the TOWN HALL weblog

Howdy all, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy -

In this issue:

1. Clarification
2. Financial
3. Hackers
4. Protest
5. Alaska

1. Clarification. I wrote last week about Governor Palin attempting to kick the Troopergate investigation to the state personnel board. One of my correspondents passed along the following additional information which I will reprint in full:

Just a point of clarification on your message. The personnel board only gets involved when there is an accusation of wrongdoing which on its face would be a violation if it were to be found to be true and if it is in a sworn statement. A far as I can tell, there is no accusation of any wrongdoing. It is just an investigation to come to that determination. It may very well be a report by Branchflower that says he find no evidence of wrongdoing. Until there is an accusation, there is no invoking the personnel board.

2. Financial. When the markets go nuts just before an election, my political radar always starts finding things under leftist rocks. While I don’t think the festivities this week have been orchestrated by the leftists, they are certainly involved. It will take some years to sort out the current mess, but the source of the problem appears to be junk mortgages issued and traded by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, both of which were democrat shops. When the real estate bubble burst, and home prices were no longer rising, that bad paper – the mortgages purchased by people who couldn’t pay them when the balloon payment on the ARMs (Adjustable Rate mortgages), started percolating through the system. According to an article in Opinion Journal Friday, new accounting rules put into place over the last 15 years forced the quick reporting / write-off / eating of the bad paper (debt). As a result, we started seeing secondary lenders, the brokerage firms that traded in the bad Fannie and Freddie mortgage paper, fail right and left. The writer pointed out that none of the brokerage firms or the insurers are actually broke, with the average financial hit being around 20%. But the new accounting rules forced them to quickly eat and report the entire loss rather than spreading it out over the years. This is not unlike the Savings & Loan debacle of the late 1980s, which was triggered by a change in tax laws in 1987 without grandfathering existing investments. Greed and fraud and mismanagement will only go so far, and usually result in individual companies failing in the marketplace. But it takes government intervention – in the form of poor regulation – to turn a few business failures into a financial debacle with worldwide impact. The growing cancer in this story was Fannie and Freddie. The leftist congressional play was to give free homes to people who could not afford to pay the mortgages for them. Democrats in congress and go along to get along Republicans refused repeated efforts to corral Fannie and Freddie and they eventually were looted and driven into the ground by executives who left well paid and left the companies in shambles. I am not happy with the bailout announced Friday, but believe it may be an necessary evil. We don’t need yet another round of regulations. We need a return to sound, simple, reliable, and long used accounting rules. We need to get out of the government – private partnership business and let the marketplace work. Things will be turbulent for a while, but I expect they will sort themselves out much quicker than anyone thinks, especially if there is a plan to privatize Fannie and Freddie, cut and control regulations on the financial industries (Sarbanes – Oxley, for instance) and cut capital gains taxes to increase investment money throughout the economy.

3. Hackers. Late last week, a hacker managed to break into Governor Palin’s Yahoo e-mail account. He changed the password, took screen shots of everything, and posted it on a website of Internet Trolls called Gawker. Michelle Malkin posted what the hacker had written about breaking into the account. It appears that Yahoo uses a series of canned questions in their lost password dialog. The hacker got the questions and guessed the answers over a short period of time and was able to access the account. The Justice Department and FBI are involved. Early indications have them questioning a college student in Tennessee who is son of a democrat state legislator. The AP denied a request from the Secret Service for copies of the screen shots. The proxy owner on the other hand has provided complete support to all investigator requests, and is downloading gigabytes of data from his servers as of late in the week. I think there is going to be a troll going to jail. Why do these things always seem to be connected to elected democrats at all levels of government?

4. Protest. Governor Sarah Palin was disinvited from an organized anti-Iranian protest in NYC late last week. The setup is a typical bit of Saul Alinsky political theater that we have come to expect from the community organizer, Barack Obama. Originally, the protest was going to be bipartisan, with Senator Hillary Clinton and Governor Palin both invited and confirmed. Obama’s VP nominee Joe Biden (D, DE) had something else to do and Obama himself refused to show up to protest Ahmadinejad. Under pressure from the Obama campaign, Hillary decided to not attend, which left Governor Palin as the only high profile political attendee. The George Soros – Move On crowd then got involved and started cage rattling and threatening the protest sponsor with losing their non-profit status because Palin would be there alone. The sponsor decided discretion was the better part of honor and asked Palin not to come. The Soros and Obama people are positively gleeful at this slap, but to the rest of us they look precisely like the small, twisted little BAMN (By Any Means Necessary) twits we have come to expect them to be.

5. Alaska. It has been an eventful week here in Alaska. Here’s the latest and greatest:

More later — AG

“If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.”
- Samuel Adams, speech at the Philadelphia State House, August 1, 1776.

Note: Interesting Items can be found also at the following locations: MatSu Valley News and the home page. Rod Martin’s The Vanguard site is also a long-time supporter of this column. Alex Gimarc is a long-time member of the Town Hall Conservative group.