McCain wants to punish some people on Wall Street. Damn evil corporations.
One page contracts for mortgages! LOL
McCain had me at “tough”.... then lost me with the rest of his answer.
Holy crap, he’s an idiot when it comes to the economy. Is he going to adopt Chucklebee’s class warfare populism?
“...these institutions which were stable, clearly were not...”
Huh?!?!
Hey, McPain, Wall Street isn’t going to like that one...
I think McCain wants to stick that dull sharpie into Romney’s neck
Are you under the impression that Goldman Sucks and others are a force for good?
He also wants to essentially put me out of work with his mortgage ideas.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2007/12/30/ST2007123002933.html
Excerpt:
It is common for politicians to court big money during a campaign. But private schmooze sessions such as the gathering in Utah pose a particular dilemma for McCain, who has spent a long career decrying “special interests” and politicians who offer special access to them in order to raise money.
As a presidential candidate this year, McCain has found himself assiduously courting both lobbyists and their wealthy clients, offering them private audiences as part of his fundraising.
He also counts more than 30 lobbyists among his chief fundraisers, more than any other presidential contender.
McCain aides bridle at the notion that the senator, who has consistently fought in the Senate against so-called pork-barrel spending from such interests and championed laws to restrict their lobbying and political donations, might favor his big contributors.
“There’s never been anybody who’s done more to rein in special interests and lobbyists than John McCain,” Davis said. “If you give to him, you know there’s no quid pro quo.
People give to him because they want him to be president of the United States. They can’t be motivated by any other reason.”
McCain began his anti-special-interest drive two decades ago after he and four other senators were accused of trying to influence bank regulators on behalf of donor Charles Keating, a savings and loan financier later convicted of securities fraud.
The Senate Ethics Committee said McCain had used “poor judgment” but also said his actions “were not improper” and did not merit punishment.
Ever since, McCain has made high ethical standards a hallmark of his public persona. In his 2002 memoir he wrote that “money does buy access in Washington, and access increases influence that often results in benefiting the few at the expense of the many.”
Just this month in Detroit he told reporters that he had “never done any favors for anybody — lobbyist or special interest group — that’s a clear, 24-year record.”
Nonetheless, a recent study by the nonpartisan Campaign Finance Institute and the liberal advocacy group Public Citizen found that
***McCain has more lobbyists raising funds for his presidential bid than do any of his rivals. He has 32 “bundlers” of donations who are lobbyists.***
Former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani (R) is the closest to him with 29 lobbyist bundlers, followed by Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) with 18.
More meat at link.
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http://blog.washingtonpost.com/the-trail/2007/12/31/an_old_earmark_of_mccains_surf.html
An Old Earmark of McCain’s Surfaces
As part of a story published today on the McCain campaign’s efforts to woo lobbyists and their big money client The Washington Post reviewed years of the senator’s official correspondence to agencies that have been released over the years under the Freedom of Information Act.
That review located this 1992 letter in which McCain privately pressed the Republican administration of President Bush’s father, George H.W. Bush, to secure such a $5 million earmark for a wastewater project in Arizona after Congress had rejected the request in its own spending bill. Spurned by his colleagues, McCain took his case to the head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
“I would like to request that EPA either re-program $5 million out of existing funds or earmark the amount from an appropriate account,” McCain wrote in his Oct. 9, 1992 letter to then-EPA Administrator William K. Reilly, calling the earmark “crucial to protecting the public health and the environment.”
Reilly wrote back a few months later — in the final days of the first Bush administration — saying his agency had “no options with which to fund this project.”