Politivity

You know the old saying that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results?

Well, here we are in a financial crisis whose root cause is issuing bad loans.

What does the government do? Issue loans (aka bailout) to people who built businesses on bad loans.

These companies cannot get loans from anyone else, because no one else is stupid enough to loan them money. Why? Because they have bad business models. They have failing business models.

But the bailout is also a bad loan. Because if you just give money to people who have business models that don’t make money, then they won’t be able to pay the loan back.

That’s why government intervention won’t work.

And, in fact, government intervention is partly to blame for the crisis in the first place. Because of laws such as the Community Reinvestment Act, banks were forced to issue loans to low income areas, because politicians viewed this as fair.

While maybe the intentions were good, the results have been disastrous. Add some poor accounting rules forced on businesses by Sarbanes-Oxley, an overreaction to companies like Enron, Tyco and Worldcom, and you’ve got the perfect storm for the mess we’re in.

Actions have consequences, and unfortunately, we’re going to have to go through the correction period in order to become prosperous again.

But don’t think we can do things the way we’ve always done them. We do need to say goodbye to some companies and possibly even industries (or sectors of industries) to get on a more prosperous path.

The good news is that if we can focus on those areas instead of trying to put Humpty Dumpty back together again, we’ll be ok sooner rather than later. The question is, do we have the courage?

On July 2, 2008, Barack Obama gave a speech where he mentioned support of creating a civil national security force. The rhetoric was dropped from his stump speech.

But that doesn’t mean it was dropped from his agenda. And it’s no surprise he chose Rahm Emanuel, who also supports the idea. Emanuel, however, gives far more scary details.

Try three months of compulsory service for everyone between the ages of 18-25. And that service may require people to travel by train and stay in barracks. And serve through the national guard.

The following video includes audio with Emanuel, video with Emanuel and then video of Obama. All the proof you need.

h/t Hot Air

These are the people asking for equal rights?

Obama is being touted as the first black President.

Of course, he’s half-black, half-white. So, I guess he’s also the 44th White President.

But other Presidents in history had some black in them. Some may have had the same amount of black in them as Obama does.

Thomas Jefferson’s father was half-black and his mother was half-Indian. Presidents Warren Harding and Andrew Jackson had black in their ancestries.

It is widely speculated that Presidents Lincoln and Coolidge were half-black.

So, what is it about Barack Obama’s blackness that makes him the first black President? Especially since the Congressional Black Caucus, in 2001, honored Bill Clinton as the first Black President?

Does anyone else see the pure ridiculousness of all of this? If we want to end racism in this country, then we need to get rid of the labels.

For that to happen, there should be no question on any government papers such as social security forms, drivers license applications or the forthcoming 2010 census asking people to identify themselves by race.

The argument that we need to identify blacks to make sure they’re not neglected is over. A black man is President.

And the fact that he’s not 100% black just shows how useless these labels have been all along.

It’s time to stop using race (and gender) as a reason to get ahead or not. Black people like to think they’re the race of poverty and oppression. But I could take you to plenty of areas where white people struggle as well, if not more. It’s not like there’s a plethora of public housing projects, public transportation and other public programs in the Appalachian Mountains. And don’t tell me that poor white people haven’t been called trailer trash and been treated like crap by other, more established white folk.

Enough is enough. Let’s abolish racial (and gender and geographic, et al) labels once and for all.

Drudge has a big headline about how details of Obama’s private conversation with President Bush leaked. Of course, the only way they would leak is if one of the two men did the spilling of the beans.

And the leak came from the Obama camp, so he obviously broke the longstanding tradition of keeping that conversation between the outgoing and the incoming Presidents quiet.

My first thought is that anyone who thought Obama was going to respect that privacy is naive.

My second thought is that anyone who thinks that Obama didn’t know that those conversations were meant to be private is naive. Even I knew that conversation was meant to be private, and that was simply by watching the news and reading blogs.

By the way, anyone remember when Obama said he’d been to 57 states?

Lie #5 Sarah Palin did not want to prepare for the Katie Couric interview. If Palin has a fault when it comes to preparation, it’s that she overprepared. She’s pro-life, so her test on Trig during the pregnancy, which determined that he had down syndrome, was to be prepared. (She was, after all, at an age where pregnany can be a bit risky.) Most women get those tests to determine whether or not to abort their babies.

If you watch the Couric interview - all the clips - carefully, I can tell she was overthinking everything. I have this problem with my daughter, whom I homeschool. My daughter was classified as gifted when she was still in public school. She has such a high aptitude for interpreting literature that she attempts to apply that strength to more straightforward subjects such as science and history. She’s always reading into what the curriculum is trying to say. I’m teaching her which types of curriculum to use her interpretive strength and which types to take at face value.

Palin was rightly suspicious of the mainstream media by the time she got to the Gibson-Couric interviews. After all, there had been so many false things reported about her.

I remember watching the clip where Couric asked her what newspapers she read, and Palin wouldn’t name a specific publication. That’s when it dawned on me what’s going on.

I know all of this might seem like it’s reaching, but I have the privilege of raising 2 gifted children. Both of them are extremely gifted in some areas, but have deficits in others. You know, your basic strengths and weaknesses stuff.

It’s very easy to make extremely smart people look stupid. All you have to do is find their weakness and exploit it. The Democrats have done that to George Bush for 8 years and succeeded.

Another area Palin *may* struggle with is the ability to rattle off numbers and facts left and right. I have never been one of those people that can remember all the statistics and facts. I use search engines all the time. I’m pretty good at storing stuff for short term memory to work on the project or issue at hand.

And I think Palin is like that stuff. She’s been said to throw herself completely into the bill or project at hand in Alaska. But bring up a topic that’s not at the forefront, and yeah, she might stumble.

I do the exact same thing.

This particular point struck me when Couric brought up the Supreme Court. Palin has been on record about her opinion on at least on Supreme Court case (besides Roe v. Wade) - that had to do with payments resulting from the Valdez oil spill. But Supreme Court cases or judges haven’t been at the forefront of the news. I would have been stumped by that question, too. And my IQ is nothing to shake a stick at

My point is that Palin has a reputation for being a hard worker. She went back to work very soon after having Trig, when most women take 6 weeks (nothing wrong with that, btw). So saying that she refused preparation for the Couric interview is far-fetched indeed.

There are some nasty things being said about Sarah Palin by anonymous cowards inside the McCain campaign. Here’s why I think they’re complete lies:

Lie #1. Sarah Palin doesn’t know how local and state government works. Obviously, she was Mayor and she’s now Governor - she knows how they work. More likely, the McCain staffers, who have worked on Federal campaigns and in Federal government have an impression of how local and state government work and they are the ones who are misinformed. OR, consider that local and state government systems vary from city to city and state to state, thus different impressions how things are run. This is just an outrageous claim.

Lie #2. Sarah Palin didn’t know that Africa is a continent. Sarah Palin has a love of reading and was an excellent student. Forget the elitist concerns about all the colleges she went to - that was more likely her attempt to afford college than anything else. As the truth has started to come out, there may have been confusion about South African countries, but nothing extreme.

Lie #3. Sarah Palin was the one to go out and buy all those expensive clothes, and she charged tens of thousands of dollars to low level staffer’s cards. Red flag number one is the idea that low level staffers have credit cards where they can rack up tens of thousands of dollars worth of debt. Red flag number two is - why don’t we have any reports or pictures of Palin shopping in Neiman Marcus? And when did she have the time to go on these shopping sprees? Also, as a Townhall pointed out Palin refused to wear expensive furs when Vogue photographed her for last February’s issue. And Alaskan Magazine talked about her frugal ways in February as well.

Lie #4. Sarah Palin doesn’t understand the doctrine of American exceptionalism. For me, this is the real clincher that this entire thing is a big smear campaign. Sarah Palin is very proud of America and does believe in our country’s powerful influence in the world - and our responsibility to manage that influence in a worthy manner.

Unless Nicole Wallace arranges for a national media interview where she comes out and denounces all of this and praises Palin, I’m placing the blame for this squarely on her. She was Palin’s initial handler. Wallace is trying to cover her own butt for the Gibson/Couric interviews. Wallace is reportedly also trying to destroy Palin to clear the way for Romney. Why else do all of this?

Ok, we is just me on this blog. But I’m back. My blog went down over some confusion due to the registration of my domain. That’s all over now.

Today, Democrat VP nominee Joe Biden was out on the campaign trail and he told people that having your taxes raised is patriotic.

In that case, why will he and Obama keep 95% of the people from engaging in their patriotism? They’ve drilled it into our heads that 95% of Americans will get tax cuts. But now paying more taxes is patriotic.

So, not only do the wealthy have all the privileges afforded to them by their money, now they get to express their patriotism through higher taxes.

Of course, in reality, most of us would prefer to express our patriotism through the individual liberties afforded to us by the Constitution, instead of having our patriotism forced upon us by two members of the majority Party that won’t get anything done in Congress right now.

Oh, except vote for a budget that increases taxes on the middle class. What? That goes against Obama’s plan for America! Surely, he didn’t vote for it.

Yes, he did.