The Scanner-Politics 4/8/2009 (Double Talk; Overstaying a Welcome; Moyers Talks to William K. Black, the 1980’s Regulator Who Cracked Down on Banks–He Levels Accusations of Law-Breaking Against Obama & Company

~~By InsightAnalytical-GRL

Today’s Scanner articles courtesy Kenosha Marge

Here’s a piece that sums up the path of Barack Obama’s first few months in office nicely–it’s the pattern, stupid:

Obama’s Double-Talk

While the president talks sobriety, his policies take America on an economic bender

Matt Welch | May 2009

High-flying presidencies tend to reveal their base character in trivial moments. In March 2002, when the nation was still massively behind George W. Bush in the wake of the September 11 attacks, he gave the first obvious signal that his administration would play cheap politics even in a time of grave global uncertainty by slapping a temporary new tariff on imported steel. If the world’s fragile economy and the putatively bedrock principles of free trade could be sold out for a couple of percentage points in contested Rust Belt states, we shouldn’t have been surprised to learn that the very “war on terror” would be subject to political manipulation, or that Bush’s skin-deep economic philosophy could not be counted on in a crisis. The costs of what this move revealed became clear soon enough, and eventually Americans withdrew their benefit of the doubt.

Barack Obama’s revelatory moment may have come in his first week as president. On his first day of work, he signed an executive order prohibiting lobbyists from holding highranking administration jobs, thereby fulfilling a campaign promise to “close the revolving door” between K Street and government via “the most sweeping ethics reform in history.” Two days later, the president granted a “waiver” from the new rules to install Raytheon lobbyist William Lynn as the No. 2 man in the Pentagon.

As offenses go, the move was trivial. But as a signal of a governing pathology, it established a pattern that Obama has repeated serially since being sworn into office: reiterate a high-sounding promise from the campaign, undermine said promise with a concrete act of governance to the contrary, then claim with a straight face that the campaign promise has been and will continue to be fulfilled.

MORE

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As Obama returns to Washington to the praises of the U.S. media, apparently all aren’t as enamored “over there.”  Here’s a little snippet from the UK. It’s from the Telegraph, a Murdoch paper…but it still is quite delicious:

–From Iain Martin’s blog:

Isn’t it time for him to go home yet? It is good, in theory, that the new President of the United States is taking so much time to tour Europe. He arrived in London last Tuesday, has been to Strasbourg, Prague yesterday and now he’s off to Turkey. It shows, I suppose, that he cares about the outside world and that is ‘A Good Thing’. But his long stay means that we are hearing rather a lot from him, way too much in fact.

According to Martin, Obama is “long-winded.”  I think that’s being kind.

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Bill Moyers has interviewed William K. Black, “the former senior regulator who cracked down on banks during the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s.” Moyers introduces Black with this:

Now Black is focused on an even greater scandal, and he spares no one — not even the President he worked hard to elect, Barack Obama. But his main targets are the Wall Street barons, heirs of an earlier generation whose scandalous rip-offs of wealth back in the 1930s earned them comparison to Al Capone and the mob, and the nickname “banksters.”

During the interview Black accuses the banks of deliberately making bad loans, calling them “liars loans.”

Black supported Obama, but is disgusted now:

MOYERS:… To hear you say this is unusual because you supported Barack Obama, during the campaign. But you’re seeming disillusioned now.

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Well, certainly in the financial sphere, I am. I think, first, the policies are substantively bad. Second, I think they completely lack integrity. Third, they violate the rule of law. This is being done just like Secretary Paulson did it. In violation of the law. We adopted a law after the Savings and Loan crisis, called the Prompt Corrective Action Law. And it requires them to close these institutions. And they’re refusing to obey the law.

Well, there you go, on Moyers Journal, no less.

But, unfortunately, it’s not on the network news.  But, at this point, I guess we should be thankful for ANYBODY who goes after this mob…

The Scanner-Politics 11/10/08 (FOX Self-Censoring?; OBAMA DAY???; An Upside-Down Flag in My Town)

~~Posted by InsightAnalytical

We’re mourning the retirement of Pagan (Pagan Power)…but Pagan has something else brewing, so we won’t say goodbye–just au revoir!

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Via GRAIL GUARDIAN

Is Fox News self-censoring themselves in an attempt to curry favor with the incoming Obama administration? H/T to Days of Change for this link. Radio Equalizer says:

Fox News boss Roger Ailes doesn’t want to spoil Barack Obama’s political honeymoon, we hear. A source says Ailes has told prime-time hosts Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity and Greta Van Susteren to lay off the President-elect – at least for a while. “We’re not going to have any personal attacks on Obama,” a network insider says. “The public has spoken – we must treat him with respect.”

For those of you that have missed Megyn Kelly’s brilliant salvos at Bill Burton from the Obama campaign, Burton has been singling out Fox for being unfair in their coverage of Obama, a trend that Obama himself started at the Al Smith dinner and continued throughout the end of the campaign by Burton.

The piece goes on to claim that the marching orders came directly from News Corporation owner Rupert Murdoch.

The reason? News Corporation is bracing for potentially-vindictive actions by Obama’s incoming thugocracy, especially regarding dual station / newspaper ownership rules and apparently seeks to placate the Dear Leader, hoping he will be merciful.

I personally believe that Fox has been soft on Obama, and it looks like things are going to get even worse in the days to come. Guess we’d better all get used to submitting to the will of Dear Leader…

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Via Grail Guardian

National Obama Day?

There is, believe it or not, a movement to establish a national holiday honoring Barack Obama. The Topeka Capital-Journal is calling for Inauguration Day to honor a man who has done nothing yet except win an election!

The goals are to secure a national holiday in Obama’s honor, to organize celebrations around his inauguration and to celebrate the 200th birthday of President Abraham Lincoln, who was born on Feb. 12 1809. (IA-GRL adds from the article: “Yes We Can” planning rallies will be at 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. every Tuesday at the downtown McDonald’s restaurant, 1100 Kansas Ave., until Jan. 13.)

At 7:30 a.m. on Inauguration Day, Obama Cake will be served at the downtown McDonald’s, and a celebration is scheduled for 8 p.m. to midnight Jan. 20 at the Ramada Hotel and Convention Center, 420 S.E. 6th.

My only possible response is to suggest a nation-wide boycott of McDonalds on January 20^th in protest for supporting this travesty! First off, as one commenter points out, we generally don’t create holidays named after famous people who aren’t dead yet. Secondly, what if this were to actually happen and then Barack Obama were to turn out to be the worst President we’ve ever had? (I know that thought never even occurred to these people, but it not only occurs to me, but strikes me as a strong possibility.)

If you are worried that the Hopium intoxicated masses might just pull this off, you might want the contact information to give these people a reality check:

For more information, contact Sonny Scroggins, (785) 232-3761, 845-6148 or at biasbustersofkansas@yahoo.com; Lamont Lassiter, McDonald’s general manager, 608-2739; Ava Chander-Beard, (785) 234-9138, ava.beard@sbcglobal.net; or Rhoda Carr, (785) 220-5883.

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Finally, in this fair burg I call home, a vet hung the flag upside down following the election (Thanks to GG for sending it to me…it was actually in the paper, but I don’t really pay too much attention to it, it’s such a rag.)

Las Cruces veteran upends flag to protest Obama

LAS CRUCES — If you happened to drive by Las Crucen Lou Schrader’s house Wednesday, you probably saw his American flag flying upside-down on a pole in the front yard.

It wasn’t by accident.

Schrader, 59, flew the flag upside-down for a day in protest of the election of Barack Obama as president. He’s calling the move a political statement against Obama’s platform.

Schrader, who lives on Ethel Avenue, said he also flew his flag upside-down both times Bill Clinton was elected.

“We have descended into a one-political-party nation,” he said. “The Democrats have taken over everything. We’re going to be taxed out of existence.”

Schrader assures his action was not racially motivated.

“It’s not that I’m a racist; I just don’t like this guy as an individual,” he said. “Some of the things Barack Obama said during his campaign has scared me to death, (such as) “let’s spread the wealth.’ Excuse me, that’s socialism.”

Schrader, a former member of the Navy, said he’s concerned Obama “hates the military.”

The flag wasn’t flying Thursday. Schrader said he only flies it on federal holidays and in protest of certain presidents winning office.

Schrader lives across the street from three Obama supporters, who happen to be black.

Neighbor Dimitris Kollaros, 32, seemed to be taking Schrader’s action with a grain of salt.”We were laughing about it all day long,” said Kollaros, interviewed Wednesday evening. “Now that there’s an African-American president, he’s protesting the U.S., and I think it’s funny because, if you love your country, you love it no matter what.”

(SNIP)

According to U.S. Code, which contains laws about handling the American flag, the flag shouldn’t be displayed upside-down “except as a signal of dire distress in instances of extreme danger to life or property.”

Las Cruces police showed up at Schrader’s home Wednesday to check whether the flag was a distress signal.

According to http://www.ushistory.org, there aren’t penalties for violating the flag code, and the U.S. Supreme Court “has ruled that politically motivated violations of the flag code are protected by the First Amendment.”

As you can see, the neighbors immediately brought up race…first on their list of why it Schrader shouldn’t have hung the flag upside down. No mention of what the black neighbors thought, from what I can infer. And I have to wonder, who called the cops? Or did they just pass by?

Post Election Thoughts…The Last Salvo or REALITY BITES

~~By Grail Guardian

There will never be a female President of the United States. There. I said it. Ladies, go home and grab your burkas and start cooking dinner for your man and popping out babies. You will never have equal pay for equal work, you will never be considered competent or capable at anything you ever do, and you stand no chance of ever getting anywhere unless it’s to a soccer or hockey game to cheer your (male) children on. Of course the laws will be wide open to allow you to abort female children so you don’t have to sully the landscape with them at all anymore.

How do I know? Because before even half the nation’s votes were tallied tonight, not only were all the major networks calling the race for Barack Obama, but the pundits are already discussing how Sarah Palin was John McCain’s downfall. Pundits attempting to defend her popularity with statistics were shot down on Fox News. That’s it – it’s over. You will not see another female Presidential candidate taken seriously in this country in our lifetimes. We’ll be lucky if we continue to see women continue to hold seats in the Senate and House after tonight. Female Governors? Forget about it. Palin won’t be re-elected there, because in spite of the fact that Alaska loved her (90% approval rating) just 4 months ago, she has been trashed and is now persona non grata in her own state courtesy of the Chosen One.

Hillary Clinton will lose her Senate seat in 2012. Barack Obama had determined that before she surrendered her fight for the Democratic nomination, and all the pundits are hammering how he “beat the Clinton machine”. She is toast. But frankly, that’s OK with me tonight. As far as I am concerned, Hillary is one of the top reasons that Barack Obama was able to destroy the United States Constitution and insinuate himself into the Presidency. She has lost my respect and she has lost my vote. She bears a huge responsibility for Obama’s victory. She gave up on America to save her career. She sold out her constituents and supporters for the proverbial 30 pieces of silver, and she will have to live with that for the rest of her life.

So here are my top reasons for the desecration and destruction of the Constitution of the United States of America:

Karl Rove: The Republican strategist was neck deep in foisting Obama on an unaware America. After his manipulations to get and keep George W. Bush in the White House, he pulled off the ultimate hoodwink by clandestinely switching sides and getting the most unelectable man in politics elected on literally no platform. His uncontrollable glee while watching the returns confirmed for me that he had more than just a casual involvement in the victory. I’m sure he is now convinced that he is the most powerful man in the world.

Hillary Clinton: She spent the primary convincing us how unqualified Obama was to be POTUS and how she would never quit fighting for the American people. After all is said and done, I believe history will prove her correct on the former point. After “suspending” her campaign and humiliating herself and her 18 million supporters at the Democratic convention, she fulfilled her promise to “work my heart out” and campaigned at full tilt for Obama till the very end and convinced a painful number of her supporters that Obama was a suitable replacement for her. Rather than stand on principle and speak out against Obama’s Constitutional ineligibility to serve as POTUS, she knowingly and willingly aided and abetted the criminal activities of Obama and the DNC.

Main Stream Media: Of course one of the biggest reasons for the destruction of the United States of America and life as we know it is the Main Stream Obamedia. I cannot adequately convey my disgust with them, but let’s face it; they created a President. We have allowed them to decide a Presidential election for the third time in a row, and there is no stopping them now. Plan on spending the rest of your lives (and money) on whatever crap they decide to sell you, whether it be political candidates, lousy programming, toothpaste, or male enhancement products. They bought the soul of America with infomercials and “reality” shows that don’t vaguely resemble reality. It was the Bargain of the Century.

Fox News: “Fair and Balanced” reporting was next to impossible to find this election season as MSNBC, CNN, NBC, CBS, and ABC immediately suited up for Team Obama during the primaries. Before the GE race started in earnest, Fox appeared to be the only source of coverage that wasn’t totally biased in favor of Obama. It turned out that was a sham. The first to start fawning over Obama was the shameless Bill O’Reilly. His disgust with John McCain overruled his whatever journalistic instincts he had, and he threw the race in order to feebly protest the people having chosen McCain as the Republican nominee. The rest of the network quickly followed suit with only a few exceptions (Megan Kelly stands out), and by election night they were quicker to call the race for Obama than nearly anyone and spent all their post-coital analysis slamming McCain for having has the cajones to even consider running in the first place, nonetheless with a woman on the ticket. In the end, it’s tough to decide if they were influenced by owner Rupert Murdoch’s endorsement of Obama or were just trying desperately to keep a luke-warm candidate from embarrassing the party. Either way, they garnered millions of cable viewers based on their supposed impartiality, then proceeded to join in the mass brainwashing, with unparalleled gusto by the last week of the campaign.

The Republican Party: In a year when the Republicans had virtually no chance in hell of taking the White House, true conservatives “allowed” the public to nominate John McCain in what they though was a throwaway election. Imagine their surprise when McCain actually started to show some signs of life (and without them)! After the base was reinvigorated by the brilliant announcement of Sarah Palin as McCain’s Vice Presidential nominee, the party had 2 choices: support the centrist McCain and try with gusto to steal the White House from the Democrats in a year that it was all but guaranteed to be theirs, or sit back and do nothing in quiet protest of the likelihood of a McCain victory. The party decided as an entity to do the latter, and the sheeple of the right within the party followed suit, complaining that he wasn’t really their man and they’d rather give the White House to the Dems than suffer losing their control of the party from the radical right. The party that a few short weeks before had looked like heroes for putting a woman on the ticket after the brutal ravaging of Hillary Clinton wound up looking like misogynists; campaign leaks called Palin a “rogue” and “out of control” in efforts to prevent her from seeking further national office in the future. In the end, it was not the leadership of the party or McCain, but the spineless conservative members who tanked an election and gave up control of Congress rather than let a woman near the White House.

The Democratic Party: Howard Dean, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Donna Brazile, Jimmy Carter, Zbigniew Brezinski and other Democratic leaders colluded, long before the start of the 2008 Presidential campaign, to use radical tactics to steer the party to the far left and overthrow the legitimate government of the United States. They selected a young, unknown freshman Senator from Illinois with literally no history and molded him into their dream candidate. Their plan to use race as a means to energize the African American voter base and intimidate whites into voting out of guilt and fear dripped of cynicism and hatred for America. The one obstacle that stood in their way was popular front-runner Hillary Clinton. With unprecedented viciousness, the DNC and Obama campaign launched an all out misogynistic attack on Clinton, accompanied by charges of racism against her, husband Bill Clinton, and literally all of her 18 million supporters. Suddenly empowered by the report-nothing media, they started to publicly break their own rules, change rules midstream, change and assign votes cast to their chosen candidate, and lie about virtually everything. Once their ravaging of Clinton brought her to her knees, they thought they were golden, until John McCain chose Sarah Palin as his running mate. Unequipped to handle the public’s adoration of the Alaska Governor, they trashed Palin with lies, innuendo, and false charges which were all lustily covered by the media. Their destruction of everything female in this country now stands complete, and sadly I know many women that voted Democratic yesterday, probably a straight party ticket. When all is said and done, it will be shown that the Democratic brand is nothing more than the flip side of the people that brought us the corrupt Republican brand of George W. Bush.

The Socialists: I won’t spend time right now going into repeated detail about the likes of William Ayers, Bernadette Dohrn, Khalid al Mansour, et al. Let it be enough to say that an organized Socialist movement that started smoldering in the 1960s burst into full flames this year and will soon sweep this nation like wildfire. Their efforts were deliberate, domestic terrorism and I’m quite sure that Timothy McVeigh is smiling like mad from his platform in hell.

Mob Rule: You can include the illegal activities of ACORN in this category or the one above – take your pick. Angry blacks, agitated to the brink of race war by the Obama machine, and young white college types determined to put a black man (any black man – with man being the operative word) in the highest office in the land to assuage their white guilt, threatened to riot, bullied opponents mercilessly online, and even intimidated other voters while standing in line to vote by discussing the riots that would ensue if Obama lost. Never underestimate the bullying of thugs both physical and psychological. I also include trolls in this category, because without their relentless assault on literally every website that ever posted even 1 word in opposition to Obama, this victorious annihilation of all common sense and decency would not have been possible. Pat yourselves on the backs, Psy Ops Warriors! Job well done. There will be posts for all of you in the new Civilian Police Force, dragging PUMAs off to re-education camps, so the fun isn’t nearly over yet.

“4th Wave” Feminists: Never underestimate the power of women defiling other women in this coup d’etat. Names like Nancy Pelosi, Donna Brazile, Claire McCaskill, Arianna Huffington, Erica Jong, Alice Germond, Peggy Noonan, Maureen Dowd, Oprah Winfrey, and literally every woman in Hollywood leap to mind in this category at first blush, but let’s not take the credit away from the invisible everyday “feminist”. I’m talking the ones that cried “It’s not that I don’t want a woman President, I do. Just not that woman!” and “I just can’t believe they picked Sarah Palin. That woman isn’t qualified to be President!” They did more to demoralize and frustrate the efforts of every woman in this nation than we have seen in decades. As I stated at the outset, these women (the type who live merely to find men and have no sense of self outside their relationships) have ensured that I shall not live to see a female President of the United States of America. Perhaps it makes them feel more powerful in their own meaningless lives, but they are traitors to us, to themselves, and to this Republic. They have played a vital role in pushing back the clock to roughly the 1920s as far as Women’s Rights are concerned. And I will not be able to laugh or say I told you so when they realize the aftereffects of what they have done.

The American People: Ultimately, the blame must lie with those who did nothing or not enough to stop this decline during this and the previous 5 administrations. I count myself in the latter category. I apparently awoke too late to stop the juggernaut of the New World Order. I fought like mad at the end (during the last year), but like most of America I was asleep at the wheel when people like both George Bush 41 & 43, Reagan, Carter, and even Bill Clinton steered this nation towards the slippery slope that it is on today. I watched and either complained or ignored as our liberties were slowly eroded. I bristled at the overt actions, but was easily assuaged back to my complacency when adjustments were made to allow my comfort level to return. I sold my country out for the ability to buy PCs, cell phones, SUVs, bigger houses, designer clothing, “organic” foods, and other such frivolities. I got angry and excited at an unseen enemy when my handlers in the media told me it was time to do so. I ranted about Global Warming and going Green, signed up for an HMO that had nothing whatsoever to do with Health Maintenance or even getting better when I was sick or injured, and dug deep into my pockets to help others less fortunate than I around the world when disasters struck and even remained silent when I had to do it for my own countrymen in the Hurricane ravaged south after Katrina and other storms showed that our government was unwilling and incapable of helping our own in time of need, regardless of how many tax dollars they had paid into the system. I kept silent. I averted my eyes. I deafened myself to the sure sounds of corruption and moral decay. And I turned off my feelings for my fellow Americans long enough for them to become so very angry that they would lash out at me in fury to destroy America as payment for my complacency. And for that, I am truly sorry America. I have failed you.