The Red Moon Journal: The View From Fly-Over Country

September 16, 2008

A Multicultural Banking Crisis

This editorial from Investors Business Daily traces the roots of the current banking crisis that we have been dealing with for the last year or so, and which again burst into the open with yesterday's market sell-off. Back during the Clinton administration, democrats brought us multicultural lending standards that have, over time, undermined the stability of our credit system. Simply put, the liberal left thinks that it is unfair if you happen to be poor and a person of color and you don't also own your own home. They had good intentions you see. And so they pointed a gun at the banks and demanded that they lower the standards for lending. Thus was born the sub-prime market.

Now there is nothing wrong with owning your own home if you can afford to make the payments. Ownership is part of the American dream and a long term way of accumulating assets is to buy property. Wealth is a good thing if you have earned it honestly. But as noted above, you have to be able to make the payments. Unfortunately, multicultural lending standards were quite a bit lower than conventional standards would otherwise have been. They would have to be in order to make it possible for poor minority people and illegal aliens to be able to get any kind of mortgage at all. Thus we saw a proliferation of new and bizarre types of mortgages in the last few years that were designed to make it possible for anyone with a pulse to get a loan if they wished it. And many people did just that.

The results are now coming home to the economy with multiple bank failures caused by a large number of mortgage defaults. The people who were the target of the liberal's social meddling are now unable, or unwilling, to pay their bills and banks are finding that they can no longer manage their cash flows. This is what happens when you lower standards based on the liberal utopian fantasy.

Obama in a statement yesterday blamed the shocking new round of subprime-related bankruptcies on the free-market system, and specifically the "trickle-down" economics of the Bush administration, which he tried to gig opponent John McCain for wanting to extend.

But it was the Clinton administration, obsessed with multiculturalism, that dictated where mortgage lenders could lend, and originally helped create the market for the high-risk subprime loans now infecting like a retrovirus the balance sheets of many of Wall Street's most revered institutions.

Tough new regulations forced lenders into high-risk areas where they had no choice but to lower lending standards to make the loans that sound business practices had previously guarded against making. It was either that or face stiff government penalties.

The untold story in this whole national crisis is that President Clinton put on steroids the Community Redevelopment Act, a well-intended Carter-era law designed to encourage minority homeownership. And in so doing, he helped create the market for the risky subprime loans that he and Democrats now decry as not only greedy but "predatory."

Yes, the market was fueled by greed and overleveraging in the secondary market for subprimes, vis-a-vis mortgaged-backed securities traded on Wall Street. But the seed was planted in the '90s by Clinton and his social engineers. They were the political catalyst behind this slow-motion financial train wreck.

And it was the Clinton administration that mismanaged the quasi-governmental agencies that over the decades have come to manage the real estate market in America.

As soon as Clinton crony Franklin Delano Raines took the helm in 1999 at Fannie Mae, for example, he used it as his personal piggy bank, looting it for a total of almost $100 million in compensation by the time he left in early 2005 under an ethical cloud.

Other Clinton cronies, including Janet Reno aide Jamie Gorelick, padded their pockets to the tune of another $75 million.

Raines was accused of overstating earnings and shifting losses so he and other senior executives could earn big bonuses.

In the end, Fannie had to pay a record $400 million civil fine for SEC and other violations, while also agreeing as part of a settlement to make changes in its accounting procedures and ways of managing risk.

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September 15, 2008

A Tale of Two Bridges

Deroy Murdock brings us this article about the now famous "Bridge to Nowhere." Critics have come up with the rather strange claim that Sarah Palin did not really kill this particular pork project. Mr. Murdock brings us the details and shows that, in fact, the McCain people have got it right. Moreover, we find that Obama not only voted for the pork project, but did so at the expense of Katrina victims.

Obama and Biden had an excellent opportunity to do the right thing. Just seven weeks after Hurricane Katrina, Senator Tom Coburn (R., Okla.) proposed to transfer $125 million from the notorious Bridge’s budget and instead devote it to rebuilding the Interstate 10 Twin Spans Bridge between New Orleans and St. Tammany’s Parish. The storm chopped up the bridge.

“We have the largest natural catastrophe we have ever seen in our history,” Coburn said on the Senate floor on October 20, 2005. “It is time we reassess the priorities we utilize in this body as we think about our obligations at home.”

Coburn’s amendment failed 15-82. Obama and Biden were among the “nays.” They and 80 other senators preferred to protect the earmarking tradition than to assist Katrina’s tempest-tossed citizens.

Obama and Biden put pork first and people second. While the residents of New Orleans and southern Louisiana endured perhaps their greatest challenge since the Civil War, Obama and Biden both turned their backs on these embattled Americans.

Katrina demolished much of the city of Slidell, home to Nan Eitel, a formerly New Orleans-based attorney who relocated with her family to Washington, D.C. after the storm. The Twin Spans Bridge was “the route I used to take to work every day,” she recalls by phone. When Eitel learned Monday that Obama and Biden helped junk Coburn’s plan to rebuild the bridge she traveled every weekday morning and evening for 14 years, she says, “I was stunned. That bridge is critical to the economy of the greater New Orleans region.” She explains that it connected Slidell’s bedroom community with downtown New Orleans. She says it served “many people who worked in the oil and gas industry and the Michoud, Louisiana facility where the Space Shuttle’s rockets are built.”

Eitel says that Obama and Biden’s votes “showed a tremendous lack of understanding for that community and the bridge’s importance to the reconstruction effort.” While other routes connected New Orleans to the north and west, the ruined Twin Spans Bridge left it isolated from points east. “Without the bridge, you couldn’t get the city rebuilt,” Eitel says. “Without it, you could not bring in building supplies. Without it you could not truck in the water and food that people needed.”

The Twin Spans Bridge is being rebuilt, though without the help that Coburn tried to provide and Obama and Biden helped block.

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Media Meltdown

If you have been paying attention the last week or so, you may have noticed that the media is having a hissy-fit the likes of which we have not seen in some time. It seems that every day we are treated to stories about the horrors of Sarah Palin while at the same time the numbers for McCain rise and Obama's plummet. The Obama campaign is clearly in trouble as they flail about trying to stop the bleeding from their own self-inflicted wounds. Hubris has its cost. And the media, which has been in the tank for Obama from the start, does not know what to do about it. They have gone into panic mode and it shows.

Aside from the fact that the McCain-Palin ticket is moving ahead in the polls, something that the elite media monoculture deeply fears, there is another factor that explains the ferocity of the media onslaught.

The media mavens must have noticed that despite all of their panicked, over the top flailing about, no one is taking them seriously. Despite all the smears and mud they have tried to throw at Palin and McCain, they have been unable to sway public opinion by so much as a single percentage point. No one is listening to them or taking them at face value. In fact, most people responding to polls indicate that they think the media is in the tank for Obama and is trying to undermine the McCain-Palin team. (which of course they are) The day of the media monopoly, and its ability to control the debate, has passed.

The explanation for this is that the truth is getting out through new media. People who are interested in knowing the facts have come to the conclusion that dinosaur media can no longer be trusted. And like a restaurant that regularly serves poor quality food, they are finding that no one goes there anymore.

This is already happening. All around the country, the institutional outlets of old media are dying. The LA Times and The New York Times have been forced to lay off staffers, like so many other newspapers that have been around for decades. The major TV networks are unable to attract new viewers and are seeing their ratings drop year by year. Ad revenues are falling. And people are going elsewhere for their news and information, mostly to new media, like the internet and talk radio, and taking their disposable dollars with them.

They could turn their fortunes around if they would just try to be fair and balanced like that other cable network that is getting all of the new viewers. But it would require old media to admit that they have been wrong all these years and that they have a product that they are no longer able to sell to an unwilling public that has other options.

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Countdown to No Ratings

And speaking of Media Meltdowns, during the Republican convention much amusement was had at the expense of hard left network (I'm being generous here; they actually do have more than one viewer) MSMBC. Stephen Spruiell writes at The National Review about the comic antics of the out of control anchors and the thrill running up their legs as they spouted their venom at conservatives and Republicans during the convention. But we have no need to worry; they have been rewarded with the lowest ratings for any of the cable networks.

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Journalism and Expendable Truths

Media still in the tank for Obama

In this opinion piece from Steve Chapman of The Chicago Tribune we see the rather vain and inglorious attempt by The Elite Media Monoculture to deal with the sinking Obama campaign by trotting out various fabrications in the hope that most people who read the essay will not already know that they are a pile of leftist agitprop. Let's take a few of these and look them over.

Last week, he released a TV spot on education studded with falsehoods. It quoted the Chicago Tribune calling Obama a "staunch defender of the existing public school monopoly." But the Tribune didn't say it. I did, in a signed column in the Tribune, which praised McCain's support for school vouchers for low-income families.

Interesting that Chapman tries here to blame McCain for something that he himself said in his own newspaper. Just how exactly does McCain bear any responsibility for what is written at The Chicago Tribune? Presumably Chapman would say that he stands by the assessment of Obama's views on vouchers, so what is the problem here? Apparently Chapman is upset that someone actually used his words against The Anointed One. But note that he does not say that his views on Obama are incorrect. He only thinks they are inconvenient.

The ad couldn't be bothered explaining why Obama is wrong about vouchers. Instead, it said his "one accomplishment" was a bill mandating sex education for kindergartners. "Learning about sex before learning to read?" asked the narrator, implying that 5-year-olds would be taught the proper use of condoms before being taught their ABCs. Which, as it happens, is not true.

The purpose of a political ad is not to teach people the theoretical ideas behind vouchers or how they have become a political issue. When you watch a commercial on TV for, say Nike shoes, does it spend a lot of time telling you the history of shoe-making or the theory of orthopedics? Not as a rule. The purpose of a commercial is to get you to accept a single idea or image as a motivation to action.

If you want to know the underlying ideas of how vouchers work there is plenty of information on the web that you can use to become educated on the issue. You can go to The Heritage Foundation or the Cato Institute and read about the ideas of free markets and how they can be applied to the problems we have in government monopoly education to your hearts content. Or you can read Free to Choose by Nobel prize winning economist Milton Freidman who is credited with coming up with the idea in the first place. Responsible voters are expected to at least do a bit of their own thinking and reading for themselves before they decide who will get their vote. For Chapman to demand that a commercial become a lesson in how to understand public financed education is, of course, deeply absurd. But then, when is the major media these days anything other than absurd in their desire to see The Lightworker elected?

And as far as the sex education bill in question is concerned, note that Mr. Chapman does not actually refute the charge. And that is because the bill would have done exactly what its critics are charging. Jim Geraghty at The Corner comments:

Anyway, having now looked at the text of the sex education bill in question… it’s clear that one of its key purposes was to change existing law that said “Each class or course in comprehensive sex education offered in any of grades 6 through 12 shall include instruction on the prevention, transmission and spread of AIDS” to “Each class or course in comprehensive sex education offered in any of grades K through 12 shall include instruction on the prevention of sexually transmitted infections, including the prevention, transmission and spread of HIV.” Yes, the legislation permitted parents to take their children out of the class. But that was already existing law.

One has to wonder that the people who are calling McCain a liar seem not to have noticed that the text of the bill says just what the ad would make you think it said. But no critic seems to want to discuss the actual text of the bill. It's too easy to just call McCain a liar and leave it at that without adding any specifics. As we have seen in the last two weeks, these kinds of charges against McCain-Palin have consistently fallen down when they have been examined closely, something that the left would rather not do.

"We have yet to dispute any claim from the Obama campaign about Palin."

Neither have many other of the house organs of The Elite Media Monoculture. They have been too busy praising The One's coming healing of the planet and lowering of the seas to do any kind of serious journalism. That has been left to talk radio and the bloggers of the new media who have done the kind of job that is no longer done by dinosaur media, thank you very much. Is it any wonder that the Tribune, like so many other papers, is being forced by falling circulation and ad revenues to lay off staff? Not to us, but apparently it is still a mystery to Mr. Chapman.

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September 4, 2008

Sarah Palin Hits it out of the Park

Media whines and moans

Sarah Palin's speech at the Republican convention was stunning in its success. It roused the conservative base and struck just the right tone between serious discussion of issues that will face our nation in the next years and the humor used to puncture the balloon of the media and the Obama-Messiah. RealClearPolitics has the video and the full text here.

Meanwhile the Dinosaur media are back on their heels trying to figure out how to attack and smear Palin without driving away the dozen or so people who are still relying on them for their regular 10 minutes of "news". Thomas Lifson at The American Thinker quotes The Atlantic Monthly's Clive Crook (don't you just love the irony) trying to get to some sort of smear, any kind of smear, that might actually work to stop the American people from liking Sarah Palin. The results are hilarious.

The Democrats have a problem. They had a few days of calling her a clueless redneck, a stewardess, a nonentity, and she has hurled that back in their bleeding gums. (If I were Joe Biden, I'd start practising for October 2nd right now.) Even before tonight's speech, they had backed off the "no experience" strategy, because (as the Republicans intended) that was sending shrapnel in Obama's direction. Their line right now is their default mode, that McCain-Palin is four more years of George Bush. But this too is a completely untenable strategy, since the Republican ticket now looks stunningly fresh to voters, as fresh in fact as Obama-Biden. Where they will have to end up is obvious: McCain-Palin is an extreme right-wing ticket. It is a team that will prosecute the culture war against all that is decent and civilized in the United States: that must be the line.

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The Deep and Twisted Sickness of the Hard Left

Ugly hate from ugly people who like Obama

I don't really spend a lot of time commenting on the social issues like abortion and gay marriage that some conservatives find important. There are, after all, many types of conservatives. Like the Democrat party, the Republicans are a coalition of groups that tend to have their own particular ideas that they consider primary. In my case, the two big issues that I always want to keep an eye on are national security and the economy with cultural issues coming in after that. But the issues that concern social conservatives don't really move me as much because I consider them to be secondary to the survival of the country and to Western Civilization. Without a proper defense to protect the country and without a free economy to hold up our ability to act in a dangerous world, these other issues would be moot.

But you may have noticed that over the weekend the hard left has unleashed an attack on the family of Sarah Palin that is nothing short of sick and disgusting. The left pounced on Palin immediately after her nomination was announced and came up with the "story" that her youngest child was actually her grandchild. When that didn't pan out, they went after Palin's daughter Bristol for being young, pregnant and unmarried.

Bristol and her parents have chosen to keep that child, as yet unborn, and there will be a marriage in Bristol's future. But the hard left that has in the past lectured all of us about the privacy of the individual and the primacy of a woman's right to choose, is now telling us that we must reject Sarah Palin because her daughter had the bad luck to get pregnant. Note that it is not Bristol who is running for office and who, by rights should not be considered a public figure. She is just a kid herself by any common sense measure.

But the hard left is unconcerned about common sense, or decency or the rights of Bristol Palin. They like to pompously lecture to us that kids are going to have sex anyway, so why not just accept it? Well, if we take them at their word, then why are they launching this vicious smear attack against Sarah Palin based on her daughter's activity? Why such reckless hate? Why the name-calling contest at Democratic Underground? Why the attacks at blogs like The Daily Kos? What about that right to privacy that they screech about at every opportunity?

Of course we all know that these supposed concerns that the left brings up when they are useful are but a pretext and a cover for their attacks on America and the ideas and values that make America's continued survival possible. But in fact they only really value the privacy of leftists. It is only the left that is entitled to free speech. Only the left has a right to choose and to be left alone by others. Misogyny and sexism is OK for the left, but not for anyone else. For the left has a different set of rules for themselves than they do for the rest of us.

No, the smears and attacks against Sarah Palin will continue and are continuing because that is what the left does. They have to do so because they cannot go to the issues in this campaign. What the left wants is to impose socialism on this country whether the rest of us want it or not. But if they come out and say so, they lose. The American people don't want what the left wants, so the left has to hide and lie about their true agenda. And that is why they have to attack Sarah Palin. She is the living refutation of everything that they say they want. As long as there is a Sarah Palin it is proof that we don't need or want their utopian schemes. It is proof that America is a good and decent place. It is proof that regular people can make it with perseverance and effort. It is proof that the elites are wrong about who we are.

And they cannot win as long as we are confident of who we really are.

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September 2, 2008

The Fighter Pilot and the Moose Hunter

McCain’s V.P. pick has electrified the base—for good reason.

In this article from Lisa Schiffren of City Journal we take a look at the Republican VP choice Sarah Palin. There is little doubt that Palin was the dark horse candidate in this contest and was a surprise to many observers. Schiffren looks at how this pick is a bold one by McCain and how it will shake up the political landscape in Washington.

It should be noted that with Palin on the ticket the Republican side now has a claim to experience in a number of areas that the Obama camp cannot match. The McCain side can now boast military, executive, business and legislative experience. The Democrats, on the other hand, can claim only two lawyers with no business or military background. And only long-time Washington insider Biden has any extensive legislative history to speak of. Unfortunately for the Democrats his history of bad policy pronouncements doesn't really work in his favor when measured against real world events. Too many of his predictions have turned out to be mistaken. And at the top of the ticket Obama has no other experience outside of politics and academia to give him balance and very little time in any political position that he has held in any case. Given his political machine background and the Biden VP pick, his argument for hopey changey is looking more and more thin.

Indeed, Obama comes from an insulated political machine in Chicago that, by its nature, would keep him outside the mainstream of political reality in the rest of the country. Time after time Obama has demonstrated by his comments that he has an almost casual contempt for the "bitter clingers" who live in flyover country. He comes from a specifically urban and liberal environment saturated with payoffs, corruption and back-room deals. Of course Chicago has many other redeeming features, but its tightly controlled and corrupt political patronage system is not one of them. Nor does it seem likely that it would prepare a candidate to understand the mostly conservative nature of the rest of the country. Obama's time with the Chicago Annengerg Challenge is proving to be a problem as well given that the project spent millions of public and private dollars with no visible effect on the Chicago education system that it was supposedly intended to help.

As the last few weeks have gone by it has become more and more clear that the Obama team is in trouble and that they are coming to the realization, slow though it has been, that they could actually lose the election in November. The desperation that they are now beginning to show demonstrates that they did not have a plan for their current situation. They thought that they would breeze into the White House on the belief that the country hated Bush and would, therefore, vote for the Democrats without any other persuasion being required. Imagine their surprise when they found out that their suppositions were incorrect.

By putting the relatively unknown governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, on his presidential ticket, John McCain has demonstrated that rarest of all political qualities: willingness to take a real risk on a serious new venture with great potential. It’s a sign of confidence, not desperation.

If the response from the conservative base is any indication, McCain has hit a home run with the Palin selection. A sullen GOP, set to vote reluctantly, if at all, for the “maverick” (some say unprincipled) senator from Arizona, has suddenly become electrified. In the first 36 hours after McCain announced his pick, $7 million in new contributions poured in online. This isn’t because Palin is making history as the first woman on a GOP ticket. It’s because of the type of woman and politician that she is. She’s a normal person, a mother and wife, who entered politics in 1992 by running for city council in Wasilla, Alaska to oppose tax hikes. She became mayor and swept a bunch of cronies out of the bureaucracy. She ran for, and lost, a race for lieutenant governor. She served on the state’s Oil and Gas Commission, where she went after the corrupt state GOP chairman, who had taken money from oil companies. In 2006, she ran for governor and won, after first beating the Republican incumbent for the nomination.

Throughout, she hewed to a few clear principles. She championed fiscal responsibility, cutting pork in the form of capital projects as well as larger symbols of waste, such as the infamous “bridge to nowhere” sponsored by Republican senator Ted Stevens. In a state that has been awash in oil money and political corruption, she also demanded real ethical standards and sent people who didn’t meet them to jail, never hesitating to challenge Republicans who were corrupt or ineffective. And she was pro-development, supporting drilling in ANWR; for that matter, she has dealt extensively with the tricky energy issues that have become central to this year’s election, and she understands them better than anyone else on either ticket.

In summary, Palin worked her way up the political ladder, rising on talent (she’s likable and a good speaker) and incremental achievement. She didn’t marry into power, and no one handed her anything. This is what conservatives say they want in female and minority candidates for high office. Further, she’s a reformer and a Washington outsider in a year when, as Republicans know, their own party is part of the problem. She represents real “change,” to adopt a word of the moment, and for Reaganites who have been waiting for the first post-Reagan conservative generation to rise to power, Palin represents “hope” as well.

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Barack Obama, Aspiring Commissar

The Editors at National Review bring us this update on the story of Obama's Stalinists and their attack on investigators looking into the details of The Chicago Annenberg Challenge. The attack on Stanley Kurtz and Milt Rosenberg is a glimpse into the kind of strong arm censorship we are likely to see if the hard left candidate Obama gains the kind of power that the Presidency will give him. Such events and the thuggish intimidation we have seen are only a small taste of what would be in store should the hard left gain power in the country. It's just another good reason to keep Obama out of the White House that he is unqualified to occupy in any case.

Listen to the Milt Rosenberg show in question here if you want to see a bit of what the hard left has in mind for you if you like to think for yourself and you happen to like the idea of a free press in a free country. Even some on the liberal side of the political spectrum have a problem with this issue. Nader supporter Steve Diamond has dug into the CAC and his blog can be found here. He has plenty of information that should be required reading for any person supporting the Dali-Bama.

While the Obama coronation proceeds apace in Denver, it is in Chicago that Americans are getting a disturbing demonstration of his thuggish methods of stifling criticism.

Stanley Kurtz, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, is a Harvard-educated social anthropologist and frequent contributor to National Review, among other publications. He is widely respected for his meticulous research and measured commentary. For months, he has been doing the job the mainstream media refuses to do: examining the background and public record of Barack Obama, the first-term senator Democrats are about to make their nominee for president despite the shallowness of his experience and achievement.

Bluntly, Obama has lied about his relationship with Ayers, whom he now dismisses as “a guy who lives in my neighborhood.” Ayers and Obama have made joint appearances together; they have argued together for “reforms” of the criminal justice system to make it more criminal-friendly; Obama gushed with praise for Ayers’ 1997 polemical book on the Chicago courts; and they sat together for three years on the board of the Woods Fund, a left-wing enterprise that distributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to their ideological allies. Most significant, they worked closely together on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC).

The CAC was a major education reform project, proposed by Ayers, which was underwritten by a $49.2 million grant from the Annenberg Foundation, complemented by another $100 million in private and public funding. The project ran for about five years, beginning in 1995. As the liberal researcher Steve Diamond has recounted, Ayers ran its operational arm, the “Chicago School Reform Collaborative.” Obama, then a 33-year-old, third-year associate at a small law firm, having no executive experience, was brought in to chair the board of directors, which oversaw all “fiscal matters.”

By the time the CAC’s operations were wound down in 2001 it had doled out more than $100 million in grants but had failed to achieve any improvement in the Chicago schools. What little is known about the grants Obama oversaw is troubling. As Diamond relates, one of the first CAC awards in 1995 was $175,000 for the “Small Schools Workshop,” which had been founded by Ayers and was then headed by Mike Klonsky. It was only the beginning of the CAC’s generous funding of Klonsky — a committed Maoist who had been an Ayers comrade in the radical Students for a Democratic Society (the forerunner of Ayers’ Weatherman terrorist organization), and who hosted a “social justice” blog on the Obama campaign website until his writings were hastily purged in June after Diamond called attention to them.

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Red Moon Journal Archives

Pro-Liberty Think Tanks

Pro-Liberty Organizations

Pro-Liberty Educational Institutions and Books

News and Information on the Net

Activism for Liberty

Blogs and Other Anti-Idiotarian Spots

The War on Islamofascism

The Elite Media MonoCulture

National Newspapers

Midwest Newspapers

International Newspapers

Government Information on the Net

The Dis-Loyal Opposition

Know Your Enemy ...(So Said Sun Tzu)- Peacenicks, Useful Idiotarians, 5th Columnists and The Inaction Faction

Terrorist Cheerleaders (The sons of monkeys and pigs!)

Epimentoes

Polling and Voting Information

Products and Services

Pro-Liberty
Educational Institutions and Books

Know Your Enemy ...(So Said Sun Tzu)-
Peacenicks, Useful Idiotarians,
5th Columnists and The Inaction Faction

Terrorist Cheerleaders
(The sons of monkeys and pigs!)