Free Republic

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal is renowned for his policy wonkery and strict Catholicism, not a cutting sense of humor. So when he took the stage a few months ago at Washington’s annual Gridiron dinner, one jab stood out in particular. “The Menendez scandal is disturbing,” Jindal said, referring to reports (later proved untrue) that Senator Robert Menendez had paid for sex in the Dominican Republic. “Soliciting prostitution is completely unacceptable. We would never put up with that in Louisiana.” The butt of the joke was obvious to everyone in the room. Six years earlier, Louisiana’s junior senator, David Vitter, confessed...

In many circles -- including advocates for cleaner air, safer streets, public transit -- it's a major policy goal to get people out of cars. Reduce car use, and you reduce pollution. Reduce car use, and we'll need fewer costly roads and parking garages. Reduce car use and shift more people onto bikes and trains, and maybe we'll all spend less of our lives idling in traffic. That line of thinking, however, seldom considers a group of people for whom more car use might actually be a good thing: the poor. A group of researchers at the Urban Institute, the...

Former HUD-OIG Special Agent In Charge Indicted on Mortgage Fraud Charges Herschell Harvell, Jr., 53, Conyers, Georgia, made his initial appearance in federal court on charges of making false statements to a bank to obtain a mortgage loan and conspiring to obstruct an investigation into his real estate transactions by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Office of Inspector General (HUD-OIG). Until he was terminated in 2013, Harvell was the Special Agent in Charge of HUD-OIG’s Atlanta office, which encompasses several southeastern states. Harvell’s co-defendant and nephew, Tavus A. Wright, 32, Milledgeville, Georgia, also made his initial appearance...

Try as I might, I cannot rule out the possibility that the Democratic Party is some sort of elaborate performance art piece. One of those subversive ones where the real point is not the performance itself, but the reaction drawn from an unsuspecting audience. There was a cocktail party where the artist explained his vision, but we squares who are part of the patriarchal consumer culture weren’t invited. They are just seeing how far they can push this thing before we catch on. That must be it. There can be no other acceptable explanation for the straight-faced rationalizations many of...

Video at link. Arizona is defying a federal order to eliminate apartments for deaf seniors at a housing complex built specifically -- for the deaf. "I think it's about the most ridiculous thing I've heard in a while," said Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., who attempted to negotiate the impasse. "There are a lot of stories of out-of-control regulators, but this just seems to be going to the extreme." A 2005 federal study found that the U.S. had virtually no affordable housing for the deaf. So the federal government helped build Apache ASL Trails, a 75-unit apartment building in Tempe, Ariz.,...

- FrontPage Magazine - http://frontpagemag.com - Obama’s Secret Collaboration with ACORN BossesPosted By Matthew Vadum On October 17, 2013 @ 12:50 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 1 Comment Former officers of the disgraced radical group ACORN are still advising the Obama administration and guiding its catastrophic far-left policies almost three years after the group filed bankruptcy.Former ACORN Housing public affairs director Bruce Dorpalen, who now runs the National Housing Resource Center (NHRC), has been meeting with and advising senior Obama administration officials on housing policy, according to good-government group Judicial Watch. The watchdog discovered the secret collaborations after filing a...

Well, there is good news in the government shutdown. The Federal budget deficit is DECREASING in real time. See here. usdebtclocjk100313 This comes on top of the news that many Federal employees are non-essential. This comes from AP. In general, about 60 percent of the 2.1 million federal workforce is still working during the shutdown. But some not-so-loved federal agencies can’t even muster 10 percent on the essential meter. The Environmental Protection Agency, often a whipping boy for Republicans in Congress, has only 6 percent of its workers listed as essential. So does the Department of Housing and Urban Development....

Do you think it is a good idea to give the Department of Housing and Urban Development unchecked power to put an apartment building in your neighborhood? HUD has proposed a new rule that could do just that.

One of the many unintended consequences of the political crusade for increased homeownership among minorities, and low-income people in general, has been a housing boom and bust that left many foreclosed homes that had to be rented, because there were no longer enough qualified buyers. The repercussions did not stop there. Many homeowners have discovered that when renters replace homeowners as their neighbors, the neighborhood as a whole can suffer. The physical upkeep of the neighborhood, on which everyone's home values depend, tends to decline. "Who's going to paint the outside of a rented house?" one resident was quoted as...

New documents obtained by Judicial Watch, proves that the Obama administration continued to fund ACORN after all funding was banned for that organization. ACORN Housing changed their name to Affordable Housing Centers of America. All the top officials at ACORN Housing retained the same positions at AHCOA. They also retained the same tax number. Snip Since there was a federal ban on public funding of ACORN by the federal government, they should not have received a federal grant. NeighborWorks America, a public/private entity, funded by the taxpayers of the United States, determined that was a violation of federal law. Judicial...

Rocker John Mellencamp's two teenage sons face battery charges for allegedly punching and kicking a man during a fight that left the victim with serious facial injuries. On Thursday, prosecutors in Monroe County, Ind., charged 19-year-old Hud Mellencamp of Nashville, Ind., and 18-year-old Speck Mellencamp, of Bloomington, with one count each of battery resulting in serious bodily injury. Ty A. Smith, 19, of Bloomington, Ind., faces the same charge in the early morning July 29 attack.

According to Goldman Sachs, a whopping 60% of home purchases are made with cash. GS housing cash That would partially explain the doggedly (as in 1996) levels of mortgage purchase applications. mbaplt081413 Clearly, Fed policies to stimulate the housing market have not overly successful given the dormant purchase application levels. Even mortgage refi applications have run out of steam. mbarefi081413 CoreLogic reports that in-the-money borrowers are dwindling in number. clinthemoney Most middle- and lower-class households don’t have cash on hand to purchase a home, particularly in higher-cost urban areas … like Los Angeles. Foreign investors from China, Europe, Latin America...

Fannie and Freddie have been in operation for decades without problems until recently. Fannie began in 1938 as a quasi-governmental agency making affordable homes available to people by making the financing easier and funds more readily available by establishing a secondary market for mortgages. Previously banks had held onto their mortgages in a system called portfolio mortgages and were made mostly to their own account holders. With the homes as collateral, the banks then lent out that same money again to other local borrowers. If you remember the scene from It's a Wonderful Life when there is a run on...

Move would allow Obama administration to institute policies that would better integrate communities The Department of Housing and Urban Development has proposed a new plan to change U.S. neighborhoods it says are racially imbalanced or are too tilted toward rich or poor, arguing the country's housing policies have not been effective at creating the kind of integrated communities the agency had hoped for. The proposed federal rule, called "Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing," is currently under a 60-day public comment period. Though details of how the policy would specifically work are unclear, the rule says HUD would provide states, local governments...

There is an old program called "Section 8" housing where the US taxpayer gives welfare folks a voucher to rent houses or apartments. In many states (and everywhere, if Obama's HUD prevails), landlords have to accept Section 8 tenants or they get sued or even criminally prosecuted. The link is a video showing what happened to a lovely restored home whose landlord was forced to accept a Section 8 tenant. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAzDaKsBUk0

The Department of Housing and Urban Development has proposed a new plan to change U.S. neighborhoods it says are racially imbalanced or are too tilted toward rich or poor, arguing the country's housing policies have not been effective at creating the kind of integrated communities the agency had hoped for. The proposed federal rule, called "Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing," is currently under a 60-day public comment period. Though details of how the policy would specifically work are unclear, the rule says HUD would provide states, local governments and others who receive agency money with data and a geospatial tool to...

In a move some claim is tantamount to social engineering, the Department of Housing and Urban Development is imposing a new rule that would allow the feds to track diversity in America’s neighborhoods and then push policies to change those it deems discriminatory. The policy is called, "Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing." It will require HUD to gather data on segregation and discrimination in every single neighborhood and try to remedy it. HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan unveiled the federal rule at the NAACP convention in July. "Unfortunately, in too many of our hardest hit communities, no matter how hard a child...

It seems our government will never learn their lesson. For decades, we have seen the political leaders and bureaucrats in Washington push for fair housing practices. They used the Community Reinvestment Act to do this and with each liberal President we elected, the push was intensified. Thus, we saw the housing market plunge off a cliff because so many people who couldn't afford a mortgage received one, nonetheless. Some bankers were afraid to refuse loans because of threats by groups such as ACORN. This push was the beginning of the trend that helped steer our economy into the worst recession...

In a move some claim is tantamount to social engineering, the Department of Housing and Urban Development is imposing a new rule that would allow the feds to track diversity in America’s neighborhoods and then push policies to change those it deems discriminatory. The policy is called, "Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing." It will require HUD to gather data on segregation and discrimination in every single neighborhood and try to remedy it. HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan unveiled the federal rule at the NAACP convention in July. "Unfortunately, in too many of our hardest hit communities, no matter how hard a child...

The consensus response to President Obama’s Knox College speech on the economy is that the administration has been reduced to pushing a menu of stale and timid policies that, in any case, won’t be enacted. But what if the administration isn’t actually out of ideas? What if Obama’s boldest policy initiative is merely something he’d rather not discuss? And what if that initiative is being enacted right now? A year ago, I published Spreading the Wealth: How Obama Is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities. There I described the president’s second-term plan to press a transformative “regionalist” agenda...