Today's Retail Sales activity for Nov broached expectations, thus cooperating nicely with our anchor. Consumers are far less cautious than before. Thank you very much. But this blog’s about National Politics is it not?
OK, let’s veer away from recent data just a tad and look at another key development: The House Committee on Financial Services (before, the House Banking Comm) is about to acquire a new chairman, thanks to Nov/2. We celebrate this event.
Under Barney Frank the committee went awol. As a result the crisis of Q4 ‘08 was birthed.
Frank never understood the workings of Fannie & Freddie. Bush efforts to reform the twins were blocked by Frank (and his Dem counterparts in the Senate, including BO). He and Clinton and Dodd and Obama may not have known that in encouraging the twins to take just a little more risk, then just a little bit more, in the successful effort to garner black votes that they would trigger the crisis but that was the result. That is, Barney politicized the mortgage origination business and for that he should be strung up by his thumbs (or by something, you pick).
KEY: Walt Street lampreys would have been without a host if not for Frank. (McCain would have won the election if he could have articulated this to the masses. He tried once in debate, then gave up the effort.)
We spent a day in front of the House Banking Committee when under Henry Gonzalez (D - Tex). We didn’t share Henry’s politics but admired the man. He was after Greenspan and Greenspan’s Fed for their multiple indiscretions; so were we. Gonzalez understood banking. He was fair. He was also a boxer in his younger years, something a heckler should have remembered. In a restaurant in Texas one day this poor fool called Henry a communist. Henry was in his late 70's at the time. He jumped up and knocked the guy out, TR style.
Somehow Frank and his sleazy far left politics do not fit this mold, even if he has put that male prostitute business behind him. Frank is sharp but so what? He was nothing more than a pseudo community organizer acting as the helmsman of US finance - a misfit. As a pilot on Twain’s Mississippi, he was sure to run aground.
We can expect the new chair, Spencer Bachus (R - Ala) and vice chair Jeb Hensarling (R- Tex) to unsnarl most of Frank’s mistakes, beginning with the Dodd-Frank act, “to correct, replace or repeal job-killing provisions that unnecessarily punish small businesses and community banks that did nothing to cause the financial crisis,” as Bachus told the Wash Times.
Then onto the twins.
Robert Craven
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Monday, December 6, 2010
Reluctantly an American
Mark Halperin, sr political analyst for TIME laments this week about his one-time idol, Obama. Everybody’s turned against him, Halperin writes, “Liberals believe he is an over-compromising wimp.....the business community considers Obama ignorant... a socialist at worst....The media..now see the president as incompetent and overwhelmed.” Poor Mark. He hopes in desperation that Obama will capture bin Laden, or preside over the fall of Iran; something, anything, “to reintroduce him to the American people and show the strengths he demonstrated as a ...candidate.”
Well, not exactly the “strengths” demonstrated as a candidate, but the lies demonstrated as a candidate. And he cannot be “reintroduced” because he never was one of us. He is only reluctantly an American.
His parents (a habitually drunk, polygamist, socialist father and a hater of America / a libertine, socialist mother and a hater of America), his associations with other America haters, with convicted terrorists, are all formative events.
Few of those who were taken in at the voting booth bothered to look past BO’s half color. If they had, they might have encountered this: From Stanley Kurtz, “The afternoon of April 1, 1983, Barack Obama, then a senior at Columbia University, made his way into the Great Hall of Manhattan’s Cooper Union to attend a ‘Socialist Scholars Conference.’”
“The conference itself was not a secret, but it held a secret, for it was there that a demoralized and frustrated socialist movement largely set aside strategies of nationalization and turned increasingly to local organizing as a way around the Reagan presidency — and its own spotty reputation,” he continues. “In the early 1980s, America’s socialists discovered what Saul Alinsky had always known: ‘Community organizing’ is a euphemism behind which advocates of a radical vision of America could advance their cause without the bothersome label ‘socialist’ drawing adverse attention to their efforts.”
“The 1983 Cooper Union Conference, billed as a tribute to Marx, was precisely when Obama discovered his vocation for community organizing,” notes Kurtz.
A regular American guy? A patriot? How so?
An extremist, a radical as we have warned all along? Looks like it.
Robert Craven
Well, not exactly the “strengths” demonstrated as a candidate, but the lies demonstrated as a candidate. And he cannot be “reintroduced” because he never was one of us. He is only reluctantly an American.
His parents (a habitually drunk, polygamist, socialist father and a hater of America / a libertine, socialist mother and a hater of America), his associations with other America haters, with convicted terrorists, are all formative events.
Few of those who were taken in at the voting booth bothered to look past BO’s half color. If they had, they might have encountered this: From Stanley Kurtz, “The afternoon of April 1, 1983, Barack Obama, then a senior at Columbia University, made his way into the Great Hall of Manhattan’s Cooper Union to attend a ‘Socialist Scholars Conference.’”
“The conference itself was not a secret, but it held a secret, for it was there that a demoralized and frustrated socialist movement largely set aside strategies of nationalization and turned increasingly to local organizing as a way around the Reagan presidency — and its own spotty reputation,” he continues. “In the early 1980s, America’s socialists discovered what Saul Alinsky had always known: ‘Community organizing’ is a euphemism behind which advocates of a radical vision of America could advance their cause without the bothersome label ‘socialist’ drawing adverse attention to their efforts.”
“The 1983 Cooper Union Conference, billed as a tribute to Marx, was precisely when Obama discovered his vocation for community organizing,” notes Kurtz.
A regular American guy? A patriot? How so?
An extremist, a radical as we have warned all along? Looks like it.
Robert Craven
Public Sector Unions, Obama and the Economy
Reasonable folk are amazed at the frolics of the left. Why did so much of the stimulus money go to union projects? Is that why it hasn’t worked? Why to Obama is American business simply an afterthought? Why is BO’s main focus on labor and green issues? Why is BO in battle with the private sector, with free enterprise?
Silly us, we thought the present administration had the interests of the American people and their economy in mind. Apparently not. Some of the most useful insight has come from Dem’s themselves, recently chastised.
John Kotkin of Chapman Univ is one of these, highlighting the above noted flaw. He writes that, “Modern-day liberalism... is often ambivalent about expanding the economy — preferring a mix of redistribution with redirection along green lines. Its base of political shock troops, public-employee unions, appears only tangentially interested in the health of the overall economy.” Well natch. These types can’t compete with free enterprise. Ever see a city street crew at work? Or, what’s orange and sleeps three? A Caltrans truck. Enough said. The private sector is a huge threat to these guys. Think BO is going to get away with seeing to the welfare of the private sector over these clowns?
Kotkin continues, “This contrasts with the far broader support for the familiar form of liberalism forged from the 1930s to the 1990s. Democratic presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Bill Clinton focused largely on basic middle-class concerns — such as expanding economic opportunity, property ownership and growth.” Yes they did, but that party was hijacked.
There’s thought and reflection here to be sure. Key is that the modern left’s priorities are misaligned, never mind the method. BO not only screwed up, he didn’t really care in the first place, or if he did his being in hock to the unions precluded any real solution. For BO to have cut taxes then got out of the way would have alienated his party base, big time. Never waste a crisis. Use it to create a program to stimulate the unions.
Again from Kotkin, “Public sector unions are not just the base of the party -- they're the base of the base. As the 2010 campaign ground on, other supporters and donors, notably Wall Street, had abandoned Democratic candidates. But unions representing teachers and state and local employees have doubled down. The National Education Association, the largest U.S. teachers union, spent more than $3.4 million on ad buys and direct-mail campaigns for the key electioneering period from Sept. 1 to Oct. 14. The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees spent $2.1 million in that period. Union members and their families are key to the Democratic ‘ground game’ for Nov. 2.”
May thanks to the left and BO and particularly to his state & local employee union pals for their fine contribution to the better interests of this country.
Robert Craven
Silly us, we thought the present administration had the interests of the American people and their economy in mind. Apparently not. Some of the most useful insight has come from Dem’s themselves, recently chastised.
John Kotkin of Chapman Univ is one of these, highlighting the above noted flaw. He writes that, “Modern-day liberalism... is often ambivalent about expanding the economy — preferring a mix of redistribution with redirection along green lines. Its base of political shock troops, public-employee unions, appears only tangentially interested in the health of the overall economy.” Well natch. These types can’t compete with free enterprise. Ever see a city street crew at work? Or, what’s orange and sleeps three? A Caltrans truck. Enough said. The private sector is a huge threat to these guys. Think BO is going to get away with seeing to the welfare of the private sector over these clowns?
Kotkin continues, “This contrasts with the far broader support for the familiar form of liberalism forged from the 1930s to the 1990s. Democratic presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Bill Clinton focused largely on basic middle-class concerns — such as expanding economic opportunity, property ownership and growth.” Yes they did, but that party was hijacked.
There’s thought and reflection here to be sure. Key is that the modern left’s priorities are misaligned, never mind the method. BO not only screwed up, he didn’t really care in the first place, or if he did his being in hock to the unions precluded any real solution. For BO to have cut taxes then got out of the way would have alienated his party base, big time. Never waste a crisis. Use it to create a program to stimulate the unions.
Again from Kotkin, “Public sector unions are not just the base of the party -- they're the base of the base. As the 2010 campaign ground on, other supporters and donors, notably Wall Street, had abandoned Democratic candidates. But unions representing teachers and state and local employees have doubled down. The National Education Association, the largest U.S. teachers union, spent more than $3.4 million on ad buys and direct-mail campaigns for the key electioneering period from Sept. 1 to Oct. 14. The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees spent $2.1 million in that period. Union members and their families are key to the Democratic ‘ground game’ for Nov. 2.”
May thanks to the left and BO and particularly to his state & local employee union pals for their fine contribution to the better interests of this country.
Robert Craven
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