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John McCain started smearing Barack Obama about non-existent ties to Fannie Mae in some of his deceptive attack ads. Anonymous smear emails have followed McCain’s lead by fabricating even more connections. These smears disguise the fact that Barack actually has a sensible, detailed plan to fix the economy — and it’s a much better source of answers than anonymous attack emails. The non-partisan fact-check website Snopes.com looked into these smears, and their conclusions about Barack and the Fannie Mae executives shouldn’t be surprising: “None of them has (or apparently ever had) ongoing roles with the campaign as chief economic advisors.”...

Joe Biden's denunciation of his own campaign's ad to Katie Couric got so much attention last night that another odd note in the interview slipped by. He was speaking about the role of the White House in a financial crisis. "When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn't just talk about the princes of greed," Biden told Couric. "He said, 'Look, here's what happened.'" As Reason's Jesse Walker footnotes it: "And if you owned an experimental TV set in 1929, you would have seen him. And you would have said to yourself, 'Who is that...

Watch the video... "It must be designed. Uh It must not be designed. The recklessness of some of these executives has.. has uh helped to cause this mess. Even as they walked away with billion dollar.. uh multi-million dollar golden parachutes.. uh while taxpayers are left holding the bag. Those who benefit are uh.. uh expected to contribute. CEO's and Executives got reckless. uh lobbyists got what they wanted. How to modernize our system. Brueprint.. uh.. Blueprint. The answer is no.. uhhh. He.. He.. Here's how. Do higher taxes make sense at this time? Alright.. uh uh good question. it.....

I’m sure this isn’t the Penny Pritzker Obama knows and all, but it sure doesn’t look good to have her around anymore. Senator Barack Obama’s campaign faces a potential controversy over finance chairwoman Penny Pritzker’s past association with Superior Bank, which failed and was seized by regulators in 2001. “Billionaire Penny Pritzker helped run Hinsdale, Ill.-based Superior, overseeing her family’s 50% ownership stake,” John R. Emshwiller writes for The Wall Street Journal. “She now serves as Barack Obama’s national campaign-finance chairwoman, which means her banking past could prove to be an embarrassment to her — and perhaps to the campaign.”...

The campaign puts out a statement from former Fannie Mae chief Franklin Raines, disowning ties to Obama, after a McCain ad attacked him for the ties. The Washington Post reported -- with the kind of blind sourcing that suggests the source was Raines -- that Raines had "taken calls from Barack Obama's presidential campaign seeking his advice on mortgage and housing policy matters." Raines said in the statement through the campaign, "I am not an advisor to Barack Obama, nor have I provided his campaign with advice on housing or economic matters." Obama spokesman Bill Burton added an attack: This...

Franklin Raines From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, search Franklin Delano Raines (born January 14, 1949 in Seattle, Washington) is the former chairman and chief executive officer of Fannie Mae who served as White House budget director under President Bill Clinton. He is currently employed by Barack Obama's Presidential Campaign as an economic adviser. The son of a Seattle janitor [1], Raines graduated from Harvard University, Harvard Law School; and Magdalen College, Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. Raines was of age during the Vietnam War, but performed no military service. He served in the Carter Administration as...