From the NYT, 9/11/03:

The Bush administration today recommended the most significant regulatory overhaul in the housing finance industry since the savings and loan crisis a decade ago.

Under the plan, disclosed at a Congressional hearing today, a new agency would be created within the Treasury Department to assume supervision of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored companies that are the two largest players in the mortgage lending industry.

The new agency would have the authority, which now rests with Congress, to set one of the two capital-reserve requirements for the companies. It would exercise authority over any new lines of business. And it would determine whether the two are adequately managing the risks of their ballooning portfolios.

The plan is an acknowledgment by the administration that oversight of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — which together have issued more than $1.5 trillion in outstanding debt — is broken. A report by outside investigators in July concluded that Freddie Mac manipulated its accounting to mislead investors, and critics have said Fannie Mae does not adequately hedge against rising interest rates.

”There is a general recognition that the supervisory system for housing-related government-sponsored enterprises neither has the tools, nor the stature, to deal effectively with the current size, complexity and importance of these enterprises,” Treasury Secretary John W. Snow told the House Financial Services Committee in an appearance with Housing Secretary Mel Martinez, who also backed the plan.

Mr. Snow said that Congress should eliminate the power of the president to appoint directors to the companies, a sign that the administration is less concerned about the perks of patronage than it is about the potential political problems associated with any new difficulties arising at the companies….

…”These two entities — Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — are not facing any kind of financial crisis,” said Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee. ”The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.”…

From the Boston Globe:

….As a state senator, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee coauthored an Illinois law creating a new pool of tax credits for developers. As a US senator, he pressed for increased federal subsidies. And as a presidential candidate, he has campaigned on a promise to create an Affordable Housing Trust Fund that could give developers an estimated $500 million a year.

But a Globe review found that thousands of apartments across Chicago that had been built with local, state, and federal subsidies - including several hundred in Obama’s former district - deteriorated so completely that they were no longer habitable.

Grove Parc and several other prominent failures were developed and managed by Obama’s close friends and political supporters. Those people profited from the subsidies even as many of Obama’s constituents suffered. Tenants lost their homes; surrounding neighborhoods were blighted….

….Campaign finance records show that six prominent developers - including Jarrett, Davis, and Rezko - collectively contributed more than $175,000 to Obama’s campaigns over the last decade and raised hundreds of thousands more from other donors. Rezko alone raised at least $200,000, by Obama’s own accounting.

One of those contributors, Cecil Butler, controlled Lawndale Restoration, the largest subsidized complex in Chicago, which was seized by the government in 2006 after city inspectors found more than 1,800 code violations….

Read the whole thing. Pretty incredible this doesn’t get more attention. There’s ample evidence Obama helped some very corrupt people get very wealthy, is there any evidence he ever did anything of note for his poorer constituents?

Tom Wolfe, from Mau-Mauing to the Flak Catchers:

Everybody but the most hopeless lames knew that the only job you wanted out of the poverty program was a job in the program itself. Get on the payroll, that was the idea. Never mind getting some job counseling. You be the job counselor. You be the “neighborhood organizer.” As a job counselor or a neighborhood organizer you stood to make six or seven hundred dollars a month, and you were still your own man. Like if you were a “neighborhood organizer,” all you had to do was go out and get the names and addresses of people in the ghetto who wanted to relate to the services of the poverty center. That was a very flexible arrangement. You were still on the street, and you got paid for it.

Fascists appartchiks at the Supreme Leader’s personal TV network have this to say about our candidates:

• Americans ”don’t understand that (Obama’s) education would enable him to serve them better”
• McCain is a “respectable, humane, honest, and patriotic man.
• Palin “doesn’t have any experience”

Listen carefully to everything this puppet says - is there any idea, any single sentence that wouldn’t sound entirely natural coming from a “mainstream” democrat

I emailed a friend today that the GOP should get Palin to Iraq - visit the troops, give the kind of rousing speech we now know she can deliver, get some photos with her in an army utility uniform.

Actually already sort of happened. Palin visited troops in Kuwait in July 2007.

I mused it might be cool to see her firing a weapon…..yup:

I even wrote it would be cool to get a picture of her with troops and an Alaskan flag….

She might even have been genuinely interested in the troops there - hard to believe this was a VP-prep photo op way back in July 2007.

Important speech: 

…and some good remarks (the previous evening):

NYT website hits for the following searches:

obama and rezko - 4630 Results

palin and daughter - 68,000 Results