In the first Presidential debate, Barack Obama used the line more than once that this credit crisis we’re in stems from policies that “shredded” regulations, and that assumed that regulation is “always bad”.  But that characterization is simply not true, and in the cases of Freddie and Fannie, which are government sponsored enterprises (GSE), government oversight is especially required.

First of all, GSEs are a non-free-market concept, contrary to Rep. Barney Frank’s assertion that this credit crunch is a failure of the free market.  It is a government program to target certain sectors with cheap loans.  Overall, it has been fairly successful, but it is not a free market issue.  This is government stepping in to deal with a situation it wants to see changed.

The second issue is that when Democrats pushed Freddie and Fannie to create what became known as the subprime mortgage market.  That was the subject of the previous video I posted on this subject.  It became the late-20th-century version of “a chicken in every pot” promise.  Everyone gets a home!  Well, not really.  Everyone gets a mortgage, including some who couldn’t afford it.  But Freddie and Fannie took this mandate and went wild.  It was essentially a big-government solution being administered by a big-government program; again, not a failure of the free market. 

During this time, Republicans realized that more regulation of these types of loans and the securities backed by them was required, but Democrats did not believe there was a problem.  Those were their words; not a problem.

Roll the tape, and listen to their words.

So Obama’s sweeping contention that Republican consider regulation “always bad” is demonstrably false.  Less regulation is a hallmark of conservatism, true, but where it’s required, especially in a government program, it should be done.  But Democrats, when faced with tightening the purse strings on a constituency that they claim for themselves, will see no evil.  Being for the little guy does not mean setting them up for failure.  It’s partisan politics, pure and simple.

And by the way, where’s the MSM on this?  Quiet as a mouse.  FactCheck.org’s checking of debate facts is silent on this issue.  The objectivity on this issue is pointing out some glaring blind spots.

Update: Roger Kimball gives the roots of this crisis a closer look, with suitable linkage.  Short and sweet, but informative.

Yes, there could be profits made with the taxpayer-backed bailout funds for the mortgage-backed securities.  The government would be buying them at a discount, likely, and most folks don’t default on their mortgages. 

So who should get the profits?  How about, oh, the taxpayers?  It’s only fair; they (we) took the risk, they (we) should get the benefits.  But Washington Democrats, true to their view that any money in their vicinity is theirs (not the taxpayers), are already trying to lay dibs on it to fund other government programs.  They can’t even try to help the economy without sneaking in what amounts to a 20% tax.

Thanks, guys.

Charlie Martin has gone as far as getting the URL http://www.palinrumors.com/ to point to his ever-updated list of rumors about Sarah Palin.  Since last I visited there, there have been new ones added.  Here are a few (and details are on the site):

#72: No, she didn’t try to charge rape victims personally for rape kits.

#76: No she didn’t institute a “windfall profits” tax on oil companies.

#79: No, Palin didn’t eliminate or “void” the Alaskan WIC program as Newsweek claimed.

#83: No, she did not cut the Special Olympics funding in a recent budget, except in the Washington sense of “didn’t increase it as much as someone wanted.”

#84 Yes, she did bill the Alaska State Government for per diem on days when she was “home.”  But that’s the way the law is written, and even doing what other governors did, she still had expenses one-third to one-fifth of the previous governor’s.

Bookmark that page.

From the Patriot Post, a compendium of quotes regarding the current credit & mortgage crisis, and the bailout being debated.  Quite a number of different takes on it, looking at it from different aspects. 

(By the way, the Patriot Post can come to your inbox 3 times a week.  It’s a good read.)

“Financial institutions are not being bailed out as a favor to them or their stockholders. In fact, stockholders have come out worse off after some bailouts. The real point is to avoid a major contraction of credit that could cause major downturns in output and employment, ruining millions of people, far beyond the financial institutions involved. If it was just a question of the financial institutions themselves, they could be left to sink or swim. But it is not.” —Thomas Sowell

“The credit crunch and foreclosure problems are failures of government policy. In fact, what we see now is a market correction to foolhardy government policy. Congress’ move to bail out lenders and borrowers who made poor decisions will simply create incentives for people to make unwise decisions in the future.” —Walter Williams

“[A]s lawmakers debate buying up hundreds of billions in assets, they should realize that the government’s aggressive meddling in financial decision-making is what got our economy into this mess in the first place. The long-term answer isn’t more federal control, it’s a return to free-market principles.” —Ed Feulner

“Crisis is the friend of the State. The politicians are desperate to be seen as ‘showing leadership,’ so we’re surely in for a new round of government interventions.” —John Stossel

“When the Forbidden Fruit was handed to Adam and Eve, they were allowed the moral choice to accept or decline. I know people who have refused to feast on the money tree. They live simply, within their means, and seem far more content than those who are trying to horde their wealth while clinging to the ladder of ‘success,’ terrified to let go. That isn’t real living. The Puritans rightly saw that as covetousness.” —Cal Thomas

…in a single two-panel cartoon at Red Planet Cartoons.  The problem seems to stem from folks defaulting on home loans.  It’s easy to label the lending institution “greedy” and go from there, but there’s a whole lot more to it than that.  One big-government program has spawned this new big-government bailout. 

Those with short attention spans will miss the larger picture.  The larger picture is the more important one.

…by Francis Cianfrocca, aka “Blackhedd”, at Redstate.  His explanation of the situation that the Fed found themselves in with regard to AIG is, for the most part, readable by a non-financier. 

He also addresses the anger some are feeling about the government bailing out another huge firm, and against the top brass of that company.  In addition, he touches on how this affects free-market capitalists and the eggshells the government is now walking on in this regard.

A good read.

From Bruce McQuain at Q&O, comes a quiz:

1.  Who identified and tried to fix what presently ails Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae 5 years ago?

2.  Who opposed the plan, saying they were not in any kind of financial crisis?

McQuain gives a hint as to what the answer to #2 is; the same folks who say Social Security is just fine, and Medicare is doing well, too.  Bruce has a link to a contemporaneous New York Times article that explains the proposal and the smack down. 

Remember this when Dem…er, certain politicians try to place blame for this and try to use it as a campaign gimmick.

Everybody says they want more politicians in office that fight corruption, wasteful spending, and are willing to go after their own party to do it.  Yet Sarah Palin is continually talked down by Democrats, who’s concerns about corruption seem to have taken a holiday.

Now comes word that their concerns about bipartisanship — about both parties working together — is also on vacation.

Sen. John McCain’s record of working with Democrats easily outstrips Sen. Barack Obama’s efforts with Republicans, according to an analysis by The Washington Times of their legislative records.

Whether looking at bills they have led on or bills they have signed onto, Mr. McCain has reached across the aisle far more frequently and with more members than Mr. Obama since the latter came to the Senate in 2005.

In fact, by several measures, Mr. McCain has been more likely to team up with Democrats than with members of his own party. Democrats made up 55 percent of his political partners over the last two Congresses, including on the tough issues of campaign finance and global warming. For Mr. Obama, Republicans were only 13 percent of his co-sponsors during his time in the Senate, and he had his biggest bipartisan successes on noncontroversial measures, such as issuing a postage stamp in honor of civil rights icon Rosa Parks.

Democrats say that they want bipartisanship, and indeed have praised McCain’s overtures to them in the past.  But all of a sudden, that seems to be ancient history.

Now, I will say that I’m not entirely a big fan of some of McCain’s bipartisanship. McCain-Feingold “First Amendment Abridgement Act” (my name for it, not theirs) is a prime example.  But outside the campaign season, politician and voter alike keep complaining about how all this bickering in Washington keeps them from doing “the people’s business”.  But here we are, with the most bipartisan politician for President I think we may have ever seen, and suddenly Democrats have lost all interest in it.

Oh, and Sarah Palin is also quite adept with respect to bipartisanship, getting a 75% job approval rating from Alaska Democrats.  Congress can only dream of such high numbers.

Guess “bipartisanship” just means “doing what I want you to do”.

Barack Obama’s former employer as a community organizer is at it again, trying to elect their favorite son by any means necessary.

Several municipal clerks across the state are reporting fraudulent and duplicate voter registration applications, most of them from a nationwide community activist group working to help low- and moderate-income families.

The majority of the problem applications are coming from the group ACORN, Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, which has a large voter registration program among its many social service programs. ACORN’s Michigan branch, based in Detroit, has enrolled 200,000 voters statewide in recent months, mostly with the use of paid, part-time employees.

“There appears to be a sizeable number of duplicate and fraudulent applications,” said Kelly Chesney, spokeswoman for the Michigan Secretary of State’s Office. “And it appears to be widespread.”

But ACORN is an equal-opportunity defrauder.  Michigan isn’t singled out.

In recent years, ACORN’s voter registration programs have come under investigation in Ohio, Colorado, Missouri and Washington, with some employees convicted of voter fraud.

ACORN officials said they were looking into the problem.

Indeed, with conclusions, no doubt, some time after election day.

Memory fades? In the evening interview (I didn’t catch it) of Mrs Palin was asked about the Bush doctrine.

Gibson’s description—“The Bush doctrine, as I understand it, is that we have the right of anticipatory self-defense, that we have the right to a preemptive strike against any other country that we think is going to attack us,” wasn’t a good description of even the preemption element of the Bush doctrine (and his claim that the preemption element was enunciated in September of 02 is also incorrect), though Palin’s answer suggested she didn’t quite agree with Bush on the question of imminence.

My impression was that the Bush doctrine was essentially that if a country chooses to actively support terrorism, it abrogates the moral right to exist, that is that any other nation may in good conscience attack it. The reasoning behind this is that terrorism, when illegal in nation states is little more than a criminal annoyance. If however, a nation decides to harbor and support terror … those numbers and capabilities grow by orders of magnitude and in our modern world become a threat to our lives and liberty.

Am I wrong in my recollection? Mr Gibson certainly is wrong.

A commenter recently noted that there was a tape of Sarah Palen supporting Ted Steven’s pork project nicknames “The Bridge to Nowhere”.  A writer on a local group blog, “Peach Pundit” says she was for it before she was against it.  As one of their commenters notes, she was for state funding if the state wanted, and her speech in Dayton confirmed that. 

Yesterday, before McCain’s VP announcement, the Democracy Project blog put put their top 10 reasons why she should be VP.  Definitely worth a look.  My favorites ones are 9, 7, 5 and 2, but read the whole list.

Not Romney, Pawlenty, and not Lieberman.  John McCain has made either party choice in November a historic one by choosing Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska as his running mate.  This is so big, the Drudge Report website is overwhelmed with readers (I can’t get a link in edgewise).

Aside from the obvious appeal to history, and the disenchanted Clinton voters, Palin brings experience.  “Experience?”, you may say, “She’s not even been governor a full 2 years.”  Indeed, but that’s 2 years more executive branch experience that the other 3 candidates — Obama, Biden and McCain — combined.  Prior to that (via Wikipedia):

• Became mayor of Wasilla, AK on a platform of cutting spending and taxes.  She did both, with cutting her salary being the first thing.
• Appointed by then-governor Murkowski to the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission as the Ethics Commissioner.  She quit over ethics issues in her own party, so she’s not afraid to call it like she sees it.

The Wikipedia article has much more about her that I find absolutely excellent.  Great job, Senator McCain.