Free Republic

Civil Rights: The Supreme Court has given the White House license to water down, if not destroy, virtually every standard dealing with housing. There's nothing stopping its push for affirmative-action lending and zoning. In a shocking 5-4 decision, the high bench ruled that housing- and lending-discrimination lawsuits based on no proof other than statistics showing different outcomes by minority groups are within the bounds of civil-rights law. It agreed with housing-rights zealots that zoning and underwriting policies that have a harmful effect — or disparate impact — on minorities are illegal, even if that harm is unintentional. Sometime-conservative Anthony Kennedy...

Remember when Barney Frank insisted in 2003 that “Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are not in a crisis,” and “I want to roll the dice a little bit more in this situation toward subsidized housing?”As chairman of the powerful House Financial Services Committee, former Rep. Frank, Massachusetts Democrat, helped defeat Bush administration proposals to rein in the two federal loan giants. The housing market crashed in 2008 on thousands of bad subprime home loans, triggering the Great Recession, from which this nation still has not recovered.Well, it’s time to roll the dice again. According to the 5-4 majority opinion at...

US Senate Candidate Richard Blumenthal today held a press conference, to defend himself against a New York Times article citing a video in which Blumehthal says he served in Vietnam. Blumenthal served in the Marine Reserves during Vietnam, but not in Vietnam. "On a few occaisions I have misspoken about my service, I take full responsibility," Blumenthal said.

BEIJING (AFP) — China warned on Saturday it would step up a controversial "re-education" campaign for Tibetans after a fresh protest showed a huge security crackdown had failed to extinguish nearly one month of unrest. The statement in the state-run Tibet Daily newspaper called for Buddhist monks to become Chinese patriots, but activist groups said the heavy-handed techniques already employed in the campaign were inflaming tensions. Efforts by authorities to "re-educate" monks at a monastery in Sichuan province in southwest China led to protests there on Thursday in which at least eight Tibetans were killed, the activist groups said. China's...