Mary, they want so badly to demonize the Liberals. That is all that they have left. They need a common enemy and we are it; especially Barack Obama.
This is what you get when they have no ideas, no solutions, no answer to any of the multitude of problems that we face.
Reaganism is dead and these are the dead-enders, doing everything that they can to hold on to their power and keep their dying ideology alive.
Posted by Anjha at October 12, 2008 12:20 PMThey need to start attacking the Milton Friedman economic theory and his free-market capitialism. This whole mess is the fruition of his theory. Lay the blame where it should be, at the feet of this bonehead and his followers.
Start bringing back Keynesian economics and show how successful it was compared to Friedman.
Posted by Seven of Six at October 12, 2008 12:42 PMTHIS is the fundamental difference between the 1981-1993 Republican era and the 1995-2009 Republican era.
In the first, Reagan-Bush-the-First era, the Birchers, segregationists, Flat Earthers, and other wingnuts were invited to vote en masse for the Republicans but weren't given much actual authority to do anything. Those in power knew the difference between the bullshit arguments they were using to get the wingnuts to the polls and reality.
In the second, Gingrich-Rove era, the distinction was blurred. Those in power actually believed the lies.
This is why the Republicants cannot fix the problems they created -- because they are unable to get to the first step: admit your failure.
This is a political party that believes in fairy tales. Just look back in the archives of Drudge, Worldnutdaily, Newsmax, or Fox. "Saddam trained 9/11 terrorists on a 707 in Baghdad." "WMDs found in Iraq, moved to Syria." "Proof that Noah's Ark included Dinosaurs." "Tax cuts for rich increase tax revenues." "95% of Democrats are Gay" (Okay, that last one is stolen from the Simpsons.)
The Republicans have created a subclass of American that believes in a large number of things that are provably false. Many of these tall tales have infected middle America as well. THIS is America's greatest enemy -- the enemy within.
Posted by Anonny at October 12, 2008 02:03 PM"Proof that Noah's Ark included Dinosaurs."
Anonny, is that snark? It's hard to tell anymore.
Hopefully people will now see the truth and vote their pocketbook....hopefully.
Posted by Anjha at October 12, 2008 02:33 PMMcClatchy is wrong. Mary is wrong.
The rewrite, as City Journal noted back in 2000, "made getting a satisfactory CRA rating harder." Banks were given strict new numerical quotas and measures for the level of "diversity" in their loan portfolios. Getting a good CRA rating was key for a bank that wanted to expand or merge with another.
It's the government intervening in the private sector that caused the crisis.
Documented much better here:
http://tinyurl.com/3v578j
"You see", says Buck the Troll, "the problem is that the niggers, spics and liberals got together and FORCED Lehman to adopt a 33:1 loan/asset ratio, instead of the 12:1 ratio that the law required until the Republicans changed the law. And they FORCED them to create a web of derivative mortgage-based instruments that hid the true risk level from the buyers of the instruments. Worse, the niggers, spics, and liberals got together and FORCED the investment banks, that weren't allowed to write mortgages until the 1999 Graham law, to relax all the rules that had existed previously and permit mortgages for white folks who clearly couldn't afford them."
"I know", says Buck, "Because I got this info from WorldNetDaily, who not only proved that Saddam personally trained the 9/11 hijackers, but also proved bigfoot exists, that the Grand Canyon was formed by the Noah's Ark flood 4000 years ago."
Stupid. Republicans are the enemy within.
Posted by Anonny at October 12, 2008 05:57 PMIsn't it strange that only Dems care that people are starving? And that Republicans continue to block legislation that keeps people from starving and freezing to death.
People are fucked Buck; don't blame the poor, they have been fucked for a long time. Food insecurity is not new for much of America.
Because some rich asshole cannot afford to keep all ten of their homes just means that they have woken up to the fact that what goes around comes around.
Posted by Anjha at October 12, 2008 06:25 PMYou misunderstand. No one is blaming the poor. It was the government's fault for forcing the private sector to market these loans to people who could not afford them. The government also encouraged low income people to buy houses. The government was and is completely responsible. Not the low income people. They were the victims of bad liberal policies. As usual.
Posted by Buck at October 12, 2008 10:04 PMThere's no fool like an old Republican fool.
I just read an excellent Business Week article (linked via Buzzflash) which laid out exactly who is responsible for this financial crisis...and it wasn't federal government intervention in the private sector that was the problem, but the utter lack of federal government intervention/oversight, in the public's interest, OVER the private sector that made this meltdown possible.
This all sounds eerily familiar.
The corrupt Bush administration fired a warning shot in 2001 across our nation's economic bow with the Enron debacle.
Former U.S. senator Phil Gramm inserted a provision into a law in late 2000 (while his wife was on Enron's board of directors) that deregulated the energy trading market.
Within several months, Enron energy traders on the West Coast took advantage of this Gramm "loophole" and proceeded to game the energy markets out west.
California's governor, a Democrat, contacted the Bush administration, and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, to find out who and how someone was driving up energy prices.
The Bush administration stalled and stalled and stalled, doing nothing for months, as Enron energy trading free-marketeers screwed California utility rate payers out of tens of billions of dollars, with rate payers seeing their monthly utility bills double and even triple.
In the case of the sub-prime lending debacle/disaster, many local councils and state governments tried to put a stop to all the fraudulent lending practices that were occurring in their town or state, but the Bush administration consistently sided against those on a local or state government level who were trying to stop these sub-prime lending scams while the corrupt Bush administration sided always with the Ponzi/Pyramid Scheme pushers in the private banking/investment firm sector.
And participating in the Communities Reinvestment Act (CRA) program had little to do with all these fraudulent, high-risk sub-prime lending practices. In Massachusetts, for instance, almost 99 percent of these high-risk mortgages were written by private banking/investment firms, while only 1 percent were CRA related.
Once again, there's no fool like an old Republican fool.
Posted by The Oracle at October 13, 2008 01:38 AM