Now at Edwardsreport.com!

We’ve moved!  Now at Edwardsreport.com!  New contributors!  An awesome logo! More posts!  More features! More ads!  Now gluten free! The same lame, right wing Onion rip-off! Yeah!  Edwardsreport.com! Edwardsreport.com! Edwardsreport.com!  Everybody’s smoking Edwardsreport.com, why don’t you?  Are you chicken?  It feels good, trust me.  You’ll like it.  Edwardsreport.com.

Breaking – New Palin Scandal! (Repost!)

Impacting Hard

The political world was thrown into chaos Tuesday night as a possible devastating scandal involving Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and one of her children emerged.  The New York Times is set to report in five front page articles on Wednesday morning that Piper, the Palin’s 6-year-old daughter, has been a very naughty girl, raising questions about Gov. Palin’s governing abilities.  Among other shocking details, the Times is revealing that Piper once stayed up past bedtime and refused to eat her vegetables.  Bernice Satanica, the head of Humorless Alliance for Grrls! (HAG), responded to the revelations by asking, “If she can’t get her 6-year-old to eat broccoli, can we really trust her to negotiate with Ahmadinejad?  What kind of mother has ever had a child that disobeyed them?”  Campbell Brown, a CNN anchor who also works as a spokesman for the Obama campaign, asked a McCain staffer about the damaging information during her most recent newscast.  ”This makes one wonder if Palin was really vetted at all.  Why didn’t the McCain campaign hire a private investigator to follow Piper around so they could have avoided this embarrassment from the start?” Campbell then went on to say that Gen. Petraeus was in charge of putting kids to bed, not parents, before turning things over to Anderson Cooper, who had just returned from a day of antique shopping and Appletinis with his girlfriend, Anita Beard.

North To Alaska

Here is the suddenly very popular post on Gov. Sarah Palin.

D’s Worried Over Republican Smears, Dirty Tricks, Spin

The Obama campaign headquarters buzzed with energy yesterday afternoon, but there was a sense of foreboding among staffers.  ”We are just waiting for the Rove/Bush spin machine to kick into high gear and turn Obama into somebody we wouldn’t recognize,” said campaign strategist Harold Scrottle, taking a break from planning a campaign ad aimed at convincing voters that John McCain, a former POW, doesn’t support America’s veterans.  ”But what keeps us up at night is the anticipation of the dirty smears, the swift-boating, that will be attempted against Obama,” worried Scrottle, who paused briefly to read an email from a 527 group asking for input on an internet effort to spread the idea that McCain has become senile.  ”We are planning to face a barrage of lies about Obama’s past statements.  They will lie and twist everything Barack has said,” lamented Scrottle, before posting a blog entry on Obama’s website accusing McCain of advocating more American casualties by wanting troops to stay in Iraq forever.   “We will have a hard time fighting back against the Republican echo chamber of Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, and Rush Limbaugh,” Scrottle fretted before heading out the door for interviews with ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, MSNBC, CNN, NPR, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and USA Today.

In other fake election news . . .

Media Outraged Over Obama Accusations Against Obama

Coming Soon!

*EXCLUSIVE, BREAKING NEWS: A transcript of Obama’s marriage proposal!

*What Courtney Love’s crotch has in common with the fabulous Ting Tings!

*McCain’s racism!

Impacting (sorry, Drudge!) later this week . . .

*Stories of addictions, pundits edition #2.

*Personal ads for cable news channels.

Here for the Church of Obama?

Scroll down!  And check out my other posts!  Thanks!

Keep Portland Congested

In order to reduce current congestion and what is forecast to be constant gridlock, progress is being made on replacing the ailing I-5 bridge between Oregon and Washington. A smooth flowing I-5 is vital not just to the Metro area, but the entire West Coast, as evidenced by the ever present trucks. So what is in the works to alleviate the bottleneck? Proving once again that environmentalism is a religion, and a fundamentalist one at that, Portland pols and Metro councilors are proposing replacing the 6 lane bridge with . . . a 6 lane bridge! But what about the congestion? Nothing a Max line and bike and passenger lanes can’t solve! This brought to mind a quote I read in the NYT last Sunday. The French then deputy mayor for the environment, Yves Contassot, said the following about those with the audacity to still drive an automobile: “It is only by making them live in hell that we’ll get drivers to renounce their cars.” The planners in government and their politician bosses are in thrall to a philosophy that will force us to live in apartments, walk or bike to not just work but everywhere we want to go, and become effeminate, latte sipping, NPR listening, vegan members of the “creative class”. (Just kidding about that last one.) (I hope.) My question for the leftists running Portland and Metro: If we make driving cars impossible, where will we put our “Keep Portland Weird” bumper stickers?

 

Drop Dead Freddie

Leave it to the op-ed pages of the WSJ to bring some clarity, common sense, and perspective to the Fannie/Freddie fallout. As I noted earlier, they have been in the fore front of advocating reform of these two private/government institutions. (The official term is government sponsored enterprises, or GSEs.) The cost of a collapse of either or both would lead to a world wide financial catastrophe, so one could assume our government will step in to make sure that does not happen. The big mistake, though, as pointed out by the AEI’s Peter J. Wallison in the WSJ, is if we do avoid economic devastation but then return to the same actions that got us here in the first place.

We Are Still At War

The lack of coverage of the Iraq war should be your first clue that the “surge” has been quite successful at quelling the violence there. Taking the place of its articles is coverage of the devolving state of the war in Afghanistan. The Bush administration is pushing harder for more involvement by Pakistan, but the new government is too busy making peace deals with terrorists and pulling troops out of the dangerous frontier areas of the country. The “militants” (MSM term for terrorists) are using these areas to base their operations, which consist of setting up a Taliban-lead “government” in the until now ungoverned lands and making cross-border attacks on Afghan soil. With the decline of violence in Iraq and the increase in Afghanistan, the latter is now more deadly than the former. A sad demonstration of this occurred on Sunday, when nine U.S. soldiers were killed in an attack, the worst in that war so far. A sad reminder that we are still at war, even if some of us forget that some times.

Drill Bit

According to www.nytimes.com, “President Bush lifted a presidential moratorium on drilling for oil and
natural gas on the Outer Continental Shelf on Monday…” Finally! In an abysmal election year to be a Republican, the GOP has been given an issue that could save them from utter humiliation in November, and yet they can’t find their voice and their actions so far have been tepid. They must push hard, forcing votes and holding up bills in Congress, and continually press the following talking points about drilling for oil in ANWAR and off the Outer Continental Shelf (three to 200 miles off the coast): 1) We would not be sending the money to unfriendly countries; 2) It would create many, many jobs for Americans; 3) It would bring in revenue for struggling states; and, most importantly, 4) It will immediately lower gas prices.
It should be noted that President Bush’s move is symbolic. Not only was their a presidential executive order, there is still in place a Congressionally enacted moratorium. The time to push this against the D’s, held hostage to the environmental extremists who provide so much to the party, was months ago, but there is still time. The Left’s arguments against drilling for domestic oil are vapid and clearly designed to cover over the fact that they have desired these high prices for gasoline for years. (They’re only upset now because the government isn’t getting the revenue from the gasoline increase.)

Wham Bam Thank You Gramm

I want to take a few minutes to defend the man who should be president:
former Sen. Phil Gramm. The economics PhD. has come under assault in
the last few days for claiming we are only in a “mental recession” and
that we have become a “nation of whiners.” In a society that claims to
want “straight talk” and holds spin and pandering by politicians in
disrepute, this should have been received as refreshing. Instead, this
has become an overblown media story that is just another excuse to
attack Republicans as uncaring.
Q: How do the media know we are in a recession?
A: We have a Republican president and it’s an election year.
Despite
not meeting the textbook definition of a recession, this downturn is
still portrayed as such, if not as a depression. People, please, get a
grip. Growth is anemic, but not negative. Unemployment is only 5.5%,
historically low and close to the old definition of full employment (5%
unemployment). There are some troubling aspects to the economy, but our
pain threshold as nation is
very small. Stocks are down, gas is expensive, some prices are going
up, but America as we know it is not coming to an end. We’ve
experienced worse, and in recent history. This, well, mental recession
is another example of our country’s historical illiteracy and short
memory.
But are we a
nation of whiners? This statement was criticized as if Sen. Gramm was
referring to, say, a recently unemployed factory worker who is facing
foreclosure and a future with neither health care nor retirement. Uh,
no. I’m too lazy to look for links, but two examples of what he was
referring to come immediately to mind. Both were published in articles
in either the NYT or WSJ. In the first, a woman complained that that
economic downward had caused her to have to eat at Applebees instead of fancier restaurants, and to shop at Target
instead of more upscale clothiers. The other involved a man kvetching
that the decline in the stock market had caused him to delay his
retirement by a few years. He was a health 57. Wah. Sen. Gramm was
right.

Template Spinning

We all know the template constantly repeated by the media, Dem pols, and academia: Bush is a unilateralist, engaged in cowboy diplomacy, and only our Lord and Savior Barack Obama can save and repair our relationships with other countries. It’s a great talking point that has, because of endless repetition, become accepted as fact despite evidence to the contrary. For example, see the Bush administration’s multilateral approach to North Korea, which is criticized by the Left for being, well, multilateral. Or, the most recent example, the Democrats’ disturbing oppostition to the free trade agreement with Columbia. All their arguments in opposition, all echoed and embraced by the Transcedent One who will save our tattered reputations with foreign nations, are absurd, if ever articulated at all. But don’t take my word for it. Coming in for treatment usually reserved for conservatives, NYT reporter Steven Weisman writes:

If approved by Congress, it would open a new market for American
produce and manufactured goods. Unlike other trade deals, it would not
threaten American jobs, because imports from Colombia are already
coming in nearly duty-free.

And it would have the added benefit of shoring up a respected ally, President Álvaro Uribe,
who has made progress in taming the narcotics traffickers, right-wing
death squads and left-wing guerrillas that had almost made Colombia a
failed state.

In recent months, nearly 100 newspapers in the United States have
endorsed the Colombia trade agreement. So have many top Democrats,
including Mayor Richard M. Daley
of Chicago. And Mr. Uribe, who was already popular in Congress, was
widely lionized after the dramatic rescue of hostages in Colombia on
July 2.

To reiterate: Columbian goods coming to America are already basically tariff free. This deal would help America exports to Columbia enjoy the same privelege. It would reward our most important ally in South America where Chavez, Morales, et al. are pushing an anti-U.S. agenda.
The opposition basically boils down to a complaint about anti-labor violence in Columbia. President Uribe has actually fought to radically decrease this violence, and been very successful. But facts don’t matter when you can just repeat that President Bush is a unilateralist who doesn’t respect our allies. That doesn’t require any critical thinking at all.

Somebody Tell This To The Leftists

Interesting story on a famous Iranian dissident in the Sunday NYT. If you have several minutes, I would take the time to read about his journey from freedom fighter, to torture by the lunatics running Iran, to, finally, freedom in the United States. I think this is probably the first time this sentiment has been expressed in the NYT:

When his flight from Vienna landed at Dulles Airport in Virginia in
late June, Mr. Batebi was astonished to see that the airport worker
waving the jet into the gate was a Muslim woman wearing a tight head
scarf.

Mr. Batebi was enthralled, sensing a casual tolerance that
was exactly what he had longed for in his own country. “It seems to me
that people here are free to live their lives, as long as they do no
harm to anyone else,” he said.

Free(die) Market Economics

Rarely noted in the current panic over Fannie and Freddie is the role that free market think tanks, conservative editorialists, and Republican politicians played in trying to raise awareness (yes, I’m using the phrase sarcastically) about the dangers and need for reform at the two institutions. From former GOP representative Jim Leach to the WSJ editorial page to the CATO institute, the efforts to expose the corruption and liabilities in Fannie and Freddie were made by the Right. How does the NYT report this? Oh, not by ignoring it, but by reporting it this way:

From 1990 to 2000, as each company’s stock grew more than 500 percent
and top executives earned tens of millions of dollars, much criticism
appeared on opinion pages of newspapers, in reports by free-market
research groups and in Congressional testimony. Much of it was
sponsored by a loose coalition of Washington lobbyists and consultants
who were paid to portray Fannie and Freddie as too big and risky.
(Emphasis added.)

Kiss My Fannie, Mac

To understand how incestuous and corrupt our capital has become, one must read this morning’s article in the NYT on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Here are some key (and disgusting) elements:

In Washington, Fannie and Freddie’s sprawling lobbying machine hired
family and friends of politicians in their efforts to quickly sideline
any regulations that might slow their growth or invite greater
oversight of their business practices.

Fannie and Freddie were careful to include powerful Democrats and
Republicans as executives, board members and lobbyists to make sure
they had access to top government officials and clout on Capitol Hill,
no matter which party was in power.

Fannie also opened up what it called Partnership Offices. They were
billed as regional oversight offices for various housing projects
financed by Fannie. In reality, critics, including the Department of Housing and Urban Development,
said they were used primarily to influence Congress by providing local
politicians and business leaders with ample ribbon-cutting ceremonies
and photo opportunities.

The offices were often run by and
populated with former Congressional staff members. Several of those
offices were staffed by family members of legislators, said Joshua
Rosner, an analyst at Graham-Fisher in New York.