SNL spoofs mortgage abusers

Saturday Night Live spoofs President Bush, Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank - no spoof needed - the abusers of mortgages.

- Two totally unqualified buyers - jobs, etc. Nancy feels their pain and give one of them a hug.

- Flippers. They intended to sell in six months at triple the prices, but had to settle for a gain of 10%.

- Predatory lenders and George Soros.

Posters at the SNL site say this version cut out where the couple thank Barney Frank and congress for blocking congressional oversight, which is true.

That's the light-hearted way to explain the subprime mess. Seriously. Here is the article that linked to it:

Conservatism Today

But there were many people who took out loans that they never intended to repay (when the favorable environment changed).

The brilliant SNL parody very accurately displays the Silicon Valley couple that bought condos to "flip" (buying houses and quickly reselling) in a rapidly rising housing market. Unknowingly to the Democrat machine of Fannie and Freddie, these flipper investors were the true catalysts of the meltdown. Without the "flipper investors" it's very likely the Dem's Fannie/Freddie fraud would still be churning unabated. You see, flippers were considered subprime borrowers as well. Those loans were/are grouped in with the low income borrowers. Here's why they are subprime and a demonstration of what happened:

Those flipper loans were not conventional loans. The flipper would only need to be asset worthy to qualify for an exotic 0 down ARM (adjustable rate mortgage) loan with no documentation. If they could show a bank account or asset that could potentially cover a default, they could qualify. As long as the market stayed hot and home prices escalated, they were more than OK. The flippers were sought after by the mortgage companies because of the quick turnaround.

12 Reasons Why McCain Can Still Win

Light at Huffington Post. Must be a mistake. Of course he clouds his light with bias, but he does show some light.

William Bradley: Huffington Post:

* America "turns the page" back to a calmer economic moment, enabling cultural issues to come to the fore. Some say it's just bad luck that McCain is running against Obama in a year of economic crisis. Others think it's poetic justice, since he has mainly supported the Bush/Cheney economic policies. Whichever it is, McCain needs a greater sense of calm in the US economy. It could happen.

** The closed credit spigot is opened. Of course, in order for Team McCain to turn the page away from a pervasive sense of economic crisis, the locked credit market must become decidedly unlocked. Right now, the State of California is in deep crisis, with its usual cash-flow issue at this time of year metastasizing in to potential disaster as the usual lenders turn a deaf ear. This is going on everywhere. Of course, if big financial concerns really want a continuance of Republican governance in the White House, they can start lending money. We'll see how they "vote."

** McCain finds an economic initiative ... other than suspending his campaign to pass the Wall Street bailout bill, earmark reform, and big tax breaks for corporations and the rich. The campaign suspension fell flat, as McCain delivered nothing much and ended up debating Obama last week anyway. Earmark reform, well, hardly any voters know what that bit of Potomac-speak means and it's a drop in the bucket of the federal deficit anyway. The tax breaks? "Joe Sixpack" on "Main Street" sitting around his "kitchen table" -- and each of those are egregious cliches used by supposed populists who don't know many people outside their very own elite bubbles -- doesn't relate to big corporate tax breaks.

Schwarzenegger had a big infrastructure program that was central to his re-election campaign. Maybe McCain can do something to stimulate the economy. Or push for a health care program. Something that concretely gets things moving or helps "average people," another pol-speak cliche, with their real lives.

** The debate shifts to national security. McCain, of course, sees himself as a wartime president. And we are at war. It's just not war that is presently playing to his 20th century war hero strengths. But a sudden crisis that people relate to -- not Russia's easy war with Georgia, prompted by McCain's rather gullible friend Misha Saakashvili's predictably backfiring baiting of the bear -- could shift things quickly. This would not be triggered by McCain, a man of honor in these areas. It might be triggered by someone abroard who wants McCain elected, for their own purposes. As with Osama bin Laden's very late move in 2004, which helped stop John Kerry's late surge against President Bush.

** The campaign refocuses on Obama. Clearly, the McCain campaign wants the focus all on Obama, his youth, his relative inexperience, his relatively exotic background, his supposed economic, social and geopolitical radicalism, and his associations with Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, etc. This means a highly negative campaign, waged both by McCain and aligned entities. This is tried and true for the Republicans.

Yes Washington budget has a huge deficit

The fact checkers say Dino Rossi is correct: Christine Gregoire finishes her term as governor with the budget facing a deficit of over $3 billion.

Fact checking Wash. gov's race: Budgets, taxes - MyNorthwest.com:

SHE SAYS:

"Today, we sit on a surplus ... We have literal money in the bank. The projected - and I emphasize the word projected - deficit is for 2011."

HE SAYS:

"It's like having $800 in your checking account, and you owe over $4,000 come January - you're still over $3,000 upside down."

THE TRUTH:

Gregoire is cherry-picking the slice of truth that sounds best while pooh-poohing the bad part. Rossi is being more truthful - there's a deficit ahead, and the state's savings won't be enough to cover it.

Gregoire grudgingly acknowledged some sort of future budget hole when the Legislature adjourned earlier this year. But she continued to answer questions about the deficit by saying the state had a surplus.

Lately, she's 'fessed up a little more, but still emphasizes the deficit is not set in stone.

That's technically true. The state's balance sheet shows a general fund surplus of about $87 million, with about $440 million in the Rainy Day Fund - a savings account for emergencies - through the 2007-2009 budget.

So we do have "money in the bank." But for practical purposes, it's already spent.

If she had to write a new budget for the 2009-2011 fiscal year right now, Gregoire would be facing a big deficit. That's because current state spending, if carried forward, would likely cost about $3.2 billion more than Washington is expected to have by the end of the 2011 fiscal year.

They also address claims of raising taxes and the balanced budget that Dino Rossi and ex-Governor Gay Locke put together.

Plot against Spokane author's novel about Prophet Muhammad

KOMO News

Three men have been charged with plotting to attack the publisher of a controversial novel dealing with the Prophet Muhammad, British police said Thursday.

The three - salesman Abrar Mizra, 22; cab driver Abbas Taj, 30; and Ali Beheshti, 40 - were arrested Saturday near the north London home and office of Martin Rynja, who plans to publish "The Jewel of Medina," police said.

They were arrested after a fire broke out at Rynja's building, but police have refused to disclose any details.

The men were charged with plotting to endanger life and damage property. Beheshti was also charged with possessing a weapon. All three are due to appear in court Friday.

The novel by Sherry Jones, who lives in Spokane, Wash., is a work of historical fiction about Aisha, who according to tradition was 9 when she became the wife of the Prophet Muhammad. She later became a political and military leader in her own right.

The book is being released next week. Early to cut short the build up against it!

Yes, Global warming is just propaganda

Nigel Calder's father wrote propaganda against the Nazis during World War II, so he knows what it is. And he is a science writer, so he knows a bit about science

Nigel Calder at News Letter (UK)

Worldwide interest in my quite run-of-the-mill comment, on the need to debate the manmade global warming hypothesis, is pleasing but not surprising. It confirms that my fellow science writers have miscalculated badly. Most readers don't want endless scare stories about climatic doom, accompanied by authoritarian lectures about their carbon footprints. They're hungry for a variety of opinions.

Unfortunately only 1% of the huge number of articles on climate change in the posh London newspapers deviate from the official line of the Intergovernmental Panel. That's not my reckoning. It comes from researchers at Oxford University who complain about the more balanced reporting in the not-so-posh papers, with a deviancy rate of 23%. They say it has 'skewed public understanding of human contributions to climate change'. In other words, kindly abandon the journalistic principle that different points of views should be heard on controversial matters, or else a lot of dreadful people out there (you or me) may not truly believe that climate change is their fault.

Yes, you've got it. Man-made global warming is just propaganda. My father Ritchie Calder was a science writer too, but during the Second World War he played a leading part in Allied propaganda against Nazi Germany. He told me quite a lot about the tricks, employed in what was then a good cause. Now I watch them being used every day by the global wamers.

For example: exaggerate small facts. A brilliant wartime example came when someone in occupied Belgium was chalking V on public walls. He meant V for Vrijheid, or freedom. But London announced that in occupied Europe people were writing V for Victory everywhere. So people listening secretly to the BBC went out and did just that, to annoy the Germans and hearten their neighbours.

The polar bears qualify as a similarly astute exaggeration from the global warming camp. Some years ago, a small family of bears was caught in a violent storm, and drowned. That could have happened a hundred or a thousand years ago. But no, the Disneyesque sob story is put about, by Al Gore and others, that bears are drowning because the Arctic ice is melting. Total rubbish, because the polar bears are thriving. But it's dazzling propaganda.

Another technique is to hush up unfavourable news. In wartime that can mean not informing even the bereaved relatives if an important warship has sunk without the enemy knowing. Again the polar ice provides a modern parallel. Last year you were told – shock, horror! -- that Arctic sea ice was at its lowest extent since satellite measurements began. What went unreported was that Antarctic sea ice was simultaneously at a record high. The collusion of my fellow journalists in the deception is disturbing. Although the big freeze in Antarctica was plainly announced in a press release from the US weather bureau, NOAA, not a single newspaper in North America or Europe carried this unfavourable story.

My Dad's chief opponent was Hitler's propaganda minister Josef Goebbels. Among many meditations on his craft, he wrote, 'The English follow the principle that when you lie, you should lie big, and stick to it.' And of course Goebbels did the same himself – most wickedly in the case of the Jews.

One big lie about climate change is that man-made global warming is proven scientifically. Not so. On the contrary, any objective physicist would say that the evidence is strongly against it. The very mechanism for the supposed greenhouse warming, reinforced by that extra CO2, requires tropical air temperatures to rise faster at high altitudes (6 miles above the ground) than they do lower down. Weather balloons that routinely carry thermometers to those heights and beyond have shown no such trend over recent decades.

That negative result was an important element of what I had in mind when remarking, in my comment last Monday, that the scientific evidence is far stronger for a rival explanation of climate change. It's the discovery that the Sun controls the cosmic rays that help to make the Earth's clouds. The supporting observations and experiments are explained in simple terms by Dr Henrik Svensmark and me in our book The Chilling Stars.

The biggest lie of all, breathtaking in its audacity, is the insistence that mankind's misbehaviour means that global warming is getting worse. The measurements for August 2008 are just in, and they confirm the world is distinctly cooler this year than last. It's fair enough to argue about whether the Earth's temperature has stopped rising, or merely paused, or gone into reverse. But the key fact is that, despite that indisputable increase of CO2 in the air, the Earth is no warmer now than it was 12 years ago.

Old media avoid Gov. Palin's accomplishments

Bill Dyer does the leg work the main-stream media refuse to do:

Bill Dyer posting at Hugh Hewitt's blog

In considering Sarah Palin's fitness as a vice presidential nominee, it's absolutely crucial to distinguish between mere tenure in office and actual accomplishments while there. In their televised interviews with her, however, Charlie Gibson and Katie Couric have almost completely ignored Gov. Palin's actual record in office. So, too, have most of the old-media sources who've been writing about her. They'd far rather dig through a dumpster or watch videos of a guest pastor from Kenya speaking at a church Gov. Palin has sometimes attended than talk about Gov. Palin's day job as chief executive of the largest state in America.
(There's yet another important aspect to her candidacy that the mainstream media has ignored almost as resolutely, which is her courage and determination in campaigning as an underdog reformer, taking on deeply entrenched and ethically challenged members of her own party in Alaska. Arguably that's her most important accomplishment of all, given how much of a cesspool Washington has become. But let's set that aside for the moment.)
Gov. Palin is now finishing up her second year as Governor of Alaska. Even added to her years as a city councilman and mayor, or her service as chair and ethics officer of the Alaska Oil & Gas Conservation Commission, that is not a very long record. But length is only one dimension. How deep is her record?
The answer to that question is critically important. Joe Biden has been a senator, as Gov. Palin points out, since Gov. Palin was in grade school, so of course he has a long record. With that seniority has come committee chair positions, first on the Senate Judiciary Committee, then on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. But on closer examination, neither as a committee chairman nor a legislator has Slow Joe Biden particularly distinguished himself. His greatest legislative triumph has been in championing revisions to the bankruptcy code that dramatically changed the slope of the playing field to favor his home-state credit card companies in consumer bankruptcy proceedings — an accomplishment much disdained, in fact, by the Hard Left. So what, by contrast, has Gov. Sarah Palin done in her dramatically shorter tenure as a state chief executive?
If you only know three things that Sarah Palin has accomplished as Governor of Alaska, it should be these three:

1. Gov. Palin is a proven fiscal conservative who used her line-item veto to slash hundreds of millions of dollars in spending from the state budget. [more details at the link]

2. Gov. Palin kept her campaign promise to revamp the state's pre-existing severance tax on oil & gas production, replacing a structure negotiated behind closed doors by ethically challenged predecessors and the big energy companies with one negotiated in full public view — and then rebated part of the resulting surplus directly to tax-payers. [more details at the link]

3. Gov. Palin broke a multi-year stalemate over the financing and construction of a $40 billion cross-state gas pipeline that will deliver cleaner, cheaper natural gas to Alaska's own population centers (Alaskans themselves pay some of the nation's highest energy prices), while also delivering gas to the energy-hungry Lower 48. [more details at the link]

John Fund spoke here on Stealing Elections

Today I had lunch with John Fund of the Wall Street Journal and about 200 other supporters of Evergreen Freedom Foundation.

John has recently updated his book Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud threatens our Democracy with new material including Washington's 2004 accomplishment by Christine Gregoire. You can learn about the book and its theme at the Amazon link and the 2004 Washington Governor race was ably covered here by Stefan Sharkansky and others. So I won't go into their depths.

The $700 billion bail-out bill was not on the agenda, but was unavoidable, so a couple of notes:

- The tide turned against Secretary Paulson's bill when he went to the Republican caucus and referred to the Speaker and Majority Leader as "Nancy and Harry" but called their Republican near-counterparts "Boehner and Blunt." It was clear who are his friends.

- Fund didn't take a position on the bill that was defeated today or suggest how to rewrite it. But he suggested a "Plan B" that can be implemented by President Bush tomorrow without action by Nancy and Harry and their Congress.
(1) End "mark to market" which requires reflecting a reduced market value immediately even though the value might recover. This can cause insolvency even though recovery is possible. End it.
(2) Index the capital gains on stocks for inflation. Now you (and your mutual funds, etc.) pay tax on the "gain" that is eaten away by inflation. End that. It would increase everyone's gains and would certainly cause some people to sell stocks they were holding to avoid paying the excessive taxes, thus freeing up some "frozen" funds to provide desperately needed liquidity.

- ACORN, the "community organizer" group that has repeatedly been caught submitting voter registrations for nonexistent people and other voting fraud, has been big on pushing use of the Community Reorganization Act of 1977 which in the 1990s required banks to make risky loans, in effect making it illegal to do due diligence before making loans.

Stealing Elections and the 2008 election

- Barrack Obama was a very successful community organizer in a sub organization of ACORN. He rose to the top of ACORN and became, first, their national trainer, then their attorney. He doesn't brag about this (my emphasis).

- The 1993 Motor Voter Act required the risky practices of registering people by mail and while getting driver's licenses without appearing before an election official. It opened the door. Illinois Governor Edgar refused to implement parts of Motor Voter he found unconstitutional. He was sued by attorney Barrack Obama on behalf of ACORN. He doesn't talk about this accomplishment - he won in court.

- ACORN, the empire of vote fraud, cannot be audited or even tracked. It is not one organization, but 154 organizations in the same building. The $700 billion bail-out bill including 20%, that's $140 billion, for community organizations including ACORN.

Cross-posted at Sound Politics. See also Obama will convict your for your speech.