Osama-Hiden

[jwanck11]

Yeah, my wife told me yesterday if Obama gets elected and they implement his healthcare plan, her two business will fold. She's got over 40 employees. They're all in the lower income range and they really depend on her business for the healthcare benefits.

How does she know that????

[jwanck11]

Yes, but it takes more energy to produce ethanol than it produces.

???

Again, it needs R&D!!! That is a "the world is flat" view.

[Fast1911]

I have read it. Don't actually understand what you mean in the last sentence. I think it is only appropriate to look holistically looking at an alternative. Ethanol is in the earliest stages of development. Cellulosic ethanol is even more wet behind the ears. Give time for R&D and power plants optomized for the fuels and that may be a completely backwards statement.

Remember in 1906 the engine did not do much at all. Remember that engines half the size as those produced in the 70's turn out far more power... etc.

I like Obama's stance on energy - diversification over McCain's position of drill (without refinement I might add) and nose dive into nuclear. That makes no freaking sense.

"nose dive into nuclear"?, we already have a lot of nuclear plants in the US and I believe that is a good way to go, we have two nuclear plants here in S Florida and they run just fine. There is a risk/reward scenario no matter which solution you go with. Nuclear is pretty clean..........

[chpthril]

The article below is very interesting! However, the snopes link below the article is even more interesting as it sites the efforts of the Clinton administration to expand credit for mortgage loans among low and moderate income people (particularly minority groups, Stockholders of Freddie and Fannie who wanted more growth and the financial institutions who wanted to provide more loans to subprime borrowers. In addition in 2003 the Bush administration proposed legislation to rein in Freddie and Fannie. As we all know the legislation got no where due to lobbying and Barney Frank, who said last week that the Republicans were at fault for our present crisis.

Yet, the liberal media and the people sold on Obama being the savior fail to get any of this.



In case someone wants to really know the truth...this from the New York Times in 1999...



The origins of the problem are pretty well laid out by the NY Times themselves in 1999, 9 years almost to the day.




September 30, 1999 The NYTimes
Fannie Mae Eases Credit To Aid Mortgage Lending

By STEVEN A. HOLMES

In a move that could help increase home ownership rates among minorities and low-income consumers, the Fannie Mae Corporation is easing the credit requirements on loans that it will purchase from banks and other lenders.

The action, which will begin as a pilot program involving 24 banks in 15 markets -- including the New York metropolitan region -- will encourage those banks to extend home mortgages to individuals whose credit is generally not good enough to qualify for conventional loans. Fannie Mae officials say they hope to make it a nationwide program by next spring.

Fannie Mae, the nation's biggest underwriter of home mortgages, has been under increasing pressure from the Clinton Administration to expand mortgage loans among low and moderate income people and felt pressure from stock holders to maintain its phenomenal growth in profits.

In addition, banks, thrift institutions and mortgage companies have been pressing Fannie Mae to help them make more loans to so-called subprime borrowers. These borrowers whose incomes, credit ratings and savings are not good enough to qualify for conventional loans, can only get loans from finance companies that charge much higher interest rates -- anywhere from three to four percentage points higher than conventional loans.

''Fannie Mae has expanded home ownership for millions of families in the 1990's by reducing down payment requirements,'' said Franklin D. Raines, Fannie Mae's chairman and chief executive officer. ''Yet there remain too many borrowers whose credit is just a notch below what our underwriting has required who have been relegated to paying significantly higher mortgage rates in the so-called subprime market.''

Demographic information on these borrowers is sketchy. But at least one study indicates that 18 percent of the loans in the subprime market went to black borrowers, compared to 5 per cent of loans in the conventional loan market.

In moving, even tentatively, into this new area of lending, Fannie Mae is taking on significantly more risk, which may not pose any difficulties during flush economic times. But the government-subsidized corporation may run into trouble in an economic downturn, prompting a government rescue similar to that of the savings and loan industry in the 1980's.

''From the perspective of many people, including me, this is another thrift industry growing up around us,'' said Peter Wallison a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. ''If they fail, the government will have to step up and bail them out the way it stepped up and bailed out the thrift industry.''

Under Fannie Mae's pilot program, consumers who qualify can secure a mortgage with an interest rate one percentage point above that of a conventional, 30-year fixed rate mortgage of less than $240,000 -- a rate that currently averages about 7.76 per cent. If the borrower makes his or her monthly payments on time for two years, the one percentage point premium is dropped.

Fannie Mae, the nation's biggest underwriter of home mortgages, does not lend money directly to consumers. Instead, it purchases loans that banks make on what is called the secondary market. By expanding the type of loans that it will buy, Fannie Mae is hoping to spur banks to make more loans to people with less-than-stellar credit ratings.

Fannie Mae officials stress that the new mortgages will be extended to all potential borrowers who can qualify for a mortgage. But they add that the move is intended in part to increase the number of minority and low income home owners who tend to have worse credit ratings than non-Hispanic whites.

Home ownership has, in fact, exploded among minorities during the economic boom of the 1990's. The number of mortgages extended to Hispanic applicants jumped by 87.2 per cent from 1993 to 1998, according to Harvard University's Joint Center for Housing Studies. During that same period the number of African Americans who got mortgages to buy a home increased by 71.9 per cent and the number of Asian Americans by 46.3 per cent.

In contrast, the number of non-Hispanic whites who received loans for homes increased by 31.2 per cent.
Despite these gains, home ownership rates for minorities continue to lag behind non-Hispanic whites, in part because blacks and Hispanics in particular tend to have on average worse credit ratings.

In July, the Department of Housing and Urban Development proposed that by the year 2001, 50 percent of Fannie Mae's and Freddie Mac's portfolio be made up of loans to low and moderate-income borrowers. Last year, 44 percent of the loans Fannie Mae purchased were from these groups.

The change in policy also comes at the same time that HUD is investigating allegations of racial discrimination in the automated underwriting systems used by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to determine the credit-worthiness of credit applicants.


Here's some more interesting info: http://www.snopes.com/politics/business/easescredit.asp

[chpthril]

It could be coming to this for the Wall Street boys.

[jwanck11]

"nose dive into nuclear"?, we already have a lot of nuclear plants in the US and I believe that is a good way to go, we have two nuclear plants here in S Florida and they run just fine. There is a risk/reward scenario no matter which solution you go with. Nuclear is pretty clean..........

I believe nuclear is a good way to go too - However I see nuclear power as always being a huge national security risk. I also do not think it is a good idea to invest in a single energy source.

Go to http://www.ans.org/honors/recipients/va-standserv and look at 1989. That is my great uncle. He was the Cheif Security Officer at GE in the Nuclear Power division. GE is a pretty big player in the globes nuclear energy platform. He also was part of hte build team that created a nuclear reactor at Penn State University.

Yes, I am certainly for nuclear energy, but not as a sole replacement source. That is a dangerous proposition. I see a host of benefits in diversification.

[dogbert]

That is a "the world is flat" view.

You mean it's not?

[jwanck11]

when I walked up to the edge of it, I thought I noticed a slight curl...

[dogbert]

How does she know that????

um, cuz she read what he's proposing.

Like I said. Read his book. I've come to the conclusion he's all talk. We'll see what happens when he's on the hook to actually solve a problem.

[dogbert]

BTW, I'm not saying the alternative is any better. Once again it's a choice of who will suck the least. Kinda depressing, actually...

[jwanck11]

um, cuz she read what he's proposing.

Like I said. Read his book. I've come to the conclusion he's all talk. We'll see what happens when he's on the hook to actually solve a problem.

She must be looking at specific elements?? That is a very specific statement that certainly has specific/concrete backing???

Also, I've never known a President in history to be able to enact all that they are proposing even in a same party presidency/congress.

All president wannabe are all talk. There have been very few in history that have been nearly as much walk. Our current President is one of them.

[chpthril]

[Fast1911]

BTW, I'm not saying the alternative is any better. Once again it's a choice of who will suck the least. Kinda depressing, actually...

so very true

[chpthril]

Angry Obama the pothead is not how they remember him in Hawaii: I wonder how much more about his life, past and current, is fiction, hmmm!

"Barack Obama's frank admissions of youthful drug abuse, helped establish him as a refreshingly different front-runner for the US presidency.


The confession that he smoked marijuana and snorted cocaine presented the American public with a candidate prepared to tackle, head-on, questions usually ducked by senior politicians.

But now his candour has been questioned by some of those who knew him best.

Sen Obama's self-portrait of an angry young black man who became a "pothead" is scarcely recognisable to those who knew him during his formative years in Hawaii.

Now some are asking whether the first serious black contender for the White House may also be the first major candidate to exaggerate his drug use for political effect.

Sen Obama's emergence as Hillary Clinton's main rival for the Democrat presidential nomination next year is based heavily upon his compelling personal history and charisma.

Born Barack Hussein Obama the son of a Kansas teenager and a Kenyan goat herder - he overcame a troubled youth to become the first black editor of the Harvard Law Review.

In his memoir, Dreams From My Father, published 10 years ago, Sen Obama, 46, freely admitted to smoking marijuana and makes an oblique reference to hard drugs.

"I blew a few smoke rings, remembering those years," he wrote. "Pot had helped, and booze; maybe a little blow when you could afford it. Not smack, though." "Blow" is street slang for cocaine, "smack" is heroin.

In the book, Sen Obama recalls that he had "been headed" to the status of "junkie" or "pothead", which he describes as "the final, fatal role of the young would-be black man". He recalls smoking "reefer" in the backs of his friends' vans, dorm rooms and "on the beach with a couple of Hawaiian kids who had dropped out of school".

That is not what Bryon Leong, a former classmate at the elite Punahou School where Sen Obama won a scholarship aged 10, remembers.

"He was known as a partier, as a guy looking for a good time, but not much more," Mr Leong said. "There was pot in Hawaii in the 1970s, but it wasn't a big deal."

"It wasn't like guys were smoking dope on campus and coming to school high," said Eric Kusunoki, 57, Sen Obama's teacher from age 15 to 18. "If they did, it would have been pretty obvious. If he did dabble with drugs or alcohol, I didn't see it."

The Illinois senator's depiction of his Hawaiian upbringing as a time of intense inner struggle, full of racial angst, is also a surprise to those who shared his time in the archipelago where the "Aloha Spirit" of racial harmony defines America's 50th state.

The verdant islands, with their golden beaches 5,000 miles from the American capital, are the home to a Pacific melting pot, where Polynesians, Japanese and Chinese have harvested sugar cane for generations and whites from the mainland, known as haoles, have long been a minority.

A keen basketball player, Sen Obama highlights in his book the feelings of alienation caused by "always playing on the white man's court - by the white man's rules. If the principal, or the coach, or a teacher wanted to spit in your face, he could, because he had the power and you didn't."

But that's not the Barack Obama, nor the Hawaii of the 1970s, recalled by his friends, teachers and team-mates. They remember instead the summer of 1978 when "easy-going Barry" was in constant search of a basketball game, strutting around the island as if he owned it, dribbling a ball from school to the golden sands of Waikiki beach as he belted out Earth, Wind and Fire songs in a distinctive, gravelly voice.

Kelli Furushima, 46, a close friend of Mr Obama, recalls: "We're just such a mixed-up bag of races, it was hard to imagine that he felt that way because he just seemed happy all the time. Smiling all the time." Flicking through an old school yearbook, full of pictures of a grinning Obama, she added: "You see he talks in his book about race and stuff, and we all have the same reaction: we're all so surprised that he had any sort of anguish at all. You can see we had so many tones of brown. If someone is brown, they can be Samoan or Fijian or Tongan. I can't tell if someone is Fijian, or black." She paused to point out how Sen Obama had dotted his signature with a little Afro-haircut symbol atop the "B" and the "O".

They all remember his easy smile and that same confident stride they see on national television. "It all comes back to that walk and that smile. That's the one thing that hasn't changed," said Alan Lum, another member of the Punahou basketball team.

"He describes himself as a skinny black kid who just arrived from Indonesia, but he was a chunky black kid from Indonesia," said Tom Krieger, recalling how he once teased Sen Obama about not needing a pillow at night, because he had his afro. "It was Hawaii. We can make fun of each other."

The interest in Sen Obama's Hawaiian upbringing is fuelled because, unlike his chief rivals, Sen Clinton or former senator and vice-presidential candidate John Edwards, Sen Obama has not previously been subjected to a national presidential campaign or the dark arts of opposition research.

Sen Obama's father, also called Barack, walked out on the family two years after his son was born. When Sen Obama was six-years-old, his mother got a divorce and married an Indonesian. Young "Barry" spent four years living in Indonesia, rising early to read for his American correspondence courses.

Aged 10, he returned to Hawaii to live with his grandparents and attend Punahou School. He made friends quickly and told his classmates that his father was an African prince, the leader of a proud and successful people.

In challenging Sen Obama's recollection of the 1970s, many of his friends are careful to note that he may have been hiding his inner anguish during his years on the tropical island, like any uncertain adolescent.

"I wish I would have known that those things were bothering him, or if they did bother him," said Mr Kusunoki. "Maybe we could have helped him. But he seemed to have coped pretty well."

Dan Hale, a blond, 6ft 7in basketball team-mate, said: "I don't remember seeing certain things that are referred to, but it doesn't mean that they didn't happen. For him, it was something."

If Sen Obama did show flashes or anger or hurt, according to team-mates and friends, it sprang from his lack of minutes on the basketball court rather than his angst as a young black man in a multi-racial society.

But once he became a senator, he may have made peace with his basketball demons. On a return visit to his former school, he sought out Chris McLachin, the coach who sat him on the substitutes' bench in his final year. "He came up to me and said: 'You know, coach, I was never as good as I thought I was'," said Mr McLachin. "And I said: 'No, Barry, you weren't'."
"

[Fast1911]