So are Fannie and Freddie to blame for the housing crisis?

You bet they are. They were the tool for social engineering instituted by Congress — what was technically known as the Federal Housing Enterprises Financial Safety and Soundness Act.

Ironically, it was this act that turned the market on its head. Under its terms, regulators abandoned common sense underwriting — you remember down payments, good credit, solid income — and substituted the liberal lending that ultimately brought down the housing market

via FOXBusiness.com – The Freddie, Fannie Autopsy.

Are you as frustrated by all of this as I am?  It’s easy to see that these guys were trying to intimidate voters.  The guy who was elected is the guy they were supporting and now they don’t get prosecuted.  Maybe he’s saving them for the next election.

If they force or allow Christopher Coates to testify, the answer is given and this part of the question is put to bed.  Same for Obama’s birth certificate. If there’s nothing to hide then he shouldn’t have any problem producing it just like everyone else out there has to.  This certificate of live birth crap is just that.  It is not accepted by anyone as an actual legal document so why should it be accepted for holding the highest office in the land?  Complete BS!  And what happens in this land of supposed laws?  NOTHING!  How can those in power have so much power without the populace revolting?

For the longest time, the falsely inflating real estate market kept the banks making these loans afloat until the bubble finally burst.  Prices of the real estate they had as collateral collapsed and they couldn’t lend any more money because they didn’t have the assets to back up the loans.

Also remember that the fat cats in DC were getting special mortgage deals themselves from Freddie and Fannie so they had plenty of incentive to keep the cash flowing in their direction.  If the swamp of DC ever was drained like Pelosi falsely claimed she was going to do, a lot of dirty DC’ers would be found in the muck.

Fannie Mae had a loss of $1.2 billion in the second quarter, compared with a loss of $14.8 billion in the same period a year earlier, it said today in a filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission. The Washington-based company posted more than $147 billion in losses in the preceding 11 quarters, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

The Treasury Department seized Fannie Mae and McLean, Virginia-based Freddie Mac, the biggest sources of U.S. mortgage funding, in September of 2008 and has spent $145 billion already to keep them solvent. In April, the Treasury and Department of Housing and Urban Development asked for public comment on how to fix the funding system after the companies’ losses on subprime mortgages pushed them to the brink of collapse.

via Fannie Mae Seeks $1.5 Billion From U.S. Treasury After 12th Straight Loss – Bloomberg.

The rush to recess gives Democrats little time to pass any major laws. That’s why there have been signs in recent weeks that party leaders are planning an ambitious, lame-duck session to muscle through bills in December they don’t want to defend before November. Retiring or defeated members of Congress would then be able to vote for sweeping legislation without any fear of voter retaliation.

Hide your money!  They’re going to get every penny of it they can find come January 2011!

This is just the kind of thing that makes people despise politicians.  They do sneaky stuff like this trying to get their last hurrah before they get their asses kicked out.  If you want real reform, make any legislation passed by lame duck sessions be taken up and voted on without changes by the incoming congress.

You can also look at the sickening presidential pardons like those committed by Clinton as evidence of their lack of respect for the American people they are supposedly representing.

I hope that this will at least lead to some common sense in offshore drilling.  Best case, this should lead to some kind of new technology or advancement in existing technology to prevent similar accidents and set up contingencies for containing gushing spills like this.  I can’t imagine how they’ve been doing all of this drilling without any contingency in place.  I don’t have a clue as to what the problem is at the moment that’s preventing BP from capping the well, but it must be a huge hurdle.  Every day that it goes on, it further damages their credibility.

I also hope that BP will be held responsible for cleanup and damage to livelihoods.  I know that it will be tough to gauge, but it shouldn’t be that difficult to at least know who has been damaged by it.  Look at their income tax filings from last year and determine if they have indeed been making a living from a related business that has been damaged or destroyed.  As for the tourism industry, that’s a different matter altogether.  It will be extremely difficult to gauge who has been damaged and by how much right now.  The past 2 years have been so shaky economically, that you can’t necessarily go back to last year or even the year before and have an accurate measurement of loss.

Now President Obama (I still get nauseous when I say that) has decided that he needs to smack someone around about all of this.  It’s taken him 50 days to determine this?  He’s showing his inexperience again.  He’s relying too much on political hacks because he doesn’t have the executive experience that he needed to be able to handle such a huge job as president.  Don’t get me wrong, I know that it’s not his fault that this happened, but I also don’t blame President Bush.  There are agencies out there that should be monitoring such things and making sure that contingency plans are in place before they allow drilling.  The problem is in his response, or lack thereof.  His only responses so far have been political ones and not of any substance.  What a mess.  So now the question becomes, how do we get him out of office 2 years from now?

Lawmakers want to increase the current 8-cent-a-barrel tax on oil to make sure there is enough money available to respond to oil spills. At least 6 million gallons of crude have spewed into the Gulf of Mexico since a drilling rig exploded April 20 off the Louisiana coast.

President Barack Obama and congressional leaders have said they expect BP to foot the bill for the cleanup.

OK so which is it?  Is BP going to pay for it or is the tax going to be used to pay for the cleanup?  The fact is, the tax increase has nothing to do with the oil spill other than it gives the Obamanation another excuse to raise taxes.

If there’s an oil spill, make those who caused it pay to clean it up.  If they were negligent in causing it, fine them on top of it. End of story. NO NEW TAXES.

Do you really think that the government is going to let that money just sit there unused?  Of course not.  They need it for more vote buying schemes like the healthcare scam.  Just look at how broke social security is.  Why? Because Congress just couldn’t stand to see all that money sitting there waiting for those who paid it in to claim it when they (Congress) could spend it to buy votes.

This past Sunday, in one of the most aggressive and offensive intimidation tactics to date, hundreds of members of the largest union – the SEIU – stormed the front yard of Bank of America deputy general counsel Greg Baer’s home. The angry mob had bullhorns, signs and even broke the law by trespassing to bully Baer’s teenage son, the only one home at the time, who locked himself in the bathroom out of fear.

This is what unions do. They pressure politicians into spending too much. They push government into bad policy decisions. They sacrifice the private sector for the public sector. And now, they trespass and break the law only to scare the children of private citizens to get their way.
If you think the unions are working alone, think again.

Surprised?  You shouldn’t be.

My philosophy, Objectivism, holds that:

1. Reality exists as an objective absolute—facts are facts, independent of man’s feelings, wishes, hopes or fears.
2. Reason (the faculty which identifies and integrates the material provided by man’s senses) is man’s only means of perceiving reality, his only source of knowledge, his only guide to action, and his basic means of survival.
3. Man—every man—is an end in himself, not the means to the ends of others. He must exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself. The pursuit of his own rational self-interest and of his own happiness is the highest moral purpose of his life.
4. The ideal political-economic system is laissez-faire capitalism. It is a system where men deal with one another, not as victims and executioners, nor as masters and slaves, but as traders, by free, voluntary exchange to mutual benefit. It is a system where no man may obtain any values from others by resorting to physical force, and no man may initiate the use of physical force against others. The government acts only as a policeman that protects man’s rights; it uses physical force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use, such as criminals or foreign invaders. In a system of full capitalism, there should be (but, historically, has not yet been) a complete separation of state and economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of state and church.

Deep, huh?  If you read more of her writings, she really pushes the point home that she believed that man’s ultimate state was where he worked for nothing but his own self interest and had no interest in the benefit of others unless it also benefited himself in some way.  This is basically the point of item 3 above.

I don’t pretend to have all of the answers and indeed I don’t have most answers to these types of philosophical questions.  In the end, I think that the point of philosophy is to make you think and consider ideas that, without some other person’s effort, you likely wouldn’t have thought about yourself.  So where does that leave Rand’s work and writings dealing with her philosophy?  I suppose that she had financial gain from putting the effort forth to get her philosophy out there which would have made it worth her while.

In Atlas Shrugged, she goes into great depth of what is morally right.  There are pages upon pages of what I call rants about the looters in government and society who practice item 3 – forcing others to sacrifice themselves for the benefit of the looters in the name of the so called common good.  I absolutely love the book and its basic premise, but don’t fully agree with its philosophy.  For the producers of society to simply vanish and leave the world to collapse upon itself without them is certainly something that they have the right to do.  In fact, as in the book it would be terribly painful to vast numbers of people but do they really have the right to ask the producers to sacrifice themselves for the benefit of others as our government and many other governments around the world force them to do?

The basis of tax systems in place in the United States today is based upon this premise.  Sacrifice your labor, whether it be physical, intellectual or other, for the good of others.  Charity at the point of a gun.

I understand that the government needs money to operate and should have the ability to force its citizens to pay for the basics allowed for in the Constitution.  The problem is that now we are forced to give up our earnings to support programs of someone else’s choosing.  The community organizer president now has a much bigger pot to steal from to redistribute to his buddies.  Guess what… He has his hand in our pockets while holding a gun to our head with the other hand.

My moral system calls for me to help those who need it and I allocate part of my monthly income to doing just that.  On the other hand, liberals believe that the government is the one who should determine how my money is spent, not me.  This is where the whole system begins to stink of socialism.  The members are only there to support the whole and should not feel as though they deserve anything more than those “less fortunate” looters.

I don’t know what set me off on this again, but if you haven’t read Atlas Shrugged it is definitely worth the effort and clocking in at close to 1000 densely packed pages (in my paperback version) it’s definitely one that takes some dedication to finish.  At the end there are some pretty exciting parts and while many things are resolved I was left wishing she had covered more detail of the aftermath.  I guess that’s left to your own imagination.

BEIJING (Reuters) – Senior Chinese military officers have proposed that their country boost defense spending, adjust PLA deployments, and possibly sell some U.S. bonds to punish Washington for its latest round of arms sales to Taiwan.

Oh, but there’s no such thing as too much spending.  What could possibly happen? It’s not like some foreign power could have any influence over us just because we owe them billions of dollars!