Reynolds calls it a “meltdown” as well. The only thing melting in the last couple years has been the economy and conservative credibility.

Your neighbor’s mortgage is your problem. America is not a Katrina-style you’re on your own nation. That abandoned house down the street and the millions like it will become an incubator for crime and ruin, and then your house will lose value and our society will be the worse off for it.

It’s still amazing to me that these people who claim to be Christians conveniently skip over some relevant text:

And the LORD said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother? And he said, I know not: Am I my brother’s keeper?

– Genesis 4:9

(By the way, remember when conservatives said liberals were stupid to protest things?)

First of all, even if Fannie and Freddie were the most awful companies in the history of the planet, its books chock-a-block with non-performing loans, none of the financial contagion—none of it—would have happened had not greedy financial institutions invented the risky securities that used mortgages as their foundation, via procedures that created economic incentives to write non-performing loans. We explained that a long time ago, here. Second of all, as we explained yesterday, loans that fulfilled the anti-redlining Community Reinvestment Act, performed better than the average mortgage.

Third of all: the part that makes you sick to your stomach. The pattern being drawn across the right—the Big Lie so notorious it’s hard to belief they’d even dare it—is that this financial mess is something black people have done to white people.

The difference this time is that this blood libel is being debunked by liberals who aren’t spineless. Wall street made this mess with an assist from their conservative pals, and yet again Democrats are needed to clean up a Republican’s economic mess.

The lobbying firm of the man Republicans say John McCain has chosen to begin planning a presidential transition earned more than a quarter of a million dollars this year representing Freddie Mac, one of the companies McCain blames for the nation’s financial crisis.

Timmons & Co., whose founder and chairman emeritus is William Timmons Sr., was registered to lobby for Freddie Mac from 2000 through this month, when the federal government took over both Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.

Newly available congressional records show Timmons’s firm received $260,000 this year before its lobbying activities were barred under terms of the government rescue of the failed mortgage giant. Timmons, 77, is listed as a lobbyist for Freddie Mac on the company’s midyear financial-disclosure form.

In this clip from Morning Joe, Kudlow details how he believes that the poor multibillion-dollar firms on Wall Street were forced to give mortgages to the thuggish poor, and that is what caused the current meltdown on the market. The reality of course is, as always, Wall Street got greedy, had no oversight, and then promised many people the chance to own a home and sold them a bill of goods built on a mountain of sludge.

On the other side were many speculators who thought they could flip these houses quickly, and that buying led to an increase in the bubble and again Wall Street was just handing out money like it was going out of style without government oversight.

But no, Larry Kudlow says, its the poor people’s fault for wanting to own a home and its the government that forced the poor Wall Streeters to do this. Off to the debtor’s camps with them!

Running the federal government is, indeed, “hard work”. Republicans, for the past decade or so, have worked hard at getting elected then once in office they think the job is done – mission accomplished. That’s why they argue so strenously against the government we are all a part of. That is why their goal is to privatize as much of it as they can while sending as much money into the hands of their friends, families and other associates. But this great nation didn’t become great by our government sitting back and letting the robber barons belly up to the table. We need the government to mind the store, to referee, to regulate and legislate so we can keep the country running. Bush and his fellow Republicans like McCain fiddled while the mortgage crisis grew and now the fallout is almost daily.

Senior officials from the Bush administration and the Federal Reserve on Friday called in top executives of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage finance giants, and told them that the government was preparing to place the two companies under federal control, officials and company executives briefed on the discussions said.

The plan, which would place the companies into a conservatorship, was outlined in separate meetings with the chief executives at the office of the companies’ new regulator. The executives were told that, under the plan, they and their boards would be replaced and shareholders would be virtually wiped out, but that the companies would be able to continue functioning with the government generally standing behind their debt, people briefed on the discussions said.

It is not possible to calculate the cost of any government bailout, but the huge potential liabilities of the companies could cost taxpayers tens of billions of dollars and make any rescue among the largest in the nation’s history.

It is interesting how swiftly the Bush-McCain Republicans moved to bail out the millionaires at Bear Sterns but have kept hitting the brakes when the issue of average American mortgages have been in play. It’s like they’re a bunch of rich guys who don’t care about the rest of us.

Or something.

Federal Deposit Insurance Corp (FDIC) might have to borrow money from the Treasury Department to see it through an expected wave of bank failures, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The borrowing could be needed to cover short-term cash-flow pressures caused by reimbursing depositors immediately after the failure of a bank, the paper said.

Strong like the Jello they serve at a retirement home.