Barney Frank, architect of the housing crisis, has a breathless piece in Politico arguing that Republicans ought to embrace Reagan and learn to apologize for America’s misdeeds. Curiously, though, Frank has never apologized for his own, political and personal.

As his evidence, Frank mentions the inexcusable internment of the Japanese Americans and how Frank allegedly worked with Reagan to give the Japanese-American victims of internment monetary redress.

Frank leaves out, of course, how his party was behind the internment in the first place. He ignores the culpability of fellow progressives like Governor Earl Warren and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who helped to execute that shameful act. Earl Warren’s biographer, G. Edward White, writes that Warren was “the  most visible and effective California public official advocating internment.”

“The Japanese situation as it exists in this state today may well be the Achilles heel of the entire civilian defense effort,” Warren wrote. It was nonsense, but enforced by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who is something of Frank’s ideological hero.

But there is no such thing as a national apology because there is no such thing as collective guilt. There is only individual guilt and individual shame and Barney Frank is shameless.

When will Barney Frank apologize for the role he played in the financial crisis?

Peter Wallison, member of the Federal Crisis Inquiry Commission, notes Frank’s involvement:

Barney Frank was the principal advocate in Congress for using the government’s authority to force lower underwriting standards in the business of housing finance. Although he claims to have tried to reverse course as early as 2003, that was the year he made the oft-quoted remark, “I want to roll the dice a little bit more in this situation toward subsidized housing.” Rather than reversing course, he was pressing on when others were beginning to have doubts.

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For most of his career, Congressman Frank was one of the leaders of the effort in Congress to meet the demands of activists like ACORN for an easing of underwriting standards in order to make home ownership more accessible to more people. It was perhaps a worthwhile goal, but it caused the financial crisis when it was done by lowering mortgage underwriting standards. In the end, it was a colossal policy error by Congress and two presidential administrations.

Indeed in the aftermath of the Great Recession, Frank blamed capitalism, not his meddlesome economic policy, for the economic failures he caused. “This is equivalent to what FDR had to do . . . to save capitalism from its own excesses,” he said.

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UPDATE 2/15 1:32 PM PST: The post has been stealth-corrected.

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UPDATE 11:16 PM PST: Remarkably, this post is still not corrected.

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Earlier today, Philadelphia magazine published an article by Natalie Hope McDonald titled “Coulter Wants to Woo the Gays” in their “Best of the Gayborhood” section.  The article included the following passage:

Andrew Breitbart, however, seems to side with Coulter. As a member of GOProud’s advisory council, Breitbart attended the conference as an openly gay conservative. “The truth is that it is liberals in America who are bent on dividing people, on forcing people into ideological boxes based merely on their race, religion, sex or sexual orientation,” said Breitbart in a press statement. “I applaud GOProud’s strong, principled conservatism and admire their courage to defy the left’s stifling demand for group conformity.”

The article is largely a fair assessment of the circumstances surrounding GOProud’s involvement in CPAC, but it’s inaccurate to say that Andrew Breitbart is “gay,” much less “openly gay.”  While there certainly wouldn’t be anything wrong with that if he were gay, Mr. Breitbart has a wife and four children.

We kindly request they correct the record.

Greg Hengler at Townhall caught this troubling Today show segment where Meredith Vieira celebrates Cheryl Kilodavis, author of My Princess Boy, and her son, Dyson, a five-year-old who dresses up in pink tutus and sparkles:

What’s upsetting about this video is not that there is a boy in America that dresses like a girl and his parents are cool with it, it’s that he’s being encouraged by an American society (i.e the media) gradually losing sight of the Judeo-Christian values on which it was founded; these values are being replaced by the politically correct axiom of acceptance.  Not until the latter half of the 20th century were we foolish enough to consider “acceptance” a value.  There are infinite human tendencies we choose not to accept as a society — we don’t accept people who eat too many carbs or who don’t want to pay for health insurance, much less people inclined to extreme violence or pedophilia.  The idea that we are to practice “acceptance” without considering what it is we are being asked to accept is so poorly thought through, it could only emanate from the left.

As opposed to blindly accepting/cashing in on her son’s behavior, Kilodavis has two perfectly acceptable options to deal with it:

The first, and this one is probably most appealing to more traditional parents, is simply setting boundaries for the child and enforcing them.  The fact that five-year-olds are now calling the shots and essentially raising themselves while the parents simply observe and write children’s books about them is stranger than fiction. (more…)

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In the weeks leading up to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) last week, there was a sidebar skirmish involving two of the CPAC sponsors.  The new gay conservative group, GOProud.org, which was formed in 2009, wanted to make a splash at CPAC and introduce itself to the conservative movement.  But long-time sponsor, Liberty University, would have none of it:

Obviously as an exhibitor or participant, you don’t necessarily have to think that everyone agrees with you, and some people might even work against you [notes Liberty Law School Dean Mat] Staver.  But as a co-sponsor, even though not everybody would have the same mission, not everyone would agree with the same tactics, and some would actually focus on economics whereas others might focus on social issues and others might focus on national defense – the fact is they’re all conservative in nature.  You wouldn’t expect, however, a co-sponsor to actively work to undermine another co-sponsor, and that is in fact what GOProud does.

Liberty dropped, GOProud stayed, and CPAC took some heat.  So coming into CPAC, GOProud knew its presence would be controversial and their members were prepared to address opponents at the exhibit booth.  But last Friday, when a series of student activists spoke at the podium, no one imagined the undercurrent would erupt the way it did.

Alexander McCobin addressed the GOProud/Liberty sponsor issue head-on and praised CPAC for being inclusive and standing up for the principles of freedom and liberty.  McCobin was met with praise and applause for his remarks. (more…)

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For years, the left has informed us that the right is interested in shutting down scientific inquiry.  As President Obama put it:

Our government [under President Bush] has forced what I believe is a false choice between sound science and moral values … [P]romoting science isn’t just about providing resources – it is also about protecting free and open inquiry. It is about letting scientists like those here today do their jobs, free from manipulation or coercion, and listening to what they tell us, even when it’s inconvenient – especially when it’s inconvenient. It is about ensuring that scientific data is never distorted or concealed to serve a political agenda – and that we make scientific decisions based on facts, not ideology.

Of course, the fact is that the left is most interested in curbing science when that science conflicts with political correctness.  From comprehensive sex ed for teenagers (which ignores brain science demonstrating that teens are essentially incapable of regulating risky behavior even when given information about it) to global warming (which apparently causes earthquakes according to vagina expert Eve Ensler) to abortion (in which the actual biological development of fetuses is ignored in favor of niceties about cell clusters) to gay marriage (where leftists idiotically state that men and women are gender constructs), the left is constantly shutting down science in the name of ideology. (more…)