Pink Floyd on Government Education

After blogging about the death of Rick Wright, I've decided to blog about Pink Floyd a bit further by noting that the band is heavily anti-government, particularly in the area of government education. This is one of the best lyrics from The Wall (which inspired that excellent surrealistic movie of the rock opera of the same name).

Here's some of the band's best anti-government lyrics on government schooling by Roger Waters, taken from the song "Another Brick in the Wall" (which is a three-part tune featured on The Wall):

We don't need no education
We dont need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the classroom
Teachers leave them kids alone
Hey! Teachers! Leave them kids alone!
All in all it's just another brick in the wall.
All in all you're just another brick in the wall.

We don't need no education
We dont need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the classroom
Teachers leave them kids alone
Hey! Teachers! Leave them kids alone!
All in all it's just another brick in the wall.
All in all you're just another brick in the wall.

Update: Here are two different versions of the band's music video "Another Brick in the Wall." Please enjoy them; I have.

This one is the original first video clip of the tune:



This second one is a video clip taken from the film version of the rock opera:

Michigan Chapter of ACORN Tied to Voter Fraud in Michigan

Michigan's branch of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), a grassroots political organization allegedly geared towards communities of low- and middle-income people and families totalling over 400,000 members, apparently is in legal hot water with the state. According to a recent Detroit Free Press piece, ACORN has been discovered to have submitted fraudulent and duplicate voter registration forms to state officials. The group, which is based in Detroit, enrolled over 200,000 voter applications with the state with approximately 200,000 paid, part-time employees on its payroll.

Here's the article in its entirety:

September 14, 2008


Bad voter applications found

Clerks see fraudulent, duplicate forms from group

BY L.L. BRASIER
FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER

Several municipal clerks across the state are reporting fraudulent and duplicate voter registration applications, most of them from a nationwide community activist group working to help low- and moderate-income families.

The majority of the problem applications are coming from the group ACORN, Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, which has a large voter registration program among its many social service programs. ACORN's Michigan branch, based in Detroit, has enrolled 200,000 voters statewide in recent months, mostly with the use of paid, part-time employees.

"There appears to be a sizeable number of duplicate and fraudulent applications," said Kelly Chesney, spokeswoman for the Michigan Secretary of State's Office. "And it appears to be widespread."

Chesney said her office has had discussions with ACORN officials after local clerks reported the questionable applications to the state. Chesney said some of the applications are duplicates and some appear to be names that have been made up. The Secretary of State's Office has turned over several of the applications to the U.S. Attorney's Office.

The U.S. Attorney's Office on Friday declined to confirm whether an investigation was taking place.

In recent years, ACORN's voter registration programs have come under investigation in Ohio, Colorado, Missouri and Washington, with some employees convicted of voter fraud.

ACORN officials said they were looking into the problem.

"We'll do an investigation to see what's happening," said David Lagstein, a spokesman for the Detroit office. "If it's really as many as that, it warrants further investigation."

In Pontiac, where several thousand applications have been submitted by ACORN in the last few weeks for the November election, the clerk's office is finding that numerous applications are sometimes filed under one name.

"What it causes is a slowdown of our operations," said Pontiac City Clerk Yvette Talley. "They're steadily coming in, and we are finding a huge number of duplications."

Talley said she could not provide an exact number.

Clerks are required to check their records against a statewide database of all registered voters within their jurisdiction, so it would be unlikely that duplications would allow voters to cast their votes more than once, Talley said.

"We catch them all, but it's taking up a lot of our time," she said.

In Oak Park, clerk Sandra Gadd said they have been seeing "lots of duplication" from ACORN in recent months but were reassured by ACORN officials that the group was working to correct the problem.

"They've been very cooperative," Gadd said. "I spoke with them this week. They called me, and they're willing to go door-to-door to do whatever they have to do to take care of this."

ACORN is the nation's largest community organization for low- and moderate-income families. Created more than 30 years ago, it has branches in 100 cities and claims 350,000 families as members. It works to help create affordable housing and health care, and to improve job conditions and neighborhood schools.

Lagstein said ACORN's Detroit office has hired dozens of employees for the voter registration program and that any problems likely stem from sloppiness or incompetence -- not an intent to let people vote more than once.

"We're proud of our efforts to increase voter registration, and we have aggressive training for our staff to make sure the cards are filled out appropriately," he said.

ACORN has a method to track the workers who filled out individual registration cards, which will allow investigators to question the workers, Lagstein said.

"We certainly do our best to keep the duplications as low as possible, so we'll have to evaluate what's happening here," he said.

Contact L.L. BRASIER at 248-858-2262 or brasier@freepress.com.

The article conveniently leaves out the allegation that Obama is behind the voter fraud with the help of ACORN. Not only that, the Press also leaves out recent investigations into ACORN's voter registration practices in Wisconsin, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and a number of other states. Moreover, Obama's associations with ACORN is said to be very deep.

Now, with all of this information out, is anyone really ecstatic about voting this year, especially in those states?

Hilarious SNL Impersonation of Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton

Check out this hilarious impersonation of Palin (portrayed by Tina Fey) and Hillary Clinton (portrayed by Amy Poehler). SNL was spot on with the idiotic statism of both Palin and Clinton. Even many of Fox News' Palin-McCain sycophants love the skit.

Palin's $600 Million "Other" Bridge Boondoggle

Sarah Palin's public opposition to using state funds for the Alaskan Bridge to Nowhere will be nothing compared to the latest story that's broken today so far. Apparently, Palin supports a bridge being constructed in her home state of Alaska, one that will be connected to her hometown of Wasilla. This state-subsidized boondoggle will cost Alaskan taxpayers approximately $600 million, linking the state's largest city to her home town with a population of 7,000 residents.

Here's more on the story:

Palin supports $600 million 'other' bridge project

By GARANCE BURKE
The Associated Press
Tuesday, September 16, 2008; 6:58 AM



ANCHORAGE, Alaska -- Gov. Sarah Palin may eventually have said "no thanks" to a federally funded Bridge to Nowhere.

But a bridge to her hometown of Wasilla, that's a different story.

A $600 million bridge and highway project to link Alaska's largest city to Palin's town of 7,000 residents is moving full speed ahead, despite concerns the bridge could worsen some commuting and threaten a population of beluga whales.

Local officials already have spent $42 million on plans to route traffic across the Knik Arm inlet, a narrow finger of water extending roughly 25 miles northeast of Anchorage toward Wasilla. The proposal exists thanks to an earmark request by Republican Rep. Don Young, whose son-in-law has a small stake in property near the bridge's proposed western span.

A Democratic council member in Anchorage will try Tuesday to spike the city's sponsorship of the project, which Palin supports with some reservations.

"This is basically an incredibly expensive project that doesn't help commuters, doesn't help create jobs and may drive whales to extinction," said Justin Massey, an attorney advising environmentalists opposed to the proposal. "It is also a project that serves the area where the governor is from, which is near and dear to her heart."

The Knik Arm was one of two bridge proposals in Alaska awarded more than $450 million from lawmakers who requested money for special projects in 2005, when Young chaired the House Transportation Committee. Young, Alaska's 18-term congressman, has said Alaska still lacks basic roads, railroads and bridges that were developed long ago in older and less spacious states.

At the time, Palin's running mate for the Republican ticket, Arizona Sen. John McCain, derided both projects as wasteful. He called Young's highway bill a "monstrosity" that was "terrifying in its fiscal consequences."

"I want no part of this," McCain said in a July 2005 statement. "This legislation is not _ I emphasize not _ my way of legislating."

The governor initially championed the first so-called Bridge to Nowhere, which would have connected the southeastern Alaska town of Ketchikan to its airport on nearby Gravina Island. She later pulled the plug on the project after it became a national symbol of extravagant federal spending.

Palin's record on the Bridge to Nowhere has emerged as a central point of controversy in the campaign over her recent public claims that she had opposed it, aligning herself with McCain's anti-earmarks philosophy.

Palin still supports the second bridge, officially named Don Young's Way in honor of the congressman. She called for a review of the bridge's financing plans and raised concerns about its financial risks for the state. Still, the planning process is marching forward.

"Governor Palin's demand for accountability and transparency around this project is exactly what she has called for across the board to ensure taxpayers' dollars are being used wisely," spokeswoman Maria Comella said.

Dianne Keller, who succeeded Palin as mayor in Wasilla, has said the new $600 million crossing could lower traffic congestion in the fast-growing community. A Federal Highway Administration study shows the project would cut down some area commutes, but could add to others as more people move to the suburbs.

The average commuter trip to work for Wasilla residents is 34 minutes, compared to an average of 25 minutes for the rest of the United States, according to 2000 Census figures, the most recent available.

The bridge is popular with property developers _ including a group comprised of Young's son-in-law, the former legislative director for indicted Republican Sen. Ted Stevens and three others _ who own land across from Anchorage on the inlet's western side.

The National Marine Fisheries Service is evaluating whether the isolated beluga whales that breed and feed in the waterway's strong tides should be listed as endangered under the federal Endangered Species Act. Palin has publicly urged the government not to list Cook Inlet beluga whales as endangered.

Anchorage Assembly members Patrick Flynn and Matt Claman, both Democrats, plan to introduce a proposal to kill the bridge on Tuesday. They argue the money would be better used to set up commuter van pools and fix Alaska's existing highways, some of which are so rutted that cars go skidding off the road.

"She clearly hasn't said 'no thanks' to this particular bridge," Claman said. "If money were not an issue and we had no limits, maybe we'd build a bridge. But this is not a pragmatic or efficient way to spend scarce resources."

So much for Alaska's great governor being a "fiscal conservative," as many of her Republican colleagues, including John McCain, claim she is.

R.I.P. Pink Floyd's Rick Wright

Rick Wright, the founder and keyboardist of the psychedelic and space rock bank Pink Floyd, passed away from an undisclosed type of cancer yesterday. His death has sent an enormous shockwave to the music and entertainment industries, although it's no secret that he had been ill for quite some time.

I remember when I was approximately four or five years old, my brother Brian and his then-girlfriend (now his wife) Barb, both of whom had been high school sweethearts, were heavily into Pink Floyd with their friends. At that time, the band's monstrous hit rock operaThe Wall had already hit the rock music scene, and it already had secured itself a number-one hit entitled "Another Brick in the Wall" in the U.S., the U.K., Germany, and many other countries.

I recall one day, as a young kid, I wandered into my brother's room where Brian, Barb, and their friends were hanging out. I saw them painting the back wall, copying the cover of the band's album. I even partook in it (painting the wall that is), and I do remember them smoking pot in those days. When I first heard the song in that room, I fell in love with it. Obviously, at that age, I didn't exactly understand it, but I loved it. It wasn't until my later years that I came to appreciate the song for its anti-government school, pro-human liberty stand on education.

Thank you, Rick Wright, David Gilmour, and Roger Waters for a wonderful time. It was great. I will never forget that experience for as long as I live.

Here's a great clip of Rick singing a solo version of "Breakthrough," which, as a studio tune, was originally arranged to have another singer on vocals. This is the only time he sang it by himself.

[H/T to Tom Woods of the LRC blog for blogging about this last night.]

The Left Brings Back the Culture War

The biggest problem that the Left, including "libertarian" Real Time host Bill Maher, has is that it has played right into the GOP's hand of demonizing the culture war, which has always been a Republican talking point. Their recent attack of Sarah Palin on her family background (including Bill Maher's obtuse and not-so-funny smear conflating Palin's Down Syndrome-stricken infant son Trig with former Senator John Edwards because of his infamous affair with a campaign employee which he later admitted but denied being the father of her child) and claims that the "lack" of government regulations on Wall Street, corporations, and business in general is tantamount to "lawlessness" and all free markets are inherently evil are just moronic to the nth degree.

As of recent they have been idiotically bashing Palin's retort on Obama's alleged experience as a community organizer, saying, "Well, Jesus Christ was a community organizer and Pontius Pilate was a governor." Come on now! Is this the best they can do in a politically-charged climate, thanks to the government media's over-hyped election season?

Do leftists really want to lose this race? In a predictable fashion the rightist pundits have berated the Left for this, asserting that the liberal talking point per se is highly strange, unnecessary, and implausible. But, as I seem to recall, the Right was doing the same thing when they deified Bush by comparing him and his troops in Iraq to Jesus and His sacrifices, all the while implying that the Democrats were equivalent to Satan. Apparently, as Anthony Gregory pointed out on the LRC blog, there is a clear-cut double standard here, like so many other culture wars.

My advice to the Left is this: please shut up! You're egging on the Right to moan about the culture war, which seems to be its favorite past time. Stop pushing it! Just stop for once!

Fed Finally Bails Out Wall Street

Following the recent fall of the government-subsidized financial industry, the Fed's claim that it wouldn't bail out Wall Street has been short-lived.

NEW YORK: Global markets plummeted on Monday after investment bank Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy protection, rival Merrill Lynch agreed to be taken over and the Federal Reserve threw a life line to the battered financial industry.

As a deepening crisis took new, bigger victims, The U.S. Federal Reserve said for the first time it would accept stocks in exchange for cash loans and 10 of the world's top banks agreed to establish a $70 billion (39 billion pound) emergency fund, with any one of them able to tap up to a third of that.

As always, the government (and the Fed is a big part of it) will willingly continue to process worthless fiat called "money" and disperse loans in its guise. Message to Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke: the problem has nothing to do with liquidity but has everything to do with colossal malinvestments that need to be liquidated.

Shattered AIG

In the wake of the fall of Wall Street's banks, the American International Group (AIG), this ridiculously government-leveraged insurance firm, has been downgraded by Moody's Investor Service from Aa3 to A2 and Standard & Poor's from AA- to A-.

Bloomberg, which reported on this latest move, also points out:

S&P said it cut the rating of the largest U.S. insurer by assets because of a "combination of reduced flexibility in meeting additional collateral needs and concerns over increasing residential mortgage-related losses."

S&P also lowered AIG's short-term counterparty credit rating by two levels to A-2 from the top A-1+ rating, and cut its counterparty credit and financial strength ratings on most of AIG's insurance operating subsidiaries by three notches to A+ from AA+. The ratings remain on watch for a possible further downgrade, S&P said.

I think S&P's rating is highly unrealistic, simply because it's far too moderate. Moody's is somewhat more sensible than S&P's. Here's my rating for AIG: SHATTERED. That seriously destroys the illusion that the government, especially the Fed, can "save" free enterprise. Considering Leviathan and the Fed are not bailing out Merrill Lynch and the Lehman Brothers (or at least those organizations say they won't do it, at least not directly), the people who had those accounts with those banks or had FDIC securants and would have otherwise lost their deposits would have the Fed create that money out of thin air and deposit it into another bank, despite the fact that money had already been created out of thin air in the first place. Interestingly enough, the FDIC has already approached the Treasury and said they need more money because they can't insure all the deposits.

This political and financial quagmire shows the reality of the damage done by the Greenspan-Bernanke boom. How exciting it is to see the Fed and the Treasury being helpless to "save" their biggest subsidized pals!

The Fall of Wall Street's Banks

It now appears that the mortgage and housing crisis is hitting the fan big time. Merrill Lynch, the pro-corporate welfare, pro-state banking and mortgage powerhouse which has been in financial turmoil simply by teetering on bankruptcy, has now been sold to Bank of America for approximately $50 billion in an effort to avert another financial meltdown -- a debacle that has been plaguing the housing, financial, and mortgage industries for quite some time. This comes at the same time that another government-subsidized financial juggernaut Lehman Brothers is looking to bankruptcy protection over its failure to secure a buyer. All of this comes on the heels of Obama and McCain collectively agreeing to a bailout of Freddie Mae and Freddie Mac, another powerhouse that's been on the verge of financial collapse as well.

With Obama and McCain agreeing to "save" Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Merrill Lynch being placed under another government-subsidized banking entity, and Lehman Brothers filing for bankrupty protection, isn't there any wonder that corporatism (or fascism, if you really want to call it) allows allies in the financial and political sectors (including the Republican and Democratic camps) to rob from the poor and give it to the rich? Talk about reverse income redistribution at its worst!

With friends (that is, collusions between government and its politically-connected firms like Bear Sterns, Lehman Brothers, and Merrill Lynch) like those, who needs enemies?

Here's the New York Times piece on the fall in its entirety:

September 15, 2008
After Frantic Day, Wall St. Banks Falter
By ANDREW ROSS SORKIN
This article was reported by Jenny Anderson, Eric Dash and Andrew Ross Sorkin and was written by Mr. Sorkin.

In one of the most dramatic days in Wall Street’s history, Merrill Lynch agreed to sell itself on Sunday to Bank of America for roughly $50 billion to avert a deepening financial crisis, while another prominent securities firm, Lehman Brothers, said it would seek bankruptcy protection and hurtled toward liquidation after it failed to find a buyer.

The humbling moves, which reshape the landscape of American finance, mark the latest chapter in a tumultuous year in which once-proud financial institutions have been brought to their knees as a result of hundreds of billions of dollars in losses because of bad mortgage finance and real estate investments.

But even as the fates of Lehman and Merrill hung in the balance, another crisis loomed as the insurance giant American International Group appeared to teeter. Staggered by losses stemming from the credit crisis, A.I.G. sought a $40 billion lifeline from the Federal Reserve, without which the company may have only days to survive.

The stunning series of events culminated a weekend of frantic around-the-clock negotiations, as Wall Street bankers huddled in meetings at the behest of Bush administration officials to try to avoid a downward spiral in the markets stemming from a crisis of confidence.

“My goodness. I’ve been in the business 35 years, and these are the most extraordinary events I’ve ever seen,” said Peter G. Peterson, co-founder of the private equity firm the Blackstone Group, who was head of Lehman in the 1970s and a secretary of commerce in the Nixon administration.

It remains to be seen whether the sale of Merrill, which was worth more than $100 billion during the last year, and the controlled demise of Lehman will be enough to finally turn the tide in the yearlong financial crisis that has crippled Wall Street and threatened the broader economy.

Early Monday morning, Lehman said it would file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in New York for its holding company in what would be the largest failure of an investment bank since the collapse of Drexel Burnham Lambert 18 years ago, the Associated Press reported.

Questions remain about how the market will react Monday, particularly to Lehman’s plan to wind down its trading operations, and whether other companies, like A.I.G. and Washington Mutual, the nation’s largest savings and loan, might falter.

Indeed, in a move that echoed Wall Street’s rescue of a big hedge fund a decade ago this week, 10 major banks agreed to create an emergency fund of $70 billion to $100 billion that financial institutions can use to protect themselves from the fallout of Lehman’s failure.

The Fed, meantime, broadened the terms of its emergency loan program for Wall Street banks, a move that could ultimately put taxpayers’ money at risk.

Though the government took control of the troubled mortgage finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac only a week ago, investors have become increasingly nervous about whether major financial institutions can recover from their losses.

How things play out could affect the broader economy, which has been weakening steadily as the financial crisis has deepened over the last year, with unemployment increasing as the nation’s growth rate has slowed.

What will happen to Merrill’s 60,000 employees or Lehman’s 25,000 employees remains unclear. Worried about the unfolding crisis and its potential impact on New York City’s economy, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg canceled a trip to California to meet with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Instead, aides said, Mr. Bloomberg spent much of the weekend working the phones, talking to federal officials and bank executives in an effort to gauge the severity of the crisis.

The weekend that humbled Lehman and Merrill Lynch and rewarded Bank of America, based in Charlotte, N.C., began at 6 p.m. Friday in the first of a series of emergency meetings at the Federal Reserve building in Lower Manhattan.

The meeting was called by Fed officials, with Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. in attendance, and it included top bankers. The Treasury and Federal Reserve had already stepped in on several occasions to rescue the financial system, forcing a shotgun marriage between Bear Stearns and JPMorgan Chase this year and backstopping $29 billion worth of troubled assets — and then agreeing to bail out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

The bankers were told that the government would not bail out Lehman and that it was up to Wall Street to solve its problems. Lehman’s stock tumbled sharply last week as concerns about its financial condition grew and other firms started to pull back from doing business with it, threatening its viability.

Without government backing, Lehman began trying to find a buyer, focusing on Barclays, the big British bank, and Bank of America. At the same time, other Wall Street executives grew more concerned about their own precarious situation.

The fates of Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers would not seem to be linked; Merrill has the nation’s largest brokerage force and its name is known in towns across America, while Lehman’s main customers are big institutions. But during the credit boom both firms piled into risky real estate and ended up severely weakened, with inadequate capital and toxic assets.

Knowing that investors were worried about Merrill, John A. Thain, its chief executive and an alumnus of Goldman Sachs and the New York Stock Exchange, and Kenneth D. Lewis, Bank of America’s chief executive, began negotiations. One person briefed on the negotiations said Bank of America had approached Merrill earlier in the summer but Mr. Thain had rebuffed the offer. Now, prompted by the reality that a Lehman bankruptcy would ripple through Wall Street and further cripple Merrill Lynch, the two parties proceeded with discussions.

On Sunday morning, Mr. Thain and Mr. Lewis cemented the deal. It could not be determined if Mr. Thain would play a role in the new company, but two people briefed on the negotiations said they did not expect him to stay. Merrill’s “thundering herd” of 17,000 brokers will be combined with Bank of America’s smaller group of wealth advisers and called Merrill Lynch Wealth Management.

For Bank of America, which this year bought Countrywide Financial, the troubled mortgage lender, the purchase of Merrill puts it at the pinnacle of American finance, making it the biggest brokerage house and consumer banking franchise.

Bank of America eventually pulled out of its talks with Lehman after the government refused to take responsibility for losses on some of Lehman’s most troubled real-estate assets, something it agreed to do when JP Morgan Chase bought Bear Stearns to save it from a bankruptcy filing in March.

A leading proposal to rescue Lehman would have divided the bank into two entities, a “good bank” and a “bad bank.” Under that scenario, Barclays would have bought the parts of Lehman that have been performing well, while a group of 10 to 15 Wall Street companies would have agreed to absorb losses from the bank’s troubled assets, to two people briefed on the proposal said. Taxpayer money would not have been included in such a deal, they said.

Other Wall Street banks also balked at the deal, unhappy at facing potential losses while Bank of America or Barclays walked away with the potentially profitable part of Lehman at a cheap price.

For Lehman, the end essentially came Sunday morning when its last potential suitor, Barclays, pulled out from a deal, saying it could not obtain a shareholder vote to approve a transaction before Monday morning, something required under London Stock Exchange listing rules, one person close to the matter said. Other people involved in the talks said the Financial Services Authority, the British securities regulator, had discouraged Barclays from pursuing a deal. Peter Truell, a spokesman for Barclays, declined to comment. Lehman’s subsidiaries were expected to remain solvent while the firm liquidates its holdings, these people said. Herbert H. McDade III, Lehman’s president, was at the Federal Reserve Bank in New York late Sunday, discussing terms of Lehman’s fate with government officials.

Lehman’s filing is unlikely to resemble those of other companies that seek bankruptcy protection. Because of the harsher treatment that federal bankruptcy law applies to financial-services firms, Lehman cannot hope to reorganize and survive. It was not clear whether the government would appoint a trustee to supervise Lehman’s liquidation or how big the financial backstop would be.

Lehman has retained the law firm Weil, Gotshal & Manges as its bankruptcy counsel.

The collapse of Lehman is a devastating end for Richard S. Fuld Jr., the chief executive, who has led the bank since it emerged from American Express as a public company in 1994. Mr. Fuld, who steered Lehman through near-death experiences in the past, spent the last several days in his 31st floor office in Lehman’s midtown headquarters on the phone from 6 a.m. until well past midnight trying to find save the firm, a person close to the matter said.

A.I.G. will be the next test. Ratings agencies threatened to downgrade A.I.G.’s credit rating if it does not raise $40 billion by Monday morning, a step that would crippled the company. A.I.G. had hoped to shore itself up, in party by selling certain businesses, but potential bidders, including the private investment firms Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and TPG, withdrew at the last minute because the government refused to provide a financial guarantee for the purchase. A.I.G. rejected an offer by another investor, J. C. Flowers & Company.

The weekend’s events indicate that top officials at the Federal Reserve and the Treasury are taking a harder line on providing government support of troubled financial institutions.

While offering to help Wall Street organize a shotgun marriage for Lehman, both the Fed chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, and Mr. Paulson had warned that they would not put taxpayer money at risk simply to prevent a Lehman collapse.

The message marked a major change in strategy but it remained unclear until at least Friday what would happen. “They were faced after Bear Stearns with the problem of where to draw the line,” said Laurence H. Meyer, a former Fed governor who is now vice chairman of Macroeconomic Advisors, a forecasting firm. “It became clear that this piecemeal, patchwork, case-by-case approach might not get the job done.”

Both Mr. Paulson and Mr. Bernanke worried that they had already gone much further than they had ever wanted, first by underwriting the takeover of Bear Stearns in March and by the far bigger bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Outside the public eye, Fed officials had acquired much more information since March about the interconnections and cross-exposure to risk among Wall Street investment banks, hedge funds and traders in the vast market for credit-default swaps and other derivatives. In the end, both Wall Street and the Fed blinked.

Reporting was contributed by Edmund L. Andrews, Eric Dash, Michael Barbaro, Michael J. de la Merced, Louise Story and Ben White.

Sarah Palin: Bush Has Attempted to "Rid This World of Islamic Extremism"

Or says Palin during her first ABC interview last Thursday.

LNC Rejects "Snubgate"

The Libertarian National Committee (LNC) has rejected to remove Bob Barr from its presidential ticket. Apparently this latest story, which broke on IPR tonight and serves as a response to "Snubgate," pertains to the grassroots move to eliminate Barr from the ticket. However, not a single member of the 17-member body was willing to make a motion to vote on it.

Interestingly enough, LNC At-Large Representative Mary Ruwart (who ran for president on the LP's ticket this year and lost to Barr) presented her resolution calling for Barr to "apologize" to Dr. Ron Paul. LNC Treasurer Aaron Starr, who's leading the "pro-Barr faction," counters that with a resolution of his own -- one that berates Paul, simply because Ron didn't hand his endorsement to Barr and is responsible for "splitting the Freedom Movement."

Neither resolution passed, simply due to a lack of adequate votes.

[H/T to IPR for making this report available.]

Sarah Palin's True Colors

One of Sarah Palin's biggest problems is that she tries too hard to be very libertarian on the issues, but she doesn't even accomplish that very well. Her recent two-part interview that she gave to ABC News' Charles Gibson last Thursday should be any indication to libertarians and even many conservatives about her neoconservative, Bush-esque stands on the issues. At first it seemed as though she was very libertarian on a number of issues, including her past support for the Alaskan Independence Party of which she was a member. Not only that, she stood by its advocacy of secession, which is now a matter of public record.

However, if you dig beneath the surface, you'll find that she's not as libertarian as many "libertarians" like Eric Dondero Rittberg and conservatives like Matt Drudge would like you to think she is. Let's be quite blunt about this. She's a social conservative. Her stands on social and some economic issues are hardly pro-freedom; in fact, they're more statist than ever. Her public opposition to abortion, especially in cases of rape and incest, epitomizes that record of hers and is hardly pro-freedom. Another anti-freedom position of hers is that she opposes gay marriage, simply parroting the typical "traditional marriage" conservative line. If she were truly libertarian on the issue, she would have called for government to get out of the marriage industry at the federal and state levels once and for all. But she doesn't do that; thus, that is where her social conservativism goes off the deep end.

When Gibson asked her whether she could tell the country whether she had "the experience" to not only be vice president but perhaps also be president, she bluntly said:

PALIN: I do, Charlie, and on January 20, when John McCain and I are sworn in, and if we are so privileged to be elected to serve this country, we'll be ready. I'm ready.

This statement alone has raised a lot of eyebrows in the political establishment. The fact that she thinks she is "experienced" to do the job as the vice president is troubling on all accounts. No one is qualified to be president or vice president or even hold any political office for that matter. Her brief record as governor, while hailed by many conservatives and libertarians (because of her libertarianesque positions, although they're not as libertarian as they appear to be) and denounced by many liberals (because of her inexperience and her role as a mother of five children), is substandard and mostly bad. Her problem is not that she has too "little experience," but rather too much experience in government. As a newbie and a McCain acolyte, she's learning the political trappings of Washington and its cronies. Is that someone to look up to? Is that something that you would want to aspire to be?

And what is this "privileged" nonsense? What makes her think that John McCain and she "are so privileged" to rule the United States? There's nothing that is "privileged" about it. She is truly learning the political tricks of the trade here. When she talks about "being so privileged," what she really means is that McCain and she are politically adulated and deified to sit on the thrones of the state. In politics, the term "privilege" is a code word for government worship of the rulers by the ruled. There's nothing truly glorious and sacrosanct about this sentiment. She, along with McCain on the GOP, Barack Obama, and his running mate Biden are looking to be graciousy accepted and welcomed by the ruled via the political tools of campaigning. These candidates are nothing more than wanna-be rulers who are coercively ensuring that voters of all stripes partake in this governmental process of "electing their leaders." Moreover, this is especially when the "leaders" (the pluralized term rulers is more like it) are going to win by default, whether the voters get involved in the political process or not.

And this claptrap about "serving the country" needs to be debunked once and for all. Palin, along with McCain, isn't looking to "serve her country" if and when she's elected to the vice presidency. She's looking to have individual Americans "serve" her. This claim that she would be "serving" the nation is far from the truth. She's simply serving the interests of her special interests and buying votes, while putting on an act to make it look as though she cares about "serving" the people. She will impose her political and religious will on individual Americans and support McCain's neoconservative doctrine, especially when it's not even discernible from the Bush Doctrine. After all, she blatantly admitted that she was on board with Bush's insane intervention in Iraq and even a possible intervention in Iran, and she's on especially on board with McCain's plan for miring us in the Iraqi occupation for 100 years. Those actions are in direct contrast to a foreign policy of non-interventionism.

Her concession to not having met foreign heads of state is a double-edge sword, politically speaking. On one hand, it is good that she has never met them, because the less politicians get involved in matters of foreign affairs, the better. While diplomacy is better than war, the real libertarian position is scrap our current foreign policy of interventionism and replace it with one of non-interventionism. On the other hand, since she has never dealt with the foreign policy issue, it shows that her naivete is showing. If she pushes for a pro-war policy and carries out McCain's 100-year war, then the United States will be mired in it neck-deep for decades to come. Even her ignorance on the Bush Doctrine is unsurprising but inexcusable. There's no reason for her not to be aware of what that policy is and how deleterious it has been to our country.

Moreover, her support for the war in Iraq, while not a surprise, is unjustifiable. Her comments to her church's congregation that national leaders are sending our sons and daughters "on a task from God" to Iraq are heavily theocratic. This zealotry coming from her is indicative of the ideological influence coming from the Religious Right base of the GOP. She posits that she is borrowing from what Lincoln said in a similar fashion:

Sir, my concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on God's side, for God is always right. -- Abraham Lincoln.

But Lincoln was talking about the country being on "God's side," not the other way around. He was merely speaking about the War Between the States in a ponderous fashion -- that is, whether the Union should be "on God's side." (Not that Lincoln was innocent, as he, with strong support from the Union, nationalized the railroads and shut down enterprises, including newspapers, that didn't agree with him on the War.) However, this entire talk about the "task from God" is seriously a distraction, because it focuses too much attention away from the real issue: government too much in our lives, in our economy, and in the Middle East and the entire world.

Besides, her fundamentalist religious views have no place in government as much as govenment has any place in the church. Such collusions seriously weaken and harm the separation of church and state. Doesn't she get that at all?

Even her opposition to marijuana, even for medicinal use, showcases her anti-libertarianism on a strong note. (Guess what? She tried and didn't like it, although she did inhale it.) While she was right on refusing to use state monies to complete the construction of the Bridge to Nowhere at a price tag of $398 million, she hypocritically supported the funding initially before Congress pushed for the funding and then came out against it. She didn't even try to "marketize" (truly privatize) the airport to which the bridge would have connected and the ferry boat system, which made access almost impossible. How are any of these stands libertarian at all? They are typical of a staunch social conservative Republican. She even supported taxing windfall profits of oil companies that were looking to do business in Alaska. That's hardly libertarian at all. Plus, the allegation that she fired a Wasilla librarian for removing books is a serious charge. (Even that controversy might not necessarily help McCain and the ticket, but it's a very strong possibility.) However, it shows that government should not be funding libraries, and they ought to be in the province of the free market, not bureaucrats and politicians.

It's obvious that Palin's true colors have been shining brightly. While it was a good political move for McCain to choose her in order to draw away attention from Obama, the Left, and their cronies from behind-the-scenes and in the media, it was a bad philosophical move, because Palin is not going to be against the establishment. Actually, she is the establishment now. Whatever hopes that "limited-government" conservatives might have had simply have gone up in smoke.

Support Comrade Palin and Neo-America!

Someone is having a ball with illustrating the true nature of Sarah Palin and the "Party of the People." For Party, the State, and the Motherland!!!

[H/T to Charles Featherstone of LRC and Mark of Mark a reformed Patriot from whom I got this pic and information.]

WikiNews Covers "Snubgate"

WikiNews, the populist-controlled free news source which is a division of online encyclopedia Wikipedia and is an alternative to the corporate-controlled mainstream media, has just covered the infamous "Snubgate" affair.

It looks like it's not looking good for Bob Barr and his Republicanesque cretins, is it?

[H/T to Tom Knapp of KN@PPSTER and as IPR's LP correspondent who covered this blurb.]

Movement Launched to Remove Barr and Root from LP Presidential Ticket

It seems that there is an enormous amount of pressure to remove LP presidential nominee Bob Barr and LP vice presidential nominee Wayne Allyn Root from the LP ticket, in the aftermath of Barr's stand-up of Ron Paul at his press conference. This pressure is being used to push LNC members to "un-endorse" Barr and Root and either replace them with alternatives or keep the ticket empty. Many proponents of this move are justifying it by saying that this is the only way the LP can be saved after the disastrous snub that Barr handed to Paul last Wednesday morning.

On a grassroots note, an activist has launched an online petition that calls for the removal of Barr and Root from the Party's ticket.

This is what the petition says in its entirety:

We, the supporters of freedom and liberty hereby petition you to immediately remove Bob Barr as the Libertarian Party nominee for President of the United States. Furthermore, we request that he not be replaced by the current vice presidential nominee Wayne Allen Root, but by another, less divisive candidate.

This request is not made lightly, but with much seriousness. The actions, track record, and history of Bob Barr has divided libertarians and other liberty leaning individuals across the nation.

WHEREAS the primary goal and purpose of the Libertarian Party is and has always been not conservatism but liberty,

WHEREAS Robert Barr has, not only refused to participate in the 10 September 2008 press conference of Rep. Ronald Paul of Texas and the Campaign for Liberty but has deliberately sabotaged this event with a false RSVP,

WHEREAS Robert Barr's campaign has simultaneously called for Rep. Ronald Paul of Texas to be its vice presidential candidate and called him a thief, demonstrating either gross incompetence or a deliberate attempt to undermine the drive for liberty,

WHEREAS refusal to participate in a promising avenue for the enlargement of the party and the advancement of the cause of liberty is not in the best interests of the Libertarian Party, and

WHEREAS the Libertarian Party was not founded and does not exist for the aggrandizement of Robert Barr,

WE THE UNDERSIGNED hereby affirm that we are registered voters in the several United States of America, and do petition Robert Barr to step down from his position as candidate of the Libertarian Party for President of the United States; we do petition the Libertarian Party to renounce its support of Robert Barr's candidacy for the office of President of the United States; or both.