It’s about time.

“Whatever the question, whatever the issues, there’s always a back story with Senator Obama . . . Our current economic crisis is a good case in point. The crisis started in our housing market in the form of subprime loans that were pushed on people who could not afford them.

“Bad mortgages were being backed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and it was only a matter of time before a contagion of unsustainable debt began to spread,” McCain said during an event in Albuquerque, NM.

“This corruption was encouraged by Democrats in Congress, and abetted by Senator Obama.”

McCain said he raised the alarm and called for tighter borrowing rules on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac two years ago, which could have helped stem the crisis.

By comparison, he said, Obama was “silent” while congressional Democrats fought efforts to rein in the mortgage giants.

“As recently as September of last year, [Obama] said that subprime loans had been, quote, ‘a good idea.’ Well, Senator Obama, that ‘good idea’ has now plunged this country into the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression,” McCain said.

McCain needs to hit this hard at the debate tonight. This is more important to the American people than Obama’s connections to a domestic terrorist or a racist, anti-American preacher. All of those things are important, but the economy dominates everything right now. In addition to those attacks, McCain must give a bold agenda tonight. By bold, I don’t mean spending a lot of money. I mean big changes that can get people excited. Things like totally reforming the tax code, giving a payroll tax cut to the middle class, suspending capital gains taxes for two years to bring new capital into America. Be bold, John.

Los Angeles Times Staff Writers

October 3, 2008

SACRAMENTO — California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, alarmed by the ongoing national financial crisis, warned Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson on Thursday that the state might need an emergency loan of as much as $7 billion from the federal government within weeks.

The warning comes as California is close to running out of cash to fund day-to-day government operations and is unable to access routine short-term loans that it typically relies on to remain solvent.

(more…)

Share or Bookmark These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Pay phone on

Posted by Greg

Obama keeps blaming the Bush policies and deregulation on the problems with our economy. This makes absolutely no sense. There has been no deregulation of the banks during Bush’s eight years. The latest deregulation of banks was passed into law by President Clinton. It didn’t lead to this crisis, in fact, it helped mitigate the crisis. The Community Reinvestment Act pushing subprime loans for people who couldn’t afford them, ACORN,  Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the Democrats pushing for even more subprime loans are the main culprits in this. Obama is in it up to his armpits.

Barack Obama wasn’t just the second-largest recipient of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac political contributions. He was also the senator from ACORN, the activist leader for risky “affirmative action” loans.

Obama, who once represented ACORN in a lawsuit against the state of Illinois, was hired by the group to train its community organizers and staff in the methods and tactics of the late Saul Alinsky. ACORN would stage in-your-face protests in bank lobbies, drive-through lanes and even at bank managers’ homes to get them to issue risky loans in the inner city or face charges of racism.

Sarah Palin needs to hit on this in the vice presidential debate Thursday night. She needs to lay out the history of this crisis and how Obama, ACORN, the Democrats, and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are at the heart of it. She needs to lay out how John McCain helped write a law in 2005 that would regulate Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and seriously helped avoid this crisis. The Democrats fought it. Why isn’t the McCain camp focusing on this?

The rescue plan that was voted down yesterday was a lot better than it could have been, but not as good as it can be. Here are a couple good stories with new ideas for a plan.

Paulson 2.0 cut the Bolshevik stuff out of the legislation. ACORN subsidies? Gone. Voting shares in U.S. companies? Gone. CEO compensation caps? Mostly gone. In consultation mainly with House Republicans and a few “opinion molders” such as yours truly. The size of the expenditure was also cut. Some deregulatory measures were added, such as giving the SEC the authority to suspend the tremendously destructive mark to market accounting mandate. Score one for Kudlow, Forbes, Wesbury and a few lesser “molders” like Bowyer. We harped on it; Paulson listened.

The rescue plan became a lot more conservative after the Republicans got mad. That’s good. Why not make it even better?

Perhaps the mark to market regulations could be suspended before the taxpayers are forced to move in. Maybe if some of these rules are eliminated, little or no taxpayer dollars will be needed. If Congress doesn’t want to put public dollars into this, it should let private equity put private dollars in.

I had a great call on the show yesterday. She said, why doesn’t the government allow individual citizens to buy into this plan. Many people would love to buy these assets at pennies on the dollar. Great idea. Make it even better by making any investment into this plan 100% tax-free. Let’s make this plan better and get it done.

Leftists haven’t forgotten that President Bush bills himself as a free market guy and yet wants to nationalize financial institutions…

Of course, the ironies and the potential pitfalls of this administration enacting a socialist takeover can hardly be overstated. This is the political party that for decades has insisted on deregulation and free markets, has scolded Hugo Chavez for nationalizing the oil industry, and even now is attempting to tar and feather Barack Obama with the label of socialist. But if this bill is enacted at its advertised $700 billion price tag—and many people believe the price will ultimately prove higher—it means that the Bush administration has undertaken the single largest socialist investment in the history of mankind. The Bolshevik revolution of 1917 couldn’t dream of an economy worth $700 billion; the figure dwarfs anything ever attempted by Fidel Castro or the Sandinistas.

They are completely right to criticize Bush as a hypocrite. Fact is, Bush has never really been a free market guy. In eight years the Bush Administration bailed out the airline industry, nationalized security workers by creating the Transportation Security Administration, and signed Sarbanes-Oxley — to name just a few pieces of anti-free market legislation. Most real free market types were completely against all of these actions.

Can the Republican party truly criticize Barack Obama as a socialist when this is the legacy of the Bush years?

It does makes those of us serious about the free market look like a joke.

posted by Mike

The good stuff starts at about 48 seconds in. McCain gets in a few shots atObama celebrity-fest on Tuesday night as well. What worries me about our economy is that we are going to overregulate now in a knee-jerk reaction. A big part of why we are in this mess is because of what Congress has been doing all the way back to the Clinton administration. Congress passed the community redevelopment act and forced lendersto give loans to people who really could not afford them. Now Congress is all upset that lenders gave loans to people who couldn’t afford them. Stop the bail outs and let the free market work. The institutions that made poor choices need to suffer the consequences of the people think twice about doing this again. All the people who made the right decisionsview me and every other taxpayer should not be on the hook for this.

Posted By Tim….
By NEAL KARLINSKY and KRISTIN RED-HORSE

LAS VEGAS, Sept. 7, 2008—

Just a few weeks ago Jim Eble lived in his dream home in Las Vegas. It now sits empty because he owed the bank more money than the house was worth and the bank was threatening foreclosure.

“It’s tough to come back here now,” said Eble, looking at his dream house.

But Eble has found an answer to his financial problem: buying a new home. Although it’s hard to imagine with one house near foreclosure, his solution is to buy a second house at a bargain price and simply walk away from the old house.

(more…)