Gerry Charlotte Phelps

World Has Never Seen Such "Freezing Heat"

                            (Image from z.hubpages.com)

ByChristopher Booker, November 16, 2008, in the UK Telegraph.*

A surreal scientific blunder last week raised a huge question mark about the temperature records that underpin the worldwide alarm over global warming. On Monday, Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which is run by Al Gore's chief scientific ally, Dr James Hansen, and is one of four bodies responsible for monitoring global temperatures, announced that last month was the hottest October on record.

This was startling. Across the world there were reports of unseasonal snow and plummeting temperatures last month, from the American Great Plains to China, and from the Alps to New Zealand. China's official news agency reported that Tibet had suffered its "worst snowstorm ever". In the US, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month, and ranked it as only the 70th-warmest October in 114 years.

So what explained the anomaly? GISS's computerised temperature maps seemed to show readings across a large part of Russia had been up to 10 degrees higher than normal. But when expert readers of the two leading warming-sceptic blogs, Watts Up With That and Climate Audit, began detailed analysis of the GISS data they made an astonishing discovery. The reason for the freak figures was that scores of temperature records from Russia and elsewhere were not based on October readings at all. Figures from the previous month had simply been carried over and repeated two months running.

The error was so glaring that when it was reported on the two blogs - run by the US meteorologist Anthony Watts and Steve McIntyre, the Canadian computer analyst who won fame for his expert debunking of the notorious "hockey stick" graph - GISS began hastily revising its figures. This only made the confusion worse because, to compensate for the lowered temperatures in Russia, GISS claimed to have discovered a new "hotspot" in the Arctic - in a month when satellite images were showing Arctic sea-ice recovering so fast from its summer melt that three weeks ago it was 30 per cent more extensive than at the same time last year.

A GISS spokesman lamely explained that the reason for the error in the Russian figures was that they were obtained from another body, and that GISS did not have resources to exercise proper quality control over the data it was supplied with. This is an astonishing admission: the figures published by Dr Hansen's institute are not only one of the four data sets that the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) relies on to promote its case for global warming, but they are the most widely quoted, since they consistently show higher temperatures than the others.

If there is one scientist more responsible than any other for the alarm over global warming it is Dr Hansen, who set the whole scare in train back in 1988 with his testimony to a US Senate committee chaired by Al Gore. Again and again, Dr Hansen has been to the fore in making extreme claims over the dangers of climate change. (He was recently in the news here for supporting the Greenpeace activists acquitted of criminally damaging a coal-fired power station in Kent, on the grounds that the harm done to the planet by a new power station would far outweigh any damage they had done themselves.)

Yet last week's latest episode is far from the first time Dr Hansen's methodology has been called in question. In 2007 he was forced by Mr Watts and Mr McIntyre to revise his published figures for US surface temperatures, to show that the hottest decade of the 20th century was not the 1990s, as he had claimed, but the 1930s.

Another of his close allies is Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC, who recently startled a university audience in Australia by claiming that global temperatures have recently been rising "very much faster" than ever, in front of a graph showing them rising sharply in the past decade. In fact, as many of his audience were aware, they have not been rising in recent years and since 2007 have dropped.

Dr Pachauri, a former railway engineer with no qualifications in climate science, may believe what Dr Hansen tells him. But whether, on the basis of such evidence, it is wise for the world's governments to embark on some of the most costly economic measures ever proposed, to remedy a problem which may actually not exist, is a question which should give us all pause for thought.

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*At http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2008/11/16/do1610.xml  

Hillary Would Have Beaten McCain By Wider Margin

              (Image from committedtoromney.com)

At http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2008/11/12/politics/horserace/entry4596620.shtml?source=search_story.

This CBS article examines exit polls and finds that if the election had been between Hillary Clinton and John McCain:

• 52 percent said they would have backed the former Democratic candidate; 41 percent would have voted for McCain, wider than Obama’s 7-point margin over McCain. :
• 16 percent of McCain voters said they would have voted for Clinton
, the Democrat, if she had been her party’s nominee.
• These voters valued experience over change. 47% said experience was their top candidate quality and 32% said a candidate who shares their values. Just 10% picked change. But like voters overall, the economy was the top issue for these voters.  (All emphases added.)

While 85% of Obama voters said they would have voted for Clinton had she been the Democratic candidate, 13% would not have supported her including 6% who said they would have backed McCain and 7% who said they would not have voted.

But you should see the whole article.

Election Map Shows America Still Conservative

This NewsMax county-by-county election map shows that America is still a conservative country.  At http://images.newsmax.com/misc/2008_Election_Map.jpg.

"The Treatment of Bush Has Been A Disgrace"

AP

At http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122584386627599251.html, Wall Street Journal, 11-5-08, by Jeffrey Scott Shapiro;  "What Have Our Enemies Been  Thinking?"

Earlier this year, 12,000 people in San Francisco signed a petition in support of a proposition on a local ballot to rename an Oceanside sewage plant after George W. Bush. The proposition is only one example of the classless disrespect many Americans have shown the president.

According to recent Gallup polls, the president's average approval rating is below 30% -- down from his 90% approval in the wake of 9/11. Mr. Bush has endured relentless attacks from the left while facing abandonment from the right.

This is the price Mr. Bush is paying for trying to work with both Democrats and Republicans. During his 2004 victory speech, the president reached out to voters who supported his opponent, John Kerry, and said, "Today, I want to speak to every person who voted for my opponent. To make this nation stronger and better, I will need your support, and I will work to earn it. I will do all I can do to deserve your trust."

Those bipartisan efforts have been met with crushing resistance from both political parties.

The president's original Supreme Court choice of Harriet Miers alarmed Republicans, while his final nomination of Samuel Alito angered Democrats. His solutions to reform the immigration system alienated traditional conservatives, while his refusal to retreat in Iraq has enraged liberals who have unrealistic expectations about the challenges we face there.

It seems that no matter what Mr. Bush does, he is blamed for everything. He remains despised by the left while continuously disappointing the right.

Yet it should seem obvious that many of our country's current problems either existed long before Mr. Bush ever came to office, or are beyond his control. Perhaps if Americans stopped being so divisive, and congressional leaders came together to work with the president on some of these problems, he would actually have had a fighting chance of solving them.

Like the president said in his 2004 victory speech, "We have one country, one Constitution and one future that binds us. And when we come together and work together, there is no limit to the greatness of America."

To be sure, Mr. Bush is not completely alone. His low approval ratings put him in the good company of former Democratic President Harry S. Truman, whose own approval rating sank to 22% shortly before he left office. Despite Mr. Truman's low numbers, a 2005 Wall Street Journal poll found that he was ranked the seventh most popular president in history.

Just as Americans have gained perspective on how challenging Truman's presidency was in the wake of World War II, our country will recognize the hardship President Bush faced these past eight years -- and how extraordinary it was that he accomplished what he did in the wake of the September 11 attacks.

The treatment President Bush has received from this country is nothing less than a disgrace. The attacks launched against him have been cruel and slanderous, proving to the world what little character and resolve we have. The president is not to blame for all these problems. He never lost faith in America or her people, and has tried his hardest to continue leading our nation during a very difficult time.

Our failure to stand by the one person who continued to stand by us has not gone unnoticed by our enemies. It has shown to the world how disloyal we can be when our president needed loyalty -- a shameful display of arrogance and weakness that will haunt this nation long after Mr. Bush has left the White House.

Mr. Shapiro is an investigative reporter and lawyer who previously interned with John F. Kerry's legal team during the presidential election in 2004.

Dems Will Turn Meltdown Into Catastrophe

                          (Image from meidner.com)

With scant elegance, nuance or tact, this "bird's-eye view" is a rough picture of what will happen if we go over this particular cliff at this, "our moment" in history, and why we may never regain what will be lost if we do.

The problem is not only with the presidency.  Increasingly, Congress is the problem.  Congress has much more power than the President now.  If the Democrat majority grows, it will have still more power over the new President, whether Obama or McCain.  What will that mean for the future, and especially for this meltdown?

Remember how this meltdown started.  It was from the Democrat party, and from their mis-handled compassionate desire to help minorities and poor people own their own homes.  The motive was laudable.  The result was ruinous.  We need to assess blame in order to know what not to do, and who not to put in charge next time.

To recap:  President Carter started the CRA, which pushed banks to make sub-prime mortgages to people who could not afford them.  ACORN pushed banks into making sub-prime mortgages that they were forbidden to make, by law and by prudent practice.  ACORN pushed Congress into forcing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into accepting more of such mortgages than they wanted.  Then Congress forced Fannie/Freddie to make 50% of all its mortgages be sub-prime mortgages.  Then President Clinton's Justice Department under Janet Reno actively threatened any banks who did not comply.  (Clinton has recently acknowledged his mistake.)* 

Madness!  The house of cards started its free-fall when the price of housing started down, and the "housing bubble" burst.  But that house of cards was built, first to last, by the Democrats.  To understand our future, that fact must be remembered at every turn.  Because we must move from Left to Right to have any semblance of a good future.

Why?  Because this meltdown will take years to work out, even if we do everything right.  (Much worse, if we do not do everything right.)  That is because this meltdown is a "perfect storm."  More than one crisis is going on, and more will come.  They will be worse than this one, because this one, at least, has some underlying equity behind the bad debt in the form of property.  The oncoming crises do not.  And these crises will all feed on each other.

The housing crisis will be followed quickly by the Social Security crisis and the Medicare crisis.  It Democrats are elected this time, there will also be the nationalized health care crisis.

Why will they be crises?  Because they are all Ponzi Schemes.  None of them are sustainable.  Each one is a bubble, waiting to burst.  Each one is built on debt.  Sooner or later, debts have to be paid.  If not, there is default on the debts.  Then the bubble bursts.  Then there is a meltdown, like this one - or worse.

Each of these future meltdowns will rapidly become international, world-wide.  Why?  Because the U.S. has become the lynchpin, the cornerstone, that keeps the world economy functioning.  Why?  It is the major market in the world.  Everyone wants to sell to the U.S.  It is also the major "safe haven" for investment money.  Why?  Because money is less likely to be stolen or lost here than anywhere else.  And because it is the U.S. military  - supported by U.S. prosperity - that is the primary guarantor of however much safety and stability there is in the world.

Another more long-term, underlying trend must be factored in.  It is demography (population studies.)  All countries have had declining birth rates for several decades now.  At the same time, life-expectancy and life-spans have also been increasing in all countries.  This has caused a "gray overhang."  That is, the older population percentage has been growing while the younger population percentage has been shrinking.  This means there are fewer and fewer young workers to support more and more older non-workers.  This will ruin retirement schemes all over the world.  Not to mention universal health-plans, which are heavily impacted by the old.  This trend also invisibly underlies many other economic/political problems and will help drive them into crises.  Now that the retirement of the huge Boomer generation has arrived, these crises will not delay long.

But what of the prosperity we have had since WWII?  It cannot last, without drastic changes - toward the Right.  Our prosperity has mostly been based on debt - the promise to pay in the future what we borrow and spend today.  Such promises eventually must be paid, or see the whole system collapse.  The Asian countries save money.  The West saves little.  The U.S., nationally, does not save at all.  Everything, all our prosperity, is based on debt.  (For instance, our Social Security has no "lockbox".  There are no funds, no actual savings there.  Congress spends every dime, in "off-budget" spending.  This "Ponzi  Scheme" has assumed that taxes from younger workers would always pay retirement for the older non-workers.  Our declining birth rates and growing survival rates have destroyed that possibility.)

All over the world, savings from retirement plans have been invested  in the U.S. for security and safe returns.  So when we crash, they crash too.  And we will crash, because we are built on debt.

What can we do?  First, when we are in a hole, we have to stop digging.  So for a long time, we have to stop electing Democrats.  Why?

Democrats want to help people.  At least, some of the people. And they want to do it on a new, much larger scale  To do that, they want to use force.  That is, they want to force part of the population to support the other part.  With what force?  Government.  Government is defined primarily as the ultimate coercive power - the highest power that can force people to do things.  And Democrate, bless them, want to help people in the only way they know - through government.

To spend what they must in order to do what they plan, they must build government debt to great new levels.  Why?  Because there is no way they can spend that much out of current U.S. income.

What can we do?  Don't let them spend what they plan.  How can we stop them?  Don't elect them.  Don't vote for them.

Whatever other preferences we may have doesn't change the equation.  We cannot afford the Democrat way.  We cannot survive this, and the other coming crises, by making it worse.

I'm truly sorry.  And I do realize and acknowledge that the Republicans have many, many problems of their own.  But voting Democrat, at this time and probably for a long time, is to say "Bring it on!" to catastrophe.  I'm sorry.  But I can't argue with facts anymore than you can.**

__________________

* Congress is pushing mightily to shift blame from itself to Wall Street fat cats - who are not without fault here.  But the truth is that it was Democrats in office who pushed Wall Street (through the banks who were forced into making bad mortgages) into accepting toxic debt.  This meltdown belongs to Democrats in office.

**Helping the poor and disadvantaged must not be abandoned.  But we must find ways to help them apart from government.  Fortunately, there are many other ways, with good, less-ruinous track records.

Hockey Moms And Capital Markets

              (Image from extrememortman.com)

By Spengler on 10-7-08 in Asian Times at http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/JJ07Dj07.html.

Why do Asian investors depend on American capital markets? Given the near breakdown of key sectors of the American market, one might expect Asians to bring their money home. Quite the opposite has happened:..Asian capital markets cannot absorb Asia's savings.

What does America have that Asia doesn't have? The answer is, Sarah Palin - not Sarah Palin the vice presidential candidate, but Sarah Palin the "hockey mom" turned small-town mayor and reforming Alaska governor. All the PhDs and MBAs in the world can't make a capital market work, but ordinary people like Sarah Palin can. Laws depend on the will of the people to enforce them. It is the initiative of ordinary people that makes America's political system the world's most reliable.

America is the heir to a long tradition of Anglo-Saxon law that began with jury trial and the Magna Carta and continued through the English Revolution of the 17th century and the American Revolution of the 18th. Ordinary people like Palin are the bearers of this tradition.

Outside of the United States, the young governor of Alaska has become a figure of ridicule - someone who did not own a passport until last year and who quaintly believes that her state's proximity to Russia gives her insights on foreign policy. How, my European friends ask, was it possible for such an an ignorant bumpkin to become a candidate for America's second-highest office? They don't understand America.

Provincial America depends on the initiative of ordinary people to get through the day. America has something like an Education Ministry, but it has little money to dispense. Americans pay for most of their school costs out of local taxes, and levy those taxes on themselves. In small towns, many public agencies, including fire protection and emergency medical assistance, depend almost entirely on volunteers. People who tax themselves, and give their own time and money for services on which communities depend, are not easily cowed by the federal government or by large corporations.

Palin's career may look like a poor imitation of a Preston Sturges script, but films such as Hail the Conquering Hero (1944) struck a chord with Americans precisely because the character type of the ordinary man or woman who takes on entrenched interests is instantly recognizable in America.

Palin really did take on the American oil companies and turn the scoundrels out of office. Her predecessor, Frank Murkowski, appointed her to the state oil and gas commission in the apparent belief that a small-town mayor and former beauty queen would rubber-stamp corrupt deals between the state and the Big Oil companies.

Shades of Jimmy Stewart in Mr Smith Goes to Washington, Palin ran against Murkowski and took his job. That does not qualify her to be president, to be sure, but it does show cunning and strength of character. Palin is qualified for high office by temperament if not by education, and is preferable to candidates whose education has made no improvement on their characters.

The fact that ordinary people safeguard their rights and have the means to challenge established interests does not exclude the possibility of fraud on a grand scale.

Asian investors were cheated by a conspiracy of the financial industry and the ratings agencies, which sold them ostensibly low-risk securities that turned out to be toxic. The just-approved US$700 billion support package for American banks sets America back to a regime of oligarchy, according to New York Times columnist David Brooks. Despite this fraud and its attendant humiliation, and despite the deterioration of governance in American markets, Asian investors are putting more rather than less money into America, judging from the decline of Asian currencies against the dollar in the course of the crisis.

One doesn't see demonstrations by wronged peasants in the small towns of America. There never were peasants - American farmers always were entrepreneurs - and the locals avenge injury by taking over their local governments, which have sufficient authority to make a difference. At the capillary level, school boards, the Parent Teachers' Association, self-administered religious organizations and volunteer organizations incubate a political class entirely different from anything to be found in Asia. There are tens of thousands of Sarah Palins lurking in the minor leagues of American politics, and they are the guarantors of market probity.

"Hockey Moms," to be sure, may not be the optimal promoters of America's future. One for one, the "Piano Moms" of China are cleverer people and produce smarter offspring. China's 30 million students of classical piano are one of the two great popular movements in the world today: the other is the House Church movement in Chinese Christianity. Children who play hockey will grow up to get coffee for children who study piano. As a pool of talent, nothing compares with the educated segment of the East Asian population that has embraced and mastered Western culture. Nonetheless, Asia still can't invest its own money at home, and seems farther than ever from that objective.

It is true that Asian economies depend on American consumers and an American recession is bad for Asian currencies. But why don't Asians consume what they produce at home? The trouble is that rich Asians don't lend to poor Asians in their own countries. Capital markets don't work in the developing world because it is too easy to steal money. Subprime mortgages in the US have suffered from poor documentation. What kind of documentation does one encounter in countries where everyone from the clerk at the records office to the secretary who hands you a form requires a small bribe? America is litigious to a fault, but its courts are fair and hard to corrupt.

Asians are reluctant to lend money to each other under the circumstances; they would rather lend money in places where a hockey mom can get involved in local politics and, on encountering graft and corruption, run a successful campaign to turn the scoundrels out. You do not need PhDs and MBAs for that. You need ordinary people who care sufficiently about the places in which they live to take control of their own towns and states when required. And, yes, it doesn't hurt if they own guns. Popular gun ownership places a limit on the abuse of state power. 

...That is why Asia's retirement money must look for a home overseas...The trouble (is that)...the derivative securities created out of the inedible scraps of the mortgage market - were subject to monstrously large demand from a world of aging savers (see The monster and the sausages, Asia Times Online, May 20, 2008). (All emphases added.)

CNN's Anderson Cooper On Obama-Ayers Issue

See video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvROBLortBQ or YouTube.com>   6 minutes.  You may be surprised at how seriously he takes the strength of the linkage between Obama and Ayres.

                   (Image from cnn.com)

Who Worked To Avoid This Meltdown?

                                        (Image from koreatimes.co.kr)

This news broadcast video simply shows who worked to avoid the meltdown, how and when.  At http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMnSp4qEXNM.  4 minutes.  Short, simple, factual.

(Hat Tip to Robert Martin)

Jack Welch On What Is To Come

          (Image from nelsonconsulting.co.uk)

Here's what fabled Jack Welch, former CEO of GE, has to say on CBN about the aborted Bail-Out bill today, and what he thinks is about to happen to the economy.  At  Video: Welch on GE, Wall Street bailout.  Helpful.  Excellent..

(Heck. I can't make the link work.  Try going to http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26946382/page/2/, then click on " Video: Welch on GE, Wall Street bailout at the bottom of the (2nd) page.  The type is in red.)

ACORN's Role In Meltdown

ACORN's Madeline Talbott

(Image from investorsgroup.com)

This from NY Post: "O's Dangerous Pals," by Stanley Kurtz, 9-29-08, at http://www.nypost.com/php/pfriendly/print.php?url=http://www.nypost.com/seven/09292008/postopinion/opedcolumnists/os_dangerous_pals_131216.htm

WHAT exactly does a "community organizer" do? Barack Obama's rise has left many Americans asking themselves that question. Here's a big part of the answer: Community organizers intimidate banks into making high-risk loans to customers with poor credit.

In the name of fairness to minorities, community organizers occupy private offices, chant inside bank lobbies, and confront executives at their homes - and thereby force financial institutions to direct hundreds of millions of dollars in mortgages to low-credit customers.

In other words, community organizers help to undermine the US economy by pushing the banking system into a sinkhole of bad loans. And Obama has spent years training and funding the organizers who do it.

THE seeds of today's financial meltdown lie in the Commu nity Reinvestment Act - a law passed in 1977 and made riskier by unwise amendments and regulatory rulings in later decades.

CRA was meant to encourage banks to make loans to high-risk borrowers, often minorities living in unstable neighborhoods. That has provided an opening to radical groups like ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) to abuse the law by forcing banks to make hundreds of millions of dollars in "subprime" loans to often uncreditworthy poor and minority customers.

Any bank that wants to expand or merge with another has to show it has complied with CRA - and approval can be held up by complaints filed by groups like ACORN.

In fact, intimidation tactics, public charges of racism and threats to use CRA to block business expansion have enabled ACORN to extract hundreds of millions of dollars in loans and contributions from America's financial institutions.

Banks already overexposed by these shaky loans were pushed still further in the wrong direction when government-sponsored Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac began buying up their bad loans and offering them for sale on world markets.

Fannie and Freddie acted in response to Clinton administration pressure to boost homeownership rates among minorities and the poor. However compassionate the motive, the result of this systematic disregard for normal credit standards has been financial disaster.

ONE key pioneer of ACORN's subprime-loan shakedown racket was Madeline Talbott - an activist with extensive ties to Barack Obama. She was also in on the ground floor of the disastrous turn in Fannie Mae's mortgage policies.

Long the director of Chicago ACORN, Talbott is a specialist in "direct action" - organizers' term for their militant tactics of intimidation and disruption. Perhaps her most famous stunt was leading a group of ACORN protesters breaking into a meeting of the Chicago City Council to push for a "living wage" law, shouting in defiance as she was arrested for mob action and disorderly conduct. But her real legacy may be her drive to push banks into making risky mortgage loans.

In February 1990, Illinois regulators held what was believed to be the first-ever state hearing to consider blocking a thrift merger for lack of compliance with CRA. The challenge was filed by ACORN, led by Talbott. Officials of Bell Federal Savings and Loan Association, her target, complained that ACORN pressure was undermining its ability to meet strict financial requirements it was obligated to uphold and protested being boxed into an "affirmative-action lending policy." The following years saw Talbott featured in dozens of news stories about pressuring banks into higher-risk minority loans.

IN April 1992, Talbott filed an other precedent-setting com plaint using the "community support requirements" of the 1989 savings-and-loan bailout, this time against Avondale Federal Bank for Savings. Within a month, Chicago ACORN had organized its first "bank fair" at Malcolm X College and found 16 Chicago-area financial institutions willing to participate.

Two months later, aided by ACORN organizer Sandra Maxwell, Talbott announced plans to conduct demonstrations in the lobbies of area banks that refused to attend an ACORN-sponsored national bank "summit" in New York. She insisted that banks show a commitment to minority lending by lowering their standards on downpayments and underwriting - for example, by overlooking bad credit histories.

By September 1992, The Chicago Tribune was describing Talbott's program as "affirma- tive-action lending" and ACORN was issuing fact sheets bragging about relaxations of credit standards that it had won on behalf of minorities.

And Talbott continued her effort to, as she put it, drag banks "kicking and screaming" into high-risk loans. A September 1993 story in The Chicago Sun-Times presents her as the leader of an initiative in which five area financial institutions (including two of her former targets, now plainly cowed - Bell Federal Savings and Avondale Federal Savings) were "participating in a $55 million national pilot program with affordable-housing group ACORN to make mortgages for low- and moderate-income people with troubled credit histories."

What made this program different from others, the paper added, was the participation of Fannie Mae - which had agreed to buy up the loans. "If this pilot program works," crowed Talbott, "it will send a message to the lending community that it's OK to make these kind of loans."

Well, the pilot program "worked," and Fannie Mae's message that risky loans to minorities were "OK" was sent. The rest is financial-meltdown history.

IT would be tough to find an "on the ground" community organizer more closely tied to the subprime-mortgage fiasco than Madeline Talbott. And no one has been more supportive of Madeline Talbott than Barack Obama.

When Obama was just a budding community organizer in Chicago, Talbott was so impressed that she asked him to train her personal staff.

He returned to Chicago in the early '90s, just as Talbott was starting her pressure campaign on local banks. Chicago ACORN sought out Obama's legal services for a "motor voter" case and partnered with him on his 1992 "Project VOTE" registration drive.

In those years, he also conducted leadership-training seminars for ACORN's up-and-coming organizers. That is, Obama was training the army of ACORN organizers who participated in Madeline Talbott's drive against Chicago's banks.

More than that, Obama was funding them. As he rose to a leadership role at Chicago's Woods Fund, he became the most powerful voice on the foundation's board for supporting ACORN and other community organizers. In 1995, the Woods Fund substantially expanded its funding of community organizers - and Obama chaired the committee that urged and managed the shift.

That committee's report on strategies for funding groups like ACORN features all the key names in Obama's organizer network. The report quotes Talbott more than any other figure; Sandra Maxwell, Talbott's ACORN ally in the bank battle, was also among the organizers consulted.

MORE, the Obama-supervised Woods Fund report ac knowledges the problem of getting donors and foundations to contribute to radical groups like ACORN - whose confrontational tactics often scare off even liberal donors and foundations.

Indeed, the report brags about pulling the wool over the public's eye. The Woods Fund's claim to be "nonideological," it says, has "enabled the Trustees to make grants to organizations that use confrontational tactics against the business and government 'establishments' without undue risk of being criticized for partisanship."

Hmm. Radicalism disguised by a claim to be postideological. Sound familiar?

The Woods Fund report makes it clear Obama was fully aware of the intimidation tactics used by ACORN's Madeline Talbott in her pioneering efforts to force banks to suspend their usual credit standards. Yet he supported Talbott in every conceivable way. He trained her personal staff and other aspiring ACORN leaders, he consulted with her extensively, and he arranged a major boost in foundation funding for her efforts.

And, as the leader of another charity, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, Obama channeled more funding Talbott's way - ostensibly for education projects but surely supportive of ACORN's overall efforts.

In return, Talbott proudly announced her support of Obama's first campaign for state Senate, saying, "We accept and respect him as a kindred spirit, a fellow organizer."

IN short, to understand the roots of the subprime-mort gage crisis, look to ACORN's Madeline Talbott. And to see how Talbott was able to work her mischief, look to Barack Obama.

Then you'll truly know what community organizers do.

Stanley Kurtz is a senior fellow with the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, DC.

Why The Crisis Is Like A Kidney Stone

   (Image from tommitsoff.com)

By the inimitable, Irreplaceable Bill Whittle.  Short.  See it at http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YWE1YTg0N2I5OTQ1ZWNkYjFmYTNjZjQ2ZmMzYmM5ZjA=. 

Samples:

(I had) no health insurance. Why? A preexisting surgery made me tough to insure, but the fact is, I had gotten away with it yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that. So I was trusting to luck for a while. And I had been lucky — for a while.

Next thing I know I’m bent over in the hallway, waiting for the car to come around — hands on my knees like I’d run a marathon. And then — BAM! I’m kneeling in front of the couch, arms wrapped around the cushion, making sounds like frying grease . . . little pops and grunts and hisses. Ten minutes in and I was beneath language already.

After the stone was gone,

Do you want to know what my honest-to-God first thought was when the pain got manageable enough to be able to hold a thought? I tell you: I thought of John McCain. And I’ll tell you what hit me the hardest: not his pain lasted for five years when mine lasted for four hours. But to add to that raw fear, lying in filth and knowing that those footsteps in the hall would bring not relief but more pain . . . my God! When I think about those men on those fields from Bunker Hill to Baghdad, lying there for hours, awaiting rescue and relief that often simply never came . . . I end up — and I don’t expect any of you to actually believe this — I end up grateful for those few hours.

His thoughts:

Here was my second thought: I would like to kiss the hand of those evil, greedy, horrible KKKorporations that made and tested Demerol and Dilaudid and the ultrasound sensor and clean needles and sterile IV bags and all the rest of it. I know they’re the villains of courtroom novels and Michael Moore movies and thus are wicked, greedy, soulless Nazis — but if I met a single one of them I would kiss their hands and feet in gratitude. And it did not elude me, when that blinding light finally went out and I felt good again, that my Moral Superiors who protest and vilify these companies at every turn have not — in point of fact — ever done a single thing to relieve my pain or anyone else’s. Nor could any of those murdering, Seventh-century barbarians we are fighting do so much as carve a block of wood to look like that ultrasound sensor. No, pain has been here forever, and when you strip all the plasma TV’s and jet travel and iPhones away you are left with the brass tacks: It takes civilization to remove pain, and Western Civilization to actually fix what’s causing it, more often than not. And that is another thing I try never to forget.

"And I had a final thought"

My dad suffered from kidney stones his whole life...And yet, the only time I ever saw that man cry was when he talked about the Depression, and how it felt to watch your neighbors eat out of garbage cans.

I don’t want that experience. Just about any remedy, no matter how horrible, would be better than that. But I have re-negotiated my new job to include health insurance. Why today and not three years ago? Because I just came through a world of hurt. I don’t ever want to go through that again.

And this is my concern about the $700 billion kidney stone the economy is trying to pass. It seems to me that if we are going to change behaviors then the people who got us into this mess need to feel a little pain. 

Is that too much to ask of this mess? That from whatever pain we have to endure, we can perhaps learn enough from it so that we don’t go through this again?

Scam That Caused The Crisis

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_              (Image from epluribusmedia.net)

Take 8 minutes to see this video of Congress pooh-poohing the Fannie/Freddie problem just a few short years ago, at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MGT_cSi7Rs.  Sad and shocking. 

Especially see former President Clinton's frank, rueful comments at the end. 

Video: What Caused Financial Crisis?

                        (Image from e-watchman.co.uk)

This video shows better, quicker and more understandably how all this came about than anything I have seen.  At http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5tZc8oH--o.  9 minutes.

(This video came from The Drudge Report.  In the last minute it turned out to be a McCain ad.  But the first 8 minutes summarize the facts from most of the better articles on the roots of this crisis.  The value of this video is that it presents the major facts graphically and all in one place.  That makes it a very helpful summary of the relevant information..)

Bailout Could Make Money For Taxpayers

                (Image from msnbcmedia1.msn.com)

In the Wall Street Journal today, Andy Kessler writes at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122230704116773989.html:

In 1992, hedge-fund manager George Soros made $1 billion betting against the British pound. In 2007, John Paulson's Credit Opportunities fund correctly bet against subprime mortgages, clearing $15 billion for the year and $3.7 billion for him. Warren Buffett is now hoping to make big money on Goldman Sachs.

But these are small-time deals. My analysis suggests that Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson (a former investment banker, no less, not a trader) may pull off the mother of all trades, which could net a trillion dollars and maybe as much as $2.2 trillion -- yes, with a "t" -- for the United States Treasury.  (Emphasis added.)

You should read the rest of this fascinating article, at the link above. 

In support of Kessler's article, Warren Buffet has already profited by his large investment, hours ago, in Goldman Sachs.  There is already a profit of about $783 million on his $5 billion investment in just hours.   (See http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/banking_and_finance/article4821506.ece)

There is a fire sale going on!  Reputable old companies with huge assets but no cash, who are dying for cash, will pay a lot to get cash..  If this bail-out goes through, it could help pay something toward Social Security, health care or tax cuts. 

It could be profit time, as well as reform time, for the U.S. government with Paulson's deal.

McCain Tried to Reform Fannie/Freddie in 2006

                      (Image from drudgereport.com)

This is the statement of Senator McCain to the Senate in 2006, as he addresses the President of the Senate, at http://www.johnmccain.com/mccainreport/Read.aspx?guid=74063c9d-7cb5-47c9-acf6-53c0c2d88376:

Statement by Senator John McCain, May 25, 2006:

Mr. President, this week Fannie Mae's regulator reported that the company's quarterly reports of profit growth over the past few years were "illusions deliberately and systematically created" by the company's senior management, which resulted in a $10.6 billion accounting scandal.

The Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight's report goes on to say that Fannie Mae employees deliberately and intentionally manipulated financial reports to hit earnings targets in order to trigger bonuses for senior executives. In the case of Franklin Raines, Fannie Mae's former chief executive officer, OFHEO's report shows that over half of Mr. Raines' compensation for the 6 years through 2003 was directly tied to meeting earnings targets. The report of financial misconduct at Fannie Mae echoes the deeply troubling $5 billion profit restatement at Freddie Mac.

The OFHEO report also states that Fannie Mae used its political power to lobby Congress in an effort to interfere with the regulator's examination of the company's accounting problems. This report comes some weeks after Freddie Mac paid a record $3.8 million fine in a settlement with the Federal Election Commission and restated lobbying disclosure reports from 2004 to 2005. These are entities that have demonstrated over and over again that they are deeply in need of reform.

For years I have been concerned about the regulatory structure that governs Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac--known as Government-sponsored entities or GSEs--and the sheer magnitude of these companies and the role they play in the housing market. OFHEO's report this week does nothing to ease these concerns. In fact, the report does quite the contrary. OFHEO's report solidifies my view that the GSEs need to be reformed without delay.

I join as a cosponsor of the Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act of 2005, S. 190, to underscore my support for quick passage of GSE regulatory reform legislation. If Congress does not act, American taxpayers will continue to be exposed to the enormous risk that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pose to the housing market, the overall financial system, and the economy as a whole.   (Emphasis added.)

I urge my colleagues to support swift action on this GSE reform legislation.

Getting Rid of Christians in Myanmar

                                   (Image from economist.com)

(From Chuck Colson's Breakpoint today, at www.breakpoint.org:)

The news from Myanmar/Burma keeps getting worse.  As of May 11, nearly 300,000 were dead or missing.  The UN said 1.2 - 1.9 million were struggling to survive after the storm.

But the conduct of the Burmese junta is even more appalling.  It actively hinders relief operations.  After it seized food aid last week, the UN had to stop sending it.

...a week after the cyclone, the junta was still refusing to let relief workers into the country, insisting that countries send only supplies and not personnel. 

The junta eventually relented, but only after stamping their own names on the boxes, and not soon enough to prevent a catastrophe.

Their intransigence may have already doomed a generation of Burmese children, according to international aid agencies. They warned of epidemics of “apocalyptic proportions.” The death toll from the epidemics and starvation could exceed the death toll from the storm itself.

The junta does not value the lives of its people.

Burma's Christians know this better than anyone.  The junta has used...

...ethnic cleansing of Christian minority groups, destruction of villages, forced conversions and even rape and murder...“to create a uniform society in which the race and language is Burmese and the only accepted religion is Buddhism.”  (bolding added)

The mainstream media has mostly ignored this story.  Most Westerners do not even know that Burma has a substantial Christian population.

We ought to be at the forefront of alleviating the suffering of the Burmese people.

But at the same time, we ought to point out to the world that while cyclones do not discriminate between Buddhists and Christians, this junta does.

And our nation ought to be mobilizing world opinion to bring down this oppressive regime.

Clinton's Methodist Church Affirms Gay Marriages

     Foundry United Methodist Church, Wash. D.C.

                       (Image from casavant.ca)

The Clinton's former church, the prominent Foundry United Methodist Church of Washington D.C., has announced that homosexual couples can have their associations recognized and honored at the church.

Mark Tooley, Executive Director of UMAction, responds, "It is absurd to claim that a United Methodist Church can 'recognize' a same-sex union without celebrating it."

UMC church law prohibits any ceremonies that celebrate homosexual unions which involve UM pastors or church buildings.  The UMC, however, officially "affirms God's love and civil rights for all people, while also affirming marriage as the lifelong union of man and woman."

Tooley commented:

The United Methodist Discipline clearly prohibits celebrating homosexual unions.  By providing worship leadership and a church building, Foundry United Methodist Church is doing everything short of an exchange of vows.  This is clearly a violation of the spirit of the Discipline.

It is absurd to claim that a United Methodist church can "recognize" a same-sex union without celebrating it.  Are we to believe that the United Methodist pastor will roboticaly acknowledge such unions without any encorsement of them, all the while surrounded by the trappings of a traditional wedding service?

UMAction calls upon Baltimore-Washington Conference Bishop John Schol to uphold both the letter and spirit of the United Methodist Discipline by preventing these same-sex rites.

From www.TheIRD.org

The Man Who Says He's JFK's Son

      (Image from Globe and Mail)

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                Enlarge Image

This story, broken in the Drudge Report, is all over the Canadian press tonight, while largely missing from the U.S. media.  Among papers carrying the story is the Globe and Mail, here

They report that Vanity Fair in the U.S. has been working quietly on the story for 18 months.  Jack "Worthington" - not his actual name - has come forward.   He seems to have signed papers saying that he does not want money from the Kennedys.  But he is asking for DNA from the Kennedys in order to prove that he is JFK's son.

He claims to have been born at about the time JFK was assassinated, which if true, would mean he was conceived about a month after JFK was sworn in as President.  His mother is alleged to be from a family that was close to LBJ, and that it was LBJ who introduced her to JFK.  Her family is supposed to have been closely allied to LBJ politically in Texas.

At present, the American businessman is living anonymously in Canada close to Vancouver.  He has been in talks with some Canadian papers, and this is the latest development.  While it is not shocking, considering the wide publicity given to the womanizing of the Kennedy brothers and of Joe Kennedy, their father, it is still news that is bound to fascinate Americans.

Look for it to hit the U.S. press tomorrow.

A New "Rwanda" in Kenya?

  (Image from newsimg.bbc.co.uk)

The slaughter in Kenya now may be progressing to a Rwanda-type genocide.  Then, international governments sat on their hands while the Rwandan slaughter flared rapidly into genocide.  This must not happen again.  The U.S. and the E.U. need to act now, before it is too late to stop another Rwanda. 

President Kibaki came from behind to win against opponent Raile Odinga, who is alleged to have "made an agreement with the Muslims" according to an email (below) from Kenya Sunday.  Odinga's followers are the ones doing the rioting and killing.  Hundreds of the dominant kikuyu tribe have been killed with machetes, or burnt to death in cars, houses and churches.  50 died who were seeking sanctuary in one church that was burnt to the ground Sunday in Eldoret.  According to MSNBC, here, 

Kibaki's supporters say he has turned Kenya's economy into an east African powerhouse, with an average growth rate of 5 percent. He won by a landslide in 2002, ending 24 years in power by the notoriously corrupt Daniel arap Moi. But Kibaki's anti-graft campaign has been seen as a failure, and the country still struggles with tribalism and poverty.

Odinga, a flamboyant 62-year-old with a son named Fidel Castro, cast himself as a champion of the poor. His main constituency is Kibera, where some 700,000 people live in breathtaking poverty, but he has been accused of failing to do enough to help them in 15 years as a member of parliament.

In a disturbing reminder of Rwanda, this is also a tribal dispute.  President Kibaki is of the Kikuyu tribe, the largest in Kenya.  Odinga is of the large Luo tribe.  The Luos feel that the Kikuyus have held the government too long, and are too prominent in business.  They want their turn.  Leftist Odinga, who named a son after Fidel Castro, is their champion.

Also - as may have been the case in Rwanda - this conflict may be exacerbated by tensions between Muslims and Christians.  Kenya is almost evenly divided between the two.  Just 2 years ago, a law was narrowly defeated that  prohibited Christians from meetings in public places, while at the same time allowing Muslims to have such meetings, here. 

Here is a first-hand report from a respected Kenyan pastor, received by email Sunday 12/30/07:

Thanks, for your prayers were answered!  Mary, I and family were traveling from Kakuru to Eldoret and ran into 5 roadblocks.  At one of them, the machete-waving rioters tried to pull Mary out of the car, asking what tribe she was from.  God intervened and sent 3 men (probably angels) from the local Kalinjin tribe that were able to get me and family out of the situation by driving us to Eldoret.  The Kalinjin men told me they would rather die than let me and my family not get home 50 kilometers away!  Awhile later, we were stopped again and the mob said that the 3 men were paid to drive us through.  100 men surrounded the vehicle and broke our taillights with rocks and somehow one man released us and told us to get out of there as fast as possible.

We are home now and this is what I can say: we saw death with our own eyes, and we saw the Lord save me and my family.  On two incidents we saw, they burnt two cars of people in front of our eyes.  Whenever my girls saw these bad people stopping us on the road, they saw death of at least their mother, because she is of the Kikuyu tribe.

Keep praying.  Kibaki [the President of Kenya] came from behind and beat Raila Odinga .  Now Raila's people are even more upset.  They are the ones who have been rioting all along, because they don't agree with the results.

By the way, I'm sorry that I even did not know that today is Sunday.  That was not in me.  The only thing that mattered was life for my family and I.

6 Kikuyus have been killed in Eldoret.  (He did not know then about the 50 more who died when an Eldoret church was burned to the ground that same day.)  10 Kikuyus killed in Kisii, 10 in Kakamega, and Mathare and Kibera slums are burning now.  Many people are displaced.

Keep praying for our protection.

I believe the church now has an opportunity to bring reconciliation to the tribalism that is obviously a major rift in the country.  Pray that God's people from across all 42 tribes would unite and bring healing to the land.

Pass this on to anyone you know who will pray for our Kanyan brothers and sisters.

(Italicized text added to original)

Biofuels Worse than Oil for Planet, Poor

                   (Image from telegraph.co.uk)

"We need a 5-year freeze on biofuels, before they wreck the planet, writes George Monbiot in The Guardian, here.

The theory is that fuels made from plants will reduce carbon dioxide from cars and trucks.  What is wrong with that?  Just this:

Plants absorb carbon as they grow - it is released again when the fuel is burnt. By encouraging oil companies to switch from fossil plants to living ones, governments on both sides of the Atlantic claim to be “decarbonising” our transport networks.

First, this sets up a competition for food between cars and people. 

The people would necessarily lose: those who can afford to drive are, by definition, richer than those who are in danger of starvation.

It would also lead to the destruction of rainforests and other important habitats(5).

This is already happening.

Since the beginning of last year, the price of maize (corn) has doubled(6). The price of wheat has also reached a 10-year high, while global stockpiles of both grains have reached 25-year lows(7). Already there have been food riots in Mexico and reports that the poor are feeling the strain all over the world...According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, the main reason is the demand for ethanol: the alcohol used for motor fuel, which can be made from both maize (corn) and wheat(9).

Farmers will respond to better prices by planting more, but it is not clear that they can overtake the booming demand for biofuel. Even if they do, they will catch up only by ploughing virgin habitat.

Second, besides taking food from the poor, biofuel is already known to be worse for the planet than petroleum.

The UN has just published a report suggesting that 98% of the natural rainforest in Indonesia will be degraded or gone by 2022(10). Just five years ago, the same agencies predicted that this wouldn’t happen until 2032. But they reckoned without the planting of palm oil to turn into biodiesel for the European market.

This is now the main cause of deforestation there and it is likely soon to become responsible for the extinction of the orang utan in the wild. But it gets worse. As the forests are burnt, both the trees and the peat they sit on are turned into carbon dioxide. A report by the Dutch consultancy Delft Hydraulics shows that every tonne of palm oil results in up to 33 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions, or ten times as much as petroleum produces(11).

I feel I need to say that again. Biodiesel from palm oil causes up to TEN TIMES as much climate change as ordinary diesel.

Similar impacts are happening all over the world.

Sugarcane producers are moving into rare scrubland habitats (the cerrado) in Brazil and soya farmers are ripping up the Amazon rainforests. As President Bush has just signed a biofuel agreement with President Lula, it’s likely to become a lot worse. Indigenous people in South America, Asia and Africa are starting to complain about incursions onto their land by fuel planters. A petition launched by a group called biofuelwatch, begging western governments to stop, has been signed by campaigners from 250 groups(12).

The British government is well aware that there’s a problem. On his blog last year the environment secretary David Miliband noted that palm oil plantations “are destroying 0.7% of the Malaysian rain forest each year, reducing a vital natural resource (and in the process, destroying the natural habitat of the orang-utan). It is all connected.”(13)

Then why are governments so enthused about biofuels?  It is because they don't upset drivers.

(Biofuels) appear to reduce the amount of carbon from our cars, without requiring new taxes. It’s an illusion sustained by the fact that only the emissions produced at home count towards our national total. The forest clearance in Malaysia doesn’t increase our official impact by a gram.

So what should we do?  Monbiot says:

We need a moratorium on all targets and incentives for biofuels, until a second generation of fuels can be produced for less than it costs to make fuel from palm oil or sugarcane.

I suggest a five-year freeze.

This would be very hard to do, because "...encouraged by government policy, vast investments are now being made by farmers and chemical companies. Stopping them requires one heck of a battle. But it has to be fought."

Monbiot's foottnotes can be found at the link at the top of this post.  (See also here.) 

That Notorious One Percent

         (Image from savecivilization.org)

Economist Thomas Sowell, Fellow of the Stanford Hoover Institute, has a great gift.  He makes economics simple.  He does it again, here to explain the notorious 1% wealthiest in the U.S.

A recent column by Anna Quindlen in Newsweek (or is that Newsweak?) laments that "the share of the nation's income going to the top 1 percent is at its highest level since 1928."

Who are those top one percent? For those who would like to join them, the question is: How can you do that?

Easy: you can join them by selling your house in San Francisco (if you have one.)

Virtually anyone who owns a home in San Francisco, no matter how modest that person's income may be, can join the top one percent instantly just by selling their house.

But that's only good for one year, you may say. What if they don't have another house to sell next year?  Well, they won't be in the top one percent again next year, will they? But that's not unusual.

Americans in the top one percent, like Americans in most income brackets, are not there permanently, despite being talked about and written about as if they are an enduring "class" -- especially by those who have overdosed on the magic formula of "race, class and gender," which has replaced thought in many intellectual circles.

Recent data from the Internal Revenue Service show that more than half the people who were in the top one percent in 1996 were no longer there in 2005.  Among the top one-hundredth of one percent, three-quarters of them were no longer there at the end of the decade.

This kind of movement between income groups happens all the time, to and from all income groups, here and here.  In the U.S. there are no permanent income classes, but constant movement between income groups.

Among corporate CEOs, those who cash in stock options that they have accumulated over the years get a big spike in income the year that they cash them in. This lets critics quote inflated incomes of the top-paid CEOs for that year. Some of these incomes are almost as large as those of big-time entertainers -- who are never accused of "greed," by the way.

Sowell points out:

Most Americans in the top fifth, the bottom fifth, or any of the fifths in between, do not stay there for a whole decade, much less for life. And most certainly do not remain permanently in the top one percent or the top one-hundredth of one percent.

So why does it seem like the richest 1% is mostly the same group?  It is the way statistics are gathered, he explains.

Most income statistics do not follow given individuals from year to year, the way Internal Revenue statistics do. But those other statistics can create the misleading illusion that they do by comparing income brackets from year to year, even though people are moving in and out of those brackets all the time.

That especially includes the top one percent, who have become the focus of so much angst and so much rhetoric.

War Movies That Miss The Story

Most war movies are not actually about war, but are soap operas where the war is merely a backdrop.  So says Wretchard the Cat today at the Belmont Club, here.  He adds that the movie that was actually the best WWII movie was Casablanca.  That although it did not show even one battle scene - most of the action took place in a saloon - it was more truly about the war, what it cost and why it was being fought, than any other movie.  He writes:

But because it explored the great issues of a civilization torn between barbarism and freedom and the dilemmas of people caught in its tides it became, by popular acclaim, the greatest war movie of the 20th century...Every line in the script was devoted to the War and its effect on the fugitives in Rick's Cafe.

As evidence, he offers this film clip from the ending of Casablanca.

Wretchard also writes that:

Since September 11, 2001 only one film has come remotely close to being the Casablanca of the war on terror: the Lord of the Rings trilogy. This is not as surprising as it might seem. JRR Tolkien was a combat veteran of the Great War...

It's the themes that speak to us.  And it should not have been surprising to hear, in Peter Jackson's film, echoes of so many of the lines that I learned by heart in the endless screenings of Casablanca at the Brattle Street theater in Harvard Square.

Here are Humphrey Bogart and Sean Astin delivering essentially the same lines.

But read the whole fascinating article!

"Christians, Come Back To Your Home, Iraq"

          Photo by independent embedded journalist Michael Yon, here. 

This is the same church pictured in my post 11/9/07, here, with Christians and Muslims putting the wooden cross back up on the church roof. 

Now Michael Yon reports this:

Today, Muslims mostly filled the front pews of St John’s. Muslims who want their Christian friends and neighbors to come home. The Christians who might see these photos likely will recognize their friends here.

The Muslims in this neighborhood worry that other people will take the homes of their Christian neighbors, and that the Christians will never come back. And so they came to St John’s today in force, and they showed their faces, and they said, “Come back to Iraq. Come home.”

They wanted the cameras to catch it. They wanted to spread the word: Come home. Muslims keep telling me to get it on the news. “Tell the Christians to come home to their country Iraq.”

                           LTC Stephen Michael at St John’s.   

Michael Yon writes:

LTC Michael told me today that when al Qaeda came to Dora, they began harassing Christians first, charging them “rent.”

It was the local Muslims, according to LTC Michael, who first came to him for help to protect the Christians in his area. That’s right. LTC Michael told me more than once that the Muslims reached out to him to protect the Christians from al Qaeda. Real Muslims here are quick to say that al Qaeda members are not true Muslims.

From charging “rent,” al Qaeda’s harassment escalated to killing Christians, and also Muslims. Untold thousands of Christians and Muslims fled Baghdad in the wake of the darkness of civil war.  Most of the Christians are gone now; having fled to Syria, Jordan or Northern Iraq.

                                                    The interpreter “Ice”

Yon writes:

Ice, pictured here with members of the congregation outside St John’s after mass, grew up in this neighborhood. His family is Christian and St. John’s is their church. I asked Ice if the Muslims treat the Christians poorly in Iraq, and he said what other Iraqi Christians and Muslims have also told me: an unequivocal “No.” Ice said they had no problems at all until al Qaeda instigated friction between people.

Elections Mean "Talking The Economy Down"

                  (Image from thumbs.dreamstime.com)

If it's election time, then it's time for one side to be "talking the economy down." That always would be the party that does not currently have the presidency, but who wants to get it this election.

So the economy is getting "talked down."  A recession is expected any moment, they say.  (And the sooner, the better, apparently.)  The discouraging points are ticked off.  The dollar is down.  Oil prices are up.  The housing "bubble" has burst. The stock market is down, and still queasy.  Oh, woe!

So - where is the economy, actually?  Are we better off?  Or worse off?  Is it time to panic yet?  To answer that, let me put on my economist hat for a minute:

No, it's not panic time.  In fact, the economy is still improving.  Hard to believe?  Well, listen to this:

-3.9% growth rate in the economy, best in 4 years [1]

-The Fed's core inflation rate is down to 1.9%, below its 2% target

-U.S. exports are soaring, canceling out the housing bust.  (Thanks, weak dollar!)

-Employment rates are holding steady - 125,000 new jobs, net, in October

-Individual income is 4.1% ahead of last year [2]

And thanks to the Bush tax cuts which brought in more tax revenue:

-Tha national deficit is down to $160 billion, just 1% of the GDP

Or, to quote Larry Kudlow, "If things are so bad, why are they so good?"

Remember that, the next time you hear all the doom and gloom: the housing bust, the price of oil, exporting jobs, Chinese competion, falling incomes, loss of jobs, income inequality - with true and false all mixed together.

Does that mean that parts of the economy are not doing well?  No.  Caution is still a good idea if you are in the stock market or thinking of buying or selling a home.  There is always bad news and good news.  But when you see the economy as a whole doing well, then the good news is outweighing the bad news.  You can relax.

Despite any bad news, the economy is still getting better - as it has been for some 5 years now.  It's just election time again.

____________

[1] 3rd quarter of 2007, in real gross domestic product, the best summary measurement of the economy.&nbs