Xeno Writes Out Part 6, Is 4 Links From Posting When Abruptly *Poof* Like Magic, It Disappears

Start:	Oct 19, '08 7:00p
Location:	Hell

...After 2 hours of typing, coding, and pasting an endless horde of links, Chrome took a dump; it of course conveniently reloaded all my tabs when I re-opened it, but my hard work? Gone. And Multiply does not autosave to draft.

WHY DO YOU HATE ME, MULTIPLY?

Sleep Deprivation, Unemployment, And Movies

Rating:	★
Category:	Other

Just so you guys know...

Part 6 of my series on the mortgage has had to undergo some severe rewriting as more corruption has come to light in the last few days.

This has not been helped AT ALL by my persistent sleep deprivation, new-job jitters, and my son becoming obsessed with two movies and watching them - one or the other - over and over.

Sadly, I like BOTH movies; and I just know that after another week of this, I will HATE Little Shop Of Horrors and Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory.

Dammit.

The boy managed somehow to watch Little Shop so many times this week that I can't get the dentist song out of my head, now.

I was writing about Treasury Secretary Paulson earlier, and found myself writing "You'll find a way / To make your natural tendencies pay..."


...Help?

The American Voter

Rating:	★
Category:	Other

Mkay... I'm not a Howard Stern fan, but this was brilliant, and scary as hell.

H/T goes to Glynis for finding this video!

ATTENTION DEMOCRATS!!!

Rating:	★
Category:	Other

Crashing global financial markets is not a cost-effective means of lowering fuel prices.

You still have to drill for more oil, in the places where oil exists.


Today's gas price: $2.65

Path - Apocalyptica

Just in case anyone still exists out there that thinks classical instruments can't be metal, I bring you: Path, by Apocalyptica, also known as three guys with cellos.

Fucking cellos.

Tell me this video's not metal.

A House Built Upon The Sand (The Mortgage Meltdown, Part Five Of Seven)

[* The series as it unfolds:

1. You Unmitigated Bastards
   
2. What The Fuck Are Fannie Mae And Freddie Mac, Anyway?
   
3. Community Organizing
   
4. It's Like A Weed, Man
   
5. A House Built Upon The Sand...
   
6. And Like That House, Down It Goes
   
7. None Of You Is Fit To Lead
   

*]

At first, the effects of ACORN and the ACLU's strong-arm use of the CRA to create thousands of subprime mortgage loans looked good, on paper. Minority home investment went up; overall home investment went up; housing values started to climb.

The first - the VERY first - concrete sign that something was going very wrong came in 1999, from none other, interestingly enough, than a man I've already called out as a criminal: Senator Barack Obama's campaign advisor, Franklin Raines. As CEO of FNMA, Mr. Raines warned in 1999 that the flood of CRA loans was risky, and that the amount of debt FNMA was securing was already greater than its assets, and that assuming even more would be very dangerous.

He was right.

He was ignored, and after months of mounting pressure from HUD and Congress, relented and joined the chorus, apparently resigned to the coming crisis. But history is clear; Raines was the first to really point out the dangers.

Why?

Most likely the major reason Raines wanted to forestall the incredibly risky lending practices at FNMA, was because his hands were in the cookie jar; he was later forced to resign under investigation for fraud, because the entire time he was at FNMA - prior to his role in the Obama campaign - he was busily robbing the public blind, and didn't want to let risky loan practices and overspeculation kill his source of extra income.

The result was a company whose managers engaged in one questionable maneuver after another, including two transactions with investment banking firm Goldman Sachs Group Inc. that improperly pushed $107 million of Fannie Mae earnings into future years. The aim, OFHEO said, was always the same: To shape the company's books, not in response to accepted accounting rules but in a way that made it appear that the company had reached earnings targets, thus triggering the maximum possible payout for executives including Raines, Howard and others.

Note that name? Goldman Sachs? Remember it. It'll come back to haunt us. That notwithstanding, his was the first red flag raised about the CRA loans, and he was ignored.

In fact, the signs had been there all along; they had simply been ignored in the rush to get every non-white person in America a house, whether or not they could afford it.

The Heritage Foundation warned - as far back as 1991 - that

The haunting fear is that if the corporations falter, the taxpayer could end up being forced to bail them out.

Gee, you think?

But the SECOND person to raise a red flag about subprimes was none other than our much-disliked President, George W. Bush. In fact, he proposed an impressive overhaul of the GSEs, including nearly all the features Newt Gingrich would recommend in the National Review seven years later.

That legislation was shot down.

But more than that, it was openly mocked by Representative Barney Frank, who said:

I want to begin by saying that I am glad to consider the legislation, but I do not think we are facing any kind of a crisis. That is, in my view, the two government sponsored enterprises we are talking about here, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, are not in a crisis. We have recently had an accounting problem with Freddie Mac that has led to people being dismissed, as appears to be appropriate. I do not think at this point there is a problem with a threat to the Treasury.

...Good luck with that.

Having been stymied in humiliating fashion, the president turned his attention to the Iraq War, and left the GSEs to Congress. 

In hindsight, that was a huge mistake.

Congress tried its best to ignore it, with a few exceptions. One of those exceptions was Senator John S. McCain. In 2006, he gave a series of - I would call them fiery, except he's 370 years old and it was more like "banked coals" - speeches on the Senate floor, recommending basically all the same changes to the GSE regulations that the President had. He made a lot of political capital out of being a "maverick," and defying - well, someone - about the issue, before quietly letting it drop.

Of course, Senator McCain's hiding a dirty secret, too. His comes in the person of a gentleman named Leland C. Brendsel. Brendsel has been a campaign staffer and advisor to Senator McCain since 1988.

He's still on Senator McCain's staff today.

He's also the same Leland C. Brendsel who - when he was CEO of FHLMC - was removed for fraud, and forced to pay millions of dollars in fines for doing the exact same thing Franklin Raines did.

Senator McCain's campaign manager, Rick Davis, owns a lobbying firm that has been taking $15,000 a month from Freddie Mac since 2005  - shortly before Senator McCain let the issue of GSE regulation drop - and still is.

And let's not forget Senator McCain's campaign co-chairman, Phil Gramm, the man who authored and sponsored the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which eliminated regulations on Credit Default Swaps (remember those?) or Mark Buse, Senator McCain's Senate office chief of staff, who earned $460,000 in 2003 and 2004 from Freddie Mac for lobbying the Senator on their behalf. In fact, TONS of McCain advisors and staffers are lobbyists.

I wasn't kidding when I said that nobody's hands were clean here.

Senators Dodd, Kerry, Clinton, and Obama were the unquestioned leaders in campaign contributions from FNMA and FHLMC, true, but good ol' Maverick McCain received $21,500 from them directly, as well; nowhere near the sums they spent on the Democrats, but still.

Maybe - just maybe - the mess might have been prevented, if the warnings hadn't been ignored.

We'll never know.

But since the ones responsible for causing the mess are the same ones we're relying on to fix it, we'll continue to see corruption as usual from Washington.

[* As promised, here is the information you'll need to contact your Congressional Representatives and Senators about this mess, if you are so inspired. I hope you will. I hope you're furious. I hope you're as furious as I am. I hope you tell them so at great length. Here's the info; enjoy.

U.S. House Of Representatives Member Directory By State

U.S. Senate Member Directory By State

And while I'm at it, the president's email address - I hope he gets a ton of viagra ads - is president@whitehouse.gov, and the Veep is vice_president@whitehouse.gov - so use them wisely and OFTEN. *]

Multiply Photo Importer

Rating:	★★
Category:	Other

Right.

Five stars for being able to import whole albums from other websites.

One star for immediately adding them to my page, open to everyone, regardless of my preferences or desire to pick and choose photos to go into public albums.

Sorry about the inbox spam; I don't normally do that. I had no idea Multiply was going to simply dump all my photos onto the front page without letting me set access, or actually perform any editing at all.

Start my new 15-hour-a-day job. I LOVE OVERTIME!!!

Start:	Oct 16, '08 08:00a
Location:	Lewistown, PA

Starting training at First Quality Baby Products as a machine operator; 15 hour days including the commute, but they pay for the commute!

....Overtime pay, plus I get MORE days off than I get now!