The black hole of our destroyed housing market continues to grow:

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s federal regulator is renegotiating the companies’ financing plan with the U.S. Treasury Department and may seek an increase to their $400 billion federal lifeline before the end of the year, according to people familiar with the talks.

These two entities hold $5.5 trillion in US mortgages and as the housing crises continues to deepen – yes, “deepen”; not, “get better” as the talking heads of finance and government have it – it just gets worse for Fannie and Freddie especially as they have such a huge percentage of the really garbage loans generated in the sub-prime boom. There is no amount of bail out which would actually solve the problem – there’s just too much bad debt secured by assets not worth 50% of the loans on them.

The only way to fix this – other than by mass citizens’ action to simply walk away from all the “underwater” loans – is to essentially put our housing and mortgage markets through bankruptcy reorganization. It would be hard, everyone would take a hit, but if we did it, the problem would be solved. Fundamentally, this involves reducing the principle owed on primary-residence homes in line with current market values for the property – and, so, a house which has lost 50% of its value would have its mortgage(s) reset at 50% of current principle, or to property market value, whichever is greater.

Doing this would do the most important thing: keeping people in their homes. There are about 10 million people “underwater” on their loans and, more and more, they are just bagging it and heading in to the rental market. If even 20% of those homes show up on the market over the next year, it will cause another big drop in home values…thus pushing even more people in to “underwater” status and thereby reinforcing the urge to walk. We’re probably already at the point where people who bought even as long as 10 years ago have lost principle – certainly, this is the case in the worst hit areas, and it will just spread and get worse unless we do something about it.

Or we can just keep bailing out banks and ignoring the fundamental issue of lost home values – and have one heck of a massive crash.

Keep fighting:

Our contest is not only whether we ourselves shall be free, but whether there shall be left to mankind an asylum on earth for civil and religious liberty. – Samuel Adams

This is “justice” under Obama:

The Justice Department has told the federal attorneys who filed a civil complaint against the New Black Panther Party for disrupting a Philadelphia polling place last year not to cooperate with an investigation of the incident by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

The commission last week subpoenaed at least two Justice Department lawyers and sought documents from the department to explain why the complaint was dismissed just as a federal judge was about to punish the New Black Panther Party and three of its members for intimidating voters.

Why do they do this? Because when a leftist says “community organizer” he doesn’t mean someone like Obama but, actually, someone like these Panthers who intimidated voters. A well organized community, for the left, is a community which votes the right way – and no better way to ensure the “correct” vote than to put bully boys out in front of the polling place to scare away anyone who might want to vote the wrong way. The left has never allowed a fair vote unless it absolutely had to – because the other side had enough force on its side to keep things fair. Absent proper counter-force, the left will cheat at election time in a grand manner as as a matter of course.

The Department of Justice is supposed to act as the counter-force to those who would attempt to hijack or intimidate the vote. They are supposed to on the look out for thugs at polling places and scams to stuff ballot boxes. Unfortunately, Justice has often been absent, especially in liberal areas of the country…and now, under Holder, Justice might be nowhere to be found. In the end, in order to protect our right to vote, we might have to post patriots at every polling place in sufficient force to intimidate the intimidators.

It’d be better if we could avoid this – but I don’t hold out much hope that Obama’s Justice Department will be at all interested in doing the right thing.

Over at IMAO:

…Anyway, the issue is getting a grasp of just how much Democrats suck so we can at least try and explain them to future generations. Well, one thing illustrative of that is out of the 58 Democrats in the Senate, Harry Reid was apparently the best of them and thus made leader. Even worse, out of the 258 Democrats in the House, they apparently have none smarter or more personable than Nancy Pelosi. Can you even comprehend that? If Helen Keller were also a quadriplegic, you’re still not quite to the sorry state the Democrats are in…

That’s how much they suck…

The news:

The latest calculation of the National Debt as posted by the Treasury Department has – at least numerically – exceeded the statutory Debt Limit approved by Congress last February as part of the Recovery Act stimulus bill.

The ceiling was set at $12.104 trillion dollars. The latest posting by Treasury shows the National Debt at nearly $12.135 trillion.

A senior Treasury official told CBS News that the department has some “extraordinary accounting tools” it can use to give the government breathing room in the range of $150-billion when the Debt exceeds the Debt Ceiling.

Tell you what, fellow Americans: how far do you think we’d get if we used “extraordinary accounting tools” on our tax returns? Think the Treasury would be ok with that?

What matters US law when the people in charge of our government (a) don’t know what “rule of law” means and (b) would still break it, even if they knew?

A little revolution, now and then, is a good thing.

Just a couple quick announcements…

As of this moment, I have processed all blogroll requests… I was behind about 12 months, so that was no easy task. All blogs that are still active and met all other requirements were added. It is possible i missed one or two here and there, so if you sent a request, and don’t see yourself in the blogroll, please resubmit.

I’d also like to direct everyone’s attention to the Local Issues page. Blogs For Victory is starting to syndicate conservative blogs that focus on state politics. Content is published in full, but if you’d like to comment, you must visit the source. As of now, we have blogs covering Massachusetts, Western New York, South Carolina, and Washington State. If you have a local politics blog and would like to be considered for syndication, feel free to send us a request at blogsforvictory+local@gmail.com.

That’s pretty much it.

Our man Vin Suprynowicz here in Las Vegas lets ’em have it:

To land continued government grants, it was necessary to “develop” evidence that would “prove” the claim that “man-made global warming will fry us all on a griddle unless we cede massive new power, massive wealth, our standard of living and our industrial dominance of the world to the ‘scientific’ central state.”

What those who dutifully excreted such steaming piles of crap have come close to accomplishing is to require that the world now presume, in self-defense, that any state-funded “science” is little more than government-funded propaganda to justify taxing us, regulating us, licensing us, fining us, advancing National Socialism under a new, Green flag.

Mind you, it couldn’t happen to a more deserving gang of grant-chasing welfare leeches and receivers of stolen property.

Suprynowicz is good like that – he is, after all, the man who invariably refers to our public school system as “government youth propaganda camps”. Can’t always agree with all his libertarianism, but he’s hit the nail on the head here. And just this sort of brazen exposure is what is needed.

Its no good softening the blow, good people. Our liberals are armored from ear to ear against logic and appeals to decency. The rhetorical 2 x 4 is the only way to reach them. Any hemming and hawing – any attempt, that is, to concede they might be at least working from honest motives – just gets us further behind the 8 ball. Give them a debate inch, and they’ll take a mile – say anything even remotely nice about them or their views and you’ll find yourself “quoted” in liberal-land as supporting liberalism. Better to just keep them at arms length, and then bash them with a big stick.

I’m still just amazed at this:

Republican candidates have bounced back to a seven-point lead over Democrats in the latest edition of the Generic Congressional Ballot.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that 44% would vote for their district’s Republican congressional candidate while 37% would opt for his or her Democratic opponent.

As a life-long Republican, I’m just not used to this sort of thing. My side is always behind on the Generic Ballot. To be ahead at all is thrilling – to be ahead for nearly 6 months is downright amazing.

Here’s why:

…It’s for good reason that our Constitution mentions only three federal crimes (treason, piracy, and counterfeiting).

The Founders viewed the criminal sanction as a last resort, reserved for serious offenses, clearly defined, so ordinary citizens would know whether they were violating the law.

Yet over the last 40 years, an unholy alliance of big-business-hating liberals and tough-on-crime conservatives has made criminalization the first line of attack — a way to demonstrate seriousness about the social problem of the month, whether it’s corporate scandals or e-mail spam…

…There are now more than 4,000 federal crimes, spread out through some 27,000 pages of the U.S. Code. Some years ago, analysts at the Congressional Research Service tried to count the number of separate offenses on the books, and gave up, lacking the resources to get the job done. If teams of legal researchers can’t make sense of the federal criminal code, obviously, ordinary citizens don’t stand a chance…

Every now and again, in any human government, the law books get a bit cluttered and its time to revise to ensure that the laws are short and easily understood. If we’ve got 27,000 pages of US Code, then we’re about 26,500 more than we need.

One of the tasks for Sara….errrmm…I mean for the next President of the United States is to preside over a full revision of our law code. And we have to be certain that no liberal gets within 100 miles of the revision process – nothing but the most rock-ribbed conservatives leavened with libertarians should have anything to do with it.

And then we pass a constitutional amendment which requires that each bill cite constitutional authority for its existence and that all bills be 50 pages or less. Time to jackhammer the bureaucrats out of our way and the best way to do it is to cut down on the sheer volume of paper they’ve buried us under.

The Battle of the Bulge – here’s a recent account about a veteran of the battle:

The crisp, winter sun burned through the fog around noon in the town of Longchamps, Belgium … revealing a wall of German tanks aligned on the snow-capped hillside.

No sooner did 2nd Lt. Everett “Red” Andrews call the target back to his fellow troops in the 377th Parachute Field Artillery Battalion, than he was struck through the mouth by shell fragmentation from the ensuing German onslaught.

“I hold the record for the shortest time spent as a forward observer ever,” he joked, before calmly describing the scene in graphic detail. “I peaked my head above the fox hole to see if we hit the targets, and next thing I knew I was clutching the blood from my mouth in my hands and trying to put it back in me. I thought I was going to die. I was twenty-two years old, I didn’t know. I guess besides my bright red hair at the time, that was another reason folks call me ‘Red.'”

The fragmentation is still lodged in his lower jaw, sixty-five years after forcing his early exit from the seminal World War II Battle of the Bulge, the largest land battle in U.S. Army history.

Andrews received a Purple Heart for his injuries suffered during the battle. He is quick to defer the significance of his service and the harsh conditions he experienced, first mentioning the hardship of the infantrymen he served alongside.

Here is an excellent description of the overall battle. It is important that we remember these events, and the men and women who served in them. We are forgetting far too much of our history – we aren’t teaching our children and grand-children just what this country has done, and what it has meant to those who sacrificed the most for it.