There were some shots of Palin on the youtube coverage I watched (I think it was CNN?), and she looked like she was going to cry.

Actually I'm impressed that she didn't.

 

From the latest leaders debate of our two main parties, either of these will become our prime minister, the election is on Saturday:

"Both said they did not believe in God or in an afterlife, and that it was a woman's right to choose on abortion."

 

Finally, an end to all of the protests and hateful vitriol that embodied the American left under GW. And all it cost was the dissolution of the admittedly antiquated notion that we should be in control of our own finances.

Not too bad a trade-off, right?

 

"And all it cost was the dissolution of the admittedly antiquated notion that we should be in control of our own finances."

Yes, god forbid we have a Democrat who plans to begin reducing the vast Republican budget deficit by incrementally raising taxes on the rich. Who knows what other disasters might befall us with a Democrat directing the nation's fiscal policy? Why we might lapse into a recession as the entire financial, banking, and auto industries collapsed, requiring hundreds of billions in government bailouts! Oh wait...

Also:
"The unemployment rate is at its worst in 14 years. October retail sales were the worst in 37 years. The ISM manufacturing index is at its lowest level in 26 years. And the service sector index is at its lowest level ever."

 

So the left's concerted effort over the past 30 some years to ensure that people who couldn't afford to get mortgages weren't "discriminated against" had nothing to do with the recession, eh? It was all GW's fault. Duly noted. Kudos on noting the side effects of recession and implying that they're unrelated (and Bush's fault) as well.

Let me get this straight: you feel that the way to cut the deficit is to increase government income before reducing spending? The only way the deficit will shrink is when the cash flow stops, be it with stone-walling tax cuts or having no capital gains left to tax. Guess which will happen first under Obama?

 

No, the various civil rights legislation that forced banks to stop the redlining tactics they used to avoid giving loans to minorities, which as you note had been in place for more than 30 years, had virtually nothing to do with the bursting of the housing bubble. That's a rather scurrilous argument adopted by some right wing bloggers in an effort to blame the whole affair on black people. Loans of that nature made up a negligible sliver of the total mortgages in the US, and have been defaulted on at rates lower than mortgages on the whole.

Read the Irvine Housing Blog; I link to it all the time. It's anecdote, not data, but they've posted hundreds of case studies of foreclosures and short sales from Irvine, virtually all of them created by (formerly) rich white people, trying to flip properties as investments, or HELOCing themselves into bankruptcy through profligate spending. Loans to poor people were not the cause of the housing bubble, or the mortgage crisis.

In fact, actual foreclosures and bad loans are almost irrelevant to the financial industry's collapse, which was chiefly brought about by the virtually unregulated financial markets and their high tech credit loan swapping of derivatives and other crazed plans to leverage massive bundles of risky loans into AAA-rated investments. It's laughable for anyone to claim that hundreds of billions of dollars were lost due to bad housing loans; the damage came from the exponential multiplication of those losses thanks to them being repackaged and magnified on the financial markets.

Sadly, while the laxity of oversight that allowed such "investments" to exist and be marked as "risk-free" was largely spearheaded by Republicans and the financial industry lobbyists they use to write their business legislation, the Democrats didn't exactly put up a fight. The Ds aren't quite the fawning subsidiary of business interests that the Rs have become, but they're far from an actual opposition party in most areas. They certainly weren't in this one. Deference and reverence to our financial overlords is fairly mandatory in Washington, the past few decades.

And yes, of course Bush and Republicans get the blame for the recession/depression. There's fairly robust evidence that the nation's economy does better under Democratic policies. That aside, if the economy were booming and the deficit were shrinking as it was when Clinton left office, Bush would take the credit and McCain (or some other Republican) would have won the election handily. It's not, so they get the blame. Apportioning credit (or blame) for the state of the economy after one party has had 8 years to set the nation's financial agenda seems fair enough to me.

 

A financial guy from an accountancy firm came to our work to hold a lunchtime presentation about the current economic situation.

He said that the problems in the US market happened after the Enron scandal where the government decided to put in more regulation for on-balance sheet assets etc. So in an effort to keep doing what they were previously doing, the financiers moved the activity off the balance sheet in order to avoid the regulations.

That's just his opinion, and it's the first time I've heard that particular take on it, but it does make a certain amount of sense.