Who do you like?

[Jerry]

CleanUpWashington.org has a list of Senators and Representatives, along with rankings, and their dependency on money other than raised at home. See the Senate link at:
http://www.cleanupwashington.org/sii...ings.cfm?CAT=s
House link is at:
http://www.cleanupwashington.org/sii...ings.cfm?CAT=h

Click on each Senator or Representative for a short bio and money taken from various groups. Sad to say many Democrats (6) are in the top 10 of Senators, 14 Republicans in the top 20 Representatives. Special interest money is bipartisan. Note: Stats are a few years behind the times, ending for most categories at December 2006.

[planedick]

Predictions

I leave you my predictions of what will happen if the
junior Senator from Illinois becomes President - especially
If the House and Senate are veto-proof Democrat:

1). Strict gun laws, though he promised he would not.

2). "In God We Trust" will be removed from all currency.

3). He will renege on his pledge to Israel and leave them to the wolves of Islam.

4) Hillary Clinton will be named to the Supreme Court.

5). Tax rates will surge to the highest levels in 30 years.

6). Capital gains tax will be at least double current levels.

7). Retired Army General Wesley Clark will be named Secretary of Defense.

8). Your borders will be open to all comers - especially from the Middle East and South America .

9). Amnesty will be granted to all illegals in the U.S, regardless of status or even gang membership (think MS-13).

10). Our presence in Iraq will come to an abrupt end - with tragic results though their citizens and devastating consequences to our military.

My predictions will not sit well with some people - the best we could hope for is that I am wrong.

Any bets?

[Bigfoot]

Sounds about right to me. And the entire 4 years, whenever something looks bad they will point the finger and blame Bush.

[DJinNH]

My take on this discussion is that we are all staying civil because we are all sick of politicians period! The lies, the bashing of each other, the money spent on campaigns. The promises of "change" when we have all seen over the decades that the only way change will take place is if the parties of congress put aside the partisan bickering and manage to put in enough hours in a work week to get anything done.

Don

[Jerry]

I leave you my predictions of what will happen if the
junior Senator from Illinois becomes President - especially
If the House and Senate are veto-proof Democrat:

I don't recall hearing this argument (veto-proof) when G.W. Bush was running and the Republicans controlled both the House and Senate. Remember, for 6 years the Republicans controlled all 3 branches of government and appointed Supreme Court judges as well.

Evberyone is entitled to thie opinions, but consider this observation from John Mecham of Newsweek:

But history, as John Adams once said of facts, is a stubborn thing, and it tells us that Democratic presidents from FDR to JFK to LBJ to Carter to Clinton usually wind up moving farther right than they thought they ever would, or they pay for their continued liberalism at the polls. Should Obama win, he will have to govern a nation that is more instinctively conservative than it is liberal—a perennial reality that past Democratic presidents have ignored at their peril. A party founded by Andrew Jackson on the principle that "the majority is to govern" has long found itself flummoxed by the failure of that majority to see the virtues of the Democrats and the vices of the Republicans.

Republicans would sell McCain on fear of Obama. Personally, I don't buy it. This country is on the wrong track, and IMHO Republicans are responsible for the mess we are in. 8 years of a Republican president, 6 of those years with Republican control of the Presidency, House, and Senate, and before that control for another 4 years of the House and Senate. Thats 10 years of control. Look where it got us in both foreign and fiscal policies. I suspect the Republican's greatest fear is that Obama and the Democrats may succeed where they have failed. Clinton did it by threatening to shut down the government; he called the Republican bluff and it resulted in a government surplus. It time to give the Democrats a turn; they can't do worse than the Republicans.

[kf4anm]

solution

Here's a crazy idea, why don't we lease congress and the senate out to a foriegn operator like we have with the toll roads, baggage terminals, freight yards, and occasional Holiday Inn. Now granted it might not seem ideal but it would run more efficiently and possibly get something positive done. If in the progress A few Dusty old senators who have been in office since beofre I was born loose their job and have to get a job in the real world and apply for a subprime loan because they have no credit because they have voted themselves anything they ever wanted - oh well.

[skipt]

Virtues of the Democrates

That is a oxy moron. Speaking of the National Party, not all
those hard working citizens out there.
I believe that the Democratic party as a whole has moved
so far to the left that it is scary. It's kind of like the frog in
a boiling pot of water thing. The change has been so grad-
ual and so long in coming that it is accepted as the norm.

Skip

[Geezer]

Talk about scary, take a look at the articles in these 2 links...

illegal_donations


More illegal donations

Geezer

[red bandit]

Perhaps the U.S. should pull out of Chicago ?
Body count:
In the last six months:
292 killed (murdered) in Chicago ;
221 killed in Iraq .
Chicago.... Who Runs it:
Senators: Barack Obama & Dick Durbin
Rep: Jesse Jackson Jr.,
Illinois Gov: Rod Blogojevich,
Illinois House leader Mike Madigan,
Illinois Atty. Gen. Lisa Madigan (daughter of Mike),
Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley (son of Mayor Richard J. Daley)
.....our leadership in Illinois .....all Democrats.
Thank you for the combat zone in Chicago .
Of course, they're all blaming each other!
Can't blame Republicans; there aren't any!
State pension fund $44 Billion in debt, worst in country.
Cook County ( Chicago ) sales tax 10.25% highest in country. (Look 'em up if you want).
Chicago school system rated one of the worst in the country.
This is the political culture that Obama comes from in Illinois . And he's gonna 'fix' Washington politics for us?

[red bandit]

Were to start… The Democrats in 93-94 that had the numbers to stop/prevent any thing the Republicans tried including any filibuster. At that time, the Democrats had control over the House and Senate for almost 40 yrs. straight. That was there chance. That’s why there were so many Republicans voted in, in 94. Between 2000-2006 the Republicans did have control over the House and Senate by a NARROW margin, not near enough votes to stop a filibuster from the Democrats. 2006-2008 the Democrats had control over the House, so, since the President does not control the money, congress does, the President has to have congressional approval meaning the Democrats APPROVED the spending including the money spent in Iraq. Lets not forget what Clinton did his last day in office. There were 2-3 big time cocaine dealers in federal prison, Clinton gave them a full pardon. But of course, Bill was never involved in anything like that. Thanks Bill. And yes Obama wants to pull the troops out of Iraq….so he can put them in Afghanistan, those people and their Gov. do not want us there. I can see that is much better than being in Iraq. Obama was a poor black child, that went to Harvard??? McCain’s 24 yr history must be diff. than Biden’s (super liberal) 34 yrs. If you want socialism, vote for the Democrats. Social programs cost money, where do you get money? TAXES. I’m not saying that McCain is the answer but he is defiantly the lesser of two evils.

[Jerry]

Here is an article excerpt from http://www.questia.com/googleScholar...cId=5002102595

Beginning in 1992 the U.S. economy expanded for an unprecedented 120 consecutive months into the year 2001, when it began to slow down. During the 1992-2000 period, jobs increased at an annual average of more than 2.6 million, or 2.2 percent a year (U.S. Census Bureau 2000a; Hughes and Seneca 2001a, 2001b). The annual unemployment rate fell from 7.5 percent in 1992 to 4.0 percent in 2000 (U.S. Census Bureau 2001). Per capita personal consumption expenditures rose from $17,800 to $21,900 in 1996 dollars (U.S. Census Bureau 2000a). The homicide rate fell from 9.3 per 100,000 people to 6.3 (U.S. Census Bureau 2000a). Pew Foundation researchers reported that 20 percent of Americans trusted the federal government to do what is right always or most of the time in 1994, and the proportion increased to 39 percent by 1997 (Pew Research Center 1998, 4). Pew attributed the increasing trust to good times.

I would say that if the Democrats had as much influence as Red Bandit indicates, they didn't do that badly.

Not a bad performance from a Democratic President, either. In comparison here are a few facts about the current Bush economics:

Bush Administration Fails to Jumpstart Economy
As of May, 2005, there have been 893,000 jobs created over the first 52 months of the Bush presidency - a gain that is due solely to the 917,000 jobs created in the government sector that offset the 24,000 jobs lost in the private sector. Since the Great Depression, no other president who served at least 52 months has overseen a net loss in private sector jobs through this point. In addition to lack of job growth, real weekly and hourly wages have declined since the start of the recession. At a time when middle-class Americans are experiencing stagnant wages and vanishing benefits, CEO pay continues to rise.
Source: Center for American Progress, Economic Policy Weekly, Jenna Churchman, June 6, 2005

And this:

Bush Administration Projects Economic Improvements, Then Backs Away from Data
During the first three years of the Bush-Cheney administration, the unemployment rate increased by one-third and 2.2 million jobs were lost, and the country has gone from a $281 billion surplus to a $521 billion deficit. Debt has increased 23% from $5.7 trillion, to $7 trillion. Bush recently restated his pledge to create 2.6 million jobs, stating "5.6% unemployment is a good national number." However, the New York Times recently uncovered a White House report indicating that the president is considering reclassifying low-paid fast-food jobs as higher-paid manufacturing jobs to make it appear like the unemployment rate is going down.

Note: This also was with Republicans controlling the Presidency as well as the House and Senate.

As I mentioned earlier, McCain is trying to sell fear, as a are a couple posts in this thread. I don't buy it, based on facts and statistics. Facts are stubborn things. the fact is that under Clinton and the combination of Democrat and Republican-Democratic leadership of the house and senate, this country did pretty well economically.

I have no confidence McCain would put this country back on the right track. Obama may not have the answers either, as it is going to take a lot of work to reverse the effects of the last 8 years of misguided foreign and fiscal policy. When McCain says he can ballance the federal budget in 4 years, I just have to laugh. That is so out of touch with reality it is hard to beleive a serious candidate could even say such a thing. If he is that far out of the mainstream, what about his other policies?

I grew up a Republican, was even a Young Republican in HS and attended a state convention, and supported McCain in 2000. That was his time. Now its Obama's time.

If you want to read some more statistics about the current Bush's economy, look at this web site: http://thebusheconomy.com/page2_The_Truth.html

1. THE WORST RATE OF JOB CREATION IN 40 YEARS

2. The Economy is Creating Poor Quality Jobs or BUSH'S NEW JOBS PAY $9000 LESS PER YEAR.

There are several other parts to that page, I recommend looking at them.

[Incubus]

The link below will take you to the best plain English explanation for the financial meltdown that I have found. It wasn't the subprime mortgages - it was what Wall Street did with those mortgages that f'ed everything up. It could happen because of the lack of regulation:

http://www.rollingstone.com/blogs/ta...-post.php#more

Patrick

[planedick]

The link below

Don't click on it. It is malicious.

[Incubus]

It's not malicious, Dick. It's Rolling Stone. The only thing malicious about it is for people who disagree with the analysis. Norton calls sites malicious if they try to put a tracking cookie on your computer, like most media sites.

Patrick

[Incubus]

Here's the pertinent part of the article I linked to. It's long, but poignent and funny....:

The reason things got ugly with York is because in the middle of a discussion we were having on the campaign, he pulled out the latest Rush Limbaugh/Sean Hannity/Laura Ingraham propaganda line about the financial crisis, i.e. that the problem was rooted in the efforts of left-wing reformers dating back to the Carter administration to bring by government fiat the benefits of the “ownership society” to poor people and minorities. Humorously it took the Republican punditocracy a good long while to settle on this particular explanation for the crisis, and I honestly think the reason for that was that none of the ranking talking heads understood enough at first about the real reasons for the crisis to even come up with an informed lie.

In any event, I first saw this vile line of reasoning trotted out when Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe ran a piece at the end of last month, essentially arguing that the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 forced so many private lenders to cough up mortgages to ill-qualified minority borrowers that the whole system ended up collapsing.

When I first heard this, I actually laughed – I figured that no one would be stupid enough to think that the entire system of international finance could be brought down by a bunch of individual defaults to low-value urban properties. Nothing could be more comic than the idea that this whole teeming galaxy of rich Ivy Leaguers and bespectacled European bankers and keen Japanese finance professionals could be so massively and credulously over-invested in urban black American homeowners that the whole world could be thrown off its axis by a sudden – and apparently wholly unexpected – failure of these low-income borrowers to make their payments. I mean, this stuff goes beyond preposterous. You’d have to spend weeks breathing straight out of a nitrous oxide tank in order to even begin to take an idea like this seriously.

But they plowed ahead with this line of attack, and why not? If your business is stoking the fears of nervous white people who are disinclined to spend more than thirty seconds wondering why their IRAs or 401Ks just lost 25% of their value, then this is exactly what you should do – find some arcane corner of the affirmative action universe that happens to intersect with banks and mortgages, and move all your chips onto that square. It makes sense, from a propaganda point of view.

The reason people like York get away with this stuff with regard to the financial crisis is because these *******s on Wall Street – like any tribe of arrogant, vernacularizing insiders in any profession – have intimidated people into thinking that what they do for living is so complicated and subtle that no ordinary person could ever hope to understand it.

This is horse****. It’s almost exactly like, say, going to a race track. The first time you go and someone hands you a racing form, you feel like it might as well be written in ancient Greek. You see these wrinkly guys walking around with their forms all marked up in pen in the margins and you feel like you’ll never understand all those numbers on the page.

But after about an hour you realize that it’s just a bunch of people watching dogs run in a circle. That’s all it is. The track came up with all these different columns and complex wagers to make the underlying activity seem more interesting, but that doesn’t change what you’re watching. Wall Street is basically the same deal. It’s twenty square blocks of guys in ties finding increasingly fancy ways to argue about the value of the crap they spend all day selling back and forth to each other. They make it sound like rocket science, but in the end it’s still just dogs running in a circle.

The exactas and trifectas and superfectas of this particular mess at the racetrack are financial instruments like CDOs (Collateralized Debt Obligations) and CDS (Credit Default Swaps). Massive trading in these two types of instruments, among others, were the key causes of this crisis. There are two basic bubble-causing concepts at work here and these are concepts that any person can understand: the first is selling worthless crap to people who think it’s gold and the other is betting with money you don’t have.

On the betting with money you don’t have front, the CDS is basically a form of insurance in which two idiots make promises to pay each other sums of money if some third totally unrelated person defaults on his debt.

Let’s say Aquaman takes out a million-dollar bond to open a gay strip club. You’re gay and you like superheroes so you think it’s a good idea – but your mother doesn’t, so you agree to pay your mother a million dollars in the event that Aquaman’s strip club fails, in exchange for her paying you, until that time, regular monthly payments of $10,000. All your family members agree with your mother and they, too agree to pay you $10,000 a month in exchange for a promise that you’ll pay them a million bucks if Aquaman defaults.

Now, thanks to Phil Gramm, who lobbied for the so-called “Enron Exception” covering these trades back in 2000, this market is totally unregulated, so you don’t have to show that you have even a dollar, much less a million bucks for every promise you made to your family members. So a year later your entire extended family is betting against Aquaman’s place and when it finally does go bust, thanks to Superman opening a far superior and better-managed club down the block, Aquaman’s one-million-dollar loss creates a hundred million dollars in losses for you (and, it turns out, for society in general, which might end up having to use tax money to pay your mother and everybody else for the bet you couldn’t cover).

You will note that when a person buys insurance for his own businesses, this is called good business. When two people bet on whether or not a third person pays his debts, this is called gambling. There is currently $62 trillion worth of Credit Default Swaps out there. This is more than the gross domestic product of the entire world.

Given that, is it really that much of a mystery why the collapse of a single investment bank like Lehman Brothers can send all of Wall Street underwater? Like any Ponzi-type scheme, the whole system explodes the instant one link in the chain, or one brick in the pyramid, fails: if you get a million people betting on the same small pool of mortgages, you can turn a $300,000 in actual defaults into $300 million in gambling losses overnight. More to the point, you can blow up all of Wall Street, or almost blow it up, with just the defaults of bonds issued by Lehman brothers. No one even knows for sure how much money has been lost via Lehman-related Credit Default Swaps. Some estimates say the number is $400 billion.

This is why it’s so revolting when guys like Byron York try to pin the financial crisis on the minority homeowners who defaulted on their home loans. There aren’t enough low-income minority homeowners in the remaining years of human history to create $62 trillion worth of pressure on the economy. You’ve got not billions but trillions of dollars tied up in the Wall Street equivalent of a craps game – the ruling class of the earth gambling away the whole world’s bank deposits on a dice roll, which is about as irresponsible a use of resources as can be imagined – and guys like York want to blame the blowout on a few black people who tried to do something absolutely and completely sensible with their money, buying houses they intended to live in.

In the area of selling worthless crap as gold, there is the CDO (great explanation here). This is basically an instrument which one entity sells a package of securities to another. That package can contain anything, from bonds to college loans to mortgages. The actual mathematics of how they work is complicated, but all you really need to know about them is that the package of securities within a CDO can also contain other CDOs – and if one CDO packaged within a second CDO happens to contain ****ed-up subprime mortgages, you can trade the second CDO as though it had an investment-grade rating.

So long as the housing market is booming, this is an easy way for the person issuing the CDO to turn worthless paper into real cash. What he is selling, essentially, is a promise that the **** in his package is worth what he says it's worth. Since this market is totally unregulated, he doesn't have to back that promise up with anything. Some meth addict on a skateboard can put a dollar down on a boarded-up $580 row house in East St. Louis and this ******* can sell it as though it’s as solid a bet as the mortgage on the Queen of England's Monte Carlo villa.

Again, this is not exactly a Ponzi scheme, but the dynamics are very similar. In a Ponzi scheme the operating problem is time. If you promise every investor a 300% return on a $100 investment, you‚re fine as long as you continually get enough new investors to keep the first ones off your back. But once the demand slackens even a hair the whole structure crumbles, and what you get in the end is a panicked bumrush as everybody you conned races to your office with their fists raised to reclaim what’s left of their money, understanding at last that their cash was the only asset that ever existed in this enterprise.

Does that sound familiar? Because that’s what happened with this market. The valuation of all these securities was based on faith and promises, not real assets. And once everyone realized that, the whole world raced for the exits.

Now, there are types of pyramid schemes – we’ve all come across them – where every investor on the bottom level has to find two more investors and continually kick his money up the pyramid. We all know that if the guys on the bottom screw this up and so much as one person fails to get those targeted two investors, the whole thing collapses. Which is too bad, I guess, but you’d have to be nuts – or, apparently, a Republican – to blame this whole catastrophe on the general slacker-ness of the bottom-rung investor.

A pyramid scheme is a criminal enterprise. The guys running the game are criminals. Amazingly, these Republicans are trying to tell everyone that it’s low-income minorities at the bottom defaulting on their mortgages who queered this whole deal for everybody. But all it takes is a thimbleful of common sense to realize that a few individual mortgage defaults don't cause this kind of worldwide financial holocaust unless somebody much higher up ****ed up very, very badly.

Which is why the Rush Limbaughs and Sean Hannitys and so on who are pushing this line about the crisis being blowback from an attempt to bring the “ownership society” to minorities either have no idea what they’re talking about, or they’re the most shameless liars of all time. Thank God they’ll be out the door and picking strawberries in Siberia a few weeks from now.