She was angrier than I have ever seen her after the House defeated the bill on Monday. And she is a stay at home mom with very little understanding of the financal sector. But she had read up enough on what was going on during the previous week to call “BS” on the political posturing, while the rest of us are risking our paychecks.

Now the one place where your wife and my wife agree is that the Dems caused this mess, and killing the GSEs and every corrupt politician involved should be the first order of business.

McCain can easily capitalize on both sets of anger.

That’s part of what I’ve been saying this week. By keeping them open, and not dismantling them, we do nothing to solve the problem.

Bailing out Chrysler, for all the Iacocca melodrama, only put off the inevitable. What’s more, it convinced the other auto makers there was nothing fundamentally wrong with their plan. Check GM’s stock price these days, and the fact Chrysler has been bought and sold twice since, and you’ll see it solved nothing. In fact, it exasperated the problem.

Government bailouts don’t fix the problem. And with GSE’s, the problem is doubled, because they dictate to the market. So when they go under, they take everything else with, just like a giant ship sinking takes everything else under with it in the wake.

The rush to push through this plan also ensures it really could not have been worse. Everything the Founders built into our government was designed to create a deliberate process. The fear mongering of this bill ensured that was bypassed. It couldn’t have been worse, no matter who was President in January, because people could at least have THOUGHT about this until then. If it was still going to be socialized because BHO won, then at least it would’ve been a socialized solution that had a chance to work on it’s own principles.

This bill, socialism-light, doesn’t do anything right, and is guaranteed to walk us right into the same trap 10yrs down the line. Tops. And no, we cannot let the Democrats off the hook for this. McCain needs to get serious about nailing this to Obama, Frank, and the others who went to bed with FF/FM.

He promises to make pork-supporters famous. Show us how, John, make THESE people famous, please. It might be the only way you can win.

Needs to let the anger over the Bailout go. At least for now.

What needs to happen is we all need to be channeling our energies into winning this election, instead of bickering back and forth on how best to do it, and why the bailout was right or wrong.

Here is what needs to happen, right now.

1) All of those who are going to vote McCain need to make sure we are capitalizing in our blogs, posts, emails, letters to editors of publications, the fact that the Democratic Party is, by and large, at fault for the current crisis. Are we completely clean of responsibility? No. And this will come up.

2) When the matter IS brought up that we are partly to blame. OWN UP TO IT. Yes, we have, as a party, made mistakes. Emphasize that good leaders recognize when they have made an error and are able to move past it, learn from it, and not make that mistake again.

3) Turn it around. While McCain and the RNC have accepted the responsibility in the fiasco, the Democrats have not, and instead of showing a willingness to accept responsibility and work to solve the root cause, they would have us socialize our structure, and move along with business as usual in Washington and Wall St.

4) Push the ties between those responsible, particularly the CEO’s and Golden Parachute recipients, to the Obama campaing, and the Democratic machine overall.

5) Realize that Obama comes from one of the most corrupt political areas, in practice and history, in the nation. A quick google of the scandals in his state, and his ties to some of the bigger names in these scandals produces a cornucopia of information.

6) There are four weeks left in this game. It is the fourth quarter, and the opposing team just called in their starting line up, well rested and ready to trounce you. Obama has an incredible ground campaign. Sure it is riddled with fraud, but it is impressive in scope and size. Are we going to let petty issues like being in support or opposition to a bill that has now become law interrupt and divide OUR ground effort? May I remind you that the Republican party has been sluggish to respond in the last three election cycles to an ever growing grassroots, get out the vote machine on the other side.

In summation, we need to stop convincing each other of how right we are, and start convincing the independents and apathetic voters of why we are the party to rescue this, and be the pheonix form the ashes.

. . . wait til she gets a load of this part of the bailout bill.

“The Treasury Department is authorized to “guarantee” home mortgages, essentially becoming a kind of co-signer, to reduce the number of foreclosures. If the home owner stops paying his or her mortgage, taxpayers would be on the hook. The Treasury Department can also eliminate a “reasonable” amount of a home owner’s mortgage debt, under section 109 of the new law, which would likely delay the process of house prices falling.”

Last night during the debate, my wife went nuts when she heard Biden say that he and Obama supported letting bankruptcy judges adjust the principal amount of a borrower’s mortgage interest. Her first words were ‘well, maybe we should get divorced, I could go on welfare, you can declare bankruptcy, and we can just shack up here in the house together and see our loan payments go way down’. Now she was being sarcastic of course, but as we have seen with virtually every other government handout program, if you create perverse incentives for bad behavior, people will engage in it frequently.

However, this section 109 idiocy goes even further than what Biden talked about, and even worse, it is now the law of the land!!! So the US Department of the Treasury can now guarantee your mortgage, putting taxpayers on the hook for it if you dont pay, and even better, can just come in and unilaterally reduce the principal of your mortgage by a ‘reasonable’ amount.

Of course, as usual, the legislation doesnt specify what the rules will be for getting your principal reduced — as usual, the moral cowards on the Hill have punted this issue to unelected bureaucrats in the Executive Branch to actually make the tough decisions. So what faceless bureaucrat will now decide what amount it is ‘fair’ to reduce your mortgage principal by? Who qualifies to apply? Do you have to be a deadbeat and about to default? Disadvantaged minority? Below a certain income level, so Democratic class warfare principles can be applied? Or will this be open to all Americans?

My suspiscion is that this little-talked about title will become the focus of more fraud, abuse, and ultimately litigation than the Community Reinvestment Act abuses that prompted this mess in the first place. The principal reduction provision screams out to me as being something that will benefit only the politically connected and the politically-correct. Can you imagine Barack Obama and his ACORN cronies now have it within their power, should he become President, to reward their friends and political supporters by having the Treasury reduce the amount of the mortgage balance, and send the bill to the taxpayer? How on earth any Republican could have ever voted for this is beyond me. I don’t care what the consequences would have been, there is no way this should have ever been allowed to take place.

My wife and I bought our house, in the expensive DC metro area, at nearly the peak of the market in 2005. We had 20% down in cash, and solid credit. Every lender we talked to tried to talk us into a gimmick mortgage of some sort, the kind that would have greatly lowered the payment for the first few years, which would have given us a higher montly spending budget than we otherwise should have. Every lender told us how safe it would be to take an ARM, a zero option ARM, an interest-only mortgage, so on and so forth, because of course, our house was always going to be worth $100,000 more next year than it was this year, and we can just refinance again.

We told them NO WAY. We took a 30 year, fixed rate convential mortgage. Our payments are significantly higher, actually an order of magnitude higher, than what they would have been on one of the gimmick plans. But we felt the responsible thing to do was to lock in at the historically-low rates of interest at the time, leave nothing to chance, and make sacrifices so we had a house payment that we knew would never rise out of control. I wont get into all the sacrifices we had to make, but sale of a prized possession that I had wanted for two decades, and only got to enjoy for 4 years, was one of the things that had to go, in order to get more cash down and keep our 30 year fixed payment in line with what we could afford. While these decisions were tough, we were confident we made the right ones, and time has proved us correct.

But what enrages us now is that we are stuck with our high cost monthly mortgage, which we have paid on time and as agreed for 3 1/2 years, on a house that is not worth what we paid for it, and at present, may be worth only slightly more than our mortgage balance. And on top of that, Congress has just told me and my wife that not only do we have to pay our mortgage, but we now have to pay the mortgages of those people who didn’t choose to sacrifice like we did. We have to now back the borrowers who took the lower payments of the gimmick mortgage, bought a Hummer, the 60 inch plasma TV, built the inground swimming pool, took expensive vacations, and now, when their mortgage adjusts, complain that they can’t pay it any more. Geez, I guess maybe my wife and I shouldnt have been responsible after all. Maybe we should have taken the gimmick mortgage, lived it up, and expected someone else to bail us out.

This site does not allow the words I would like to use to express my complete outrage at Congress, and particularly the GOP Members, for letting this Section 109 become law. I literally want to throw them all out — and this is coming from someone who worked on the Hill for 16 years and counts many friends there.

Never in my life would I have expected to say this, but the very first time the Treasury uses this new Section 109 authority to adjust any borrower’s mortgage principal downward, there should be a massive class action lawsuit filed on behalf of every other mortgage holder in the United States to enjoin the government to cease and desist, based on the incredible artibtrariness and unfairness of granting this extraordinary relief to some but not to others. If legal action wont work, every American should simply refuse to pay one more dime on their mortgages, period. Does anybody think that if the government is unwilling to throw deadbeats who bought more house than they can afford out of their homes, that they would allow 50 million plus mortgages to be foreclosed on at once? Now that would be a real economic crisis.

Too bad that us honest, hardworking citizens who pay our bills are just that — honest, hardworking citizens who would never walk away from their debts as a matter of honor. And because of this sense of honor, we are about to be taken advantage of by Washington once again in order to bail out the thieves, the scum, the ignorant, the greedy, the lazy, and all the others who continue to demand,decade after decade, something for nothing, courtesy of the productive members of society.

Yeah, my wife and I are d*mned mad about this bailout.

I will promote the best I can..bring it

she said it’s just going to happen again and again and again.

She’s right: it is going to happen again and again and again.

It is the unstated policy of the Professional Politician Party that the government shall maximize the number of Americans who are nominal “homeowners,” as this has proven to be a civilizing influence on people.

Last time it was the Savings and Loan debacle. Set up some institutions that subsidize home ownership, then keep pushing the envelope on who can qualify until the mortgage pool is polluted with crap. Then stage a public hanging (Charles Keating will do), blame everything on greedy bankers, and put in some new and different institutions that subsidize home ownership. Lather, rinse, repeat.

If the policy only crashes every twenty years, it’s considered a success.

Your wife and I agree on this.

Fannie and Freddie must die.

Let new institutions and new people handle the existing portfolios. Without it, NO JUSTICE HAS BEEN DONE.

All previous top and middle managers of Fannie/Freddie must be removed.