So true, and so scary.....

This is only the latest example. So it was Fanny and Freddie, eh? Then why did Lehman Bros. fail? Why did AIG need to be nationalized?

But let's be fair. McCain did say once that the economy was not his strength. So lets turn to his strength, foreign policy. Here we can expect to find lucid analysis and policy statements. But No! He is just as confused here. Take for instance the disgraceful way he seems to lump the PM of Spain with such "baddies" like Morales, Castro and Chavez. Spain! A NATO ally! A country if anything more democratic than our own. (see http://www.thenation.com/blogs/campaignmatters/361898, or click my sig. Then make sure you watch the video.)

This guy is so confused and out of his depth that he is dangerous. I'm not sure that Palin wouldn't be an improvement over him, albeit a small one.

But I would add that this also would not have come to pass if the Glass-Stegall act hadn't been overturned by the Clinton administration. When I heard that that had happened, I said, Oh, shit, what are those guys doing?

Republicans have been calling attention to Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama's choice of advisers because two of them used to run Fannie Mae, the mortgage lender that was taken over by the federal government last week in one of the many shockwaves that have torn through financial and credit markets.

Now GOP presidential nominee John McCain's campaign is out with a TV ad that lays into Obama for bring aboard one of those men -- Franklin Raines -- as an economic adviser (the other former Fannie Mae executive who has counseled Obama is Jim Johnson)

http://blogs.usatoday.com/onpolitics/2008/09/mccain-ad-assai.html?csp=34

Only a democratic administration can get to the bottom of our failed system and fix it. In a two-party system, we can only get our political system to recover properly if we reject the ruling administration after an abysmal performance. Otherwise, we would be REWARDING them with another four years for shoddy policies and poor stewardship of government and the economy. We need a fresh rethinking of policy that truly understands and learns from the mistakes of the current administration. A continuing republican administration will probably resist such new thinking because of a desire to rationalize the failures of the current administration. The implementation of new policies will also be more difficult because of the retention of the vast majority of incompetent political appointees.

It will take a democratic administration to clean the Augean stables of the bureaucracy. Imagine retaining most of the same people who were responsible for the Katrina response and the incompetent justice department and energy department bureaucrats and other appointees whose main qualifications are party loyalty. Furthermore, there can be no investigation of wrongdoings if the perpetrators remain in their jobs to obstruct inquiries.

Why do you think Karl Rove and company are helping McCain? They want an insurance policy that will protect the current administration from investigations against their wrongdoings. It would be wishful thinking to expect McCain to go after the malfeasance of the Bush administration after what Bush and his allies are doing to win him the election.

To improve the odds that the crimes of the Bush administration will be investigated with vigor, I would rather have a democratic administration to do the job under a situation where evidence cannot be easily hidden from the investigators.

Reports are now coming out of the Treasury that the Feds are going to set up a private company to buy up all the bad debts sitting on Wall Street’s books. This is going to be just like the $300 billion bailout of the S&L industry in late 80s when the federal government set up the RTC to close down all the failed S&Ls only at an enormously greater cost. One of the biggest problems with the current crisis is that NOBODY really knows how far the problem spreads.

Let me repeat that NOBODY knows just how big this thing really is. The derivates market is a mass of fog designed to hide risk.

Thanks to the now repealed Glass-Steagall Act the S&L crisis of the late 80s was largely contained to the commercial real-estate and Banking sectors. It was expensive but survivable. The era of ‘shared-risk’ means that the current crisis hits the entire financial sector and even crosses numerous borders with markets around the world taking a beating.

This new ‘government sponsored corporation’ will be on the hook for all those bad debts and their derivatives. And NOBODY knows just how much money they are talking about. $500 billion, $700 billion, $1 trillion. We DO NOT KNOW.

Meanwhile the twits who made all these bad decisions will ride off into the sunset with their billions in profits and billions in taxpayer money that paid for all their mistakes.

At least we know how Republicans are going to try to spin this now: If only Fannie and Freddie were completely privatized we would never have had a financial crisis!

It's just disgusting.

If you are looking for an abuse of power, that's where to start.

But McCain's campaign isn't looking for an abuse of power. They're looking for a scapegoat that will draw attention away from the abuses of power that they enabled.

I would like to know more about the specific stories of how Phil Gramm passed some of his de-regulating legislation.

I've read that one of Gramm's gems was at the last minute tucked into some massive budget bill that "had to be passed" because time was running out. I assume there's a distinct possibility that some of these de-regulations were a surprise -- particularly to the people who had the responsibility of knowing what was going on.

You hear so often about these corrupt and clandestine legislative shennanigans of this type. It all makes me think the legislative process (and yes, oversight and regulation of that process) needs a serious tuneup. These jerks are clearly out of control, and the public needs a clear, simple and direct legal path by which we can send some of these folks to prison so they can gain their self-respect back by being examples of what can happen to the people who replace them.

Any knowledge of Gramm's legislative "stylings," Andrew?