John Piper has some great words about your vote on Tuesday and things to consider and things to remember. He says well something that has been bouncing around in my head lately.

Let’s not forget that God is sovereign and whoever is elected He has a purpose in it and a plan for His administration. So the best thing we can do on Tuesday is praise God that He is in control and that He is sovereign and that we can rest assured that His purpose will stand.

This is an article from NY Times in 1999 about Bill Clinton’s role in the current mortgage crisis.

September 30, 1999

Fannie Mae Eases Credit To Aid Mortgage Lending

By STEVEN A. HOLMES

In a move that could help increase home ownership rates among minorities and low-income consumers, the Fannie Mae Corporation is easing the credit requirements on loans that it will purchase from banks and other lenders.

The action, which will begin as a pilot program involving 24 banks in 15 markets — including the New York metropolitan region — will encourage those banks to extend home mortgages to individuals whose credit is generally not good enough to qualify for conventional loans. Fannie Mae officials say they hope to make it a nationwide program by next spring.

Fannie Mae, the nation’s biggest underwriter of home mortgages, has been under increasing pressure from the Clinton Administration to expand mortgage loans among low and moderate income people and felt pressure from stock holders to maintain its phenomenal growth in profits.

In addition, banks, thrift institutions and mortgage companies have been pressing Fannie Mae to help them make more loans to so-called subprime borrowers. These borrowers whose incomes, credit ratings and savings are not good enough to qualify for conventional loans, can only get loans from finance companies that charge much higher interest rates — anywhere from three to four percentage points higher than conventional loans.

”Fannie Mae has expanded home ownership for millions of families in the 1990’s by reducing down payment requirements,” said Franklin D. Raines, Fannie Mae’s chairman and chief executive officer. ”Yet there remain too many borrowers whose credit is just a notch below what our underwriting has required who have been relegated to paying significantly higher mortgage rates in the so-called subprime market.”

Demographic information on these borrowers is sketchy. But at least one study indicates that 18 percent of the loans in the subprime market went to black borrowers, compared to 5 per cent of loans in the conventional loan market.

In moving, even tentatively, into this new area of lending, Fannie Mae is taking on significantly more risk, which may not pose any difficulties during flush economic times. But the government-subsidized corporation may run into trouble in an economic downturn, prompting a government rescue similar to that of the savings and loan industry in the 1980’s.

”From the perspective of many people, including me, this is another thrift industry growing up around us,” said Peter Wallison a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. ”If they fail, the government will have to step up and bail them out the way it stepped up and bailed out the thrift industry.”

Under Fannie Mae’s pilot program, consumers who qualify can secure a mortgage with an interest rate one percentage point above that of a conventional, 30-year fixed rate mortgage of less than $240,000 — a rate that currently averages about 7.76 per cent. If the borrower makes his or her monthly payments on time for two years, the one percentage point premium is dropped.

Fannie Mae, the nation’s biggest underwriter of home mortgages, does not lend money directly to consumers. Instead, it purchases loans that banks make on what is called the secondary market. By expanding the type of loans that it will buy, Fannie Mae is hoping to spur banks to make more loans to people with less-than-stellar credit ratings.

Fannie Mae officials stress that the new mortgages will be extended to all potential borrowers who can qualify for a mortgage. But they add that the move is intended in part to increase the number of minority and low income home owners who tend to have worse credit ratings than non-Hispanic whites.

Home ownership has, in fact, exploded among minorities during the economic boom of the 1990’s. The number of mortgages extended to Hispanic applicants jumped by 87.2 per cent from 1993 to 1998, according to Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. During that same period the number of African Americans who got mortgages to buy a home increased by 71.9 per cent and the number of Asian Americans by 46.3 per cent.

In contrast, the number of non-Hispanic whites who received loans for homes increased by 31.2 per cent.

Despite these gains, home ownership rates for minorities continue to lag behind non-Hispanic whites, in part because blacks and Hispanics in particular tend to have on average worse credit ratings.

In July, the Department of Housing and Urban Development proposed that by the year 2001, 50 percent of Fannie Mae’s and Freddie Mac’s portfolio be made up of loans to low and moderate-income borrowers. Last year, 44 percent of the loans Fannie Mae purchased were from these groups.

The change in policy also comes at the same time that HUD is investigating allegations of racial discrimination in the automated underwriting systems used by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to determine the credit-worthiness of credit applicants.

So Apple has redesigned its notebooks. I think they are great, but they are getting a lot of criticism from the Mac community over the glossy screen. The glossy causes a lot of glare and is harder to see outside. Another problem with the Macbooks is the lack of a Firewire port. If you don’t use any firewire devices like a video camera or a external harddrive, it’s no big deal, but it is still quite annoying. I would not be able to hook up my sister’s video camera and copy the video to a DVD in this case. 

It now comes with a backlit keyboard, which is nice in the dark. I always have a hard time hitting those F keys when its dark. They have a upgraded graphics card, which is nice. The graphics on the old Macbook was no better than any other manufacturer’s integrated graphics. 

I think Apple took a step in the right direction, but there are no doubt lots of people who disagree.

So I watched the presidential debate last night. I must say, i was unimpressed either way. I got tired of hearing McCain say “my friends”. It seems his only solution to the economic crisis is stabilizing home values. Both of them supported the financial rescue deal that I oppose. I do agree that with Obama’s thoughts on Iraq and our abandonment of Afghanistan. We should have finished dealing with Afghanistan before leaving Iraq. The news did some fact-checking on the candidates claims in the debate.

So, I find myself in a love/hate relationship with MobileMe. I love how it keeps all my contacts, calendars, and bookmarks synced between both my macs and my iPhone. It is also great for its gallery and iDisk. But what I can’t stand is its web interface. It is one of the worst I’ve seen. it is slow and often doesn’t work. Mail doesn’t have any rich text editing and is a pain to use. Switching between different parts of MobileMe on the web is slow as well.

So I’m ditching MobileMe’s mail and sticking with Gmail. Gmail is the best email service out there. If they ever come up with easy Calendar & Contact syncing with the iPhone, my Macs and the Google services, I’ll ditch MobileMe completely.

I also recently discovered SpanningSync. This is software that keeps my Google Calendar and Contacts synced with iCal and Mail on the Mac. I imagine that in a year when MobileMe is up for renewal, that I’ll have what I want with Google and won’t be renewing.

http://encarta.msn.com/encnet/Features/Lists/?article=UselessBodyParts

8. Sinuses

Doctors don’t really know much about sinuses — only that we have a lot of them. Possibilities for their function range from insulating our eyes to changing the pitch and tone of our voice.

6. Tonsils

Also prone to swelling and infection. If you still have them when you reach your 30s, it’s almost an accomplishment.

5. Coccyx

More useful as a game-winning Scrabble word than as part of the anatomy, the coccyx or tailbone, is made up of several fused vertebrae left over from the olden days when we had tails.

4. Arrector pili

When we were hairier (see No. 9), the arrector pili made the hairs stand on end when we needed to appear bigger and scarier. Now, it just gives us goose bumps.

Darwin claimed the appendix was useful for digestion during our early plant-eating years; it’s dwindled down to little since we started eating more digestible foods.

1. Male nipples
Because, why?

So. WordPress has an iPhone app. This is my first post with it. Hopefully this will help me post more often.

http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/081003/financial_meltdown.html

Sadly, Banking bailout/rescue bill passed the house. Now it has been signed by the president. But to get it passed, the bill grew in length by 150 times.  Let’s take a look at all the Pork added to this bill to get it passed.

Plugin Hybrid Vehicle Credit

Increase in subsidy for biodiesel production

tax break for owners of motorsports complexes

wooden arrows for children

tax breaks for rum industry

$148 million in tax relief for U.S. wool fabric producers

subsidies for people who bike to work

Both Obama and McCain agreed in the beginning that this bill needed to be passed quickly and without lots of stuff added in. McCain has been a huge opponent to earmarks and pork barrel spending. Buying votes has to stop.

If you want to waste time you can read the bill itself.

So last night I went with my family to see The High Kings in concert. The High Kings are an Irish Folk group that tour all over the world. This is their first American tour, and apparantly we were the last stop on their tour. I am sure that any performer will tell his audience they were great, but The High Kings told us we were the best audience of the entire tour. We were the loudest and most engaged audience they had while in America.

This was an amazing concert. It was at the Majestic Theater in downtown Dallas. The whole show was fun and they music was great. They had us sing along on many occasions. They sang great songs like “Paddy’s Green Shamrock Shore”, “The Parting Glass”, and many others.

This was my kind of concert, because I was able to sit in a comfy seatt and enjoy a good show. I’m not a big fan of concerts where I have to stand the whole time to see and everybody is screaming loud and obnoxiously. I’d like to go see some concerts at Bass Hall sometime.

So if you want to explore a genre of music you may not know, I highly recommend that you check out this group.