McCain Throws BO Under the Straight Talk Express

The gloves are off.

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Hat tip: Ace

Welcome, dear reader, to the most intense nightly read in the ‘sphere… The Nightly Ramble….

A new week. A new Monday. And a few surprises over the weekend. Let’s get to it.

• Sam Youngman at The Hill reports that Sarah Palin gives more to chairty than Joe Biden. Well, heck, Sam, I could have told you that without looking at the records. In fact, I’ll tell you that even I gave more to charity than Biden did, again without looking. How do I know? A Democrat thinks charity is the work of government. We’ve addressed this before.
• And of COURSE they’re going to say Palin is being racist. Forget that it’s the biggest non sequitur in known history. Pure race baiting. But the sorry part is, it works. I’m telling you, gang… Obama gets in office… ANY objection to his policies are going to labeled as being racist.
• Will someone please explain to me how anyone can question that the Dinosaur media is obviously biased left?
• As I said over the weekend at OTB If there’s any indication that the American strikes in Pakistan are justified, it’s the Taliban’s reaction.
• Been doing a it of YouTube linking over the weekend, as you doubtless see.  Some of it, frankly, is playing their their embedding code, which I now have working well in this CSS.  It didn’t work in the old one.(Guys… just switch to HTML mode and drop the embed code in, then switch back to the visual editor. No need to use the plugin code I gave you anymore, unless you really want to.)  The other reason though, of course is as a reinformcement for the points I’ve been making about this meltdown, and who is to blame. Sometimes the point is best made in their own words.
• So, they dragged Kin Jong-Il out for the first time in nearly two months. I’m reminded of the line you will invariably hear at funerals if there’s an open casket involved… ‘Didn’t he look like himself?’ If he guy isn’treported as TU in a year I’ll be amazed, between the mental isues, the rather obvious physical issues and the number of enemies he’s made, inclduing the Chi-Coms…. yikes!
• Whatever might be said of ‘Dear Leader’, and his brainwashed followers,  might also be said of The Chosen One, and HIS followers. MichaleW over at Q&O has a few thoughts… I find the similarity between Obama’s followers and Kims’ are striking… and disturbing. I note for example this morning via Drudge a story about how large numbers of black youth have pledged aligience to Obama. When it comes down to a choice between the country or Obama, I wonder which they’d choose? Well, actually, no, I really don’t wonder.  I’ll say it again, arguing against Obama cannot occur on logical ground, since the devotion to the man is itself not based on logic.  The similarity between Obama and other socialist leaders on that score should be scaring the poop out of you.
• A federal judge ruled recently that a student in Pennsylvania cannot wear a t-shirt with gun pictures on it to his government school. I’ll bet kids can wear the ones pictured here, without causing any concern on the part of government paid school offiicals, however. Telling, that. And yes, I think it fairly clear given the story above, that one pretty much equals the other.
• Jeff Goldstein has broken the code:
  

  Solution? Have the “objective” media turn an empirical fact — William Ayers is not only a terrorist, but a proudly unrepentant one — into a “coded” message of racism.

  Bingo. Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding! Is there anyone who doesn’t understand the racist ploy Obama and his supporters, including Douglas Daniel, are employing here? This one of Jeff’s is a must read. And Hey, Barry: This is not a distraction. As Boortz puts it this monring;

  The Obama campaign has chalked Palin comment to a “smear campaign.” Obama says that the Republicans are using “smears” in order to distract the voters from real problems. A presidential candidate who befriends or is befriended by an unrepentant terrorist is a real problem in my eye … though perhaps not in the eyes of those who hate America.

  Exactly so. This stuff has been on record for a long time. I said it this monring, this is going to cost Obama, and he knows it. How MUCH it costs him depends on how hard the Republicans hit it. Or, a little closer, it’ll cost him if the Republicans, McCain in particular, have the courage to hit it hard enough.

• Add to that the number of questions about where Obama’s money is coming from… and you have a less than desireable picture.
• Since the review of “An American Carol” is posted over at RWN and does about as good a job as I would have, I’ll link to it.
• Botox, hell… Biden had so much facial work done, he looks like he’s turning Japanese, just like he’s turning Japanese, I really think so.
• We’ve confirmed reservations at Lake Erie SP, as I told you, for next weekend. Long term forecast is showing nice weather for the days we’ll be there. Of course, that means I’ll be a little out of pocket for that couple days. LESP is where my older boy took this fabulous sunset shot a few years ago. No, no touchups on it, either. The place has some of the best sunsets I’ve ever seen… and assuming the weather forecasts hold, (70 in the daytimes, 40’s at night) we’ll be in great shape.
• Gas for the trip to the campsite will be cheaper. Oil’s down below $90 and still falling. Most of that on the strength of the dollar.
• Meanwhile, the Telegraph is saying:
  

  We face extreme danger. Unless there is immediate intervention on every front by all the major powers acting in concert, we risk a disintegration of global finance within days. 

  I remain unconvinced it’s that bad, but there’s no question that folks are getting hurt out there.  All because the Demorats decided to push something for nothing.

• Which brings up a bit fromTapscott, who looks at Rasmussen polling this morning and says:
  

  I refuse to accept the notion that the fundamental conservative message about individual freedom, limited government, a strong national defense and a recognition of the special role of America as the shining city on a hill is no longer relevant. To the contrary, I believe it is even more relevant and important to political success than ever. All it needs is a party that is faithful to its tenants and unfailingly tenacious in its application.By the way, Rasmussen provides the entire quote from Reagan, who, it is important to recall, delivered it in a time of economic distress that in some respects was more severe than our present crisis:

  “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem. From time to time we’ve been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people.

  “Well, if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else? All of us together, in and out of government, must bear the burden. The solutions we seek must be equitable, with no one group singled out to pay a higher price.”

  The emphasized sentence is the fundamental conservative principle – we will each either be governed by ourselves or we will be ruled by others by force, which is the essence of government.

  And so it is. Which would seem to cover the destruction of a world banking system for the benefit of one minority group, for example.

• Interesting note from Radio buddy Scott Fybush over at NERW:  The Rev John Norris has passed away.  Norris was the complainant in the Red Lion case… which is a case that all  those pushing for a reinstatement of the ‘Fairness Doctrine” should study.  As Scott points up the case dragged on for decades.
• Scott also mentions Rt81 Broadcasting is having it’s financial problems, closing it’s biggest station. These are long term probelms as Scott mentions, (And thereby really has nothing to do with the current credit crunch) but this can’t be good for 1350/WCBA in Corning, which I used to work at in the 80’s, and is now owned by Rt81.  (And now you know why I even bother to mention it at all)

Bruce McQuain does an admirable job of explaining my estimation on the sub-prime meltdown quoting a 1999 article in the New Work Times:

The lede:

In a move that could help increase home ownership rates among minorities and low-income consumers, the Fannie Mae Corporation is easing the credit requirements on loans that it will purchase from banks and other lenders.

Yeah, I know, I’ve beaten this drum for quite a few posts now, but it is important to understand. What, if you were a bank or lender, would this say to you?

It says, “Hey, I can take risks I normally wouldn’t take because Fannie is going to take the real risk off my hands by buying up dubious loans”. So what do banks and lenders do then with an expanded market? They exploit it.

So why was Fannie Mae making this move of loosening credit requirements?

Fannie Mae, the nation’s biggest underwriter of home mortgages, has been under increasing pressure from the Clinton Administration to expand mortgage loans among low and moderate income people and felt pressure from stock holders to maintain its phenomenal growth in profits.

Exactly. And well done, Bruce. This is exactly the argument I’ve been making for weeks, now.

Nice bit over the weekend from Whizban’s Kim Preistap:

“America, this is what a feminist looks like”

Who said that about Sarah Palin? Would you believe the president of LA’s National Organization for Women, Shelly Mandel? Amazing! This is quite a moment for her to push back against the pressure from the feminist groups who see Sarah Palin as a traitor because she’s a Republican and pro-life who actually lived her principles

Quite. And it exposes the Title of ‘Feminist LEft” actually places more weight on the second word, not the first. There’s more at Whizbang, of course. Go and see.

Much has been said about Obama Ayers, but not nearly enough, in my view.

Hand over the heart, Barry, remember?

This morning, David Bernstein looks at the subject, and says it well:

Obama is an extremely ambitious man. He’s been interested in a national political career for many years. It’s not that surprising that he wouldn’t find Ayers and Wright objectionable company–in the very liberal, Hyde Park/Ivy League circles that he’s traveled in since attending Columbia, people with such views are more mainstream than, say, the average conservative evangelical Christian. That itself makes Obama far more liberal than the image his campaign attempts to portray.

But what is interesting to me is that not only did Obama not personally find anything especially obnoxious about Wright’s radicalism, anti-Americanism, ties to Farrakahn, and so on, or Ayers’ lack of regret for his terrorist past, he apparently didn’t expect that much of anyone else would care, either. How else do you explain why he didn’t jettison these individuals from his life before they could damage his presidential ambitions? How else do you explain how his campaign seemed to be caught flatfooted when Obama’s ties to Wright and then Ayers became campaign issues? And, perhaps most tellingly, how else do you explain that when Obama was asked in a debate with Clinton about his ties to Ayers, he analogized his friendship with Ayers to his friendship with Senator Tom Coburn, as if being friends with a very conservative senatorial colleague is somehow analogous with being friends with an unrepentant extreme leftist domestic terrorist?

Quite.

The Obama version of Patriotism?

Of course, it should be pointed out that Obama also associated with Jerry Wright, he  of ‘”Not God Bless America, but God Damn America” infamy.The ani-Americanism is out there for all to see in the cases of both Wright and Ayers.

And, yes, Obama’s wife… who didn’t find thing one to be proud of about America until her husband was nominated.

Now, we hear from Mike Allen that Obama and his people are planning to respond to these increasingly asked questions, by bringing up the Keating Five episode.

Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) on Monday is launching a multimedia campaign to draw attention to the involvement of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in the “Keating Five” savings-and-loan scandal of 1989-91, which blemished McCain’s public image and set him on his course as a self-styled reformer.

Pushing back against what it calls McCain’s “guilt-by-association” tactics, the Obama campaign overnight began e-mailing millions of supporters a link to a website, KeatingEconomics.com, which will have a 13-minute documentary on the scandal beginning at noon Eastern time on Monday. The e-mails urge recipients to pass the link on to friends.

Lame, certainly. But, one can understand why Obama is responding this way.  He has little to defend himself from such charges, so he frantically  drags up stuff upon which McCain’s involvement has already been judged.  McCain, even at the time, was quite open about the Keating affair, even putting it in his book, unlike Obama, who is still doing anything and everything he can do to bury reports of his relationship with Ayers.

Ben Smith looks at all this and says, in part:

The case for Keating being less relevant is that McCain hardly hides the affair. He called it, in his 2002 autobiography, “the worst mistake of my life.” He remade himself as a reformer in reaction to the scandal. McCain’s case isn’t that you should ignore his sin, or that it isn’t a sin; it’s that he’s expiated it.

Or, as an old friend of mine who passed on years ago, once said to me, it’s not where you’ve been, but where you’re going. Given that rather obvious difference, you know Obama wouldn’t be bringing this up, absent a certain level of desperation. And he is desperate, because he knows this stuff could cost him if he doesn’t keep a lid on it.

Addendum: (Bit)

Fellow Swamp-Stomper Sister Toldjah points out:

Ben Smith reports:

McCain spokesman Brian Rogers notes that three of McCain’s fellow members of the Keating Five have endorsed Obama: Former senators Dennis DeConcini. John Glenn, and Donald W. Riegle. All three are Democrats — McCain was the only Republican in the group — and DeConcini and Riegle were among the more deeply implicated officials.

Oops.

Yeah. Oops.
That rather confirms my read about Obama using this as a weapon of last resort. It just blew up in his face. Amusing side note… In the title Sis wonders openly if Obama will reject these endorsements….

Well, this is interesting. Pete Kirkham, Executive Director of the NRCC has been sending this one around, and a copy landed in my box overnight:

As good as this is, I’ve yet to see it on any local station. This is a great start, but this needs to be hammered home, bigtime.  Why am I not seeing this ad being run on local outlets, Pete?

The supposedly peace loving liberals among us must feel blind sided as regards the middle east these days, as they are a great many things. Because of Bill Clinton’s bumbling in the middle east, we’re now closer to war than we have been in years.

Ah, yes… middle east peace. Never have so many westerners given so much for so little. So great is the need to  believe that  sacrifice and bloodshed will not be necessary; and that peace and prosperity are the universal goals of mankind, that they were willing to accept the help of a known liar toward their goal of, as Nevile Chamberlin put it; “Never to go to war with one another again”.

Thing is, facts refute liberalism. The middle east is no different than any other armed conflict in the history of man.  Others learned the lessons, painful as they tended to be. Chaimberlin’s England, for example,  along with  the remainder of the free world, learned about appeasement of a mortal enemy the hard  way.  The American left, apparently not having leaned the lesson taught by the infamous socialist, Hitler,  was taught the lesson again, by another band of socialists, as Soviet tanks rolled into Afghanistan.  It is clear reading Jimmy Carter’s comments on the era, that HE hasn’t learned anything from the experience, to this day.

I doubt the remainder of the American left have leaned their lesson yet, either As evidence, I point to the recent events in the middle east, and their foolish forbearance of Clinton’s vain and blind pursuit of his legacy… right in the same spot Jimmy Carter tried so hard to earn a legacy that, alas, lasted around, oh, fifteen minutes. Al at the expense of Israel.

Israelis seem to be waking up from the over-long self delusion… one that’s been going on since President Clinton decided he wanted to try and create a legacy for himself, other than Monica, and a string of dead bodies and other scandals. One wonders if leftist Americans will EVER wake up.

From Oslo to Camp David, Clinton has pushed Israel to the bargaining table, and pressured her to give up vital strategic and cultural assets she has no business giving away, if survival is at all on her agenda.  Ehud Barak, by his giving into Bill Clinton (who, along with his staff including Jim Carville, did much to  put Barak into office), has done little more than demonstrate  just how empty the Palestinians’ peace talk really is, and how desperate Clinton was to be seen as a good President, his crimes against his oaths not withstanding.

Consider….

At Clinton’s insistence, Barak offered Arafat  the keys to the kingdom; just about all of the West Bank and Gaza, plus East Jerusalem and even Palestinian sovereignty over the Temple Mount. How do the peace loving Palestinians respond?  Yasser Arafat turned it all down, and gave us another few nights of headlines, filled with kids in the street throwing stones, and being shot, occasionally. He also sent his armed forces, (You recall, they’re supposed to be policemen?) to fire at the Israelis, apparently hoping for an excuse to tell the rest of the world how Israel is a war-mongering nation.

Of course that should have been a signal to about anyone with a brain that he didn’t give a damn about peace. All he and his followers are interested in is the destruction of Israel. It should have also been a signal that Clinton’s attempt at a legacy backfired, big time, and more, that it didn’t have a chance to start with…. something that Clinton should have known, did he have any understanding of the situation at all. You will recall, perhaps that back in 1992, Clinton more or less bragged he had no understanding of matters of foreign policy. This was never quite so clear as during this monstrosity Mr. Clinton unleashed on the world.

For Israel’s part, all of this has been laid at the feet of Ehud Barak, perhaps unfairly. No, I don’t think he was the man for the job, and clearly was only in the PM’s position because Clinton’s people worked so hard to get him there, apparently hoping to set up Clinton’s brokering a of peace deal. Easy to do when you have the PM of Israel owing you his election. But Barak apparently was under pressures he had no control of, having nothing to do with politics at home, or the Palestinians… both of which were quite out of his control to begin with, in any event.. He was concerned with Israel continuing to get support from the US. In this concern, he saw Israel as being on the controlled end of the puppet’s string… and knowing that if he did not capitulate to Clinton’s demands, that vital US support would wither as quickly as Benjamin Netenyau’s prime ministership did, when it became clear he wasn’t  going to buckle to Clinton’s concession demands.

And Barak wasn’t alone, nor was the left in Israel, in this perception of US control versus Israel’s survival. Yitzhak Rabin, hardly a liberal even by American standards and certainly not under Bill Clinton’s extortion based control to the extent that Barak was,  saw the same problems. His longtime friends, according reports I’ve seen, tell us he was deeply troubled over the prospect of losing US support… and therefore bought into the ‘land for peace’ deals being brokered by the liberals in the US. This was something I predicted he wouldn’t have done.

Israeli voters, seeing this happening, and clearly annoyed with the US control over Israel’s dealings with the Palestinians, trounced Barak in the polls. Unless one considers this anger, the election of Ariel Sharon, his replacement, is hard to fathom, since he has never been overly popular, as best I can tell. But perhaps  the people of Israel are finally figuring out what the real story is.. that in truth, there is no dealing with the Palestinians, and Arifat.

One hopes that they’ve not been too late in coming to this conclusion. If they are, world war seems fairly certain to me… possibly nuclear in nature.

However… also of great  import, I think, and far more certain, is the damage that has been done to our ability to deal with other countries on the world stage, even on the assumption that Israel survives all they’ve given away under Clinton’s threats. Our foreign policy influence has been diminished, because other countries, seeing what has gone on with Israel, one of our best friends, will trust us less, when we come with the helping hand. They’ll be, perhaps, wondering what the OTHER hand is doing. And after Bill Clinton, who could blame them?

And no… as much as I loathe Mr. Clinton and everything he stands for, I’m not piling on. I am simply issuing a warning that the damage he has caused will take a while to heal, if it will ever do so. And that we should avoid making such choices in the next several elections.  Never again should we as a nation or as a world, allow ourselves to be pushed into the situation we found ourselves in with Mr. Clinton’s attempts at salvaging face.

Our future, assuming we actually have one, will depend on it.

The AP unwittingly has stumbled over one of the ways the Demoats are using to gain power in November: Fostering the Felon vote.

RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — Undaunted by the heat, James Bailey spent his late-summer afternoons walking Virginia’s bleakest neighborhoods on the hunt for ex-cons — each a potential voter who might cast the decisive ballot in this hotly contested state.

Finding them isn’t the hard part. It’s getting them to admit that a past mistake has kept them from the ballot box.

“People are really, really reluctant to say, ‘I lost my rights to vote,'” Bailey said of his quest, which continued in the run-up to Monday’s registration deadline in Virginia for the November election.

Nationally, there are roughly 4 million released felons whose convictions have cost them the right to vote at least temporarily, if not permanently. To return to the ballot box, felons must negotiate suffrage laws that vary from state to state, in many cases working with election officials who can be both unfamiliar with the law and hostile to former convicts seeking to register.

Such challenges matter little to Bailey and others trying to return former criminals to voter rolls, an effort they consider crucial in light of the results of the past two presidential elections: A shift of a few hundred votes in Florida in 2000 would have changed the outcome of the presidential race, and the results in 2004 came down to a margin of 119,000 votes in Ohio.

When looking at a candidate and his or her qualifications, it is wise I think to view in very sharp detail, who it is that supports them. In this case, the concepts are fairly clear. I suspect that most would be repulsed on finding out about all this. Perhaps it’s why we’ve heard so little about this?

But it’s not like the GOP, John McCain, in particular, wasn’t trying to do the people’s business. They were stonewalled by Democrats.

Again….

Any questions?

How hard is to to link the credit crisis with the democrats like B.J. clinton and Barney frank?  Not every.  Even Alex Baldwn can connect the dots. Noel Sheppard, Newsbusters:

BALDWIN: I’m gonna rape you…The, the thing we have to remember, a friend of mine who is very close to the financial community in New York pointed out that Democrats have a lot of the responsibility for this as well. I mean, it was Clinton who killed the Glass-Steagall, and it happened under a Democratic president. Barney Frank and his committee, they, they kept propping up Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac saying everything’s fine, everything’s fine, everything’s good. And it was his job to know everything wasn’t fine. And Barney Frank let you down and let us down as well. And so, but I want to say there’s blame to go both ways. But I will say, I want to, I maybe keep beating this to death, but I still think anyone in this Congress who voted to add $140 billion to that bill, they should be ashamed of themselves. That is a disgrace. It’s a disgrace. This Congress is a disgrace, Democrat and Republican.

If even Baldwin is capable of connecting the dots, why isn’t the main stream media?   Is the collective MSM even dumber than a Hollywood actor?   Apparently so. 

Note, Newbusters was the video posted as well, (language warning).

Bruce:

The House has passed the travesty, er, bailout, er “Financial Rescue Plan” (263-171).

UPDATE: It sure impressed the stock market, didn’t it?

While I don’t doubt that there’s a distaste on the part of the market for this bailout bill, I’m unconvinced that the market drop we saw is in direct connection to the passage of the bill.

Trying to judge what drives the band of lemmings known as “The Stock Market” to do what it does and nail down the causes for each motion, rather reminds me of a project we were once given in high school… trying to reverse engineer a pseudorandom number generator by means of analyzing it’s output.

Or, perhaps more correctly, of the tale of the blind men and the elephant. How does one know if they’re getting the attribution right, or wrong?

And if the market was quite so predictable, why are we not all understanding of when exactly to get into the market thereby making us all rich?

Part of the problem, here, is that the bailout bill wasn’t about the stock market only, but rather the credit market, the connection of which to the stock market is partial at best.

Now, understand me; I’ll be the first to say that the issues which got us here are not solved by this influx of cash, unless and until the business practices… IE; the government’s 70% stake in housing debt… is removed.  But mislabeling market unknowable reactions as confirmation of a political position hardly seems a way to get there.

As we all so well recall:

The verdict came 13 years to the day after Simpson was cleared of murdering his ex-wife and a friend of hers in Los Angeles in one of the most sensational trials of the 20th century

That jury verdict also made the headlines on my birthday.  I like this one better.

From the Associated Press:

LAS VEGAS – O.J. Simpson, who went from American sports idol to celebrity-in-exile after he was acquitted of murder in 1995, was found guilty Friday of robbing two sports-memorabilia dealers at gunpoint in a Las Vegas hotel room.

Simpson, 61, could spend the rest of his life in prison. Sentencing was set for Dec. 5.

Simpson 1995 murder victims had names,  Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman.    Now Simpson’s search for the “real killer or killers” will be limited to any golf course Simpson can find in prison.

Addendum:(Bit) Lessee, here. Killed his wife. Issued threats against others. Facing life.

But we all hate him because he’s black.

He’ll be out in 7 years or less. Hmmm?