Congressmen Accuse Fannie and Freddie Boss of Ideological Bias

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — Is the tea party getting its groove back? Shouts of vindication from around the country suggest the movement's leaders certainly think so.

A recent Tea Party Second Amendment program attracted an overflow crowd to a rear dining room at the First Street Family Restaurant in Simi Valley. A few days later, a couple of hundred people, many of them local Tea Party members, attended a "Day of Resistance" gun rights rally and march in Ventura.

CNBC's Rick Santelli has done it again.  During today's rant, Santelli went absolutely nuts on Jim Iurio of TJM Institutional Services screaming, "The Fed doesn't have a clue neither does the president neither does congress...Neither does Tim Geithner who gives a speech about the debt ceiling.  I'd like to see if he could count to a million much less 16.4 trillion!"

Not satisfied with wasting close to $200 billion of taxpayer dollars bailing out holders of Fannie and Freddie Bonds (notably PIMCO and China), Geithner is back at it with another proposal sure to cost US taxpayers plenty if adopted. The proposal this time is for taxpayers to pick up 63% of the cost of mortgage principal reductions. Geithner made the offer to Edward J. DeMarco, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s overseer.

Jonathan Rauch has an interesting article on George Wallace as the spiritual father of the modern conservative movement (though he’s at pains—implausibly—to say that race has nothing to do with it) which he claims is a kind of betrayal of “real” conservatism:

It's looking increasingly like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are going to cost the US government much more than AIG.  In its latest long-term budget outlook released in late January, the CBO projected that the AIG bailout would ultimately cost the Treasury $9 billion dollars.  Indeed, the entire private financial industry bailout is ultimately expected to cost less than $30 billion; of the $99 billion that the CBO expects we will ultimately lose on TARP, half of the loss comes not from helping the "banksters", but

Back before the financial crisis hit, conservatives would frequently make some good points about the problems with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Ever since the crisis, you’ve been more likely to hear nutty stuff from the right about how somehow the whole recession is a conspiracy between Fannie, Freddie, and the Community Reinvestment Act. But that nonsense aside, there are still a lot of problems with Fannie and Freddie and I hope that congress will do away with them.