Our Insane Government

From Reason:

Watching Washington policymakers in action, I sometimes think they make mistakes because of unrealistic goals, flawed thinking, blind obedience to party, or dubious information. And sometimes I think they make mistakes because they are—how to put this?—clinically insane.

There is no other way to explain what is going on at the Federal Housing Administration, which provides federal guarantees for home mortgages. Given the collapse in real estate prices, the weak economy, and the epidemic of foreclosures, banks are acting with more caution than before. They now commonly require home buyers to make down payments of 20 percent to qualify for a loan. But the FHA often requires only 3.5 percent.

That’s the equivalent of playing pool with a guy named Snake, and it’s had two predictable effects. The first is that the agency is insuring about four times as many home loans as it did just three years ago. The other is that the number of FHA-approved borrowers who are not repaying their loans is climbing. Since last year, the default rate has jumped by 76 percent.

Read the whole thing.

What is to Be Done With the Race-Baiters?

Andy McCarthy opines on Rush and race:

I’m hunkered down on some projects and just heard about the phony attacks on Rush by the race-hustlers extraordinaire, Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson. I know Rush has big shoulders and he’ll handle it just fine. But everytime one of these stories comes up, which is all too often, I can’t help but think it says a lot more about us than whoever happens to be in the cross-hairs. Why do Sharpton and Jackson have careers? Why aren’t they shown the door for serial racism and dishonesty? Why does anyone give a damn what they say? Why does the press treat them like they matter when they’re a walking, talking parodies?…

…There’s only one way this nonsense ever goes away: When we say “enough!” and tell the race-baiters their time is up. It’s too much of an industry, so it probably won’t happen tomorrow. But the Sixties ideal is crashing and burning before our very eyes, and I think it’ll take a lot of its warped obsessions down with it.

Unfortunately, this stuff won’t go away no matter how much or how often we say, “enough!”. It can go away, however, if we say “budget cuts”. You see, by one means or another, the left is largely funded on the tax payer’s dime – either directly via government grants, or indirectly through tax breaks for donating to leftwing causes.

We actually send taxpayer dollars every year to Planned Parenthood – the nation’s largest abortion provider gets taxpayer funds…supposedly to help people, but no matter how you slice it, it frees up funds for Planned Parenthood to then go about putting political pressure on the system to advance abortion. We’re paying for them to fight against the laws we pass to place common sense restrictions on abortion. We also consider it equally worthy to send money to Catholic Charities as to the Environmental Defense Fund – we pay for environmentalists to pressure government to restrict our freedoms and increase our cost of living.

On and on it goes like that – Southern Poverty Law Center, Code Pink, PETA, ACLU Foundation, NPR, etc, etc, etc…all tax exempt and donations are tax deductible…and while all of these groups will claim non-partisanship, does anyone want to say that they ever, even in a million years, advance anything center/right? These groups employ liberals who attack the center and right at every opportunity and who follow the party line rigidly – they might as well all be in one organization, because they all work together to advance the left. And we’re subsidizing them!

So, we need to adjust things – first off, to stop all government grants for leftwing groups, secondly to change the definition of “charity” to actually mean “a group which does charity work”. What do we mean by “charity work”? You know – getting out there and actually providing some physical help to the suffering. Not “advocacy” – advocacy never filled a single belly. If you want to do it, fine: but do it on your own dime. If you really think it important, then you’ll gladly sacrifice yourself to do it.

Once we get back in to power, de-funding the left will have to be a major effort – in fact, its a lot more important, in the long run, than passing things like tax reform, spending curbs, etc. It is the means by which will force the left out of politics – the left has never been popular and was never able to advance seriously in American political life until it got its hand in the taxpayer’s pocket. If we can de-fund the left, we’ll have ensured the dominance of the center/right – which is only natural, as America is a center/right nation. A center/right nation which has, unfortunately, paid leftists to undermine itself.

In addition, getting the liberals out of their well-paid sinecures will force them to get real jobs…and once they experience life in the real world, they’ll start to modify their asinine views.

Toomey Leads Specter in PA

A long way out, but still good news:

Republican-turned-Democratic Senator Arlen Specter trails potential GOP challenger Pat Toomey by five points in an early look at Pennsylvania’s 2010 Senate race. But another Democrat, Joe Sestak, runs dead-even with the likely Republican candidate.

The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey of Pennsylvania voters shows 45% would vote for Toomey if the election were held today. Forty percent (40%) would vote for Specter, while six percent (6%) prefer a third option. Nine percent (9%) are undecided.

If Sestak wins the Democratic nomination, however, the race is a toss-up: 38% for Sestak and 37% for Toomey. In August, Sestak trailed Specter by 13 points in the race for the nomination.

The bad news is that Democrats are figuring out that Specter may be a sure-loser…on the other hand, Democrat leaders never give a darn what rank-and-file Democrats want, and so they might muscle Specter through…which would be good news for us. Even if Democrats are smart enough to nominate Sestak, there is still a very good chance we’ll win in PA next year – the Democrat “brand” is becoming more toxic by the day, and with unemployment set to be 10% or higher all through 2010, there’s not much chance Democrats will be able to burnish their image.

The Good News From J P Morgan?

It got the DOW to surge above 10,000 for the first time in a year; what was it?

Well…

JPMorgan Chase & Co. posted its highest profit since the subprime mortgage market collapsed in 2007, relying on a surge in investment-banking revenue to weather higher losses on consumer loans…

…The investment-banking unit generated $1.92 billion in profit during the quarter, or more than half the bank’s total…

..Profit in the corporate and private-equity business was $1.29 billion, compared with a loss of $1.78 billion last year, because of trading gains on investments…

Woohoo!!! What a performance! Everything is going perfect! Except…

…The retail bank posted net income of $7 million, a decline of $57 million from a year earlier, as the bank set aside more money to cover credit losses. Home-equity charge-offs climbed to $1.14 billion from $663 million and are expected to reach about $1.4 billion “over the next several quarters,” the bank said in slides posted on its Web site. Prime-mortgage losses rose to $525 million from $177 million.

Credit cards, a division Dimon has said is unlikely to make money this year or next, lost $700 million, compared with income of $292 million in the third-quarter of last year. The net charge-off rate, excluding some bad loans acquired in the takeover of Washington Mutual, climbed to 9.41 percent, from 8.97 percent in the second quarter and 5 percent in the year- earlier period.

Card Forecast

Dimon said on the conference call with analysts that credit cards may lose $1 billion in the first quarter.

“The capital markets portion of the industry was very strong in the quarter, while there are continued problems in the traditional banking part of the company…(emphasis added)

So, what happened? A large bank played around with stocks and made a huge profit during a big sucker rally … meanwhile, what it normally does for a living was a complete disaster and is expected to get worse. And this means that unless the stock market continues to climb, J P Morgan will be in very deep doo-doo.

Oh, and the good news from China? Exports were only 15% lower than last year…this is considered good because it wasn’t a 21% drop…

Arguing Against Authority

What should certainly be a fascinating read, touching off an interesting debate – from the abstract of The Empty Idea of Authority:

The idea of authority is a fabrication. Claims of moral right to be obeyed owe their historic salience to the self-interest of claimants. When Enlightenment scholars demolished the divine right of kings, they should have disabused us of the right, not just of the notions that it came from the divine and belonged to kings. Their effort to salvage the idea of right to rule and to press it into serving as support for their favored governments was understandable but unjustified.

Claims of moral right to be obeyed have their origins in creationist accounts of law and government. This article presents an evolutionary account of law and government. The law of a human community is a self-generating, self-recognizing system of human communications that signals likely action within that community. Law is a signaling system that uniquely serves and symbiotically defines a human community. Autopoiesis, not authority, is the phenomenon that authentically animates law and government…

…Understanding law as an autopoietic signaling system frees us to discard the idea of authority.

And to the dictionary I go for, “autopoietic”: and come up with “no dictionary results”. So, how about “poietic”? Seems that the best I can gather is it means “self-forming”. Ok – I like to use a bit of odd vocabulary, myself, from time to time…but this presses the issue. Anyways…

A few quick thoughts about it:

How can something be self-forming if the only examples we have of it are based on the injunctions of law-givers who have no moral right to be obeyed? It seems to me that the author merely wishes to replace Moses with the author. Its a neat job, if you can get it.

“Creationist accounts” is a nifty way of denigrating the idea of Authority – you know, “those creationists who think that Adam and Eve kept dinosaurs as pets”, in the leftist meme about the very concept of creation. But to denigrate is not to refute. If Moses was making it up to benefit himself or his class, then why do his laws not actually do such a thing? The basics of Mosaic law – the Ten Commandments – are the most succinct expression of well-ordered liberty devised: to put it in rather quick and vulgar terms; don’t murder, don’t lie, hands off other people’s stuff, keep it in your pants, take a day off every week, don’t worship any thing or anyone other than God. If we were all to really follow the Commandments, the world would be a vastly better place and not a single person would be able to get over on any of us. These are not the laws of someone looking out for number one.

From my history books, I understand that the scholars of the so-called “enlightenment” were actually in favor of “enlightened despots”, had no faith in the common people and viewed the folks as mere clay for their social experiments. While those cobweb spinners might have knocked “divine right”, all they were doing was knocking a heretical idea long since denounced by that ultimate exemplar of Authority, the Roman Catholic Church. I’ll leave alone such scholarly pursuits as the September Massacres the last generation of “enlightened” scholars engaged in.

HAT TIP: Instapundit

Send a Message to the Left Today…

Many, if not most of you may have heard about the woman of whom I am proud to have as my Minnesota 6th District Congresswoman, Michele Bachmann, who is continually under assault for doing what she does best, speaking the truth. As of now, there is a ton of money pouring into her opponent’s coffers from big unions, Moveon.org, George Soros and others. As a result, Congresswoman Bachmann is asking for our help:

“Everyday, it must seem that Washington just isn’t listening to you. In fact, it must seem they’re doing their best to work against your interests. Those of us who call ourselves Republicans, or worse yet conservatives, are denigrated as crazy, nuts, wacko, extreme, racist, fill in your derogatory adjective. They say we’re more interesting in stopping progress than in making reforms. The White House refuses to work with Fox News, saying it is a “wing of the Republican party.” This isn’t conjecture; these are the words of the Communications Director of the White House.

You and I know the truth: We’re not being obstructionists. The problem is that the proposals coming out of Washington – from cap-and-trade to bailout mania to socialized medicine – are simply bad public policy. We don’t believe that government is inherently evil, set out to destroy the hopes and aspirations of its citizens, no matter how some media outlets portray us. We realize that an unchecked government can get too big for its own good. And,we know that right now in Washington, this Administration and this Congress have forgotten the tried and true principle of our founding – that the government works for the people, not the other way around.

They seem intent on plowing forward with their agenda no matter how many town halls you speak at or tea parties you attend.

Look around and you’ll see the warning signs about the plummeting value of our dollar. Overseas, the sharks are circling and calling for a reevaluation of the prominent spot the dollar has long enjoyed. Yet, Washington continues to spend and spend and borrow and spend with no regard to our skyrocketing debt and annual deficits. Something has got to give.”

Republicans have put forth alternatives to every proposal — and our alternatives won’t break the bank. When we’re lucky, they get lip service from the Democrat majority. More often, they don’t even get a debate. And this from a majority that promised to end partisan bickering and bring true transparency to the legislative process!

They have an agenda of their own and they’re on a path to increase spending as well as the size and scope of government on every issue. They’re out to protect their friends — like ACORN — regardless of what it costs you and what it will cost our nation’s future.

Don’t give up! I hear you. And, there are others in Congress who hear you, too. Today, let’s send a message to Washington that they can’t ignore. I promise to keep speaking the truth for all of you, but I need your help to do it. Is it worth just a few minutes of your time and a few dollars to make sure Washington gets the message that ENOUGH IS ENOUGH?

Ms. Bachmann is one person in Washington who isn’t afraid to loudly proclaim that our current socialist ‘emperor’ has no clothes. If you agree with this, please let Ms. Bachmann know by supporting her with a generous contribution.

Limbaugh Hits Back

And hits back rather hard:

For some reason it didn’t occur to the State-Controlled Media to check the veracity of Sharpton’s allegations. They just accept them. Yeah, I guess so, just like they accepted Mike Nifong and his allegations of rape at Duke University. Suddenly the State-Controlled Media loses its journalistic character to hop on board with Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson. Oh, yeah, really a high point for the media. This time, the media are a party to a lie, a willing party to a lie, a series of lies. Sitting in the front of the Sharpton smear bus, hosting him, interviewing him, promoting him, nothing new here, folks, Jesse Jackson, too. Other less prominent people are hopping on and off that bus. Most of them are ignorant of the facts. Others are deceiving themselves out of prejudice. And those people are always going to be out there, and I know that. Some are going to learn the truth, others won’t. It has always been this way. I don’t care. Anybody can take me on about what I have said. I expect that and I don’t shy away from it. But to go after me about what I have not said shows the character of the people behind this smear. Otherwise intelligent people believing these lies, shows their character.

The lack of curiosity on the part of people I have met, the lack of curiosity on the part of people I know to say, “What? That doesn’t sound like Limbaugh.” To just blanketly accept it shows the character of the people believing the smear. When the truth comes out, will it be too late? Yeah, for some things possibly, but the big picture, the pursuit of truth is not a sprint, it’s a marathon, and the truth always wins when it comes out. I know this for a fact. This is all not just about me. It’s about every one of us and what kind of country we’re going to have and the effort to discredit those who speak up for liberty, fairness, capitalism, freedom, those of us who speak up pose the biggest threat to the left in this country today. Individualism, rugged individualism, this is not desired, it’s not wanted. And so anybody who has the ability to speak up and be persuasive about it is going to be targeted for a smear and for destruction.

This is not about the National Football League. It’s not about the St. Louis Rams. That’s just a subset. This is the latest in a long line of attempts by the left to discredit any of us who believe what we believe. Sarah Palin, the list is as long as I wanted to make it. And I wanted to make sure that I thank you all for your support, and I wanted to make sure you understood that I know exactly what this is all about, and I want you to also understand, I’m not even thinking of exiting. I’m not even thinking of caving. I am not a caver. None of us are. We have been betrayed by too many who have caved. Pioneers take the arrows. We are pioneers. It’s a sad thing that our country over 200 years old now needs pioneers all over again, but we do.

Best comment on this:

How is it that when Righties quote Lefties, they have video, audio, and notarized confirmation from the Pope, but when Lefties ‘quote’ Righties, they have Wiki entries contributed by ‘Cobra’?

Mark Steyn:

So where are these racist soundbites? Where’s the audio? Where’s the transcript? Name the year. Heigh-ho, say CNN’s Rick Sanchez and the rest of the basement-ratings crowd. Not our problem: It’s for Limbaugh to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he’s never said it. We’re too busy fact-checking anti-Obama jokes to fact-check our own reporting…

Rush is right on about this – it’s a gambit to destroy his credibility; to take him out so that he can’t play in 2010 the role he played in 1994. It’ll fail, as all their efforts have failed, because Rush doesn’t lie, he’s not a racist, he’s not a hater…he’s just someone speaking his mind, entertaining his audience and having a ball doing it. And liberals hate him for it…

Chinese Real Estate Bubble About to Burst

When things get this absurd:

It’s a price tag that would make even New Yorkers and Londoners gasp — an outsized luxury apartment sold for nearly $57 million in Hong Kong Wednesday amid growing fears of a real estate bubble.

The five-bedroom duplex suite with as much as 6,158 square feet was sold to an unidentified buyer from mainland China, said the developer, Henderson Land Development, a major Hong Kong property company. It is believed to be Asia’s most expensive property by square foot at nearly $9,200.

It’ll come crashing down, rather soon, I expect.

Democrats Protecting Their Fat Cat, Corporate Buddies

What? You liberals actually think your Democrat party is on the side of the little guy? Man, I’ve got a bridge to sell you in Brooklyn…

…the chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Edolphus Towns, New York Democrat, does not believe the Countrywide VIP program is worth the committee’s time. In a letter sent to oversight committee members on Sept. 30, Mr. Towns characterized the VIP program as “… enhanced customer service, in a manner similar to airline frequent flier programs or supermarket discount cards.”

Countrywide Financial and Angelo Mozilo clearly are at the nexus of the current economic crisis. It was Countrywide’s packaging of subprime mortgages that helped inflate the housing bubble, and it was Mr. Mozilo’s VIP program that sought to minimize congressional scrutiny and derail housing policy reforms that could have mitigated the crisis.

The documents that can lift the veil from Countrywide’s VIP program are readily available, however, and their custodians are prepared to provide them to Congress upon receipt of a subpoena.

But somewhere in Washington, Mr. Mozilo’s secrets are getting cover.

Seems that the Friends of Angelo are still alive and kicking on Capitol Hill. What are the Democrats afraid of? As is pointed out in the linked piece, there is a chance that a lot of GOPers are involved, too. We’re supposed to go after corruption – Nancy promised us the most ethical Congress in history. What’s the hold up?

Well, I’ll tell you what the hold up is: Democrats of Big Government and Big Corporation work together to protect them selves. There’s not a chance in heck that any Democrat is going to want to go after Mozilo…do that and the corporate bosses might stop being so generous with donations and well-paid sinecures for retired Democrat Congresscritters. The dirty secret of American politics is how tight Big Government and Big Corporation are – they each use each other to gather untold wealth and keep competition at bay (in government by making it hard for challengers to meet the incumbents on an even financial playing field…Reid is raising $25 million dollars for his re-election; no matter who is challenger is, he or she won’t get 10% that much…because the big money in Big Corporations wants to protect Reid, who protects them; in business by setting regulations which make it hard for small and mid-sized players to compete with the big boys).

If we want to end this, then we must first end the power of the Democrats, then reduce government, and then put the squeeze on the big corporations (which also, by the way, fund a great deal of the non-governmental left – like Soros and his ATM for kook leftists). The whole, rotten mess built up over the past 75 years has to go – and a renewed American Republic take its place.

Phrase of the Day

From top to bottom, we have to reform our government and our economy:

Legal plunder can be committed in an infinite number of ways; hence, there are an infinite number of plans for organizing it: tariffs, protection, bonuses, subsidies, incentives, the progressive income tax, free education, the right to employment, the right to profit, the right to wages, the right to relief, the right to the tools of production, interest free credit, etc., etc. And it the aggregate of all these plans, in respect to what they have in common, legal plunder, that goes under the name of socialism. – Frederic Bastiat