But then a caller challenged Frank's continued insistence that the meltdown was brought on by Republican deregulation, citing the 1999 NY Times article concerning Clinton Administration efforts to force Fannie to ease mortgage standards in order to provide more minority and lower-income lending. The caller reminded Barney of his own words as ranking member from a 2003 Times piece reporting Bush's initiative to reign in Fannie and Freddie by creating new oversight under the Treasury Department:

The rule of thumb for fact checkers of Thursday night's vice-presidential debate was that every time Joe Biden sounded especially confident, he was saying something that wasn't true. Levin tracks the many lies, distortions and half truths Joe Biden used in the debate and the Obama campaign uses in ads to smear John McCain. The healthcare lies are especially revealing.

Shockingly, after the worst month of financial news in a generation, his frenetic and ineffectual response to the crisis, and two indecisive debates, he is within mid-single digits according to the RealClearPolitics poll average. It seems almost unbelievable that his candidacy would still be viable, and yet it is. So how should he spend the last four weeks of his campaign if he wants to stage the most remarkable comeback in presidential politics?

What follows is by no means comprehensive, but it does shed some much-needed light on a number of Obama's positions, statements, and associations about which he has been less than honest. We've attempted to boil each issue down to a succinct explanation with an accompanying, brief video clip-often starring Barack Obama in his own words. Before pulling the lever for someone who hopes voters will ignore his paper-thin resume, unsavory associations, and hard-left voting record, each citizen has a duty to do his due diligence.

Contrarian that I am, I'm voting for John McCain. I'm not talking about bucking the polls or the media consensus that it's over before it's over. I'm talking about bucking the rush of wet-fingered conservatives leaping to Barack Obama before they're left out in the cold without a single state dinner for the next four years.

In sum, Mr. Obama is proposing to use the tax code to substantially redistribute income -- raising tax rates on a minority of taxpayers to finance tax credits and direct income supplements to millions of others. How much revenue his higher rates would raise depends on how much less those high-earners would work, or how much they would change their practices to shelter their income from those higher rates. By contrast, Mr. McCain is proposing some kind of tax reduction for most Americans who pay taxes. He says he would finance those cuts by reducing the rate of growth in federal spending.

Comprehensive history of Obama's socialism, and the associations that influenced him.

The Great Depression of the 1930's tested America's political institutions like no other event in our history except the Civil War. Much as Lincoln saved the Union and established the symbols of American nationalism, so Franklin Delano Roosevelt (it is said) saved capitalism from itself and laid the framework for the American welfare state.

Fueled by easy credit, the real-estate market had been rising swiftly for some years. Members of Congress were determined to assure the continuation of that easy credit. Suddenly, the party came to a devastating halt. Defaults multiplied, banks began to fail. Soon the economic troubles spread beyond real estate. Depression stalked the land. The year was 1836.

Amity Schlaes, author, "The Forgotten Man," re the mistakes made by Herbert Hoover and/or FDR in 1931-1934 that deepened the recession into the Great Depression.  Amity identified the four errors, what I call the four horseman, as taxes, protectionism, class warfare, and the abuse of private capital so that it leaves the marketplace.  One of these four is already in place in the closing weeks of the Bush administration as a result of the extraordinary bullying session of October 13 at the grandiose office of Hank Paulson at Treasury when the nine biggest banks in the country were forced to accept Treasury billions in exchange for accepting the regulations and unknowns of the executive and the legislative branches.  Private capital is no longer safe from Congress, and in the 1930s the effect was to drive private capital into hiding.  

According to Reagan Economist Arthur Laffer: This administration and Congress will be remembered like Herbert Hoover. Twenty-five years down the line, what this administration and Congress have done will be viewed in much the same light as what Herbert Hoover did in the years 1929 through 1932. Whenever people make decisions when they are panicked, the consequences are rarely pretty. We are now witnessing the end of prosperity.

Speaking on a call-in radio show in 2001, you can hear Senator Obama say things that should profoundly shock any American - or at least those who have not taken the time to dig deeply enough into this man's beliefs and affiliations. Read the text or Hear it for yourself!

Quote from Obama: "I will cut investments in unproven missile defense systems. I will not weaponize space. I will slow our development of future combat systems. [snip] I will set a goal of a world without nuclear weapons. To seek that goal, I will not develop new nuclear weapons. I will seek a global ban on the production of fissile material. And I will negotiate with Russia to take our ICBM's off hair-trigger alert." Wow. Is Barack Obama planning a unilateral drawdown of U.S. forces? He says that's what he wants, and he sounds pretty clear about it to me.

All three liberal waves have transformed American expectations of the state. The spirit of the age is: Ask not what your country can do for you, demand it. Why can't the government sort out my health care? Why can't they pick up my mortgage?

The "change" he peddles is not new. We've seen it before. It is change that diminishes individual liberty for the soft authoritarianism of socialism. It is a populist appeal that disguises government mandated wealth redistribution as tax cuts for the middle class, falsely blames capitalism for the social policies and government corruption (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) that led to the current turmoil in our financial markets, fuels contempt for commerce and trade by stigmatizing those who run successful small and large businesses, and exploits human imperfection as a justification for a massive expansion of centralized government. Obama's appeal to the middle class is an appeal to the "the proletariat," as an infamous philosopher once described it, about which a mythology has been created. Rather than pursue the American Dream, he insists that the American Dream has arbitrary limits, limits Obama would set for the rest of us - today it's $250,000 for businesses and even less for individuals. If the individual dares to succeed beyond the limits set by Obama, he is punished for he's now officially "rich."

Stephen CalaBresi of the Federalist Society describes Obama's view of the Constitution, and what he means by "negative liberties" and "economic and social justice". Calabrese also discusses the situation with judicial appointments and how these opportunities for the socialists will move us towards Obama's dream of replacing the rule of law and equaility before the law with the law of Obama empathy. Calabrese's conclussion, "Nothing less than the very idea of liberty and the rule of law are at stake in this election. We should not let Mr. Obama replace justice with empathy in our nation's courtrooms".

So where is the new Obama administration likely to take us? Seven things seem certain: The U.S. military will withdraw from Iraq quickly and substantially, regardless of conditions on the ground or the obvious consequence of emboldening terrorists there and around the globe. Protectionism will become our national trade policy; free trade agreements with other nations will be reduced and limited. Income taxes will rise on middle- and upper-income people and businesses, and individuals will pay much higher Social Security taxes, all to carry out the new president's goals of "spreading the wealth around." Federal government spending will substantially increase. The new Obama proposals come to more than $300 billion annually, for education, health care, energy, environmental and many other programs, in addition to whatever is needed to meet our economic challenges. Mr. Obama proposes more than a 10% annual spending growth increase, considerably higher than under the first President Bush (6.7%), Bill Clinton (3.3%) or George W. Bush (6.4%). Federal regulation of the economy will expand, on everything from financial management companies to electricity generation and personal energy use. The power of labor unions will substantially increase, beginning with repeal of secret ballot voting to decide on union representation. Free speech will be curtailed through the reimposition of the Fairness Doctrine to limit the conservative talk radio that so irritates the liberal establishment. These policy changes will be the beginning of the Europeanization of America.