Political Punch

I cannot believe my ears. This a.m., I heard on a cable news program that the CEO of Lehman Brothers stood to still make 65 BILLION, yes BILLION and that is 65, with this last proposed bailout check.

I am aware that the proposed bailout legislation crashed and burned yesterday.

May I offer humbly the following proposed 5 year solution?

1) Have the US Govt. offer subsidies to any homeowner with adjustable rate mortgages, who’s payments will or have escalated.

2) Have the US Govt guarantee any mortgage for any new purchases, or capital for small business owner, for people with a credit score of (_____)

3) Upon request, the US Government purchase any home, on the market for than 180 days, at it’s July 1, 2007 assessed value. Commission local brokers to sell purchased homes like any other house, marking it down 1% per month until sold.

This simple solution will ease the pain on Main Street, stabilize prices on Wall Street, and allow the chips to fall where they may on corporate America. NO BAILOUT. Remember that it’s the uncertainty causing the fluctuation. Offer a REAL solution and the markets will calm. It’s simple, transparent and digestable.

George Jobel

I propose a million taxpayer march on Washington DC. It is easy to ignore paper, phone, and electronic communications. Let them deal with us face to face. I am willing to pay our exorbitant gas prices to drive to DC to see our illustrious leaders face to face and have them explain to a million of us why we must fund the rich and Wall Street

No one ever mentions the primary reasons
for this "crisis", and de-regulation is not among them. Foremost are the FED, and the printing of fiat money, money
that is backed up by---nothing. There is a term for Governments that control the economy. That word is FASCISM! This Republic is now as dead as the CONSTITUTION. So much for 'conservative' Republicans.

No Re-election for any member who goes along with it!

Wall Street bailout: What is Bush thinking!!! To all Senators and Rep.s, please vote NO on the Wall Street Bailout. Do not sell-out America's future. Think of our youth. DO NOT GAMBLE AWAY OUR YOUTH'S FINANCIAL FUTURE!

Goldman Sachs stole your investments. Bush regime = Paulson and Cox.

Contact your state reps and let them know that Wall Street gets no $700B deal unless every H1B visa recipient gets sent home so that Americans can work. There is no worker shortage and the temporary workers do not buy homes or invest in our economy.

Obama/Biden 08!

mccain has placed reasonable limits on executive pay.

where the hell is obama?
--------------------------------------

Looking for Carly to pass her the meme.

"The expansion of unregulated Savings and Loans in the 1980s brought on the collapse of that industry, a crippling of the economy, and left taxpayers holding the bag. Maybe that was only happenstance. Those pushing for the Garn-St. Germain Depository Institutions Act may not have known what they were doing.

The deregulation of the California electricity market, along with the protections provided to Enron through Phil Gramm's lobbyist-written legislation brought blackouts, fiscal and political chaos, and left taxpayers holding the bag.
But the people who engineered that event -- people like Gramm and Greenspan -- had already seen what happened with the S&Ls. They should have known better. Still, perhaps that was only coincidence.

The sub-prime mortgage crisis that has not only come so close to utterly destroying the markets, but has ruined the value of many people's homes and left millions with mortgages they can't pay, was also the outcome of the deregulation created by these men.
The very predictable outcome. When taxpayers are left holding the bag for $1 trillion this time around, it's hard to believe it's any sort of accident."

Mission really Accomplished

"Richard Cizik is one of the country’s most powerful and outspoken Christian evangelical leaders. He happens to be a Republican, and he has known the GOP’s presidential nominee for many years. “I thought John McCain was a principled person,” Cizik says. “But John McCain has backed off, not just on climate change but on torture and a sensible tax policy — in other words, he’s not the John McCain of 2000. … He seems to be waffling on issue after issue.

“It’s not illogical for someone to conclude that John McCain is going to be more like George Bush than John McCain is going to be like John McCain in 2000.”

No matter what happens, republicans always blame Clinton.
The only president to leave a surplus.

that's to be expected when you have the republican's record of the last 8 years --

alpaig52:

to answer your question, a brief summary: you can easily find the whole speech if you look.

March, 2008
In a speech at Cooper Union in New York, Senator Barack Obama proposed relief for homeowners and an additional $30 billion stimulus package to address the nation’s economic woes.

Mr. Obama outlined six principles that he said “should guide the legal reforms needed to establish a 21st century regulatory system.”

But he cautioned that the “change we need goes beyond laws and regulation – we need a shift in the cultures of our financial institutions and our regulatory agencies.”

He also criticized John McCain’s economic plan as something that “amounts to little more than watching this crisis happen.

“While this is consistent with Senator McCain’s determination to run for George Bush’s third term, it won’t help families who are suffering, and it won’t help lift our economy out of recession,” he said.

September 02, 2008
The Republican Party platform took aim yesterday at President George W. Bush and presidential nominee John McCain for supporting big-government bailouts.

Republican platform 2008:

"`We do not support government bailouts of private institutions,'' according to the text, adopted at the national convention in St. Paul, Minnesota. ``Government interference in the markets exacerbates problems in the marketplace and causes the free market to take longer to correct itself.''

Jeru You didn't answer the question though about where has Obama been in regards to asking for oversight in these past three years? Oh, I forgot, he's been too busy running for President since the day he walked into the doors of the Senate. Why don't you do a little critical thinking and do a search on an article by Brody Williams on "Big Business prefers Obama, CLinton to McCain" which you can also find on the Green Change site. Maybe the Club for Growth's paper "John McCain's Tenous Record as an Economic Conservative".

The credit crisis and the lack of oversight over government-subsidized lenders like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac occurred on the watch of George Bush, and many blame his economic team for their lack of oversight in the collapse. Barack Obama has made this point one of his major campaign themes, arguing that John McCain would provide more of the same failures that Bush did. However, what many do not recall is that Bush wanted to tighten oversight with a new regulatory board for Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and other government recipients for the express purpose of addressing bad loan practices — and Democrats blocked it.

The New York Times reported this five years ago:

The Bush administration today recommended the most significant regulatory overhaul in the housing finance industry since the savings and loan crisis a decade ago.

Under the plan, disclosed at a Congressional hearing today, a new agency would be created within the Treasury Department to assume supervision of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored companies that are the two largest players in the mortgage lending industry.

The new agency would have the authority, which now rests with Congress, to set one of the two capital-reserve requirements for the companies. It would exercise authority over any new lines of business. And it would determine whether the two are adequately managing the risks of their ballooning portfolios.

The plan is an acknowledgment by the administration that oversight of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — which together have issued more than $1.5 trillion in outstanding debt — is broken. A report by outside investigators in July concluded that Freddie Mac manipulated its accounting to mislead investors, and critics have said Fannie Mae does not adequately hedge against rising interest rates.

This should have been a no-brainer, right? With hindsight, we can see that the Bush administration had accurately diagnosed the problem in the lending market and had a plan to address it. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac reluctantly supported the plan. However, Democrats objected (emphases mine):

Among the groups denouncing the proposal today were the National Association of Home Builders and Congressional Democrats who fear that tighter regulation of the companies could sharply reduce their commitment to financing low-income and affordable housing.

”These two entities — Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — are not facing any kind of financial crisis,” said Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee. ”The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.”

Representative Melvin L. Watt, Democrat of North Carolina, agreed.

”I don’t see much other than a shell game going on here, moving something from one agency to another and in the process weakening the bargaining power of poorer families and their ability to get affordable housing,” Mr. Watt said.

Sounds a little like the Democratic denial of problems in Social Security, doesn’t it? Nothing to see here, no crisis on the horizon. Everybody just move along, now. The Democrats had forced lenders to assume more risk at lower interest rates in the 1990s, as IBD points out today, and they didn’t want to countenance an end to their populist policies:

But it was the Clinton administration, obsessed with multiculturalism, that dictated where mortgage lenders could lend, and originally helped create the market for the high-risk subprime loans now infecting like a retrovirus the balance sheets of many of Wall Street’s most revered institutions.

Tough new regulations forced lenders into high-risk areas where they had no choice but to lower lending standards to make the loans that sound business practices had previously guarded against making. It was either that or face stiff government penalties.

The untold story in this whole national crisis is that President Clinton put on steroids the Community Redevelopment Act, a well-intended Carter-era law designed to encourage minority homeownership. And in so doing, he helped create the market for the risky subprime loans that he and Democrats now decry as not only greedy but “predatory.”

Yes, the market was fueled by greed and overleveraging in the secondary market for subprimes, vis-a-vis mortgaged-backed securities traded on Wall Street. But the seed was planted in the ’90s by Clinton and his social engineers. They were the political catalyst behind this slow-motion financial train wreck.

And it was the Clinton administration that mismanaged the quasi-governmental agencies that over the decades have come to manage the real estate market in America.

It was the Bush administration that wanted to rein in the madness in the credit markets, and the Democrats who wanted to extend the Clinton policies that created the crisis we have now. After the fit hit the shan, as Michelle says, these same Democrats want to shift blame back to the administration that wanted to increase oversight and curtail risk in lending practices while reducing patronage at the giant GSEs.

The Bush administration isn’t blameless in letting this get out of hand, but clearly the origins of the disaster and the efforts to keep bad policies in place fall on the Democrats in this case.

Update: John Lott points me to a March column he wrote at Fox News explaining the underlying causes of the debacle. Forcing lenders to make questionable loans and blocking tougher regulation of the government-supported entities was a recipe for collapse, and Lott explained it six months before it happened.

What's really hilarious is that SEN DODD is the KING of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac campaign donations and he's in just about every photograph of the guys pushing the bailout. I wonder how much he'll get if it passes?

Rex As long as Obama has been taking more money from Wall Street then McCain then mission is not accomplished.
Everyone standing around him the other day was part of the whole Clinton period of deregulating the banking industry while not ensuring any consumer protections in the whole deal.
You've got Pelosi and Kerry who have personally invested in some of these institutions among others. You have Johnson and Raines and others around Obama who have ties to this mess and
lobbyists on Obama's staff just like McCain has. You can even out the playing field between these two and match lobbyists and associates and the question still is where was Obama while this was all happening? What bill did he put forth like McCain did in 2005?

Gee, Obama was fundamentally against NAFTA and now he's not. He fundamentally didn't support FISA until he decided to support it. He fundamentally felt public financing was the right way to go until he decided it wasn't. Where was Obama when McCain put forth the Federal Housing Regulatory Reform Act of 2005 which would put more oversight into secondary mortgage enterprises? The one Democrats blocked both attempts of because they feared that tightening regulations of Fannie Mae andd Freddie Mac would reduce their committment to financing low-income and affordable housing. They knew at the time that oversight was broken. They knew Freddie Mac was manipulating its accounting to mislead investors and that Fannie Mae employees were intentionally manipulating financial reports to hit earnings targets in order to trigger bonuses for senior executives. McCain, this week, talking about the need for more oversight and talking about Wall Street being a bunch of crooks is not something he just said this week to win an election- he's been saying it since 2003. I'm not going to defend Republicans for their vices BUT are people really that stupid to think the Dems aren't up to their necks in this mess also? That they couldn't have done something or at least not blocked the bill in 2005. You have both Repubs and Dems sitting on banking and financing committees who've gotten money from almost every institution implicated in this mess. You have Obama, after Dodd, taking more money from Wall Street then anyone and you expect change or have hope in this one man who is as much old politics and entrenched in a corrupt political system as the rest? If Obama would have committed to public financing I wouldv'e had a bit more respect for him and believed he really might be the real deal, but he's not. At least if McCain gets in he won't be worrying about his reelection the minute he walks through the White House doors like Obama will be- and if you're worried about being reelected then nothing is going to change.

WHOOPS.......so what exactly is the money for?

•-> McCain: My Campaign Manager Had Nothing To Do With Freddie Mac Since 2005... "And I'll Be Glad To Have His Record Examined By Anybody Who Wants To Look At It"

McCain Campaign Manager on the Freddie Mac Payroll .. Thru .. August 2008

The McCain campaign has spent days attacking Barack Obama for his 'ties' to executives of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

But tonight the New York Times reports that McCain campaign manager Rick Davis's lobbying firm has been receiving $15,000 monthly payments from Freddie Mac through last month.

Mission Accomplished

Common Sense :

I'm for investigating all of the last 8 years...
top to bottom

only then... will we really have achieved

Mission Accomplished

Cameron,

It is about demagogery and taking the cyncial position of using the crisis for personal advantage by distancing yourself from your own administration (the children) and the people who what to stem the damage (the adults) by suddenly being a 'populist' and claiming the ills of the compromise after everyone else has supported it.

That way everyone who is upset about losing $7,000,000,000 of your money can say "What Leadership!!"

Get it??

Is Jake on drugs?

McCain has no real power to promote or stop this bill.

McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds says McCain has not made a decision one way or another.
------------------------------------------

So what DOES Paulson know about McCains intentions???

They really, really do think we are stupid.

I'm just wondering how Henry Paulson happens to know what John McCain is going to do.

"Ignore the man behind the curtain!"

The Rick Davis scandal proves that McCain hasn't changed that much after all: he's still the good ole John 'Keating Five' McCain. The guy who left his handicapped wife to marry the daughter of a millionaire. The guy who chooses to own seven houses and thirteen cars. The one who is totally out of touch with the everyday concerns of everyday Americans.

Ryan C,

"Over the last 12 years Obama has gtotten $120K total from Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac. And he is not the largest recipient of funding from either."

Good point. That is about $10K a year. Minimum wage would pay better than $10K a year, so I'm sure no favors could be expected for such a trivial donation.

"Raines, former Fannie Mae chairman, is an Obama advisor."

The person who "shared" that tale us probably doesn't know that he's spewing lies on behalf of McCain. The only reason McCain's ad tried to tie Obama to Raines was to ignite fear and mistrust of Obama simply because both Obama and Raines are black. McCain is a bigot! It was confirmed with the Raines ad.

Hope for change, hope for change!!!

Obama/Biden 08!

Rex,

"A senior law enforcement official says the inquiries, still in preliminary stages, will focus on the financial institutions and the individuals that ran them."

I see this as just another Republican-manufactured distraction. The real crooks are Paulson, Cox and Bush and the rest of their Goldman Sachs friends. Haven't you heard, with all this bad stuff going on, Goldman has decided to be a bank (now they get to use your deposits however they see fit).

Funny that the FBI is going after everybody the Bush regime despised instead of the real criminals. This administration is nothing more than a band of thugs and John McCain and Sarah Palin are just like them.

Obama/Biden 08!

Over the last few days, John McCain has talked a decent game when it comes to enacting new regulations to protect American families from another financial crisis. But as this new video demonstrates, McCain's talk is just hot air - he's got no record to back it up.

Last March, he famously said that he was "fundamentally a deregulator." In July, he said that his "fundamental difference" with Barack Obama was that Obama favored "more regulation" while he favored less. And earlier this month, McCain's strong support for deregulation was on display in speech after speech at the GOP convention.

Now, John McCain is scrambling to follow Barack Obama's lead as a reform-minded proponent of regulation. But that can't change the fact that when it comes to his record, all the way up until Thursday of last week, John McCain is "The Fundamental Deregulator".

Palin won't cooperate with the original Troopergate investigation — the one approved unanimously by a majority Republican committee in the state legislature this summer, which Palin welcomed in a spirit of transparency and accountability before she became the Republican Party's vice-presidential nominee.

The Alaska Senate Judiciary Committee had started the inquiry when former public safety commissioner Walt Monegan alleged that he might have been dismissed for not firing the allegedly loutish state trooper Mike Wooten, who was in a bitter custody battle with Palin's sister Molly McCann and was accused of threatening members of the governor's family. The investigation has since been painted by John McCain and Palin backers as a purely partisan exercise, particularly because the committee chair, state senator Hollis French, is an Anchorage Democrat who made several seemingly prejudicial statements to the media early on, including that the probe could yield an "October surprise" right before the election. Palin spokeswoman Meg Stapleton says French has already made up his mind about the governor's guilt and at this point is "just leading people into an ambush."

Instead, Palin plans to cooperate with an investigator from the state personnel board. That investigator is a Democrat, but the board's three members are political appointees who ultimately answer to the governor herself.

So, Obama receives 126K and McCain's received 22K?

Who's more compromised? Both? Neither?

Who sponsored legislation to reign in Freddie & Fannie? McCain.

Who's proposed lobbying and ethics reform? McCain

Who violated their campaign financing oath? Obama

I'd say both candidates have dirty hands here, but McCain's shown an impulse towards reform and Obama's showed ZIP!

The Rick Davis - Freddie Mac scandal features as BREAKING NEWS on Roll Call, the Capitol Hill newspaper.

So no, McCain and Schmidt, bashing the NYT will not do this time.

This scandal will sink the McCain campaign, and rightly so.

What a liars they are!

Oh, yeah, and McCain is just so compromised by Davis that he sponsored legislation that would have reigned in Freddie Mac and Freddie Mae. And Obama did what . . . ? Oh, yeah, nothing. And Obama's legislative accomplishments are what? Well, not so much, but he's run a campaign, the one where he appointed Johnson to head his search for his Vice President, and whined that you couldn't expect him to vet the vetters . . .

"Ah, yes, that NYT--you got to love 'em when they take on the campaign manager when OBAMA THE CANDIDATE got MORE FANNIE MAE AND FREDDIE MAC CONTRIBUTIONS THAN ANY OTHER SENATOR aside from Senator Dodd (a more salient fact they studiously ignored). WHO IS MORE COMPROMISED?"

Let's see over his 12 year career in public office Obama recieved about $120K in political donations from employees of Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac with about $4K of that from the Fannie Mae PAC ($2K in 2004 & 2006).

Rick Davis has received $30K a month for 5 years (and counting apparently even though the McCain campaign denied it). That is paid directly, into his coffers, not a campaigns.

That means for 2008 alone (while the crisis was at its height) Rick Davis has been given at least $240K.

I know No Child Left Behind has devastated our educational system but I think even a right winger knows that $240K is more than $120K.

Ah, yes, that NYT--you got to love 'em when they take on the campaign manager when OBAMA THE CANDIDATE got MORE FANNIE MAE AND FREDDIE MAC CONTRIBUTIONS THAN ANY OTHER SENATOR aside from Senator Dodd (a more salient fact they studiously ignored). WHO IS MORE COMPROMISED???

McCAIN-PALIN '08!

For leaders who have the courage to call corruption what it is whether it's Republican or Democratic corruption (and there's plenty to go around as we all know and see), and the sense to work across the aisle with politicians from both sides.

In contrast to the little man of small heart who couldn't bridge the tiny gap in his own party. He wasn't big enough and didn't care enough about his party or country to go the small distance to put Senator Clinton on the ticket. A doctrinaire left-winger who never found a liberal, left-wing mantra he didn't support.

I think we can all agree that Senator Clinton was the superior candidate in this election cycle of whatever party, and she had my vote and 18M others. In her absence, the clear second choice is Senator McCain!

The NYT is up with a sequel to the story that prompted furious allegations of bias, which linked John McCain's campaign manager to the troubled mortgage giants.

This one flatly contradicts Rick Davis's denials:

"One of the giant mortgage companies at the heart of the credit crisis paid $15,000 a month to a firm owned by Senator John McCain’s campaign manager from the end of 2005 through last month, according to two people with direct knowledge of the arrangement. The disclosure contradicts a statement Sunday night by Mr. McCain that the campaign manager, Rick Davis, had no involvement with the company for the last several years. Mr. Davis’s firm received the payments from the company, Freddie Mac, until it was taken over by the government this month along with Fannie Mae, the other big mortgage lender whose deteriorating finances helped precipitate the cascading problems on Wall Street, the people said."

It's harder to attack the messenger when day two is this strong.

"Senator McCain tried to reign in Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae in 2005, and proposed legislation to do so, "

McCain did not propose the legislation. He became a cosponsor and gave a speech on it...in May of 2006.

The bill was originally intro'd in 2005.

I know that bill is the extent of McCain's regulation and oversight career so its important to mention but you really should get the detail right.

It went nowhere in a Republican controlled committee in a Republican controlled Senate.

Americans for OBAMA. ! Republicans and Bush are finished!
McCain isn’t Hope just Dope!
John McCain is desperate to be a President his campaign the most sleazy and shamefully ever!
I don’t have any problem in characterizing McCain .He is a Republican! According to his own campaign, Republicans are corrupt and incompetent.
Obviously he has inside information

All high priests of
deregulation are
Republicans.

What's the difference between Ahmadinejad and Palin?

Lipstick?

Yes and no.

Ahmadinejad speaks to reporters.

He also might be waiting for that FBI investigation of Freddie and Fannie to be completed.

Never know what roaches that might bring into the light of day.

"You must not be old enough to remember the Carter DEBACLE!"

You mean the guy who cleaned up after Nixon....errr.....Ford?

Presidents Reagan and Bush 41 DID leave the country in a MUCH better shape than they found it, thank you very much. You must not be old enough to remember the Carter DEBACLE!

More significantly, who controlled Congress during those years? To the extent that Government has any influence over boom and bust cycles, Congress, which appropriates, has far greater influence than the Executive Branch.

"Oh, yeah, about Rick Davis and Freddie Mac: seems they were paying him until just last month"

But John McCain assured us that Rick was no longer doing that!

Oh, yeah, about Rick Davis and Freddie Mac: seems they were paying him until just last month, according to the New York Times.

Now we know why Mac needs to keep up a blizzard of lies. Disgusting.

The old man instead of
getting better with age
and doing what's good
for the countrty has
become an obstructionist.

Jeru--

HILARIOUS!, and you are absolutely right. Great satire.

Chad3337
re: 'republicans running the country into the ground"

well lets look at the last 30 or so years, only one President, Clinton, left the country in better shape and a surplus than he found it..

Reagan, Bush 1 & Bush 'dope' didn't..

hey.... Mission Accomplished

maybe this is why there's such a rush to use 700 billion so quickly......

"WASHINGTON - The FBI is investigating four major U.S. financial institutions whose collapse helped trigger a $700 billion bailout plan by the Bush administration.

Two law enforcement officials said the FBI is looking at potential fraud by mortgage finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., and insurer American International Group Inc.

A senior law enforcement official says the inquiries, still in preliminary stages, will focus on the financial institutions and the individuals that ran them.

As to that canard that Republicans ran the economy into the ground, you just go back and see who has controlled Congress for the majority of the last 70 years, and give me a break!

Tuesday, September 23, 2008 5:11 AM
From: X
To: citizen

Dear Sir

I need to ask you to support an urgent secret business relationship with a transfer of funds of great magnitude.

I am Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of America. My country has had crisis that has caused the need for large transfer of funds of 800 billion USD. If you would assist me in this transfer, it would be most profitable to you.

I am working with Mr. Phil Gramm, lobbyist for UBS, who (God willing) will be my replacement as Ministry of the Treasury in January. As a former U.S. congressional leader and the architect of the PALIN / McCain Financial Doctrine, you may know him as the leader of the American banking deregulation movement in the 1990s. As such, you can be assured that this transaction is 100% safe.

This is a matter of great urgency. We need a blank check. We need the funds as quickly as possible. We cannot directly transfer these funds in the names of our close friends because we are constantly under surveillance. My family lawyer advised me that I should look for a reliable and trustworthy person who will act as a next of kin so the funds can be transferred.

Please reply with all of your bank account, IRA and college fund account numbers and those of your children and grandchildren to wallstreetbailout@treasury.gov so that we may transfer your commission for this transaction. After I receive that information, I will respond with detailed information about safeguards that will be used to protect the funds.

Yours Faithfully,

Minister of Treasury Paulson

Oh, yeah, us bitterers sure are racists and we luv us sum guns & religion . . .

Unfortunately, there wasn't good evidence that lending disparities were racially motivated--that was the argument advanced by the "Community Organizers" to force wealth redistribution.

The actual data was far more ambiguous, and suggested only a correlation between income level and credit-worthiness, SHOCK OF SHOCKS!

"So, what was so wrong with traditional home mortgage lending and underwriting standards, and why did Democrats feel so strongly they needed to rewrite those rules"

Those rules were rewritten under Carter after a pattern of racism became evident in the application for credit.

Mortgage companies were not "forced" to lend to anyone. Republicans made it profitable to lend to bad credit people(who range across all colors of the rainbow including white) by allowing said lenders to charge outrageous interest rates. Republicans also eliminated regulation and neutered oversight organizations. Coupled with the Republicans running the economy into the ground and losing jobs at a historic rate the result was predictable. Many people could not afford to keep up with their mortgage and these subprime lenders found themselves holding bad loans.

Love those racist right wingers blaming minorities for this crisis!

Much easier than actually looking at the cause.

It's not the deregulation that's the problem. It's abandonment of traditional lending standards, and that abandonment was the result of more social engineering brought to you by the liberal wing of the Democratic Party.

Big corporate greed knows no limits or ethics. Conservatives barred regulations to big corporations for years in the name of free market, with their favorite motto THE MARKET WILL SELF ADJUST or REGULATIONS WILL ONLY HURT THE MARKET. Now that their free market is heading for a free fall from the insatiable greed, they want a socialist solution so they can keep lining their own pockets with tax payers’ money. Neat tricks for stupid people who keep voting for conservatives, thinking we are not being screwed enough and their experience can really SAVE us.

More wealth redistribution, served up by Democrats in Congress, who NEVER pass up the opportunity for hand-outs.

Unfortunately, creation of the subprime market is EXACTLY what created this mess. The Congressional Democratic Leadership's insistence that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac lend money to people (of whatever race) that did not qualify for home loans according to traditional lending standards is exactly the intervention that perverted the markets and created this crisis.

As a result, the average middle class homeowning family that bought a house responsibly at prices they could afford is now supposed to bail out both their financially unqualified neighbors, who will be allowed to write-off tens of thousands of dollars of mortgage obligations and wipe out the equity the responsible homeower built up slowly over years if not decades, AND bail out the irresponsible lenders as well (who were, truth be told, following Fannie and Freddie's lead).

UNBELIEVABLE AND REVOLTING, and as this sinks in to the middle class, there will be OUTRAGE at what the Congress has wrought!

So, what was so wrong with traditional home mortgage lending and underwriting standards, and why did Democrats feel so strongly they needed to rewrite those rules?

Re: McCain's Keating days:

HE was cleared; Only Democrats were convicted.

Re: Monies stolen from Fannie and Freddy:

Obama ranked Second ... during a THREE year period... and it was about $175,000 not $120,000...

but who's counting?

"Obama, in his first year in the Senate, became the highest recipient of funds from Fannie Mae."

Over the last 12 years Obama has gtotten $120K total from Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac. And he is not the largest recipient of funding from either.

"Raines, former Fannie Mae chairman, is an Obama advisor."

A phone call is not an adviser.

"Another chief Obama advisor, Penny Pritzker (yes, THAT elite ridiculously wealthy Chicago Pritzker), was involved with a failing of her family bank."

Funny you should mention that.

John McCain's son resigned from the Silver State bank for personal reasons 1 month before we had to spend billions in taxpayer money to rescue it. And while that might sound like a flash back to McCain's Keating days, that S & L collapse happened a month ago.

"You can COUNT on McCain demagogueing this bill. The man has no guiding principles other than "me first!". "

this by a supporter of the candidate whose sole life accomplishments are 2 adolescent auto-biographies.

Do any of YOU think this bail-out is the "perfect plan"?

Why should McCain?

He was the one who in 2005 WARNED against the lack of oversight... and was voted down!

McCain will do whatever he feels needs to be done, and I for one will trust him.

"John McCain has been very clear that he has certain reservations about the details of the agreement that has been released at last notice," Bounds said.

"There is no final agreement to review, but when there is, John McCain will weigh in responsibly and appropriately."

And even Reuters agrees that this is a situation which requires more than a lick and a promise to fix!

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Stocks tumbled on Monday as investors worried a $700 billion bailout for the financial sector may not resuscitate a slumping economy, while a record spike in oil prices renewed concern about consumer spending.

McCain and Palin

COUNTRY BEFORE PARTY.

Obama, in his first year in the Senate, became the highest recipient of funds from Fannie Mae.

Raines, former Fannie Mae chairman, is an Obama advisor.

Another chief Obama advisor, Penny Pritzker (yes, THAT elite ridiculously wealthy Chicago Pritzker), was involved with a failing of her family bank.

Obama can not possibly solve the problem, when he and his advisors were clearly PARTY of the problem.

He has no solutions. Just accusations. Even his VP disagrees with him. Poor Obama had to criticize Biden. Can you imagine? The puny, inexperienced Obama criticizing the seasoned, experienced, but big mouth Biden? Don't know how Biden tolerates being embarassed by this big baby Obama.

Obama....BAD for America.

John McCain has been a prince of deregulation since his Keating Five days. He supported the king of deregulation, Phil Gramm, for President in 1996 and had him as his main economic advisor until he called Americans whiners. He voted for Sarbannes/Oxley but later said that he "regretted" the vote. McCain said as recently as Sunday on Sixty Minutes that he believes that deregulation of the banking industry has helped the economy.

Does this guy have any core principles?

In 1982, the same year John McCain entered the Senate, a bill was put forward that would substantially deregulate the Savings and Loan industry. The Garn-St. Germain Depository Institutions Act was an initiative of the Reagan administration, and was largely authored by lobbyists for the S&L industry -- including John McCain's warm-up speaker at the convention, Fred Thompson.
The official description of the bill was "An act to revitalize the housing industry by strengthening the financial stability of home mortgage lending institutions and ensuring the availability of home mortgage loans." Considering where things stand in 2008, that may sound dubious. It should.

Seven years later, the S&L industry was collapsing. What was the cause? Garn-St. Germain handed the S&Ls a greatly expanded range of capabilities, allowing them to go head to head with full service banks, but it didn't give them the bank's regulations. Left to operate in an anarchistic gray area, S&Ls chased profits, indulged in amazing extravagances, and cranked out enough cheap mortgages to fuel a real estate boom.
They also experimented with lots of complex, creative -- and risky -- investments, even though they didn't have the economic models to really determine the worth of the things they were buying. The result was a mountain of bad debts and worthless "assets." Does any of that sound eerily (or nauseatingly) familiar?

It wasn't a foregone conclusion. In 1985, three years after the deregulation of the S&Ls, the chairman of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board saw that the situation was already looking shaky, with the potential to become much worse.
He instituted a rule to limit the amounts and types of investments S&Ls could carry on their books in an effort to head off disaster. However, many savings and loans -- among them Lincoln Savings & Loan Association of Irvine, CA, which was headed by a fellow named Charles Keating -- promptly ignored these rules.

Now enters a familiar cast of characters. First to pop up was the universally beloved Fed-chief-to-be, Alan Greenspan. Greenspan argued against the loan board's new rules, and persuaded Reagan to appoint one of Keating's pals to the board to blunt the requirements. A quintet of senators, among them John McCain, began having meetings with both the management at Lincoln and the regulators at the loan board. ]
Alan Greenspan also helped out with a letter to the regulators, asking that Lincoln be exempt from the new rules. With their help of Greenspan and their pet senators, Lincoln was able to stay in business an additional two years, at the end of which they failed -- taking the life savings of 21,000, mostly elderly, investors with them.

How involved was John McCain? McCain and Keating had known each other since 1981 and had become fast friends. Of all the "Keating Five," it was McCain who moved into the life of the Lincoln S&L chief. The two men vacationed together multiple times, with the whole McCain clan (babysitter included) heading out for Keating's private Caribbean property on Keating's private jet. McCain didn't think to actually report these trips, or pay for them, until the investigators were breathing down his neck. And McCain took his payment in the form of more than just vacations. Keating and other members of Lincoln's parent company padded McCain's pockets with $112,000 in campaign contributions.

McCain stole Obama's six point plan of action from Sunday.

Is there anything original about this guy?

I support a bailout of the wall street crooks from prison, but only after they spend a few weeks getting a feel for what it's like to be screwed!!!

McCain, along with most Republicans, has spent the past three decades pushing deregulation, saying that govtr oversight only hinder business growth. Now he wants to blame the few regulators still in place. He is the Al Davis of Govt, blaming others for his own mistakes.

Henry Paulson is the fox.

He's guarding the chickens -
that's us the taxpayers and
our money.

He's giving taxpayers' money
to his buddies who run the
big firms on Wall Street.

Henry Paulson should be denied
any role in the bailout.

It's funny that the whole vote comes down to McCain's position. Nobody cares what Obama thinks anymore. I guess the country knows a leader when they see one.

McCain is saying, We must hurry up, and TAKE OUR TIME, to make sure the proposal is right for everyone.

What the heck is his 'HURRY UP,and TAKE OUR TIME', mentality?

Multi-faced McCain.

Everything comes at a price and if we don't pay for it today our children and grandchildren will pay throughout their lives. For your consideration, McCAIN's plan is BUSH's plan by his own admission. So how has it worked for us in the last 8 years. FACT: Over the last 100 years democratic presidents have resided over stronger economies than their Republican counterparts. FACT: Over the last 20 years (BUSH/CLINTON/BUSH) the Democratic president has far and away out performed his Republican Counterparts, in every catagory. FACT: The greatest number of bank closures since the great depression. Fact: greatest number of foreclosures since the great depression. McCAIN's economic advisor "Americans are whiners". McCAIN "the fundamentals of the economy are strong". McCAIN "I don't know that much about economics". Most independent economists favor Obama's plan.