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VIENNA, Virginia (CNN) -- The acting chief financial officer of mortgage finance giant Freddie Mac was found dead Wednesday morning at his home, police said. David Kellermann, acting CFO of Freddie Mac, was found dead at his home on Wednesday, police said. David Kellermann's death "may have been an apparent suicide," said Lucy Caldwell, a spokeswoman for police in Fairfax County, Virginia. She said there were no signs of foul play when officers arrived at the home in Vienna shortly before 5 a.m.

The acting head of Freddie Mac, David Kellermann, has apparently committed suicide, Fairfax County Police tell WTOP. Fairfax County Police spokeswoman Mary Anne Jennings says Kellermann, 41, was found at his Hunter Mill Estates home Wednesday morning. Jennings says police responded to the home after family members called police around 5 a.m. "We were called from inside the house to come investigate an apparent suicide," Jennings says. Because of legal ramifications, Jennings says she can't describe the nature of the suicide. "We're not to give you details of the condition of the body, except to say it was an apparent...

The number of American households threatened with losing their homes grew 24 percent in the first three months of this year and is poised to rise further as major lenders restart foreclosures after a temporary break, according to data released Thursday. The big unknown for the coming months, however, is President Barack Obama's plan to help up to 9 million borrowers avoid foreclosure through refinanced mortgages or modified loans. The Obama administration expects its plans to make a big dent in the foreclosure crisis. But it remains to be seen whether the lending industry will fully embrace it, despite $75...

Barney Frank wants credit for putting out a fire that he helped to start. President Obama has declared an era of responsibility. But to Democrats responsibility means blaming Republicans for everything that goes wrong. Aside from the President himself, perhaps no Democrat is more eager to lay blame at the doorstep of conservatives than Barney Frank, Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee. I bore witness to Frank's song and dance routine during a talk he recently gave at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. A video of the forum can be found here. (http://www.hks.harvard.edu/news-events/news/articles/forum-frank-apr09) It is worth...

Bill Haling: Where’s the outrage? President Obama has been in office just 60 days and we have tripled the nation’s debt. Wow! All those that voted for change certainly got it — along with the rest of the taxpayers. Everyone knows this depression is Bush’s fault. “Give the stimulus time!” is the response. The Bush depression will take time for the Democrats to rescue this country. How long will it take for our children and grandchildren to pay for the excesses? Any outrage? The news of AIG paying $165 million in executive bonuses has certainly created a lot of media...

Bob Secter and Andrew Zajac of the Chicago Tribune report that, while researching what went at Freddie Mac during the period White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel served on the government sponsored enterprise’s board of directors, they were unable to get minutes of board meetings and other information: The Obama administration rejected a Tribune request under the Freedom of Information Act to review Freddie Mac board minutes and correspondence during Emanuel’s time as a director. The documents, obtained by Falcon for his investigation, were “commercial information” exempt from disclosure, according to a lawyer for the Federal Housing Finance Agency....

Yesterday, we learned from the Chicago Tribune that Freddie Mac documents are not subject to the Freedom of Information Act because they contain or might compromise commercial information–that is, the proprietary insider information of a private company. Today, in the Washington Post, we learn that that private company was pressured to withhold negative information it was obligated to disclose under SEC rules. It seems that following government policy will adversely affect its bottom line, and the firm wanted to tell its remaining shareholders that. Federal officials who took over Freddie Mac stopped short of nationalizing the company, leaving it partly...

Steve Doocy discusses with Dan Gainor.

EXCERPT Rahm Emanuel was director when Freddie Mac board was tipped to a fraudulent bonus scheme. On Rahm Emanuel's watch, the Freddie Mac board was told by executives of a plan to use accounting tricks to mislead shareholders about outsize profits the government-chartered firm was then reaping from risky investments. The goal was to push earnings onto the books in future years, ensuring that Freddie Mac would appear profitable on paper for years to come and helping maximize annual bonuses for company brass. The accounting scandal wasn't the only one that brewed during Emanuel's tenure. During his brief time on...

Before its portfolio of bad loans helped trigger the current housing crisis, mortgage giant Freddie Mac was the focus of a major accounting scandal that led to a management shake-up, huge fines and scalding condemnation of passive directors by a top federal regulator. One of those allegedly asleep-at-the-switch board members was Chicago's Rahm Emanuel—now chief of staff to President Barack Obama—who made at least $320,000 for a 14-month stint at Freddie Mac that required little effort.

Will Obama’s Chief of Staff Return Money From Stock Options He Got While Helping to Drive Freddie Mac Into the Ground?The Chicago Trib reports how Rahm Emanuel scored big at Freddie Mac! The collapse of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were key elements in the financial meltdown of 2008. It’s no secret that Democrats under Bill Clinton had used both organizations as personal piggybanks to reward loyal friends. Note: President Bush put a stop to such gross patronage during his Administration.We all know about the tens of millions in bonuses Fannie Mae paid to Franklin Raines, former Clinton...

SNIPPET: "Congressman Lynn Westmoreland (R-Georgia) is a member of the House census subcommittee and chairs a census task force created by Minority Leader John Boehner. Westmoreland says ACORN's involvement in the census is due in large part to the fact that their former attorney has taken up residence in the White House. "You have to realize that President Obama used to represent ACORN," he notes. "In fact, he represented them in an Illinois case that said certain banks in Illinois were not doing enough lending to people who could not afford a mortgage, and therefore [he] is one of the...

Fannie and Freddie are paying out those bonuses anyway – regardless of Barney Frank’s demands and the populist furor over AIG’s bonus payouts. Frank, the chairman of the Financial Services Committee, sent a letter Friday to James Lockhart, the federal regulator overseeing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, asking him to rescind retention bonuses of at least $1 million planned for four top executives over the next two years. But in letter obtained by POLITICO, Lockhart tells Frank there’s a “great risk” of key employees walking away if they don’t pay out the promised bonuses. These Fannie and Freddie employee retention...

Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae beg not to be included in "Bonus Gate". The root causes of the problem beg that they are now the good guys.

Frank asks Freddie, Fannie to halt bonuses By Silla Brush Posted: 03/20/09 12:21 PM [ET] As Congress races to claw back bonus payments at firms taking government bailout cash, Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) on Friday called on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to cancel payments at the mortgage giants now under government control. Fannie Mae is set to pay retention bonuses, with some top executives at the mortgage giant planning to receive more than $1 million. Freddie Mac has yet to release bonus figures. Frank wrote a letter on Friday to James Lockhart, head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency,...

Watch the video when you have a moment.

Memory eventually fails us all, but apparently the decline strikes one party far more than the other. In recent weeks, my friends across the aisle have expended a lot of breath proclaiming that the Democrats caused the present financial crisis by failing to pass legislation to regulate financial services companies in the years 1995 through 2006. There is only small one problem with this story -- throughout this entire period the Republicans were in complete charge of the House and for the most critical years they controlled the House, the Senate, and the Presidency. In the House of Representatives, the...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Fannie Mae is planning to pay retention bonuses of as much as $611,000 each to several top executives of the government-controlled mortgage finance titan. Sibling company Freddie Mac is planning similar awards.

While everyone assails AIG for using less than 0.1% of the taxpayer-bailout money it received to meet contractual obligations in compensation through retention bonuses, another recipient of government largesse has its own bonus program in operation. According to their annual report, Freddie Mac has a generous retention bonus plan built into its operation for the next year. Eligibility includes all of the senior and executive VPs. It comes in four payouts, and only the last has any connection to company performance. Exhibit 10-4 on page 414-5 lays out the program:Objective To retain as many people as possible for 18 months...

Rep. Barney Frank, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, said he hopes to introduce legislation later this year to restructure government-backed mortgage investors Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. "The current model is broken," the Massachusetts Democrat said in an interview Tuesday. One possibility, he said, is to separate the companies into entities serving two functions: one that would ensure adequate funding for the home-mortgage market as a whole and another that would provide government subsidies for housing low-income people. Earlier Tuesday, Mr. Frank spoke at a breakfast meeting hosted by the Center for American Progress, a think tank headed...

Freddie Mac: The Government's Next Black Hole? By STEPHEN GANDEL – Tue Mar 17 AIG is to date the most expensive corporate bailout in American history, requiring $180 billion of government funds. But it may soon have competition. Last week, mortgage giant Freddie Mac said that it had lost $50 billion in 2008 alone. A look at the company's books suggests the government will have to spend at least triple that much to save the financial firm from collapse. If the housing market worsens, the tab could even be larger. "Freddie's portfolio of [mortgage] insurance is more risky than the...

LETTER: Bush raised red flags about Fannie and FreddieMarch 14, 2009 6:00 AM Bush raised red flags about Fannie and Freddie In its editorial, "Protect homeowners: It's job No. 1 for Congress" (March 8), The Standard-Times proclaimed that Rep. Barney Frank has been a victim of unfair criticism and that he was actually among the voices "warning that disaster loomed" at government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Having an entirely different recollection of the facts, I did a little digging. Here is what I found. Starting with the 2002 budget request in April 2001, the Bush administration raised...

Exclusive: Has Illegal Immigration’s Effect on Education Become the ‘Third Rail’ of Politics? Vincent Gioia Traditionally, Social Security has been the “third rail” of politics but we now have another third rail – illegal immigration and education. Politicians step all over themselves asking for more and more money to be spent on education; ignoring the fact that money alone does not make for a good public education. Another thing we are not allowed to mention in a discussion about public education quality and costs is the impact of illegal immigration; otherwise we are labeled “racists.” The United States has the...

13 Million Illegal Immigrants Living in the United States March 8, 2009 FAIRUS.org How Many Illegal Immigrants? Illegal Immigrant Problems & Statistics FAIR estimates that in 2007 the illegal immigrant population is above 13 million persons. Government and academic estimates indicate that as of 2006 there were 11 to 12 million illegal immigrants living in the United States. The Center for Immigration Studies estimated the illegal immigrant population at 10 million as of November 2004. It is difficult to have an exact figure because the illegal nature of their presence prevents any enumeration, but the U.S. Census Bureau estimated 8.7...

President-elect Barack Obama's newly appointed chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, served on the board of directors of the federal mortgage firm Freddie Mac at a time when scandal was brewing at the troubled agency and the board failed to spot "red flags," according to government reports reviewed by ABCNews.com.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Freddie Mac is asking the government for $30.8 billion in aid after posting a gargantuan loss of more than $50 billion last year as the U.S. housing market worsened.

An accounting rule that requires banks and insurance companies to write down assets to reflect market values is worsening the financial crisis and should be suspended, said Steve Forbes, chief executive officer of Forbes Inc. "Market-to-market accounting is destroying capital of insurance companies and banks," Forbes said Monday in a Bloomberg Radio interview. "They have to suspend it completely and start over again. It is the equivalent of saying, 'Put your house on the market and sell it by 2 p.m.' You are not going to get a very good price for it."

This was taken off of You Tube due to the liberal media. This link is to the same video, but is routed through Canada.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac In September 2003, Frank, then the ranking Democrat on the Republican-led Financial Services Committee, opposed a Bush administration proposal for transferring oversight of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from Congress and the Department of Housing and Urban Development to a new agency that would be created within the Treasury Department. The proposal reflected the administration's belief that Congress "neither has the tools, nor the stature" for adequate oversight. Frank stated, "These two entities...are not facing any kind of financial crisis.... The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the...

Congressional Democrats Bankrupted the Nation *snip* The End In April 2001, before the events of 9/11 and just after entering the White House, President Bush began signaling warnings to members of congress that both Fannie and Freddie were headed into deep treacherous waters which could cause “strong repercussions in financial markets.” In early 2003, the Bush White House upgraded its warnings to “a systemic risk that could extend well beyond just the housing markets.” On September 10, 2003, Bush Treasury Secretary John Snow testified in congress that something had to be done to confront the growing storm at Fannie and...

Join us for an appearance by Senator Chris Dodd and Representative Joe Courtney for Health Care Forum. Find out about the health care plan. A great opportunity to show Dodd and Courtney how you feel about their performance in Washington.

Despite assurances that the takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would be temporary, the giant mortgage companies will most likely never fully return to private hands, lawmakers and company executives are beginning to quietly acknowledge.

<p>NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — Freddie Mac's chief executive, installed last year after the government took over the troubled mortgage finance company, is resigning, the company and its regulator said Monday.</p> <p>David Moffett will step down by March 13. Freddie Mac (FRE, Fortune 500) said it would announce a successor by then.</p>

President Obama on Saturday struck back aggressively at critics of his $3.6 trillion budget proposal, casting himself as a populist crusader whose "sweeping change" has angered Washington's entrenched special interests, and promised to fight them. "I realize that passing this budget won't be easy. Because it represents real and dramatic change, it also represents a threat to the status quo in Washington," Mr. Obama said in his weekly video and radio address. Mr. Obama's language was combative and confrontational, as he promised to fight for "American families." "I know these steps won't sit well with the special interests and lobbyists...

Red ink is starting to gush in even larger quantities at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, as the government wrestles with deciding what role should be played by the two biggest providers of funding for U.S. home mortgages. Fannie late Thursday reported a $25.2 billion loss for the fourth quarter, and Freddie is expected to report a huge loss for the latest quarter when it posts earnings, probably in early March. Homeowner defaults have continued to increase even as the government has redirected the two companies to focus their attention on preventing foreclosures and propping up the housing market. Gone...

President Barack Obama's first budget includes $15 billion a year for renewable energy programs and an ambitious plan to raise $646 billion from a carbon reduction proposal. "Because our future depends on our ability to break free from oil that's controlled by foreign dictators, we need to make clean, renewable energy the profitable kind of energy," Mr. Obama said Thursday morning. "That's why we'll be working with Congress on legislation that places a market-based cap on carbon pollution and drives the production of more renewable energy." The plan uses money from a cap-and-trade program — which would allow companies to...

Must see video from 2004: 'Democrats Defend Fannie/Freddie from Regulation'. Watch it 'til the end. You will not believe it. "We've been through nearly a dozen hearings where frankly we were trying to fix something that wasn't broke. Mr. Chairman we do not have a crisis at Freddie Mac and in particular at Fannie Mae under the outstanding leadership of Mr. Frank Raines."-Rep. Maxine Waters, 2004http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MGT_cSi7Rs

President Obama will pledge Tuesday night that the nation "will rebuild, we will recover," as he delivers an address to a joint session of Congress and with a nervous nation watching at home. "While our economy may be weakened and our confidence shaken; though we are living through difficult and uncertain times, tonight I want every American to know this: We will rebuild, we will recover, and the United States of America will emerge stronger than before," Mr. Obama will say, according to excerpts of his remarks. In lofty language, Mr. Obama is expected to promise a new path forward...

WASHINGTON – Lawyers hired by mortgage finance giant Freddie Mac are quietly investigating the firm's own $2 million lobbying campaign, The Associated Press has learned. The lobbying effort helped quash proposed new regulations on the company before the housing market collapsed. It was not immediately clear how much Freddie Mac is spending to investigate its own conduct or whether it is spending any federal bailout money on the internal probe. The firm was placed under U.S. government control due to its massive investment losses. One of Washington's leading law firms, Covington & Burling LLP, has spent more than a month...

From television specials to newspaper editorials, the media are pushing the idea that current economic problems were caused by the market and that only the government can rescue us. What was lacking in the housing market, they say, was government regulation of the market's "greed." That makes great moral melodrama, but it turns the facts upside down. It was precisely government intervention that turned a thriving industry into a basket case. An economist specializing in financial markets gave a glimpse of the history of housing markets when he said: "Lending money to American homebuyers had been one of the least...

The White House is lashing out publicly and personally at a CNBC reporter whose attack on President Barack Obama’s anti-foreclosure plan caught fire on the Internet on Thursday. White House press secretary Robert Gibbs jumped at the chance to go after the CNBC journalist, Rick Santelli, when a question about his bracing critique was asked at Friday’s news briefing. “I’ve watched Mr. Santelli on cable the past 24 hours or so. I’m not entirely sure where Mr. Santelli lives or in what house he lives but the American people are struggling every day to meet their mortgages, stay in their...

Perhaps no one word has defined this recession better than "foreclosure." In the last year, banks started foreclosure proceedings on more than 2.3 million households, according to RealtyTrac, and entire neighborhoods in Florida, Arizona, Nevada and California became ghost towns. Today, President Obama will unveil his administration's plan to stop that foreclosure flood. Click Here for the Latest Business Stories From ABC News ABC News has learned some details of the plan aimed at reducing homeowners' monthly mortgage payments that Obama will unveil today at Dobson High School in Mesa, Ariz. A Democrat familiar with the proposal says it will...

News broke last week that Rahm Emanuel, now White House chief of staff, lived rent- free for years in the home of Rep. Rosa De Lauro (D-Conn.) - and failed to disclose the gift, as congressional ethics rules mandate. But this is only the tip of Emanuel's previously undislosed ethics problems. One issue is the work Emanuel tossed the way of De Lauro's husband. But the bigger one goes back to Emanuel's days on the board of now-bankrupt mortgage giant Freddie Mac. Emanuel is a multimillionaire, but lived for the last five years for free in the tony Capitol Hill...

Check out this graph, it pretty much explains it all: http://perotcharts.com/images/challenges/challenges01.png also, check out the slope of the line starting in 2000, when Bush took office.... even taking out the Iraq war, the slope would still be greater than in the Clinton era....

I have decided to start a thread focusing on edible weeds. Many of the common plants we see everyday are edible, and while most are not hugely palatable or nutritious, a few are truly very good. If you would like to post a recipe, please post recipes related to these plants only. As always, an extreme amount of caution is advised. It's probably true that 90 percent or so of plants are actually edible, there is a small percentage that if you eat them, you WON'T have to worry about eating again! Oleander comes to mind, it would take less...

“Lehman Brothers collapse is traced back to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two big mortgage banks that got a federal bailout a few weeks ago. Freddie and Fannie used huge lobbying budgets and political contributions to keep regulators off their backs. A group called the Center for Responsive Politics keeps track of which politicians get Fannie and Freddie political contributions. The top three U.S. senators getting big Fannie and Freddie political bucks were Democrats and No. 2 is Sen. Barack Obama”(foxnews.com). Obama has these connections with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Jim Johnson and former Fannie Mae chairman and...

Next time when your liberal friend / relative* starts whining about how Bush economic policies caused the financial meltdown and how Obama will save America with his GigaPork stimulomarxist package, hit him back hard with this video. Read on

Government-Sponsored Enterprises (GSEs): An Institutional Overview is one of thousands of documents recently made available on WikiLeaks. A veritable myriad of Congressional Research Service documents offer startling glimpses into the scale and scope of government intrusion in the free markets. Why Did Congress Create GSEs? GSEs were not created for the purpose of expanding home ownership by lower- and middle-income members of the public. Rather, Congress established GSEs "to improve the efficiency of capital markets" and to overcome "statutory and other market imperfections which otherwise prevent funds from moving easily from suppliers of funds to areas of high loan...

Financial firms and other companies receiving billions of dollars in federal bailout money spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay for meetings and charitable gifts on behalf of lawmakers. In the last six months of 2008, as a financial crisis enveloped the country and lawmakers voted on a $700 billion financial rescue package, eight companies that would benefit from that package spent roughly $366,000 on events and charities connected to members of Congress, according to a review of congressional lobbying records. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored mortgage companies, spent more than $330,000 in the period, but since...

It is all very well for President Obama to vent his anger on all those US bankers who continued to claim billions of dollars in bonuses while expecting Washington to bail them out after the sub-prime mortgage scandal brought the banks to their knees. But conveniently overlooked has been the curious part Mr Obama himself played in the sub-prime debacle. At the heart of it was a 1995 amendment to the Community Reinvestment Act which legally required banks to lend money to buy homes to millions of poor, mainly black Americans, guaranteed by the two biggest mortgage associations, Fannie Mae...