Hank Paulson, Ezra Merkin--chronic shame, the results of poor parenting

"GMAC, the auto financing arm of General Motors that's half owned by Cerberus Capital, is

• spooling up its own bid for a federal bailout. GMAC wants to mimic American Express, Goldman Sachs and others that converted to bank holding companies and then tapped the TARP.

Meanwhile, GMAC's chairman, Jacob Ezra Merkin, runs Ascot Partners, an investment firm that

• lost most of its $1.8 billion in assets in the Madoff scandal, according to the New York Times.

So, sure, let's give billions in federal funds to a guy who blows almost $2 billion of his and his clients' money on a Ponzi scheme.

• GMAC got to the point of begging the government for cash because
  

• it was a major peddler of subprime mortgages, many of them through its DiTech division.
  

Now, to borrow from DiTech's annoying marketing slogan, it may be taxpayers who will lose another loan to DiTech."

"I CAN SEE RUSSIA FROM MY HOUSE." Who made this statement?

NOT SARAH PALIN, AS MOST OF THE WORLD THINKS--THANKS ENTIRELY TO THE MEDIA. THE PERSON WHO MADE THE STATEMENT IS TINA FEY ON SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE:

• "But it was comedian Tina Fey -- portraying Sarah Palin -- who delivered the Most Memorable Quote of 2008. Fey's "I can see Russia from my house,"

• which is often erroneously attributed
  
• to Sarah Palin,

was given the top spot by 27 percent of the survey's participants. Fey was alluding to a moment during the famed interviews with CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric when

• Palin said parts of Russia are visible from land in Alaska."

'Enough with Radical Islam'

"Enough with the pseudonyms. Western civilization isn't at war with terrorism any more than it is at war with grenades. Western civilization is at war with militant Islam, which dominates Muslim communities all over the world. Militant Islam isnt a tiny minority of otherwise goodhearted Muslims. Its a dominant strain of evil that runs rampant in a population of well over 1 billion.

• Enough with the psychoanalysis. They dont hate us because of Israel. They dont hate us because of Kashmir. They dont hate us because we have troops in Saudi Arabia or because we deposed Saddam Hussein. They dont hate us because of Britney Spears. They hate us because we are infidels, and because we dont plan on surrendering or providing them material aid in their war of aggressive expansion.

Enough with the niceties. We don't lose our souls when we treat our enemies as enemies. We don't undermine our principles when we post more police officers in vulnerable areas, or when we send Marines to kill bad guys, or when we torture terrorists for information. And we dont redeem ourselves when we close Guantanamo Bay or try terrorists in civilian courts or censor anti-Islam comics. When it comes to war, extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, and moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.

• Enough with the words. Talking with Iran without wielding the threat of force, either economic or military, wont help.
• Appealing to the United Nations, run by thugs and dictators ranging from Putin to Chavez to Ahmadinejad, is an exercise in pathetic futility. Evil countries dont suddenly decide to abandon their evil goals -- they are forced to do so by pressure and circumstance.

Enough with the faux allies. We don't gain anything by pretending that Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are true allies. They arent. At best, they are playing both sides of the table. We ought to be drilling now in order to break OPEC. Building windmills isnt going to cut it. We should also be backing India to the hilt in its current conflict with Pakistan -- unless Pakistan can destroy its terrorist element, India should be given full leeway to do what it needs to do. Russia and China, meanwhile, are facilitating anti-Western terrorism. Treating them as friends in this global war is simply begging for a backstabbing.

• Enough with the myths. Not everyone on earth is crying out for freedom. There are plenty of people who are happy in their misery, believing that their suffering is part and parcel of a correct religious system. Those people direct their anger outward, targeting unbelievers. We cannot simply knock off dictators and expect indoctrinated populations to rise to the liberal democratic challenge. The election of Hamas in the Gaza Strip is more a rule than an exception in the Islamic world.

Enough with the lies. Stop telling us that Islam is a religion of peace. If it is, prove it through action.

• Stop telling us that President-elect Barack Obama will fix our broken relationship with the Muslim world. They hate Obama just as much as they hated President George W. Bush, although they think Obama is more of a patsy than Bush was. Stop telling us that we shouldn't worry about the Islamic infiltration of our economy. If the Saudis own a large chunk of our banking institutions and control the oil market, they can certainly leverage their influence in dangerous ways.

Enough. After the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, the plane downed in Pennsylvania, the endless suicide bombings, shootings and rocket attacks in Israel, the Bali bombings, the synagogue bombing in Tunisia, the LAX shootings, the Kenyan hotel bombing, the Casablanca attacks, the Turkey synagogue attacks, the Madrid bombings, the London bombings, and the repeated attacks in India culminating in the Mumbai massacres -- among literally thousands of others -- its about time that the West got the point: we're in a war. Our enemies are determined. They will not quit just because we offer them Big Macs, Christina Aguilera CDs, or even the freedom to vote.

• They will not quit just because we ensure that they have Korans in their Guantanamo cells, or because we offer to
  
• ban The Satanic Verses (as India did).
  
• They will only quit when they are dead. It is our job to make them so, and to eliminate every obstacle to their destruction.

So enough. No more empty talk. No more idle promises. No more happy ignorance, half measures, or appeasement-minded platitudes. The time for hard-nosed, uncompromising action hasn't merely come -- its been overdue by seven years. The voice of our brothers blood cries out from the ground."

It's the Ideology: emotionally disturbed media parsing Mumbai

(Ocean County Register, Steyn): "But we're in danger of missing the forest for the trees. The forest is the ideology. It's the ideology that determines whether you can find enough young hotshot guys in the neighborhood willing to strap on a suicide belt or (rather more promising as a long-term career) at least grab an AK-47 and shoot up a hotel lobby. Or, if active terrorists are a bit thin on the ground, whether you can count at least on some degree of broader support on the ground. You're sitting in some distant foreign capital but you're of a mind to pull off a Mumbai-style operation in, say, Amsterdam or Manchester or Toronto. Where would you start? Easy. You know the radical mosques, and the other ideological front organizations. You've already made landfall.

• It's missing the point to get into debates about whether this is the
  

• "Deccan Mujahideen" or the ISI or al-Qaida or Lashkar-e-Taiba. That's a reductive argument. It could be all or none of them.
  

• The ideology has been so successfully seeded around the world that nobody needs a memo from corporate HQ to act: There are so many of these subgroups and individuals that they intersect across the planet in a million different ways.
  

It's not the Cold War, with a small network of deep sleepers being directly controlled by Moscow. There are no membership cards, only an ideology. That's what has radicalized hitherto moderate Muslim communities from Indonesia to the central Asian 'stans to Yorkshire, and co-opted what started out as more or less conventional nationalist struggles in the Caucasus and the Balkans into mere tentacles of the global jihad.

• Many of us, including the incoming Obama administration,
  

• look at this as a law-enforcement matter.
  

• Mumbai is a crime scene, so let's surround the perimeter with yellow police tape, send in the forensics squad, and then wait for the D.A. to file charges.

There was a photograph that appeared in many of the British papers, taken by a Reuters man and captioned by the news agency as follows: "A suspected gunman walks outside the premises of the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus or Victoria Terminus railway station."

• The photo of the "suspected gunman" showed a man holding a gun.
  

• We don't know much about him – he might be Muslim or Episcopalian, he might be an impoverished uneducated victim of Western colonialist economic oppression or
  

• a former vice-president of Lehman Brothers embarking on an exciting midlife career change –
  

but one thing we ought to be able to say for certain is that a man pointing a gun is not

• a "suspected gunman" but a gunman.
  

"This kind of silly political correctness infects reporters and news services worldwide," wrote John Hinderaker of Powerline. "They think they're being scrupulous – the man hasn't been convicted of being a gunman yet! – when, in fact, they're just being foolish. But the irrational conviction that nothing can be known

• unless it has been determined by a court and jury isn't just silly, it's dangerous."

Just so. This isn't law enforcement but an ideological assault –

• and we're fighting the symptoms not the cause.
  

Islamic imperialists want an Islamic society, not just in Palestine and Kashmir but in the Netherlands and Britain, too. Their chances of getting it will be determined by the ideology's advance among the general Muslim population, and the general Muslim population's demographic advance among everybody else.

So Bush is history, and we have a new president who promises to heal the planet, and yet the jihadists don't seem to have got the Obama message that there are no enemies, just friends we haven't yet held talks without preconditions with. This isn't about repudiating the Bush years, or withdrawing from Iraq, or even liquidating Israel. It's bigger than that.

• And if you don't have a strategy for beating back the ideology, you'll lose.

Whoops, my apologies. I mean "suspected ideology.""

George Bush beats Obama to the punch--turns over US economy to European Fabian Socialists via G20 Meeting

• If you like socialism, you might not like "Fabian Socialism." It works slowly behind the scenes without the knowledge of most citizens.
  

"The results of the G-20 economic summit amount to nothing less than the seamless integration of the United States into the European economy. In one month of legislation and one diplomatic meeting, the United States has unilaterally abdicated all the gains for the concept of free markets won by the Reagan administration and surrendered, in toto, to the Western European model of socialism, stagnation and excessive government regulation. Sovereignty is out the window. Without a vote, we are suddenly members of the European Union. Given the dismal record of those nations at creating jobs and sustaining growth, merger with the Europeans is like a partnership with death.

At the G-20 meeting, Bush agreed to subject the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and our other regulatory agencies to the supervision of a global entity that would critique its regulatory standards and demand changes if it felt they were necessary. Bush agreed to create a College of Supervisors.

• According to The Washington Post, it would "examine the books of major financial institutions that operate across national borders so regulators could begin to have a more complete picture of banks' operations."

Their scrutiny would extend to hedge funds and to various "exotic" financial instruments. The International Monetary Fund (IMF), a European-dominated operation, would conduct "regular vigorous reviews" of American financial institutions and practices. The European-dominated College of Supervisors would also weigh in on issues like executive compensation and investment practices.

There is nothing wrong with the substance of this regulation. Experience is showing it is needed. But it is very wrong to delegate these powers to unelected, international institutions with no political accountability.

• We have a Securities and Exchange Commission appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate, both of whom are elected by the American people. It is with the SEC, the Treasury and the Federal Reserve that financial accountability must take place.

The European Union achieved this massive subrogation of American sovereignty the way it usually does, by negotiation, gradual bureaucratic encroachment, and without asking the voters if they approve. What's more, Bush appears to have gone down without a fight,"...

• from Townhall.com

Academic credentials of Dr. Allen Hershkowitz, CCNY product

Hershkowitz is routinely identified as NRDC "senior scientist," but his academic credentials say he majored in politics and money--no science mentioned. He is what he seems --a professional shuck and jive artist out of the 1970's CCNY mold:

"He received his Ph.D. in political economics from the City University of New York Graduate School in 1986, specializing in energy resources economics;

• an M. Phil in political economics in 1982;

• a B.A. (cum laude) from the City College of New York in 1978,

• and; a Certificat D’assiduite from the University of Grenoble in 1975." GoGreenExpo.com (item at end of article)

.

The real drag on the McCain-Palin ticket

• via Lucianne.com

On news of Obama's election, Russian Pres. sets off missiles in Europe

"President Dmitri Medvedev took advantage of the euphoria in America today to order the deployment of missiles inside Europe as a response to US plans for a missile defence shield.

• Speaking within hours of Barack Obama's election as the new US President, Mr Medvedev announced that Russia would base Iskander missiles in its Baltic exclave of Kaliningrad next to the border with Poland.

He did not say whether the short-range missiles would carry nuclear warheads. Mr Medvedev also cancelled earlier plans to withdraw three intercontinental ballistic missile regiments from western Russia."...

"Barack Obama will pay my mortage, fill my gas tank"

Woman: Barack Obama Will Pay My Mortgage and

• Fill My Gas Tank

• Peggy Joseph speaking with NBC 6 about how she won't have to fill her gas tank
  
• once Obama is elected. Full Video from NBC 6

Roy Campanella Mystery Guest on What's My Line

The May 1st, 2008 episode featured Roy Campanella as the mystery guest panelists had to figure out (Dorothy Kilgallen, Steve Allen, Arlene Francis, etc.). It turns out it was the same day in 1953 Campanella hit his 38th homerun for the Brooklyn Dodgers. The show is on from 3-330AM ET (GSN) and of course can be taped. I also saw Phil Rizzuto on that show in the past few months as I believe the first mystery guest when it began in the 1950's. It was the off season and Rizzuto was employed doing one of his off season jobs. (The show more often features standard entertainers as mystery guests). You might think this kind of show creaks which it does, but it's worth it to see some legendary athletes.