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Friday, September 12, 2008
McCain still peddles Palin mythology
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Appearing on “The View” on Friday, Sen. John McCain claimed that Sarah Palin had not sought federal earmarks as governor of Alaska.
Here is the official list of federal earmarks requested by Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska for the 2009 budget year, on Palin’s letterhead as governor.
Palin’s defenders point out that her 2009 request was considerably lower than that of the previous year. Nonetheless, it totals almost $200 million, which is more than any other state in the country on a per capita basis.
Furthermore, in the current fiscal year Congress approved almost $15 billion in earmarks. That is down considerably from the peak of $27 billion in 2005, when Republicans controlled both houses of Congress.
So if Sarah Palin is a small-government anti-earmark reformer, so too is the Democratic-controlled Congress under Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid.
Oh, and for those who ask, I’ll stop writing about it when they stop lying about it. Why?
Because their strategy is to keep restating these lies until people stop bothering to complain about it. And at that point, the lie will become accepted as the truth.
Except it’s not the truth. And the truth matters.
UPDATE: The link above is to a PDF file. It opens for me in Safari, but not in Firefox, so I’ll just post it here for those who want access to it:
http://stevens.senate.gov/earmarks/Approps-StateofAlaska.pdf
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The Christian view on torture
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
In conjunction with what they call a “National Summit on Torture” here in Atlanta, Georgia’s Mercer University and Faith in Public Life have released a fascinating poll of white Southern evangelicals on the topic. (h/t Political Insider).
According to the poll, 20 percent of white Southern evangelicals said that torture can often be justified, while another 38 percent say it can sometimes be justified. That’s a total of 58 percent of white Southern evangelicals saying that torture can often or sometimes by justified.
That’s considerably higher than the 48 percent of Americans overall who in an earlier poll said torture can often or sometimes be justified.
Overall, only 38 percent of white Southern evangelicals said torture could rarely or never be justified.
However, those who put the poll together then gave it a twist that is, well, almost diabolical. They reminded poll subjects of the Golden Rule, which demands that you treat others as you yourself would want to be treated, and then asked the question again.
Armed with that admonishment, the percentage who thought torture should rarely or never be used jumped by 14 points, to 52 percent.
There’s a lot of meat on that bone to be chewed over, but please, keep it respectful and avoid namecalling. Remember the Golden Rule.
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Bush reigns over death of capitalism?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Lehman Bros, the nation’s fourth largest investment bank, is teetering on the brink of failure, and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson is reportedly trying frantically to broker deals to sell pieces of the firm to other companies before it collapses altogether.
That’s fine. I hope he succeeds. But after committing taxpayers to as much as $200 billion for the bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, there can be no public money or government loan guarantees to sweeten the deals. None. If private enterprise doesn’t have enough faith in Lehman’s fundamentals to rescue the firm, government should stand aside and let it fall.
Anatole Kaletsky, the well-respected economics writer for the Times of London, takes a sobering look at the situation in his latest column:
“Even more than the mind-boggling $5,500 billion size of the two US mortgage companies, it was the political significance of their nationalisation that marked it out as an historic turning point. This was, after all, the biggest expropriation of private property undertaken by a government outside the former communist world, yet there was absolutely no protest, nor even discussion, about the terms imposed by the US Treasury.”
Kaletsky opens his piece by noting that this era was supposed to mark the triumph of capitalism, with communism gone and the markets triumphant. But events on Wall Street and in Washington indicate that “just as the triumph appeared to be complete, the innermost sanctum of the global capitalist system suddenly collapsed.” His conclusion is pretty chilling:
“If the US loses faith with free markets, compromises the protection of property rights and hobbles its financial markets — all of which it has dramatically done in the past seven days — then Europe will surely follow suit. Emerging economies such as China and India will become even more ambivalent about market economics. Instead of We Are All Capitalists Now, There Are No Capitalists Left may become the ideology of the next decade.”
And all under the reign of George W. Bush.
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