This one is a three pointer! 

The constant reminder that President Obama is articulate is something that concerns me greatly.  I worry that, after 8 years of a man who should have read directly from a script no matter what anyone told him, people will simply stumble over themselves to fall in line to Obama's requests just because he's so darn good at rhetoric. 

There may be some of that dynamic (W certainly lowered the bar), but I think Obama deserves some credit: insofar as his rhetoric is more persuasive than was W's, I think a good part of it is that he gives the impression -- a correct impression, in my view -- that he has a deeper understanding of the issues he's discussing, that he's aware of and appreciates the complexities involved, that he has seriously considered various angles/perspectives of the problem and potential solutions, etc., and I consider that difference a legitimate basis for someone to be more likely to give one president more benefit of the doubt than another.

thanks. Yeah, I should be more active here than I've been lately. I probably will be.

 job? You know the leader of the American people?

 Rush Limbaugh, and RW disagree. They still hate his guts.

 And some still think he has turned the white house into a c**n haven.

If that helps put you in a better mood.

If the banks were "forced" to make bad loans, how do you explain the fact that about half of the sub-prime loans were made by mortgage companies that were not subject to the rules of the Community Reinvestment Act? The reason so many of these loans were made was because the folks making the loans (banks and mortgage companies), were making boatloads of money off of them by bundling them and selling them off, not because they were forced to make them.

Banks were not forced to make bad loans.

That's a falsehood.

Economic conditions made it extremely profitable for them, in the short run, to make bad loans.

But they were NOT forced.   How do I know?

Because there are dozens and dozens of banks that didn't grant these loans.  Banks that are doing just fine right now.

Why did some banks make these loans?

Three points:

1. Small mortgage lenders had no problem with giving out questionable loans because the Gramm-Leach-Bliley act of 1999 made it easy for them to bundle the loans and immediately sell them as securities.... thus taking the risk out of their hands and putting it in someone else's.  They make a profit and someone else owns the risk.

2. If the didn't bundle and sell the mortgages.... there STILL was no risk, as long as housing prices kept going up.  If the "bad borrowers" defaulted, the banks got ownership of the house - an asset that was steadily rising in value.

3. If the did sell the mortgages, the buyer's of these securities had no problems at all if the borrowers defaulted, because then the security holder got to take over ownership of the borrower's house - which was a great deal as long as house prices kept going up.  See #2.

If it weren't for the Gramm-Leach-Bliley act of 1999.... which tore down the depression-era barriers that prevented investment banks from getting involved in mortgage securities.... then the sub-prime crisis, like the S&L crisis of the '90s before it, would have been confined to ONE SECTOR of the banking community.

If the Gramm-Leach-Bliley act of 1999 would have been in place in the early '90s, the S&L crisis would've cost this country far more than $160 billion and the failure of a bunch of small S&Ls.  It would've been what we're experiencing now.

And what was the Gramm-Leach-Bliley act of 1999?   It was a de-regulation of the banking industry... pushed through and named for Senator Phil Gramm (Republican).  The bill was written by the banking industry lobbyists that Gramm was beholden to.

But the blame doesn't just lie with Gramm.   Bill Clinton signed the thing.   82 Senators voted for it (including over 30 Democrats).

It was a bi-partisan cluster-fuck that directly led to the current crisis.

Ask yourself why large investment banks like Lehman Brothers would be affected at all by a housing bubble bursting?

Prior to 1999, they couldn't have purchased securities made up of mortgage loans (good or bad).

There was a reason that the barriers between banking sectors existed and worked well from 1933 to 1999.

A GOP-led congress, and a complicit Democratic President, removed depression-era firewalls that would've limited the current crisis to the Countrywides and other mortgage banks.

Disclosure:  My brother is a VP and PNC Bank.  My understanding of this comes from conversations with him.   He knows more about this than you.    And I venture to say, he's probably more Republican than you.  ;-)

 I agree that in both cases there are global implications.

......without being a dick about it?