Sen. Dodd's reelection bid embraces his, umm, success with banking

From the Political Hah! Dept.:

Chris Dodd’s Comeback Slogan: ‘Banking on Change’ - BrianFaughnan’s blog - RedState

So what’s Chris Dodd’s plan to save his lucrative government gig? Remind people of his spot on the Banking Committee [link to RollCall article]:

Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), facing increasingly difficult odds in 2010, is spending the two-week recess barnstorming his home state to try to improve his political standing…

The appearances are part of a series dubbed “Banking for Change,” meant to highlight Dodd’s work on consumer protection issues as chairman of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee.

Seriously? [link to Dodd's site]

If Dodd manages to win this time around, having proven what a terribly self-interested boob he is -- and it appears that Conn. voters are even less cerebral than Mass. and West Va. voters (Ted, John Kerry, Barney, etc.) -- it shows just how much work that sincere, dignified conservatives and general non-cretins will have to get through to try to recover some sway in D.C. That is, to clarify, there is a lot of work to come for people who believe in simple things:

• smaller government,
• a balanced budget,
• power to the actual people (not their elected king by proxy),
• peace through strength,
• America still is (stuck or blessed as) the leader of the free world and should act like it,
• despising mistreatment of people here but giving passes for mistreatment of "groups" elsewhere is absurd
• liberty, freedom and the pursuit of happiness don't equate with living in a welfare state
• we have the biggest guns, and we don't prefer to use them, but we damn well will
  

So, cut to the chase: Get the pitchforks, effigies, tar, feathers, and torches ready. Just like the good old, pre-Revolutionary War, days.

- jR, aka AirFarceOne (Twitter)

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Year 2000: Madoff scam was uncovered

You think the Bernie Madoff scam is a surprise? Nope. It was just a surprise to his investors, since the SEC ignored repeated input about the guy's scam. It was not a surprise to anyone who cared enough, or was simply smart enough, to bother to look at facts. One smart guy actually tried to do something about it and was thoroughly ignored by the SEC. Why was he ignored? He tells the tale.

In short, lots of people know how to succeed, they have money to invest. Many have no commonsense grasp of, or any education in, investing, so they leave it to others. Madoff was among those who people trusted -- he was once chairman of the NASDAQ exchange!

Some folks simply cannot visualize what is possible or credible in investing. Some cannot see for themselves what is either screwy tricks done via poor lawmaking (many mortgages and highly "creative" financial concepts come to mind) or impossible dreams dressed up as a viable reality.

Harry Markopolos is just one of the ignored people who have been pointing out the OBVIOUS for many years. His big difference is that he made official moves, which makes him honorable, indeed. It also makes more vacuous the lack of REAL regulation over the "greed" industries: mortgages, stocks, hedge funds, derivatives, commodities.

Why do I call them "greed" industries? If you have to ask, then you don't really understand what the finance industry has to some degree been peddling over the years. There are a wide variety of viable investment ideas out there, and if folks fog over in any discussion of how investing, or money, works, then they are easy targets. It's sad, really.

When one talks of a bubble bursting in financial markets -- and in 2008 there was a few massive bursts -- one talks of overblown assumptions about the markets being dashed by a heavy dose of REALITY. Watch the CBS News 60 Minutes video, linked, with that in mind.

The Man Who Figured Out Madoff's Scheme - CBS News

It has been two and a half months since Bernard L. Madoff was picked up and charged with what is believed to be the largest financial fraud in history. Yet we still don't know much more about the alleged $50 billion scam than what Madoff initially told the FBI agents who arrested him.

Watch the video:

...
Until a few months ago, Harry Markopolos was an obscure financial analyst and mildly eccentric fraud investigator from Boston who most people would never notice on the street.

But today he enjoys an almost heroic status, pursued by journalists and movie producers, and honored by colleagues as the man who went to the Securities and Exchange Commission and blew the whistle on Bernie Madoff and his $50 billion fraud.

But he seems uncomfortable with the attention, and knows that he is no hero. "I stand before you a 50 billion dollar failure," he said at an event.

Asked how many times he sent materials to the SEC, Markopolos told Kroft, "May 2000. October 2001. October, November, and December of 2005. Then again June 2007. And finally April 2008. So five separate SEC submissions."

"And in spite of all of the things that you did, it still ended up in disaster?" Kroft asked.

"There's nothing to be proud about in this case. I feel horrible about the result. It's been a total disaster for the victims," Markopolos replied.

It began a decade ago, when Markopolos was working for a Boston investment firm. His boss told him that Madoff, a former chairman of the NASDAQ stock exchange, was running a huge unregistered hedge fund that was producing incredible returns. He wanted Markopolos to reverse-engineer its trading strategy and revenue streams so the firm could duplicate Madoff's results.

"He had the patina of being a respected citizen. One of the most successful businessmen in New York, and certainly, one of the most powerful men on Wall Street. You would never suspect him of fraud. Unless you knew the math," Markopolos told Kroft.

"I mean, you're like a math guy, right?" Kroft asked.

"I've taken all the calculus courses, from integral calculus through differential calculus, as well as linear algebra. And statistics, both normal and non-normal," Markopolos said.

Asked how long it took him to figure out something was wrong, Markopolos said, "It took me five minutes to know that it was a fraud. It took me another almost four hours of mathematical modeling to prove that it was a fraud. "

For my point of view, this fellow underlines just what exactly went wrong with financial market regulation, not just of the SEC, but with regard to responsible finance practices all over the place, including mortgages and mortgage-derived investment packages. Our lawmakers fell down on the job, our regulatory agencies, our professionals in the industries -- they failed us.


- jR

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Buchanan: give Obama a fight on his radicalistic budget

Patrick Buchanan, though seeming the expert talking head without a cause most days on MSNBC, weighs in most firmly on the monster budget and taxation hit coming from the White House liberal rebel with a questionable cause.

The headline lays it out: "Obama Has No Mandate For Radicalism." That is, Obama may have an elected mandate for change -- since he won, duh -- but not a mandate for radical (read: dangerous) economic and systemic upheaval.

RealClearPolitics - Articles - Obama Has No Mandate For Radicalism

In his campaign and inaugural address, Barack Obama cast himself as a moderate man seeking common ground with conservatives.

Yet, his budget calls for the radical restructuring of the U.S. economy, a sweeping redistribution of power and wealth to government and Democratic constituencies. It is a declaration of war on the Right.

...

Buchanan writes, of the timing of the economic problems and the election: Obama "was behind McCain [in the polls] when the decisive event that gave him the presidency occurred -- the September collapse of Lehman Brothers and the market crash.

Republicans are under no obligation to render bipartisan support to this statist coup d'etat. For what is going down is a leftist power grab that is anathema to their principles and philosophy.

...

Who is going to pay for all this?

The top 2 percent, the filthy rich who got all those Bush tax breaks, say Democrats. But the top 5 percent of income earners already pay 60 percent of U.S. income taxes, while the bottom 40 percent pays nothing. [While these numbers are likely accurate, what exactly do they give us in details? Not much. But then...]

Those paying a federal tax rate of 35 percent will see it rise to near 40 percent and will lose a fifth of the value of their deductions for taxes, mortgage interest and charitable contributions. [Sad. Painful! And very ill-timed!]

...

Markets are not infallible. But the stock market has long been a "lead indicator" of where the economy will be six months from now. What are the markets, the collective decisions of millions of investors, saying?

Having fallen every month since Obama's election, with January and February the worst two months in history, they are telling us the stimulus package will not work, that Tim Geithner is clueless about how to save the banks, that the Obama budget portends disaster for the republic.

The president says he is gearing up for a fight on his budget.

Good. Let's give him one.

A bit heavy on the numbers, read the whole piece -- after all, for a budget, all that matters are the numbers, and where those numbers will go.

I find it a bit late coming from Mr. Buchanan at this moment, since he seemed half a fan of Obama during the campaign. He did few favors for fiscal conservatism during the 2008 presidential campaign (from what I saw or read, at least), least of all on MSNBC. But, like many, he is now deeply disappointed in the pro-government, pro-welfare, anti-business, anti-free-market moves that Obama and his shameless cheerleaders in Congress are shoving down our throats.

It always comes down to this for me: How does it get anyone a job? If you want to work for government, perhaps you have it made. Otherwise, what do you have out of it, but more trepidation for investors, business leaders and entrepreneurs?


- jR

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So-called progressives' cry against AM radio: anti-free market rules are pro-free speech

The recent assault on talk radio by progressives (so-called) has also produced comments that moderate reporting, or non-biased to non-media people, is boring. That's just one of the little offshoots of this odd agenda being taken up right now.

I have a serious problem with this. This is the worst of what liberalism, or progressivism, or whatever you call it, has to offer. It shows the broader goal they look toward: to run things without a care of free markets or consumer and market guided business. It's called overregulating. They are for it. I am against underregulating, but this is no better. Nooo better!

The playground rules of equal time at bat is now being pushed for radio. Have you ever listened to AirAmerica? I once listened to a ten-minute assault on Barbara Bush, back in January 2009, calling her mean and vicious and alleging all sorts of profane things about her. I think they actually referred to her as fat at one point. I mean, it was foul and just mean. Why? How appealing is it that these "radio personalities" go after the MOTHER of the current president! Little wonder this stuff dies in the free market! Crude, and more ironically juvenile than Pee Wee's Playhouse (or, for that matter, more juvenile than Glenn Beck's radio show some days, when he does the cynical, half-funny "America's favorite game show" segments)!

Since the free market does not exist for these pro-overregulation clowns, there's ongoing debate of 'conservative' radio vs. fairness doctrine for radio. Not papers & TV, but just radio! Would force far left liberal - oh wait, 'progressive' - radio on radio stations. For what? Their future economic success?!!

They call it a 'system' of companies. Bull. Air America not a company, then? It ignores the biz law of what sells ads, which certainly TRUMPS any 'BALANCE' LAW. Ask any struggling paper just how much ads determine their life or death! Or, any radio station! This smacks of collectivism, where the media would be controlled by the all-knowing, all-controlling hand of government. Period.

I would welcome more successful liberal radio, because the so-called progressives are being so oddly anti-business, anti-free market, and inferring communist ideals in their hassling of radio stations and their owners that it smacks of outright shameless envy and jealousy. They will apparently stop only short of cutting power sources to radio stations with this assault on AM radio. (I should avoid mentioning that some areas, such as Nashville, Tenn., have excellent FM talk stations.)

Think Progress » Dear Rush Limbaugh, Why Are You Hell-Bent On Protecting A Radio Market That Limits Free Speech?
(First of all, HAAA! What a headline! Can you guess where that's going? Duh!)

ThinkProgress asked the authors of the original report to respond to Limbaugh. Two co-authors, CAP’s John Halpin and Free Press’s Josh Silver, gave us this response:

Dear Rush Limbaugh:

We have a straightforward question, which we hope you will answer in a straightforward way: When a handful of major media companies control who and what is allowed to be broadcast on the commercial dial, how is that not regulation of radio content? When these same companies then push out one-sided, right-wing information 90 percent of the time, how does that uphold freedom of expression?

Those of us at CAP, Free Press and other public interest organizations do not want to reinstate the Fairness Doctrine and we definitely do not want to limit free speech. We want more of it. You and other conservatives seem more interested in protecting a system that does the exact opposite.

If Limbaugh wants a debate, let’s have it.

Go ahead and call him, debate it! Please! There's only a few of you who could manage to handle it! But debate? Good luck with that. Rhetoric as what comes from ThinkProgess will not play for success on this issue. I think it would bore his listeners if he waited until these closeted big govt freaks had the nerve to call him and offer something remotely close to a civil, topical argument about this subject.

In the piece they at once call these "commercial stations", yet bluntly claim that they "push" an agenda? How is it that they are making any money, then? Somebody must be advertising on the stations! So all the advertisers are conservatives, too, and there's some secret handshake of advertisers and listeners who support those businesses?

Their presumption falls on its face, it seems, and they surely must know it. How can dashing free market ideals for their version of a "free" (wink) media possibly pass muster under authentic public debate? These pro-controlled airwaves (oh, but ONLY radio!) people are tossing rocks, and keeping their distance, they are not offering a debate.

Liberals have most of TV in their back pockets. Viewership of news on TV is lowering, for them. MSNBC is the laughed-at geek among all TV news entities, and steeply liberal. It is rising generally, we learned recently from viewership reports, but MSNBC is comparably rising far less than FOX News. Fox News is of course another media outlet despised by liberals. This one is disliked for simply not being liberal rather than for its being rampantly conservative -- but don't try to tell any of them that, they're too busy calling it racist, fascist and owned by "the Man". These same liberals pan PBS and NPR for being too moderate, too. Shame. I like both of those, and appreciate their reporting. Funny, I thought reporting was meant to be objective as possible, but plenty of progressives -- and a few blow-hard counterparts on the far right -- call objectivity boring. So much for news reporting and "boring" old journalism!

Liberals lay claim to the majority of large newspapers in the nation, and seem to be doing just fine with not forcing "balance" on those media. So, what gives? Not debate, that's for sure! Can you imagine if conservative talk radio hosts started insisting that such action be taken to level the playing field on television, or in major newspapers, what would happen? Can you imagine if someone allegedly legitimate tried -- seriously, not as a joke -- to petition HBO to have a counterbalance to the Bill Maher show?

How is it that AM radio, which is for some the mocked poster child for old technology, gets so much attention from these folks for abuse of free markets? Isn't this a bit like hilariously odd, like a liberal faction of our government demanding that we invade the Phillipines?

Perhaps they are doing this since they simply want to win the ubiquitous debate, not actually have one. You know, like Chavez holds elections, and supporters take control of gov't buildings while the election happens to show their support. They'll debate it, but only on their terms. "I'll debate you any time! Just submit the questions three days ahead of time, please!"

I really wish I could resist reacting to any particularly stupid fringe ideas for control, at either edge, but I cannot help it when they are conceptually bizarre and insincere as this is. Who'd have thought that AM radio was the chief threat to the First Amendment!


- jR

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(rev. Feb. 24, 2009)

Bad policy, bad ethics, broken ideals, and the downfall of America's markets

Yet more clear reasons why Obama and the Democrats (if we can still call them that, and not Obamacrats) won an election based on the broadest of false claims, that the economics of laissez faire, of hands-off and low taxes, got us into this. It was not capitalism and free markets that hurt us, it was failure by gov't, be it Clinton, GW Bush, or many years of Congressional leaders, that got us into this mess. And yes, CRA and poverty mortgages got us into this!

This problem of the failing economy was PARTLY the fault of Republicans in Congress, since they make the LAWS, but not sure when GW Bush instisted banking regulations be all but forgotten. In fact, it seems the GOP leaders were basically assuaged -- or illicitly looked the other way -- and played along with crazy, fast-times-will-never-slow policies, in the case of the sour mortgages that turned into sour credit default swaps, which turned into a ruined U.S. economy.

In my thoughts, in reading about this economic crisis and how we got here, I am reacting against big government types, and socialists, and liberals, all who to some extent or another seem to be convincing people that the GOP did this to us. Ironic, then, that it was liberal mortgage ideas that got us here, right alongside a lack of regulations (which, indeed, is a small gov't thus GOP attitude) but not by way of GW Bush, but through Clinton-era Congressional diddling through the ever-expanding nonsense of CRA and ill-thought mortgage regulations.

Here's some hard work to that end, linked below, but diced into some small pieces, following:

Feds Re-Impose Loan Standards They Helped Undermine | RealClearMarkets

There is a great irony that Washington will now lead the way in imposing new, stricter standards, including a tougher income-to-payment ratio, because it was Washington, prodded by affordable housing advocates, which pushed mortgage lenders to dilute their traditional underwriting values in the first place. Federal regulators attacked those established standards as being “unintentionally biased” against low and moderate income borrowers and used a variety of laws and regulatory bodies to push often resistant lenders into programs based on these lower standards. The government and those who backed its actions assured lenders these lower standards were safer than they thought, even though there was little research to support that contention. Now that a huge chunk of the market based on these debased standards has melted down, the government is going full circle.

And those who were most easily "prodded by affordable housing advocates" are now running things, so this is quite quite ironic.

...a Freddie Mac program called Affordable Gold, which purchased loans from banks under looser underwriting standards, including loans which allowed a borrower to make a down payment with funds contributed from a third party like a government assistance program or a nonprofit, showed sharply higher default rates, up to four times higher than traditional underwriting standards.

...politicians in both parties made expanding the number of home owners in America a high priority, and the only way to keep doing that was to lend to people with increasingly riskier credit.

Got bad credit? No problem! Not only will you get a loan, but it will be with a low interest rate, too! We'll bend over backwards for our risky customers since Big Brother asked us to. After all, everyone deserves to lose a home at least once in their lifetime!

In a recent Forbes article Peter Wallison of the American Enterprise Institute and Edward Pinto, former chief credit officer of Fannie Mae, point out that by 2001, 18 percent of Fannie Mae’s portfolio consisted of loans to people with credit scores below 680—the traditional definition of a loan to someone with riskier credit, who is also someone more likely to default.

Of course, with two huge federal agencies willing to purchase such loans, mortgage makers couldn’t churn them out fast enough, and private investors also began snapping up the loans in competition with Fannie and Freddie.

As if that is not insulting enough, and ironic that this all came to a head during GW Bush's time in office, when he was too busy waging war on Teararists to notice the economy was failing in a big way, there's this little nugget to chew on:

[Relevant experts] say federal programs were not the problem because many of the worst loans portfolios were created by non-bank lenders which are not even subject to the Community Reinvestment Act. But that’s an argument that ignores the much broader role that government played in watering down standards, including using pressure to force players across the industry to participate.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development under President Clinton, for instance, threatened to introduce legislation to make non-bank lenders, that is, mortgage finance companies, subject to CRA if these firms didn’t sign on to affordable lending goals.

So where were these blowhard, blame Bush, extended-stay Congress members during all of this, for two double-term presidents?!! Those sillies over in Congress -- can't do anything without the White House, it seems!

Who were some of the big fans of this fun mortgage idea? Countrywide hopped right into the cesspool first!

One of the first ... to take up the pledge was Countrywide, which pledged to introduce low-down payment loans with high income-to-payment ratios for low-income borrowers. Countrywide and its co-founder, Angelo Mozilo, ultimately became infamous as one of the first major mortgage lenders to melt down under the weight of its bad lending, but before it was notorious Countrywide was celebrated for its low-income efforts.

Today, the Obama administration acknowledges through its bailout program that those standards were unsafe. It’s a backhanded acknowledgement. ... I suppose that’s about as far as we can expect government to go in admitting the mess it helped to make.

I guess I don't get a bailout, since I was not getting any loans out. Oh well. I hope I can get a JOB at some point that isn't in CONSTRUCTION. Which I have zero experience in.


- jR

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NY Times' Friedman laments, but does not quite hit, the money crisis cronies

Thomas L. Friedman is a guy who has long-winded opinions -- that's meant as a description, not an insult -- and has made a thorough living, since the 1970s, with his writing, including opinion. He's a Pulitzer winner, several times. In this piece, though, he leaves out the one small group of Americans who, along with the business leaders, the finance companies, the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac operators, and financially sunken mortgage takers, took our free market and turned it into a free-for-all hedged on a permanently positive economy.

The current economic crisis makes me think -- metaphorically -- of the starving masses when Marie Antoinette said, "Let them eat cake." Smug politicians, and business leaders, have led us down a wrong path, and now presumably informed and intelligent writers such as Friedman say is is everyone who must pay the way.

That's paying homage to an undeserving status quo, I suspect. We are not at an economic crossroads right now, we are at a civilization crossroads. Friedman likely recognizes that the rich and powerful will always be the rich and powerful. I do too. But unlike Friedman, at least in this piece, I think that not merely business leaders and average Joes will suffer these consequences, but our politicians must be held accountable, must own up to their culpability.

All Fall Down - NYTimes.com

This financial meltdown involved a broad national breakdown in personal responsibility, government regulation and financial ethics.

So many people were in on it: People who had no business buying a home, with nothing down and nothing to pay for two years; people who had no business pushing such mortgages, but made fortunes doing so; people who had no business bundling those loans into securities and selling them to third parties, as if they were AAA bonds, but made fortunes doing so; people who had no business rating those loans as AAA, but made fortunes doing so; and people who had no business buying those bonds and putting them on their balance sheets so they could earn a little better yield, but made fortunes doing so.

Citigroup was involved in, and made money from, almost every link in that chain. And the bank’s executives, including, sad to see, the former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, were clueless about the reckless financial instruments they were creating, or were so ensnared by the cronyism between the bank’s risk managers and risk takers (and so bought off by their bonuses) that they had no interest in stopping it.

These are the people whom taxpayers bailed out on Monday to the tune of what could be more than $300 billion. We probably had no choice. Just letting Citigroup melt down could have been catastrophic. But when the government throws together a bailout that could end up being hundreds of billions of dollars in 48 hours, you can bet there will be unintended consequences — many, many, many.

It is a very basic tenet of common economic teaching that economies move in cycles. It is also an obvious fact that a lot of people get into the money business to make ridiculous amounts of money on speculation. For years, the Bush Administration, from Treasury to other finance-relevant departments, urged Congress to act to rein in subprime loans. Nothing happened with the GOP in leadership; nothing happened after 2006 with Dem leaders. They are all to blame. So who do we trust? Who can we trust?

The most horrendous error in this whole debacle, which is causing the biggest, most historic global economic upheaval since 1929, is that financiers, banks and government leaders were ignoring that knock on the door. In other words, everyone who should have known, or at least had some idea, of the complexities of markets and economic paths, proved they did not know or did not care. Most to blame are the leaders of our government, who are the only ones who can tell anyone what to do in the self-centered and greed-oriented banking and finance industries, for assuming that hard-to-believe products were, indeed, unbelievable.

- jR

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Angry W. House meeting roils Wall St bailout talks

Angry White House meeting roils Wall Street bailout talks

Politicians being politicians: the economic crisis is bad for everyone, but lately it seems it is not as bad for the Democrats. According to Dems, including leaders of finance oversight leaders, they had nothing to do with it. How is that? Didn't they have a president back a few years back who signed some bills? Blame is the first response when one cannot handle responsibility. Perhaps they cannot handle responsibility. Perhaps none of them can handle being in charge - Dem or GOP. Maybe it is time for a real change. Imagine ...

History museum, 2138 A.D.:

Sept 2008 A.D. news report
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Negotiations in the U.S. Congress toward a massive bailout for Wall Street fell into disarray on Thursday night after a contentious White House meeting, with lawmakers later offering conflicting reports about the position of presidential candidate Sen. John McCain.

The White House meeting -- attended by McCain, Democratic rival Sen. Barack Obama, President George W. Bush and lawmakers from both parties -- "devolved into a contentious shouting match," according to a statement from the McCain campaign.

"At today's cabinet meeting, John McCain did not attack any proposal or endorse any plan," the statement said.

This is how people used to run the country until we shot all the politicians and let the monkeys run things according to basic, instinctual training with bananas for rewards and touch screens for making the decisions, son.

- The Popper

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Finance, credit cards and capitalism: Free trade or a free-for-all?

Is this what we call free trade, or is it just a free-for-all?

That credit cards, and the whole gamut of lenders, can do the things they have been doing, to everyone's ruin, is wrong. It is not merely unfortunate, nor unfair, but immoral, amoral, and capitalism in its crudest, egregious form. How such behavior can possibly be considered a free market is euphemistic at best.

A free market could be mistakenly defined, in finer print, as one that takes advantage of the poorest and [those who are] the hardest working for the lowest wages: that is capitalism at its worst. If that is free trade, then give me something BETTER than that. A free market would be one that considers all the rational and positive facets of the word "free": free to trade, free to live, free from illicit deception, etc. Free market ought not be defined as one party is free to do any damned thing they please no matter the result on others (including, as in the recent financial disaster, the results that impact all others).

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Missing Minds | Obama's Fannie Mae 'Connection' (Wash. Post - The Fact Checker)

Minds are missing, but no one at the Washington Post seems to notice.

This is from our "get over it, you silly PC dum-dum" file:

Washington Post's "The Fact Checker" cannot even get past pointing out skin color of people in an ad that regards economics by a presidential campaign. What is the point to giving credence to their fact checks, then? I put a comment under the piece at the site, but the idiocy of the piece goes beyond that one item. Going deeper into the uselessness of this fact check by the Post, says the super-brilliant Fact Checker: "The latest McCain attack is particularly dubious." Particularly dubious? How about the dubiousness of the fact check? Here's the first example from this Post "fact check" that makes my head ache:

The McCain video attempts to link Obama to Franklin Raines, the former CEO of ... Fannie Mae, who also happens to be African-American. It then shows a photograph of an elderly white woman taxpayer who has supposedly been 'stuck with the bill' as a result of the 'extensive financial fraud' at Fannie Mae."

My comment, taunting and crass, but not racist (except it would be, to irrational, knee-jerk PC liberals) seeing the context, was this:

Did you forget that Obama is half-white in his ethnic lineage? Or has he disavowed his, umm, whiteness? Curious that you point out the black and white skin color of the people in this video. Really, I suggest that the woman might be Hispanic. Oh, now that would be shocking! If you are so sure to offer the facts, try keeping to RELEVANT facts, too, Skippy.

This beautiful example of poor journalism only starts with pointing out the skin color of people, as if that is relevant. It then stumbles over its claim that McCain's camp is lying with a statement that shows Obama's troupe might be lying about the facts in the ad, and that Franklin Raines is definitely lying, within 100 words!

So what part is incorrect in the McCain camp's video? That they suggest Raines an adviser to the campaign? That's not accurate, but it is not an outright lie! The Post neglects to point out that the Obama campaign likely has -- and Raines definitely has -- lied in the matter, while the paper (seemingly by accident) actually demonstrates the lie:

Obama spokesman Bill Burton went a little further, telling me in an e-mail that the campaign had "neither sought nor received" advice from Raines "on any matter."

The piece then notes that Raines himself told a Post writer "that he had gotten a couple of calls from the Obama campaign. I asked him about what, and he said 'oh, general housing, economy issues.' "

So, how is it that Raines and the Obama camp are not lying, which is worse than stretching the truth, which is what McCain's ad does? Raines said that he got calls from the Obama team! Where is the "dubious" adjective attached to the Obama/Raines side? After the ad runs Raines says he is not an adviser, the BO club says the same thing, but Raines had said he did get calls for advice. OK, so Raines isn't flying to events with Obama, but the he did get calls. It's not an official role with the campaign, but it goes against the Obama campaign statement that "the campaign had 'neither sought nor received' advice from Raines 'on any matter.' " It would appear that they had.

Washinton Post, your bias is showing. Yet again! That, or you really need to start training your writers to see facts, and add them up.

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