Orthodox Editors

How to Ruin the U.S. Economy

Yahoo! Finance | Ben Stein | Oct. 6, 2008

1) Have a fiscal policy that creates immense deficits in good times and bad, burdening America’s posterity with staggering burdens of repaying the debt.

2) Eliminate regulation of Wall Street and/or fail to enforce the regulations that already exist, instead trusting Wall Street and other money managers and speculators to manage other people’s money with few or no regulations and little oversight.

3) Have an energy policy that disallows producing our own energy and instead requires that we buy energy from abroad, thus making our oil prices highly volatile and creating large balance of payments deficits, lowering the value of the dollar and thus making the problem get progressively worse.

4) Have Congress mandate that banks and other financial entities lend money to persons they know in advance to have poor credit ratings or none at all. [Read more…]

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How the Democrats Created the Financial Crisis

Guess who killed key legislation back in 2005 that would have addresed the financial mess we’re in.
Bloomberg | Kevin Hassett | Sept. 22, 2008

If that bill had become law, then the world today would be different. In 2005, 2006 and 2007, a blizzard of terrible mortgage paper fluttered out of the Fannie and Freddie clouds, burying many of our oldest and most venerable institutions. Without their checkbooks keeping the market liquid and buying up excess supply, the market would likely have not existed.

But the bill didn’t become law, for a simple reason: Democrats opposed it on a party-line vote in the committee, signaling that this would be a partisan issue. Republicans, tied in knots by the tight Democratic opposition, couldn’t even get the Senate to vote on the matter.

That such a reckless political stand could have been taken by the Democrats was obscene even then. Wallison wrote at the time: “It is a classic case of socializing the risk while privatizing the profit. The Democrats and the few Republicans who oppose portfolio limitations could not possibly do so if their constituents understood what they were doing.” [Read more…]

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New Agency Proposed to Oversee Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae

Guess who tried to prevent the financial crisis more than 5 years ago.
The New York Times | STEPHEN LABATON | Sept. 11, 2003

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. [Read more…]

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Do Facts Matter?

Townhall.com | Thomas Sowell | Oct. 3, 2008

Abraham Lincoln said, “You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you can’t fool all the people all the time.” Unfortunately, the future of this country, as well as the fate of the Western world, depends on how many people can be fooled on election day, just a few weeks from now. Right now, the polls indicate that a whole lot of the people are being fooled a whole lot of the time.

The current financial bailout crisis has propelled Barack Obama back into a substantial lead over John McCain– which is astonishing in view of which man and which party has had the most to do with bringing on this crisis. [Read more…]

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The Most Wanted Infidel in the World

OrthodoxyToday.org | Raymond Ibrahim | Sep. 18, 2008

Al Qaeda declares Coptic priest Zakaria Botros “one of the most wanted infidels in the world” and offers $60 million for his head.

You have probably never heard of Father Zakaria Botros. But you need to know his story. He is far and away the most-watched and most-effective Arab-American evangelist focused on reaching the Muslim world, and by far the most controversial. The Rush Limbaugh of the Revivalists, he is funny, feisty, brilliant, opinionated, and provocative. But rather than preaching the gospel of conservatism, he is preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ. And his enemies do not simply want to silence him. They want to assassinate him. [Read more…]

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Thank you for supporting our ongoing efforts to bring the light of truth and wisdom to a world that desperately needs it.

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Edmund Burke said a long time ago that “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” This site and those that donate their time, skills, efforts, and energy in managing and maintaining it are a testament to the daily fight against evil, falsehood, and corruption, and in support of truth and righteousness, that goes on to the glory of God and the salvation of mankind.

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Responding to Neo-Atheism

American Thinker | Rick Richman | Sep. 21, 2008

Neo-atheism has had a very successful publishing run over the past several years, with best-selling books by Christopher Hitchens (“god is not great”), Sam Harris (“Letter to a Christian Nation”) and Richard Dawkins (“The God Delusion”), among others. But this year there has been an equally impressive counter-phenomenon. Three recent books, written from three widely divergent perspectives, have responded to the arguments of neo-atheism with both intellectual force and literary grace.

In April, David Berlinski, a secular Jew and well-known skeptic of Darwinism, who holds a Ph. D. in Philosophy from Princeton and has written widely on mathematics and science, published “The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions.” The book defends religion by attacking atheism’s attempt to enlist science in its cause. [Read more…]

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Mass Immigration – and Exploitation

FrontPageMag | Jamie Glazov | Sept. 25, 2008

Steinlight: The raid [in Iowa] demonstrates that massive immigration by the uneducated, unskilled and impoverished to a knowledge-based, largely post-industrial America is joined at the hip to exploitation. If one supports massive immigration – currently at the highest level in all of American history with the immigrants, legal and illegal, comprised predominantly of unskilled, uneducated and impoverished Hispanics – one must be prepared to countenance their exploitation and be complicit, knowingly or unwittingly, in permitting whole sectors of corporate America to return to the moral universe of unfettered capitalism portrayed in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. Neither wholesale violation of the rule of law by illegal aliens nor their brutal exploitation ought to be matters that divide the Left from the Right in America. [Read more…]

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