Hardball

But why pose as our friends? Just come right out and say we are enemies. I'd have more respect for them then.

__________________
The Way of the Warrior is Practice. Daily practice, accumulate practice minute by minute, hour by hour and day by day. {Book of 5 Rings}
Calendar year 2009 Crunch Challenge. 39,800/73,000
Calendar Year 2008 Final Crunches 54,000

---

Ghost

They arent saying that or intending that.
It you and me that are causing the problems.
Its the US and UK that want to put missile systems on their borders.
They are willing to be friends.
Do you get me? its OUR missile systems that are pissing THEM off.
If we didnt do that they would be friends with us.

It is our fault, this took me ages to accept, but the UK and the US are the bad guys on this planet. Its hard to accept but its true, we cant twist whats happening, its plain and simple now.

__________________
There are no second chances.

“Anyone can give up, it's the easiest thing in the world to do. But to hold it together when everyone else would understand if you fell apart, that's true strength.”

---

darrianation

I hope I'm wrong.

Increasing taxes in this economy will be disastrous… Not to mention what the dems will do in massive intrusions into the free markets.

Look I don’t expect great things from McCain (I was a Ron Paul supporter—now supporting Chuck Baldwin) but Obama will do far more damage-- economic, socialism, security, etc.

__________________
The law of tyranny:

1. Any power that can be abused will be abused
2. Abuse always expands to fill the limits of resistance to it.
3. If people don't resist the abuses of others, they will have no one to resist the abuses of themselves, and tyranny will prevail.


Welcome to the Socialist States of Amerika . Coming soon Jan 20th 2009!

---

darrianation

Planting Seeds of Disaster
ACORN, Barack Obama, and the Democratic party.

By Stanley Kurtz
‘You’ve got only a couple thousand bucks in the bank. Your job pays you dog-food wages. Your credit history has been bent, stapled, and mutilated. You declared bankruptcy in 1989. Don’t despair: You can still buy a house.” So began an April 1995 article in the Chicago Sun-Times that went on to direct prospective home-buyers fitting this profile to a group of far-left “community organizers” called ACORN, for assistance. In retrospect, of course, encouraging customers like this to buy homes seems little short of madness.

Militant ACORN
At the time, however, that 1995 Chicago newspaper article represented something of a triumph for Barack Obama. That same year, as a director at Chicago’s Woods Fund, Obama was successfully pushing for a major expansion of assistance to ACORN, and sending still more money ACORN’s way from his post as board chair of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. Through both funding and personal-leadership training, Obama supported ACORN. And ACORN, far more than we’ve recognized up to now, had a major role in precipitating the subprime crisis.

I’ve already told the story of Obama’s close ties to ACORN leader Madeline Talbott, who personally led Chicago ACORN’s campaign to intimidate banks into making high-risk loans to low-credit customers. Using provisions of a 1977 law called the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), Chicago ACORN was able to delay and halt the efforts of banks to merge or expand until they had agreed to lower their credit standards — and to fill ACORN’s coffers to finance “counseling” operations like the one touted in that Sun-Times article. This much we’ve known. Yet these local, CRA-based pressure-campaigns fit into a broader, more disturbing, and still under-appreciated national picture. Far more than we’ve recognized, ACORN’s local, CRA-enabled pressure tactics served to entangle the financial system as a whole in the subprime mess. ACORN was no side-show. On the contrary, using CRA and ties to sympathetic congressional Democrats, ACORN succeeded in drawing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into the very policies that led to the current disaster.

In one of the first book-length scholarly studies of ACORN, Organizing Urban America, Rutgers University political scientist Heidi Swarts describes this group, so dear to Barack Obama, as “oppositional outlaws.” Swarts, a strong supporter of ACORN, has no qualms about stating that its members think of themselves as “militants unafraid to confront the powers that be.” “This identity as a uniquely militant organization,” says Swarts, “is reinforced by contentious action.” ACORN protesters will break into private offices, show up at a banker’s home to intimidate his family, or pour protesters into bank lobbies to scare away customers, all in an effort to force a lowering of credit standards for poor and minority customers. According to Swarts, long-term ACORN organizers “tend to see the organization as a solitary vanguard of principled leftists...the only truly radical community organization.”

ACORN’s Inside Strategy
Yet ACORN’s entirely deserved reputation for militance is balanced by its less-well-known “inside strategy.” ACORN has long employed Washington-based lobbyists who understand very well how the legislative game is played. ACORN’s national lobbyists may encourage and benefit from the militant tactics of their base, but in the halls of congress they play the game with smooth sophistication. The untold story of ACORN’s central role in the financial meltdown is about the one-two punch to the banking system administered by this outside/inside strategy.

Critics of the notion that CRA had a major impact on the subprime crisis ask how a law passed in 1977 could have caused a crisis in 2008? The answer has a lot to do with ACORN — and the critical years of 1990-1995. While the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act did call on banks to increase lending in poor and minority neighborhoods, its exact requirements were vague, and therefore open to a good deal of regulatory interpretation. Banks merger or expansion plans were rarely held up under CRA until the late 1980s, when ACORN perfected its technique of filing CRA complaints in tandem with the sort of intimidation tactics perfected by that original “community organizer” (and Obama idol), Saul Alinsky.

At first, ACORN’s anti-bank actions were relatively few in number. However, under a provision of the 1989 savings and loan bailout pushed by liberal Democratic legislators, like Massachusetts Congressman Joseph P. Kennedy, lenders were required to compile public records of mortgage applicants by race, gender, and income. Although the statistics produced by these studies were presented in highly misleading ways, groups like ACORN were able to use them to embarrass banks into lowering credit standards. At the same time, a wave of banking mergers in the early 1990's provided an opening for ACORN to use CRA to force lending changes. Any merger could be blocked under CRA, and once ACORN began systematically filing protests over minority lending, a formerly toothless set of regulations began to bite.



ACORN’s efforts to undermine credit standards in the late 1980s taught it a valuable lesson. However much pressure ACORN put on banks to lower credit standards, tough requirements in the “secondary market” run by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac served as a barrier to change. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac buy up mortgages en masse, bundle them, and sell them to investors on the world market. Back then, Fannie and Freddie refused to buy loans that failed to meet high credit standards. If, for example, a local bank buckled to ACORN pressure and agreed to offer poor or minority applicants a 5-percent down-payment rate, instead of the normal 10-20 percent, Fannie and Freddie would refuse to buy up those mortgages. That would leave all the risk of these shaky loans with the local bank. So again and again, local banks would tell ACORN that, because of standards imposed by Fannie and Freddie, they could lower their credit standards by only a little.

So the eighties taught ACORN that a high-pressure, Alinskyite outside strategy wouldn’t be enough. Their Washington lobbyists would have to bring inside pressure on the government to undercut credit standards at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Only then would local banks consider making loans available to customers with bad credit histories, low wages, virtually nothing in the bank, and even bankruptcies on record.

Democrats and ACORN
As early as 1987, ACORN began pressuring Fannie and Freddie to review their standards, with modest results. By 1989, ACORN had lured Fannie Mae into the first of many “pilot projects” designed to help local banks lower credit standards. But it was all small potatoes until the serious pressure began in early 1991. At that point, Democratic Senator Allan Dixon convened a Senate subcommittee hearing at which an ACORN representative gave key testimony. It’s probably not a coincidence that Dixon, like Obama, was an Illinois Democrat, since Chicago has long been a stronghold of ACORN influence.

Dixon gave credibility to ACORN’s accusations of loan bias, although these claims of racism were disputed by Missouri Republican, Christopher Bond. ACORN’s spokesman strenuously complained that his organization’s efforts to relax local credit standards were being blocked by requirements set by the secondary market. Dixon responded by pressing Fannie and Freddie to do more to relax those standards — and by promising to introduce legislation that would ensure it. At this early stage, Fannie and Freddie walked a fine line between promising to do more, while protesting any wholesale reduction of credit requirements.

By July of 1991, ACORN’s legislative campaign began to bear fruit. As the Chicago Tribune put it, “Housing activists have been pushing hard to improve housing for the poor by extracting greater financial support from the country’s two highly profitable secondary mortgage-market companies. Thanks to the help of sympathetic lawmakers, it appeared...that they may succeed.” The Tribune went on to explain that House Democrat Henry Gonzales had announced that Fannie and Freddie had agreed to commit $3.5 billion to low-income housing in 1992 and 1993, in addition to a just-announced $10 billion “affordable housing loan program” by Fannie Mae. The article emphasizes ACORN pressure and notes that Fannie and Freddie had been fighting against the plan as recently as a week before agreement was reached. Fannie and Freddie gave in only to stave off even more restrictive legislation floated by congressional Democrats.



A mere month later, ACORN Housing Corporation president, George Butts made news by complaining to a House Banking subcommittee that ACORN’s efforts to pressure banks using CRA were still being hamstrung by Fannie and Freddie. Butts also demanded still more data on the race, gender, and income of loan applicants. Many news reports over the ensuing months point to ACORN as the key source of pressure on congress for a further reduction of credit standards at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. As a result of this pressure, ACORN was eventually permitted to redraft many of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s loan guideline.

Clinton and ACORN
ACORN’s progress through 1992 depended on its Democratic allies. Whatever ACORN managed to squeeze out of the George H. W. Bush administration came under congressional pressure. With the advent of the Clinton administration, however, ACORN’s fortunes took a positive turn. Clinton Housing Secretary Henry Cisnersos pledged to meet monthly with ACORN representatives. For ACORN, those meetings bore fruit.

Another factor working in ACORN’s favor was that its increasing success with local banks turned those banks into allies in the battle with Fannie and Freddie. Precisely because ACORN’s local pressure tactics were working, banks themselves now wanted Fannie and Freddie to loosen their standards still further, so as to buy up still more of the high-risk loans they’d made at ACORN’s insistence. So by the 1993, a grand alliance of ACORN, national Democrats, and local bankers looking for someone to lessen the risks imposed on them by CRA and ACORN were uniting to pressure Fannie and Freddie to loosen credit standards still further.

At this point, both ACORN and the Clinton administration were working together to impose large numerical targets or “set asides” (really a sort of poor and minority loan quota system) on Fannie and Freddie. ACORN called for at least half of Fannie and Freddie loans to go to low-income customers. At first the Clinton administration offered a set-aside of 30 percent. But eventually ACORN got what it wanted. In early 1994, the Clinton administration floated plans for committing $1 trillion in loans to low- and moderate-income home-buyers, which would amount to about half of Fannie Mae’s business by the end of the decade. Wall Street Analysts attributed Fannie Mae’s willingness to go along with the change to the need to protect itself against still more severe “congressional attack.” News reports also highlighted praise for the change from ACORN’s head lobbyist, Deepak Bhargava.

This sweeping debasement of credit standards was touted by Fannie Mae’s chairman, chief executive officer, and now prominent Obama adviser James A. Johnson. This is also the period when Fannie Mae ramped up its pilot programs and local partnerships with ACORN, all of which became precedents and models for the pattern of risky subprime mortgages at the root of today’s crisis. During these years, Obama’s Chicago ACORN ally, Madeline Talbott, was at the forefront of participation in those pilot programs, and her activities were consistently supported by Obama through both foundation funding and personal leadership training for her top organizers.

Finally, in June of 1995, President Clinton, Vice President Gore, and Secretary Cisneros announced the administration’s comprehensive new strategy for raising home-ownership in America to an all-time high. Representatives from ACORN were guests of honor at the ceremony. In his remarks, Clinton emphasized that: “Out homeownership strategy will not cost the taxpayers one extra cent. It will not require legislation.” Clinton meant that informal partnerships between Fannie and Freddie and groups like ACORN would make mortgages available to customers “who have historically been excluded from homeownership.”

Disaster
In the end of course, Clinton’s plan cost taxpayers an almost unimaginable amount of money. And it was just around the time of his 1995 announcement that the Chicago papers started encouraging bad-credit customers with “dog-food” wages, little money in the bank, and even histories of bankruptcy to apply for home loans with the help of ACORN. At both the local and national levels, then, ACORN served as the critical catalyst, levering pressure created by the Community Reinvestment Act and pull with Democratic politicians to force Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into a pattern of high-risk loans.

Up to now, conventional wisdom on the financial meltdown has relegated ACORN and the CRA to bit parts. The real problem, we’ve been told, lay with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. In fact, however, ACORN is at the base of the whole mess. ACORN used CRA and Democratic sympathizers to entangle Fannie and Freddie and the entire financial system in a disastrous disregard of the most basic financial standards. And Barack Obama cut his teeth as an organizer and politician backing up ACORN’s economic madness every step of the way.

— Stanley Kurtz is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Institute.

NRO article: Planting Seeds of Disaster by Stanley Kurtz on National Review Online

__________________
The law of tyranny:

1. Any power that can be abused will be abused
2. Abuse always expands to fill the limits of resistance to it.
3. If people don't resist the abuses of others, they will have no one to resist the abuses of themselves, and tyranny will prevail.


Welcome to the Socialist States of Amerika . Coming soon Jan 20th 2009!

---

jubaji

Ah, there's that 'modern' education at work! Unrestricted relativism and guilty self-loathing masquerading as 'open-mindedness,' with reckless indifference for the nihilistic conclusion to which it inevitably leads.

Way to go.

__________________
Optional signature you may use to appear at bottom of your posts.

---

Ghost

that doesnt mean anything though, the facts are clear. I can link you to all the news stories if you wish.

Fact is russia is pissed cos of the missile system, who wouldnt be.
The rest of the world is pissed cos of how the UK and USA go around invading everyone for no good reason, who wouldnt be.
I dont see what else there is.

__________________
There are no second chances.

“Anyone can give up, it's the easiest thing in the world to do. But to hold it together when everyone else would understand if you fell apart, that's true strength.”

---

darrianation

Barrack Obama friend Bill





Obama, "I nver heard his anti-American hate speached." On Bill Ayers: "Ultimately, I ended up learning about the fact that he had engaged in this reprehensible act 40 years ago, but I was eight years old at the time and I assumed that he had been rehabilitated.

A rehabilitated terrorist? C'mon...Do you really think we are that stupid?

Even if Obama's past radical associations don't bother you don’t his lies bother you?

__________________
The law of tyranny:

1. Any power that can be abused will be abused
2. Abuse always expands to fill the limits of resistance to it.
3. If people don't resist the abuses of others, they will have no one to resist the abuses of themselves, and tyranny will prevail.


Welcome to the Socialist States of Amerika . Coming soon Jan 20th 2009!

---

Ghost

this thread is nuts, darrianation im sorry, i like you but this is nonsense.
Its paranoid in the extreme.

__________________
There are no second chances.

“Anyone can give up, it's the easiest thing in the world to do. But to hold it together when everyone else would understand if you fell apart, that's true strength.”

---

jubaji

The 'facts' are clear enough to all interested parties.


You are forgetting, ignoring, or at the very least avoiding the facts of history. Go ask a few people from former Soviet bloc countries about it.


"No good reason" is a conclusion based on your political prejudices.



Of course you don't. Having tied your ego to this position you cannot entertain any other possibilities.

__________________
Optional signature you may use to appear at bottom of your posts.

---

jubaji

I don't get how people can swallow the "when I was only eight" bit as an excuse.

__________________
Optional signature you may use to appear at bottom of your posts.

---

Ghost

but jubaji, things have moved on, you are talking about the former soviet block, who was wrong and who was right in the cold war?
id say it was 50-50 both sides being paranoid.

Russia has moved on. USSR doesnt exist now, they dont trust america, sure, who would?
No one trusts the UK and USA.


Everything im reading smacks of extremist propaganda.

I expect when Obama comes into power we will see that hes a nice guy and a reasonable person, as are 99%+ of the people in the world.

If im wrong then fair enough, ive made a huge error of judgement, but i think im right obviously and only time will tell now.

__________________
There are no second chances.

“Anyone can give up, it's the easiest thing in the world to do. But to hold it together when everyone else would understand if you fell apart, that's true strength.”

---

jubaji

Again, go talk to some people living in the shadow of Russia and of that history.



And I'm sure that sort of relativism is considered quite 'enlightened' among the university crowd...




That again is your personal political prejudice. You gotta wonder about the direction society is heading in when self-loathing is celebrated as the height of intellectual awareness.

Funny you should mention that, noam...



And that is your standard for a world leader?

???

__________________
Optional signature you may use to appear at bottom of your posts.

---

Ghost

Jubaji, do we need a list of countries the US has invaded and hte UK has invaded compared to Russia?
or any other country.
history proves why the world is scared of us, because they have every right to be.
We seemingly randomly invade countries. Does Russia do this?
Not on anything like the scale that we do.
Why do we do it? what is the threat? there is no threat is there. Most of the world is nice.
Ive been around a lot of the world, including the middle east and its lovely.I have no idea why we feel the need to invade everyone all the time. Maybe if people actually travelled to these countries and met the people they would feel differently.

__________________
There are no second chances.

“Anyone can give up, it's the easiest thing in the world to do. But to hold it together when everyone else would understand if you fell apart, that's true strength.”

---

Ghost

lol and the arguement that educated people agree with me, does that mean only stupid people agree with you?

__________________
There are no second chances.

“Anyone can give up, it's the easiest thing in the world to do. But to hold it together when everyone else would understand if you fell apart, that's true strength.”

---

darrianation

You know Ghost a lot of people say nothing will change much if Obama wins and that Republicans and dems are more alike than not and whoever is in charge it more or less the same. Well it could be argued that 8 years of Bush certainly changed things right?

Listen, if you are listening to what I am trying to say you will find that Obama lacks the experience to deal with international crises. He is a candidate who is pushing socialism and big government on us at a time when we should be scaling government and taxes back, and he comes from a sociopolitical environment that is less than friendly and fact down right hostile to Western culture and values and he lies constantly about it showing his true character for those who have their eyes open to see it.

I am not saying he is the anti-Christ but he isn't the Messiah either and the "change" he'll bring will be more harmful to freedom loving Americans than beneficial. His economic package in normal conditions wouldn’t destroy the economy but between McCain’s and Obama's plan McCain’s plan would grow the economy faster and create more jobs. Obama’s plan is bigger and bolder than FDR’s which worsened the depression. We are on the brink of repeating the same mistakes today that caused and worsened the “Great Depression” in the past.

It could be argued that nothing we can do now will prevent another depression but that doesn’t mean we should do all we can to make it worse and it certainly does not excuse a bad plan.

__________________
The law of tyranny:

1. Any power that can be abused will be abused
2. Abuse always expands to fill the limits of resistance to it.
3. If people don't resist the abuses of others, they will have no one to resist the abuses of themselves, and tyranny will prevail.


Welcome to the Socialist States of Amerika . Coming soon Jan 20th 2009!

---