“Experts fault Bush’s mortgage strategy,” Roll Call reports. The president’s push to “loosen mortgage loan qualification standards for first-time homebuyers” helped cause the current financial crisis. Bush’s efforts to increase homeownership became the core of the “ownership society” that he promoted during his 2004 re-election bid.
The non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics said yesterday that “[t]he campaign to elect a new president and members of Congress is on pace to hit an unprecedented $5.3 billion.” However, “[t]he cost of the presidential race alone — a record $2.4 billion — is less than the $2.6 billion Coca-Cola spent on advertising in 2006.”
House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) on Wednesday urged President Bush to block all federal funds to ACORN until federal investigations are completed. “It is evident that ACORN is incapable of using federal funds in a manner that is consistent with the law,” Boehner wrote.
“I could have seen the subprime problem coming earlier,” Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson admitted in a New York Times interview, “but I’m not saying I would have done anything differently.”
12 days to go: Barack Obama will attend a rally in Indianapolis and then fly to Hawaii to be with his ailing grandmother. Joe Biden attends rallies in North Carolina. John McCain is in Ormond Beach, FL, and Sarah Palin is in Troy, OH.
Former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan will testify before the House Oversight Committee today on the causes of the current financial crisis. He will likely face questions on why he “opposed attempts to impose tighter controls on complex financial contracts known as derivatives, which are largely unregulated and which some see as a contributing factor in the current problems.”
According to the Department of Labor, “The number of U.S. workers laid off in September climbed to the highest level since the days following Hurricane Katrina in 2005.” “The last time employers cut work forces en masse at this rate was September 2001.”
Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov told reporters earlier this week that if a proposed American-Iraqi security pact fell through, Russia would support allowing United States-led troops to stay in Iraq under a United Nations mandate. “We’ll support Iraq’s request to the U.N. Security Council if the Iraqi government asks for the mandate of the current international military presence to be extended,” said Lavrov.
A CBS investigation recently found high formaldehyde levels in FEMA-issued trailers of Iowa flood victims. FEMA has responded by blaming the residents for creating the formaldehyde, saying the toxins could have been caused by “cooking” or “smoking.”
And finally: Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly sat down with the ladies of “The View” yesterday, attempting to anger Joy Behar by calling Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) a “Communist.” (He then later downgraded the label to “socialist.”) During the segment, O’Reilly claimed that the only reason MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann dislikes him is because he’s “jealous,” and said that he hopes Gov. Sarah Palin (R-AK) comes on his show because he has “outfits she can wear.” Watch the segment here.
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