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A decision, made under pressure from Congress and investors, to steer Fannie Mae into dangerous corners of the mortgage market proved to be disastrous.

[In 2004, Daniel] Mudd, [new CEO of Fannie] made a fateful choice. Disregarding warnings from his managers that lenders were making too many loans that would never be repaid, he steered Fannie into more treacherous corners of the mortgage market, according to executives. ... Capitol Hill bore down on Mr. Mudd as well. The same year he took the top position, regulators sharply increased Fannie’s affordable-housing goals. Democratic lawmakers demanded that the company buy more loans that had been made to low-income and minority homebuyers. “When homes are doubling in price in every six years and incomes are increasing by...

Getting class-warriors to admit they're wrong about anything is always a struggle. Witness Bill O'Reilly's attempt to get House Financial Services Committee chairman Barney Frank (D-Massachusetts) to admit he was on the wrong side of housing policy for decades. Frank, a member of the kooky socialist Congressional Progressive Caucus, wouldn't give an inch in a recent interview even though his fingerprints (and those of some Republicans) are all over the current crisis on Wall Street. (See transcript from October 2 "The O'Reilly Factor" show here; video here) But let's look at the facts. Stanley Liebowitz, an economist at the University...

What if the current Mortgage/Credit Crunch is not just an isolated financial crisis, but in fact the signal for the death of one era, and the (painful) birth of another? If that is the case, it goes a long ways towards explaining the bizarre nature of what we’re seeing going on in Washington and on Wall Street… and suggests that we need a whole different set of solutions. Living out here in Silicon Valley, the heartland of American innovation, it’s hard not to be appalled by the events taking place 3,000 miles away in the seats of American finance and...

Think there's no such thing as too much parking? Take a look at Tysons Corner, where there's more parking than jobs, more parking than office space, more parking than in downtown Washington. That must change, said advocates and politicians seeking to transform Virginia's largest business hub from suburb to city. Reducing parking, charging for parking and finding new uses for the acres of parking that separate Tysons' buildings and the people inside is at the heart of plans to remake the area.... "Who wants parking spaces to be the hallmark of a development?" said Clark Tyler, chairman of a Fairfax...

Dr. Love is struggling.... Dr. Love's allies in the war on childlessness have fared no better. The Singaporean government's official matchmaking agency, the SDU -- the initials stand for Social Development Unit, but it's known to snarky islanders as "Single, Desperate, and Ugly" -- is situated just off the city-state's main shopping thoroughfare, and it doesn't seem nearly as popular as the nearby Emporio Armani.... The developed world is experiencing a wave of pro-natalist sentiment that threatens to bully the childless, tax the single, and reorient states toward the production rather than the protection of citizens. In most developed nations...

From Times OnlineApril 23, 2008 Executives harpooned by online 'whalers' Spies and conmen target bosses in e-mail attacks to install malicious software with access to most privileged data Jonathan Richards Corporate bosses have become the latest target of cyber-criminals, after a string of attacks in which senior management have been singled out to receive fraudulent e-mails. Internet fraudsters have taken to sending personally addressed e-mails to chief executives and other high-level executives with a view to installing malicious software on computers that have access to the most privileged company information. In the latest e-mail scam, known as "whaling" because it...

Compassionate fascism is just as anti-liberty as the other kind Perhaps you wonder how society's self-appointed hall monitors got the right to make you feel bad about the fries on your plate or the cigarette you're smoking, or outlaw listening to iPods while crossing the street. If so, you may also be fed up with being nagged about recycling, and be wondering why just because you don't think we're all responsible for global warming, you have been designated a pariah through that infelicitous phrase -- climate-change denier. You know what that's supposed to sound like. Worse, some of your accusers...

by Richard Lawrence Poe Friday, February 29, 2008 ArchivesPermanent Link I ADDRESS this column to that new breed of conservative, the Hillarycon. These are conservatives who support Hillary Clinton. Below I describe the three types of Hillarycon and explain why each is wrong. TYPE 1: The Innocent Hillarycon The first type is the most well-meaning, but possibly the most deluded. Innocent Hillarycons view Hillary as a weaker candidate than Obama, and thus seek to help Hillary win the nomination. They are wrong. Hillary's weakness is an illusion. She is playing rope-a-dope with Obama. By hanging on the ropes, and...

UNHAPPY couples used to stick together for the sake of the kids. Now they can make the best of a bad marriage in the name of being environmentally friendly. Scientists have quantified for the first time the extent to which divorce damages the environment. The researchers found that the combined use of electricity across the two new households created rose 53% while water use was up by 42%. Across America – one of 12 countries studied – divorced households used 73 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity in 2005 that could have been saved if the families had not split up. That...

WASHINGTON — Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee has a message for Americans: Quit digging your grave with a knife and fork. Huckabee shed more than 100 pounds after being diagnosed with Type 2 Diabetes in 2003. He has taken his personal health kick to the next level by running marathons and writing books like "Quit Digging Your Grave With A Knife And Fork." He is also using his success story to wage war on junk food in public schools in hopes of targeting childhood obesity rates. Other states, under pressure to encourage healthier eating habits for children, are developing similar school...

http://forums.ebay.com/db2/thread.jspa?threadID=1000565444&start=0 Ebay was hacked today. Users complete credit card information was being posted today on eBay's Trust and Safety board including name, cc number, CCV, paypal info, etc. It took eBay over 90 minutes to finally pull down the Trust & Safety server to remove the publicly posted information. If you have an eBay or PayPal account, you might want to monitor the above link.

Victory for Britain's metric martyrs as Eurocrats give up the fightBy BENEDICT BROGAN and PAUL SIMS - More by this author » Last updated at 00:05am on 11th September 2007  Brussels will today give up the fight to make Britain drop pints, pounds and miles. The right of Britons to use imperial weights and measures will be enshrined in EU law under plans being announced by the European Commission. Traditional measures will remain legal "until Kingdom come", the Commissioner responsible for the move told the Daily Mail last night. Scroll down for more...Vindicated: The 'Metric Martyr' Steve Thoburn, who...

If California wants to achieve its goal of cutting greenhouse-gas emissions 25 percent by 2020 to fight global warming, it must find a way to cut down the biggest source of those pollutants: cars, trucks and other motor vehicles. Even though transportation contributes 41 percent of greenhouse gases, our society is too geographically dispersed and mobile to realistically expect that we can dramatically reduce the number of miles we drive, ride and fly. So that means our vehicles need to become far more fuel-efficient. The less gasoline per mile that a car uses, the less heat-trapping carbon dioxide it spews...

Lower tax rates for women would have a number of benefits, two economists argue. But their ideas, which get high marks for originality, have drawn doubters. Want to reduce the overall level of income taxes and see more women taking home paychecks?

For the second time in a month The New York Times is touting a 10-year old Mexican anti-poverty program that New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg wants to import. The social engineering program essentially offers bribes to adults to get jobs, and to make sure their children stay in school (second item, The Daily Blade). According to The New York Times: The payments are tied to changes in behavior intended to lift families out of poverty. So the program requires families to keep their children in school and take them for regular checkups. Parents must also attend talks on health,...

Press Releases Contact: Brendan Daly 202-226-7616 For Immediate Release 04/24/2007 Pelosi: ‘Working Women and Their Families Deserve Equal Pay for Equal Work’ Washington, D.C. – Speaker Nancy Pelosi released the following statement this morning at an Education and Labor Committee hearing on equal pay: “I want to thank the Education and Labor Committee Chairman George Miller for convening this critical hearing today on Strengthening the Middle Class: Ensuring Equal Pay for Women. “I also want to recognize the leadership of Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro, a champion for equal pay in the Congress, who for 10 years has been introducing the Paycheck...

The Return Of The Women's Equality Amendment By Ashley Herzog April 10, 2007 I didn't plan on writing another column about feminism, but I keep discovering more examples of pernicious ideas the so-called "women's rights activists" are pushing on society. Last week, the Democrat-controlled Congress reintroduced the long-dead Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), which gained popular support in the 1970s but died when Americans found out what it actually entailed. Thirty years later, feminists in Congress seem to think we've forgotten. The language of the ERA, now renamed the Women's Equality Amendment, is deceptively simple: "equality of rights under the law...

It's 30 years since the TV drama Roots first screened. The show had a profound impact on black people in the US and UK, recalls Kwame Kwei-Armah, right, who spoke to others about their memories of the programme.Thirty years ago I was an 11-year-old growing up in West London. One evening I sat down with my family to watch a new television programme called Roots. It was a moment that changed my life. By the end of the series I had told my mother that I would one day trace my heritage back to Africa and reclaim an ancestral...

In recent years, legal scholars have produced a voluminous literature on the rule of law in indirectly controlling social norms and individual preferences. Smoking bans provide on of the favorite "success stories" of those who laud the use of legal rules to change norms and preferences. According to these scholars, smoking bans affect behavior, even if under-enforced, because they change the social norm regarding smoking in public. With the advent of smoking bans, non-smokers who previously felt embarassed about publicly expressing their distaste for ETS are speaking up. By providing a de facto community statement that public smoking is unacceptable,...