Liberals Call for Fannie and Freddie to "Relax" Mortgage Standards – AGAIN!

You're not going to believe this. Here we are in the midst of a major financial crisis – a crisis largely brought about by lax and corrupt lending practices at mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac – and guess what Democratic Reps. Barney Frank (D-MA) and Anthony Weiner (D-NY) want to do.
Yep, you guessed it. They want the quasi-public organizations to "relax" their mortgage standards yet again!
Here's the scoop according to Reuters:

Two U.S. Democratic lawmakers want Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to relax recently tightened standards for mortgages on new condominiums, saying they could threaten the viability of some developments and slow the housing-market recovery, the Wall Street Journal said.
In March, Fannie Mae said it would no longer guarantee mortgages on condos in buildings where fewer than 70 percent of the units have been sold, up from 51 percent, the paper said. Freddie Mac is due to implement similar policies next month, the paper said.
In a letter to the CEO's of both companies, Representatives Barney Frank, the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, and Anthony Weiner warned that a 70 percent sales threshold "may be too onerous" and could lead condo buyers to shun new developments, according to the paper.

Now, there is no question that the condo market has been slammed in this economy, wreaking havoc in many parts of the country, especially in places like Florida. But relaxing standards is clearly not the answer. As The Atlantic recently noted: "...It's a little unclear...why Fannie and Freddie should listen to Congress, since guaranteeing condos poses greater risk to taxpayers' wallets than single-family home mortgages."
In other words, trying to slap a quick fix on the condo problem will only make matters worse. Don't we already know how this works?

As you may recall, the first domino to fall in this financial crisis was the housing market. And the reason for that? Under pressure from the Clinton administration and their liberal allies in Congress, Fannie and Freddie relaxed their lending standards and provided home loans to people who could not afford them.
Here's how The New York Times described this risky scheme back in 1999:

In a move that could help increase homeownership rates among minorities and low-income consumers, the Fannie Mae Corporation is easing the credit requirements on loans that it will purchase from banks and other lenders...Fannie Mae, the nation's biggest underwriter of home mortgages, has been under increasing pressure from the Clinton administration to expand mortgage loans among low and moderate-income home people and felt pressure from stockholders to maintain its phenomenal growth in profits.

The article goes on to predict that such a strategy might not cause problems during times of economic prosperity, but that Fannie Mae could run into serious financial difficulty during an economic downturn.
Now Frank and company seek to repeat this mistake, even after the collapse. (Frank has a sorry history of protecting Fannie and Freddie.)

By the way, if you haven't yet checked it out, click here to watch Judicial Watch's educational panel entitled "The Truth About the Financial Crisis." (We have a written transcript available as well.) Then you'll have an even better understanding of why Frank and Weiner's plan is a terrible idea.

"Latino Activist" commits voter fraud

Cheating Commiecrat "Latino Activist" commits voter fraud. Water is wet, fire burns, con men pull off cons.

Longtime Latino rights activist and former Santa Ana school board chairman Nativo Lopez has been charged with four felony counts of voter fraud and has been released on his own recognizance pending trial.

The charges stem from Lopez allegedly registering to vote at a Los Angeles office address while continuing to live with his family in Orange County. He also allegedly cast an illegal ballot from Los Angeles in the 2008 presidential primary.

He faces charges of fraudulent voter registration, fraudulent document filing, perjury and fraudulent voting, according to Secretary of State Debra Bowen. The maximum penalty if convicted on all charges would be 3 years and 8 months in state prison.
(...)
Lopez is national president of Mexican American Political Association and national director of Hermandad Mexicana Latinoamericana, both of which are advocates for immigrant rights. A controversial figure among both anti-illegal immigration activists and some community activists, Lopez was recalled in 2003 from his post as school board member after serving six years.

The charges against him were filed after Bowen’s office investigated a tip and turned the matter over to the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office to prosecute. The office where he was registered to vote was the Boyle Heights branch of Hermandad Mexicana Latinoamericana, according to Bowen.

The Orange County Registrar of Voters said Lopez had been registered to vote in Santa Ana until January 2008, when he cancelled his Orange County registration.

Lopez surrendered to authorities on Wednesday. Superior Court Commissioner Alan Rubin granted Lopez's request to be released without posting bail.

The Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office had been seeking bail of $55,000, said spokeswoman Sandi Gibbons. Arraignment - when Lopez will state whether he is guilty or not guilty - was set for July 8.

In 1996, Lopez attracted controversy for registering new citizens in the congressional district where Democrat Loretta Sanchez upset incumbent Bob Dornan.

A congressional investigation later found that some voters had cast ballots before their citizenship was finalized. The Orange County District Attorney’s Office investigated allegations that Lopez’s primary organization, then known as Hermandad Mexicana Nacional, was responsible for the improper registrations but no charges were filed.

Lopez also ran into difficulties in 2002 over hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal funding received by Hermandad Mexicana Nacional, whose services included citizenship training and English lessons. Prosecutors alleged that Lopez had wrongly used the education grants to pay the mortgage on his headquarters in Santa Ana.

Hermandad Mexicana Nacional agreed to pay a $600,000 settlement, but did not admit wrongdoing.

Open Letter To President Obama

Lou Pritchett is a former vice president of Procter & Gamble whose career at that company spanned 36 years before his retirement in 1989, and he is the author of the 1995 business book, Stop Paddling & Start Rocking the Boat.

Mr. Pritchett confirmed that he was indeed the author of the much-circulated "open letter." “I did write the 'you scare me' letter. I sent it to the NY Times but they never acknowledged or published it. However, it hit the internet and according to the ‘experts’ has had over 500,000 hits:

You are the thirteenth President under whom I have lived and unlike any of the others, you truly scare me.

You scare me because after months of exposure, I know nothing about you.
You scare me because I do not know how you paid for your expensive Ivy League education and your upscale lifestyle and housing with no visible signs of support.
You scare me because you did not spend the formative years of youth growing up in America and culturally you are not an American.
You scare me because you have never run a company or met a payroll.
You scare me because you have never had military experience, thus don't understand it at its core.
You scare me because you lack humility and 'class', always blaming others.
You scare me because for over half your life you have aligned yourself with radical extremists who hate America and you refuse to publicly denounce these radicals who wish to see America fail.
You scare me because you are a cheerleader for the 'blame America' crowd and deliver this message abroad.
You scare me because you want to change America to a European style country where the government sector dominates instead of the private sector.
You scare me because you want to replace our health care system with a government controlled one.
You scare me because you prefer 'wind mills' to responsibly capitalizing on our own vast oil, coal and shale reserves.
You scare me because you want to kill the American capitalist goose that lays the golden egg which provides the highest standard of living in the world.
You scare me because you have begun to use 'extortion' tactics against certain banks and corporations.
You scare me because your own political party shrinks from challenging you on your wild and irresponsible spending proposals.
You scare me because you will not openly listen to or even consider opposing points of view from intelligent people.
You scare me because you falsely believe that you are both omnipotent and omniscient.
You scare me because the media gives you a free pass on everything you do.
You scare me because you demonize and want to silence the Limbaughs, Hannitys, O'Relllys and Becks who offer opposing, conservative points of view.
You scare me because you prefer controlling over governing.
Finally, you scare me because if you serve a second term I will probably not feel safe in writing a similar letter in 8 years.

"Justice" Sotomayor: The Court Takes A Turn For The Worse

Quin Hillyer of the American Spetator Laments:

I never in my life thought I could possibly see a Supreme Court pick as bad as Sonia Sotomayor. Barack Obama is quite clearly trying to upend all the underpinnings of American society in order to create his own version of a Brave New World. Government takeovers of banks and car companies, firings of executives, politically based decisions on which individual car dealerships remain open, world tours apologizing for supposed American sins, mollycoddling our enemies while insulting our friends, broken promises about transparency combined with selective release of classifed documents to serve political purposes.... and so much more, and now.... THIS. He nominates the most radical possible choice for the Supreme Court, a woman whose speeches and writings are so obscenely racialist that no white male could possible get away with saying anything like those things and live, professionally, for even a single additional day. Obama's emphasis today, in introducing Sotomayor, on biography over all else was absolutely sickening. And despicable. To which all decent Americans ought to respond: No, it does NOT make a difference whether she grew up rich or poor, black or white or Hispanic, left-handed or right-handed, ill or healthy, Jew or gentile. All that matters is whether or not she will uphold her oath to serve the Constitution and laws as written, including the explicit and tacit restrictions therein on judicial authority. In America, judges are not supposed to be fonts of wisdom, not supposed to "feel" the right things and not supposed to be demigods purveying some sort of cosmic notion of fairness. Instead, they are supposed to apply the laws as provided to them by the political branches within these United States. Period. As Justice Potter wrote in a famous dissent {Griswold vs. Connecticut}, later echoed by Clarence Thomas, a judge's duty is not to decide whether or not a law is wise or fair or even whether it is "uncommonly silly." His duty is just to do what the law says, and let the political branches change it if its silliness or unfairness is manifest.

What does this nomination teach us?
1. Well, elections have consequences. Staying home and pouting that McCain sucked and not voting led to this. Then again, given that Sotomayor got her start as a George H.W. Bush appointee, and that Bush appointed a clown like David Souter to the Supreme Court, there are no guarantees of judicial patriots from RINOs. That is still better than judicial commies from the likes of Obama however.
2. "Empathy" and "Feelings" now trump the Rule Of Law.
3. Nicholas Stix notes that Sotomayor was schooled by the worst of politicized judges, Robert Morganthau.

Memorial Day

"Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends."John 15:13 NIV

Click here for a riveting account of the World War II battle of Tarawa in 1943, as told by the late Gil Ferguson, who, at age 19, survived the battle, and later served 10 years for pro-family, conservative values in the California Assembly. Tarawa was the first US amphibious assault against a defended beachhead. Victory here came at the price of 3,000 dead or wounded U.S. Marines.

US to Expand Immigration Checks to Local Jails‏?

At first, the Washington Post article made me think that I have to give the Obamunists credit where credit is due:

The Obama administration is expanding a program initiated by President George W.
Bush aimed at checking the immigration status of virtually every person booked into local jails. In four years, the measure could result in a tenfold increase in illegal immigrants who have been convicted of crimes and identified for deportation, current and former U.S. officials said.

But upon reading further, I find that:

The effort is likely to significantly reshape immigration enforcement, current and former executive branch officials said. It comes as the Obama administration and Democratic leaders in Congress vow to crack down on illegal immigrants who commit crimes, rather than those who otherwise abide by the law.

In other words, the Bush administration WAS deporting illegals as illegals, and the Obamunists just intend to deport those who are illegals and commit other felonies too? In other words, Amnesty! Oh boy!

Or does it really? Since:

But even some supporters of the program wonder whether it can be implemented smoothly and whether there will be sufficient funding. A surge in deportation cases, noted Stewart Baker, former assistant secretary of homeland security for policy, would require more prosecutors, immigration judges, detention beds and other resources.

Wait a minute, I thought the article said the Obama administration would be more selective? So which is it? Way to muddle the issue, Washington Post!

Nancy Pelosi--dishonest

The case against Nancy Pelosi remaining Speaker of the House is as simple as it is devastating:

The person who is No. 3 in line to be commander in chief can't have contempt for the men and women who protect our nation. America can't afford it.

To test how much damage Speaker Pelosi has done to the defense of our nation, ask yourself this: If you were a young man or woman just starting out today, would you put on a uniform or become an intelligence officer to defend America, knowing that tomorrow a politician like Nancy Pelosi could decide and proclaim publicly that you were a criminal, even though she previously approved of what you were doing in private, if she needed to appease her leftist voting bloc?

The controversy swirling around Speaker Pelosi isn't political -- SHE may think it is, other liberal Democrats may think it is, and the media may want it to appear that way...But this isn't just about politics. It's about much more than that. It's about national security.

At issue is whether Speaker Pelosi was informed, at a briefing by intelligence officers on September 4, 2002 when she was the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, that the CIA had used and was using enhanced interrogation techniques -- specifically "waterboarding" -- on captured al Qaeda terrorists.

Prior to her now infamous press conference last week, Speaker Pelosi insisted that the CIA had not told her in 2002 that waterboarding and other enhanced techniques were being used. At last week's press conference she went beyond this position to assert, "the only mention of waterboarding at [the September 2002] briefing was that it was not being employed."

In contrast, Leon Panetta, the current CIA director, wrote a memo last Friday to CIA employees in which he stated, "our contemporaneous records from September 2002 indicate that CIA officers briefed truthfully on the interrogation of [Al Qaeda terrorist] Abu Zubaydah, describing 'the enhanced techniques that had been employed.'" To his credit, Panetta is honest.

And so the question, prior to her rambling press conference, was one of memory: Did Speaker Pelosi remember correctly the briefing she received in 2002?

If she had confined the controversy to her memory versus the CIA's, Speaker Pelosi may have saved herself. She would be guilty of irresponsibility and incompetence perhaps, but that would basically be it. Not good, but not disqualifying.

But Speaker Pelosi did not confine the question to the reliability of memory. Instead, she made the allegation last week that the CIA intentionally misled her -- misled Congress -- and not just once, but routinely.

"They mislead us all the time," she said.

She charged that the CIA, deliberately and as a matter of policy, violated the law by lying to Congress.

And with that allegation, refuted by Leon Panetta among many others, Speaker Pelosi disqualified herself from the office she holds.

And the question that remains is why? Why would Speaker Pelosi escalate the small skirmish she found herself in over the 2002 briefing into a full-scale war with the CIA?

Perhaps it's because if America knew that Speaker Pelosi consented to waterboarding, fully informed and without complaint, back in 2002, it would reveal the current liberal bloodlust over interrogations for what it is:
The Left's attempt to dishonestly smear its political opponents.

If Nancy Pelosi believed that waterboarding was justified in 2002 -- just like Porter Goss, President Bush, Vice President Cheney and CIA Director Tenet believed! -- then a policy of selectively using enhanced interrogation techniques in carefully circumscribed ways in order to prevent future attacks (in other words, the Bush Administration policy) is vindicated.

But rather than admit that President Bush, when faced with an array of difficult choices, made the hard choice that kept the nation safe, Nancy Pelosi has instead retreated into the cheap sanctity of "ignorance". She didn't know... so she claims. THAT'S why she didn't do anything about it.

But President Bush did know. It was his job to know, and he made the tough choices needed to save American lives.

It was Nancy Pelosi's job to know too. But to avoid culpability for the choices she supported, she's now telling us she didn't know. And she's calling the intelligence officials who say otherwise liars and criminals.

Gay Leftists Bash Carrie Prejean

I thought about this during the recent flap over Carrie Prejean's (Miss California) answer to a loaded question from a nasty little scumbag who goes by the pseudonym Perez Hilton - one of the judges in the Miss USA pageant. It's not just that a question about gay "marriage" would have been unthinkable in a Miss USA contest not that long ago, it was an outrageous question even in today's upside-down America.

What in the world does anyone's personal opinion about gay marriage have to do with being a worthy Miss USA? Obviously, nothing. So, why did this Hilton character pose the question to Ms. Prejean? Because, having taken control of the body politic in Washington, the Demunist Commiecrats are feeling their oats. Agree with us, or else, Comrade! Much like a Red Guard youth having to swear his allegiance to Stalin or Mao back in the day of either, having the "right" opinion of gay marriage is a litmus test for liberal Demunists.

As to the gorgeous-times-10 Ms. Prejean, her answer, under enormous pressure, earned her an A+ for poise on my scorecard: "We live in a land where you can choose same-sex marriage or opposite marriage," she said.

And you know what ... I think ... in my country ... in my family ... I think that I believe that a marriage should be between a man and a woman. No offense to anybody out there, but that's how I was raised.

Would it have been possible for her to be any nicer ... any more tactful ... and still have the courage to say what she believed in? Now, juxtapose her gracious response to the Barney Frank-like hysterical babble of gay militant Perez Hilton.

Until I saw him in the news, I had never heard of this little creep. In fact, I just now looked him up on the Internet and found that his real name is Mario Armando Lavandeira, Jr. Converting that to "Perez Hilton" took quite an imagination. Though I would never be one to disparage anyone who calls himself a Hilton, as far as I can tell he is a nobody whose only achievement to date has been to find a way to mingle with minor celebrities.

After he stated, on camera, that Carrie Prejean lost the Miss USA contest because "she's a dumb bitch," the media was all over the story. When Sean Hannity asked her about the remark, Ms. Prejean politely replied that he was obviously a very disturbed individual and that she felt genuinely sorry for him. I believe she meant it. I wish I could be so generous.
I know, waah, the Commiecrats will cry, I'm a "hater". But really, no. Homosexuality, of and by itself, is a yawner.

In fact, I think that I CAN sympathize with the plight of "gay" people. Like anything else that makes a person feel like a outcast, I have to believe that homosexuality has to be the source of an enormous amount of pain and frustration for those saddled with that condition from birth, or came to it as a result of experiences in one's formative years, or whatever (as opposed to those who simply choose to lead a perverse lifestyle). A gay person has a right to pursue life, liberty, and happiness, the same as anyone else, and I'll stand up and be counted on that every time.

What is distasteful, however, is the in-your-face, hateful attitude of a significant number of "gay" men and women. If only they were smart enough, and secure enough, to just go about their business in private and leave others alone.

But being an integral part of the Commeicrat "progressive" movement, they cannot settle for that. They feel compelled to force others to think as they do. Probably nothing short of outlawing the traditional family will appease them.

After watching Mr. Lavandeira-Hilton-Butthole spew out his hateful remarks, I couldn't help but think about a gay actor, Richard Chamberlain. In his 2004 book "Shattered Love", Chamberlain discusses, in a calm, forthright, dignified manner, the trials and tribulations of his formative years and his coming to grips with his homosexuality. What sticks out in my mind is that he came to realize that his homosexuality was actually a "pretty uninteresting fact."

So you see, Mr. Mario-turned-Perez Butthole, you can be as gay as a "Thorn Bird" if you want, without feeling the need to shove it in everyone's face. Sorry, but your sex life is about as interesting to the rest of us as is Rosie ODonnell's - and interest in her sex life hovers around zero. And whether we - and, for sure, a contestant in a beauty pageant - are against gay marriage is NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS. And that's the politically incorrect truth.

But none of this will stop the leftist Red Guards. They are furiously digging up dirt on Carrie Prejean. Their latest gambit is to call her "hypocrite" because--gasp--she had cosmetic surgery, namely, lovely breast implants:



Oh, puhleeze, Commiecrats. As if conservative women don't like to look good. Many beauty pageant women have had work done -- nose, lips, cheeks, breasts, buttocks -- and yet there's a rather large firestorm about this particular woman's breast enhancement. I hate to be cynical, but for some reason, I think people are leaking stuff about her -- and the media is eagerly running with those leaks -- because she dared to express an unpopular thought.

Did I say "unpopular thought"? My error. It's the OVERHWELMING majority thought in the country, including the liberal President, but it's unpopular with those who matter, namely, those in the liberal media-political industrial complex. As noted admirer of the female form Perez Hilton said, she's a "dumb bitch," and deserves to be destroyed.

The Commiecrats also want to accuse Carrie Prejean of "hypocrisy" because she modeled lingerie and made racy poses. As if conservative women don't like to feel sexy for themselves, let alone their husbands or boyfriends:

This really is leftist retardation in motion - The Commiecrats make pretend, caricatured standards of what conservatives and patriots care about and then call balls and strikes based on their fantasy.

Oh, but she claims to be a Christian, the leftists simper.

Let me get this straight: for leftists hamster-stuffing, fisting, and buttpiracy is all right? But if a beauty pageant contestant poses semi-topless that’s the heighth of hypocrisy because she’s a Christian? What’s next? Releasing audio of Christian truck drivers who curse? Publishing photos of Christian plumbers who show booty crack? How about surveillance photos of Christians who SKIP church!? Will the hypocrisy never cease?

The reason any conservative’s failing is always major news is that it allows liberals to engage in their very favorite taunt: Hypocrisy! Hypocrisy is the only sin that really inflames them. Inasmuch as liberals have no morals, they can sit back and criticize other people for failing to meet the standards that liberals simply renounce. It’s an intriguing strategy. By openly admitting to being traitors, philanderers, liars, weasels and cowards, liberals avoid ever being hypocrites.

Special Election May 19: VOTE NO ON EVERYTHING

I looked it over, and it is all a crock. Even Props 1D, 1E and 1F, which seem good at first.

NO on Prop. 1A - Tax Hike and Phony Spending Cap

In a state that already has the highest aggregate tax levels in the nation, Proposition 1A would impose the "temporary" sales tax and income tax hike for *another* full year, the increased car tax for another two years, and would continue punishing parents with a pseudo-tax of $210 per child (a two-thirds reduction in the state child tax credit) for another two years.

So these taxes are not even "progressive" (although frankly California has played the "progressive" card so often that businesses that earn the high incomes are progressively leaving the state, making everyone poorer and decreasing revenue as a result).

Prop. 1A is nothing more than a massive tax increase masked as a phony spending limit.

Here’s the year-by-year tax increase if 1A is passed or defeated.

Vote NO on 1A to limit the tax increases on California families. Vote NO to defeat 1A, which will also defeat the $9.3 BILLION “bribe” of Prop. 1B. But most of all, vote NO on 1A to force the Governor and the California Legislature back to the drawing board to make the politically difficult but necessary changes to save us tens of billions of dollars and never raise taxes again. (as you might have guessed, the politically difficult changes involve illegal aliens and stifling unions).

NO on Prop. 1B - Exempts schools from said spending cap

So just when they try to sell you with a phony spending cap in Proposition 1A above, they then turn around and say, "But not for the schools!" The effect of this is to undo the spending cap, as (1) schools are such a massive part of the budget, and (2) funding for a good many infrastructure projects can fall under the schools banner.

Just as Prop. 1A is deceptive and tricky because it doesn’t talk about extending tax increases, Prop. 1B is based on a fundamental deception not adequately explained by the ballot pamphlet.

In 1998, California voters passed Prop. 98 to guarantee K-12 public schools and community colleges at least 40% of the state budget revenues. Yet since revenues are down due to lost income, lost jobs, and depressed property values, the amount of funding to government schools under Prop. 98 has also declined, just like the amount of funding available to anything else.

But the government education unions can't face this fact, so they have taken an odd reading of the law, claiming that the state has to pay back the funds they "lost" the last two fiscal years. This amounts to around $7 BILLION. However, most Prop. 98 experts agree that government schools are NOT entitled to be paid the money now or in the future as a constitutional guarantee.

Yet in order to avoid a lawsuit and avoid negative press relations, the Legislature agreed to place Prop. 1B on the ballot to satisfy the government education unions. But it’s much more money – $9.3 BILLION, not $7 BILLION. This is a very expensive "bribe" just to avoid an unjustified lawsuit. And there would be no education reforms at all in exchange for this money. This is deceptive and wrong, making 1B perhaps the worst proposition on the ballot.

Even if 1B weren’t a "bribe," more money still won’t solve education problems in California. Already, the average cost per pupil exceeds $11,000 for substandard education. A quarter of California public schoolchildren are so uninspired by establishment schools that they drop out. It’s even a bigger problem among blacks and Hispanics where the drop-out rate hovers around 50%. (And again, there's that proverbial elephant in the room called illegal aliens).

California public schools receive more than 40% of the state budget yet have chronic problems: "multicultural" agendas that teach falsehoods when they teach at all, low academic performance, high drop-out rates, lack of accountability, language confusion, negative socialization, sexualization, and violence. In the mid-1960s, California had an admirable public school system and spent $3,000 per pupil in year-2000 inflation adjusted dollars. Now, California taxpayers spend much more for a vastly lower quality of education. Current per-pupil spending statewide averages $11,626, a 27% increase in real, inflation-adjusted terms over the past decade. But all these billions of dollars aren't meeting the academic needs of children. And still, the well-moneyed government employee unions continue to call for more spending and higher taxes, which shouldn't even be considered when public school enrollment is declining.

NO on Prop. 1C - Lottery Manipulation

Prop. 1C would put Californians in greater debt and greatly expand gambling. This measure borrows $5 BILLION against future lottery sales and would immediately spend all of it in an attempt to decrease the budget deficit – without slashing billions of dollars in anything. Even worse, 1C allows unlimited future borrowing – without cutting anything.

Prop. 1C was placed on the ballot by the California Legislature to enable it to continue its foolish overspending instead implementing substantial structural reforms. If 1C passes, all of the $5 BILLION borrowed from the lottery fund would be spent in one fiscal year beginning in July. But these funds would have to be paid back with interest, increasing taxpayer debt. 1C is risky because it’s unknown whether the state can pay back this debt and avoid digging an ever bigger financial hole. Interest rates are low for the moment, but with inflationary "stimulus" pressures, will that remain the case?

Our school system receives around $1.1 BILLION each year from lottery funds. Yet, under Prop. 1C, these payments won’t be paid from the lottery fund but from the deficit-ridden state general fund. But where will this $1.1 BILLION per year – in addition to the $50 BILLION or so every year in Prop. 98 funds, plus the $9.3 BILLION in Prop. 1B funds – come from? It’s time for our state government to cut up the credit card and slash spending just like families and businesses have had to do. Vote “no” on Prop. 1C.

NO on Prop. 1D - Fund juggling (Children's Services) -- although not so bad

Prop. 1D started off as a good idea – to pay down the state budget deficit by billions in surplus money from Prop. 10 (Rob Reiner's cigarette tax from 1998 to fund big-government “universal childcare”). But in the legislative process, the idea of using the money to pay down debt was scuttled in lieu of diverting only $340 million in immediate funds. In the final analysis, 1D doesn’t do very much except to co-dependently enable the state government’s overspending problem.

Prop. 1D would instead use a portion of these funds – $340 million now and then $268 million a year for the next four years – to spend on “children’s programs” in the state general fund. In the big picture, Prop. 1D only takes a little bit of wasted funds and gives it to the irresponsible California Legislature. To vote “yes” on 1D would be to endorse the Legislature’s irresponsibility and fake reform. To vote “no” on 1D is to say you know better and aren’t going to facilitate any more dysfunction. Vote “no” on Prop. 1D.

NO on Prop. 1E - Fund juggling (Mental Health) -- although not so bad

Prop. 1E is similar to 1D, and admittedly is better. Instead of slashing wasteful spending, the Legislature is proposing Prop. 1E to divert $230 million a year for two years from Proposition 63 (a 1% surtax on millionaires from 2004 to fund children’s mental health programs) to offset general fund debt. Mind you, paying down debt is good, but like Prop. 1D, this is too little, too late. Prop. 1E allows unsustainable, wasteful government to continue instead of reforming. Vote “no” on 1E.

NO on Prop. 1F - Pay Raises -- although not so bad

At first, this sounds just great. Prop. 1F says California state elected officials can’t get a raise in pay during a deficit year. It sounds good, but this “cure” is actually worse than the problem.

Proposition 1F was placed on the ballot by the Legislature to help a couple of legislators -- Republicans at that -- feel better about violating their promises not to raise taxes. (yes, Abel Maldonado and Mike Villines, I'm referring to you two). This ridiculous waste of ballot space allowed these legislators, among others, to pretend that they got something in return for supporting large tax increases.

Proposition 1F does not really change anything. It prohibits constitutional officers and legislators from receiving pay raises in deficit years. The salaries for these elected officials are set by the California Citizens Compensation Commission (not the Legislature), and that Commission has never increased salaries in a deficit year anyway.

Proposition 1F does not even accomplish what it pretends to do. Pay increases, when they are authorized by the Commission, do not take effect until after the next election. So they are not likely to have any influence on any legislator’s vote.

I share the outrage that many voters have toward our state’s dysfunctional budget process. I do not believe that "deficit years" should be allowed to exist at all, since our spending should decline whenever revenues decline. However, Proposition 1F does nothing to improve that situation. All it does it allow a few legislators to pretend that they got something valuable in return for breaking their campaign promises. We get to pay tens of billions of dollars in new taxes while they brag that future legislators might not get raises, maybe.

I urge a "NO" vote on Proposition 1F. First, 1F’s goal is to apply pain to legislators and the Governor to get them to balance the budget. But 1F doesn’t have the teeth to motivate the legislators. The majority of them primarily get their power from the unions, and that money will continue to be their “security.”

The current salary for nearly all legislators is $116,208. Yet in the last 10 years, the California Citizens Compensation Commission has only increased pay a few times.

Prop. 1F is a tortured and tricky way to try to make you think the California Legislature is interested in reforming itself, which it is not.

Aftermath

Turnout was low, but those who turned out essentially told the Demunist Commiecrats and RINO Republicans like Ah-nold to get lost. I must say, I am heartened by the results of yesterday's election. The faux reform propositions were rejected and Proposition 1F, the one symbolic F-U to the legislature, passed. (I opposed that because it was symbolic, but the results are great anyway). I don't know if we just got lucky and dodged a bullet or if this has greater implications vis-a-vis voter attitudes in 2010 as regards government spending and overreach.

Flashback to this day in 1975....

Saigon was falling to the communists, and "boat people", "killing fields" and "re-education camps" were to follow. Noam Chumpsky, Howard Zinn, and associated commie minions were high-fiving each other.

But what obsessed Time, Newsweek, and US News And World Report at the time?

Global cooling!

A fine short history of warming and cooling scares has recently been produced. It is available here.

If we had the media then that we do now...

Scores Killed, Hundreds Injured as Para-Military Extremists Riot in Boston Area

BOSTON , April 20, 1775 (AP)

National guard units seeking to confiscate a cache of recently banned weapons were ambushed on April 19th by elements of a paramilitary extremist faction. Military and law enforcement sources estimate that 72 were killed and more than 200 injured before government forces were compelled to withdraw.

Speaking after the clash Massachusetts Governor Thomas Gage declared that the extremist faction, which was made up of local citizens, has links to the radical right-wing tax protest movement. Gage blamed the extremists for recent incidents of vandalism directed against internal revenue offices. The governor, who described the group's organizers as "tea baggers," and “white separatists”, has issued an executive order authorizing the summary arrest of any individual who has interfered with the government's efforts to secure law and order.

The military raid on the extremist arsenal followed widespread refusal by the local citizenry to turn over recently outlawed weapons. Gage issued a ban on military-style assault weapons and ammunition earlier in the week. This decision followed a meeting earlier between government officials and magistrates at which the governor authorized the forcible confiscation of illegal arms. One government official, speaking on condition of anonymity, pointed out "none of these people would have been killed had the extremists obeyed the law and turned over their weapons voluntarily."

Government troops initially succeeded in confiscating a large supply of outlawed weapons and ammunition. However, troops attempting to seize arms and ammunition in Lexington met with resistance from heavily armed extremists who had been tipped off regarding the government's plans. During a tense standoff in Lexington 's town common, National Guard Colonel Francis Smith, commander of the government operation, ordered the armed group to surrender and return to their homes. The impasse was broken by a single shot, which was reportedly fired by one of the right-wing extremists.

Eight civilians were killed in the ensuing exchange. Ironically, the local citizenry blamed government forces rather than the extremists for the civilian deaths. Before order could be restored, armed citizens from surrounding areas had descended upon the guard units. Colonel Smith, finding his forces over-matched by the armed mob, ordered a retreat.

Governor Gage has called upon citizens to support the state/royal joint task force in its effort to restore law and order. The governor has also demanded the surrender of those responsible for planning and leading the attack against the government troops. Samuel Adams, Paul Revere, and John Hancock, who have been identified as ringleaders of the extremist faction, remain at large.

The Tea Parties and The Liberal Media

On April 15, 2009, something happened that has not happened before in the memory of living Americans. For the first time, Middle America took part in a mass national protest. Millions of people actually got off their butts and took a public "right wing" stand about something.

In the recent past, the national stage was filled with white-hating Black protests like the "Million Man March" (sic), illegal alien sedition and treason protests, man-hating so called "feminist" protests, gay and lesbian protests, etc. -- all of them smaller than the Tea Parties, all of them with much more top-down organization than the Tea Parties, and all of them "progressive" or "Politically Correct" (barf). The liberal mainstream media reported on these ad nauseum, and quite sympathetically.

This time, however, something happened that scared and enraged the largely liberal and often anti-American national media. Middle America (the ones deemed stupid and racist by the national lamestream media) actually stood up in a mass protest of our government's irresponsible use of tax dollars.

As newsworthy as this is, however, most of the national media ignored the mass protests or had their reporters dismiss them as racist-driven media events. The New York Times and other major newspapers buried reports of the Tea Parties in the back pages. Where there was coverage, it was hostile. A CNN reporter, Susan Roesgen, asked a protester a question, interrupted his answer, and started barraging him with Politically Correct questions and a semi-lecture. Was she fired? No. Why would they fire her? She was doing what she was sent out to do.

(UPDATE 7/16/09: I was wrong, CNN has let her go! I have to give them credit for that.
More from Ace Of Spades here)

Actress and "Air America" (sic) bitch Janeane Garafalo opined that the whole Tea Party phenomenon was planned and attended by people who don't want to support our "Black"president. In other words, the Tea Parties are racist. That is ridiculous, but typical of the Commiecrat Left.

However, there IS a racial aspect to the Tea Parties, but not the aspect that the dishonest bitch will ever admit. Decent Middle Americans are tired of paying for the race-based "Affirmative Action" welfare plantations that leftist politicians and people like Garafolo have used and continue to use for political power. For years, decent and honest people who pointed this out were smeared by Garafolo and her media allies. But perhaps the times are changing. Perhaps a significant number of decent Americans are no longer willing to be afraid to speak out for fear of being called racist. Perhaps they are beginning to see that they are actually the victims of reverse racism more often than not. Perhaps they are tired of being identified as American villains and as the world's villains.

Middle America has had to bear the brunt of the racial and economic problems that the Left has foisted upon America for the last two decades (in other words, ever since the Left's idealized Sandinistas and Soviets fell apart and they changed tactics and focused upon the Achilles Heel of race relations). It is just possible that Middle America is starting to wake up. And this despite most television networks either ignoring the protests or dealing with them in a dishonest and condescending manner. Having been denigrated, robbed of their rights, and indoctrinated in "multicultural" (multicommunist) guilt, Middle America has for two decades been on the retreat. Perhaps that is changing.

So what finally got these people concerned? No, Janeane Garafolo, it wasn't anxiety about "people of color", you lying bitch. In fact, the Asian American and Mexican and other Hispanic American people in my area who run businesses were there in droves too. No, what got these people concerned was and still is the ways their tax dollars are being used. They are tired of their money being stolen by the government for things of which they disapprove. Of course, the liberal Demunists and RINO Republicans in the government have always used taxpayers' dollars to support their own political and social agendas. But now we are in an economic crisis, and the great masses appear to be paying attention.

For example, anyone with half a brain understands that the threat of Affirmative Action legal shakedowns (the stick), combined with indulgent underwriting by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (the carrot), led banks to grant loans to too many people who could not pay them back. In addition, politically rigged unions and poor management have led some of our leading industries into near bankruptcy. George Bush responded to these two crises with an allegedly one-time bailout for failing financial institutions and for the struggling automobile industry. However, Barack Obama took this many steps further, and by spending more money at one time than had been spent in total by all other presidential administrations in our history, guaranteed that generations to come will be strapped by a monstrous, insurmountable debt. Why? In order to bolster our economy on a short-term basis. In addition to wild spending of an unprecedented nature, Obama also fired the CEO of an auto company and essentially gave control of the company to the U.S. government. Since then, the U.S. government has enacted policies that require banks to go under government control.

According to polls, the American people disapproved of bailouts, discovering in the process that what the American people want is irrelevant to America's national politicians. Nobody comes to bail out Middle America, do they? In truth, no government in history, American or otherwise, has ever been able to spend itself out of debt and out of deflation without paying for it a short time later with massive inflation. Since nobody seemed to be listening, a sizable number of people who understand this fact took to the streets.

Finally, many Americans are beginning to see that the government's policy is not about wise stewardship of their tax dollars but about ushering in more government control. So middle class Americans are finally protesting. They don't seem any longer willing to put up with their tax dollars being used to lower prosperous and hard-working middle class citizens into the level of poverty. The American middle class is tired of subsidizing both the failed rich and the criminal poor. They are also tired of their tax dollars being used to support a welfare system for illegal aliens and trashy people of all colors that threaten to take over American institutions and culture by virtue of higher birth rates. More power to these awakening Americans.

Of course, the American people often respond to governmental actions the way the liberal media leads them to respond. But it didn't work in the case of the scamnesty bill pushed by George Bush and Congress, and it wouldn't have worked in the case of bailout bills and liberal pet project funding pushed by Barack Obama and Congress if the people had a greater knowledge of economics.

There is however, one problem with the Tea Parties. There are plans to have the next ones on July 4? If this is not done early enough, it will conflict with privately scheduled parties with friends and family in a way that April 15 did not. As a result, they will be noticeably smaller, and the liberal media will write the Tea Parties off as just a one-day exercise of energy by people who have been beaten down so long by the media that they expended all they had on April 15.

What killed Kurt Cobain? Multicultural Commie Brainwashing

Fifteen years ago today, Kurt Cobain chose to end his life. Obviously, drugs, chiefly heroin, had much to do with it. To say nothing of a rather horrible family background.

But reading through Kurt Cobain's Journals and the biography Heavier Than Heaven by Charles Cross, I can't help but notice that Kurt really absorbed the "multicultural" leftist self-hating indoctrination, and I can't help but think that it was another factor that led to his suicide.

Although one suspects the monitoring of Courtney Love over both Cross' biography and all of the Journals contents (and I wonder how many pages of his Journals where he wrote less than flattering words about her were torn out and didn't get published), Journals is still fascinating and sadly revealing.

(That said, I have really had enough of the utterly unjust accusations of Courtney Love having anything to do with her husband's alleged "murder". There is no credible evidence to support any of that. Let's not forget he was the father of her child. Let's also not forget that she revived him from overdoses at least several documented times, most notably an overdose that was also a suicide attempt on March 3, 1994, a little more than one month before his ultimate successful suicide. One would think if she wanted Kurt gone, she could have just not revived him. One can argue that Courtney Love was (1) a bitch, (2) self-destructive in her own way, (3) no help to Kurt and (4) someone who even made matters worse for him, but that's it.)

It can be said that Kurt Cobain, in spite of not finishing high school, was quite witty. He had an undeveloped knack for word play. In his writings he refers to the MTV network as "Empty TV", loathing its hype while realizing that it was important to getting his music out. In another passage, he observes his fast rising stardom and writes:

I hope I die before I turn into Pete Townshend.

But to find these gems in the Journals, one must go through lots and lots of ignorant leftist hatred, ignorant leftist posing, and perhaps most revealing, self-hatred. In a list of what Kurt liked that included "vinyl" (records), "to swim" and "girls with weird eyes", suddenly there is this:

I like to feel guilty for being a white, American male.

And this sort of leftist indoctrination is abundant throughout the Journals. Before meeting Courtney Love, he wrote this to ex-girlfriend Tobi Vail:

...all Isms feed off one another, but at the top of the food chain is still the white corporate, macho strong ox male....I mean, class ism is determined by sexism because the male decides whether all other isms exists.

"Corporate" and "macho strong ox" are contradictions in terms, but sadly that doesn't dawn on Cobain at all. Given his lack of a complete education with language combined with the Leftist indoctrination in the Olympia, Washington area, perhaps I shouldn't be surprised when he concludes in the same letter that:

Words suck.

This need to fit in with the leftist Olympia crowd was apparently strong. He had left his hometown of Aberdeen, Washington to try to make a go of it as a musician in Olympia. In his biography, Charles Cross observed that:

(Kurt) wanted nothing more than to be thought of as an Olympia sophisticate, not an Aberdeen hick. Class-ism would be a fight he would struggle with his entire life, because no matter how far away he got from Grays Harbor, he felt branded as a hillbilly. Most of the Greeners (Olympia college students) were from big cities--like many privileged college kids, their prejudice toward people from rural communities was in marked contrast to the liberalism they professed toward different races.

Typical phony liberals--not surprising.

And the desire to fit in with the "politically correct" (politically communist) crowd began to bear on Kurt as well. About his time in the Olympia, Washington punk rock scene and his dating Tobi Vail, he wrote:

Everything I do is an overly conscious and neurotic attempt at trying to prove to others that I am at least more intelligent or cool than they think.

And indeed, Kurt began to fabricate much of his past. In an interview with the gay magazine The Advocate, Kurt claimed to have been friends with a gay student at his high school, suffering bullying at the hands of homophobic students. However, his good friends Jesse Reed and Chris "Krist" Novoselic deny any such person ever existed.

Kurt also claimed to have spray painted pro-gay slogans like "GOD IS GAY" and "HOMO SEX RULES" around his hometown of Aberdeen, Washington. However, those who knew him and his one police arrest in the Aberdeen / Montesano area indicate that his vandalism was *nothing* like this, and actually consisted of silly statements like "Ain't got no how watchamacallit".

(In) fact, most of what he wrote was nonsensical. He enraged a neighbor with a boat by painting "Boat Ack" in red letters on the ship's hull; on the other side he lettered "Boat people go home."

Not exactly politically correct. Then again, given the lack of Vietnamese Americans in the area, I think young Kurt was just being a goof.

Hip poser gay-friendliness was matched by hip poser leftist anti-Americanism. After the smashing victory of the first Iraq War, he wrote a letter to Eugene Kelly of the Vaselines, a band he admired, where he complained about the sidewalk sale of:

Desert Storm trading cards, flags, bumper stickers....When I walk down the street, I feel like I'm at a Nuremburg rally.

Given that Saddam attacked Israel, dreamed of another holocaust, and was feeding his dissidents through wood chippers and putting women into "rape rooms", this statement is especially appalling. But such is the indoctrination of the Left.

Kurt's Journals also reveal an obsession with abortion. In his suicide note, he regretted "the self-destructive death rocker" he had become, and his journals show that he had been cultivating a personal culture of death for several years. Beginning in his Olympia years, he would often copy down in his journals and elsewhere (reportedly as graffiti) the slogans "Abort Christ" and "Mandatory Breeding Laws Now". Between dropping his first girlfriend/muse Tracy Marander (with whom, in retrospect, he should have stayed) and meeting Courtney Love, Kurt dated and bedded his share of leftist "riot grrls", Tobi Vail among them, and perhaps these leftist and pro-abortion platitudes were just a way to please and hop into bed with the ladies.

However, from reading his journals, I get the impression that Kurt thought that the "Politically Incorrect" people didn't deserve to live. Only one day it must have dawned upon him that *he* was one of those people who didn't deserve to live as well.

And yet, for all his leftist posing, there was something very Conservative at the heart of Kurt Cobain's music, something that was an angry reaction to the Leftist hippies of the late 1960's. He wrote frequently about how betrayed he felt when his parents divorced, and how he longed for a traditional mom and dad situation. The song "Territorial Pissings", with its opening mockery of the hippie era, was a big signal.

Steven Capozzola, "San Francisco Herald" e-zine columnist, explains in "A Brief Reflection on Kurt Cobain...":

I once had the chance to talk with one of the major figures of the Sixties, one of the main characters profiled in Tom Wolfe's ‘Electric Kool Aid Acid Test.' This fellow had been intimately associated with psychedelia, rock ‘n roll, and the Counterculture. We happened to talk about rock music and began to discuss Kurt Cobain. This famed Sixties fellow sneered at Cobain, calling him “insipid" and “an idiot." I told him how strongly I disagreed, at which point he commented that Cobain's music was “garbage."

What I found most interesting, though, was that the guy didn't have the slightest idea why Cobain had succeeded. This Sixties figure had his money and his house and his Generation X children, but he had no awareness of single-parent homes, mass divorce, children of alcoholics, stabbings in schools, shootings in school, all the things that his Sixties generation had wrought. For me, one glance at Cobain, one listen to him speaking to a reporter, and I felt a kinship. I knew he'd been through the same grief as the rest of us. He was pissed-off. That anger is what scared the hell out of the Sixties fellow.

Moreover, in 1991, when Grateful Dead nostalgia was still sacrosanct, anyone who told interviewers, even in jest, the following:

I want a tie-dyed shirt made with the blood of Jerry Garcia.

is a Conservative Republican at heart, even if he does not know it. Today, some of us would like a tie-dyed shirt made with the blood of Senator Patrick Leahy.

And in spite of his leftist indoctrination and his obvious self-destruction, I must admit the guy did in large part speak for Generation X. I was born just a few months after Kurt, and he summed up how we all felt about life at the time.

It was late 1991 and I had just turned 24 when "Nevermind" hit the airwaves. I had just graduated from the University of California at Berkeley the previous spring, and I was feeling a whole lot of malaise. While I was a full-time student, I felt the same malaise, but I thought that it was just temporary, that I was just serving time, that things were going to be great once I graduated and left the "politically correct" crap. I thought I would work a good job in a glass box in the Financial District, and while I knew I would have to kowtow to some boss or another, and he or she might even be really nasty, I figured at least I would get paid enough for a nice little condo or townhome in the East Bay or Peninsula burbs. And once I had "the career thing" in order, I might even achieve "the relationship thing".

But that didn't happen. Opportunities dried up or were otherwise non-existent for new grads in the recession of 1990-1994, and I found myself interviewing for what few jobs there were along side laid off older fellows with years of experience already. Worse still, in those job interviews, I discovered that the "politically correct" crap had burst out of campus and infiltrated into the workplace! Nor were even the crummiest of rentals all that affordable. Eventually, I gave up, came home to Ma and Pa, and became an office temp for a host of Silicon Valley electronics firms. I was stuck in that rut for the next several years, while studying to obtain various professional licenses.

The despair I felt in the 1980's, days of high school and university, was due to not being able to get to the party fast enough. The despair I felt in 1992 was of knowing that:
--The party was over, and that there probably never would be another party like it.
--All those hopes and dreams I had in college were unrealistic and weren't going to come true.
--My education was in large measure a ripoff.
--Life was a LOT more complicated than I thought it was.
--I could trust hardly anything or hardly anybody.

During that malaise period, Kurt and Nirvana wrote songs about angst, alienation, and depression that really hit home for me (plus they had a great beat and you could rock out to them). And for a time, it seemed to an ignorant observer like me that Cobain had triumphed, had turned his inner demons into money, had found a kindred soul in Courtney Love and had a baby. And despite diminished career prospects, perhaps Generation X could have a happy ending after all.

Cobain's success probably allowed other pop-punk bands of his generation to achieve commercial success as well. I remember when those punk kids in Green Day were just high school kids happy to get a gig at The Gilman Street Project in Berkeley and play before 30 people. By 1993, they were appearing on Saturday Night Live. For a time, it seemed anything was possible for Generation X.

And then, 4 days after he did it, while I was in the middle of studying for the upcoming Certified Public Accountant exams, I heard the news that Kurt Cobain -- the media's official Generation X spokesperson, the man who had put our disappointments and frustrations to music, good music that we could rock out to and escape our disappointments, if only for three minutes, the man who seemingly had achieved wild success from humble origins -- had blown his brains out.

To paraphrase that Edwin Arlington Robinson "Richard Cory" poem:

"And on I worked, and went to school by night, and couldn't get any pussy, and cursed my lack of bread, and Kurt Cobain, one rainy spring night, went home and put a shotgun to his head."

Meanwhile, Spencer Elden, the naked baby on the cover of Nevermind, is now 17 going on 18:

And Tracy Marander, Kurt's first love (and the woman he should have stayed with if he had had any sense), is now 44 years old, married, and a mother of two:

After having lived with Cobain for three years in Olympia, Wash., Marander still has artwork potentially worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Her collection consists of four paintings and an oil pastel, all made when Cobain was in his early 20s, before the world knew the word "grunge." One painting depicts a white skeletal figure with knees upraised--a self-portrait with a touch of tortured German expressionism. "Kurt always thought he was too skinny," she says. Other subjects include fetuses, a homeless man and even Charles Manson. "He didn't paint happy-looking flowery stuff."

A married stay-at-home mom....Marander says she'd consider unloading one or two pieces to put a down payment on a house or send her two children to college. The rest she'd like to save for their inheritance. "Some guy harassed me for two weeks to sell him something," she says.

Here are four photos of her, two from when she was with Kurt 20 odd years ago, and two recent ones:

Life goes on, and those of us who don't kill ourselves get older.

Pay No Attention To That Diversity Mandate Behind The Curtain

Steve Salier, as ever, is blunt:

In recent decades, “diversity”has become one of America’s sacred mantras, propagandized relentlessly in the schools and the press. Expressing skepticism about the diverse within internal business communications has become, in effect, a civil offense, punishable in anti-discrimination lawsuits.

Not surprisingly, self-interested manipulators learned to play the race card to justify their machinations.

Thus, the universally-endorsed societal necessity of lending more money to minority homebuyers was used to justify both regulation (such as the Community Reinvestment Act) and deregulation (such as the hands-off approach to subprime bucket shops). Any practice positioned as helping minorities achieve their fair share of the American Dream had the wind at its back.
Consider, for example, three huge Southern California originators of dubious debt—Ameriquest, New Century, and Countrywide—all of which collapsed in recent years when Wall Street and the big banks finally wised up to the mortgage-backed securities they peddled.

E. Scott Reckard and Mike Hudson reported in 2005 for the Los Angeles Times on Ameriquest, then the biggest subprime originator:

Borrowers were told what their income had to be to qualify, these ex-workers said, and they were often coached to invent fictitious side jobs, such as home-based computer consulting, to hit the mark. Nearly one out of every six Ameriquest mortgages sold to Wall Street investors in 2004 was a stated-income loan, according to a Times analysis of 90,000 Ameriquest mortgages listed in filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission."[Workers Say Lender Ran ‘Boiler Rooms’, February 4, 2005]

The Left claims that the rise and fall of the subprime peddlers demonstrates the iniquity of the rightwing ideology of deregulation.

But this dishonest assessment blatantly ignores *who* was doing the deregulation, and *why*. The Affirmative Actioneers were doing it for Affirmative Action. When it came to mortgage lending to minorities, as regulated by the Community Reinvestment Act and other anti-discrimination laws, excessive skepticism was made illegal. Lenders and investors were only allowed to err in one direction.

Not surprisingly, excessive credulity came to dominate the system.

By no means were all the subprime peddlers sincere believers in the dogmas of multiculturalism. Instead, they knew they could wield political correctness like a club to scare off regulators.

Thus, to avoid inconvenient investigations, the owners of subprime mortgage originators tended to present themselves to politicians and the press as financial statesmen, moral leaders in the war on bigotry against minority borrowers.

Sue Kirchhoff reported in USA Today on April 17, 2007 in Subprime lenders’ big gifts helped lawmakers:

The nation's top subprime lenders, including New Century Financial (NEWC), which has filed for Chapter 11, have lavished generous donations on homeownership programs sponsored by black or Hispanic members of Congress. The paid sponsorships give lenders an entree to lawmakers and their constituents. Along with New Century, backers include Countrywide Financial (CFC), which settled a New York fair-lending investigation in 2006 by agreeing to compensate black and Latino borrowers for improper loans and set up a $3 million consumer-education program. Another is Ameriquest Mortgage, which in 2006 agreed to a $295 million settlement with state attorneys general who charged it with improper lending practices.

Similarly, Susan Schmidt and Maurice Tamman of the Wall Street Journal reported on January 5, 2009 in Housing Push for Hispanics Spawns Wave of Foreclosures:

The Congressional Hispanic Caucus created Hogar in 2003 to work with industry and community groups to increase mortgage lending to Latinos. At that time, the national Latino homeownership rate was 47%, compared with 68% for the overall population. Hogar called the figure 'alarming,' and said a concerted effort was required to ensure that 'by the end of the decade Latinos will share equally in the American Dream of homeownership.'

Hogar's backers included many companies that ran into trouble in mortgage markets: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, both now under federal control; Countrywide Financial Corp., sold last year to Bank of America Corp.; Washington Mutual Inc., taken over by the government and sold to J.P. Morgan Chase & Co.; and New Century Financial Corp. and Ameriquest Mortgage Corp., both now defunct.

Hogar's ties to the subprime industry were substantial.

Sorry, the derivative bubbles would never have inflated that high if Fannie and Freddie were not standing by to underwrite it all. Private bankers were *competing* with Fannie and Freddie, who were operating under Affirmative Action rules, and who *instituted and fomented* the 40 to 1 leverage. Policies have consequences.

Chart: So JUST WHO converts to Islam?

Why has the West declined?

Whiskey has an answer, and it is an interesting one, combining economics, demographics, and human sexuality. I'm not so sure about his argument, but I think he missed out on an major opportunity when he didn't have his post ready in time for Valentine's Day:

But these cultural Marxists don't have magical powers of "evil." If people find their ideas deeply attractive, something must be deep at work all over the West, to transform society so clearly and completely in less than fifty years.

Rather than some magical powers of persuasion, unstoppable, or deep conspiracy, or anything of that nature, what has happened all over the West, from Japan and Coastal China to Italy to Norway to the United States, is a broad set of changes, mostly demographic, that have tilted the West towards Multiculturalism, political correctness, and general weakness in all areas along with a general cultural collapse in music, arts, entertainment, and morals.

These broad trends are:
--A huge increase in wealth, through global manufacturing, spurring a global consumer environment
--The collapse of manufacturing in the West
--The so-called "Gentry" of Western nations becoming impossibly rich, and therefore influential outside their limited numbers
--The decline of the middle and working classes in the West
--The Pill, Condom, increased female earning, and anonymous urban living, leading to the death of the nuclear family
--The fragmentation of unifying mass communication institutions and media
--Consumerism, advertising, marketing, and mass media becoming a gay and female ghetto
--Lack of "affordable family formation" leading to hedonism instead of old Western cultural values

Let us examine these factors, and see how they created the decline of the West by undermining the West's fundamental advantage: how people cooperate, in high-trust networks, stemming from widespread nuclear families. Since the secret of the West's advance for nearly a thousand years, from 1000 AD to 1965 or so, is the story of the spreading and deepening of the nuclear family and the resulting cooperation among people in nation-states, driving ever greater increases in wealth, technology, and military, social, and cultural power.

What's in the Porkulus Monster?

Here's Some of What's in The So-Called "Stimulus" (A complete breakdown here):
$50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts
$380 million in the Senate bill for the Women, Infants and Children welfare program
$300 million for grants to combat "violence against women"
$2 billion for federal child-care block grants
$6 billion for university building projects
$15 billion added to Pell Grant college scholarships
$4 billion for job-training programs, including $1.2 billion for "youths"
$1 billion for community-development block grants
$4.2 billion for "neighborhood stabilization activities" (funds for ACORN and other radical groups)
$650 million for digital-TV coupons
$90 million to educate "vulnerable populations" (more money for radical activists non-profits, such as ACORN)
$83 billion for the earned income credit (which are just "tax refund" payments to people who don't pay taxes)
$150 million for the Smithsonian
$34 million to renovate the Department of Commerce headquarters
$500 million for improvement projects for National Institutes of Health facilities
$44 million for repairs to Department of Agriculture headquarters
$350 million for Agriculture Department computers
$88 million to help move the Public Health Service into a new building
$448 million for constructing a new Homeland Security Department headquarters
$600 million to convert the federal auto fleet to hybrids
$450 million for NASA (for "climate-research missions")
$600 million for NOAA (for "climate modeling")
$1 billion for the Census Bureau
$89 billion for Medicaid
$30 billion for COBRA insurance extension
$36 billion for expanded unemployment benefits
$20 billion for food stamps
$850 million for Amtrak
$87 million for a polar icebreaking ship
$1.7 billion for the National Park System
$55 million for Historic Preservation Fund
$7.6 billion for "rural community advancement programs"
$150 million for agricultural-commodity purchases
$150 million for "producers of livestock, honeybees, and farm-raised fish"
$2 billion for renewable-energy research ($400 million of which is for global-warming research)
$2 billion for a "clean coal" power plant in Illinois
$6.2 billion for the Weatherization Assistance Program
$3.5 billion for energy-efficiency and conservation block grants
$3.4 billion for the State Energy Program
$200 million for state and local electric-transport projects
$300 million for energy-efficient-appliance rebate programs
$400 million for hybrid cars for state and local governments
$1 billion for the manufacturing of advanced batteries
$1.5 billion for green-technology loan guarantees
$8 billion for innovative-technology loan-guarantee program
$2.4 billion for carbon-capture demonstration projects
$4.5 billion for electricity grid
$79 billion for State Fiscal Stabilization Fund

Adding all of the above up, that's just $420 billion, 926 million of it.

This will not help the economy. This will further destroy our economy. This is a massive transfer of wealth from citizens and businesses to government, labor unions, and far-left non-profit organizations. The legislation also effectively repeals welfare reform, the single most successful domestic policy of the 1990s.

US Troops Are Getting Too Fat!

So says liberal jackass Gregg Zoroya in USA Today.

The number of troops diagnosed as overweight or obese has more than doubled since the start of the Iraq war, yet another example of stress and strains of continuing combat deployments, according to a recent Pentagon study.

Let me see if I have this right....Obesity is in large part a product of inactivity. Being deployed in a war zone entails many hazards, but becoming a couch potato is not one of them. If servicemen really are packing on the pounds while deployed in Iraq, it doesn't mean they're too stressed out, but that they don't have enough to do over there.

As it turns out, however, Zoroya's story is remarkably thin (bad pun, I know). Just for starters, the headline is wrong in declaring that obesity has doubled. Here's what the piece actually says:

From 1998 to 2002, the number of servicemembers diagnosed as overweight remained steady at about one or two out of 100. But those numbers increased after 2003, according to the study, and today nearly one in 20 are diagnosed as clinically
overweight.

Zoroya's lead paragraph combines "overweight" and "obese," which are two *different* levels of weight, and the headline writer settled on the latter, which is inaccurate, although obviously both more sensational and a shorter word. But all the study finds is that the percentage of overweight servicemen has increased, to 5% from 1% or 2%. Wow. Big deal.

The military has physical-fitness requirements, so that the likelihood of a soldier being *obese* is quite slim.

By contrast, Zoroya writes, "one in five Americans between ages 18 to 34 is obese, the study says." In other words, by the study's numbers, a young American adult not in the service is four times as likely to be *obese* as a military man is to be merely *overweight*, which is a lower weight level.

And even then, some obvious questions need to be asked:

1) Are the numbers adjusted for age? If not, it may be that the expanding number of overweight soldiers is a function of the average soldier's being older, as a result of higher re-enlistment and the deployment of reserve and National Guard units into active duty.

2) Are servicemen--and especially older servicemen--more likely to be examined by military physicians during wartime than peacetime?

The most amusing flaw in this story, though, is that Zoroya quotes the study as saying the exact opposite of what the reporter claims it says:

"Stress and return from deployment were the most frequently cited reasons" for gaining weight, the study said.

Not deployment--return from deployment. This makes perfect sense: On coming home after months in a war zone to the land of McDonald's, home cooking and alcohol, who wouldn't indulge enough to put on some pounds?

There is a reason for this new liberal media tack. They have realized that they can't smear our brave troops as monsters and baby-killers anymore, so now they fall over themselves to portray them as victims, unfortunates, and otherwise losers. The media depiction of vets as victims is obviously superior to its depiction of them as monsters, but it is full of its own condescension.

Health Care now means someone else decides.

The bill will allow HHS to decide who is worth spending money on for medical care.

Feeling old? Just die and save the feds from making the decision for you.

Only In San Fransicko

San Francisco officials seek toilet torcher

Investigators are puzzled by wave of potty pyromania

SAN FRANCISCO - Construction workers are anxious and investigators are puzzled. Someone has been sending San Francisco's portable toilets up in flames in a wave of potty pyromania.

"It's an outrage," said Scott Johnson, a 57-year-old contractor who has been working on apartment building renovations on Russian Hill, the elegant neighborhood that is home to famously crooked Lombard Street and has had most of the fires.

Since November, at least 20 of the ubiquitous construction site toilets have been set afire in the city, creating a trail of malodorous wreckage and causing an estimated $50,000 in property damage, according to fire officials.

Most fires set at night

Investigators have little to go on. Most of the fires have been set at night, although one portable potty burst into flames during a recent afternoon.

"Somebody's getting very bold," said Fire Department Lt. Mindy Talmadge. It's not unheard of for vandals to strike the portable restrooms but "this is unusual," she said.

Contractors have been trying to foil the attacks by securing or camouflaging their industrial outhouses. A walk around Russian Hill last week found almost none of the familiar bright blue toilets, save for one lashed to a large metal trash bin and another tucked discreetly behind folds of black material.

Theories vary on who is responsible.

"Kids would be my guess," said Johnson.

Restroom arson claims units

Alex Rodriguez, president of Concord-based Far West Sanitation & Storage Containers, thinks whoever is doing it is motivated by the thrill of lawlessness, "trying to play catch-and-seek with the police." His company has lost a couple of units to the restroom arson.

The loss of a portable toilet can amount to several hundred dollars.

Plus, there is the unenviable job of cleaning up a disgusting mess, and there is the threat that a fire could spread.

"It kind of worries me and worries everybody that I talk to," Rodriguez said. "These people, I don't think they're criminals, but they are kind of out of their minds to do that."