Who will become the next Senator from Delaware?

[Brittain33]

The joke will be on you guys if she wins, you know.

I'm puzzled by statements like this. What does it matter? The joke will be on you if Jack Conway wins, but that doesn't mean it's at all likely to happen, or you should suddenly start talking like he's going to.

[Brittain33]

There are a lot of people who are going to want to stick it to the establishment, and will thus vote for people they wouldn't otherwise vote for.

Why are these people lying to pollsters and saying a) they hate that candidate and b) aren't voting for her?

[Brittain33]

We know how banks were intimidated into giving mortgages to individuals that couldn't afford them, and where that led.

Yes, during the Clinton and Bush years, and it was hardly through intimidation.  The banks sought a quick buck, and that backfired on the entire economy.  Oops!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Reinvestment_Act

That has nothing to do with the explosion of subprime mortgages 20+ years later, when small banks (not the big guys affected by CRA) realized they could make a killing on bad loans to credit risks, and they were bought up or copied by the big banks because it was an extremely profitable market niche and customers were ill-informed enough to accept massive fees and interest rate hikes. Banks needed no government encouragement at all, they jumped in with both feet. It was profitable until they got stuc holding the bag in 2008.

[Brittain33]

Exactly, the banks were giving loans to people that they knew weren't good risks. It's hard to see how the government forces banks to make poor business decisions.

Giving loans at high rates to bad risks, and then quickly selling off the loans to investors, was an excellent business decision for banks. It's when they were stuck with loans they couldn't sell, or bought someone else's bad mortgages, that they got in trouble.

[Brittain33]

It started with the Community Reinvestment Act and groups that would make sure banks complied.
But I do agree banks themselves were complicit towards the end of the crisis.
Once some genius figured they can package the loans and sell them and the bad risk as investments, they gladly went along with it.

When do you date the beginning of the crisis, according to this framework, where banks only become complicit "toward the end"?

[Brittain33]

I'll tell you my theory. The banks or financial institutions were stuck writing these sure to lose mortgages forced on them as a quota of their loans by the CRA, and like "smart" capitalists, they figured a way to dump their almost certain losses onto other entities. But it all started with government meddling in private enterprise.

No offense, but this is wrong and has no basis in reality. There are facts out there about what happened, there's no need to make up theories. There's a great book called Broke, U.S.A. that I recommed to you if you're genuinely interested in which banks started this trend, how, and why.

[Brittain33]

Al is right. This is basically on the level as if that joke candidate Flyers supported in 2006 beat Bob Casey in the primary.

Oh, God, Chuck Penacchio? Back when I still posted on MyDD, the true believers there were convinced that he would somehow beat Casey (and then Santorum). When I asked how he would do that despite having raised no money, they waved off that concern with "the money will come" when he was nominated.

Ah, so that was his name, I forgot that even. That's rather amusing. How did they explain how he was going to beat Casey and thus get the nomination resulting "the money coming"?

On Daily Kos, everything came back to "Paul Wellstone did it!"

[Brittain33]

We can dispense with the scenario that Coons takes this race for granted while O'Donnell outhustles him to victory. NYT reports she isn't doing any campaigning in Delaware while Coons is working the voters.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/30/us/politics/30bai.html

[Brittain33]

So O'Donnell has no desire to serve in the US Senate, and just handed the seat over to the Democratic nominee solely so she could get her pretty face on TV and make money?

This strategy worked very well for Alan Keyes.

[Brittain33]

"History always repeats itself twice: first time as tragedy, second time as farce." - Karl Marx