Government created the financial market climate responsible for the risky loans that should never have been given. Yet government has now appointed itself the savior that will rescue us from bad decisions made by government. How this guy can be so far off base is amazing.

Self-reliance. Individual responsibility. A faith in free markets and a belief that people should have the opportunity to fail or succeed on the basis of their hard work and ingenuity. These are qualities that have been as central to the national identity as they have been to the American economic model.

Which is why it is so extraordinary that the government now finds itself hip-deep in the direct management of the financial system, rescuing four of the country’s biggest financial institutions — Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and now Lehman Brothers — from the harsh discipline of markets and the consequences of their own misjudgments.

This unprecedented intrusion of government is coming in the waning days of the administration of a Republican president who made privatization, deregulation and a faith in free markets the centerpiece of his economic policies and of his political agenda.

In case you don’t know it Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were created by the federal government.

In recent months, the nation’s two largest mortgage finance lenders have come under increasing scrutiny at the hands of Congress, the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The Federal National Mortgage Association, nicknamed Fannie Mae, and the Federal Home Mortgage Corporation, nicknamed Freddie Mac, have operated since 1968 as government sponsored enterprises (GSEs). This means that, although the two companies are privately owned and operated by shareholders, they are protected financially by the support of the Federal Government. These government protections include access to a line of credit through the U.S. Treasury, exemption from state and local income taxes and exemption from SEC oversight. A recent accounting scandal at Freddie Mac that resulted in the replacement of three of the company’s top executives has led to mounting concerns over the privileged status these GSEs enjoy in the marketplace.

Let’s say your daughter got raped. Would you hire the rapist to provide your daughter therapy? That’s as silly as bringing in the federal government to fix the problems it created by allowing Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae to make irresponsible loans under the protection of law.

Fannie Mae was created in 1938 as part of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal. The collapse of the national housing market in the wake of the Great Depression discouraged private lenders from investing in home loans. Fannie Mae was established in order to provide local banks with federal money to finance home mortgages in an attempt to raise levels of home ownership and the availability of affordable housing.

Initially, Fannie Mae operated like a national savings and loan, allowing local banks to charge low interest rates on mortgages for the benefit of the home buyer. This lead to the development of what is now known as the secondary mortgage market. Within the secondary mortgage market, companies such as Fannie Mae are able to borrow money from foreign investors at low interest rates because of the financial support that they receive from the U.S. Government. It is this ability to borrow at low rates that allows Fannie Mae to provide fixed interest rate mortgages with low down payments to home buyers. Fannie Mae makes a profit from the difference between the interest rates homeowners pay and foreign lenders charge.

Let me be bold. If this cycle of hiring the problem creator to manage the problem continues, foreign armies will one day arrive here to collect the debts we are unable to repay.

Meanwhile a retard named Steven Pearlstein prattles on about free markets with nary a glimmer of understanding.

If these actions had been taken in Moscow, Paris, Beijing or even Brasilia, they would have seemed merely confirmation of long-standing socialist instincts and traditions. But in Washington, they are revolutionary. As with the Great Depression, it has taken a full-blown financial crisis to shake the faith that free markets will always deliver better outcomes than politicians and bureaucrats.

What free market you moron? Franklin Delano Roosevelt set the stage for the socialist controlled market in 1938! The current conditions are the direct result of government interference in free markets. Your advocating more government interference is akin fighting a fire by pouring fuel on it. What the hell is wrong with you people?

It should come as no surprise that federal employees have been accused of being in bed, literally, with oil industry representatives. The nature of power almost demands such relationships exist.

WASHINGTON (CNN) — U.S. government employees received improper gifts from energy industry representatives, and engaged with them in illegal drug use and inappropriate sexual relations, according to a report issued Wednesday.

A report says government officials accepted gifts from oil and gas company employees.

The report was issued by the Interior Department’s inspector general after a $5.3 million investigation “uncovered recreational marijuana and cocaine use” by “a handful” of Interior Department staff, and found two federal employees “engaged in brief sexual relationships with representatives from companies doing business” with the department.

Two Interior Department employees “received combined gifts and gratuities on at least 135 occasions from four major oil and gas companies with whom they were doing business — a textbook example of improperly receiving gifts from prohibited sources,” Inspector General Earl Devaney says in a letter to Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne accompanying the report.

Randall Luthi, head of the Minerals Management Service at the Interior Department, said the public had not suffered financial losses as a result of the employees’ behavior.

Some of the government employees tried to hide their close association with the industry they were supposed to be regulating, the report says.

The real problem here is not that human nature is what it is. Why does no one ever ask the question that is really important: why do we accept that government can police itself? It does a terrible job. These employees will never be appropriately punished because they are part of a monopoly that naturally protects itself. Its name is the United States Federal Government.

“The Bush administration put an ‘America for Sale’ sign on the White House lawn from day one and has been courting Big Oil ever since,” Rep. Louise Slaughter, D-New York and chairwoman of the House Rules Committee, said in a written statement. “Democrats have been saying it for some time, but this proves it. This administration is literally in bed with Big Oil. Little did we know they were such a cheap date.”

Representative Louise Slaughter is a part of the problem. She cunningly points the finger at a man we all love to hate. The truth of the matter is that Democrats are just as cheap to date as Republicans. To say that either of our two parties isn’t filled with whores would be disingenuous. Many Americans, though, remain happily oblivious to the fact that the two party system is a shell game designed for just one purpose - keeping the power in government where it can be abused with impunity.

As a legally naturalized citizen of these United States, and a trained disciple of the cult of big government, my first thought upon reading an article stating that the world would prefer a President Obama was why the hell should I care what choice the rest of the world would make if they got to cast a ballot.

The answer is simple. The U.S. government makes a habit of forcing itself and its policies on the world. Democrats have done it. Republicans certainly do it. The world is quite aware of it. Whether you were born in Kosovo, Mogadishu or Baghdad, you might feel you have a stake in who becomes the next U.S. president. After all, the decision may determine whether or not your family gets bombed in the middle of the night. Americans don’t have to worry about that (yet).

The longer I study U.S. history the more clear it becomes that the United States government has acted as an agression machine far longer than I have been alive. As a part of that factory of forced policy (a national guardsman) I would much prefer that the federal behemoth shrink to the point where I don’t have to worry about which war I’ll be fighting next. Make no mistake, some wars are probably unavoidable. I am not a fan of rushing headlong into as many as possible. That’s something only a complete idiot would embrace.

Yet there seems to be no shortage of complete idiots. We also seem to have an overabdundance of men and women willing to use force to make others comply with ideas that start off well intentioned and almost always turn into unmitigated and poorly managed disasters.

If the world prefers Obama, who am I to tell them they have no say? It seems to me that they do.

You may not have noticed, but America is in trouble. Our credit is overextended. Our military is overextended. Our welcome in the rest of the world is overextended. Civil liberties are disappearing and it’s only a matter of time before people start vanishing too. As a group, we’re getting fatter and lazier. Our political system is broken to the point that many people don’t think it can be repaired. There are not enough significant differences between the two parties in charge to matter in the long run. Both of them are driving us inexorably towards a point where we’ll either be a giant modern day version of a plantation or, depending where the technology goes, the majority of us will be converted into Solyent Green to feed the elite class. Anyone outside the two-party umbrella is marginalized or criminalized or simply ignored, depending what’s most expedient.

Jack Cafferty gets at least half of the picture.

It’s more than symbolic that when a million Americans are losing their homes to foreclosure, the Republican candidate for president has lost track of his holdings.

McCain surrounds himself with people like former Republican Sen. Phil Gramm who called America a “nation of whiners” and said we are only suffering a “mental recession.”

That’s the same problem the Republican Party has. It has lost track of what it used to stand for: small government, a disciplined fiscal policy, integrity.

In a way, the perfect storm of a rapidly changing population — old white people aren’t going to be in the majority very much longer (and isn’t that who most of the Republicans are?) — has combined with the total abdication of principles, Republican or otherwise, of arguably the worst president in the nation’s history to mark the beginning of the end of the Republican Party as we know it.

The Democrats will be in charge of both the legislative and executive branches soon. This means they’ll have some opportunities to take over the judicial again. Things will change, as they always do, but not for the better. Government doesn’t offer inspiration. Government isn’t good at hope. Government has no idea what creative vision is and it doesn’t do invention well. When all you offer as a solution to every problem is more government, then the overriding problem becomes how much government you have. We’ve reached that point.

Instead we can expect the police state to continue to grow. Concepts like zero tolerance, a “war on terror,” the continual decline of individual choices, more monitoring technologies and the ongoing dumbing down of citizens as the rise of the nanny state continues. That’s what I predict when the ball passes from the Republicans to the Democrats.

It’s true that Barack Obama loves guns. But only for the privileged politician and bureaucrat classes. You see, without guns, the bureaucrats would get a lot less cooperation fighting all the wars they are engaged in. Gun control is not about protecting us from each other. Gun control is about protecting bureaucrats from their subjects.

You don’t have to go back that far to find Obama taking an extreme stance against gun rights. In 2004, while running for the U.S. Senate, he promised to bar citizens nationwide from receiving concealed-carry permits. The Chicago Tribune reported then that Obama “backed federal legislation that would ban citizens from carrying weapons, except for law enforcement.” Obama explained his plan to pre-empt state concealed-carry laws with a federal bill: “National legislation,” Obama said at the time, “will prevent other states’ flawed concealed-weapons laws from threatening the safety of Illinois residents.”

For a man who doesn’t know me to arrogantly make assumptions about my level of competence and tell me I am not allowed to defend myself is morally wrong. Government has lots of guns. Why can’t I have guns?

The assumption is that government is more responsible with guns than regular people. Prove it. How many individuals have declared war on a country and killed millions of its citizens? Take away every gun regulation. The equation would remain exactly the same. People would still go crazy from time to time without thousands of gun regulations. Some of them would still get access to guns. If all the guns were gone, they would use a car, or poison your food and water, or devise some other method. The mentality a society teaches its citizens is much more important than the rules it writes down in books.

Maybe you could care less about guns. Maybe your pet issue is social injustice. Fine. Let’s talk about that.

The basic problem with government is that it doesn’t actually solve problems. It manages them.

Name one of the social injustices that government has declared war and won. War on Poverty? Nope. We’re nowhere near winning that one. War on Drugs? Nope. Drug use is up. Doesn’t matter if you look at illegal substances or prescription abuse. Not winning. That particular boondoggle isn’t going away anytime soon. War on Terror? The term itself is asinine. The program isn’t designed to stop terror. It’s designed to make us all very afraid. Of real and imagined boogeymen, some of whom wear government issued uniforms and lord it over you at the airport, border crossings and increasingly, on your city streets. We’re not winning the War on Terror and we never will because you cannot wage war on something as broad as “terror” - the whole idea is idiotic.

Finally, the most important war the government is fighting. I see the bureaucrats making a great deal of progress in that particular campaign. The War on Intelligence is moving right along. No, they aren’t winning per se. But the federal government has certainly managed to dumb us down since it took over educating us in 1979. No Child Left Behind has to be one of the most intelligence damning pieces of legislation ever written. The Idiocracy is coming. We’re 23rd in math and 16th in science. Under the management of FedGov, those numbers are sure to get bigger.

Let’s get back to our next President Mr. Obama and his worldview for a moment.

He has promised to pick guardians of the Constitution who do not respect gun rights and believe that a comprehensive ban on gun ownership is consistent with the second amendment.

Senator Obama has a history of projecting a misleading moderation in his politics — and he does it very smoothly. According to his biographer, David Mendell, one of Senator Barack Obama’s greatest political virtues is “his ingenious lack of specificity. . . . While talking or writing about a deeply controversial subject, he considers all points of view before cautiously giving his own often risk-averse assessment, an opinion that often appears so universal that people of various viewpoints would consider it their own.”

It is my belief that Barack Obama has no interest in solving my problems. That’s good because I don’t want him to solve my problems either. The tricky part is that I don’t even want him to manage my problems. They are my problems, and I’ll deal with them.

Mr. Obama when you become President all I want you to do is leave me alone to live my life. I have the audacity to hope you’ll end the four unwinnable wars your predecessors have been managing so poorly in direct violation of the Constitution they swore to uphold. Let the states handle social issues. Let me handle my business. You worry about protecting our borders and getting us out of all those ill advised foreign police duties we’ve assigned ourselves over the last 60 years or so. I’ll worry about running my own life, saving for retirement, choosing which medicine and medical treatment is best for me, picking what kind of gun I want to keep for personal defense, educating my kids and living as long and as healthy as I can. I don’t need help managing any of that stuff, please and thanks. The more rules you try to make me follow in my day to day routine the less likely it is I’ll cooperate with you. Hint: the same rule of thumb applies to people in other countries. Most people who didn’t ask to be managed don’t appreciate it when you decide they need managing.

I appreciate your taking a moment to consider this American’s viewpoint.