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Politics : Just the Facts, Ma'am: A Compendium of Liberal Fiction -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sully- who wrote (70524)	3/25/2009 2:39:03 PM
From: Sully-	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 90947

PC Gone Wild John Derbyshire The Corner This 36-second video clip is going round the web. johnderbyshire.com It's from a Fox News broadcast. In case you can't play it, here is my transcription. A single studio newscater is reading the story into the camera. <<< Well, there is an urgent need for firefighters in the West to battle about two dozen major wildfires. The Denver channel dot-com [?] reports that many of the new recruits are Hispanics who speak only Spanish, and in Oregon that means that some of the supervisors who speak only English are being laid off or demoted, because in Oregon a crew boss is required to be able to speak the language of the firefighters, even if it's only one worker on a twenty-person crew. The state says the rule is necessary for safety reasons. So why not require the workers to speak English? The state has no clear answer on that. >>> [Me] Just when you think political correctness can't possibly get any crazier, it gets crazier. Is there any end to this lunacy? corner.nationalreview.com

To: Sully- who wrote (70524)	3/25/2009 3:06:53 PM
From: Sully-	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 90947

Time To Start Holding Barney Frank Accountable Mark Hemingway The Corner As Ed Whelan noted earlier today, Rep. Barney Frank has caused something of a kerfuffle by going on a gay website's news show and calling Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia a “homophobe.” Whelan's right in noting that the context of Frank's remarks seems to betray his casual slander of the man, but before he runs around calling anyone else intolerant, let me step forward and be the one to note for posterity that I wish Frank was personally more discriminating in his own relationships.</rimshot> I don't know whether Frank is just running off at the mouth or whether he's somewhat desperate to shift the attention off of himself. Frank keeps getting reelected despite gross ethical lapses in part because he's a savvy legislator and in part because he represents Moscow-on-the-Charles, and his constituents are more scandalized by Republicans in the Harvard faculty lounge than Frank paying a man for sex who runs a prostitution ring out of his apartment. But if Frank's considerable flaws are ever going to catch up to him, it seems about as likely now as ever. Despite his protestations, Frank's fingerprints are all over the financial mess – from living with the Fannie Mae exec in charge of dreaming up new mortgage products for seven years while being the ranking member of the House Financial Services Committee in charge of overseeing Fannie Mae to his fierce opposition to the Bush administration's sensible plan to move Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac oversight away from the Department of Housing and Urban Development to the Treausury, where they actually have the financial expertise exercise proper oversight of runaway GSE behemoths. But Frank was in bed with Fannie Mae — literally — and was quite explicit that any close oversight of Fannie Mae was another example of how Republicans hate the poor or whatever. The media has also been strangely silent about his relationship with OneUnited, a Boston based bank that Frank helped get federal bailout money for just before the bank was slapped with a cease-and-desist from the FDIC for among other things, paying for the CEO's Porsche and Beach House. Figuring out exactly what Frank knows about OneUnited is also of importance because Treasury officials later discovered that Congresswoman Maxine Waters also worked with Frank in arranging the bailout, despite the fact her husband once served on the bank's board of directors and may have profited off the bank receiving TARP funds. After the fact, Frank now claims he told Waters to “stay out of it.” However, the damage has already been done and forgive me if I don't trust Frank when he says he tried to get Waters to do the right thing, given his ethical track record. Frank is about as smart as they come and is very good at dissembling, so I see why Congressional Republicans might be hesitant to go after him. Frank hardly bears sole responsibility for the current mess, but if he's going to run around demonizing others willy-nilly, it's high time Republicans make him answer some questions about his own behavior. corner.nationalreview.com