WASHINGTON (AP) – A Republican senator who has opposed President Barack Obama’s health overhaul effort said Tuesday that the deals Democratic leaders have cut to round up the votes they need to push the measure through the Senate have been “sleazy.”

Speaking Tuesday on NBC’s “Today” show, GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina cited concessions won by Nebraska Democratic Sen. Ben Nelson, whose support gave Democrats the 60th and final vote they need. Among other things, Nelson won an agreement that the federal government will pay to expand Medicaid services in Nebraska.

Said Graham: “That’s not change you can believe in. That’s sleazy.”

Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa defended the concessions, saying: “The one that’s being talked about for Nebraska, it also benefits other states. It’s not just Nebraska.”

He also said he would vote for the package even if it didn’t contain concessions for Iowa. “The principle of this bill overrides everything,” Harkin told CBS’”Early Show.”

Graham rejected criticism leveled by some Democrats that GOP opposition to Obama’s health care effort is being driven by extremists.

“I’m not a member of a militia, I’m not a birther,” he said, referring to those who have questioned, inaccurately, whether Obama is an American citizen. “I’m a senator who wants to reform health care, but I’m not going to allow my country to become a socialized nation when it comes to health care.”

Harkin described the debate as “a demarcation line.”

He explained: “On one side is health care as a privilege. On the other side is health care as a right. With these votes, with the vote that we’ll take before Christmas, we will cross that line finally and say that health care is a right of all Americans.”

The Senate had procedural votes Tuesday morning on the overhaul bill and Democrats are pushing for final passage before Christmas.

Telegraph:

If you own any shares in alternative energy companies I should start dumping them NOW. The conspiracy behind the Anthropogenic Global Warming myth (aka AGW; aka ManBearPig) has been suddenly, brutally and quite deliciously exposed after a hacker broke into the computers at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (aka CRU) and released 61 megabytes of confidential files onto the internet. (Hat tip: Watts Up With That)

When you read some of those files – including 1079 emails and 72 documents – you realise just why the boffins at CRU might have preferred to keep them confidential. As Andrew Bolt puts it, this scandal could well be “the greatest in modern science”. These alleged emails – supposedly exchanged by some of the most prominent scientists pushing AGW theory – suggest:

Conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more.

One of the alleged emails has a gentle gloat over the death in 2004 of John L Daly (one of the first climate change sceptics, founder of the Still Waiting For Greenhouse site), commenting:

“In an odd way this is cheering news.”

But perhaps the most damaging revelations – the scientific equivalent of the Telegraph’s MPs’ expenses scandal – are those concerning the way Warmist scientists may variously have manipulated or suppressed evidence in order to support their cause.

Here are a few tasters.

Manipulation of evidence:

I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.

Private doubts about whether the world really is heating up:

The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.

Suppression of evidence:

Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4?

Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment – minor family crisis.

Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new email address.

We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.

Fantasies of violence against prominent Climate Sceptic scientists:

Next
time I see Pat Michaels at a scientific meeting, I’ll be tempted to beat
the crap out of him. Very tempted.

Attempts to disguise the inconvenient truth of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP):

……Phil and I have recently submitted a paper using about a dozen NH records that fit this category, and many of which are available nearly 2K back–I think that trying to adopt a timeframe of 2K, rather than the usual 1K, addresses a good earlier point that Peck made w/ regard to the memo, that it would be nice to try to “contain” the putative “MWP”, even if we don’t yet have a hemispheric mean reconstruction available that far back….

And, perhaps most reprehensibly, a long series of communications discussing how best to squeeze dissenting scientists out of the peer review process. How, in other words, to create a scientific climate in which anyone who disagrees with AGW can be written off as a crank, whose views do not have a scrap of authority.

“This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the “peer-reviewed literature”. Obviously, they found a solution to that–take over a journal! So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering “Climate Research” as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board…What do others think?”

“I will be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor.”“It results from this journal having a number of editors. The responsible one for this is a well-known skeptic in NZ. He has let a few papers through by Michaels and Gray in the past. I’ve had words with Hans von Storch about this, but got nowhere. Another thing to discuss in Nice !”

Hadley CRU has form in this regard. In September – I wrote the story up here as “How the global warming industry is based on a massive lie” – CRU’s researchers were exposed as having “cherry-picked” data in order to support their untrue claim that global temperatures had risen higher at the end of the 20th century than at any time in the last millenium. CRU was also the organisation which – in contravention of all acceptable behaviour in the international scientific community – spent years withholding data from researchers it deemed unhelpful to its cause. This matters because CRU, established in 1990 by the Met Office, is a government-funded body which is supposed to be a model of rectitude. Its HadCrut record is one of the four official sources of global temperature data used by the IPCC.

I asked in my title whether this will be the final nail in the coffin of Anthropenic Global Warming. This was wishful thinking, of course. In the run up to Copenhagen, we will see more and more hysterical (and grotesquely exaggerated) stories such as this in the Mainstream Media. And we will see ever-more-virulent campaigns conducted by eco-fascist activists, such as this risible new advertising campaign by Plane Stupid showing CGI polar bears falling from the sky and exploding because kind of, like, man, that’s sort of what happens whenever you take another trip on an aeroplane.

The world is currently cooling; electorates are increasingly reluctant to support eco-policies leading to more oppressive regulation, higher taxes and higher utility bills; the tide is turning against Al Gore’s Anthropogenic Global Warming theory. The so-called “sceptical” view – which is some of us have been expressing for quite some time: see, for example, the chapter entitled ‘Barbecue the Polar Bears’ in WELCOME TO OBAMALAND: I’VE SEEN YOUR FUTURE AND IT DOESN’T WORK – is now also, thank heaven, the majority view.

Unfortunately, we’ve a long, long way to go before the public mood (and scientific truth) is reflected by our policy makers. There are too many vested interests in AGW, with far too much to lose either in terms of reputation or money, for this to end without a bitter fight.

But to judge by the way – despite the best efforts of the MSM not to report on it – the CRU scandal is spreading like wildfire across the internet, this shabby story represents a blow to the AGW lobby’s credibility from which it is never likely to recover

Apologies to Rick Moran, who covered this topic well, from a different angle.

GERMANY 1939 ALL OVER AGAIN FASCISM IS

 ALIVE AND WELL 

Bill would give president emergency control of Internet

Original article

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10320096-38.html

As banks, insurance companies, brokerage firms, automobile manufacturers, and God knows who else line up to try and feed at the public trough, the original source of the spreading financial and credit crisis, the mortgage industry, is still in deep trouble. Whether the initial bailout plan passed by Congress will help stem mortgage lenders’ financial problems in the short run is still an open question. But one thing is certain: Nothing in the original legislation or Treasury’s actions and infusion of funds since then have made the legal, regulatory, and enforcement changes required to prevent this problem from happening again in the long run — no matter how many tax dollars the Treasury Department pours into the problem.

Nothing in the mortgage bailout legislation called for Congress to fix the serious problems with the [1] Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) that empower ACORN-style pressure tactics against lenders. Nothing made the Federal Reserve change its lending instructions. Nothing urged the president to change the enforcement policies at the Justice Department and HUD that forced lenders to make risky loans to unqualified applicants.

At its most basic level, this crisis started because of the weakening of mortgage lending standards caused by the Federal Reserve and other federal agencies. Lenders also feared facing discrimination claims and enforcement actions by government law enforcement agencies and organizations such as [2] ACORN.

Consider a faulty study the Boston Fed conducted in the 1990s. It claimed that minority mortgage applicants were rejected at higher rates because of discrimination. Yet a detailed analysis by University of Texas economists Stan Liebowitz and Theodore Day showed that the Boston Fed study was so full of data transcription errors that it was “outrageously unreliable.” When those errors were eliminated, there was no discrimination. Some minority groups do have a higher rejection rate for mortgages on average, but because of weaker credit histories, not discrimination by lenders.

Undaunted, the Boston Fed issued a new manual that called traditional lending standards like creditworthiness and down payment requirements “outdated” and “discriminatory” because they supposedly prevented minorities from getting loans. Other federal agencies joined in. The FDIC still has a compliance manual that discourages banks from requiring an “excellent” credit rating or “adequate” longevity on the job because it may have a “disparate impact” on minority applicants. This despite the current crisis and the fact that in 2007 the Federal Reserve finally admitted in a report to Congress that credit scores are “predictive of credit risk for the populations as a whole and for all major demographic groups.”

Mortgage lenders were also pressured to adopt these weakened standards by the Community Reinvestment Act. If they couldn’t show enough lending in minority neighborhoods to bad credit risks, they could be accused of discrimination, their charter renewals or merger deals held up by third party “community” organizations like ACORN. These organizations used the CRA as an extortion racket to get money for themselves (so they could do things like “counsel” high-risk borrowers) and to get mortgage funds directed to borrowers who had no down payments, no steady employment, and terrible credit histories. And everyone in Congress and the executive branch are wringing their hands over how to keep these borrowers in mortgages they cannot afford, rather than getting them out and thereby stopping the hemorrhaging in the lending industry.

As Professor Liebowitz said in testimony before Congress this past summer, the government’s entire housing policy was based “on a false claim, or lie” that mortgage lenders were discriminating against minorities. This lie was also pushed by the liberal civil rights community and the Congressional Black Caucus — and it was repeated “over and over again. Eventually this lie began to poison the mortgage market, and now the entire economy is at risk.” The secondary market necessary for the securitization of all of these bad mortgages (by bundling and packaging them together) accepted the constant reassurances by the Fed, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and other government agencies that these high-risk mortgages were perfectly safe.

So where does the bailout plan direct the Federal Reserve, the FDIC, and all the other federal agencies involved in banking and lending to change their compliance manuals and regulations to allow mortgage lenders to tighten their lending standards? Where does it tell them to go back to traditional methods of determining creditworthiness without putting their charters in jeopardy or being accused of discrimination? Where are the amendments to the CRA to prevent lenders from being blackmailed into making more of these bad loans? Where are the president’s directives to the Justice Department and HUD banning the use of “disparate impact” in their enforcement actions and ordering those agencies to consider individual creditworthiness and other traditional lending requirements when investigating discrimination claims? You haven’t seen any of these directives because they don’t exist — and they are just as unlikely to come from the new administration.

You don’t hear any plans by anyone in Congress, the Federal Reserve Board, or in other federal agencies to take any of these actions — because no government officials want to admit their role in the financial crisis or incur the wrath of the race hustlers. They don’t want to confront the Congressional Black Caucus or the NAACP or other liberal pressure groups that will do everything they can to oppose these changes.

In a hearing in February, Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) actually claimed that the only problem with the CRA was that it didn’t cover enough of the credit market. Now that the Treasury Department is essentially buying control of American banks, mortgage lenders, insurance companies, brokerage firms, and other industries as the crisis spreads, how long will it be before federal career bureaucrats start using the government’s new ownership interest to force those same institutions and industries to implement “new and improved” social policies in their lending, credit, brokerage, manufacturing, and insurance practices?

And who will continue to be the real victims of these policies, in addition to the American taxpayer who is funding the bailout or losing his job because of the economic distress of so many employers? It will be the borrowers, many of them minorities, who have been put into terrible financial straits by lending practices forced onto mortgage lenders by the government.

This overwhelming problem is not the result of too much “deregulation” of the financial industry. It is the result of coordinated government regulations and destructive racial preference enforcement policies that effectively pressured lenders to make billions of dollars of loans to individuals who lacked the financial means to repay them. With the regulatory structures that are the root and cause of this whole problem unchanged, the American taxpayer will almost certainly be called upon to bail the mortgage system out again, as well as all of the other sectors of our economy being hurt by the credit crunch it engendered.

Now that a 2001 public radio interview has surfaced to confirm The One has plotted to redistribute middle class wealth since the beginning of his political career, the media are in overdrive to save their savior. In a burst of “news” stories culled directly from the talking points of the George Soros-funded Media Matters, a string of reporters have accused the McCain/Palin campaign of misrepresenting Obama’s statements and ideology. In the process, these impartial journalists and analysts for the nation’s most prestigious media outlets have obfuscated more than McCain could manage in his most imaginative “rhetorical flourish.”

Obama spokesman Bill Burton responded in identical fashion to other irrefutable scandals, such as his candidate’s longtime association with Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright: he channeled the Wizard of Oz. “This is a fake news controversy,” he said, “drummed up by the all too common alliance of Fox News, the Drudge Report, and John McCain, who apparently decided to close out his campaign with the same false, desperate attacks that have failed for months.” After shooting the messengers, the campaign, and its allies at Media Matters, claimed Obama had merely been offering an intellectual assessment of civil rights strategy – and in no way advocating (perish the thought!) the Supreme Court redistribute wealth. In his only remark addressing the content of the tape, Burton asserted, “In this seven-year-old interview, Senator Obama did not say that the courts should get into the business of redistributing wealth at all.”[1]

Soon, his words found their way into the mouths of multiple unbiased, independent journalists.

The Washington Post awarded the McCain campaign “two Pinocchios” for lying about the tape. “Obama says pretty much the opposite of what the McCain camp says he said,” the Post contended. The paper concluded, “The McCain camp is wrong to suggest that the Illinois senator advocated an [sic.] ‘wealth redistribution’ role for the Supreme Court.”

Obama made his now-infamous comments on “Odyssey,” a program hosted on the Chicago NPR station WBEZ-FM. Chicago Public Radio quickly rolled into full protection mode, with CPR’s Ben Calhoun claiming someone on YouTube “posted excerpts of the interview, edited to misrepresent Obama’s statements…Obama’s position is distinctly misrepresented.” He adds, “ironically, he says the Supreme Court was a failure in cases that it took on a role of redistributing resources.”

Others went further in defending the pure common sense of Obama’s call for “economic justice.” Andrew Sullivan blogged, “it seems to me that this statement is actually a conservative one about the limits of judicial activism. Is this really all McCain has left?”

Yet no one could equal NBC’s Andrea Mitchell, who said, with a straight face, that Obama took “a strict constructionist view.” Mitchell added, “he was saying the courts were not in that business and shouldn’t be in that business.”

The world’s largest news agency joined the fray. The Associated Press charged, “Republican John McCain is misreading seven-year-old comments by rival Barack Obama.” The story implies his comments dealt only with civil rights strategy, not the court. It added, “Obama did not define redistributive change in the interview, but he said one example of such change involves education, ‘how do we get more money into the schools and how do we actually create equal schools and equal educational opportunity.’” Thus, “redistribution” simply means equal schooling; who could be against that?

The last emphasis echoed the defense Cass Sunstein offered in The New Republic. In Sunstein’s telling, Obama:

complained, not that the Court refused to enter into those issues, but that “the civil-rights movement became so court-focussed” [sic.] … In answering a caller’s question, he said that the court “is just not very good at” redistribution. Obama added, with approval, that the Constitution “is generally a charter of negative liberties”…Obama was referring to the sorts of claims being made in courts in the relevant period, for which the word “redistribution” has often been used. (Those claims involved denials of education and medical care, and discrimination in welfare programs.) It is true that Obama supports the Earned Income Tax Credit (an idea pioneered by Republicans)…

But it is truly ridiculous to take Obama’s remarks in 2001 as suggesting that the nation should embark on a large-scale redistributive scheme.

The piece does not mention Sunstein is “a Harvard law professor who is advising Obama.”[2]

In all these cases, one is left with the impression his is merely a meandering historical argument of refined legal theory, using highly specified language that does not mean what it sounds like. Normal people like Joe the Plumber cannot possibly comprehend it. However, all these media reports distort the facts and leave a false impression that covers up the explosive revelation contained in his own words: Barack Obama believes the Constitution embodies a “fundamental flaw” in the fabric of America “that continues to this day,” has pined for “economic justice” for at least a decade, seeks political power to implement “wealth redistribution” with the aid of Congress, implies the Supreme Court should “break free” from the “constraints” of the Founders, believes public financing of abortion is an “important” aspect of the struggle, and has promised an “activist” Executive Branch to enforce his socialistic vision.

Obama begins, as his media backers note, by discussing “the victories and failures of the civil rights movement and its litigation strategy in the Court.” Among its successes he counts the High Court’s vesting blacks with “formal rights,” such as the right to vote. “But,” he rapidly pivots, “the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society.” This he plainly counts among the movement’s “failures,” indeed “tragedies.”

This indicates he intends more than mere adequate funding for Tuscaloosa elementaries but the fundamental economic life of the nation. He illustrated the success of “formal rights” by saying under the Court’s rulings, “I would now be able to sit at a lunch counter and order, and as long as I could pay for it, I’d be OK.” He later answered a caller’s question about whether it was “too late” for nationwide “reparative economic work.” (See below.) Later yet, when fellow panelist Susan Bandes broached the topic of the Supreme Court’s upholding lawmakers’ right to prohibit the federal funding of abortion, Obama replied that the justices did not order funding, as they would if they were activists. They decided whether it was “a legitimate prohibition,” adding, “I think those are very important battles that have to be fought, and they do have a distributive aspect to them.” (Media Matters dropped this phrase from later press releases.) Barack Obama’s comments clearly touched upon a broad view of redistribution of wealth, encompassing everything from minority income to abortion subsidies, all viewed favorably. (In fact, Obama still supports taxpayer funding for abortion and has vowed to restore it.)

Far from making a “strict constructionist” argument that the High Court should not rule on such matters, he made a procedural argument that there are more effective ways to remedy this tragedy. In response to a question whether it was “too late” for “reparative economic work,” and whether it should be mandated by the courts or the legislature, Obama assessed, “I’m not optimistic about bringing about major redistributive change through the courts. The institution just isn’t structured that way” and is “just not very good at it.” He added, “any three of us sitting here” on this panel “could come up with a rationale for bringing about economic change through the courts. I think that as a practical matter our courts are just poorly equipped to do it.”

That constitutes a robust rejection of neither judicial activism nor economic redistribution, which he had endorsed above. He simply projected the Supreme Court would not be the most likely nor most effective vehicle for these policies. In his remarks on the civil rights movement’s “tragedies,” he listed foremost its failure “to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change.” He observed, “in some ways we still suffer from that” – namely, that community organizers have not yet elected one of their own to the White House. He now leads what is, according to polls, the nation’s largest power-seeking coalition. In 2001, Obama deemed redistribution “a process that is essentially administrative”; one is hardly out of bounds in asking whether it will make the agenda of an Obama administration. The Post admits in its article that “Dennis Hutchinson, a University of Chicago law professor who joined Obama in the panel discussion” told them, “‘Obama said that redistribution of wealth issues need to be decided by legislatures, not by the courts. That is what a progressive income tax is all about.’” Sunstein defined redistribution by presenting a list of numerous extant federal wealth-transfer programs including the progressive income tax “and much more.” As FrontPage Magazine columnist Paul Sperry addressed yesterday, his little-examined platform outlines a redistributionist agenda heavily geared toward infusing wealth into urban households.

Obama’s interview stokes suspicions all the more with his positive view of an “activist” Executive Branch. When his interviewer, Gretchen Helfrich, mentioned the possibility of a “one-two punch of a Justice Department and a Court together,” he praised the notion. He noted “the sheer resources involved in actively litigating and monitoring activity at the local level” are staggering and not available to the justices, “and without an activist Attorney General’s office and Justice Department that is able to come in and provide just the sheer resources that are required, many of these changes just don’t take place.” If an Obama administration will undo the tragic failure of the civil rights movement to bring about “economic justice,” it will flex federal muscle to do so.

None of which should imply he has no role for an activist Supreme Court. Like a true law professor, he found the notoriously activist Warren Court “wasn’t that radical,” because it:

didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution, at least as it’s been interpreted, and [the] Warren Court interpreted it in the same way, that, that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. It says what the states can’t do to you, says what the federal government can’t do to you, but it doesn’t say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf, and that hasn’t shifted.

Having listened to the audio, this author did not hear these last words spoken “with approval.” And if Obama appoints the Court’s justices, its outlook could well shift from negative to positive rights; in fact, he cites state courts as encouraging signs of this elsewhere in the interview. However, the judicial philosophy implicit in this statement is frightening: that the Founding Fathers’ views of limited government are “constraints” from which the nation should “break free.” (He did not describe, e.g., the 14^th amendment or the elastic clause in such negative terms.) The Founders crafted “negative rights” for a reason. George Washington told his fellow countrymen, “Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force! Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.” For that reason, Thomas Jefferson urged “in questions of power then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.” By contrast, Barack Obama urges the government to become free at last.

To do so, he believes the Court can “take judicial notice of” societal phenomena and interpret the Constitution accordingly. “[Y]ou’ve got a whole host of social conditions that the Court inevitably is influenced by,” he stated with approval. He added the Warren Court took these developments into consideration to enact “one of those rare circumstances where the Court is willing to get slightly beyond conventional opinion, and stake a place sort of beyond the political mainstream.” However, “in the case of Brown, I think there were a lot of social changes...before you see the Supreme Court being willing to venture out into the areas that they did.” But the role of the Court is not to orient itself around conventional social and political opinion, whether ahead, behind, or in the middle of its dominant arc; its role is to interpret the U.S. Constitution as written. As an increasing number of Supreme Court justices believe they must take foreign law into consideration, rejection of this principle grows more ominous.

As does the agenda Obama lays out in the interview. In one stunning passage, he likened the environmental debate to the abolitionist movement, lamenting that current environmental laws are made on a cost-benefit analysis rather than on the basis of rights – as though the land had the same worth as a human slave. This, he seems to say, must be rectified.

He further states slavery itself has not been cleaned up yet. He said, “The Constitution reflected a [sic.] enormous blind spot in this culture that carries on to this day.” He went on to make clear this was the document’s acceptance of slavery. Thus the Constitution “reflected the fundamental flaw of this country that continues to this day.” Obama clearly believes, in some sense, slavery has not yet been stamped out. One can reasonably assume he would thus favor reparations to establish “political and economic justice in this society” at last. Perhaps this sense of urgency explains why he believes his election is “the moment…that the world has been waiting for.” Yet the view that slavery lingers in 21^st century America is perhaps the most contemptuous thing one can say about a country that lost hundreds of thousands of lives fighting a war to end slavery, endured massive social upheaval to bury Jim Crow, transferred untold trillions of dollars of wealth so that we would “wipe away the scars of centuries,” then welcomed the son of a Kenyan Muslim reared in a foreign land and are presently entertaining a national debate about elevating him to the most powerful office in the world.

It is, however, precisely what is to be expected from an individual reared by an “unreconstructed liberal” mother of the ‘60s era, an individual who consciously sought out Marxist professors – both as college instructors and as sponsors for his career in Chicago politics.

Far from an insignificant and highly theoretical bout of legal navel-gazing, this 2001 interview provides a clear glimpse into the ideology Obama wishes to implement. For this reason, the transcripts must be assailed – with those news outlets that report them.

After all, he does not have the luxury of saying he made these comments when he was naïve and inexperienced, because he is still naïve and inexperienced. Further, reparations based on race, sex, class, or sexual orientation still lie at the heart of his judicial philosophy. His only option is to deny the words on the page. His fan base in the media has gotten ahead of him on the matter. Will he be successful in his effort to deny his own views and thereby get an opportunity to implement them?

Next Tuesday, we may find out.

ENDNOTES:

1. Bill Burton later got into an on-air tiff with Fox News journalist Megyn Kelly, ironically charging her network with having “an agenda.”

2. The Earned Income Tax Credit was created by Senator Russell Long, D-Louisiana, the son of the infamous Huey “Kingfish” Long, whose program for addressing the Great Depression was known as “Share Our Wealth.” Its central pillar stated, “by limiting the size of the fortunes and incomes of the big men, we will throw into the government Treasury the money and property from which we will care for the millions of people who have nothing.” 

‘One man with courage makes a majority.’

  - Andrew Jackson

 ‘The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.’

  - Franklin D. Roosevelt

 
‘The buck stops here.’

  - Harry S. Truman

 
‘Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.’

  – John F. Kennedy

 

 

And for today’s democrats…

 

‘It depends what your definition of ‘IS’ is?”

  - Bill Clinton

 

‘That Obama – I would like to cut his NUTS off.’

  – Jesse Jackson

 

‘Those rumors are false …. I believe in the sanctity of marriage.’

   – John Edwards 

 

‘I invented the Internet’

  – Al Gore

 

‘The next Person that tells me I’m not religious, I’m going to shove my rosary beads up their ***.’

  – Joe Biden

 
 ‘America is–is no longer, uh, what it–it, uh, could be, uh what it was once was…uh, and I say to myself, ‘uh, I don’t want that future, uh, uh for my children.’ ”

   – Barack Obama

 
 ’I have campaigned in all 57 states.

  - Barack Obama

 ‘You don’t need God anymore, you have us democrats.’

  – Nancy Pelosi     (said back in 2006)

Christopher Barkley

Last updated: 8:01 am
October 9, 2008
Posted: 4:31 am
October 9, 2008

CLEVELAND – Two Ohio voters, including Domino’s pizza worker Christopher Barkley , claimed yesterday that they were hounded by the community-activist group ACORN to register to vote several times, even though they made it clear they’d already signed up.

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Barkley estimated he’d registered to vote “10 to 15″ times after canvassers for ACORN, whose political wing has endorsed Barack Obama, relentlessly pursued him and others.

Claims such as his have sparked election officials to probe ACORN.

“I kept getting approached by folks who asked me to register,” Barkley said. “They’d ask me if I was registered. I’d say yes, and they’d ask me to do it [register] again.

“Some of them were getting paid to collect names. That was their sob story, and I bought it,” he said.

Barkley is one of at least three people who have been subpoenaed by the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections as part of a wider inquiry into possible voter fraud by ACORN. The group seeks to register low-income voters, who skew overwhelmingly Democratic.

“You can tell them you’re registered as many times as you want – they do not care,” said Lateala Goins, 21, who was subpoenaed.

“They will follow you to the buses, they will follow you home, it does not matter,” she told The Post.

She added that she never put down an address on any of the registration forms, just her name.

A third subpoenaed voter, Freddie Johnson, 19, filled out registration cards 72 times over 18 months, officials said.

“It feeds the public perception that there could be [fraud], and that makes the pillars fall down,” said local Board of Elections President Jeff Hastings.

Registering under a fake name is illegal. But officials usually catch multiple registrations and toss them.

The major risk of fraud growing out of mass canvassing involves the possibility of ineligible voters filing absentee ballots, and thus avoiding checks at polling places, said Republican National Committee chief counsel Sean Cairncross.

The subpoenas come as Republicans have ramped up criticism of ACORN. Officials in Nevada raided ACORN’s Las Vegas office Tuesday, accusing the group of signing people up multiple times – in some cases under phony names, like those of Dallas Cowboys.

ACORN’s Cleveland spokesman, Kris Harsh, said his group collected 100,000 voter-registration cards; only about 50 were questionable, he claimed.

As for workers, “We watch them like a hawk,” he said.

By CARL CAMPANILE, AP

MISS SUNSHINE: Sarah Palin keeps up her attacks on Obama’s ties to domestic terrorist William Ayers yesterday in Florida.

Last updated: 9:04 am
October 7, 2008
Posted: 3:40 am
October 7, 2008

John McCain went nuclear on Barack Obama yesterday, charging that the Illinois Democrat “abetted” the mortgage meltdown.

McCain’s harshest attacks on Obama’s readiness for the White House came on another disastrous day on Wall Street, with stocks plummeting despite Washington’s approval last week of a rescue plan for troubled financial firms.

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HURT: John Must Make Debate A ‘World’ War

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With the economy worsening, Obama has opened an 8-point lead over McCain – the largest of the campaign – according to two separate polls by Gallup and Rasmussen Reports.

Obama countered the attacks by rehashing McCain’s role in the “Keating Five” savings-and-loan scandal two decades ago – the last major government intervention in troubled financial institutions.

But McCain insisted he’s the man to fix the economic mess, not Obama, whom he mocked as a typical “Chicago politician.”

“Whatever the question, whatever the issues, there’s always a back story with Senator Obama . . . Our current economic crisis is a good case in point. The crisis started in our housing market in the form of subprime loans that were pushed on people who could not afford them.

“Bad mortgages were being backed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and it was only a matter of time before a contagion of unsustainable debt began to spread,” McCain said during an event in Albuquerque, NM.

“This corruption was encouraged by Democrats in Congress, and abetted by Senator Obama.”

McCain said he raised the alarm and called for tighter borrowing rules on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac two years ago, which could have helped stem the crisis.

By comparison, he said, Obama was “silent” while congressional Democrats fought efforts to rein in the mortgage giants.

“As recently as September of last year, [Obama] said that subprime loans had been, quote, ‘a good idea.’ Well, Senator Obama, that ‘good idea’ has now plunged this country into the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression,” McCain said.

For his part, Obama pounced on a statement from a McCain adviser that the Arizona senator’s campaign was “looking forward to turning a page on this financial crisis.”

“I have got news for the McCain campaign, the American people are losing right now,” Obama said, referring to the loss of homes, jobs and health care, during a speech in Asheville, NC.

The Obama campaign also retorted that McCain had twisted the Illinois senator’s remarks on the subprime-mortgage crisis.

In the same speech McCain cited, Obama also blasted mortgage lenders for lowering borrowing standards, which made homeownership “just too good to be true.”

AS panicked politicians prepare to fork over $1 trillion in taxpayer funding to rescue Wall Street, they’ve fingered regulation, deregulation, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the Community Reinvestment Act, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, both Bushes, greedy banks, greedy borrowers, greedy short-sellers and minority-home-ownership promoters for blame. 

But there’s one villain that has slipped notice: how illegal immigration, crime-enabling banks and open-borders Bush policies fueled the mortgage crisis. It’s no coincidence that the areas hardest hit by the foreclosure wave – Loudoun County, Va., California’s Inland Empire, Stockton and San Joaquin Valley, and Las Vegas and Phoenix – also happen to be some of the nation’s largest illegal alien sanctuaries. Half of the mortgages to Hispanics are subprime. A quarter of all those subprime loans are in default and foreclosure.

Regional reports across the country have decried the subprime meltdown’s impact on illegal-immigrant “victims.” A July report showed that in seven of the 10 metro areas with the highest foreclosure rates, Hispanics were at least one-third of the population; in two of those areas – Merced and Salinas-Monterey, Calif. – Hispanics comprised half the population. The National Council of La Raza and its Development Fund have received millions in federal funds to “counsel” their constituents on obtaining mortgages with little to no money down; the group almost succeeded in attaching a $10 million earmark for itself in one of the housing bills passed this spring.

For the last five years, I’ve reported on the rapidly expanding illegal-alien home-loan racket. The top banks clamoring for their handouts as their profits plummet, led by Wachovia and Bank of America, launched aggressive campaigns to woo illegal-alien homebuyers. The quasi-governmental Wisconsin Housing and Economic Development Authority guaranteed home loans to illegal immigrants.

The Washington Post noted in 2005: “Hispanics, the nation’s fastest-growing major ethnic or racial group, have been courted aggressively by real-estate agents, mortgage brokers and programs for first-time buyers that offer help with closing costs. Ads proclaim: “Sin verificacion de ingresos! Sin verificacion de documento!” – which loosely translates as, ‘Income tax forms are not required, nor are immigration papers.’ “

Fraudsters also have engaged in house-flipping rings using illegal aliens as straw buyers. Among many examples the FBI cites: a conspiracy in Las Vegas involving a former Nevada First Residential Mortgage Company branch manager who directed loan officers and processors in the origination of 233 fraudulent Federal Housing Authority loans valued at over $25 million. The defrauders made and submitted false employment and income documentation for borrowers; most were illegal immigrants from Mexico. To date, the FBI reported, “Fifty-eight loans with a total value of $6.2 million have gone into default, with a loss to the Housing and Urban Development Department of over $1.9 million.”

It’s the tip of the iceberg. Thanks to lax Bush administration policies allowing illegal aliens to use “matricula consular cards” and taxpayer-identification numbers to open bank accounts, mortgage fraud has grown. Money-lenders still have no access to a verification system to check Social Security numbers before approving loans.

In an interview about rampant illegal-alien home-loan fraud, a spokeswoman for the US General Accounting Office told me five years ago: “Considering the size of Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Houston and other large cities throughout the United States known to be inundated with illegal aliens, I don’t think the federal government is willing to expose this problem for financial reasons as well as for fear of political repercussions.”

The chickens are coming home to roost. Law-abiding taxpayers are going to pay for it.