danivon wrote:Still, you would prefer to ignore it.

My initial point remains: an actual conviction is not enough to bar a b President.

danivon wrote:"Your"

Your initial point was off-point. It was a conviction having nothing to do with national security. And, if I recall correctly, he was driving in a not too populated area

danivon wrote:

Your initial point was off-point. It was a conviction having nothing to do with national security. And, if I recall correctly, he was driving in a not too populated area

1. The words I quoted you using did not mention national security. You want to claim "whataboutery"? Have "moving the goalposts".

freeman3 wrote:Hillary will be a much better president than GW; I am pretty sure of that. Talk about setting a low-bar...

freeman3 wrote:Well you would probably say he was a better president than Obama, too...I looked up a survey of some organization of political scientists and it came out with GW as the 17th best president...Are they out of their minds? What other president mistakenly invaded a country and presided over a near meltdown of our economy. We barely escaped his reign and he gets a ranking of 17?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/mo ... ver-rated/

So Hillary just needs to not mistakenly invade a country and avoid a depression. I think she will manage that.

Well, put it all together--what is making so many people so angry that they would gamble the country on a Trump presidency? What is the overarching principle that unites Trump voters? This is not anger over something small--they have to see something deeply important to them being threatened. What is it?

freeman3 wrote:There were a lot of things that could have been done if anyone was paying attention. The government has a lot of tools to intervene in the economy when there is a problem. Nothing was done until very late.

Bush's first budget, written in 2001 — seven years ago — called runaway subprime lending by the government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac "a potential problem" and warned of "strong repercussions in financial markets."

In 2003, Bush's Treasury secretary, John Snow, proposed what the New York Times called "the most significant regulatory overhaul in the housing finance industry since the savings and loan crisis a decade ago." Did Democrats in Congress welcome it? Hardly.

"I do not think we are facing any kind of a crisis," declared Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., in a response typical of those who viewed Fannie and Freddie as a party patronage machine that the GOP was trying to dismantle. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it," added Sen. Thomas Carper, D-Del.

Unfortunately, it was broke.

In November 2003, just two months after Frank's remarks, Bush's top economist, Gregory Mankiw, warned: "The enormous size of the mortgage-backed securities market means that any problems at the GSEs matter for the financial system as a whole." He too proposed reforms, and they too went nowhere.

In the next two years, a parade of White House officials traipsed to Capitol Hill, calling repeatedly for GSE reform. They were ignored. Even after several multibillion-dollar accounting errors by Fannie and Freddie, Congress put off reforms.

In 2005, Fed chief Alan Greenspan sounded the most serious warning of all: "We are placing the total financial system of the future at a substantial risk" by doing nothing, he said. When a bill later that year emerged from the Senate Banking Committee, it looked like something might finally be done.

Unfortunately, as economist Kevin Hassett of the American Enterprise Institute has noted, "the bill didn't become law, for a simple reason: Democrats opposed it on a party-line vote in the committee, signaling that this would be a partisan issue. Republicans, tied in knots by the tight Democratic opposition, couldn't even get the Senate to vote on the matter."

Had they done so, it's likely the mortgage meltdown wouldn't have occurred, or would have been of far less intensity. President Bush and the Republican Congress might be blamed for many things, but this isn't one of them. It was a Democratic debacle, from start to finish.

rickyp wrote:I believe The New Republic is a conservative publication?

The New Republic is a liberal American magazine of commentary on politics and the arts published since 1914, with major influence on American political and cultural thinking. Founded in 1914 by major leaders of the Progressive Movement it attempted to find a balance between a progressivism focused on humanitarianism and moral passion, and on the other hand sought a basis in scientific analysis of social issues. It supported American entry into World War One, but discarded much of its faith in the possibility of a scientific liberalism. After the 1980s it incorporated elements of conservatism.[2] After undergoing a change of ownership and a crisis in 2014 that saw the resignation of many of its editors and writers, its publication was briefly suspended.

rickyp wrote:Hilliary Clinton's current policies will go a ways to improving the plight of those disadvantage.