RNC: Mailing to Fla. Democrats a 'gimmick'

In a conference call Wednesday to discuss election preparations, Republican National Committee officials were asked about the recent mailing to long-time Florida Democrats that featured a "voter registration tracking form" and listing their affiliation as "unconfirmed." The mailing has sparked fears among some Democrats that the GOP is creating a database to challenge some voters' eligibility on Election Day, but party officials said that is absolutely not their intent.

"In effect, what it is is a fundraising gimmick," RNC general counsel Sean Cairncross said. "It's something that says 'Our system that shows you are a Republican. If you are a Republican, please send us a donation.' That's all it does ... It does not touch the voter's registration. It is not drawn on any sort of state list. It is our internal mailing list. It has been mailed every year since, I believe, 1997. It's simply a direct-mail fundraising piece, and frankly it raises a good deal of money."

Florida Democrats say it appears the mailing went mainly to older voters, and several who contacted the St. Petersburg Times said they were life-long Democrats who had no idea how their names could be in any Republican Party database. Secretary of State Kurt Browning has called the mailing "unfortunate" because of its potential to make some voters question the validity of their registrations.   

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Comments

If the press believes this line of spin, I would like to sell them some really prime land in the middle of the Everglades. Oh, and by the way, the fundamentals of our economy are strong.

[Caged voter in Ohio]

I've heard those lies somewhere before, or some others just like them.

Did they mention the "gimmick" of cancelling the debate for Friday?

Attention GOP... your "gimmick" over the past 8-years (aka: Dubya) has ruined America.

Good job you un-American treasonous reprobates!

So, like McCain, the mailing lies.

[Stupid Ploy]

Please, please don't debate me!

http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/M/MCCAIN?SITE=FLPET&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2008-09-24-15-19-06

Gimmick? Here's a gimmick: Baxter Trollman, I mean Troutman, just got dumped by his fiance and won't be getting married next month. That's right, the inane proposal we were all forced to watch on the floor last year ends with the bride needing more time. More time with other men than Baxter.

you guys suck at living.

total fail.

here's a gun and a bullet, time to hit reset.

"Republican presidential nominee John McCain challenged rival Barack Obama on Wednesday to suspend their heated campaign, postpone Friday's debate..."

... because McCain just found out that "debate" wasn't that stuff you put on the end of your fishing hook!

Just another example of what happens when the Republicans cut back on regulations. They want less regulations except in areas of education, which they want to control and make faith based. Women's rights and gay rights those need more regulation according to the republicans. They don't want regulate elections because they don't want to count everyone's vote if they can help it. The banks don't need regulation just look how well they are doing now without it. Wall street and the banks want you and I to bail them out. Who is going to give us money now that our home values have gone down. Who will bail out the person who is now unemployed because the republicans allowed big business to send so many jobs out of the country while still giving business tax breaks. What about the cut backs in the FDA which allows unsafe meat and unsafe drugs to get into the stores. Doesn't your safety mean anything to these people? The list goes on and on. The republicans would want you to believe less regulation is better and now we all can see how well that has worked. They want you to believe they are for small government yet the budget deficit is massive and about to get ever bigger. Don't listen to the lies. Banks and business can not be trusted to regulate themselves.

Anyone hear about the "gimmick" of Obama being elected a US Senator but hardly ever showing up to vote and doing his JOB!?!?

[True Conservative]

10:28 you should check your facts before you post because John McCain is the current winner in the Senate for missed votes, weighing in at a whopping 64.1% to Barack Obama's 45.9%. It's a disgrace on both their parts but since I know your feelings about not showing up to vote now, I'm sure that you will be fair and balanced in equating McCain guilty of a "gimmick" in his senate job also. If you are intellectually honest you will have no other choice.

[Putnam's Fundraiser]

Cong. Putnam - the 3rd most powerful Republican in the US House of Reps and who sits on the House Financial Services Committee, was hanging out in Nantucket this weekend while the "worst economic crisis since the Great Depression" was pummeling the United States.

What was Putnam doing there? He was having a $2500 per person campaign fundraiser.

While Rome burned, Cesar-in-waiting was eating gourmet food and drinking micro-brews. Not in DC working on the plan that will cost tax payers upwards of $1.8 trillion or in the District, parts of which are about to hit 8% unemployment. Nope, he was in Nantucket enjoying the weekend.

Here are the details of the event in the honor of the "Boy From Bartow." http://politicalpartytime.org/party/2894/

Oh, and some are saying that the same event planning firm that ran this fundraiser is the exact same firm that was caught up in the Delay and Abramoff scandal.

Remember republicans are for smaller government just not for smaller government spending. LOOK AT THE NATIONAL DEBT THAT THEY CREATED!

[the truth]

How A Clinton-Era Rule Rewrite Made Subprime Crisis Inevitable.

One of the most frequently asked questions about the subprime market meltdown and housing crisis is: How did the government get so deeply involved in the housing market?

The answer is: President Clinton wanted it that way.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, even into the early 1990s, weren't the juggernauts they'd later be.

While President Carter in 1977 signed the Community Reinvestment Act, which pushed Fannie and Freddie to aggressively lend to minority communities, it was Clinton who supercharged the process. After entering office in 1993, he extensively rewrote Fannie's and Freddie's rules.

In so doing, he turned the two quasi-private, mortgage-funding firms into a semi-nationalized monopoly that dispensed cash to markets, made loans to large Democratic voting blocs and handed favors, jobs and money to political allies. This potent mix led inevitably to corruption and the Fannie-Freddie collapse.

Despite warnings of trouble at Fannie and Freddie, in 1994 Clinton unveiled his National Homeownership Strategy, which broadened the CRA in ways Congress never intended.

Addressing the National Association of Realtors that year, Clinton bluntly told the group that "more Americans should own their own homes." He meant it.

Clinton saw homeownership as a way to open the door for blacks and other minorities to enter the middle class.

Though well-intended, the problem was that Congress was about to change hands, from the Democrats to the Republicans. Rather than submit legislation that the GOP-led Congress was almost sure to reject, Clinton ordered Robert Rubin's Treasury Department to rewrite the rules in 1995.

The rewrite, as City Journal noted back in 2000, "made getting a satisfactory CRA rating harder." Banks were given strict new numerical quotas and measures for the level of "diversity" in their loan portfolios. Getting a good CRA rating was key for a bank that wanted to expand or merge with another.

Loans started being made on the basis of race, and often little else.

"Bank examiners would use federal home-loan data, broken down by neighborhood, income group and race, to rate banks on performance," wrote Howard Husock, a scholar at the Manhattan Institute.

But those rules weren't enough.

Clinton got the Department of Housing and Urban Development to double-team the issue. That would later prove disastrous.

Clinton's HUD secretary, Andrew Cuomo, "made a series of decisions between 1997 and 2001 that gave birth to the country's current crisis," the liberal Village Voice noted. Among those decisions were changes that let Fannie and Freddie get into subprime loan markets in a big way.

Other rule changes gave Fannie and Freddie extraordinary leverage, allowing them to hold just 2.5% of capital to back their investments, vs. 10% for banks.

Since they could borrow at lower rates than banks due to implicit government guarantees for their debt, the government-sponsored enterprises boomed.

With incentives in place, banks poured billions of dollars of loans into poor communities, often "no doc" and "no income" loans that required no money down and no verification of income.

By 2007, Fannie and Freddie owned or guaranteed nearly half of the $12 trillion U.S. mortgage market — a staggering exposure.

Worse still was the cronyism.

Fannie and Freddie became home to out-of-work politicians, mostly Clinton Democrats. An informal survey of their top officials shows a roughly 2-to-1 dominance of Democrats over Republicans.

Then there were the campaign donations. From 1989 to 2008, some 384 politicians got their tip jars filled by Fannie and Freddie.

Over that time, the two GSEs spent $200 million on lobbying and political activities. Their charitable foundations dropped millions more on think tanks and radical community groups.

Did it work? Well, if measured by the goal of putting more poor people into homes, the answer would have to be yes.

From 1995 to 2005, a Harvard study shows, minorities made up 49% of the 12.5 million new homeowners.

The problem is that many of those loans have now gone bad, and minority homeownership rates are shrinking fast.

Fannie and Freddie, with their massive loan portfolios stuffed with securitized mortgage-backed paper created from subprime loans, are a failed legacy of the Clinton era.