Highmark
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Posts posted by Highmark
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14 minutes ago, SnowRider said:
Simple. Look at other countries with less lethal violence and follow suite.
Registration
Insurance
Training
Mental Health Evaluations
Waiting Periods
lLicense
Etc...
Other countries have less problems with Gangs. Control the gangs in the US and you control the violence.
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37 minutes ago, Capt.Storm said:
But I will concur it took effort to fawk it all up from a lot of people..but still it was billy's watch.
- The Federal Reserve, which slashed interest rates after the dot-com bubble burst, making credit cheap.
- Home buyers, who took advantage of easy credit to bid up the prices of homes excessively.
- Congress, which continues to support a mortgage tax deduction that gives consumers a tax incentive to buy more expensive houses.
- Real estate agents, most of whom work for the sellers rather than the buyers and who earned higher commissions from selling more expensive homes.
- The Clinton administration, which pushed for less stringent credit and downpayment requirements for working- and middle-class families.
- Mortgage brokers, who offered less-credit-worthy home buyers subprime, adjustable rate loans with low initial payments, but exploding interest rates.
- Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, who in 2004, near the peak of the housing bubble, encouraged Americans to take out adjustable rate mortgages.
- Wall Street firms, who paid too little attention to the quality of the risky loans that they bundled into Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS), and issued bonds using those securities as collateral.
- The Bush administration, which failed to provide needed government oversight of the increasingly dicey mortgage-backed securities market.
- An obscure accounting rule called mark-to-market, which can have the paradoxical result of making assets be worth less on paper than they are in reality during times of panic.
- Collective delusion, or a belief on the part of all parties that home prices would keep rising forever, no matter how high or how fast they had already gone up.
The U.S. economy is enormously complicated. Screwing it up takes a great deal of cooperation. Claiming that a single piece of legislation was responsible for (or could have averted) the crisis is just political grandstanding. We have no advice to offer on how best to solve the financial crisis. But these sorts of partisan caricatures can only make the task more difficult.
–by Joe Miller and Brooks Jackson
I'm not saying Bush doesn't share in the blame but he did try to reign things in all the way back in 2003 and was blocked by the dems. He should have pushed for it much harder.
New Agency Proposed to Oversee Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae
By STEPHEN LABATON
Published: September 11, 2003
WASHINGTON, Sept. 10— The Bush administration today recommended the most significant regulatory overhaul in the housing finance industry since the savings and loan crisis a decade ago.
Under the plan, disclosed at a Congressional hearing today, a new agency would be created within the Treasury Department to assume supervision of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored companies that are the two largest players in the mortgage lending industry.
The new agency would have the authority, which now rests with Congress, to set one of the two capital-reserve requirements for the companies. It would exercise authority over any new lines of business. And it would determine whether the two are adequately managing the risks of their ballooning portfolios.
The plan is an acknowledgment by the administration that oversight of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- which together have issued more than $1.5 trillion in outstanding debt -- is broken. A report by outside investigators in July concluded that Freddie Mac manipulated its accounting to mislead investors, and critics have said Fannie Mae does not adequately hedge against rising interest rates.
''There is a general recognition that the supervisory system for housing-related government-sponsored enterprises neither has the tools, nor the stature, to deal effectively with the current size, complexity and importance of these enterprises,'' Treasury Secretary John W. Snow told the House Financial Services Committee in an appearance with Housing Secretary Mel Martinez, who also backed the plan.
Mr. Snow said that Congress should eliminate the power of the president to appoint directors to the companies, a sign that the administration is less concerned about the perks of patronage than it is about the potential political problems associated with any new difficulties arising at the companies.
The administration's proposal, which was endorsed in large part today by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, would not repeal the significant government subsidies granted to the two companies. And it does not alter the implicit guarantee that Washington will bail the companies out if they run into financial difficulty; that perception enables them to issue debt at significantly lower rates than their competitors. Nor would it remove the companies' exemptions from taxes and antifraud provisions of federal securities laws.
The proposal is the opening act in one of the biggest and most significant lobbying battles of the Congressional session.
After the hearing, Representative Michael G. Oxley, chairman of the Financial Services Committee, and Senator Richard Shelby, chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, announced their intention to draft legislation based on the administration's proposal. Industry executives said Congress could complete action on legislation before leaving for recess in the fall.
''The current regulator does not have the tools, or the mandate, to adequately regulate these enterprises,'' Mr. Oxley said at the hearing. ''We have seen in recent months that mismanagement and questionable accounting practices went largely unnoticed by the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight,'' the independent agency that now regulates the companies.
''These irregularities, which have been going on for several years, should have been detected earlier by the regulator,'' he added.
The Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, which is part of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, was created by Congress in 1992 after the bailout of the savings and loan industry and concerns about regulation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which buy mortgages from lenders and repackage them as securities or hold them in their own portfolios.
At the time, the companies and their allies beat back efforts for tougher oversight by the Treasury Department, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation or the Federal Reserve. Supporters of the companies said efforts to regulate the lenders tightly under those agencies might diminish their ability to finance loans for lower-income families. This year, however, the chances of passing legislation to tighten the oversight are better than in the past.
Reflecting the changing political climate, both Fannie Mae and its leading rivals applauded the administration's package. The support from Fannie Mae came after a round of discussions between it and the administration and assurances from the Treasury that it would not seek to change the company's mission.
After those assurances, Franklin D. Raines, Fannie Mae's chief executive, endorsed the shift of regulatory oversight to the Treasury Department, as well as other elements of the plan.
''We welcome the administration's approach outlined today,'' Mr. Raines said. The company opposes some smaller elements of the package, like one that eliminates the authority of the president to appoint 5 of the company's 18 board members.
Company executives said that the company preferred having the president select some directors. The company is also likely to lobby against the efforts that give regulators too much authority to approve its products.
Freddie Mac, whose accounting is under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission and a United States attorney in Virginia, issued a statement calling the administration plan a ''responsible proposal.''
The stocks of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae fell while the prices of their bonds generally rose. Shares of Freddie Mac fell $2.04, or 3.7 percent, to $53.40, while Fannie Mae was down $1.62, or 2.4 percent, to $66.74. The price of a Fannie Mae bond due in March 2013 rose to 97.337 from 96.525.Its yield fell to 4.726 percent from 4.835 percent on Tuesday.
Fannie Mae, which was previously known as the Federal National Mortgage Association, and Freddie Mac, which was the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, have been criticized by rivals for exerting too much influence over their regulators.
''The regulator has not only been outmanned, it has been outlobbied,'' said Representative Richard H. Baker, the Louisiana Republican who has proposed legislation similar to the administration proposal and who leads a subcommittee that oversees the companies. ''Being underfunded does not explain how a glowing report of Freddie's operations was released only hours before the managerial upheaval that followed. This is not world-class regulatory work.''
Significant details must still be worked out before Congress can approve a bill. Among the groups denouncing the proposal today were the National Association of Home Builders and Congressional Democrats who fear that tighter regulation of the companies could sharply reduce their commitment to financing low-income and affordable housing.
''These two entities -- Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- are not facing any kind of financial crisis,'' said Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee. ''The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.''
Representative Melvin L. Watt, Democrat of North Carolina, agreed.
''I don't see much other than a shell game going on here, moving something from one agency to another and in the process weakening the bargaining power of poorer families and their ability to get affordable housing,'' Mr. Watt said.
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Even that idiot Barney Frank eventually got it.
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/02/barney-frank-the-poor-should-rent-not-own/35041/
In its final installment of the Big Think's "Went Went Wrong" Series on the financial crisis, they interviewed Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D-MA). Much of the interview was predictable: Frank mostly explained what anyone closely following the financial regulation push in Congress already knew. But there was one fascinating gem in discussing where Fannie and Freddie went wrong. Frank views ushering the poor to own homes as a mistake and believes they should rent instead.
Frank was responding to the question about how Fannie and Freddie could be structured to avoid moral hazard and a too cozy relationship with the regulators. After stating that we should separate the liquidity creation function from the subsidy objective (which we already knew he supported), he said: "I think the answer is you separate out the function of providing the equity in general for the mortgage market and doing some subsidy and in my judgment, the subsidy again, as I said before, should be focused on affordable rental housing, not in pushing low income people into owning homes that they can't afford."
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On 6/14/2016 at 1:49 PM, Mainecat said:
Republicans are selfish....they dont care about the gay community or Muslims or the middle class or the poor or feeding kids.
Theres much more but I have things to do.
Liberals never profile.
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On 6/14/2016 at 6:07 PM, SnowRider said:
Yes lets understand gun violence in America.
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/428922/racial-disparities-gun-violence-and-gun-control
Thanks to the Washington Post, I discovered this rather astounding chart showing the different rates of gun deaths for blacks and whites. For whites, “77 percent of gun deaths are suicides.” For black Americans, 82 percent die from homicide:
The next interesting statistic is that this high homicide rate comes from a population with a much lower rate of gun ownership. Roughly “41 percent of white households own guns, compared with to just 19 percent of black households.” In other words, when it comes to guns — white and black Americans live different lives. White Americans don’t experience much criminal gun violence but have much greater experience with guns. Widespread gun ownership doesn’t lead to criminal carnage, so fear-based gun control arguments simply don’t ring true. The experience of black communities, by contrast, shows that unless there are effective legal, political, and cultural efforts to thwart the criminal class, even much lower rates of gun ownership won’t stop widespread violence. It doesn’t take many armed and angry people to exact a terrible toll. Black America has a rate of gun ownership that gun controllers would long to achieve for the rest of the country, yet it still suffers from a horrifying level of homicide. Suicides represent not just the vast majority of white gun deaths, but the vast majority of gun deaths overall. It’s unclear, however, whether high rates of gun ownership are necessarily material to the suicide rate. After all, as my colleague Mark Wright pointed out, Japan and South Korea have extremely high suicide rates despite far lower rates of gun ownership. Suicide is a cultural problem. It is not a gun problem. Gun controllers roll their eyes whenever they hear the old saying, “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.” But it’s true. Communities with low rates of gun ownership can still suffer high rates of homicide. Communities with low rates of gun ownership can suffer from high rates of suicide. Black America has a homicide problem. White America has a suicide problem. In both instances, people are responsible for their own actions. Guns don’t make them kill.
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/428922/racial-disparities-gun-violence-and-gun-control -
I still question why labeling it a "gay club" is so important? If it wasn't would they be calling it a "straight club?" If was frequented by blacks would it be a "black club?" American's were attacked and killed by an Islamic terrorist. That's the only labels we need.
Its also telling how there is all this talk about helping the LGBT community? WTF, they are American's, nothing more nothing less.
More proof its not about being treated the same but being treated different but only in the way they want.
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This post cracks me up. Anti Muslim words.
http://www.nowtheendbegins.com/40-mind-blowing-quotes-barack-hussein-obama-islam-christianity/Amazing how he can be so critical of the bible and Christianity but NEVER have a bad thing to say about Islam or the Quran.
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On 6/14/2016 at 10:28 PM, Capt.Storm said:
Anyways I posted those vids because this guy must really be a wimp.
NY Daily News Reporter .@GershKuntzman Lies About The AR-15
It feels like a bazooka — and sounds like a cannon.
...
I’ve shot pistols before, but never something like an AR-15. Squeeze lightly on the trigger and the resulting explosion of firepower is humbling and deafening (even with ear protection).The recoil bruised my shoulder. The brass shell casings disoriented me as they flew past my face. The smell of sulfur and destruction made me sick. The explosions — loud like a bomb — gave me a temporary case of PTSD. For at least an hour after firing the gun just a few times, I was anxious and irritable.
Even in semi-automatic mode, it is very simple to squeeze off two dozen rounds before you even know what has happened. In fully automatic mode, it doesn’t take any imagination to see dozens of bodies falling in front of your barrel.
http://www.redstate.com/streiff/2016/06/14/ny-daily-news-reporter-.gershkuntzman-lies-ar-15/
"The recoil bruised my shoulder."
Did shitrider write this article?
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Dem's never passed any gun legislation nor hardly tried Obama's first 2 years in, often for a variety of reasons.
1. Would have made election results of 2010 even worse. Lots of dem's need to stay pro gun to get elected.
2. Dem's don't really want anything big passed. Its a issue to point the finger of blame.
3. The terror watch list bill is a joke without strong bipartisan oversight. Who decides who is and is not on it. Head of Homeland Security, Head of the FBI, The POTUS? We all know with how the dems ran the IRS that it can lead to political witch hunts. Whats next if your on the terror watch list your on the well known KILL LIST Obama has? I'm not against a terror watch list nor and I 100% against not allowing those to obtain guns but that is a slippery slope for both sides with the hate both sides have for one another.
I think its nuts ANYONE who is not a US citizen can buy ANY type of firearm. If we need a constitutional amendment to fix that then get it done.
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21 hours ago, sledder10 said:
Assault rifle might be the most misunderstood term in the history of mankind. http://www.gunsandammo.com/gun-culture/9-misused-gun-terms/
Assault Rifles vs. Assault Weapons vs. Semi-Automatic Rifles
The term “assault rifle” is perhaps the most commonly misused gun term, and certainly it’s one of the most damaging to the public’s perception of firearms. Most often, the media, anti-gun groups and all-too-many gun owners incorrectly use it to describe an AR-15 rifle.As noted by David Kopel in an article in the “Journal of Contemporary Law,” the U.S. Department of Defense defines assault rifles as “selective-fire weapons that fire a cartridge intermediate in power between sub-machine gun and rifle cartridges.” The AR-15 and other civilian carbines errantly called assault rifles do no such thing. They are semi-automatic, non-battlefield firearms.
To add further clarity, “AR” also does not stand for “assault rifle” or “automatic rifle” — as is occasionally implied — but rather ArmaLite rifle, after the company that developed it in the 1950’s.
However, anti-gun groups have been hugely successful applying the false label to convince Americans that AR-15’s and other semi-auto rifle platforms are a fully automatic, public threat. Much of the mainstream media now uses the “assault rifle” label broadly and without question.
To further capitalize, anti-gun groups completely invented the term “assault weapons” to broadly cover everything from home-defense shotguns to standard-capacity handguns — anything they wish to ban.
Read more: http://www.gunsandammo.com/gun-culture/9-misused-gun-terms/#ixzz4BZ4lshHzI know the difference I'm posting what the media and statistics call them.
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Pending what you want to use it for the Polaris Ranger 900 xp is hard to beat. Plenty of power, traction and suspension. Nice ergo's with the bench seat and large box.
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33 minutes ago, Mileage Psycho said:
Can anyone intelligently answer the questions below.
The same thing Jimmy Carter was trying to accomplish?
Fourth, the Secretary of Treasury [State] and the Attorney General will invalidate all visas issued to Iranian citizens for future entry into the United States, effective today. We will not reissue visas, nor will we issue new visas, except for compelling and proven humanitarian reasons or where the national interest of our own country requires. This directive will be interpreted very strictly.
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1 minute ago, Capt.Storm said:
I doubt we could ever go back though to the 50's or whatever.
It would be tough with how Hollywood props up the nontraditional family so much but like I said a big start would be a change in the laws and perception that the govt is here to take care of you no matter what.
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2 minutes ago, Capt.Storm said:
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Yep..I have said that on here a few times now and that means our politicians are pretty much worthless- correct?
Not entirely. They can make personal responsibility more of factor in our laws. One of the real downfalls of the American family was when the govt starting doing too much for the people creating an entitlement mentality that rots us to this day. Nobody is saying people in need don't need and deserve help, we've just taken it way to far. Trillions spent on poverty has gotten us nowhere.
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8 minutes ago, racer254 said:
The left has promoted single families with their social programs. Their policies are ruining this country and I can only hope that people are waking up to that simple fact. We continuously get worse because of them.
7 minutes ago, Capt.Storm said:Maybe I should rethink my stance on abortion.
We can't legislate our population to morality but breakdown of the family is and will continue to be a huge issue in America. Fact is Roe v. Wade did not help it. If you look at average annual income and some other statistics like crime by race those that have the highest % of 2 parent households earn the most and commit the least amount of crime and whites are not on top, Asian American's are.
In one week during January 1973, President Richard M. Nixon was inaugurated to his second term, former President Lyndon B. Johnson died, the United States and North Vietnam entered into the Paris Peace Accords, and the Supreme Court legalized abortion. Only the last of these events continues to affect and haunt the moral and constitutional order every minute of every day.
The Court’s decision in Roe vs. Wade is arguably its most controversial in the post-World War II era. Its effect has been as pernicious to human life as was its 19th century intellectual progenitor, Dred Scott vs. Sanford, in which the Supreme Court ruled that African-Americans are not persons.
Roe declares that the states may not ban abortions during the first trimester of a woman’s pregnancy because the states have no interest in or right to protect the baby during that time period. This made-up rule was a radical and unconstitutional departure from nearly 200 years of jurisprudence, during which the states themselves decided what interests to protect, guided since the end of the Civil War by the prohibition on slavery, and the requirements of due process and equal protection.
During the second trimester of pregnancy, the Court declared in Roe, states may regulate abortions but only to protect the health of the mother, not the life or health of the baby, in which, the Court found, the states have no interest. This, too, was a radical departure from well-settled law.
Under Roe, during the third trimester of pregnancy, the states may ban abortions or they may permit them; they may protect the life of the baby or they may not protect it. This diabolic rule, the product of judicial compromise and an embarrassing and destructive rejection of the Civil War era constitutional amendments, permits the states to allow abortions up to the moment before birth, as is the law in New Jersey, where the state even pays for abortions for those who cannot afford them.
The linchpin of Roe vs. Wade is the judicial determination that the baby in the womb is not a person. The Court felt it was legally necessary to make this dreadful declaration because the Constitution guarantees due process (a fair jury trial, and its attendant constitutional protections) whenever the government wants to interfere with the life, liberty or property of any person; and it prohibits the states from permitting some persons to violate the basic human rights of others, as was the case under slavery. As the Supreme Court sometimes does, it ruled on an issue and came to a conclusion that none of the litigants before it had sought.
Roe candidly recognizes that if the fetus in the womb is a person, then all laws permitting abortion are unconstitutional. The Court understood that abortion and fetal personhood would constitute the states permitting private persons to murder other persons. So, in order to accommodate the killing, it simply redefined the meaning of “person,” lest it permit a state of affairs that due process and the prohibition of slavery could never tolerate. George Orwell predicted this horrific and totalitarian use of words in 1949 in his unnerving description of tyranny, “1984.”
Is the fetus in the womb a person? No court has contradicted the Supreme Court on this, and the Roe supporters argue that non-personhood is necessary for sexual freedom. Think about that: The pro-abortion rights crowd, rejecting the natural and probable consequences of ordinary, healthy sexual intercourse, wants to continue to kill babies in the name of sexual freedom.
I take a back seat to no one when it comes to personal freedom. But the freedom to kill innocents violates all norms of civilized society. It violates the natural law. It wasn’t even condoned in the state of nature, before governments existed. It violates the 13th and 14th Amendments. Yet, the Supreme Court and numerous Congresses have refused to interfere with it. It is a grave and profound evil. It is legalized murder.
Is the fetus in the womb a person? Since the fetus has human parents and all the needed human genome to develop postnatally, of course the fetus is a person.
A simple one-line statute could have been enacted when Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush were in the White House and Republicans and pro-life Democrats (the handful that have made it to Congress) controlled the Congress. They could have ended the slaughter by legislatively defining the fetus in the womb to be a person. They did not. Are the self-proclaimed pro-life folks in Congress sincere, or do they march under the pro-life banner just to win votes?
Their failure to attempt to define the fetus in the womb as a person seriously, and the Supreme Court’s unprecedented dance around the requirement of due process and the prohibition of slavery has resulted in 44 million abortions in 43 years. That’s an abortion every minute. Abortion is today the most frequent medical procedure performed in America; and the Democrats have become its champion.
They, and their few Republican allies, have become the champions of totalitarianism as well. The removal of legal personhood from human offspring in order to destroy the offspring is only the work of tyrants. How long can a society last that violates universal norms and kills its babies in the name of “sexual freedom”?
Whose personhood will the government define away next?
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Just now, racer254 said:
Maybe we need more politicians that understand ethics and morals.
Maybe we need more citizens in general that do.
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19 hours ago, Mainecat said:
looks like money influences politics. Keep supporting corporations are people you dumb ass republicans and their SC plants
Maybe, just maybe the politicians shouldn't be influenced.
Another comment Ron Paul was right on.
Commenting on the Supreme Court's ruling in Citizens United, in 2010 Paul said, "You should never restrict lobbying because the Constitution is rather clear about the people being allowed to petition Congress, and whether you're an individual or you belong to a [special interest group] ... you should be allowed to do that."[108] He argues that corporations should be able to spend their money in any way that they want.[108] He also opposes taxpayer-funded public campaign financing.[109]
Paul rejects the notion that corporations are people, with collective rights. He says that only individuals have rights; people are individuals, not groups or companies.[110][111] "Corporations don't have rights per se, but the individual who happens to own a corporation or belong to a union does have rights, and these rights are not lost by merely acting through another organization."[109]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_positions_of_Ron_Paul
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Just now, Capt.Storm said:
Hell they don't seem to be able to do chit about gang violence right in this country..
If you cannot accurately identify the problem there is no way to fix it. The lefts root cause analysis for any violence always is guns.
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Assault rifles are only used in 11% of mass shootings.
https://everytownresearch.org/reports/mass-shootings-analysis/
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Maybe the left will start understand what Islam is about.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/jun/13/farrokh-sekaleshfar-imam-speaking-orlando-said-gay/
An Islamic scholar who spoke earlier this year at an Orlando mosque has previously said gay people should be killed according to Islamic law “out of compassion.”
“Death is the sentence,” Sheikh Farrokh Sekaleshfar said at a speech at the Husseini Islamic Center in Orlando in 2013. “We know. There’s nothing to be embarrassed about this. Death is the sentence.”
“We have to have that compassion for people,” he continued. “With homosexuals, it’s the same. Out of compassion, let’s get rid of them now.”
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Hypocrisy of the left wing media
in Current Events
Posted · Edited by Highmark
No fly list unconstitutional.
The new ruling came in response to an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit brought on behalf of 13 U.S. citizens prevented from boarding flights, including four military veterans. The inability to fly caused them real harm.
http://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/06/25/the-no-fly-list-is-unconstitutional/
No buy gun list constitutional.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/14/opinion/time-for-a-no-buy-list-on-guns.html