Wow:
Sen. Diane Feinstein’s husband Richard Blum won a construction contract for California’s high-speed rail project, reports the California Political Review.
Author Laer Pearce says Perini-Zachary-Parsons, a construction group partially owned by Blum’s investment firm, Blum Capital, and their investors, bagged the nearly billion dollar contract:
Pays to be connected.
North Carolina is firmly red, much to the joy of NC State fans the world over!
But seriously, some folks are not overly happy that the republicans are in power:
We don’t take civil disobedience lightly. But the avalanche of extreme policies from Gov. Pat McCrory and the North Carolina General Assembly — attacking the poor and unemployed, cutting crucial funding from public education and dismantling voting rights — left us no choice. From teenage college students to elderly grandmothers, we are assembling in the State Capitol, week after week, to sing, pray and force politicians to hear our voices.
After our first nonviolent protest, 17 of us were arrested and jailed. The next Monday, 30 moral witnesses were carted off in handcuffs, and the next week the number was 49. Last week, 57 protesters were arrested and jailed. Still more of us are prepared to put our bodies on the line to oppose the backward, far-right ideological vision taking hold in our state.
Here’s why.
In the first 50 days of this session alone, the General Assembly and McCrory cut the earned income tax credit for more than 900,000 poor and working people. They rejected federal funding to expand Medicaid to cover 500,000 North Carolinians without health insurance. They slashed state unemployment benefits and rejected federally funded Emergency Unemployment Compensation to 170,000 laid-off workers. This vicious war on the poor will devastate hundreds of thousands of North Carolinians who are already suffering. And with no checks on the Republican hold on the legislature and governorship, these laws are only the beginning.
Piling further indignities on the poor, they also want to require people applying for temporary assistance or benefits to submit to criminal background checks, and force applicants to a job training program for low-income workers to take a drug test, for which they have to pay.
Now the legislature wants to increase and expand taxes on groceries, haircuts and prescription drugs. They’re even taking aim at poor children with a bill to lower the income requirement for North Carolina’s prekindergarten program, making it off limits to nearly 30,000 children who would have previously qualified.
Perhaps most terrifying is that the politicians who have seized control are trying to rig the state’s election rules, seeking to remain in power far after this legislative session. In their kitchen sink approach to voter suppression, they have pushed bills to require strict forms of photo ID for voting, repeal same-day registration, cut early voting from 17 days to six and ban early voting on Sundays.
Mr. Barber is the President of the North Carolina chapter of the NAACP. And he’s been instrumental in the Moral Monday protests at the capital.
Personally, the protests smack of laziness and juvenile tendencies. These people are getting arrested to see their names in the paper. To back slap each other at the Occupy Nowhere bonfires. They fuel themselves.
The Tea Party rallied, to be sure. But they were legal. They weren’t arrested. They left the grounds better than they found them
These people? Occupy Wall Street retreds.
Posted in Government, Politics: North Carolina, Politics: State
Tagged Moral Monday, NAACP, William Barber
A teaser:
First, Clinton:
Former president Bill Clinton said it best in 2008. “I think the responsibility the Democrats have may rest more in resisting any efforts by Republicans in the Congress or by me when I was president to put some standards and tighten up a little on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.”
And then Artur Davis:
“Like a lot of my Democratic colleagues I was too slow to appreciate the recklessness of Fannie and Freddie. I defended their efforts to encourage affordable homeownership when in retrospect I should have heeded the concerns raised by their regulator in 2004. Frankly, I wish my Democratic colleagues would admit when it comes to Fannie and Freddie, we were wrong.
Via Coyoteblog
The immediate impact of the legislation is due to the fact that it wasn’t until Christmas eve in the middle of a snowstorm that the democrats wheeled a dying 117 year old man to vote that this was a done deal.
So, Obama released his 2012 tax filing Friday. Guess what?
President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama reported an adjusted gross income of $608,611 for 2012 and paid an 18.4 percent income tax rate.
Un-freaken-believable!
Anyway, the best part is yet to come:
[O]n June 25 of last year, the Bidens gave ‘Clothing, Boots, Kitchenware, Glassware’ totaling $400 to Goodwill,” the report notes. “Earlier, on May 16, the Bidens gave ‘Furniture and Exercise Equipment’ valued at $1,100 to the Ministry of Caring. And on May 27 of last year, the Bidens gave ‘Bicycles, Toys, Glasses, Pottery, Kitchenware’ valued at $500 to the same Goodwill.
Blink. Blink.
This piece of garbage, “paying your taxes is patriotic”, next in line to be leader of the free world, donated less than 2% of his income to charity, and of THAT amount, 25% of it was in the form of unwanted shit laying around the house.
Seriously, who itemizes bikes, toys, glasses — GLASSES?!?!?!, pottery and kitchenware when they drop-off at the Goodwill?
Are you kidding me?
But hey, maybe I should go easy on the guy, after all, how is expected to survive collecting $29,761 in Social Security payments.
I would say that Biden is following my theory that the reason liberals are so tight in their personal charity is that they view taxation as charity. However, a Biden and The Barckness Monster prove, they don’t even like paying taxes at a rate equal to that of Buffet’s secretary!
Posted in Crime, Government, Idiots on Parade
Tagged Barack Obama, Charity, Joe Biden, Taxes
Alright, now that the left has come clean on kids:
My question to my liberal friends:
What if my “community” is one of devote Christians that love to pray before breakfast, lunch, dinner, Communion and school?
Can my community be defined by anything other than State? Cause when you say “community” I know that’s dog whistle for “State”.
Rand Paul spoke at Howard University. I’ve just listened to the speech, more on that later. I was struck by his response to one of the student’s questions regarding voter ID:
I think it’s important in the history to know what happened. Democrats in the south were very very harsh. Almost all democrats, okay? That’s who ran the governments. And they DID have tests at the polls literacy tests and special tests. And guess what, if you were white and forward you didn’t have to do the test but if you were black you had to do the test and you didn’t pass the test. People were scared and intimidated and prevented from voting.
I think if you liken using a drivers license to literacy tests, you demean the horror of what happened in the 40’s and 50’s. Maybe from 1910 all the way through 1960’s in the south. It was horrific. NOBODY is in favor of that, NO republican is in favor of that. But showing your drivers license to have an honest election I think is not unreasonable. And I think that is the main thing republicans have been for.
Again, I think the democrat position that election laws being racist is an example of racism today. You have a political movement, an ideology, using race as a lever to gain advantage for themselves.
Well said!
With Obama’s announcement that he is interested in creating conditions that will lead to another housing bubble, it’s interesting to go back and revisit the conditions that led to the most recent bubble.
It has long been my position that it was the government that was responsible for the conditions that created the housing bubble that burst in 2007. That it was the government’s role in pushing home ownership levels to higher and higher values that eventually led to the condition where people who couldn’t afford homes finally began to default resulting in the crisis. A crisis that we haven’t truly recovered from.
To be sure, there were private industry players that contributed to the crisis. There were vehicles that were created that also led to that crisis. But, in the end, it was the government’s desire to increase home ownership among lower income and “at-risk” households that drove the poor behavior of those private individuals and the creation of those vehicles.
Not everyone agrees with me. In fact, blog favorite Scott Erb often takes me to task, most recently in the comments of the above post. More specifically, he’s pointed me to a book that he claims supports his position: “All The Devils Are Here”.
As part of my attempt to make MY case, I’ll be quoting from this book in an effort to show that it was government goals that was the genesis of the whole meltdown.
Here’s the first such example:
Here’s a surprising fact: it was the government, not Wall Street, that first securitized modern mortgages. Ginnie Mae came first, selling securities beginning in 1970 that consisted of FHA and VA loans, and guaranteeing the payment of principal and interest. A year later, Freddie Mac issued the first mortgage-backed securities using conventional mortgages, also with principal and interest guaranteed. In doing so, it was taking on the risk that the borrower might default , while transferring the interest rate risk from the S&L to a third party party: investors. Soon, Freddie was using Wall Street to market its securities. Volume grew slowly. It was not a huge success.
In the example above, it would be my position that the government created the conditions that eventually led to Wall Street marketing those loans in the early 70’s. Did Wall Street actors engage and participate in the process? Sure, it’s clear they did. Were they all above board? Perhaps but likely not. However, the initial push, the lighting that struck primordial mud and created carbon life was government.
And it’s my case that the same thing happened long ago that resulted in the crash of 2006-2007.
I’m not sure that we’ll have another housing bubble burst soon, or even in my lifetime. But I’m sure that if we do, the genesis of that bubble will begin like this:
The Obama administration is engaged in a broad push to make more home loans available to people with weaker credit, an effort that officials say will help power the economic recovery but that skeptics say could open the door to the risky lending that caused the housing crash in the first place.
President Obama’s economic advisers and outside experts say the nation’s much-celebrated housing rebound is leaving too many people behind, including young people looking to buy their first homes and individuals with credit records weakened by the recession.
In response, administration officials say they are working to get banks to lend to a wider range of borrowers by taking advantage of taxpayer-backed programs — including those offered by the Federal Housing Administration — that insure home loans against default.
The best of intentions, to be sure. But the beginnings of a potential housing contagion.
And let’s not forget the associated racist dog whistle that accompanies these efforts:
“If you were going to tell people in low-income and moderate-income communities and communities of color there was a housing recovery, they would look at you as if you had two heads,” said John Taylor, president of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, a nonprofit housing organization. “It is very difficult for people of low and moderate incomes to refinance or buy homes.”
And like past bad behavior, this time around the language surrounding the policy sounds good:
“I think the ability of newly formed households, which are more likely to have lower incomes or weaker credit scores, to access the mortgage market will make a big difference in the shape of the recovery,” Duke said last month. “Economic improvement will cause household formation to increase, but if credit is hard to get, these will be rental rather than owner-occupied households.”
It’s a free stimulus!
However, to be fair, if this is Day One, then Day Zero occurred a long time ago:
Deciding which borrowers get loans might seem like something that should be left up to the private market. But since the financial crisis in 2008, the government has shaped most of the housing market, insuring between 80 percent and 90 percent of all new loans, according to the industry publication Inside Mortgage Finance. It has done so primarily through the Federal Housing Administration, which is part of the executive branch, and taxpayer-backed mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, run by an independent regulator.
It’s the same song that got us into this mess, this is just a new stanza.
Posted in Economics, Government, Idiots on Parade
Tagged Barack Obama, Bubble, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Housing
I was over at Poison Your Mind today discussing benefits when I remembered this proposition introduced by republicans here in North Carolina:
Raleigh, N.C. — County Departments of Social Service would be required to conduct criminal background checks on those applying for federal benefits under a bill that cleared the House Health and Human Services Committee on Tuesday.
If someone applying for Food and Nutrition Assistance, what many people call food stamps, or Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, which are cash payments, is found to have an outstanding warrant, social service workers would be required to report them to local law enforcement under House Bill 392.
“Local law enforcement and all county agencies should work together to keep the public as safe as possible,” said Rep. Dean Arp, R-Union. He said federal law already prohibits benefits from going to fleeing felons and parole and probation violators.
The fact that this isn’t already the case, that it requires a law to make that conversation takes place, comes from a mindset that entitlement benefits should be extended to as many people as possible in amounts that should have no upper limit and have no brake in place that would conceive of an ending to these benefits.
As I mentioned at PYM, I can acknowledge a contract between the state and the individual. A contract that says society will take care of you if you take care of society.
This contract, perhaps only implicit, requires an acknowledgement that if you commit crimes against society, that society can take steps to discourage that behavior.
And among those first steps is the denying of charity.