http://www.bucksright.com/bush-proposed-fannie-mae-freddie-mac-supervision-in-2003-1141

This article clearly states who was at fault and why.

Bush Proposed Fannie Mae / Freddie Mac Supervision In 2003
Tue, Sep 16, 2008 at 12:21 pm Posted by Steven in Economy
A September 11, 2003 New York Times article shows that President Bush proposed “the most significant regulatory overhaul in the housing finance industry since the savings and loan crisis a decade ago.” His proposal: An agency within the Treasury Department to supervise mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Fearing that mortgages would no longer be available to people who were unable to pay them back, Democrats eventually killed the proposal. The current meltdown in the mortgage industry is a direct result of giving mortgages to people who could not pay them back, a practice protected by Congressional Democrats.

Both entities were recently taken over by the government, a move that puts trillions of taxpayer dollars at risk.


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.

But Democrats in Congress, also known as “the caucus perpetually on the wrong side of history,” were having none of this “responsibility” stuff.

”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.

The proposal worked its way around Congress for a couple of years. Efforts at reform of the kind proposed by President Bush were shot down by Democrats each time.

In 2005, Republican Mike Oxley, then chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, brought up a reform bill (H.R. 1461), and Fannie and Freddie’s lobbyists set out to weaken it.

[...]

During this period, Sen. Richard Shelby led a small group of legislators favoring reform, including fellow Republican Sens. John Sununu, Chuck Hagel and Elizabeth Dole. Meanwhile, [Democrat in bed with the mortgage industry Chris] Dodd — who along with Democratic Sens. John Kerry, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were the top four recipients of Fannie and Freddie campaign contributions from 1988 to 2008 — actively opposed such measures and further weakened existing regulation.

According to OpenSecrets.org, between 1988 and 2008 Dodd received $133,900, Kerry $111,000, Clinton $75,550, and Obama — in only 143 days in the Senate — received a whopping $105,849 from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac lobbyists.

Pennsylvania Democrat representative Paul Kanjorksi, who also opposed new Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac regulations, was given more than any other member of the House of Representatives. He was paid $65,500 coming by these lobbyists.
The 2003 New York Times article was unearthed by a Free Republic poster.



Where Was Sen. Dodd?
Playing the Blame Game On Fannie and Freddie

By Al Hubbard and Noam Neusner
Friday, September 12, 2008; A15



Taxpayers face a tab of as much as $200 billion for a government takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the formerly semi-autonomous mortgage finance clearinghouses. And Sen. Christopher Dodd, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, has the gall to ask in a Bloomberg Television interview: "I have a lot of questions about where was the administration over the last eight years."

We will save the senator some trouble. Here is what we saw firsthand at the White House from late 2002 through 2007: Starting in 2002, White House and Treasury Department economic policy staffers, with support from then-Chief of Staff Andy Card, began to press for meaningful reforms of Fannie, Freddie and other government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs).

The crux of their concern was this: Investors believed that the GSEs were government-backed, so shouldn't the GSEs also be subject to meaningful government supervision?

This was not the first time a White House had tried to confront this issue. During the Clinton years, Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and Treasury official Gary Gensler both spoke out on the issue of Fannie and Freddie's investment portfolios, which had already begun to resemble hedge funds with risky holdings. Nor were others silent: As chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan regularly warned about the risks posed by Fannie and Freddie's holdings.

President Bush was receptive to reform. He withheld nominees for Fannie and Freddie's boards -- a presidential privilege. While it would have been valuable politically to use such positions to reward supporters, the president put good policy above good politics.

In subsequent years, officials at Treasury and the Council of Economic Advisers (especially Chairmen Greg Mankiw and Harvey Rosen) pressed for the following: Requiring Fannie and Freddie to submit to regulations of the Securities and Exchange Commission; to adopt financial accounting standards; to follow bank standards for capital requirements; to shrink their portfolios of assets from risky levels; and empowering regulators such as the Office of Federal Housing Oversight to monitor the firms.

The administration did not accept half-measures. In 2005, Republican Mike Oxley, then chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, brought up a reform bill (H.R. 1461), and Fannie and Freddie's lobbyists set out to weaken it. The bill was rendered so toothless that Card called Oxley the night before markup and promised to oppose it. Oxley pulled the bill instead.

During this period, Sen. Richard Shelby led a small group of legislators favoring reform, including fellow Republican Sens. John Sununu, Chuck Hagel and Elizabeth Dole. Meanwhile, Dodd -- who along with Democratic Sens. John Kerry, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were the top four recipients of Fannie and Freddie campaign contributions from 1988 to 2008 -- actively opposed such measures and further weakened existing regulation.

The president's budget proposals reflected the nature of the challenge. Note the following passage from the 2005 budget: Fannie, Freddie and other GSEs "are highly leveraged, holding much less capital in relation to their assets than similarly sized financial institutions. . . . A misjudgment or unexpected economic event could quickly deplete this capital, potentially making it difficult for a GSE to meet its debt obligations. Given the very large size of each enterprise, even a small mistake by a GSE could have consequences throughout the economy."

That passage was published in February 2004. Dodd can find it on Page 82 of the budget's Analytical Perspectives.

The administration not only identified the problem, it also recommended a solution. In June 2004, then-Deputy Treasury Secretary Samuel Bodman said: "We do not have a world-class system of supervision of the housing government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs), even though the importance of the housing financial system that the GSEs serve demands the best in supervision."

Bush got involved in the effort personally, speaking out for the cause of reform: "Congress needs to pass legislation strengthening the independent regulator of government-sponsored enterprises like Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, so we can keep them focused on the mission to expand home ownership," he said in December. He even mentioned GSE reform in this year's State of the Union address.

How did Fannie and Freddie counter such efforts? They flooded Washington with lobbying dollars, doled out tens of thousands in political contributions and put offices in key congressional districts. Not surprisingly, these efforts worked. Leaders in Congress did not just balk at proposals to rein in Fannie and Freddie. They mocked the proposals as unserious and unnecessary.

Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) said the following on Sept. 11, 2003: "We see entities that are fundamentally sound financially. . . . And even if there were a problem, the federal government doesn't bail them out."

Sen. Thomas Carper (D-Del.), later that year: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

As recently as last summer, when housing prices had clearly peaked and the mortgage market had started to seize up, Dodd called on Bush to "immediately reconsider his ill-advised" reform proposals. Frank, now chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, said that the president's suggestion for a strong, independent regulator of Fannie and Freddie was "inane."

Sen. Dodd wonders what the Bush administration did to address the risks of Fannie and Freddie. Now, he knows. The real question is: Where was he?

Al Hubbard was director of the National Economic Council and assistant to the president from 2005 to 2007. Noam Neusner was a speechwriter and communications director in the Bush administration from 2002 to 2005.



“If Congress does not act, American taxpayers will continue to be exposed to the enormous risk that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pose to the housing market, the overall financial system, and the economy as a whole.”


Who said that?

John McCain 5/26/2006



C-Span video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usvG-s_Ssb0


NOW FOR THE HACKER

Son Of Tennessee Democrat Alleged Palin Hacker
NCG

MEMPHIS, TENN—The son of Democratic state representative Mike Kernell is reportedly a suspect in the hacking of the personal e-mail account of Alaska’s Gov. Sarah Palin, Republican vice presidential candidate.

According to The Tennessean, Memphis Democrat Kernell has confirmed that his 20-year-old son David is at the center of the investigation of the hacking being conducted by the FBI and Secret Service but said there had not yet been contact of him or his son by law enforcement agencies.

David Kernell attends the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. Kernell told the newspaper that he had spoken with his son on Thursday but declined to further comment on the investigation of his son’s whereabouts.

Reports indicate that Palin’s Yahoo e-mail account was accessed by the hacker impersonating her and obtaining her password. A person claiming to be the hacker and using the e-mail address rubico10@yahoo.com which was later traced to Kernell, posted to a forum at 4chan and described how he had hacked into Palin’s account using the password-recovery tool to obtain her password. He said he later changed the password to “popcorn”, which is not surprising considering his name is Kernell.

Palin’s private account was hacked between 3 and 4 a.m. Wednesday and a group of political activists who claimed to belong to an anti-Scientology movement and who call themselves Anonymous initially took credit for the hacking.

The group is also associated with another group which engages in hacking, denial-of-service-attacks and other computer crimes against websites who they believe are engaged in Internet censorship. They believe everything on the Internet is free and they strongly oppose copyright and privacy laws. Anonymous (group) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

Postings on several websites Wednesday included screen shots of the mailbox of the GOP candidate for vice president, divulged the contents of two e-mails, listed the e-mail addresses of Palin’s friends, family and associates and showed private family photographs.

The cell phone number of Palin’s daughter Bristol was publicized and called. The e-mail account of Palin’s husband, Todd was also hacked.

In a posting at the blog wired.com, the alleged hacker said that he had read all of Palin’s emails and had found “nothing incriminating, nothing that would derail her campaign as I had hoped. All I saw was personal stuff, some clerical stuff from when she was a governor….and pictures of her family”.

He said that once he’d read Palin’s e-mails, he realized what he had done and that he was likely to be caught because he had only used a single proxy service to try and hide his IP address. That operator of that proxy service is said to be cooperating in the investigation.

Palin E-Mail Hacker Says It Was Easy | Threat Level from Wired.com 9-18-08



He should be punished swiftly and severely.

To borrow a phrase from Office Space. I hope this guy gets to spend some serious time in “Federal Pound You In The A$$ Prison”







"The FACTS are always subject to CHANGE once the TRUTH is applied"
"In the entire history of man the only stupid questions are the ones that don't get asked"

1) I can't believe how incredibly biased that first article was. It's almost as if they expect people to believe that only the D's were against it,, and that all the R's were for it. Didn't the R's have the majority when that bill was introduced?
2) What happened to R's being for small government? Then, when it's convenient, they should regulate everything. And, since I'm hungry again today, bacon or eggs people?
3) They're all F'n corrupt to heck and back. You want to do something about it, get rid of the damn lobbyists. No matter what they claim, neither candidate is going to make any significant changes here. I almost wish Paul would be elected as a statement, even though I think he's crazy in numerous regards.
4) Where was the supervision of the Brokers when these transactions were being so freely thrown together? If you want regulation, we need to set some boundaries for the root of the problem, the Brokers. How is it they can profit so much, and not receive any of the backlash? Broken system.
5) I agree with their concern for affordable housing, the problem is that these people were being led to believe that they could afford more than they actually could (and they were stupid enough to believe it, although I doubt they were all PhDs).
6) The biggest problem was people who bought into the housing bubble as an investment, because well, everyone was (jumping off bridges). These multiple property people NEED to be hung out to dry, as any other market's investors would/should be. The BIPARTISAN bailout is a joke.

As for the email hacker -
1) Remember, "alleged". Just like Palin allegedly had been using her personal email for government-related business.
2) Whoever did it, they obviously weren't very bright revealing what they had done after not finding any damning evidence, lol.
3) What jurisdiction does the SS have in her personal email account? I'm really curious about that one.

Quote:

Federal Pound You In The A$$ Prison

Oh, how I love that movie.

/insert arbitrary lipstick joke




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Quote:

About BucksRight

My name is Steven, and I am a proud conservative situated in a purple county in a blue state.

I went looking for local information - some Internet destination where other Bucks County conservatives were congregating and discussing issues from a conservative standpoint. Apart from a few sites dedicated to specific issues, I found none.

The Rest of the Meltdown Story
Neal Boortz

What in the world is going on here?

You've seen the headlines, and you heard of the failures and buyouts. Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, AIG; all big names and all in big trouble. Then those mysterious quasi-government agencies with names like Freddie and Fannie become wards of the state and you learn that you and your fellow taxpayers are potentially on the hook for tens of billions of dollars. At the end of the week Washington Mutual is looking for a buyer, and you start to wonder about the security of your own bank and your own savings account. Let's change that ad copy to WaMu -- boo hoo.

Somewhere in the back of your mind you understand that this is all tied somehow to bad mortgages. If you start reading a bit further to enhance your understanding you run into terms like Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS) and credit-default swaps, whatever in the world those are. Read further and you find out that a combination of falling home prices and mortgage defaults have put many investment banks and other financial institutions in deep puddin'. All this reading, all this watching the talking heads on TV, and you still don't really know what in the world is going on here.

Fear not. I'm here to help. I know ... I'm just another talk show host; but the fact is that when the stage was being set for the problems we're seeing today I was making most of my money as a real estate lawyer .. closing loans for some of the very institutions that are the tank today. This rather unique combination - closing lawyer and radio talk show host - gave me a front row seat to the politicization of mortgage loans that led us to today's headlines.

OK .. so we all know that a lot of really bad real estate loans were made. The political class would sure love for us to believe that the blame here rests squarely on "greedy" (try to define that word) mortgage brokers and lenders. The truth is that most of the blame rests on political meddling in the credit decisions of these mortgage lenders.

Twenty years ago the buzz-word in the media was "redlining." Newspapers across the country were filled with hard-hitting investigative reports about evil and racist mortgage lenders refusing to make real estate loans to various minorities and to applicants who lived in lower-income neighborhoods. There I was closing these loans in the afternoons, and in the mornings offering a counter-argument on the radio to these absurd "redlining" claims. Frankly, the claims that evil mortgage lenders were systematically denying loans to blacks and other minorities were a lot sexier on the radio than my claims that when credit histories, job stability, loan-to-value ratios and income levels were considered there was no evident racial discrimination.

Political correctness won the day. Washington made it clear to banks and other lending institutions that if they did not do something .. and fast .. to bring more minorities and low-income Americans into the world of home ownership there would be a heavy price to pay. Congress set up processes (Research the Community Redevelopment Act) whereby community activist groups and organizers could effectively stop a bank's efforts to grow if that bank didn't make loans to unqualified borrowers. Enter, stage left, the "subprime" mortgage. These lenders knew that a very high percentage of these loans would turn to garbage - but it was a price that had to be paid if the bank was to expand and grow. We should note that among the community groups browbeating banks into making these bad loans was an outfit called ACORN. There is one certain presidential candidate that did a lot of community organizing for ACORN. I won't mention his name so as to avoid politicizing this column.

These garbage loans to unqualified borrowers were then bundled up and sold. The expectation was that the loans would be eventually paid off when rising home values led some borrowers to access their equity through re-financing and others to sell and move on up the ladder. Oops.

Right now this crisis is being sold to the American public by the left as evidence the failure of the free market and capitalism. Not so. What we're seeing is the inevitable result of political interference in free market economics. Acme bank didn't want to loan money to Joe Homebuyer because Joe had a spotty job history, owed too much money on his credit cards, and wasn't all that good at making payments on time. The politicians told Acme Bank to figure out a way to make that loan, because, after all, Joe is a bona-fide minority-American, or forget about opening that new branch office on the Southside. The loan was made under politicial pressure; the loan, with millions like it, failed - and now we are left to enjoy today's headlines.

So ... why aren't you reading the whole story in the mainstream media? Come on, are you kidding me? Do you really expect the media to blame this mess on deadbeat borrowers and political interference in the free market when it is so easy to put the blame on greedy lenders and evil capitalists? Remember ... there's an election going on. One candidate is decidedly anti-capitalist. Do the math.








"The FACTS are always subject to CHANGE once the TRUTH is applied"
"In the entire history of man the only stupid questions are the ones that don't get asked"

The problem isn't the deadbeat borrowers, it's the lenders. If I lend you 50$ when I know that you can't pay me back and you *surprise surprise* don't pay me back, who's the one ultimately at fault? The hungry animal being presented with food or the idiot who puts his hand in the cage?

I make 15$ an hour, work 40 hours a week, hold a security clearance, have been working at the same job for more than 8 years and have excellent credit. Know how much a Canadian bank will lend me for a house? 50 grand. That's it. Not a penny more, and even at 50 grand I'd better be ready to do a little begging. Why? Because with my salary I couldn't deal with a wildly fluctuating interest rate and they're scared that even though I could technically pay 80 to a 100 grand at today's relatively low rates, I couldn't when they will inevitably rise.

You Yanks don't do that. You just loan money to anyone with even marginally decent credit. If a guy makes 1500$ a month and he takes out a loan for 800$ a month, he can theoretically pay it. BUT, if the interest rates climb and he ends up owing 1300$ a month, he's in real trouble. Canadian banks account for this, a lot of American banks don't. That's why you don't see Canuckian banks closing all over the place. They're very stingy with their loans.

A lot of these deadbeats were approved for loans that the lenders knew damn well they couldn't pay. In fact, the lenders even went so far as to lower the total payments so that they'd only be paying the basic interest rates. (SPECIAL! Low introductory rate!) Which means that a lot of these suckers ended up owing more than they borrowed after five years because the loan itself never got paid off.

Then you got banks giving retirees second morgages left and rights on the escalating value of their homes, so when the market prices dropped like a stone they ended up... you guessed it: owing more than the house was worth. So all of a sudden they gotta pay back a few hundred grand or lose the house.

Having raged against the reality that I may never own my own house, I can't possibly fault people who were dangled money in front of their faces by greedy unscrupulous lenders. They took a chance at the Merkin dream and lost.

john317(AKA Gary the Old guy) wrote:I won't mention his name so as to avoid politicizing this column.

Give me a break. Very poor facade.
Gary, you first posted an article on how Democrats were evil for not regulating the mortgage industry, and then an article with how they were evil for regulating it. Do you, honestly, not see the contradiction here? You can't just post up columns from every donkey-basher you find... Responses from yourself would also be somewhat expected when people comment on the columns you post.

Knoxfire wrote:The problem isn't the deadbeat borrowers, it's the lenders.

No, it's both. We need to start expecting some glimmer of personal responsability, THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!!1!! lol




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knoxfire. see i just feel the opposite you do. because i was one of those people that was dangled a large loan in front of my face. when i went to buy a house i looked at my budget and figured on what i could afford to make my payments, on approval the mortgager waved a number in my face a good 50 grand higher then what i figured my comfort level was. i had the common sence to purchase the house i new i could afford not what the person selling me the house said i could afford. i mean a house for the most part is the biggest single purchase they will ever make, and if they dont even bother to know what they can afford is it really anyones fault but their own? ive never walked into a car dealership and bought a corvette just because some guy tells me i can afford one.

now i do agree that the banks should have been smart enough not to give out loans like that but they didnt nock on the guys door and go " hey come over here and buy this house" . and now you can see which banks didnt take those risk because those are the banks that are buying out all these other banks that took to much risk.




in your instance your also talking about variable rate loans. get a fixed intrest loan. if you can't then stay in an apartment and dont buy a house. allot of these people bought houses they new they couldnt afford, live there for a year and just move on.


you have to start holding people accountable for their actions. not the other way around. its like when you go buy a used car, you dont walk up to a car with no sticker on it and go " hey i have 15 grand, how much is this car" what do you think the price on that car is going to be?????





and to the original article even though i lean towards the conservative side you can tell the heavy heavy bias in that one.


http://www.flickr.com/photos/sndsgood/ https://www.facebook.com/#!/Square1Photography

By FRANK RICH
Published: September 20, 2008
NOT until 2004 could the 9/11 commission at last reveal the title of the intelligence briefing President Bush ignored on Aug. 6, 2001, in Crawford: “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” No wonder John McCain called for a new “9/11 commission” to “get to the bottom” of 9/14, when the collapse of Lehman Brothers set off another kind of blood bath in Lower Manhattan. Put a slo-mo Beltway panel in charge, and Election Day will be ancient history before we get to the bottom of just how little he and the president did to defend America against a devastating new threat on their watch.

For better or worse, the candidacy of Barack Obama, a senator-come-lately, must be evaluated on his judgment, ideas and potential to lead. McCain, by contrast, has been chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, where he claims to have overseen “every part of our economy.” He didn’t, thank heavens, but he does have a long and relevant economic record that begins with the Keating Five scandal of 1989 and extends to this campaign, where his fiscal policies bear the fingerprints of Phil Gramm and Carly Fiorina. It’s not the résumé that a presidential candidate wants to advertise as America faces its worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. That’s why the main thrust of the McCain campaign has been to cover up his history of economic malpractice.

McCain has largely pulled it off so far, under the guidance of Steve Schmidt, a Karl Rove protégé. A Rovian political strategy by definition means all slime, all the time. But the more crucial Rove game plan is to envelop the entire presidential race in a thick fog of truthiness. All campaigns, Obama’s included, engage in false attacks. But McCain, Sarah Palin and their surrogates keep repeating the same lies over and over not just to smear their opponents and not just to mask their own record. Their larger aim is to construct a bogus alternative reality so relentless it can overwhelm any haphazard journalistic stabs at puncturing it.

When a McCain spokesman told Politico a week ago that “we’re not too concerned about what the media filter tries to say” about the campaign’s incessant fictions, he was channeling a famous Bush dictum of 2003: “Somehow you just got to go over the heads of the filter.” In Bush’s case, the lies lobbed over the heads of the press were to sell the war in Iraq. That propaganda blitz, devised by a secret White House Iraq Group that included Rove, was a triumph. In mere months, Americans came to believe that Saddam Hussein had aided the 9/11 attacks and even that Iraqis were among the hijackers. A largely cowed press failed to set the record straight.

Just as the Bushies once flogged uranium from Africa, so Palin ceaselessly repeats her discredited claim that she said “no thanks” to the Bridge to Nowhere. Nothing is too small or sacred for the McCain campaign to lie about. It was even caught (by The Christian Science Monitor) peddling an imaginary encounter between Cindy McCain and Mother Teresa when McCain was adopting her daughter in Bangladesh.

If you doubt that the big lies are sticking, look at the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll. Half of voters now believe in the daily McCain refrain that Obama will raise their taxes. In fact, Obama proposes raising taxes only on the 1.9 percent of households that make more than $250,000 a year and cutting them for nearly everyone else.

You know the press is impotent at unmasking this truthiness when the hardest-hitting interrogation McCain has yet faced on television came on “The View.” Barbara Walters and Joy Behar called him on several falsehoods, including his endlessly repeated fantasy that Palin opposed earmarks for Alaska. Behar used the word “lies” to his face. The McCains are so used to deference from “the filter” that Cindy McCain later complained that “The View” picked “our bones clean.” In our news culture, Behar, a stand-up comic by profession, looms as the new Edward R. Murrow.

Network news, with its dwindling handful of investigative reporters, has barely mentioned, let alone advanced, major new print revelations about Cindy McCain’s drug-addiction history (in The Washington Post) and the rampant cronyism and secrecy in Palin’s governance of Alaska (in last Sunday’s New York Times). At least the networks repeatedly fact-check the low-hanging fruit among the countless Palin lies, but John McCain’s past usually remains off limits.

That’s strange since the indisputable historical antecedent for our current crisis is the Lincoln Savings and Loan scandal of the go-go 1980s. When Charles Keating’s bank went belly up because of risky, unregulated investments, it wiped out its depositors’ savings and cost taxpayers more than $3 billion. More than 1,000 other S.&L. institutions capsized nationwide.

It was ugly for the McCains. He had received more than $100,000 in Keating campaign contributions, and both McCains had repeatedly hopped on Keating’s corporate jet. Cindy McCain and her beer-magnate father had invested nearly $360,000 in a Keating shopping center a year before her husband joined four senators in inappropriate meetings with regulators charged with S.&L. oversight.

After Congressional hearings, McCain was reprimanded for “poor judgment.” He had committed no crime and had not intervened to protect Keating from ruin. Yet he, like many deregulators in his party, was guilty of bankrupt policy-making before disaster struck. He was among the sponsors of a House resolution calling for the delay of regulations intended to deter risky investments just like those that brought down Lincoln and its ilk.

Ever since, McCain has publicly thrashed himself for his mistakes back then — and boasted of the lessons he learned. He embraced campaign finance reform to rebrand himself as a “maverick.” But whatever lessons he learned are now forgotten.

For all his fiery calls last week for a Wall Street crackdown, McCain opposed the very regulations that might have helped avert the current catastrophe. In 1999, he supported a law co-authored by Gramm (and ultimately signed by Bill Clinton) that revoked the New Deal reforms intended to prevent commercial banks, insurance companies and investment banks from mingling their businesses. Equally laughable is the McCain-Palin ticket’s born-again outrage over the greed of Wall Street C.E.O.’s. When McCain’s chief financial surrogate, Fiorina, was fired as Hewlett-Packard’s chief executive after a 50 percent drop in shareholders’ value and 20,000 pink slips, she took home a package worth $42 million.

The McCain campaign canceled Fiorina’s television appearances last week after she inadvertently admitted that Palin was unqualified to run a corporation. But that doesn’t mean Fiorina is gone. Gramm, too, was ostentatiously exiled after he blamed the economic meltdown on our “nation of whiners” and “mental recession,” but he remains in the McCain loop.

The corporate jets, lobbyists and sleazes that gravitated around McCain in the Keating era have also reappeared in new incarnations. The Nation’s Web site recently unearthed a photo of the resolutely anticelebrity McCain being greeted by the con man Raffaello Follieri and his then girlfriend, the Hollywood actress Anne Hathaway, as McCain celebrated his 70th birthday on Follieri’s rented yacht in Montenegro in August 2006. It’s the perfect bookend to the old pictures of McCain in a funny hat partying with Keating in the Bahamas.

Whatever blanks are yet to be filled in on Obama, we at least know his economic plans and the known quantities who are shaping them (Lawrence Summers, Robert Rubin, Paul Volcker). McCain has reversed himself on every single economic issue this year, often within a 24-hour period, whether he’s judging the strength of the economy’s fundamentals or the wisdom of the government bailout of A.I.G. He once promised that he’d run every decision past Alan Greenspan — and even have him write a new tax code — but Greenspan has jumped ship rather than support McCain’s biggest flip-flop, his expansion of the Bush tax cuts. McCain’s official chief economic adviser is now Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who last week declared that McCain had “helped create” the BlackBerry.

But Holtz-Eakin’s most telling statement was about McCain’s economic plans — namely, that the details are irrelevant. “I don’t think it’s imperative at this moment to write down what the plan should be,” he said. “The real issue here is a leadership issue.” This, too, is a Rove-Bush replay. We want a tough guy who will “fix” things with his own two hands — let’s take out the S.E.C. chairman! — instead of wimpy Frenchified Democrats who just “talk.” The fine print of policy is superfluous if there’s a quick-draw decider in the White House.

The twin-pronged strategy of truculence and propaganda that sold Bush and his war could yet work for McCain. Even now his campaign has kept the “filter” from learning the very basics about his fitness to serve as president — his finances and his health. The McCain multihousehold’s multimillion-dollar mother lode is buried in Cindy McCain’s still-unreleased complete tax returns. John McCain’s full medical records, our sole index to the odds of an imminent Palin presidency, also remain locked away. The McCain campaign instead invited 20 chosen reporters to speed-read through 1,173 pages of medical history for a mere three hours on the Friday before Memorial Day weekend. No photocopying was permitted.

This is the same tactic of selective document release that the Bush White House used to bamboozle Congress and the press about Saddam’s nonexistent W.M.D. As truthiness repeats itself, so may history, and not as farce.

KevinP (Stabby McShankyou) wrote:
and I'm NOT a pedo. everyone knows i've got a wheelchair fetish.

By PETE YOST, Associated Press Writer
Wed Sep 24, 3:50 AM ET



WASHINGTON - Almost up until the time it was taken over by the government in the nation's financial crisis, one of two housing giants paid $15,000 a month to the lobbying firm of John McCain's campaign manager, a person familiar with the financial arrangement says.

The money from Freddie Mac to the firm of Rick Davis is on top of more than $30,000 a month that went directly to Davis for five years starting in 2000.

The $30,000 a month came from both Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, the other housing entity now under the government's control because of the nation's financial crisis.

All the payments were first reported by The New York Times, which posted an article Tuesday night revealing the $15,000 a month to the firm of Davis Manafort. The newspaper quoted two people with direct knowledge of the arrangement.

In response to the latest disclosure, the McCain campaign issued a statement saying that Davis left the firm and stopped taking salary from the firm in 2006.

A person familiar with the contract says the $15,000 a month in payments to Davis' firm started around the end of 2005 and continued until the past month or so. The person spoke on condition of anonymity.

The connection between Davis and the housing giants that figure centrally in the global financial crunch emerged after the McCain campaign unleashed a sharp attack on Democratic rival Barack Obama.

McCain has tied Obama to Fannie and Freddie's troubles and has called on Jim Johnson and Franklin Raines — both Obama supporters and former Fannie Mae executives — to return large golden parachute payments they received from the corporations after leaving.

McCain's campaign released a new television ad that says Raines is among those advising Obama on housing policy.

Obama's campaign released a statement from Raines, who says he is not an Obama adviser.

Robert McCarson, a former spokesman for Fannie Mae, criticized the McCain campaign's attack on Obama, given the five years of payments to Davis.

"It's either idiocy or hubris" on the McCain campaign's part, McCarson, a Democrat, said in an interview.

KevinP (Stabby McShankyou) wrote:
and I'm NOT a pedo. everyone knows i've got a wheelchair fetish.

This thread is an editorial war. LOL. In any case - the solutions isn't a 100% free market - we have all seen where that leads(current case, 1929, etc, etc) nor is the solutions heavy arbitrary regulation(now you are stifling the economy), but a balanced approach in between. Some limited common-sense regulation.




Naturally the common people don't want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in
America, nor in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the
country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along,
whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist
dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the
leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and
denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the
same in any country. - Hermann Goring