Bent Notes

Have you noticed the meme being puked on command by the Chicago Marxist’s camp all day today whenever asked about the Ayers connection?  It’s instantly “I think the American people want to talk about the big issues, whether they’ll be able to keep their jobs and houses and retirement accounts.”

Th paraphrase the Chicago Marxist, a leader must be able to focus on a few things at a time.  We can examine his freedom-hating career and life and still obliterate his freedom-hating position on what to do about our current economic situation.

He was buds with Ayers and knew about his past. 

There, that one’s dealt with. 

 His tax hikes on capital gains, corporate earnings and inheritance - and let’s not forget the incomes of people making over $250,000 - would be disastrous. 

And the economic front involves his connections as well.  Frankin Raines, Jim Johnson, ACORN’s bank fairs that were staged to intimidate lending institutions to grant mortgages to unqualified borrowers.

There, that one’s dealt with.

At least here.  Let’s just hope The Maverick gets both messages across this evening.  

To get at documentation about fraudulent voter registration.

 Raila Odinga

Joyce Foundation

Frank Marshall Davis

Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals”

Jeremiah Wright

Bill Ayers

Tony Rezko

ACORN

Chicago Annenberg Challenge

“punished with a baby”

when life begins “above my pay grade”

“America is downright mean”

no pride in America until BHO winning primaries

Franklin Raines

Jim Johnson

unconditional talks with rogue-state dictators

socialist health care plan paid for by seizing the assets of the most successful Americans

“truth squad” of Missouri sheriffs and prosecutors

Global Poverty Initiative (more seizing of Americans’ assets to send to failed Third-World dictatorships)

scrapping the secret ballot in union elections

capital gains tax increase

corporate income tax increase

knowing how unwed teen mothers, homeless people and gay people feel as main criterion for a good federal judge

 The only real problem for me, and all my homies here at BN, being that our freedom, and this Western civilization that has made our lives so liveable, goes down the tubes if you don’t get a clue, and pronto.

 This s— of not letting your campaign bring up Rev. Wright is not just suicidal but genocidal.

You thought that he-will-change-the-world video featuring the real young kids was bad, check this out.

One commenter at Free Republic, one of the myriad sites where this is being seen and discussed, ho-hummed it, saying that one of these days these guys will come across The Next Big Thing, or, more likely, discover girls, and that will be that.  I look at the level of discipline going on here and I see something else.

Shari Pine, a NYC-based singer-songwriter whose early CD I reviewed for Indie-music.com some years back, and with whom I’ve stayed in touch, has a new CD out.  This is the video of the title track, “The Painter.”

A surprise-filled afternoon in Houston.  A blown Indy lead, a deficit that looked insurmountable by the beginning of the fourth quarter, and then the climb back, culminating in the Payton Manning-to-Reggie Wayne air attack with 1:54 left to go.  And another interception after that, with less than a minute left.

That’s the way this team does it.

1.) This constant use of the term “middle class” by Biden and the Chicago Marxist.  It’s being employed to plant the notion of a zero-sum game in voters’ minds, as if tax “breaks” for corporations or “the wealthy” somehow somehow deprive “ordinary” Americans of income.  Pretty easy to demolish, really.  Point out that some 40 percent of U.S. households don’t pay any taxes, and the top 10 percent of earners pay well over 50 percent of the nation’s taxes.  Then point out that the Chicago Marxist is being disingenuous to the point of intelligence-insulting with his condemnation of “tax breaks” (grrrrr, there’s that term again; I’ll get back to that one shortly) for corporations that “ship jobs overseas.”  They do so PRECISELY BECAUSE THEY FIND A MORE FAVORABLE TAX ENVIRONMENT IN SOME OTHER COUNTRY.  The whole thing can be condensed to a soundbite-sized rebuttal: No one in this country - no individual or business - needs to pay once cent more in taxes.

2.) The Chicago Marxist’s health-care proposal.  As with all FHer schemes, there are two parts to this one: the Santa Claus part, and the how-we’ll-pay-for-it part.  Here’s how you nuke this one: the Santa Claus part involves a narrowing of the individual’s range of choices, and the second part involves naked wealth redistribution.  (See item one and the theft of the money of those with incomes over $250,000.)  That’s really as wonky as you need to get.  Again, this one can be condensed to a soundbite that tells the whole story: SENATOR OBAMA, IT’S NOT YOUR MONEY.

Oh, yeah, and demolish this business about tax “breaks.”  Once again, it’s an attempt to get voters to think that high tax rates for a particular group were some kind of baseline, and that any subsequent lowering of that was some kind of deviation, a momentary respite because the government, benevolent entity that it is, wanted to give them a leg up for a little while, and that now it’s time for such a group to return to “patriotic” levels of coughing up its money.

The American people aren’t idiots.  If this stuff were expalined to them exactly like this, they’d see what was really going on.

. . . no longer stands for “mainstream,” but rather “Marxist Suck-up.”

Exhibit A is Douglass Daniel’s AP “analysis” of Sarah Palin’s remarks referenced in the last post.  In the first paragraph, he used the term “racially tinged,” and I thought, Huh?  So I read down a few more graphs, to where he says that, Palin and the McCain campaign run the risk of her “not the way we see America” comment being perceived as racist, “whether it was meant that way or not.”

Well, s—!  No one was going to see it that way UNTIL YOU ENGAGED IN THIS VULGAR RACE-BAITING, YOU STINKING TOTALITARIAN CHUNK OF DOG VOMIT!

Then there’s Tom Brokaw’s characterization of Bill Ayers as having evolved from a “radical” into an “educational reformer.”

When I first heard Sean Hannity declare that 2008 marked the death of the profession of journalism, I thought it was a bit overheated, a purple moment of talk-show hyperbole.

No, he is spot-on.

Well, Barracuda, you’re definitely doing what I said you needed to do in the last post.

Beautiful.  Magnificent. Marvelous.

“We gotta start telling the electorate what the other side represents.”

I’ve felt, since I saw her debut as veep candidate in Dayton, that it wasn’t the gosh-darn factor, the record of leadership in Alaska, or the strong marriage and big family that was what mainly made her a formidable asset.  I could just see that, within that snappy, attractive package was someone capable of waging war.

As I’ve said for months here at BN, you don’t go up against the Freedom Haters with anything less than a war mentality.  Even a fourth-generation military man like McCain doesn’t understand that.  Left to his own devices, he’d roll over for his own public, nationally broadcast disemboweling.

Fortunately, he has Barracuda now to be fierce for him, and for us.

Pour it on, Governor. Hourly, for the next thirty days.

It appears that if I’d been more objective last evening, I’d have been less dismal.  The general consensus among our people is that Sarah rocked.  Michelle Malkin, Mike Gallagher, Fred Barnes, the editors at National Review all see it that way.

In a post at NRO’s The Corner, Mark Levin explains her unfortunate populist excursions by saying that she can’t engage in obvious departures from the positions of the guy at the top of the ticket.  Fair enough.  They still made, and make, me cringe.  And part of it may be my persnickitiness about style.  I’m more of a weigh-the-issues-of-the-day-against-the-bullet-points-of-core-principles kind of guy, and not so much given to corny images of families huddled around kitchen tables, but that may just be me.

Upon, reflection, though, I do lean a little closer to the sunniness I’m encountering this morning.  She was indeed surprisingly cogent on foreign policy, the area in which expectations had been the lowest.

The big question is whether her renewed empowerment is enough to pull the ticket through.  There are still a number of factors tugging the other, grimmer way: the unlikeliness of a quick fix to the financail crisis, even if both houses of Congress come together on a bailout yet this week, dismal auto-sales figures - and, of course, embarrassing mediocrity at the top of the GOP ticket.

So, Barracuda, my status as a believer is back at full strength.  Let’s see the heaviest artillery imaginable 24/7 all month.  It looks like it’s up to you.

She’s held her own on some key topics, but overall, it strikes me as less than what is needed.  Most dispiriting of all is the statements that give me the sense that the McCain people have successfully infected her with Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome.  Crud about how regulations are good.  Crud about “greed.”  Stuff about oil companies and “tax breaks,” whatever the hell those are (see Robert Novak’s Townhall column today, “What Is A Loophole?”).

Ironically, the other topic besides energy on which she’s doing best is foreign policy.  Good responses on Iran, Iraq, Pakistan.

I’m trying not to scare the hell out of my wife with my roaring and screaming whenever that stool sample Joe Biden opens his mouth.

Bottom line as of 10:08: This isn’t sufficient.  One year from now: block-by-block spy committees and re-education camps.  Two years from now: incinerated cities.

I suppose IQ-wise, Christopher Hill is a smart enough guy, but he’s currently behaving like an idiot.  Give it up, guy.  This regime will always play us for fools.

Gwen Ifill, the moderator of Thursday’s VP debate, is hardly an objective journalist.

More than one person has accused my characterization of Democrats as Freedom-Haters as being over the top and unproductive.  It’s cost me some BN readers and I think even a friendship or two.

Because being liked is rather important to me, I’ve frequently examined my employment of this term, asking myself, “Oh, Jeez, have I burned some bridges I’m going to regret?”  I’ve looked back over the last seventy years of American history, made a point of seeing what FDR and Truman and JFK did right, reminded myself that the party of Jefferson has had in its ranks admirable people of principle - Scoop Jackson, Zell Miller, Joe Lieberman - figures who, however misguided on economic policy, understood what American exceptionalism was all about, as well as the spiritual nature of the foundation of the American experiment.  In short, I’ve wanted to cling to some shred of possibility that the modern Democratic party was really just one of the two main American political organizations, the one whose overall orientation I agreed with less of the time than that of the other, but which was nevertheless operating out of good faith.  I wanted to see it as still grown-up, embracing trustworthiness, sanity, bedrock love for America and freedom.  I wanted it to be a legitimate force in modern society.

This year, more than the last twenty-five, has absolutely squelched the last ounce of hope against hope within me.  There is no other conclusion but that the modern Democratic party is indeed the repository of Freedom-Hatred.

When this party can come up with a piece of social engineering like the Community Reinvestment Act (instituted under the Jew-hating utter failure Jimmy Carter) and turn over its implementation to a gang of thugs and intimidation artists like ACORN, with its bank fairs and voeter-registration fraud, and say, as Barney Frank and Maxine Waters did four years ago that they saw no problems with the viability of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, and then have the nerve, when the whole thing leads to a financial crisis like our present one, to try and place the blame on “right-wing ideology” and an “unsupervised” free market, we are witnessing a chilling level of deception indeed.

When the monolithically Democrat-voting MSM does nothing to put together the whole picture conveyed by Barack Obama’s trail of thuggery - the attempt to have Missouri law-enforcement silence free speech, the phone-bank flooding of the Chicago radio station on which Stanley Kurtz and David Freddoso appeared as guests, clear back to his first run for the Illinois State Senate in 1996, when he directed his volunteers to discredit the legality of incumbent Alice Palmer’s nominating petitions, forcing her off the ballot - the result is that this affable and good-looking Stalinist is positioned with a five-point lead in the race for U.S. president five weeks from election day.

When the Speaker of the House goes to Syria to undermine America’s objectives in the mideast, when the Senate Majority Leader declares a war lost that the U.S. is now on the verge of winning and we are so deadened to evil that we will return them to their posts for another term, we have arrived at a foul scenario indeed.

Someone in the McCain campaign must address the moral level of what’s going on.  We are not dealing with just another bunch of folks who see things a little differently.

At the very least, if McCain can’t find something to say about Obama’s Stalinism, the urgency of low taxes, dismantling Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae and winning a decisive victory in the current world war, he needs to shut his stinking mouth about bipartisanship.

Claudia Rosett in Forbes on how six-way-talk diplomacy with North Korea has brought us to the same damn juncture every earlier attempt at acting like we were dealing with reasonable, decent human beings did.  The unique aspect of this time around is that rogue regimes with nuclear ambitions - and there’s one regime in particular that is very close to having nukes - have every reason to feel encouraged by the precedent set.

None of that “affordable-housing” nonsense that would fill the coffers of ACORN ande La Raza, and no mark-to-market accounting.  Ditto judges being able to arbitrarily adjust mortgages.  Ditto some union heavy-handedness.

So now we know what the market will be reacting to at the opening bell tomorrow morning.  What remains to be seen is how it will react.

Barack Obama, Stalinist thug.  Today, the state of Missouri, tomorrow the entire nation.

As of this writing, congressional leaders of both parties, both presidential candidates, and economic advisors are meeting in Washington to discuss the bailout plan W outlined in last night’s address to the nation.

The idea is that it will restore the financial system’s health quickly enough that the American taxpayer will realize a return on its outlay of $700 billion.  Sounds good, but also quite iffy.

It doesn’t look like a purely free-market solution to this is in the offing, since this catastrophe has its roots in a fuzzy melding of the public and private sectors.  That said, I hope and pray there will be a camp within the assemblage meeting with W that will press for the way forward that comes the very closest possible to such a plan.

As every grown-up knows, the other side of the freedom coin is responsibility.  Underneath the layers of bundled mortgages and deals and cleverly wrought instruments for growing wealth and government guarantees against failure lie actual exchanges of money for for promises to pay it back at a given interest rate.  Someone said, “Yes, I’ll loan you this amount of money on terms involving this amount of time for paying it back at this rate of return,” and someone else saying, “Okay, is this the dotted line where I sign?”  If either of them thought it unlikely that he or his organization could make good on what they were freely obligating themselves to, they’re not particularly wise individuals, are they?

Now, compound that by all the subsequent operators who saw home prices rising and said, “Hey, man, even if a lot of these loans are risky, bundling them together in this favorable market is a cool way to make some cheddar!”  We have to presume that the folks on this level understood the degree of risk in what they were doing as well.  Don’t we?

It looks to me like our culture’s zeal for ever-more slickly designed gizmos, with ever-more bells and whistles - think iphones and Blackberries and voice-activated GPS devices - permeated the financial world.  The main difference, it seems to me, is that microchips and plastic and steel and aluminum aren’t inherently risky substances.  You combine them into this product or that, and you can rely on them to do their thing as what they are.  Mortgages and other loans, in contrast, may, shall we say, decay over time.  They may fall prey to slow payment or even default.  This makes designing super-fancy financial products out of them kind of a shaky proposition.

So what I hope gets trumpeted loudly at the gathering in Washington today is this:  Let’s determine to the best of our ability who is responsible for each of the various aspects of this mess and hold them accountable as much as possible and minimize the burden to the American taxpayer, who needs to see his or her overall burden reduced anyway, as much as possible and as soon as possible.  Free people keeping their own hard-earned money is the real key to moving pst this perilous moment.

Jerome Schmitt at The American Thinker has a great piece on MIT Meteorology Professor Richard S. Lindzen’s report “Cilmate Science: Is it currently designed to answer questions?” and Schmitt’s own experience with the relationship between the doling outof grant money and the necessity of coming to the “correct” conclusions about worldwide climate.

The upshot is that Al Gore and his minions, with degrees in areas like “government” rather than any weather-related science, have strong-armed their way into postions of arbitration, distorting the amassing of actual knowledge of how our atmosphere really works.