Michele Bachmann explains the financial crisis to Occupy Wall Street

A couple of standout takeaways at tonight's Team R debate at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. I'll hit my favorites in a couple of posts.

At first opportunity, Michele Bachmann spoke the truth. There's no other correct answer to the question "Why?", to explain our economic meltdown, other than pointing to the decades of Democrats who used the Federal Government to intervene in our financial well-being for to advance their moving-ever-further LEFT ideology.

From Suntimes (where there is a complete transcript)...

TUMULTY: Congresswoman Bachmann, three years after the financial meltdown, Main Street continues to suffer. People have lost their jobs, they've lost their homes, they've lost their faith in the future. But Wall Street is thriving. The banks not only got bailed out by the government, they have made huge profits, they've paid themselves huge bonuses.

Do you think it's right that no Wall Street executives have gone to jail for the damage they did to the economy?

BACHMANN: I think if you look at the problem with the economic meltdown, you can trace it right back to the federal government, because it was the federal government that demanded that banks and mortgage companies lower platinum level lending standards to new lows.

TUMULTY: But the federal government has also deregulated them.

BACHMANN: It was the federal government that pushed the subprime loans. It was the federal government that pushed the Community Reinvestment Act. It was Congressman Barney Frank and also Senator Chris Dodd that continued to push government-directed housing goals.


They pushed the banks to meet these rules. And if banks failed to meet those rules, then the federal government said we won't let you merge, we won't let you grow.


There's a real problem, and it began with the federal government, and it began with Freddie and Fannie. If you look at these secondary mortgage companies which the federal government is essentially backing 100 percent, they put American mortgages in a very difficult place.


We had artificially low interest rates, Freddie and Fannie were the center of the universe on the mortgage meltdown, and we had lending standards lowered for the first time in American history. The fault goes back to the federal government, and that's what's wrong with Dodd- Frank.


Dodd-Frank institutionalized all of these problems that were put into effect by the federal government. That's why I introduced the bill to repeal Dodd-Frank. It's the Jobs and Housing Destruction Act.

Here that, #OWS? If anyone should be frog-marched to prison for causing the financial collapse, it should be Democrats Barney Frank and Chris Dodd, firstly. Because of their Leftist ideology, they put together and sustained programs that've all but destroyed the financial sector of this Republic.

It was Democrat's 'helpful' but heavy-handed pushing of socialism, the creation of laws that caused the meltdown: specifically, the jaded practice of give-'em-feel-goods-for-power-and-votes Community Reinvestment Act (thanks! Jimmy Carter, ramped up by Bill Clinton after being largely ignored by Ronald Reagan and Bush I) for the specific purpose of garnering votes from their Gimme stuff NOW! constituency. Add ACORN and other 'Community Organizers', and you've got yourself a powerful political machine that advanced this faulty ideology at the expense of our very future.

A slick swap, America's future sold out so Democrats could keep political power, feeding on emo-envy that was stoked (and continues to be stoked) by Democrats who 'Community Organize'. Barack Obama, you listening? Keep up that 'class warfare' now, you hear?

If Michele Bachmann, or any Team R player, could just get this message out there to the mush heads...

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Michele Bachmann 'Newsweak' Cover

...because it's better this way.

Oh, and screw 'Newsweek', that rag of a publication that's worth, what, 50 cents if that?

And I mean the 'per share' price, not the cover price.

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Michele Bachmann makes a Gaffe! Eric Cantor, the burr under Obama's Saddle! and, Gallup shocks!

Andrew Klavan points out Michele Bachmann's numerous gaffes...

Michelle Bachmann is running for president and she's supported by the Tea Party. You know, the "angry" ... "emotional" ... "ugly" middle Americans with "low-sloping foreheads" who believe in constitutional government, lower spending and the rule of law. Let's join our MSM pals and freak out when Bachmann says something so we can let everyone know about it and she won't be elected in 2012. Is this fun or what?

In other news, Eric Cantor (R, VA; Democrat's newest Evil Monster) speaks out to NRO on his performance that sent Barack Obama scuttling like a bug from that infamous White House meeting...

“This is not a game,” Cantor says. “We have serious problems. We have put out very thoughtful proposals to try to address them. But sometimes, around here, that doesn’t always make it through.” ...

The president “got very agitated,” Cantor told reporters Wednesday night at the Capitol. Cantor added that Obama then told him not to “call my bluff,” and said that he would take his argument to the “American people.”

Reflecting on the episode Thursday afternoon, Cantor chuckles over how dramatically the president behaved. He chalks up the heated conversation to politics more than anything. “They’re just not serious,” he says. “Even those things identified in the Biden talks have been cast aside, only touchable if we raise taxes.”

“I was willing to compromise,” Cantor contends. “I said, Mr. President, we want to do it right. I said, I agree with you, we ought not to go beyond August 2. But because the votes are not there in the House, I asked whether he was willing to come off his statement that he will veto that. That’s what led to the blowup.”

The impasse, he predicts, will continue, unless President Obama can agree to work with Republicans on a short-term extension coupled with significant spending cuts. “It is certainly at a point of frustration right now, but we are not giving up hope,” he says. One of the points he keeps making to the president, he says, is that Republicans have already shown that they will share the sacrifice, pointing to the House GOP budget, which tackles entitlement reform, as his main example. Democrats, he says, are the ones who need to show a similar commitment to fiscal discipline.

Still, Cantor wonders whether Obama already has, in essence, shut down the opportunity for a cuts-laden compromise. “I really do question when I’m sitting in the room, hearing the president say that we must not have any movement unless it takes us through the election,” he says. “That, to me, seems very political. I’d like to get it right, rather than just do something.” ...

“I’ve given the vice president credit and will continue to give him a lot of credit,” Cantor says. “He was able to keep apart philosophical differences and focus on how we can reduce spending. But after about six weeks, he began to hear marching orders from the other side of this building. They began to sound the alarm that the cuts had gone too far.” ...

Since then, Cantor says, the discussions have gone downhill, with the White House chipping away at the cuts it had openly considered during the Biden meetings as parts of a possible debt-limit package. Coming out of the Biden talks, Cantor says, “I believed that we were at a $2.2, $2.3 trillion–type number, Well, the president said that he felt like we were more at $1.7, maybe $1.8 trillion if you massage it. Then, yesterday, after staff members met at the White House, we get a paper telling us that the number is barely at $1.4 trillion.”

At about the time the far-left started howling about their 'entitlements' and the 'unfairness!' that the 'evil rich' were allowed to live in relative splendor compared to the dirt-poor and ragged Democrats aimlessly wandering the streets looking for one of Barack Obama's 'shovel-ready' jobs promised on the way after the first couple bailouts (that were nothing more than payoffs to BHO's cronies who got him elected in the first place).

The good news? The latest Gallup polling data suggests that a 'generic' Republican candidate would retire this little dirty socialist prezzidint-man in 2012 by a statistically-significant 8 points.

I could come out, as some maddened and crazed LeftLibProggs say, and proclaim'Game Over'. But I won't say that, because I realize that there's a lot of time between now and November 2012. And things are just getting better for Baracky by the minute, aren't they?

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