Unreal: Obamas' Dog Arrives on Own Flight for Martha's Vineyard Vacation
President Obama is officially on vacation with his family in Martha's Vineyard but apparently, there just wasn't enough room on 4,000 square feet of Air Force One for their dog Bo. Naturally, the dog was put on a separate flight.Rooms have to be found for dozens of Secret Service agents, someone has to carry a selection of presidential basketballs, and of course the family dog needs his own state-of-the-art aircraft.
Arriving in the idyllic coastal retreat of Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts, Mr Obama left behind him in Washington DC high profile debates over the budget, government surveillance and his health care reforms. Instead, he will spend the next eight days playing golf, going to the beach, and buying books from the Bunch of Grapes bookstore.
In the air he swapped his suit and tie for khakis and a blue shirt with rolled-up sleeves, while Mrs Obama wore a yellow-and-white summer dress.
Bo, the president's Portuguese Water Dog, arrived separately on one of two MV-22 Ospreys, a hybrid aircraft which takes off like a helicopter but flies like a plane.
It was the first time the Ospreys have been taken on holiday by a US president.According to the Government Accountability Office, it costs $11,000 per hour to fly an Osprey. The Osprey is typically used for military operations, not as a presidential dog taxi.
Keep working America!
http://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2013/08/12/unreal-obamas-dog-arrives-separately-for-marthas-vineyard-vacation-n1662127
A Scandal Bigger Than Benghazi?
In a story that has remained largely under the mainstream media radar, Congress announced late last month that it would finally investigate the Aug. 6, 2011 helicopter crash in Afghanistan that resulted in 38 deaths, including 22 members of SEAL Team 6, made famous three months earlier when they killed Osama Bin Laden. Grieving family members insist that soldiers in the elite unit were placed in unnecessary danger by the recklessness of the Obama administration, whose actions they characterized as criminal. “We’re going to dive into this,” said Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee on National Security.The families of the slain soldiers have every right to be furious. SEAL Team 6 is a covert unit whose operations are ostensibly classified. As a result, it has never been revealed which members of the team were involved in the killing of the terrorist mastermind, or how many of those same men were among those killed when the Chinook helicopter in which they were traveling was shot down by Taliban terrorists.
The focus of the families’ fury and shock, along with that of SEAL Team 6 members themselves, was the administration’s desire to tout their success in killing Bin Laden — compromising the safety of the unit in the process. Only two days after the raid, Vice President Biden gave a speech at the Ritz Carlton hotel in Washington, D.C. “Let me briefly acknowledge tonight’s distinguished honorees: Adm. Jim Stavridis is a — is the real deal; he could tell you more about and understands the incredible, the phenomenal, the just almost unbelievable capacity of his Navy SEALS and what they did last — last Sunday,” Mr. Biden revealed to audience members gathered for the 50th anniversary of the Atlantic Council, an international affairs think tank.
What followed was a testament to Biden’s disturbing ability to speak before thinking. “And what was even more extraordinary was — and I’m sure former administration officials will appreciate this more than anyone — there was such an absolute, overwhelming desire to accomplish this mission that although for over several months we were in the process of planning it, and there were as many as 16 members of Congress who were briefed on it, not a single, solitary thing leaked. I find that absolutely amazing,” Biden added, apparently oblivious to the reality that he had just perpetrated one of the more egregious leaks of national security information in recent history.
As a result, SEAL Team 6 members realized they had a target painted on their backs. That reality was hammered home in a May 10, 2013 Fox News interview with Karen and Billy Vaughn, whose son Aaron was killed in the chopper crash. Karen spoke first. “As soon as Joe Biden announced that it was a SEAL Team who took out Bin Laden, within 24 hours, my son called me and I rarely ever heard him sound afraid in his adult life….He said, ‘Mom, you need to wipe your social media clean…your life is in danger, our lives are in danger, so clean it up right now’,” she revealed.
Billy Vaughn took on Biden in no uncertain terms. “The media has let this man get away with saying ‘Uncle Joe’s gaffes, Uncle Joe’s gaffes,” he fumed. “This is not Uncle Joe and he’s not some senile old grandfather. He is the second in command of the most powerful country in the world and he needs to take responsibility for the comments he makes and quit being given a pass.”
Charles Strange, the father of slain SEAL Michael Strange, was also furious. During a family conference with reporters at the National Press Club in Washington a day earlier, Strange recounted his exchange with President Obama at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware on Aug. 9, 2011. Strange noted that, despite Obama saying he would look “very, very, very deep into this,” he never heard from the president again. In an exchange with radio host Michael Savage last month, Strange took it one step further. He claimed his son told him, “Something’s going on with the team. Somebody’s leaking things out. Something’s going on.” Savage asked: “Your son knew he was being sent to his death?” Strange’s response was chilling. “They knew,” he answered. “They knew something was up. Every one of them.”
The military has provided more than 1,000 pages of documentation to the parents. Those documents contain the Defense Department’s assertion that they don’t believe the SEALs were targeted following the Bin Laden operation. Moreover in a transcript, a Defense Department official disputes the families’ assertion that the helicopter was brought down by an “established ambush,” contending it was “a lucky shot of a low-level fighter” who “happened to be in the right spot.”
The families aren’t buying that assessment, and they are extremely troubled by other questions surrounding the case as well. Of the 38 people killed in the crash, seven were members of the Afghan National Army. They were replaced at the last minute by other Afghan military officials who were not on the flight manifest, raising the possibility the replacements were Taliban infiltrators.
The military claimed that when the CH-47 Chinook helicopter was shot down, the bodies were badly burned and had to be cremated. Charles Strange believes the military is lying. “I saw Mike’s dead body,” he said in an interview. “It was clearly recognizable. He was clutching his gun. He wasn’t burned to a crisp. Why did they cremate my boy? They didn’t need to do that. Something’s not right.” Rep. Chaffetz, who said he saw a photo of a deceased SEAL, echoed that assertion. “The body I saw didn’t need to be cremated,” he said.
The military claims the helicopter’s black box was never recovered because it was washed away in a flash flood. Yet flash floods in that area of Afghanistan are extremely rare.
Furthermore, the families want to know why their sons were flown into a hot combat zone in a helicopter made in the 1960s. They want to know why such a large group of SEALS was put on a single aircraft and why no aerial backup was deployed, which is standard military procedure when special forces are involved. And they want to know why, during a funeral ceremony held at Bagram Air Base in Kabul, a Muslim cleric was allowed to recite a prayer condemning the American “infidels” to eternal damnation.
Yet perhaps the most damnable reality of all was revealed by Karen Vaughn at the aforementioned National Press Club meeting. “Why was there no pre-assault fire? We were told as families that pre-assault fire damages our effort to win the hearts and minds of our enemy,” she told reporters. “So in other words, the hearts and minds of our enemy are more valuable to this government than my son’s blood.”
This was not the first time the Vaughn family has challenged the so-called Rules of Engagement (ROE) that make a mockery of American soldiers’ ability to conduct effective warfare. Three days after Benghazi, they were among several Gold Star families of servicemen lost in combat who held a press conference on the subject. It was there the Vaughns made it known that after their son’s helicopter went down, air support refused to fire on the enemy because there might have been “friendlies” in the building. The ROE required the military present at the operation to stand down as a result. Billy Vaughn was incensed. ”Our military men go to war because they love what is behind them more than they hate what is in front of them,” he said at the time. “The least the government can do is give them the tools and the proper equipment and ROE that favor our warriors more than they favor our enemy.”
The least the government can do at the present time is conduct a thorough investigation into the the largest loss of life in a single day since the U.S. involvement in Afghanistan began. Freedom Watch is assisting some of the families of the deceased. Founder Larry Klayman minced no words regarding what he thinks about this tragedy. “This is a scandal even greater than Benghazi,” he said. “There we lost four valued American lives; here we sacrificed 30 American soldiers. The big question is were these brave Americans sold out by the Afghani government as payment to the Taliban for the death of bin Laden?”
Perhaps a bigger question is why the Obama administration can get away with the monumental hypocrisy of being the administration that has prosecuted more leakers than any other, while Joe Biden gets a pass. Republicans need to find answers to the many questions above. Our troops and their families deserve nothing less than a full accounting of this tragic incident.
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/arnold-ahlert/a-scandal-bigger-than-benghazi/
‘This Shouldn’t Be Happening’: Federal Officials Reportedly Purchasing Hotel Rooms for Illegal Immigrants
Federal officials are purchasing hotel
rooms for illegal immigrants and even releasing some to cities around
the country due to an unexpected surge of individuals from Mexico
seeking asylum in the U.S., documents obtained by Fox News reveal.
The documents reportedly show that
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency has been buying hotel
rooms costing up to $99 for dozens of undocumented families to relieve
overcrowding inside processing centers near the Mexico border.
An anonymous source, reportedly a long-time border agent and supervisor, told Fox News that the measures were necessary.
“People were sleeping on floors – they had nowhere to put them,” said the source. “This shouldn’t be happening.”
“Unless there is an immediate and well-pubicized policy change, this situation will become another debacle,” the source added.
Others are reportedely released to “bogus” addresses in Texas, Florida, and New York.
“When they don’t show up for court, they are removed by an immigration judge in absentia,” reports Fox News.
The sudden influx of illegal immigrants appears to be due to a recently discovered border “loophole”
that individuals from Mexico are exploiting to cross the border. Those
seeking to cross over to the U.S. are being instructed to recite “key
words” to U.S. border officials, resulting in unexpected overflow at
processing stations.
Last week the sudden influx forced one
processing station to shut down and nearly 200 people went through the
Otay Mesa crossing in San Diego telling U.S. immigration officials they
had a “credible fear” of the drug cartels.
Former U.S. Attorney for Southern
California Peter Nunez said the unexpected surge of individual seeking
asylum has been organized by someone.
“This clearly has to have been
orchestrated by somebody,” he told Fox News. “It’s beyond belief that
dozens of thousands of people would simultaneously decide that they
should go to the U.S. and make this claim.”
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/08/12/this-shouldnt-be-happening-federal-officials-reportedly-purchasing-hotel-rooms-for-illegal-immigrants/
Surprise! DoJ’s mortgage-fraud prosecutions claim turns out to be … fraudulent
Bloomberg News caught the Department of Justice in a particularly noteworthy Friday-night news dump over the weekend. The Obama administration, stung by accusations from the Left that it hadn’t gone after fraudulent mortgages and the lenders that helped fuel the bubble, claimed that a year-long initiative run by the Mortgage Fraud Working Group in the DoJ had charged 530 people who had victimized 73,000 people. When Bloomberg’s reporters began digging into the claim, the DoJ stonewalled — and then finally admitted it cooked the books themselves:The Justice Department made a long-overdue disclosure late Friday: Last year when U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder boasted about the successes that a high-profile task force racked up pursuing mortgage fraud, the numbers he trumpeted were grossly overstated.
We’re not talking small differences here. Originally the Justice Department said 530 people were charged criminally as part of a year-long initiative by the multi-agency Mortgage Fraud Working Group. It now says the actual figure was 107 — or 80 percent less. Holder originally said the defendants had victimized more than 73,000 American homeowners. That number was revised to 17,185, while estimates of homeowner losses associated with the frauds dropped to $95 million from $1 billion.Hey, they only inflated those claims by 80% and 9o% — or looking at it from the other direction, 500% and 900%. Shouldn’t they get a chance to round up to the nearest 1000%? If you’re wondering what prompted this sudden outbreak of honesty, Bloomberg explains that two of its reporters had figured out the fraud:
The government restated the statistics because it got caught red-handed by a couple of nosy reporters. Last October, two days after Holder first publicized the numbers, Phil Mattingly and Tom Schoenberg of Bloomberg News broke the story that some of the cases included in the Justice Department’s tally occurred before the initiative began in October 2011. At least one was filed more than two years before President Barack Obama took office.Jonathan Weil then played phone- and e-mail-tag with the DoJ spokesperson for a month, who promised Weil a list of those charged with fraud under the MFWG project. And promised. And promised. Instead, Weil wrote a column blasting Justice for stonewalling him.
The DoJ has finally corrected the record — late on a Friday, when few press outlets were around to note it. As it turns out, the original figure included people prosecuted or just sentenced in the same fiscal year, even though they had been charged with crimes long before the MFWG came into being. The victims were not limited to distressed homeowners, as the DoJ had originally claimed, and as Eric Holder himself bragged.
This isn’t the first time Holder has been caught cooking the books, Weil reminds us:
This was the second time, mind you, that Holder’s Justice Department had pulled a stunt like this. In December 2010, Holder held a press conference to tout a supposed sweep by the president’s Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force called “Operation Broken Trust.” (The mortgage-fraud program was part of the same task force.) As with the mortgage-fraud initiative, Broken Trust wasn’t actually a sweep. All the Justice Department did was lump together a bunch of small-fry, penny-ante fraud cases that had nothing to do with one another. Then it held a press gathering.
At least on that occasion, the Justice Department promptly provided me with a list of the defendants’ names and case details when I asked for them. That is how I was able to determine for a December 2010 column that the government’s Broken Trust numbers were inflated.
Among the handful of cases on the list that I spot-checked, one defendant was sentenced to probation before the operation’s supposed start date. Another person on the list had no record of criminal charges. Other cases had nothing to do with any actions by the task force. The Justice Department still hasn’t restated the Broken Trust numbers — even though those statistics clearly were in error, too.And people wonder why no one trusts government. Remember when Democrats and the media got so exercised about politicization at the Department of Justice when President Bush asked six political appointees in the US Attorney corps to resign? Good times, good times.
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/08/12/surprise-dojs-mortgage-fraud-prosecutions-claim-turns-out-to-be-fraudulent/
Congress leaves town but the Obama administration keeps on regulating
Big bureaucracies aren’t typically counted on to get anything done, but the Obama administration’s burgeoning executive branch has been busy. In the last 90 days, it has written over 6,300 rules and regulations for the American people.According to federal tracking and comment website Regulations.gov, federal agencies have posted 106 rules in just the last three days. Congress, on the other hand, enacted only 22 laws this year before leaving for an August recess last week.
The Daily Caller News Foundation recently reported on a joint George Washington University and Washington University St. Louis study by researchers Susan Dudley and Melinda Warren which pointed out that federal spending on the agencies writing
the regulations is increasing — despite sequestration cuts.With more funding for agencies that write the rules, Americans can expect even more regulations in the future. And the few laws that Congress does pass have led to massive amounts of new executive branch rules.
The Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 created the Consumer Financial Protection
Bureau, an agency primarily organized to regulate the interactions
between banks and their customers. The federal regulations website cites
220 rules that have been passed or proposed since the agency began operating.The 46.1 percent budget bump expected in 2013 and Obama’s proposal for another 27.3 pecent jump in 2014, as reported in the Dudley-Warren report, will keep the CFPB churning out its regulations at a record rate.
The Affordable
Care Act is another breeding ground for federal regulation. Senate
Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has cited the high number of regulations
in his anti-Obamacare campaign. McConnell’s cursory search turned up over 20,000 pages of rulemaking total.Compliance costs
are also on the rise. The Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free-market think tank, found that in 2012, it took over $1.8 trillion for Americans to figure out how to follow all the rules.http://dailycaller.com/2013/08/12/congress-leaves-town-but-the-obama-administration-keeps-on-regulating/
Taxpayers pay the fare for lawmakers to travel in style
It costs $21 for a lawmaker to take the train between Chicago and Springfield, or about $65 to drive.
But it costs taxpayers $4,060 when lawmakers choose to fly a six-seat executive airplane between the two cities.
Despite the enormous cost difference, the presiding officers of both the Illinois House and Senate are choosing to fly in the taxpayer-funded executive planes.
The practice has been going on for decades, but as the state struggles to pay its bills some are wondering if it is something Illinois can afford.
“Would getting rid of these planes solve the state’s budget problems? No. But it is of enormous symbolic value. The leaders seem unwilling to sacrifice,” said state Rep. Bill Mitchell, R-Forsyth, who has introduced legislation to eliminate most of the state’s fleet of executive aircraft.
But Steve Brown, a spokesman for House Speaker Michael Madigan, called Mitchell’s bill a “cheap publicity stunt.”
“I guess if you think a state as large as Illinois doesn’t need airplanes for state officials to get around, then you must be Bill Mitchell’s type of person,” he said.
One of the people co-sponsoring the legislation is state Rep. Don Moffitt, R-Gilson.
“I am sponsoring this because I think it will save the taxpayers money,” Moffitt said. “I take Amtrak whenever I can. If that is not available, I drive. As lawmakers, we have a responsibility to set a good example. … Now, having said that, I can’t speak to what the speaker of the House or the Senate president should do. I can only speak for myself.”
Moffitt said he has used state airplanes twice during his 21-year legislative career because there wasn’t a convenient alternative, and Mitchell said he has never flown on a state plane.
Using the state’s open records laws, the Illinois News Network obtained copies of the flight logs for the state’s four legislative leaders from July 1, 2012, through June 30, 2013.
During that period, Senate President John Cullerton booked 7,906 miles on state aircraft, Madigan flew 4,526 miles and Senate GOP Leader Christine Radogno rode state planes 438 miles.
House GOP Leader Tom Cross did not use the state airplanes at all during that period.
“These legislative leaders just think they are entitled,” Mitchell said. “There is no reason they can’t ride Amtrak to Springfield or drive like everybody else.”
But Brown said it is far more time efficient for Madigan to use the state plane, which lands and takes off from Midway International Airport, near the speaker’s home.
He added that Madigan usually uses regularly scheduled state flights that would operate whether he was aboard or not.
But Mitchell said that misses the point, because no one but the governor should have access to state aircraft.
The state executive aircraft fleet consists of four King Air 350 airplanes and two Sikorsky S-76 helicopters. The Illinois Department of Transportation also operates 10 utility aircraft used in road surveying and other endeavors.
Other states, such as New Mexico, have cut back on their airplane fleets during the economic downturn.
Mitchell is quick to point out that rank-and-file lawmakers have cut back on how much taxpayers pay them to commute to Springfield by car.
“Right now, we get reimbursed at a rate of 31 cents for each mile we drive – that’s far below the recommended federal reimbursement rate,” he said. In fact, the Internal Revenue Service recommends that employers reimburse employees at a rate of 56.5 cents per mile.
But how much does it cost to fly the airplane?
The Illinois Department of Transportation places the number at $4,892 per hour.
That would place the 50-minute, 146-mile flight between Springfield and Chicago’s Midway International Airport at $4,076, or $27.92 per mile in a King Air 350 airplane.
By way of comparison:
- The current Amtrak rate for a one-way ticket between Springfield and Chicago is $21.
- When driving the 207 road miles between Chicago and Springfield, lawmakers are reimbursed at a rate of 31 cents per mile, which equals $64.17.
- According to faremeasure.com, the average commercial flight ticket between Chicago O’Hare International Airport and Springfield was $131 during the past three months.
A spokesperson for Cullerton said, “Using the state plane’s shuttle flights is one way for lawmakers to maximize and balance the time split between district duties and Springfield work.”
Madigan’s spokesman, Brown, said it is worth noting that legislative use of the state airplanes is far below that of those working in the executive branch.
But an analysis of travel logs found that often Madigan and Cullerton are accompanied by other lawmakers when they travel between the state capital and Chicago.
“When the pope was archbishop of Buenos Aires, he rode the bus to work every day,” Mitchell said. “If public transportation is good enough for the pope, why isn’t it good enough for our state legislative leaders?”
http://watchdog.org/100368/taxpayers-pay-the-fare-for-lawmakers-to-travel-in-style/
PK'S NOTE: This is a fabulous summary of the mortgage problem. I don't think I've seen it done so clearly previously.
Votes for Mortgages
Fannie and Freddie have been in operation for decades without problems until recently. Fannie began in 1938 as a quasi-governmental agency making affordable homes available to people by making the financing easier and funds more readily available by establishing a secondary market for mortgages.
Previously banks had held onto their mortgages in a system called portfolio mortgages
and were made mostly to their own account holders. With the homes as
collateral, the banks then lent out that same money again to other local
borrowers. If you remember the scene from It's a Wonderful Life when
there is a run on the bank, you can visualize how that works when
confidence in the system disappears. With a secondary market for mortgages,
banks could recoup their money rather than keeping it tied up. The
result was that banks could loan out the same funds 5-6 times. If there
were a run, they could cover it. That stabilized the whole banking
system in the eyes of the public. It also led to mortgage
loans being more readily available, and the ability to do business with
banks across the country and lenders whom borrowers never saw. Millions
of people bought homes that way.
In 1996, Andrew Cuomo, then head of HUD for Bill Clinton announced that banking was going to change in the name of affordable housing. The government intended to see that more housing was available to the less fortunate in life. That's how the Subprime Crisis began.
The Community Revitalization Act of 1977, a law intended to stop redlining by banks, was used to pressure lenders to make loans to more and more people with ever lower credit scores.
With lender's traditional safeguards eliminated by government pressure, the resulting crash was inevitable. However, that explains only the high foreclosure rate.
What occurred to the bundled mortgages that Fannie and Freddie accumulated, then sold, is not their fault. That blame belongs to the financial investors and brokers on Wall Street. A brokerage firm would buy bundles valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars. After all, what better collateral is there than people's homes?
The brokers didn't do any due diligence though, so no problems ever showed up. Had the credit issues been revealed earlier, the market in mortgages would have dried up and the loans ceased to be made.
Even though there were three classes of borrowers by then, Prime, Alt-A, and Subprime, the mortgages from these classes were mixed in the bundles without any sort of inventory to account for them. The bundles were sold based simply on the face amount of the mortgages. That created an unknown level of risk for the buyers and was very different from the previous, all Prime, bundles. Without being able to sort out the mortgages, brokerages simply made assumptions about the number of mortgages in each bundle that would default. You always assume the worst, so revenue to Fannie and Freddie was reduced both short term and long term to compensate for that risk.
That's how the American General credit default swap came into being. The brokerages wanted to insure their bundles against loss, so they looked to a form of insurance to do that. Any company which insured a $600M loss would have to have available to it that amount in funds as long as the policy was in effect. That is a huge amount of money to have waiting idle. It's also a regulatory nightmare that the insurance commissions would watch very closely. But if it weren't really insurance, and wasn't sold by an insurance company, all of that could be avoided. What could go wrong doing it another way? People's homes were the collateral? It don't get no better than that.
So American General told companies that it would swap with them a previously defined amount of money for their defaulted credit. However, faced with the reality of a $600M loss, they couldn't live up to their end of the deal and defaulted themselves. That made it painfully obvious to others how shaky the value in their investments, by now called Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDO) really were.
It gets worse.
The CDO's were sold repeatedly, as financial instruments often are. That created more problems. The ownership of the underlying collateral, the homes and land, was never transferred on city and county property rolls as they were sold. Eventually, it became impossible, literally, to determine who owned an individual mortgage on a given piece of property. Worse, no one really wanted to jump into the tedious task of finding paper trails for hundreds of thousands of homes. That may still be true.
If a mortgage was actually paid off in this environment, the correct lender might not get paid as a result. That could, and did, cause legal problems and current homeowners sometimes faced eviction for not continuing to pay monthly notes on homes that they no longer owed money on.
Property titles weren't clear so no one could legally show as the owner of record, even if the home had been occupied by the same family for years. Responsibility for paying taxes was in doubt. That meant the homes could not be sold or even given away. Some families ceased paying and lived rent free because there was no one to evict them. If a lender thought they owned a mortgage, they had to construct a paper trail in order to satisfy a court before going beginning foreclosure proceedings. More than one lender was caught attempting to ignore that part of the process and just deem that it was the mortgage owner. That didn't go well with the courts when it came out and they were caught.
Nothing of significance has been done to date to correct the situation just described. Shutting down Fannie and Freddie, as recently called for by Obama, will have no impact on it at all. That is simply a distraction. It will only stop whatever government funding is going to those agencies themselves. They will be replaced in the secondary market because there is money to be made there and that is capitalism at it best.
The president thinks that the government will be able to dictate terms in that market without actually having a stake in it.
Maybe, but this won't do anything but create a venue for new kinds of interference.
In the wake of Obama's announcement, the FHA revealed that it is going to dictate the racial makeup of neighborhoods in the future. Neighborhoods will have to be in compliance with affirmative action dictates despite the Supreme Court's hinting that the days of affirmative action are near their end.
The houses that are sitting empty, that have residents who are living rent free, where the titles are clouded, or the owners are on the edge of foreclosure, are not likely to be in minority neighborhoods where people 'need' affordable housing. If the FHA wanted to do that, it could give away the city of Detroit.
The houses listed above are going to be taken by the FHA and given titles by the federal government since it thinks is already owns everything. It can't be sued later so the new owner/resident (?) will be safe on that account. My opinion, but it works and it fits.
The newly-titled houses will be given to others who most likely can't afford them without government assistance. That means that the funds that are claimed to have gone to Fannie and Freddie despite their making a profit will then be paid out in direct assistance to voters, voters who will then be obligated to the government. No votes, no house, the same way people get garbage cans in Chicago today.
Cronies may also buy the houses at giveaway prices and rent them out while paying nothing on them and leaving them unmaintained, sort of like a suburban Cabrini Green.
It seems that one crisis is normally accompanied by another incident or announcement in tandem. Which comes first in this, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, or the FHA announcement is beyond me -- if it even matters. But the two are connected. Of that there should be no doubt.
In 1996, Andrew Cuomo, then head of HUD for Bill Clinton announced that banking was going to change in the name of affordable housing. The government intended to see that more housing was available to the less fortunate in life. That's how the Subprime Crisis began.
The Community Revitalization Act of 1977, a law intended to stop redlining by banks, was used to pressure lenders to make loans to more and more people with ever lower credit scores.
With lender's traditional safeguards eliminated by government pressure, the resulting crash was inevitable. However, that explains only the high foreclosure rate.
What occurred to the bundled mortgages that Fannie and Freddie accumulated, then sold, is not their fault. That blame belongs to the financial investors and brokers on Wall Street. A brokerage firm would buy bundles valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars. After all, what better collateral is there than people's homes?
The brokers didn't do any due diligence though, so no problems ever showed up. Had the credit issues been revealed earlier, the market in mortgages would have dried up and the loans ceased to be made.
Even though there were three classes of borrowers by then, Prime, Alt-A, and Subprime, the mortgages from these classes were mixed in the bundles without any sort of inventory to account for them. The bundles were sold based simply on the face amount of the mortgages. That created an unknown level of risk for the buyers and was very different from the previous, all Prime, bundles. Without being able to sort out the mortgages, brokerages simply made assumptions about the number of mortgages in each bundle that would default. You always assume the worst, so revenue to Fannie and Freddie was reduced both short term and long term to compensate for that risk.
That's how the American General credit default swap came into being. The brokerages wanted to insure their bundles against loss, so they looked to a form of insurance to do that. Any company which insured a $600M loss would have to have available to it that amount in funds as long as the policy was in effect. That is a huge amount of money to have waiting idle. It's also a regulatory nightmare that the insurance commissions would watch very closely. But if it weren't really insurance, and wasn't sold by an insurance company, all of that could be avoided. What could go wrong doing it another way? People's homes were the collateral? It don't get no better than that.
So American General told companies that it would swap with them a previously defined amount of money for their defaulted credit. However, faced with the reality of a $600M loss, they couldn't live up to their end of the deal and defaulted themselves. That made it painfully obvious to others how shaky the value in their investments, by now called Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDO) really were.
It gets worse.
The CDO's were sold repeatedly, as financial instruments often are. That created more problems. The ownership of the underlying collateral, the homes and land, was never transferred on city and county property rolls as they were sold. Eventually, it became impossible, literally, to determine who owned an individual mortgage on a given piece of property. Worse, no one really wanted to jump into the tedious task of finding paper trails for hundreds of thousands of homes. That may still be true.
If a mortgage was actually paid off in this environment, the correct lender might not get paid as a result. That could, and did, cause legal problems and current homeowners sometimes faced eviction for not continuing to pay monthly notes on homes that they no longer owed money on.
Property titles weren't clear so no one could legally show as the owner of record, even if the home had been occupied by the same family for years. Responsibility for paying taxes was in doubt. That meant the homes could not be sold or even given away. Some families ceased paying and lived rent free because there was no one to evict them. If a lender thought they owned a mortgage, they had to construct a paper trail in order to satisfy a court before going beginning foreclosure proceedings. More than one lender was caught attempting to ignore that part of the process and just deem that it was the mortgage owner. That didn't go well with the courts when it came out and they were caught.
Nothing of significance has been done to date to correct the situation just described. Shutting down Fannie and Freddie, as recently called for by Obama, will have no impact on it at all. That is simply a distraction. It will only stop whatever government funding is going to those agencies themselves. They will be replaced in the secondary market because there is money to be made there and that is capitalism at it best.
The president thinks that the government will be able to dictate terms in that market without actually having a stake in it.
Maybe, but this won't do anything but create a venue for new kinds of interference.
In the wake of Obama's announcement, the FHA revealed that it is going to dictate the racial makeup of neighborhoods in the future. Neighborhoods will have to be in compliance with affirmative action dictates despite the Supreme Court's hinting that the days of affirmative action are near their end.
The houses that are sitting empty, that have residents who are living rent free, where the titles are clouded, or the owners are on the edge of foreclosure, are not likely to be in minority neighborhoods where people 'need' affordable housing. If the FHA wanted to do that, it could give away the city of Detroit.
The houses listed above are going to be taken by the FHA and given titles by the federal government since it thinks is already owns everything. It can't be sued later so the new owner/resident (?) will be safe on that account. My opinion, but it works and it fits.
The newly-titled houses will be given to others who most likely can't afford them without government assistance. That means that the funds that are claimed to have gone to Fannie and Freddie despite their making a profit will then be paid out in direct assistance to voters, voters who will then be obligated to the government. No votes, no house, the same way people get garbage cans in Chicago today.
Cronies may also buy the houses at giveaway prices and rent them out while paying nothing on them and leaving them unmaintained, sort of like a suburban Cabrini Green.
It seems that one crisis is normally accompanied by another incident or announcement in tandem. Which comes first in this, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, or the FHA announcement is beyond me -- if it even matters. But the two are connected. Of that there should be no doubt.
Mark Levin's The Liberty Amendments
Today marks the publication of Mark Levin's important new book, The Liberty Amendments.
I must confess that I had some trepidation when starting to read it,
for as the editor of American Thinker I turn down most submissions that
propose amending the Constitution as a solution for what ails us. The reason is simple: amending the Constitution is deliberately difficult to accomplish, so changing it is a solution easy to propose and difficult to dispose.
But Mark, whose body of work as a political thinker includes not just the significant tomes Men in Black, Liberty and Tyranny, and Ameritopia but also three hours a day of extemporaneous political talk on one the nation's most popular syndicated talk shows, is in a different category. And not simply because of his stature. The Liberty Amendments consists
of a well thought-out program of amendments (offered as a starting
point for discussion and modification), combined with a political
strategy that could (at least potentially) work: using a constitutional
convention called by two-thirds of the states. As Article 5 of the
Constitution reads:
In Chapter One of the Book, "Restoring the American Republic (also the subtitle of the book itself), Mark lays out his case that judicial precedent and politics have in effect altered the Constitution the framer's intended us to have, and restoring a constitutional republic as originally envisioned is going to require some extensive amending. Fortunately, Mark has posted this chapter online for all to read. I urge readers to click on the link and see the case that Mark makes.
The actual program of amendments, each analyzed in a separate chapter, should be read by all who see in this bold and visionary program a way to rescue our republic before it falls, as it surely will if present conditions continue to develop as they have been since the progressives first gained power. Sure, it is easy for me to point out how difficult it is to accomplish the passage of calls for a constitutional convention in 34 states. But take a look at a map of the red states, and then imagine the sort of grass roots movement Mark calls for, one energized and focused on local legislators. And keep in mind that state legislatures would gain enormous resources and power, should something like the program of amendments be ratified. Self-interest, properly checked and balanced, is the essence of our founders' wisdom, and legislative self-interest is a factor worth keeping in mind.
The chapter titles indicate in broad outline the nature of the constitutional program Mark has in mind:
An Amendment to Establish Term Limits for Members of Congress
An Amendment to Restore the Senate (repeal of the 17th Amendment establishing direct elections, provisions for replacement of senators before the end of their terms, and establishing the right of a state legislature to remove a senator upon a two-thirds vote).
An Amendment to Establish Term Limits for Supreme Court Justices and Super-Majority Legislative Override
Two Amendments to Limit Federal Spending and Taxation (limiting the federal government to outlays not exceeding 17.5% of GDP, and limiting total federal tax collections from any source to no more than 15% of a person's income). I must confess that I found reliance on specific numbers troubling here and in a few other amendments because there is so much room for manipulation in calculating GDP and income, or in determining the value of certain dollar amounts included in other amendments. But Mark makes very clear his is not the last word on this or any other subject, but merely a proposal to get people thinking about an entire package that counteract the transformation of the federal government into a colossus never imagined by the founders.
An Amendment to Limit the Federal Bureaucracy (automatic sunset for all department and agencies if they are not legislatively reauthorized, mandatory congressional authorization of any regulation imposed by bureaucrats if the economic burden exceeds $100 million).
An Amendment to Promote Free Enterprise (redefining the Commerce Clause to a specific grant of power limited to preventing states from impeding commerce among the states, and preventing Congress from regulating commerce within a state).
An Amendment to Protect Private Property (curbing abuses under the Takings Clause).
An Amendment to Grant the States Authority to Directly Amend the Constitution (allowing two thirds of the states, voting for the exact same language, to amend the Constitution, and providing a six year time frame within which the passage must be secured).
An Amendment to Grant States Authority to Check Congress (three fifths of the state legislatures may overturn acts of Congress or larger impact executive orders, within 24 months, with no judicial review permitted).
An Amendment to Protect the Vote (requiring photo ID for voting in person or via mail ballot and prohibiting electronic voting).
My summaries of the gist of each amendment ignore finer points in the text of each, not to mention in the discussions Mark presents.
Conservatives badly need to come together on a vision for America that can be presented to the American people as a way out of our dysfunctions that multiply with each growth of federal power. If Mark Levin succeeds in kicking off a grassroots movement to restore the constitutional balance, he will have performed a historic public service.
But Mark, whose body of work as a political thinker includes not just the significant tomes Men in Black, Liberty and Tyranny, and Ameritopia but also three hours a day of extemporaneous political talk on one the nation's most popular syndicated talk shows, is in a different category. And not simply because of his stature. The Liberty Amendments consists
of a well thought-out program of amendments (offered as a starting
point for discussion and modification), combined with a political
strategy that could (at least potentially) work: using a constitutional
convention called by two-thirds of the states. As Article 5 of the
Constitution reads:The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution, or, on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments, which, in either Case, shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as Part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States, or by Conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other Mode of Ratification may be proposed by the Congress; Provided that no Amendment which may be made prior to the Year One thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any Manner affect the first and fourth Clauses in the Ninth Section of the first Article; and that no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.
In Chapter One of the Book, "Restoring the American Republic (also the subtitle of the book itself), Mark lays out his case that judicial precedent and politics have in effect altered the Constitution the framer's intended us to have, and restoring a constitutional republic as originally envisioned is going to require some extensive amending. Fortunately, Mark has posted this chapter online for all to read. I urge readers to click on the link and see the case that Mark makes.
The actual program of amendments, each analyzed in a separate chapter, should be read by all who see in this bold and visionary program a way to rescue our republic before it falls, as it surely will if present conditions continue to develop as they have been since the progressives first gained power. Sure, it is easy for me to point out how difficult it is to accomplish the passage of calls for a constitutional convention in 34 states. But take a look at a map of the red states, and then imagine the sort of grass roots movement Mark calls for, one energized and focused on local legislators. And keep in mind that state legislatures would gain enormous resources and power, should something like the program of amendments be ratified. Self-interest, properly checked and balanced, is the essence of our founders' wisdom, and legislative self-interest is a factor worth keeping in mind.
The chapter titles indicate in broad outline the nature of the constitutional program Mark has in mind:
An Amendment to Establish Term Limits for Members of Congress
An Amendment to Restore the Senate (repeal of the 17th Amendment establishing direct elections, provisions for replacement of senators before the end of their terms, and establishing the right of a state legislature to remove a senator upon a two-thirds vote).
An Amendment to Establish Term Limits for Supreme Court Justices and Super-Majority Legislative Override
Two Amendments to Limit Federal Spending and Taxation (limiting the federal government to outlays not exceeding 17.5% of GDP, and limiting total federal tax collections from any source to no more than 15% of a person's income). I must confess that I found reliance on specific numbers troubling here and in a few other amendments because there is so much room for manipulation in calculating GDP and income, or in determining the value of certain dollar amounts included in other amendments. But Mark makes very clear his is not the last word on this or any other subject, but merely a proposal to get people thinking about an entire package that counteract the transformation of the federal government into a colossus never imagined by the founders.
An Amendment to Limit the Federal Bureaucracy (automatic sunset for all department and agencies if they are not legislatively reauthorized, mandatory congressional authorization of any regulation imposed by bureaucrats if the economic burden exceeds $100 million).
An Amendment to Promote Free Enterprise (redefining the Commerce Clause to a specific grant of power limited to preventing states from impeding commerce among the states, and preventing Congress from regulating commerce within a state).
An Amendment to Protect Private Property (curbing abuses under the Takings Clause).
An Amendment to Grant the States Authority to Directly Amend the Constitution (allowing two thirds of the states, voting for the exact same language, to amend the Constitution, and providing a six year time frame within which the passage must be secured).
An Amendment to Grant States Authority to Check Congress (three fifths of the state legislatures may overturn acts of Congress or larger impact executive orders, within 24 months, with no judicial review permitted).
An Amendment to Protect the Vote (requiring photo ID for voting in person or via mail ballot and prohibiting electronic voting).
My summaries of the gist of each amendment ignore finer points in the text of each, not to mention in the discussions Mark presents.
Conservatives badly need to come together on a vision for America that can be presented to the American people as a way out of our dysfunctions that multiply with each growth of federal power. If Mark Levin succeeds in kicking off a grassroots movement to restore the constitutional balance, he will have performed a historic public service.
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