Inside the political football: The subprime mortgage crisis

"Sharon" over at Common Sense Political Thought (she also blogs at Gold-Plated Witch on Wheels) has a nice summary of the subprime mortgage crisis and the etiology of blame. Click the link and read the rest once your appetite is whetted.

As Ed Morrissey of Hot Air points out, the collapse of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae happened on George W. Bush’s watch, and for that, Democrats will try to pummel him. And he certainly didn’t pursue any regulatory solutions wholeheartedly, but it’s not like this was unpredictable. Indeed, the New York Times ran a story on this five years ago.
(read more)

***

Hey, "Inside the political football" garners no Google hits. It's nice to think up something first for a change, especially after I discovered that "Elastic Waste Band" had already been used by a Grateful Dead tribute band.

Though I suppose somebody could have thought of the football thing and dumped it for something much better ...

Expect an Obama presidency to result in poor supreme court justice selection

Dana Pico of "Common Sense Political Thought" concisely pegs where Obama is wrong respecting his criteria for judges.

Mr Obama said, concerning who he would appoint:

We need somebody who’s got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom. The empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor, or African-American, or gay, or disabled, or old. And that’s the criteria by which I’m going to be selecting my judges.

This is exactly wrong, just like the editors of Commonweal were wrong. Judges exist to apply the law, as written, not to dispense whatever their notions of “justice” happen to be. This is how we are moving from a representative republic, in which the elected representatives of the people, sitting in constitutionally-constituted legislatures, write and vote for the laws under which our society is governed, to an oligarchy of nine unelected judges. If a law strikes people as unjust, the proper mechanism for redress exists: petition to the government for change — a right specifically protected by the First Amendment. For example, our good friends at the Delaware Liberal have been on the story of the state legislature trying to modify the eminent domain law to prohibit injustices such as were allowed by Kelo v City of New London.¹

Such clear expression calls for little comment. Amen, Dana.

Another fine blog from the right

I'm quite certain that I'm biased, but it seems to me much easier to locate conservative blogs that comment intelligently about issues (focused on facts and analysis instead of ridicule and such).

I just ran across "Common Sense Political Thought," a group conservative blog.
Good stuff. That's the style of blog I'd like to find from a liberal perspective--folks who can express a cogent set of thoughts and then prove willing to discuss them ably.

So far, I'm looking in the wrong places for intelligent liberal thought. Feel free to point me in the right direction, anybody.