Joel's Rant

For Obama, producing wealth is less noble than rearranging it‏

January 30th, 2010 . by joel

Here’s a brilliant critique of the State of the Union speech by the editors of the National Review Online. This sums it all up pretty well. And that’s all there is to it.

January 28, 2010 12:16 A.M.

From the Editors

National Review Online

Statist Quo

Everything changes except President Obama. His agenda doesn’t change. He has had no second thoughts about the wisdom of his health-care policies, or any of his policies; resistance is always and only a reason for redoubling. Also unchanging is the condescension with which he articulates his agenda: He faulted himself for not explaining health

care well enough to the easily confused American public. The same familiar strawmen dot the landscape of his rhetoric. (Republicans want to “maintain the status quo” on health care. This president is willing to listen to Republican ideas, just so long as he can then forget that he has ever done so.) Narcissism, too, is a constant companion. The opening of the speech, and the end, invited us to regard Obama as the embodiment of the nation. But it is not the country’s future that has suddenly come under doubt. It is his administration’s. It is not the country’s spirit that is in danger of breaking. It is contemporary liberalism’s.

“Let’s try common sense,” said the president. For Obama, that means that expanding Medicaid is the way to reduce the deficit. That increasing the price of energy is the way to create jobs. That further socializing medicine is the way to stay ahead of India. Nothing in his speech suggested that the government’s most important economic task might be to create the context of stability in which growth can occur. (Perhaps that thought would have interfered with the theme of “change.”) Beyond a pro forma sentence, nothing in the speech suggested that any positive economic trend could ever take hold without a direct assist from the federal government. Without its help, firms wouldn’t export or get credit. The proposal to forgive student-loan debt on special terms for people who go into “public service” typifies this administration’s attitude toward the economy: Producing wealth is less noble than rearranging it. On one of the country’s true economic challenges, runaway entitlement spending, Obama punted to a commission.

The president’s foreign-policy remarks were both perfunctory and otherworldly. Bringing our resources and our ideals into balance is always the difficulty in American foreign policy. Obama resolved the tension by pretending that he had consistently favored democrats and freedom-fighters the world over. In Iran, in Cuba, in China, his actual policy has been the reverse.

Anyone could find something to agree with in an endless speech, and we will dutifully applaud the president’s professed desire for new nuclear plants. All in all, though, our impression was of an administration that has no real understanding of the political straits in which it finds itself and thus no way to escape them.

Posted in budget, cap & trade, capitalism, earmarks, energy, foreign policy, global warming, health care, national security, Obama, Political, socialism | No Comments »

Déjà vu all over again

January 29th, 2010 . by joel

Here’s a story that has almost completely escaped scrutiny yet should make blood shoot from your eyes.

First some background. In September 2008, federal regulators took over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the name of stopping their risky mortgage practices, and in fact legislation was passed that set a limit to cover up to $200 billion in losses incurred by those government operated institutions. (That’s when $200 billion was considered real money).

But in March 2009, the Obama administration, along with its stimulus plan, increased the purchases of risky mortgages and forced Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to run additional losses of tens of billions more to bailout deadbeat and sub-prime mortgage borrowers, and then tried to cover-up those losses by increasing the limit to $400 billion, thereby staying under the “financial crisis” radar. (Remember, this is all taxpayer money).

Now here’s the virtually unreported bombshell. On Christmas Eve, the day before the “Christmas Day bomber” burned off his genitals and was Mirandized after only 50 minutes of perfunctory questioning by some still inexplicably unnamed Justice Department official who should be fired, and when it hoped no one would notice, the Obama administration lifted the $400 billion limit on bailouts for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and reset the limit to - infinity. They lifted the limit completely. Now there is no limit. None! Zero! Zilch!

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac can now assume losses in the Trillions and they’ll be covered by the American taxpayers. Is this déjà vu all over again? And since all of this was passed by the Democrats in Congress and made the law of the land, such losses would be perfectly legal. And on top of that, the Obama administration granted Fannie Mae’s and Freddie Mac’s executives bonuses totaling over $42 million. Is that unbelievable? Where’s Ken Feinberg (Obama’s pay czar) when you need him? What disgusting hypocrisy, for crying out loud.

As you’ll recall, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac played a primary role in spawning the mortgage crisis by acting as loan agents for the government, buying up risky mortgages that the government forced banks to make under the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), and thus creating an artificial market for what otherwise would be worthless pieces of crap. Before that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac also acted as agents for the Clinton administration that also required them to buy up lots of risky loans, again as part of the CRA. During that time they paid their CEOs millions (Clinton supporters Franklin Raines and Jamie Garolick were paid $96 million and $36 million respectively) in the process, and were found to have committed accounting fraud; $6.3 billion at Fannie Mae alone in an effort to increase the size of their Democrat managers’ bonuses. These organizations are not much different than ACORN except that their ability to do irreparable damage to the fabric of the American economy is unquestioned.

Amazingly enough, banks will now be pressured to make even more risky, low-income loans, loans where welfare payments are actually counted as income. Obama is planning on creating the Consumer Financial Protection Agency, whose job will be enforcing the same CRA that required, by law, that banks provide loans to poor people and those with poor credit and was primarily responsible for today’s’ financial crisis.

Are you getting this? This is completely insane. The next crisis will be even worse than the present crisis.

And all this happened while everyone was opening presents and drinking eggnog.

And that’s all there is to it.

Posted in budget, mortgages, Obama, Political, socialism, Stimulus | No Comments »

The saga of the Xmas bomber lives on

January 29th, 2010 . by joel

The Real Detainee Scandal

By Charles Krauthammer

WASHINGTON — The real scandal surrounding the failed Christmas Day airline bombing was not the fact that a terrorist got on a plane — that can happen to any administration, as it surely did to the Bush administration — but what happened afterward when Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was captured and came under the full control of the U.S. government.
After 50 minutes of questioning him, the Obama administration chose, reflexively and mindlessly, to give the chatty terrorist the right to remain silent. Which he immediately did, undoubtedly denying us crucial information about al-Qaeda in Yemen, which had trained, armed and dispatched him.
We have since learned that the decision to Mirandize Abdulmutallab had been made without the knowledge of or consultation with (1) the secretary of defense, (2) the secretary of homeland security, (3) the director of the FBI, (4) the director of the National Counterterrorism Center or (5) the director of national intelligence (DNI).
The Justice Department acted not just unilaterally but unaccountably. Obama’s own DNI said that Abdulmutallab should have been interrogated by the HIG, the administration’s new High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group.
Perhaps you hadn’t heard the term. Well, in the very first week of his presidency, Obama abolished by executive order the Bush-Cheney interrogation procedures and pledged to study a substitute mechanism. In August, the administration announced the establishment of the HIG, housed in the FBI but overseen by the National Security Council.
Where was it during the Abdulmutallab case? Not available, admitted National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair, because it had only been conceived for use abroad. Had not one person in this vast administration of highly nuanced sophisticates considered the possibility of a terror attack on American soil?
It gets worse. Blair later had to explain that the HIG was not deployed because it does not yet exist. After a year! I suppose this administration was so busy deploying scores of the country’s best lawyerly minds on finding the most rapid way to release Gitmo miscreants that it could not be bothered to establish a single operational HIG team to interrogate at-large miscreants with actionable intelligence that might save American lives.
Travesties of this magnitude are not lost on the American people. One of the reasons Scott Brown won in Massachusetts was his focus on the Mirandizing of Abdulmutallab.
Of course, this case is just a reflection of a larger problem: an administration that insists on treating Islamist terrorism as a law-enforcement issue. Which is why the Justice Department’s other egregious terror decision, granting Khalid Sheik Mohammed a civilian trial in New York, is now the subject of a letter from six senators — three Republicans, two Democrats and Joe Lieberman — asking Attorney General Eric Holder to reverse the decision.
Lieberman and Sen. Susan Collins had written an earlier letter asking for Abdulmutallab to be turned over to the military for renewed interrogation. The problem is, it’s hard to see how that decision gets reversed. Once you’ve read a man Miranda rights, what do you say? We are idiots? On second thought …
Hence the agitation over the KSM trial. This one can be reversed and it’s a good surrogate for this administration’s insistence upon criminalizing — and therefore trivializing — a war on terror that has now struck three times in one year within the United States, twice with effect (the Arkansas killer and the Fort Hood shooter) and once with a shockingly near miss (Abdulmutallab).
On the KSM civilian trial, sentiment is widespread that it is quite insane to spend $200 million a year to give the killer of 3,000 innocents the largest propaganda platform on earth, while at the same time granting civilian rights of cross-examination and discovery that risk betraying U.S. intelligence sources and methods.
Accordingly, Sen. Lindsey Graham and Rep. Frank Wolf have gone beyond appeals to the administration and are planning to introduce a bill to block funding for the trial. It’s an important measure. It makes flesh an otherwise abstract issue — should terrorists be treated as enemy combatants or criminal defendants? The vote will force members of Congress to declare themselves. There will be no hiding from the question.
Congress may not be able to roll back the Abdulmutallab travesty. But there will be future Abdulmutallabs. By cutting off funding for the KSM trial, Congress can send Obama a clear message: The Constitution is neither a safety net for illegal enemy combatants nor a suicide pact for us.

Posted in foreign policy, national security, Obama, Political, terrorism | No Comments »

Scott Brown’s win Vindicates Obama……this is great stuff‏

January 27th, 2010 . by joel

Only liberals and democrats could be so completely deluded, willfully blind, out of touch with reality, and in need of serious drugs and psychiatric care, and possibly alcohol, as to completely misread the message delivered to them last week. That message of denial of the democrat/liberal/Marxist agenda could not have been clearer, especially coupled with the magnitude of the wins in Virginia and New Jersey just two months earlier.

To read this liberal’s analysis of the Massachusetts Senate win for Scott Brown, and the poll numbers determined by the Washington Post and Harvard University for crying out loud, you’d think the voters were sending Barack Obama a vote of complete confidence. It’s laughable.

One can only hope they keep this craziness up for the duration. If this is what Obama and his minions are thinking, both houses will be in GOP hands come November.

Ya gotta love the Dems.

http://thehill.com/opinion/columnists/mark-mellman/78173-meaning-of-mass-election

Posted in health care, Obama, Political | No Comments »