Vast Write Wing - September 2008

[lwoolley]

The Wash-Post-CBS have collaborated in a sudden poll,out of nowhere,
that shows that Obama is ahead BY NINE POINTS.That's right after
yesterday's polls that generally show it as too close to call.
They offer that "this proves that the dwindling economy shows that Democrats are gaining more credibility because they are trusted more in an economic crisis".How self-serving

If you smell a push-poll,where the tail wags the dog, YOU ARE RIGHT.
The sample included 28 %...Republicans.The way you get ahead w/
a secular-progressive agenda is by DISHONESTY that claims "look, everybody's doin it, so you'd better fall in line or you're gonna be left out." Now if KFMB(San diego) had done their Snopes work ,like our Vanessa did w/ the Houston story on illegals debate, they'd have found it fallacious.
But no, KFMB reported slavishly ,without reservation

Remember how they did it w/ phony push-polls during the Clinton impeachement? i e "most college students believe oral sex is not..sex"
Dishonesty PAYS for Democrats because they have a large media support network who'll back their"who're ya gonna believe, your eyes or me"

In order to affect SOCIAL CHANGE they fall back on lies>I'm calling KFMB

Al, Lemon Grove

[lwoolley]

Hi Lynn,
I heard the letter you read from the unnamed guy from Waco (9/19/08) who
thinks he is so smart that no one except him knew that Massachusetts and
other northeastern states were the first to agitate for the revolution
against Britain and his main point, to encourage invasion of the South to
end slavery. Lest he think that we ignorant southerners believe the Civil
War's greatest Northern support was for the purpose of ending slavery,
I'd like to remind him that both wars (the American revolution and the
Civil War) were more driven by economics than altruism. Further, the main
slave traders were northerners.
Best Regards,
Allen

[lwoolley]

I thought perhaps I had sent this to you before, but can't find that I
did. You had something on today about "The View," apparently a TV show
I've never seen which accused Republicans of being racist. I just
yesterday, (9/21/08) saw that a Quinnipiac poll indicated that 93% of
blacks are going to vote for Obama. I find it hard to believe that the
whole 93% are basing their vote on analysis of issues advocated by the
two candidates. Could there be a little bit of hypocrisy?
Regards, Allen

[theotherside]

Lynn Ole Boy,

Since the melt down on Wall Street, you have been trying every which way to somehow blame it on the Democrats including Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. Let us take stock of these accusations. It does not pass the smell test of any logical thinking organism except maybe the wild right wing chicken hawks of Woolleyism and Limburger...er...Limbaughism. Jimmy Carter left office in January 1981. That's nearly twenty eight years ago, Lynn Ole Boy. At some point in time you need to find a more recent and relative scapegoat to lay all the blame on. You are like the excuse maker....always looking to avoid responsibility. It's always somebody else's fault, isn't it Lynn Ole Boy. Never mind that we've had three Republicans elected to the presidentcy since 1981. That's a total of twenty years of the last twenty eight years since Jimmy Carter's one term.

Bill Clinton left office in January 2001. Last I checked the Republican Party has been in control of the White House since Wild Bill left. You wonderfully silly Republicans held control of both houses of Congress for six of the last eight years. Not to mention control of the House from 1994 to 2007(thirteen years of Republican control), Lynn Ole Boy. Stands to reason that these chickens are going to roost at the door steps of the Republican Party. Now I know you right wingers like to blame anything or anyone left of the John Birch Society and the White Christian Neo-Nazis for all the woes of the world, but it just won't work this time. Most Americans are rational and logical and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to connect all of the dots and see this meltdown as Republican Economics exposed (October 1929 all over again). You guys will privatize any gains from the stock market while socializing losses so the rest of us take the hit for the incompetence of your party's economic theories. I can only envision what the right wing zealist talk show crew would be saying on the air ways if a liberal Democrat had decided to nationalize the biggest insurance company (AIG) in America. Probably would have had you righties joining the Palin Separatist Movement from Alaska and resorted to force to overthrow the bum.

When things are going well, the management makes out, the shareholders make out, all the private sector people do well, but when something goes wrong and decisions are made that turn out to be bad decisions, the U.S. taxpayer has to take on the problem and there is something very wrong about that. All of these people that made all of that money are running off with the money and the rest of us are left holding the debt bag.

When Alan Greenspan and all of you free marketers (aka Markateers) demanded that there be no regulation of vast entities of the market....just let the free market alone and go on without any regulation what so ever.....well geez..... look at the results. Hooverism revisited. This problem isn't near done. We have not even come close to the bottom and to allow the same bunch of idiots to get us out of what they got us into slaps of idiocy or insanity or both.

Your Loyal Listener,
Richard in Temple

[lwoolley]

I grew up in the Chicago neighborhood.
I left there in 1971 when I joined the Army. (Fort Hood)
Moved back in 1974 when I got out of the Army.
Moved back to Texas again for good in 1978 and been here every since. I have only been back to visit family 5 times in the past 30 years. I used to think the Land of Lincoln was great place until had a chance to visit the rest of the USA.
No love loss for ILLINOIS (Pronounced Ill & Annoy)
John

Wonderful Chicago, the City That Obama Represents?



Body count. In the last six months 292 killed (murdered) in Chicago, 221 killed in Iraq.

Sens. Barack Obama & Dick Durbin, Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., Gov. Rod Blogojevich, House leader Mike Madigan, Atty. Gen. Lisa Madigan, Mayor Richard Daley.....our leadership in Illinois.....all Democrats. Thank you for the combat zone in Chicago. Of course they're all blaming each other. Can't blame Republicans, they're aren't any!

State pension fund $44 Billion in debt, worst in country. Cook County (Chicago) sales tax 10.25% highest in country. (Look'em up if you want). Chicago school system one of the worst in country.

This is the political culture that Obama comes from in Illinois. He's gonna "fix" Washington politics

[lwoolley]

Lynn,
I would have to be a kook for you to understand my true believes as you are also a kook who uses
the radio and paper to spread your kooky self.I will try to explain it simple enough for you to understand.
1. I do not believe in abortion..
2. I do believe in birth control and I stressed to young ladies that not having sex was the right way to
to make sure they didn't get pregnant .But as you should know sex is going to take place and some
young ladies will get pregnant.
3. I would get very up set when a mother and daughter would come to me asking for help when the
father was her own father and the mother wanted to protect him.Some times he was a white male
like you who claimed he was a conservative but was really just another kook. You protest so much I
wonder
about you. As a high school counselor I was by law required to report each case to child protective
service's.In cases like this I think abortion should be considered .What if her baby was a girl and her
father was still around?
4. I also don't believe we shouldn't be in Iraq killing children and innocent women. When I got out the
marines after world war two I got rid of both of the guns that I owned. By the way Iraq didn't attack
us, Bush/Cheney ordered the attack on them.
5. I may be a kook but there are a lot of us including you. A conservative I think not. Maybe some day
you will admit to your self what you are hiding, for all I know you may be a molester. Good night
and pleasant dreams.

Still a voter,
Herbert R Baker

Kill those babies! That way, they're safer! You're a nut, Herb.

Lynn

[lwoolley]

Lynn,
All those groceries have to be paid for on the front end. All those items
are paid for with American dollars given to foreign suppliers. You need
to go to the store and read the lables where those raw veggies, fruits,
can and boxed items come from. They mostly come from foreign places.
Those are items paid for with the American dollar. That dollars keeps
getting less and less valuable there for the dollar that we Americans
spend in those stores gets less and less valuable and the price of those
items get more and more expensive. That reaches a point where it cost too
much to buy for the folks.

[lwoolley]

The media reports the polls (supposedly what the American people think) put the "blame" for the financial meltdown on the backs of the Republicans. This is primarily because the President is a Republican and the fallout is happening now. The truth is that it takes a while for financial markets to collapse, especially when the first years of the loans are set up with artificially low payments and the built in escalations are seldom considered and even more often not understood by the new "homeowner" (buyer).

This expose' tells you the real reason for the meltdown created by the sub-prime loans; now the big banks who bought up these mortgages and then repackaged and sold them to other banks and Investment Companys as security for borrowing even more money are in a financial crisis because the loans aren't worth the paper they were written on.

How A Clinton-Era Rule Rewrite Made Subprime Crisis Inevitable

By TERRY JONES
INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Wednesday, September 24, 2008 4:30 PM PT

One of the most frequently asked questions about the subprime market meltdown and housing crisis is: How did the government get so deeply involved in the housing market?

IBD Exclusive Series: What Caused The Loan Crisis?

The answer is: President Clinton wanted it that way.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, even into the early 1990s, weren't the juggernauts they'd later be.

While President Carter in 1977 signed the Community Reinvestment Act, which pushed Fannie and Freddie to aggressively lend to minority communities, it was Clinton who supercharged the process. After entering office in 1993, he extensively rewrote Fannie's and Freddie's rules.

In so doing, he turned the two quasi-private, mortgage-funding firms into a semi-nationalized monopoly that dispensed cash to markets, made loans to large Democratic voting blocs and handed favors, jobs and money to political allies. This potent mix led inevitably to corruption and the Fannie-Freddie collapse.

Despite warnings of trouble at Fannie and Freddie, in 1994 Clinton unveiled his National Homeownership Strategy, which broadened the CRA in ways Congress never intended.

Addressing the National Association of Realtors that year, Clinton bluntly told the group that "more Americans should own their own homes." He meant it.

Clinton saw homeownership as a way to open the door for blacks and other minorities to enter the middle class.

Though well-intended, the problem was that Congress was about to change hands, from the Democrats to the Republicans. Rather than submit legislation that the GOP-led Congress was almost sure to reject, Clinton ordered Robert Rubin's Treasury Department to rewrite the rules in 1995.

The rewrite, as City Journal noted back in 2000, "made getting a satisfactory CRA rating harder." Banks were given strict new numerical quotas and measures for the level of "diversity" in their loan portfolios. Getting a good CRA rating was key for a bank that wanted to expand or merge with another.

Loans started being made on the basis of race, and often little else.

"Bank examiners would use federal home-loan data, broken down by neighborhood, income group and race, to rate banks on performance," wrote Howard Husock, a scholar at the Manhattan Institute.

But those rules weren't enough.

Clinton got the Department of Housing and Urban Development to double-team the issue. That would later prove disastrous.

Clinton's HUD secretary, Andrew Cuomo, "made a series of decisions between 1997 and 2001 that gave birth to the country's current crisis," the liberal Village Voice noted. Among those decisions were changes that let Fannie and Freddie get into subprime loan markets in a big way.

Other rule changes gave Fannie and Freddie extraordinary leverage, allowing them to hold just 2.5% of capital to back their investments, vs. 10% for banks.

Since they could borrow at lower rates than banks due to implicit government guarantees for their debt, the government-sponsored enterprises boomed.

With incentives in place, banks poured billions of dollars of loans into poor communities, often "no doc" and "no income" loans that required no money down and no verification of income.

By 2007, Fannie and Freddie owned or guaranteed nearly half of the $12 trillion U.S. mortgage market — a staggering exposure.

Worse still was the cronyism.

Fannie and Freddie became home to out-of-work politicians, mostly Clinton Democrats. An informal survey of their top officials shows a roughly 2-to-1 dominance of Democrats over Republicans.

Then there were the campaign donations. From 1989 to 2008, some 384 politicians got their tip jars filled by Fannie and Freddie.

Over that time, the two GSEs spent $200 million on lobbying and political activities. Their charitable foundations dropped millions more on think tanks and radical community groups.

Did it work? Well, if measured by the goal of putting more poor people into homes, the answer would have to be yes.

From 1995 to 2005, a Harvard study shows, minorities made up 49% of the 12.5 million new homeowners.

The problem is that many of those loans have now gone bad, and minority homeownership rates are shrinking fast.

Fannie and Freddie, with their massive loan portfolios stuffed with securitized mortgage-backed paper created from subprime loans, are a failed legacy of the Clinton era.

[lwoolley]

Lynn,

Last night when the President said that he has invited and encouraged Mc Cain and Obama to Washington to help asses this economic crises, did you feel that was a political punch to Obama? I ask this because Obama’ stand on this issue was publically to dismiss the urgency of his presence and this crisis. I think Obama is staying as far as he can from Washington because his economic advisors are partly responsible for this. Mc Cain has Obama painted into a corner! GODS SPEED,



MOE(Temple)

[lwoolley]

I realize we've got a presidential campaign going on. However, BOTH of our candidates are senators that were elected by the people of their state to represent them in Washington! So, until such time as one of them is elected president, they need to be in Washington doing the job they were elected to do! Especially right now!
BB

[lwoolley]

I enjoy your show as much as I can listen at work. It would probably be beneficial if you looked into the "mark to market" scenario you mentioned on the show. It seems to have merit in helping the situation of using insurance without a full-fledged bailout. Something probably needs to be done, but this would be much less painful.

[lwoolley]

I'm tired, frankly, of listening to all the talking heads analyzing Obama
as a candidate and what he believes and the meaningless words that come
out of his mouth. I know it has to be done but, as I frustratingly told
someone recently during one of my political rants, all we need to know
about obama is A). He is a Political Hack B). He is a Socialist.
Unfortunately, at least 40 percent of Americans embrace and embody those
two principles.
Ultimately, if John McCain wins this election by less than 3 or 4 points,
I will be dumbfounded. If he loses, well count me among the future
apathetic voter who would possibly have trouble turning on the Lynn Wooley
or Rush Limbaugh Show on a daily basis.

MPH

[theotherside]

Lynn Ole Boy,

Can't let the Terry Jones quote on 'How A Clinton Era Rule Rewrite Made this Financial Crisis Inevitable'. Lynn Ole Boy, you can spout Fannie Mae or Freddie Mae or CRA or cronyism on your show all day long. What you are actually trying to do and failing miserably at, is diverting resposibility and focus away from your Republicans and towards Bill Clinton whose been out of office and out of power for eight years now. Enough is enough Lynn. You can put lipstick on a......well....you know the rest. The facts of this financial nightmare do not change simply because you say so, Lynn Ole Boy.

First of all we are in a recession and this recession is different fromn the other recessions because it began and is continuing with the collapse of the credit markets and the collapse in the credit markets is, in turn, the result of deregulation gone nuts. AKA dergulation on steroids. And this is a repeat of a lot of things that happened in the 1920's, where there was too much speculation with too much borrowed money and a complete lack of transperancy. The regulators, the public had no idea these bonds had been created out of subprime mortgages and what they really contained, what they were really worth. The people that packaged them were not subject to any kind of regulatory scrutiny.

Regulation of our financial institutions and failure to manage our trade deficit has led top a huge accumulation of capitol in other countries like China, and that capitol had to find a place to go, and that ended up lowering interest rates and sort of chasing after all kinds of investments, including the mortgage investments that were the trigger of this current crisis.

Other regulatory failure was the failure to address the housing bubble. The rules of the economy that have existed for the last 100 years, had been suspended to think we didn't have a housing bubble and Alan Greenspan let it go by.

The fourth failure was the broader financial deregulatory failure, which is both a specific rollback of prior regulations on Wall Street and on big banks and, more generally the laissez-faire attitude by the Bush Admoinistration to let these financial insitiutions do whatever it wants. Because as you have always said, Lynn Ole Boy, the free market knows what is right and what is wrong and regulation only ties the hands of its investors. Well...... you got your Republican oversight at the White House and in congress for six of the last eight years and now we paying a very serious price for that.

And finally, there was the failure to regulate the housing market itself, with all of the subprime mortgage lending abuses. These issues have been identified for years by organizations fighting against predatory lending. It has been allowed to spin completely out of control by our federal government run by the Republican Bush Administration for the past eight years and in Congress for six of the past eight years. BTW....you repubs have had control of our House of Representative for the past thirteen years until 2007. This is coming to roost at your doorstep, Lynn Ole Boy. Maybe now we can shove through the Fairness Doctrine so there is not this unchecked right wing propoganda spouting constantly throughout the radio airways without any kind of check and balance to it.

Your Loyal Listener,
Richard in Temple

[lwoolley]

help me out here. I tried to email obama to ask him why he thought it would ever be proper to tell anyone to "call me if you need me in Washington". I think he already had the call. The call was when he got elected. why did he choose to set on his ass and continue with his self serving campaign and not go to work as he had been paid to do. If I lived in the little guy's district I would be really pissed. I cannot imagine the ignorance required of an individual that would feel that little guy would be worthy of a vote.

Sherman
Odessa, Tx

[lwoolley]

Lynn,

Recommend you check out my new Basic Economics thread. Must admit, the Bluto-Biden one made me chuckle.

I’m still a senior Army civilian at Fort Hood. 32 years and counting. Hooah!

My youngest son is now three months into a 12+ month deployment to Afghanistan. He’s a Private assigned to an Infantry unit at Hood. Doing well but I must admit; it was one thing when it was me, quite another when its your kid. Proud of him though. Years from now he’ll be able to look back and say “I stepped up; I served”.

Swapped emails with Thane this week. He has his family there in Korea and extended his tour for a third year. Says he’ll retire when he gets back next summer and that he and I would get together for coffee. I’ve never met him so I’m intrigued about one day putting video with audio. Want to join us?

Still Serving & Army Strong!

Stu