Not to grind this into the ground, but it was truly appalling to watch Obama during the debates last night accuse McCain and Republicans in general of causing Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae to collapse by opposing regulation. The reality is quite different:

<link>

In general Republicans oppose regulation, because regulation tends to be excessive and strangulates constructive activity. But as we see, Republicans favor constructive regulation, just as Democrats oppose it — when they've been paid off to do so.

Posted by Van Helsing at 6:43 AM

Deregulation is dead. The 700,000,000,000.00 dollar bailout, combined with the 150,000,000,000.00 dollar earmark that the Republicans tacked on to the bailout to ensure that the Republicans in the house would vote for it, pretty much did the whole Reagan movement in.

Reaganism is dead. Good, bad or indifferent, Obama is winning by a landslide and we are headed for a new America.

Actually, it's more like a rebuke. http://www.electoral-vote.com/

Hi~

Senator McCain made 1 speech for a bill that would have regulated some aspects of Fannie and Freddie about 1 year after a bill offered in early '05 by Senator Hagel, Sununu, and Dole was voted out of committee and turned over to the then GOP conference chair Santorum. <link>: No other action was taken on the bill, McCain did nothing other than make his speech while becoming a co-sponsor of a bill to nowhere.

Dems took over the House the next year, and Barney Frank got legislation passed in that body that offered virtually the same regulation and it died in the Senate in '07. <link> Senator Hagel pushed his bill again in the 110 Session <link> (starting in 2007), but Senator McCain made no effort to get that bill passed and WAS NOT a co-sponsor. Barney Frank then got a bill passed which, as I recall, included Hagel's language. Neither McCain nor Obama voted on the bill. <link>

McCain postures that he was addressing the problem with his support of the '05 bill, but he was only addressing, with a minimum of effort, an aspect of the problem. The real underlying cause of the credit crisis has been unregulated sub prime lending and credit swaps.

I do not mean to avoid criticism of the people running those two agencies. They were making millions while they should have been paying attention to their agency's mission. Passage of legislation in it's final form did not stop the crisis because it did not address the root problem, and it was also too little, too late.

God Speed,

David