When you’ve lost Howard Stern
I can’t believe I missed Howard Stern’s epiphany regarding the modern day Democratic Party. I heard the audio just this morning at iOwnTheWorld, a blog I’ve never heard of before but will check out again. Howard Stern on his radio show the other day said that he’s had enough with the Democrats. He’s realized that they are exactly what many of us have said they are: communists.
For years you could not stand those smug, holier-than-thou environmentalists who felt they corned the market on moral superiority. Well, consider yourself a good judge of character. The Daily Caller brings us the story:
When Al Gore was caught running up huge energy bills at home at the same time as lecturing on the need to save electricity, it turns out that he was only reverting to “green” type.
According to a study, when people feel they have been morally virtuous by saving the planet through their purchases of organic baby food, for example, it leads to the “licensing [of] selfish and morally questionable behaviour”, otherwise known as “moral balancing” or “compensatory ethics”.
Do Green Products Make Us Better People is published in the latest edition of the journal Psychological Science. Its authors, Canadian psychologists Nina Mazar and Chen-Bo Zhong, argue that people who wear what they call the “halo of green consumerism” are less likely to be kind to others, and more likely to cheat and steal. “Virtuous acts can license subsequent asocial and unethical behaviours,” they write.
You always knew that those environmentalists who sneered down their noses at you because you didn’t put your recycled glass and plastic at the curb every week and drove an SUV instead of a Prius were like arrogant jerks. Now there’s a study to prove it.
The Mudville Gazette posted this image that will swell your heart with pride for our military men and women.
Image via The Sniper
A couple of weeks ago we learned that the state of Illinois is facing almost certain financial disintegration because of decades of Democrats’ shockingly irresponsible government spending. It’s gotten so bad that now Illinois state lawmakers are receiving eviction notices on their local offices:
The state’s money problems are so bad that lawmakers are getting eviction notices and calls from collection agencies about their offices back home.
At least five state senators say they’ve piled up so much unpaid rent, sheepish landlords are asking them when the government plans to make good on its bills.
“He said, ‘Ira, I’m sorry,’” said Sen. Ira Silverstein, D-Chicago, recalling a visit from his landlord delivering an eviction notice. “And what am I going to do? I can’t argue with the man.”
While none of the lawmakers has actually gotten the boot yet, they are getting a taste of the frustratingly slow pace at which the state pays bills as it careens toward a $13 billion budget hole. It’s a pain that’s magnified exponentially for school districts, drug rehabilitation counselors and businesses awaiting tax refunds.
“It certainly puts us in a position of looking like deadbeats,” said Sen. Mike Jacobs, an East Moline Democrat who got an eviction notice last year from a longtime friend who has rented the same building for years to the senator and his father before him. Payment eventually arrived — nine months late — but Jacobs was prepared to pay if the state had failed to come through.
A notice threatening eviction startled freshman Sen. Dan Duffy, a Lake Barrington Republican. Unsure when the state will cough up the $10,000 it owes his landlord, Duffy is scrambling to see if he can take refuge in a nearby secretary of state driver’s license outlet or a local library should he eventually get evicted.
“When they can’t pay the rent of a Senate office, there’s no way they’re going to be able to pay the hundreds of millions of dollars in bills that they have back due,” Duffy said. “It just shows what a tragic crisis we’re in and how far out of hand this is.”
Out of hand? That’s one of the biggest understatements I’ve ever heard. And it’s gotten that way because the state’s Democrats threw around taxpayer dollars so quickly and nonchalantly that it was hard to tell if they were lawmakers or spoiled, rich trust-fund teenagers. Unfortunately, the GOP were quite handicapped in both the Senate (22 GOP to 37 Dems) and the House (48 GOP to 69 Dems), which meant the Democrats could pretty much spend taxpayer money as they pleased on any pet projects and entitlement programs they liked. Now the state is on the verge of economic collapse.
But I can’t place blame solely on the Democrats. The voters can’t point the finger at state government as if they had nothing to do with their state’s current mess. They must share some of the blame for continually reelecting those bozos.
Update: Now that the Democrats have spent Illinois back to the stone age, Illinois’ Democrat governor Pat Quinn wants to raise the state income tax by a third, from 3% to 4%. Not only are the Democrats irresponsible spenders, they’re irresponsible taxers, too. Quinn seems to think he can raise taxes in a vacuum; however, a tax increase will have a negative ripple effect that will hurt Illinois’ taxpayers by confiscating more of their income at a time when they need every single penny they make to support their families. They simply don’t have the disposable income to pay more taxes.
The Democrats’ terrible management of the Illinois state budget makes me think of a sign I used to see in a few offices of people I used to work with a number of years ago:
Poor planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine.
Michael Ramirez at Investor’s Business Daily has a brilliant editorial cartoon out today that captures perfectly the state of the Democratic Party:
Even though it depicts what is happening with laser-like pinpoint accuracy, it will without a doubt stir the pot of controversy. Leftists will undoubtedly understand the point Ramirez is making, which is that Democrats have chosen to blow up their political careers in the name of Obama and his health care agenda, but they will deliberately ignore it and instead use it to argue that Ramirez and like-minded conservatives think Obama is a closet Muslim or something.
So, why did Ramirez choose to depict the Democrat donkey as a suicide bomber with explosives strapped to his person to make his point instead of another less controversial image? Ed Morrissey’s explanation is right on the money:
Perhaps that could also have been depicted as falling on a grenade or committing seppuku, but for this age, the image instantly communicates exactly what the artist intends.
Ramirez could have also depicted the Democrat donkey as a kamikaze pilot in a health care labeled fighter plane shouting “Banzai Obama,” but that would have been more reconizable to our parents and grandparents. Today, Americans hear on a regular basis news anchors report about the numbers of people killed by enemy suicide bombers with explosives strapped to their bodies or in their vehicles.
I commend Ramirez for having the nerve to go with such an accurate and powerful image to make his point even though it will create controversy.
Mish at Mish’s Global Economic Trend Analysis is getting emails from readers that tell him that the FDIC is really cracking down on a number of banks’ lending habits. It seems federal auditors are combing through the books of lending institutions and requiring that they downgrade or call in loans that are not yet problematic but could be at risk of becoming problematic over time. This is not good news for small businesses or home buyers. Here’s a portion of a letter he received from someone in the home construction business (Hat tip: Instapundit) :
Banks are forcing developers/builders (especially smaller ones) to give up their properties (unsold homes and lots).
Banks say the reason is that the properties in question are no longer performing assets. I am sure there are some loans out there that are not performing and the owners are going under. I am equally sure that there are plenty of developers that are still selling homes – just not at the pace originally planned on the pro formas.
Having inside information on one of these scenarios that happened today, I cannot help but wonder what is really going on? The bank told a small developer/builder I work for that they were taking back his ongoing subdivision.
He is selling houses and updated pro formas would indicate that the current sales pace would exhaust all remaining lots within 33 months. Yet the bank stated they would only give him until April 15 to find alternative financing. The bank is also willing to let him buy the subdivision at a 33% discount to what is currently owed.
This letter writer also said that from what he’s learned a number of banks are doing the same thing and that they are all working on the same time frame, which is to have these potentially problematic construction loans written off or resolved by the end of the second quarter. Naturally, he was hoping Mish could shed a little light on what might be going on. After contacting a business banker he knows, Mish responded with this (emphasis mine):
Putting 1 and 1 together, I sense the FDIC has decided to take problem loans by the horns, forcing banks to address those problems. Banks with enough capital to take huge writedowns will survive, those that don’t, won’t. Many won’t.
If the above scenario applies to commercial real estate as well as housing, expect a huge wave of FDIC bank takeovers in the third and fourth quarters, spilling over into next year. In the meantime, expect to see more lending contractions as banks fearful of this regulatory crackdown respond with further cutbacks in business lending, especially small business lending.
I’m sure you can all predict the negative consequences that could happen as a result. Small businesses have always been the backbone of America’s economy, but with the already tight credit market, small business owners can’t get loans as it is now and are either laying off employees or closing altogether. Further tightening of the credit markets will force even more people out of work, reducing even further small business’s already shrinking customer base, possibly causing the economy to spiral even more out of control.
Additionally, the housing markets in some states are more brisk than others, but those states whose markets are sluggish at best, which includes my state of Michigan, already have large numbers of homes for sale that have been on the market for a very long time and a continually shrinking credit market will mean they will sit on the market longer still.
Mish then placed an email that he received as an addendum at the end of his post:
A friend of mine is a loan officer at a small regional bank here in Oregon. She told me last week that she cannot get any of her mortgage loans clients approved for loans because the bank has raised the qualifications so high that NO ONE is being approved for home loans. These are all borrowers who are more than qualified. If she does not make her quota this month for closed loans, per her boss, she will be getting her pink slip on March 31.
There is definitely something going on at banks for all types of loans. They are hunkering down. My banker friend believes also that there is going to be a massive failure of many banks in the near future.
Who knows, if normally good candidates for home loans can’t get loans under the newly tightened standards, we might see the land contract make a bit of a comeback as it did in the 1980’s when interest rates were so high no one could afford mortgages.
It is an understatement to say that this news does not inspire confidence, especially since pending home sales dropped 7.6% in January. Some say the bad weather accounts for a lot of that drop; however, if the FDIC crackdown sweeps into the residential housing market, banks will continue to tighten credit requirements and I just don’t see how the housing market can improve under those conditions. And if the housing market continues to show anemic numbers, the economy can’t recover.
Just so I am clear here, I’m not arguing that the FDIC is out of line to require banks to downgrade loans that could cause a problem or to tighten new loan qualification standards. This may be the tough medicine we simply have to accept because of the sub prime mortgage crisis that sent the entire economy into a tailspin. (As an aside, Mark Tapscott at the Washington Examiner published a piece yesterday that pointed the finger directly at Andrew Cuomo and the decisions he made when he was the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development in the Clinton administration.)
I do find it interesting, though, that the FDIC is cracking down on the loan practices of private lending institutions, which could lead to massive bank failures, when just two months ago the federal government removed completely Fannie Mae’s and Freddie Mac’s bailout ceiling for three years, which will allow them to issue loans to their hearts’ desire putting the American taxpayers on the hook for any bad loans.
So, guess where the American people will have to go to get a mortgage if they don’t meet the private banks’ increasingly tough loan qualification standards? The the US government, which is where they may have to go for student loans as well if the Senate passes the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act.
About me
I am a conservative. I believe in the greatness of America. I also believe that she is this world's last best hope for freedom, liberty, individualism, and self-reliance.
