Reid’s Irresponsible Lie Costs Insurance Industry a Fortune

Harry Reid did his best to cause us to fail in Iraq by proclaiming that the war had already been lost, even as the Surge turned the tide in our favor. Now he’s applying similar tactics to the economy, in hopes of whipping up enough financial chaos to sweep Obama into the White House. His disgraceful efforts appear to be meeting with success.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is getting credit for sparking a blistering sell-off in insurance stocks.
MetLife Inc., Hartford Financial Services Group and Prudential Financial Inc. all fell by double-digit percentage amounts [yesterday] after Reid on Wednesday said the financial-system bailout plan was crucial because a large insurer was at risk of failing.

Reid specifically cited “a major insurance company — one with a name that everyone knows — that’s on the verge of going bankrupt,” according to Dow Jones Newswires.

But apparently Dingy Harry was just kidding — i.e., talking trash for political purposes.

A statement from his office said that Reid was “not personally aware of any particular company being on the verge of bankruptcy” and that “he has no special knowledge about nor has he talked to any insurance company officials,” Dow Jones reported.

However, the damage has been done.

But with investors already on high alert after the Federal Reserve’s rescue of insurance titan American International Group Inc. on Sept. 16, and with the credit crunch still making funding difficult for even the largest U.S. financial companies, Reid’s comments were the equivalent of pouring gasoline on a grease fire.
MetLife plunged $7.19, or 14.9%, to $40.96; Hartford dived $12.20, or 32%, to $25.91; and Prudential slid $7.15, or 11%, to $57.65.

Reid is following in the proud tradition of fellow Democrat Senator Charles “Chuckie Schmuckie” Schumer.

In late June, Democrat Schumer made public a letter he had sent to federal bank regulators, expressing concern that Pasadena-based IndyMac Bancorp was on the brink of failure.
When regulators seized IndyMac in mid-July, they accused Schumer of fomenting a panic run on deposits that made the bank’s collapse inevitable.

Due to liberal domination of the media, lefty politicians stand only to benefit from the economic ruin they inflict, as they can be assured that few people will know enough to hold them responsible.

Irresponsible fools in positions of great power.

Anti-Obama Bloggers Say They Were Silenced

Web loggers who are campaigning against Senator Obama‘s presidential run are accusing Google and Obama supporters of silencing them after their Web logs were marked as spam and their accounts temporarily frozen.

On Thursday last week, hours after publishing a post about an online petition demanding that Mr. Obama publicly produce his birth certificate, an associate professor of business administration at Brooklyn College, Mitchell Langbert, found that he could no longer access his Web log.

Google’s Blogger hosting service had suspended “Mitchell Langbert’s Blog,” which Mr. Langbert describes as “two-thirds academic stuff I’m working on and one-third politics,” until it could verify the Web log was not a “spam blog,” or a site designed solely to increase the page views of associated Web sites.

A day later Google lifted the block on the account, but the incident and earlier Web log freezes in late June have led Mr. Langbert and other anti-Obama bloggers to accuse the Illinois senator’s supporters of intentionally identifying their blog addresses to Google as spam blogs. They also say the company has reflexively suspended the sites.

“These tech-savvy smart alecks have figured out that if you report a blog you don’t like, you can do some damage to a person,” Mr. Langbert said.

A spokesman for Google, Adam Kovacevich, said in a statement that an overzealous antispam filter was responsible for the blocks.

“We believe this was caused by mass spam e-mails mentioning the ‘Just Say No Deal’ network of blogs, which in turn caused our system to classify the blog addresses mentioned in the e-mails as spam,” he said. “We have restored posting rights to the affected blogs, and it is very important to us that Blogger remain a tool for political debate and free expression.”

Several of the blogs that were blocked, including hillaryorbust.com and comealongway.blogspot.com, are part of the “Just Say No Deal” network of anti-Obama blogs. But Mr. Langbert’s blog is not, leading him to conclude that Obama supporters had targeted him.

On her right-leaning blog “Atlas Shrugs,” Pamela Geller keeps a list of blogs that Google has temporarily blocked. “The blockings do come in waves,” she said. “The last wave was this past week, and now it got very quiet.”

Some writers have had their blogs unblocked, while others have moved them to WordPress, a rival blog host.

“I don’t think” Google has “malicious intentions at all, it’s just that spammers can literally overrun a service if you’re not careful, so their defenses have become overzealous,” a spokesman for WordPress, Matthew Mullenweg, said in an e-mail.

“We always have human review before turning off an active blog,” he said. “People invest so much time into their blogs, to treat it with anything less than the utmost respect is criminal.”