Abu Wabu

Via Ace

Obama trashes the Republicans to their faces at their meeting in Baltimore. Guess he thought his attack on the Supremes was the beginning of a new chapter in the glorious history of bipartisanship. Keep f'n that chicken...

Anyone thinking the past week has been bad for Obama ain't seen nothin' yet. It's as if Providence is responding to the mess that is "progressive" governance by a bunch of inept totalitarian freaks led by a monumental narcissist, and has decided to become The Divine Party Of No.

Today Barack Obama

- faced one slamdown review after another of his disgraceful STFU address;
- watched contentedly as his wholly-owned subsidiary (that would be the Senate) passed another insane increase in the debt ceiling, with the new Senator from Massachusetts still prevented from voting;
- responded to overwhelming public pressure by instructing the Justice Department to consider other venues for the 9/11 terror trial presently slated for lower Manhattan and then, as if to punish the people for their temerity,
- announced that he would not support funding the 9/11 health bill, literally abandoning the heroic first responders of 9/11.

He doesn't appear to have realized it yet, but Obama is about to discover that being president involves facing real criticism without the luxury of being able to blame someone else, usually a straw man who can't answer back, and quite often an honorable man who won't. His strategy for dealing with opposition appears not to have evolved from his days as a champion of entitlement (what "progressives" call a "community organizer" and conservatives call "a parasite"), when his solution to almost every problem could be found in Alinsky's Rules For Radicals, namely, the Chicago Way: punch back twice as hard.

But reality is fast gaining.

Obama's answer to the little people is to tell them to sit down and shut up. Get out the way or he'll run you over, anddon'tthinkhewon'tbecausehejustdidittotheSupremeCourt, biatch.

And yet the man can't even bend a massive two-house majority to his will for anything more substantial than another excruciating hour of slow motion teleprompter ping-pong signifying nothing.

I believe the decision to move the KSM trial to parts yet unknown does not reflect a material change in Obama's thinking but instead constitutes a retreat, because that is what Obama does in the face of real opposition: he folds. He talks tough, but he folds. He has caved to Iran's leaders with nary a peep and dithered on Afghanistan for months. He twice made a fool of himself and the U.S. at Copenhagen and handed Eastern Europe and American missile defence to Russia on a silver platter. He bows to every head of government he meets (except Queen Elizabeth who, having seen it all, probably couldn't care less).

The lesson to one and all, including the surging citizens' rebellion and, I suspect, more than one NY Democrat Senator, is that Obama is really a thin-skinned bully who has never faced as implacable a foe as an Islamist thug, Chuck Schumer or an informed electorate, and whose "you have Me" bravado falls apart under serious pressure - I mean, this is a guy who needs a Presidential podium, twin teleprompters and a sloganeering backdrop just to chair a committee meeting or hold a presser in a grade six classroom.

As a result, The People are now thinking hey: if it works for Iran, Putin, Dingy Harry, the Spending Bintch, Schumer, Bloomberg and that committee meeting, it'll work for us, too! And once Obama's idiotic plan to try KSM in Manhattan gets scuttled, other potential victims of his ideological stupidity are going to begin pushing back as well. Like they did in Massachusetts. And Virginia, and New York, and New Jersey.

President Barack Obama can pose behind a podium and reprise candidate Barack Obama all he wants, but out on the street his name is finally mud, and as long as he sticks to campaigning like it's still the heady days of 2008, it's only going to get worse for him.

And therefore better for the nation.

Mmmm mmm mmm.

Obama's State of Obama speech was an unmitigated disaster.

Unpresidential. Narcissistic and petty. An insult to the intelligence of the American people. An insult to the truth. An attack on the separation of powers generally and on the Supreme Court in particular. Angry. Anti-business. Petulant. Immature. Dismissive. Cynical. Hectoring. Misleading. Dishonest. Fraudulent. Disrespectful. Mocking. Irresponsible. Bullying. Contradictory. Divisive. Delusional. Confrontational. Defiant. Authoritarian. Demagogic. Megalomaniacal.

And finally, the Republicans just laughed at him.

Meanwhile, the destruction continues.

Mark Thiessen on Obama's "overseas contingency operations" as they apply to reality:

The last five words were a stunning admission. One year after President Obama dismantled the CIA’s capability to interrogate high-value terrorists, the program that is supposed to take its place is still not “fully operational.” We currently have no capability in place to conduct high-value-terrorist interrogations.

HT Jonah Goldberg

Gateway Pundit Jim Hoft reports that the United States Marines have wrapped up their mission in Iraq.

Shhh… Don’t tell anyone. It may make George W. Bush look good. It may make Republicans look good.

It may shine light on the Democrats’ awful record on national defense.

Here's the buzz from Fox News:

The Marines formally handed over control of Sunni-dominated Anbar, Iraq’s largest province, to the Army during a ceremony at a base in Ramadi — where some of the fiercest fighting of the war took place.

If all goes as planned, the last remaining Marines will be followed out by tens of thousands of soldiers in the coming months. President Obama has ordered all but 50,000 troops out of the country by Aug. 31, 2010, with most to depart after the March 7 parliamentary election.

The remaining troops will leave by the end of 2011 under a U.S.-Iraqi security pact.

Thank you President Bush and thank you Marines.

Columnist to the World and noted Arab-hater Mark Steyn:

Got it. People are so angry and frustrated at George W. Bush that they’re voting for Republicans. In Massachusetts.

HT Hot Air

The Supreme Court's ruling on Citizens United v FEC confirms the right to freedom of speech guaranteed in the First Amendment, so it's quite telling to see Obama and his minions decrying the decision as some kind of attack on the political process by what they hilariously describe as an "activist court". Only an idiot or a liar would refer to Citizens United v FEC as an "activist" decision - any decision that reconfirms a right guaranteed in the Constitution is by definition conservative and, I will add, correct and just.

Obama, Schumer and all their fellow totalitarians know that the concept of an activist court is kryptonite to decent Americans, so, as they so often do, they have absconded with the very term "activist court" and tried to pervert its meaning to serve their ends. It won't work, except to further confirm just how dishonest and drunk with power they really are.

Obama whines that the decision somehow strikes a "powerful blow to our efforts to rein in corporate influence".

As usual, he's lying. And because we know he's lying, we can see what he is really up to.

As Ed Morrissey reminds us, Obama availed himself of every last dime of corporate money he possibly could when he opted out of the public matching fund program (after promising, of course, that he wouldn't) in order to fleece all those "special interests" against which he now brazenly rails, and who gave the better part of 600 million dollars to his campaign.

It’s worth pointing out that Barack Obama had an opportunity to limit that influence in the 2008 election simply by remaining in the public matching fund program that every major Presidential candidate had used since Watergate. In fact, Obama himself pledged to do just that in 2007 and again in early 2008, but changed his mind in June when he discovered that he could raise a lot more money than his opponent — by currying favor with Wall Street and the unions, as well as ethanol companies and a host of corporate-sponsored, lobbyist-run PACs. Obama raised over $600 million in 2008 for his eventual victory.

Now he wants to limit the power of politicians to raise that kind of money, which is mighty convenient for incumbents such as himself — and his Democratic allies on Capitol Hill.

Obama's attack on Citizens United v FEC exposes both his rank hypocrisy and the extent to which he despises the Constitution for the limits it places on his power. And as Morrissey further observes, the New York Times shares Obama's hypocrisy.

There is nothing behind the whines of protest over the ruling but the left's totalitarian urge, which the First Amendment was specifically designed to counter. Paul Sherman writes in Bench Memos:

When you hear reformers howl about the downfall of elections as a result of this ruling, consider that states like Missouri, Utah, and Virginia already allow corporations to spend unlimited amounts on political ads, and there’s no evidence that these states’ elections have been “corrupted” or “overwhelmed” by this additional political speech. And that is not surprising. After all, no matter how much money is spent to promote or oppose candidates, voters remain free to disagree with those views. And they often do, as well-financed but failed candidates Ross Perot, Steve Forbes, Mitt Romney, and, more recently, Jon Corzine can attest.

But the reformers are not content to leave something as important as election results to voter free will. Their real complaint is not with the Supreme Court or its ruling in Citizens United, but with the First Amendment itself, which prohibits their efforts to empower government to micromanage political debate. The Founders saw the folly of that approach and gave us a First Amendment that rejected it in clear terms: “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech.” Despite the reformers’ complaints, the ruling in Citizens United is faithful to the First Amendment, and that, ultimately, is the only test that matters.

Chief Justice John Roberts is absolutely clear on the matter in his concurrence:

The Government urges us in this case to uphold a direct prohibition on political speech. It asks us to embrace a theory of the First Amendment that would allow censorship not only of television and radio broadcasts, but of pamphlets, posters, the Internet, and virtually any other medium that corporations and unions might find useful in expressing their views on matters of public concern. Its theory, if accepted, would empower the Government to prohibit newspapers from running editorials or opinion pieces supporting or opposing candidates for office, so long as the newspapers were owned by corporations—as the major ones are.

Citizens United v. FEC in plain English by Lisa McElroy, SCOTUSblog
Citizens United and 'Conservative Judicial Activism' by Richard Garnett, Bench Memos

Rush Limbaugh:

I thought talk radio was so easy.

It was your prototypical modern "progressive" idiot venture: Flog a POS no-one wants, lie about its viability even after the numbers come in, rob the innocent to keep it going after investors flee; blame everyone else when it finally dies, then leave the stinking corpse for others to clean up.

Sounds kinda like the projected life cycle of oh, say, Obamacare, doesn't it?

The Good Michelle: Lib talk radio flops again: Air America goes bankrupt

Over at The Corner, Daniel Foster sifts through the chickenshit:

And then there is this sentence:

In this climate, our painstaking search for new investors has come close several times right up into this week, but ultimately fell short of success.

What happened this week that was so bad for liberals?

Money quote:

Radio is a dying industry.

If by "radio" Sam Seder means "broadcasting your monumental idiocy"?

Well.

Okay.

But real radio? It's doing just fine.

Dave In Texas' headline: "Actually Almost Nobody Hardest Hit"

Now that Washington Democrats and their MSM sycophants have realized what a thumping they're going to take in just Eight Short Months, they are suddenly trumpeting the lie that they're all about working across the aisle with their GOP colleagues. It's the first thing reporters asked Scott Brown about at his presser today, and the hyper-partisan John F'n Kerry, who fought in Vietnam and was heard just two days ago deriding Brown's supporters as "teabaggers", lectured Brown in front of reporters that the way to get along in Washington is to "reach across the aisle" and work on a bipartisan basis.

This is in sharp contrast to Kerry, Pelosi, Reid and of course Captain Wonderful himself ignoring Republicans for an entire year and declaring that, no matter who won in Massachusetts, Obamacare will pass come hell or high water.

So watch: it won't be long before Democrats prove all their talk of "reaching across the aisle" is the same lip service it always is. Because whatever Democrats might say in service to their own goals, it is by their actions ye shall know them, actions such as passing Obamacare through reconciliation, nationalizing student loans, attacking the banking industry and adding another 1.9 trillion dollars to the debt ceiling.

These bastards aren't finished by a long shot.

Happy Anniversary, man.

It's remarkable to see how weirdly self-delusional Media Madders is today, protesting all over the place that Scott Brown's victory yesterday had nothing to do with Obamacare, especially when Brown declared at every campaign appearance that he would be the Republicans' 41st vote against Obama's massive and corrupt government takeover of health care insurance (no link - not now, not ever.).

Even ignoring that fact, all Media Madders has to do is listen to what Democrats from Jim Webb to Bawney f'n Fwank are saying this morning as they distance themselves from their erstwhile Messiah. Or they could refer to this New York Times story on how Dems are abandoning en mass Nancy Pelosi's plans for an Obamacare cramdown. Or they can listen to Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY):

Or they could consult the Wall Street Journal:

The White House insists that the election had nothing to do with health care. But Mr. Brown ran explicitly on a promise to be the 41st Senator against ObamaCare. "I can stop it,'' he declared in one debate.

Massachusetts passed a prototype of the Obama plan in 2006, and residents have since watched as their insurance premiums have risen to the highest in the nation, budget costs have soared, and bureaucrats are planning far more draconian regulation of medical practice. Mr. Brown accurately said the national sequel would be too expensive and reduce the quality of care, and that it would be a "raw deal" forcing Massachusetts taxpayers to subsidize all other states.

It's telling, too, that at his rally for Mrs. Coakley on Sunday, Mr. Obama mentioned health care only by implication. The Commander in Chief did find time to deride Mr. Brown's pickup truck—six separate times. Mrs. Coakley also didn't mention health care in her final TV ad. The Democratic Party's top priority had become such a political albatross that Democrats didn't dare mention it lest it drive more votes to Mr. Brown.

How's about today's TNR?

There were no network exit polls, only a limited sample by Rasmussen, but some of the polls taken beforehand bear out Obama’s role in Coakley’s defeat. In the final January 17 poll by Public Policy Polling, a Democratic-leaning North Carolina outfit that picked up Brown’s surge early in the month, 20 percent of the respondents who voted for Obama in 2008 said they’d vote for Brown. Among those voters, only 22 percent approved of Obama’s presidency, and only 13 percent backed his health care plan. (Click here to read Thomas B. Edsall: "Why Health Care is the Graveyard of Democratic Dreams.")

In fact, the percent of 2008 Obama voters who were backing Brown almost perfectly matched the percentage who were dissatisfied with Obama’s health care plan, which Brown himself singled out for criticism in his campaign. According to the Rasmussen exit sample, 52 percent of Brown voters rated health care as their top issue--a clear indication that they were viewing the election in national and not merely state terms.

N'duh.

Some things never change, and Media Madders is still proving that you have to be an idiot to believe their Soros-funded propaganda.

The truth is that Scott Brown's election in Massachusetts was a referendum on Obama's entire disastrous presidency, including and perhaps especially Obamacare.

Erroll Southers has withdrawn as the nominee to head TSA. He blames Washington politics, but this guy is as idiotic as they come.

Southers lied to Congress in a signed affidavit about his abuse of power as an FBI agent, advocated giving the global warming fraud the same priority as national security, called pro-life advocates domestic terrorists, and attributed Islamic terror on America's relationship with Israel and France (?). As Jim Hoft put it,

This kook rattled off every leftwing nut conspiracy in one interview. Good work.

His nomination was originally put on hold by Republican Senator Jim DeMint, who prudently suspected Obama of wanting Southers to unionize TSA.

AP

Full batshit at 00:52



And so it goes.

UPDATE
Joe Scarborough tweets:

Obermann calls Brown a "homophobic racist reactionary" who "supports violence against women." How reckless and how sad.

Don't forget "progressive"!

In American lore it's about the horse, and Scott Brown's truck is his horse. He rides it around the territory to make his case with the voters. It is his trusty companion.

This is a central archetype of the American myth, and there was America's president, Barack Hussein Obama, mocking it in the worst possible context. I believe this will be remembered forevermore as a signature moment in Obama's one and only term.

Obama is going down and he's taking the entire Democrat brand down with him, which is a godsend given its wretched constituents.

Sure hope Scott Brown wins today.

Oooh, I like the sound of that. It's got "timeless" written all over it.

Obama Attacks Scott Brown's Truck. Not his policies -- his truck. As if it's some cheap hook like chanting "Yes We Can".





Thank you Mr. President!

Scott Brown responded to Obama’s mockery with the following statement:

Mr. President, unfortunately in this economy, not everybody can buy a truck. My goal is to change that by cutting spending, lowering taxes and letting people keep more of their own money.

Scott Brown's Closing Argument

The party machine is in high gear for my opponent. The establishment is afraid
of losing their Senate seat. You can all remind them that this is not their
seat, it is yours.

Vandals!

Sonic Frog has a detailed account of Obama's very own Armstrong Williams affair and the importance of repeating the word "consensus" in propagating "progressive" lies.

From Moonbattery via AoSHQ

Here I was all convinced that God (the real one, not Obama) had brought His wrath down on Haitians for making a deal with the devil to free them from the French (and really, who in their right mind wouldn't?) - that's what the Reverend Pat Robertson told me, and he's the Reverend Pat Robertson! Man of God, friends in high places, all that. Not just some crazy old guy with his head up his ass.

But now Activist, Actor and Producer Danny Glover says the Haitian earthquake was caused by the Big Milf being all pissed about the failure at Copenhagen to "stop the oceans' rise", to borrow a Messianic phrase. And hey, it's Danny Glover we're talking about here, y'know? Champion of Gaia, friends in high places, all that. Not just some self-absorbed celeb with his head up his ass. Check it out yo at 1:60:



Ace provides context:

This is why we call him "actor Danny Glover" rather than, say, "Doctor Danny Glover" or even "High-Functioning Retard Danny Glover."

I mean, hey: UN official.

Announcing a tax on the banks had its obviously intended effect yesterday when the S&P fell by almost 1% after a six day run and bank stocks tanked across the globe. That should signal to one and all that Obama is intentionally putting even more downward pressure on the economy, moving once again to punish a targeted area of the private sector where he has no business whatsoever extending his reach.

At the same time Obama is punishing private sector bankers for their successes, he is doing the exact opposite with Fan and Fred, both of whom he has cut loose from any fiscal accountability whatsoever and whose executives are drawing huge salaries. This is baldfaced scapegoating by a president looking to divert attention away from the disastrous unemployment he has wrought with his insane and immoral economic policies.

Obama’s Found a Villain to Distract the Angry Voter

The voters are getting angry at The One. A majority disapprove of how he’s handling health care “reform” AND the economy. The AP reports that the billions spent on road construction has done nothing to lower unemployment. The “most popular government program” in years, Cash-4 -Clunkers was actually, predictably, a flop. Unemployment is way higher than they said it would be if we didn’t rush through the borrow and spend porkulus bill...

So, what to do to keep the rabble from voicing their displeasure? Blame someone else! Obama wants to tax the big bad banks. He says it’s to get our TARP money back and to reduce undue risks by the greedy bankers. The One wants you to believe that the big banks are the kind of guys who would take the last piece of pizza from the birthday boy at Chuck-E-Cheese (see above photo).

Obama has been strident in his criticism of bankers, calling them “fat cats” last month in an interview that aired on the eve of their visit to the White House. With public anger over the bailout still strong, Obama has embraced populist rhetoric in an effort to shame bank executives into paying back the government more quickly and their executives less lavishly...

If the purpose is to get the TARP money back from the banks, that’s almost done. Most of the banks have paid it back and the rest are working on it. The money we’ve totally flushed away is the stuff we gave out after we turned TARP into a giant slush fund – the bailouts to the auto companies, AIG, Goldman Sachs, etc.

If the purpose is to get banks to quit taking outrageous risks, I have a better solution – When questionable investments put banks at risk of failure…LET THEM FAIL. That will temper risk. Failed banks will be broken up and sold off to sound banks. Let capitalism take care of it. Get the government out of it.

The real purpose is to distract the voters from the failure of the stimulus, boost Obama’s approval ratings and create a new tax to redistribute the wealth. It certainly isn’t a way to grow the economy.

I recall reading this Coulter column back in December. Now Martha Coakley's detestable victimization of innocent people in service to her own career advancement has bubbled up to center stage just in time for the final week of her campaign.

Involvement in Amirault case makes Martha Coakley unfit to replace Ted Kennedy as Senator
Kennedy left a woman to drown in his car; all Coakley did was imprison an innocent man for a few years. Who would you vote for?

Tooky Amirault joins Dennis and Callahan to tell his amazing story

Is Martha Coakley committed to justice?
What is "no"?

And that's just one facet of this horrible woman's multifacted nastiness. F'r instance, as Weekly Standard reporter John McCormack discovered, if she doesn't like your question, she'll have you assaulted by one of her thugs.




But Martha Coakley is more than just an abusive crank who stomps on peoples' lives and then throws them away like trash. She is also a monumental idiot when it comes to the war on Islamofascism.

Why Brownie isn't up by eleventy right now is beyond me.

More lies.

How The White House Used Gruber’s Work To Create The Appearance of a Broad Healthcare Consensus.

Michael Barone writes in the Washington Examiner:

As the educated class bitterly clings to its contempt for the increasing numbers not enlightened enough to share its views, other Americans have noticed, even in the liberal heartland of Massachusetts, where Republican Scott Brown seems on the brink of an upset victory in the special Senate election next Tuesday. That would have reverberations for the educated class an awful lot like that tea party back in 1773.

Mmmm, mmmm, mmmm.

Jim Hoft has a reminder for Captain Wonderful: Barack Obama on Harry Reid: “He’s Always Been on the Right Side of History”…Harry Reid: “This War is Lost” (Video)

You can fool some of the people all of the time, you can fool all the people some of the time, but when the economy is in the tank, unemployment is at its highest since the Great Depression, you're treating Islamofascist terrorists like common criminals, government tyranny has surpassed even that of the Hoover years, you've quadrupled the national debt in just 10 months and you're surrounded by crooks and commies, you ain't foolin' no-one no mo no how'.

Sorry: dialect coach? Is there a dialect coach in the house?

I guess if Brown had raised 2 million it would have been the blood libel.

Y'all stay classy, folks:


Meanwhile, here's lockstep Rethuglican Scott Brown, creepy evil rape-loving right winger:



Tick tick tick tick tick tick tick.

Alvin S. Felzenberg at The Corner:

[Harry] Reid is but the latest in a long line of walking embarrassments the Democrats continue to parade on the national stage. The cast includes a Treasury secretary (Timothy Geithner) who did not pay all his taxes; a nominee to head the Transportation Security Administration (Erroll Southers) who abused his authority as an FBI agent when he hacked into the criminal record of his wife’s boyfriend; and a White House budget director (Peter Orszag) who recently fathered a child out of wedlock, while serving a president who lectures about the tragedy of absentee fathers.

In political terms, the GOP might be advised to cease calling for Reid’s resignation. Like Orszag and the others, he can do Republicans the most good right where he is.

From Behind The Golden EIB Microphone:

It is really, really bad for the Democrats out there all over the country electorally. In Massachusetts, the pollsters are kind of coalescing around the idea that Martha Coakley is going to win, but Scott Brown keeps raising money, big-time money. The fact that the Democrats are having to fight this hard... I mean, they're sending the union troops in there! The fact that the Democrats are having to fight at all for Ted Kennedy's seat! Wouldn't it be the most delicious irony if the Ted Kennedy seat were lost, preventing health care from passing?

Now, I know that the Democrats, if Scott Brown wins, are going to delay his swearing in until after the health care vote. They'll delay it a couple of months if they have to, an emergency change to the law, but everybody's going to see this. The Democrats are now running naked through the streets. There's no cover. Everybody sees them for who they are: Job destroyers, private sector destroyers.

The Scott Brown Campaign, Red Against Blue:

Thank you! $1,303,302.50 raised!

I think I'll call this phenomenon "The Brown Note": you strike a chord with the American people and the entire left shits itself.

The U.S. housing mortgage crisis got bigger on Christmas Eve with the very quiet announcement that Obama's government was taking the lid off taxpayer's exposure to the subprime mortgage fraud. To put the gravity of that move into historical context, the Wall Street Journal's Peter Wallison wrote a December 30 exposé about Fanny/Freddy's central role in decimating the financial markets and almost destroying the world economy:

On Christmas Eve, when most Americans' minds were on other things, the Treasury Department announced that it was removing the $400 billion cap from what the administration believes will be necessary to keep Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac solvent. This action confirms that the decade-long congressional failure to more closely regulate these two government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) will rank for U.S. taxpayers as one of the worst policy disasters in our history. ...

The GSEs had begun buying risky loans in 1993 to meet the "affordable housing" requirements established under congressional direction by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

Most of the damage was done from 2005 through 2007, when Fannie and Freddie were binging on risky mortgages. Back then, [Congressman Barney] Frank was the bartender, denying that there was any cause for concern, and claiming that he wanted to "roll the dice" on subsidized housing support. ...

By the end of 2008, Fannie and Freddie held or guaranteed approximately 10 million subprime and Alt-A mortgages and mortgage-backed securities (MBS)--risky loans with a total principal balance of $1.6 trillion. These are now defaulting at unprecedented rates, accounting for both their 2008 insolvency and their growing losses today. Since 2008, under government control, the two agencies have continued to buy dicey mortgages in order to stabilize housing prices.

There is more to this ugly situation. New research by Edward Pinto, a former chief credit officer for Fannie Mae and a housing expert, has found that from the time Fannie and Freddie began buying risky loans as early as 1993, they routinely misrepresented the mortgages they were acquiring, reporting them as prime when they had characteristics that made them clearly subprime or Alt-A. ...

It is easy to see how this misrepresentation was a principal cause of the financial crisis.

Market observers, rating agencies and investors were unaware of the number of subprime and Alt-A mortgages infecting the financial system in late 2006 and early 2007. Of the 26 million subprime and Alt-A loans outstanding in 2008, 10 million were held or guaranteed by Fannie and Freddie, 5.2 million by other government agencies, and 1.4 million were on the books of the four largest U.S. banks.

In addition, about 7.7 million subprime and Alt-A housing loans were in mortgage pools supporting MBS issued by Wall Street banks--which had long before been driven out of the prime market by Fannie and Freddie's government-backed, low-cost funding. The vast majority of these MBS were rated AAA, because the rating agencies' models assumed that the losses that are incurred by subprime and Alt-A loans would be within the historical range for the number of high-risk loans known to be outstanding.

But because of Fannie and Freddie's mislabeling, there were millions more high-risk loans outstanding. That meant default rates as well as the actual losses after foreclosure were going to be outside all prior experience. ...

[The roots of the financial crisis] go back to 1993, when Fannie and Freddie began stocking up on subprime and other risky loans while reporting them as prime.

Why Fannie and Freddie did this is still to be determined. But the leading candidate is certainly HUD's affordable housing regulations, which by 2007 required that 55% of all the loans the agencies acquired had to be made to borrowers at or below the median income, with almost half of these required to be low-income borrowers.

Via Power Line comes word that Pajamas Media is doing something with this story that the MSM of course refuses to do: they're investigating. And writer Tom Blumer has uncovered what appears to be a brazen scheme by Democrat insiders (think Jim Johnson, Franklin Raines, Jamie Gorelick, Chris Dodd, Barney Frank, Chuck Schumer and yes, Barack Obama, Rahm Emanuel and ACORN) to profit in manifold ways from a massive defamatory fraud on American capital markets, for which Congressional Democrats would then have the pretense to indict the free markets, and therefore Capitalism, as responsible for Democrats' crimes:

Before (former Fannie Mae chief credit officer Edward)Pinto's bombshell, we knew that Fan and Fred were used as instruments to "encourage" loans to undeserving borrowers. We knew that this "encouragement" was enforced through the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), a law originally passed in the 1970s that was "progressively" given threatening teeth in ensuing years.

We have known for some time, as described in my September 2008 column, that Fan and Fred lowered the qualifying standards for conventional and subprime loans they would buy from participating lenders roughly as follows (quoting from that column):

The credit score threshold for conventional mortgages, which had generally been 670 or more, dropped to about 630. In the real world, a score of 630 indicates that you're having trouble with your debt load, paying your bills on time, or a little of both.

More ominously, the credit score threshold for subprime mortgages, which had generally been 630 or more, fell to about 590. A score of 590 is the credit scoring equivalent of barely having a pulse.

We know that in doing this, Fan and Fred, as well as those who underwrote or bought securities backed by these conventional and subprime mortgages, were taking a huge risk by hoping that borrowers with mediocre or poor credit histories would somehow keep up with their mortgage payments. ...

Incredibly, the Pinto paragraph above takes things one step further. It's bad enough that Fan and Fred lowered the loan approval thresholds. Pinto's point is that for 15 years, they doubled down by "routinely" misclassifying approved loans, effectively telling the capital markets and the public that these loans weren't as risky as they really were. Because of this, securities backed by these mortgages carried lower interest rates than they would have if the risks had been properly disclosed. Some of the offerings should probably never have been issued or should have been given junk bond pricing. Further, misrepresented loans Fan and Fred kept on their books enabled the two entities to continually make false claims of financial health.

And now Obama has just decreed that there is no limit to the claims Fannie and Freddie can make on the American taxpayer.

No.

Limit.

Kinda makes Obamacare pale in comparison as the tipping point for statist control, doesn't it?

No wonder the MSM is ignoring this story. So much scandal, so many friends in the Democratic Party, so much protective fawning for president Baby Jesus. Charles Gibson probably thinks this is "one for the cables": it certainly is one for the American voter to get to know before the congressional elections in November, by which time they may want an explanation not only from the shameless crooks populating the upper ranks of the Democratic Party Crime Family but their enablers and apologists in the Main Stream Media as well.

Take that, idiots.

Sarah Palin and Liz Cheney both at Fox News...

It's like I just heard the last tumbler click into place.

Harry Reid: the gift that keeps on giving.

It took Obama 3 days to respond to the Christmas Bomber fiasco and I think a couple of days to demagogue Trent Lott, but it took him a mere .0356 seconds to forgive Dingy Harry over the public airwaves because the Senator From Nevada is on the Social Justice team of righteousness.

It's like being a member of the Justice League Of America, except it's social justice rather than the blind variety adults revere.

I think we should rename him Useful Harry for now and be ready to make adjustments on the fly, IYKWIMAITYD.

Via JammieWearingFool,

Obama's efforts to undercut national security and the Constitution by flooding detainees into the civil court system has borne its first fruit: Judge tosses out most evidence on Gitmo detainee:

A federal judge has tossed out most of the government's evidence against a tarrorism [sic] detainee on grounds his confessions were coerced, allegedly by U.S. forces, before he became a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay.

In a ruling this week, U.S. District Judge Thomas Hogan also said the government failed to establish that 23 statements the detainee made to interrogators at Guantanamo Bay were untainted by the earlier coerced statements made while he was held under harsh conditions in Afghanistan.

This is just the beginning. Remember: Obama just pledged to do everything in his power to defeat the Islamist enemy. Right now those are just words: as long as Obama continues to steer jihadi assholes away from the military tribunal system and into the civil courts, he is knowingly giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

Maureen Dowd thinks she may have heard "boy" at the end of this:



Bonus Round:

More Thoughts On Captain Wonderful’s Counter Intel Review, Such As It Was

Essentially, Obama was directing the intel agencies to go back to doing the exact work they had been doing under the Bush Administration and should still have been doing all along. This from the guy who sicked Attorney General Eric Holder on the CIA to satisfy the idiot fantasy of charging Bush and Cheney with war crimes; who puts Navy Seals on trial for giving a target a bloody nose; who swore to close Gitmo and send the detainees back to Yemen with no regard whatsoever for the dangers, particularly the glaring record of recidivism among released detainees; who gives as his reason for closing Gitmo the ludicrous claim that it has become a recruiting tool for AQ, and then proposes to move the detainees to a prison in Illinois because - because - what? Holding them on American soil somehow magically won’t be a recruiting tool?

The fact is that Obama and his people have swept into office with both the intel and military services in their collective sights. First they announced that the biggest threat to America was in its very own “extreme right wing”, code language for pretty much whomever the Obama people might decide to target in the future, with a special shout-out to returning veterans. Then they set about imposing political correctness and restraints on the very language these agencies use to just go about their work: there was no longer a war on Islamic terror; only “overseas contingency operations”; a terrorist attack was henceforth only to be referred to as a “man-caused disaster”; rules of engagement were rendered moot and successful interrogation techniques were made public to the benefit only of the enemy.

Obama’s claim in this speech that “there is no silver bullet in screening incoming potential threats” is correct, but only because he chooses not to employ profiling as a defense. Once again, the commander-in-chief, whose first responsibility is to protect the American people from harm, has been subsumed by the legal academic whose leftist sensibilities prevent him from accepting the true nature of the threat and using the necessary tools to defeat it.

The insane brew of ideology-induced ineptitude and shameless dishonesty on display in this speech would be shocking in any other administration; for this one, it is entirely predictable.

Goes to the Columnist To The World:

Oh, that's grand. Try to kill hundreds of people in an act of war, and it's the starting point for a plea deal.

Everyone is trashing Obama's stupidity and hypocrisy when it comes to fighting terrorism. Mark Steyn just does it best.

Where to begin? Because this was about the most dishonest, ass-covering, sophomoric, lame and derisible piece of theater I've ever seen from any White House in my life. This narcissistic bastard is so far over his head both practically and ideologically that he has rendered himself a future world-class historical punchline, and not in a good way.

The downside, of course, is that one or more Americans will likely be slaughtered by Islamic radicals if only because this president's targeting of his own country's intel community simply for serving the Bush administration has taken them off their game in the interest of self-preservation. These are human beings with families and lives who serve their country in the worst hellholes and trenches around the world and who know the man in the White House is NOT on their side, that he has placed persecuting them over protecting the country in the hope of garnering political gain.

And the bottom line is that none of this would be so if Obama had been honest with the American people about his world view, because if he had, he would never have been elected. But again, he wasn't honest. And now this.

Let's begin with NRO's The Corner:

Instant Review by Cliff May

Watching the White House briefing and my reaction: This is much too bureaucratic to be reassuring.

Also, what I think most Americans already grasp:

1) The father says his son may have joined al-Qaeda. One phone call should have been enough to cancel the kid's visa to the U.S. Why didn't that happen? I didn't hear an answer.

2) Abdulmutallab buys his one-way ticket with cash, has no luggage, and has been in Yemen for the past few months. So you pull him out of line, question him and screen him. Why didn't that happen? I didn't hear an answer.

And:

White House national security adviser James Jones says Americans will feel "a certain shock" when they read an account being released Thursday of the missed clues that could have prevented the alleged Christmas Day bomber from ever boarding the plane.

So where's the shock? What was new? What did I miss?

Close But No Cigar by Clifford May

Perhaps in an effort to answer conservative critics who have charged that he doesn’t seem to understand that a global conflict is underway, President Obama said today

We are at war, we are at war against al Qaeda …

Well, yes, but somehow I can’t imagine FDR saying

We are at war, we are at war with the Wehrmacht.

Why not? Well, because we were at war not only with the armed forces of Germany. We also were at war with violent, supremacist ideologies (e.g. Nazi, Fascist, Japanese militarist) intent on the destruction and conquest of the democratic nations.

As we are again today (e.g. radical Islam in both its Shia and Sunni forms).

BTW, my column for NRO today, looks at Paul Johnson's brief history of the 1930s, a time that seems remarkably similar to the present.

Lehman: Clueless Obama by Robert Costa

After watching President Obama’s remarks on national security this afternoon, John Lehman, the secretary of the Navy in the Reagan administration and a member of the 9/11 Commission, tells National Review Online that, “frankly, I’m pissed off.”

“President Obama just doesn’t get it,” says Lehman. “I don’t think he has a clue. It’s all pure spin. He’s ignoring key issues and taking respectable professionals like John Brennan and turning them into hacks and shills. It’s beyond contempt.”

“The president has ignored the 9/11 Commission’s report,” says Lehman. “This whole idea that we can fix things by jumping higher and faster is ridiculous. The fact is that the system worked just like we said it would work if the president failed to give the Director of National Intelligence the tools he needs: it’s bloated, bureaucratic, layered, and stultified.”

“President Obama continues to totally ignore one of the important thrusts of our 9/11 recommendations, which is that you have to approach counterterrorism as a multiagency intelligence issue, and not as a law-enforcement issue. He’s made a lot of commission’s members angry for dismissing our report and ignoring key recommendations.” Obama, he adds, has taken a “lawyer-like, politically-correct approach” to national security issues like terrorist watchlists and no-fly lists. “You got to blame the president for enforcing the politically-correct and legalistic policies that led to these failures.”

Bolton: Obama Misses the Big Picture by Robert Costa

John Bolton, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, tells National Review Online that President Obama’s remarks on recent American intelligence and security failures this afternoon “miss the big picture” and “ignore the problems we face in dealing with al-Qaeda.”

“I didn’t hear any hint of the president planning to deal with al-Qaeda’s growing capabilities,” says Bolton. “Now, maybe that’s still to come, but, for now, it seems like the president still thinks this is about one person and the intelligence agencies. He outlined a message of government management when he should have addressed the importance of destroying al-Qaeda’s base camps and eradicating its networks.”

Obama, Bolton adds, “needs to remember that classic formulation: the best defense is a good offense.”

“If we’re simply relying on the intelligence agencies to keep people off a plane, then we’ll have many more examples of near misses or, God forbid, a tragedy, in coming years,” says Bolton. “Pushing for a shift in the intelligence bureaucracy won’t stop al-Qaeda. I don’t think the president realizes the implications of what he’s doing with this kind of law-enforcement response.”

“The tone of the remarks is not what’s important,” says Bolton. “We’re not judging some rhetoric exercise. The metric of government is effective action and what he’s proposing addresses issues at the molecular level, not the molar level.”

Nuff said? No.

Cheney: 'We’re not going to win this war through more intense airport screenings' by Robert Costa

Liz Cheney, the founder of Keep America Safe, tells National Review Online that President Obama’s national-security remarks this afternoon, plus the press conference with John Brennan and Janet Napolitano, were “extremely troubling.”

“Over the course of the last year, President Obama has taken his eye off the ball and allowed America's counterterrorism systems to erode,” says Cheney. “Brennan and Napolitano both said they were surprised to learn from the review released today that al-Qaeda in Yemen was operational. Napolitano went on to say she hadn't realized previously that al-Qaeda might use an individual to attack us. Yet, in the past year, we’ve had three attacks on America from individuals with Yemeni connections — from the terrorist at the recruiting station in Little Rock to the terrorist at Ford Hood and now the Christmas Day bomber.” Thus, she says, “it is inexplicable that our nation's top counterterrorism officials would be surprised by a method of attack we've repeatedly seen before.”

“At the end of the day, we cannot win this war without daily, unwavering, resolute presidential stewardship,” says Cheney. “By tasking his counterterrorism officials to spend their time focused on trying to close Guantanamo and investigating their predecessors, by treating terrorists as criminals, by treating terrorist attacks on the U.S. as the acts of ‘isolated extremists,’ President Obama has failed to make fighting terror and keeping the nation safe his top priority.”

“The president says he’s using every tool at his disposal but he’s not,” says Cheney.

“We can't prevail against terrorists without intelligence. When President Obama treats terrorists like criminals, reads them their Miranda rights and allows them to lawyer up, he ensures we won't get the intelligence we need.” In addition, Cheney says, “When the president stopped the enhanced-interrogation programs and revealed our tactics to our enemies, he significantly reduced our ability to successfully interrogate any senior al-Qaeda leaders. Intelligence is key. Let’s be clear: We’re not going to win this war through more intense airport screenings.”

And when did the matter of "an isolated extremist" suddenly morph into a "race against time" against an incoming horde? Are there suddenly a "shocking" number of isolated extremists emanating from the same source in oh, let's say, Yemen?

More later.

Power Line on Obama's C-SPAN Lie, the consequences of which are proving decidedly disastrous:

How many times have we seen images of Barack Obama with his nose in the air, offering "hope"? Obama promised to be different--not worse, but better!--and his pledge to invite television cameras to observe behind-the-scenes legislative deliberations exemplified that image.

Today, Obama's message to voters is: "Don't tell me you actually believed that s***?!"

We didn't, but millions of those who did are feeling betrayed.

Meanwhile, over at Big Gov my favorite Professor Paul A. Rahe studies another seed of Obama's impending fall:

When this shot is shown in high resolution, as one perceptive observer soon noted, “Obama looks like he has contempt for Biden” –which, he added, may be the case “given Joe ‘The Gaff Machine’ Biden’s performance this year.” I am, he concluded, once again reminded “of how this administration seems to have become oblivious to the images they project to the public.”

I wonder whether this last point is right.

Obama and his minions are certainly capable of stumbling. Their handling of the recent attempt by Al Q’aeda to bring down a Northwest Airlines flight originating in Amsterdam is a case in point. But the posting of this photograph is by no means the first time that the current President of the United States has seized upon an opportunity to display in a manner oblique but unmistakable his disdain for another public figure.

As I tried to document last year in a series of posts on Powerline — here, here, here, here, here, and here — Barack Obama is, in fact, a master of the insulting gesture and the calculated insult.

Here's a clip from Naked Emperor News courtesy of Breitbart TV showing candidate Obama lying about holding health care "reform" negotiations live on C-SPAN. I submit that his body language and verbal hesitations are those of a studied liar, and that it was only ever just a matter of time before this, like all his other empty promises, ran into its inevitable expiration date.



Bottom line? He lied. Nothing has happened in the way of extenuating circumstance or mitigating factor since he repeatedly made that promise to voters, to cause him to change his mind for practical or political or any other reasons; it was always made up about how the Obamacare express was ultimately going to steamroll public opposition because he always knew that is what it would take. He just flat-out lied - that's what he does.

That middle finger flipped at Hillary and then John McCain during the campaign? That was really meant for all you selfish clingers out there who would have gotten in the way.

What a day for Obama,
What a day for a daydreamin' boy.
He's lost in a daydream,
Dreamin' 'bout his bundle of joy.

What a day for Obama: everything is converging to take down both Captain Wonderful and his Democratic Congressional majority in the coming year, with The One's socialist dream of a destroyed America finally taking fatal hits in a fast-approaching fait accompli.

The list of troubles is a long one.

Obama can't effectively prosecute the War on Terror because he is deluded about it; he has angered every potential ally both foreign and domestic, both left and right; he doesn't want to hear the message he is getting, from the very financial advisors he selected to his Cabinet, that the economy needs private-sector jobs - the kind that only come via tax cuts and setting business free; he has handed the Obamacare steamroller to a runaway, totalitarian legislative branch run by PelosiReid.

Obama, through Attorney General Eric Holder, is extending aid and comfort to the enemy by affording captured illegal enemy combatants full Constitutional protections as if their terror attacks were criminal matters and not miltary ones; Iran is laughing at Obama's obsequiousness; Israel is aghast at his arrogance.

Obama's response to the Detroit terror attack was appalling, and the followup by Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Incompetano claiming that "the system worked" was flagrantly dishonest, completely oblivious to the potential gravity of the attack, and an insult to Americans' intelligence. The subsequent damage-control tour by Obama's Deputy National Security Adviser John Brennan on the Sunday news shows was an unparalleled fiasco, revealing weapons-grade ideological blindness at the very top of the Obama administration.

Now comes news today that Democratic senators are jumping ship like a herd of rats. From Red State, this is big:

Bill Ritter, the Governor of Colorado, is gone. Senator Byron Dorgan (D-ND) is gone. Chris Dodd (D-CT) is gone.

That's right.

Obama and the Democrats as a whole are heading for a reckoning with the American people later this year, and it ain't going to be pretty.

The president’s oath is to protect the American people, not appease the Muslim masses abroad.

Great news: