ARREST THE MEDIA FOR FRAUD

From Orson Scott Card's scathing essay—Would the Last Honest Reporter Please Turn On the Lights? The essay is rather long and thoroughly comprehensive, so please don't neglect to hit the link.

An open letter to the local daily paper—almost every local daily paper in America:

I remember reading All the President's Men and thinking: That's journalism. You do what it takes to get the truth and you lay it before the public, because the public has a right to know.

This housing crisis didn't come out of nowhere. It was not a vague emanation of the evil Bush administration. It was a direct result of the political decision, back in the late 1990s, to loosen the rules of lending so that home loans would be more accessible to poor people. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were authorized to approve risky loans.

What is a risky loan? It's a loan that the recipient is likely not to be able to repay.

The goal of this rule change was to help the poor—which especially would help members of minority groups. But how does it help these people to give them a loan that they can't repay? They get into a house, yes, but when they can't make the payments, they lose the house—along with their credit rating.

They end up worse off than before.

This was completely foreseeable and in fact many people did foresee it. One political party, in Congress and in the executive branch, tried repeatedly to tighten up the rules. The other party blocked every such attempt and tried to loosen them.

Furthermore, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were making political contributions to the very members of Congress who were allowing them to make irresponsible loans. (Though why quasi-federal agencies were allowed to do so baffles me. It's as if the Pentagon were allowed to contribute to the political campaigns of Congressmen who support increasing their budget.)

Isn't there a story here? Doesn't journalism require that you who produce our daily paper tell the truth about who brought us to a position where the only way to keep confidence in our economy was a $700 billion bailout? Aren't you supposed to follow the money and see which politicians were benefitting personally from the deregulation of mortgage lending?

Read it all.

HOMEGROWN ECONOMIC TERRORISM

AND HERE"S A WONDERFUL comment I found on the blogosphere—hell or high water, I hope Georgie Bush and his penchant for ease-dropping ultimately has this all on tape. John McCain needs to stop being coy, suit up, get militant, and proceed in all earnestness in striking at the head of this dragon. Sarah Palin needs to be carrying an AK47 and names need to be named. It is time for resignations and indictments.

Pursuit, punishment, retribution and reform in a post-2008 America—NOW! Of course, the Obama campaign will scream racism. But that's okay. That's what THEY DO. Charming, isn't it? And if Obama wins, there are those who believe chances are he'll do the same, but think Joe Stalin, not Joe Six-Pack. Charming campaign, isn't it?

Need a link to calculate your new post-meltdown federally-negotiated mortgage? Try HERE.

CHRIS DODD AND BARACK OBAMA

Obama and Dodd. Tight as ticks in the Financial Dawg House.

WORKING FROM TOWNHALL.COM, Amanda Carpenter exposes the Democrat connection to the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac fiascos with her compellingpiece—Obama Owns Housing Bubble Crisis. You will recognize the names and the faces. All Democrats. Excepting McCain who in 2005 and 2006, warned of the approaching problem that the housing giants were hiding behind closed doors, protected by influential Democrats in the legislature, including Chris Dodd and Barack Obama.

There may be nothing new under the sun, but there is certainly nothing new in Washington.

Why do I say this? Because Obama now places the blame on McCain, as old Washington power. And yet, incredibly, here are the words of one of Obama's own top financial advisors:

In Bubble-lusions: Why most real-estate agents aren't getting rich, published in Slate on September 23, 2007, the author wrote, if you want to make money off the housing bubble, you'll have to do it the old-fashioned way: Buy a place with a no-money-down mortgage and then flip it.

In A Reality Check For Home Sellers, published in the New York Times that same day, the author wrote of the conflict between economists and real people, and said people who refuse to sell their houses for less than they paid for them are violating a cardinal rule of the market: stuff is worth what it’s worth. It doesn’t matter what you paid for it...

By being hung up about whether your condominium will sell for what you paid for it, you aren’t just driving yourself crazy trying to get a buyer. You may be threatening the very performance of the economy and driving up the unemployment rate—provided that many others behave in a similar way. What is to be done? Well, if you are holding out for an above-market price to recoup your losses, perhaps you would do well to hear the advice that Professor Joe Blow gives his own family members.

"If you want to sell your house then you list it at the market price and you sell it," he said. If you don’t really want to sell then don’t put it on the market. But don’t say you want to sell and then set the price so high that you spend the year cleaning up every morning, having people walk through your living room and look in your medicine cabinets and reject you. That's just painful—and expensive."

Apparently, this flippant economist's carefully nuanced research offers a simple lesson for everyone out there waiting for a high price to push them back into the black: You must be dreaming.

All of the following are written by Obama economic policy adviser Austan Goolsbee, a provocative thinker whose above language will assuredly not show up in any Obama speech anytime soon.