Sept. 25, 2008, A Day That Will Be Recorded In History:

With incentives in place, banks poured billions of dollars of loans into poor communities, often "no doc" and "no income" loans that required no money down and no verification of income. By 2007, Fannie and Freddie owned or guaranteed nearly half of the $12 trillion U.S. mortgage market -- a staggering exposure.

Worse still was the cronyism. Fannie and Freddie became home to out-of-work politicians, mostly Clinton Democrats. An informal survey of their top officials shows a roughly 2-to-1 dominance of Democrats over Republicans. Then there were the campaign donations. From 1989 to 2008, some 384 politicians got their tip jars filled by Fannie and Freddie:

#1 Senator Dodd
#2 Senator Obama

Over that time, the two GSEs spent $200 million on lobbying and political activities. Their charitable foundations dropped millions more on think tanks and radical community groups. Did it work? Well, if measured by the goal of putting more poor people into homes, the answer would have to be yes. From 1995 to 2005, a Harvard study shows, minorities made up 49% of the 12.5 million new homeowners. The problem is that many of those loans have now gone bad, and minority home ownership rates are shrinking fast.


Fannie and Freddie, with their massive loan portfolios stuffed with securitized mortgage-backed paper created from subprime loans, are a failed legacy of the Clinton era.

Can't POP this either. But I sure can comment about it.

Good clip.

Can't POP this either. But I sure can comment about it.

I've installed Clipmarks (firefox version) over the current install when I'd had problems in the past, which usually resolves the issue.

Last time I was getting "hum-bug" with CM, I uninstalled and re-installed it.

With regard to FF, I've had two updates within the past few days and it's become so erratic and slow,
I've been using Flock.

Just restored my whole system from an earlier backup (that worked) and the problem persists. So I know it's not client side, but server side. And that means the problem is on their end.

Napster, just for your own information, I have never experienced your particular problem with not being able to pop.

Hope it all gets fixed though, that would be irritating.