Squidoo is giving away money to charity. The company has $80,000 to give away and they're letting people vote on what charities to give the money to.

Please scroll down and choose "Soldier's Angels." Each click = $2.

If you haven't heard about them before, check out Soldier's Angels and what they try to do. It's a good cause.

(Thanks to Rusty Shackleford for pointing this out).

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 09:15 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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We previously debunked this smear campaign here, here and here, but it is nice to now have Governor Palin on the record in her own words.

Flush another steaming, stinking, Associated Press-carried, Democratic Party-complicit, liberal-blogosphere- astroturfed lie down the toilet:

The entire notion of making a victim of a crime pay for anything is crazy. I do not believe, nor have I ever believed, that rape victims should have to pay for an evidence-gathering test. As governor, I worked in a variety of ways to tackle the problem of sexual assault and rape, including making domestic violence a priority of my administration.

A small liberal blog started the rumor, apparently after two Democratic Party researchers scoured the archives of the Frontiersman for dirt, and came up with an ambiguous story from 2000, that quickly bounced to an muckraking liberal blog.

Top Alaskan Democrats for Obama Tony Knowles (whom Palin beat in the governor's race) and Eric Croft, the sponsor of the law HB 270, both claimed in a recent press conference by Democrats falsely claimed the law was passed because of Wasilla's Police charged victims.

That is a demonstrable, bald-faced, and proven lie.

Read the committee minutes for yourself.

Palin, Fannon, and Wasilla are never mentioned.

Three expert witnesses testified that they knew of no police agencies in Alaska that billed victims. The law was needed because hospitals occasionally exercised bad judgment and billed victims.

The media and Democratic Party should be ashamed.

Update: The New York Times-owned Boston Globe is still attempting to carry on with the smear. Perhaps you should register for a free account and let them know what you think about their editorial standards--or lack thereof.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 08:54 PM | Comments (51) | Add Comment
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Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 02:52 PM | Comments (11) | Add Comment
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Big Brother Approved! (not any more. The original video has been pulled. Enjoy this one while you can).

I'll let Kim Priestap delve into just how creepy and reminiscent of the concerts by kids in totalitarian states this is, and focus on those behind it.

While described as a grassroots effort, Kathy Sawada, who posted the video and can been seen directing the children in the video, is a bit more than just an enthusiastic music teacher you might find in your average public school.

Sawada is a teacher at an elite and expensive Colburn School of Performing Arts in Los Angeles as part of the Piano faculty. Colburn just built a $120 million 12-story high-rise addition for their musicians.

Does a concert-quality musician in an elite school in the middle of the most ego-centric city in the United States count as a "grassroots" effort?

Here's a partial list of those who helped produce this "grassroots" effort:

• Jeff Zucker — American television executive, and President & CEO of NBC Universal Gaffer, Chief Lighting Technician in Boogie Nights.
• Post-producer (former choreographer?) Holly Shiffer.
• Motion picture camera operator/steadicam specialist Peter Rosenfeld (appropriately enough, worked in Yes Man, a movie about " a guy challenges himself to say 'yes' to everything for an entire year."
• Darin Moran, another motion picture industry professional, who just finished filming — how appropriate — Land of the Lost.
• Andy Blumenthal, Hollywood film editor.

Grassroots all the way, baby

In Hollywoodland, anything is possible.

Update: The wrong entertainment industry Obamaphile named Jeff Zucker was originally credited above. Now corrected.

Update: Kindernacht seems to have been an embarrassment, so the original video has been pulled. IT has been replaced above by a copy... while it lasts.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 11:25 AM | Comments (61) | Add Comment
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I still don't know a great deal more about economics than I did last week, and guess what: neither do you.

That hasn't stopped our fellow Americans from assaulting the Congressional switchboards over our current economic crisis, assuring that the bailout bill in the House of Representatives failed yesterday.

It wasn't even especially close, falling 207 for and 226 against it. Down party lines, Democrats voted for it 141-94, and Republicans against it 66-132.

Yes, more Democrats opposed it (94) that Republicans voted for it (66).

Nancy Pelosi could have passed this bill simply whipping Democratic votes into line, but she didn't. The conventional wisdom is that Democrats up for re-election voted against the bill in order to placate angry constituents that didn't want to be stuck with a $700 billion bailout. Speaker Pelosi, no doubt, didn't want the blame if there was backlash over the bill, and pulled a "Sir Robin, " and allowed her fellow Democrats to "bravely run away."

This doesn't let Congressional Republicans off the hook.

Many were hearing the same sort of howling from their constituents (and conservative bloggers) to kill the bill, and so they did. Later blaming Pelosi for her heated partisan rhetoric as a convenient excuse for the lack of Republican support was just as bad as Pelosi's idiotic and nonsensical rant assigning blame for the meltdown on the Bush Administration when the problems began during the Clinton Administration and were enabled by Congress.

Glass houses, Madame Speaker.

And so the bill died.

We're now headed into a sizable recession, and the sad fact is that most of us don't yet grasp what it means. The same people who have been crying out to their Congressmen and Senators to "kill the bill" on ideological grounds will quickly change course once that ideology causes their company to shut down, their small businesses to fail, and their life's savings to evaporate.

And sadly, it seemed that as a nation, we're poised to elect a President who will only make matters worse.

If anything was under-reported about the first McCain-Obama debate, it was the fact Barack Obama couldn't come up with a single program or entitlement he would cut to rein in the cost of government to our faltering economy, and in fact, he was pitching massive new outlays. He was also insisting that he could cut taxes for 95% of Americans, while making up the difference by soaking the rich and corporations.

The nasty, dirty truth is that the pending recession has made Obama's entire stated Peter Principle platform unobtainable.

He cannot expect to run the existing government we have by cutting personal income taxes for 95% of Americans. That claim always an overt fiction to begin with, as nearly one-third of Americans already pay no taxes:

One of the biggest challenges facing both John McCain and Barack Obama in their commitment to provide tax relief to working-class Americans is the simple fact that millions of them already pay no personal income taxes.

According to the most recent IRS statistics for 2006, some 45.6 million tax filers—one-third of all filers—have no tax liability after taking their credits and deductions. For good or ill, this is a dramatic 57 percent increase since 2000 in the number of Americans who pay no personal income taxes.

If Obama truly cut income taxes for the 95% of individuals currently paying taxes—which is what he means to imply with his campaign speeches— the government of the United States would simply shut down. Period. There would not be enough money coming into the Treasury to make the federal payroll and write checks to those in various entitlement programs.

Social Security, Medicare, etc... simply gone.

Granted, they're bound to fail anyway within my lifetime because they are unsustainable in any form remotely similar to what they already are, and always were, but Obama's "robbing the rich to give to the poor" socialist platform just slammed into the ground.

Obama's entire platform was premised on a bull market, and cannot pass even a cursory non-economist's scrutiny now.

Here's a brief visual demonstration of a Barack Obama economy.

As always happens under socialism in a bad economy, the people get burned.

Update: A New RNC Ad makes the case.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 10:35 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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As if there was any doubt about the media being nothing more than an extension of the Obama campaign:

A READER AT A MAJOR NEWSROOM EMAILS: "Off the record, every suspicion you have about MSM being in the tank for O is true. We have a team of 4 people going thru dumpsters in Alaska and 4 in arizona. Not a single one looking into Acorn, Ayers or Freddiemae. Editor refuses to publish anything that would jeopardize election for O, and betting you dollars to donuts same is true at NYT, others. People cheer when CNN or NBC run another Palin-mocking but raising any reasonable inquiry into obama is derided or flat out ignored. The fix is in, and its working." I asked permission to reprint without attribution and it was granted.

The Anchoress hears it also to no one's surprise.

If you recall, several weeks ago Charlie Gibson used a doctored quote when interviewing Sarah Palin.

Gene Johnson of the Associated Press was the person (I hesitate to use the term journalist at this point) who purposefully truncated the quote to make it mean something entirely different, and so I contacted his superior, and noted he had clearly violated APs code of ethics by doctoring the quote.

After a period of silence, I asked the AP "In what way is altering a subject's quote to change the entire context of the quote, and present an entirely false interpretation of what the subject clearly said, not at odds with the Associated Press' ethics policy?"

The response?

"the remark could be interpreted in different ways"

Yes, when you allow persons to slice and dice quotes until they sound like what the media wants the victim to sound like, it certainly can.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 10:37 PM | Comments (13) | Add Comment
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House Minority Leader Boehner, Eric Cantor, and others just dropped the responsibility of the failure of the bailout bill to an extremely partisan statement by San Francisco liberal and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. Fox confirms.

Does she not have the minimal common sense to save the partisan rhetoric until after the vote is passed?

Uh, obviously not.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 01:49 PM | Comments (21) | Add Comment
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While Barack Obama has long downplayed his connection to Bill Ayers, a co-founder of the violent Weather Underground radical group, new documents show the two worked much more closely together in starting an educational foundation than has been previously known.

Recently released board-meeting minutes for the Chicago Annenberg Challenge show the two were present together at least six times in 1995 as the foundation's members discussed how to organize and operate the project, which was Ayers' brainchild.

Ayers' wrote the grant proposal that led to the creation of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, and saw Obama, who had no prior experience in education administration, installed to the Board of Directors, and then elevated over University presidents to the CAC chairmanship.

As chairman, Obama oversaw the awarding grants to radicals for indoctrination instead of education, including a grant to Ayers' Small Schools Workshop, which was run by Ayer's associate former SDS radical and founder of the Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist), Mike Klonsky.

Klonsky, an Obama supporter, had his blog on BarackObama.com "disappeared" by the campaign earlier this year.

Barack Obama funneled money that was supposed to be used for education to radicals bent on far left agitation, indoctrination, and community activism, pissing away the education of a generation of Chicago school children to pursue a far left political agenda.

Kinda of makes you wonder what he would do with the power of the Presidency and an an ideologically-aligned Congress, doesn't?

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 08:51 AM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
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And yes, the one running for President has his hands all over it:

IT would be tough to find an "on the ground" community organizer more closely tied to the subprime-mortgage fiasco than Madeline Talbott. And no one has been more supportive of Madeline Talbott than Barack Obama.

When Obama was just a budding community organizer in Chicago, Talbott was so impressed that she asked him to train her personal staff.

He returned to Chicago in the early '90s, just as Talbott was starting her pressure campaign on local banks. Chicago ACORN sought out Obama's legal services for a "motor voter" case and partnered with him on his 1992 "Project VOTE" registration drive.

In those years, he also conducted leadership-training seminars for ACORN's up-and-coming organizers. That is, Obama was training the army of ACORN organizers who participated in Madeline Talbott's drive against Chicago's banks.

More than that, Obama was funding them. As he rose to a leadership role at Chicago's Woods Fund, he became the most powerful voice on the foundation's board for supporting ACORN and other community organizers. In 1995, the Woods Fund substantially expanded its funding of community organizers - and Obama chaired the committee that urged and managed the shift.

That committee's report on strategies for funding groups like ACORN features all the key names in Obama's organizer network. The report quotes Talbott more than any other figure; Sandra Maxwell, Talbott's ACORN ally in the bank battle, was also among the organizers consulted.

MORE, the Obama-supervised Woods Fund report acknowledges the problem of getting donors and foundations to contribute to radical groups like ACORN - whose confrontational tactics often scare off even liberal donors and foundations.

Indeed, the report brags about pulling the wool over the public's eye. The Woods Fund's claim to be "nonideological," it says, has "enabled the Trustees to make grants to organizations that use confrontational tactics against the business and government 'establishments' without undue risk of being criticized for partisanship."

Hmm. Radicalism disguised by a claim to be postideological. Sound familiar?

Oh, it sounds all too familiar.

The one constant of Barack Obama's rise to power is his ability to funnel money to radical groups without drawing undue attention to himself.

As chairman of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, Obama directed educational monies meant for elementary and secondary school improvement into a series of grants to radical organizations bent on activism and ideological indoctrination. You'll be shocked—shocked!—to find out that those millions were directed to groups identified by the Chicago School Reform Collaborative—headed by domestic terrorist and Obama fundraiser Bill Ayers.

Obama has also used the Woods Fund (as noted in the article above) and the Joyce Foundation to launder money from grant-giving organizations into funding for radical groups and causes that were too politically controversial to directly raise funds on their own. He's great for the economic welfare of radicals.

And don't you love the mess he's helped get us all into now?

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 08:20 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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A man who is a 21-year associate, business partner, fellow board member, and political supporter of the Democratic nominee for President led an organization that came within hours of carrying out the most deadly terrorist attack in American history prior to Timothy McVeigh's attack in Oklahoma City.

It's about time we talk about that.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 12:10 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
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The McCain camp didn't have to wait until the end of the debate to make a commercial:

Frankly, I think everyone, right and left, was expecting something far different than we saw here tonight.

Barack Obama, credited with being a great public speaker, stuttered frequently, interrupted McCain constantly, and got heated on several occasions. He was on the defensive, got visibly angry at least once, and just wasn't on his game.

I think Obama was expected to win, and McCain had him on his heels time and again.

John McCain won tonight, but in doing so, all he did was do was expected. Barack Obama simply came apart under the pressure, and it was not pretty for any of us who watched it.

If he can't handle a simple debate without falling apart, how is he going to handle a Presidency?

Update: I was reading and commenting at Ace's place during his liveblog, and several people noticed early in the debate that John McCain got inside Barack Obama's OODA loop.

Observe.
Orient.
Decide.
Act.

Then Observe.
Orient.
Decide.
Act.

Then Observe...

Read Whittle for a full understanding of just how powerful this is, but let's be very clear in what occurred: John McCain out-thought Barack Obama early on, and increased that throughout the debate.

I don't pretend to know if John McCain is smarter than Barack Obama, but in their first head-to-head, it was clear that thinks faster on his feet.

Looking back through the campaign season at the various "3 A.M." moments and the candidate's reactions, this doesn't appear to be an isolated event.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 09:36 PM | Comments (44) | Add Comment
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So far, I think the "heartbeat away" blitzkrieg against Sarah Palin has been wildly overblown, despite the fact it seems to have finally browbeat Kathleen Parker of National Review into submission.

Now I can only imagine the email she's getting at the moment, and hope none of my readers pile on, but really, how well thought out is this fear-mongering that John McCain could catch a cold/have a heart attack/mysteriously trip and impale himself on a nearby moose antler the week after he is inaugurated really thought out? more...

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 04:38 PM | Comments (22) | Add Comment
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Before I dive into this, let me say one thing: I am not an economist, and have no idea if the current proposal is a good one, if other proposals and amendments are better, or even if any of them will work.

What I do know is politics in action, and we saw it in spades last night, as noted chillingly in this article from David Rogers at The Politico:

At the White House, in fact, House Minority Leader John Boehner had bluntly warned about the lack of Republican support for the massive government intervention: "I can't invent votes," Boehner said. But House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.) angrily accused the minority of trying to undercut Paulson by crafting a late-breaking alternative proposal—with the tacit support, Frank said, of Republican presidential candidate John McCain.

Both McCain and his Democratic rival, Sen. Barack Obama, would leave the White House without comment, and the meeting was described as among the wildest in memory. A beleaguered President Bush had to struggle to maintain order and reassert himself. And when Democrats left to caucus in the Roosevelt Room, Paulson pursued them, begging that they not "blow up" the legislation.

The former Goldman Sachs CEO even went down on one knee as if genuflecting, to which Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Cal.) is said to have joked, "I didn't know you were Catholic."

It was McCain who had urged Bush to call the White House meeting but Democrats made sure Obama had a prominent part. And much as they complained later of being blindsided, the whole event turned out to be something of an ambush on their part—aimed at McCain and House Republicans.

"Speaking professionally," said one Republican aide, "They did a very good job."

When Bush yielded early to Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D- Nev.) to speak, they yielded to Obama to speak for the assembled Democrats. And it was Obama who raised the subject of the conservative alternative and pressed Paulson on what he thought of the idea.

It seems probable that a deal had been reached earlier yesterday as mid-day reports were indicating, but then the Democratic leadership—Pelosi, Reid, and Presidential nominee Obama—determined that they were willing to risk a national (and global) economic collapse in order to play Presidential politics and try to make this into a "McCain versus Obama and Obama is the hero" story.

Reid and Pelosi's judgment is notoriously bad (as their lowest recorded Congressional approval ratings in history and utter failure to pass any meaningful legislation in the last Congress proves), and Obama is preternaturally self-centered and ambitious, so it is not entirely surprising that they would go this route.

It is just that we've been hearing so much about how serious a bailout is needed, and that we need to pass something relatively quickly, and then they do this—a melodramatic hissy-fit—for no other reason than theatrics. All major democratic concerns had been met in eariler compromises.

It's disgusting.

Update: And for what little it is worth considering economics is far outside of my comfort zone, I'm falling into the camp of thinking that the bailout plan as proposed isn't that great of an idea.

Why?

It has a bit to do with the big picture view of capitalism that Bill Whittle wrote of in Trinity, (Part 1). As with most of Whittle's essays it is brilliant and insightful in a "why didn't I think of/see that?" sort of way, but it is a lengthy screed, so I'd set aside a good half-hour (and get a nice fresh cup of coffee) before you snuggle into it.

There is also a second part, helpfully titled Trinity, (Part 2) that I won't get a chance to dive into until this evening, but both are pushing me back to my fundamental, capitalist core beliefs that government intervention in most things is almost always bad.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 08:44 AM | Comments (14) | Add Comment
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Professor David Demming lets cultural incongruity Barack Obama have it with both barrels:

When Obama refers to "my Muslim faith," the verbal gaffe resonates as a Freudian slip because of Obama's thinly veiled hatred for this country's unique culture and institutions. Obama sat for 20 years in a church where the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr preached "goddamn America." He only resigned from the congregation when it became politically expedient to do so. When earlier this year, Michelle Obama said "for the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country," can we conclude that her husband disagrees? Is it not remarkable that Michelle Obama can be so small-minded as to find nothing in the history of the United States that merits her admiration but the personal success of her husband?

What is Barack Obama for? His campaign motto is "change." But even a 6-year-old child understands that "change" can be either good or bad. Lacking specifics, the invocation of "change" as policy is completely empty. As we witness Obama's minions mindlessly endorse the meaningless maxim of "change," it only can call to mind the barnyard animals in George Orwell's "Animal Farm" chanting "four legs good, two legs bad!"

The choice of Sarah Palin as John McCain's running mate has been devastating for the Obama campaign precisely because she is everything Obama is not. Palin is not ashamed of her culture or country. She is not embarrassed by being an American, but naively embraces her birthright. Unassisted by affirmative action, Palin has risen to national prominence on the basis of her character, intelligence and natural gifts. In a word, she has guts. This is a woman who is proud of her country, not because it has granted her personal success, but because she respects what America stands for: freedom, opportunity, and individualism.

Obama is a vapid demagogue, a hollow man that despises American culture. He is ill-suited to be president of the United States. As the weeks pass, more Americans will come to this realization and elect McCain/Palin in a landslide.

And he's right: Barack Obama's life story, half-lived and half-told in two self-aggrandizing auto-biographies, is not the story of America or of Americans, but the story of a "citizen of the world." Barack Obama cannot hold quintessential American values because he has not lived a life that celebrates or even respects American culture.

His mother Stanley Ann was the offshoot of an odd and vain man who was determined to name his child after himself, regardless of sex. She became radicalized in high school in Washington state, and met the freshman Senator's Kenyan communist father in a Russian language class in Hawaii. Three months after she became pregnant she married Obama's father, though he was still married to his first child's mother in Kenya (no doubt, we can expect Andrew Sullivan to launch an investigation into Obama's paternity any day now). Barack Obama, Junior was born six months later, abandoned by his foreign father within several years, and spent his youth in Indonesia with a new stepfather, boning up in his English via correspondence courses. Barack Junior finally left Asia many years later to move in with his grandparents and go to high school in Hawaii.

Barack Obama apparently never set foot on the U.S mainland until he graduated high school and went to Occidental College for two years, before transferring to Columbia and developing into the radical leftist we know today.

Barack Obama despises America and American values because he has never known or experienced them, as he did not grown up in a normal American culture.

The heartland of America, the small towns and suburbs, the "baseball, apple pie and Chevrolet" that forms the core of our cultural experience is alien to Barack Obama. He cannot love it, share it, or reflect it, because he does not know it.

What does Barack Obama know? What is his vision of America?

He never experienced his first taste of mainland American until he was already a grown man, and his experience was further indoctrination and immersion in universities with a radical leftist bent. He was further radicalized by 20 years of indoctrination in a Christian cult founded on the teaching of the Black Panthers and Malcolm X, one that taught a self-segregating, blame-casting "black values system" that added spiritual alienation to his pre-existing cultural alienation. He embraced an infamous domestic terrorist as a friend and partner in schemes designed to undermine core American cultural values to push small "c" communism and radicalism, and pissed away the future of a generation of Chicago's school children as he helped launder $150 million of educational grant money to former terrorists and radicals that sought to indoctrinate, instead of educate.

Barack Obama isn't anti-American, but he is un-American. Our cultural memory and experiences are something he read about in books, but never lived, and something he cannot feel.

He is not one of us.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 09:03 AM | Comments (54) | Add Comment
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As they fire up more centrifuges and continue to refine the rocket motors for their ICBMS, the Iranians hope that these useful idiots represent change they can believe in:

Calling it a "major step forward" in relations between Iran and the United States, leading activists Medea Benjamin and Jodie Evans of CODEPINK Women for Peace — along with more than 150 other U.S. peace group representatives — met Wednesday afternoon with Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad here following his appearance at the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday.

[snip]

"U.S. government officials are quick to stir up hostilities with Iran, but the American people are tired of war," said Benjamin, co-founder of the nonpartisan women's peace group CODEPINK. "The peace movement represents the sentiment of the majority of Americans who want our two countries to find ways to work together and improve relations. We are modeling the behavior we want to see our government adopt."

As Hot Air notes, Evans is a major bundler for Barack Obama, pledged to raising over $600,000 for the freshman Senator, and here she is, trying to make nice with a regime that practices Holocaust denial, that publicly threatens the state of Israel with destruction on a regular basis, and that is working on nuclear weapons to carry out that threat.

Barack Obama has a close partnership with a domestic terrorist who's group bombed government buildings, fire-bombed a judge's family at home, and murdered law enforcement officers during a bank robbery. Obama and the terrorist used that relationship to abuse education grants and launder $150 million to radical groups to indoctrinate school children and their parents.

Now Obama gladly takes more than a half-million dollars collected from the founder of a group that wants us to lose in Iraq and Afghanistan, even as she idolizes the worst state sponsor of terrorism in modern history.

Who's side is Barack Obama on?

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 07:43 AM | Comments (9) | Add Comment
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John McCain is suspending his presidential campaign tomorrow in order to return to Washington to work on the economy, and wants to postpone Friday's scheduled debate with Barack Obama.

The Obama campaign, however, wants the debate to continue.

What to do?

My friend Ray Robinson emailed me with an excellent compromise: have Sarah Palin step in Friday in McCain's place at the debate.

The proposal—if accepted by the Obama campaign—would solve several problems at once.

For better or ill, the national spotlight on Palin would reveal whether or not Palin is capable of holding her own in the national spotlight, and depending on the questions asked, could shred light on her suitability to lead if needed.

The Obama campaign has bent over backwards to belittle Palin as a small town mayor incapable of performing under the pressure.

Now is a great time to prove it.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 03:43 PM | Comments (28) | Add Comment
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Obama/Sulzberger '08:

Though these facts are a matter of public record, the New York Times, in what can only be explained as a willful disregard of the truth, failed to research this story or present any semblance of a fairminded treatment of the facts closely at hand. The paper did manage to report one interesting but irrelevant fact: Mr. Davis did participate in a roundtable discussion on the political scene with...Paul Begala.

Again, let us be clear: The New York Times -- in the absence of any supporting evidence -- has insinuated some kind of impropriety on the part of Senator McCain and Rick Davis. But entirely missing from the story is any significant mention of Senator McCain's long advocacy for, and co-sponsorship of legislation to enact, stricter oversight and regulation of both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- dating back to 2006. Please see the attached floor statement on this issue by Senator McCain from 2006.

To the central point our campaign has made in the last 48 hours: The New York Times has never published a single investigative piece, factually correct or otherwise, examining the relationship between Obama campaign chief strategist David Axelrod, his consulting and lobbying clients, and Senator Obama. Likewise, the New York Times never published an investigative report, factually correct or otherwise, examining the relationship between Former Fannie Mae CEO Jim Johnson and Senator Obama, who appointed Johnson head of his VP search committee, until the writing was on the wall and Johnson was under fire following reports from actual news organizations that he had received preferential loans from predatory mortgage lender Countrywide.

Therefore this "report" from the New York Times must be evaluated in the context of its intent and purpose. It is a partisan attack falsely labeled as objective news. And its most serious allegations are based entirely on the claims of anonymous sources, a familiar yet regretful tactic for the paper.

We all understand that partisan attacks are part of the political process in this country. The debate that stems from these grand and sometimes unruly conversations is what makes this country so exceptional. Indeed, our nation has a long and proud tradition of news organizations that are ideological and partisan in nature, the Huffington Post and the New York Times being two such publications. We celebrate their contribution to the political fabric of America. But while the Huffington Post is utterly transparent, the New York Times obscures its true intentions -- to undermine the candidacy of John McCain and boost the candidacy of Barack Obama -- under the cloak of objective journalism.

I'm not sure of Goldfarb's last claim. When was the last time anyone thought the Times practiced objective journalism?

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 02:36 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Because Americans will piss away their money on anything, as long as they find it amusing.

Keep on bidding, folks. Can't we enthusiastically get behind this this empty, useless trash, and push it far higher than it deserves to be based on merit, for no reason at all?

Yes, we can! Yes, we can! Yes, we can!

Oh, wait a minute...

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 09:37 AM | Comments (8) | Add Comment
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From Chief Long of the Wasilla Police Department, via Kristie Smithers, City Clerk, with the notation:

While searching electronic files, I ran across the attached email sent to Chief Savage regarding SART exams paid for by the City of Wasilla in 2000 and 2001.

I have redacted the names of the victims in accordance with state law.

SART = Sexual Assault Response teams. These are the rape kits paid for by the City of Wasilla for rapes that occurred in 2000-2001.

All four of these rapes occurred after the law was signed in Alaska protecting sexual assault victims from having to pay for the cost of rape kits. Experts, including Del Smith, the Deputy Commissioner of the Alaska Department of Public Safety, Lauree Hugonin, Director, Alaska Network on Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault, and Trisha Gentle, Executive Director, Council on Domestic Violence & Sexual Assault, noted in committee testimony that no law enforcement agencies in Alaska were known to have billed rape victims for the cost of forensic medical exams, but that some hospitals had done so.

As noted above, the city of Wasilla paid for the only two rape kits used in in 2000, and the two used in 2001. Four kits were used over these two years, for a total of $2,238.

Considering the small number of sexual assaults reported during her six years as mayor, it is very plausible that Mayor Palin would not know about such small expenditures. Quite possibly, the city spent more on toilet paper and paper towels during that same time period.

Update: Jim Geraghty finishes off the faux scandal with the Wasilla Debunking Kit.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 09:13 PM | Comments (19) | Add Comment
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Well, he's bad enough...

...but are we ready for this man to be a frayed strap away from the Presidency?

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 01:32 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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