Big Dogs Weblog

Clinton and Bush in Joint Mortgage Plan

Dec 6, 2007 Political

There are about 1.8 million people who received foreclosure notices this year on homes they had no business buying. The people were attracted to buy homes that were too much for their budgets by lenders who offered no down payment loans and adjustable rate mortgages. The promise of future wealth from escalating home values was too much for some who bought into the lower rates never taking the time to consider what would happen if the market went south. The sub prime market is now rearing its ugly head as many more Americans will face foreclosure in the coming years.

But wait, George Bush and Hillary Clinton are riding to the rescue. The President put forth a plan today which was in the works when Clinton touted the very same ideas. Despite her claim that her plan is better and helps people in ways that the Bush plan does not, the fact is they are nearly identical and they are potential disasters for the economy. The government has no business getting involved in the affairs of private companies and the people with whom they have entered contracts. This is a matter that can and should be worked out between the parties in the contracts.

Bush and Clinton claim that no taxpayer money is involved but the plan offers financial counseling to people so the money to pay for that has to come from somewhere. Also, some people will be able to move into loans secured by the FHA which means that if they default, the taxpayer will get socked. This is an ill advised plan that is designed to help people who made poor decisions and there are no guarantees that this will not hurt the taxpayer. For instance, once the loan rates are frozen, one option under the plan, what procedures are in place to ensure that homeowners do not borrow against the equity in the house? People with financial problems (and anyone who opts into this has financial problems) are easily influenced to take out home equity loans to pay the bills. Those loans are secured with the home which, in some cases, will be secured with taxpayer money.

Sometimes people make bad choices and the unfortunate fact of life is that they must suffer the consequences of those choices. When people spend more than they can afford buying a car or racking up credit card debt there is no expectation that the federal government will swoop in to bail them out. Why then, do people expect the federal government to bail out those who got in over their heads when they purchased a house? There are solutions that can involve the government.

First, they can make some kind of uniform rules governing the sale of homes. I have bought two homes in my lifetime and the amount of paper and the number of times that one has to sign is staggering. I have read every item that I was signing and asked for clarification for anything I did not understand. I also understand that, as the song says, what goes up must come down. People should have some understanding that the cost of homes go up and down and that great markets do not last forever. They should also understand that an adjustable rate can adjust in both directions. The government can help by forcing mortgage companies to make the language on forms clearer and easier to understand.

Additionally, there should be some disclosure about how adjustable rates work and how increases can affect payments. Since home sales that require no down payment cause havoc and gain little equity, people should not be allowed to purchase homes under these terms unless credit history and financial statements show that the purchaser is able to absorb increases in interest rates.

These items will help people with future home purchases but what about those who are already in trouble? Mortgage companies should work this out without government intervention. The most reasonable thing would be for the companies to offer a fixed rate refinance at a reasonable cost. The cost could be included in the new loan so those with little cash on hand could refinance and have a fixed monthly rate upon which to plan.

In some cases, people are going to have to shop around and try to get a fixed rate mortgage and it might cost them money. This is the cost of making a bad business deal. If all else fails they could negotiate with the mortgage company for relief until they can sell the home and get something that they can afford.

Regardless of which path people take it should not be one lined with assistance from the government. There are too many problems associated with government intervention and the unintended consequences could be worse for the economy, the homeowners, and the mortgage companies.

If all else fails and people lose their homes, I understand the government has a bunch of trailers in New Orleans that are not being used. Also, Hillary’s involvement gives her opponents more proof that she is not very different from George Bush after all.

Source:
WBAL

Tags: george bush, Hillary Clinton, mortgage, poor choices, sub prime

Defending Hillary

Dec 5, 2007 Political

As anyone who reads this blog knows, I cannot stand Hillary Clinton. I have never met her and yet I have this genuine hatred for her and all she stands for. Not only does she rub me the wrong way but her habit of lying and manipulating is off putting and in my mind she is Satan in the flesh. However, on the rare occasion that I find she is being treated unfairly or that something is not fair I feel that I should weigh in on the side of what is right.

There is a story in The Politico that discusses an email sent by a Clinton staffer to some number of other staffers. One of the recipients replied that it was racist and disgusting and that was all that was done. The email in question is about Obama and his supposed Muslim connections. The email, which has circulated for years, is about Obama being a covert Muslim who will bring Islam to America. Though I personally do not trust Obama the email has been debunked quite some time ago. Besides, if he turned out to be a covert Muslim he could not get much done without the approval of Congress and he might find America looking to impeach him. Regardless, the email was sent and now there is some question as to whether this was deliberate. For the record, The Politico is just reporting on the story.

I do not know if this was a deliberate attempt by people in the campaign and I do not know if Hillary was aware of it. What I do know is that it was discovered and that the person who originally sent it has resigned. While it happened in her campaign it is impossible for her to know about every email and what is done at the lowest levels around the country. It happened and was taken care of. I think Hillary would say the same thing. I only wish she and her fellow Democrats used this kind of fairness when they ignore their duties (like passing a budget and fixing the AMT) to launch countless investigations that rarely pan out and waste time.

Having said all this, we might learn at some time in the future that Hillary had something to do with the whole thing or that she knew about it well before it was made public (like Bill’s countless affairs including one involving a blue dress). If that is the case she will be done. It would be her scream so to speak and it would cause damage from which she could not recover.

Regardless, this could not have come at a worse time. Hillary just stated she was going to get dirty and go after her opponents and indicated that it would be “fun.” Now wonder there are some who think she had a hand in it.

I wonder if it is “fun” right now over at Camp Hillary?

Others with similar posts:
Outside the Beltway, Blog @ MoreWhat.com, Rosemary’s Thoughts, Right Truth, Adam’s Blog, The World According to Carl, Blue Star Chronicles, The Pink Flamingo, Leaning Straight Up, The Amboy Times, Dumb Ox Daily News, Right Voices, and The Yankee Sailor, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

Tags: budget, campaign, Democrats, dirty tricks, Hillary, muslim email, Obama

Don’t Take Flight 93 to Mecca 12-5-07

Dec 5, 2007 Flight 93

TBogg deleted evidence of cover up at the Flight 93 Memorial

TBogg has edited a comment thread to remove an important piece of evidence about the Memorial Project’s cover up of Islamic and terrorist memorializing features in the planned Flight 93 memorial. A historically important comment left by a consultant to the Memorial Project has been deleted.

In January 2006, Alec Rawls baited the TBogg leftists for insisting that it is perfectly okay to plant a giant Mecca oriented crescent on the Flight 93 crash site. TBogg’s comment thread swelled to epic proportions and eventually yielded something more than the usual litany of moonbat excuses for not thinking straight. At the end of the thread, posted sometime in March or April of 2006, there appeared an extended comment, about 600 words long, posted anonymously, and written as a semi-formal evaluation of Rawls’ January 2006 report to the Memorial Project.

Mr. Rawls would later find out that this anonymous comment was the sole piece of written feedback on which the Memorial Project was basing its denial of Islamic features in the winning design. (Crescent of Betrayal, download 3, pp. 149-50.)

The Project only communicated snippets of the TBogg comment, so the fact that the whole thing had been posted online caught them by surprise, undermining their ability to control the story. In particular, the TBogg comment did not deny the Mecca orientation of the giant crescent. On the contrary, it acknowledged that the crescent at the center of the memorial is geometrically similar to a traditional mihrab (the Mecca-direction indicator around which every mosque is built), and offered a variety of excuses for why people should not be concerned about this similarity. (e.g. “[J]ust because something is ‘similar to’ something else, does not make it the ‘same’.”)

Dr. Kevin Jaques

Only in the last couple of weeks has the identity of the anonymous scholar who wrote the TBogg comment been learned. Last week’s blogburst about the Park Service’s fraudlent internal investigation discusses a Memorial Project “White Paper” that identifies the TBogg commentator as Dr. Kevin Jaques, an Islamicist (a scholar of Islam), at the University of Indiana.

One of Dr. Jaques excuses for not being concerned about the half-mile wide Mecca-oriented crescent is that it is so much bigger than any other mihrab:

Thirdly, most mihrabs are small, rarely larger than the figure of a man, although some of the more ornamental ones can be larger, but nothing as large at the crescent found in the site design. It is unlikely that most Muslims would walk into the area of the circle/crescent and see a mihrab because it is well beyond their limit of experience. Again, just because it is similar does not make it the same.

You might recognize it as a giant crescent from an airplane like Flight 93 flying over head, but from the ground? Pshaw.

It’s too big to recognize!

TBogg deleted the Kevin Jaques comment from his comment thread

For most of 2007, the original TBogg comment thread has not been available, but TBogg now has it reposted, with one glaring omission: Dr. Jaques comment has been removed.

If you want to see what TBogg is posting now, the url for his 2006 “Lunacy abounds” post is http://tbogg.blogspot.com/2006/01/lunacy-abounds-nuts.html.

For posterity, here are copies of the original comment thread, as of 5/29/2006, with Dr. Jaques’ comment intact at the end, and the comment thread repost, as of 12/3/2007, with Dr. Jaques’ comment deleted.

A full discussion of what TBogg properly calls “the infamous comment thread” can be found in Chapter Eight of Alec’s Crescent of Betrayal book (download 3, pp 131-).

The question now for Mr. TBogg is why he deleted Kevin Jaques’ comment. Did he do it on his own, or did he do it at someone’s request? Did Dr. Jaques ask him to delete the comment? Did architect Paul Murdoch ask? Did someone in the Park Service ask?

Whether TBogg acted on his own or was prompted, it is obvious that he understood that he was deleting an important piece of evidence. Just the fact that he singled it out for deletion shows a conscious act of cover-up. Maybe he did not realize the full import of having the comment remain publicly available via an original source, but he certainly knew he was covering up something important. What kind of blogger deletes a piece of evidence that he knows to be central to a high profile controversy? (Republican presidential candidate Tom Tancredo (R-CO) sent the Park Service a letter last month asking that crescent design be scrapped entirely.) This is very bad behavior.

Was TBogg’s comment thread originally removed in order to hide Jaques comment?

It was odd enough when the “infamous comment thread” first disappeared from TBogg’s blog. What blogger removes anything famous from their blog? But at that time, there was no publicly available information that could have alerted TBogg to the significance of that last anonymous comment. The most likely explanation for the disappearance of the comment thread seemed to be that TBogg simply had a coding glitch, or maybe he is cheap enough to have been worried about bandwidth.

Now that the comment thread has been restored without the Jaques comment, it seems likely that the reason the comment thread came down in the first place was to hide the Jaques comment. The interesting thing about this scenario is that at the time the comment thread was removed (sometime between June 2006 and June 2007) the only way TBogg could have learned the importance of that last anonymous comment would have been through the internal investigation conducted by the Park Service in the spring and summer of 2006. No one else knew that the comment came from an advisor to the Memorial Project until July 2007 when Alec Rawls released the downloadable “Director’s Cut” version of his Crescent of Betrayal book. (Given the urgent public need to know, World Ahead Publishing graciously allowed Alec to make his then final draft available for free download until the print edition—still being updated—comes out in the first quarter of 2008.)

The TBogg comment thread was removed before the Director’s Cut release. (Noted in Crescent of Betrayal, download 3, at p. 131.) Chief Ranger Jill Hawk, who was conducting the investigation, would not tell Alec who wrote the anonymous TBogg comment, but Alec warned her to be suspicious. Given the overtly dishonest nature of its excuse making, he urged her to double check its provenance. She answered back that she had been able to get email confirmation of authorship.

This email communication with Jaques might well have alerted him to the faux pas he committed by posting his comment on the TBogg thread. Did he then contact TBogg and ask for the comment to be removed?

That would seem to be the most likely scenario. Others who were privy to the internal investigation could have also contacted TBogg, but there is no evidence for any other such route of transmission.

It is disturbing to think that TBogg would have acceded to any request to remove evidence about a possible enemy plot. He is fully aware of what Rawls is claiming: that an al Qaeda sympathizing architect entered our open design competition with a plan to build a terrorist memorial mosque and won. Kevin Jaques’ TBogg comment is crucial for understanding how such a plot could succeed, revealing the utter fraudulence of the internal investigation that should have detected any such plot. As the lone consultant to the Memorial Project on the crescent design, Jaques engaged in overtly dishonest excuse-making. And TBogg is willing to help him cover it up?

If TBogg has some other explanation for his deletions, the rest of us would sure like to hear it.

The fraudulent internal investigation

For more of Kevin Jaques’ dishonest excuse-making, see last week’s blogburst on the fraudulent internal investigation. Before the Park Service was done, it managed to round up two more academic frauds in addition to Kevin Jaques. There is Dr. Daniel Griffith, who claims there is no such thing as the direction to Mecca, and a third Mosqueteer still to be discussed. (Saving the worst for last.)

But Jaques is the central fraud, being the Project’s sole source of feedback during a crucial period when its dismissive posture was set in stone. In addition to being an expert on sharia law, Jaques has also proved to be an expert at taqiyya.

————————
If you want to join the blogroll/blogburst for the Crescent of Betrayal blogburst, email Cao at caoilfhionn1 at gmail dot com, with your blog’s url address. The blogburst will be sent out once a week to the participants, for simultaneous publication on this issue on Wednesdays.

Crescent of betrayal/surrender Blogburst Blogroll

Tags: cover up, dishonesty, Flight 93, Mecca, memorial

Democrats Break Work-Week Promise

Dec 4, 2007 Political

The Democrats promised that they would work 5 days a week and that they would do more than the do-nothing Republicans. They started out like a ball of fire and worked nearly 5 full days while members from both parties complained about not being home (here is a clue. If you don’t like it get out). Then the work weeks started slipping and poof, they are gone. Next year the Democratically controlled Congress will only work a few 5 day weeks and they will be off for about 2 weeks every time a holiday pops up and of course, they will be off the entire month of August. I know that it is tough working all those days in DC when they have families and constituents at home but they are the ones who said they would do it.

As for this idea being floated around that they did more than the Republican led Congresses ever did, it is hogwash. They might have been there more days than when the Republicans are in charge but they have not done much of anything. They have not passed a budget and it is months overdue. Their irresponsibility will soon cause government workers to be furloughed (no one from Congress will miss a paycheck though) and our military will not have the things they need to fight the war. The Democrats have not done anything about the Alternative Minimum Tax which will bite a lot of people it was never intended to touch. The Democrats did pass a minimum wage increase by adding it to a DEFENSE bill and they have been pretty good at naming post offices. Other than that, they have done little.

I realize that it is hard for these folks to be away from their home districts and that it causes them problems. I have no sympathy for them because they ran for office of their own free will and if it were actually as terrible as they make it seem they would not keep running. Fact is, they keep running because they have a lot of power and do very little to earn a paycheck. Our military, on the other hand, has to be away from their families for a very long time and they are in constant danger and they sure as hell do not make anywhere near as much money as a member of Congress. However, there is no excuse for the members of Congress to get 2 weeks off every time a holiday rolls around and they certainly do not need the entire month of August off. They say they are working in their districts but it seems to me that their districts are not in Iraq, Israel, Syria or other places that they trek off to. Those who stay in their districts have a strange way of working. Must be difficult to get things done while standing on skis or sailing in a boat.

However, there is a solution to this. A commenter at The Politico mentioned it and I had thought of it before. Why do these people need to be in DC to do their jobs. We have some of the most sophisticated equipment in the world. Certainly they should be able to cast votes from their district offices. Congress could be in DC for two weeks (including the weekends) and then be in their districts for the next two. They can work on the committee stuff while in DC and their staff can put it all together. They can hold confirmation hearings and other things that require them all to be there at that time. Then, they can go home and work in their district offices where they would be in communication with other members when votes were taken. I am sure that it could be set up so they could vote electronically and I know it could be done via roll call.

They should use modern technology to alleviate the burden, and cost, of traveling all over the country. This would also ensure they are actually working during the 2 week holiday breaks and would negate the need to have all of August off. It would also put the members of Congress with their constituents instead of DC with the lobbyists. This would allow the people who the members should be listening to greater access and curb the access that lobbyists currently enjoy. It is not necessary for them to be in DC all the time they spend there and it is a waste of money to let them have off all the time. The rest of us have to go to work everyday or we don’t get paid.

There is one thing that the Democrats have shown with their latest work schedule. This country needs a smaller, less intrusive government. The work schedule shows that they believe they do not need to work more than a few hundred days a year and that they can take off a lot. Surely, they are showing we do not need them all the time and that a part time government would be satisfactory.

In any event, the Democrats broke the promise they made. I don’t care about all the circumstances, they made the promise. They knew they could not (or would not) keep it but they made it anyway. Seems the donks have broken a lot of promises this past year.

Is anyone surprised?

As an aside, since they are late with the budget and have not fixed the AMT shouldn’t we be able to file our taxes later this year? If they don’t have to do anything on time, why should we?

Tags: broken promises, Congress, Democrats, taxes, work week

Bill Clinton Whines About Hillary’s Press Coverage

Dec 4, 2007 Political

Bill Clinton is out on the campaign trail and he is whining about the press coverage his wife is getting. Clinton said that the media ignores experience and looks at political issues which he claims have a “half life of 15 seconds.” He made the claim that if the media would only look at the experience of his wife then people would see she is best qualified and most experienced to lead this country. Let us take a look.

Hillary has never run anything. She has not been a CEO of a company, she has not been a Governor of a state and she has not been the boss in a business. Her work experience is as a lawyer and as the First lady of Arkansas and of the country. She was not in a position of leadership in any of those capacities and yet this is what she claims for experience. She is no more experienced than any of her rivals other than she can lay claim to being a First Lady and they cannot. The job of First Lady does not qualify her or anyone else to be the President. The wife of a CEO for a large corporation is not qualified, based upon being the wife of the CEO, to run the company. In addition, Hillary refuses to release any of the records that might shed light on her supposed experience.

As for Bill, he has no right to complain about media coverage. He had it easy as President and continues to get great coverage. If Drudge had not broken the Monica story it might have never been told. When the “Path to 9/11” aired Clinton used his star power to force ABC to take out truthful items that reflected unfavorably on him. He used a surrogate to steal documents from the national archives and the media failed to skewer him as they would have ANY Republican. Clinton got sympathy from the media when he was being impeached and the treatment was in stark contrast to the treatment that Republicans involved in sex scandals have received.

Bill Clinton and his wife are liars who rewrite history as a matter of convenience. He recently said that he was against the Iraq War from the start despite the fact that his earlier words on the subject convey a totally different opinion. If we were to have a Democracy in Iraq tomorrow with all fighting in the Middle East ended, Clinton would claim that he supported the effort from the start.

Hillary is no different. She changes positions depending on the latest poll and who will be offended the least. She made statements, before George Bush was in office, that Hussein was a threat and that he had WMD and needed to be removed from office. Now she claims she was misled by the President. She is a partisan hack who is only interested in attaining power, a power she feels is due to her. She believes that it is her birthright to be President and that we should trust her because she said so. She was responsible for the socialized health care plan that failed though her hubby, in revisionist style, is now taking the blame for it.

They are both snake oil salesmen who will say or do anything to get and keep power. Bill indicated that even if he were not married to her he would be out there stumping for her. The truth is, if they had never been married no one would no who she is and she would not be in the Senate and she would not be running for the presidency.

And if Bill were not married he would be out doing the same thing he has done all through his married life.

Chasing, conquering, and sexually abusing women.

Source:
Breitbart

Others with similar items:
Outside the Beltway, Wake Up America, Adam’s Blog, The World According to Carl, Pirate’s Cove, The Pink Flamingo, Leaning Straight Up, The Amboy Times, Dumb Ox Daily News, Conservative Cat, Right Voices, and The Yankee Sailor, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

Tags: Clinton, democrat, Hillary, lies, President, revisionist history, sexual abuse