Texas still leads nation in rate of uninsured residents...

But the numbers are misleading, said John Goodman, president of the National Center for Policy Analysis, a right-leaning Dallas-based think tank. Mr. Goodman, who helped craft Sen. John McCain's health care policy, said anyone with access to an emergency room effectively has insurance, albeit the government acts as the payer of last resort. (Hospital emergency rooms by law cannot turn away a patient in need of immediate care.)

"So I have a solution. And it will cost not one thin dime," Mr. Goodman said. "The next president of the United States should sign an executive order requiring the Census Bureau to cease and desist from describing any American – even illegal aliens – as uninsured. Instead, the bureau should categorize people according to the likely source of payment should they need care.

"So, there you have it. Voila! Problem solved."

I shouldn't need to explain why this comment is so ridiculous, but I will anyway. First, Mr. Goodman seems seriously confused about the difference between health care and health insurance. You see, Mr. Goodman, health care is what you might get if you go to an emergency room, or a clinic, or a regular doctor, or something like that. Health insurance is supposed to help you pay for it.

You know what happens if you are having a heart attack and you go to the emergency room and they treat you? They send you a bill. Which, if you have insurance, you can try to get your insurance to pay. Otherwise, the hospital expects you to pay for it. Sure, you might not have the money to pay for it, but that does not stop the hospital from trying to collect it, including nasty things like destroying your credit or sending the bill to a collections agency that will hound you night and day.

And, if they don't succeed in collecting the money from you, the hospital either eats the cost or gets money from the government -- the care itself doesn't magically cost nothing just because it came from an emergency room. In fact, care from an emergency room is usually far more expensive than similar care from another source. In part that's because of what an emergency room is for: saving your life right this very minute. You can't really go to the emergency room for, say, a routine prescription.

Which is another incredibly stupid thing about this statement -- where on earth did Mr. Goodman get the idea that the only kind of health care people need is the kind of immediate, right now, save-your-life care that emergency rooms are required to give? Does he, or anybody he knows, ever go to the doctor? Do they get checkups? Screenings? Flu shots? Prescriptions? Do they seek medical assistance to manage diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol? Does he know anyone who's ever been treated for cancer? Because I'm pretty sure that you can't get any of that in an emergency room.

Finally, this is moronic from a public relations standpoint. Not only does it perpetuate the image of Republicans as sociopaths indifferent to human suffering, but also it demonstrates a bizarre lack of seriousness on matters of policy. His cavalier wording, "Voila! Problem solved" makes the whole thing sound like a joke.

For utter cluelessness this is up there with Phil Gramm's "nation of whiners" comment, although I think it has an even higher moronitude factor. What's up with McCain surrounding himself with idiots, anyway? Is it to make himself look smarter in comparison?

Speaking of which, Sarah Palin -- wow, what a piece of work. The more I see of her, the more I become convinced that she is exactly like George W. Bush, only more so. Bush concentrate. She seems to have his attitude toward leadership, anyway -- it's about getting other people to do what you say. All power, no responsibility. Like how little kids imagine being president.

This means that she is disturbingly popular among certain groups, such as the rabid Republican base and Internet trolls and raging misogynists. Also, has anyone else out there noticed the Republican double standard in full swing? The very same people who fell all over themselves making tacky sexist Hillary Clinton comments seem to be the ones all huffed up over the "sexism" of anyone who dares to criticize Palin or suggest she is in any way unfit to be president.

In other news: the FBI predicted as early as September 2004 that the booming business in shaky mortgages had to potential to be an "epidemic" with "as much impact as the S&L crisis."

But nobody listened because the agent who made this report also had an obsession with aliens and bizarre meta-government conspiracies.

(By the way, did you know that John McCain was one of the Keating Five?)

The FBI was pretty early to catch on -- earlier than The Housing Bubble Blog, earliest post December 2004, but, not earlier than the folks over at iTulip.com, who called it in August of 2002.

And they were all well before this guy:

Washington Post, Thursday, October 27, 2005; Page D01

U.S. house prices have risen by nearly 25 percent over the past two years, noted Ben S. Bernanke, currently chairman of the president's Council of Economic Advisers, in testimony to Congress's Joint Economic Committee. But these increases, he said, "largely reflect strong economic fundamentals," such as strong growth in jobs, incomes and the number of new households.

I remember reading quotes like this in 2005 and wondering just how dumb they thought the American people were -- I mean, incomes might have been rising, but they were not rising by 25 percent over two years.

Overpriced real estate -- just like overvalued stocks -- are a bit like a game of musical chairs. Wait, better: hot potato. It is possible, if you aren't deeply in denial, to see the bubble forming very early. So you know the music is going to stop at some point, but you also know that there's going to be a lot of money to be made by selling at the top of the bubble. The game is to sell at the last possible moment before prices start to go down again. Time it right and you end up rich. Time it wrong and you end up with a rapidly cooling potato that nobody wants.

This provides incentives -- maybe perverse incentives -- for the very people who are most likely to notice the bubble forming (investors) to deny the bubble's existence.

Also, it seems to me that there were political forces fueling this bubble, especially in the later stages. After the stock bubble collapse, we were probably due for a bit of a recession anyway, greatly exaggerated by the aftermath of 9/11. I believe Bush wanted a sort of Reagan-like scenario, where the economy could go deeply into recession during 2001-2002 and then be bouncing back by the time he was up for election in 2004. If you review Bush's rhetoric during the 2000 election, and early in 2001, he seemed to be actively pushing the idea that we were in a recession. And why not? It was early enough in his presidency that he could still blame it on Clinton.

But, by 2003-2004, the economy needed to be seen to be recovering. Other than the already bubblicious housing market, I don't think it was. So, even though other indicators suggested that he tighten the federal money supply, Chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan kept interest rates at historic all-time lows, and even (in a speech early in 2004) urged lenders to offer home purchasers a greater variety of "mortgage product alternatives." Hello, impending sub-prime market collapse.But it kept things looking good -- to some people at least -- for a while longer. Long enough for Bush to get in for a second term. Then, in January 2006, Greenspan quit.

I think he knew what he was doing.