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Home  Liberal Lunacy
Liberal Lunacy
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Saturday October 04, 2008 13:05 |
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 Stanley Kurtz - Sept. 29, 2008
What exactly does a "community organizer" do? Barack Obama's rise has left many Americans asking themselves that question. Here's a big part of the answer: Community organizers intimidate banks into making high-risk loans to customers with poor credit.
In the name of fairness to minorities, community organizers occupy private offices, chant inside bank lobbies, and confront executives at their homes - and thereby force financial institutions to direct hundreds of millions of dollars in mortgages to low-credit customers.
In other words, community organizers help to undermine the US economy by pushing the banking system into a sinkhole of bad loans. And Obama has spent years training and funding the organizers who do it.
The seeds of today's financial meltdown lie in the Community Reinvestment Act - a law passed in 1977 and made riskier by unwise amendments and regulatory rulings in later decades.
CRA was meant to encourage banks to make loans to high-risk borrowers, often minorities living in unstable neighborhoods. That has provided an opening to radical groups like ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) to abuse the law by forcing banks to make hundreds of millions of dollars in "subprime" loans to often uncreditworthy poor and minority customers.
Any bank that wants to expand or merge with another has to show it has complied with CRA - and approval can be held up by complaints filed by groups like ACORN.
In fact, intimidation tactics, public charges of racism and threats to use CRA to block business expansion have enabled ACORN to extract hundreds of millions of dollars in loans and contributions from America's financial institutions. |
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Saturday September 27, 2008 02:19 |
Wall Street Journal
SEPTEMBER 23, 2008
Many monumental errors and misjudgments contributed to the acute financial turmoil in which we now find ourselves. Nevertheless, the vast accumulation of toxic mortgage debt that poisoned the global financial system was driven by the aggressive buying of subprime and Alt-A mortgages, and mortgage-backed securities, by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The poor choices of these two government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) -- and their sponsors in Washington -- are largely to blame for our current mess. How did we get here? Let's review: In order to curry congressional support after their accounting scandals in 2003 and 2004, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac committed to increased financing of "affordable housing." They became the largest buyers of subprime and Alt-A mortgages between 2004 and 2007, with total GSE exposure eventually exceeding $1 trillion. In doing so, they stimulated the growth of the subpar mortgage market and substantially magnified the costs of its collapse. |
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Thursday September 25, 2008 16:46 |
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Wednesday, September 24, 2008 4:20 PM PT
Energy: In a stunning defeat, congressional Democrats were forced to allow the quarter-century-old offshore drilling ban to expire. But the fight has only begun, with the struggle now shifting to state legislatures.
Funny how the Democrat-controlled Congress can't get the things it wants enacted, can't even get a single appropriations bill passed, yet minority Republicans this week succeeded in ending a supposedly sacrosanct ban on oil and gas offshore drilling that dates back to the early 1980s.
It was an unexpectedly powerful knockdown of Democrats and their enviro-extremist allies, but they are not yet counted out.
GOP Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina noted in a letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., the possibility that Democrats would "use environmental lawsuits to block exploration until they can reinstate these energy bans after the November elections." DeMint warned Reid that it "would be a major mistake."
So with the ban ending, what are the next moves toward reducing America's dependence on oil from hostile regimes in places such as the Middle East, Russia and leftist Venezuela?
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Sunday September 21, 2008 19:57 |
On issue after issue after issue Democrats take up the side that weakens America while consistently opposing the side that strengthens America.
 
Democratic Crises After examining issue after issue this year I was struck by one thought. Democrats seem to always support policies that weaken America while opposing policies that would strengthen her. While spending considerable time trying to figure out why this would be, I think I’ve come upon a theory that explains everything. The thing that made this such a mystery was my ability to accurately predict what stand the Democratic party would take on any given issue simply by asking which position would hurt America and which would help. Democrats consistently choose the policy that would most hurt America. Using this standard it is easy to predict which position Democrats will take on a wide variety of seemingly unrelated issues. For instance, two unrelated issues: home mortgages and oil. On the surface these two issues have nothing in common, yet if you examine the results of policies Democrats favored and implemented, you will see that those policies have three things in common: they both failed, it was knowable in advance that they would fail and their failure was devastating to America. | | | | | Policies Democrats Oppose that would strengthen America: - Drilling for oil
- Nuclear power
- Lower Taxes
- Making Life Difficult for terrorists
- Anti-Missile Defense
- Teacher-control of the classroom
- School Choice
- Photo ID when voting
- Protect the borders
- Environmental policies that put people first
- Strong military
- Strong CIA
| | In the 1990s Democrats supported policies that would strong arm banks into giving mortgages to less-than-creditworthy individuals so they could buy homes. These people had little ability to pay back the loans and traditionally would have been considered bad credit risks. But through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the Clinton administration assured the banks that was no problem. When a bank makes a mortgage loan these quasi-governmental agencies purchase the loan, providing liquidity to the banking system by providing banks with a fresh infusion of capital that they then turn around and use to make more mortgage loans. As primary purchasers of mortgage loans Fannie and Freddie had the clout to set the credit standards banks would use in making loans. If Fannie and Freddie demanded that banks lend only to customers with excellent credit, then that's what banks would do. If they loosened their standards and agreed to purchase mortgages made to less creditworthy individuals, then the banks could loosen their standards and make even more loans. Since the banks turn around and sell their mortgages to Fannie and Freddie, they have no real stake in whether the borrower actually pays the loan back. So they base their credit requirements on whatever Fannie and Freddie will allow. As far as the banks are concerned, if Fannie and Freddie will purchase mortgages made to less than creditworthy individuals - it's good for them because it allows them to make loans to more people, thus helping their bottom line. At the heart of this problem is the fact that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were directed by the Clinton administration to "liberalize" their credit standards so that people with credit scores less than what was traditionally acceptable could get mortgages. The stated intention was to make home ownership possible for more people. However, conservatives at the time often pointed out that this would eventually come back to haunt us as the less than credit-worthy borrowers defaulted and the taxpayer would have to bail everyone out. | | | | | |
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Monday September 08, 2008 19:33 |
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One of the most controversial provisions in the Patriot Act was a provision that would allow government investigators to obtain public library records during terrorist investigations. The Left howled in fury when this provision became known. They were certain that this was one of the most evil laws government had ever tried to pass. As if library records were somehow more sacred than other records the Left protested vehemently against the Patriot Act - using this provision as the excuse. However, it turns out that the Bush administration's insistence that this provision be left in the Patriot Act as a crucial part of fighting terrorism, was correct. The people who opposed this provision had a romanticized and outdated view of what libraries are. They pictured them as the peaceful places of our childhoods. They made it sound almost as if the government wanted to spy in children. But they forgot one major change that has come to the modern world - and that is the internet. Since most libraries now provide access to the internet, it gave terrorists a great place to go to connect to their comrades around the world - undetected. As long as they knew the government wasn't allowed to look at library records of computer data transmission using library computers was like a consequence-free zone for them. The "library" provision of the Patriot Act has saved lives and in this article in the National Review details how. National Review
April 25, 2005 As Congress considers reauthorizing the Patriot Act, it explicitly should add libraries to the locations where federal investigators may hunt terrorists. Here are five reasons why: Marwan al Shehhi; Mohand, Wail, and Waleed Alshehri; and Mohamed Atta — September 11 hijackers, all.
Reference librarian Kathleen Hensmen remembers Wail and Waleed Alshehri's summer 2001 visit to the Delray Beach Public Library. Well-dressed, they resembled "the GQ of the Middle East" that evening, she tells me. Hensmen found them "very courteous, very friendly," although "they just sat at one computer, and they were staring at me, and I didn't understand why."
Hensmen had ethnic Arab neighbors in her native southeastern Michigan, though she rarely saw such folks at her library in southeastern Florida. "They [the Alshehri brothers] stood out in my mind because not many Middle Eastern people pass through here." |
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