Gosh, Who Might be Responsible for the Subprime Mortgage Collapse?

Niall Ferguson gives a lucid enlightening excursion through "Planet Finance" and halfway through manages to unearth the culprits in the "subprime market meltdown." The article is a follow-on to his brilliant Empire Falls piece in Vanity Fair in 2006. Here is a punchline from his latest view from Mt. Olympus:

Significantly, a disproportionate number of subprime borrowers belonged to ethnic minorities. Indeed, I found myself wondering, as I drove around Detroit, if “subprime” was in fact a new financial euphemism for “black.” This was no idle supposition. According to a joint study by, among others, the Massachusetts Affordable Housing Alliance, 55 percent of black and Latino borrowers in Boston who had obtained loans for single-family homes in 2005 had been given subprime mortgages; the figure for white borrowers was just 13 percent. More than three-quarters of black and Latino borrowers from Washington Mutual were classed as subprime, whereas only 17 percent of white borrowers were. According to a report in The Wall Street Journal, minority ownership increased by 3.1 million between 2002 and 2007.

He also lays the original idea for low-cost mortgages at the door of the clueless eff-up Jimmy Carter, though there is a lot of blame---Barney Frank and his "husband" at Fannie Mae in the early 90's making the country assume the position for their perv gyrations in the housing market are left unmentioned.

In addition, derivatives and hedges based on math models that conveniently omitted the Crash of '87 and the Great Depression were employed to create another "Extraordinary Delusion [due to] The Madness of Crowds," as Ferguson quotes Mackay's 19th c. perennial classic which the tabloids and their ink-stained wretches perennially neglect. Sadly, many half-dead branches have been pruned and the proligate USA no longer will have China supporting its ridiculous spending habits.

The whole article is extremely clear and devoid of the PR-hack journalism of tabloids like the NYT. And Detroit is a human sewer that deserves Iverson and the Lions!

CHRC Commissars Will not retract Fatwa on Hate Crimes

Canada appears to be sliding into the Bureaucratic Authoritarianism that ensues when a critical mass of bureaucrats, lawyers, and the perpetually offended [insert other fanatical interested parties] combine to become an indigestible block of cement in the national GI tract.

Hopefully, the US will not be taken over by an Oprah-nanny army of little old ladies/shemales in tennis shoes with acute PMS of the mind.

IAEA Moron El-Baradei wants to reward Syria with a nuke reactor!

The Wall Street Journal asks at the end of its editorial why Condi Rice agreed to a second term for this obvious eff-up. Here's the gist of the editorial:

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) confirmed last week that it had discovered a "significant number" of chemically processed uranium particles at a suspected Syrian nuclear site destroyed last year by Israel. The IAEA also reported that satellite images of the site taken prior to its destruction had the markings of a nuclear reactor.

"People and countries are innocent until proven guilty," the Egyptian told an IAEA committee studying the request, according to a transcript of his comments obtained by Agence-France Presse. "Technical cooperation programs to any member states should not be blocked, delayed or otherwise hindered for mere suspicion or unproven allegations."

Mr. ElBaradei has an interesting idea of what "mere suspicion" amounts to. Syria bulldozed the wreckage of the destroyed reactor -- the existence of which it has always denied -- shortly after the Israeli raid. It later limited IAEA inspectors to a single visit to the area, and has ruled out an IAEA request to inspect three other sites suspected of being part of a covert nuclear program. Those three sites were also landscaped by the Syrians after the IAEA requested visits, according to the agency's chief investigator.

By its own admission, the IAEA knew nothing about the Syrian reactor, much less of North Korea's involvement in it, until it was destroyed. For an agency charged with enforcing the nonproliferation regime, that's bad enough, if not altogether surprising. That Mr. ElBaradei should now abet Syria's nuclear ambitions -- even as it obstructs his own inspectors -- is astonishing.

It's obvious that the Terrorism-Abetting Arm of the UN named IAEA & its Al Qaeda Fellow Traveller Mohamed El-Baradei are dangers to international security as is the United Nation. Although the UN remains useful in keeping some failed states from spilling their murderous barbarism abroad, it actually aids terror states like Syria and Iran in achieving their goals. The obviously recessive product of generations of inbreeding named El Baradei simply wants Muslims to be able to build a bomb and the feckless spineless bureaucratic elites, including Ms. Rice, are content to allow the inbred Muslim degenerates a chance at building a bomb.

Let's hope Russky Nuke Cruiser Doesn't Spring Radioactive Leak!

Russian Tech lags far behind the West's for many reasons, but lack of safety measures is a major factor. When I was in Baku, I was warned not to eat the local Caspian Sea seafood because a sunken USSR nuke sub was on the bottom 18 miles offshore and leaking toxic nuke materials into the surrounding eco-systems.

Not to mention the problems with the Kursk and other Russian-model eff-ups over the decades [I just saw among the "destroyed in seconds" Discovery Channel show a couple of Soviet Air Show disasters, sparkiing this admonitory blog].

Perhaps rather than a military threat, the chief Russian menace to the region is to Venezuela as a public health threat!

"Reverse Ferrets" Huffington & Sullivan Ape their Mentor Murdoch

Slate has a nice piece describing the "volte face" that Murdoch's NY Post has done vis-a-vis Obama. Nowhere, of course, does Slate ever avert to the newly-converted ultra-lib opportunists like Arianna Huffington [nee Stassinopoulos] who once upon a time in the nineties strutted around posing at that time as a Republican-oriented conservative. Nor the tranny-in-training emo-boy Andrew Sullivan who formerly posed as a Catholic Irish homo conservative, but now is a senior bitch-boy on the gay-friendly far left.

Interesting how Palinomania continues on the far left's party line blog-vibe while she is now being treated more civilly by the serious media. And how rapidly rat-bitches like K. Parker jump ship when confronted with a job at the Washington Post.

No whores like old whores.....

Happy People Watch Less TV, "go to Church"

The NYT notes that a recent study concludes that people who describe themselves as "happy," one of the three basic rights as Americans we all have [life, liberty and the pursuit of......], watch less TV. After watching UMiami get slaughtered on ESPN last night, I can see why.

Seriously, the NYT naturally downplays the concomitant conclusion, that people who "socialize, go to church, volunteer..." are happier. Except for football and other sports, I watch little TV nowadays. The advent of High Def has made that more pleasurable, but my distaste for everything except Man From Mars and Gossip Girl remains strong, except for Jeopardy.

Maybe I'm happier than most....?

Dalrymple on Liberal Silliness

Theodore Dalrymple watches our society totter and crumble just as he observed the Brits disintegrate under the pressure of social engineering to produce social justice, which is an ever-receding target which will never be attained:

The Sunday before the American election, the Observer in London published an assessment of President Bush’s legacy by several well-known American writers. One of them, Tobias Wolff, wrote: “When I see someone being rude to a waiter, or blocking the road in a Ford Expedition, or yakking loudly on a cell phone in a crowded elevator, I naturally assume they voted for George W. Bush.”

Now, President Bush’s credentials as a conservative might well be questioned; but I take it nevertheless that he was elected preponderantly by conservative voters. Is there, in fact, a connection between being a conservative and having the selfish thoughtlessness (of the kind with which we are all familiar) that Wolff describes?

My guess is that there is no such connection, but rather the reverse. Modern conservatives tend to see the locus of appropriate moral concern more in personal behavior than in social structure (I am not here concerned with whether they are right or wrong). They believe in personal responsibility rather than causation by abstract social forces. They do not believe in entitlement, their own or anyone else’s, or in an indefinite extension of rights. They do not believe in perfection, and they think that even improvement usually comes at a cost.

Modern liberals, by contrast, tend to focus their moral concern more distantly from themselves, on the more abstract political and economic sphere. For example, the personal sexual code does not concern or worry them much unless it is restrictive. They believe that bad behavior finds its origin in social forces rather than in man’s soul. They believe in everyone’s entitlements, which are never met quite sufficiently and need to be extended endlessly. For them, the perfect society will result in perfect people.

Which outlook is more conducive to good manners? It seems to me, a priori, the conservative rather than the liberal: for what can the daily personal conduct of a single man add to or subtract from the sum of human goodness or evil, happiness or misery?

Wolff himself supplies evidence in favor of my thesis. Acknowledging the meanness of what he is about to say, he writes, “When a tornado tears off a few roofs in Texas, I think, serves you right!” This reminded me of something I once heard from a man who organized international intellectual conferences in Amsterdam: the only people who ever complained to him about their lodgings were those who were most publicly concerned with social justice.

“That’s some of what the last seven years have done to this writer,” Wolff adds. So it’s not really his fault that he sees fit to express this ignoble thought to an audience of hundreds of thousands. It’s the last seven years that did it. If they had been fat instead of lean, he would have been sweetness and light, and would have taken the Texans to his heart.

Frauds and mountebanks like Tobias Wolff will always claim they became monsters because "someone turned them into one..." This entitlement monkey will probably thrive in the sewage of a society vulgar enough because of liberal pretensions and lack of boundaries to turn him into an affluent monster in the next four years.

"Qualis artifex perior" is what Wolff really means....

UPDATE The New Criterion has a much better take on Tobias's solecisms than I.

Dem Electoral Crime Wave Hits Minnesota Even Before Recount

The RICO Crime Spree known as the Democrat Party continues its election fraud---presumably employing non-existent Repub "fraud" to justify their high crimes and low-life political methods.

Minnesota is following the state of Washington which managed to steal a governorship in the 2004 election through massive "discovery" of missing ballots. The reason Dems commit these election crimes is that government to the Dems is everything----Repubs have the sensible attitude that it is a necessary evil, Dems believe it must grow until government dominates the economy and public life through Bureaucratic Authoritarianism, a creeping unaccountable power-grab by judges, "administrative law," and other ways to avoid the Constitution, which the Dems regard as an unnecessary evil.

Obama even admitted in a candid interview while he was a State Senator that "redistributive" social and economic justice should replace private property and that the Constitution was a flexible document that even the hyper-liberal Warren Court [Ike called appointing Earl Warren as Chief Justice "the biggest mistake I ever made"] had not gone far enough to wrest property from those who owned it to "redistribute" property to those who deserve it, i.e., coincidentally traditional Dem constituencies!

The repulsive porn "comedian" Franken is even more ridiculous than Gov. Gregoire of Washington, who stole the governorate with the assistance of entrenched bureaucrats and criminal Dem operatives across the state. The Repubs have ignored gigantic voter fraud in states like Missouri and Wisconsin [the latter in both 2000 & 2004] simply because they won the presidency nation-wide. In the meantime, Dems like the execrable Bobo Boxer of CA were making fools of themselves by claiming that Ohio was not legally won.

The Dems will continue to use illegal and extra-legal means to circumvent the public will, as in the recent votes banning gay marriage, simply because these arrogant political commissars KNOW BETTER than the poor benighted voters! Prepare yourself for mysterious bureaucratic manipulations and more electoral fraud as the Red Star Tribune cheers on the vote stealers in MN to give that state a Senator as silly and stupid as the average inhabitant [I lived the worst four years of my life in MN].

WSJ Asks McCain to Demonstrate Honor Toward His Own VP Candidate

John McCain should call in the bizarre finger-pointing campaign his functionary/operatives in his recent campaign have been waging against Sarah Palin. The crapola comments emitted by the loser crew for McCain against Palin reflect the discredited MSM [the NYT loses over a thousand readers per week on a consistent basis] campaign to denigrate and slander a REAL conservative who lives her own family life and isn't a gaffe-a-matic buffoon like Joe Biden, whose silly comments finally consigned him to a penalty box for the last month of the Obama campaign. Obama, of course, says hardly anything and has no reporters vetting his possible illegalities with Rezko and his associations with unrepentant terrorists.

Instead it's a phony wardrobe scam that this fake-news brigade pushes forward because McCain aides are angry that she drew the crowds while J-Mack actually turned off conservatives.

The Rasmussen Poll says 62% of Republicans support her, with Romney & Huckabee & Jindal close to single digits. McCain was the candidate of the MSM, which then mousetrapped him with phony pieces in the soon-to-be-defunct NYT about Vickie Iseman & his wife----classy stuff & none of it true, just like the wardrobe hoax generated by former CBS newsie & current McCain advisor Nicolle {LNU] & her partners in disinformation Murphy & Noonan. The WSJ wing that favors illegal immigration got their boy Johnny as the Repub candidate, but couldn't stand a real conservative like Palin, who owns one house and has five kids & her first husband. The MSM females rarely have any husbands except the Ellen DeGeneres variety. No wonder they hate a good-looking smart female [who's been jumped on by the MSM while serial dunce Biden got a free pass]. But the WSJ now has the good sense to give Bill McGurn space in today's op-ed for a slam-down of the Rollins/Nicolle/Murphy/Noonan cabal seeking to discredit Palin;

Two weeks or so before the campaign was over, the first round of McCain campaign rumors alleged that Mrs. Palin was a "whack job," and characterized her clothes-shopping as "hillbillies looting Neiman-Marcus from coast to coast." More recently, she has been alleged to know as little about geography as Barack Obama knows about the number of states in the union (at one point, he put it at 57).

The unmistakable message here has nothing to do with Africa, the North American Free Trade Agreement or bathrobes. It is the campaign team's cry, "It's not our fault. How could we ever win with this woman on the ticket?"

The first point to make here is the most obvious: This is the language of losers.


Associated Press
This whole display calls to mind those embarrassing codas to each episode of "The Apprentice," when the losing team would sit before Donald Trump in the boardroom and then start blaming everyone but themselves for their failures. The apparent eagerness of Team McCain to indulge in this kind of fingerpointing is similarly unprofessional, and it raises an interesting question.

We are asked to believe that Mrs. Palin was not ready for a national campaign. On what evidence from any part of this election are we to conclude that anyone on the McCain campaign team was ready for a national campaign?

Let's stipulate that Mrs. Palin was not perfect. Regardless whose idea the Katie Couric interview was, it went badly and left some damage. The phone call she took from a comedian pretending to be French Prime Minister Nicolas Sarkozy didn't help. Neither did her assignment as campaign attack dog, the traditional role for any vice presidential candidate.

Yet there are other, more salient points. In the treatment of Mrs. Palin by some of the McCain staff, there is the clear whiff of condescension. That's something a sitting American governor might understandably find hard to stomach coming from a bunch of young professional Republicans who have never themselves run for office.

Ultimately, of course, this will all pass. And if Mrs. Palin goes back and continues to do a good job as governor of Alaska, these attacks will likely only reinforce her outside-the-Beltway credentials to rank-and-file Republicans.

Let's remember too that the only time Mr. McCain surged ahead -- in the polls, in the volunteers, in the mojo -- was when he picked Mrs. Palin. Before that he and his staff had been flying solo, and they were losing. When the contest returned to the top of the ticket, as presidential campaigns inevitably do, Mr. McCain and his team drove their lead into the ground.

It wasn't Mrs. Palin who dramatically flew to Washington promising a legislative answer to the most important economic issue of our day -- and then, in the words of a New York Times campaign profile, "came off more like a stymied bystander than a leader who could make a difference."

And what does it say when the campaign team of a man who has spent decades in the U.S. Senate cannot agree on (much less present) a coherent answer to why he should be elected president of the United States -- except that he's not Barack Obama?

Good questions, Bill. Especially in light of the perp/perv ultra-left loon squads on the blogosphere like Handy Andy Sullivan trying to justify their slanders of Palin 24/7. Methinks the girly-men doth protest too much.

In summing up, McGurn notes McCain's characteristic nice-guy approach to his Dem opponent while his wrecking crew trashes Palin. McCain had little in his national campaign to say that was positive about Repubs and should probably start a party of two with Lieberman. But here's McGurn's sum-up:

In Mr. McCain's moving concession speech, he wished "godspeed to the man who was my former opponent and will be my president." He asked his fellow Americans to join him in helping President-elect Obama bridge our differences and build a better, more hopeful nation.

It will be instructive to see whether Mr. McCain will now extend the same level of graciousness to Mrs. Palin that he has to Mr. Obama, by giving a public slapdown to the very public smears emanating from his own campaign team. We have no idea what Mr. McCain will do when he sits down with Mr. Leno tonight.

But there's no doubt what a man of honor would do.

Comment on MSM/McCainiac Campaign to Discredit Palin

The crapola media comments about Palin's purportedly "dragging down the Repub ticket" reflect the discredited MSM [the NYT loses over a thousand readers per week on a consistent basis] campaign to denigrate and slander a REAL conservative who lives her life and isn't a gaffe-a-matic loon like Joe Biden, whose silly comments finally consigned him to a penalty box for the last month of the Obama campaign. Obama, of course, says hardly anything and has no reporters vetting his possible illegalities with Rezko and his associations with unrepentant terrorists.

Instead it's a phony wardrobe scam that this fake-news blog puts forward on the word of McCain aides angry that she drew the crowds while J-Mack actually turned off conservatives.

The Rasmussen Poll says 62% of Republicans support her, with Romney & Huckabee & Jindal close to single digits. McCain was the candidate of the MSM, which then mousetrapped him with phony pieces in the soon-to-be-defunct NYT about Vickie Iseman & his wife----classy stuff & none of it true, just like the wardrobe hoax generated by former CBS newsie Nicole {LNU] & her partners in disinformation Murphy & Noonan. The WSJ wing that favors illegal immigration got their boy Johnny as the Repub candidate, but couldn't stand a real conservative like Palin, who owns one house and has five kids & her first husband. The MSM females rarely have any husbands except the Ellen DeGeneres variety. No wonder they hate a good-looking smart female [who's been jumped on by the MSM while serial dunce Biden got a free pass].

Gorelick Appointment Would Prove Obama Just Another Hack Pol

Jamie Gorelick has a career in government which has clambered down the ladder from failure to failure---and the NYT, a loser publication hemorrhaging thousands of readers a month naturally trumpets her candidacy for Attorney General.

But even the NYT has difficulty ignoring a couple of elephants in the parlor:

Carries as baggage: Her work at Fannie Mae, which had to be bailed out by the government in September as part of a $200 billion deal. Ms. Gorelick left the company just as it was coming under attack for huge accounting failures. She has also drawn criticism for her role at the Justice Department, in which she allegedly created an intelligence “wall” that hindered counterterrorism agents in the years before the Sept. 11 attacks. Conservatives called for her removal from the Sept. 11 commission, but her fellow members rallied around her and said critics were distorting her record. The criticism grew so heated that the F.B.I. investigated a death threat against her family, and President Bush had to intervene personally to stop the Justice Department from releasing sealed reports involving her. Some conservative bloggers have already begun trying to derail Ms. Gorelick’s possible nomination as attorney general, pointing to her experiences at both Fannie Mae and the Sept. 11 commission.

Heh, "allegedly" as in a crime against the USA as it turned out, with Al Qaeda operatives finding the CIA/FBI turf battles leaving many intelligence boundaries unguarded. Ask the families of the 3000 9/11 victims if a total incompetent like Gorelick should be REWARDED for her lack of concern for American security. An Obama appointment would indicate that the naif young dude in the Oval Office hasn't got a clue about national security.

Although Gorelick appears to be the candidate of the wholly anti-American NYT, sensible candidates such as Janet Napolitano now serving as Governor of Arizona or Tim Kaine, Gov. of Virginia, would be interesting choices and avoid the stigma of Clintonian meddlesome interference in protecting the country from enemies who are still out there.

GWB never gets credit from America haters for defending the country from follow-on attacks after Gorelick and her Clinton-crowd cronies left the door open for a catastrophe like 9/11. Gorelick is just another grasping lawyer who should be prosecuted herself for the RICO crime spree malfeasance that the Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac meltdown revealed. Instead, the soon-to-be-defunct NYT is touting this greedy eff-up for AG!

Michael Crichton Debunks Big Science Priesthood & Gore-brained nitwittery

Michael Chrichton was taken from us too soon. This great man understood the dangers of considering scientists and technologists as a priestly class, immune from temptations of fame, profit or power," as the Wall Street Journal puts it. Here is an except from "Aliens Cause Global Warming:"

"As the 20th century drew to a close," he warned, "the connection between hard scientific fact and public policy became increasingly elastic. In part this was possible because of the complacency of the scientific profession; in part because of the lack of good science education among the public; in part because of the rise of specialized advocacy groups which have been enormously effective in getting publicity and shaping policy; and in great part because of the decline of the media as an independent assessor of fact."

Michael was right on all three counts and accusations. Science ed sux. LIttle old ladies in tennis shoes and boy-bitch morons like Gore have seized on specious spurious bogus issues to promote [and inflate their bank accounts]. And the media is in full free-fall---a pitiful joke.

Rasmussen Exonerates Palin, "anonymous cowards" still lying about Sarah

Rasmussen has the goods on the agit-prop campaign to spew leftie-Noonan monkey vomit all over Sarah Palin.

The lefties & Rockefeller Repugs have colluded to try to destroy Palin from the start. The genocidal infanticide-loving Sapphic crones hate her having a child with Down Syndrome and the Repug-left RINOs hate her popularity with the vast majority of conservative voters. McCain lost all credibility when he suggested appointing Andrew Cuomo to head the SEC, apparently blissfully unaware that Cuomo helped CAUSE the meltdown by fanning the FanFred mortgage scam [which Barney Frank's "husband" was on the board overseeing as well as Rahm Emanuel and other RICO crime spree perps like Jim Johnson, Jamie Gorelick, and Franky-boy Raines] while Andy was chief of HUD, working with FanFred to move worthless homes to worthless Dem constituents.

Palin is the only sane person among the final four top candidates, although Obama appears lucid at times. Biden was the biggest joke in the entire campaign [well, maybe Mike Gravel was, but Joe was near the top funnyman-fool]. McCain kept swinging haymakers like he was trying to hit a big pinata. Obama was helped by a pliant, even perv [Tweety-bird's leg shivers], media which refused to investigate the seamy underside of the Obama CV.

Palin and Huckabee and Jindal are the top three in my book, with P & J both POTUS material.

And it appears that Mark Salter has called the stories about Sarah Palin "lies" and wonders who can be behind the slanders and calumnies---maybe Murphy & Noonan & former CBS hack Nicole W? Plus Romney Uruk-Hai orcs-in-waiting?

Also, women are even stupider than most people thought. And the airheads pushed Obama over the top while believing the media was not biased---hmm... gotta rewire the distaff side to see if there are any short circuits.

Finally, GOP voters preferred Palin to McCain another Rasmussen poll divines. And all along I thought it was just me!!!