IAP Political Forum

I dislike the author but that is some good reading right there I dun care who you are/.

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On MSNBC this week, Newsweek's Jonathan Alter tried to connect John McCain to the current financial disaster, saying: "If you remember the Keating Five scandal that (McCain) was a part of. ... He's really getting a free ride on the fact that he was in the middle of the last great financial scandal in our country."

McCain was "in the middle of" the Keating Five case in the sense that he was "exonerated." The lawyer for the Senate Ethics Committee wanted McCain removed from the investigation altogether, but, as The New York Times reported: "Sen. McCain was the only Republican embroiled in the affair, and Democrats on the panel would not release him."

So John McCain has been held hostage by both the Viet Cong and the Democrats.

Alter couldn't be expected to know that: As usual, he was lifting material directly from Kausfiles. What is unusual was that he was stealing a random thought sent in by Kausfiles' mother, who, the day before, had e-mailed: "It's time to bring up the Keating Five. Let McCain explain that scandal away."

The Senate Ethics Committee lawyer who investigated McCain already had explained that scandal away -- repeatedly. It was celebrated lawyer Robert Bennett, most famous for defending a certain horny hick president a few years ago.

In February this year, on Fox News' "Hannity and Colmes," Bennett said, for the eight billionth time:

"First, I should tell your listeners I'm a registered Democrat, so I'm not on (McCain's) side of a lot of issues. But I investigated John McCain for a year and a half, at least, when I was special counsel to the Senate Ethics Committee in the Keating Five. ... And if there is one thing I am absolutely confident of, it is John McCain is an honest man. I recommended to the Senate Ethics Committee that he be cut out of the case, that there was no evidence against him."

It's bad enough for Alter to be constantly ripping off Kausfiles. Now he's so devoid of his own ideas, he's ripping off the idle musings of Kausfiles' mother.

Even if McCain had been implicated in the Keating Five scandal -- and he wasn't -- that would still have absolutely nothing to do with the subprime mortgage crisis currently roiling the financial markets. This crisis was caused by political correctness being forced on the mortgage lending industry in the Clinton era.

Before the Democrats' affirmative action lending policies became an embarrassment, the Los Angeles Times reported that, starting in 1992, a majority-Democratic Congress "mandated that Fannie and Freddie increase their purchases of mortgages for low-income and medium-income borrowers. Operating under that requirement, Fannie Mae, in particular, has been aggressive and creative in stimulating minority gains."

Under Clinton, the entire federal government put massive pressure on banks to grant more mortgages to the poor and minorities. Clinton's secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Andrew Cuomo, investigated Fannie Mae for racial discrimination and proposed that 50 percent of Fannie Mae's and Freddie Mac's portfolio be made up of loans to low- to moderate-income borrowers by the year 2001.

Instead of looking at "outdated criteria," such as the mortgage applicant's credit history and ability to make a down payment, banks were encouraged to consider nontraditional measures of credit-worthiness, such as having a good jump shot or having a missing child named "Caylee."

Threatening lawsuits, Clinton's Federal Reserve demanded that banks treat welfare payments and unemployment benefits as valid income sources to qualify for a mortgage. That isn't a joke -- it's a fact.

When Democrats controlled both the executive and legislative branches, political correctness was given a veto over sound business practices.

In 1999, liberals were bragging about extending affirmative action to the financial sector. Los Angeles Times reporter Ron Brownstein hailed the Clinton administration's affirmative action lending policies as one of the "hidden success stories" of the Clinton administration, saying that "black and Latino homeownership has surged to the highest level ever recorded."

Meanwhile, economists were screaming from the rooftops that the Democrats were forcing mortgage lenders to issue loans that would fail the moment the housing market slowed and deadbeat borrowers couldn't get out of their loans by selling their houses.

A decade later, the housing bubble burst and, as predicted, food-stamp-backed mortgages collapsed. Democrats set an affirmative action time-bomb and now it's gone off.

In Bush's first year in office, the White House chief economist, N. Gregory Mankiw, warned that the government's "implicit subsidy" of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, combined with loans to unqualified borrowers, was creating a huge risk for the entire financial system.

Rep. Barney Frank denounced Mankiw, saying he had no "concern about housing." How dare you oppose suicidal loans to people who can't repay them! The New York Times reported that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were "under heavy assault by the Republicans," but these entities still had "important political allies" in the Democrats.

Now, at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars, middle-class taxpayers are going to be forced to bail out the Democrats' two most important constituent groups: rich Wall Street bankers and welfare recipients.

Political correctness had already ruined education, sports, science and entertainment. But it took a Democratic president with a Democratic congress for political correctness to wreck the financial industry.

www.anncoulter.com/

Why did Bush and Cogressional Republicans put Clinton's surplus into housing?

That wasn't the fault of Democrats.

Is it possible that no single event committed by a single person or group of people caused the mess we're in?

By God, I think it is...

That's the way Reaganite!! You racist piece of shit. Blame the economy on blacks.

lol. ann coulter. phfft.


Time for all the righties to come out:
"I don't netheth-tharily agree with things she says but I wike a woman who sthpeaks her mind...mmmmh"



Ahk

IF that is true, then that really is a smoking guy in this mess.

Ann Coulter...he's been proven a liar before... ;)

Ann Coulter and Pathetic.

A match made is the Gary, Indiana Sheraton.

Perhaps not this time...


http://hickfromsticks.blogtownhall.com/2008/09/25/a_few_comments_to_senator_ken_salazar.thtml

This is enlightning... but not incriminating.

How many bad mortgages were Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac "forced" to secure? How many of those securities did they still have when they became liabilities (at the time housing prices fell and they entered negative equity)?

Right now Ann Coulter's charge is too broad.

I agree, brax. This problem has tons of layers. I am fundamentally more interested in fixing the problem than blaming someone, but we need to find out how we came to this point so as to not repeat history.

Me too, but I'm convinced, as are you, that it's more then one thing that went wrong and should be fixed.

Partisan politics works against the more educated debate that NEEDS to occur.

The article does not blame ANYTHING on blacks and YOU are the racist for thinking that when people say unqualified buyers and or poor it means black people.


WHERE does that say black?  You racist piece of shit....

The Ant and the Grasshopper, 2008 edition
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2008

With what looks like imminent passage of the Mother of All Bailouts (following on the heels of a year’s worth of government-funded rescues of private homeowners, lenders, insurers, and the automakers), Washington has turned Aesop’s famous fable about prudence and hard work on its head. The time is ripe for a revised 2008 edition of “The Ant and the Grasshopper:”

In a meadow on a hot summer’s day, a Grasshopper was chirping and carousing his time away. He watched scornfully as an Ant nearby struggled to store up large kernels of food and build a secure nest. The Ant pulled overtime shifts to pay off his loans and accumulate retirement funds for the future.

“Give it a rest,” the Grasshopper said. “Why bother saving and slaving and toiling and moiling? Let’s party!” The Ant demurred: “I am planning ahead for winter and you should do the same.” The Grasshopper blew off the Ant, squandered his supplies the rest of the season, and abandoned his home while on vacation (paid for by tapping every last cent of his home equity gain) instead of holding down a job.

When winter came, the Grasshopper’s pantry was empty and his shelter ruined from neglect. The Ant, weary from planting, harvesting, and stocking up for months, was dining comfortably in his nest.

Cold, hungry, jobless, facing foreclosure, and up to his two pairs of eyeballs in debt, the Grasshopper limped to the Association of Community Winged Insects for Rescue Now and demanded recourse. The office was swamped with thousands just like him. ACWIRN immediately put the Grasshopper to work registering dead ants as new voters.

Funded with tax dollars from the rest of the meadow’s residents, ACWIRN organized mass protests at the Bank of Antamerica, ambushed its top officials at their private homes, harassed their children, and demanded that the meadow’s politicians halt all foreclosures (”We must keep Grasshoppers in their houses!”) and outlaw discriminatory lending practices against starving, homeless Grasshoppers (”Well-stocked shelters are basic insect rights!”)

The banking industry capitulated; the Orthoptera Lobby secured hundreds of millions of dollars in housing earmarks and grants and counseling subsidies to support the Grasshoppers with the shadiest credit and employment histories. Antie Mae, the meadow’s government-backed home lending giant, fueled the push for increased insect homeownership in the name of biodiversity. Its executives cooked the books and headed for the hills. Katie Cricket and the Mainstream Meadow Media joined the grievance-for-profit circus, profiling Grasshopper sob stories and drumming up ratings as bewildered Ants wondered who was looking out for them.

The banks drowned in toxic debt. More Grasshoppers fell behind on their mortgage payments. Bailout mania and panic gripped the meadow.

Our little Ant, minding his own business, heard a knock on his door one late winter night a year later. It was his old, sneering Grasshopper neighbor. With ACWIRN’s presidential candidate, Barack Cicada, now in office, the Grasshopper had been hired by the meadow as a tax collector.

“I’m here to take your provisions,” the Grasshopper cackled.

But it was the Ant who had the last laugh. “I’ve learned my lesson,” he told his shiftless friend. “Why bother saving and slaving and toiling and moiling? I’ve spent all my savings. I’m walking away from my mortgage. Thrift is for suckers,” the Ant said as he headed out the door, leaving the Grasshopper empty-handed.

Posted in: Subprime crisis

So we're back to blaming poor people?

Reaganite, you're so out of touch it's scary.

I hate Ann Coulter, but she is right minus the racism.

I am not shaking my pitch fork at any party; just this stupid idea of cosmic justice.

However, good arguments have been made about why these loans were given to low-income borrowers.   The reason?

Federal housing projects that are designed to hold low-income tenants decrease property values.   Any city ordinance that has federally subsidized housing program will cause the surrounding well-off neighborhood members to be livid because thier property values will fall.  Considering these residential areas and businesses may have leverage over city councils, it would be obvious that the political pressure has been placed in order to keep federal housing projects out of the woodwork.

So where do you put all the poor people? You give them a house.  

A reckless maneuver by law makers indeed.   But, it does raise the question again, where do you put all the poor people?

why should we worry about that?

Seriously why is it the GOVERNMENTS responsibility to give housing to people?

Why the f..  is welfare considred INCOME when you buy a house...

if you are poor you should not buy a house.. this is plain and simple... YOU CANT AFFORD IT!!!

Its not blaming the poor its blaming the government and the banks for making the loans...

Because the government is supposed to be based upon a democracy.  Where peoples votes exert the force to get certain things done. 

If well-off's surrounding housing projects have declining retail values because of them, they are going to exert their political pressure.  It will either be a) kick the poor out of the area by raising taxes or b) get the federal government to do something about it.   a) has some terrible backlash.  I mean, we are trying to have some empathy towards these people aren't we?

Either way, politicians will do whatever gets them those votes.

That's great. Here's another article, with more raw data:


This really irks me. It's one thing to want to be charitable, but not at the expense of everything else. I mean, if we destroy our economy, how can we give, or do anything else?

Democrats buy votes of the "poor" by keeping them poor, but make believe they are on their side.

THESE LOANS SHOULD NOT HAVE BEEN MADE.....

so... maybe affirmative action in banking is bad?

does not take a rocket scientist to figure out who you are talking about when you say affirmative action. by making it seem like she (and you) are not directly talking about blacks in general, you call them poor and unqualified instead. Ever heard of hidden racism? Anyone reading this article knows exactly what they are talking about. Next you are going to tell us Airlines and banks failed because "poor" people purchased tickets using credit cards and didn't make their payments. You want to blame the poor? Then here is a for you.

"In the past, we were taught to see others who are different as being deficient. We established arbitrary norms and then determined that anybody not like us was abnormal. But a change is coming because we no longer see others who are different as being deficient. We just see them as different. Over the past 50 years, thanks to the scholarship of dozens of expert in many different disciplines, we have come to see just how skewed, prejudiced and dangerous our miseducation has been."  -Rev. Jeremiah Wright



Leaders, prodimantly white, have ruined this country and miseducated us and this world for years. Maybe it is time for a minority to clean up their mess.

mach gets +1 for calling reaganite on his BS

You want to be an ignorant bigot, just be an ignorant bigot and stop trying to hide behind conservative ideology. Grow a pair already. It's a free country and this is an anonymous venue.

I'm interested to find out why anyone thinks this is a racist post at all.  It is a matter of numbers, not colors.  Nobody is trying to pin this on all the black people.  That is a ridiculous statement.  In fact, many people were interested in finding a way to help prevent any more forclosures from happening (no matter what color the owners happen to be).  What about the latin people?  What about poor white people?  Are black people the only ones that are poor in this country?  Was affirmative action in banking only for black people?  The fact still remains that loans were given out to people who could not make the payments when the economy changed.  Even if it turns out that the majority of people losing their homes are black, how does that in any way change the numbers?  And how does that make it a racist statement?  I'm not trying to be antagonistic here, I really am curious.  I get that many of you are irratated with Reaganite but all he did was post some information that could be another piece of the puzzle in how we got where we are today.  Some people may not agree with it but I didn't read anything that led me to the conclusion that anybody places blame on black people.   

then maybe you need to familiarize yourself with Ann Coultore and her work. In the eyes of a racist there is no latino/black/asian/arab...you are either black (non-white) or white. The minorities that affirmative action protects are those of non-whites. So when she says minorities she means non-whites. I have no time to debate whether or not her article attacks minorities and blame them for the current economic downfall, but I know a duck when I see a duck.

Indeed

Exactly.  Although if you don't hide behind euphemisms like he does he will get banned. The owner has no sense of humor when stuff like that is concerned.

Good point.

I'm just tired of getting labeled a racist when I voice opposition to race quota based affirmative action, hate crimes legislation, or point out the obvious disconnect with justice in the rhetoric of some "black leaders". IMO, to a great degree I have bigots that hide behind these issues to thank for this.



Having said that, there is truth to the idea that government pushing the banking industry to lend money in risky situations has played a role in our current situation. Personally, I'm not really a big fan of the government encouraging home ownership in the first place. It does stimulate the economy (with mixed results as we're now seeing), but it also encourages urban sprawl and discourages high-medium density mixed use development. I'd rather see policy that seeks to give renters some of the same benefit as home owners.

We have the suburbs to thank for our extreme auto dependency, increasing loss of farmland, and a host of other problems.

You do make some good points.  All of which I agree with.

As to being called a racist.  I've posted this before but it's been a while.  I worked with the most racist piece of shit I had ever known.  He was far worse than Pathetic is.  One day I had enough of his crap and told him I had enough of his blatant racism.  He was honestly surprised.  He said, 'I can't be racist!  I'm black!'.  And believed it.  I found a new job before I killed him. 

You mean you found a new job before you had to kill him... right?

;)

Yeah, let's go with that.

LOLOLOLLOLOLOL...

I cam called a racist for saying POOR PROPLR should not have been given 200,000 loans to buy houses...  The bigots on this thread that automatically ASSUME when someone says poor they are talking about blacksare the real racists in this country.

I AM AS BLACK AS OBAMA YOU MORONIC ASSHOLES lololol

Ok explain this, if the poor trying to chase a dream of owing an house are to blame, then is the government buying out these companies? Its crooked politics. My buddies business is going under, lets give them $85 billion so that he can keep his $1 Billion pension plan and salary. This "bailout" is more of a choreoghraphy than the 2003 Iraq War was to scare voters. I wouldn't even under estimate ol' Bush telling soul searching Putin to put on another cold war scare to help him out. I fought hard for troops to help in Iraq. They betraded me and are making me look like an ass by saying a troop withdrawal is coming, when at first they said it would be a disaster. I am only a Republican because I believe in a strong military, that is the only thing I have in common with the current asshole Party right now. They are idiots, liars, and rich scumbags that are truely out of touch with today's society.

 :laugh: :laugh: :laugh:

 For the record;
  http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/politics/2008157607_mckeating04.html

(http://tbn0.google.com/images?q=tbn:vUohkhmBK-uvsM:http://bp1.blogger.com/_Zl5WEoyt_sQ/SFJznQ3EX1I/AAAAAAAAAQc/iMQbnqN411Q/S220/Laughing_ChimpM.gif) Even Bonzo himself can't believe he said that...

No, you're as white as Obama.


Ahk

So let me get this straight, Reaganite is a racist who is black, likes Ann Coulter, trashes Obama everyday and is a die hard republican but is voting for Obama, and doesn't like McCain but likes Bush. I think Reaganite has finally come full circle in his mental collapse of stupidity. You can't get any dumber than this. I'm beginning to think Reaganite is George W's long lost retarded brother who was formed when George HW took a trip to Kansas and decided he needed some sexual relief with one of the toothless locals there.

I know for a fact he's not black.

I didn't find the initial post racist...it didn't mention race at all.

I'm know a number of black and "non white" people who do not fall into the category of poor sub prime trusts.

maybe it was this guys dream (along with Greenspan) who thought every American had the right to own a home...I'm with Reagenite on this...some people are going to have to rent their whole lives.

(http://content.cartoonbox.slate.com/?feature=0750929a528de80f32e580a850868b7f)

I thought we went through this "it's no ONE person's fault," shit already...

hehe...its a cartoon.

gotta keep a sense of humor ;)

ITS THE BANKS AND GOVERNMENTS FAULTS FOR GIVING LOANS TO PEOPLE THEY KNEW WOULD NOT PAY THEM...

how hard is that to understand...

If I give a 5 year old a bag of candy and expect him not to eat they whole its MY FAULT if they eat the whole bag and get sick not theirs...

They know no better....

I am not black I am american.. :)  I dont classify my race as back or white.

When asked I refuse to answera nd write in american.

I am voting for Obama to kill liberalism..

Ohh and btw I assume if you are allowed to use personal insults I am too :)  Go fuck yourself you worthless used condom :)

ahh that felt good :)

(http://tbn0.google.com/images?q=tbn:vUohkhmBK-uvsM:http://bp1.blogger.com/_Zl5WEoyt_sQ/SFJznQ3EX1I/AAAAAAAAAQc/iMQbnqN411Q/S220/Laughing_ChimpM.gif)

Sorry freethinker had to steal this one, just thought it was appropriate