If you go to Pollster.com and look at the numbers and the graph, Obama is now at over 50% (averaged over all polls surveyed) for the first time ever.
Take that, all you "Palin nailed the debate" people.
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Comments: 26
So the Democrats do have a much better chance of winning in Nov.
You should really check out this link: Just For the Record. It's all taken from data acquired from U.S. Government agencies.
It is probably their only remaining hope, yet is expected to backfire, because the public really hates that sort of negative campaigning.
The neoconservatives, of course, will eat it up, but, then, they're already anti-Obama anyway. It is expected to push the remaining undecided voters further from McCain.
Watch out -- it could get ugly...
Not sure what your link has to do with your article but I bookmarked it to check out later.
A fascist dictatorship doesn't like to give up power.
"The CRA was passed by the 95th United States Congress and signed into law by President Jimmy Carter in 1977 as a result of national pressure for affordable housing.[2] In Congressional debate on the Act, critics charged that the law would "distort credit markets, create unnecessary regulatory burden, lead to unsound lending, and cause the governmental agencies charged with implementing the law to allocate credit." In response Congress included little prescriptive detail and gave agencies considerable regulatory flexibility.[3]"
"In an article for the New York Post, economist Stan Liebowitz wrote that the CRA encouraged a loosening of lending standards throughout the banking industry despite warnings of default. Banks were allowed to loan to consumers who were not credit worthy with "no verification of income or assets; little consideration of the applicant's ability to make payments; no down payment." According to Liebowitz, the chief executive of Countrywide said that in order to approve minority applications, "lenders have had to stretch the rules a bit."[21]"
The CRA helped a little, but only a little until 1995, when the Clinton Administration gave new subprime authorization to lenders with massive additional provisions in the CRA. Home loans skyrocketed.
"In July 1993 President Clinton asked regulators to reform the CRA in order to reduce paperwork and reward performance.[8] The CRA regulations were substantially revised and featured requiring numerical assessments to get a satisfactory CRA rating; using federal home-loan data broken down by neighborhood, income group, and race; encouraging community groups to complain when banks were not loaning enough to specified neighborhood, income group, and race; allowing community groups that marketed loans to targeted groups to collect a fee from the banks.[3]"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Reinvestment_Act
In 1933, the Glass-Steagall Act separated commercial banking from the securities business. It prevented securities speculation from destroying bank capital and shrinking bank deposits from bank failures and runs on banks by depositors. Congress and President Bill Clinton foolishly repealed the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999.
"The repeal of the 1933 law was driven by profit lust in the banking industry and by "free market" ideology, which claims the unfettered marketplace is always superior to regulation. In pushing the repeal forward, Congress and Clinton ignored warnings from the Government Accountability Office that the banks needed to build up their capital levels before being permitted to enter a broad range of securities businesses. The GAO also noted that there were no regulatory structures in place to monitor the new financial networks that would result from removing the wall between commercial and investment banking."
http://www.economyincrisis.org/articles/show/1208
So far we have two Democrat Presidents passing bad laws which eventually led to the financial crisis.
Well, in 2003, the Bush Administration proposed a new agency to oversee and regulate Freddie Mac and Fanie Mae, (the government sponsored companies that are the two largest players in the mortgage lending industry) This would have been the most significant regulatory overhaul in the housing finance industry since the S and L crisis a decade ago.
The Democrats stopped it…supporters of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae said efforts to regulate the lenders tightly under the proposed agency might diminish their ability to finance loans for lower-income families."
"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."
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E06E3D6123BF932A2575AC0A9659C8B63
Barney Frank (D-MA) (response to the Bush requested oversite)
“The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies (Freddie and Fannie), the less we will see in terms of “affordable housing.”
In 2005, John McCain warned of the pending mortgage collapse. He co-sponsored a bill…The Housing Enterprise Regulatory Act of 2005.
This too was blocked by the Democrats.
http://www.govtrack.us/congress/record.xpd?id=109-s20060525-16&bill=s109-190
If we look at campaign contributions from Opensecrets.org we see Obama receiving over 82K in donations from employees of Fannie Mae and more than 21K from freddie Mac with McCain receiving less than 7K from fannie Mae and nothing from Freddie.
eben,
You tried to conditionalized my response by asking for facts that implicate the Democrats alone.
Both sides need to accept some blame but the blatant blocking of two attempts to regulate these instutions are sufficient enough to lay the lions share of the blame on the Democrats.
As to the Glass-Steagall Act repeal of 1999, aka the Gramm-Leach-Billey Act, that was the brainchild of Phil Gramm, a Republican Senator. Yes, Clinton signed it, but only with additional provisions that, he though, would help lower-income borrowers. Frankly, I think Clinton was an idiot to sign it at all, but Gramm was the bigger idiot to think that lowering the firewalls between investment banking, commercial banking, and insurance services was actually a good thing.
With regard to the 2003 "regulation" of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, I read a New York Times article on the subject (http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E06E3D6123BF932A2575AC0A9659C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=print) which contained a line that immediately sent up a red flag: "The administration's proposal...was endorsed in large part today by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac...." The article states first that FNMA and FDMC are "broken", then says that the proposed new government oversight is actually welcomed by the broken companies? That sounds reeeeeeeeally fishy to me...especially since it didn't pass! If they truly wanted to run a tighter ship, why wouldn't they have just done so? Without government regulations?
The 2005 bill that McCain co-sponsored might have done some good, but the reasons the Democrats opposed it were good ones: 1) it exempted the Federal Home Loan Banks from compliance with certain sections of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934; 2) it did nothing to address issues of fraud; and 3) it didn't actually tighten oversight of the Federal Home Loan Banks, just shift it to a different independent agency. Additionally, it never even made it out of committee. The Republicans controlled the committee 11 to 9, and an 11 to 9 vote would have sent it to the Senate floor for a vote. Therefore, at least one Republican must have also opposed the bill (though I've been unable to find any records to indicate which one).
Here's something else that's telling: Before all this happened, there was a reigning philosophy on the residential mortgage banking business. That philosophy was that what happened to the Savings & Loans in the late 1980's/early 1990's could not possibly happen to the residential mortgage banks, because the capital markets of Wall Street, out of sheer self-interest, would prevent it from happening. Angelo Mozilo, the co-founder and CEO of Countrywide Mortgage, was a huge proponent of this philosophy, despite his contempt for Wall Street as a whole.
Well, guess what? Wall Street—and especially the banks of Wall Street—got just as greedy as everyone else, and they didn't stop this mess from happening. In fact, they helped cause it.
Are some Democrats to blame for this? Certainly, and Clinton is one of them for signing that Republican-crafted bill in 1999. Carter...maybe, but probably not so much. But most of the sources I've come across seem to think that it was the deregulation of the whole banking industry over the last decade or so that has led to this meltdown--deregulation that, for the most part, was Republican-initiated.
And I think it's funny how, before the meltdown, McCain was calling for less regulation of the industry, and now he's calling for more.