The CRA should be abolished, along with the government-sponsored enterprises that fueled the secondary market for subprimes  under pressure from Clinton, who ordered HUD to set quotas for “affirmative action” lending at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
But powerful Democrats in Washington want to protect the act  along with Fannie and Freddie  and spin the subprime scandal as the result of too little regulation, not too much.
“Repealing or weakening the CRA would be a mistake,” warns Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd, D-Conn., who argues that the CRA should be strengthened.
Dodd, the top recipient of Fannie donations and himself a beneficiary of a sweetheart mortgage brokered by a subprime lender, recently invited one of Clinton’s top enforcers of the CRA to testify.
“The notion that CRA has caused this problem is a pernicious thought,” said former Comptroller of the Currency Gene Ludwig. “These are not truthful statements. The CRA has helped to create a better and sounder world for finance, not the opposite.”
Dead wrong. But the mainstream media believe it, and have attacked those, including this paper, who dare to tell the truth about the crisis. Already the debacle has erased $13 trillion in wealth, while putting taxpayers on the hook for up to $8 trillion in bailouts.
Abolished? Couldn’t we just send it to Hyde Park and give it a university job?
(h/t Insty)
“Already the debacle has erased $13 trillion in wealth, while putting taxpayers on the hook for up to $8 trillion in bailouts.”
I think we need to roll the dice a little more. Go from erasing wealth to spreading it.
~ “Take your stinking paws off me, you damn dirty Apes.”
– FMC’s Thanksgiving Weekend of Channel of The Apes
The CRA has helped to create a better and sounder world for finance
Because getting people to buy homes they couldn’t afford is never risky or speculative.
And the sucker citizen with the old-fashioned social mores that made sure s/he could afford his/her mortgage payment and services it still, will NOT be rewarded with reduced principal/interest on their house, but the neighbor who bought three houses to flip, a boat, a couple of jet skis, went on lavish vacations all on money generated by easy “equity” money will walk away from the debt, get a sweetheart deal to save the primary residence and, in a few years, be eligible to start all over again — all to the expense of sucker taxpayer who will be in an upside-down mortgage for years because his/her sound judgment is “rewarded” with nothing, nada, zilch.
Of course, any criticism of the CRA and dramatically lowered standards at Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac that led to the current mess is automatically labeled RACIST!, even though the vast majority of the people Darleen describes are non-Hispanic whites.
Eight years into the Bush pesidency and you guys are still trying find something to blame on Bill Clinton.
Talk about desperation.
Yeah! This was all due to Reagan’s deregulation anyway!
What exactly is the mechanism by which one blames Bush? What were the missing regulations exactly? The only Bush ones I read about were because Europe was moving ahead with some sketchy leveraging standards and we felt we needed to follow to stay competitive and they wouldn’t have been so sketchy if people paid their bills. The people who were part of the problem know who they are and a lot of them are at Freddie and Fannie and the rest of them are perusing Apartment Finder.
How does Dodd have any credibility on this?
It was only not long ago that Texas even allowed home equity loans. So that was a state choice thinger. I remember voting against it maybe or I just thought allowing home equity loans was stupid cause that’s not what houses are for and I wasn’t supportive. This is because in my thinking when you have a roof over your head you are Ahead Of The Game.
Because there are lots of blockhead “parsnips” in the Media hive.
A combination of ignorance, hatred, and amorality.
Comment by parsnip on 11/30 @ 11:06 am
Yeah, cuz Barney Frank, Maxine Waters, Franklin Raines, Chris Dodd, et al …. BUSHIES, each and every one of ’em.
The idea of flushing the CRA tickles me. It’ll be an uphill battle, though.
To kill the CRA, it’ll take a concerted, devoted effort by America’s remaining, scattered capitalists. That means Clintonista-DLC’ers, Blue-Dog Dem’s, pragmatic libertarians and pro-business media will all have to work together with Mitch McConnell’s Republican caucus to make it happen.
Also, conservative punditry has made it even more difficult. I mean, after dissing Republican state governors like Sarah Palin, will the Brooks/Frum wing of the conservative movement ever stoop to working with “snowbilly trailer trash” towards a common goal?
The IBD op/ed board? They have a lot of credibility. Talk about wingered emptyheaders.
Here comes the Sarah Palin dumb call.. “A-Duuuuuuuh!” How will white trash Sarah-redumblicans get a home loan if not for the CRA?
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac weren’t even major players in the sub-prime markets, “A-Duuuuuuuh!”
Stop it thor! Your facts are burning our eyes!
Stop it thor! Your facts are burning our eyes!
Facts? ROFL!
Kicked to the floor by the electorate, is more like it.
Trolls, be happy. Your guy won. It’s time to move on and find some meaning in your lives besides hanging out on sites you apparently don’t like and insulting people in the comments. That is, if you can find any other meaning in your lives. I remain skeptical.
Think about it…this country just elected Barry Obammie largely in part because the idiots thought he would be the one that could dig us out of this financial mess…when in reality his actions as a community organizer actually predicated the situation.
Ironical…no?
I’m conflicted. Bahney Fwank should be in prison, but I think he would enjoy it way too much.
Thor’s right, we can just vote ourselves rich from here on out. We can also vote ourselves beautiful, thin, multilingual and good at Trivial Pursuit. There’s no such thing as stupid legislation if it’s painted in high-minded terms.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac weren’t even major players in the sub-prime markets, “A-Duuuuuuuh!â€Â
Were they players at all, thor?
Salt Lick – Pay no attention to thor on this topic. He is flat out wrong.
This is the result of McCain’s bungling of the first debate. He had the chance to lay out the democrat’s fault in this financial crisis but true to form he just went after wall street rather than the main culprits. By the time he tried to pin some blame on the democrats in the third debate it was too late and looked like he was just trying to salvage a losing position. Pres Bush too takes some blame here as he also failed to use what was left of his bully pulpit to communicate the real reasons for the disaster, but he at least knew that he had to go hat in hand to the democrats in Congress and putting the blame on them was not likely to get him seven hundred fifty billion taxpayer dollars. Whereas the dems in congress and in the media knew they could pin this on Bush without him being able to fire back and by the time anyone of influence could fire back it would be too late. The narrative would be set in stone by then.
So, maya, exactly how destructive does the CRA have to be before you’ll countenance its repeal? If it only annihilates $1 trillion in wealth every decade or so, do we leave it in place so certain constituencies are given unwarranted access to capital?
sorry…”meya”
“If it only annihilates $1 trillion in wealth every decade or so, do we leave it in place so certain constituencies are given unwarranted access to capital?”
Depends how serious that trillion was to begin with. Its looking like there was a big shitpile being leveraged, making who knows how many billions or trillions that shouldn’t have been. Now we’re falling and having serious liquidity problems figuring out who is going to be holding that shitpile. The CRA had nothing to do with that leverage. You can tell that, because its not CRA loans and mortgage holders getting bailed out. Its people much higher in the food chain who weren’t really forced to do what they were doing. What would thomas jefferson do? Probably die in debt and have the farm sold off.
Dennis Miller on O’Reilly, yeah, heard Dennis say that and laugh.
No, fagbreath (still trying to match your witty affront from the other thread), you’re 100% fuckin’ wrong. Derivative securities held by banks is the major problem, marking-to-market those non-existent values, specifically, and not a few sub-prime loans given out to app-lying white people who speculated in the real estate market, app.s for mortgages that no bank or mortgage company should have accepted, but they did, for the fees.
Hey, deregulation-baby! Nobody is looking! Income as stated! And the developer is offering a kick-back for a downpayment! Can’t lose! Real estate is red hot!
You can pretty much cut-and-paste that into any thread thor comments in.
Dude, given the history of the “Great Society” and “New Deal”, you feel the need to ask that? No liberal program is a failure, regardless of the level of destruction it brings. It just wasn’t big enough.
Depends how serious that trillion was to begin with. Its looking like there was a big shitpile being leveraged, making who knows how many billions or trillions that shouldn’t have been. Now we’re falling and having serious liquidity problems figuring out who is going to be holding that shitpile. The CRA had nothing to do with that leverage.
By definition, when people who don’t have any liquid assets are buying homes, there is going to be leverage. In a lot of cases, there will be little there but leverage. Couple that with an artificially low interest rate courtesy of the Fed, and you’ve got the seeds of a mighty big bubble in real estate. Who happens to be getting bailed out as a result has no bearing on what the causes were, and the CRA was definitely one of the causes.
Hey, deregulation-baby! Nobody is looking! Income as stated! And the developer is offering a kick-back for a downpayment! Can’t lose! Real estate is red hot!
Which regulations were repealed that made this situation come about, Thor? Specifically.
You’re expecting an answer?
Thor, the derivative market certainly was a factor. There was no other way to back the securities that were created to justify the absurdity of the investments than to con investor morons. But the aftermarket was created to justify the anti-redlining policies.
You’re expecting an answer?
I’m expecting a response. “Answer” might be a bridge too far. I just want to know which regulations were “de”‘d that allowed the actions Thor puts forth.
Never Happen. Acorn depends on CRA for funding.
In other words, teh full faith and credit of teh dishonest on teh behalf of teh gullible was used to beguile teh stupid.
Those getting bailed out were the cause. Too many banks leveraged themselves without proper risk management. The proof is that those banks that incorporated the best portfolio risk management don’t need to be bailed out.
The Fed, Greenspan in particular, had too much confidence in the banks’ management, but those are his own words so don’t blame me for not going along with the low-information politics-is-all-I-know harpies. Office of Thrift Supervision, they sucked eggs as well.
If one was making the point that the CRA is/was applying politics to banking where it should be merely overseeing non-discriminatory lending practices, I’d agree. If you drag your knuckles and wag your tail while repeating fables of who owns the risk management mistakes, and itzonleeez dah demwoocwats then any intelligent person should/would backhand that nonsense. Children do like a good fairy tale come bedtime, that’s all that says.
All you’ll get is abuse. It’s all he ever “contributes”.
See? He proved my point before I could even state it.
Thor’s worthless. He’s not even as useful as shit, because shit can fertilize plants.
Those getting bailed out were the cause. Too many banks leveraged themselves without proper risk management. The proof is that those banks that incorporated the best portfolio risk management don’t need to be bailed out.
So were these unbailed-out banks operating under a different set of regulations, ones that were not repealed?
I do wonder if thor comes around here because if he were to act like this in person, he’d have long ago become a regular at the local emergency room.
Who the fuck was it that stood up for thor? Why?
Let’s face it Rob,
This latest “blame the Democrats so we never have to admit we’re wrong” fantasy manufactured for consumption only by the Radical Right is all kinds of stupid.
If there was a point and laugh emote we wouldn’t have to type anything.
On the plus side, it means the Republicans have already written off 2012.
The cap amount FNMA could accept as sub-prime was one. They increased the cap amount and that only resulted in FNMA’s exposure to sub-prime increasing, which wasn’t the original logic behind the cap increase.
The problem with this debate is I’ve already posted my thoughts. Doing so over and over takes too long. Much of the aggressive lending was originally initiated in California and elsewhere where the ratio of incomes to median home price far surpassed national levels. To keep the fun going and home values upward, mortgage lenders created new lending products that required less and less equity upfront from the buyer. Once those products became accepted and incorporated into banks normal lending lines, then, as the another poster mentioned earlier, all that was needed was for Greenspan to drop the Fed Funds rate to near zero and the climate was ripe for a leverage-fueled real estate boom nationwide.
That has precisely zero to do with the bill of particulars posted in #29, Thor. Here’s your indictment:
No, fagbreath (still trying to match your witty affront from the other thread), you’re 100% fuckin’ wrong. Derivative securities held by banks is the major problem, marking-to-market those non-existent values, specifically, and not a few sub-prime loans given out to app-lying white people who speculated in the real estate market, app.s for mortgages that no bank or mortgage company should have accepted, but they did, for the fees.
But since you brought it up, who ran interference for Fannie for years and who was trying to rein them in?
Duuuuuuuh Squadron leader calling for others to gather round in formation.
Rob wants to turn this thread into an insult-o-rama, because that’s all he’s good for, the u-poo-poo-head fling. Right hick-Robbie, now’s the time to put your headgear on.
How about the “douchnozzle!” bark. That’s almost as good as the “fuckwit!” howl.
Wasn’t John McCain’s campaign manager named Rick Schmidt? Republicans like him, that’s who ran cover, and George Bush, if one were being honest. Were their plenty of Dem.s as well, why yes, yes there were.
But that was always the problem with setting a corporate entity that would, and eventually did, have the implicit backing of the Fed.
FNMA would say they were acting in the best interests of their shareholders if you called them out on their lobbying. They’d play both sides of the fence like no other qausi-gov’t agency could.
In FNMA’s defense, most of their ultimate equity evaporation was due to a historic market decline in real estate prices, in other words they were built to survive a 6.5 earthquake and not a 8.0 scale one.
nope
Steve, yep.
A good weedumblican loser lobbyist.
uh, thor, I think you mean, Rick Davis. it appears Steve Schmidt only helps people campaign.
and Schmidt was a campaign advisor, not manager. That, again, was Rick Davis.
Any minute now, thor will make another of his wonderful comments that involve guttural noises intended to insult the intelligence of the people who have — once again — corrected him on the facts.
I stand corrected. Rick Davis was one of many redumblicans hired to lobby for FNMA. Rick Smits played center/power forward for the Indiana Pacers, so many similar names I confuse.
The lack of hard logic and reality is the redumblicans greatest shortfall at this time. All their easy to remember slogans have gone poof.
No, Barney Frank didn’t help the situation at FNMA. But if he is partially to blame then by the same logic the redumblicans who sat in his chair before him are even more responsible for FNMA’s collapse.
You wouldn’t know a fact if you were suckin’ one.
You’re a rejected dejected hick.
oink oink
The trolling appears to be rabid today. I get trollhammered posts one after the other, with nothing in between. Whatevs.
Eventually, PW’s comments section will be nothing but (TrollHammered).
“No, Barney Frank didn’t help the situation at FNMA. But if he is partially to blame then by the same logic the redumblicans who sat in his chair before him are even more responsible for FNMA’s collapse.”
Funny…I don’t seem to recall that any of the Republican House Financial Services Committee chairmen were getting their pudgy asses poundedby an assistant Fannie Mae director at the time they were supposed to be overseeing the GSE that the ass-pounder worked for.
Bahney Fwank is often overheard saying that his asshole is really “thor”
So Republicans are responsible because they weren’t able to push through the legislation the Democrats blocked and claimed was unnecessary?
It is true! Being a Democrat means never having to take responsibility! You can make decisions that will lead to disaster, block any attempt to head off that disaster, and then blame everyone else when the disaster happens!
Eventually, PW’s comments section will be nothing but (TrollHammered).
It beats having the pusillanimous pussboi’s puerile preachings excreted all over the blog, though.
Stay off the guy’s property. What’s so hard about that?
meya, the essential problem is that CRA had no language that “mandated loans” to anyone. What it did do is state that if you are a member of an official government “victim group”, you can file complaints / lawsuits / challenges to business activities, and the government will a) help you do it and b) make the lender prove it’s innocence rather than be proven guilty. Oh, and classifying a lot of the actions as civil meant that the standards of proof were even lower.
Barak Obama, ACORN, Jesse Jackson, La Raza, and every other poverty pimp in this country took this and filed lawsuits, blocked bank lobbies, etc. It soon became obvious that denying a $100k loan was guaranteed to incur $400k in legal bills… so loans that shouldn’t have been made went through. Oh, and of course, if you had all these complaints against you, you obviously weren’t fit to do business with anything so pristine as government. No contracts for you!
“But there aren’t that many minorities!” By which standard? Under the new “one drop” rule, Ward Churchill is just as Native American as Sitting Bull. And unless you recruit loan officers with 100% gaydar, California expects that “minority” to have a place at the trough too. Credit history and verified income were good standards; these, no.
“Then they can get out of the lending business!” True, and that’s what I would have done. The problem was, they couldn’t just get out of the mortgage business; they were told by the regulators that if they stopped serving these underserved areas, they wouldn’t be allowed to service anyone else in any area.
Bottom line, if you can’t have standards that apply to everyone, you can’t have standards for anyone.
So here are lenders with all these “loans” on the books. Technically, these are “liabilities” balanced out by the “assets” of future repayment and collateral. What they really are is black holes into which money has been poured. And more money has to be poured to try and collect. So they do what businesses do with bad debts: they sold off the right to collect to a business that does collections full time, got back a percentage of the cash, and went on. As long as home prices continued to rise, this looked like a good deal; after all, the house could be seized and sold for enough to make back most of the money… until it couldn’t.
There’s more details, but that’s essentially why CRA was a bad idea.
FNMA would say they were acting in the best interests of their shareholders if you called them out on their lobbying. They’d play both sides of the fence like no other qausi-gov’t agency could.
I don’t blame Fannie Mae for lobbying in what they believed was their interest (of course, events have shown it was most decidedly not in the shareholders’ interest, but in the interest of the well-connected Democrat executives), but those in Congress that acted in a similar capacity while charged with the duty of protecting the American taxpayer and banking system. And while there were doubtless some Republicans that joined in the defense, please don’t insult both out intelligences by claiming it was anyone but Democrats that led the charge to make sure no one derailed Frank Raines’ gravy train.
And I’ll take your non-addressing of your baseless assertions of #29 as a concession.
In FNMA’s defense, most of their ultimate equity evaporation was due to a historic market decline in real estate prices, in other words they were built to survive a 6.5 earthquake and not a 8.0 scale one.
Normal banks are built to withstand a 6.5. Fannie’s reduced capital requirements (just to mention one special regulatory exception they had) assured that the slightest temblor would bring down the rickety edifice. They were also instrumental in creating the earthquake, aka the housing bubble, that destroyed them.
Barak Obama, ACORN, Jesse Jackson, La Raza, and every other poverty pimp in this country took this and filed lawsuits, blocked bank lobbies, etc. It soon became obvious that denying a $100k loan was guaranteed to incur $400k in legal bills… so loans that shouldn’t have been made went through. Oh, and of course, if you had all these complaints against you, you obviously weren’t fit to do business with anything so pristine as government. No contracts for you!
Oh, so true. I had a BIL who was VP of HR at a large regional bank and he used to regale us with horror stories of the OFCC. The bank was required to do any number of stupid things, including opening branches in minority areas that continually lost money and were robbed on a regular basis. The most vivid story was about one audit where they were told that, though the OFCC couldn’t prove they were discriminating, they knew it anyway. The bank was then commanded to construct a rigid algorithm for their past years’ hiring, against which each and every hiring was compared and the bank fined for outliers.
“You wouldn’t know a fact if you were suckin’ one.
You’re a rejected dejected hick.”
That’s big talk coming from a child molesting fantasist.
They say Larry Craig used to have a special hand signal whenever he’d sit a FNMA’s offices’ bathroom wanting to give a Fred Schwartz quickie to a minority.
Speaking of Larry Craig, look who showed up, PW’s suckle-beggar himself.
That’s big talk coming from a child fellating fantasist.
The drunk at the end of the bar seems especially agitated this evening… somebody send him another, maybe he’ll pass out.
His life has no meaning except for the pathetic attempts at relevance he makes here.
“That’s big talk coming from a child fellating fantasist.”
Don’t look at me, you pederast. When you kidnap small children on the street, do you offer them a lollipop first?
Because it’s not really about stopping baseless discrimination, but rather about exacting revenge. There was a local case where an “affordable housing” organization was defrauded enough that authorities took notice; one of the suspects made a statement to the effect that “white people have been stealing from us for so long, we were just getting some for ourselves”.
How clever you are, my dear. You never mean a single word you say.
Sure wish I’d said that.
You will.
Your mastery of anecdotal data is impressive, Rob.
Too bad it’s a worthless skill in the reality-based world we’re all living in now.
“Comment by parsnip on 11/30 @ 7:06 pm #
Your mastery of anecdotal data is impressive, Rob.
Too bad it’s a worthless skill in the reality-based world we’re all living in now.”
Please–your world is reality-based the same way Kraft singles are cheese-based.
On a more serious note, the fundamental problem isn’t necessarily the CRA, it was the government’s notice to banks and lenders that any bad loans would be taken over by Fannie and Freddie. The NYT pointed out back in 1999 that this policy would work fine if the economy stayed strong, but that problems could emerge if there was a serious downturn. It should have been obvious to everyone that when the government says “You don’t have to be responsible, we’ll take care of it,” that this was going to go sour eventually. The problem wasn’t “de-regulation” despite the bleatings of the left, it was BAD regulation and could have been avoided by keeping the goddamn government out of the market in the first place–which a modification of the CRA could have easily fixed.
The Republicans bear some of the responsibility for not rejecting the “compassionate conservatism” nonsense and focusing on porking up their districts, but the fact of the matter is that both Bush and McCain were trying to sound alarms on this before the meltdown and Dems like Frank and Dodd stonewalled any efforts at oversight. The fact that Frank’s ex-boyfriend was on Fannie’s board during the 90s should have raised all kinds of alarm bells on this, and it’s one of the more egregious examples of how worthless the media is that they didn’t grill him on this and shame him into resigning over such a clear conflict of interest. Every other attempt to reform this stupidity before it went tits-up was greeted by obfuscation and implications of racism–fortunately, YouTube has the video for all to see for any leftist who is foolish enough to think that the Dems don’t have their fingerprints all over it.
This is a classic example of why this Congress has approval ratings that are making Nixon look like a rock star with a Number One record–it’s not just the fact that they fucked up and can’t man up and admit it, it’s that they don’t want to take ANY responsibility for this at all, even when the video evidence is right there for everyone to see.
When even Billy Jeff Bentpecker blames the Democrats for not reining in the GSE’s you know there is just a heaping pile of shit they just don’t want to talk about. The rape and pillage of Fannie and Freddiw would have resulted in prison terms had they been true private companies and likely required testimony from many senior legislators.
Meanwhile thor can continue ignoring inconvenient evidence and bark at whatever it is he thinks he is barking at. Just because he can! This is America after all, not Daily Kos. I hope he doesn’t think people believe anything he says, ’cause that would be sad.
CRA guidelines strong arm banks to make high risk loans. High risk loans are loans that are unlikely to be paid back. The government puts banks and borrowers in jeopardy and hurts those their social engineering aims to help. The CRA make no sense.
It’s quite amazing how many Democrats seem to have cycled through high-ranking positions at Fannie and Freddie, and taken home quite a huge chunk of money in the process.
XVIII: No person who holds, or has in the past held, elective or appointive office of the United States, or any non-military post requiring confirmation by the Congress, during the one hundred twelfth Congress, may again be elected, appointed, or confirmed to any office of trust or benefit of the United States; and no person may be elected, appointed, or confirmed to any office of trust or benefit of the United States, if the term of such office would result in that person serving more than twelve years in offices of trust or benefit of the United States.
Regards,
Ric
[It’s a draft. Comments welcome]
The “Contract with America” shtick has been tried before, Ric.
Fool me once, shame on you…
We already knew your reading comprehension was nil, alphie. No need to demonstrate.
Regards,
Ric
#81 Ric Need to figure out a way to exempt the judiciary.
CRA guidelines strong arm banks to make high risk loans. High risk loans are loans that are unlikely to be paid back.
Putting aside what caused the present crisis, does anyone disagree with the above?
#84 Randy: Federal judicial terms are “during good behavior”. The proposed amendment says you can’t take office again. If the term doesn’t end, they stay.
Regards,
Ric
That would be acceptable to me, Ric, although I prefer something more along the lines of this:
“Neilette: ‘We put all our politicians in prison as soon as they’re elected. Don’t you?’
Rincewind: ‘Why?’
Neilette: ‘It saves time.’ ”
Terry Pratchett– The Last Continent (1998)
I like to check out Protein Wisdom every once in a whole for a laugh. Pinning the current financial meltdown on the CRA and the Clintons, that’s just about par for the course. A control+F of these comments finds nary a mention of a CDO or a credit-default swap.. Brilliant.On top of that, the front page is occupied with a few posts about a Wal-Mart trampling, one about some hippies in Denmark, and another about a company in Chicago that did something wonderful for their employees followed by a non sequitur about how the nasty Left would not approve. In other words, the main issues of the day. Keeping the cocoon warm, which is great news for John McCain.
Being a troll was never more fun!
uh, PETE, most trolls, troll the active comments. not ramble six hours after the last comment on a day old post. but keep up the good “work”.
I’ll bet every once in a whole PETE just laughs out loud for no apparent reason, and the rest of the people on the bus all scoot one seat further away.
#88
Uh. Since you’re in the mood to ‘check stuff out’, the election’s over. Check it out.
i am a liberal conservative and i think that a closer look should be taken. I’m not so sure at this point, but if it is, i sure hope to be here for that if it must be. I can’t belive i am the only sane space alien creature left on earth. All this time i was sure they were there.
I can be located at http://dirty-net.blogspot.com
Looks like a couple of blogs worthy of thor’s talents, right there.