John Cusack, I mean.

Also: Babs and Spicoli offer their wisdom.

Posted by: Ace at 02:30 PM | Comments (33)
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As Geekesque (Geek, Esq.?) says, "We have to do the dirty work that Barack Obama won't or can't."

Thanks to SarahW.

Posted by: Ace at 01:44 PM | Comments (58)
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At 5:30 EDT/2:30 PDT.

Mountain and Central time don't matter, because they don't have computers. Or clocks.

Or teeth.

Posted by: Ace at 01:24 PM | Comments (42)
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Um...

"I'll have to get back to you as soon as I can"?

They're obviously trying to get their stories straight and figure out some plausible way to claim this had nothing to do with the Obama campaign.

They're a crisis communications firm. And they've had 12 hours to figure out their story. But they apparently haven't come up with a good one yet.

I wonder if Liu-Klein realizes that as the lowest man on the totem poll here, he's the obvious fall-guy: "We regret an overly eager employee decided to hijack our YouTube accounts for his own unauthorized political purposes..."

Posted by: Ace at 12:52 PM | Comments (84)
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"That's what I said." more...

Posted by: Ace at 12:16 PM | Comments (93)
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Here's what it says now.

Sorry. I can't seem to find that story. j 1 k 1 l

Here's what it used to say. Emphases mine.

Viral attacks are where it's at in 2008. Emails, blogs, online news sources. Content flows upstream in today's media environment.

We can be the gun.

Indeed, if Barack can't or won't do the dirty work, then we have to do it for him. No excuses. No more hand-wringing.

Let's get to work.

How, you ask? Simple.

It's all about finding really damaging stuff--news stories, YouTubes, informative blog posts. And then circulating those with the intent of having them work their way up the media stream. Email it to your friends. Email it to any journalists whose email you have. Post it in diaries or blog comments.

Example, here is a devastating YouTube on Sarah Strangelove:

[The Palin smear video was inserted here]

You should email this to ten people. Or ten bloggers. Or both. Spread it far, spread it wide.

If you would like to do this on a regular basis, I've set up a couple of Google Groups to help out with that process.

One group, [group's name] is a gathering point for potentially damaging stories about the enemy. Folks who belong to that one can post whatever stories they find anonymously. Just post a link or create a page, and others will take it from there.

That brings me to the other group, [other group's name]. This group is the actual action group--the one where the most damaging stories collected by folks at the VMP. It's real simple. You log in or get an email alert, you copy and paste, and you email it to various folks--either friends and family or content-based websites like blogs and online news sources.

I am more than happy to add folks to either group or both. Just email me at:

[redacted e-mail]

and let me know which you'd like to join.

Let's go out and expose these bastards for what they are.

To the barricades.

Note: If you don't believe in scorched-earth politics, no one is forcing you to join this effort, of course. We all contribute in our own way.

I'd say this is pretty strong evidence "geekesque" is also part of the Winner & Associates viral marketing team-- he's disappearing the evidence of his part in this the same as "eswinner" and "cnwinner."

So: "Geekesque," who tells us "viral attacks are where it's at in 2008," pushes the video at the same time as Winner & Associates sockpuppet astroturfers are pushing it, and, by an amazing coincidence, disappears evidence of this at the same time the other Winner & Associates sockpuppet astroturfers hide their tracks.

Cached copy of DKos diary courtesy of ClobberGirl.

Ha, Ha, Ha: "Geekesque" on false flag operations and Nixonian tactics.

Ha, ha, ha, ha...

Posted by: Ace at 10:24 AM | Comments (216)
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Calling out America's most prominent nutroots blog-on-paper: more...

Posted by: Ace at 10:00 AM | Comments (29)
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McCain, of course, pressed for action to head off the crisis. The Democrats on the Banking Communism and Graft Committee blocked it on a party-line vote.

The economic history books will describe this episode in simple and understandable terms: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac exploded, and many bystanders were injured in the blast, some fatally.

Fannie and Freddie did this by becoming a key enabler of the mortgage crisis. They fueled Wall Street's efforts to securitize subprime loans by becoming the primary customer of all AAA-rated subprime-mortgage pools. In addition, they held an enormous portfolio of mortgages themselves.

In the times that Fannie and Freddie couldn't make the market, they became the market. Over the years, it added up to an enormous obligation. As of last June, Fannie alone owned or guaranteed more than $388 billion in high-risk mortgage investments. Their large presence created an environment within which even mortgage-backed securities assembled by others could find a ready home.

The problem was that the trillions of dollars in play were only low-risk investments if real estate prices continued to rise. Once they began to fall, the entire house of cards came down with them.

Turning Point

Take away Fannie and Freddie, or regulate them more wisely, and it's hard to imagine how these highly liquid markets would ever have emerged. This whole mess would never have happened.

It is easy to identify the historical turning point that marked the beginning of the end.

Back in 2005, Fannie and Freddie were, after years of dominating Washington, on the ropes. They were enmeshed in accounting scandals that led to turnover at the top. At one telling moment in late 2004, captured in an article by my American Enterprise Institute colleague Peter Wallison, the Securities and Exchange Comiission's chief accountant told disgraced Fannie Mae chief Franklin Raines that Fannie's position on the relevant accounting issue was not even ``on the page'' of allowable interpretations.

Then legislative momentum emerged for an attempt to create a ``world-class regulator'' that would oversee the pair more like banks, imposing strict requirements on their ability to take excessive risks. Politicians who previously had associated themselves proudly with the two accounting miscreants were less eager to be associated with them. The time was ripe.

Greenspan's Warning

The clear gravity of the situation pushed the legislation forward. Some might say the current mess couldn't be foreseen, yet in 2005 Alan Greenspan told Congress how urgent it was for it to act in the clearest possible terms: If Fannie and Freddie ``continue to grow, continue to have the low capital that they have, continue to engage in the dynamic hedging of their portfolios, which they need to do for interest rate risk aversion, they potentially create ever-growing potential systemic risk down the road,'' he said. ``We are placing the total financial system of the future at a substantial risk.''

What happened next was extraordinary. For the first time in history, a serious Fannie and Freddie reform bill was passed by the Senate Banking Committee. The bill gave a regulator power to crack down, and would have required the companies to eliminate their investments in risky assets.

Different World

If that bill had become law, then the world today would be different. In 2005, 2006 and 2007, a blizzard of terrible mortgage paper fluttered out of the Fannie and Freddie clouds, burying many of our oldest and most venerable institutions. Without their checkbooks keeping the market liquid and buying up excess supply, the market would likely have not existed.

But the bill didn't become law, for a simple reason: Democrats opposed it on a party-line vote in the committee, signaling that this would be a partisan issue. Republicans, tied in knots by the tight Democratic opposition, couldn't even get the Senate to vote on the matter.

That such a reckless political stand could have been taken by the Democrats was obscene even then. Wallison wrote at the time: ``It is a classic case of socializing the risk while privatizing the profit. The Democrats and the few Republicans who oppose portfolio limitations could not possibly do so if their constituents understood what they were doing.''

Read the whole thing, which documents the graft, the huge amounts of money being funneled to Democratic Senators to keep the gravy train running... until it derailed. And then they presented you with the clean-up bill.

Thanks to Sprung.

Posted by: Ace at 09:57 AM | Comments (57)
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Even as America totters on the brink of a depression caused by Barney Frank's determination to guarantee spectacularly ill-advised loans, he's still fighting for more.

A bare-minimum bit of reform was suggested. Barney Frank stamped down his pudgy feet in protest.

[T]he public sector somehow feels it can continue to ignore reality—at least for a little longer.

The committee, chaired by Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank, took steps to gut a modest reform of the bad lending policies that helped get us into this mess. By voice vote, members moved to overturn a ban on something called “seller-financed down payments” for some government-guaranteed mortgages. Congress largely banned government support for such mortgages just two months ago at the request of the Federal Housing Administration.

The FHA and the Department of Housing and Urban Development have provided ample evidence that these loans are just too risky for taxpayers to take on. Under a seller-financed down payment, a homebuyer doesn’t put any money down. Instead, the seller, usually a property developer, provides the homeowner with funds to prod along the sale of the house. The first problem with this approach is that it gives the homeowner little incentive to negotiate on the purchase price of a home, since it seems to him that he’s getting a good deal—after all, the developer is kicking in thousands of dollars, which seems generous. The developer in turn finds it easier to charge an inflated price for the house, making it more likely that the government won’t get its money back if the home ever goes into foreclosure. And in fact the homeowner is more likely to default: since the value of the home is quite likely inflated, he is more likely to have difficulty selling it for the price he paid if he runs into financial trouble. Having none of his own money at stake, he also has less incentive to struggle to make his payments.

Hardcore lefties are fond of saying the worst it gets, the better it is. The idea being that our evolution to full socialism and communism can only happen if capitalism results in catastrophe. And bitter little communists like Barney Frank are more than happy to speed along that catastrophe.

Thanks to Dave @ Garfield Ridge.

Posted by: Ace at 09:36 AM | Comments (46)
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He's giving up on North Dakota, Georgia, Idaho, and Alaska. Of course, they're making it about race.

The Associated Press reported this evening and an Obama spokeswoman confirmed that the Chicago-based campaign is pulling its 50-some staffers out of the heavily Republican state full of embittered small towns and shipping the workers east to Minnesota and Wisconsin, where the Democrat's prospects seem brighter and closer.

John Kerry did the best of recent Democrats there, getting 36% of the North Dakota vote in 2004 -- 3 percentage points more than Al Gore in 2000.

The abandonment of at least one Midwestern state by Obama comes as a new AP poll indicates that race could play a significant role in deciding a close national election. (See video.) Some experts

estimate the first African American candidate of a major party might be as much as 6 percentage points more ahead if he wasn't black.

Yes, all of that editorializing ("embittered small towns") is in the original.

These four states are indicators of where the contest is going and which dreams (yes, pipe-dreams) the Democrats are giving up on.

Georgia: the Obama campaign had dared to hope that it could pick up some Southern states with large black populations. Georgia was the most promising, but Obama's pulling his TV ads there. As money is needed for more likely prospects, expect a Democratic draw-down throughout the South.

Alaska: for reasons passing understanding the Democrats have been talking up Montana. They seated the Montana delegation front-and-center during the convention, as if to declare their intentions. Obama made a trip out to Billings. But as Alaska goes, so will go Montana and Alaska is going for Palin.

Obama may have felt like he had to spend time in these places because of Howard Dean's Fifty State Strategy. The idea is to whip up Democratic activists in every state. It may not help with the presidential election, but they think it will win them a few down-ticket races.

Obama may also have been trying to force McCain to defend states he already was winning. If so that has been a monumental failure. Obama's pulling out of North Dakota. McCain never had anyone in North Dakota...and still he's winning. The same thing went on in Florida over the summer, where Obama spent millions and McCain spent nothing...and still he's winning.

In any case, as Obama starts to realize that he's got to do better than winning just John Kerry's blue states, he'll target his resources more carefully onto the battlegrounds...other than Florida, of course, which I think he's going to lose quite handily. He's already on the defensive in Michigan and Pennsylvania. He needs to somehow take Ohio or Virginia and preserve his margin in New Mexico and Colorado.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 06:13 AM | Comments (71)
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