Two Democratic lawmakers are calling on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to relax recently tightened standards for mortgages on new condominiums, saying they could threaten the viability of some developments and slow the housing-market recovery.

[...]

In a letter to the chief executives of Fannie and Freddie, Reps. Barney Frank, the Massachusetts Democrat who is chairman of the House Financial Services Committee [The Hon. Barney's fingerprints are all over this current mess. -ed.], and Anthony Weiner (D., N.Y.) warned that the 70% sales threshold “may be too onerous” and could lead condo buyers to shun new developments. The legislators asked the companies to “make appropriate adjustments” to their underwriting standards for condos.

via Changes Urged to Rules on Condo Loans – WSJ.com.

Isn’t government interference in business decisions largely to blame for the current state we’re in? If the pols would have kept their ignorant hands out of things, maybe we wouldn’t be as bad off as we are now.

The government-anointed judges of risk at Standard & Poor’s, Moody’s and Fitch inflicted upon investors the AAA-rated subprime mortgage-backed security. They also inflicted upon the world’s nest eggs the even more opaque AAA-rated collateralized debt obligation (CDO). Without the ratings agency seal of approval — required by SEC, Federal Reserve and state regulation for many institutional investors — it would have been nearly impossible to market the structured financial products at the heart of the crisis. Yet Team Obama suggests only that regulators reduce the agencies’ favored role “wherever possible.”

via A Triple-A Punt – WSJ.com.

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If you’re at all familiar with search engine optimization (SEO) as it relates to your traffic generation efforts, you know that if you want your individual pages to rank well in search engines they’ll need to have quite a few quality incoming links. That’s SEO 101.

While there are quite a few ways to do that, it takes a lot of time and effort. You request links from other site owners. They slap you down as a spammer. You build your social networks, traffic starts to trickle in.

It doesn’t have to be that way any more. Jonathan Leger, well known in the IM community for services like 3WayLinks, has done it again.

Visit “My Way Links” and check out his newest creation. It promises to be a killer SEO tool.

If you want GOOD incoming links, from GOOD sites, links that will pass on a little of their PR love to your pages, you owe it to yourself to check out Jonathan’s new program.

I don’t think you’ll be sorry.

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“The Republican Party is in deep trouble,” Powell told corporate security executives at a conference in Washington sponsored by Fortify Software Inc. The party must realize that the country has changed, he said. “Americans do want to pay taxes for services,” he said. “Americans are looking for more government in their life, not less.”

via CongressDaily – Powell Says Shrinking GOP Should Return To The Center.

Guess all the tea-partiers were protesting about something else?

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I can’t remember the last time I picked up a printed copy of a newspaper. I don’t seem to be the only one in that category, either. Newspapers are shutting left and right. Why?

They simply don’t provide what we, the information-consuming public, want, in the way that we want it. Namely, yesterday. We’re in a ‘breaking news’ information world.

When the US Navy rescued Captain Phillips, news-hungry interneters knew about it within hours, if not minutes. When the earthquake struck Italy, the world was mobilizing to help almost immediately.

That kind of news delivery doesn’t, can’t, happen with a newspaper.

Some people lament the closing of newspapers as ‘a decline in society’. Where will we be, they ask, when the local newspaper prints its last daily edition?

Who cares?

No, I’m not oblivious to the fact that people who work in the newsrooms will likely lose their jobs. I’m aware that the pressman is very worried that he has worked a lifetime to master a fading technology and has no other skill to substitute. I’m relatively certain that buggy-whip craftsmen felt the same way.

So in that respect, about the people, I do care. But about newspapers as an ‘institution’? Nope.

I don’t know that print newspapers will survive. I definitely don’t think of them as venerable, ‘must have’ institutions that need to be propped up and kept in some sort of zombie limbo by government bailout or capital injection. I know that the companies that run the newsrooms will survive, providing that they re-invent themselves to provide what we want, when we want it, in the way that we want it.

This little missive was inspired by an article by L. Gordon Crovitz in today’s Wall Street Journal (ONLINE!) that detailed the reinvention of that paper by managing editor Barney Kilgore. The WSJ was in trouble. Their monopoly on providing market information to the financial world was gone. Investors and market-watchers were able to get stock pricing immediately. What did Mr. Kilgore do?

Kilgore observed that then new media such as radio meant market news was available in real time. Some cities had a dozen newspapers that had gained the Journal’s once-valuable ability to report share prices.

The Journal had to change. Technology increasingly meant readers would know the basic facts of news as it happened. He announced, “It doesn’t have to have happened yesterday to be news,” and said that people were more interested in what would happen tomorrow. He crafted the front page “What’s News — ” column to summarize what had happened, but focused on explaining what the news meant.

On the morning after Pearl Harbor, other newspapers recounted the facts already known to all the day before through radio. The Journal’s page-one story instead began, “War with Japan means industrial revolution in the United States.” It outlined the implications for the economy, industry and commodity and financial markets.

Kilgore led the Journal’s circulation to one million by the 1960s from 33,000 in the 1940s by adapting the newspaper to a role reflecting how people used different media for news. His rallying cry was, “The easiest thing in the world for a reader to do is to stop reading.”

Even after radio and TV began delivering news in ‘real time’, newspapers survived. Newspapers provided a depth of information that couldn’t be provided in sound bites and video segments.

The internet, obviously, is the game changer.

There is, of course, the question of just who will do the reporting if/when the big papers close. I don’t have a worry of that. If there is a vacuum in the marketplace, some entrepeneur somewhere will move to fill it. “How,” people ask, “will any company be able to pay for a reporter or analyst to be on-scene when everything is moving toward free content on the internet?”

It might happen that way. But one thing I’m sure of – if people don’t get the information they want in the way they want it, for free, they’ll pay for it. Eventually. It may take some scarcity in the news marketplace for people to realize that if they want timely, accurate information and analysis they’ll have to pay for it. But if it’s needed, it will happen, sooner or later.

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‘Universal health care’. They rallying cry of idealists and liberals everywhere. I respect the ideal, I really do. But I also recognize its impracticality, unlike most idealists. I recognize that when something is handed out for free, the availability is abused – something that proponents of a single-payer medical system refuse to acknowledge.

So what’s going to happen when a ‘universal’ health care system hits the US? Ask Massachusetts:

…The Patrick panel is considering one option to “exclude coverage of services of low priority/low value.” Another would “limit coverage to services that produce the highest value when considering both clinical effectiveness and cost.” (Guess who would determine what is high or low value? Not patients or doctors.) Yet another is “a limitation on the total amount of money available for health care services,” i.e., an overall spending cap.

via Massachusetts’s Health-Care Program Offers a Preview of Barack Obama’s Universal Health-Care Plan – WSJ.com.

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Disclaimer: at this point in time, I don’t have to worry about how much my tax burden will be when I go over $250K in gross income. I want to earn that much, but don’t yet. In thinking about it, though, maybe I don’t want to. Why should I if it’s just going to get taken away by Obama & Co.?

That dilemma is the subject of a Wall Street Journal Online article today: Jonathan Clements Says the Bonus Tax Creates a Disincentive to Work.

A snippet:

That would be me. Once my total income hits $250,000 for the current calendar year, I will have no incentive to work a single day more in 2009. After all, for every extra dollar of income I earn above $250,000, I will lose 90 cents of the bonus I received earlier this year.

Being somewhat knowledgeable about personal finance, I’m trying to figure out how to finagle this. By minimizing my investment income in 2009 and pushing other income into 2010, I reckon I can delay the day of tax reckoning. But even with that finagling, by mid-October, I will hit $250,000 in total income — and have no incentive to earn any more income in 2009.

At that point, I plan to ask Citi for an unpaid sabbatical. Forget earning more income. There’s no point. Instead, you will find me hunkered down at home, desperately trying not to spend money. This will make entire financial sense for the Clements household. What about the struggling economy? Not so much.

Some of you cheer using the tax code to punish achievement. Not that you use that as the reasoning – the reasoning is to ’spread the wealth’. As if someone who doesn’t earn it deserves a sizeable chunk of what *I* earn.

What if the wealthy people, the high earners that you steal this money from, decide that it isn’t worth it any more? Then where are you?

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Paul Krugman writes in the NYTimes:

And the rhetorical response of conservatives to the stimulus plan — which will, it’s worth bearing in mind, cost substantially less than either the Bush administration’s $2 trillion in tax cuts or the $1 trillion and counting spent in Iraq — has bordered on the deranged.

It’s “generational theft,” said Senator John McCain, just a few days after voting for tax cuts that would, over the next decade, have cost about four times as much.

Libs have succeeded in reframing what tax cuts really are. They’ve equated tax cuts with spending, and people have bought into it. Only in government can a decrease in revenue be termed a ‘cost’. They wail about ‘the cost of a tax cut’ like it’s a bill that needs to be paid. What it implies is that the money that they thought was going to come in was already spent.

So how do we decrease the cost of tax cuts? The way most normal people would – cut back on spending. You make less, you spend less.

Unless you’re a politician and it’s other people’s money.

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Peter Ferrara Says Barack Obama’s Economic Policy, Guided By Liberal Ideology, Is Impeding Recovery – WSJ.com
In his inaugural address, President Barack Obama said, “The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works — whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified.” Or as administration spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter said in January, the touchstone is, “What will have the biggest and most immediate impact on creating private sector jobs and strengthening the middle class? We’re guided by what works, not by any ideology or special interests.”

As Mr. Ferrara says, in a nice way, bullshit.

This spending plan that just passed is the biggest abomination in the history of the U.S, and a return to the failed liberal ideology that massive spending can boost an economy out of recession or even depression. It didn’t work with FDR, it didn’t work with Jimmy Carter.

Reagan cut government spending as a % of GDP, cut taxes, cut back onerous regulation on business. The country’s economic outlook improved dramatically, in just a couple of years.

Obama and the liberal congress is doing just the opposite. Think it’ll work?

The producers of this country, the backbone – small businesses, entrepeneurs – look at this monstrosity of a spending bill and wonder where all this money is going to come from. Money that is being firehosed toward totally ideological programs – rather than the country’s infrastructure – has to come from somewhere. Unfortunately, we know where it’s going to come from.

Us. You. Me. The people who make America work. The people who drive the country. Not the ones who suck it up without putting back. You think that excites me? You think that makes me want to work hard, to succeed, when I know that anything I produce over a certain amount is going to be handed to some woman in Section 8 housing who hasn’t worked in 40 years? And has a 60″ big screen TV? Hardwood floors?

Yessiree Barry and Nancy and Harry – that sure motivates me to go above and beyond.

I’m worried about the seemingly impossible-to-stop socialist juggernaut that the U.S. government has turned into.

I’m worried that my 16- and 14-year old kids are going to be left holding the bag. Somebody’s going to try and make THEM pay for what the socialist dems are doing today.

I want to see the 100 million people that make America work stand up to the 100 million or more that don’t and say, “No. Enough.” But I don’t think it’s going to happen.

Because the people who are on the dole are going to vote down the people who aren’t, every time.

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Michael Crichton

One of my favorite authors, Dr. Michael Crichton, died a few days ago.

In 2003, he gave a lecture at CIT — and exposes the fundamental fallacies of global warming hysteria. Here is part of what he said (emphases mine)…

Cast your minds back to 1960. John F. Kennedy is president, commercial jet airplanes are just appearing, the biggest university mainframes have 12K of memory. And in Green Bank, West Virginia at the new National Radio Astronomy Observatory, a young astrophysicist named Frank Drake runs a two-week project called Ozma, to search for extraterrestrial signals. A signal is received, to great excitement. It turns out to be false, but the excitement remains. In 1960, Drake organizes the first SETI conference, and came up with the now-famous Drake equation:

N=N*fp ne fl fi fc fL

Where N is the number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy; fp is the fraction with planets; ne is the number of planets per star capable of supporting life; fl is the fraction of planets where life evolves; fi is the fraction where intelligent life evolves; and fc is the fraction that communicates; and fL is the fraction of the planet’s life during which the communicating civilizations live.

This serious-looking equation gave SETI a serious footing as a legitimate intellectual inquiry. The problem, of course, is that none of the terms can be known, and most cannot even be estimated. The only way to work the equation is to fill in with guesses. And guesses — just so we’re clear — are merely expressions of prejudice. Nor can there be “informed guesses.” If you need to state how many planets with life choose to communicate, there is simply no way to make an informed guess. It’s simply prejudice.

The Drake equation can have any value from “billions and billions” to zero. An expression that can mean anything means nothing. Speaking precisely, the Drake equation is literally meaningless, and has nothing to do with science. I take the hard view that science involves the creation of testable hypotheses. The Drake equation cannot be tested and therefore SETI is not science. SETI is unquestionably a religion. . . .

The fact that the Drake equation was not greeted with screams of outrage — similar to the screams of outrage that greet each Creationist new claim, for example — meant that now there was a crack in the door, a loosening of the definition of what constituted legitimate scientific procedure. And soon enough, pernicious garbage began to squeeze through the cracks. . . .

I want to pause here and talk about this notion of consensus, and the rise of what has been called consensus science. I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you’re being had.

Let’s be clear: The work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.

There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period. . . .

I would remind you to notice where the claim of consensus is invoked. Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough. Nobody says the consensus of scientists agrees that E=mc2. Nobody says the consensus is that the sun is 93 million miles away. It would never occur to anyone to speak that way. . . .

To an outsider, the most significant innovation in the global warming controversy is the overt reliance that is being placed on models. Back in the days of nuclear winter, computer models were invoked to add weight to a conclusion: “These results are derived with the help of a computer model.” But now large-scale computer models are seen as generating data in themselves. No longer are models judged by how well they reproduce data from the real world — increasingly, models provide the data. As if they were themselves a reality. And indeed they are, when we are projecting forward. There can be no observational data about the year 2100. There are only model runs.

This fascination with computer models is something I understand very well. Richard Feynman called it a disease. I fear he is right. Because only if you spend a lot of time looking at a computer screen can you arrive at the complex point where the global warming debate now stands.

Nobody believes a weather prediction twelve hours ahead. Now we’re asked to believe a prediction that goes out 100 years into the future? And make financial investments based on that prediction? Has everybody lost their minds?

Bravo, Dr. Crichton.

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Gas prices in the U.S. rose above $4.00 a gallon for a number of reasons: speculation, a weakening dollar, perception of short supply. We all know this.

What is keeping prices hovering around $4.00 a gallon, though, are the antics of your two favorite Democrat members of Congress: King Harry Reid of Nevada, and Queen Nancy Pulosi of California.

These two members of Democrat royalty want to keep gas prices rising. They WANT you to pay more at the pump. They don’t think you’re paying enough. They think that premium energy prices will force a move to alternative energy sources. They are deliriously happy because now they don’t even have to pass a “don’t use the carbon” tax.

You think Bush is in the pocket of Big Oil? King Harry and Queen Nancy are in the pocket of Big Enviro. When Big Enviro says “jump”, all the King and Queen do is ask, “how high?”

They have basically shut down the Congress to avoid having anything energy-related come to a floor vote, because they know they’d lose. Constituents are pressing their representatives in both the Senate and the House to do something about energy prices — repeal the prohibitions and restrictions on offshore drilling and drilling in ANWR. The last figure I heard was 76% of Americans favor relaxing restrictions on drilling.

Shocked at the price of food lately?

Guess what it takes to get food from the farm to the store. Ahh, you got it–diesel fuel. What about the packaging? What do you think is one of the necessary ingredients for the plastic bottles that everything comes packaged in? Right again–oil.

And we’re not even talking yet about the price of corn, the stuff that enviro-ethanol is made from. Because of mandated food-for-fuel policies of the enviro-Dems, corn prices have tripled over the last year.

And you think Democrats stand for the ‘little guy’? King Harry and Queen Nancy spit in your eye.

They’re telling you, straight to your face, “We don’t give half a shit that it costs you double to feed your family. Eat noodles.

“We don’t care that you can’t afford to drive to work. Ride the bus.

“We don’t care about the hardship you’re going through. Deal with it.

“Our Lord AlGore, in his infinite wisdom (not to mention all the enviro-peeps who give us campaign money), says that you need to sacrifice for the good of the planet. You have to give up the oil.

“We don’t care that there’re no real alternatives.

“We don’t care that what we’re doing will probably send us and the world into economic depression.

“High oil prices? Best thing since sliced bread! They’re not high enough!

“You don’t like it? Too bad, so sad. We run the country, just the two of us, and you don’t. Fuck off.“

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