ARREST THE MEDIA FOR FRAUD

From Orson Scott Card's scathing essay—Would the Last Honest Reporter Please Turn On the Lights? The essay is rather long and thoroughly comprehensive, so please don't neglect to hit the link.

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?

Read it all.

DEMOCRATIC CROWN LOSING MARBLES

IF YOU THOUGHT THE three-headed hydra of Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank and Harry Reid sounded shrill this morning at their partisan press conference while nervously bumbling through this latest wrinkle of the financial meltdown we as a nation as facing, it is because they ARE nervous. Nervous that their hand-picked CHOSEN ONE is not going to save the hour, much less the day, for the party. As Senate Majority Leader, Senator Reid (D-NV) especially has has delivered several rather bizarre announcements throughout this crisis:

When news of the crisis broke, Reid's first response was “No one knows what to do.”

A day later, he insisted that John McCain needs to return to DC to make the GOP rank & file support the bill he was cobbling together with his ideological cronies, then a few hours later he said McCain shouldn’t come to to DC at all, and insists with all the seriousness of a dead possum in the middle of the road, that the scheduled debate on Friday was more important than anything in Washington at the moment.

This morning, after pumping up the tenative agreement as Obama's brain trust, he then lamented that banking is subtle, difficult and complex and that both Obama & McCain don’t know anything about it.

Here's a plan we can all believe in. Harry Reid needs to step down off the chair, leave the rope where it is, and simply leave the building.

And yes, this one folks, is a Democratic scandal, not a Republican one.