Another Nail in the Coffin of the Bush Legacy

[William J. Decker]

Originally Posted by jburkeson1

Of course, right after... Drill Here, Drill Now. Decker is once again speaking out of both sides of his face in a vain attempt to sound wise.

Thanks, Joe, for agreeing with me.

[Joseph Burkeson, CMI]

Originally Posted by jfunderburk

JB, do you ever do home inspections? Seems all I ever see from you are political rants.

What does it matter to what I do, want to fight... bring it on.

[John McKenna]

Originally Posted by wdecker

Attacking other countries, premptively, has a long U.S. history. Jefferson, the so-called Father of the Dems, started our first war by premptively attacking the Barbury Pirates. We also premptively attacked in the Mexican-American and Spanich-American wars.

Also, Truman had almost as low approval ratings, but he is now being lionized.

JFK was very polular, but is legacy defines him as not as perfect as everyone used to think (started and escalated Vietnam, Affairs, etc). Don't get me wrong, he also did good stuff (lowered tax rates from 94% to 71%, just like Reagan and Bush have).

You need at least 40 years to gain some perspective

And Western nations have been at war with radical Muslims for a long long time.

The Barbary pirates, also sometimes called Ottoman corsairs, were Muslim pirates

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbary_pirates

[Michael Larson]

A Democratic Congress Tries To Fix What It Broke

By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Wednesday, September 17, 2008 4:20 PM PT

Regulation: As the financial crisis spreads, denials on Capitol Hill grow more shrill. Blame an aloof President Bush, greedy Wall Street, risky capitalism — anybody but those in Congress who wrote the banking rules.
Read More: Election 2008 | Iraq

Such denials won't hold against the angry facts banging on their doors. The only question is whether the guilty party can keep up the barricade until Election Day.

A visibly annoyed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi rejected suggestions that Democrats share blame for the meltdown. "No," she snapped at reporters who dared ask.

Stick to our narrative, she scolded: The bursting of the housing bubble was another story of market failure and deregulation.
"The American people are not protected from the risk-taking and the greed of these financial institutions," she said, while calling for investigations of the industry.

Only, the risk-taking was her idea — and the idea of all the other Democrats, along with a handful of Republicans, who over the past 30 years have demonized lenders as racist and passed regulation after regulation pressuring them to make more loans to unqualified borrowers in the name of diversity.

They were the ones who screamed — "REDLINING!" — and sent banks scurrying for cover in low-income neighborhoods, where they have been forced to lower long-held industry standards for judging creditworthiness to make the subprime loans.

If they don't comply, they are threatened with stiff penalties under the Community Reinvestment Act, or CRA, a law that forces banks to make home loans to people with poor credit risks.

No fewer than four federal banking regulatory agencies are responsible for enforcing the law. They subject lenders to racial litmus tests and issue regular report cards, the industry's dreaded "CRA rating."
The more branches that lenders put in poor neighborhoods, and the more loans they make there, the better their rating. Those lenders with low ratings can not only be fined, but also blocked from mergers and other business transactions needed to expand.

The regulation grew to monstrous proportions during the Clinton administration, obsessed as it was with multiculturalism. Amendments to the CRA in the mid-1990s dramatically raised the amount of home loans to otherwise unqualified low-income borrowers.

The revisions also allowed for the first time the securitization of CRA-regulated loans containing subprime mortgages. The changes came as radical "housing rights" groups led by ACORN lobbied for such loans. ACORN at the time was represented by a young public-interest lawyer in Chicago by the name of Barack Obama.

HUD, in turn, pressured Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to purchase more subprime mortgages, and Fannie and Freddie, in turn, donated to the campaigns of leading Democrats like Barney Frank and Pelosi who throttled investigations into fraud at the agencies.

Soon, investment banks such as Bear Stearns were aggressively hawking the securities as "guaranteed." Wall Street's pitch was that MBSs were as safe as Treasuries, but with a higher yield.

But they weren't safe. Everyone in the subprime business — from brokers to lenders to banks to investment houses — absolved themselves of responsibility for ensuring the high-risk loans were good.

The mortgage lenders didn't care, because they were going to sell the loans to other banks. The banks didn't care, because they were going to repackage the loans as MBSs. The investors and traders didn't care, because the MBSs were backed by Fannie and Freddie and their implicit government guarantees.

In other words, nobody up and down the line — from the branch office on main street to the high-rise on Wall Street — analyzed the risk of such ill-advised loans. But why should they? Everybody was just doing what the regulators in Washington wanted them to do.

So everybody won until everybody lost, including the minorities the government originally mandated the banks to serve.
The original culprits in all this were the social engineers who compelled banks to make the bad loans. The private sector has no business conducting social experiments on behalf of government. Its business is making profit. Period. So it did what it naturally does and turned the subprime social mandate into a lucrative industry.

Of course, it was a Ponzi scheme, because they weren't allowed to play by their rules. The government changed the rules for risk.
In order to put low-income minorities into home loans, they were ordered to suspend lending standards that had served the banking industry well for centuries. No one wants to talk about it, so they just scapegoat Wall Street. Even John McCain has joined the Democrat chorus on this.

The FBI is now investigating 24 large mortgage lenders for alleged abuses. But who will investigate the pols and the lobbyists and the community agitators who made the bad decisions that ultimately forced businesses to make their bad decisions?

[klott]

The stinking Democrats engineer this disasters, then throw the blame on "This Administration" and they keep getting away with it. Absolutely Maddening! Now they keep shouting their support for the middle class, to gain total power. At this rate, there will not be any classes left, except the devastated and broke class!

[Brian E. Kelly]

Originally Posted by jmckenna1

Read my post again very slowly before you comment.

I am not Texican John, I not only do not read slow, but I do not move my lips either.

[Brian E. Kelly]

Originally Posted by jmckenna1

No... the U.S. did not like what the Germans were doing to our buddies in Europe,
so we picked a fight with them.

If you think all our wars have been after someone punched us in the nose, you
may want to read behind the stories you have heard.

\kings that will be built in the middle east.

I neither said that or even remotely implied that John, go back and and check a couple of times until what I actually said sinks in.

But I do enjoy your "the U.S. did not like what the Germans were doing to our buddies in Europe" view of World History, is there a corresponding coloring book?

Maybe if you scan my posts with your IR camera you will get it.

Then again maybe not.