Red State

There's no defending a comparatively few violent criminals who think molotov cocktails are an acceptable form of political expression. But what do you say about hundreds of liberal Democrats from one Maryland community who want to boycott a business whose owner dares to show his support for John McCain?

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Go here for the transcript, and here for Allahpundit's commentary on the video:

AP's worried (not very surprising: he's a good and habitually pessimistic blogger) that this is more evidence that McCain & Palin are at odds with each other over how hard to hit the Democrats on this and other issues.

I do not agree.

Anyway, while not a Evangelical myself, I fully understand why David Brody is so happy with the text quoted in the subtitle above; I share his reaction. It's refreshing to have a politician that's this unapologetic about the ultimate source of her stance on life issues: unapologetic, and unafraid. Far too many of our current legislators act as if straightforwardly acknowledging the influence of their religious beliefs on their moral philosophy is somehow... tacky. Watching somebody who won't do that soothes.

Moe Lane

Sunday, October 12, 2008

PREFACE:

On FOX News Sunday, host Chris Wallace first talked to Rick Davis and David Axelrod, who spoke mostly at the same time. Davis posited that the media would not discuss Bill Ayers, and Axelrod countered that Bill Ayers the most discussed "unknown public figure" in the history, I suppose, of unknown public figures. In the next segment, Governor Tim Pawlenty stressed Obama's inexperience while Governor Ed Rendell said that, despite his ravings about how Pennsylvanians hate blacks, this time the economy will trump race in his State. Rendell said also that divided government is a bad thing and the entire system should be run by one party.

On ABC's This Week, host George Stephanopoulos talked first to former Larry Summers and James Baker. Summers said that it is time to stop talking and to start acting. Former Treasury Secretary James Baker said that "this will be with us for a while," but "we will come out of it." In the next segment, Congressman Barney Franks said that it is "very important to get this done today." Congressman Roy Blunt argued that there were going to be losses, but it should not be the taxpayers who lose.

On NBC's Meet the Press, it was Rob Portman and John Corzine. It was a civil exchange between adults, despite Tom Brokaw attempts to stir things up. For instance, Portman spoke of McCain's proposed spending freeze while Corzine spoke of Obama's plan to start spending $50-billion dollars to create jobs, rebuilding infrastructure, converting to alternative energy, etc.

On CBS's Face the Nation, Lindsey Graham took offense at the Obama campaign comparing John McCain and Sarah Palin to George Wallace. Congressman Adam Putnam sees McCain as strong in Florida. Douglas Wilder sees the Bradley Effect being nullified because of Obama's gifts and because "America is ready." Colorado Governor Bill Ritter declared that "the gloss has come off Governor Palin." NEXT SEGMENT, Fred Bergsten, a former official in the Administration of Jimmy Carter, declared that there is now a "crisis of confidence." (Where have we heard that one before?) However, he thinks the "authorities" are doing the right things this time and we should come out of it alright.

On CNN's Late Edition, Senators Chuckie Schumer and Arlen Specter had a major dustup over Schumer's political attacks on Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell on an issue over which everyone agreed that there would be no partisan attacks.

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Both presidential candidates have been accused of not meeting the Constitutional requirement that only "natural-born" citizens hold the presidency.

Last month a federal judge threw out a lawsuit seeking to remove John McCain from the California ballot because he was born in the Panama Canal Zone:

Judge William Alsup of Federal District Court ruled late Tuesday that the law at the time of Mr. McCain’s birth automatically granted citizenship to offspring of American citizens.

Mr. McCain’s parents were both citizens when he was born on Aug. 29, 1936, in the Panama Canal Zone, an American territory where his father was stationed with the Navy.

Obama still faces a legal challenge to his constitutional eligibility to be president. A lawsuit, Berg v. Obama, brought by Philip J. Berg, a Philadelphia attorney, alleges Obama is not eligible to be president.

Instead of producing records proving Obama is a natural born citizen, Obama and the Democratic National Committee have filed a motion seeking a protective order to block production of documents until a motion to dismiss is the law suit is ruled on by the court. Obama and the Democratic National Committee also claim attorney Berg has no standing - has no right - to bring the lawsuit.

What is it that Obama and the Democratic National Committee are trying to hide? Why not just produce documents that prove Obama's citizenship and make the lawsuit go away?

Watch the following video, in which Berg talks about his lawsuit:

I repeat, what is it that Obama and the Democratic National Committee are trying to hide? If Obama can post his birth certificate on his website why can't he provide it to the court?

Everybody did.

Gotta love modern engineering, huh?

Open thread.

Because it's getting harder and harder to keep track of who's doing what, and to whom.

Via Ace of Spades

Moe Lane

PS: Just to reassure Allahpundit: here's a link to the connections that the CCC has with all of its community organization friends, not to mention Leftist, Marxist, and generally radical activist groups. These people have been pretty much all living in each other's pockets for the last forty years; by now they're more incestuous than a Faulkner novel.

PPS: You may want to have a chat with DNC mouthpiece Brad Woodhouse about what the phrase "There's no relationship here" actually means. Although I must say that the accelerated mushroom treatment that you've put the DNC through seems to have paid dividends: they repeat the Approved Points of Talk quite steadily. Electroshock? Drug cocktail? Forced memetic downloading?... oops, ignore that last one.

Let's just call John Lewis (D-GA) what he is: a race baiter.

It is not deniable. It is not controversial. John Lewis, who made history standing up for civil rights, has become a parody of his former self. It is somewhat understandable. He struggled for civil rights in the sixties. He saw friends gun downed by white police officers and was himself targeted.

But John Lewis has never put aside the legitimate hate he developed in the sixties. All struggles now are as bad as struggles then for John Lewis. He uses his celebrity to drive the hyperbole of race baiting.

The left may not like me saying it, but it is the truth.

In 2006, John Lewis cooperated with a radio ad for John Eaves, the present Chairman of the Fulton County Commission in Georgia. The ad played on black radio stations. In it, Lewis said this:

On Nov. 7, we face the most dangerous situation we ever have. You think fighting off dogs and water hoses in the '60s was bad. [Now we] sit idly by, and let the right-wing Republicans take control of the Fulton County County Commission.

This was followed with Atlanta's current mayor Shirley Franklin claiming the efforts of Martin Luther King, Jr. might be undone and of former Atlanta mayor Andrew Young saying they couldn't afford to turn the clock back.

Lewis, though, got the last word, saying:

Your very life may depend on it.

The message is clear: Vote Republican and you go back to slavery.

John Lewis is a race baiter. The man who routinely sows seeds of hatred in the black community against the white community is really in no position to accuse John McCain of anything.

Leslie Brockette Leudtke and Kevin Carl Robinson - the two suspects - didn't just happen to have incendiary devices in their car trunk. They had a plan. Via Protein Wisdom Pub:

Pair arrested after large McCain sign torched in Sellwood yard

PORTLAND, Ore. - Authorities have arrested two men after a Molotov cocktail was thrown at a 4-foot by 8-foot campaign sign for Republican presidential candidate John McCain in a southeast Portland yard.

Karen Scrutton said she was asleep inside her home at 7956 S.E. 17th Ave. in the Sellwood neighborhood when she saw her sign go up in flames after 1 a.m.

"I screamed upstairs to my husband, 'Jean! Jean!" she said.

A neighbor heard a crash and chased off one of the suspects. Jean Scrutton said his son-in-law found another suspect not far away.

And yes, "Molotov cocktails." That's what it says on the news release.

Moe Lane

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H/T to Okie Campaigns

As I experience my worst college football season in my lifetime - Michigan fan living in Columbus, Ohio - and the economy heads toward whatever it is heading toward, I thought I would offer a little comic relief. The picture below was take in the parking lot of a local grocery store.

Outstanding. There shall be no excerpts. Read it all and hope that there are people paying heed.

Lots and lots of people have probably written and are probably continuing to write letters addressed to the North Pole swearing to Santa that they will be good little--or big--boys and girls if only Barack Obama gets elected President and gives them the New New Deal they have lusted for ever since the Old New Deal ran its course.

To which, Santa should reply "FORGET IT!"

Two UCLA economists say they have figured out why the Great Depression dragged on for almost 15 years, and they blame a suspect previously thought to be beyond reproach: President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

After scrutinizing Roosevelt's record for four years, Harold L. Cole and Lee E. Ohanian conclude in a new study that New Deal policies signed into law 71 years ago thwarted economic recovery for seven long years.

"Why the Great Depression lasted so long has always been a great mystery, and because we never really knew the reason, we have always worried whether we would have another 10- to 15-year economic slump," said Ohanian, vice chair of UCLA's Department of Economics. "We found that a relapse isn't likely unless lawmakers gum up a recovery with ill-conceived stimulus policies."

In an article in the August issue of the Journal of Political Economy, Ohanian and Cole blame specific anti-competition and pro-labor measures that Roosevelt promoted and signed into law June 16, 1933.

"President Roosevelt believed that excessive competition was responsible for the Depression by reducing prices and wages, and by extension reducing employment and demand for goods and services," said Cole, also a UCLA professor of economics. "So he came up with a recovery package that would be unimaginable today, allowing businesses in every industry to collude without the threat of antitrust prosecution and workers to demand salaries about 25 percent above where they ought to have been, given market forces. The economy was poised for a beautiful recovery, but that recovery was stalled by these misguided policies."

Using data collected in 1929 by the Conference Board and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Cole and Ohanian were able to establish average wages and prices across a range of industries just prior to the Depression. By adjusting for annual increases in productivity, they were able to use the 1929 benchmark to figure out what prices and wages would have been during every year of the Depression had Roosevelt's policies not gone into effect. They then compared those figures with actual prices and wages as reflected in the Conference Board data.

In the three years following the implementation of Roosevelt's policies, wages in 11 key industries averaged 25 percent higher than they otherwise would have done, the economists calculate. But unemployment was also 25 percent higher than it should have been, given gains in productivity.

Meanwhile, prices across 19 industries averaged 23 percent above where they should have been, given the state of the economy. With goods and services that much harder for consumers to afford, demand stalled and the gross national product floundered at 27 percent below where it otherwise might have been.

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Will Wilkinson is golden. Naomi Klein really should stop volunteering to be humiliated in debate concerning Friedman's legacy. And since it cannot be said enough, I shall say it again: If Friedman was alive, he would have been more than glad to debate Klein, he would have filleted her and he would have smiled throughout the entire process.

Once again, I condemn inflammatory comments directed at any Presidential or Vice Presidential candidate by anyone at any rally. But someone really needs to clue Kathleen Hall Jamieson in on something:

But Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania an author of 15 books on politics, says the vitriol [against Obama] has been encouraged by inflammatory words from the stage.

"Red-meat rhetoric elicits emotional responses in those already disposed by ads using words such as 'dangerous' 'dishonorable' and 'risky' to believe that the country would be endangered by election of the opposing candidate," she said.

First of all, the overwhelming majority of people who appear in McCain-Palin rallies are respectful and the very opposite of boorish. Secondly, where was Jamieson's handwringing when Obama and Biden said that McCain was "dishonorable" or "erratic"? Why wasn't this "red-meat rhetoric" condemned so vociferously.

I am looking for a reason other than "John McCain has an 'R' next to his name" for an answer to this question.

John McCain predicted the storm and tried to warn people that it was coming.

Barack Obama, by contrast, stayed utterly silent as the storm clouds gathered.

And now he wants to be President?

[Update]: A statement about the hate crime from Katon Dawson, SC GOP Chair:

"This cowardly attempt to intimidate our conservative Republican reform team here in South Carolina will motivate our volunteers and activists to work that much harder for our candidates up and down the ballot. The destructive actions of these vandals should be taken as a sign of desperation. They clearly lack the energy, ideas and candidates to compete in this election - and are running scared."

Vandals strike York County GOP headquarters

By Matt Garfield

Vandals spray-painted the words "Republican means slavery" on the door of the York County GOP campaign headquarters overnight Friday.

Party volunteers called police after discovering the message when they arrived at the office on Rock Hill's Oakland Avenue. The vandals also stole about 45 candidate signs from the front yard and spray-painted over a banner that carried a picture of Republican presidential nominee John McCain. Their messages included lettering and symbols sometimes used by gangs.

Well, at least they weren't using firearms to make their points.

Yet.

Moe Lane

PS: I'd just like to note for the record that, grammatically speaking, "Republican" is either an adjective (which means that it cannot be properly equated with "slavery," which is a noun), or it is a proper noun (which means that it cannot be properly equated with "slavery," which is a abstract concept [no, really: there are no slavery atoms]). I mention this just to point out to our Democratic colleagues that they're apparently doing just as well with the public education system as they did with the subprime mortgage industry.

[Note by Jeff:] An even more basic educational deficiency, Moe, could be the fact these upstanding citizens apparently never learned in school which party's President issued that pesky old Emancipation Proclamation...

Or are your internal polls telling you something?

H/T Hot Air

Skip to the end, where he informs the audience that they will not be "hoodwinked" or "bamboozled." Sound familiar? Of course it does: he pulled the same trick against Hillary Clinton in South Carolina, as well-known VRWC rag The New Republic reported at the time:

His use of the phrase is resonant. It comes from a scene in Malcolm X, where Denzel Washington warns black people about the hidden evils of "the White Man" masquerading as a smiling politician: "Every election year, these politicians are sent up here to pacify us," he says. "You've been hoodwinked. Bamboozled."

By uttering this famous phrase, Obama told his black audience everything it needed to know. He was helping to convince blacks that the first two-term Democratic president in 50 years, a man referred to as the first black president, is in fact a secret racist. As soon as I heard that Obama had quoted from Malcolm X like this, I knew that Obama would win South Carolina by a massive margin.

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Syndicated columnist Ben Shapiro, targeting Jewish voters, has put together a set of YouTube videos making the "Jewish case against Barack Obama."

You can see the preview here and the three parts are below the fold. It may be called the "Jewish case against Barack Obama," but it might as well just be the case against Barack Obama.

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The lamestream media has been doing a pretty good job of shielding Barack Obama and Congressional Democrats from blame in the current credit crisis. It's therefore no surprise that when Representative Maxine Waters (D-CA) was called out for it by Steve Moore, her first instinct was to lie:

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This is going to be one whale of an investigation, if true:

Obama fundraiser, convicted of fraud, spills beans

Oct 11 03:26 AM US/Eastern By MIKE ROBINSON Associated Press Writer

CHICAGO (AP) - Jailed political fundraiser Antoin "Tony" Rezko, the Chicago real estate developer who helped launch Barack Obama on his political career, is whispering secrets to federal prosecutors about corruption in Illinois and the political fallout could be explosive.

Democratic Gov. Rod Blagojevich, whose administration faces multiple federal investigations over how it handed out jobs and money with advice from Rezko, is considered the most vulnerable.

Rezko also was friendly with Obama—offering him a job when he finished law school, funding his earliest political campaigns and purchasing a lot next to his house. But based on the known facts, charges so far and testimony at Rezko's trial, there's no indication there'll be an October surprise that could hurt the Democratic presidential nominee—even though Rezko says prosecutors are pressing him for dirt about Obama.

"I think this strikes fear into the Blagojevich administration and the Statehouse Democrats but not into the Obama campaign," says state Sen. Kirk Dillard, R-Westmont, a John McCain delegate to the GOP convention but an old friend of Obama.

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They can't because they don't have any facilities for cross-checking, and the order by a judge to require Democratic Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner to certify the results and make them available just got reversed by the 6th District Court of Appeals.

The problem is, of course, long-time Democratic ally ACORN:

Thousands of new-voter cards in Ohio undeliverable

By Jim Siegel

COLUMBUS - Thousands of cards mailed by county election boards to newly registered voters in Hamilton County and throughout the state are being returned because the people can't be found.

[snip]

Ohio Republican Party Chairman Robert Bennett on Tuesday said it's a result of statewide registration fraud conducted by independent groups that support Democratic candidates.

[snip]

He said many were submitted by groups he terms "auxiliaries of the Democratic Party": the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) and America Coming Together.

Oops! Silly me. That's a story from 2004, which would be the last time ACORN tried to commit voter registration fraud in Ohio during a Presidential election.

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For Sunday, October 5, 2008

FOX News Sunday (FNS): Host Chris Wallace talks to McCain campaign manager Rick Davis and chief Obama strategist David Axelrod; then he moves to surrogates Tim Pawlenty and Ed Rendell.

This Week (ABC): Host George Stephanopoulos talks about the financial mess with House Republican whip Roy Blunt and with one of the fiasco's architects, Barney Frank.

Meet the Press (NBC): Moderator Tom Brokaw hosts two New Mexico Congressmen: Tom Udall (D) and Steve Pearce (R). They're running for the U.S.Senate seat currently held by Republican Pete Domenici.

Face the Nation (CBS): Host Bob Schieffer talks politics with Lindsey Graham; Dem Governor Bill Ritter of Colorado, Richmond's Dem Mayor Doug Wilder, and Republican Representative Adam Putnam of Florida. The he chats about the Wall Street meltdown with Dr. C. Fred Bergsten of the Peterson Institute for International Economics and the former assistant secretary of the Treasury for international affairs under… President… Jimmy… Carter.

Late Edition (CNN): Host Wolf Blitzer chats with Steve Forbes, Robert Reich, Specter and Schumer, and the always-irate Debbie Wasserman Schultz. And his usual cast of thousands.

Why Davis & Axelrod (FNS)? Better would be Schmidt & Axelrod or Davis & Plouffe (rhymes with "puff"). I'm just sayin'.

Word is that McCain is now calling Chris Dodd and Barney Frank (TW) for paving our road to this financial mess. I approve of that message, as it is easy-to-grasp and true. Congressman Blunt, who can play hardball with the best of them, can make short work of Barney if he wants.

Can we hold Domenici's seat (MTP)?

I don't know what to make of Schieffer's half hour (FTN) this week, but it's currently the top rated Sunday Show.

When Arlen Specter, God love him, is to speak (LE), I become nervous. We know Chuckie's going to bring the acid.

Promoted from diaries, with a quote from the article below the fold. There were apparently over fifty seven thousand bad voter registrations (out of 250,000), and the claim is that most of these were from Democratic ally ACORN. - Moe Lane

Our democracy is becoming a farce. McCain and Palin have to mention Obama, ACORN and voter fraud every single chance they get. Here is another article on the grotesque voter fraud uncovered in Pennsylvania:

http://www.theamericanprowler.com/dsp_article.asp?art_id=14034

This has me madder than hell. If Obama does pull this thing off, he will be illegitimate, but let not go there yet. Let’s use ACORN against Obama and pray to God that this backfires against Obama.

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I know that economic times are tough. But predictions of The Great Depression 2.0 strike me as being entirely wrong headed. We still have a very potent economy and despite the fact that it is going through a bad business cycle, there is no reason to think that it will not come back quite soon and stronger than ever. Indeed, there is every reason to believe that the economy currently is stronger than we give it credit for. The following is an important takeaway note:

It turns out that John McCain, who was widely mocked for saying that "the fundamentals of our economy are strong," was actually right. We're in a financial crisis, not an economic crisis. We're not entering a second Great Depression.

It would be nice if the media would pay attention to the arguments made by people like Professor Casey Mulligan. But "if it bleeds, it leads" and since there is so much emphasis on the bleeding, the hidden strengths of the economy are not liable to receive much attention nowadays. Pity--we are potentially setting ourselves up for bad policymaking fueled by abject panic and the mistaken belief that American capitalism itself is coming to an end.

We have two of them and they address a common topic:

It seems to every administrator that it is only by his efforts that the whole population under his rule is kept going, and in this consciousness of being indispensable every administrator finds the chief reward of his labour and efforts. While the sea of history remains calm the ruler-administrator in his frail bark, holding on with a boat-hook to the ship of the people and himself moving, naturally imagines that his efforts move the ship he is holding on to. But as soon as a storm arises and the sea begins to heave and the ship to move, such a delusion is no longer possible. The ship moves independently with its own enormous motion, the boat-hook no longer reaches the moving vessel, and suddenly the adminstrator, instead of appearing a ruler and a source of power, becomes an insignificant, feeble man...

--Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace.

And from the Economist, there is this:

. . . How far should the balance between governments and markets shift? This special report will argue that although some rebalancing is needed, particularly in financial regulation, where innovation outpaced a sclerotic supervisory regime, it would be a mistake to blame today's mess only, or even mainly, on modern finance and "free-market fundamentalism". Speculative excesses existed centuries before securitisation was invented, and governments bear direct responsibility for some of today's troubles. Misguided subsidies, on everything from biofuels to mortgage interest, have distorted markets. Loose monetary policy helped to inflate a global credit bubble. Provocative as it may sound in today's febrile and dangerous climate, freer and more flexible markets will still do more for the world economy than the heavy hand of government.

There is now a lot of talk that McCain rallies are being filled with "hate" against Obama and that this hate could lead to violence. James Joyner says phooey to this line of argument, and he's right:

Sheesh.  Look:  It's the closing days of a long, polarizing campaign.  We've been whipped up to believe that this is The Most Important Election in American History and that The Fate of America's Future is at stake.  McCain is losing.  Obama is winning.   The culmination of all this is that some McCain supporters are frustrated.

So what?

This has been the case as long as I can remember.  Certainly, we saw it in 2004, as Kerry supporters simply could not believe that we were about to re-elect George W. Bush.   Heck, we saw it from supporters of Hillary Clinton, Mitt Romney, and other losing candidates in this year's primaries.   People who are enthusiastic enough about a candidate to show up at a rally are naturally going to have a hard time dealing with the fact that their fellow partisans/countrymen don't share their view.  That's especially for those afflicted with Pauline Kael Syndrome and therefore can't even imagine what kind of people would vote for the other candidate.

It should go without saying, but in the event that you need to hear it from me, people who call Barack Obama a "terrorist" or advocate violence are being ridiculous at best and despicable at worst. But spare me the contention that this is some new phenomenon in American politics. It's not. Really, it's not. And need it really be said that so long as he continues to appear on Bill Maher's show, Andrew Sullivan is in no position whatsoever to decry the supposed lack of civility in American political discourse?

deserves another:

A man at the center of a voter-registration scandal told The Post yesterday he was given cash and cigarettes by aggressive ACORN activists in exchange for registering an astonishing 72 times, in apparent violation of Ohio laws.

"Sometimes, they come up and bribe me with a cigarette, or they'll give me a dollar to sign up," said Freddie Johnson, 19, who filled out 72 separate voter-registration cards over an 18-month period at the behest of the left-leaning Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.

"The ACORN people are everywhere, looking to sign people up. I tell them I am already registered. The girl said, 'You are?' I say, 'Yup,' and then they say, 'Can you just sign up again?' " he said.

I call shenanigans and I want an investigation. Pronto. We have a Congress that supposedly loves engaging in oversight and delights in holding hearings on all sorts of issues. Why doesn't it do so here?

And no, the answer "because the party controlling Congress is the one most likely to benefit from ACORN's fraudulent activities" doesn't cut it. Voter fraud--you know, the stuff so many people on the other side of the partisan divide say does not exist--should not get a pass on the basis of so weak an excuse. If the current leadership in Congress can't carry out its oversight responsibilities, maybe we ought to get a new leadership that can. Not to mention a President that won't tolerate this nonsense.

The words you are looking for are "endemic voter fraud":

Officials in Missouri, a hard-fought jewel in the presidential race, are sifting through possibly hundreds of questionable or duplicate voter-registration forms submitted by an advocacy group that has been accused of election fraud in other states.

Charlene Davis, co-director of the election board in Jackson County, where Kansas City is, said the fraudulent registration forms came from the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN. She said they were bogging down work Wednesday, the final day Missourians could register to vote.

"I don't even know the entire scope of it because registrations are coming in so heavy," Davis said. "We have identified about 100 duplicates, and probably 280 addresses that don't exist, people who have driver's license numbers that won't verify or Social Security numbers that won't verify. Some have no address at all."

The nonpartisan group works to recruit low-income voters, who tend to lean Democratic. Most polls show Republican presidential candidate John McCain with an edge in bellwether Missouri, but Democrat Barack Obama continues to put up a strong fight.

Jess Ordower, Midwest director of ACORN, said his group hasn't done any registrations in Kansas City since late August. He said he was told three weeks ago by election officials that there were only about 135 questionable cards -- 85 of them duplicates.

"They keep telling different people different things," he said. "They gave us a list of 130, then told someone else it was 1,000."

Yeah, I'm shocked--shocked!--to find all of this happening.

I can't believe I am actually wasting time writing this, but someone needs to point out to Jimmy Carter that when it comes to Presidents with lousy economic policies, his Administration still takes the cake no matter how bad things have gotten in the current financial crisis. Under the Carter Administration, inflation skyrocketed into the double digits--reaching 13.5% at the time of the 1980 Presidential campaign. Unemployment was at 7.7% nationwide by 1980 and worse in various industrial pockets. Interest rates were at a shocking 21.5%. Any President who is responsible for such a sorry spectacle has no business lecturing successors on how to set economic policy.

Contrary to Carter, "spending, borrowing and tax cuts" have nothing to do with the current economic crisis. As anyone who hasn't been living in a cave knows, the current economic crisis was brought about by the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977--signed by Jimmy Carter--along with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, all of which conspired to introduce Americans to the phenomenon of subprime mortgages. We thus started down the primrose path to offering mortgages to people at risk of not being able to pay those mortgages back. Mortgage-backed securities arose from subprime lending and while it is tempting to blame a lack of regulation for the emergence of MBSs, it has been conclusively demonstrated that deregulation is not the villain in this story. Indeed, opting for regulation--as Carter, with financial lust in his heart, appears so plainly to do--will have a deleterious policy effect.

I realize that Carter wants to obscure a clear examination of his calamitous economic record by trying to get people to dislike George W. Bush and I understand why Carter is resorting to tired shibboleths as he makes the effort. But that shouldn't excuse Carter's rhetorical dishonesty. Carter's Pavlovian answers do nothing to address the current financial crisis and despite the news of the moment, the economic disaster Carter helped bring about does not even remotely look better over time.

[UPDATE: Via AoSHQ's headlines, nope, it's FoxNews. NBC did something similar to Obama two weeks ago, too; them's the breaks. What, disable the link? Hah! I ain't the McCain campaign, bubbeleh.]

"Spies, Brigands and Pirates" (what, no ninja?) of Protein Wisdom Pub suspects that the Fox News copyright complaint about the ACORN ad (which you can still see here by the way) is a fake accusation, given that there's something like 129K Fox News clips on YouTube already. S/he also notes that people were playing "adult content" games earlier with the Ayers video -

You know, this one:

• so who knows?
  

Moe Lane

PS: Thanks for confirming that this stuff worries you, guys.

PPS: There's this... interesting little rumor, too.