Just When You Thought It Was Safe To Get Another Home Equity Loan…

Somewhere along the way, Americans seemed to have forgotten that the government is the biggest shark with the most revenous appetite in the ocean of freedom, yet all we hear from Hillary and the Left in this country, is for government to step in and save people from their own mistakes.

The government will devour what a foreclosure could not eat…your liberty and dignity.

US civil rights leaders urge aid for housing crisis

U.S. President George W. Bush on Thursday unveiled a plan to slow a wave of foreclosures that has threatened to knock the U.S. economy into recession and rattled investors worldwide.

Speakers at the rally — peppered with chants such as “Save our homes! Restructure loans!” — said Bush’s plan failed to provide a full solution.

“We want the president and the Congress to recognize that a small step is not enough,” said Marc Morial, president of the National Urban League. “We need a giant leap.”

Gimme, gimme, gimme!!!

And a little bit is not enough! Gimme it all!!! We want more!!! Rob the rich!!!

Who gets help from Bush foreclosure fix?
Also: How much would a mortgage bailout cost the government?

Grasping At The Straws of Torture and Treason for Power

In the desperate efforts to relive the glory days of both the 1960′s Hippie/Anti-war movment and Watergate, House and Senate Democrats are going beserk trying to recreate the only victory they’ve had in their entire lives.

The CIA interrogation tapes of Al Qaeda operatives, that have been subsequently destroyed, is the latest hoped for “Gotcha!” of a party and Congress that has accomplished absolutely NOTHING since it won power in 2006 except attempt after attempt to destroy a president and his party by securing defeat in a war they authorized, and weaken America in the contest against our enemies.

Much media trumpeting of the destroyed CIA tapes of U.S. interrogation techniques of Al Qaeda prisoners has reached air-raid siren status among the Left. In predictable fashion, the Democrat Leadership feined outrage and made public spectacles falling all over themselves in talking-point heaven to compare the destroyed tapes to the “18 minute gap” in Nixon’s Watergate tapes and rushing to microphones to be the first to demand a Special Prosecutor investigate:

Democratic Senate leaders compared the CIA’s actions to the Watergate scandal.

Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., asked, “What would cause the CIA to take this action? The answer is obvious — coverup.” “What is at stake here goes to the heart of the rule of law and justice in America,” said Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill.

This afternoon, Durbin wrote Attorney General Michael Mukasey urging him to investigate a possible “obstruction of justice.”

But as we are discovering – this is simply another straw of desperation that is filled with deliberate hypocrisy and false outrage for political consumption by the Left. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.), Sens. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), as well as Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.) and Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan) all witnessed the CIA waterboarding technique in September of 2002, as members of the House Intelligence Commitee and NONE of them objected to the procedure. In fact, they asked whether or not the technique was “strong enough” to break the will of captured Jihadists.

Today however, in another flamboyant act to stage political theater, two of these individuals; Rockerfeller and Harman were also aware that the interrogation tapes were scheduled for erasure. Rockerfeller admits finding out that the tapes were destroyed in Novermber 2006. OVER A YEAR AGO. Harman wrote a letter asking that the tapes NOT be destroyed, but learned that they already had been. We can only assume that the other leading members of this Oversight Committee were also aware of that at the time.

But now, all-of-a-sudden, a year later – it’s a “scandal” with Watergate possibilities???

As the new York Times duly notes:

“Jane Harman also knew of the intention to destroy the tapes, and she at least ‘urged’ the C.I.A. in writing not to do it.” But he notes, “But when she found out the C.I.A. had destroyed the tapes, where was Harman’s press conference? Where were the congressional hearings?”

Indeed, where WAS the press conference and calls for hearings a year ago?? Was it not important? Did it not rise to the level of Watergate status last year during the Election cycle?

Ah yes – there was this little thing called national security at one time in this country, and Intelligence Matters are restricted to high security clearance – of which the eight members of the Congressional Intelligence Committee possessed and were restricted in discussing. By law they are prohibited from acknowledging or discussing anything they learn on the Intelligence Committee until such information is declassified. To Democrats, “Classified” under a Republican Administration means “Coverup” and as such, “classififed” is just an obstacle to be overcome. Much like they treat the Constitution.

Consider all the “leaks” we’ve had about our ‘intelligence’ apparatus of late – does anyone even allow the possibility that some of these creeps on this committee are engaging in treason and breaking the law by discussing what they are not allowed to discuss?? How else does such national intelligence matters get disseminated to willing members of the media for publication?

The entire notion of waterboarding being declared as “torture’ by this same bunch is nauseating in the extreme, since they were not sure if the technique was severe enough to break reticent Al Qaeda terrorists back in 2002. Yes. Not only were these same Democrats feigning outrage over “torture”, they watched the procedure and asked if the technique was strong enough to break hardened terrorists!

I don’t know about you – but after seeing the videos of slow beheadings of Americans at the hands of Al Qaeda, and how bodies of Americans are drug through streets and hung up by wire on bridges, the idea of a pitcher of water poured on my blindfolded face to get information about terrorist operations is not quite in the same universe of comparison. America apparently does not have the guts or stomach to do what is necessary to stop what our enemies clearly are more than willing to do to us. We would rather think ourselves moral and noble by treating barbarians who are plotting to kill us, like we would like to be treated in similar circumstance. Such a misguided sense of morality is not noble or American, it’s stupid. We can think ourselves better and moral all the day long, treating captured Jihadists like guests at the Hilton, and it will not make one iota’s difference to Al Qaeda terrorists.

But let’s talk about the rule of law as it pertains to intelligence gathering. If no one from the Gang of Eight committee ‘leaked’ the practice the CIA was engaged in on Sheik Khalid Mohammed, the entire world would not now be aware of America’s intelligence methods. And yet we hear Kennedy and Durbin pontificate endlessly about the “rule of law” when I am of the opinion that their own Democrat leaders were engaged in breaking it themselves by leaking intelligence information for use as a political weapon.

The Democrats demand an accounting. They demand hearings. They demand upholding the rule of law and adherance to morality. We hear them demand all these things when they knew of them in 2002. They charge criminal coverup, while some of us are still waiting for someone in Congress to raise an eyebrow over Sandy Berger’s theft of National Security Documents he stuffed into his pants.

The truth is in this day and age of our political fall from Christian Republic to Caligulan Rome – the means justifies the desired end result: absolute power. There is nothing sacred in politics, except the politcal weapon of Political Correctness, and then, it is selectively applied. Sandy Berger gets a pass for what would be a felony, just as his boss William The Impeached got a free pass over lying under oath to a grand jury. Democrat Congressmen can have oodles of cold hard cash stuffed into their freezers and investigations are called “racist” and “partisan witchunts”. But when it comes to Republicans or national security, there is no reverence for the country, or our sovereignty, or our security. All is fair game to achieve a political win, regardless of the consequences. Regardless if it results in our defeat in the face of Jihadists, regardless if it ends up as a bright sunrise over an American city some dark night in the future.

Torture update: What did Nancy Pelosi know and when did she know it?

What the Democrats Knew and When They Knew It

Hill Briefed on Waterboarding in 2002
In Meetings, Spy Panels’ Chiefs Did Not Protest, Officials Say

Pelosi Knew About Waterboarding in 2002: Media Frenzy to Follow?

No Risk Freedom: Nanny State Government Will Control Everything – From Housing To Religion

Another thought-provoking essay by Mark Steyn.

Let’s have a free market for housing and religion

By Mark Steyn

Last week the Bush administration decided to “freeze” for five years the interest rates of certain types of mortgages. You’ve probably caught the tail end of news stories about “subprime” home loans, lots of foreclosures, etc. Never a happy moment when the bank takes the farm.

So now the government has stepped in and said that, if you fall into a particular category of adjustable-rate mortgage (ARMs, in the biz) and you’re worried that it’s getting way too adjustable, don’t worry: The Nanny State is about to readjust it well inside your comfort zone. By fiat of the Treasury secretary, your adjustable-rate mortgage is henceforth an unadjustable adjustable-rate mortgage. These new UNARMs will spread their healing balm across the land until it’s safe enough for the housing “market” to once again be exposed to market forces.

The government has, in effect, nullified the terms of legal contracts mutually agreed by both parties — borrower and lender, Mr. and Mrs. Joe Schmoe and the First National Bank of Pleasantville.

This is a pretty remarkable act by a “conservative” administration. The government’s general absolution for imprudence by both borrower and lender doesn’t seem a smart move — for the U.S. credit markets, for real estate, for responsible borrowers for future homeowners, or for state and municipal taxpayers whose governments are being encouraged by Washington to bail out home “owners” by issuing tax-free debt.

Democrats bemoan the lack of “affordable housing” while simultaneously demanding government rescue home “owners” with unsustainable mortgages. But saving the latter obstructs the former: the principal benefit of a property-bubble correction is, after all, much more “affordable housing.”

One of the great strengths of the United States is that property is not, by comparison with other developed nations, an overspeculative enterprise. Most of us buy a house, and it increases respectably in value but not spectacularly. In Britain, by contrast, you buy a basement flat in a rundown slum for a quarter-million pounds, put a cat flap in the back door and sell it as “extensively remodeled” for a half-million pounds.

I write often about the demographic decline in Europe — the lack of children — but quite a bit of that has to do with the space constraints. If you’re living in a small apartment, as many Germans do, do you really want three kids clogging up the joint?

America is one of the cheapest places in the developed world to buy a four-bedroom house on a one-acre lot. A few years back, I noted that a three-bedroom, air-conditioned home in Crawford, Texas, cost $30,000, but, if that sounds a bit steep, you could get a couple of acres and a double-wide for about a fifth of the cost. And a rather sour leftie said, well, what do you expect? Bush moves in, and there goes the neighborhood. Well, if that’s the case, you’d think he’d be applying the Crawford Effect and depressing the property market nationwide instead of artificially obstructing its operation.

One shouldn’t overstate the administration’s actions: in Zimbabwe, the government seizes your property; in the United States, the government seizes your property contract and then hands it back to you all fluffy and painless.

Comment: Unless of course the local government wants your property to put up condos and strip malls for windfall tax profits – then, as the KELO case in SCOTUS proves – the government can take your property and defy the Constitutional requirement of just compensation by redefining market compensation to whatever compensation the government feels like giving you.

Yet out on the campaign trail no candidate initially seemed very bothered by it. Musing on various ninnyish programs being mooted by candidates of both parties, Fred Thompson said the other day, “I don’t think that it’s the primary responsibility of the federal government to tell you what to eat.” It’s apparently not the primary responsibility of the government to tell you to suck it up (which is what columnist Michelle Malkin proposed as an alternative outreach plan to troubled mortgage holders). “The fact of the matter is we got an awful lot of knowledge,” Sen. Thompson continued. “Sometimes we don’t have a whole lot of will power, and I don’t know of any government program that’s going to instill that.”

There don’t seem to be a lot of takers for small government out on the hustings this season. We were told by plenty of experts that this would be the year in which the Christian right would be rendered politically irrelevant: Nominating Rudy Giuliani (a pro-choice candidate positively Chiracesque in his sexual habits and the taxpayer funding thereof) would leave the religious right out on the fringe. Instead, the evangelicals found a candidate, destabilized the race, and we’ve spent the past couple of weeks talking about nothing but religion. Mike Huckabee’s declaration in his Iowa advertising that he is a “Christian leader” seems a barely coded dig at Mitt Romney’s Mormonism, and Mitt’s big speech Thursday was his own attempt to put the Mormon question to bed.

As far as Christian conservatives are concerned, Gov. Huckabee is obviously a sincere Christian. But he doesn’t seem to be any kind of a conservative — not if you look at his record on domestic policy.

As for Gov. Romney, one of the most interesting passages of his speech was his contrast of America’s faith with Europe’s: “I’m not sure that we fully appreciate the profound implications of our tradition of religious liberty,” he said. “I have visited many of the magnificent cathedrals in Europe. They are so inspired … so grand … so empty. Raised up over generations, long ago, so many of the cathedrals now stand as the postcard backdrop to societies just too busy or too ‘enlightened’ to venture inside and kneel in prayer. The establishment of state religions in Europe did no favor to Europe’s churches.”

That’s very true. As America demonstrates, faith thrives in a free market. In Europe, the established church, whether formal (the Church of England) or informal (as in Catholic Italy and Spain), killed religion as surely as state ownership killed the British car industry. When the Episcopal Church degenerates into wimpsville relativist milquetoast mush, Americans go elsewhere. When the Church of England undergoes similar institutional decline, Britons give up on religion entirely.

Instead of a state church, Europe believes in the state as church — the all-powerful beneficent provider of cradle-to-grave welfare.

“Freedom requires religion,” said Mitt Romney, and, whether or not one agrees, in Europe big government has led naturally to small religion — a point Gov. Huckabee might want to ponder. I would rather we talked less about religion in America (which can take care of itself) and more about government, which seems to be trending in an alarmingly European direction, Democrats and Republicans disagreeing merely on the speed at which we’ll get there. Yet the two are explicitly connected.

Europe’s religious decline derives in part from the state’s usurpation and annexation of so many of the other supporting structures of society, including the church. I am in favor of a free market in religion and a free market in housing, but right now I’d like a conservative candidate with a clear-headed commitment to both.

Unfortunately in America, a growing majority no longer have faith in their church, instead they have shifted responsibility to the government, which will replace the church in charity and as arbiter of liberty.

Such is the path of tyranny.

For States of men in power will suffer no rivals of allegience, whether to God or anthing else.

Religion becomes faith in the state, and the state becomes the religion. Something you are witnessing happen right before your very eyes.

“U.S. Gave Up on Religion”

” Without morals a republic cannot subsist any length of time; they therefore who are decrying the Christian religion, whose morality is so sublime and pure…are undermining the solid foundation of morals, the best security for the duration of free governments.” – Charles Carroll – signer of the Declaration of Independence

“No human society has ever been able to maintain both order and freedom, both cohesiveness and liberty apart from the moral precepts of the Christian Religion applied and accepted by all the classes. Should our Republic ever forget this fundamental prcept of governance, men are certain to shed their responsibility for licentiousness and this great experiment will then surely be doomed.” – John Jay, 1st Chief Justice of the Supreme Court

While I am not endorsing Mike Huckabee’s candidacy for President – what he said last night, rings solidly true about our current national cultural and political mess.

I have stated it many times, that if the churches and religious institutions were doing the job that was intended of them by God, Jesus Christ and our Founders (Matthew 28:19 comes to mind) we would not find our nation in such a deteriorated state as we see it today.

New religions of secular humanism, Global Warming and the blend of Socialist politics with red letter Christianity are fast replacing the principles upon which our liberties were established. The rising tide of militant Islam, Atheism and hedonism is overshadowing the strength the Christian religion once possessed in this country. Soon, they will replace sound religious principles as the dominant forces shaping the course of the nation.

Huckabee: U.S. gave up on religion
School shootings were wake-up call, he says

Government may have dropped the ball in modern American society, but religion dropped it first, Gov. Mike Huckabee told Southern Baptist pastors Sunday night.
“The reason we have so much government is because we have so much broken humanity,” he said. “And the reason we have so much broken humanity is because sin reigns in the hearts and lives of human beings instead of the Savior.”
Huckabee, an ordained Southern Baptist minister, addressed his contemporaries at the two-day Pastors’ Conference, which continues today. The three-day Southern Baptist Convention begins Tuesday here in the heartland of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the city in which the Mormons have their world headquarters.
Huckabee told the pastors gathered in the Salt Palace Convention Center that while the March 1, 1997, tornadoes which struck Arkansas were tragic, at least the devastation could be clearly seen from a helicopter. In contrast, he said, the catalysts for the nation’s recent school shootings — including the one March 24 near Jonesboro that left four students and a teacher dead and 10 others wounded — were harder to see but were driven by “the winds of spiritual change in a nation that has forgotten its God.”
“Government knows it does not have the answer, but it’s arrogant and acts as though it does,” Huckabee said. “Church does have the answer but will cowardly deny that it does and wonder when the world will be changed.”
The shootings were just one more wake-up call to the nation, he said.
“I fear we will turn and hit the snooze button one more time and lose this great republic of ours.”
Huckabee said ungiving individuals are responsible for higher taxes.
“I’m often asked why taxes are so high and government is so big. It’s because the faith we have in local churches has become so small. If we’d been doing what we should have — giving a dime from every dollar to help the widows, the orphans and the poor — we now wouldn’t be giving nearly 50 cents of every dollar to a government that’s doing … what we should have been doing all along.”
Huckabee also explained why he left pastoring for politics.
“I didn’t get into politics because I thought government had a better answer. I got into politics because I knew government didn’t have the real answers, that the real answers lie in accepting Jesus Christ into our lives.”
He compared his entry into politics to “getting inside the dragon’s belly,” adding, “There’s not one thing we can do in those marbled halls and domed capitols that can equal what’s done when Jesus touches the lives of a sinner.”
The most basic unit of government is not the city council, quorum court or state legislature, Huckabee said. “It is Mom and Dad raising kids and teaching them respect for authority, others and God.”
The nation has descended gradually into crisis, Huckabee said, and repairing the damage needs to be gradual, too. He said the solution is simple: faith in Christ.
Huckabee recalled the five occasions he’s had to sit by the phone on the eve of an execution.
“It’s the greatest sense of helplessness and despair you can imagine to know we’ve exhausted all help and hope here on earth for that person.”
He also spoke of his early misconceptions of his duties as a pastor.
“In one of the first churches I was assigned to, I thought I was supposed to be the captain of a warship leading the congregation into a battle against spiritual darkness,” he said.
“But they wanted the captain of the Love Boat. They just wanted everybody to be happy. It was not about how many people were won to Christ or how many teens were pulled away from drugs or how many marriages were saved. Instead, it was about the seniors having a great trip going to watch the fall leaves change, the teen-agers going to a better summer camp than the church across town.”
Huckabee concluded his speech by recalling his 10th birthday, when he accepted Christ.
“I went to Vacation Bible School for all the wrong reasons — I was told they’d give me all the cookies I could eat and all the Kool-Aid I could drink. But that day I got something better than cookies and Kool-Aid. I got the Savior.
“I hope we answer the alarm clock and take this nation back for Christ.”