Nom de guerre: Rivrdog

A failure of representation

It's curious that a right-wing pundit such as your Rivrdog should abandon party politics one month before the general election, but this is the case.

In the congressional action on the recent bailout bill, the Congress, both houses of that bicameral body, completely failed the American Republic in both duty and honor.

I was in favor of the original concept of the bailout, a simple idea that would have required the Treasury Department to buy up instruments of issuance of bad credit and hold them, out of the mainstream of commerce, to improve the overall quality of commercial credit operations.

The public law which resulted does not resemble this concept, and it has, instead, become a pirate's chest of looted booty from the taxpayers.

That's not the worst of it.

In the days of the Founders, when Congress assembled in Philadelphia to do it's work, the Members had to bring with them the wishes of their constituencies, because the lines of communication back to their Districts were slow and tenuous.

Flash forward to the 21st Century - we have excellent communications that can and DOES convey, INSTANTLY, the wishes of the constituents to the Members of Congress. Accordingly, when the votes were being tallied for the first Bailout Bill, it was opposed by overwhelming numbers in almost all Congressional Districts. The House acted (as a body) like they were supposed to, and they rejected it. In retrospect, given that opinions supporting the bill far less than 5% (one twentieth) were expressed to the Members of the House, the Bill should not have garnered a single vote. It was barely defeated.

The original Bill had the basic concept and just a smattering of ancillary concepts attached (the one about CEOs not getting huge salaries and bonuses for running companies into the ground comes to mind), but NO EARMARKS.

When the second set of bills was introduced, it looked nothing like Secretary Paulson's 3-page proposal sent over to Congress last week. That proposal had ballooned modestly to a 10-page Bill for an Act. The second Bill was 350-plus pages, with an attached $100 billion worth of earmarks. I'm not going to go into the fetishist list of earmarks, you can find that by searching the internet.

What I AM going to rant about is the fact that while some push-polling showed attitudes towards the bailout bill softening, it was NOT favored by most folks contacting their Congressional Representatives and Senators, it was still opposed.

Taking the most expensive, non-war appropriation ever suggested, Congress hastily enacted a Bill that the US electorate  had decisively rejected. It was accepted with a few paltry hours of debate.

It's time for a list.

Here's how I see the failure of the Congress:

• After the first rejection, it was Congress' duty to have additional hearings to require Secretary Paulson to explain why his idea, garnering so little support as it did, should even be reconsidered by Congress. Congress failed in that duty.
• After the first rejection, it was Congress' duty to go to their Districts and find out why American citizens were almost unanimously opposed to Paulson's idea. Congress failed in that duty.
• The leadership of both parties in Congress had originally agreed to not put ANY earmarked funding into the Bill, but in the hours between the first Bill's rejection and the introduction of the second Bill, $100 Billion worth of earmarks had appeared in that second version. This is a change of such magnitude that the Congress owed the American citizens a complete explanation of why that change was made. Congress failed in that duty.
• Even if Congress could be excused for taking Wall Street at it's word that the Bill was required to save the US economy (your Rivrdog accepted that theory), after three days of post-rejection trading, it had become obvious that the "must-bail-out" urgency was not holding up to scrutiny. With the urgency of avoiding complete economic collapse fading rapidly, Congress had a duty to be more deliberate in it's action. Congress failed in that duty.

If this sort of failure of duty with the Congress was a one-time thing, maybe we could excuse them, but it isn't. Actually, in ignoring the electorate they are sworn to represent, Congress has simply acted in their usual manner, with their usual attitude that winning a seat in Congress somehow makes them all-seeing and all-knowing, so the wishes of the electorate does not have to be considered when doing the business of the nation.

What to do?

The simple fact is that Congress, both houses of it, presently sits in complete contempt of the Electorate. The penalty for that offense is simple and swift: every sitting Member of Congress should be voted out of office (that is to say, the opponents of all sitting in Congress should be voted into office). The two major party candidates for President, and one Vice Presidential candidate are also Members of Congress, and they ESPECIALLY failed in their duty as to their roles in Congress, but also in their hoped-for roles as national Executives. None of them deserve our votes, either.

This is not about "party" anymore. This is about whether we are to allow a dictatorship of elite incumbents to govern our Nation, especially when they have so aptly demonstrated their Contempt for their own Nation, and the principles upon which it was founded, and their very oaths.

In one month, every adult citizen with voting rights will be presented a ballot on which to indicate who they want to govern this Nation. The incumbent Members of Congress seeking re-election will be prominently displayed on those ballots.

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UPDATE: 100508: 1655 PDT: It appears that I am not the only one with the "throw the bums out" attitude. Thanx, Kevin.

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It is the duty of every American voter to refuse to vote for a single incumbent Member of Congress. To break out of this dictatorship of elites, we must start with a fresh slate of Members of Congress. Some folks have been sounding this alarm for years. My own father was one of them, but never before now has the reason for the "throw the bums out" choice been so evident, nor the need for action so pressing.

Heeeere's the "Pundit-dog"

October - meh. There really is nothing much more important than the economy of the lead nation of the Free World, but our politicians refuse to see that, so they are shoveling shit with great vigor, not realizing that the end result will be - a bigger pile of shit.

So, let's skip October, and the election, even. At this point, Obama would have to try VERY hard to lose it, and it seems that the harder he tries with anything, the worse he does at it, so he will back in and win. It's all really about youth, not politics. After several abortive tries, the youth have finally gotten it together enough to give us old farts the boot. We will shortly be out of power, at least as the Executive goes.

The Congress is the nightmare that the youth haven't dreamed yet. They will all run, with their various agendas, to the halls of Congress next January, and noisily demand the passage of THEIR programs, few of which will actually see the lights of a committee hearing room. Congress is far less amenable to the ragtag political machinations of youth than the young voters who are about to vote in Obama realize.

About next summer, President Obama will get tired of trying to do EVERYTHING by Executive Orders, especially after being rebuffed on a Second Amendment issue by the Supreme Court, and he will get impatient with Congress, and a serious rift will develop that will last into 2010, when the Congress will have a 1994-style upheaval, and Obama will lose his majority, if not outright, it will become so small that tiny blocs of rogue (D) Reps will be able to stymie his dreams. Mushing ahead to 2012, the (D)onks will dump him in favor of someone who can put their shit in one sock. That someone will be Hillary.

So, if the GOP wants to still be a party of the Center and Right, it needs to get IT'S shit in one sock and start planning for the 2010 Congressional elections and the 2012 Presidential election. It needs to identify a young, mostly-conservative executive like Bobby Jindal, and start getting him ready as a national leader.

My generation's day is done. We will never have the reins of power again, but that doesn't have to be a bad thing. The Constitution will be safe with some of the bright, young GOP leaders out there. It's up to us old farts to get behind one or more of them NOW, because only one of their caliber will be able to knock out the Hildebeeste in 2012.

Sure, I'll vote for McCain/Palin (probably not now, see next post "A failure of representation"), and I won't be throwing my vote away. The GOP duo will garner maybe 45% of the popular vote at most, and they will lose by 5-8%, a significant margin in these days. That will be the youth talking, but that's the last concerted voice we will hear from them. They are too young and full of their own bullshit to continue to pull the oars in a coordinated manner after November '08, so their ship will just plow circles in the political water. The conservative geezers AND the new conservative youth WILL listen to one Captain, and we will pull OUR oars with a precise purpose.

Only the center-right is capable of the unified thought that spells dynasty. What we need NOW is to get past this coming failed election process, and get serious about the job of finding and promoting that Captain.

Time's-a-wastin'.

Debate blarney

My gudwife made me sit through one of the three times she watched the dee-bate last night. It's rolling off of me like a rainshower off a swimming duck. I just don't care. Then Obama was trying to hammer McCain about meeting with enemy leaders, and he said something about Henry Kissinger as if the old Nixonian was his good buddy. I chuckled, but relapsed into semi-conciousness as I continued to cook dinner. Political stupor.

Late last night, as the spin machines spun up, the depth of that lie grew on several people, even on the MSM, represented here by ABC News:

During the debate, McCain said that Kissinger would not endorse Obama's position that he would meet on a presidential level with leaders of enemy countries. "I guarantee you he would not say that," McCain said of Kissinger.

Obama took issue with McCain's characterization of the former top diplomat's position, but just last week Kissinger said that, while he broadly agrees on the need to negotiate with Iran, he "preferred doing it at the secretary of state level."

...and the blarney goes on, and on, and on....

BTW, did anyone else notice that Obama CONSTANTLY butted in on McCain when he was speaking, and that Leherer NEVER called him on it? I was on a famous debate squad, second team on the Portland State College team of '64 (members of which also won the GE College Bowl that year). If I had butted in as much as Obama, I would have lost enough points to sink the entire squad for the entire year. If it's actually going to be called a debate, use the common rules of debate, the commonest of which is that the moderator actually RUNS the debate, and has a duty of at least reminding participants to remain silent until it's their turn to speak.

A pox on BOTH their houses. May the worst man lose.

Pelosi busting...

...is EASY when you have a fine fisk like this one to show folks.

Yahoo! news blog says election is GOP's to lose

Read this article to get the idea of just how bad it is within the Democratic Party right now. Bear in mind that Politico is a liberal newsblog known for slanting the news to the left. If THEY admit that it's bad, it must REALLY be bad.

"A Washington Post-ABC News poll released this week showed white women swinging hard against the Democratic ticket."

Wow! Just Wow!

If they haven't done so already, the DNC will now pull out all the stops, and turn the campaign over to the Dirty Tricks Dept. I heard on Fox News last night that may already be a possibility, since about 30 DNC operatives, including political-process lawyers, have gotten off of planes in AK in the last two days.

Those operatives will be digging primarily for major dirt on Palin, so we will see in the near-term lots of "breaking news" flashes about things she is supposed to have done to folks up there. Of course, the folks telling those tales to the DNC dirt-diggers won't be interviewed in depth, so we'll never really know just what shade of shady they really are.

I refuse to read the Daily Kos, but count on the DNC to continue prodding that slime-barrel of a news blog to release ALL the unsubstantiated rumor that the DNC folks feed them, and encourage them to make up some. At least Fox will usually name that source, if that is where slime originated from.

The election IS the GOP's to lose now, and if McCain-Palin get by the debates, they have a lock on it.

The debates, if what I've seen so far holds true, will have to feature softball questions for Obama leading directly into his talking points. McCain will have to actually play the moderator and dig at the weak spots in those talking points, he can't count on the debate moderator to ding Obama for weaseling like he's done so far on the Fox interview. As for the Biden-Palin debate, all she needs to do is shut up and let Biden lose it, and lose it he will, because the man simply can NOT stop talking, and he will get very annoyed and blow up when the moderator has to cut him off. Biden has the pedantic style of Ted Kennedy, and just keeps rolling along. I haven't seen much of Palin's style, but she seems to be able to make short statements. The debates are a sound-bite arena, and Biden will lose in that arena simply because he can't so sound bites. Look back, just how many of his sound bites have you seen on TeeVee? Right. Damn few.

The end is in sight, folks, if the RNC keeps it together and doesn't make major gaffes, like Obama just did with the "lipstick on a pig" thing.

Hey Buddy, can you spare $5 Trillion?

Imagine, if you will, a vagrant approaching you on the street and asking you, not for "spare change", but for five trillion dollars.

That is the un-enviable position of the US Treasury Dept right now. It's regulators have taken over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the quasi-Governmental mortgage banks, because they are broke, their shares having fallen to about 8 percent of their recent value.

The loan portfolios of these two giants, which guarantee the security of about 60% of all US residential mortgages, amount to roughly $5,000,000,000,000, or about 40% of the entire Gross Domestic Product.

As I understand these two banks' operations, they don't actually HOLD the loans, they GUARANTEE them. There's a difference. If the loan defaults, as about 5% of them have, the commercial bank holding the paper may request that the guarantor make good on it. A guarantor is like a co-signer of the note. It is estimated that as many as 20% of these loans are in some threat of default, due to the practice of making many of them as Adjustable Rate Mortgages, loaning as much as 125% of the actual cash value of the property (remember all those awful Di-Tech ads on teevee?). As all those ARMs reach their maximum interest rate potential, many of the mortgagees can't make the payments. To that, add the fact that real estate values have fallen, as much as 30% in many markets, and could fall farther, and you have a prescription for many folks having to walk away from their homes, and give the properties back to the banks. The banks don't do well selling them, and rarely recover 50% of what they have loaned out, so they bang the US Treasury for the difference via the guarantee.

Enter Joe Biden, Democratic Veep nominee, and shill for the big banks. He was apparently interviewed on "Eat the Press" this morning, and made a couple of curiously conflicting statements (but when doesn't he).

In the AssPress synopsis (I don't watch Eat the Press), Biden tries to lead with what he must think is fiscal conservatism:

"Joe Biden says the government's rescue of the big mortgage companies Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae should not mean bailing out shareholders at the expense of taxpayers."

Excellent, I agree. but then his true colors show: again from AP:

"The goal is to shore up the mortgage market."

So how do you "shore up" the mortgage market without bailing out the commercial banks which hold the bad paper? The short answer is that you can't.

I smell another wealth transfer coming, but because investor-owned banks are involved, it will be out of the little guys' pockets, not the big investors. Biden and the (D)onks will find a way to raise taxes on the middle class and hand this money to the mortgage bankers who STUPIDLY loaned out money which financed the "plastic economy" that is failing as I write.

I say let the banks fail. We depend entirely too much on them in this culture, and they have led us, Pied Piper fashion, out of the good habit of squirreling actual money away as cash savings and into the never-never land of plastic money, an invention of their own that they control and get their vig off of. Yep, there will be hard times when they go under, the banks will see to that, but when we survive (and the smartest and strongest of us will come out of it faster), we will have learned a valuable lesson about plastic money and phony real estate valuations.

Hillary People: They're going to vote McCain/Palin

And this is why.

If you are a Hillary follower, you have a discernible amount more ability to think than an Obama person. Obama people are like the fundie Christians who just shake their Bible at you and tell you, "God said it, it must be so". THOSE folks have severed all connections of critical thinking from their lives. Obama people don't have a Bible, they don't need it, they just have Hope and they believe in Change. Matters not what they are hoping for, matters not what the changes will be, they Believe. See the connection? They are fundamentalists in a religion as much as the Christian fundies are.

So, what does a truckload of discarded American flags have to do with all this? Glad you asked. Don't bother to sit down, this won't take long.

Hillary people believe in a lot of things I don't, but having known a few of them, I rate most of them as thinkers. They are going to ask themselves why the Obama people, who controlled all physical aspects of the Democratic National Convention, bothered to put up American flags to show their "patriotism", then threw those flags away, when part of Patriotism is knowing how to properly dispose of the American flag.

Several answers to my question might be conjured up, but the only obvious one, and the one that many Hillary people are going to agree with, is that the Obama people don't give a damn about the Flag, or what it stands for. Their use of the flag was a trick to fool the eye, nothing more. The eyes to have been fooled were ours. We were supposed to have our eyes tell us what our brains wouldn't, that Obama was an upright American, patriotic to the core.

I don't cotton to some of the beliefs that Hillary holds, but I do believe that she would not have led the nation to the disaster, both internally and externally, that will be our reward if Obama gets the voters' nod.

So, I think that those Hillary people will, with their rational brains, control their angst over voting for someone not of the Left, and they will vote for McCain/Palin in droves, and our nation shall be saved.

Thanks, GuyK, for pointing me at this tidbit. Have another cuppa and continue chalking out that evac loading for the Red Ram.

A new broom...

....could sweep DeeCee a lot cleaner than it is now. McCain owes allegiance to few (including not much to the GOP), and Sarah Palin owes even less, especially considering that most of her GOP "mentors" are either in the pokey,on the way there, or washing dishes, AT HER HAND.

Does the "new broom" sobriquet apply to Obama? Not in my book, since he DOES owe allegiance to not one, but TWO political machines: the Daley Machine and the DNC (heavily). One hopes that he doesn't owe allegiance to machines NOT on our shores, but I wouldn't die of shock if THAT turned out to be true. Biden, of course, is pwned by the Big Banks in Delaware, and probably STILL has solid connections in the anti-war underground.

I like THIS idea, very Darth-Rovian, indeed, if true.

Yep, watched the Palin speech twice last night. I don't share the discontent of some GOP troops who pick apart her every move (Michael Savage comes to mind). If you or I were standing before our first worldwide audience, delivering our first major political speech for the global audience, we might step on our laugh lines also. Likewise the fact that she may not have written that speech doesn't impress me as worthy of more than 10 words, either.

I am VERY impressed by McCain's continued grasp of OpSec and CommSec, in that NO ONE knew of his Veep choice until he wanted to release it. If he can foil the leakers and the traitorous media, he's worth electing even if he needs lessons regarding the First and Second Amendments.

I've just time to go put away the fruits of my lunchtime shopping. I added a couple of weeks worth of canned food to my cache, and scored some .44 Mag Remington green-box 180gr SP ammo for $25, so I'm happy. I also bought 100 rds worth of .44 Mag Hornady 240gr XTP bullets, and will load them as warshots with this data:

Cases: New Winchester. Powder, 24.0 gr of H110, CCI #300 primer and a full crimp with the carbide die. This should CUP in the mid-30s.

I'm also going to load 112 rds with a Bulletworks.com 240gr LSWC (#24) in once-fired Remington cases, using the same CCI 300 primers. Still have to decide on the speed and powder I want to use, though. Leaning towards Unique and something in the 900s to shoot indoors, but I will probably load about 20 of those cases with the same bullet and powder combo as the XTPs, just to get a comparison of how they shoot and how much lead they leave behind in the throat and barrel of both the Anaconda and the Marlin 1894C.

Off to my cache to store the food, and reloading bench to drop off the supplies, and then it's only one hour until the NFL season opener!

DNC tidbits

...from the cornvention.

Item One: What's with the deliberate attempt to confer "star power" on Michelle Obama? Hundreds of "Michelle" signs were issued for those in the camera's eye to wave for the occasion of her speech last night. Just what IS Michelle Obama if BHO gets elected? Bueller? Yes Bueller, she is one of those, but you may report to the Principal's office for using that language in my class. Anyone else? OK, with Bueller out of the room, allow me to point out that Michelle Obama would simply be the wife of the President. She has no official function at all, so she needs no "star power". Of course we all remember the LAST time a President tried to give his wife a role to play. This is just more of the (D)onks trying to reinvent the roles of government in our (supposedly) Constitutional society.

Item Two: The Swimmer. My remote fell between the couch cushions, so before I could get it out to mute the volume, the Swimmer had already intoned some gibberish about how great we used to be and could be again (talked about landing a man on the moon as an example). OK, Teddy Boy, listen up: We did those things back in "the day", and many WERE done in Democratic Administrations, because the generation which had actual GUTS and GUMPTION was still in charge. That would be the "Greatest Generation" for those of you short on history. The generation which fought and won World War Two. What the Swimmer wants is for the X-generation and the next one after that to rise up and do great things. Sorry Teddy, it ain't gonna happen, because YOU and your liberal cronies saw to it that our society had all those fine individual traits such as GUTS and GUMPTION removed from them and replaced with Political Correctness and cowardice. So, why no, Senator Kennedy, what you just called for will never happen, so go back to the Cape Cod Complex, have a drink, lay down and wait for your end.

UPDATE: Item Three: The ObamaMessiah spin machine grinds on. In an effort to get some "we be Presidential" creds, Obama now says that after election, he will have his Attorney General review all of Bush's Ececutive Orders to see if they are Constitutional. Except that doesn't make him look MORE Presidential, it makes him look LESS Presidential. Making such a review, of course, is his FIRST duty upon taking the office, and everyone who DIDN'T sleep though high-school Civics already knows that. The "hook" in this tidbit was Executive Orders surrounding the reaction to the Abu Grahib scandal, which NO ONE ever thought was Bush's doing in the first place. So, the airhead picks a topic to show off on which is like saying "drinking water is good for you", then illustrates it with an example that shows he  not only doesn't read his own MSM and their push-polls, but he is just looking to bash Bush, not advance his own cause. Poor campaign strategy, but do we expect more?

Next, we have two days of Clintons, then what promises to be a rabid-dog attack speech by Biden, then, blissfully, the weekend (with FOOTBALL!) to recover before the almost-equally FUBAR GOP gets IT'S chance to screw the pooch.

In the meanwhile, Hurricane Gustav threatens the Gulf, so top off your emergency fuel supplies wherever you live (the fuel price-gougers are already drooling over Gustav), and keep a close eye and keen ear to all the warnings if you live in the threatened areas.

Fox News blows the scoop of the year

Maybe the scoop of the century.

Fox was covering Barack Obama as he spoke to a "town-hall" political event (starring himself, natch), and when they cut in, he was in "Professor" mode, lecturing the crowd on how Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac work. That was all pretty much straight up, but when he got to the part of saying that the Government MUST keep the two mortgage companies afloat, Fox News decided that they were done with that coverage, and they cut away.

Fox blew it big time. Obama was at the point of saying that the government must guarantee all the mortgages, even the subprime ones. The actual total loan portfolios of the two "private" mortgage giants is somewhere between 5 and 8 trillion dollars, at today's market prices.

Had the TeeVee camera kept rolling, we might have seen a citizen ask Obama some critical questions about HIS take on the inevitable bailout.

Those questions would be:

1. Who is going to write that check? The Federal government doesn't have enough money to bail out the pair of mortgage banks.
2. When is the bailout going to occur, on a scale of soon to later?
3. Is the real estate market going to be allowed to bottom out before the bailout? If it isn't at bottom, the bailout will never be complete.
4. What about the 40% of residential mortgages which are NOT guaranteed now?
5. What about other real-estate loans? Commercial properties?

I would have loved to see how Obama proposes to answer those questions, but Fox News were ignoramuses, and failed to see the importance of their coverage, and they cut away.

For you readers who want life to continue as it has, and who don't want to have to face the End Times, you owe it to yourselves to get some answers to these questions. From both candidates.

The answers to the questions above are important enough to be made a decision-point in deciding who to vote for. If either candidate provides the right answers, I'm going to vote for that candidate, because if the leadership of the Nation falters on this issue, what WE get out of it is an economic crash of Republic-ending proportions.

Some sort of bailout will have to happen, but if it isn't done right, a crash might occur anyway. Maybe less of a crash, but enough of one to call it a bad Depression.

OTOH, if the Feddle Gummint just signs a blank check to back every mortgage in the nation, that doubles the National Debt, and when the debt gets that high, the US dollar will be worthless abroad. You thought $4 gas is too high? Wait for a two-bucks-to-one-Euro dollar and see what fuel prices zoom to.