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This is the BEST video I have seen about the crisis. The most accurate, the most detailed, and backed up by facts. Its a little shy of 10 minutes, but is worth watching in its entirety. Watch it, pass it on to your friends. Link to it. Embed it. Do whatever you want. The media won’t tell you the whole truth. But here it is.

Last night, Barack Obama, Harry Reid and others complained that John McCain was playing politics with this crisis as negotiations broke down last night.  That’s apparently not true according to four independent sources.

Though Sen. Chris Dodd implied that Sen. McCain sandbagged the rest of the negotiators by bringing up alternative proposals, McCain himself did not bring up those proposals, according to four independent sources briefed by four different principals inside the meeting, including two Republicans and two Democrats.

“McCain has not attacked the Paulson deal,” said a third Republican who was briefed by McCain direclty. “Unlike the [Democrats] in the [White House] meeting, he didn’t raise his voice or cause a ruckus. He is urging all sides to come together.“

Sounds once again like John McCain is being a leader and trying to form a consensus while the Democrats and Barack Obama are just worried about themselves.

For more information, visit gunbanobama.com.

And before you start citing FactCheck.org’s erroneous report on these ads by the NRA, read rebuttals from Volokh or Patterico.

Protect the second amendment. Vote McCain/Palin.

I’ve made this reference before, but it bares repeating.  Ask anyone who has ever played or been involved with team sports.  Winners and Leaders want the ball when the game is on the line.  Losers and Followers want to pass.

During the current economic crisis, with the economy on the brink and the bailout on the line, John McCain wanted the ball.  He has proven he is a leader… Barack Obama, not so much.  Barack Obama whined about meeting tonight, I guess acting as a Senator and not just running for office is above his pay grade.

Barack Obama told Fox News tonight:

“It’s not clear to me that having presidential candidates in a high-profile way in the negotiating process is useful.”

Does that surprise anyone?  Barack Obama is whining because he is expected to do his job as a U.S. Senator.  If he is too busy to do that, and is whining about having some responsibility to fix the current economic mess, what will he do as President?  The President doesn’t get to pass the ball, and he doesn’t get to vote present when the country is on the line.  Barack Obama is proving without a shadow of a doubt that he is not a leader and not capable of being President.  You would think someone running for the highest office in the land would take a stand and lead at this tumultuous time… clearly Obama can’t be bothered with that.

And it is incredibly phony when they complain that John McCain is there, doing his job, even with the stakes of his Presidential campaign are on the line.  John McCain was asked to be there.  We know Harry Reid asked John McCain to take a leadership role in this mess:

“We need, now, the Republicans to start producing some votes for us. We need the Republican nominee for president to let us know where he stands and what we should do.”

And we know from Bob Scheiffer, no friend to the right, that Secretary Paulson asked John McCain to get involved:

Paulson then called, according to my sources, Senator Lindsey Graham, who is very close to John McCain, and told him: you’ve got to get the people in the McCain campaign, you’ve got to convince John McCain to give these Republicans some political cover. If you don’t do that, this whole bailout plan is going to fail. So that’s how, McCain, apparently, became involved.

So John McCain is not only doing his duty as a United States Senator, but he is doing what both the Majority Leader and the Secretary of the Treasury asked him to do.  Now that John McCain is doing his job, acting Presidential and trying to lead in a moment of crisis, Barack Obama and the Left are whining and moaning because it might be beneficial to the McCain Campaign.

Clearly some people are playing politics with this mess, and they all have a (D) beside their names.

Complaints from the Democrats ring incredibly untrue, especially when McCain is doing the right thing.  What kind of hypocrite thinks he can be President, but can’t be bothered to help lead at a time of crisis.  A crisis that Barack Obama himself called the most serious since the Great Depression.  If Obama truly believed that, but wasn’t willing to take a leadership role in getting it fixed, you have to question why.

By the way, the ridiculous assertions on the left that John McCain is some kind of chicken and doesn’t want to debate Barack Obama is absolutely absurd.  McCain proposed many more debates, but Obama ran scared.  After saying he would participate in joint Town Hall meetings, Obama broke his promise (just like he broke his promise on public campaign finance rules).  John McCain spanked Obama at Saddleback.  John McCain stood tall at many of the Republican debates.  Meanwhile Obama got his butt handed to him time and time again by Hillary Clinton in the Democrat debates and refused to debate her in the end because he was getting beat so badly.  So to assume that John McCain is scared to debate Obama is preposterous.

John McCain has once again put his country first, something Barack Obama will never understand.

Watch the entire foreign policy segment of Governor Palin’s interview with Katie Couric.

The Governor gets a little tongue tied when asked about her comment that Alaska is close in proximity with Russia.  I think Sarah Palin is being a little too handled by the McCain campaign and that’s causing her to parse and stumble.  The point she was trying to make with Charlie Gibson originally is that it is a small world and like it or not, our national interests are often global interests.  We can not let the Russian Bear spread its claws again without countering it every step of the way.  That may seem abstract for us in the continential United States who are far removed from the Russians… but when you can litterally see Russian soil from your home state you have a different perspective on the threat an aggressive Russia poses.

As for the last little bit about Israel.  What the heck is Couric trying to do?  Of course we are not going to prevent Israel from defending itself and we would never publicly tell them what they can or cannot do.  Doing so with an ally would jeopardize our own sovereignty and we should not be interferring with their own self defense unless we would accept the same interference if the roles were reversed.  Nonetheless, as an ally, of course we work with them to strengthen their position and thus strengthen our own.  Of course we seek to find a common point to counter the spread of evil.  But if Israel ever feels the threat from Iran is immediate and imminent, you can bet we neither could nor would stand in their way.  Nor should we.

Aided by the New York Times with a spectacular piece of pathetic journalism, the Obama campaign has been trying to link McCain to the Fannie Mae problem, because one of his advisers, Rick Davis, had once done lobbying work for Fannie Mae.  The Times and the Obama campaign even assert that Davis made some money from Fannie over the past year, which the McCain campaign sharply rebuts.

The Times and Obama fail miserably at this pathetic hit job. Davis has not been a lobbyist since 2005 and has not received profit from his company since 2006.  Furthermore, Davis’ lobbying efforts didn’t cause Fannie Mae to fail.  Jim Johnson is another story all together.

Jim Johnson, to this day, is an adviser to Barack Obama. Jim Johnson was once the CEO of Fannie Mae, and made over $20 million for his work there and a sweetheart mortgage deal from CountryWide while leading Fannie Mae into disaster (at the expense of the American taxpayer).  Johnon pathetic management and potentially fradulent activites at Fannie Mae are partially responsible for the mess we are in now.  Yet Obama continues to call on Johnson for advise on how to deal with this crisis.

Furthermore, Barack Obama received over $120,000 in campaign contributions from Fannie/Freddie, averaging more than $30,000 a year.  John McCain received contributions from them too… at less than $1,000 per year.  As they say… follow the money.

Captain Ed has a great post at Hot Air comparing the relationships of both these men to Fannie Mae and the current presidential campaigns.  Rick Davis is not even remotely equivalent to Jim Johnson nor is there any evidence that Rick Davis is offering advice on the housing and economic crisis to John McCain.  Can Johnson and the Obama campaign make a similar claim?  Not hardly.

Brit Hume’s program had a good summary of how we got into this mess and the voices who tried to avoid it.  President Bush, John McCain, Secretary Snow, Greenspan all tried to get Fannie and Freddie under control and warmed that failing to do so could lead to a broad economic crisis.  Sound familiar?

But the democrats, Barney Frank, Chris Dodd and Chuck Schumer didn’t want to hear any of it.  They were too busy playing politics and turning a blind eye to real concerns.

And what has Barack Obama ever done to fix this mess before it broke?  Nothing.

Big Lizzards has a great post on Mortgage Backed Securities, why we are in this mess, and even makes the case for the so-called bailout.  It’s long and its good.  Read it for yourself.  If we are going to pass something, that is going to cost the taxpayers billions, then buying the securities and scrubbing them WITH NO OTHER EARMARKS might be the best of the bad solutions.

Read this and decide for yourself.

CHRIS CUOMO, ABC NEWS: A little surprising for you to hear the Democrats saying, “This came out of nowhere, this is all about the Republicans. We had nothing to do with this.” Nancy Pelosi saying it. She signed the ‘99 Gramm Bill. She knew what was going on with the SEC. They’re all sophisticated people. Is that playing politics in this situation?

BILL CLINTON: Well, maybe everybody does that a little bit. I think the responsibility the Democrats have may rest more in resisting any efforts by Republicans in the Congress or by me when I was President to put some standards and tighten up a little on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Republicans did try to fix this. Several Republicans tried.  But the Democrats blocked every attempt, and encouraged riskier and riskier loans.  Now that house of cards has collapsed.

Want change?  Want to throw the bums out?  Make sure you know who the bums are.  Chris Dodd.  Chuck Schumer.  And all of the Democrats who towed the line for Fannie and Freddie, accepting thousands in campaign contributions and turning a blind eye to the mess.

For more information, visit GunBanObama.com.

And before you start citing FactCheck.org’s erroneous report on these ads by the NRA, read rebuttals from Volokh or Patterico.

Protect the second amendment. Vote McCain/Palin.

Dave Ramsey has a solution to fix the current credit freeze and economic crisis, and it won’t cost $700 Billion.

Remember Enron, WorldCom, Adelphia, and other companies had artificially put assets on the books? They’d say something was worth $10M when they bought it, but eventually it decreased in value, and they never updated the value in the books. That was part of the fraud. Under current laws at that time, they were all convicted and put in jail for fraud.

Then we got all mad and made all these new laws that are coming out the wazoo called sarbanes oxley. It’s a huge, massive law but the idea is that we were going to mandate ethics to corporate America because apparently they didn’t have any, according to the Enron failure. It’s now a total pain in the butt to execute it in a publicly traded company.

It didn’t work because you can’t cause ethics to happen. However, it does make each company each day restate what their assets are worth if sold on the market. This accounting procedure is mark to market accounting–you need to remember that. It’s a good concept and keeps companies from having loaded balance sheets.

However, it’s part of what’s caused this in the news now. Merrill Lynch was sitting with $30 billion tied up in sub-prime loans with houses. Stupid! They get what they deserve for doing that, and I’m with you on that. Those houses didn’t become worthless all of a sudden because those people couldn’t sell their bonds. Since they couldn’t sell them, they basically gave them away for 22 cents on the dollar. Now do you think all those houses lost 80% of their value underneath that deal? No, they didn’t, so they gave them away for 22 cents on the dollar (about $6 billion total) because there was no market for them. Nobody wants to buy sub-prime bonds because they suck. They’re junk bonds. But at 22 cents on the dollar, it’s a bargain because even if you foreclosed on every one of the houses in there, you’d probably get $20 billion back out of $30 billion, and so the company that bought those for $6 billion got a deal! But there’s no market for them. That’s where these companies are stuck. They can’t sell this stuff, but accounting-wise, they’ve had to mark it down to market and it’s frozen the marketplace.

And he’s exactly right.  As a (now former) mortgage company owner, my father (who has been in the business for almost 15 years) and I were actually discussing this the other day.  Just because people aren’t lining up to buy mortgage securities at the present time doesn’t mean they are worthless.  If you have $100 Million of mortgages in a pool, even if every single home went into foreclosure and the mortgages were at 100% of their value, you would still get a return.  It may not be 100%, but it also wouldn’t be zero.

But if you have $100 Million in mortgage securities on your books, you have to have about $100 Million more in liquid assets just to offset the mortgage securities because in today’s climate due to SOX, it would be worth close to zero.

Because you have to restate asset value virtually every day, you can’t wait it out for the value to return or the mortgage to be sold.  They are a drag on the books and tie up capital that could be used for something else.  Thus there is a freeze in additional lending and companies with plenty of assets on the books appear insolvent on paper, all due to accounting standards.

Paulson and the President are right, we do need to have someone unclug the lending sink.  But Ramsey may be right and it could be done without costing the tax payers a dime.  Repeal, even temporarily, Sarbanes Oxley, and let’s get the system flowing again.

Jim Johnson, failed CEO of Fannie Mae, whose very policies and “leadership” helped create the current mortgage crisis, and got his own sweetheart deal from CountryWide, is STILL advising Barack Obama.

Best line of the day thus far:

Here is the architect of the self-destruction of Fannie Mae constructing the Obama presidency.

Sad, but true.  While Barack Obama and the complicit media try to paint John McCain as Bush 2.0 (which is laughable really).. Barack Obama actually lives his own campaign attack “more of the same”.  We are in an absolute financial crisis in this country that was precipitated by the mortgage and credit collapse.  And Barack Obama is being advised by one of the architects of the failure.

So the John McCain is suspending campaign activities for the moment so he can do his job as United States Senator and work on the current financial crisis and bailout vote.  I saw this on Drudge and didn’t really believe it… then I saw it at Michelle Malkin’s site and the AP, and it kind of sunk in.  McCain is also asking the debate commission to postpone Friday’s debate so they can focus on the bailout bill and have a “leadership” meeting (including President Bush and Barack Obama) to try and work out the details and a path forward.

I can hear the liberals now, claiming McCain is scared or not ready, or throwing a Hail Mary to save his Presidential hopes.

Sorry, I don’t buy it.  Disagree with Senator McCain as I often to, I don’t think this bold action is a political calculation.  Its got a 50/50 shot of killing any chance he has in the election, especially with a hugely biased media framing the story.  But unlike some politicians, I believe John McCain sees his duty as Senator as a solemn promise to work on behalf of the country and not his own self interests.  Just as he would rather lose an election than a war, I believe he would rather lose an election than fail the American people at this trying time.

If you paid attention to the talking heads, it was a foregone conclusion that neither McCain nor Obama would show up for the “bailout vote” as its better to leave the political hot potato alone that get in the middle.  But John McCain is not only going to vote, he’s asking for the ball.  When the game is on the line and you are down by one, you give the ball to the team leader who wants it and isn’t afraid to take the last shot.  John McCain wants to take the shot.

Its a stark contrast from someone who votes present 130 times or has a tendency to skip contentious votes.  But now Obama can’t sit idly by.  Will he take the opportunity to lead as well or will he look for someway to pass the ball?

Time will tell, and the election is likely on the line.  But at least John McCain is putting Country First.

>>John McCain’s Statement

UPDATE: Video

UPDATE: Harry Reid can’t help but play politics and continue being an embarassment. After yesterday trying to get McCain to support the bailout and take leadership in the issue:

“We need, now, the Republicans to start producing some votes for us. We need the Republican nominee for president to let us know where he stands and what we should do.”

Reid is now telling John McCain to stay away.

But yesterday, Reid demanded that the White House made sure the legislation had John McCain’s backing, and Reid floated this bogus piece of news clearly intended to force McCain’s hand: “I got some good news in the last hour or so … it appears that Sen. McCain is going to come out for this.” McCain flatly denied that he had endorsed the plan.

So Harry Reid says that it’s essential that John McCain backs legislation designed to avert the greatest economic meltdown since the Great Depression. And when McCain says the highly problematic legislation, in its current form, is not good enough, Reid tells McCain to stay away from Capitol Hill. Who’s playing politics with economic crisis?

I’m not Catholic, I’m a Southern Baptist… but I approve of this message.

Visit CatholicVote.com for more information.  (H/T: HotAir)

For more information, visit gunbanobama.com.

And before you start citing FactCheck.org’s erroneous report on this ad, read rebuttals from Volokh or Patterico.