That’s right, the guy whom the Left said hated black people. The evangelical community, along with Bono, lobbied for it, and Dubya did it. It’s not something that’s mentioned often, but…

"This should be shouted from the rooftops. This is a heroic American story," Bono said in a remarkable radio interview with Jim Daly, the president of Focus on the Family, to be broadcast by the group Tuesday.

The housing bubble, anyone remember it? That’s when people who would not have otherwise been able to get credit to buy a house were given it anyway because the government pressured banks to do it. Everybody gets a home, and if you’re against this policy, you clearly hate the poor. Then the bubble burst, defaults were rampant, and more government programs had to be thought up to save us from the previous government programs. And, as Bruce McQuain notes at the Q&O blog, yes, the government’s meddling is what caused that sub-prime mortgage meltdown, which then was a huge contributor to the subsequent recession.

And now we have this.

The Obama administration is engaged in a broad push to make more home loans available to people with weaker credit, an effort that officials say will help power the economic recovery but that skeptics say could open the door to the risky lending that caused the housing crash in the first place.

President Obama’s economic advisers and outside experts say the nation’s much-celebrated housing rebound is leaving too many people behind, including young people looking to buy their first homes and individuals with credit records weakened by the recession.

Those who do not learn from history are doomed to … create public policy to repeat it. It’s allegedly being instituted to allow the poor to participate in the housing recover, but you can be sure that it won’t be a temporary measure, because any attempt to return to semi-sane credit checks will, will, be demagogued, once again, as eeevil Republicans throwing the poor out on the streets. This has to prove without a doubt that Democrats only care about intentions, not results. Even if the results have just finished happening.

Short-attention span voters love this stuff. Obama just thinks anything Bush did he can do better, and in this case, he very well could. We just did this, like, six years ago, and Barney Frank told us it was all good and not to worry. And then we had to bail out a bunch of banks, because we made them make loans to people who couldn’t pay them back, because, you know, racist / sexist.

The President has been treating the cuts from the sequester as some sort of budget Armageddon; blaming Republicans and talking up how much they’ll hurt. Here’s another perspective on these cuts from people who look more closely at our financial situation.

Credit rating agencies are shrugging off sequestration, saying the U.S. government will need to do more to reduce the deficit if it wants to prevent a downgrade of the nation’s credit rating.

While the agencies say the $85 billion in automatic spending cuts represent at least a step towards deficit reduction, they argue much more is needed to prevent the United States from losing its “AAA” rating.

“It’s not the most ideal outcome,” said David Riley, Fitch Rating’s global managing director for sovereign ratings, on CNBC Europe. “You’d rather have intelligent cuts and some revenue measures as well … but we don’t live in an ideal world, and it’s better to have some deficit reduction than none at all.”

The agencies view it as a positive sign that Congress did not simply scrap the unpopular sequester. Erasing the cuts without coming up with an alternative, something pushed by some liberal lawmakers, would have added to the deficit and debt and further pressured agencies to downgrade the nation’s credit rating.

They are glad Congress didn’t scrap it, but the year’s still young. In any event, when you hear Democrats freak out about these cuts, just remember that the credit agencies are yawning.

When a nut shot Gabby Giffords, the Left blamed it on the Tea Party and thought Sarah Palin should apologize or reach out. LA shooter Chris Dorner idolizes the Left, and suddenly the media is a model of restraint.

Alleged Los Angeles shooter Christopher Jordan Dorner, influenced by left-leaning media coverage of gun crime in the wake of the Newtown shootings, has virtually paralyzed the City of Angels. Floyd Lee Corkins, a gunman incensed by anti-gay marriage bias after reading articles by the liberal advocacy group Southern Poverty Law Center, took a firearm into the Family Research Council’s headquarters with the intention of killing “as many as possible.” He hoped to smash Chick-fil-A sandwiches in the faces of as many corpses as he could. These shooters were clearly moved by left-wing media, and we should thank every benevolent force in the universe that they were. Had either shooter possessed even a tenuous link to a conservative group, a media-driven hysteria about the malevolent influence of right-wing broadcasters and commentators would be gripping the nation today. Fortunately, when a crazed shooter’s ideology is explicitly and demonstrably left-wing, the media displays admirable restraint about linking a gunman’s politics to their acts of violence.

It’s one thing to criticize decisions. It’s another to realize you have to make the same ones you criticized. But Barack Obama has been continuing the same war policies from the Bush administration that he ran against. It’s amazing what getting the job has on your view of the job

If President Obama tuned in to the past week’s bracing debate on Capitol Hill about terrorism, executive power, secrecy and due process, he might have recognized the arguments his critics were making: He once made some of them himself.

Four years into his tenure, the onetime critic of President George W. Bush finds himself cast as a present-day Mr. Bush, justifying the muscular application of force in the defense of the nation while detractors complain that he has sacrificed the country’s core values in the name of security.

(Oh, and the NY Times is just now realizing this?)

And will likely pay with his life.

Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez is dying of cancer in Havana, in a live demonstration of Cuba’s vaunted socialized medical care. He went there instead of Brazil because he wanted to make a political statement. What irony.

As party cronies hover at his bedside, Cuban officials bark orders to the government in Caracas, and red-shirted Chavistas hold vigils, all signs are pointing to an imminent exit for the Venezuelan leader who controls a huge part of the world’s oil.

He’s going out exactly as he wouldn’t have liked — helpless and at the mercy of doctors, a far cry from the blaze of heroic socialist glory he might have preferred.

Most galling for him: It didn’t have to happen this way.

His expected demise will be entirely due to his gullibility to leftist propaganda and bad choices that came of it.

Remember, this is the Michael-Moore-acclaimed Cuban health care system covered in his movie "Sicko".

No, the Bush tax cuts didn’t cause the recession. Yes, Obama’s "recovery" has been the worst in history. These and other economic realities can be summed up in this graph. (Click for a larger version.)

A sex scandal involving adults and children under their charge. No, not the Catholic church of the 60s; the public schools of today.

While he did get the number wrong, Romney was right in that those who pay the least in income taxes are the least likely to vote for him.

The number of scientific papers that had to be retracted last year was a 10x increase over the rate during the previous decade. And a study of those retractions finds that 3/4ths of those retractions were due to misconduct rather than honest mistakes.

Good news in the stem cell debate. "Two stem-cell researchers have won this year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their groundbreaking work in cellular reprogramming, a technique that unleashed a wave of advances in biology, from cloning to the possible treatment of diseases using a patient’s own cells." That is, there is less of a reason to use embryonic stem cells, when adult ones will do just as well.

Hedging their bets? "A survey by the Pew Research Center discovered that 2.4 percent of Americans say they are atheists and 3.3 percent say they are agnostic. Among the atheists and agnostics, however, 6 percent said they pray daily."

Need more money for your school district, by proving how many students attend? Make them wear microchips. Privacy takes a back seat to cash.

And finally, some apt scripture for the VP debate last night. (Click for a larger version.)

This is what you get when you try to soak the rich.

President Obama proposes to pay for his $447 billion jobs bill mainly by limiting tax deductions for wealthy Americans. Unfortunately, if enacted, this policy will likely dampen charitable giving and further shift perceived responsibility for social welfare from individual donors to the state.

The President’s plan calls for lowering the rate at which wealthy taxpayers can take itemized deductions—from the current rate of 35 percent down to 28 percent, beginning in 2013. The change would affect individuals making more than $200,000 (and families making more than $250,000) per year.

So how much would we be talking about?

The result of President Obama’s proposal will likely be several billion dollars in decreased revenue each year for hospitals, educational institutions, and nonprofits that help the poor. While giving would probably drop only a small percentage, the anticipated amount would total more than the combined annual operating budgets of the Ameri­can Cancer Society, World Vision, St. Jude Chil­dren’s Research Hospital, Habitat for Humanity, and the American Heart Association.

Those who are served by these institutions aren’t the only ones who would be hurt by decreased giving. Many people’s jobs would also be threatened.

Perhaps most importantly, Obama’s proposal sends the message that federal bureaucracy can deploy the resources of the wealthy more effectively than civil society can. Decreasing an incentive for charitable giving implies that the state should assume responsibility for people’s needs, even at the expense of vital nonprofit organizations. Churches, ministries, and other community-based institutions, however, are often better equipped to serve people in need. And they often do so at reduced costs.

If Republicans vote against this, be sure that this analysis will not be mentioned. Instead, by protecting charities, Republicans will be said to be "against jobs".

I know I’m biased, but Romney was mopping the debate floor with Obama last night. Even on the ObamaCare vs RomneyCare situation, he’s came out on top.

Some of the big-name liberals were astonished as well. Jeff Jarvis, media critic at BuzzFeed tweeted, "How did Obama get backed into the corner defending the death panel?" Indeed, Sarah Palin deserves an apology. Bill Maher had to admit, "i can’t believe i’m saying this, but Obama looks like he DOES need a teleprompter". Markos Moulitsas of The Daily Kos top liberal blog lamented, "Nobody likes seeing a prevent defense in action, and that’s what Dems saw tonight."

Some good Tweets from the Right, too.

James Taranto: It’s a close one, but I’ll say Obama had a better night than Lehrer.

David Limbaugh: Again — listen to Obama- in almost every answer he focuses on what is and isn’t fair. He never addresses what will work esp 4 growht [sic] & debt

Blogger Ace of Spades quotes a pollster: Frank Luntz: "I have not had a group that swung this much. This is overwhelming for Romney. This is a big deal."

Again, I know I’m biased, but I think Romney won on substance as well as style; explaining the $716 billion he would put back in Medicare (and why), why RomneyCare was at least passed in a bipartisan way (as opposed to ObamaCare), and, as I said, getting Obama to admit and even defend "death panels".

It was a great first day of the rest of the campaign. Hopefully, this will translate into votes.

First, Senator Harry Reid comes out with an allegation that Mitt Romney had times in the past 10 years when he paid no taxes. His source remain some anonymous person formerly of Bain Capital. He beats this drum for weeks, in the media and on the Senate floor, insisting Romney prove his innocence instead of Reid prove his guilt.

Then Romney releases a summary of his past 20 years of tax returns. At no time in the past 2 decades did his effective tax rate dip below 13%. With that allegation proven false, does the Left demand accountability of Harry Reid, for making these unfounded charges? Do they ask who his unreliable source was?

No, they ask 10 more questions of Romney!

Y’know what this sounds like? It sounds like the Birthers who, after Obama produced his birth certificate, asked more and more questions of him, and dissected the PDF file that was given to them.

And what’s really telling is, if you look at the comments on that second link, there are those who are upset — upset — that Romney did not take his full charitable deduction for the $4 million he gave to charity so that he could say he never paid less than 13%. "That jerk; he gave more to charity than he took credit for!" Wow, really? Is that the petard you want to hoist yourselves on? And really; if he had taken the full deduction and brought his effective rate down to 9%, you would have been OK with that?

Yeah, right. The screaming would have only been louder.

It’s Birtherism for taxes. I  need to come up with a catchy name for that.