When Obama was just a budding community organizer in Chicago, Talbott was so impressed that she asked him to train her personal staff.

He returned to Chicago in the early '90s, just as Talbott was starting her pressure campaign on local banks. Chicago ACORN sought out Obama's legal services for a "motor voter" case and partnered with him on his 1992 "Project VOTE" registration drive.

In those years, he also conducted leadership-training seminars for ACORN's up-and-coming organizers. That is, Obama was training the army of ACORN organizers who participated in Madeline Talbott's drive against Chicago's banks.

More than that, Obama was funding them. As he rose to a leadership role at Chicago's Woods Fund, he became the most powerful voice on the foundation's board for supporting ACORN and other community organizers. In 1995, the Woods Fund substantially expanded its funding of community organizers - and Obama chaired the committee that urged and managed the shift.

That committee's report on strategies for funding groups like ACORN features all the key names in Obama's organizer network. The report quotes Talbott more than any other figure; Sandra Maxwell, Talbott's ACORN ally in the bank battle, was also among the organizers consulted.

MORE, the Obama-supervised Woods Fund report ac knowledges the problem of getting donors and foundations to contribute to radical groups like ACORN - whose confrontational tactics often scare off even liberal donors and foundations.

Indeed, the report brags about pulling the wool over the public's eye. The Woods Fund's claim to be "nonideological," it says, has "enabled the Trustees to make grants to organizations that use confrontational tactics against the business and government 'establishments' without undue risk of being criticized for partisanship."

Hmm. Radicalism disguised by a claim to be postideological. Sound familiar?

Read the whole thing. A "Community Organizer in Chief" sitting in the White House is the last thing this country needs.

There are as many starting points for the mortgage meltdown as there are fears about how far it has yet to go, but one decisive point of departure is the final years of the Clinton administration, when a kid from Queens without any real banking or real-estate experience was the only man in Washington with the power to regulate the giants of home finance, the Federal National Mortgage Association (FNMA) and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (FHLMC), better known as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Andrew Cuomo, the youngest Housing and Urban Development secretary in history, made a series of decisions between 1997 and 2001 that gave birth to the country's current crisis. He took actions that—in combination with many other factors—helped plunge Fannie and Freddie into the subprime markets without putting in place the means to monitor their increasingly risky investments. He turned the Federal Housing Administration mortgage program into a sweetheart lender with sky-high loan ceilings and no money down, and he legalized what a federal judge has branded "kickbacks" to brokers that have fueled the sale of overpriced and unsupportable loans. Three to four million families are now facing foreclosure, and Cuomo is one of the reasons why.

Cuomo said the point was "to discourage practices that give financial incentives to mortgage brokers that offer higher-priced loans than what are generally available in the marketplace." The MBA, which includes brokers and other industry organizations, got Congressional leaders to oppose it, and Cuomo retreated. A year and a half later, Cuomo adopted a new rule that did the opposite of his first proposal. "The Lending Industry Welcomes Policy Clarification" was the subhead on the MBA's cover story. Cuomo's 1999 rule, issued under pressure from Congress to come up with a policy statement one way or the other because of all the lawsuits, found that YSPs were legal if "reasonably related to the value of the goods" actually furnished or the services "actually performed" by brokers. The Cuomo rule-making also stated that "HUD does not view the name of the payment as the appropriate issue," even though calling something a premium based on a "yield" and a "spread" pretty much destroys any notion that the payment is tied to a good or a service.

Experts point out that borrowers usually have no idea that such a thing exists. In fact, Harvard law professor Howell Jackson discovered that the HUD booklet on settlement costs, issued for distribution to borrowers on Cuomo's watch, never mentions YSPs or how they are financed. "You may wish to ask about the fees that the mortgage broker will receive for its services" is as close as the booklet gets. "Critically absent," concludes Jackson, "is disclosure of the fact that the borrower finances the cost of YSPs through higher monthly mortgage payments." In 1997, Cuomo's proposed rule said that "a consensus" on only one point emerged from the negotiations with the department's broadly based advisory group, namely that "a rule should require that mortgage brokers inform borrowers of the role that they are serving early enough in the transaction to allow the consumer to shop for alternatives." Cuomo's final rule, much like the GSE edict, concluded: "This statement does not mandate disclosures beyond those currently required."

Glaser acknowledged that YSPs are a big cause of the crisis, though he pointedly insisted that they were "not the biggest," and he blamed them on Bush. He pointed out that Mel Martinez issued a YSP rule in late 2001, and claimed that he did so because Cuomo's ruling permitted class-action lawsuits. In fact, courts around the country had denied class-action certifications based on Cuomo's ruling, but a circuit court in Alabama decided that Cuomo's regulations were "ambiguous," which is why Martinez then issued what he called a "clarification" of the Cuomo regulations. But as a San Francisco circuit court found shortly thereafter, the Martinez clarification essentially "reiterated" Cuomo's position and "carries forward the same principles." A dissenting member of the same California panel deplored Cuomo's ruling and said "the phrase 'yield spread premium' " was a "way of avoiding calling a kickback a kickback."

The sad fact is that Cuomo's surrender on YSPs can't be excused as an unfortunate consequence of well-motivated policy, as his defenders have argued regarding his FHA and GSE actions. He has no cover for this one; it exposes him as an agent of special interests. And looking at his GSE and FHA policies through the lens of his retreat on these payoffs (which even Glaser, in a marked change from his MBA days, now condemns) suggests a pattern of compromised judgments.