Say Anything Blog

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By Examiner Editorial

It’s getting steadily more difficult to detect differences between an organized nationwide criminal conspiracy to commit voter fraud and the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). Thus far in the 2008 campaign, state election officials representing both major political parties in 15 states, including such key battlegrounds as Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida, have accused ACORN of various schemes involving widespread voter fraud. The pattern is so pervasive - and the danger to our electoral system so dire – that it demands federal intervention.

The Justice Department’s indictment in 2005 of the Milberg Weiss class-action securities law firm under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) did not involve charges of mob involvement. Ultimately, the firm plea bargained and several of its senior partners now reside in federal prisons. Likewise, ACORN’s repeated abuses don’t include mafia links, but the pattern matches the organized criminal conduct RICO was passed to combat. If prosecutors don’t know where to start their investigation, here are four suggestions:

Indiana: In Indianapolis and surrounding Marion County, where ACORN has been active and early voting is allowed, the number of voter registrations exceeded the over-18 population by 5 percent.

Nevada: The secretary of state and attorney general, both Democrats, raided ACORN’s Las Vegas office last week, seizing eight computers and 20 boxes of documents. The search warrant alleges that 59 felons ACORN hired to register voters submitted hundreds of phony registrations – including the starting lineup of the Dallas Cowboys.

Ohio: A 19-year-old Cleveland man told reporters that he signed 73 ACORN voter registration cards over a five-month period in exchange for cigarettes and cash. In Franklin County, 3,700 people who were registered by ACORN listed a vacant building as their home address.

Missouri: In April, eight ACORN workers in St. Louis pleaded guilty to charges of federal election fraud during the 2006 election. This year, election officials in Jackson County found fake addresses and Social Security numbers on hundreds of ACORN-submitted registrations. In Kansas City, “Monica Ray” was registered 20 times.

ACORN officials recently admitted in a media conference call that their quality control process is “not perfect,” and they routinely claim that abuses are isolated incidents. That rationalization might have sounded reasonable when abuses were found in only a few states, but it strains credulity when serious questions arise in 15, including key battleground states.

[...]

The lefties will do anything to seize power.  It’s time to stop them.

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Anatomy of a media smear

Rick Moran

Over the last fortnight, the Democrats, the Obama campaign, media, and bloggers have all railed against John McCain for “allowing” crowds at his rally to get out of control and espouse hateful sentiments.

Numerous conservative bloggers have debunked this notion - an easy task if one were to simply watch the YouTube streams of these rallies. But liberal critics have pointed in particular to one Palin rally in Pennsylvania where an audience member supposedly screamed “Kill him” when Obama’s name was mentioned.

Commentators from Keith Olbermann to Joe Klein at Time Magagzine have pointed to this single utterance as “proof” that Republican crowds were turning into an “angry mob” and posed a danger to Obama and our republic.

It turns out, the genesis of this story is from a report on the rally that appeared in the Scranton Times-Tribune. One reporter wrote of the supposed shouted threat. The problem is, no Secret Service agent in the crowd heard it nor did anyone else apparently. And the Secret Service says that after interviewing 20 people who attended the rally - security and non security people aike - the allegation is now “unfounded.”

The Scranton Times-Tribune first reported the alleged incident on its Web site Tuesday and then again in its print edition Wednesday. The first story, written by reporter David Singleton, appeared with allegations that while congressional candidate Chris Hackett was addressing the crowd and mentioned Oabama’s name a man in the audience shouted “kill him.”

News organizations including ABC, The Associated Press, The Washington Monthly and MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann reported the claim, with most attributing the allegations to the Times-Tribune story.

Agent Bill Slavoski said he was in the audience, along with an undisclosed number of additional secret service agents and other law enforcement officers and not one heard the comment.

“I was baffled,” he said after reading the report in Wednesday’s Times-Tribune.

He said the agency conducted an investigation Wednesday, after seeing the story, and could not find one person to corroborate the allegation other than Singleton.

Slavoski said more than 20 non-security agents were interviewed Wednesday, from news media to ordinary citizens in attendance at the rally for the Republican vice presidential candidate held at the Riverfront Sports Complex. He said Singleton was the only one to say he heard someone yell “kill him.”

“We have yet to find someone to back up the story,” Slavoski said. “We had people all over and we have yet to find anyone who said they heard it.”

[...]

The only person who heard the remark was the reporter? Mr. Singleton was interviewed by the Secret Service and “stands by his story.” When contacted, Singleton referred people to his editor who claims “The facts reported are true and that’s really all there is.”

Except that’s not all there is. This is a story that went viral, appearing on national cable nets and broadcast news channels as well as national magazines and hundreds if not thousands of blogs.

And now we find that the reporter - despite his protestations to the contrary - just made it up out of whole cloth in order to play into his overall theme that GOP crowds were “angry” and out of control?

Let’s see how many media outlets who rushed this story on to the air or into print report on the Secret Service investigation. If they had a single ounce of integrity, they would apologize to the McCain-Palin campaign, the GOP, its supporters, and every single American who heard the story.

My guess is they’ll have as much integrity as Mr. Singleton’s editor who seems to be living by the creed, even if it’s a lie, “stand by the story.”

More leftie lying; what else is new?  The question I have is this: If Obama is such a “sure thing”, why do the lefties need to lie like this and why do they need all those phony voter registrations?  Maybe the polls aren’t telling a true story.

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Tom Friedman’s ironic column
Thomas Lifson
An unfortunate coincidence for Tom Friedman, the New York Times columnist who married the daughter of a billionaire real estate developer. In his NYT column he pontificates on the perils of financing real estate:

I have a friend who regularly reminds me that if you jump off the top of an 80-story building, for 79 stories you can actually think you’re flying. It’s the sudden stop at the end that always gets you.

When I think of the financial-services boom, bubble and bust that America has just gone through, I often think about that image. We thought we were flying. Well, we just met the sudden stop at the end. The laws of gravity, it turns out, still apply. You cannot tell tens of thousands of people that they can have the American dream - a home, for no money down and nothing to pay for two years - without that eventually catching up to you. The Puritan ethic of hard work and saving still matters. I just hate the idea that such an ethic is more alive today in China than in America.

Our financial bubble, like all bubbles, has many complex strands feeding into it - called derivatives and credit-default swaps - but at heart, it is really very simple. We got away from the basics - from the fundamentals of prudent lending and borrowing, where the lender and borrower maintain some kind of personal responsibility for, and personal interest in, whether the person receiving the money can actually pay it back. Instead, we fell into what some people call Y.B.G. and I.B.G. lending: “you’ll be gone and I’ll be gone” before the bill comes due. [emphasis added]

[...]

Even a leftie like Friedman eventually has to admit the truth.

Ed Lasky

The New York Times, as is their wont, tries to whitewash Democratic responsibility for the housing disaster in today’s editorial “Misplaced Blame” by holding that the Community Reinvestment Act is blameless for the problems that beset America.

The Community Reinvestment Act was signed into law by Jimmy Carter in 1977. The Times editorial states that it is hard to fathom how a law signed 30 years ago is ceratinly partly (if not mostly) responsible for the crisis we have now. Well, first of all, the Act was made more potent when Bill Clinton, in 1999, beefed up its provisions and enforceability so the thirty -year statue of limitations that the Times creates out of thin air is not applicable.

[...]

However, economics changed. Housing prices went into a free fall, money supply constricted, interest rates increased. These conditions would not have caused the harm that they did had there been an adequate cushion (a big downpayment) or qualified borrowers who could fulfill their obligations.  These were not requirements imposed on home purchasers by the Community Reinvestment Act.

The root of this problem-or at least one of the main roots-was the Community Reinvestment Act and the proliferation of purchases of homes by people who could not afford them if conditions changed.

The Times skirts one of the major causes of the crisis - the Democratic push for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to lower the standards of mortgages they would guarantee and market. The banks, savings and loans, the mortgage brokers, would not have been able to market these products without Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s backing. The Times did not look at its own archives. A 1999 article pinpointed this risk when reporting on Democratic efforts to loosen Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac standards.

You can’t solve a problem unless you address the true cause.

By Tom Blumer

Three weeks out from Election Day, surely more Americans are tuning into the Big 3 networks’ evening newscasts, right?

Wrong.

In the past two weeks, Big 3 evening newscast viewership has actually declined by 360,000, or 1.6%. What’s more, in percentage terms, viewership among “The Demo” of ages 25-54 has declined even further (220,000, down 3.1%).

[...]

Given that almost anyone would have expected the nets to at least hold steady through Election Day, it’s not unreasonable to surmise that some of the declines above might be due to:

* Charles Gibson’s slanted and selectively edited interview of Sarah Palin on ABC.
* Katie Couric’s similarly biased effort for CBS. Her Palin interview likely accounts for the ratings bump during the week of September 29, but notice that CBS was back below it two-week-ago level the following week. Is that a backlash?
* The ongoing MSNBC-ization of NBC.
* Relentlessly biased reporting in general.
* All of the above.

This result offers some hope that viewers—and voters are looking for more accurate information in outlets outside of traditional media.

Tables of viewer numbers at link.

I wonder if the taxpayers will be forced to bail out the networks if they go broke?

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By Binyamin Appelbaum
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 15, 2008; A01

Community banking executives around the country responded with anger yesterday to the Bush administration’s strategy of investing $250 billion in financial firms, saying they don’t need the money, resent the intrusion and feel it’s unfair to rescue companies from their own mistakes.

But regulators said some banks will be pressed to take the taxpayer dollars anyway. Others banks judged too sick to save will be allowed to fail.

The government also said yesterday that it will guarantee up to $1.4 trillion of private investment in banks. The combination of public and private investment is intended to refill coffers emptied by losses on real estate lending. With the additional money, the government expects, banks would be able to start making additional loans, boosting the economy.

[...]

On Wall Street, bank stocks soared even as the broader market stayed flat while investors grappled with economic concerns. The Dow Jones industrial average was down 0.82 percent, or 76.62 points, to close at 9310.99 one day after its largest percentage gain in more than half a century.

And in offices around the country, bankers simmered.

Peter Fitzgerald, chairman of Chain Bridge Bank in McLean, said he was “much chagrined that we will be punished for behaving prudently by now having to face reckless competitors who all of a sudden are subsidized by the federal government.”

At Evergreen Federal Bank in Grants Pass, Ore., chief executive Brady Adams said he has more than 2,000 loans outstanding and only three borrowers behind on payments. “We don’t need a bailout, and if other banks had run their banks like we ran our bank, they wouldn’t have needed a bailout, either,” Adams said.

The opposition suggested that the government may have to continue to press banks to participate in the plan. The first $125 billion will be divided among nine of the largest U.S. banks, which were forced to accept the investment to help destigmatize the program in the eyes of other institutions.

In rolling out the program, Treasury said it would make the rest of the money available to banks that requested it. Officials said they expected thousands of banks to participate.

But both the American Bankers Association and the Independent Community Bankers of America said that they knew of few banks that planned to participate.

“I’m not sure we’ve heard from any that want to participate,” said Karen Thomas, vice president for government relations at the community bankers group, which represents about 5,000 banks. “That said, if any community banks do enroll, we anticipate it will be just a small minority.”

Federal regulators said they did expect some banks to volunteer, though none stepped forward yesterday. But they added that they would not rely on volunteers. Treasury will set standards for deciding which banks can be helped, and the regulatory agencies will triage the banks they oversee: The institutions faring best and worst will not receive investments. The institutions in the middle, whose fortunes could be improved by putting a little more money in the bank, will be pushed to accept the money from the government.

“We will encourage institutions to apply,” said John C. Dugan, the comptroller of the currency, who oversees most of the nation’s largest banks.

In return for its investments, Treasury will receive preferred shares of bank stock that pay 5 percent interest for up to five years. After that, if the companies haven’t repaid the government’s initial investment, the interest rate goes up to 9 percent.

Participating banks cannot increase the dividends they pay to shareholders without federal permission, they must accept some limitations on compensation for their executives, and Paulson said the government would press companies to limit mortgage foreclosures.

The government decided not to impose an explicit requirement that banks use their taxpayer dollars to increase lending. But regulators said they will watch banks closely. They also noted that banks have less reason to hoard money now that they can borrow more easily. Most important, however, they said, banks want to make money.

“And the way that banks make money is by lending,” Dugan said.

[...]

Bair acknowledged that the new guarantees shelter banks from the immediate consequences of misbehavior because depositors and investors have no incentive to remove their money from an institution if they know that the government stands behind it.

But Bair said the government’s first priority was to stabilize the industry.

“The risks of moral hazard were simply outweighed by the need to act and act dramatically and act quickly,” Bair said.

Dugan offered a slightly different perspective.

“It just means we’ve lost one tool and we’re going to have make sure that we compensate,” he said.

It was exactly this kind of coercion that produced the original problem.
The inherent morality of the free market is that good investments succeed, and bad investments fail.  Anything that interferes with that produces distortion, and ends up costing us all money.

By James Lewis

Bill Ayers said in 1995 that he was just a “small ‘c’ communist.” He said it with a little laugh. And most of us aren’t even shocked. We’ve heard words like that before. But we should feel shivers running up our spines.

I know goofy liberals who moan about all the good intentions demonstrated by Karl Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky. They’re all Obama voters, for some reason. They are the same kinds of people who think Jesus was a communist, and that George W. Bush is Hitler. They are often the kind of people who try desperately to be completely nice in their lives, especially to designated victims. But often they harbor a belly full of rage—against conservatives, or big corporations, or fundamentalist Christians, or anybody who challenges their belief in their own saintliness.

In basic politics there are only two numbers you need to know. One is Six Million. You know what that means. The other number is not nearly as well-known, but it should be. It’s One Hundred Million. Six Million is forever linked to Hitler’s Final Solution to the Jewish Problem. Whether it was precisely Six Million, or whether we should include the Armenian Genocide committed by the Turks, or whether we should add the tens of millions of other people killed by Hitler, not to mention all the other genocides in history ... all that comes later. The expression “Six Million” has come to be a touchstone for human evil, and we fragile humans really need our touchstones. Otherwise we get confused, and wander off into perversity. We become suckers to political scam artists.

We need some kind of soundbite to remind us of deliberately chosen human evil, and Six Million is just about the right size to keep in mind. Six Million should stand for all the massacres of innocents: In Rwanda, in centuries of African slave trade, in Nanking, in Turkish Armenia, in the Partition of India, the list is painfully long.

One Hundred Million is the estimated number of people massacred by Communists in the 20th Century, according to a definitive study by French Leftist historian Stéphane Courtois and his team, published in The Black Book of Communism. 

One Hundred Million is the second soundbite every sane person on earth should know.

Six Million and One Hundred Million—forget all the quibbles, just listen to the sound of those numbers.

Now when your friendly neighborhood “small ‘c’ communist” comes along, all smiles, and offering love and peace, we need to say just one thing: One Hundred Million. If that doesn’t wipe the smile off their faces they are beyond human reach. By that act of willed ignorance they have exiled themselves from the company of decent people.

[...]

If Professor Bill Ayers then comes along and says with his little laugh,

“I am a radical, Leftist, small ‘c’ communist ... [Laughs] Maybe I’m the last communist who is willing to admit it. ... The ethics of Communism still appeal to me.”

Well, right away we know who he is, don’t we?

Or take his lady wife, Bernardine Dohrn, who famously cheered on the Manson murders in 1969: “Dig it! First they killed those pigs and then they put a fork in their bellies. Wild!”

She’s sure no Governor Palin of Alaska, is she?

Or take the grinning minister who tells his people that “Jesus was a Communist.” (What about those 100 million, Reverend?)

Then there’s Obama’s Harvard Law backer, black supremacist Don Warden, aka Khaleed Al Mansoor,

“...whatever you do to [white people], they deserve it, God wants you to do it and that’s when you cut out the nose, cut out the ears, take flesh out of their body, don’t worry because God wants you to do it.” 


[...]

So if somebody—say, one of our presidential candidates —if he just doesn’t get that, it really tells us all we need to know, doesn’t it?

I would never give the time of day to anybody who fills his life with Nazis, Kluxers, or Maoists. Or with bloody-minded professors of any stripe whatsoever.

And to Professor Bill Ayers: If you were just “a small ‘n’ nazi,” instead of “a small ‘c’ communist” ... you would still be just as evil as you obviously are. You have convicted yourself out of your own mouth.

See, simple touchstones are pretty useful.

Obama’s roots and allies.  Very telling.
Are there any conservatives or America lovers in Obama’s influences?

Just heard it on the radio.  They just won’t quit with the negative propaganda, I guess.  When the market goes down, they scream “recession!”, and when the market goes up, they scream “recession!”.
At least they’re consistent.
The stock market isn’t the economy.

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Readers Digest did a poll of people from around the world. Most media organizations will undoubtedly focus on the fact that the poll says the world wants Obama. Whoop-de-doo, who cares what a bunch of foreigners want?

However, something else caught my eye from the poll.

You constantly hear that the rest of the world hates America and the Left ceaselessly attempts to remake our nation in the image of a socialized Western European country. But, I can’t help but notice how many people around the world want to move to this country.

I had to compile this one country at a time because, for reasons I don’t understand, as I can tell Readers Digest didn’t put all this info in one handy, dandy chart—but, take a look at these results.

(People from country X) would be interested in moving to America if economic and political barriers were non-existent.

Poland: 16%
Russia: 16%
Australia: 19%
Germany: 20%
Finland: 21%
Indonesia: 24%
Canada: 27%
Britain: 30%
Brazil: 31%
Spain: 32%
Mexico: 33%
Taiwan: 36%
France: 52%
Netherlands: 55%
South Africa: 65%
India: 73%

Is there any other country in the world that would have 1/3 as many people who want to move there? Would 52% of Americans want to move to France or would even 20% want to move to Germany?

The Left never stops spitting on this country and talking about what a horrible place it is, but across the world, there are large segments of the population in every country they polled that would rather live in the United States than the country they were born in.

[...]

Another leftie lie about America refuted.

While the elitists mock Republican vice presidential candidate Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska as a frozen moose hunter who thinks conducting foreign relations means she can see Russia from her house, they are merely betraying their own ignorance. 

However, even her own state’s main newspaper, the Anchorage Daily News, berates her for letting her energy platform be dumbed down to “drill, baby, drill,” while praising her for her truly outstanding accomplishments.

In energy alone they summarize: 

In just two years as governor:

* She worked with lawmakers and used her popularity to vastly increase Alaska’s take-home share of its oil wealth, providing the state with billions of dollars in budget surplus with an oil tax that increased both the base rate and captured progressively more at higher oil prices.

* She encouraged new investment and exploration with generous, intelligent tax credits.

* She kick-started investment in a natural gas pipeline—both through her own Alaska Gasline Inducement Act and the response by North Slope producers BP Alaska and Conoco Phillips, who pledge to spend up to $600 million on their own project.

* She maintained her predecessor’s hard- line stance with Exxon/Mobil over development of the Point Thomson gas reserves, ultimately deciding to take the leases back rather the trust Exxon to make good on its umpteenth promise to produce. That prompted Exxon to go to court. That also prompted Exxon to promise $1.3 billion of work on Point Thomson.

* She proposed a Renewable Energy Fund that lawmakers last session approved for $250 million over five years. This is money to bankroll wind, geothermal, tidal and other forms of renewable energy.

• She supported lawmakers’ work on home energy conservation, including $200 million for the Weatherization Program that increased the qualifying income limits for individuals and families and $100 million for the Home Energy Rebate Program, which provides up to $10,000 per household for energy efficiency improvements.

(snip)

Her Alaska record shows she’s paid attention, can see beyond drilling platforms and isn’t afraid to take on the industry when the public good demands it. So far on the campaign trail she’s shown gumption without vision on the subject of energy. Rather than pad her resume, she should build on it; she’s got more to offer than “drill, baby, drill.”

[...]

Meanwhile the late night comedians, who think a drill is something only dentists use and can’t utter a thought without a teleprompter spewing someone else’s words, and her opponents who have, as in Senator Obama’s case mostly voted present in the legislature and accomplished nothing during his stint as a community organizer except “pal around with radicals” who practice vote fraud; and while Senator Joseph Biden plagiarizes and proclaims FDR went on television when the market crashed in 1929 and US Marines drove out Hezb’allah from Lebanon; all would freeze in their fancy energy consuming homes without energetic and creative doers such as Governor Palin.

By Terry Trippany

Mehdi Kalhor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s media consultant and Iran’s Vice President of media affairs announced on Saturday that Iran is setting two preconditions before it will engage in any talks with the United States. (h/t Wizbang).

The announcement was made in an interview with the Islamic Republic News Agency and has been reported independently by both the Fars News Agency and Al Jezeera. Strangely though there does not appear to be any mention in the US media according to a Google search. (all emphasis mine throughout)

Vice President for Media Affairs Mehdi Kalhor said on Saturday that Iran has set two preconditions for holding talks with the United States of America.

In an exclusive interview with the Islamic Republic News Agency, he said as long as U.S. forces have not left the Middle East region and continues its support for the Zionist regime, talks between Iran and U.S. is off the agenda.

Al Jazeera confirmed the report and added the following:

On Saturday, Kalhor said Tehran would accept ‘repentance’ on behalf of the US government toward the Iranian people.

“Negotiations would be rational if the US moves out of the Middle East and the US government gives up its widespread support for the Zionist regime,” he said.

[...]

Obama’s appeasment “chickens” have come home to roost.
Among all of his stupid policies, his announced intention to give up the natural advantage we have in any international negotiations is right up there near the top.  This is just one result of that stupidity.

Hopefully, President McCain will slap the Iranians down to where they should be, groveling and suing for peace to avoid total destruction.

Thomas Lifson

Reuters reports the good news:

The average price of a gallon of gasoline in the United States recorded its largest drop ever as consumer demand continued to wane and oil prices slid, a prominent industry analyst said on Sunday.

[...]

The sharp decline in oil prices is pumping more money into the United States financial system, and is starting to put more money in Americans’ pockets. Because there is a lag, the drop in gasoline prices is going to continue. It won’t completely compensate for recent financial losses, but it is a helping the economy. The market system is wondrous mechanism with its own equilibrating effects.

For those lefties who still embrace the Marxist bullshit about free markets.

Randall Hoven

As stocks traded around the world on October 1, the bailout was in trouble.  The last thing that had happened was the US House of Representatives had voted against it.  The market held its breath, hoping against hope that wiser heads would prevail.  Then on the night of October 1, the US Senate passed a sweetened-up version of the bailout.  By October 3, the House passed and President Bush signed the sweetened bailout.  The world financial markets were saved.

[...]

Market
10/1 close 10/10 close Change

Nikkei (Japan) 11,368.26 8,276.43 -27.2%

S&P 500 (US) 1,161.06 899.22 -22.6%

Dow (US) 10,831.07 8,451.19 -22.0%

DAX (Germany) 5,806.33 4,544.31 -21.7%

CAC 40 (France) 4,054.54 3,176.49 -21.7%

FTSE (London) 4,959.60 3,932.10 -20.7%

Nasdaq (US) 2,069.40 1,649.51 -20.3%

Straight Times (Singapore) 2,358.91 1,948.33 -17.4%

Hang Seng (Hong Kong) 18,016.21 14,796.87 -17.9%

The average loss of the above markets:  21.3%.

To an unsophisticated rube this would appear as if the world markets have judged that the bailout was a bad idea.  Such rubes might therefore want to undo the bailout and try something different.

But sophisticated financial experts know that a 21% drop in world wealth in just 7 days is actually good news; it would have been worse without the bailout.  In fact, the market reaction just shows that government needs to do even more than the measly $1.8 trillion the various bailouts tally up to so far.  More government intervention is needed.  And thank goodness Treasury Secretary Paulson is up to the task.  He already has the government buying equity in US banks—for the first time since the 1930s .

So sit back and relax.  Our government is fixing the economy, just like it did in the 1930s.  Can you image if we’d listened to the rubes instead?

For those who missed it in the title, this is a satire.