SebastianJer

Dreams of Our Fathers

Posted by: sebastianjer, 2:16 AM GMT on October 31, 2008

“A well-instructed people alone can be permanently a free people.”
-James Madison

This is one many very important issues to watch in the next administration. If you support this legislation which President-Elect Obama has endorsed and the Democratic Congress has passed, why? If you do not support it then let your Representative know and hold him accountable for his vote. If you do not know what this legislation is about, then find out about it. Stay informed, this is the peoples government, not big corporations or special interest of any persuasion.

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Dreams of Our Fathers

“The Constitution only gives people the right to pursue happiness. You have to catch it yourself.”
-Benjamin Franklin

“Guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism.”
-George Washington

“The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased.”
- Alexander Hamilton

“It's not tyranny we desire; it's a just, limited, federal government.”
-Alexander Hamilton

“The government of the United States is a definite government, confined to specified objects. It is not like the state governments, whose powers are more general. Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government.”
- James Madison

“I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.”
-Thomas Jefferson

“In the general course of human nature, A power over a man's subsistence amounts to a power over his will.”
-Alexander Hamilton

“Congress has not unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare, but only those specifically enumerated.”
-Thomas Jefferson

“If the freedom of speech is taken away then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.”
-George Washington

“A well-instructed people alone can be permanently a free people.”
-James Madison

“A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce, or a tragedy, or perhaps both.”
-James Madison

“Real firmness is good for anything; strut is good for nothing.”
-Alexander Hamilton

“Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain and most fools do.”
-Benjamin Franklin

“Associate with men of good quality if you esteem your own reputation; for it is better to be alone than in bad company.”
-George Washington

“All that seems indispensable in stating the account between the dead and the living, is to see that the debts against the latter do not exceed the advances made by the former.”
-James Madison

“A wise and frugal government… shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government.” — Thomas -Jefferson, First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1801

“But a Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored. Liberty, once lost, is lost forever.”
-John Adams

“I always consider the settlement of America with reverence and wonder, as the opening of a grand scene and design in providence, for the illumination of the ignorant and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth.”
-John Adams

“It is impossible to rightly govern a nation without God and the Bible.”
-George Washington

“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
-John Adams

“And I have no doubt that every new example will succeed, as every past one has done, in showing that religion and Government will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together.”
-James Madison

“Where liberty is, there is my country.”
-Benjamin Franklin

“In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men the great difficulty lies in this: You must first enable the government to control the governed, and in the next place, oblige it to control itself. “
-Alexander Hamilton

“It will be found an unjust and unwise jealousy to deprive a man of his natural liberty upon the supposition he may abuse it.”
-George Washington

“The very atmosphere of firearms anywhere and everywhere restrains evil interference - they deserve a place of honor with all that's good.”
-George Washington

“Americans have the right and advantage of being armed - unlike the citizens of other countries whose governments are afraid to trust the people with arms.”
-James Madison

“Commercial shackles are generally unjust, oppressive, and impolitic.”
-James Madison

“Those who stand for nothing fall for anything.”
-Alexander Hamilton

I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.
-James Madison

“It is only when the people become ignorant and corrupt, when they degenerate into a populace, that they are incapable of exercising their sovereignty.”
-James Monroe

“A great empire, like a great cake, is most easily diminished at the edges.”
-Benjamin Franklin

“Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There was never a democracy that did not commit suicide.”
-John Adams

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Updated: 12:58 PM GMT on November 05, 2008

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Obama's Constitution

Posted by: sebastianjer, 3:02 AM GMT on October 14, 2008

Last Week Daily Tracking Polls Only

10-28-2007
Rasmussen +5
Tipp +4
Gallup(T) +2
Gallup(E) +7
Zogby +4
Battlegroud+3
Hotline +8

Average +4.71 Obama

10-29-2008
Rasmussen +3
Tipp +3
Gallup(T) +3
Gallup(E) +7
Zogby +5
Battlegroud+3
Hotline +7

Average +4.28 Obama

10-30-2008
Rasmussen +5
Tipp +4
Gallup(T) +5
Gallup(E) +7
Zogby +7
Battlegroud +3
Hotline +6

Average +5.28 Obama

10-31-2008
Rasmussen
Tipp
Gallup(T)
Gallup(E)
Zogby
Battlegroud
Hotline

Average

Daily Tracking Only 11-01-2008
Rasmussen
Tipp
Gallup(T)
Gallup(E)
Zogby
Battlegroud
Hotline

Average

Daily Tracking Only 11-02-2008
Rasmussen
Tipp
Gallup(T)
Gallup(E)
Zogby
Battlegroud
Hotline

Average

Daily Tracking Only 11-03-2008
Rasmussen
Tipp
Gallup(T)
Gallup(E)
Zogby
Battlegroud
Hotline

Average
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Bill of Rights

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

source

Read the following article this morning and I am reasonably sure in my own mind that this is the type of America that Barack Obama foresees. I say this based on his past pronouncements, associations, and on several occasions his actual statements and policy pronouncements, once you get past the spin.

Actually it is becoming obvious that a large portion of the American people have no problem with this, if a majority do so be it. The problem is that I doubt that anywhere near a real majority do. If this is Obama's belief structure that is his right and he should lay it out to the American people so that we can elect candidates based on their true belief structure and agenda. The fact that Obama and his campaign go to such lengths to deny or parse the policies and positions that he has always advocated in the past shows that they know that a majority of the American public would not be in favor of it, polls show it also.

Having been raised in a family that saw FDR as a hero and an icon, I understand the attachment to these beliefs. My grandfather raised a large family through the Depression as a union worker and organizer, I fully comprehend the historical and economic nature from which this springs.

Barack Obama has a similar approach and mindset as those of my grandfather's status and economic class of his era. The poor, disenfranchised often persecuted; whose only hope politically was a fairness imposed by the government to level the playing field.

The fact that neither FDR or Barack Obama were actually full fledged members of this class is really unimportant though Obama at least was exposed to it. Obama after all was the grandson of a Bank VP who attended a private prep school in Hawaii and three different Colleges including Columbia and Harvard.

Regardless, Obama is as I have said many times and have known since I really started studying him and his positions this spring, nothing new. The Change he is advocating is pretty much a European style Socialist Democracy. There are countries where it is and has been very successful, Sweeden and Finland being prime examples. There are also countries where it has been tried and is beginning to be recognized as having been not so good, France, Italy, Denmark and others and they are now pulling back from it in varying degrees.

I don't see that it can work in the US for many reasons. Our size and diversity being one but the most important is our historical and cultural traditions, not to mention our current form of government which would have to be significantly modified to enact it. There are only two ways that this type of government could ever be enacted in the US. The right way, by the consent of the majority of the American people. Or the way we are going, the slow encroachment on American institutions, particularly the Federal Court System, by those who are of the mind set that they know what is best, regardless of what the people want.

Next Tuesday we are going to the polls to elect a new president, I have already voted actually, but I would ask everyone to ask themselves a simple question. If the views and words expressed in the audio interview posted below from 2001 with Obama are not somehow offensive to a majority of the American people why does he not just embrace them and explain them clearly and openly to the American people?

To me the most troubling aspect of the interview is not his comments on income redistribution, we have had that for a long time in the name of fairness, the real troubling quote is this.

"And to that extent as radical as people tried to characterize the Warren court, it wasn’t that radical. 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 generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties."

Those "essential constraints" and "negative liberties" are the Bill Of Rights, what the Government can not do. If government is allowed to "break free" from these constraints, what do you think that means?

Again if all this is so acceptable, or if people are somehow misconstruing his words and they are his own words, why not just hold a press conference and explain them? Why blame Fox, Drudge etc. for putting them out there, they are after all Barack Obama's own words. Perhaps we will hear an explanation in his half hour infomercial on Wednesday night, if not ask yourself why?
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Obama's Constitution

October 28, 2008 Posted by Scott at 5:36 AM

Yesterday the Obama campaign called on University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein to tamp down the furor over Obama's advocacy of "redistributive change" and overcoming of the Constitution's "negative rights" in his 2001 radio interview. Politico's Ben Smith reliably channelled Professor Sunstein's spinning on behalf of Obama.

Professor Sunstein was actually the right man to call on to explain Obama's remarks. They derive directly from Sunstein's advocacy of Roosevelt's so-called second Bill of Rights. Sunstein devoted a book to the subject in 2004 -- The Second Bill of Rights: FDR's Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need It More Than Ever. Roosevelt set forth his "second Bill of Rights" in his January 1944 State of the Union Address:

In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all--regardless of station, race, or creed.

Among these are:

The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation;

The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;

The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;

The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;

The right of every family to a decent home;

The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;

The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;

The right to a good education.

Tom Palmer usefully explicated the political thought underlying Sunstein's argument in his review of the book. By contrast with the doctrine of rights conferred by God and nature set forth in the Declaration of Independence, Sustein holds:

You owe your life -- and everything else -- to the sovereign. The rights of subjects are not natural rights, but merely grants from the sovereign. There is no right even to complain about the actions of the sovereign, except insofar as the sovereign allows the subject to complain. These are the principles of unlimited, arbitrary, and absolute power, the principles of such rulers as Louis XIV. Intellectuals have assiduously promoted them; think of Jean Bodin and Thomas Hobbes.

Thus Palmer deems Sunstein a "new intellectual champion of absolutism" who advances "the radical notion that all rights -- including rights usually held to be 'against' the state, such as the right to freedom of speech and the right not to be arbitrarily imprisoned or tortured -- are grants from the state."

At the American Constitution Society's "Constitution 2020" jamboree at Yale Law School in 2005, according to my daughter's notes, Sunstein explained:

* With growth and change, political rights enshrined in Constitution are inadequate.

* Need economic bill of rights. Ingredients of Second Bill of Rights--only with these rights will we have security

* Long tradition of American political thought--states owe to every citizen a degree of subsistence. Second Bill of Rights made possible by attack on distinction between negative and positive rights. Effort to separate them is unfit for the American legal framework.

* Roosevelt . . . did not favor return to narrowly construed judgments of those who drafted the Constitution.

* By 2020, it's going to be about time for the Second Bill of Rights to be reclaimed. . . . Beauty of Roosevelt's Second Bill of Rights is its concreteness--right to education, etc.

The debate on the left, alluded to in Obama's remarks and addressed in Sunstein's book, has been whether Congress or the courts should promulgate the welfare state agenda. Three years ago Sunstein et al. modestly posited the fulfillment of their welfare state dreams in 2020. With left-wing Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, and with Obama's ascendance, it looks like the future is now..

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. "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 generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. It says what the states can’t do to you, it 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."

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Media's Presidential Bias and Decline

Columnist Michael Malone Looks at Slanted Election Coverage and the Reasons Why
Column By MICHAEL S. MALONE

Oct. 24, 2008 —

The traditional media are playing a very, very dangerous game -- with their readers, with the Constitution and with their own fates.

The sheer bias in the print and television coverage of this election campaign is not just bewildering, but appalling. And over the last few months I've found myself slowly moving from shaking my head at the obvious one-sided reporting, to actually shouting at the screen of my television and my laptop computer.

But worst of all, for the last couple weeks, I've begun -- for the first time in my adult life -- to be embarrassed to admit what I do for a living. A few days ago, when asked by a new acquaintance what I did for a living, I replied that I was "a writer," because I couldn't bring myself to admit to a stranger that I'm a journalist.

You need to understand how painful this is for me. I am one of those people who truly bleeds ink when I'm cut. I am a fourth-generation newspaperman. As family history tells it, my great-grandfather was a newspaper editor in Abilene, Kan., during the last of the cowboy days, then moved to Oregon to help start the Oregon Journal (now the Oregonian).

My hard-living -- and when I knew her, scary -- grandmother was one of the first women reporters for the Los Angeles Times. And my father, though profoundly dyslexic, followed a long career in intelligence to finish his life (thanks to word processors and spellcheckers) as a very successful freelance writer. I've spent 30 years in every part of journalism, from beat reporter to magazine editor. And my oldest son, following in the family business, so to speak, earned his first national byline before he earned his drivers license.

So, when I say I'm deeply ashamed right now to be called a "journalist," you can imagine just how deep that cuts into my soul.

Now, of course, there's always been bias in the media. Human beings are biased, so the work they do, including reporting, is inevitably colored. Hell, I can show you 10 different ways to color variations of the word "said" -- muttered, shouted, announced, reluctantly replied, responded, etc. -- to influence the way a reader will apprehend exactly the same quote. We all learn that in Reporting 101, or at least in the first few weeks working in a newsroom.

But what we are also supposed to learn during that same apprenticeship is to recognize the dangerous power of that technique, and many others, and develop built-in alarms against them.

But even more important, we are also supposed to be taught that even though there is no such thing as pure, Platonic objectivity in reporting, we are to spend our careers struggling to approach that ideal as closely as possible.

That means constantly challenging our own prejudices, systematically presenting opposing views and never, ever burying stories that contradict our own world views or challenge people or institutions we admire. If we can't achieve Olympian detachment, than at least we can recognize human frailty -- especially in ourselves.

Reporting Bias

For many years, spotting bias in reporting was a little parlor game of mine, watching TV news or reading a newspaper article and spotting how the reporter had inserted, often unconsciously, his or her own preconceptions. But I always wrote it off as bad judgment and lack of professionalism, rather than bad faith and conscious advocacy.

Sure, being a child of the '60s I saw a lot of subjective "New" Journalism, and did a fair amount of it myself, but that kind of writing, like columns and editorials, was supposed to be segregated from "real" reporting, and, at least in mainstream media, usually was. The same was true for the emerging blogosphere, which by its very nature was opinionated and biased.

But my complacent faith in my peers first began to be shaken when some of the most admired journalists in the country were exposed as plagiarists, or worse, accused of making up stories from whole cloth.

I'd spent my entire professional career scrupulously pounding out endless dreary footnotes and double-checking sources to make sure that I never got accused of lying or stealing someone else's work -- not out of any native honesty, but out of fear: I'd always been told to fake or steal a story was a firing offense & indeed, it meant being blackballed out of the profession.

And yet, few of those worthies ever seemed to get fired for their crimes -- and if they did they were soon rehired into even more prestigious jobs. It seemed as if there were two sets of rules: one for us workaday journalists toiling out in the sticks, and another for folks who'd managed, through talent or deceit, to make it to the national level.

Meanwhile, I watched with disbelief as the nation's leading newspapers, many of whom I'd written for in the past, slowly let opinion pieces creep into the news section, and from there onto the front page. Personal opinions and comments that, had they appeared in my stories in 1979, would have gotten my butt kicked by the nearest copy editor, were now standard operating procedure at the New York Times, the Washington Post, and soon after in almost every small town paper in the U.S.

But what really shattered my faith -- and I know the day and place where it happened -- was the war in Lebanon three summers ago. The hotel I was staying at in Windhoek, Namibia, only carried CNN, a network I'd already learned to approach with skepticism. But this was CNN International, which is even worse.

I sat there, first with my jaw hanging down, then actually shouting at the TV, as one field reporter after another reported the carnage of the Israeli attacks on Beirut, with almost no corresponding coverage of the Hezbollah missiles raining down on northern Israel. The reporting was so utterly and shamelessly biased that I sat there for hours watching, assuming that eventually CNNi would get around to telling the rest of the story & but it never happened.

The Presidential Campaign

But nothing, nothing I've seen has matched the media bias on display in the current presidential campaign.

Republicans are justifiably foaming at the mouth over the sheer one-sidedness of the press coverage of the two candidates and their running mates. But in the last few days, even Democrats, who have been gloating over the pass -- no, make that shameless support -- they've gotten from the press, are starting to get uncomfortable as they realize that no one wins in the long run when we don't have a free and fair press.

I was one of the first people in the traditional media to call for the firing of Dan Rather -- not because of his phony story, but because he refused to admit his mistake -- but, bless him, even Gunga Dan thinks the media is one-sided in this election.

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not one of those people who think the media has been too hard on, say, Republican vice presidential nominee Gov. Sarah Palin, by rushing reportorial SWAT teams to her home state of Alaska to rifle through her garbage. This is the big leagues, and if she wants to suit up and take the field, then Gov. Palin better be ready to play.

The few instances where I think the press has gone too far -- such as the Times reporter talking to prospective first lady Cindy McCain's daughter's MySpace friends -- can easily be solved with a few newsroom smackdowns and temporary repostings to the Omaha bureau.

No, what I object to (and I think most other Americans do as well) is the lack of equivalent hardball coverage of the other side -- or worse, actively serving as attack dogs for the presidential ticket of Sens. Barack Obama, D-Ill., and Joe Biden, D-Del.

If the current polls are correct, we are about to elect as president of the United States a man who is essentially a cipher, who has left almost no paper trail, seems to have few friends (that at least will talk) and has entire years missing out of his biography.

That isn't Sen. Obama's fault: His job is to put his best face forward. No, it is the traditional media's fault, for it alone (unlike the alternative media) has had the resources to cover this story properly, and has systematically refused to do so.

Why, for example to quote the lawyer for Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., haven't we seen an interview with Sen. Obama's grad school drug dealer -- when we know all about Mrs. McCain's addiction? Are Bill Ayers and Tony Rezko that hard to interview? All those phony voter registrations that hard to scrutinize? And why are Sen. Biden's endless gaffes almost always covered up, or rationalized, by the traditional media?

Joe the Plumber

The absolute nadir (though I hate to commit to that, as we still have two weeks before the election) came with Joe the Plumber.

Middle America, even when they didn't agree with Joe, looked on in horror as the press took apart the private life of an average person who had the temerity to ask a tough question of a presidential candidate. So much for the standing up for the little man. So much for speaking truth to power. So much for comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable, and all of those other catchphrases we journalists used to believe we lived by.

I learned a long time ago that when people or institutions begin to behave in a matter that seems to be entirely against their own interests, it's because we don't understand what their motives really are. It would seem that by so exposing their biases and betting everything on one candidate over another, the traditional media is trying to commit suicide -- especially when, given our currently volatile world and economy, the chances of a successful Obama presidency, indeed any presidency, is probably less than 50/50.

Furthermore, I also happen to believe that most reporters, whatever their political bias, are human torpedoes & and, had they been unleashed, would have raced in and roughed up the Obama campaign as much as they did McCain's. That's what reporters do. I was proud to have been one, and I'm still drawn to a good story, any good story, like a shark to blood in the water.

So why weren't those legions of hungry reporters set loose on the Obama campaign? Who are the real villains in this story of mainstream media betrayal?

The editors. The men and women you don't see; the people who not only decide what goes in the paper, but what doesn't; the managers who give the reporters their assignments and lay out the editorial pages. They are the real culprits.

Bad Editors

Why? I think I know, because had my life taken a different path, I could have been one: Picture yourself in your 50s in a job where you've spent 30 years working your way to the top, to the cockpit of power & only to discover that you're presiding over a dying industry. The Internet and alternative media are stealing your readers, your advertisers and your top young talent. Many of your peers shrewdly took golden parachutes and disappeared. Your job doesn't have anywhere near the power and influence it did when your started your climb. The Newspaper Guild is too weak to protect you any more, and there is a very good chance you'll lose your job before you cross that finish line, 10 years hence, of retirement and a pension.

In other words, you are facing career catastrophe -- and desperate times call for desperate measures. Even if you have to risk everything on a single Hail Mary play. Even if you have to compromise the principles that got you here. After all, newspapers and network news are doomed anyway -- all that counts is keeping them on life support until you can retire.

And then the opportunity presents itself -- an attractive young candidate whose politics likely matches yours, but more important, he offers the prospect of a transformed Washington with the power to fix everything that has gone wrong in your career.

With luck, this monolithic, single-party government will crush the alternative media via a revived fairness doctrine, re-invigorate unions by getting rid of secret votes, and just maybe be beholden to people like you in the traditional media for getting it there.

And besides, you tell yourself, it's all for the good of the country &

This is the opinion of the columnist and in no way reflects the opinion of ABC News.

Michael S. Malone is one of the nation's best-known technology writers. He has covered Silicon Valley and high-tech for more than 25 years, beginning with the San Jose Mercury News as the nation's first daily high-tech reporter. His articles and editorials have appeared in such publications as The Wall Street Journal, the Economist and Fortune, and for two years he was a columnist for The New York Times. He was editor of Forbes ASAP, the world's largest-circulation business-tech magazine, at the height of the dot-com boom. Malone is the author or co-author of a dozen books, notably the best-selling "Virtual Corporation." Malone has also hosted three public television interview series, and most recently co-produced the celebrated PBS miniseries on social entrepreneurs, "The New Heroes." He has been the ABCNews.com "Silicon Insider" columnist since 2000.

Copyright © 2008 ABC News Internet Ventures

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Would the Last Honest Reporter Please Turn On the Lights?

October 25, 2008 10:25 AM EDT

By Orson Scott Card

Editor's note: Orson Scott Card is a Democrat and a newspaper columnist, and in this opinion piece he takes on both while lamenting the current state of journalism.

An open letter to the local daily paper — almost every local daily paper in America:

I remember reading All the President's Men and thinking: That's journalism. You do what it takes to get the truth and you lay it before the public, because the public has a right to know.

This housing crisis didn't come out of nowhere. It was not a vague emanation of the evil Bush administration.

It was a direct result of the political decision, back in the late 1990s, to loosen the rules of lending so that home loans would be more accessible to poor people. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were authorized to approve risky loans.

What is a risky loan? It's a loan that the recipient is likely not to be able to repay.

The goal of this rule change was to help the poor — which especially would help members of minority groups. But how does it help these people to give them a loan that they can't repay? They get into a house, yes, but when they can't make the payments, they lose the house — along with their credit rating.

They end up worse off than before.

This was completely foreseeable and in fact many people did foresee it. One political party, in Congress and in the executive branch, tried repeatedly to tighten up the rules. The other party blocked every such attempt and tried to loosen them.

Furthermore, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were making political contributions to the very members of Congress who were allowing them to make irresponsible loans. (Though why quasi-federal agencies were allowed to do so baffles me. It's as if the Pentagon were allowed to contribute to the political campaigns of Congressmen who support increasing their budget.)

Isn't there a story here? Doesn't journalism require that you who produce our daily paper tell the truth about who brought us to a position where the only way to keep confidence in our economy was a $700 billion bailout? Aren't you supposed to follow the money and see which politicians were benefiting personally from the deregulation of mortgage lending?

I have no doubt that if these facts had pointed to the Republican Party or to John McCain as the guilty parties, you would be treating it as a vast scandal. "Housing-gate," no doubt. Or "Fannie-gate."

Instead, it was Senator Christopher Dodd and Congressman Barney Frank, both Democrats, who denied that there were any problems, who refused Bush administration requests to set up a regulatory agency to watch over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and who were still pushing for these agencies to go even further in promoting sub-prime mortgage loans almost up to the minute they failed.

As Thomas Sowell points out in a TownHall.com essay entitled "Do Facts Matter?" ( http://snipurl.com/457townhall_com] ): "Alan Greenspan warned them four years ago. So did the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers to the President. So did Bush's Secretary of the Treasury."

These are facts. This financial crisis was completely preventable. The party that blocked any attempt to prevent it was ... the Democratic Party. The party that tried to prevent it was ... the Republican Party.

Yet when Nancy Pelosi accused the Bush administration and Republican deregulation of causing the crisis, you in the press did not hold her to account for her lie. Instead, you criticized Republicans who took offense at this lie and refused to vote for the bailout!

What? It's not the liar, but the victims of the lie who are to blame?

Now let's follow the money ... right to the presidential candidate who is the number-two recipient of campaign contributions from Fannie Mae.

And after Freddie Raines, the CEO of Fannie Mae who made $90 million while running it into the ground, was fired for his incompetence, one presidential candidate's campaign actually consulted him for advice on housing.

If that presidential candidate had been John McCain, you would have called it a major scandal and we would be getting stories in your paper every day about how incompetent and corrupt he was.

But instead, that candidate was Barack Obama, and so you have buried this story, and when the McCain campaign dared to call Raines an "adviser" to the Obama campaign — because that campaign had sought his advice — you actually let Obama's people get away with accusing McCain of lying, merely because Raines wasn't listed as an official adviser to the Obama campaign.

You would never tolerate such weasely nit-picking from a Republican.

If you who produce our local daily paper actually had any principles, you would be pounding this story, because the prosperity of all Americans was put at risk by the foolish, short-sighted, politically selfish, and possibly corrupt actions of leading Democrats, including Obama.

If you who produce our local daily paper had any personal honor, you would find it unbearable to let the American people believe that somehow Republicans were to blame for this crisis.

There are precedents. Even though President Bush and his administration never said that Iraq sponsored or was linked to 9/11, you could not stand the fact that Americans had that misapprehension — so you pounded us with the fact that there was no such link. (Along the way, you created the false impression that Bush had lied to them and said that there was a connection.)

If you had any principles, then surely right now, when the American people are set to blame President Bush and John McCain for a crisis they tried to prevent, and are actually shifting to approve of Barack Obama because of a crisis he helped cause, you would be laboring at least as hard to correct that false impression.

Your job, as journalists, is to tell the truth. That's what you claim you do, when you accept people's money to buy or subscribe to your paper.

But right now, you are consenting to or actively promoting a big fat lie — that the housing crisis should somehow be blamed on Bush, McCain, and the Republicans. You have trained the American people to blame everything bad — even bad weather — on Bush, and they are responding as you have taught them to.

If you had any personal honor, each reporter and editor would be insisting on telling the truth — even if it hurts the election chances of your favorite candidate.

Because that's what honorable people do. Honest people tell the truth even when they don't like the probable consequences. That's what honesty means . That's how trust is earned.

Barack Obama is just another politician, and not a very wise one. He has revealed his ignorance and naivete time after time — and you have swept it under the rug, treated it as nothing.

Meanwhile, you have participated in the borking of Sarah Palin, reporting savage attacks on her for the pregnancy of her unmarried daughter — while you ignored the story of John Edwards's own adultery for many months.

So I ask you now: Do you have any standards at all? Do you even know what honesty means?

Is getting people to vote for Barack Obama so important that you will throw away everything that journalism is supposed to stand for?

You might want to remember the way the National Organization of Women threw away their integrity by supporting Bill Clinton despite his well-known pattern of sexual exploitation of powerless women. Who listens to NOW anymore? We know they stand for nothing; they have no principles.

That's where you are right now.

It's not too late. You know that if the situation were reversed, and the truth would damage McCain and help Obama, you would be moving heaven and earth to get the true story out there.

If you want to redeem your honor, you will swallow hard and make a list of all the stories you would print if it were McCain who had been getting money from Fannie Mae, McCain whose campaign had consulted with its discredited former CEO, McCain who had voted against tightening its lending practices.

Then you will print them, even though every one of those true stories will point the finger of blame at the reckless Democratic Party, which put our nation's prosperity at risk so they could feel good about helping the poor, and lay a fair share of the blame at Obama's door.

You will also tell the truth about John McCain: that he tried, as a Senator, to do what it took to prevent this crisis. You will tell the truth about President Bush: that his administration tried more than once to get Congress to regulate lending in a responsible way.

This was a Congress-caused crisis, beginning during the Clinton administration, with Democrats leading the way into the crisis and blocking every effort to get out of it in a timely fashion.

If you at our local daily newspaper continue to let Americans believe — and vote as if — President Bush and the Republicans caused the crisis, then you are joining in that lie.

If you do not tell the truth about the Democrats — including Barack Obama — and do so with the same energy you would use if the miscreants were Republicans — then you are not journalists by any standard.

You're just the public relations machine of the Democratic Party, and it's time you were all fired and real journalists brought in, so that we can actually have a news paper in our city.

I am sure this will be thoroughly investigated by all the media outlets...right. Remembering Watergate well, I fully understand why the whole public campaign financing was enacted. The fact that Obama chose to not use it and instead went for not accepting it, the first presidential candidate since Watergate to do so, should have thrown up red flags throughout the mainstream media. After all it was the media that for the most part revealed the corruption of Watergate and saved the nation from an out of control president.

I find it interesting that Joe Biden was a first term Senator during the time that the abuses of Watergate were being revealed and laws enacted to counter them. I have no doubt that he was a strong supporter of the campaign finance oversight that came into being yet he is now, a candidate on the first ticket to refuse public financing. Below is the first of many stories that will be revealed as the result of this decision. Of course I am sure this is not the fund raising operation that Barack Obama had come to know. Please Read and also the Who is John Galt link.

What did Della Ware?

October 24, 2008 Posted by Scott at 5:42 AM

Yesterday we noted the Obama's campaign's acceptance of credit card contributions made via the Internet under false names and addresses in "Who is John Galt?" Many readers wrote to confirm the experiment conducted by our reader under the names John Galt, Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and Bill Ayers at obviously phony addresses.

At the same time, the contributions of "John Galt" and all the rest were rejected without fail by the McCain campaign. How could this be?

Mark Steyn and many readers (thanks to all) wrote to explain that the McCain campaign has chosen to avail itself of the Address Verification System, or AVS. It is a simple tool that prevents credit card fraud. As Steyn observed, "the AVS security checks most merchant processors use to screen out fraudulent transactions (and, incidentally, overseas customers) were intentionally disabled by the Obama campaign -- and thus their web donation page enables fraudulent (and/or foreign) donations."

Steyn also reported the contribution of NRO reader "Della Ware" of "12345 No Way." Steyn later reported that "Ms. Ware's" contribution was actually withdrawn from her account yesterday.

Campaign contributions under false names are illegal, as are contributions by noncitizens. Federal campaign law also limits the amount any one citizen can contribute to the presidential campaign to $2,300. The acceptance of campaign contributions via credit card without AVS protection facilitates illegal contributions. This is what the Obama campaign has chosen to do, and what the McCain campaign has chosen to avoid.

Steyn elaborated on this point at the end of the day:

[I]n order to accept donations from "Della Ware" and "Saddam Hussein" et al, the Obama website had, intentionally, to disable all the default security settings on their credit-card processing. I took a look at the inner sanctum of my (alas, far more modest) online retail operation this afternoon and, in order to permit fraud as easy as that which the Obama campaign is facilitating, you have to uncheck every single box on the AVS system, each one of which makes it very explicit just what you're doing - ie, accepting transactions with no "billing address", no "street address" match, no "zip code" match, with a bank "of non-US origin" (I've got nothing against those, but a US campaign fundraiser surely should be wary), etc. When you've disabled the whole lot one step at a time, then you've got a system tailor-made for fake names and bogus addresses.

By this time "Della Ware" had contacted the New York Times to report her experiment. Here, one might think, is a story. At the least, it provides an important sidebar to the heralded Obama online fundraising operation. Yet when Times reporter Michael Luo wrote it up for the Times's campaign blog, he somehow missed the point. "To be fair to the Obama campaign," Luo wrote, "officials there have said much of their checking for fraud occurs after the transactions have already occurred. When they find something wrong, they then refund the amount."

But, to repeat, the Obama campaign has chosen to establish an online contribution system that faciliates illegal anonymous or falsely sourced contributions, illegal foreign contributions and the evasion of contribution limits. Why has it chosen to do so? Why has it not availed itself of the AVS protection that would expose or prevent such illegal contributions? Luo does not grasp the heart of the story.

It is a story, however, and an important one. At least Luo reported it. The rest of the Times and its mainstream media colleagues have averted their eyes or turned their attention elsewhere..
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Is it time to go John Galt?

For those that have not read it, I highly recommend Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. Those that have read it know how scary prophetic it is becoming. My withdrawl from productive society would have no affect but I am very much considering it. I just have to figure out a way to tell my wife :)

Actual Exchange on Sunday between a plumber and Barack Obama

"Your new tax plan is going to tax me more, isn't it?" the plumber asked, complaining that he was being taxed "more and more for fulfilling the American dream."

"It's not that I want to punish your success. I just want to make sure that everybody who is behind you, that they've got a chance for success too," Obama responded. "My attitude is that if the economy's good for folks from the bottom up, it's gonna be good for everybody ... I think when you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody."
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Updated: 10:18 PM GMT on October 30, 2008

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Japanese Proverb

Posted by: sebastianjer, 2:06 AM GMT on October 06, 2008

When the character of a man is not clear to you, look at his friends.

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