In both debates so far, all 4 candidates were asked which promises and/or programs that they’d proposed would they not be implementing due to the current financial crisis.  I don’t think any of them gave a satisfactory answer to this question, with Obama’s “scaling back” response being the only thing close.

If anything, this credit crisis should be teaching us one lesson: severely curtail borrowing.  Huge debt is killing us.  In the mortgage-backed-securities field, things were compounded when Bank A would take an IOU from Bank B and use it as collateral to get a loan from Bank C.  Repeat this with Bank C and continue until you can hardly follow the trail.

The same goes for the federal government, who, in addition to the national debt already run up, plans to be the final resting place of this toxic debt.  So now all are eggs will be in one unimaginably huge basket.  If the bailout bill doesn’t do the trick and if foreign investors call in their chips, who bails out the feds?

Make no mistake; we are not out of the woods yet.  Sarah Palin mentioned in the VP debate the need for American’s to do their part by not taking on excessive debt.  (Personal responsibility; what a concept!)  This should ring throughout Washington, DC as well.  Spending needs to be cut, deeply and immediately.  A trillion dollars in new programs are not what this nation needs at this moment in time.  Soaking the rich to pay for more big government programs is just kicking the problem down the road.  Soaking businesses to pay for them affects employment and prices in a negative way, so we all get hit by it (promises of aiding the middle class to the contrary).

What I am afraid will happen, however, is that once the current crisis is no longer front page news — when it’s financial concepts that the public doesn’t have time for — the politicians will continue their MO like nothing’s happened.  I wish at least John McCain would get real with this issue, but he won’t any more than Barack Obama will.

And that’s largely our own fault.  Too many of us have the “Ask not what your country can do for your” mentality.  We’re buying the line that if only the rich would pay their “fair share” we’d be out of this mess, but we’ve bought into an incredibly selfish definition of the word “fair”.  We say we want our politicians to tell us the truth, but our vote too often goes to the one promising us more and more for less and less.

The bill has come due.  Let’s cut up the credit cards and stop spending what we don’t have.  This is the first step to freeing up our politicians to tell the truth.

No matter who you are, the current credit crunch does affect you, even if you don’t have a penny in the bank or a stock.  Never mind (for now) the domino effect of the credit market seizing up, if you vote, it should affect you.

Item 1:  Rep. Barney Frank has called this current crisis two things that are both flat-out lies; a failure of the free market and the result of Bush administration policies.  Frank should, and likely does, know better, since he’s the chair of the House Committee on Financial Services.  There has been video all over the blogosphere, and linked here as well, that show he and his fellow Democrats denying any problems at all with Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac, and now he’s trying to solely blame Republicans.  There’s plenty of blame to go around in both parties, but he’s in a unique position, as committee chair, to pronounce the truth of the matter to us.  Instead, he’s politicizing this huge issue for partisan gain.  If you’re from Massachusetts and you vote, this should affect your vote.

Item 1a: Senator Joe Biden said the same thing about it being all about Bush administration policies.  This should affect your vote.

Item 2:  At the foundation of this crisis is an abandonment of free market principles, not the failure of them.  Republicans have (more often) been the keepers of the free market flame.  (That’s not been a constant by any means, but a good generality.)  The Community Reinvestment Act is a Carter-era program to basically force lenders to give home loans to those who would otherwise not qualify, and the default rate of these loans is higher than normal.  That, along with the Gramm-Leach-Billey act which allowed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to write or buy up these loans in a bigger way, released other banks from this higher-risk paper and continued us down the primrose path.  Again, videos highlighted here showed, one of Obama economic advisors Franklin Raines, who at the time of the video was CEO of Fannie Mae, insisted that home prices would always go up.  Now, there is no doubt in my mind that Wall St. greed fueled this as well, but with a government mandate to write high-risk loans, and a (for all intents and purposes) government agency ready and willing to buy them up, this was a recipe for disaster.

The point is, as honorable and as high-minded the intentions were to try to get more people into their own homes, it set more people up for failure.  You can say that the number of foreclosures wasn’t enough to be a problem, yet here we are, the engine of commerce about to seize up over securities backed by mortgages.  This started when Democrats decided that the free market wasn’t working and instituted policies to, in their eyes, fix things.  While it did get many into homes that might not have otherwise been able to, does it really help us in the long run when Congress has to eventually bail us out to try to avoid a recession or worse?  (And the jury’s still out on if the bailout will really do it, or if it’s just a short-term band-aid.) 

Those who think that the free market failed us then, and are now ironically blaming the free market again, are running for President in November.  This should affect your vote. 

It does affect you.  Or it should.

It’s just a debate moderator, the lefty blogosphere tells us.  She’s just asking questions.  What’s the big deal about her book?  Well, just a few questions.

1. So then, the next Presidential debate can be moderated by John Stossel and the Democrats would be fine with that?
2. If all the moderator does is ask questions, why wouldn’t Democrats even debate themselves on Fox News?

Either blatant partisanship, real or perceived, is to be avoided at a debate, or it isn’t.  Either moderators with their own biases, plain or hidden, can be fair questioners, or they can’t.  Just pick an answer and stick with it, or don’t be surprised when Republicans ask for the same deal the Democrats ask for.

To mix a metaphor.

The Media Research Center has the details on how Katie Couric treated Joe Biden vs. Sarah Palin. 

Y’know, there’s nothing wrong with having a bias.  We all do.  But be up-front and honest about it, eh?

Mr. Instapundit noted yesterday:

A READER AT A MAJOR NEWSROOM EMAILS: “Off the record, every suspicion you have about MSM being in the tank for O is true. We have a team of 4 people going thru dumpsters in Alaska and 4 in arizona. Not a single one looking into Acorn, Ayers or Freddiemae. Editor refuses to publish anything that would jeopardize election for O, and betting you dollars to donuts same is true at NYT, others. People cheer when CNN or NBC run another Palin-mocking but raising any reasonable inquiry into obama is derided or flat out ignored. The fix is in, and its working.” I asked permission to reprint without attribution and it was granted.

UPDATE: The Anchoress hears similar things.

Water must be warm in the tank.

When sexual abuse in the Catholic church was uncovered, the national mainstream media was all over the story, as it should have been.  But when it’s a public school system that is involved in the same thing — including sending known offenders back in to work with kids, and trying to minimized the issue — their silence betrays their bias.  Then, there was outrage and daily reports on the evening news.  Now, local reporting but not much else.

Dave Pierre of NewsBusters chronicles the issue here (back in May) and here (last week).  The national media ignores a government program but wallops Christians over the same issue.  Yeah, no bias there, right?

As my wife and I talked about the bailout failure, she wondered if there would be the catastrophe that pundits were predicting would come about.  I mean, some were giving the impression that the next day we’d be in The Great Depression 2.0.  The Dow Jones drop yesterday was a large absolute number, but it was just a little over 6%; less than a third of the percentage drop in ’86.  And over the past week the market has taken wide swings as emotion rather than reason has put it on the roller coaster.

But as the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy reminds  us; don’t panic.

There are two reasons not to panic.  The first is that God is still in control, He knows what’s coming, and if we’re trusting in Him we don’t have to worry.  “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.” (Romans 8:28)  Those “all things” may not all be pleasant and cheerful, but they’ll all work for good.  Likewise, this doesn’t mean we don’t have plans if disaster strikes — I have a savings account, a retirement account, and I backup my computer; this verse doesn’t tell us not to be careful — but whatever events come our way we need to trust Him to get us through it.  Panic, as human and as understandable as it may be, is a lack of trust.  A good article, “Fearing the Future”, is here at Crown Financial Ministries’ web site.  Don’t panic.

The second is that panic makes us do foolish things that calm consideration may warn against.  We react instead of respond to the events of the day.  Take the fuel shortage hitting my neck of the woods.  If every car in metro Atlanta were to top off their tank on the same day, we’d have a fuel shortage even if all the stations had gas to begin with.  But, true to (human) form, when we heard that hurricane Ike slowed the flow of gas into the southeast, and the governor said not to panic, Atlanta did anyway.  Worried about gas lines and higher prices, Atlantans created and implemented a self-fulfilling prophesy.  If folks with 7/8th of a tank all hadn’t decided to top off during the same few days, we may have been able to ease through it.  There would have been some disruption, no doubt, but not to the point where some folks trail gas tankers to their delivery locations. 

The stock market lost 6% yesterday?  Then today’s the day to jump in.  Other people panicked and bailed out of the market, creating bargains.  Some folks have dumped stock of companies that aren’t going to be affected, or affected little, by this situation, so their stocks are now artificially low.  This podcast episode from Crown Financial Ministries deals with this specific issue.  (And I recommend picking up the feed in your podcatcher of choice.  Good advice all the time.)  Don’t panic.

But could we actually wind up in The Great Depression 2.0?  Only God knows, and that’s not a cliche.  Whether we experience some pain now or if we kick the can down the road, it’s still all known to God.  Trust Him, and don’t panic. 

With a tip of the hat to Bruce McQuain at Q&O, the country of Ecuador is about to take a step into environmental extremism that is (so far) unparalleled.

The South American republic of Ecuador will next week consider what many countries in the world would say is unthinkable. People will be asked to vote on Sunday on a new constitution that would give Ecuador’s tropical forests, islands, rivers and air similar legal rights to those normally granted to humans. If they vote yes – and polls show that 56% are for and only 23% are against – then an already approved bill of rights for nature will be introduced, and new laws will change the legal status of nature from being simply property to being a right-bearing entity.

This is a complete rewrite of the definition of the concept of a “right”. 

And where did they get this idea?  American leftists.

Thomas Linzey, a US lawyer who has helped to develop the new legal framework for nature, says: “The dominant form of environmental protection in industrialised countries is based on the regulatory system. Governments permit and legalise the discharge of certain amounts of toxics into the environment. As a form of environmental protection, it’s not working.

“In the same way, compensation is measured in terms of that injury to a person or people. Under the new system, it will be measured according to damage to the ecosystem. The new system is, in essence, an attempt to codify sustainable development. The new laws would grant people the right to sue on behalf of an ecosystem, even if not actually injured themselves.”

Linzey is a member of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund.  This is their liberalism and environmental policies running out of control, and is a peek into what they really want in our country.

Linzey admits that Ecuador may be taking a step into the legal unknown. “No one knows what will happen [if the referendum goes in favour of new rights for nature] because there are no examples of how this works in the real world,” he says. “A lot of people will be watching what happens.”

Yeah, good luck with that guinea pig thing.  Just waiting for the Plant’s Suffrage movement.

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.

This is a 10-minute video that sets the Way-Back Machine to 1995 and documents, with quotes, news articles, charts & graphs, how we really got into this mess.  It also notes who contributed to it and who tried to stop it before it happened. 

Keep your mouse on the Pause button.  It packs a lot of information into those 10 minutes.

The latest advancement in stem cells is that it’s getting safer to convert adult stem cells to “induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells” (basically what embryonic stems cells are).  Adult stem cells are already curing loads of diseases, without the need for destroying embryos.  This is just one less reason to want to rely on the ethically murky embryonic ones.

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.

…or “on empty”, depending on how you look at it.  Last Tuesday this came out about Obama’s latest ad.

Democrat Barack Obama’s campaign hit Republican John McCain today over his family’s ownership of foreign cars, saying it would air a TV ad in Michigan highlighting McCain’s statements on buying American.

But the ad, which accuses McCain of misleading Michigan voters by saying he’s bought American vehicles “literally all my life,” doesn’t say that of the 13 vehicles owned by the McCain family, only one is registered to McCain himself – a 2004 Cadillac CTS built in Lansing.

The 12 other vehicles include a 2005 Volkswagen convertible, a 2001 Honda sedan, a 2007 Ford half-ton pickup and three Gem neighborhood electric vehicles – essentially road-worthy golf carts built by a Chrysler subsidiary.

Cindy McCain is the legal owner of 11 vehicles. The Lexus she drives is registered to Hensley & Co., the Anheuser-Busch beer distributorship she inherited from her late father.

He’s unfit for office because … he owns cars, of all things!  And he married into 11 of them!  Oh, the humanity.

If the Obama campaign is trying to say that being rich means you’re elitist, then it’s just the same old class warfare that Democrats have used for decades.  So much for “change”.  “Elitism” is an attitude, not the result of a balance sheet.  I would say that racism is elitist, thinking your race is better than others, but anyone from Joe Sixpack to Donald Trump could have that attitude.  You can be in an elite group of people, such as the super-rich, but not necessarily have an elitist attitude.

I would say that suggesting that Pennsylvanians cling to guns and religion during bad times (like that’s a bad thing) is elitist.  And especially after you’d just returned from Pennsylvania praising those same people. 

But my main point is that this sort of ad — calling attention to what he owns instead of what he thinks — smacks of desperation.

Congressman Alcee Hastings (D-Oz), speaking to the National Jewish Democratic Council, used this fine bit of prose to attack Sarah Palin.

Florida Democratic Congressman Alcee Hastings pointed to Sarah Palin on Wednesday to rally Jews to Obama.

“If Sarah Palin isn’t enough of a reason for you to get over whatever your problem is with Barack Obama, then you damn well had better pay attention,” said Hastings. “Anybody toting guns and stripping moose don’t care too much about what they do with Jews and blacks. So, you just think this through.”

Hastings, who is a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, made his comments in Washington, D.C., while participating in a panel discussion sponsored by the National Jewish Democratic Council.

Well, there’s a leap I don’t think I’ve ever heard made.  “Don’t vote for Palin; she clings to her guns and mooses.”  And the connection to caring about Jews and blacks is obvious, right?  Right?

I’ve wondered about this before, but couldn’t figure out how.  It could remove some of the thrust of the wind and have … some sort of effect.  Perhaps seeds don’t get blown as far or something like that.

Well, this Q&A column from the NY Times notes that one study suggests that the turbines / windmills could force the agitation of moister ground air with drier air higher up to produce a drying effect at ground level.  That’s probably not a big deal if your windfarm is in the desert southwest, and maybe not even if it’s out at sea.  But it makes it less likely you’ll want to toss up windmills in the middle of fields in the country’s breadbasket.