Blogs For Victory

It is, ultimately, their country and their lives at stake:

President Barack Obama and top U.S. military commanders are being pressed by senators and civilian advisers to more than double the size of Afghan security forces, a move that would cost billions of dollars.

In letters and face-to-face meetings, the lawmakers and the advisers have urged Obama, National Security Advisor Jim Jones and the new U.S. commander in Afghanistan to boost the Afghan National Army and police from current levels of 175,000 to at least 400,000.

“Any further postponement” of a decision to support a surge in Afghan forces will hamper U.S. efforts to quell an insurgency in its eighth year, Senators Joseph Lieberman, chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, and Carl Levin, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, wrote to the White House in a July 21 letter obtained by Bloomberg News.

General Stanley McChrystal, the new U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, will recommend a speedier expansion of Afghan forces beyond current targets in an assessment he will give within a month to U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates and North Atlantic Treaty Organization Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, according to a senior military official familiar with the review.

No matter how good our troops are, they can’t win this campaign for the Afghans. Just as in Iraq, eventually the Afghans will have to step up in sufficient numbers to take the main burden of crushing the enemy. We should be doing everything we can to get more Afghans in the field against the Taliban/al Qaeda forces.

I’m starting to feel that no one is in charge at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave…that things are just happening because low level staffers get the ball rolling and Obama is too busy looking Presidential to pay attention to detail:

…In the real world bestowing the Medal of Freedom on Mary Robinson is only important as a symbol. Take a look at the Medal of Freedom winners. There are many mediocre men and women on the list. But, overall, you will brim with pride, as the clichéd phrase puts it. Robinson had a commendable career as president of Ireland, mostly filled with symbolics, but important symbolics. It has been downhill ever since, a good deal of it in the gutter of anti-semitism.

She was the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights when the commission began to specialize in the practice of supporting governmental repression and calling it freedom–as, frankly, Obama has done with the burqa, also in Cairo. But Robinson’s biggest role on the world stage was as chair of the 2001 World Conference Against Racism in Durban. She planned it, she mostly ran it and she is responsible for that Witch’s Sabbath of hate against both Israel and America, actually the west and western values in general and in particular. Since then, she has been doing the time-consuming NGO thing, talking mostly to one another and soliciting grants from American foundations.

Robinson’s base in the world is the G-77 which has watched amiably as many of its member states increasingly preside over atrocities committed against their own inhabitants. Not much to honor here.

The administration will try to put a big smile on its face about the president honoring Mary Robinson. I’d bet, however, that there’s been a lot of shouting around the White House…and a lot of blame. Obama will smile through it all. But inside he’ll be seething. At his staff and at those of us who don’t just shut up…

I don’t know if Obama will be seething – he might not even understand what all the fuss is about. He might not even be fully aware, as he’s awarding the medal, just who is being honored, or why. Obama doesn’t seem to be good with hard facts. Platitudes are his forte’ – and his staff seems to be doing a better job keeping him to that than they used to…or, at least, they’ve prevented any major teleprompter malfunctions lately.

But who nominated this lady? I mean, who really nominated her? Who in the Obama Administration figured that the lady who headed up the Durban hate-fest was worthy not just of a Medal of Freedom, but of one of Obama’s first medals of freedom? Just how deep is anti-Semitism embedded in the Obama staff? For crying out loud, if only one or two non-anti-Semites had seen this coming down the pike, they could have swiftly killed it just by bringing it to the attention of senior White House staff.

What sort of government have we got?

This happened about a half mile away from my house:

Police say an interagency homeland security unit is looking for several men seen leaving the area after an explosion damaged equipment at a North Las Vegas construction site.

No injuries were reported, and authorities haven’t said what type of vehicle the men were in.

North Las Vegas police Sgt. Tim Bedwell says the apparent bomb blast left a football-sized hole in the side of a water truck.

Bedwell says several neighbors reported the explosion just after midnight at the construction site near Aliante Parkway and Grand Teton Drive.

He says police didn’t find the source of the noise until construction workers arrived about dawn and found the damage.

The Mrs was heading out to get a bagel and soda early this AM and the police blocked her path and turner her around. Other than what is in the story, we know nothing about what is going on. The water truck, for a while part of our local scenery, is parked in a vacant lot immediately adjacent to a large electric power substation.

Side note: No, I didn’t hear a darned thing.

Because maybe they can’t borrow as much as they’ll need:

China takes a pass on U.S. Treasuries

Two countries, the United States and China, are playing financial poker, with the U.S. Treasury and the Federal Reserve on one side and China on the other.

On one side, wearing a visor and dark glasses, we have Ben Bernanke of the U.S. Federal Reserve, who must fund our $1.8 trillion deficit. So the U.S. Treasury and the Fed are issuing record amounts of treasury securities. Last week alone the Treasury issued $200 billion of debt securities. The results of at least two auctions were a bit shaky.

At the table, opposite the U.S. Treasury, are the Chinese players, also wearing dark glasses. When the play went to China, China took a pass on two of last week’s auctions. The Chinese are worried about the high level of U.S. debt and are uncertain if they should keep buying U.S. Treasuries.

There is also the prospect that China can’t buy any more US debt because they aren’t selling enough in the US to obtain the money to buy US debt (it is a cruel ring of economic fate binding China and the United States together).

But whether its “can’t” or “won’t”, it all works out the same – if we can’t sell our bonds, then we can’t finance our spending and that means either massive cuts or massive increases in the supply of currency. Obama, being a liberal Democrat, simply won’t cut – in a pinch, he might cut a bit out of defense, but a lot of those defense workers pay union dues which supply Democrats with campaign cash, so there’s only so much which can be cut…and certainly not enough to cover things like hundreds of billions, or trillions, of dollars of new spending.

A rather tricky situation for which, as long as we’re governed by Obama and his liberal Democrats, there is no way out.

Pay attention, liberals:

In the general course of human nature, A power over a man’s subsistence amounts to a power over his will. – Alexander Hamilton

Yikes:

There is a lot of disinformation about health insurance reform out there, spanning from control of personal finances to end of life care. These rumors often travel just below the surface via chain emails or through casual conversation. Since we can’t keep track of all of them here at the White House, we’re asking for your help. If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov.

So, if you see anything anti-Obama out there, be sure to report it to the Cheka….errmmm…I mean to the White House…

Strange days, indeed:

Father regrets encouraging son, 7, to drive family SUV

Next headline:

Son Regrets Dad, Idiot, Asked Him to Drive

Again and again and again we see this:

Dr. Thio Li-ann, professor at the National University of Singapore, was invited to teach at New York University Law School this fall. After it was discovered that the Christian professor, while serving as a Singaporean lawmaker in 2007, opposed a repeal of the law proscribing homosexual acts, NYU students and alumni organized to protest her appointment. She subsequently withdrew her interest in teaching at NYU.

She dared to be different – and in the mindless, rigid world of American higher education, this is not to be tolerated.

And about time this political bully was hit back:

Following reports that White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel has been orchestrating an effort to intimidate members of Congress and Governors who raise legitimate concerns regarding the effectiveness of the stimulus, House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Ranking Member Darrell Issa (R-CA) sent a letter to Emanuel saying “While this type of scare tactic may work In Chicago, it will not work to intimidate me or other Members of the United States Congress.”

“I and others have dared to bring these facts to the attention of President Obama, the Congress and the American people,” Issa wrote. “You’ve unfortunately reacted by once again resorting to the playbook of the Chicago political machine.”

A coordinated series of letters threatening a loss of federal funding was sent out in a clear attempt to pressure people like Issa in to keeping quiet about the failures of Obamunism. Emanuel is engaging in classic machine politics – using his power to coerce others in to going along with his scheme. This is what we get when we bring Chicago politics in to DC – it was already plenty corrupt and then we put the masters of corruption in charge.

Nothing doing, “Rahmbo”. We won’t be silenced.

The news story:

The government’s $50 billion program to ease the mortgage crisis is helping only a tiny fraction of struggling homeowners, and a list released Tuesday showed which lenders are laggards.

As of July, only 9 percent of eligible borrowers had seen their mortgage payments reduced with modified loans. And the first monthly progress report showed that 10 lenders had not changed a single mortgage.

The report indicated that lenders such as Bank of America Corp. and Wells Fargo and Co. have lagged behind government expectations. Both banks received billions in federal bailout money.

BofA modified just 4 percent of eligible loans, and Wells Fargo 6 percent. Wachovia Corp., which was taken over by Wells Fargo in December, modified only 2 percent.

“We think they could have ramped up better, faster, more consistently and done a better job serving borrowers and bringing stabilization to the broader mortgage markets and economy,” said Michael Barr, the Treasury Department’s assistant secretary for financial institutions. “We expect them to do more.”

This is a complex issue and its not entirely the banks fault. Its mostly their fault, but not entirely.

First off, you have to keep in mind that “servicing bank” and “holder of the note” are only rarely the same entity, especially in the larger banks. “Un-Named Bank A” services my loan, but my note is held by Freddie Mac – having been sold to them by Centex Mortgage, my loan originator. I can talk to “Un-Named Bank A” until I’m blue in the face (and I am talking to them, and I’m nearly blue), but when push comes to shove, “Un-Named Bank A” can only do what the note holder allows – and therein lies the problem.

We have three parties, for most mortgages, and they are all working at cross purposes:

1. Servicing bank just wants to keep making money servicing the loans and I suspect that they get paid at least partially on the amount of loan they’re servicing. I might be wrong on this, but the deliberate obtuseness of Loss Mitigation departments at these servicing banks indicates either massive stupidity or a desire to spin things out and hope that little or nothing will eventually have to be done.

2. Borrower wants to “cram down” the mortgage amount to be in line with current market value. If you owe $400,000 on a house worth $200,000 there is no sense at all – financial, for certain; in morality, it is a bit complex and I’m not qualified to render a final judgment on such things – in shoveling money in to it…even if the mortgage is stretched out to 40 years and the interest rate dropped very low, the fact of the matter remains that you are paying for a house which will never be worth what you paid for it (at least, not in any reasonable time frame – the most optimistic people actually involved are figuring 10-20 years for a price recovery…the more negative are figuring that we’ll never get back to that bubble level in real terms).

3. The note holders seem to be viewing a “short sale” as preferable to “cram down” – in other words, they’d rather have the $400,000 house go on a short sale for $150,000 than re-do the mortgage to $200,000. A 150k bird in the hand seeming to be more desirable than a 200k bird in the bush. A “short sale” also helps the note holder in that, unlike in a foreclosure, they don’t have title and therefor responsibility for the house. This relieves the note holder from all sorts of hassles and liabilities.

In my view, “cram down” is the only logical, moral and financially responsible thing to do – and don’t think that its all the banks losing on such a deal. As a matter of fact, the only people currently losing on the deal are the borrowers…time for the banks to take a bite of the poop sandwich. These borrowers have paid many tens of thousands of dollars since loan origination and that money is gone. They’ve lost that money – now its time for the banks to lose some, too. Now, why doesn’t this happen?

The managers of the banks – service and note-holder – are afraid. Scared spitless at losing job, wealth, position, prestige…for the people who run these financial institutions the raw, stark thought of not having what they have now has made them simply afraid to make a decision…because if you make a decision, you might make the wrong one, and that could cost you. They are standing about, Micawber-like, hoping that something turns up to get them off the hook – to make it so that they don’t have to make a decision. They look to China’s booming stock market, Obama’s spendulus, book keeping which allows them to ignore “one time” losses…something, anything which puts off that terrible day when “yes” or “no” will have to be uttered.

Its going to be interesting to watch – especially as the second wave of foreclosures hits (which won’t show up as foreclosures, per se, but as a vast increase in non-performing loans), commercial lending collapses and China’s stock bubble goes down in flames. A bit scary, too, as it will probably cost me my job – which is bad in the sense of not having income, good in the sense that I will have my very reasonable excuse for disengaging with this aspect of our economy.