McCain seeks to delay Friday debate to deal with financial crisis

While McCain risks his career on taking a stand and voting on an issue, the U.S. economy.. Obama is on the campain trail as usual.

Obama who voted present 130 times as a senator, and will now vote present on the most important issue to ever hit the United States.

"Obama votes Present on the Economy."

Please. Obama has actually been campaigning less than McCain so as he (Obama) can prepare for the debate.

What McCain really wants is for this to blow over slightly so people forget his history of being favour of deregulation and how McCain's campaign manager was taking payments from Freddie Mac up until last month.

Also, a President should be able to multi-task to some extent so what McCain is saying is that he can't deal with two things at once in his feeble old mind.

Lastly, it must be really important for McCain who's missed 230 out of 286 senate votes since Q4-2007 ()

I loled. You do realized first Obama called McCain to say we should do some joint press release on the Economic bailout, and then McCain basically one upped him. And good for him, to be honest.

To say that Obama has been campaigning less is...well strange since they've been both campaigning plenty.

Except that Obama has been in Florida this week to prepare. It's McCain who's been in full campaign mode until now.

Actually McCain was for the Community Reinvestment Act, which Representative Barney Frank ( - MA) stopped from passing.

If the CRA passed this would not have happened.

Also, when David Letterman is busting balls like this, you know McCain has done something

McCain can either show up at the debates or be represented by an empty chair. He was afraid he was going to get taken to school, so he tried to dodge. Obama called his bluff. So did the university.

Besides, how long do you suspend the campaign for? Until this bill is passed? What if they don't meet the requirements of one or both candidates? Maybe you wait until the crisis is over? Of course the Great Depression lasted for a decade.

He is putting Country First. What is more important for a true patriot of the United States, running for a President, or tring to do soemthing NOW to save the economy and millions of citizen taxpayer retirement funds.

McCain is about his love for his Country, Obama is about Obama..

YOU WILL KNOW THEIR NAMES: BARNEY FRANK, NANCY PELOSI, CHRIS DODD

Congress Tries To Fix What It Broke

Regulation: As the financial crisis spreads, denials on Capitol Hill grow more shrill. Blame an aloof President Bush, greedy Wall Street, risky capitalism � anybody but those in Congress who wrote the banking rules.

Such denials won't hold against the angry facts banging on their doors. The only question is whether the guilty party can keep up the barricade until Election Day.

A visibly annoyed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi rejected suggestions that Democrats share blame for the meltdown. "No," she snapped at reporters who dared ask.

Stick to our narrative, she scolded: The bursting of the housing bubble was another story of market failure and deregulation.

"The American people are not protected from the risk-taking and the greed of these financial institutions," she said, while calling for investigations of the industry.

Only, the risk-taking was her idea � and the idea of all the other Democrats, along with a handful of Republicans, who over the past 30 years have demonized lenders as racist and passed regulation after regulation pressuring them to make more loans to unqualified borrowers in the name of diversity.

They were the ones who screamed � "REDLINING!" � and sent banks scurrying for cover in low-income neighborhoods, where they have been forced to lower long-held industry standards for judging creditworthiness to make the subprime loans.

If they don't comply, they are threatened with stiff penalties under the Community Reinvestment Act, or CRA, a law that forces banks to make home loans to people with poor credit risks.

No fewer than four federal banking regulatory agencies are responsible for enforcing the law. They subject lenders to racial litmus tests and issue regular report cards, the industry's dreaded "CRA rating."

The more branches that lenders put in poor neighborhoods, and the more loans they make there, the better their rating. Those lenders with low ratings can not only be fined, but also blocked from mergers and other business transactions needed to expand.

The regulation grew to monstrous proportions during the Clinton administration, obsessed as it was with multiculturalism. Amendments to the CRA in the mid-1990s dramatically raised the amount of home loans to otherwise unqualified low-income borrowers.

The revisions also allowed for the first time the securitization of CRA-regulated loans containing subprime mortgages. The changes came as radical "housing rights" groups led by ACORN lobbied for such loans. ACORN at the time was represented by a young public-interest lawyer in Chicago by the name of Barack Obama.

HUD, in turn, pressured Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to purchase more subprime mortgages, and Fannie and Freddie, in turn, donated to the campaigns of leading Democrats like Barney Frank and Pelosi who throttled investigations into fraud at the agencies.

Soon, investment banks such as Bear Stearns were aggressively hawking the securities as "guaranteed." Wall Street's pitch was that MBSs were as safe as Treasuries, but with a higher yield.

But they weren't safe. Everyone in the subprime business � from brokers to lenders to banks to investment houses � absolved themselves of responsibility for ensuring the high-risk loans were good.

The mortgage lenders didn't care, because they were going to sell the loans to other banks. The banks didn't care, because they were going to repackage the loans as MBSs. The investors and traders didn't care, because the MBSs were backed by Fannie and Freddie and their implicit government guarantees.

In other words, nobody up and down the line � from the branch office on main street to the high-rise on Wall Street � analyzed the risk of such ill-advised loans. But why should they? Everybody was just doing what the regulators in Washington wanted them to do.

So everybody won until everybody lost, including the minorities the government originally mandated the banks to serve.

The original culprits in all this were the social engineers who compelled banks to make the bad loans. The private sector has no business conducting social experiments on behalf of government. Its business is making profit. Period. So it did what it naturally does and turned the subprime social mandate into a lucrative industry.

Of course, it was a Ponzi scheme, because they weren't allowed to play by their rules. The government changed the rules for risk.

In order to put low-income minorities into home loans, they were ordered to suspend lending standards that had served the banking industry well for centuries. No one wants to talk about it, so they just scapegoat Wall Street. Even John McCain has joined the Democrat chorus on this.

The FBI is now investigating 24 large mortgage lenders for alleged abuses. But who will investigate the pols and the lobbyists and the community agitators who made the bad decisions that ultimately forced businesses to make their bad decisions?

Hey Tritium, why don't you help me out a bit here. What party had the majority in Congress since 1994 to 2006?

Both Parties Democrat and Republican are partly responsible for this financial mess..

This isn't a time for political grandstanding playing the blame game or for McCain and Obama trying to up one another..

the US is VERY close to financial collapse.

I don't think they can afford to bail out their economy, whether they want to or not.

Oh, don't even try to feed us that shit. He tried a crass political ploy and was out-maneuvered.

Is he a patriot? I doubt it. He's been instrumental in creating this mess and his calls for further deregulation show that he hasn't learned his lesson. He's put corporations ahead of the interests of his country as a matter of course for years. Patriots don't do that.

And Obama is right...a president who can only do one thing at a time is not fit for the office.

And Obama is right again...if there's a time the American people need to hear from the men vying to run their country, it would be now.