Zee Links and Minifeatures: April 2009 Archives

Come back Thursday morning for the Consumer Focused Carnival of Real Estate

For those who missed my article on Home Valuation Code of Conduct (the new appraisal standards), or just decided not to believe me, here's a video explaining a lot of the practical points once again. They don't get everything, but they do manage to paint a basic picture of the most common issues we are facing.

HVCC is here. Even if you were applying for a loan today (April 28th), the lenders have already implemented it. I've been insisting upon every loan HVCC compliant for a couple weeks now. Even if you got a signed dated loan application done before May 1st, it is entirely common that lenders insist upon another application at a later point and use that as the origination date. What happens if you've done a non-HVCC compliant appraisal? The answer is that you're going to pay for another appraisal.

The video is aimed at agents, but the general public can get some good information out of it. Here's some important information about it I've already discovered: Lots of agents are in denial about this. Most of them are going to lose multiple transactions before they figure it out. Make sure your agent isn't one of them.

HVCC is a foetid rotting cow carcass full of its own excrement, the moral equivalent of a royal monopoly from the middle ages. It doesn't help lenders, it doesn't help buyers, it doesn't help sellers, It doesn't help owners trying to refinance, it doesn't help agents, it doesn't help loan officers and it doesn't even help appraisers. Indeed, it harms all of these. Nonetheless, we have to comply until such time as the outrage causes politicians to repeal it or do something that's actually better. I'd advise being ready for a long wait, because the appraisal management companies (who it does help by distorting the appraisal process and adding the Appraisal Management Company layer/bottleneck to the process) have some heavy duty influence.

I just got this email:

Dear NAMB Member,

IMMEDIATE ACTION REQUIRED! Today the House Financial Services Committee will
hold a mark-up session on H.R. 1728 to decide which provisions will be
included in the bill. Please contact your Congressmen and urge them to
support the Childers/Miller Amendment (which imposes a 12-month moratorium
on the Home Valuation Code of Conduct ["HVCC"]). Click here
to find your Congressman's contact
information.

In addition, please stress the importance of Title I, Section 103 that was
carefully drafted and negotiated as part of HR 1728. This Section does its
part to ban incentivized compensation from all distribution channels while
still protecting mortgage brokers' ability to earn a living. It offers true
consumer protection.

You must act NOW! Below are talking points to assist in your conversations.
Preserve your ability to make a living by urging your Congressmen to vote
for the Childers/Miller Amendment in H.R. 1728!

_____

Talking Points:

I. Support the Childers/Miller Amendment
A) Imposes a 12 month moratorium on the HVCC.
B) Additional information about the HVCC is available here
.

II. Title I, Section 103: YSP
A) Protects small business.
B) Bans incentivized compensation from all distribution channels.
C) Provides true consumer protection: protection from incentive-driven
practices while still allowing competition in the market.
D) Consumers want zero-point or no cost loans. In order to make a living and
compete with larger banks, brokers must be able to earn indirect
compensation as part of the rate or financed into the mortgage amount.

I don't blindly parrot anyone's talking points, but they're mostly right.

The Politics of Liberal Amnesia

Or maybe the speaker missed what former CIA Director (and Bill Clinton appointee) George Tenet writes in his memoir, "At the Center of the Storm," about the CIA interrogation of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed:

"I believe none of these successes [in foiling terrorist plots] would have happened if we had had to treat KSM like a white-collar criminal -- read him his Miranda rights and get him a lawyer who surely would have insisted his client simply shut up. In his initial interrogation by CIA officers, KSM was defiant. 'I'll talk to you guys,' he said, 'after I get to New York and see my lawyer.' Apparently he thought he would be immediately shipped to the United States and indicted in the Southern District of New York. Had that happened, I am confident that we would have obtained none of the information he had in his head about imminent threats to the American people."

Sometimes the necessary steps are in conflict with the desire to see ourselves as "nice people," or "the good guys." This isn't a novel; it certainly isn't a Hollywood movie. The end has not been predetermined by a scriptwriter, and there are no certain choices. One of the few certainties is that if we let our need to be seen as "the good guys" control us too much, innocent people will die. Perhaps a lot of innocent people - perhaps our own families. And that is one thing real "good guys" do not do - sit around wringing their hands because in order to prevent a great evil they must perpetrate a smaller one.

I'm not involved in the day-to day decision-making of what is still a War on Terror, no matter what the current administration's lawyers are calling it this week. I have never been directly involved with anything similar. But I have been following the decisions, their rationale, and their results for thirty years now. The decisions that we are making to act like lawyers determined to uphold the law, rather than fighters determined to win a war, are going to get lots of Americants killed. Perhaps they will even cause us to lose. And that is emphatically not a good thing.

"Scooter" Pelosi

Richard Fernandez has been there

I fear that one day, perhaps soon, and perhaps under Barack Obama's Presidency, that an attack on US soil will be made which will dwarf 9/11 both in destructiveness and brutality. And I predict that when it happens, many of the people who are now baying for the prosecution of Bush era officials will be demanding that they be protected -- at all costs. They demand protection not because they are morally inferior, intellectually infirm or ideologically corrupted, but because survival is the first rule of life. Anybody who has gone through a hospital ward and heard the patients, request and then demand their pain medication knows that to the question "how far can you go?", there is no easy answer. Nobody really knows the meaning of "last and desperate" until he's been there.

"How far are we willing to go?" isn't an easy question, and any attempts to treat it as one are doomed to failure, because there will be a successful attack we could have averted by going further. I might agree, both now and then, that going further will be something we shouldn't have done. But most people don't - won't - stop and think rationally when something punches them emotionally. The mood in the country today is very different than it was seven and a half years ago before the Bush Administration had kept us safe against subsequent attacks for seven years. Run a search engine for some random articles from September 12th, 2001 on for the next six months. That's likely to be the mood the country will be in after the next successful attack - the survivors anyway. Actually, it will probably be stronger.

It's a cheap and tawdry trick to, with the current perception of safety, project an unalloyed "The US doesn't do any of that ever because we're the good guys." Explode one suitcase size "dirty nuke" in New York Harbor or San Francisco Bay or any of a long list of other candidates, and that stance will become a political non-starter. Until we allow ourselves to forget again that the real world has people with differing agendas who won't hesitate a single microsecond to commit mass murder if it furthers their cause even slightly.

Arlen Spector switches parties

Specter, 79 and seeking a sixth term in 2010, conceded bluntly that his chances of winning a Pennsylvania Republican primary next year were bleak in a party grown increasingly conservative

and

Tuesday's switch was not Specter's first.

He was a Democrat until 1965, when he ran successfully on the Republican ticket for district attorney in Philadelphia.

His career moves and votes paint a very coherent picture. Arlen Specter acts as he does not out of any inborn conscience. If he did, I'd respect him. He acts as he does to advance his political career (if you want to take issue with this, name me at least one time in his Senate career he stood up to be counted in a way that was likely to cost him votes). He votes to maintain his political career. He will do anything to get 50% plus one of available votes and stay in office one more term.

But let me ask: What is the value of electing a weathervane?

Leaders don't act in a certain way because that's the way 50% plus one want them to act. They persuade 50% plus one of the people that theirs is the correct course of action. Arlen Specter is not a leader. He simply pretended to be something he wasn't for as long as it was an advantage, until it become politically untenable. He's neither a centrist nor a moderate - what he is is a political whore (and I feel like I'm insulting whores with that remark). Quite frankly, a committed leftist would be better for the country and for Pennsylvania - and I say this as someone who doesn't like leftists very much. Here's hoping Specter gets beaten badly next year - either by a Democrat in the primaries, or by a Republican in the general.

The growing opacity of the Obama administration

Darn right they were because, you know, they were catching corrupt union officials. Can't have that. So "unfair and burdensome" - something that tax payers are never able to plead about the gigantic and undecipherable tax code - now takes priority over transparent and accountable.

Political payoff, plain and simple.

Steve Forbes: The Looming Fight for 17% of the U.S. Economy

Rationing. Bureaucracy. Driving doctors and other health care providers out of business. How we're supposed to get more, better, and cheaper health care out of the government running it is something nobody rational can figure out, and Mr. Forbes shows the insanity.

He's got good ideas too.

The Truth About Cars and Trucks . And the UAW

Chrysler was bailed out directly with government loan guarantees; the Big Three all benefited from Reagan era "voluntary" quotas on Japanese imports to prop up domestic car prices. But these were temporary fixes. For more than 40 years, a 25% tariff has kept out foreign-built pickup trucks even as a studied loophole was created in fuel-economy regulations to let the Big Three develop a lucrative, protected niche in the "passenger truck" business.

This became the long-running unwritten deal. This was Washington's real auto policy.

For three decades, the Big Three were able to survive precisely because they skimped on quality and features in the money-losing sedans they were required under Congress's fuel economy rules to build in high-cost UAW factories. In return, Washington compensated them with the hothouse, politically protected opportunity to profit from pickups and SUVs.

Carnival of Personal Finance

The Cost of Media Bias

Andrew Breitbart has more.

The Government Becomes a Loan Shark

When I first heard rumblings in the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere that the government would not allow big banks to repay their TARP loans, I thought it was either a genuine misunderstanding or an unfair partisan canard against the Obama administration. But the stories continue in the press and Tim Geithner has not done what he needs to do to kill this story: publicly announce that almost any bank that wants to pay back the TARP can bring a "check" to him personally.

It used to be that when you borrowed money from the mob, you could almost never get free. Once the mob got its hooks into you, you found that they owned you.

Now instead of the mob, it's the federal government that won't let you free, even if you want to pay off your loan with interest.

It's about getting and keeping control. In other words, power. The Obama administration has done more in 100 days to perpetuate their own hold on power than the Bush Administration did in eight years with the War on Terror, or whatever the Obama administration is calling their attempts to control terrorists with lawyers this week.

Obama's asking his cabinet for $100 Million in savings. Instapundit illustrates how much difference that would make.

Green jobs: The next sub-prime mortgage?

Where's the Backbone?

Well, not exactly. Look at the fate of various proposals in the Obama budget, and the question that arises is not Walter Mondale's famous "Where's the beef?" It's "Where's the backbone?"

The President Ties His Own Hands on Terror

Disclosure of the techniques is likely to be met by faux outrage, and is perfectly packaged for media consumption. It will also incur the utter contempt of our enemies. Somehow, it seems unlikely that the people who beheaded Nicholas Berg and Daniel Pearl, and have tortured and slain other American captives, are likely to be shamed into giving up violence by the news that the U.S. will no longer interrupt the sleep cycle of captured terrorists even to help elicit intelligence that could save the lives of its citizens.

Which brings us to the next of the justifications for disclosing and thus abandoning these measures: that they don't work anyway, and that those who are subjected to them will simply make up information in order to end their ordeal. This ignorant view of how interrogations are conducted is belied by both experience and common sense. If coercive interrogation had been administered to obtain confessions, one might understand the argument. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), who organized the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, among others, and who has boasted of having beheaded Daniel Pearl, could eventually have felt pressed to provide a false confession. But confessions aren't the point. Intelligence is. Interrogation is conducted by using such obvious approaches as asking questions whose correct answers are already known and only when truthful information is provided proceeding to what may not be known. Moreover, intelligence can be verified, correlated and used to get information from other detainees, and has been; none of this information is used in isolation.

Obama is thinking like a lawyer; he needs to think like the leader of a country who is responsible for the welfare of its inhabitants.

The Sting in Four Parts

For those who don't recognize the reference, it's both a confidence game conclusion and a movie about a con.

Undaunted, Obama offered his New Foundation speech as the complete, contextual, canonical text for the domestic revolution he aims to enact. It had everything we have come to expect from Obama:

The Whopper: The boast that he had "identified $2 trillion in deficit reductions over the next decade." It takes audacity to repeat this after it had been so widely exposed as transparently phony. Most of this $2 trillion is conjured up by refraining from spending $180 billion a year for 10 more years of surges in Iraq. Hell, why not make the "deficit reductions" $10 trillion -- the extra $8 trillion coming from refraining from repeating the $787 billion stimulus package annually through 2019.

A World Of Trouble For Obama

Now comes the interesting part: when it starts to become evident that Bush did not create rogue states, terrorist movements, Middle Eastern blood feuds or Russian belligerence -- and that shake-ups in U.S. diplomacy, however enlightened, might not have much impact on them.

The Illusions of Obama's Idealism Abroad

The damage has been limited to theatrics. But as Kennedy learned, weak theatrics can induce aggression. And Obama is accumulating some weak theatrics.

Medical care: words versus realities

The bottom line is medical care. But the rhetoric and the talking points are about insurance. Many people who could afford health insurance do not choose to have it because they know that medical care will be available at the nearest emergency room, whether they have insurance or not.

Read the whole thing.

Tea Party Economics

Some analysts have made the case that Americans are not overtaxed (at the federal level) and that therefore the protests were not justified. But this misses the point. Government spending is exploding, with the Congressional Budget Office projecting $9.3 trillion in deficits over the next 10 years. People know that this spending represents future taxes.

Here is an interesting set of facts. If the government increased the top tax rate from the current rate of 35% to 100% (yes, that's right 100%), it would only collect an extra $400 billion this year. In other words, confiscating all the income that is currently taxed at 35% would not raise enough revenue to cover any of the annual deficits projected in the next 10 years. There is no way that tax hikes on the rich alone can pay for proposed spending in the current budget.

Misconceptions About the Interrogation Memos

As a former federal prosecutor, I know a good case from a bad one. I know a case based on solid evidence and even-handed application of the law versus one based on scoring political points. Mr. Obama and his attorney general, Eric Holder, have professed their desire to take politics out of the Justice Department, to restore integrity to a department that they believe had gone astray under Mr. Bush. Their recent actions, however, speak otherwise.

Do we really want to criminalize policy differences? What happens when the next Republican Administration wants to use this precedent to charge Democratic Obama Administration officials with crimes? Perhaps to avoid that, might the Obama Administration wield all possible power (legal or not) to avoid a Republican successor? Might not all future administrations try to avoid an opposing party successor, by any means possible (Once again, legal or not)? How then, would we differ from the Mexico of 1929-2000, where the appointed PRI candidate always won the elections? Did this period do any good for the government or culture of Mexico? (I assure you, the answer is no).

Damnation of Memory

President Obama would not a want a putative President Palin to begin hearings on who ordered the targeted executions of two suspected Somali pirates, taken out in the middle of protracted negotiations. He would not wish a President Sanford one day to indict those Obama officials who approved the assassination-by-Predator-missile of suspected terrorists and their families in Pakistan -- without habeas corpus, Miranda rights, or avenues of appeal. He would not enjoy a future President Giuliani's bringing indictments of Obama officials over the NSA's exceeding its allotted e-mail intercepts, or the CIA's conducting overseas renditions of suspected terrorists without providing them the benefits of U.S. law.

Two ways to avoid that: Avoid prosecuting the Bush Administration for political differences, or avoid handing over power. There really isn't a third because the precedent Obama would establish by prosecuting them would require the continuance of complete Democratic domination of government in order to avoid future prosecution by the next Republican administration.

Can You Believe this chutzpah? Telling us he's a deficit fighter after wasting $1.6 Trillion dollars in less than 100 days, and setting up more federal deficit in the remainder of his term than all of his predecessors combined in their full terms. And that includes the previous record holder for fiscal irresponsibility, George W. Bush.

Did I say $1.6 Trillion? More like $3 Trillion for the expansion of TARP alone. Much of that number is already known to be vulnerable to shenanigans, about which Obama and Geithner are doing basically zip.

They said if I voted for a Republican in 2008, I'd wind up with an autocratic administration determined to wipe out civil rights -- and they were right! The Obama administration has argued for the end of the Michigan v Jackson ruling that requires police to provide an attorney for a suspect once one has been requested.

The Michigan vs Jackson ruling in 1986 established that, if a defendants have a lawyer or have asked for one to be present, police may not interview them until the lawyer is present.

Any such questioning cannot be used in court even if the suspect agrees to waive his right to a lawyer because he would have made that decision without legal counsel, said the Supreme Court.

However, in a current case that seeks to change the law, the US Justice Department argues that the existing rule is unnecessary and outdated.

The sixth amendment of the US constitution protects the right of criminal suspects to be "represented by counsel", but the Obama regime argues that this merely means to "protect the adversary process" in a criminal trial.

The Justice Department, in a brief signed by Elena Kagan, the solicitor general, said the 1986 decision "serves no real purpose" and offers only "meagre benefits".

Hot Air concludes with the right question:

Wasn't Barack Obama supposed to be a Constitutional scholar? Was that in the "How To Dismantle" school of thought?

Hilarious! Capitalist pranks "free hugs" hippie

I'm still playing catch up from four days doped up in bed. I'm working on an article about how changes in lender policy are effecting consumers and what the best practices under the changed circumstances will be. If I can finish it, it will be up Monday.

Disgraceful: Afghan women pelted with stones during rape law protest

Glenn Reynolds on the Tax Day Tea Parties

There's good news and bad news in this phenomenon for establishment politicians. The good news for Republicans is that, while the Republican Party flounders in its response to the Obama presidency and its programs, millions of Americans are getting organized on their own. The bad news is that those Americans, despite their opposition to President Obama's policies, aren't especially friendly to the GOP. When Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele asked to speak at the Chicago tea party, his request was politely refused by the organizers: "With regards to stage time, we respectfully must inform Chairman Steele that RNC officials are welcome to participate in the rally itself, but we prefer to limit stage time to those who are not elected officials, both in Government as well as political parties. This is an opportunity for Americans to speak, and elected officials to listen, not the other way around."

I'd say that the time has probably passed for the Republicans to lead the tax revolt, and having missed the opportunity, will become targets themselves.

Bill Whittle

These men signed a document knowing that was their death sentence, should their ramshackle collection of farmers and brewers and smiths fail to prevail against the most powerful military force the world had ever seen. A death sentence. They did that, not because they craved money, or social position, or political power - as with all revolutions before or since. Most of them had that in abundance. This was a risk they took not to gain everything, but to lose it.

They did it because they believed that men should be free: free from the petty tyrannies of other people telling you what to do for your own good. They risked their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor for you. If we cannot take two hours out of work to repay that debt, then we deserve everything that is coming to us.

Ed Morrissey

At some point, we have to start paying these bills, and when we do, it will hammer the middle class.

That's what drives the Tea Parties -- not taxes today, but all of the spending that will eventually require crushing taxes to resolve. The Obama administration plans a spending spree unlike anything outside of world wars in our history, and wants to sell a fantasy that only the rich have to pay for it. It's ridiculous on its face. The amounts are staggeringly high, and even 100% confiscation wouldn't begin to cover it.

Actually, the Obama administration campaigned upon the fantasy that "the rich" would be forced to pay for it all. People making $250,000 per year or more can't pay for all of it - there simply aren't enough such people. In fact, these people (less than 1% of the population) already pay more than 40% of all income taxes. But people who were intent upon having others pay for all of the goodies they wanted from the government didn't care that the math did not support Obama's campaign promises.

Furthermore, there are places on earth - quite pleasant places as long as you're wealthy - where the people the administration wants to tax to pay for the populist goodies can keep 90% plus of what they make. In most cases, there is no reason whatsoever that the profitable moneymaker cannot relocate to those places. What do you think is going to happen once these highly productive people make that move?

Here's a little historical context: The fascist state anti-Jewish policies caused Albert Einstein, Johann Van Neumann, Enrico Fermi, and a host of other brilliant central and eastern european Jews to emigrate. What development did these men all have a hand in? Answer: If the fascists had not frightened off these comparatively few brilliant men, men who didn't make the same mistakes the scientists left behind in central europe did make, Germany would have developed the Atom Bomb sometime around 1942. So when everything looks darkest, England still just holding on, Rommel and Montgomery fighting in North Africa and the Germans in control of most of european Russia, Allied cities start vanishing under mushroom clouds and major allied troop concentrations are obliterated by one bomb each. Prognosis for the allies and for the world?

The men and women the Obama Administration will economically persecute out of the country under the his campaign promises will make no less of a difference to the future of the world than the Jewish refugees of the 1930s.

When Fascism Comes To America

It's here. People so afraid of the arguments that others will make that they prevent those others from speaking.

Federal agency warns of radicals on right

Q and O gives the warning its due deconstruction.

Me, I think I'm seeing the beginning of the next Emmanuel Goldstein campaign.

The document itself is here

Having been in a profession where I occasionally was required to read and apply law enforcement directives, this thing stands out as shoddy work. Yes, there are right wing crazies out there - but this is so vague as to enable the targeting of whomever the authorities want to target.

The report uses debunked reports as its basis

As Michelle Malkin notes, in the past, these documents identified specifically named groups and had said specifically named groups not been exactly what was alleged, they had recourse in the press, in the courts, etcetera. But without naming specific groups, DHS keeps from being held responsible. They also do not name specific activities, but rather a host of things that sound a lot more like political dissent and disagreement.

There's no hackneyed left-wing stereotype of conservatives left behind in this DHS intelligence and analysis assessment. I asked both DHS spokespeople to tell me who, specifically, the report was accusing of "rightwing extremist chatter" and which "antigovernment" groups are being monitored as "extremists." They say they'll get back to me.

I have here in my hand a list of 205...

Here's the report of Left-Wing groups for comparison. Fewer specifically named groups than I recall from similar documents, but still a model of precision compared to the previous document, and they name specific terrorist strategies and things to beware of.

Hot Air:

In other words, it does not treat all animal-rights criticisms as indications of terrorist thought. It fails to paint all opponents of free trade as potential national-security threats. Global warming activism does not get treated in this instance as federalism does in the execrable DHS report on conservatives and libertarians. In other words, in this report, the DHS actually focuses on threats, not becoming the Thought Police.

This report differs from the latest in another key way. Instead of rambling on about how organizing for political change represents a threat to the US, this report focuses on the nature of potential attacks. Their choices are interesting in and of themselves. Instead of remarking on potentially violent threats from these groups, which have used violence in anti-globalization protests around the world, torching car dealerships for environmental causes, and destroying laboratories to free research animals, DHS mainly focuses on the threat of cyber attack from these groups. In fact, that's practically all it discusses, along with a specific list of targets that require protection, including the now-defunct Wachovia Bank.

DHS sees no potential for violence in groups with proven track records of violent terrorism? Cyber attack is really the greatest threat we can see from Recreate 68, ELF, and ALF? Really?

Even some die-hard liberals are demanding an explanation.

Watch this:

Staged Military Photo Ops: Then and Now

Snakes on a plane. For real. Baby pythons escape during flight in Australia

Glad they weren't something poisonous. But it's like a bad movie attacking in real life.

A word of explanation and apology: I have been sick as the proverbial dog since the night of Good Friday. I had been completely exhausted, and when I took a chill it hit me hard. The reprints this week weren't planned; I just haven't had any choice, being doped up on Theraflu and similar medications. I'm hoping it's starting to recede, if so I will try and do something new for tomorrow since I certainly can't go out looking at properties or much else that is constructive.

The below is mostly from before I got sick.

Spam level *declines*... to 97 percent of all email

The title says it all.

Fundamental Dishonesty

First, he strongly intimated that because only 1 percent of children were able to "escape" (and boy, that's some admission) from D.C.public schools through this program, it was not worth saving.

So, you may ask, why not allow the 1 percent to turn into 2 percent or 10 percent instead of scrapping the program? After all, only moments later, Duncan claimed that there was no magic reform bullet and that it would take a multitude of innovations to fix education

If you think that the Secretary of Education wasn't given marching orders on this subject by Obama, well, perhaps you need to wait until you're a little older before you vote.

Obama and the Reawakening of Corporatism

In 1970, General Motors was the largest and most profitable company in America. Today, of course, GM is neither. Instead, in 2009 America's largest company is Wal-Mart, which was still only a regional, privately-held retailer in 1970. Wal-Mart's rapid rise is not unique, however. Among the 100 largest firms today, a number--including FedEx, Microsoft, Cisco, and Home Depot--didn't even exist in 1970. So profoundly has the landscape changed that 80 percent of the Fortune 100 companies today are different from 1970.

Read it. Major corporations appreciate the moat Obama is building for them, protecting them from competition. They've already got the resources to deal with complex regulations, and control over the market (or enough of it) to raise prices to compensate. Who does this business environment disadvantage? The entrepreneurs who have been our major source of economic gains.

Victor Davis Hanson: The Politics of Blame

The Obama administration, remember, signed the Democratic-sponsored bill to authorize new bailouts for Wall Street firms and mega-bonuses for their executives. And during the Clinton administration, Treasury Secretaries Robert Rubin and Larry Summers - who both later made millions on Wall Street - succeeded in freeing investment banks from federal regulations that eventually led to their reckless gambling with trillions in sub-prime mortgage debt.

The quasi-government-run Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac mortgage agencies - staffed with ex-Clinton administration cronies - were at Ground Zero of the financial meltdown. Liberals in Congress like Sen. Chris Dodd and Rep. Barney Frank were among the largest recipients of Wall Street money. In the 2008 presidential campaign, most of the big investor money went to Democratic candidate Obama.

Billionaire investors like Warren Buffet and George Soros proved to be among Obama's staunchest supporters. Health and Human Services Cabinet-nominee Tom Daschle had to bow out because he skipped paying income taxes on free corporate limousine service. Democrats are clearly no longer the party of dirt farmers in bib overalls and sweaty dockworkers.

Is this starting to paint a coherent picture for you? There's a reason major, already established corporations make their campaign contributions to the Democrats, despite the Democrats being anti-business. These corporations can afford regulatory costs, they can afford lawyers, they can afford the campaign contributions for special favors. They will just raise prices to compensate. It's the new business that can't afford those. This effectively gives the established corporations a monopoly (or an effective monopoly) over the market.

Obama Has Been a Divider, Not a Uniter

But Obama was supposed to be the antidote to the poison of partisanship. During the presidential campaign, chief strategist David Axelrod told Brownstein, "If there's an enhanced Democratic majority, I think that he's going ... to urge a special sense of responsibility to try and forge coalitions around these answers, not because we won't be able to force our will in many cases, but because, ultimately, effective governance requires it in the long term."

That makes last week's votes on the budget resolutions a landmark of ineffective governance. Not a single Republican in the House or Senate supported the bill, largely because the Democratic majority forced its will. Republicans were flattened, not consulted. Democratic leaders talk of enacting controversial elements of the budget through the reconciliation process -- which would require 51 Senate votes, not the normal 60, for passage. Only in Washington would the word "reconciliation" refer to a form of partisan warfare.

Women's Rights as a Measure of Civilization

In a society where might makes right, where the rule of brute force has been thoroughly unleashed, women are always the first victims. Even the poorest and meanest man, the guy on the lowest rung who is oppressed by others above him who are bigger and stronger-even he can find one person he is still able to dominate and oppress: a woman, whether it is his mother, his wife, or his daughter. And he will oppress her-if the oppression of others by force is the accepted norm of the society he lives in. For examples, look to the Muslim world with its "honor" killings, arranged marriages, sexual segregation, and special restrictions on the travel and attire of women.

He can't resist throwing stones at the political right, but he does acknowledge that it's the right who has been the champion of women's rights of late.

N. Korea shows need for missile defense

But at least the Soviet Union was run by rational, clear-minded men. North Korea and Iran are in the grips of regimes controlled, in Pyongyang, by a paranoid egomaniac who starves his people and isolates his nation, and, in Tehran, by religious fanatics who harbor millennial, apocalyptical fantasies.

Yes, the possibility of a rogue state turning an atom bomb over to terrorists may be a greater threat than intercontinental ballistic missiles. But North Korea and Iran want rockets for a reason. Even if they didn't launch an ICBM, the mere capability and threat to do so would give these dictators enormous power -- unless they knew a defense system could knock down their warheads.

Let me ask you this: Suppose there were a missile headed for your city. Wouldn't you want a missile defense system operational, with at least a chance to prevent a trillion dollar disaster potentially killing millions?

The other alternative is to watch it hit and clean up afterwards. Yeah, we can nuke the perpetrator into radioactive glass, but that doesn't make the damage done to us any less.

That missile is going to happen - probably more than once. It's only a matter of time. The question is whether we will be ready when it does.

Game Theory Exposes PPIP As Fraudulent

Suppose someone is willing to fund your gambling problem, and lend you $80 at zero interest. Better still, if you lose the bet you don't have to pay him back. Under that scenario, the same gambler would pay $90 for the bet, giving him an even chance of winning or losing $10.

A Message to the Rich

So let me now send a personal message to The Rich in America...

As an American and a patriot, I implore you - I go to my knees and beg you - LEAVE NOW.

Leave. Just go away. Retire to the Cayman Islands or Bermuda or wherever, but do it now, please, while you still have some love for this country. Close your companies, fire your employees, shutter your factories and offices, sell your property, and take all of that somewhere else... better yet: somewhere scenic but poverty-stricken. Somewhere that could use some wealth creation. Somewhere that people simply are grateful to have a job in the first place. Somewhere where you will be appreciated.

You are not welcome in America any more. Take your wealth and prosperity and inventiveness and hard work and vision and insight and bold risk-taking and joy in seeing growth and wealth creation and just go away - right now, before it's too late. Because if you stay, Joel Berg and Barack Obama and Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi and Barney Frank and Chris Dodd will continue to come after you for more and more and more and they will not ever stop - not ever - until you are forced to flee. And when that day comes, you will go with not with fond remembrances and a desire to return home, but rather a black heart and hard and bitter memories.

Read the whole thing.

What happens if the wealthiest 1% takes him up on it

Stevens case closed, case against prosecutors open

A federal judge dismissed the corruption conviction of former Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens on Tuesday and took the rare and serious step of opening a criminal investigation into prosecutors who mishandled the case.

"In nearly 25 years on the bench, I've never seen anything approaching the mishandling and misconduct that I've seen in this case," U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan said.

Ted Stevens is still corrupt, but he shouldn't have been subjected to this kind of trial. As close as the election was that he lost only days after his conviction, I don't think anyone should doubt he would have won had his trial been conducted honestly.

Subjects of the probe are Brenda Morris, the lead prosecutor in the Stevens case and the No. 2 official in the Public Integrity Section; Public Integrity prosecutors Nicholas Marsh and Edward Sullivan; Alaska federal prosecutors Joseph Bottini and James Goeke; and William Welch, who did not participate in the trial but who supervises the Public Integrity section.

Has anyone checked their voter registrations? Could it be that there was a political motivation?

Another in the sad litany of abuses by the Saleh regime in Yemen: Yemeni MP Imprisoned Despite Immunity

It happens here, too. It could happen a lot more if people don't start waking up to the fact that a government with the power to give you everything you want can also take it away.

Obama said he'd meet the leaders of Iran without preconditions. Problem is, the leaders of Iran want preconditions

While we're on the subject, Iran nuke plan revealed in NYC indictment

John Bolton accused Bush critics within American intelligence of cooking the books in order to gain control of American policy.

Looks like Bolton pretty much got it right. The UN bans a number of materials from being sold to Iran to keep the mullahs from getting the bomb. Among the material sold to Iran through this ring are a special alloy of aluminum chiefly used for long-range missiles, maraging steel rods used in nuclear-bomb casings, and the tungsten copper plate needed for missile guidance. Even better, this ring operated from 2006 to 2008, right at the time when the brilliant minds at Langley tried to convince everyone that Iran had stopped pursuing nuclear weapons years before.

It really does make the "intelligence" in Central Intelligence Agency seem ironic, doesn't it?

Congress should demand hearings into the politicization of the intelligence processes that produced that NIE. Since Democrats benefited the most from the perversion of intel, though, don't hold your breath waiting for it.

Richard Fernandez nails the only modern change this video needs

Stop Spending Our Future

Obama, Pitchforks, and a Couple of History Lessons

Community organizers were instrumental in forcing banks to give subprime loans to unqualified minority borrowers by using the "pitchforks" tactics -- protesting in front of the banks, camping on the lawns of the bankers' family houses, intimidating families, and suing in courts. After the bankers were sufficiently roughed up, a community organizer would show up at their office to "negotiate" the bank's surrender in the form of bad loans and money for community organizations that pay community organizers for their "services."

The Great Repression

Last week, proponents of this repression accounting got their way. They persuaded Congress to use its political will to meddle in the traditionally professional and independent business of setting accounting standards. Setting accounting standards is usually the province of the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB), an independent expert body set up to be outside the reach of Congressional influence, precisely to insulate it from the latter's political passions.

But now Congress has pressured FASB into letting assets be reported not according to prevailing economic realities but according to what they would be worth if the economy were growing and asset prices stable or rising. In short, Congress has prescribed repression as a solution to repression. They wish to sustain, not confront, The Great Repression.

This is what is known as a recipe for disaster. Mark to market rules were there for a lot of reasons, primary among which is the ability to con the unsuspecting if you don't follow them.

Another transparency problem for the Obama administration

Obama's word play

President Obama had a grand time in Europe. He wowed the press, met the queen, gave some wonderful news conferences and got virtually none of the major policy concessions he wanted. But he did do a lot of talking, for what that's worth.

And for Obama, that's worth a lot. During the campaign, then-Sen. Obama made it clear that he thought words meant a great deal. "Don't tell me words don't matter," Obama proclaimed. " 'I have a dream' -- just words? 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal' -- just words? 'We have nothing to fear but fear itself' -- just words? Just speeches?"

The issue is that if you can't translate words into actions, you've got a problem. And you can talk forever in stirring, soaring rhetoric that touches the soul of all who hear it, but if people won't do what you need them to as the result of that talk, you have failed.

Right now, Obama's getting a lot of positive press because the press is determined to support him. But when it comes to actual accomplishments, the emperor has no clothes. The American public has two years to figure out the difference between PR and actual accomplishments. Seeing as how increasing numbers are already figuring it out, the prognosis does not look good for Mr. Hope and Change.

Newt Gingrich lays it all out

Even Obama doesn't pay much attention to his own words to his own supporters, and many of those early supporters are most unhappy with him over it. He threw them some red meat words, and they thought he meant it. The actions that one would expect to follow if he did mean it have not materialized. Obama's current position is closer to right than the people he led on like Peter the Hermit, but the point is words versus actions.

PS: Characterizing something as "extremist" or otherwise denigrating it is a way to avoid debate, not a way of being even-handed and rational.

Carnival of Real Estate

Carnival of Personal Finance

Victor Davis Hanson: President Obama's First 70 Days: It really does all make sense.

In other words, if you believed as President Obama and many of his advisors do, then you would do what Obama and his advisors are now doing.

You want to know what people believe, what their priorities are, what they really want, watch what they do, not what they say.

Look Who's Politicizing Justice Now

In the course of its usual task of reviewing pending legislation to identify constitutional problems, OLC determined that the D.C. voting rights bill, which would give the District of Columbia a voting member in the House of Representatives, is unconstitutional. The acting head of OLC, David Barron -- a liberal Harvard law professor appointed by Holder -- signed an opinion setting forth OLC's conclusion. That conclusion is no surprise, as it has been the Department of Justice's consistent position, under presidents of both parties, at least as far back as Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy in 1963 and as recently as two years ago.

When Holder, a longtime supporter of the voting rights bill, learned of the OLC determination, he acted to override it. He contacted another of his appointees, deputy solicitor general Neal K. Katyal, to ask whether Katyal's office could, under its usual standards, defend the bill in court. Katyal said it could, and Holder then overruled OLC.

Making a movie of Atlas Shrugged

With the rise of the group mentality and class warfare, the producers in our world today are castigated and blamed for the current economic downfall. Rand once said, "One of the methods used by statists to destroy capitalism consists in establishing controls that tie a given industry hand and foot, making it unable to solve its problems, then declaring that freedom has failed and stronger controls are necessary." That is exactly what we are seeing in today societal and political rhetoric, just look at recent comments by President Barack Obama for affirmation of the misguided and canerous populism consuming America. That the market has failed and it must be regulated to the point of expanding government power to take over businesses.

Barack Obama fails to win NATO troops he wants for Afghanistan

Gordon Brown was the only one to offer substantial help. He offered to send several hundred extra British soldiers to provide security during the August election, but even that fell short of the thousands of combat troops that the US was hoping to prise from the Prime Minister. Related Links

Just two other allies made firm offers of troops. Belgium offered to send 35 military trainers and Spain offered 12. Mr Obama's host, Nicolas Sarkozy, refused his request.

And this is the war NATO voted to support. Great Britain, whom Obama has done quite a bit to antagonize offers a few hundred troops when he wanted thousands, and the rest of the "alliance" offers a grand total of 47.

As opposed to what these same allies did when George Bush wanted help, a much larger number of troops.

But he's going to "rehabilitate our international reputation". Excuse me while I roll on the floor, laughing. It beats the other alternative.

Obama, Going Along to Get Along

What's striking about Obama's diplomacy, however, has been his willingness to embrace the priorities of European governments, Russia and China while playing down -- or setting aside altogether -- principal American concerns.

As U.S. officials readily acknowledge, strategic arms control is of much greater interest to Russia -- whose nuclear arsenal is rapidly deteriorating -- than it is to the United States. From Washington's perspective, stopping Iran's nuclear program is far more urgent than agreeing on the next incremental reduction in Cold War warheads. Yet Obama essentially consented in his first summit with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to devote the next four months of U.S.-Russian relations to an intensive effort to complete a new START treaty. No such cooperation on Iran is on the horizon. "I don't think we want to suggest that somehow . . . there's agreement about how to proceed," one U.S. briefer conceded

However, after a certain point, this incompetence can no longer be classified as funny. I think we're going to be crying for a very long time.

Why they hate Sarah Palin so much

Obamateurism of the Day

Nick Robinson asks Obama which country is most to blame for the current economic meltdown, especially since every Western government is pointing their finger at the US. For some reason, Obama very clearly didn't anticipate this, and goes deep into "uh" mode for almost three minutes while ducking the question

See video at the link

A bill to give the President authority to shut down the internet "in the interest of national security"

Section 14 may be a bigger problem. It essentially revokes all privacy safeguards on Internet use for all networks. The Fourth Amendment would go straight out the window with the explicit inclusion of "private sector owned critical infrastructure information systems and networks." While Section 18 limits jurisdiction to federal networks, Section 14 allows the government to go after private networks without search warrants. The section also doesn't limit the jurisdiction to acute attacks, either. That jurisdiction exists at all times.

The big problem isn't that Obama might shut down the Internet. It's that the bill essentially repeals the Fourth Amendment.

I was a lot more willing to give the Bush Administration power than the Obama, simply because the Bush Administration had so many self-declared enemies in the press and media, and nobody willing to sweep any alleged misdeeds under the rug or down the memory hole. With the Obama administration, that's much more for the reason that mass media wants to believe this guy is the messiah, and they will manipulate what is reported to serve that end.

China: Strong On The Outside, Rotten On The Inside

Real Culture of Curruption: Rep. Murtha Wants $134M In Earmarks

Four of the earmark requests from Murtha's office are for current or former clients of a lobbying firm, the PMA Group, that is currently under federal investigation for connection to possible "straw" donations to Murtha and other Democratic members of the House.

PMA Group clients include: Advanced Acoustic Concepts ($5 million request), Argon ST ($8 million request), MTS Technologies, Inc. ($5 million request) and Planning Systems Inc. ($2.3 million request).

You can't make stuff like this up. Stuff you make up has to be believable.

Wall Street Journal: Obama Wants to Control the Banks

I must be naive. I really thought the administration would welcome the return of bank bailout money. Some $340 million in TARP cash flowed back this week from four small banks in Louisiana, New York, Indiana and California. This isn't much when we routinely talk in trillions, but clearly that money has not been wasted or otherwise sunk down Wall Street's black hole. So why no cheering as the cash comes back?

My answer: The government wants to control the banks, just as it now controls GM and Chrysler, and will surely control the health industry in the not-too-distant future. Keeping them TARP-stuffed is the key to control. And for this intensely political president, mere influence is not enough. The White House wants to tell 'em what to do. Control. Direct. Command.

It is not for nothing that rage has been turned on those wicked financiers. The banks are at the core of the administration's thrust: By managing the money, government can steer the whole economy even more firmly down the left fork in the road.

If the banks are forced to keep TARP cash -- which was often forced on them in the first place -- the Obama team can work its will on the financial system to unprecedented degree. That's what's happening right now.

And the difference between this an the fascist/national socialist program that was worked upon Italy and Germany to take complete control of them 70 to 80 years ago is....?

I mean, I'd really like to find a difference that matters economically and legally. So far I'm coming up blank. Help me out here, someone?

The reason I can't find one couldn't possibly be that there aren't any, could it?

Cool! Hidden Planet Discovered in Old Hubble Data

The method was used to find an exoplanet that went undetected in Hubble images taken in 1998 with its Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS). Astronomers knew of the planet's existence from images taken with the Keck and Gemini North telescopes in 2007 and 2008, long after Hubble snapped its first picture of the system.

GM Bankruptcy? Tell Me Another

President Obama rightly says "sacrifices" must be made if GM is to emerge as a viable company. But there's one sacrifice he won't make: his re-election chances, by leaving the fate of the UAW truly up to a bankruptcy judge.

Obama's Losing Bet on Detroit

Truth is, that industry already exists. The Big Three just don't happen to be a part of it. The United States has robust, job-creating, fuel-efficient automakers, in the form of companies like Toyota, Honda and Subaru.

But they don't count in the eyes of this president, presumably because their employees don't belong to the United Auto Workers union. So he apparently couldn't care less how much they resemble what he fantasizes GM and Chrysler will soon become.

Angela Merkel: Voice of Reason

First the Politicians Come After the Rich...

What's happening in New Jersey is not unique. Just months after a presidential campaign in which Barack Obama argued that he intended to make the wealthy pay their 'fair share' of taxes, politicians across the country are scrambling to balance their budgets by focusing on higher-income earners. But in doing so they are also redefining downward who constitutes the wealthy. Upper-middle and even middle class taxpayers are finding out that when politicians say they are coming after the rich, they don't really mean just the rich.

Budget Debate Shows Washington Politicians in Denial

Yet, instead of having an honest conversation with the American people about the need for restraint we are continuing to indulge in the bad habits of the past. President Obama was elected on pledges to go through the budget line by line, eliminate failing programs and end the abuse of earmarks and no-bid contracts. Congress, however, has little interest in change, unless it comes from the taxpayer's pockets. In this Congress' first ten weeks it has spent more than $2 trillion and funded more than 8,000 earmarks. Congress continues to do the easy work - nothing unites politicians more than the pleasure of spending other people's money - and still refuses to do the hard work of setting priorities and living within our means. With this budget the perfect political moment for fiscal responsibility continues to be a mirage just beyond the horizon of the next election.

Hate Speech? Nope. Just Common Sense

Blogs, phone calls to talk radio and letters to the editor all ring with the same theme. Anything that is remotely critical of our president or the Democrats in Congress is now being characterized as "hate speech." Liberals have even been emboldened to shout at me across busy floors of public commerce. The political dialogue in this country has taken a nasty turn.

When disagreement becomes a crime, we have lost democracy, and we have lost freedom. It's just a matter of time until the government decides that allowing you to have choices is inconvenient.

Silence Meets Despair of Afghan Women

That was then. This is now: Afghan President Hamid Karzai has just signed a law that forces women to obey their husbands' sexual demands, keeps women from leaving the house -- even for work or school -- without a husband's permission, automatically grants child custody rights to fathers and grandfathers before mothers, and favors men in inheritance disputes and other legal matters. In short, the law again consigns Afghan women to lives of brutal repression.

President Bush fought for the liberation of Afghan women. President Obama throws them under the bus for political advantage. Which one has done more to help those downtrodden?

This calls for the ChiaObama

Chicago politics has moved into the White House

"Don't think we're not keeping score, brother." That's what President Barack Obama said to Rep. Peter DeFazio in a closed-door meeting of the House Democratic Caucus last week, according to the Associated Press.

So much for the end of partisanship - unless by the end of partisanship you mean, "Do it our way or suffer the consequences."

Yes, it is April 1st, but as much as I wish these were all jokes, most of them are not.

Free the Job Creators

I always take the wisdom of crowds with a large grain of salt, because in all too many instances the crowd doesn't know what they're talking about (look at Obama's election rimshot), but in this case, the wisdom the crowd is spouting is the same as the experts.

Government Gone Wild

But all of this is just a pipe dream. Government spending does not cause a net increase in jobs over the long run; it costs jobs. Every dollar the government spends is either taxed or borrowed from the private sector, which means it "crowds out" private sector job creation. And because government spending is less efficient than private sector spending, the economy actually grows more slowly in the long run as the government gets bigger.

A New Era of Govt-Controlled Business?

The big bankers say they are profitable. And with an upward-sloping Treasury yield curve and some market-to-market accounting reform coming from the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB), the outlook for banks should be getting better, not worse. So why is the Treasury jamming more TARP money down bankers' throats, especially after announcing a new plan to use private capital to clean up bank balance sheets and solve the toxic-asset problem?

It kinda sounds like the Treasury doesn't want to let go of its new uber-regulator status.

As for Detroit, the carmakers should have been in bankruptcy months ago. And it is a bankruptcy court that should have fired GM's Wagoner and his board. Along with some serious pain for bondholders, bankruptcy would have broken the high-cost labor contracts with the UAW as well as carmaker contracts with dealers across the country. That's what bankruptcy courts are for. They're part of the free-market capitalist system.

Continuity We Shouldn't Believe In - Moral Hazard and the Geithner Bailout Plan

Ironically, the moral hazard created by the Geithner plan is similar to the incentivizing of risky mortgage investments by the government's backing of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which played a major role in causing the financial crisis in the first place, as economists Peter Wallison and Charles Calomiris describe in this paper. Wallison deserves some credit for warning about this danger back in 2005.

One reason why you should take the wisdom of crowds with a large grain of salt: Freeman Dyson: The Civil Heretic

Dyson says he doesn't want his legacy to be defined by climate change, but his dissension from the orthodoxy of global warming is significant because of his stature and his devotion to the integrity of science. Dyson has said he believes that the truths of science are so profoundly concealed that the only thing we can really be sure of is that much of what we expect to happen won't come to pass. In "Infinite in All Directions," he writes that nature's laws "make the universe as interesting as possible." This also happens to be a fine description of Dyson's own relationship to science. In the words of Avishai Margalit, a philosopher at the Institute for Advanced Study, "He's a consistent reminder of another possibility." When Dyson joins the public conversation about climate change by expressing concern about the "enormous gaps in our knowledge, the sparseness of our observations and the superficiality of our theories," these reservations come from a place of experience. Whatever else he is, Dyson is the good scientist; he asks the hard questions. He could also be a lonely prophet. Or, as he acknowledges, he could be dead wrong.

This man ranks right up there with the greatest geniuses of all time. Nobody since Leonardo da Vinci has contributed so much to so many areas of science - and it's gotten a lot harder since da Vinci.

Read the whole thing.

President Obama means well. Iran doesn't.

But misleading analysis easily follows: Europeans and Americans who are adamantly opposed to the use of force (or economy-crushing sanctions) naturally start to see "pragmatists" where they don't exist. Khamenei calls the United States "Satan Incarnate" and President Obama responds with a verse about brotherhood from the Persian Sufi poet Saadi. To respond otherwise would be to act like Bush. (Note to the White House: Revolutionary clerics don't appreciate Sufism, with its ecumenical call for brotherhood. They harass and suppress it.)

Did the NYT spike an ACORN story to benefit Obama?

Is that what happened here? The Times may claim that they didn't have enough corroboration to run the story. That didn't stop them from running a despicable hit piece on John McCain alleging a sexual affair between the Senator and a lobbyist, one which they eventually had to retract after getting sued by Vicki Iseman. They sent reporters to Wasilla to dig up dirt on Sarah Palin, but somehow neglected to cover her exoneration on ethics charges, as The Bulletin notes.

Unlike with the Iseman non-story, in which the Times used two disgruntled and unnamed former aides, The Bulletin has a public witness testifying under oath about the Paper of Record's political machinations. The Times has given a non-response response. I'd call this a clear loss for the Times, and further proof of its descent into political hackery -- this time covering up corruption in high political circles for its own policy preferences.

Original story here: 'New York Times' Spiked Obama Donor Story

I'd say the thing speaks for itself.

he EEOC: "The Fox Guarding the Henhouse"

The EEOC has a much worse record of labor and civil-rights violations than most corporations and agencies with a similar-size workforce.

The EEOC was found guilty of systematic, illegal, reverse discrimination (discrimination against white males) in Jurgens v. Thomas, 29 Fair Empl. Prac. Cas. (BNA) 1561, 1982 WL 409 (N.D.Tex.1982). When he was head of the EEOC, Clarence Thomas tried but apparently failed to end the reverse discrimination that went on in the agency.

The EEOC also has had a lot of sexual harassment lawsuits against it (and I am talking about real sexual harassment, not weak claims based on a couple of off-color jokes, the sort of trivial thing the EEOC itself might unsuccessfully sue a private employer over).See, e.g., Spain v. Gallegos, 26 F.3d 439 (3rd Cir.1994).

So much for government being superior to corporate america. Or anyone else.

Race and the 2008 Election: What the Exit Polls Showed

Those who said race was an important factor voted 55 percent to 44 percent in favor of Obama.

via Instapundit

Future Present

Our archeologist, while rummaging among the ruins of our fallen civilization, met a ghost from the long dead race of Americans. The wraith boasted much about what we had been as a people.

Stop worrying about the warranty on your car: