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The following was post as a comment on Plains Radio website:
YOU BE THE JUDGE….THIS MAKES ME PROUD TO BE A REPUBLICAN!!!!!!!!
1. Outgoing President George W. Bush quietly boards his helicopter and leaves for Texas, commenting only: “Today is not about me. Today is a historical day for our nation and people.”
Eight years ago the day of the inauguration:
1. Outgoing President Bill Clinton schedules two separate radio addresses to the nation, and organizes a public farewell speech/ rally in downtown Washington D.C. scheduled to directly conflict with incoming President Bush’s inauguration ceremony.
Yesterday:
2. President Bush leaves office without issuing a single Presidential pardon, only granting a commutation of sentence to two former border patrol agents convicted of shooting a convicted drug smuggler. He does not grant any type of clemency to Scooter Libby or any other former political aide, ally, or business partner.
Eight years ago yesterday:
2. President Clinton issues 140 pardons and several commutations of sentence on his final day in office. Included in these are: billionaire financier, convicted tax evader, and leading Democratic campaign contributor Marc Rich; Whitwater scandal figure Susan McDougal; Congressional Post Office Scandal figure and former Democratic Congressman Dan Rostenkowski; convicted bank fraud, sexual assault and child porn perpetrator and former Democratic Congressman Melvin Reynolds; and convicted drug felon Roger Clinton, the President’s half-brother.
Yesterday:
3. The Bush daughters leave gift baskets in the White House bedrooms for the Obama daughters, containing flowers, candy, stuffed animals, DVD’s and CD’s, and heartfelt notes of encouragement and advice for the young girls on how to prepare for their new lives in the White House.
Eight years ago Yesterday:
3. Clinton and Gore staffers rip computer wires and electrical outlets from the White House walls, stuff piles of notebook papers into the White House toilets, systematically remove the letter “W” from every computer key-pad in the entire White House, and damage several thousand dollars worth of furniture in the White House master bedroom.
Eight years
Headlines On This Date 4 Years Ago:
“Republicans spending $42 million on inauguration while troops Die in unarmored Humvees”
“Bush extravagance exceeds any reason during tough economic times”
“Fat cats get their $42 million inauguration party, Ordinary Americans get the shaft”
Headlines Today:
“Historic Obama Inauguration will cost only $170 million”
“Obama Spends $170 million on inauguration; America Needs A Big Party”
“Everyman Obama shows America how to celebrate”
“Citibank executives contribute $8 million to Obama Inauguration”
“We Have A President With The Blood Of American Troops On His Hands”
A comment on Sgt. Welsh’s “Big Hollywood” post yesterday:
I did my time in Iraq. I was wounded, I’m alive against all probability. I have several friends who died for America there.
We have a President with the blood of American troops on his hands. I will die not believing that, but knowing it. He did all he could to extend the killing, so we would leave, and the Democrats’ Vietnam II script, would have the ending they needed.
And when he couldn’t win by killing us, he tried to by insulting us, dishonoring those of us who were still fighting, those of us who had returned, those of us who who had been wounded, and those of us who were dead.
“The surge didn’t work.”
And when that lie was obviously just too big, and he had to acknowledge the success, he stole it from us, and handed it to our Sunni brothers-in-arms. The ones who fought with our weapons and our training, who we’d spent years winning over to our side, who lived in barracks with us, who fought shoulder to shoulder with us, whose wounds we treated, and whose dead bodies we carried from the field. In Obama’s mythology, we weren’t there. He now murdered us with his words.
And we soldier on, his lies gone with the wind, but etched forever in the history books. We willingly and happily absorb more blows and cuts, all that we must, from all enemies foreign and domestic.
As for Obama, if Rush Limbaugh merely criticizes, he weeps and gnashes his teeth with the pain.
There’s a reason why boys like Barack Obama don’t join the military.
I know for sure there’s one thing we’re going to learn, and that is what it’s like to have a President with absolutely no conscience, absolutely no sense of decency, absolutely no sense of honor.
- The Ghost Behind You
We have all had a good laugh at the mugshot photos of some of the big name celebtities, like Mel Gibson, Nick Nolte, and Wynonna Judd. Perhaps we need to send the stars a memo on the new mugshot dress code:
Obama Shirts The Mugshot Rage
Blame for the mortgage crisis is flowing everywhere. Of course, the legislators who pushed the banks into making homes available to “Everyone” (Barney Frank, Maxine Waters), and community stabilization groups (ACORN, Barack and Michelle Obama, Father Pfleger), have claimed no responsibility in the debacle.
The follwoing article is from Seattlepi.com:
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Last updated 2:58 p.m. PT
AP
Bank repossession, foreclosure and for sale signs sit outside a foreclosed home in Houston. Two retired FBI officials asserted that the Bush administration was thoroughly briefed on the mortgage fraud crisis and its potential to cascade out of control, but made the decision not to give back to the FBI the agents it needed to address the problem.
FBI saw mortgage fraud early
The FBI was aware for years of “pervasive and growing” fraud in the mortgage industry that eventually contributed to America’s financial meltdown, but did not take definitive action to stop it.
“It is clear that we had good intelligence on the mortgage-fraud schemes, the corrupt attorneys, the corrupt appraisers, the insider schemes,” said a recently retired, high FBI official. Another retired top FBI official confirmed that such intelligence went back to 2002.
The problem, according to the two FBI retirees and several other current and former bureau colleagues, is that the bureau was stretched so thin that no one noticed when those lenders began packaging bad mortgages into bad securities.
“We knew that the mortgage-brokerage industry was corrupt,” the first of the retired FBI officials told the Seattle P-I. “Where we would have gotten a sense of what was really going on was the point where the mortgage was sold knowing that it was a piece of dung and it would be turned into a security. But the agents with the expertise had been diverted to counterterrorism.”
The FBI not only lacked the resources, but also never got the tips it needed from the banking regulatory agencies. The Securities and Exchange Commission, the Office of Thrift Supervision and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency also failed to detect the securities issue, said the first retired FBI official.
“These are very resource-intense cases that take a lot of work by very skilled people,” said John Falvey Jr., a former federal prosecutor who currently does white-collar criminal defense work in Boston.
And Falvey said that financial executives who deliberately chose not to learn the facts about dicey mortgage-lending practices in their companies — who chose to be “willfully blind” to such practices and the subsequent securitization of those mortgages — could be vulnerable to prosecution for securities fraud.
Both retired FBI officials asserted that the Bush administration was thoroughly briefed on the mortgage fraud crisis and its potential to cascade out of control with devastating financial consequences, but made the decision not to give back to the FBI the agents it needed to address the problem. After the terrorist attacks of 2001, about 2,400 agents were reassigned to counterterrorism duties.
This mass reassignment was first chronicled by the Seattle P-I in the Terrorism Tradeoff, a series of investigative reports beginning in 2007 and stretching into 2008. That administration policy, the P-I reported, resulted in a dramatic plunge in FBI criminal investigations and referrals for prosecution. And recent data from Syracuse University researchers shows the problem has worsened.
FBI Assistant Director Ken Kaiser — in a statement – took issue last week with any implication “that if the FBI had made more arrests for mortgage fraud, the crisis could have been averted. To even suggest that is a cry for a lesson in both civics and basic economics.
“It is not a fair or realistic assessment.”
The FBI is now making one of its largest hiring pushes ever. The bureau is seeking 850 new agents this year, some to fill vacancies that had been allowed to languish for years even as the administration blocked efforts to reinforce the FBI’s crime squads.
Still, a P-I analysis of information provided by the FBI shows that 850 new agents doesn’t come close to restoring the bureau’s crime squads. It would take more than double the number of agents and at least $400 million of new funding to bring the bureau’s corps of crime-fighters back to pre- 9/11 levels.
But Deputy Director Steve McMillin of the Bush White House’s Office of Management and Budget told the P-I last year that even partially restoring the FBI crime-fighting capabilities was not a priority.
“The assumption that how it was pre- 9/11 is how it ought to be for all time is not the correct premise,” he said.
The first retired FBI official said: “We made a direct pitch (for more agents) to the OMB even though we weren’t supposed to and they said no.” Instead, “we were looking at reductions, not additions.”
Further complicating efforts to detect and prosecute mortgage fraud, banks and other mortgage lenders were making so much money from the constant churn of transactions and the continually escalating price of homes that the fraud that did arise simply didn’t cost the industry enough money to raise their concerns.
“You had victim banks that would not acknowledge that they were victims,” said the first retired FBI official. ” ‘We’re not out any money,’ they would say. Nothing has been foreclosed. The banks weren’t reporting, the regulators weren’t regulating and the FBI was concentrating on external mortgage fraud as opposed to the underlying internal problem.”
And the administration’s attention was turned to terrorism.
When FBI Director Robert Mueller was briefed on mortgage fraud, “his eyes would glaze over,” the first retired FBI official said. “It was not something that he would consider a high priority. It was not on his radar screen.”
“We knew we had a broader problem, but you’ve got a Justice Department and the administration saying you need to concentrate on domestic intelligence and counterterrorism,” the first official said. “It wasn’t very popular to ask for resources for anything. It was dead on arrival.”
The second FBI official said: “Mueller was caught in a box.
“Mueller actually circumvented the Justice Department and the OMB to get resources. But he was shut down” by the administration.
Public statements by one high FBI executive shows that the bureau was well aware of the potentially devastating impact of rampant mortgage fraud at least five years ago. The executive ominously foretold the crisis in testimony before Congress.
“Based on various industry reports and FBI analysis, mortgage fraud is pervasive and growing,” Chris Swecker, then assistant director of the criminal investigation division, said in October 2004 before the House subcommittee on housing and community opportunity.
Then Swecker made a chillingly accurate prediction of the coming mortgage meltdown and financial collapse:
“The potential impact of mortgage fraud on financial institutions in the stock market is clear. If fraudulent practices become systemic within the mortgage industry and mortgage fraud is allowed to become unrestrained, it will ultimately place financial institutions at risk and have adverse effects on the stock market.”
Swecker went on to describe the scenario that ultimately wrecked financial havoc around the world: “Often mortgage loans sold in secondary markets are used by financial institutions as collateral for other investments. … When loans sold in the secondary market default and have fraudulent or material misrepresentation … these loans become a nonperforming asset, and in extreme fraud cases, the mortgage-backed security is worthless. Mortgage fraud losses adversely affect loan-loss reserves, profits, liquidity levels and capitalization ratios, ultimately affecting the soundness of the financial institution itself.”
Swecker declined recently to comment, other than to say, “My testimony in 2004 speaks for itself.”
But Kaiser, who currently occupies Swecker’s old post, warned against misinterpreting the testimony.
“In context, Assistant Director Chris Swecker meant he believed the FBI could stay focused on mortgage fraud to prevent fraud from becoming the major driver that would cause a collapse of credit in the housing market,” Kaiser said in comments e-mailed to the P-I earlier this month. “We believe by a good measure, the bureau did that.
“The FBI’s Criminal Division has arrested 1,000 suspects and targeted 180 criminal enterprises since 2004,” Kaiser said. “We targeted those lenders and buyers involved in multiple frauds or cases where the profits went to drug crews, gangs or organized crime. More investigations are ongoing. But the FBI is a law enforcement and intelligence agency, we are not banking regulators.”
It wasn’t just the FBI’s white-collar crime program that lacked the resources and political will to do its job.
The Office of Thrift Supervision and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency “and the bank regulators are really the first line of defense,” the first official said. “The investigative agencies (like the FBI) are the second line of defense. We all caught the mortgage fraud aspect. But none of us caught the corporate fraud aspect.”
But even if the regulatory agencies had come to the FBI with the tips, the resources necessary to pull off such an inquiry simply did not exist.
“There were two hurdles,” said the second retired FBI official, “not enough agents working in the criminal area and not enough (federal prosecutors) to prosecute these complex cases. You have to have investigators to follow the money, you have to follow the decision making to take it up to the corporate suites. And we didn’t have it.”
The FBI had every certified public accountant in the bureau working on big fraud cases such as Enron and HealthSouth, the first retired FBI official said. “The ones that weren’t working (those cases) went to terrorist financing.”
The SEC, said the official, did not show an interest in working with the FBI on the problem, either. And it didn’t begin responding to pervasive financial corruption until after the economy collapsed.
“The regulators are the ones embedded in the banks,” the first retired FBI official said. “They would be able to see it if they were looking. They were the first line of defense in detecting it.”
SEC officials declined to comment.
Thrift office spokesman William Ruberry said, “The OTS has a robust enforcement program to investigate and take appropriate action against corruption and fraud uncovered by our examiners, reported by consumers or conveyed by other sources.”
Comptroller’s office spokesman Kevin Mukri said only that “the OCC has always had and continues to have a professional and cooperative working relationship with all law enforcement agencies.”
Nevertheless, high FBI and Bush administration officials knew a potentially devastating problem was on the horizon and failed to stop it.
“It was a sleight of hand because the public thought the administration was resourcing counterterrorism when in fact they were forcing cannibalization of the criminal program,” the retired FBI official said. “Now the chickens have come home to roost.”
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/397690_fbiweb28.html
Last year, as the world’s financial minds met at their annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, we all seemed to be so engrossed in the primaries of our Presidential election season that we either did hear or the media did not report the dire warnings for the economy that eminated from that meeting. Last year’s report from the World Economic Forum (WEF) correctly predicted the crisis in the financial sector, the volatile energy market, and impending food shortages.
The WEF is once again meeting in Davos, and the talk has turned to the global economy, the global crisis, and global control. The identified risks are:
1. The outlook for the global economy remains grim. Markets will remain volatile as liquidity has not returned to the markets.
2. Unemployment will continue to rise as confidence remains at record lows.
3. The WEF predicts the U.S. economy could drag the Chinese Eeonomy down to 6% growth as opposed to the current 8% target. This could have widespread implications.
4. Asset prices around the globe in equities, housing and corporate debt will continue to fall. In fact, they suggest the markets will be flooded with more assets than they can absorb. This will trigger further erosion in assets and massive government spending and intervention particularly in the financial arena.
In light of the economic concerns, on a global basis, one has to wonder the actaul impact of where these problems may be leading our country, and closer to home, the impact on your household.
Gerald Celente is the head of the Trends Research, which does trend analysis studies for businesses, industries, etc. Within the scope of their studies, the Trends Research, over the past decades, has had great accuracy in the trends that have become reality in our economy. In his recent newsletters and interviews (on FOX, CBS, MSNBC, among others), Celente paints a dire picture of our coming months and years. For example, he has predicted that the Christmas season will change over the next few years to become more traditional in gift giving and sharing the holidays, because the retail industry will be in such an upheaval. The Greatest Depression is on the horizon, as we look toward a horrendous summer, the Crash of 2009.
The greatest problem that we as individuals face in interpreting these types of predictions is how to prepare for such events. How much food and supplies should be bought now, and how to store them? How much ammunition, which is already in short demand, should one buy? What should one do with their finances (invest in gold, collectibles, put in the mattress)? How does one monitor the warning signs, the red herring stories?
Mr. Celente is warning of the “Commercial Real Estate Collapse of 2009″, which he says will dwarf the financial collapse of 2008. The following interview was done in December of 2008:
Since this interview, Circuit City has laid the groundwork to close their doors. Linens & Things has alreday closed. Near me, they are located directly across from each other.
A lot to think about!!
http://glickreport.blogs.foxbusiness.com/2009/01/28/back-in-davos-with-a-grim-outlook/
http://www.trendsresearch.com/index.htm
Update: Mr. Celente mentions “camps, or holding centers, in his interview. Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-FL) has introduced legislation this week that would authorize the building of six “security” facilities that could be used for several purposes, including “other purposes the government may deem”.
President Barack Obama was extremely critical of the “signing statement” policies used by his predecessor, President George W. Bush. How ironic then, that President Obama is using a great number of Executive Orders and Executive Memo’s to guide the policies of his administration.
Today, with his dues due to organized labor, President Obama has tapped Vice-President Joe Biden to head up a “Middle Class Task Force” to assure the recovery and growth of the Middle Class of America. As a part of this effort, he issued several orders that require management to make sure that their employees are informed about their rights under the National Labor Relations Board where collective bargaining is concerned, and to highlight union relations in conjunction with federal contracts.
The website for this task force is www.astrongmiddleclass.org . It is to invite input from the middle class. However, I strongly urge the Vice President, to make sure that as a part of the task force, they include members of the middle class: the small business owner impacted by FEMLA, minimum wage, health benefits and a choking tax burden; the families who no longer trust the education system of our country to provide a fair education to their children instead of an indoctrination of liberal socialistic views; the teacher who is instructed to teach only one viewpoint of a subject despite the fact that it is erroneous or one-sided. A task force of a Washington think-tankers will provide no positive changes, simply more burdens on the middle class.
