Did Hillary eat too much chocolate at Easter or has she just had a temporarily daft moment? 

According to Reuters, "Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and other economic experts should determine whether the U.S. government needs to buy up homes to stem the country's housing crisis, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton will propose on Monday."

Proposing Greenspan for this position is definitely like putting the fox in charge of the hen house or having a surgeon who botched an operation do the repair.  He is part of the problem not the solution.

Here is an excerpt from an article I wrote on 12/18/07, "Alan Greenspan, former Federal Reserve chairman and Republican flunkie extraordinaire, played a key role in the mortgage crisis.  He promoted adjustable rate mortgages that were risky and other highly levered ownership propositions.  Greenspan is now trying to absolve himself by pointing the finger elsewhere, a hallmark of a true Bushite."

One from an article I wrote on 10/17/07, "As for Bush's plan to help homeowners who are facing foreclosure, it's Bushite Republicanism smoke and mirrors: it's much less than meets the eye and doesn't even extend to most of the problem loans.

"There were warnings about the housing bubble but this Republican right-wing administration, never slackers when it comes to assisting or cashing in on corporate greed and profits, ignored the cautioning advice.

"...Henry Paulson and all the other Bush political appointees, Alan Greenspan, and the Wall Street big boys could care less because political cronies bail out (with taxpayers' money or by borrowing that increases the trillions in deficits) wealthy crony perpetrators (political big donors) who return to shoot financial craps another day, unfettered and practically unregulated. It's working Americans who pay, lose, become poorer, and suffer."

And another I wrote on 2/19/08, "... Alan Greenspan, self-centered, Republican brown noser extraordinaire, the following, from a 2004 article, "Don't take mortgage advice from Alan Greenspan" by Bill Fleckenstein, captures the asinine former Fed chairman perfectly,

".....a Federal Reserve chairman who has demonstrated that he couldn't identify reckless behavior if it ran him over...

"...March 6, 2000....he waxed on about the wonders of technology and how it had brought us a new era and all that other stuff. Folks may not remember that date, but it was four days before the Nasdaq Composite (COMPX) hit its all-time high of 5,048.62. Despite the recovery over the past year ago, the composite is still down nearly 60% from the March 2000 peak.

"This is not the first time Easy Al has been way off. On March 7, 2000, I wrote a column called Alan Greenspan: Friend or Foe that chronicled some of his prior quotes, speeches and the like. It includes his Jan. 7, 1973, utterance (right before the recession that ranks as our worst, at least until we get through the one we're in but haven't completed): 'It is very rare that you can be as unqualifiedly bullish as you can be now.'

"And, there are other examples.....For instance, in 1984, he wrote a letter to Edwin Gray, then-chairman of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, advising the regulator to exempt Charles Keating's Lincoln Savings & Loan, a Greenspan client, from harsh federal regulations about its investments. He told Gray he should 'stop worrying so much' about such things as junk bonds, and that 'deregulation (of the savings & loan industry) was working just as planned.'

"As {economist Dean} Baker says of Greenspan, 'In fairness to Bernanke, most of the blame for the housing bubble rests on the shoulders of his predecessor, Alan Greenspan. However, Mr. Greenspan has fled the scene of the crime. (Actually he is still there, busily trying to rationalize his failures, but Greenspan is no longer accountable to Congress.)' "

And now Hillary Clinton proposes that Alan Greenspan, a Bushite loyalist and Ayn Rand acolyte, who was an integral part of and played a key role in the housing mortgage lending crisis, should be a member of an economic group to determine whether the government "needs to buy up homes to stem the country's housing crisis!"

Hillary is wrong, wrong, wrong about Alan Greenspan. Thought she was smarter than that. However, Greenspan was chairman of the Fed during the Clinton administration, so perhaps Hillary and Bill continue to hold him in such esteem that they have never noticed or ignored the fact that Greenspan, "couldn't identify reckless behavior if it ran over him," and even encouraged it.