10/11/2008
Can You Spot The Problem With ACORN?
“The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
10/10/2008
Meet Sarah Palin’s radical right-wing pals
Oct. 10, 2008 PALMER, Alaska — | On the afternoon of Sept. 24 in downtown Palmer, Alaska, as the sun began to sink behind the snowcapped mountains that flank the picturesque Mat-Su Valley, 51-year-old Mark Chryson sat for an hour on a park bench, reveling in tales of his days as chairman of the Alaska Independence Party. The stocky, gray-haired computer technician waxed nostalgic about quixotic battles to eliminate taxes, support the “traditional family” and secede from the United States.
So long as Alaska remained under the boot of the federal government, said Chryson, the AIP had to stand on guard to stymie a New World Order. He invited a Salon reporter to see a few items inside his pickup truck that were intended for his personal protection. “This here is my attack dog,” he said with a chuckle, handing the reporter an exuberant 8-pound papillon from his passenger seat. “Her name is Suzy.” Then he pulled a 9-millimeter Makarov PM pistol — once the standard-issue sidearm for Soviet cops — out of his glove compartment. “I’ve got enough weaponry to raise a small army in my basement,” he said, clutching the gun in his palm. “Then again, so do most Alaskans.” But Chryson added a message of reassurance to residents of that faraway place some Alaskans call “the 48.” “We want to go our separate ways,” he said, “but we are not going to kill you.”
Though Chryson belongs to a fringe political party, one that advocates the secession of Alaska from the Union, and that organizes with other like-minded secessionist movements from Canada to the Deep South, he is not without peculiar influence in state politics, especially the rise of Sarah Palin. An obscure figure outside of Alaska, Chryson has been a political fixture in the hometown of the Republican vice-presidential nominee for over a decade. During the 1990s, when Chryson directed the AIP, he and another radical right-winger, Steve Stoll, played a quiet but pivotal role in electing Palin as mayor of Wasilla and shaping her political agenda afterward. Both Stoll and Chryson not only contributed to Palin’s campaign financially, they played major behind-the-scenes roles in the Palin camp before, during and after her victory.
Read more @ Salon.com.
10/09/2008
"My Fellow Prisoners"
Republican presidential candidate John McCain while speaking to his supporters in Bethlehem, Penn, referred to them as “my fellow prisoners”. The presidential race has become the malaprop marathon, the Daily News reported. At a Pennsylvania rally on Wednesday McCain referred to “my fellow prisoners,” when he apparently meant to say “my fellow Americans.” It came amid a riff cracking Obama. But instead of drawing cheers, the puzzled audience was silent.
10/08/2008
Palin: Pit Bull With A Lynch Mob
"Now it turns out, one of his earliest supporters is a man named Bill Ayers," Palin said.
"Boooo!" said the crowd.
"And, according to the New York Times, he was a domestic terrorist and part of a group that, quote, 'launched a campaign of bombings that would target the Pentagon and our U.S. Capitol,'" she continued.
"Boooo!" the crowd repeated.
"Kill him!" proposed one man in the audience.
Palin went on to say that "Obama held one of the first meetings of his political career in Bill Ayers's living room, and they've worked together on various projects in Chicago."
Palin says nothing.
By Dana Milbank
CLEARWATER, Fla. -- "Okay, so Florida, you know that you're going to have to hang onto your hats," Sarah Palin told a rally of a few thousand here this morning, "because from now until Election Day it may get kind of rough."
You betcha. And the person dishing out the roughest stuff at the moment is Sarah Palin.
read more @ Washington Post.
10/07/2008
Prediciton From 1999...
Fannie Mae Eases Credit To Aid Mortgage Lending
"Fannie Mae has expanded home ownership for millions of families in the 1990's by reducing down payment requirements. Yet there remain too many borrowers whose credit is just a notch below what our underwriting has required who have been relegated to paying significantly higher mortgage rates in the so-called subprime market."
Franklin D. Raines
Fannie Mae's chairman and CEO in 1999
By STEVEN A. HOLMES
Published: September 30, 1999
In a move that could help increase home ownership rates among minorities and low-income consumers, the Fannie Mae Corporation is easing the credit requirements on loans that it will purchase from banks and other lenders.
The action, which will begin as a pilot program involving 24 banks in 15 markets -- including the New York metropolitan region -- will encourage those banks to extend home mortgages to individuals whose credit is generally not good enough to qualify for conventional loans. Fannie Mae officials say they hope to make it a nationwide program by next spring.
Fannie Mae, the nation's biggest underwriter of home mortgages, has been under increasing pressure from the Clinton Administration to expand mortgage loans among low and moderate income people and felt pressure from stock holders to maintain its phenomenal growth in profits.
In addition, banks, thrift institutions and mortgage companies have been pressing Fannie Mae to help them make more loans to so-called subprime borrowers. These borrowers whose incomes, credit ratings and savings are not good enough to qualify for conventional loans, can only get loans from finance companies that charge much higher interest rates -- anywhere from three to four percentage points higher than conventional loans.
Read more @ NY Times.
10/06/2008
Bill O'Reilly Grows Up...
"If I'm the president of the United States, I walk right into Union Square, I set up my little presidential podium, and I say, 'Listen, citizens of San Francisco, if you vote against military recruiting, you're not going to get another nickel in federal funds. Fine. You want to be your own country? Go right ahead. And if Al Qaeda comes in here and blows you up, we're not going to do anything about it. We're going to say, look, every other place in America is off limits to you, except San Francisco. You want to blow up the Coit Tower? Go ahead.'"
Bill O'Reilly
after San Francisco voted to ban military recruiters from city schools, Nov. 8, 2005
"If the Americans go in and overthrow Saddam Hussein and it's clean, he has nothing, I will apologize to the nation, and I will not trust the Bush Administration again, all right?"
Bill O'Reilly
on finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, March 18, 2003
The Keating 5 Revisited
Among McCain's earliest benefactors in Arizona was Lincoln Savings and Loan chief Charles Keating Jr., who filled McCain's campaign coffers with more than $100,000 and hosted the McCains multiple times at his vacation home in the Bahamas."
More @ The SeatleTimes
10/05/2008
Palin makes Obama terrorist claim
Several day after jumping over the 2" bar of low expectations, Palin goes on to attack Obama.
Palin makes Obama terrorist claim
Watch Sarah Lie Though Her Lipstick:
US Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin has accused the Democratic presidential candidate, Barack Obama, of associating with terrorists.
She said he had been "palling around" with an ex-member of US-based militant group Weather Underground, which opposed the Vietnam War in the 1960s.
Mr Obama once served on a charity board with a member of the group, but he has denounced its activities.
A Democratic spokesman accused the Republicans of gutter politics.
"What's clear is that John McCain and Sarah Palin would rather spend their time tearing down Barack Obama than laying out a plan to build up our economy," Hari Sevugan said.
Commentators say Mrs Palin's attack forms part of a broader Republican strategy to attack Mr Obama's character.
Denunciation
Speaking to supporters in Colorado and later in a Los Angeles suburb, Alaska Governor Palin said the time had come to take the gloves off.
John McCain and Barack Obama (composite image)
The White House candidates face their second debate on Tuesday
Quoting a New York Times article, she attacked Senator Obama over his link to Bill Ayers, a founder of the Weather Underground, which waged a violent campaign against the Vietnam War.
The group was blamed for a number of bombings in the US in the 1960s.
Mrs Palin described Mr Obama as someone who saw the US "as being so imperfect... he is palling around with terrorists who would target their own country".
Mr Obama served on a charity board several years ago with Mr Ayers, who is now a professor at the University of Illinois.
The White House hopeful, who was a child when Weather Underground was active, has denounced Mr Ayers' radical past.
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