Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two mortgage giants, “should be abolished”.

Of course. But who says so now?

No other than their greatest champion through the many years of their corrupt practices – Representative Barney Frank.

It was because Barney Frank defended Fannie and Freddie from investigation and oversight that the subprime mortgage disaster pitched the world into economic crisis.

That is why Barney Frank bears a personal responsibility for the recession and the debt Americans have to bear.

Okay, he’s not the only one to blame, but he’s one of the most guilty, along with Presidents Carter and Clinton, and Senator Chris Dodd.

From our post Moment of decision, Sept 29, 2008:

Jimmy Carter, 1977. The Community Reinvestment Act. Banks must make loans to high-risk borrowers.

Bill Clinton, devotee of multiculturalism, pressed for more home-ownership by those who could not afford it, minorities and in effect even illegal immigrants, and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac responded, buying up hundreds of billions of dollars of the bad loans and sellng them on the world markets.

Barney Frank and Chris Dodd who ran Congress’s banking panels, vigorously and persistently opposed Republican Party efforts to regulate Fannie and Freddie.

From our post Free market not to blame for economic crisis, Oct 4, 2008, quoting Thomas Sowell:

It was liberal Democrats, led by Senator Christopher Dodd and Congressman Barney Frank, who for years –  including the present year – denied that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were taking big risks that could lead to a financial crisis.

It was Senator Dodd, Congressman Frank and other liberal Democrats who for years refused requests from the Bush administration to set up an agency to regulate Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

It was liberal Democrats, again led by Dodd and Frank, who for years pushed for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to go even further in promoting subprime mortgage loans, which are at the heart of today’s financial crisis.

From our post Ten most corrupt politicians, December 31, 2009, quoting Judicial Watch:

Judicial Watch uncovered documents in 2009 that showed that members of Congress for years were aware that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were playing fast and loose with accounting issues, risk assessment issues and executive compensation issues, even as liberals led by Rep. Frank continued to block attempts to rein in the two Government Sponsored Enterprises (GSEs)… Frank received $42,350 in campaign contributions from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac between 1989 and 2008. Frank also engaged in a relationship with a Fannie Mae Executive while serving on the House Banking Committee, which has jurisdiction over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Obama blamed Wall Street and the banks for the crisis, and did nothing to stop the real culprits. Instead of shutting down Fannie and Freddie, he made its easier for them to carry on undermining the economy.

From our post Fannie and Freddie: the dirty dance goes on, January 4, 2010, quoting Bruce Bialosky at Townhall:

[Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac], which together own or guarantee over one half of home mortgages, and which had previously been injected with a $111 billion bailout, received an unexpected Christmas present from the Obama Administration: an executive order, issued in the dark of the night … The Treasury announced they were eliminating the $400 billion limit available to these two entities – in essence giving them license to fritter away as much money as they want while the American people (and their grandchildren) pick up the tab …

What seems to be missing is major reform of the lending practices. There’s no evidence that they’ve become more vigilant in their loan procedures, or more attentive to the credit-worthiness of the borrowers. In fact, it seems pretty clear that they have resumed their lending habits of old.

Proportional fault has never been placed on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for the subprime loan crisis.

Because these entities have been protected by Barney Frank in the House and Christopher Dodd in the Senate, the two lenders have escaped the kind of brutal public scrutiny visited upon banks and other lenders. While bankers have been on the hot seat and skewered by late night comedians, the people who run these behemoths have escaped unfazed.

And now it is Barney Frank, of all people, who want them to be abolished.

Investor’s Business Daily comments today:

After years of dissembling and denial, Rep. Barney Frank has finally come out. He now says bankrupt government mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac “should be abolished.” Better late than never.

‘There were people in this society who for economic and, frankly, social reasons can’t and shouldn’t be homeowners,” Frank said in an interview with the Fox Business Network and sounding a lot more like an elephant than a donkey. “I think we should, particularly, stop this assumption that you put everybody into homeownership.”

Barney Frank said that?

(What else is happening today? Are pigs flying? Is the Pope denouncing Christianity? Is Obama siding with America?)

After years of blaming heartless Republicans and Wall Street for the crisis caused by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — and their predominantly Democratic supporters in Congress — it’s refreshing to hear a member of the Democratic Party admit his mistakes.

It’s especially true of Frank, who, more than any other elected official, championed the cause of the government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Indeed, Frank is most responsible for stopping GSE reform in the early 2000s, at a time when such a move might have prevented the financial meltdown. …

In 2000, when Rep. Richard Baker proposed more oversight for the GSEs, Frank called concerns about Fannie and Freddie “overblown,” claiming there was “no federal liability whatsoever.”

In 2002, again, Frank said: “I do not regard Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as problems. I regard them as assets.”

In 2003, he repeated himself in opposing reform, saying he did not “regard Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as problems.”

Even after a multibillion dollar accounting scandal hit Freddie Mac just a month after those remarks, Frank insisted nothing was wrong. “I do not think we are facing any kind of crisis,” he said.

By 2004, Fannie had its own accounting scandal. Frank again insisted it posed no threat to the U.S. Treasury. …

As late as 2008, after the tide of losses and foreclosures washed away Fannie’s and Freddie’s remaining capital, Frank was adamant that it was all Wall Street’s fault: “The private sector got us into this mess … the government has to get us out of it.”

Of course, he had it exactly backward. We’ve already spent $148 billion of taxpayer money on the two losers. The Congressional Budget Office estimates it will ultimately cost taxpayers $389 billion to bail them out. Even that may be too little; at least one private estimate put the final toll at $1 trillion. …

We’ve spent a lot of money for Barney Frank’s education in financial reality. Today, he’s basically saying he and his party were wrong all along.

That’s a good start. But how about an apology? Or even a frank admission that his party’s indefatigable support of Fannie and Freddie — which, prodded by the Community Reinvestment Act, created and funded the massive subprime market that later collapsed — was to blame for our multitrillion dollar meltdown and the loss of millions of jobs? …

Let’s get government out of the business of encouraging homeownership, an undertaking at which it has failed miserably.

Now that the idea is dead, let’s bury it once and for all.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, having to make a statement about the 10 members of the medical team working for a Christian aid organization who were shot dead by the Taliban, said yesterday in that cold dead voice of hers:

With these killings, [the Taliban] have shown us yet another example of the lengths to which they will go to advance their twisted ideology.

Their twisted ideology? What is their ideology? It has a name – Islam. The ideology in the name of which the Taliban killed those men and women is Islam.

It is not their ideology that is objected to by the administration of which Hillary Clinton is a member. On the contrary, they protect it. Obama positively promotes it.

It is only the method the Taliban use that bothers Barack and Hillary: the method of terrorism. They have to denounce that, regardless of where their sympathies lie. But Muslims who help advance Islamic jihad by other means – infiltration, indoctrination – have the full blessing of Obama’s henchmen and henchwomen. Hillary Clinton herself lifted the ban on Tariq Ramadan getting a visa to enter the US, and he’s a Muslim who devotes his life to promoting the ideology of Islam.

When Attorney General Eric Holder had  to comment on the arrest of 14 American Muslims for supplying money and recuits to al-Shabab, the al-Qaeda  affiliated terrorist organization in Somalia, he did not say – not even once – that they were Muslims. He studiously avoided mentioning the fact. The word only came into his statement when he praised unnamed Muslims for helping to bring about the arrests. Then he went on to lecture us all, hastening to instruct us that Muslims are victims of terrorism. So are others, Mr Holder! In America many more non-Muslims than Muslims are victims of Muslim terrorism, but they don’t deserve a mention?

The administration is in denial that Islam is intrinsically militant, terroristic, cruel, and intent on the conquest of the rest of the world. But that is why the 10 Christians were killed in cold blood in Afghanistan. That is why American Muslims are helping al-Shabab and al-Qaeda.

What’s the point of pretending otherwise? Reality is not changed by pretense.

In the vocabulary of the militant international Left, the word “peace” is a code word for “pro-tyranny” and “anti-freedom”.

This comes from a must-read article, titled The Peace Racket, by Bruce Bawer in City Journal (reprinted in the current issue from Summer 2007):

We need to make two points about this movement at the outset. First, it’s opposed to every value that the West stands for—liberty, free markets, individualism—and it despises America, the supreme symbol and defender of those values. Second, we’re talking not about a bunch of naive Quakers but about a movement of savvy, ambitious professionals that is already comfortably ensconced at the United Nations, in the European Union, and in many nongovernmental organizations. It is also waging an aggressive, under-the-media-radar campaign for a cabinet-level Peace Department in the United States. Sponsored by Ohio Democratic congressman Dennis Kucinich (along with more than 60 cosponsors), House Resolution 808 would authorize a Secretary of Peace to “establish a Peace Academy,” “develop a peace education curriculum” for elementary and secondary schools, and provide “grants for peace studies departments” at campuses around the country. If passed, the measure would catapult the peace studies movement into a position of extraordinary national, even international, influence.

The Peace Racket’s boundaries aren’t easy to define. It embraces scores of “peace institutes” and “peace centers” in the U.S. and Europe, plus several hundred university peace studies programs. …

At the movement’s heart … are programs whose purported emphasis is on international relations. Their founding father is a 77-year-old Norwegian professor, Johan Galtung, who established the International Peace Research Institute in 1959 and the Journal of Peace Research five years later. Invariably portrayed in the media as a charismatic and (these days) grandfatherly champion of decency, Galtung is in fact a lifelong enemy of freedom. In 1973, he thundered that “our time’s grotesque reality” was—no, not the Gulag or the Cultural Revolution, but rather the West’s “structural fascism.” He’s called America a “killer country,” accused it of “neo-fascist state terrorism,” and gleefully prophesied that it will soon follow Britain “into the graveyard of empires.” …

Fittingly, he urged Hungarians not to resist the Soviet Army in 1956, and his views on World War II suggest that he’d have preferred it if the Allies had allowed Hitler to finish off the Jews and invade Britain.

Though Galtung has opined that the annihilation of Washington, D.C., would be a fair punishment for America’s arrogant view of itself as “a model for everyone else,” he’s long held up certain countries as worthy of emulation—among them Stalin’s USSR, whose economy, he predicted in 1953, would soon overtake the West’s. He’s also a fan of Castro’s Cuba, which he praised in 1972 for “break[ing] free of imperialism’s iron grip.” …

His all-time favorite nation? China during the Cultural Revolution. Visiting his Xanadu, Galtung concluded that the Chinese loved life under Mao: after all, they were all “nice and smiling.” While “repressive in a certain liberal sense,” he wrote, Mao’s China was “endlessly liberating when seen from many other perspectives that liberal theory has never understood.” Why, China showed that “the whole theory about what an ‘open society’ is must be rewritten, probably also the theory of ‘democracy’—and it will take a long time before the West will be willing to view China as a master teacher in such subjects.”  [See our post, Mao in the White House, October 15, 2009, for glimpses of what Mao’s China was really like.]  …

Galtung’s use of the word “peace” to legitimize totalitarianism is an old Communist tradition. …

The people running today’s peace studies programs give a good idea of the movement’s illiberal, anti-American inclinations. The director of Purdue’s program is coeditor of Marxism Today, a collection of essays extolling socialism; Brandeis’s peace studies chairman has justified suicide bombings; the program director at the University of Missouri authorized a mass e-mail urging students and faculty to boycott classes to protest the Iraq invasion; and the University of Maine’s program director believes that “humans have been out of balance for centuries” and that “a unique opportunity of this new century is to engage in the creation of balance and harmony between yin and yang, masculine and feminine energies.” (Such New Age babble often mixes with the Marxism in peace studies jargon.)

What these people teach remains faithful to Galtung’s anti-Western inspiration. First and foremost, they emphasize that the world’s great evil is capitalism—because it leads to imperialism, which in turn leads to war. …

Students acquire a zero-sum picture of the world economy: if some countries and people are poor, it’s because others are rich. They’re taught that American wealth derives entirely from exploitation and that Americans, accordingly, are responsible for world poverty.

If the image of tenured professors pushing such anticapitalist nonsense on privileged suburban kids sounds like a classic case of liberals’ throwing stones at their own houses, get a load of this: America’s leading Peace Racket institution is probably the University of Notre Dame’s Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies—endowed by and named for the widow of Ray Kroc, founder of McDonald’s, the ultimate symbol of evil corporate America. It was the Kroc Institute, by the way, that in 2004 invited Islamist scholar Tariq Ramadan to join its faculty, only to see him denied a U.S. visa on the grounds that he had defended terrorism. [He has since been granted a visa by Hillary Clinton – JB.] …

What’s alarming is that these [peace studies] students don’t plan to spend their lives on some remote mountainside in Nepal contemplating peace, harmony, and human oneness. They want to remake our world. They plan to become politicians, diplomats, bureaucrats, journalists, lawyers, teachers, activists. They’ll bring to these positions all the mangled history and misbegotten ideology that their professors have handed down to them. Their careers will advance; the Peace Racket’s influence will spread. And as it does, it will weaken freedom’s foundations.

“This is an administration that could just as well have been put in place by America’s most relentless enemies,” David Solway writes at FrontPageMag. “It is headed by a president with deep roots in a neo-Marxist social movement and associational ties with a host of disreputable characters.”

Yes.

Solway sums up the Obama Devastation of America thus far:

There can be little doubt any longer that the United States is now governed by a rogue administration … We are observing an establishment that is unwilling to defend the nation’s borders from drug cartel violence and illegal immigration, forcing unread bills through Congress in the dark of night, embarking on a socialized medicine program it cannot afford and which has not worked wherever else it has been tried, plunging the nation into bankruptcy with misnamed “stimulus spending,” unsustainable entitlements and exponential debt, refusing to drill safely on land to reduce its dependence on foreign oil supplies, utterly incapable of dealing with cataclysms like the Gulf oil spill, touting an impractical, premature and ruinously exorbitant Green Energy policy, considering cap-and-trade legislation when it has become undeniably clear that Global Warming research is a profoundly unsettled and perhaps even a false science, scrubbing all reference to Islamic terror from its official documents and pursuing a foreign policy that might accurately be described as geopolitically suicidal. Quite a list, but unfortunately an accurate one.

And a damning one, though not even comprehensive.

The rogue president still has two more years to go.

Only by an unforeseeable stroke of luck could it be less.

Only by an unpreventable fit of national lunacy could it be more.

We are of the school of thought that holds taxation to be theft, though we concede that citizens must pay for the few essential functions of government, chiefly defense, law and order, the enforcing of the law of contract, the separation of infectious diseases (and locally for common facilities, of course). Adam Smith included instruction in basic literacy for the children of the poor, but we don’t see a need now, in America, for even the most elementary education to be paid for out of the common purse. (We acknowledge that this opinion is probably unpopular.)

The socialist state takes most of your earnings away from you, and when you die confiscates most of your capital worth so you cannot leave much to your children.

As the provider of the necessities of your life, the socialist state has the power to deprive you of them. Your life is in its hands, and you have no voice in its decisions, which is why socialism is called the road to serfdom.

Obama has set America on that road, and the descent is gathering pace.

This is from the Heritage Foundation’s Morning Bell today:

This year is actually the first year since 1916 that Americans do not have to pay any federal taxes when a family member dies. But thanks to the way Congress had to pass the legislation that phased out the Death Tax in 2001, it is set to go from zero percent to 55 percent at the stroke of midnight on December 31, 2010. The Death Tax is but one of many government taxes on capital and entrepreneurship, and its reinstatement will be yet another job killer from the Obama administration. It rewards estate tax lawyers, insurance companies and big businesses at the expense of small family-owned enterprises. According to a study by the American Family Business Foundation, a full repeal of the death tax, like the one [introduced by Republican Senator Jim DeMint, and] rejected by the Senate last night, would create 1.5 million jobs. Before the vote, Sen. DeMint described the tax as an “unfair, immoral double tax on property and assets that folks have already paid taxes on throughout their lives.” …

Last night’s vote to raise the Death Tax is just the beginning of the Obama administration’s historic tax hike campaign. Unless Congress acts to oppose President Obama’s agenda, everyone’s taxes on personal income, capital gains and dividends will rise….

For two generations after post-war reconstruction, Europe and America have pursued different economic models, and accordingly, moved in different economic directions. The American model was low tax, low spending and small government. It favored growth, income and vibrancy. The European model is high tax, high spending and big government. It favored fairness, equality and stability. It also featured unemployment rates double those of the United States, often hovering around 10 percent. Now that is no longer the case. Under Obama’s economic leadership, U.S. unemployment rates are surpassing Europe’s.

Last night’s vote was just the beginning of a larger choice the American people must make: do they want to continue down the Obama path of high taxes, high spending and high unemployment? Or do they still believe in American exceptionalism, in limited government and in a vibrant U.S. economy? Last night’s vote was a step in the wrong direction.

Is Obama evil? Does he intend to do evil?

Cal Thomas writes at Townhall:

The Obama people are not intrinsically evil. Like someone caught up in a cult, they sincerely believe in the fiction they are peddling: more taxes will produce a healthier economy; the record debt is not a problem; more regulation will result in banks and big businesses operating ethically and for the greater good of their customers and the country; nationalized health care will mean better care for the sick; unrestricted abortion and same-sex marriage are fine; unenforced immigration laws are good because Democrats need to import votes and Republicans want cheap labor.

Maybe he’s right. Maybe Obama intends good and is simply mistaken as to how to achieve it.

We cannot be certain what anyone’s unexpressed thoughts and intentions are.

But we can make some judgments by contemplating the choices they make, and Obama chose to follow Saul Alinsky, who dedicated his book “Rules for Radicals”  – the bible of the “community organizers” whose ranks included Barack Obama – “to Lucifer”. Was Alinsky “only joking”, or was he informing his readers that he meant to do evil?

It seems to be hard for Americans, generally speaking (and perhaps to their credit), to believe that anyone can actually mean to do evil.  They’d rather believe that those who produce evil outcomes are merely making a terrible mistake. Or are victims so stressed by whatever has made them suffer that they act out of uncontrollable but understandable emotion, and so are forgivable.

Europeans know better.

Our post below discusses the European cultivation of evil.

Republicans are disappointed with Scott Brown, who is turning out to be more of a lefty than they’d hoped and expected.

They should ask themselves: Would the traditionally Democratic electorate of Massachusetts have voted for Scott Brown if he were a true conservative? Not likely.

Fred Dardick writes at Canada Free Press:

In one of the greatest upsets in modern political history, the people of Massachusetts, sick and tired of the free spending, economy destroying ways of Obama and Democrats in Washington, came together to elect Republican Scott Brown to take over [Ted] Kennedy’s old Senate seat with the intention of ushering in a new age of federal fiscal responsibility.

But what a sorry joke that has turned out to be…

The ink wasn’t even dry on the election certificate before the self-described “fiscally conservative” candidate turned his back on the Massachusetts electorate and joined with Democrats to pass Obama’s “jobs” bill. …

Brown’s latest act of conservative betrayal was his clinching vote for the monstrous 2,500 page financial reform bill that contains liberal nonsense like minority and gender hiring quotas for financial firms, union representation on corporate boards, and not one single mention of the actual cause of the economic meltdown, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. …

To think the former beefcake model with seven whole months on the job has the slightest idea what consequences the 500 regulations contained within the bill will have upon our financial system is laughable.

Dardick suspects that Scott Brown is not only stupid but also corrupt:

So the question remains: Why would Brown vote for legislation that he is clearly nowhere near capable of fully understanding? Answer: Money.

It would appear the good Senator’s votes are driven more by desire for personal gain, than genuine concern for the public’s well being. He no doubt understands that fundraising in the liberal bastion of Massachusetts as a Republican would be next to impossible, but if he talks like a Republican and votes like a Democrat, well that’s a whole different ball of wax.

I can picture Obama and other Democrat leaders whispering in Brown’s ear that if he supports the liberal agenda, endless riches and influence will be his. And if not, well… good luck trying to raise money from the Tea Party crowd since your name is now garbage in Republican circles.

Is his name “garbage in Republican circles” – as it ought to be? In conservative circles, yes. But not all Republican circles are conservative – as they ought to be.

Those whose hearts have been lifted by the prospect of a Republican Party  victory in November may feel them sinking again if they read the chilling predictions which Charles Krauthammer’s makes in today’s Investor’s Business Daily. If he is right, Republican majorities in Congress could make Obama more dangerous:

I have a warning for Republicans: Don’t underestimate Barack Obama.

Consider what he has already achieved. ObamaCare alone makes his presidency historic. It has irrevocably changed one-sixth of the economy, put the country inexorably on the road to national health care and … begun one of the most massive wealth redistributions in U.S. history.

Second, there is a major financial overhaul, which passed Congress on Thursday. … There is no argument that it will give the government unprecedented power in the financial marketplace.

Its 2,300 pages will create at least 243 new regulations that will affect not only, as many assume, the big banks, but just about everyone, including, as noted in one summary, “storefront check cashiers, city governments, small manufacturers, homebuyers and credit bureaus.”

Third is the near $1 trillion stimulus, the largest spending bill in U.S. history. And that’s not even counting nationalizing the student loan program, regulating CO2 emissions by EPA fiat, and still-fitful attempts to pass cap-and-trade through Congress.

But Obama’s most far-reaching accomplishment is his structural alteration of the U.S. budget. The stimulus, the vast expansion of domestic spending, the creation of ruinous deficits as far as the eye can see are not easily reversed. …

He explains how and why this is true, and  goes on to warn that more woe is to come:

Obama’s transformational agenda is a play in two acts.

Act One is over. The stimulus, ObamaCare, financial overhaul have exhausted his first-term mandate. It will bear no more heavy lifting. And the Democrats will pay the price for ideological overreaching by losing one or both houses, whether de facto or de jure. The rest of the first term will be spent consolidating these gains (writing the regulations, for example) and preparing for Act Two.

Republican control of Congress, Krauthammer warns, could be a positive help to Obama, making it easier for him to be re-elected.

If Democrats lose control of one or both houses, Obama will likely have an easier time in 2012, just as Bill Clinton used Newt Gingrich and the Republicans as his foil for his 1996 re-election campaign.

Obama is down, but it’s very early in the play.

He’s done much in his first 500 days. What he has left to do he knows must await his next 500 days — those that come after re-election.

What will these afflictions be? He forecasts three of them:

The next burst of ideological energy — massive regulation of the energy economy, federalizing higher education and “comprehensive” immigration changes (i.e., amnesty) — will require a second mandate, meaning re-election in 2012.

2012 is the real prize. Obama sees far, farther than even his own partisans.

Republicans, he warns, “underestimate him at their peril”.

But won’t a Republican dominated Congress be stronger next time  …  repeal … stand firm … ?

And does Obama really have much of a chance of re-election? We think not, but that may be because hope springs eternal in the skeptic’s breast.

The “redistribution of wealth” is the confiscation of your earnings by the state to spend on wicked things like state miseducation and state healthcare rationing. It is a tried, tested, reliable way of creating an equality of misery.

As America, the land of liberty, morphs into Obama’s socialist utopia, all taxes must rise, and he’ll not be in the least ashamed of the lies he told to the contrary when he was campaigning for the presidency.

The Heritage Foundation warns about coming tax hikes:

If you earn income, your taxes are about to go up. If Congress does not act to preserve current law, even the lowest 10 percent bracket will rise to 15 percent. Throw in tax hikes on capital gains, dividends and other tax code fixes, and the American economy is staring straight down the barrel of $3.2 trillion tax hike over the next ten years.

It doesn’t take a genius to realize that raising taxes by $3.2 trillion dollars would be an economic recovery killer. …

The tax raising culprit here is the expiration of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts set to take effect on January 1, 2011. The leftist majority in Congress is refusing to extend current law because they believe that these tax cuts are the cause of our trillion dollar deficits. They are wrong. …

The real cause of our nation’s debt problem is spending. …

The leftist majority in Congress has had years to address this impending economic disaster but have refused to act. Last month, the House leadership announced that for the first time in the history of the budgeting process, they would not set a budget this year. And not only are they refusing to set any limits on their own spending, but now they are even talking about punting the tax issue into December so that they can raise our taxes without having to answer to the American voter. …

The end of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts are just the beginning of President Obama’s tax hike spree. The Obama administration’s budget also calls for higher taxes on small businesses, higher taxes on energy and higher taxes on American companies that compete overseas.

Nile Gardiner, writing in the Telegraph, predicts that Obama’s economic policies will result in catastrophe not only for America, but for the world:

The latest annual Congressional Budget Office Long-Term Budget Outlook … offers a truly frightening picture of the scale of America’s national debt, with huge implications for the country’s future prosperity. …

The CBO warns of potentially devastating consequence for the United States if this debt mountain is not tackled, and even points out that its “projections understate the severity of the long-term budget problem because they do not incorporate the significant negative effects that accumulating substantial amounts of additional federal debt would have on the economy:

“Large budget deficits would reduce national saving, leading to higher interest rates, more borrowing from abroad, and less domestic investment—which in turn would lower income growth in the United States. …”

Over time, higher debt would increase the probability of a fiscal crisis in which investors would lose confidence in the government’s ability to manage its budget, and the government would be forced to pay much more to borrow money.

The CBO assessment is probably the most important economic report the President of the United States will read this year. And it should be a huge wake-up call for the Obama administration, which has so far adopted a policy of sticking its head in the sand in the face of an impending Greek-style financial crisis in the very near future. …

The White House needs to wake up to reality, and aggressively reduce borrowing, cut down on public spending, and dramatically reduce the size of the federal government. If it doesn’t, there will be devastating implications for the United States as the world’s only superpower.

With his reckless big government policies, Barack Obama threatens to run his country into the ground, with American decline the inevitable end result. It is not too late to reverse course, but so far there is not a shred of evidence that the president is willing to do what is necessary. Not only will the United States suffer from this kamikaze-style approach, but the world will too.

J. Christian Adams is the lawyer formerly employed by the Department of Justice who recently revealed the DOJ’s policy of not prosecuting blacks for intimidating white voters (see our post Payback time at the DOJ, June 28, 2010.)

Now at PajamasMedia he reveals another policy decision which makes it plain that under Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder, the DOJ disdains the law, and assumes an arbitrary right not to uphold and enforce it.

The “Motor Voter” law was passed in 1993 to promote greater voter registration in the United States. … [It] obliged the states to ensure that no ineligible voters were on the rolls — including dead people, felons, and people who had moved. Our current Department of Justice is anxious to encourage the obligations to get everyone registered, but explicitly unwilling to enforce federal law requiring states to remove the dead or ineligible from the rolls.

In November 2009, the entire Voting Section was invited to a meeting with Deputy Assistant Attorney General Julie Fernandes, a political employee serving at the pleasure of the attorney general. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss Motor Voter enforcement decisions.

The room was packed with dozens of Voting Section employees when she made her announcement regarding the provisions related to voter list integrity:

“We have no interest in enforcing this provision of the law. It has nothing to do with increasing turnout, and we are just not going to do it.”

At Commentary Contentions, John Steele Gordon comments on this:

The only reason I can think of why the DOJ would not want to purge the voter rolls of the names of those ineligible to vote is to make voter fraud as easy to accomplish as possible.

We think he’s right. The decision mocks democracy. But  the issue is bigger and more important even than voter fraud. It is a threat to the rule of law itself.

The law is the house of our safety. Obama with his henchmen and henchwomen are knocking it down. If they are not stopped, we will be left exposed to the whims of dictatorship, whichever way they blow.