Try and place the blame where you like, but the simple fact is that these companies were not struggling prior to govt. intervention.

Fannie Mae was created by the Government. I guess you could call that intervention. Dah. You can't blame the governemt for ordering Fannie to do something that they were chartered to do.

Frequently Asked Questions

Fannie Mae's Charter

What is Fannie Mae's charter?
Fannie Mae operates under a federal charter called the Federal National Mortgage Association Charter Act, which confers certain rights and responsibilities on the company. The charter requires that the company increase liquidity in the residential mortgage finance market, promote access to mortgage credit throughout the country and provide assistance to the secondary market for residential mortgages.

Fannie Mae has a special responsibility to facilitate housing for low- and moderate-income families and housing in underserved areas. Fannie Mae's status as a federally-chartered institution also confers certain benefits that help the company fulfill its mission. These benefits include:

1) exclusion from the Securities and Exchange Commission's (SEC) registration requirements*

2) exemption from state and local income taxes

3) the availability of our debt as collateral for public deposits

4) the eligibility of our securities for Federal Reserve open market purchases; and the ability of the U.S. Treasury Department to purchase up to $2.25 billion of our debt

The FHA Administrator chartered Fannie Mae on February 10, 1938.
blah
blah
blah


The Federal Housing Enterprises Financial Safety and Soundness Act of 1992

The Federal Housing Enterprises Financial Safety and Soundness Act ("FHEFSSA") of 1992 modernized the regulatory oversight of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. It created the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight ("OFHEO") as a new regulatory office within HUD with the responsibility to "ensure that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are adequately capitalized and operating safely." OFHEO is funded by assessments on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and is authorized to act without HUD oversight on a range of regulatory issues enumerated in the statute. FHEFSSA established risk-based and minimum capital standards for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. And, it established HUD-imposed housing goals for financing of affordable housing and housing in central cities and other rural and under served areas.




I reiterate, for over 50 years these companies were financially sound, then along came Bill.

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It is not affordable housing, it is welfare housing, plain and simple.
When the high rise welfare housing did not work, they (Democrats) tried using private homes.

Feel free to use after your discretion:












Then there are the usual:

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"I'm trying to maintain a shred of dignity in this world." - Me

I reiterate, for over 50 years these companies were financially sound, then along came Bill.

You mean this ---> Bill... ;)

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It may not be 1984 but George Orwell sure did see the future . . .

The Dark Bailout

A little mashup of the latest batman movie with the Bush tv appearance. Things must be bad when Bush actually addresses the nation he presides over.

I reiterate, for over 50 years these companies were financially sound, then along came Bill.

And now that the gov has taken them back out of the hands of the private sector, they should continue to be sound. The gov isn't as good at shannanigans at the private crooks they call CEOs. I'm talking Freddy & Fanny here only. All the other companies fouled up totally on their own.

Palin and the Truman comparison

BARBARA SHELLY
THE KANSAS CITY STAR

Thanks for the article, Misfit!

The manner in which Sarah Palin came to party is very much like another very popular Republican Governor. He also had a well established reputation as a reformer who refused to play ball with the bosses of his own state party. When the Republican establishment realized that he could not be controlled, his name was put forward as an ideal choice for Vice President in the upcoming election. The prospect of him being on the ticket energized the Republican voters. Following his nomination, he campaigned vigorously for the ticket and helped it to victory. Upon his taking office, the Republican leadership was thrilled because they had found the perfect way to get rid of him.

The year was 1900. The Governor was Theodore Roosevelt.

As we know, the President, William McKinley, was shot and killed the next year and Roosevelt became President.

Sarah Palin is no Theodore Roosevelt.

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Join the PACK!

The Dark Bailout

A little mashup of the latest batman movie with the Bush tv appearance. Things must be bad when Bush actually addresses the nation he presides over.

I reiterate, for over 50 years these companies were financially sound, then along came Bill.

And now that the gov has taken them back out of the hands of the private sector, they should continue to be sound. The gov isn't as good at shannanigans at the private crooks they call CEOs. I'm talking Freddy & Fanny here only. All the other companies fouled up totally on their own.

LAF

yesterday you were bragging about them being created by the govt...now it's a private company?

Make up your mind, lefty.

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Sarah Palin is no Theodore Roosevelt.

But she is better looking.

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me@rescam.org

Time for some campaigning!

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me@rescam.org

Another interview with Sarah Palin

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me@rescam.org

Sarah in a bathing suit at a beauty pagant

I'm waiting for "the video" to surface.

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me@rescam.org

i thought president is elected based on knowledge and political skills,
and it is not beauty contest, but then again you voted bush two times
so i guess it is not either one for usa

How McCain wins on Election Day

WILLIAM KRISTOL
THE NEW YORK TIMES

September 30, 2008

John McCain is on course to lose the presidential election to Barack Obama. Can he turn it around, and surge to victory?

He has a chance. But only if he overrules those of his aides who are trapped by conventional wisdom, huddled in a defensive crouch and overcome by ideological timidity.

The conventional wisdom is that it was a mistake for McCain to come back to Washington last week to engage in the attempt to craft the financial rescue legislation, and that McCain has to move on to a new topic as quickly as possible. As one McCain adviser told The Washington Post, “you've got to get it [the financial crisis] over with and start having a normal campaign.”

Wrong.

McCain's impetuous decision to go to Washington last week was right. The agreement announced early Sunday morning, but defeated yesterday in the House, was better than Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's original proposal, and it was better than the deal the Democrats claimed was close on Thursday. If the the legislation had passed, and assuming it reassured financial markets, McCain would have been able to take some credit.

But the goal shouldn't be to return to “a normal campaign.” For these aren't normal times.

We face a real financial crisis. Usually the candidate of the incumbent's party minimizes the severity of the nation's problems. McCain should break the mold and acknowledge, even emphasize, the crisis. He can explain that dealing with it requires candor and leadership of the sort he's shown in his career. McCain can tell voters we're almost certainly in a recession, and things will likely get worse before they get better.

And McCain can note that the financial crisis isn't going to be solved by any one piece of legislation. There are serious economists, for example, who think we could be on the verge of a huge bank run. Congress may have to act to authorize the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. to provide far greater deposit insurance, and the secretary of the Treasury to protect money market funds. McCain can call for Congress to stand ready to pass such legislation. He can say more generally that in the tough times ahead, we'll need a tough president willing to make tough decisions.

With respect to his campaign, McCain needs to liberate his running mate from the former Bush aides brought in to handle her – aides who seem to have succeeded in importing to the Palin campaign the trademark defensive crouch of the Bush White House. McCain picked Sarah Palin in part because she's a talented politician and communicator. He needs to free her to use her political talents and to communicate in her own voice.

I'm told McCain recently expressed unhappiness with his staff's handling of Palin. On Sunday he dispatched his top aides Steve Schmidt and Rick Davis to join Palin in Philadelphia. They're supposed to liberate Palin to go on the offensive as a combative conservative in the vice presidential debate on Thursday.

That debate is important. McCain took a risk in choosing Palin. If she does poorly, it will reflect badly on his judgment. If she does well, it will be a shot in the arm for his campaign.

In the debate, Palin has to dispatch quickly any queries about herself, and confidently assert that of course she's qualified to be vice president. She should spend her time making the case for McCain and, more important, the case against Obama. As one McCain supporter told me, “Every minute she spends not telling the American people something that makes them less well disposed to Obama is a minute wasted.”

The core case against Obama is pretty simple: he's too liberal. A few months ago I asked one of McCain's aides what aspect of Obama's liberalism they thought they could most effectively exploit. He looked at me as if I were a simpleton, and patiently explained that talking about “conservatism” and “liberalism” was so old-fashioned.

Maybe. But the fact is the only Democrats to win the presidency in the past 40 years – Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton – distanced themselves from liberal orthodoxy. Obama is, by contrast, a garden-variety liberal. He also has radical associates in his past.

The McCain campaign might consider responding by calling attention to Chapter 14 of Obama's eloquent memoir, “Dreams From My Father.” There Obama quotes from the brochure of Wright's church – a passage titled, “A Disavowal of the Pursuit of Middleclassness.”

So when Biden goes on about the middle class on Thursday, Palin might ask Biden when Obama flip-flopped on middleclassness.

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me@rescam.org

John McCain is on course to lose the presidential election to Barack Obama. Can he turn it around, and surge to victory?

Why not? President Bush did it... TWICE! ;)

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It may not be 1984 but George Orwell sure did see the future . . .

Fannie Mae was created by the Government. I guess you could call that intervention. Dah. You can't blame the governemt for ordering Fannie to do something that they were chartered to do.

That's idiotic.

You can blame the gov't for chartering them in the first place. You can blame the gov't for chartering them to do something stupid. And you can blame the gov't for ordering them to do something stupid even if it was their charter to do so.

Intervention in free markets ALWAYS skews people away from what they normally would have done, which means that eventually the costs of the correction will be higher than they otherwise would have been because people did things that they otherwise would not have done.

Creating Fannie and Freddie, chartering them idiotically, rating subprime securities as AAA and implying that they were gov't backed is idiotic.

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Cordially,
Rush

elrushbo2@theobviousgmail.com
Remove the obvious...

Sual Alinsky's legacy from wikipedia
Many important community and labor organizers came from the "Alinsky School," including Ed Chambers and Tom Gaudette. Alinsky formed the Industrial Areas Foundation in 1940. Chambers became its Executive Director after Alinsky died. Since its formation, hundreds of professional community and labor organizers and thousands of community and labor leaders have attended its workshops. Fred Ross, who worked for Alinsky, was the principal mentor for Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta.[7][8] In Hillary Clinton's senior honors thesis at Wellesley College (access to which was restricted after Bill Clinton became President),[9] an analysis of Alinsky's work,[8] Clinton noted that Alinsky's personal efforts were a large part of his method.[10] She later noted that although she agreed with his notion of self-empowernment she disagreed with his assessment that the system could only change from the outside.[10] Alinsky's teachings influenced Barack Obama in his early career as a community organizer on the far South Side of Chicago.[8][10] Working for Gerald Kellman's Developing Communities Project, Obama learned and taught Alinsky's methods for community organizing.[8] Several prominent national leaders have been influenced by Alinsky's teachings,[8] including Ed Chambers,[5]Tom Gaudette, Michael Gecan, Wade Rathke,[11][12], and Patrick Crowley.[13]

Wade Rathke was one of the founders of ACORN.

Dale Rathke, the brother of ACORN's founder Wade Rathke, was found to have embezzled $948,607.50 from the group and affiliated charitable organizations in 1999 and 2000. ACORN executives did not inform the board or law enforcement, but signed an enforceable restitution agreement with the Rathke family to repay the amount of the embezzlement. Wade Rathke stated to the Times that "the decision to keep the matter secret was not made to protect his brother but because word of the embezzlement would have put a “weapon” into the hands of [...] conservatives who object to [ACORN]'s often strident advocacy on behalf of low- and moderate-income families and workers." A whistleblower revealed the fraud in 2008, leading to the departure of both Dale and Wade Rathke.[14]