Palin Relaunches Herself

For anyone who hangs on my every word and listens to no one else (Hi Mom!), you should know that no one whom I consider wise or a shrewd observer agrees with me on the veep debate. Sure, these are conservatives, but so am I. Conservatives tend to be self-critical, so I take this widespread praise to be well-considered. Palin has apparently relaunched herself into shining stardom. Perhaps she will push ugly economic news off the front page.

Deborah Saunders at The San Francisco Chronicle, "The Palin-Biden Verdict."

Peggy Noonan, "Palin and Populism."

David Brooks, "The Palin Rebound."

Rich Lowry, "The Veep Debate: She's Back!"

Dick Morris and Eileen McGann, "Palin Wins Big With Reagan-Like Flair."

Fred Barnes, "Palin's Comeback."

Even Hillary Clinton gave her praise: "It's amazing. She's been thrust into the national spotlight with very little preparation and I think, all things considered, you saw a very composed and effective debater last night."

Barack Obama thinks Biden won. So there.

The Bailout and Distrust

The ancient Greek orator Demosthenes said:

There is one safeguard known generally to the wise, which is an advantage and security to all, but especially to democracies as against despots. What is it? Distrust. (Philippic 2, sect. 24)

When Congress and our former Goldman Sacks CEO Treasury Secretary ask us for $700,000,000,000, ask yourself, "Do I trust these people with this much power?"

What Running Mates Do Joe Did

Last night, watching the Veep Debate, even I felt an urge to vote for Obama-Biden. Then I shook myself, and said, "No, David! It's all an illusion!"

Biden played his running mate attack dog role effectively. He tore into McCain and made the Arizona Senator look like a slug. According to Biden, McCain voted to cut money for the troops, voted twenty times against alternative fuels, voted against health coverage for kids, voted against the Violence Against Women Act, proposes to tax health care benefits, and would give $4 billion to oil companies that are already making $600 billion in profits. On top of all that, he opposed the regulation of Wall Street as he has opposed all regulation. (You see? The financial crisis is John McCain's fault!) And he wants to make the same mess of our health care system by getting the government out of that too!

Who would vote for a beast like that? Whereas, according to Biden, Barack Obama anticipated every major problem that we face today, including the credit crisis, and urged the right actions for each one. The guy's amazing! And he loves the middle class too.

Biden actually got angry at McCain's record, but there was no such alarm and outrage from the other side of the stage. He is not a Maverick, Biden said, then made a list of charges.

Palin took a few jabs at Obama. But whereas there is a mountain of dirt she could have dumped on him, she only kicked some dust on his shoes.

She spent a lot of her boasting of how ordinary she is and how well she relates to ordinary people. Biden buried that with his own testimony, ending with an almost tearful remembrance of sitting at the bedside of his child who was hovering between life and death. Furthermore, Palin struck me as too ordinary. She seemed like a nice lady you'd meet at the bowling alley. People expect a certain amount of polish in their Presidents and prospective Presidents.

McCain-Palin will not win simply with their boasts of being Mavericks and just like us. They need to expose the Obama illusion. The debates are the big opportunity because they get no free airtime with the press. Palin's job last night was to do the heavy lifting on that. She did not.

Card Night at Ole Miss

Ethan Campbell writes:

Barack Obama may not look like a seasoned cardsharp, but he reportedly dominates Senate poker games. “Obama’s analytical mind,” James McManus gushed in The New Yorker, “helped him to excel at draw, stud, hold ’em, and also the sillier, more luck-based variants.”

Indeed, on Friday night in Mississippi, both candidates proved themselves capable high-stakes debaters, with full decks of anecdotes and statistics. But in a Presidential race, as in a poker tournament, the prize is never simply rewarded to the player with the best math skills. Undecided voters ask themselves gut-level questions—like which candidate is better suited to sit across the green felt table with sharks like Putin or Ahmadinejad or Abbas. The winning strategy thus belongs to the man who can master the intangibles.

The first key, any Vegas pro will tell you, is to develop the right poker face. It could be the classic neutral stare, or a cavalier smile—or in McCain’s case, an unnerving, reptilian smirk. What matters is that the player’s emotions are unreadable.

During the debate, Obama wore the face of a nickel-ante gambler at the Bellagio. Early on, he looked straight at the TV camera and delivered a promise to middle-class taxpayers: “You will not pay another dime.” But as the game shifted to foreign policy, his answers grew tentative, and his direct looks at the camera stopped. The message to viewers was subtle but clear—Obama wasn’t confident enough to look us in the eye. His baby browns didn’t meet ours again until the very end, back on the safe turf of childhood memories.

Obama’s smile was never one of good humor or playful sarcasm. It was a grin of helpless panic. When McCain scored hits—“It’s hard to reach across the aisle from that far to the left,” “It isn’t just naive, it’s dangerous”—the tally wrote itself on his stretched lips.

McCain’s expressions, on the other hand, were almost freakishly consistent. While Obama spoke, McCain fixed an eerie gaze on moderator Jim Lehrer, never once making eye contact with his opponent or the camera. When Obama attacked, he looked down at his notes. When the attacks got vicious, he gave Lehrer the smirk.

Often while Obama rebuked him, McCain treated the viewer to all three expressions in a row. Eerie gaze, down at his notes, smirk. Even during Obama’s finest moment—a two-minute tongue lashing over Iraq that made the Youtube highlight reel—McCain looked down, then up to smirk, then back down. Rinse and repeat.

The unreadable face does little good, though, unless one uses it to bluff. And McCain constantly pushed the action, with attacks that were difficult to verify.

Obama proposes “$800 billion in new spending on new programs,” McCain said. “I . . . I don’t know where John is getting his figures,” the junior Senator sputtered.

“He has voted to increase taxes on people who make as low as $42,000.” Obama denied the charge (“That’s not true, John”), and McCain denied right back (“You can look it up”).

Even after Obama’s Iraq indictment, the rhetorically wounded veteran shot back with a baffling but brazen claim: “Senator Obama doesn’t understand the difference between a tactic and a strategy.” He continued with a rambling tirade, about soldiers pleading to “let us win” and Obama cutting their funds.

Obama impotently tried to interrupt, but settled for smiling until it hurt. “Jim,” he said finally, “there are a whole bunch of things we have got to answer.”

The pattern developed quickly. McCain placed bets, and Obama called them. When Obama attacked, McCain raised the stakes.

When Obama mentioned embarrassing quotes from McCain’s past—singing “bomb, bomb Iran,” or saying we could “muddle through” Afghanistan—McCain didn’t bother to touch them. Instead, he stayed on the offensive: “You might think that with that kind of concern, Senator Obama would have gone to Afghanistan.”

When Obama accused him of voting “23 times against alternative energy, like solar, and wind, and biodiesel,” McCain absorbed the blow and struck back: “Senator Obama says he’s for nuclear, but he’s against reprocessing and storing. It’s hard to get there from here.” Obama desperately tried to “correct the record,” as Lehrer pressed the candidates to move on.

An aggressive strategy does not always win, but whoever drives the betting controls the game. And the game isn’t over until someone pushes all his chips into the pot.

In his closing statement, McCain accused Obama of clinging to ideology while ignoring practical reality. “We’ve seen this stubbornness before, in this administration,” he said. “We need more flexibility in a president of the United States.”

Paul Newman in The Sting couldn’t have matched the audacity of this final, all-in move. McCain was actually comparing Obama—Barack Obama, opponent of the Iraq war, supporter of nationalized health care and abortion on demand—to George W. Bush.

For once, Obama didn’t respond with a clarification. “You know, my father is from Kenya,” he said limply. McCain had left him nothing more to gamble with. He could only shake his head, grin like the Cheshire cat . . . and fold.

-- Ethan Campbell is assistant professor of writing at The King's College in New York City and is a guest writer today at Principalities and Powers. He is co-author of the recently published Teen Challenge: 50 Years of Miracles.

Illustration from The New Yorker.

For a post of perhaps related interest to card players, see my post, "Dogs Playing Poker: A Friend in Need." Which dog is Obama and which one is McCain?

Radical Fascist Chic

Ed Driscoll has a great video piece up at his site making the following argument:

This past summer, Rick Perlstein, the author of the new biography called Nixonland, looked back on the period leading up to Richard Nixon's 1968 election and told Reason magazine that in his opinion, "Bonnie and Clyde was the most important text of the New Left", adding: "It made an argument about vitality and virtue vs. staidness and morality that was completely new, that resonated with young people in a way that made no sense to old people. Just the idea that the outlaws were the good guys and the bourgeois householders were the bad guys--you cannot underestimate how strange and fresh that was." It certainly was strange, compared with the nation's politics at the start of the 1960s.

In the latest edition of our Silicon Graffiti videoblog, we take a look back at the film, its radical chic times, and its champion--Pauline Kael of the New Yorker, who would reject traditional culture for "trash cinema." And we'll also look at Bobby Kennedy's Fascist Moment--and even a Bonnie & Clyde-related excerpt the fourth edition of Austin Bay and Jim Dunnigan's A Quick And Dirty Guide To War. Which sounds like one meaty, beaty, big and bouncy little video to me.

Tommy guns and fedoras are optional, of course.



Violence, wedded in a most ironic way to righteousness, is at the core of fascism. It is the default impulse of the powerless, as Hannah Arendt pointed out in On Violence. and also of the mindless. The Nazis glorified irrationality and will over cold, bourgeois reason. The New Left, and now the New New Left, mirror that preference: note the presence of violent agitators that has become expected at all political conventions and meetings of transnational organizations. Most of the protestors don't even know what the organizations are, what they do, or what is being discussed. They show up for the mindless violence and to join a mass expression of the will to destroy whatever exists. They are the shock troops intended to spread chaos and distrust of institutions and leaders, in order to make way for the strong man or party to step in and restore order. A fascistic order, that precludes that over-rated bourgeois value, freedom.

Political Arson

Barack Obama is out there today talking about houses burning down as an analogy with the Congress voting down the bail out bill. Well, it so happens someone has had a video compilation up at YouTube for a while now with the title "Burning Down the House."



This is a fast moving account of how this fiasco unfolded, in case you haven't had a chance to get up to speed on it. It has been removed several times already, so don't wait to check it out--these things critical of Obama and Democrats in general have a way of being censored at YouTube. Why would that be?

[DCI - Sure enough. The link in my September 27 posting of this video is dead. This one Harold has given us is live and prefaced by the suggestion that the Warner Music Group is more concerned about the electoral prospects of Barack Obama to whom they have given a lot of money than about the use of their song in a YouTube video.]

Also,--and I'll have more to say about this in a later post--this American Thinker piece, "Obama and the Strategy," gives chapter and verse on the manifold connections with the Fascist Left that Barack Obama has. Truly alarming stuff. Arm yourself with the truth--read the whole thing.

Obama Youth Brigade Sings For Change

Evidence of the political Messianism that surrounds Barack Obama continues unabated. Here is a creepy video of children singing out the One. A child sings, "We're gonna spread happiness. We're gonna spread freedom. Obama's gonna change it. Obama's gonna lead 'em. We're gonna change it, and rearrange it. We're goin' to change the world."



Obama's going to bring freedom, but not for people to pursue happiness. The freedom will come in the happiness that he provides. He will do this by rearranging the world. This is consistent with the messianic claims his more enthusiastic follows have made for him. The song's expectation that he will "rearrange" the world is consistent with his claim that it is not politics that is broken (as McCain claims), but America itself. His wife, Michelle, says, "our souls are broken." Perhaps he will re-arrange our souls.

If Obama is sworn in as President, can we expect an Obama catechism for children, either issued by the White House or initiated by the public schools with the approving sufferance of the White House?

Nazis and Communists have been known for this blend of patriotism (a thing that is healthy in itself), Utopian political hopes, and personality cult. I thank the Belmont Club blog for directing me to this nightmarish scene from Cabaret that depicts a wholesome young man singing a seemingly apolitical song expressing love for his fatherland. The scene slowly transforms into a passionate, mass devotion to the Fuhrer and his personal agency in uniting these people with what they believe to be the beautiful future they deserve. It is called "The Future Belongs to Me."



Consider also this Leninist exploitation of children for political purposes. (Thanks again to Belmont Club.)



I can't vouch for the translation in the sub-titles, but it sounds like Mao's Cultural Revolution and today's North Korea.

[Note: Actually, my colleague at The King's College, economist Alex Tokarev, is a native Russian speaker, and he says the words have nothing to do with what the children are singing in this video, and the reference to Lenin's little potatoes doesn't sound credible even for socialist propaganda of the period. Always go to the source, and to the original language if you can!]

Of course, this is quite distinct from the love of country that we instill in our children, though within measure, even through patriotic songs such as "America, the Beautiful" and the National Anthem. It's worth reflecting on the difference between the cultivation of patriotic sentiment in young hearts and the propagandizing of children in totalitarian states that we see in these videos.

There appears to have been difficulty keeping the "Sing For Change" video publicly accessible, as Belmont Club attests. ("BTW, the original YouTube video was withdrawn from public sharing and the embedded video stopped working for a time, but someone has reposted it (HT Sobieski) and I’ve re-embedded. There may be a struggle to keep the video visible to the public in the coming days. Who could have foreseen it would be harder to keep a video criticizing Obama up than one criticizing Hitler?") Perhaps the thugs from Obama's "truth squads" have been busy.

Of course, the other side of messianic political movements and figures is their actively fascistic (yes, I use the word advisedly) intolerance of any criticism. We observe this in American political liberals in general, as Jonah Goldberg has documented in his book, Liberal Fascism, and as Barack Obama himself has already begun to demonstrate. See Harold Kildow's post "The Dark Night of Fascism."

Trees Hang Low With Obama Guilt

Here is even more on Obama's "community organizer" association with our looming economic depression. Stanley Kurtz in "O's Dangerous Pals: Barack's 'Organizer' Buds Pushed for Bad Mortgages" (New York Post, Sept. 29, 2008), has become quite productive in this field of reporting.

WHAT exactly does a "community organizer" do? Barack Obama's rise has left many Americans asking themselves that question. Here's a big part of the answer: Community organizers intimidate banks into making high-risk loans to customers with poor credit.

In the name of fairness to minorities, community organizers occupy private offices, chant inside bank lobbies, and confront executives at their homes - and thereby force financial institutions to direct hundreds of millions of dollars in mortgages to low-credit customers.

In other words, community organizers help to undermine the US economy by pushing the banking system into a sinkhole of bad loans. And Obama has spent years training and funding the organizers who do it. ...

Mona Charen gives us, "ACORN, Obama, and the Mortgage Mess."

Kenneth Blackwell presents the connection in, "An ACORN Falls from the Tree."

David Limbaugh calls on McCain to, "Pin the Tail on the Donkey."

Perhaps it is because of connections like this that Nancy Pelosi went partisan-ballistic on the floor of the House, criticizing Bush and the Republican advocacy of small government for the nation's present financial instability. When the detectives start closing in on who done it, the culprit creates a distraction.

As an appendix, or something, here's Jon Stewart's take on why the American people are so opposed to this $700,000,000 lay out to "solve" the problem.

Jesus said "Do not worry about tomorrow," but laughing is always an option.

In Times of Crisis, Trust Capitalism

Joseph Calhoun, an investment officer at an investment management firm, speaks for a lot of people whose principles are still grounded in the American understanding of the seamless nature of freedom, encompassing the political, economic, religious, social, and cultural arenas. Socialism kills freedom in all its forms, like a wet blanket on a fire.

The US government is executing a coup d’etat of capitalism and I fear that we will pay the price for many years to come. Hank Paulson, Ben Bernanke and a host of others tell us the credit market is not working and the only way to get it working again is for the government to intervene. They claim this intervention is urgently needed and if we don’t act, the consequences are dire. Dire, as in New Depression dire. Have these supposed experts on capitalism forgotten how it really works?

If this bailout goes ahead in its current form and the Treasury pays a high enough price to recapitalize the troubled banks, what has been accomplished? The plan may be enough to induce the banking sector to start lending again, although frankly, I don’t know why we would want institutions who have shown such poor judgment in the past to stay in that business. This plan short circuits the capitalist model which would allow the stronger, well-run institutions to gain market share and/or expand profit margins. The long-term effect will be to lower the overall return on capital in the financial services industry. The government apparently believes that the key to economic recovery is to allocate limited resources in an inefficient manner. Does that make sense?

Read the whole thing here. It will cleanse your mind.

The Dark Night of Fascism

One of our readers took me to task recently for describing the Left in this country as having fascist tendencies. It lowers the level of discourse, I believe was his claim. I have seen several examples come and go since then, but this story coming out of Missouri is truly chilling, and indicates the fascist intentions of elements within the Obama campaign and in.

Last Tuesday without any fanfare, the Barack Obama campaign announced Jennifer Joyce and Bob McCulloch, the top prosecutors in St. Louis city and St. Louis County, were joining something called an Obama truth squad. They plan to respond immediately to any misleading advertisements and statements that might violate Missouri ethics laws.

The story itself is scary, in that the reporter's sarcastic tone shows he sides with the Obama campaign in threatening free speech--he obviously thinks his speech rights will never be threatened. Governor Matt Blunt of that state was sufficiently alarmed to issue a statement concerning the threat of law enforcement officials signing up to deter what they consider untruthful campaign ads against Barack Obama.

What Senator Obama and his helpers are doing is scandalous beyond words, the party that claims to be the party of Thomas Jefferson is abusing the justice system and offices of public trust to silence political criticism with threats of prosecution and criminal punishment.

This abuse of the law for intimidation insults the most sacred principles and ideals of Jefferson. I can think of nothing more offensive to Jefferson’s thinking than using the power of the state to deprive Americans of their civil rights. The only conceivable purpose of Messrs. McCulloch, Obama and the others is to frighten people away from expressing themselves, to chill free and open debate, to suppress support and donations to conservative organizations targeted by this anti-civil rights, to strangle criticism of Mr. Obama, to suppress ads about his support of higher taxes, and to choke out criticism on television, radio, the Internet, blogs, e-mail and daily conversation about the election.

What response would be appropriate from a prosecutor to paid advertising, which I believe still falls under the First Amendment? We do still have a First Amendment, right? What business do prosecutors have, in their official capacities, being part of a "truth squad"? I'll bet Ernst Rohm, the community organizer in charge of Hitler's Brown Shirts, would admire that one.

Organized intimidation: now an approved method in American politics, and the jihadis haven't even gotten warmed up here yet.

The Democrat Fannie and Freddie Cover-Up

The current financial crisis has corrupt, market-meddling Democrat fingerprints all over it.

This is another video that documents Democratic Congressional resistance to Republican attempts at reforming Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Notice the role of Franklin Raines in fiddling the Fannie and Freddie books and skimming huge sums of money off the top for himself. Raines is an Obama economic adviser.



According to Neil Cavuto, Sen. Obama was at the head of the line when the piggies lined up at the Fannie and Freddie trough for campaign bucks. Senator Barack Obama! Number two on the Fannie and Freddie list of favored politicians after just four short years in the Senate."



McCain needs to forget the post-partisan image he is trying to craft and hammer away at this connection. You can be quite certain that Obama and his friends in the MSM are sparing no efforts to paint this as a Bush crisis that is founded on Republican principles. The problem is economic liberty. The solution is an economy managed from Washington.

This McCain ad is a start.



If we end up in a depression, its architects, the Dems, will blame it on the Republicans and we'll all believe them for the next fifty years.

Dems Using Crisis to Fund Radical Friends

As usual, the Democrats are using a public crisis to enrich their far left political constituencies with huge gobs of public money while claiming to look out for the little guy.

The deal they were supporting before the House Republicans scuttled it would have shaved 20% off the top of any profit from selling the purchased bad debts and given it to ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, an organization of Marxist agitators with a history or embezzlement and intimidation, and an important role in using government programs to hook up people with mortgages they can't afford in overpriced houses.

Sen. Lindsey Graham blows the whistle:


Read "One Reason There Was 'No Deal' Yesterday" at Right Wing News. The article quotes Lindsey Graham, the text of Chris Dodd's proposal from Ed Morrisey's Hot Air blog, and The Heritage Foundation.

See also Michelle Malkin, "Kill the Bailout: More ACORN Funding?"

It's a Democrat Financial Crisis or an Obama White House

Clearly, John McCain's advisers put him under strict orders to guard his tongue during the debate at Ole Miss. He should have put that punk in his place and made headlines doing it. As it is, they sparred to a draw, giving the win to Barack Obama.

When Obama accused McCain of being complicit in the present economic mess because 90% of his votes in the Senate have agreed with the administration, McCain should have looked straight at him, and said, "Mr Obama, not only are you are a Senator, you are also part of the Democratic Party's governing majority in Congress. You are in no place to be pointing the finger at me. Let me tell you about that 10%. It's a 10% that you don't have in disagreement with your party! Congress has made a mess of our financial system are you are part of that."

But because McCain seems to want to present himself as a post-partisan unifier, he didn't criticize the Democrats. But the Democratic Congress is even more unpopular than the President, and they are responsible for this mess.

You must watch these two videos.

The first one from Fox News documents how the Bush administration saw this subprime loan trouble coming and tried to prevent through regulation Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from making all these bad loans to people who really could not afford to be in the housing market. But the Democrats blocked it. Fox provides footage of Barney Frank--yes, Barney Frank the extremely liberal Democrat from Massachusetts who is scolding Bush and Wall Street for this crisis and who is at the center of Congressional efforts to dig us out of the crisis--saying that all this talk of problems at Fannie and Freddie is just a Republican trick to deny mortgages to the poor (i.e. adjustable rates, subprime rates, no money down, interest only payments, no questions asked about income--step right up!). Brit Hume and Bret Baier ask, "What were those warning signs? Who raised them? Who raised them, and who disputed them?"

This next video, "Burning Down the House," is longer--ten minutes--and very fast paced, but people under thirty should have no problem keeping up with it. It shows how the crisis developed, viz. not the failure of free market capitalism, but Democrats forcing private financial institutions to lend money to people who are not credit worthy It then documents John McCain's opposition to all of this and Barack Obama's political and financial involvement with the whole caper and its chief culprits.

[Oct. 1 - The "Burning Down the House" video has been pulled from YouTube for this stated reason: "This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Warner Music Group."]

So why does McCain not tie this around his opponent's neck? Instead, he lets Obama and the Democrats define the problem as a capitalist problem (markets don't work; they must be directed by wise and benevolent bureaucrats) and a Republican problem (Republicans don't believe in any regulation ever--yes, he said that).

Finally, Barack Obama closed with a story about his father coming to America because he saw it as a land of opportunity. (He has gall mentioning his father who was a communist, and who took the "opportunity" to abandon baby Barack and his mother and head back to Kenya. But that aside.) He claimed that--here comes the down-on-America stuff--people around the world no longer see American that way. Of course, it only Barack and Michelle and their Amerika hating friends (like Jeremiah Wright and William Ayers) who don't see America that way. McCain should have used his final minute to draw attention to the continuing political goodness of this country and to the millions of people still clamoring to come here, yes, even from Muslim countries. Instead he repeated his commitment to help veterans. Obama pricked him on the issue and McCain feasted on the bait.

Despite what you hear about negative campaigning, Americans like a fighter. McCain needs to define his opponent for who he is and do so with a few solid, memorable blows of devastating wit. He has got it. He needs to use it. Otherwise, we will see the triumph of evil regimes abroad and painful lessons about government control at home.

Landing Safely in the New World of Finance

The financial crisis is very confusing, even to those in the industry, or so it seems given the variety of analyses we have seen. But I pass along what ever I think seems especially insightful (emphasis on seems).

First, what we have always known as "Wall Street" is no more. A Wall Street Journal editorial, "The End of Wall Street," Sept. 23, 2008) announces it.

And so, in a single week, the era of the independent investment bank has ended. Wall Street as we've known it for decades has ceased to exist. Six months ago there were five major investment banks. Two -- Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns -- have failed, Merrill Lynch is selling itself to Bank of America, and now the last two are becoming commercial banks.

What has replaced it? David Brooks calls it "The New Establishment" (New York Times, Sept. 22, 2008). He helps us understand it with a short historical retrospective on the old establishment and what intervened. The Paulson plan "is a pure establishment play."

[The Paulson Plan] would assign nearly unlimited authority to a small coterie of policy makers. It does not rely on any system of checks and balances, but on the wisdom and public spiritedness of those in charge. It offers succor to the investment banks that contributed to this mess and will burn through large piles of taxpayer money. But in exchange, it promises to restore confidence. Somebody, amid all the turmoil, will occupy the commanding heights. Somebody will have the power to absorb debt and establish stability.

Here are two different views of the Paulson bailout plan. Andy Kessler, a former hedge fund manager, says that "The Paulson Plan Will Make Money for Taxpayers" (Wall Street Journal, Sept. 25, 2008). He predicts a $1-2 trillion dollar windfall for the public treasury. The political reality of this is, however, that even if it is true, while the public would pay the bill up front for the $700 billion bailout, Congress would go on a drunken spending spree as the profits roll in. Net losers: generations of taxpayers.

In today's Journal, John Paulson, a New York money guy, argues that "The Public Deserves a Better Deal." Under what he calls the "Preferred Plan," because he thinks we should prefer it, we would "[i]nvest the $700 billion of taxpayer money in senior preferred stock of the troubled financial institutions that pose systemic risks." The Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac deal serves as a model, and it is also the deal Warren Buffett has worked out with Goldman Sacks.

He argues that the most important feature of this plan is that it protects taxpayers while stabilizing the system.

Shareholders had their dividends blocked and remain first in line to bear losses, as they should have been. Taxpayers came both first and last -- first to get paid back, as the new preferred stock is senior to all shareholders; and last in realizing losses, as common and other preferred equity would be extinguished before the taxpayers would be at risk."
This mechanism -- purchases of senior preferred stock with warrants in troubled institutions -- addresses the problems with the Treasury plan. The financial market is stabilized, companies get recapitalized, failures are avoided, debt securities are supported, and time is gained for illiquid assets to mature.
The institutions continue to function, their cost of funding will decline as equity capital increases, and innocent third parties like bank depositors, broker/dealer clients and insurance-policy holders are all protected. The only difference is that potential losses are kept with the shareholders where they belong.

I suspect that the answers are fairly obvious to anyone who is informed and public-spirited. Thus, I suspect that the wrangling and disagreement on Capitol Hill between Treasury and Congressional Democrats (Barney Frank et al.) has more to do with securing power and prosperity for themselves and their friends than with the public good.

We should beware of the establishment protecting itself and enriching itself at public expense. Given that Washington players are lucratively connected with them, voters must judge for themselves who is dealing honestly and who is snowing us.

Political Counsel for Soft-Hearted Evangelicals

A friend passed along this letter from an Evangelical Christian man whose politics are shifting leftward as he follows what he thinks are the practical implications of his faith.

He writes:

The biggest thing pushing me to Obama (or the Democratic Party as a whole) is a political paradigm shift I've had with regard to a solution to help me "love my enemy." I am willing for my taxes to go to help those less fortunate...those my church and other private organizations may not be able to reach. And while the Republican party tries really hard to protect life inside the womb, once you're out of the womb they could care less about you. Don't abort that baby born into a life of crime and poverty, but sure don't help him get out of that!

Well, where does one start? Vote Democrat, and kill the baby before he even has a chance? Barack Obama voted against a bill (3x!) that would protect babies born alive who were supposed to be killed by abortion. That IS a paradigm shift.

The Democratic approach is to treat people as though they were helpless children and do as much as possible for them. The Republican approach (when Republicans are true to their principles) is to treat people as adults and to help them help themselves. That is not saying, "You're on your own." Effective prosecution of crime (a Republican priority) and policies that promote broad prosperity through healthy free markets (oh, another Republican priority) will help that boy more than Democratic efforts to give him ever more entitlement programs, ensuring that he and the generations that follow him are reduced to being wards of the state. And where are the kids this confused brother describes? They are in cities the Democrats have controlled for the last 50 years.

The difference between the parties is the difference between liberty and paternalism. Liberty frees you to serve God; paternalism offers itself in place of God. The Biblically stated purpose of government is to "punish evil and praise what is good" (I Peter 2:14). That is to say, it is to secure the governed in their liberty so that they can live peaceful and quiet lives in godliness and holiness (I Tim. 2:2). It is to provide a secure environment so that they can go about their business providing for themselves and one another.

Having said that, even if it were the government's place to provide for people in that situation, Democrats want all power concentrated at the highest level, furthest away from the people where it is least responsive to the people and least responsible to them, instead of at the local and state levels. Democrats don't like the people getting in the way of the government "helping" them, for example when poor inner city parents want to be able to choose what school they use for educating their children. Foolish parents, thinking that they have a better understanding of what’s best for their children than the wise Democrats in the government school system.

Lastly, if this brother wants to spend his money helping specifically situated people in specific ways, there are private organizations to which he can give his money (whose effectiveness he vastly underestimates). What he should not do is use the coercive power of government to force others to make the same judgments.

(Never mind the fact that what he and those organizations do is charity, i.e., loving service perhaps even in Jesus’ name, whereas what the government does is entitlement. On that point, he must read how entitlements morally corrupt both the recipients and those who otherwise would be givers in Tocqueville’s "Memoir On Pauperism."* While he’s at it, he should read Tocqueville’s Speech on the Right to Work. I know of nothing better than these two writings to cure a kind-hearted man of his socialist confusions.)

*www.civitas.org.uk/pdf/Tocqueville_rr2.pdf (This links to a pdf file, and does not work directly from the blog.)

Reading List for Friday's Debate

The first of the three presidential debates for 2008 is on Friday in Mississippi. So in addition to everything Harold and I have written on this blog (see the tags "McCain," "John McCain," and "Barack Obama" or just go to "2008 election" and "2008 primaries"), here is a reading list. Get to it. There'll be a quiz on Monday. (No. Sorry. What was I thinking?)


Investor's Business Daily has a series of essays they entitled, "The Audacity of Socialism." Harold Kildow deals with it below in "Nightmare Scenario."

Barack Obama has styled himself a centrist, but does his record support that claim? In this series, we examine Senator Obama's past, his voting record and the people who've served as his advisers and mentors over the years. We'll show how the facts of Obama's actions and associations reveal a far more left-leaning tilt to his background — and to his politics.

We've seen many comparisons between Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama, but Christopher Hitchens in Slate gives us, "Is Obama Another Dukakis: Why Is Obama So Vapid, Hesitant and Gutless?"

By the end of that grueling campaign season, a lot of us had got the idea that Dukakis actually wanted to lose—or was at the very least scared of winning. Why do I sometimes get the same idea about Obama? To put it a touch more precisely, what I suspect in his case is that he had no idea of winning this time around. He was running in Iowa and New Hampshire to seed the ground for 2012, not 2008, and then the enthusiasm of his supporters (and the weird coincidence of a strong John Edwards showing in Iowa) put him at the front of the pack. Yet, having suddenly got the leadership position, he hadn't the faintest idea what to do with it or what to do about it.

Stanley Kurtz at the Ethics and Public Policy Center is finally able to share with us what he found digging through those papers that Obama's friends worked so hard to prevent him seeing. Read "Obama and Ayers Pushed Radicalism on Schools" in today's Wall Street Journal.

Despite having authored two autobiographies, Barack Obama has never written about his most important executive experience. From 1995 to 1999, he led an education foundation called the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC), and remained on the board until 2001. The group poured more than $100 million into the hands of community organizers and radical education activists.

The CAC was the brainchild of Bill Ayers, a founder of the Weather Underground in the 1960s. Among other feats, Mr. Ayers and his cohorts bombed the Pentagon, and he has never expressed regret for his actions. Barack Obama's first run for the Illinois State Senate was launched at a 1995 gathering at Mr. Ayers's home.

On the McCain side, in "McCain Loses His Head," George Will wonders if John McCain is temperamentally fit for the presidency.

It is arguable that, because of his inexperience, Obama is not ready for the presidency. It is arguable that McCain, because of his boiling moralism and bottomless reservoir of certitudes, is not suited to the presidency. Unreadiness can be corrected, although perhaps at great cost, by experience. Can a dismaying temperament be fixed?

John Podhoretz at Commentary joins in drawing attention to McCain's combustible character, and in that way his unpredictable behavior, in "McCain's Challenge."

Substantively, this has been the worst week of John McCain’s campaign — and I mean since its beginning, in early 2007. With a perfect argument to make on his own behalf — that he saw the problems with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and called them out in 2005 while others were still angling for their largesse, and that therefore he possesses the experience and demonstrated the kind of leadership and insight that are required for the presidency — he instead flailed about. Calling for the firing of Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Chris Cox? Right there, in that act, we got a glimpse of why senators so often make bad presidential candidates. From time immemorial, senators haughtily acts as though the dismissal of executive branch officials is a form of policymaking when it is almost always the opposite — an act of scapegoating.

Harold Kildow wrote when he drew my attention to this short article, "We could be one election away from a slide into fascism...and only a maverick senator standing in the way. Or maybe he'll help usher it in. That's the problem with mavericks--you never know what you're going to get. "

Nightmare Scenario

Try this for the strangest outcome to the strangest campaign (possibly) in our great Republic's history:

On Nov. 5, the presidential election winds up in a electoral-college tie, 269-269, the Democrat-controlled House picks Sen. Barack Obama as president, but the Senate, with former Democrat Joe Lieberman voting with Republicans, deadlocks at 50-50, so Vice President Dick Cheney steps in to break the tie to make Republican Sarah Palin his successor.
"Wow," said longtime presidential historian Stephen Hess. "Wow, that would be amazing, wouldn't it?"

The piece argues this tie vote scenario, replicating the vicious election of 1800, is more likely than it seems. And it would kind of fit in with what we've already witnessed, wouldn't it?

John Fund, with his book on election fraud, has been talking about "election month" versus election day for some time now, pointing to the army in wing tips lined up by both sides to contest outcomes all over the country, should the need arise. We move closer and closer to banana republic territory as the left increasingly gives expression to it fascistic tendencies to lie, bully, and manipulate. ACORN and its members are already on court dockets across the country for jamming up county election commissions with phoney voter registrations in this year's election--a typical Saul Alinsky tactic designed to further frustration, resentment, and anger among the general population who will not blame the agitators, but the officials, for delays and incompetence.

"By any means necessary" and "the worse the better" are the two guiding dicta of the Saul Alinsky Left, the familiar spirit of the Weather Underground and Students for Democratic Action. Oh, and the topic for Hillary Clinton's college thesis.



Why the picture of Bill Ayers with this post? He's another Alinsky acolyte, ally and mentor of Barack Obama, willing to do and say anything, including terrorist bombing campaigns. Look at him defiantly trampling the flag. This will be the mindset of an Obama administration. Are you questioning his patriotism?

The Flatlined Mainlined Churches

Joseph Bottum at First Things has been reflecting on what the demise of the Protestant mainline churches has meant for American political life ("The Death of Protestant America"). Describing America as a Christian nation may scare people but it is an unavoidable fact that America's Christianity has been, in particular its Protestant Christianity, has been an indispensable element of the three legged stool that has been the formula for America's liberty and stability: democracy, capitalism and Protestant Christian religion.

The death of the Mainline is the central historical fact of our time: the event that distinguishes the past several decades from every other ­period in American history. Almost every one of our current political and cultural oddities, our contradictions and obscurities, derives from this fact: The Mainline has lost the capacity to set, or even significantly influence, the national vocabulary or the national self-understanding.

I found this last statement especially interesting. "The Mainline has lost the capacity to set, or even significantly influence, the national vocabulary or the national self-understanding." He has in mind the large (but shrinking), theologically liberal denominations that left the authority of Scripture for the certainty of science, and left spiritual salvation for social enlightenment--the Episcopal Church, the Presbyterian Church (USA), the United Methodist Church, the United Church of Christ, the American Baptists, the Congregational churches in New England, and such.

Of course, this invites a comparison with those other Protestants, the Evangelicals, whose churches are growing in numbers and who continue to influence American culture (though they are notoriously influenced in turn) and American politics. Consider the relative influence of Evangelicals and the Mainlines in the GOP and the Democratic Party, respectively.

Evangelicals generally vote Republican and the Mainlines, insofar as they are theologically liberal, vote Democratic. Yet, while the Evangelicals are an important constituency in the republican coalition, Mainline Protestants receive no mention in political discussion and go entirely unnoticed in the Democratic Party. Whereas the Evangelical presence in the GOP has lead to explicitly Christian approaches to Christian policy concerns, the Mainline presence in the Democratic Party has recognizable influence. The Mainlines don't actually bring concerns to the Democratic Party. They see that the party shares their concerns and flock to it.

And it is remarkable that the Democratic Party no more religious as a result of Mainline Protestant involvement. Indeed, they are a notoriously anti-religious party. The reason for this is that the Mainlines get their moral agenda from the same secular source as the Democratic Party does. After all, when we say "theologically liberal," liberal means departing (or set at "liberty") from the authority of Scripture. So where do they depart to? Rather than the thoughts of God, they turn to the thoughts of men, in particular to secular cultural and philosophical sources, the same sources that inform the rest of the American political left. Though conservative Evangelicals are often co-opted by secular American political conservatism, the Biblical perspective they bring is always there with the potential to challenge themselves and their party. The Mainlines, on the other hand, have nothing to challenge the left. Having abandoned Scripture, all that remains for them are the philosophical tenets they share with their leftist political community. They bring neither salt nor light.

The religious parallel between the right and left in American politics is not that between the Evangelicals and the Mainlines. The religious group in the Democratic Party that corresponds with the Evangelicals in the GOP is the environmentalists. And of course the Mainlines, in lieu of a Biblical agenda and having seen the god of the social gospel fail (liberal progressivism and socialism), has adopted that secular religion as their own.

The Mainline has flatlined.

The Financial Crisis And What To Do About It

Conrad Black tells us what brought us to this national financial crisis and tells us what to do about it. ("Lessons to Learn From Wall Street's Week of No Return," National Post, September 20, 2008.)

Broadly, the principal official financial policy errors in the United States over the last 15 years or so (during which time there has been minimal inflation and unemployment, and nearly 30-million net new jobs created), have been:

• Nothing has been done in U.S. tax policy to discourage excessive debt accumulation by the American public, which has spent more than it has earned for years, most of it on non-durable goods, and much of it imported. This has created terrible financial and psychological vulnerability throughout the population.

• Nothing has been done to reduce the back-breaking importation of oil, which has grossly raised energy costs, fueled inflation, enriched unfriendly states such as Russia, Iran and Venezuela, and financed their mischief, and burdened the United States with about half of its $800-billion annual current account deficit.

• Successive U.S. administrations of both parties have sat, inert as suet puddings, while China has piled up a $265-billion annual trade surplus with the United States.

• The deliberate reduction in the value of the U.S. dollar came too late to save manufacturing jobs and went on too long to improve the real buying power of American consumers. Meanwhile, Washington’s low-interest-rate policy was too deep and prolonged, and encouraged compulsive spending and expansion, and excessive borrowing and speculation, especially in housing.

Beyond that, the United States and other countries have fallen too far into the fool’s paradise of the service economy. The U.S. GDP of $13-trillion is about half composed of worthless and non-productive effort, which yet engages the efforts of a large number of very skilled people. A trillion dollars annually goes into legal expenses to feed the absurdly litigious society and state prosecutocracy. Another great fortune goes to insane insurance costs on medical lawsuits, and superfluous consulting fees -- which mainly substitute for what management should be doing, and provide a lightning rod to shelter inept management from shareholder wrath.

His three step recommendation for fixing the situation is as follows. Go to the story itself for fuller details.

In the first step, the U.S. government should raise spending (and bailing out financial institutions will ensure that), increase the money supply, cut the discount rate, and reduce taxes, and not with Barack Obama’s shell game of “refundable tax credits,” which is only one step short of the late Montreal mayor Jean Drapeau’s famous “voluntary tax.”

The second step should unfold over the longer term, as the U.S. incentivizes savings, starts to seriously reduce energy imports, follows market forces in a redistribution of some effort from service to productive or research areas, and regains or exploits more of its sophisticated manufacturing potential.

The third step is creating the right combination of public-sector vigilance to prevent self-destructive financial excess, and private-sector fermentation, without regulators substituting themselves for commercially accomplished people.

Politically, he sees McCain as more likely to pursue a recovery agenda as opposed to a deepen-us-into-terrible-depression agenda. "Who would be the best for the task? Both candidates were pretty unconvincing last week. But I still believe that a tax-cutting ex-combat pilot is a better bet than a soak-the-rich ex-social worker."

Conrad Black, born and educated in Canada but now a British citizen and member of the House of Lords, is a former media mogul, author of biographies of Maurice Duplessis, Franklin Roosevelt, and Richard Nixon.

A Tight Battle For Reform Mantle

A New York Times/CBS News poll (consider the source?) indicates that registered voters (not necessarily likely voters) view Barack Obama as far more likely to bring change to Washington than John McCain. Given the tightness of the race, which is reportedly tied again, and the supposed importance of this "change" issue, this seems counter-intuitive.

So McCain's remarks today in Cedar Rapids are important. They seem devastating. Expect to hear more about these connections between Obama, this economic crisis, and those who brought it upon us.

McCain's remarks in Cedar Rapids, Iowa:

I’m happy to be introduced by Governor Palin, but I can’t wait until I introduce her to Washington. Let me offer an advance warning to the big spending, greedy, do nothing, me first, country second crowd in Washington and on Wall Street: change is coming.
We need reform in Washington and on Wall Street. The financial markets are in crisis. Times are tough. Enormous strain is being put on working families and individuals in America. I know that the events unfolding can be difficult to understand for many Americans. The dominos that we have seen fall this week began with the corruption and manipulation of our home loan system. The reason this crisis started was the abuses that took place within our home loan agencies, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and within our home loan system.
Two years ago I warned this Administration and Congress that regulations for our home loan agencies, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, needed to be fixed…
But nothing was done.
Senator Obama talks a tough game on the financial markets but the facts tell a different story. He took more money from Fannie and Freddie than any Senator but the Democratic chairman of the committee that regulates them. He put Fannie Mae’s CEO who helped create this disaster in charge of finding his Vice President. Fannie’s former General Counsel is a senior advisor to his campaign. Whose side do you think he is on? When I pushed legislation to reform Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Senator Obama was silent. He didn’t lift a hand to avert this crisis. While the leaders of Fannie and Freddie were lining the pockets of his campaign, they were sowing the seeds of the financial crisis we see today and enriching themselves with millions of dollars in payments. That’s not change, that’s what’s broken in Washington.
There was no transparency into the books of Wall Street banks. Banks and brokers took on huge amounts of debt and they hid the riskiest investments. Mismanagement and greed became the operating standard while regulators were asleep at the switch.
The primary regulator of Wall Street, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) kept in place trading rules that let speculators and hedge funds turn our markets into a casino. They allowed naked short selling — which simply means that you can sell stock without ever owning it. They eliminated last year the uptick rule that has protected investors for 70 years. Speculators pounded the shares of even good companies into the ground.
The Chairman of the SEC serves at the appointment of the President and has betrayed the public’s trust. If I were President today, I would fire him.
We cannot wait any longer for more failures in our financial system. Structures like the resolution trust corporation that dealt with the failed savings and loan industry were designed to clean up the system and worked. Today we need a plan that doesn’t wait until the system fails. I am calling for the creation of the mortgage and financial institutions trust – the MFI. The priorities of this trust will be to work with the private sector and regulators to identify institutions that are weak and take remedies to strengthen them before they become insolvent. For troubled institutions this will provide an orderly process through which to identify bad loans and eventually sell them.
This will get the treasury and other financial regulatory authorities in a proactive position instead of reacting in a crisis mode to one situation after the other. The MFI will enhance investor and market confidence, benefit sound financial institutions, assist troubled institutions and protect our financial system, while minimizing taxpayer exposure. Tomorrow I will be talking in greater detail about the crisis facing our markets and what I will do as President to fix this crisis and get our economy moving again.
Senator Obama has never made the kind tough reform we need today. His idea of reform is what his party leaders in Congress order him to do. We tried for bipartisan ethics reform and he walked away from it because his bosses didn’t want real change. I know how to make the change that Senator Obama and this Congress is afraid of. I’ve fought both parties to shake up up Washington and I’m going to do it as President.
Those same Congressional leaders who give Senator Obama his marching orders are now saying that this mess isn’t their fault and they aren’t going to take any action on this crisis until after the election. Senator Obama’s own advisers are saying that crisis will benefit him politically. My friends, that is the kind of me-first, country-second politics that are broken in Washington. My opponent sees an economic crisis as a political opportunity instead of a time to lead. Senator Obama isn’t change, he’s part of the problem with Washington.
When AIG was bailed out, I didn’t like it, but I understood it needed to be done to protect hard working Americans with insurance policies and annuities. Senator Obama didn’t take a position. On the biggest issue of the day, he didn’t know what to think. He may not realize it, but you don’t get to vote present as President of the United States.
While Senator Obama and Congressional leaders don’t know what to think about the current crisis, we know what their plans are for the economy. Today Senator Obama’s running mate said that raising taxes is patriotic. Raising taxes in a tough economy isn’t patriotic. It’s not a badge of honor. It’s just dumb policy. The billions in tax increases that Senator Obama is proposing would kill even more jobs during tough economic times. I’m not going to let that happen.
I have seen tough times before. I know how to shake-up Wall Street and Washington. I will get this economy moving. I will lead us through this crisis by fighting for you, and when I am President we will be stronger than ever before.