I blogged about rising crude and falling gasoline prices two weeks ago. The trend has continued. Here is a chart for the last 6 years. Notice how gas follows crude…until recently.
Barney Frank has decided to retire from Congress. That is a good thing. Now for the bad news. The Democrats likely replacement is Maxine Waters. It’s like they want to take incompetence to a new level.
Here is what Congresswoman Waters had to say about Fannie Mae and their now disgraced ex-chairman Franklin Raines in a 2003 Congressional hearing:
We do not have a crisis at Freddie Mac, and in particular at Fannie Mae, under the outstanding leadership of Mr. Frank Raines
I’m sure you know about the housing crash (that Democrats blame on Republicans), but do you know about Frank Raines. Under his leadership, Fannie Mae was caught in an accounting scandal that makes Enron look like child’s play. When they were finally audited by those dumb Republicans, it was found that they had overstated their profits from 2001 to 2004 by 40%…$9 billion dollars. He is also the guy who started a pilot program at Fannie Mae in 1999 to push sub-prime mortgages.
Back before the crash, this is how the New York Times described it:
Fannie Mae, the nation’s biggest underwriter of home mortgages, does not lend money directly to consumers. Instead, it purchases loans that banks make on what is called the secondary market. By expanding the type of loans that it will buy, Fannie Mae is hoping to spur banks to make more loans to people with less-than-stellar credit ratings. (link)
In the same 1999 article, a conservative organization warned:
From the perspective of many people, including me, this is another thrift industry growing up around us,” said Peter Wallison a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. ”If they fail, the government will have to step up and bail them out the way it stepped up and bailed out the thrift industry.
So how did they push this through…again from the 1999 article
The change in policy also comes at the same time that HUD is investigating allegations of racial discrimination in the automated underwriting systems used by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to determine the credit-worthiness of credit applicants.
And Maxine Waters is the Queen of the Race Card, and it doesn’t end there.
Maxine Waters is also under an ethics violation investigation for steering bail out money to a bank that she had a financial interest in (her husband was on the board). Her defense? Racism of course.
I’ve said it many times before. Incompetence and arrogance are a deadly mixture.
NOTE: The released email discussed below have not been verified, but I’m a blogger…not a journalist. I’m jumping on the story because I believe them to be true based on the history we do know.
The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) was put in place so the public could not be shut out from the government they fund. This morning, FOIA.ORG released a fraction of the email that they have regarding climate scientist. The scientist are not independent. We pay them and they work for us.
Today 5000 of the 1/4 million were released. Here is one (one of many) embarrassing line:
Because how can we be critical of Crowley for throwing out 40-years in the middle of his calibration, when we’re throwing out all post-1960 data ‘cos the MXD has a non-temperature signal in it, and also all pre-1881 or pre-1871 data ‘cos the temperature data may have a non-temperature signal in it! (link)
They knew they were fudging their numbers…they knew their colleagues were fudging their numbers. But the needed to support the “cause” (Michael Mann’s wording).
Washington is headed toward another budget battle. They must find a way to control the debt. At best, a compromise will be difficult with such a deep divide between the parties. Leadership is needed in order to come to some agreement.
Our President sat back and let the “Super” Committee take the job. A small group of hand picked legislators where given the task to do what the Constitution tells us all of Congress must do. They have failed.
The job of a leader is not to micro-manage…and God knows that is not Barack Obama’s biggest failing…but a leader must know when his team is headed in the wrong direction. It is the leader that keeps the team working toward a successful solution.
Months ago, Newt Gingrinch said the Super Committee would not work. He was right. We can’t know if he would have been able to find a solution…but it was apparent from the beginning that the President chosen path would end in failure. It makes you wonder if his critics are correct when they claim that is what he wanted all along.
When an honest history of this period in the United States is written, it will no be kind to the corporate cronyism that preyed upon public ignorance of earth science to create a crisis — global warming — to exploit and loot the Treasury.
What does the Occupy Wall Street crowd stand for? There is no correct answer. They are all over the place. One thing is for sure…there are a lot of radical socialist and communists there. You can see that sentiment in their signs. Recently, they have found a common voice. They are suddenly for “free speech” and the right to “assemble”.
What they want is the right to live on land they don’t own or pay for. They want to live by their own rules and standards. Their sudden interest in the Constitution only derives from their want to keep their illegal camp sites. Like most liberals, the Constitution is not a guiding principal, but a tool to be used against those that believe in it.
The price of crude oil has risen from below $80 per barrel at the beginning of October to almost $100 per barrel. Maybe you weren’t aware of this 25% increase. Could it be because the price of gasoline hasn’t moved? In that same period, a gallon of gas has gone from $3.41 to $3.41…and it was pretty constant throughout the period.
Typically, the price of oil lags the price of crude. Usually, the lag time is less than 2 weeks. It has been 6 weeks since crude hit it’s low.
I’m not suggesting some great conspiracy. I’m just wondering what is going on and wondering what comes next.
I’m going to lift a whole post from The Corner
In 1969, in Tinker v. Des Moines, the Supreme Court ruled that students at public schools had a First Amendment right to wear black armbands to protest the Vietnam War, even if other students would be offended. The Court noted that because the students were “quiet and passive” while wearing the bands, they did not impinge on the rights of others. “A prohibition against expression of opinion, without any evidence that the rule is necessary to avoid substantial interference with school discipline or the rights of others, is not permissible under the First and Fourteenth Amendments,” the Court added.
Now, a federal court has ruled that a school can forbid the wearing of American flags — American flags! — on Cinco de Mayo, on the grounds that the passive wearing of such flags can cause a “substantial disruption” by causing fights between white and Hispanic students. Not only does this contradict a Supreme Court ruling in a very similar case, but the “disruption” standard itself creates a “heckler’s veto,” giving students and groups of students the ability to censor their peers by overreacting to speech they find offensive.
How about we punish kids who are enraged to the point of violence at the sight of an American flag, rather than censoring our nation’s most fundamental symbol?
This is a ridiculous ruling and should be overturned.
If you don’t think this is contradiction is what you get with liberalism…you haven’t been paying attention.
This is the type of legal system you get when judges rule based on how they feel…and liberalism raised emotion above logic and rules.
Progressives have this nasty habit of repeating errors over and over. Barack Obama learned nothing from history. His socialism by bureaucracy and big government ideas are FDR all over again. He sells his ideas as new, but they are not. Progressives like to re-label old ideas and try again. Hell…they re-labeled themselves “liberal” and the re-re-labeled themselves “progressive” again…like we wouldn’t notice.
In the Occupy Wall Street camps, they too are failing history. They have probably all heard of Woodstock. I bet 90% of them wish they could have been there. 1969 started with idealistic youth coming together in a big party and casting off the world of their elders. They had fun, but there idealism soon gave way to human nature. Woodstock gave way to the Altamont Speedway later that year when a young man, high on drugs, pulled a gun and was stabbed by the Hell’s Angels. They idealism of Woodstock came crashing down.
The Occupy Wall Street crowd started off as a bunch of idealistic (but misguided) youth with grand visions of remaking society…and today could be the Altamont Speedway moment. A bloodied body has been pulled from a tent at an Occupy Obamaville in Vermont. These camps have been havens for drugs, rape and violence. Surprise! This is the society you create when you cast aside rules and and rule enforcement.
If New York’s finest in fact are refusing to enforce the law for fear of provoking the so-called protesters to further violence, it is a gross abdication of leadership by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who ought to take assault at least as seriously as he takes salt…James Taranto
We spent a trillion dollars and still we have high unemployment. Why?
President Obama once let it slip that there weren’t as many shovel ready jobs as they hoped. That’s part of it, but a reader to Instapundit explains that the effect of the stimulus was to drain the construction job pipeline within putting anything in on the other end:
I’m a civil engineer with a little over ten years in transportation design, and I’ve witnessed first hand the chaos the industry has fallen into. I worked with a private consultant for state and local transportation agencies, and the whole shovel-ready mess wrecked our long term plans by using up most of the available funding in short-term projects. The process now takes four to six years for even a small project to go through, so when everyone moved projects up to qualify for funding through ARRA, it left a gap where no new projects are expected for a few years. Not to mention, most of the ARRA projects required very little or no engineering (repaving roads or adding sidewalks, for example). I was among the last group of engineers and surveyors laid off from my company in June and have only found one temporary job since then, with almost all the companies in my area (Nashville) treading water or downsizing since then. (In my job search, I’ve been told more than once that people are not planning on adding staff until after next year’s election.) I’m now wondering if I should change disciplines in order to hedge my bets. Environmental engineering looks promising. If you’ve been regulated out of a job, I guess apply for a job with the regulators.
Much like the Cash for Clunkers program, government intervention only has a temporary effect.
The protesters around the country who have gathered to “Occupy Wall Street” are another failed experiment in left-wing ideas. It may have started with noble intentions (in their minds), but it is clearly falling into chaos, crime and violence. This is how many left-wing experiments end (think Soviet Union, China, Cuba, etc). The reason for their repeated failure is the left thinking they can change human nature.
The highly educated left-wingers are so full of confidence. They believe that they can articulate a better way and get everyone to work together in a coordinated common cause…but that’s not how people operate. People work for their own self interest. The proof is written in history. The left collective concepts fail time and time again…and yet they never learn.
The Occupy Wall Street crowd must have missed these competing stories, otherwise they would be in Washington D.C.
Freddie Mac reports Q3 loss, asks for $6B in aid
Freddie Mac outgoing CEO “stands to make as much as $6 million in deferred and bonus pay for 2011″
Democrats are hyperventilating about the wealthy. They have helped to gin up (maybe even organize) the Occupy Wall Street crowd. It seems every non-thinking person in the country wants to “spread the wealth” without thinking about what wealth is.
Is there a finite amount of wealth in the world? Can we just go gather it and hoard it? That notion is childish.
Wealth is created. Oil is a black, sticky goo underground. It has no value until someone drills it, ships it to a refiner, processes it into a usable fuel and then takes it to market to be sold. If you sit down and think about it for a second, you would realize that the price of a gallon of gasoline is incredibly low. If you take the taxes out of it, you might even wonder why someone would go to all the trouble to make such little money.
You may say the people own the oil, but crude oil deep under ground has no value. Extracting crude oil and getting it to your local gas station is wealth creation. That kind of activity creates millions of jobs.
Those standing outside for weeks on end complaining about the wealthy create nothing (except a terrible smell).
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