• techPresident – Daily Digest: ________ for Obama
• Student groups face registration challenges - Youth Vote '08
• The Latest Right Wing Assault on Higher Ed, or "Those who make revolutions by halves do but dig themselves a grave." | Future Majority
• Sarah Silverman Backs Obama /// Buzz & Viral Marketing Agency ★★★Vanksen|Culture-buzz
• Black Youth Vote! Blog: Bow Wow Partners with Black Youth Vote!
• Congress poised to pass Internet radio legislation
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• Renee Hartley, YDA V.P. to join Shawn P. Williams Now on Blog Talk Radio
• Rock the vote from your couch - Focus
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• Op-Ed Columnist - Revolt of the Nihilists - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com
• Presidential Debate Tweets, Analyzed - Boing Boing
• Students Fight for Their Right to Vote
• Progressives for Obama: Youth Vote: Critical Battleground Everywhere
• Making Sense of the College Republican National Committee Budget | Future Majority
• Students Fight for Their Right to Vote
• History of U.S. Gov’t Bailouts - ProPublica
• BotherVoting.org
• McCain Camp Blames Obama For Bailout Failure (VIDEO)
• Washington Wire - WSJ.com : McCain Blames Obama and Democrats, Despite Lopsided Vote
• Voter registration efforts intensify as deadlines loom - Youth Vote '08
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• Congress in your pocket - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)
• The Daily Texan - Student voter discrimination provokes congressional hearing
• Politics: Vote Ahead of Time with an Absentee Ballot
• e.politics: online advocacy tools & tactics » Watching Conservatives Revolt against Palin Online

I went through the full text of the failed Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, AKA the Bailout Bill, and here is my overview.

The program that would be created by this bill is called the Troubled Assets Relief Program, or TARP. The program would purchase “troubled assets” from financial institutions. A trouble asset is defined as any mortgage or other financial instrument whose purchase would promote market stability. It’s a pretty broad definition.

An institution is not allowed to sell an asset to the Treasury for a price greater than what it paid for it in order to prevent companies from profiting from the program.

The Secretary of the Treasury is required to establish a program to insure troubled assets of financial institutions. This appears to be one of the compromises that provides an alternative to purchasing assets.

The Secretary is supposed to take into consideration the interests of the taxpayers, providing stability to financial markets and the banking system to protect jobs and retirement security, the need to keep families in their homes, providing assistance to all institutions regardless of size in order to protect smaller institutions and those that serve low and middle-income Americans.

The bill would create the Financial Stability Oversight Board which reviews the implementation of the bill.

Throughout the bill there are a number of clauses that require frequent reporting of progress at all levels of the program.

Any profits from the sale of troubled assets are required to be put toward paying down the national debt.

If the Secretary needs to hire contractors those contractors should be minority and woman-owned business to the maximum extent possible.

The Secretary is required to develop a program to help prevent future foreclosures by encouraging mortgage companies to modify their loans, as well as using loan guarantees and credit enhancement.

In terms of golden parachute compensation, any institution whose assets are bought directly by the Treasury may not provide them. If assets were bought at an auction, golden parachute payments face a 20% tax and prevent payments of above $500,000 from being lessened by tax deductions.

The Secretary is encouraged to reach out to other countries to implement their own versions of the act.

The Secretary would encourage private institutions to purchase troubled assets.

Passing the bill would authorize $700 billion to purchase troubled assets, but only $250 billion would be available immediately. The President would have to send a certification to Congress to increase the amount to $350 billion, and then once again send a certification to increase the amount to $700 billion. If the President requests the $700 billion amount, Congress has 15 days to pass a Joint Resolution of Disapproval if they do not want the increase. If that Resolution passes, the maximum amount remains $350 billion. It is important to not that these numbers refer to the maximum dollar amount of troubled assets the Treasury is allowed to hold at one time.

The Comptroller General of the United States is required to monitor the program and present reports to Congress. The Comptroller is also required to initiate a study on the role that leveraging and deleveraging by financial institutions played in the current crisis. Leveraging is the practice of taking on excessive debt in order to initiate growth, and deleveraging occurs when a company attempts to pay off its existing debt due to slower than expected growth.

The act calls for judicial review of the Secretary of the Treasury and TARP in order to make sure that all actions are within the law.

The authority of the act is set to expire on December 31, 2009, though Congress is able to extend the effective date to no later than two years from the date of passage, which is effectively just short of an additional year.

The act calls for the creation of a Special Inspector General for TARP who is appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate. The Special Inspector audits and investigates the actions of the Secretary of the Treasury in carrying out the act.

The act would amend the United States code to raise the limit on public debt to $11,350,000,000,000. Yup, over 11 trillion dollars.

The act amends the National Housing Act, also known as  Hope for Homeowner, by increasing the eligibility of the act to help prevent foreclosures.

A Congressional Oversight Panel would be created consisting of 5 members. The Majority and Minority Leaders of the House and Senate each appoint 1 member. The fifth member is jointly appointed by the Speaker of the House and the Senate Majority Leader after consulting with the minority leaders. The five members would be outside experts. The panel can hold hearings and take sworn testimony on the state of the markets and the actions taken by TARP.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Act would be amended to included stronger provisions penalizing against institutions that falsely claim to be covered by FDIC insurance.

Federal financial regulatory institutions would be required to cooperate with the FBI.

The Financial Services Regulatory Relief Act of 2006 would take effect immediately. It is currently not set to take effect until October of 2011. The summary I read indicates that the act allows the Federal Reserve to pay interest on its reserves.

The Security and Exchange Commission would be authorized to suspend mark-to-market accounting. Mark-to-market accounting is the practice that Enron used to cook their books. Essentially the concept is that you have a futures contract that doesn’t mature for another 10 months, so you don’t know what the actual value is going to be. If you marked the contract to market, you would value it at the day’s market price. Companies have used this to come up with arbitrary valuations in order to balance their accounts. The bill would also call for a study on mark-to-market accounting and how it impacts the quality of financial information.

In 5 years the President is required to submit a proposal to Congress that recovers from the financial industry any losses taken by taxpayers.

That’s my summary of what the bill does. Unfortunately there isn’t really a way to sum it all up in a paragraph or two. If you have any questions I’ll do my best to answer them for you. Leave them in the comments.

Earlier today the Bailout Bill was defeated in the House, falling short of the 218 votes necessary for passage. Despite the fact that a majority of Democrats voted for the bill and a majority of Republicans voted against it, the GOP, especially Rep. Eric Cantor, are blaming Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats for the failure.

The Republican claim is that Nancy Pelosi delivered a “hyperpartisan floor speech” that led some of their members to switch their votes to no. Of course, it doesn’t say much about your commitment to solving a problem when you don’t vote for what your supposedly believe is the solution because you didn’t like what someone said.

Rep. Barney Frank railed on the GOP for this excuse:

“Well if that stopped people from voting, then shame on them,” he said. “If people’s feelings were hurt because of a speech and that led them to vote differently than what they thought the national interest (requires), then they really don’t belong here. They’re not tough enough.”

Here is the part of Pelosi’s speech that led the GOP to put feelings first instead of country:

“They claim to be free market advocates when it’s really an anything-goes mentality: No regulation, no supervision, no discipline. And if you fail, you will have a golden parachute and the taxpayer will bail you out. Those days are over. The party is over,” Pelosi said.

“Democrats believe in a free market,” she said. “But in this case, in its unbridled form, as encouraged, supported, by the Republicans — some in the Republican Party, not all — it has created not jobs, not capital. It has created chaos.”

There are a lot of political undercurrents at play here that have resulted in today’s failure.

A lot of Republicans are afraid of taking the political risk in supporting the bill:

“We’re all worried about losing our jobs,” Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., declared in an impassioned speech in support of the bill before the vote. “Most of us say, ‘I want this thing to pass, but I want you to vote for it — not me.’ “

This bill provides some Republicans the opportunity to oppose President Bush in an attempt to separate themselves from his unpopularity.

Another political undercurrent involves inter-GOP politics. Rep. Eric Cantor has been posturing himself to challenge Rep. Boehner’s leadership in the election for Minority Leader.

The Republicans do not want this to be a bipartisan measure. For this to truly be bipartisan, both sides would need to provide a similar percentage of votes for passage. What the Republicans want to do is pass the bailout, but do it with the least amount of Republican votes possible. This way, if there is political fallout from the bill, the Republicans can blame the Democrats for it. If both sides vote in approximately equal percentages both parties would have to own the consequences of the bill.

McCain aides are now trying to turn this against Barack Obama, saying that this failure happened because Obama only “phoned it in.” Unfortunately for McCain, it was the Republican side that failed to deliver the votes. If McCain was so concerned about this bill passing, shouldn’t he have spent time convincing the four Republican members of Congress from his home state of Arizona that all voted against the bill?

• Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Survey on Young Evangelicals | Future Majority
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• Slashdot | Be Part of the 2008 Presidential Youth Debate

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• Pandora Lives a Little Longer, House Passes Webcaster Act - ReadWriteWeb
• Home: where the vote is - The Boston Globe
• C-span: C-SPAN 'Debate Hub' Is the Political Social Media Web 2.0 Uber Geek's Wet Dream
• Weston teen elects to make a change - The Advocate
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• LIVE from Debate08, its Young Voters (Everyday Citizen)

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• Pandora Issues a "Call to Arms" to its Listeners - ReadWriteWeb
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• Klein: Obama Wins Debate On Tactics and Strategies - TIME
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• New Media Crashes the Presidential Debate - ReadWriteWeb
• Presidential Campaign 2008 - Paula Villescaz blogs on the election - sacbee.com
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• Memo to young voters: Make a dash to the polls - Collegenews.
• Tasty Blog Snack - Esquire and Rock The Vote
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• Students to Secretary Paulson: Bail Out Distressed Borrowers, Not Banks - Chronicle.com
• Poll: Young people who use landlines are more conservative than those who use mobile phones
• collision detection: At Amherst college, 1% of first-year students have landlines, 99% have Facebook accounts
• Festival the Debate | Future Majority
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• gary vaynerchuk » When do you know you have a community? - my 2 minute take on life
• KMPH Fox 26 | The Youth Vote Takes Center Stage At Fresno Sate
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• Creating Gen-Y Magic: Gen-Y Political Hot Seat with Kevin Bondelli

So this is the web video that the McCain campaign put out 15 seconds after the debate ended. It attacks Barack Obama for saying John McCain is right. Here is why I think it is stupid.

First, the video makes it look like that by virtue of agreeing with John McCain on something you aren’t ready to lead. Agreeing with John McCain on a lot of things certainly implies questionable judgment, yet I don’t think that was the message they were going for.

Second, it’s misleading. Every time Obama said he agreed with McCain on something, he followed up with how he disagreed with McCain on the big picture or the way to address the problem. It’s like someone saying “America needs to be energy independent” and another saying “I agree that we need to be energy independent, but your plan isn’t the right way to get there.”

Third, it attacks the concept of bi-partisan cooperation. If anything Obama is showing where there is some common ground, which would be the basis of coming to consensus across party lines to find solutions to America’s challenges. This ad shows that when it comes to working across party lines, McCain is all talk. This is why the members of the two parties rarely work together. As soon as they do it becomes fodder for political attacks.

Here is a video created by the Huffington Post that shows Obama calling McCain out when he was dead wrong, and this poor judgment has cost our country dearly.

Here are some screenshots from the online polls from a number of sites asking the question “who won tonight’s debate.”

Chicago Tribune

Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Michigan Live

Politico

CNN

Rocky Mountain News

Twitter has caught on to the mainstream and a number of Republicans are using it to attack young voters. Here is a small selection that has popped up through a search of the words “youth vote.”

gnj46 - If Youth of the nation vote for Obama, that shows your they have small minds

Seriously, check your spelling/grammar before accusing a demographic of having small minds.

aataxi - Youth Vote = uninformed

If you want to check out the back and forth over Twitter during the debate, check out the election 2008 Twitter page for a zeitgeist.

P.S. Stop making the assumption that every voter under the age of 30 is out getting blasted on every Friday night. Seriously.

My name is Heather Brown and I am the President of Young Democrats of Nevada.

This year we are making history all over the country, students are mobilized and energized and want to make the difference this year!!!

We are working with College Democrats of America to do two separate invasions into Nevada on October 3rd-5th.

We are inviting all of our surrounding states to come into Nevada to come to either Northern Nevada (Reno Area) or Southern Nevada (Las Vegas Area).

Nevada is an important state this year!! We have a real opportunity to turn Nevada Blue in the Presidential race and to also add two Democrats to the House of Representatives.

Invasion Dates:
Friday October 3rd - Sunday October 5th

Travel:
We will be providing transportation for everyone who wants to make a difference!!

Housing:
We will be providing Housing for every student.

We are going to make history in so many ways this year, and with your help we are going to WIN this November.

Please send out this information to all of your members. This is an open invitation to all you are interested.

Feel free to contact me with any questions that you might have.
Email: brownh@collegedems.com