This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Category: Politics

  • Look in the mirror, Jesse

    Jesse Jackson, race pimp extraordinaire, has set his sights on “predatory lenders” in the lastest crisis de jour of subprime lenders. (Reuters)

    Civil rights activist Jesse Jackson will hold a rally on Wall Street next week to persuade the financial community to help people who are foreclosing on their homes amid a deepening mortgage crisis.
     
    Jackson wants financial leaders to restructure mortgage plans for people who risk losing their homes because they are falling behind in their payments, he said in a statement.

    “Two million homes nationwide will be at risk of foreclosure by 2008,” Jackson said in a statement. “Most foreclosures result from shady products that have been offered by subprime lenders ultimately financed by Wall Street.”

    I watched Jackson on the local Fox 5 news last night as he called the mortgage problems a “financial tsunami” in Prince George’s County, Maryland. Apparently, the word “crisis” has lost it’s cache and Leftist hyperbole demands a more urgently discriptive term.

    But, it’s significant that Jackson was in Prince George’s County – the county borders on Washington DC’s poorer Black neighborhoods. PG County largely reflects it’s neighbors’ economic and demographic condition. Most of the businesses that ply trade in both areas are black-owned and black-operated franchises. The predators that Jesse Jackson are blaming are largely Black, but Jackson and others are trying to cover up that inconvenient fact (Bloomberg);

    As many as 2 million homes are at risk of foreclosure, Jackson said in a statement. The rallies will be held Dec. 10, and also sponsored by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and National Urban League. Other rallies will be held in Atlanta, Los Angeles, Detroit, New Orleans, Washington and Chicago.

    Jackson’s plans show how the increase in delinquencies on subprime mortgages, some of which were the product of what Federal Reserve officials said were “lax” lending practices, is capturing political attention. Democratic Senator Hillary Clinton, a candidate for her party’s presidential nomination, this week called for a 90-day moratorium on foreclosures.

    There is definitely greed involved in the subprime lending market – the mortgage companies, their representatives and ultimately, the borrowers themselves share in the blame. The borrowers were willing to accept the temporary lower rate in the short term, fully knowing the payment would bloom into a much larger payment – and they now claim ignorance, with Jesse Jackson showing the way. Jackson and the media have compounded the problem by telling delinquent mortgagees that they aren’t culpable if they default on their loans. 

    But, either way, Jackson knew he’d get to hold mortgage companies responsible; can you imagine the hue and cry from the race pimp if mortgage companies hadn’t been so “lax” in their lending practices and had excluded Blacks from the housing growth of the last half-decade?

    Jackson complained in an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal entitled A Marshall Plan for Mortgages that President Bush’s plan doesn’t go far enough;

    The Bush administration’s proposed five-year freeze on home-loan rates, while a step in the right direction, doesn’t go far enough. The plan, unveiled yesterday, simply doesn’t help most of the families facing a foreclosure threat. Of the 6.5 million subprime borrowers in total, only about 750,000, or 12%, would be helped, according to some estimates. They are the homeowners who are up-to-date now with their loan payments but would fall behind and risk foreclosure when the loan resets in the coming year.

    Jackson’s main problem is that there’s no government money for him to skim off with his Rainbow Coaliton – that’s why he’s driving his pity train to Wall Street.

    It’s time for another U.S. government-sponsored Marshall Plan. But instead of reconstructing Europe after World War II, today’s Marshall Plan for mortgages would restore homeowners’ and investors’ confidence and dreams.

    In other words, Jackson’s first solution is always government (taxpayer) money instead of a last resort. Mortgage companies don’t want people to stop paying their mortgages – that makes no sense, where would they make money if people lost their homes. But in the world of Jesse Jackson where all money is government money, apparently it makes perfect sense.

  • Pelosi approved of waterboarding five years ago

    So, while Congress acts as if it didn’t know about the destruction of certain torture tapes by the CIA, the CIA and Justice Department are starting their own “investigation” into the incident (Washington Examiner, Pamela Hess);

    The Justice Department and the CIA’s internal watchdog announced Saturday a joint inquiry into the spy agency’s destruction of videotaped interrogations of two suspected terrorists as the latest scandal to rock U.S. intelligence gathered steam.

    The review will determine whether a full investigation is warranted.

    “I welcome this inquiry and the CIA will cooperate fully,” CIA Director Mike Hayden said in a statement. “I welcome it as an opportunity to address questions that have arisen over the destruction back in 2005 of videotapes.”

    The House Intelligence Committee is launching its own inquiry next week. It will investigate not only why the tapes were destroyed and Congress was not notified, but also the interrogation methods that “if released, had the potential to do such grave damage to the United States of America,” said Chairman Rep. Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas, on Saturday.

    “This administration cannot be trusted to police itself,” Reyes said.

    What they’re investigating, I don’t have a clue – it’s well-known by now that the Democrats were told about the impending destruction years before it happened. SO what’s to investigate?

    Well, maybe they can start by investigating the Democrats who gave their tacit approval of waterboarding and other information extraction techniques back in 2002 (Washington Post, Joby Warrick and Dan Eggen);

    In September 2002, four members of Congress met in secret for a first look at a unique CIA program designed to wring vital information from reticent terrorism suspects in U.S. custody. For more than an hour, the bipartisan group, which included current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was given a virtual tour of the CIA’s overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk.

    Among the techniques described, said two officials present, was waterboarding, a practice that years later would be condemned as torture by Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill. But on that day, no objections were raised. Instead, at least two lawmakers in the room asked the CIA to push harder, two U.S. officials said.

    CIA Director Michael V. Hayden said in an interview two months ago that he had informed congressional overseers of “all aspects of the detention and interrogation program.” (By Charles Dharapak — Associated Press)

    “The briefer was specifically asked if the methods were tough enough,” said a U.S. official who witnessed the exchange.

    Funny how there’s so much dirt to dig up relating to Democrat hypocrisy while this administration is said to be untrustworthy.

    Other bloggers;

    Ed Morrissey: If Congress couldn’t find it objectionable when waterboarding was employed, they have little to complain about years afterward.

    Mad as Hell: Can we just jack up the Capitol dome and drive a new Congress underneath? 

  • The NIE and Iran; a lesson in common sense

    An awful lot of people in Washington think Americans are generally stupid – the same goes for an awful lot of people in other countries. So when the now-famous National Intelligence Estimate was released that claims Iran halted it’s nuclear weapons program four years ago, the wonks in Washington were sure Americans were going to swallow it hook-line-and-sinker. After all, it was released by those super-brainiacs at the State Department, right? Those guys with three first names who all graduated from Ivy-league schools.

    Well, according to a Rasmusen poll (h/t Flopping Aces) they only suckered in 18%;

    Just 18% of American voters believe that Iran has halted its nuclear weapons program. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that 66% disagree and say Iran has not stopped its nuclear weapons program. Twenty-one percent (21%) of men believe Iran has stopped the weapons development along with 16% of women.

    I’m very happy that women are more skeptical than men - it means women are still thinking deeply about our national security instead of just going along with the herd of men who are trying to get in their pants.

    In the meantime, the Islamic Republic is shocked (shocked, I tell you) the the US is spying on them. Gateway Pundit quotes a FARS news report in which a general does his best impression of Nancy Pelosi;

    “The hypocritical and bullying face of Bush and the US neoconservative reactionaries was brought into light by this report,” Major General Hassan Firooz Abadi said in the wake of the latest report by 16 US intelligence agencies stressing that Iran is not pursuing a nuclear weapons program.

    Meantime, he called on Iran to maintain vigilance, reminding that the hawks are still in power in the US.

    “We should be vigilant as the hawks are still in power in the US and the aggressive forces of the world arrogance are still occupying Afghanistan and Iraq and their oppression and cruelty against the Palestinian and Lebanese nations have not ended,” the commander said.

    Meaning, I suppose, that the Islamic Republic’s military supports a Democrat candidate for President next Fall.

    Meanwhile, Defense Secretary Gates took an opportunity to warn about Iran’s continued malfeasance in the Middle East (Washington Times’ Lolita C. Baldor);

    Members of the audience challenged his rebukes of Tehran, evidence of the divide among Arab nations over the Bush administration’s tough stance. Asked if the U.S. would be willing to talk with Iran, Mr. Gates said the behavior of Iran’s current leadership “has not given one confidence that a dialogue would be productive.”

    “Everywhere you turn, it is the policy of Iran to foment instability and chaos, no matter the strategic value or cost in the blood of innocents — Christians, Jews and Muslims alike,” Mr. Gates said in his address at the event organized by the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies.

    So, apparently, this administration’s policy reflects American public opinion more closely than the media and the three-first-named State Department wonks would care to admit.

  • And That’s Just Since He’s Been Married…

    Andrew Young, a civil rights “icon” I hadn’t heard of until five minutes ago, in a Newsmaker’s Journal interview said of Bill Clinton “He’s probably gone with more black women than Barack,” *rimshot*. Young also asserted that Bill is every bit as black as Obama.
    Really? He’s half black? Oh, gee, was that a cheap shot? No, not at all. Obama’s father was a black man from Kenya, his mother was a white girl from Wichita. The various democrat campaigns are waiting for this info to break much closer to a primary. Interracial marriage is no more (or less, I suppose…)insane than uniracial marriage. It just isn’t something that is popular with either white people or black people. Hillary Clinton, you can be sure, is waiting with bated breath for this to sink in with the racist voters of both races, black and white, as it can only help her.
    Bill Clinton could be as black as Al Jolson, and it wouldn’t have any legitimate bearing on Hillary’s competency, honesty or experience.

    Young also commented that Obama needs a network to back him up and protect him. Like the criminal cartel that hovers around in the wings around the Clintons waiting to be used as scapegoats. Those aren’t friends and colleagues, those are lackeys.

    Just think how popular with blacks Clinton would be if Monica Lewinsky had been named Shanequa Jones?

    It isn’t that the calling Clinton Black thing is stupid, it is, but, it is also a kind of racism. Is Obama’s, as Biden noted, clean, articulate nature unimportant next to the charisma of Bill Clinton?

  • Eyes off the prize

    The Democrats have lost the political initiative – they’ve been proven wrong on Iraq. Even their own ranks have conceded that the US troops have begun an effective pacification program and the Iraqis are taking control of their own security. So with an election on the horizon, they needed more ammunition.

    Democrats got their boost this week from the anti-Bush and China-loving elements at the State Department and the CIA. The weinies a the State Department decided to abruptly release a National Intelligence Estimate that doesn’t jibe with common sense (Jon Ward, Washington Times);

    Several current and former high-level government officials familiar with the authors of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran described the report as a politically motivated document written by anti-Bush former State Department officials, who opposed sanctioning foreign governments and businesses.

    A Republican senator plans to introduce a bill next week that would create a commission of policy experts to examine whether the new report on Iran is accurate, a spokesman said today.

    John Bolton finds the major flaws of the NIE report (h/t Atlas Shrugs)

    First, the headline finding — that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 — is written in a way that guarantees the totality of the conclusions will be misread. In fact, there is little substantive difference between the conclusions of the 2005 NIE on Iran’s nuclear capabilities and the 2007 NIE. Moreover, the distinction between “military” and “civilian” programs is highly artificial, since the enrichment of uranium, which all agree Iran is continuing, is critical to civilian and military uses. Indeed, it has always been Iran’s “civilian” program that posed the main risk of a nuclear “breakout.”

    Obviously, a weak attempt to dissuade Americans that Iran is a threat to world peace. Now, this morning, we read that the CIA destroyed video tapes of interrogations in 2002 – instantly sending Democrats off on a false tangent of outrage (Wall Street Journal, Siobhan Gorman)

    The CIA’s acknowledgment that it destroyed videotapes of interrogations of detainees made in 2002 set off a fierce debate on Capitol Hill today, as it re-opened a contentious issue that the CIA director has worked for a year and a half to put to rest.
     
    It also raised new questions about the government’s handling of evidence in the trial of al Qaeda suspect Zacarias Moussaoui, who is now serving a life sentence after his conviction last year.

    But, Michele Malkin says Democrats in Congress were informed of the tapes’ impending destruction more than four years ago;

    Rep. Jane Harman of California, then the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, was one of only four members of Congress in 2003 informed of the tapes’ existence and the CIA’s intention to ultimately destroy them.

    “I told the CIA that destroying videotapes of interrogations was a bad idea and urged them in writing not to do it,” Harman said. While key lawmakers were briefed on the CIA’s intention to destroy the tapes, they were not notified two years later when the spy agency actually carried out the plan. Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., said the committee only learned of the tapes’ destruction in November 2006.

    Yet the propaganda wing of the Democrat Party (otherwise known as the Washington Post) calls it a “startling disclosure”;

    The startling disclosures came on the same day that House and Senate negotiators reached an agreement on legislation that would prohibit the use of waterboarding and other harsh interrogation tactics by the CIA and bring intelligence agencies in line with rules followed by the U.S. military.

    Hardly startling when even Rockefeller admits he knew about it a year ago. Yet, WaPo perpetuates the myth of “startling”;

    Hayden said he decided to discuss the tapes publicly because of news media interest and the possibility that “we may see misinterpretations of the facts in the days ahead.” The New York Times said on its Web site that it had informed the CIA on Wednesday night that it was preparing a story about the destroyed tapes.

    So how did the New York Times find out? Either leaky-ass Congress or the anti-Bush wing of the CIA – my money’s on both.

    WSJ writes on “our troops are SS concentration camp guards” Little Dick Durbin’s drama play;

    Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois fired off a letter to Attorney General Michael Mukasey asking for a Justice Department investigation of “whether CIA officials who destroyed these videotapes and withheld information about their existence from official proceedings violated the law.” On the Senate floor, Mr. Durbin rejected the CIA’s explanation that it was trying to protect the identity of its agents.

    Of course, the Washington Post thinks that the ACLU has a dog in the fight for our National Security;

    Civil liberties advocates denounced the CIA’s decision to destroy the tapes, saying the agency should have known by 2005 that the actions depicted on them were potentially the subject of litigation and congressional investigations.

    Jameel Jaffer, a national security lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union, said the tapes were destroyed at a time when a federal court had ordered the CIA to comply with a Freedom of Information Act request by the ACLU seeking records related to interrogations.

    “The CIA appears to have deliberately destroyed evidence that would have allowed its agents to be held accountable for the torture of prisoners,” Jaffer said. “They are tapes that should have been released to the courts and Congress, but the CIA apparently believes that its agents are above the law.”

    The Leftists in this country can’t get it through their fat heads that this isn’t an exercise in law enforcement, it’s dealing with people who would kill us all if they had the chance – which is why we need to stop Iran’s nuclear ambitions whether they’re advanced or not.

    But they’d rather play silly political games and russian roulette with our security.

  • It’s only a ‘hate crime’ if the victim is black

    If the perps had been white and the recipient of the vicious beating had been black, Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson would have been all over this like stench on excrement:

    As Sarah Kreager, 26, tried to sit down on a Baltimore City bus Tuesday, police say, a middle-schooler told her she couldn’t. When she attempted to take another seat, a middle-schooler wouldn’t let her. Finally, according to police, Kreager just sat down.

    She was “immediately attacked” by nine students — three females and six males — from Robert Poole Middle School. They punched and kicked her at 2:59 p.m. at the intersection of 33rd Street and Chestnut Avenue, according to Maryland Transit Administration police.

    Kreager was dragged off the bus and her boyfriend, Troy Ennis, attempted to get her back on, police said.

    She sustained “serious injuries” and had to be transported to the University of Maryland Shock Trauma Center, according to a police report.

    Kreager suffered two broken bones in her left eye socket, police said.

    “She had eye muscles that were damaged,” a police report states. “She had deep lacerations on the top of her head and another above her neck.”

    Two seats and the bus’ rear glass were destroyed during the attack, police said.

    The bus driver on the No. 27 line quickly called police, who responded and arrested the nine juveniles, said Jawauna Greene, an MTA police spokeswoman.

    All nine suspects, ages 14 and 15, were arrested and charged with aggravated assault.

    Their bus tickets — provided by the school — have been revoked, Greene said.

    “Riding the bus is a privilege,” she said. “Public safety is our primary concern.”

    Greene said the investigation into the incident was ongoing and she didn’t know whether the attack had anything to do with the victim’s race.

    The suspects in the incident are black. The victim is white, according to the police report.

    http://www.examiner.com/a-1089067~Students_beat_woman_on_city_bus__police_say.html

    “…didn’t know whether the attack had anything to do with the victim’s race”????

    Three guesses, and the first two don’t count.

    Funny, how the race-baiting cockroaches come crawling out from under their rocks when they get a whiff of a “racially motivated crime” against a black victim.

    Justin Barker and Sarah Kreager are the latest in selective outrage by the black militant community.

    The first thing that comes to mind when I read about youth gangs and thugs like the ones mentioned in the report is: “Where in the hell are the parents?”

    Well….meet the “parents”:

    ……But the mother of one of the suspects says the victim, for an unknown reason, provoked the attack by spitting in the face of one of the girls. Beverly Bell, whose son is an eighth-grader at Robert Poole, said the victim’s boyfriend then pulled out a knife and threatened the girls, which prompted the boys to attack the man.

    Interviewed after yesterday’s court hearing, Bell said her son had never been in trouble before. Testimony in juvenile court revealed that five of the six boys arrested had no juvenile records.

    “We don’t know why that woman did what she did,” said Bell, referring to the alleged spitting incident. “But I can’t see these kids jumping on anyone for no reason.”

    Another parent said it was Kreager who did not want any students sitting next to her initially, prompting an argument.

    ……The bus dispute is the most recent in a series of local fights involving teenagers.

    Late last month, a brawl in Edgewood left a man paralyzed after he was assaulted with a baseball bat and kicked by at least six juveniles, according to Harford County sheriff’s deputies.

    Link: http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/local/baltimore_city/bal-md.ci.beating06dec06,0,5412204.story

    It didn’t take long for the “my kid wouldn’t do such a thing” excuse. Too often, the parents are just as criminally inclined as their kids.

    Bell makes the ludicrous statement: “I can’t see these kids jumping on anyone for no reason.”

    Really? The thought of one person picking an unprovoked fight with nine middle school-aged punks on a bus, stretches the limits of credibility to the point of absurdity.

    If there’s any justice in Baltimore, these punks will get put away for awhile, and their “parents” will be held financially liable for the medical bills and destruction of public property, as well as taken to task for not controlling their brats.

  • Code Pink wackjobs deported from Pakistan

    This particular stop on their world tour got them ousted:

    Pakistan authorities today ordered the deportation of the leader of the feminist U.S. antiwar group Code Pink, who was in Lahore to join protests against the emergency rule imposed by President Pervez Musharraf, according to a spokeswoman for the group.

    Medea Benjamin, a co-founder of the group, said she was arrested at a student demonstration by agents of the Pakistan Inter-Service Intelligence and detained for about four hours before being released with orders to leave the country tomorrow morning.

    “I’m OK — a little shaken up,” Ms. Benjamin told The Washington Times by telephone from her hotel in Lahore. “They mistreated us.”

    Ms. Benjamin said she feared for her life as the agents held her at gunpoint in a car speeding through the city to the police station.

    “I thought I was going to die in the car,” she said. “They totally terrorized us.”

    Pakistani authorities also detained and then ordered the deportation of Tighe Barry, a longtime Code Pink activist who was participating with the student rally outside the Lahore Press Club.

    Pakistan officials told Ms. Benjamin that she was being deported because she took part in an illegal demonstration, she said.

    “It’s a sad state of affairs when the Pakistani government, a government that is trying to portray itself to the West as democratic, tries to harass and deport U.S. human rights activists,” Ms. Benjamin said at the press club before her arrest. “If they do this to us, who have the protection of being U.S. citizens, imagine what they do to their own citizens.”

    Link: http://washingtontimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071204/NATION/112040100/1001

    Aw, the widdle Code Pinky gal was aaaaaaall shaken up over being arrested because she protested in a foreign country. The funny thing is, this idiot believes she is protected in a hostile foreign environment because she’s a American citizen. Aside from that, if she really wants to prove how concerned she is over ‘human rights’, she and her Code Pink moonbats need to put Saudi Arabia on their itinerary. The way women are treated and abused in that country would keep her ‘terrorized’ for a long time….if she lived long enough.

  • A Cartoon Even Jonn will Like

     

    Ha!

     

    Jonn added: Yes, I do like it. And here’s some New York Times BDS from Newsbusters to go with it (h/t Ace of Spades)