In the early 1990s, I attended a conference designed to teach journalists the tools of an emerging field known as computer-assisted investigative...

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One of the hottest sessions explained how journalists could replicate stories that other papers had done locally using computer tools, including one especially popular project to determine if banks in your community were discriminating against minority borrowers in making mortgages.

One newspaper, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, had won a Pulitzer Prize for its computer-assisted series on the subject, and others, including the Washington Post and Detroit Free Press, had also weighed in with their own analyses based on government loan data. Everyone sounded keen to learn if their local banks were guilty, too.

Although academic researchers leveled substantial criticisms against these newspaper efforts (namely, that they relied on incomplete data and did not take into account lower savings rates, higher debt levels and higher loan default rates for many minority borrowers), bank lending to minority borrowers still became an enormous issue — mostly because newspaper reporters and editors in this pre-talk-radio, pre-blogging era were determined to make it so.

Editorialists called for the government to force banks to end the alleged discrimination, and they castigated federal banking regulators who said they saw no proof of wrongdoing in the data.

This, then, became the dominant government position, even though subsequent efforts by other researchers to verify the Fed's conclusions showed serious deficiencies in the original work.

For instance, one economist for the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. who looked more deeply into the data found that the difference in denial rates on loans for whites and minorities could be accounted for by such factors as higher rates of delinquencies on prior loans for minorities, or the inability of lenders to verify information provided to them by some minority applicants.

Regardless of how well Sarah Palin does in Thursday's debate, conservatives would be astounded if the major media acknowledged her success.

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For the most part, the media have decided the appropriate response to the governor is to sneer, and sneering at great conservative leaders, from Ronald Reagan to Rush Limbaugh, has been a liberal pastime for decades.

What makes Gov. Palin unique from the other three candidates in this race is she seems so normal. She worked her way through college, married a good local guy, stayed home with her children for several years and has an impressive professional resume as well.

If press interviews are granted, the criterion should be: "Has the interviewer ever done a fair interview with a conservative woman?" That would save the governor a lot of energy and let her share her message with the millions of Americans hungry to hear more from her.

Liberals are extraordinarily chagrined that the first woman in 24 years to be on a national ticket isn't Hillary, but a conservative. And while they critique and disrespect Palin with gusto, they underestimate the backlash of support they've created for her, even from many Americans who don't think of themselves as conservatives.

Make no mistake: The left-wing criticism of Sarah Palin is not an honest look at her readiness, but a criticism of her core values and her Reaganesque philosophical conservatism. For liberals, a movement conservative will never be ready.

Palin's answer to those who question her readiness should be: "I don't know every issue. And I didn't know every issue when I became governor of Alaska. But 80% of the people of the state approve of my work."

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Basing its recommendation on the theory that the greenhouse gases emitted by meat and dairy production are principal contributors to global warming, the Food Climate Research Network, operating out of the University of Surrey, strongly suggests that meat and milk consumption in developed countries be rationed.

This nonsense emanating from an institute of supposedly higher learning is alarmingly similar to the madness spouted by Rajendra Pachauri, the vegetarian chair of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, who wants people to "give up meat for one day (a week) initially, and decrease it from there."

The limit prescribed by the British group is four ounces of meat every other day and one liter of milk, "just about enough for cereal in the morning" — or 100 grams of cheese — each week.

Tara Garnett, author of the Surrey report, reportedly believes that simply encouraging voluntary changes in habits doesn't work and supports government restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions. It's reasonable to assume that she would embrace state-mandated food rationing, using her group's guidelines, as well.

It wasn't hard to see this coming. The forces that want to scare the world about global warming wish to dictate how the rest of us live, from the homes we live in to the automobiles we drive and, now, to the food we eat. They want people to believe that they have only the public interest at heart, but in reality their goal is to set themselves up as autocrats who can shape the world so that it suits their tastes.

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On Monday, the House of Representatives voted to block the $700 billion package to bail out the struggling financial sector. The Senate is expected to consider similar legislation Wednesday.

But even this staggering cost—and the $140 billion already spent to bail out AIG, Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—pales in comparison to the massive bill taxpayers will face for runaway spending on entitlement programs.

A new Heritage Foundation graphic sent to news media demonstrates that this $840 billion is just a drop in the bucket compared to the long-term liabilities from Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

"Together, these programs hold unfunded obligations totaling $41 trillion - 60 times larger than the proposed Wall Street bailout," Heritage's Brian Riedl writes in the San Francisco Chronicle.

This is a real crisis we face, Riedl explains. "Imagine a taxpayer bailout even larger than what's proposed for Wall Street. Now imagine it recurring every year in perpetuity. That's our fiscal future unless we fundamentally reform these unsustainable entitlement programs."

Obama’s attack on the First Amendment

Some may be tempted to shrug this off as an ironic payback to McCain for the BCRA, but McCarthy rejects that.  In both cases, the true victim isn’t an opposing politician but the Americans who assumed that the First Amendment guaranteed the right to political speech more than the right to dance nude in front of drunk frat boys.  Allowing this kind of legal intimidation to political speech guarantees that we will have less of it.  It also shows a certain tendency towards fascism among Team Obama’s supporters that voters should carefully consider.

Must read: Ken Timmerman on Obama’s unreported campaign donations

McKinney: DoD shot 5,000 prisoners during Katrina

The Glass-Steagall dodge

Democrats have tried to cast blame for the credit-sector meltdown on deregulation, and point to the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act as the linchpin.  The repeal came in 1999, though, and it did nothing to cause the real cancer at the heart of the crisis: wildly overvalued mortgage-backed securities issued by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.  If Democrats don’t believe that, they can ask one of their own:

A running cliché of the political left and the press corps these days is that our current financial problems all flow from Congress’s 1999 decision to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 that separated commercial and investment banking. Barack Obama has been selling this line every day. Bill Clinton signed that “deregulation” bill into law, and he knows better.

In BusinessWeek.com, Maria Bartiromo reports that she asked the former President last week whether he regretted signing that legislation. Mr. Clinton’s reply: “No, because it wasn’t a complete deregulation at all. We still have heavy regulations and insurance on bank deposits, requirements on banks for capital and for disclosure. I thought at the time that it might lead to more stable investments and a reduced pressure on Wall Street to produce quarterly profits that were always bigger than the previous quarter.

“But I have really thought about this a lot. I don’t see that signing that bill had anything to do with the current crisis. Indeed, one of the things that has helped stabilize the current situation as much as it has is the purchase of Merrill Lynch by Bank of America, which was much smoother than it would have been if I hadn’t signed that bill.”

In fact, the repeal made it possible to rescue depositors from the collapse of banks and protect FDIC funding, keeping taxpayers from footing the bill for the collapse.  And the repeal was no partisan project, either; it passed 90-8.  Thirty-eight Democrats in the Senate voted for the repeal, including Barack Obama’s running mate, Joe Biden, as well as Chuck Schumer, John Edwards, Chris Dodd, John Kerry, Joe Lieberman, and others.  In other words, a Democratic President signed it, and it had the support of members of every Democratic ticket since then — including Obama’s.

Obama wants to blame Republicans for transparent political purposes.  Phill Gramm wrote the bill, and Gramm has been an adviser to John McCain.  That makes this a convenient target for the Democrats, but Clinton won’t play along with it.  He insists that the repeal of Glass-Steagall was something he supported on his own, and that it had nothing to do with the financial crisis we see now.