Arkansas Blog

Guess again who's to blame for U.S. mortgage meltdown
Analysts point not to greed, but to social activist politics

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Posted: September 19, 2008
6:19 pm Eastern

By Drew Zahn
© 2008 WorldNetDaily

Stan J. Liebowitz

While many pundits are pointing to corporate greed and a lack of government regulation as the cause for the American mortgage and financial crisis, some analysts are saying it wasn't too little government intervention that cased the mortgage meltdown, but too much, in the form of activists compelling the government to pressure Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae into unsound - though politically correct - lending practices.

"Home mortgages have been a political piñata for many decades," writes Stan J. Liebowitz, economics professor at the University of Texas at Dallas, in a chapter of his forthcoming book, Housing America: Building out of a Crisis.

Liebowitz puts forward an explanation that he admits is "not consistent with the nasty-subprime-lender hypothesis currently considered to be the cause of the mortgage meltdown."

In a nutshell, Liebowitz contends that the federal government over the last 20 years pushed the mortgage industry so hard to get minority homeownership up, that it undermined the country's financial foundation to achieve its goal.

"In an attempt to increase homeownership, particularly by minorities and the less affluent, an attack on underwriting standards was undertaken by virtually every branch of the government since the early 1990s," Liebowitz writes. "The decline in mortgage underwriting standards was universally praised as 'innovation' in mortgage lending by regulators, academic specialists, (government-sponsored enterprises) and housing activists."

He continues, "Although a seemingly noble goal, the tool chosen to achieve this goal was one that endangered the entire mortgage enterprise."

"As homeownership rates increased there was self-congratulation all around," Liebowitz writes. "The community of regulators, academic specialists, and housing activists all reveled in the increase in homeownership."

An article in the Los Angeles Times from the late '90s praised the sudden surge in homeownership among minorities, calling it "one of the hidden success stories of the Clinton era."

John Lott, a senior research scientist at the University of Maryland, however, claimed in a Fox News article yesterday that the success came at a great price.

According to Lott, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston produced a manual in the early '90s that warned mortgage lenders to no longer deny urban and lower-income minority applicants on such "outdated" criteria as credit history, down payment or employment income.

Furthermore, claims Lott, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac encouraged and praised lenders - like Countrywide and Bear Stearns - for adopting the slackened policies toward minority applicants.

"Given these lending practices mandated by the Fed and encouraged by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac," writes Lott, "the resulting financial problems for financial institutions such as Countrywide and Bear Stearns are not too surprising."

Liebowitz' contention that lenders were under pressure to loosen their standards for racial and political goals was confirmed years ago by the companies at the heart of today's crisis: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

A New York Times article from Sept. 1999 states that Fannie Mae had been under increasing pressure from the Clinton administration to expand mortgage loans among low- and moderate-income people and that the corporation loosened its lending requirements to comply.

An ominous paragraph of the article reads, "In moving, even tentatively, into this new area of lending, Fannie Mae is taking on significantly more risk, which may not pose any difficulties during flush economic times. But the government-subsidized corporation may run into trouble in an economic downturn, prompting a government rescue similar to that of the savings and loan industry in the 1980s."

Liebowitz likewise predicted in a 1998 paper the risk of sacrificing sound financial policy for social activism.

"After the warm fuzzy glow of 'flexible underwriting standards' has worn off," Liebowitz wrote, "we may discover that they are nothing more than standards that led to bad loans. . It will be ironic and unfortunate if minority applicants wind up paying a very heavy price for a misguided policy based on a badly mangled idea."

And though some have speculated that lenders in the '90s dove into sub-prime mortgages in an effort to gouge new markets, the president and chief operating officer of Freddie Mac in 1999, David Glenn, confessed his company was pushed by a federal agenda.

"The mortgage industry intends to pursue minorities with greater intensity as federal regulators turn up the heat to increase home ownership," Glenn said in his remarks at the annual convention of the Mortgage Banker Association of America.

"The federal government in the meantime has increased pressure on lenders to seek out minorities, as well as low-income groups and borrowers with poor credit histories," Glenn said. "Fannie Mae recently reached an agreement with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to commit half its business to low- and moderate-income borrowers. That means half the mortgages bought by Fannie Mae would be from those income brackets."

In that same year, Freddie Mac warned of the logical pitfalls of pursuing loans on the basis of skin color and not credit history.

The Washington Post reported that the company conducted a study in which it was found that far more black people have bad credit than white people, even when both have the same incomes. In fact, the study showed a higher percentage of African Americans with incomes of $65,000 to $75,000 had bad credit than white Americans with incomes of below $25,000.

Such data demonstrated that when federal regulators demanded parity between racial groups in lending, the only way to achieve a quota would be to begin making intentionally bad lending decisions.

The study, however, came under brutal attack in the U.S. Congress and was ridiculed with charges of racism.

A few years later, when Greg Mankiw, chairman of President Bush's Council of Economic Advisers, voiced a warning about weakened underwriting standards, Congress rebuffed him as well.

The Wall Street Journal quoted Congressman Barney Frank, D-Mass., in 2003 as criticizing Greg Mankiw "because he is worried about the tiny little matter of safety and soundness rather than 'concern about housing.'"

Frank, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, rejected a Bush administration and Congressional Republican plan for regulating the mortgage industry in 2003, saying, "These two entities - Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac - are not facing any kind of financial crisis." According to a New York Times article, Frank added, "The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing."

Sept. 22 (Bloomberg) -- The financial crisis of the past year has provided a number of surprising twists and turns, and from Bear Stearns Cos. to American International Group Inc., ambiguity has been a big part of the story.

Why did Bear Stearns fail, and how does that relate to AIG? It all seems so complex.

But really, it isn't. Enough cards on this table have been turned over that the story is now clear. The economic history books will describe this episode in simple and understandable terms: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac exploded, and many bystanders were injured in the blast, some fatally.

Fannie and Freddie did this by becoming a key enabler of the mortgage crisis. They fueled Wall Street's efforts to securitize subprime loans by becoming the primary customer of all AAA-rated subprime-mortgage pools. In addition, they held an enormous portfolio of mortgages themselves.

In the times that Fannie and Freddie couldn't make the market, they became the market. Over the years, it added up to an enormous obligation. As of last June, Fannie alone owned or guaranteed more than $388 billion in high-risk mortgage investments. Their large presence created an environment within which even mortgage-backed securities assembled by others could find a ready home.

The problem was that the trillions of dollars in play were only low-risk investments if real estate prices continued to rise. Once they began to fall, the entire house of cards came down with them.

Turning Point

Take away Fannie and Freddie, or regulate them more wisely, and it's hard to imagine how these highly liquid markets would ever have emerged. This whole mess would never have happened.

It is easy to identify the historical turning point that marked the beginning of the end.

Back in 2005, Fannie and Freddie were, after years of dominating Washington, on the ropes. They were enmeshed in accounting scandals that led to turnover at the top. At one telling moment in late 2004, captured in an article by my American Enterprise Institute colleague Peter Wallison, the Securities and Exchange Comiission's chief accountant told disgraced Fannie Mae chief Franklin Raines that Fannie's position on the relevant accounting issue was not even ``on the page'' of allowable interpretations.

Then legislative momentum emerged for an attempt to create a ``world-class regulator'' that would oversee the pair more like banks, imposing strict requirements on their ability to take excessive risks. Politicians who previously had associated themselves proudly with the two accounting miscreants were less eager to be associated with them. The time was ripe.

Greenspan's Warning

The clear gravity of the situation pushed the legislation forward. Some might say the current mess couldn't be foreseen, yet in 2005 Alan Greenspan told Congress how urgent it was for it to act in the clearest possible terms: If Fannie and Freddie ``continue to grow, continue to have the low capital that they have, continue to engage in the dynamic hedging of their portfolios, which they need to do for interest rate risk aversion, they potentially create ever-growing potential systemic risk down the road,'' he said. ``We are placing the total financial system of the future at a substantial risk.''

What happened next was extraordinary. For the first time in history, a serious Fannie and Freddie reform bill was passed by the Senate Banking Committee. The bill gave a regulator power to crack down, and would have required the companies to eliminate their investments in risky assets.

Different World

If that bill had become law, then the world today would be different. In 2005, 2006 and 2007, a blizzard of terrible mortgage paper fluttered out of the Fannie and Freddie clouds, burying many of our oldest and most venerable institutions. Without their checkbooks keeping the market liquid and buying up excess supply, the market would likely have not existed.

But the bill didn't become law, for a simple reason: Democrats opposed it on a party-line vote in the committee, signaling that this would be a partisan issue. Republicans, tied in knots by the tight Democratic opposition, couldn't even get the Senate to vote on the matter.

That such a reckless political stand could have been taken by the Democrats was obscene even then. Wallison wrote at the time: ``It is a classic case of socializing the risk while privatizing the profit. The Democrats and the few Republicans who oppose portfolio limitations could not possibly do so if their constituents understood what they were doing.''

Mounds of Materials

Now that the collapse has occurred, the roadblock built by Senate Democrats in 2005 is unforgivable. Many who opposed the bill doubtlessly did so for honorable reasons. Fannie and Freddie provided mounds of materials defending their practices. Perhaps some found their propaganda convincing.

But we now know that many of the senators who protected Fannie and Freddie, including Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Christopher Dodd, have received mind-boggling levels of financial support from them over the years.

Throughout his political career, Obama has gotten more than $125,000 in campaign contributions from employees and political action committees of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, second only to Dodd, the Senate Banking Committee chairman, who received more than $165,000.

Clinton, the 12th-ranked recipient of Fannie and Freddie PAC and employee contributions, has received more than $75,000 from the two enterprises and their employees. The private profit found its way back to the senators who killed the fix.

There has been a lot of talk about who is to blame for this crisis. A look back at the story of 2005 makes the answer pretty clear.

Oh, and there is one little footnote to the story that's worth keeping in mind while Democrats point fingers between now and Nov. 4: Senator John McCain was one of the three cosponsors of S.190, the bill that would have averted this mess.

To contact the writer of this column: Kevin Hassett at khassett@aei.org

If you were to dedicate yourself to helping rebuild a Girl Scout camp so others could use it, and you're not quite capable of doing a lot of donations of time and effort, where would you turn? Are there local companies and corporations that might be willing to donate materials around here? Places to get cast-offs for reconstruction? Volunteer groups that might be willing to put in a little sweat equity?

Just a-workin' on a project, that's all.

Anti-witch and pro-Palin. Do the clicky.

Okay, another search.

I know I can find mixes for fry bread... but is there any place in Arkansas that serves them? I am so craving this light and tasty goodie... and haven't a clue where I'd go. Pic of a couple of applications from the Fry Bread House in Phoenix at bluename.

Fry bread with honey is like the most ethereal, sweet sopapilla and twice as delightful. And fry bread tacos are just divine.

Hey Miz Kat, are you preggers?? As one who was there 4 times I'm suspicious of all that

craving you are doing.

If its a secret just ignore my meddling.

I wanna try the Fry Bread...sounds kinda Kosher?

I'm happy we have better food options in LR than 10 years ago..and at the risk of being blown back to Arkansas eats blog; has anyone tried the catfish at the Heights Kroger? I think it's super-fine!

Jazzy, I'da thought it was obvious by now. Me and the mister are planning her arrival for sometime around Thanksgiving.

And the Heights Kroger serves catfish? The heck you say? S'pose I can't look past my Silvek's obsession.

Lovely Mondo. Except there's some major falsehoods in there.

"What happened next was extraordinary. For the first time in history, a serious Fannie and Freddie reform bill was passed by the Senate Banking Committee. The bill gave a regulator power to crack down, and would have required the companies to eliminate their investments in risky assets.

Actually the bill emerged in the House and was passed. It was killed in the U.S. Senate.
Guess who killed it?

.

Stop the damn presses! Forget about all this money mess. Put the war on hold for a minute! The biggest news story of the day is at my mother-clicking name!

Preparing for the October surprise: (clicky and scroll down)

Army Unit to Deploy in October for Domestic Operations

Beginning in October, the Army plans to ****station an active unit inside the United States for the first time*** to serve as an on-call federal response in times of emergency. The 3rd Infantry Division's 1st Brigade Combat Team has spent thirty-five of the last sixty months in Iraq, but now the unit is training for domestic operations. The unit will soon be under the day-to-day control of US Army North, the Army service component of Northern Command. The Army Times reports this new mission marks the first time an active unit has been given a dedicated assignment to Northern Command. The paper says the Army unit may be called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control. The soldiers are learning to use so-called nonlethal weapons designed to subdue unruly or dangerous individuals and crowds.

And your point is what? What do you think they are going to do quarter troops in your home?

The main reason this little time-buying scheme, all laced up with blame the Demos, won't work:

They do nothing to address the $180-trillion derivatives time bomb at U.S. commercial banks: Thirty years of deregulation have allowed a parallel financial system to arise in America in which more than $180 trillion dollars in derivatives are held and traded by U.S. banks with scant government supervision or accounting.

Read the number and weep.

Gold rocks. Up 43 today. Up 85 last Friday.

Oh, a little girl...how wonderful, know you will be a great mom.

I picked up on a few clues but tonight I sang out to Frenchie, who was in the kitchen, *Miz

Kat's preggy!!!!!!!!!*

His reply, *Mon Dieu, who is Miss Kat and what is she preggy about??*

Never a dull moment here.

God bless and feel the love.

Hey Strange and Mondo, any thoughts on McCain economic advisor Phil Gramm's Enron Loophole?

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The "Enron loophole" exempts most over-the-counter energy trades and trading on electronic energy commodity markets from government regulation.[1] The "loophole" is so-called as it was drafted by Enron Corporation lobbyists working with U.S. Senator Phil Gramm to create a deregulated market for their experimental "Enron On-line" initiative[2].

The "loophole" was enacted in sections (h)(3) and (g) of the Commodity Exchange Act, 7 U.S.C. as a result of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, signed by U.S. president Bill Clinton on December 21, 2000.[1] It allowed for the creation, for U.S. exchanges, of a new kind of derivative security, the single-stock future, which had been prohibited since 1982 under the Shad-Johnson Accord, a jurisdictional pact between John S.R. Shad, then chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, and Phil Johnson, then chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

On June 22, 2008, U.S. Senator Barack Obama proposed the repeal of the "Enron loophole" as a means to curb speculation on skyrocketing oil prices.[3

Thanks Eureka. One has to be vigilant against the possibility of a police state being set up in America. Our founding fathers had good reason to be wary of such and so should we. Just look at Communist China and how the military has been used to repress their own people.

Are you kidding? Citing an article from my favorite site, WorldNetDaily?

The most right-wing crackpot religious destination since Jim and Tammy Faye's Heritage, USA?

Hysterical!

This is LOL....LMAO..funny...sent to me today.

clicky

Name calling. I didn't hear you refute what the author said. Can't you. I guess it is easier to call someone a name and try and discredit them that way instead of the hard way of refuting their arguments. You need to learn to focus, norman.

Hey, norman, what does you favorite rag, the daily kos, have to say about the fiancial situation?

Thanks, Jazzy! Drop-dead funny! Love Gladys in Austin!

Agreed Jake, Would have been illegal up until a couple of years ago when Posse Comitatus was rescinded. This is a very big change in how our government now thinks about we the people.

The very idea of bringing war weary, no knocking troops straight home to patrol "we the people" is beyond frightening and outrageous.

This should never happen and even if it's all on the up and up... this will backfire (no pun intended) upon us someday.

Army Times has more details.. which of course paints as pretty a picture as possible.. Nevermind the fact they will train to use non lethal force upon all of us.. Like the RNC or kent State, I suppose. We know the GOP is hell bent on stopping the vote this year... what else could they be up to.. Prepping the troops to man Wall Street or DC?

http://www.armytimes.com/news/2008/09/army_homeland_090708w/

http://www.armytimes.com/news/2008/09/army_homeland_090708w/

Be thankful that they will be available. If something happens and they weren't available you all would be complaining about the government not be proactive. They used troops during Katrina. I didn't hear anyone complaining about that.

Be thankful that they will be available. If something happens and they weren't available you all would be complaining about the government not being proactive. They used troops during Katrina. I didn't hear anyone complaining about that.

We all need a laugh, Season Premiere...Boston Legal is on!!

I guess there's no connection between the bailout of AIG because of the Bush/Cheney's connection to the Carlyle Group...ha. From bejeeus' post:

"And why did they go along to bail out AIG? Because Henry Kissinger is on the board of directors and they are intimately tied with BlackStone Group and the Carlysle Group..."

Y'all are right...WHAT THE FUCK:

"Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency."

Congratulations, kat!

Congrats! Kat.

Jazzy, that is a belly laugh!

BULLETIN -- Bill Clinton Will Campaign in Arkansas for Obama

Look at the link on my name. It's from tonight's installment of The Fix from the Washington Post web site. Here's the key excerpt (which follows some other fascinating stuff Bill says about Palin):

--------

Clinton also said he would campaign for Obama in Arkansas, where he said he thinks the Illinois senator could pull off an upset.

"Arkansas is now the most Democratic Southern state. We're back in business now," Clinton said. "My crowd down there thinks he could win. If you win Arkansas, you could turn the lights out."

Thanks, Eureka.

"Civil unrest?" "Crowd control?"

You mean, like, "dissent?"

Yep. That's what they mean.

Like "Democracy Now" reporter Amy Goodman and AP photographer Matt Rourke being arrested at the RNC, kept from reporting or photographing until the convention was over, then released with no charges being filed against them.

A police state that stifles dissent, in other words.

You BET the Republicans will do anything to stop or rig these elections, as they have in the past.

But here is their dilemma: They have so screwed up America in the past eight years -- economically, internationally, debt-wise, health-care-wise, jobs-creation-wise, truth-wise -- that their choice is to turn over their abysmal mess to the other party for "solutions" (NOBODY can solve, in four years, what the Republicans have left us with over the last eight) . . . or plunge all the way with an attempted takeover of America to prevent their prosecution and justice for their crimes.

They, and the religious-right theocrats behind them, know this is their last-chance Armageddon.

They can't govern effectively, they've run the economy into the ground, they've lied us into a war that's cost over 4,000 American lives and 100s of thousands of Iraqi lives, and they're still lying. About everything.

That's all they have. Lying directly to your face, and guns and intimidation to ensure you go along with them.

The Supreme Irony?

Their Armageddon comes down to yanking away same-sex equality in California. THAT'S where the money's going -- to pass Proposition 8. THAT'S the Big Issue in this election -- AGAIN.

Because, honey? If the gays win that one, it's all over. Fact-based Reality triumphs over Faith-Based Reality and the whole house of cards dives into a slo-mo collapse. Which, frankly, it's already in.

"As California goes, so goes the nation." It's been true for seventy years or more.

THAT'S why the ENORMOUS pressure to pass California's Prop. 8 from religious institutions and "conservative" businesses around the country.

They sense that we the people are about to vote down an historically discriminatory theocratic measure (which takes away a minority's already-existing civil rights in the name of religious persecution) and say, "Fuck you" to the theocrats, authoritarians, anti-intelligence, anti-science, anti-"elitist", bullying fascists who have convincingly Photoshopped Jesus into Adolph Hitler for their ignorant, uninformed, reactionary religious rubes -- their "gays, guns and God" base.

Who knew disco and Donna Summer were such threats to civilization?

lmao..

maybe that's the winning slogan

Leave Donna Summers ALONE

The Repubs will rig the elections???????? What do you call the wholesale fraud perpetrated by groups like ACORN. Who can forget the large scale fraud of the 1960 elections in Cool County, Illinois. The only fraud that I have personally observed is that done by democrats.

I observed an incident back in the 60s when the Republicans bringing the ballot box in from an outlying precinct to the court house got drunk and threw the wrong box in the river.

"Robert Wagner reveals love affair with Stanwyck"---dbi string

Barbara Stanwyck? Yuk! The only thing that could have been worse DBI was for it to have been Joan Crawford.

Yes we can..............

calling it a night.............

clicky

My brother sent this and I think it is perfect for strange, Ark Red and several others. Blue name. Enjoy.

Eureka....do that look like preparations for the meltdown of American society that will occure when the markets collapse and the elections are called off and about 90% of Americans are hungry and tired of living in the dark?

For hundreds of years we've told ourselves....It can't happen here, America is different. Sure as hell looks like it CAN happen here and is. I'm disgustingly sober and sane and it looks like a plan, a plot, a noose slipping around our necks. Do we have it in us to put up a fight? I just don't know.

I know a link to part of this guy's stuff was posted along here somewhere/time...HOWEVER, if you wanna get FIRED UP, at my bluename...

Truth Warning to StrangeMORON, ARRed and other truth-averse, propaganda/ideology-loving dipshits who keep bothering us here: TRUTH?!! You can't HANDLE the TRUTH!!!

To the rest, enjoy, and g'night.
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...as for the propaganda posted above by Mondo Freaks:

FACTS are a terrible affront to some of the posters here - case in point, from the American Enterprise Institute re S190, attempting to:

1. Buck up McCain the "reformer," and
2. Blame Dems.

Here are the facts (emphasis mine):

S190 was introduced in the Senate on Jan 26, 2005, sponsored by Hagel and co-sponsored by Dole and Sununu. McCAIN WAS NOT A CO-SPONSOR. S190 was discussed in the Senate Banking Committee on July 28, 2005 with the result being the bill died in a REPUBLICAN CONTROLLED committee and never came to the floor of the Senate or back to the Senate Banking Committee for reconsideration. S190 died in committee.

As eL correctly stated, that would be a REPUBLICAN CONTROLLED committee - HELLO!!! ...and truly now, g'night!
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"Simply purchasing bad debt, 'cash for trash' and not receiving anything of value or giving $700 billion and not having a commensurate equity interest in Wall Street firms is unacceptable," Kucinich said in a news release Monday. "No 'cash for trash.'"

The former Democratic presidential candidate said he would be introducing a bill this week to create a "United States Mutual Trust Fund" to convert assets purchased by the governemnt into shares that would be distributed to every man, woman and child in the country. Every American would receive about $2,300 worth of shares because that is the cost of the bailout package to each individual, Kucinich said.

Hey...get rid of those offensive USSR words making this deal secret and only for Cheney to direct and let's adopt Kucinish's proposal and we'll all own a piece of the trillion dollar pie! If we're buying..we ought to own it. Sign me up! In the mean time start digging fox holes under your house and make sure to have some holes to stick your gun barrel through. We are so in trouble!

Too bad we are not drilling right here right now, otherwise we could have avoided the surge in oil prices today.

PS We've spent 2 or 3 hundred billion already on failed financial institutions, now Bush wants to spend a trillion. Anyone know how much money we got? We might need to know that before anyone starts writing checks? I'm think China is our overdraft protection. Assuming they charge as much as 1st National Bank in Fort Baptist......can we afford all this?

Twat do we do if China forecloses on the USA-AT&T? We'll we be pushing 1 for Chinese? Is there any chance China will line up everyone in Congress and shoot them, last cigarette or no? When that happens....I have 2 girls....will I have to kill one of them? Can Sarah Palin also see China from her house? Don't ya wish Tuesday would get here quicker?

Another giant economic hit coming in January

clik elwood

deeb, it definitely smells like one of those continuous "inch" moves to me.. incremental has been happening at such a pace on so many levels lately.. I don't know if the avg. Joe will know the noose is there until their feet are off the ground.

I knew.. and I hollered when private militia and real military were used post Katrina.. it's one of those things that people didn't think of because the only pictures were of folks being saved (sort of)... not the countless folks being shot off camera.. Just get a few native Louisiana natives who were rescue personnel at the time - like paramedics, and get them away from their families with a couple beers... they will tell you what happened.

Anyway speaking of needless use of the military which gets a lot of American trooops killed and maimed.. let's bring them home right now.. Bail out our troops! And use that money for better things ta boot. We need it... and if we don't Cheney's going to leave us in one hell of a Pakistani pickle.

OMG, eLwood - THE ONION!

Classic clip! Thanks!

Clarification:

Posse Comitatus has been reinstated. Thanks in large part to Senator Leahy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insurrection_Act#Repeal_of_amendments Scroll down to the third from last section.

So if this is the case.. shouldn't ordering military (non guard) troop deployment within the US be illegal?

I'm asking around, but I just wanted to update folks as I sort through it.

The reason no one bothers to argue or refute stranglelove is that he is well-known for Making Shit Up and thus does not argue in good faith. Since that fact about his behavior became obvious, he's stopped try to make his own arguments. Instead, he takes big greasy infodumps right in the middle of otherwise civilized discussion threads, like a sick puppy trying to get someone, anyone to pay attention.

I figure the puppy's chances are better. What a sad little man.

http://gmy.news.yahoo.com/v/9856612

Now for all you PALINITES....I'm seeing she has some more important things to study....beyond world leaders ! ( SHameless pandering!)

jazzy, do the clicky