Obama = Power-Hungry

I haven't posted since before the national election, as I have been too dejected by the election of Barack Obama and too exhausted from arguing so hard for John McCain and Sarah Palin. I'm also busy with business. But the world continues to rotate, and since Nov 2 all I've been hearing about is how The Messiah is running his transition like a genius, and W sucks, etc. etc. The mass media in this country are so far to the left it's just embarrassing.

I'm at the point now where I just want the guy to take office already.  Enough with the speculation and fawning over him - let him try governing!  Let's see what he's got.  I'm betting he's got nothing - nada - zilch.  I've never found Obama to be remotely impressive and I doubt I'll be surprised when he takes office.

Obama continued his campaign posturing and preening even after the election, starting with a new "Office of the President-Elect" seal on his podiums, furniture, and stationery.  What a buffoon.  He is so hot to have everyone look up to him that he just can't wait another 2 months.  "Look up to me NOW!" he seems to be saying.

A couple of days ago, during his vacation in Hawaii, Obama dropped in for a surprise visit to some troops as they were enjoying a Christmas dinner.  According to one report, the reception was relatively quiet, with the troops staying seated until Obama approached them, at which point they were respectful.  Contrast this with the "rock star" receptions Bush reportedly gets.  Bush spends more time with them, doesn't posture for cameras, even serves the troops their food.  Obama showed his face and "slapped backs" for an hour, then bailed out and had dinner at his beach home.  The guy is all talk.

Like I said, give him the authority already.  Let him try to govern.  Heck, let him just try to be an effective executive -- for the first time in his life.  He has no experience for this job whatsoever, but obviously thinks very highly of himself.  Let's see what happens when he can't vote "Present" anymore.

Obama is a Radical on the Issue of the Unborn

I believe that Barack Obama is leading in the polls right now because he is succeeding at deceiving the public about who he really is and what he really believes. If the public really knew what he believes and plans to do as POTUS, he would lose in a landslide. The mass media is helping him immensely by neglecting to investigate any of the serious allegations raised by the Right.

Professor Robert George of the Witherspoon Institute has written a piece that, in my opinion, if everyone were to read would sink Obama's candidacy by itself. The piece deals with only one issue: The Unborn. This is the most controversial issue of our day, and it is the clearest divider between the two political parties. Obama, being a good Democrat, is pro-choice. No news there. But in his op-ed, George makes the case that Obama's beliefs and actions have gone far beyond the standard pro-choice agenda. George asserts, in fact, that he is so extreme in these beliefs that they make him a "pro-abortion" candidate.

I really recommend everyone read the entire piece. But here are the main points:

• Obama supports repealing the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits federal funding of abortions that are not the result of rape, incest, or to save the life of the mother (in other words, most abortions).


• Obama has stated that "the first thing I'd do as President is sign the Freedom of Choice Act." This act, if enacted, "would abolish virtually every existing state and federal limitation on abortion, including parental consent and notification laws for minors, state and federal funding restrictions on abortion, and conscience protections for pro-life citizens working in the health-care industry-protections against being forced to participate in the practice of abortion or else lose their jobs." We have a proposal we're voting on here in California during the same election, Proposition 4, which would require parental consent before a minor could get an abortion. These kinds of laws would presumably go away.


• Obama has opposed the ban on partial-birth abortions, and condemned the Supreme Court decision that affirmed the federal law against this disgusting procedure.


• Obama wants to remove federal funding for crisis pregnancy centers that provide alternatives to abortion. How extreme is that?


• Obama has not supported his own party's "Pregnant Women Support Act," which would provide help for pregnant women in need. Furthermore, he has opposed some provisions in the act that even ultra-liberals like Ted Kennedy support, which would offer information to these pregnant women about the long-term effects of abortion and which would provide coverage under the national S-CHIP health plan for the unborn babies.


• Obama opposes the "Mexico City Policy" that opposes funding abortion in other countries.


• Obama has voted multiple times against, and spoken out against, legislation that would require doctors to provide care to babies who survive abortion or who are intentionally delivered before they are "viable" (able to survive without help outside the womb). There can be no doubt that this practice constitutes actual infanticide. Yet common-sense humanitarian legislation like this was supported at the federal level by such prominent pro-choice activists as John Kerry and Barbara Boxer, but opposed by Barack Obama.


• Going beyond abortion to the controversial practice of killing human embryos for research on their stem cells, Obama joins many other legislators in their belief that federal funding should be permitted for this practice. Note that the practice is not illegal (it should be), just that President Bush has ordered that the government cannot pay for it.


• Obama has gone way beyond that position, which talks only about human embryos that already exist due to over-production during in-vitro fertilization procedures, and sponsored legislation to authorize the large-scale industrial production of human embryos for this purpose.


• That same bill would mandate the killing of any embryos produced by cloning. It would make it a federal crime to implant such an embryo in a woman to bring it to term. This is Obama's way of saying "I'm anti-cloning." Not that we shouldn't be cloning, but that we should clone and then kill what we've cloned. Again, despicable.


• A year or two ago, when scientists announced they had discovered a way to create, in effect, stem cells from non-stem cell material, the pro-life world rejoiced. Wanting to support promising research in that area, pro-lifers had to oppose it because it required killing scores of unborn children. With this discovery, we could "have our cake and eat it, too." Well, when a bill came up in the Senate to invest federal dollars into this new technique, Obama was one of the few senators to actually oppose it. As Professor George aptly comments, "It is as if Obama is opposed to stem-cell research unless it involves killing human embryos."


• Obama believes Roe vs. Wade was properly decided, and has made it clear that he would only consider as justices for the Supreme Court people who are solidly pro-choice. With up to six of the nine current justices past the normal retirement age and the court now evenly divided between leftist activists and justices who understand their role is to interpret, not make, law, the next president will be in a position to tip the balance of the court one way or the other. Vote Obama and we will lose any hope of reversing Roe vs. Wade in my lifetime, if ever.

All of these positions are revolting. Some of these positions are mainstream. Many are clearly outside the mainstream, which makes Obama a radical. In an average citizen, we'd just say, "wow, that guy's pretty extreme in his views." Instead, "that guy" is getting ready to be elected President of the United States. Not only that, but Congress will be solidly left after this election, too, which means this leftist president will have a left super-majority in Congress to do his bidding.

In short: They will be able to pass whatever they want to.

We cannot afford to let this happen. Vote McCain on November 4^th, and convince a friend to do the same.

Voting Catholic. Voting for Life.

CatholicVote.com posted a beautiful 3-minute video highlighting Catholics in American history and encouraging them to vote for a culture of life.

The Financial Crisis In A Nutshell

Barack Obama has surged in the polls during the last three weeks, as far as I can tell because of the current financial mess that the country is in. While the fact that we're in a financial crisis is obvious, what I do not understand is why significantly more Americans say they trust Barack Obama on financial issues and saving our economy then they do John McCain. Also, most people still do not seem to understand how we got into this mess, nor the various proposals being floated around Washington to get us out of it. I don't claim to understand it all, but I think I have a better understanding than most and so I am going to describe what I understand and see where it leads.

First, a little background: for the past 7 years I have worked as a professional software developer, but for 15 years before that, I worked in the finance industry (I couldn't cut it as a Computer Science major in college so I switched to Finance). My first three jobs out of college were as an investment accountant. Every day, I spoke directly with bond and stock traders and handled the accounting for all investments for a number of large companies. In my first job, working for Executive Life Insurance, part of my job was to determine the market value of our $17 billion bond portfolio every month. In later years I was a financial advisor and was also trained to sell residential mortgages. I don't claim to be an expert, but my point is that I do have some experience and knowledge in this area.

Banking 101

We all need mortgages. The cost of a house is so large that thinking of buying one without taking out a loan to do so is beyond the imagination of most people. This is fine, because lending like this is part of what makes our economic system churn. People put money into checking and savings accounts in banks, and those banks have a responsibility to take those funds and lend them out to generate interest. For banks, deposits are a liability and loans are an asset (this is backwards from the traditional understanding). Banks are regulated by the state or by the fed's depending on their charter, and as such they are only allowed to invest in very safe investments. This is both to protect against actual investment losses and to keep the public confident in the banking system as a whole.

Confidence is critical because account holders could come into the bank and demand their money back at any time. Banks assume a certain percentage of their depositors will do this on any given day and keep enough cash and liquid investments around to handle this, and to give the illusion that all the deposits are available all the time. In reality, most of the monies are loaned out to businesses and homeowners in illiquid (i.e. difficult to turn into cash quickly) investments. If all, or even most, of the bank's depositors came in and demanded their money back (called a "run" on the bank), the bank would be in deep trouble, and would probably fail. It would fail not because the depositors' monies were gone, but because they were tied up in long-term investments.

Say the bank loaned $500,000 to a business for capital improvements, with monthly interest and principal to be paid back over 15 years. A bank run occurs and the bank now needs this money bank to satisfy deposit demands. How do they get it? The business has no obligation, much less ability, to pay the money back immediately. They might be able to refinance and pay the loan back that way, but this would take some time and effort, and costs would be borne by the original bank anyway since they are causing the problem. In the meantime, the bank fails.

Or the bank could be seized or backstopped by the government, which would gallop in on its white horse and pay the depositors back through the FDIC (bank insurance fund) or some other, similar, entity. In return they would take over the loan portfolio of the bank and probably sell it to another bank or work out some arrangement with the original bank to keep the doors open. But the key point here is that the depositors' money was never in jeopardy; it was just illiquid. Lack of confidence is what caused our hypothetical bank to fail.

Modern-Day Mortgage Industry

Back in the day, you'd get a mortgage for your house and make your payments to the bank that got you the mortgage until it was paid off. If you fell behind on your payments, you had to deal with your local bankers to get caught up. This still happens with business loans: Your local bank's commercial loan officers investigate your business and your collateral, and meet together to decide whether to risk loaning your business their depositors' money. After you get the loan, you pay them back until you're done. If you fail to pay it back, they take over your collateral and liquidate it to get their money back.

Today, though, at least on residential mortgages, your loan officer / mortgage broker typically gets you a "rate lock" not with his own bank, but with some huge mortgage lender instead, like Countrywide or Chase, or one of the pseudo-government entities like FNMA, FHLMC, or GNMA. He will collect from you the documents that lender requires, and his own bank's loan processors will do some level of underwriting based on that lender's underwriting standards, before ultimately sending the loan package off to the large lender for final underwriting and approval. His local bank, in the end, doesn't receive your monthly interest payment, but instead receives a fee for writing the loan.

And it doesn't end there. The large lenders have, for years, "securitized" these mortgages by pooling similar (i.e. maturing in the same year) ones together into what's called a "Mortgage-backed security," or MBS. When they are turned into securities in this way, the pools can be traded on the "secondary market," such as a bond exchange or among institutional investors. So the large lender pools together 100 mortgages that are due in 30 years, names the pool "FNMA MBS 5.5% 10-2038 POOL A" or something similar. Then other companies can buy and sell that pool.

The Market for Bonds

Mortgage-backed securities are essentially bonds, or "debt instruments." You have a bunch of people – homeowners, in this case – who need to borrow money and agree to pay a stated interest rate and some capital every month for some period of time. As an investor, you are providing some of the money for those loans and are receiving this interest back as profit. Buying bonds is as old as investing itself. It's simple to understand, profitable and relatively safe, and vital to our economy.

Determining the price/value of a bond is both classic and elegant. Classic, in that it's one of the first things a Finance student learns to do after he learns about present value calculations, and it's exciting to work through your first few times (I think, but I may just be being silly). It's elegant in that it's so simply laid out – it's not rocket science. Pricing a bond involves putting 3 elements together: The term of the bond; the rating of the bond; the interest rate, or coupon, of the bond. Without going into all the gory details about par value and interest rate risk, nor a specific example, suffice it to say that these 3 elements alone make up the value of a bond. Two bonds that have the same maturity, coupon, and rating will be priced the same on any given day.

How MBS's Fit Into the Bond Markets

If you've persevered this far, I thank you from the bottom of my heart and hope this is helpful.

Mortgage-backed securities are bonds, but they are very strange ones. Most bonds have a stated coupon and maturity date, neither of which ever change. In addition, they typically pay the interest every six months, and they don't pay any of the capital back until the maturity date, at which point they pay the whole thing off at once (think of it as a balloon payment). MBS's, on the other hand, pay interest monthly, and pay down part of the principal every month, too. What's more, they almost never survive to maturity because most of the mortgages in the pool will wind up being paid off prematurely – how many people, if any, have you heard of who take out a mortgage and hold it (not even refinancing) the whole 30 years? So you just can't fairly price these things based just on the stated term and interest rate. Clearly some allowances must be made in these areas, and they are made.

The rating is now where we arrive at. And for the first time, we're now touching on something that has directly contributed to our current financial crisis. There are several firms that provide bond ratings, but two stand out as the classics: Standard & Poors (S&P), and Moody's. Each has a similar rating system, using letters or letters/numbers to communicate the safety of a given bond. I'll focus on S&P since it's the most prominent and the one I can actually remember without having to look it up. S&P's highest rating, also known as "risk-free," is "AAA." As a bond is considered more risky, the ratings change to "AA," "A," then "BBB," "BB," "B," "C," and then "D" meaning "Default." Default is bad, by the way.

Bonds that are rated "AAA" would include all Treasury Bonds, and those primary debts of large companies like IBM, Exxon, etc. Since there is no real risk, these bonds typically have the lowest coupons. As you go up the risk ladder with lower-rated bonds, the coupon rates will get higher (assuming the same issue date).

Rating MBS's – AKA Getting Into Trouble

So what would you think that MBS's would carry as far as rating goes? Well as best I can remember, all MBS's I saw were rated "AAA." This I think was obviously not a comment at all on the underlying quality of the mortgages, but because everyone knew that FNMA/FHLMC/GNMA MBS's were ultimately backed by the federal government. As such, there was no risk, thus the AAA rating.

And what expertise, truly, would a bond rating professional at S&P have in determining the actual riskiness of those underlying mortgages? These guys are used to looking at a company's balance sheets and income statements, evaluating actual collateral and income in assessing a rating for a bond. How were they going to go in and tear apart these MBS's to really do a thorough rating? And why should they anyway? Again, although those agencies are not backed in writing by the fed's, everyone knows the fed's will step in if necessary to bail them out. "AAA for you!"

In a better world, every MBS would have the proper research applied by the bond analysts, and would receive a rating based on the collateral value. With the appropriate rating applied, the pricing would naturally be higher for riskier mortgage pools.

Unfortunately, that is not how things have been done up until now. With AAA ratings across the board, most mortgage pools are assumed to be risk-free in terms of principal losses (and priced accordingly). For the longest time, this worked out fine because banks are naturally conservative, and demand homeowners either put down at least 20% of the size of their mortgage down in cash before getting the loan. They could put down less, but would have to then buy mortgage insurance (PMI) to protect the bank in case they quit making their payments and the value of their home decreased, putting the bank at risk. The bottom line is that all mortgage loans were "secured" with capital: the house, and cash, and possibly insurance.

Sub-primes Foul the System

The problem we're facing today is a result of lowered standards by banks as to who they're willing to lend money to. Somewhere along the line they seem to have thrown their lending standards out the window (these less-than-ideal loans are referred to as "sub-prime"):

1. They have encouraged dangerous "interest-only" loans and adjustable-rate loans so people could get as low a payment as possible (and thus afford to buy). In a low-interest rate environment, this is fine, but as soon as rates start rising (and they always do eventually), these homeowners are the first to go into default.
   
2. They've also allowed people to apply for loans without verifying their incomes ("no-doc" loans), which encourages fraud.
   
3. Lenders also allowed people to borrow money with nothing down, or even borrow against 125% of the value of their home. If and when these borrowers stop making their payments, the bank can foreclose (seize the home and sell it), but whether they'll get all their money back is debatable because they didn't insist on the "cushion" of the down payment.
   

Without that cushion, the bank only has two other sources of protection left: The house value, and PMI. As long as housing prices go up, even lending practices as bad as these can be fixed through foreclosure. Since the house is worth more than the amount owed, the bank or investor does not lose money. In a "down" housing market, though, the sale of the home doesn't provide enough money to pay it back. If the homeowner carried PMI, as they would have had to without putting down 20%, that insurance should also kick in and protect the bank from the loss.

In our case, all three of these safety valves failed: Shoddy lending practices led to high default rates when interest rates began to rise. The resulting high foreclosure rates undoubtedly contributed to the decline of a housing market that had already peaked. And higher and higher losses on these foreclosures bankrupted the PMI system.

"So What? I Always Make My Mortgage Payments"

Why do we, the 95% of us who make our mortgage payments on-time every month, care about all this? Well, like another controversial issue of our day, gay marriage, we care because of "Unintended Consequences." That is, while the initial "action" doesn't really matter to the rest of us, it does set off a whole series of other problems that actually do affect everyone else.

Firstly, when sub-prime borrowers start defaulting, and the foreclosures start happening and housing prices plummet, and losses mount up, and PMI fails, etc., the lenders can only absorb so much of that before they have to file bankruptcy themselves. The problem is, these are banks, and you can't just let banks start failing all over the place. The banking system is absolutely at the heart of any economy; it has to be strong as a rock or that economy will collapse. Banks don't just lend to homeowners; they lend to businesses of all sizes so the businesses can expand their operations, build new buildings, or just meet monthly payroll. Trouble in one sector will have repercussions in other sectors of that bank's operations. Depositors, hearing about the lending losses, might run the bank. Other businesses that count on continuing lines of credit from the bank may have to divert energy to finding the credit elsewhere, and/or may see their operations damaged or killed by the loss of available credit. Serious losses like these are not supposed to happen to banks because the risks are just too great, and in fact that is why so many safety valves are in place.

It gets worse, though. Remember that these mortgages are not owned solely by the banks. The whole point of turning them into trade-able securities is to sell them to other investors in pools, or MBS's. With their AAA ratings, the mortgages are good financial instruments to trade around. The problem is, no one appears to have been paying attention to what the lenders were actually putting into these MBS's. They started putting prime and sub-prime loans into the pools (I don't know whether both types would have been found in the same pool). So now you have these risky sub-prime mortgages "polluting" the pool of highly safe "prime" mortgages. What investors think is a risk-free investment is actually fairly risky, depending on how much sub-prime it contains.

The institutions and individuals who buy AAA investments are, by definition, the most "risk-averse" investors out there. Retirees; high-safety bond mutual funds; insurance companies; banks. In other words, those who cannot afford (indeed, are not permitted by law to own) risky investments in their portfolios. Again, the bedrock of the economy. They buy safe investments because while their portfolios must generate profit from investments, it is even more important that their portfolios remain solvent. If you own life insurance and you die, your family must receive the death benefit. If you are a bank, you are investing other people's money – you cannot just say, "well we lost your savings" if depositors or investors come around asking for their own property back. With these investors, losses are not acceptable, period.

It still gets a little bit worse. These polluted pools of mortgages (the MBS's) were actually pooled themselves into still larger investment vehicles, appropriate for the largest of investors. These investments are called "Collateralized Mortgage Obligations," or CMO's. So whether or not sub-prime pollution inhabited the same MBS's as prime, at this level it didn't matter because they certainly were combined. CMO investors would not be individuals, but large institutions and overseas corporations.

At this point you begin to see why your sub-prime neighbor down the street who defaulted on his mortgage is hurting the entire economy. Sub-prime mortgages are like a contagion, a virus, that has infected otherwise healthy mortgage pools and been distributed around the globe, making those who can least afford to get sick, get very sick. The deaths or even near-deaths of these institutions has profound ramifications everywhere else.

The Effects of All This, Present-Day

So rock-solid institutional investors have been getting sick by buying these MBS's and CMO's. Many, like Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Bear Stearns – household names – have gone under or been bought-out. Some, like AIG, FNMA, or FHLMC, have gotten "rescue" or "bailout" money either as a loan or as a purchase of part of the company's equity in order to stay in business and not damage the economy further by failing.

Another effect has been that those investors, including overseas institutions, that survived this mess so far are now staying away from these kinds of investments in droves. Since they still don't know just what the heck is inside these CMO's and MBS's, it makes sense not to buy them. Properly rated, these investments might be A-rated, or B-rated, you just don't know. Thus you don't know what to demand in terms of price, given the level of risk you'll be taking. Who needs it?!

With no MBS/CMO buyers left out there, banks can't possibly write as many mortgages. They also have to clean up their act in terms of the lending standards – they have to start being picky about who they loan money to again. There's also less money to go around, which makes credit still tighter. Many are now saying that even good credit risks are being denied credit.

The result of all this will be a slowdown in the economy. Credit is the engine of expansion and growth. Without it we're just spinning our wheels. If we were not in a recession – 2 quarters of negative growth, or shrinkage, of the economy – we were close enough that this situation would certainly put us there.

Problems and Solutions

To be honest, this little blog post took on a life of its own as I wrote it and has gotten way bigger than I planned. I'm content, then, to just leave it here. Dennis Prager has several expressions I'm fond of and believe in. One of them is, "first present the facts, then give your opinion." The message being that too often we do it the other way around. I think that with this post, I've laid out the facts pretty thoroughly, as best as I understand them. There are a number of other issues surrounding this crisis that should be discussed, but they all fall into the realm of "opinion." Those should come next, as they're already being discussed in other places right now.

Some of those issues should include: Why did the banks lower their lending standards? Was de-regulation to blame? What, if anything, should the government have done differently in order to prevent this? Why did so many people default on their mortgages? What is the point of the bailouts/rescues and will it work? Should congress people have voted for those bailouts? How do we get out of this mess, and how long will it take? What will be the damage done in the end?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

McCain About to (Finally) Go After Obama Hard?

You can't watch TV or listen to the radio without hearing that we are currently in the "greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression" (Obama) or "during our lifetime," (McCain) or something similar. Both parties seem to agree: This is a bad situation we're in. And to think no one was talking about this even a month ago. All of a sudden we (the public) get blindsided by multi-billion dollar federal bailout after multi-billion dollar federal bailout, and now everything is up for grabs. McCain, who had been leading, has now fallen decisively behind Obama again in the polls. They had a presidential debate a couple weeks ago and McCain barely laid a glove on Obama. Last week Sarah Palin did a little bit of damage to Joe Biden in their debate, but not enough. Now comes word that McCain is finally ready to take the gloves off and start hitting Obama hard, and that Obama's camp is going to respond in kind. Will it finally start heating up?

There are less than 30 days left until November 4^th. McCain needs to pull out all the stops, and he needs to do it now. Barack Obama is so blatantly unqualified to ascend to the presidency, and his campaign rhetoric so non-specific and empty, McCain ought to be ahead by 20 points. That he is behind by 5 or more is almost unbelievable.

McCain/Palin has begun to hammer Obama on his relationship with William Ayers, the convicted American terrorist who firebombed several federal buildings in the 1970's. This is fine, but it's not even close to enough. There are so many unsavory characters in Obama's life and career that they should be rattling off the whole list every chance they get instead of focusing on Ayers. The fact that Obama has ties with men like Ayers, Jeremiah Wright, Tony Rezko, Michael Pfleger, etc., and is on the verge of becoming president should make responsible Americans stand up and ask whether they really know who it is they're about to vote for.

The word is that as "payback" for running with the Ayers issue this past week, Obama's campaign is going to launch a new 13-minute video online about – wait for it – McCain's involvement in the "Keating 5" scandal about 25 years ago. Yeah, go with that, guys, that's brilliant. Herein lies the problem for Obama's people, and the opportunity for McCain's: McCain has been in the national public eye for a quarter-century. America knows all about this guy, warts and all. People already know what they're gonna get if they elect him POTUS. Obama, on the other hand, is largely unknown to America. He burst onto the national scene just four years ago with a single speech at the Democratic convention. Elected to the Senate, after just 3 months in office he announces he's running for president. America does not know this guy. They only know what Obama is putting out there as PR (and the media gobbles it up and regurgitates it to their viewers without complaint) about himself. Whenever someone tries to talk about Obama's past, like author David Freddoso, Obama has his attorney thugs threaten to sue radio stations that put the guy on-air and/or otherwise criticize Obama or reveal his past. Again, the media does nothing to discourage this. Obama has been created entirely by the media and, if Americans don't wake up and kick the MSM in the teeth and start demanding some actual journalism be practiced with regard to Obama and his campaign, he will be elected president with the direct and regular help of the MSM, too.

As far as I can tell, Barack Obama has done almost no media interviews with conservative journalists. He was on with Bill O'Reilly a month or so ago, but O'Reilly is a weak conservative, anyway. I didn't think it was a particularly good interview, overall. And Obama only went on there, I believe, because he was falling behind in the polls. My point is: Obama has still not been vetted despite the fact that we're only 30 days away from the election! We don't know for sure what the deal is/was with Ayers because he refuses to talk about it and a real conservative reporter who would ask such things cannot get near the man.

If this man gets elected without having to face tough (but fair) questions from interviewers who do not share his worldview, the country will suffer for it, mark my words…

Blogging “The Case Against Barack Obama” – Chapter 2

While Chapter One of David Freddoso's "The Case Against Barack Obama" shows us that Barack was not, in fact, a reformer (though he regularly plays one) and was instead part of the infamous Chicago political machine, Chapter Two focuses on Obama's rise to senator through the state senate in Springfield, Illinois. On the first page of this chapter, Freddoso introduces us to Illinois State senate president Emil Jones, who is described by the Associated Press as Obama's "political godfather." Freddoso describes Jones's political connections and Machine activities, including such beauties as landing his son an unadvertised high-paying job with the state for which he may not have been qualified, and fighting hard to keep the state utility company from having to lower its rates, apparently in return for giving his stepson's company a large consulting contract. The best example, though, was getting his friend, the Democrat governor of Illinois, to remove the common-sense requirement that the Director of Mental Health for the state be an actual doctor. This opened the door for Jones's own wife (someone has no shame) to take the job, for which she received $186,000 per year, a 75% pay increase.

Obama had told Jones he wanted to run for the federal Senate seat, and Jones set about helping him in any way he could. Mostly this meant creating a resume for Obama as quickly as possible. He put Obama in charge of committees and, thus, legislation that was not controversial and that would put him in a position of being owed political dividends by powerful state unions. To me the most egregious favors involved taking high-profile legislation away from other state senators – sometimes right before it was to be passed by the legislators – and giving it to Obama to pass, a nasty little process called "bill-jacking". Freddoso quotes a state legislator who in 2002 almost went to blows with Obama outside the senate chamber over another matter (this is also detailed in the book), about this practice:

"No one wants to carry the ball 99 yards all the way to the 1 yard line, and then give it to the halfback who gets all the credit and stats in the record book." Years later, in the Houston Press, Spivak [a reporter] wrote that Henden [the legislator] had been the original sponsor of two bills that Obama often writes and speaks about as if they had been his own.

In this chapter, Freddoso also introduces us to Obama's famous habit of voting "present" instead of yea or nay, so that he could not later be attacked over his stand on controversial issues. While in the state senate, Obama did this approximately 130 times (Here I'm reminded of a television ad that John McCain did earlier this year, in which he points out rightly that "when you're President, it's not enough to be 'present.'"). With Emil Jones's high-powered help, Obama managed to sponsor over 800 bills in the state senate during 2003-2004, a dramatic increase for him and a truly remarkable number in its own right (depending on the actual number of days involved during that two-year period, you're talking about at least two bills per day, every weekday).

Mr. Obama Goes to Washington

Once in Washington, DC of course, Obama was in a perfect position to repay so many favors to Emil Jones. One of the beauties that Freddoso recounts at this point proves – yet again – that Obama is not the reformer he claims to be. Last year, an Illinois state senator wrote to Obama to ask for his help in getting Emil Jones to stop holding up a package of 7 reform bills she wanted to have put up for debate. She wrote to Obama both because he was connected to Jones, and because the seven reform bills under consideration were very similar to reforms that Obama had promised to pass during his run for the presidency. It seems logical to believe that, given these circumstances, Obama would be in a perfect position to help out. However, according to Freddoso, "Obama did not even respond." Obama would later add that the state senator's request was "irregular." As a result, six of the seven bills are still stuck in committee. Great job, Obama.

The end of this chapter (a short one) briefly describes the first few times that Obama was referred to by black leaders as "not authentically black." Freddoso quotes Congressman Bobby Rush, a longtime black democrat leader in Chicago, who, if I recall correctly, was part of the Black Panther movement in the 1960s and who beat Obama badly in the 2000 election. Rush is a big name in Chicago politics.

My Thoughts

Freddoso spends much more time in chapter one discussing Obama's political career in Chicago before getting to Springfield. But it seems clear, nonetheless, that Obama was able to learn how to play the political game in Chicago very quickly, and apply those lessons to the same game on a bigger scale at the state level. He obviously has not tried, or needed to try, to play these games at the Federal level, but then he was only a sitting senator for less than 140 days before he announced his bid for the presidency. So far, to me it seems that Obama's "claim to fame" is that he has been a very effective politician, but I have yet to see any evidence whatsoever that he has been or could be an effective reformer at any level. Moreover, the ease with which he seems to travel in these politically-connected (and corrupt) circles really strikes me as dishonest, certainly not the image of the clean-cut Harvard-educated "community organizer" that he's selling, and that everyone seems to be buying. He'd be a senator I'd want to keep an eye on as a guy who might end up with cash in his freezer one day. The idea that he could, in less than two months, be the President of the United States is truly frightening.

And I'm only on Chapter 2.

Blogging David Freddoso’s “The Case Against Barack Obama”

I purchased David Freddoso's "The Case Against Barack Obama" tonight and plan to blog it as I read through it. There are 11 chapters, so it shouldn't take very long. My hope is that I can learn more about who Barack Obama is, what he really believes, and get the facts on troublesome areas of his past. Unlike some other conservative books that have been written about Obama, I believe Freddoso's book to be accurate, and can see that it is thoroughly documented.

Chapter One - Chicago

This chapter deals with Obama's political life in Chicago. It begins with his very first-ever election, to state senator. In this election, in 1996, Obama was to run against three other opponents, including the heavily favored incumbent. So how did Obama win? He basically cheated. He hired a guy whose job it was to disqualify each of Obama's opponents from the ballot. This operative examined every single signature in the petitions of each of the candidates, looking for any technicality that could be used to disqualify that signature. Since each candidate was required to have at least 757 signatures to be qualified to run, all he had to do was discredit enough signatures to get that candidate below 757 signatures, and the candidate would be disqualified from running in the election. Somehow, Obama's operative was able to do this. All three of Obama's opponents in this, his first election, were disqualified from running, and Obama thus won by default. The really scary thing about this episode is that, when asked about it in 2007, Obama felt no remorse about winning in this fashion. Instead he said, "I think they ended up with a very good state senator." In other words, the ends justified the means.

The next section of this chapter deals with the infamous "Chicago Machine." Freddoso is making the point that Obama is not just a lone liberal trying to get elected using these types of tactics. In his short time in Chicago politics, Obama was part of the Chicago Machine, supported it, and was even involved in saving its life in 2006. The Machine has always been about maintaining a pyramid of corrupt politicians in power in Chicago by providing good government jobs and contracts to constituents willing to sell their votes for a little piece of the pie and some upward mobility. Freddoso runs down the most recent history of John Stroger, the head of the Machine, and his son Todd, who took over for him after a stroke. He describes how, in 2006, when Obama was very popular nationwide, a "friend" of his, a popular liberal reformer, was running against the head of the Machine and looked like he might win the election, knocking down the empire. Barack "Change We Can Believe In" Obama not only didn't lift a finger to help his friend (and Chicagoans), but instead co-authored a letter with fellow lib senator Dick Durbin, heaping praise on Stroger and encouraging voters to cast theirs for this "good progressive Democrat, who will bring those values and sensibilities to the job." Showing just how gullible Chicago voters are, Stroger won and the chance for reform died.

Freddoso continues this theme by next focusing on Richard Daley, the 20-year mayor of Chicago. He demonstrates that Daley is even more corrupt than Stroger by running down several funny anecdotes about the administration, then describing how Obama has supported Daley politically, endorsing him for re-election as recently as January of 2007, in the midst of a federal investigation of his office for cronyism and corruption, complete with indictments. Again, taxpayer representatives work for reform, Obama interferes with it. We even learn that Michelle Obama briefly worked in the mayor's office. Freddoso winds up this section with the story of Obama chief strategist David Axelrod, who apparently has worked for Daley for over 15 years. As Freddoso runs down a number of the kind of corrupt government scams you see in movies actually happening in Daley's administration, he quotes Axelrod in what are just patently deceitful statements defending Daley. Here you have friends and contributors of Daley's setting up front operations to secure hundreds of millions of dollars of city funding by faking minority-run operations. Or, in the infamous "hired truck scandal," trucking contracts were literally sold for bribes by a Daley appointee, and Daley and his brother apparently received some of these bribes. Again, in the midst of all this craziness and corruption, Senator Obama the Reformer chose not to reform anything, but to instead endorse Daley, "as somebody who is constantly thinking about how to make the city better."

Implied, but left un-asked in this chapter, is this: How much more powerful could a guy like Daley become with a friend like the President of the United States on his side? But of course, this book is about Obama, and this summary quote from Freddoso is excellent: "If Barack Obama is a reformer, he may be the first reformer ever to become president of the United States before doing anything serious in the name of reform."

Has anyone in the national media bothered to investigate Obama's claim to be a reformer? Or have they just accepted it as a legitimate talking point and moved on? In a race where they send legions of investigators to Alaska to dig up dirt on Sarah Palin, who's not even running for president, you would think that an unbiased, legitimate news organization would put somebody on Obama's past.

The First Presidential Debate

Obama and McCain met onstage for the first time in this election. The stakes were high, and McCain is behind in the polls. He needed a big win here.

Moderator Jim Lehrer, of PBS, started out with a question about the current financial crisis, then moved into the Iraq war, and then he brought up Afghanistan. He tried many times to get the two candidates to engage each other directly after answering their questions. This fell flat because McCain demonstrated no interest whatsoever in even looking at Obama, much less speaking to him directly. In my opinion this was a mistake that made him look bad. That and his frequent filibusters definitely annoyed Obama throughout the event.

The questions covered all the major areas of national security, and the candidates didn't seem to really say anything new. They each leveled the same attacks they've been using for the past several months against each other. To me this made it fairly boring to watch. And because McCain would not look at Obama, he also wound up not challenging him directly, either. Obama said a number of things that McCain should have challenged right away, but because he waited for his turn and kept his gaze on the moderator, the few counterpunches McCain threw seemed to just drift off instead.

One item, in particular, near the beginning of the debate was when Obama actually raised the issue of "how did we get here," referring to the current debacle. He thew out the old liberal canard about the cause being de-regulation and that he, Obama, has been pushing for more regulation and oversight for years. McCain should have taken this statement and rammed it down his throat, pointing out that he, McCain, had sponsored a bill 3 years ago to significantly tighten FNMA and FHLMC regulation, but that he was thwarted by a party-line vote, including by Obama and Biden. Instead, the best he could do was proclaim that he, too, had been for greater regulation. Golden opportunity just passed over. Obama and the Dem's deserve to be hit hard on this.

A big area of difference was on the Iraq war. McCain was actually fairly aggressive, here. He talked about his love for the veterans and the great job that they and Petraeus in particular are doing over there, and pointed out that Obama just refuses to admit he was wrong about the surge. Obama stuck to his old explanation that, "we were wrong to go there in the first place," and described how he opposed it at the time. Of course, at that time he wasn't even in the U.S. Senate, so exactly what difference an Illinois state senator's opinion means on such an issue is really nil. He didn't have to cast a vote on it, so he's just not credible. For his part, McCain fired off a good one, stating that the next president doesn't have to worry about how we got there, but what we're going to do now that we're there and winning. His point: Quit fighting 6-year-old battles that were decided well before you were even elected senator.

McCain finally came on strong at the very end, but for my money he should have done a much better job overall. I thought he came off as stubborn and irritating, and his refusal to make eye contact with Obama, or speak to Obama directly rather than refer to him in the third person, really bothered me. When Obama would speak and look directly at McCain, McCain would be looking down, scribbling something in his notes. As I recall, he did the same thing when he debated Romney in the primaries. As a Romney supporter it really got under my skin. Maybe that's his point.

I felt like McCain got hurt in this debate. But as I listen around, other conservatives seem to think McCain got the better of Obama or at least tied him. I think that's being generous. He certainly didn't hit a homerun, which I had been half-expecting given the subject matter.

Next stop: Palin / Biden on 10/2.

State of the Race and the Country, Sep 2008

The last time that I wrote a blog post, John McCain was behind in the polls and had not yet named his running mate for the 2008 election. Although only a month or two has gone by, a lot seems to have changed since then. In fact, a lot seems to have changed in just the past week. This race is fluid unlike any other I have ever seen.

Sarah
First, let me make a few comments about Sarah Palin. I was as surprised as anyone last month when John McCain chose Sarah Palin for his running mate, but I quickly came to appreciate the pick as a brilliant political move. I had seen pictures of Governor Palin before, since she was considered to be on McCain's short list, but I had never heard her speak, as I suppose most other people had not, also. When I watched her acceptance speech in Ohio that day, I came away with a giant grin on my face, knowing I had just seen the future of the Republican Party and the conservative movement. Governor Palin was amazing. Besides being very pretty, she was articulate and intelligent, devoutly religious and an outdoorswoman, and down to earth all at the same time. A conservative feminist in the truest sense of the term. Someone I could walk through fire for.

I was, of course, also impressed with Governor Palin's speech at the Republican convention the following week. On such a huge stage, and with a teleprompter malfunction, Governor Palin was flawless. The crowd loved her, and so did I. Her life experience and the person she is today provide a fantastic role model for both of my daughters.

Insane Media & Left Reaction
Of course, the reaction by the media and the Left to Governor Palin's appointment was unbelievably bad. I have never in all my life heard more evil vitriol, sexist comments, religious bigotry, and just downright nastiness directed at any one person, especially not a good and virtuous person. To this day, I still cannot understand how people who seem so normal in an ordinary conversation can spew such evil and hatred toward a truly good and moral person. Call me naïve, I guess. It has certainly been an education for all of us, that much is certain. I have to believe that Americans who lean to the left surely must have been as aghast at these attacks as I have been, and will have come to see what the left actually stands for, instead of what they have always claimed they stood for: Not for advancement of women, for example, but advancement of liberal women. Conservative women can go to Hell. I have finally come to realize that the left is truly evil.

The Polls
Sarah Palin is a decent and honorable person. She is the type of person who is so happy with her own life that her smile is contagious. She is the type of American who you feel like you know right away, someone who is a "regular" person. People sense this about her, just as John McCain must have. And so she is more popular than McCain himself. She has revitalized the Republican ticket like no one dreamed could have happened. For couple of weeks, the Republican ticket was ahead of Obama in every poll. That was the first time that had happened in this election cycle. Things have since died down a little, but the race is basically dead even at this date.

The Financial Meltdown & Crisis
During the past week, extremely bad financial news has been rolling in day after day. After having had Bear Stearns file bankruptcy a month or so ago, this week we had Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers, two huge investment banks, threaten to file bankruptcy unless they were bailed out. Merrill Lynch was in a similar position, and sold themselves to Bank of America to avoid having to go bankrupt. Goldman and Lehman are now being turned into banks, also, which will put them under the scrutiny of federal bank regulators and force them to invest much more conservatively than they have before. The era of investment banks is officially over.

The really interesting thing about this crisis, however, is the reaction of the public so far. Senator Obama has received a decent bump in the polls as a result of this financial crisis. Why? Because President Bush is a lame duck and unpopular, and because Senator Mccain is a republican just like Bush. People are having a knee-jerk reaction and blaming the president for this crisis, not knowing all the facts yet. As I understand them, and as the public will come to understand them during the next week, the democrats, not the republicans, are squarely responsible for this mess. It's not often that it's possible to blame just one side of the aisle, but in this case it certainly seems to be fair.

The reason we're in this financial crisis today is because there is significantly less liquidity in the financial markets now than there was a month ago. There is a crisis of confidence among investors that is paralyzing them and preventing them from investing in American financial Instruments. They're taking their money elsewhere to invest, because they see too much risk in American financial markets.

Why is this? Because the two largest providers of mortgage-backed securities in this country, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, have basically burned everyone who has been investing with them. They sell packages of mortgages to institutional investors, and the securities are considered very low risk because everyone knows that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are backed by the United States gov't. If, God forbid, large numbers of homeowners whose mortgages are packaged inside these securities stop paying their mortgages, a highly unlikely scenario, the Federal government would step in if necessary to make sure that investors in these mortgage-backed securities did not lose their investments.

Well, as it happens, large numbers of American homeowners did stop paying their mortgages when the housing bubble popped and they could no longer afford to pay their monthly mortgage bills. Lenders, egged on by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, encouraged low income families to buy their own homes, permitting them to put "zero down" and/or to borrow against unrealized capital gains (that never materialized). Home ownership, part of the American Dream, is believed by liberals to be extremely important in this society, and Democrats in Congress have done everything possible to encourage more homeownership, even (especially) among the poor. Since housing prices had been rising for years and years, this was seen to be a low risk venture. But eventually, housing prices peaked, and as they came down, more and more people got into more and more trouble.

Besides "zero down" loans, loan officers also offered "no-doc" loans (at higher rates), where you didn't have to provide any documentation of the financial situation you claimed. We're learning now that (surprise, surprise) a great many of these people lied on their applications, and their defaulting on their mortgages was just a matter of time.

Liberals in Congress have been so enamored with the idea of making it possible for every American to own a home that they balked whenever responsible Republicans tried to impose additional oversight of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, or otherwise tighten up lending rules. For years, Republicans and conservative economists warned that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were getting too big; were not being regulated tightly enough; and were eventually going to cause a serious financial meltdown that would extend beyond the mortgage industry. Democrats pooh-poohed these notions (it's in the Congressional Record), pointing out correctly that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had been great successes, increasing overall homeownership and providing a ready market for mortgage-backed securities. With a Democrat majority in the Congress and party-line votes, Republicans pushing for greater regulation -- John McCain as one specific example -- were rebuffed and voted down by Dem's, notably by Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

Bottom line

1) Republicans saw this coming and tried to avert it years ago, but were blocked by Democrats.
2) Specific prominent senators from both parties were involved directly: John McCain sponsored a bill that would have tightened regulation and averted today's crisis. The bill was voted down by Democrats including Barack Obama and Joe Biden.
3) Americans in general are blaming the GOP for some reason, and McCain is being hurt by this. The truth must be put out there.

My Attitude Now
I continue to be hopeful for a McCain victory for a number of reasons. One, I love Sarah Palin and want to see her made Vice President and eventually President. Two, I can't think of one other person in Washington who I trust on the War On Terror more than John McCain. He is a true war hero and American patriot, and I believe he would do his absolute best for this country as President. Third, I believe Barack Obama is manifestly unqualified and unprepared to be President of the United States. He has never run a single thing, and has no accomplishments at all in his resume. He is a first term senator who has done absolutely nothing of note up until this point in his career. Why anyone would think that he is qualified to be president is absolutely beyond me.

Most importantly, he is a staunch defender of abortion, even to the point of voting against bills designed to prevent infanticide, and would stand an excellent chance of appointing perhaps four Supreme Court justices during his term(s) as president, and this would effectively cement Roe vs. Wade in the books, possibly forever. This last fact alone should be enough for any even marginally pro-life voter to make sure that Senator Obama never becomes president.

In short, as a devout Catholic, and as a person who believes that America occupies a special place in God's heart, I honestly do not believe that Our Lord will permit a radical leftist like Obama to be elected President. I believe that we will defeat him with God's help. I truly believe this. I don't worry too much from day to day, even when I see McCain down in the polls, because I believe this. I also believe, on the same grounds, that God has a special plan for Sarah Palin. We will see what it is over the next several years.

In the meantime, there are 40 days left until the election. We must all do what we can to get McCain/Palin elected. I know I will.

Thoughts While Watching the Obama Acceptance Speech

The DNC convention has been going on all week, but I have not had the time or the stomach to watch any of it yet. Finally, Obama is giving his acceptance speech tonight, playing to an audience of roughly 80,000 people in a stadium. A speech in front of a large crowd, complete with soaring rhetoric and low on details, is where Obama shines the most, so this ought to be good.

The transcript for the speech can be found here.

Opening: slow, patriotic music is playing, with what sounds like actor David Straithern providing narration. Patriotism is oozing. Why do we have to keep hearing his life story, over and over and over? He came from average American roots. He complained about homework. Mom was a saint. Now we're hearing how he courted Michelle <gag>. Again with the student loans hardship… Barely anything on his Senate experience (all 143 days of it). Mom passed away. A lot of slow-motion images of Barack working. Video of Barack speechifying against "special interests," probably not Democrat ones, though. Professionally done piece, very nice presentation. Almost makes me like the guy.

Obama takes the stage. Everyone waving "Change" banners. Shot of a girl crying. Very strange looking stage. About 25 thank yous. No one will sit down. Obama thanks everyone including his wife and kids. Michelle stage-managing the kids.

Because for 232 years, at each moment when that promise was in jeopardy, ordinary men and women -- students and soldiers, farmers and teachers, nurses and janitors -- found the courage to keep it alive.

We meet at one of those defining moments, a moment when our nation is at war, our economy is in turmoil, and the American promise has been threatened once more.

What a strange thing to say. In all of American history, at least since after we won the Revolutionary War, it's difficult to think of a time when the American promise has been threatened. America is great because of its constitution and because of the people who make up the citizenry. Because it recognizes individual rights, because it is grounded in Christianity, and because it has a market based economy. None of these fundamentals has ever been in serious jeopardy.

Tonight, more Americans are out of work and more are working harder for less. More of you have lost your homes and even more are watching your home values plummet. More of you have cars you can't afford to drive, credit cards, bills you can't afford to pay, and tuition that's beyond your reach.

These challenges are not all of government's making. But the failure to respond is a direct result of a broken politics in Washington and the failed policies of George W. Bush.

Actually, the unemployment rate in the United States is hovering around 6%, so the assertion that more Americans are out of work is simply untrue. "more of you have lost your homes?" 96% of the loans in this country are not in default. The vast majority of Americans who have mortgages do not have subprime mortgages. Home values have been going down, but this is cyclical, and expected. If people have cars they cannot afford to drive, why did they buy them? If their credit card balances are too high, they should work harder to get their debt under control. So the big question: how are any of these problems the fault of the president? What should he have done differently? What will Obama do differently?

Veterans sleeping under bridges. It didn't take long for him to pull that tired cliché out. New Orleans drowned because the government sat on its hands. No mention of the Democrat governor of Louisiana (now thrown out) nor the Democrat mayor of New Orleans, the combination of which were responsible for first-responders in that crisis.

Next week, in Minnesota, the same party that brought you two terms of George Bush and Dick Cheney will ask this country for a third. And we are here -- we are here because we love this country too much to let the next four years look just like the last eight. On November 4th, on November 4th, we must stand up and say: Eight is enough.

Newsflash for Obama: George Bush is not running for third term.

He said that our economy has made great progress under this president. He said that the fundamentals of the economy are strong. And when one of his chief advisers, the man who wrote his economic plan, was talking about the anxieties that Americans are feeling, he said that we were just suffering from a mental recession and that we've become, and I quote, "a nation of whiners."

Good quotes; they're all true, including the one from Phil Gramm, which McCain should have defended.

Why else would he define middle-class as someone making under $5 million a year? How else could he propose hundreds of billions in tax breaks for big corporations and oil companies, but not one penny of tax relief to more than 100 million Americans?

How else could he offer a health care plan that would actually tax people's benefits, or an education plan that would do nothing to help families pay for college, or a plan that would privatize Social Security and gamble your retirement?

The $5 million figure was a joke and Obama knows it. If we give tax breaks to corporations, maybe they'll invest more in domestic jobs? Maybe? If you don't give them tax breaks, and just punish them as Obama wants to do, they're guaranteed to move offshore. What an idiot this guy is. Privatizing social security is easily the most effective way to save it. The other choices are cut benefits and/or raise taxes, neither of which anyone will sit still for.

Obama: Democrats define progress as when families can save money; attend college; make enough money to pay the mortgage. He cites 23,000,000 new jobs that were created when Clinton was president. He doesn't mention that Clinton had virtually nothing to do with most of these jobs, which were created when the Internet took off. Most of those jobs, including mine, melted away when Clinton left office and the Internet bubble burst. Clinton was in the right place at the right time. Obama claims that average household income went up under Clinton and down under Bush. I'd like to see that statistic.

Obama's rhetoric is high on emotion and low on logic. He talks about the "dignity" of work, while Republicans would refer to the "value" of work. He cites several examples of working class people, including his mother, who struggled to make it in succeeded in the American economy. These are actually excellent examples. People doing what is necessary to succeed and provide for their families. None of Obama's examples begged for handouts, or were saved by the government. All of them made it on their own. That is the America that Republicans believe in, not Democrats. In fact, Obama himself was railing against this type of attitude just two paragraphs earlier in this speech.

Obama raises his voice, and 70,000 people stand up on cue.

the market should reward drive and innovation and generate growth, but that businesses should live up to their responsibilities to create American jobs, to look out for American workers, and play by the rules of the road.

This is where Obama gets it wrong. Businesses do not have a "responsibility" to create American jobs; they have a responsibility to earn profits. If they can earn more profits by creating American jobs, they should and will do so. If they can earn more profits, as has been happening lately, by going overseas, then they should do this. That is the nature of a global economy. To mandate that companies hire American workers while profits dictate otherwise, is protectionism.

what it should do is that which we cannot do for ourselves: protect us from harm and provide every child a decent education; keep our water clean and our toys safe; invest in new schools, and new roads, and science, and technology.

Again, Obama has it right, here (even a broken clock…). Government should do no more than create a level playing field for all people and companies. Create it, and maintain it, and otherwise stay out of the way.

That's the promise of America, the idea that we are responsible for ourselves, but that we also rise or fall as one nation, the fundamental belief that I am my brother's keeper, I am my sister's keeper.

Now he's got it wrong again. That "we also rise or fall as one nation" is true of any nation on the planet. Used in this context it's just meaningless rhetoric. And I especially love it when Obama tries to quote scripture. Every time he does so, he winds up looking like a fool because it seems obvious that he has no idea what he's talking about. This is a common challenge for today's secular democrats: talk like a Christian even though you never go to church. The "brother's keeper" reference from Genesis has no relevance in this situation whatsoever; and the "sister's keeper" phrase is something Obama made up to please the feminists. It has no scriptural basis at all.

I'll eliminate capital gains taxes for the small businesses and start-ups that will create the high-wage, high-tech jobs of tomorrow. I will -- listen now -- I will cut taxes -- cut taxes -- for 95 percent of all working families, because, in an economy like this, the last thing we should do is raise taxes on the middle class.

Wow, he finally sees the light on cap gains taxes, and just in time for the big speech. And he'll lower taxes for 95% of the people? Why do the remaining 5%, who already pay more than almost the other 95% already, deserve to pay still more? I thought you wanted fairness, Barack…

And for the sake of our economy, our security, and the future of our planet, I will set a clear goal as president: In 10 years, we will finally end our dependence on oil from the Middle East… Now is the time to end this addiction and to understand that drilling is a stop-gap measure, not a long-term solution, not even close.

I would say that's physically impossible to do, and foolish to suggest, unless you're willing to start drilling offshore and in ANWR (he's not). With billions upon billions of barrels of oil under our sovereign ground, why should we not tap into this valuable natural resource? It just makes no sense whatsoever.

As president, I will tap our natural gas reserves, invest in clean coal technology, and find ways to safely harness nuclear power. I'll help our auto companies re-tool, so that the fuel-efficient cars of the future are built right here in America. I'll make it easier for the American people to afford these new cars.

How, exactly? And I'm glad you've finally found religion on clean coal and nuclear power, but I wonder what your liberal base will make of this, especially considering you came up with that right before the big speech.

I'll invest $150 billion over the next decade in affordable, renewable sources of energy -- wind power, and solar power , and the next generation of biofuels -- an investment that will lead to new industries and 5 million new jobs that pay well and can't be outsourced.

Again, Obama fundamentally misunderstands the problem. It's not government's job to invest $150,000,000,000 in energy sources. That is a job for the market economy. Provide tax incentives, listen to industry leaders, encourage startup companies. Let them make the investments, not government. Obama has not run a single thing in his entire life, yet he stands up on this stage and proposes spending hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars on what amounts to research and development in an industry in which he has no experience whatsoever.

I will not settle for an America where some kids don't have that chance. I'll invest in early childhood education. I'll recruit an army of new teachers, and pay them higher salaries, and give them more support. And in exchange, I'll ask for higher standards and more accountability. And we will keep our promise to every young American: If you commit to serving your community or our country, we will make sure you can afford a college education.

First of all, what kids don't have that chance in this country? Even illegal immigrants get free education. Who is he talking about? Why do we need an army of new teachers? Why do these teachers need to be paid more? What makes you think you will be able to ask for higher standards and more accountability? One of the most powerful lobbyist groups the Democrats have are the teachers unions. What about vouchers? When you were asked that question at the Saddleback forum one week ago, you were barely able to get an answer out of your mouth because you know the teachers unions are against vouchers, charter schools, home schooling, and probably every other alternative to public schools. As far as paying for a college education in return for community service, we already do this.

Now, many of these plans will cost money, which is why I've laid out how I'll pay for every dime: by closing corporate loopholes and tax havens that don't help America grow. But I will also go through the federal budget line by line, eliminating programs that no longer work and making the ones we do need work better and cost less

Obama flirts with reality with this paragraph, after a dozen or so covering such favorite liberal topics as Health Care, "equal pay," and Social Security. But besides the fact that this line is very ambiguous, it's also not believable, because liberals have no such history of doing any such thing in any government that they've ever been in. If you want proof of that, take a look at California. Run almost entirely by liberal democrats, California has been on the brink of bankruptcy, dodging bullets seemingly every year lately, and still the liberals refuse to cut spending; instead demanding higher taxation. Liberals don't cut programs. Liberals raise taxes.

"The One" then spoke at length about how he would be a more effective commander-in-chief than President Bush has been, or John McCain will be. There are just too many lines to quote, here, but I was surprised that he spoke as directly on this subject as he did. It is not a subject that is comfortable for his base, nor one that he seems to know very much about. He certainly has no foreign relations experience at all, much less wartime experience. Yet he feels confident enough to criticize McCain and Bush, both of whom have been on the front lines for this country for as many years as Mr. Obama has been alive. He claims that he is anxious to debate McCain on this subject, though of all the subjects that I can imagine him doing well against McCain in in a debate, this one would be the last on my list. Especially considering his dismal performance at the Saddleback forum one week ago, alongside McCain's stellar performance, if I were Obama, I would want as few debates as possible before the election.

The last 10 minutes or so of the speech are all about "change" and unification rhetoric, nothing new there. Frankly I don't think any of what he says there is probably any different than what McCain would say if he could deliver such a speech. Certainly nothing controversial here.

The one thing that strikes me as I listen to this speech is how far to the center Obama has moved with it. He is now talking openly about tax cuts, capital gains cuts, pursuing nuclear technology, developing clean coal technology, cutting government spending, employing our military against enemies in the Middle East, and relaxing gun legislation. He even wore a flag lapel pin and ended his speech with the famous "God Bless America" line. If he keeps this up, he and McCain will have very little to argue about.

Obama Apologizes to Germany for America

Barack Obama delivered a rousing speech to a German crowd estimated at over 200,000 strong this past week in Berlin, during a campaign trip overseas. It's a familiar scene because this is where Obama is strongest: Delivering a prepared speech in front of a large crowd. This one was particularly bad because a) He delivered it while pretending to be POTUS; b) He delivered it on foreign soil while campaigning for a U.S. election; c) He apologized to foreigners for the alleged sins of this country.

Read Obama, Don't Listen
As I listen to his speeches now, I mentally separate the variations in his tone and pitch from the actual content of the speech. When you do this it's much easier to focus on how lacking and wrong the substance of his words actually are. And when you notice that the screaming fans are so caught up in the emotion his voice is able to generate (that you're separating/ignoring) and not the content, you realize that people aren't listening and don't care what he's actually saying, and the idea that these lemmings will vote for him in this condition is truly frightening.

I just ran across a piece in The Weekly Standard by Andrew Ferguson where he attempts to do an "in-depth" look at the speech itself. He starts off by mentioning that he had missed the speech on TV (as did I) and so went to Obama's website to actually read the thing. Then he describes, 10 times better than I just did, why it's so instructive to read Obama's speeches rather than watch or listen to them:

To an unnerving degree his appeal relies on sight and sound rather than sense. Better, in my opinion, to stick to the printed word. On paper (or the computer
screen) his words can be thought about and chewed over. You can understand him
at your own pace, undistracted by that rich baritone, the regal bearing, the
excellent drape of his Burberry suits.

What Ferguson concluded as he read the speech was that there really wasn't much to say about it, because Obama himself really wound up saying not much of anything:

Instead, in the heart of Europe, before 200,000 breathless admirers, Obama pulled himself up to his full height, lifted his chin, unlimbered those eloquent hands, and said nothing at all.

Ferguson, thus, instead spends the rest of the piece describing Obama-as-human-cliche-machine, which is entertaining in itself.

The Substance of the Speech
The text of Obama's speech in Berlin can be found here (ht: Power Line). It has all the normal fear-mongering about global warming and how the Obamessiah will make that go away for us, as well as the afore-mentioned verbiage about how America hasn't lived up to its own ideals about truth and justice.

Laura Ingraham, unusually substantive in her daily email blast, had this to say:

Make no mistake: Barack Obama's speech in Berlin's Tiergarten park was one of the most revealing and, frankly, terrifying moments of the campaign so far. We witnessed a man who may very well be the next president of the United States APOLOGIZE to a bunch of foreigners for his own country's failings! He told the crowd of 200,000 that he addressed them "as a fellow citizen of the world" and then dropped this bomb: "I know my country has not perfected itself. At times, we've struggled to keep the promise of liberty and equality for all of our people. We've made our share of mistakes, and there are times when our actions around the world have not lived up to our best intentions."

Apparently lost on Obama and the crowd was the incredible irony that a Nazi flag would be flying over Berlin at this very moment if it weren't for the sacrifices made by the United States and our allies in WWII; hundreds of thousands of Americans died to liberate Europe and prevent the spread of tyranny around the world.

The crowd, of course, was enthralled with the speech. But there's a very simple reason why Obama's been received like a rock star everywhere he goes in Europe: the European people have no desire to see America remain the world's number one power!

Here's the bottom line: The United States can't afford a commander-in-chief who travels to other countries with his hat in his hand and begs for some understanding. We need a president who will stand up for America, not apologize on her behalf. And if Obama had no qualms about delivering this speech to the European public, what's to stop him from doing it in private with Ahmadinejad in Iran?

Say goodbye to America, the superpower; say hello to America, the good global citizen.

At the end of the day, none of these Germans, who were treated to a free concert and free beer just before Obama's appearance (heard that on the news?), cheer for him because he's proposing that America is not enough like Europe, and that he'll fix that. And they can cheer all they want, because none of them will be able to vote for him in November. The last thing this country needs is to be more like Europe, which is in the throes of death even now. America has risen to greatness because we have perfected what Europe started (and then abandoned): a Judeo-Christian based, capitalistic society with a secular government. The further we get away from that ideal, which is what the Left is always pushing for, and the more socialistic and atheistic we get, like Europe, the more tenuous our survival becomes.

Yet Another....Idiotic Liberal Proposal

With Obama spewing so much moronic rhetoric lately, I had forgotten there are other liberals in the legislature, too. All the attention is on gas prices these days, and you've got Nancy Pelosi out there claiming that President Bush's "failed energy policy" is the reason for high gas prices, and that conservatives' call for more drilling out in the ocean and in Alaska is a "hoax, hoax, hoax!" She claims that drilling where we believe there are millions of barrels of oil (increasing the global supply) would do nothing to lower gas prices. Her alternative? Pull some barrels out of our strategic reserve (increasing supply). Wait, I thought increasing supply wouldn't solve the problem, Nancy? What's wrong with this picture? How does a woman this stupid actually get to be Speaker of the House, third in line for the Presidency of the U.S.?

Now I see we have this one state legislator in Michigan, an old guy named Aldo Vagnozzi (a D, of course), saying, "hey, let's lower the speed limit back down to 55 again. That'll save gas and lower prices." The scarier thing is he's actually got John Warner, conservative Repub in the Senate, listening. We want to bring back the 70's? Really? Well I guess we're already contemplating doing that by electing Empty Suit president, right?

Look, if you want to save some gas and $ by driving 55, Be My Guest. Have a nice day. But imposing a law so that everyone has to do this? You've got to be kidding me. There's about 20 other things you could do that would be less invasive and more effective.

Back to Rep Vagnozzi: "These are the same people who say 'Government should do something about gas prices.' Uh, you either want them to help, or you don't." News flash: No one needs the government to make them drive 55, they can do that whenever they want to. What kind of stupid "solution" is that? He actually gets paid to come up with this stuff.

When people say government should do something about the price of gas, they mean it should do big things like ending the moratorium on offshore oil drilling; allowing drilling in ANWR; encouraging development of clean coal, nuclear energy, and oil shale extraction. In other words, get government out of the way! Reagan said it best: "Government is not the solution; government is the problem." It's as true today as it was 25 years ago.

Obama Flips and Flops All Over the Place

The past few weeks have been brutal, because we now have Empty Suit Obama shifting rapidly toward the center, flipping on just about every position he's ever held; and John McCain, sitting there picking his nose the entire time. It's like watching the Bush White House refuse to defend itself for the past 7 years.

One of my favorite columnists, Charles Krauthammer, has chronicled a number of the flips in his last two columns (here and here). He also points out, in print and on television, the absolute audacity; the intellectual arrogance of Obama, as he not only shifts to the right (which everyone expected), but does so in the span of about 3 weeks (incredibly fast), and to put icing on the cake, Obama and every one of his supporters that I've heard so far insists that his positions have not changed at all!!

The one thing I keep thinking about during this campaign is, "I don't mind my candidate losing as long as everyone truly knows who and what they are voting for." With McCain, we pretty much know what we've got because the guy's life has been an open book. With Obama, we don't know much yet, and so everyone's struggling to figure out what the guy really believes. Well, he has the most liberal voting record in the U.S. Senate, and we can point to plenty of votes he's made in support of radically left ideas, like voting against the partial birth abortion ban and against giving babies who survive an abortion procedure and are born the right to live. We can also listen to his rhetoric, which is clearly leftist/Marxist. We rightly say, then, that he's a leftist, and a radical one, at that.

But a radical leftist cannot get elected POTUS, so he must tack to the center, which he is now doing. So we're left standing here wondering, was he lying then, or is he lying now? And this is why he tries to characterize his flips as non-events.

Let's take a recent one in particular: He says now that while he still wants to begin to pull the troops out right away when he is elected, he might hold off a while if the generals say that's the best course. Given that he made a strong point of saying he would pull them out, a brigade a month, for a year-and-a-half beginning with his first day in office, many months ago, this is obviously a flip, and yet he denies this. It's clearly a flip because I distinctly remember him being asked, even if it's shown that there is progress on the ground, would you still pull troops out? And his reply was "absolutely, because I'm the commander-in-chief," and he's the one who has to make the tough decisions (he left out a single example of such a decision from his life thus far). So he would pull troops out regardless of what his generals said. This is diametrically opposed to what he is saying now.

Krauthammer thinks Obama will get away with this nonsense, and I tend to agree. The Left will not abandon him at this point, because where would they go? Ralph Nader? In short, Obama has nothing to lose. Leftist voters could not care less about what Obama does; they are voting for him even if he abandons every single position (which he's on course to do).

It's truly disgusting. This guy has ZERO experience, zero qualifications for the presidency. He has never managed a single thing in his life. He attended a black racist church for 20 years and his wife talks incessantly about how awful the country is. He has sleazy politician and lobbyist friends from Chicago, a city notorious for corrupt politics. And now he's openly lying about what he believes in, and doing so blatantly, as though he is fearless about getting caught.

Meanwhile, John McCain sits around and does virtually nothing. The man has 10 times as compelling a personal story as Obama does, and his family is a model military family that has served this country for almost a century at the highest levels. And yet, he gets in front of a camera and looks like he's about to fall asleep. He points out that Obama is flipping, but does so quietly and almost puts me to sleep in the few seconds they show him out on the trail.

Days like these, it really looks like Obama could win the presidency, and God Help Us if he does.

Tour de France 2008 Underway!

Every July, I get excited for two main reasons: First, it's Independence Day! Barbeques, fireworks, our country's birthday! No holiday beats Independence Day for patriotism and good times. Second, it's the month of the Tour de France, the world's most important cycling event.

Most Americans couldn't care less about cycling, much less French cycling. But most hard-core recreational cyclists, like me, enjoy following it at least to some extent. I'm a little more crazy than most; I actually watch most of the 4 hours of live coverage available on "Versus" every day. To me, it's exciting and relaxing at the same time.

Although I've been cycling off-and-on since Junior High School, and have known about the Tour all during that time, it wasn't until a few years ago when I realized I could actually watch the event on a little network on my DirecTV dish called "OLN" or "Outdoor Life Network." I started watching and got hooked on the whole experience: The veteran British cycling commentator Phil Liggett and his sidekick, former pro racer Paul Sherwen; the beauty of the French countryside; the quaint French villages with ancient churches and castles in them, where the residents all come out to watch the Tour fly by for a few minutes; the craziness of the long climbs through the Pyrenees and Alps, with fans just inches from the passing riders; the elegant power of the Peloton (the group of 100+ riders) as it winds its way down tree-lined two-lane roads at 30mph; the drama of a breakaway (a small group of riders trying to escape the Peloton) as it struggles to survive the stage; and the frightening way in which a caught breakaway gets swallowed up by the Peloton. I could go on.

I watched OLN's coverage of the Tour for several years, and continue today after they renamed the network "Versus." I got to see Lance win 3 or 4 times, and the year after he retired I got to see Floyd Landis, one of Lance's former teammates, have the best year of his career and win the Tour, only to see it get taken away in a doping scandal (I still believe he was set up). And then last year, yet another American stepped up to play the hero, the cyclist who filled in for Lance at the Olympics in 2004, Levi Leipheimer. Never a podium finisher, Levi got to lead Lance's former team, which was still extremely strong, and did manage to make the podium, but was outshined by his much younger teammate, Alberto Contador, who came out of nowhere to win.

Shake-Ups in the Off-Season
During the off-season last year, a lot happened. Discovery Channel ended its sponsorship of Armstrong/Leipheimer's team, and rather than get a new sponsor, as they had done previously when U.S. Postal Service ended its reign, the team just dissolved. Riders went their separate ways, to different teams. At the same time, in the wake of huge doping/steroid scandals at last year's Tour and throughout the season, Team Astana basically fired the entire team and started over. When they did this, they first hired Johann Bruyneel, the former manager of Discovery Channel / USPS, Lance's manager throughout all his Tour wins. He brought with him Contador and Leipheimer, and they built a quality team, made up of riders who had never ever been busted for doping. They also instituted a super-harsh doping control system over and above what the Tour and the international governing body, UCI, require. All in all, a great setup.

Then the Tour organizers announced that, because Astana had been such a disgrace the previous year, they would not be invited to this year's race. This, despite the complete re-construction of the team, and the fact that the 1^st and 3^rd place finishers from 2007 were on the team and ready to defend the title. And the organizers never budged. Since the Tour is an invitational, they had total control over who can race. So, this year no Contador, no Leipheimer, and no Bruyneel. And frankly, so many of the big stars of the past few years – Ivan Basso, Alexander Vinokourov, Floyd Landis, Tyler Hamilton, Jan Ullrich, Tom Boonen, etc – have been caught doping or with drugs and suspended (and humiliated), that it's hard to know who to cheer for. It's a little disconcerting.

Watching is Different
So this year I'm watching, and enjoying, but I haven't figured out who to cheer for yet, and instead I find myself getting caught up not in the "GC" overall standings, but in the daily stage wins instead. I focused on a small 4-frenchman breakaway yesterday that included young Thomas Voeckler, who carried the yellow leader's jersey for several days a few years back, winning the affection of everyone watching, before enjoying the last-minute catching of the breakaway and the sprint for the finish line by the "God of Thunder," Norwegian Thor Hushovd, and almost caught in the process by a no-name GC contender, Kim Kirchen. And the hard-fought win the day before by Alejandro Valverde. These guys are big names, but not Tour winner names. The real contender has yet to appear, and won't for another week or more. Two of my favorites, though, Armstrong lieutenant George Hincapie and Christian Vandevelde, are only 7 seconds off the lead. How great it would be to see one of those guys win.

Even the commentators are second-string. With Al Trautwig, the host of Versus's pre-race show every day, out covering gymnastics at the Olympic trials this month, Versus tapped the most stiff field guy they could get, Craig Hummer, to fill in for him. Another former racer, Hummer's interviews with racers out in the warmdown areas have always been pretty lame. Now that he's doing pre-race, I try to watch a little because I enjoy Bob Roll, a real nutty American former racer whose trademark is absolutely butchering any French words he encounters during commentaries. And then Phil and Paul will join in for a few minutes of banter, which is fun, but overall the pre-race just isn't the highlight I used to enjoy.

So this weblog has wound up always being about politics, even though it wasn't intended that way. And I just noticed I hit 100 posts the other day (and one comment among them – awesome!!). So to celebrate, I'm mixing it up. I'm going to blog a little about the Tour. Maybe I'll even get some theology mixed in here some day, too. Or maybe some Xbox 360 articles. Who knows? With the political scene so depressing this year, I'm going to have to write about something uplifting before I have to go on medication.