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All rights reserved. webmaster@world-of-newave.com (Webmaster) Sat, 11 Oct 2008 22:15:31 GMT Sat, 11 Oct 2008 22:15:31 GMT Newave Lisa XML Engine v1.0 - http://www.world-of-newave.info/about.htm 60 http://www.world-of-newave.info/images/wi8831.gif World-of-Newave.info - Knowledge and Informational Database http://www.world-of-newave.info/ 88 31 {ISSUES > BIAS AND BALANCE} - Myths and falsehoods about the purported link between affordable housing initiatives and the financial crisis http://articles.world-of-newave.info/society/issues/business/media/bias-and-balance/myths-and-falsehoods-about-the-purported-link-between-20081098812.htm http://articles.world-of-newave.info/society/issues/business/media/bias-and-balance/myths-and-falsehoods-about-the-purported-link-between-20081098812.htm Sat, 11 Oct 2008 03:24:14 GMT Conservative and other media figures, echoing a reported strategy on the part of Republicans, have attempted to deflect blame for the financial crisis onto proponents of the expansion of affordable housing and legislation and institutions created to effect that expansion. Newsweek senior editor Daniel Gross wrote in an October 7 Slate commentary: On the Republican side of Congress, in the right-wing financial media (which is to say the financial media), and in certain parts of the op-ed-o-sphere, there's a consensus emerging that the whole mess should be laid at the feet of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the failed mortgage giants, and the Community Reinvestment Act, a law passed during the Carter administration. The CRA, which was amended in the 1990s and this decade, requires banks -- which had a long, distinguished history of not making loans to minorities -- to make more efforts to do so. Recent attacks have turned personal, with conservative media -- along with congressional Republicans and Sen. John McCain -- targeting Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) directly as a purported culprit in the financial crisis, falsely representing his decades-long advocacy of increased affordable housing as advocacy of lax oversight over Fannie and Freddie. The attacks are premised on several myths and falsehoods and, in the case of CRA and attacks on minority lending, have taken on a racial tinge. MYTH: The 1977 Community Reinvestment Act forced lenders into irresponsible lending In a September 28 Boston Globe column, Jeff Jacoby asserted: The roots of this crisis go back to the Carter administration. That was when government officials, egged on by left-wing activists, began accusing mortgage lenders of racism and "redlining" because urban blacks were being denied mortgages at a higher rate than suburban whites. The pressure to make more loans to minorities (read: to borrowers with weak credit histories) became relentless. Congress passed the Community Reinvestment Act, empowering regulators to punish banks that failed to 'meet the credit needs' of 'low-income, minority, and distressed neighborhoods.' Lenders responded by loosening their underwriting standards and making increasingly shoddy loans." Jacoby is not alone in his reference to "minority" lending. On the September 18 edition of Fox News' Your World, host Neil Cavuto asked Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-CA), "[W]hen you and many of your colleagues were pushing for more minority lending and more expanded lending to folks who heretofore couldn't get mortgages, when you were pushing homeownership ... Are you totally without culpability here?" Cavuto later said, "I'm just saying, I don't remember a clarion call that said, 'Fannie and Freddie are a disaster. Loaning to minorities and risky folks is a disaster.' " But the suggestion that the financial crisis was caused by banks lending irresponsibly to comply with the CRA is widely discredited. According to housing experts, a large number of subprime loans were not made under the CRA, which applies only to depository institutions. A study released earlier this year by a law firm specializing in CRA compliance estimated that in the 15 most populous metropolitan areas, 84.3 percent of subprime loans in 2006 were made by financial institutions not governed by the CRA. Moreover, Janet Yellen, president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, stated in a March 2008 speech that "studies have shown that the CRA has increased the volume of responsible lending to low- and moderate-income households" [emphasis added]. In testimony before the House Financial Services Committee, University of Michigan law professor Michael Barr stated: Despite the fact that CRA appears to have increased bank and thrift lending in low- and moderate-income communities, such institutions are not the only ones operating in these areas. In fact, with new and lower-cost sources of funding available from the secondary market through securitization, and with advances in financial technology, subprime lending exploded in the late 1990s, reaching over $600 billion and 20% of all originations by 2005. More than half of subprime loans were made by independent mortgage companies not subject to comprehensive federal supervision; another 30 percent of such originations were made by affiliates of banks or thrifts, which are not subject to routine examination or supervision, and the remaining 20 percent were made by banks and thrifts. Although reasonable people can disagree about how to interpret the evidence, my own judgment is that the worst and most widespread abuses occurred in the institutions with the least federal oversight. The housing crisis we face today, driven by serious problems in the subprime lending, suggests that our system of home mortgage regulation, including CRA, is seriously deficient. We need to fill what my friend, the late Federal Reserve Board Governor Ned Gramlich aptly termed, "the giant hole in the supervisory safety net." Banks and thrifts are subject to comprehensive federal regulation and supervision; their affiliates far less so; and independent mortgage companies, not at all. Moreover, many market-based systems designed to ensure sound practices in this sector-broker reputational risk, lender oversight of brokers, investor oversight of lenders, rating agency oversight of securitizations, and so on -- simply did not work. Conflicts of interest, lax regulation, and "boom times" covered up the extent of the abuses -- at least for a while, at least for those not directly affected by abusive practices. But no more. Others who have advanced this or similar claims include guest Jonathan Hoenig during the September 25 edition of The Radio Factor with Bill O'Reilly, radio host Laura Ingraham during the September 25 edition of Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor, and a September 25 Investor's Business Daily editorial claiming that the CRA "forced banks to make many more subprime loans." MYTH: Excessive lending to undocumented immigrants is responsible for the financial crisis On the October 9 edition of CNN's Lou Dobbs Tonight, San Diego radio host Roger Hedgecock claimed that "[w]e have a situation where today HUD [the Department of Housing and Urban Development] was talking about 5 million illegal alien home mortgage loans that have gone bad." Radio host Joe Madison responded, "You see, this really angers me, because I'm sitting here ... and wondering, how is it that people who are illegal get loans when people in my community who are legal have a difficulty getting loans, and if they do get them, they're often from predators?" Neither Hedgecock nor Madison cited a source for the purported HUD statistic. On October 9, the Drudge Report linked to an article on the Phoenix radio station KFYI website under the headline, "HUD: Five Million Fraudulent Mortgages Held by Illegals..." However, according to an October 9 Phoenix Business Journal article posted at 3:15 pm MT (more than an hour before Lou Dobbs Tonight aired), HUD "says there is no basis to news reports that more than 5 million bad mortgages are held by illegal immigrants" and "a HUD spokesman said ... his agency has no data showing the number of illegal immigrants holding foreclosed or bad mortgages." Other media figures advancing the claim that lending to undocumented immigrants is responsible for the mortgage crisis include syndicated columnist Michelle Malkin, who wrote in her September 24 column that "there's one giant paternal elephant in the room that has slipped notice: How illegal immigration, crime-enabling banks, and open-borders Bush policies fueled the mortgage crisis. MYTH: Congressional Democrats, led by Barney Frank, opposed strengthening oversight over Fannie and Freddie In a September 18 column, Fox News host Bill O'Reilly falsely claimed that Frank "sat by as mortgage brokers Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac made bad loans" and asserted that "[i]nstead of demanding responsible business practices from Fannie and Freddie, Frank continued to pound the table to extend even more credit to 'low income' families." In fact, Frank did not "s[i]t by." Frank's efforts to enhance regulatory oversight on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac include: In 2005, Frank, then the ranking Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, worked with committee chairman Rep. Michael Oxley (R-OH) on the Federal Housing Finance Reform Act of 2005, which would have established the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) to replace the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO) as overseer of the activities of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. After voting for the bill in committee, Frank voted against final passage of the bill on the House floor, stating that he was doing so because an amendment to the bill on the House floor imposed restrictions on the kinds of nonprofit organizations that could receive funding under the bill. In early 2007, as chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, Frank sponsored H.R. 1427, a bill to create the FHFA, granting that agency "general supervisory and regulatory authority over" Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and directing it to reform the companies' business practices and regulate their exposure to credit and market risk. Among other things, Frank's legislation, titled the "Federal Housing Finance Reform Act of 2007," directed the FHFA director to "ensure" that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac "operate[] in a safe and sound manner, including maintenance of adequate capital and internal controls" and to establish standards for "management of credit and counterparty risk" and "management of market risk." The FHFA was eventually created after Congress incorporated provisions that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said were "similar" to those of H.R. 1427 into the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008, which the president signed into law on July 30. Some in the conservative media have taken the charge further, suggesting that in the 1990s, Frank allowed his relationship with Fannie Mae executive Herb Moses to affect his responsibility as a senior member of the House Financial Services Committee to conduct oversight over Fannie Mae. For example, in an October 3 article, Fox News deputy Washington Managing editor Bill Sammon asserted, in a charge he later echoed on Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor, "Unqualified home buyers were not the only ones who benefitted from Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank's efforts to deregulate Fannie Mae throughout the 1990s. So did Frank's partner, a Fannie Mae executive at the forefront of the agency's push to relax lending restrictions." In his article, however, Sammon cited only two sources: an anonymous Republican congressional staffer and Dan Gainor, who, Sammon did not note, is an employee of the conservative Media Research Center. Moreover, Sammon misrepresented Frank's record by reporting in his article that Frank "spent years blocking GOP lawmakers from imposing tougher regulations" on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Sammon did not note in his article or during an October 6 appearance on The O'Reilly Factor that in the early 1990s, while Frank's Democratic Party still held the majority in Congress, and while Moses was at Fannie Mae, Frank supported bills to increase regulation of Fannie Mae and create a government regulatory agency that would supervise and have authority over some aspects of the company: On September 30, 1991, Frank voted for a bill to create a new regulatory agency to oversee Fannie and Freddie that would have "[r]equire[d] the [agency's] Director to establish by regulation a risk-based capital test for the enterprises," "[r]equire[d] the Director to establish risk-based capital levels for each enterprise according to statutory guidelines," "[e]stablishe[d] minimum capital levels, critical capital levels, and enforcement levels," and "[s]et[] forth mandatory supervisory actions for the enterprises at various capital levels, including mandatory conservatorship." In October 1992, Frank voted for the Housing and Community Development Act of 1992, creating OFHEO, which was tasked with "ensur[ing] that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (the enterprises) and their affiliates are adequately capitalized and operating safely." As with the bill Frank voted for in September 1991, the new law gave OFHEO authority to set, monitor, and enforce risk-based capital requirements for Fannie and Freddie. Neal Boortz also advanced this claim about Frank and his former partner during the October 8 edition of his nationally syndicated radio show. On October 8, The Wall Street Journal reported that "[a] conservative political organization will begin airing nationwide TV advertisements Wednesday that criticize congressional Democrats for their ties to mortgage giants Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae." MYTH: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac caused the "current financial mess" In a September 19 Huffington Post blog post, Center for American Progress senior fellow David Abramowitz wrote: "There must be a Republican playbook circulating widely with a chapter entitled, 'What to say if asked who's to blame for the foreclosure mess.' Because an awful lot of Republican candidates are all suddenly yelling 'Fannie Mae, Fannie Mae, Fannie Mae' whenever plunging home prices and the housing crisis comes up. [...] So their plan seems to be to chant Fannie Mae often and loudly enough, and hope the public will get confused about who really caused this huge national calamity. It is always a good political story to just blame a bad guy who has something to do with the same topic. Indeed, during the September 24 edition of Fox News' Special Report, host Brit Hume said, "Many financial analysts are saying that if mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had been effectively regulated years ago, the supercharged subprime mortgage meltdown that led to the current financial mess would either never have happened or would have been nowhere near as severe." But rebutting the suggestion that the subprime mortgage purchasing activities of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac caused the "current financial mess," economist Dean Baker recently stated: Fannie and Freddie got into subprime junk and helped fuel the housing bubble, but they were trailing the irrational exuberance of the private sector. They lost market share in the years 2002-2007, as the volume of private issue mortgage backed securities exploded. In short, while Fannie and Freddie were completely irresponsible in their lending practices, the claim that they were responsible for the financial disaster is absurd on its face -- kind of like the claim that the earth is flat. Indeed, in a 2006 Securities and Exchange Commission filing (available here) covering its activities in 2004, Fannie Mae stated: "We did not participate in large amounts of these non-traditional mortgages in 2004 and 2005." In the report, Fannie Mae also noted the growth of subprime lending and reported, "These trends and our decision not to participate in large amounts of these non-traditional mortgages contributed to a significant loss in our share of new single-family mortgage-related securities issuances to private-label issuers during this period." Gross wrote in Slate that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were an "integral part" of a "culture of stupid, reckless lending." But, he wrote, they are not the primary culprits in the current financial crisis. He wrote: Investment banks created a demand for subprime loans because they saw it as a new asset class that they could dominate. They made subprime loans for the same reason they made other loans: They could get paid for making the loans, for turning them into securities, and for trading them-frequently using borrowed capital. As an example, he noted that the following happened during testimony by Lehman Brothers CEO Richard Fuld before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform: At Monday's hearing, Rep. John Mica, R-Fla., gamely tried to pin Lehman's demise on Fannie and Freddie. After comparing Lehman's small political contributions with Fannie and Freddie's much larger ones, Mica asked Fuld what role Fannie and Freddie's failure played in Lehman's demise. Fuld's response: "De minimis." From Fuld's testimony: MICA: And one of your big com -- well, one of the big packagers, or the competitor, so to speak, was Fannie Mae, which was deep into this. And you were -- you were dealing in some of the paper, I think, for secondary markets and other securitized mortgage paper, to basically package it and make money off it. Is that right? FULD: Yes, sir. MICA: What was Lehman Brothers' exposure to the debt of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and what role did their collapse play in precipitating some of your financial troubles? FULD: Our -- MICA: It didn't matter or you -- FULD: Our exposure to both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac was de minimis, sir. MYTH: Sen. Barack Obama's campaign has significantly more ties to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac than does John McCain's In articles about the presidential candidates' responses to the economic crisis, the Associated Press, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the San Francisco Chronicle, and The Washington Post reported that the McCain campaign criticized Sen. Barack Obama for, in the words of McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds, "his ties to spiraling lenders like Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and their jet-set CEOs." But those articles did not note that several senior McCain campaign aides have served as lobbyists for Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, or both. According to a Media Matters for America search of the Senate Office of Public Records' Lobbying Disclosure Act Database, they include: Political adviser Charlie Black, who lobbied for Freddie Mac from 1999 to 2004; National finance co-chairman Wayne Berman, who lobbied for Fannie Mae from 2004 to 2008 and for Freddie Mac in 2004; Congressional liaison John Green, who lobbied for Fannie Mae from 2004 to 2007 and for Freddie Mac in 2003; Arthur Culvahouse, who reportedly headed McCain's vice-presidential search team, lobbied for Fannie Mae in 1999, 2003, and 2004; and William E. Timmons Sr., who reportedly "has been tapped by the McCain campaign to conduct a study in preparation for the presidential transition," lobbied for Freddie Mac from 2000 to 2008. Additionally, several media outlets have reported that McCain campaign manager Rick Davis previously served as president of the Homeownership Alliance, a Washington-based advocacy group whose founding members included Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which Media Matters has noted. MYTH: Democrats sought to divert funding in the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act to ACORN On the September 29 edition of CNN's Lou Dobbs Tonight, host Lou Dobbs claimed: "ACORN [Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now] stands to reap hundreds of millions of dollars from a government bailout of Wall Street." Dobbs added later: "This is a straightforward deal for ACORN and other groups, left-wing groups, set up by the Democratic leadership of Congress. They're not interested in the bailout per se. They want to spread this out, and many people believe that this bailout in part is dear to the Democratic leadership because they want to advance a social agenda here as much as much as an economic bailout of Wall Street." Numerous other media figures also reported the false claim that Democrats were trying to steer money to ACORN. In fact, neither the draft proposal nor the final version of the bill contained any language mentioning ACORN. Those making the false claim were misrepresenting a provision -- since removed -- that would have directed 20 percent of any profits realized on troubled assets purchased under the plan into two previously established funds: the Housing Trust Fund and the Capital Magnet Fund, which, under the law authorizing them, distribute funds through state block grants and through competitive application processes, respectively. On the October 9 edition of Fox News' Hannity & Colmes, Wall Street Journal columnist John Fund similarly made the false claim that ACORN "almost got a slush fund in the housing bailout bill a few weeks ago." MYTH: Former President Clinton has blamed Democrats for the financial crisis In a September 30 post on Time.com's Swampland blog, Washington bureau chief Jay Carney claimed that comments former President Bill Clinton made during a September 25 interview on ABC's Good Morning America that were subsequently featured in a McCain campaign ad "could undercut Democratic arguments that Bush and the Republicans are primarily responsible" for the financial crisis. During that interview, Clinton said, "I think the responsibility that the Democrats have may rest more in resisting any efforts by Republicans in the Congress or by me when I was president to put some standards and tighten up a little on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac." But in reporting on the ad, Carney failed to point out that in the very same interview, Clinton also said, "I think the biggest mistake, by the way, that contributed to the current circumstance that almost nobody talks about, is the repeal after decades of something called the uptick rule, which allowed the hedge funds, heavily leveraged, and others to just drive down the market without any kind of automatic stoppers." In a separate interview aired that day with Matt Lauer, co-host of NBC's Today, Clinton stated of the financial situation: "[T]his thing really took off when the SEC, under this administration, exercised less oversight and they got rid of something called the uptick rule, which enabled betting down on housing stocks to go crazy." The uptick rule, which was created in 1938, was a securities trading rule that regulated market short selling, the act of selling a stock that an investor does not own (but borrows from a broker or someone else) in anticipation that the stock's price will decrease. After a June 13, 2007, decision that became effective July 3, 2007, the SEC issued a final rule that repealed the uptick rule. From C-SPAN's October 6 coverage of the House Oversight Reform Committee: MICA: Again, you -- when you opened your statement, you said that Lehman Brothers -- and it was around for what, 150 years -- dealt in some pretty hard assets and some secure investments. You've been around a while. What turned the corner for you to get into some of the more speculative ventures, like subprime and some of the other, again, riskier investments? FULD: As I said in my verbal testimony, our participation in the mortgage-related businesses was clearly a natural for us, given our dominance in fixed income. That was something that went back a number of years. And even as I listened, as I say, to the panel before me, they correctly pointed out that this was a goal of the government to provide funding and mortgages to a number of people that typically would not or could not have received a mortgage. MICA: And one of your big com -- well, one of the big packagers, or the competitor, so to speak, was Fannie Mae, which was deep into this. And you were -- you were dealing in some of the paper, I think, for secondary markets and other securitized mortgage paper, to basically package it and make money off it. Is that right? FULD: Yes, sir. MICA: What was Lehman Brothers' exposure to the debt of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and what role did their collapse play in precipitating some of your financial troubles? FULD: Our -- MICA: It didn't matter or you -- FULD: Our exposure to both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac was de minimis, sir. MICA: OK, but their collapse -- did that help precipitate any problems with your firm? FULD: It certainly set the stage for an environment, as I talked about loss of confidence and credit-crisis mentality that permeated our market, clearly set the stage for investors losing confidence, counterparties asking for additional collateral, and clearly an environment that lost liquidity -- MICA: I notice you -- FULD : -- which is the lifeblood of the capital market system. Mediamatters.Org Myths and falsehoods about the purported link between affordable housing initiatives and the financial crisis {new window}   Mediamatters.Org - Conservative and other media figures, echoing a reported strategy on the part of Republicans, have attempted to deflect blame for the financial crisis onto proponents of the expansion of affordable housing and legislation and institutions created to effect that expansion. Newsweek senior editor Daniel Gross wrote in an October 7 Slate commentary: On the Republican side of Congress, in the right-wing financial media (which is to say the financial media), and in certain parts of the op-ed-o-sphere, there's a consensus emerging that the whole mess should be laid at the feet of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the failed mortgage giants, and the Community Reinvestment Act, a law passed during the Carter administration. The CRA, which was amended in the 1990s and this decade, requires banks -- which had a long, distinguished history of not making loans to minorities -- to make more efforts to do so. Recent attacks have turned personal, with conservative media -- along with congressional Republicans and Sen. John McCain -- targeting Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) directly as a purported culprit in the financial crisis, falsely representing his decades-long advocacy of increased affordable housing as advocacy of lax oversight over Fannie and Freddie. The attacks are premised on several myths and falsehoods and, in the case of CRA and attacks on minority lending, have taken on a racial tinge. MYTH: The 1977 Community Reinvestment Act forced lenders into irresponsible lending In a September 28 Boston Globe column, Jeff Jacoby asserted: The roots of this crisis go back to the Carter administration. That was when government officials, egged on by left-wing activists, began accusing mortgage lenders of racism and "redlining" because urban blacks were being denied mortgages at a higher rate than suburban whites. The pressure to make more loans to minorities (read: to borrowers with weak credit histories) became relentless. Congress passed the Community Reinvestment Act, empowering regulators to punish banks that failed to 'meet the credit needs' of 'low-income, minority, and distressed neighborhoods.' Lenders responded by loosening their underwriting standards and making increasingly shoddy loans." Jacoby is not alone in his reference to "minority" lending. On the September 18 edition of Fox News' Your World, host Neil Cavuto asked Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-CA), "[W]hen you and many of your colleagues were pushing for more minority lending and more expanded lending to folks who heretofore couldn't get mortgages, when you were pushing homeownership ... Are you totally without culpability here?" Cavuto later said, "I'm just saying, I don't remember a clarion call that said, 'Fannie and Freddie are a disaster. Loaning to minorities and risky folks is a disaster.' " But the suggestion that the financial crisis was caused by banks lending irresponsibly to comply with the CRA is widely discredited. According to housing experts, a large number of subprime loans were not made under the CRA, which applies only to depository institutions. A study released earlier this year by a law firm specializing in CRA compliance estimated that in the 15 most populous metropolitan areas, 84.3 percent of subprime loans in 2006 were made by financial institutions not governed by the CRA. Moreover, Janet Yellen, president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, stated in a March 2008 speech that "studies have shown that the CRA has increased the volume of responsible lending to low- and moderate-income households" [emphasis added]. In testimony before the House Financial Services Committee, University of Michigan law professor Michael Barr stated: Despite the fact that CRA appears to have increased bank and thrift lending in low- and moderate-income communities, such institutions are not the only ones operating in these areas. In fact, with new and lower-cost sources of funding available from the secondary market through securitization, and with advances in financial technology, subprime lending exploded in the late 1990s, reaching over $600 billion and 20% of all originations by 2005. More than half of subprime loans were made by independent mortgage companies not subject to comprehensive federal supervision; another 30 percent of such originations were made by affiliates of banks or thrifts, which are not subject to routine examination or supervision, and the remaining 20 percent were made by banks and thrifts. Although reasonable people can disagree about how to interpret the evidence, my own judgment is that the worst and most widespread abuses occurred in the institutions with the least federal oversight. The housing crisis we face today, driven by serious problems in the subprime lending, suggests that our system of home mortgage regulation, including CRA, is seriously deficient. We need to fill what my friend, the late Federal Reserve Board Governor Ned Gramlich aptly termed, "the giant hole in the supervisory safety net." Banks and thrifts are subject to comprehensive federal regulation and supervision; their affiliates far less so; and independent mortgage companies, not at all. Moreover, many market-based systems designed to ensure sound practices in this sector-broker reputational risk, lender oversight of brokers, investor oversight of lenders, rating agency oversight of securitizations, and so on -- simply did not work. Conflicts of interest, lax regulation, and "boom times" covered up the extent of the abuses -- at least for a while, at least for those not directly affected by abusive practices. But no more. Others who have advanced this or similar claims include guest Jonathan Hoenig during the September 25 edition of The Radio Factor with Bill O'Reilly, radio host Laura Ingraham during the September 25 edition of Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor, and a September 25 Investor's Business Daily editorial claiming that the CRA "forced banks to make many more subprime loans." MYTH: Excessive lending to undocumented immigrants is responsible for the financial crisis On the October 9 edition of CNN's Lou Dobbs Tonight, San Diego radio host Roger Hedgecock claimed that "[w]e have a situation where today HUD [the Department of Housing and Urban Development] was talking about 5 million illegal alien home mortgage loans that have gone bad." Radio host Joe Madison responded, "You see, this really angers me, because I'm sitting here ... and wondering, how is it that people who are illegal get loans when people in my community who are legal have a difficulty getting loans, and if they do get them, they're often from predators?" Neither Hedgecock nor Madison cited a source for the purported HUD statistic. On October 9, the Drudge Report linked to an article on the Phoenix radio station KFYI website under the headline, "HUD: Five Million Fraudulent Mortgages Held by Illegals..." However, according to an October 9 Phoenix Business Journal article posted at 3:15 pm MT (more than an hour before Lou Dobbs Tonight aired), HUD "says there is no basis to news reports that more than 5 million bad mortgages are held by illegal immigrants" and "a HUD spokesman said ... his agency has no data showing the number of illegal immigrants holding foreclosed or bad mortgages." Other media figures advancing the claim that lending to undocumented immigrants is responsible for the mortgage crisis include syndicated columnist Michelle Malkin, who wrote in her September 24 column that "there's one giant paternal elephant in the room that has slipped notice: How illegal immigration, crime-enabling banks, and open-borders Bush policies fueled the mortgage crisis. MYTH: Congressional Democrats, led by Barney Frank, opposed strengthening oversight over Fannie and Freddie In a September 18 column, Fox News host Bill O'Reilly falsely claimed that Frank "sat by as mortgage brokers Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac made bad loans" and asserted that "[i]nstead of demanding responsible business practices from Fannie and Freddie, Frank continued to pound the table to extend even more credit to 'low income' families." In fact, Frank did not "s[i]t by." Frank's efforts to enhance regulatory oversight on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac include: In 2005, Frank, then the ranking Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, worked with committee chairman Rep. Michael Oxley (R-OH) on the Federal Housing Finance Reform Act of 2005, which would have established the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) to replace the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO) as overseer of the activities of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. After voting for the bill in committee, Frank voted against final passage of the bill on the House floor, stating that he was doing so because an amendment to the bill on the House floor imposed restrictions on the kinds of nonprofit organizations that could receive funding under the bill. In early 2007, as chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, Frank sponsored H.R. 1427, a bill to create the FHFA, granting that agency "general supervisory and regulatory authority over" Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and directing it to reform the companies' business practices and regulate their exposure to credit and market risk. Among other things, Frank's legislation, titled the "Federal Housing Finance Reform Act of 2007," directed the FHFA director to "ensure" that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac "operate[] in a safe and sound manner, including maintenance of adequate capital and internal controls" and to establish standards for "management of credit and counterparty risk" and "management of market risk." The FHFA was eventually created after Congress incorporated provisions that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said were "similar" to those of H.R. 1427 into the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008, which the president signed into law on July 30. Some in the conservative media have taken the charge further, suggesting that in the 1990s, Frank allowed his relationship with Fannie Mae executive Herb Moses to affect his responsibility as a senior member of the House Financial Services Committee to conduct oversight over Fannie Mae. For example, in an October 3 article, Fox News deputy Washington Managing editor Bill Sammon asserted, in a charge he later echoed on Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor, "Unqualified home buyers were not the only ones who benefitted from Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank's efforts to deregulate Fannie Mae throughout the 1990s. So did Frank's partner, a Fannie Mae executive at the forefront of the agency's push to relax lending restrictions." In his article, however, Sammon cited only two sources: an anonymous Republican congressional staffer and Dan Gainor, who, Sammon did not note, is an employee of the conservative Media Research Center. Moreover, Sammon misrepresented Frank's record by reporting in his article that Frank "spent years blocking GOP lawmakers from imposing tougher regulations" on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Sammon did not note in his article or during an October 6 appearance on The O'Reilly Factor that in the early 1990s, while Frank's Democratic Party still held the majority in Congress, and while Moses was at Fannie Mae, Frank supported bills to increase regulation of Fannie Mae and create a government regulatory agency that would supervise and have authority over some aspects of the company: On September 30, 1991, Frank voted for a bill to create a new regulatory agency to oversee Fannie and Freddie that would have "[r]equire[d] the [agency's] Director to establish by regulation a risk-based capital test for the enterprises," "[r]equire[d] the Director to establish risk-based capital levels for each enterprise according to statutory guidelines," "[e]stablishe[d] minimum capital levels, critical capital levels, and enforcement levels," and "[s]et[] forth mandatory supervisory actions for the enterprises at various capital levels, including mandatory conservatorship." In October 1992, Frank voted for the Housing and Community Development Act of 1992, creating OFHEO, which was tasked with "ensur[ing] that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (the enterprises) and their affiliates are adequately capitalized and operating safely." As with the bill Frank voted for in September 1991, the new law gave OFHEO authority to set, monitor, and enforce risk-based capital requirements for Fannie and Freddie. Neal Boortz also advanced this claim about Frank and his former partner during the October 8 edition of his nationally syndicated radio show. On October 8, The Wall Street Journal reported that "[a] conservative political organization will begin airing nationwide TV advertisements Wednesday that criticize congressional Democrats for their ties to mortgage giants Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae." MYTH: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac caused the "current financial mess" In a September 19 Huffington Post blog post, Center for American Progress senior fellow David Abramowitz wrote: "There must be a Republican playbook circulating widely with a chapter entitled, 'What to say if asked who's to blame for the foreclosure mess.' Because an awful lot of Republican candidates are all suddenly yelling 'Fannie Mae, Fannie Mae, Fannie Mae' whenever plunging home prices and the housing crisis comes up. [...] So their plan seems to be to chant Fannie Mae often and loudly enough, and hope the public will get confused about who really caused this huge national calamity. It is always a good political story to just blame a bad guy who has something to do with the same topic. Indeed, during the September 24 edition of Fox News' Special Report, host Brit Hume said, "Many financial analysts are saying that if mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had been effectively regulated years ago, the supercharged subprime mortgage meltdown that led to the current financial mess would either never have happened or would have been nowhere near as severe." But rebutting the suggestion that the subprime mortgage purchasing activities of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac caused the "current financial mess," economist Dean Baker recently stated: Fannie and Freddie got into subprime junk and helped fuel the housing bubble, but they were trailing the irrational exuberance of the private sector. They lost market share in the years 2002-2007, as the volume of private issue mortgage backed securities exploded. In short, while Fannie and Freddie were completely irresponsible in their lending practices, the claim that they were responsible for the financial disaster is absurd on its face -- kind of like the claim that the earth is flat. Indeed, in a 2006 Securities and Exchange Commission filing (available here) covering its activities in 2004, Fannie Mae stated: "We did not participate in large amounts of these non-traditional mortgages in 2004 and 2005." In the report, Fannie Mae also noted the growth of subprime lending and reported, "These trends and our decision not to participate in large amounts of these non-traditional mortgages contributed to a significant loss in our share of new single-family mortgage-related securities issuances to private-label issuers during this period." Gross wrote in Slate that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were an "integral part" of a "culture of stupid, reckless lending." But, he wrote, they are not the primary culprits in the current financial crisis. He wrote: Investment banks created a demand for subprime loans because they saw it as a new asset class that they could dominate. They made subprime loans for the same reason they made other loans: They could get paid for making the loans, for turning them into securities, and for trading them-frequently using borrowed capital. As an example, he noted that the following happened during testimony by Lehman Brothers CEO Richard Fuld before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform: At Monday's hearing, Rep. John Mica, R-Fla., gamely tried to pin Lehman's demise on Fannie and Freddie. After comparing Lehman's small political contributions with Fannie and Freddie's much larger ones, Mica asked Fuld what role Fannie and Freddie's failure played in Lehman's demise. Fuld's response: "De minimis." From Fuld's testimony: MICA: And one of your big com -- well, one of the big packagers, or the competitor, so to speak, was Fannie Mae, which was deep into this. And you were -- you were dealing in some of the paper, I think, for secondary markets and other securitized mortgage paper, to basically package it and make money off it. Is that right? FULD: Yes, sir. MICA: What was Lehman Brothers' exposure to the debt of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and what role did their collapse play in precipitating some of your financial troubles? FULD: Our -- MICA: It didn't matter or you -- FULD: Our exposure to both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac was de minimis, sir. MYTH: Sen. Barack Obama's campaign has significantly more ties to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac than does John McCain's In articles about the presidential candidates' responses to the economic crisis, the Associated Press, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the San Francisco Chronicle, and The Washington Post reported that the McCain campaign criticized Sen. Barack Obama for, in the words of McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds, "his ties to spiraling lenders like Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and their jet-set CEOs." But those articles did not note that several senior McCain campaign aides have served as lobbyists for Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, or both. According to a Media Matters for America search of the Senate Office of Public Records' Lobbying Disclosure Act Database, they include: Political adviser Charlie Black, who lobbied for Freddie Mac from 1999 to 2004; National finance co-chairman Wayne Berman, who lobbied for Fannie Mae from 2004 to 2008 and for Freddie Mac in 2004; Congressional liaison John Green, who lobbied for Fannie Mae from 2004 to 2007 and for Freddie Mac in 2003; Arthur Culvahouse, who reportedly headed McCain's vice-presidential search team, lobbied for Fannie Mae in 1999, 2003, and 2004; and William E. Timmons Sr., who reportedly "has been tapped by the McCain campaign to conduct a study in preparation for the presidential transition," lobbied for Freddie Mac from 2000 to 2008. Additionally, several media outlets have reported that McCain campaign manager Rick Davis previously served as president of the Homeownership Alliance, a Washington-based advocacy group whose founding members included Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which Media Matters has noted. MYTH: Democrats sought to divert funding in the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act to ACORN On the September 29 edition of CNN's Lou Dobbs Tonight, host Lou Dobbs claimed: "ACORN [Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now] stands to reap hundreds of millions of dollars from a government bailout of Wall Street." Dobbs added later: "This is a straightforward deal for ACORN and other groups, left-wing groups, set up by the Democratic leadership of Congress. They're not interested in the bailout per se. They want to spread this out, and many people believe that this bailout in part is dear to the Democratic leadership because they want to advance a social agenda here as much as much as an economic bailout of Wall Street." Numerous other media figures also reported the false claim that Democrats were trying to steer money to ACORN. In fact, neither the draft proposal nor the final version of the bill contained any language mentioning ACORN. Those making the false claim were misrepresenting a provision -- since removed -- that would have directed 20 percent of any profits realized on troubled assets purchased under the plan into two previously established funds: the Housing Trust Fund and the Capital Magnet Fund, which, under the law authorizing them, distribute funds through state block grants and through competitive application processes, respectively. On the October 9 edition of Fox News' Hannity & Colmes, Wall Street Journal columnist John Fund similarly made the false claim that ACORN "almost got a slush fund in the housing bailout bill a few weeks ago." MYTH: Former President Clinton has blamed Democrats for the financial crisis In a September 30 post on Time.com's Swampland blog, Washington bureau chief Jay Carney claimed that comments former President Bill Clinton made during a September 25 interview on ABC's Good Morning America that were subsequently featured in a McCain campaign ad "could undercut Democratic arguments that Bush and the Republicans are primarily responsible" for the financial crisis. During that interview, Clinton said, "I think the responsibility that the Democrats have may rest more in resisting any efforts by Republicans in the Congress or by me when I was president to put some standards and tighten up a little on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac." But in reporting on the ad, Carney failed to point out that in the very same interview, Clinton also said, "I think the biggest mistake, by the way, that contributed to the current circumstance that almost nobody talks about, is the repeal after decades of something called the uptick rule, which allowed the hedge funds, heavily leveraged, and others to just drive down the market without any kind of automatic stoppers." In a separate interview aired that day with Matt Lauer, co-host of NBC's Today, Clinton stated of the financial situation: "[T]his thing really took off when the SEC, under this administration, exercised less oversight and they got rid of something called the uptick rule, which enabled betting down on housing stocks to go crazy." The uptick rule, which was created in 1938, was a securities trading rule that regulated market short selling, the act of selling a stock that an investor does not own (but borrows from a broker or someone else) in anticipation that the stock's price will decrease. After a June 13, 2007, decision that became effective July 3, 2007, the SEC issued a final rule that repealed the uptick rule. From C-SPAN's October 6 coverage of the House Oversight Reform Committee: MICA: Again, you -- when you opened your statement, you said that Lehman Brothers -- and it was around for what, 150 years -- dealt in some pretty hard assets and some secure investments. You've been around a while. What turned the corner for you to get into some of the more speculative ventures, like subprime and some of the other, again, riskier investments? FULD: As I said in my verbal testimony, our participation in the mortgage-related businesses was clearly a natural for us, given our dominance in fixed income. That was something that went back a number of years. And even as I listened, as I say, to the panel before me, they correctly pointed out that this was a goal of the government to provide funding and mortgages to a number of people that typically would not or could not have received a mortgage. MICA: And one of your big com -- well, one of the big packagers, or the competitor, so to speak, was Fannie Mae, which was deep into this. And you were -- you were dealing in some of the paper, I think, for secondary markets and other securitized mortgage paper, to basically package it and make money off it. Is that right? FULD: Yes, sir. MICA: What was Lehman Brothers' exposure to the debt of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and what role did their collapse play in precipitating some of your financial troubles? FULD: Our -- MICA: It didn't matter or you -- FULD: Our exposure to both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac was de minimis, sir. MICA: OK, but their collapse -- did that help precipitate any problems with your firm? FULD: It certainly set the stage for an environment, as I talked about loss of confidence and credit-crisis mentality that permeated our market, clearly set the stage for investors losing confidence, counterparties asking for additional collateral, and clearly an environment that lost liquidity -- MICA: I notice you -- FULD : -- which is the lifeblood of the capital market system.
Media Matters - Myths and falsehoods about the purported link between affordable housing initiatives and the financial crisis {...} Conservative and other media figures -- echoing a reported strategy on the part of Republicans -- have attempted to lay blame for the financial crisis on proponents of the expansion of affordable housing. Those attacks are premised on several myths and falsehoods. {...}
Published: October 11, 2008, 3:24 am - Indexed: October 11, 2008, 10:40 am - Page Size: 46KB
Category: Society > Issues > Business > Media > Bias and Balance

]]> Society > Issues > Business > Media > Bias and Balance {ISSUES > BIAS AND BALANCE} - Politico quoted from McCain campaign's Ayers ad without noting its distortions http://articles.world-of-newave.info/society/issues/business/media/bias-and-balance/politico-quoted-from-mccain-campaign-s-ayers-ad-20081029010.htm http://articles.world-of-newave.info/society/issues/business/media/bias-and-balance/politico-quoted-from-mccain-campaign-s-ayers-ad-20081029010.htm Fri, 10 Oct 2008 00:08:16 GMT In an October 9 article, the Politico's Andy Barr reported on Sen. John McCain's ad "on [Sen.] Barack Obama's relationship with 1960s radical William Ayers" without noting that it contains several distortions and misleading assertions. While the ad claims that Obama and Ayers are "friends" who have "worked together for years" and "ran a radical 'education' foundation, together," Barr did not note that "the two men do not appear to have been close," according to The New York Times, or that prominent McCain supporters are also connected to the purportedly "radical 'education' foundation" the ad references. Furthermore, Barr did not note that the ad distorts Obama's April remark that Ayers is "a guy who lives in my neighborhood." "Friends" and "palling around" Barr reported that "Ayers is referred to as a terrorist throughout the ad, which highlights his 'friendship' with Obama" and quoted the ad calling Obama and Ayers "[f]riends" who have "worked together for years." However, Barr did not note that, as Media Matters for America has repeatedly documented, an October 4 New York Times article reported of Obama and Ayers, "the two men do not appear to have been close." Nor did Barr mention that the Times article also noted that Obama has never "expressed sympathy for the radical views and actions of Mr. Ayers, whom he has called 'somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was 8.' " Barr also wrote that "McCain surrogates have been linking Obama to Ayers in recent interviews as has Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin who accused Obama of 'palling around with terrorists.' " However, Barr did not note that Palin distorted the October 4 Times article in making her remarks. In addition to the Times, CNN.com's Political Ticker blog wrote: "There is no indication that Ayers and Obama are now 'palling around,' or that they have had an ongoing relationship in the past three years. Also, there is nothing to suggest that Ayers is now involved in terrorist activity or that other Obama associates are." "[W]orked together for years" Barr uncritically reported the ad's claim that Obama and Ayers "worked together for years" -- a reference to their work on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, which the ad claims is "a radical 'education' foundation." However, Barr did not note that McCain supporter Arnold R. Weber, like Ayers and Obama, also worked with the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. Nor did Barr note that Leonore Annenberg -- whose husband, Walter, funded the Annenberg Challenge -- has been touted by the McCain campaign as a prominent supporter. According to former Annenberg Challenge executive director Ken Rolling, as quoted in an Obama campaign fact check, "Barack Obama was elected as Chair of the Annenberg Challenge by the founding Board of Directors of the Annenberg Challenge -- Susan Crown, Pat Graham, Stanley Ikenberry, Ray Romero, Arnold Weber, and Wanda White." The fact check further notes that Weber was an assistant secretary of labor and associate director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Nixon and served as an adviser to Presidents Carter and Reagan. According to a Media Matters search of Federal Election Commission data, Weber made donations of $500 and $1,000 in 2008 to McCain's presidential campaign. Media Matters found no indication that the McCain campaign has returned Weber's campaign contributions. As Time magazine's Michael Scherer noted, the McCain campaign touted the endorsement of "Leonore Annenberg, the wife of Ambassador William [sic] Annenberg, the founder of the Annenberg Institute of Reform, which funded the Annenberg Challenge." From Scherer's October 8 post on Time's Swampland blog: This morning John McCain put out a list of 100 former ambassadors who are supporting his campaign. Number two is Leonore Annenberg, the wife of Ambassador William [sic] Annenberg, the founder of the Annenberg Institute of Reform, which funded the Annenberg Challenge, which once had two famous board members: former "domestic terrorist" William Ayers and Sen. Barack Obama. So either we should all be outraged that John McCain is supported by a family who funded a foundation that hired a domestic terrorist, or this whole William Ayers thing is just plain silly. I choose the latter. "That's it?" Barr also quoted the ad stating: "When Obama just says, 'This is a guy who lives in my neighborhood.' Americans say, 'Where's the truth, Barack?' ... When their relationship became an issue, Obama just responded, 'This is a guy who lives in my neighborhood.' That's it?" In fact, contrary to the ad's suggestion that Obama said only that Ayers is "a guy who lives in my neighborhood," he went on to say that Ayers' Weather Underground actions were "detestable." From the April 16 Democratic primary debate: GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS (moderator): A gentleman named William Ayers, he was part of the Weather Underground in the 1970s. They bombed the Pentagon, the Capitol and other buildings. He's never apologized for that. And in fact, on 9/11 he was quoted in The New York Times saying, "I don't regret setting bombs; I feel we didn't do enough." An early organizing meeting for your state senate campaign was held at his house, and your campaign has said you are friendly. Can you explain that relationship for the voters, and explain to Democrats why it won't be a problem? OBAMA: George, but this is an example of what I'm talking about. This is a guy who lives in my neighborhood, who's a professor of English in Chicago who I know and who I have not received some official endorsement from. He's not somebody who I exchange ideas from on a regular basis. And the notion that somehow as a consequence of me knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was 8 years old, somehow reflects on me and my values doesn't make much sense, George. Mediamatters.Org Politico quoted from McCain campaign's Ayers ad without noting its distortions {new window}   Mediamatters.Org - In an October 9 article, the Politico's Andy Barr reported on Sen. John McCain's ad "on [Sen.] Barack Obama's relationship with 1960s radical William Ayers" without noting that it contains several distortions and misleading assertions. While the ad claims that Obama and Ayers are "friends" who have "worked together for years" and "ran a radical 'education' foundation, together," Barr did not note that "the two men do not appear to have been close," according to The New York Times, or that prominent McCain supporters are also connected to the purportedly "radical 'education' foundation" the ad references. Furthermore, Barr did not note that the ad distorts Obama's April remark that Ayers is "a guy who lives in my neighborhood." "Friends" and "palling around" Barr reported that "Ayers is referred to as a terrorist throughout the ad, which highlights his 'friendship' with Obama" and quoted the ad calling Obama and Ayers "[f]riends" who have "worked together for years." However, Barr did not note that, as Media Matters for America has repeatedly documented, an October 4 New York Times article reported of Obama and Ayers, "the two men do not appear to have been close." Nor did Barr mention that the Times article also noted that Obama has never "expressed sympathy for the radical views and actions of Mr. Ayers, whom he has called 'somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was 8.' " Barr also wrote that "McCain surrogates have been linking Obama to Ayers in recent interviews as has Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin who accused Obama of 'palling around with terrorists.' " However, Barr did not note that Palin distorted the October 4 Times article in making her remarks. In addition to the Times, CNN.com's Political Ticker blog wrote: "There is no indication that Ayers and Obama are now 'palling around,' or that they have had an ongoing relationship in the past three years. Also, there is nothing to suggest that Ayers is now involved in terrorist activity or that other Obama associates are." "[W]orked together for years" Barr uncritically reported the ad's claim that Obama and Ayers "worked together for years" -- a reference to their work on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, which the ad claims is "a radical 'education' foundation." However, Barr did not note that McCain supporter Arnold R. Weber, like Ayers and Obama, also worked with the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. Nor did Barr note that Leonore Annenberg -- whose husband, Walter, funded the Annenberg Challenge -- has been touted by the McCain campaign as a prominent supporter. According to former Annenberg Challenge executive director Ken Rolling, as quoted in an Obama campaign fact check, "Barack Obama was elected as Chair of the Annenberg Challenge by the founding Board of Directors of the Annenberg Challenge -- Susan Crown, Pat Graham, Stanley Ikenberry, Ray Romero, Arnold Weber, and Wanda White." The fact check further notes that Weber was an assistant secretary of labor and associate director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Nixon and served as an adviser to Presidents Carter and Reagan. According to a Media Matters search of Federal Election Commission data, Weber made donations of $500 and $1,000 in 2008 to McCain's presidential campaign. Media Matters found no indication that the McCain campaign has returned Weber's campaign contributions. As Time magazine's Michael Scherer noted, the McCain campaign touted the endorsement of "Leonore Annenberg, the wife of Ambassador William [sic] Annenberg, the founder of the Annenberg Institute of Reform, which funded the Annenberg Challenge." From Scherer's October 8 post on Time's Swampland blog: This morning John McCain put out a list of 100 former ambassadors who are supporting his campaign. Number two is Leonore Annenberg, the wife of Ambassador William [sic] Annenberg, the founder of the Annenberg Institute of Reform, which funded the Annenberg Challenge, which once had two famous board members: former "domestic terrorist" William Ayers and Sen. Barack Obama. So either we should all be outraged that John McCain is supported by a family who funded a foundation that hired a domestic terrorist, or this whole William Ayers thing is just plain silly. I choose the latter. "That's it?" Barr also quoted the ad stating: "When Obama just says, 'This is a guy who lives in my neighborhood.' Americans say, 'Where's the truth, Barack?' ... When their relationship became an issue, Obama just responded, 'This is a guy who lives in my neighborhood.' That's it?" In fact, contrary to the ad's suggestion that Obama said only that Ayers is "a guy who lives in my neighborhood," he went on to say that Ayers' Weather Underground actions were "detestable." From the April 16 Democratic primary debate: GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS (moderator): A gentleman named William Ayers, he was part of the Weather Underground in the 1970s. They bombed the Pentagon, the Capitol and other buildings. He's never apologized for that. And in fact, on 9/11 he was quoted in The New York Times saying, "I don't regret setting bombs; I feel we didn't do enough." An early organizing meeting for your state senate campaign was held at his house, and your campaign has said you are friendly. Can you explain that relationship for the voters, and explain to Democrats why it won't be a problem? OBAMA: George, but this is an example of what I'm talking about. This is a guy who lives in my neighborhood, who's a professor of English in Chicago who I know and who I have not received some official endorsement from. He's not somebody who I exchange ideas from on a regular basis. And the notion that somehow as a consequence of me knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was 8 years old, somehow reflects on me and my values doesn't make much sense, George.
Media Matters - Politico quoted from McCain campaign's Ayers ad without noting its distortions {...} The Politico 's Andy Barr reported on Sen. John McCain's ad "on [Sen.] Barack Obama's relationship with 1960s radical William Ayers" without noting that it contains several distortions and misleading assertions. Barr failed to mention that, in contrast to the ad's claim, The New York Times reported that "the two men do not appear to have been close," or that prominent McCain supporters are also connected to the purportedly "radical 'education' foundation" the ad references. {...}
Published: October 10, 2008, 12:08 am - Indexed: October 10, 2008, 12:04 pm - Page Size: 20KB
Category: Society > Issues > Business > Media > Bias and Balance

]]> Society > Issues > Business > Media > Bias and Balance {KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT > ROOT CAUSE ANALYSIS} - Ricky's Blog: Tell me where you rank; Reactive vs Proactive http://articles.world-of-newave.info/reference/knowledge-management/knowledge-creation/problem-solving/root-cause-analysis/ricky-s-blog-tell-me-where-you-rank-reactive-vs-proactive-2008104857.htm http://articles.world-of-newave.info/reference/knowledge-management/knowledge-creation/problem-solving/root-cause-analysis/ricky-s-blog-tell-me-where-you-rank-reactive-vs-proactive-2008104857.htm Wed, 08 Oct 2008 14:35:03 GMT The question is, “How do you know if you are in Reactive Maintenance?” Provide your comments and tell us where you are as to Proactive vs Reactive taking a scale of 1-10. 10 begin totally proactive and 1 totally reactive. If you have a plan to move more proactive share with us the Number 1 thing you are focusing on that is making the biggest change. Tell me where you rank Maintenancetalk.Com Ricky's Blog: Tell me where you rank; Reactive vs Proactive {new window}   Maintenancetalk.Com - The question is, “How do you know if you are in Reactive Maintenance?” Provide your comments and tell us where you are as to Proactive vs Reactive taking a scale of 1-10. 10 begin totally proactive and 1 totally reactive. If you have a plan to move more proactive share with us the Number 1 thing you are focusing on that is making the biggest change. Tell me where you rank
Reliabilityweb.com, This site provides an alternative method for notification of Reliabilityweb.com updates with RSS feeds. Download the Reliabilityweb.com Tristana newsreader and bring Reliabilityweb.com to your desktop. {...}
Published: October 8, 2008, 2:35 pm - Indexed: October 10, 2008, 12:00 pm - Page Size: 17KB
Category: Reference > Knowledge Management > Knowledge Creation > Problem Solving > Root Cause Analysis

]]> Reference > Knowledge Management > Knowledge Creation > Problem Solving > Root Cause Analysis {LITERATURE > CYBERPUNK} - Making acorn flour http://articles.world-of-newave.info/arts/literature/genres/cyberpunk/making-acorn-flour-20081031911.htm http://articles.world-of-newave.info/arts/literature/genres/cyberpunk/making-acorn-flour-20081031911.htm Sat, 04 Oct 2008 03:02:21 GMT My pals Eric and Julia of Ramshackle Solid made acorn flour this year, and in their blog they showed how they did it. Once the flour is dried out it may be a little coarse. You can put it in a cleaned out coffee grinder to get a finer texture. A good food processor also works and I am pretty sure they make attachable gadgets for mixers that really mill the flour if you get completely obsessed. Our favorite use is acorn pancakes. Just mix the acorn flour 1/2 and 1/2 with wheat or other flour from your favorite recipe. I love the acorn flavor - slightly nutty, very hearty. If you make your own, let us know how it went. I'm going over there uninvited for pancakes. Link... Boingboing.Net Making acorn flour {new window}   Www.Boingboing.Net - My pals Eric and Julia of Ramshackle Solid made acorn flour this year, and in their blog they showed how they did it. Once the flour is dried out it may be a little coarse. You can put it in a cleaned out coffee grinder to get a finer texture. A good food processor also works and I am pretty sure they make attachable gadgets for mixers that really mill the flour if you get completely obsessed. Our favorite use is acorn pancakes. Just mix the acorn flour 1/2 and 1/2 with wheat or other flour from your favorite recipe. I love the acorn flavor - slightly nutty, very hearty. If you make your own, let us know how it went. I'm going over there uninvited for pancakes. Link...
Making acorn flour - Boing Boing {...}
Published: October 4, 2008, 3:02 am - Indexed: October 5, 2008, 10:37 am - Page Size: 66KB
Category: Arts > Literature > Genres > Cyberpunk

]]> Arts > Literature > Genres > Cyberpunk {ISSUES > BIAS AND BALANCE} - CBS asserted "Democrats and many in the media" question "Palin's readiness to be president," but not that many questions came from conservatives http://articles.world-of-newave.info/society/issues/business/media/bias-and-balance/cbs-asserted-democrats-and-many-in-the-media-question-2008105622.htm http://articles.world-of-newave.info/society/issues/business/media/bias-and-balance/cbs-asserted-democrats-and-many-in-the-media-question-2008105622.htm Thu, 02 Oct 2008 23:05:59 GMT A September 29 CBSNews.com article asserted that "[Gov. Sarah] Palin's readiness to be president in the event she and [Sen. John] McCain are elected and McCain becomes incapacitated has been widely questioned by Democrats and many in the media," but did not note that many of those who were "question[ing]" Palin's readiness are conservatives. In fact, as CBS Early Show national correspondent Jeff Glor noted during the September 29 edition of The Early Show, "even some conservatives are concerned, including syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker, who said Palin is 'clearly out of our league' and called for the Alaska governor to leave the race." Earlier, Early Show co-host Maggie Rodriguez stated: "[T]he question a lot of Americans are asking this morning, including some prominent Republicans, is whether Sarah Palin is ready." On September 26, Parker wrote: "As we've seen and heard more from John McCain's running mate, it is increasingly clear that Palin is a problem. Quick study or not, she doesn't know enough about economics and foreign policy to make Americans comfortable with a President Palin should conditions warrant her promotion." Parker later wrote: "Palin's recent interviews with Charles Gibson, Sean Hannity, and now Katie Couric have all revealed an attractive, earnest, confident candidate. Who Is Clearly Out Of Her League." She concluded: "Only Palin can save McCain, her party, and the country she loves. She can bow out for personal reasons, perhaps because she wants to spend more time with her newborn. No one would criticize a mother who puts her family first. Do it for your country." Numerous other conservative media figures also have expressed concerns about Palin's readiness to be vice president. For instance: As the website Raw Story and others have noted, on the September 28 edition of the NBC syndicated Chris Matthews Show, New York Times columnist David Brooks stated: I admire Sarah Palin for many things. Not many of us put our careers on the line to challenge something. And she put her career on the line to challenge the corrupt Republican Alaska establishment. So, I give her a lot of credit for that. But is she ready to be vice president? Based on what we've seen with the Katie Couric interview, it's embarrassing. It's painful to watch those things. You want to turn them off. And, so, I just think that's the fundamental fact. She is a very talented politician who was brought to the national limelight before she was ready, and it's just a problem. In a September 26 column, National Review editor Rich Lowry wrote: "Does Palin know enough to be a national candidate right now? No, but she can be mostly walled off from the press." Earlier in the column, he said McCain was "making moves that mark him as different, but can be seen as risky or gimmicky, whether choosing Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential nominee or canceling the first day of the Republican Convention during Hurricane Gustav." Additionally, in a September 13 post on National Review Online's The Corner blog, Lowry said of Palin's interview with ABC News' Charles Gibson: "[T]his was a merely adequate performance. The foreign-policy session was a white-knuckle affair. She barely got through it and showed no knowledge more than an inch deep." Lowry later added: "The fact still remains that she very likely didn't know any of the possible definitions of the Bush doctrine. I can't imagine if Obama had picked Gov. Tim Kaine [VA] and he had had a similar moment, conservatives would have rushed to say that the Bush doctrine is just too amorphous and complicated for him to know anything about it. [italics in original]" Lowry added: "Palin seemed weak on economic and budgetary policy too, talking in the vaguest generalities. She was much better, and positively good, on the social issues -- which are dear to her and she's thought about -- and anything having to do with her personally or with her record in Alaska." And he concluded: "I understand how we all want to be protective of her -- I feel the same impulse -- but let's not be patronizing. I believe the truly pro-Palin position is to think she can, should, and will do better than this." In a September 13 blog posting, titled "Sarah The Unready," Ross Douthat, conservative blogger and senior editor at The Atlantic stated of Palin's interview with Gibson: "[S]he seemed about an inch deep on every issue outside her comfort zone." He further stated that Gibson's questions "were all questions that a vice-presidential nominee needs to be able to answer." Douthat added: "There's no way to look at her performance as anything save supporting evidence for the non-hysterical critique of her candidacy -- that it's just too much, too soon -- and a splash of cold water for those of us with high hopes for her future on the national stage." In his September 5 Washington Post column, Charles Krauthammer stated that "the choice of Palin remains deeply problematic." Krauthammer later stated: The vice president's only constitutional duty of any significance is to become president at a moment's notice. Palin is not ready. Nor is Obama. But with Palin, the case against Obama evaporates." George Will stated in a September 3 Washington Post column that "the man who would be the oldest to embark on a first presidential term has chosen as his possible successor a person of negligible experience." He later wrote: "Clearly, experience is not sufficient to prove a person 'qualified' for the presidency." In an August 29 column in the National Post, columnist and former speechwriter for President Bush David Frum asserted that "she [Palin] has zero foreign policy experience, and no record on national security issues." He went on to say that "Mr. McCain's supporters argue that he is more serious about national security than Barack Obama. But the selection of Sarah Palin invites the question: How serious can he be if he would place such a neophyte second in line to the presidency?" He further claims that "if anything were to happen to a President McCain, the destiny of the free world would be placed in the hands of a woman who until the day before Friday was a small-town mayor." Frum concluded his column by stating: "Ms. Palin is a bold pick, and probably a shrewd one. It's not nearly so clear that she is a responsible pick, or a wise one." From the September 29 CBSNews.com article: A month ago, Sally and Chuck Heath's third child, Sarah Palin, a self-proclaimed hockey mom and wildly popular governor of Alaska, was thrust into the national spotlight when John McCain picked her to be his running mate. In the time since, Palin's readiness to be president in the event she and McCain are elected and McCain becomes incapacitated has been widely questioned by Democrats and many in the media. But, in an exclusive interview at their home in Wasilla, Alaska, the Heaths told Early Show co-anchor Harry Smith their daughter is, indeed, ready to occupy the Oval Office at a moment's notice. From the September 29 edition of CBS' The Early Show: HARRY SMITH [co-host]: You bet. Now here's Maggie. RODRIGUEZ: Thank you, Harry. You can bet the vice-presidential candidates will be asked about the bailout during their debate on Thursday. But the question a lot of Americans are asking this morning, including some prominent Republicans, is whether Sarah Palin is ready. Early Show national correspondent Jeff Glor is in Columbus, Ohio. Jeff, good morning. GLOR: Maggie, good morning to you. This is a state -- Ohio -- that could, once again, decide this election. It's one of the reasons why we're here. It's one of the reasons why John McCain and Sarah Palin will be here today as the campaign deals with these continued questions. [begin video clip] GLOR: Sarah Palin has mostly been kept away from reporters, but the interviews she has done are raising eyebrows. PALIN: It is from Alaska that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia, because they are right there. GLOR: The most recent, with Katie Couric, provoked widespread criticism from liberals on the Web and a lampooning on Saturday Night Live: TINA FEY: Katie, I'd like to use one of my lifelines. AMY POEHLER: You don't have any lifelines. FEY: Well, in that case, I'm just gonna have to get back to you. GLOR: But even some conservatives are concerned, including syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker, who said Palin is "clearly out of our league" and called for the Alaska governor to leave the race. ALEX BURNS [Politico reporter]: I think there are a small number of people who will publicly say that they're worried about her abilities as a candidate. I think there's a larger number of people who privately express kind of muted criticism and concern. GLOR: McCain himself was asked about the chatter on Sunday. McCAIN: I'm so excited about the reaction that Sarah Palin has gotten across this country -- huge turnouts, enthusiasm, excitement. She knows how to communicate directly with people. They respond in a way that I've seldom seen. [end video clip] GLOR: Palin will be interviewed again today by Katie Couric -- which you can see on the Evening News -- and then Palin is off for a couple of days of debate preparation in Arizona before Thursday's much anticipated vice-presidential debate in St. Louis. Maggie. RODRIGUEZ: CBS' Jeff Glor in Ohio. Thank you, Jeff. Mediamatters.Org CBS asserted "Democrats and many in the media" question "Palin's readiness to be president," but not that many questions came from conservatives {new window}   Mediamatters.Org - A September 29 CBSNews.com article asserted that "[Gov. Sarah] Palin's readiness to be president in the event she and [Sen. John] McCain are elected and McCain becomes incapacitated has been widely questioned by Democrats and many in the media," but did not note that many of those who were "question[ing]" Palin's readiness are conservatives. In fact, as CBS Early Show national correspondent Jeff Glor noted during the September 29 edition of The Early Show, "even some conservatives are concerned, including syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker, who said Palin is 'clearly out of our league' and called for the Alaska governor to leave the race." Earlier, Early Show co-host Maggie Rodriguez stated: "[T]he question a lot of Americans are asking this morning, including some prominent Republicans, is whether Sarah Palin is ready." On September 26, Parker wrote: "As we've seen and heard more from John McCain's running mate, it is increasingly clear that Palin is a problem. Quick study or not, she doesn't know enough about economics and foreign policy to make Americans comfortable with a President Palin should conditions warrant her promotion." Parker later wrote: "Palin's recent interviews with Charles Gibson, Sean Hannity, and now Katie Couric have all revealed an attractive, earnest, confident candidate. Who Is Clearly Out Of Her League." She concluded: "Only Palin can save McCain, her party, and the country she loves. She can bow out for personal reasons, perhaps because she wants to spend more time with her newborn. No one would criticize a mother who puts her family first. Do it for your country." Numerous other conservative media figures also have expressed concerns about Palin's readiness to be vice president. For instance: As the website Raw Story and others have noted, on the September 28 edition of the NBC syndicated Chris Matthews Show, New York Times columnist David Brooks stated: I admire Sarah Palin for many things. Not many of us put our careers on the line to challenge something. And she put her career on the line to challenge the corrupt Republican Alaska establishment. So, I give her a lot of credit for that. But is she ready to be vice president? Based on what we've seen with the Katie Couric interview, it's embarrassing. It's painful to watch those things. You want to turn them off. And, so, I just think that's the fundamental fact. She is a very talented politician who was brought to the national limelight before she was ready, and it's just a problem. In a September 26 column, National Review editor Rich Lowry wrote: "Does Palin know enough to be a national candidate right now? No, but she can be mostly walled off from the press." Earlier in the column, he said McCain was "making moves that mark him as different, but can be seen as risky or gimmicky, whether choosing Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential nominee or canceling the first day of the Republican Convention during Hurricane Gustav." Additionally, in a September 13 post on National Review Online's The Corner blog, Lowry said of Palin's interview with ABC News' Charles Gibson: "[T]his was a merely adequate performance. The foreign-policy session was a white-knuckle affair. She barely got through it and showed no knowledge more than an inch deep." Lowry later added: "The fact still remains that she very likely didn't know any of the possible definitions of the Bush doctrine. I can't imagine if Obama had picked Gov. Tim Kaine [VA] and he had had a similar moment, conservatives would have rushed to say that the Bush doctrine is just too amorphous and complicated for him to know anything about it. [italics in original]" Lowry added: "Palin seemed weak on economic and budgetary policy too, talking in the vaguest generalities. She was much better, and positively good, on the social issues -- which are dear to her and she's thought about -- and anything having to do with her personally or with her record in Alaska." And he concluded: "I understand how we all want to be protective of her -- I feel the same impulse -- but let's not be patronizing. I believe the truly pro-Palin position is to think she can, should, and will do better than this." In a September 13 blog posting, titled "Sarah The Unready," Ross Douthat, conservative blogger and senior editor at The Atlantic stated of Palin's interview with Gibson: "[S]he seemed about an inch deep on every issue outside her comfort zone." He further stated that Gibson's questions "were all questions that a vice-presidential nominee needs to be able to answer." Douthat added: "There's no way to look at her performance as anything save supporting evidence for the non-hysterical critique of her candidacy -- that it's just too much, too soon -- and a splash of cold water for those of us with high hopes for her future on the national stage." In his September 5 Washington Post column, Charles Krauthammer stated that "the choice of Palin remains deeply problematic." Krauthammer later stated: The vice president's only constitutional duty of any significance is to become president at a moment's notice. Palin is not ready. Nor is Obama. But with Palin, the case against Obama evaporates." George Will stated in a September 3 Washington Post column that "the man who would be the oldest to embark on a first presidential term has chosen as his possible successor a person of negligible experience." He later wrote: "Clearly, experience is not sufficient to prove a person 'qualified' for the presidency." In an August 29 column in the National Post, columnist and former speechwriter for President Bush David Frum asserted that "she [Palin] has zero foreign policy experience, and no record on national security issues." He went on to say that "Mr. McCain's supporters argue that he is more serious about national security than Barack Obama. But the selection of Sarah Palin invites the question: How serious can he be if he would place such a neophyte second in line to the presidency?" He further claims that "if anything were to happen to a President McCain, the destiny of the free world would be placed in the hands of a woman who until the day before Friday was a small-town mayor." Frum concluded his column by stating: "Ms. Palin is a bold pick, and probably a shrewd one. It's not nearly so clear that she is a responsible pick, or a wise one." From the September 29 CBSNews.com article: A month ago, Sally and Chuck Heath's third child, Sarah Palin, a self-proclaimed hockey mom and wildly popular governor of Alaska, was thrust into the national spotlight when John McCain picked her to be his running mate. In the time since, Palin's readiness to be president in the event she and McCain are elected and McCain becomes incapacitated has been widely questioned by Democrats and many in the media. But, in an exclusive interview at their home in Wasilla, Alaska, the Heaths told Early Show co-anchor Harry Smith their daughter is, indeed, ready to occupy the Oval Office at a moment's notice. From the September 29 edition of CBS' The Early Show: HARRY SMITH [co-host]: You bet. Now here's Maggie. RODRIGUEZ: Thank you, Harry. You can bet the vice-presidential candidates will be asked about the bailout during their debate on Thursday. But the question a lot of Americans are asking this morning, including some prominent Republicans, is whether Sarah Palin is ready. Early Show national correspondent Jeff Glor is in Columbus, Ohio. Jeff, good morning. GLOR: Maggie, good morning to you. This is a state -- Ohio -- that could, once again, decide this election. It's one of the reasons why we're here. It's one of the reasons why John McCain and Sarah Palin will be here today as the campaign deals with these continued questions. [begin video clip] GLOR: Sarah Palin has mostly been kept away from reporters, but the interviews she has done are raising eyebrows. PALIN: It is from Alaska that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia, because they are right there. GLOR: The most recent, with Katie Couric, provoked widespread criticism from liberals on the Web and a lampooning on Saturday Night Live: TINA FEY: Katie, I'd like to use one of my lifelines. AMY POEHLER: You don't have any lifelines. FEY: Well, in that case, I'm just gonna have to get back to you. GLOR: But even some conservatives are concerned, including syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker, who said Palin is "clearly out of our league" and called for the Alaska governor to leave the race. ALEX BURNS [Politico reporter]: I think there are a small number of people who will publicly say that they're worried about her abilities as a candidate. I think there's a larger number of people who privately express kind of muted criticism and concern. GLOR: McCain himself was asked about the chatter on Sunday. McCAIN: I'm so excited about the reaction that Sarah Palin has gotten across this country -- huge turnouts, enthusiasm, excitement. She knows how to communicate directly with people. They respond in a way that I've seldom seen. [end video clip] GLOR: Palin will be interviewed again today by Katie Couric -- which you can see on the Evening News -- and then Palin is off for a couple of days of debate preparation in Arizona before Thursday's much anticipated vice-presidential debate in St. Louis. Maggie. RODRIGUEZ: CBS' Jeff Glor in Ohio. Thank you, Jeff.
Media Matters - CBS asserted "Democrats and many in the media" question "Palin's readiness to be president," but not that many questions came from conservatives {...} A CBSNews.com article asserted that "[Gov. Sarah] Palin's readiness to be president ... has been widely questioned by Democrats and many in the media." The article failed to note, however, that many of those "questioning" Palin's readiness are conservatives. In fact, CBS Early Show correspondent Jeff Glor noted, "even some conservatives are concerned, including syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker, who said Palin is 'clearly out of our league' and called for the Alaska governor to leave the race." {...}
Published: October 2, 2008, 11:05 pm - Indexed: October 3, 2008, 12:04 pm - Page Size: 25KB
Category: Society > Issues > Business > Media > Bias and Balance

]]> Society > Issues > Business > Media > Bias and Balance {SECURITY > NEWS AND MEDIA} - Scott Adams: The unexpected economist http://articles.world-of-newave.info/computers/security/news-and-media/scott-adams-the-unexpected-economist-2008104185.htm http://articles.world-of-newave.info/computers/security/news-and-media/scott-adams-the-unexpected-economist-2008104185.htm Thu, 02 Oct 2008 16:10:00 GMT Featured links from the CNET Blog Network Scott Adams: The unexpected economist--Dilbert cartoonist is making significant personal contributions to discourse on the economy, but he needs to learn how to distinguish good arguments from bad ones. Ubuntu misses the memo on Stallman's cloud computing rant--When choosing an IT system, you don't choose what will be most profitable for your vendor. You choose what works, and SaaS and open source "just work." Where's the artist outcry over record labels?--Musicians are taking Apple to task for its call to reduce royalty rates. Maybe it's time they start pointing fingers at the record labels too. Fujitsu to sell hard drive unit to Western Digital?--Company will sell its hard disk drive business to Western Digital, according to a Japan-based report. News.Cnet.Com Scott Adams: The unexpected economist {new window}   News.Cnet.Com - Featured links from the CNET Blog Network Scott Adams: The unexpected economist--Dilbert cartoonist is making significant personal contributions to discourse on the economy, but he needs to learn how to distinguish good arguments from bad ones. Ubuntu misses the memo on Stallman's cloud computing rant--When choosing an IT system, you don't choose what will be most profitable for your vendor. You choose what works, and SaaS and open source "just work." Where's the artist outcry over record labels?--Musicians are taking Apple to task for its call to reduce royalty rates. Maybe it's time they start pointing fingers at the record labels too. Fujitsu to sell hard drive unit to Western Digital?--Company will sell its hard disk drive business to Western Digital, according to a Japan-based report.
Scott Adams: The unexpected economist | Speeds and feeds - Technology analysis by Peter N. Glaskowsky - CNET News {...} Dilbert cartoonist is making significant personal contributions to discourse on the economy, but he needs to learn how to distinguish good arguments from bad ones. Read this blog post by Peter Glaskowsky on Speeds and feeds. {...}
Published: October 2, 2008, 4:10 pm - Indexed: October 3, 2008, 12:38 pm - Page Size: 135KB
Category: Computers > Security > News and Media

]]> Computers > Security > News and Media {COMPUTERS > HARDWARE} - Scott Adams: The unexpected economist http://articles.world-of-newave.info/computers/hardware/scott-adams-the-unexpected-economist-2008103453.htm http://articles.world-of-newave.info/computers/hardware/scott-adams-the-unexpected-economist-2008103453.htm Thu, 02 Oct 2008 16:10:00 GMT Featured links from the CNET Blog Network Scott Adams: The unexpected economist--Dilbert cartoonist is making significant personal contributions to discourse on the economy, but he needs to learn how to distinguish good arguments from bad ones. Ubuntu misses the memo on Stallman's cloud computing rant--When choosing an IT system, you don't choose what will be most profitable for your vendor. You choose what works, and SaaS and open source "just work." Where's the artist outcry over record labels?--Musicians are taking Apple to task for its call to reduce royalty rates. Maybe it's time they start pointing fingers at the record labels too. Fujitsu to sell hard drive unit to Western Digital?--Company will sell its hard disk drive business to Western Digital, according to a Japan-based report. News.Cnet.Com Scott Adams: The unexpected economist {new window}   News.Cnet.Com - Featured links from the CNET Blog Network Scott Adams: The unexpected economist--Dilbert cartoonist is making significant personal contributions to discourse on the economy, but he needs to learn how to distinguish good arguments from bad ones. Ubuntu misses the memo on Stallman's cloud computing rant--When choosing an IT system, you don't choose what will be most profitable for your vendor. You choose what works, and SaaS and open source "just work." Where's the artist outcry over record labels?--Musicians are taking Apple to task for its call to reduce royalty rates. Maybe it's time they start pointing fingers at the record labels too. Fujitsu to sell hard drive unit to Western Digital?--Company will sell its hard disk drive business to Western Digital, according to a Japan-based report.
Scott Adams: The unexpected economist | Speeds and feeds - Technology analysis by Peter N. Glaskowsky - CNET News {...} Dilbert cartoonist is making significant personal contributions to discourse on the economy, but he needs to learn how to distinguish good arguments from bad ones. Read this blog post by Peter Glaskowsky on Speeds and feeds. {...}
Published: October 2, 2008, 4:10 pm - Indexed: October 3, 2008, 11:07 am - Page Size: 133KB
Category: Computers > Hardware

]]> Computers > Hardware {MARKETING AND ADVERTISING > NEWS AND MEDIA} - How to Increase Traffic to Your Corporate Blog http://articles.world-of-newave.info/business/marketing-and-advertising/advertising/news-and-media/how-to-increase-traffic-to-your-corporate-blog-2008105867.htm http://articles.world-of-newave.info/business/marketing-and-advertising/advertising/news-and-media/how-to-increase-traffic-to-your-corporate-blog-2008105867.htm Wed, 01 Oct 2008 18:06:13 GMT You want to increase blog traffic but making your company blog popular takes more than just announcing you have one. Learn how to increase traffic and join the ranks of... Advertising.About.Com How to Increase Traffic to Your Corporate Blog {new window}   Advertising.About.Com - You want to increase blog traffic but making your company blog popular takes more than just announcing you have one. Learn how to increase traffic and join the ranks of...
How to Increase Traffic to Your Corporate Blog {...}
Published: October 1, 2008, 6:06 pm - Indexed: October 2, 2008, 10:36 am - Page Size: 21KB
Category: Business > Marketing and Advertising > Advertising > News and Media

]]> Business > Marketing and Advertising > Advertising > News and Media {INTERNET > GOOGLE} - Now, read us in gadget form http://articles.world-of-newave.info/computers/internet/searching/search-engines/google/now-read-us-in-gadget-form-2008107123.htm http://articles.world-of-newave.info/computers/internet/searching/search-engines/google/now-read-us-in-gadget-form-2008107123.htm Wed, 01 Oct 2008 11:37:58 GMT Our corporate blog network is more than four years old now. We offer blogs about Google products and initiatives, local blogs (for 11 countries), blogs for advertisers and publishers, and a stable of blogs for developers. We hope you find the contents to be informative, timely, and, on occasion, fun.To help you keep track of our news and updates more easily, we've created a new Blog Directory (which links from the main page on this blog) and an iGoogle gadget so you can stay current right from your dashboard. If you'd prefer to read recent posts by category, install our iGoogle blog tab (the customizable tab will load upon clicking), which will always show you the most recent blog updates by categories such as 'Open Source,' 'Mobile' or 'Publishers.' There are 16 categories, so you can pick and choose which ones to keep on your page after adding.Software engineer Derek Collison built the gadget using the AJAX APIs. The current version is in beta; we plan to use the Language API to roll out translations for the blogs in 13 languages other than English and add new interface and navigation options. Developer Ben Lisbakken built the tab, and webmaster extraordinaire Champika Fernando built the directory with help from graphic designer Ryan Germick. A heartfelt thanks for all of their contributions in making our blog family more 'universally accessible and useful.'Posted by Joscelin Cooper, Google Blog team Blogger.Com Now, read us in gadget form {new window}   Www.Blogger.Com - Our corporate blog network is more than four years old now. We offer blogs about Google products and initiatives, local blogs (for 11 countries), blogs for advertisers and publishers, and a stable of blogs for developers. We hope you find the contents to be informative, timely, and, on occasion, fun.To help you keep track of our news and updates more easily, we've created a new Blog Directory (which links from the main page on this blog) and an iGoogle gadget so you can stay current right from your dashboard. If you'd prefer to read recent posts by category, install our iGoogle blog tab (the customizable tab will load upon clicking), which will always show you the most recent blog updates by categories such as 'Open Source,' 'Mobile' or 'Publishers.' There are 16 categories, so you can pick and choose which ones to keep on your page after adding.Software engineer Derek Collison built the gadget using the AJAX APIs. The current version is in beta; we plan to use the Language API to roll out translations for the blogs in 13 languages other than English and add new interface and navigation options. Developer Ben Lisbakken built the tab, and webmaster extraordinaire Champika Fernando built the directory with help from graphic designer Ryan Germick. A heartfelt thanks for all of their contributions in making our blog family more 'universally accessible and useful.'Posted by Joscelin Cooper, Google Blog team
Indexed: October 1, 2008, 11:37 am - Page Size: 4KB
Category: Computers > Internet > Searching > Search Engines > Google

]]> Computers > Internet > Searching > Search Engines > Google {NEWS > BREAKING NEWS} - Six New Directors Who Are Making Music Video Cool Again http://articles.world-of-newave.info/news/breaking-news/six-new-directors-who-are-making-music-video-cool-2008109091.htm http://articles.world-of-newave.info/news/breaking-news/six-new-directors-who-are-making-music-video-cool-2008109091.htm Wed, 01 Oct 2008 05:00:00 GMT Not long ago, it seemed music videos were doomed to go the way of the radio star. Cool bands hated making them, MTV had stopped showing them, and innovative directors like Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry had long since moved on. Then, somewhere between OK Go's treadmill-dancing "Here It Goes Again" on YouTube (more than 37 million views) and Feist's "1234" choreography lesson turned iPod ad, the music video made a comeback — and launched a new generation of directors more at home with URL than TRL. Meet the next wave of filmmakers and their greatest hits — so far. Cat Solen Signature style: Art-school aesthetic on the cheap. Key video: Bright Eyes, "At the Bottom of Everything." As a jetliner plummets toward the ocean, the passengers gleefully embrace, and smiling stop-motion clouds play catch with the plane. "I want to keep making videos because they're artistic yet appeal to a mass audience," Solen says. Rik Cordero Signature style: Urban tales with a grime-noir twist. Key video: Nas, "Be a Nigger Too." A nine-minute epic of narrative arcs within arcs about the most loaded of words, with nearly every directorial technique thrown in. "It used to be the only outlet for non-mainstream videos were street DVDs," Cordero says. "When YouTube came along, we just ran with it like purse snatchers." Matthew Cullen Signature style: Technical chops and enough whimsy to choke a dramatic prairie dog. Key video: Weezer, "Pork and Beans." YouTube semi-celebs from Tay Zonday to the geographically challenged beauty queen are gathered into one joyous mega-meme. "The Web is the new home for the music video," says Cullen, who's currently making viral shorts with Tiger Woods for EA. "MTV has become an afterthought." Vincent Moon Signature style: Home movies of hipster bands busking the streets of Paris. Key video: Animal Collective, "Taste." Psych-folk weirdos roll down the street in a shopping cart singing garbled vocals into cardboard cups. Moon's video blog, La Blogotheque, features impromptu performances in odd places by bands like the Shins, Beirut, and the National. "I'm trying to fight what TV has made us in the past 20 years," he says. "I want to use these new screens to communicate with the world." Vincent Morisset Signature style: Interactive Flash apps set to music. Key video: Arcade Fire, "Neon Bible." Clicking on the screen while frontman Win Butler sings causes him to perform sleights of hand with spooky expressionistic flair. "When I was a kid," Morisset says, "I paid 50 cents for an MTV phone contest to see 'Pour Some Sugar on Me' a second time. So the immediacy of online is a plus." Keith Schofield Signature style: Visual gags worthy of Chuck Jones. Key video: Brighton Port Authority, "Toe Jam." Fatboy Slim tapped Schofield to shoot his new supergroup's first single (featuring Dizzee Rascal and David Byrne). In it, a bunch of shag-carpet-loving swingers dance nude, Busby Berkeley-style, but it's the censor bars over the naughty bits that steal the show. "It's great," says Schofield, who's working on videos for CSS, Ladyhawke, and the Ting Tings. "You can make a video about pop culture or videogames or Linux, and then it goes viral." Wired.Com Six New Directors Who Are Making Music Video Cool Again {new window}   Www.Wired.Com - Not long ago, it seemed music videos were doomed to go the way of the radio star. Cool bands hated making them, MTV had stopped showing them, and innovative directors like Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry had long since moved on. Then, somewhere between OK Go's treadmill-dancing "Here It Goes Again" on YouTube (more than 37 million views) and Feist's "1234" choreography lesson turned iPod ad, the music video made a comeback — and launched a new generation of directors more at home with URL than TRL. Meet the next wave of filmmakers and their greatest hits — so far. Cat Solen Signature style: Art-school aesthetic on the cheap. Key video: Bright Eyes, "At the Bottom of Everything." As a jetliner plummets toward the ocean, the passengers gleefully embrace, and smiling stop-motion clouds play catch with the plane. "I want to keep making videos because they're artistic yet appeal to a mass audience," Solen says. Rik Cordero Signature style: Urban tales with a grime-noir twist. Key video: Nas, "Be a Nigger Too." A nine-minute epic of narrative arcs within arcs about the most loaded of words, with nearly every directorial technique thrown in. "It used to be the only outlet for non-mainstream videos were street DVDs," Cordero says. "When YouTube came along, we just ran with it like purse snatchers." Matthew Cullen Signature style: Technical chops and enough whimsy to choke a dramatic prairie dog. Key video: Weezer, "Pork and Beans." YouTube semi-celebs from Tay Zonday to the geographically challenged beauty queen are gathered into one joyous mega-meme. "The Web is the new home for the music video," says Cullen, who's currently making viral shorts with Tiger Woods for EA. "MTV has become an afterthought." Vincent Moon Signature style: Home movies of hipster bands busking the streets of Paris. Key video: Animal Collective, "Taste." Psych-folk weirdos roll down the street in a shopping cart singing garbled vocals into cardboard cups. Moon's video blog, La Blogotheque, features impromptu performances in odd places by bands like the Shins, Beirut, and the National. "I'm trying to fight what TV has made us in the past 20 years," he says. "I want to use these new screens to communicate with the world." Vincent Morisset Signature style: Interactive Flash apps set to music. Key video: Arcade Fire, "Neon Bible." Clicking on the screen while frontman Win Butler sings causes him to perform sleights of hand with spooky expressionistic flair. "When I was a kid," Morisset says, "I paid 50 cents for an MTV phone contest to see 'Pour Some Sugar on Me' a second time. So the immediacy of online is a plus." Keith Schofield Signature style: Visual gags worthy of Chuck Jones. Key video: Brighton Port Authority, "Toe Jam." Fatboy Slim tapped Schofield to shoot his new supergroup's first single (featuring Dizzee Rascal and David Byrne). In it, a bunch of shag-carpet-loving swingers dance nude, Busby Berkeley-style, but it's the censor bars over the naughty bits that steal the show. "It's great," says Schofield, who's working on videos for CSS, Ladyhawke, and the Ting Tings. "You can make a video about pop culture or videogames or Linux, and then it goes viral."
Read about the latest Entertainment News on Wired.com, including art, technology, films, animation, music, web video, tv, podcasts, and blogs. {...}
Published: October 1, 2008, 5:00 am - Indexed: October 1, 2008, 11:48 am - Page Size: 46KB
Category: News > Breaking News

]]> News > Breaking News