Just can’t get away from them, I guess:

President Obama’s recent nominee for ambassador to El Salvador was forced to withdraw her nomination to another diplomatic post a decade ago following concerns about ties to Cuba, raising red flags as her name heads to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee once again for approval.

The White House announced the nomination of Mari Carmen Aponte last Wednesday along with a handful of other appointments. The selection has started to draw some attention given that former President Clinton nominated her for ambassador to the Dominican Republic in 1998, only to see the nomination fizzle after the foreign relations panel questioned her over her past relationship with someone who had apparently caught the attention of the FBI.

One former official with knowledge of that nomination said the committee started scrutinizing Aponte after learning that she had attended a party at the Cuban mission to the United Nations in New York City, and that she had a relationship with someone, Roberto Tamayo, who had raised concern at the FBI over “possible ties to the Cuban government” and “repeated trips there.”

Is there anyone in the Obama Administration who isn’t a communist, connected to terrorists or a crook? Other than Gates at Defense, I can’t think of any…

Latest over at Pajamas Media:

As James Delingpole, in the Telegraph, noted Wednesday:

Climategate just got much, much bigger. And all thanks to the Russians who, with perfect timing, dropped this bombshell just as the world’s leaders are gathering in Copenhagen to discuss ways of carbon-taxing us all back to the dark ages.

On Tuesday, we heard via the Ria Novosti agency that the Moscow-based Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) issued a report claiming that the Hadley Center for Climate Change had probably tampered with Russian-climate data:

The IEA believes that Russian meteorological-station data did not substantiate the anthropogenic global-warming theory. Analysts say Russian meteorological stations cover most of the country’s territory, and that the Hadley Center had used data submitted by only 25% of such stations in its reports. Over 40% of Russian territory was not included in global-temperature calculations for some other reasons, rather than the lack of meteorological stations and observations.

With all the money at stake for the left and liberal fat cats, this will not go away soon – but, honestly, anyone with any sense at all realizes by now, at the minimum, that the data used by the UN and other government agencies to set “global warming” policy is tainted beyond redemption. If you still wish to hold to the theory of anthropogenic global warming, you’re going to have to go back and re-do the data from scratch and see what shows up.

My bet is that it won’t show that man is the cause of whatever warming we had in the late 20th century.

And this, finally, should put the nail in the coffin for the environmentalist movement – there never has been anything out of that movement besides lies, slanders and, at their best moments, half-truths. It is time to return to conservation and leave environmentalism in the dustbin of history.

Here’s the news:

Morgan Stanley, the securities firm that spent more than $8 billion on commercial property in 2007, plans to relinquish five San Francisco office buildings to its lender two years after purchasing them from Blackstone Group LP near the top of the market.

The bank has been negotiating an “orderly transfer” of the towers since earlier this year, Alyson Barnes, a Morgan Stanley spokeswoman, said yesterday in a telephone interview. AREA Property Partners will take over the buildings. Barnes declined to say when the transfer will occur.

“This isn’t a default or foreclosure situation,” Barnes said. “We are going to give them the properties to get out of the loan obligation.”

This is what we’re told – over and over and over again – not to do. We, the people, dare not walk away from our mortgages! That would be evil! Wrong! Deadbeat! The horrors of it all!

Which, of course, is all just so much nonsense. It is what the bankers and the bureaucrats want us to believe. It is, indeed, what plenty of regular folks who are not “underwater” believe. But its simply not true – when you borrow money to buy a house, you have a secured loan. What is it secured by? The house. You can either pay back the loan, or give up the house. You and the bank are both betting that the house will maintain or increase value and that, of course, over a 30 year period you’ll continue to be in the financial shape necessary to make the payments. There is no guarantee, here. Its not like laying money on a blackjack table in Vegas, but its not like putting money in your piggy bank, either.

The moral obligation of the debtor is to render his payments as agreed or give up the house. The only thing which would be morally wrong is for the debtor to not pay and keep the house – and not in terms of missing a few payments, but in having the house for life and being able to sell it without having paid off the loan secured by the house. That would be wrong. But giving up the house? Its a six of one, half a dozen of the other proposition – with the only caveat being that banks don’t like it when you don’t pay up, so they will report you to the credit bureaus and, in some jurisdictions, they can attempt to recover any difference between the sale price and mortgage value (though this is harder to do than one might think, and a person can always go through bankruptcy to avoid such a thing – and if you are thinking of walking on your mortgage, do consult a lawyer before you do it). All of this becomes even more true if the homeowner has lost income since the start of the loan via unemployment, illness or death of a breadwinner.

Morgan Stanley is just doing the logical thing when faced with property which not only has lost value, but probably won’t recover that value in any reasonable amount of time (and this, by the way, should be taken as major indicator of our economy, at the moment). But we’re still bombarded with a “you must pay your mortgage, no matter what” bit of Bankster/Bureaucrat propaganda. I’m not having any of that – if you’re “underwater”, consult with an attorney and do what works best given your overall economic circumstances.

The black hole of our destroyed housing market continues to grow:

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s federal regulator is renegotiating the companies’ financing plan with the U.S. Treasury Department and may seek an increase to their $400 billion federal lifeline before the end of the year, according to people familiar with the talks.

These two entities hold $5.5 trillion in US mortgages and as the housing crises continues to deepen – yes, “deepen”; not, “get better” as the talking heads of finance and government have it – it just gets worse for Fannie and Freddie especially as they have such a huge percentage of the really garbage loans generated in the sub-prime boom. There is no amount of bail out which would actually solve the problem – there’s just too much bad debt secured by assets not worth 50% of the loans on them.

The only way to fix this – other than by mass citizens’ action to simply walk away from all the “underwater” loans – is to essentially put our housing and mortgage markets through bankruptcy reorganization. It would be hard, everyone would take a hit, but if we did it, the problem would be solved. Fundamentally, this involves reducing the principle owed on primary-residence homes in line with current market values for the property – and, so, a house which has lost 50% of its value would have its mortgage(s) reset at 50% of current principle, or to property market value, whichever is greater.

Doing this would do the most important thing: keeping people in their homes. There are about 10 million people “underwater” on their loans and, more and more, they are just bagging it and heading in to the rental market. If even 20% of those homes show up on the market over the next year, it will cause another big drop in home values…thus pushing even more people in to “underwater” status and thereby reinforcing the urge to walk. We’re probably already at the point where people who bought even as long as 10 years ago have lost principle – certainly, this is the case in the worst hit areas, and it will just spread and get worse unless we do something about it.

Or we can just keep bailing out banks and ignoring the fundamental issue of lost home values – and have one heck of a massive crash.

Keep fighting:

Our contest is not only whether we ourselves shall be free, but whether there shall be left to mankind an asylum on earth for civil and religious liberty. – Samuel Adams

This is “justice” under Obama:

The Justice Department has told the federal attorneys who filed a civil complaint against the New Black Panther Party for disrupting a Philadelphia polling place last year not to cooperate with an investigation of the incident by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

The commission last week subpoenaed at least two Justice Department lawyers and sought documents from the department to explain why the complaint was dismissed just as a federal judge was about to punish the New Black Panther Party and three of its members for intimidating voters.

Why do they do this? Because when a leftist says “community organizer” he doesn’t mean someone like Obama but, actually, someone like these Panthers who intimidated voters. A well organized community, for the left, is a community which votes the right way – and no better way to ensure the “correct” vote than to put bully boys out in front of the polling place to scare away anyone who might want to vote the wrong way. The left has never allowed a fair vote unless it absolutely had to – because the other side had enough force on its side to keep things fair. Absent proper counter-force, the left will cheat at election time in a grand manner as as a matter of course.

The Department of Justice is supposed to act as the counter-force to those who would attempt to hijack or intimidate the vote. They are supposed to on the look out for thugs at polling places and scams to stuff ballot boxes. Unfortunately, Justice has often been absent, especially in liberal areas of the country…and now, under Holder, Justice might be nowhere to be found. In the end, in order to protect our right to vote, we might have to post patriots at every polling place in sufficient force to intimidate the intimidators.

It’d be better if we could avoid this – but I don’t hold out much hope that Obama’s Justice Department will be at all interested in doing the right thing.

Over at IMAO:

…Anyway, the issue is getting a grasp of just how much Democrats suck so we can at least try and explain them to future generations. Well, one thing illustrative of that is out of the 58 Democrats in the Senate, Harry Reid was apparently the best of them and thus made leader. Even worse, out of the 258 Democrats in the House, they apparently have none smarter or more personable than Nancy Pelosi. Can you even comprehend that? If Helen Keller were also a quadriplegic, you’re still not quite to the sorry state the Democrats are in…

That’s how much they suck…

The news:

The latest calculation of the National Debt as posted by the Treasury Department has – at least numerically – exceeded the statutory Debt Limit approved by Congress last February as part of the Recovery Act stimulus bill.

The ceiling was set at $12.104 trillion dollars. The latest posting by Treasury shows the National Debt at nearly $12.135 trillion.

A senior Treasury official told CBS News that the department has some “extraordinary accounting tools” it can use to give the government breathing room in the range of $150-billion when the Debt exceeds the Debt Ceiling.

Tell you what, fellow Americans: how far do you think we’d get if we used “extraordinary accounting tools” on our tax returns? Think the Treasury would be ok with that?

What matters US law when the people in charge of our government (a) don’t know what “rule of law” means and (b) would still break it, even if they knew?

A little revolution, now and then, is a good thing.

Our man Vin Suprynowicz here in Las Vegas lets ’em have it:

To land continued government grants, it was necessary to “develop” evidence that would “prove” the claim that “man-made global warming will fry us all on a griddle unless we cede massive new power, massive wealth, our standard of living and our industrial dominance of the world to the ‘scientific’ central state.”

What those who dutifully excreted such steaming piles of crap have come close to accomplishing is to require that the world now presume, in self-defense, that any state-funded “science” is little more than government-funded propaganda to justify taxing us, regulating us, licensing us, fining us, advancing National Socialism under a new, Green flag.

Mind you, it couldn’t happen to a more deserving gang of grant-chasing welfare leeches and receivers of stolen property.

Suprynowicz is good like that – he is, after all, the man who invariably refers to our public school system as “government youth propaganda camps”. Can’t always agree with all his libertarianism, but he’s hit the nail on the head here. And just this sort of brazen exposure is what is needed.

Its no good softening the blow, good people. Our liberals are armored from ear to ear against logic and appeals to decency. The rhetorical 2 x 4 is the only way to reach them. Any hemming and hawing – any attempt, that is, to concede they might be at least working from honest motives – just gets us further behind the 8 ball. Give them a debate inch, and they’ll take a mile – say anything even remotely nice about them or their views and you’ll find yourself “quoted” in liberal-land as supporting liberalism. Better to just keep them at arms length, and then bash them with a big stick.

I’m still just amazed at this:

Republican candidates have bounced back to a seven-point lead over Democrats in the latest edition of the Generic Congressional Ballot.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that 44% would vote for their district’s Republican congressional candidate while 37% would opt for his or her Democratic opponent.

As a life-long Republican, I’m just not used to this sort of thing. My side is always behind on the Generic Ballot. To be ahead at all is thrilling – to be ahead for nearly 6 months is downright amazing.