President Obama Addresses CIA & FBI Employees - I've got your back...

from Investor's Business Daily
by Michael Ramirez

The Right Needs to Play as Dirty as the Left

"Attack rapidly, ruthlessly, viciously, without rest. However tired and hungry you may be, the enemy will be more tired, more hungry. Keep punching." - General George S. Patton

It's time to give them a taste of their own medicine.

May 1, 2009
by John Hawkins
from Pajamas Media

When I was in college, I studied Southern Long Fist Kung Fu for more than a year and my teacher told me something that I never forgot. He said that when you’re being attacked, the aggressor sets the rules and if you want to survive, you have to play by those rules. In other words, if your opponent is trying to cut your head off with a sword while you’re trying not to hurt him, chances are that you’re going to end up dead. This is a lesson that conservatives can and should apply to politics.

Too often today, liberals are using below-the-belt tactics against conservatives and paying no price whatsoever. Meanwhile, those on the right like to pat themselves on the back for being above it all. This is like a boxer priding himself on never taking off his gloves while his opponent nearly beats him to death with his bare firsts. But in the end, there’s not much to be said for lovable losers. Conservatives should realize that fair play isn’t going to pay any dividends.

While we conservatives don’t have to stoop quite as low as the left has, we do need to start giving them a taste of their own medicine, if only to make them think twice about the way they’re treating our side.

For example, look at the media jihad that was shamelessly launched against Sarah Palin’s family. There was a not-so-subtle message being sent: if you’re a Republican woman, you better stay in the shadows or we’re going to destroy your family to get you. The left gave the same kind of intrusive, public scrutiny to “Joe the Plumber,” a private citizen who merely asked an inconvenient question to Barack Obama. While conservatives defended both Sarah and Joe as we complained incessantly about the way they were treated, the reality is that the Democrats paid no price whatsoever for the out-of-bounds attacks.

Instead of continuing to complain, here’s a better idea. Why don’t conservatives do opposition research on the journalists endlessly running stories about Bristol Palin and Joe the Plumber? Have they ever been arrested? Whom do they own property with? Have they ever been paid to do a speech for someone and then run a favorable news story about him? Certainly Keith Olbermann’s personal life is just as newsworthy as Joe the Plumber’s, and the details of Maureen Dowd’s life are just as noteworthy as those of Bristol Palin — are they not?

Here’s another example. On college campuses, conservative speakers often need bodyguards to give a speech. Conservatives are shouted down and attacked — and nothing serious ever seems to happen to the fascists who engage in these thuggish tactics. So why shouldn’t conservative groups do the exact same thing to every liberal speaker who comes to the college? Go on stage, lock arms, and shout him down — then sue the university if they’re given so much as an hour’s detention more than the protesting liberal students.

Along those same lines, how is it that we have public universities using taxpayer dollars to discriminate against conservatives, indoctrinate kids into liberalism, and hire faculty like Bill Ayers? Why are Republican state legislators allowing this? How about standing up and saying, “If you want to continue to receive taxpayer money, you’re going to act like a university should, not an indoctrination center”?

If you are tired of being called a racist by race-hustling poverty pimps like Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and the NAACP, how about using their own tactics against them by boycotting organizations that work with them or support them financially?

Are you sick of feeling like you need to familiarize yourself with porn terms just to understand what they’re saying about the tea parties on MSNBC or CNN? Then start filing obscenity complaints with the FCC. The left has never hesitated to use the government and the court system against its political opponents, so why should we?

Obviously, we don’t have to become liars — in fact, even setting aside the ethics of it, it’s better for our credibility if we don’t. But conservatives do need to stop playing by Marquess of Queensberry rules and futilely hoping that the public will finally start to notice that we’re actually nice guys, even as we are smeared as Nazis, homophobes, and racists every day.

How much credit did John McCain get for refusing to talk about Jeremiah Wright and Barack Obama’s lack of patriotism? How many times was George Bush — a moderate on domestic issues who bent over backwards to create a “new tone” — accused of being Hitler? How many times has Fox News, which makes more of an effort to be balanced than any of the other networks and all the biggest newspapers in America, been accused of being as biased as Rush Limbaugh?

Complaining bitterly about the Democrats’ “politics of personal destruction” or bellyaching that the media doesn’t treat us fairly ultimately accomplishes nothing. The public doesn’t care.

Using the exact same tactics against the left that it uses against the right may very well be effective.

Even if it isn’t, it may at least convince them that such tactics ought to be off limits on both sides. We can say, “Gee, what if Bush had done this” or “That’s a cheap shot” all day long, but until our political opponents feel the brunt of the same savage incivility that it dishes out on a regular basis, nothing is going to change.
Click to read the rest of the article and the comments

Just Who Is Protecting Whom from the Pitchforks?

Obama's got it wrong. It's the bankers who will pull his and the Democratic Party's chestnuts out of the fire.

image from Now Public
article from Pajamas Media
April 10, 2009
by Eric Florack

America’s bankers lack backbone.

Maybe I’m being unfair to the current crop of bankers. After all, the problem has always existed. It’s just that it has come to a head recently because we have a political power structure in place that clearly plans to take advantage of that perceived weakness. As a rule, financial types are not exactly noted for their bravery. And we all know, as was demonstrated on 9/11, predators tend to attack where they see weakness — particularly if they anticipate some gain for themselves.

So it was recently when we saw a Democratic president of the United States suggesting that his administration was the only thing standing between the bankers and the pitchforks.

To anyone who has been watching the events unfolding recently and understands the causes of those happenings, the statement of the president was absurd on its face. The issue, of course, is that most people today really don’t have much of a grasp of economics. Thus, any Democratic Party propaganda offered to explain away Democratic/big government culpability in the current financial mess will have far more credibility than it would with people who do understand economics. Most Americans might say, “Well, I don’t know this stuff, but he must — it sounds reasonable.” So along comes President Obama trying to push the image of the bankers being the problem. And of course his supporters, who know little to nothing about economic matters, nod in unison like so many bobblehead dolls glued to the dashboard.

But it’s not true.

Very seldom do economic crises occur without government being at or near the root of the problem. So it is with this crisis.

This is not a failure of regulation of any kind, particularly of banking. Nor is it a failure of free markets. Rather, it’s a failure of over-regulation and a lack of free markets. In short, it’s a failure of government. Governmental interference in the market requiried bankers, for example, to make loans to people who couldn’t afford them. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — government-created entities — helped to create this artificial boom, and government also caused the bust by way of serious mismanagement.

The scheme got Democrats lots of votes and created a lot of very rich Democratic cronies (including players within the current administration), but eventually all fell apart because the people who benefited in the short term from these government-imposed loan deals couldn’t pay their mortgages. Of course, the people who passed the law forcing the banks to make those loans don’t pay for it; you and I do. And the banks, which were simply following the law, get the blame for the government-mandated mess.

Obama’s efforts at solving the financial crisis are less than successful because you can’t use government to solve a problem created by government. The president would like us to forget this fact because to admit it would mean he would have to confess that government was the problem. That is something a big government Democrat will never do.

Such an admission would also force the Democrats into the uncomfortable position of admitting there was a logical business reason for some folks not getting home loans — a reason that had nothing to do with the rich, racism, or any of the other Democratic Party codewords. Since those same people who got loans they couldn’t afford are among the Democratic Party’s core group of voters, that’s not going to happen.

Clearly, it is in the political interests of the Democrats to make us forget it was government, and not the bankers or anyone else, who created this problem. This effort would doubtless be aided by the perception on the part of the voters that Obama’s not the problem but the solution, which was part of the president’s message in that “pitchfork” line.

It sure doesn’t help that we have so few true fiscal conservatives and free-market thinkers in government right now. If we had more of them (and people of courage to boot), we could see honest discussions of the problems and the solutions. We’d actually see people in government propose the unusual idea that government is the problem and thus can’t be the solution. Then again, given the Democrats’ hold on all three branches of government, one can hardly expect such miracles to occur within those marble halls.

But imagine what would have happened if one or more of the bankers in that meeting with Mr. Obama had had the courage to stand up and remind him of of the facts:

“No, Mr. President. The only thing between the Democrats and the pitchforks is us, the bankers, and that’s the way it always has been. You Democrats used us to buy votes with home loans, requiring us to lend money to people who could not pay it back. You left us holding the bag, Mr. President — you and the rest of the Democrats then in Congress. And you need our cooperation to save your political hide from the people with the pitchforks.”

One can only conclude we’d all be in better shape (both from a financial standpoint as well as from the standpoint of freedom) if the bankers showed that kind of mettle. Trouble is, I fear, such courage is not in them.
Click to read the article and comments

Fed Told Banks to Stay Mum on ‘Stress Test’ Results

Anyone had enough of this BS yet? I know I have. This is an absolute manipulation of the stock market by Geithner.

Rees

By Bradley Keoun and Scott Lanman

from Bloomberg

April 10, 2009

April 10 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. Federal Reserve has told Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Citigroup Inc. and other banks to keep mum on the results of “stress tests” that will gauge their ability to weather the recession, people familiar with the matter said.

The Fed wants to ensure that the report cards don’t leak during earnings conference calls scheduled for this month. Such a scenario might push stock prices lower for banks perceived as weak and interfere with the government’s plan to release the results in an orderly fashion later this month.

“If you allow banks to talk about it, people are just going to assume that the ones that don’t comment about it failed,” said Paul Miller, an analyst at FBR Capital Markets in Arlington, Virginia.

Regulators are using the tests to determine whether the 19 biggest banks have enough capital to cover loan losses during the next two years if the economy shrinks, unemployment surges and housing prices keep declining. The tests are a linchpin of the plan Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner announced in February to bolster confidence in the nation’s banks and restore financial-market stability.

Geithner has likened the stress tests to those used by doctors to evaluate a patient’s health. They’re designed to mesh with the administration’s effort to remove distressed mortgage assets from banks’ balance sheets. The Fed is overseeing the administration of the tests, people briefed on the matter say.

Progress Report

President Barack Obama is scheduled to get a progress report on the tests today during a meeting with his economic team. Geithner will attend, along with Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and Sheila Bair, chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.

Goldman Sachs plans to report first-quarter earnings April 14, followed by JPMorgan Chase & Co. on April 16. Citigroup reports April 17, and Morgan Stanley announces April 21. All four banks are based in New York.

Spokesman for the banks declined to comment. [to avoid arrest - my comment]

“No matter what the result, the stress tests are going to move markets,” Camden Fine, president of the Independent Community Bankers of America, said in an interview yesterday. “That’s the tricky part. If they don’t give out enough information or the information is presented in the wrong way, that could cause markets to plunge.”

Silent on ‘Process’

Banks should stay silent because a focus on the tests would be “a harmful distraction” from earnings, said Scott Talbott, senior vice president for government affairs at the Financial Services Roundtable in Washington.

"It is premature for banks to talk about the stress tests,” Talbott said yesterday. “They aren’t finalized yet and there is no framework to evaluate the results.” [if there is no framework to evaluate the results, how did they establish the framwork for the stress tests? - my comment]

Wells Fargo & Co. Chief Financial Officer Howard Atkins declined to discuss the tests yesterday after his bank reported a record first-quarter profit that beat the most optimistic Wall Street estimates.

“We haven’t commented on regulatory matters and we won’t start now,” Atkins said in an interview. “We don’t comment on the process.”

In a separate interview later, Wells Fargo spokeswoman Julia Tunis Bernard declined to say whether the bank had been told by regulators to keep silent. “We don’t comment on our discussions and conversations with regulators and officials,” she said.

Under the Treasury’s plan, banks would have six months after the reviews to raise any new capital they might need. If the money isn’t obtained from private investors, the government will provide the funds from the $700 billion bank-rescue plan.

Click to read the article

Is Silicon Valley a Systemic Risk?

Obama and company are doing whatever they need to in order to have control over all major corporations. I think the banks, etc., should file a lawsuit against the government, with the defendents being Obama, Geithner, Bernanke and a few others. It needs to be done so this issue can make it to the Supreme Court and we can hopefully stop this unconstitutional breach of power.
Rees

Treasury decides to treat venture capitalists like hedge funds.

from The Wall Street Journal
by JAMES FREEMAN
April 9, 2009

The Obama administration wants to regulate venture capital firms to prevent systemic risks. Silicon Valley residents are scratching their heads and asking: What risks? The rest of us should ask why Washington is targeting a jewel of the American economy that had nothing to do with the housing bubble.

The confusion began when Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner recently told Congress that large venture capital (VC) firms should be forced to register with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and submit regular reports on their investors and portfolios. Data collected by the SEC would then be shared with a new risk regulator to ensure that VCs aren't "a threat to financial stability."

Since then, venture investors have been trying to solve the mystery of how they could possibly threaten the financial system. Their work involves very little banking. Venture firms raise equity from wealthy investors to buy ownership stakes in small companies. The VCs and the companies in which they invest use little or no debt.

"I cannot imagine any venture fund being of a size to pose 'systemic risk,' so they either don't understand the nature of the business, or by including this provision they are sharing that their agenda is not the overt one disclosed," says Jack Biddle of Novak Biddle Venture Partners. What Washington needs to understand is that bank-style regulation could destroy the culture that created the microprocessor.

In justifying new SEC registration requirements, Mr. Geithner said that Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme demonstrated that investors need more protection. He didn't mention that Madoff's firm was registered with the SEC as an investment adviser and had also been regulated by the SEC for decades as a broker-dealer. Also, Madoff was not running a venture firm.

The entire venture capital industry is smaller than the Madoff fraud. VCs invest a total of $30 billion each year, far less than one-tenth of 1% of U.S. financial transactions. Venture investors -- affluent individuals and institutions -- are putting up equity and know that they can lose it all. SEC regulation could have the same negative impact on them that it had on Madoff's investors: creating an illusion of safety in what is an inherently risky endeavor. Or the regulation could become so severe that it actually does eliminate risk from venture investing, killing the innovative ideas that can only be funded by risk-takers.

The fact that VC money is small potatoes compared to Wall Street money doesn't mean we wouldn't notice if the industry were regulated out of existence. Venture investments helped build Intel, Apple, Google, Amazon and Cisco, to name just a few. Is Mr. Geithner sure that he has a better model?

Since the Treasury secretary lumped venture capital into a category with hedge funds, there's a question of whether something has been lost in translation between Washington and Silicon Valley. Mr. Geithner says that he needs to make sure that private investment firms are not overleveraged. But leverage is such a small factor in the venture world that the trade association for venture capital firms doesn't even collect data on it. Responding to the Treasury plan, the National Venture Capital Association is now seeking more information. Will they discover dangerous levels of debt piled on such shaky foundations? Don't bet on it.

The only people threatened when a start-up goes bust are its small group of employees and investors, and they wouldn't have it any other way. Says Mr. Harrick, "You've got people willing to take risks. In fact, they need to have a tolerance not just for risk, but for the potential of outright failure."

If our economic system is to thrive, venture capital is exactly the place where we have to encourage risk. In pursuit of innovations that will enrich themselves and the world, employees at start-ups accept low pay and reputational risk, while well-heeled investors accept the possibility of losing every nickel of their investment.

Attempts to limit risk pose a systemic threat to American technology. Venture capitalists, mainly veterans of the tech industry, are deeply involved in the companies they back, often helping to recruit each of the key employees at a start-up. This hands-on feature of venture investing means that innovative companies and their backers tend to cluster in areas like Silicon Valley. If the VCs move offshore, that's probably where the next generation of companies will be born.

Even if one wishes to be paranoid about systemic risks, it's hard to imagine how tiny tech companies could be ground zero in a future credit bubble. The politicians aren't driving capital into this business. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac don't provide cheap financing to VCs. Major credit-ratings agencies don't grade start-ups, so there will be no government-distorted judgments of creditworthiness. Neither VCs nor the companies they fund issue bonds or CDOs or CLOs. There's no Technology Community Reinvestment Act. Moral hazard? Not in Silicon Valley. No tech-company founders or VCs could possibly believe they are too big to fail.

Washington-created failure is what riles Cypress Semiconductor CEO T.J. Rodgers. In a recent email, he notes that this isn't the best moment in history to add another burden to America's tech industry. Very few start-ups have gone public in recent years, thanks in part to the multimillion-dollar compliance costs imposed by the Sarbanes-Oxley law in 2002, the last time Congress sought to re-regulate corporate finance.

Says Mr. Rodgers, "First, Sarbanes-Oxley mandated byzantine corporate bureaucracy to 'protect' investors. Then, the SEC damaged the Silicon Valley economy by forcing companies to count stock options twice, both as dilution and as expense. As a result, Silicon Valley, for decades the bright spot of the American economy, produced only one [initial public offering] in all of 2008.

Now, Geithner wants to regulate venture capital firms to protect us some more. It's like watching children deface an economic work of art."

Click to read the rest of the article

YOU'VE BEEN WARNED!...

from Breitbart.com
by Derek Broes
April 4, 2009

Over the past three months we have witnessed some truly amazing movements by the Obama administration.

- He has proposed more spending than all Presidents in history combined;
- He has trampled the Constitution by allowing the Treasury to take on a dictator style infringement on private companies, and now the democratically lead Congress has proposed the “Pay for Performance Act” which passed Thursday with even some Republican Congressman voted for it.

This bill essentially allows the Treasury to define “fair pay” for all employees, at any level. Worse, the Treasury would like to be able to take over any company it deemed as important enough to take over regardless of whether or not it had accepted bailout funds.

Worse still, the Serve Act proposes to make volunteering for the government mandatory (with pay, of course). Last time I looked, working for pay was called A JOB.

The scariest part of the bill is that while you’re serving as a “volunteer,” you’re prohibited from participating in worship and church activities, political rallies and being involved in a union. In short, your essential freedoms are gone. I keep hearing about Obama being a socialist but, I have to disagree. Based on these measures he appears to more like a person pursuing Communism or Fascism.

Let’s face it; if you wanted to tear down the Republic and install a Communist Oligarchy you would first have to take over all major industries where corporate power resides, then you must get the wealth away from the rich — but how would you do that? Well, you create an even larger economic crisis so the country thinks your massive debt spending is a way to help the country when your real plan is to incur so much debt that the only way to prevent the country from bankruptcy is to impose a tax system that depletes the wealth of the top 1% until we’re all equally “wealthy.” …Well, except for those wealthy people who helped you get there. You know the ones I’m talking about. I don’t mean to HARPO on the subject, but we seemed to have forgotten what we’re protecting. What about the Republic? Is it already gone?

When the government ignores legal contractual obligations because they judge someone’s bonus as unfair the law has been ignored, which means it was violated and this violation occurred at the highest level of government. I’m not saying the AIG bonuses weren’t excessive. My point is, we don’t know what these people did to deserve or NOT to deserve them because this was never mentioned or examined. Maybe some of those people brought in a billion dollars of business and their bonuses were based? Maybe the CEO is the main reason the company is failing? Does that mean that some guy who worked hard to bring in that billion dollars in business shouldn’t be rewarded? But Obama needs a way to regulate pay and the bill proposed doesn’t even stop at executives, it doesn’t even stop at dollar amounts. In fact, it has no specification whatsoever.

So we can all look forward to government cars, government jobs, paid civilian volunteers who watch our every move and the the loss of our ability to reach for our dreams. The sad part is that Obama told us exactly what he was going to do and 52% of you refused to hear what he said. In fact many of you cheered at these things. Let’s remember just of few of the things he said.

1. The Constitution is fundamentally flawed. It only protects the rights of the people but does not allow the government to do anything on your behalf.
2. He wants a civilian Army as large as our military, and as well funded ($650 billion annually).
3. He wants to “spread the wealth.” Oh, don’t pretend you don’t remember Joe the Plumber.

And let’s not forget good ole Reverend Wright whose teachings about America being evil and unequal ring in Obama’s ears. Funny … It’s equality that got Obama elected. Change? Oh yes, there’s change and if we don’t act soon the meaning of hope will have a very different meaning.

Click to read the article and comments

The Proverbial Fork In The Road

image by rees

Unfortunately, I think I know which direction about 52% of the people are going to go. Let's hope that many finally wake-up and make the correct choice...