REMEMBERING NGUYEN TUONG VAN: ONE YEAR LATER

By Diori Yu

Has it been a year since we and others frantically blogged and pleaded with whomever would listen to spare Van's young life from a Singaporean hanging?

Nancy Pelosi's First Major Defeat

Speaker-elect Pelosi's strong support for war-critic John Murtha to become House Majority Leader was rebuked in a Party caucus vote this morning. Pelosi's long-time rival, Steny Hoyer, was elected to the leadership post instead.

This is a warning shot across the bow from "blue-dog" Democrats to their liberal colleagues: Do not move too Left too quickly.

This turn of events cannot be a good sign for the Botox Lady's leadership of the House of Representatives.

I Told You So...

We correctly predicted the Republicans' defeat in both the House and Senate. See The Fairbank Report's October 28, 2006 entry.

But let's put things into perspective here. Yes, it was a thumping as the President colourfully put it. But this Republican defeat is similar to other mid-year "thumpings." In the 1982 mid-term, Reagan lost 30 seats in the House. And please remember, my benighted colleagues in the MSM, that Bill and Madame Clinton lost a whopping 73 seats in the House in 1994. Now that's getting hammered!

THE GREAT HOUSING BUBBLE BURSTS

What goes up really fast will come down really hard!

November 7, 2006: BUSHWACKED!

By Jonathan Fairbank, Editor-in-Chief, The Fairbank Report

Los Angeles, CA-- About a fortnight before the mid-term Congressional elections, it is now apparent that the Republicans will lose control of the House of Representatives. It has been 12 years since Newt Gingrich brilliantly engineered the Party’s victory of the House. And the Republicans were able to do some significant things. First and foremost, they stopped Bill Clinton from moving to the Left. From 1994 onward, he (and Madame Clinton) had little choice but remained centrist.

Second, the Republicans passed two historic pieces of legislation: welfare reform (which had been sorely needed since 1965) and the 1997 tax relief act, which allows most American homeowners to keep the profits from the sale of their houses tax-free. The latter was a significant contribution to the 1998-2005 housing boom, which resulted in billions of tax-free dollars in Americans’ pocketbooks.

Power over a long period of time, history reminds us, often results in arrogance. And the Republicans of the Class of 1994 were no exception. Under the first six years of the Bush presidency, the Republican-controlled Congress authorized unprecedented amounts of Federal spending on all kinds of questionable programs.

And then there is the problematic issue of illegal immigration. At a time when American men and women are fighting a troublesome two-front “war on terror” in order to defend the Homeland, President Bush and his Republican Congress are actually encouraging a civil invasion from Mexico and Central America. America’s major urban centers are no longer recognizable as America’s own, and about half of the 300 million people who reside in the territorial United States do not speak English!

Los Angeles, Chicago, New York City, San Francisco, Miami, and Houston have virtually become territorial enclaves of the great Republic of Mexico.

All of these developments were actively encouraged by President Bush and the Republican Congress.

Only recently have certain Republicans in the House reacted to the de facto invasion of America. They have pushed through a few robust legislation to defend America’s southern borders (by dragging their reluctant Senate colleagues as well as the President kicking and screaming).

But it’s a bit too little too late. In May, we at the Fairbank Report argued that the Republicans will lose their base of political support because of unfettered Federal spending and illegal immigration and therefore will lose the House (and possibly the Senate) in November. We noted then that conservative thinker Peggy Noonan was of the same opinion.

Now, it’s only a matter of days when the Republicans WILL lose control of the House of Representatives and very likely the Senate too. A gleeful “I told you so” immediately comes to our minds. But the thought of Nancy “Botox” Pelosi as Speaker of the House and Harry “Wimpy” Reed as Senate Majority Leader calls for sobriety, if not outright Parkinsonian convulsions…JF