FBI Investigates Financial Institutions

From FOXBusiness.com

The FBI is investigating four major U.S. financial institutions whose collapse helped trigger a $700 billion bailout plan by the Bush administration.

Two law enforcement officials said the FBI is looking at potential fraud by mortgage finance giants Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Lehman Brothers and American International Group Inc.

A senior law enforcement official says the inquiries, still in preliminary stages, will focus on the financial institutions and the individuals that ran them.

Update: Jim Angle of FOX News reports on who's resposible for the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac meltdown.



Update: From Powerline - 2003 NY Times article on proposed reforms to Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac.

Update: From Newsbusters - 1999 NY Times Article Revealed True Cause of Current Fannie Mae Crises.

I think any reasonable person (those that can read) should have a clear idea how we got ourselves into this situation.

Lt. Colonel Jeffery Chessani

After devoting 20 years of his life to defend ours, Lt. Colonel Jeffery Chessani, USMC, faces criminal charges because of a legitimate combat action taken by four of his marines after being ambushed in Haditha, Iraq on November 19, 2005, the so-called Haditha Massacre – a massacre that never happened.

Time magazine with the help of insurgent propaganda operatives in Iraq and Congressman John Murtha created a media firestorm, calling all of the marines involved “cold blooded murderers” before the investigation had even been completed.

A military judge dismissed all charges against Lt. Colonel Chessani, but the politicians in the Pentagon appealed the dismissal. Jeff Chessani is the scapegoat they must convict to satisfy the liberal, anti-American media and John Murtha.

Click here to read the full story at WorldNetDaily.
Click here to donate to Lt. Colonel Jeffery Chessani's defense fund.

The Archbishop of Canterbury

Rowan Williams' Dangerous Claptrap
By Christopher Hitchens - Slate.com

In December 1931, George Orwell got himself arrested in the slums of East London in order to find out about conditions "inside," and then he wrote an essay about the people he met while in detention. One of them was a buyer for a kosher butcher who had embezzled some of his boss's money. To Orwell's surprise, the man told him that "his employer would probably get into trouble at the synagogue for prosecuting him. It appears that the Jews have arbitration courts of their own, and a Jew is not supposed to prosecute another Jew, at least in a breach-of-trust case like this, without first submitting it to the arbitration court."

You might think that such relics of the medieval ghetto, and of the rabbinical control that was part of ghetto life, had more or less disappeared in England in the 21st century. And you would largely be right. There exists a "Beth Din," or religious court, in the prosperous North London suburb of Finchley to which the ultra-Orthodox submit some of their more arcane disputes. (This little world is very amusingly described by Naomi Alderman in her lovely novel Disobedience.) But to speak in general, Jews in Britain consider themselves, and are considered, to be answerable to the same laws as everybody else. Should I mention any of the numerous reasons why it would be extremely nerve-racking if this were not true?

But now the archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has cited the Beth Din as one of his reasons for believing that sharia, or Islamic law, can and should become a part of what he called "plural jurisdiction" in Britain. His reasoning, if one may call it that, is clear: Other faiths already have their own legal authorities, so why not the Muslims, too? What could be more tolerant and diverse? This same argument has been used already, and will be used again, to demand that laws governing "blasphemy," originally written to protect only Christians from being upset, should now, in a nondiscriminatory way, be amended to cover Muslims as well. The alternative--don't have any blasphemy laws and let religious people's feelings be hurt, just as the feelings of the secular are regularly offended by religion--doesn't occur to the archbishop and people who think like him.

A BBC interview with Williams had him saying that the opening to sharia would "help maintain social cohesion." If that phrase is even intended to mean anything, it can only imply that a concession of this kind would lessen the propensity to violence among Muslims. But such abjectness is not the only definition of social cohesion that we have. By a nice coincidence, a London think tank called the Center for Social Cohesion issued a report just days before the leader of the world's Anglicans and Episcopalians capitulated to Islamic demands. Titled "Crimes of the Community: Honour-Based Violence in the UK," and written by James Brandon and Salam Hafez, it set out a shocking account of the rapid spread of theocratic crime. The main headings were murder and beating of women, genital mutilation, forced marriage, and vigilante methods employed against those who complained. It could well be--since we are becoming every day more familiar with the first three--that the fourth is the one that should concern us most.

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Cambridge MA Votes Down Scouts' Aid For GIs

From The Boston Herald

Big-hearted Boy Scouts collecting donations for care packages for U.S. troops are still scratching their heads after being sent packing from polling stations when Cambridge officials ruled their generous effort “political.”

"We just wanted to make a lot of troops happy," said Scout Patrick O'Connor, 16. "I was devastated that someone would think to take (the donation boxes) out," he said.

O"Connor of West Cambridge was one of the Scouts who wanted to collect toiletries, magazines, candy and other items for care packages after one of his relatives was injured in an IED explosion while serving in Iraq.

"He mentioned to me that some people got care packages from home and how happy it made them," the Scout said.

Troop 45 Cambridge Boy Scouts placed boxes in the city's 33 polling stations on Election Day.

But someone complained to the city, claiming the boxes were a "political statement," and the boxes were removed.

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Ski Resort's Impeachment Vote Backfires

Some of the ski fans who have patronized Telluride, Colo., now are calling the ritzy resort "the land of radical liberals" and canceling planned vacations there because the town board voted to approve an ordinance calling for the impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Cheney. Read More...

CAIR part of Muslim Brotherhood

More trouble for those moderate bullies over at CAIR. From The Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT) (thanks to all who sent this in): Dallas--In testimony Tuesday, FBI Agent Lara Burns reported before the jury in the Holy Land Foundation (HLF). Read More...

No More Apologies

It's time for the tolerant West to stop apologizing to intolerant Muslims. Read More...

"Toilet Koran"

Let me introduce "Toilet Koran." Please, hold your applause, this magnificent work of art is, after all, unfinished. Read More...

Pace University Koran Case

I’ve received an email from Stanislav Shmulevich, who has been arrested in New York for putting a Koran in a toilet at Pace University. And his case is even more outrageous than we first reported. Read More...

Think No Evil

A proposal for federal hate crime legislation is currently winding its way through Congress. H.R. 1592, the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2007, has already passed the House of Representatives, and is now pending in the Senate. Yet, in these over-heated and volatile times, broadening hate-crime laws is unwise. Read More...

Report from the Hamas Trial in Dallas

Counterterrorism Blog has a report on the testimony of terrorism expert Matthew Levitt at the Hamas funding trial of the Holy Land Foundation, in Dallas: Matthew Levitt Takes the Stand in Dallas HAMAS Trial. Read More...

Why Do Liberals Like to Talk About Impeachment?

They are like Pavlov’s dogs…say the word “impeachment” to a liberal and they salivate. They love that word–impeach Cheney, impeach Bush, impeach everybody. Here’s the problem–it isn’t grounded in reality. Read More...

Workers Get To Say No To Labor Bosses

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Thursday that unions may not spend non-union workers' fees for political purposes without the workers' permission. Now the question is, will the unions obey the ruling?

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