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Politics : John McCain for President -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RetiredNow who wrote (3969)	10/9/2008 10:00:48 PM
From: puborectalis	Respond to of 6579

Biden: McCain's Latest Plan Bails Out Banks By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Filed at 9:44 p.m. ET ST. JOSEPH, Mo. (AP) -- Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Biden said Thursday that Republican John McCain keeps switching responses to the economic crisis and now advocates a plan for troubled mortgages that would ''reward banks and lenders for their greedy behavior.'' Biden has increasingly tried to paint McCain as ''lurching'' from one position to another in a bid to convince voters that he would be incapable of addressing the nation's economic woes. ''Now he's gone to the point of actually wanting to reward banks and lenders for their greedy behavior,'' Biden said. ''Ladies and gentlemen, this is not a steady hand.'' McCain has proposed to devote $300 billion -- nearly half the recently enacted financial rescue package -- to buying troubled mortgages at face value from financial institutions. McCain promotes it as a way to help homeowners. But Barack Obama's running mate said the real winners would be the banks that made the bad loans. ''He's going to spend $300 billion of your money so the banks don't lose a single penny. I'm not making this up -- I know it sounds like fiction -- but I'm not making this up,'' Biden told several hundred supporters at Missouri Western State University. ''That's not bailing out the homeowner, you're bailing out the bank.'' McCain spokeswoman Wendy Riemann said Biden's criticism was an example of ''putting politics above the interests of the people.'' ''The homeownership resurgence plan proposed by Sen. McCain represents no new expense to the taxpayer, but refocuses priorities to more directly assist the homeowners on Main Street who are suffering instead of the greed on Wall Street,'' Riemann said. McCain's campaign has changed its mortgage plan. When first distributed, the plan called for the government to buy failed mortgages at discounted rates. Conservatives had pushed for that language because many of the homes are not worth the amount mortgaged. But the campaign deleted that line Wednesday, which means the government would pay the full value of the mortgage. Biden's event was the first of four campaign rallies scheduled over two days in the swing state of Missouri, where recent polls have showed the race about even. The first two events -- in St. Joseph and the Kansas City suburb of Liberty -- are in swing counties that narrowly backed Democrat Al Gore in the 2000 elections but switched to Republican President Bush four years later when he won Missouri by a more convincing margin. The latter two events -- in the capital of Jefferson City and in Springfield -- are in reliably Republican areas. All four areas have been registering new voters at a faster pace than the statewide average. En route to a later event at William Jewell College in Liberty, Biden detoured for some coffee, handshaking and photos at a locally owned bookstore and coffee shop. Neighboring business owner Rick Bradford happened to walk in about the same time and paid for Biden's $2.75 cup of vanilla latte so he could brag to his friends about having bought coffee for the potential vice president. Bradford said he was ''still on the fence'' in the election, but leaning toward Obama-Biden because of the economy. Since spring, Bradford said, he lost about 20 percent of his commercial cleaning contracts because his clients were looking for ways to save money in their own businesses. ''I feel more optimistic that Obama will have a bigger impact on turning the situation around,'' Bradford said. At a nighttime rally under a pavilion at a Jefferson City park, Biden denounced McCain for ''ugly inferences and unbecoming personal attacks'' against Obama, without offering specifics. McCain, campaigning in Wisconsin on Thursday, asserted that Obama has not been truthful in describing his relationship with Vietnam-era radical William Ayers. Obama has denounced Ayers and his past violent actions and views.