yeah, the democrats do such a great job with Christianity...you know...killing God's children and all.


Yeah, of course that's what I meant. It couldn't possibly be that some of the VERY people you find yourself aligned with politically are the VERY same people that you have discussed with derision and at times a bit of contempt.

Spoken like a true democrat though.

I was hoping that you would wake up and see what this party does and is promising to do to God's children.


I do not respect the opinions and beliefs of any people that consider the murder of unborn babies acceptable. A Christian KNOWS that God has given life and that it is NOT for us to take it away as a matter of convenience.

Folks - Please do not attack people for their association or any other reason.

How about focussing on the ideas. A novel concept I know but this thread will be locked if this bickering continues.

I find that a shocking statement in light of the fact that you live in a democrat controlled state that has the worse economy of any state in the nation. Democrats have destroyed the ecomony there just as they did in Louisana under democrats in the past. [and just as they did under the last democrat administration under Jim Blanchard]

Secondly, we can see what democrats have done to the economy in our nation with just a tiny little control over our Banking Committee, and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. They instituted a run on subprime mortgages in this country, actually FINING banks for not lending to unqualified people. They encouraged banks to sell these mortgages to the unqualified and bought them up by the billions.

Democrats Barney Frank and Chris Dodd oversaw this abortion, placing their friend and Obama's financial advisor, Franklin Raines in charge of FM and FM. He has since been removed and fined for accepting millions of dollars in bonuses based on fradulent reporting in FM and FM. The simple truth of the matter is we would not be here if not for DEMOCRATS.

Sure, the Republicans should have tried harder to stop them, but it democrats, going back to the clinton administration who got us here. The democrats are not fit to run a dog kennel after they have almost single handedly brought our economy to its knees with their foolishness. And to add insult to injury, they don't even have the decency to admit their complicity which means they have not learned from their mistakes. They are dangerous to this nation.

Lets also keep in mind that while the Republicans have spent like drunken sailors in the 6 years they controlled both houses, [this term] so have democrats since they took control in 2006.

The New York Times was crowing about the democrat's policies to extend loans to unqualified minorities back in 1999. We can see where their policies have led us TODAY. This does not assure me that democrats can be trusted with anything more than city dog pound and do not have the capacity to even learn from their mistakes:

New York Times
Fannie Mae Eases Credit To Aid Mortgage Lending

By STEVEN A. HOLMES
Published: September 30, 1999

excerpts:

In a move that could help increase home ownership rates among minorities and low-income consumers, the Fannie Mae Corporation is easing the credit requirements on loans that it will purchase from banks and other lenders.

Fannie Mae, the nation's biggest underwriter of home mortgages, has been under increasing pressure from the Clinton Administration to expand mortgage loans among low and moderate income people and felt pressure from stock holders to maintain its phenomenal growth in profits.

In moving, even tentatively, into this new area of lending, Fannie Mae is taking on significantly more risk, which may not pose any difficulties during flush economic times. But the government-subsidized corporation may run into trouble in an economic downturn, prompting a government rescue similar to that of the savings and loan industry in the 1980's.

''From the perspective of many people, including me, this is another thrift industry growing up around us,'' said Peter Wallison a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. ''If they fail, the government will have to step up and bail them out the way it stepped up and bailed out the thrift industry.''

Fannie Mae, the nation's biggest underwriter of home mortgages, does not lend money directly to consumers. Instead, it purchases loans that banks make on what is called the secondary market. By expanding the type of loans that it will buy, Fannie Mae is hoping to spur banks to make more loans to people with less-than-stellar credit ratings.

Fannie Mae officials stress that the new mortgages will be extended to all potential borrowers who can qualify for a mortgage. But they add that the move is intended in part to increase the number of minority and low income home owners who tend to have worse credit ratings than non-Hispanic whites.
entire article

Lets pay special attention to this line from the NY Times article:

Fannie Mae, the nation's biggest underwriter of home mortgages, does not lend money directly to consumers. Instead, it purchases loans that banks make on what is called the secondary market. By expanding the type of loans that it will buy, Fannie Mae is hoping to spur banks to make more loans to people with less-than-stellar credit ratings.

Mission accomplished! Thank you, democrats!

To make her head look bigger and give the illusion that she might actually have a bigger brain instead of one she has: the size of a radish seed.



Charlotte

Looks like she's starting a trend...

STARTING W/ KATIE COURIC

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEKKKKKKKKKKK!!!!!

Say it ain't so!!!

WABOCATFNLAATIMOS!!!!!!!!!!!!!! There, glad I got that off my chest--and by using acronym form, without getting the thread locked down, either!

You have to look no further than the $10 trillion national debt the current administration rung up to see just how true this is.


Bingo! You think maybe this relationship has anything to do with why 7 years later we STILL haven't found the real TERRORIST responsible for the deaths of 3,000 citizens on our own soil? You think OIL may have had a factor in the decision to INVADE Iraq? Considering that 18 of the 19 terrorists responsible for 9/11 were Saudi nationals that just maybe it would have been prudent for the Bush administration to detain the Saudi family instead of breaking the country wide grounding of flights to whisk them out of the country to safety? Can you say conflict of interest?


Gore didn't lose the election, GWB's brother stole it for him. The reason Kerry lost is because he took the high road instead of defending against the onslaught attack ads. Too bad Obama wouldn't stand still and be a good little target or it likely would have happened again. The newspaper headlines around the world said it all the day after the 2004 election was over..."How can 52 million people be this dumb."


It's akin to selling out the American people. Expecting corporations to act responsibly and support the people from which there earn enormous profits. The only thing important to corporations if the bottom line. Choosing to send jobs overseas to please stockholders, all in an effort to squeeze out a few more dollars profit at the expense of their employees and customers. Corporate GREED is what ruined our country not the Democrats.



While the Republicans had their eye off the ball focusing on AyersGate, ACORNGate and PalinGate not only are they going to lose the White House, but there is a very real possibility they will lose a filibuster-proof majority of the Senate too.

Want2Stay

Spoken like a true believer in Socialist philosophy, Want2.

What is "important" to corporations is NOT "just" the bottom line, but it IS the only thing that keeps the doors open and employees EMPLOYED.

What the Socialist "position" is, is simply what you see with the Democrats, what Obama is spewing as a "cornerstone" principle (i.e. "Joe the Plumber, we NEED to spread the wealth around so when you own that business WE can take MORE of you money and just like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, FORCE it to be given to others whether you like it or not.").

If EVER there was a CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER to the "American Way of Life" it IS the Democrats and their belief in, and commitment to, Socialism as the "the cure" for whatever ails you."

As Melody so correctly pointed out, the Democrats "presided over" and took huge political contributions from, the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac "socialist piggy banks" with NO consideration for that BIG BAD CORPORATE NEED FOR A [B]SOUND[/D] BOTTOM LINE. No "bottom line," not Business. But wait!. The Democrats will "bail out" their own MESS by making YOU pay for it, unlike businesses who can't TAKE your money from you.

In the meantime, the REAL "problem" is between Capitalism and Socialism as a bedrock prinicple of how ANY country should be run.

If you (anyone) really want to have Socialism as the underpinning of America, my OPINION is that you can have it by simply moving to Canada or France. You do NOT have to seek to destroy THIS country to ensconce a FAILED economic/political philosophy HERE and get this country to be dragged down into the same neverending mess that other Socialist countries already have and already have SHOWN us through their "experiment" that is does not work. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is a GLARING example and warning that Socialist ideas of "Income Redistribution" and "big daddy goverment will take care of you" does NOT work.

And to, I believe it was PenalyKill who said it, the statement that welfare isn't a problem...when is the last time you ever looked at Medicaid and the financial drain it LASHES the "entitlement" budget with? WHERE, exactly, do you think the MONEY comes from to PAY for MediCAID?

Mr. W., I do hope you consider the arguments, not the "perfection of a given party," but the arguments of the Conservative and Liberal positions. I hope you also do so in the context of being a believe who may want to consider being able to support any candidate, regardless of party, who supports, defends, and will sign the "Reproductive Freedom Act" that directly supports and defends the wanton slaughter of MILLIONS of innocent children to "pay for the sins of the parents." That is just more "Democrat-like speak" for "income redistribution" (responsible to irresponsible) and making someone else PAY for your "bad choices."

If you think you can "stack up" all your arguments for Democrats and IGNORE the issue of their stance against God's children, then you and I do not know the same LORD. "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and unto the Lord what is the Lord's."

There will NEVER be a "perfect" country on this earth until the Lord reigns. But that does NOT mean that you EMBRACE them when they are clearly AGAINST God. Democrats are "quick" to bring up things like "thou shalt not kill" in opposition to war and armed conflict, but they somehow can't seem to see the application of that to the wanton slaughter of millions of innocent babies who have done nothing to us or against us.

IF the Democrat argument is that "we should never have gone to war because THEY didn't do anything to US," where is there "thinking" when they DON'T apply that very same reasoning to UNBORN CHILDREN who, most definitely, have NOT done anything to us? IF the Democrat position is that our "chickens have come home to roost" because of OUR past actions, and we now "deserve" to be attacked and killed, WHERE is that same sort of thinking with respect to UNBORN BABIES having to be killed because of the past actions of others (their mothers and fathers)?

This reasoning you are submitting, Mr.W. is very surprising and most saddening, but I have come to expect similar sorts of "double speak" or slanted reasoning from the Socialist Democrat Party, but am saddened when I hear it coming from someone as smart as you.

Want, c'mon, this is tinfoil hat talk that has no relation to reality. This is from the imagination of liberals and has no basis in FACT. Wild speculation is not FACT.


More of the same.


Democrats presided over the biggest banking failure in US history and we are supposed to blame corporations? uh no. The behavior of corrupt democrats on the Banking committee, Chris Dodd and Barney Frank have brought our banking industry to its knees and the answer to democrats is the usual deflect, deflect, deflect.. This is why they are not fit to lead.

If they take no accountibility, we can expect more of the same.

Our economy will not be safe until Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, and Chris Dodd are removed and brought to justice. They need to be put on trial the same as Ken Lay of ENRON. They need to be brought to justice, not REVERED.

From 1999 NY Times article:

The proof is in the pudding, WANT.

Is this your argument?

JH was a conservative and a racist.

Therefore all conservatives are racists?

The Myth of the Racist Republicans

..."In all these ways, the gop appears as the national party of the middle-class, not of white solidarity. And it is this interpretation, and not the myth, that is supported by the voting results. The myth's proponents highlight, and distort, a few key electoral facts: Southern white backlash was most heated in the 1960s, especially in the Deep South. It was then and there that the GOP finally broke through in the South, on the strength of Goldwater's appeals to states' rights. Democrats never again won the votes of most Southern whites. So Goldwater is said to have provided the electoral model for the GOP.

But hidden within these aggregate results are patterns that make no sense if white solidarity really was the basis for the GOP's advance. These patterns concern which Southern votes the GOP attracted, and when. How did the GOP's Southern advance actually unfold? We can distinguish between two sub-regions. The Peripheral South—Florida, Texas, Tennessee, Virginia, North Carolina, and Arkansas—contained many growing, urbanizing "New South" areas and much smaller black populations. Race loomed less large in its politics. In the more rural, and poorer, Deep South—Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, South Carolina, and Louisiana —black communities were much larger, and racial conflict was much more acute in the 1950s and '60s. Tellingly, the presidential campaigns of Strom Thurmond, Goldwater, and Wallace all won a majority of white votes in the Deep South but lost the white vote in the Peripheral South.

The myth that links the GOP with racism leads us to expect that the GOP should have advanced first and most strongly where and when the politics of white solidarity were most intense. The GOP should have entrenched itself first among Deep South whites and only later in the Periphery. The GOP should have appealed at least as much, if not more, therefore, to the less educated, working-class whites who were not its natural voters elsewhere in the country but who were George Wallace's base. The GOP should have received more support from native white Southerners raised on the region's traditional racism than from white immigrants to the region from the Midwest and elsewhere. And as the Southern electorate aged over the ensuing decades, older voters should have identified as Republicans at higher rates than younger ones raised in a less racist era.

Each prediction is wrong. The evidence suggests that the GOP advanced in the South because it attracted much the same upwardly mobile (and non-union) economic and religious conservatives that it did elsewhere in the country.

Take presidential voting. Under FDR, the Democrats successfully assembled a daunting, cross-regional coalition of presidential voters. To compete, the GOP had to develop a broader national outreach of its own, which meant adding a Southern strategy to its arsenal. In 1952, Dwight Eisenhower took his campaign as national hero southward. He, like Nixon in 1960, polled badly among Deep South whites. But Ike won four states in the Peripheral South. This marked their lasting realignment in presidential voting. From 1952 to the Clinton years, Virginia reverted to the Democrats only once, Florida and Tennessee twice, and Texas—except when native-son LBJ was on the ballot—only twice, narrowly. Additionally, since 1952, North Carolina has consistently either gone Republican or come within a few percentage points of doing so.

In other words, states representing over half the South's electoral votes at the time have been consistently in play from 1952 on—since before Brown v. Board of Education, before Goldwater, before busing, and when the Republicans were the mainstay of civil rights bills. It was this which dramatically changed the GOP's presidential prospects. The GOP's breakthrough came in the least racially polarized part of the South. And its strongest supporters most years were "New South" urban and suburban middle- and upper-income voters. In 1964, as we've seen, Goldwater did the opposite: winning in the Deep South but losing the Peripheral South. But the pre-Goldwater pattern re-emerged soon afterward. When given the option in 1968, Deep South whites strongly preferred Wallace, and Nixon became president by winning most of the Peripheral South instead. From 1972 on, GOP presidential candidates won white voters at roughly even rates in the two sub-regions, sometimes slightly more in the Deep South, sometimes not. But by then, the Deep South had only about one-third of the South's total electoral votes; so it has been the Periphery, throughout, that provided the bulk of the GOP's Southern presidential support..."



"The Decline of Racism

Timing may provide the greatest gap between the myth and the actual unfolding of events. Only in the 1980s did more white Southerners self-identify as Republicans than as Democrats, and only in the mid-1990s did Republicans win most Southern House seats and become competitive in most state legislatures. So if the GOP's strength in the South only recently reached its zenith, and if its appeal were primarily racial in nature, then the white Southern electorate (or at least most of it) would have to be as racist as ever. But surely one of the most important events in Southern political history is the long-term decline of racism among whites. The fact that these (and many other) books suggest otherwise shows that the myth is ultimately based on a demonization not of the GOP but of Southerners, who are indeed assumed to have Confederate flags in their hearts if not on their pickups. This view lends The Rise of Southern Republicans a schizophrenic nature: it charts numerous changes in the South, but its organizing categories are predicated on the unsustainable assumption that racial views remain intact.

What's more, the trend away from confident beliefs in white supremacy may have begun earlier than we often think. David Chappell, a historian of religion, argues that during the height of the civil rights struggle, segregationists were denied the crucial prop of religious legitimacy. Large numbers of pastors of diverse denominations concluded that there was no Biblical foundation for either segregation or white superiority. Although many pastors remained segregationist anyway, the official shift was startling: "Before the Supreme Court's [Brown v. Board] decision of 1954, the southern Presbyterians. . . and, shortly after the decision, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) overwhelmingly passed resolutions supporting desegregation and calling on all to comply with it peacefully. . . . By 1958 all SBC seminaries accepted black applicants." With considerable understatement, Chappell notes that "people—even historians—are surprised to hear this." Billy Graham, the most prominent Southern preacher, was openly integrationist.

The point of all this is not to deny that Richard Nixon may have invited some nasty fellows into his political bed. The point is that the GOP finally became the region's dominant party in the least racist phase of the South's entire history, and it got that way by attracting most of its votes from the region's growing and confident communities—not its declining and fearful ones. The myth's shrillest proponents are as reluctant to admit this as they are to concede that most Republicans genuinely believe that a color-blind society lies down the road of individual choice and dynamic change, not down the road of state regulation and unequal treatment before the law. The truly tenacious prejudices here are the mythmakers'."

MORE

Marshmallow,

An article from a conservative think tank? Surely you can do better.

Feel free to argue w/ the facts presented, Krazy.

I will not.

Anyone who thinks racist Republicans are a myth is either so ignorant or so myopic that nothing is going to change their puny mind.

I've lived amongst racist Republicans my entire life. I know beter.

Spoken like a paranoid "the commies are coming" Capitalist.

Believe what you wish, but the facts are that the fortune 500 companies alone made over $880 billion profits in 2007. Of that money, they managed to hide over $200 billion overseas to avoid paying taxes. So much for a responsibe member of our country?

As someone who has been on the receiving end of cool corporate buzzwords like "synergies" and "best practices." I have had to sit back and watch as the industry in which I chose to work has been evicerated in the name of the bottom line. I had to witness first hand as the CEO of my company, that supposedly cared so much for the employees, took a $7 million pay increase and 2 months later dismantled the entire IT department and sent the JOBS to India all in the name of increased profits to appease shareholders.

I've seen how the corporations use the system to pay the bare minimum to the people which do the actual work that earns windfall profits. Doling out 3% pay increases under the guise that "you're lucky you have a job." Raises that don't even compensate for inflation let alone ever increasing health care premiums. How about corporations using the provisions for "contract workers" to avoid paying health care, sick pay or vacations. Doesn't happen right? So much for supporting the people that do the actual work.

The conservatives would like to believe that it's the "lazy do nothing liberals" that are the ones complaining about the status quo. That is not the case. It's the American WORKING middle class that has grown tired of the ever increasing gap in incomes and wages that have been stagnant for YEARS. Trickle down economics do not work or our country would not be in $10 trillion of debt. There is a difference between doing what's right for the citizens off which you earn enormous profits and true SOCIALISM.



Not true. Yes, the Democrats are responsible for the policies that led to the economic crisis, but the Replublicans are the ones that "presided" over the disaster. There is plenty of blame to go around. Trying to pin it all on the Democratic party is FALSE. As for the political contributions, John McCain took $162,000 in contributions from Fannie & Freddie and his presidential campaign advisor, Rick Davis, lobbied for a fee of $15,000 per month.

The Bush administration had NO problem sitting back and touting the lastest new home sales figures every month to portend that "our economy is strong" but now they want to dump it at the feet of Democrats. You can't have it both ways.

Who Caused the Economic Crisis?

So who is to blame? There's plenty of blame to go around, and it doesn't fasten only on one party or even mainly on what Washington did or didn't do. As The Economist magazine noted recently, the problem is one of "layered irresponsibility ... with hard-working homeowners and billionaire villains each playing a role." Here's a partial list of those alleged to be at fault:

- The Federal Reserve, which slashed interest rates after the dot-com bubble burst, making credit cheap.

- Home buyers, who took advantage of easy credit to bid up the prices of homes excessively.

- Congress, which continues to support a mortgage tax deduction that gives consumers a tax incentive to buy more expensive houses.

- Real estate agents, most of whom work for the sellers rather than the buyers and who earned higher commissions from selling more expensive homes.

- The Clinton administration, which pushed for less stringent credit and downpayment requirements for working- and middle-class families.

- Mortgage brokers, who offered less-credit-worthy home buyers subprime, adjustable rate loans with low initial payments, but exploding interest rates.

- Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, who in 2004, near the peak of the housing bubble, encouraged Americans to take out adjustable rate mortgages.

- Wall Street firms, who paid too little attention to the quality of the risky loans that they bundled into Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS), and issued bonds using those securities as collateral.

- The Bush administration, which failed to provide needed government oversight of the increasingly dicey mortgage-backed securities market.

- An obscure accounting rule called mark-to-market, which can have the paradoxical result of making assets be worth less on paper than they are in reality during times of panic.

- Collective delusion, or a belief on the part of all parties that home prices would keep rising forever, no matter how high or how fast they had already gone up.

The U.S. economy is enormously complicated. Screwing it up takes a great deal of cooperation. Claiming that a single piece of legislation was responsible for (or could have averted) the crisis is just political grandstanding. We have no advice to offer on how best to solve the financial crisis. But these sorts of partisan caricatures can only make the task more difficult.