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hree comics sat around a café table in the chilly atrium of the Minneapolis Convention Center, talking about how to create the cleanest possible set. “Don’t do what’s in your gut,” Zoltan Kaszas said. “Better safe than sorry,” Chinedu Unaka offered. Feraz Ozel mused about the first time he’d ever done stand-up: three minutes on giving his girlfriend herpes and banging his grandma. That was out. This was not a case of professionals approaching a technical problem as an intellectual exercise. Money was riding on the answer. They had come to Minneapolis in the middle of a brutal winter for...

About 10 years ago I wrote a history of the National Aerospace Plane Program, published by the USAF. It was restricted, expensive, and difficult to obtain. I guess the USAF decided to make it more available, releasing it in paperback. I just discovered it, but I've talked about this project with many of you:

Already facing the loss of federal government funding, the community-organizing group Acorn also has run afoul of one of its big corporate partners, Bank of America Corp. In response to questions from The Wall Street Journal, a spokesman for the banking company said it has "suspended current commitments" to Acorn Housing, an affiliated group, and "will not enter into any further agreements with Acorn or any of its affiliates," pending assessments by the bank of the organization's operations. Acorn, officially the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, has been under fire since the recent release of secretly recorded videos...

The wait was long and by midday, the air conditioning had quit. But about 3,000 people found such conditions well worth tolerating Friday because of what else awaited them at an east Charlotte office park: The prospect of a job. One thousand fourteen jobs, to be precise, with Neighborhood Assistance Corp. of America, a community advocacy and homeownership organization that Thursday announced it planned a mass hiring in Charlotte. On Friday, the Boston-based nonprofit began a job fair, which continues today at its local office off Albemarle Road. The plan is to hire about 550 people immediately, and the rest...

The far-left community group NACA just squeezed taxpayer dollars out of the state of North Carolina. NACA (Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America) is a very aggressive ACORN wannabe and it played a role in the subprime mortgage collapse by using the Community Reinvestment Act to hound banks into lending money to people they should have known wouldn't be able to pay it back. The state's Democratic governor, Bev Perdue, is even bragging about surrendering the $1 million grant from the One North Carolina Fund on her website. The grant is going to help NACA expand its operations. In her press...

In the unfolding economic crisis, helping borrowers with troubled mortgages has become a growth business, landing Charlotte a dose of good economic news today for its beleaguered financial sector. At an office park in east Charlotte, Gov. Bev Perdue and other government officials gathered to announce an expansion by a non-profit organization that aims to add 1,014 jobs here over the next five years. Boston-based Neighborhood Assistance Corp. of America, a nonprofit community advocacy and homeownership organization, plans to hire customer service specialists, mortgage counselors, negotiators and others to help low-income and minority borrowers. NACA, as the organization is known,...

Gov. Bev Perdue will be in Charlotte this morning for a “significant economic development announcement,” the head of the Charlotte Chamber said Wednesday. Chamber President Bob Morgan said that he, Perdue and local elected officials will gather at 9:30 a.m. on the fourth floor of 5855 Executive Center Drive. Morgan declined to say more, but the address is the same as the Charlotte office of the Neighborhood Assistance Corp. of America. Based in Boston, NACA is a national affordable lending program that focuses on low- and moderate-income families and properties. It offers loans with no down payments, closings costs or...

... [Bruce] Marks's nonprofit organization, Neighborhood Assistance Corp. of America, has emerged as one of the loudest scourges of the banking industry in the post-bubble economy. It salts its Web site with photos of executives it accuses of standing in the way of helping homeowners -- emblazoning "Predator" across their photos, picturing their homes and sometimes including home phone numbers. In February, NACA, as it's called, protested at the home of a mortgage investor by scattering furniture on his lawn, to give him a taste of what it feels like to be evicted. In the 1990s, Mr. Marks [...] organized...

Isn’t this how we got into the mess in the first place, making mortgage loans to people who couldn’t afford them? But in its segment this morning on the stimulus, Good Morning America hailed the work of the Neighborhood Assistance Corp. of America. GMA portrayed the group simply as mortgage counselors, helping distressed homeowners work out tenable terms. But a trip to NACA’s website reveals that they are also multi-billion dollar lenders themselves, who brag of this very curious lending policy: "Everyone gets the same incredible terms, including the below-market interest rate, regardless of their credit score or other factors."...

The Clinton administration has turned the Community Reinvestment Act, a once-obscure and lightly enforced banking regulation law, into one of the most powerful mandates shaping American cities—and, as Senate Banking Committee chairman Phil Gramm memorably put it, a vast extortion scheme against the nation's banks. Under its provisions, U.S. banks have committed nearly $1 trillion for inner-city and low-income mortgages and real estate development projects, most of it funneled through a nationwide network of left-wing community groups, intent, in some cases, on teaching their low-income clients that the financial system is their enemy and, implicitly, that government, rather than their...

There's an old joke about the man who asks his neighbor to turn down the loud, raucous noise emitting from her stereo."What's the matter, are you a music hater?" "No," he replies, "I'm a music lover." I'm reminded of this by the calls of some over the years to end the space-shuttle program, even (perhaps especially) by people who are frustrated by our lack of progress in space. In the wake of the latest tragedy, the calls will undoubtedly grow louder, but in many cases, even if correct, they will be for the wrong reasons, and may not lead to...