God Bless the House Republicans Read the whole thing long but right on

http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/daily/site_093008/content/01125106.guest.html

Democrats left and right. That’s another thing.  I am agitated today.  I am sick and tired of our conservative intelligentsia media trying to balance things out by saying “both sides are at fault.”  Both sides are not at fault!  They may be talking about the vote yesterday on the bailout.  Both sides are not at fault.  Stop trying to impress people are going to hate you no matter how much you might think they like you.  Stop trying to get invited to cocktail parties and dinner parties in Washington.  Both sides are not to blame for this!  What is the point of having a conservative media if they’re not going to stand up for conservatism?  What’s the point of having a conservative media if all they’re going to do is wring their hands? “Well, we know that both sides are at fault, Mr. Limbaugh, and we must be assessing blame accurately and fairly on both sides.”

Both sides are not to blame.  If you could find a Republican guilty here, he would be in the hoosegow.  As I keep saying, they would have had congressional hearings led by, Barney Frank, Harry Reid, John Conyers, et al.  Both sides are not at fault here, and until we can come to grips with that, we’re just going to be whistling Dixie (no offense to Dixie) about fixing this problem, and Lecturer Miron here sums it up in one brief sentence. “The fact that government bears such a huge responsibility for the current mess means any response should eliminate the conditions that created this situation in the first place, not attempt to fix bad government with more government. The obvious alternative to a bailout is letting troubled financial institutions declare bankruptcy. Bankruptcy means that shareholders typically get wiped out and the creditors own the company

If you really want to undestand the global financial crisis, watch these videos

If you really want to undestand the global financial crisis, watch

Humor close to the truth

http://il.youtube.com/watch?v=mzJmTCYmo9g

Democrat that gets it

Click here: YouTube – Let’s Play “WALLSTREET BAILOUT” The Rules Are… Rep Kaptur

Democrat Leaders Played to Lose

Democrat Leaders Played to Lose

By The Prowler

Published 9/30/2008 12:50:21 AM

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi ordered her Majority Whip, Jim Clyburn, to essentially not do his job in the runup to the vote on Monday for the negotiated Wall Street bailout plan, according to House Democrat leadership aides. “Clyburn was not whipping the votes you would have expected him to, in part because he was uncomfortable doing it, in part because we didn’t want the push for votes to be successful,” says one leadership aide. “All we needed was enough to potentially get us over the finish line, but we wanted the Republicans to be the ones to do it. This was not going to be a Democrat-passed bill if the Speaker had anything to say about it.” During the floor vote, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and House Democrat Conference chair Rahm Emanuel could be seen monitoring the vote on the floor, and gauging whether or not more Democrat votes were needed. Clyburn had expressed concerns, says the leadership aide, of being asked to press members of the Black and Hispanic caucuses on a bill he was certain those constituencies would not want passed. “It worked out, because we didn’t have a dog in this fight. We negotiated. We gave the White House a bill. It was up to the Republicans to get the 100 plus votes they needed and they couldn’t do it,” said another Democrat leadership aide. Emanuel, who served as a board member for Freddie Mac, one of the agencies that precipitated the economic crisis the nation now finds itself in, had no misgivings about taking a leadership role in tanking the bill. “He was cheerleading us along, mothering the votes,” says the aide. “We wanted enough to put the pressure on the Republicans and Congressman Emanuel was charged with making it close enough. He did a great job.” Pelosi and her aides have made it clear they were not going to “whip” or twist the arms of members who did not want to vote, but they also made no effort to rally any support for a bill they attempted to hijack over the weekend. Further, according to House Oversight Committee staff, Emanuel has received assurances from Pelosi that she will not allow what he termed a “witch hunt” to take place during the next Congressional session over the role Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac played in the economic crisis. Emanuel apparently is concerned the roles former Clinton Administration members may have played in the mortgage industry collapse could be politically — or worse, if the Department of Justice had its way, legally — treacherous for many.

Opposing view: The sky is not falling

By John Shadegg

 

Every Republican who voted against the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act on Monday believes that Congress must address this crisis. They take it seriously and stand ready to vote for reasonable legislation. They were unwilling to give Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson a blank check.

The sky is not falling. The market will return. Secretary Paulson is getting a lesson in civics. The world he has entered is different than the wheeling-and-dealing Goldman Sachs world where he made his fortune.

Members of Congress have a duty to protect the interests of the American people. That is precisely what they did. The vote against the measure was solidly bipartisan.

Paulson’s $700 billion dollar plan was fundamentally flawed. The bill asked for a blank check. It did not specify which assets could be purchased or the procedure by which they would be purchased.

Regrettably, Congressional Democrats inserted extraneous provisions and chose to put groups such as ACORN (a liberal housing advocacy group) and trial lawyers before the American people. After Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., courageously halted the stampede, most negotiation time was spent removing harmful Democrat language, rather than improving Paulson’s proposal.

House Republicans want to protect the American people and our nation’s financial institutions, enabling them to make the loans needed to run America’s economy. It is also critical to calm public anxiety.

To begin, “mark to market,” the accounting rule that requires mortgage-backed securities to be valued at fire-sale prices, must be suspended. For reasons that are incomprehensible, Paulson and congressional Democrats refused to include such a provision. It’s a systemic reform Congress must insist upon to reduce taxpayer exposure and prevent this crisis from reoccurring. Further, an update to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., increasing its $100,000 limit, would relieve the concern of millions of Americans for their life savings. It’s hard to imagine why anyone would oppose such a change.

Many House conservatives do not like the structure of Paulson’s proposal to have the government purchase troubled assets. But there is nothing inherent in this plan that’s inconsistent with the two reforms outlined above.

Americans need to understand that the Senate was not scheduled to vote on this bill until Wednesday evening, as a result of the Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashanah today. We have ample time to reach an acceptable compromise if all parties act in good faith. The Democratic House majority can move to reconsider its bill if Speaker Nancy Pelosi will allow an amendment to improve it by making changes, including those I have outlined.

This problem can be solved in the very near future, and the market will come back.

Rep. John Shadegg, R-Arizona, first elected in 1994, has held a number of Republican leadership positions in the House.

Who caused “the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression?”

Who caused “the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression?”

September 29, 2008 – by Roger Kimball

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2RZ0sUcVcE&eurl=http://www.powerlineblog.com/

[1] Powerline links to a video that answers this question with admirable clarity. I’ll link to the video below. First, here are a few data points from the video and other sources:

The Root Cause

* According to Senator Chris Dodd (D. CT) the “root cause” of the problem is “the housing foreclosure crisis.”

Not 100% accurate, perhaps–it’s really a credit crisis–but close enough for government work, especially from someone who has just happens to chair the Senate Banking Committee and who, completely coincidentally, has been such a [2] conspicuous beneficiary of preferential mortgages and who, also coincidentally, leads the list of those who have received campaign contributions from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. (Guess who comes in [3] 2nd and 3rd?)

* But what caused the housing crisis to which Senator Dodd alludes? The housing “bubble.”

* And what caused the housing bubble? “Sub-prime,” i.e., risky, mortgages; that is, mortgages made to people who, in the normal course of things would have to pay a premium in order to obtain a mortgage (if they could obtain one at all) because

a) they had bad or non-existent credit

b) their income was insufficient or

c) both.

Packaging the American Dream

A home of your own. It’s part of the American dream. Work hard, save up for a down payment, pay your bills on time and, presto, you, too, can buy a home.

For decades the government has done things to help Americans to realize the dream, e.g., graciously allowing citizens to keep some of their own money to help pay for the interest on a mortgage (the official term for this is a “tax deduction,” but I prefer my locution since it emphasizes the fact that it is YOUR MONEY we are talking about).

But what about people who do not work hard (if they work at all)? What about people who have not saved up for a down payment? What about people who do not pay their bills on time (if they pay them at all)? Why shouldn’t they get to live the American dream?

That was the question that led to

 ”The Community Reinvestment Act” (see [4] here for more).

* The original Community Reinvestment Act was signed into law in 1977 by Jimmy Carter. Its purpose, in a nutshell, was to require banks to provide credit to “under-served populations,” i.e., those with poor credit.

The buzz word was “[5] affordable mortgages,” e.g., mortgages with low teaser-rates, which required the borrower to put no money down, which required the borrower to pay only the interest for a set number of years, etc.

* In 1995, Bill Clinton’s administration made various changes to the CRA, increasing “access to mortgage credit for inner city and distressed rural communities,” i.e., it provided for the [6] securitization, i.e. public underwriting, of what everyone now calls “sub-prime mortgages.”

Bottom line? It forced banks to issue $1 trillion in sub-prime mortgages.

$1 trillion, i.e., a thousand billion dollars in sub-prime,i.e., risky, mortgages, in order to push this latest example of social engineering.

But wait: how did it force banks to do this? Easy. Introduce a federal requirement that banks make the loans or face penalties. As Howard Husock, writing in City Journal way back in 2000 [7] observed: “Bank examiners would use federal home-loan data, broken down by neighborhood, income group, and race, to rate banks on performance. There would be no more A’s for effort. Only results—specific loans, specific levels of service—would count.” Way back in 1994, for example, Barack Obama sued Citibank on behalf of a client who [8] charged that the bank “systematically denied mortgages to African-American applicants and others from minority neighborhoods.”

* In 1997, Bear Stearns–O firm of blessed memory–was the [9] first to get onto the sub-prime gravy train.

* [10] Fannie Mae & Freddy Mac–were there near the beginning, too.

Anatomy of a bubble

Step 1. The intoxication: “My house is worth millions!” From 1995 – 2005, the number of sub-prime mortgages skyrocket. So did the house prices.

Step 2. The hangover: “Oh my God, my house isn’t selling. What went wrong?”

Why didn’t someone try to stop it?

[11] Someone did: “The Bush administration today recommended the most significant regulatory overhaul in the housing finance industry since the savings and loan crisis a decade ago,” The New York Times, September 11, 2003.

But someone intervened to stymie the Bush administration. Who? The New York Times reports:

Supporters of the companies said efforts to regulate the lenders tightly under those agencies might diminish their ability to finance loans for lower-income families. . . . “These two entities — Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — are not facing any kind of financial crisis,” said Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee. “The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.”

Why didn’t someone else ring the alarm?

Someone else did. In 2005, [12] John McCain  co-sponsored the “[13] Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act,” which among other things provided for more oversight of Freddie & Fannie. The bill didn’t pass. Guess who blocked it?

The bill was reintroduced in 2007. But again, no luck. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had friends in the Senate:

* Chris Dodd, [14] a recipient of “sweetheart” loans from a Freddie and Fannie backed company.

* The junior senator from Illinois, i.e., Barack  Obama, who turned to Jim Johnson, [15] former head (1991-1998) of Fannie Mae, to help advise him on whom to pick for the vice-presidential slot on his ticket. From 1985 to 1990, incidentally, Johnson was managing director of Lehman Brothers. Remember them?

* You might also want to check out one of Barack Obama’s other advisors: Franklin Raines, former CEO of Freddie Mac: see [16] here , for example, or [17] here , or [18] here.

Towards the end of the video, we read this salutary observation: “Everyone deserves a home, not a house of cards.”

Who gave us the house of cards? Watch the whole thing [19] here   (original link was  [20] here). And then pass it along to everyone you know.

---

From Which of These Guys Would You Buy a Used Car?

From Which of These Guys Would You Buy a Used

 Car?

By Kyle-Anne Shiver

This presidential election has been spun in every way under the sun by pundits from coast to coast.  But if one were to boil this huge pot of verbosity down to the only solid matter left, what single question would remain? 

When it comes to politics, my grandfather’s election question has always been the most reliable:

 

“From which of these guys would you buy a used car?”

 

As my grandfather would explain, honesty and character are truly the only things one can count on in a candidate.  Once a man is in office, everything else — promises, platforms, programs — can be left at the polling-place door.  But character and integrity are indispensable, not easily shed behind even the grandest closed doors.

 

J. C. Watts is a man after my grandfather’s heart, especially on “character”: 

 

“Everyone tries to define this thing called ‘character.’  It’s not hard.  Character is doing what’s right when nobody’s looking.”

 

Which is precisely why 2008 may be the easiest choice Americans have had in a long, long time.  And the current financial crisis provides the perfect test case for my grandfather’s used-car-lot question.

 

A Tale of Two Salesmen

 

Even without his teleprompter last Friday night, Barack Obama cut a fine figure of a man and gave one pretty terrific sales pitch on the financial crisis.  He managed to smoothly use his “Bush’s fault” mantra, adding the other tried-and-successful-so-far line about McCain “voting with Bush 90% of the time.”  He even managed to throw in the pitch about being the guy who will protect “the middle-class,” which he has already turned into a TV sales ad. 

 

What a heap of lying balderdash!

 

Such brazen lies have not been seen in public since Slick Willy’s, “I did not have sex with that woman.”

 

As clearly evidenced by on-the-record events from the past decade, this debacle is only the fault of Republicans in so far as they failed in their numerous attempts to rein in the financial fraud being committed by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, the Democratic Black Caucus, the Democratic leadership in Congress, and yes, even Barney Frank and Barack Obama, personally.  At this point, we could call Frank and Obama the it’s-all-their-fault-finger-pointing twins.

 

We now know that the entire sub-prime mortgage meltdown that caused this crisis can be laid directly at the feet of Democrats in the Clinton Administration, especially Franklin Raines and Jaime Gorelick.  We know that Wall Street can hardly bear all the blame, when Congress forces lending institutions to make loans to people who could never afford to pay them back.  And it was this huge influx of money into the housing market that inflated the bubble, which crashed last month, and still hasn’t stopped wrecking our economy and credit markets, like a line of falling dominoes. 

 

Do Democrats simply fail to understand that trust is the commodity that actually makes our economy sound? 

 

That lost trust cannot be instantly restored? 

 

We now know that lots of political fat cats have gotten rich on this housing scam, and that taxpayers are being railroaded into taking the fall for them.  We know that Barney Frank, Chairman of the Banking Committee, was a chief enabler of the phony mortgage house of cards that has finally come crumbling to the ground, and now threatens every one of us.

 

And we know that the top three recipients of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac lobbyist — yes, Senator Obama, lobbyist! — money for all this protection of Fannie/Freddie fraud, were Democrats.  Chris Dodd, who tried to ram the bailout through without a public airing, has been the #1 recipient since 1989, at a walloping $165,400. 

 

(Open Secrets.org has the whole list here.) 

 

Senator Obama, of the oh-so-squeaky-clean conscience crowd, comes in as the #2 recipient, at $126,349, after less than 4 years in the Senate.  Does Senator Obama not understand the meaning of the word, “lobbyist,” any better than Bill Clinton understood the meaning of the word, “is”?  It would certainly seem so.

 

Not only that, but Barack Obama has also been in the tidy Chicago bed of the Pritzker family since 2002, that Pritzker family with a banking fortune in excess of $15 billion.  Penny Pritzker, who is currently Barack Obama’s campaign finance Chairwoman, was also on the board of Superior Bank of Chicago (part of the Pritzker financial empire), when it failed in 2001, due to the same problem we have now.  Overinvestment in  sub-prime mortgages. 

 

As meticulously summarized last week by Edward Sisson, at the American Spectator, Obama’s finance Chair was actually the very person, who persuaded federal regulators to go along with these speculative ventures in risky loans, a move that resulted in the bank’s failure and a loss of hundreds of millions of dollars.  Yet Senator Obama thinks it’s just fine and dandy to have her as his finance Chairwoman, and said Sunday that on the financial crisis, Senator McCain is “out of touch.” 

 

Now that’s audacity with a capital A!

 

Obama’s claiming to be above dirty politics, while shamelessly taking hundreds of thousands from these lobbyists and surrounding himself with public shysters seems downright hypocritical.

 

Buy a used car from Obama? 

 

At this point, I would not buy a mechanical pencil from the man, much less an automobile.

 

John McCain, on the other hand, seems to have a very clear record when it comes to the current financial mess.  It is not 100% blot-free; he has received $21,500 from Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac since 1989.  This is not really very much, especially compared with Senator Obama’s $126,349 in less than 4 years.

 

And Senator McCain also made a pretty bold attempt to head off the current meltdown by co-sponsoring legislation that would have overhauled the regulatory body that oversaw the sub-prime housing debacle.  In 2005, McCain spoke passionately about the need for this action to avoid the current crisis:

 

“I join as a cosponsor of the Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act of 2005, S. 190, to underscore my support for quick passage of GSE regulatory reform legislation. If Congress does not act, American taxpayers will continue to be exposed to the enormous risk that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pose to the housing market, the overall financial system, and the economy as a whole.

“I urge my colleagues to support swift action on this GSE reform legislation.”

 

The bill that could have avoided this crisis died, however, as reported by Ed Morrissey at Hot Air:

 

“It never made it out of committee.  Chris Dodd, then the ranking member of the Banking Committee and now its chair, was in the middle of receiving preferential loan treatment from Countrywide Mortgage, one of the companies gaming the system in the credit crisis.”

 

Senator McCain, other Republicans in Congress and even President Bush all tried to warn of the coming crisis, urged regulatory reform, and were fought at every juncture by Democrats.

 

No wonder John McCain was having such a hard time containing his utter disdain for Barack Obama on the stage at last Friday’s debate.  When John McCain suspended his campaign to return to Washington, it was to make sure that the Democrats responsible for the putting our Country in such a fix did not ram through an even worse fix-it bill, without any protections for us taxpayers.  They had plenty of votes to do it, and the President was evidently prepared to do anything to keep the entire Country from going down.

 

Senator McCain even graciously tried to give the whole thing an aura of bi-partisanship.  Evidently, he does understand that trust is the foundation of our economy, even if Democrats do not.

 

Our media elites can play cover-up for their Democratic Party darlings all they want.  I’m just glad that there are at least a few Americans left who are willing to put the Country first.  Senator McCain is definitely one of them.

 

At this juncture, I haven’t a single doubt about which of these two men — Obama or McCain — I would choose to sell me a used car. 

 

Do you?

 

Kyle-Anne Shiver is an independent journalist and a frequent contributor to American Thinker.  She blogs at kyleanneshiver.com. 

MONA CHAREN: If Obama wins, it means hiring an arsonist to fight a fire.

Guilty Party
ACORN, Obama, and the mortgage mess.

By Mona Charen

The financial markets were teetering on the edge of an abyss last week. The secretary of the Treasury was literally on his knees begging the speaker of the House not to sabotage the bailout bill. The crash of falling banks made the earth tremble. The Republican presidential candidate suspended his campaign to deal with the crisis. And amid all this, the Democrats in Congress managed to find time to slip language into the bailout legislation that would provide a dandy little slush fund for ACORN.

ACORN stands for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, a busy hive of left-wing agitation and “direct action” that claims chapters in 50 cities and 100,000 dues-paying members. ACORN is where Sixties leftovers who couldn’t get tenure at universities wound up. That the bill-writing Democrats remembered their pet clients during such an emergency speaks volumes. This attempted gift to ACORN (stripped out of the bill after outraged howls from Republicans) demonstrates how little Democrats understand about what caused the mess we’re in.

ACORN does many things under the umbrella of “community organizing.” They agitate for higher minimum wages, attempt to thwart school reform, try to unionize welfare workers (that is, those welfare recipients who are obliged to work in exchange for benefits) and organize voter registration efforts (always for Democrats, of course). Because they are on the side of righteousness and justice, they aren’t especially fastidious about their methods. In 2006, for example, ACORN registered 1,800 new voters in Washington. The only trouble was, with the exception of six, all of the names submitted were fake. The secretary of state called it the “worst case of election fraud in our state’s history.” As Fox News reported: “The ACORN workers told state investigators that they went to the Seattle public library, sat at a table and filled out the voter registration forms. They made up names, addresses, and Social Security numbers and in some cases plucked names from the phone book. One worker said it was a lot of hard work making up all those names and another said he would sit at home, smoke marijuana and fill out the forms.”

ACORN explained that this was an “isolated” incident, yet similar stories have been reported in Missouri, Michigan, Ohio, and Colorado — all swing states, by the way. ACORN members have been prosecuted for voter fraud in a number of states. (See www.rottenacorn.com.) Their philosophy seems to be that everyone deserves the right to vote, whether legal or illegal, living or dead.

ACORN recognized very early the opportunity presented by the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) of 1977. As Stanley Kurtz has reported, ACORN proudly touted “affirmative action” lending and pressured banks to make subprime loans. Madeline Talbott, a Chicago ACORN leader, boasted of “dragging banks kicking and screaming” into dubious loans. And, as Sol Stern reported in City Journal, ACORN also found a remunerative niche as an “advisor” to banks seeking regulatory approval. “Thus we have J.P. Morgan & Co., the legatee of the man who once symbolized for many all that was supposedly evil about American capitalism, suddenly donating hundreds of thousands of dollars to ACORN.” Is this a great country or what? As conservative community activist Robert Woodson put it, “The same corporations that pay ransom to Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton pay ransom to ACORN.”

ACORN attracted Barack Obama in his youthful community organizing days. Madeline Talbott hired him to train her staff — the very people who would later descend on Chicago’s banks as CRA shakedown artists. The Democratic nominee later funneled money to the group through the Woods Fund, on whose board he sat, and through the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, ditto. Obama was not just sympathetic — he was an ACORN fellow traveler.

Now you could make the case that before 2008, well-intentioned people were simply unaware of what their agitation on behalf of non-credit-worthy borrowers could lead to. But now? With the whole financial world and possibly the world economy trembling and cracking like a cement building in an earthquake, Democrats continue to try to fund their friends at ACORN? And, unashamed, they then trot out to the TV cameras to declare “the party is over” for Wall Street (Nancy Pelosi)? The party should be over for the Democrats who brought us to this pass. If Obama wins, it means hiring an arsonist to fight a fire.

House Speaker Fails Leadership Test in Turbulent Times

House Speaker Fails Leadership Test in Turbulent Times

Written by Melanie Morgan

Monday, 29 September 2008

Astonishingly, the most powerful woman in the world couldn’t pull together her own caucus to stitch together a Wall Street bail-out deal …House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, drawn and defeated, failed due to her compulsive need to inject every vote with partisan hatred of Republicans and this administration.  No wonder her approval rating hovers around 9 percent. From the San Francisco Chronicle: “…But in the end Pelosi could not pass the bill with her own party’s votes. The Congressional Black Caucus, whose new leader is Oakland’s Barbara Lee, joined conservative free-market Republicans in the revolt. Lee said she was voting against the bill because it did nothing to create jobs. GOP leaders, one of whom waved Pelosi’s speech, blamed her for pushing over the edge 12 wavering Republicans. “We put everything we had into getting the votes to get there today,” Boehner said. “But the Speaker had to give a partisan voice that poisoned our conference; caused a number of members, who we thought we could get, to go south.”

“Why should anybody trust Joe Biden?”

http://michellemalkin.com/2008/09/29/why-should-anybody-trust-joe-biden/

Barack Obama And The Strategy Of Manufactured Crisis

http://wwwwakeupamericans-spree.blogspot.com/2008/09/barack-obama-and-strategy-of_29.html

Here is documentation that irrefutably chains Barack Obama to the most odious leftist movements in the United States today. Furthermore, it presents conclusive evidence that Obama not only knows of, but has participated in promotion of the Left’s apocalyptic strategy of destruction for the United States: the Cloward-Piven Strategy of manufactured crisis. Don’t miss the flow chart!