I missed like a month on Party Builder, what happened to the Crazy Hillary Supporters Like Femdemo, Paul Hammond and True Blue?

Today we were handed a gift by John McCain. that is that he choose to be his VP: Sara Palin. I was so amazed that he would do something that stupid that I had to turn on three different channels and the read it on the Internet this morning to believe it. MSNBC has been nice to her while CNN has Passively ripped her. I thought he would make a dumb choice by picking Pawlenty, but this by far exceeds any expectations I had about the stupidity someone can have in this big of a decision in politics. I predict that she could be the worst choice for VP ever.

Why do I feel this way ? She's like Ann Culter, Dan Quayle and Ted Stevens rolled into one. first off she will get owned by Joe Biden in a debate, It could be worse than Quayle-Benson, next she is an EXTREME right whinger, then there is the fact that she could be Indicted for her ties to the corrupt Ted Stevens and/ or the Illigit firing of her ex-brother-in-law (which I don't blame her for, but none the less is a possible count for indictment). She brings nothing as far as geography goes (3 Electoral Votes that were Leaning McCain anyway) and she forces him to give up his biggest argument (experience). She has been governor of the most corrupt political state in the nation for only one and a half years. and as if that was not enough there is something much bigger, about McCain. He is wiling to sacrifice his first (and hopefully last) executive decision in a hollow attempt to "Out Minority" Obama. I think it is more sick than anything we have seen through this entire campaign, and we have seen some pretty sick things.

and I am not sexist when it comes to politics (or anything else for that matter), Part of me was rooting for Obama to pick a dark horse in Barbra Boxer (but she would have problems appealing to Independents). I have a list of five people I want to see as Majority leader in 2009 two of whom are women, and if you attack Sara Palin because of her sex I will fight you with the same passion I did when I saw people play the Race card in the primaries.

so in short she was an incredibly stupid choice, but when you attack her, attack her on substance and not on sex or because of her last son.

We all saw Ted Kennedy Speak last night and there is one particular quote that I found Inspirational. it was a reference to his convention speech in 1980 when he gave the famous line "The work goes on, the cause endures, the Hope still lives, and the dream will never die" when Kennedy said this in 1980 he was giving up his life long dream of becoming president, it had become clear that it would never happen, but it was the end of something more than that. It was the end of the chances that there would ever be a full Kennedy presidency. the dream composed by Jack, Robert and Ted had perished in America.

To me it was something greater than even that. To me it is all the same dream: the same dream that inspired this country to be created in the first place, the same dream that inspired Abraham Lincoln and Hannibal Hamlin to fight for equality, The same dream that inspired Wilson to stay out of WWI as long as he could because he did not want a single drop of American blood (or any blood for that matter) to be spilled, the same dream that inspired Muhandus Ghandi to fight his repression with every ounce of his strength but to never raise a fist, the same dream that 20 years later inspired Sadat to offer Peace to Israel, the same dream that Mandela went to jail for 20 years to protect, The Dream that we can better our selves and, though it may take centuries,we can reach perfection.

What did ted Kennedy say that inspired me last night? "the dream lives on". this coming from Ted Kennedy after he has been diagnosed with Brain Cancer. He has never said such words for any other candidate. he is placing amazing stock and Hope in to Barack Obama. coming from the most recent American Dreamer of our times I feel obligated to act.as Kennedy him self said: "the Work Goes on, the cause endures, the Hope still lives and the dream will never die"

Obama is set to announce his VP Friday in an e-mail and formally announce it Saturday. I am Calling it today. Obama's VP short list Consist of: Evan Bahy, Tim Kaine, Kathleen Sabillius and Joe Biden. If my Final Call is Accurate Obama Will Pick...............   Read More »

to the family, Friends and Supporters of Stephanie Tubbs Jones, Who Died yesterday of a brain anyurism. I didn't always agree with her (mostly when it came to the primaries) but she was a good person and a good congresswoman, she will be missed.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton says her defeating Barack Obama at a contested Democratic National Convention “is not going to happen” but she is looking for a way for her delegates to vent before getting behind the future nominee ahead of the November election.

Clinton, who battled Obama for 18 months but came up shy of the delegate votes needed to capture the nomination, told a mostly female group of backers at a California fundraiser last week that she wants unity in the party, but she is asked every day whether she will put her name on the ballot.

Clinton said that her delegates want to have a role and feel that their “legitimacy is validated,” before the group moves forward to back Obama.

“I happen to believe that we will come out stronger if people feel that their voices were heard and their views respected. I think that is a very big part of how we actually come out unified,” Clinton, D-N.Y., said to applause.

“Because I know from just what I’m hearing, that there’s incredible pent-up desire. And I think that people want to feel like, ‘OK, it’s a catharsis, we’re here, we did it, and then everybody get behind Senator Obama.’ That is what most people believe is the best way to go,” she said.

“Doesn’t work that way,” shouted one supporter. The video clip of her remarks was posted on YouTube accompanied by the one-word remark, PUMA, an acronym for a group of Clinton supporters who have not committed to Obama. PUMA stands for “Party Unity My A�".”

Click here to see the YouTube video of Clinton.

In the video, Clinton, who endorsed Obama on June 7 after the final Democratic primary, said that she is fully behind Obama and actually has offered more help to him than other candidates have done for other nominees in previous years.

“I think it’s fair to say if you look at recent history, I have moved more quickly and done more on behalf of my opponent than comparable candidates have. And most of them didn’t endorse until the convention,” she said, naming Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy, former California Gov. Jerry Brown and former Colorado Sen. Gary Hart, all past presidential candidates who lost the party nomination.

Obama spokesman Bill Burton nothing has been decided in terms of the role of Clinton’s delegates. He said Democrats remain united, despite the hard-fought battle between Clinton and Obama.

The Democratic convention is being held in Denver on Aug. 25-28, with the first three nights’ activities taking place at the 21,000-seat Pepsi Center. Obama is expected to accept the nomination at Invesco Field at Mile High, a 75,000-seat stadium where the Denver Broncos play. Convention planners said the venue would demonstrate the massive support Obama commands.

“You don’t have to be a delegate or party insider to witness this historic moment firsthand,” Democratic National Convention Committee CEO Leah Daughtry said, announcing the plans for credentials.

Ticket selection was designed “to showcase the gains the party has made in the West,” she said. Nearly two-thirds of the tickets will go to residents of the West and Southwest, including Colorado, where Democrats have made inroads in recent elections.

But several of Clinton’s supporters are insistent that the former first lady get a vote on the convention floor. One self-identified delegate at the California fundraiser said a petition had been formed to put Clinton’s name on the ballot.

Clinton did not oppose that idea, but said it won’t change the outcome.

“I have made it very clear that I am supporting Senator Obama and we’re working cooperatively on a lot of different matters, but I think that delegates can decide to do this on their own. They don’t need permission. They can decide under the rules of the DNC, and so I think it would be better if we had a plan that actually we put in place and everybody knew what it was and then we executed it because I just think that would go more smoothly,” she said.

Former Clinton campaign manager and Howard Wolfson also obliquely acknowledged Thursday that relations between Clinton’s and Obama’s delegates aren’t all roses and sunshine.

“You know the these two people ran against each other for 18 months there were some moments of … friction as you might imagine,” he said, stressing that Clinton is doing her part to contribute to Obama’s election.

“If you have some people that are concerned that they are not getting the respect that they are looking for, that the party not quite yet unified, what is the way to bring those people back into the party to make sure that they are enthusiastically supporting Senator Obama by the time the November election comes around? And one possible way of doing that is to have roll call that has Senator Clinton’s name placed in nomination, that is one option. There are other options and I think that the important thing is that this is going to get decided between Senator Clinton and Senator Obama in a way that I think both can agree unifies the party and bring people together,” he said.

Democratic strategist Bob Beckel added that a vote for Clinton would help relieve some of the tension between the Obama and Clinton delegates.

“They can’t stop them if they want to do it. They cast their vote for Hillary Clinton and before the final roll call is finished they are going to go back through and make it unanimous by state. That’s one way I think to let a little bit of the pressure out of this pressure cooker, but it’s there. I mean it’s bound to be. You can’t have a convention with 1,800 delegates out of 4,400 be for somebody else and not expect there is still going to be some latent animosity,” Beckel said.

Clinton is expected to deliver a prime-time address to delegates on Aug. 26, the second night of the gathering. Typically the vice presidential nominee delivers the address on the third night of the convention.

As the one-year anniversary of the housing and credit crunch approaches, investors in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have nothing to celebrate. They won’t see an end to the losses at these mortgage finance giants until after next year.

Moreover, a report from the regulator of the two mortgage finance giants gives embarrassing new detail on how Fannie (FNM: 12.25, +0.42, +3.55%) and Freddie (FRE: 7.94, +0.42, +5.58%) were mindlessly gunning the securitization engines well after the housing bubble had burst and Wall Street backed off.

Freddie Mac will report its second-quarter financial results Wednesday. Fannie Mae will release its results on Friday. Freddie Mac’s shares are down 88% this year, while Fannie’s shares have dropped 83%. More losses and writedowns for the two are likely on the way.

The Office of Housing Enterprise and Oversight says in a new report that the two combined own about $217 bn in securities minted by Wall Street firms that are backed by the shakiest home mortgages dating to 2004 and 2005, the height of the housing bubble.

The mortgages here are subprime and Alt-A loans, just a notch above subprime. To the extent that Wall Street firms book fair value losses on this pool, “Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac may have to do so as well,” OFHEO says.

As delinquencies and defaults on subprime loans continue, and increasingly even prime loans bellyflop, Fannie and Freddie will continue to book losses into 2009, says Credit Suisse. Some analysts say they may lose an additional $24 bn or more.

This should alarm both taxpayers and investors across the country.

Elected officials enacted a $300 bn housing bailout bill that gives these two carte blanche without any statutory limits on their colossal $5.3 tn book of business (Lehman Bros says the two have another $3.3 tn in hedges, among other items, off the balance sheet). The two have reported more than $11 bn in pre-tax losses over the last three quarters and have a history of accounting misdeeds (on a fair value basis, Fannie incurred a loss of $13.3 bn, Freddie, $24.7 bn, OFHEO says).

The housing rescue now lets the government inject tens of billions of taxpayer dollars into these two publicly traded companies, who clearly have failed in their fiduciary responsibilities. The government can now use tax dollars to buy unlimited equity stakes in the companies and their bonds if needed.

The thinking is, the Treasury will simply mint more debt and use that resulting capital to inject more liquidity into Fannie and Freddie, despite their history of accounting misdeeds, losses, misstatements and repeated dilutive equity raises that prove that these two companies do not know what they are doing. Also, the two can now borrow at the Federal Reserve.

Fear is now rampant that if the rescue doesn’t work, the US government must spend more than what the Congress said it would cost to bolster Fannie and Freddie, $25 bn, a sum it cooked up in order to sell the $300 bn housing bailout bill.

Remember, the government’s estimate of the cost to taxpayers for the S&L crisis rose from an initial $50 bn to more than $124.6 bn (not inflation adjusted).

More importantly, Congress spitballed that $25 bn number even though just this past month it sent in bureaucrats from the Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to go find out what the heck is really sitting on Fannie and Freddie’s books, as it clearly doesn’t believe the management at these two levered up examples of crony capitalism.

The fear is, too, that the government may have to swallow these two obesities, causing the US dollar to plunge in anticipation of the need to mint more dollars, creating more inflation (not to mention the $99 tn in unfunded liabilities at Social Security and Medicare, according to Fed stats).

In effect, US taxpayers have been loaded into the backseat of Congress’s spaceship pointed directly at the center of the sun.

Because the market believes the US government has given Fannie and Freddie an “implicit guarantee”of their debt, for years both have used that backing to execute a sweet carry trade, where they can borrow money much more cheaply than banks and then turn around and use that money to buy things such as higher-yielding mortgage-backed securities from lenders, in turn injecting liquidity into the lending system to make more loans. The two also sell guarantees against defaults on loans for a fee.

For years, Wall Street believed their obligations were “nearly as good as Treasurys themselves,” notes Dennis Gartman of The Gartman Letter. Indeed, their securities traded as if the government backed them, and US government debt traded as if the government did not back them.

Fannie Mae was born in 1938 as part of FDR’s New Deal to get the country out of the Great Depression and provide home ownership. Back then, millions of Americans were struggling to buy homes, and also faced foreclosures, as banks weren’t lending and mortgage money had dried up.

For years Fannie sat on the government’s books, helping to expand the real estate industry. In 1968, the LBJ administration, worried about the effect of the Vietnam War on the federal budget, moved Fannie Mae off the government’s books, and Fannie became a publicly traded company.

When the savings-and-loan industry wanted its own mortgage financing creature to play with beginning in 1968, Congress obliged and in 1970 Freddie Mac was born. The two quasi-socialist mortgage finance giants then became to the US economy what off-balance sheet vehicles were to Enron, Gartman says.

When Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were limited in the dollar amount of mortgages they could buy and securitize, to $417,000, in the ‘90s, Wall Street stepped in to securitize these loans.

Wall Street then manufactured all sorts of subprime paper, paid the credit ratings agencies to get rosy ratings, and then sold this drunken daisy chain of paper to all sorts of unwitting investors from here to the Arctic Circle, now sitting as landfill in portfolios run by pension funds, hedge funds and local governments.

Wall Street firms then kept a sizable slug of this bad paper off their balance sheets to keep financial results rosy, and then wrote themselves sweet bonus checks off the goosed-up numbers.

So Wall Street, with the help of Fannie and Freddie, shot these risky loans into the ether, thus breaking the bond between the overseer, meaning the lender, and the borrower. Why care about monitoring a borrower who has no skin in the game with a zero-down mortgage when you’ve entirely offloaded that loan as a security?

As far back as 1987 the Financial Accounting Standards Board warned there was no adequate way to value these derivatives, and now Frankenstein derivatives are sluicing financial poison through the system.

Then Fannie and Freddie itself started buying Wall Street’s mortgage backed securities, securities backed by zombie loans given by banks such as Countrywide Financial (CFC), which already had pointed its conveyor belt of bad loans at Wall Street.

When the credit markets seized up in 2007, Wall Street stopped doing much of these securitization deals as its recycling machine for these cut and paste jobs had sand thrown in its gears.

But as Wall Street stepped back, check out how Fannie and Freddie stepped in big time.

OFHEO says in its recent report that while the volume of single-family mortgatges securitized in 2007 fell by 8% to $1.9 tn, as the number of single family mortgages originated declined, “Fannie Mae’s and Freddie Mac’s combined share of MBS [mortgage-backed securities] issuance rose substantially to 61.6% from 46.7% in 2006.”

Indeed, OFHEO says Fannie and Freddie “increased their MBS issuance by nearly one-third in 2007 as competition” from Wall Street “virtually ceased in the second half of the year,” though OFHEO says the two started to curtail their purchases of securities backed by shoddy loans. Too little too late.

Now teetering atop Fannie’s and Freddie’s painfully razor thin $54 bn in net worth is a pyramid of $5.3 tn in debt that is nearly half the size of the US gross domestic product. The two have much higher leverage ratios than banks or hedge funds, but lower borrowing costs due to their implicit government backing. The two whittled down their capital cushions after they gunned their lobbying engines on Capitol Hill, showering elected officials with money.

JPMorgan Chase (JPM: 41.10, +0.96, +2.39%) or Bank of America (BAC: 33.69, +1.07, +3.28%), for example, have almost as much bank-level capital as these two “combined supporting one fifth of the commitments,” says the research website The Institutional Risk Analyst, published by Lord, Whalen LLC.

So the fear is that, as mortgages belly flop right and left and an increasing number of homes go into foreclosure, the two are insolvent. Former Fed official William Poole has said as much of Freddie Mac.

But instead of reining in their colossal, outsized portfolios which has caused such danger to taxpayers, the new housing rescue legislation went in the opposite direction. It would increase the statutory limit on the national debt by $800 bn, to $10.6 tn, as the two would now get to buy and back jumbo loans worth $625,000.

And as economist Edward Yardeni points out (his reports are a must-read), both “have been scrambling to plug all the holes in their huge mortgage portfolios.” Citing the Wall Street Journal, Yardeni notes that at the end of last year, the two “started guaranteeing payments on loans that back mortgage securities held by others to delay recognizing losses on some delinquent loans.”

Yardeni adds that “earlier this year, in their most shocking (desperate) tactic to reduce losses, Fan and Fred started making loans of up to $15,000 to people who have fallen behind on their mortgage payments.”

Here are the stink bombs, potholes and steam pipes bursting in these two reckless publicly traded companies:

*Both have a total of a microscopic�"did you see it, did you catch it?�"$54bn in net worth, generally assets minus liabilities (don’t listen to the $81 bn figure tossed around for their total capital, that’s a pro forma fake number that doesn’t include certain losses).

*Teetering atop that razor thin wedge is a pyramid of $5.3 tn in debt.

*One stink bomb is the total of $260 bn in securitized assets backed by subprime and Alt-A loans, loans which sit in between subprime and prime. Those sums dwarf their capital positions.

*Freddie has $156.8 bn in level three assets, those illiquid securities it can’t get a pricetag on because no one wants them now. Remember, under US accounting rules, it gets to assign its own values to these assets, they could be worth more, they could be worth less.

*Fannie has $56.1 bn in level three assets, or about a seventh of its fair valued assets.

*Fannie and Freddie have combined debts of $1.59 tn, borrowings they made merely to operate their businesses. Again, that’s against just $54 bn in total net worth. Their guaranteed liabilities were 29 times their net worth at the end of the first quarter.

*They each have $2.25 bn pipelines into the Treasury, which the government now wants to expand.

*Forty years ago, when they went public, Fannie had debt of about $15 bn. Do the math against Fannie’s $804 bn in liabilities today, and the pipelines should be about $120 bn each.

Still believe that $25 bn figure Congress is selling you?

the shortlist has been leaked and there are four names left on it:
4. Sen. Evan Bahy (D-IN)

Now the only thing I know about the selection at this point is that it will not be Evan Bahy for two Reasons. 1) He's boring 2) If Obama wins and the Democrats get to 60 the governor of Indiana (Likely to remain Republican) will choose his replacement which means The GOP could Filibuster.

3.Gov. Tim Kane (D-VA)

At first when making my list, of 10 and then 7, I took off Tim Kane because I thought he was not well known enough. Obama think different. Kane is extremely charismatic and Powerful. Kane would be an excellent counter to the now likely McCain Pick of Eric Cantor. Kane could help bring Virginia and maybe North Carolina.

2. Gov. Kathleen Sabillius (D-KS)

Sabillius is a good choice. She could help with some Clinton supporters who wanted to see a woman in office. She makes it harder for McCain to use the Experience argument against Obama. She is fully able to be Vice President. She Can help in the Midwest, in states like MT, ND, SD, CO, IA, MO NM and NV. However, she is a risky choice. Racism and Sexism could prove difficult to overcome. The McCain Campaign could still bash them on foreign policy.

1. Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE)

I feel Biden is the by far the best choice Obama has. He is the one of the most qualified people in politics to be Vice President. He brings foreign policy experience. He has been a major critic of Bush and his Cronies. He will make almost every one more likely to vote for Obama. He is Respected by almost every one, he has a high approval rating. some people say he doesn't help with the map but I dis agree. I see him helping in states Like MN,MI,WI,PA,
OH,VA and CO.I think Biden will help make all Democrats and Liberal Independents feel better and make them More Likely to Vote. I feel Biden should, and is likely to be the VP.