Contributors

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Uh Oh.

The subject of ACORN and some voter fraud came up in comments recently so I thought I would share this photo that I just got from Robo Cam Guy.

Yep, that's right. It's John McCain attending an ACORN rally.

So, should his link to ACORN be as scrutinized as Barack Obama's?

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Good to see Mark behaving in the ways he normally decries when someone he disagrees with does it. Not much condemning going on of acorn so you found a pic of John McCain when he gave a speech several years ago in front of the group.

Yep, giving a speech. Some link.

Then instead of responding to the article contained in birks link, he just bashes the source. Sounds like your consistent complaints about conservative reaction to the New York Times. Projection projection projection, on display for everyone to see.

I disagree that the people in trouble when he takes office are the old guard in the Democratic Party. Where all you have are speeches he gave the voting record tells a different story, and that carries more weight than speeches.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122403045717834693.html?mod=todays_us_opinion

So tonight is the last debate and in the first 2 debates, Obama has claimed that he foresaw the subprime mortgage collapse and took steps to warn the Treasury — by writing a letter. Obama was a Senator and had the power to draft legislation, not letters, to potentially prevent the financial problems we have today. He didn't do anything to prevent the spread of bad loans thoughout the system.

The organization that is really darn close to the epicenter of this crisis is Fannie and Freddie. They bought up subprime loans at a massive rate (over a trillion dollars), transformed them into securities, and then spread these "assets" around the entire financial system like an infection...withthe goal of social engineering in mind. I'm not even sure why I'm wasting cyberink here this morning as I'm fairly certain that folks posting here know that to be true and for the sake of being good political warriors, aren't honing up to the mistakes the people they vote for made.

Oh, and blk, I don't give a rats ass about who is intelligent and who is not. Guess who else may be considered "intelligent" in your world? Barney Frank and Franklin Raines...both those guys graduated from Harvard too. Are Barney Frank, Franklin Raines and Obama the entire reason for the recent economic collapse, of course not but they all financed and worked with a major core player in the subprime lending saga. It's a matter of ideology, dreadful judgment and their impact on the real world.

One more thing, when somebody on here steps up and admit they were wrong about the state of the Canadian Healthcare system, then you can talk about who has the ability to admit when they are wrong. The founder of the entire program came out a couple months ago and validated what I said about it over a year ago on this blog. Practice what you preach.

Anonymous said...

Well I've become quite popular recently. Myself and Last in Line are going to be trade reps to Colombia under whatever new administration takes over the reigns on Jan 20.

Spread legs, not wealth.

LIL, 2008 beyaa!

Anonymous said...

Oh, and blk, I don't give a rats ass about who is intelligent and who is not. Guess who else may be considered "intelligent" in your world? Barney Frank and Franklin Raines...both those guys graduated from Harvard too. Are Barney Frank, Franklin Raines and Obama the entire reason for the recent economic collapse, of course not but they all financed and worked with a major core player in the subprime lending saga. It's a matter of ideology, dreadful judgment and their impact on the real world.

You know, I've often thought it's just a waste of time writing on blogs because no one ever changes their minds. But when you start your argument with "I don't care about intelligence," you prove my point.

Ideology got us into a war in Iraq that was based on lies and forged documents. Ideology stood by and allowed mortgage companies and financial institutions do whatever they damn well pleased, and brought the economy to its knees. The ideology of the administration for the last eight years has been to ignore the real world and wish real hard that it was the way they wanted it. Bluster, "boldness," and wishful thinking have been the standard, while thoughtfulness, competence and practicality have been disdained.

And when the administration finally did acknowledge reality (as it finally did with North Korea), the right-wing ideologues excoriated them for being weak and foolish.

There's plenty of blame to go around for financial meltdown. The people who took loans out in bad faith, the financial institutions that made them, and the regulatory agencies that ignored the problems for three years are 99% responsible for the mess. If you want to assess blame on a proportional basis, Obama and Frank register at maybe 0.0001%. But why mention Frank at all? Might it be that Barney Frank is the favorite whipping boy of the right because he's gay? And the right has to play the guilt by association card at every possible opportunity?

Ideology is just not enough. Intelligence matters. No matter how ideologically pure you are, unless you are smart enough to accomplish what you want to do, you will just mess things up (see: War in Iraq).

What this campaign has shown is that Obama is an intelligent, self-controlled and thoughtful guy who's not slavishly devoted to ideology. It has also shown that John McCain is old and erratic, full of anger and spite for those who would deny his right to become president. McCain has gone from pillar to post in a desperate attempt to fire up a base that in large part hates him.

McCain himself tells us he's not the brightest guy, and he's been all over the board on any number of issues. So he comes up short on intelligence, ideology and temperament. The last goes directly to judgment. McCain himself tells us that he's prone to snap judgments and that he has to live with the consequences. McCain keeps yapping about all his international experience, but after years of war in Iraq he still didn't know the difference between the Shiites and the Sunnis. This ain't some picky detail -- it's the key to understanding Iran, Iraq, Al Qaeda and the whole mess over there.

I think McCain has reached the age where he can't learn new things anymore. He's an impatient old man, full of vinegar and piss. It's sad, and it's not his fault -- we all get old, though not at the same rate. He's had a hard life, and it's taken a lot out of him.

The current president is a shoot-from-the-hip kind of guy, and it just ain't working anymore. More of the same just won't cut it. Obama isn't the first guy I'd pick to be president, but McCain has moved himself way down the list through his own actions. His erratic stunts and serious lack of judgment (Palin) have disqualified him from being president.

Anonymous said...

I'd change the wording of your first sentence to "It is indeed a complete waste of time to try to change peoples minds while writing on a blog". That's why I save myself the headaches of trying to change peoples minds on pretty much anything. It's all about interpretation and perspective...people have to change those 2 things on their own before you can change their mind.

I never said I didn't care about intelligence. I'm referring to individual people here. Perhaps I mentioned Frank because he is in charge of the committee that was in charge of overseeing F&F. I could care less that he is gay but since you want to go there you should come over sometime and meet my gay roommate who rents the spare bedroom in my home. You criticize people for playing the "guilt by association" charge and in the sentence before that, you associate me with intolerance toward gay people because I mentioned Barney Frank. My disagreement with him is on policy alone.

People still speak as though the "associations" issue and economic issues are two different things. They’re not. ACORN wants to spread peoples wealth around. So does Bill Ayers. That’s why Obama worked with both ACORN and Ayers. It's really not that hard to figure out. The economic differences between Obama and McCain both explain, and are explained by, the Obama’s history of radical political alliances. Obama’s current policies and his past political alliances and associations are part of a broader picture.

Do I think Obama sees the world through the same prism as Ayers? Absolutely not, but I do think Obama's prism is one that doesn't see anything wrong with someone like Ayers or J Wright so long as he doesn't become a political liability for him. That might speak to Obama's opportunism more than his worldview but it is still a legit question to me. It sure sounds like Obama and Ayers provided funding for various projects under the cover of "educational reform", which, to me, may shed some light on how Obama might treat education through his appointees when he becomes president.

Throughout the debate last night, IMO Obama repeatedly showed an unfortunate ignorance of one of the fundamental principles of taxation: that all taxes are paid by people. On multiple occasions, Obama claimed that businesses or corporations "can afford" to pay higher taxes. Does the corporation's building pay the tax? How about its fax machine or water cooler? No. People pay taxes, usually it is the end user of the products (you and I).

Last night Obama said "I think that it’s important for judges to understand that if a woman is out there trying to raise a family, trying to support her family, and is being treated unfairly, then the court has to stand up, if nobody else will. And that’s the kind of judge that I want."

Except, of course, THAT'S NOT THEIR JOB. It's in any business law 101 textbook - judges have the task of applying the law as coordinated between the elective branches of government, the legislative branch and the executive branch. That responsibility does not rest with the one branch of government unaccountable to the voters. That design, that was put in place a couple hundred years ago by the founding fathers of this nation so as to keep the US from being ruled by lifetime-tenured judges with no recourse left available to the electorate.

I read up on Lily Ledbetter (the case the Obama mentioned last night) this morning. Congress passed a law some time ago that had a statute of limitations for filing claims, which almost all laws have (murder is an exception for example). Ledbetter did not meet that requirement and had her suit dismissed. If you want to say that the law wasn’t written properly or that she really got the shaft by her employer then you are certainly free to do so and I very well may agree with you but the judge and the appellate courts interpreted the law as Congress passed it. Instead of having Congress be responsible for their arguably poor legislation, Obama wants judges who will simply rewrite the law to suit their own opinion of "fairness" and "justice". To me, that undermines the entire notion of representative government. Our system works because our elected representatives create the laws under which we live. If they pass bad laws or fail to pass good laws, they have to answer for that in elections.

Obamas health care plan mandates what's known in the insurance industry as "guaranteed issue" and "community ratings". Guaranteed issue means insurers can't deny coverage to someone who's already sick and community ratings mean insurers can't charge more based on risk. The natural consequence of this, thanks to Obamas ideology that health care is a "right", will be that this mandate will create an environment where no one will have any incentive to get health insurance when they're young and healthy and over time, Obama's plan may destroy some health care markets. If destroying health care markets is secondary to providing health care as a "right", Obama should at least be honest that preserving markets is a secondary concern.

I'm not even going to start on the "spreading the wealth around" bit. I'm all for businesses investing in neighborhoods and charities helping people out (voluntary transactions) but I don't really care for government doing the redistributing.

The guy I wanted most was Ron Paul. Since I don't really have a candidate in this election I'm stuck voting for McCain. Here's some of my economic interests...

McCain came out with a "Pension and Family Security Plan" recently. IMO, the most important pro-growth measure in there is a reduction in the capital-gains tax rate to 7.5 percent in 2009 and 2010. Although I wish it were permanent, at least it will reward investors who scoop up undervalued assets, including bargain-basement stocks and underwater homes. Two years is not a very wide window but this could promote a faster recovery in asset prices and wealth creation.

He also proposed increasing the amount of capital losses eligible for tax write-offs from $3,000 to $15,000 for the next 2 years. While it should be permanent, at least it will be helpful.

Withdrawals from tax-preferred retirement accounts will be taxed at the lowest rate (10 percent) for the first $50,000 withdrawn from these accounts. Tax rules forcing seniors to sell retirement-account stock holdings when they reach age 70.5 will be suspended. That’s good.

All of these measures are pro-growth but McCain has done a horrible job of selling the plan, and that's just one of the reasons why he will lose.

Anonymous said...

Might it be that Barney Frank is the favorite whipping boy of the right because he's gay?

Or could it be that Frank was chairman of House Financial Services Committee?

blk, you are a monumental ass.

Anonymous said...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZDeAMNIXg8