Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Uncle Orson Weighs In

Currently Reading: Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

This is a great article by one of the world's greatest Science Fiction authors. Ironically he's a democrat too.
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By Orson Scott Card October 5, 2008

Would the Last Honest Reporter Please Turn On the Lights?

An open letter to the local daily paper -- almost every local daily paper in America:

I remember reading All the President's Men and thinking: That's journalism. You do what it takes to get the truth and you lay it before the public, because the public has a right to know.

This housing crisis didn't come out of nowhere. It was not a vague emanation of the evil Bush administration.

It was a direct result of the political decision, back in the late 1990s, to loosen the rules of lending so that home loans would be more accessible to poor people. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were authorized to approve risky loans.

What is a risky loan? It's a loan that the recipient is likely not to be able to repay.

The goal of this rule change was to help the poor -- which especially would help members of minority groups. But how does it help these people to give them a loan that they can't repay? They get into a house, yes, but when they can't make the payments, they lose the house -- along with their credit rating.

They end up worse off than before.

This was completely foreseeable and in fact many people did foresee it. One political party, in Congress and in the executive branch, tried repeatedly to tighten up the rules. The other party blocked every such attempt and tried to loosen them.

Furthermore, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were making political contributions to the very members of Congress who were allowing them to make irresponsible loans. (Though why quasi-federal agencies were allowed to do so baffles me. It's as if the Pentagon were allowed to contribute to the political campaigns of Congressmen who support increasing their budget.)

Isn't there a story here? Doesn't journalism require that you who produce our daily paper tell the truth about who brought us to a position where the only way to keep confidence in our economy was a $700 billion bailout? Aren't you supposed to follow the money and see which politicians were benefitting personally from the deregulation of mortgage lending?

I have no doubt that if these facts had pointed to the Republican Party or to John McCain as the guilty parties, you would be treating it as a vast scandal. "Housing-gate," no doubt. Or "Fannie-gate."

Instead, it was Senator Christopher Dodd and Congressman Barney Frank, both Democrats, who denied that there were any problems, who refused Bush administration requests to set up a regulatory agency to watch over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and who were still pushing for these agencies to go even further in promoting subprime mortgage loans almost up to the minute they failed.

As Thomas Sowell points out in a TownHall.com essay entitled Do Facts Matter? "Alan Greenspan warned them four years ago. So did the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers to the President. So did Bush's Secretary of the Treasury."

These are facts. This financial crisis was completely preventable. The party that blocked any attempt to prevent it was ... the Democratic Party. The party that tried to prevent it was ... the Republican Party.

Yet when Nancy Pelosi accused the Bush administration and Republican deregulation of causing the crisis, you in the press did not hold her to account for her lie. Instead, you criticized Republicans who took offense at this lie and refused to vote for the bailout!

What? It's not the liar, but the victims of the lie who are to blame?

Now let's follow the money ... right to the presidential candidate who is the number-two recipient of campaign contributions from Fannie Mae.

And after Freddie Raines, the CEO of Fannie Mae who made $90 million while running it into the ground, was fired for his incompetence, one presidential candidate's campaign actually consulted him for advice on housing.

If that presidential candidate had been John McCain, you would have called it a major scandal and we would be getting stories in your paper every day about how incompetent and corrupt he was.

But instead, that candidate was Barack Obama, and so you have buried this story, and when the McCain campaign dared to call Raines an "adviser" to the Obama campaign -- because that campaign had sought his advice -- you actually let Obama's people get away with accusing McCain of lying, merely because Raines wasn't listed as an official adviser to the Obama campaign.

You would never tolerate such weasely nit-picking from a Republican.

If you who produce our local daily paper actually had any principles, you would be pounding this story, because the prosperity of all Americans was put at risk by the foolish, short-sighted, politically selfish, and possibly corrupt actions of leading Democrats, including Obama.

If you who produce our local daily paper had any personal honor, you would find it unbearable to let the American people believe that somehow Republicans were to blame for this crisis.

There are precedents. Even though President Bush and his administration never said that Iraq sponsored or was linked to 9/11, you could not stand the fact that Americans had that misapprehension -- so you pounded us with the fact that there was no such link. (Along the way, you created the false impression that Bush had lied to them and said that there was a connection.)

If you had any principles, then surely right now, when the American people are set to blame President Bush and John McCain for a crisis they tried to prevent, and are actually shifting to approve of Barack Obama because of a crisis he helped cause, you would be laboring at least as hard to correct that false impression.

Your job, as journalists, is to tell the truth. That's what you claim you do, when you accept people's money to buy or subscribe to your paper.

But right now, you are consenting to or actively promoting a big fat lie -- that the housing crisis should somehow be blamed on Bush, McCain, and the Republicans. You have trained the American people to blame everything bad -- even bad weather -- on Bush, and they are responding as you have taught them to.

If you had any personal honor, each reporter and editor would be insisting on telling the truth -- even if it hurts the election chances of your favorite candidate.

Because that's what honorable people do. Honest people tell the truth even when they don't like the probable consequences. That's what honesty means. That's how trust is earned.

Barack Obama is just another politician, and not a very wise one. He has revealed his ignorance and naivete time after time -- and you have swept it under the rug, treated it as nothing.

Meanwhile, you have participated in the borking of Sarah Palin, reporting savage attacks on her for the pregnancy of her unmarried daughter -- while you ignored the story of John Edwards's own adultery for many months.

So I ask you now: Do you have any standards at all? Do you even know what honesty means?

Is getting people to vote for Barack Obama so important that you will throw away everything that journalism is supposed to stand for?

You might want to remember the way the National Organization of Women threw away their integrity by supporting Bill Clinton despite his well-known pattern of sexual exploitation of powerless women. Who listens to NOW anymore? We know they stand for nothing; they have no principles.

That's where you are right now.

It's not too late. You know that if the situation were reversed, and the truth would damage McCain and help Obama, you would be moving heaven and earth to get the true story out there.

If you want to redeem your honor, you will swallow hard and make a list of all the stories you would print if it were McCain who had been getting money from Fannie Mae, McCain whose campaign had consulted with its discredited former CEO, McCain who had voted against tightening its lending practices.

Then you will print them, even though every one of those true stories will point the finger of blame at the reckless Democratic Party, which put our nation's prosperity at risk so they could feel good about helping the poor, and lay a fair share of the blame at Obama's door.

You will also tell the truth about John McCain: that he tried, as a Senator, to do what it took to prevent this crisis. You will tell the truth about President Bush: that his administration tried more than once to get Congress to regulate lending in a responsible way.

This was a Congress-caused crisis, beginning during the Clinton administration, with Democrats leading the way into the crisis and blocking every effort to get out of it in a timely fashion.

If you at our local daily newspaper continue to let Americans believe --and vote as if -- President Bush and the Republicans caused the crisis, then you are joining in that lie.

If you do not tell the truth about the Democrats -- including Barack Obama -- and do so with the same energy you would use if the miscreants were Republicans -- then you are not journalists by any standard.

You're just the public relations machine of the Democratic Party, and it's time you were all fired and real journalists brought in, so that we can actually have a daily newspaper in our city.


Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Howling Jack!

Currently Reading: The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead by Max Brooks and Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

Ok, here's what happened. Two weeks ago we took the doggies to the vet for a check-up. Katya has been scratching and itching a bit and I thought maybe it was just her usual, yearly attempt to yank out her undercoat and speed up her shedding. The vet says she's got allergies and points to the few little sores she's got on her. That's what she's been scratching.

The solution to this problem is an oatmeal bath for her. No big deal for me. I just have to take her to work with me and let her soak in the oatmeal shampoo for 10 minutes. Simple right? Sure it is. Well, I decided to take JUST her with me to work because Jack doesn't really like going to the salon. He doesn't like getting a bath either and since he didn't NEED one, I saw no reason to take him with us. I leashed up Katya and the whole time, Jack was hiding over by CC with a look on his face that said he REALLY hoped he wasn't going to get called out.

So Katya and I leave. Jack is home with CC all afternoon. The first hour or two, he gets a little moody and CC gets it on tape.



Sheesh you'd think he'd be a little happier that he finally got the whole apartment to himself right?

Election Year Reading

Currently Reading: The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead by Max Brooks and Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

Yup, we're in another election year. Only way you can avoid hearing about it until your head explodes is to turn off your TV, lock the doors, don't listen to the radio, close all the windows and pull down the blinds. Don't go online, don't read your e-mail. Pretty much just go into hiding in a cave somewhere and have no contact with anyone or anything until next January. Yes, I know the election is in November but we're still going to keep hearing about it until they swear in whoever won.

And what do I think about the whole mess? Not much. In fact, these days I try to do as little thinking about it as possible. When I do let my mind wander into the realm of politics these days the one thought that most frequently comes to mind is: this is the best we can do?

There's a very old saying that states, "you get the government you deserve." There's a derivative version about how people who don't actually participate and vote have no business criticizing the government. I used to believe that second one right up until the primaries this year. After all that arguing, all the money thrown around, political ads, debates, etc., this is what we get? These two guys? Our choice is between the young, dashing, Chicago politician and the seasoned, veteran Senator. I'm trying to make this sound as positive as I can mind you. Our real choice is between the somewhat scary Chicago politician who talks a good game but who hasn't actually PRODUCED anything in all his years in politics (and don't let that Chicago label slip by you; we're talking a MAJOR hotbed of corruption there), and on the other side, a long-time Washington insider who, because he occasionally argues with his own party, got the label of maverick.

To put it even more bluntly, we've got two versions of more of the same. No, not more Bush. McCain isn't Bush, at least not current Bush. He may be Papa Bush, but he's not Baby Bush. And, in a return to the great stage, we have Jimmy Carter. So, Bush vs Carter? This is what we're dealing with here? And they wonder why young people don't vote. Imagine you're 18, fresh out of high school, first semester of college, or worse, that you're 21, just missed the LAST election and this is your first chance to vote for president. What a choice eh?

So, in the spirit of the grand game we're playing this October (and I'm not talking Baseball here folks) I've decided to break with my usual habit of reading only one book at a time and I've gone and picked out TWO that I think are appropriate for the season. I'm reading Atlas Shrugged, the classic and LONG novel about what happens when the folks who actually DO the work in the world say "to hell with this" and just stop. And on a lighter note, I'm reading the Zombie Survival Guide which is perfect for dealing with the more practical aspects of any election year. Both are FULL of useful information that should allow me to maintain my sanity until January . . . I hope :-)

Friday, October 03, 2008

The Housing Crisis

Currently Reading: Ghost in the Shell 1.5 by Masamune Shirow

This video, while a bit heavy-handed, does a pretty good job of explaining the whole housing crisis thing. It manages to put together all the little bits and pieces of information that have been trickling out ever since the big stock market crash.

Of course, in the end, it turns into a commercial for John McCain but the guy who made it at least went out of his way not to blame it all on Obama. He does point out Obama's tangental relationship to this whole thing and why it should matter. Give it a look.