Quotes of the day

In the past dozen years, nearly every woman to win the Academy Award for Best Actress has broken up with her husband, boyfriend or lover -- some just months after thanking them from the award show stage.--Todd Venezia

The reality is that the economic meltdown began with federal government policies which kept interest rates artificially low and forced banks to abandon traditional lending practices in the name of home ownership for all. These policies started under the Clinton administration, and continued under the Bush administration. Democrats, including people like Barney Frank and Chris Dodd, fought hard to avoid Bush administration attempts to reign in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. I have spent most of my professional life suing Wall Street firms, so I have no sympathy for the many bad practices which have ripped off investors. But just because Wall Street has engaged in some bad practices does not mean Wall Street is responsible for everything that goes wrong in the economy. Wall Street was an accomplice in the housing bubble in the sense that the securitization of the mortgages provided a cash flow which allowed the bubble to grow. But honesty requires the acknowledgement that Wall Street did not create the housing bubble or cause it to burst. No bad mortgage lending practices, no housing bubble. No bad mortgage lending practices, no economic meltdown. No bad mortgage lending practices, no bad bets on the housing markets. It was the bad mortgage lending practices, stupid. The economic meltdown started with the people in government -- including many of the Democrats who now are pushing for "reform" -- who corrupted the credit practices of banks and other lenders in the name of progressive policies. The same policies which will cause our heath care system to collapse.--William Jacobson

And, via Jacobson, here are eight minutes of congressional quotes from past decade on government programs that were too big to fail; some real history: