There is a viciousness about the way many on the right are attacking those who currently hold sub prime loans; one is reminded of lynch mob mentality. It is clear that those loans are at the root of our current problems but faulting those whose loans are currently underwater is analogous to blaming the New Orleans disaster on too much rain. What are we missing here?

First and foremost this is a classic case of musical chairs. I personally sold a home just before the market tumbled; Now I don't know how my buyers financed their buy but by today's valuation they took a beating and if there was an ARM in there, even one of the non sub-prime ones, they are looking at a huge problem when that thing starts adjusting-as it surely will with the federal government sucking up all the money in sight. I bought the place with an ARM and if they bought with an ARM we are looking at musical chairs. I got out but they are left with no 'chair'. Lots of homes were sold in the last 2-4 years by folks who may well be sitting back today arrogantly disparaging those who bought their homes for doing so with poor financing. These folks need to consider where they would be today if no one had bought their overpriced home and freed them to move on to greener pastures.

Second is the simple fact that we all enjoyed the economic good times that came with over inflated home prices. No one was turning down work, not selling cars or turning away remodeling work out of an altruistic understanding of how 'wrong' all this spending was. Now that those times are past and we know those loans were are the center of the problem is it wholly inappropriate to try to pretend that we all did not benefit and to try to blame the folks now (musical chairs remember) stuck with those loans.

Thirdly, we live in a representative democracy. That means the folks inside the beltway are our folks; we put them there. When Barney and Maxine staunchly fended off any attempts to reign in Fannie and Freddie they did so with the help of our representatives and as our representatives. When Phil Graham closed ranks with Rubin and Clinton to start this whole expanded home ownership movement they were our representatives. And when the Republican controlled Senate had a chance to act but did not because they 'feared' they would not get the votes-they acted as our  representatives. We got the government we voted into place-just as we have it today.

So I would ask everyone who is so arrogantly and pompously ready to let those currently holding bad loans go under to kindly remember they have a piece of this too. Remember too that we are talking the continued decline of our economy for another 2-4 years until all the ARMs are bankrupt or short sold; and all the jobs that will be lost as the economy continues to decline. The smart move is to stabalize the real estate market and that means bailing those folks with sub primes or even the 'good' ARMs out. If we don't the impact is enormous. How do we do that?

We must mandate that the banks and lenders clean those loans up. I beleive Obama has such a plan, now that socialism by the numbers is in place, he has trotted out the far cheaper and more reasonable solution. But it may, I have not seen specifics, get the job done. Anything short of cleaning up those loans, real fast, will only prolong the economic malaise; and with the money in the so-called stimulus and TARPs we certainly can't afford to delay a recovery!

President Obama's picks for various administration posts seem to reflect a worse than usual cast of folks that clearly do not represent a change from the way things were and not reflective of any change in the way business is done;  so far they have more issues of character than I can personally remember so early in an administration. How could this be?

We have to remember that the erstwhile President of change has little experience with issues at a national level. The vast bulk of his experience with public affairs was gained in Illinois politics. His long standing closest associates, advisers and mentors clearly do not translate to a national level team and moreover, they are so unsavory that he had to cast most of them aside to save his run for the presidency. And he's dealing with issues of a scope and importance he has never experienced. He needs a lot of help fast. So now he's secured the top job, where can he look for help with his agenda?

Since he is a left wing socialist he'll find some folks already there that will support him BUT he certainly has no long or even short term relationships that he can rely on-with the possible exception of Rahm Emmanuel who I suspect will soon emerge as a huge liability. He desperately wants to appear moderate and non-partisan but the issues are of too great a consequence (read lucrative) for the liberal left not to try and exploit the crisis as Rahm has said should be the effort if one is in charge at such a time. So everything Obama tries to do will be taken as far left as possible by the Pelosi/Reid crowd. And I think we are already seeing his willingness to support the left by making partisan comments to the press. I suspect it will not be too long before his lack of experience and relianace on help from those he does not know and should not trust will presage a sharp decline in his popularity. This is no two term President by any stretch. Glibness may sell during a campaign but now it is substance and principle that count-and he has little of either to draw on.

 

 

 

Nancy Pelosi, in an interview her home town paper, has stipulated that the reason the ‘surge’ has succeeded in Fallujah is that the Iranians, out of their enormous good will, chose to put an end to the violence. Clearly in her mind without the gracious support of the Iranian government the situation in Fallujah would still be violent and intolerable. To put this in perspective I thought a few analogies might be in order.

A few come quickly to mind. American’s should be thanking the British every 4^th of July for their independence since victory in the Revolutionary War was only achieved when the British graciously ceased hostilities. U.S. Grant is not the one to be revered for final victory in the Civil War; that honor falls to General Lee for calling Grant to Appomattox so that hostilities could be ended. WWII? We should thank the Japanese for allowing us to park our aircraft carrier in their harbor so we could sign the surrender agreement only made possible by the Japanese graciously offering to end hostilities. Really?

The Iranians have been supporting terrorism through out the world and were totally invested in seeing terror continue in Iraq. And the real reason that Fallujah is now quiet and under the control of the Iraqi armed forces is that those Iraqi forces soundly defeated the Iranians and their fellow travelers; in the words of local business folks now back in business due to the new and welcome security, the bad guys were either killed or captured-defeated by a resurgent Iraqi military ever more capable of securing and maintaining the peace.

Why is it so hard for liberals to just admit that our military can devise workable strategies, that they can execute them effectively and that positive results, in this case an Iraqi army that can stand on its own, can occur? Are they so vested in how bad America is and how terrible the military is that they cannot see and accept facts for what they are? Or are they simply so vested in their mantra of failure in Iraq that to admit even the slightest progress is intolerable despite the facts? Or is this just the liberal disease-facts be damned its all about how you feel. As in Barack responding to a Charley Gibson question on raising taxes on capitol gains and the negative repercussions of such activity from history that he was not concerned about the impact to business or revenues to the government-he was concerned about what is ‘fair’.

What’s fair is to give credit where it is really due. General Petraus has done an outstanding job, our troops have performed exceptionally well and we have lots to be proud of and hopeful for in the Iraq situation. Is that not good for America? Is that not good for the Middle East? Just what is it the Pelosi and her fellow travelers really want for America?

 

Obama’s press conference on the 29^th to address Wright’s comments is exactly what has been going on with this guy from day one. He appeared out of nowhere with no history or accomplishments trumpeting himself as the answer to all our problems. But slowly, VERY slowly, the picture is developing. For all the smooth talk and grand speeches the real Obama comes into focus:

1. First he had a friendly relationship with Bill Ayers which has evolved into his condemning what Ayers did 40 years ago but you have to understand that he is now a respected English teacher at a university in Chicago. How could Obama be responsible for what Ayers did when he, Obama, was on only 8 years old? BUT Ayers as late as 2001 was unrepentant of his previous deeds and only regrets not  doing more. And while Obama does not REGULARLY consult with Ayers on the issues just what is it that two such politically motivated men do when they DO talk?
2. When asked about raising the Capital gains tax in the last Democratic debate, despite having the evidence before him that raising the tax was bad for government ‘revenue’ because it was bad for business, he would raise it anyway as a matter of ‘fairness’. That sounds a lot more like ‘from each according to his ability and to each according to his need’ than it does ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’. Marx would love him but Jefferson would be appalled. (Perhaps we see here what he has in common with Ayers-a bloodless coup that would not make Che happy but would achieve his ends.)
3. The Reverend Wright’s speeches this week have caused Barack to try to distance himself even further from the good reverend while making these recent speeches  out to be a shift in what the reverend was doing in his church for 20 years for the benefit of not only Barack but his wife (when you hear some of her speeches you hear shades of the reverend) AND his children. The truth is that the reverend has changed nothing. Barack backed away from having the Reverend give the invocation at his announcement for President at the last minute over a year ago because he knew the reverend might just do what he’d been doing for years. That was before the recent exposure of his sermons, his church’s Africa centric posture and its support of and awards for Louis Farrakhan.
4. At a private fund raiser in San Francisco Barack disparages some voters in Pennsylvania as clinging to their guns, faith and dislike of those ‘not like them’ because of economic issues. The clear message being that if he and his rich elite friends can put the right bait (derived from increased taxes) in front of these folks they will drop their guns and faith and join the glassy eyed, oratorically drugged Obamites.
5. Both Hillary and Obama will raise taxes on income earners while assuring us that they will protect the middle class. For Hillary that means families earning less than 250K a year. For Barak that means anyone earning less than 50-75K. Think about 50K as the top end of the middle class earner.
6. Tony Resko.
7. He is the MOST liberal senator by virtue of his very skimpy voting record. NO-ONE is to the left of him. And not once has he demonstrated in the U.S. Senate the slightest desire or ability to bridge the gap and bring folks together.

 

Charlie Gibson asked a great question at the Democratic debate. He asked both candidates how they would deal with the current 15% rate on capital gains understanding that every time since the 80s (and I think this extends back further) that the rate has been CUT the revenue to the Government has INCREASED, while increasing it has LOWERED revenues. Senator Clinton was at least wise enough to understand that she could go UP to where her husband LOWERED it to, 20%, and she hopes, not have too great an impact on the economy. Obama, overt socialist liberal that he is, could not resist the attempt to imply that while history SO FAR was that letting the private sector reinvest its profits MIGHT lead to growth in the economy and hence revenue one certainly could not be sure that was ALWAYS the case and therefore he would not say he would not raise the capital gains tax higher than 20%. His opinion was that this was an issue of fairness, not economics, and that it was his job to level the playing field. Lenin and Trotsky would be proud.

Taxes redux on the ‘middle class tax cut’. For Hillary the middle class tax cut would be folks under 250K. Obama started at 75 but Charles gave him an out and he agreed (I’d like to hear his answer again) to 250-275K. The following weekend, at a town hall meeting, he was back to 50-75K. If you are making more than 50-75K then Obama needs your hard earned money to pay for ‘affordable’ housing (from the same townhall meeting). That means housing provided by the government at your expense. And our free market system should not provide that housing, it should be provided by the government (Obama will establish a politburo to address that). With any luck at all we can soon be living one family (of any size) in government built housing (the American dream) with our needs met by Cuban style healthcare (third world trained doctors in short supply providing very limited access to overburdened facilities) and our political decisions made by ‘super’ delegates who, of course, will not be subjected to such harsh realities since, like Bill Ayers and Angela Davis, they are members of the Elite Left whose struggles to destroy our democratic institutions must be rewarded with tenured professorships from which to rot the minds of our youth-like Barrack perhaps.

Obama thinks the best way to be a good commander in chief is to make sure the military is never in harms way. So we’d get the hell out of the Middle East and God knows where else as quickly as possible so we eliminate any need to meet with disabled veterans or have any opportunity for them to become victims of live fire under his watch. Surely we can negotiate with anyone if we have our allies all in a neat little row. NEVER in the history of the run up to the Iraq war, when EVERY civilized nation knew that Saddam had WMD and would use them as soon as possible, did we ever have the full support of Russia, China, Germany or France. Never in ANY international crisis have all these ‘allies’ agreed on a course of action. Today we might get France but that’s it. The rest of these very powerful UN Security Council dominating nations will do what THEY think is in their own best parochial interests and if that is not in line with what Barack wants than he will quickly get a very harsh lesson in world politics. His naïveté is only exceeded by his incredibly inflated ego. Where Hillary, much to her credit,  is willing to say that if Iran launches on Israel there will be harsh and immediate military response from the U.S., Barrack would ‘Take the necessary actions’ -which could well mean lobbying for more ineffectual sanctions or even inviting the Mullahs to the White House for a confab.

Both of them want to come down hard on ‘Wall Street’ and possibly put a ‘windfall’ tax on the big corporations, especially the oil companies, and put those hard earned tax dollars to work in Government funded programs. Just think for a minute-the government is going to take private sector money and spend it better and smarter than the private sector? If you can buy that nonsense I’ve got bridges to sell. The reality is that these self serving companies will not miss an opportunity to be the first on their block to make the move to the next big energy boom-and they’ll do it better and faster than you can imagine. Crippling these companies with wasteful taxes will surely make the journey to better and more ‘green’ energy sources that much longer.

Social security will be solved by increasing taxes on the ‘wealthy’ according Obama. Hillary would have it that we can form another commission which will raise the retirement age and lower benefits. The real answer is to recognize that there is no ‘trust fund’ and that we have to start now giving younger generations a better option than a government run program that is a constant source of additional funding for pork barrel spending in Congress.

And then there are those pesky issues of character. You see the voters really do want to know who they are putting in office. You can look at a man or woman’s life work and judge them. Such is the case with John McCain. But lacking anything more than a few years of senate service, as is the case with Obama and Hillary, you have to look elsewhere for how to measure their worth. In Obama’s case we are stuck with his associations. If I spent my life hanging around with Sonny Barger and riding with Hell’s Angels it would be really hard for folks to think I was anything but a hell raising, drug dealing motorcycle hoodlum. Obama hangs out with Bill Ayers and his mentor Rev. Wright- the inspiration for his ‘Audacity of Hope’ and a clear America hater and hard core bigot. His excuse for Ayers is that he was 8 years old when Ayres was a bomber, forgetting completely that he is even now unrepentant and wishes he’d done more. By that yardstick, had Adolf Hitler survived WWII and was still alive, it would be OK to hang with him even if he still hates Jews and thinks they should be exterminated. Would you vote for someone who called Adolf a friend? Really? And of course, thinking no one would ever know, he blurted out the truth to his wealthy liberal elitist cronies at a fund raiser in San Francisco; that truth is that there are many American’s in the hinterlands who are bitter about the country’s moving away from their values and who cling to their bibles and guns. But with the right big government giveaway program their votes can be bought and those bibles and guns can be wrested from their cold, big government program silenced hands.

Hillary has very little experience too so again we have to go to associations and things said. The sniper fire deal in Bosnia is a prime example of stretching the truth to meet the immediate need for experience more defined by the desperate need to have any at all then by the its actual existence. Hillary is part of the tired old tax and spend liberal left that, like Obama, ferverently believes in the Marxist mantra of wealth redistribution-‘from each according to his ability and to each according to his need’. Such thought processes fail utterly to realize that the entrepreneurial spirit that been so much a part of our nation’s greatness, and which is so fundamental to its continued success, could not exist but for the knowledge that in making the effort and sacrifice to achieve success one might actually receive some reward for oneself or ones progeny. It’s the most fundamental principle of free enterprise and the one which liberals attack at every opportunity. Why? To gain power and do so by using the hard earned money of those who typify the American experience to buy the votes of those who are less successful.

I’m not sure that McCain has all the right answers, I’d guess more wrong than right, but he is light years better than Hillary or Barrack. Particularly in the area of character.

 

At some point Barack Obama must be asked some hard questions about his associations. He seems to be surrounded by people who dislike America, have attacked America and who promote racial divisiveness. These associations bring into question his leadership ability, or perhaps more importantly, his leadership focus.

He is friends with and has worked with a member of the weatherman. This friend is an admitted bomber and attempted killer of his fellow citizens. He should be locked up for life or executed but he runs free and Obama is his friend. In all these years the man is unrepentant for his acts of terrorism. He is and was a terrorist and he is Obama's friend and thier children play together.

His minister and the man who inspired his book ‘The Audacity of Hope’ is a blatant racist and anti-Semite. His church has given Louis Farrakan a life time achievement award. From the pulpit his minister rants against America and white people. Barack has been a member of the church for 20 years, his daughters are exposed to this divisive rhetoric and Barack looks to this man for spiritual guidance.

Barack’s wife does not sound too dissimilar in her comments to the good minister. Obviously someone in the Barack household is in agreement with the minister’s venomous rhetoric. And if she is in agreement with this un-American garbage then can the children be far behind? For that matter she campaigns on his behalf so they must share common values.

So Barack is surrounded by people who dislike America, have bombed America and who rant from the pulpit about how terrible America is. Is there any evidence anywhere that he has stood up at church during one of the minister’s rants and provided a counter point? Has he distanced himself from his weatherman connection and denounced acts of terrorism committed by this scum? Has he kept his family, especially his impressionable children, from exposure to his minister’s divisiveness and America hating rhetoric? Evidence to date is that he has not. And lacking the leadership, or more importantly the convictions, to act against these many and very significant un-American influences in his life only brings into clearer focus that what Obama says and how he says it may have very little to do with who he really is. He is entirely unfit for the Presidency of our nation.  

“It bordered on science fiction to think that someone as liberal on as many issues as Rudy Giuliani could become the Republican nominee,” said Nelson Warfield, a Republican consultant who has long studied the former mayor’s career. “Rudy didn’t even care enough about conservatives to lie to us. The problem wasn’t the calendar; it was the candidate.”

 

I read this in an article on Rudy’s ending his bid for the Presidency. Now I know folks will say I’m taking this comment wrong but the only way I can read this is that this particular conservative would have been more accepting of Rudy if he’d at least lied about his positions. That’s the state of politics in America-If you aren’t really an advocate of my positions you have to at least lie to me about being an advocate and then it’s all right. Have we really become so jaded that we would accept the fiction that suits our needs rather than the fact that at least bespeaks integrity?

 

The Clinton’s have often been called Machiavellian in their campaign practices and I fear that with too much of that sort of thing we have come to accept being lied to as part of the political process; as Machiavelli would have it “Nevertheless our experience has been that those princes who have done great things have held good faith of little account, and have known how to circumvent the intellect of men by craft, and in end have overcome those who have relied on their word.”

 

I picked Rudy as my first choice for President because he got things done across party lines in New York. He also has stuck by his positions on those things, like abortion, that have the conservatives in a tizzy. I picked McCain as my second choice not because I agree with many of his positions, I absolutely do not, but I do trust him to be who he says he is on the stump, and I know he will prosecute the war on terror as advertized. Romney has so many self serving abuses of the truth to his credit that I have no way to believe him. That he has many conservatives promoting him proves him to be as Machiavellian as the Clinton’s at their worst. And Mike Huckabee, while well meaning and sincere, is still that Baptist minister at heart which explains why he pardoned more prisoners than his neighboring governors combined, why he believes public money should be used to educate the children of illegal’s and why he’ll founder badly inside the beltway when trying to deal the very Machiavellian leadership of the Senate and House-be they Republican or Democrat.

 

McCain may not be a classic Reagan Republican but Romney is surely not the man we need to put forth as the Republican standard bearer appearing as he does to this conservative much more like Gore and Kerry in his capacity for prevarications than that stalwart and bastion of integrity and truth Ronald Reagan. Character does count!

Author Toni Morrison endorses Obama

‘‘In addition to keen intelligence, integrity and a rare authenticity, you exhibit something that has nothing to do with age, experience, race or gender and something I don’t see in other candidates,’’ Morrison wrote. ‘‘That something is a creative imagination which coupled with brilliance equals wisdom.”

            Boy, philosophers down through the ages have sought the true meaning of wisdom and here it is. Creativity and brilliance-done, we have wisdom. Of course the great sages were seeking wisdom as defined by the best that man could be in all things; a goodness coupled with altruism seeking out and begetting, fortune willing, great and noble outcomes for one’s fellow human being.

            While creative imagination and brilliance have long been associated with success all too often that success has not included altruism or the best interests of one’s fellow human being. Mao was decidedly brilliant and imaginative as was Hitler but I dare say neither would be sought after as the source of wisdom that good and noble folks look for in pursuing that which is best is in all of us and for all of us. I suspect too that Morrison equates glibness and brilliance when, in fact, glibness has no part in brilliance except to perhaps lend itself to the timely expression of brilliance and even then, absent the expression of true wisdom, as was the case in many of Hitler’s greatest speeches, is far removed from wisdom or its expression. 

            But I may be expecting too much of the liberal mind in so enormous a definition as wisdom.  Where a conservative would want each of us as individuals to, as best we can, exhibit our own individual wisdom it is true by observation that liberals seek and desire that someone else be the bearer of wisdom and that the madding crowd can then take part in that wisdom by adulation, acceptance and without need to develop their own hard won wisdom; a wisdom for which we have no one to blame but ourselves but which would appall the staunch liberal who, wanting no part of individual responsibility, seeks ever the wise one and is all too often disappointed at the result.

            Forgive me my conservative individualism (and skepticism) but I much prefer the wisdom gained by age and experience to the perceived ‘brilliance’ that short passage of time will quickly punish in the harsh and unforgiving incubator of reality.

So U.S. District Judge Marcia Cooke thinks the detention of Padilla and his fellow cell members was so harsh that it warranted her lightening their sentences. She also took into account that although their avowed purpose is (not was) to kill as many innocent people as possible for Allah they had not actually killed anyone (yet). So her solution to these heart wrenching moral dilemmas is to truncate their sentences so that in 12-15 years, or sooner with good behavior, these animals can be back at the throats of unsuspecting innocents. Good God!

 

At some point does it not occur to folks, especially those responsible for keeping these vermin away from the useful portions of humanity, that these scum are adherents of a faith, that they will die for that faith and that they certainly will not give up that faith. There will be no rehabilitation in prison. Quite the contrary-in our efforts to afford all prisoners access to the ministers of their faith these cretins will not only be visited by the local prison mullah its highly likely that the mullah will praise them for their martyrdom and exhort them to stay the course so that they can, when they’ve served their sentences, resume their interrupted efforts to massacre for Allah.

 

These swine did not commit a crime against society the likes of a bank robbery or extortion where the severity of sentence can act to alter a criminal behavior. These are not criminals; they are foot soldiers of a religious fanaticism whose goal is to destroy anything and anyone standing in the way of a world wide caliphate. LISTEN to them-they are not bashful about their goals. The federal court system is not designed to deal with issues of this large a scope and consequences this far reaching. They tend to look at the individual before them as isolated criminals. If we are going to try them in these courts then we must have sentencing guidelines that protect us from narrowly focused and myopic judges.

 

The sentence for being involved in any Islamic plot to carry out terrorist attacks must be permanent expulsion from human society. If we have no stomach for execution than a mandatory life sentence without possibility of parole is the only other recourse. But unleashing this garbage back into humanity to resume its despicable conduct is beyond unconscionable.