Fannie Mae, the nation's biggest underwriter of home mortgages, has been under increasing pressure from the Clinton Administration to expand mortgage loans among low and moderate income people and felt pressure from stock holders to maintain its phenomenal growth in profits....
...''Fannie Mae has expanded home ownership for millions of families in the 1990's by reducing down payment requirements,'' said Franklin D. Raines, Fannie Mae's chairman and chief executive officer.[ed - Obama advisor Franklin Raines] ''Yet there remain too many borrowers whose credit is just a notch below what our underwriting has required who have been relegated to paying significantly higher mortgage rates in the so-called subprime market.''...
...''From the perspective of many people, including me, this is another thrift industry growing up around us,'' said Peter Wallison a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. ''If they fail, the government will have to step up and bail them out the way it stepped up and bailed out the thrift industry.''
In the meantime, by comparison, Gov. Palin was busy pursuing a career as a multi-term city councilman; then a multi-term city mayor and head of the Alaska Conference of Mayors; then an unsuccessful candidate for lieutenant governor; then the chair and ethics officer of the Alaska Oil & Gas Conservation Commission; then a private-citizen reformer who drove from state office first an ethically challenged fellow commissioner and then an ethically challenged attorney-general; then a successful candidate for governor who defeated, in succession, an ethically challenged incumbent and a popular former governor; and then a successful governor who, in less than two years, has helped enact comprehensive ethics reforms, completely revised her state's most important tax structure, and accomplished more than any single other American public servant of any rank or party to help bring us closer to national energy independence, all the while maintaining stratospheric public approval ratings among her home-state constituents.
Clearly she has no qualifications or accomplishments to her name.
Not since Rosie O'Donnell & Co. manhandled Elizabeth Hasselbeck weekdays on "The View" have liberals been so gleeful to watch a bitter lesbian tear down a confident and beautiful conservative Republican woman. Unresolved high school lust and angst at well-adjusted cheerleaders and popular prom queens should be left for medical professionals, not for midmorning television gabfests.
For many, gay marriage is a key issue.
Yet none of these gilded-ghetto living haters point out that their savior, Mr. Obama, stands against gay marriage, too. Is that change Melissa Etheridge can believe in?
Like President Clinton, who supported regressive anti-gay-rights legislation such as "don't ask, don't tell" and the Defense of Marriage Act, Mr. Obama gets a massive pass from the activist gay left and their stenographers in the mainstream media.
The never-reported political reality is that both Mr. Clinton and Mr. Obama understand that key components of the Democratic Party - the black and Hispanic blocs - hold views that Brad Pitt would deem "homophobic."
For these minority groups, and for many other religious Democrats, gay marriage is a nonstarter.
Yet liberal celebrities and activist journalists never hurl epithets at these coddled groups no matter how retrograde their ideas. President Bush correctly pegged this phenomenon as "the soft bigotry of lowered expectations." Political correctness, the rigging of politics using different rules for different groups, and buttressed by the media, ensures that Democrats always have the upper hand.
I just had some Obama cultists knock on my door. I took about five minutes to explain to them that I will not vote for a guy who is pro-choice on infanticide, who wants to socialize health care, who knows jack about foreign policy, and who spent the better part of his political formative years being counseled by Marxists like Ayers and Wright.
I got pretty blank stares in return along with a quiet protest that socialized health care "works in England, where I lived."
Sure thing.
Part of me can't wait for this election to be over, but another part dreads that Obama might win, which will make having the election over quite dreary in itself.
I've thought that for quite some time - at least on foreign policy. Charles Krauthammer agrees:
What the president did note with some pride, however, is that beyond preventing a second attack, he is bequeathing to his successor the kinds of powers and institutions the next president will need to prevent further attack and successfully prosecute the long war. And indeed, he does leave behind a Department of Homeland Security, reorganized intelligence services with newly developed capacities to share information, and a revised FISA regime that grants broader and modernized wiretapping authority.
In this respect, Bush is much like Truman, who developed the sinews of war for a new era (the Department of Defense, the CIA, the NSA), expanded the powers of the presidency, established a new doctrine for active intervention abroad, and ultimately engaged in a war (Korea) — also absent an attack on the U.S. — that proved highly unpopular.
So unpopular that Truman left office disparaged and highly out of favor. History has revised that verdict. I have little doubt that Bush will be the subject of a similar reconsideration.
Anyone who reads this blog (that means no one, but hey...) knows that I'm no fan of Barack Obama. I think his ideology sucks; I believe strongly that said ideology is shaped by a wrong view of the role of government; I think he has bad ideas, and I desperately hope that he doesn't win the election.
Cool lady. But a word of advice: When you're driving Laura Ingraham anywhere, don't get distracted by fiddling with the A/C and accidentally drift onto the rumble strips along the highway. She doesn't react well to that.
