Conservative Cabal

Definitely a strong point for McCain last night were his (many) references to  Joe the Plumber, and the fact that Obama’s solution is to “spread the wealth around”. Of course, the left is going after poor Joe. “He’s not even licensed! He’s a Republican! He wants to make a lot of money!”

This brings up a salient difference. How much is too much? Who will get to spread the wealth, if wealth needs to be spread? The answers to these questions highlight the difference between a socialist and a free-market thinker.  And if you want to blame the free market for the recent “economic crisis”, go ahead, but please note that it’s the response of the free market to government regulations, starting with the Community Reinvestment  Act of 1977 (which, by the way, was a creature of ACORN — that bastion of helpfulness to illegal and probably dead voters everywhere).

McCain is not a great debater, that is for sure, BUT we are not electing a debater, but a decider!

I do wish, however, that he would have mentioned and elaborated more on the fact that Obama’s tax plan will most emphatically NOT be a tax cut for 95% of Americans.  The Wall Street Journal’s “Obama’s 95% Illusion” details it rather nicely. When a third of Americans pay no tax whatsoever, it’s really a handout to them. But this fits in well with his desire to  spread the wealth around.

Pretty soon, will there be wealth to spread?

And was crushed by fear and panic and a well-meaning clod of a government.

When is the bottom coming? I somehow don’t think we’ve reached it yet. And although I don’t think it’s necessarily Obama’s (or McCain’s) fault that the crisis is as bad as it is, I honestly don’t think it’s helping Wall Street or any investors to know that, no matter what, someone who thinks government intervention is the answer will be the next president of the U.S.A.

If government intervention was the answer, wouldn’t the buy-out of Fannie and Freddie have helped? Wouldn’t the $700 billion “rescue” as McCain recently called it, have helped? And neither have. The market correction will not be stopped, and is worse because of government fiddling. Stop. It. Now. Haven’t you done enough, Uncle Sam?

Why are we rewarding bad behavior — by banks AND numb-skulled politicians and unrealistic people who think they can put everything on credit card. Free money!

I respect McCain for attempting to lead on this issue, but he’s leading in the wrong direction. (Of course, raising taxes on small businesses and others as Obama would do is much worse). Why should we as taxpayers directly buy these mortgages? Why.

Perhaps we should stick with the very very … generous current law (a Democrat bill which is significant government intervention in and of itself) , that does help people who want to stay in their homes, but not those who are simply flipping properties or who have already given up.

She of the Chinese Wall between Intelligence and Law Enforcement that kept CIA from talking to FBI leading to 9/11.  She’s also a Fannie Mae Maven…

It’s not often that one person plays such a key role in two unmitigated disasters.

Go read the whole thing.

And go read The American Thinker, I’m just stealing from them today…

But saying the same things over at Investor’s Business Daily.

The Clinton-era corruption, combined with unprecedented catering to affordable-housing lobbyists, resulted in today’s nationalization of both Fannie and Freddie, a move that is expected to cost taxpayers tens of billions of dollars.

Thanks, Bill!

I was bickering with a friend of mine the other day about the mortgage crisis, about the evil bankers who had lured the poor benighted masses into taking loans they couldn’t afford. About the horrible monsters in Washington ignoring their duty to reign in the crimes of these monstrous bankers devouring the first time home buyer’s and their dreams.

Rather, that’s what he was saying. Needless to say he was somewhat disappointed when I failed to immediately concede to his wish to regulate the industry out of existence.

There is another story to be told about the mortgage crisis, and those darn “liar’s loans” and so forth.

Does anyone remember, way back in the heady days of the 90’s when Clinton was President and the markets only went up? Anyone remember how then the problem was those darn banks discriminating against the poor, the undocumented folks who couldn’t apply for a regular loan? Anybody remember Redlining?

The elephant in the room of this whole scandal is simple to see if one remembers and thinks. In the 90’s the Clinton HUD and the Clinton Justice Department leaned on banks to make more loans to “the poor” or they were gonna get hit with racial discrimination law suits (”Racist! Racist!” being the favorite crime of the Left then as now). The tacit agreement was this; The Banks make bad loans and the Government through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac buys up the questionable debt to spread the risk around. If things go south, it’ll be too huge to let everything collapse and the Government will come in and bail everybody out.

Now, in an election year no less, the check has come due and everyone on the Left conveniently forgets they blackmailed the Banks into making all these crap loans and decries “corporate welfare” as loudly as they can.

Those in the mainstream media who acknowledge the government’s role in the mess conveniently forget where it all started in their zeal to blame everything on Bush, but let’s put this baby on the correct parish doorstep, alright?

Here’s some links on the subject:

Openmarket.org pegs it, here. Also here. They’ve got tons of stuff so just go there and start clicking. h/t DrewM. at Ace.

Here is the Washington Post piece.
This is not a case of markets letting people down, it’s a case of government coercion distorting markets to achieve a policy goal and then running for cover when the bill comes due.

UPDATE:  And wowsers.  Who’d a thunk that Obama’s favorite fascists, ACORN, were involved in the Freddie fiasco?

Which brings us to the Fannie Mae Foundation. A sweet little set up for handing out cash to a nice little outfit called ACORN among others. Here are a few of the grants to ACORN.

ACORN Housing Corporation-National
Chicago, IL $100,000 approved in 2004
General operating support of an organization that helps families of limited means to secure and protect decent housing by providing housing counseling services, building homes, and educating policy makers in Chicago, IL; Phoenix, AZ; and Brooklyn, NY

Wow.  That’s a huge post, and rambling but it joins a lot of this mess to Obama directly which I wasn’t doing before.  As they say, read the whole thing. h/t The American Thinker.

Unless you count Obama’s ascension to demigod status. That being the case, there are some things I wish we all knew.

-We are winning in Iraq. So, shouldn’t our goal be to win? The Left’s default position since the invasion was that Iraq was another Vietnam (their memory of which is certainly questionable) and hence “unwinnable”. But since we’re, ya know, winning now, should we focus on finishing the job, getting the government of Iraq on a stable footing and leaving a country that can handle itself?

And on that, I am very worried about the plotting of Sadr and his Iranian leash-holders. It seems clear to me that with the defeat of his open armed militia, the Shiite Islamists are planning on turning southern Iraq into another southern Lebanon. The militia will go underground, create an alternative power structure and work to undermine the security and stability of the Shiite areas. They hope thereby to paralyze the nation of Iraq, keep it from entering into the modern world and keep the rest of the world occupied with these proxy problems so they can be left alone to pursue their nuclear weapons and delusions of grandeur.

So, I’m for working against that and winning the war. If it’s no longer unwinnable, how about we win.

-The Globe, such as it is, stopped warming about ten years ago. It is behaving exactly as the skeptics claimed it would and as the IPCC said it could not. Of course, the Warmists have done what they always do. They have adapted their predictions ex post facto to fit the latest observations. This is not new for them. From the beginning Global Warming has been based on computer models instead of actual observations. And these models have always been too hot. Given data from whenever to 1980 and asked to model today’s temperatures, these models always come up way too hot (10 degrees too hot before, now more like 2 degrees too hot). Faced with this, the “scientists” simply re-do their models (without anyone being able to see and verify that whatever they are doing behind the scenes in their progamming) and low-and-behold, suddenly it fits today, and gets warmer tomorrow. When tomorrow comes in cool again, we’ll just redo to program again, and trust me, this time it’ll be right. Never doubt the theory, we’re causing global warming.

The thing is, it’s not just their predictions that are wrong. Human caused global warming requires there to be a tropical warm belt in the atmosphere. There should be a measurable warm area in the air above tropical latitudes if CO2 is causing this warming, and it simply isn’t there. Weather balloons don’t see it, satellites don’t see it. It isn’t there. So like good little scientists, the Global Warming Crowd is claiming that the thermometers, which work everywhere else, are broken in this particular instance. They’ve got lots of reasons, but no facts. Because the theory predicts it, it must be there, facts be damned, reality be damned. I’ve got more to say about this nonsense later, but for now, I’ll just scoff at the “reality based community”.

-And by the way, we aren’t in a recession. And it is looking more and more like we won’t be. So there’s that.

If Bush could hammer those three points into the heads of the press and the American people before November, that would be a great service to our country. Not that he hasn’t already done a lot, but this one little thing would be really appreciated. That and fire everyone in the State Department.

Am in the midst of reading Tim Harford’s “The Undercover Economist” (Little, Brown, 2006), and was struck by my extreme lack of knowledge in this area. The author, a columnist for the Financial Times and occasional Slate.com contributor, breaks down the beautiful science to make it accessible and fascinating for dunderheads like me. Gem chapters include “Beer, Chips and Globalization.”

The product of a fairly good secondary school and university, I was never required to take an economics course. My post-college education primarily consists of books such as “Freakonomics” and the movie “A Dangerous Mind.”

Barack Obama believes that requiring students to take a second language is the answer to making America more aware of the world and make U.S. tourists more palatable to the Frogs, but wouldn’t making economics a required course in high school be more advantageous?

It would be easy enough to get rid of filler classes such as Yearbook and Basketweaving and teach students how to actually think. A semester devoted to why poor countries are poor may do the little pampered darlings a world of good and cut down on traffic stoppages due to student-filled protests. See, everyone wins.