Wednesday, May 20, 2009

The Chipmunk Whisperer


Chris McVeigh (hat tip: BuzzFeed) bribes chipmunks with almonds and then snaps photos of them engaging with action figures.

I'm going to take a wild guess and presume that Chris voted for Obama. Not that there's anything wrong with that.


Larwyn's 'Lines: Obama's Risky Debt

Have a great link you'd like me to review? Drop me an email!

Nation

The Alinsky Administration: Geraghty
Conservatives, Republicans, and the Man of Steele: Greenroom
Hoekstra: Pelosi taking 'wrecking ball' to CIA morale: Times

Obama's risky debt: WaPo
New CAFE goals will kill more Americans than Iraq War: Green Hell
Biden-esque Levels of Stupidity: Dingy Harry's Presser: JWF

Holder in the Hot Seat: PJM (Rubin)
Truth About ACORN, Obama & NYT: Post-Chronicle
Move the Gitmo detainees to Notre Dame: TAB

Uh oh: only 33% of Nevadans would vote for Reid: PatRoom
Not a cent to ACORN: Schlafly
Memorial Day Tradition: BMW

World

Netanyahu stands firm against demands: Telegraph (UK)
Blood libel at NatGeo Magazine: PJM (Chesler)
Hammer on Obama and Netanyahu: Corner

The Blood Tax: IBA
Peace isn't Arab goal: Jacoby

Media

Sy Hersh did Claim Cheney Ran "An Executive Assassination Ring": LegalIns
My personal credit crisis: New Bankrupt Times (Andrews)
Movie reveals truth about environmentalism: PJM (Klavan)

Scitech

The Link: Uncovering our earliest ancestor: LGF

Cornucopia

bRight & Early can use a little financial help
Parade leads ducklings to safety: ABC
I don't care: Gotta Get Drunk First

Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Democrat Bundler Hsu Convicted


Subtitle: Another Hsu drops.

C'mon, you know that was a good one!

Norman Hsu -- one of the foremost Democrat donation bundlers in recent years -- was found guilty earlier today of illegal campaign contributions. Hsu raked in hundreds of thousands of dollars for Hillary Clinton and other powerful Democrats.

...a jury convicted Mr. Hsu of four counts of campaign-finance fraud after about 2½ hours of deliberations. Each count carries up to five years in prison...

...In 2007, Mrs. Clinton's presidential campaign agreed to return $850,000 in funds raised through Mr. Hsu. During the trial, the government introduced a voice-mail message of support to Mr. Hsu left by Mrs. Clinton...

"What am I going to do with you, Norman? You are working so hard for me," Mrs. Clinton said. "I just don't even know what to say anymore. I've never seen anybody who has been more loyal and more effective and really just having greater success supporting someone than you."

Once featured on the Hillary for President website, Hsu was quickly tossed down the memory hole once the suspect donations became public.

Clinton, Jefferson, Mollohan, Waters, Murtha, Pelosi, Feinstein, Reid, Rangel, Dodd... now that's what I call a Culture of Corruption.


A little Military motivation


Sent in by Truck:
















Linked by: American Digest. Thanks!

Graph o' the Day: Vacant Homes, 1965 to 2008


I've added a few helpful dates to a graph from the March 2009 Congressional Budget Office report on the Obama budget.

Vacant Homes Per Thousand Households, 1965-2008

In short, the Democrat Party's housing interventions have resulted in a series of increasingly devastating catastrophic failures.

And these are the guys who tell us they can run health care, change the climate and create "green" energy sources from whole cloth. There's only one word to call the people who vote for Democrats: drones.

Reason #4,206 that the mainstream media is dead


Through Twitter, a retweet alerted me to a real-time broadcast on uStream. The uStream service allows anyone to broadcast live video using their mobile device. Here's a screen-cap of what I was watching for a few minutes.

This is the view from Robert Luketic's iPhone. Luketic was on the set of Five Killers, a movie starring Ashton Kutcher. You know, Demi Moore's hubbie.


In this scene, filmed in a grocery store, Kutcher storms down one of the aisles with an angry expression. Which is the same as his surprised expression. And his happy expression.

In a nutshell, anyone can be a johnny-on-the-spot pro journalist and broadcaster. I feel a tingle going up my leg anticipating the end of several pathetic broadcasting careers.


Larwyn's 'Lines: "ACORN will commit Census fraud"

Have a great link you'd like me to review? Drop me an email!

Nation

Cap-and-Trade Scam Debate Begins: GWP
Former organizer: ACORN will commit Census fraud: Examiner
Photos from Cali tax protest: Varones

Climate-bill foes likely to seize on CBO's scoring: Times
Audits are no laughing matter: WSJ (Reynolds)
Ex-employee: ACORN exploits African-American workers: Examiner

We're all rich now!: C & W
Reservoir Dogs: S, C & A
Official California Budget Initiatives Voting Guide: Greenroom

Obama flexes for the Unions: NOFP
Al Gore: Greedy Idiot: Exile
Candidate Obama vs. President Obama: Wolf

Media

From Dowdifying To Cut & Pasting: PJM (Driscoll)
TPM bloggers mum on Dowd controversy: Bloggasm
WaPo: Racism, Sexism Behind Wanda Sykes' Critics: NewsBusters

Ayers is back and he's slamming the Times: Times
San Fran Nan's Twitter Account: Surber
The view from Instapundit's window: Instapundit

World

Obama-Netanyahu Meeting: Ominous: PJM (Hornik)
Wright, Ayers team up for Peace Hate Israel rally: Ace
Raw footage: Obama, Netanyahu news conference: C-SPAN (Video)

The Loony Conspiracy Theories of Seymour Hersh: GWP
Obama’s Jewish Problem: CFP
Iran divides Obama, Netanyahu: Timmerman

Cornucopia

Worst Slide Story: Newday
Swine Flu Symptoms: Hatless

Monday, May 18, 2009

Another stroke of automotive brilliance by the Statists!


Not content with all but killing the American auto industry -- inflicting disastrous labor laws, arbitrary CAFE standards, emissions controls, "safety" mandates, and enough regulations to fill a dumpster -- Democrats issued a new edict today.

The Waxman-Markey bill talks about “harmonizing” fuel-economy rules in California and the rest of the country. The Obama administration will make clear just what that means today, the WSJ reports: The U.S. will jack up fuel-economy rules to 35 miles per gallon by 2016, four years earlier than planned.

Not to worry, though. The new emissions and fuel economy dictates will only cost manufacturers another $1,300 per vehicle!

The plan would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 900 million metric tons through 2016, the senior administration official said. In 2016, meeting the standards will cost automakers $600 a vehicle in addition to the $700-a-car cost automakers face under standards in existing law, the official said.

Also in 2016, light trucks would have to meet a standard of 30 mpg, and the average for cars would be 39 mpg.

I never realized Democrats were this talented. I knew they could quadruple the budget deficit, destroy the currency, overturn bankruptcy laws, and undermine the military and intelligence communities.

But I had no idea Harvey Waxman -- or whatever the hell is name is -- knew how to engineer automobiles... but sign me up for this beauty!




New York Ti-ku


Without the requisite Treacher quality.

Suffering from a
major case of writer's block
Maureen cuts and pastes


A crazy preacher,
And a terrorist mentor,
Nothing to see here.


Cindy McCain's drugs,
And her husband's sly affair,
No Obama dirt.


Hoyt investigates
his own paper's malfeasance
But finds nothing wrong.


Op-eds for all views,
opinions, creeds and colors,
except John McCain's



Igor has a scoop!


Igor, a recent immigrant to the U.S., has produced the only known vault copy of Barack Obama's birth certificate.

And I do mean produced.


Larwyn's 'Lines: Dowd plagiarizes the blogosphere

Have a great link you'd like me to review? Drop me an email!

Nation

Obama's honest day's work: Greenroom
Tuesday: California goes over the edge: GRW
Stupid policies of the ruling class: TheTownTalk

Obamas lived way above their means: S+L
Hasta la vista, Arnold: Reason TV
Why U.S. ed schools are so awful: CJ (Stern)

The Awakening of a Dumb (Gay) American: Winecoff
From RINOs to IOUs, GOP Must Face the Facts : PJTV
How The Socialists Are Destroying America From Within: WVT

Fever swamp memo: R.S. McCain
Marines: Denny

World

America's Trade War with Canada: Mises
Pakistan rapidly adding new nukes: Greenroom
The Europeanization of American Capitalism: PJM (Kern)

The wrong change for Afghanistan: Charlie Foxtrot

Climate & Energy

Before we 'fix' climate change, we should define what it is: Toronto Sun
Argos monitoring systems must be burned at the stake: Rick
Something hinky this way comes: Watts

Media

Killing a story: how it's done: Power Line
NYT Public Editor investigates ACORN non-story, finds nothing amiss: New Bankrupt Times
What's killing newspapers?: CBK

Maureen Dowd plagiarizes TPM: TPM

Sunday, May 17, 2009

Compulsive Intervention Disorder


In December, the New York Times published a 5,100-word article alleging the Bush administration’s housing policies had “stoked” the foreclosure crisis and, therefore, the financial meltdown. Using a variety of governmental mechanisms, the Times alleged, Bush seduced millions of people into mortgages that they ultimately couldn’t afford.

The Times has forgotten -- or, more likely, chosen to ignore -- a long and sordid history of government involvement with housing.

In 1922, Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, overreacting to a tiny dip in home ownership rates reflected by the 1920 census (from 45.9% in 1910 to 45.6%), warned that three-quarters of all Americans would be renters within a few decades (experts believe that the small drop was actually related to the after-effects of World War I).

The New York Times echoed Hoover's urgency, "The nation’s stability [is] being undermined... The masses [are] losing their struggle for a better life.”

Without waiting to see if postwar prosperity might change the trend, Hoover launched a program of aggressive government intervention into the housing market. Hoover's Own Your Own Home program prompted GM, U.S. Steel and -- most significantly -- federally chartered banks to dive into the housing business.

From 1927 to 1929, national banks’ mortgage lending increased 45 percent. Despite an obviously overheated market, The New York Times applauded the “wave of home-building” turning America into "a nation of home owners."

The 1930 census revealed 47.8% of U.S. households were living in their own homes.

But all was not well. Foreclosures rose from 2% in 1922 to 11% in 1927.

The October 1929 stock market crash touched off bank runs and cash-starved institutions stopped lending altogether.

By 1933, 1,000 homes were foreclosing each day.

Hoover's Own Your Own Home program had created a housing bubble. Mortgage loans more than doubled in less than ten years, a primary reason that 750 financial institutions failed in 1930 alone.

Construction jobs also fell 70% from 1929 to 1933.

You might thank that Hoover's housing debacle would have taught politicians the dangers inherent in engineering housing policy.

Instead, the feds reacted to the crisis by forming the Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC). HOLC was a New Deal bailout organization that turned government into an even bigger player in the housing market. HOLC would buy up troubled mortgages from banks and allow homeowners to refinance.

HOLC turned into a massive federal agency, reaching 20,000 employees at its height. Despite the new loans it negotiated, 20% of these reformulated mortgages defaulted.

HOLC loan officers characterized two thirds of the defaults as borrowers refusing to renoegotiate, as homeowners rightly figured that the government wouldn't kick them out of their homes.

And despite all of its purchases of bad loans, mortgage lending never revived during the thirties.

The feds' attempts at central planning continued with the Federal Home Loan Bank system to provide funds to banks; the Federal Housing Administration to insure loans; the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae) to purchase insured mortgages; and the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation to prevent future bank runs.

Put simply, the U.S. government had federalized much of the mortgage market.

1944's GI Bill included government-subsidized mortgages for returning veterans. By 1949, more than half of U.S. households owned homes and 40% were government-subsidized.

As homeownership grew, political pressure to allow riskier loans increased. As a result, the government eased its lending requirements, approving riskier loans and extending terms.

Predictably, the failure rate on FHA-insured loans spiked by 500% from 1950 to 1960.

By contrast, the foreclosure rate of conventional mortgages barely changed at all; many traditional lenders had maintained strict underwriting standards.

Ignoring all of these issues, the FHA embarked on a massive urban-loan program in the sixties and seventies. It turned out to be a catastrophic failure.

After the riots of 1968, the government passed a law giving poor families FHA-insured loans with nearly no down payments.

The result: massive real-estate flipping as speculators took advantage of the easy loan terms and uneducated home buyers. Foreclosures ran wild in more than 20 cities. The FHA became Detroit's biggest homeowner after it took about $200 million in losses. In New York, the tab ran more than $300 million. The final bill to taxpayers was estimated at $1.4 billion in losses.

Aside from the monetary losses, the program caused many neighborhoods to fall into ruins. Bushwick, a once-stable blue-collar Brooklyn community, became a burned-out husk of its former self as many buyers walked away from their properties and arsonists torched vacant homes. Entire blocks remained burned-out for years.

Once again, Washington's attempts at social engineering had failed as rampant speculation and corruption ran unchecked because the taxpayers were on the hook.

Again ignoring the problems endemic in any central planning of the housing market, the government next stepped into the breach in 1975.

Community agitators claimed studies were demonstrating that blacks were not receiving the same number of loans as whites; and the media jumped on the bandwagon. Experts pointed out, however, that creditworthiness of borrowers had not been taken into account.

Despite these obvious failings, Congress passed the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) in 1977. It gave regulators the power to deny banks the right to expand if they didn’t lend at "acceptable rates" in poor neighborhoods. In 1979, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) rocked the banking industry when it used the CRA to deny the Greater New York Savings Bank to open a bank branch in Manhattan, claiming it hadn't met its lending obligations in Brooklyn.

The theme was repeated over and over again. In 1980, the FDIC told a Maryland bank that its expansion plans would be denied unless it started lending in the District of Columbia, though the bank had no branches there. Then the government began instructing wholesale banks—institutions without retail branches and that don’t lend to consumers —that they, too, had to implement urban lending programs.

Another milestone to the current meltdown was caused directly by the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (Acorn), which threatened to stop bank acquisitions in 1986 until it accepted "flexible credit and underwriting standards" for minority borrowers.

Acorn also successfully applied political pressure to Congress, which passed legislation in 1992 that required Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to devote 30% of their loan portfolios to low- and moderate-income borrowers.

The campaign gathered inertia with the election of Bill Clinton, whose secretary of HUD, Henry Cisneros, began lobbying for zero-down loans, expanding federal insurance and using the CRA and other laws to force private money into low-income programs. Fannie and Freddie (also known as government-sponsored entities -- or GSEs) followed Cisneros' guidelines and further loosened underwriting standards, despite the FHA disaster of the sixties.

To meet the stated goals, the GSEs began enlisting large lenders to meet the new, flexible underwriting standards. In 1994, after accusions in Congress of "egregious redlin[ing]" by Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA), the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) shocked the banking world by signing an agreement with HUD to increase minority lending. The first MBA member to enlist: Countrywide Financial, the firm at the center of the subprime meltdown.

As the volume of low-income loans increased, Wall Street began to take note.

In early 2000 the FDIC proposed increasing capital requirements for lenders making subprime loans, Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) and John J. LaFalce (D-NY) battled the attempts, urging the regulators “not to be premature” with stricter underwriting.

In 1999, despite new lenders in the market, the Clinton administration kept pushing aggressive mortgage products.

In July, HUD increased desired levels for the GSEs low-income lending. In September, the GSEs began purchasing loans made to “borrowers with slightly impaired credit”, lowering the bar still further. In the following years, Congress set higher goals for the GSEs.

By 2007, some $1 trillion in loans had been made to lower- and moderate-income buyers. And Countrywide was the biggest supplier of mortgages to low-income buyers for Fannie Mae.

There was no shortage of evidence that this approach was doomed to fail.

In October 1994, Fannie Mae head James Johnson reminded a banking convention that mortgages with small down payments had a much higher risk of defaulting (actually, three times more likely to default). Yet the very next month, Fannie expanded its program to include products with a 97 percent loan-to-value ratio (a 3% down payment), the result of more political pressure from Maxine Waters and others in Congress.

No matter how high ownership rates climbed, however, a new group below the bar needed help. Massive immigration during the nineties, for example, created huge new pools of prospective borrowers. The Congressional Hispanic Caucus created Hogar, an initiative that eased lending standards for immigrants, and mortgage lending to Hispanics soared. Today, in areas where Hispanics make up 25 percent or more of the population, foreclosure rates are now nearly 50 percent higher than the national average.

Last year, lenders began foreclosing on roughly 2.3 million homes; some experts believe that before the crisis is over, 8 million homes will have been foreclosed upon.

Despite all of these lessons, Washington is preparing for the next housing debacle.

Barney Frank (D-MA) has aggressively resisted attempts to privatize the GSEs, which would eliminate both the risk to taxpayers and the political influence endemic in the series of failures. And the Obama administration’s mortgage bailout plan eerily resembles the New Deal’s HOLC.

Behind all of these efforts is a fundamental misconception that central planning can help increase housing outcomes when conventional underwriting programs have succeeded admirably.

If nothing else, the last ninety years have shown that political tampering in the free market has caused a series of disasters. And we're on course for more, if we keep electing big government Statists to office.

What's that definition of insanity, again?


Based upon: Steven Malanga's outstanding Obsessive Housing Disorder in the Spring 2009 City Journal. Linked by: Michelle Malkin, City Journal, Legal Insurrection and Nice Deb. Thanks!

U.S. Army Field Manual and Guide to Voting in 2010



Let me just predict for the record that in 2010, the Democrat Party will wage an especially vicious campaign to suppress the military vote (even worse than their efforts in 2008, 2004 and 2000).

The Gore campaign's behavior in 2000 was especially despicable.

There is no evidence that the absentee ballots of felons have been challenged.

But the absentee ballots of members of the military were challenged. Many were thrown out.

In the most shameful and painful act of the hand counts, the Democrats on the ground, and their operators from the Democratic National Committee and the state organization and the Gore campaign, deliberately and systematically scrutinized for challenge every military absentee ballot, and knocked out as many as they could on whatever technicality they could find or even invent.

Reports begin to filter out. The Democratic army of lawyers and operatives marches into the counting room armed with a five-page memo from a Democratic lawyer, instructing them on how to disfranchise military voters. The lawyers and operatives unspool reams of computer printouts bearing the names and party affiliation of military voters. Those who are Republicans are subject to particular and seemingly relentless scrutiny. Right down to signatures on ballots being compared with signatures on registration cards. A ballot bearing a domestic postmark because a soldier had voted, sent his ballot home to his parents and asked them to mail it in on time, is thrown out. A ballot that comes with a note from an officer explaining his ship was not able to postmark his ballot, but that he had voted on time--and indeed it had arrived in time--is thrown out, because it has no postmark.

The Democratic operatives are ruthless, focused. As one witness says, "They had a clear agenda..."

Payback, like war, is hell.



Stimulus Absurdity Map


The Associated Depress offers a startling map of transportation projects funded by the "Stimulus" package.

The invaluable Mises Blog observes, "It illustrates the absurdity that dumping tax dollars on road construction firms will revive the economy."


Friedrich A. Hayek's The Road To Serfdom (Comic)


Courtesy of the Ludwig von Mises Institute:


It's especially timely.



Related: Volokh: Happy 100th Birthday, F. A. Hayek. Hat tip: Alouette.