Why I cannot stand Mitt Romney

For this crap right here:

The Obama Administration’s $85 billion auto bailout in 2009 was “crony capitalism on a grand scale,” according to Mitt Romney.

In an opinion editorial published today by The Detroit News, the Republican presidential hopeful not only attacks the way the administration handled the bailout of General Motors Co. and Chrysler Group LLC, but argues that the United Auto Workers union benefited from the bankruptcies in wake of contributing millions to Democrats and Barack Obama’s campaign.

“Thus, the outcome of the managed bankruptcy proceedings was dictated by the terms of the bailout,” Romney writes. “Chrysler’s ‘secured creditors,’ who in the normal course of affairs should have been first in line for compensation, were given short shrift, while at the same time, the UAWs’ union-boss-controlled trust fund received a 55 percent stake in the firm.”

via Romney: Auto bailout was ‘crony capitalism,’ taxpayers should get reimbursed | MLive.com.

I mean, the man is a serial flip-flopper, to the point when Jennifer Granholm, of all people, had to point this out. Now he is trying to appeal to the wealthy Republicans by capping the auto industry. The dude is a two-bit phony and I believe Michigan is getting hip to this. Which is why he is failing in the polls here. I am not a fan of Santorum either; but at least he is honest about what he actually is. But, no matter, neither of them will win to Obama. Which is why I believe we need a brokered Convention in the Republican Party. So we can put a real Conservative in there, a Tea Party candidate and not some beltway veteran.

Video: New RNC Ad — Five Years Later

(Via InstaPundit)

The real question is this; would America be any better under a big Government statist Republican like Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich…. or a Christian Statist like Rick Santorum?

I tend to believe that not to be the case.

Fox Business Network Drops Judge Napolitano

First they got rid of Glenn Beck and now Fox News Channel’s Business network gives Judge Napolitano the axe.

Alternate headline: Fox News goes back to its Neoconservative roots and kicks the Paleoconservative voices out.

The Story:

In a surprise announcement Thursday afternoon, the Fox Business Network announced a major makeover of its primetime lineup. The new look slate will feature re-airs of The Willis Report, Cavuto, and Lou Dobbs Tonight, while ending the runs of FreedomWatch with Judge Andrew Napolitano, Power & Money with David Asman, and Follow the Money with Eric Bolling. In addition, the network will be developing a new show featuring Melissa Francis, which will eventually air at 5 p.m., bumping Gerri Willis‘ live show to 8 p.m. (Willis will air live at 5 p.m. with re-airs at 8 p.m. until the second quarter).

via Fox Business Network Drops Bolling, Napolitano Shows In Primetime Shuffle | Mediaite.

I did not always agree with Judge Napolitano, who is a Ron Paul supporter. But I will say this; he has in the past called out the Wilsonian Trotskyite crowd for what they truly are and I commend him for that. I wish the Judge all the best and if I were him, I would be heading over to Glenn Beck’s network and trying to make a deal. Fox News never was one to stray too far away from they consider to be “Mainstream” Conservative thought. Paleoconservatives and libertarians were only there to be, like liberals, to be made sport of. They do it Bob Beckle and also to John Stossel. If I were John Stossel, I would be making sure my ship was secure, if not; I would be looking elsewhere too.

Again, it is a shame that this is going on, but that is the business of media; they follow the winds and when the winds change, networks have to react.

My thoughts on the mortgage settlement

You can read about this here, here, here and here.

First of all, let me say this; this issue here, above all of the others, is why I packed it in with the Democratic Party. On top of all of the class warfare, class resentment, racial resentment and everything else; was the realization that I made, that the Democratic Party, starting in 1973 and again in 1993 literally rigged the system to fail. This was by loosing credit restrictions to allow people, who had no business even getting loans, to get credit so easily.

Then once the system failed, the Government, started by George W. Bush in 2008 with tarp loans and the bailing out banks that were “Too big to fail.” Not to mention the fact that the Republicans ripped out regulations that made the whole thing like one million percent worse and when the Republican Congress received a warning that the whole thing was going to collapse, what did they do? They held a hearing and the CEO of Freddy and Fannie played the RACE CARD, they retreated! 😡 I won’t even get into the stupidity of the Federal Reserve, which really made some seriously idiotic mistakes.

Then instead of Obama being smart and saying, “We’re not picking favorites, we are going to allow the market to correct itself.” Instead, he continued the bailouts and even spent more on top of that. Not the mention his attempt to destroy our private healthcare system.

Anyhow, this settlement is not perfect; in fact, it stinks and someone has given a bullet-point list as to why.

This is via Naked Capitalism:

Here are the top twelve reasons why this deal stinks:

1. We’ve now set a price for forgeries and fabricating documents. It’s $2000 per loan. This is a rounding error compared to the chain of title problem these systematic practices were designed to circumvent. The cost is also trivial in comparison to the average loan, which is roughly $180k, so the settlement represents about 1% of loan balances. It is less than the price of the title insurance that banks failed to get when they transferred the loans to the trust. It is a fraction of the cost of the legal expenses when foreclosures are challenged. It’s a great deal for the banks because no one is at any of the servicers going to jail for forgery and the banks have set the upper bound of the cost of riding roughshod over 300 years of real estate law.

2. That $26 billion is actually $5 billion of bank money and the rest is your money. The mortgage principal writedowns are guaranteed to come almost entirely from securitized loans, which means from investors, which in turn means taxpayers via Fannie and Freddie, pension funds, insurers, and 401 (k)s. Refis of performing loans also reduce income to those very same investors.

3. That $5 billion divided among the big banks wouldn’t even represent a significant quarterly hit. Freddie and Fannie putbacks to the major banks have been running at that level each quarter.

4. That $20 billion actually makes bank second liens sounder, so this deal is a stealth bailout that strengthens bank balance sheets at the expense of the broader public.

5. The enforcement is a joke. The first layer of supervision is the banks reporting on themselves. The framework is similar to that of the OCC consent decrees implemented last year, which Adam Levitin and yours truly, among others, decried as regulatory theater.

6. The past history of servicer consent decrees shows the servicers all fail to comply. Why? Servicer records and systems are terrible in the best of times, and their systems and fee structures aren’t set up to handle much in the way of delinquencies. As Tom Adams has pointed out in earlier posts, servicer behavior is predictable when their portfolios are hit with a high level of delinquencies and defaults: they cheat in all sorts of ways to reduce their losses.

7. The cave-in Nevada and Arizona on the Countrywide settlement suit is a special gift for Bank of America, who is by far the worst offender in the chain of title disaster (since, according to sworn testimony of its own employee in Kemp v. Countrywide, Countrywide failed to comply with trust delivery requirements). This move proves that failing to comply with a consent degree has no consequences but will merely be rolled into a new consent degree which will also fail to be enforced. These cases also alleged HAMP violations as consumer fraud violations and could have gotten costly and emboldened other states to file similar suits not just against Countrywide but other servicers, so it was useful to the other banks as well.

8. If the new Federal task force were intended to be serious, this deal would have not have been settled. You never settle before investigating. It’s a bad idea to settle obvious, widespread wrongdoing on the cheap. You use the stuff that is easy to prove to gather information and secure cooperation on the stuff that is harder to prove. In Missouri and Nevada, the robosigning investigation led to criminal charges against agents of the servicers. But even though these companies were acting at the express direction and approval of the services, no individuals or entities higher up the food chain will face any sort of meaningful charges.

9. There is plenty of evidence of widespread abuses that appear not to be on the attorney generals’ or media’s radar, such as servicer driven foreclosures and looting of investors’ funds via impermissible and inflated charges. While no serious probe was undertaken, even the limited or peripheral investigations show massive failures (60% of documents had errors in AGs/Fed’s pathetically small sample). Similarly, the US Trustee’s office found widespread evidence of significant servicer errors in bankruptcy-related filings, such as inflated and bogus fees, and even substantial, completely made up charges. Yet the services and banks will suffer no real consequences for these abuses.

10. A deal on robosiginging serves to cover up the much deeper chain of title problem. And don’t get too excited about the New York, Massachusetts, and Delaware MERS suits. They put pressure on banks to clean up this monstrous mess only if the AGs go through to trial and get tough penalties. The banks will want to settle their way out of that too. And even if these cases do go to trial and produce significant victories for the AGs, they still do not address the problem of failures to transfer notes correctly.

11. Don’t bet on a deus ex machina in terms of the new Federal foreclosure task force to improve this picture much. If you think Schneiderman, as a co-chairman who already has a full time day job in New York, is going to outfox a bunch of DC insiders who are part of the problem, I have a bridge I’d like to sell to you.

12. We’ll now have to listen to banks and their sycophant defenders declaring victory despite being wrong on the law and the facts. They will proceed to marginalize and write off criticisms of the servicing practices that hurt homeowners and investors and are devastating communities. But the problems will fester and the housing market will continue to suffer. Investors in mortgage-backed securities, who know that services have been screwing them for years, will be hung out to dry and will likely never return to a private MBS market, since the problems won’t ever be fixed. This settlement has not only revealed the residential mortgage market to be too big to fail, but puts it on long term, perhaps permanent, government life support.

As we’ve said before, this settlement is yet another raw demonstration of who wields power in America, and it isn’t you and me. It’s bad enough to see these negotiations come to their predictable, sorry outcome. It adds insult to injury to see some try to depict it as a win for long suffering, still abused homeowners.

I have zero to add to this. The only thing I will ask is, who’s paying for all of this? Answer: You and Me — in Taxes. 😡

This is why we need a new political Party to get in there and fix this asinine morass.

Others: (All Liberals BTW…) American Prospect, Washington Post, US Politics, FT Alphaville, ourfuture.org/blogs_chrono/*, Wall Street Journal, Time, The Huffington Post, Swampland, ThinkProgress, Prairie Weather, Firedoglake, Business Insider, Financial Times and Discourse.net, ThinkProgress, The Huffington Post, Washington Monthly, Washington Post, Firedoglake, Rolling Stone, The Big Picture, Business Insider, Hit & Run, The Democratic Daily, Zandar Versus The Stupid, Feministing, ourfuture.org/blogs_chrono/*, No More Mister Nice Blog, Blog of New Orleans, Gambit, emptywheel, The Political Carnival, DealBook, The Page, Booman Tribune and Wall Street Journal, ProPublica, FORECLOSURE FRAUD, Business Insider and Calculated Risk, Washington Post, Daily Kos and Firedoglake, The Atlantic Online

Why do Republicans do stupid stuff like this?

…and to think, I supported this guy’s election:

Video:

Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R) does not generally script his speeches, preferring to form his remarks off-the-cuff based on notes. In the case of his State of the State address on Tuesday, that approach appears to have come back to bite the first-term chief executive, as he issued a rambling 100-minute speech that featured a series of bizarre — and potentially offensive — statements and actions.

During the address, Kasich imitated a Parkinson’s patient, cried, insulted the people of California, praised his “hot wife,” gave 14 shout-outs to the same person and played an awards show host while tearfully channeling a famously emotional fellow Ohio Republican, House Speaker John Boehner.

Roughly 70 minutes into the speech, Kasich discussed medical research and its impact on the Buckeye State’s economy. He was highlighting a deep brain massage program at Ohio State University to cure Parkinson’s when he started simulating the shaking actions that mark the disease as a means of highlighting what he and his cabinet saw when they visited the facility.

via John Kasich Parkinson’s Imitation Marks Ad Hoc Speech That Veered Off The Rails.

I know he was explaining what he saw, but still; did he have to do it like that?!

Oh, he wasn’t done there:

Kasich framed the speech as a pep talk for Ohioans, but in order to promote his record on job creation, he took swipes at residents of other states.

“A year ago, Ohio ranked 48th in job creation,” he said. “We trailed only Michigan and California in lost jobs — Michigan, the home of the auto industry that was devastated and California, of course, filled by a bunch of wackadoodles.”

In a break from tradition, the governor moved the speech’s location from the Capitol in Columbus to a school auditorium in the rural town of Steubenville, near the Pennsylvania border. He used the rural location to highlight new investment in hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, in the state, which will occur primarily in the areas closer to Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Frank Semple of MarkWest will be investing $500 million in starting new fracking businesses in the state, he announced.

The governor also championed the state’s coal industry.

“We’re the Saudi Arabia of coal. Clean it and burn it,” he said. “Clean it, Gordon, and burn it. Clean it, Battelle, and burn it. Use it.”

At one point, Kasich saluted his wife, Karen, describing her as his “hot wife.”

“And I also want to give a nice comment about my wife, Karen Kasich,” he said. “Sweetie, stand, take a little wave, would you, okay? I remember that cartoon that said, ‘Kasich will still not reveal how he snagged that hot wife.'”

Good luck in the reelection Governor. I mean, I hate to sound like I am whining; but this is the reason that the majority of Americans, who watch the liberal media, think that Republicans are just plain crazy. The sad part, the Republican party really does stand for some great things. Meaning those who actually stand by those things — unlike these two idiots; but yet, the Republican Party has idiots acting like this. It is truly a shame.

I guess what I trying to say here is this; I stopped voting for the Democratic Party back in 2008, because that party was on the crazy bus — headed for the cliff at one hundred miles an hour. (Figuratively, of course.) Now, it seems to me, that the Republican Party is loading up the same kind of a bus and is about to do the same thing. Which is why I am voting libertarian in 2012, because if the crazy, big government conservative wing of the Republican Party takes power again, which it will, if Mitt Romney gets the nomination; I really do not want to be responsible for it.

Coming to an airspace near you: 30,000 surveillance drones!

Remember what I wrote this?

A Government that watches it’s citizens and considers them a threat; fears those people and that is because they are doing wrong. This is nothing more than a police state action; and the American people should vote accordingly in 2012.

Well, here you go, this confirms what I said….:

Look! Up in the sky! Is it a bird? Is it a plane? It’s … a drone, and it’s watching you. That’s what privacy advocates fear from a bill Congress passed this week to make it easier for the government to fly unmanned spy planes in U.S. airspace.

The FAA Reauthorization Act, which President Obama is expected to sign, also orders the Federal Aviation Administration to develop regulations for the testing and licensing of commercial drones by 2015.

Privacy advocates say the measure will lead to widespread use of drones for electronic surveillance by police agencies across the country and eventually by private companies as well.

“There are serious policy questions on the horizon about privacy and surveillance, by both government agencies and commercial entities,” said Steven Aftergood, who heads the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation also is “concerned about the implications for surveillance by government agencies,” said attorney Jennifer Lynch.

via Drones over U.S. get OK by Congress – Washington Times.

The nanny staters and big Government socialists will carp — But-but-but-but it is for the greater good!:

“It’s not all about surveillance,” Mr. Aftergood said.

Homeland Security has deployed drones to support disaster relief operations. Unmanned aircraft also could be useful for fighting fires or finding missing climbers or hikers, he added.

The FAA has issued hundreds of certificates to police and other government agencies, and a handful to research institutions to allow them to fly drones of various kinds over the United States for particular missions.

The agency said it issued 313 certificates in 2011 and 295 of them were still active at the end of the year, but the FAA refuses to disclose which agencies have the certificates and what their purposes are.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is suing the FAA to obtain records of the certifications.

Good luck with that lawsuit. The Government only reveals what they want you to know. You can go read the rest of that; but one thing that stands out:

Currently, the only barrier to the routine use of drones for persistent surveillance are the procedural requirements imposed by the FAA for the issuance of certificates,” said Amie Stepanovich, national security counsel for the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a research center in Washington.

The Department of Transportation, the parent agency of the FAA, has announced plans to streamline the certification process for government drone flights this year, she said.

I give it about a year or so; and they Governments — local, state and federal will be flying these drones, with equipment in them to see inside houses and know what you are doing. It is what the liberal Democrats and Statist Republicans in this Country have wanted to do for years. Now the technology is there and they can do it.

As Randy Weaver found out, the Government is not your friend; and if and when they want to come after you, they will. This right here will make that feat even more possible.

(H/T HotAir.com Headlines)

FBI says that “sovereign citizens” are a threat.

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm….:

(Reuters) – Anti-government extremists opposed to taxes and regulations pose a growing threat to local law enforcement officers in the United States, the FBI warned on Monday.

These extremists, sometimes known as “sovereign citizens,” believe they can live outside any type of government authority, FBI agents said at a news conference.

The extremists may refuse to pay taxes, defy government environmental regulations and believe the United States went bankrupt by going off the gold standard.

Routine encounters with police can turn violent “at the drop of a hat,” said Stuart McArthur, deputy assistant director in the FBI’s counterterrorism division.

“We thought it was important to increase the visibility of the threat with state and local law enforcement,” he said.

via FBI warns of threat from anti-government extremists | Reuters.

I said this over at another blog’s comment section and I will say it here; A Government that watches it’s citizens and considers them a threat; fears those people and that is because they are doing wrong. This is nothing more than a police state action; and the American people should vote accordingly in 2012.

Further more, I find it most insulting that the United States Government would rather hunt down its own citizens, rather than hunt down and capture the real terrorists, who truly hate this Country and want to see it destroyed. That would be the radical Islamic Jihad Terrorists; you know like the ones that slammed those planes into the Trade Center, the Pentegon, and the field near Shanksville, Pa? — or people like these here? But no, our Government, see people like me; citizens who disagree with the policies of the socialist President to be a threat.

Having said that, I have an open message to the United States Government, Federal Bureau of Investigation, President Barack Hussein Obama, The United Nations and the rest of the Big Government morass:

Go Fuck Yourselves Sirs!

Which is all the more reason to go here and get armed with one of these:

That is all….

Others: Blogcritics, Hot Air, Weasel Zippers, Scared Monkeys, Atlas Shrugs, The PJ Tatler

Update: Like this posting? Please vote it up over at Reddit, please.

Why are Conservatives having dinner with Bill Ayers?

This bothers me and I will explain under the video: (H/T BreitBart via HotAir.com’s Headlines)

As I mentioned in my previous posting and in the related video; that the only difference between an internationalist Democrat and a Neoconservative is, quite frankly, the R and the D. Not to mention the fact that both take funding from special interest groups. Well, the more I want to believe that these current crop of Conservatives are truly Conservatives, the more that these current crop of Conservatives want to prove my suspicions, that they are nothing more than Trotskyite Conservatives who have much more in common with the far leftists than they would want us to really believe.

Video: Open Message to Michelle Malkin and Karl Rove

First of all, before you watch my video; Go read this article here, it will open in a new window — then come back here.

After reading that article, I went to twitter and really spoke my mind:

I am the type of person, if I make a mistake; I will admit it. I am also the type of person, that when I feel that I am right, I will back it up. So, I made this video:

I will simply end this blog posting with this; as I said in the video. To Michelle Malkin and Karl Rove; clean up the crap in your own party, before you unleash on my home town. The Republican Party is just as evil, just as screwed up and just hypocritical about many things, including foreign policy. I agree on Terrorism, it is a problem. But the Republican Party’s nominee for 2000 and 2004, who won those elections handled 9/11 in a wrong-headed way. Because of this, we are now having the problems in the middle east that we are having now. Maybe you should work to fix the problems with your party’s foreign policy and let Detroit sort out its own problems.

Thank You.

-Patrick

…and of course, Michelle Malkin’s resident useful idiot agrees with her.

Update: ….and if this isn’t bad enough, we have Andrew Breitbart meeting with Bill Ayers. You see now why I don’t want anything to do with the Republican Party and the majority of the Conservatives; or those who call themselves Conservative? 🙄

Update #2: In my video, I made a reference to Michelle Malkin using Frankfort School tactics, this is what I was referring to here:

Others: Alan Colmes’ Liberaland, The Atlantic Wire, New York Magazine, The Nation, Wonkette, Hollywood Reporter, nation.foxnews.com, The Hill, The Moderate Voice, Christian Science Monitor, Los Angeles Times, National Review, PopWatch, emptywheel, Poynter, ABCNEWS, Taylor Marsh, Outside the Beltway, The Raw Story, The Daily Caller, Hullabaloo and Daily Kos (via Memeornadum)

The Donald endorses Mittens

A crony capitalist endorses a crony capitalist:

The Video:

The Story:

(CNN) — Celebrity business magnate Donald Trump endorsed Mitt Romney for president Thursday, telling reporters he will not mount an independent campaign if Romney is the Republican nominee.

Trump, who has repeatedly flirted with the possibility of his own White House bid, revealed his decision in Las Vegas two days before Nevada’s Saturday caucuses.

“It’s my honor, real honor, to endorse Mitt Romney,” Trump said, with Romney and his wife standing nearby. Calling Romney “tough” and “smart,” Trump said, “he’s not going to continue to allow bad things to happen to this country.”

Romney responded by praising Trump for “an extraordinary ability to understand how our economy works and to create jobs” and for being “one of the few who has stood up to say China is cheating” in international trade.

via Trump endorses Romney – CNN.com.

The White House reacts: (Video) (H/T Washington Examiner)

Drudge called that sneering. I thought it was rather funny myself. 😛

Blogger Roundup Here.