Category: politics

News of US politics

A virtually undetectable penis

Seth Anderson0 comment

I don’t know, is that something you’d put on your resume1 ? Especially since it is your employer saying it about you?

Lonely Zenith

The constantly offended assholes at the Parents Television Council have complained to the FCC about the brief, accidental nudity on last week’s Survivor Gabon episode, in which Marcus’ genitalia was briefly visible during a challenge.

Citing the the accidentally broadcast of Libra’s “fuck” on Big Brother 10, the PTC says in a press release that “CBS has once again decided to violate the public trust,” and calls the flash “shocking and purposeful.” Because seeing a human body part will forever destroy their souls and the souls of the precious, innocent children who happen to be Googling about penises, the PTC wants an apology and for CBS to hunt down the person who dared let this happen. People: It’s a penis, and it’s only shocking to those people who don’t get to see one regularly, either their own or someone else’s.

[From reality blurred + CBS calls Marcus’ penis “virtually undetectable”]

The Devil and Pope

Don’t the PTC folks have anything better to do? Rhetorical question, of course. And to think, if Sarah Palin becomes President (or even Vice President), the Christian Taliban will have a high ranking politician on their side, taking their phone calls, and expanding their hateful message.

Footnotes:
  1. CBS lawyers responded “This was a completely unintentional, inadvertent and fleeting incident that was virtually undetectable when viewed in real time. In the first 24 hours after the broadcast, before freeze-frame images were widely posted online, we received one viewer comment from the 13 million who watched the telecast.” [↩]

Make-Believe Maverick

Seth Anderson0 comment

Reckless and dishonest, that about sums the man up. Also, if McCain hadn’t been Navy royalty, he would have never flown, nor kept his wings after destroying two planes in questionable circumstances.

Tim Dickinson of Rolling Stone has a long, good article about the life and career of John McCain. A few excerpts:

This is the story of the real John McCain, the one who has been hiding in plain sight. It is the story of a man who has consistently put his own advancement above all else, a man willing to say and do anything to achieve his ultimate ambition: to become commander in chief, ascending to the one position that would finally enable him to outrank his four-star father and grandfather.

In its broad strokes, McCain’s life story is oddly similar to that of the current occupant of the White House. John Sidney McCain III and George Walker Bush both represent the third generation of American dynasties. Both were born into positions of privilege against which they rebelled into mediocrity. Both developed an uncanny social intelligence that allowed them to skate by with a minimum of mental exertion. Both struggled with booze and loutish behavior. At each step, with the aid of their fathers’ powerful friends, both failed upward. And both shed their skins as Episcopalian members of the Washington elite to build political careers as self-styled, ranch-inhabiting Westerners who pray to Jesus in their wives’ evangelical churches.

In one vital respect, however, the comparison is deeply unfair to the current president: George W. Bush was a much better pilot.

[Keep reading Make-Believe Maverick : Rolling Stone]

Incompetent, reckless, and dishonest: not characteristics of good presidents.

But the subsequent tale of McCain’s mistreatment — and the transformation it is alleged to have produced — are both deeply flawed. The Code of Conduct that governed POWs was incredibly rigid; few soldiers lived up to its dictate that they “give no information . . . which might be harmful to my comrades.” Under the code, POWs are bound to give only their name, rank, date of birth and service number — and to make no “statements disloyal to my country.”

Soon after McCain hit the ground in Hanoi, the code went out the window. “I’ll give you military information if you will take me to the hospital,” he later admitted pleading with his captors. McCain now insists the offer was a bluff, designed to fool the enemy into giving him medical treatment. In fact, his wounds were attended to only after the North Vietnamese discovered that his father was a Navy admiral. What has never been disclosed is the manner in which they found out: McCain told them. According to Dramesi, one of the few POWs who remained silent under years of torture, McCain tried to justify his behavior while they were still prisoners. “I had to tell them,” he insisted to Dramesi, “or I would have died in bed.”

Dramesi says he has no desire to dishonor McCain’s service, but he believes that celebrating the downed pilot’s behavior as heroic — “he wasn’t exceptional one way or the other” — has a corrosive effect on military discipline. “This business of my country before my life?” Dramesi says. “Well, he had that opportunity and failed miserably. If it really were country first, John McCain would probably be walking around without one or two arms or legs — or he’d be dead.”

Once the Vietnamese realized they had captured the man they called the “crown prince,” they had every motivation to keep McCain alive. His value as a propaganda tool and bargaining chip was far greater than any military intelligence he could provide, and McCain knew it. “It was hard not to see how pleased the Vietnamese were to have captured an admiral’s son,” he writes, “and I knew that my father’s identity was directly related to my survival.” But during the course of his medical treatment, McCain followed through on his offer of military information. Only two weeks after his capture, the North Vietnamese press issued a report — picked up by The New York Times — in which McCain was quoted as saying that the war was “moving to the advantage of North Vietnam and the United States appears to be isolated.” He also provided the name of his ship, the number of raids he had flown, his squadron number and the target of his final raid.

and the confession: McCain was1 the only one of his group of 600 POWs to confess to war crimes. I can’t criticize someone breaking down under torture – that is what torture is designed to accomplish – break down the resistance of weak willed men, but is this really John McCain’s main qualification for running the country?

In the company of his fellow POWs, and later in isolation, McCain slowly and miserably recovered from his wounds. In June 1968, after three months in solitary, he was offered what he calls early release. In the official McCain narrative, this was the ultimate test of mettle. He could have come home, but keeping faith with his fellow POWs, he chose to remain imprisoned in Hanoi.

What McCain glosses over is that accepting early release would have required him to make disloyal statements that would have violated the military’s Code of Conduct. If he had done so, he could have risked court-martial and an ignominious end to his military career. “Many of us were given this offer,” according to Butler, McCain’s classmate who was also taken prisoner. “It meant speaking out against your country and lying about your treatment to the press. You had to ‘admit’ that the U.S. was criminal and that our treatment was ‘lenient and humane.’ So I, like numerous others, refused the offer.”

“He makes it sound like it was a great thing to have accomplished,” says Dramesi. “A great act of discipline or strength. That simply was not the case.” …

The brutal interrogations that followed produced results. In August 1968, over the course of four days, McCain was tortured into signing a confession that he was a “black criminal” and an “air pirate.” “

“John allows the media to make him out to be the hero POW, which he knows is absolutely not true, to further his political goals,” says Butler. “John was just one of about 600 guys. He was nothing unusual. He was just another POW.”

McCain has also allowed the media to believe that his torture lasted for the entire time he was in Hanoi. At the Republican convention, Fred Thompson said of McCain’s torture, “For five and a half years this went on.” In fact, McCain’s torture ended after two years, when the death of Ho Chi Minh in September 1969 caused the Vietnamese to change the way they treated POWs. “They decided it would be better to treat us better and keep us alive so they could trade us in for real estate,” Butler recalls.

By that point, McCain had become the most valuable prisoner of all: His father was now directing the war effort as commander in chief of all U.S. forces in the Pacific. McCain spent the next three and a half years in Hanoi biding his time, trying to put on weight and regain his strength, as the bombing ordered by his father escalated. By the time he and other POWs were freed in March 1973 as a result of the Paris Peace Accords, McCain was able to leave the prison camp in Hanoi on his own feet.

Even those in the military who celebrate McCain’s patriotism and sacrifice question why his POW experience has been elevated as his top qualification to be commander in chief. “It took guts to go through that and to come out reasonably intact and able to pick up the pieces of your life and move on,” says Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former chief of staff, who has known McCain since the 1980s. “It is unquestionably a demonstration of the character of the man. But I don’t think that it is a special qualification for being president of the United States. In some respects, I’m not sure that’s the kind of character I want sitting in the Oval Office. I’m not sure that much time in a prisoner-of-war status doesn’t do something to you. Doesn’t do something to you psychologically, doesn’t do something to you that might make you a little more volatile, a little less apt to listen to reason, a little more inclined to be volcanic in your temperament.”

John McCain has never been interested in consistency, another aspect of his dice-throwing personality.

In June of this year, McCain reversed his decades-long opposition to coastal drilling — shortly before cashing $28,500 from 13 donors linked to Hess Oil. And the senator, who only a decade ago tried to ban registered lobbyists from working on political campaigns, now deploys 170 lobbyists in key positions as fundraisers and advisers.

Then there’s torture — the issue most related to McCain’s own experience as a POW. In 2005, in a highly public fight, McCain battled the president to stop the torture of enemy combatants, winning a victory to require military personnel to abide by the Army Field Manual when interrogating prisoners. But barely a year later, as he prepared to launch his presidential campaign, McCain cut a deal with the White House that allows the Bush administration to imprison detainees indefinitely and to flout the Geneva Conventions’ prohibitions against torture.

What his former allies in the anti-torture fight found most troubling was that McCain would not admit to his betrayal. Shortly after cutting the deal, McCain spoke to a group of retired military brass who had been working to ban torture. According to Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former deputy, McCain feigned outrage at Bush and Cheney, as though he too had had the rug pulled out from under him. “We all knew the opposite was the truth,” recalls Wilkerson. “That’s when I began to lose a little bit of my respect for the man and his bona fides as a straight shooter.”

But perhaps the most revealing of McCain’s flip-flops was his promise, made at the beginning of the year, that he would “raise the level of political dialogue in America.” McCain pledged he would “treat my opponents with respect and demand that they treat me with respect.” Instead, with Rove protégé Steve Schmidt at the helm, McCain has turned the campaign into a torrent of debasing negativity, misrepresenting Barack Obama’s positions on everything from sex education for kindergarteners to middle-class taxes. In September, in one of his most blatant embraces of Rove-like tactics, McCain hired Tucker Eskew — one of Rove’s campaign operatives who smeared the senator and his family during the 2000 campaign in South Carolina.

…

“I’m sure John McCain loves his country,” says Richard Clarke, the former counterterrorism czar under Bush. “But loving your country and lying to the American people are apparently not inconsistent in his view.”

Footnotes:
  1. as far as I know [↩]

McCain gets testy

swanksalot0 comment

Angry McLame strikes:

Tuesday, during a question and answer session with the editorial board of the Des Moines Register in Iowa, that infamous McCain temperament seemed to surface. The entire interview is fascinating, with McCain appearing far less restrained and carefully managed than he has for much of the campaign.

McCain became testy when asked about whether Sarah Palin had enough experience to assume the role of president if necessary, answering, “So, with due respect, I strongly disagree with your premise that she doesn’t have experience and knowledge and background.” McCain added that Palin has “been a member of the PTA, been a governor, been a mayor.” Then, seeming to realize that he’d lost his cool somewhat, McCain said “I’ll stop there.” He went on anyway, however, concluding, “But you and I just have a fundamental disagreement and I’m so happy that the American people seem to be siding with me.”

McCain became especially sarcastic when asked about backlash from some conservatives over his selection of Palin. “Really? I haven’t detected that,” he said. “Now if there’s a Georgetown cocktail party person who quote calls himself a conservative and doesn’t like her, good luck.”

And adding to the confrontational nature of the interview, McCain challenged a questioner who asked whether the Straight Talk Express had been derailed by less than truthful attacks on Obama. Saying that he “always had 100 percent truth” in his political career, McCain supported the claims made in one of his campaign ads, that Obama supports comprehensive sex education for children in kindergarten. Many news organizations have judged that a perversion of Obama’s actual policy stance on the issue.

Perhaps McCain’s reaction to his Iowan inquisitors came out of the fact that he seems to have little chance of winning the state. Polling results consistently show Barack Obama firmly in the lead there.

A clip from the interview is [here]. The entire series of videos can be found on the Des Moines Register’s Web site. (While you’re there, you can also check out the paper’s footage of the Iowa Oktoberfest festivities, which included keg rolling and beer balance beam competitions, assuming you can watch that sort of thing without being jealous because you’re stuck at a computer.

[From McCain gets testy]

Hey, sign me up for beer balance beam contests, I’d do great! As far as Angry McSame, I would doubt if that aspect of his personality emerged in the constrained atmosphere of a debate, but I’d love to see it. Well, as long as it doesn’t cause McCain to have another stroke. I don’t wish death on McCain, just electoral defeat, humiliation even.

Brad Sherman and the Skeptics Caucus

Seth Anderson0 comment

David Corn publishes Brad Sherman’s reason for voting now on the Paulson Plan for Wall Street friends of Paulson:

a leader of a subset of these Democrats–dubbed the Skeptics Caucus–has been Representative Brad Sherman, of the San Fernando Valley (District 27).

Sherman attracted several dozen members to a series of meetings and briefings this past weekend, as the bill was being negotiated by others. As he left Congress after the vote on Monday, he told me that the most effective argument he made was that the bailout bill was darn weak when it came to recouping the taxpayers’ $700 billion. He cited a memo he circulated among colleagues that pointed out that taxpayers were not likely to see that money–either in profits from a future selloff of the bad assets the Treasury would buy from Big Finance Firms or in a revenue bill (meaning some sort of tax on the finance industry). In other words, he challenged Paulson and his own party leaders on a fundamental of the bill: this is not a handout, but a timely investment.

[From CQ Politics | David Corn – Why Some Democrats Said No to the Bailout ]

Here’s Sherman’s memo:

TAXPAYERS HIGHLY UNLIKELY TO RECOUP ANY OF THE COSTS — Brad Sherman 9/29/08

We know that the Bailout Bill allows million-dollar-a-month salaries to executives of bailed-out firms, and it allows hundreds of billions to be used to buy toxic assets currently held by foreign investors. But we are told: “don’t worry, this $700 billion bill won’t cost us anything. We will get it all back next decade through a revenue bill.”

I. Section 134 of the Bailout Bill merely says that the President must submit a revenue bill to Congress in 2013 that recoups from the financial industry the taxpayers’ net losses.

a. If the President has any revenue ideas he actually likes, he would submit them to us anyway.

b. If the President submits revenue ideas only because he is forced to by Section 134, he will send it to us with a note saying that he believes they are bad for the country, and reserves the right to veto.

c. The Bailout Bill does not automatically enact any revenue increases, nor protect a revenue bill from filibuster or veto.

II. Congress is unlikely to pass a tax increase bill of hundreds of billions of dollars in 2013.

a. Tax increase bills are anathema to many.

b. 41 Senators can block the plan. We’re giving Wall Street enough money to hire 4100 lobbyists.

c. In recent years, Wall Street has easily defeated every attempt to close every loophole that they exploit, no matter how pernicious-even the abusive use of Cayman Island tax havens by hedge fund managers, who thereby pay zero tax.

III. Any tax on the financial industry would make the good banks pay a huge tax so we can recoup what we gave to the bad banks.

a. Section 134 says the tax will be on “the financial industry.” It does not provide for a tax on just those firms that received bailout payments.

b. A bank that doesn’t get a bailout payment still pays the tax.

c. Community banks and perhaps credit unions will also be subject to the tax, so we can recoup what we gave to Wall Street.

IV. It is impossible to draft a tax that hits only those firms that received bailout payments, and even more impossible to draft one that taxes each bank in proportion to how much money we lost on its toxic assets.

a. There are no provisions to even keep track of losses on each asset purchased as it is managed over the years. Assets purchased from several

banks will be pooled, managed, and sold together, and we can never know how much we lost on assets purchased from any one bank.

b. If three banks in the year 2013 have the same income and size and operations, they will all pay the same tax-even if one got no bailout payments, a second got a million dollars, and a third got a billion dollars.

c. Many bailed-out firms won’t exist in 2013.

1. Some will go under.

2. Some bailed-out firms are only shell companies. Example: Assume the Bank of Shanghai has $30 billion in toxic assets. It will sell these to the tiny subsidiary it has incorporated in California. The subsidiary will then sell these to the Treasury in 2009, and will be dissolved long before 2013.

3. Many bailed-out firms will still be unprofitable in 2013.

4. Some bailed-out firms will move offshore before 2013.

d. The whole purpose of the bill is to improve the balance sheets of the bailed-out firms. If particular bailed-out firms owe us the money they receive, they would have to list this as a liability, and the bill would fail to improve their balance sheets.

In 2013 we will not pass a tax bill that imposes hundreds of billions of dollars of taxes on the financial services industry, including those banks that got no bailouts, community banks, and credit unions. A tax bill imposed only on those entities that got bailout payments is impossible to draft, and contrary to the purposes of the Bill.

If it were easy to pass a bill to recoup hundreds of billions of dollars through taxes to be imposed in 2013 and thereafter, then provisions imposing such taxes would be in today’s bill.

Wall Street gets their money now, and we get it back never.

Palin Was A Formidable Foe in Alaska Debates

swanksalot0 comment

Palin sounds she should be more than able to hold her own in tomorrow’s debates, so there is no reason for Joey the Shark to hold back. I hope he demolishes her.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska — There are two things people here remember about Sarah Palin’s debating style during her race for governor two years ago.

One is the stack of color-coded cue cards she took to the podium for help whenever she was asked a policy question. The other is how quickly she was able to shuck those props, master the thrust-and-parry of jousting with her opponents and inquisitors, and project confidence to an audience of television viewers watching from home.

“That’s the Sarah Palin I remember from the 2006 debates: positive, confident and upbeat,” recalls Libby Casey, an Alaska public-radio reporter who served as a debate moderator on two occasions that year.

…

But Gov. Palin’s telegenic gifts could help neutralize some shortcomings. Ms. Casey, the public-radio reporter, credits Gov. Palin’s training as a TV sportscaster for her ability to connect with a broadcast audience at home.

In her debates during the 2006 campaign, Ms. Palin would often thank the reporters serving as debate moderators — invariably addressing them by their first names, and adding a compliment for their insightful questions. She would then turn immediately to the camera to speak directly to a home audience.

“Like a sportscaster, she’s learned to be good at dropping the g’s, and relating to the viewer as a fan,” Ms. Casey explains. “You know: ‘It’s a big game this weekend and it’s gonna be tough. But we’re all in this together.'”

[From Palin Proved to Be Formidable Foe in Alaska Debates – WSJ.com] [Digg-enabled link for non WSJ subscribers]

She is no delicate flower, let’s stop treating her as anything but an odious politician, with questionable judgements.

Henry Paulson and his Deal

swanksalot0 comment

William Greider on the bailout of Wall Street Greed:

All of the political leaders blessed the deal, but the House of Representatives spit it out anyway. The Wall Street bailout is so odious to public opinion, the “people’s house” rejected it today, 228-205. The fever chart in Wall Street–better known as the stock market–swooned instantly, with the Dow falling 700 points. The political bedlam in Washington is as real as it gets.

The party leaders will probably try again. I doubt they have the energy or courage to renegotiate the terms in any serious way. A majority of Democrats voted for the measure, but most Republicans took a walk. They will be scolded–and pounded by captains of industry and finance–for being “irresponsible.” But I doubt the public will agree.
In all of elected Washington, representatives are closest to the people and they know a vote for this outrageous measure is going to end the careers of some colleagues–maybe many of them. This time, the dissenters can claim principle and say they are voting with the folks, while also voting to save their own hides.
It adds another deep shock to the system, both in politics and economics, but what an invigorating moment for democracy.

[From Henry Paulson’s Deal]

If the situation was so dire, why did the markets recover on Tuesday?

Keene Block

And of course, the money spigot rules both parties:

Republicans, as usual, are playing their own political game–trying to evade the blame, now and later. Their proposal for an insurance program that financial firms must pay for is ludicrous. It’s like trying to buy hurricane insurance on your house after the storm has already blown it away. But the GOP already is in ruin, so its members are thinking long-term survival and creating a predicate for revival. Blame the government, blame Wall Street, blame the go-along Democrats–maybe people will start liking Republicans again.

Democrats are still in recovery from twenty-five years of deferring impotently to the wise men of Wall Street and retreating tactically from conservative initiatives. I see this crisis as the Democrats’ hesitant first step toward rediscovering their nerve and abandoned convictions. They are not there yet. But this crisis is not over. I predict they will get another opportunity to stand up for something and rather soon.

Palin and Six Thousand Year Old Earth

Seth Anderson2 Comments

I would be very interested if Sarah Palin was asked, point blank, in the upcoming debate if she believes the Earth is 6,000 years old. If she has conviction of her beliefs, she shouldn’t lie in response just to obscure and deny her religion, but have the courage to actually say what she believes.

Dinosaur Invasion
[Dinosaur Invasion – click to embiggen, if you aren’t easily frightened]

ANCHORAGE — Soon after Sarah Palin was elected mayor of the foothill town of Wasilla, Alaska, she startled a local music teacher by insisting in casual conversation that men and dinosaurs coexisted on an Earth created 6,000 years ago — about 65 million years after scientists say most dinosaurs became extinct — the teacher said.

After conducting a college band and watching Palin deliver a commencement address to a small group of home-schooled students in June 1997, Wasilla resident Philip Munger said, he asked the young mayor about her religious beliefs.

Palin told him that “dinosaurs and humans walked the Earth at the same time,” Munger said. When he asked her about prehistoric fossils and tracks dating back millions of years, Palin said “she had seen pictures of human footprints inside the tracks,” recalled Munger, who teaches music at the University of Alaska in Anchorage and has regularly criticized Palin in recent years on his liberal political blog, called Progressive Alaska.

The idea of a “young Earth” — that God created the Earth about 6,000 years ago, and dinosaurs and humans coexisted early on — is a popular strain of creationism.

Though in her race for governor she called for faith-based “intelligent design” to be taught along with evolution in Alaska’s schools, Gov. Palin has not sought to require it, state educators say.

[From Palin treads carefully between fundamentalist beliefs and public policy – Los Angeles Times]

Palin has not sought yet, but she’s probably just biding her time.

Palin is flailing

Seth Anderson0 comment

One of the most compelling reasons not to vote for John McCain is because of his perplexing selection of a neophyte as Vice President. Sarah Palin should not be anywhere near the levers of power in Washington, especially with Cranky John looking fairly old already, and the election hasn’t even occurred.

Bob Herbert transcribes the train-wreck Palin Couric interview from this week:

When asked again this week about her puerile linkage of foreign policy proficiency and Alaska’s proximity to Russia, this time by Katie Couric of CBS News, here is what Ms. Palin said she meant:

“That Alaska has a very narrow maritime border between a foreign country, Russia, and on our other side, the land — boundary that we have with — Canada.”

She went on, but lost her way midsentence: “It’s funny that a comment like that was kind of made to — cari — I don’t know, you know? Reporters …”

Ms. Couric said, “Mocked?”

“Yeah, mocked,” said Ms. Palin. “I guess that’s the word. Yeah.”

It is not just painful, but frightening to watch someone who could become the vice president of the United States stumbling around like this in an interview.

Ms. Couric asked Ms. Palin to explain how Alaska’s proximity to Russia “enhances your foreign policy credentials.”

“Well, it certainly does,” Ms. Palin replied, “because our, our next-door neighbors are foreign countries, there in the state that I am the executive of. And there—”

Gently interrupting, Ms. Couric asked, “Have you ever been involved in any negotiations, for example, with the Russians?”

“We have trade missions back and forth,” said Ms. Palin. “We do. It’s very important when you consider even national security issues with Russia. As Putin rears his head and comes into the airspace of the United States of America, where do they go? It’s Alaska. It’s just right over the border. It is from Alaska that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia, because they are right there. They are right next to our state.”

It was surreal, the kind of performance that would generate a hearty laugh if it were part of a Monty Python sketch. But this is real life, and the stakes couldn’t be higher. As Ms. Palin was fumbling her way through the Couric interview, the largest bank failure in the history of the United States, the collapse of Washington Mutual, was occurring.

[From Bob Herbert – Palin’s Words Raise Red Flags – Op-Ed – NYTimes.com]

Not to mention that the trade missions allegedly conducted with Russia are so top secret, nobody will discuss them on the record.

I spent some time on the Governor’s Web site seeking more details about her trade negotiations with Russia. There’s a press release about Gov. Palin’s meeting with a trade mission from the Yukon, but nothing about Russia anywhere in the archives. Tony Knowles, a Democrat who was governor from 1994-2002, led a trade mission — back in 1997, while Palin was running Wasilla — to the remote island of Sakhalin, off the coast of Siberia. That seems to be about it for Russia-Alaska trade missions lately.

When asked for examples of trade missions with Russia that have taken place under Palin’s watch, gubernatorial spokeswoman Kate Morgan refused to answer the question. Morgan said she could not legally discuss any trade missions with me because she’s a state employee and I had first heard this claim through the Couric interview, which was part of Palin’s campaign for the vice-presidency. When I pointed out that any trade missions that occurred would have been official state business, Morgan again noted that I had learned about them in the context of the campaign. “The law is very stringent,” she said, and recommended that I contact the McCain-Palin campaign. Two spokespeople did not respond to requests for comment.

Debate 1 Notes

Seth Anderson0 comment

I’d score the first debate as mostly a draw, which means Obama, as the new guy, won. I don’t recall any sound bites tailor-made for repetition on the 24 hour news shows, nor any obvious gaffes. McCain couldn’t help himself from lying a few times about Obama’s record, but that’s typical behavior. McCain has never been constrained by the truth.

As far as demeanor, McCain seemed petty by not ever looking directly at Obama, nor calling him by his first name. Perhaps McCain was afraid of mangling the word, “Barack”? McCain did mangle nearly every world leader’s name1. McCain fidgeted and smirked while Obama spoke, while Obama was calm and cool, and able to speak in coherent sentences. Again, Obama won this aspect of the debate by looking presidential.

NYT

More than anything, Mr. McCain seemed intent on presenting Mr. Obama as green and inexperienced, a risky choice during a difficult time. Again and again, sounding almost like a professor talking down to a new student, he talked about having to explain foreign policy to Mr. Obama and repeatedly invoked his 30 years of history on national security (even though Mr. McCain, in the kind of misstep that no doubt would have been used by Republicans against Mr. Obama, mangled the name of the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and he stumbled over the name of Pakistan’s newly inaugurated president, calling him “Qadari.” His name is actually Asif Ali Zardari.).

…

But Mr. Obama seemed calm and in control and seemed to hold his own on foreign policy, the subject on which Mr. McCain was assumed to hold a natural advantage. Mr. Obama talked in detail about foreign countries and their leaders, as if trying to assure the audience that he could hold his own on the world stage. He raised his own questions about Mr. McCain’s judgment in supporting the Iraq war.

McCain made a big deal about earmarks, even as his own running mate requested millions of dollars in earmarks this year. Earmarks are not the biggest economic problem our country faces however, and represent a miniscule part of the annual budget2.

Obama managed to work in the point that McCain forgot who the president of Spain was, even though his delivery was not quite as harsh as it could have been3. For all of McCain’s vaunted foreign policy experience, he seems to have trouble remembering facts about places. McCain also seems to emphasize going to a country makes one an expert. Not sure how relevant setting foot on foreign soil and being escorted around by Secret Service equivalents in a dignitary’s motorcade is to actually learning details and nuance about a country. Similar reasoning to saying that one is a Russian expert because of proximity of one’s house to Russia. You learn more about a subject by reading about it, and talking to experts, at least in my experience. Simply setting foot in Afghanistan is not relevant. Also, Madeleine Albright is not a Republican, so McCain cannot claim her, especially when the Republicans used to ridicule her for attempting to have dialogue with North Korea.

As far as North Korea is concerned, our secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, went to North Korea. By the way, North Korea, most repressive and brutal regime probably on Earth. The average South Korean is three inches taller than the average North Korean, a huge gulag.

(via transcript of the debate)

A brief roundup of some pundit reaction to the debate here including this:

Jonathan Alter on MSNBC: The biggest loser? Sarah Palin. The debates set a standard she cannot live up to.

Footnotes:
  1. such as calling the new president of Pakistan “Qadari” instead of Zardari [↩]
  2. somewhere less than 1% [↩]
  3. though apparently McCain muttered under his breath, horse shit [↩]

Greed Derivatives

Seth Anderson0 comment

Hunter and Devilstower over at Daily Kos make a strong case that the billions involved in the bailout are not for the mortgages, but rather the derivatives from the mortgages.

And that’s where we get that math problem. 1% of all mortgages — the amount now in default — comes out to $111 billion. Triple that, and you’ve got $333 billion. Let’s round that up to $350 billion. So even if we reach the point where three percent of all mortgages are in foreclosure, the total dollars to flat out buy all those mortgages would be half of what the Bush-Paulson-McCain plan calls for.

Then we need to factor in that a purchased mortgage isn’t worth zero. After all, these documents come with property attached. Even with home prices falling and some of the homes lying around unsold, it’s safe to assume that some portion of these values could be recovered. In the S&L crisis, about 70% of asset value was recovered, but let’s say we don’t do that well. Let’s say we hit 50%. Then the real outlay for taxpayers would be around $175 billion.

Which, frankly, is a number that Wall Street should be able to handle without our help. After all, the top firms on Wall Steet payed out $120 billion in bonuses alone between 2000 and 2006. If they’ve got that kind of mad money, why do they need us to step in now? And why do they need twice as much as all the mortgages that are even likely to implode?

[From Daily Kos: What Is This Money Even For?]

No, not the mortgage, the derivatives:

And despite what we’ve been told, then, we can only presume that the problem is in fact not all the bad, scary subprime mortgages. And it’s not. Yes, a lot of people are finding themselves upside-down on their houses right now, but Paulson isn’t proposing we do squat to solve that — and even the “controversial” Democratic counterproposal, that we actually do at least a little something to help those people, after they’ve already gone bankrupt, is pathetically weak.

Instead, we’re getting a Wall Street bailout not of the mortgages, but of the absurd, speculative, economy-wrecking derivatives based on those mortgages, derivatives that investors and banks ravenously sold each other at unsupportable and quite-probably-crooked prices. Those derivatives, generally speaking, are “bets” on the state of the underlying mortgages. And they didn’t just bet wrong — they bet irrationally, based on presumptions of near-zero risks to those underlying mortgages. And worse, the big banks even — bafflingly — got special permission to overleverage themselves 40 to 1, all but assuring collapse if those derivatives went south. Which they did.

The whole bailout (bipartisan or not) still smells fishy to me.

Is that the best approach? I’m not convinced, and I’m more than a little angry at the Democrats for, once again, accepting what they are given and trying to tweak it rather than coming up with true counterproposals. Propping the housing market up from the bottom may be much cheaper than trying to prop up the entire derivatives market from the top, and would seemingly have the same stabilizing market effects. Taking equity in firms in exchange for taking their crappy, non-marketable products would, yes, seem the absolute least we could do — there must be an upside for the taxpayer in providing this trillion-dollar investment at the expense of ballooning our national debt and crippling public sector works for a decade or more. But that’s still weak tea, all things considered.

Not being talked about as much, though, is that we must allow overextended companies to fail. It is an essential part of our economy that economy-threatening recklessness on the part of speculators not be rewarded, and especially not be rewarded by the government. Any actions to stabilize the economy should indeed inject liquidity — but it’s not clear that injecting liquidity through the very companies most in trouble is sustainable or even rational.

Wild day, no deal

Seth Anderson0 comment

Damn, I wish there was video footage of this massive temper tantrum, and especially of Still-President Bush “struggling to maintain order”. What, he was yelling at folks? Offering to refill their sippy cups with Jim Beam? Why would anyone, on either side of the aisle, even bother to listen to Bush? He’s so obviously out of his element when the topic isn’t about blowing things up.

House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.) angrily accused the minority of trying to undercut Paulson by crafting a late-breaking alternative proposal—with the tacit support, Frank said, of Republican presidential candidate John McCain.

Both McCain and his Democratic rival, Sen. Barack Obama, would leave the White House without comment, and the meeting was described as among the wildest in memory. A beleaguered President Bush had to struggle to maintain order and reassert himself. And when Democrats left to caucus in the Roosevelt Room, Paulson pursued them, begging that they not “blow up” the legislation.

The former Goldman Sachs CEO even went down on one knee as if genuflecting, to which Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Cal.) is said to have joked, “I didn’t know you were Catholic.”

[From Wild day, no deal – David Rogers – Politico.com]

John McSame wants to make sure the whole charade turns into a partisan snipe-fest for his own reasons, and so he can avoid losing a debate to a better prepared candidate.

(via Whet Moser)

Coburn Hates Trains

Seth Anderson0 comment

Senator Tom (“Global Warming is a lot of crap“) Coburn hates trains in general, hates Amtrak in particular, and especially hates passengers on Amtrak and similar commuter trains. Coburn would be much happier if everyone drove Hummers to and from their jobs instead of taking the communistic commuter rail.

Waiting for You is Lonely

Legislation that would mandate collision-avoidance systems for trains is being blocked by Republican Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, who objects to a provision that would provide a major funding boost for Amtrak that was bundled together with the safety measures this week.

In a phone interview, Mr. Coburn said that in addition to the specific reservations he has over the increased spending in the rail package, which has an estimated cost of about $14 billion over five years, the $700 billion federal rescue plan makes fiscal discipline in other areas even more imperative.

“We’re on a short financial leash for at least the next couple of quarters,” Mr. Coburn said. “We have to start doing things now … that will make a difference for the future.”

Transportation leaders in Congress reached an agreement Wednesday on a long-pending package of bills related to rail safety and service. Supporters of increased funding for Amtrak’s passenger rail service hoped to overcome Mr. Coburn’s opposition by combining that measure with legislation that would attack railway safety problems highlighted by the Sept. 12 train crash in California that killed 25 people. The safety measures include increasing the number of federal railroad inspectors and limiting the consecutive hours train crews can work.

…

Mr. Coburn also opposes a provision that would steer $1.5 billion to the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, saying passengers and local authorities should fund mass-transit operations in the nation’s capital.

[From Senator Holds Up Bill on Train Safety Device – WSJ.com]

Money for Wall Street, but not a dime for safety measures for ordinary citizens. Lovely man, indeed. Too bad he’s in office until 2010 (unless of course some hinted-at scandals become public)

A Contrast

Seth Anderson0 comment

McCain’s weird day yesterday should be remembered for posterity. McCain just made voting for Obama a lot easier for a lot of on-the-fence people1. There is a definite contrast in styles between the two men, Obama has the Presidential demeanor2 in a way that John McCain could only wish he had.

Anyway, Henrik Hertzberg had this to say:

What a contrast yesterday. First, out comes McCain, looking drawn, jittery, and (to my admittedly jaundiced eye) guilty, with his announcement that he doesn’t want to debate on Friday because the financial crisis is too awful for a thing like politics to occur. He reads his statement and exits quickly. A couple of hours later, Obama appears. He looks and sounds like a President of the United States. He is preternaturally calm. He explains the chronology of the day: he called McCain at 8:30, the call was returned at 2:30, they discussed the idea of putting out a joint statement about the crisis. He says not a word about postponing the debate.

Then, unlike McCain, Obama takes questions. It becomes a full-fledged press conference. He eventually mentions the postponement. He says that during their phone call McCain had said it was something that ought to be looked at, and he had replied that they should get their joint statement out first. He makes it clear, in an offhand way, that McCain had blindsided him, but he does it without rancor. Perhaps there was a miscommunication, he suggests generously. He stresses his agreement with McCain that the crisis is neither Republican nor Democratic but American. He outlines some conditions he would like to see attached to the bailout bill but adds that both parties should refrain from loading it up with extraneous desiderata. He mentions a couple of specific examples of Democratic pet causes, including bankruptcy protection, that he doesn’t think should be in the bill. His manner with respect to the crisis is grave and businesslike, but he treats McCain’s debate-postponement demand as a minor matter that need not be taken too seriously. He notes dryly that both candidates have big airplanes with their names emblazoned and can easily travel to Oxford, Mississippi. He suggests that a potential President ought to be able to cope with more than one problem at a time.

[From Hendrik Hertzberg: Online Only: The New Yorker]

There’s more in that vein, if you’re interested, including an observation that Obama handled McCain’s cheap gambit with aplomb, by ignoring it.

Footnotes:
  1. not me, obviously, as I would abstain rather than vote for McCain, but you probably know somebody who isn’t quite sure if Obama is Presidential enough, mostly because they haven’t been paying much attention to the campaign yet [↩]
  2. again, whatever the hell that is. [↩]

Good Cash for Trash

swanksalot0 comment

Paul Krugman is concerned about the outrageous new Bush proposal to give unprecedented power to the Treasury Department without even a twinge of oversight. The entire article is well worth a read, but here’s a sample:

Some skeptics are calling Henry Paulson’s $700 billion rescue plan for the U.S. financial system “cash for trash.” Others are calling the proposed legislation the Authorization for Use of Financial Force, after the Authorization for Use of Military Force, the infamous bill that gave the Bush administration the green light to invade Iraq.

…

So let’s try to think this through for ourselves. I have a four-step view of the financial crisis:

1. The bursting of the housing bubble has led to a surge in defaults and foreclosures, which in turn has led to a plunge in the prices of mortgage-backed securities — assets whose value ultimately comes from mortgage payments.

2. These financial losses have left many financial institutions with too little capital — too few assets compared with their debt. This problem is especially severe because everyone took on so much debt during the bubble years.

3. Because financial institutions have too little capital relative to their debt, they haven’t been able or willing to provide the credit the economy needs.

4. Financial institutions have been trying to pay down their debt by selling assets, including those mortgage-backed securities, but this drives asset prices down and makes their financial position even worse. This vicious circle is what some call the “paradox of deleveraging.”

[From Paul Krugman – Cash for Trash – Op-Ed – NYTimes.com]

Paulson wants to focus on Step 4 (theoretically breaking the cycle of de-leveraging), but Krugman notes this will subsidize a massive windfall for financial corporations, their executives, and their remaining shareholders – all at taxpayer expense.

Krugman instead suggests intervention at Step 2: investing capital into the financial sector, but getting something in return – ownership. Ownership means if and when the financial corporations get back into profitability, the taxpayer will receive some return on investment, not just the executives who ran the financial sector into the ditch in the first place.

Loneliness is an ATM

Krugman concludes:

But Mr. Paulson insists that he wants a “clean” plan. “Clean,” in this context, means a taxpayer-financed bailout with no strings attached — no quid pro quo on the part of those being bailed out. Why is that a good thing? Add to this the fact that Mr. Paulson is also demanding dictatorial authority, plus immunity from review “by any court of law or any administrative agency,” and this adds up to an unacceptable proposal.

I’m aware that Congress is under enormous pressure to agree to the Paulson plan in the next few days, with at most a few modifications that make it slightly less bad. Basically, after having spent a year and a half telling everyone that things were under control, the Bush administration says that the sky is falling, and that to save the world we have to do exactly what it says now now now.

Loan Titans Paid McCain Adviser Nearly $2 Million

swanksalot0 comment

Since McCain is complaining about this article, I had to seek it out to see if I missed anything. Not really, just more of McSame.

Senator John McCain’s campaign manager was paid more than $30,000 a month for five years as president of an advocacy group set up by the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to defend them against stricter regulations, current and former officials say.

A 2004 photograph from a report by the Homeownership Alliance, an advocacy group for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, shows John McCain with Ken Guenther, a former chairman of the group, left, and David Lereah of the National Association of Realtors.

Mr. McCain, the Republican candidate for president, has recently begun campaigning as a critic of the two companies and the lobbying army that helped them evade greater regulation as they began buying riskier mortgages with implicit federal backing.

[From Loan Titans Paid McCain Adviser Nearly $2 Million – NYTimes.com]

McSame often lies about lobbyists and their connection to his campaign. Nothing new here.