Part of the problem with the assinine bailout that just occured was that bad loans were handed out by banks. These include not only banks taking advantage of customers, but also the government forcing banks to give loans to those who normally wouldn't pass the smell test for loans of such proportions.

As has been the buzz on the net the last couple days, Obama is directly involved in this fiasco. In 1994, he sued Citibank, pressuring them with charges of racism for not giving loans to poorer folks in the inner city. Nevermind the truth of these charges, the banks were extorted into giving said loans, determining that they'd lose more business from the bad PR. Remember - it takes ten times the effort to refute a false story, which is the reason why negative political ads work.

The group Obama worked with, ACORN, as noted by the New York Post, were instrumental in helping to undermine the economy and bring us where we are today.

The seeds of today's financial meltdown lie in the Community Reinvestment Act - a law passed in 1977 and made riskier by unwise amendments and regulatory rulings in later decades.

CRA was meant to encourage banks to make loans to high-risk borrowers, often minorities living in unstable neighborhoods. That has provided an opening to radical groups like ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) to abuse the law by forcing banks to make hundreds of millions of dollars in "subprime" loans to often uncreditworthy poor and minority customers.

Any bank that wants to expand or merge with another has to show it has complied with CRA - and approval can be held up by complaints filed by groups like ACORN.

In fact, intimidation tactics, public charges of racism and threats to use CRA to block business expansion have enabled ACORN to extract hundreds of millions of dollars in loans and contributions from America's financial institutions.

Why does ACORN sound farmiliar you ask? Because in the original bailout package, the Democrats included funding for them as an earmark. Indeed, giving money to the folks who got us here in the first place will do tons to help.