Governor Sarah Palin (R-Alaska) gave her first policy speech of the campaign today in Pittsburgh, focusing on policy adjustment for special needs children. Palin said the money politicians are extracting through earmarks for “pet projects” such as “fruit fly research in France” should be reallocated to “take care of the most vulnerable children.” Mentioning motivation from “God’s vision of perfection versus the world’s vision of perfection,” Palin said she would triple the funding for special needs children by 2011 if elected Vice President.
Palin stated that the public school systems are failing to render enough help for special needs children like her son, who has down’s syndrome. She spoke about federal funding to follow every special needs child without “bureaucratic complications or barriers”. She pledged to “finally fully fund” the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, as well as Individualized Education Programs. Palin said parents of children with disabilities have “enough complications already” and should have more options in schools for their children, whether they be private or public schools.
While Palin and Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) intend to “reduce taxes to promote growth” if elected, Palin scrutinized Senator Obama’s (D-Ill.) plan to raise taxes because it would have “serious and harmful consequences” for parents of special needs children, who might lose funding for things like Special Needs Trusts.

White house correspondent, Lovisa Frost, will be covering the white house briefing.
The Washington Bureau will be covering a hearing on building and economic recovery package. The Washington Bureau will also be covering the news conference with independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader. The Washington Bureau will be covering the House Oversight and government Reform Committee hearing on gaming the tax code.
In the afternoon, the Washington Bureau will be covering a discussion on a new report on vital signs via broadband: remote health monitoring transmits savings, enhances lives. Finally, the Washington Bureau will be covering a discussion at the Brookings Institute featuring Gen. Victor Renuart.

The McCain-Palin campaign says the Obama-Biden campaign’s tax plan will have a downward effect on Social Security solvency by giving Americans credit for their payroll tax liability. The campaign’s Senior Policy Adviser Doug Holtz-Eakin said the Obama campaign plans to relieve Americans of payroll taxes, and by doing would “rob Social Security indirectly,” because payroll taxes finance social security, as well as medicare.
Former U.S. Senator Dan Coats (R-Ind.) said, “The rhetoric and record of Barack Obama clearly supports higher taxes and more spending…At a time of financial crisis that we’re all going through right now, the idea of raising taxes is counter to what virtually every economist who has ever written, or studied, or analyzed the situation would recommend. You don’t raise taxes in a fiscal downturn”. Holtz-Eakin explained that the impact of raising taxes hurts small businesses first, who generate “80 to 90 percent of new jobs in America.”
Former Senator Coats added that another one of the main differences between the McCain-Palin campaign and the Obama-Biden campaign is that McCain supports the use of coal in the mid-west, where Coats says there are abundant coal resources and new clean coal technologies.

Frank Sharry of America’s Voice discusses the potential that immigrants have in changing elections. (0:37)

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Naturalized citizens and New Americans, the children of immigrants, will be playing an increasingly important role in the electorate, agreed all of the participants in a call conference held by the Immigration Policy Center.
New Americans registered in significant numbers in several battleground states for this election. In some swing states, such as in Colorado and Florida, New Americans make up a percentage of the electorate which is larger than the margin of victory during the 2004 election. This means that New Americans could tip battleground states and will be critical in this and future elections.
New Americans are sensitive to immigration issues, and a significant amount of New Americans are Latino and Asian. Republicans need to make sure that they are not perceived as anti-immigrant or anti-Latino, said Frank Sharry of America’s Voice. Sharry predicted that the record number of New Americans registering to vote would create large momentum towards immigration reform. “The fact is is that it’s very hard to be competitive in a presidential year if you’re perceived as anti-immigrant by the fastest growing group of new voters in the country,” said Sharry.

A Zogby poll sponsored by the organization Judicial Watch found that 81.7 percent of Americans believe that political corruption was a major factor that lead up to the current financial crises. According to Thomas Fitton, Judicial Watch’s President, the evidence suggests those 81.7 percent are correct.
“American’s seem to get what the problem is, but because ‘everyone’ is involved, you wont hear a peep about it from the city’s establishment,” said Fitton, speaking at a Judicial Watch panel discussion on the causes of the financial crisis.
“Arguably, the financial crisis is part of the biggest government corruption scandal in our nation’s history, and it doesn’t get much bigger than Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac…the companies took care of both political parties.”
Editor of the Real Clear Markets website John Tamny said that deregulation was not the cause of the crisis, as some democratic leaders are suggesting.
“If you look at the biggest freeze so far in this mortgage meltdown, it’s been of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac If we ignore first of all the fact that both parties to varying degrees were literally horizontal in bed with these guys, the idea that they didn’t have oversight of their activities is laughable,” said Tamny.
Instead, Tamny attributes the origin of the crisis to the weak dollar.
“Real estate is very commodity like, and just how commodities always do well when the dollar is weak, so does real estate. And with housing making big gains upwards in nominal terms in recent years, Americans logically chased this performance and piled into the housing sector.”
This housing boom resulted in people purchasing risky mortgages under the belief that if they found out they could no longer afford it, they would be able to sell it easily in the empowered real estate market. Eventually, the housing market turned sour, and the housing investments followed.
Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute Alan Reynolds found blaming the recession that is taking place worldwide on U.S. housing to be a ‘bit of a stretch’, and claimed that a spike in oil prices had a role in the crisis, pointing to nine occurrences when oil prices tripled, only to be followed by periods of recession. Reynolds expressed skepticism to a government solution.
“Recessions happen. If energy prices get too high, they have to come down. If home prices get too high, they need to come down. If homebuilders build too many houses, they have to stop building for a while until they get the inventory down..if the governments really knew how to stop, prevent, alleviate recessions, why do we still have recessions?”
John Berlau, Director of the Center for Entrepreneurship said that the initial emphasis the government put on housing in the finance system was not as helpful as originally believed, and instead suggested that they should have focused on getting the poor to save and invest.
Berlau said that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were essentially hybrids of government and private industry which had dangerous consequences.
“Fannie and Freddie were kind of the worst of both worlds. They could lobby like the private sector could do, but they were also built by congress and had built in government support where they had a 2 billion dollar line of credit…that made investors think, and it turned out rightly, that if anything happened they would be bailed out by the government.”

Editor of the Real Clear Markets website John Tamny said that deregulation was no the cause of the crisis, as some democratic leaders are suggesting. (0:32)

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Frank Sharry of America’s Voice discusses how the growing presence of New Americans, the children of immigrants, will reshape the politics in America.

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John Berlau, Director of the Center for Entrepreneurship, said that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were essentially hybrids of government and private industry which had the dangerous consequence of making investors believe that their investments were risk free (0:32)

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The McCain-Palin campaign’s Senior Policy Adviser Doug Holtz-Eakin explains why he thinks the Obama-Biden campaign’s tax plan will have a downward affect on Social Security solvency.

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