Say Anything Blog

By C. Edmund Wright

Can Barney Frank Dunk on Lebron? No, he cannot. Nor can anyone else in Washington. Nor can they catch passes from Ben Rothlisberger in the Super Bowl or strike out Derek Jeter in the World Series. They are not equipped to do so.

So what?

This ridiculous image speaks to the business malaise infecting the economy since Obama took office. The point is that politicians are equally ill-equipped to run the auto industry or the health industry or the lending industry or the insurance industry—and their determination to do so is sucking all the dynamism from the entrepreneurial class in this country.

With the threat of this administration and congress, what is the possible motivation for anyone with ideas and capital to invest his time, talent, and money into a risky endeavor? There appears to be none. In fact, there appear to be powerful incentives not to invest any time or treasure—thus an economy with almost zero creative inertia.

For Obama voters, almost zero creative inertia means almost no one is having bright ideas, starting businesses based on them, and hiring employees to help share the dream.

Consider: A professional sports league featuring Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, Dennis Kucinich, and Robert Byrd is not an enterprise that can successfully draw investors or paying customers, nor will it command media attention as anything resembling excellence. The entrepreneurial class in this country looks at the governing class in Washington today and sees a bunch of misfit incompetents who are determined to play starring roles in every nook and cranny of the economy.

And it is repulsive as well as disheartening. Maybe three of the 535 members of Congress have what it takes to keep a small business alive for a single fiscal quarter. We believe even fewer have what it takes to roll the dice and actually start one.

Yet they continue to pass laws and speak to reporters about all they are doing to create or save jobs. Yeah, right.

[...]

Any business idea, from the first day it is hatched, is nothing more than a series of cost-benefit analyses that the idea-holder either acts on or passes. Sometimes the first decision is to forget the idea. Sometimes the first decision is to move ahead and invest some cash. Perhaps a few million cost-benefit analyses later you might have Microsoft or Home Depot or ESPN. Or you might have Bill’s Plumbing or Johnson’s Quality Homes or a café or an electrical wholesaler, and so on. And those businesses still operate on a constant stream of risk-reward decisions. In the business world, there is no neutral gear.

This is the American dream. And it is being killed daily because there are few opportunities worth the risk anymore, thanks to Washington. Whether the Congress or the administration will infuse themselves directly into a given industry is not the only point. When government arrogantly claims it can perform impossible slam dunks in the banking industry, the auto industry, the insurance industry, and the medical industry, all the while imposing confiscatory taxes, there is almost nowhere to escape them in any legitimate business.

[...]

For many decades, the American dream has been undergirded by the faith that regardless of its current state, the economy would come back around thanks to the greatness of ordinary people being free to do extraordinary things. Thus the bold gunslinger mentality many business owners have had in previous recessions, refusing to participate, and even expanding cheaply to grab market share in the next recovery.

But it’s different now, and there is no denying it. The dream itself is being killed by legal and regulatory micromanagement. Washington is determined to employ policies to cure something that can be cured only by government getting the hell out of the way.

A small business summit in the White House will accomplish nothing unless the invitees include unions and lawyers and bureaucrats, in which case it will be devastating. When did a union or a lawyer or a bureaucrat ever start a business? How many times a day do they kill one?

And that’s the climate entrepreneurs see. Unions, lawyers, and bureaucrats gain more power and leverage every day. The big opportunity now is to spend government money: an eighteen-million-dollar government contract to create an awful Recovery.org website, SEIU union jobs in ObamaCare, bankruptcy lawyers, and perhaps carbon credit trades coming.  There are ACORN-style crony contracts to be had, not to mention all the jobs created by the David Axelrod astroturfing media escapades. If you are connected or if your dream is to enrich yourself by killing the dreams of others, then the field is ripe for you.

But if you simply want to live some iteration of building a better mousetrap, this is not currently the country for you. And entrepreneurs can sense it. This is not about tax policy.  It is not about health care. It is not about cap-and-trade. These are all terrible and need to be stopped, but most importantly, the dying American dream is in trouble. We now have a class of people in Washington now that will relentlessly pursue these ruinous initiatives, and a never-ending stream of similarly un-American agendas, until they are removed from power.

The businessmen are under attack, and they know it. This kind of economy cannot work—not until pigs fly, or until Barney Frank dunks on Lebron James.

If only Obama were as motivated to fight and kill terrorists as he is to fight and kill American private sector business.

By Bruce Walker

Seven different indicators suggest that 2010 will be a very tough year for the Obama Administration’s plans to turn America into a Socialist People’s Republic.  If some of these indicators pointed one way and others pointed the other way, projections might be murkier.  But all the winds seem to be blowing in the same direction and the result may be for Republicans the Perfect Storm.  What are these seven different indicators?

1) Public opinion polls, led by the very accurate Rasmussen Poll, have shown in the summer a clear line in the “strong approve” and “strongly disapprove” of Obama.  Although the figures waggle day to day, the trend is very clear:  not only is Obama less and less popular, but the intensity of support for and against Obama, which will be critical in the low turnout mid-term elections, shows a huge negative gap for Obama.

[...]

2) Elections corroborate polling data.  This means more than just the dramatic Republican victories in Virginia and New Jersey this November.  Republicans have been winning special state legislative elections all over the nation, often winning by wide margins districts that Democrats had held comfortably for many years.  Even recent municipal elections in Democrat strongholds like Albuquerque have produced stunning Republican upsets.

But elections mean more than just the election of candidates for office.  Democrats have yet to explain the stunning defeat of the establishment-backed propositions in California in May, which showed the Sacramento politicians losing for some of the propositions every single county in California.  There is a pattern to ballot initiatives.  Maine voters surprisingly defeated gay marriage, taking a stand directly contrary to their elected officials.  All this suggests that fiscal and social conservatism are robust and alive in the hearts and minds of voters.

[...]

4) Recruitment also is helped by the enthusiasm of conservatives.  The spontaneous uprisings at Tea Party and other gatherings shows that there should be no problem getting campaign workers and small contributors in 2010 for candidates who are running against Obama.  Doug Hoffman’s campaign in New York took off largely because of the tremendous grassroots support of conservative voters from throughout the nation.  The percentage of Americans, according to Rasmussen, who “strongly disapprove” of Obama is at very high historic levels for this young a presidency.

Leftist advocates by contrast, see President Obama continuing (as everyone not on the far left understood) the wars in Afghanistan and in Iraq.  They see him compromising on health care issues, perhaps allowing some limitation on abortion in the bill.  They listen to his rhetoric, which inevitably is less radical than they had hoped, and their enthusiasm melts noticeably. 

5) Closely related to enthusiasm is the composition of the electorate who are supporting Republicans and the composition of the Obama voters.  Senior citizens, who vote in nearly all elections, are alarmed by Obama’s plans regarding Medicare.  The young voters and the black voters who turned out in record numbers to elect Obama were conspicuous by their absence in November 2009.  Obama will not be on the ballot in 2010.  There will, instead, be a lot of old, white rich Democrat candidates trying to appeal to the center—trying, in many cases, to sound more Republican than Republicans.  As a consequence the electorate in 2010 will almost certainly be much more conservative than in 2008, and that will affect results.

6) Beyond all these factors, President Obama is showing an increasing tendency to fumble and to grope. The inexplicably silly remarks that Obama made when Cambridge police arrested Professor Gates in July revealed a highly parochial political instinct in which pummeling white police officers is considered good tactics.  His bowing before foreign heads of state is another amateurish mistake.  Obama went to Copenhagen to get the Olympic Games in Chicago and came back humiliated.  The jobs putatively created by his stimulus bill now appear to have come in nonexistent congressional districts.  The cumulative impact is to make Obama look more and more like Jimmy Carter, a man who cannot lead.

7) The seventh, and deadliest, problem for Obama in 2010 will be that he owns all the bad political problems of our country. Ft Hood was the first terrorist attack on American soil since September 11, 2001—Obama has not been able to do what Bush did.  If there are more attacks, Republicans will force him to acknowledge the obvious:  he is weaker than Bush on terror.  Unemployment is at very high levels.  Democrats are increasingly embroiled in scandals.

2008 may well prove to be the “Perfect Storm” for Democrats, united behind a smooth, handsome young black man and running against the last dying days of a much maligned George W. Bush Republican Party, and 2010 may prove the be the complete unraveling of an overstretched Democratic Party, yet to learn that conservatives are the huge majority of Americans.

The silver lining on the dark cloud of the election of 2008 keeps getting brighter as the American people come to realize what a mistake they made in electing an unqualified Marxist.

By Elinor Lynn Warner

In 1970 America, two infamous organizations were gearing up for big things. Wade Rathke founded ACORN in Arkansas and soon after moved its headquarters to New Orleans.  Jim Jones was building the Peoples Temple and set up operations in San Francisco and Los Angeles.  Rathke and Jones were gifted community organizers utilizing Democrat politicians, a compliant media, and vulnerable citizens to further their quest for power and money. Their identical pretense was helping the poor and downtrodden.

Jim Jones could round up crowds of protesters and door to door campaign workers on demand.  Admired and enabled by San Francisco Democrats and media moguls, Jones gathered emotionally and economically needy people around him, pretending to be a minister to their needs. He forced them to drain their bank accounts, sign over their homes and their welfare and social security checks.

Jones gave their money generously to the Democrat liberal elite and stashed millions in illegal overseas accounts. When Democrats needed a crowd of thousands, Jones provided his willing flock.  He ran faith healing and miracle scams. He loved and admired communism, Mao, Lenin, Marx, and Angela Davis. He railed against capitalism, but was ready to pocket all that his followers signed over to him.  He was a sought after Democrat community organizer masquerading as a man of faith:

  We are not really a church, but a socialist organization.  We must pretend to be a church so we’re not taxed by the government…  Those who remained drugged with the opiate of religion had to be brought into enlightenment - socialism. [Seductive Poison by Deborah Layton.]

While Jones peddled the drug of religion and talked socialism, he imposed communism. Once his followers were hooked, he trapped them in his demoralizing dictatorship, all under the guise of fighting poverty and prejudice.

[...]

The big Democrat names and newspaper editors in 1970 San Francisco sat in Jones’ pews and either bought his act or just liked his payoffs and power. But in 1977, things began to spin out of Jones’ tight control and a few frank stories of his oppressive Peoples Temple saw the light of day.

Jones fled to socialist Guyana where the constraints of polite society would not hinder him. He paid off government officials and isolated his flock as he set up his dream dictatorship.  When the move spiraled out of control, a congressman investigating the group, an NBC news crew, and some disenchanted Jones followers were all gunned down as they tried to board planes to depart and tell their story.

Later on that day in November of 1978, nearly one thousand forsaken men, women and children, virtual prisoners of Jim Jones, were forced to drink cyanide laced Kool-Aid. They died hideous deaths in the communist paradise of Jonestown, Guyana, a perfect snapshot of a communist dictator’s respect for humanity.  The media preferred the story line that Jones was a crazed religious zealot and cult leader. The story of Jones’ help from friendly big name Democrats was also swept away.

More businesslike, stable and enduring than Jim Jones, Wade Rathke built a nationwide taxpayer funded partisan criminal enterprise. He was also enabled by like-minded Democrats and the media. Partisan protection of ACORN continues today, even from career politicians like Jerry Brown.  Remember that Brown assisted Jones by placing the Temple attorney in a position of political power.  Brown is either a naïve man or he lusts for the political power both Jones and ACORN wielded. He is not alone.

Now ACORN’s tentacles reach many organizations, including the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), which wrote glowingly about highly partisan campaign work in 2004:

[...]

In 2008, the CPUSA website gushed:

  The grand coalition of the AFL-CIO and Change to Win along with National Council of La Raza, Women’s Vote, ACORN, MoveOn and Rock the Vote has launched the biggest ever-independent voter mobilization, which is at the heart of winning a massive turnout on Election Day and after.

Numerous voter fraud and corruption investigations, ACORN’s links to the CPUSA, labor unions and other questionable and partisan groups did not interest the traditional media. Most often it praised and protected this massive community organization.  In the face of a couple of young adults’ recent undercover ACORN sting, the traditional media was first shamed into coverage, but now has no interest in getting to the bottom of any of it.

[...]

Like a good communist leader, Jones squirreled away millions in off shore accounts.  The recent raid on ACORN offices in New Orleans seeks to find evidence of Dale Rathke’s embezzlement and a cover-up by Wade Rathke.  ACORN national board members with sincere motives and questions about this financial wrongdoing were fired.  Like many in the Peoples Temple, these members believed that their mission was altruistic, that community organizing was to benefit the needy.

The reality is that both Jones and the leaders of ACORN used the weak and good hearted to line their own pockets and further their own power.  Similar themes of exploitation, communism, race baiting, intimidation, and dishonesty run through their stories. Their stroke of genius was to support Democrats and in so doing, buy off the media.  Despite lessons learned from the largest mass murder-suicide in history, this formula for unfettered corruption continues unabated.

Anyone who doesn’t know that the left is at war with America just isn’t looking at the facts.

by Dennis Prager

There may be a major silver lining for conservatives and for America’s future thanks to the foreign and domestic policies of President Obama and the Democrat-controlled House and Senate: For the first time in their lives, millions of Americans are coming to understand the left.

It is difficult to overstate how important this is. For decades, the left has largely controlled the news media, the arts, the universities and the entertainment media. And vast numbers of Americans have imbibed these leftist messages and the leftist critiques of conservatives. What these Americans have never been able to do is to see what the left would actually do if in power.

Of course, all one had to do was look at California and see how a left-wing legislature brought the country’s largest state economy to near insolvency and bankruptcy, chased away many of its most productive citizens, and wasted tens of billions of dollars thanks in large measure to union domination of the state’s politics.

[...]

In half a year, there has been a 23 percent shift from Democrats to Republicans among independent voters. And nothing particularly bad had occurred—no further economic meltdown, no terrorist attack from abroad (the Poll preceded the Fort Hood attack).

Now Americans see the left’s policies for what they are:

1. The left wants America to abandon its defining commitment to individualism and replace it with a European-style nanny, or welfare, state. At most Americans’ core is an abiding belief that we are supposed to take care of ourselves, our families and our neighbors, and not rely on the state to do so.

2. The left is naive about evil. Most Americans deemed Communism evil; the left ridiculed President Ronald Reagan for calling the Soviet Union an “evil empire” and often undermined the fight against the Communist world. So, too, the left is naive about Islamic terror and undermines the fight against it.

The smoking gun was the nearly universal denial by the left that his Islamic beliefs had anything to do with Maj. Nidal Hasan’s mass murder of fellow servicemen at Fort Hood. One of many examples was this reaction to the shootings by Evan Thomas, Editor at Large at Newsweek: “I think he’s probably just a nut case. But with that label (Muslim) attached to him, it will get the right wing going…”

3. The left is more interested in redistributing wealth than in creating it. This should have been as obvious to Americans as the brightness of the sun. Finally, Americans are coming to realize that the left’s goal is now, as it always has been, equality, not prosperity.

4. The left is far more interested in power than the right is. This, too, should have been self-evident, but finally, people are realizing that those who are preoccupied with creating an ever-expanding state are obviously far more interested in amassing power than those who want a smaller state.

[...]

It’s about time for the sleeping giant which is conservative, real America to be awakened.

Joe Weisenthal

A recent CBO report estimated that the government spends about $300 billion to intervene in the housing market each year. That’s based on a range of activities, from direct subsidies to homebuyers, to the mortgage interest tax deduction, and the backstop of Fannie and Freddie.

And thus it’s no surprise that the housing market doesn’t work like other markets, and that we had a major bubble there. Even now, Goldman Sachs estimates, the government is adding at least 5% to the cost of each home, through its various “affordability” measures.

But it’s not just housing. Virtually every important sector of the economy is being manipulated in some way.

[...]

Healthcare

Healthcare is one of the worst inflation culprits. No matter what the rest of the economy is doing, prices march higher, and more and more folks are kicked off insurance rolls. Ironically, the reason for this is that the government tries so hard to make the market more equitable! Just look at all the ways the government manipulates this market:

  * The patent system is highly arbitrary, and it encourages pharmaceutical companies to spend tons of money on legal expenses, rather than research.
  * Medicare and Medicaid attempt to set rates for doctors and services.
  * The government establishes state-wide monopolies for insurance companies, discouraginging competition.
  * The government gives subsidies to employers to buy health insurance, thus disadvantaging independent workers.

[...]

Bottom line

Politicians of both parties pay lip service to the market, but in the end, regulators and politicians think they know better how the market should behave. And as long as that’s going on (which will be forever), we’ll keep having ridiculous inflation, undesirable side affects and bubbles.

It’s time for the taxpayers, who pay for everything, to take back our country.
Govt can’t run business, and without business, we can’t pay our bills.
Trying to engineer social outcomes by manipulating markets doesn’t work, and should be stopped.

By Bob Weir

Have you ever seen so much hatred for, and vitriolic criticism of, someone who had only a brief stint on the national political stage? More than a year after the presidential election in which Sarah Palin, as the GOP nominee for Vice-President, campaigned for about 3 months, she is still being pilloried by the leftwing loons as though she had been elected and was now actively engaged in dismantling the liberal establishment. Not a day goes by that we don’t hear or read vicious attacks on a woman who represents the conservative, wholesome values of Middle America; values that have been insidiously and incrementally eroded during the last few decades.

There’s an interesting contrast between Palin and Barack Obama. We keep hearing that she’s not qualified to be president, but Obama is. Why? Some say it’s because she didn’t have enough experience in government. Yet, as Governor of Alaska, she earned executive experience, while the current Oval Office resident only had a few years of legislative work. Others point to the interviews with Katie Couric and Charles Gibson during the campaign last year.

Let’s understand something: Couric and Gibson are liberal journalists who live for those gotcha moments when they can embarrass a conservative and get a round of high fives at the next penthouse cocktail party in New York’s Central Park West. In contrast, Obama’s interviewers seemed like they were more interested in dating him than they were in getting answers to questions. Obama’s personal lapdog, MSNBC’s Chris Mathews, gets a thrill up his leg from the chosen one. It’s obvious that Mathews has some sort of unresolved intimacy issues to deal with.

In the liberal mind, Obama can do no wrong, mainly because he’s black. If he fouls up with a misstatement or a faux pas, they’ll cover up for him as though they were protecting a child with a debilitating disease. It reminds me of what Bush 2 used to refer to as “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” Therefore, when one of those sycophants asks him a question, it’s not only a softball, it comes with heavy breathing and dangling tongues.

Compare that to the lion’s den that Palin walked into every time she sat down with one of Obama’s obsequious panderers. Given the ideology of the interviewers, I already knew how it would turn out. What really impressed me was watching this woman muster the courage to face her liberal antagonists on national television. How much courage does it take for Obama to engage in one of those cozy love fests with his fan club?

What this country needs is a strong conservative leader with the courage of her convictions. Sensing those qualities in Sarah Palin, the liberal left is becoming frantic because they can’t seem to halt her popularity. The reason they’re panicking is because they’re afraid of her connection with regular folks who work for a living, pay their taxes, attend a religious worship service regularly and believe that our country has lost the moral fiber that once united us. The book, Profiles in Courage by John F. Kennedy, covered several historical figures that stood up against the corruption surrounding them, and succeeded in defeating it. Sarah Palin did exactly that in her home state of Alaska. In a saner time in our history, she’d be a shoe-in for the White House.

But we’re living in an era of in-your-face corruption; a time when elected officials rob us blind and dare us to do something about it. The powerful Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, New York Congressman Charles Rangel, is facing a growing investigation of ethics and tax scandals. When the man empowered with the responsibility to write our tax laws refuses to pay his, something terrible has happened to our country. With a laundry list of misbehavior attributed to him, Rangel boldly continues to keep his seat, his chairmanship, and is running for reelection.

[...]

I could illustrate hundreds of other examples of rampant corruption by people in elective office. Pointing to government decay is the job of the free press. But are they hounding any of the power hungry scoundrels that masquerade as symbols of decency and honor? No, they’re engaged in a continuous merciless attack on a woman who has led the way in the fight against the very corruption that is being overlooked by those who have become blinded by their own ideology.

Palin is a threat because she symbolizes decency in a country that has been taken hostage by moral degenerates. If she isn’t stopped, this country might end up reclaiming some of the values that made us the envy of the world.

Whenever Obama attacks Rush, Hannity and Beck, their ratings go up and they get richer and more influential.
The relentless tide of lying smear directed at Sarah by the left wing noise machine has made her very famous and influential.
It’s the law of unintended consequences, which is always a factor in every leftie endeavor.

They said it. The Washington Examiner has come out in an editorial in favor of disbanding government employee unions.

It is not the concept of unions that needs to go, as the editorial clearly states. It is the idea that government employees can agitate for higher wages against us - the taxpayer - who will end up footing the bill.

“Unions” used to mean auto workers, steel workers, and other industrial work. Now it’s “white-collar Todd and Margo Yuppiecrat” working in a government office:

  The breakdown of union membership make this change clear: Only 7.3 percent of all private sector employees are union members, while 37.6 percent of all government workers are unionized. Fifty-one percent of all union members are government workers.

  As the Heritage Foundation’s James Sherk points out, these numbers ought to be red flags for taxpayers because “government employees don’t strike to get higher wages from a private business—they strike to get higher wages from you.”

  “Their pay is funded through your tax dollars,” he adds. “For government employee union members to get more, your taxes need to go up. So that is what unions now lobby for.” And as with so much else in this country, Sherk cautions that what is happening on the West Coast is likely a portent of disturbing things to come for the rest of us:

  * In Oregon, public employee unions are funding ballot initiatives to raise personal income and business taxes in order to protect gold-plated medical benefits from state spending reductions.

  * In California, the Service Employees International Union spent at least $1 million on a massive television ad campaign demanding that desperate state government officials raise oil, gas and liquor taxes instead of cutting spending.

  These actions point to the hard reality that the interests of government employee unions are fundamentally opposed to the interests of taxpayers.

And that’s the bottom line. When you consider that the old reasons for joining a union - to prevent exploitation by bosses - don’t apply in the case of working for the taxpayer, the justification for public employee unions becomes even less apparent.

[...]

But if politicians think they need to cut services by reducing the number of employees in a department, they should be able to make that choice without the threat that all workers will walk off the job. Holding the taxpayer hostage for higher benefits, cushier health and pension plans, and higher pay should be outlawed.

Congrats to the Examiner for taking a brave stand.

Find it here

Leftist Blood-Curdling Scream Alert: CMPA Reports That Fox IS Fair and Balanced

By Tom Blumer

Leftists including those in the White House who presumptively and obsessively attack Fox News will not be pleased with this.

At Forbes (HT Hot Air Headlines), S. Robert Lichter of George Mason University’s Center for Media and Public Affairs, asks the question, “Fox News: Fair And Balanced?”—and answers in the affirmative. In the process, the GMU Professor of Communications also makes a number of interesting points about Fox’s competitors, discusses the convergence of news and analysis, and provides useful historical context.

Using a methodology that would be difficult to refute, Lichter’s work relating to campaign 2008 is in sync with what CMPA found in late 2007 (noted at the time at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog) during the opening stages of the presidential campaign.

Here are key paragraphs from Lichter’s commentary (bolds are mine):

  Fox News has become embroiled in a nasty controversy over its ill treatment of President Obama. But are the charges true?

  What if I told you that Fox gave Obama his worst press and John McCain his best press of any network during last year’s presidential election? If you work for the White House, you’d probably take this as proof that Fox is just a mouthpiece for the opposition. Now what if I told you that Fox had the most balanced coverage of any network during the same campaign? If you work for Fox, you’d probably say we told you so.

  But what if I told you that both scenarios are true?

  While it seems unlikely, that conclusion is precisely the case, based on an ongoing study by the Center for Media and Public Affairs (CMPA). That both these seemingly contradictory scenarios are true tells us something important not only about the war between Fox and the White House, but about the changing nature of television news in America.

  .... The CMPA study compares ABC, CBS and NBC evening news shows and the first half hour of Fox News Channel’s Special Report, which most closely resembles its broadcast news counterparts.

  .... So how could Fox have both the most balanced and the most anti-Obama coverage? Simple. It’s because the other networks were all so pro-Obama. CMPA analyzed every soundbite by reporters and nonpartisan sources (excluding representative of the political parties) that evaluated the candidates and their policies. On the three broadcast networks combined, evaluations of Obama were 68% positive and 32% negative, compared to the only 36% positive and 64% negative evaluations of his GOP opponent John McCain.

  In fact, Obama received the most favorable coverage CMPA has ever recorded for any presidential candidate since we began tracking election news coverage in 1988. The totals were very similar—within a few percentage points—at all three networks. (These figures exclude comments on the candidates’ prospects in the campaign horse race, which obviously favored Obama.)

  Meanwhile, Fox’s Special Report was dramatically tougher on Obama, with only 36% favorable vs. 64% unfavorable evaluations during the same time period. But McCain didn’t fare much better, garnering only 40% favorable comments vs. 60% negative ones. So the broadcast networks gave good marks to one candidate and bad marks to another, while Fox was tough on both—and most balanced overall.

Other points Lichter makes:

  * The historical pattern during a president’s first year in office is that the establishment press tends to go negative. Lichter interestingly asserts that all networks have done so this year, with the Big 3 nets tallying 35% favorables for Obama vs. 27% for Fox on Special Report. Lichter’s take is that “Fox’s coverage has gone from being the worst of all to merely the worst among equals.”
  * The White House claim that Fox “really isn’t a news organization” is risible, given that in Special Report the channel at least runs “nightly news modeled on the broadcast networks.” MSNBC and CNN don’t even try.

[...] 

Leftists who will predictably howl that CMPA is conservatively biased (because SourceWatch says so, as if that proves anything beyond paranoia) are going to have to explain what is wrong with CMPA’s scorekeeping methodology, which appears to be relatively immune from partisan slant, even if one had that as an objective. In any event, the footage is out there, and they are free to try to replicate and poke holes in what CMPA did any time. I bet they won’t; whining is so much easier.

This is no news to conservatives, of course.  The MSM is so incredibly partisan that it essentially funcions as the Ministry of Propaganda for the Dem Party and the Obama administration.
Fox has the real news.

By EILEEN AJ CONNELLY

NEW YORK (AP) - The pace at which people fell behind on their mortgages slowed during the summer for the third consecutive quarter, but the overall delinquency rate hit another record, a new report shows.

For the three months ended Sept. 30, 6.25 percent of U.S. mortgage loans were 60 or more days past due, according to credit reporting agency TransUnion. That’s up 58 percent from 3.96 percent a year ago.

Being two months behind is considered a first step toward foreclosure, because it’s so hard to catch up with payments at that point.

The rate was up 7.6 percent from the second quarter. That’s a much smaller jump than the 11.3 percent rise in the second quarter from the first, and the 14 percent leap seen in the quarter before that.

While the slowing growth rate is a positive sign, the increase shows there’s still a lot of problematic mortgages out there, said F.J. Guarrera, vice president of TransUnion’s financial services division. The company doesn’t expect the figure to start declining until the middle of 2010.

Two things must get better before mortgage delinquency rates start reversing themselves, he said: home values and unemployment. “Until we see improvement in both of those areas, it’s possible that it will take longer for delinquency to improve,” Guarrera said.

The statistics, which are culled from TransUnion’s database of 27 million consumer records, show that mortgage delinquencies remain highest in the four states where the crisis has hit the worst.

[...]

TransUnion expects delinquency to rise to just short of 7 percent for the fourth quarter, compared with 4.6 percent for the 2008 fourth quarter. The rate may reach 16 percent in Nevada. Those states with the highest delinquency and foreclosure rates will likely continue to see depressed housing prices.

The average mortgage debt per borrower nationwide edged up to $193,121 in the third quarter, from $192,287 last year. The District of Columbia had the highest average mortgage debt per borrower at $359,788. The lowest average mortgage debt per borrower was in West Virginia at $97,265.

The Obama administration keeps claiming that the economy is “recovering”, while things keep getting worse for citizens and better for the govt ruling elite.  Is Obama trying to enslave us?

Rush posed this question this morning on his show, and concludes that Obama wants to put the US on trial.  I agree.  This is just a continuation of his internationalist agenda, including apologizing for the US all over the world.

Find it here

Palin Claims She Did Couric Interview Because She Felt Sorry For Her

By Noel Sheppard

Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin claims in her soon to be released book that the reason she let Katie Couric interview her was because she felt sorry for the CBS “Evening News” anchor:

  I almost started to feel sorry for her. Katie had tried to make a bold move from lively morning gal to serious anchor, but the new assignment wasn’t going very well.

I’d say the assignment wasn’t going very well given Couric’s continually plummeting ratings since she took over the anchor position.

With this in mind, the excerpt of Palin’s “Going Rogue” posted at the Drudge Report makes for fascinating reading: 

  From the beginning, [Palin campaign adviser] Nicolle [Wallace] pushed for Katie Couric and the CBS Evening News. The campaign’s general strategy involved coming out with a network anchor, someone they felt had treated John well on the trail thus far. My suggestion was that we be consistent with that strategy and start talking to outlets like FOX and the Wall Street Journal. I really didn’t have a say in which press I was going to talk to, but for some reason Nicolle seemed compelled to get me on the Katie bandwagon.

  “Katie really likes you,” she said to me one day. “she’s a working mom and admires you as a working mom. She has teenage daughter like you. She just relates to you,” Nicolle said. “believe me, I know her very well. I’ve worked with her.” [...]

  Nicolle went on to explain that Katie really needed a career boost. “She just has such low self-esteem,” Nicolle said. She added that Katie was going through a tough time. “She just feels she can’t trust anybody.”

  [...]

  Hearing all that, I almost started to feel sorry for her. Katie had tried to make a bold move from lively morning gal to serious anchor, but the new assignment wasn’t going very well.

  “You know what? We’ll schedule a segment with her,” Nicolle said. “If it doesn’t go well, if there’s no chemistry, we won’t do any others.”

Chemistry?

Yeah—like a cobra and a mongoose!

Too bad no one inside the campaign understood the trap Palin was walking into.

After all, admitting it fourteen months later does nobody any good.

We already know that the McCain campaign repeatedly stabbed Sarah in the back, and is still doing it.
Sarah is smacking all the liars with the truth.

By Pamela Geller

In surveying the cultural carnage in the wake of the worst terrorist attack on a military installation in US history, it bears noting that there have been seismic shifts in America. When America was free of the shackles of Islam, say, fifty years ago, the current response to such an attack by an enemy faction would have been unthinkable.

I have watched in abject horror the stunning reaction of elites in this country to this act of war.  The denial, the submission, the excuses, the dodging, the self-flagellation, the shame, the deceiving of the American people by the media, the military, society, law enforcement, authorities and politicians, all the way up to and including the White House, amounts to the enforcement of Shariah law.

Shariah law forbids criticism of Islam. And here we are.

We are witnessing an Islamized America. This is well beyond political correctness. We are enforcing Shariah law. We will not insult Islam. That is Shariah law. We self censor. That is Shariah law. We disrespect ourselves, our nation, so that we might respect Islam. This is dhimmitude. We should be raging. We should be outraged. We should be strategizing for this worldwide conflict. We should be debating about which leader will best handle Islam’s war on the West. And yet we have not one leader who begins to understand the conflict—that’s how feared the subject matter is. Not one leader.

[...]

When the reality of war, Islamic doctrine and bloodshed lays bare the nature of the enemy and the battle we are in, the door creaks open and Robert Spencer starts getting invited to appear on radio shows, and NRO finally runs pieces by Bostom and Spencer that show up the soft conservative narrative on Islam, which is soft and fuzzy and stupid (i.e., “Islamist” vs “Islamic”). Of course, we bad boys will be put back in our boxes until the next terrible time the jihad comes calling.

It pains me to say it, but expect to see us more frequently in the coming months and years. For the giant con job on the American psyche continues apace: He was a crazy! It was “vicarious” Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder! It was “Pre-Traumatic” Stress Disorder! It was radical extremism! It was part of a tiny fringe! It doesn’t represent Islam!

All lies. He was devout. He was a jihadist. Period. And many Muslims admire what he did. The Left worries about Muslim backlash. How about Muslim backlash against the infidels? Every “Soldier of Allah” who goes jihad is an enemy combatant. Every devout Muslim who believes in the word of the Quran has his or her duty to Islam, his call to jihad. Hence this terrible act of war, the 14,363 Islamic attacks across the world since 911, and all of the relentless plots, plans and to take down America in the past month alone. Devout Muslims should be prohibited from military service. Would Patton have recruited Nazis into his army?

I am writing this on Veterans Day. I call upon all Americans to step back, consider the unfathomable loss at Fort Hood, the ensuing apologia, and the tragic consequences of such behavior. This is a call to action. You’re either with us or against us.

Obama, almost as if he were a devout Muslim, refuses to criticize anything Muslims do, even when it’s slaughtering our soldiers on their own base.
Is this really what we want, in this time of a war of terrorism being waged against us and the rest of the free world?

Not for the unhip.

Ya mon!

Find it here

WaPo: EPA Forces Employees to Pull Down YouTube Video Critical of Cap-and-Trade

By Ken Shepherd

Imagine if you will, that during the prior presidential administration two EPA employees put up a video on YouTube that criticized environmental and energy policies supported by Republicans in Congress and President Bush, only to be told by EPA officials that they need to take down the video.

Given the media’s consternation about the Bush administration’s alleged efforts to squelch proponents of the theory of manmade global warming, such a story would likely be front page news in many newspapers, including the Washington Post.

But in this instance, the administration in question is Obama’s, and the EPA employees are going at the president from his left flank, arguing the so called “cap-and-trade” plan would “lock in climate degradation.”

Despite this, the Washington Post placed David Fahrenthold’s November 11 story, “EPA tells workers to tone down YouTube clip about climate bill” on page A8:

  Two Environmental Protection Agency lawyers who made a YouTube video calling current climate legislation a “huge mistake” were told by the agency to remove the clip and edit out some references to their employer, one of them said.

  [...]

  Another comment, in which Zabel said he oversees a cap-and-trade system for smog-causing pollutants in California, also had to go, she said. In addition, the agency said they had to take out a photo of the EPA’s San Francisco office building.

The coverup of the debunking of the myth of AGW comtinues.