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OK, leave on one side the caricature of Obama, with the usual mirror-image fallacy (we want smaller government, therefore liberals just want bigger government, never mind what it does); there we go with the “Barney Frank did it” story. Deregulation, the explosive growth of virtually unregulated shadow banking, lax lending standards by loan originators who sold their loans off as soon as they were made, had nothing to do with it — it was all the Community Reinvestment Act, Fannie, and Freddie.

Look, this is one of the most thoroughly researched topics out there, and every piece of the government-did-it thesis has been refuted; see Mike Konczal for a summary. No, the CRA wasn’t responsible for the epidemic of bad lending; no, Fannie and Freddie didn’t cause the housing bubble; no, the “high-risk” loans of the GSEs weren’t remotely as risky as subprime.

This really isn’t about the GSEs, it’s about the BSEs — the Blame Someone Else crowd. Faced with overwhelming, catastrophic evidence that their faith in unregulated financial markets was wrong, they have responded by rewriting history to defend their prejudices.

This strikes me as a bigger deal than whether Rubio slurped his water; he and his party are now committed to the belief that their pre-crisis doctrine was perfect, that there are no lessons from the worst financial crisis in three generations except that we should have even less regulation. And given another shot at power, they’ll test that thesis by giving the bankers a chance to do it all over again.

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Asked in Philadelphia about the decision by Pope Benedict XVI to resign later this month, the high profile Catholic said: “I am not running.”

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Fake news fools again.

Another journalist fell prey to a fake story on a satirical website, and reported it as news. This time, a blogger for the Washington Post reported—wrongly—that Sarah Palin, the former Republican candidate for vice president who recently parted way with Fox News, had moved on to the Al-Jazeera network to reach millions of “devoutly religious people.”

Oops.

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This is President Obama doing an exploding fist bump with someone Sen. Mark Kirk (R – Ill.), who had a stroke in 2012, after the president’s arrival and before his speech. That’s right: not just an exploding fist bump, an exploding fist bump with a Republican. The state of our union is dope, y’all.

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