Oy!, I do understand and have a lot of empathy for the “between the devil and the deep blue sea” position you and a lot of other people are in. I know students who are having trouble affording to get to school because of gas prices, and several people who are stuck in the middle of real estate transactions.
Yeah, it sucks. This bill violates the hell out of my principles; I’m a Kucinich liberal, and normally I’d be screaming against it. But being in a situation where I personally desperately needed it to be passed (and am not at all assured that its passing will help me out) made me realize that my situation can not be particularly unusual, and that therefore this really did need to be done.
That in turn led me to the insight that, like most pork barrel projects, when you actually look at the meat of them, there is actual possible merit in doing it. Since we’re human beings and thus really, really bad in predicting the consequences of our actions, the best we can do is to take our best shot and hope things work out all right. I honestly think most of Congress were voting in good faith here. They may be wrong, but they were being sincere about it.
A couple economists are on CNN talking about the bill. They think it was a horrible mistake . They should have forced the regulation now ,before they gave the money away. Paulson says give me the money now and we can deal with rules to prevent it from happening again later. They wont. We had some power over them and could have done some good for the future. They screamed panic, played the fear card and got away with it. This bill does practically nothing for the middle and lower classes. It does nothing to prevent the problem from coming back ,assuming it does some good and makes it go away. The foreclosures are still there coming to get us.
Well, gonzo, all I can say is that we can hope for better things with a Democratic congress and a President Obama. Unfortunately, we can’t promise them. Obama’s a moderate, Clintonesque guy. The best things you can say about him are that he’s highly intelligent and knowledgeable, his natural bent is toward the left, and he’s one hell of a lot better than the alternative.
This is great. Our government is already in the red for $600 billion a year, and both Presidential candidates promise to cut taxes. Now we’re forking out another $700 billion (no, wait, let’s make it $800 billion … it’s only money).
It would be as if i were deep in debt with more bills than paychecks, abd decided to cut my hours at work to take more vacations. I have a feeling that this wanton creation of money is going to have disatrous results.
So… can i buy gold and foreign currency on AmeriTrade? I knew i should have done it years ago when Bush first cut taxes, but i didn’t have much for savings back then.
Only one tiny finger would sway you? Oh goody!
So that’s at least two “tiny fingers”. I’m thrilled that you’ll now believe he’s serious about his “change” platform!
I wonder if you are aware that Obama’s friend Emil Jones regularly hijacked bills that others had worked on for years, handed them to Obama in order to allow him to get the credit…including the bills you mention here. Here’s a cite for you.
So, your examples don’t impress me all that much. That campaign finance bill was already well on its way, Barack Obama or no, so I’m not all that impressed by his sponsorship of it. And your second example was from September 18 of THIS YEAR? Oh, sure, that’s a great example of his long career fighting corruption!
If Obama wanted to impress me with his committment in this area, he might have started with refraining from endorsing Todd Stroger in his controversial run for President of Cook County Board of Commissioners. You folks who don’t live in Chicago may not have a clear picture of how the machine runs here, but here is a cite that will give you a little bit of an idea. Cook County and the City of Chicago are incredibly corrupt, and time after time, Obama has endorsed these machine politicians for his own political ends. Color me unimpressed.
Ah, so you didn’t really mean it when you said you’d “be a little more inclined to believe if he ever lifted one tiny finger against corruption.” Gotcha ya.
I also take issue with the crybabies who appear to be jealous that they couldn’t accomplish closure on bills on some of these issues that Barack Obama was then successful in negotiating into law. If you actually read the first link I provided, you’ll see that at the time Obama took on the Death Penalty legislation, nobody wanted it. Nobody. So clearly whatever work had been done previously, wasn’t even the slightest bit effective. Yet everyone acknowledges Obama’s skill at bringing everyone to the table and actually getting it done.
The allegation that these whiners want to characterize this as Obama simply running the ball into the end zone from the 1 yard line after they did all the hard work, smacks of envy, and looks to me to be a flat out lie. I’d hardly characterize a bill that nobody wanted, and that everyone was vocally opposing, as sitting at the 1 yard line at the time.
Color me unimpressed by your unwillingness to actually accept the terms you, yourself set.
What you are counting as a “little finger” is very little indeed. Microscopic, I’d say. Last month he made a phone call to his mentor, asking him to vote a certain way. That’s really going out on a limb.
Oh, please…I’m not talking about pushing one piece of legislation through that has very little to do with the corruption at every level of government in my county, city, & state (and which was bound to go through eventually…good for him for getting it done, but it he wasn’t fighting that much of an uphill battle). He consistently has endorsed people who are in the midst of hiring scandals, contractor shakedown scandals, patronage scandals, and God knows what else. And he’s done so when there were candidates running on the same reform platform that he’s running on now. So, if he’s so committed to this kind of change, why did he never endorse these candidates? Because they were outsiders, and he wasn’t. Sucking up to the Democratic machine got him where he is, and if that’s ok by you, then great, but I’m not falling for his “reform” line.
Of that 700 billion… it ain’t gone yet. They may not spend any of it. They may not spend all of it. Apparently, the CEO payment part is really toxic to banks. They’ll do almost anything to avoid it, at least, according to CBS Newsradio 88, this afternoon.
I understand your point, but for me, how it was passed is, in the big picture, less important than that it was passed. It had been languishing in Congress for years, it’s very much needed, and yes, it affects me personally.
FTR, though, it’s the only thing I like about the bill. I’m not convinced the “crisis” is so dire that they had to pass this abomination of a bill that’s so full of pork and so huge (450+ pages) so quickly that nobody had a chance to read it and see what we’re going to be paying for. 
Really, cause from here it looks like either they thought it was the right thing to do, but needed a bribe to do it or thought it wasn’t the correct course for our nation but decided a kickback would change their mind.
Stock market is dropping like a rock today. International markets are in steep declines. If the bailout was supposed to be a rallying call .it was not heard. Bush was on TV saying it will take time for it to work. Then why were we in such a hurry to pass it? We could have taken our time and done it right. The market has been down in the area of 600 all day. The German economists are panicking and one headline says gold bars are your best hope. This is a mess.