Medary.com

Let's see . . . Franklin Roosevelt created the Federal National Mortgage Agency ("Fannie Mae") in 1938 at the very tail end of FDR's "New Deal."

Lyndon Johnson partially privatized the FNMA in 1968, to take it "off the budget."  I say "partially" because although the corporation was divorced from direct public control, it was still implicitly backed by the Federal Treasury, yet FNMA as well as it's partner in white-collar crime, Freddie Mac, were not required to make the same kind of public accounting records that all truly private corporations must do.

FNMA took 70 years to fail, with the result that almost all of the American mortgage industry is practically nationalized.

Nationalized.  Brought under government control.

So, remember the Fannie, when talking about Social Security, or nationalized health care.  The clock is ticking on Social Security.  Can we afford to bail out that New Deal mistake, too?  Can we afford to make another New Deal-class mistake with one-sixth of the nation's economy--health care?

I don't think so.

It isn't privatizing Social Security, or radical reform of Medicare which should be off the table--it's allowing the Federal Government to control even more of the nation's retirement or health care systems than they already do.

It is past time to start phasing out New Deal, command-economy policies and programs, and start implementing 21st-Century, Information-Age, market-oriented policies and programs instead.

I suspect I have somehow managed to become the last person to blog on yesterday's McCain/Palin rally in Lee's Summit, Missouri (my cozy and comfortable home town).

At this point, I suppose I just need to prove that I was there.  But since I always have a mental block against such things, I took no pictures of myself or of Snookums, standing in that enormous snaking line going into the John Knox Village Pavillion.

The rally itself was . . . OK, I guess.  I think I'm not a rally-kind of person.  It was all interesting and everything, but it's not really an experience I need to repeat.

So, on to the pictures and, a first for Medary.com, our very own YouTube videos of the event.  They're crappy, hard-to-watch, kinda hard-to-hear videos, but what the heck, I had to play with my new camera (which, of course, I still owe my eight readers a review of).  So much Internet to surf, so little time . . .

We're in the right place

Taking a picture of Fox 4's standup

A small part of the long line to get in

The Straight Talk Express, departing

Palin's stump speech, in two parts (warning, really bad quality, but hey, it's my first try at YouTubing a public event. I've got a lot of room to improve. Anyway, here it is:

I was going to post McCain's stump speech video here, too, but for some reason the two parts didn't get uploaded to YouTube. Trust me, it's probably for the best.  The video quality is equal in crummyness to the Palin videos. Oh well.  Progress is sometimes measured in learning what NOT to do.

Still, I came home with a McCain yard sign.  (No Palin on it, just McCain.  Grr.)  It isn't up yet, but I've got Snookums to agree to let me put it up.  That's why I married that gal!  (Well no, not really, but it helps, I guess.)

Others who blogged the Lee's Summit rally:

Dee at Conservatism With Heart

 NiceDeb at, er, NiceDeb who, all in all, did a much better job than I did.

Ten days ahead of time, on FreeRepublic.

Here are my Palin posts, before McCain's introduction of her as his running mate on August 29th:

The bold parts are the ones where I'm particularly prescient, I think . . .

Tuesday, August 19:
Palin is, I think, my preference for McCain’s VP.

Whitman would be a bit more of a “hail mary” (forgive the confused but somehow apt analogy) that McCain might have needed if he was already down 5-10 points. But he’s not—he’s even, possibly even a bit ahead of Obama right now.

Palin keeps what’s left of his conservative base intact, but still gives all those PUMA Hillary supporters an affirmative-action reason to look at punching the R chad in November.

So, Palin for me.



Saturday, August 23:
I’m still rooting for Palin . . . Romney isn’t a game-changing choice, in my opinion. Palin really upsets the dynamics of the campaign, I think.

For those who say Palin doesn’t have the experience—I think she’s got more experience than Obama for the job. She’s actually RUN a government, unlike him. Palin on McCain’s ticket just further highlights how little real experience Obama has.

Plus, the vision of ol’ Grins-and-Lies Biden getting nasty and snippy and condescending with Palin at the VP debate would be worth it. And you KNOW in your heart that he wouldn’t be able to avoid doing it, either.

Later on Saturday, Aug. 23:
I think of the relative quality of the R VP candidates vs. the crew that Obama had to choose from, and remark that McCain is in the enviable position of choosing which parts of his campaign to enhance, while Obama had to choose which of his weaknesses he had to shore up. He picked foreign policy (with good reason). Now, judging from the guffaws from the rightie-blogs and the moaning from the leftie-blogs, it’s apparent that Biden really doesn’t give Obama very much.

Personally, I favor the bump and buzz that I think McCain would get from Palin, but Romney, Pawlenty, or some of the other front-runners have definite electoral strengths, too. I just see Palin as a game-changing, strategic pick (take a few percent of the most pissed-off PUMAs and a few more of the soccer/security moms), while the others would be more typical tactical Electoral College picks.

The one highly amusing thing Palin does is highlight just exactly how inexperienced Obama is—I mean, even Palin, with her rather short resume, has more meaningful governmental executive experience than Obama and Biden combined do.

But I’ll be happy with any of a number of potential R VP’s. It’s just that Palin’s potential to drive the D’s into an absolute pretzel of hypocritical contortions pleases me greatly.

They oughta pay me for this . . . assuming of course that I wanted gainful employment!

Zogby says.

Summary:  McCain/Palin favored by somewhere between 47.6% and 51.8% of the population.
Obama/Biden is favored by somewhere between 43.8% and 48.0% of the population.

(Zogby reports 49.7%-45.9% with a 2.1% margin for error.  I just added the margin of error to the two median numbers to show the range--which is actually the correct way of interpreting a poll.)

Bill Whittle writes at National Review Online on Sarah Palin, writing an article with which I'm approximately 99.34% in agreement.

Go read the whole article.  But here, and below (click the Read More) are tidbits:

. . . John McCain . . . wasn’t my first choice (Fred) or my second (Rudy), . . .

And so — prior to this week — all we had was a grim determination to vote against a dangerous, socialized vision of the future. We were portrayed — largely accurately — as old, tired, out-of-touch, out of ideas, out of candidates . . . too white, too male, too square. It doesn’t matter how true or false that caricature was. That was the narrative, and there was enough of it that fit.

And then the earthquake came.

The world's oldest gorilla--well, the oldest one in captivity, named Jenny, has died at 55 at the Dallas Zoo.

Democrats immediately blamed it on Sarah Palin's opposition to socialized health care and cited her record of hunting cute furry animals.  John McCain said "I know what it's like to live in captivity for years" in a written statement.

A commenter on the lawblog The Volokh Conspiracy:

The emerging meme from the left is that she didn't write the speech. It seems to me that when that's the best response you can spit out, you're conceding it was a hell of a performance.

In an oddly welcome break from the stomach-turning world of politics, we move to the stomach-turning world of pro sports, where we find NBA rookies Mario Chalmers and Darrell Arthur being kicked out of the NBA's rookie camp because marijuana was found in their hotel room--according to the Kansas City Star.

Ah, sports!  Oasis for the politics-weary!

Via Althouse.  Freakin' funny (bad language...deal with it):

Yep, those Democratic Presidential and Vice-Presidential candidates sure can lead their followers, can't they?

Obama:

"I have said before and I will repeat again: People's families are off limits," Obama said. "And people's children are especially off-limits. This shouldn't be part of our politics. It has no relevance to Gov. Palin's performance as a governor or her potential performance as a vice president. So I would strongly urge people to back off these kinds of stories. You know my mother had me when she was 18 and how a family deals with issues and teenage children, that shouldn’t be a topic of our politics."

Biden:

"The press has been asking me that question and I have not answered it for two reasons," Biden said at a town hall meeting in Deerfield Beach, Fla. "Number one, first of all, I don't know the governor. Everything I know about her, there's no reason not to respect her and believe she's qualified to be the vice president."

Emphasis mine.

A selection of what's on the front page of Daily Kos (no link--why bother?):

Hurricane Palin Might Finish What Katrina Started
McCain:  What Will You Learn at Palin's Feet
The Palin hypocrisy has made me an "angry" liberal
Governor Palin, You're A Disgrace
What books did Palin want banned?

It's even worse on other leftie web sites, such as the New York Times, CNN, CBS, MSNBC, etc., etc.

You know, I don't give to political campaigns as a rule, but all of this crap is starting to edge me toward donating to McCain/Palin, in hopes that it will shut up these pinheads.