politics - Gary Edwards on Diigo

Biden-Palin: An Unhealthy Debate by Yuval Levin on National Review Online

The rule of thumb for fact checkers of Thursday night’s vice-presidential debate was that every time Joe Biden sounded especially confident, he was saying something that wasn’t true.

Levin tracks the many lies, distortions and half truths Joe Biden used in the debate and the Obama campaign uses in ads to smear John McCain. The healthcare lies are especially revealing.

Tags: biden, palin, debate, mccain, obama, politics, lies on 2008-10-04 -All Annotations (0) -About

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www.rightchange.com - Home

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Stratfor - Geopolitical intelligence, economic, political, and military strategic forecasting | Stratfor

The politics of global conflict, trade, and idiological differences

Tags: politics, stratfor, geopolitical on 2008-10-02 and saved by13 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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American Thinker: Wrecks, Lies and Barney Frank

But then a caller challenged Frank's continued insistence that the meltdown was brought on by Republican deregulation, citing the 1999 NY Times article concerning Clinton Administration efforts to force Fannie to ease mortgage standards in order to provide more minority and lower-income lending. The caller reminded Barney of his own words as ranking member from a 2003 Times piece reporting Bush's initiative to reign in Fannie and Freddie by creating new oversight under the Treasury Department:

Tags: politics, bailout, barney-frank, fannie-freddie on 2008-10-01 -All Annotations (5) -About

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Frank did, however, introduce legislation of his own in October of last year. Would you believe that H.R. 3838 was actually an attempt to temporarily increase the caps on Fannie/Freddie portfolios and to mandate the "use of 85% of such increase for refinancing subprime mortgages at risk of foreclosure?
What's more, the "regulation" Frank now takes credit for was not his (H.R.1427 passed the House last year but never escaped Senate committee) but rather Nancy Pelosi's (H.R. 3221 - The Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008). And Pelosi's version, not surprisingly and unlike its Republican predecessors, was signed marked up with over 66 pages of Liberal wealth redistribution wish-fulfillment under the guise of assuring "affordable housing." While it did establish (and way too late, Barney) the Federal Housing Finance Agency, with regulatory authority over Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, the Federal Home Loan Banks, and the Office of Finance, it's bogged down with tons of pork-fat. This oinker even increased the national debt limit from $9.82 trillion to $10.62 trillion, and commissioned a boatload of programs for low income families to spend it on.
In truth, the Bill that would have likely averted the Fannie/Freddy failure -- the Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act of 2005 (S. 190) -- was Republican legislation introduced by Sen. Charles Hagel [R-NE] in January of 2005.
"The recklessness of government is a primary culprit here. For years, Congress has been pushing banks to make risky, subprime loans. Using the authority of the Community Reinvestment Act, the big push for subprime mortgages began in earnest during the Clinton years. Banks that didn't play ball were subject to serious fines and lawsuits, and regulatory obstacles were placed in their way. While expanding access to the American Dream is a worthy goal, by blindly pursuing that goal and allowing the end to justify any means, we put millions of Americans at financial risk."
But then a caller challenged Frank's continued insistence that the meltdown was brought on by Republican deregulation, citing the 1999 NY Times article concerning Clinton Administration efforts to force Fannie to ease mortgage standards in order to provide more minority and lower-income lending. The caller reminded Barney of his own words as ranking member from a 2003 Times piece reporting Bush's initiative to reign in Fannie and Freddie by creating new oversight under the Treasury Department:

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American Thinker: Time for McCain to Name Names

There is but one issue in the 2008 election. The economy. Or more to the point, the economic meltdown. Whoever wins this debate will win the election. Or perhaps more accurately, whoever loses this debate will lose the election. Period.

Tags: cedmond-wright, american-thinker, bailout, politics on 2008-10-01 -All Annotations (4) -About

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naked capitalism: Martin Feldstein Calls a Downturn, Takes Issue With Government Statistics

What is missing is action to prevent positive-equity mortgages from becoming negative-equity mortgages. The federal government could achieve that by providing low-interest loans with full recourse that would allow any homeowner to pay down a significant fraction of his mortgage. Homeowners would be in effect giving up the potential to default on their mortgage loans in exchange for lower interest costs.

Tags: politics, bailout, martin-feldstein, downturn, loansubstitution on 2008-10-01 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Martin Feldstein: Bail-out must address negative equity. Loan-substitution program could help | Population & Demographics > Demographic Groups from AllBusiness.com

The CMPS Institute on April 22 sent Congress a detailed proposal calling for government-backed loans to homeowners of up to 20 percent of the homeowner's current mortgage balance. "Negative homeowner equity is the one root problem that Congress can help solve," said Gibran Nicholas, chair of the CMPS .......... "If homeowners have no incentive to keep up their mortgage payments, the problems in the housing markets could continue to spread and plunge our country into a deep recession,".... "A voluntary loan-substitution program could reduce the number of defaults and dampen the decline in house prices - without violating contracts, bailing out lenders or borrowers, or increasing government spending,"

Tags: politics, bailout, banking, martin-feldstein, loansubstitution on 2008-10-01 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Jeffrey Miron, Economist: Bankruptcy, not bailout, is the right answer - CNN.com

This bailout was a terrible idea. Here's why.

The current mess would never have occurred in the absence of ill-conceived federal policies. The federal government chartered Fannie Mae in 1938 and Freddie Mac in 1970; these two mortgage lending institutions are at the center of the crisis. The government implicitly promised these institutions that it would make good on their debts, so Fannie and Freddie took on huge amounts of excessive risk.

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So what should the government do? Eliminate those policies that generated the current mess.
The bailout has more problems. The final legislation will probably include numerous side conditions and special dealings that reward Washington lobbyists and their clients.
If financial institutions cannot make productive loans, a profit opportunity exists for someone else. This might not happen instantly, but it will happen.
In contrast, a bailout transfers enormous wealth from taxpayers to those who knowingly engaged in risky subprime lending. Thus, the bailout encourages companies to take large, imprudent risks and count on getting bailed out by government. This "moral hazard" generates enormous distortions in an economy's allocation of its financial resources.
Bankruptcy punishes those who took excessive risks while preserving those aspects of a businesses that remain profitable.
Congress pushed mortgage lenders and Fannie/Freddie to expand subprime lending.
subprime lending was more than a minor relaxation of existing credit guidelines. This lending was a wholesale abandonment of reasonable lending practices in which borrowers with poor credit characteristics got mortgages they were ill-equipped to handle.

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ACORN, Obama and the Mortgage Mess: Guilty Party by Mona Charen on National Review Online

The financial markets were teetering on the edge of an abyss last week. The secretary of the Treasury was literally on his knees begging the speaker of the House not to sabotage the bailout bill. The crash of falling banks made the earth tremble. The Republican presidential candidate suspended his campaign to deal with the crisis. And amid all this, the Democrats in Congress managed to find time to slip language into the bailout legislation that would provide a dandy little slush fund for ACORN.

ACORN stands for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, a busy hive of left-wing agitation and “direct action” that claims chapters in 50 cities and 100,000 dues-paying members. ACORN is where Sixties leftovers who couldn’t get tenure at universities wound up.

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Obama's Leftism - WSJ.com

Community Organizer = Saul Alinsky Professional Radical and Revolutionary: If we discount his absences, Mr. Obama voted to ADA's approval more than 98% of the time.

This touches directly on the question of what, beyond the platitudes of unity, hope and change, Mr. Obama himself believes in. His voting record is one indication. Another is his intellectual evolution.

Tags: obama, politics, marxism on 2008-09-30 -All Annotations (19) -About

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we must accept multiculturalism at home and share our wealth abroad.
the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income . . . the arms merchants in our own country . . . feeding the countless wars that rage across the globe.
In this litany of global perfidy, the issues of Saddam Hussein's murderous dictatorship, of American security, of the future of freedom, shrink to inconsequentiality next to the struggle of the oppressed against their American capitalist overlords.
a radical worldview. In one notable remark, he said of voters in economic distress that in their desperation they "cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them." Chastised for his condescension, he responded: "I said something that everybody knows is true." This was elitism of a very specific kind—the mentality of the community organizer, according to which people in the grip of "false consciousness" need to be enlightened as to the true nature of their class interests, and to the nature of their true class enemies.
her view, expressed in her standard stump speech, that our country is a "downright mean" place, "guided by fear," where the "life . . . that most people are living has gotten progressively worse."
He called himself "progressive," a term of art favored by veterans of the hard New Left, like Tom Hayden, as well as by old-time Communists.
Like others among his mentors or patrons, Ms. Palmer, too, was a radical, a member of the executive body of the U.S. Peace Council, the least disguised of Soviet front organizations.
Alice Palmer, who had decided to make a run for the U.S. Congress. She introduced Mr. Obama in Democratic Party circles as her anointed successor.
In his campaign for the Illinois senate, Mr. Obama was endorsed by the New Party, a coalition of socialists, Communists and other leftists.
As his wife, Michelle, put it: "Barack is not a politician first and foremost. He's a community activist exploring the viability of politics to make change."
The two also served together on the board of the leftist Woods Fund from 1998 until 2001.
Ayers named himself to head the Collaborative; Barack Obama, apparently by Ayers's choice, became chairman of the Board.
in 1994, when the philanthropist Walter Annenberg put up $500 million to help the nation's public schools, Ayers submitted a grant proposal that secured $50 million for an entity called the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. The word "challenge" signified that the recipients were required to find double the amount in matching funds; this they did, disposing altogether of some $160 million.
Thanks to the meticulous investigations of the left-leaning blogger Steven Diamond (globallabor.blogspot.com), the story of Mr. Obama and Ayers's collaboration has been seeping into the public record despite extraordinary efforts to seal it.
Bill Ayers, a former leader of the so-called Weather Underground. This leftist terrorist group, akin to the German Baader-Meinhof gang or the Italian Red Brigades, specialized in bombing government buildings. Ayers later wrote boastfully that he had personally carried out an attack on the Pentagon. Ayers's wife and closest collaborator was Bernardine Dohrn, whose views were so extreme that they seemed to cross a line from ultraleftism to Satanism. At a meeting of the Weather Underground, she hailed the murders then recently committed by Charles Manson's demented followers.
The flow of culture now ran in reverse as well, the former gang-banger, the teenage mother, had their own forms of validation—claims of greater deprivation, and hence authenticity.
"We are an African people, and remain 'true to our native land,' the mother continent, the cradle of civilization." It defines Trinity as, among other things, "a congregation committed to the historical education of African people in diaspora, a congregation committed to liberation." When Mr. Obama joined the church in the 1980s, it did not yet have a Web site, but he tells of a brochure that, while condoning the pursuit of income, warned congregants against the "psychological entrapment of black 'middleclassness.'
"The vision statement of Trinity United Church of Christ," in Wright's words, was "based upon the systematized liberation theology that started in 1969 with the publication of Dr. James Cone's book, Black Power and Black Theology."
Alinsky's institutional base was the Industrial Areas Foundation, which he called a "school for professional radicals" and whose goal he announced to be "revolution, not revelation."

Do you oppose the $700 billion Wall Street bailout? Click here | Politics and Law - CNET News

A flurry of Web activism is channelling misgivings about the proposed $700 billion Wall Street bailout into political action. This web page breaks down the current cost to taxpayers already incurred by the bailouts of AIG, Bear Stearsn, Fannie and Freddie, and the Fereal Housing Administration rescue bill. Total cost to day: $1.8 Trillion. Cost per household: $17,064

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The Public Deserves a Better Deal - WSJ.com

There is a better alternative to stabilize the markets: Invest the $700 billion of taxpayer money in senior preferred stock of the troubled financial institutions that pose systemic risks. Let's call this the "Preferred plan." In fact, it is the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac model -- which the Treasury Department has already endorsed and used in practice. It is also the approach Warren Buffett used for his investment in Goldman Sachs.

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Stop the Socialist Spendathon by Deroy Murdock on National Review Online

It may take time and tightened belts, but padlocking Washington’s bailout window will offer a generation of “masters of the universe” lessons that America’s Mr. Rogers-in-Chief cannot teach: Keep your winnings, but own your losses. If you fall on your face, especially after dancing drunk on the roof, Uncle Sam may empathize, but he no longer will rush in to swaddle you in silk sheets and place your bruised head on pillows stuffed with crisp $100 bills.

Other options exist, of course — and while they lack the bracing appeal of this sort of financial Darwinism, they remain far more attractive than our current policy of “survival of the fattest.”

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Asia Times Online :: Asian News, Business and Economy.

How Obama lost the election
By Spengler

DENVER - Senator Barack Obama's acceptance speech last week seemed vastly different from the stands of this city's Invesco Stadium than it did to the 40 million who saw it on television. Melancholy hung like thick smog over the reserved seats where I sat with Democratic Party staffers. The crowd, of course, cheered mechanically at the tag lines, flourished placards, and even rose for the obligatory wave around the stadium. But its mood was sour. The air carried the acrid smell of defeat, and the crowd took shallow breaths. Even the appearance of R&B great Stevie Wonder failed to get the blood pumping. ..."

Excelent article picked up by Rush Limbaugh 9/09/08

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Obama Should Come Clean On Ayers, Rezko And the Iraqi Billionaire - WSJ.com

good summary of the marxist and corrupt friends

Tags: obama, kurtz, ayers, rezco, auchi, politics, marxism, liberty, wsj on 2008-08-30 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Who Framed George Lakoff? - ChronicleReview.com

<i>...cognitive linguistics, that is reshaping our understanding of the complex relationship between language and thought. More recently he has been vying for respect among people notoriously hard to persuade about anything — politicians and their financial backers. So this summer he has been on the road promoting his new book, The Political Mind: Why You Can't Understand 21st-Century American Politics With an 18th-Century Brain (Viking), which argues that liberals have clung to the false belief that people think in a conscious, logical, and unemotional manner and that this belief has doomed Democrats' chances with voters.</i>

Excellent discussion on how to "frame" the objects of an argument so that your argument prevails

Tags: lakoff, cognitive-linguistics, politics on 2008-08-13 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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the idea of "frame semantics" — the theory that words automatically bring to mind bundles of ideas, narratives, emotions, and images. He called those related concepts "frames," and he posited that they are strengthened when certain words and phrases are repeated. That suggested that language arises from neural circuitry linking many distinct areas of the brain. In other words, language can't be studied independently of the brain and body. Lakoff concluded that linguistics must take into account cognitive science.
Democrats, Lakoff bemoans, have persisted in an old-fashioned assumption that facts, figures, and detailed policy prescriptions win elections.
Republicans have been quick to realize that the way people think calls for placing emotional and moral appeals at the center of campaign strategy.
In that sea, which Lakoff calls "the cognitive unconscious," most people's ideas about morality and politics are formed.
"Enlightenment reason," the belief that reason is conscious, logical, and unemotional. Harnessing together work from several fields, particularly psychology, neuroscience, and linguistics, he mounts a polemical assault on the notion that people think rationally — which, he argues, is fundamentally at odds with how the brain actually functions.

American Thinker: Obama's Anger

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EU-IDABC ODEF Workshop 2007 in Berlin - Documentation - presentations

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Microsoft's 'Men in Black' kill Florida open standards legislation

Tags: odf, odf-legislation, officeopenxml, ooxml, opendocument, openxml, politics on 2007-06-21 -All Annotations (0) -About

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GullFOSS: It's our way or the highway. So what if new cool features = Zero Interop? Download OOo and get over it already!

Tags: california, davinci, interop, iso, massachusetts, oasis, odef, odf, ooxml, opendocument, politics, xml on 2007-06-10 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Make no mistake about it. Microsoft is absolutely right about three things:

.... Compatibility with existing file formats is not an ODF concern.

.... Sun controls the OASIS ODF TC.

.... Sun makes certain that ODF is bound tightly to the OpenOffice feature set.

Sun's view of interoperability is that of a one way street. Documents can be converted into ODF-OOo/SO, but they are guaranteed to break during any kind of document routing or round tripping.

This is also the reason why the Sun "external" plugin for MSOffice fails. One way conversion simply isn't enough to crack the hold MSOffice has on critical day to day business processes. The only way to that is with a conversion process able to maintain high level fidelity while round tripping.

As the EU IDABC has figured out, the ODF-OOo/SO specification is loaded with interoperability break points. That's why they are turning to ODEF, which can be seen as a version of ODF that is truly application independent and optimized for interoperability.

~ge~
post by garyedwards on 2007-06-10
The chuckleheads at Sun's StarOffice/OpenOffice Hamburg office respond to Florian's comprehensive lis tof suggestions to greatly improve ODF interoperability.
post by garyedwards on 2007-06-05

When such new features that enhance the interoperability require enhancements to the Open Document file format we will propose the necessary changes to the OASIS Open Document TC. This way not only OpenOffice.org but also Open Document benefits from our efforts. Florian Reuter, who now works for Novell, lists some of the changes we have in mind in his blog . So there are a lot of common ideas how we can improve the interoperability between OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Word documents and I hope we can work together with Florian here.

Gary Edwards's Bookmarks tagged politics → View Popular

Biden-Palin: An Unhealthy Debate by Yuval Levin on National Review Online

www.rightchange.com - Home

Stratfor - Geopolitical intelligence, economic, political, and military strategic forecasting | Stratfor

American Thinker: Wrecks, Lies and Barney Frank

American Thinker: Time for McCain to Name Names

naked capitalism: Martin Feldstein Calls a Downturn, Takes Issue With Government Statistics

Martin Feldstein: Bail-out must address negative equity. Loan-substitution program could help | Population & Demographics > Demographic Groups from AllBusiness.com

Jeffrey Miron, Economist: Bankruptcy, not bailout, is the right answer - CNN.com

ACORN, Obama and the Mortgage Mess: Guilty Party by Mona Charen on National Review Online

Obama's Leftism - WSJ.com

Do you oppose the $700 billion Wall Street bailout? Click here | Politics and Law - CNET News

The Public Deserves a Better Deal - WSJ.com

Stop the Socialist Spendathon by Deroy Murdock on National Review Online

Asia Times Online :: Asian News, Business and Economy.

Obama Should Come Clean On Ayers, Rezko And the Iraqi Billionaire - WSJ.com

Who Framed George Lakoff? - ChronicleReview.com

American Thinker: Obama's Anger

EU-IDABC ODEF Workshop 2007 in Berlin - Documentation - presentations

Microsoft's 'Men in Black' kill Florida open standards legislation

GullFOSS: It's our way or the highway. So what if new cool features = Zero Interop? Download OOo and get over it already!

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