All Tanked Up

Michelle says:

My dictionary defines “moderator” as “the nonpartisan presiding officer of a town meeting.” On Thursday, PBS anchor Gwen Ifill will serve as moderator for the first and only vice presidential debate. The stakes are high. The Commission on Presidential Debates, with the assent of the two campaigns, decided not to impose any guidelines on her duties or questions.

But there is nothing “moderate” about where Ifill stands on Barack Obama. She’s so far in the tank for the Democrat presidential candidate, her oxygen delivery line is running out.

In an imaginary world where liberal journalists are held to the same standards as everyone else, Ifill would be required to make a full disclosure at the start of the debate. She would be required to turn to the cameras and tell the national audience that she has a book coming out on January 20, 2009 – a date that just happens to coincide with the inauguration of the next president of the United States.

The title of Ifill’s book? “Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama.” Nonpartisan my foot.

Yeah, I knew about this, and knew this would come up now.

Still, I also know it’s not going to change anything. She’ll still pass herself off as impartial, and the debate will be slanted left by it’s moderator. But nobody will dare complain, lest they be considered racist.

Right Wing News has just posted an interview with David Freddoso, author of “The case against Barack Obama.”

Did you know Barack Obama actually had his supporters try to call in and disrupt an interview David did with WGN-AM in Chicago? As David points out in the interview, there was one big problem with Obama’s strategy,

“The joke, by the way, was on his people because it was a pre-taped debate between an Obama supporter and me. I was already in Washington by the time all the calls started coming in…”

David also tells a fantastic and very revealing story about Obama’s first election,

What’s really interesting is how embarrassed he is by this. It’s to the point where he would write a fictional account of his own election in his memoir

“In the prologue to the The Audacity of Hope he talks about how he went around Chicago’s South Side, giving this speech about how people had been let down by politicians before, but don’t get cynical about politics. If we all work together for the common good and set aside our petty self interests, we can effect real, positive change. He said he didn’t know if people liked the speech as much as he did, but either way, they liked him and his youthful swagger enough that he made it to the Illinois legislature. Full stop there. That’s the story he tells, period.

That is a fictional account because what actually happened is that he threw all of his opponents off the ballot on technical grounds, by challenging all their petition signatures. He had his campaigners go in and do this. They would update him nightly on their progress and tell him how many voter’s signatures they disqualified and some of them were disqualified legitimately, some not…He threw an incumbent state senator off of the ballot. He threw all of no-chance candidates off the ballot, too, so he could run unopposed.

Yeah, well, so much is revealed already about Obama as fictional anymore…. Oh, never mind.

BO says he supports the bail-out plan:

RENO, Nev. (AP) — Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama on Tuesday called for Americans to get behind attempts to salvage a $700 billion rescue plan for the financial sector, saying that if Wall Street fails ordinary people will also be hurt.

“This is no longer just a Wall Street crisis. It’s an American crisis, and it’s the American economy that needs this rescue plan,” Obama told about 12,000 people at a rally at the University of Nevada at Reno.

Obama said Congress should put aside politics — he didn’t mention GOP rival John McCain by name during his remarks — and should act on the legislation quickly.

Yet BO’s campaign co-chair does not.  Statement from Repesentative Jesse Jackson,  via Lynn Sweet, Chicago Sun-Times:

“Today, I voted NO on the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, a $700 billion earmark for Wall Street. Although this bill is a tremendous improvement over the legislation proposed by the Bush Administration last week, it still falls short of what is needed to shore up the economy, protect taxpayers and promote economic growth. We have gone from Roosevelt’s New Deal, to Reagan’s Raw Deal, to Bush’s Quick Deal. The American People are demanding a Fair Deal and on November 4th will elect Fair Dealers”

If BO does in fact support the bail-out plan, he going to great lengths ti avoid signaling his support to his supporters in Congress.    Or are we somehow suppposed to believe that BO can unite the country but not his own campaign co-chair?

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

• Leaving aside the issue of the Republicans who bolted off the bailout plan yesterday, changing their vote from ‘yes’ to ‘no’, (I’ll get back to that) I note with some interest that there was a large number of Democrats voting ‘no’ on this one. Now, the fact is there’s a great deal of opposition to the bill, at least from the ones being vocal at the moment. A few more down days on the market, and we’re going to see this thing pass. But if you look at Democrats who voted ‘no’, an interesting pattern emerges. To a man, these are people who hold office in battleground states.  This would seem to suggest, among other things, that the Democrats do not have a lock on increasing their hold on the House… and one may logically assume the same for the Senate. That’s an important lesson from this, that only a paltry few are mentioning. I see Limbaugh mentioned it yesterday during the 2:00(eastern) hour, and 538 mentioned it last night. (By the way, that 538 link has a full vote breakdown of the battleground states, too. ) I’ve seen it mentioned in a few Email groups I monitor, but few others have noted it. And certainly, you will not see the press dare to menton it. The reason? It doesn’t fit the usual mantra, of course.
• Now, what caused so many Republicans to jump ship? Some folks, myself included will include Nancy Pelosi’s self-serving anti-Bush diatribe.

  [wp_youtube]ey3ZlsmIkz4[/wp_youtube]

  No, Barney, you blithering fool,  this is not about hurt feelings. This is about correct problem identification. The Republicans were quite willing to try to save your sorry backsides, but when you start trying to deflect blame onto the people you’re asking for votes… when in fact the whole thing is demonstrably YOUR fault, it’s just too much. I suppose the Republicans who voted had reached their BS limit. In my view the gloves come off, now, if the Republican leadership has any smarts.

• An interesting aspect of this is that Nancy Pelosi is a first class idiot, if she thinks this kind of BS is generating a ‘spirit of cooperation’.  And you know, if she wanted to scuttle the bill, I can’t think of a more effective way to do it, than what she did yesterday in the well. Come to think of it,  it’s to the Democrats’ advantage to set things up this way, because in a few days, or weeks when she finally gets around to bringing this up for a vote again, she’s going to have congress critters begging to get screwed over, just so we can get the damn thing passed. The Democrats will be able to slip in about anything to that bill, and the desperation level will be high enough that nobody will object… or so she must figure. So, no, I wouldn’t put it past her to have planned things just so.
• Indeed, there seems some question if the Democrats really think ths thing a crisis. KJL was the first I saw to mention the point.
  

  We’re on the verge of financial meltdown, but Congress can afford to take a day or two off? I understand that it’s a major religious holiday for some members, but this is an “emergency.”

    Jay Tea  agrees.

  So, to me, it seems abundantly clear that the Democrats don’t see the current situation as a crisis, and are acting like everything is business as usual. To me, that says — far more clearly than their words — that they don’t think things are anywhere as bad as they say they are.And that is what convinces me that things are far worse than they think.
  Because the Democrats have been consistently wrong on the whole situation, and have been for years. There is no end of videos of leading Democrats praising Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s stability, of their performance, defending the leaders (most notably Franklin Raines and Jim Johnson), and thoroughly denouncing and scuttling numerous attempts to head off the problems that have started to come to a head in the past month or so.

  It’s a kind of negative evidence, but it’s persuasive to me: the Democrats have a solidly established record of being utterly and completely wrong on the whole mess. They are now acting as if the situation isn’t so bad, and are still far more interested in playing their run-of-the-mill political games with the whole process. If they are still wrong (and the odds are highly in favor of that conclusion), then we are in real trouble and the bailout that they don’t seem to care about whether or not it passes is probably a necessary evil.

  Well, that may be true. Since their actions brought all of this about, only an idiot would not think that such actions would eventually cause a collapse. Indeed, even the New York Times, no less, predicted such failure back in 99. So, said collapse may be part of the plan.  A stretch? Yeah, maybe. But at the moment, ‘Maybe not” looms large in the mirror, too, so I mention it. The part that keeps my attention and should peak yours a little at least is that based on the record of the last several years, I wouldn’t put it past them, anymore.

• The fact is, though, that the more likley scenario was that she couldn’t get her own people to vote for it, and so she launched her bomb, and stood back.  As the New York Post notes this monring, something like 95 House Democrats voted against it, despite the serious arm-twisting we hear was going on.  But she gets up, opens her yap, and because she caused a number of Republicans to back off the thing, loudly, she now can place the blame on those nasty Wascuwee Wepubwicans, in spite of the facts, and thus saving face, she thinks. (I’ve seen her face… it ain’t worth saving, gang..) Such a move doesn’t hurt Obama’s chances at the election, either, given the blame game. And yes, I think she’d do it… crash the economy to gain an election. In one hot second, she’d do ti.
• Roger Kimball has a great peice on all this, you should read.
• Boortz lists Acorn Vote Fraud.
• YetAnotherJohn gets an Honorable Mention at OTB’s Caption Contest. Me, too.
• I have my differences with PJ O’Rourke.  But, you gotta admire anyone who can write:
  

  I looked death in the face. All right, I didn’t. I glimpsed him in a crowd. I’ve been diagnosed with cancer, of a very treatable kind. I’m told I have a 95% chance of survival. Come to think of it — as a drinking, smoking, saturated-fat hound — my chance of survival has been improved by cancer.

  A sense of humor is the best medicine possible. Best wishes from here, PJ on your recovery.

•  Amidst all of this, is the bit tith Tony Rezko, Apparently, he’s been visiting the courthouse of late, and rumor is, he’s singing like a canary. One would hope that if in fact there’s enough to pull Obama down, they’re going to act before November, and spare the nation another Clintonseque embarrassment. But this is Chicago we’re talking about, after all, so who knows?
• I mentioned last night that Europe seemed to be affcted by reality with regards to it’s enviro-whackjobs laws.  Today, McQ looks closely at that subject.

Hume last night:

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has decided a racially-tinged attack by one of its commentators on Sarah Palin was not such a good idea after all. Heather Mallick said in a September 5 column that Republican men were sexual inadequates and that Palin was a toned-down version of a porn actress. She then said Palin “added nothing to the ticket that the Republicans didn’t already have sewn up, the white trash vote.”

The CBC initially stood by Mallick, but after more than 300 reader complaints — and criticism from both Canadian and U.S. media — the CBC is now apologizing. The corporation’s ombudsman said Mallick’s assertions were not fact-based, and CBC’s publisher John Cruickshank says “we erred in our judgment… Mallick’s column is a classic piece of political invective. It is viciously personal, grossly hyperbolic and intensely partisan.”

Meanwhile, Mallick has never apologized for her column and lauded the CBC for its initial support.

Ya know, for 40 years, I listened regularly to CBC’s Radio 1 outlet, CBL/740. The old Horton site, in the north end of the GTA, shared with another 50kw CBC AM outlet, the French service of CBC, CJBC/860, really packs a huge punch. And the old Continental transmitters they ran gave a classic sound I used to love from a technical angle.  I lamented when CBL went dark years ago to be taken over by CHWO some weeks later.   CBL went to CBLA on FM, which gets wiped off the radio  here locally by adjacent channel WBZA over in Rochester. So, I don’t often hear R1 anymore.  

But I have to tell you when I see what the CBC as an org has developed into, I have to say I’m somewhat less displeased with the current state of affairs. You guys can keep it up there, thank you. And if CBC is really, as it used to be,  a representation of Canada as a whole, you can keep the whole country, too.

From Fox News:

NDIANAPOLIS – A convicted sex offender died Sunday during a struggle with a father who found the naked man in or near his 17-year-old daughter’s bedroom, police said.

Police responding to a call from the city’s northwest side about 3:20 a.m. found 64-year-old Robert McNally on the hallway floor with his arm around the neck of 52-year-old David T. Meyers, who was pronounced dead at the scene.

Police spokesman Sgt. Matthew Mount said Meyers had a heart condition and may have had a heart attack. An autopsy was planned.

Good show Mr. McNally.   However I think a Colt 1911 would have worked better.

From Johnny Dollar, Karl Rove asks “What as the Speaker Thiniking?”    Alos note that Barack Obama close allies in the House vooted no.   Maybe BO shoud have been working the phones, Johnathan Martin:

More members of the Congressional Black Caucus, whose heavily black districts include many of Obama’s most ardent supporters, opposed the bill than supported it.

Few of these members are in, or will ever have, tough re-elections.

Obama, it seems, could have helped deliver some of these votes if he had been more invested in the bill

If Barack Obama had supported the bailout, it would have passed.  Jesse Jackson Jr, would not have voted against a bill that BO supported.    This bill could have been easily passed.   Whether is should have passed in an altogether different question.

Flash the stock market is adjusting, not crashing. As Michellle points out, today Dow drop did not crack the market’s all time top ten list in percentage of market share lose.

Today’s stock market drop is a record point drop, but does not even crack the top 10 single-day percentage drops in American history

We need the adults in the House, that the Representatives not named Dennis Kucinich , Nancy Pelosi and Barney Frank, to step and show some leadership.   Mrs. Pelosi needs to buy a clue:

$700 billion. A staggering number, but only a part of the cost of the failed Bush economic policies to our country. Policies that were built on budget recklessness when Pres. Bush took office, he inherited Pres. Clinton’s surpluses – four years in a row budget surpluses on a trajectory of $5.6 trillion in surplus. And with his reckless economic policies, within two years, he had turned it around. And now 8 years later, the foundation of that fiscal irresponsibility, combined with an “anything goes” economic policy, has taken us to where we are today.

This is a credit crunch caused by the faiiled policy of the Community Redevelopement Act, a brain child of the Carter and Clinton administration.    Democrats like Frank, Chuck Schumer, Barack Obama and Chris Dodd protected Frannie Mae and Freddie Mac from government oversight.   The credit crunch is the result of failed democrat policy.

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

Lots to cover today, as always and as dictated by events, most of it to do with the bailout which at this point (About 2pm eastern) is looking like it won’t pass.  so let’s get to it.

• Jerry Pournelle:
  

  Golden parachutes: we may detest them, but they are not the cause of the problem. And every one of the Democrats involved in this bailout benefited from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and every one of them was in favor of the CRA provisions requiring more and more sub-prime loans in order to increase home ownership.

  No kidding. We see where that led. As a direct result of that push, how many millions did Democrat cronies walk away with from Government sponsored entities like Fannie and Freddie? Those were government’s responsibility… not the income of those working for private concerns.

  And that the Democrats put that up so high on their list in spite of the real issue, tells me that there’s something they want out of that aspect, something of at least some psychological import; A reinforcement of socialist thought…. that success can only happen when government is running things.

  Otherwise, why bother with it at all, since the numbers tell the story… that what CEO’s get paid in the private sector really doesn’t mean much, in the end? And no… I’m not suggesting this is the first step on that slippery slope.  That was already taken when we accepted (Without anyone asking us) that the government has the right to decide who gets paid what. No, the first step was taken when we accepted the idea that such would be a good thing, (for reasons we never quite defined) if only the government could “do something about it”.

  Perhaps one of you would be good enough, though to explain to me, how CEO’s getting less pay, benefits Joe Lunchbox, in any way? And how much longer are we going to allow the Democrats to push this illusion of theirs that their policies had nothing at all to do with the current situation, when the facts are in the archives??

• By the way, if you want the actual text of the bailout bill, and have a couple hours to kill, have at it.
• Dale at Q&O makes a decent enough case against the bailout. It’s worth your time to read, because he makes a number of good points, and it’s well stated. I tell him in comments there…
  

  All well stated, Dale.But there’s one over-riding issue in my view; This is a governmentally created problem. They forced this number of failures by means of governmental power. Specifically, the expansion of the CRA and by means of hiding corruption within the agency they ran that expansion through. (If there was a lack of governmental oversight, it was at F&F, where Democrat cronies walked away with millions of taxpayer money.!) …they broke it, they need to pay to get it fixed. On that basis, I support the concept of a payment, if not, perhaps, under these specific conditions.

  The way I described the morality involved here, the other day is this:

  Let’s imagine that someone drives a truck through your house. Thank God, nobody gets hurt, but your house is now a large pile of kindling. Would you not want the people responsible for the accident… the driver and the company he’s driving for, for example, to pay for the damages and to set things right?

  This situation was caused because government misrepresented itself to the companies that failed, and forced them into bad business practices, and gave them implicit assurances that they’d be backed by the government.

  The government, of course, lied. to extend the metaphor, they broke it, they should pay for it, and going forward should keep their hands the hell away from it.

  Yes, unquestionably, this bailout will mean a growth of government, but given my understanding of our situation,(Indeed, they’re already doing it when they lay the blame for this current crisis at the feet of private enterprise and try to attach ACORN funding to it, for example)… I see a larger growth occurring without it, as they will without question try to deal with the repercussions of the collapse.

  Understand me clearly; I’m not happy about this either. Yet, given the basic morality of ‘you broke it you fix it’ and particularly given the dire consequences we see absent such a bailout process, I fail to see a moral alternative.

  The stuff that will get added on is the nature of politics, I’m afraid, at the moment. We’re going to have to deal with the financial consequences and the initial problem as separate issues. Those added items, and those misdirections need to be fought, tooth and nail, I think.

  The difference to be made, here I think, is how the lesson this crisis teaches, gets absorbed into our national consciousness. I accept, very grudgingly, that the government paying to fix the problem is the only first step that can be taken. However, the lesson needs to go out that government needs to keep their hands off private enterprise… including CEO pay, including lending policy, and so on, going forward.

  There is a lot of blame to be placed at the feet of both parties for our current condition; The Democrats for pushing us in this direction and the Republicans for their ‘go along to get along’ and “we’re all Americans” BS, in allowing this nonsense to get as far as it has, instead of fighting this stuff tooth and nail as they should have been. But we’re here now, and there’s nothing for it, but this, I’m afraid.

  What needs to happen now, as a part of this process, is problem identification, without shrinking from what we find. Solving a problem after all, involves identification of the cause, and arranging things so it doesn’t happen again. Given our situation with the election as the backdrop, that means McCain, and the Congressional Democrats are going to have to start attacking the Democrats on their history in this thing.

  And that, by the way, is what I expect to see out of McCain in the following days.

• Now, I’m getting blowback from some, telling me about how these private firms jumped right in on their own, and that thereby the bailout is not valid. But as I told Lance, today:
  

  It’s going to be a little hard, to argue as Dale does, (And I think correctly) that…

  y Reinvestment Act is about as pure an example of fascism as you’re likely to find. Its sole purpose is to require private firms to advance government aims. They might as well have called it the “Strength Through Joy Act”.

  We really need to have debate about CRA. If the government wants to ensure that non-credit-worthy people receive home loans, even if their ability to pay for them is questionable, then the government, not private-sector companies, should be footing the bill…

  …. and then turn around and suggest as Nancy Pelosi does that the government does not bear direct responsibility for the problem and it’s depth.

• And no, in case you didn’t get that out of my comments here and for the last couple days I’m not at all happy abut the direction this thing is taking. Me at OTB this afternoon:

Yeah, but Bit, that’s not what I was responding to. What I was responding to was your (kind of) hair-on-fire claim that this was the first step down the path to government wage controls for all of us. That’s a stretch, no?

Frst step? Hardly.

Merely another along the way.

The first step? That was already taken when we accepted (Without anyone asking us) that the government has the right to decide who gets paid what. No, the first step was taken when we accepted the idea that such would be a good thing, (for reasons we never quite defined) if only the government could “do something about it”.

I didn’t say as much there, because frankly I was in a hurry. But, for the record, this, of nessessity includes a minimum wage law. Far as I’m concerned, Billy’s quite correct  as  I quoted him the other day; We’ve gone much father down the road toward socialism than most are willing to admit. A denial of that now is not going to help us.   So, yeah, this bailout solution I’m not at all hapy with. But I view it as I do war; sometimes there  no other way out, and I think this is one of those times. At the same time, then, a we go into this thing, we need a I told Dale, proper problem identification… and we need a teaching process based on that, to remind all of us how we got there…. socialism.

• Did you see where this chef died after eating some hot chili? Of course the good news is, he won the bet.
• Did you note Obama’s wesbite saying “Unfortunately” only citizens can vote?  Yep…. Just let that phrasing roll around for a while. You’ll figure out the thinking, here.
• The New York Post has taken the time to document some of the ties of Obama to William Ayers, unrepentant terrorist. As a whole, the press keeps trying to ignore this, apparently in the hopes the voters will, too.
• Here’s why. They know this race is going to come down to a question of honor and character. Commentary Magazine’s Jennifer Rubin agrees…
  

  Bill Kristol is right, certainly, that John McCain needs to break the trajectory of the race or he will lose…..

  McCain won the GOP primary ( albeit in a divided field) largely in a character contest. No less a figure than Bill Clinton remarked that “his greatness is that he keeps trying to come back to service without ever asking people to cut him any slack or feel sorry for him or any of that stuff because he was a POW.” If he can make it that again — a contest of moral fiber and character – he has his shot.

  Just so. And that means, that McCain is going to have to take the gloves off on issues like Ayers, and like the Fannie and Freddie scandals.

• I see reality has taken hold in Europe. They’re talking about easing polution regulations in the face of economic issues.  Apparently, they understand such things are based on arbitrary numbers and are in fact a luxury.
• In case anyone cares, Oil is now below $100.bbl
• London markets are down… the dollars getting a big boost… biggest since it started going down under Clinton.

I’ll have much more on the bailout bill in tonight’s Ramble  but for now the thing is moving too fast for me to track. 

Drudge and Memeorandum seem the best aggragators at the moment.

The bailout bill is due up for a vote today. Lawmakers are supposed to be at it at 8 this morning, and the President is speaking this morning on the subject.

I think I’ve found the best indicator possible in terms of the bailout bill being worthy of support: Dennis Kucinich is against it. As a general rule, anything that moron is against must merit serious consideration.

He also gives us indication on it’s passage:

“I will tell you right now I don’t know if they have votes,” said Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio). “If the votes were there, this would be on the floor. The votes aren’t there.”

Translation: I’ll pass by a wide margin.

By way of Gateway Pundit:

Sunday, September 28, 2008

Obama Goon Squad Shuts Down Macsmind Blog

Macsmind blog is down.
Obama goon squads:
This is MacRanger of Macsmind. As you know I was hacked by operatives of the Obama Campaign last month. Well, it happened again. Basically they flooded the site with “sql bombs” according to the host that caused the shared server to stop running. Subsequently be had to disable the site. This had to do with running the “Obama wants to Disarm America” post which more than 2 million people viewed on the site. Just like the goons in Missouri, the Obama truthers can’t let the truth be known. I’ve now moved the blog back to blogspot at macsmind.blogspot.com at least temporally. Because of the hacking job I had to move to another host but unfortunately they haven’t got the server up yet to redirect the traffic to blogspot. I would appreciate a mention to your readers. I’m getting a couple of hundred emails about “what happened”, but as you can imagine it hard to get the word out by reply.

Thanks,

MacRangerHere is the temporary Macsmind blog.

Here’s the vid that spurred the attack… apparently Obama doesn’t want you to see this.

[wp_youtube]fU4sVQV3Lhk[/wp_youtube]

The WSJ, this morning:

Top U.S. policy makers emerged from hours of tense negotiations with a clear message just after midnight Sunday morning: A deal to bailout U.S. financial markets has been agreed on and all that remains to be done is to commit the legislation to paper.

Well, yeah… and in that translation, it seems to me, lies a number of possibilities to add to ACORN’s coffers, huh?

Well, OK, maybe I’m being cynical, but as I said the other day, I have no choice but to be cynical. Democrats are involved, after all.  To that point I will add, that one thing we’ve been short on from Washington is problem identification, as I’ve laid out here, here, here, here here and here. Now, notice also, please, that when problem identification becomes part of the package, who gets nervous and jerky.

It should be fairly clear as to why. The biggest fear these people have is that someone will figure out they’re at the root of this problem.

So, what to do about it all?

Well, let’s take a moral lesson first as a basis of discussion.

Let’s imagine that someone drives a truck through your house. Thank God, nobody gets hurt, but your house is now a large pile of kindling. Would you not want the people responsible for the accident… the driver and the company he’s driving for, for example, to pay for the damages and to set things right?

Well, as I demonstrated quite clearly in the list of links above, this crisis is the direct result of a failure of government… (actually several failures of government all of which are tied to socialistic attitudes)  in failing to acknowledge and act on problems within the GSE’s Fannie and Freddie, but in using the force of government to re-writing bank policy as regards lending, to literally force banks into a position of arranging a housing bubble, and one based on mortgages that could never be paid off…   The combination of these two situations, both of which were fostered by Democrats, are why we are, where we are just now. This crisis has been caused by Democrats pushing the kind of socialism described in the graphic left. And doesn’t that graphic describe the situation so very clearly?

I understand and trust me, I fully appreciate the idea that this is a growth of government. I understand and trust me, I fully appreciate the idea that this will be expensive and more, I understand and trust me, I fully appreciate the idea that this bailout will be used by the left in their attempt to grow government more still. They’re already doing it when they lay the blame for this current crisis at the feet of private enterprize. But the root cause of this problem was corruption in the GSE’s and in governmental regulators trying to by votes in getting their supporters something for nothing, by way of questionable loans, and their socialistic manuvers in attempts in dictating CEO pay.  Yet, given the basic morality of ‘you broke it you fix it’ I fail to see a moral alternative, here. The stuff that will get added on is the nature of politics, I’m afraid, at the moment. We’re going to have to deal with the financial consequences and the initial problem as seperate issues.

The difference to be made, here I think, is how the lesson this crisis teaches, gets absorbed into our national consciousness.  I accept, very grudgingly, that the government paying to fix the problem is the only first step that can be taken. However, the lesson needs to go out that government needs to keep their hands off private enterprise… including CEO pay, including lending policy, and so on, going forward, because there’s no free lunch; the law of unintended consequences always steps in. As an example, Billy mentions the other day:

“A friend on Capitol Hill in a very dark mood thinks so. Last time, House Republicans got blamed for shutting down the government, this time they’ll get blamed for shutting down the financial system. He also worries—did I mention he’s in a dark mood?—that if nothing passes and the crash comes, the country may arrive at a turning point, moving irrevocably in the direction of a social democracy.”

Rich Lowry doesn’t get it.

The fact of this discussion means that it already is.

He’s got a point. Though, I’ve never accepted that socialism is a border to be crossed so much as a hill climbed, and one that frankly, nobody’s ever reached the top of, nor will they.  The lack of breathable air  up there always brings reality to intrude on that quest… something that history has proven countless times. That we’re moving up the hill the last 60 years or so is lamentably unquestionable.  I submit that where we are in this financial crisis just now is a direct result of that climb attempt. There is a lot of blame to be placed at the feet of both parties for our current condition;  The Democrats for pushing us in this direction and the Republicans for their ‘go along to get along’ and “we’re all Americans” BS, in allowing this nonsense to get as far as it has, instead of fighting this stuff tooth and nail as they should have been.

I agree that given the conditions we face at the moment, there wasn’t a great deal of choice remaining in the matter, but to throw money at the issue to keep us afloat. But just as important, and likley moreso, what needs to happen now, is problem identification as I’ve laid it out here. That’s going to be, as I’ve been saying, a slow political process. And sometimes a shock like this is what’s required to get things moving back down the hill.

I tell you… we need to start fighting.

Now.

At the least, to start with this means getting Democrats, and liberal Republicans out of power to the degree possible. Then, it means keeping the talons dug into the people we do elect to get them shrinking governemntal intrusion. But first, this means explaining in graphic detail… over and  over and  over and  over and over again, why such a transition is needed. And yes, it will become a job of repetition. Where we are now is also a direct result of not telling people why keeping socialism in all it’s forms is needful for a healthy country. And reminding them daily.

If you have a new driver who doesn’t understand about road junk and flat tires, how are they going to know that it’s important to keep out of the crap along the side of the road to guard against flat tires?  This stuff needs to be taught. We used to. It’s past time we started attending that need again.

This one, courtesy of McGehee.

I say again, why on earth is anyone… anyone… voting Democrat?

The Democrats fought against fixing the problem with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Over, and over and over again. Watch this vid offered by the GateWay Pundit.

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Now, that’s just devastating all by itself. Fannie and Freedie were mismanaged out of billions, while the Democrats fiddled and chanted the mantra of ‘Affordable Housing”.

Why on earth is anyone voting Democrat?