Tag: Politics

Out of the mouths of cardinals . . .

Cardinal George of Chicago gave a spicy account of his tete-a-tete with Obama last March 18.

“It’s hard to disagree with him because he’ll always tell you he agrees with you,” he [told 200 priests in Louisiana].  “. . . You have to say, again and again, ‘No, Mr. President, we don’t agree (on abortion).’

He told Obama he was concerned about his decision to rescind the Mexico City policy, which meant taxpayer money would go to fund abortion overseas.  He apparently said we were “exporting abortion” by that decision.

“He said we weren’t exporting abortion,” the cardinal said. “I said, ‘Yes we are.’ He would say, ‘I know I have to do certain things here.  . . . . But be patient and you’ll see the pattern will change.’ I said, ‘Mr. President, you’ve given us nothing but the wrong signals on this issue.’ So, we’ll see, but I’m not as hopeful now as I was when he was first elected.”

Why he was hopeful at any time escapes me, but if that was naive of him, the same simplicity, or at least directness, led him to provide a fascinating glimpse at the man who the inimitable Mark Steyn says “has the knack of appearing moderate while acting radical,” calling it, however, “a lethal skill.”

It seems from the cardinal’s account that he was not fooled.

 

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Obama prays alone

Obama will pray privately, as usual for him, says White House spokesman Robert Gibbs.  He will sign his proclamation of the National Day of Prayer but will let it go at that, reverting to how it was before GW Bush.

He did host a Passover Seder for family and friends in April, for a presidential first, but he took a pass on the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast at the Washington Hilton, where 1,300 were expected.  Didn’t ask to come, said a Breakfast spokesman. 

If he had asked and did come to the Catholic breakfast, as GW Bush did, he would not have been allowed to speak, however, as Bush regularly did, because of

a 2004 directive from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops saying that public figures who have taken positions opposing Catholic doctrine should not be publicly honored. [! Except at Notre Dame?]

“We’d host him graciously, but we’d not give him a platform to speak,” [spokesman Joe] Cella said.

All major presidential candidates were invited to attend last year, he added, but none responded.

Catholic Obama-ites were invited this year — Biden and cabinet officers Sebelius, Donovan, Napolitano among them — but none responded, said Cella.

They might have gotten an earful from the keynote speaker, Archbishop Raymond Burke, formerly of St. Louis and now of the Vatican, who has recommended pro-choice Catholics such as Sebelius be denied Communion.

Justice Scalia was scheduled to speak.

Meanwhile, National Day of Prayer ceremonies were to be held Thursday morning in the Cannon House Office Building on Capitol Hill — without Obama.

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The root of our current difficulty

Affordable housing run amok:

A major lesson of Fan and Fred and the subprime fiasco is that no one benefits when we push families into homes they can’t afford. Yet that’s what Congress is doing once again as it relentlessly expands FHA lending with minimal oversight or taxpayer safeguards.

That’s Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored lending programs asking a mere 3.5% down, vs. 10% minimum on conventional loans — with 100% tax-paid guarantee on defaults. 

Which guarantee “means banks and mortgage lenders have no skin in the game,” observes WSJ.  No-skin means no risk, means wotthehell wotthehell, let’s do it, why not?  (If this devil-may-care approach was good enough for that cat mehitabel, it’s good enough for us.)

The VA housing program, to site another way of doing business,

has a default rate about half that of FHA loans, mainly because the VA provides only a 50% maximum guarantee. [italics added]

Thus providing “a market test that the loan shouldn’t be made.”

As for the downpayment, the FHA minimum was 20% when the agency opened in the 30s.  In the 60s it dropped to10%, in 1978 to 3% — raised to 3.5% last year.  The road to national meltdown was paved with good affordable–housing intentions.

Among which was the “bizarre initiative” in 2007 and since then to help the FHA “regain market share” as banks chose en masse to go elsewhere, namely to proliferating subprime lenders.  So now we have what WSJ calls “the federal subprime lending program.”

Wotthell, it’s save-the-agency time.  Damn the default rate, full speed ahead.

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No Laetare award but boffo speaker

John T. Noonan to the barricades:

Judge John T. Noonan Jr., the 1984 recipient of the Laetare Medal, has accepted an invitation to deliver an address in the spirit of the award at Notre Dame’s 164th University Commencement Ceremony on May 17.

His speech will be in lieu of awarding the medal this year.

In Contraception, Noonan in 1965 compared centuries-old anti-usury church legislation (opposed to lending with any amount of interest), which was eventually abandoned, with its much-debated anti-birth control prohibition, leaving Catholics with at least a conundrum of major dimensions.

Shrewd, shrewd move by Notre Dame: Noonan on stage with Obama, with considerable chance of focused confrontation, or at least provocative juxtaposition — especially in giving no award this year and calling Noonan’s a Laetare-style speech. 

A speech by one highly praised by this year’s Laetare recipient, who refused it because of Obama’s being honored at the same graduation ceremony.

[T]he quality of his legal scholarship and judicial opinions prompts Harvard Law School Professor Mary Ann Glendon to place Noonan alongside Learned Hand, Benjamin Cardozo, and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. as “one of the legal giants of the twentieth century.”

Major hat tip to David Gibson at Dot Commonweal.

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The state will provide

Sen. Roland Burris is “Tombstone” to Chi Trib’s John Kass, and rightly so, but he made some sense in a South Side community meeting last week.  Pestered by former Chicago Housing Authority Director Phil Jackson (who complained mostly about Obama’s neglecting poor people), Burris 

told Jackson there was little the government could do to solve the problems of broken African-American families.

“No government, no senator, no alderman, no representative is going to be in your family dealing with those kids that we’re raising,” he said.

And Burris, 71, said he found himself at a loss trying to stop some children from turning to crime, saying “an old gentleman like me trying to deal with 10- and 12-year-olds that will cuss you out in a minute if you look at ’em . . . ”

Jackson interjected: “That’s what we need help on.”

“A dollar bill ain’t going to help that,” Burris replied.

“We need help to put structures into place,” Jackson countered.

There’s a lot in that “dollar bill” remark, and a lot in Jackson’s reply.  J. himself had raised the broken-family issue, which he sees in terms of “structures” to be installed by elected officials, starting with Obama, specifically

CeaseFire, an anti-gang violence program in the city which hasn’t gotten any federal stimulus money.

This is sad.  A government program is supposed to create a whole new culture for black families?  The same government that installed welfare-dependence structures that for generations made families virtual wards of the state?

And that all-purpose “stimulus.”  Of what?  Jobs for counsellors?

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Ford surges, builder gets inventive

Competition is alive and well in the U.S.A., no matter how the gentiles rage — i.e. “gentes,” or nations, in the Psalms, reading here U.S. Treasury and the governmental leviathan.

The results [lower than expected quarterly loss, thanks to union-contract negotiating and bond-buybacks] reflect in part Ford’s strategy: to steal customers from its weakened crosstown rivals and separate Ford from GM and Chrysler in the minds of the public, investors and lawmakers.

The strategy is part of a longer-term vision that would have Ford rise above its age-old competitors to form a new, global Big Three with the two largest car makers, Toyota Motor Corp. and Volkswagen AG, say people familiar with the company’s thinking.

Look.  It’s natural to man (and woman); so socialists, beware.  You can’t snuff this thing out.

Similarly, the Calif. home-builder builds a better mousetrap, not only installing furniture, but also making it worth a resident’s worthwhile to move in and add to salability.

This $1.2 million seaside pied-a-terre is occupied by Johnna Clavin, a 45-year-old Los Angeles event planner and decorator who has seen business slow. In exchange for giving the townhouse a stylishly lived-in look, she gets to stay there at a steep discount and stands to earn a bonus if the house sells fast.

It’s what you call making do, American-style.  How’d it happen?

Ms. Clavin responded to a Craigslist ad placed by Quality First Home Marketing, a San Diego startup. It aims to fill high-end empty houses with occupants who play the part of happy homeowners, in a bid to remove the price-depressing stigma of vacancy.

Go American!

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The day’s baddest news

Obama wants to fix “access to credit.”  Being from the government, he’s there to help.  Demurring politely, Congressman Scott Garrett (R.-NJ) explains the problem, closing with a politic sentence that has a key word missing:

I am a strong advocate for Access to Credit Reform, and I believe we need to ensure that government actions don’t cause greater problems in the marketplace and result in the restriction of credit availability for all consumers. [Italics added]

The key word is “but,” replacing “and” before “I believe.”

This is typical politic talk (he is a politico and has to negotiate) — downsizing the objection, refusing to give it the highlighting it deserves.  It comes after he has said what’s wrong with this foolish, if not execrable meddling by legislators.

This [reform] bill [to be considered next week] has the potential to reduce investment in the marketplace, increase rates and fees for all credit card holders, and restrict credit availability.

Problem: Legislative meddling drives out capital, further “tightening in marketplace liquidity,” and raises rates for all, “regardless of their level of credit risk.”

It can, he said — it will: why wouldn’t it? — make credit less available for all.  It’s supposed to protect borrowers with bad credit history, but it makes it harder for them and everyone else to get it.

Obama wants it, and that’s my most scarifying headline, in today’s Chi Trib:

President Barack Obama seeks crackdown on credit card rate, fee hikes: President wants crackdown on rate, fee hikes; industry defends practices as necessary

or, in hard copy, p-1, four columns, above fold:

Obama takes aim at ‘unfair’ credit card fees, practices: Industry likely to launch strong opposition

In the latter, Chi Trib leads with Wilma Erwin and her “surprise and anger” at the raised rate of her Discover Card and Thomas Charles Kenniff, who carries no balance but had his available credit “slashed nearly in half” by Bank of America.

Fie on those nasty lenders!  Make them lend at lower rates to help Wilma!  Make them lend more to Thomas Charles! 

So speaks Obama:

“There has to be strong and reliable protections for consumers, protections that ban unfair rate increases and forbid abusive fees and penalties,” Obama said after a White House meeting with credit card company executives. “The days of any-time, any-reason rate hikes and late-fee traps have to end.”

Can he be sued for abuse of power?  Maybe some well-financed court case that will tie up his lawyers and call witnesses to the stand.  Obama could call Wilma Erwin to the stand.  A jury of her peers could decide it.

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Serious about jobs in Ga.

Georgia is going against the grain, cutting taxes, Stephen Moore reports in the email-accessible WSJ.Com’s Political Diary.

Senate Majority Leader Dan Moody says: “We are trying to create a contrast with the overspending and overtaxing in D.C.” Jonathan Williams of the American Legislative Exchange Council adds: “We know from recent history that those states that cut their taxes will gain more jobs and will have a faster economic recovery.”

No soaking the rich down there, at least if the Republican governor goes along.

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We’re all John Maynards now

Gotcha, John Maynard:

John Maynard Keynes often employed flowery language like “animal spirits” and “liquidity trap” to describe things he did not understand. He was, after all, more of a bureaucrat than an economist. In fact, he would best be described as an anti-economist because he eschewed things like supply and demand and held the opinion that government could run the economy.

He be the devil-may-care proponent of our newly resurrected borrow-and-spend philosophy.  He may rest in peace again some day, but not yet.

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Our left-wing president

Looking, acting, talking like a . . . duck?

President Obama showed his hand this week when The New York Times wrote that he is considering converting the stock the government owns in our country’s banks from preferred stock, which it now holds, to common stock.

This seemingly insignificant change is momentous. It means that the federal government will control all of the major banks and financial institutions in the nation. It means socialism.

Dick Morris cutting to the chase.

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