Just Incredible!

[molson_golden2002]

Talk about crazy! They serioulsy want tax cuts to solve the problem! And McCain?

 

 

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080926/ap_on_...ancial_meltdown

 

WASHINGTON - Even for a party whose president suffers dismal approval ratings, whose legislative wing lost control of Congress and whose presidential nominee trails in the polls, it was a remarkably bad day for Republicans.

 

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A White House summit meeting on Thursday meant to shore up John McCain's shaky campaign "devolved into a contentious shouting match." And that's how McCain's own campaign described it.

 

The meeting revealed that President Bush's $700 billion bid to combat the worst financial crisis in decades had been suddenly sidetracked by fellow Republicans in the House, who refused to embrace a plan that appeared close to acceptance by the Senate and most House Democrats.

 

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson begged Democratic participants not to disclose how badly the meeting had gone, dropping to one knee in a teasing way to make his point according to witnesses.

 

And when Paulson hastily tried to revive talks in a nighttime meeting near the Senate chamber, the House's top Republican refused to send a negotiator.

 

"This is the president's own party," said Rep. Barney Frank, a top Democratic negotiator who attended both meetings. "I don't think a president has been repudiated so strongly by the congressional wing of his own party in a long time."

 

By midnight, it was hard to tell who had suffered a worse evening, Bush or McCain. McCain, eager to shore up his image as a leader who rises above partisanship, was undercut by a fierce political squabble within his own party's ranks.

 

The consequences could be worse for Bush, and for millions of Americans if the impasse sends financial markets tumbling, as some officials fear. Closed-door negotiations were to resume Friday, but it was unclear whether House Republicans would attend.

 

Republicans and Democrats alike seemed unsure which way McCain was leaning. His campaign's statement late Thursday shed little light.

 

"At this moment, the plan that has been put forth by the administration does not enjoy the confidence of the American people," it said. It was unclear whether McCain would attend Friday night's scheduled debate against Democratic nominee Barack Obama in Oxford, Miss.

 

Ordinarily a Republican president's problems are with Democrats, especially if they control the House and Senate. In this case, Bush seemed almost over that hurdle.

 

To be sure, Democrats demanded a number of changes in his $700 billion bailout plan, but administration insiders signaled they probably were acceptable. They included greater oversight, more protections for taxpayers, efforts to head off home foreclosures and piecemeal allocations of the federal money to buy toxic mortgage securities.

 

What caught some by surprise, either at the White House meeting or shortly before it, was the sudden momentum behind a dramatically different plan drafted by House conservatives with Minority Leader John Boehner's blessing.

 

Instead of the government buying the distressed securities, the new plan would have banks, financial firms and other investors that hold such loans pay the Treasury to insure them. Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wisc., a chief sponsor, said it was clear that Bush's plan "was not going to pass the House."

 

But Democrats said the same was true of the conservatives' plan. It calls for tax cuts and insurance provisions the majority party will not accept, they said.

 

At one point in the White House meeting, according to two officials, McCain voiced support for Ryan's criticisms of the administration's proposal. Frank, a gruff Massachusetts liberal, angrily demanded to know what plan McCain favored.

 

These officials also said that as tempers flared, Bush struggled at times to maintain control.

 

At one point, several minutes into the session, Obama said it was time to hear from McCain. According to a Republican who was there, "all he said was, 'I support the principles that House Republicans are fighting for.'"

 

Some at the table took that to mean the conservatives' alternative proposal, which stands little chance of passage.

[molson_golden2002]

Both McCain and his Democratic rival, Sen. Barack Obama, would leave the White House without comment, and the meeting was described as among the wildest in memory. A beleaguered President Bush had to struggle to maintain order and reassert himself. And when Democrats left to caucus in the Roosevelt Room, Paulson pursued them, begging that they not “blow up” the legislation.

 

The former Goldman Sachs CEO even went down on one knee as if genuflecting, to which Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Cal.) is said to have joked, “I didn’t know you were Catholic.”

 

It was McCain who had urged Bush to call the White House meeting but Democrats made sure Obama had a prominent part. And much as they complained later of being blindsided, the whole event turned out to be something of an ambush on their part—aimed at McCain and House Republicans.

 

“Speaking professionally,” said one Republican aide, “They did a very good job.”

 

When Bush yielded early to Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D- Nev.) to speak, they yielded to Obama to speak for the assembled Democrats. And it was Obama who raised the subject of the conservative alternative and pressed Paulson on what he thought of the idea.

 

House Republicans felt trapped—squeezed by Treasury, House Democrats and a bipartisan coalition in the Senate. And while McCain spoke surprisingly little after asking for the meeting, he conceded that it appeared there were not the votes for the core Paulson plan without major changes.

 

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0908/13918.html

[molson_golden2002]

The wild White House meeting may have the effect of uniting Democrats more. And only hours before, Dodd, Frank and bipartisan set of prominent senators had reached a bipartisan agreement Thursday on the framework for legislation authorizing the massive government intervention.

 

But passing the Treasury plan is still an uphill climb, and Pelosi will be reluctant to expose her members if House Republicans are sitting out the process. And the whole sequence of events confirmed Treasury’s fears about the decision by Bush, at the urging of McCain, to allow presidential politics into what were already difficult negotiations.

 

Great job McCain!

[Johnny Coli]

He only showed up to inject himself into the crisis and cajole the GOP House caucus to tank the negotiations. What a great leader. What a man of conviction.

[pBills]

My father-in-law was on the Hill last night, every congressman he talked to said that the house republicans blew this one and that McCain was pretty much non-existent. He got what he was looking for originally, press converage. Great press coverage? Remains to be seen. I hope to god that no one will praise him for this.

[EndZoneCrew]

Country First......unless my campaign needs a boost...

[taterhill]

Oops that was me above

[/dev/null]

Great job McCain!

 

Are you done replying to your own posts?

[molson_golden2002]

Are you done replying to your own posts?

Updates, that's all

[/dev/null]

Updates, that's all

 

Late breaking news huh? 8 and 3 minutes apart?

[Johnny Coli]

What a joke. Is there any doubt what his real agenda is now? Does anyone still believe his nonsense about "suspending" his campaign (which still plods along...yet one more lie from the maverick)?

McCain Leaps Into a Thicket

At the bipartisan White House meeting that Mr. McCain had called for a day earlier, he sat silently for more than 40 minutes, more observer than leader, and then offered only a vague sense of where he stood, said people in the meeting.

 

In subsequent television interviews, Mr. McCain suggested that he saw the bipartisan plan that came apart at the White House meeting as the proper basis for an eventual agreement, but he did not tip his hand as to whether he would give any support to the alternative put on the table by angry House Republicans, with whom he had met before going to the White House.

 

(snip)

 

But there was no evidence that he was playing a major role in the frantic efforts on Capitol Hill to put a deal back together again.

 

Blow into town and help tank a bipartisan solution. Call a meeting that you don't participate in. Present no ideas. Play no role in solving the crisis YOU are personally prolonging. Just so you can get out of a debate.

[pBills]

Johnny... it's just sad that people believe in him as much as they do. Just goes to show that the war thing can go pretty far. I wondering how people will say that he will win in a landslide.

[molson_golden2002]

Blow into town and help tank a bipartisan solution. Call a meeting that you don't participate in. Present no ideas. Play no role in solving the crisis YOU are personally prolonging. Just so you can get out of a debate.

Change we can believe in!

[East Brady]

Yeah incredible that you guy's are so naive as to be cheerleading this bailout when it will not fix the problem.

 

Here are some words from a FED chairman that blows-up the criminal Ben Bernanke and his buddy's in congress along with the criminal Hank Paulson.

 

http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/

 

http://market-ticker.denninger.net/2008/04...sions-just.html

 

Here also is an open letter from Ron Paul; you guys should pull your heads out of your ass's and get a clue.

 

 

 

 

My Answer to the President

September 25th, 2008 by Ron Paul

 

Dear Friends:

 

The financial meltdown the economists of the Austrian School predicted has arrived.

 

We are in this crisis because of an excess of artificially created credit at the hands of the Federal Reserve System. The solution being proposed? More artificial credit by the Federal Reserve. No liquidation of bad debt and malinvestment is to be allowed. By doing more of the same, we will only continue and intensify the distortions in our economy - all the capital misallocation, all the malinvestment - and prevent the market’s attempt to re-establish rational pricing of houses and other assets.

 

Last night the president addressed the nation about the financial crisis. There is no point in going through his remarks line by line, since I’d only be repeating what I’ve been saying over and over - not just for the past several days, but for years and even decades.

 

Still, at least a few observations are necessary.

 

The president assures us that his administration “is working with Congress to address the root cause behind much of the instability in our markets.” Care to take a guess at whether the Federal Reserve and its money creation spree were even mentioned?

 

We are told that “low interest rates” led to excessive borrowing, but we are not told how these low interest rates came about. They were a deliberate policy of the Federal Reserve. As always, artificially low interest rates distort the market. Entrepreneurs engage in malinvestments - investments that do not make sense in light of current resource availability, that occur in more temporally remote stages of the capital structure than the pattern of consumer demand can support, and that would not have been made at all if the interest rate had been permitted to tell the truth instead of being toyed with by the Fed.

 

Not a word about any of that, of course, because Americans might then discover how the great wise men in Washington caused this great debacle. Better to keep scapegoating the mortgage industry or “wildcat capitalism” (as if we actually have a pure free market!).

 

Speaking about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the president said: “Because these companies were chartered by Congress, many believed they were guaranteed by the federal government. This allowed them to borrow enormous sums of money, fuel the market for questionable investments, and put our financial system at risk.”

 

Doesn’t that prove the foolishness of chartering Fannie and Freddie in the first place? Doesn’t that suggest that maybe, just maybe, government may have contributed to this mess? And of course, by bailing out Fannie and Freddie, hasn’t the federal government shown that the “many” who “believed they were guaranteed by the federal government” were in fact correct?

 

Then come the scare tactics. If we don’t give dictatorial powers to the Treasury Secretary “the stock market would drop even more, which would reduce the value of your retirement account. The value of your home could plummet.” Left unsaid, naturally, is that with the bailout and all the money and credit that must be produced out of thin air to fund it, the value of your retirement account will drop anyway, because the value of the dollar will suffer a precipitous decline. As for home prices, they are obviously much too high, and supply and demand cannot equilibrate if government insists on propping them up.

 

It’s the same destructive strategy that government tried during the Great Depression: prop up prices at all costs. The Depression went on for over a decade. On the other hand, when liquidation was allowed to occur in the equally devastating downturn of 1921, the economy recovered within less than a year.

 

The president also tells us that Senators McCain and Obama will join him at the White House today in order to figure out how to get the bipartisan bailout passed. The two senators would do their country much more good if they stayed on the campaign trail debating who the bigger celebrity is, or whatever it is that occupies their attention these days.

 

F.A. Hayek won the Nobel Prize for showing how central banks’ manipulation of interest rates creates the boom-bust cycle with which we are sadly familiar. In 1932, in the depths of the Great Depression, he described the foolish policies being pursued in his day - and which are being proposed, just as destructively, in our own:

 

Instead of furthering the inevitable liquidation of the maladjustments brought about by the boom during the last three years, all conceivable means have been used to prevent that readjustment from taking place; and one of these means, which has been repeatedly tried though without success, from the earliest to the most recent stages of depression, has been this deliberate policy of credit expansion.

 

To combat the depression by a forced credit expansion is to attempt to cure the evil by the very means which brought it about; because we are suffering from a misdirection of production, we want to create further misdirection - a procedure that can only lead to a much more severe crisis as soon as the credit expansion comes to an end… It is probably to this experiment, together with the attempts to prevent liquidation once the crisis had come, that we owe the exceptional severity and duration of the depression.

 

The only thing we learn from history, I am afraid, is that we do not learn from history.

 

The very people who have spent the past several years assuring us that the economy is fundamentally sound, and who themselves foolishly cheered the extension of all these novel kinds of mortgages, are the ones who now claim to be the experts who will restore prosperity! Just how spectacularly wrong, how utterly without a clue, does someone have to be before his expert status is called into question?

 

Oh, and did you notice that the bailout is now being called a “rescue plan”? I guess “bailout” wasn’t sitting too well with the American people.

 

The very people who with somber faces tell us of their deep concern for the spread of democracy around the world are the ones most insistent on forcing a bill through Congress that the American people overwhelmingly oppose. The very fact that some of you seem to think you’re supposed to have a voice in all this actually seems to annoy them.

 

I continue to urge you to contact your representatives and give them a piece of your mind. I myself am doing everything I can to promote the correct point of view on the crisis. Be sure also to educate yourselves on these subjects - the Campaign for Liberty blog is an excellent place to start. Read the posts, ask questions in the comment section, and learn.

 

H.G. Wells once said that civilization was in a race between education and catastrophe. Let us learn the truth and spread it as far and wide as our circumstances allow. For the truth is the greatest weapon we have.

 

In liberty,

 

Ron Paul

 

Share/Save/Bookmark

[pBills]

Yeah incredible that you guy's are so naive as to be cheerleading this bailout when it will not fix the problem.

 

Here are some words from a FED chairman that blows-up the criminal Ben Bernanke and his buddy's in congress along with the criminal Hank Paulson.

 

http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/

 

http://market-ticker.denninger.net/2008/04...sions-just.html

 

Here also is an open letter from Ron Paul; you guys should pull your heads out of your ass's and get a clue.

 

 

 

 

My Answer to the President

September 25th, 2008 by Ron Paul

 

Dear Friends:

 

The financial meltdown the economists of the Austrian School predicted has arrived.

 

We are in this crisis because of an excess of artificially created credit at the hands of the Federal Reserve System. The solution being proposed? More artificial credit by the Federal Reserve. No liquidation of bad debt and malinvestment is to be allowed. By doing more of the same, we will only continue and intensify the distortions in our economy - all the capital misallocation, all the malinvestment - and prevent the market’s attempt to re-establish rational pricing of houses and other assets.

 

Last night the president addressed the nation about the financial crisis. There is no point in going through his remarks line by line, since I’d only be repeating what I’ve been saying over and over - not just for the past several days, but for years and even decades.

 

Still, at least a few observations are necessary.

 

The president assures us that his administration “is working with Congress to address the root cause behind much of the instability in our markets.” Care to take a guess at whether the Federal Reserve and its money creation spree were even mentioned?

 

We are told that “low interest rates” led to excessive borrowing, but we are not told how these low interest rates came about. They were a deliberate policy of the Federal Reserve. As always, artificially low interest rates distort the market. Entrepreneurs engage in malinvestments - investments that do not make sense in light of current resource availability, that occur in more temporally remote stages of the capital structure than the pattern of consumer demand can support, and that would not have been made at all if the interest rate had been permitted to tell the truth instead of being toyed with by the Fed.

 

Not a word about any of that, of course, because Americans might then discover how the great wise men in Washington caused this great debacle. Better to keep scapegoating the mortgage industry or “wildcat capitalism” (as if we actually have a pure free market!).

 

Speaking about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the president said: “Because these companies were chartered by Congress, many believed they were guaranteed by the federal government. This allowed them to borrow enormous sums of money, fuel the market for questionable investments, and put our financial system at risk.”

 

Doesn’t that prove the foolishness of chartering Fannie and Freddie in the first place? Doesn’t that suggest that maybe, just maybe, government may have contributed to this mess? And of course, by bailing out Fannie and Freddie, hasn’t the federal government shown that the “many” who “believed they were guaranteed by the federal government” were in fact correct?

 

Then come the scare tactics. If we don’t give dictatorial powers to the Treasury Secretary “the stock market would drop even more, which would reduce the value of your retirement account. The value of your home could plummet.” Left unsaid, naturally, is that with the bailout and all the money and credit that must be produced out of thin air to fund it, the value of your retirement account will drop anyway, because the value of the dollar will suffer a precipitous decline. As for home prices, they are obviously much too high, and supply and demand cannot equilibrate if government insists on propping them up.

 

It’s the same destructive strategy that government tried during the Great Depression: prop up prices at all costs. The Depression went on for over a decade. On the other hand, when liquidation was allowed to occur in the equally devastating downturn of 1921, the economy recovered within less than a year.

 

The president also tells us that Senators McCain and Obama will join him at the White House today in order to figure out how to get the bipartisan bailout passed. The two senators would do their country much more good if they stayed on the campaign trail debating who the bigger celebrity is, or whatever it is that occupies their attention these days.

 

F.A. Hayek won the Nobel Prize for showing how central banks’ manipulation of interest rates creates the boom-bust cycle with which we are sadly familiar. In 1932, in the depths of the Great Depression, he described the foolish policies being pursued in his day - and which are being proposed, just as destructively, in our own:

 

Instead of furthering the inevitable liquidation of the maladjustments brought about by the boom during the last three years, all conceivable means have been used to prevent that readjustment from taking place; and one of these means, which has been repeatedly tried though without success, from the earliest to the most recent stages of depression, has been this deliberate policy of credit expansion.

 

To combat the depression by a forced credit expansion is to attempt to cure the evil by the very means which brought it about; because we are suffering from a misdirection of production, we want to create further misdirection - a procedure that can only lead to a much more severe crisis as soon as the credit expansion comes to an end… It is probably to this experiment, together with the attempts to prevent liquidation once the crisis had come, that we owe the exceptional severity and duration of the depression.

 

The only thing we learn from history, I am afraid, is that we do not learn from history.

 

The very people who have spent the past several years assuring us that the economy is fundamentally sound, and who themselves foolishly cheered the extension of all these novel kinds of mortgages, are the ones who now claim to be the experts who will restore prosperity! Just how spectacularly wrong, how utterly without a clue, does someone have to be before his expert status is called into question?

 

Oh, and did you notice that the bailout is now being called a “rescue plan”? I guess “bailout” wasn’t sitting too well with the American people.

 

The very people who with somber faces tell us of their deep concern for the spread of democracy around the world are the ones most insistent on forcing a bill through Congress that the American people overwhelmingly oppose. The very fact that some of you seem to think you’re supposed to have a voice in all this actually seems to annoy them.

 

I continue to urge you to contact your representatives and give them a piece of your mind. I myself am doing everything I can to promote the correct point of view on the crisis. Be sure also to educate yourselves on these subjects - the Campaign for Liberty blog is an excellent place to start. Read the posts, ask questions in the comment section, and learn.

 

H.G. Wells once said that civilization was in a race between education and catastrophe. Let us learn the truth and spread it as far and wide as our circumstances allow. For the truth is the greatest weapon we have.

 

In liberty,

 

Ron Paul

 

Share/Save/Bookmark

 

 

I don't believe anyone here is completely buying into the bailout. It's more along the lines of laughing at the Straight Talk Express, Mr. Super Economy... John McCain campaign. Just sad.

[finknottle]

My father-in-law was on the Hill last night, every congressman he talked to said that the house republicans blew this one and that McCain was pretty much non-existent. He got what he was looking for originally, press converage. Great press coverage? Remains to be seen. I hope to god that no one will praise him for this.

 

McCain is not the Messiah - he's not going to stand up in front of the cameras and part the waves of bankruptcy with a spread of his arms, like the One. He is only there to ensure that he can get behind whatever comes out, because if he can't it is not going to pass - end of story. That means listening, not posing.

 

Don't take my word for it, take Harry Reid's, before he was given the Obama talking points about McCain being a distraction. He specifically called on McCain to rally republican support for the bill. See for yourself -

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3f0BwyZKMw

[Kelly the Dog]

What a joke. Is there any doubt what his real agenda is now? Does anyone still believe his nonsense about "suspending" his campaign (which still plods along...yet one more lie from the maverick)?

McCain Leaps Into a Thicket

 

 

Blow into town and help tank a bipartisan solution. Call a meeting that you don't participate in. Present no ideas. Play no role in solving the crisis YOU are personally prolonging. Just so you can get out of a debate.

Sen. Shelby, the strongest Republican leading the charge against the bailout plan, said this morning on live TV that he hasn't spoken to McCain once in the last week, McCain never tried to call him, and then spoke to him "for a few minutes" yesterday.

[East Brady]

I don't believe anyone here is completely buying into the bailout. It's more along the lines of laughing at the Straight Talk Express, Mr. Super Economy... John McCain campaign. Just sad.

As opposed to what Obama and his #1 economic adviser ROBERT RUBIN of goldman fame working hand in hand with his buddy the criminal Hank Paulson, also of goldman, they designed the system they now try to bailout.. We are being ROBBED by the powers that be and its time to end the FED that is the cause of the collapse.

[pBills]

McCain is not the Messiah - he's not going to stand up in front of the cameras and part the waves of bankruptcy with a spread of his arms, like the One. He is only there to ensure that he can get behind whatever comes out, because if he can't it is not going to pass - end of story. That means listening, not posing.

 

Don't take my word for it, take Harry Reid's, before he was given the Obama talking points about McCain being a distraction. He specifically called on McCain to rally republican support for the bill. See for yourself -

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3f0BwyZKMw

 

 

 

May not stand up for Cameras in DC, however his campaign made many statements about how he is putting Country First. Even over his campaign. Acting as though he was going to swoop in and help this thing along. When in fact he's not on any notable committee related to this... and he barely participated in the meeting. Oh and he had time to stop off at CBS and an event before he arrived to save the day.

[pBills]

As opposed to what Obama and his #1 economic adviser ROBERT RUBIN of goldman fame working hand in hand with his buddy the criminal Hank Paulson, also of goldman, they designed the system they now try to bailout.. We are being ROBBED by the powers that be and its time to end the FED that is the cause of the collapse.

 

 

 

Both Candidates are affiliated one way or another.... matter of fact most congressman & women are affiliated one way or another.