Political Bloviation

The GOP leadership says their members couldn’t vote for the bailout because Nancy Pelosi hurt their widdle feelings. If only she had been nice to them, then they would have voted for the good of the country. I had no idea they were so sensitive.

Glenn Geenwald’s take:

House Republicans are blaming a speech Nancy Pelosi gave this morning for defeat of the bill, claiming that her “partisan tone” drove many GOP members to vote against it. That is really dumb. If House Republicans decided how to vote on this bailout based on a speech Nancy Pelosi gave — rather than their views on the merits — that is as potent an indictment of those GOP members as anyone else could make. What seemed to happen is that enough members were afraid of the extreme public anger against this bailout bill and petrified of what it would do to their future job security. That’s a good thing — it’s called responsiveness and accountability.

I read about this monstrosity at Ars Technica, earlier this week. I thought that Congress critters would roll over and turn private civil matters into a free out for the RIAA, I got nauseous. Hopefully the reaction from DOJ and Commerce will help scuttle this ugly, ill-conceived heap of offal.

DoJ to Senate: don’t make us be Big Content’s copyright cops
In polite but unmistakeable language, the Departments of Justice and Commerce yesterday told Congress that the new Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights Act of 2008 (EIPRA) was a monstrosity so horrifying that only a stake through the heart of several key provisions could make it palatable. This is the bill, remember, that would give Justice the power to bring civil (not just criminal) lawsuits on behalf of groups like the RIAA, seek “restitution” damages, and then turn the money over to the private groups.

In other words, the DoJ could become a pro bono lawyer for the RIAA, freeing the trade group from all that bad PR and the millions of dollars it has spent filing tens of thousand of lawsuits in the last few years. Plus, the RIAA would still get all the money. Shockingly, the DoJ didn’t think this a really good use of taxpayer-funded resources.

Marc Ambinder (September 22, 2008) - Sign Of The Times; McCain Camp Accuses Reporter Of Being In Obama “Tank”
A reporter asks the McCain campaign to back up some basic claims made by a senior strategist in a public conference call.

The campaign refuses, with a prominent spokesperson accusing the reporter, Ben Smith, of being “in the tank.”

As in — no, we don’t have to justify what we say, and the fact that you would question our assertions is proof-positive that you’ve absorbed the Obama campaign’s worldview.

Not only is that Addington-esque in its logic — the spokesperson is PAID by one tank, so how can he possibly make that accusation credibly — it’s also immature (like throwing reporters off planes) and counterproductive. Maybe I’m in Ben Smith’s tank for saying this.

It’s about time that people have clearly realized which party represents their interests. The rest of the election is simply attempts by the McCain to distract the voters from that essential truth.

CNN Political Ticker: All politics, all the time Blog Archive - CNN Poll: GOP takes brunt of blame for economy, Obama gains « - Blogs from CNN.com
A new CNN/Opinion Research Corporation Poll suggests that by a 2-to-1 margin, Americans blame Republicans over Democrats for the financial crisis that has swept across the country the past few weeks — one factor that may have contributed to an apparent increase in Barack Obama’s edge over John McCain in the race for the White House.

Sully follows-up on the mendacity a Sarah Palin:

The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan
So for the record, let it be known that the candidate for vice-president for the GOP is a compulsive, repetitive, demonstrable liar. If you follow the links, here is the proof.

Follow the link above, he documents each false statement.  I agree with Sully, the nomination of Palin shows an absolutely breathtaking disregard for the gravity of our security problems across the globe. It a purely electoral and political choice that should in itself disqualify McCain from serious consideration by anyone who cares about this country. There’s absolutely no way an unapoligetic serial liar is qualified to be elected to anything, much less the vice presidency.

McClatchy Washington Bureau | 09/23/2008 | Obama concedes that bailout costs may force him to adjust plans

On the bright side it shows Obama has at least a nodding acquaintance with reality. Maybe he could commit to getting the US out of a certain oil producing hell hole in the middle east that’s draining billion per month from the treasury, hmmm? On the other hand, McCain having never met a fact he couldn’t ignore for his personal benefit, promises to extend the welfare handout tax breaks to the creme de la creme of America’s wealthiest families while gleefully flushing tax dollars down the toilet in Iraq indefinitely. Brilliant!

Let’s run up that deficit some more and see how much of our treasury notes our foreign masters “trading partners” in China dump. Really, they don’t even need to dump the assets, they can just stop buying new treasury notes and send us, along with much of the world, into a economic tailspin that hasn’t been seen since the Great Depression. Either that or continue buying increasingly less attractive assets from our treasury. Not a pleasant situation is it?

My god this is depressing:

Daily Kos: Things Become More Serious
I won’t bore you with the bloody details; others, such as bonddad, have already sliced open the corpse and described the basic anatomy of the crisis, which is depressingly identical to the aftermath of every other speculative bubble since Adam and Eve tried playing the apple futures market.

Bells and whistles aside (such as the fungal growth of a $10 trillion global over-the-counter credit derivatives market, or Wall Street’s blind faith in its own ability to transubstantiate subprime mortgages into AAA-rated, investment-grade paper) the only thing remarkable about this one is the scale of the recklessness.

Some mistakes look even dumber in hindsight than they did at the time: Like the creation of a parallel depository banking system (a.k.a. the money market mutual fund industry) without any sort of insurance fund (either public or private) and only cursory regulation — which is roughly like building a 150-story skyscraper with one fire alarm and no sprinklers.

Investors drove both stocks and US treasury notes down in trading. This sets the scene for a 1970s’ like stagflation.

Daddy doesnt know best - Paul Krugman - Op-Ed Columnist - New York Times Blog

Krugman slams the Paulson plan as arrogant and pushes Sen. Dodd’s proposal that actually gives taxpayers something for their $700 billion. Imagine that, we don’t have to be stampeeded into what Bush administration dictates. Who knew?

McCain’s Economic Plan For Nation: “Everyone Marry A Beer Heiress” | The Onion

The Onion is on the job again.

$13 Billion in Iraq Aid Wasted Or Stolen, Ex-Investigator Says - washingtonpost.com
A former Iraqi official estimated yesterday that more than $13 billion meant for reconstruction projects in Iraq was wasted or stolen through elaborate fraud schemes.

Salam Adhoob, a former chief investigator for Iraq’s Commission on Public Integrity, told the Senate Democratic Policy Committee, an arm of the Democratic caucus, that an Iraqi auditing bureau “could not properly account for” the money.

While many of the projects audited “were not needed — and many were never built,” he said, “this very real fact remains: Billions of American dollars that paid for these projects are now gone.”

He said a report that went to Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and other top Iraqi officials was never published because “nobody cares” about investigating such cases. Many investigators, he said, feared for their safety because 32 of his co-workers have been murdered.

Wouldn’t it be easier to just stick with the fact as they are?

The Washington Monthly
It’s been a consistent pattern with the McCain campaign — these guys lie, even when the truth is just as good. In this case, Schmidt and Davis took relatively legitimate areas of inquiry — the Biden family’s ties to the credit card industry; Obama’s relationship with William Ayers, etc. — and twisted already-embarrassing truths into new and creative lies. Part of the point of the call was to push back against charges that the McCain campaign is lying, and during the call, the McCain campaign kept lying.

When Smith asked about the conference call’s errors, McCain campaign spokesperson told him, “You are in the tank.”

$700 Billion Is Sought for Wall Street in Vast Bailout - NYTimes.com
The Bush administration on Saturday formally proposed a vast bailout of financial institutions in the United States, requesting unfettered authority for the Treasury Department to buy up to $700 billion in distressed mortgage-related assets from the private firms.

So the gang that couldn’t shoot straight wants everyone to just trust that they can fairly, wisely and prudently distribute at least $700 bilion, perhaps more like a trillion, in public funds? Congress needs to pass enabling legislation that has rules and real oversight to control this bail out. They have Henry Paulson, former CEO of Goldman-Sachs handing off billions to his collueages. Exactly who’s interests will he be serving?

I would imagine that has the more voters get to know McCain true record and Palin’s public stupidity the larger Obama’s lead gets.

FiveThirtyEight.com: Electoral Projections Done Right: Today’s Polls, 9/18: Obama Regains the Lead
On the strength of an abundance of state and national polling, Barack Obama has retaken the lead in our Electoral College projection. Our model now forecasts him to win the election 61.2 percent of the time; it also gives him a slight, half-point advantage in the popular vote. Yesterday, Obama was projected to win the Electoral College just 45 percent of the time, so this is a rather dramatic move upward.

Jonathan Cohn on the McCain health plan:

The Essence of McCain’s Health Plan: Don’t Get Sick - The Plank
Fewer people with health insurance. Weaker insurance for those who already have it. This is McCain’s solution to the anxiety over rising medical bills?

With a steady decline in the number of people covered by employers, do we really want to remove incentives for employers to offer coverage? As I’ve said before, the only really bright side to the McCain plan is that it might actually piss off enough people to reach a tipping point, then we might see the systemic reform that the curretn system sorely needs.

EzraKlein Archive | The American Prospect
John McCain’s contention is that Wall Street has, for years, been rotting in a toxic mixture of greed and overreach and corruption. Simultaneously, a 70-year-old regulatory structure has proven inadequate at checking the institution’s excesses. This is, in other words, a crisis composed of trends, rather than a singular, unpredictable, catastrophe.

Three years ago, John McCain signed on to George W. Bush’s efforts to privatize Social Security. He surveyed Wall Street and decided that it was a stable enough institution to entrust with the nation’s pension funds. Three years ago. And this wasn’t just an attempt to cozy up to Bush: McCain was arguing for privatization in 1999. So McCain’s argument is that Wall Street is built atop an unstable regulatory foundation and is shot through with most of the seven deadly sins. That the situation has been allowed to fester so long is evidence that “people were asleep at the switch.” Even so, McCain has consistently argued that much of Social Security should be turned over to…Wall Street. Either he wanted to tank the nation’s pensions funds or he was one of the people asleep at the switch. But those are really the only two options here.

I added the emphasis. You think his seat on the Senate Commerce Committee gave him any influence over the outdated, lax regulatory environment? Maybe he was too busy inventing wi-fi and blackberry cellphones to be bothered.

Perhaps that’s just a wee bit exaggerated, hmmm?

Jonathan Martin’s Blog: Holtz-Eakin: McCain helped create BlackBerry - Politico.com
Asked what work John McCain did as chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee that helped him understand the financial markets, the candidate’s top economic adviser wielded visual evidence: his BlackBerry.

“He did this,” Douglas Holtz-Eakin told reporters this morning, holding up his BlackBerry. “Telecommunications of the United States is a premier innovation in the past 15 years, comes right through the Commerce Committee. So you’re looking at the miracle John McCain helped create and that’s what he did.”

It’s true in exactly the same way Al Gore invented the internet. Perhaps the democrats ought to mercilessly mock Grandpa McSame exactly the same way.

McClatchy Washington Bureau | 09/15/2008 | Wall Street crisis is culmination of 28 years of deregulation

From Regan through Bush I, Clinton and Bush II we have persued a national policy of unfettering the financial market from the “evil” that is regualtion. I suppose the best way to prove someone a fool is to give them their way, but at what cost here? now we have a clear choice between two contenders. One wants to do exactly the same thing, only crazier. The other would like to return to sensible regualtion. I suppose if you’re the chariman of a investment bank the first one sounds like a good idea, but for everyone else it’s in your interests to vote Obama.

I have enough “skin in the game”, thanks anyway. Doesn’t everyone by definition have all their (real) skin in the game already?

Kevin Drum - Mother Jones Blog: Vote McCain, Lose Your Health Insurance
Remember: this is a feature, not a bug. Republicans think Americans use too much healthcare, and they figure that the best way to fix this is to make it more expensive. So that’s what McCain’s plan does. It’s a pretty typical specimen of the “more skin in the game” plan beloved of conservative think tanks.

Yes, too much health care. And somehow this is the consumers’ fault? It has nothing to do with the way medicine is practiced in the US? Nothing to do with bizzare financing methods or an unwillingness to implement systemic reform?

It is encouraginig that some members of the MSM are finally calling St. McCain out for the liar that he is.

Campaign of lies disgraces McCain - St. Petersburg Times
McCain’s straight talk has become a toxic mix of lies and double-speak. It is leaving a permanent stain on his reputation for integrity, and it is a short-term strategy that eventually will backfire with the very types of independent-thinking voters that were so attracted to him.

Some Guy With a Website by August J. Pollak - 9/15/2008 - See students

Augie says if you can see it you must be as qualified as Sarah Palin is in foreign affairs.