We have heard much in the press lately about the American taxpayer being forced to rescue the sharpies on Wall Street from their own greed and irresponsibility. Anti-bailout sentiment cuts “across class lines” on Main Street because “the taxpayers are on the hook for the bad judgment of others,” as the Washington Post put it.

Throughout the years, Fannie and Freddie have come to play a dominant role in the housing market by buying up mortgages and reselling them to investors. With approximately 5 trillion dollars of investment portfolios, Freddie and Fannie owned or guaranteed about 70% of the U.S. mortgage market - these banks have simply become too large to fail.

In my more cynical moments, I think that we Americans deserve what we get from our politicians, many of whom can be generally described as nothing less than loathsome. You say, “Williams, that’s a pretty heavy putdown.” My question to you is how else would you describe these congressmen who are now blaming the financial mess on the failure of the free market? Starting with the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, that was given more teeth during the Clinton administration, Congress started intimidating banks and other financial institutions into making loans, so-called sub-prime loans, to high-risk homebuyers and businesses. The carrot offered was that these high-risk loans would be purchased by the government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Anyone with an ounce of brains would have known that this was a prescription for disaster, but there was a congressional chorus of denial.

As you may have noticed, left-wingers really hate to lose. That’s why, even eight years after the fact, they are still wringing their hands over the 2000 presidential election. They still insist that George W. Bush and the Republicans swiped it, even though several objective sources have since confirmed that, chads or no chads, Bush carried Florida and that Sandra Day O’Connor, otherwise a heroine to leftists, was one of the Supreme Court justices who ruled against Al Gore, the candidate who couldn’t even carry his home state. Which is reason enough all of us should be forever grateful to the voters in Tennessee.

Hundreds of educators have endorsed a letter opposing the “demonization” of Williams Ayers – the domestic terrorist who helped launch Barack Obama’s poliltical career, and whose relationship with the Democratic presidential candidate continues to be major controversy – arguing that frequent reports of his involvement in domestic bombings are “designed to intimidate free thinking and stifle critical dialogue.”

Major broadcast networks ABC, NBC and CBS have decided to help Barack Obama hide his real agenda by refusing to accept advertisements for “The Audacity of Deceit: Barack Obama’s War on American Values,” claims the new book’s author, media expert Brad O’Leary.

The congressional hearings before the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform started today in the Rayburn Building with the usual dose of grandstanding and class warfare. Both were being offered up by the chairman Henry Waxman in abundance.

This idea has been around since 1941 (a big pause because of the WWII problem).  The mush-minds in Sacramento and Salem consider these areas as full of hicks for tax revenues.

Quite simply, the current credit crisis was caused by Democratic interference with the free market. In fact, Democrats hate the free market out of an interest in buying votes from those who don’t profit as much or as easily as they’d like to from it. Accordingly, The Federal Reserve, Fanny Mae, Freddie Mac, The Community Reinvestment Act, and FHA, among many others, all exist to interfere in a huge way with the free market in order to make home buying easier for those whom the free market deems unqualified because of their actuarial inability to pay back their home loans.

The issue of the nation’s financial and economic security is likely to dominate the November 4 election. Earlier in the campaign cycle we might have assumed that foreign affairs and energy would be uppermost on the minds of voters, but we’re told that, ultimately, voters vote their pocketbooks.

My favorite translation of the Bible is the Revised Standard… and second, the American Standard..

...American health care is also much more confusing, impersonal, and expensive than it needs to be. Conflicting opinions from doctors and insurers often strand patients with complex diseases in a medical maze. Many primary-care physicians, frustrated with red tape and puny reimbursements, limit the number of Medicare and Medicaid patients whom they see, or they drop out of the profession altogether. Adding insult to injury, employers and employees face seemingly endless cost increases, with health-insurance premiums rising much faster than inflation or income.

Unfortunately, the future of this country, as well as the fate of the Western world, depends on how many people can be fooled on Election Day, just a few weeks from now.

New York - Say what you will about Geert Wilders – and his critics, not least the Islamic clerics who issue near-daily fatwas commanding his death, have made their views plain – there is no gainsaying that the man has guts. Ever since 2004, when the Dutch politician emerged as one of Europe’s more forthright foes of Islamic fundamentalism, Wilders, 45, has been the subject of considerable obloquy, both in his native Netherlands, where he is scorned by the political elite, and abroad, where he is the target of untold assassination plots. 

More than half of the whopping $426.9 million Barack Obama has raised has come from small donors whose names the Obama campaign won’t disclose.