Thursday, April 15, 2010

Welcome to the Obama recovery!

Don't you feel like celebrating?

'09 Profits Soar to Historic Highs, While Sales Plummet...

New jobless claims 'unexpectedly' soar...

Rise for second straight week...

Soros warns on market crash...

Foreclosure rates surge, biggest jump in 5 years...

Homeless 'Tent City' Settlers In Get Reprieve...

All of these headlines are from today. After the $840 billion "Stimulus" program, the $410 billion Omnibus spending deal, the $60 billion auto bailout, "Cash-for-Clunkers", HAMP, and trillions in unfunded liabilities, the economy is still flat on its back.

The CBO is warning that budget deficits are going to be far worse than earlier predicted. And this is before the economy is further strangled by DemCare, the expiration of the Bush tax cuts, and the ominous, economy-killing VAT tax.

Democrats have the Midas Touch: everything they touch turns into a rusty muffler*.


* Hat tip: Henny Youngman

Gee, that policy change is quite a shock. In May of 2008, Candidate Obama stated: Israel a "constant sore" that "infects... foreign policy"

The "dramatic deterioration of diplomatic relations between the United States and Israel" should have come as no surprise to those who bothered to research candidate Obama.

Interviewed in The Atlantic in May of 2008, then-Senator Barack Obama informed the electorate that Israel is a "constant wound... a constant sore..." and an infection. Jim Hoft caught Obama's inflammatory remarks.

Jeff Goldberg:--- Do you think that Israel is a drag on America’s reputation overseas?

Barack Obama:--- No, no, no. But what I think is that this constant wound, that this constant sore, does infect all of our foreign policy. The lack of a resolution to this problem provides an excuse for anti-American militant jihadists to engage in inexcusable actions, and so we have a national-security interest in solving this, and I also believe that Israel has a security interest in solving this because I believe that the status quo is unsustainable. I am absolutely convinced of that, and some of the tensions that might arise between me and some of the more hawkish elements in the Jewish community in the United States might stem from the fact that I’m not going to blindly adhere to whatever the most hawkish position is just because that’s the safest ground politically.

Obama's remarks seem to parallel those of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

In yet another verbal attack against Israel, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called the Jewish state a "filthy bacteria" whose sole purpose was to oppress the other nations of the region.

"The world powers established this filthy bacteria, the Zionist regime, which is lashing out at the nations in the region like a wild beast," the Iranian president told supporters at a rally in southern Iran.

Come to think of it, a Mr. A. Hitler had some remarks along these lines.

Against the infection of materialism, against the Jewish pestilence we must hold aloft a flaming ideal. And if others speak of the World and Humanity we say the Fatherland - and only the Fatherland!

In the centuries-long war between the forces of radical Islam and the West, President Obama appears to back the barbarians.

 

Double Your Vote

Herein I present six (count 'em: six) blog widgets using my patented "Double Your Vote" theme. Each points to the respective GOP challenger in a key House race. If you don't have a blog yourself, please pass the link on to friends who do. Needless to say, if you have a blog -- get to steppin'.

And, either way, if you can spare a couple of bucks, click on the links and donate.

MD-01

DOUBLE YOUR VOTE: ELECT HARRIS
FIRE KRATOVIL & PELOSI


MS-01

DOUBLE YOUR VOTE: ELECT ALAN NUNNELEE
FIRE TRAVIS CHILDERS AND NANCY PELOSI


NM-02

DOUBLE YOUR VOTE: ELECT PEARCE
FIRE TEAGUE & PELOSI


NH-01

DOUBLE YOUR VOTE: ELECT GUINTA
FIRE PELOSI & SHEA-PORTER


OH-01

DOUBLE YOUR VOTE: ELECT CHABOT
FIRE NANCY PELOSI AND STEVE DRIEHAUS


OH-15

DOUBLE YOUR VOTE: ELECT STIVERS
FIRE PELOSI & KILROY


Glenfiddich 50

Mr. Chopper Dude:

Glenfiddich 50 Year Old


Time to add another bottle to your list of "stuff I'd love to drink if I had the money."

Glenfiddich 50 Year Old ($16,000) is an incredibly expensive, incredibly rare, and, presumably, an incredibly tasty whisky. Part of only the second-ever vatting of the half-century Glenfiddich — the first was done for founder William Grant's children — this unique spirit has spent the last 50 years in two oak casks, which were then combined and aged for another six months in an American oak barrel to create the well-balanced, pleasantly sweet flavor.

Daddy like.


 

Larwyn's Linx: ObamaCare's $3.9B Tax Hike on the Middle Class

Have a great link you'd like me to review? Drop me an email. You can also install a Larwyn's Linx blog widget.

Nation

ObamaCare's $3.9B Tax Hike on the Middle Class: RWN
Tea Party gets valuable advice from... Axelrod: PJM
Mitt Romney-Sarah Palin in 2012? You betcha!: Herald

Alinsky's Avenging Angels: Tea Party Saboteurs: Malkin
Party like it's 1773: Crittenden
Will Democrats Get Trounced in the Midterms?: Greenroom

White-only Racist Rednecks gather in Boston: GrandRants
Lindsey 'Goober' Graham: Hey, let’s hike gas taxes!: Hot Air
Ye Shall Know Me by the Friends I Keep: Dewey

Economy

Could Amnesty Solve our Entitlement Woes? Eh, Hell No.: RWN
Bernanke: I Tricked You -- and Now You're Screwed: Denninger
Obama's Back-Alley Health Care: RWN

Another Obama Favor for Union Bosses: WashExam
Greenlining: The Little Bank That Fought Back: WashExam
Unemployment for Blacks in Michigan: 26% and Rising: BlogProf

Climate & Energy

More green genocide? Short-sighted ban endangers food supply: WashExam
Comcast Decision May Thwart EPA CO2 Finding?: PJM
Climategate: the official whitewash continues: PJM

Media

RED ALERT – New York Times About to Put American Troops in Deadly Peril: BigJournalism
Photo released of GOP officials beaten after SRLC event: GWP
Citizen-Journalist Engages WaPo Ombudsman Over ‘N-Word’ Story, Ombudsman Loses: BigJournalism

Yes, Huffington Post Hates the Troops: Jawa
Jason Levin’s Political Manifesto Uncovered: Legalized Heroin, Polygamy, and Torture Among Other Things: Verum Serum
Obama Lied, More Jobs Died Today: Riehl

Video: Union Thugs Crash Tea Party: Moonbattery
Pruning the Garden State: AmCon

World

Let Them Meet Steel: Totten
The Iranian Bomb: Within a Month?: Ledeen
The Obama Grovel Index: DocBulldog

The Systematic Dismantling of a Secure America: AT
Greece Circles the Bowl: Denninger

What if the Palestinians don't want a state?: Volokh
Oh, Geez: Nice Logo: GWP
New Israel Fund: Supporting Israel’s Destruction, One NGO at a Time?: PJM

SciTech

Life Inside The Googleplex Is Kinda Creepy: Insider
Obamunist Mediocrity Imposed on Space Program: RWN

Cornucopia

The Big Chill Hil: MOTUS
Harden the F*** Up: Ronnie Johns (Language Warning)
Leave Her Airbrush Alone!: iOTW

Images: iOwnTheWorld.
Today's Larwyn's Linx Sponsored By: Nice Deb.


Wednesday, April 14, 2010

One Chart to Rule Them All

Before you click to enbiggen the chart (below), please consider this Los Angeles Times article by Ronald Brownstein, which appeared in print on page A-5 of the May 31st, 1999 morning edition.

"It’s one of the hidden success stories of the Clinton era. In the great housing boom of the 1990s, black and Latino homeownership has surged to the highest level ever recorded. The number of African Americans owning their own home is now increasing nearly three times as fast as the number of whites; the number of Latino homeowners is growing nearly five times as fast as that of whites.

These numbers are dramatic enough to deserve more detail. When President Clinton took office in 1993, 42% of African Americans and 39% of Latinos owned their own home. By this spring, those figures had jumped to 46.9% of blacks and 46.2% of Latinos.

That’s a lot of new picket fences. Since 1994, when the numbers really took off, the number of black and Latino homeowners has increased by 2 million. In all, the minority homeownership rate is on track to increase more in the 1990s than in any decade this century except the 1940s, when minorities joined in the wartime surge out of the Depression.

This trend is good news on many fronts. Homeownership stabilizes neighborhoods and even families. Housing scholar William C. Apgar, now an assistant secretary of Housing and Urban Development, says that research shows homeowners are more likely than renters to participate in their community. The children of homeowners even tend to perform better in school. Most significantly, increased homeownership allows minority families, who have accumulated far less wealth than whites, to amass assets and transmit them to future generations.

What explains the surge? The answer starts with the economy. Historically low rates of minority unemployment have created a larger pool of qualified buyers. And the lowest interest rates in years have made homes more affordable for white and minority buyers alike.

But the economy isn’t the whole story. As HUD Secretary Andrew Cuomo says: “There have been points in the past when the economy has done well but minority homeownership has not increased proportionally.” Case in point: Despite generally good times in the 1980s, homeownership among blacks and Latinos actually declined slightly, while rising slightly among whites.

All of this suggests that Clinton’s efforts to increase minority access to loans and capital also have spurred this decade’s gains. Under Clinton, bank regulators have breathed the first real life into enforcement of the Community Reinvestment Act, a 20-year-old statute meant to combat “redlining” by requiring banks to serve their low-income communities. The administration also has sent a clear message by stiffening enforcement of the fair housing and fair lending laws. The bottom line: Between 1993 and 1997, home loans grew by 72% to blacks and by 45% to Latinos, far faster than the total growth rate.

Lenders also have opened the door wider to minorities because of new initiatives at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac–the giant federally chartered corporations that play critical, if obscure, roles in the home finance system. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac buy mortgages from lenders and bundle them into securities; that provides lenders the funds to lend more.

In 1992, Congress mandated that Fannie and Freddie increase their purchases of mortgages for low-income and medium-income borrowers. Operating under that requirement, Fannie Mae, in particular, has been aggressive and creative in stimulating minority gains. It has aimed extensive advertising campaigns at minorities that explain how to buy a home and opened three dozen local offices to encourage lenders to serve these markets. Most importantly, Fannie Mae has agreed to buy more loans with very low down payments–or with mortgage payments that represent an unusually high percentage of a buyer’s income. That’s made banks willing to lend to lower-income families they once might have rejected.

But for all that progress, the black and Latino homeownership rates, at about 46%, still significantly trail the white rate, which is nearing 73%. Much of that difference represents structural social disparities–in education levels, wealth and the percentage of single-parent families–that will only change slowly. Still, Apgar says, HUD’s analysis suggests there are enough qualified buyers to move the minority homeownership rate into the mid-50% range. [Ed: brilliant.]

...But with discrimination in the banking system not yet eradicated, maintaining the momentum of the 1990s will also require a continuing nudge from Washington. One key is to defend the Community Reinvestment Act, which the Senate shortsightedly voted to retrench recently. Clinton has threatened a veto if the House concurs.

The top priority may be to ask more of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The two companies are now required to devote 42% of their portfolios to loans for low- and moderate-income borrowers; HUD, which has the authority to set the targets, is poised to propose an increase this summer... Barry Zigas, who heads Fannie Mae’s low-income efforts, is undoubtedly correct when he argues, “There is obviously a limit beyond which [we] can’t push [the banks] to produce.” But with the housing market still sizzling, minority unemployment down and Fannie Mae enjoying record profits (over $3.4 billion last year), it doesn’t appear that the limit has been reached.

The breathless mainstream media and the race-obsessed Democrat Party hyped the kind of no-documentation, loosely underwritten loan that formed the core of the housing crisis.

In July of 2009, according to The New York Times, Andrew Cuomo's Department of Housing and Urban Development mandated that half of all loans purchased by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were to have originated with low- and moderate-income borrowers. In 1998, 44% of all Fannie loans had already met those criteria.

Consider the chart in that context.

On the way: more central planning, more social engineering, more Democrat-inspired disasters, but this time with your health care, not just your home.


Another Hockey Stick Heard From: Now It's Oil Prices

FMX Connect, via Zero Hedge (PDF), publishes the critical digest of prices for energy traders. Today's edition spotlights the wonderful stewardship of the economy by the Democrats. Plus their willingness to explore new energy sources, so long as they're not oil, natural gas, coal or nuclear.

Prices had been rising for months on a combination of higher equities, a periodically weaker dollar and the vague assumption that an economic recovery was both coming and would be capable of lifting oil demand. Up until now, though, we have seen very little reason to believe that that demand had arrived or would arrive soon. That seems to have been the basis for selling over the previous five days. Inventories are high and demand had not yet reached high enough levels to eat into them.

But the selling we had for five days, based on high inventories and insufficient demand, did not build up enough momentum to generate a serious thrust lower. This week’s report – while it still fails on all the really major, long-term tests for supply and demand – has given prices just enough fundamental support to kick the seasonal tendency for higher prices back into gear. As a result, it now looks like the seasonal may have found just enough fundamental buying to replace the flagging interest coming from equities and currencies to carry prices higher over the next few weeks.

Oh, goodie. Higher oil prices.

All part of the Dems' masterful Cloward-Piven implementation plan.


Study: Federal regulations cost Americans $1.2 trillion annually

The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) will release a study tomorrow -- on Tax Day, fittingly -- that calculates just how out of control our authoritarian, centralized federal government has become. CEI calls the "10,000 Commandments of Federal Regulation" a crushing, hidden tax.

Worse still, under the current Democrat leadership, the federal government is poised to become even bigger, more unionized, less accountable and tougher to fire when it fails to deliver. Which is often.

Federal regulations cost a whopping $1.187 trillion last year in compliance burdens on Americans. That’s the finding of a new report, Ten Thousand Commandments: An Annual Snapshot of the Federal Regulatory State, from the Competitive Enterprise Institute that examines the costs imposed by federal regulations.

...The costs of federal regulations often exceed the benefits, yet receive little official scrutiny from Congress. The report urges Congress to step up and take responsibility as lawmakers to review and roll back economically harmful regulations. “Rolling back regulations would constitute the deregulatory stimulus that the U.S. economy needs,” said Crews... Among the report’s findings:

3,503 new regulations took effect last year. The burden of government is heavier than ever.
• How much does government cost? Government is spending $3.518 trillion of our money and imposing another $1.187 trillion dollars in the form of regulatory compliance costs.
• How much of our economic output should be eaten by regulatory costs? Regulatory costs now absorb 8.3 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product.
• What's the federal government's total share of the economy? Regulations + spending combined puts the federal government's share of the economy at over 30 percent.
• Which do you think costs us more: individual income tax or regulations? Regulations cost more than the income tax!
• New rules that cost at least $100 million increased by 13 percent between 2007 and 2008.

The report urges reforms to make the regulatory costs more transparent and accountable to the people, including annual “report cards” on regulatory costs and benefits, and congressional votes on significant agency rules before they become binding.

Not to mention implementation of The Fair Tax, a pro-growth national sales tax that would supercharge the economy and liberate private enterprise.

Which is why Democrats oppose it.

Consider: regulations cost the real economy -- the private sector -- $1.2 trillion that would otherwise be spent on hiring, innovation, research, investment, capital equipment, and the like.

But please don't tell Paul "Nikita" Krugman. He's not aware that there's an entire country west of Battery Park.


Hat tip: W

Unhinged reporter for McClatchy (but I repeat myself) claims GOP is 'unified by hatred of Obama'

Shockingly, one of McClatchy's professional dimwits keeps banging the race card drum, given his complete inability to rationally debate policy positions. Like whether one political party is ignoring the Constitution, for example.

Thought experiment: imagine the headline, circa 2002, that reads Unified by hatred of Bush, Moonbats seek challenger.

I'll leave you with this. The stock chart of McClatchy (MNI).

Nice work, pro journalists!

Memo to the Sharpton League of Hatemongers: we hate your policies. Not because of your race. Because of your stupidity. We hate Marxism. And Marxism is the doctrine of the stupid.


Hat tip: @McClatchyWatch.

Holy Patch Tuesday, Batman!

Chopper Man writes:

Okay – so usually there’s a heads up of some kind if a Microsoft security patch cycle is particularly worrisome... but this one takes the cake. Over the top. Here’s the official MS-approved release explanation:

Today, as part of its routine monthly security update cycle, Microsoft is releasing 11 security bulletins to address 25 vulnerabilities: five rated Critical, five rated Important and one rated Moderate. This month's release affects Windows, Microsoft Office, and Microsoft Exchange. Additionally, the Malicious Software Removal Tool (MSRT) was updated to include Win32/Magania.

Microsoft recommends that customers deploy all security updates as soon as possible. However, Microsoft's guidance on deployment priority is that customers should consider MS10-019, MS10-026, and MS10-027 as the top priority bulletins for April.

This month’s patch cycle is so complex, Microsoft actually released a graphic to help explain this month’s patch cycle:


Comforting.