Tonight's Music

I recieved an invitation to what looks to be one of the best Halloween parties in the nation, but It happens to be in Philadelphia so I won't be attending. However if any of you are in the area you might want to check out Dracula's Ball.

The Medieval Babes will be appearing, among others.



In fact they have set aside a room exclusively for medieval music like Qntal, Corvus Corax, Faun and the Babes due to its growing popularity.

If the market is allowed to work it will sort things out

James Calhoun offers some badly needed perspective:

Last week Goldman Sachs raised $10 billion in new capital in one day. They sold $5 billion in preferred stock and warrants to Berkshire Hathaway and also completed a secondary offering of common stock that raised another $5 billion. Friday, JP Morgan raised $10 billion in a secondary offering to help pay for the Washington Mutual takeunder. Both of these offerings were oversubscribed, meaning that the companies could have raised more capital if they wanted. There is not a shortage of capital for well run financial companies. There is, however, a shortage of capital for companies that have acted irresponsibly with investor capital in the recent past. For some reason, our political leaders believe this is a failure of the market, but isn’t this what should be expected from rational investors? ...

The biggest bank failure in the history of the United States happened last Thursday night and by Friday morning, it was business as usual. The only difference was the name on the door and the losses suffered by those unfortunate enough to invest in Washington Mutual bonds or stock. The taxpayers didn’t lose anything and depositors didn’t lose anything, only investors. That is how capitalism works in case everyone has forgotten.

In a free market situations like this are dealt with by badly run businesses going under and their assets being taken over by better run businesses. Bad debt is written off, investors take a hit (investors reap the largest rewards of success but they assume the risk and sometimes lose their money if you can't deal with that don't invest) and the economy begins to grow again.

This 700 billion (which will quickly swell to at least a trillion) dollar bailout was a gigantic ream job which the left (Treasury Secretary Paulson is a liberal Democrat) was attempting to foist on the American taxpayers. The propose of the bailout was to generate a huge pile of cash which congressional liberals could divert to their buddies (like B. Hussein Obama's associates at ACORN) knowing that a substantial cut would be returned to them as campaign contributions and that these entities would have lucrative jobs waiting for Democrats retiring from "public service".

Equally important, to the left, was the fact that the bailout would have moved the federal government into the nation's financial markets in a way which has never been done before. This move would have represented a government takeover of a significant part of the American economy almost on a par with Hillary Clinton's attempt to bring about socialized medicine in the 90's.

The failure of this "deal" is a good thing. Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron puts it this way:

This bailout was a terrible idea. Here's why.

The current mess would never have occurred in the absence of ill-conceived federal policies. The federal government chartered Fannie Mae in 1938 and Freddie Mac in 1970; these two mortgage lending institutions are at the center of the crisis. The government implicitly promised these institutions that it would make good on their debts, so Fannie and Freddie took on huge amounts of excessive risk.

Worse, beginning in 1977 and even more in the 1990s and the early part of this century, Congress pushed mortgage lenders and Fannie/Freddie to expand subprime lending. The industry was happy to oblige, given the implicit promise of federal backing, and subprime lending soared.

This subprime lending was more than a minor relaxation of existing credit guidelines. This lending was a wholesale abandonment of reasonable lending practices in which borrowers with poor credit characteristics got mortgages they were ill-equipped to handle.

Once housing prices declined and economic conditions worsened, defaults and delinquencies soared, leaving the industry holding large amounts of severely depreciated mortgage assets.

The fact that government bears such a huge responsibility for the current mess means any response should eliminate the conditions that created this situation in the first place, not attempt to fix bad government with more government.

The obvious alternative to a bailout is letting troubled financial institutions declare bankruptcy. Bankruptcy means that shareholders typically get wiped out and the creditors own the company.

Bankruptcy does not mean the company disappears; it is just owned by someone new (as has occurred with several airlines). Bankruptcy punishes those who took excessive risks while preserving those aspects of a businesses that remain profitable.

In contrast, a bailout transfers enormous wealth from taxpayers to those who knowingly engaged in risky subprime lending. Thus, the bailout encourages companies to take large, imprudent risks and count on getting bailed out by government. This "moral hazard" generates enormous distortions in an economy's allocation of its financial resources.

[. . .]

Anticipation of the bailout will engender strategic behavior by Wall Street institutions as they shuffle their assets and position their balance sheets to maximize their take. The bailout will open the door to further federal meddling in financial markets.

So what should the government do? Eliminate those policies that generated the current mess. This means, at a general level, abandoning the goal of home ownership independent of ability to pay. This means, in particular, getting rid of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, along with policies like the Community Reinvestment Act that pressure banks into subprime lending.

The right view of the financial mess is that an enormous fraction of subprime lending should never have occurred in the first place. Someone has to pay for that. That someone should not be, and does not need to be, the U.S. taxpayer.

It is time NOW just weeks before a presidential election for the American public to take a long hard look at exactly who caused this mess and exactly what needs to be done to fix it.

As Mr. Miron said the answer to bad government is not more government.

More on who to blame

Here is another video of a congressional hearing in which Republican after Republican warns of a serious problem and Democrat after Democrat denies that anything is wrong and implies that the only reason to question the status quo is racism.


Want to know who to blame for this whole mess? You need look no further than the Democrat party.

Now they want us to give them the White House.

NO WAY IN HELL!

Still wondering what is causing all the banks to fail?

Here is a great video which summarizes the current crisis. Watch the whole thing. Like it says everything in it is a fact which you can verify for yourself.



H/T: Lima Lima Mike Foxtrot

Peas in a pod

This video is presented in honor of the little messiah, B. Hussein Obama.



Like his predecessor Adolf Hitler B. Hussein Obama is a mesmerizing public speaker whose words have a profound effect upon his target audience. As with Hitler Obama's political movement has a strong racial component. And like Hitler Mr. Obama began his political career as a street organizer. Also like Hitler Mr. Obama's followers regard him as a kind of savior who possesses an almost mystical power to transform the nation. And, most importantly, like Hitler Barack Obama seeks to use fear and intimidation to silence his opponents during his rise to power and I have no doubt that if he should ever gain power he, like Hitler, will use all the power of the state to "evacuate" his enemies to the "East".

The little messiah unleashes his freikorps

On Friday the little messiah's campaign dropped this turd into the nation's political punchbowl. Jim Geraghty writes on NRO's The Campaign Spot:

Missouri Prosecutors, Sheriffs 'Target Anyone Who Lies' About Barack Obama

A St. Louis television station reports — their words — "The Barack Obama campaign is asking Missouri law enforcement to target anyone who lies or runs a misleading TV ad during the presidential campaign."

Prosecutors and sheriffs from across Missouri are joining "The Barack Obama Truth Squad."

They mention Jennifer Joyce, St. Louis Circuit Attorney and Bob McCullough, prosecutor for St. Louis County in Missouri.

The reporter says, "They will be reminding voters that Barack Obama is a Christian who wants to cut taxes for anyone making less than $250,000 a year."

While the report never quite comes out and says that anyone running an ad saying those things would be subject to prosecution, that certainly is the message implied.

Not all things that are wrong are illegal. Saying that Barack Obama is a Muslim is wrong, but it does not warrant prosecution by the state.

I would cite Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism, but an angry mob just took my copy to their book-burning...

UPDATE: AIP responds:

Washington, DC – September 26, 2008 – Barack Obama is now using local law enforcement officials to carry out his campaign of legal intimidation by assembling a group of high-ranking Missouri police officials and prosecutors – including St. Louis County Prosecutor Bob McCullough and City of St. Louis Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce – to identify and target anyone the campaign determines is producing “misleading” political advertisements.

“This is an outrageous and shocking attempt by the Obama campaign to again employ Stalinist, police state tactics against those who dare to disagree with Barack Obama,” said Ed Martin, American Issues Projects president. “I am frankly stunned to see public officials like McCullough and Joyce abusing their official prosecutorial positions to serve as attack dogs for a national political campaign. I am quite certain Missourians elected these individuals to enforce the laws and arrest criminals, not to throw people in jail for daring to practicing free speech.

"The Obama campaign continues to provide a chilling preview of what would happen to political freedom in an Obama administration.”

This new effort is only the most recent attempt by the Obama campaign to crack down on free speech. Obama’s lawyers twice demanded the Department of Justice investigate and prosecute the American Issues Project, its officers, board of directors, and donors. The campaign also threatened stations running American Issues Project’s ad in an unsuccessful attempt to compel them to pull the spot, and ran its own ad in response.

Notably, this ad failed to dispute a single fact the American Issues Project has put forth.

The Governor of Missouri had this to say in response:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Saturday, September 27, 2008 Contact: Jessica Robinson, 573-751-0290 Gov. Blunt Statement on Obama Campaign’s Abusive Use of Missouri Law Enforcement

Gov. Blunt Statement on Obama Campaign’s Abusive Use of Missouri Law Enforcement

JEFFERSON CITY - Gov. Matt Blunt today issued the following statement on news reports that have exposed plans by U.S. Senator Barack Obama to use Missouri law enforcement to threaten and intimidate his critics.

“St. Louis County Circuit Attorney Bob McCulloch, St. Louis City Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce, Jefferson County Sheriff Glenn Boyer, and Obama and the leader of his Missouri campaign Senator Claire McCaskill have attached the stench of police state tactics to the Obama-Biden campaign.

“What Senator Obama and his helpers are doing is scandalous beyond words, the party that claims to be the party of Thomas Jefferson is abusing the justice system and offices of public trust to silence political criticism with threats of prosecution and criminal punishment.

“This abuse of the law for intimidation insults the most sacred principles and ideals of Jefferson. I can think of nothing more offensive to Jefferson’s thinking than using the power of the state to deprive Americans of their civil rights. The only conceivable purpose of Messrs. McCulloch, Obama and the others is to frighten people away from expressing themselves, to chill free and open debate, to suppress support and donations to conservative organizations targeted by this anti-civil rights, to strangle criticism of Mr. Obama, to suppress ads about his support of higher taxes, and to choke out criticism on television, radio, the Internet, blogs, e-mail and daily conversation about the election.

“Barack Obama needs to grow up. Leftist blogs and others in the press constantly say false things about me and my family. Usually, we ignore false and scurrilous accusations because the purveyors have no credibility. When necessary, we refute them. Enlisting Missouri law enforcement to intimidate people and kill free debate is reminiscent of the Sedition Acts - not a free society.”

It's not that the little messiah, or the manchild as Rush calls him, needs to "grow up". He already is "grown up". It's just that he grew up in the sewer of Chicago street politics where the almost unbelievable corruption of the Cook County Democrat machine meets the handout oriented racially charged grievance culture created by the welfare state.

Barack Obama's political identity was formed by reading and closely following the book Rules for Radicals which was written by the hard-core Stalinist Saul Alinsky and by the mentoring of the America hating racist and Black Liberation Theology spouting "pastor" Jeremiah Wright and by his years-long friendship and close association with unrepentant terrorist bomber and communist revolutionary William Ayers.

Given that background how can we expect Obama to be anything other than the kind of man who would seek to enlist the power of the nation's legal establishment to intimidate his opponents into silence?

The left in this country has made a cottage industry of comparing Bush to Hitler. However nothing that Mr. Bush has ever done or sought the congressional authority to do (which really only amounts to giving the nations law enforcement and intelligence agencies the ability to listen in on the phone calls of people who have a proven connection to foreign terrorists) comes within light years of what the "Obama Truth Squad" is setting out to do.

At the Republican convention we saw Obama's partisans dressed alike in black "uniforms" plotting acts of violence against the delegates up to and including kidnapping and attempted murder (throwing bags of cement off freeway overpasses onto the buses carrying delegates to the convention is attempted murder).

This is EXACTLY the kind of behavior that Hitler's Sturmabteilung (SA, Brownshirts, Storm Troopers) engaged in during the time when the NSDAP (Nazi party) was competing in German elections.

After gaining power Hitler bent the law enforcement agencies of the German state to his will. Under the leadership of men like Heinrich Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich and Adolf Eichmann the law enforcement agencies of Germany became the servants of the Nazi party and its leader Adolf Hitler.

In the police state environment created by Hitler in Germany, Stalin in the Soviet Union and Mussolini in Italy to simply disagree with and express a contary opinion to the ruling party and its Leader carried serious consequences, up to and including a concentration camp or a bullet through the back of the head.

Now in America we have a major party's nominee for the office of president attempting to use similar police state tactics before he has even been elected. If he will do this when he is just a candidate what will he do if he actually has the power of the executive branch in his hands?

I urge my fellow citizens to think long and hard about this question before they head into the voting booth.

H/T: White Trash Republican

Blogs for Borders video blogburst

Our weekly vlog/podcast on illegal immigration and border security. In this weeks edition...

Vigilance Dispatch: Everyone is talking about the massive bailouts. How has illegal immigration fed into the financial crisis that Washington plans to fix using our taxpayer dollars?

100% Preventable! Americans continue to pay the bloody price for open borders, when will the madness end?

Download for your Ipod here.

Make sure to visit this weeks sponsor....

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If you'd like to sponsor a show contact us here.

This has been the Blogs For Borders Video Blogburst. The Blogs For Borders Blogroll is dedicated to American sovereignty, border security and a sane immigration policy. If you’d like to join find out how right here.

Technorati Tags: illegal immigration, open borders, invasion, rape, pedophile, child molester, bailout, subprime mortgage crisis, corruption,

A new member for the Hillbilly Ecosystem

It's been a while since we welcomed a new member to the Hillbilly Ecosystem but today we have that honor. Lima Lima Mike Foxtrot has joined up. They are tons of fun from the Great White North. Go over and pay them a visit.

The little messiah screws up again

The Atlantic explains that it wasn't McCain who torpedoed the White House conference on the bailout deal:

Though Sen. Chris Dodd implied that Sen. McCain sandbagged the rest of the negotiators by bringing up alternative proposals, McCain himself did not bring up those proposals, according to four independent sources briefed by four different principals inside the meeting, including two Republicans and two Democrats.

"McCain has not attacked the Paulson deal," said a third Republican who was briefed by McCain direclty. "Unlike the [Democrats] in the [White House] meeting, he didn't raise his voice or cause a ruckus. He is urging all sides to come together."

Republicans like John Boehner brought up the concerns of House GOPers and McCain acknowledged hearing about their concerns. And McCain, and staffers, did seek to gauge the level of support of the GOP working group's white paper. The Democrats were left with the impression that McCain endorsed the GOP efforts, but they concede that he did not raise them directly.

The fact is that Boehner doesn't have 100 votes from his conference -- 100 votes that Nancy Pelosi really wants. And that's not McCain's fault.

But Boehner and the White House -- and McCain -- if they want to get something passed -- do have the responsibility to persuade these Republicans to support the bailout .

After all, if not to get these recalcitrant Republicans on board, why did McCain go to Washington in the first place?

In the first place McCain didn't go to Washington to force the House Republicans to accept a bad deal. He went to Washington because he is a United States Senator from the state of Arizona. He has a sworn duty to be the voice of the people of Arizona in the Senate. He is 50% of Arizona's Senate representation. And love John McCain or hate him he is a man who will do his duty or die trying.

In the second place there was no "deal" for McCain to blow up. The supposed deal is a giant ream job that the Secretary of the Treasury and congressional Democrats are trying to get the nation to bend over and grab their ankles for and the House Republicans aren't having any of it - and thank God for them.

The Republican counter proposals may not be perfect but they are market based, they do not leave the taxpayers in the position of having to cover a blank check for up to a trillion dollars and they provide for the economic stimulation of serious tax cuts which will grow the economy to the point where the cost of the bailout will not be onerous.

In the third place the truth of what happened in the meeting, according to insiders, is that the Democrats all deferred to B. Hussein Obama -otherwise known as the little messiah, allowing him to be their spokesman. The reports are that he went into the meeting very much ignorant of anything but the bare outline of the Republican position and proceeded to attack the Republican proposals in a belligerent and ill-mannered (and ill-informed) way.

It is at this point that the meeting is said to have fallen apart in shouting and argument.

This is how Barack Obama brings people together.

This is how Barack Obama leads.

This is the "change" we can expect from Barack Obama.

This is what we can "hope" for from Barack Obama.

The little messiah is an ignorant and simple minded man who simply cannot function anywhere outside of the sewer of Chicago street politics without a teleprompter feeding him words written by David Axelrod or some other puppetmaster.

This is not a "man" who needs to be allowed any closer to the White House than the guided tour.

World's First!

Yves Rossy just flew this device over the English Channel (video here). Although the video does not give us a close up view of his face I'm sure that he is wearing a look of cruel determination.

When they come out with one that deploys from a small backpack and allows you to fly halfway around the world at supersonic speeds I'll buy one. I have seen such technology in comic books so I am certain that it exists.

Stating the obvious

Tony Blankley notices what everyone else picked up on months ago:

The mainstream media have gone over the line and are now straight out propagandists for the Obama campaign. While they have been liberal and blinkered in their worldview for decades, in 2007-08 for the first time, the major media are consciously covering for one candidate for president and consciously knifing the other. This is no longer journalism — it is simply propaganda. (The American left-wing version of the Volkischer Beobachter cannot be far behind.) And as a result, we are less than seven weeks away from possibly electing a president who has not been thoroughly and even half way honestly presented to the country by our watchdogs — the press.

Note: The American left-wing version of Volkischer Beobachter is already here. It is called The New York Times and there is an on-air version called MSNBC.

The image of Barack Obama that the press has presented is not a fair approximation of the real man. They have consciously ignored whole years in his life, and showed a lack of curiosity about such gaps that bespeaks a lack of journalistic instinct. Thus, the public image of Mr. Obama is of a "Man who never was." I take that phrase from a 1956 movie about a real life WWII British intelligence operation to trick the Germans into thinking the Allies were going to invade Greece, rather than Italy, in 1943. Operation "Mincemeat" involved the acquisition of a human corpse dressed as a Maj. William Martin, R.M. and put into the sea near Spain. Attached to the corpse was a brief-case containing fake letters suggesting that the Allied attack would be against Sardinia and Greece.

To make the operation credible, British intelligence created a fictional life for the corpse — a letter from a lover, tickets to a London theater, all the details of a life — but not the actual life of the dead young man whose corpse was being used. So, too, the man the media has presented to the nation as Mr. Obama is not the real man.

The mainstream media ruthlessly and endlessly repeats any McCain gaffes, while ignoring Obama gaffes. You have to go to weird little Internet sites to see all the stammering and stuttering that Mr. Obama needs before getting out a sentence fragment or two. But all you see on the networks is an eventual one or two clear sentences from Mr. Obama. Nor do you see Mr. Obama's ludicrous gaffe that Iran is a tiny country and no threat to us. Nor his 57 American states gaffe. Nor his forgetting, if he ever knew, that Russia has a veto in the United Nations. Nor his whining and puerile "come on" when he is being challenged. This is the kind of editing one would expect from Goebbels' disciples, not Cronkite's.

Actually no it isn't. Remember how the Viet Cong's "Tet Offensive" (they called it the "General Uprising") was an abject failure? Remember how the South Vietnamese people refused to join in the uprising, decisively rejecting the Communist revolutionaries and their North Vietnamese controllers? Remember how the Viet Cong's numbers were decimated in the US and South Vietnamese counterattack and how they ceased to be a combat effective force after that point.

If you are like the average American who lived through the Vietnam War or if you studied it in public school you don't know or remember any of that. The reason is that Walter Cronkite made a conscience decision not to report it. After Tet Cronkite was fully briefed by the US military. He was shown evidence that Tet was a massive failure for the NLF and he chose not to report any of it. He told the general officer who was briefing him that he had decided that the war was unwinnable and that was what he was going to tell the American people and that set the tone for the press's reporting on Vietnam from that point forward.

So I have no trouble whatsoever believing that the disciples of Chronkite are choosing to act as political propagandists for a radical left-wing, Know-nothing Marxist who comes directly out of Chicago's corrupt street thug machine politics. Ever since Chronkite the American mainstream media has deliberately chosen to take whatever side was against America. This has meant everything from carrying water for the Soviet Union to supporting Democrats in domestic elections. The only thing different from their current support for Obama and their previous support for Clinton, Gore, Kerry, Mondale or Carter is that they are hardly even bothering to pretend to be anything other than propagandists.

This can only mean that they sense in Obama a man who can actualy accomplish their goal of destroying America.

More appalling, NBC's "Saturday Night Live" suggested that Gov. Sarah Palin's husband had sex with his own daughters. That scene was written with the assistance of Al Franken, Democratic Party candidate for Senate in Minnesota. Talk about incest.

Like I say, they're not even pretending anymore.

But worse than all the unfair and distorted reporting and image projecting, is the shocking gaps in Mr. Obama's life that are not reported at all. The major media simply has not reported on Mr. Obama's two years at Columbia University in New York, where, among other things, he lived a mere quarter mile from former terrorist Bill Ayers— after which they both ended up as neighbors and associates in Chicago. Mr. Obama denies more than a passing relationship with Mr. Ayers. Should the media be curious? In only two weeks the media has focused on all the colleges Mrs. Palin has attended, her husband's driving habits 20 years ago and the close criticism of Mrs. Palin's mayoral political opponents. But in two years they haven't bothered to see how close Mr. Obama was with the terrorist Ayers.

They're not going to look closely at Obama's close association with Ayers because they envy Ayres. Ayres is a hero to them. Leftists in the media, politics and academia have to pretend. They have to moderate the way they express their hatred for this country but Ayers go to be authentic! He bombed the freakin' Pentagon for goodness sakes. You can't get more hard-core than that.

So of course vicious America-hating leftists like the people who run the University of Chicago, B. Hussein Obama and his media enablers and the rest of the Democrat establishment are going to put Ayers on a pedestal.

Nor have the media paid any serious attention to Mr. Obama's rise in Chicago politics — how did honest Obama rise in the famously sordid Chicago political machine with the full support of Boss Daley? Despite the great — and unflattering details on Mr. Obama's Chicago years presented in David Freddoso's new book, the mainstream media continues to ignore both the facts and the book. It took a British publication, the Economist, to give Mr. Freddoso's book a review with fair comment.

Obviously he was able to thrive in Chicago's political culture because he is not "honest". He understands and lives by the rules of Chicago's political culture where politics is a knife fight in a sewer and the only rule is do whatever it takes to win. That is why he is flooding the airwaves with ads which contain such egregious lies that even the MSM (absent MSNBC) has been forced to take note of them.

The public image of Mr. Obama as an idealistic, post-race, post-partisan, well-spoken and honest young man with the wisdom and courage befitting a great national leader is a confection spun by a willing conspiracy of Mr. Obama, his publicist David Axelrod and most of the senior editors, producers and reporters of the national media.

You know one of the reasons that George W Bush is so hated by the left is his very poor speaking ability. Even though he has an above average IQ and attended Harvard and Yale (earning a masters degree) he comes off sounding like a moron half the time because he has so much trouble with the spoken word.

What are the elites going to think of Obama if he actually becomes president and has to present himself to the American people without the teleprompter as presidents frequently have to do? Listen to Obama when he is not reading words prepared for him by someone else. He sounds like a low-grade moron.

Perhaps that is why the National Journal's respected correspondent Stuart Taylor has written that "the media can no longer be trusted to provide accurate and fair campaign reporting and analysis." That conspiracy has not only photo-shopped out all of Mr. Obama's imperfections (and dirtied up his opponent Mr. McCain's image), but it has put most of his questionable history down the memory hole.

The public will be voting based on the idealized image of the man who never was. If he wins, however, we will be governed by the sunken, cynical man Mr. Obama really is. One can only hope that the senior journalists will be judged as harshly for their professional misconduct as Wall Street's leaders currently are for their failings.

In one sense they are are already being judged. The MSN is losing readers and viewers faster than the housing market is losing liquidity. If the New York Times continues to decline at the current rate it will not be long before they become a weekly shopper. They are also being judged by the backlash which erupted after their attempts to slime Sarah Palin.

If John McCain and Sarah Palin win this election a not-small part of the credit will go to the public's revulsion over the conduct of the media.

In the mean time let us pray as we have never prayed before that we will not be governed by this "sunken, cynical man".

Miss Ann is talking

That means that YOU are listening!

On MSNBC this week, Newsweek's Jonathan Alter tried to connect John McCain to the current financial disaster, saying: "If you remember the Keating Five scandal that (McCain) was a part of. ... He's really getting a free ride on the fact that he was in the middle of the last great financial scandal in our country."

McCain was "in the middle of" the Keating Five case in the sense that he was "exonerated." The lawyer for the Senate Ethics Committee wanted McCain removed from the investigation altogether, but, as The New York Times reported: "Sen. McCain was the only Republican embroiled in the affair, and Democrats on the panel would not release him."

So John McCain has been held hostage by both the Viet Cong and the Democrats.

Alter couldn't be expected to know that: As usual, he was lifting material directly from Kausfiles. What is unusual was that he was stealing a random thought sent in by Kausfiles' mother, who, the day before, had e-mailed: "It's time to bring up the Keating Five. Let McCain explain that scandal away."

The Senate Ethics Committee lawyer who investigated McCain already had explained that scandal away -- repeatedly. It was celebrated lawyer Robert Bennett, most famous for defending a certain horny hick president a few years ago.

In February this year, on Fox News' "Hannity and Colmes," Bennett said, for the eight billionth time:

"First, I should tell your listeners I'm a registered Democrat, so I'm not on (McCain's) side of a lot of issues. But I investigated John McCain for a year and a half, at least, when I was special counsel to the Senate Ethics Committee in the Keating Five. ... And if there is one thing I am absolutely confident of, it is John McCain is an honest man. I recommended to the Senate Ethics Committee that he be cut out of the case, that there was no evidence against him."

It's bad enough for Alter to be constantly ripping off Kausfiles. Now he's so devoid of his own ideas, he's ripping off the idle musings of Kausfiles' mother.

Even if McCain had been implicated in the Keating Five scandal -- and he wasn't -- that would still have absolutely nothing to do with the subprime mortgage crisis currently roiling the financial markets. This crisis was caused by political correctness being forced on the mortgage lending industry in the Clinton era.

Before the Democrats' affirmative action lending policies became an embarrassment, the Los Angeles Times reported that, starting in 1992, a majority-Democratic 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."

Under Clinton, the entire federal government put massive pressure on banks to grant more mortgages to the poor and minorities. Clinton's secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Andrew Cuomo, investigated Fannie Mae for racial discrimination and proposed that 50 percent of Fannie Mae's and Freddie Mac's portfolio be made up of loans to low- to moderate-income borrowers by the year 2001.

Instead of looking at "outdated criteria," such as the mortgage applicant's credit history and ability to make a down payment, banks were encouraged to consider nontraditional measures of credit-worthiness, such as having a good jump shot or having a missing child named "Caylee."

Threatening lawsuits, Clinton's Federal Reserve demanded that banks treat welfare payments and unemployment benefits as valid income sources to qualify for a mortgage. That isn't a joke -- it's a fact.

When Democrats controlled both the executive and legislative branches, political correctness was given a veto over sound business practices.

In 1999, liberals were bragging about extending affirmative action to the financial sector. Los Angeles Times reporter Ron Brownstein hailed the Clinton administration's affirmative action lending policies as one of the "hidden success stories" of the Clinton administration, saying that "black and Latino homeownership has surged to the highest level ever recorded."

Meanwhile, economists were screaming from the rooftops that the Democrats were forcing mortgage lenders to issue loans that would fail the moment the housing market slowed and deadbeat borrowers couldn't get out of their loans by selling their houses.

A decade later, the housing bubble burst and, as predicted, food-stamp-backed mortgages collapsed. Democrats set an affirmative action time-bomb and now it's gone off.

In Bush's first year in office, the White House chief economist, N. Gregory Mankiw, warned that the government's "implicit subsidy" of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, combined with loans to unqualified borrowers, was creating a huge risk for the entire financial system.

Rep. Barney Frank denounced Mankiw, saying he had no "concern about housing." How dare you oppose suicidal loans to people who can't repay them! The New York Times reported that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were "under heavy assault by the Republicans," but these entities still had "important political allies" in the Democrats.

Now, at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars, middle-class taxpayers are going to be forced to bail out the Democrats' two most important constituent groups: rich Wall Street bankers and welfare recipients.

Political correctness had already ruined education, sports, science and entertainment. But it took a Democratic president with a Democratic congress for political correctness to wreck the financial industry.

Once again Miss Ann doesn't really need humor to make her point.

What is so frustrating to Republicans (and anyone else with an IQ in the triple - or even high double - digits) is that this scandal is entirely the making of the liberal left. It was not the GOP which brought affirmative action to the mortgage industry.

All we Republicans need is a presidential candidate who is willing to stand up and speak the truth and point his finger at the guilty. Sure the mainstream media (also known as the Obama campaign's auxiliary press office) will do everything in its power to cover up the truth but the alternate media has destroyed their monopoly on the dissemination of information.

Talk radio and the blogs can get the truth out but we need the leadership of our candidate to to cause everything to jell in the minds of the general public.

If McCain and Palin will go on the attack they will force the Obama camp (including the mainstream media) to go over on the defensive and people on the defensive can't help but look at least a little guilty.

I think that it says something good about John McCain's character that he is willing to put his campaign on hold and go back to the Senate in order to participate in the debate over what to do about the financial crisis. However the Obama campaign and the mainstream media (sorry, redundant) will just frame this as McCain "hiding" from his upcoming debate with Obama.

The only way this works if if McCain goes back to the Senate and sends Palin out on the campaign trail alone to keep hammering at the Democrats. Let her make the point, over and over again, that while John McCain is doing his sworn duty as a United States Senator to put the nations good ahead of his own B. Hussein Obama, who has only bothered to show up for work on 143 days during his two years as a Senator, is AWOL from the Senate so that he can continue promoting his petty little campaign.

If McCain does it that way he will turn the issue to his favor but if he muzzles his campaign while his opponent continues on the attack the very small lead that Obama may currently have in the polls will widen until it becomes insurmountable.

During the run up to the congressional elections in 2006 I warned people that while the Republicans might not deserve to win that the nation absolutely did not deserve what would happen if they lost.

Events since then have proven me more right than I ever could have feared. The stakes today are far higher than they were in 2006. We stand on the brink of handing over control of both the executive and legislative branches of government to people who are responsible for everything from the sub-prime crisis to the price of gasoline topping $4.00. How on earth can anyone hope that the outcome of such a catastrophic blunder could be anything but disastrous for the nation?

Submitted for your approval

The Watchers Council have made their nominations:

Council Submissions

• Hillbilly White Trash - Knowing the Left
• The Colossus of Rhodey - Surprise from Philly Daily News: White voters “discomfitted” by Obama
• Soccer Dad - The connection betweeen J-street and the Obama campaign
• Cheat-Seeking Missiles - Obama’s Bizarre List Of 40 “Probing” NYT Stories
• The Razor - A Lack of Clarity
• Bookworm Room - Are Americans Really Racists?
• Wolf Howling - Palin’sanity
• Joshuapundit - Doin’ The Race Based Politickin’ Shuffle

Non-Council Submissions

• Submitted By - Hillbilly White Trash: Private Papers - Palin and Obama: What Really Is Wisdom?
• Submitted By - The Colossus of Rhodey: Dennis Prager - Liberals’ Warnings About Obama Loss May Prove Self-Fulfilling
• Submitted By - Soccer Dad: Doug Ross - Any questions?
• Submitted By - Cheat-Seeking Missiles: The Next Right - Yes, Obama Turning Down Public Financing Is Still An Epic Mistake
• Submitted By - The Razor: The Jacksonian Party - On Honor
• Submitted By - Bookworm Room: Michael Yon - Death in the Corn : Part III of III
• Submitted By - Wolf Howling: New York Times / Steven Holmes - Fannie Mae Eases Credit To Aid Mortgage Lending
• Submitted By - Joshuapundit: The Jawa Report - Hope, Change, & Lies: Orchestrated “Grassroots” Smear Campaigns & the People that Run Them

When Democrats write the rules

Here is an excellent breakdown of the current financial crisis:

HOW did America wind up in its worst financial crisis in decades? Sen. Barack Obama explained it this way last week: "When sub-prime-mortgage lending took a reckless and unsustainable turn, a patchwork of regulators systematically and deliberately eliminated the regulations protecting the American people."

That's exactly backward. Mortgage lending took that "reckless and unsustainable turn" because of regulation - regulation driven by liberals and progressives, not free-market "deregulators."

Pushed hard by politicians and community activists [you mean community organizers - like Barack Obama? - LC], the regulators systematically and deliberately altered financially sound lending practices.

The mortgage market was humming along just fine when, in the late 1980s, progressives decided that it needed to be "fixed." Their complaint: Some ethnic groups got approved for mortgages at lower rates than others.

In reality, mortgage lenders were simply being prudent - taking care to provide mortgages to those who could best afford to make the payments.

The shift began in 1989, when Congress amended the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act to force banks to collect racial data on mortgage applicants. By 1991, critics were using that data to paint lenders as racist by showing that minority applicants were approved at far lower rates. Banks were "Shamed By Publicity," as one 1993 New York Times headline put it.

In fact, they found a racial disparity only by ignoring relevant data on applicants' ability to make mortgage payments - such as their assets and credit history.

But the political pressure was intense - with few in politics or media eager to speak the truth. And then, in 1992, came a study from four researchers at the Boston Fed, which seemed to bear out the critics' contentions.

Notice how yet another disaster for the United States traces back to a Democrat presidential administration (Bill Clinton) backed by a Democrat controlled congress. Do we really want to entrust the solving of this problem to that lethal combination? Think about that this November.

That study was, in fact, based on quite flawed data - but the authors' political, media and academic protectors stifled most serious criticism, smearing the reputation of one whistleblower and allowing the Boston authors to avoid answering serious academic challenges (mine included) to their work. Other studies with different conclusions were ignored.

The very next year, the Boston Fed announced new requirements for banks - rules that have now turned out to be monumentally catastrophic: Adopt "relaxed lending standards" or risk being labeled as racists, and face serious penalties under the federal Community Reinvestment Act.

Gone (as "arbitrary" and "outdated") were traditional lending requirements such as requiring a down payment or limiting mortgage payments to 28 percent of income. (Of course, the loosened lending standards weren't limited to poor and minority applicants - that would be discriminatory.)

The new standards performed as intended: Home- ownership rates, stagnant for 25 years, began a rapid 10-year ascent in 1995, with many new homeowners being lower-income and/or minority families.

The large rise in demand for houses, however, fed a run-up in prices starting in 1997 - the infamous housing bubble. And rising prices hid the great vulnerability of these loans to defaults and foreclosures, because refinancing or selling at a profit was the easy alternative.

The government regulations distorted the free market and started pushing money into the housing market. Buying a house was given the appearance of being a better investment than it was.

Soon, these loans began to be sold in the secondary market. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were enthusiastic proponents of relaxed lending standards and purchased large swaths of these loans.

Time after time, Fannie and Freddie trumped criticism by pointing to how they were helping broaden homeownership. Because of the subject's racial overtones, they beat back calls for reform even after financial irregularities were found.

Executives at Fannie and Freddie (who are now Barack Obama's economic advisers) used the only-on-paper increase in the value of their assets to trigger performance based bonuses. This is very much like what the top management at Enron did.

Rating agencies such as Standard & Poor's had no experience with such loans - and imprudently used the misleading bubble-induced performance to incorrectly judge the likely performance of financial instruments based on such loans.

In 2002, the "reformers" declared victory. In a Fannie report, four academic supporters of relaxed standards crowed how these changes were "fundamentally altering the terms upon which mortgage credit had been offered in the United States from the 1960s through the 1980s . . . These changes in lending herald what we refer to as mortgage innovation."

Lucky us.

Now that the popped bubble has left us swimming in foreclosures, the supporters of loosened credit standards seem shy about taking credit for their "mortgage innovations." Instead, they blame subprime lenders for becoming "predatory" - when they were simply taking the Boston Fed rules to their logical conclusion while broadening the mortgage market.

Amazing isn't it how quickly the "enlightened and progressive lenders who were making it possible for minority and other economically disadvantaged Americans (and illegal aliens) to realize the American Dream of home ownership" turned into "greedy robber barons". Nothing changed except the fact that enough time passed to make manifest the foolishness of basing economic (or any other, for that matter) policy on political correctness rather than sound real world principles (and political correctness will always differ from sound real world principles).

Investors holding mortgage-based assets now want out. Perhaps they deserve a $700 billion refund - since they were sold a bill of goods by "progressive" politicians, academics and government officials who, in the hope of remaking society, insisted that loans based on relaxed underwriting standards were sound.

No they do not deserve a "refund". Anyone who makes an investment has the responsibility to do his due diligence. In this case the fact that home ownership was being driven by politically correct regulations which were forcing lenders to grant mortgages to people who did not have either the income or credit history to indicate that they could or would be able to repay them was not a secret. People who made these investments were doing so in he belief that they could ride the housing market boom to profit and jump off before the collapse. If they timed it wrong then that's on them not on the taxpayers. I do feel sorry for the poor people who were told that they could have a mortgage that they could in no way repay but the lenders were not being "predatory" they were being "law abiding". The government told the lenders that they had to loan money to people who couldn't pay it back.

One of the comments on this New York Post story said:

This article just doesn't add up to me. With the exception of an 8 year presidency, those horrible liberals were not in charge of the government. Republicans held the presidency, the House and the Senate.

Obviously this person doesn't know his history. Both the Bush administration and John McCain tried to tighten regulation on the lending industry. In 2006 McCain even stood on the Senate floor and gave a speech in support of a bill which he was cosponsoring in which he predicted exactly what is currently happening.

However each time that Republicans (otherwise known as "the grownups") tried to return some semblance of reality to this out-of-control politically correct mess the left, who had created this mess and whose hands were in the till up to the elbow siphoning cash out of Fannie and Freddie, would rise in feigned indignation and self-righteously condemn any attempt to restore sanity to the housing market as a racist attack, as though only Bull Connor would think it was a bad idea to loan people money which they couldn't pay back.

The lesson here is that whenever you see left-liberal politicians wrapping "the poor" around themselves like the Shroud of Turin you can know that they are in the process of stealing your money or your liberty (or both).

H/T: Shooting the Messenger

When leftists go insane

Palin Derangement Syndrome has driven its first victim over the edge into complete raving insanity. Naomi Wolf sends up a Paranoid Schizophrenic scream for help in the Huffington Post:

Please understand what you are looking at when you look at Sarah "Evita" Palin. You are looking at the designated muse of the coming American police state.

You have to understand how things work in a closing society in order to understand "Palin Power." A gang or cabal seizes power, usually with an affable, weak figurehead at the fore. Then they will hold elections -- but they will make sure that the election will be corrupted and that the next affable, weak figurehead is entirely in their control. Remember, Russia has Presidents; Russia holds elections. Dictators and gangs of thugs all over the world hold elections. It means nothing. When a cabal has seized power you can have elections and even presidents, but you have freedom.

I realized early on with horror what I was seeing in Governor Palin: the continuation of the Rove-Cheney cabal, but this time without restraints. I heard her echo Bush 2000 soundbites ("the heart of America is on display") and realized Bush's speechwriters were writing her -- not McCain's -- speeches. I heard her tell George Bush's lies -- not McCain's -- to the American people, linking 9/11 to Iraq. I heard her make fun of Barack Obama for wanting to prevent the torture of prisoners -- this is Rove-Cheney's enthusiastic S and M, not McCain's, who, though he shamefully colluded in the 2006 Military Tribunals Act, is also a former prisoner of war and wrote an eloquent Newsweek piece in 2005 opposing torture. I saw that she was even styled by the same skillful stylist (neutral lipstick, matte makeup, dark colors) who turned Katharine Harris from a mall rat into a stateswoman and who styles all the women in the Bush orbit --but who does not bother to style Cindy McCain.

You can see that Ms. Wolf is seriously off the deep end. To address the most important point in her lunatic stream of consciousness the "torture of prisoners" she is talking about is using non damaging techniques like waterboarding to force terrorists to give up information about immanent attacks. In other words is it worth making an al Qaeda commanding officer extremely uncomfortable (but not actually harming him) in order to prevent another 9/11 attack. The vast majority of Americans say yes. The batshit crazy left (and, unfortunately John McCain) say no.

The fact that Governor Palin may sometimes sound more like George W Bush than John McCain is explained by the fact that George W Bush is more conservative than John McCain (though neither of them is really all that conservative) so Mrs. Palin, who is a true Reagan conservative, will often sound closer to Bush than she does to McCain. But just wait until she is campaigning for president herself and doesn't have to stick to McCain's "moderate centrist" talking points. Then you'll hear the kind of speeches that you haven't heard since the Gipper retired.

Also, Cindy McCain is a multimillionaire. She has staff to take care of her hair and makeup.

Then I saw and heard more. Palin is embracing lawlessness in defying Alaskan Legislature subpoenas --this is what Rove-Cheney, and not McCain, believe in doing. She uses mafia tactics against critics, like the police commissioner who was railroaded for opposing handguns in Alaskan battered women's shelters -- Rove's style, not McCain's. I realized what I was seeing.

The subpoenas she and her husband are "defying" are not binding upon them and are part of a partisan witch-hunt whose conclusions have already been written by Palin's enemies to be an "October surprise".

Is the new left-wing party line on the firing of the police commissioner that he was opposed to giving abused women the means to defend themselves from their tormentors? That is going to go over as even more of a lead balloon than the accusation that he was fired because he refused to dismiss an Alaskan State Trooper who drove his police car drunk, was physically abusive to his stepson and made death threats against his ex-wife's family.

Even though Ms. Wolf styles herself a feminist I guess she is unaware that abusive men are the most likely to actually kill their wives/girlfriends after those women have made a decisive break like filing for divorce and/or moving into a shelter. An abused woman is never in greater danger and therefore never in greater need of effective self defense than just after moving out.

Or perhaps she simply doesn't care about real women being murdered in flyover country.

Reports confirmed my suspicions: Palin, not McCain, is the FrankenBarbie of the Rove-Cheney cabal. The strategy became clear. Time magazine reported that Rove is "dialed in" to the McCain campaign. Rove's protégé Steve Schmidt is now campaign manager. And Politico reported that Rove was heavily involved in McCain's vice presidential selection. Finally a new report shows that there are dozens of Bush and Rove operatives surrounding Sarah Palin and orchestrating her every move.

Karl Rove is a halfway good political strategist who was very good at "get out the vote" efforts but is no more a conservative than George W Bush. All you had to do was listen to him on the Sunday shows talking about how we needed amnesty for alien criminals to know that.

What's the plan? It is this. McCain doesn't matter. Reputable dermatologists are discussing the fact that in simply actuarial terms, John McCain has a virulent and life-threatening form of skin cancer. It is the elephant in the room, but we must discuss the health of the candidates: doctors put survival rates for someone his age at two to four years. I believe the Rove-Cheney cabal is using Sarah Palin as a stalking horse, an Evita figure, to put a popular, populist face on the coming police state and be the talk show hostess for the end of elections as we know them. If McCain-Palin get in, this will be the last true American election. She will be working for Halliburton, KBR, Rove and Cheney into the foreseeable future -- for a decade perhaps -- a puppet "president" for the same people who have plundered our treasure, are now holding the US economy hostage and who murdered four thousand brave young men and women in a way of choice and lies.

I almost agree with her first sentence. McCain had internal polling telling him that enough conservatives were going to sit the election out to deny him any chance of victory. His only chance was to send up the white flag to the conservative movement by picking one of them to be his running mate. He did so and now rather than restructuring the GOP into a center-left McCain party it is being rebuilt into the party of Reagan once again.

However everything Wolf says after the first sentence only shows how deeply she has sunk into delusion.

In the first place McCain has a clean bill of health from his doctors (Obama, curiously enough will not release his medical records, why not?) and his still living mother is 96-years-old. Genes are a very good predictor of lifespan. In the second plate Halliburton is a company which provides services to the oil industry. If you eat lunch on an offshore oil rig the person ladling mashed potatoes onto your plate will be a Halliburton employee. So why are they regarded by the left as the focus of evil in the world today? Because Dick Cheney once worked for them and owned some company stock (he has none now). The left in their paranoia and abysmal ignorance saw that they had something or other to do with the oil industry and Cheney once had some kind of connection to them so of course there had to be some kind of evil conspiracy.

If Elizabeth Dole had been elected president the Red Cross would be getting the same treatment.

How, you may ask, can I assert this? How can I argue, as I now do, that there is actually a war being ramped up against US citizens and our democracy and that Sarah Palin is the figurehead and muse for that war?

How? That's easy. It is because you are crazy as a shithouse rat.

Look at the RNC. This is supposed to be McCain's America. But you see the unmistakable theatre of Rove's S and M imagery -- and you see stages eight, nine and ten of the steps to a dictatorship as I outlined them in The End of America. Preemptive arrest? Abusive arrest? "Newly released footage, which was buried to avoid confiscation, shows riot cops arresting and abusing a giant group of people for nothing."

These people would be those who were throwing bags of cement off freeway overpasses attempting to hit the busses carrying delegates to the Republican convention.

Journalists were arrested -- for reporting. Amy Goodman and ABC producers were arrested. Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake and others were forced to lie face down as armed agents tied their hands behind their backs. The riot police wore the black S&M gear of the Rovian fantasy life and carried the four foot batons cops carry in North Korea. All this is not John McCain's imagery or strategy: it is Karl Rove's.

Sometimes in situations like this cops have to arrest everyone and sort the good guys from the bad guys after order has been restored. As for how the police dressed cops doing riot duty or on SWAT teams tend to wear black or camouflage BDU's. If these cops had been in cammies what would she have said? That they were like Nixon's Vietmam baby-killers?

Again how does Karl Rove (the Pillsbury Doughboy of the GOP) figure into all of this?

In McCain-Palin's America, citizens who are protesting are being charged as terrorists. This means that a violent war had been declared on American citizens. A well known reporter leaked to me on background that St Paul police had dressed as protesters and, dressed in Black -- shades of the Blackshirts of 1920 -- infiltrated protest groups. There were also phalanxes of men in black wearing balaclavas, linking arms and behaving menacingly -- alleged "anarchists." Let me tell you, I have been on the left for thirty years and you can't get three lefties to wear the same t-shirt to a rally, let alone link arms and wear identical face masks: these are not our guys. Agent Provocateurs framing protesters and calling protest "terrorism" constitutes step ten of a police state:

"In what appears to be the first use of criminal charges under the 2002 Minnesota version of the Federal Patriot Act, Ramsey County Prosecutors have formally charged 8 alleged leaders of the RNC Welcoming Committee with Conspiracy to Riot in Furtherance of Terrorism... [they] 7 1/2 years in prison under the terrorism enhancement charge which allows for a 50% increase in the maximum penalty."

"Paid, confidential informants... infiltrated the RNCWC on behalf of law enforcement. They allege that members of the group sought to kidnap delegates to the RNC, assault police officers with firebombs and explosives, and sabotage airports in St. Paul. Evidence released to date does not corroborate these allegations with physical evidence or provide any other evidence for these allegations than the claims of the informants. Based on past abuses of such informants by law enforcement, the National Lawyers Guild is concerned that such police informants have incentives to lie and exaggerate threats of violence and to also act as provocateurs in raising and urging support for acts of violence."

Well if the uber-left National Lawyers Guild says it. . . Couldn't she find a quote from the Daily Worker?

And what all this "McCain-Palin's America" business all of a sudden? I though that McCain was the patsy who was going to die of "health related issues" sometime in the first two years of his term. Now he is one of the masterminds? Lunatics aren't big on consistency.

Also remember that we are talking about Minnesota here. This is the only state that went for Mondale in 1984. This is the only state where Al Frankin stands a chance of being elected to the Senate. We're hardly talking about Munich in 1928 here.

Under the Palin-Rove police state, you will see escalating infringements on your access to a free internet:

"Sarah Palin was baptized at Wasilla Assembly of God...Last Sunday our research team released a video, a ten-minute mini-documentary, focusing on the Wasilla Assemblies of God and the video seemed on the verge of a massive "viral" breakthrough when YouTube pulled it down, citing 'inappropriate content'. At the point the video was censored by YouTube it had been viewed by almost 160,000 people. The short of it is that YouTube has censored a video documentary that appeared to be close to having an effect on a hard fought and contentious American presidential election..."

I don't know what was on the Internet video Ms. Wolf is referring to but the thing that most has leftists writhing on the ground in paroxysms of foaming madness is this comment Mrs. Palin made in June of this year to a graduating class of ministry students, "Pray... for this country, that our leaders... are sending [U.S. soldiers] out on a task that is from God. That's what we have to make sure that we're praying for, that there is a plan and that that plan is God's plan".

Now anyone who isn't ready for a rubber room can see that she was praying that America's actions would line up with God's will not that God would rubber stamp Bush administration policy. Those not ignorant of US history will also recognize that Governor Palin was echoing Abraham Lincoln's thoughts on the US Civil War. Is she suggesting that the Great Emancipator was some kind of theocrat?

Under the coming Palin-Rove police state, you will witness the plans now underway to bring Iraqi troops to patrol the streets of our nation. This is not McCain's fantasy: it is Rove's and Cheney's.

If you follow the link to an article in the Army Times that Wolf thoughtfully provides you will find that US troops are being brought home and trained for disaster relieve and counter terrorism. Here is a sample of what Wolf thinks is some kind of smoking gun:

The 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team has spent 35 of the last 60 months in Iraq patrolling in full battle rattle, helping restore essential services and escorting supply convoys.

Now they’re training for the same mission — with a twist — at home.

Beginning Oct. 1 for 12 months, the 1st BCT will be under the day-to-day control of U.S. Army North, the Army service component of Northern Command, as an on-call federal response force for natural or manmade emergencies and disasters, including terrorist attacks.

It is not the first time an active-duty unit has been tapped to help at home. In August 2005, for example, when Hurricane Katrina unleashed hell in Mississippi and Louisiana, several active-duty units were pulled from various posts and mobilized to those areas.

Does she also think that the fighter aircraft flying combat air patrols over New York City after 9/11 were there to enforce BushHitler's police state?

Let's skip to here conclusion where we see her paranoid delusions running rampant:

Under the Palin-Rove police state, citizens will be targeted with state cyberterrorism. Bruce Fein of the American Freedom Agenda, a former Reagan official, warned me three years ago that the Bush team went after a Republican who had crossed them through cyberstalking: they messed with his email, messed with his phones and I believe messed with his bank account -- he became a cyber-pariah, unemployable and haunted. With modern technology, there really is less place to hide from the state than there was in East Germany in the Cold War era. I remember feeling a chill: of course. That is the wave of the future once we breach the protections around citizens of FISA and the fourth amendment. That way lies the abyss for us all.

How about giving us the name of this unfortunate man. After all he has been through some publicity could only help him, don't you think? Of course that would assume that he actually exists outside of Ms. Wolf's fever dreams.

Am I trying to scare you? I am. I am trying to scare you to death and ask you to scare your Republican and independent friends most of all. How do you know when it is war on citizens? When there are mass arrests, journalists are jailed, the opposition is infiltrated, rights are stripped and leaders start to ignore the rule of law.

Let's review. The "mass arrests" were of "protesters" whose tactics came straight out of Ernst Rohm's SA handbook.

Almost everyone I work with on projects related to this campaign for liberty has been experiencing computer harassment: emails are stripped, messages disappear. That's not all: people's bank accounts are being tampered with: wire transfers to banks vanish in midair. I personally keep opening bank accounts that are quickly corrupted by fraud. Money vanishes. Coworkers of mine have to keep opening new email accounts as old ones become infected. And most disturbingly to me personally is the mail tampering I have both heard of and experienced firsthand. My tax returns vanished from my mailbox. All my larger envelopes arrive ripped straight open apparently by hand. When I show the postman, he says "That's impossible." Horrifyingly to me is the impact on my family. My childrens' report cards are returned again and again though perfectly addressed; their invitations are turned back; and my daughters many letters from camp? Vanished. All of them. Not one arrived. Try explaining that to a smart thirteen year old. Try explaining it in a way that still makes her feel secure and comfortable.

You know the only proven bit of cyber-terrorism or cyber-stalking in this election season was when a Democrat hacked the Palin family's E-mail and published it on the web.

I am not telling you this because it's about my life. I am telling you this because it is about your life -- whoever you are, Conservative or Liberal, independent or evangelical. Your politics will not protect you in a police state. History shows that nothing portects you in a police state. This is not about my fear and anxiety: it is about what awaits you and everyone you love unless you see this for what it is:

No Ms. Wolf. It is about you and your life. With the insane it's always about them and their lives. They can't help it. This is Naomi Wolf's chance to parade herself as a martyr. As she sinks further into her madness she will become useless even to the organs of the left and the great Cheney/Rove/Palin conspiracy will be her explanation for why eventually even Zsa Zsa Algore won't print her ravings. But all is not lost for her. The DailyKos will always be open to any left-wing kook no matter how deranged. If only the asylem will let her have an Internet connection.

Scharansky divided nations into "fear societies" and "free societies." Make no mistake: Sarah "Evita" Palin is Rove and Cheney's cosmetic rebranding of their fascist push: she will help to establish a true and irreversible "fear society" in this once free once proud nation. For God's sake, do not let her; do not let them.

It would be fun to put all the leftists who invoke terms like Nazi and fascist into the real Nazi Germany or the USSR at the height of Stalin's purges and see how they would make out in a real police state.

But in Ms. Wolf's case that would be cruel. She really is bug-house crazy and therefore of only limited responsability for her words and deeds.

Who to blame

Want proof positive that the current problems in the financial sector are to be blamed on Democrats rather than Republicans?

There has not been one call for a special prosecutor or Justice Department investigation from congressional Democrats. There has not even been a call for a blue-ribbon commission to get to the bottom of the crisis and fix blame.

Neither the House nor Senate banking of commerce committees are going to hold a series of special hearings to investigate the causes of the current problems with an eye to finding out who is responsible.

Elected Democrats would be doing all those things and more if they didn't know that the trail of any real investigation didn't lead directly to their doorstep.

Palin vs Obama

Victor Davis Hanson has a excellent essay up contrasting Sarah Palin and Barack Obama:

Palin vs. Obama

The race unfortunately has been framed the last two weeks by Democrats as one of Obama versus Palin. That will stop as Obama realizes he loses should it continue. Nevertheless, the comparison of the respective experiences of a McCain and Obama is so much in favor of the former, that it requires no discussion. So I turn to Palin, given the charges that she is unfit and clueless.

Is Palin Tough?

I have been asked by many why I have such confidence in a rookie Alaskan governor, given the rigors of the campaign to follow. (Many Republican pundits apparently do not.) I think we are starting to see the answers to that question. The proverbial “they” hacked into her private email accounts. They swore that her daughter was the real mother of her Down Syndrome baby. They sent legions of reporters and lawyers to Alaska to dig up dirt. They wrote columns suggesting that she was stupid, uneducated, dishonest, a liar, and worse still. All this was the work of moralists, who, in their more extreme manifestations, tried to flood a Chicago radio station to disrupt guests, who doctored photos of McCain to subvert his portrait, who disgraced the Atlantic brand by trafficking in pregnancy rumors, and who now publish the private email of Palin.

And? She is still smiling and apparently unmoved. Had they done this to Biden, he would have gone berserk. Wait — they didn’t do this to Biden, and he seems near berserk in his daily gaffes.

So Who Is Really Experienced?

The point is this: I think it is much harder for a mother of three or four in an out-of-the-way Alaskan town to get elected to city council and the mayorship, then take on the entire Republican establishment and get elected governor than it is for a Barack Obama to emerge from Chicago politics into the Illinois state house and later Senate. The qualities that allowed a Palin to succeed without the power spouse, the identity politics, the Ivy-League cache, the fawning New York editors and D.C. insider-press will ensure she does not implode on the campaign trail — and won’t in office either.

Barack Obama, in contrast, on numerous occasions has complained how tiring, how hard, how unfair, how racist the campaign has turned out to be; Palin never. I could not imagine Obama doing his hope and change thing in the Senate while holding a one-year-old and checking on four more children at home. And I wager shooting a moose or trying to navigate a snowmobile in the chill is a little harder than shooting baskets in one’s down time or offering riffs to the fainting at a Beverly Hills get together or Presidio Heights fundraiser.

Again my point? That the much deprecated “life experience” is every bit as important to leadership as is abstract learning. Both complement each other, but so far I think Palin understands the symbiotic world of word and the world of deed far more so than does Obama. And again, we are not talking about McCain, where the contrast only widens–and is far more important.

[. . .]

What Is Wisdom?

Not necessarily degrees, glibness, poise, or factual recall, but the ability to understand human nature. And that requires two simple things: an inductive method of reasoning to look at the world empirically, and a body of knowledge and experience to draw on for guidance.

Palin in empirical fashion bucked the Republican establishment and the old-boy network when she thought it was unreasonable; Obama never figured out or at least never questioned Tony Rezko or the Chicago machine, Trinity Church or the Pelosi-Kennedy liberal mantra — unless it proved advantageous. Palin draws on everything from position papers on ANWR to how to keep four screaming kids fed and bathed; Obama on Harvard Law Review and dispensing more public money to more Chicago interest groups.

That’s a simplification, but also an answer to the old Euripidean question “What is wisdom?”

You should go and read the rest.

Notice something else. As soon as any details about Sarah Palin began to emerge the entire Left-liberal machine, from the Obama campaign to Hollywood to the mainstream media, began to attack her mercilessly with a sheer viciousness and intensity that they had never used on McCain. This is because McCain is an enemy in that he stands in the way of putting B. Hussein Obama into the White House But he has never been The Enemy to the left.

The sad fact is that John McCain has spent nearly half his time in elected office, especially in the last 10 years or so, working for the left's interests as much as he has served the right. To the overwhelming majority of liberal Democrats McCain was an acceptable fallback. Yeah, they wanted "their guy" in the White House but if they couldn't get that they would take McCain in his place. This kept the attacks on him somewhat muted. He was "too old", "out of touch" and would be a "third term for Bush".

Then Sarah Palin entered the race and the left immediately recognized her as The Enemy. Governor Palin is a conservative who walks the walk as well as talks the talk. In this she is very much like another Western governor who went to Washington, Ronald Wilson Reagan.

And in addition to being a genuine conservative Palin she is also a genuine reformer. There are a great many politicians, many of them Republican, in Alaska who are soiling their diapers at the thought of Vice President Palin guiding Attorney General Fred Thompson (who has already brought down one corrupt state party machine) and his investigators through the sewer of Alaska's corrupt "old boy" network.

And there are even more politicians, even more of them Democrat, who have night terrors over the thought of someone like Sarah Palin draining the Capitol Hill cesspool and flushing away the mess, some of it to land in federal prison.

To the left Sarah Palin is THE ENEMY. She has captured the heart of Red State America (also known as Real America) and everyone with a brain knows that the vice presidency is only the prologue to the Pain Era in Washington. Even if McCain manages to lose this election (and he may very well lose since he can't seem to control his impulse to run to the left as fast as he can) the national political stage will not have seen the last of her, just as it took Ronald Reagan more than one try to get to the White House.

Make no mistake about it. The left views Sarah Palin as the greatest threat it has ever faced. She is a greater danger to them than Ronald Reagan ever was since his target was the Soviet Union while her target will be them. They will use every tool in their toolbox to not only defeat her but destroy her.

The only thing that has prevented them from doing so already is their own panic-driven hysteria. In their blind thrashing about for any weapon to use against her they allowed too much of their real nature and agenda to show. Instead of criticizing her official conduct as governor or her stated positions on national political issues they attacked her children using the most hateful gutter tactics imaginable. Her youngest child should have been murdered in the womb because he has a disability and besides her daughter is the real mother and when her daughter was revealed to be pregnant the only candidate for father in the left's mind was Todd Palin.

To the average American people who think this way reveal that they have absorbed evil into themselves until it has penetrated down to the very bone because this kind of thinking doesn't come naturally to anyone who isn't irredeemably rotten and corrupt. Leftists showed themselves to be the kind of people that decent Americans cross the street to avoid and don't think should be allowed to live within 1000 feet of a school.

This is why the McCain/Palin ticket is now tied with the Obama/Biden ticket among the nation's women. Even if Governor Palin wasn't as attractive, competant and likeable as she is large numbers of people would still driven to support her out of sheer disgust with her enemies.

Blogs for Borders video blogburst

Our weekly vlog/podcast on illegal immigration and border security. In this weeks edition...

You do the math: Lake County Illinois cuts murder rate in half utilizing 287(g) protocol.

Uncounted Beans: Kansas politicians on the other hand are quite happy to have illegal aliens killing their citizens.

100% Preventable! Americans continue to pay the bloody price for open borders, when will the madness end?

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This has been the Blogs For Borders Video Blogburst. The Blogs For Borders Blogroll is dedicated to American sovereignty, border security and a sane immigration policy. If you’d like to join find out how right here.

Technorati Tags: illegal immigration, deportation, 287(g), invasion, lake county illinois, open borders, border security, mark curran, murder, rape, prince william county, fairfax county, virginia, chicago,

Double Standard?

(CNN) — Democrats eager to portray John McCain as out of touch with average Americans and as a flip-flopper seized on a report Sunday the Arizona senator and his wife, Cindy, own more than a dozen cars — including several foreign-made automobiles.

13 cars! Oh my! Obviously a man who can afford 13 cars is out of touch with ordinary Americans and should in no way ever become president!

Meanwhile:

B. Hussein Obama shows off his new 757, a 65 million dollar aircraft.