When the Music Stops

Now it looks as though the Paper Empire has collapsed.
There are a lot of reasons why it did.
People treated their homes like banks.
The government legislated bad loans to people who could not afford houses.
The government has been treating money like Monopoly dollars.
Trade has been badly regulated. (Note I did not say under-regulation. We have no free market and to blame this on the free market is ludicrous).
And last Wednesday evening, there was a complete freezing of liquidity; there was no commercial paper. This meant that most businesses would have collapsed by Friday, since most businesses rely on loans for operation.
...
And now other irresponsible parties--like those who bought more house than they could afford or racked up the credit cards and funded it with serial mortgages--now these people also want a bail-out. As do the big investment banks and the owners of bundled securities comprised of the bad mortgages.

All the dancers want to be relieved of their responsibility to pay the piper.

And the bill is steep, too. They are saying $700 billion (700 with nine zeros after it), but it could easily become over $2 Trillion. (That's 2 with 12 zeros after it, which is why I capitalized Trillion. It's a sufficiently weighty amount that it needs that capital T).
....
And now the weasels in Washington want to get their cut, too. They want another stimulus package. They want special favors added to the bill. They want to prove, in this election year, that they are DOING SOMETHING.

Of course, for most of the Pols in Washington, it was their DOING SOMETHING that got us into this mess.


More at Ragamuffin Studies

Daily Dose of CM

Knowledge is not sensation, nor is it to be derived through sensation; we feed upon the thoughts of other minds; and thought applied to thought generates thought and we become more thoughtful. No one need invite us to reason, compare, imagine; the mind, like the body, digests its proper food, and it must have the labour of digestion or it ceases to function.

But the children ask for bread and we give them a stone; we give information about objects and events which mind does not attempt to digest but casts out bodily (upon an examination paper?). But let information hang upon a principle, be inspired by an idea, and it is taken with avidity and used in making whatsoever in the spiritual nature stands for tissue in the physical.

Towards a Philosophy of Education, by Charlotte Mason

The Dawn of the Heroes

From Herakles, The Hero of Thebes and Other Heroes of the Myth, by Mary E. Burt and Zenaide A. Ragozin, 1900

The Land of the Heroes
(lightly edited by the DHM)

One look at the map of Greece will show us that it is the smallest of European countries. For may hundreds of years it was inhabited by the handsomest, bravest, and most intelligent people of the world. But these people, the Greeks, or Hellenes, as they called themselves, had not always lived in the country.

Thousands of years before the Hellenes came to Greece it was a perfect wilderness of mountains, narrow valleys, torrents, and tangled forests. It was a land of wild beasts, and they were so numerous and fierce that there was almost no room for men.

Yet men did live there, but we know nothing about them or what they were like....
Then the new people, the Greeks, began to come into the country. They came in boats from across the sea and on foot from the north, through numberless mountain-passes. They did not come all at once, but in small detachments, in single tribes, so that it took them many years to spread over the country.

.... Not content with caves and forest dens, each tribe, after it had chosen a district and taken possession of it, selected some high hill, built rude dwellings upon it and temples to its patron gods, a public treasure-house also, and enclosed the hill with strong walls. It had become a fortress, and it was called Acropolis, in their language.

Each tribe.... had its leaders, usually belonging to some family which had earned the gratitude and loyalty of the people by brave and affectionate service, adn the leadership descended from father to son. These were the kinds, and they resided within the Acropolis.

There were still wild men and wilder beasts in the forests and fields away from the Acropolis. Each small district had its particular terror making the country around unsafe.

Young and courageous men, sons of the ruling families, athletes practiced in the arts of war, able to afford better weapons and armour, felt it their duty to their people to do for them what the poor herdsmen and laborers could not. They also sought adventure, and every year they would wander across the country seeking glory. They would follow the stories they heard on their way to the dens of the wild beasts, cruel monsters, and they would either overcome the animals- and return home to tell their adventures, or they would die in the attempt, in which case there were no stories to tell.

Those who succeeded carried home trophies of their heroic deeds, hides, horns, heads of the beasts. Thus they put new heart into their people, both by opening up new areas for panting and tilling, and by raising men's spirits, inspiring them with confidence and ambition.

Making the most of the time....

Infancy and toddlerhood cover such a brief span of time. Providing a secure beginning to a child's life by being there responsively is a worthwhile investment and one every mom can enjoy if she gives herself permission to snuggle.

Debra Evans, Heart and Home

Eggplant Parmigiana

This has a meatlike texture so is more satisfying to those used to meat.

1 medium sized eggplant
1 t. salt
1/4 cup flour
1/2 t. salt
1/4 t. pepper
1/2 cup chopped onion
1/2 cup chopped green pepper
1 large clove garlic, minced
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1 can tomato sauce (8 ounces)
1/2 t. oregano
8 ounces sliced mozzarella cheese
parsley

Pare and cut eggplant into 8 slices 1/2 to 3/4 inch thick. Sprinkle both sides with salt, place between paper towels, weight down with a heavy plate and let stand for 30 minutes. This reduces bitterness.
Rinse slices off well and dry on paper toweling.
Combine flour, slat, and pepper on waxed paper. Coat eggplant on both sides iwth this mixture.
Pour 2 tablespoons oil in large skillet, saute eggplant slices a few a ta time adding additional oil as needed. When both sides are lightly browned, drain slices on paper toweling. Add to the skillet the remaining oil, onion, green pepper and garlic. Saute over low heat five minutes, stirring occasionally.
Add tomato sauce adn oregano. Simmer five minutes.
Spoon half he tomato sauce mixture into a 1.5 quart shallowbaking dish. ARrange eggplant slices on the sauce. Cover with slices of mozzarella and spoon remaining sauce on top. Sprinkle with Parmesan.
Bake at 350 for 1/2 an hour or until cheese is bubbling. Sprinkle with parsley when serving.

From a 4/75 issue of Family Circle

Enemy Among Us

Richard Maybury: The country and the government are not the same thing. I love this country and would not want to live anywhere else, but I consider the government to be the country's most dangerous enemy. Washington is taxing us to death, it's throwing the best medical system in the world into boundless confusion, it's interfering in absolutely every aspect of our lives, its foreign policy for more than a century has been to wander the globe poking sharp sticks at rattlesnakes, and it's packed with crooks and liars.

September, 2007

Grape Pie and Wind Storms

From my great-grandmother's journals for 1960 and 1961:

Friday, September 30

Worked around.
Mrs. Fish stopped on her way out of town. Brot me biscuits and a piece of sirloin steak from the (?) market. Good seeing her. Watched television.

September 30, Saturday (1961)
H. and E. and baby came for dinner. The baby is a darling. We had a hamburger supper and Mrs. May's grape pie. First they had ever tasted. A's couldn't come over, had company. C. came over. Looked at pictures H. had taken. We had the worst windstorm I ever lived thru. broke a big limb down over the house. Trees down all over town.

I've never had a grape pie, either. Wonder what it tasted like?

Tuna Croquettes

four servings

1/4 cup butter, margarine, or other solid fat
1/2 cup chopped onion
1/2 cup chopped green pepper (you can buy bags of frozen peppers, or substitute finely minced celery or carrot)
2 t. curry powder
14 ounces tuna
2 cups bread crumbs (make them yourself using four slices bread or various bits of leftover breads that you freeze)
1 cup shredded cheddar cheese
2 slightly beaten eggs
2 t. chopped parsely
1/2 t. salt
1/4 t. pepper
1/4 cup flour
1/4 cup melted butter, margarine, or other fat
1 egg
1 T. water
1/2 cup packaged bread crumbs

In a medium sized skillet melt butter, add onion, green pepper and curry powder; saute until onion is transparent, about 5 minutes. Turn into a large mixing bowl. Add tuna fish, bread crumbs, cheddar cheese, eggs, parsley, salt and pepper, mix thoroughly. Divide tuna mixture into 8 equal portions. Shape each portion to form an oblong shape.
Place flour and packaged bread crumbs on two separate pieces of wax paper. Beat egg and 1 tablespoon water in a pie plate.
Roll each tuna croquette in flour, coat evenly with egg and roll in bread crumbs. Place each finished croquette on a plate or cookie sheet. Cover with waxed paper. Refrigerate until ready to cook.
To cook, saute the croquettes in the hot butter or vegetable oil until nicely browned on all sides. Serve on a bed of fluffy cooked rice with a mushroom, Mornay or curry sauce, if you wish. Garnish with lemon slices and parsley, if desired.

Daily Dose of CM

Charlotte Mason was an educator in England during the Victorian era. She spent some fifty years studying, reading about, and thinking through a comprehensive educational philosophy. She applied her ideas in day schools, boarding schools, a teaching school, and through home-study programs. At the end of her life she wrote her sixth volume about what she had been reading, thinking about, and trying to accomplish with education. She called it 'Towards a Philosophy of Education' because she did not believe she'd found all the answers.

She suggested that we should begin by reconsidering what we believe about the human mind- starting with an analogy that was very much in vogue at the time:

Perhaps the only allowable analogy with the human mind is the animal body, especially the human body, for it is that which we know most about; the well-worn plant and garden analogy is misleading, especially as regards that tiresome busybody, the gardener, who will direct the inclination of every twig, the position of every leaf; but, even then apart from the gardener, the child-garden is an intolerable idea as failing to recognize the essential property of a child, his personality, a property all but absent in a plant.

The 'child-garden' was the kindergarten, developed by Froebel.

Now, let us consider for a moment the parallel behaviour of body and mind. The body lives by air, grows on food, demands rest, flourishes on a diet wisely various. So, of the mind,––(by which I mean the entire spiritual nature, all that which is not body),––it breathes in air, calls for both activity and rest and flourishes on a wisely varied dietary.

So when Miss Mason speaks of the mind, she includes the heart, mind, and soul- all, as she says, that is not physically tangible.

We go round the house and round the house, but rarely go into the House of Mind; we offer mental gymnastics, but these do not take the place of food, and of that we serve the most meagre rations, no more than that bean a day! Diet for the body is abundantly considered, but no one pauses to say, "I wonder does the mind need food, too, and regular meals, and what is its proper diet?"

What would it mean to provide the mind with a widely varied diet? Are not many of the exams and busy work we give to children merely mental gymnastics? There is a place for these sorts of exercises, but the child requires nourishing food for the mind as well.

I have asked myself this question and have laboured for fifty years to find the answer, and am anxious to impart what I think I know, but the answer cannot be given in the form of 'Do' this and that, but rather as an invitation to 'Consider' this and that; action follows when we have thought duly.

I think one reason why many people believe they have tried and failed something called a 'Charlotte Mason Education' is because they have taken to action first without giving due thought to the underlying philosophy. Charlotte Mason's philosophy of education is a philosophy, not a list of instructions- do nature study, don't do workbooks, do narrate, don't read twaddle.

In the book In Defense of Food, Michael Pollan points out that we took a wrong turn when we abandoned food, real food upon which the human body had been nourished for thousands of years, for nutrients. We don't eat carrots, we want beta-carotene, and so a pill will suffice for fresh carrots. WE don't eat broccoli and cabbage, we eat something called 'anti-oxidants,' and so a vitamin drink is seen as equal to or better than the real thing- although it usually turns out that we dont' get the imitation precisely right.

In the same way, we have broken down the life of the mind into artificial categories. This activity fosters cognitive thinking, that one increases receptive language skills, this one hones something called targeted reading skills.

IN truth, our bodies and minds need real, whole food.

The life of the mind is sustained upon ideas; there is no intellectual vitality in the mind to which ideas are not presented several times, say, every day.

REading for Heroes

The child's heart goes out to the man of action, the man who makes short work of things and gets directly at a result. He responds to life, to energy, quick wit, the blow that hits the nail on the head at the first stroke.

The rapidity of action in the stories of Herakles, Jason, and other Heroes of the Myth, the prowess and courage and untiring endurance of the men, render the characters worthy subjects of thought to young minds, and have secured the stories a permanent place in educational literature. It is not elegant literature alone that boys need, but inspiring ideals which will impel them to stand fearlessly to their guns, to do the hard thing with untiring perseverance, to reach the result with unerring insight.

It is exactly this unbending courage in Herakles and his comrade heroes, that has made them the backbone of literature for ages, holding their own in spite of the sapless literary fungus crowding our book-shelves.
While traveling in Greece I found the children of the primary schools reading these stories in the lower grades, the book being the one used next above the primer. The interest was enthusiastic, and I brought home a copy of the book, which, with Madame Ragozin's collaboration, I have arranged as a first or second book of reading for our own schools.

From Herakles, The Hero of Thebes and Other Heroes of the Myth, by Mary E. Burt and Zenaide A. Ragozin, 1900

quote

I am absolutely convinced that God designed mothering to be rewarding to mothers. To me all the hundreds of hours I have spent holding and nursing and snuggling my children make up much of what has been gentle, sweet, and lovely in my life.

Debra Evans, Heart and Home

FLDS, Sept. 29

Thanks to Kurt, at I Perceive for this story on how CPS in TX still doesn't share well with others, and continues to claim the case is just too big for them to show any parents and lawyers the evidence- even though they've nonsuited 300 of the roughly 439 FLDS children (one of the most bizarre details of this case continues to be the fact that CPS has NEVER been consistent in their counts, so we still don't know how many people were actually held in CPS custody- and neither do they):

More lawyers for children taken in the raid on the Fundamentalist LDS Church's YFZ Ranch are taking Texas Child Protective Services back to court to force the agency to hand over evidence of abuse.

Hearings are scheduled here next week seeking discovery in cases involving at least 30 children.

It should surprise nobody that some of those 30 children scheduled to have hearings next week were already nonsuited.


In the comments somebody shared the link this very comprehensive article with some behind the scenes look at the doings leading up to the State Supreme Court smack-down of Judge Walthers bizarre ruling allowing the state to help itself to all the YfZ children (and a good many adult women). Here are the parts I am cherry picking out (emphasis added):

When Susan L. Hays took an at­tor­ney ad litem assignment ....

“I thought I was going to get a pregnant teenager and her creepy 50-year-old husband,” says Hays...

....[hundreds of lawyers volunteered, all with expectations similar Hays']

By the time the action was halted by a state appeals court, Hays and others had discovered a different, more complex truth confronting them on the ground.

...

468 children had been removed.

Under Texas law a child must be in immediate danger to be removed from his or her home. Texas authorities argued that based on the group’s beliefs about spiritual marriages involving minors, all of the children were in danger, whether or not it seemed likely that an individual child was in imminent danger of being married.

Indeed, whether or not it seemed that ANYBODY was in imminent danger of being married.

The state presented as evidence alleged church records showing that 20 females at the ranch between the ages of 13 and 17 had been pregnant.

I think this sentence is badly worded. It should say, "...20 females had allegedly been pregnant between the ages of 13 and 17." That's because what the state presented was a claim that 20 females had, at some point, been pregnant between the ages of 13 and 17. What they did not present was any proof that these females were still minors, that they had been pregnant in the state of Texas, that they had been impregnated by adult men, that they were not legally married. Nor did the state mention that some of these females were now adults, and had been pregnant teens years before in a state and time when it was not illegal for them to consent.

...

But many attorneys ad litem say that when they got to know their clients’ mothers, the women seemed like great parents. Most forbade junk food and television in their homes, and their children were noticeably well-behaved. Children separated from their families constantly asked to be returned to the compound—their home.

...

“It’s not like you have a boyfriend who is sexually abusing the child or beating them, or Mother’s a drug addict,” says Richard “Dicky” Grigg, an Austin plaintiffs lawyer who was appointed attorney ad litem for a 2-year-old girl.

...He’d never done attorney ad litem work before, and, like most lawyers involved, his training amounted to a three-hour CLE family law course that the State Bar of Texas offered shortly after the Eldorado raid.

Hays and other attorneys ad litem believe the state trampled on the rights of FLDS members in a variety of ways. But many—including some who advocated for reunification—are not completely confident their clients will be safe in the long run.

...

Hays' Hays' client's stepfather is Merrill Jessop. She felt her client's mother is a good mother, but she doesn't know about Merrill.

When the state returned her children, the mother opted to settle at a San Antonio duplex rather than return to the ranch. By July they had moved back.

“Five kids in a duplex on a busy road where the kids can’t play didn’t last long,” says Hays, who was impressed with the ranch. The multiple-story log structures, where many members live in a somewhat communal style, reminded her of condominiums in Aspen, Colo.

“There were also allegations that the children didn’t know how to play, and that’s just BS,” Hays says. “The children are quite playful. They just don’t have unnecessary things.”

Hays hadn't intended to take a case, but some friends from a former law firm talked her into coming with them to San Angelo:

They attended an attorney orientation at the Emmanuel Episcopal Church downtown, just across the street from the Tom Green County Court­house where the FLDS cases were to be heard.

...

Guy Choate, a former president of the Texas Trial Lawyers Association, has lived in San Angelo since he was a child; he served as a media representative for the hearings. In San Angelo, he says, there were only six lawyers trained to do attorney ad litem work, and they welcomed the assistance.

At the San Angelo Coliseum (which is used for rodeos, among other things):

Lawyers met with clients in the livestock barn, where cubicles were set up for privacy. Many remember a strong scent of horses and hand sanitizer.

Lawyers from Texas RioGrande Legal Aid were already in San Angelo. When they arrived, however, they had no FLDS clients because they were denied access.

Staying four to a room at a Howard Johnson hotel, the legal aid lawyers stayed up all night preparing a lawsuit, which was faxed the next morning to Gary L. Banks, managing attorney of the San Angelo office of the Department of Family and Protective Services. Within 30 minutes, access was granted.

Banks did not respond to repeated requests for an interview from the ABA Journal.

Yeah, I'll bet he didn't.

Julie M. Balovich, a legal aid lawyer with Texas RioGrande Legal Aid based in Alpine, met with a group of the FLDS women, who by then were housed at the coliseum.

All of her clients were adult mothers who could not afford private counsel. Their cell phones had been confiscated and they didn’t know to expect legal aid.

...Unlike some of the attorneys, Balovich says she has no concerns about the safety of the FLDS children.

“I’m a feminist, and I was apprehensive about what I was going to be defending,” she says. “The second I met my clients, I wasn’t worried. They are very independent women who are very assertive and very capable of explaining what they love about their lifestyle.”

That's probably one of the things CPS hated about them, their independence.
This next paragraph is potentially a bombshell- I would like to know more about the times and dates:

Mary Noel Golder, a San Angelo lawyer who prac­tices with Choate at the plaintiffs firm Webb, Stokes & Sparks, was one of a number of female lawyers called to the courthouse the afternoon of the raid by Barbara Walther, the state judge who presided over the cases.

“They thought they’d pick up between 25 and 30 girls, who for religious reasons would need female lawyers,” Golder says. “I told the judge that I didn’t even have a family code book; she handed me hers.”

Why did they think they would be getting 25 to 30 girls, and when did they think this? The 'afternoon of the raid?' But the raid took place in the evening. So was this before the raid?

Golder represents nine FLDS children who range in age from 3 to 10. A tenth turned out to be 20 years old and was dropped from the cases. All of Golder’s clients told her—repeatedly—that they wanted to go home. One 8-year-old questioned why she was taken from her family.

Golder told her that her household included some people who were married, even though they were too young to be.

“Well, my mother’s not too young, so why am I here?” the girl asked.

“This one,” Golder says, “I don’t worry about.”

Heh. I like this child. Too bad, you know, that she's so 'brainwashed' and unable to think for herself, iddn't it?
At the 14 day hearing Hays was stuck at the satellite site, where she couldn't hear the proceedings far too much of the time.

The room did have wireless Internet access and cell phone ser­vice, so she used the time to research order­ing a birth certificate online for her client’s mother.

The wom­an, who is in her 30s, was originally classified as a minor.

CPS continues to blame pretty much everybody but themselves for their foul ups.

While doing that, Hays tried to follow the proceedings. At the attorney ad litem orientation, she says, horrible abuse was alleged without specifics.

“We were anxious to hear what the deal was,” Hays says. “We were waiting the whole day for the other shoe to drop, and it didn’t come. I knew something wasn’t right because I wasn’t learning much.”

There were many questions, as the lawyers began to suspect that state claims were not supported by evidence.

So CPS and the Court used hundreds of lawyers that had little to no experience in these sorts of cases. Then they gave them 'training' where the state told the attorneys that their clients were the victims of horrible, heinous abuse. NO wonder so many of the attorneys seemed not to know what they were doing in the 14 day hearings.

Walthers, of course, ruled that the children who had been removed by her court order in the first place should stay 'removed,' and CPS began shifting children to more permanent foster care situations.

The judge instructed that siblings be kept together, and Hays says a CPS lawyer told her that direction would be followed. It wasn’t.

“I regret taking him at his word,” she says. “They knew my client belonged with her siblings, but they separated them anyway.”

It's hard to know pick one thing in this horrific police action against mothers and children as worse than any other, but this one does seem particular cold, calculated, and egregious.

Balovich says telling her clients about the separation order was one of the hardest things she has done as a lawyer. Previously, she had told them that the state did not seem to have enough evidence to remove children.

“I would tell them, ‘This is how the law works,’ ” Balovich says. “Then I’d have to say later, ‘Well, this is how the law is supposed to work, but it didn’t work out that way.’ ”

Hays’ 2-year-old client was sent to College Station, an east Texas town that is the home of Texas A&M University. The older siblings were placed 260 miles away in Abilene, and the girl’s mother went to the San Antonio shelter with her 6-month-old son.

Hays never visited her client in College Station. Instead she found it more useful to see the mother in San Antonio.

“ ‘I’m not your lawyer—I represent your child. This is not an attorney-client privileged conversation, but if you want to tell me something that will help your child, that’s great.’ I’ve said that about 100 times,’ ” Hays says.

Biological parents could only talk to foster parents during allotted visitation times, so Hays relayed messages between her client’s mother and caregivers. In May, Hays used 8,867 minutes on her cell phone.

“I spent two weeks trying to translate how to put my client to sleep at night,” she says. “And may I add how woefully unqualified I am to accurately relay messages about caring for a 2-year-old, as a childless, career-woman lawyer?”

The people responsible for separating this two year old child from her siblings should be summarily fired and never permitted to work with children again. Given the climate at CPS, I feel sure that they will instead be promoted.

Service plans were boilerplate lan­guage, at­torneys ad litem say, and didn’t reflect individual cases.

“The service plan for my client [stated] that the children are taught not to respect women and fear outsiders. That was not my experience talking to anyone,” Hays says.

...
Then came the two higher court rulings telling Walthers to vacate her order. Hays is thrilled. Choate, not so much. Choate says:

“I hope the lesson learned isn’t that if you have enough people, and their actions are confusing or duplicitous, you can do what you want. Because if that’s the case, the state doesn’t have any power to protect the most vulnerable.”

It's illegal to be confusing?

As a whole, this statement is highly ironic given that it was the state whose , actions were confusing and duplicitous, and it was the state who acted as though it could do as it liked without regard for the law, and it was the state who actually harmed the most vulnerable.

A while back I linked to a story that quoted this interview with Voss and Dwyer from CPS, but here's video footage. Voss tells us that a combination of things happened within the first two hours of being on the ranch that caused her great concern and she wishes she could describe them but she can't. Because that would be compromising to the investigation? No. Because it was a bad feeling that she can't describe if you weren't there. "It was the atmosphere and the feeling of it. It's not a place for children." Should anybody in this country lose their kids for five minutes because Angie Voss has a bad feeling and gets the vapors?
Paul Dyer says through investigation they know things that no-one knows. I believe that interview was about a week or two after the children were returned to their parents. Well, it's now months later, and he's had plenty of opportunities to tell CPS supervisors, attorneys, and Judge Walthers all about those things he and other investigators know but nobody else does. Curiously, CPS keeps nonsuiting FLDS children.

On a Personal Note

Most of us will be gone this week on a family camping trip, so there won't be any up to date political news to speak of. There will, however, be several other posts each day on a variety of topics I find interesting- Greek Mythology, old books, Charlotte Mason, cooking, frugal living, economic principles in general, and I don't remember what all else. STay tuned.

If you're not a subscriber to our blog through a feed, then you may not know I updated this post and added a few very interesting videos. Be sure to check them out.

Two Laws

Do all you have agreed to do.
Do not encroach on other persons or their property.

These are the two fundamental laws taught by all religions. The first is the basis of contract law. The second is the basis of tort law and some criminal law.

These laws are essential for an advanced civilization. The first gives rise to trade and specialization of labor. The second creates peace, security and goodwill.

Experience shows that where these laws are widely obeyed by everyone, including the government, the result is liberty, free markets and rapid economic growth. Investment opportunities abound. Where these laws are not obeyed, especially by governments, liberty is not an option—only tyranny or chaos, and failures of every kind.

Richard Maybury

Giving the government special permission to violate these two laws results is just as bad as not having them in the first place.

Forward from my mother-in-law, I loved it.

I'm against the $85,000,000,000.00 bailout of AIG.

Instead, I'm in favor of giving $85,000,000,000 to America in a "We Deserve It Dividend".

To make the math simple, let's assume there are 200,000,000 bonifide U.S. Citizens 18+.

Our population is about 301,000,000 +/- counting every man, woman and child. So 200,000,000 might be a fair stab at adults 18 and up.

So divide 200 million adults 18+ into $85 billon that equals $425,000.00.

My plan is to give $425,000 to every person 18+ as a "We Deserve It Dividend".

Of course, it would NOT be tax free. So let's assume a tax rate of 30%.

Every individual 18+ has to pay $127,500.00 in taxes. That sends $25,500,000,000 right back to Uncle Sam.

But it means that every adult 18+ has $297,500.00 in their pocket. A husband and wife has $595,000.00.

What would you do with $297,500.00 to $595,000.00 in your family?

Pay off your mortgage, housing crisis solved. Repay college loans, what a great boost to new grads Put away money for college, it'll be there
Save in a bank, create money to loan to entrepreneurs. Buy a new car, create jobs Invest in the market , capital drives growth Pay for your parent's medical insurance, health care improves Enable Deadbeat Dads to come clean, or else.
Remember this is for every adult U.S. Citizen 18+ including the folks who lost their jobs at Lehman Brothers and every other company that is
cutting back. And of course, for those serving in our Armed Forces.

If we're going to re-distribute wealth let's really do it...instead of trickling out a puny $1000.00 (vote buy) economic incentive that is being proposed by one of our candidates for President.

If we're going to do an $85 billion bailout, let's bail out every adult U.S. Citizen 18+!

As for AIG liquidate it. Sell off its parts. Let American General go back to being American General. Sell off the real estate. Let the private sector
bargain hunters cut it up and clean it up.

Here's my rationale. We deserve it and AIG doesn't.

Sure it's a crazy idea that can never work. Maybe?

But can you imagine the Coast-To-Coast Block Party!

How do you spell Economic Boom?

I trust my fellow adult Americans to know how to use the $85 Billion "We Deserve It Dividend" more than I do the geniuses at AIG or in Washington DC.

And remember, The Birk plan only really costs $59.5 Billion because $25.5 Billion is returned instantly in taxes to Uncle Sam.

Mended sheets and grape arbors

From my great-grandmother's journals for 1960 and 1961:

September 28th, Wednesday (she was not above the sly aside)
W. cleaned up my house, had a good dinner and supper. Watched television in the evening. J. put up my bird feeder. That C. got me for Xmas.

Think she was being a bit tart about the fact that her Christmas bird feeder didn't get put up until nearly the following Christmas?

September 28th, Thursday (1961)
Got oil, standard paid 19.65
Mrs Souson here cleaning the place. Cost me 9.00 to clear up and haul away.


Thursday, September 29th
Had Breakfast and then W. and J. left for Wyoming. It was so good having them here- W. took the sheets to the laundry.

The next sentence is difficult for me to decipher, but I think she might be saying that W. left everything clean, or 'neat everything I can,' which doesn't make sense.
I still have some of those sheets- she mended them by hand.

Paid lights: 6:54
Tax 43.83
Insurance: 102:51

September 29th, Friday, 1961

Annie May here to clean, brot me a sack of potatoes and apples, picked grapes, said she would make a pie for me.

There are still a lot of flowers in my great-grandmother's yard, but the grape arbor is long gone.

We Are All Investors Now

Whether we want to be or not.
Michelle Malkin has ten very disturbing things about the bill- if you've heard that they only approved about a third of the money, and more funding has to be approved by the next Congress, guess again. They made that automatic. The next Congress has to vote on it if they want to back out- but this Congress gave themselves and the next gang of crooks massive political cover. It's an automatic trigger.

Paulson has complete freedom to define 'troubled assets' as he sees fit.

"We" are giving this man a trillion dollars under 'conditions' like this:

SALE OF TROUBLED ASSETS.—The Secretary may, at any time, upon terms and conditions and at a price determined by the Secretary, sell, or enter into securities loans, repurchase transactions, or other financial transactions in regard to, any troubled asset purchased
under this Act.

It is breathtakingly unconstitutional. It rewards fiscal irresponsibility and punishes fiscal care. We have basically added banking and mortgages to our already heavy Welfare program, and completely disregarded every constitutional principle there is.

Peolosi talked about how the taxpayers are going to make money, that their money will be returned. She's using 'taxpayer' as a synonym for the 'political class in Washington,' because we're never going to see a dime.

As Spunky explains:

In in remarks prepared for a speech, Barack Obama said the following about the federal bailout,

[I]f American taxpayers finance this solution, they should be treated like investors. That means Wall Street and Washington should give every penny of taxpayers’ money back once this economy recovers."

For Obama to say that we are "investors" implies voluntary cooperation. What if I don't want to "invest?" Only someone who views our money as his money, would think that we are all "investors" in this debacle. And just when does this economy recover, Senator Obama? I'd like to know when I can look for a return on my investment, with interest of course.

A friend of ours tells us he wrote his public servants in Washington (and isn't that term a joke at this point?) and included a copy of the Declaration of Independence, suggesting that they might do well to read it first, very carefully, before they voted for this bill.

Spunky linked to this post from Rod Dreher:

Your Urgent Help Needed

Dear American:

I need to ask you to support an urgent secret business relationship with a transfer of funds of great magnitude.

I am Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of America. My country has had crisis that has caused the need for large transfer of funds of 800 billion dollars US. If you would assist me in this transfer, it would be most profitable to you.

I am working with Mr. Phil Gram, lobbyist for UBS, who will be my replacement as Ministry of the Treasury in January. As a Senator, you may know him as the leader of the American banking deregulation movement in the 1990s. This transactin is 100% safe.

This is a matter of great urgency. We need a blank check. We need the funds as quickly as possible. We cannot directly transfer these funds in the names of our close friends because we are constantly under surveillance. My family lawyer advised me that I should look for a reliable and trustworthy person who will act as a next of kin so the funds can be transferred.

Please reply with all of your bank account, IRA and college fund account numbers and those of your children and grandchildren to wallstreetbailout@treasury.gov so that we may transfer your commission for this transaction. After I receive that information, I will respond with detailed information about safeguards that will be used to protect the
funds.

Yours Faithfully Minister of Treasury Paulson

I have found it absolutely discouraging to watch the petulance, spite, small minded, vindictive antics of the likes of Paulson, Pelosi, Frank, Dodd, et al on Capitol Hill. The Anchoress feels the same:

I’m not kidding, either. After watching the incompetence, lies, malice, spitefulness, bad faith and corrupt, self-serving buffoonism of the whole lot of them in Washington, I am horrified by what we have seen. We’re in big, big trouble, and I’m not even talking about the bailout. I trust absolutely nothing coming out of Washington this day. And I bet you don’t, either.

Clearly, this fellow does not: …the failure is deliberate. Don’t laugh. This method not only has its proponents, it has a name: the Cloward-Piven Strategy. It describes their agenda, tactics, and long-term strategy.

Updated to add this video footage of Barney Frank insisting there's nothing wrong with FAnnie Mae:





And to note this possible conflict of interest as Barney Frank was romantically involved with FAnnie Mae Exec Herb Moses:

Frank was and remains a stalwart defender of Fannie Mae, which is now under FBI investigation along with its sister organization Freddie Mac, American International Group Inc. (NYSE:AIG) and Lehman Brothers (NYSE:LEH) – all recently participants in government bailouts. But Frank has derailed efforts to regulate the institution, as well as denying it posed any financial risk. Frank’s office has been unresponsive to efforts by the Business & Media Institute to comment on these potential conflicts of interest.



While the relationship reportedly ended 10 years ago, Frank was serving on the House Banking Committee the entire 10 years they were together. The committee is the primary House body which along with the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO) has jurisdiction over the government-sponsored enterprises.



He has served on the committee since becoming a congressman in 1981 and became the ranking Democrat on the committee in 2003. He became chairman of the committee, now called the House Financial Services Committee, in 2007.



Moses was the assistant director for product initiatives at Fannie Mae and had been at the forefront of relaxing lending restrictions at the company for rural customers, according to the Feb. 23, 1998, issue of National Mortgage News (NMN).



“Herb Moses, who helped develop many of Fannie Mae’s affordable housing and home improvement lending programs, has left the mortgage industry,” Darryl Hicks wrote for NMN. “Mr. Moses - whose last day was Feb. 13 - spent the past seven years at Fannie Mae, most recently as director of housing initiatives. Over the course of time, he played an instrumental role in developing the company’s Title One and 203(k) home improvement lending programs.”



Hicks explained in his story how Moses orchestrated a collaborative effort between Fannie Mae and the Department of Agriculture.

“The Dartmouth grad also played a crucial role in brokering a relationship between Fannie Mae and the Department of Agriculture,” Hicks wrote. “This led to the creation of Fannie Mae’s rural housing program where the secondary marketing agency agreed to purchase small farm loans insured through the department.”



While Moses served at Fannie Mae and was Frank’s partner, Frank was actively working to support GSEs, according to several news outlets.

And note this story where the LATimes says:

Under Clinton, bank regulators have breathed the first real life into enforcement of the Community Reinvestment Act, a 20-year-old statute meant to combat “redlining” by requiring banks to serve their low-income communities. The administration also has sent a clear message by stiffening enforcement of the fair housing and fair lending laws. The bottom line: Between 1993 and 1997, home loans grew by 72% to blacks and by 45% to Latinos, far faster than the total growth rate.

That's a quote from a 1999 story. Please note that anytime you have the government requiring a business to do something, you do not have a free market, 'deregulated' situation.

Updated again to add this:

Maxine Waters: Through nearly a dozen hearings, we were frankly trying to fix something that wasn’t broke. Mr. Chairman, we do not have a crisis at Freddie Mac, and particularly at Fannie Mae, under the outstanding leadership of Franklin Raines. [Raines would barely avoid prosecution for fraud.]

Gregory Meeks: … I’m just pissed off at OFHEO [the regulators trying to warn Congress of insolvency at the GSEs], because if it wasn’t for you, I don’t think we’d be here in the first place. … There’s been nothing that indicated that’s wrong with Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac has come up on its own … The question that then comes up is the competence that your agency has with reference to deciding and regulating these GSEs.

Lacy Clay: This hearing is about the political lynching of Franklin Raines.

Barney Frank: I don’t see anything in this report that raises safety and soundness problems.

Take a good look through this video in 2004, and ask yourself who on this panel wanted more regulatory oversight of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and which members spent their time attacking the regulators. When Barack Obama talks at debates about how the past eight years of regulatory laissez-faire created the problem, he may want to review the transcripts of these hearings and note that Democrats repeatedly undermined regulators and called them everything from incompetent to bigoted in their rush to keep the status quo at Fannie and Freddie.

Sunday Hymn Post

Touching a Mystery

The story is from everlasting to everlasting. Yet when it happens to you, that your new born child is laid for the first time inyour arms, it is the whole miracle of creation and your heart cries aloud as did Mary's: "My soul doth magnify the Lord." You know without being told that you are as near to touching the divine mystery as one may come in this life.

Neil Dorr

The Debates and The Economy

I did not get a chance to watch the debates. Did you? Who do you think won? What were the most important take away points to you?

I did watch the part my fellow conservatives are touting- where Obama had to check his bracelet to see the name of the soldier on it- I don't think that's a fair criticism. I think it's just as likely he checked to make absolutely sure he did not botch the pronunciation of the name, which wasn't a common one, or, to put a more negative interpretation on it, he just wanted to prove that he did, in fact, have a bracelet, which was no worse than McCain bringing it up in the first place. I think the whole bracelet thing was trivial and emotional manipulation on the part of each of them, but I don't agree that Obama double checking the pronunciation indicates he didn't even know the name of the guy on the bracelet.

I think it's important to note that Kissenger does not, as Obama said he did, agree with Obama's idea to deal with Iran. He agrees with McCain.

Otherwise, my sense, from reading blogs on left and right, is that it was either a draw or a slight advantage to Obama.

The Economy- I am thinking if it's as urgent as they are telling us it is, they wouldn't be talking on funding for the disreputable group ACORN or trying to sneak in another ban on drilling onto it, nor would they be forgetting to invite the Republicans to a 'bipartisan' meeting- seriously.

Ace is trying his best to help explain the credit crisis. Here's a good attempt from a reader.

This video is helpful- albeit political. Forget about whose fault it is (Bush, for instance, had a responsibility to use his veto and he did not), and notice the progression:


There are plenty of blogs and news stories about how the government stands to make money on the bail-out later. HEre's one.

I've already said that I don't think the government is supposed to be in the banking business. But here's another concern. IF the government that regulates businesses is one of their competitors, how is this not creating a massive conflict of interest situation?

Gnocchi Parisienne

four servings, bake at 350 for 20 minutes

1 cup water
1/4 cup butter, margarine, or other solid fat
1/4 t. salt
1/8 t. cayenne
1 cup plus 2 T. flour
1/4 cup Parmesan cheese
1/2 t. dry mustard
4 eggs
1 T. salt
Mornay sauce (see below)
2 T. butter or margarine

Combine water, butter, the 1/4 t. salt, and cayenne in a medium size saucepan, boil

Combine flour, Parmesan cheese and mustard in small bowl. When liquid is boiling rapidly and butter is melted dump in flour mixture all at once and, stirring rapidly, lift pan a few inches above the heat and continue to stir for 30 seconds, until paste comes away from sides of pan and forms a rough ball in center.

Add the eggs, one at a time, beating vigorously after each addition until paste is smooth and shiny.

Fill a large deep skillet half full with water, add the tablespoon of salt and bring to boil
With two tablespoons dipped into the hot water, mold dough into egg shapes and drop them into the water. Lower heat so that water just simmers and poach a few at a time for about 15 minutes or until firm, turning each over occasionally with a slotted spoon. Drain on Cookie sheet, covered with paper toweling, and refrigerate while making the mornay sauce.

Spread half of the mornay sauce on the bottom of a 2 quart shallow baking dish. Arrange the gnocchi in the dish and spoon over remaining sauce.
Bake in a moderate oven for 20 minutes or until sauce is bubbly hot.
Dot with remaining 2 T butter, place under broiler just until top is glazed and brown.

Mornay Sauce
2 cups milk
1 bay leaf
slice of onion
a few peppercorns
6 tablespoons butter or margarine
6 tablespoons flour
1/4 t salt
dash cayenne
1/2 cup heavy cream
1/2 cup parmesan
1/4 t. dry mustard

In small saucepan have first four ingredients. Heat milk to steaming hot.
In a large saucepan melt butter. Stir in flour, salt, and cayenne. Remove from heat, and strain hot milk into it, a third at a time, stirring constantly until mixture is smooth and thick. Stir in remaining ingredients, return to heat and cook over low heat for 3 minutes, stirring frequently.

From Family Circle, 4/75

Six Dollar Electric Bill

From my great-grandmother's journals for 1960 and 1961:

Tuesday, September 27th- Started out early for R's (another married son who lived a couple hours away). W and J went to (the biggest city near us), came back for supper- which was such a good one. Had such a good visit with all of them. Got back home at 11.

Wednesday, September 27th, 1961 (I believe my great-grandmother went to a nursing home the following year, when she could no longer walk):
Paid electric, 6.67
Worked around
Watched television

I think she's nearly 90 in these entries.

Perry Mason, Red Skelton, The Avengers, The JOey Bishop Show, Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color, these are some of the shows she could have watched in 1961. I think it's interesting that she never identifies them. She just says she watched television.

Bail-out Reading

Thanks to David for passing on the link to this very useful website with a collection of articles past and present which help the willing student to make some sense of the current economic crisis.

In Need of a Good Laugh

The Boy kindly offered to remove Yertle and give him a burial spot in the same area another fish, a squirrel found in the yard, and a hermit crab have been buried.

Paca is no longer suffering, but the friends who can help dispose of him cannot be here until supper time. Have I mentioned that my husband's boss is one of the most wonderful God-fearing men we have ever known? He is a good man. He came, shooed the EC inside, did what needed to be done, and then left, refusing to be thanked. I have tried to thank him for things he has done for us before, and he gets tears in his eyes and tells me to stop.

We have purchased chocolate and ice-cream, and now we are choosing a movie to make us laugh. Here are some of our favorites, in case you, too, need to laugh sometime:
My Man Godfrey.

Anything by Danny Kaye, but especially The Inspector General (I know other people who like the Court Jester best, but we just don't agree. The Inspector General is much more fun)

You Can't Take It With You

The Long, Long Trailer (Desi Arnez and Lucille Ball, particularly hilarious if you, as a family, have ever moved)

It Happened One Night

The Man Who Came to Dinner (this is only enjoyable for people who enjoy crusty, obnoxious, rude curmudgeons with a knack for witty dialogue)

March of the Wooden Soldiers with Laurel and Hardy

Pirates of Penzance with Linda Rondstadt and Rex Smith (not so old, but hilarious good fun)

After the little ones are in bed we also enjoy Arsenic and Old Lace and Charade.

Kind Hearts and Coronets made us laugh even though we felt rather guilty about it.

We have another post (probably more than one, embarrassingly enough) about movies we like here.

That list is a bit embarrassing, it's so long (and incomplete), so I should say that after we've soothed away some raw edges, we'll also be playing a game, as the HG is bringing home one or two college students tonight after the Friday night Bible study her college friends have.

Heart-Aches

One of the paradoxes of my existance is that on the one hand, I think it's really important for children to have animals, and so we do that. With a vengeance. And on the other hand, of all parenting crises, of all the emotional ups and downs that children go through (and even my 25 year old is still my child) and all the angst and drama of being a Mom to human beings- the grief and pain the children experience when a pet dies is probably the agony that wrenches me the most.
The EC took the FYG with her last night to house and pet sit with her at a friend's house in town. We had to call them back home this morning, as this is the situation which we found when we awoke:

Yertle is dead.
The last goldfish is dead.
Paca, the old white horse, is on the ground dying.


The Equuschick bought him some 8 years ago with her own money. She was cheated- he was an old dude horse then, and he hated people and has never been very good as a horse, but he was hers and she loved him. We knew he was not going to make it through another winter, and, in fact, he was doing so poorly that she hoped he would go quietly into that good night in his sleep some time this fall.

He is not able to survive this last illness, but he is not going quietly, so my husband's boss, who is a hunter, is on his way out to do the best thing. Then we will have other logistical details to figure out.

The EC is sitting outside with him. Pip is drowning her sorrows in her music, playing her heart out on the piano.

I am, to be honest, not much of an animal person. When all my pretty chicks have flown the coop, there shall be no more beasts in the Common Room (and the HG and Jenny say they think they can do without them, too). And I can tell myself, "It's just a fish. It's a turtle. Turtles are reptiles. That horse would have died 6 years ago if he had another than the EC, and he has had a golden period, the best years of his life have been with her as his owner, and he is a HORSE, not a human, and it is his time to go." But The Progeny- they are human. They are my humans as I am theirs, and their pain is my pain.

And I want to make it go away and I can't.

Poly Ticks As Usual

The Democrats want 20 percent of profits from the Bail-Out to go to ACORN.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi has the plenary power to bring a bill to the floor of the House, and no parliamentary procedure can help a minority to block a majority will to pass it. That’s one fact that has to be remembered while Pelosi and Barney Frank blame the House GOP over the collapse of the bailout bill...

More at HotAir.

Frugalities

I have another magazine from the 70s with money saving ideas in it. See this week's post at Frugal Hacks for more.:00

Spinach Cheese Tart

Line a 9 inch pie pan with pie crust (much cheaper to make than to buy)
Cover bottom with a bit of waxed paper, add a layer of dried rice or beans to weight down, ake at 400 for 5 minutes, remove waxed paper and rice or beans so crust can brown, bake 6-8 minutes longer.

Filling:
Thaw 20 ounces of frozen, chopped spinach. Put the thawed spinach in a colander over a bowl and squeeze the juice out of the spinach (press it against the sides of the colander using a wooden spoon, saving the green liquid for another recipe (below)

Saute onion in butter until transparent, stir in spinach, 1/2 t. salt, 1/4 t. nutmeg, and dash pepper.

In large mixing bowl combine 15 ounces cottage or ricotta cheese, 1 cup milk, cream, half and half, or reserved spinach juice with powdered milk mixed in; 1/2 cup parmesan cheese, and 3 slightly bean eggs. Mix well. Stir in spinach, put into baked pastry shell, bake at 350 for 50 minutes or until custard is set and top is lightly browned.

Serve with tomato salad and carrot sticks

Using the liquid from the spinach:
Use it in an alfredo sauce to make a sort of 'florentine' sauce- serve over crepes, pasta, or calzones.

Chicken livers and Company

From my great-grandmother's journals for 1960 and 1961:

Monday, September 26, 1960:
W and J went antiquing. Went to A's for supper and had such a grand supper and visit. (W and J are a married son and daughter-in-law who live out of state, but came for a visit. A was my grandmother, her daughter)

Tuesday, the 26th, 1961:
Worked around. cool. Watched television. Mrs. Sveterland (?) brot me chicken livers from the poultry plant. Mrs. May sent over a jar of the best cooked beans. So very tender.

thought: so many of the entries show neighbors sending in a can of food, a jar of home-preserves, a bit of steak from the market. Would anybody appreciate that today, or would they dismiss it? Complain? How did Mrs. Sveterland get chicken livers from the plant? Did she work there? Was there some announcement on processing day that you could come pick up livers? Did she have a friend who worked there?
Granny Tea tells me that when she was a girl, her mother (A) used to buy hens from the egg laying factory up the road- when the hens were no longer laying enough for the egg farm, local residents could buy them very cheaply, and with improved living arrangements, the hens would lay several times a week for another year or so, when they would put them in the stewing pot.

This and That About the Internet

Who are we kidding? It's nearly all about politics and economics.


Palin took spontaneous questions at Ground Zero today.

The Anchoress has a sobering post on the economic situation- the source is the spouse of a banker who is reporting what another banker said, so take it for what it's worth to you. His bank is doing well, he said:

BUT…He also mentioned, when asked, not as a (bank) representative, but as a man who must analyze financial situations world wide and make critical decisions based on that information that the situation was extremely critical for the next few days and that could all change very quickly.

He said that the situation is much much more critical than is even being reported by any outlet he’s seen. The original “runaway Dems” response has many world-wide investors terrified & ready to drop ALL US investments like hot rocks.

If something isn’t done, this man believes, by Monday at the latest, he is convinced from having his ear to the wall & the nose to the ground that our whole economy will simply collapse like a house of cards in a gust of breath because the worst fears of these world wide investors - who invest in our economy to the tune of trillions (and in some ways ARE the American economy) - will rid themselves of their holdings and call loans due and we are not in a position to pay our debts right now. We are a ‘debtor nation’, tottering on a terrible brink, he said, worse than the situation in the 1920’s and he said even the extremely healthy (bank) would likely go under with the rest of our economy.

Palin's right to avoid the press, because it's a losing proposition when they've already decided how to portray you:

Running for office is now like being a game-show contestant: Can you navigate the series of booby-trapped events set up by people experienced at focusing on the silly? Rather than trying to elicit information that will help voters discern if the candidate will be a good president (or veep), the press focuses on coaxing the candidate they don't like into saying something that will eliminate him or her from the game.

This is no way to pick a president.

Marine cleared of all charges in Haditha trial suing Murtha for slander and violation of his Constitutional rights. I don't ordinarily approve of lawsuits, but in this case, an elected official violated and outraged common decency with his public statements insisting these Marines were guilty- and the fact of their innocence isn't getting nearly as much airtime. I think Murtha needs to be held accountable.

Gabriel Mailor on the Bail-out:

The claim is that none of the banks which currently hold mortgage-backed securities can properly value the securities (they are opaque) so none of them can buy or sell them (they are illiquid). The idea behind the bailout is that a government agency will be created that will take a guess at a price, purchase them, then determine their actual value, make that information public, and auction them back into the market. Dafydd calls it a "reset button."

Why can't the financial services institutions do all that themselves? Because in the meantime the securities are valueless. That represents a serious loss and the institutions are finding out that they have far less capital than they previously thought. Some institutions are simply worth less, but they'll live through it. Others are declaring bankruptcy or threatening the government that they will declare bankruptcy in an attempt to get a handout.

We are being asked to rely on a few assumptions here that we shouldn't.

New wave of airline passenger screening- reading your mind. It's very interesting, a little exciting, and kind of disturbing.

Bail-out on the brain- I can't help it. Here's another angle:

Christopher Thornberg, a principle economist at Beacon Economics and an opponent of the bailout, tries to understand the motivation for the rescue. "There are two kinds of financial stress," he says. "One is simple bad investments. The other is a panic and a run on the banks. But I don't understand why they think that's going to happen. And I don't see why the taxpayer has to be on the hook for a completely out of control Wall Street... The picture Bernanke's going to paint is: bank run after bank run. But there's no reason for banks to fail as long as the Fed is there as a backstop. That's the point of the Fed: to prevent bank failure by being a lender of last resort."

It's never been more clear what an orphan the free market argument is. The Republicans are looking to establish a form of crony socialism and the best the Democrats can come up with is to demand that the government establish CEO salary caps. And since everybody else sees an epidemic spreading, I'll see one too: Why should we stop at financial services? After this bailout, what will be the argument against having the government rescue health care, water and electric, airlines, print media, and other troubled industries?

Warren Buffet says it's an economic Pearl Harbour, and we have to have the bail-out.



Excellent, excellent essay on how we've never, ever, even tried a free market approach. I know, she said sadly. But one would like to give it a chance.

Impressive graph of the press coverage of Obama during his run. That ought to make the better of them a little embarrassed, but I doubt it will.

Here's Something to Make You Laugh

Pip sent it to me. Mildly off color comment at the beginning, but that's as bad as it gets.
Very funny stuff.

Clinton STrikes Again

Two Clinton clip in a row? This is getting to be a bad habit:

In an unexpected bit of campaign weirdness, Bill Clinton has emerged on Good Morning America to say something I wouldn’t say earlier: that McCain’s call for a postponement was a good-faith move (not the cynical ploy I’d characterized it as last night). Clinton even points out that suggestions by Obama fans that McCain did this because he’s “afraid to debate” don’t hold much water, since McCain’s been trying to get Obama on a debate stage for months.

Click on teh link to see more Harry Reid double standards- i.e. a few months ago he mocked McCain for not coming back to Washington to perform 'his day-job' and now that's just politicking.

I think it was a mistake for McCain to ask Obama to cancel the debates. If Congress reaches a deal, he can go to the debate without losing face and his tactical error won't be so significant. If they don't reach a deal, he'll look lame whether he debates or not.

Ban On Off-Shore Drilling to Expire

Story here.:

With the clock ticking down to what some are calling “Energy Freedom Day” — October 1, 2008, when the congressional bans on offshore oil drilling and onshore oil-shale development are set to expire — anti-drilling Democrats have backed down from a high-stakes stand-off that could have caused a government shutdown and will now result in the complete demise of the drilling bans. This is a stunning victory for grassroots activists over environmental special interests and business-as-usual in Washington. If not derailed, it also will be great news for all American consumers.

Here’s a behind-the-scenes look at how the pro-drilling victory transpired.

The normal process of funding the U.S. government through appropriations bills broke down this year, forcing Congress to prepare a continuing resolution to keep the government funded at last year’s levels. Proponents of American oil and gas production have long suspected that the Democrats would use the resolution to hide an extension of the wildly unpopular bans on offshore drilling and oil-shale development. The theory was that by simply extending last year’s Interior Appropriations act, which included the bans, they could hide an extension without even mentioning it in the text of the bill.

To pre-empt this strategy, Jim DeMint in the Senate and Jeb Hensarling and John Shadegg in the House collected signatures from enough members of Congress to make it clear that an expected presidential veto of any such extension of the drilling ban would be sustained. Meanwhile, free-market and conservative groups presented a united front to Congress and the White House, urging lawmakers to let the ban expire. Facing organized opposition in Congress and overwhelming public opinion in favor of drilling, Democrats signaled late last week that a continuing resolution would not include an extension of the drilling bans.

But that’s when the financial crisis struck and everything on Capitol Hill was thrown into the air.

With the Treasury’s proposed financial-market intervention drawing attention away from the energy debate, anti-drilling House Democrats were temporarily emboldened. On Monday they inserted language into their continuing-resolution draft that would permanently ban oil drilling within 50 miles of the U.S. coast, where the vast majority of offshore oil and gas is believed to be.

Their political calculation was that the White House would be willing to sign this into law and go along with the charade that it represented a real increase in offshore drilling. That calculation was wrong. News broke last night that President Bush threatened to veto the continuing resolution unless it allowed the bans to cleanly expire. As a result, Democrats backed down — no doubt aware of the strength of public opinion on the underlying policy issue.

It's Washington- this could all change. And, of course, if there's a Democrat sweep in the coming elections, I expect it will.

There's Enough Mud to Go Around

One of the places where Palin stumbled badly in the Couric interview was in Couric's questions about Rick Davis' role in McCain's campaign while his company received donations from Fannie Mae/Freddy Mac. This is one of the places where my impression was that she was struggling because she was also concerned about that.
The NYT article was not accurate- Davis isn't a lobbyist, and he did not receive payments from them until last month. However, the McCain campaign's rebuttal omitted to acknowledge that Davis' company has received those payments. Davis has been on a leave of absence from that company for a couple years, but I think Palin is still unhappy that his company was receiving payments.

Fair enough. I'll be concerned, too. Here's what Ed Morrissey at HotAir has to say about that:

And who got most of the attention from Fannie and Freddie? It wasn’t John McCain, who averaged $1,000 per year in contributions from Fannie/Freddie sources over the past two decades. Chris Dodd, the chair of the Banking Commitee, averaged $8,000 a year in contributions from those same sources. Barack Obama, though, set records. In less than four years in the Senate, he received more than $120,000 from Fannie/Freddie sources, at a rate of over $30,000 per year.

In 2006, McCain tried to move legislation with Chuck Hagel, John Sununu, and Elizabeth Dole — all Republicans — to bring tighter regulation and more oversight on Fannie and Freddie. Barack Obama and Chris Dodd took their money and did nothing to support that effort. Regardless of whether McCain relies on Rick Davis or not, Fannie and Freddie knew who their friends were, and made sure they invested in them.

Team Obama wants people to think Rick Davis is the villain of the Fannie/Freddie failure because he worked at a firm that did lobbying for them. Meanwhile, Jim Johnson busies himself working for Barack Obama and giving seminars on the lending industry:

But it's worse than that:

Who is Jim Johnson? He’s one of the people behind its fraudulent business practices, as auditors discovered:

[...]

An initial review of the 1999 Fannie Mae Proxy Statement “Summary Compensation Table” suggests the source of the Washington Post figure on 1998 compensation for Mr. Johnson. A close read of that proxy, including footnotes, shows that the Table itself listed only a small portion of the actual 1998 long-term compensation of Mr. Johnson. Mr. Johnson used a program available to only very senior Fannie Mae executives (Executive Vice President and above) to defer a sizable amount of earned Performance Share Plan shares. Fannie Mae disclosed in a footnote to the Summary Compensation table that Mr. Johnson deferred 111,623 shares; the actual value of the shares did not show up in the Summary Compensation Table.

Fannie Mae disclosed his compensation at the time as $2 million. The actual value of his compensation? Twenty-one million dollars. Why did Johnson and Fannie Mae hide that cost from its shareholders and government auditors? Nor was this his only peccadillo. As it turns out, while CEO of Fannie Mae, he took sweetheart loans from Countrywide Mortgage under a “friends of Angelo” program initiated by Countrywide CEO Angelo Mozilo...

So far as I know, Penny Pritzger also still works with the Obama campaign.

Incidentally, this post from the Brothers Judd is a pretty good description of this race, which has turned out to be politics as usual by both sides, with the brief exception of McCain choosing Palin and the media's increasingly unabashed support of one candidate:

...you'd do well to recall that the last two times we had match-ups with so little difference between two candidates with such modest ideas were Ford v. Carter and Bush v. Dukakis, which rendered one-termers in both cases. In the absence of distinct governing philosophies and/or political agendas both presidents found themselves prey to congresses that felt unfettered by the Executive. Considering that Maverick and the Unicorn Rider are both creatures of the legislature either is likely to be an even more trivial figure than those unillustrious predecessors.

The Palin Couric Interview

You can watch it here.

I could only watch about 3/4 of the first half because this laptop started doing annoying things. But based on the part I saw:

I think Katie was reasonably fair- my only objection there is simply that we haven't seen Obama subjected to the same sort of serious questioning.

I don't think Palin did very well. On a couple of issues, I think this is because she's really not comfortable taking the McCain line, but on others, she just wasn't ready and she wasn't very quick on her feet (neither am I, that's why I blog instead of talking in public. Plus there's that whole anti-social thing).

I don't think she's any worse than Biden, but I think Biden is too low a standard.

My Great-Grandmother's Diary

I've shared some bits and pieces from these short journal entries from a diary my great-grandmother kept from about 1950 to 1961. One entry is here, another is here.

If you're missing a sense of community, if that's something you want to see restored, you might enjoy those two posts. You could also take my great-grandmother and her neighbors as a model.=)

From September 22 to the 25th in 1960:

Thursday: September 22, Mrs. Guy came up with my insurance papers. Owe 100 dollars insurance. Joe's got in late. (this is her shorthand for 'Joe's family')

Friday, September 23: Got my first oil [bill] 23.26 [her bill the previous year was 19.65]
A and C came over for supper (that's her daughter and son-in-law) Mrs. T. brot over the birthday cake for W. It was a beauty.

Saturday, September 24: H & E came. Family went out to play golf. Had a late supper. W. bot a pot roast for Sunday.

Sunday, September 25: A. came over. We had such a good dinner. H and E left after dinner.

The following year in the same week A came over with the truck to get her groceries, and my great-grandmother says she 'looked tired. I suggested a medical check up. She carries a heavy load.'
(A. was my grandmother, and my grandfather was not a terribly easy man to get along with. I don't know if that's what my great-grandmother was referring to. I don't know if it would have mattered, that check-up, by my grandmother was dead of breast-cancer in another dozen years or so.)

A neighbor came into visit her in the evening the following day. On the 25th another neighbor 'brot over my wash. Had a big bundle. She asked to do it.' A son who lived out of state called (H), and A's son, my uncle, stopped by in the evening and watched television with his grandmother for a while. He would have been around 23 or 24 at the time.

Jenny Any Dots goes into town about once a week to help an older lady with her light housecleaning. It's hard for her to push a vacuum now, that older widow, and Jenny Any Dots loves her and has a cheerful servant's heart. She's been complaining, our elderly friend, increasingly, that the rest of us have neglected her, and I am afraid it's true. I don't like to go into town, for one thing. I don't like to drive, I don't like to leave my house. When I have to go into town, I like to do what I have to do and go home. I don't want to listen to talk about who has died and who is going to die, and I don't want to have to smile while I try to choke down the stale, wretched food in her cupboard- she keeps it there for a very long time, and she stores things together in the same tupperware containers- things like nuts, butterscotch candies, and tortilla chips rub shoulders with each other for six months or more and they all begin to taste like each other and it makes me gag a little. I don't want to see her funeral clothes one more time, or hear the very, very intimate details of her health problems, and we can sum up this list anything that might follow with this:
I. am. selfish.

That paragraph is very embarrassing. I knew it would be when I started, but you can't think how it makes me wince to look at all those 'I, I, I, I, I' sentences and leave them there. It's so very unattractive and hideous. I used to do much better (there's that 'I' again, and anyway, life is not an IRA account you fill up with good deeds and then retire and rest on our laurels and the interest).

In any given week in the fifties and the first two years of the sixties, my great-grandmother had at least half a dozen people drop in on her to visit, to do something helpful in her house, to bring her a jar of canned vegetables or preserves, to share some produce from the garden, to show her pictures of an event she'd missed, and she did not move to the town where she was living then until she was a grandmother. Somewhere we seem to have lost that sense of responsibility and commitment to others, and most of us lament its passing- but I wonder how many of us are like me?

I, I, I, I.

America Needs You, Davy Crockett

(Several bloggers are pointing out that this isn't just throwing away money- that it's a investment by the government. They are buying now to sell later. But the business of government really is not business. Yes, it's going to hurt if the government doesn't step in. But what we're doing is selling our children's and grandchildren's freedom for our current financial comfort.)

Not Yours to Give

by

Colonel David Crockett;

Compiled by Edward S. Ellis



One day in the House of Representatives, a bill was taken up appropriating money for the benefit of a widow of a distinguished naval officer. Several beautiful speeches had been made in its support. The Speaker was just about to put the question when Crockett arose:

"Mr. Speaker--I have as much respect for the memory of the deceased, and as much sympathy for the sufferings of the living, if suffering there be, as any man in this House, but we must not permit our respect for the dead or our sympathy for a part of the living to lead us into an act of injustice to the balance of the living. I will not go into an argument to prove that Congress has no power to appropriate this money as an act of charity. Every member upon this floor knows it. We have the right, as individuals, to give away as much of our own money as we please in charity; but as members of Congress we have no right so to appropriate a dollar of the public money. Some eloquent appeals have been made to us upon the ground that it is a debt due the deceased. Mr. Speaker, the deceased lived long after the close of the war; he was in office to the day of his death, and I have never heard that the government was in arrears to him.

Every man in this House knows it is not a debt. We cannot, without the grossest corruption, appropriate this money as the payment of a debt. We have not the semblance of authority to appropriate it as a charity. Mr. Speaker, I have said we have the right to give as much money of our own as we please. I am the poorest man on this floor. I cannot vote for this bill, but I will give one week's pay to the object, and if every member of Congress will do the same, it will amount to more than the bill asks."

He took his seat. Nobody replied. The bill was put upon its passage, and, instead of passing unanimously, as was generally supposed, and as, no doubt, it would, but for that speech, it received but few votes, and, of course, was lost.

Later, when asked by a friend why he had opposed the appropriation, Crockett gave this explanation:

"Several years ago I was one evening standing on the steps of the Capitol with some other members of Congress, when our attention was attracted by a great light over in Georgetown . It was evidently a large fire. We jumped into a hack and drove over as fast as we could. In spite of all that could be done, many houses were burned and many families made homeless, and, besides, some of them had lost all but the clothes they had on. The weather was very cold, and when I saw so many women and children suffering, I felt that something ought to be done for them. The next morning a bill was introduced appropriating $20,000 for their relief. We put aside all other business and rushed it through as soon as it could be done.

"The next summer, when it began to be time to think about the election, I concluded I would take a scout around among the boys of my district. I had no opposition there, but, as the election was some time off, I did not know what might turn up. When riding one day in a part of my district in which I was more of a stranger than any other, I saw a man in a field plowing and coming toward the road. I gauged my gait so that we should meet as he came to the fence. As he came up, I spoke to the man. He replied politely, but, as I thought, rather coldly.

"I began: 'Well, friend, I am one of those unfortunate beings called candidates, and--'

"'Yes, I know you; you are Colonel Crockett, I have seen you once before, and voted for you the last time you were elected. I suppose you are out electioneering now, but you had better not waste your time or mine. I shall not vote for you again.'

"This was a sockdolager . . . I begged him to tell me what was the matter.

"'Well, Colonel, it is hardly worth-while to waste time or words upon it. I do not see how it can be mended, but you gave a vote last winter which shows that either you have not capacity to understand the Constitution, or that you are wanting in the honesty and firmness to be guided by it. In either case you are not the man to represent me. But I beg your pardon for expressing it in that way. I did not intend to avail myself of the privilege of the constituent to speak plainly to a candidate for the purpose of insulting or wounding you. I intend by it only to say that your understanding of the Constitution is very different from mine; and I will say to you what, but for my rudeness, I should not have said, that I believe you to be honest. . . . But an understanding of the Constitution different from mine I cannot overlook, because the Constitution, to be worth anything, must be held sacred, and rigidly observed in all its provisions. The man who wields power and misinterprets it is the more dangerous the more honest he is.'

"'I admit the truth of all you say, but there must be some mistake about it, for I do not remember that I gave any vote last winter upon any constitutional question.'

"'No, Colonel, there's no mistake. Though I live here in the backwoods and seldom go from home, I take the papers from Washington and read very carefully all the proceedings of Congress. My papers say that last winter you voted for a bill to appropriate $20,000 to some sufferers by a fire in Georgetown . Is that true?'

"'Well, my friend; I may as well own up. You have got me there. But certainly nobody will complain that a great and rich country like ours should give the insignificant sum of $20,000 to relieve its suffering women and children, particularly with a full and overflowing Treasury, and I am sure, if you had been there, you would have done just as I did.'

"'It is not the amount, Colonel, that I complain of; it is the principle. In the first place, the government ought to have in the Treasury no more than enough for its legitimate purposes. But that has nothing to do with the question. The power of collecting and disbursing money at pleasure is the most dangerous power that can be intrusted to man, particularly under our system of collecting revenue by a tariff, which reaches every man in the country, no matter how poor he may be, and the poorer he is the more he pays in proportion to his means. What is worse, it presses upon him without his knowledge where the weight centers, for there is not a man in the United States who can ever guess how much he pays to the government. So you see, that while you are contributing to relieve one, you are drawing it from thousands who are even worse off than he. If you had the right to give anything, the amount was simply a matter of discretion with you, and you had as much right to give $20,000,000 as $20,000. If you have the right to give to one, you have the right to give to all; and, as the Constitution neither defines charity nor stipulates the amount, you are at liberty to give to any and everything which you may believe, or profess to believe, is a charity, and to any amount you may think proper. You will very easily perceive what a wide door this would open for fraud and corruption and favoritism, on the one hand, and for robbing the people on the other. No, Colonel, Congress has no right to give charity. Individual members may give as much of their own money as they please, but they have no right to touch a dollar of the public money for that purpose. If twice as many houses had been burned in this county as in Georgetown , neither you nor any other member of Congress would have thought of appropriating a dollar for our relief. There are about two hundred and forty members of Congress. If they had shown their sympathy for the sufferers by contributing each one week's pay, it would have made over $13,000. There are plenty of wealthy men in and around Washington who could have given $20,000 without depriving themselves of even a luxury of life. The congressmen chose to keep their own money, which, if reports be true, some of them spend not very creditably; and the people about Washington , no doubt, applauded you for relieving them from the necessity of giving by giving what was not yours to give. The people have delegated to Congress, by the Constitution, the power to do certain things. To do these, it is authorized to collect and pay moneys, and for nothing else. Everything beyond this is usurpation, and a violation of the Constitution.

"'So you see, Colonel, you have violated the Constitution in what I consider a vital point. It is a precedent fraught with danger to the country, for when Congress once begins to stretch its power beyond the limits of the Constitution, there is no limit to it, and no security for the people. I have no doubt you acted honestly, but that does not make it any better, except as far as you are personally concerned, and you see that I cannot vote for you.'

"I tell you I felt streaked. I saw if I should have opposition, and this man should go to talking, he would set others to talking, and in that district I was a gone fawn-skin. I could not answer him, and the fact is, I was so fully convinced that he was right, I did not want to. But I must satisfy him, and I said to him:

"'Well, my friend, you hit the nail upon the head when you said I had not sense enough to understand the Constitution. I intended to be guided by it, and thought I had studied it fully. I have heard many speeches in Congress about the powers of Congress, but what you have said here at your plow has got more hard, sound sense in it than all the fine speeches I ever heard. If I had ever taken the view of it that you have, I would have put my head into the fire before I would have given that vote; and if you will forgive me and vote for me again, if I ever vote for another unconstitutional law I wish I may be shot.'

"He laughingly replied: 'Yes, Colonel, you have sworn to that once before, but I will trust you again upon one condition. You say that you are convinced that your vote was wrong. Your acknowledgment of it will do more good than beating you for it. If, as you go around the district, you will tell people about this vote, and that you are satisfied it was wrong, I will not only vote for you, but will do what I can to keep down opposition, and, perhaps, I may exert some little influence in that way.'



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"'If I don't,' said I, 'I wish I may be shot; and to convince you that I am in earnest in what I say I will come back this way in a week or ten days, and if you will get up a gathering of the people, I will make a speech to them. Get up a barbecue, and I will pay for it.'

"'No, Colonel, we are not rich people in this section, but we have plenty of provisions to contribute for a barbecue, and some to spare for those who have none. The push of crops will be over in a few days, and we can then afford a day for a barbecue. This is Thursday; I will see to getting it up on Saturday week. Come to my house on Friday, and we will go together, and I promise you a very respectable crowd to see and hear you.'

"'Well, I will be here. But one thing more before I say good-by. I must know your name.'

"'My name is Bunce.'

"'Not Horatio Bunce?'

"'Yes.'

"'Well, Mr. Bunce, I never saw you before, though you say you have seen me, but I know you very well. I am glad I have met you, and very proud that I may hope to have you for my friend.'

"It was one of the luckiest hits of my life that I met him. He mingled but little with the public, but was widely known for his remarkable intelligence and incorruptible integrity, and for a heart brimful and running over with kindness and benevolence, which showed themselves not only in words but in acts. He was the oracle of the whole country around him, and his fame had extended far beyond the circle of his immediate acquaintance. Though I had never met him before, I had heard much of him, and but for this meeting it is very likely I should have had opposition, and had been beaten. One thing is very certain, no man could now stand up in that district under such a vote.

"At the appointed time I was at his house, having told our conversation to every crowd I had met, and to every man I stayed all night with, and I found that it gave the people an interest and a confidence in me stronger than I had every seen manifested before.

"Though I was considerably fatigued when I reached his house, and, under ordinary circumstances, should have gone early to bed, I kept him up until midnight, talking about the principles and affairs of government, and got more real, true knowledge of them than I had got all my life before.

"I have known and seen much of him since, for I respect him--no, that is not the word--I reverence and love him more than any living man, and I go to see him two or three times every year; and I will tell you, sir, if every one who professes to be a Christian lived and acted and enjoyed it as he does, the religion of Christ would take the world by storm.

"But to return to my story. The next morning we went to the barbecue, and, to my surprise, found about a thousand men there. I met a good many whom I had not known before, and they and my friend introduced me around until I had got pretty well acquainted--at least, they all knew me.

"In due time notice was given that I would speak to them. They gathered up around a stand that had been erected. I opened my speech by saying:

"'Fellow-citizens--I present myself before you today feeling like a new man. My eyes have lately been opened to truths which ignorance or prejudice, or both, had heretofore hidden from my view. I feel that I can today offer you the ability to render you more valuable service than I have ever been able to render before. I am here today more for the purpose of acknowledging my error than to seek your votes. That I should make this acknowledgment is due to myself as well as to you. Whether you will vote for me is a matter for your consideration only.'

"I went on to tell them about the fire and my vote for the appropriation and then told them why I was satisfied it was wrong. I closed by saying:

"'And now, fellow-citizens, it remains only for me to tell you that the most of the speech you have listened to with so much interest was simply a repetition of the arguments by which your neighbor, Mr. Bunce, convinced me of my error.

"'It is the best speech I ever made in my life, but he is entitled to the credit for it. And now I hope he is satisfied with his convert and that he will get up here and tell you so.'

"He came upon the stand and said:

"'Fellow-citizens--It affords me great pleasure to comply with the request of Colonel Crockett. I have always considered him a thoroughly honest man, and I am satisfied that he will faithfully perform all that he has promised you today.'

"He went down, and there went up from that crowd such a shout for Davy Crockett as his name never called forth before.

"I am not much given to tears, but I was taken with a choking then and felt some big drops rolling down my cheeks. And I tell you now that the remembrance of those few words spoken by such a man, and the honest, hearty shout they produced, is worth more to me than all the honors I have received and all the reputation I have ever made, or ever shall make, as a member of Congress.

"Now, sir," concluded Crockett, "you know why I made that speech yesterday.

"There is one thing now to which I will call your attention. You remember that I proposed to give a week's pay. There are in that House many very wealthy men--men who think nothing of spending a week's pay, or a dozen of them, for a dinner or a wine party when they have something to accomplish by it. Some of those same men made beautiful speeches upon the great debt of gratitude which the country owed the deceased--a debt which could not be paid by money--and the insignificance and worthlessness of money, particularly so insignificant a sum as $10,000, when weighted against the honor of the nation. Yet not one of them responded to my proposition. Money with them is nothing but trash when it is to come out of the people. But it is the one great thing for which most of them are striving, and many of them sacrifice honor, integrity, and justice to obtain it."

Holders of political office are but reflections of the dominant leadership--good or bad--among the electorate.

Horatio Bunce is a striking example of responsible citizenship. Were his kind to multiply, we would see many new faces in public office; or, as in the case of Davy Crockett, a new Crockett.

For either the new faces or the new Crocketts, we must look to the Horatio in ourselves!

"Democrat" Covers a Multitude of Sins for the Media

From Real Clear Politics:

The mainstream media have gone over the line and are now straight-out propagandists for the Obama campaign.

While they have been liberal and blinkered in their worldview for decades, in 2007-08, for the first time, the major media consciously are covering for one candidate for president and consciously are knifing the other. This is no longer journalism; it is simply propaganda. (The American left-wing version of the Völkischer Beobachter cannot be far behind.)

And as a result, we are less than seven weeks away from possibly electing a president who has not been thoroughly or even halfway honestly presented to the country by our watchdogs -- the press. The image of Obama that the press has presented to the public is not a fair approximation of the real man. They consciously have ignored whole years of his life and have shown a lack of curiosity about such gaps, which bespeaks a lack of journalistic instinct.

Thus, the public image of Obama is of a "man who never was."

The man who never was is a reference to one of our favorite stories from history here at the Common Room. You'll have to click through to read that fascinating little bit of trivia.

Meanwhile, do you think the press would mention it if Palin referred to Iran as a tiny country that was no threat to us? Obama said that. Do you think the press would have a field day if Palin forgot (or never knew) that Russia has a UN Veto? Obama seemed unaware of that fact.

While we have learned about the colleges Palin attended, her husband's driving record 20 years ago, and everybody has counted up on their fingers the months between their wedding and Track's birth:

The major media simply have not reported on Obama's two years at New York's Columbia University, where, among other things, he lived a mere quarter-mile from former terrorist Bill Ayers. Later, they both ended up as neighbors and associates in Chicago. Obama denies more than a passing relationship with Ayers. Should the media be curious? In only two weeks, the media have focused on all the colleges Gov. Palin has attended, her husband's driving habits 20 years ago, and the close criticism of the political opponents Gov. Palin had when she was mayor of Wasilla, Alaska.

But in two years, they haven't bothered to see how close Obama was with the terrorist Ayers.

Nor have the media paid any serious attention to Obama's rise in Chicago politics. How did honest Obama rise in the famously sordid Chicago political machine with the full support of Boss Daley? Despite the great -- and unflattering -- details on Obama's Chicago years presented in David Freddoso's new book on Obama, the mainstream media continue to ignore both the facts and the book. It took a British publication, The Economist, to give Freddoso's book a review with fair comment.

The public image of Obama as an idealistic, post-race, post-partisan, well-spoken and honest young man with the wisdom and courage befitting a great national leader is a confection spun by a willing conspiracy of Obama, his publicist (David Axelrod) and most of the senior editors, producers and reporters of the national media.

We are supposed to care deeply that Palin's husband was a member of the Alaska Independence Party or that as Mayor she wore a Pat Buchanon button the day he come to town, but we aren't supposed to be remotely interested in the work Obama has done with Ayers or the fact that he has been dishonest about his connections with Ayers. We are supposed to be outraged about where Palin has gone to church, but ignore as an unseemly interest in private spiritual matters Obama's 20 year membership at a church where the pastor gives sermons damning America, Whitey, and saying 9/11 was the chickens coming home for roost.

Powerline:

...the mainstream media have prescribed the proper emotion, the seemly sentiment, the fitting moral tone, that must be established; and all information that muddies the tone and weakens the feeling has been thrown down the memory hole.

Wolfe's description has obvious application to the press's treatment of Barack Obama during this campaign season, with the result that important stories illuminating Obama's character, judgment and lack of seriousness have been thrown down the memory hole if they have ever seen the light of day. Here are five of them, briefly noted with links.

The five stories are the things he privately promised the teamsters, his two-faced stance on Iran, his relationship with Ayers and his characterization of that relationship (just some guy in his neighborhood):

Obama's description of his relationship with Ayers is simply deceitful. Thanks to the work of Steve Diamond and Stanley Kurtz among others, followers of the campaign on the Internet have discovered that Obama had a close working relationship with Ayers.

His extremist stance on abortion (the only senator to vote against recognizing babies who survive their abortion as human beings), which he falsely characterizes as 'moderate' (not even NARAL could stomach killing babies outside the womb), and:

Obama's historical howlers: Obama has repeatedly made it clear when invoking American history to support his positions that he is shockingly ignorant. In support of his advocacy of presidential negotiations with Iran, for example, Obama points to the constructive role that the Kennedy-Khrushchev summit in Vienna played in the ultimate American victory in the Cold War.

By all accounts, however, the Vienna summit was a disaster for the United States. It led, among other things, to the emplacement of the Berlin Wall by the Soviet Union, to the Cuban missile crisis and to the enhancement of the American role in Vietnam. Either Obama is familiar with the history and is deliberately exploiting the ignorance of his supporters, or he has no idea what he is talking about. (I incline to the latter view.)

All of these things ought to be interesting to a press with any surviving journalistic instincts. We know that they would be the subject of intense investigation if Obama were a Republican.

We are supposed to be outraged that Palin fired an official who served at her whim to begin with- she had the right to hire or fire whom she would for that position, and this official was offered another job first. We are supposed to see it as some dark and unholy abuse of power that she objected to having as a police officer a man who tasered a ten year old and issued death threats- but we are not to notice that astroturfing is Axelrod's area of expertise and Palin has clearly been the victim of an astroturfing effort by members of a firm who have worked with Axelrod. Nor are we to care that the adult son of a Democrat senator who supports Obama has broken into Palin's private email account expressly to look for something to throw the election Obama's way, and has publicized the private contact information of a minor child in his efforts. Nor should we be upset- or even aware, that Rangel, the Democrat who heads the ways and means committee, who writes the tax laws, has been violating those tax laws for years, has engaged in other greedy, illegal, and unethical behavior and STILL SERVES as chairman- Nancy Pelosi won't make him step down. The 'D' after his name makes his criminal and unethical conduct invisible to the media.

The Strata-Sphere:

It is a pathetic crumbling of what was once journalism. Journalists are now part of the problem in America’s government. They are a key element of the Political Industrial Complex which has strangle hold on the levers of power and are barring any of “We The People” from getting to those levers. You can see it in how they have reacted to Sarah Palin, being just a commoner from the backwoods.

80% of us know this country is on the wrong track. But it is not left or right policies, it is the idiots who have the reigns of power and refuse to listen to those of us who hired them. The people in DC say and do things we normal rubes out here outside the DC beltway could never do in our jobs (and never would do anyway - we have too much respect and professionalism to stoop to the levels of the pols and talking heads and ‘media’ hot heads).

And how many more corrupt Congressman do we have to put up with who have taken bribes, stashed $100K in there freezer or evaded their tax responsibilities?

From The Economist, the book review of Freddoso's book on Obama (we also were not supposed to notice or care that Obama's campaign openly, dishonestly, and viciously attacked Mr. Freddoso's character, work ethic, and work history while they attempted to shut down any discussion of his book):

IF YOU find yourself believing that “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for”, or that “this is the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow” or even, tout court, that “yes we can”, the chances are that you are suffering from a severe case of Obamamania.

Tens of millions of Americans and an even larger number of Europeans have fallen victim to the syndrome, which involves a belief that a young black senator from Chicago can cure the world’s ills, in part because of his race, in part because of his obvious intelligence and rhetorical skill; but in no part because of any record of achievement in the past. Fortunately, an inexpensive remedy is at hand.

The remedy is reading the Freddoso book, The Case Against Barack Obama.
Afraid of information, that is a remedy the Obama campaign does not want you to take.

The Obama that emerges from its pages is not, Mr Freddoso says, “a bad person. It’s just that he’s like all the rest of them. Not a reformer. Not a Messiah. Just like all the rest of them in Washington.” And the author makes a fairly compelling case that this is so. The best part of the book concentrates on Mr Obama’s record in Chicago, his home town and the place from which he was elected to the Illinois state Senate in 1996, before moving to the United States Senate in 2004. The book lays out in detail how this period began in a way that should shock some of Mr Obama’s supporters: he won the Democratic nomination for his Illinois seat by getting a team of lawyers to throw all the other candidates off the ballot on various technicalities. One of those he threw off was a veteran black politician, a woman who helped him get started in politics in the first place.

Freddoso is partisan, as he admits (unlike, say, the NYT).

Sometimes, however, Mr Freddoso lets his own partisan nature run away with him. It strikes the reader as odd to make an issue out of the Obamas’ comfortable income, when everyone knows that John McCain and Hillary Clinton both have family fortunes in excess of $100m. On the whole, though, Mr Freddoso raises legitimate points. And he ends with a question Obamamaniacs should ask themselves more often: “Do you hope that Barack Obama will change politics if he becomes president? On what grounds?”

We are supposed to believe whatever Obama says today without comparing it to what he has actually done (see gun control) or said yesterday (see Iran, Georgia/Russia, the financial crisis, etc. etc, etc.)

Nor are we supposed to be aware of his radical connections- this is 'guilt by association:'

After hearing about Barack Obama's ties to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, Fr. Michael Pfleger, and the militant activists of ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), it should be clear to everyone that his extremist roots run deep. But the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee has yet another connection with the world of far-Left radicalism. Obama has long been linked -- through foundation grants, shared political activism, collaboration on legislation and tactics, and mutual praise and support -- with the Chicago-based Gamaliel Foundation, one of the least known yet most influential national umbrella groups for church-based "community organizers."

The same separatist, anti-American theology of liberation that was so boldly and bitterly proclaimed by Obama's pastor is shared, if more quietly, by Obama's Gamaliel colleagues. The operative word here is "quietly." Gamaliel specializes in ideological stealth, and Obama, a master student of Gamaliel strategy, shows disturbing signs of being a sub rosa radical himself. Obama's legislative tactics, as well as his persistent professions of non-ideological pragmatism, appear to be inspired by his radical mentors' most sophisticated tactics. Not only has Obama studied, taught, and apparently absorbed stealth techniques from radical groups like Gamaliel and ACORN, but in his position as a board member of Chicago's supposedly nonpartisan Woods Fund, he quietly funneled money to his radical allies -- at the very moment he most needed their support to boost his political career. It's high time for these shadowy, perhaps improper, ties to receive a dose of sunlight.

The connections are numerous. Gregory Galluzzo, Gamaliel's co-founder and executive director, served as a trainer and mentor during Obama's mid-1980s organizing days in Chicago. The Developing Communities Project, which first hired Obama, is part of the Gamaliel network. Obama became a consultant and eventually a trainer of community organizers for Gamaliel. (He also served as a trainer for ACORN.) And he has kept up his ties with Gamaliel during his time in the U.S. Senate.

Each of these links contains much, much more information- information you won't be seeing in the New York Times or on NBC.

The Bible says that 'love covers a multitude of sins.' In the media world, it's that letter 'D' after a politician's name that covers a multitude of sins.

Reasons Why People Call Barack Obama The One

Jenny, who is the least political and least cynical of our voting Progeny, walked through the living room as this was playing. When it was over, she looked at me, puzzled, and asked, "That's a joke, right? That isn't serious, is it?" It's serious.

More about that song here:

You may have never heard of a local songwriter named Michele Smith. But right now, all over America, people are memorizing the lyrics to one of her songs, and watching the video over and over to learn the melody.

On Saturday, several thousand people will be singing her song in unison in Washington.

Organizers of the Walk for Change, a rally to show support for Barack Obama's presidential campaign, liked Smith's song Barack Obama, He's the One so much they're going to have participants sing it as they walk through the streets of the capital.

As of late August, more than 3,000 people had signed up for the walk.

Oprah Winfrey:

Winfrey also recalled a story from "The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman," a 1974 film based on Ernest Gaines' 1971 novel.

In Winfrey's telling, the protagonist – an old woman who had survived slavery and the Civil War – would ask every child, "Are you the one? Are you the one?"

"I do believe I do today we have the answer to Miss Pittman's question – it's a question that the entire nation is asking – is he the one?" Winfrey said. "South Carolina – I do believe he's the one."

Marla Garza, Hilary supporter, columnist, editorialist:
True, he's got a lot of blanks to fill in. He's been deliberately vague on some

positions that he must define in the coming weeks. I still think Hillary Clinton is fabulous and that she's suffered from the deep well of sexism still entrenched in this country. But I think I was wrong when I picked Hillary. If Obama can spark inspiration in an old cynic like me, imagine what he's going to do for America.

"We are the ones we've been waiting for," Obama said that night. And he's the one we've been waiting for to make that true.

The title of a long editorial in support of Obama, written by Mick Youther:
Barack Obama--He's the One!
That was May of '08, like the video at the top of this post.

Title of a May, '08 blog post by Puerto Rican supporter Ada Molina:

He's the ONE

There are others, but I really think the first one, the youtube video of a song to be sung by thousands of his supporters in the streets says it all about this cult of personality.

Like Asking a Wino How Much Money He Needs...

Hmmmmm:

We think it is important for Congress to hear from the well-run financial institutions as most of the concerns have been focused on the problem companies. It is inappropriate that the debate is largely shaped by the financial institutions that made very poor decisions.

[Snip]

Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae are the primary cause of the mortgage crisis. These government supported enterprises distorted normal market risk mechanisms. While individual private financial institutions have made serious mistakes, the problems in the financial system have been caused by government policies including, affordable housing (now sub-prime), combined with the market disruptions caused by the Federal Reserve holding interest rates too low and then raising interest rates too high.

There is no panic on Main Street and in sound financial institutions. The problems are in high-risk financial institutions and on Wall Street.

More here.

Chemo Doesn't Work for Everybody

And researchers might be figuring out why that is.

Now MIT researchers have shown that cells from different people don't all react the same way when exposed to the same DNA-damaging agent -- a finding that could help clinicians predict how patients will respond to chemotherapy.

This is fascinating stuff. Read the whole article. This raises some questions.

MNNG, a DNA-damaging compound similar to toxic chemicals found in tobacco smoke and in common chemotherapy agents, usually kills cells by inducing irreparable DNA damage. However, the researchers found a wide range of susceptibility among cells taken from healthy people.

"A cell line from one person would be killed dramatically, while that from another person was resistant to exposure," said Rebecca Fry, former MIT research scientist and lead author of the paper. "It wasn't known that cell lines from different people could have such dramatic differences in responses."

So then, might not different people's cells respond differently to other substances as well? So one herbal remedy might be highly effective for one person, while another person receives no benefit at all, and one pharmaceutical might be just what the doctor ordered (heh) for some people, and not much better than a placebo for others?

It's only a matter of time before they regulate it...

Politicians must hate youtube.

VERY Reassuring

This is how we are governed:

But Democratic leaders, who said they hope to approve the bailout plan by the end of the week, were having their own trouble rallying the rank and file. House Democrats summoned to a lunchtime meeting to discuss the proposal yesterday received a glossary of financial terms, such as "credit default swap" and "illiquid assets." Many nonetheless emerged unconvinced of the need for speed, comparing the administration's warnings that the economy will collapse unless Congress acts to warnings they received regarding the invasion of Iraq.

These guys write the bills the rest of us have to abide by, they vote on this stuff, they pontificate about it, they are constantly spending our money, confiscated through taxes, and they needed a glossary?

I do not want to hear another word about Palin and the Bush Doctrine. Apparently serving in office at the Federal level IS an open book test.

It's also on the job training:

At one point during yesterday's Senate hearing, the Fed chairman tossed aside his prepared testimony -- and the reserved language he usually uses in such formal settings -- to strongly argue that the consequences of inaction could be dire.

"I'm a college professor. I never worked in Wall Street," he said. "My interest is solely for the strength and the recovery of the U.S. economy. I believe if the credit markets are not functioning, that jobs will be lost; the unemployment rate will rise; more houses will be foreclosed upon; GDP will contract; that the economy will just not be able to recover in a normal, healthy way, no matter what other policies are taken."

Relying on a Broken Reid

Harry Reid, September 17th, 2008:

ABC News' Z. Byron Wolf reports from Capitol Hill: Don't look for any legislation in the near future to address the financial crisis.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, asked today what new regulatory actions Congress can take, said, bluntly, "No one knows what to do. We are in new territory here. This is a different game. We're not here playing soccer, basketball or football, this is a new game and we're going to have to figure out how to do it."

Harry Reid, from a news story dated the 18th (I think this is in reference to the 'nobody knows what to do' comments of the previous day, but there's more info):

Sept. 18 (Bloomberg) -- The Democratic-controlled Congress, acknowledging that it isn't equipped to lead the way to a solution for the financial crisis and can't agree on a path to follow, is likely to just get out of the way.

Lawmakers say they are unlikely to take action before, or to delay, their planned adjournments -- Sept. 26 for the House of Representatives, a week later for the Senate. While they haven't ruled out returning after the Nov. 4 elections, they would rather wait until next year unless Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke, who are leading efforts to contain the crisis, call for help.

One reason, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said yesterday, is that ``no one knows what to do'' at the moment.

Harry Reid, Tuesday, September 23, 2008:


Republicans and Democrats, Tuesday afternoon, September 23rd:

ABC News' George Stephanopoulos reports: If Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain doesn't vote for the Bush administration's $700 billion economic bailout plan, some Republican and Democratic congressional leaders tell ABC News the plan won't pass.

"If McCain doesn't come out for this, it's over," a Top House Republican tells ABC News.

Harry Reid Tuesday night, the 23rd;

Republican presidential nominee John McCain will support a proposed $700 billion bailout of the financial markets, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) announced Tuesday evening.

Harry Reid, Wednesday, September 24:

A Democratic leadership source says that White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten has been told that
Democratic votes will not be there if McCain votes no -- that there is no deal if McCain doesn't go along.

Harry Reid on September 24th:

A Democrat tells ABC News that, in a phone call late this afternoon, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., told Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., that it would NOT be helpful for him to come back to Washington, D.C., to work on the Wall Street bailout bill.

McCain this afternoon suspended his campaign and said he would skip the first presidential debate in order to return to Capitol Hill to work on the log-jammed Bush administration legislation, which, as of Wednesday afternoon, was in peril.

McCain had phoned Reid to ask about the prospects of him, Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., and others to sit down and work together on hammering out a bipartisan proposal.

"Sorry," Reid said to him, a Democrat close to Reid says.

Harry Reid in the evening of September 24th:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., just took some swipes at Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., at a press availability with Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, after the Democratic Senate Caucus met this evening with Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke.

Reid sneered at McCain's plans to cancel his campaigning -- including his participation in Friday night's debate -- to return to the Capitol to work on the Wall Street bailout bill.

"It appears to me John McCain is trying to divert attention to his failing campaign," said Reid. "He can spare an hour and a half of his time and participate in that debate."

Reid re-told the story ABC News reported earlier, that McCain called Reid to offer his help and Reid read him the statement he'd already issued, implying McCain's plans were nothing more than "a campaign photo op."

"With all due respect to my friend John McCain," said Reid -- showing not a great deal of respect for a man who is not necessarily his friend -- "we're doing just fine. This should not have presidential politics doing here."

Lo, thou trustest in the staff of this broken reed, on Egypt; whereon if a man lean, it will go into his hand, and pierce it: so is Pharaoh king of Egypt to all that trust in him.
Isaiah 36:6

Photographs from North Korea

Beautiful collection. Must see.

Testing

Maggie's Farm has a pop-quiz for you.

McCain Suspends Campaign

To go to Washington to work on the Bail-out discussions. He wants the debate suspended.

The Bombing in Islamabad

From the Muslim blogger at The Rickshaw Diaries:

A few months later the school my six-year-old niece attends received bomb threats because they taught their curriculum in English and allowed girls to be students. “What should I do?” my sister asked me. “Keep her at home?”

And today, it’s already starting: This happened because we supported them in the war on terror. Let the Americans fight their own war. If we end our support, we’ll be safe.

There have been over 22 major bombings or suicide bombings in Pakistan this year alone, killing 1200 people. At what point do we recognize the cancer we nurtured, the excuses-paved road, and say enough is enough?

At what point do we realize that Muslims who kill Muslims gathered to break their fast will not lack excuses to kill them when the Americans leave, if foreign policies change, or if girls stop going to school?

Nothing we do will ever be enough for them.

My sisters and I each got married in the Marriott, the hotel that was destroyed today. My sister went to the gym there every morning, and my childhood home is just a few blocks away, close enough that the blast cracked windows there.

I worry about my loved ones in Islamabad every single day and don’t want them to live in an atmosphere of violence and fear. When my niece was visiting the US earlier in the summer she saw the smoke from a neighbor’s barbecue and clutched my hands in fright. “Is it a bomb?” she whispered, terrified.

Her words broke my heart and made me realize once again that no one should have to live in fear or insecurity.

Saul Alinsky and the NEA

The National Education Association highly recommends reading Saul Alinsky's books:

Saul Alinsky: The American Organizer
Recommended Reading
from NEA Staff
"Reveille for Radicals"
by Saul Alinsky

An inspiration to anyone contemplating action in their community! And to every organizer!

Saul Alinski wrote the book on American radicalism - two books, in fact: a 1945 best-seller, "Reveille for Radicals" and "Rules for Radicals" in 1971. The "Reveille" title page quotes Thomas Paine... "Let them call me rebel and welcome, I feel no concern from it; but I should suffer the misery of devils, were I to make a whore of my soul."

Saul Alinsky, who was a labor and civil-rights activist from the 1910's until he died in 1972, has written here a guidebook for those who are out to change things. He sets down what the goal is: a society where people are free to live, and also aren't starving in the streets. A society where there is legal and economic justice. Then he sets out to say how to get there.

Alinsky spends a lot of time critiquing the idea that "The end does not justify the means." What end? What means? He feels that there are circumstances where one can and should use means that in other circumstances would be unethical. I am not sure I agree, but Alinsky certainly speaks with the voice of experience.

Alinsky's goal seems to be to encourage positive social change by equipping activists with a realistic view of the world, a kind of preemptive disillusionment. If a person already knows what evil the world is capable of, then perhaps the surprise factor can be eliminated, making the person a more effective activist. Alinsky further seems to be encouraging the budding activist not to worry to much about getting his or her hands dirty. It's all a part of the job, he seems to say.

Alinski, the master political agitator, tactical planner and social organizer didn't mince words...

"Liberals in their meetings utter bold works; they strut, grimace belligerently, and then issue a weasel-worded statement 'which has tremendous implications, if read between the lines.' They sit calmly, dispassionately, studying the issue; judging both sides; they sit and still sit.

"The Radical does not sit frozen by cold objectivity. He sees injustice and strikes at it with hot passion. He is a man of decision and action. There is a saying that the Liberal is one who walks out of the room when the argument turns into a fight.

"Society has good reason to fear the Radical. Every shaking advance of mankind toward equality and justice has come from the Radical. He hits, he hurts, he is dangerous. Conservative interests know that while Liberals are most adept at breaking their own necks with their tongues, Radicals are most adept at breaking the necks of Conservatives.

"Radicals precipitate the social crisis by action - by using power. Liberals may then timidly follow along or else, as in most cases, be swept forward along the course set by Radicals, but all because of forces unloosed by Radical action. They are forced to positive action only in spite of their desires ...

* The American Radical will fight privilege and power whether it be inherited or acquired by any small group, whether it be political or financial or organized creed.
* He curses a caste system which he recognizes despite all patriotic denials.
* He will fight conservatives whether they are business or labor leaders.
* He will fight any concentration of power hostile to a broad, popular democracy, whether he finds it in financial circles or in politics.
* The Radical recognizes that constant dissension and conflict is and has been the fire under the boiler of democracy. He firmly believes in that brave saying of a brave people, "Better to die on your feet than to live on your knees!"
* The Radical may resort to the sword but when he does he is not filled with hatred against those individuals whom he attacks. He hates these individuals not as persons but as symbols representing ideas or interests which he believes to be inimical to the welfare of the people.

That is the reason why Radicals, although frequently embarking upon revolutions, have rarely resorted to personal terrorism."

Alinski practiced what he preached. He said, "Tactics means doing what you can with what you have ... tactics is the art of how to take and how to give."

He uses eyes, ears and nose for examples...

Eyes
"If you have a vast organization, parade it before the enemy, openly show your power."

Ears
"If your organization is small, do what Gideon did: conceal the members in the dark but raise a clamor that will make the listener believe that your organization numbers many more that it does."

Nose
"If your organization is too tiny even for noise, stink up the place."

Alinski devised and proved thirteen tactical rules for use against opponents vastly superior in power and wealth.

1. "Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.
2. Never go outside the experience of your people.
3. Wherever possible go outside of the experience of the enemy.
4. Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.
5. Ridicule is man's most potent weapon.
6. A good tactic is one that your people enjoy.
7. A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.
8. Keep the pressure on.
9. The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.
10. Major premise for tactics is development of operations that will maintain constant pressure upon the opposition.
11. If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside.
12. The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.
13. Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.

The real action is in the enemy's reaction. The enemy properly goaded and guided in his reaction will be your major strength. Tactics, like life, require that you move with the action."

Alinski was hated and defamed by powerful enemies, proof that his tactics worked. His simple formula for success...

"Agitate + Aggravate + Educate + Organize"

Union dues at work.

Greek Tragedy

From the prologue of Barack Obama's book "The Audacity of Hope:"

Undoubtedly, some of these views will get me in trouble, I am new enough on the national political screen that I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripe project their own views. As such I am bound to disappoint some, if not all of them. Which perhaps indicates a second, more intimate theme to this book - namely how I or anybody else in public office, can avoid the pitfalls of fame, the hunger to please, the fear of loss, and thereby retain that kernel of truth, that singular voice within each of us that reminds us of our deepest commitments.

I find Obama in many ways a sympathetic figure, even though I can't stand his politics, and I think he has been posing rather than sincere about 'change' and a new kind of politics (I think the media is worse, much worse, and I truly loathe what part the media has played in creating the ObamaMessiah). I also find Obama a tragic figure. I would agree that everybody in public office needs to avoid the pitfalls of fame, but I don't really see in McCain a hunger to please or a fear of loss. I see those things to some degree in Bill Clinton, but not Hilary, and it's interesting that Bill Clinton and Obama both come from broken homes.


President Bush misspeaks all the time, and I think the left made far too much of it. It's not his tiny, and insignificant gaffe that interests me here- it's the bewilderment on his face. It's sad.
At the fund-raiser Bon Jovi held for him, Oback said:

"I hope you guys are up for a fight. I hope you guys are game because I haven’t been putting up with 19 months of airplanes and hotel food and missing my babies and my wife – I didn’t put up for that stuff just to come in second"

The pitfalls of fame, the fear of loss- this is about him, not the country, and not the sacrifices his babies have made while he pursues this dream.

Is he missing his babies? I believe he does, I really do, and the fact that he chose to campaign for two years instead of serve his Senate seat or stay home and parent those girls does not in any way negate that. What makes tragedy so tragic is the part the protagonist's own character and choices play in his drama. Read his remarks in this Father's Day sermon he gave. It makes my heart ache (well, until he gets to the bits about Washington policies he wants to see, then it gives me heartburn).

Am I projecting too much on that blank screen? It's possible. I am married to a child of divorce. Neither parent wanted to be a parent, and after being tossed about a bit, my husband was raised by his grandparents, as Obama was by his. ONly in my husband's case, his grandfather died by the time he was six years old. I see similarities. But maybe that's just me.

The Anchoress, as we've mentioned before, wonders if perhaps his strategy backfired- he didn't mean to get elected this time, he meant only to get some name recognition, some compaign cred, and maybe end up Veep on Hilary's ticket. In that case, it seems to me that what he called the pitfalls of fame, his own admitted hunger to please and fear of loss simply swept him away: Christopher Hitchens wonders, as we did, whether

Obama never meant to be president in this election, that he meant rather to sow the seeds for a future run or - at most - end up as Hillary’s veep, but that things got away from him. The sense I’ve been having for a little while is that Obama does not really want to win; that he knows, deep down, he’s not really ready. I think he’s essentially a decent person, but if he knows he’s not ready, he can’t exactly say, it can he? Not after being called “The One.” Interesting. Give Hitchens a read.

If you're pressed for time, the last four paragraphs of Hitchens are the ones I'd recommend the most.

The media has, of course, seized on this 'blank screen,' and they project to us only what they want us to see.

Is it the Test or Me?

I took the political preference test at Harvard again, and I again supposedly had a strong automatic preference for Obama. Then I took it again, this time a revised version, where they also asked me questions about the role feelings and intuition play in my decision making process, and this time I had a moderate preference for Obama over McCain.

I continue to think this is probably because on a purely emotional level, I do think Barack Obama is a more likable, personable, charismatic, likable fellow with a magnetic personality. I have a high regard for what McCain did in Viet Nam, but this does not translate to a reason to vote for him to me, and he doesn't have the same warmth that Obama projects. But I don't vote on how much I like a candidate or how he makes me feel. I vote on the issues, in descending order, starting with the one issue most important to me.

On a policy level, there's little Obama believes that I agree with, and when it comes to baby-killing, I wouldn't vote for him in a million years. If he were pro-life, I would vote for him in a New York minute- not because I agree with his fiscal policies, but because I cannot be 'nuanced' about killing babies. At any rate, I don't think McCain's fiscal approach will differ in what I would consider a meaningful way, although there is, again, the fact that he has no record of requesting earmarks, and Obama and Biden do. In fact, Biden has the worst record on earmarks of any member of the Senate.

Right now they say that 18 percent of Democrats and 15 percent of Republicans display no preference for one or the other, and 39 percent of Democrats vs 42 percent of Republicans display a strong preference for their respective party's candidates.

Bail-outs

The Anchoress thinks we should bail-out home-owners, not businesses.

Michelle Malkin doesn't want to bail out anybody, and she's hoping some real conservatives will stand up.

David Freddoso isn't happy.

Donald Luskin has questions.

Mark Hemingway says it's socialism.

Are we following the footsteps of Argentina, Zimbabwe, and Weimar Germany?

Economic Crisis Tutorial

Betsy's husband has put together a tutorial for his MBA students on the current financial crisis.

Hubris? Nah, Not Us

First we had the Vero Possumus seal, and then the Barackopolis. One might have thought that Team Obama would have learned their lesson on hubris and self-absorption, but a deal with a British firm goes even farther. Democrats have begun striking coins with Barack Obama’s profile — and already proclaiming him President

More at HotAir.

Yertle the Turtle

He is doing so badly that Pip thought he had died this morning. Then when she picked him up he had some sort of spasm and he seems to be alive, but still not doing very well.
We have no idea what to do. Some of the children are most distressed. I am most distressed when my children are distressed and grieving over pets.

The NYT and McCain

A couple days ago McCain campaign manager Rick Davis called the Times an Obama Advocacy Group. HEre's their response:

According to the NYT:

One of the giant mortgage companies at the heart of the credit crisis paid $15,000 a month from the end of 2005 through last month to a firm owned by Senator John McCain’s campaign manager, according to two people with direct knowledge of the arrangement.

We are never told who these two people are or how they have this direct knowledge.

Jill Hazelbaker, a spokeswoman for the McCain campaign, did not dispute the payments to Mr. Davis’s firm. But she said that Mr. Davis had stopped taking a salary from the firm by the end of 2006 and that his work did not affect Mr. McCain.

That sounds kind of like disputing to me. The Times and its anonymous friends say the payments continued until the government take-over this month. The spokeswoman said that they did not, they ended in 2006.

On Sunday, in an interview with CNBC and The Times, Mr. McCain responded to a question about that tie between Mr. Davis and the two mortgage companies by saying that he “has had nothing to do with it since, and I’ll be glad to have his record examined by anybody who wants to look at it.”

Such assertions, along with McCain campaign television advertisements tying Mr. Obama to former Fannie Mae chiefs, have riled current and former officials of the two companies and provoked them to volunteer rebuttals.

The two people with direct knowledge of Freddie Mac’s post-2005 contract with Mr. Davis spoke on condition of anonymity. Four outside consultants — three Democrats and a Republican, also speaking on condition of anonymity — said the arrangement was widely known among people involved in Freddie Mac’s efforts to influence policy makers.

Elsewhere they are called 'the people familiar with the arrangement.' These are pretty serious charges to rest on the anonymous say-so of a paper with the history of bias and distortion the NYT has.

The McCain camp replies:

Today the New York Times launched its latest attack on this campaign in its capacity as an Obama advocacy organization....

In fact, the allegation is demonstrably false. As has been previously reported, Mr. Davis separated from his consulting firm, Davis Manafort, in 2006. As has been previously reported, Mr. Davis has seen no income from Davis Manafort since 2006. Zero. Mr. Davis has received no salary or compensation since 2006. Mr. Davis has received no profit or partner distributions from that firm on any basis -- weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, bi-monthly, quarterly, semi-annual or annual -- since 2006. Again, zero. Neither has Mr. Davis received any equity in the firm based on profits derived since his financial separation from Davis Manafort in 2006.

Further, and missing from the Times' reporting, Mr. Davis has never -- never -- been a lobbyist for either Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac. Mr. Davis has not served as a registered lobbyist since 2005.

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.

The New York Times is trying to fill an ideological niche. It is a business decision, and one made under economic duress, as the New York Times is a failing business. But the paper's reporting on Senator McCain, his campaign, and his staff should be clearly understood by the American people for what it is: a partisan assault aimed at promoting that paper’s preferred candidate, Barack Obama.

Chad, posting at Ace, says:

While it's good to see a Republican standing up for himself in the press I don't think McCain can really win this fight. The Times can print anything it wants and since it is still considered a highly reputable journalistic organization it will get greeted with the presumption of credibility by most people. Any retractions, if they are forthcoming, will be issued sometime after McCain's death. But the higher probability is that the Public Editor in his role of discerner of truth for the masses will look at the reporting and declare that while it was false it served the purpose of bringing out important questions.

Any retraction would be buried in small print on page 33. Which pattern of behavior is why I see the press' complaints about lack of access to Sarah Palin as so much foot stomping and not worth my time. It's not like we actually have a fourth estate anymore.

There are Gaffes and Then There is Something Else

I wrote this post at 3:11 yesterday afternoon. Then I decided to sit on it a bit. I know that with my dad's condition I am oversensitive. But I don't think I'm over-reacting.

For background, I thought Quayle's 'potatoes' was insignificant, but the media used it as a blunt instrument.

I thought Obama's 57 states was an easy mistake for anybody to make, and only worth mentioning for the amusement value, like Bush's 'misunderestimated.'

I don't care how nuclear is pronounced.


But Biden isn't amusing, he's kind of scary:

"When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn't just talk about the princes of greed," Biden told Couric. "He said, 'Look, here's what happened.'"

As Reason's Jesse Walker footnotes it: "And if you owned an experimental TV set in 1929, you would have seen him. And you would have said to yourself, 'Who is that guy? What happened to President Hoover?'"

Something is wrong with Joe Biden, and Victor David Hanson thinks so, too.

Car Loans and Student Loans, Too?

In the dark of night over the weekend when most people were snoozing, the Treasury dramatically expanded its bailout plan to include buying student loans, car loans, credit card debt and any other "troubled" assets held by banks.

The changes, which were included in draft language that also opened the bailout program to foreign banks with extensive loan operations in the United States, potentially added tens of billions of dollars to the cost of the program.

Although it was a major addition to what was already the nation's largest-ever bailout, it did not become part of the debate between Democrats and the Treasury over details of the program. A Monday counterproposal by Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher J. Dodd included such consumer loans as well as mortgages, just as the Treasury's draft did Saturday night.

More here

FLDS, Sept. 24

The Grand Jury indicted three more men today, but won't say who they are.

They are indicted on charges related to marrying minors, and two of them are also charged with bigamy.

Officials removed 439 children from the ranch and kept them in state custody for two months. So far, the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services has dismissed cases involving 300 children. It has just one child, a 14-year-old daughter of ranch overseer Merril Jessop, in custody. The girl was allegedly spiritually married to sect leader Warren S. Jeffs in 2006.

No FLDS members were called in as witnesses for this GJ meeting.

So far, the grand jury has indicted five men on sexual assault charges, including Jeffs. Four men also face bigamy charges. A sixth man, Lloyd H. Barlow, faces three misdemeanor counts of failure to report child abuse.
Williams said the grand jury will meet again Nov. 12 and on Dec. 16. Tom Green County Judge Barbara Walther has extended the jury's term until the end of the year.

Taxation without Representation

Read, read, read:

I'll gladly concede that Paulson knows more about the world's rapidly collapsing finance system than I do. That doesn't matter. Paulson's request violates an inviolable principle, namely, to repeat, that if a public official demands $700 billion by week's end, no strings attached, with no democratic or judicial review of that official's unfettered discretion to spend that $700 billion as he chooses, then you say, "No."

"No" is the only possible answer a free person can give to that request.

If you don't answer "No," then you have to answer "Yes, Your Majesty, screw that whole experiment-with-democracy thing, we think you'll make a fine sovereign and king and please take our money as tribute from your loyal, unquestioning subjects." I prefer the former answer, and not just because it's shorter.

This isn't overstatement. To hand over such a kingly sum -- $700,000,000,000 -- while agreeing that it will be spent without review, without accountability and without interference, is to abandon even the pretense of democracy. Period.

It's been a productive day

+ Prepared most of a preliminary bibliography for an honors thesis paper. I'll turn this into my faculty mentor tomorrow so he can write all over it, scratch out titles, add titles, etc. This was built off the fruits of my 2.5 hours in the library yesterday. I've now got approximately two dozen books stored on some bookshelf space the DHM has generously loaned to me for the next several months. :)

+ Read almost 100 pages of Children of Coyote, Missionaries of St. Francis: Indian-Spanish Relations in Colonial California, 1769-1850. Only 315 more pages to go - the class is discussing it Friday morning.

+ Read a couple of articles on the Spanish Civil War and began to tentatively wade through a Spanish language article on it. Tomorrow in Spanish we're writing an essay on it. This makes me really nervous.

+ Worked through some wedding stuff with the Equuschick. We were interrupted by the Zeus-Dog, who decided to sit squarely on top of all our papers and stick his head on the Equuschick's shoulder. She thought it was adorable and wanted a picture. I found it less than endearing.

+ E-mailed a professor of English to set up an appointment for some consultation. She specializes in an area I'll be writing part of a paper on (Puritan attitudes towards and use of indigenous languages) and my history professor suggested I ask her for help with sources.

Death of a chicken, and a chicken, and a chicken., and a....

Butchering chickens- no ugly pictures unless you want them. Just a feel good story about how to provide all the chicken a family eats in a year. I'm jealous. We have had such a terrible time with our chickens since we moved here- so terrible a time that we no longer have chickens. I miss them.


Of course, when we had chickens we lost them to the following causes (this is in Nebraska, Colorado, and here, not all one batch of hens):

1. two managed to stick their heads through the wire cover over the coop heater intended to keep chickens out. They did not figure out how to get their heads out again, and... well. It wasn't pretty.

2. A member of the family got the bright idea that instead of giving them fresh water in their waterer, which had to be replaced daily, we could just run a small trench, leave the hose slightly on, and they could get water from that miniature trench in the chicken yard any time. They got sick, as the chicken yard is not a very clean place to run drinking water.

3. raccoons, several times. Raccoons decapitate their victims just for the sheer fun of it, as far as I can tell, and they leave the headless bodies, looking like two brooding hens sitting quietly until you come up to them and see that they are sitting quietly because they are resting in peace. And also piece.

4. a fox- it is not true that wild animals only kill what they can eat. They are not so discerning and judicial. They simply lay into the flock and kill what moves.

5. coyotes

6. opposum- they usually go more for eggs and small chicks, but they are nasty, nasty creatures and we hates them.

7. other hens- that phrase 'pecking order?' It has a whole new meaning once you've actually seen a flock work out the pecking order. Shudder.

8. a dog that somebody abandoned in our yard was a seemingly sweet beast, gentle, good with children. We let her stay. And in the night she went into Pip's room where a batch of day old chicks were recovering from their mailing, and quietly slaughtered them. Pip awoke to a room splattered in blood and feathers- like a horror film. Charming. I am sure she is scarred for life.

9. While another batch of chicks was safely (we stupidly thought) inside chicken wire, a cat reached through as much as she could and clawed them to death. Chickens are not very bright birds. But then, we don't seem to be very bright bird-owners. Or former bird owners.

10. Another stray dog. Large, malamute/shepherd type- broke into the coop and killed two or three chickens on the spot, snarled viciously at my husband. My husband went down the road to the man he thought owned the dog, the man said "I don't care what you do to it. Kill it." The neighbors, who also owned chickens but not a gun, said, "If you won't shoot it, we will. If we can borrow your gun."
The dog died.

11. The neighbors who urged us to kill the stray dog who killed our chickens? Their dog got into our yard and killed our chickens. They insisted their dog did no such thing. We caught it another time- right in the act- and put it in our shed. We could follow their footprints in the snow from their house to our shed and back again- this time with doggie prints amiably alongside the people prints, so the next time the dog leapt the fence and grabbed a chicken, we did some leaping of our own (I was much younger then) and grabbed the dog and took it to the pound. We called the neighbors and said, "That stray dog that isn't yours killed another chicken so we took it to the pound." They cussed us out and quit talking to us.

12. Cold- we had the wrong breed for Nebraska winters. In Co we bought light feathered brahmas and they seemed to do much better.

Did I say I miss the chickens? I do not know what I was thinking. I really miss the eggs. Oh, wait. I buy them for 1.50 a dozen from a local lady who has her own flock. Any predators are not my problem. Cleaning the coop? Not my problem. Neighbors who don't reign in their dogs? Not my problem. Rain, sleet, snow? Not my problem.


bonnet tip to Amy's Humble Musings, where they just got some meat birds, and where I found the link above.

FactCheck, Obama, And Guns

I haven't considered FactCheck a 'nonpartisan' organization for some time. This story gives a good demonstration of why that is.

Home-School Moment

Books we've been reading for school lately:

Buried Cities, by Jenny Hall*
Streams of Civilization,
Pharoahs of Ancient Egypt, by Elizabeth Payne*
Machines, Buildings, Weaponry of Biblical Times by Max Schwartz
The Kingfisher book of the ancient world by Hazel Mary Martell
The History of the Ancient World by Susan Wise Bauer*
World History by Ray Notgrass (very nice people, the Notgrass family)*
The World's Great Events by Singleton, published by Collier (a ten volume anthology of historical accounts written by authors like Plutarch, Sir Walter Raleigh, Herodotus, and more, compiled in chronological order, it is also online. Here's volume one).
The Story of Mankind, A Picturesque Tale of Progress, ... Olive Beaupre Miller, illustrated (this is volume 2, Conquests)*

Buried Cities and Streams of Civilization I read aloud to the youngest two.
Pharoahs, Machines, The Story of Mankind, and the Kingfisher book they read to themselves.
The History of the Ancient World, Pip reads to herself.
World History by Ray Notgrass and The World's Great Events Pip reads to the youngest two. Pip has some others she reads to herself, and when we get back from a vacation we're taking next week, we'll add things like The Iliad and the Oddyssey and some Greek plays, The Epic of Gilgamesh, and some other things. The youngest two are also reading a book about government and civics.

We read these books for perhaps an hour, maybe two every day. We do not necessarily read from the whole list every single day. I don't really do anything else with the books- no glue, paper, and paint projects. No salt dough maps, though we do look at the maps in the books and discuss them. We'll do the timeline about once a week. They narrate, we might talk about something of interest that came up. There are no workbooks, spelling tests, or papers assigned yet.

So today as The Boy was reading the Pharoahs book, he sighed and said, "I really want to read a book about King Tut." Well, we live in a house of six seven eight thousand books, so this was doable. I found one for him.

"So," he asked, as he thumbed through it, "Was King Tut, like, the most important king who ever lived?"

"Not really," I replied. I don't think he was important at all when he was alive. He was a boy king, and I guess any king was important to the Egyptians at the time, but I don't think he had any great power or influence beyond that. What's important about King Tut," I said, getting into full lecture mode, "Is that his was the very first king's tomb that had been found with nearly everything in it, and so because of that-"

"OH!" he said with excitement, and such a pretty lightbulb over his head I couldn't tell him not to interrupt, "So that way they can study his tomb and find out more about other Egyptian kings and how they lived and stuff."

"Exactly!" I said- but anything further I would have said was muffled as his history major big sister, who had been on the staircase during this discussion, swooped down to cover him in kisses (which he objected to strenuously) and a big hug.

He fled the room (and the kisses), book in hand, and his sister and I gave each other a high five via telepathic communication and then we grinned at each other in open and odiously sappy satisfaction and rubbed our hands in glee.

I love it when a plan comes together.

*For the most part, these books were chosen because they are what we had on hand. The Bauer book is from the library. Those with asterisks are those I think specifically worth looking into if you're interested in ancient history.

Curioser and Curioser

More details on the political detective story- to recap a small bit, Ace, who knows that members of the Obama campaign read his blog, put them on notice that there would be a story breaking connecting Axelrod and astro-turfing. He did NOT say what that connection would be, and he didn't mention the Winner family or anybody else associated with the company that produced the video.
Ace, Jawa, and others broke the story at midnight- (and Rusty has kept it current. If you have not read that link, PLEASE do so). Within 90 minutes all the vidoes and accounts in question had been deleted.

By the close of the next business day, Ethan Winner had admitted his connection to the videos but insisted it was entirely private (why would it take fifteen hours to confess nobody else was involved?), had nothing to do with his family's business or the Obama campaign, and the professional actress was somebody else who had never done work for the Obama campaign, and he'd hired her independently from an agency. Um, hired her? Yeah, he's gonna pay her as soon as he gets an invoice (is there an arrangement whereby he will never get that invoice making this a true but shifty statement?). Click on the link above to see if you think it's reasonable that the two ads are using two different voice-overs. Maybe they are. I don't know. Maybe it's only a coincidence that he happened across an actress who sounds an awful lot like the one doing the other official ads. I do know:

Winner ...doesn’t name the artist, and claims that “the voice-over artist has never done any work for the Obama campaign.” How does he know?

He doesn’t answer Ace’s question of why the videos and profiles came down so quickly, when the only thing teased in advance was that there would be a post tying phony grassroots activity to David Axelrod. Are we to presume that there was no such tie, yet Winner and family were simply monitoring Ace of Spades and Jawa Report and Patterico, so that they were ready to pull everything down within an hour of our posts going up??

He says that the idea for the video was his — but he pointedly doesn’t deny that one of the people working for his PR firm was involved in promoting it. And he doesn’t explain why that person refused to answer a simple question from the Weekly Standard regarding whether he had posted the video to Democratic Underground. If there was nothing nefarious going on, why did Jared Liu-Klein tell the Weekly Standard that he’d have to get back to them on that very simple question??

And he sidesteps the issue of the video’s blatantly false claims. Remember what Rusty told us in his original post:

The New York Times was forced to retract their earlier claim that Palin was a member of the party, blaming the error on the party’s chair. That retraction was published Sept. 3rd, 8 days before the video was first made publicly available.

And he doesn’t explain why Daily Kos suddenly killed their post promoting the smear — just like they killed their post promoting the “Trig Trutherism” smear...”

P.S. I will say this: all arguments that this video was an “in kind” contribution to Obama are bordering on fascism. This guy has a First Amendment right to say whatever he wants — and I think he retains that right even if he is doing Barack Obama’s explicit bidding. To reach any other conclusion is to deny the First Amendment.

I think that last paragraph is extremely, btw. Let's not shut people up. I would hate to see political speech any more constrained than it already is. But let's be honest about the sources of that political speech, and let's note that this is not the sort of 'Change' Obama is running on.

As Patterico points out- there is at least one known connection between Axelrod and Winner's firm:

An investigation has shown that David Axelrod, chief media advisor to Obama had previously worked with the PR firm chief Chuck Winner on another campaign.

In 1996, a group of investors penned Proposal E in Detroit which allowed for casinos. The investors hired the firm Winner/Wagner & Mandabach to study the chances of passing that proposal. As told in an article written by Laurence B. Deitch, an attorney for the proposal supporters, the Winner firm later led the media effort to help pass the measure. It brought in several outside media and communications groups.

A video from the Detroit Mayor's office produced by Mayor Archer's political consultant David Axelrod was noted as a key part of the Winner directed effort. This revelation places Axelrod in a direct working relationship with the Chuck Winner PR firm in a past campaign.

More here

And this is veddy, veddy interesting- 'Geekesque,' who also spread the viral astroturfing video, has insisted that:

Viral attacks are where it's at in 2008. Emails, blogs, online news sources. Content flows upstream in today's media environment.

[...]

It's all about finding really damaging stuff--news stories, YouTubes, informative blog posts. And then circulating those with the intent of having them work their way up the media stream. Email it to your friends. Email it to any journalists whose email you have. Post it in diaries or blog comments.

Example, here is a devastating YouTube on Sarah Strangelove:

[The Palin smear video was inserted here]

You should email this to ten people. Or ten bloggers. Or both. Spread it far, spread it wide.
[...]
Note: If you don't believe in scorched-earth politics, no one is forcing you to join this effort, of course. We all contribute in our own way.

and he works six doors down from the Winner Office building. What a striking coincidence.

Parenting

From Miss Manners' Guide to Rearing Perfect Children:

Miss Manners' dear mother, a teacher, often heard the parental lamentation of "But we give him everything" from those whose children confided in their teacher, separately, how much they cheerfully hated their parents. The parental complaint was followed by a list itemizing valuable goods given.
"I could never find a correlation between the parents' generosity and the child's feeling about them," noted Miss Manners' mother. "Then I began to notice a connection between the child's feelings and the parents' facial expressions when they came to pick him up at school, or even when they just talked about him. The parent who beamed at the child had a loving child, and the one who didn't, didn't. After that, it didn't seem to matter what else the parents did or didn't do."
Miss Manners is happy to present such unmaterialistic news, although she does not deny that many people's fondest childhood memories have to do with toys or other presents. Yet the parent who gives whatever is asked, when it is asked, seems to get no return except increased expectation. The generally sensible parent, who restricts giving to fixed occasions and choice of presents to items that are educational, useful, or apt to be of lasting, rather than fleeting enjoyment, will give enormous pleasure by a rare wild deviation from this policy.

Education Carnivals

I keep forgetting both to enter and then to announce or read these (bad blogger, bad, bad, bad), but be sure to check out the Carnival of Education and The Carnival of Homeschooling

Here are some that interested me:

Chicago public schools have started paying kids for good grades- fifty dollars for an A, 20 dollars for a C. Does it work?

Chicago Public School chief executive Arne Duncan is in favor of the program, “...I’m trying to level the playing field. This is the kind of incentive that middle-class families have had for decades.”

I never got paid for grades. I got in big trouble for a C, my dad insisting that if C was average that must mean a C was a failing grade. I never could figure out if he was honestly that baffled by the meaning of the term 'average' or if he was making a point, and with his dementia I don't think it would do any good to ask.
They did use some financial incentives with my youngest brother, who was smarter than the rest of us put together, but did poorly in school. All I remember about that is how much I resented it, thinking it unfair. Now I realize the significance of him being smarter than the rest. I started out with good grades and so expectations were high. He started out with bad grades, so expectations were low.

The importance of play for a child's developing mind:

Many of our schools are losing the "play" part of the day. Recess [has been replaced by reading time for some struggling students] These same students would benefit from play (exploration) and foster that sense of wonder which creates those "life-long learners" districts talk so much about.

It is a tough decision for schools to make. The community is pushing for higher test scores based on the perception that those test numbers amount to learning while at the same time, there are many people in the field of education that know play is crucial for building a strong mind and body.
.... Students need time to think through and articulate new ideas. Often this can be done through play. Scripted curriculum does not allow students to grapple with ideas, to make the ideas real, to absorb them and understand.

We've posted about this before, here, here, and here.

Sometimes people think that because I am a (passionately outspoken) homeschooler, I look down my nose at public school teachers. This is not (entirely) true. I believe there is an important distinction between the good ones, whom I call public school teachers, and the bad ones, whom I call educationists. So I do not look down my nose at the public school teachers, but I am distinctly unimpressed by educationists (who usually go on to become administrators anyway). And far from disdaining public school teachers, I admire their efforts greatly and think it's terribly unfair to compare what I do to what they do. They are working within a deplorably warped system with little control over hundreds of factors that are entirely within my control here at home with my children. When I remembered to read the education carnivals more regularly, I especially liked to pick out those posts that illustrated just how stark the difference is between what I do and what they do, to remind my homeschooling friends that it's just not fair to compare. Here's an example: :All the students in my school? They speak and write the same language as I do:

In one of my classes I have two English Learners. And they're not just learning English, they're also learning the Roman alphabet. You might imagine that those two tasks, combined with having been in the US only a very short time, and combined with the "exotic" vocabulary used in secondary math, would create extremely high hurdles to success for these students. It's clear that they're struggling to understand.

And while it is true that many homeschoolers adopt children who do not speak English, even there, they have an advantage- the children live with them 24 and 7, and so they have more time to work with them.


From the homeschooling carnival we have too many good ones for me to get them all read, but here's a few:

Teaching your kids to draw, including a link to Jan Brett's page, where she now has videos showing how she draws.

Countdown to College offers information on the National History Day project, and explains why projects like this might be important to your student's college application. I would quibble with the cliam that colleges won't be interested in a transcript signed by the parent without independent verification from outside activities like these. SAT and ACT scores are outside verification that you student has learned. The HG's SAT scores and home-made transcript were accepted by a private college (which included scholarships for all but 3000 dollars), a community college (anybody can go to one of these), and a large state university (where she is going).

Mrs. Happy Housewife generously shares the taxonomy chart she put together for her own children.

Christian homeschoolers will find some special encouragement for those rough days here.

Here's a long and thought-provoking read on the basics of teaching music.

Boys and Girls really are different-

"When it comes to sound, infant females are much less tolerant - one researcher believes that they may 'hear' noises as being twice as loud as do males. Baby girls become irritated and anxious about noise, pain or discomfort more readily that baby boys.

Baby girls are more easily comforted by soothing words and singing. Even before they can understand language, girls seem to be better than boys at identifying the emotional content of speech. From the outset of life, girl babies show a greater interest in communicating with other people. One study involves babies of only 2-4 days old. It shows that girls spend almost twice as long maintaining eye contact with a silent adult, and girls also look longer than boys when the adult is talking. The boys' attention span was the same, whether the adult was talking or not

Click through for lots more interesting details.

This free curriculum (again, of greatest interest to Christians) looks very, very interesting.

There were many other good links at the carnival, I just didn't have time to write about them all- plus, that work has been done for you at the Carnival!

This Just Might Be a First

For this blog. Bill Clinton says some things I agree with:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/politico/20080921/pl_politico/13684;_ylt=AuALLzwrNaPg.ILKsWBPh.SyFz4D

Yes, the sky must be falling.

Although, watching him pat Barbara's knee while she just sat there smiling was kind of an ick moment.

Lehman and Global Warming

Irony is always tasty.

Ron Paul on the Two Party System

And he endorses a candidate.

Read Alouds

Q. I've heard two camps, one that says she should do whatever she's capable of, another says I should read aloud everything until the age of 9.

A. I think they should read for themselves schoolbooks they are capable of reading as soon as they are able. I also think some parental reading aloud should continue forever-
In the case of books where you might wish to do some judicious editing OR judicious discussion the moment certain passages come to the child's attention.

To keep a finger in the pie, so to speak. Read alouds are a delicious way to bond together and develop some unity- and it gives you something to discuss, common ground.

Stalkers

I was flipping through the Wired magazine that just came in the mail, and I found this story, entitled My Paparazzo: Hiring a Stalker Is Easy.

500 dollars an hour? I'm smelling a future job... ;)

Another Book-list

Because I so badly need another list of books to pile on the three x four foot desk next to my bed....

What have you read?

Does anybody have a top 25 list for the left?

Debased and Tasteless

Children are off limits? Right.

SNL not only did a nasty skit featuring the 'humor' of an allegation of disgusting criminal and abusive behavior by Todd Palin towards his daughter.

SNL also aired an anti-McCain skit written by Democrat Al Franken who is running for a SEnate seat in Minnesota. His campaign first denied it, and then had to back pedal.

Frugal Glasses

This might be the way to go next time.

The Taser-Gate Investiigation

Question: would Obama welcome an investigation headed by a Republican who was actively campaigning for McCain in Illinois?

Of course not. It's ridiculous.

Did He or Didn't He?

Tom McGuire on ABC, Obama, Bush, and the SOFA or SFA, and the paucity of candidates all around.

Government and Prayer, a History Lesson

Silhouettes

Over at The Homespun Heart there is an adorable craft idea which anybody can do, providing anybody has access to a camera, a computer, a scanner and a printer.

It's so cute!

The Islamabad Hotel Bombing

HotAir has surveillance video footage, and it turns out the Pakistani government had intended to hold a meeting there at the time of the bombing. They altered their plans at the last minute.

Political Detective Story

Suppose an allegedly grass-roots, amateur political video propagating smears against one candidate was all about smears that were corrected by the New York Times 8 days before the amateur, grass-roots videos went up? Suppose the actor doing the voice-overs for the amateur video sounds an awful lot like the same actor for the voice-overs used in the official candidate commercials?

Suppose it was discovered that the allegedly grassroots video propagating demonstrably false information turned out to be uploaded and pushed along the internet by members of a professional PR firm?


Suppose the family that owned that firm were known to be staunch supporters of one particular party and candidate?

Suppose it also appeared that the video was being simultaneously pushed and promoted around the internet during company hours- by at least one company employee who isn't related to that family?

Suppose somebody thought it curious that the actor for the amateur, grass-roots video sounded an awful lot like the actor for the professional campaign ads, and investigated and learned that the actor for the professional campaign ads works for the main media strategist for the campaign, and, more significantly, that media strategist's company has a history of astro-turfing (phony grass roots projects)?

And suppose that when bloggers mentioned this research project they've been working on- at midnight, all those 'grassroots' videos were pulled within 90 minutes, as well as user accounts associated with it?

Wouldn't you think this is at least curious enough to interest a journalist, let alone the FEC?

Is this all true?

I do not know. I just know that at this point, there's enough 'there' there that it should be very, very interesting to those with any journalistic instincts.


Original blog breaking the story- includes substantial details, screen shots, more information, and a voice-over comparison. Strongly recommended.

See here, here, and here for more.

Hurricane Ike and Cowboy Boots

Glenn Reynolds has a really good round-up regarding the aftermath of Hurricane Ike, with emails from people letting him know how the recovery is going.

He also wonders why there is so little interest in the devastation wrought by Ike, versus Katrina, which we’re still talking about.

A friend of mine emailed me the simple answer, which I borrowed for the header. Boiling down her rant, what she said was this: Katrina got tons of coverage, crying newscasters, incorrect but dramatic stories of “roving gangs raping babies” at the Superdome and Sean Penn in a sinking boat because it was a hurricane that hit a Democrat city, with and incompetent Democrat Mayor and an inept Democrat Governor. Bad local and state governance, and the woes betiding Democrats in general = handy hammer to beat Bush and GOP in ‘06. So much coverage we’re still talking about it.

Ike got little coverage, no crying newscasters, no fake horror stories and no celebrity attention because it was a Hurricane that hit a bunch of Republicans in cowboy boots, who’d elected a competent Republican Mayor and a capable Republican Governor. Good local and state governance, and no woes betiding Democrats in general = no hammer to beat Bush and GOP in ‘08. No coverage.

Yeah, it’s partisan in the extreme, I agree. But, I can’t see where she’s wrong, either. I mean, have you seen the pictures from Galveston? It looks like a bomb went off there. And for the press, it is all a bit of a shrug. Not interesting.

More from The Anchoress

Is the sky falling or isn't it?

Why is it that reading articles like this one and this one has me humming a tune like this one?




Here are some points from the discussion from the comment section at Hotair:

most of these failed and failing sectors (not to mention other sectors too) haven’t been free-market in decades!

Both Fannie & Freddie were regulated by the federal gov’t. since the early 1990s. The direct pressuring of the mortgage industry by the Fed’s for a purely socio-political reason — to increase homeownership among minorities and the poor (traditionally Democrat voters, no? during a time when there was a Dem majority in both houses…) — is the antithesis of a free-market economy. It is the implementation of Marxism — and we now see the outcome.

And this intrusion of the federal gov’t into the marketplace (beyond the regulation of commerce between the states, with foreign nations, and with Native American tribes) is certainly not within the limits of a plain and clear reading of the Constitution, particularly Article 1.

Free-Market Capitalism is a tremendously powerful economic system. Maybe sometime this century America will actually try it.

I don’t know what the solution will be to these economic troubles (and there are more ahead — prepare now for the coming deflation of the dollar) but I DO know that it’s NOT more government intervention.

Harpazo on September 20, 2008 at 2:45 AM
--------


ome on, folks! The first link is to the NEW YORK TIMES and features Chicken-Little quotes from Democrat Congress critters who have come down with a massive case of the vapours when presented with the reality of actually being held accountable for something important.

The sum of what they all said: “HOLY SH*T WHAT DO WE DO?!? WE DON’T KNOW HOW TO FIX THIS BUT WE DO KNOW THAT THE FEDERAL GOV’T IS THE ONLY ONE WHO CAN!”

This should be no surprise. The Left (esp. under the Alinsky model) sees ANY crisis - real or imaginary, natural or fabricated - as a means by which the populous can be tricked into accepting a larger, more intrusive, more authoritarian, more wasteful Federal bureaucracy. The absolute, unalterable goal of the Left is the establishment of a Marxist/socialist government with the members of the revolution in the seats of power.

Harpazo on September 20, 2008 at 2:09 AM

+1 exactly. Schumer and Dodd and Pelosi think if they can trigger a financial panic it will win their political party an election. The NY Times is extremely anxious to do anything it can to help them.

And if we had a real conservative administration, Dodd would be looking at lots of subpoenas. Sadly, Bush will let him skate. McCain may not be a doctrinaire conservative in some ways, but if he’s elected, Dodd and the rest of this bunch will be in jeopardy of being held accountable for their culpability in this mess.

funky chicken on September 20, 2008 at 10:47 AM
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I don’t trust efforts to augment the impact of the urtext. Legislation REQUIRING banks & loan institutions to hand out money knowing it would not be returned will not be fixed with legislation REQUIRING tax payers foot the bill. Panic should not further enable the wrongs.

It is obvious troubles abound.

But to cure fascism with more fascism won’t set things right, only put us further beneath the iron boot of slavery to owners who are insulated that much further with each legislated “fix”.

It’s an opinion.

maverick muse on September 20, 2008 at 6:32 AM

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What market crash? Dow down by 300 one day and 500 the next? From a total of over 12,000?

It’s still over 11,000. That’s not a crash. It’s barely a hiccup. But democrats and the media are willing to scream that it is, to try to terrify people into making a run on banks so we can have financial destruction/turmoil because they think it will help get them elected. And the Bush administration continues its pattern of rolling over and letting it happen.

funky chicken on September 20, 2008 at 10:55 AM

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Before the crash of 1929 my frugal hard working grandparents bought a small frame home in a new ’subdivision’ in Detroit. The market crashed and there were no jobs and no cash flow. My grandparents could not pay the mortgage to the builders.

One of the partners took aside the other and told him
1. there is no one to buy these homes
2. if we evict this couple the house will be vacant and vandalized
3. they are good people and will maintain the property (he lived across from them)

The partner agreed and my grandparents were allowed to stay - without payment. Eventually Grandpa got work and they were able to buy the house. After years of hardship, horsemeat, and labor they were able to make things right

Later when the buikder was old and dying, my grandparents moved him into their house and cared for him until his death

In that same period the neighborhood grocer kept a tab. My grandmother saw he had surplus apples and offered to take them home and bake pies for him to use or sell (she had been a professional cook). He agreed and she did this as well. Eventually they owed the tab over a thousand dollars. Years after the Depression my grandparents finally payed back this good man who told them if everyone payed him back like them he would be a rich man

Are we our bother’s keeper? The prodigal son was not worthy yet the father welcomed him back.

If we destroy the American working class to prove a point what will we have gained?

entagor on September 20, 2008 at 12:19 PM
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See The Telegraph 09-19-08,Ambrose Evans-Prichard article titled “Federal Reserve needs to rediscover power to shock and awe to ease crisis”

The yield on three-month Treasury notes remains near zero - a level last seen after Pearl Harbour - reflecting a near total loss of confidence in all financial instruments. The five-year CDS credit default swaps on a great clutch of America’s biggest companies are flashing imminent bankruptcy signals: Washington Mutual (2638), General Motors (2284), MBIA Insurance (2187), Advanced Micro (1773), Ford Motor (1718).

We are dangerously close to a $3.5 trillion collapse of America’s money market fund industry. “It’s an incredibly serious issue. A tipping point in this crisis would be when you have a run on money markets, and we are right on the cusp of that,” said Paul McCulley, PIMCO’s portfolio chief.

From the same article

How much would it cost? Prof Kenneth Rogoff, former chief economist at the IMF, says the bill would run to at least $1 trillion. This would increase the US government debt from 48pc to 55pc of GDP (under IMF measures) - still lower than that of Germany, France, Italy or Japan

A theme gnawing at me daily is the 1 trillion in surplus dollars held by China because we bought cheap crap made by slave labor from a tyrrany, and because they have no intention of returning the favor by buying much from us.

Had China recirculated the trillion by buying real goods from the USA that money would be pumping our nation.

Instead it seems to be the amount of liquidity we are missing.

Will people ever understand we cannot simply be a buyer nation, especially from a China who intends to keep their trillion away from anything that might save us

We gave them our water for crumbs of bread and now they have built a swimming pool for themselves

entagor on September 20, 2008 at 1:37 PM
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A trillion dollars? That doesn't even make me feel sick- it makes me feel like my eyes are going to roll back in my head as I drop into a coma along with the economy.
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Back to square one, says Bruce Bartlett:

What this means is that we cannot afford either candidate's tax and spending plans. [...]The fundamental problem of the U.S. economy is too much debt. Fixing that will require belt-tightening from everyone -- including the federal government, which must get its fiscal house in order to help the financial sector heal.

Voters should insist that McCain and Obama throw out their tax and spending plans and offer something that reflects current economic realities. These new plans must be more than vague generalities and should commit the next president to a course of action that involves real spending cuts and real tax increases.
[...]
The trick will be getting both Obama and McCain to put forward budget restructuring packages so one isn't unfairly penalized for his honesty....

Greed is bad, but so is stealing. The article doesn't say so, but when you accuse somebody else of greed, you're judging their hearts and motives. When you accuse somebody else of theft, you're judging their actions.

Earmarks

Betsy's Page: And as the Democrats continue to try to wind up the appropriations process, we get stories like this one from the Examiner, about how Harry Reid is sneaking earmarks into the defense bill.As the stock market plunged nearly 1,000 points in two days this week, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada was preoccupied with protecting billions of dollars worth of earmarks contained in a separate, unpublished committee report that got a one-sentence reference in a giant $612 billion defense bill. Reid engineered the 61-to-32 vote to limit debate on the bill, thus barring consideration of an amendment offered by Sen. Jim DeMint. The South Carolina Republican’s amendment would have deleted the reference to the committee report so that it would have to be considered separately. By leaving the language in the bill, the lawmakers were able to carry out one of their favorite maneuvers: Incorporating committee reports into omnibus bills so they can give billions of tax dollars to their cronies without recorded votes on specific spending measures. This is the same Harry Reid who with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi promised to “drain the swamp” of Republican corruption if voters would return the Democrats to the majority.

But Reid’s move was not just a slap at DeMint. Under pressure from a bipartisan coalition of fiscal watchdog groups, including Porkbusters, Club for Growth, Citizens Against Government Waste, National Taxpayers Union and Taxpayers for Common Sense, President George W. Bush signed an executive order last January that directed federal agencies to ignore earmarks that only appear in committee reports. If DeMint’s proposal had passed, the earmarks in the defense bill’s committee report would have been merely suggestions – not legally binding spending instructions. No wonder Reid made sure the South Carolinian’s amendment never made it to the Senate floor.

The FYB at Granny Tea's

He went to the historical society, the farmer's market, somewhere else I've forgotten, and on a walk to the creek. He got to be an important big boy helper with Granny Tea as she burned her trash. He ate a lot of bread: plain, with jam and roasted over the open fire. At supper he ate a chicken thigh, some green beans and more bread and jam. Got up from the table while he and the Grandparents were eating and said he was going to eat on the deck--bread and jam. Came in and said he was sorry he couldn't help clean up kitchen more, but he needed to go home.

Came home, greeted me wanly, and then said he had to take a bath. Soaked for about an hour.

The words 'hog heaven' come to mind for some reason.

Sunday Hymn Post

Little Lambs Eat Ivy

And we'll be eating little lambs, come the end of the month. But the agony of decisions, decisions.... "For example, do you want a whole leg of lamb or chops; lamburgers shaped in patties or not shaped; etc. Just let us know what kind of cuts you want."

I don't know. I can't decide. I might be wrong. There must be one right way to order lamb, the most efficient way. But I don't know what it is.

Jiggety-Jig

We're home again, home again, but mostly napping. Except JennyAnyDots, who very productively finished the FYG's skirt for the wedding, and then did some five or six siashes for the bridesmaids.

RSVPs are trickling back in, and the breath-holding is getting uncomfortable as we wait to see if it's true that about half the rellies Shasta invited won't come. If it's not true, some of us well be standing outside, peering in the windows.

One of the women at the retreat married off her first daughter about four months ago, and she got a good laugh over Shasta only just now remembering to casually let it drop that he didn't know if one of his groomsmen was going to be able to come or not, and he thought if he didn't make it, we'd just grab some dude from the guests.

This was hilarious because her son, like Shasta, is an otter, if you're familiar with John Trent and Gary Smalley's personality classification system. Part of the evening's events had been to sort ourselves out into those classifications and spend a bit of time with 'our' herd. The otters were, of course, a lively bunch- lots of noise from that corner. The Golden Retrievers had a group hug. The Beavers sat in our corner looking glumly at each other and discussing all our negative traits, when we discussed anything at all other than, "What are we supposed to be doing? What's the plan? Are there instructions anywhere?"

Then there was a skit, this skit, and that was mainly hilarious because each of the women who participated had to stop to say, "I DO THIS, and not only this, but I ALSO...."

We had a couple Bible studies, some other 'get to know you' activities (it's a larger church and there's a new batch of university students), and games. I was feeling a bit besieged by the noise and crowd, so by then I took The Cherub with me back to my bed and read a while and tried to get her to listen to my iPod. She preferred to sprawl on the bed and push my legs over from time to time. It will come as no surprise that I almost don't even register on the otter scale.

The FYG and the EC made a run to the store because The Cherub's bag never made it into the van (my otter daughter left it on the rocking chair in the living room), and she needs her Good Nights.

I believe we settled in to bed at around 2:00 and were up by 7:30, and then we had breakfast and another Bible study and discussed limestone and marble.

The Boy had a lovely time with Granny Tea- he had such a good time that he decided not to tell her when he found out we were home so that he could continue to have a lovely time with her. Stinker.

There would probably be some nice point wrapping all this up if I'd been able to sleep past 7:30.

You probably thought I was going to say 'if I'd gotten to be earlier,' but that would be silly.

Catching my eye....

I am actually not here right now. We left yesterday afternoon, the female Progeny and I, for a women's retreat put together by some of the ladies from our church. We spent the night. I assume we had a good time, some of us will probably post about it later, but we're not expected home until later today. The Boy is having a proud and fulfilling time of it, as the HM took him to work with him yesterday afternoon and again this morning.

Meanwhile, these links have been of interest to me:

Soviet propaganda- and how we might still be seeing some of the effects of propaganda efforts launched in the 60s and 70s. Also interesting look at the Cold War for those who have been studying the 20th century (and you know who you are=))

What IS the Bush Doctrine? This interests me not directly because of Sarah Palin (though I watched the interview again, and nope, I don't think Sarah Palin knew the term), but because it's something that will probably be in the history books and this is a good explanation.

From SM Hutchens a post on the propensity to spend much time in anguished and emotional prayer in order to happily conclude that what God wants is what we wanted all along:

But I am more confident now that the Holy Spirit, while mysterious, infinitely subtle, and often counter-intuitive is for all that no fool. The gabbling of enthusiasts is not his favored means of communication, nor is he a private gentleman. If he has a message for one who speaks for him, it meets what he has already placed in many of his own, and agrees. He is a friend to reason because he invented it, a friend of counsel, because he is eternally in counsel himself (some would even say, and not without reason, that he is Counsel), and a friend to the wisdom of age and experience, for he is the one who has given it, presumably for use toward his ends. (The presence of these virtues in the church virtually eclipses, I believe, the need for much of what is commonly regarded as charismatic gift. Since they are themselves part of the concrete and enduring telos of the Spirit’s work, there is good reason to suspect that the overuse and overvaluation of charismata--which may indeed be from God--is also, in whatever age and in whatever church they appear, a sign of spiritual infantilism.)

New Health Care plan, and that's a misnomer, in Oregon- the government will kill you for free, but you have to pay for cancer treatment. Is this the face of Universal Health Care?


False equivalence is the real fundamentalism

In China:

the government announced on Wednesday that baby milk powder from 22 dairy companies contained traces of melamine, leading to the deaths of four babies and sickening more than 6,200 others.

Symptoms have included kidney stones, an inability to pass urine and vomiting, although there have been no reports of adults suffering such problems from drinking tainted milk.

Melamine is normally used to make plastics but it can also make milk and other food products appear to have a higher protein content than they actually do.

It has become apparent in recent days that people in China have been deliberately watering down the milk to cut costs, then adding in the melamine to boost the protein content and make the product look normal.

Some Chinese press reports said the scam had been going on for years, with China's chaotic and corrupt food safety system unable either to detect or prevent it.

This builder has a great advertisement for his skills.

Why bailouts are bad.
Why they're necessary. You decide. Not that it matters what you decide.

Book-banning

Michelangelo's 'David' is deteriorating.

Half of all Americans believe in angels, but it turns out that the liberal theologians are more superstitious:

The survey, which has a margin of error of four percentage points, also revealed that theological liberals are more apt to believe in the paranormal and the occult - haunted houses, UFOs, communicating with the dead and astrology - than do conservatives.

From the Brothers Judd, where I also found this bit of nostalgia:

...for the first half of the school year The Mother dropped me at school in West Orange in the morning and I was supposed to take public transportation home in the afternoon. But not only did I have an unfortunate tendency to go to sleep on the bus and end up at the terminal in Newark, I also figured out that if I walked home I could use the fare to buy books and comic books.

Just a couple years ago he looked at the distance he walked to save that .65. Pretty funny.
I also walked home from school from kindergarten through the end of second grade. Sometimes I didn't get home until after dark. Of course, that's because I dawdled badly. Sometimes I didn't even leave the playground until after dark. I never have had a good sense of the passage of time.

In Your Face

Barack Obama ad attacking the pro-life ad featuring Gianna Jesson, adult survivor of an abortion attempt on her life when her mother was 7 1/2 months pregnant, click on the link to view.

I guess this in keeping with his call for his followers to get in the faces of people who disagree with them:

I need you to go out and talk to your friends and talk to your neighbors. I want you to talk to them whether they are independent or whether they are Republican. I want you to argue with them and get in their face.”

This line is funny:

"And now he tells us that he's the one who's going to take on the old boys network," Obama said. "The old boys network. In the McCain campaign that's called a staff meeting. Come on."

I liked that. It's witty. But the recent campaign ad where he linked McCain to Rush Limbaugh on immigration, an issue where the two disagree vehemently, and then yanked Rush's remarks completely out of context, that was politics as usual, liberally salted with race-baiting.

And I don't think the folks who have been going after Sarah Palin's children, her private email, and spreading all manner of lies need to be encouraged to 'argue with them and get in their faces.'

The Social Sciences

Ace points out that those studies which conclude conservatives are conservatives because of rigid, fearful, authoritarian thinking , and liberals and are liberal because of their generous free spirited open minded qualities are studies that start out with the answers already determined. We can see this by the value-laden explanations of the results.

He writes the following response to the psychology department of a New York university which wrote him asking him to solicit politically active participants in yet another study of why conservatives are so stupid conservatives vote against their own best interests as determined for them by those generous and warm hearted souls on the left:

We all know that conservatives are more fond of tradition and liberals are more fond of fads and "new things."

Now, we already know that. There is no reason to even collect data on it. It's a fact. It's 75% of what makes conservatives conservative and liberals liberal.

But rather than framing it neutrally, you -- if you are anything like the six bazillion psychologists before you -- will say "liberals show they are more OPEN-MINDED and RECEPTIVE OF NEW IDEAS AND NEW EXPERIENCES than conservatives, who are CLOSED-MINDED and FEARFUL OF ANYTHING NEW OR DIFFERENT.

I could take the same data and give it a different spin:

Conservatives are more mature and comfortable with themselves. Liberals, however, similar to juveniles, are seek out fads and transient fashions, much like teenagers "identity shop" by trying out new personae until one fits.

The thing is, the data should be reported straight. Neutrally. And if you're going to spin a value judgment on to it, there is no reason to favor the "CONSERVATIVES FEARFUL" spin over of my own "LIBERALS FADDISH AND ONLY PARTIALLY-FORMED IN THEIR ADULT PERSONAE" spin.

But I know in advance -- well, I know to a 99% certainty, based on the all of the similar studies I've read previously -- that it's going to be CONSERVATIVES FEARFUL.

Why bother? Let's just skip the whole pretense of faux scientific rigor and get right to the money graf: Conservatives suck, liberals are better and smarter. And like trying out new foods and listening to "World Music."

It seems clear to me that the 'conservatives are rigid in their thinking, probably as a result of brain damage from their authoritarian upbringing' and 'liberals are flexible thinkers, open-minded' meme doesn't really make sense in light of something we blogged about earlier, Haidt's research (and he is not remotely conservative):

in which liberals and conservatives were asked to project themselves into the minds of their opponents and answer questions about their moral reasoning. Conservatives, he said, prove quite adept at thinking like liberals, but liberals are consistently incapable of understanding the conservative point of view.

That's not to say that there aren't individual exceptions on each side- of course there are. But when studying a larger group of liberal and conservatives, Haidt found that liberals were consistently incapable of seeing a point of view other than their own when it came to conservative vs liberal, and conservatives were not just able to do that, they were adept at it.

I think Haidt's research was sound (well, of course I would, wouldn't I?), but I think he faltered and permitted his own values to intrude when he tried to draw conclusions from that research. How clearly is he really able to understand the conservative point of view? And what kind of sense does this 'liberals are the open minded, flexible ones, conservatives are angry and rigid' even make when liberals are the group consistently incapable of understanding the 'other' point of view?

I also disagreed with one of his starting premises:

Why in particular do working class and rural Americans usually vote for pro-business Republicans when their economic interests would seem better served by Democratic policies? We psychologists have been examining the origins of ideology ever since Hitler sent us Germany's best psychologists, and we long ago reported that strict parenting and a variety of personal insecurities work together to turn people against liberalism, diversity, and progress.

I don't agree that my economic interests are better served by Democratic policies, and 'personal insecurities' is a value laden term. I suspect that the issues that concern conservatives are labled 'insecurities' and those that concern liberals are labeled "concerns" or 'empathies.'

Democrats, in contrast, appeal to reason with their long-winded explorations of policy options for a complex world.

That's one way of looking at it. Another would be that Democrats appeal to the desire to be thought intellectual, an insecurity of its own. That is also a value judgment and who is to say which is the correct analysis?

Incidentally, while googling for a link I wanted for this post, I came across this article which repeats all the same negative canards about why conservatives are conservatives, and wondered if I spoted a flaw in the research methodology:

In the current study, Amodio and his colleagues recruited 43 college students for a simple experiment. The subjects reported their political attitudes confidentially on a scale from -5 (extremely liberal) to +5 (extremely conservative). Then they completed a computer test called "Go/No-Go" while an EEG measured their brain activity.
Subjects were told to press a button ("Go") each time the computer flashed the letter M, but not when a W was displayed. Each stimulus-response set had to be completed within half a second.
Amodio said the "Go" stimulus came up 400 out of 500 times, so "they're sitting there getting in the habit of pressing this button. But 20 percent of the time, the 'No Go' stimulus comes up — it's unexpected — and they're supposed to do nothing. We can see how accurate people are at withholding the habitual response."
Subjects who rated themselves more liberal had higher scores for accuracy, Amodio said. But, more importantly, they also showed stronger electrical activity when the "No Go" cues were presented, indicating that more neurons were firing.

As Dave Duffy repeats in an essay on why he is no longer a liberal:

There is an old adage that goes something like: "If you're not a liberal when you're in your 20s you haven't got a heart; if you're not a conservative by the time you're 40 you haven't got a brain." It's a reasonable summation of youth's innocence and its desire to save the undertrodden from the seeming unfairness of the world, and of adults' experience and its learned realization that utopia on earth is not an option.

What would be really interesting would be to follow those 43 college students and see how many of them and which ones are still of the same political persuasion when they are forty as they are now.

Frugalities from 1973

This is the last recipe from the old Family Circle magazine article on frugal meals I found. Sometime next week I'll look back through the archives and gather all the links to all the meals in a single place.

The menu for main course number 14 is:
Russian Cabbage Borsch with Beef and Frankfurters (.39 a serving)
Pumpernickel with Caraway butter (.05 per serving)
Total cost .44 a serving

Incidentally, for some perspective on this, I was thumbing through another magazine from about the same era, 1975 or so, and there was a story about a family of six. The husband made 14,000 a year, and this was considered comfortable, and the wife supplemented the family income with 4000 a year from part time work at a grocery store.

The author of the article says it is impossible to make only enough cabbage borsch for four people, so the proportions given are for six people.

1 1/4 pounds (approximately) meaty beef bones (.64)
6 cups water
2 t. salt
1 small package soup greens containing 1 leek, 1 small parsnip, 1 large carrot, 1 stalk celery with leaves, 3 sprigs parsley, 1 onion (.53)
2 medium beets, peeled and cut into matchstick strips (.15)
2 canned tomatoes, chopped, with liquid (.10)
1 pound shredded cabbage (.19)
2 medium potatoes, peeled and cubed (.11)
1 clove garlic
1 to 2 T. vinegar
1-2 t. sugar
1 bay leaf
6-8 peppercorns
2 small slices bacon, diced (.14)
1 small onion, minced
1 T flour
2 frankfurters, sliced
3/4 cup dairy sour cream
1 T minced ill

Place beef bones in a 3 quart tall, straight-sided pot made of enameled cast iron or stainless steel. Add salt, bring to a boil and skim off scum, as it rises to the surface. When soup is clear, reduce heat, cover and simmer for 1/2 hour. Add well-washed leek, the scraped carrot cut in half, celery, the scraped parsnip, parsley and the onion peeled and quartered. Cover and simmer 40 minutes longer. Meanwhile, simmer cut beets in a small saucepan with the tomatoes and their liquid for about 30 minutes, or until tender. When soup vegetables are completely tender and meat is falling away from bones, remove from soup. Strain soup into a bowl, rinse pot and return clear soup to it. Cut all beef from bones and add to soup, along with beets and tomatoes, shredded cabbage, potatoes, garlic, bay leaf and peppercorns. Simmer for 15 minutes, then add vinegar and sugar to make flavor slightly sweet-sour. Continue simmering until all vegeta