I LIKE this judge!

When it came time to sentence ACORN for voter registration fraud, Nevada District Judge Donald Mosley imposed the maximum fine and put those Leftist election crooks in their place:

Mosley, reading the pre-sentence report, listed a series of voter registration fraud allegations against ACORN workers. He said that if the claims have been true, then "It is making a mockery of our election process. If I had an individual in this courtroom...who was responsible for this kind of thing, I would put that person in prison for 10 years, hard time, and not think twice about it," he said. "To me this is reprehensible. This is the kind of thing you see in some banana republic, Uruguay or someplace, not in the United States."

I LIKE this judge! And I, too, yearn for the day when people committing vote fraud in the United States are sent to prison. It would be even better if the jail birds were those elected via election fraud they were involved in. Election fraud is treason against constitutional democracy and a crime against legitimate voters and should be treated as such.

But instead under the Obama regime, the Department of Justice is enabling election fraud, not fighting it.

Obama Lies on ACORN

Obama on ACORN over the weekend: “I didn’t even know that ACORN was getting a whole lot of federal money.”

Yeaaaah, riiiight.

You’d have to have your head in the sand not to know that ACORN is “getting a whole lot of federal money.” Instead Obama’s White House has been busy from Day One shoveling money to ACORN. Only when it was further revealed what a criminal enterprise ACORN is has the White House tried to distance itself from ACORN . . . which is another joke.

When Obama took office, I never thought he would rival Bill Clinton at being a bald-faced liar. I was wrong.

Franken Steals Another Senate Seat for Democrats

As expected, Al Franken has succeeded in stealing another Senate seat for the Democrats. Yes, I am being a bit dogmatic there. There is no question in my mind that Franken took this seat not because he received the most votes but because Democrats aggressively and unethically gamed the vote recount, the will of the voters be damned.

And, no, I will not leave the issue of election fraud alone. With the Senate seats already stolen, with Obama and ACORN gaming the Census, and with God-knows-what the Democrats will try to pull in the next two elections, in addition to blatant disregard of the Constitution, we are in danger of having a government without a shred of legitimacy after the next two elections.

I am not predicting that. I expect voter anger will overcome the Democrats’ electioneering in 2012 if not 2010. But with the Democrats being so successful in stealing elections and so willing to do so and now having the added tool of the Census, it is a danger.

Like I said, I will revisit this issue.

Obama Youth Funds for ACORN

Think the concern out there that Obama Youth funding will be used to funnel money to ACORN and other Leftist groups is just paranoia?

Think again. In the Senate, Sen. David Vitter offered an amendment to prohibit such funds from going to ACORN. The amendment was voted down 53-43.

This is but one aspect of the Obama regime’s contempt for your conscience. Do you object to abortion, ACORN, and other leftisms? Too bad. You are going to pay for them anyway.

All the more reason to go Galt.

U. S. Catholic Bishops Cut Off Funds to ACORN

Kudos to U. S. Roman Catholic bishops for cutting off all funds to ACORN. The Catholic Campaign for Human Development (There’s a scary title.) had been making grants to ACORN.

Now I could ask why the heck the Cartholicks were giving uberleftist pro-abortion subverters of democracy like ACORN money in the first place. But I’m trying to be charitable this morning.

Obama Is Funding ACORN Vote Fraud

First, I give the “Mainstream” News Media some much deserved bashings. So when much deserved kudos are in order I will give those, too. So kudos to CNN for investigating and reporting on ACORN’s vote fraud.

I saw their excellent report over lunch just now. One of the items it mentions is that the Obama campaign paid ACORN $800,000 earlier this year for their voter registration drives. So Obama is funding their vote fraud.

CNN: Despite its past, the Obama campaign gave $800,000 to ACORN to help fund its primary registration drive, and ACORN has endorsed Barack Obama for president. The Obama campaign reacted this afternoon, saying, it is “committed to protecting the integrity of the voting process and said it has not worked with ACORN during the general election”.

Yeah, right. But ACORN sure is working for them, using that $800,000 to corrupt our election.

There is no excuse for Obama’s complicity in this as ACORN has a sordid history of vote fraud in past elections as well documented here. Obama cannot with any credibility say, “We didn’t know.”

So I’ll say it again – Barack Obama is funding election fraud.

ACORN Registers Dallas Cowboys to Vote . . . in Nevada

Obama’s favorite community organizing group, ACORN, has once again been caught engaging in voter fraud, this time fraudulent voter registrations in Nevada.

The phony names used included the starting line-up of the Dallas Cowboys.

Dallas sports talk radio is having a bit of fun with that.

This excuse takes the cake:

“The fact is, this is hard work and there were some people that probably sat down on a couch and filled out names out of a phone book,” said Matthew Henderson, Southwest regional director for ACORN. “That’s really what we’re talking about here — not an attempt to steal an election.”

Of course not. And, of course Obama wouldn’t support any such efforts. No, not at all.

What Caused the Current Financial Crisis?

I don’t want to oversimplify the causes of the current financial mess. There is more than one cause and a lot of blame to spread around. For one thing, mandated mark-to-market accounting certainly has – and is – contributing. And allowing bond insurance to be separated from the underlying bonds (enabling people to do the financial equivalent of buying life insurance on their enemies) certainly has thrown fuel on the fire.

But probably the biggest problem is the great push, practically mandated by the federal government and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, to make massive amounts of sub-prime mortgages. These were an accident waiting to happen – waiting for the next housing downturn. And, sure enough, the first significant housing downturn caused many of these sub-prime mortgages to fail.

Democrats are trying to blame Bush for this (Doesn’t he get the blame for everything?) and to blame McCain, too. But the facts are Bush tried to reform mortgage lending back in 2003 as reported by the New York Times(!). And in 2005, McCain co-sponsored housing finance reform with this prescient warning:

If Congress does not act, American taxpayers will continue to be exposed to the enormous risk that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pose to the housing market, the overall financial system, and the economy as a whole.

If you want to go further back – and you should – here is one of the better explanations of the sources of the sub-prime mess I’ve come across. Pay particular attention to the following excerpt (I haven’t formatted the links. Those can be found at the above source.).
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A home of your own. It’s part of the American dream. Work hard, save up for a down payment, pay your bills on time and, presto, you, too, can buy a home.

For decades the government has done things to help Americans to realize the dream, e.g., graciously allowing citizens to keep some of their own money to help pay for the interest on a mortgage (the official term for this is a “tax deduction,” but I prefer my locution since it emphasizes the fact that it is YOUR MONEY we are talking about).

But what about people who do not work hard (if they work at all)? What about people who have not saved up for a down payment? What about people who do not pay their bills on time (if they pay them at all)? Why shouldn’t they get to live the American dream?

That was the question that led to
”The Community Reinvestment Act” (see here for more).
* The original Community Reinvestment Act was signed into law in 1977 by Jimmy Carter. Its purpose, in a nutshell, was to require banks to provide credit to “under-served populations,” i.e., those with poor credit.
The buzz word was “affordable mortgages,” e.g., mortgages with low teaser-rates, which required the borrower to put no money down, which required the borrower to pay only the interest for a set number of years, etc.
* In 1995, Bill Clinton’s administration made various changes to the CRA, increasing “access to mortgage credit for inner city and distressed rural communities,” i.e., it provided for the securitization, i.e. public underwriting, of what everyone now calls “sub-prime mortgages.”

Bottom line? It forced banks to issue $1 trillion in sub-prime mortgages.

$1 trillion, i.e., a thousand billion dollars in sub-prime, i.e., risky, mortgages, in order to push this latest example of social engineering.

But wait: how did it force banks to do this? Easy. Introduce a federal requirement that banks make the loans or face penalties. As Howard Husock, writing in City Journal way back in 2000 observed: “Bank examiners would use federal home-loan data, broken down by neighborhood, income group, and race, to rate banks on performance. There would be no more A’s for effort. Only results—specific loans, specific levels of service—would count.” Way back in 1994, for example, Barack Obama sued Citibank on behalf of a client who charged that the bank “systematically denied mortgages to African-American applicants and others from minority neighborhoods.”
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And guess who else made big contributions to this mess? Among the villains are Barney Frank, Christopher Dodd, and – Surprise! Surprise! – Obama and his favorite community organizing group, ACORN.

Are there Republicans to blame for the current troubles? Oh yes. Did eeeevil Wall Street people contribute? Well, yes. What about predatory lenders? Well, I’d personally like to see some in prison.

But facts are facts. The big push behind the policies that led to the sub-prime mortgage mess came primarily from Democrats . . . though Democrats try to demagogue and distract from that and though the “Mainstream” News Media ignores it.

Not One Effing Dime for ACORN! (UPDATED)

I support the Paulson Plan to deal with difficult financial instruments that are clogging up the financial markets. And some of the alterations proposed by Democrats are reasonable. (I bet you thought I’d never say something like that.) But two things have me livid.

One is the performance by Senate Democrat Leader Harry Reid just now. He played brazen partisan politics with this at the worse time, blaming John McCain for the difficulties in getting something passed. What I said to the TV is not printable on this blog.

Meanwhile (#2), the Democrats are trying to use this to funnel more money to ACORN. Yes, the same radical corrupt “community organizing” group favored by Obama repeatedly caught engaging in vote fraud. And that may be the real deal killer.

Republicans and reasonable Democrats should demand support for ACORN and similar groups is stripped from this measure now!


UPDATE: Good news. One report says the ACORN slush fund has been removed. Let’s hope so.