Go Marines

Marine Makes Insurgents Pay the Price
November 18, 2008Marine Corps Newsby Cpl. James M. Mercure

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FARAH PROVINCE, Afghanistan — In the city of Shewan, approximately 250 insurgents ambushed 30 Marines and paid a heavy price for it.
Shewan has historically been a safe haven for insurgents, who used to plan and stage attacks against Coalition Forces in the Bala Baluk district.
The city is home to several major insurgent leaders. Reports indicate that more than 250 full time fighters reside in the city and in the surrounding villages.
Shewan had been a thorn in the side of Task Force 2d Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment, Special Purpose Marine Air Ground Task Force Afghanistan throughout the Marines’ deployment here in support of Operation Enduring Freedom, because it controls an important supply route into the Bala Baluk district. Opening the route was key to continuing combat operations in the area.
“The day started out with a 10-kilometer patrol with elements mounted and dismounted, so by the time we got to Shewan, we were pretty beat,” said a designated marksman who requested to remain unidentified. “Our vehicles came under a barrage of enemy RPGs (rocket propelled grenades) and machine gun fire. One of our ‘humvees’ was disabled from RPG fire, and the Marines inside dismounted and laid down suppression fire so they could evacuate a Marine who was knocked unconscious from the blast.”
The vicious attack that left the humvee destroyed and several of the Marines pinned down in the kill zone sparked an intense eight-hour battle as the platoon desperately fought to recover their comrades. After recovering the Marines trapped in the kill zone, another platoon sergeant personally led numerous attacks on enemy fortified positions while the platoon fought house to house and trench to trench in order to clear through the enemy ambush site.
“The biggest thing to take from that day is what Marines can accomplish when they’re given the opportunity to fight,” the sniper said. “A small group of Marines met a numerically superior force and embarrassed them in their own backyard. The insurgents told the townspeople that they were stronger than the Americans, and that day we showed them they were wrong.”
During the battle, the designated marksman single handedly thwarted a company-sized enemy RPG and machinegun ambush by reportedly killing 20 enemy fighters with his devastatingly accurate precision fire. He selflessly exposed himself time and again to intense enemy fire during a critical point in the eight-hour battle for Shewan in order to kill any enemy combatants who attempted to engage or maneuver on the Marines in the kill zone. What made his actions even more impressive was the fact that he didn’t miss any shots, despite the enemies’ rounds impacting within a foot of his fighting position.
“I was in my own little world,” the young corporal said. “I wasn’t even aware of a lot of the rounds impacting near my position, because I was concentrating so hard on making sure my rounds were on target.”
After calling for close-air support, the small group of Marines pushed forward and broke the enemies’ spirit as many of them dropped their weapons and fled the battlefield. At the end of the battle, the Marines had reduced an enemy stronghold, killed more than 50 insurgents and wounded several more.
“I didn’t realize how many bad guys there were until we had broken through the enemies’ lines and forced them to retreat. It was roughly 250 insurgents against 30 of us,” the corporal said. “It was a good day for the Marine Corps. We killed a lot of bad guys, and none of our guys were seriously injured.”

Poor Barack

Former President Bill Clinton has agreed to several restrictions on his future business and philanthropic activities around the world to pave the way for his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, to serve as secretary of state, Democrats close to the situation said Wednesday.

Poor Barack, he just does not get it. Bill Clinton will tell him whatever he wants to hear because BILL CLINTON IS A DOCUMENTED LIAR!

Methodist's Getting it Right

Wesley's Pro-Lifers

By John Lomperis on 11.17.08 @ 6:06AM
With the strengthening of Democratic congressional majorities, the election of Barack Obama, and liberal victories on state ballot initiatives concerning abortion, bioethics, and assisted suicide, the last two weeks have given little for pro-lifers to celebrate. Yet pro-lifers have also seen the emergence of more encouraging trends in unlikely places.
One is the United Methodist Church, our country's second-largest Protestant denomination. Like other mainline American Protestant denominations, United Methodism has for decades been dominated by a theologically liberal and radical hierarchy that is out-of-step with the generally much more conservative grassroots membership. One of the many reflections of this was the official abortion-friendly positions adopted by such denominations a generation ago.
At its 1972 General Conference (as the denomination's quadrennial policymaking body is called) the United Methodist Church adopted a lengthy statement of "Social Principles" on various controversial issues, including a moral defense of abortion and a call for the practice's legalization. Ever since, pro-life United Methodists have been trying to take their church back. In the last three General Conferences, "death with dignity" rhetoric of "right-to-die" advocates was officially abandoned in order to clearly state that the denomination "opposes assisted suicide and euthanasia" along with "any pressure upon the dying to end their lives." At the 1988 General Conference, the Social Principles statement was amended to oppose abortion "as a means of gender selection" or as a "means of birth control" -- which, the data shows, applies to most U.S. abortions.
In 1992 and 1996, the denomination passed amendments calling the church "to provide nurturing ministries" to "those in the midst of a crisis pregnancy," including both "those who terminate a pregnancy" and "those who give birth." At the 2000 General Conference, statement was added "oppos[ing] the use of" partial-birth abortion and "call[ing] for the end of this practice" in most instances. In 2004, the statement on abortion was qualified with strong support for adoption. The denomination's position was further modified that year to recognize post-abortion stress and promote counseling for its victims.
When United Methodists convened this spring, they took quite a number of pro-life steps. Delegates adopted a supplemental statement that lengthily denounced the global problem of gender-selective abortion while describing abortion as "violent" and something to oppose when chosen for "trivial reasons." Opposition to abortion as a means of birth control was strengthened, and language opposing parental notification requirements was neutralized while adult "notification and consent" and family consultation were endorsed for minors' abortions. The Social Principles now indicate a clear preference for life with a sentence to "affirm and encourage the Church to assist the ministry of crisis pregnancy centers … that compassionately help women find feasible alternatives to abortion."
More significantly, this last General Conference removed much of the pro-abortion language that had remained in place for 36 years. 1972 rhetoric about circumstances that "warrant" abortion, "unacceptable pregnancy," and support for abortion being somehow "[i]n continuity with past Christian teaching" were stricken from the Social Principles, which now declare that "we are equally bound to respect the sacredness of the life and well-being of the mother and the unborn child." Now the abortion problem with the United Methodist Social Principles has been reduced to a single sentence, which "supports[s] the legal option of abortion" during unspecified "tragic conflicts of life with life."
It is true that the pace of pro-life progress has been frustratingly slow, and the vagueness of that single sentence has enabled liberal denominational officials to continue claiming a mandate for promoting pro-abortion policies in the church's name. Yet the encouraging fact remains that for the last 20 years, every abortion-related change to the denomination's Social Principles has been life-affirming. There are now also positive signs of change in the denominational hierarchy, with at least three bishops in as many years taking the groundbreaking step of speaking out against abortion.
The biggest disappointment for the pro-life Methodist cause came when a margin of just 32 General Conference delegates (out of 800 voting) sustained the denomination's continued affiliation with the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice (RCRC), which stridently opposes any legal restriction or moral disapproval of abortion. The vote was suspiciously scheduled at a time when more than 100 of the increasingly international denomination's pro-life-leaning African delegates were absent. The vote was also influenced by a massive and apparently unprecedented effort by RCRC staff and volunteers before and during the General Conference to lobby delegates, at several points with blatant dishonesty about the extent of their uncompromising extremism. Yet the fact remains that the United Methodist vote on RCRC affiliation was nevertheless the closest it has ever been.
It is also worth remembering that there is recent precedent for an abortion-affirming denomination to reverse course. Two other mainline Protestant denominations, the American Baptist and the Northern Moravians, have chosen to sever their past ties with RCRC. America's largest Protestant denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, adopted a resolution in 1971 that anticipated the Supreme Court's reasoning two years later, demanding legal abortion for reasons as vague as the threat of consequences for the mother's emotional health, effectively making any abortion impossible to prohibit.
In 1974, they adopted a mealy-mouthed resolution calling for "a middle ground" on abortion without any supporting any concrete limitation. Among RCRC's early supporters were several Southern Baptist seminary professors and Foy Valentine, who remained that denomination's chief public spokesman on social issues until 1986. Yet through a struggle of many years, the Southern Baptist Convention has renounced its support for abortion, adopted a position in line with historic Christian teaching, and become a critical institutional bulwark of the pro-life movement.
Many pro-life United Methodists are cautiously optimistic that a similar change may be underway in their own denomination.

Apology Time

Although I was never a McCain fan one thing I thought I knew for sure is the ultimate decency of the m:
an until I saw how the people around him treated Sarah Palin. Like it or not she was the one who drew the large crowds not McCain.

This is an excerpt from the Wall Street Journal:

Let's remember too that the only time Mr. McCain surged ahead -- in the polls, in the volunteers, in the mojo -- was when he picked Mrs. Palin. Before that he and his staff had been flying solo, and they were losing. When the contest returned to the top of the ticket, as presidential campaigns inevitably do, Mr. McCain and his team drove their lead into the ground.
It wasn't Mrs. Palin who dramatically flew to Washington promising a legislative answer to the most important economic issue of our day -- and then, in the words of a New York Times campaign profile, "came off more like a stymied bystander than a leader who could make a difference."
And what does it say when the campaign team of a man who has spent decades in the U.S. Senate cannot agree on (much less present) a coherent answer to why he should be elected president of the United States -- except that he's not Barack Obama?

George W Bush

The attacks on the 2nd President Bush have been brutal. This President has had monumental triumphs and monumental mistakes. Mostly let's remember the President for the man he has been. From the time who took the oath of office he took the high road with Republican majorities in both houses of Congress he reached across the isle in much the same way that Reagan did. He reached out to the leader of the Liberals Ted Kennedy for friendship and legislation. Unfortunately his attempt at goodwill with the opposing party did not have any positive results.

This has been a wild ride this past eight years and it is important to note the challenges we faced as a country with this President:

2000 ELECTION:

This is where the crazies on the left started hating the President. By every objective measure the Florida electors were duty bound to cast their vote for President Bush. At every turn the Bush team showed they could meet the challenges of the various ways the Gore team and the Florida Supreme court were changing the rules of the game. Finally after so many changes for 37 days the supreme court ruled and the Gore team accepted the loss. Even the analysis by the major media (Wasington Post, New York Times, etc...) agreed Bush won the state and therefore won the presidency.

CHINESE HOSTAGES:

Many may have forgotten but this was the first foreign policy crisis and where most experts in that field expected our country to spend most of our energies on. When these men in uniform were taken hostage by the Chinese and accused of espionage there was very little we could do. The President utilized all the diplomacy in his arsenal to convince the worlds #2 super power to do the right thing. It must be noted that the attack heard by most is Bush does not use diplomacy. This first challenge has proven his detractors wrong.

TECH BUBBLE:

When President Bush first started running for President in 1999 we were in the midst of a period of unprecedented economic growth. What the Bush team saw and no one prepared for was that most of the economic and stock price growth were based on unsustainable prices in the technology sector. We had companies with stock prices in the tripple digits and no earnings. Unlike today there are no recriminations like the housing bubble. This affected our economic growth for a period of the most of the first term of President Bush. Due to the job losses in the tech industry we had near zero job growth in the economy. The Bush economic team dealt with this in a very conservative way and they cut the heck out of taxes. This is what finally got our economy moving and it took the cuts 2001 and 2003 to get us out of this mess but in the end there were millions of jobs created.

9/11:

This is what the Bush Presidency was made for. The several previous attacks on our interests in the world were treated as a simple nuisance and a job for law enforcement. The second that 2nd plane hit the President's own words were "we are at war." The major question had there been a Gore Presidency would we have gone after the perpetrators and let that be it. The left, including Obama, hate the term "war on terror". We can not answer such a hypothetical but the words of the left in the post 9/11 era certainly are indicators on what their approach would be. The President did something that Alexander "The Great", the British, and the Soviet Union could not do and that is he over threw the sitting government in Afghanistan. Afghanistan is not a finished project but mostly due to our success in other regions are the enemy reconstituting themselves there.

IRAQ:

Most people view this a a "war of choice" and maybe it was. It is important to recall what was going on before we went ahead with this war. Saddam Hussein was financially supporting terrorists throughout the middle east. Iraq was shooting down our planes in the so called "no fly zone" which in itself is an act of war. The largest outrage is the "Oil for Food" scandal. This was the U.N. sanctioned bribary scam.

The decision was made and the invasion was planned by General Franks and executed flawlessly. On the other hand the post invasion was a disaster and unlike Vietnam Bush listened too intently to the Generals on the ground. It was evident for a couple of years that he needed more troops on the ground and it was not until late in the war that in a very stern meeting where General Sanchez could not answer appropriately why we did not need more troops that President Bush decided to make a change in leadership to General Petreus. At this writing this appears to have worked as long as President Obama does not screw it up.


CREDIT CRISIS:

This was a long running crisis that has many fathers but the question was is how the Bush team handled it. History will have to bear this out but in the short run it appears we as a nation have made the same mistakes that F.D.R. made in the New Deal but not the same mistakes that the Hoover Administration made in raising taxes. From a purely ideological stand point having the government so entwined with industry is a failure for the long run. So now as Republican's we have set a path for the Democrat Administration. This is the biggest disappointment I see with the Team Bush. Mistakes like this have happened in our history before and have been corrected so let's all hope this one will as well.

Even though the Bush Administration ended on a sour note he will be missed by me. I like the man's integrity and style. I like the confidence he has in our way of life as American's. One area he has taught me greatly on and that is his experiment as a big government Republican. In the beginning I thought wrongly it was worth a try to give a little on the government side to woo supporters but in the end that never worked and we sold out our ideals as a party.

I hope that President Bush has a wonderful Post Presidency and he is remembered for the difficulties he faced while in office. Who knows he may be remembered kindly when the historical record is examined with an unbiased eye.

A Good History on the Mortgage Crisis

John Steele Gordon gives a good synopsis of how all of this happened:

Even after the end of Jim Crow in the 1960’s, the effect of redlining lingered, perhaps more out of habit than of racial prejudice. In 1977, responding to political pressure to abolish the practice, Congress finally passed the Community Reinvestment Act, requiring banks to offer credit throughout their marketing areas and rating them on their compliance. This effectively outlawed redlining.
Then, in 1995, regulations adopted by the Clinton administration took the Community Reinvestment Act to a new level. Instead of forbidding banks to discriminate against blacks and black neighborhoods, the new regulations positively forced banks to seek out such customers and areas. Without saying so, the revised law established quotas for loans to specific neighborhoods, specific income classes, and specific races. It also encouraged community groups to monitor compliance and allowed them to receive fees for marketing loans to target groups.
But the aggressive pursuit of an end to redlining also required the active participation of Fannie Mae, and thereby hangs a tale. Back in 1968, the Johnson administration had decided to “adjust” the federal books by taking Fannie Mae off the budget and establishing it as a “Government Sponsored Enterprise” (GSE). But while it was theoretically now an independent corporation, Fannie Mae did not have to adhere to the same rules regarding capitalization and oversight that bound most financial institutions. And in 1970 still another GSE was created, the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, or Freddie Mac, to expand further the secondary market in mortgage-backed securities.
This represented a huge moral hazard. The two institutions were supposedly independent of the government and owned by their stockholders. But it was widely assumed that there was an implicit government guarantee of both Fannie and Freddie’s solvency and of the vast amounts of mortgage-based securities they issued. This assumption was by no means unreasonable. Fannie and Freddie were known to enjoy lower capitalization requirements than other financial institutions and to be held to a much less demanding regulatory regime. If the United States government had no worries about potential failure, why should the market?
Forward again to the Clinton changes in 1995. As part of them, Fannie and Freddie were now permitted to invest up to 40 times their capital in mortgages; banks, by contrast, were limited to only ten times their capital. Put briefly, in order to increase the number of mortgages Fannie and Freddie could underwrite, the federal government allowed them to become grossly undercapitalized—that is, grossly to reduce their one source of insurance against failure. The risk of a mammoth failure was then greatly augmented by the sheer number of mortgages given out in the country.
That was bad enough; then came politics to make it much worse. Fannie and Freddie quickly evolved into two of the largest financial institutions on the planet, with assets and liabilities in the trillions. But unlike other large, profit-seeking financial institutions, they were headquartered in Washington, D.C., and were political to their fingertips. Their management and boards tended to come from the political world, not the business world. And some were corrupt: the management of Fannie Mae manipulated the books in order to trigger executive bonuses worth tens of millions of dollars, and Freddie Mac was found in 2003 to have understated earnings by almost $5 billion.
Both companies, moreover, made generous political contributions, especially to those members of Congress who sat on oversight committees. Their charitable foundations could be counted on to kick in to causes that Congressmen and Senators deemed worthy. Many of the political contributions were illegal: in 2006, Freddie was fined $3.8 million—a record amount—for improper election activity.
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By 2007, Fannie and Freddie owned about half of the $12 trillion in outstanding mortgages, an unprecedented concentration of debt—and of risk. Much of the debt was concentrated in the class of sub-prime mortgages that had proliferated after the 1995 regulations. These were mortgages given to people of questionable credit standing, in one of the attempts by the federal government to increase home ownership among the less well-to-do.
Since banks knew they could offload these sub-prime mortgages to Fannie and Freddie, they had no reason to be careful about issuing them. As for the firms that bought the mortgage-based securities issued by Fannie and Freddie, they thought they could rely on the government’s implicit guarantee. AIG, the world’s largest insurance firm, was happy to insure vast quantities of these securities against default; it must have seemed like insuring against the sun rising in the West.
Wall Street, politicians, and the press all acted as though one of the iron laws of economics, as unrepealable as Newton’s law of universal gravity, had been set aside. That law, simply put, is that potential reward always equals potential risk. In the real world, unfortunately, a high-yield, no-risk investment cannot exist.
In 2006, after an astonishing and unsustainable climb in home values, the inevitable correction set in. By mid-2007, many sub-prime mortgages were backed by real estate that was now of lesser value than the amount of debt. As the market started to doubt the soundness of these mortgages, their value and even their salability began to deteriorate. So did the securities backed by them. Companies that had heavily invested in sub-prime mortgages saw their stock prices and their net worth erode sharply. This caused other companies to avoid lending them money. Credit markets began to tighten sharply as greed in the marketplace was replaced by fear.
A vicious downward spiral ensued. Bear Stearns, the smallest investment bank on Wall Street, was forced into a merger in March with JPMorgan Chase, with guarantees from the Federal Reserve. Fannie and Freddie were taken over by the government in early September; Merrill Lynch sold itself to Bank of America; AIG had to be bailed out by the government to the tune of $85 billion; Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy; Washington Mutual became the biggest bank failure in American history and was taken over by JPMorgan Chase; to avoid failure, Wachovia, the sixth largest bank in the country, was taken over by Wells Fargo. The most creditworthy institutions saw interest rates climb to unprecedented levels—even for overnight loans of bank reserves, which are the foundation of the high-functioning capitalist system of the West. Finally it became clear that only a systemic intervention by the government would stem the growing panic and allow credit markets to begin to function normally again.
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Many people, especially liberal politicians, have blamed the disaster on the deregulation of the last 30 years. But they do so in order to avoid the blame’s falling where it should—squarely on their own shoulders. For the same politicians now loudly proclaiming that deregulation caused the problem are the ones who fought tooth and nail to prevent increased regulation of Fannie and Freddie—the source of so much political money, their mother’s milk.
To be sure, there is more than enough blame to go around. Forgetting the lessons of the past, Wall Street acted as though the only direction that markets and prices could move was up. Credit agencies like Moody’s, Standard & Poor’s, and Fitch gave high ratings to securities that, in retrospect, they clearly did not understand. The news media did not even try to investigate the often complex economics behind the housing market.
But remaining at the heart of the financial beast now abroad in the world are Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the mortgages they bought and turned into securities. Protected by their political patrons, they were allowed to pile up colossal debt on an inadequate capital base and to escape much of the regulatory oversight and rules to which other financial institutions are subject. Had they been treated as the potential risks to financial stability they were from the beginning, the housing bubble could not have grown so large and the pain that is now accompanying its end would not have hurt so much.
Herbert Hoover famously remarked that “the trouble with capitalism is capitalists. They’re too greedy.” That is true. But another and equal trouble with capitalism is politicians. Like the rest of us, they are made of all-too-human clay and can be easily blinded to reality by naked self-interest, at a cost we are only now beginning to fathom.