Author: Tickler
Would the Last Honest Reporter Please Turn On the Lights?
In a piece entitled “Would the Last Honest Reporter Please Turn On the Lights?” columnist and novelist Orson Scott Card chastises members of the liberal media for failing to report on the sources of the financial crisis we’re suffering through right now…
This housing crisis didn’t come out of nowhere. It was not a vague emanation of the evil Bush administration.
It was a direct result of the political decision, back in the late 1990s, to loosen the rules of lending so that home loans would be more accessible to poor people. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were authorized to approve risky loans.
What is a risky loan? It’s a loan that the recipient is likely not to be able to repay.
The goal of this rule change was to help the poor – which especially would help members of minority groups. But how does it help these people to give them a loan that they can’t repay? They get into a house, yes, but when they can’t make the payments, they lose the house – along with their credit rating.
They end up worse off than before.
This was completely foreseeable and in fact many people did foresee it. One political party, in Congress and in the executive branch, tried repeatedly to tighten up the rules. The other party blocked every such attempt and tried to loosen them.
Gavin Newsom Marries Two Women on First-Grader Field Trip
The money’s flying on both sides of the Marriage Protection proposition
While the No on 8 side has gotten big donations from Hollywood luminaries like Brad Pitt, Steven Spielberg and Knight, the Yes on 8 side has a media star, too, and not an expected one: San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom.
Mining snippets of an enthusiastic Newsom speech where he proclaims, “this door’s wide open now” for gay marriage, “whether you like it or not,” the Yes on 8 campaign has turned him into a figurehead of TV and radio ads that are “picture perfect” for their audience, said David McCuan, a Sonoma State University political science professor who specializes in California ballot initiatives. The Newsom spots have been such a good foil for the Yes on 8 campaign that opponents may be forced to raise even more money to counter them, McCuan said.
Newsom was in the headlines again over the weekend, as conservative groups pointed out that a San Francisco first-grade class went on a field trip from school because their teacher was marrying another woman at City Hall — a ceremony officiated by the mayor. The class didn’t attend the actual ceremony, but waited outside on the steps of City Hall to congratulate their teacher.
I like to call that indoctrination and frankly child-abuse.
California, vote YES on proposition 8. Yes on 8, Yes on 8.
Tickler’s Letter to Thomas Friedman
I sent a note to Thomas Friedman today, about the protectionist position Obama is taking on jobs, just to win the votes of down-and-out lower middle class families. He’s a wily and sinister candidate, but certainly a thoroughly say-anything-to-get-a-vote politician.
Mr. Friedman,
I’ve been enjoying your book The World Is Flat for the many points of data and interviews you conducted with the various organizations. I haven’t appreciated your pot shots at George Bush and the republicans as much. As you must know, with so much knowledge of the world and things, that both parties share the blame for what’s wrong with America and why our lead is dwindling.
One thing you point out, and I wholeheartedly agree with, is that we cannot be protectionist when it comes to non-think jobs. However, the candidate you’re likely voting for, Obama, is campaigning on a protectionist platform and has made more comments about penalizing companies for off-shoring than anyone this election season. He’s appealing to the lower-middle class masses just to get elected and it’s dishonest and disingenuous.
I admit to avoiding the New York Times, and in keeping with that have not read your regular columns, but as one on the left who I know understands the challenges we have, it would be nice to have you do the right thing and come out in writing about Obama’s stance and it’s dangerous isolationist campaign-season air.
Tickler
I hope Friedman loves this country more than he can tolerate Obama blowing smoke about jobs that have long gone away, and will never come back.
We need to build up thinking jobs in this country. We need to build up managers and orchestrators and leaders in this country. Allentown and Detroit as they were are gone and we need to make the changes in the education system and structure of business in this country to build world business leaders of Americans or we’ll have to watch China and others as they pass us by.
Ayers-Style: Anti-Capitalist Education Reform
A Manhattan Institute Fellow, Sol Stern, has written a piece about William Ayers and his “education reform” really means to the American education system…
I’ve studied Mr. Ayers’s work for years and read most of his books. His hatred of America is as virulent as when he planted a bomb at the Pentagon. And this hatred informs his educational “reform” efforts. Of course, Mr. Obama isn’t going to appoint him to run the education department. But the media mainstreaming of a figure like Mr. Ayers could have terrible consequences for the country’s politics and public schools…
Mr. Ayers was hired by the Chicago public schools to train teachers, and played a leading role in the $160 million Annenberg Challenge grant that distributed funds to a host of so-called school-reform projects, including some social-justice themed schools and schools organized by Acorn. Barack Obama became the first chairman of the board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge organization in 1995…
In fact, as one of the leaders of a movement for bringing radical social-justice teaching into our public school classrooms, Mr. Ayers is not a school reformer. He is a school destroyer.
He still hopes for a revolutionary upheaval that will finally bring down American capitalism and imperialism, but this time around Mr. Ayers sows the seeds of resistance and rebellion in America’s future teachers. Thus, education students signing up for a course Mr. Ayers teaches at UIC, “On Urban Education,” can read these exhortations from the course description: “Homelessness, crime, racism, oppression — we have the resources and knowledge to fight and overcome these things. We need to look beyond our isolated situations, to define our problems globally. We cannot be child advocates . . . in Chicago or New York and ignore the web that links us with the children of India or Palestine.”
This kind of unrepentant terrorist needs to be ejected from the education system before he causes major damage.
In the world of the Ed schools, Mr. Ayers’s movement has established a sizeable beachhead — witness his election earlier this year as vice president for curriculum of the American Education Research Association, the nation’s largest organization of education professors and researchers.
If Barack Obama wins on Nov. 4, the “guy in the neighborhood” is not likely to get an invitation to the Lincoln bedroom. But with the Democrats controlling all three branches of government, there’s a real danger that Mr. Ayers’s social-justice movement in the schools will get even more room to maneuver and grow.
Horrifying.
“Just Bad Luck? All of Obama’s People Hate America…”
Glenn Beck’s got a hilarious piece on the bad luck Obama’s had in being surrounded by those who hate, or at the very least aren’t proud of America.
Then Barack is like, “Hey, I want to be a state senator. Where should I have it? I mean, I could launch it from a park, you know, I could go to like a cool podium some place, maybe I can go to Pizza Hut. Where could I possibly — and somebody says, hey, I know, you can go do it at my house. And he’s like, really? Now, you would think to yourself, well, that’s lucky. And I’m sure that’s what Barack Obama was thinking, “I don’t know if I have a place to do it, I don’t know if I can get a park and a podium, I don’t know if I can get into Pizza Hut and we’ll have room for all the cameras. And this guy seems to have a big house. I mean, I don’t know him, we live in the same neighborhood but we don’t really talk.” Okay, so he launches at his house, and it’s this beautiful house. Turns out — ready for this one? Turns out the guy is a home grown terrorist.
Obama Votes Present on Fannie/Freddie
Again, the WSJ is on the ball today…
If Sen. Obama were truly looking for a kind of deregulation that might be responsible for the current financial crisis, he need only look back to 1998, when the Clinton administration ruled that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac could satisfy their affordable housing obligations by purchasing subprime mortgages. This ultimately made it possible for Fannie and Freddie to add a trillion dollars in junk loans to their balance sheets. This led to their own collapse, and to the development of a market in these mortgages that is the source of the financial crisis we are wrestling with today.
Finally, on the matter of deregulation and the financial crisis, Sen. Obama should consider his own complicity in the failure of Congress to adopt legislation that might have prevented the subprime meltdown.
In the summer of 2005, a bill emerged from the Senate Banking Committee that considerably tightened regulations on Fannie and Freddie, including controls over their capital and their ability to hold portfolios of mortgages or mortgage-backed securities. All the Republicans voted for the bill in committee; all the Democrats voted against it. To get the bill to a vote in the Senate, a few Democratic votes were necessary to limit debate. This was a time for the leadership Sen. Obama says he can offer, but neither he nor any other Democrat stepped forward.
Instead, by his own account, Mr. Obama wrote a letter to the Treasury Secretary, allegedly putting himself on record that subprime loans were dangerous and had to be dealt with. This is revealing; if true, it indicates Sen. Obama knew there was a problem with subprime lending — but was unwilling to confront his own party by pressing for legislation to control it. As a demonstration of character and leadership capacity, it bears a strong resemblance to something else in Sen. Obama’s past: voting present.
Why Do Our Taxes Go To ACORN?
You might ask, as I did when I found out the Democrat shell company ACORN is federally funded, why this is the case. A Wall Street Journal piece today lays out some detail we didn’t know, and now we feel like being militant ourselves.
“But the organization’s real genius is getting American taxpayers to foot the bill. According to a 2006 report from the Employment Policies Institute (EPI), Acorn has been on the federal take since 1977. For instance, Acorn’s American Institute for Social Justice claimed $240,000 in tax money between fiscal years 2002 and 2003. Its American Environmental Justice Project received 100% of its revenue from government grants in the same years. EPI estimates the Acorn Housing Corporation alone received some $16 million in federal dollars from 1997-2007. Only recently, Democrats tried and failed to stuff an “affordable housing” provision into the $700 billion bank rescue package that would have let politicians give even more to Acorn.
All this money gives Acorn the ability to pursue its other great hobby: electing liberals. Acorn is spending $16 million this year to register new Democrats and is already boasting it has put 1.3 million new voters on the rolls. The big question is how many of these registrations are real.”