Another Kindle Plug
WASHINGTON (AP) — After leaving the White House, the nation’s “reader in chief,” Laura Bush, plans to continue promoting literacy through the United Nations and the George W. Bush presidential library in Dallas.
The first lady, who will host the National Book Festival on Saturday, also said in an interview that she hopes her signature Washington event becomes a lasting tradition — and she’ll whisper something about that to the next first lady. This is the eighth year for the book festival.
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Visitors to the festival also will get a peek at the World Digital Library set to debut in 2009, which will allow people to access the collections of major national libraries including Brazil, Russia and Egypt. The online library will be available in seven major languages.
Looking five or ten years into the future, Bush said electronic reading devices may play a larger role in the book festival.
“My mother-in-law, for instance, is now reading from a little hand-held screen that she can download books on,” Bush said of former first lady Barbara Bush. “But I also think that there will always be a place for the book and that people love to collect books.”
The Associated Press: First lady hosts her final National Book Festival.
She doesn’t actually say it’s a Kindle, but chances are pretty good that’s what it is!
Published Proof
This is what got us into this mess!!
From the New York Times - NOTE THE DATE OF THIS ARTICLE
By STEVEN A. HOLMES
Published: September 30, 1999
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.
”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 (and current Obama advisor) . ”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.”
Follow Up to Texas Lawsuit
As a follow up to this post, I learned today that the Texas Supreme Court doesn’t feel they have to justify their reasons for allowing the two major-party candidates to disregard state law. Click here for the full text of the ruling. Really. It won’t take but a second or two to read the whole thing!
Presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain will have their names on the ballot when election season rolls around in Texas.
The Texas Supreme Court denied a petition filed by Libertarian presidential candidate Bob Barr and the Libertarian Party of Texas to remove the Democratic and Republican presidential nominees from the ballot because of their respective parties’ failure to file with the state by Aug. 26. Without going into specifics, the Texas Supreme Court’s Web site said the court has denied the petition.
Earlier this month, the Libertarians waged a battle to enforce an Aug. 26 deadline in Texas, which requires all parties to certify their nominees with the state by that date.
UPDATE 09/24/08: There’s an interesting post on this here.
DON’T PANIC!
Uncle Jay explains how the government is going to take care of everything. Worry not.
“Creative Accounting” - on both sides of the aisle
Forget AIG for a moment. Forget Freddie and Fannie, Merrill Lynch, Bear Stearns, and Lehman Brothers. Imagine a company much bigger. Imagine a company that at the end of this year will have spent $400 billion more than it has taken in. Worse, imagine that the company’s accounting is so bad, the $400 billion doesn’t even begin to cover the whole of this company’s liabilities.
In fact, the company deliberately chooses to use what’s known as “cash accounting” rather than the more accurate accrual accounting. Cash accounting looks at how much cash the company has on hand, regardless of future liabilities. It’s like saying if you have $75 dollars in your checking account right now, you’re $75 in the black, never mind that you’ve deferred your car payment this month, quit your job, and have a rent check due at the end of the month.
The company also practices dirty accounting tricks like “forward funding,” “advance funding,” and “delayed obligations,” deceptive tricks that hide its precipitous finances from auditors and its investors.
This company routinely borrows from its workers’ pension plan to pay off its debt. Its accountants then claim that because the company owes the borrowed money to its own pensioners and not to outside creditors, the resulting hole in the pension plan doesn’t really count as a liability. Sometimes, the company’s executives neglect to pass a budget at all. When that happens, they keep the company running with “emergency expenditures,” which its accountants don’t consider real expenditures for records-keeping purposes, even though they’re paid with real money.
Where in the Constitution does it say that the Federal Government has the responsibility/right to use taxpayer money to bail out private enterprise?
