Ellie Light Revealed – And “She’s” a 51 y/o Male...and a Kos Kid...

This is an odd story that’s broken about a pro-Obama letter. Over the past couple of months the same or very similar letter to the editor has been printed in dozens of newspapers cross the country...a message about how the waning support for the current President is due to a childishly impatient electorate and not bad policy.

There was only one problem with that letter, ALL of them turned out to be written by an “Ellie Light” and “Ellie Light” turned out to be a frightened 51 y/o man who claimed he used the name “Ellie Light” because he feared writing the letters in his own name might get him attacked for his views.

The letter read,

A year ago, if we had read in the paper that employers were hiring again, that health care legislation was proceeding without a bump, that Afghanistan suddenly became a nice place to take your kids, we would've known we were being lied to. Back then, we recognized that the problems Obama inherited as president wouldn't go away overnight.

During his campaign, Obama clearly said that an economy that took eight years to break couldn't be fixed in a year, that Afghanistan was a graveyard of empires and would not be an easy venture for us.

Candidate Obama didn't feed us happy talk, which is why we elected him. He never said America could solve our health care, economic and security problems without raising the deficit. Instead, he talked of hard choices, of government taking painful and contentious first steps towards fixing problems that can't be left for another day.

Right after Obama's election, we seemed to grasp this. We understood that companies would be happy to squeeze more work out of frightened employees, and would be slow to hire more. We understood that the banks that had extorted us out of billions of dollars, were lying when they said they would share their recovery. We understood that a national consensus on health care would not come easily. Candidate Obama never claimed that his proposed solutions would work flawlessly right out of the box, and we respected him for that.

But today, the president is being attacked as if he were a salesman who promised us that our problems would wash off in the morning. He never made such a promise. It's time for Americans to realize that governing is hard work, and that a president can't just wave a magic wand and fix everything.

Ellie Light

According to the Cleveland Plain Dealer; “A man who identified himself as Winston Steward, 51, of Frazier Park, Calif., says he made up the name "Ellie Light" to protect himself from criticism and possible physical attacks, and used fake addresses across the country to get local newspapers to publish his letters.”

SEE: http://www.cleveland.com/open/index.ssf/2010/01/im_ellie_light_california_man.html

According to the Cleveland newspaper’s account, “His e-mail address matched the address of the Ellie Light missives that were sent to newspapers to praise Obama and urged second-guessers to be patient as the president advances the Democratic agenda.

“The story took several twists this week, as The Plain Dealer and "Ellie Light" spoke first through e-mail and later via phone. At one point Tuesday, the person who had been using the name acknowledged it was fake - but then said her real name was Barbara Brooks. The person spoke in a husky voice that could pass for either gender.

“But public records, including those of marriages, property and professional licenses in California and Texas, and phone interviews eventually led to the identity of Steward. Those interviews included several with a woman in Texas who said she is the real Barbara Brooks - records appear to confirm this -- and that she is married to Steward, who for now lives in their other home in California but plans to join her in their home near San Antonio.

“He said, however, that he and Brooks are no longer married, a point Brooks disputed.

"He's making up all kinds of garbage," she said. "We're not divorced. We're not separated. He just doesn't want anybody to trace him because he's afraid of the right-wing crazies up in Bakersfield."

“She said she does not condone his use of a fake name.”

There’s a lot that can be gleaned from that piece about a

The letter itself is hardly compelling as it fails to make any case for any of the misguided domestic agenda the American people seem sick of. Although that may not be the point, perhaps the real intent was to show that there are many Americans who still strongly support the Obama agenda...though in this case, it seems to be only one middle aged man with a deep-set fear of his own neighbors whom he refers to as “right-wing crazies.”

The letter itself is not all that well written and doesn’t offer a single compelling argument for “staying the course.”

The first paragraph starts off with some misdirection, “A year ago, if we had read in the paper that employers were hiring again, that health care legislation was proceeding without a bump, that Afghanistan suddenly became a nice place to take your kids, we would've known we were being lied to. Back then, we recognized that the problems Obama inherited as president wouldn't go away overnight,” adding, “During his campaign, Obama clearly said that an economy that took eight years to break couldn't be fixed in a year...”

Hmmm, Ms. Ligh...I mean Mr. Steward conveniently omits the mortgage meltdown that was generated back in the 1970s when Senators Proxmire and Kennedy pushed the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) through the Senate, without House approval and set the mechanism of government’s micromanaging our banks in place.

That micromanaging picked up steam in the 1990s as both Attorney general Reno and HUD Secretary Cisneros began suing banks both large and small for “not loaning money to low income Americans.”

As a result of that, America’s banks wrote over $1 TRILLION in subprime loans (loans to people with poor or sub-prime credit ratings) in the 1990s, resulting in the Clinton administration bailing out a number of our major banks.

With Moderate Republicans on-board Jack Kemp’s “Ownership Society,” the GSEs (Fannie Mae ad Freddie Mac) were set loose with the goal of freeing up credit and expanding home ownership. Cisneros’ successor as HUD Secretary, Andrew Cuomo called it “affirmative action in lending.”

And that’s what resulted in the $4 TRILLION in subprime loans made by American banks (under threat of lawsuit and worse by the government) from 2001 and 2008, most of that bad paper bought by Fannie Mae and repackaged by Freddie Mac, triggering a global credit crisis once our mortgage market here imploded.

So the economy wasn’t broken in 8 years, and it wasn’t broken by “greedy bankers,” but instead by banks that were being micromanaged by mouth-breathing bureaucrats like Barney Frank and Chris Dodd. In fact, a not so funny story, a young Barack Obama worked on one of those lawsuits for an ACORN member (Ms. Roberson) suing Citibank for “not making enough subprime loans available to low income people” in that area.

Apparently Ms. Ligh...damn!...I mean Mr. Steward is unaware that a growing number of Americans are learning about what led to last year’s economic meltdown through the cottage of industry of books on the subject, from the aptly named Meltdown by Thomas E. Woods Jr. and Ron Paul, Architects of Ruin by Peter Schweizer and Financial Fiasco by Johan Norberg.

As for the current administration’s anti-terror policies, they’ve failed to close Gitmo by their own deadline, not only didn’t they scuttle the NSA Surveillance Program, they’ve ratcheted it up. They’ve increased the use of Rendition (sending high-value detainees to foreign portals for “enhanced interrogations”) and Barack Obama has authorized more predator drone attacks in a single year than Bush did from 2003 until 2009.

This administration’s anti-terror policies can be described as schizophrenic at best. While we haven’t drawn down in Iraq, as Afghanistan spirals out of control, the Obama administration has seen fit to give KSM a controversial trial in New York City, a move opposed by over 2/3s of the American people. Although, to be fair, that’s perfectly in line with this administration’s ordering FBI agents to mirandize Umar Farouk AbdulMutallab (the Christmas “underwear bomber”) even though terror suspects do not have to be mirandized as there is a major exception to the Miranda requirements in such cases – “Investigators ARE allowed to question a suspect without providing a Miranda warning if they are trying to end a threat to public safety.”

Most of the rest of the missive is collection of anti-business ranting, “We understood that companies would be happy to squeeze more work out of frightened employees, and would be slow to hire more. We understood that the banks that had extorted us out of billions of dollars, were lying when they said they would share their recovery.”

Of course, in Ms. Light’s/Mr. Stewart’s view it’s the “greedy” private sector that’s at fault...only the private sector is flawed. Sadly for her...I mean him(?), it’s the private sector that allows the public sector to exist by actually producing things and providing the revenues the public sector takes for granted.

So who is Ellie Light/Winston Steward?

That might better be phrased, “Who ARE?”

Some really great work’s been done by Dan Riehl ((http://www.riehlworldview.com/carnivorous_conservative/), in fact, he seems to have come close to linking this to the WH; http://www.riehlworldview.com/carnivorous_conservative/2010/01/linking-ellie-light-to-the-white-house.html

Left Coast Rebel (http://www.leftcoastrebel.com/) and Patterico’s Pontifications (http://patterico.com/) have been doing a lot of work on trying to dig this up. Those two and, of course, Dan Riehl (http://www.riehlworldview.com/carnivorous_conservative/) are the ones to check to stay current on this