screw you, chump. You'll be paying to make things rosy for someone who bought in at three percent or nothing down and bought more than they could afford.

- Not only that, but section 109 gives Paulson and the Feds a mandate to lean on servicers of existing mortgages to 'mitigate foreclosures and to encourage servicers of mortgages to modify loans through Hope for Homeowners and other programs. Allows the Secretary to use loan guarantees and credit enhancement to avoid foreclosures.'

Servicers, for those of you who don't know is anyone in charge of administering and collecting on a home loan. Not only does Paulson want to mess with the garbage the taxpayers are buying outright, but it the bill gives him a mandate to lean on lenders to to lower credit standards and modify loan terms on the mortgages the Feds don't own, especially if 'deserving homeowners' and a possible foreclosure are involved.

To realize how insidious this is, be aware that mortgages are legal contracts between a borrower and a lender, and are then sold to investors on what's called the secondary market. If you bought say, $10 million dollars worth of mortgages at six percent as an investment and the contract for the dollar amount and the yield you were expecting on your investment could suddenly be altered at the whim of some bureaucrat, do you think you'd be in a hurry to invest your hard earned money in mortgages again ?

- But wait, there's more....Paulson gets the unlimited authority to hire whom he wants to administer this mess, according to section 108, because Paulson decides what constitutes 'conflict of interest' , what gets bought, who buys it or where and how they can go to work after they finish their sojourn in DC..a perfect recipe for bribery and corruption almost unparallelled in history.

This bill doesn't do what it's supposed to do, with is to provide confidence to clean out the blocked arteries of credit. The way to do that would have been to allow the Feds to either insure these loans ( at a fair price to the lenders) or to pick them up the same way any other investor of last resort would, at a deep discounts. What it does do is to punish every American Bank, Thrift and S&L who was prudent and played by the rules in order to reward Paulson's pals on Wall Street, keep the same corrupt politicians in charge of the mess, and rob the taxpayers in order to buy votes for the Democrats.

And of course, ultimately that's what this is all about anyway...presidential politics. The Democrats are more than willing to promote economic chaos if it will help them win the White House, no matter how much pain it causes 'the little people' .

The Democrats want to make this election about the economy and are thus exacerbating a 'crisis', just as they did with oil prices by refusing to allow any domestic drilling.And what's more, they want to be able to hang the failure for failing to fix the so-called 'crisis' on the Republicans, who's votes they don't need anyway in order to pass this license to loot the treasury.

It's a tribute to the common sense of the American electorate that they are opposed to this highway robbery by a vast majority.

Ali Baba and his Forty Thieves will probably try to push this through before sundown tonight.

Make your voices heard: 202-224-3121.

UPDATE: THE VOTE: 228 NAY; 205 YEA... Apparently Nancy Pelosi was primarily responsible by ginning up a particularly nasty partisan screed before the vote that blamed the Republicans and a "right-wing ideology of anything goes, no supervision, no discipline, no regulation" for all the problems with the financial markets, and accused them of being 'unpatriotic'. According to Boehner, this caused a few Republicans who were planning on voting for this travesty to change their minds, but I think it was more that they noticed that Democrats in contested districts were being allowed by the Dems congressional leadership to vote nay, and they rightly saw this as exactly what it was..a set up, with Pelosi deliberately coming off with a nasty, insulting speech in order to goad the House Republicans.

The reality is, the Dems want a 'crisis' to continue, at least until November 4th. It's how they feel they can win.


Congress is planning on adjourning until Thursday...keep up the pressure.


ADDENDUM: After the vote failed, you'll notice that the Dow climbed again once Wall Street realized that they would have to make do and conduct biz without access to our money. Some crisis, hmm?

And for those of you concerned about the supposed drying up of credit, as a public service, I've offered a simple solution to cure the credit crisis and save the taxpayers $600 billion dollars.

All the current occupant of the White House has to do is e-mail me, or have his people do it if he's otherwise engaged.

Fight Night - Who Won?

Depends on whom you talk to.

To those people that consider the Drudge Report a right wing hate site and Huffington Post or MSNBC fair and balanced, Obama was the obvious winner. But Drudge's online poll with almost 350,000 respondents had McCain winning with 68%, with about 2% undecided.MSNBC, CBS and CNN had Obama winning...which was to be expected, simply because of their own bias and who watches them.

And, by the way, one thing I found personally fascinating is the relatively low numbers of viewers for the debate. Apparently it was far less than the numbers for the first Bush-Kerry faceoff.People are obviously wishing for this forever campaign to end.

My own impressions? McCain definitely won, but on a decision - he let Obama slide with some key points that could have resulted in a knockout had he pursued them. I know I would have.

McCain started out slowly. He was obviously tired from the last minute flight to Mississippi, and it showed....had I been his campaign manager I would have insisted he take a day or so to rest and get ready. But about 30 minutes into it, he go this second wind and began hammering Obama, particularly in the final part of the debate that dealt with foreign policy.

The beginning part of the debate, 45 minutes or so was devoted to economics and the proposed bailout, and McCain certainly did no harm to himself talking about out of control spending and earmarks. One place he let Obama slide was when the Chosen One claimed that '95% of Americans will be getting a tax break.'

Had I been McCain, I would have shot back with "Senator, your plan calls for a large increase in payroll taxes and in capital gains taxes. That's obviously a tax on all Americans, since businesses don't pay taxes....they make it up with price increases to their customers. And how many jobs will be lost, especially in small businesses because of the increased cost of investment and expansion and because businesses have to lay off employees to cut costs because of your tax increases?"

Instead, McCain kept to his mantra of cutting spending, which was good, but also allowed Obama to slide by with the sound bite that he was giving a tax break to the middle class rather than a whopping increase.

Another zinger I would might have pulled out of the hat when Obama kept repeating 'John is right' for the third time would have been 'Thank you for that, Senator..I'm glad we agree, experience and judgment count.'

On the foreign policy front, McCain did pretty well, and I especially liked the part where Obama stumbled and had to read the bracelet on his wrist to remember the name of the dead veteran he was supposedly honoring.Yet again, there were two major gaffes McCain could have exploited that he let Obama get away with.

After Obama went into his spiel about how the McCain-Bush administration had `taken their eye off the ball in Afghanistan', McCain responded by reminding Obama that Osama bin-Laden and al-Qaeda had declared Iraq their central front in their war on us and that if Obama had his way , the US military would have come home in defeat. And he mentioned that Obama chairs the Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on European Affairs but has yet to convene it..without explaining to the audience that that committee has the direct responsibility of negotiating to increase the European's lack of combat troop support for NATO's mission in Afghanistan!

McCain actually let Obama sluff this off by mumbling ` well,you know that no actual business comes before that subcommittee, this is kind of inside baseball stuff..but let me go on...'

if I were McCain, I would have simply responded, `Senator,I beg to differ...this subcommittee you head is charged with negotiating with our European allies to provide more boots on the ground in Afghanistan. Obviously nothing is going to come of that if its' chairman takes his eye off the ball and never convenes them even once.'

I would also have mentioned that the Europeans actually showed some signs of putting more combat troops into Afghanistan until Barack Obama came along pledging to remove US troops from Iraq and send extra US troops to Afghanistan - thus taking the heat off of countries like France, Italy and Germany, who will now, of course be prepared to wait until after the election and see if the Americans and others do the heavy lifting under an Obama administration.

Had McCain said something like that I think we might have had a deer-in-the-headlights moment.

Next, when Obama was criticizing all that aid we give to Pakistan and talking about how we that money was all wasted,McCain should have reminded Obama politely that that you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, and that map reading is an important and necessary skill for a commander-in-chief. He should have reminded the audience that Afghanistan is landlocked, that 75% of the supplies for our troops in Afghanistan pass through the Pakistani port of Karachi and comes into Afghhanistan overland through through the Torkham border crossing, and that the Pakistanis closed that corridor for over a day in response to the last US attack in Waziristan. And he should have finished by saying that the alternative if Obama creates a hostile Pakistan is either a costly and inefficient airlift or shipping the stuff through the Black Sea into Georgia and Azerbaijan (assuming they let us) and then crossing the Caspian Sea and shipping the stuff through Turkmenistan and then over rough, mountainous country into Afghanistan from the Northwest.

Again, had McCain said that, I think we would have seen Obama motor boating as he tried to pick himself up off the canvas.

As it is, McCain scored significant points,but not decisive ones. That will have to wait until the next outing, a townhall style debate that McCain will hopefully be more in shape for.

Watcher's Council Results, 9/26/08

The Council has spoken! A complete rundown of the voting tallies is here.


Among the Council members, the winner was The Glittering Eye for Don’t Just Do Something, Stand There , Dave Schuler's excellent post on the ramifications of the bail out.

Coming in second was The Razor's moving post, A Lack of Clarity

Also getting votes were Hillbilly White Trash for Knowing the Left, Cheat-Seeking Missiles for Obama’s Bizarre List Of 40 “Probing” NYT Stories and Bookworm Room with Are Americans Really Racists?

Among the non-Council entries, the winner my nomination, The Jawa Report - Hope, Change, & Lies: Orchestrated “Grassroots” Smear Campaigns & the People that Run Them

In second place was Private Papers for Palin and Obama: What Really Is Wisdom?

As usual, congratulations not only to the winners, but to the participants.

Creepy Liars: How The So-Called Deal Fell Apart

Amazing dealings in Washington.

The latest fable being spun by the Democrats and their shills in the dinosaur media is that everything was going swimmingly in DC, Republicans and Democrats were singing kumbayah in the halls of Congress, a deal had been cut for that $700 billion buyout..and then that nasty John McCain had to show up and lead a revolt, a revolt mind you, against President Bush and torpedo the whole damn thing:



This nonsense reminds me of the old Superman comics I used to read as a kid - remember Bizarro World, where people would say the opposite of what had actually occurred? Only is this case,Barney Frank, Harry Reid, and Chris Dodd know they're out and out lying.

Here's what really happened.

The White House meeting was supposed to be a publicity op for Barack Obama. The Democrats all deferred to him and allowed him to be the spokesperson for them, and he spoke first at the meeting.

Originally, as you know,the Chosen One wasn't going to show up in DC, but once McCain was en route and after President Bush personally requested he be present ,Obama decided to attend and his handlers saw it as a golden opportunity to show him off as 'presidential'.

There was in fact at that point no 'deal' as Ohio democrat Senator Sherrod Brown revealed.And it was Secretary of the Treasury Paulson who literally begged for the White House meeting, which was attended by the president, thDemocrat leadership and the Republican leadership.

Here's where the fun starts, according to American Spectator:

When Sen. Barack Obama was given the floor to speak during White House negotiations, according to White House aides, he did so raising concerns about a House Republican alternative to the Paulson/Bernanke $700 billion bailout. But those concerns weren't necessarily his, as he was not aware of the GOP plan before reviewing notes provided him by Paulson loyalists in Treasury prior to entering the meeting.

According to an Obama campaign source, the notes were passed to Obama via senior aides traveling with him, who had been emailed the document via a current Goldman Sachs employee and Wall Street fundraiser for the Obama campaign. "It was made clear that the memo was from ‘friends' and was reliable," says the campaign source.


The memo allowed Obama and his fellow Democrats to box in Republican attendees and essentially took what President Bush had billed as a negotiating meeting off the rails.


"Paulson and his team have not acted in good faith for this President or the administration for which they serve," says a House Republican leader who was not present at the White House meeting, but who instead is part of the team hammering out the House GOP alternative. "We keep hearing about how Secretary Paulson is working with Democrats on this or that, yet he never seems to consider working with the party that essentially hired him. Perhaps he's auditioning for a Democratic administration job. Our proposal didn't just spring forth fully formed; we've been working on this for several days, and Treasury staff has known about it."

Just for the record, Paulson, as you may know came from Goldman-Sachs before joining the cabinet. The dots connect pretty easily.

The Spectator obviously knows what it's talking about, since, as I mentioned, the Democrat leadership all deferred to Obama and gave him the floor so he could speak first...and when he started ripping into the Republican proposals the meeting 'became contentious' according to the dinosaur media.Or, in the language normal people use, turned into a screaming match, and a complete failure in leadership for the Chosen One.

John McCain's only contribution to the meeting was to state that he thought the GOP suggestions had some merit and should be studied, with the idea of coming up with a blended position. And after that,at the end of this debacle McCain and House GOP Minority Leader Bohner strolled off arm in arm.

In other words, McCain understands that the American people are overwhelmingly opposed to a $700 billion dollar Federal gift from the Democrats to their friends in the financial sector with no controls whatsoever, which was what Paulson wanted.

And here another point for you to ponder.The Democrats, should they wish to have the votes in the House to push this through if they so desire.Riddle me this: why are they so insistent on getting the Republicans on board? Is it because they realize how bad their proposal actually is and how deeply the American people oppose it, and they want to ensnare the Republicans in the political fallout? You think?

Talking about ' injecting presidential politics', today's spin was designed solely to protect Obama by demonizing McCain, which is why we had today's parade of Democrats not just spinning but outright lying about what went on.

There's a back story to this, and one Americans should consider when they vote in November. The Democrats feel that a bad economy helps them, and they've been consciously doing their best to achieve exactly that. The first attempt was their opposition to the US actually using its oil resources, which actually worked for awhile, but gave the Republicans an issue they needed to campaign on.

This latest attempt, a government giveaway to the same sort of people the Democrats enabled in causing this mess in the first place is designed to appeal to the Democrat's class war tactics while torpedoing any sensible proposals to deal with an emergency that could have a lasting effect on the country's credit sector if it's not dealt with.

To these people, it's all about power, no matter what the cost. They ought to hang their heads in shame.

Send The Lawyers To Wasilla!

Barack Obama singz da blues...pretty funny!

The Bailout Blues

As you've noticed, I deliberately have avoided commenting much on the proposed federal bailout now being proposed on Capitol Hill.

Having been involved in the industry and having seen (and to be honest, profited) from the laxity in credit standards and loan underwriting standards, I saw this coming quite some time ago, although even I wasn't aware of how deep the rot went.

There's a part of me that's viscerally opposed to the idea of the Feds bailing out companies that made millions pushing paper through the system by buying up assets that are now severely devalued because of their own greed and lack of basic ethics.And if it was simply a matter of letting a few of these companies go under,that would be one thing.

Unfortunately, it's not that simple. Few things are. Markets survive on confidence as much as profit, and when confidence is lacking, things can quickly spiral out of control. And like a rock dropped into a pond, that lack of confidence sends out ripples far afield of the actual companies affected...which means your small business line of credit,your ability to get a mortgage or an auto loan, your credit card balances, your pension, your home equity loan, and perhaps ultimately your job as commercial credit tightens and investment and expansion suffer.

The current occupant of the White House, with access to the best professional speechwriters in the country took 12 minutes out of everyone's life last night and somehow wasn't able to make that clear, so as a public service I'm doing so now.



As distasteful as it might be, the bail out is necessary and needs to be done.
But I think a few things ought to be crystal clear before we sign on to this.

First of all, bi-partisanship be damned. John McCain has been the prime mover in taking this bill from something that looked like it was going to fall apart because of the obstructionism of Harry Reid and his Donkey cohorts to something that now looks like fairly certain to pass.

He needs to speak to the American people and remind them that the Democrats created this mess by supercharging the Community Recovery Act and leaning on Fannie and Freddie as well as lenders to relax standards to get more people in homes, whether they were qualified or not.He needs to tell them how he attempted to rein in Fannie and Freddie some time ago and that it was the Democrats who torpedoed it..something even Bill Clinton, of all people admitted to Chris Cuomo on ABC yesterday when he accused Democrats for years of "resisting any efforts by Republicans in the Congress or by me when I was President to put some standards and tighten up a little on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac".


(the relevant section is at around 2:41)

Moreover, he needs to let the American people know that this plan is necessitated by years of looking the other way abetted by certain legislators who received considerable financial contributions from the management of Fannie and Freddie in order to stonewall any oversight like Chris Dodd, Barack Obama and Barney Frank.And that there are risks involved, but that this is the best possible solution to a bad situation, and that he personally will keep the electorate informed to make sure this isn't simply another raid on the treasury.

If McCain makes that case to the American people, not only will his credibility go up on economic management but he will go into the debates with a full head of stem and rocket ahead in the polls. People understand leadership and the ability to make tough choices in a crisis...something Barack Obama is noticeably deficient at.

As far as the plan itself goes, one thing that has to be avoided at all costs is exactly the kind of cronyism that got us into this mess in the first place. These properties will one day rebound in value. Rather than simply selling off these assets at fire sale prices to well connected 'investors' the Federal Government needs to make sure that these assets are resold and utilized at maximum value for the taxpayer's benefit. And if that means kicking some of these deadbeats out of these houses and creating a federal office or simply opening bids for federal contractors to repair the properties and rent them out profitably for a fee until they can be profitably sold, so be it.Handled correctly, there could be some fairly sweet lemonade in these lemons.

In any event, seeing as the alternative is financial meltdown in the credit sector, we have little choice.

$100K Obama `Success' As Community Organizer Being Investigated

The Chosen One has made a huge deal out of his supposed expertise as a community organizer.It was all about doing good, you see...and apparently Obama and a few of his political allies did pretty well out of it.

Here's how one of these sleazy transactions went down:

A $100,000 state grant for a botanic garden in Englewood that then-state Sen. Barack Obama awarded in 2001 to a group headed by a onetime campaign volunteer is now under investigation by the Illinois attorney general amid new questions, prompted by Chicago Sun-Times reports, about whether the money might have been misspent.

The garden was never built. And now state records obtained by the Sun-Times show $65,000 of the grant money went to the wife of Kenny B. Smith, the Obama 2000 congressional campaign volunteer who heads the Chicago Better Housing Association, which was in charge of the project for the blighted South Side neighborhood.

Smith wrote another $20,000 in grant-related checks to K.D. Contractors, a construction company that his wife, Karen D. Smith, created five months after work on the garden was supposed to have begun, records show. K.D. is no longer in business.

Attorney General Lisa Madigan -- a Democrat who is supporting Obama's presidential bid -- is investigating "whether this charitable organization properly used its charitable assets, including the state funds it received," Cara Smith, Madigan's deputy chief of staff, said Wednesday.

In addition to the 2001 grant that Obama directed to the housing association as a "member initiative," the not-for-profit group got a separate $20,000 state grant in 2006.

{...}In a previous interview, Smith said the state grant money was legitimately spent, mostly on underground site preparation.

But no one ever took out construction permits required for such work, city records show. And a contractor who Smith said did most of the work told a reporter all he did was cut down trees and grade the site with a Bobcat.

Citing the garden's failure to take root, NeighborSpace -- an umbrella group for dozens of community gardens citywide -- moved Sept. 9 to return the site to the city. Its action followed a July 11 Sun-Times report on the grant.

The contractor who cut down the trees and graded the site, Rudolfo Marin, was quoited by the Sun-Times as saying,"What I was hired for was: Clean up the area and cut the trees -- that's all....If he spent about $3,000 with me, that was too much."

Now, Obama has some history with the Smiths, as you might imagine.Smith and his wife were both long-time aides and donors for Obama's failed campaign for Congress and his successful campaigns for the Illinois State Senate and the US senate, and are now presumably helping out with his presidential campaign. Obama's handshake to the Smiths goes back to at least 1997, when Obama wrote a letter that Smith used to help the housing association win city funding in a totally separate project for an affordable-housing development near the garden site. Obama got Smith taxpayer funding for 50 homes were supposed to be built, but only a dozen poorly constructed homes ever were..and what happened to the rest of that money is a mystery too.

Sooo, lesseee...here we have a pair of longtime Obama operatives that got rewarded with one huge grant of taxpayer money that was supposed to build houses for low income people that ended up going elsewhere, and what does the Chosen One do? He rewards these same people with another huge grant of taxpayer money for a public garden that also somehow goes astray.

Yup, that's what I call positively presidential judgment, even if some of those funds that mysteriously disappeared didn't end up being kicked back to the Obama campaign under the table.

Now that's Community organizing - Chicago-style!

By the way, I wouldn't count on this going too far, with a Democrat attorney general beholden to the Daley machine. As a matter of fact, the only reason it got this far is because the Sun-Times broke the story and embarrassed a few people.

Of course, the dinosaur media has been far too busy sending dozens of reporters to Wassila to have any to spare to investigate this sort of thing.

McCain Suspends Campaign, Debate To Deal With Financial Crisis

Here we have an example of Country First versus me first; John McCain, in a surprise announcement said that he was suspending his campaign and postponing Friday's debate in order to go to Washington and deal with the current congressional fracas over the financial bail out legislation, and called for Barack Obama to do the same.

Obama, in a game of twistee unique even for him first insisted that he was the one who first called McCain and suggested it...but he now has no plans to suspend his campaign or the debate.Which,of course,makes his original story nonsensical.Sort of like he was for the idea before he was against it....

Even crazier when it comes to the game of political twister is the odious Harry Reid, the Democrat senate majority leader.

Yesterday, the Democrats, only interested in playing politics and absolutely unconcerned about whether the economy went into a tailspin or not announced that without the strong support and vote of John McCain personally, they would refuse to vote in favor of any bailout and the bill would be dead:



Now, all of a sudden, since Barack Hussein Obama has decided that his fundraising and campaigning is more important than actually doing his job as senator and stepping up to deal with an actual crisis, Reid, who yesterday was asking John McCain to tell them what to do is now telling McCain to get lost and stay away from Washington.

Reid's rationale is that McCain, whom he was begging to come to Washington yesterday should now stay away because McCain's arrival would be 'a political stunt'. This foul little man cannot conceive of the fact that the nation's business might just be more important than partisan political warfare. And neither does Obama.

McCain, perceiving that he just might be the key to heading this crisis off, is on his way to Washington DC regardless of what Reid, Obama or any other idiot with his head up his posterior might think.

That, of course, is the difference between a principled leader and a jackass out for himself first, last and always. And I have a feeling the American people might just see this the same way.

UPDATE:Believe it not, President Bush shafted McCain once again. He apparently made a personal call to the Chosen One asking him to come to DC and actually do his job...and according to Obama's spokesmouth, he'll be there, for a nice cozy bi-partisan phot-op. And thus, he deprives McCain of the benefit of appearing to the American people as someone who cares more about the country than his campaign and provides Obama with good PR and an out.

Condi Fumbles Another One - North Korea

Ah yes...another 'success' by possibly our worst secretary of state ever. North Korea has trashed its agreement with the US, kicked out the UN's IAEA inspectors and revved up the centrifuges at its Yongbyon nuclear facility:

In a highly provocative snub to Washington, Beijing and Seoul, North Korea has broken the United Nations seals that had disabled its nuclear programme, and said it would soon begin feeding atomic material back into its Yongbyon facility.

As well as kicking UN nuclear watchdog inspectors out of the country and re-opening its reprocessing plant, Pyongyang is now likely to demand the removal of International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) seals on the thousands of plutonium fuel rods removed from the plant last year.

The fuel rods represent the most critical ingredient in the resurrection of Kim Jong Il’s nuclear weapons programme – a scenario which the United States and North Korea’s immediate neighbours thought they had negotiated off the table and are desperate to avoid.

Of course, being Brits, the Times blames the US and cites 'the continued designation of North Korea by the US as a sponsor of terrorism' rather than the poisonous nature of North Korea'a fascist regime itself...and never mind that Condi Rice successfully got the Bush Administration to take them off the list back in June. According to the Times, I guess Kim Jong-Il and his pals just needed love and understanding...

As usual, John Bolton saw this coming.

As for Condi Rice, she can put North Korea on her list of diplomatic accomplishments,no?

Watcher's Council Nominations, 9/24/08

The Watcher's Council is a group of some of the most incisive blogs in the`sphere. Every week, the members nominate two posts each, one of their own and one from outside the group for consideration by the whole Council.

A full list of entries, including some excellent non-Council ones can be found here.

Council News: We are still taking applications for the spot available on the Watcher’s Council. If you have a blog of your own and feel you measure up, you're welcome to find out what's involved and apply here. Or you can leave a comment in the comments section on this post.

So, let's see what we have this week...

Joshuapundit - Doin’ The Race Based Politickin’ Shuffle - This week, I take a look at the way the Obama campaign and their surrogates in the dinosaur media are attempting to play racial politics in an attempt to get the Chosen One elected...to the detriment of the country. An dI have a few things to say about why this approach is being used by the Obama campaign, and why it seems so familiar to us

The Glittering Eye - Don’t Just Do Something, Stand There - Dave Shuler takes an in-depth look at the various viewpoints surrounding the current financial crisis and its possible effects.

Hillbilly White Trash - Knowing the Left - Lemuel expounds on his opinion of the Left, and why it's not safe for children or other living things.

The Colossus of Rhodey - Surprise from Philly Daily News: White voters “discomfitted” by Obama - Hube likewise notes how the race card is being played in the media.

Soccer Dad - The connection betweeen J-street and the Obama campaign - For those of you who don't know, J-street is a far Left quisling anti-Israel organization formed and funded by George Soros as an 'alternative' to pro-Israel groups like AIPAC. Soccer Dad notes an additional connection to the Obama campaign besides Soros and shows decisively how that influenced the dis-inviting of pro-Israel VP candidate Sarah Palin from the anti-Ahmadinejad rally in New York City.

Cheat-Seeking Missiles - Obama’s Bizarre List Of 40 “Probing” NYT Stories - Laer noted, as I did, the response of the New York Times to the McCain Campaign's accusation of bias, wherein they claimed '40 probing articles'. Laer gives us a finely detailed look at exactly how 'probing' those puff pieces really were...the titles alone give the game away.

The Razor - A Lack of Clarity - Scott has a deep post his week that deals, literally, with life and death decisions. It will make you think about your own elderly loved ones.

Bookworm Room - Are Americans Really Racists? - Ms. Bookworm looks at the notion that non-black Americans are inherently racist and puts forth her theory that what non-blacks are actually predjudiced against is the type of black culture peddled to them over the years by Madison Avenue and Hollywood.

Wolf Howling - Palin’sanity - GW has a lot of fun with a piece that attempts to logically explain PDS ( Palin Derangement Syndrome) among Leftist women. He focuses on Manhattan, but I'm certain there are a number of women with exploding heads in places like the Bay Area, Cambridge, and the West Side of Los Angeles.

The Rally That Wasn't, But Was...

I'm of course referring to the anti-Iran rally in New York City during Presidetn Ahmadinejad's address to the UN general assembly, the one Sarah Palin was rudely disinvited from because of pressure from Leftist Jewish Democrats within the organizing groups.

J Street, the NJDC and other Jewish Democrat groups were high-fiving each other over their 'victory', which supposedly involved threats to attack the tax exempt status of the Jewish organizations organizing the rally with lawsuits - but in reality likely had a lot more to do with threats from Jewish Leftists to cut off their donations if Governor Palin wasn't exorcized.

In reality, this was the rally that wasn't. Today's Anti-Ahmadinejad rally drew a whopping 2,000 (and that was with the Jewish day schools in attendance). Last year, by comparison, the same rally drew 25,000 people the last time Ahmadinaejad was here, and that's according to CBS, so it was probably more.

What's more, the Jewish Democrat shills for Obama may have vastly overplayed their hand. Directly the news of the offensive rudeness to Governor Palin got out, the blogosphere and Jewish groups went into action and called for a boycott, which was successful. And as we see even many of the people who attended turned the rally into a sort of anti-Obama rally as well...quite justified considering the Democrat candidates' stance on dealing with Iran.

In that way, today's rally was, oddly enough, a success, in that it showed these groups that the people most likely to support a pro-Israel agenda aren't willing to march in lockstep with the these people any more.The morally bankrupt so-called 'leadership' provided by groups like the UJA-Federation of New York, the Council of Presidents, the Union for Reform Judaism and others of their ilk simply are no longer relevant, for all their fancy offices, impressive letterheads and inflated salaries.And that will continue to be true until these groups make a decision to put their leftist Democrat bias behind them and concentrate on the tasks they were formed to do.

The proof of this will be on Thursday's rally, put together by groups who refused to attend the restricted one held today. That on ewill protest the dinner 'honoring' Mahmoud Ahmadinejad by The American Friends Service Committee, Mennonite Central Committee, Quaker UN Office, Religions for Peace, and the World Council of Churches-UN Liaison Office in front of New York City's Grand Hyatt Hotel.

That rally is sponsored by groups like Women United, the Jewish Action Alliance, Stand With Us, Center for Security Policy, the Catholic League, The Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, the Alliance of Iranian Women and over 30 organizations of all faiths and political affiliations.

And Governor Sarah Palin has been invited to speak. So expect fireworks.

Slow Joe Strikes Again...

I swear, just in pure entertainment value I love the fact that Joe Biden is part of the campaign.

Check this out...in last night's interview with Katie couric, in between dissing Obama's campaign ads, Biden let this out:

"When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn't just talk about the princes of greed," Biden told Couric. "He said, 'Look, here's what happened.'"

Lessee...the market crashed in 1929, and FDR didn't take office until 1933. And assuming you somehow had access to a television picture back then, wouldn't you be wondering what happened to President Hoover?

But remember, his IQ's higher than yours...

{rimshot)

Ba-dum-dah-dah!

Can you imagine the headlines if John McCain had said this? They'd be calling for a mandatory imprisonment in an old folks' 'facility.'

UPDATE: Remember Biden's actually revealing to Katie Couric that he was stricken by remorse over the Obama ad that mocked McCain's disability that occurred while he was a POW?

Well, Joe Biden apparently got spanked by the higher ups in the campaign and he's now been revised:

In the statement issued by the Obama campaign, Biden said he had never seen the ad and only read press reports of it.

"Having now reviewed the ad, it is even more clear to me that given the disgraceful tenor of Senator McCain's ads and their persistent falsehoods, his campaign is in no position to criticize," Biden said in the statement.

Notice that this was a statement drafted by some hack at the the campaign, not an actual live statement from Biden.

One decent moment of shame and remorse...I guess we knew that couldn't last.

It's becoming more and more plausible to me that Biden is headed off the ticket after th eVP debates 'for health reasons.'

Doin' The Race Based Politickin' Shuffle

We all knew it was forming beneath the skin of the campaign and we've even caught a glimpse of it now and then , but it finally has erupted and popped its horrid pus ridden head into plain sight - the race card.

As is usual with this particular joker in the deck, it's being brought into the game as a weapon by the very people that are benefiting most by racism in this campaign as a weapon....Barack Obama and his surrogates in the dinosaur media.

It's essentially an attempt to stem Obama's drop in the polls, a reminder that anybody voting against the Chosen One is of course a de facto racist.

The latest eruption started with one of CNN's resident leftards, Jack Cafferty, who wrote a nice little hit piece stating that the only reason the polls were even close had to be because of white racism.

That seems to have been the starting gun for a whole slew of similar remarks an articles around the including statements by Kansas governor Kathleen Sebelius,, lefty pundit David Gergen, The Atlantic of course, the View, Air America, NBC, ABC, the New York Times, heck, even Michael Dukakis...and finally this week's topper, a poll out of Stanford University published and promulgated by the AP that (*gasp!*) white racist Democrats could cost the Chosen One the election:

More than a third of all white Democrats and independents — voters Obama can’t win the White House without — agreed with at least one negative adjective about blacks, according to the survey, and they are significantly less likely to vote for Obama than those who don’t have such views…

Lots of Republicans harbor prejudices, too, but the survey found they weren’t voting against Obama because of his race. Most Republicans wouldn’t vote for any Democrat for president — white, black or brown.

Not all whites are prejudiced. Indeed, more whites say good things about blacks than say bad things, the poll shows. And many whites who see blacks in a negative light are still willing or even eager to vote for Obama.

On the other side of the racial question, the Illinois Democrat is drawing almost unanimous support from blacks, the poll shows, though that probably wouldn’t be enough to counter the negative effect of some whites’ views.

Race is not the biggest factor driving Democrats and independents away from Obama. Doubts about his competency loom even larger, the poll indicates. More than a quarter of all Democrats expressed doubt that Obama can bring about the change they want, and they are likely to vote against him because of that…


Still, the effects of whites’ racial views are apparent in the polling.
Statistical models derived from the poll suggest that Obama’s support would be as much as 6 percentage points higher if there were no white racial prejudice.

This is absolutely farcical.

For one thing, the pollsters state that while the Chosen One has near unanimous black support, it's not enough to counteract `the negative effect of some white's views.'

Just how would they know that? Did they also figure into the equation how many guilty white leftists are voting for Obama simply because of his color, regardless of how incompetent and inexperienced he is? Or how many Muslims of all races in America are voting for Obama because they perceive him to be a Muslim? And what about that almost monolithic black support? How about this for a headline? "Black racism could cost McCain support in urban cities."

Or here's another way to put it, something else nobody dares talk about: if it's not racist for the vast majority of black people to vote for Obama out of tribal loyalty , why is it considered 'racist' for some white people to vote against him for the same reason?

Think you'll see anyone putting out that little morsel anytime soon on CNN or in the New York Times? Or in the AP for that matter?

And I loved this bit, way down deep in the story where people skimming the article are unlikely to see it:

Statistical models derived from the poll suggest that Obama’s support would be as much as 6 percentage points higher if there were no white racial prejudice.

But in an election without precedent, it’s hard to know if such models take into account all the possible factors at play. .

Translation? We don't really know what we're talking about, but we got hired by Obama's supporters over at the AP to come up with something they could use to help his campaign...so we delivered.

The entire story is carefully hedged like that....some whites may harbor racist feelings towards blacks but will still vote for Obama, others are more concerned about his competency, many more whites say positive things then negative things about blacks..on and on it goes, one huge circle jerk, except for that screaming headline, repeated ad nauseum in the dinosaur media:

AP poll: Racism among white Democrats could cost Obama the election

And trust me on this one. Given the close ties between the Obama campaign and its shills in the dinosaur media the timing on this is no accident.

Y'see, race is a factor in this campaign, but not in the way the dinosaur media would ever admit, let alone the Democrat party...because Barack Hussein Obama is the official Sooper Dooper Affirmative Action candidate.

And it's about time someone said it.

In Barack Obama, we have someone with no discernible qualifications for the office of president, a machine party hack with a razor thin resume who's chief skill seems to be the ability to read a teleprompter in a sonorous baritone while saying absolutely nothing of substance better than anyone since William Jennings Bryan.

He's the nominee in spite of serial gaffes that would have sunk a white candidate like the Titanic a long time ago. He's the nominee in spite of losing the popular vote and in spite of losing the primaries in virtually every large blue state the Democrats need to carry to win in November.

The reason's simple. Thanks to backing from George Soros and a few other well heeled Leftards plus some expertise provided by the Chicago Daley machine, Obama became the first serious black presidential candidate. The superdelegates, the party shield carriers who's position was designed to thwart any nasty problems with the rank and file simply decided that given a choice between a monolithic black vote, the nutroots and George Soros' money versus the Clinton wing of the party, they'd go with Obama.

Call it a race based quota carried to its ultimate level of absurdity. Geraldine Ferraro had it exactly right..take away Obama's approximately one third African heritage and you essentially have Dennis Kucinich or John Edwards. Or maybe Chuckles the Clown without the fright wig.

And this goes beyond mere race, although that's a factor. By making this a major tactic in their scheme to get the Chosen One into the White House, the Obama campaign and their shills in the dinosaur media reveal something else about the way they feel deep down about this country and its people.

Not only do they see us as a bunch of redneck racists, but they actually think we're so stupid as to buy their crap and allow them to guilt us into voting for one of the most unqualified, far left candidates in history.

It remains to be seen whether the American people are going to drink this putrid Kool-Ade, but I don't think that's who we are as a country. And as for the people who would characterize an Obama defeat as due to 'racism', I can do without their approval very well, thank you.

More Palestinian Terrorist Attacks In Jerusalem

Jerusalem's Arabs continue to make the case for their outright expulsion with two terrorist attacks on Israelis today.

The first incident involved, once again, an attempt to use a vehicle as a weapon. An Arab drove his car into a group of people in Jerusalem's Tzahal Square outside the Old City, injuring 17 of them. The driver was shot and killed by an IDF reservist.

This is the third attack since July involving Arabs using vehicles a weapon instead of a gun or a bomb.

The other attack occurred after a Palestinian woman threw acid in an IDF soldier's face on Monday as she was crossing the Hawara checkpoint outside Nablus. He may lose an eye.

This one had an interesting twist to it:

The IDF said that the woman came to the checkpoint from Nablus and entered the "humanitarian lane" which is meant to be used by Palestinians who are in need of immediate medical attention and are therefore allowed to bypass an inspection in the regular lane.

IDF sources said that the attack demonstrated a "cynical" use of IDF humanitarian efforts by Palestinian terrorists. The IDF, the sources stressed, had eased travel restrictions throughout the West Bank in recent weeks to enable Palestinians to travel more freely during the month of Ramadan.

Meanwhile Monday, the IDF revealed that the Palestinian terrorist who was killed on Saturday as he tried infiltrating Yitzhar with a Molotov cocktail was the same terrorist who infiltrated the settlement a week earlier and stabbed a nine-year-old boy.

Yes, the IDF was ordered once again by the Israeli government to ease travel restrictions at the checkpoints, just like Condi Rice and Abbas insisted.The results could easily have been predicted.

The NYT "Not By Any Standard A Journalistic Organization.."

Well, it's about time somebody said so.McCain's campaign manager Steve Schmidt pretty much tells it like it is..



Oh by the way, th eNew York Times responded with this list of what they referred to as Obama 'investigations'. Read these titles and th etruth of what Schmidt said becomes self evident:

1. In Law School, Obama Found Political Voice [New York Times, 1/28/07]
2. So Far, Obama Can’t Take Black Vote For Granted [New York Times, 2/2/07]
3. Obama Had Slaveowning Kin [New York Times, 3/3/07]
4. Disinvitation by Obama Is Criticized [New York Times, 3/6/07]
5. Obama, in Brief Investing Foray In '05, Took Same Path as Donors [New York Times, 3/7/07]
6. Obama Says His Investments Presented No Conflicts of Interest [New York Times, 3/8/07]
7. Charisma and a Search for Self In Obama's Hawaii Childhood [New York Times, 3/17/07]
8. Clinton Camp Challenges Obama on Iraq. [New York Times, 3/22/07]
9. After 2000 Loss, Obama Built Donor Network From Roots Up [New York Times, 4/3/07]
10. A Candidate, His Minister and the Search for Faith [New York Times, 4/30/07]
11. An Obama Patron and Friend Until an Indictment in Illinois [New York Times, 6/14/07]
12. In Illinois, Obama Proved Pragmatic and Shrewd. [New York Times, 7/30/07]
13. In 2000, a Streetwise Veteran Schooled a Bold Young Obama. [New York Times, 9/9/07]
14. Loyal Network Backs Obama After His Help. [New York Times, 10/1/07]
15. Obama’s Account of New York Years Often Differs From What Others Say. [New York Times, 10/30/07]
16. It’s Not Just ‘Ayes’ and ‘Nays’: Obama’s Votes in Illinois Echo. [New York Times, 12/20/07]
17. Nuclear Leaks and Response Tested Obama in Senate [New York Times, 2/3/08]
18. Daschle Uses Senate Ties To Blaze Path for Obama [New York Times, 2/5/08]
19. Old Friends Say Drugs Played Bit Part in Obama’s Young Life [New York Times, 2/9/08]
20. Seeking Unity, Obama Feels Pull of Racial Divide [New York Times, 2/12/08]
21. Obama Walks a Difficult Path as He Courts Jewish Voters [New York Times, 3/1/08]
Obama in Senate: Star Power, Minor Role [New York Times, 3/9/08]
22. A Free-Spirited Wanderer Who Set Obama’s Path [New York Times, 3/14/08]
23.Pastor Defends His Predecessor at Obama’s Chicago Church [New York Times, 3/17/08]
24. Obama’s Narrator [New York Times, 4/1/07]
25. Wright Remains a Concern for Some Democrats [New York Times, 5/1/08]
26. A Strained Wright-Obama Bond Finally Snaps [New York Times, 5/1/08]
27. A Pulpit-and-Pews Gulf on Obama’s Ex-Pastor [New York Times, 5/2/08]
28. A Fiery Theology Under Fire [New York Times, 5/4/08]
29. Obama Secret Service Agent Tied To Sex Joke [New York Times, 5/15/08]
30. The Story of Obama, Written by Obama [New York Times, 5/18/08]
31. Following Months of Criticism, Obama Quits His Church [New York Times, 6/1/08]
32. Many Blacks Find Joy in Unexpected Breakthrough [New York Times, 6/5/08]
33. Where Whites Draw The Line [New York Times, 6/8/08]
34. Obama’s Organizing Years, Guiding Others and Finding Himself [New York Times, 7/7/08]
35. As a Professor, Obama Enthralled Students and Puzzled Faculty [New York Times, 7/30/08]
36. Delicate Obama Path on Class and Race Preferences [New York Times, 8/3/08]
37. Big Donors, Too, Have Seats at Obama Fundraising Table [New York Times, 8/6/08]
38. Is Obama the End of Black Politics? [New York Times, 8/10/08]
39. Obama’s 2003 Stand on Abortion Draws New Criticism in 2008 [New York Times, 8/20/08]
40. Obama Aides Defend Bank’s Pay to Biden Son [New York Times, 8/25/08]
41. Once a Convention Outsider, Obama Navigated a Path to the Marquee [New York Times, 8/27/08]
42. Obama Looks to Lessons From Chicago in His National Education Plan [New York Times, 9/10/08]

Oooh, ` Obama's Organizing years: guiding others, seeking himself'...sounds like a real no holds barred hit piece to me!

Biden Disses Obama's Campaign Ad!

Apparently there's some o' the nasty stuff even Joe Biden won't eat...

Illegal Anti-Palin Video Traced Directly To Obama's Campaign Manager's PR Firm

This is huge.

You may have noticed a lot of 'concerned Christian conservatives' and 'lifetime Republicans' leaving comments on the net and repeating anti-Palin talking points.

Well it turns out that this smear campaign is not exactly the grassroots campaign it was supposed to be, but was orchestrated directly by David Axelrod's PR firm. The PR term for this is 'astro turfing' and Axelrod is reportedly a master of the craft.

And this time, it appears they crossed the line and violated FEC rules. Rusty at the Jawa Report has the story:

Our research suggests that a subdivision of one of the largest public relations firms in the world most likely started and promulgated rumors about Sarah Palin that were known to be false. These rumors were spread in a surreptitious manner to avoid exposure.

It is also likely that the PR firm was paid by outside sources to run the smear campaign. While not conclusive, evidence suggests a link to the Barack Obama campaign. Namely:

Evidence suggests that a YouTube video with false claims about Palin was uploaded and promoted by members of a professional PR firm.

The family that runs the PR firm has extensive ties to the Democratic Party, the netroots, and are staunch Obama supporters.

Evidence suggests that the firm engaged in a concerted effort to distribute the video in such a way that it would appear to have gone viral on its own. Yet this effort took place on company time.

Evidence suggests that these distribution efforts included actions by at least one employee of the firm who is unconnected with the family running the company.

The voice-over artist used in this supposedly amateur video is a professional.

This same voice-over artist has worked extensively with David Axelrod's firm, which has a history of engaging in phony grassroots efforts, otherwise known as "astroturfing."

David Axelrod is Barack Obama's chief media strategist.

The same voice-over artist has worked directly for the Barack Obama campaign.

This suggests that false rumors and outright lies about Sarah Palin and John McCain being spread on the Internet are being orchestrated by political partisans and are not an organic grassroots phenomenon led by the left wing fringe.

So, distasteful as it is, why is it a crime? Because Federal election law requires that all political ads have a disclaimer from those paying for campaign ads is legally mandated to appear on any "electioneering communication" and on any public ad by anyone that advocates the election or defeat of a clearly identified candidate or solicits funds in connection with a federal election.


Even when the ad isn't paid for by a candidates campaign, "the disclaimer notice must identify who paid for the message, state that it was not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee and list the permanent street address, telephone number or World Wide Web address of the person who paid for the communication."

Guess what ..there's no disclaimer on this particular ad. What it looks like here is that the ad was professionally produced but put on YouTube ( and later places like Democratic Underground) as a 'grassroots' ad then spread in such a way as to make it seem like amateurs had made it and gone viral with it. And that's illegal.

Even 527 groups like MoveOn are required to report money spent on advertising opposing a candidate for public office. So if some group paid for the making of this professionally done video and then didn't report it to the FEC, it's a major breach of federal campaign law.

Proof of how bad this is can be seen by the fact that no sooner had the blogosphere broken this than the videos were scrubbed of of YouTube...but not quite fast enough, as both Rusty and Ace have downloaded copies and will be hosting them on their servers.

Ace connects the dots:

"If, as seems to be the case, Axelrod hired Winner and Associates to do this, then there had better be a disclosure somewhere in Obama's FEC filings that he's hired this company through Axelrod. If he's deliberately hiding firms he knows to be working for him, that has got to be a violation of the law{...}

Tomorrow they will claim this was all inadvertent, etc. They'll say they did produce the ad, and sent it to Winner and Associates to, um, focus-group or something, then decided not to run it, but that dirty Winner family and its employees attempted to get it to go viral without their authorization.

Whatever.

If this is all so innocent, why are the videos being yanked even as we speak?

Just about one hour after the post went up, "cnwinner," "eswinner" and the rest of the winner gang are yanking their videos.

Almost as if... I don't know, some kind of major campaign organization was patrolling the internet 24/7.

Can we believe "cnwinner," "eswinner," and etc. just all suddenly were monitoring the internet and decided to take their videos down simultaneously?

No, we cannot.

Can we believe Winner & Associates scours the internet 24 hours a day for derogatory stories about them?

No, we cannot.

But -- can we believe the Obama campaign has people watching the internet 24/7 and just sent out the call to Winner & Associates to bury the evidence?

Yes we can, friends.

Yes we can.

You guys put it out there. Dishonestly. You tried to get it to go viral without the Obama campaign's fingerprints on it.

Well, it's about to go viral, guys. More viral than you ever expected. And it's now news -- and possible evidence of a crime..."

Caught like the rats they are.... Ace and Rusty, major kudos for breaking this open.

Another Brit Labour Minister Disses Sarah Palin

This is getting ridiculous. First it was PM Gordon Brown, and now yet another cabinet representative of Britain's Labour party decided to stick her large nose in our affairs, referring to US GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin as 'horrendous.'

This time, it was Communities Secretary Hazel Blears, who been responsible, among her other achievements at seeing that sharia Muslim law is now completely enforceable in Britain and helped set up 5 sharia courts virtually in secret.

And this cretin has the nerve to call another public official 'horrendous'? Especially during an American election, when her government might end up having to work with Sarah Palin's party at the White House in a few months? I mean, hiow stupid can you be and still be in government?

I said it once and I'll say it again, cousins...if you're so all fired anxious to have Barack Hussein Obama and Joe Biden in charge, you take them and let them run Britain. Based on what I'm seeing lately from your side of the pond, they'd fit right in...and we'd be well rid of them.

If I were British, I'd be embarrassed, to say the least.

Marriot Hotel In In Pakistan Bombed; 53 Dead and Rising

The Islamabad Marriot Hotel, a major gathering place and watering hole for westerners and Pakistan's elite was destroyed by a truck bomb yesterday. So far, the death toll is 53, including two Americans and the Czechoslovakian ambassador. Over 250 people were injured, a number of them critically.

The heavy truck rammed a steel barrier and detonated less than sixty feet from the hotel's entrance. According to Pakistan's acting top security official, Rehman Malik, the truck contained an estimated 1,300 pounds of military-grade explosives including RDX and potassium chloride as well as artillery and mortar shells and left a crater 59 feet wide and 24 feet deep in front of the main building.The bomb also contained aluminum powder, designed to cause the fire that gutted the hotel.



The attack was designed to produce maximum casualties, occurring at the height of the dinner hour following the Ramadan fast. The entire ceiling of the main banqueting hall collapsed, burying 500 guests at a banquet that was supposed to have included Pakistan's president and prime minister, who changed plans at were not in the building. Just a few hours ago and half a mile away from the Marriott, Pakistan's new president Asif Ali Zardari made his first official address to parliament and pledged to fight both terrorism to resist violations of the country's sovereignty, a clear reference to the recent US raids in Waziristan against Taliban and al-Qaeda targets.

"We will not tolerate the violation of our sovereignty and territorial integrity by any power in the name of combating terrorism," he said, as legislators thumped their desks and cheered in support.

The attack was obviously a message to Zardari and the Pakistanis from the Taliban and al-Qaeda...first, that they can reach out anywhere, even if the heart of Pakistan's capitol and second, to end any cooperation with the Americans or pay the price.

The attack occurred one year to the day from the time when Osama bin-Laden called for a jihad against the Pakistan's government. Last month, in a video release al-Qaeda's No. 2 Sheik Ayman al-Zawahri accused Pakistan's new leaders of being tools of the US and called for their destruction.

Part of the problem is the fact that the Taliban and al-Qaeda still have substantial support among Pakistan's security establishment, especially in the ISI, Pakistan's equivalent of MI5 or the CIA.

A blatant attack like this could have one of two results;either increased ties with the US and renewed cooperation to root the Taliban and al-Qaeda out of Waziristan or another de facto cease fire that allows them to operate with impunity as long as they leave Pakistan's ruling class alone.

I'd place my bets on option number 2. As I've pointed out before, the aid money we give Pakistan is a bribe to allow supplies to flow from Pakistan's ports to our forces in Afghanistan, and the Pakistanis need to do little more to keep the money coming in.

The big question, of course, is how long the US is going to allow this situation to continue. The Taliban and al-Qaeda have bases within easy reach of Pakistan's nuclear facilities, and I'd call this a pretty volatile situation at best.

Watcher's Council Results, 9/19/08

The Council has spoken! A complete rundown of the voting tallies is here.


Among the Council members, the winner was Bookworm Room for her excellent False Syllogisms.

Coming in second was Wolf Howling's finely detailed analysis of the relationship between McCain, Fannie, Freddie & Obamafuscation.


Also getting votes were Cheat-Seeking Missiles for Lipstick Not Only Pig-Hockey Mom Difference and The Razor for There Must Be Blood

Among the non-Council entries, the winner was Brits at Their Best: 9-11-1777 What If?

In second place was Doug Ross Journal: Jamie Gorelick: Mistress of Disaster

As usual, congratulations not only to the winners, but to the participants.

South Africa Moves To The Left, As President Mbeki Ousted

South African president Thabo Mbeki was essentially kicked out of office today by his own African National Congress ( ANC) Party.

This leaves a major power vacuum in the country, as his Deputy President Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka is also resigning. Under South Africa's constitution, she'd normally be next in line.

The ANC is by far the dominant party in South Africa, and this the final act of a long standing contest between Mbeki and Jacob Zuma, who ousted Mbeki as ANC party leader last december in a contest that was largely seen as a referendum between the two.

What happened is that the ANC's 86-member National Executive Committee ordered Mbeki to quit at a meeting in Johannesburg, eight days after a High Court judge suggested Mbeki pressured prosecutors to pursue corruption charges against Zuma.

Zuma, like Mbecki is an old ANC hand and was Mbecki's deputy president until Mbeki fired him in 2005 after a scandal surfaced that Zuma's adviser Schabir Shaik tried to solicit a bribe for him in connection with contracts for South Africa's navy. Shaik took the fall for his boss, was convicted of bribery and sentenced to 15 years in jail.

Charges against Zuma were dropped after High Court Judge Chris Nicholson invalidated them last week on a technicality, saying prosecutors didn't follow proper procedures and that the case may have been politically motivated. There was no attempt to find out whether Zuma actually did takes the alleged bribes.

After the government decided to appeal, the ANC acted quickly to prot4ect its leader and booted Mbecki out.

Zuma has the backing of his Zulu tribe, the labor unions and the communists, who are a large political factor in the country.Before they took power, the ANC was a communist organization backed by the Soviets, and while they have their ownparties, there are still a lot of them within the ANC.

Mbecki's biggest headaches aside from his feud with Zuma were South Africa's spiking crime rate, an out-of-control AIDS epidemic and general instability in the economy, all of which affected foreign investment and the country's standard of living.

Mbecki left crime and AIDS alone, but attempted to privatize parts of the economy, which ticked off the unions and the rank and file marxists in his own party.

Adding to the uncertainty is the question of who takes over now.As the ANC leader, Jacob Zuma would noramlyy take over, and the ANC has already nominated him to succeed Mbeki. But he can't take over the presidency until elections, which are supposed to happen next year, because he isn't in parliament right now.

What will probably go down is that the ANC will appoint a caretaker president until Zuma can take over.

This isn't the first time turf wars between factions in the ANC have paralyzed South Africa.

In any event, once Zuma takes over, look for South Africas to veer leftward.It remains to be seen whether Zuma can get control over the country's deep seated problems.

Sandra Bernhard: Palin Would Be Gang-Raped By Blacks in Manhattan

Yes, they're really coming out of the woodwork.

Let's start with 'comedienne' Sandra Bernhard, who said on stage that Palin Would Be Gang-Raped By Blacks in Manhattan...



Warning..this is one angry and deranged person and there's some pretty foul language.

Here's some choice bits:

"Now you got Uncle Women, like Sarah Palin, who jumps on the s--t and points her fingers at other women. Turncoat b---h! Don’t you f--kin’ reference Old Testament, bitch! You stay with your new Goyish crappy shiksa funky bulls--t! Don’t you touch my Old Testament, you b---h! Because we have left it open for interpre-ta-tion! It is no longer taken literally! You whore in your f--kin' cheap New Vision cheap-ass plastic glasses and your [sneering voice] hair up. A Tina Fey-Megan Mullally brokedown bulls--t moment."

Your 'Old Testament' Sandra? for one thing, most Jews refer to it as the Torah (if they're talking about the five book of Moses) or the Bible.And I seem to recall that the scripture has a few things to say about bearing false witness and lashon hora ( literally an 'evil tongue'). Plus, there's that pesky little bit of Leviticus that sort of discourages your choice of lifestyle. And by the way, are you kosher and do you keep the Sabbath? Maybe you can beat the bushes and find a Rabbi to go along with your particular `interpretation', but most even reasonably observant Jews would call that uh...bulls**t, to use that trenchant phrase your foul mouth seems so fond of.

I also wonder about that reference to `your new Goyish crappy shiksa funky bulls--t!' I realize that you're now a biblical scholar in addition to your other talents, but you obviously missed the lesson about how Christians like Governor Palin accept and honor both the Bible and the New Testament as divine Scripture.

And you know what Sandra...she's has as much right to it as you do. If not more, because she at least appears to practice her religion.

To add insult to injury, this hate fest was proudly produced at the J Street theater by the D.C. Jewish Community Center. Here's a quote from spokesman Ari Roth:

We’re proud of our producing -- proud of Sandra’s sense of timing -- taking the fight out to the house and to the street beyond, channeling so much of our rage and frustration at the bizarre recent twists of fortune since Karl Rove trotted out Sarah Palin for John McCain to briefly meet and then get in bed with.Sandra’s face is hanging 10 feet tall in a banner over the DCJCC steps and we’re proud that she’s a new emblem and ambassador for our theater and our center. She’s not the only one who represents us. But her large heart, her generous talent, and her big mouth are all a big part of who we are.

Undoubtedly this kind of hate-filled rant is a big part of whom these people are. But it has nothing to do with Judaism, and I would advise you, your pals and Sarah Bernhard to keep your mitts off our Torah, thank you.

And to my Christian friends, my sincere apologies, It seems that I've been doing a lot of that lately as empty secular Leftist Jews continue to make a mockery of the faith.