I have to like Chuck Baldwin, he does not mince words:
It has happened again. We go through this every four years, and every four years the vast majority of “conservatives” fall for it. This is such a broken record. What did Forrest Gump say: “Stupid is as stupid does”? And wasn’t it P.T. Barnum who said, “There’s a sucker born every minute”? Well, here we go again.
Neocon RINO George H.W. Bush picks “conservative” Dan Quayle. “Conservative” G.W. Bush picks neocon RINO Dick Cheney. Neocon RINO John McCain picks “conservative” Sarah Palin. Now, neocon RINO Mitt Romney picks “conservative” Paul Ryan. As long as there is one “conservative” on the ticket, mushy-headed “conservatives” across the country will go into a gaga, starry-eyed, hypnotic trance in support of the Republican ticket. I’m convinced that if Lucifer, himself, was the GOP Presidential candidate, he would get the support of the Religious Right and Republican “conservatives” as long as he selected a reputed “conservative” to join his ticket. And, by the way, the notable “conservative” wouldn’t think twice about joining such a ticket, either, I’m convinced.
Let’s just get this on the record: since 1960, there have only been two Presidential nominees (from the two major parties) who were not controlled by the globalist elitists. One was a Democrat, John F. Kennedy; the other was a Republican, Ronald Reagan. Kennedy was shot and killed; Reagan was shot. Every other President, Democrat or Republican, has been totally controlled, which is why none of them have done diddly-squat to make a difference in the direction of the country. On the issues that really matter, Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are just more of the same!
He goes on to say that Ron Paul is the only one; and I disagree with that. However, I will say this; he is right about Romney and Ryan. Which is I am voting for:
I hate repeating myself, but for the sake of blogging about something, I am going to have to repeat myself….again. However, for short, it’s just more of this here.
But for those of us, who want a longer version of the story; I give you this:
When you print more money, you devalue currency, and when you devalue currency, the price of everything goes up. This, in turn, causes employers to have to pay for more everything, and this also causes them to look at their bottom line. This is the vicious cycle of inflation. Which is caused by a fiat currency, which is not backed by Gold. I said this on my old blog, a million times back when Obama was being elected and afterwards.
So, here we have the story about August unemployment numbers being bad. Again, as I report this, remember what I said above:
New Gallup unemployment data suggest an increase in the government’s seasonally adjusted unemployment rate for August when it is reported on Friday, Sept. 7. During recent months, Gallup’s measurements have been more optimistic than those of the BLS. Barring a sharp reversal in this relationship, the government’s unadjusted unemployment rate might be expected to stay the same or increase in August.
Gallup’s Daily tracking of the unemployment situation is based on interviews with more than 30,000 adults over the 30 days ending Aug. 15, and shows essentially no change in the unadjusted unemployment rate at 8.3% compared to 8.2% in July. In turn, this suggests that the government’s unadjusted unemployment rate could increase to 8.7% in July from 8.6% in June. The government’s measurement of the unadjusted unemployment rate has been known to differ with Gallup’s findings, but a drop of 0.3% in July is necessary to bring the government’s unadjusted rate down to Gallup levels.
More interestingly, there were no BLS seasonal adjustments in August 2011. If this remains the same in 2012, the Gallup seasonally adjusted unemployment rate for August would be 8.3% while that of the BLS would be 8.7%, assuming a similar increase to that shown in the Gallup data. Further, Gallup’s data show the labor force participation rate to be increasing in August. In turn, that could have an additional negative impact on the unemployment rate for August if the government’s data show a similar pattern.
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Trying to guess the U.S. unemployment rate has been a thankless task in 2012, even using Gallup’s 30,000 interviews as a basis for estimation — even worse than trying to guess the results of the government’s establishment survey. However, like ADP’s (Automatic Data Processing) estimates of the establishment survey results, Gallup’s numbers have been close to the household survey results much of the time.
Regardless, barring heroic adjustments or a sharp change in direction, Gallup data suggest the seasonally adjusted U.S. unemployment rate for August will increase — possibly substantially — when announced in early September.
So, if you cannot find a job, this is why: Employers are having to look at their bottom lines. They have to take in account for the fact that they have to pay for supplies, taxes, insurance, and equipment; this does not leave much left over for extra employees. This is not rocket science my friends; this is textbook small business administration. It is too bad that progressives, Democrats and the Obama Administration simply do not seem to understand this concept.
The U.S. government just notched its highest ever monthly deficit, with the red rink running to an estimated $229 billion in February.
The Congressional Budget Office, in a preliminary analysis, reported that the February 2012 deficit broke last year’s monthly record of $223 billion.
The office attributed the shortfall in part to a decline in revenue — mainly because of a $25 billion increase in income tax refunds thanks to disbursement timing issues.
According to the CBO, processing delays pushed refund payments that would have been distributed in January off into February. And the additional day in February this year allowed for extra refunds to be distributed during the month that otherwise would have been paid out in March.
The CBO projected that for the first five months of the fiscal year, the federal government is running a $578 billion deficit.
The projected deficit this year is once again projected to top $1 trillion
The only thing I can truly say about this one is this; elections matter. This is what happens when you put progressives and moderate Republicans in Government, they spend on your dime and you get stuck with the tab and most usually, you do not get a thing for it in return. This is why we have to get people elected to political office, in City, State and Federal levels; who at the very least, have the American people’s interests in mind and not their own political fortunes in mind. Because when the political veterans are running the show; both Republican and Democratic Parties; this is what you get —- Debt.
China cannot buy our debt forever, or eventually they will own this Country. Not to mention, China is not exactly a free Country. All China would have to do, is tell the United States that they will not be buy anymore of our debt and we, as a Nation, would be history. We, as Conservatives have no one to blame, but ourselves for this fine mess. The Republican Party elected a moderate Republican by the name of Richard Nixon, who wanted so badly to make a name for himself and that idiot liberal Republican just had to go to China and normalize relations with those Communist bastards. Which is pretty darned ironic, considering what the Communists in China did to John Birch. This is one Conservative who felt Watergate was nothing more than sweet justice. (…and No, I am NOT being snarky!)
This why we the American people, the silent majority; need to vote differently this coming November. Our Nation’s future might just depend on it.
In March 2005, David James called Rep. Ron Paul’s (R-Texas) Congressional office for some documentation.
James’s nonprofit group, the Liberty Committee, had paid for one of Paul’s flights, and James needed a receipt or boarding pass to document the expense. He’d been pushing Paul for the paperwork and now, on the phone, he was “putting his foot down.”
“So I called the office manager,” James recalled. “They knew me, like, as well as they knew Ron. And I said, ‘Liberty Committee is paying for this expense. I need to get the boarding pass or the ticket or something.’”
The office manager said Paul’s Congressional office no longer had documentation for that flight; Paul had sent it in to the House Finance Office for reimbursement. But Liberty Committee had already sent a check to American Express to cover the charge on Paul’s credit card.
“I don’t care what flights the Liberty Committee pays for,” James said, “because Ron never took enough in expenses to come anywhere near his value to us. And this was piddly. But it’s just what it was.”
James first thought it was accidental and faxed a letter to Paul’s office, requesting that its money be returned for the flight. Paul did repay the $403.70, but the episode strained their relationship and led to a falling out a year later.
In a subsequent conversation, James raised the issue, and Paul “was very curt, and he simply said, ‘Yep, well, happens all the time,’” James, 64, told Roll Call.
Ed Morrissey also writes about this, and thinks that Ron Paul should come clean or face a house ethics committee hearing. I wholeheartedly agree. If you are going to pawn yourself off as the most honest person on capital hill; you should try actually being the most honest person on capital hill. I have written on my previous blog about this man’s claims to be the most honest politician, and for a short time, I actually believed that, but as time wore on, I began to read about the stuff that Mr. Paul does and does not want his own followers really knowing about it. But, I, as well as other bloggers have documented his antics for a while now.
While Mr. Paul might have some very good ideas on capitalism, free trade and our monetary system; his utter hypocrisy when it comes to issues like this and his utter idiotic ideas on foreign policy handicap him. Not only this, but his past writings that did have his name on them, and his associations with Jew haters, racists and other such sort of nonsense make him someone, despite what I said recently, which was honestly in jest; that I could never, in good conscience vote for in a million years. All one would need to do is look through the archives of my previous blog to see all the stuff that I have written about the man over the past 6 years.
Again, while I can appreciate his opposition to Wilsonian foreign policy; something that I have spoken out against myself here, and I can and do agree with very much, as much as I agree with his idea of free trade, free markets and the gold standard. I cannot side with this man because of the rest of his problems. As I have said on this blog and my previous blog many, many times; Ron Paul is NOT, nor has he EVER been the Messianic figure that many of his well-intentioned followers assumed him to be. This proves that and if the Ron Paul crowd had any sort of common sense at all; they would back away from Ron Paul and support someone who could actually fix this Nation’s problems.
However, if I know the Ron Paul crowd like I do; they will simply dismiss this true story, as some sort of Jewish conspiracy by the Illuminati and the Bilderberg boys to keep him from winning the White House, which is pretty much par for their course. I could tell you stories of how when I, on my previous blog, would write something even remotely critical of Ron Paul; my inbox would overflow with Ron Paul supporters calling me everything from a Neo-Con (which is Jew in Ron Paul speak) to a Bush-lover. Once, though, one of them went over the line and sent a death threat via e-mail. I did report that to the FBI in Detroit. This is why I try to avoid writing about the man. Because his most devout followers are absolutely insane.
Trust me, when I tell you this; the left’s crazies, have nothing on Ron Paul’s crazies. 😯
A mob of some 50 Palestinian Muslims stoned a group of Christian tourists atop Jerusalem’s Temple Mount on Sunday morning. Three of the Israeli police officers who acted to protect the Christian group were wounded by the stone-throwers.
Police arrested 11 Palestinians, several of them minors, for their role in the attack.
The attack is believed to have been instigated by the former Muslim mufti of Jerusalem, Ekrama Sabri, who told Palestinian media over the weekend that Jewish groups were planning to break into the mosques that occupy the holy compound and desecrate them.
Sabri urged all local Muslims to protect the mosques from “the Israeli conspiracy against the city and its holy places.”
Muslim religious figures regularly claim that Israel is plotting to destroy the Dome of the Rock and the Al Aqsa Mosque to pave the way for the rebuilding of the Jewish Temple, which the Muslims now insist never previously existed.
Because of the constant threat of Muslim violence, and despite the fact that the Temple Mount is the most holy place on earth to Jews and many Christians, the Israeli police comply with Muslim demands for harsh restrictions on non-Muslim visitors to the site. For instance, Jews and Christians are forbidden to carry Bibles atop the Temple Mount or to utter even silent prayers within its walls. Jews and Christians are regularly detained for violating these conditions.
In other violence, Palestinian terrorists operating out of the Gaza Strip fired a Grad-type missile at the southern Israel city of Beersheva on Saturday. The projectile landed in an open area just outside Beersheva and did not cause any injuries or damage. Two more short-range rockets hit nearby Israeli towns.
Palestinian forces fired at least two rockets at southern Israel – one at the coastal city of Ashkelon – on Friday, again causing no injuries or damage.
But-but-but-but they’re just peaceful Muslims! 🙄
The same damned peaceful Muslims who did this:
Remember this?
and this:
............and this?
These are the men who did the above, and Shanksville, Pa:
We should never forget what these men did, we should never forget thier race, their religion and why they did it to us, ever!
They were acting under the command of this man:
The ringleader. Who is now dead.
The liberals in this Country want to flush this event down the memory hole. They would rather blame Bush and Cheney for the attacks; and not the incompetence of Bill Clinton, which was the real cause of 9/11. Like his incompetence in rigging the housing market to fail, like it did. This is why I no longer vote Democratic Party; because those bastards are the reason why we are living in the police state hole that we live in now.
Some people cannot see that; and that’s their own darned fault. I’m no fool and I see things for what they really are. Terrorism is a threat and these same people CLAIM to want a two-state solution! Which is a lie of the devil, they want to see Israel pushed into the sea and the Jewish race exterminated from the earth, kind of like Hitler.
The $25 billion settlement with banks over foreclosure abuses may result in a wave of home seizures, inflicting short-term pain on delinquent U.S. borrowers while making a long-term housing recovery more likely.
Lenders slowed the pace of foreclosures as they negotiated with attorneys general in all 50 states for more than a year over allegations of faulty and fraudulent paperwork used to repossess homes. With yesterday’s agreement, banks are likely to resume property seizures.
“The best thing about the settlement, frankly, is that it will be done,” said Stan Humphries, chief economist for Seattle-based Zillow Inc. (Z), a provider of home-sales data. “The shadow of the settlement hung over the market for a year now.”
The backlog of foreclosures has trapped homeowners in properties they can no longer afford, depressed neighborhood prices by increasing the number of abandoned homes and led banks to tighten mortgage credit standards because of uncertainty about the cost of their potential obligations. Foreclosure starts fell 46 percent in December from October 2010, when the investigation into the so-called robo-signing of mortgage documentation began, according to Irvine, California-based RealtyTrac Inc.
At the risk of sounding like, of all people, Ron Paul; This is what happens when Government gets involved with the private market. It gets screwed up and attempts to fix it, screw it up even worse! Let this be a lesson to our Government and all involved; do not involve yourself in private markets, like housing. It only messes things up. The sad thing is, a whole bunch of people had to suffer, because a group of liberal elitists decided that a tried and true system just had to be tweeked to give to the “have-nots” and from what I read above, the suffering is just beginning.
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.
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.
(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.
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:
Megan McArdle is a good writer that makes a whole bunch more money writing than I do.
She writes a very good blog entry about the President’s State of the Union address. In it, she writes the following, that I feel the need to comment about:
The harsh way to put it is that the speech was an extended whine about how all the rich bankers and George Bush have screwed everything up. That was fine campaign rhetoric when he was a Senator. But it’s pretty weak when he’s been in charge for most of a full term–two years of that with a majority in congress.
You see this is the entire problem; the Democrats lead by President Obama, continue to perpetuate the outright lie that the President George W. Bush and the cabal of rich bankers caused the Wall Street crisis and that drove our economy into the ground. This is nothing more than outright historic revisionism. The truth is the so-called “bankers” took advantage of the situation. As I have written on this blog and my previous blog, in 1973, the Democrats passed the community reinvestment act. In 1993, the Democrats added the subprime clause to that act, which created the ability for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mack to sell high-risk, adjustable rate mortgages to those who, under normal circumstances could not even remotely be qualified to get them.
There was one thing that did exacerbate the situation, that was the removal by Congress and not by Bush; the regulation that was supposed to prevent predatory lending conditions. Furthermore, The Republicans in Congress at the time, can be blamed for backing off an investigation, when the then President of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac played the race card in response to a warning from the Bush White House that the housing market was about to crash.
Now the question as to the morality of the bankers is another story entirely. However, the very idea that somehow a cabal of banks actually brought the economy down is weapons grade conspiracy theory nonsense. The only thing that “The Bankers” and Wall Street did was take advantage of a situation created by the very socialists who are blaming the banks for the situation in the first place.
