My take is we should remember that it was Fannie Mae who started the whole securitization craze in an insane push for more home ownership and as Peter Schiff put it, “[created] a conflict of interest between the real estate market and mortgage market… [and] has corrupted an industry in which the availability and cost of credit are of central economic importance.” (Crash Proof, pg. 126) And it was that securitization, along with the massive influx of capital made avaible by the Federal Reserve, that were the primary causes of the housing boom and subsequent housing bust. In the end, phasing out these institutions, or at least reducing their role in the economy is the right step to take. Remember, the best way for there to be “affordable housing” is for housing to stay affordable. Fannie’s and Freddie’s incentives for people to take out more loans and drive up housing prices accomplishes the exact opposite.

Dean is right about the public option; it is unpopular and it should be. Obama is now trying to defend it in the courts as a tax even though he denied it was a tax for over a year! A poll by the Progressive Campaign Change Committee found that while people favored the public option 59% to 31%, people opposed the individual mandate without a public option 56% to 33%. According to Rassmussen, a slight majority actually supports health reform now. However, this is after Obama launched a $700,000 ad campaign (taxpayer financed) to “correct the record” after the bill had already been passed. Back in September, 56% of people opposed it.

Rand Paul just cannot catch a break in the media. It all started after his primary victory over Trey Grayson when he told Rachel Maddow he philosophically disagreed with one out of the 10 titles to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, he was pretty much tarred and feathered constantly for an entire week of 24 hour news cycles.

Mortgage debt in the United States (currently more than $10 trillion) has grown to the point that it is nearly the same size as our national debt (in fact, a few years ago, U.S. mortgage debt actually successfully passed our national debt), and it has only been as a result of the new Administration’s debt spending that our national debt has regained the lead in the race to see which can account for the highest amount of our economic debt.

Barack Obama…….4,090,000
Justin Bieber………124,000,000

Yes that’s one hundred twenty four million monthly searches, 3100% more than the president during a major global recession. It shouldn’t be long now…

Today however, the Obama administration is facing lawsuits from 21 states over the mandate. So how do they defend it? Under the taxing powers of Congress of course.

The military draft is indefensible in anything other than an extreme national emergency in which it would be almost certainly unnecessary. The reason it’s indefensible is simple enough, as Russell Kirk said, “the military draft is slavery.” Yes, quite literally, by definition, it’s slavery.

We’ve written before in favor of gay marriage, so I guess I’m happy to see Prop 8 overturned by a federal judge. Unfortunately, we’ve also written in favor of federalism and I see nothing in the Constitution pertaining to marriage. Regardless, I find the progressive “victory” yesterday somewhat ironic. The reason I find it ironic is because although gay marriage is a cause celeb for progressives, assuming the federal ruling holds up, the progressive “victory” was won in a completely anti-democratic way.

H.R. 2454 is a train wreck of corporate welfare that ignores better alternatives and probably dedicates too much of our scarce resources to fighting climate change, but those are aside the point. The point here is that almost a year after the House passed cap-and-trade on April 20th, the massive BP oil leak started. Fortunately, they just capped the leak, hopefully for good, after it had been gushing millions of gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico for 87 days. But the capped leak was and still is being used to push through cap-and-trade.

Now BP was negligent as Krugman points out, but he concludes that Paul’s stance of personal responsibility is only applied to the poor and powerless. Disregarding that BP will be required to pay for this mess, which Rand Paul supports, perhaps, just perhaps, whatever cronyism is involved because 1) policies meant to help the poor often hurt them (see affordable housing, healthcare and college tuitions) and 2) those who are powerful often have closer access to government, thereby the bigger the government, the more money, power and influence they can extort.