The American Apologist

Clinton, Palin and Ahmadinejad… one is a strong-willed, female Senator from New York, one is a strong-willed, female Governor from Alaska, and the third is a male Islamic extremist from Iran — which one does belong in this group? Well, if you’re a Liberal Democrat, the answer is Sarah Palin!

By now you’ve all heard that Gov. Palin was invited to join Hillary to speak at an anti-Iran rally, but when Hillary refused to attend with Palin there, the sponsors *withdrew* their invitation to Gov. Palin. This is confusing some people around the globe. Linda at LindaSOG.com has these excerpts from the Jerusalem Post:

Their argument was part naked pretext and part veiled threat: that maintaining the invitation just might prompt the IRS to investigate all sponsoring organizations’ non-partisan tax-exempt status-an interesting understanding of “partisan” considering the invitations to Clinton, Obama, Biden and Wexler. (Perhaps this gives a clue how an IRS run by Obama lieutenants might treat political opponents). In an effort to maintain an appearance of Jewish unity against the evil of Iran, the organizers were forced to cave; Palin was given the boot. Game over. The Democrats won.

And so did Ahmadinejad.

…

Don’t the Democrats vainly claim to be the party of the powerless and the voice of the voiceless? Fighters for human rights and protectors of liberty? They shouldn’t flatter themselves. How did they help those causes this week? By strong-arm tactics, stifling dissent and sacrificing their “principles” for some perceived marginal political gain? Aren’t those the sorts of things they’re supposed to be protesting against? Perhaps they should tell us which principles they won’t trample in order to gain fleeting political advantage.

In all likelihood, by getting their way and silencing Palin, the Democrats won only a Pyrrhic victory. This political gamesmanship is not going to sit well with most Jewish and pro-Israel voters-including Democrats and Independents-who take the Iranian threat seriously. The same day as the rally, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency warned that Iran could be hiding certain nuclear activities, and estimated that Iran could go nuclear in just six months. And this past Sunday, no longer content to merely “wipe Israel off the map,”Ahmadinejad presided over a military parade with banners reading “Israel should be eliminated from the universe.”

…

Democrats and Obama-supporters, please ask yourselves: was it really so important to begrudge any forum to Palin that you’d sacrifice a golden opportunity to raise the profile of Iran’s increasingly imminent threat to world security? What, exactly, are your priorities?

…

Obama’s talk of post-partisanship and “reaching across the aisle” looks increasingly divorced from reality. If his operatives can’t even bring themselves to join Republicans in something with such wide bipartisan support and national security implications as preventing the nuclearization of Iran, just where is that supposed post-partisanship going to appear? Do they not agree that the enemy is Ahmadinejad, not the GOP?

There is something very wrong with a party that insists on sitting down with Ahmadinejad without preconditions, but refuses to share a stage with the Republican Party candidate for Vice President of the United States of America.

My comment (on Linda’s site) was about this excerpt: “Democrats and Obama-supporters, please ask yourselves: was it really so important to begrudge any forum to Palin that you’d sacrifice a golden opportunity to raise the profile of Iran’s increasingly imminent threat to world security? What, exactly, are your priorities?” — the answer is plain and simple: their priorities lie with gaining power by any (and all) means necessary in order to create a socialist society ruled by an elite ruling class (themselves). They want to gain strength (over the CITIZENS of the world) through elections, judicial fiat, educational persuasion, propaganda, fiscal obligation, and fear.

Just look at the last 40 years:

• Education has become “dumb-downed” and school is all-too-often about disciplinary actions and preventing acts of violence, not about educating students.
• Judges (not the People, not even their Elected Representative) decided abortion was a Constitutional right… I don’t recall reading about abortion in the Constitution, but I do recall reading about gun ownership in the Bill of Rights!
• The Press, once thought to be a noble profession, is so biased that there is literally a grass roots revolution against them. The crap the “journalist” (and I used the term tongue-in-cheek) spew is SO BIASED that I rarely watch television news anymore — Christ Almighty, when you have Bill Clinton telling people that FOX News is the most fair and balanced coverage, you KNOW the hardcore Liberals Main Stream Media is blatantly biased! — I listen to the radio for much more of my news than the TV.
• Elections and Fiscal Obligations — too many people now want the Government to supply their every need and want. In days of old (even 100 years ago) the People wanted to take care of themselves and NOT have Government intervention. Now, the norm seems just the opposite — couch potatoes want free insurance and medical benefits, free prenatal care, government-run daycare and preschools, pensions and a free college education. We see now, with the Mortgage Crisis, how Liberal intervention works. Franklyn Raines and Jamie Gorelick are Liberal Democrats — deep into Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae — that made a BOAT-LOAD of money by requiring banks to extend credit to high-risk homeowners who didn’t qualify for mortgage under conventional (read: conservative) practices. They used some creative account practices to make the financial situation look great and pocketed millions in taxpayer (read: The People’s) money — bonuses, no less. When the situation exploded, (under a Republican administration) they blamed the Administration and called for more oversight (liberal oversight, that is) into the lending practices — excuse me, but wasn’t it Liberal oversight into the lending practices which got us in this mess? Now we’re gonna have the Federal Government running our mortgage market to the tune of 1 Trillion US Dollars — doesn’t that bother any of you Libs out there?? No? I thought not, it’s just another form of control for you…

Obama preaches Change and Hope — if he’s elected, I see 40 more years of the same old crap… the Liberal eroding your freedoms, handing you a pittance for medicine or retirement and all the while telling you how good it’s GOING to be — Nirvana — just wait and see!! The problem is we have a generation wanting life to be like Star Trek. Life aboard the starship entailed an 8 hour-a-day career with virtually no manual labor, unlimited food, travel, entertainment, and free healthcare. You only had to worry if you wore a red shirt — just like living America in 2008, huh?

Joe

This is an excerpt from NR Online:

On May 23, 2006, as a jury in Houston deliberated the case against top Enron executives Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling, a little-known regulatory agency in Washington, the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO), released a study with the dryly bureaucratic title “Report of the Special Examination of Fannie Mae.” The document received far less attention than the news from Enron, but its conclusions were stunning. In meticulous detail, it outlined a culture of corruption at the Federal National Mortgage Association — better known as Fannie Mae — that rivals the most serious corporate scandals in recent years. In this case, however, the main players are Washington insiders — some of them prominent veterans of the Clinton administration — and the scandal’s effects could ripple through Congress for years.

Fannie Mae is the biggest single source of money for mortgages in the United States. From 1998 to 2004, the years covered by the OFHEO investigation, it was headed by former Clinton budget director Franklin Raines, whose top management team included former Clinton Justice Department official Jamie Gorelick, sometimes mentioned as a future attorney general in a Democratic administration. During that period, the report says, Raines and his team grossly overstated Fannie Mae’s earnings — to the tune of $10.6 billion — for the purpose of paying themselves big bonuses. “By deliberately and intentionally manipulating accounting to hit earnings targets,” the report says, “senior management maximized the bonuses and other executive compensation they received, at the expense of shareholders.”

In doing so, the report says, Raines and his team steered Fannie Mae far afield from its original mission, transforming it from a stable business into a risky one. Fannie Mae has its roots in the New Deal, when it was established to increase the amount of money available for mortgages. Over the years, its main business has been to issue debt and then use the proceeds to buy mortgages from lenders, allowing those lenders to give out new mortgages. Originally a government agency, Fannie Mae went private in 1968, with the goal of “increasing the availability and affordability of homeownership for low-, moderate-, and middle-income Americans,” according to its mission statement.

But Fannie Mae is not just any private institution. It is congressionally chartered, meaning its existence is established in law, it does not have to pay state and local income taxes, and it is not subject to bankruptcy laws. It can borrow money at a lower rate than anyone else except the federal government itself. Given all that, there is a public perception that Fannie Mae is a rock-solid government institution. “There is an implied guarantee,” says Sen. John Sununu, a member of the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee who has sponsored legislation to reform Fannie Mae. “Investors think they are the next best thing to Treasuries.”

There’s no doubt that Fannie Mae succeeded in its original mission of increasing the amount of money available for mortgages. In the 1980s, it went a step further, essentially creating a new product when it bought up mortgages and bundled them for sale to investors as mortgage-backed securities. It was an extraordinarily profitable move for Fannie Mae, and good for the housing market, too.

But in the 1990s, the company moved in a much riskier direction. Fannie Mae used its borrowing power to buy up mortgages and hold them, making a profit from the difference between the low price it paid to borrow the money and the higher interest rate it received on the mortgage. It was potentially profitable, but it had nothing to do with helping low- and middle-income people buy houses. “It doesn’t do anything to support their core mission,” says Senator Sununu, “and it increases their exposure to interest-rate risks.”

But the OFHEO report suggests that none of that mattered to Raines, who had been a top official at Fannie Mae in the early 1990s before leaving to join the Clinton administration and then returning to Fannie Mae as chief executive in 1998. According to the report, Raines became obsessed with propping up Fannie Mae’s earnings per share, or EPS, even if he had to use creative accounting to make it happen. Raines set a series of increasingly higher EPS goals that, if met, would trigger bonuses for the executive team that far surpassed what they received in salary.

Now, you may ask, what does this have to do with Obama and his “change” strategy? Well, I’ll tell you — both Franklin Raines and Jamie Gorelick are financial advisers for Sen. Barry Obama. If you vote to elect Obama to the White House in 6 weeks, you’ll just get more of the same! Vote Maverick — Vote McCain!

P.S. — my favorite quote of the week from H. L. Mencken — “votes are collared under democracy, not by talking sense but by talking nonsense.”