What Now?

The bailout failed. Not sure how I feel about that-- I find myself strangely devoid of opinion.

If the only fallout was the DOW losing a thousand points, I'd give the proposed deal a Roman thumbs-down vote (death to the greedy people who screwed us!!). But the thought of my large multi-national employer not making payroll because banks aren't fronting any dough, well... that's an unthinkable shot of reality.

The politics of this are mind boggling. Dems could not be the only ones supporting the bill... it required bi-partisanship to pass what is essentially a Republican action (from Bush). The Republican and Democratic whips thought they could bring enough votes to the floor to pass it with a Democratic majority but -- get this -- Newt Gingrich was actively whipping against the vote in the name of ideology. I imagine John Boehner must have been tearing his hair out to hear Newtie accuse them all of being socialists. And then Nancy Pelosi gave a stupidly partisan speech (albeit the most mildly partisan speech I have ever heard in my LIFE), which the Republicans latched onto as an excuse for their failed vote delivery (like this is kindergarten and they got their widdle feelings hurted when she said the situation was a Bush failure). I never thought Obama and McCain as Senators were going to be able to do much to help with this House vote but McCain was out there yesterday morning taking credit for the vote after saying away from Capital Hill all weekend (no wonder he didn't realize the bill was on the ledge). It was a stupid idea that McCain was going to affect the Republican vote anyway... for all of his claims of leadership they don't like him and they never, ever will. Besides, Republican voters were registering very strongly (and vocally) against the bill. Meanwhile, Obama remained forcefully non-committal. The whole situation was like a giant incendiary ball destined to go down in flames.

So bottom line: Democrats brought more than half the votes, Republicans couldn't make their numbers (not even close). This iteration of the bill failed, maybe as it should have. Now what?

I have no idea how big of an issue this really is. Not only does Congress seem to not be reading this as a doomsday scenario worthy of suspending politics for, the DOW futures are UP this morning as I write by 200 points. What the hell???

Most economists, while agreeing that gov intervention is needed, say the bailout plan was inadequate to ward off the looming disaster. It's almost as if this bailout was doomed to fail from the get go, whether it died on the House floor or just ultimately failed to stop our economic meltdown.

My favorite economist, Nouriel Roubini, is looking pretty gloomy. Yesterday he said this:

It is obvious that the current financial crisis is becoming more severe in spite of the Treasury rescue plan (or maybe because of it as this plan it totally flawed). The severe strains in financial markets (money markets, credit markets, stock markets, CDS and derivative markets) are becoming more severe rather than less severe in spite of the nuclear option (after the Fannie and Freddie $200 billion bazooka bailout failed to restore confidence) of a $700 billion package: interbank spreads are widening (TED spread, swap spreads, Libo-OIS spread) and are at level never seen before; credit spreads (such as junk bond yield spreads relative to Treasuries are widening to new peaks; short-term Treasury yields are going back to near zero levels as there is flight to safety; CDS spread for financial institutions are rising to extreme levels (Morgan Stanley ones at 1200 last week) as the ban on shorting of financial stock has moved the pressures on financial firms to the CDS market; and stock markets around the world have reacted very negatively to this rescue package (US market are down about 3% this morning at their opening).

Let me explain now in more detail why we are now back to the risk of a total systemic financial meltdown…

Read his whole post here. Scary shit.

I have no idea where we go from here. Hopefully Bush will actually call on a few economists to help them get the bill right and then call on Congress to behave like big boys and girls and do what needs to be done. And if bad things do happen, maybe the American people will bother to look up from their favorite reality TV shows long enough to educate themselves about what's going to happen to us if no action is taken.

Palin Raising Money For Planned Parenthood

Last week a friend of mine passed along the viral email being reported below. The joke is that when you donate online to Planned Parenthood in someone's name, the site asks you to include their mailing address so they can send an automatically generated thank you note.

Sounds like Sarah Palin's mailbox might be starting to get pretty full.

The latest mark of what a polarizing figure Sarah Palin has quickly become: A viral email, of unknown origin, urging readers to contribute in Palin's name to Planned Parenthood has raised nearly a million dollars for the group.

From the press release:
Call it the ultimate in grassroots activity, a viral email urging people to donate to Planned Parenthood “in honor of Sarah Palin” generated more than 31,313 donations totaling more than three-quarters of a million dollars ($802,678) as of today. With contributions from all 50 states, more than two-thirds of the individuals making a contribution “in honor of Sarah Palin” are first-time Planned Parenthood donors.

That's an average donation of $25 per person.

Baked Alaska

I do believe I'm starting to grow rather fond of her.

COURIC: Why isn't it better, Governor Palin, to spend $700 billion helping middle-class families who are struggling with health care, housing, gas and groceries; allow them to spend more and put more money into the economy instead of helping these big financial institutions that played a role in creating this mess?

PALIN: That's why I say I, like every American I'm speaking with, were ill about this position that we have been put in where it is the taxpayers looking to bail out. But ultimately, what the bailout does is help those who are concerned about the health-care reform that is needed to help shore up our economy, helping the—it's got to be all about job creation, too, shoring up our economy and putting it back on the right track. So health-care reform and reducing taxes and reining in spending has got to accompany tax reductions and tax relief for Americans. And trade, we've got to see trade as opportunity, not as a competitive, scary thing. But one in five jobs being created in the trade sector today, we've got to look at that as more opportunity. All those things under the umbrella of job creation. This bailout is a part of that.

I especially love the part about how one in five jobs is now being created in the trade sector. That's friggen' awesome, man.

Shame On Drudge

Shame on Drudge for linking to this bullshit video. Freddie and Fannie did NOT cause the real estate bubble!! The real-estate bubble was caused by over-investment in the housing market because of freakishly low interest rates ("money for nothing"), lax lending practices by aggressively competitive lenders (just ask my hubby's real estate broker friends), fancy pantsy financial products pushed by financial institutions that underpriced risk to increase their profit, and sheer speculation.

Start with this: Half of all sub-prime loans originated outside of the Community Reinvestment Act. In fact, in 2005 and 2006 -- the years everyone was wildly jumping on the sub-prime bandwagon -- non-CRA lenders were financing sub-primes at twice the rate of CRA banks. Why? Because they thought it was extremely profitable to do so, that's why. And this idiotic video would have us believe lenders were forced against their will by the CRA to make the sub-prime loans that gave them record profits and netted BILLIONS in bonuses? Excuse me while I go howl with laughter!

Remember... sub-prime loans are just high-risk loans, and as such they carry a higher interest rate (in order to counter the risk to the lender). For example, when I bought my mobile home in 1987, my loan was a sub-prime loan. I paid a double digit interest rate because all mobile home financing is considered risky... sub-prime. What happened in the past decade is that lenders simply started disregarding the risk part of the equation. The higher yield sub-prime interest loans actually became desirable.

You know those big ol' JUMBO loans people used to finance their McMansions? Those are non-conforming loans (also sub-prime). Anything over $417K was outside the purview of the CRA... independent. Absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with Freddie/Fannie. Why did banks make those jumbo loans? Because they were very fucking profitable, that's why!

Freddie and Fannie are guilty of a lot of bad things and they definitely had a role to play in this mess but it is just politically convenient bullshit to say they are the cause of the problem. And the CRA did not cause the problems, either, with their regulated low-end loans.

The painful truth is that the entire financial institution thought they were smart enough to make risk obsolete by laundering it through the secondary mortgage market with CDOs and a bunch of CDSs. They were wrong. The post-dot-com investment in housing that was inspired by low interest rates created a housing bubble that made everyone feel wealthy overnight. They were wrong. They said if the stock market was doing well, the fundamentals must be strong despite our pathetic consumer driven economy. They were wrong.

The perfect storm has now given us the perfect disaster.

Forbes has done an excellent, simple write up on who's to blame in their online Investopedia. Please read it or any other good economics site. Do not rely on a dumb ass video that does nothing to help and only misinforms the public. Misinformation is not going to help us get out of this situation.

One last point. Forbes does not mention this but the 2005 bankruptcy legislation changed bankruptcy laws so that people could not declare bankruptcy and still keep their homes (unless they had second homes... those could be kept). This was done at the behest of the credit card companies but the unintended consequence is that folks no longer have ANY incentive not to walk away from their homes once they're over their heads. Score one for the bootstrap crowd!

The Traveling Class

More Palin-Couric interview tidbits are surfacing.

Here's Palin commenting on not having gotten a passport until she was 42:

"I'm not one of those who maybe come from a background of, you know, kids who perhaps graduated college and their parents get them a passport and a backpack and say, 'Go off and travel the world.' Noooo. I worked all my life. In fact, I usually had two jobs all my life, until I had kids. ... I was not part of, I guess, that culture."

She's definitely right with this one. Once you start having kids, unless you are well off enough to cart them around with you, your traveling days are mostly suspended. I am happy to report, however, that it is entirely possible to be brilliant and educated without ever leaving the United States.

Unfortunately for Palin, she is neither of those things.

The Alaska governor rolled her eyes when discussing how her comment "I can see Russia from my house," was, as Couric put it, "mocked" by reporters.

Couric pressed, asking why Russia's visibility enhances her foreign policy credentials.

"Well, it certainly does," Palin replied. "Our next-door neighbors are foreign countries, there in the state that I am the executive of."

Debate On

I think this is a very good thing for voters but... I don't think this is a good thing for Obama, necessarily.

Obama's conversational speaking style is horrible. Love him, I do... but his "errrr..." and "uhhhh..." habits just make me want to tear at my eyeballs. You can almost see the wheels turning in his brain and you can tell he's not just speaking rote talking points but it makes me want to yell at him to just please for the love of God spit it out, man!!!!

What If...

What if the $700B isn't really about bailing out banks... what if the $700B is really a bailout of the Federal Reserve?

There's something going on below the radar that's driving this panic by Those In The Know and they're not telling the rest of us. What is it?

Friday LOL

Mickey Kaus, a guy I love to hate, makes me laugh this morning:

Drama Queen: No convention today! ... OK, it's on! ... The economy's sound... No, wait, it's going to fall apart unless I go to Washington tomorrow! ... We need a commission! ... We need to fire somebody! ... Get me Andrew Cuomo! ... I want ten more debates! ... But let's postpone the one we've scheduled! ... Do you get the impression a McCain presidency would be a bit exhausting?

Oh Mickey, you're so fine... thanks, I needed that!

Helping Or Not Helping?

Leadership:

Senator John McCain had intended to ride back into Washington on Thursday as a leader who had put aside presidential politics to help broker a solution to the financial crisis. Instead he found himself in the midst of a remarkable partisan showdown, lacking a clear public message for how to bring it to an end.

At the bipartisan White House meeting that Mr. McCain had called for a day earlier, he sat silently for more than 40 minutes, more observer than leader, and then offered only a vague sense of where he stood, said people in the meeting.

In subsequent television interviews, Mr. McCain suggested that he saw the bipartisan plan that came apart at the White House meeting as the proper basis for an eventual agreement, but he did not tip his hand as to whether he would give any support to the alternative put on the table by angry House Republicans, with whom he had met before going to the White House.

Inquiring Minds

If you suspend your campaign and then spend all of your time doing TV interviews, are you really suspending your campaign?

Troubling

Of all of the scary aspects of this financial mess, somehow I find this to be the most alarming thing I've come across:

Feeling betrayed after sticking their necks out for Bush - a Republican who badly wants a rescue plan passed - angry Democrats huddled in the Roosevelt Room after the White House meeting with Bush, McCain and Democratic nominee Barack Obama.

In a bizarre scene, Paulson reportedly followed them in, kneeled down as if to genuflect and begged: "Please don't blow this up."

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) jokingly shot back, "I didn't know you were Catholic," according to Politico.com.

Things got serious again when Rep. Barney Frank, a Democrat who has been leading negotiations on the rescue, told Paulson, "Don't say that after all we've been through!"

Pelosi chimed in, "We're not the ones trying to blow this up - it's the House Republicans," ABC reported.

Paulson replied, "I know, I know."

The distinguished Paulson actually knelt in front of Pelosi. Just how incredibly fucked does he believe we are for him to have done that?

BTW, WaMu failed last night while Republicans were busy trying to make the bailout feel more more Repubicany by stuffing in some corporate tax breaks. Psssst, Republicans: Nothing you do to this bill is going to make anyone like it. You could load it up with school vouchers and abstinence only education and your base is still not going to think it's a good idea. Quit stalling and just do what needs to be done. Corporate tax breaks are not going to help the situation anyway and, in fact, it's pissing me off even more than I already was since I know many of us will be looking at a tax increase down the road... you can't add $700B on top of a $3T debt and expect not to pay for it.

From Wall Street to Pennsylvania Avenue... bastards, all.

Political Economics

Congress seems to have worked out some of the issues with the Paulson Bailout as it was originally worded.

Yay, I guess. My read on the situation is thus:

1. The White House quite literally sprung this bailout on Congress and the American people simultaneously, thus creating massive amounts of chaos as everyone from esteemed economists to Congressmen to Mom and Pop America tried to digest and interpret the action, risks, and repercussions.

2. The bailout plan was universally reviled by Mom and Pop America while being celebrated by Wall Street (you know, the guys who got us into this mess?), as evidenced by the 400 point rally immediately following the announcement. That made Mom and Pop America even more angry.

3. Congressional leaders from both sides of the aisle, while generally agreeing with the concept, needed to fix some of the egregious language in the original proposal... things like, "Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency."

4. Republicans were in a tight spot since just three weeks ago they adopted a platform that explicitly says no to bailouts. "We do not support government bailouts of private institutions," states the platform, approved Sept. 1. "Government interference in the markets exacerbates problems in the marketplace and causes the free market to take longer to correct itself." Oops!

5. This presented quite a pickle for the Republican congresscritters, who were hearing lots and lots about the bailout from their constituents. The 'Pubbies mostly agreed the bailout was necessary (even if completely outrageous) but there would be political consequences with the base. Right before an election, too! Some clever Republicans thought it would be smart to stage a big "No!" vote while letting the Democratic congress pass the bill anyway. That way the economy would still be saved while giving the Republicans some political cover. Then they could spend the next four years blaming the Democrats for being "Tax and Spend" long after everyone has forgotten what got us in this mess to begin with.

6. Democrats, although trying to be the grown-ups in the room, were not going to fall for that one. Wow... a backbone, who knew???

7. Republicans have now resigned themselves to having to "sell" the magnitude of the crisis. Democrats, too, but for them it's not quite the same embarrassing reversal of principle. And so it was decided to hold hearings in which they could all publicly bash on Paulson, Bernake, Cox, et al, and posture a bit in front of the teevee cameras for good effect. McCain suspended his campaign (after 99% of the work was done, but whatever, it looked good politically) and then the Republicans trotted Bush out to present the dire message to Mom and Pop (I thought he did well, actually). Bush even invited Obama and McCain for a Very Important Meeting in Washington today. All of this to discuss what is already a done deal with the exception of getting Mom and Pop onboard.

8. McCain decided to declare he was "canceling" the debate on Friday. Since he doesn't have the authority to "cancel" a debate that was agreed to by his party long before McCain became their nominee, it will be interesting to see how this plays out. His actual proposal is perhaps a bit more telling than he'd like it to be: reschedule the presidential debate for Oct 2, which happens to be the date for the VP debate, and then do the VP debate at some other time tbd. Even funnier, now he's talking about having Sarah Palin suspend her campaign, too. Pretty convenient given how well the Katie Couric interview went (or not, see below). Star-eyed Hannity must have run out of prearranged softball questions to gently spoon feed her so now I guess the intent is to keep Palin sealed in bubblewrap for the rest of the campaign so as not to ruin our image of her as the mavericky wunderkind from Alaska. At least until after the election.

An Unquiet Mind

For the past few days I have been reading. And reading. And reading. And reading. And reading some more. Reading this one really helped me understand derivatives.

I have also been watching all of the gawd awful hearings and conferences and CNBC by the hour.

Here's where it's gotten me: I am angry beyond lipstick on a pig at what those greedy motherfuckers in the top wealth tiers have done to the rest of us with their giant incestuous ponzai scheme. I am so angry that I find myself questioning this bailout... willing to consider personal losses just to ensure the bastards don't walk away with their wealth intact. And then I wonder if I should stop behaving like a petulant child and do the grown up thing and swallow the bitter $700B medicine.

And then I get angry again.

I am angry that we were told repeatedly that the fundamentals of the economy are strong by those who were making money in it, while the concerns of the rest of who looked at facts around us and knew something wasn't adding up were dismissed. Those of us who knew that it was impossible to survive as a nation of bankers. Those of us who questioned how a nation that doesn't produce can survive. Those of us who now know those bankers weren't even making money on actual assets... they were betting each other on the value of assets they didn't even own.

Then I get even angrier when I hear this meltdown misrepresented as a Freddie/Fannie issue, or even a sub-prime issue, by those who would try to distill it down to a political sound byte . This is not the time to pander to the most ignorant among us. It's time to let the American people know what's really going on. In fact, I'd say it's political malfeasance not to tell them. F&F were as dysfunctional as any of those book cooking, de-reg'd securities players but they don't bear the sole responsibility for this mess. We could have weathered their failure, had it been an isolated incident, with some pain, and not many would have mourned the loss as their carcasses were picked clean by their competitors. We could have weathered the housing bubble breaking and the resultant recession. No, the dire situation that spawned secret, urgent, government meetings after AIG tottered on the brink is coming from a different place. This isn't about a few bad companies. The Credit Default Swap market scheme (derivatives... aka making huge amounts of money from nothing) has always been a grenade waiting to explode. The housing bust was just the pin.

I'm not sure I could cast another vote for another politician if they agree to a $700 bailout without having been given the following info:

• What did Paulson say in the emergency Thursday night meeting and why is it top secret? Why isn't the public entitled to know what's at risk?? If this situation is so dire, so horrible, why wouldn't they want to share it with a skeptical public in order to gain their support? Who could possibly believe they should ask the American people for that much money without all of the facts on the table? Haven't we endured enough secrets from this administration?
  

• And speaking of this administration, why was the White House supposedly holding this information to themselves for months before springing it on congress and expecting them to respond in one day?

• Who are we bailing out... which companies are benefiting from this money? I want to know exactly who is getting the cash and exactly how much.
  

• How do we know $700 billion is enough? The amount of money tied up in the CDS market is greater than the entire global economy. We could go through $700 billion at the speed of light and end up in exactly the same place a week from now. We're trying to transfuse the patient with a bag of blood but nobody knows how much blood she needs or where she's hemorrhaging.
  

• Why are we looking at paying anything more than current value? Why would anyone pay for this giant shit pile at anything other than current value? There's a reason the market value is low... because that's what it's worth on the market!!

• And speaking of markets, do people understand that the stock market is still overvalued? That housing is still overvalued? Do people understand that all of the "gains" we enjoyed in the last decade aren't real? Why would we try to prop up the value of assets in these markets when we know it's not real? Let the prices fall to their actual value, suck up the fact that the gains we thought we were realizing on our 401Ks were inflated, and let's try to rebuild our economy on the good old fashioned economic principles that create real value instead of only creating wealth for those who know how to scam it.
  

Debt

Nouriel Roubini is, once again, far in front of the crowd regarding what's ailing the economy. He was the first to understand the problem, the first to predict the fall out, and now possibly the first to identify the fix. In his latest post, Roubini seems to be suggesting that the proposed bailout is targeted to the wrong group of stakeholders:

When a country (say Russia, Ecuador or Argentina) has too much debt and is insolvent it defaults and gets debt reduction and is then able to resume fast growth; when a firm is distressed with excessive debt it goes into bankruptcy court and gets debt relief that allows it to resume investment, production and growth; when a household is financially distressed it also needs debt relief to be able to have more discretionary income to spend. So any unsustainable debt problem requires debt reduction. The lack of debt relief to the distressed households is the reason why this financial crisis is becoming more severe and the economic recession - with a sharp fall now in real consumption spending – now worsening. The fiscal actions taken so far (income relief to households via tax rebates) and bailouts of distressed financial institutions (Bear Stearns creditors’ bailout, Fannie and Freddie and AIG) do not resolve the fundamental debt problem for two reasons. First, you cannot grow yourself out of a debt problem: when debt to disposable income is too high increasing the denominator with tax rebates is ineffective and only temporary; i.e. you need to reduce the nominator (the debt). Second, rescuing distressed institutions without reducing the debt problem of the borrowers does not resolve the fundamental insolvency of the debtor that limits its ability to consume and spend and thus drags the economy into a more severe economic contraction.

So of the five possible uses of fiscal policy – income relief to households (the 2008 tax rebate), rescue/bailout of financial institutions (Bears Stearns, Fannie and Freddie, AIG), purchase of assets of failed institutions (an RTC-like institution), recapitalization of undercapitalized financial institutions (an RFC-like institution), government purchase of distressed mortgages to provide debt relief to households (an HOLC-like institution) – the last option is the most important and effective to resolve this severe financial and economic crisis. During the Great Depression the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation was create to buy mortgages from bank at a discount price, reduce further the face value of such mortgages and refinance distressed homeowners into new mortgages with lower face value and lower fixed rate mortgage rates. This massive program allowed millions of households to avoid losing their homes and ending up in foreclosure. The HOLC bought mortgages for two year and managed such assets for 18 year at a relatively low fiscal cost (as the assets were bought at a discount and reducing the face value of the mortgages allowed home owners to avoid defaulting on the refinanced mortgages). A new HOLC will be the macro equivalent of creating a large “bad bank” where the bad assets of financial institutions are taken off their balance sheets and restructured/reduced; thus it will be the macro equivalent of the “bad bank” that Lehman tried to create for its bad assets.

Creating a new HOLC mechanism is likely to be more effective than creating a new RTC (whose purpose was to buy and dispose over a number of years of the assets of already failed S&Ls): we need to provide debt reduction to households well before hundreds of banks failed as working out the bad assets only after banks have failed is costly. Certainly many insolvent banks will fail regardless of in this financial crisis; and once they do their bad assets can be transferred to the new HOLC to be rapidly worked out. But we don’t need an RTC that picks up the bad assets of failed banks and works them out after such banks have failed; the priority is to take off the balance sheet of distressed and/or potentially insolvent banks the bad assets and reduce their face value so as to avoid a tsunami of defaults, foreclosures and/or households walking away from their homes. Similarly having an HOLC is more important than creating an RFC (the institution that during the Great Depression injected public capital – in the form of preferred shares – into 4000 undercapitalized banks).

It does not appear that either McCain or Obama have hit on this yet, although Obama comes closest with his recognition that the 2005 bankruptcy legislation needs to be reversed.

While most folks who try to be responsible with their money find the concept of bankruptcy to be odious, Roubini seems to have defined the concept of debt forgiveness as necessary in the greater economic scheme of things.

The 2008 Election Wars

There may not be anyone left standing at the end of this election... it's about to get brutal.

• The Race Wars. The Weakly Weekly Standard is now reporting that McCain is ready to unleash a Jeremiah Wright attack. Not sure how that will play out... certainly it will play into suburban white fear of the Scary Militant Black Man. It will also play into the slow burning white male resentment of Black Entitlements. I'm relatively certain that those two camps 1) already live in the Republican tent, or 2) quickly fled to the Republican tent at the mere sight of Obama. Still, it's going to be like jabbing a sharp stick into America's still unhealed racial wound. In the end, if Obama wins, and if he governs well, this could be an opportunity to heal the wound once and for all. Whites would have a positive "black experience" with Obama. Also, blacks won't be able to claim "The Man" is holding them down when a black man is "The Man" in the oval office. Hopefully people wore themselves out on the topic when Hillary unleashed it, though. The idea of a rehash bores me.
  

• The Religion Wars. The best way for Obama to ward off a Jeremiah Wright preacher attack is to use it as a launch pad to veer into the wonderful world of religion. McCain is still unforgiven by the religious right for his heathenism and no amount of faux contrition and cynical pandering has granted him acceptance in their circle. Adding Palin to the ticket may have soothed the religous righties but I have to believe it's an uneasy truce. On the flip side, a very big chunk of GOP voters are of a fiscal / libertarian bent. It's a tightrope act for McCain here as he tries to appeal to the latter while letting Palin appeal to the former. If anyone were to, say, probe a little bit into just how bizarre Palin's religious activities have been (organizing a christianist takeover of school boards and hospital boards kind of puts that whole book banning attempt in perspective) there could be chaos in the ranks quickly. Divide and conquer, baby.

• The Ethnic Wars. Obama's latest ad in espanol using Rush Limboob's outrageous quotes was kind of clever. Rush is the messiah of the anti-immigration movement. Plus he's an ego-maniac... naturally he couldn't help himself from using a megaphone to blast his outrage over the ad to the Universe. His outrage over the ad that would have gotten about ZERO media attention if he hadn't drawn it himself. An ad that was probably never intended to target Latinos, but rather... anti-immigration Republicans! A subtle little poke at McCain to draw out some anti-immigration rhetoric that can be used in flip-flop ads that would... pose as a reminder to voters of McCain's previous amnesty support?
  

• The Ethics Wars. If McCain wants to go there with Obama's connection to Fannie's Jim Johnson (note to Obama: what in the hell were you thinking??), I strongly suggest that Obama remind folks about the Keating Five. I was about 18 during the S&L scandal but even in my teen age ignorance this is what I retained in my psyche: greed, corruption, bank closings, bail outs, taxpayers being screwed. Sound familiar? The current banking collapse would be the perfect backdrop to point out that McCain is not only more of the same, but one of the original same!
  

Yes, I realize how horrible I sound for even mentioning these things. But if I've learned anything in the past two years, it's that "fair" has no meaning in an election and if you run on "fair", your opponent will simply clobber you over the head with it while the media watches with a blank eyed stare.

Playing The Blame Game

My mum and Jeff and I had a lovely chat yesterday (Mom no longer reads my blog - sadness! - thus effectively cutting my readership by 50%) about the wretched financial crisis we're in. For the three of us, at least, we shared a common sense of outrage and worry and bewilderment with a situation that seems to require a degree in economics to fully comprehend.

This morning I read something on Think Progress regarding Bush touting rising home ownership as part of his crafty "Ownership Society" theme back in 2004. I remember that, although I'm sure I heard it earlier... I could have sworn I him heard take credit for it in his first SOTU address. No matter. The point is that this snowball started rolling down the hill a long time ago.

It's interesting now to watch everyone trying to find THE person to blame for this mess when, in fact, there are many. McCain is anxious to make this a Freddie and Fannie issue because he finds it politically expedient to do so but Freddie and Fannie did not dissolve the regulatory line between investment brokerage and commercial banking. They did not spawn innovative new "products" and the shadow banking system. They did not create the greed-fueled "anything goes" lending practices that started with subprime and eventually wound their way through Alt-A and, finally, conventional loans. Freddie and Fannie also did not wildly speculate in the real estate market, creating a bubble. Nor did they manipulate interest rates to make it advantageous for everyone to over-leverage. Nor did they pass bankruptcy legislation in 2005 that allowed predatory lending to continue unabated while making any form of bankruptcy extremely difficult to file... thus incenting people to simply pack up their minivans in the middle of the night and drive away from a losing situation.

Freddie and Fannie may be ideologically suspect for its half public / half private perversion but it did not create the mess we're in now any more than any other single participant like Lehman or Bear Sterns.

For at least two years now there have been voices in the wilderness trying to point out that we've created an unstable, untenable economic brew while guys like Larry Kudlow sat around in their 3-piece suits, reaping the profits, insisting that the naysayers were partisan and full of shit. While people much smarter than myself have been screaming that this consumer-driven economy is a house of cards, BushCo has been insisting that the fundamentals are strong. While Reaganites kept insisting that national debt was inconsequential, we've now found ourselves dependent on foreign countries to buy our debt in order for us to stay solvent. The biggest fear in this mess, as far as I can tell, is that foreign countries will find us a bad investment and take their money elsewhere... in which case we'd face a total and utter collapse. The situation we've gotten ourselves in here is really quite breathtaking.

So here we are... nobody likes this crazy bailout scheme but what's the alternative? I don't think anyone is willing to risk finding out what's behind curtain #2.

For me, I blame the kind of greed that insists the party must continue as long as the guys at the top are still making money... damn the consequences. The kind of greed that concocted the convenient lie theory of "trickle down economics." The kind of greed exhibited by the people in power who stack the deck to ensure they benefit from that power. The kind of greed that refuses to acknowledge that naked capitalism is a zero sum game... one in which, without intervention, the rich get richer at the expense of everyone else. The kind of greed that insists on personal responsibility as long as it's not their person.

It is the Republican platform that has embraced and embodied the Gordon Gekko "greed is good" mantra. When I blame Republican principles for the mess we're in, this is where I'm coming from.

But you know who I am most angry at? The ancient and powerful Democrats in office who not only failed in their mission to be a counter weight to the power elite, they aided and abetted the ruse. I mean, at least the post-1980 Republicans have been forthright about holding fast to their greed-as-a-principle ideology. The Dems were supposed to provide balance. At this point, as much as I loathe Phil "a nation of whiners" Gramm, I can't even stand to see Nancy Pelosi's overly-botoxed face on my teevee.

Here's The Thing

I do not like it when there are things going on in the world that I don't fully understand but are affecting me just the same... ignorance being an undeniably poor position from which to navigate. So I spin around like a top trying to stay one step ahead, trying to stay informed, trying to sharpen my perceptions. Attempted omniscience as a means of warding off the gross manipulations that have historically been bestowed on the unaware.

But I give up.

Really.

This current financial crisis is just so over my head. Also, every mendacious word spewing from this year's election cycle (a year when there's so much of our future at stake) has brought a wave of outrage so strong that it's overwhelming my sense of proportion.

There is no earnest search for truth, or accumulated knowledge, that can negate this feeling of powerless, of being completely and utterly at the mercy of what is beyond my control to affect. Most of the time I feel like I'm screaming into the wind.

It's maddening.

Hackers

UPDATE: Wow... the Gawker website has actually posted some of the personal stuff, not just the work stuff, including contact information (I refuse to link to it). That's pretty damn serious... there's no need for that shit. Public people are allowed to have a private life just like everyone else. Maybe someone should post Gawker's private information.

-------------------

Wired is reporting that hackers got access to mail from Sarah Palin's private Yahoo mail account and posted some of it online at wikileaks.org. The wikileaks website must be getting hammered because I can't seem to get to it.

This story would only be outrageous instead of scary if Palin wasn't using private email accounts to conduct public business. Besides the fact that it's unethical to evade governmental rules regarding public records, Yahoo mail is about as secure as the shed in my backyard. D'oh!

I would never condone hacking but I'm having a hard time mustering much sympathy for her.

Totally True Fact

My eleven year old son likes to watch cable news shows with me for the politics.

*wiping tear of joy from my eye

Box Quotes

testing!!

Dead Right

My thoughts exactly:

For my part, I stand by my skepticism of everything Sarah Palin says. To my mind, her constant public lies about almost anything, large and small, and the proximity of this strange, unvetted blank slate of a candidate to the Oval Office render all usual assumptions of good faith on the part of a candidate moot. The refusal of the McCain campaign to allow her to hold a press conference - unprecedented in modern American history - reinforces this skepticism. It is simply incredible that a vice-presidential candidate who is the governor of a state cannot hold an open press conference to clear the air on any number of issues of fact that are out there. Worse than incredible: dangerous.

Palin Under Glass

I'm sure this will only be helpful to voters trying to understand the truth:

JUNEAU, Alaska - GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin is effectively turning over questions about her record as Alaska's governor to John McCain's political campaign, part of an ambitious Republican strategy to limit any embarrassing disclosures and carefully shape her image for voters in the rest of the country.

Republican efforts include dispatching a former top U.S. terrorism prosecutor from New York, Ed O'Callaghan, to assist Palin's personal lawyer working to derail or delay a pending ethics investigation in Alaska. The probe, known as "Troopergate," is examining whether the governor abused her power by trying to remove her former brother-in-law as a state trooper.

I wonder if McCain can keep Ms Mooseburgers under glass until the election so as not to destroy the carefully constructed myth. The ABC interview went pretty badly so apparently now she's only allowed to appear on Fox, where Hannity can rub perfumed oil on her feet while asking her difficult questions like, "Sarah Palin: One of the great VP picks or the greatest VP pick ever?"

Moral Hazard, My Ass

The Fed was unable to broker a deal to get anyone in the private sector -- anyone -- to loan money to AIG because it wasn't a sound business venture, because it wouldn't make any sense to throw good money after bad, because nobody really knows just how big the hole is.

So what did the Fed do? The Fed decided that the US taxpayers would have to step up and save the day by eating yet ANOTHER bite of the big shit pile. You know... the big shit pile that the private sector won't touch with a 10 foot pole? We just gave it $85 billion. On top of the F&F bailout that put taxpayers at risk for $25 billion. On top of $29 billion Bear Sterns bailout. And nobody really knows if $85 billion is enough!

Here's a number to add some perspective to this mess: The actual 2007 budget allocation for re-training workers displaced by the global economy was $150 million. Get it? Corporate welfare for Wall Street totals BILLIONS but the poor slobs who got kicked to the curb so Corporate America could maximize their profits (yay, globalization!) got $150 million to put their lives back together. Republican "bootstrap" philosophy apparently only counts for people who pay payroll taxes.... the investor class must be protected at all costs. And social security is EVIL.

But what really pissed me off today is that as soon as Wall Street caught a wiff of a Fed rescue, what happened? Why a rally, of course!

Hey man, let the party continue.

Permission To Like Sarah Palin

I gotta say, I find this advice to Obama supporters from Sean Quinn quite disturbing. Not that I think he's wrong -- in fact, I think he's probably right -- but because I am appalled that people would allow an emotional response to triumph over a logical one, especially when their last emotional response got us eight years of Bush and everything that's come with it. I know I can be kind of a cold hearted bitch and all, but, seriously, I just don't understand it.

For the inquiring ones, the reason I immediately zeroed in on Palin's acute lack of substance (my Obama support notwithstanding) is because I recognized it. I see it all the time in my profession... and even in myself. Ambition + good presentation + a good reputation will very often result in getting into positions that are over your head, into a job you are not qualified to do. And when you get really far in over your head, no amount of superficial prep work (such as cramming for an interview) will hide the fact that you don't understand the fundamentals (such as F&F and the Bush Doctrine). And if you don't understand the fundamentals, you will be unable to attach perspective to even your most basic judgments. Some things just can't be bluffed.

When I started my first IT job 18 years ago, I could not tell the difference between a printer and a tape drive. Or an air conditioning unit, for that matter. My ex-husband's friend had gotten me an interview at the insurance company where he worked and told me not to worry about my lack of experience... that they would train me. I turned in an application along with my very thin resume (waitress, receptionist, bartender). But I was clean cut and kind of good looking back then, and, thanks to my mom, capable of conjugating a verb properly. They hired me even with my zero knowledge of IT.

The reason I had zero knowledge of IT, by the way, is because I had never been interested enough in computers to obtain any. I was completely incurious on the topic. I was never interested enough in programming to learn it, I was never interested enough in engineering to learn it, I was never interested in operations enough to take even a single class on the subject. What I was interested in was money, and this job was $8.50 an hour... a fortune.

On my first day I was introduced to the CIO (or VP, really, by today's standards). From behind his big cherry veneer desk he told me this: "We can tell you which buttons to press and in what order to press them but you will never understand this job unless you either have the educational background for it or commit to the time it takes to build a foundation. You won't be able to get promoted until you have the skills required to read a situation correctly so you can provide the necessary response." Quite the pep talk, right? But it was $8.50 an hour and I wouldn't have cared if he'd told me he ate kittens for breakfast.

So I pressed the buttons they told me to press and in the order they told me to press them without understanding any of the logic behind it. It took four years before I progressed to the next level. It's not because I was stupid or lazy but because I started so far in the hole as far as knowledge and education that it took me forever to break even and even longer to excel.

When I hear Sarah Palin's story, that's what I think of. I can see clearly that she is in over her head. And when I saw that she didn't know what Freddie and Fannie are, or what the Bush doctrine is, I knew it was because she was never interested enough before to find out. Which is perfectly fine given the fact that she was busy with her family and her job, etc. But this isn't some IT job at an insurance company... this is the VP pick for a 70 year old presidential candidate.

I don't want someone in there who is only now learning what they need to know because they want the job... I want someone in there who wants the job because of what they've already learned. With her journalism degree, I doubt she's even qualified for governor. By all accounts, her popularity is directly attributed to the fact that 1) her predecessor was a total dirtbag, and 2) she has windfall-taxed the oil companies to give $3000 apiece to the Alaskan citizens (which begs the question of why she needed all that earmark money from the Federal govt, but I digress...).

So that's what I have against Palin. That, and she obviously has more ego than honor, given her penchant for accepting credit and gushing applause she hasn't earned. Oh yeah, and the ease with which she lies to my face, like I'm one of the sheeple she can manipulate to suit her ambition.

Honestly, I don't know how to stop pointing out that she's LYING to us and misrepresenting her fitness for this office, just to avoid alienating the people who find her likable. I don't understand how that could make me an elitist... me with my community college degree and my middle class, middle-aged, mother-of-three existence. I am just as "authentic" and down to earth as any Palin supporter.

Idiotic Sentiment Of The Day From Kristol

They kill me, these people... they really do. Billy Kristol writes today from his ivory tower Op Ed column in the NYT:

And he chose as his running mate Sarah Palin, one of the least-known outsiders to be picked in modern times, and the first woman on a Republican ticket.

This in turn sent other establishments into a frenzy.

The media establishment was horrified. Its members expressed their disapproval. Palin became more popular. They got even more frustrated. And so we had the spectacle last week of ABC’s Charlie Gibson, one of the most civil of the media bigwigs, unable to help himself from condescending to Palin as if he were a senior professor forced to waste time administering a Ph.D. exam to a particularly unpromising graduate student.

Of course it fucking sent the media into a frenzy! We are facing one of the most important decisions to be made in our lifetime -- who will navigate this country through the big, dangerous SHIT PILE we've inherited from BushCo -- and who does 70 year old John McCain decide randomly, cynically, desperately, to throw on his ticket? Some heretofore unknown (to all but 670,000 Alaskans) newbie.

According to the Kristol narrative, this selection drove all kinds of very unreasonable questions from the media, like, Who is this person? What is her record? What is her world view? What are her qualifications? What is her background and how might that influence decisions she makes on behalf of this nation?

I mean, really... how dare anyone ask those kinds of questions? How DARE the media not just accept whatever they're told and regurgitate the GOP talking points without question?

If you think about it, Obama declared his presidency 20 months ago and during that time the media, the GOP, and his own party (through the primaries) have been doing a brutal vetting of his candidacy. That's exactly as long as Sarah Palin has been the governor of Alaska!

Ironically, it was an interesting kind of vetting the Fox News crowd subjected Obama to. Instead of focusing on his positions and record, they chose instead to focus on his patriotism, whether or not he wore a flag pin, whether or not he went to school in a madrassa, whether or not he exchanged a "terrorist fist bump" with his wife, whether or not he denounced his crazy preacher adequately, whether or not he's a militant black, whether or not he's Christian enough. Those are the things the Fox News crowd is interested in. So cry me a bloody river if nobody drilled his record like Palin's record is being drilled. What a bunch of losers.

Screw Bill Bennet's "Death of Outrage" mantra... I am outraged by the total demise of critical thought.

Gratuitous Picture

From a NH rally on Saturday:

Yay!

Finally Obama ties the current financial crisis to GOP philosophy.

I'm sure he wasn't comfortable doing that since he's a policy wonk who seems to avoid oversimplification, and this is a VERY complex, nuanced thing, but it is still, on the whole, true. Anyway, this is what the Republicans are so effective about doing-- just throwing shit out there to put their opponents on the defensive, burn up news cycles, and create a visceral impression with voters.

Lesson I hope he's learned: stay on the offensive, not the defensive.

What else is he supposed to do, just sit around all day responding to blatant lies about having "dropped 30 lawyers" on Alaska to smear the delicate Palin or having encouraged kindergartners to have sex?

Personally, I would have thrown a little Keating 5 in for good measure.

The Queen Of Earmarks

Q: When is an earmark not an earmark? A: When it's a project! Hahahahaha!

Finally the Wall Street Journal acknowledges what the rest of us have known for a long time... Sarah Palin loves earmarks just like everyone else. Actually, what it says is that she is a liar who has been trying to accept credit for something she never did... but whatevs.

It is difficult to compare Sen. Obama's earmark record with Gov. Palin's -- their states differ in size, for instance, and the two candidates play different roles in the process. But using the same calculation that the McCain campaign uses, the total amount of earmarked dollars divided by the number of working days while each held office (assuming a five-day workweek, every week, for both), Gov. Palin sought $980,000 per workday, compared with roughly $893,000 for Sen. Obama.

No, WSJ, it's not hard to compare them, not even with bad math skills and not even at 7:00 in the morning. Let's just take it a little further... $980,000 / the population of Alaska @670,000 = $1.46 per person, per day for Alaska. $893,000 / the population of Illinois @12,831,970 = $.07 per person, per day for Illinois. In fact, as an Illinois resident I'm suddenly feeling a little screwed by Obama!

Clearly Palin is the earmark Queen of the Universe (where do you suppose that 80% approval rating came from, eh?) so that must mean that Obama is a bad person who wants kindergartners to have sex.

Sarah Palin Is One Of Us!

I'm sure we'll all find that very comforting.

What we are facing now if the beginning of the unraveling and collapse of the entire shadow financial system, a system of institutions (broker dealers, hedge funds, private equity funds, SIVs, conduits, etc.) that look like banks (as they borrow short, are highly leveraged and lend and invest long and in illiquid ways) and thus are highly vulnerable to bank like runs; but unlike banks they are not properly regulated and supervised, they don’t have access to deposit insurance and don’t have access to the lender of last resort support of the central bank (with now only a small group of them having access to the limited and conditional and thus fragile support of the Fed). So no wonder that this shadow banking system is now collapsing. The entire conduits/SIV system has already collapsed with the roll-off of their ABCP financing; next is the collapse of the broker dealers (Bear, Lehman and soon enough the other ones) that rely mostly on unstable overnight repos and other very short term funding for their financing; next will be hundreds of poorly managed hedge funds that will face a tsunami of redemptions; and finally runs on money market funds that are not supported by a large financial institutions or other smaller member of the shadow banking system as well as highly leveraged and distressed private equity funds cannot be ruled out either.

This is indeed the most severe financial crisis since the Great Depression and occurring at a time when the US is falling in a now severe consumer led recession. The vicious interaction between a systemic financial and banking crisis and a severe economic contraction will get much worse before there is any bottom to it. We are only in the third inning of a nine innings economic and financial crisis. And the only light at the end of the tunnel is the one of the incoming train wreck.

Read the whole thing. Please.

I Wish I Could Have Been There

I love democracy in action!! Pictures lifted from frsbdg's pictoral diary about the Anchorage rally today:

Alaska's Biggest Political Rally Ever

That slogan may be the funniest double entendre I've ever seen.

Alaskan political blogger Mudflats has had a busy weekend, attending first a good sized Palin rally and then an even bigger Alaska Women Reject Palin rally. Of the Reject Palin rally, he says:

"The rally was organized by a small group of women, talking over coffee. It made me wonder what other things have started with small groups of women talking over coffee. It’s probably an impressive list. These women hatched the plan, printed up flyers, posted them around town, and sent notices to local media outlets. One of those media outlets was KBYR radio, home of Eddie Burke, a long-time uber-conservative Anchorage talk show host. Turns out that Eddie Burke not only announced the rally, but called the people who planned to attend the rally “a bunch of socialist baby-killing maggots”, and read the home phone numbers of the organizers aloud over the air, urging listeners to call and tell them what they thought. The women, of course, received many nasty, harassing and threatening messages.

So, as I jettisoned myself from the jaws of the ‘Drill Baby Drill’ crowd and toward the mystery rally at the library, I felt a bit apprehensive. I’d been disappointed before by the turnout at other rallies. Basically, in Anchorage, if you can get 25 people to show up at an event, it’s a success. So, I thought to myself, if we can actually get 100 people there that aren’t sent by Eddie Burke, we’ll be doing good. A real statement will have been made. I confess, I still had a mental image of 15 demonstrators surrounded by hundreds of menacing “socialist baby-killing maggot” haters.

...snip...

Never, have I seen anything like it in my 17 and a half years living in Anchorage. The organizers had someone walk the rally with a counter, and they clicked off well over 1400 people (not including the 90 counter-demonstrators). This was the biggest political rally ever, in the history of the state. I was absolutely stunned. The second most amazing thing is how many people honked and gave the thumbs up as they drove by. And even those that didn’t honk looked wide-eyed and awe-struck at the huge crowd that was growing by the minute. This just doesn’t happen here.

Then, the infamous Eddie Burke showed up. He tried to talk to the media, and was instantly surrounded by a group of 20 people who started shouting O-BA-MA so loud he couldn’t be heard. Then passing cars started honking in a rhythmic pattern of 3, like the Obama chant, while the crowd cheered, hooted and waved their signs high."

Hmmm... interesting! Especially considering this little snippet from TPM:

As many reporters noticed, Gov. Palin dropped her "Bridge to Nowhere" lie from her stump speech during her trip to Alaska last week, presumably because too many locals knew about her actual role as a major supporter of the project. So I'd been wondering whether the line would return once she returned to the lower 48. Sure enough, today in Carson City, Nevada, she's back at it.

Best SNL Skit EVER!

SPHC
Uploaded by Hishighness

Poehler and Fey nail it as Palin and Hillary... an instant Saturday Night Live classic.

It Takes Two Hands To Eat A Whopper

Yet another whopper in the attempt to boost Palin's foreign policy creds (like living in close proximity to Russia isn't enough!). Amazingly, I'd heard Palin claim this but I never would have thought to question it if this hadn't been pointed out to me. From Factcheck.org:

Palin claims Alaska "produces nearly 20 percent of the U.S. domestic supply of energy." That's not true.

Alaska did produce 14 percent of all the oil from U.S. wells last year, but that's a far cry from all the "energy" produced in the U.S.

Alaska's share of domestic energy production was 3.5 percent, according to the official figures kept by the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

And if by "supply" Palin meant all the energy consumed in the U.S., and not just produced here, then Alaska's production accounted for only 2.4 percent.

Shameless.

BTW, I'd be for increased US drilling if I thought the benefit outweighed the risks. I haven't seen anything to indicate that's the case. Since I'm REAL big on not giving terrorists and despots our oil dollars, I really wish US drilling was the boon people think it is. Oil is finite resource and it's time to deal with that.

Shameless

Oh my gawd, is there NOTHING these people won't lie about? Is there nothing they won't throw out to the public like some kind of lab experiment to see what they can get to stick before someone calls them on it?

It seems that Maverick McMooseburgers hasn't actually visited troops in Iraq... or been in Iraq, for that matter:

Following her selection last month as John McCain's running mate, aides said Palin had traveled to Ireland, Germany, Kuwait, and Iraq to meet with members of the Alaska National Guard. During that trip she was said to have visited a "military outpost" inside Iraq. The campaign has since repeated that Palin's foreign travel included an excursion into the Iraq battle zone.

But in response to queries about the details of her trip, campaign aides and National Guard officials in Alaska said by telephone yesterday that she did not venture beyond the Kuwait-Iraq border when she visited Khabari Alawazem Crossing, also known as "K-Crossing," on July 25, 2007.

Asked to clarify where she traveled in Iraq, Palin's spokeswoman, Maria Comella, confirmed that "She visited a military outpost on the other side of the Kuwait-Iraq border."

It was the second such clarification in as many weeks of the itinerary of what Palin has called "the trip of a lifetime." Earlier, the campaign acknowledged that Palin made only a refueling stop in Ireland.

Now it looks like they might even be lying about the number of people showing up at McCain / Palin stump speeches, too.

In your FACE, voters!

America Evolves

Hot off the wire:

As Lehman Brothers teetered Friday evening, Federal Reserve officials summoned the heads of major Wall Street firms to a meeting in Lower Manhattan and insisted they rescue the stricken investment bank and develop plans to stabilize the financial markets.

Ah yes, another chapter in the story of America.

Once upon a time we had Labor, and Labor was good. It transformed the dog-eat-dog working class into the middle class and, with a little help in the form of the GI Bill and secured 30-year fixed mortgages and social security, America was both productive and prosperous.

But then Labor became quaint and we threw it overboard for technology in the name of globalization. We were told it would create a new and improved middle class... a white collar middle class deluxe. A lot of people lost their jobs but a lot of people were able to buy cheap big screen TVs so it was OK... it was a different kind of prosperity.

But then technology became quaint too, and we devolved into a high yield nation of "financial products" and "hedge funds" and "investment firms" supported by the direct manipulation of monetary and fiscal policies. This enabled a new class to emerge, the Fuck You class, who used other people's money, at considerable risk, to create staggering wealth for themselves without concern for penalty or consequence. Leveraging became all the rage... investors leveraged themselves to play in the global market, consumers leveraged themselves to buy more big screen TVs, and companies leveraged the low cost labor from lesser evolved countries to spare themselves from having to share their prosperity with American workers.

The Fuck You class got really prosperous and China got really prosperous and the American tax payers got stuck with a financial shit pile so big that most of them don't quite yet comprehend it. Now Americans can sit in their depreciating homes and watch the economic fall out on their big screen TVs.

THE most important thing to take away from all of this, of course, is that social security is evil and Obama had a crazy preacher and Sarah Palin is just like us.

On Social Issues, Not So Bad

I just saw a clip from ABC's interview with Palin regarding social issues. Definitely her strongest segment... she actually came across as very real and likable and non-judgemental. On this one topic (if this is the real Sarah Palin, it's hard to say given her previous positions and behaviors), I thought she did very well. She sounded like any of my friends or neighbors sound.... "I have my opinion but I still respect your opinion." (paraphrasing)

Unfortunately, her little victory here does not resolve the fact that she LIES without conscience, accepts credit where she doesn't deserve it, is woefully uninformed for a governor (much less a vp or prez), and exhibits some downright Cheney-esque tendencies regarding secrecy and abuse of power.

Oh yeah, and I still don't forgive her for the attempted book banning / librarian firing episode. There is no other way to paint that situation... if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck you can be pretty damn certain it's a duck.

Uno Problemo, Senior McCain...

I still think the winning card -- if Obama wanted to stoop low enough to play it (at least as low as McCain's been playing, anyway) -- is immigration. It would take a bit of a reversal from Obama to steal a page from Bush/Roves "divide and conquer" playbook but I think it would be effective in a very evil way.

Mickey Kaus seems to agree:

Attention Ms. Coulter: John McCain is running an ad in Spanish attacking Obama for allegedly failing to support the "comprehensive immigration reform" bill that McCain himself has said he no longer supports. ... I guess McCain got the "message" but not the mensaje. ... P.S.: The picture of Sen. Patrick Leahy is especially terrifying. ... P.P.S.: Would McCain ever run this ad in English?

Quite The Reformer There... Not.

From the latest interview excerpts released by ABC:

GIBSON: You have said continually, since he chose you as his vice-presidential nominee, that I said to Congress, thanks but no thanks. If we're going to build that bridge, we'll build it ourselves.

PALIN: Right.

GIBSON: But it's now pretty clearly documented. You supported that bridge before you opposed it. You were wearing a t-shirt in the 2006 campaign, showed your support for the bridge to nowhere.

PALIN: I was wearing a t-shirt with the zip code of the community that was asking for that bridge. Not all the people in that community even were asking for a $400 million or $300 million bridge.

GIBSON: But you turned against it after Congress had basically pulled the plug on it; after it became apparent that the state was going to have to pay for it, not the Congress; and after it became a national embarrassment to the state of Alaska. So do you want to revise and extend your remarks.

PALIN: It has always been an embarrassment that abuse of the ear form -- earmark process has been accepted in Congress. And that's what John McCain has fought. And that's what I joined him in fighting. It's been an embarrassment, not just Alaska's projects. But McCain gives example after example after example. I mean, every state has their embarrassment.

GIBSON: But you were for it before you were against it. You were solidly for it for quite some period of time...

PALIN: I was...

GIBSON: ... until Congress pulled the plug.

PALIN: I was for infrastructure being built in the state. And it's not inappropriate for a mayor or for a governor to request and to work with their Congress and their congressmen, their congresswomen, to plug into the federal budget along with every other state a share of the federal budget for infrastructure.

GIBSON: Right.

PALIN: What I supported was the link between a community and its airport. And we have found that link now.

GIBSON: The state of Alaska, under OMB figures in 2008, got $155 million in earmarks for a population of 670,000. That's $231 per person in Alaska. The state of Illinois, Obama's state, got $22 per person. You got ten times per person as much. How does that square with your reforms?

PALIN: We have drastically, drastically reduced our earmark request since I came into office.

GIBSON: But you still have multiple of any other state.

PALIN: We sure are -- and this is what -- you go out and you ask any Alaskan this. This is what I've been telling Alaskans for these years that I've been in office, is no more.

GIBSON: Governor, this year, requested $3.2 million for researching the genetics of harbor seals, money to study the mating habits of crabs. Isn't that exactly the kind of thing that John McCain is objecting to?

PALIN: Those requests, through our research divisions and fish and game and our wildlife departments and our universities, those research requests did come through that system, but wanting it to be in the light of day, not behind closed doors, with lobbyists making deals with Congress to stick things in there under the public radar. That's the abuse that we're going to stop. That's what John McCain has promised over and over for these years and that's what I'm joining him, also, saying, you're right, the abuse of earmarks, it's un-American, it's undemocratic, and it's not going to be accepted in a McCain-Palin administration. Earmark abuse will stop.

I *Heart* Andrew Sullivan

I simply must post this in its entirety because I, too, have drawn the same conclusion... not just that Obama's take on Pakistan was prescient, but because in retrospect he seems to have been right more often, about more policy points, than anyone else. The ability to read a situation right, by the way, is about more than instinct. It's about logic and reason and having built a broad foundation of knowledge from which to draw informed conclusions.

"In some ways, Obama has been a shadow president for a while. Even JPod now concedes that Obama has been right about the terror war:

I was among many people who ridiculed the Obama proposal at the time, on the grounds that a) no nation violates the territorial integrity of an ally, even if that ally is problematic, and b) Obama’s bellicosity seemed entirely unbelievable, given that he spoke in the wake of his remarks about meeting with the leaders of the world’s worst regimes “without preconditions.” On the latter point, he was and remains wrong and foolish.

On the former point, though, he was, apparently, precognitive, and may be due an apology.

Ya think? Radley Balko adds:

Will McCain now condemn the Bush administration's decision to go into Pakistan? Or was this idea only naive ten months ago? Was it only naive because it came from Obama? The Obama campaign should be making a much bigger deal about this.

Yes, they should. On one of the most critical decisions of the war, Obama staked out a position a while back that the Bush camp and neocons assailed as naive, disastrous, and revealing of his unfitness to be president. But like almost everything else Obama has said about the war, he was right and Bush was wrong. Obama was ahead of Bush in proposing to shift troops to Afghanistan, ahead of Bush in suggesting a timetable for Iraq withdrawal (subsequently embraced by Maliki), ahead of Bush in arguing we should talk directly to Iran, and, of course, right about not fighting the war in the first place.

The Bush administration - when guided by the saner forces within it such as Gates and Rice - eventually follows Obama's advice. In that sense, Obama has been president for quite a while already. And proving he could be a shrewd, pragmatic and prescient one."

I *Heart* John Cole

I agree with John Cole's observations regarding the addition of palin to the ticket.

The depressing thing is that this has been the GOP platform for years now. Expertise is overrated. Gut instincts, being “tough,” and being “decisive,” and not “blinking” are all far more important than actually knowing things.

He blames this on the GOP. I blame it on the GOP voters. It's a small quibble.

A Different View

TPM busts McCain for lying on The View (wow... McCain went on The View?):

It's become pathological. John McCain just claimed on TV that Sarah Palin has never requested an earmark for her state -- when actually her state gets more earmarks than any other state in the country. And this year she asked for $197 million worth of them herself.

Even the AP couldn't ignore his lying -- even though they phrased it in their own anemic way. "When pressed about Palin's record of requesting and accepting such money for Alaska, McCain ignored the record and said: "Not as governor she didn't."

For the record Palin requested $197 million this year and $256 million last year. Per capita, that's $288 this year and $376 last year.

To give you some perspective, Palin herself requested at least ten times the dollar value of earmarks as most states get total every year.

Here's the transcript, below. Is he intentionally lying or just oblivious? I think I'm going to have to take lying for $10, Alex.

Barbara Walters: What is she going to reform, specifically, Senator?

McCain: Well, first of all, earmark spending, which she vetoed a half a billion dollars worth in the state in alaska.

Barbara, and others: She also took some earmarks

McCain: No, not as governor she didn't.

Barbara: [inaudible]

McCain: Well, look, the fact is she's a reform governor...

Much Ado About Nothing?

This strikes me as much ado about nothing:

GIBSON: Have you ever met a foreign head of state?

PALIN: I have not and I think if you go back in history and you ask that question of many vice presidents, they may have the same answer.

Apparently every VP of the past 30 years or so has met foreign heads of state but so what? I don't really see how that is an important pre-req for the office.

I am much, much more concerned (horrified, really) that she thought Freddie & Fannie were directly supported by taxpayers prior to the bailout and that she hasn't a clue what the Bush Doctrine is.

A VP candidate doesn't need to be well traveled and well versed in hobnobbing with heads of state but I do think they should be well educated and well informed about what I consider to be very, very basic components of our economic and foreign policies.

D'oh!

One thing I caught from Obama on the Service forum last night... he said it's his job to "make government cool again", which he said in the context of trying to lure talented young people back into government roles who may be turned off by decades of cynicism and dysfunction.

Reasonable enough.

But I am pretty sure that is going to make a most excellent soundbite for a McCain ad on the theme of Obama's celebrityism.

The Victim

McCain has yet ANOTHER ad out today that portrays Sarah Palin as a victim. The new ad is here, the ad from Wednesday is here (both of them contain blatant and therefore outrageous lies but I don't know what else to say about that fact other than what I've already said).

Why is it okay for Palin to viciously attack her opponents but when they attempt to call her out, suddenly she's a victim?

Why would anyone want to see a potential (and statistically probable, given McCain's age) president portrayed as a victim in a glossy campaign ad?

What is "feminist" about a woman running on the ticket for the most powerful office in the world if she keeps insisting that she must be treated differently than a male candidate would be? The idea that she must be protected from scrutiny and rebuttals and counter attacks is just pathetic.... it's a slap in the face to those women who didn't demand special treatment but instead got tougher and worked harder to compete on male turf. In my opinion as a woman, it brings shame to those women who paved the way for Sarah Palin to be where she is today. It's a disgrace.

In the end, as with everything I find disgusting about this election, I blame the voters for buying this shit at least as much as I blame the McCain campaign for putting it out there and the media for peddling it.

And if the media cows to McCain's fantasy of making them look biased for simply reporting the FACTUAL bullshit, then we are all doomed.

One Last Thought Before Bed

It will be interesting to see how everyone receives Ms Mooseburger's ABC interview. I think the bar was set so low she could have tripped over it walking in the door and everyone would have been happy. From the excerpts I've read, though, it looks like she was pretty much out of her league.

Even more than her Russian war response (not enough coaching, rookie mistake?) the Bush Doctrine question just floors me. Anyone who has watched televised news, read a newspaper, or linked to a blog anytime in 2003-2004 should know what that means. It was debated and dissected and discussed a million times. She didn't need to know the precise definition to answer that question... most people would probably be able to get it somewhere in the ballpark if they were even remotely paying attention during the run up to the Iraq war. And if she wasn't paying attention to the run up of THE WAR, then what the hell is she doing on this ticket?

Isn't there a minimum requirement for this job or something?

Obama, on the other hand, during the Service forum at Columbia, almost put me to sleep. I'm not entirely sure what he said, for some reason it sounded flat and uninteresting. I did snap out of it briefly when he mentioned that all colleges should allow military recruiters on campus (and I agree with that for COLLEGE, not high school) and then I got snoozy again. My bad.