A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
VIEWED: 755368
PAGE 38 of 725
Another difference between Democratic politicians and GOP: The Wall Street Journal reports that banks are getting tired of performing actual appraisals for high-volume home loans — the kind that get packaged into mortgage-based securities — and are turning instead to less rigorous broker price opinions:
Quote:What could go wrong? “Their popularity,” says the Journal, “shows how Wall Street is finding ways to adapt to government efforts to crack down on some of the excesses that contributed to the housing crisis.”
Now these perfunctory valuations abound, underpinning tens of billions of dollars of home deals. Sometimes the process is outsourced to India, where companies charge real-estate agents a few dollars to come up with U.S. home values by consulting Google Earth and real-estate websites. BPOs have been used to value collateral in the more than $20 billion of bonds sold by institutional landlords, such as Blackstone’s Invitation Homes Inc., and in the fast-growing business of lending to individual house flippers.
It’s remarkable how fast we’ve decided to ignore the lessons of the great housing bubble and the subsequent crash. Republicans, of course, never wanted to learn any lessons from the very start, but Wall Street stayed cautious for at least a few years. Now even that’s receding into the rear view mirror, a mere decade after the second-worst recession of the past century. Republicans are naturally happy to help this process along, because the market is always right, even when the market is wrong. Plus the finance industry is generous to politicians who let them do whatever they want.
It took upwards of 50 years to unlearn the lessons of the Great Depression. The Great Recession took only ten.
www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/01/a-decade-after-the-great-recess
ion-were-outsourcing-home-appraisals-to-india/
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
There are no quick political cures in two years; there is only moving slowly away from a mess created by Republicans, a mess the GOP did NOT want fixed. Closing GITMO was one of your examples of failure. Don't you remember how the GOP fought 8 years the Democrats over that? The GOP loves and protects every mistake it every made and fights the Democrats to the death to keep the mistakes alive.
You're right. So what?
I think my only real problem with you at the end of the day Second is that you seem to think that the exact same thing can't be said about the Democratic party.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Another difference between Democratic politicians and GOP: The Wall Street Journal reports that banks are getting tired of performing actual appraisals for high-volume home loans — the kind that get packaged into mortgage-based securities — and are turning instead to less rigorous broker price opinions:Quote:What could go wrong? “Their popularity,” says the Journal, “shows how Wall Street is finding ways to adapt to government efforts to crack down on some of the excesses that contributed to the housing crisis.”
Now these perfunctory valuations abound, underpinning tens of billions of dollars of home deals. Sometimes the process is outsourced to India, where companies charge real-estate agents a few dollars to come up with U.S. home values by consulting Google Earth and real-estate websites. BPOs have been used to value collateral in the more than $20 billion of bonds sold by institutional landlords, such as Blackstone’s Invitation Homes Inc., and in the fast-growing business of lending to individual house flippers.
It’s remarkable how fast we’ve decided to ignore the lessons of the great housing bubble and the subsequent crash. Republicans, of course, never wanted to learn any lessons from the very start, but Wall Street stayed cautious for at least a few years. Now even that’s receding into the rear view mirror, a mere decade after the second-worst recession of the past century. Republicans are naturally happy to help this process along, because the market is always right, even when the market is wrong. Plus the finance industry is generous to politicians who let them do whatever they want.
It took upwards of 50 years to unlearn the lessons of the Great Depression. The Great Recession took only ten.
www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/01/a-decade-after-the-great-recess
ion-were-outsourcing-home-appraisals-to-india/
You know where I stand on this particular issue.
In case you missed it, I am not a fan of where the DOW is headed, and I don't feel that it is going to end well. Furthermore, I don't feel that it is at all reflective of how the working class in general is "recovering" since this all happened.
Anybody saying there has been any recovery at all is full of shit. The Obama administration was full of shit for years about it, and now the Trump administration has been full of shit for over a year about it.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Jared Kushner Is China’s Trump Card
How the President’s son-in-law, despite his inexperience in diplomacy, became Beijing’s primary point of interest. Since the election, Beijing intelligence has targeted Kushner as a key asset.
In Kushner, Cui found a confident, attentive, and inexperienced counterpart.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/01/29/jared-kushner-is-chinas-
trump-card
T 
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lol...
Meanwhile, T is afraid of Communist ghosts.
Keep fighting the good fight.
Idiot.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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“I wasn't ever taught not to trust anyone. It was a learned behavior.” - 6ixStringJack
http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=62170&mid=10450
61#1045061
Decide who you can trust. Or trust that people you know will fail in predictable ways. I trust that I know exactly how a Republican will fail. Democrats are trickier to predict because sometimes they do not fail. Sometimes there are improvements. Sometimes they do not mislead you and sometimes keep promises that are beneficial.
There is a spectrum between completely untrustworthy and worth-trusting-with-your-life. I know where all Texas Republicans are on that spectrum, while Democrats are spread across it from worst to best. With Democrats, you have to sort the rotten from the good.
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
“I wasn't ever taught not to trust anyone. It was a learned behavior.” - 6ixStringJack
http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=62170&mid=10450
61#1045061
Decide who you can trust. Or trust that people you know will fail in predictable ways. I trust that I know exactly how a Republican will fail. Democrats are trickier to predict because sometimes they do not fail. Sometimes there are improvements. Sometimes they do not mislead you and sometimes keep promises that are beneficial.
There is a spectrum between completely untrustworthy and worth-trusting-with-your-life. I know where all Texas Republicans are on that spectrum, while Democrats are spread across it from worst to best. With Democrats, you have to sort the rotten from the good.
Like
T
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Donald Trump's Many, Many, Many, Many Ties to Russia
The most obvious example is Trump Soho, a complicated web of financial intrigue that has played out in court. A lawsuit claimed that the business group, Bayrock, underpinning Trump Soho was supported by criminal Russian financial interests. While its initial claim absolved Trump of knowledge of those activities, Trump himself later took on the group’s principal partner as a senior advisor in the Trump organization.
“Tax evasion and money-laundering are the core of Bayrock’s business model,” the lawsuit said of the financiers behind Trump Soho. The financing came from Russian-affiliated business interests that engaged in criminal activities, it said. “(But) there is no evidence Trump took any part in, or knew of, their racketeering.”
Journalists who’ve looked at the Bayrock lawsuit, and Trump Soho, wonder why Trump was involved at all. “What was Trump thinking entering into business with partners like these?” Franklin Foer wrote in Slate. “It’s a question he has tried to banish by downplaying his ties to Bayrock.”
But Bayrock wasn’t just involved with Trump Soho. It financed multiple Trump projects around the world, Foer wrote. “(Trump) didn’t just partner with Bayrock; the company embedded with him. Bayrock put together deals for mammoth Trump-named, Trump-managed projects—two in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, a resort in Phoenix, the Trump SoHo in New York.”
But, as The New York Times has reported, that was only the beginning of the Trump organization’s entanglement with Russian financiers. Trump was quite taken with Bayrock’s founder, Tevfik Arif, a former Soviet-era commerce official originally from Kazakhstan.
“Bayrock, which was developing commercial properties in Brooklyn, proposed that Mr. Trump license his name to hotel projects in Florida, Arizona and New York, including Trump SoHo,” the Times reported. “The other development partner for Trump SoHo was the Sapir Organization, whose founder, Tamir Sapir, was from the former Soviet republic of Georgia.”
Trump was eager to work with both financial groups on Trump projects all over the world. “Mr. Trump was particularly taken with Mr. Arif’s overseas connections,” the Times wrote. “In a deposition, Mr. Trump said that the two had discussed ‘numerous deals all over the world’ and that Mr. Arif had brought potential Russian investors to Mr. Trump’s office to meet him. ‘Bayrock knew the people, knew the investors, and in some cases I believe they were friends of Mr. Arif,’ Mr. Trump said. ‘And this was going to be Trump International Hotel and Tower Moscow, Kiev, Istanbul, etc., Poland, Warsaw.’”
http://time.com/4433880/donald-trump-ties-to-russia/
T
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In a dramatic moment on the Senate floor Monday afternoon, as the upper chamber rushed a spending bill through to end the government shutdown, the top Republican and Democrat on the Intelligence Committee warned that the bill contains language that would kneecap Congress’s ability to oversee secret covert actions and surveillance programs. Their effort to amend the language was rebuffed.
The intelligence community, in its latest grasp, has gone too far even for Richard Burr. The Republican chair of the Senate Intelligence committee has long been one of the Senate’s staunchest advocates for the intelligence agencies, leading the fight to reauthorize surveillance programs and fighting to bury the results of the Senate’s five-year investigation into CIA torture. But he took to the Senate floor Monday to warn that it would compromise Congress’s ability to oversee secret intelligence programs.
“This language could erode the powers of the authorizing committee,” Burr said. “Effectively, the intelligence community could expend funds as it sees fit without an authorization bill in place and with no statutory direction indicating that an authorization bill for 2018 is forthcoming.”
The provision, first reported by The Intercept, appeared in the House version of the spending bill last week and modified the 70–year-old-law that first chartered the CIA. It removed language that requiring intelligence agencies to spend money according to Congress’s instructions, and replaced it with a provision that allows the agencies to move money around freely and without Congress’s knowledge. Blackwater founder Erik Prince has recently pitched the administration on a private intelligence force that would report directly to President Donald Trump and CIA Director Mike Pompeo.
The move cuts off the Intelligence Committee’s most effective means of oversight, because it allows the intelligence community to repurpose funds in the event that the legislature eliminates funding for a certain program, the senators charged. “If this exemption is granted, you could potentially have an administration, any administration, go off and take on covert activities, for example, with no ability for our committee — which spends the time and has the oversight — to say time out, or to say we actually disagree with that policy,” said Mark Warner, the leading Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee.
https://theintercept.com/2018/01/22/the-top-republican-warns-under-new
-spending-bill-the-intelligence-community-could-expend-funds-as-it-sees-fit/
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
“I wasn't ever taught not to trust anyone. It was a learned behavior.” - 6ixStringJack
http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=62170&mid=10450
61#1045061
Decide who you can trust. Or trust that people you know will fail in predictable ways. I trust that I know exactly how a Republican will fail. Democrats are trickier to predict because sometimes they do not fail. Sometimes there are improvements. Sometimes they do not mislead you and sometimes keep promises that are beneficial.
There is a spectrum between completely untrustworthy and worth-trusting-with-your-life. I know where all Texas Republicans are on that spectrum, while Democrats are spread across it from worst to best. With Democrats, you have to sort the rotten from the good.
Once again, you're only half delusional. How can you believe that one side is ALL BAD? I don't believe that about Democrats. In fact, I agree with a lot of traditional Liberal beliefs. It's the fucking wack jobs and extremists that have co-opted the party and subsequently taken control of it that I'm very wary of. The ones who make no bones about it that I am part of the problem simply because of my color and my gender.
It really must be nice having so much money that you feel that you can vote against your own personal well being. Most of us don't have that luxury.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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