Smear videos against Palin linked to Obama campaign

National Defense Examiner: Smear videos against Palin linked to Obama campaign

A series of videos designed to spread lies about the Republican Vice Presidential nominee, Governor Sarah Palin has been connected to a professional Public Relations firm. Those videos also share production qualities used in pro-Obama videos produced by Obama media campaign strategist David Axelrod.

...also compared the smear videos to videos known to have been produced by David Axelrod's media company in support of the Obama campaign. The Jawa Report presents strong evidence that the female voice-over used in the smear videos is the same voice used in all of the Obama campaign videos from Axelrod's company. In addition, the investigators who routinely review jihadist videos for clues have determined that the video and production quality of the smear videos was high and likely done by a professional production company, not a “grassroots” effort.

...Based upon the evidence it appears that Axelrod likely orchestrated the smear campaign providing his media company resources to create the smear videos for the PR firm which launched the viral campaign. It was all meant to look like it came from some where other than the Obama campaign, a prime example of “astroturfing”.

Update: With in minutes of the revelation of this information at The Jawa Report  the smear videos were taken down by the poster on Youtube. Anticipating this, the Jawans made a copy and reposted it.

Evil Republicans' Risky Scheme...

I thought I'd take a shot at doing some analysis of how people would have fared if they had the opportunity to invest their hard-earned social security money in the evil, risky, Republican scheme known as "privatization".

Surely, after recent events, this would show the problems with the plan and how the Democrats "saved" retirement for millions of Americans.

So I entered some data in a spreadsheet (many of you know what a numbers geek I am) and plotted out what has happened since this plan could have taken effect back when President Bush's first fiscal budget when into effect October 1st, 2001.

My calculations involved investing the employee's share (6.2% of their income) for someone making $50,000 per year in an S&P 500 Index fund (considered by many to be representative of "the market"). I did not perform any calculations for the employer's share (another 6.2%) and assumed this would stay in the current social security system. This makes the total "risk" no more than 50% of the funds contributed.

After enduring the "worst economy since Hoover", rising unemployement, an "illegal and expensive war", the collapse of the real estate market and the total failure of some of the biggest financial companies in the world, I was certain that all of this perosn's money would have been flushed down the drain.

What I found was nothing short of amazing. From October 1, 2001 to today's market open, this hypothetical person would have contributed $21,958.33 to their personal account. Their balance today would have been $23,679.20 - a GAIN of $1,720.87. Not much of a gain, mind you - but the amazing thing is this:

This paltry gain in one of the worst economic and stock market environments in our country's history still BEAT the gain that this worker received through the "safe and protected" current version of the Social Security system.

How bad does the current system have to be in order to actually perform WORSE than money invested in the stock market during these horrific events?

Click the graph below for a larger image.

The 5 Richest Senators

The 50 Richest Members of Congress - Roll Call

I'm confused. This can't be right. As I scan the list of the richest Senators, I am somewhat taken a back by the fact that the partyo fo "the working man" seems to be filled with ultra-rich elitists. Someone needs to recalculate.

The 50 Richest Members of Congress

September 22, 2008, 12:00 a.m.
By Paul Singer, Jennifer Yachnin and Casey Hynes
Roll Call Staff

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..Roll Call’s annual attempt to rank the riches of Members of Congress is hampered by one fundamental flaw: It is based on the lawmakers’ financial disclosure forms, which are extraordinarily unreliable sources of information.

The disclosure rules allow Members to report assets in broad categories, so there is no way to tell the difference between a $20 million investment and a $5 million investment. The top category on the Members’ forms is “over $50 million,” so it is impossible to accurately account for anything worth more than that — like a professional sports team, for example. There is also a gaping loophole for assets owned by the Members’ spouse or dependent children; anything worth more than $1 million in value can be reported as “over $1 million.” There is no way to tell whether that is $1.2 million or $1.2 billion.

Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.)
$230.98 million

The Massachusetts Senator claims the mantel of richest Member in the 110th Congress. Kerry’s actual holdings, however — including those of wife Teresa Heinz Kerry, widow to ketchup heir Sen. John Heinz (R-Pa.) — are likely much greater.

In an April 2008 article, Forbes.com estimated Heinz Kerry’s net worth at $1 billion.

Kerry’s disclosure forms list the value of more than 180 assets — including Heinz family trusts and investment funds — only as “over $1 million,” rather than the more specific ranges including $1 million to $5 million. Senators are allowed to list assets in the “over $1 million” category only if the items are held independently by a spouse or dependent child.

Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.)
$80.40 million

A descendant of oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller, the West Virginian’s vast assets remained stable in 2007, as his net worth increased by a little more than 1 percent.

Rockefeller’s fortunes are stored primarily in three blind trusts with JPMorgan Chase & Co., Wachovia Corp. and United National Bank, valued at more than $50 million, $25 million to $50 million, and $5 million to $25 million, respectively.

Another family trust is listed at simply “over $1 million.”

The Senator lists at least $5.5 million in debt on two loans, down from $6.5 million in 2006, when he listed an additional $1 million loan from United National Bank in Charleston, W.Va.

Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.)
$55.33 million

Lautenberg, who made millions from the payroll processing company he created five decades ago, reported that his total minimum assets jumped about 24 percent, from $45 million in 2006, but that number is still not very revealing. Lautenberg’s two biggest assets are two blind trusts that he set up for himself, each worth $5 million to $25 million. Together they count for $10 million of his assets for this list, though they could be worth five times that amount.

The major increase over last year appears to be in his wife’s assets. She has several family trusts in her name, mostly holding real estate, and between 2006 and 2007 she received additional assets from her mother, Lautenberg’s office said.

So in 2006, Lautenberg reported that through an entity called LCBS Corp. his wife held “over $1 million” of Mira Loma Associates, a company holding residential real estate in Riverside, Calif. In 2007, Mira Loma was listed twice at “over $1 million” — once as part of LCBS and once as a separate asset in Bonnie Englebardt Lautenberg’s name. Several of her family trusts also purchased real estate and other assets worth more than $5 million in 2007.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.)
$52.34 million

Together with her husband, financier Richard Blum, Feinstein claims a diversified portfolio that grew by $1.8 million, or an increase of just under 4 percent, since 2006.

The Californian lists assets with her husband that include ownership of all or part of numerous limited partnerships.

Among those, the Blum Family Partners, owned entirely by Blum, claims “over $1 million” in stock in RAE Systems, a manufacturer of chemical and radiation detection equipment. The fund also includes “over $1 million” in a real estate investment trust.

In addition, Feinstein lists a $5 million to $25 million investment in Carlton Hotel Properties in San Francisco and owns condos in both Tahoe City, Calif., and on Kauai in Hawaii, both valued at $1 million to $5 million.

Feinstein also lists at least $2 million in debt to Bank of America for two loans made to Blum Capital Partners.

Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.)
$47.62 million

Much of Kennedy’s wealth stems from family trusts, and the Massachusetts Senator reported almost no change in 2007, with an increase of less than 1 percent.

Kennedy lists one family trust valued from $25 million to $50 million, as well as four trusts worth at least $5 million each and a blind trust totaling at least $1 million.

The Bay State lawmaker also owns a rental property in Hyannisport, Mass., valued at at least $1 million and lists a plot of undeveloped land in Lafayette, La., owned by his wife, worth from $500,000 to $1 million.

Kennedy lists $1 million in mortgage debt from Northern Trust Co. for his Hyannisport property.

The End of a Lie

FrontPage Magazine

With Morton Sobell's recent admission that both he and his comrade Julius Rosenberg were Soviet spies, “the end has arrived for the legions of the American left wing that have argued relentlessly for more than half a century that the Rosenbergs were victims, framed by a hostile, fear-mongering U.S. government.” For decades, the Left has painted the Rosenbergs, along with Alger Hiss and other Soviet spies, as martyrs for civil liberties, sentenced only for their political beliefs and opposition to the bi-partisan Cold War anti-Soviet foreign policy. This is not an issue out of the distant past; rather, the fight over whether they were innocent or guilty is “a crucial part of the ongoing dispute between right and left in this country.”

This is a long read but well worth it for those who would like to learn what the lunatic left has done to this country in its defense of people like these traitors.

How the Democrats Created the Financial Crisis

Bloomberg.com: News by Kevin Hassett

...For the first time in history, a serious Fannie and Freddie reform bill was passed by the Senate Banking Committee. The bill gave a regulator power to crack down, and would have required the companies to eliminate their investments in risky assets.

Different World

If that bill had become law, then the world today would be different. In 2005, 2006 and 2007, a blizzard of terrible mortgage paper fluttered out of the Fannie and Freddie clouds, burying many of our oldest and most venerable institutions. Without their checkbooks keeping the market liquid and buying up excess supply, the market would likely have not existed.

But the bill didn't become law, for a simple reason: Democrats opposed it on a party-line vote in the committee, signaling that this would be a partisan issue. Republicans, tied in knots by the tight Democratic opposition, couldn't even get the Senate to vote on the matter.

That such a reckless political stand could have been taken by the Democrats was obscene even then. Wallison wrote at the time: ``It is a classic case of socializing the risk while privatizing the profit. The Democrats and the few Republicans who oppose portfolio limitations could not possibly do so if their constituents understood what they were doing.''

Mounds of Materials

Now that the collapse has occurred, the roadblock built by Senate Democrats in 2005 is unforgivable. Many who opposed the bill doubtlessly did so for honorable reasons. Fannie and Freddie provided mounds of materials defending their practices. Perhaps some found their propaganda convincing.

But we now know that many of the senators who protected Fannie and Freddie, including Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Christopher Dodd, have received mind-boggling levels of financial support from them over the years.

Throughout his political career, Obama has gotten more than $125,000 in campaign contributions from employees and political action committees of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, second only to Dodd, the Senate Banking Committee chairman, who received more than $165,000.

Clinton, the 12th-ranked recipient of Fannie and Freddie PAC and employee contributions, has received more than $75,000 from the two enterprises and their employees. The private profit found its way back to the senators who killed the fix.

There has been a lot of talk about who is to blame for this crisis. A look back at the story of 2005 makes the answer pretty clear.

Oh, and there is one little footnote to the story that's worth keeping in mind while Democrats point fingers between now and Nov. 4: Senator John McCain was one of the three cosponsors of S.190, the bill that would have averted this mess.

I'm puzzled (not really) by the mainstream media's lack of coverage of these massive campaign contributions to Barack Obama from the folks that created this monumental mess.

Obama steps in it...AGAIN!!!

You just have to love it when you put out an ad criticizing John McCain for saying something and then the person you claim knows more McCain and should be trusted says EXACTLY the same thing! He'll never learn - the way to lead is to lead, not stand by, do nothing and criticize the real leaders.

Paulson voices confidences in U.S. fundamentals

Palin draws crowd of 60,000 in The Villages

Palin draws crowd of 60,000 in The Villages | news-press.com | The News-Press

Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin told wildly cheering, flag-waving, chanting supporters that John McCain is "the only great man in this race" and promised Sunday he will fix the nation's economy if voters give the GOP four more years in the White House.

Can someone please explain...

...how Sarah Palin can draw a crowd of 60,000 people to an appearance and the press photographers present can't get a single picture of the crowd???

Click here to see what they managed to get. You would think since Joe Biden is averaging 2,000 people, that someone would want a picture of 60,000!!! Guess not.

Wonder why?