@ Tantris

Since everyone else seemed to have issues with each others' links to polls and such, I decided to just go to www.gallup.com, click on the link for the president's approval polls, and copy and paste the link to the most recent article on the list.

I don't recall hearing many (if any) people attacking Clinton as a way to defend Bush. I remember hearing things more along the lines of "Bush is president, leave him alone."

The thing that kills me is how Republicans called liberal dissenters traitors (e.g. anti-war protesters) during the Bush administration while Democrats said that sort of dissent was patriotic, but now that the shoe is on the other foot Republicans defend conservative dissenters (e.g. Tea Party folks) while Democrats say anything bad about them they can come up with.

Whenever I say something about this, it instantly leads to partisans attacking the other side immediately and no one seems willing to admit that both sides are being hypocritical here.

@Tantris - no matter how much he threatens, if it doesn't have popular support, it is less likely to get pushed through and the Reps are good at drumming up support against his legislation and putting pressure on the other side of the aisle.

I'm actually amazed (and a bit dismayed) that the healthcare bill went through without being even more watered down. After all, the bill as a whole is not a popular bill. But I guess it's the exception that proves the rule.

The polling was from Gallup before...and was a comparison of the different presidents polling over time. It was asserted that Obama had the lowest approval rating of any president in history at this time of his presidency, which wasn't true.

Both sides try to marginalize the other side. Especially the grass roots...I honestly feel the left has more of a case on this, since the tea party movement is sponsored by the Republican Party and Fox News...whereas the protesters against Bush were marginalized by the news and by the Democratic Party, but I digress...

As for the attacking Clinton to defend Bush...the 9/11 attack was blamed on Clinton, the recession has been called the Clinton recession by Hannity, Boortz, Limbaugh and those groups, the housing bubble was blamed on Clinton trying to remove discrimination based on race in home loans.

@Draugnar:
The bill is not popular, because it was watered down. He lost his base. If you looked at polling with the public option included, it is much higher. If you actually described the bill, it had really high approval. Obama didn't use the bully pulpit at all to defend or even describe the bill. It got defined as "death panels" and "rationing" and such. That was his failure.

As for popular bills...if he fought for it, he could have made it popular. He could have at least gotten his base excited. I am part of his base, and let me tell you...I am not excited. When the damn press secretary praised Ben Nelson, and attacked Howard Dean, argh! He pushed his own damn bill to the right, and undermined any attempt to defend it or push it to the left.

@Tantris - Clinton set up Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac. His intentions may have been good, but the road to hell is paved with good intentions. And I have one acronym for you, NAFTA. Who do you think is to blame for that fiasco? And the irony is, his own wife tried to use how bad it was and that she would end it to get the Presidential nomination when she was one of the big supporters and pushed him into supporting the idea.

9/11 has enough blame to go around on both sides of the aisle.

@Tantris

Sorry, I guess I don't watch Foxnews are much as you.

As for the housing bubble, there was legislation passed toward the end of his term requiring lenders to not discriminate on a number of factors that made it harder to avoid lending to bad borrowers and made it easy for predatory lenders to target people who Congress had wanted to be able to get easier loans (this is where the paperless loans came from).

Oh, and while Clinton signed it into law, that legislation was passed by a fully Republican-controlled Congress, so don't try to dismiss the impact this actually had as being partisan rubbish against the Democrats, this actually was a contributory factor the Democrats just haven't had the sense to try and spin against the Republicans (it was a liberal-backed issue, but Democrats blame Republicans for things like that all the time and get away with it more often than the Republicans do).

Oh, and as long as this thread has devolved into random political banter, what about financial reform?

Specifically, what about auditing the Federal Reserve and what about Freddie/Fannie? What should the government do about itself (or the institutionalized banks with regard to the Fed)?

@Draugnar:
Clinton did not set up Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. I believe those were actually created during the depression. NAFTA sucks, but then so does the WTO...remove them both, but then those are Republican issues, aren't they?

@SteevoKun:
The legislation passed during the end of the Clinton administration that stopped that has been shown to not have been the major cause of the housing crisis. It at most had about a 28% affect(and it looks to be much lower), but the banks affected actually held onto the loans they made, so the main problem with the crisis(the CDO's and CDS's) wasn't affected by it. Actually, paperless loans came because there was so much money out there, that a bank would lend for any reason at all. Now, Clinton did remove Glass-Steagall at the end of his administration, which I do believe lead to this collapse. I will completely agree to that.

Audit the Fed, Freddie/Fannie, limit the size of banks(if they are too big, regulate them to the point they can take no risks) and put back in place Glass-Steagall.

While it is true Fannie and Freddie were depression area creations, they were a very different F&F from what Clinton turned them into with his laws requiring banks to take on more risky mortgages from lenders who simply couldn't afford a home and didn't belong owning one.

As far as Nafta goes, it was signed into law by President Bill Clinton on December 8, 1993 and entered force January 1, 1994. If he didn't like it/didn't want it, why did he sign it into law?

@Tantris

I'd be interested in seeing the statistical breakdown of the cause percentages regarding the housing bubble and bust.

Obviously things like the interest rate set by the Fed played a big role, but Congress pushing lenders to give more money to more people - many of whom were quite poor - gave the perfect setup to create the sort of predatory lending situation we had, and the ability to lend to so many new people who had no business taking those loans did a lot to increase the number of outstanding loans, which increased the supply for CDO's and CDS's. That increased supply meant more institutions jumped into that whole mess.

While I think we need to be careful about regulating bank size, I otherwise agree. Frankly, the Fed has become a bad joke as far as I'm concerned.

@SeevoKun - "I'd be interested in seeing the statistical breakdown of the cause percentages regarding the housing bubble and bust."

HAHA, you assume far too much of economists. There will never be this statistical breakdown! There isn't any single contribution to the current economic situation where you could analyze the magnitude of its contribution to the economic situation. You couldn't even come close. Also the Fed isn't ideal, but the root of the problem has to do not with the nature of the assets banks were selling, or the fact that they could sell these assets at all, but rather the fact that they could pass them off as "low risk" investments. If there had simply been a freer flow of information about the nature of the assets being exchanged, banks simply wouldn't have assumed the excess risk at the volume they did.

@KaptinKool

Just interested in seeing the data about 28% impact that was referenced above.

Most situations where the government is said to be a necessary regulator all that's really needed is transparency, but transparency isn't something the average American shmuck gets excited about.

@Draugnar:
That is not what the law did. It required banks to give loans to the areas they serviced, and not be allowed to red line areas. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac weren't involved in that, since they have very specific requirements for loans they buy.

As for NAFTA, I was saying it is funny to attack Clinton on that, since it is normally a right wing issue, and you are attacking him from the right.

@SteevoKun:
Congress didn't have to push people. See, there was an amazing amount of money out there. China was buying US debt, and when we lowered the interest rate, it was now more attractive to buy this new CDO product. The banks started selling them, and couldn't find enough to sell, so they started giving loans to anyone. The changes Congress did to increase loans were marginal at best. There was way too much money out there, and nothing to invest that amount in. The banks needed more CDO's, so they started giving loans to people who didn't deserve them. And, it wasn't the banks that were the worst, it was just loan originators. People that just set up loans, and sold them immediately didn't even both checking documentation anymore. They sold them to banks, who put them in CDO's and sold them. CDS's started later...when a few people started to figure out that this was all going to pop. Amusingly, the CDO's kept being sold, but a few people started buying huge amounts of CDS's on them.

Congress's actions were minor. The allowance for the investment banks to leverage their money more than 10 times was a major thing, but that was an executive branch action under Bush.

@SteevoKun:
I got that from the amount of subprime mortgages written by banks subject to the law you were citing. I can find the article on it.

Ok, here is a crappy source, but you can read the argument at least here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Reinvestment_Act

BACKKKKK on toPIC:

What Obama did, not going when he could have, is a jackass move. I will give everyone that. It makes me respect him a lot less. Not because he was playing golf.... but because he didn't go.

What he did to Gordon Brown, forcing him to run around to try to find him... that was less insulting, just a little rude. It's not like it was someone's funeral.

What is going on between Obama and Israel. Obama is totally justified. It is not, as Invictus tried to claim, and "insignificant issue." You sound like you're from Israel. It's a significant issue for Palestine, and therefore it's a significant issue to the peace process. Why Israelis want so badly to encroach on Palestinian land, you got me, but something tells me it's because they're Zionist assholes. And it's Zionist assholes who create more suicide bomber assholes. So it's kind of important to push the issue even at the expense of looking "insulting" in order to keep people from getting their brains blown out.

@Thucydides:
Obama couldn't go, because of the flying bans over most of northern and central Europe.

"What Obama did, not going when he could have, is a jackass move. "
Wow, read a newspaper Thucy...

the article says there was a window for him to go but he didn't take

As for your Israel bashing, this op-ed was in the WPost today. I found it interesting, particularly the 2nd paragraph:

"For the moment, though, most Israelis still like Obama and approve his approach; they, too, want a two-state solution. Most American Jews feel the same, although Obama's support is clearly slipping. Still, it is unlikely that American Jewish liberals, some of whom have high school crushes on Obama, will ever desert the man.

But the political middle, particularly the Israeli middle, is scared. It would give up East Jerusalem and the West Bank for peace -- only it is skeptical that even those concessions would work. None of this is theoretical. It is about life and death. It is about rockets coming in from Gaza yet again. It is about Hezbollah's Scud missiles and the reasonable apprehension that Hamas would oust the moderate (and hapless) Palestinian Authority from the West Bank and turn the area into the functional equivalent of Gaza, an Islamic republic whose charter is a stew of crackpot anti-Semitism laced with death threats.

What then? Would Obama stick by Israel? Many Israelis wonder. Obama "needs to address Israelis' fears," the Israeli philosopher Carlo Strenger wrote recently in Haaretz. So far, Obama has done just the opposite, even going to Cairo to assure the Palestinians and the greater Arab world that he appreciates their plight without assuring Israelis that he appreciates theirs. His coolness toward Netanyahu, earned or not, has chilled the Israeli public and encouraged Palestinian defiance. He is on the cusp of an enormous diplomatic blunder. "

@Thucydides:
Not sure what article you are talking about, but the one linked here says that there was an opportunity(to play golf), because the trip was canceled.

@Thucy - there was no window of opportunity for him to go. Although, as president, I'm sure he could have forced the issue, but had I been his chief of staff I would have reminded him that he is too important to risk his life on a flight to attend a funeral as the ash was, at that time, extremely heavy and potentially dangerous.

Seems ironic to debate whether to risk the life of a president flying in questionable conditions to get to the funeral of a president who died while flying in questionable conditions.

It might have already been pointed out (haven't gone through all 80-some responses), and if so I apologize, but if you read the article carefully - he didn't actually blow off the funeral to go golfing.

"... when an opportunity opened up on his schedule after flying bans over most of northern and central Europe <u>forced him to cancel his trip to Krakow </u>to attend the funeral ...."

He went golfing because he couldn't go to the funeral. I'm not a huge fan of Prez Obama, except in contrast with his predecessor, but let's not make him out to be worse than he actually is.