While many have heard about how Barack Obama took over $100,000 from Fannie Mae ($126,349, according to Open Secrets), I think I've found the Fannie Mae trivia question for the day.

Who turned down $100,000 from Fannie Mae?

No, that is not a trick question or a joke. (Nor is the economic crisis triggered by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac a laughing matter, even if these things beg for ridicule.)

According to George F. Will (who is not laighing), the answer is the CATO Institute:

In the 1994 elections, Republicans ended 40 years of Democratic control of the House of Representatives. So in 1995, a vice president of Fannie Mae wrote a letter to Ed Crane, president of the Cato Institute, saying that Fannie Mae intended to give that libertarian, free-market think tank a $100,000 grant.

Politics produced Fannie Mae. It was created by the government in 1938 to further the government objective of increased homeownership. It was sold -- semi-privatized, sort of -- for a political purpose: to help President Lyndon Johnson finance the Vietnam War. Fannie Mae has no objection to interventionist government; the regulatory state created and cosseted it. And it has always known which side its bread is buttered on -- on both sides, by taxpayers, through the implicit federal guarantee of Fannie Mae's obligations.

But in 1995, Fannie Mae, attempting to ingratiate itself with conservatives, approached Cato with cash, thereby proving that it understands libertarianism no better than it understands subprime mortgages. When Crane responded that Cato never accepts government funding, he received a starchy letter from Fannie Mae hotly denying that it was in any way a government entity.

Will goes on to discuss another of the seemingly endless government subsidies (in this case more "corporate welfare for GM, Ford and Chrysler"), which also aren't meant as jokes, no matter how ridiculous they look.

And he closes by citing Marx. Which Marx?

Not Groucho, but Karl:

In "The Communist Manifesto," Karl Marx marveled that, such is capitalism's dynamism, "all that is solid melts into air." Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch should not be the last to learn the truth of that.

(I don't know what Groucho would have said, but at the risk of sounding optimistic, I don't think Karl took into account the dynamism involved in using gaseous emissions to solidify our liquidity to prevent liquidating our solids.)