More on how we got into this mess, and who got us into it: from the National Review, fifteen years ago: Assault on the Mortgage Lenders.The first paragraph sums up the situation well:

QUIETLY, behind the scenes, the Clinton Administration is preparing for the biggest regulatory crackdown of recent years. Attorney General Janet Reno is linking up with banking regulators and with HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros to end the supposed epidemic of discrimination against minorities in making home loans. The implications for society at large are ominous.

Newt Gingrich on the bailouts.
P.S. Meanwhile, David Blake blames Greenspan.

Ever notice that where the government runs an enterprise - say, for example, a commuter railroad - stuff like this tends to happen?

Virtually every career employee — as many as 97 percent in one recent year — applies for and gets disability payments soon after retirement...

Something to think about as the government keeps swallowing up businesses.

Mike Allen on our current financial turmoil: which candidate does it hurt more?

The essential problem coming to light is a profound disconnect between the Barack Obama of the candidate's speeches, and the Barack Obama who has actually been in politics for the past decade or so.
Speechmaker Obama has built his campaign on the promise of reform, the need to change the culture of American political life, to take on the special interests that undermine government's effectiveness and erode trust in the system itself,
Politician Obama rose through a Chicago machine that is notoriously the most corrupt in the country. As David Freddoso writes in a brilliantly cogent and measured book, The Case Against Barack Obama, the angel of deliverance from the old politics functioned like an old-time Democratic pol in Illinois. He refused repeatedly to side with those lonely voices that sought to challenge the old corrupt ways of the ruling party.
Speechmaker Obama talks about an era of bipartisanship, He speaks powerfully about the destructive politics of red and blue states.
Politician Obama has toed his party's line more reliably than almost any other Democrat in US politics. He has a near-perfect record of voting with his side. He has the most solidly left-wing voting history in the Senate. His one act of bipartisanship, a transparency bill co-sponsored with a Republican senator, was backed by everybody on both sides of the aisle. He has never challenged his party's line on any issue of substance.
Speechmaker Obama talks a lot about finding ways to move beyond the bloody battlegrounds of the “culture wars” in America; the urgent need to establish consensus on the emotive issue of abortion.
Politician Obama's support for abortion rights is the most extreme of any Democratic senator. In the Illinois legislature he refused to join Democrats and Republicans in supporting a Bill that would require doctors to provide medical care for babies who survived abortions. No one in the Senate - not the arch feminist Hillary Clinton nor the superliberal Edward Kennedy - opposed this same humane measure.

Gerald Baker

John Batchelor: Obama's Plumbers

Clarice Feldman: Obama and the Annenberg Files: The Mystery Deepens

Have you heard about the team Obama sent to Alaska to dig up dirt on Palin. They'll have to do better than this. P.S. Details on this non-scandal from Instapundit.

The Democratic Party gamble in this election was hedged on a bet that the Obama campaign could maintain the media’s focus and the electorate’s attention on “The One” to divert attention from all of his attached inside-the-Beltway strings. That illusion has been shattered. For the first time in this campaign, Obama is playing catch-up.
Senator McCain has responded by going all in with Gov. Sarah Palin. Instead of a promise of future change and breaking with politics as usual, McCain has delivered it. The desperation on Obama’s part is evident today as the headlines are about his comments that he really is more experienced than her — the very discussion that Obama and his supporters had desperately hoped to avoid.

Patrick Poole on the Palin pick