If any further proof is needed that Barney Frank has been completely incompetent in his oversight of the financial services industry, one need look no further than this past week. Just one day after Frank sent a memo to the White House urging the President to reject the attempt by Republicans to include GSE reform in any financial reform bill, Freddie Mac requested an additional government bailout of $10.6 billion to cover losses incurred in the first quarter. Only one day (!) after Frank defended the GSE’s, writing that “as Fannie and Freddie operate today, going forward, there is no loss”.

There is no loss.

Rep. Frank, of course, has a distinguished history of ineptitude when it comes to regulation of the housing industry, and his role in the financial market collapse. But when it comes to avoiding culpability, he is second to no one in his ability to spin a web of deceipt and reinvent history.

“It was Tom DeLay’s fault, he was in charge back then. Republicans were the ones pushing home ownership on the poor. I only advocated for rental housing.”

Lies, demonstrable lies.

But let’s not forget that Frank became chair of the House Financial Services Committee in January 2007, after the Democrats re-took congress. While the housing market decline had already begun, it would be well over a year before the financial crisis really began to accelerate. Fannie and Freddie, in fact, were not placed under federal control until September 2008.

Surely Barney Frank, with his vast intellect and experience, saw these problems developing and was preparing to do everything within his power to reign in the mortgage industry, and stem this crisis, as he assumed his new leadership role. Right?

Source: CSPAN

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If you will, imagine Slobodan Milosevic, during the early part of his reign, threatening to wipe Great Britain off the map. Imagine further, that after he made that statement, he announced that he was in the process of obtaining nuclear missiles.  Undeterred by such comments, the UN, appoints Milosevic’s country to its Commission on Human Rights.  Great Britain, understandably angered by such comments and a lack of World action, calls for renewed diplomatic action and increased sanctions.  Shortly thereafter, The Prime Minister of Great Britain visits the United States.

The President of the United States, however, agrees to only meet in private and refuses to take a picture with the Prime Minister.  Thereafter, the President calls for a loosening of the sanctions against Milosevic and says not a word about the appointment to the Commission on Human Rights.

I suggest to you that if that had come to pass, not only would Great Britain be beyond outraged, but US allies around the globe would sink back in their chairs and wonder if the US could be trusted as an ally at all.

As difficult as that scenario was to imagine is not near as difficult as it is for Israel today.

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Today, in 1718, the city of New Orleans was founded. Enjoy your weekend.

Despite its deep blue hues, Illinois is poised for a Republican pick up this November as Democrat Senate candidate Alexi Giannoulias is neck deep in scandal. This remarkable ad is running statewide in Illinois and in 30 seconds shows why the Democrat party has destroyed this great state over the past 30 years.

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More hope and change…

Faisal Shahzad was removed from the national terrorist surveillance list before the Times Square attack.

(CBS News)

Confessed terrorist Faisal Shahzad was removed from the Department of Homeland Security travel lookout list sometime after Barack Obama came into office.

CBS reported:

Sources tell CBS News that would-be Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad appeared on a Department of Homeland Security travel lookout list – Traveler Enforcement Compliance System (TECS) – between 1999 and 2008 because he brought approximately $80,000 cash or cash instruments into the United States.

The New York Times reported that the person who bought Faisal’s apartment back in 2004 was interviewed by federal investigators.

George LaMonica, a 35-year-old computer consultant, said he bought his two-bedroom condominium in Norwalk, Conn., from Mr. Shahzad for $261,000 in May 2004. A few weeks after he moved in, Mr. LaMonica said, investigators from the national Joint Terrorism Task Force [JTTF] interviewed him, asking for details of the transaction and for information about Mr. Shahzad. It struck Mr. LaMonica as unusual, but he said detectives told him they were simply “checking everything out.”

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Sporting posters with Che Guevara’s image and flying a Hammer & Sickle flag, May Day marchers in San Francisco confronted a protest organized by Tea Party members, Minutemen and 912 Protesters this past weekend.

Inspired by opportunistic Bay Area politicians who have sought to boycott and demonize the state of Arizona, the May Day marchers screamed profanities, made obscene gestures and attempted to storm a police barricade.  Unlike allegations of similar behavior made by members of the Congressional Black Caucus, all of this vile behavior is caught on video.

Pro-Illegal Immigration Protesters with Che Guevara Sign

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The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) acknowledged Thursday it would launch a tough internet regulatory campaign aimed at reclassifying broadband lines under decades-old rules crafted for traditional phone networks, signaling a stark departure from the trial balloon some commissioners floated the same week that federal regulators would administer the Internet through the existing framework.

The suggestion, first reported Sunday by the Washington Post, that the Commission might forgo President Barack Obama’s goal of adopting so-called network neutrality rules triggered a firestorm among progressives and liberal special interests, who complained the Administration had caved in the face of broad public skepticism and intense business opposition.

In the wake of an appeals court ruling last month that demonstrated that the scope of the FCC’s regulatory control with regard to internet services was much more limited than the agency has argued, proponents of net neutrality demanded the FCC reclassify broadband as a Title II telecommunications service–a framework developed in the 1930s to regulate phone service–so that it fall within the preview of federal regulators.

In a memo to clients, Stanford Bernstein analyst Craig Moffet wrote Wednesday the move to reclassify promises to have a “profoundly negative impact on capital investment.”

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We’ve reached a new low. A high school disciplined students for wearing American flag t-shirts to school because they did so on Cinco de Mayo. As some of the students of Mexican descent explained – “That’s ‘our’ day.”

“We knew it was Cinco de Mayo. But we just came to show our flag,” said student Dominic Maciel. “We didn’t mean anything by it. We didn’t want to start anything. Nothing like that.”

We obviously aren’t teaching our kids well. They should know that the American flag is offensive in America! I blame the parents.

Student Anthony Caravalho was also sent home for not turning his shirt inside out. “They said we had to wear our t-shirts inside out and then we could go back to class and we said no,” said Caravalho. “It would be disrespectful to the flag by hiding it.”

It’s our flag that’s disrespectful. They could have avoided trouble and been hailed as tolerant if they’d burned the American flag t-shirts.

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In an e-mail message to employees two weeks after an explosion rocked BP’s Deepwater Horizon drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar continued parroting the Obama Administration lines about “being on the job from Day One” and about BP being responsible.

“From day one, we have been anticipating and preparing for the worst case scenario,” Secretary Salazar writes in the e-mail’s opening paragraph. “Thirteen days into this event, the situation is still dangerous.”

I find it telling that the action words in Secretary Salazar’s message are “anticipating and preparing” instead of acting, fixing, resolving or, if he had wanted to be honest — hoping.

In the fourth paragraph, he writes, “BP has a massive oil spill for which they are responsible,” —–even though no official investigation report has reached that conclusion.

Below, I share the full text of the message:

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Remember Joe and Eileen Bailey?  They are the imaginary friends of Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) who accompany him wherever he goes. He talks about them often.

This year, New Yorkers may finally realize that it’s only Schumer’s imaginary friends who benefit from his presence in the senate.  Businessman Jay Townsend may be the person who convinces them of it.

Townsend – who announced his candidacy against Schumer last Saturday – opened his campaign with a speech which featured the Baileys. Townsend said, “Senator, instead of inventing a family that does not exist, perhaps you could find some time to listen to real New York families that are struggling to make ends meet, put their kids through school and pay the taxes and fees you impose upon them from your throne on Capitol Hill.”

He said of Schumer, “One person, more than any other, stands as a stark symbol of what is wrong with Washington.  Chuck Schumer is considered the most powerful Democrat on Capitol Hill.  He is the head financier, the architect, the enabler, the avatar, the cheerleader-in-chief of an Imperial Congress that turns a deaf ear to those begging to be heard; the back of a hand to those who dare disagree.”

Schumer appears to be more vulnerable than many assume.

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Just so we understand the ground rules here: 1) calling a Progressive Democrat a Socialist is bad; 2) Calling “Tea Party” protesters “Tea Baggers” is A-OKAY.

We seem to remember when the Left went apoplectic over imaginary suggestions that they were unpatriotic for being “against the war” during the Bush administration. We seem to recall President Obama very recently complaining about being called a Socialist (why do Democrats find Socialist to be such a dirty word? What is it about being a Socialist that they should universally shrink away from the title?).

You couldn’t ask for a more textbook definition of hypocrisy.

It is perversely amusing, though, watching Media Matters defend President “Tea-Bagger” for referring to average Americans, whose only crime is to reject Socialism, with a sexually offensive slur.

For a reminder, here are some shots of some U.S. citizens, who, in the Media Matters universe, should be referred to by the President of the United States as people who take testicles into their mouths.

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As readers are likely aware, the NBA’s Phoenix Suns wore ‘Los Suns’ jerseys for Game 2 of the Western Conference Semifinals.  First off, let me just say that if they were to be grammatically accurate, the jerseys should have read ‘Los Soles.’

More importantly, the premise that the the Arizona immigration law is unjust, and that thus the Suns should wear these jerseys to stand in solidarity with Hispanics against it is a flawed one.

As Byron York has been adeptly arguing in recent days, the Arizona law is a carefully crafted one.  According to Mr. York it is only

the criticism of the law that is over the top, not the law itself.

The law requires police to check with federal authorities on a person’s immigration status, if officers have stopped that person for some legitimate reason and come to suspect that he or she might be in the U.S. illegally. The heart of the law is this provision: “For any lawful  contact made by a law enforcement official or a law enforcement agency…where reasonable suspicion exists that the person is an alien who is unlawfully present in the United States, a reasonable attempt shall be made, when practicable, to determine the immigration status of the person…”

Critics have focused on the term “reasonable suspicion” to suggest that the law would give police the power to pick anyone out of a crowd for any reason and force them to prove they are in the U.S. legally. Some foresee mass civil rights violations targeting Hispanics.

What fewer people have noticed is the phrase “lawful contact,” which defines what must be going on before police even think about checking immigration status. “That means the officer is already engaged in some detention of an individual because he’s violated some other law,” says Kris Kobach, a University of Missouri Kansas City Law School professor who helped draft the measure. “The most likely context where this law would come into play is a traffic stop.”

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E&E Daily reports that, speaking before a lobbying group gathered to promote more ethanol-style boondoggles (but for windmills), “Sen. John Kerry is predicting widespread support from electric utilities, chemical companies and Big Oil as he enters his seventh month of closed-door negotiations on a comprehensive energy and climate bill that still hasn’t made its way into public view.”

Along the way Kerry says some very silly things as putative lead author of this, the Senate’s cap-and-trade bill now being styled as an “energy” bill on the heels of a memo by pollster Stanley Greenberg that the public weren’t buying “cap-and-trade” or “global warming”. As quoted by E&E:

“Ironically, we’ve been working very closely with some of these oil companies in the last months,” Kerry said, referring to BP, ConocoPhillips and Royal Dutch Shell PLC. “And I want to tell you they’ve acted in good faith and they’ve worked hard with us to try to find a way to get us to a solution that meets all of our needs. And I believe, when we roll out a bill, and we will very, very soon, we’re going to have a unique coalition.”

Actually, Baptist and Bootlegger coalitions are not remotely unique, as Kerry presumably knows full well. But this whole setup has been telegraphed for some time, and I detail the whole scam, just in time, here.

The truth is that Kerry’s partner in drafting this bill, BP, lost the plot some years ago in its zeal to pretend it was “Beyond Petroleum” (check its balance sheet to see the reality). Working closely with none other than Enron, BP focused on getting the Kyoto treaty and cap-and-trade schemes with subsidies for their otherwise failing wind and solar boondoggles. Along the way BP chased out their most talented people by telling them the future lay elsewhere.

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The Democrats’ health care takeover didn’t stop with ObamaCare and there are some hurtful provisions in the new financial regulation bill Americans should know about if they have any expensive dental procedures coming up.

For millions of American teenagers braces are an embarrassing rite of passage, and for their parents, a tremendous cost. According to bracesinfo.com, the average prices of straightening a teenager’s teeth is about $5,400. In South Carolina, where themedian family income is approximately $45,000, the cost of braces for one child can total more than 10 percent of a parent’s gross income for the year.

Because braces are so expensive, many families pay for them through an installment agreement with their dentist. This is often a fair and affordable option that allows families to avoid charging the expense on their credit card and paying double-digit interest rates.

But the Democrats in Washington are clamping down on health care payment plans with the banking bill. As the bill is currently written, health care providers, or any other business that allows customers to make payments in more than four installments or assesses any kind of late fees, will be treated under the same terms as AIG, Freddie Mac and Goldman Sachs. A new Consumer Financial Protection Agency, housed in the Federal Reserve, will regulate their transactions and could subject them to further regulatory burden.

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As our readers have already learned, Rep. Andre Carson gathered Capitol Hill reporters around him and told the tale of racial slurs and menacing crowds on the verge of hurling rocks at the congressmen.  Our first few videos showed the congressmen coming out of the Cannon Office Building, walking down the steps and into Independence Avenue from various angles.  None of those videos revealed the racial hatred Rep. Carson conveyed to reporters that day and none of the videos showed a mob rushing or in any way impeding the congressmen.

When Rep. Carson gathered reporters around him to spread the myth of racial slurs being hurled “fifteen times” he painted the protesters not just as racists, but as a terrorist threat.  We know this, because Kerry Picket of the Washington Times recorded Rep. Carson as he explained it all to eager reporters.

KERRY PICKET (Wash. Times): Do you think the people outside are generally dangerous or no?

REP. CARSON: Oh absolutely. I worked in homeland security. I’m from intelligence, and I’ll tell you, one of the largest threats to our internal security…I mean terrorism has an Islamic face, but it really comes from racial supremacist groups. (inaudible) Its the kind of thing we keep a threat assessment on record [for].

PICKET: From groups like this?

REP. CARSON: Oh absolutely.

And we can now see this two pronged message continuing in the narrative from Democratic politicians and the media:  The Tea Party protests are really about white rage and they are sowing the seeds for domestic terrorism.  This was the message delivered by Rep. Carson that afternoon and that is the message the media has run with.

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Today, voters in Britain elect a new Parliament and, potentially, a new Prime Minister. The Tories, despite running an anemic campaign, are expected to win. Probably like the GOP in November here.

Remember when you couldn’t turn on nightly newscasts without hearing something about CIA employee Valerie Plame being “outed” by the Bush Administration? Democrat House Chairman held hearings. Grand juries were impaneled. A special prosecutor was appointed and the media pursued every possible angle.

Now consider a similar case, but with different actors. Have you heard of the group of lawyers associated with the American Civil Liberties Union self titled the “John Adams Project”? These folks apparently hired private investigators to take pictures of CIA agents they believe may have interrogated terrorists after September 11th. They then passed these pictures on to the lawyers defending said terrorists in hopes that one of them will accuse the agents of torture. These photos of covert CIA agents were later found in the cells of al-Qaeda members being held at Guantanamo Bay.

The Obama Justice Department is quietly investigating the lawyers associated with the John Adams Project who may have violated a number of laws in place to protect our covert operatives and their families. But so far, with few exceptions, the media and their friends on Capitol Hill haven’t found this case nearly as interesting as Valerie Plame. Could it have anything to do with the ideological bent of the perpetrators?

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Britain’s Labour Party Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, is in an uphill battle to retain a majority in the House of Commons. His party may pull him across the finish line in this week’s election.

He’s certainly done nothing on his own to endear himself to British voters. You can’t really rally the voters with a stirring cry of: “It could have been worse.”

Just as he headed into the climactic week of Britain’s mercifully short campaign season, Gordon Brown was caught in a Joe B*Den moment. He did not realize that his microphone was picking up his nasty comments about a woman voter, a Labour Party backer, even. Brown had just finished sucking up to Mrs. Duffy, complimenting her on her red jacket, when he ducked back into his limo. There, he was overheard denouncing the woman as “bigoted.”

Why? Because Mrs. Duffy dared to express her concerns over Britain’s broken immigration process. Over the past forty years, Britain has admitted hundreds of thousands of immigrants from the former British Empire. Many of these immigrants become fine British subjects. But a disturbing number are jihadists who have converted large swaths of English towns into “no go” areas for local police. They want to create Londonistan.

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