Archive for the ‘Barney Frank’ Category

Conservative Refocus

About all we can say is that it’s a good thing ole “Frank-n-Furtive” is leaving in very short order.

He has, in fact, already become an embarrassment to himself; however, if he schticks around much longer, he may even begin to besmirch the reputation of the US Congress, if that’s even possible.

Yeah, that’s mean, like he isn’t…..

What many may not consider, is the fact that Congress’ abysmal approval rating probably hinges on just a relative few Congressional curmudgeons, and ole’ Frank-n-Slime is the signatory poster child for sleazy Congressional flotsam.

Good riddance, and don’t let the door, or the page, hit your butt on the way out, Count Flatula.

Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., said he advised President Obama against taking up health care reform following a special election in 2010 that changed Democrats’ fortunes in the Senate, saying that he should have instead turned his focus to financial reform.
From National Journal:

Frank referenced former President Bill Clinton and his failed health care plan from the 1990s. “Obama made the same mistake Clinton made,” Frank said in a wide-ranging interview with New York magazine. “When you try to extend health care to people who don’t have it, people who have it and are on the whole satisfied with it get nervous.”
The outgoing representative from Massachusetts added that after Republican Scott Brown won former Sen. Edward M. Kennedy’s seat, breaking Democrats’ filibuster-proof majority, Obama should have backed down: “I think we paid a terrible price for health care. I would not have pushed it as hard. As a matter of fact, after Scott Brown won, I suggested going back. I would have started with financial reform but certainly not health care,” Frank said.
He said that if the president had followed his advice, “you could have gotten some pieces of it.”
Republicans seized on the comments, with the National Republican Congressional Committee issuing a release to several Democratic-held districts on Monday: “Even Barney Frank admits that ObamaCare has been a disaster,” the statement read. On Tuesday, Frank pushed back against the growing storm, saying that the GOP is “twisting my words,” and arguing that he was making a comment on the politics of the bill, not its “subject matter.”
“I have no issue with the subject matter or the bill itself,” Frank said in an interview with Talking Points Memo. “I was just commenting on the politics. And I was saying it was a mistake to have done it first.”
He further argued that he believes the bill will become more popular as time goes by. “I think, for instance, as the health care bill goes forward, it will be less and less plausible that it was doing any damage to anybody, and more and more people will be seeing the benefits of it,” Frank said.

I’m sure most of you recall when then-incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi promised that her Congress would be “the most ethical Congress evah!”. O.K., perhaps she actually said “ever” instead of “evah”, but you get the point. This was supposedly in response to all of the ethics issues occurring while Republicans were in control of the House, such as dealings with uber-lobbyist Jack Abramoff and the Mark Foley scandal. But truly, how could any House of Representatives that still contained Barney Frank, William Jefferson and Alcee Hastings be considered anything remotely close to ethical.

Speaking of Alcee Hastings, do you know about him? This Florida Congressman was once a Federal Judge before being impeached for accepting bribes. Go back and read that last sentence. If you read “was once a Federal Judge before being impeached for accepting bribes” then you read it correctly. Alcee Hastings was impeached in 1988 by the Democrat-controlled House before being removed by the Senate the next year after he was charged (though acquitted after his co-defendant refused to testify) of accepting around $150,000 in bribes.

Fast-forward a few years and former Judge Hastings was elected to Congress to represent a heavily-gerrymandered minority district in South Florida which was newly created (some argue specifically for him, but we all know that such things never happen) in 1992. Since then he’s done very little, not offering much in the way of actual legislation and generally enjoying such perks as a taxpayer-funded Lexus.

Shockingly, Congressman Hastings has found himself caught up in yet another ethics scandal, this time involving claims of sexual harassment made by a former staffer who claims:

For over two years, from January 2008 through February 19, 2010, Ms. Packer was forced to endure unwelcome sexual advances, crude sexual comments, and unwelcome touching by Mr. Hastings while serving as the Representative of the Commission to the United States Mission to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. Although Ms. Packer repeatedly rejected Mr. Hastings’ sexual attention and repeatedly complained about the harassment to the Commission Staff Director, Fred Turner, Mr. Hastings refused to stop sexually harassing her. Rather, Mr. Hastings and Mr. Turner began to retaliate against Ms. Packer—including making threats of termination—because she continued to object to Mr. Hastings’ conduct.

If this is an example of “the most ethical Congress ever”, we are relieved that former Speaker Pelosi didn’t promise that it would be the most fiscally conservative Congress ever.
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Wednesday, 15 Jun 2011 09:56 AM

By Forrest Jones

The housing crisis that began in 2006 is now worse than the meltdown in the Great Depression, with home prices having fallen 33 percent since then compared to 31 percent in the 1920s and 1930s, according to data from Case-Shiller, which tracks the sector.

“The sharp fall in house prices in the first quarter provided further confirmation that this housing crash has been larger and faster than the one during the Great Depression,” says Paul Dales, senior economist at Capital Economics in Toronto, according to CNBC.

The figures come at a time when unemployment numbers hover stubbornly high around 9.1 percent, while economic growth figures remain sluggish to the point that Fed officials say expansive monetary policy will stay in place.

There is one bright spot for the sector, however.

“The only comfort is that the latest monthly data show that towards the end of the first quarter prices started to fall at a more modest rate,” Dales says.

Still, he adds, expect a lost year.

“Nonetheless, prices are likely to fall by a further 3 percent this year, resulting in a 5 percent drop over the year as a whole.”

Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke has said the jobs market is running through a “loss of momentum,” and until hiring picks up and unemployment rates fall, the economy will continue to limp along.

“Until we see a sustained period of stronger job creation, we cannot consider the recovery to be truly established,” Bernanke said recently in Atlanta, Georgia, according to AFP newswire.
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Read more: CNBC: Housing Crisis Officially Worse Than Great Depression

I saw a political cartoon today that has Patrick Henry saying, “Give me liberty or give me civility.” The apparent point being that civility is a limit on liberty. There is a saying that people in the old west tended to be rather polite, because everybody was armed; to the degree that is true, people voluntarily limited the offensiveness of their speech as a matter of prudence. The reality is that anything that governs any action is a limit on liberty, which is why the Founding Fathers held the idea of limited government as a basic tenet of the foundation of our republic.

There is a balance that should be maintained between complete freedom to say and behave in any way a person chooses and in civility and polite behavior. Politeness and civility come from a person’s upbringing and the social culture of society.

When I was a child, in the 1950’s, society was considerably more polite than it is today, not only in speech, but in grooming, dress, and general behavior. Men were careful of their personal appearance, were chivalrous, tipping their hats (everyone wore a hat), stepping aside to allow others to pass on the sidewalk, holding doors for women, children, and the elderly, and watching their language in public.

The big change to this came from the younger members of my generation in the late sixties and seventies. Inspired by left-leaning professors, it started with college students who refused to honor the draft, developed into opposition to the Viet Nam war; running counter to traditional patriotic support of our soldiers during time of war. This bloomed into the hippy era, drug culture, free love, abortion rights, women’s rights, environmentalism, and a general anti-establishment philosophy. They rose up in a mass rebellion against pretty much every social and moral more of the time.

From the close of World War II, the Soviet Union was very actively working to foment this type of unrest through agents and contacts in the American Communist Party, the Socialist Party, labor unions, the universities, and the media. These have elevated extremism to mainstream politics via left wing groups from followers of Alinsky, SDS, Acorn, and various other “community organizations” and radical groups.

The McCarthy hearings of the early fifties identified some of this activity, but concentrated most on the film industry, where they were fairly successful in disarming that propaganda effort. The irony of the Soviet success in placing socialist plants and creating civil unrest was that, while they ended up succeeding beyond their original hope, it did not cause a push for Soviet style communism, but instead a push toward greater liberty; almost, but not quite, an anarchy type of freedom.

There were some very good things that came from all this. Freedom of speech and expression were given a greater emphasis than ever before. Women gained equality in the workplace and a greater say in the political and civic arena. Citizens became openly hostile toward public corruption and cronyism. Industrial pollution and toxic waste has been reduced by probably 90%.

Business has been changed from the type X labor/management conflict model to a more win/win approach. Families have switched from a rigid patriarchal style, to more of a partnership with greater parental involvement with children. All these are examples of the good that came out of this period of unrest.

However, there were almost an equal number of bad things that came from this period; it was a sort of a “throwing the baby out with the bathwater” situation. The polite civility of our parent’s generation didn’t completely disappear, but it was badly damaged and greatly reduced.

The use of slang, poor grammar, and of aggressive, offensive, and threatening language greatly increased. Self-discipline and personal accountability have been replaced with selfish hedonism and victimization. The concept of earning respect was replaced with deserving respect. Our children have been raised to believe that competing is bad, and winning isn’t important; everybody deserves the same reward regardless of personal effort and performance.

Political correctness has created a society unable to address differences between cultures, races, or other social distinctions, while at the same time destroying the concept of the American social “melting pot.” We now have Afro-, Hispano-, Asian-, etc. Americans who believe the culture and values of their homeland or racial group is more important than their identity as Americans. We have inadvertently created a new type of segregation.

So in addition to the many good things, the history of the Baby Boomers and their children has created all kinds of bad fall-out. Examples are extremely high rates of birth out of wedlock, huge numbers of abortions, huge numbers of single parent families, widespread use of drugs, illogical environmental and social laws, great loss of heavy industry, tremendous growth in government and the taxes required to support it, and a less civil, more crude society.

A second irony is the left accusing the right of using violent rhetoric when the use of extreme aggressive violent language, hyperbole, rhetoric , and imagery has been an invention and mainstay of the left; they are now accusing a much more mild right, in particular the Tea Party and talk radio, of abusing freedom of speech with excessive use of violent language. For any liberal to make such an accusation is not only ironic, but also hypocritical.

Personally, I would like for people on all sides of the political spectrum to avoid aggressive language and instead endeavor to express their ideas and opposition with more accuracy and less emotion. I don’t think this will really happen, because the left is steeped in the concept of using every crisis to drive an emotional following to a loud attack on their opposition.

I recently stated that I dislike seeing the Republicans “playing nice” with the Democrats; and I definitely feel that way. I think the Republicans need to respect the right of the Democrats to their opinions, but I also think Republicans need to strongly counter those damaging and anti-American ideas.

Modern politics is more clearly than ever aligned between not just conservative and liberal, but right and wrong. The conservatives are simply right, and the liberals are simply wrong, and there is nothing in that to compromise. I would rather see congress unable to ever pass another law than to pass one more law that will hurt our country.

An example of left-wing civility