Dirty Democrats

“Advice”: “

John McCain has decided to attack Barack Obama on his connections to Fannie Mae CEO Franklin Raines.  With Obama attempting to pass off McCain as a newcomer to the Hope-Change Express, McCain points out Obama’s complete lack of economic experience — and points out that his adviser has a great deal of responsibility for Fannie Mae’s insolvency:

Obama has no background in economics. Who advises him? The Post says it’s Franklin Raines, for “advice on mortgage and housing policy.”

Shocking.

Under Raines, Fannie Mae committed “extensive financial fraud.” Raines made millions. Fannie Mae collapsed.

Taxpayers? Stuck with the bill.

Barack Obama. Bad advice. Bad instincts. Not ready to lead.

Team McCain knows that this will be a big problem for voters looking for a change in Washington.  Raines, and Obama’s other Fannie Mae advisor Jim Johnson, are exactly the kind of CEOs and big shots that Obama usually demonizes on the campaign trail.  They took exorbitant salaries and ran Fannie into the ground.

Here are a few articles of interest about Raines from the Washington Post:

• March 2005: Perverse executive pay forced Raines out of his job.
• May 2006: Extensive fraud at Fannie Mae under Raines’ direction, generating over $50 million in bonuses for nonexistent growth.
• April 2008: Raines gives up $24 million in future payouts to avoid criminal charges in Fannie Mae fraud, although most of that was in worthless options; he pays $2 million in cash.

Note that Raines continued to advise Obama even after that settlement.  It’s not as though Obama didn’t know Raines’ past.  Apparently, he just didn’t care.

Excellent ad.  McCain needs to expand on this.

Update: JWF has the Obama response, which falls back on the “seven houses” meme:

This is another flat-out lie from a dishonorable campaign that is increasingly incapable of telling the truth. Frank Raines has never advised Senator Obama about anything — ever. And by the way, someone whose campaign manager and top advisor worked and lobbied for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac shouldn’t be throwing stones from his seven glass houses.

Uh-huh.  By the way, it wasn’t the McCain campaign that “smeared” Obama, but also the Washington Post:

• 7/16/08: “In the four years since he stepped down as Fannie Mae’s chief executive under the shadow of a $6.3 billion accounting scandal, Franklin D. Raines has been quietly constructing a new life for himself. He has shaved eight points off his golf handicap, taken a corner office in Steve Case’s D.C. conglomeration of finance, entertainment and health-care companies and more recently, taken calls from Barack Obama’s presidential campaign seeking his advice on mortgage and housing policy matters.”
• 8/28/08: “In the current crisis, their biggest backers have been Democrats such as Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher J. Dodd (Conn.) and House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (Mass.). Two members of Mr. Obama’s political circle, James A. Johnson and Franklin D. Raines, are former chief executives of Fannie Mae.“

Team Obama never objected to this reporting before tonight.  Jim Johnson will almost certainly get the next starring role in a McCain ad, and what will Obama have to say about the man he originally tapped to pick his running mate?

The 109th Congress has become the focus of hindsight in the financial meltdown of the past few days.  With perhaps as much as one trillion dollars in federal funds in play for bailouts under a Bush administration proposal, people want to know why no one saw this coming before now.  As Kevin Hassett reports at Bloomberg, Congress had an opportunity to force better practices on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, but some familiar names failed to act:

It is easy to identify the historical turning point that marked the beginning of the end.

Back in 2005, Fannie and Freddie were, after years of dominating Washington, on the ropes. They were enmeshed in accounting scandals that led to turnover at the top. At one telling moment in late 2004, captured in an article by my American Enterprise Institute colleague Peter Wallison, the Securities and Exchange Comiission’s chief accountant told disgraced Fannie Mae chief Franklin Raines that Fannie’s position on the relevant accounting issue was not even “on the page” of allowable interpretations.

Then legislative momentum emerged for an attempt to create a “world-class regulator” that would oversee the pair more like banks, imposing strict requirements on their ability to take excessive risks. Politicians who previously had associated themselves proudly with the two accounting miscreants were less eager to be associated with them. The time was ripe.

Alan Greenspan told Congress that they needed to act, and quickly:

If Fannie and Freddie “continue to grow, continue to have the low capital that they have, continue to engage in the dynamic hedging of their portfolios, which they need to do for interest rate risk aversion, they potentially create ever-growing potential systemic risk down the road,” he said. “We are placing the total financial system of the future at a substantial risk.”

What happened?  Despite moves from Republicans such as Chuck Hagel, John Sununu, Elizabeth Dole, and John McCain to get more regulatory oversight on Fannie and Freddie, Congress took no action.  Why?  Fannie and Freddie had already co-opted Chris Dodd with over $130,000 in campaign contributions over 20 years, and over $120,000 to Barack Obama over less than four years.  Hillary Clinton  took tens of thousands in eight years, and Chuck Schumer also opposed any new regulation on markets that Congress had forced open.

We can play blame games for the next several months and years, but what would be the point?  In this case, there is a point, and it couldn’t be more clear or important.  We have two candidates running for President who would bring much different styles to executive authority over regulatory responsibility.  Barack Obama and his allies took the money and stayed on the sidelines rather than take proactive action to resolve the credit crisis.  McCain and his co-sponsors of this bill had the right idea and instincts, but could not get any cooperation from Clinton, Schumer, or Obama.

Does this mean that Obama gets the entire blame for the financial crisis?  Of course not; it’s shared among many people who failed to act, and some who acted poorly to create the problem in the first place by mandating loans to ill-qualified lenders and then allowed those loans to form the basis of widely-traded securities.  McCain doesn’t become the sole protagonist in this morality play, either.  However, this demonstrates the qualities of both judgment and leadership of both men — and those two qualities are critical for determining which man should be running the executive branch for the next four years.

MSNBC: Biden’s earmarks a “legitimate” issue: “

Maybe this is Bizarro MS-NBC, or perhaps this is what happens when media outlets stop using partisan hacks as news anchors. David Schuster and James Popkin take a closer look at Joe Biden and his earmarks, which Biden has refused to itemize prior to this year — when he’s requested over $340 million in pork. Instead of an Olbermann rationalization about Biden’s earmarks somehow having the power to transform America when combined with Obamessiah-y goodness, Popkin and Schuster note the staggering hypocrisy between Barack Obama’s primary rhetoric and his defense of his running mate now:

DAVID SCHUSTER: As far as Democrat Joe Biden, the GOP has a clock running on their website counting the minutes since Republicans first called on Biden to release his earmarks, over 9 days and 23 hours. He has released his earmarks for this year but not previous. Where does Joe Biden stand on earmarks?

JIM POPKIN: Well, Joe Biden also has been an active participant in the earmark game. Just this year alone, he disclosed that he’s requested $342 million in earmarks. And what the McCain campaign, the GOP, is asking for is a more fulsome list. He’s been in Congress since 1972 and they’re asking for a list dating back over those 3 decades; his entire list of earmark requests which presumably would be much higher than the $342 million that he’s acknowledged just this year alone.

SCHUSTER: And it’s so interesting because just this past week the Washington Times wrote, in March when Mr. Obama released his 2005 and 2006 earmark requests, his communications director called on then-rival Senator Hillary Clinton to do the same. “If Senator Clinton will not agree in joining Senator Obama will not releasing her earmark requests, voters should ask why she doesn’t believe they have the right to know.” So, Jim, why doesn’t the Obama campaign believe voters have right to know about Joe Biden?

POPKIN: You know, I think it may be a legitimate question to ask. I don’t know if — any of these folks should be throwing stones. I will say, however, that Senator McCain has always said that he has never asked for any earmarks, and one of the major nonprofit groups that looks at earmarks took a look at a list that the Obama campaign prepared on some– I’ll call them alleged requests back from the early ’90s and could find kind of no compelling evidence that McCain had ever requested or received any earmarks for his state.

SCHUSTER: NBC’s Jim Popkin, thanks for coming on. Great stuff as always, we appreciate it.

Hammering Joe Biden. Acquitting John McCain. Calling out Obama for hypocrisy. Are we sure we dialed into the right cable news network?

The Obama-Ayers connection: Chicago Annenberg Challenge: “

Stanley Kurtz tried to force the University of Illinois at Chicago to open its records on a publicly-funded project, and for his journalistic effort got called a “smear merchant” and “character assassin” by Barack Obama and his campaign.  They didn’t want reporters snooping through the records of the Chicago Annenberg Project, Obama’s one claim to executive experience — and the years that belie Obama’s characterization of former domestic terrorist William Ayers as nothing more than a neighbor and an acquaintance.  Kurtz discovers a long working relationship between the two on a project designed to spread radical political thought by essentially feeding it to schoolchildren under the guise of educational reform:

CAC translated Mr. Ayers’s radicalism into practice. Instead of funding schools directly, it required schools to affiliate with “external partners,” which actually got the money. Proposals from groups focused on math/science achievement were turned down. Instead CAC disbursed money through various far-left community organizers, such as the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (or Acorn).

Mr. Obama once conducted “leadership training” seminars with Acorn, and Acorn members also served as volunteers in Mr. Obama’s early campaigns. External partners like the South Shore African Village Collaborative and the Dual Language Exchange focused more on political consciousness, Afrocentricity and bilingualism than traditional education. CAC’s in-house evaluators comprehensively studied the effects of its grants on the test scores of Chicago public-school students. They found no evidence of educational improvement.

CAC also funded programs designed to promote “leadership” among parents. Ostensibly this was to enable parents to advocate on behalf of their children’s education. In practice, it meant funding Mr. Obama’s alma mater, the Developing Communities Project, to recruit parents to its overall political agenda. CAC records show that board member Arnold Weber was concerned that parents “organized” by community groups might be viewed by school principals “as a political threat.” Mr. Obama arranged meetings with the Collaborative to smooth out Mr. Weber’s objections.

The Daley documents show that Mr. Ayers sat as an ex-officio member of the board Mr. Obama chaired through CAC’s first year. He also served on the board’s governance committee with Mr. Obama, and worked with him to craft CAC bylaws. Mr. Ayers made presentations to board meetings chaired by Mr. Obama. Mr. Ayers spoke for the Collaborative before the board. Likewise, Mr. Obama periodically spoke for the board at meetings of the Collaborative.

First off, we should note what this isn’t.  It’s not a smoking gun revealing criminal activity, and not a precursor to an armed overthrow of American government, although Ayers has done both in his lifetime and still talks approvingly of at least the latter.  The program outlined by Kurtz breaks no laws, and Kurtz never claims otherwise.

However, Kurtz’ report provides a very interesting look at the early political life of Barack Obama.  He had already entered politics at the time he joined the CAC, and even at that stage had allied himself with ACORN, which has found itself at the center of more than a dozen voter-fraud investigations.  Obama also allied himself with Ayers and helped the former Weather Underground fugitive push forward with his plans to radicalize an entire generation of schoolchildren in the area through the CAC.  Note well the parallels to community organizing that play out in the activities of the CAC, and recall again how Obama claims that activity as a major qualification for the presidency.

Ayers wanted teachers trained to instruct against “oppression” and to push schoolchildren towards political beliefs Ayers valued — apparently valuing them higher than actual education.  Barack Obama agreed, and for several years worked in close partnership with Ayers to implement that educational policy.  Even had Ayers never tossed a single bomb, this kind of educational philosophy would likely raise eyebrows with most parents, who desire a real education for their children and not some sort of political indoctrination camp.  With the context of Ayers’ violent radicalism, however, it makes the CAC even worse — a breeding ground for future Weathermen, ready to follow Ayers’ lead when the time comes for the revolution that Ayers and his wife (and co-terrorist) Bernardine Dohrn to this day desire.

Barack Obama not only supported this, he helped run this program for several years.  What does that say about Obama’s idea of mainstream, as he has repeatedly described Ayers and Dohrn?  What does that say about his own politics, his own ideas on education, and what kind of philosophy he brings to American politics?

Update: Steve Diamond notes other, more political aspects of the Obama-Ayers relationship, and says the CAC was part of a campaign to fight Mayor Ruchard Daley and the teachers’ unions for control of the schools:

Ironically, while Kurtz wants to tar Obama with the red paint brush of the 60s “radical” Ayers, an understanding of the real purpose of the CAC indicates a much closer political alliance between Obama and Ayers.

The grant application itself and much of what the CAC was up to emerged in the heated “Chicago School Wars” underway in that city from the late 1980s until the late 1990s. This war was for the control of Chicago’s public schools.

One side in this war was controlled by Mayor Richard M. Daley, Jr., son of the legendary Mayor Daley.

And the other side was led by Ayers and a small group of reformers that had emerged several years earlier in 1988 during a battle to create a new power center in the Chicago schools, the so-called Local School Councils, or LSCs. The LSCs were an effort to rein in the power of unionized teachers, school principals and school administrators, in the wake of an unpopular teachers’ strike in 1987.

This milieu around Ayers also included, as far back as the late 80s, Barack Obama and the Developing Communities Project (DCP) that had hired Obama as its Executive Director in 1985. The DCP was a leading participant in the campaign to establish the LSCs.

Thus, in fact, the “radical” Bill Ayers and his ally Barack Obama, a Democratic political activist and lawyer on the rise in Chicago, were engaged in an anti-union effort to influence the direction and nature of the entire Chicago public school system. It would lead them into a battle with Mayor Daley himself.

Read the whole post. I have a little skepticism about this, though, since Obama allied himself politically with both the educational unions and Daley during this same period of time. If Obama was at war with Daley and the unions, neither side acted much like it — and Daley has publicly defended William Ayers on more than one occasion.

Sins of Omission?: ”

It’s politics as usual as the Left’s media stooges are continuing their assault on Sarah Palin. From Newsbusters:

A transcript of the unedited interview of Sarah Palin by Charles Gibson clearly shows that ABC News edited out crucial portions of the interview that showed Palin as knowledgeable or presented her answers out of context. This unedited transcript of the first of the Gibson interviews with Palin is available on radio host Mark Levin’s website. The sections edited out by ABC News are in bold. The first edit shows Palin responding about meeting with foreign leaders but this was actually in response to a question Gibson asked several questions earlier:

GIBSON: Have you ever met a foreign head of state?

PALIN: There in the state of Alaska, our international trade activities bring in many leaders of other countries.

GIBSON: And all governors deal with trade delegations.

PALIN: Right.

GIBSON: Who act at the behest of their governments.

PALIN: Right, right.

GIBSON: I’m talking about somebody who’s a head of state, who can negotiate for that country. Ever met one?

PALIN: I have not and I think if you go back in history and if you ask that question of many vice presidents, they may have the same answer that I just gave you. But, Charlie, again, we’ve got to remember what the desire is in this nation at this time. It is for no more politics as usual and somebody’s big, fat resume maybe that shows decades and decades in that Washington establishment, where, yes, they’ve had opportunities to meet heads of state … these last couple of weeks … it has been overwhelming to me that confirmation of the message that Americans are getting sick and tired of that self-dealing and kind of that closed door, good old boy network that has been the Washington elite.

Next we see that Palin was not nearly as hostile towards Russia as was presented in the edited interview:

GIBSON: Let me ask you about some specific national security situations.

PALIN: Sure.

GIBSON: Let’s start, because we are near Russia, let’s start with Russia and Georgia.

The administration has said we’ve got to maintain the territorial integrity of Georgia. Do you believe the United States should try to restore Georgian sovereignty over South Ossetia and Abkhazia?

PALIN: First off, we’re going to continue good relations with Saakashvili there. I was able to speak with him the other day and giving him my commitment, as John McCain’s running mate, that we will be committed to Georgia. And we’ve got to keep an eye on Russia. For Russia to have exerted such pressure in terms of invading a smaller democratic country, unprovoked, is unacceptable and we have to keep…

GIBSON: You believe unprovoked.

PALIN: I do believe unprovoked and we have got to keep our eyes on Russia, under the leadership there. I think it was unfortunate. That manifestation that we saw with that invasion of Georgia shows us some steps backwards that Russia has recently taken away from the race toward a more democratic nation with democratic ideals. That’s why we have to keep an eye on Russia.

And, Charlie, you’re in Alaska. We have that very narrow maritime border between the United States, and the 49th state, Alaska, and Russia. They are our next door neighbors.We need to have a good relationship with them. They’re very, very important to us and they are our next door neighbor.

GIBSON: What insight into Russian actions, particularly in the last couple of weeks, does the proximity of the state give you?

PALIN: They’re our next door neighbors and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska, from an island in Alaska.

GIBSON: What insight does that give you into what they’re doing in Georgia?

PALIN: Well, I’m giving you that perspective of how small our world is and how important it is that we work with our allies to keep good relation with all of these countries, especially Russia. We will not repeat a Cold War. We must have good relationship with our allies, pressuring, also, helping us to remind Russia that it’s in their benefit, also, a mutually beneficial relationship for us all to be getting along.

We also see from Palin’s following remark, which was also edited out, that she is far from some sort of latter day Cold Warrior which the edited interview made her seem to be:

We cannot repeat the Cold War. We are thankful that, under Reagan, we won the Cold War, without a shot fired, also. We’ve learned lessons from that in our relationship with Russia, previously the Soviet Union.

We will not repeat a Cold War. We must have good relationship with our allies, pressuring, also, helping us to remind Russia that it’s in their benefit, also, a mutually beneficial relationship for us all to be getting along.

Palin’s extended remarks about defending our NATO allies were edited out to make it seem that she was ready to go to war with Russia.

GIBSON: And under the NATO treaty, wouldn’t we then have to go to war if Russia went into Georgia?

PALIN: Perhaps so. I mean, that is the agreement when you are a NATO ally, is if another country is attacked, you’re going to be expected to be called upon and help.

But NATO, I think, should include Ukraine, definitely, at this point and I think that we need to — especially with new leadership coming in on January 20, being sworn on, on either ticket, we have got to make sure that we strengthen our allies, our ties with each one of those NATO members.

We have got to make sure that that is the group that can be counted upon to defend one another in a very dangerous world today.

GIBSON: And you think it would be worth it to the United States, Georgia is worth it to the United States to go to war if Russia were to invade.

PALIN: What I think is that smaller democratic countries that are invaded by a larger power is something for us to be vigilant against. We have got to be cognizant of what the consequences are if a larger power is able to take over smaller democratic countries.

And we have got to be vigilant. We have got to show the support, in this case, for Georgia. The support that we can show is economic sanctions perhaps against Russia, if this is what it leads to.

It doesn’t have to lead to war and it doesn’t have to lead, as I said, to a Cold War, but economic sanctions, diplomatic pressure, again, counting on our allies to help us do that in this mission of keeping our eye on Russia and Putin and some of his desire to control and to control much more than smaller democratic countries.

His mission, if it is to control energy supplies, also, coming from and through Russia, that’s a dangerous position for our world to be in, if we were to allow that to happen.

That answer presented Palin as a bit too knowledgeable for the purposes of ABC News and was, of course, edited out. Palin’s answers about a nuclear Iran were carefully edited to the point where she was even edited out in mid-sentence to make it seem that Palin favored unilateral action against that country:

GIBSON: Let me turn to Iran. Do you consider a nuclear Iran to be an existential threat to Israel?

PALIN: I believe that under the leadership of Ahmadinejad, nuclear weapons in the hands of his government are extremely dangerous to everyone on this globe, yes.

GIBSON: So what should we do about a nuclear Iran? John McCain said the only thing worse than a war with Iran would be a nuclear Iran. John Abizaid said we may have to live with a nuclear Iran. Who’s right?

PALIN: No, no. I agree with John McCain that nuclear weapons in the hands of those who would seek to destroy our allies, in this case, we’re talking about Israel, we’re talking about Ahmadinejad’s comment about Israel being the ‘stinking corpse, should be wiped off the face of the earth,’ that’s atrocious. That’s unacceptable.

GIBSON: So what do you do about a nuclear Iran?

PALIN: We have got to make sure that these weapons of mass destruction, that nuclear weapons are not given to those hands of Ahmadinejad, not that he would use them, but that he would allow terrorists to be able to use them. So we have got to put the pressure on Iran and we have got to count on our allies to help us, diplomatic pressure.

GIBSON: But, Governor, we’ve threatened greater sanctions against Iran for a long time. It hasn’t done any good. It hasn’t stemmed their nuclear program.

PALIN: We need to pursue those and we need to implement those. We cannot back off. We cannot just concede that, oh, gee, maybe they’re going to have nuclear weapons, what can we do about it. No way, not Americans. We do not have to stand for that.

Laughably, a remark by Gibson that indicated he agreed with Palin was edited out:

PALIN: But the reference there is a repeat of Abraham Lincoln’s words when he said — first, he suggested never presume to know what God’s will is, and I would never presume to know God’s will or to speak God’s words.

But what Abraham Lincoln had said, and that’s a repeat in my comments, was let us not pray that God is on our side in a war or any other time, but let us pray that we are on God’s side.

That’s what that comment was all about, Charlie. And I do believe, though, that this war against extreme Islamic terrorists is the right thing. It’s an unfortunate thing, because war is hell and I hate war, and, Charlie, today is the day that I send my first born, my son, my teenage son overseas with his Stryker brigade, 4,000 other wonderful American men and women, to fight for our country, for democracy, for our freedoms.

Charlie, those are freedoms that too many of us just take for granted. I hate war and I want to see war ended. We end war when we see victory, and we do see victory in sight in Iraq.

GIBSON: I take your point about Lincoln’s words, but you went on and said, ‘There is a plan and it is God’s plan.’

Gibson took her point about Lincoln’s words but we wouldn’t know that by watching the interview since it was left on the cutting room floor. I urge everybody to see just how the unedited version of the first interview compared to what we saw on television by checking out the full transcript. It is a fascinating look into media manipulation via skillful editing.

—P.J. Gladnick is a freelance writer and creator of the DUmmie FUnnies blog.

H/T – Semperlost

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(Via Lone Star Times.)

Video: Who’s responsible for the Fannie and Freddie mess?: