Lord Monckton and Snake Oil

Indeed, the only time Fraud Monckton ran for house of Lords he received zero votes.

While Lord Monckton might be good at devising Sudoku puzzles, you sure don’t want to seek his advice on anything to do with either science or politics since he’s demonstrably a consummate and nearly pathological liar when it comes to those two arenas.

He’s hopped on the climate denialist bandwagon, and there are many examples of untruths, hyperbole, and amazing claims in his body of statements on climate science, and he even managed to sucker me before I knew much about him [back here — one of those posts I really regret having created, followup is embedded in an update in the original post and here.]

Another bizarre example – he claims to be a member of the House of Lords, even though the House of Lords has stated that:

“Christopher Monckton is not and has never been a Member of the House of Lords. There is no such thing as a ‘non-voting’ or ‘honorary’ member.”

Indeed, the only time Fraud Monckton ran for house of Lords he received zero votes.

Peter Sinclair at Climate Denial Crock of the Week has a two part series debunking the Snake Oil that Fraud Monckton is pimping, if you haven’t seen Part one, stop by LGF , and here is part II:

H/T Deltoid

Obama’s Greatest Hits

A concise compilation of the things that should raise doubts about an Obama Presidency. H/T Patterico

How Obama Supports Acorn

Senator Obama has worked hand in glove with ACORN, the group under investigation for voter fraud in many states, for many years. You won’t find our press reporting these connections, so if you want the true facts on Barack Obama sometimes you have to read foreign papers, strange as it seems. Here you seen an article at Canada Free Press that outlines those recent legislative ties:

Not only did Senator Barack Obama’s presidential campaign pay more than U.S. $800,000 to a front of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform, Now, ACORN, currently under investigation in a dozen States for voter registration fraud and bribery schemes, for “get-out-the-vote-efforts”; Obama co-sponsored legislation called the “Helping Families Save their Homes in Bankruptcy Act of 2007”– that was supported by ACORN and protects them.

On the surface the goal was noble, but like his record with the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, Barack’s efforts on the housing front led to zero results, unless you want to look at the monumental meltdown of financial companies from choking on sub prime loans forced down their throats, which is a very bad result. If you go to the areas Obama organized in, if you look at housing in his state, you see people no better off or worse off. See Here.

Acorn has fought foreclosures but also supported legislation that enabled this credit market meltdown for almost two decades. They are particularly responsible for helping raise the caps on permissible loan to values, lowering of the standards at Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac (FNMA & GMAC,) as well as legislation that increased the percent of subprime loans they had to carry. So in a way Acorn helped open the subprime floodgates and helped create a whole new class of victims to feed into their political causes.

You won’t see the McCain campaign bring this up for a few reasons. Even though Acorn and Democrat legislators created the sub-prime valley of vultures that poor people were fed into, even though they profited with donations from the very predatory lenders that they trailblazed the market for, it’s a no go simply because the defense will be to show America a non stop calvacade of poor people getting foreclosed upon. Poor people who were sold a dream that was really a nightmare by pernicious legislators who would rather crush our economy than lose an election.

See previous articles here and here.

UPDATE: From their 2002 Brochure you can see Acorn lobbying for money for their “credit counseling groups”:

  •  
    • Congress should increase funding for the HUD Housing Counseling program from $50 million to
      $75 million, with some of the increase earmarked for foreclosure prevention counseling.
    • Cities, Counties, States, and the Mortgage Industry should provide funding for community outreach to
      borrowers in danger of losing their homes and to housing counseling programs to help homeowners
      avoid foreclosure.
    • States and the Federal Government should set up and provide the start-up money for Rescue Funds (such as the state of Ohio is doing), but these funds should be fully financed by the Mortgage Industry.

What this amounts to is creating victim classes and then using them to shake-down the mortgage industry – it took 20 years, but recently Acorn got what they really wanted through their support of regulations in Congress that led to this very debacle, and they are profiting by it just as much as those fat cats at Countrywide.

McClatchey Tries to Cover Barney Frank’s Fannie

Loan officers didn’t care, they got commission good or bad. Underwriters across the country were browbeaten until they learned to hold their nose and look the other way. In the meantime to keep up banks were sending out people with cameras to take pictures of huge sums of money laid out bill by bill on kitchen floors because there were “cultural differences” and some cultures didn’t trust banks

The notoriously liberal McClatchey papers are trying to cover up some of the guilt of Fannie Mae and by the secondary effect, some of their legislative supporters in Washington like Barney Frank and Christopher Dodd.

They print a few facts about the industry, but gloss over the real problems created by the loosy-goosey Government Sponsored Enterprises. Specifically these bullets from the article are somewhat factual, but leave out things:

_ More than 84 percent of the subprime mortgages in 2006 were issued by private lending institutions. [ true, but they wouldn’t do it if they didnt’ think a market was there – without Fannie and Freddie Securitizing these no sane lending instition would have dumpster dived the bad credit market the way they have the past decade.]

_ Private firms made nearly 83 percent of the subprime loans to low- and moderate-income borrowers that year. [Of course they did, see comment above]

_ Only one of the top 25 subprime lenders in 2006 was directly subject to the housing law that’s being lambasted by conservative critics. [ no, companies like Greentree, Canseco, Countrywide and others who created the chain of processing, sales, and servicing firms tried to comply with those federal guidelines because if they didn’t they couldn’t expand or compete with the big-box banks in products in some states and it was all about volume as well as secondary goals like selling contractor homes.]

Basically Fannie was worse than Freddy, Freddy had higher standards, and higher fees. By leading the way to the bottom in standards and raising their caps the highest Fannie led directly to this mess. If you had some toxic waste on the books you had to carry because no loan servicer would buy it who cared? Fannie or Freddy were securitizing it right?
This atmosphere of churn and burn and increasing volume led to a cuthroat business in refinancing and sales where overnight mortgage giants were racing each other to see who could dive the deepest in the credit barrel the fastest to cut into the big box bank’s turf.

Loan officers didn’t care, they got commission good or bad. Underwriters across the country were browbeaten until they learned to hold their nose and look the other way. In the meantime to keep up banks were sending out people with cameras to take pictures of huge sums of money laid out bill by bill on kitchen floors because there were “cultural differences” and some cultures didn’t trust banks (meanwhile on the counter there were labratory quality scales and packaging material…) Processing was outsourced to third parties with even lower standards because the onboard staff couldn’t keep up with the glut, and automated online processing raised their profit margins.The processing outfits got paid by number of loans processed, so it was rare to reject. Non-Traditional lenders were knife-fighting to gain major contractor’s business, and in some offices on the same computer that held the loan forms you would find the home office software to print up fake W-2’s. If you needed more money than your home was really worth on a refi package, there were specialty appraisers who would inflate the value to meet the needs.

Fly by nights came and went, and their loans got sold, repackaged, sold again. Massive fraud started occurring in some rescue agencies, some sponsored by ACORN. Straw buyer schemes, fractional deeds, and rescue angels who turned demonic all flourished. It all floated downstream to Fannie in the end because they blazed the path to lower standards and larger subprime loans. You only have to think about it a minute: Have you ever seen the government do anything where there wasn’t massive fraud and bilking? The GSE’s have been the loss leaders in today’s financial crisis, and it was truly congress and the GSE’s who led down that path into vallies of vultures by opening markets that shouldn’t have existed in the first place.

Do you think Obama isn’t neck deep with the community organizations who led to the lowering of standards and the raising of caps? Do you think Urban Democrats didn’t use these groups to increase their vote blocks?

In the wow, do we have an update department, Check out this confirmation of Obama’s ties to Acorn at LGF.

Barack’s Acorn

Didn’t fall far from the tree.

UPDATE: Youtube has pulled the ad, I’ve found it at Liveleak and reposted:


 
You can also play the ad from the Campaign Website here.

Here’s the original Youtube link, now down if you click on it:

The Barack truth Squad is out in force, this one’s been pulled down at Youtube per commentor Aknot, he dropped off an article on Acorn and voter fraud in in Florida that’s worth reading however from 970WFLA:

Supervisor of Elections Deborah Clark has notified the State Attorney and the Florida Division of Elections that her office has received 35 voter registration applications in the last two weeks from the organization Work for Progress that appear questionable and possibly fraudulent. The handwriting is virtually the same on multiple applications, and some have the same address. Some of the applications have no address or are incomplete in other ways.

One application was turned in incomplete, so elections staff sent a notice to the applicant. However, the voter responded that she has been registered to vote since 1995 and stated that she had not submitted a new registration application.

One of the bigger problems with these massive voter registration fraud efforts is how it shapes the polls and creates a false impression of reality. All pollsters weight their samples by the numbers of voters registered D or R in the states that record party affiliation. If there are 4X the numbers of Democrats registered than Republicans, they are going to sample more Democrats in their poll than Republicans, even if the state is traditionally red. This is skewing the view of the election.

UPDATE: Paul F Villarreal has a new link that works at Youtube here.

Meanwhile Barack’s Campaign is doing all they can to distance him from Acorn, but there is this quote right out of his own mouth:

I’ve been fighting alongside ACORN on issues you care about my entire career. Even before I was an elected official, when I ran Project Vote voter registration drive in Illinois, ACORN was smack dab in the middle of it, and we appreciate your work.”

Obama Campaign Pays Acorn Group To Get Out the Vote

ACORN, who bills themselves as “Non Partisan” is under investigation in up to ten states for possible voter fraud. The authorities are finding things like the Dallas Cheerleaders lineup signed up to vote in states they don’t reside in, and Acorn is pumping tens of thousands of voter registrations into key toss up states. Many of those registrations are bogus and fraudulent.

Now we discover that the Obama Campaign is paying an Acorn group directly for get out the vote efforts, and that they neglected to list that service in their filing. Video from Fox News:

Acorn Nevada Raided for Voter Fraud

The group that’s one of Barack Obama’s best friends, Acorn, had one of their offices raided in Nevada today, more from AP:

Nevada state authorities are raiding the Las Vegas headquarters of an organization that works to get low-income people to vote.

A Nevada secretary of state’s office spokesman said Tuesday that investigators are looking for evidence of voter fraud at the office of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, also called ACORN.

More at Jammie Wearing Fool