JBinMN,

This is NOT just a little thing to ignore... move along. The mortgage situation is worsening. For instance, in TODAY's news:

Another rough day on the subprime front. AIG, the world's largest insurer and one of the biggest mortgage lenders, said residential mortgage delinquencies and defaults are becoming more common among borrowers in the category just above subprime.

France's biggest listed bank, BNP Paribas, froze $2.2 billion worth of funds, citing subprime woes.

http://money.cnn.com/2007/08/09/news/economy/bc.aig.subprime.reut/?postversion=2007080911

The "blow back" is blowing "up" to the next level of borrowers. Did you see Cramer yesterday? He was ballistic!

Wake up, JB, and stop drinking the kool ade.

If lower taxes is always the answer, then the ultimate solution should be to simply end taxation. Period. Not having taxes will stimulate the economy and we will once again become a superpower to be reckoned with. Our military can be supported by bake sales. Our infrastructure can be based on fee-for-service. We can set up tollbooths on every city street, highway, and bridge, and charge people whenever they drive on them. A dime for every city block, a dollar for every highway mile, and ten dollars for bridges. We'll save a fortune by doing away with all regulatory agencies. This will have the added benefit of dramatically increasing sales of respirators and water filters as the air and water become incrasingly polluted. I could go on, but you get the idea. Privatization/no new taxes!!!

First of all people should try to remember that the events that have led to this "mortgage mess" kept us out of a serious recesion after Sept.11. Second of all, the overwelming majority of people that got "exotic" loans are still in their homes doing just fine, this is all just a little blow back. By the way, what would you all do to fix the situation? Keep the law of unintended consiquences in mind when you answer.

To be perfectly frank, I doubt if Bush does know there's a credit crunch, that the mortgage industry is melting down, or that the housing market is stalling. Why would he? (And I ask that not flippantly, but Socratically.) As Al Smith might have said, "Let's look at the facts":

Bush is deeply involved in two main areas right now: Iraq, and (charitably) fighting the war on terror or (uncharitably) an unprecedented Executive Branch power grab. Whatever attention he pays to other issues is probably minimal at best, and I am willing to bet that goes for his advisors as well. Even those not under threat of subpoena.

Bush's circle is fairly distant, both economically and business-wise, from the current mortgage and housing situation. He's surrounded by oil bidness cronies and other folks from Tejas; what do those ol' boys know about Sally Mae and such? Say what you want about Bush Sr., at least connected Yalies had friends in the finance industry. (Hell, has Bush even had a mortgage in his life? Has he even lived with someone who did?)

Bush is so deeply in a bubble that he doesn't even know there is a bubble. He's in denial there is a bubble. For him, inviting Hugh Hewitt and Neal Bortz over to breakfast provides him with "frank, opposing views." Something like mortgage interest rates, which impact people not even remotely close to Bush's circle, hasn't a hope of penetrating.

As we have seen for the last 6.5 years, Bush much prefers to look at things in simple, black and white, good vs. evil terms. "Dead or alive!"; "Axis of evil!"; "Bring it on!" "Tax cuts are good!" The cut-rate mortgage crises is the text-book definition of a murky, difficult, complex, shades-of-gray problem that Bush despises grappling with. Who is the Bad Guy (tm)? Who is the Good Guy? How can he appear to be the Strong President up on the rubble with the megaphone? Not with this kind of stuff; no chance. Best just leave it alone.

So anyway, with this President, I am utterly unsurprised that this whole thing is unaddressed. Hell, they took forever to address dying and starving people hip-deep (or more) in the Big Muddy in the middle of a national disaster after Hurricane Katrina when it was on world-wide television; I certainly don't expect an intellectually-incurious man like this President to talk about something as complex and difficult as this.

Or maybe I'm just bitter.

as in, I shot from the hip earlier in describing Prescott Bush as an arms dealer. If he was one, it was indirect. He first worked for, then had continuing connections with, Harriman Bank, the Wall Street portal for people like Fritz Thyssen, who ran various companies that gave a lot of money to the Nazis in the 1930s.

After WWII, at least a couple of formal investigators felt Bush, and others, should have been prosecuted for complicity in the Holocaust, as money flowed through their bank, and thence to the people who built the concentration camps. It seemed clear from the evidence that Bush and others involved should have or would have known where the money was going. To simplify matters over-much.

It's definitely a debatable subject, at any rate.

My point in the original post, made badly, was that the Bush family has no scruples, except those that allow them to help themselves. I suspect you have to go back to feudal Europe, or ancient Rome, or Greece, to find families of the same ilk: out for themselves and ready to sacrifice anyone and anything for their benefit.

Strikes me people like this should not be allowed anywhere near the levers of power in a democracy. But here we put TWO of them in the Presidency.

Sorry for the mis-statement of fact. My bad.

...of a man who had no idea what the card-reader in a checkout-line was.

There is no word in the language to adequately characterize the Bush family. They have been a complete and total disaster for this country. From Prescott Bush making money on arms deals to both the allies and the Nazis, to G.H.W. Bush continuing his father's affair with the Saudi Royal Family, and up to his hair-roots in the Iran/Contra scam, to his son milking every wealthy contact his family has to make a life for himself, and a fat life at that, this family is the very picture of unscrupulous immorality. They're wicked, all of them, in the classic understanding of the word.

Normally people like the Bushes stay well hidden, away from public view. H.W. Bush was bad enough, but his son has totally exposed the utter rot at the core of at least one elite American family.

The Bushes make me ashamed to be an american. And their wastrel eldest off-spring makes me feel things for which there is no good name.