Tag: posts

Although the specifics are still
hazy, The New York Times reports that a group of
deep-pocketed Republican donors and bundlers has hatched a plan to
clear the GOP field of all insurgents to make room for a favored
“establishment” candidate—preferably Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, or
Mitt Romney. But there can only be one. Republican powerbrokers
intend to get ahead of the intraparty squabbling that accompanies
the long primary season because, in the end, they think all of that
ugliness would only help elect Hillary Clinton.

David Harsanyi finds this strategy dubious. For one, there’s
scant evidence that bypassing crowded primaries enhances a party’s
chances of winning a national election. In fact, sometimes a
primary makes the candidate. What’s more, after seven years of
functioning as the opposition, Republicans may actually have to
sort out some substantive differences on policy, writes Harsanyi.
And coronations do not lend themselves to self-examination.

View this article.

• Feeling unappreciated, liberal
  lawmakers including Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) raise a fuss of
  their own over the jam-packed $1.1 trillion spending bill and
  
  snipe at the White House.
• State-level losses in the recent election and concentration in
  cities may put the
  Democratic Party in a weaker position than previously admitted,
  even before Warren took to the barricades.
• Here’s your transparency: The Obama administration is
  battling to prevent the release of documents including the
  Panetta report, which offers more details about the CIA’s
  indulgence in torture.
• Polls find that Americans generally agree with the grand jury
  decision in the Michael Brown case, but
  disagree with the decision in the Eric Garner case. Meanwhile,
  Erica Garner, daughter of Eric Garner,
  staged a “die-in” at the site where her father was killed by
  NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo.
• A
  time capsule buried in 1795 by Samuel Adams, Paul Revere, and
  others has been unearthed. No word yet on how well the winter lager
  weathered the years.
• A major online cheerleader for ISIS turns out to be
  an executive with an Indian food conglomerate. Idiot.
• Ferguson, Missouri, officials plan to
  issue more citations in their town to increase revenue.
  Brilliant.

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A
new reality series slated for A&E will feature a
cop-turned-pastor intent on saving sex workers’ souls by luring
them to hotel rooms and then lecturing them on national television.
Once he has sex workers cornered, pastor Kevin Brown has eight
minutes to convince them of the error of their whorin’ ways. It’s
like To Catch a Predator meets Pretty Woman!
Which is to say: an abomination that should never, ever have gotten
the greenlight.

The series—working title: 8 Minutes—is being produced
by Tom Forman, who would still be touting extreme home makeovers
and food truck races were it not for a 2013 Los Angeles
Times article about Brown’s “rescue” efforts. Apparently,
Brown has been at his odious task a while. In 2011, he helped form
Safe Passage OC, which conducts “unofficial stings to ‘liberate’
women and minors from a life of servitude,” as the Times
describes it. The group sees their missions “as undercover police
operations—with a dash of prayer.”

Thats right: Brown already spends his spare time hunting down
and harassing sex workers. The description of his group’s work is
truly creepy and fanatical: 

To prepare for the missions, Reese trolls backpage.com or
craigslist for potential victims, particularly those who look like
they might be minors with an “emptiness” in their faces. … The
group practices by using a Bluetooth as a walkie-talkie, driving
around in a caravan and deploying as a surveillance team across
motel properties, with each person assigned a specific role.

Seeing someone’s photo online and then proceeding to track them
down IRL and secretly monitor their movements would, under other
contexts, be considered stalking. But apparently anything goes when
your aim is to “save” women from exerting their own
agency. 

As the Times article makes clear, most of the women
Brown encounters want nothing to do with his savior complex. At
least they’re only subjected to a strange or scary or insulting
conversation. Now Brown’s stalk-and-save efforts come with a camera
crew. 

Forman told Entertainment Weekly that the
“girls” won’t be shown on television without their permission, and
that Brown’s success rate has been about 50 percent. “Sometimes
they turn and leave, but that’s the case when trying to save
prostitutes,” said Forman. (They’re wily like cats, they are!)
A&E has ordered an initial eight episodes of the
show. 

Submitted for your approval,
from a
Fannie Mae press release dated December 8:

WASHINGTON, DC – Today, Fannie Mae (FNMA/OTC) announced an
option for qualified first-time homebuyers that will allow for a
down payment as low as three percent. Building upon Fannie Mae’s
successful lower down payment program offered through state Housing
Finance Agencies, the 97 percent loan-to-value ratio (LTV) option
will expand access to credit for qualified first-time homebuyers
that may not have the resources for a larger down payment.

This makes official a federal scheme Stephanie Slade
noted as pending back in October.

For those with short memories, the Community
Reinvestment Act which encoraged home ownership at all costs,
including those of finacial prudence, is implicated by economic
research in the great housing crash of a few years ago. Economists
Sumit Agarwal of the National University of Singapore, Effi
Benmelech of Harvard, Nittai Bergman of the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology, and Amit Seru of the University of Chicago
wrote two years ago:

Our empirical strategy compares lending behavior of banks
undergoing CRA exams within a given census tract in a given month
to the behavior of banks operating in the same census tract-month
that do not face these exams. We find that adherence to the act led
to riskier lending by banks: in the six quarters surrounding the
CRA exams lending is elevated on average by about 5 percent every
quarter and loans in these quarters default by about 15 percent
more often.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (which also joins in the new round of
3 percent-down fun)
feature prominently as major promoters, under HUD direction, of
the federal government’s “affordable housing” scheme to stick
everybody under a roof that they couldn’t necessarily pay for. They
lobbied and arm-twisted banks to make the high-risk loans that led
to such an…interesting result (by which I mean meltdown).

Now, they’re back at it. But it will be different this time,
just because.

Jonathan Gruber is a liar. The
question now is whether Jonathan Gruber was a liar while under
oath. 

In a sworn hearing before the House Oversight Committee on
Tuesday, Gruber, widely cited in the press over the last few years
as an architect of Obamacare, insisted that he did not write any of
the health care law himself. “I didn’t draft the legislation,”
he said,
later reiterating the claim: “I did not write any part of the
Affordable Care Act.”

Asked by Rep. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wy.) why he claimed in 2012 to
have written part of the law, he said that it was “an effort to
seem more important than I was,” and that he “was speaking
glibly.” 

He seems to have spoken “glibly” on multiple occasions.

As The Hill notes,
in a late
2010 lecture to students at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, where Gruber is a faculty member, he talked about the
health law and described his role in its creation, saying, “Full
disclaimer: I’m going to describe it objectively, but I helped
write it.”

In another 2010 video, captured by C-SPAN and posted at
Townhall, Gruber also noted his bias in favor of the law while
claiming to have helped write it. “Once again, unabashed, I
helped write the federal [health care] bill as well,” he said. That
remark was made the same month that Obamacare was signed into
law.

Two years later, Gruber hadn’t changed his story. In
a now-infamous
2012 lecture on the law’s health exchanges at Noblis, Gruber
not only said that states that don’t set up exchanges don’t have
access to tax subsidies, he also referred the “the one bit of the
bill I actually wrote.” 

The issue isn’t whether those statements were glib. It’s whether
they were true. (Notably, when asked by Rep. Scott Desjarlais
(R-Tenn.) whether other embarassing videotaped statements were lies
or not, Gruber would only say that his remarks were “glib and
thoughtless and really inexcusable.”)

There is no way to reconcile his multiple past statements with
the statements he made this week while under oath. Either Gruber
spent two years lying about his role in writing the law, or he was
lying this week in his sworn congressional testimony. 

Tonight’s episode of The
Independents (Fox Business Network, 9 p.m. ET, 6
p.m. PT, with repeats three and five hours later) features
interviews with two Capitol Hill stalwarts who are part of that
left-right grassroots coalition you sometimes hear about when the
National Security Agency almost gets defunded or
whatnot.

First up is Rep. Justin Amash
(R-Mich.), who will talk about a
terrifying blanket-surveillance bill that passed Congress
this week with little fanfare (read Amash slam the bill on
his Facebook
page). Later in the show, socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders
(I-Vermont) will tussle with Kennedy over
economic policy and his pesidential aspirations.

Party Panel is Red Eye
co-host TV’s
Andy Levy and comedian Jimmy Failla, who will
talk about precisely what I mention in the headline of this post,
only with more verve and wit. And the hostess and I shall discuss
how journalistic catastrophes like the
Rolling Stone gang-rape article
happen.

Follow The Independents on Facebook
at http://ift.tt/QYHXdB,
follow on Twitter @ independentsFBN,
hashtag us at #TheIndependents, and click on this page
for more video of past segments.

You can now buy digital content
for a Windows Phone with bitcoins. Nobody has or wants a Windows
Phone, apparently,
but fortunately you can also buy things from Microsoft you may
actually want with bitcoins, too.

Microsoft is now
accepting bitcoins as a payment option for “apps, games, and
other digital content from Windows, Windows Phone, Xbox Games, Xbox
Music, or Xbox Video stores.” You can’t buy physical products or
services yet, you can only use bitcoins in the United States, and
if you purchase something with bitcoins, they cannot be refunded.
But it’s a start.

Remember how earlier in the year, after prominent bitcoin
exchange Mt. Gox was hacked and collapsed and the value of bitcoins
plunged, people declared the virtual currency dead
or at least doomed? The price has continued to go down—a bitcoin is
now worth about a quarter of what it used to be at the start of the
year ($335 today as opposed to $1,100).  But we’re seeing it
accepted in more and more places.

Engaget notes
that other tech consumer companies, like Dell, have embraced
bitcoins as well, but Amazon is still resistant. Be sure to check
out Reason’s December issue for a
look at the future of money.

Exodus: Gods and Kings is probably the worst
big-budget movie I’ve seen all year, and I saw the Teenage
Mutant Ninja Turtles reboot. 

At first glance, “Exodus: Gods and Kings” might seem to
represent a change of pace at the multiplex: Director Ridley
Scott’s revisionist riff on the Biblical story of the Israelites’
flight from Egypt is a lavish Hollywood blockbuster that is neither
a comic-book movie nor a sequel in some increasingly bloated
big-screen franchise.

And yet in some sense it’s also both — a heroic, effects-driven
take on a Biblical epic that attempts to recast its story to fit
within the box-office-friendly parameters of the director’s
previous work. Either way, however, it’s an epic mess.

Technically, it’s not part of a franchise, but “Exodus” falls
neatly into line as the latest in a series of ever-more-dubious
historical epics from Mr. Scott, the director of the
still-resonant “Gladiator” and the still-muddled “Kingdom of
Heaven.”

“Exodus” calls to mind both, though rarely in a good way: Like
“Gladiator,” it revolves around a clash between a king — in this
case, the Emperor Ramses (Joel Edgerton) — and a member of his
inner circle, Moses (a bored-looking Christian Bale), who leads a
people’s revolt after the elder mentor holding the two at bay
(Emperor Seti, played with campy disinterest by John Turturro)
passes on. But “Exodus” lacks both the gravitas and the searing
violence of that earlier film; it is largely bloodless and, indeed,
often boring.

As in “Kingdom of Heaven,” the story marries historical sweep to
questionable theology and sociopolitical insights. 

Read the
complete review at The Washington Times.