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September 2008
Write your own caption to this one, folks…
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
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It wasn’t Nancy with the laughing face
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Barack Obama has reportedly begun to call Democratic House members who opposed the bailout, trying to change a few minds and votes. No names are being mentioned, but you have to think that the four Georgia Democrats who voted against the bill — Hank Johnson, David Scott, John Lewis and John Barrow, whom Obama endorsed in a Democratic primary — would be on the call list.
Another Georgia Democrat, Rep. Jim Marshall of Macon, voted for the package despite facing one of the toughest re-election fights of any Democrat in Congress. He reportedly told fellow Democrats that this vote was important enough to lose his seat over if necessary. You gotta like that sentiment.
Also, you may remember that in the wake of Monday’s disastrous bailout vote, Republican House leaders tried to put the blame for their failure on an ill-considered and partisan speech by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
“We had a dozen members that we thought that we had a really good chance of getting on the floor,” House Minority Leader John Boehner told reporters afterward. “And all that evaporated when the speaker spoke.”
A day later, that excuse has fallen apart:
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Palin’s debate performance critical
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Sarah Palin’s performance in the vice presidential debate Thursday night will determine the course of the last month of the presidential campaign.
If she does OK, the race will continue to be fairly close in the last few weeks, with the outcome still in doubt but Obama holding the advantage.
However, if Palin embarrasses herself and her party and contributes further to the belief that her nomination was a monumental mistake, the presidential race is over and the only remaining question will be the margin of victory.
So far, Palin has come across as unintelligent in interviews, and has been lampooned viciously for that. However, it’s an impression that may not be entirely fair — the more charitable and accurate word may be unknowledgeable. Perfectly smart people will sound stupid if asked to expound on topics they have not studied and thought about, and that seems to be what is happening with Palin.
Time and again, she has shown no real familiarity or comprehension of national or international policy. In fact, her interview with Katie Couric is destined to become political legend. Afterward, one McCain aide tried to explain Palin’s performance in that interview by claiming that Couric had asked Palin “a series of trapdoor questions.”
They weren’t trapdoor questions, they were basic questions, and simply put.
Things got even more absurd this week after a voter in Philadelphia asked Palin whether US forces ought to chase terrorists across the Afghan border into Pakistan. Absolutely, Palin said, thus taking a position identitical to that of Barack Obama and contradicting that of John McCain.
Here’s how the conversation with the voter, Michael Rovito, played out:
“How about the Pakistan situation?” Rovito asked. “What’s your thoughts about that.”
“In Pakistan?” Palin responded.
“What’s going on over there, like Waziristan?”
“It’s working with Zardari to make sure that we’re all working together to stop the guys from coming in over the border,” Palin said. “And we’ll go from there.”
“Waziristan is blowing up,” Rovito replied.
“Yeah, it is,” Palin said. “And the economy there is blowing up, too.”
“So we do cross-border, like from Afghanistan to Pakistan, you think?” Rovito asked.
“If that’s what we have to do stop the terrorists from coming any further in, absolutely, we should,” Palin said.
It’s hardly unheard of for a vice presidential candidate to express views different from that of the presidential nominee. Joe Biden has already done so on occasion.
But in a later interview with Palin at his side, McCain claimed it was somehow “gotcha journalism” to have reported Palin’s response. Gotcha journalism, to report accurately a vice presidential nominee’s public response to a voter?
Here’s the interview. Note also how McCain and Palin try to mislead viewers about the nature of the exchange with the voter.
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A total lack of faith in economy, leaders
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Over the weekend, Gallup asked Americans how well their national leaders were responding to the economic meltdown. The results weren’t pretty. Only 28 percent approved of how President Bush has handled the problem, with 68 percent disapproving.
Republican leaders in Congress didn’t fare much better, with 58 percent of Americans disapproving and 31 percent approving. Democrats did a little better, with 50 percent disapproval and 39 percent approval.
John McCain’s campaign suspension stunt apparently didn’t go over well, with 53 percent disapproving of his performance and 37 percent approving. The only figure who came out on the plus side was Barack Obama, with 46 percent approval and 43 percent disapproval.
And of course, all those numbers were compiled before Monday’s distressing demonstration of bipartisan pettiness and incompetence.
This is not merely a financial crisis, it is a crisis of faith in American government, and the twin meltdowns are reinforcing each other with potentially terrible consequences. And in both cases, you get the sense that this has been a long time coming and will take a long time to fix.
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If you haven’t OD’d on bad news yet….
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
While you’re cruising metro Atlanta gas stations, looking for that telltale line of cars that indicates you may have hit the mother lode, here’s something to contemplate:
“The rise in global carbon dioxide emissions last year outpaced international researchers’ most dire projections, according to figures being released today, as human-generated greenhouse gases continued to build up in the atmosphere despite international agreements and national policies aimed at curbing climate change.
In 2007, carbon released from burning fossil fuels and producing cement increased 2.9 percent over that released in 2006, to a total of 8.47 gigatons, or billions of metric tons, according to the Australia-based Global Carbon Project, an international consortium of scientists that tracks emissions.
This output is at the very high end of scenarios outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and could translate into a global temperature rise of more than 11 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century, according to the panel’s estimates.”
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Two-stepping on the edge of economic disaster
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The bailout plan is now pretty much dead, at least in this version.
Why? Because the House Republicans fell well short of the votes their leadership said they could deliver, voting 2-1 against the plan. For some in the GOP, there’s a narcissistic, preening quality to their stance, a willingness to risk broad economic collapse so that they can tell themselves they are people of principle.
(UPDATE: I just got an email statement from U.S. Rep. Lynn Westmoreland, Republican from Georgia, who opposed the legislation. It illustrates my point perfectly:
“When faced with a tough decision, I rely on my principles - that smaller government is better and that markets work better bureaucratic decisions. While this bailout may work in the short term, I’m concerned greatly about the long-term consequences. When government willingly steps in to rescue people from risky behavior, government creates an incentive for future risky behavior. When businesses accept greater regulation in order to receive a bailout, we enlarge government, distort markets and render capitalism less efficient.”
The problem is, the folks back home can’t feed their kids with principle. Principle doesn’t save jobs. Principle doesn’t protect the nest eggs of retirees. In this case, principle just makes a few people feel better about themselves.)
On the other hand, Republicans are trying to put some of the blame on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for a partisan speech she gave just before the vote in which she blamed the GOP for the crisis.
And to tell you the truth, they have a very good point. As I listened to that speech, I was thinking that this is a major mistake. There is a time and place for everything, and that was neither the time nor the place for that speech.
UPDATE II: Barney Frank has responded to that charge, saying that Republicans are in effect saying they voted against the national interest because they got their feelings hurt. It’s a valid point on a purely logical basis, but human emotion plays a very big role in moments such as this. It was still a poor move by Pelosi.
UPDATE III: And the Dow average closes down 778 points.
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Now what? Bailout plan in big trouble
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Bailout plan rejected; Dow Jones down more than 600 points.
They’re leaving the vote open for now, so major arm-twisting is no doubt underway.
But it doesn’t look good.
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IRS is not “gagging” churches
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Conservative ministers across the country, including the Rev. Jody Hice of Barrow County, have decided to challenge IRS regulations prohibiting use of churches to endorse political candidates.
“From his pulpit at Bethlehem First Baptist Church outside Atlanta, (Hice) urged his congregation to vote for Sen. John McCain and to not vote for Sen. Barack Obama,” according to an AJC story by Christopher Quinn.
Hice and other ministers taking part in “Pulpit Freedom Sunday” are trying to provoke a court fight with the IRS over its regulations. The effort was organized by the conservative Alliance Defense Fund, which sees the IRS rules as an infringement on the First Amendment freedoms of religion and speech.
The rules are neither. Hice and other ministers have every right to preach politics from their pulpits. Nothing government does can or will stop them. However, they simply cannot endorse candidates AND maintain their tax-exempt status. That status is a special benefit conferred by government, and government has every right to set conditions on receipt of that benefit.
Furthermore, the IRS rules in question apply not just to churches but to a wide array of tax-exempt non-profit groups that perform religious, educational or charitable functions. Donations to such groups are tax-deductible; donations to political groups and candidates are not.
It is perfectly reasonable and fair for the IRS to enact rules to protect that distinction.
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McCain’s debate demeanor may have crystallized voter fears
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
With the presidential race sliding away from him, John McCain needed something big to happen in Friday night’s foreign-policy debate.
He didn’t get it.
McCain did fine, as did Barack Obama. In fact, I personally thought McCain might have gotten the better of the argument. The early polls disagreed, however, suggesting that voters were more impressed with Obama’s performance on a topic that should have been McCain territory.
So what happened? Historically, debates have an effect only if something happens to crystallize some pre-existing doubt about a candidate. When Mike Dukakis was asked how he would react if his wife was raped, his dispassionate response confirmed the sense that the Democrat didn’t have the fire that Americans sought in a president. Likewise, George Bush’s repeated glances at his watch in a 1992 debate confirmed voter suspicion that he wasn’t engaged.
This time, the combative, dismissive approach that McCain adopted toward Obama may have confirmed fears of many voters that as commander in chief, McCain might choose confrontation in a crisis not because that’s what the situation required, but because that is his nature.
That concern was also the subtext of a question posed to McCain in an interview on “60 Minutes” earlier this month. McCain was asked whether as president he would make it policy to “engage in preemptive war against a country that might pose a threat to the United States —- a country that hasn’t attacked us.”
“If it’s a provable direct threat,” the senator responded. “Suppose that the Iranians had nuclear weapons. And you had a whole lot of other information about Iranian intentions and you could make the case to the American people and to the world, I think it’s obvious that we would have to prevent what we are absolutely certain is a direct threat to the lives of the American people.”
Most Americans, including Obama, would agree with McCain. If we are “absolutely certain” that we face “a direct threat to the lives of the American people,” no U.S. president would hesitate to respond militarily.
The problem is, McCain has already demonstrated that his actual threshhold for war is quite a bit lower than he described to CBS.
In 2002 and early 2003, the American people faced the very dilemma posed to McCain on “60 Minutes.” President Bush and his allies were arguing that the threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was real and direct, and that if we did not act “the smoking gun might come in the form of a mushroom cloud over an American city.”
In those circumstances, McCain made it clear that he considered Iraq a threat that must be addressed pre-emptively, calling Saddam “a clear and present danger” that could not be ignored.
“In an age of weapons of mass destruction and global terrorists bent on acquiring those weapons, the costs of inaction could well be catastrophic,” McCain warned in a speech on the Senate floor.
However, even at the time Iraq did not pose “a provable direct threat” to the United States, the threshhold for action now cited by McCain. And despite some claims to the contrary, we were far from “absolutely certain” that Saddam posed a direct threat to American lives.
Nonetheless, McCain was avid for military action, to the point that he libeled fellow Americans who disagreed with his stance. He was so eager for war that he claimed Saddam “is using opponents of the war in America to advance his own ends, sowing division within our own ranks.”
McCain’s response to the “60 Minutes” question was also revealing for another reason. He took a question about a theoretical threat and immediately gave it an address, Iran. Both McCain and Obama have said that the military option must remain on the table when dealing with Iran, but McCain’s history suggests he may be too eager to use that option.
With his demeanor Friday night, McCain may have taken a nebulous, nagging doubt about his candidacy and crystallized it into something hard and real.
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Obama momentum building
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The Gallup three-day tracking poll has Barack Obama up by eight points, 50-42, a three-point jump from Saturday. That includes just one day of post-debate polling, suggesting that Obama could move up still farther in the next couple of days.
A Gallup/USA Today poll also confirms two earlier polls reporting that Obama was perceived by voters as winning Friday night’s debate. According to Gallup, 46 percent of Americans said Obama did better, compared to 34 percent for McCain.
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House Republicans playing chicken
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Congress is reportedly close to an agreement on the Wall Street bailout, but then, they’ve reportedly been close before.
However, House Republicans better be wary of overplaying their hand in opposing the deal. The cost could be devastating. If they do block passage of the bill, they would in effect assume ownership of this mess. If the market really tanks later and the economy collapses, the House Republican caucus becomes the easy scapegoat, even if unfairly, for the whole catastrophe.
And that won’t be pretty. At least some of them seem to understand that, but we’ll see….
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Early polls both say Obama won
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
So far we’ve got two polls reporting reaction to Friday night’s debate, one from CBS and one from CNN. Both show a pretty substandial advantage for Obama.
In the CBS poll of supposedly uncommitted voters, “Thirty-nine percent … said Obama won the debate. Twenty-four percent said McCain won, and another 37 percent thought it was a tie.
In the CNN poll, “Barack Obama came out on top, but there was overwhelming agreement that both Obama and John McCain would be able to handle the job of president if elected…..
“The CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey is not a measurement of the views of all Americans, since only people who watched the debate were questioned and the audience included more Democrats than Republicans.
Fifty-one percent of those polled thought Obama did the better job in Friday night’s debate, while 38 percent said John McCain did better.”
At the very least, those results suggest that McCain didn’t come close to achieving the so-called “game-changing” results he needed.
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Paul Newman dead at 83….
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
… he was a class act all around. A movie star who never got too full of himself, and a guy who seemed to get a lot of fun out of life while honoring his responsibility to his fellow man.
I think my favorite Newman films were probably “Hud,” “Cool Hand Luke” and “Slapshot,” which was on cable a few weeks ago and was still funny as hell.
We should all live lives so full.
Oh, and one more thing I should mention. His Newman’s Own Caesars salad dressing is excellent.
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Mano a mano, hand to hand
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
McCain: “Surge,” “victory,” “Georgia,” “Commander in chief”
Obama: “Afghanistan,” “Bush,” “Bin Laden,” “Bush”
UPDATE: On the bailout, the two candidates take a very similar position. McCain makes a cross-partisan appeal with the shout-out to Kennedy, following it up with approval for the bipartisan effort to pass a rescue bill.
Obama won’t commit to supporting the bill until he sees its language. McCain echoes him.
UPDATE TWO: Nice accountability story from McCain citing Eisenhower, subtly calling attention to his military background along the way. Well done.
THREE: McCain bashes the Republicans, earmarks as the gateway drug to big spending addiction. He cites $3 million bear DNA project, but I think that may have lost some sting with a $700 billion bailout request. McCain cites Obama’s earmark requests, Obama responds by citing McCain tax cut. I think McCain’s getting the better of this exchange; it’s his territory.
FOUR: McCain getting the worst of the tax-cut exchange, largely because Obama’s right. The McCain tax cuts are targeted to the rich.
Not much if any foreign policy.
FIVE: Great question from Lehrer. With $700 billion expenditure, what do we cut to offset it? What proposals do we drop?
Obama talks about the things he’s going to keep spending on. Not exactly responsive. McCain says we have to cut spending. Cut ethanol subsidies. YEAH!! Fix defense contracting. YEAH!! (although McCain has attacked Obama for saying the same thing). Advantage McCain, for at least a little bit of specificity.
I think both are doing well. A good exchange.
IRAQ: I think McCain got the better of it — both made good points, but the surge question is trouble for Obama. I do wonder how it will go over with the public, though, because they agree with Obama’s larger point — we shouldn’t have been in Iraq in the first place.
AFGHANISTAN: Obama is exactly right here. We absolutely must take out top al Qaida personnel in Pakistan if the Pakistanis refuse to do so.
IRAN: Obama doing well here, citing the advocacy of Henry Kissinger to talk with Iran. Will McCain address the Spain issue? Because that was really strange when he said that he wouldn’t talk with Spain’s prime minister.
RUSSIA: McCain pushing the naivete angle. He also sidesteps the fact that Georgia started that war. Russia used the excuse to overreact, but the initial aggression was from Georgia. You can’t rewrite that history. It’s fact.
FINAL VERDICT: I’d give the nod to McCain. But I think Obama did as well as he needed to do on this topic.
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Bluff called, McCain set for debate
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
On Wednesday, John McCain announced that little inconsequential things such as a presidential campaign and a long-scheduled debate would have to be set aside until Congress had an agreement on a Wall Street bailout.
Patriotism required it. Leadership required it. There would be no campaigning until the republic was saved.
By today, however, patriotism apparently no longer requires it. There’s still no deal — the agreement that congressional leaders and the administration thought they had cut Thursday morning has fallen apart. But McCain has nonetheless abandoned his operatic grandstanding and hustled down to Oxford, Miss. for tonight’s 9 p.m. debate.
The setback comes at a tough time for the Arizona senator. He’s declining in the polls; his vice presidential selection has been exposed as hopelessly, embarrassingly unprepared. But the subject of tonight’s discussion — foreign policy — plays to his strengths. On this topic, he has a credible story to tell, credentials to offer and experience to cite.
However, all Barack Obama has to do on this occasion is attain a draw, and I think he’ll accomplish that. He lacks McCain’s credentials and experience, but the foreign policy he advocates is more realistic and intelligent.
So feel free to post your expectations, the questions you hope get asked, the things you most want to hear — or not hear — from each candidate. I’ll post a fresh thread when the debate actually starts.
UPDATE: Oh, and let me say one more time: Lou Dobbs is unwatchable.
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Palin argues for bailout … I think
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
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Spray a little tax cut on it, it’ll be fine
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Remember the father in “My Big Fat Greek Wedding”? Whatever the problem, Windex would cure it.
House Republicans have their own version of Windex: Tax cuts. Their solution to the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression? Tax cuts. More specifically, tax cuts for dividends and capital gains. And apparently they intend to hold their breath until they get them.
Well, I got news for ‘em. If the market really starts to tank because of their little tantrum, the capital gains tax will be zero because there won’t be no steeenkin’ capital gains to tax for the next 10 or 20 years.
Democrats claim the Republican rank and file are balking at a deal just to give John McCain a problem to solve with his Dudley Do-Right act, riding back to Washington to rescue the country. I don’t think that’s accurate, and the Dems know it.
House Republicans — and not a few in the Senate, including Richard Shelby of Alabama — are rejecting the Wall Street bailout because it offends their tender Reaganite sensibilities. They want a whole different approach, including tax cuts and some sort of privately financed mortgage insurance mechanism.
I understand their distaste for the Bush plan. It sucks. Hundreds of billions of dollars to rescue Wall Street? It sucks, and nobody likes it. But we are truly in a crisis, and I happen to think an approach put together by people such as Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke has a better chance of succeeding than a plan created to satisfy the small minds of the ideologically frozen Republican core, a group whose entire economic understanding consists of cutting taxes and hating government.
But getting those folks to move will be difficult, and I doubt McCain has much leverage with them. They never liked him to begin with because in their eyes, he lacked ideological purity. Georgia’s seven Republican congressmen are no doubt right in the middle of the anti-bailout faction, and not a single one of them backed McCain in the primary. As Rep. Jack Kingston once memorably complained, McCain “lets Kennedy write the bills then puts his own name on it.”
So here we are, in one helluva standoff.
“We are working to try to get this bill ready, but if House Republicans continue to reject the president’s approach, then there’s no bill,” says Rep. Barney Frank, chair of the House Financial Services Committee. “We told Paulson the whole thing is at risk if the president can’t get his own party to participate.”
“We’ve not seen any way to getting majority [Republican] support,” counters Rep. Eric Cantor of Virginia, one of the architects of the GOP alternative approach.
Meanwhile, there’s the debate tonight. I suspect that by now, McCain realizes that his rashness has put him in quite a predicament. He would love to find a face-saving way to show up in Mississippi tonight, but how?
If the debate does come off, we’ll be live-blogging it here. But the odds of that are 50-50 at best.
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I’m sorry — Sarah Palin is a bad joke
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
In her interview with Katie Couric to be aired tonight on CBS, Sarah Palin complains that she should not have been mocked for claiming that Alaska’s proximity to Russia gives her insight into foreign policy.
So Couric gently asks Palin to explain again how proximity enhances her foreign policy credentials. Here’s the exchange, verbatim:
PALIN: “It certainly does, because our next-door neighbors are foreign countries there in the state that I am the executive of….”
COURIC: “Have you ever been involved in negotiations, for example, with the Russians?”
PALIN: “We have trade missions back and forth. We do. It’s very important when you consider even national security issues with Russia as Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where do they go? It’s Alaska, it’s just right over the border. It’s from Alaska that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia, because they are right there, they are right there next to our state.” (TRANSCRIPT CORRECTED AS OF 4:46)
And so they are.
Palin is living, breathing proof that John McCain lies when he claims to put this country first over politics. She makes Dan Quayle look like Albert Einstein with a better haircut.
Here’s the clip. Go horrify yourself. Seeing it is worse than reading it.
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The superpowers of John McCain
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Leaders of the House and Senate, Democrats and Republicans alike, have announced they’ve reached a basic deal on the Wall Street bailout package and will present it to the president this afternoon.
“We are very confident that we can act expeditiously,” said Sen. Chris Dodd, Democratic chair of the Senate Banking Committee.
“I now expect that we will indeed have a plan that can pass the House, pass the Senate, be signed by the president,” said Sen. Bob Bennett, a Utah Republican.
“There really isn’t much of a deadlock to break,” according to Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee.
So I guess I gotta ‘fess up:
That John McCain must be a real magic man. He leaves the campaign trail and shows up in Washington today and — voila!! — barely an hour later, a deal emerges, just like that.
I mean, Big John is so good he didn’t even have to go to the meeting. Just the mere rumor that he might be in town was apparently enough to heal divisions, erase disagreements and get all of Congress to start singing Kumbayah in perfect unison and right on pitch, like a regular Mormon Tabernacle Choir.
In fact, with superpowers like that the guy ought to be on “Heroes.”
Now … about that debate?
UPDATE: Seriously, doesn’t this make McCain look utterly foolish? Just this morning he was in New York, insisting there was a logjam in Washington. “”It has become clear that no consensus has developed to support the administration’s proposal to meet the crisis,” he said. “I do not believe that the plan on the table will pass as it currently stands, and we are running out of time.”
Meanwhile, at the White House, Press Secretary Dana Perino was telling reporters that things seemed to be progressing well, that negotiators were making good progress.
Well, that’s not what McCain is saying, someone pointed out.
Perino shrugged.
“Maybe he has information that I don’t have that makes him think the deal is almost dead,” she said.
It’s fascinating — McCain’s fellow Republicans in the White House and Congress didn’t even try to give him any cover on this.
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It’s not all THEIR fault, you know….
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
So this is how the Reagan Era ends, not with a bang but with the whimpering and whining of Wall Street executives begging for a bailout from an American public they long treated like unsophisticated rubes.
In less sobering times, there might be some entertainment value in that scene. But not now. To make matters worse, we have no real choice but to give them the help they seek, although with a lot more strings than they claim are possible. It’s either that, or risk letting the whole country go down the tubes.
With this bailout, we mark not just the end of an era but the demise of the ideology that created it. Events have made it crushingly obvious that greed is a poor foundation on which to build a nation and a culture. It turns out that enforcing the rules is actually a good idea, and that debts both personal and public really do come due eventually, just like daddy said they would.
In that kind of environment, it’s no wonder that John McCain has beat a retreat from the campaign trail, declining to debate. The Republican talking points make no sense anymore; the Republican worldview lies exposed and empty.
But if we’re going to be honest, we need to acknowledge that the excesses of corporate America that are now so roundly ridiculed — the grotesque bonuses, the heedless risktaking, the disdain for rules — existed because the cultural values of this country allowed them to exist and in fact helped to create them.
Most of what’s been going on with Wall Street comes as no surprise. In recent years, it was almost as if we Americans took a perverse pride in the fact that we could pay our CEOs half a billion dollars to fail, as if that bloated excess was itself proof of our great prosperity and strength. We acted as if we were one of those tribes out of mythology that celebrated its prosperity by boasting how fat its kings and princes were.
And they weren’t the only ones getting fat. Go to Realtytrac.com and plug in your ZIP code. You’ll see a map showing hundreds of houses under foreclosure or facing auction in your area. Then start poking around into other neighborhoods — rich, poor, middle-class. The problem may be more concentrated in poorer areas, but it is significant almost everywhere, crossing class lines, racial lines, state lines and political lines.
As those maps demonstrate, Americans of every description succumbed to the temptation of living beyond their means, of accepting more risk than they could really handle. Much as we might like to toss tomatoes at Wall Street, they are merely the high-end exemplars of a mindset that became endemic in our culture.
How did we come to this? On the political side of the equation, it happened because the modern Republican Party sold its soul. A quarter century ago, the fiscally conservative, tight-fisted GOP, a party that championed a balanced budget amendment, suddenly convinced itself that deficits no longer mattered.
The reasoning behind that change of heart was obvious. When the much-beloved Reagan tax cuts inevitably produced massive Reagan deficits, conservatives faced a choice. They could abandon the tax cuts that had brought them great political success and power, or they could abandon their opposition to deficits. They chose to embrace deficits.
But that in turn created a bigger problem. If deficits don’t matter, then the rationale for small government disappears. If deficits don’t matter, we can cut merrily cut taxes year after year while also doubling defense spending and creating expensive new social programs. If deficits don’t matter, it’s all carrots, no stick.
In a culture that seldom worried about tomorrow, personal debt built up. Corporate debt built up. The national debt soared, and we financed our lifestyles by sending IOUs to places such as China and Japan and Saudi Arabia, IOUs that our children and grandchildren will have to redeem.
So while the most egregious mistakes of the era can indeed be traced to Wall Street and Washington, the rest of us shouldn’t feign innocence. We all grabbed a share of the pie.
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What exactly is McCain up to?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
John McCain isn’t going back to Washington to negotiate a deal. As President Bush laid it out in his short speech Wednesday night, the very broad outlines of a deal have already been agreed upon, thanks in large part to the fact that the administration has been laudably open to compromise.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Minority Leader John Boehner also issued a joint statement Wednesday in which they “agree that key changes should be made to the administration’s initial proposal. It must include basic good-government principles, including rigorous and independent oversight, strong executive compensation standards and protections for taxpayers.”
The details may yet get sticky, but McCain has no expertise in the details on this issue and no real role to play in hammering them out. There is no deadlock he needs to break. Injecting presidential politics into that situation is dangerous.
Nor is McCain going back to Washington to reach across the aisle to Democrats. The Democratic leadership and membership as a whole is already more accepting of the need for a bailout package than their GOP counterparts. They don’t need to be wooed.
McCain’s sole usefulness in Washington — and it’s not minor — would be to rally House members of his own party to support the package that emerges. In other words, his effort would be within his own party, not bipartisan. Unfortunately, his usefulness in that regard is questionable given his relative lack of support within the GOP House caucus, and there’s no reason he has to suspend his campaign to perform that role. Certainly, it’s no reason to postpone a presidential debate.
His announcement still smacks of pure political grandstanding, and no one has yet articulated a convincing reason why a debate would not be appropriate.
We ran political campaigns during major wars; we ran them through the Depression. Campaigns are the means by which democracies decide and debate issues, and we don’t close them down in times of stress. That’s when they are most important.
Interestingly, Sen. Lindsey Graham, a top McCain ally, is now suggesting that the first presidential debate be rescheduled to Oct. 2, which is supposed to be the date of the vice presidential debate. That would conveniently knock the debate between Sarah Palin and Joe Biden back at least a week or more.
The cocoon around Palin is being woven ever tighter.
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McCain suspending campaign, seeks to delay debate
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
John McCain has announced that he is suspending his campaign pending resolution of the debate in Congress over the $700 billion bailout, and he wants to postpone Friday’s scheduled presidential debate as well.
This is a bizarre turn of events.
Neither McCain nor Barack Obama plays a critical role in the congressional process on this issue, so it’s hard to see why their presence in Washington would be so important. In fact, Congress and the administration have been moving toward resolution pretty quickly under the circumstances, with broad areas of agreement emerging on most of the major issues.
President Bush, for example, has signaled a willingness to accept some sort of limits on executive compensation in the package. They’re not close to a final deal, but the outlines of a deal are there.
So far, I’ve seen no reaction from the Obama camp.
UPDATE I:
The unilateral basis of this announcement makes it look like a political decision. With the polls turning against him — down nine points in an ABC/Washington Post poll, down six in a new Fox poll — it’s possible that McCain wants off the campaign trail until he can figure out where the public is on this issue.
That may sound cynical, but again, it’s hard to see how McCain and Obama are needed for a deal, nor is it clear how suspending the presidential campaign will bring the process to a close any sooner.
UPDATE II:
I just saw Sen. Lindsay Graham, a close McCain ally, try to explain this strange decision. If anything, his rhetoric and spin confirmed the sense that they are just trying to squeeze political advantage out of this. The Obama camp is said to be leaning against suspending his campaign, but no final word or decision yet.
UPDATE III:
Obama has now gone on air to explain his position. He acknowledges the seriousness of the issue and the importance of acting on a bipartisan basis. But he believes the debate should occur so that the American people can hear about this issue from the two candidates who want to become their leader in 120 days. And he notes that a president can often be required to deal with more than one thing at a time.
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Why can’t Sarah come out to play, Mr. McCain?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Last night, CNN anchor Campbell Brown called out the McCain campaign for its condescending treatment of Sarah Palin:
“Tonight I call on the McCain campaign to stop treating Sarah Palin like she is a delicate flower that will wilt at any moment. This woman is from Alaska for crying out loud. She is strong. She is tough. She is confident. And you claim she is ready to be one heartbeat away from the presidency.
“If that is the case, then end this chauvinistic treatment of her now. Allow her to show her stuff. Allow her to face down those pesky reporters…. Let her have a real news conference with real questions. By treating Sarah Palin different from the other candidates in this race, you are not showing her the respect she deserves.
“Free Sarah Palin. Free her from the chauvinistic chains you are binding her with. Sexism in this campaign must come to an end. Sarah Palin has just as much a right to be a real candidate in this race as the men do. So let her act like one.”
But that mean ol’ Mr. McCain won’t let Sarah come out and play.
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Paulson plan is Wall Street-centric
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Nobody knows if a huge taxpayer-funded bailout of Wall Street will stave off financial disaster. But without it, the odds of a collapse rise significantly.
So it’s not a question of whether to do it, but how to do it. And unfortunately, the proposal initially advanced by the Bush administration is seriously flawed, in large part because it reflects the same mind-set and attitude that helped cause the crisis.
For example, in his initial three-page proposal, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson advocated giving himself unchecked authority to spend $700 billion in taxpayers’ money without any oversight or review whatsoever. The language of the proposal was stark:
“The Secretary is authorized to purchase … on such terms and conditions as determined by the Secretary …”
“The Secretary is authorized to take such actions as the Secretary deems necessary …”
“Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are nonreviewable … and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.”
In other words, to cure a situation worsened or caused by a failure to exercise oversight, the Bush administration proposed a solution in which oversight would be abandoned altogether. Reaction against that power grab was harsh and bipartisan, and in comments to a Senate committee Tuesday, Paulson denied he had ever contemplated taking such powers without oversight.
So that issue is settled.
Paulson and others have also tried to block attempts to limit executive compensation in firms that take advantage of the bailout fund. Paulson, for example, warned that such limits might discourage CEOs from taking advantage of the bailout.
“If we design it so it’s punitive and so institutions aren’t going to participate, this won’t work the way we need it to work,” Paulson said.
If you think about it, that’s a pretty incredible statement. The Treasury secretary — himself the former chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs — is admitting that to preserve their exorbitant pay packages, corporate CEOs might bar their companies from participating in the bailout, even if doing so would endanger their companies’ continued existence and the nation as a whole.
Whatever the source, that is a damning indictment of the Wall Street culture. But it is particularly striking coming from an insider such as Paulson, and it reflects Wall Street’s belief that finance-industry executives have some God-granted right to extremely lucrative bonuses regardless of performance.
Just last year, Wall Street’s top five financial firms — including names such as Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns — awarded $39 billion in bonuses at a time when stockholder value in those companies fell by $74 billion.
And amazingly, this current crisis hasn’t chastened the industry a bit. Over the weekend, news broke that eight former Lehman Brothers executives, along with 200 other “key” former Lehman employees, would be given $2.5 billion in bonuses from Barclay’s in a deal to purchase part of the bankrupt Lehmans. So while Lehman stockholders get little or nothing, the executives who helped run the company into the ground get a whole new round of bonuses.
Even some conservatives now agree that compensation must be addressed in the bailout. “Severance packages should be at risk,” the Heritage Foundation advises in its analysis of the bailout. “In order to ensure that incompetent executives do not benefit from their criminal mismanagement, the new RTC should be allowed to refer cases to the Justice Department for civil suits to recover bonuses or termination compensation received by those individuals.”
With his opposition to compensation limits, it’s clear that Paulson is seeing the crisis through the eyes of a Wall Street financier, which is only natural given his background. It was telling that in his prepared comments Tuesday, the Treasury secretary blamed the crisis on banks making bad loans and homeowners buying more house than they could afford, while saying nothing about the very considerable role that he and his former colleagues on Wall Street played.
That world view extends to Paulson’s argument that taxpayers should not be allowed to share in any benefits that the bailout produces for financial firms. To Paulson’s mind, that requirement might discourage firms from participating in the bailout.
However, if companies are healthy enough to decide not to participate, they didn’t really need the bailout in the first place. Once again, Paulson’s instincts betray him. As with the compensation question, he wants to protect Wall Street first, out of the mistaken if honest belief that by protecting Wall Street he protects the best interests of the country.
That is simply not true. If taxpayers are being required to cough up $2,300 for every man, woman and child in the country to finance this bailout, basic fairness requires that their direct interests be protected first. Fairness also requires that Wall Street be required to share in the pain.
In fact, we already have a useful and longstanding precedent for that approach. Under federal law, if you carelessly start a forest fire or range fire, the government has the right to bill you for the cost of bringing that fire under control. There’s no reason that same logic shouldn’t apply to those on Wall Street who have also been playing with fire for far too long.
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The solution to our gas shortage
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
An emailer — call him JW from Roswell — sent this proposal to me for addressing the rolling gasoline shortage, and damned if it doesn’t sound like an intelligent solution:
“I am old enough to have gone through the national gas shortage in the 1970s, and the cause of the shortage then is the same as now: drivers topping off their tanks.
In essence, our gasoline inventory is in millions of individual gas tanks instead of in gas stations. Gas stations attempted to solve the problem then in the same way some are doing now, by setting a maximum gallon limit per purchase. While that seems to make sense, it is exactly the opposite of what needs to be done.
Setting a maximum encourages people to top off; setting a MINIMUM (of eight gallons, say), means that the driver must pay for the minimum whether he or she pumps that much or not, therefore making topping off very expensive.”
Like I said, sounds good to me.
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10 years ago today, Molly Ivins said….
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I’ve been watching Henry Paulson and Ben Bernanke testify about the proposed $700 billion bailout before the Senate Banking Committee. Paulson has been pretty candid that without this assistance, the financial system is likely to collapse, and he concedes that there are no guarantees even if it does become law.
Given all that, I thought I’d post large excerpts of a column by the late Molly Ivins, which the AJC published 10 years ago to the day — Sept. 23, 1998. Her subject was a proposal to deregulate the banking industry.
“AUSTIN - Watch the House pass a bad bill. Watch the Senate make it worse. Watch the banking industry dig its own grave. Watch supposedly smart people set up a financial disaster. Can we see President Clinton veto this mess? Veto, Clinton, veto.
Not since Congress passed the Garn-St. Germain bill in 1981 - the one that deregulated the S&Ls and unleashed a half-a-trillion-dollar disaster, which the taxpayers of this country wound up paying for - has there been a move to match this for pure folly.
In May, the House passed (by one vote) a bill to eliminate barriers between banks, brokerage firms and insurance companies. This sets up financial holding companies that can offer all three types of services simultaneously. The most obvious risk is that a blunder in the insurance or brokerage end of the business could bring down a bank, putting insured deposits at risk. The taxpayers, of course, then wind up with the tab, as we did with the savings-and-loan mess.
The bill contains some requirements to mitigate this risk; each branch of a financial holding company will have to maintain a separate cushion against losses, which cannot be used to shore up the other branches. Although this provision somewhat lessens the risk, it does not eliminate it.
The purpose of this bill, long sought by the financial industry, is to legalize such mergers as the proposed Citicorp-Travelers Insurance mega-merger. Many experts believe the effect will be the emergence of nine or ten enormous institutions after the consolidation of hundreds of insurance companies, banks and brokerage firms.
Even before this consequence comes to pass, it is apparent that the bill will harm consumers. Last week - on a straight party-line vote of 12-10 in the Senate Banking Committee, all the Republicans against all the Democrats - consumer protections were stripped out of the bill….
The Senate committee … weakened House-version provisions to (1) ensure that customers are informed when financial products are not FDIC-insured or they are subject to risk and (2) to require some clear separation of insured-deposit activities from non-insured-deposit activities. And the Senate created more exemptions from securities laws that help guard investors.
In addition, Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas is on a jihad against the Community Reinvestment Act, which is designed to make more loans available to low-income borrowers. He’s trying to strip those provisions out of the bill.
Now, see if you can follow this bouncing ball of news, because it’s a triple carom shot that sets up the aforementioned financial nightmare.
According to a report released Friday by federal banking regulators, banks are lowering commercial lending standards, even though the risk that business borrowers will default on a loan is rising.
According to The Washington Post, “The four-year trend is causing concern among regulators that the nation’s banks will be hit by a wave of sour domestic loans over the next 18 months.”
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency reported: “Projecting risk over the next 12 months, credit risk is expected to further increase in all commercial portfolios. Banks are leaving themselves with fewer options to control the risks associated with commercial lending should the economy falter. “
Next step: Will the economy falter? According to reporting in Friday’s Christian Science Monitor, to cite just one of many such warning articles: “Concern is growing in the top echelons of Wall Street and Washington that cheap exports from overseas may drive down the American economy. The R word — recession — is now being heard more often. “
So what we have here is (1) increasing likelihood of recession dead ahead, (2) banks already looking at serious trouble because of stupid lending policies, and (3) a bill that effectively further deregulates the banks and hurts consumers, making it even more likely that banks will get themselves into serious trouble. And we’re telling other countries how to fix their banking systems?
Veto, veto, veto.”
Clinton didn’t veto.
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John McCain, the aviator-president
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I grew up on and around military bases, and one of the things you learn in that environment is that fighter pilots are a different, more volatile breed.
A certain type of person is drawn to that line of work — aggressive, quick to act and often quick to anger — and those traits are heightened by intensive training and the demands of the job. Fighter jocks don’t have the luxury of time to think things through. At Mach speed, they have to react by instinct to what’s going on around them, and the guy who responds more quickly than his opponent — the guy who gets inside the other guy’s decision loop, as the expression goes — is the guy who survives.
You see those traits still in John McCain, which helps explain why he seems different from other politicians. It also helps explain why the answer he gives you today can be very different from the answer you got a year ago. He responds to issues from gut instinct, not from some consistent philosophical approach or time spent thinking things through.
In that sense, McCain is somewhat like George W. Bush, although with McCain it is more authentic. Having grown up around the real thing, I always thought Bush came off as a wannabe, as a poser, and never more so than on the flight deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln in that “Mission Accomplished” fiasco. For McCain that comes naturally.
However, one of the questions before the voters this year is whether the traits and instincts that make a good aviator translate well into the presidency. Thad Cochran, a Republican from Mississippi who has served with McCain in the Senate for more than 20 years, has expressed serious doubts.
“The thought of his being president sends a cold chill down my spine,” Cochran told a reporter in January. “He is erratic. He is hotheaded. He loses his temper and he worries me.”
Washington Post columnist George Will expresses similar reservations in today’s column, headlined “McCain loses his head.” Will criticizes McCain for his quick, seemingly off-the-cuff demand that SEC Chairman Chris Cox be fired in response to the Wall Street meltdown, seeing it as emblematic of McCain’s larger approach.
Will writes:
“For McCain, politics is always operatic, pitting people who agree with him against those who are ‘corrupt’ or ‘betray the public’s trust,’ two categories that seem to be exhaustive — there are no other people.”
And Will’s conclusion?
“It is arguable that, because of his inexperience, Obama is not ready for the presidency. It is arguable that McCain, because of his boiling moralism and bottomless reservoir of certitudes, is not suited to the presidency. Unreadiness can be corrected, although perhaps at great cost, by experience. Can a dismaying temperament be fixed?”
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Grab the pitchforks and torches, Part II
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Guess how much the top five firms on Wall Street — Bear Stearns, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, and Morgan Stanley — paid in executive bonuses last year alone. I’m talking bonuses alone — not salary, not options, just bonuses.
When you have a figure in mind, open the comments. Oh, and remember that the stocks of those five firms fell a combined $74 billion in 2007.
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Here’s a map of the real estate crisis
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The scale of the current financial crisis is difficult to grasp, but here’s one little piece of information that might help.
It’s a map compiled by realtytrak.com, which tracks foreclosure listings all over the country. You can plug in a zip code and see the properties that are bank-owned or scheduled for auction in that area.
The link above takes you to a map of part of the 30022 zip code near affluent Alpharetta, focused more tightly on the area surrounding the Country Club of the South. It lists 230 properties in various stages of foreclosure. Some are listed as low as $100,000, which suggests they must be condo units. Others list for well over $1 million — the most expensive I saw was at $2.5 million, although some may be higher.
It is a very sobering thing to see.
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Grab the pitchforks and torches!
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
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“Fury at $2.5bn Lehman bonus”
“STAFF at Lehman’s New York office who helped to cause the world’s biggest corporate bankruptcy are to share in a $2.5 billion bonanza.
The bonus, which has been described by London staff as a “scandal,” has been pledged by Barclays Capital, the British-based bank that last week acquired Lehman’s American operation and took on 10,000 staff.
The $2.5 billion (£1.4 billion) pot, which has been ring-fenced as part of the acquisition, has caused huge resentment among the 5,000 staff in the firm’s European and Middle Eastern operations who are not guaranteed to be paid after this month….
A Chapter 11 bankruptcy document filed by Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc says that Barclays has identified eight individuals out of the New York staff of 10,000 who are vital to make the deal succeed and a further 200 who are identified as “key”. It is thought that these eight directors will be locked into two-year contracts worth between $10m and $25m a year.”
Oh, and by the way?
Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson has now expanded the proposed $700 billion taxpayer financial bailout to include foreign-owned banks … such as Barclay’s. He is also resisting efforts to include restrictions on executive pay in that package.
I am thinking VERY bad thoughts that perhaps should not be expressed in public.
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The price of a $700 billion bailout
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Congress is grimly sorting through the details — the few details that are available — of the extraordinary $700 billion Wall Street bailout proposed by the Bush administration.
Some Democrats, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, have suggested attaching a second economic stimulus package to the must-pass bill, but that’s a bad idea. There’s no evidence the previous stimulus effort had much impact, and the package is expensive enough already.
It’ll also be interesting to see how many Republicans showboat by voting against the package, retaining their ideological purity while letting other people do the responsible thing in a crisis.
However, basic fairness and a sense of proportion do require that the bailout include programs to help keep mortgage holders in their homes and to limit the pay of CEOs whose corporations take part in the bailout. There’s a lot of anger — justified anger — at those “masters of the universe” who helped steer us into this mess. They should be given no choice but to share in the sacrifice.
Some of that anger is reflected in this leaked email from an unidentified Democratic congressman (Warning: Words are used at this link that are not family friendly and will not appear on this blog).
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The Palin/McCain ticket
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
A vice presidential nominee is supposed to bring something to the ticket that the top dog can’t.
In that sense, Sarah Palin is perfect for the Republicans. She brings people and attention and excitement, none of which John McCain can attract on his own. That’s one reason he’s keeping her right by his side in the campaign. You can’t have the presidential nominee drawing 400 people to a rally while his running mate draws 4,000. Talk about embarrassing.
But McCain has other reasons for not letting Palin out of his sight. Whenever a slightly touchy policy question comes up at town hall meetings or other formats, McCain has to be ready to step in to save his protege. And sometimes he can’t, as in a recent town hall in which Palin was asked what specific foreign policy experience qualifies her to be vice president. Her response?
“Well, I think because I’m a Washington outsider that opponents are going to be looking for a whole lot of things that they can criticize and they can kind of try to beat the candidates here, who chose me as his partner, to kind of tear down the ticket. But as for foreign policy, you know, I think that I am prepared and I know that on January 20th, if we are so blessed as to be sworn into office as your president and vice president, certainly we’ll be ready. I’ll be ready. I have that confidence. I have that readiness.”
No, she doesn’t. Her pitch that Washington needs an outsider would be a lot more convincing if the outsider in question had been paying serious attention to national and international issues the past few years. She shows no sign of that, and fact that so many in the GOP have embraced her as their party’s future suggests they don’t care a whit about substance but are enthralled by the package.
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In congressional races, a GOP revival?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The Gallup Poll recently reported that the GOP had largely closed the gap with voters asked whether they’d vote for a generic Republican or Democrat. I confess I dismissed those results as an outlier, but I can’t do that anymore.
The Politico now reports on a Pew poll basically confirming the Gallup results:
New polling suggests that the Republican Party is beginning to regain some of its luster and, perhaps as important, is experiencing a surge in excitement among its political base.
A new poll by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press reports that independent voters have an equally favorable opinion of both parties, 50 to 49 percent, a one-point edge for the GOP. That compares to an 18-point Democratic advantage as recently as August, a wide gap that had generally held for more than a year.
I don’t know how to account for that — I’m sure some of you folks will have a theory. But it will be interesting to see whether that holds up in current economic conditions.
UPDATE: Gallup just released the latest update of its three-day rolling tracking poll: Obama up 5, 49-44.
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This is the death of the Reagan era
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Everybody in Washington is pointing a finger at everybody else — Republicans are blaming Democrats, Democrats are blaming Republicans, Congress is blaming the regulators and executive branch, and the executive is blaming Congress.
They’re all correct. They’re all guilty, it’s just that some are more guilty than others. And I’m more than willing to let the historians sort that question out, because it really doesn’t matter.
But this much we know already: The Reagan Era is over. The mythology of the all-powerful, all-wise market is dead. Dig a hole six feet deep and bury it, then plant a tombstone with the dates 1981-2008. It’s finito, kaput.
Under a deeply conservative, free-market-fundamentalist administration, the U.S. government now owns the biggest insurance company in the world and the largest mortgage company in the world. And according to the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News and other financial media, the Securities and Exchange Commission may temporarily ban short-selling on the stock market.
Short-sellers essentially place a bet that a particular stock will drop in price. They fulfill a critical pricing function in the market, but a lot of folks would like to believe that the collapse of the market has been caused not by market fundamentals but by overly aggressive short-sellers.
So the SEC’s answer is to ban them, which smells an awful lot like desperation. They’re trying to fix the game. And if investors see it that way, things could get very, very ugly.
Either way, the Reagan Era is over. We don’t know what comes next, but we do know that things will never be like they were.
UPDATE: The SEC has indeed banned short selling, but only in financial stocks. Stock futures are up on the news, but it seems driven solely by government manipulation.
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Obama reclaims lead in polls
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Well, the latest Gallup tracking numbers have just been released, showing Obama up 4 points. Yesterday he was up 2 points, the day before that by one.
A week ago, he was down by five.
There are a lot of possible explanations for that movement — the race returning to its natural state after two post-convention bounces, Sarah Palin not wearing very well on closer examination, distaste for McCain’s say-anything strategy or the fiasco on Wall Street focusing attention on economics issues. If it’s the economy, I think you will see the gap grow larger, because the Gallup poll is a rolling three-day poll, meaning it includes results from Monday, before the Wall Street mess really began to take hold.
Other polls also show considerable movement toward Obama — Ramussen has it tied, CBS/NYTimes gives Obama a five-point lead.
It’s a long way from over, and one week from tomorrow, the first presidential debate, at the University of Mississippi.
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McCain turns facts into ‘facts’
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The McCain campaign has bet the ‘08 election on a belief that facts, reality, history and issues don’t matter anymore. All that matters is projecting a version of reality that voters find attractive.
In one sense that’s nothing new, and nothing unique to the McCain campaign. Political campaigns, especially at the presidential level, have long been little more than contests in image-making. But the McCain camp has taken that approach still further by creating a version of reality that is no longer tethered in any way to actual reality. They believe they can treat facts as “facts,” and once you believe you hold that power, a whole world of possibilities opens to you.
Just this week, Sen. John McCain completely shed his identity as an ardent and longtime advocate of financial deregulation. It was as if the past had never happened and that earlier version of John McCain had never existed. Suddenly, McCain 2.0 was a populist scourge of Wall Street, railing about the evils of unregulated corporate greed, and to hear the McCain campaign that’s all he had ever been.
Earlier campaigns would not have attempted such a shameless reinvention, fearful what would happen when the chasm between reality and fiction was exposed in the media. The McCain campaign has no such fear. As one McCain spokesman admitted last week, “We’re running a campaign to win, and we’re not too concerned about what the media filter tries to say about it.”
McCain strategists also understand that people who want to believe your version of reality aren’t going to be stopped by petty things like facts. If you give them even the flimsiest justification for dismissing reality, they will seize it like starved dogs.
For example, does Sarah Palin know enough about foreign policy to step in as president? Well, she’s governor of Alaska, and you can see Russia from Alaska.
As a foreign-policy credential, that’s laughable, but the McCain camp pushed it nonetheless, because it gave those who want to believe the excuse to do so. If it wasn’t reality, so what? They could at least see reality from there.
In fact, those who criticized the Palin selection because of her blank public record miss the true genius of the move. The lack of a record wasn’t a handicap; it was Palin’s greatest attribute. It offered the McCain campaign a blank canvas upon which to paint whatever image it wanted. You rarely get a chance to create a candidate out of whole cloth, with no baggage or previous public image to mar your work, and the McCain camp jumped at the chance.
McCain campaign manager Rick Davis even admitted as much in an interview with The Washington Post.
“This election is not about issues,” he said. “This election is about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates — their values, their character, their opinions, their principles.”
And in the case of Palin, Davis said, “I have the luxury of being able to fill in blanks that exist in her record. I mean, she wasn’t out debating the war in Iraq the last two years.”
That’s telling: He fills in the blanks, not Palin. She is his creation, the epitome of his art.
That also explains why the McCain camp failed to vet Palin as thoroughly as previous campaigns would have. Why obsess over the facts if the facts can be rewritten? Who cares if she fought hard for the Bridge to Nowhere, campaigning on its behalf long after Congress had killed its funding? Through mythmaking, you transform her into the very opposite and dare anyone to stop you. A fact becomes a “fact.”
By now, the American people ought to know the dangers of such a course. In its eight years in power, the Bush administration also lived in a world of its own invention, a world in which Iraq would finance its own reconstruction, there were no refugees at the New Orleans Convention Center, Brownie was doing a great job and the fundamentals of the economy were sound.
But as it turns out, in real life it matters whether a story is real or invented. If we’ve learned nothing else in the last eight years, we’ve learned that matters very much.
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So this is how Wall Street thanks us?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
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So the feds step into save AIG with $85 billion, and the market STILL tanks by almost 450 points?
And I see the news ticker on CNBC — muted in my office — reporting that the price of gold rose today by the highest dollar amount in history.
But of course, the fundamentals of the economy are sound … if by fundamentals you mean the American worker, right John?
Unfortunately, we have fewer of those “fundamentals” at work here in Georgia than we should have. The state unemployment rate last month jumped to 6.3 percent, the highest in 15 years and above the national average of 6.1 percent.
Also, market analyst Barry Ritholz, at his always useful Big Picture blog, offers this explanation for the difference between Lehman, Bear Stearns and AIG:
“— Lehman Brothers was like the little kid pulling the tail of a dog. You know the kid is going to get hurt eventually, and so no one is surprised when the dog turns around and bites the kid. But the kid only hurts himself, so no one really cares that much.
— Bear Stearns is the little pyro — the kid who was always playing with matches. He could harm not only himself, but burns his own house down, and indeed, he could have burnt down the entire neighborhood. The Fed stepped in not to protect him, but the rest of the block.
— AIG is the kid who accidentally stumbled into a bio-tech warfare lab … finds all these unlabeled vials, and heads out to the playground with a handful of them jammed into his pockets.”
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Obama’s case for tighter regulation
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
John McCain has been arguing for months, no for years, that additional regulation of Wall Street financial firms would kill the goose that was laying so many golden eggs. Now that the goose is laying an egg of a different sort, he’s changed his tune considerably.
Barack Obama has taken a different and more consistent course, warning that we were courting big trouble if we did not change our approach. In fact, he laid out that warning along with some pretty explicit recommendations for reform in a speech back in March.
I’ve posted extensive excerpts of that speech for those on either side willing to read what he had to say back then.
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$85,000,000,000 to AIG
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
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So the Fed has apparently authorized an $85 billion loan to keep AIG afloat.
$85,000,000,000
That’s a loan from you and me, by the way. More precisely, from our children and grandchildren, because they’re the ones who will have to repay it should things go bad. And it’s important to note that private investors wanted nothing to do with the deal. They thought it was way too risky, yet they insisted government step in where they dare not tread.
Privatize the profit, socialize the risk.
Just two or three days ago, AIG was said to need $35-to-$40 billion to stay afloat. On Monday, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson indicated the government would not become involved in a bailout. By Tuesday the cost of the bailout that wouldn’t happen was $75 billion. And now the bailout that’s going to happen is $85 billion.
I don’t know whether this loan was necessary to save what passes for Western Civilization. I do know that necessary or not, it sticks in my craw. After years of being told that we shouldn’t worry, that the geniuses on Wall Street knew what they were doing and the rest of us should just stop whining about the hundreds of millions they were skimming off the top as reward for their genius, it has come to this.
Like I said, maybe we had to do it. But I sure don’t have to like it. And I don’t.
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‘The final verdict on an economic philosophy that has completely failed’
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
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In terms of crisis management, Bush administration officials and the Federal Reserve seem to be handling the turmoil on Wall Street about as well as possible.
It can’t be easy. They’re at the controls of a 747 with two engines out, flying blind in a storm without instruments, trying to wrestle the thing to the ground slowly without a crash.
But so far, there’s no sign of panic in their response, and no sign of ideology or politics interfering. The situation is too critical for that nonsense, and they seem to know it. Experienced, intelligent people are simply trying to make practical decisions in compressed time, with very little hard information to go on, and they’re winging it pretty good.
Now, how we got into this mess is a very different question, a question that the two presidential candidates are rushing to try to answer for voters.
“We are going to reform the way Wall Street does business and put an end to the greed that has driven our markets into chaos,” Sen. John McCain said Tuesday. “We will stop multimillion-dollar payouts to CEOs who have broken the public trust. We will put an end to running Wall Street like a casino. We will make businesses work for the benefit of their shareholders and employees.”
American workers, McCain said, “have been betrayed by a casino on Wall Street of greed, corruption and excess that has damaged them and their futures. And we’re going to fix it.” By Wednesday, McCain’s campaign was fielding a TV ad proposing “tougher rules on Wall Street to protect your life savings.”
Barack Obama was similarly blunt, describing the last few days as “nothing less than the final verdict on an economic philosophy that has completely failed.”
“When the White House is hostile to any kind of oversight, corporations cut corners and consumers pay the price,” he said Tuesday. “When regulators are chosen for their disdain for regulation and we gut their ability to enforce the law, then the interests of the American people are not protected. It’s an ideology that intentionally breeds incompetence in Washington and irresponsibility on Wall Street, and it’s time to turn the page.”
The two candidates, in other words, are playing a similar song. But coming from McCain, it sounds like a very strange tune, like bluegrass being played on a tuba. Like others in his party, McCain has typically seen regulation and government oversight as unnecessary obstacles to economic growth.
Earlier this year, for example, when the economy began showing signs of trouble, McCain promised voters “specific proposals to address our economic challenges.” However, he also promised that “they will be based not on big-government intervention, and not on raising your taxes, not on increasing government regulation but unleashing the forces of the free market and capitalism.”
A decade ago McCain pushed unsuccessfully for a moratorium on all federal regulations. Asked about that by the Wall Street Journal this spring, McCain said, “I’m always for less regulation. But I am aware of the view that there is a need for government oversight.”
“I am fundamentally a deregulator,” he told the Wall Street Journal. “I’d like to see a lot of the unnecessary government regulations eliminated, not just a moratorium.”
That approach borrows a lot from the philosophy of McCain’s close friend and economics advisor, former Treasury Secretary Phil Gramm. As a U.S. senator, Gramm was widely considered the architect of our largely deregulated financial system that helped create this mess.
Obama, on the other hand, has been consistent in his analysis and policy. In a major speech in March, he laid out his approach quite clearly.
“Under Republican and Democratic administrations, we’ve failed to guard against practices that all too often rewarded financial manipulation instead of productivity and sound business practice,” he said. “We let the special interests put their thumbs on the economic scales. The result has been a distorted market that creates bubbles instead of steady, sustainable growth; a market that favors Wall Street over Main Street, but ends up hurting both. …
“Instead of sensible reform that rewarded success and freed the creative forces of the market, too often we’ve excused and even embraced an ethic of greed, corner cutting, insider dealing, things that have always threatened the long-term stability of our economic system,” he said in his Cooper Union speech.
Too much regulation, or regulation that is poorly crafted, can undoubtedly drain an economy of its vitality and flexibility. But as both candidates now understand — or at least say — a blind, ideological rejection of government oversight can be equally dangerous. It’s time for a return to good ol’ American pragmatism, to judging policies on whether they work, not on whether they pass some rigid litmus test.
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No rate cut for Wall Street
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The Federal Reserve Board — wisely — just refused to cut interest rates. Wall Street had been jonesing for a cut like a junkie yearning for just one more fix of heroin, but the Fed said no.
The Dow fell by 100 points inside a minute of the announcement.
UPDATE: Now up 60. Strange times we live in.
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Turmoil on Wall Street continues
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
In terms of crisis management, Bush administration officials seem to be handling the situation on Wall Street about as well as possible. They’re at the controls of a 747 with two engines out, flying blind in a storm without instruments, trying to get the thing on solid ground and avoid a crash.
There’s no sign of panic in their response, and no sign of ideology or politics interferring. The situation is too critical for that nonsense, and they know it. Experienced, intelligent people are simply trying to make practical decisions in compressed time, with very little hard information, and they’re doing the best they can.
Now, how we got into this mess is a very different question…..
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McCain/Palin offer insight to how they would govern
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
So Sarah Palin, the “reformer” advocating greater transparency in government, is now refusing to take any part in a state investigation to which she once pledged total cooperation. She is also trying to squelch release of emails and other evidence in the case.
The issue is stark: Did Palin abuse her authority and fire her state’s top public-safety official because she did not get her way in a personal family dispute? Her record as mayor of Wasilla suggests she is prone to such high-handed behavior; the fact that after just a year and a half as governor, she already found herself embroiled in another such controversy is telling.
We have had almost eight years of an administration that believed that rules were for other people, an administration that has acted as if it was immune to outside oversight. It is not “change” to replace that administration with another just like it. It is not reform.
The McCain campaign claims Palin can prove that Walt Monegan was fired as part of a budget dispute. If so, the investigation established by the Alaska Legislature — a process set up with Palin’s full support — offers a forum in which that evidence can be viewed and weighed.
But Palin refuses to do so. Is this how a McCain/Palin administration would be run, arrogantly and secretly?
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Socialists want to run this country!
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Who said this?
“We are going to reform the way Wall Street does business and put an end to the greed that has driven our markets into chaos. We will stop multimillion-dollar payouts to CEOs who have broken the public trust. We will put an end to running Wall Street like a casino. We will make businesses work for the benefit of their shareholders and employees.”
That was John McCain, Republican candidate for president. The times, they are a’changin’…
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Another Black Monday on Wall Street
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The closing bell has sounded on Wall Street. It was not a pretty day. The Dow fell 300 points early, stabilized, and then plummeted again in the last 30 minutes. That was hardly a sign of investor confidence. Panic was more like it.
By closing, the total loss topped 500 points, roughly 4.4 percent of the Dow’s value.
The worst may not be over. The prospect of a possible collapse by insurance giant AIG — the world’s largest insurance company — could make today’s crisis seem almost tame.
The scale of the problem — $75 billion in private money needed to save AIG alone — has shaken even the most sober and experienced of Street investors.
Economic data beyond the financial world was hardly encouraging. According to the Federal Reserve, “industrial production decreased 1.1 percent in August and was revised down in June and July …. factory output was down 1.0 percent in August, in part because of a drop of 11.9 percent in the production of motor vehicles and parts. Excluding motor vehicles and parts, the index for manufacturing decreased 0.3 percent.”
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McCain is smearing himself
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
For years, Sen. John McCain has opposed the Army’s Future Combat Systems, an effort to equip individual infantry soldiers with a full panoply of high-tech equipment — broadband capability, sensors, satellite digital communications, infrared vision, etc. If successful, it would in effect turn a soldier into a fighting cyborg.
I wrote about the FCS myself years ago, when I was doing a technology column for the AJC titled “Next”. At the time the project struck me as both extremely ambitious and extremely expensive, not to mention pretty damn cool.
I don’t know whether McCain was right to oppose the project, because I hadn’t followed it closely in recent years. But his opposition was consistent with other stances he had taken to expose Pentagon waste, such as his opposition to an in-flight refueling tanker contract with Boeing that later turned out to be corrupt. That’s the John McCain who actually deserved his image as maverick.
But this is what it has come to. As the Army Times points out, McCain’s position on the Future Combat Systems has taken a sudden and expedient turn:
“Has Sen. John McCain renounced his longtime antagonism toward the Army’s Future Combat Systems?
On Sept. 8, the Republican presidential candidate told a rally crowd in Lee’s Summit, Mo., about an Obama video message to a liberal advocacy group.
“He promised them he would, quote, ‘slow our development of Future Combat Systems,’” McCain said, according to wire reports. “This is not a time to slow our development of Future Combat Systems.”
Flashback to July, however, when his campaign furnished McCain’s economic plan to The Washington Post, declaring that “there are lots of procurements — Airborne Laser, [C-17] Globemaster, Future Combat System [sic] — that should be ended and the entire Pentagon budget should be scrubbed.”
In fact, McCain has long criticized the over-budget, behind-schedule FCS program. In 2005, he blasted the Army for allowing the program to balloon to $161 billion, and forced the service to rewrite the main FCS contract.”
The old McCain, McCain the maverick, believed the FCS is fatally flawed and tried to kill it. But when Obama took the identical position, McCain the corporate cow pony took over, citing Obama’s position as evidence that he is weak on defense and won’t protect America.
Imagine yourself as McCain, attacking Obama for taking the very same position that you yourself had taken. Do you simply turn your conscience off as you make such statements? Do you render yourself incapable of feeling shame?
McCain is asking the American people for their trust. He is trying to earn that trust through a conscious, calculated, shameless strategy of deceit. He is pioneering a Future Combat Systems for politicians, in which truth is an old-dated concept.
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Russia beaten by little Georgia
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Vladimir Putin all but conceded defeat last week in Russia’s war with Georgia, acknowledging that his country had been whipped by Georgia’s better-prepared high-tech forces.
Really, he did.
In traditional military terms, of course, Russia won that war easily, rolling over the Georgian army and seizing territory.
But as Putin now realizes, his country has come out of the war far more damaged than Georgia did.
That’s because it got outfought on the battlefield on which most modern wars are now decided, in the media.
“I am surprised at how powerful the propaganda machine of the so-called West is,” Putin admitted, calling it “awesome” and “amazing.”
More specifically, Putin said he had been struck by the media’s silence when Georgia’s military started the war by trying to retake two rebellious provinces by force.
There was “absolute silence, as if nothing was happening, as if this was commanded,” he said. “I congratulate you. I congratulate those who were involved in this.”
Russia’s defeat in the information war has cost it considerably. Its global strategic situation has declined, its enemies are more firmly united, its friends aren’t quite so friendly and its economy has suffered.
Up to $35 billion in foreign capital has fled Russia since the war, which in turn has sent Russia’s stock market spiraling.
The recent war between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon offers another example of the media as the deciding battlefield.
By traditional standards, the war was an overwhelming Israeli victory. The Israeli Defense Force moved deep into Lebanon, inflicting many more casualties on Hezbollah than it took in return and destroying civilian and military infrastructure.
But as even Israeli officials acknowledge, they lost the war.
International opinion swung so hard against them that they were forced to abandon the fight before achieving their goals, leaving Hezbollah to claim victory.
In the Georgia-Russia war, public-relations and public-diplomacy experts marvel at the preparation and effectiveness of Georgia’s media “blitzkrieg.”
As soon as Russia counterattacked with tanks and troops, Georgia President Mikheil Saakashvili went on the media offensive, logging five hours of airtime on global news stations in just a few days.
Journalists around the world were flooded with e-mails explaining Georgia’s situation, and pro-Georgian Web sites were advertised in major newspapers.
Darren Spinck, a principal with Global Strategic Communications Group, points out that Georgia even reached into “new media.”
“One Facebook group, ‘Stop Russian Aggression against Georgia,’ has 22,000 subscribers, more than the registered subscribers for both the Obama/Biden and McCain/Palin groups,” writes Spinck. “Many of these young and educated Facebook subscribers supporting Georgia have turned the blogosphere against Russia, whipping up Russophobic sentiments not seen in such abundance since the Cold War.”
“It seems to me that the price Russia will pay for its minuscule territorial gains will be global and long-lasting,” writes Ira Strauss, the U.S. coordinator on NATO’s Committee on Russia. “And this has nothing to do with media bias; it is the bitter reality of a logical and unavoidable consequence of what was done.”
There are lessons in Russia’s experience for U.S. policymakers and citizens, lessons involving the limits of pure military power and the importance of what might be called a nation’s “brand.”
“Countries … lucky or virtuous enough to have acquired a positive reputation find that everything they or their citizens wish to do on the global stage is easier,” according to Simon Anholt, a British expert on the marketing of nations.
“Their brand goes before them like a calling card that opens doors, creates trust and respect.
“The only sort of government that can afford to ignore the impact of its national reputation is one that has no interest in participating in the global community,” he says.
And these days, not even insular Russia fits that bill.
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Cat 4 hurricane heads for Wall Street
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The next 24 hours are going to be very interesting in the financial markets, to say the least. Lehman Bros., the nation’s fourth largest investment bank, is going down the tubes. The federal government is refusing — appropriately — to bail it out, and major private financial institutions have reportedly balked at trying to save it, afraid of being dragged down into the whirlpool themselves.
Alan Greenspan sounds downright grim:
“First of all, let’s recognize that this [the financial crisis] is a once-in-a-half-century, probably once-in-a-century type of event…,” Greenspan says. “There’s no question that this is in the process of outstripping anything I’ve seen, and it still is not resolved and it still has a way to go.
“I can’t believe we could have a once-in-a-century type of financial crisis without a significant impact on the real economy globally, and I think that indeed is what is in the process of occurring,” Greenspan said.
The AP reports that “Lehman’s collapse would have an incalculable impact on the financial markets, and would likely have a domino effect, with Merrill Lynch and the American International Group (AIG) widely cited as firms most at risk.”
Bloomberg News reports that “the government is probably concerned that panic may spread to other financial institutions, Ladenburg Thalmann & Co. analyst Richard Bove said. American International Group Inc., the largest U.S. insurer, and Seattle-based lender Washington Mutual Inc. each plummeted in New York trading last week on speculation about their financial health.
In London, SkyNews — a Rupert Murdoch outfit, so take it with a grain of salt — posts a headline reading “Bank Collapse Catastrophe Warning: The possible collapse of one of world’s biggest investment banks could be “catastrophic” and lead to the “implosion” of the banking sector, Sky sources say.”
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‘A liar lies to the people….’
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
-
A liar looks ’em in the eye
And lies to a woman,
Lies to a man, a pal, a child, a fool.
And he is an old liar; we know him many years back.
A liar lies to nations.
A liar lies to the people.
A liar takes the blood of the people
And drinks this blood with a laugh and a lie,
A laugh in his neck,
A lie in his mouth.
And this liar is an old one; we know him many years….
— Carl Sandburg
Sarah Palin’s foreign policy credentials may be pretty thin, but at least they’re bolstered by the fact that as governor, she spent some time in Iraq visiting members of the Alaska National Guard.
What’s that?
Oh. Well, the Boston Globe now reports that Palin never visited Iraq, that the closest she got was the Iraq-Kuwait border, and from there she could see INTO Iraq. Kind of like being a Russia expert because you can see it from a couple of Alaskan islands.
But at least Palin “knows more about energy than probably anyone else in the United States of America,” according to John McCain. As Palin herself says, and as McCain repeats, she comes from Alaska, which provides 20 percent of the nation’s domestic energy.
What’s that?
Oh. Factcheck.org says “Alaska’s share of domestic energy production was 3.5 percent, according to the official figures kept by the U.S. Energy Information Administration.” But hey, what does the Energy Information Administration know co mpared to the person who “knows more about energy than probably anyone else in the United States of America.”
Well, at least the McCain/Palin ticket is drawing a lot of folks to rallies. According to Bloomberg news, “McCain aide Kimmie Lipscomb told reporters on Sept. 10 that an outdoor rally in Fairfax City, Virginia, drew 23,000 people, attributing the crowd estimate to a fire marshal.”
What’s that?
Oh. Fairfax City Fire Marshal Andrew Wilson now says his office did not supply that number to the campaign and could not confirm it. Independent estimates had put the number at 8,000.
Oh, well, at least they did draw 10,000 people to the Consol Energy Arena in Washington, Pennsylvania. That must be a solid number, because the McCain camp says it came from the Secret Service, based on the number of people who passed through magnetometers.
What’s that?
Oh. “We didn’t provide any numbers to the campaign,” Malcolm Wiley, a spokesman for the Secret Service, told Bloomberg, saying he could neither confirm nor deny the crowd estimate.
Well, who cares about that stuff. The Obama campaign shouldn’t be picking on Palin anyway. In fact, the McCain-Palin campaign has released a new TV ad that pointing out that Obama is being “disrespectful” toward Palin.
What’s that?
Oh. According to Factcheck, the ad “distorts quotes from the Obama campaign. It takes words out of context to make it sound as though the Democratic ticket is belittling Palin.” For example:
“The ad says ‘they said she was doing ‘what she was told’.’ But the Obama adviser who’s being quoted didn’t accuse Palin of meekly following orders. What he actually said is that she made a false claim about Obama’s legislative record and added, “maybe that’s what she was told.”
Oh, and Palin is back to lying again about the Bridge to Nowhere, falsely claiming against overwhelming documentary evidence that “I told Congress thanks but no thanks to that Bridge to Nowhere,” as she said in a speech in Nevada this weekend.
“A liar lies to nations.
A liar lies to the people.
A liar takes the blood of the people”
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Here’s fresh thread
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
…. I want you to weave me a fine suit by the time I get back.
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John McCain and abortion
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Both John McCain and Sarah Palin say they believe that life begins at the moment of conception; both base their opposition to abortion on that principle.
McCain says that he would nonetheless allow abortions in cases of rape or incest, while Palin would not. The sole exception she would allow is to save the life of the mother.
McCain’s position makes no sense to me. If human life begins at conception, as he told the crowd at Saddleback Church a few weeks ago, then a life created through an act of rape or incest is no less deserving of protection than a life that begins the more socially acceptable way.
If you think through the internal logic of McCain’s position, he would allow the killing of human beings conceived through rape or incest. Am I missing something there?
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Obama wants to tax water!
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The volume and audacity of lies pouring from the McCain campaign is startling and even historic. This one may represent a new low — at least a new low as of Sept. 13.
In a new TV ad, McCain claims that Obama has been making attacks on Sarah Palin that have been labeled “completely false” and “misleading” by FactCheck.org.
Except FactCheck says that’s a lie. “We said no such thing. We have yet to dispute any claim from the Obama campaign about Palin,” the group states.
That’s really something, lying straight out about a FactCheck group, knowing that you’re going to get caught but not giving a damn about it.
With stuff like this, the McCain camp has cut any remaining tethers to reality and integrity and is now floating wherever the winds of illusion and whimsy may take them. It’s quite remarkable, and quite insulting to the intelligence of the American people.
Oh, and as you can tell from the statement below, the folks at FactCheck are not at all happy about being used to bolster a lie:
“With its latest ad, released Sept. 10, the McCain-Palin campaign has altered our message in a fashion we consider less than honest. The ad strives to convey the message that FactCheck.org said “completely false” attacks on Gov. Sarah Palin had come from Sen. Barack Obama. We said no such thing. We have yet to dispute any claim from the Obama campaign about Palin.
They call the ad “Fact Check.” It says “the attacks on Gov. Palin have been called ‘completely false’ … ‘misleading.’ ” On screen is a still photo of a grim-faced Obama. Our words are accurately quoted, but they had nothing to do with Obama.
Our article, posted two days earlier, debunked a number of false or misleading claims that have circulated in chain e-mails and Internet postings regarding Palin. There is no evidence that the Obama campaign is behind any of the wild accusations that we critiqued. There is no more basis for attributing these viral attacks to the Obama campaign than there is for blaming the McCain campaign for chain e-mail attacks falsely claiming that Obama is a Muslim, or a “racist,” or that he is proposing to tax water.”
Taxing water? Uh oh. I can see the new McCain commercial now:
“Obama ‘proposing to tax water!’, says FactCheck.org!!”
I mean, why not? What is there to stop them?
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Palin cops on the bridge question
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
It appears that when confronted with the truth about that Bridge to Nowhere, Palin backs down and acknowledges it was all a scam. Charlie Gibson laid out the facts for her yesterday, stating that Palin had strongly supported bridge earmarks until long past the time it was clear that Congress would never pass them. Only then did she stop pressing for them.
And Palin sat there and acknowledged that was true and defended her support for that project.
“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.”
That’s true. That is not inappropriate. It is only inappropriate to lie repeatedly about it.
It will be interesting to see whether she now stops making that claim on the campaign trail.
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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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Palin cops on the bridge question
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
It appears that when confronted with the truth about that Bridge to Nowhere, Palin backs down and acknowledges it was all a scam. Charlie Gibson laid out the facts for her yesterday, stating that Palin had strongly supported bridge earmarks until long past the time it was clear that Congress would never pass them. Only then did she stop pressing for them.
And Palin sat there and acknowledged that was true and defended her support for that project.
“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.”
That’s true. That is not inappropriate. It is only inappropriate to lie repeatedly about it.
It will be interesting to see whether she now stops making that claim on the campaign trail.
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More lipstick on the pig, please
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“I got an old ink pen, my friends, and the first pork barrel-laden earmark, big-spending bill that comes across my desk, I will veto it,” Sen. John McCain said in a speech Thursday, echoing his pledge in his acceptance speech. “You will know their names. I will make them famous, and we’ll stop this corruption.”
In fact, McCain has already gotten an early start on keeping that promise. He made one of “them” famous when he chose Sarah Palin to be his vice presidential nominee.
Palin is being marketed to the American public as a reformer who has battled the scourge of earmarks, which is rather like celebrating Madonna as a champion of chastity. As governor of Alaska, Palin has asked Congress for more than $200 million in earmarks for 2009, more per capita than any state in the country.
Of course, Palin didn’t ask for an earmark of $3 million to study the DNA of bears in Montana, which is one of McCain’s favorite examples of earmark waste and one he cites often. She’d never do something that foolish. Instead, as TalkingPointsMemo points out, Palin requested an earmark of $3 million to study the DNA of harbor seals, plus another $2 million to study the mating habits of crabs, and a million for rockfish research.
I’m not a marketer, but it seems to me that the image you’re trying to sell ought to have at least some vague resemblance to actual reality. But apparently I’m wrong about that. Apparently you can tell people that black is white and up is down, and if they want to believe it enough, they will. And they won’t even resent you for treating them as if they’re stupid.
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‘…. if Sambo gets elected’
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
One of the commenters, a little man calling himself Tony, left this gem in the thread below:
“Bush has kept us safe during his time as president and that’s good enough for me..The terrorist will have a field day if sambo gets elected.”
Now, if the Democrats were to emulate Republican tactics in this campaign season, this is what they ought to do next:
1.) Call a press conference to denounce what is being said by McCain supporters in the blogs, elevating one idiot’s posting into evidence that all conservatives think that way.
2.) Send surrogates onto the three-ring cable news circus to suggest that such statements are being supported or even planted by the McCain campaign.
3.) Claim that such comments — even though posted by an anonymous person — prove the MainStreamMedia is biased against their candidate.
4.) And finally, insist that McCain publicly distance himself from such comments, with a refusal to apologize taken as evidence that he obviously agrees with the commenter.
Do I have that technique right? Anything I’m missing here?
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Seven years and no closer to winning
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Seven years after Sept. 11, America fights on, no closer to victory than the day this started.
Even the most basic task —- taking Osama bin Laden “dead or alive,” as President Bush put it —- has yet to be accomplished. In those early days after the towers fell, with the most powerful nation in the world united in righteous anger against our attackers, I could never have conceived that the mastermind of that attack would still be walking the earth come 2008. Yet he is.
In Afghanistan, the country from which the attack was launched, we remain a long, long way from securing the country. Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Congress on Wednesday that “I’m not convinced we are winning it in Afghanistan” and that “frankly, we’re running out of time.” And of course, the main reason that we are no closer to victory after seven years, hundreds of billions of dollars and almost 5,000 dead soldiers is that we decided to invade Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with Sept. 11. That remains by far our single biggest mistake in the war on Islamic extremism, and it cripples us still.
Even now, five years after the invasion, Iraq is consuming troops badly needed in Afghanistan. We will never know what Afghanistan might be like if we had concentrated manpower and resources there, but it’s safe to assume that things would be much better than they are today. Among other things, bin Laden might not have escaped early in the war if we hadn’t held troops back for later deployment to Iraq.
However, diversion of resources and attention is not the biggest reason the decision to invade Iraq has set us back so far. Over the past seven years, we’ve learned a lot about the nature of terrorist networks and how to fight a violent insurgency. At West Point, at the Army War College and other military institutions, young officers are now being taught that while you can suppress an insurgency by killing its members, you stop an insurgency by killing its narrative. They are learning that every insurgency has its own story line, its explanation for how the world works, which it uses to recruit members, justify violence and earn the support it needs within the population. If you can expose that story line as false, the insurgency falters.
On the other hand, if you act in ways that lend credence to the insurgents’ narrative, you give that insurgency power and make it far more difficult to defeat.
That’s what the invasion of Iraq has done. In the Arab world, the al-Qaida narrative long held that the United States is in effect an arm of Israel and that we are intent on conquering the Islamic world and stealing its oil. By invading Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with Sept. 11 or with Islamic extremism, we confirmed that narrative and gave it a power that will long outlive bin Laden.
In a recent story datelined Cairo, a New York Times reporter noted that across the Arab world, people see the invasion of Iraq as, in effect, a confirmation of the al-Qaida narrative.
“What happened in Iraq confirms that it has nothing to do with bin Laden or Qaeda,” as one Egyptian told him. “They went against Arabs and against Islam to serve Israel, that’s why.”
Today, most Americans understand that the invasion of Iraq was a mistake, even if we disagree about the best way to recover from that mistake. However, one very prominent American, Sen. John McCain, still believes the war was necessary.
That’s nothing new.
Within a month of Sept. 11, McCain had publicly targeted Iraq for invasion. Within six months —- long before any public sign the Bush administration was contemplating war on Iraq —- McCain told startled European allies that “a terrorist resides in Baghdad” and that “the next front is apparent and we should not shrink from acknowledging it.”
As Mullen told Congress on Wednesday, “We cannot kill our way to victory.” But it’s a lesson that some have learned more quickly than others, and some haven’t learned at all.
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Save it for a real problem
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“Gwinnett branch NAACP President Jorge “J.P.” Portalatin is calling for the ouster of the county’s schools chief and the replacement of board members up for re-election due to what he sees as racial insensitivity.
Gwinnett Schools Superintendent J. Alvin Wilbanks came under fire last month for comments he made about the disproportionate discipline of minority students in Gwinnett County.
“Mr. Wilbanks should never have made such offensive remarks. But even more troubling, is Mr. Wilbanks’ arrogant condescending attitude and lack of remorse. It is because of his mind-set that I have lost faith in his ability to lead GCPS to the benefit of all children,” Portalatin said.
The rest of the story can be found here..
This is stupid. By claiming “racial insensitivity” in this case, J.P Portalatin cheapens the problem of racism and makes it more difficult to generate public support the next time the real thing actually does rear its ugly head.
And what were Wilbanks’ “offensive remarks?” In a discussion of statistics showing disproportionate discipline of minority students, a staff member mentioned that the issue is a problem in every state but Idaho. Wilbanks then observed that Idaho doesn’t have many black residents. In other words, you can’t have disproportionate discipline of minority students if you don’t have minority students in the first place.
“I will not be intimidated by those who are seeking to be offended,” Wilbanks is quoted as saying.
Sounds about right.
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McCain rewriting rules of decency
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
So a new McCain campaign ad accuses Barack Obama of wanting to sexualize children in kindergarten.
More directly, it claims Obama championed “legislation to teach comprehensive sex education …. to kindergarteners! Learning about sex before learning to read? Barack Obama, wrong on education, wrong for YOUR family.”
Saying the ad is a lie doesn’t begin to describe its shamelessness. But let’s get the accuracy issue out of the way first. The Illinois legislation in question did not mandate comprehensive sex education to kindergarters. It mandated age-appropriate education, which in the case of kindergartners meant teaching them about inappropriate touching by strangers and family members, and what to do about it.
Is there something wrong with that, something “wrong for YOUR family?” No, there is not. To twist the truth in such a fashion in order to make Obama look like a threat to young children is despicable. In fact, the most devastating line in the ad is the last: “I’m John McCain, and I approved this message.”
Here’s the factcheck on the ad.
The ad itself can be found on YouTube.
However, if the McCain camp believes that is fair game in politics — if those are the new rules they want to play by — the Obama campaign ought to start running TV ads accusing Sarah Palin of being a child abuser. Such a charge would have at least as much factual basis as the Obama ad.
According to a story in Newsweek, an Alaska judge warned the Palin family, including Sarah, that they were engaging in “a form of child abuse” with their constant, bitter and public disparagement of Mike Wooten, Palin’s brother-in-law. Exposing Wooten’s children to such disparagement of their father was harmful, the judge warned, and he ordered the Palin family to stop it. As the Newsweek story makes clear, the Palin family did not obey that order.
So would it unfair to run ads accusing Palin of being a child abuser? Under normal rules of decency, absolutely it would be unfair. But by the new rules being set by the McCain camp, no.
UPDATE: Here’s the text of the bill in question. It states explicitly that “(2) All course material and instruction in classes that teach sex education and discuss sexual activity or behavior shall be age and developmentally appropriate.” (Language in the existing Illinois law is in plain text; language that would be added to the law by the bill is underlined; language that would be removed from existing law is struck through.)
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Corporate socialists demanding handouts
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
For years — no, for decades — Detroit automakers blocked efforts to mandate improved gas mileage by whining and complaining about government intervention in the marketplace. Even though such policies were manifestly in the best interest of the country, making us less reliant on foreign oil, reducing air pollution, slowing the flow of dollars overseas — gas mileage regulations remained essentially what they were in the ’70s.
As a result, Detroit kept building new dinosaurs that ran on old dinosaurs, and now that the inevitable has happened, those former free-market purists are demanding $50 billion in taxpayer-guaranteed loans — $50 billion!!! — to finance conversion to the fuel-efficient technologies they refused to invest in earlier.
Likewise for years — no, for decades — Wall Street financiers likewise blocked efforts to tighten regulation of financial markets by whining and complaining about government intervention in the marketplace. The market will regulate itself, we were told, and if the market “produced” salaries of $100 million a year for certain masters of the universe, then who we lowly peons to complain? Now they too are running to the government, begging and pleading to be protected against their own excesses and foolishness. First Bear Stearns, now a bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, again at a potential cost of tens of billions of dollars.
Meanwhile, we can’t help out unsophisticated homebuyers who are losing their homes, because they have to take their lumps for their mistakes. We can’t give our returning war veterans the treatment they need, because it would be too expensive. The Georgia War Veterans Home in Milledgeville is being closed in the name of gov’t austerity, forcing 80 veterans out on the street. In downtown Atlanta we’re cracking down on panhandlers and the homeless, many of whom are clearly mentally ill, never drawing the connection between their plight and the fact that Georgia spends so little on treating its mentally ill citizens. The state Consumers Utiliity Counsel, charged with defending the interests of consumers against Georgia Power and big industrial concerns, is also being defunded in the name of austerity.
“Of the people, by the people and for the people?” Hardly. In fact, anybody who came up with such a phrase today would be condemned as a socialist. And Lord knows we can’t have any of THAT in America — well, except for the big guys. They’re different.
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Metro Atlanta getting sMARTA
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I ride MARTA everyday, so I had already seen the impact of traffic and soaring gas prices on transit ridership. The trains are more crowded, the parking lots more packed.
Still, the numbers are rather impressive. According to new data released by the American Public Transportation Association, Americans took 140 million more transit rides in the second quarter of 2008 than in the same time frame a year earlier.
“In the second quarter of 2008, public transportation continued to climb and rose by 5.2 percent. In contrast, the Federal Highway Administration has reported that the vehicle miles traveled on our nation’s roads declined by 3.3 percent in the second quarter,” APTA reports.
More locally, MARTA train ridership was up 15.6 percent in the second quarter, one of largest gains in the country.
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Palin lies could lead to Bridge to Oblivion
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Sarah Palin is out on the campaign trail, this time in Ohio, still repeating the lie that she rejected federal funding for that infamous bridge in Alaska.
“I told Congress, ‘Thanks but no thanks’ for that Bridge to Nowhere up in Alaska,” she said in a speech today. “If our state wanted a bridge, we were gonna built it ourselves.”
Yet even today’s Wall Street Journal, that bastion of liberal, pro-terrorist, anti-American ideology, reaches the only conclusion possible on the facts available:
“Despite significant evidence to the contrary, the McCain campaign continues to assert that Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin told the federal government ‘thanks but no thanks’ to the now-famous bridge to an island in her home state….,” the Journal states.
The Journal also makes clear that Palin only abandoned the project AFTER Congress had killed federal funding for it, and that “she did not return the federal money. She just allocated it elsewhere.” As late as last September, Palin was complaining that criticism of the project had been unfair, claiming that “much of the public’s attitude toward Alaska bridges is based on inaccurate portrayals of the projects here.”
In other words, it was never “thanks, but no thanks.” It was “thank you very much, and now give me some more.”
As the McCain campaign points out, both Barack Obama and Joe Biden have requested earmarks and voted for earmarks. Neither is anything close to pure on this issue. But neither Democrat is claiming otherwise. They aren’t trying to deny reality. Nor are they trying to construct their entire political identity on that falsehood.
Palin — with the full backing and support of the McCain campaign — is doing herself longterm political damage with this ploy. The American people are watching her repeatedly lie to them, day after day, and watching her do so with no apparent compunction. This is her introduction to the national scene; this is when her image is being cemented into the public mind.
And her image is increasingly that of a guiltless liar.
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Where’s the beef, Sen. McCain?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
With 75 to 80 percent of Americans saying the country is headed in the wrong direction, John McCain has joined Barack Obama in arguing that it’s time to change that direction.
But what exactly would McCain change? Yes, he has tried to separate himself from the unpopular President Bush, but that’s a move of purely symbolic importance.
On foreign policy, McCain advocates an approach very much like that of the early President Bush, motivated by an instinct to seek military solutions first and other approaches later. On economic matters, I see no difference whatsoever between the approaches of Bush and McCain, and the same is true on social issues as well, including the issue of abortion.
Just as importantly, a McCain administration would draw from the same pool of GOP political appointees as the Bush administration, meaning that little or nothing would change in agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Justice Department, which just this week proposed an approach to anti-trust law that basically protects monopolies and tells consumers tough luck.
So where’s the change? Step up and point out particular places where a President McCain would alter the direction of this country, Republicans.
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MSNBC dropping anchors in storm
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
MSNBC has announced that it is removing both Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews from election-related anchor responsibilities.
Good move. In fact, how were they ever put in that seat in the first place?
I’ve never watched Olbermann on TV, but I’ve caught one or two of his rants on YouTube. Not my cup of tea. He can be hilarious doing sports, but he seems to have become trapped by his own schtick on politics. Outrage doesn’t wear well over the long haul; eventually it becomes feigned.
I rarely if ever watch Matthews either, maybe because the last thing I want to do when I get home is watch more news and opinion. But Olbermann in particular has no place in an anchor position.
Neither does Lou Dobbs on CNN, by the way. The guy’s lost it. He’s unwatchable.
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‘Bridge to Nowhere’ leads to White House?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Is it possible to build a reputation as a straight-talking reformer upon a bald-faced lie? We may be about to find out.
In her speech to the GOP convention, Sarah Palin laid claim to the reformer title by boasting that she had told Congress “thanks but no thanks” for a $233 million federal earmark to build the infamous Bridge to Nowhere, which would have connected the mainland to an island with roughly 50 residents. That same boast is now being repeated in GOP TV ads and by John McCain as well.
“She, as governor, stood up and said, we don’t need it, and if we need it, we’ll pay for it ourselves,” McCain said Sunday. “Now, that’s guts. I saw that, and I said, this, this is what we need in Washington.”
Unfortunately, that version of events is contradicted by an extensive public record.
In her 2006 campaign for governor, Palin was a strong supporter of the bridge, as coverage at the time in the Anchorage Daily News makes clear. For example, she was asked the question point blank in a Q&A published Oct. 22, 2006:
Daily News: “Would you continue state funding for the proposed Knik Arm and Gravina Island bridges?
Palin: “Yes. I would like to see Alaska’s infrastructure projects built sooner rather than later. The window is now - while our congressional delegation is in a strong position to assist.”
In an editorial on Oct. 26, 2006, the Anchorage Daily News criticized the project. But it also noted that “Republican candidate for governor Sarah Palin supports the airport bridge project, her spokesman says. Ms. Palin told KTUU-TV last week that she would look to the federal government to write more checks for the project.”
“Yeah, right,” the editorial went on to say. “Congress took so much nationwide grief over the money it already has forked over for the bridge that getting more is about as likely as Senate Democrats voting to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to wildcat oil drilling.”
Again, that was in fall 2006, after Congress had already killed an earmark for the bridge. By September 2007, it had become clear that federal funding for the bridge would never be resurrected and in fact was as dead as a caribou carcass. If the project was to be built, it would have to be with state funds. Then and only then did Palin come out against the boondoggle.
Oh, and by the way, the $233 million in federal funding did not go back to Washington, as Palin implies. Alaska still got that extra money; it just wasn’t earmarked for the bridge. The U.S. taxpayer still paid the bill.
Now, there is no way on earth that a reasonable person could look at those facts and conclude that Palin had indeed said “Thanks, but no thanks” to Congress. Yet she and the McCain camp continue to repeat that claim, a fact that demonstrates a profound contempt for the intelligence of the American people.
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State leaders fail metro Atlanta
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Metro Atlanta generates far more tax revenue for Georgia than it receives in return, with most of that money going to assist communities and families in less prosperous parts of the state.
That’s fine. But in return, it does not seem too much to ask that state government address metro Atlanta’s critical transportation needs. The refusal to invest sufficiently in the metro region’s transportation infrastructure is already costing Atlanta a lot of jobs, which costs the rest of Georgia as well.
According to Sam Williams, president of the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce, this region has become a “truncated labor market.” Traffic congestion has gotten so bad that workers aren’t able to reach a lot of jobs they might otherwise take, and as a result businesses are forced to draw from a truncated pool of potential workers.
For example, a region the size of Atlanta could tell a prospective business that we have a pool of 2.5 million potential workers to draw from. But according to Williams, recruiting experts tell him that “congestion has truncated your 2.5 million workers down to probably 600,000. So you’re about the size of Charlotte, because your transportation system will not let your workers have access to your jobs.”
Of course, for most commuters in metro Atlanta, the problem is a little more immediate and down to earth: long, tiring commutes, draining time, energy and gasoline that are already in short supply these days. The quality of life that attracted many to this region has begun to decline, particularly in suburban areas, because people simply can’t get around to do the things they need to do.
And the big hurdle to doing something is taxes. Addressing our transportation needs will require billions of dollars, which scares state leaders to death.
In the last legislative session, metro Atlanta officials worked hard on a proposal that would have given metro voters the chance to impose a regional transportation sales tax, but in the end it failed by three votes in the Senate.
“I think there was an outcry, and almost an outrage, when the bill didn’t pass,” says Kessel Stelling, president of the Bank of North Georgia and Chamber chairman. “I can tell you when that vote failed by three votes, we didn’t attempt to embarrass any of our leaders, our legislative delegation, but we sure said we’ve got to hold them accountable.”
Officials at the Chamber and in local government —- Republicans and Democrats alike —- have made it clear to state leaders that the funding problem has to be addressed in the next legislative session. And slowly, the gravity of the situation does seem to be sinking in.
Unfortunately, with vacancies opening in the offices of governor and lieutenant governor in 2010, leaders and would-be leaders under the Gold Dome will be tempted to kill any funding plan advanced by rivals and insist that they get the credit for any plan that’s adopted.
And because much of the action is going to take place in the Republican primaries, getting any tax plan at all approved will be difficult.
Cobb County Chairman Sam Olens, a Republican who is eyeing a race for governor, says that state leaders have to bite the bullet anyway.
“If we decide we want nothing to do with the ‘T word,’ we have to accept that property values will go down, that we won’t be getting the kind of high-paying jobs we want, and that people will move elsewhere, because our quality of life will decline,” Olens said.
As he points out, final approval for a regional transportation sales tax would have to come from voters anyway, not from politicians.
And in the next few months, he warned, the true extent of the funding crisis facing the state Department of Transportation will become clear.
“That will come as a shock to the legislators and transportation stakeholders, because the extent of the crisis is significant,” he said.
The time to act is now, Olens said, because “the maturity of regional leaders and their ability to work together is better now than it has been in decades.”
Unfortunately, the opposite is true of leaders at the state level.
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Hmmm… McCain gets nice bounce
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
John McCain has overtaken Barack Obama in the Gallup daily tracking poll and has his highest level of support in that poll since early May.
McCain leads Obama 48 percent to 45 percent among registered voters, by Gallup’s measure. McCain has so far earned the same convention bounce as Obama, though at a more rapid pace.
Obama peaked at a 5-point convention bounce in polling published last Tuesday. He was ahead 49 percent to 43 percent in the Gallup poll conducted before the Republican convention. He then soared to 50 percent for the first time of the election, by Gallup’s measure, while McCain fell to 42 percent.
McCain’s 5-point to 6-point bounce so far, like Obama’s, remains at par with historical expectations. In the 22 major-party conventions since 1964, the nominee walked away with, on average in most years, a 5-point to 6-point uptick in Gallup’s polls. The presidential polling will likely remain in flux until the middle of next week.
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Seven years later, bin Laden lives
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
In the first few hours and days after the attacks of Sept. 11, I would never have believed that Osama bin Laden would still be walking the earth almost seven years later.
Yet apparently he is. The best guess is that he is still hiding somewhere in the tribal areas of Pakistan, and perhaps helping to direct the Taliban resurgence in neighboring Afghanistan.
In recent weeks the United States has begun to get more aggressive about attacking targets within Pakistan. We have launched missile strikes and even helicopter assaults on suspected terrorist locations. As long as our intelligence is solid and the target important enough, I have no problem whatsoever that approach. When we said that the man behind the attacks on the World Trade Center would find no refuge anywhere in the world, we meant it, or at least we should have.
However, it’s interesting to note that a year ago, Barack Obama was condemned as naive and worse when he said that if he was president, he would authorize attacks inside Pakistan if the Pakistani authorities refused to carry the attacks themselves. Today such attacks are being carried out with little or no criticism, at least in this country.
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Bill O’Reilly’s Faux bravado
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
On this peaceful, pleasant Atlanta Saturday morning, my colleague Cynthia Tucker, syndicated columnist and the AJC’s editorial page editor, was returning from a trip to the grocery store when she was “ambushed” on the sidewalk in front of her home by a three-person crew sent by Fox’s Bill O’Reilly.
Here’s a little background:
In a recent column, Tucker noted that Bill O’Reilly had skewered the parents of 16-year-old Jamie Lynn Spears after she became pregnant. “The blame falls primarily on the parents of the girl, who obviously have little control over her,” O’Reilly said. Yet as Tucker noted in her column, O’Reilly seemed to have a different set of standards for the parents of Bristol Palin.
As Tucker stopped outside her house to pick up her mail, the Fox camera crew emerged out of a car parked across the street and advanced on her, yelling questions. At this point, I’ll turn it over to Tucker for the blow-by-blow account, as she recalls it:
O’Reilly guy: “Cynthia, in your column, were you comparing Bristol Palin to Jamie Lynn Spears?”
Cynthia: “In my column, I was criticizing Bill O”Reilly. And I stand by that.”
O’Reilly guy: “Bill pointed out that Jamie Lynn Spears was running around unsupervised. You know that. So you were saying that Bristol Palin was running around unsupervised.”
Cynthia: “If I said that, read that part. You’re holding the column (in your hand). Read where I said Bristol Palin was running around unsupervised.”
O’Reilly guy: “You inferred (sic) it.”
Cynthia: “I inferred O’Reilly is a hypocrite. And I stand by that. Good day, gentlemen. I’m going inside to finish my Saturday chores.”
(They ran behind me, shouting, “Why weren’t you in Minneapolis? You went to the Democratic Convention. Why didn’t you go to the Republican Convention?” I didn’t look back — just got in my car and drove into my driveway.)
For the record, the AJC sent reporters to both conventions. Tucker went to the Democratic Convention, while our more conservative colleague Jim Wooten went to the Republican Convention.
Now, “Bluster Bill” O’Reilly likes to try to intimidate people. But in this case, he didn’t have the courage to do it in person. He probably didn’t want to bite off more than he could chew — as Clint Eastwood once said, “A man has to know his limitations,” and apparently O’Reilly knows his.
You can judge for yourself whose version of the column is correct, because it’s posted right here. I don’t think their “ambush” went quite the way they envisioned it, and it’ll be interesting to see whether O’Reilly chooses to actually air that little bit of video in its entirety or whether he’ll back down and throw in the loofah.
Oops, I meant throw in the towel.
UPDATE: Commenting on this post is closed.
Kathy Cox does well for Georgia
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Congratulations to Georgia Schools Superintendent Kathy Cox for winning a cool $1 million on Fox’s “Are You Smarter Than a 5th-Grader?” Even better, she’s donating her winnings to Ga. schools.
Cox, a former school teacher herself, initially took some heat for appearing on the show, as if it were somehow beneath her. But good for her for not taking herself too seriously.
Yes, we do have an awful lot of work to do in Georgia schools. But it didn’t hurt for Georgia kids to watch someone win $1 million for being smart.
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‘Uppity,’ the explanation
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
According to his spokesman, U.S. Rep. Lynn Westmoreland, a Southerner born and bred, had no idea on earth that the word “uppity” had racial connotations when he used it to describe Barack and Michelle Obama.
No idea at all. Could have knocked him over with a feather when someone told him. Really, who knew?
I wonder what they call that line of defense in PR school. I propose we name it the “My client is stupider than dirt” defense. (Here’s the audio of that bit of the interview.)
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McCain convention, Night Four
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
That was John McCain.
He’s a tough old bird. And I admire tough old birds. I like tough old birds. I just don’t think that being a tough old bird is the skill set required in the presidency at this moment in history.
Just some thoughts. The Democrats were criticized heavily for overpraising Barack Obama, building a Greek temple for him, etc. As it turns out, they were mere pikers compared to the Republicans. McCain put on a convention whose entire purpose was to celebrate the utter McCainness of McCain, to wallow in day after day of McCainophilia. I think they want McCain to replace George Washington on the dollar, Lincoln on the penny and Jefferson on the nickel.
Was Jefferson ever a POW for five and a half years? Did Lincoln ever parachute into a lake in Hanoi with two broken arms? Nah, didn’t think so.
John McCain did.
And despite his nice talk about bipartisanship and reaching across the aisle, McCain and his party made it quite clear in this convention that this is going to be an ugly, personal campaign. His campaign strategists have been blunt in saying it’s going to be about personalities, not policies. In other words, McCain has committed to the type of race that will guarantee that 51 percent of the American people will go to bed on Nov. 4 hating the other 49 percent, and vice versa. That’s not good for the country, but McCain thinks it’s good for him. So be it.
It’s going to be fascinating to watch how well this played in living rooms around the country. I expect the race will return to what it was before the conventions, a narrow Obama lead, but who knows? McCain has taken several big gambles — in picking Sarah Palin, in turning his convention into a personality cult rather than a chance to discuss issues — and big gambles pay off big or lose big.
Onward.
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The last thing we needed… ‘Uppity’
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Just a couple of weeks ago we had the Georgia Bigfoot hunters in the national news. Now we’ve got a Georgia congressman complaining that Barack and Michelle Obama are “uppity.”
Uppity.
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The Palin record on earmarks
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Here’s a pretty comprehensive rundown of Palin’s documented record on requesting earmarks. In her second term as Wasilla mayor, she got a total of $27 million in federal earmarks for a town of fewer than 9,000 people.
As governor, she requested $254 million in earmarks last year, and $197 million in earmarks this year. As the Seattle Times story notes, that’s more per capita than requested by any other state in the union:
“Palin’s requests to Congress came at a time of huge federal deficits, while Alaska state revenue was soaring due to rising oil prices and a major tax increase on oil production that Palin signed into law in late 2007.
As a result, Alaska this year was in such a money-flushed condition — with no state income tax or sales tax and total state revenues of $10 billion, double the previous year’s — that Palin gained legislative approval for $1,200 cash payments to every Alaskan.”
This, from the candidate who said Wednesday night that she “championed reform to end the abuses of earmark spending by Congress.”
My friends, that is not reform we can believe in.
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A great Night 3 for Sarah Palin
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Well, she did great, coming through for the GOP under what must have been an awful lot of pressure.
In her speech last night, Sarah Palin came across as both personable and tough. She showed a nice flair for the attack line, and seemed quite comfortable slipping a dagger between the ribs of her opponents. This was her first major hurdle, and she cleared it easily. There will be more to come — debates, press conferences, interviews, etc., — but this one she handled. It was impressive.
In fact, the scene had to be a little frightening for Republicans such as Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee, who have ambitions to lead their party someday. They were no doubt watching Palin, and watching the crowd’s reaction, and wondering whether their moment had come and gone, because here was its future. Until last night, the Grand Old Party has looked awful old but not so grand in this convention.
However, go take a look at this Washington Post story. Things are getting pretty sticky for Palin in the Troopergate scandal.
Palin first denied that she, her staff or family had put pressure on anyone to have her ex-brother-in-law fired as a state trooper. Then a tape emerged of a top staff member demanding that the man be fired. Palin quickly altered her story to account for that new evidence, stating just last month that “pressure could have been perceived to exist, although I have only now become aware of it.”
The Post story blows that second claim out of the water. Former Public Safety Commissioner Walter Monegan showed Post reporters two e-mails from Palin, e-mails that can be read only as heavy pressure exerted by the governor personally to have her ex-brother-in-law fired. And of course, when Monegan refused to buckle to that pressure, he himself was fired by Palin without public explanation.
Palin staff members who had promised to testify in an investigation of that case are now refusing. Palin herself had promised full cooperation, but now is refusing to be deposed and claims the investigation is illegal.
So … a great performance. But storm clouds are gathering.
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Is Palin victim of media conspiracy?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The McCain campaign and much of the Republican Party are outraged at media coverage of Sarah Palin. McCain strategist Steve Schmidt set the tone perfectly Wednesday, whining about a “faux media scandal designed to destroy the first female Republican nominee.”
Well cry me a river. Let’s take that claim apart, and let’s start with this:
A relative handful of columnists and commentators and a larger number of bloggers have indeed wondered in public about Palin’s decision to accept the nomination so soon after giving birth to a son with Down syndrome, a condition that requires a lot of attention, and when she has a 17-year-old unmarried pregnant daughter. How, they have asked, could Palin do right both by her family and her country?
To the McCain camp, such questions constitute a “vicious and scurrilous” media campaign to ruin a promising conservative candidate, using sexism to do it. Is that true?
Fortunately, we have a similar set of circumstances to compare against the Palin case. In March of 2007, John Edwards decided to continue his presidential campaigning even after his wife was diagnosed with terminal cancer. The reaction will sound familiar.
Rush Limbaugh said the Edwards were turning their eyes to the campaign when they instead should turn their eyes to God. Katie Couric, in a “60 Minutes” interview, accused Edwards of mining his wife’s condition for sympathy votes.
“Even those who may be very empathetic to what you all are facing might question your ability to run the country at the same time you’re dealing with a major health crisis in your family,” Couric told Edwards.
And in Time magazine, columnist Jay Carney wrote that “surely many average Americans have to be wondering at what point the candidate will decide that his duties as husband and father to three children, including a 6- and 8-year-old, trump his duty to his country and the cause of winning the White House.”
Edwards is a man; he is also a liberal. Yet, he faced the same questioning and second-guessing that Palin is now undergoing. Why? Because human beings are drawn to human stories, and the media have an economic incentive to tell those stories, regardless of political bent.
The McCain’s camp complaint about a media “feeding frenzy” focused on Palin is even more precious. John McCain chose to introduce a totally unknown player to the national scene at a critical point in the campaign, and he did so by portraying her as a gun-toting John Wayne mother of five, riding out of the wilds of Alaska to clean up Washington.
And they claim to be shocked at the “feeding frenzy” they set off? In the first hours after the announcement, TV reporters had so little information about Palin that they were reduced to reading off Wikipedia for information. Of course, the media descended on Alaska to try to fill in the gaps as quickly as possible.
The story the McCain camp peddled was so appealing that Palin even drew coverage from US magazine, People and National Enquirer, outlets that would never have wasted ink on a Kay Bailey Hutchison or Tim Pawlenty. Their interest was human, not political.
The real reason Schmidt is angry is because the reporting has shown that so much of the original McCain narrative was untrue.
Palin was cast as a reformer who fought the infamous “Bridge to Nowhere.” But in fact, she ran for governor in 2006 as a champion of the pork-barrel bridge and “opposed” it only after it was clear the project was dead. We were told that Palin abhors earmarks, the special congressional appropriations that Alaska politicians have used to bleed billions from the American taxpayer. But it turns out Palin fought to get earmarks both as mayor and as governor, hiring lobbyists and going to Washington herself to bring them home.
It’s not the media’s fault that the cinematic story envisioned by McCain and his staff has fallen apart on closer inspection. They just didn’t do their homework, and they got caught.
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GOP convention, Night Two
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Apparently, John McCain was a POW.
I’ve always had deep respect for that part of his history, but like anything it can be overplayed to the point of parody. McCain campaign strategist Steve Schmidt told the Washington Post Tuesday that this election will be decided on the basis of the candidates’ personalities, not their policy positions, and tonight was the embodiment of that approach.
As Fred Thompson said in his speech, “There has never been a time in our nation’s history, since we first pledged allegiance to the American flag, when the character, judgment, and leadership of our president was more important.” That was the message of the night.
I’d have to say, Night Two was probably effective in that driving that home. The segment on Medal of Honor winner Mike Monsoor, who jumped on a grenade in Iraq to save his comrades, was deeply touching, and convention planners clearly hoped to take the emotions built in that segment and transfer them to another legitimate hero in McCain when Thompson got up to speak.
George W. Bush was good in his endorsement of McCain, right down to doing McCain a favor by mentioning the times they’ve disagreed with each other. Pre-convention polling of GOP delegates produced high ratings for Bush as a president, but I think that was largely the stubborn pride of people who don’t want to admit a mistake. The more telling number came when delegates were asked whether Bush had harmed or helped the GOP. Only 15 percent said he had strengthened the party, while 47 percent said he had harmed it.
And Lieberman? Don’t get me started.
As always, keep it respectful out there.
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We’re drowning in crocodile tears
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Over at the conservative Redstate.com, prominent right-wing blogger Erick Erickson claims that the Obama campaign was secretly peddling ugly rumors that Sarah Palin is not the mother of four-month Trig.
What facts does Erickson offer for that allegation, which if true would be quite damning? Why, none whatsoever. Zero. To the contrary, his pathetic “case” is built on exactly the kind of pure speculation and fantasy that he is allegedly trying to condemn when others indulge in it. Go take a look and judge for yourself.
Among his “evidence:” “Barack Obama himself admits he reads Daily Kos.” Noooooo!!!
You’re also seeing claims that the existence of such nasty rumors somehow typifies liberals.
This, from the same people who for years gleefully trafficked in rumors that Hillary Clinton is a lesbian, that she killed Vince Foster, that Bill Clinton raped somebody and had an illegitimate love child with a black woman, that he helped run a cocaine-smuggling ring, that he had an affair with Eleanor Mondale, etc.
And then there was the time in the 2000 GOP primaries when someone in the Republican machine smeared John McCain — that was back in his maverick days — with allegations that his adopted daughter was actually the product of his interracial affair with a woman not his wife. A proud moment, that one.
We also shouldn’t forget the time that a prominent Republican senator cracked a joke — in public, no less — about the Clintons’ only child. “Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly?” the senator asked. “Because Janet Reno is her father.”
That man was of course John McCain.
So please, spare me the sanctimony.
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Palin candidacy takes another turn
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Sarah and Todd Palin released the following statement today:
“We have been blessed with five wonderful children who we love with all our heart and mean everything to us. Our beautiful daughter Bristol came to us with news that as parents we knew would make her grow up faster than we had ever planned. We’re proud of Bristol’s decision to have her baby and even prouder to become grandparents. As Bristol faces the responsibilities of adulthood, she knows she has our unconditional love and support.
“Bristol and the young man she will marry are going to realize very quickly the difficulties of raising a child, which is why they will have the love and support of our entire family. We ask the media to respect our daughter and Levi’s privacy as has always been the tradition of children of candidates.”
The announcement adds yet another twist to an already complicated presidential campaign. Steve Schmidt, senior adviser to the McCain campaign, made an appropriate point:
“It’s a private family matter. Life happens in families,” Schmidt said. “If people try to politicize this, the American people will be appalled by it. The fact is that the American people, who are decent people, don’t appreciate intrusions into the private space of good families.”
That was echoed by Barack Obama, himself the father of two daughters.
“This shouldn’t be part of our politics, it has no relevance to Governor Palin’s performance as a governor or her potential performance as a vice president, and so I would strongly urge people to back off these kinds of stories,” he said.
All of that is true. As the Palins, Schmidt and Obama emphasized, it is a private matter. The young girl in question has parents who love her and will support her, and “are proud of Bristol’s decision to have her baby.” She also has a boyfriend who apparently intends to marry her and help her raise their child. Bristol has made the decision that she believes is right for her, and the Christian right has every reason to applaud her for that decision.
But that’s the crucial point, a point that can indeed by debated without casting aspersions on Bristol or her parents. While this is indeed a private matter, other young women in very different circumstances might feel compelled to make a different decision. The Roe v. Wade decision was based on the right to privacy, the concept that this is an area in which government interference is not appropriate and indeed unconstitutional. To quote Schmidt, “the American people, who are decent people, don’t appreciate intrusions into the private space of good families.”
I’ll also add this observation: The McCain campaign is trying to cast the announcement as a decision forced on the Palin family by squalid rumors in the left-wing blogosphere. That claim itself is an effort to politicize this situation. To believe Schmidt is to believe that Bristol’s pregnancy would otherwise had gone unnoticed, and that is impossible. This announcement had to be made, and the sooner it was made the better, so the nation, the campaign and the family can move on.
Finally, a reminder. Be gentle and appropriate in your comments, which will be monitored more closely than usual given the subject matter. Posting here is a privilege, not a right, and it is a privilege that can be lost.
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Iraq slips from U.S. control — and that’s good
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
While America’s attention has understandably drawn inward with the presidential contest, events unfolding elsewhere are changing the landscape that will confront whoever takes office next January.
Some of the most profound changes have occurred in Iraq, where the surge has produced a real and unexpected success. And while it’s important to note that change, it’s also important to acknowledge the limits of what “success” in Iraq really means.
The surge has bought the Iraqis the time to create at least rudimentary institutions of power with which to control their country. It has created an opportunity for U.S. forces to withdraw from Iraq with honor within the foreseeable future. And it has helped to give Iraq hope of a tenuous stability where little had existed.
Those are not by any means minor accomplishments, not when you consider the bleak prospects in Iraq two years ago. Credit for that improvement goes to Gen. David Petraeus, who helped conceive and implement the U.S. military’s counterinsurgency program; to Iraqis themselves, who helped pull their nation back from the abyss; and to President Bush, whose inherent stubbornness in this case led him to make a last-ditch gamble that paid off.
But as the surge ends, where does that leave us? With violence down, will democracy begin to take root in Iraq? Will the Iraqis become strong U.S. allies in the oil-rich region, allowing U.S. forces to remain to serve as a check on neighboring Iran?
Those were once the benchmarks of what advocates of the invasion would term victory, and the success of the surge has allowed some to cling to those goals still. But it ain’t gonna happen.
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is publicly insisting that by 2011, all foreign troops will be removed from Iraqi soil. While that deadline is unlikely to be met, al-Maliki’s stance is a pretty strong indication of long-term trends.
It also indicates a newfound confidence among Iraqi officials in the ability of the Iraqi army to defend the nation, at least against internal enemies. And as the Iraqi army improves in both ability and confidence, U.S. military officials acknowledge now that it is no longer under American control.
While in one sense that is a great development, it means the Iraqi army is available for uses that contradict U.S. policy and interests, with little we can do about it.
As a result, it is becoming increasingly clear that within five years and perhaps sooner, Iraq will have abandoned democracy in all but form and reverted to some type of dictatorship, with Kurdistan effectively operating as a separate nation.
Already, provincial elections scheduled to be held in October have been canceled, with July now mentioned as the next earliest date. The initial elections almost four years ago had been boycotted by Sunni voters, who are now eager to make their voice heard. But the Shiites and Kurds who control the current government are in no hurry, understanding that new elections might weaken their grip on power and all the financial benefits that power brings.
In fact, Maliki is trying to consolidate his power not through the ballot box but at gunpoint, increasingly using the Iraqi army as a political weapon. He used it against Shiite rivals in southern Iraq, and is now turning it against the Sons of Iraq, the Sunni groups organized, armed and paid by the U.S. military to reduce terrorism.
“What it looks like we are getting is a Maliki government that won’t behave itself and wants to crush the Sons of Iraq,” Stephen Biddle, a defense expert and former advisor to Petreaus, told the Los Angeles Times.
Those trends suggest that Iraq is already reverting to form, with a strongman likely to emerge who uses democracy much like Vladimir Putin uses it in Russia, as a front to disguise his authoritarianism.
Maliki is attempting to become that strongman, but if he doesn’t succeed, somebody else likely will.
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