What Liberals ‘Helping’ The Poor REALLY Looks Like (Exactly Like A Slum).

Liberals – with the help of the most dishonest media since Joseph Goebbels’ Ministry of Propaganda in the good old Nazi days or Joseph Stalin’s TASS in Moscow’s heyday – have convinced most ignorant people (i.e., the majority of the American people) that they are the ones who care about the poor.

Bullcrap.

They’ll tell you that unless you believe in their socialism you’re not a real Christian.  Even as they demand that art that puts the cross of Christ in a jar of urine be publicly funded and even as they openly attack religion on virtually every level of culture.

Again, bullcrap.

Obama sure didn’t give a flying damn about the poor before he decided to break his promise and run for president after saying he wouldn’t.  Because prior to that, he didn’t give the poor butkus.  And as hard as it is to be more cynical and selfish and greedy than Barack and Michelle Obama, Joe Biden actually managed to pull it off.  Obama’s less than one percent charitable giving – you know, with his OWN money rather than forcing other people to “give” – looks pretty damn good compared to Joe Biden’s less than one-eighth of one percent.

How do Democrats get away with demonizing Republicans when there are ten demons in them?  It’s easy: they are as dishonest and as slanderous as they are hypocritical.  So Mitt Romney – who was actually incredibly generous with his own money – was slandered by the media propaganda as being greedy while Barack Obama who actually IS greedy was eulogized as somebody who care’s deeply about these people he didn’t give a penny to when it mattered.

That’s why it was so easy for the party of FDR, of JFK, for 2000 Democrat candidate Al Gore and for 2004 Democrat candidate John Kerry to demonize Mitt Romney because he was rich just like they all were.  When you combine the flagrant dishonesty of the Democrat Party and the flagrant propaganda of the leftwing elite media, you can get away with pretty much anything.

Michelle Malkin in her excellent book “Culture of Corruption” documented that Valerie Jarrett (Obama’s top adviser was a ruthless liberal slumlord in Chicago before she became a liberal saint in Washington.

That’s right.  A slumlord.

But the Chicago Way is all the rave now.  Which is why liberal psycho Major Bloomberg took the trick with him to New York:

How in NYC the Homeless Pay $3,000/Month to Live in Tenements
Posted on February 12, 2013

I read a lot of news every day.  It’s become my life and my passion.  Rarely do I come across a story of greed and corruption so absurd that I can’t believe my own eyes as they scroll the page.  This is one of those stories.

This takes the concept of slumlord to an entirely new level.  As New York City struggles to find shelter for its increasingly large homeless population, some landlords are paying off their rent-stabilized tenants in order to overcharge the city on rentals for the homeless.  In some cases, the rent ends up being as high as $3,000 a month for a tiny room without a kitchen or a bathroom.  Yep, you read that correctly.  So next time you wonder why you are paying so much money for your little box in the sky, you can thank America’s growing slumlord industry.  Prepare your jaw to remain open for the next couple of minutes.

From the New York Times:

The city’s Department of Homeless Services pays many times the amount the rooms would usually rent for — spending over $3,000 a month for each threadbare room without a bathroom or kitchen — because of an acute shortage in shelters for homeless men and women.

Indeed, the amount the city pays — roughly half that amount goes to the landlord, while the other half pays for security and social services for homeless tenants — has encouraged Mr. Lapes to switch business models and become a major private operator of homeless shelters. He is by most measures the city’s largest and owns or leases about 20 of the 231 shelters citywide. Most of the other shelters and residences are run by the city or by nonprofit agencies, but his operation is profit-making, prompting criticism from advocates for the homeless and elected officials.

The fact that these modest living spaces have such high rents opens a window on a peculiarity of the city’s overall homeless policy. That policy, which was put in place in response to court settlements in 1979 and 2008, requires the city, under threat of sizable fines, to find a roof immediately for every homeless person. It has given landlords willing to house the homeless leverage to dictate rental prices and other terms.

With the number of homeless people rising to 30-year record levels — over 47,216 people as of early this month, 20,000 of them children — the city has struggled to find landlords willing to accommodate a population that includes people with mental health and substance abuse problems.

Wait a minute. The number of homeless is at a 30 year high?  How could this be in the booming economic recovery we’ve got going?

Joyce Colon, a resident there who entered the homeless system in December, said she was shocked by the violence and prostitution in the building.

“For $3,000 I could have gotten an apartment, a down payment and a security deposit and some furniture,” Ms. Colon, 49, said. “The landlord is getting $3,000 and I’m getting nothing.”

Patrick Markee, a senior policy analyst for the Coalition for the Homeless, blamed the Bloomberg administration for the continuing use of private landlords to house the homeless, citing a policy not to give the homeless priority for public housing projects and Section 8 vouchers because of long waiting lists.

Of course Bloomberg has his little paws in this somehow.  Perhaps he should’ve thought about this instead of spending his time banning large sodas.

“The crisis that’s causing the city to open so many new shelters is mostly of the mayor’s own making,” he said. “Instead of moving families out of shelters and into permanent housing, as previous mayors did, the city is now paying millions to landlords with a checkered past of harassing low-income tenants and failing to address hazardous conditions.”

Welcome to the recovery.

Full article here.

In Liberty, Mike

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“We need to help those poor, poor people,” liberals say.

Because just like everybody else, the poor have way to much money for liberals to be happy unless they can steal it.

I’m a conservative, which means I don’t like slums.  And I sure don’t like the government creating them the way they’ve created Cabrini-Green and so many other thousands of hellholes.  Liberals love them and keep creating more and more and more of them and they get filthy rich doing it.  Because the more ignorant and the more oppressed and the more poverty-crushed and the more welfare-dependent and the more entitlement-demanding these desperate people are, the more they will vote for the people who are keeping them ignorant and oppressed and poor.

The fact of the matter is that conservatives are signficantly more generous with their own money and time than are liberals.

But the wolves have convinced the sheep that the sheepdogs are out to get them.  And now the sheepdogs are largely out of the wolves’ way.

P.S. Obama is nominating Penny Pritzker for Commerce Secretary – who happens to be the SAME Penny Pritzker who was at the EPICENTER of the sub-prime loan crisis that led to our housing collapse in 2008.  This same Chicago billionaire Penny Pritzker paid out a half million dollars in penalties (read “bribe money”) to the government to avoid being criminally charged like the common criminal Chicago thug she in fact is.  If I were a conspiracy theoriest, I would assume that Democrats literally intentionally created the 2008 collapse in order to take control of the government so they could REALLY destroy America from within the system.

P.P.S. Obama is a hypocrite who keeps showing the abject hypocrsiy of liberalism with his pick of Jack Lew to run the Treasury Department.  Remember how being rich and having investments in the Cayman Islands was really, really bad?  Well, that’s only true if the Cayman Island account holder happens to be a Republican; it’s FINE for Democrats.  But let’s also not forget that Jack Lew was actually heading up the unit at Citibank that was making huge profits betting that the Community Reinvestment Act-created housing bubble would colllapse and thus profiteering off of poor people.  And then there’s the fact that this turd accepted a nearly one million dollar “bonus” days before Citibank took BILLIONS in government bailout money.  Which is to say that Obama’s Treasury Secretary pick personally profitted from poor people being forced out of their homes into … slums.

I’ll leave it to the reader to decide whether Obama’s present pick for Treasury Secretary is better than the last one – who was a certified tax cheat being given the job to make sure that conservatives and Republicans paid “their fair share” of the taxes HE didn’t pay.

Biden: ‘We Misread the Economy’ – And it’s all the Republicans’ Fault

Some distant day, many scientists believe, the earth will be devoid of human life due to some cosmic catastrophe or – ultimately – due to our depleted sun transforming into a red giant. The truly good news about such an otherwise bleak future is that the Obama administration will presumably no longer be able to blame Republicans for the economy that they “inherited.”

Biden: We ‘Misread the Economy’

July 05, 2009

Big admission from Vice President Joe Biden today.

“The truth is, we and everyone else misread the economy,” Biden told me during our exclusive “This Week” interview in Iraq.

Biden acknowledged administration officials were too optimistic earlier this year when they predicted the unemployment rate would peak at 8 percent as part of their effort to sell the stimulus package. The national unemployment rate has ballooned to 9.5 percent in June — the worst in 26 years.

“The truth is, there was a misreading of just how bad an economy we inherited,” said Biden, who is leading the administration’s effort to implement it’s $787 billion economic stimulus plan.

“Now, that doesn’t — I’m not — it’s now our responsibility. So the second question becomes, did the economic package we put in place, including the Recovery Act, is it the right package given the circumstances we’re in? And we believe it is the right package given the circumstances we’re in,” he told me.

The vice president argued more time is needed for the stimulus to work.

“We misread how bad the economy was, but we are now only about 120 days into the recovery package,” he said. “The truth of the matter was, no one anticipated, no one expected that that recovery package would in fact be in a position at this point of having to distribute the bulk of money.”

Biden didn’t rule out a second government stimulus package, but downplayed calls from Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman this week that a second stimulus will be needed.

I pressed the vice president, who is also leading the administration’s middle-class task force, on whether he’d rule out a second stimulus package.

“So, no second stimulus?” I asked.

“No, I didn’t say that,” Biden said, “I think it’s premature to make that judgment. This was set up to spend out over 18 months. There are going to be major programs that are going to take effect in September, $7.5 billion for broadband, new money for high-speed rail, the implementation of the grid — the new electric grid. And so this is just starting, the pace of the ball is now going to increase.”

Let’s not tell anyone that liberal Paul Krugman’s warning that we need a second stimulus is secret code for, “The first stimulus didn’t work worth squat, so let’s throw more money down the toilet.” And let’s for DAMN sure not tell anyone that unemployment benefits are going to be ending for workers starting in September and things will truly begin to increasingly suck after that as the unemployment rate grows like “the other ‘green shoot'” up and up and up.

Joe Biden says, “We and everyone else misjudged the economy.” No, Joe, it just aint so. Just you and your stupid liberal friends misjudged the economy. Don’t drag anyone else into your ignorance. Business professionals back in October predicted that Obama would literally bankrupt the country within three years if he was elected. Republicans (such as Paul Ryan) widely predicted the terribly flawed and terribly partisan pork-laden stimulus would fail – which is why only three out of 239 Republicans voted for it (and you can actually make that TWO out of 239, given that one of the three “Republicans” was RINO traitor-turned Democrat Arlen Specter).

Please don’t try to involve conservatives in your party’s stupidity, Joe. It aint right to lie.

The fact is, the porkulus is a complete failure that will cost the American people’s children’s children’s children $3.27 TRILLION and produce NOTHING.

And the fact is, when the Obama White House assured the American people that his stimulus would save the day, he assumed responsibility for the economy. It is HIS baby now, and he can’t keep racking up trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars in stupid and useless spending that will literally “bankrupt the country” and blame the fact that it isn’t working on Republicans.

It’s also rather funny that Vice President Biden would say “there was a misreading of just how bad an economy we inherited.” Please realize that for the last two years – and most definitely for the last eight or nine months – Barack Obama and Joe Biden have been comparing the present economy to the Great Depression. And now they are claiming they didn’t know how bad it was? What’s worse than the Great Depression? It is beyond ludicrous that these people can spend all this time demonizing the economy as the worst imaginable, and then argue they didn’t know that it was that bad.

Here are the opening two paragraphs from a February 13, 2009 Wall Street Journal piece that proves the lie of Biden’s remark:

President Barack Obama has turned fearmongering into an art form. He has repeatedly raised the specter of another Great Depression. First, he did so to win votes in the November election. He has done so again recently to sway congressional votes for his stimulus package.

In his remarks, every gloomy statistic on the economy becomes a harbinger of doom. As he tells it, today’s economy is the worst since the Great Depression. Without his Recovery and Reinvestment Act, he says, the economy will fall back into that abyss and may never recover.

How can Biden, Obama, or Democrats claim they didn’t realize how bad the economy really was after their previous constant fearmongering of the economy?

And the most famous and oft-used line, of course, is that Democrats keep claiming that they “inherited” the economy.

For the record, the Dow Industrial Average was at 11,986.04 on November 3, 2006 when Republicans were last in control of Congress. The unemployment rate for October of 2006 was at 4.4% when Republicans last ran things. As I write this, the Dow is at 8163.60 (on July 7), and the unemployment rate is at 9.5%, respectively. Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid have been running the House and the Senate for the last two years, and a fine job of running the country into the ground they’ve done.

Just why is it that Democrats can have control over both the House and Senate while an economy goes from prosperity to impoverishment, and still bear no responsibility for such a result? But that’s the narrative, and both the Democratic Party and the mainstream media stuck to their scripts as though the lines had been written by Shakespeare himself. Do you see the great shining lie that you’ve been told, and told over and over again?

Since the Democrats have been in charge on both branches of Congress, the housing market has collapsed, the banks have collapsed, Fannie and Freddie have collapsed, the auto industry has collapsed, and things have generally turned to the fecal matter that Pelosi’s and Reid’s head are full of, generally.

But, hey, let’s keep blaming everything on Republicans, anyway. When you have an electorate so completely ignorant that 57.4% of voters weren’t even able to identify which party controlled Congress, such demagogic claims work.

The ONLY thing that Democrats actually “inherited” was moron genes, a talent for demagoguery and deceit, and Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid (please see “moron genes”).

Now, the OTHER thing that Democrats love to claim was that Republicans are to blame for the economic disaster because Republican George Bush was President when it happened. And we are all to conveniently forget the fact that such reasoning should likewise make Democrat Barack Obama – who is president RIGHT NOW – is thereby responsible for the current state of the disaster that he nonetheless keeps blaming on Bush.

On what possible grounds are we to blame Bush? What is it that Bush did or didn’t do that created our disaster, and which Democrats who controlled both the House and the Senate are somehow absolved from having done or failed to do? Bush, we have been repeatedly lectured, failed to regulate the housing finance industry. And that lack of regulation caused the financial industry to self-destruct. Because the government is far better able to run things than the private sector, as we all know.

Well, wrong, wrong, and wrong, respectively. But let’s stick with the Democrats’ chief script item and consider just who truly failed to regulate the housing finance industry when it actually would have done some good, and who was really in bed with the worst players who created the crisis in the first place.

First of all, Bush TRIED to regulate the housing finance industry. And the ONLY thing that kept him from succeeding was DEMOCRATS.

Let’s go back to September 11, 2003, to see what the New York Times had to say. The article begins:

The Bush administration today recommended the most significant regulatory overhaul in the housing finance industry since the savings and loan crisis a decade ago.

Under the plan, disclosed at a Congressional hearing today, a new agency would be created within the Treasury Department to assume supervision of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored companies that are the two largest players in the mortgage lending industry.

The new agency would have the authority, which now rests with Congress, to set one of the two capital-reserve requirements for the companies. It would exercise authority over any new lines of business. And it would determine whether the two are adequately managing the risks of their ballooning portfolios.

And it ends:

Significant details must still be worked out before Congress can approve a bill. Among the groups denouncing the proposal today were the National Association of Home Builders and Congressional Democrats who fear that tighter regulation of the companies could sharply reduce their commitment to financing low-income and affordable housing.

”These two entities — Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — are not facing any kind of financial crisis,” said Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee. ”The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.”

Representative Melvin L. Watt, Democrat of North Carolina, agreed.

”I don’t see much other than a shell game going on here, moving something from one agency to another and in the process weakening the bargaining power of poorer families and their ability to get affordable housing,” Mr. Watt said.

Go back to the phrase at the beginning of the article: “the most significant regulatory overhaul in the housing finance industry since the savings and loan crisis a decade ago.” That would refer to the Clinton Administration’s aggressive push to put even more future poison in the fangs of the terrible Community Reinvestment Act.

Democrats blocked the passage of the Bush attempt to regulate the housing finance industry. They were the ones who killed regulation, not Republicans. They said there wasn’t a problem. They said that everything was just peachy dandy.

Democrats essentially say that the American people should blame George Bush for not being able to stop Democrats from being stupid, incompetent, and depraved vermin. But how can anyone stop Democrats from being stupid, incompetent, and depraved vermin? It would be like trying to stop the wind from blowing.

Bush and Republicans tried again to REGULATE the housing finance industry in 2005. John McCain wrote a passionate letter warning of an impending collapse of the housing finance industry and urging passage of the bill (specifically, the Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act of 2005, S. 190). But “without a single Democrat vote, the bill was doomed if brought to the floor for the critical 60-vote cloture.” Housing finance reform died a death by Democrat.

As late as JUST BEFORE THE WHOLE HOUSING FINANCE INDUSTRY COMPLETELY COLLAPSED, Democrat Barney Frank is on the record saying:

REP. BARNEY FRANK, D-MASS.: I think this is a case where Fannie and Freddie are fundamentally sound, that they are not in danger of going under. They’re not the best investments these days from the long-term standpoint going back. I think they are in good shape going forward.

You can watch Democrats fiddling with the economy just before it burned here (Youtube).

Even Bill Clinton – hardly a Republican source – blamed Democrats and NOT Republicans for refusing to regulate the housing finance industry:

Bill Clinton on Thursday told ABC’s Chris Cuomo that Democrats for years have been “resisting any efforts by Republicans in the Congress or by me when I was President to put some standards and tighten up a little on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.”

So the bottom line is this: Democrats blocked reform and regulation. They denied there was a problem. They continued to deny that there were any problems, and continued to block reform and regulation until right before the whole economy went down the drain.

And then they blamed the Republicans for the mess that they had created, refused to fix, and denied even existed in the first place.

What is utterly beautiful in its moronic perfection is that Barney Frank is now trying to do to the condominium market what he did to the housing market by forcing lenders to make risky loans all over again.

Okay, okay, so it was the Democrats who actually screwed up the universe, but you still have to admit that the Obama Administration inherited the problem. It clearly wasn’t in power when the fit hit the shan. Right?

Not quite so fast.

Technically, the Obama Administration is obviously not be to blame, having only began its hopefully very short life on January 20, 2009. But Barack Obama personally? You should probably know what a nasty piece of work your president was before he became your president.

Barack Obama as a Senator took more money from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac than anybody except his fellow scumbag and fellow Democrat Chris Dodd (who had direct oversight as Chairman of the Senate Banking Committee). Obama also took more money than disgraced and bankrupted Lehman Brothers than anyone but his fellow sleazeball and fellow Democrat Chris Dodd. Now, maybe you’re one of those people who believe that corrupt and soon-to-be-bankrupted organizations give buttloads of money to politicians just because they’re feeling generous. But people who actually live in the real world understand that Fannie, Freddie, and Lehman Brothers gave money to the politicians whom they believed would be best for their corporate asses and their corporate assets.

Barack Obama as candidate for president made Penny Pritzker – who was at the very EPICENTER of the subprime loan fiasco – his national finance chair. She paid a “fine” of $460 million dollars to basically buy her way out of prison for her part in the early beginnings of the collapse that would eventually extend to the entire economy. Penny Pritzker was to the stability of the housing finance industry on Wall Street what Freddie Krueger was to the dreams of teen agers on Elm Street; just what kind of Faustian deal do you believe the politician who took more money in less time from the worst players in the crisis than anyone bar none struck to have knife-gloved Penny Krueger open up her Rolodex full of demons?

Barack Obama as a private citizen was one of the ACORN lawyers who sued Citibank in 1994 and forced – FORCED – them to reduce their credit standards and make extremely housing mortgage loans to minorities who would subsequently prove unable to pay them. And the ACORN suit took advantage of the openings created by President Bill Clinton in the 1990s. The result of that lawsuit changed the housing finance industry forever afterward – and basically doomed it as soon as housing prices started to drop.

So as President Barack Obama may have “inherited” the crisis; but as a private citizen, as a Senator, and as a candidate for President, he was at the very center of the mess that created the crisis right up to his giant Dumbo ears.

And as Obama continues to blame his inability to handle the economy on what he “inherited,” let us not forget that it was Barack Obama who swore up and down that his Generational Theft Act of 2009 would fix the economy – NOT Republicans and NOT George Bush – and it was his economic plan that completely failed to produce the promised results.

It was Barack Obama who put his credibility behind a plan that his administration promised would hold unemployment down below 8% and it was Barack Obama who has presided over an unemployment rate that is now 9.5% and rising. The Congressional Budget Office predicted that unemployment would only have gone to 9% by 2010 had we done nothing at all. And nothing would have been a heckuva lot cheaper than $3.27 trillion. I, for one, assure you that I could have sent the economy crashing for a lot lower price tag that Barack Obama has charged you.

The unemployment rate in November – when Barack Obama was elected – was a Lilliputian (by comparison to the gigantic mess Obama has since made of the economy) 6.7%. It was 7.2% a few months later when his administration assured the American people that he could keep unemployment under 8% if his stimulus plan was passed. It is now, I should say again, at 9.5% – and it many experts expect it to be 11% by next summer.

Obama’s answer is still MORE colossal spending. The first stimulus – advertised as a $787 billion package but actually costing $3.27 trillion according to the Congressional Budget Office – is now said to have been too low. We need more porkulus, they tell us. A lot more. We need to borrow more massive debt and pile up more massive deficits that will crush our economy with staggering interest payments in the very near future and ultimately cause a complete collapse of our way of life. We need to nationalize our health care so it will be more like the $86 trillion-in-the-hole runaway freight train to destruction that Medicare is. And we need cap-and-trade legislation that will cap our productivity and trade our prosperity to ensure that our economy can never hope to be productive again.

Keep blaming Bush. Keep blaming Republicans. Keep blaming “failed conservative policies.” Blame ANYONE and ANYTHING but Barack Hussein Obama and the Democratic Party that is now in total control of everything.

Just let me shout in your face that by doing so you will help create an economy that will make the Great Depression look like prosperity when the policies that you so stupidly supported implode into staggering debt and even more staggering hyperinflation. And you and your children will starve shoeless in the cold while food riots and tax rebellions erupt all around you as your once great nation is reduced to banana republic status.

Obama’s “New New Deal” Will Redistribute Wealth Of Shrinking Economy

The last couple weeks may well be a harbinger of things to come, as the people Obama promised to tax heavily continue to pull out of the market.  On November 4, the Dow closed at 9,625; today, it was at 8,497.  That means that the market has lost nearly 12% of its value since Obama became President-elect.  Hardly a measure of confidence.

The market spoke rather clearly on November 5:

NEW YORK, Nov 5 (Reuters) - Wall Street hardly delivered a
rousing welcome to President-elect Barack Obama on Wednesday,
dropping by the largest margin on record for a day following a U.S.
presidential contest.

 The slide more than wiped out the previous day's advance, the
largest Election Day rally ever for U.S. stocks.

Now, this wasn’t at all unexpected.  On October 24, I wrote an article titled, “Investors Ready For Dramatic Sell-Off If Democrats Win.”  A few days before that, I wrote an article pointing out that “Actual Job Creators Favor McCain 4-1 Over Obama,” which – among other things – points out that “74 percent of the executives say they fear that an Obama presidency would be disastrous for the country.”

The people who invest, and create job opportunities, and build the economy, don’t want to have their wealth redistributed.  Would you want your wealth redistributed?

Democratic apologists point out that Obama promises on a meager jump in the top federal tax rates from 36% to 39%.  But that “insignificant” 3% comes right out of peoples’ profits.  It sounds a lot worse when the reality is understood: when businesses that had been making an 11% profit are now reduced to an 8% profit.  Or an 8% profit reduced to a 5% profit.  And Obama promises to increase capital gains taxes and several other taxes that will impact upon businesses and the investment climate that supports business.  How hard are job creators willing to work to experience a diminishing return on their time, labor, and risk?

Time Magazine – a publication that has gushed over Obama for months – has a new gushing cover:

It should frighten you.  FDR was no “moderate.”  He presided over a terrible time for the country, and – while he was a popular figure because of what he tried to do – his actual economic administration has been widely recognized by economists to have been a failure.  Studies have demonstrated that the average depression lasted only four years; but for some reason the Great Depression dragged on and on and on under FDR’s governance.  By 1938, after more than four years of FDR, the effects of the Depression were actually much worse than they had been when he first took office.

As an example of the new realizations regarding the 1930s, UCLA economists argue:

Two UCLA economists say they have figured out why the Great Depression dragged on for almost 15 years, and they blame a suspect previously thought to be beyond reproach: President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

After scrutinizing Roosevelt’s record for four years, Harold L. Cole and Lee E. Ohanian conclude in a new study that New Deal policies signed into law 71 years ago thwarted economic recovery for seven long years.

Even the common man’s sense has largely been that World War II had more to do with getting us out of the Depression than FDR’s New Deal.  It certainly did get men who had been standing in bread lines put to “work.”  And as the nation coalesced together and began to pour resources into building weapons, factories that had been idled came back on line, and innovation increased to match the technological development of our enemies.  And certainly, the fact that, when hostilities ended, the United States alone was not reduced to rubble had a great deal to do with helping our economy surge forward.

But by that thinking, anyone who criticized President Bush’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq is correct only insofar as we need an even BIGGER war.  For Obama to truly be like FDR, we need to have a devastating Depression that drags on for 12 years while incompetent liberals continue to tinker, and then we need slug it out in World War III against Russia and China.

So pardon me for looking at the “New New Deal” FDR-lookalike Barack Obama and shuddering down to the marrow of my bones.

We’re watching the market beginning to go down the slide.  It’s going to go down a lot more.  And fear over Barack Obama’s policies is going to have a lot to do with the lack of confidence that keeps investment from pouring back into the economy.

The picture is far more frightening than the story the media is telling: there are more than $700 trillion in derivatives in the global economy.  That’s far more than the total currencies of all the governments in the entire world.  As one writer puts it, “In other words, every dollar of insurance on bonds issued by some deadbeat governments and corporations is leveraged 200 times!”  We’ve got a time bomb waiting to explode.  And we put a lot of the people who created that time bomb in the first place in charge of fixing the mess they themselves created.  People like Obama’s National Finance Chair, Penny Pritzker, who was at the epicenter of the subprime loan scandal and once paid $460 million to stay out of jail.  People like Jim Johnson, Franklin Raines, and Jamie Gorelick, who pocketed over $300 million from Fannie and Freddie while juggling the books so they could get their bonuses.  People like Barney Frank, who claimed that nothing was wrong with Fannie and Freddie and the housing market they supervised, and repeatedly fought off President Bush’s efforts to regulate them at time when the crisis we are currently experiencing could have been averted.  People like Charles Schumer, who exemplified the sheer hypocrisy of the Democratic Party with his blaming others for what he himself did.  People like Joe Biden, whom two major studies said shared direct blame for the foreclosure disaster because of legislation he championed as the Senator from banking-capital Delaware.  And people like Barack Obama, who embraced more contributions from Fannie and Freddie – and from scandal-plagued finance institutions such as Lehman Brothers than anyone during his short time in the Senate.  Now all these people have been entrusted with fixing a mess of literally global proportions; a mess that they in large part created in the first place.

And Barack Obama wearing the “New New Deal” mantle of FDR’s Panama hat, glasses, and fancy cigarette is not going to make that time bomb go away.  In fact, it may be the very thing that brings the whole house of cards come crashing down.

Dems Blame Bush For Deregulation: Just Another Day Of Astounding Liberal Hypocrisy

So Sen. Charles Schumer is the latest partisan Democrat ideologue to take yet another wild roundhouse swing at the Bush Administration and Republicans over the housing finance market meltdown.  But in this case, it would have served Schumer to recognize that when you point a finger at someone else, there are three fingers pointing back at you.

Fox News briefly tells the story as follows:

Democratic Senator Charles Schumer of New York says a lack of regulation by the Bush administration is responsible for the current economic troubles. The New York Sun reports Schumer says, “Eight years of deregulatory zeal by the Bush administration, an attitude of ‘the market can do no wrong,’ have led us down a short path to economic recession.”

But Schumer fails to mention he has been a leading voice of deregulation. The Sun reports he championed the repeal in 1999 of the Glass-Steagall Act, the law which separated commercial and investment banking.

He also wrote an opinion piece for The Wall Street Journal in 2006 which warned about what he called “overzealous regulators” and opposed a bill in 2005 that would have transformed Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae from large investment funds into “conduits” that only bought mortgages, packaged them into securities and sold them on the market.

And whatever one wants to say about the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, it must be mentioned first that it was President William Jefferson Clinton who signed the 1999 law that repealed it.

The New York Sun goes into the real nitty-gritty detail over just what astounding hypocrites Democrats like Charles Schumer really are.

The article begins as follows (the whole thing is ever SO worth reading):

Pro-Deregulation Schumer Scores Bush for Lack of Regulation
By JOSEPH GOLDSTEIN, Staff Reporter of the Sun | September 22, 2008

As Senator Schumer attempts to blame Wall Street‘s recent economic upheavals on a lack of regulation by the Bush administration, he may have some inconvenient facts to confront.

Until the current credit crisis, Mr. Schumer had been a leading voice for deregulation: He has championed the repeal of a Great Depression-era law that prohibited commercial banks from underwriting securities; he has written an opinion piece calling for the Sarbanes-Oxley Act to be “re-examined,” and he has opposed a bill that sought to reduce taxpayer risk in the event of a housing market slowdown by requiring Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae to sell their entire investment portfolios of about $1.5 trillion worth of mortgage assets.

The New York Sun article continues:

A spokesman for Mr. Schumer did not respond yesterday to a request for comment.

Mr. Schumer’s opposition to regulation is also beginning to come under scrutiny for the first time.

“He is responsible as one of the leading senators in the banking committee for much of the problems that we’re facing today,” a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, Peter Wallison, a former general counsel to the Treasury Department under President Reagan, said of Mr. Schumer. “He failed to regulate where there was an opportunity to reduce the taxpayers’ liability.”

Too many people naively and frankly stupidly believe that the housing finance market meltdown is the Republicans’ fault because President Bush is in the White House and Republicans used to be in charge of Congress two years ago.  And this “They wanted to deregulate” lie is at the heart of that blame game. Republicans clearly do bear a share of the blame.  But this mess has Democrat written all over it, too.  Look at Joe Biden, Charles Schumer, Barney Frank – and yes, Barack Obama – along with a whole legion of Obama Democrats like Franklin Raines, Jim Johnson, and Jamie Gorelick who collectively took well over $300 million from Fannie Mae while cooking the books to do it.  And let us not forget Barack Obama’s National Finance Chair, Penny Pritzker, who was at the epicenter of the subprime scandal, and who paid $460 million dollars of her personal fortune to literally stay out of jail.

Barack Obama is second on the list of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac campaign money recipients only after fellow Democrat Chris Dodd (who has also been identified taking a sweetheart deal from scandelized Countrywide); and he is second on the list of Lehman Bros’ campaign money recipients only after fellow Democrat Hillary Clinton.  And Obama, of course, got a sweetheart housing deal of his own, from convicted sleazeball Tony Rezko.

It needs to be realized that the Bush administration twice tried to regulate the housing finance industry in 2003 and 2005 – and both times were stymied by determined Democratic opposition.  John McCain joined President Bush in both efforts that would have saved our financial market, and was one of the four Republican sponsors of the Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act of 2005.  In his statement supporting the 2005 bill, John McCain presciently foresaw the very disaster that has since overtaken the finance industry.   Democrats’ entrenched opposition to any reform that would have prevented people who could not qualify for a home loan from getting one anyway prevented both measures from succeeding.

Looking at Barack Obama’s personal exposure and the direct culpability of his closest advisers in the housing finance scandal, one thing is sure: voting for an Obama administration would be tantamount to giving the robbers the keys to the bank.

Financial Crisis: Obama Democrats Have Red Ink All Over Them

Whether Franklin Raines is an Obama adviser or not is a rather entertaining question.  He sure seemed to be one until not very long ago:

Raines was an Obama adviser on July 16, when The Washington Post reported:

“In the four years since he stepped down as Fannie Mae’s chief executive under the shadow of a $6.3 billion accounting scandal, Franklin D. Raines has been quietly constructing a new life for himself. He has shaved eight points off his golf handicap, taken a corner office in Steve Case’s D.C. conglomeration of finance, entertainment and health-care companies and more recently, taken calls from Barack Obama’s presidential campaign seeking his advice on mortgage and housing policy matters.”

And Raines was still an Obama adviser on August 28, when The Washington Post said:

In the current crisis, their biggest backers have been Democrats such as Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher J. Dodd (Conn.) and House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (Mass.). Two members of Mr. Obama’s political circle, James A. Johnson and Franklin D. Raines, are former chief executives of Fannie Mae.

In fact, Raines was still an Obama adviser as of September 18, when a Baltimore Sun blogger cited a Wikipedia article as follows:

“Franklin Delano Raines (born January 14, 1949 in Seattle, Washington) is the former chairman and chief executive officer of Fannie Mae who served as White House budget director under President Bill Clinton. He is currently employed by Barack Obama’s Presidential Campaign as an economic adviser.”

But that last sentence has been scrubbed from Wikipedia within the last two days, and all of a sudden Franklin Raines somehow isn’t an Obama adviser anymore.  It’s almost like when Barack Obama said of Jeremiah Wright, “I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother — a woman who helped raise me…”, until, you know, he denounced him.

But when Barack Obama denounces something, all mention of it as being in any way associated with him somehow gets purged – even if that relationship lasted 23 years.  Now when it comes to the McCain denunciation of Franklin Raines as an Obama adviser, The Washington Post faults McCain for relying on…the Washington Post.

McCain spokesman Brian Rogers noted that Obama didn’t contradict the claim when it first appeared in the Post (MORE THAN TWO MONTHS AGO!!!).  But that doesn’t seem to matter.  What matters is that Franklin Raines is black, and therefore McCain is a racist for connecting Obama and Raines.  Apparently, the card deck of Barack Obama, “new politician” of “hope” and “change,” contains a whole bunch of race cards.

But, try as he might to distance himself from his erstwhile adviser, what Barack Obama CAN’T do is deny that Franklin Raines is a DEMOCRAT.  A Democrat who dredges up all sorts of bad mojo for Democrats as they try to frantically scrub their hands of all the red ink and all the corruption that took place during Franklin Raines’ tenure at Fannie Mae.

It reminds us of the October 7, 2004 Los Angeles Times story that appeared titled, “Ex-Fannie Mae Accountant Says CEO Knew of Concerns“:

The former Fannie Mae accountant who raised questions about the mortgage giant’s bookkeeping said Wednesday that he took his concerns directly to Chief Executive Franklin Raines in 2002 and asked him to investigate.

The disclosure by Roger Barnes, who left Fannie Mae in October 2003, came as Raines and Chief Financial Officer Timothy Howard defended the company’s accounting and told Congress that regulators’ allegations of earnings manipulation represented an interpretation of complex rules.

At a House subcommittee hearing, Raines and Howard testified under oath in their first public appearance since news surfaced Sept. 22 about the allegations and a Securities and Exchange Commission inquiry into government-sponsored Fannie Mae. Lawmakers questioned them closely about an instance in 1998 in which accounting rules were said to have been deliberately violated so that top executives could collect full bonuses.

“This is a very serious allegation, and I deny that it occurred,” Raines testified.

The thing is, it DID occur, and much worse.  And it was discovered that Raines had manipulated accounting practices so that senior executives could make millions in bonuses:

WASHINGTON (AP) — Employees at mortgage giant Fannie Mae manipulated accounting so that executives could collect millions in bonuses as senior management deceived investors and stonewalled regulators at a company whose prestigious image was phony, a federal agency charged Tuesday.

The blistering report by the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, the product of an extensive three-year investigation, was issued as the government-sponsored company struggles to emerge from an $11 billion accounting scandal.

Earlier, a person familiar with the situation said that Fannie Mae was being fined between $300 million and $500 million for the alleged manipulation of accounting to facilitate executives’ bonuses, in a settlement with the housing oversight agency.

“The image of Fannie Mae as one of the lowest-risk and ‘best in class’ institutions was a facade,” James B. Lockhart, the acting director of OFHEO, said in a statement as the report was released. “Our examination found an environment where the ends justified the means. Senior management manipulated accounting, reaped maximum, undeserved bonuses, and prevented the rest of the world from knowing.”

The report also faulted Fannie Mae’s board of directors for failing to exercise its oversight responsibilities and failing to discover “a wide variety of unsafe and unsound practices” at the largest buyer and guarantor of home mortgages in the country.

The OFHEO review, involving nearly 8 million pages of documents, details what the agency calls an arrogant and unethical corporate culture. From 1998 to mid-2004, the smooth growth in profits and precisely-hit earnings targets each quarter reported by Fannie Mae were “illusions” deliberately created by senior management using faulty accounting, the report says.

The accounting manipulation tied to executives’ bonuses occurred from 1998 to 2004, according to the report, a much longer period than was previously known.

Lest any not know it, Franklin Raines was a Clinton appointee.

A Wikipedia article (we’ll see how soon it takes to purge it!) talking about the Clinton years is extremely informative in the current ruinous aftermath:

The Clinton Administration’s regulatory revisions [1] with an effective starting date of January 31, 1995 were credited with substantially increasing the number and aggregate amount of loans to small businesses and to low- and moderate-income borrowers for home loans. Part of the increase in home loans was due to increased efficiency and the genesis of lenders, like Countrywide, that do not mitigate loan risk with savings deposits as do traditional banks using the new subprime authorization. This is known as the secondary market for mortgage loans. The revisions allowed the securitization of CRA loans containing subprime mortgages. The first public securitization of CRA loans started in 1997 by Bear Stearns. [2] The number of CRA mortgage loans increased by 39 percent between 1993 and 1998, while other loans increased by only 17 percent. [3] [4]

Bill Clinton walks off the stage as the conquering hero in the mythical narrative of the liberal media, but IT WAS THESE VERY LOANS BY THESE VERY LENDERS THAT RESULTED IN THE DISASTER WE ARE NOW SUFFERING.

President Bush tried to reform Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the entire housing finance industry before it was too late:

New Agency Proposed to Oversee Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae

By STEPHEN LABATON
Published: September 11, 2003

The Bush administration today recommended the most significant regulatory overhaul in the housing finance industry since the savings and loan crisis a decade ago.

Under the plan, disclosed at a Congressional hearing today, a new agency would be created within the Treasury Department to assume supervision of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored companies that are the two largest players in the mortgage lending industry.

The new agency would have the authority, which now rests with Congress, to set one of the two capital-reserve requirements for the companies. It would exercise authority over any new lines of business. And it would determine whether the two are adequately managing the risks of their ballooning portfolios.

But his effort to reform the housing finance industry by reforming Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac was blocked – BY DEMOCRATS.

The same New York Times article cited above, dated September 11, 2003 (yet another 9/11 that Democrats caused, and Republicans took the blame for ) ends with these words:

Significant details must still be worked out before Congress can approve a bill. Among the groups denouncing the proposal today were the National Association of Home Builders and Congressional Democrats who fear that tighter regulation of the companies could sharply reduce their commitment to financing low-income and affordable housing.

”These two entities — Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — are not facing any kind of financial crisis,” said Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee. ”The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.”

Representative Melvin L. Watt, Democrat of North Carolina, agreed.

”I don’t see much other than a shell game going on here, moving something from one agency to another and in the process weakening the bargaining power of poorer families and their ability to get affordable housing,” Mr. Watt said.

Barney Frank – the same liberal doofus who said that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were fine and not facing any kind of financial crisis – is still around, and still in charge of the Financial Services Committee.

Mel Watts, the race-card playing liberal who opposed reform of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac on the grounds that it would prevent poor blacks from getting home loans, is also still around.

And though Barack Obama may be able to distance himself from Franklin Raines – however falsely – he can’t distance himself from another prominent “adviser” – Jim Johnson.  Johnson was briefly appointed to head Obama’s vice presidential selection committee until it was discovered that he had benefited from sweetheart Countrywide loans.  And Johnson was another Fannie Mae CEO who was Franklin Raines’ predecessor at Fannie Mae.  He joins a long list of Clinton Democrats who “served” at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and walked away with millions.  Jim Johnson also sits on the board at Goldman Sachs, a company that was also massively invested in subprime loans but managed to sell them short and preserve itself.

And Obama is personally up to his eyeballs in the housing finance collapse in other ways, as well.  Obama is second on the list of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac campaign money recipients only after fellow Democrat Chris Dodd; and he is second on the list of Lehman Bros’ campaign money recipients only after fellow Democrat Hillary Clinton.  Is it any wonder he would appoint Penny Pritzker – who was at the very epicenter of what would come to be the biggest financial scandal in American history, and who paid a $460 million fine to bribe her way out of jail – as his national campaign finance chair.  He also named Joe Biden as his Vice Presidential nominee, in spite of the fact that Biden championed the very bill that many experts and at least two studies attribute to creating the mess that caused hundreds of thousands of Americans to lose their homes and precipitated much of the ensuing financial market meltdown.

Now allow me to provide the contrast between Obama – who is tied by both party and by big money contributions to his political career – with John McCain.  The previously quoted Washington Post says:

This is not an easy one for the Illinois senator because of the companies’ close ties to his party. To be sure, both Republican and Democratic politicos have held well-paid positions in the two firms or have partaken of the tens of millions that they spend on lobbying. But a few Republicans, such as Mr. McCain and Sen. Richard C. Shelby (Ala.), who has been chairman and ranking Republican on the Senate Banking Committee, have taken them on over the years, warning about their use of an implicit government guarantee to pursue private profits. Meanwhile, Democrats were not only politically but intellectually committed to the companies, seeing them as innovative public-private institutions that have been a boon to home ownership. In the current crisis, their biggest backers have been Democrats such as Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher J. Dodd (Conn.) and House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (Mass.). Two members of Mr. Obama’s political circle, James A. Johnson and Franklin D. Raines, are former chief executives of Fannie Mae.

John McCain fought hard to pass regulations that would control Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac back in May 25, 2006.  But again the measure was killed by Democratic opposition.  Hot Air takes up McCain’s efforts and who killed them:

In this speech, McCain managed to predict the entire collapse that has forced the government to eat Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, along with Bear Stearns and AIG.  He hammers the falsification of financial records to benefit executives, including Franklin Raines and Jim Johnson, both of whom have worked as advisers to Barack Obama this year.  McCain also noted the power of their lobbying efforts to forestall oversight over their business practices.  He finishes with the warning that proved all too prescient over the past few days and weeks.

John McCain fought in vain to prevent the collapse of the housing finance market, and would have succeeded had it not been for utterly determined Democratic opposition.  Barack Obama, for his part, led the lists of campaign contribution recipients from both Fannie and Freddie and from disgraced and belly-up Lehman Bros.

There are only 43 days left in this election.  That is not very long for the American people to realize that they are being lied to by the very people and the very party that caused the disaster that has so angered the electorate.

Obama V.P. Pick Joe Biden Shares Direct Blame For Foreclosure Disaster

Barack Obama – you know, the guy who tells us he can fix all the problems that Bush and Republicans caused – has an uncanny track record of picking the people who actually caused all the problems in the first place for key campaign positions.

Should Joe Biden Share Blame for Foreclosure Crisis?  At least two major studies and an ABC News investigative report say “YES.”  According to interviews with financial “Experts: Many Americans Lost Homes Due to a Bill Championed by Biden.”

Add that to Penny Pritzker – Obama’s National Finance Chairperson – who was at the epicenter of the sub prime loan scandal that caused the foreclosure meltdown in the first place.  She paid $460 million of her family fortune through trusts to avoid going to jail.  And add that to Jim Johnson, Obama’s pick to chair his important Vice Presidential selection committee until he resigned amidst revelations that he had received sweetheart deals from sub-prime king Countrywide.  And Jim Johnson joined other key Democrats like Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd and Senate Banking Committee Chairman Kent Conrad, who received similar sweetheart deals.  And you can add to that the fact that federal regulators are pointedly blaming U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer, D-NY for the run that caused the IndyMac bank failure.

This is just like Democrats: behind all the  ostentatious and pretentious chants that they are fighting the battles for the little guy, they do what is best for their political futures at the behest of big money donors.  And when what they do in the name of the “little guy” ends up blowing up in the little guys’ face, they wash their hands of it and try to blame Republicans for it (after all, it’s all President Bush’s fault).

Hey, Democrats: President Bush’s Vice President didn’t cause the foreclosure meltdown; Barack Obama’s did.  And President Bush’s national finance chair wasn’t involved in the sub prime scandal from the very beginning; Barack Obama’s was.

Read the ABC investigative report on Joe Biden below.  Warning: it’s damning.  You’ve got Biden fighting for a law that directly led to the foreclosure meltdown, which wouldn’t have passed without his efforts.  You’ve got banks and credit card companies headquartered in Delaware.  You’ve got Biden’s own son working as an executive, lobbyists, and consultant for one of the players.

Should Biden Share Blame for Foreclosure Crisis?
Experts: Many Americans Lost Homes Due to a Bill Championed by Biden
By JUSTIN ROOD

August 28, 2008Experts say hundreds of thousands of Americans may have lost their homes due to a bill championed by Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., Barack Obama’s vice-presidential running mate.

At least two studies have concluded that the United States’ foreclosure crisis was exacerbated by a 2005 law that overhauled the nation’s bankruptcy law. That conclusion is echoed by other experts, although the banking and credit industry disputes it.

Congressional Republicans drove the effort to pass the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act (BAPCPA) of 2005. But Biden – who has enjoyed hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign donations from credit industry executives – endorsed the measure early on and worked to gather Democratic support for it.

Biden’s early and vocal support was “essential” to the bill’s passage, said Travis Plunkett of the Washington D.C.-based advocacy group Consumer Federation, which opposed the measure. Biden “went out of his way to undermine criticism of the legislation,” and his efforts helped convince other Democrats to support the bill.

“Biden was a fairly strong proponent of that bankruptcy bill,” said Philip Corwin, a consultant for the American Bankers Association, which represents banks and lenders. However, Biden was “not in our pocket in any way,” he added.

Biden’s Senate office did not provide comment for this story.

Asked if the Obama/Biden campaign was concerned Biden’s record was a liability when discussing economic security, David Wade, a spokesman for the Obama/Biden campaign, said, “Barack Obama and Joe Biden have real solutions for struggling families in danger of losing their homes because of the Bush economy and abusive lending practices.”

BAPCPA “is directly responsible for the rising foreclosure rate since the end of 2005,” concluded a 2007 study by Credit Suisse. The law “increased foreclosures and the number of homes for sale,” echoed a July 2008 study by U.S. Treasury researcher David Bernstein. That study estimated the law had pushed foreclosures or forced sales on 200,000 homeowners since it went into effect, but noted that was a rough, “back-of-the-envelope” calculation.

“Trying to tie the forclosure crisis to the [2005 bankruptcy] bill is a stretch,” said the ABA’s Corwin. Corwin called the Credit Suisse report “junk” and said the Bernstein study wasn’t “worth the paper it was written on.”

The head author of the 2007 Credit Suisse report clarified his earlier findings in an email Wednesday. “The law likely contributed to increased foreclosures early on,” said researcher Don Ravitsky, but combined with other key factors, including subprime lending practices, to create the current crisis. Bernstein did not respond to a request for an interview.

The bill was backed by banks and credit card companies including MBNA, which is headquartered in Delaware, Biden’s home state. They wanted the bill because it would make it harder for Americans to use bankruptcy to avoid repaying credit card debt. MBNA executives had been Biden’s single largest source of campaign donations, and MBNA has employed Biden’s son Hunter as a company executive, lobbyist and consultant. The Obama campaign has said Hunter Biden did no work for MBNA on the bankruptcy bill. MBNA has since been bought by Bank of America.

Over the past two years, sub-prime mortgage borrowing and a weakening economy have pushed increasing numbers of Americans into dire financial straits. Under the old rules, many could have declared bankruptcy, shed much of their debt, restructured their mortgages and held onto their homes, according to experts and the two reports.

But the 2005 law Biden championed made it more expensive and more difficult to declare bankruptcy, experts conclude. That forced hundreds of thousands of distressed homeowners to sell their homes, or default on their mortgages, after which the bank would sell their former home, according to the studies. That flood of homes going up for sale in an already-weakening market further depressed home prices, according to the two reports, snowballing into the current crisis.

BAPCPA “increased home foreclosures, increased the dollar value of financial assets in default, and put additional downward price pressure on real estate markets,” concluded the Bernstein report. Bernstein conducted the report as an individual, not as a representative the Treasury Department.

Obama Caught With Yet ANOTHER Radical Association

Obama keeps reaching back to his Chicago political past for his policy advisers, and pulling one despicable, vile, and even evil rabbit after another out of his hat.

The list of Barack Obama’s radical associations is long and it keeps getting longer. Some are now well-known, but many are not.

They need to be.

Oh, we know about Obama’s 23 years at Trinity United Church of Christ. And we know about Jeremiah Wright. These relationships alone were enough to prompt the leftist Rolling Stone Magazine to acknowledge that:

This is as openly radical a background as any significant American political figure has ever emerged from, as much Malcolm X as Martin Luther King Jr.

And of course, many have heard the name of Father Michael Pfleger and his hateful and race-hating ramblings (what do you call a white man who despises his own race? A liberal).

But many don’t realize that Barack Obama met the radical social activist Father Pfleger while Obama was carrying out his own radical social activism. They don’t realize that Barack Obama’s stint as a “community organizer” was at ACORN, about as radical an organization that one can find in America.

But you haven’t heard quite as much about James Meeks, the third of Obama’s three closest “spiritual advisor’s.” You can hear one of his “sermons” on Youtube.

We certainly could learn more about another of Barack Obama’s friends from Chicago, Penny Pritzker, who heads the Obama campaign’s National Finance Committee. We can look into her own financial background and learn that not only was she the president of Superior Bank – which massively failed; and not only did she literally personally buy her way out of jail by paying a $460 MILLION dollar “fine”; but that she was at the very epicenter of what would become known as “the subprime loan scandal” that would come to eat this nation’s financial system alive.

We could look at former Fannie Mae CEO Jim Johnson, former head of Obama’s vice presidential selection committee until it was discovered that he had benefited from sweetheart loans from subprime king Countrywide.

The name Tony Rezko certainly ought to sound familiar.

The name William Ayers, terrorist bomber, Obama-co-lecturer, fellow board member, neighbor, and friend should certainly come to mind.

We could also look at Barack Obama’s youthful associations and see just how radical and troubling they are:

Barack Obama has been steeped in radical politics since the day he emerged from his atheist secular humanist grad student mother’s womb. The openly communist Frank Marshall Davis was his childhood mentor; Saul Alinsky and Gerald Kellman (it was through Kellman’s Woods Fund that Obama met leftist terrorist William Ayers) dominated his thinking in college. He chose the most radical church in the country; he chose to make Jeremiah Wright his “spiritual mentor”; he chose to immerse himself in hard-core ideological radicalism. Never before has this country considered such a radical leftist for its chief executive.

Barack Obama’s own wife Michelle should have a LOT more explaining to do than her “and for the first time in my adult life I’m proud of my country,” her, “America is a mean place in 2008” comments. If that’s all you know about her “work,” you have no IDEA. The following short video is guaranteed to give you some “Oh, My God!” moments, or I’ll refund your money:

Now we find another Obama association that exposes a whole other ugly can of worms.

Chicago lawyer Mazen Asbahi, who was appointed as the national coordinator for Muslim American affairs by the Obama campaign (if this link fails you will know that the Obama campaign is continuing to scrub its website) less than two weeks ago, stepped down Monday after an Internet newsletter wrote about his brief stint on the fund’s board – which also included a fundamentalist imam – prompting The Wall Street Journal to email inquiries. Asbahi attempted to make his brief time on a board the issue, when the real issues were his relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood, and his 8-year long personal relationship with Hamas fundraiser Jamal Said.

Gee, Mr. Barack Hussein Obama. If you really want people to forget that you are the son of a Muslim father who served an incredibly brutal and corrupt Kenyan government; if you want them to forget that you attended a madrassa in Indonesia as a child and even practiced Islam; if you want them to forget that you campaigned in Kenya on behalf of your cousin, Raila Odinga, who relied upon chaos, corruption, and even violence in his campaign; numerous other troubling associations between yourself and radical Muslims; forget those photographs of you waling around in traditional Muslim clothes, well then maybe, just maybe, you shouldn’t hang around with Muslim radicals such as Mazen Asbahi and another radical pal of yours, the anti-Semite Rashid Khalidi.

It is frankly impossible for me to understand how Barack Obama managed to win the Democratic nomination. That so many Americans could care less about who their candidate really is – beyond the fact that he is the Democrat in the race – is simply amazing.