Category Archives: Conservatism

Updated: Bachmann: Banks Gave Money To ACORN For Government Rating

Affirmative Action, Ann Coulter, Bush, Conservatism, Debt, Ethics, Private Property, Regulation, Republicans, Socialism, Welfare

Representative Michele Bachmann, Republican Congresswoman from Minnesota, inadvertently traces the “Minority Housing Meltdown”: The community reinvestment Act” (CRA), a creation of the federal Frankenstein, compelled private banks to make home loans to individuals with poor credit. Since no bank wants to make bad loans, this legislation in effect threatens banks to so do. Unless the bank lends to those unworthy of credit, it will not be allowed to do interstate business or expand its operations.

But, the benevolent government also offers the errant banks redemption. In order to get a positive Community Reinvestment Act rating, a bank may give over cash or in-kind donations to ACORN. A bank can also partner with ACORN to make loans to the pool of poor they represent.

By the way, where are the media stories about Super Mom Bachman who has raised five kids and 23 foster children? Maybe when the morons are through belaboring Michele Obama’s biceps, they can tell us more about Bachmann. (Here you are welcome to improvise with your own clichés of improbability.)

Fast forward toward the end of the YouTube clip for the Bachmann interview.

Update (Oct. 16): No ACORN essay is complete without mention of Bush’s crucial role in the mortgage meltdown. I have not studied the NRO Kurtz piece, but somehow I doubt it gives Bush the “credit” he is due in the diversity depression.

In 2003, Norman Singleton wrote this:

“Today the House passed, by voice vote, the American Dream Downpayment Act (HR 1276). This new welfare program forces taxpayers to subsidize the downpayments of ‘low income’ Americans. This new welfare program is a Bush Administration priority and was sponsored by Katherine Harris. The GOP is already touting how this will help with their outreach to minorities.”

Read Ron Paul’s rapid-fire response to the Bush affirmative action mortgage program.

Unless our token conservatives pay their “respects” to Bush, author of the “ownership society,” reborn conservatives—NRO, Weekly Standard—should not be lauded.

And by the by, the many poisonous pundits should atone again and again for being wrong at the time, and misleading the masses for Benito Bush. On second thought, why don’t they just go away?!

Take “snake-oil merchants like Stephen Moore of the Wall Street Journal,” who is Fox’s new Philosopher King. Moore obfuscated about the bailout (while making the obligatory noises about the merits of the free market he flouts). And Moore’s previous book was entitled Bullish on Bush: How the Ownership Society Is Making America Richer. If that’s not an indictment, nothing is. ‘Bush’s bailout society’ is an instantiation of the principles upon which ‘Bush’s ownership society’ was founded: credit for those who are not creditworthy.”

The only pundit who was vocal about the Bush economics was Michele Malkin. Not party hack Ann Coulter.

[Thanks, Stephen; I have been rather ill, but I hope to be back at my WND perch next week with renewed verve.]

The Value Of Lying

Christian Right, Conservatism, Debt, Politics, Religion, Republicans, Ron Paul, Sarah Palin

While we’re on the subject of liars and the lies they tell, a Values Voter Summit took place in Washington earlier today.

Read about John Boehner’s deceptions in this WSJ report.

Contra Boehner, the Democrats did not bankrupt the country; Bush did the dues before them; Barack is finishing what Bush began. The Republicans can’t “take our country back”; and Democrats have no more undermined national security than the Republicans did under Bush.

At the valueless summit, a straw poll was held and some straw men selected as favorites for president in 2012. Some learning curve, Middle America!

Huckabee grabbed nearly 29 percent of the vote. “Romney, Pawlenty, Palin and Pence each won roughly 12 percent of the 597 votes cast.”

Does anyone know if this hapless lot even invited Ron Paul?

Man With A Microphone

Conservatism, Literature, Media, Pop-Culture, The Zeitgeist

“IS GLENN BECK Bad for America?”, asks TIME, in what is clearly a rhetorical question for the Magazine. Better Beck’s “pox-on-both-parties populism” than nothing (or than TIME), is my reply.

“I don’t trust a single weasel in Washington. I don’t care what party they’re from. But unless we trust each other, we’re not going to make it.” This last bit of standard Beck fare is, of course, nonsense, to which TIME, not unreasonably, responds thus:

“How can we trust each other, though, when the integrated economy of ranters and their delighted-to-be-outraged critics are such a model of profitability?”

“Extreme talk, especially as practiced by a genuine talent like Beck, squeezes maximum profit from a relatively small, deeply invested audience, selling essentially the same product in multiple forms. The more the host is criticized, the more committed the original audience becomes. And the more committed the audience, the bigger target it presents to the rant industry on the other side of the spectrum. A liberal group called Color of Change has organized an advertiser boycott of Beck’s TV show — great publicity for the group and a boon to Beck’s ratings.”

“If it’s E pluribus unum you’re looking for, try American Idol.”

[SNIP]

The most disturbing thing about the “rant-racket” is in this snippet:

“Beck recently entered into a partnership with Simon & Schuster … to create a range of books for every audience, from children to teens to adults.”

…This as writers like myself struggle to find publishers for their books.

Update II: The Prejean Of Journalism (& On Entrapment)

Conservatism, Crime, Ethics, Journalism, Law, Republicans, Taxation

“Conservatives” may be adding another Carrie Prejean to their intellectual arsenal. Prejean is a beauty queen, and a ding dong of a girl, who has become the Republican spokesman against gay marraige.

The Breitbart enterprise is behind an ACORN-exposing operation starring the Prejean of journalism. I give you the “gutsy” Hannah Giles. Yes, it helps to be connected, to have a shapely behind, a videographer who is hip to your ass-ets, and who is behind this brand of tease “journalism,” with its pornographic connotation, not unfamiliar to Fox New and its cohorts.

Giles told a praise-oozing Glenn Beck that, “Like, one day I was jogging, and I saw ACORN, and I really didn’t like them,” so she hatched a scheme. She would pose as a hooker at ACORN. Well, read the transcript of the investigation, or watch the video clips to see for yourself how Giles and her accomplice, James O’Keefe, played it out.

ACORN is a contemptible outfit. It speaks to the Third Worldification of the US. ACORN is also obviously accustomed to dealing with crooked politicians, since the journalist in this clip is posing as a politician, I think.

Update II (Sept. 11): politician, pimp or politician-cum-pimp: They’re one and the same, really, except that politicians are way worse, as there is a good degree of choice to the pimping occupation. Politicians live off us and we have no say in the matter whatsoever.

Nevertheless, I’m unexercised about ACORN’s attitude to prostitution or tax fraud. The first is a choice; the second is a mitzvah.

If anything I’m impressed with the help these black mamas are offering a white ho. It’s almost delicious how mama tax lady comes up with a tax code designation—“performing artist”—for our ungrateful entrapment specialist as well as tax write-offs.

As for the alleged importation of underage, illegal girls from El Salvador (“exchange students”): The ACORN tax lady is from The Street. One look at the pretty white ho and her well-spoken white pimp, and she knows that the “girls” are better off with them than in the flesh markets of El Salvador. In fact, the Housing Assistant encourages the white madam to send her “girls” to school.

“ACORN has ascended. They elect our politicians and receive billions in tax money,” writes O’Keefe. That’s right. The government is the syndicate that feeds ACORN and facilitates its criminal activities. Let our intrepid Prejournalist go after politicians for enabling ACORN and, in general, for their everyday pimping.

Finally, I don’t like entrapment, not when citizens or cops use it to flush out potential criminals. The law must concern itself with catching criminals; not creating crime.

Update I (Sept. 11): I’m the first to admit when my readers make good points against mine. Something good has indeed come of this exercise: The Census Bureau has severed its ties with ACORN.

Over the last several months, through ongoing communication with our regional offices, it is clear that ACORN’s affiliation with the 2010 Census promotion has caused sufficient concern in the general public, has indeed become a distraction from our mission, and may even become a discouragement to public cooperation, negatively impacting 2010 Census efforts,” read a letter from Census Director Robert M. Groves to the president of ACORN.

ACORN had previously been tapped to help with low level data gathering for the 2010 census. A copy of the director’s letter has been sent to Congress and relevant committees, as well as ACORN

You could all be right (most of you have disagreed with me). Given the accretion of corruption in the US, perhaps we liberty lovers are in no state to quibble about minutia. Principled-thinking Republicans are few and far between. Therefore, all we can ask is that, while throwing fits about the affiliates of the Democrats (ACORN)—and pretending corruption and socialism began with Obama—Republicans do some good.

As long as you all remember that when their guy or girl ascends to the imperial throne, nary a word will be said about Republican corrupt subsidiaries—there will be no Town-Hall tartlets going undercover, wiggling their tushes to expose wartime socialism and the attendant corporate cronies such as Kellogg Brown & Root, the construction arm of Cheney’s Halliburton, and the Bechtel Corporation, to name a few from the “W” era. Just so you know.