The Greg Knapp Experience

Gwen Ifill doesn’t understand what all the fuss is about.

PBS journalist Gwen Ifill, moderator of the upcoming vice presidential debate, dismissed conservative questions about her impartiality because she is writing a book that includes material on Barack Obama.

The host of PBS’”Washington Week” and senior correspondent on “The NewsHour” said she did not tell the Commission on Presidential Debates about the book. The commission had no immediate comment when contacted by The Associated Press. A spokeswoman for John McCain’s campaign did not immediately return phone and e-mail messages.

Ifill questions why people assume that her book will be favorable toward Obama.

“Do you think they made the same assumptions about Lou Cannon (who is white) when he wrote his book about Reagan?” said Ifill, who is black. Asked if there were racial motives at play, she said, “I don’t know what it is. I find it curious.”

Please. Stop the race card nonsense. The title and the description of the book tell the whole story. It’s called “The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama.”  The description at Amazon reads, Ifill “surveys the American political landscape, shedding new light on the impact of Barack Obama’s stunning presidential campaign and introducing the emerging young African American politicians forging a bold new path to political power.” The book is scheduled to be released on Inauguration Day. The title alone is enough to question her neutrality. Gee, which outcome of the election would make her book sell more copies? She should recuse herself from the debate.

The rescue plan that was voted down yesterday was a lot better than it could have been, but not as good as it can be. Here are a couple good stories with new ideas for a plan.

Paulson 2.0 cut the Bolshevik stuff out of the legislation. ACORN subsidies? Gone. Voting shares in U.S. companies? Gone. CEO compensation caps? Mostly gone. In consultation mainly with House Republicans and a few “opinion molders” such as yours truly. The size of the expenditure was also cut. Some deregulatory measures were added, such as giving the SEC the authority to suspend the tremendously destructive mark to market accounting mandate. Score one for Kudlow, Forbes, Wesbury and a few lesser “molders” like Bowyer. We harped on it; Paulson listened.

The rescue plan became a lot more conservative after the Republicans got mad. That’s good. Why not make it even better?

Perhaps the mark to market regulations could be suspended before the taxpayers are forced to move in. Maybe if some of these rules are eliminated, little or no taxpayer dollars will be needed. If Congress doesn’t want to put public dollars into this, it should let private equity put private dollars in.

I had a great call on the show yesterday. She said, why doesn’t the government allow individual citizens to buy into this plan. Many people would love to buy these assets at pennies on the dollar. Great idea. Make it even better by making any investment into this plan 100% tax-free. Let’s make this plan better and get it done.

Pelosi just could not resist blaming everything on Bush and the Republicans. This is just revisionist history. The Bush tax cuts had absolutely nothing to do with the housing and banking crisis. In fact, after the Bush tax cuts were fully phased in in 2003, we had an increase in tax receipts to the treasury. We also had growth in our economy from these tax cuts. They are certainly not to blame for the deficit. Bush and the Republicans SHOULD be blamed for spending too much. However, this also has nothing to do with the current housing and banking crisis we are in.

Most of the blame goes to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the Community Reinvestment Act. Those problems have the Democrats fingerprints all over them. That’s probably why Nancy Pelosi felt she had to give this speech. She was trying to blame the Republicans during this presidential cycle.

The facts are the CRA under Jimmy Carter forced banks to give loans to poor people, and especially poor minorities, who really couldn’t afford them. The law was strengthened under Clinton and the pressure on banks to give subprime loans to people who didn’t really qualify for them increased. The Democrats encouraged Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to buy up these loans. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac made these loans looks safe since they were government-sponsored entitys. This led other investor banks to buy the loans from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Many people saw this crisis coming and tried to do something about it. Bush and McCain are two of those people. The Democrats fought any regulation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.  If you don’t believe me see the videos posted lower on my blog. You can look it up. This is a simplified explanation of the problem, but much more accurate than Pelosi’s rant.

First it was Hillary telling us about her near-death experience in Bosnia. Now Biden is telling us how he was forced down in his helicopter in Afghanistan.

“If you want to know where Al Qaeda lives, you want to know where Bin Laden is, come back to Afghanistan with me,” Biden said. “Come back to the area where my helicopter was forced down, with a three-star general and three senators at 10,500 feet in the middle of those mountains. I can tell you where they are.”

Wow, it sounds like Biden & Co. were in big trouble in Afghanistan.  I wonder what happened?

In February 2008, Biden — along with Sens. John Kerry, D-Mass., and Chuck Hagel, R-Neb. — was on a chopper that made an emergency landing in the mountains of Afghanistan.

A snowstorm had forced them down.

No one was injured, and the Associated Press reported at the time that “the senators and their delegation returned to Bagram Air Base in a motor convoy, and left for Turkey.

Kerry joked, “We were going to send Biden out to fight the Taliban with snowballs, but we didn’t have to do it…Other than getting a little cold, it was fine.” 

It looks like the walking gaffe machine, Joe Biden, is at it again. Between this and his continued propagation of a thoroughly debunked rumor that the person who killed his wife and child was driving drunk , it makes you wonder where Biden will strike next.

I guess the Democrats believe Jesus would use prayer to make fun of people.

At the Broward Democratic Party’s monthly meeting Tuesday night, it started right at the beginning — with the invocation, delivered by Mike Moskowitz, the state committeeman for the county.

He called for a “blessing on the elk and moose in Alaska who have been decimated by Sarah Barracuda” and included a prayer that Palin doesn’t turn her sights on the squirrels in Washington, D.C.

“We pray that her journey takes her across the bridge to nowhere,” he said.

Sarah Palin is really under their skin. You have to ask yourself, why? I think it’s because they know she is a real threat to them. She is energize McCain’s campaign and given the Conservatives a reason to turn out. They also can’t stand the fact that this is a successful woman who doesn’t agree with their brand of feminism. Go Sarah go!

Remember Charlie Gibson going after Sarah Palin because she prayed that we are on God’s side in the Iraq war? She was actually praying that we were doing God’s will. Of course, Gibson got it all wrong. Now, here’s Joe Biden claiming that God is on the Democrat side.

Joe Biden isn’t backing down from his startling claim last week that raising taxes on the rich is the “patriotic” thing to do. On Thursday he upped the ante, thundering that he also has Jesus in his corner. “Catholic social doctrine as I was taught it is, you take care of people who need the help the most,” Mr. Biden preached to a group of union supporters on Thursday.

I encourage you to read the entire Wall Street Journal article as it does a good job laying out the case for lower taxes.

As to the Democrats continually claiming that Jesus was a liberal and is on their side; what a joke. Liberals take all of Jesus’s teachings about helping the poor and being compassionate and decide that means they get to steal other peoples money to do good works. Jesus never talks about a certain type of government, and he never talks about stealing other peoples money to give to the poor

Jesus is all about personal responsibility and personal choice in being compassionate.  Jesus wants us to help the poor voluntarily and joyfully. One of the most important concepts of Christianity is the idea of free will. If you are forced to love God, it means nothing. Anything that is to be given must be given with a free will. That goes for love and money.

Here’s the skit crafted by Democrat Al Franken for SNL.

Franken, who hasn’t been a staff writer on the show for 13 years, “phoned in” a spoof of McCain recording campaign ads in an edit booth, said an NBC source. Seth Meyers, the show’s current head writer, wrote it, but the sketch was hatched by Franken, a longtime liberal satirist and comedian.

An SNL insider said that, as of the Wednesday script read-through, Franken was the “credited writer with Meyers” on the opening sketch. Show veteran Darrell Hammond is to play McCain.

You can tell Al Franken had something to do with the skit, because it’s not that funny. I guess this is what we expect from the mainstream media. Does anyone believe that if a Republican candidate phone in an idea for a skit to skewer Obama that Saturday Night Live would run with it? Right.

As I pointed out in the post below, Democrats put pressure on the Jewish organizations to disinvite Sarah Palin from the anti-Iran rally. It’s the one where Hillary got very upset that Sarah Palin was also invited. It looks like partisan politics won and the Jewish organizations caved.

On Thursday, the organizers withdrew the invitation to Palin, saying in a statement that in order to keep the focus on Iran, there would be no “American political personalities” at the rally.

“Governor Palin was pleased to accept an invitation to address this rally and show her resolve on this grave national security issue,” McCain said in a statement. “Regrettably that invitation has since been withdrawn under pressure from Democratic partisans.”

Is this another example of the “new politics” that Obama keeps talking about? Applying political pressure to an organization that invited people from both parties to attend? Stay classy, Democrats.

First, Obama told us that paying more taxes was just the neighborly thing to do. Now Biden is saying paying more taxes is the patriotic thing to do. 

“We want to take money and put it back in the pocket of middle-class people,” Biden said in an interview on ABC’s “Good Morning America.”

Noting that wealthier Americans would indeed pay more, Biden said: “It’s time to be patriotic … time to jump in, time to be part of the deal, time to help get America out of the rut.”

This from the guy who donates less than one quarter of 1% of his adjusted gross income to charity. Wow. 

it is not Obama and Biden’s money to take to give to middle-class people. When you take money out of someone else’s pocket and give it to other people, that is called theft. That is not compassionate. Being compassionate is taking money out of your own pocket to help people who need it. That is something that Joe bind is not very good at.

Joe Biden shows his lack of knowledge on basic economics.  When he asserts that raising taxes will increase the economic output of the nation. History has shown the exact opposite is true. Even Obama has recently admitted that he will not raise taxes while the economy is in trouble.

Most of Obama so-called middle-class tax cut will really be refundable tax credits. That means that people who pay zero income tax right now will actually be getting welfare payments from the government paid by people who actually do pay income taxes.

I will say it again, McCain needs to publish a true middle class tax cut.  The way to do that is to allow people to invest part of their Social Security taxes and their Medicare taxes.  That is a bold plan that would really change the system. I don’t think he has the guts to do it.

The good stuff starts at about 48 seconds in. McCain gets in a few shots atObama celebrity-fest on Tuesday night as well. What worries me about our economy is that we are going to overregulate now in a knee-jerk reaction. A big part of why we are in this mess is because of what Congress has been doing all the way back to the Clinton administration. Congress passed the community redevelopment act and forced lendersto give loans to people who really could not afford them. Now Congress is all upset that lenders gave loans to people who couldn’t afford them. Stop the bail outs and let the free market work. The institutions that made poor choices need to suffer the consequences of the people think twice about doing this again. All the people who made the right decisionsview me and every other taxpayer should not be on the hook for this.