obama has his fingerprints on the legislation you say. your ability to dig into the facts and line them up is impressive. however, we dont know his motive, nor what went on behind the closed judicial doors. i highly doubt that he knew or could forsee how egregious people would take his original suit. i dont think he or bush is responsible for people living out of thier means.

as far as bush giving him an opportunity to succeed, bush truely had a better gift from clinton than he is giving obama. that is not to say that bush is responsible for the mess, but it did happen under his reign. it is unfair that he will forever be linked to it independent of misplaced “ownership”.

also, when we attacked iraq, he told everybody to spend and go to disneyland and other consumer pleas. i dont think that is great advice. it is dangerous and this is just one example of his poor leadership.

i did re-read the paper and it goes to show how greedy people can take legislation that is not intended for elicit means and pervert it. i would bet my 401k that obama would not have done it in hindsight.
like i said above, i dont think obama truely would have been able to predict how the finance and mortgage industry would take his legislation. his fingers are all over it and i would like a coherent explanation, not a free pass. your research is convincing.

Matt, Matt, Matt………Nobody would have done it in hindsight, but it was with Foresight that Gramm, Bush and McCain tried to bring it to regulation because the amount of questionable loans on the Govt. guarantee were rising exponentionally. Of Course Obama didn’t do it out of bad will, but out of bad judgment and it is somewhat karmic that he has inherited this problem himself, but there are no Republican fingerprints on this particular one.

Bush started the war yes, with support of a majority of Republicans and Democrats in Congress. In hindsight I doubt he would have pursued the exact same course of action just like Obama on this Citi issue……..steve

interesting find. i hope that the right leaning press and blogs will give obama the chance to get in the white house and see what he does rather than speculate. he is in the uneviable task of cleaning up the mess that bush 43 left him. heck, at least clinton gave bush a budget surplus. our country is spiraling out of control. if he started to do something anyone would accuse him of stepping on bush and being disrespectful. let him get in the oval office first.

if anything, he owes bush a big thankyou since bush lifted the homeland security ban until after the election for asylum violators. obama’s aunt could have been embarrassed further. it could have been a national security nightmare, but more of political gesturing. lets wait to see what “goodies” gw pulls in his final days. maybe he will rival clinton in the excess of executive power. or, maybe he will ride off into the sunset watching the neo-cons impale the party. regardless, i hope that the repubs use this as an opportuntiy to rediscover their roots of classical conservative philosophy, and put some compassion into the compassionate conservative he ran under in 2000

Matt…….we are discussing the “change” that Obama has called “change you can believe in.” That would mean his assertions of altering the standby draft to include women and in combat isn’t a matter of speculation as to what he might do, hence we need to wait and see. It is something he has stated he wants. It doesn’t have anything to do with Republicans “giving him a chance.” Thus it is not hostile speculation, just like Republicans discussing Obama saying he will end the war would be hostile speculation.

I’ve said before that I am for open markets, but the mortgage got bastardized not because of open markets, the left pejoratively called that “red lining” It is the force the Democrats put on the banking industry to make very very risky loans (unlikely to be repaid) that forced this out of the free market definition. This isn’t a failure of free markets it is the failure of social engineering that was forced on the financial industry by the Democrats. You were for Huckabee, he fully understands what went wrong here. I wrote of it in my CRA White Paper, HERE. The original test case on this was by ACORN and Obama (originally separately) against CitiBank (later granted an ACORN and Obama combined class action status in 1995) and settled with City in 1997 after the Democrats forced a reduction in loan standards for Freddie and Fannie “guarantee” so Citi would write loans to unqualified borrowers. Phil Gramm saw the problem starting to emerge in 1999 and attached a fix to the bill that was otherwise supported by both the Dem’s and Rep’s abolishing the Glass Steagall Act of 1933, but when the Senate passed Gramm’s version Clinton threatened to VETO the final bill if it included the regulation of Freddie and Fannie as to the CRA. Bush’s repeated warnings to the Congressional oversight committees was repeatedly shouted down by likes of Dodd, Frank and Waters. (yes it is the congress with the responsibility for oversight of the banking community, not the President). Matt, I think you really need to come to an understanding what actually happened here. Obama is more directly responsible himself in 1994-1997 than any or all Republicans. Re-read my paper and research his record on this……….steve

http://www.worldmag.com/articles/14642

p.s. - Hope everyone had a reflective and thankful Veteran’s Day!

plodon………….Glad you came by, that is a great article and very informative as to this alarming (in my mind) situation. Thanks for the contribution to this discussion………steve

You didn’t mention GW or a sudden switch in technologies, but that’s the reason Obama gives for his energy policy and for pushing the cap and trade system that Steve was talking about, and which would force the sudden change. With that off the table, there’s no need for emergency measures to research new technologies, since we have sufficient resources here in the US and off shore.

As to the money spent on the wars, that’s a tiny fraction of what it will cost to switch our economy away from oil and coal. Just the expense of adding a new distribution system for, say, hydrogen to run fuel cell cars on would dwarf the war costs, and our yearly military budget for that matter, and it would take years to finish. In the mean time, we need to tap our own resources.

As to Obama and business, if you read his biography you’ll find that he made a point of hanging out with Marxist leaning professors. Also, several of the people he chose to spend his time with after college are admitted Marxists, Bill Ayers for example. Hence his “spread the wealth” comment.

And, yes I can imagine a world where we ignored the threat of terrorism, and that image starts with a large glowing crater in the middle of New York City and our capital relocated under Cheyenne Mountain because DC has been vaporized, and Islamic law being integrated into our legal system because a bunch of spineless liberals were more interested in buying votes with tax money than in maintaining our freedoms.

the Grit

Hi Grit……..I wanted to add that if we had as of TODAY the final product of green technology that everybody agreed was an abundant, cheap and environmentally friendly source of energy it would take decades and trillions of dollars to implement the program and infrastructure. Also people have investment in cars and home furnaces and an electrical grid hooked up to “coal.” That nobody could just walk away from. Wouldn’t it be nice to make two car payments. One for the “obsolete” car and the other for the green car. This will take a long time to sort out after the technology arrives. Certainly much longer than the false claim by the left of 10 years to get additional oil from drilling. We need to run the economy in the interim and that must be economically acceptable which will increase more supply in the short to intermediate run.

I don’t see Rocket Ships or Commercial Jets using solar or other green technologies so there will always be a place for oil………..steve

your comment on obama and fairy dust i find to be ad homienm. who said he was “special” in that regard. maybe i am wrong here, but i never mentioned a sudden switch to unproven tech. what i think is best is a paradigm shift in the direction of getting ofg fossil fuels. why not accelerate the eventual switch? could we also put the “conserve” back in conservative?

i highly doubt that there is any creaming of the jeans going on in the environmental movement. what might be going on is a giddy feeling that a candidate does not want to continue the course of bush 43 and the neocons. could that be the “change we can believe in?”

i also find it comedic that obama is treated like a massachusetts liberal. anyone in the academic community will tell you where the person teaches shapes solutions more than anything else. univ of chicago is quite pro business. obama is drawing on the resources of buffett, volker, summers and rubin? who is on the mccain panel? but, if mccain wins we will get country first. if obama wins, we will get a president who recognizes gray matter in all issues and quite possibly a shift away from american isolationism in foreign policy.

But he will spend more money on energy; it’ll just all go to Al Gore and his friends, and the rest of us will suffer from high energy prices and scheduled power outages. The environmentalist movement must be creaming their jeans today.

Hi matt,

And Obama could also whip out a bag of fairy dust, sprinkle it around and magically transform the world into a paradise for all.

Seriously, while it’s obvious that we need to look for alternative sources of energy to reduce our dependence on oil, it’s equally obvious that Obama’s plan to force a sudden switch to unproven technologies is as stupid as his belief that we can pull out of Iraq overnight. You should also note that the US has several hundred years worth of coal under our feet, so there’s not really any big rush to replace it. And please don’t bring up the Global Warming Scam; you can take a look at Northern Hemisphere temperatures this fall to know that dog won’t hunt. Or, if you need more scientific proof, look up the historic data on which this great crisis is built, and take note of such things as a total lack of data from India, and only 4 to 6 weather stations in Antarctica, and no consistent data sampling over the oceans, then look up all the mathematical tricks the “climate scientists” had to use to “correct” this scanty data so it applies to the entire world and, after more “corrections,”proves that there is a small amount of Global Warming. If that doesn’t change your view on the subject, get in touch with me as I have a bridge to sell that I think you may be interested in.

By the way, Federal money for research into alternative energy supplies has increased tremendously during the Bush Administration, but the liberal press doesn’t really like to talk about it.

the Grit

but what if the obama presidency does not turn out the way that the conservablog press is implicating him on? what if he assembles a coherent and well rounded support team that will present well thought out and executable strategies that includes a mixture of what the conservablogs are accusing him of lying about? he has not even been elected and already it seems like the nay-sayers are holding him to a standard that they would never held for bush 43 or mccain. he even said that he will make mistakes but is willing to work. have the mavericks been so forthright? i dont think it is fair. and just so people know, i am a conservative and republican but i am so distraught at where our party has gone, i want them to return to core principles of what conservative means. this is the perfect time for repubs to deeply think about how they want their party to move forward. denial is no remedy for this problem. excuses like pandering to liberals for legislative purposes or the last two years was a left congress is going to prolong their agony and truly hinder democracy. how about the get a reality check, brainstorm about the direction of their party (hopefully not sarah palin), and learn how to form a cogent message about what are the problems so that we can present solutions. blaming the left, or complaing that they were voted out is not what i am saying. what i would like to see is some humble dialog about balance of power (not bush doctrine or wolfowitz musings) but core discussions about hard decisions on solutions to our problems. an example for me is where is this generations “manhattan project” that the wwII generation heavily invested in? can we get a comprehensive look at energy without “drill baby drill” when we know that fossil fuels are not the long term answer. can they acknowlege (without invoking the war on terror) that the money we spend on iraq and afghanistan could have been used to aggressively promote new tech to get us off oil? we wasted 6 years that now put us behind the curve.

if you have made it this far, believe me, i only am saying this because i know that steve and his readers care as passionately about dialog and solutions as anybody.