Home > Jay Bookman > Archives > 2008 > October
October 2008
Getting a Handel on long voting lines
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
A friend of mine just called — he and his wife spent five and a half hours waiting to vote on North Roswell Road.
Yesterday, my wife spent four hours waiting at the Fulton County Courthouse. I’m just hoping that all this makes it easier when I try to vote Tuesday.
Down in Florida, long lines earlier in the week shrank considerably after Gov. Charlie Crist ordered longer polling hours and weekend voting. He took some heat from fellow Republicans for doing so, under the theory that allowing more votes is better for Democrats. But he did the right thing. In North Carolina, the Board of Elections also voted Thursday to give local counties the option of staying open longer to ease the crunch, and many are doing so.
Not here in Georgia. Secretary of State Karen Handel refuses to try to extend voting hours, claiming in part that her hands are bound by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which requires federal pre-approval of changes in voting procedure. However, that didn’t seem to be a problem in North Carolina, where 40 counties are also bound under Section 5.
Handel also lost an important and embarrassing case this week in the Georgia Supreme Court. Two judges had already ruled that Handel was wrong to try to bar Jim Powell, a Democrat, from running for the Public Service Commission. Both judges had ruled that Powell easily met state residency requirements, but Handel insisted on appealing those rulings even after the ballots had been sent out and early voting had begun.
After I wrote a column taking Powell’s side and urging Handel to accept the lower courts’ decisions, she wrote a scorching letter to the editor. My column “raises the bar for illogical and absurd analysis,” she wrote, claiming that I wanted her to “apply the law based on some policy or political goal rather than what the law actually says.”
No, I just wanted the law applied as the judges had seen it. I wanted the voters of Georgia, not Handel, to decide Powell’s fate.
On Thursday, the Supreme Court kept Powell on the ballot. Citing many of the same arguments that Handel had called “illogical and absurd,” the court ruled that it was Handel who misunderstood and misapplied the law.
Did I mention their ruling was unanimous?
I used to think a lot of Handel. Back in her days on the Fulton County Commission, she seemed a center of calm, sanity and independence in a crazy public body. I had hopes that if she advanced into state politics she would be a Republican I could support, much in the fashion of Johnny Isakson. In fact, the AJC editorial board endorsed her for secretary of state two years ago, with words that now seem ironic:
“Handel understands the greatest threat is not voter fraud, but voter indifference; she says one approach to changing that could be a motivational campaign that would make failing to vote as unacceptable as littering. She also emphasizes that voting is not a privilege, as some in her party contend, but a right.”
OK, so we we’re wrong.
Earlier this week, polling places around the metro area were reporting long delays because state election computers had crashed. Those computers are Handel’s responsibility, and she insisted that those crashes never happened. Reports to the contrary were consistent and widespread, however.
It’ll be interesting to see what if any effect these long lines and delays have on Handel’s political future. She has been surprisingly partisan as an elections officer, but a lot of those folks waiting in long lines are Republicans as well as Democrats.
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It depends on what the meaning of ‘even’ is….
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
You have to feel sorry for people like Rick Davis, John McCain’s campaign manager. In a conference call with reporters, he just claimed the race in Iowa is dead even.
The four most recent public polls in Iowa put the margin at 14, 15, 8 or 11. The most recent of those polls are those that report the biggest margins. I don’t think “dead even” means what Davis hopes it means.
The numbers are equally grim nationally. According to Gallup’s just released numbers, McCain is slipping a bit when he needs to be gaining:
PRINCETON, NJ — The political landscape could be improving for Barack Obama in the waning days of the campaign. Gallup Poll Daily tracking from Oct. 28-30 shows him with an eight-percentage-point lead over John McCain among traditional likely voters— 51% to 43% — his largest margin to date using this historical Gallup Poll voter model.
Since Tuesday, McCain’s support among traditional likely voters has dropped by four points (from 47% to 43%), Obama’s has risen by two points (from 49% to 51%), and the percentage of undecided voters has increased from 4% to 6%.
New reports by the Hotline tracking poll and the GWU Battleground tracking poll both show a one-point swing to Obama; Rasmussen shows a one-point swing to McCain, but within the same three-to-five point range Rasmussen has reported for the last five days.
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Obama tries to put Georgia into play
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Matt Towery, the former Republican legislator turned pollster, was quoted in the paper this morning as saying that “if the Obama campaign goes on the air with television advertising in this city, in this state, beginning this week to Election Day, Obama will win Georgia.”
According to Politico, Obama campaign manager David Plouffe said n a conference call with reporters this morning that the campaign is indeed expanding its ad buy into three states: Georgia, North Dakota and John McCain’s home state of Arizona.
That’s the act of a campaign confident of the outcome and trying to stretch out its margin.
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When history is written, debates did it
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Robert Kaiser of the Washington Post has a thesis that I suspect history will embrace when all of this is over: The debates did it. That’s where Obama won the race.
He quotes Frank Fahrenkopf, former head of the Republican National Committee and now the GOP’s representative on the debate commission:
“”I think it took Obama three debates for people to see how calm he was, how composed he was, that you couldn’t get to this guy,” says Fahrenkopf. “He was very well organized. By the time that final debate was over, I think he satisfied the qualms of the American people.”
I think that’s exactly right. There were no zingers in the debates, no meltdowns, no obvious turning points. Just one guy looking more and more presidential, and the other guy not.
REMINDER: If you’ve got a prediction on the outcome Tuesday, put your numbers in the thread down below. Deadline to post is noon Saturday.
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The neoconservatives have learned nothing
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
In a column in the Washington Post, Robert Kagan takes issue with those who — in his mind, anyway — believe the United States is in decline as the world’s dominant power and ought to act accordingly. As he correctly points out, with all of its problems the United States of America is still unchallenged as the world’s economic, cultural and military colossus.
However, what Kagan does not want to acknowledge is that even the most powerful nation in the world can overreach. Even the most powerful nation in the world has limits beyond which it weakens itself.
Kagan was an early and ardent advocate of an American invasion of Iraq, advocating unilateral action if necessary. His attitude about the use of American power then and now was captured nicely in the first two sentences of a column he wrote back in November 2002.
“America, with its vast power, can sometimes seem like a bully on the world stage,” he wrote. “But, really, the 1,200-pound gorilla is an underachiever in the bullying business.”
Kagan, like many of his fellow neoconservatives, has an inflated sense of what America acting alone on the world stage can accomplish. Our real-life experience in Iraq and Afghanistan has apparently not chastened him much. It is not “declinism” to point out that America cannot be the world’s policeman, imposing its version of order on every reluctant corner of the globe.
At this point, it is hard-earned common sense.
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The tape, the LA Times and John McCain
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
John McCain and some of his supporters are trying to make a big deal of the fact that the Los Angeles Times is refusing to release a tape of a private going-away party for a Palestinian college professor in 2003 that was attended by Barack Obama. In April, The Times used the tape to write a story about Obama’s remarks at the event.
According to the story, Obama recounted a series of dinners and conversations with Khalidi and his wife Mona over the years, conversations that had been “consistent reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases… . It’s for that reason that I’m hoping that, for many years to come, we continue that conversation — a conversation that is necessary not just around Mona and Rashid’s dinner table,” but around “this entire world.”
The McCain camp apparently believes the tape may contain evidence of far more nefarious comments or activities. Or at least it wants others to believe that. As long as the tape remains private, the McCain camp is free to imagine all sorts of things about its content, including the possibility that Bill Ayers may have been in attendance. In the final, dwindling days of the 2008 presidential campaign, perhaps one of the most important in our history, this is what they would rather talk about than the economy, our overstretched military or energy policy.
In fact, McCain claims that the Times’ refusal to release the tape is firm evidence of media bias against him and in favor of Obama. He knows better.
According to Times reporter Peter Wallsten, he was given access to the tape and permission to write about its contents only on condition that the tape not be released to the public. While you can debate whether the Times should have agreed to those conditions, it did so and is now bound by that promise.
However, if the Times had refused the deal, it risked not getting access to the tape at all, and as a result nobody would know about it today. Furthermore, the source who provided the tape probably has very honest reasons for keeping it private. The party was private; other people at the party had no reason to believe they were at a public event. The only part of what happened there that has public import are the statements by a man who later became a presidential candidate, and those statements are now on record.
In the end, for reporter Wallsten and the Times, it comes down to keeping your word. And while Fox News, in its own obsessive way, is trying to make this a big story, its own deputy managing editor disagrees publicly. Bill Sammon is a newspaper guy by training, and it shows in his statement:
“To me, it’s pretty simple. Reporter Peter Wallsten made an agreement with a source to refrain from publicly disclosing the tape. Unless that source lets Wallsten off the hook, the reporter is journalistically bound to abide by the agreement, regardless of how much heat his newspaper takes from pundits on TV.
“Indeed, Wallsten has little choice in the matter. If he were to cave in to mounting public demands for the tape, no self-respecting source would ever give him another shred of information. Nor should they.”
In his own life, John McCain has put a lot of emphasis on personal and professional honor, citing it as a central part of his being. He ought to recognize that others can be motivated by personal and professional honor as well. His refusal to do so — a refusal based purely on hopes of personal gain — does not speak well of him.
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Time to put down your predictions…
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
OK folks, step up and put your marker down. Who’s gonna win, and by how much? Let’s see what your thinking.
Your post should contain two things. First, predict the winner’s electoral vote count. For example, McCain 276, or Obama 311.
Then, in case of a tie, we’ll use the winner’s popular vote total to decide the matter, to the tenth of a percent. For example, McCain 50.2 percent, or Obama 52.7 percent.
Deadline to post your entry will be Saturday at noon. All entries must be posted on this thread, so I don’t have to go searching through the blog posts to find our winner.
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Criticism of Palin, McCain also nails the innocent
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Politico’s Roger Simon puts it well, at least initially:
“John McCain’s campaign is looking for a scapegoat. It is looking for someone to blame if McCain loses on Tuesday.
And it has decided on Sarah Palin.
In recent days, a McCain “adviser” told Dana Bash of CNN: “She is a diva. She takes no advice from anyone….”
Also, a “top McCain adviser” told Mike Allen of Politico that Palin is “a whack job.”
Maybe she is. But who chose to put this “whack job” on the ticket? Wasn’t it John McCain? And wasn’t it his first presidential-level decision?”
Good point, Roger. But then Mr. Simon has to go and ruin a perfectly fine piece by taking a personal and totally undeserved shot at some of the finest, most humble and hardworking people in America:
“Is she really a diva and a whack job? Could be. There are quite a few in politics. (And a few in journalism, too, though in journalism they are called “columnists.”)”
Et tu, Roger? Et tu? How unfair.
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Phillies win the Series….
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
always a great, fun scene on the field when a team takes it all.
Except of course when it’s the Yankees. But that hasn’t happened in a while.
Which is good.
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The 30-minute Obamathon
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
With Barack Obama holding a significant but not decisive lead in the polls, his decision to buy 30 minutes of uninterrupted airtime on NBC, CBS, FOX, Univision, BET, MSNBC and TV One (8 p.m. Eastern) can be seen as either a bold bid to press and broaden his advantage to possibly landslide proportions or an unnecessary, even grandiose gamble.
Personally, I think it’s a little of both. He’s certainly not playing it conservative, in the non-political sense of the word.
It’s also true, though, that the move is a natural extension of his campaign strategy. From the beginning, he has been committed to fighting this out on a national stage, even in states where most experts said he had no chance, and he’s sticking to the plan to the end. You know, places like Georgia? And Virginia?
You dance with the girl who brung you, as the saying goes….
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Mysterious memo emerges in Senate race
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
It is the fate of most Libertarian candidates to be ignored.
That may not be the fate of Allen Buckley, the Libertarian candidate for U.S. Senate here in Georgia.
In fact, if you believe a leaked memo attributed to McLaughlin & Associates, a national Republican polling and research firm with offices in Virgnia and New York, Buckley may be about to hit the big time, drawing the kind of attention that only the big boys get.
In polls, Buckley has been drawing 2 to 6 percent of the vote in a Senate race that has gotten a lot closer in recent weeks. Under Georgia law, which requires the winning candidate to get a majority of the votes, that would probably be enough to force the race into a runoff Dec. 2.
That possibility has drawn a lot of attention, not just here in Georgia but nationally as well. With Democrats within reach of 60 Senate seats, the magic number needed to prevent filibusters, the seat now held by Republican incumbent Saxby Chambliss has become a critical hold for the GOP. And typically, incumbents drawn into a runoff don’t do well.
According to the suspicious three-page memo Page 1 | Page2 | Page 3., faxed anonymously to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, McLaughlin & Associates supposedly conducted a series of polls immediately after debates among the three candidates.
“There is an alarming shift in key demographic segments that do not bode well for the Senator,” the memo states. “Our data indicates that support among the 35-50 and 50-65 white male segment is softening. It also appears that they [are] trending towards the Libertarian candidate.”
The memo, on what purports to be McLaughlin & Associates letterhead, was allegedly written by Brian Larkin, director of qualitative research at McLaughlin. When contacted at his office in New York Tuesday, Larkin denied any knowledge or involvement. When I mentioned I had the alleged memo in my hand, on McLaughlin letterhead with his name as its author, the phone went silent for a few moments. Larkin then asked for my phone number and promised to return the call.
Ten minutes later, he called and again denied his company had conducted any polling in the Georgia race. Later that afternoon, company CEO and founder John McLaughlin called to strongly reiterate that claim, calling the memo a forgery.
Given its unknown source, we decided not to report on the memo unless we could tie down some loose ends. That decision changed when McLaughlin called late Wednesday morning to say he had leaked “to some of my media friends that somebody is trying to do this as a dirty trick,” and that other reporters may contact us for information on the story.
Now, somebody peddling phony poll numbers seems small potatoes as a dirty trick. What makes the memo potentially incendiary is not the numbers, but the narrative that follows:
“Based on the results of our Hyper-Local polling combined with the intelligence gathered from the media sweep, we believe the runoff is unavoidable,” the memo states. “Our gravest concern is that in the post-election runoff environment, the democratic opponent will emerge as ‘the reasonable choice’. That combined with what is certain to be a monumental democratic ‘get out the vote’ campaign in the wake of an Obama victory spells real trouble for the client.
“Steve, I’ve had the opportunity to discuss your client’s situation with KR. He is as alarmed as we are due to the implications on the national scene. As you are no doubt aware, your client’s seat might well be number 60 if we can’t turn this thing around. “To avoid this messy situation, we recommend the following actions:
“Dispatch an action team to conduct the neglected opposition research on the Libertarian candidate. Our operatives will leave no stone unturned. A complete review of his income tax records, marriage records, student records and criminal records as well as detailed financial information must be obtained ASAP.
“Since the Libertarian candidate has utilized AM Talk Radio for the majority of his negative efforts, this would be the venue to launch the client’s counterassault. Radio ads must be prepared detailing some of the Libertarian party’s controversial stands on the issues such as drug law, gay marriage and abortion.
“A major effort must be made in the blogosphere to ridicule the Libertarian candidate from as many sources and directions as possible. Attacks must be made from the right and the left, spurious claims should be made while hiding under the cloak of anonymity the internet affords.
In closing, please have the contract signed and returned with payment in full.” On its website, McLaughlin lists the National Republican Senatorial Committee as a client, and describes Larkin as a former NRSC employee. The committee, chaired by Sen. John Ensign of Nevada, is dedicated to electing and re-electing Republicans to the Senate.
However, McLaughlin says his company has done no work for the committee this election cycle. “This is bizarre,” he said, “a total invention, although somebody clearly went through a lot of trouble.” He said he may refer the matter to law enforcement.
Buckley said he has no idea whether the memo is legitimate, although “I suspected that if I became a threat they would try to dig up some dirt on me.”
“I’m not an angel but there’s nothing in my past I’m worried about.”
“I know from Republicans that a lot of them are getting behind me,” Buckley said. “A lot more would be if they weren’t so worried about the 60-vote thing.”
If he is able to push the race into a runoff, Buckley said, he plans to require Chambliss and Democrat Jim Martin to make a signed public commitment of fiscal responsibility in return for his endorsement.
This has already been a strange election season. But come Nov. 5, it would become stranger still should a Georgia Libertarian become kingmaker of the U.S. Senate, his influence critical in determining whether Democrats make it to 60 seats.
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At the intersection of God and politics
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
In California, voters face a decision on Proposition 8, which would reverse a decision by the state’s Supreme Court legalizing gay marriage. Supporters of the ban are trying to frame the issue as a question of religious freedom, claiming that without the proposition, churches would be required to conduct gay marriage ceremonies against their will. That is not the case, but some people believe a lie can be put in service of the truth.
The fervor behind the measure is, well, pretty fervent, as you’ll see (H/T to Andrew Sullivan and the Daily Dish).
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The consequences of a Dem sweep
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Linda Feldman of the Christian Science Monitor has a nice piece this morning looking at the possibilities and pitfalls of one-party rule. It also includes an interesting nugget I’d missed from the recent Washington Post poll. A few excerpts:
“Washington may well be on the verge of becoming a one-party town, with Democratic Sen. Barack Obama looking strong to capture the presidency next Tuesday and Democrats poised to expand their majorities in both houses of Congress.
The history of one-party rule in America is fraught with triumphs and peril….
For Senator Obama, should he become president, the most relevant historical example is President Franklin Roosevelt, says presidential historian Robert Dallek.
“We were in dire straits,” says Mr. Dallek. “As Roosevelt said himself in his first inaugural, ‘This country is asking for action and action now.’ That’s what he gave them. In the first 100 days, he passed 15 major pieces of legislation. He couldn’t have done it unless he had a crisis and strong party support.”
Obama, too, appears poised to push initiatives in a range of areas, including a second economic stimulus package, healthcare reform, changes to tax policy, and energy reform. He has also pledged to begin, right away, the process of withdrawing US troops from Iraq….
Still, the American public is showing unprecedented support for one-party rule in Washington, according to the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll. Fifty percent of likely voters say they would prefer that the same party control both the White House and Congress, a new high for that poll. Thirty percent said they wanted split-party rule.”
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Florida’s Crist believes in democracy
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Wow. A Republican who actually wants to help people vote.
Florida Gov. Charlie Crist has issued an executive order mandating that polls stay open 12 hours a day to handle the crush of early voters. “I have a responsibility to the voters of our state to ensure that the maximum number of citizens can participate in the electoral process, and that every person can exercise the right to vote,” Crist said.
Crist has also been frank about the existence — or more accurately, non-existence — of widespread voter fraud, the latest bugaboo advanced by his party to terrify its base into obedience.
”I think that there’s probably less [fraud] than is being discussed. As we’re coming into the closing days of any campaign, there are some who enjoy chaos,” Crist told reporters recently.
With such moves, Crist positions himself as a leader of his party’s sane wing. Unfortunately, that wing is rather small at the moment — about the size of a wing on the flightless dodo bird, as opposed to the size of a wing on a soaring bald eagle. But maybe that can change.
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Gallup says race tightening!
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Gallup’s numbers have tightened. Will that be reflected in other tracking polls as well?
PRINCETON, NJ — The gap between Barack Obama and John McCain in Gallup Poll Daily tracking from Saturday through Monday has narrowed slightly, and Obama is now at 49% of the vote to 47% for McCain among likely voters using Gallup’s traditional model, and at 51% to 44% using Gallup’s expanded model.
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… and you thought the D’s were hard on Palin?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
from Politco’s Mike Allen, author of the Playbook column, referring to Sarah Palin:
“In convo with Playbook, a top McCain adviser one-ups the priceless ‘diva’ description, calling her “a whack job.”
This is a week from Election Day. Heaven knows what’s going to happen once the election is actually over and people are more free to speak their minds.
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One week from today, world changes
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
It’s one week from Election Day. The polls have turned solidly toward Barack Obama and show no signs of reversing. Karl Rove’s own electoral vote map shows Obama with 306 electoral votes, well over the 270 minimum. Once-tight battleground states such as New Mexico, Colorado, Iowa and Pennsylvania appear out of reach for McCain, and he trails significantly even in Virginia. Recent polls put even Georgia in play.
In Congress, Democrats now believe the magic number of 60 Senate seats may be in reach, aided by the felony conviction Monday of Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens, long a Republican power in the Senate. The Republican House caucus is abandoning financial commitments even to incumbents, trying to defend what seats they can.
It is an ugly scene for the Republican faithful, and it doesn’t help much to see its two “running mates” running in opposite directions, with Sarah Palin now clearly setting her eyes on the prize in 2012.
Meanwhile, the market continues to struggle. Unemployment rises, along with foreclosures. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan drag on. The U.S. auto industry, long a symbol of industrial might, is collapsing. Across the country, across generational lines and political lines and racial lines, Americans are united by little except an understanding that we stand at a tipping point, what chaos theorists call a “phase transition” from one state to another. But none of us knows what that next state is likely to be.
One week from today, a new power structure will begin to emerge from the confusion and division of the past year. New leaders will assume new positions, promising new directions and results. It’s time. It’s past time.
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The Rev. Wright makes an appearance
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Well, you knew it was going to happen sooner or later. An independent GOP group is apparently going to run this ad in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida. We’ll see; sometimes these groups don’t have the money they claim to have (note the fundraising appeal at the end).
It will also be interesting to see how Barack Obama reacts, if at all. In the past his campaign has been quick to hit back, but Obama now seems to be moving into the statesmanlike, heal-the-divisions phase typical of winning campaigns toward the end. Responding in kind may step on that message.
And the most important question, of course, is what it does to the polls. Does this hurt Obama, or does it end up boomeranging against McCain?
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America under President Obama: A view from the Christian Right
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Focus on the Family, an evangelical Christian group founded by Dr. James Dobson, claims to reach more than 220 million people in 155 nations, and Dobson himself is often described as the nation’s most influential evangelical leader. He is deeply involved in Republican Party politics, and his support is urgently courted by party leaders. It may not be mainstream in some ways, but it is certainly mainstream in terms of the power it wields.
Now, through their political and lobbying arm, the folks at Focus on the Family have been good enough to peer into their crystal ball to let us see what the United States is going to look like by 2012 should the American people be so foolish as to elect Barack Obama as their president.
Their description of America in another four years, contained in a “letter from the future,” is not a pretty sight. Here are a few highlights:
— By 2012, Obama has remade the U.S. Supreme Court into an activist, pro-gay institution, and as a result “the Boy Scouts no longer exist as an organization. They chose to disband rather than be forced to obey the Supreme Court decision that they would have to hire homosexual scoutmasters and allow them to sleep in tents with young boys.”
— “Tens of thousands of Christian (public school) teachers either quit or were fired, and there are hardly any evangelical teachers in public school any more… In addition, many private Christian schools decided to shut down after the Supreme Court ruled that anti-discrimination laws that include sexual orientation extended to private institutions such as schools.”
— “There are no more Roman Catholic or evangelical Protestant adoption agencies,” and Christian parents are being refused the right to adopt by secular adoption agencies because they have “”narrow’ or dangerous views on religion or homosexuality.”
— “The Bible can no longer be freely preached over radio or television stations when the subject matter includes such ‘offensive’ doctrines as criticizing homosexual behavior.” In addition, “churches have no freedom to refuse to allow their buildings to be used for wedding ceremonies for homosexual couples.” and “homosexuals are now given special bonuses for enlisting in military service.”
— Christian nurses, physicians, family counselors, lawyers and other professionals are being stripped of their right to work in those fields, and because homeschooling is now all but outlawed, thousands of homeschooling parents are moving their families to Australia or New Zealand.
— The U.S. Supreme Court has “nullified all Federal Communications Commission restrictions on obscene speech or visual content in radio and television broadcasts. As a result, television programs at all hours of the day contain explicit portrayals of sexual acts.”
— After President Obama pulled U.S. troops out of Iraq, “Al Qaida operatives from Syria and Iran poured into Iraq and completely overwhelmed the Iraqi security forces,” followed by mass executions. “The number put to death may soon reach the millions.”
— Four U.S. cities have been hit by terror attacks, and “in mid-2010, Iran launched a nuclear bomb that exploded in the middle of Tel Aviv… President Obama said he abhorred what Iran had done, and he hoped the U.N. would unanimously condemn this crime against humanity.”
— Russia has invaded and captured Georgia, Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Bulgaria “with no military response from the U.S. or the U.N.” Instead, President Obama moved to strengthen US ties with communist regimes in Cuba, Venezuela and Bolivia.
— Health care has been nationalized, and “the waiting list for prostate cancer surgery is 3 years.” In fact, “people older than 80 have essentially no access to hospitals or surgical procedures. Their ‘duty’ is increasingly thought to be to go home to die….”
— “Conservative talk radio, for all intents and purposes, was shut down by the end of 2010,” and evangelical Christian book publishers have been barred from selling their products through Amazon, Borders and Barnes and Noble. And dozens of Bush officials, from the Cabinet level on down, are in jail.
“When did all this start?” the folks at Focus on the Family ask, looking back at us in hindsight from 2012. “Christians share a lot of the blame. In 2008, many evangelicals thought Senator Obama was an opportunity for ‘change’ and they voted for him…. Many people thought he sounded so thoughtful, so reasonable.” Instead, the letter claims, by 2012 Obama had moved to repress all dissent to the point that “hardly any brave citizen dares to resist the new government policies any more.”
This is what millions of our fellow Americans are being told to believe by leaders in whom they place great faith and confidence. This is why you can sense a rising tide of panic from some quarters as it begins to sink in that Barack Obama is likely to become our next president. It is vile, irresponsible and unbelievable fantasy, but to many it is revealed truth. And it is difficult to imagine how that world view can ever be reconciled with that of the mainstream.
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Greenspan concedes a basic ‘flaw’
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Whatever else you might say about the man, Alan Greenspan took his punishment like a grown-up.
Appearing before the House Oversight Committee last week, the former Federal Reserve chairman acknowledged that the anti-regulatory, hyper-free-market ideology that had served him well for 40 years —- a philosophy that he literally learned at Ayn Rand’s knee —- had in some ways been wrong.
And not just slightly wrong. The economic crisis has revealed a flaw, he said, “a flaw in the model that I perceived as the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works.”
Greenspan did not come easily to that confession, but the fact he came to it at all speaks well of his intellectual honesty. As a young man, Greenspan had been a member of Rand’s inner circle, absorbing her claims that altruism was evil, that taxes should be voluntary, that mankind had no responsibility to others and that “each man must live as an end in himself and follow his own rational self interests.”
“I am opposed to all forms of control,” Rand proclaimed. “I am for an absolute laissez-faire free unregulated economy. I am for separation of state and economics.”
The young Greenspan lapped up talk like that. In a letter in 1957 to the New York Times, he defended Rand’s philosophy. “Justice is unrelenting,” he wrote. “Creative individuals and undeviating purpose and rationality achieve joy and fulfillment. Parasites who persistently avoid either purpose or reason perish as they should.”
Time and experience eventually softened the harsh edges of that belief for Greenspan, but he never wavered in his opposition to regulation or in his belief that individuals, left free to selfishly pursue their own self-interests, would generate wealth and make markets self-correcting without the heavy hand of government.
That’s the part he got partially wrong, he said last week.
“Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity, myself especially, are in a state of shock and disbelief,” he told the committee.
While Rand’s “objectivism,” as she called her philosophy, never attained the wide appeal she sought, many of its tenets and language have been absorbed into modern conservative economic theory. And Greenspan is far from alone in acknowledging that it has not held up well in current circumstances. As a result, issues long regarded as settled in American politics are about to be reopened.
“Over the past year, some of the critical pillars underlying market competition arguably have failed,” Greenspan admitted in a speech earlier this month at Georgetown University. “A worldwide debate on the future of globalization and capitalism is being intensified by the current crisis. Its resolution will define the world marketplace and the way we live for decades to come.”
That’s a potentially dangerous undertaking. In his Georgetown speech, Greenspan correctly defended the core importance of property rights, economic liberty and capitalism. As he noted, those concepts have proved essential to economic progress and should not be abandoned.
However, as he also noted, the only way to sustain political support for a capitalist system “is to continue to support market incentives that create jobs and to find productive ways to ease the pain of job losers.” He also took note of “the recent growing inequality of income,” a new problem that “requires insight into its roots, and policy action where appropriate.”
Ayn Rand, in other words, would not be pleased with her disciple. She liked to claim that her philosophy was based on hard-headed realism, the notion “that reality exists as an objective absolute.”
Well, the “objective absolute” that is reality has tested her philosophy and found it faulty, a ship of illusions that ran aground on the shoals of experience. The challenge for the next president and Congress will be to correct our course without steering us too far in the other direction.
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Will ‘Country First’ extend past Nov. 4?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Robert Zoellick, a former deputy secretary of State in the Bush administration who is now president of the World Bank, makes an obvious but important point in today’s Washington Post: Our next president, whoever it is, faces so many important challenges in so many arenas that he has the potential to leave his mark as one of our greatest presidents ever, a “21st century FDR.”
Here’s a partial list of Zoellick’s to-do list:
“The new administration will need to recapitalize banks … helping homeowners manage their mortgage debts while staying in their homes … overhaul a failed financial regulatory and supervisory system … (champion) quality schools, basic health-care choices and worker assistance … immigration rules that let the United States attract talent and regenerate its spirit … reintroducing the United States to the world… modernizing multilateralism and markets … negotiate a new climate-change treaty … A successful wind-down in Iraq, a path of progress for Afghanistan and Pakistan, and a push for peace and development in the Middle East … the courage to stand up to the challenges of isolationism at home…
While some might be tempted to condemn aspects of that list as liberal and activist, Zoellick is a strong McCain supporter and was slated to serve as McCain’s top domestic and foreign policy campaign adviser until taking the World Bank job. He is often mentioned as a likely secretary of State should McCain win.
That daunting list also poses an unstated challenge to many on the right. John McCain today said he guaranteed that the race would tighten and that he would emerge victorious late into Election Night. The numbers continue to say otherwise. The numbers say this race is over and the only remaining question is how large the margin will be.
McCain and his backers have run on a slogan of “Country First,” country over politics. The sincerity of that claim is now likely to be tested in ways they will not like. Will they support a President Obama and back him when they can? Given the critical challenges we face, it is essential that the next president has a successful administration.
“Country First.” Is that a heartfelt sentiment or a cynical slogan?
We shall see.
UPDATE: I should have included this in the original post — my bad: If this campaign ends as it appears it will, a little humility and magnanimity on the part of the winning side will be important as well.
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‘Two less Obama voters….’
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I’m sure the person who posts as “Dagny and John’s Love Child” won’t be bothered if I do this. His comment from the thread below is such a perfect distillation of a certain attitude that it just had to be highlighted where all could admire it.
“One good thing about Jennifer Hudson’s family tragedy - two less Obama voters.”
A 57-year old grandmother is killed in her home, as is her 29-year-old son. A seven-year-old child is missing and there is every reason to fear for his survival as well.
And “Dagny and John’s Love Child” expresses pleasure that two Obama voters are now gone. Presumably, the possibility that seven-year-old Julian King is also dead is also cause for pleasure, because he too might have grown up to be an Obama voter.
I’m thinking Love Child ought to come back on line and apologize, or be banned from this blog. Any comments?
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Staring into my crystal golf ball….
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The swami says that if I can break 80 today, then miracles really do happen and John McCain really does still have a chance.
But otherwise….
In the meantime, amuse but don’t abuse each other.
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Quote of the day: Palin going rogue
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
According to John King of CNN, under the headline “’Palin’s going rogue,’ McCain aide says”:
A second McCain source says she appears to be looking out for herself more than the McCain campaign.
“She is a diva. She takes no advice from anyone,” said this McCain adviser. “She does not have any relationships of trust with any of us, her family or anyone else.
“Also, she is playing for her own future and sees herself as the next leader of the party. Remember: Divas trust only unto themselves, as they see themselves as the beginning and end of all wisdom.”
I think it’s over. And it’s not ending pretty. Oh no. Not pretty at all.
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Sarah Palin and the Southern Strategy
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
If you average the five most recent presidential polls taken in Georgia, John McCain is up by only 3.6 points on Barack Obama, which makes it conceivable but still unlikely that the state will turn blue in 2008.
That fits in nicely with the premise of Harold Meyerson in American Prospect, who focuses somewhat on Virginia and more intently on North Carolina to test his thesis that this election could kill the GOP’s longtime Southern Strategy.
Certainly, if Virginia and North Carolina both go Democratic in a year in which the ticket is headed by a black man, the Southern Strategy is indeed bankrupt. Losing Georgia would be the coup de grace, and would actually be a very good thing for the Republican Party, and thus for the country.
If this election ends as current trends indicate, the GOP is about to be banished to the political wilderness. The amount of time it is forced to stay there depends on how the party handles its exile. If most of its moderate members go down to defeat, leaving it a core of deeply conservative officeholders concentrated in the South, the party could turn even more insular in defeat, and even more strongly in the grip of its evangelical base. A regional party simmering in its own bitterness would do no one any good, and would give Democrats a dangerously free hand in Washington for a long time.
However, losing Virginia, North Carolina and even Georgia would make it pretty apparent that such a strategy would be hopeless, and a new approach is needed. (Indiana, for purposes of this analysis, could also be considered a Southern state, and it too could turn blue for the first time in decades.) Losses in those areas would make it clear that the party needs a different message, that the failures of ‘08 were not merely a case of picking the wrong messenger in John McCain, as some on the right will try to claim.
Sarah Palin is another matter entirely. If the election doesn’t turn around — and that “if” gets smaller with each passing day — the GOP will break at least temporarily into two separate groups, and Palin will be the symbol and in some ways the cause of that break. She remains much beloved by the party base, and in truth has improved as a campaigner. But the polling data is quite clear that she has been poison at the box office, as they say in show biz. Palin’s selection electrified the base but drove off millions of moderates and independents.
The situation was dramatized this week when conservative legal scholar Charles Fried, the soIicitor general under Ronald Reagan, a revered figure among Republican intellectuals and a prominent campaign adviser to McCain, announced he had voted for Obama. The main reason he cited “is the choice of Sarah Palin at a time of deep national crisis.”
In a sense, then, the post-election GOP will consist of a Palin wing clinging to the Southern Strategy and all its cultural baggage, and an anti-Palin wing demanding a new strategy and a new look at how the party defines itself.
That is the battleground on which the GOP’s future will be decided.
UPDATE: I see where Politico is reporting that Palin/anti-Palin split already apparent within the McCain campaign itself.
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The aftermath of Ashley Todd’s story
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
McCain volunteer Ashley Todd has now confessed that she made up the story about being attacked by a large black man who carved the letter “B” into her cheek.
The young lady has issues, and I hope she gets the help she needs. End of story.
But let’s talk in a little more depth about the eagerness and even glee with which some in the right-wing blogosphere jumped on that story and immediately claimed it as proof of their worst nightmares coming true. So much of that story was unbelievable from the very beginning, yet certain people wanted to believe it so badly that they ignored all the warning signs and launched into full battle cry.
Andy McCarthy at the National Review’s Corner responded with a post so embarrassing he has now taken it down so nobody can see it.
Dan Riehl at riehlworldview.com posted under the headline “Thugs for change,” claiming that “Obama’s run his campaign just like a street thug out of Chicago. Now we get to see what some of his worst supporters are like.”
Noel Sheppard at newsbusters.org chastized AP for daring to be skeptical of the initial report. Most of all, he wanted to know why the AP didn’t report that the alleged perp was black. How dare they exclude a detail that had no bearing whatsoever on the alleged crime!!
Josh Painter at redstate.com blamed the attack on Barack Obama, suggesting an “Obama thugocracy” was coming: When Obama “urged his supporters to get in their face, did it not occur to him that some of his more deranged followers might take him literally?” Painter asked.
He was echoed by fellow redstater Erick Erickson, who wrote: “Hey! The dude was just doing what The One asked him to. Full pardon on January 21st.”
At Atlas Shugs, they posted the woman’s photo and called it “the new face of the Republican Party.”
“Shame on those that doubted this poor girl,” the post read. “Always ready to jump on the side of the leftists and thugs. ugh. Americans, I implore you to get off your asses and save this country from the radical left coup on the White House, Senate and House…. Perhaps the Obots misunderstood Obama urging his followers to Get In Their Face and GET IN THEIR FACES!” They got the advanced course of Camp Obama to cut up their faces.”
But perhaps the most interesting response came from John Moody, executive vice president at Fox News:
“If Ms. Todd’s allegations are proven accurate, some voters may revisit their support for Senator Obama, not because they are racists (with due respect to Rep. John Murtha), but because they suddenly feel they do not know enough about the Democratic nominee,” Moody wrote. “If the incident turns out to be a hoax, Senator McCain’s quest for the presidency is over, forever linked to race-baiting.”
Now, that is utter nonsense on two counts. First, while the incident did indeed turn out to be a hoax, it has in no way linked McCain to racebaiting and will have no impact whatsoever on the outcome of this race.
But Moody’s claim that Obama supporters might have revisited their position if the story were true is more intriguing, and more revealing as well. Moody claims that under those circumstances, people might suddenly feel they know less about Obama and thus change their vote. But what is the logical trail between those two thoughts? Such an attack would tell people absolutely nothing about Obama.
The real explanation lies in the answer that Moody rejects: racism. A lot of white Americans voting for Obama have had to overcome various degrees of racism to get themselves to that point. That doesn’t make them bad people; to the contrary, they’re thinking things through, and that’s great.
However, for many of those people, an attack of the sort described by Ashley Todd would heighten those internal, emotional obstacles to voting for Obama. That’s precisely why some on the right — with notable exceptions such as Michelle Malkin, a person I do not ordinarily respect much — were so quick to try to make it a huge deal.
They ought to be ashamed.
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A little early for a victory dance?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg said Friday that his party is in position for “an earthquake election” come November 4.
“Nothing is going to look the same,” Greenberg said, joined by Democratic strategist James Carville at a breakfast with reporters hosted by the Christian Science Monitor.
Carville likened the Washington political environment to pre-Katrina New Orleans, saying that “there will be nothing left standing” after the election. He added that Republicans stand to lose “not just an election, but a generation of voters.”
“[John] McCain and [Sarah] Palin are losing the argument,” Greenberg said, pointing to favorable numbers for Obama on the campaign’s central issue, the economy.
“They are losing on their central arguments,” the pollster said of the Republican’s focus on tax cuts. “They can’t see that what they take for granted loses them independents.”
There’s also a classic Carville line at the end of the story that you’ll have to see for yourself.
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Something just didn’t add up
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
For those who were quick to rush to judgment about the alleged attack on a McCain supporter in Pittsburgh, and more particularly those who rushed to that judgment with seeming glee, things weren’t as they seemed:
“Police planned to administer a polygraph test to Ashley Todd, 20, because her statements about the attack conflict with evidence from the Citizens Bank ATM where she claims the incident occurred, police said.”
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Could be another Black Friday on Wall Street
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Yikes….
Oct. 24 (Bloomberg) — Stocks tumbled around the world and U.S. index futures fell on deepening concern the global economic slump will crimp earnings. The yen climbed to a 13-year high against the dollar as investors shunned higher-yielding assets.
Trading in futures on the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index and the Dow Jones Industrial Average was limited to stop contracts from dropping, following declines of more than 6 percent. The U.K.’s FTSE 100 Index sank 8.1 percent and the pound slid the most versus the dollar since 1971 after the economy shrank for the first time since 1992. South Korea’s Kospi Index slumped 10 percent as the country’s economy grew at the slowest pace in four years.
The panic levels are now quite unseen,'' said Christian Gattiker, Zurich-based head of equity research at Bank Julius Baer & Co. which manages about $307.6 billion globally.It’s difficult to have any words for this situation right now.”
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Assault alleged on McCain staffer
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The report about a bizarre attack on a McCain volunteer in Pittsburgh is disturbing. If this happened as described, then the perpetrator ought to be caught and sent to prison for every day the law allows, and it ought to allow a lot.
But I’d be careful about jumping to conclusions too quickly. The Pittsburgh police certainly seem to be.
“This is what she’s telling police,” police spokeswoman Diane Richard said. “We can’t substantiate it at this time.”
Police are checking video footage from a bank surveillance camera. Let’s see how the investigation unfolds.
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Still not sure Georgia’s in play, but…
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Democracy Corps, a nonprofit run by James Carville and longtime Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg, just released a survey of 600 likely voters here in Georgia. Their finding?
“Barack Obama has no business winning in Georgia this year. Neither does U.S. Senate candidate Jim Martin. Yet both Democrats are within striking range in a state President Bush carried by 17 points in 2004, and where in the last six years Republicans replaced Democrats in both Senate seats, and won the governor’s office for the first time since Reconstruction. John McCain leads Barack Obama by just two points (44 - 46 percent) and Jim Martin trails incumbent Senator Saxby Chambliss by just 4 points, 44 - 48 percent.”
According to the poll, Martin has only a name identification of only 55 percent, suggesting a lot of potential upside. Only 39 percent rate Chambliss’ performance as good or excellent.
Their findings in the presidential race would be easier to dismiss without a recent spate of other polls that also show the contest tightening in Georgia. The last 10 polls taken here all put the margin in single digits. Here’s the aggregate poll trend as reflected by the folks at Pollster.com.
For some reason, the folks at Democracy Corps also asked whether voters would choose Roy Barnes or Karen Handel in a governor’s race come 2010 — Barnes wins 49 to 35 percent.
And the most popular political figure in Georgia? Who else but Zell Miller, followed closely by Sonny Perdue.
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GOP establishment needs to be defeated
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The Republican Party is lashing back at its presidential nominee for his frankness about George W. Bush and congressional Republicans.
According to Mike Allen of Politico, “The Republican establishment is beginning to express long-suppressed exasperation with the McCain pirate ship. In an early-morning phone call to Playbook, one of the most senior Republican strategists in the land warns the McCain campaign after reading the WashTimes interview:
“Lashing out at past Republican Congresses instead of Pelosi and Reid, and echoing your opponent’s attacks on you instead of attacking your opponent, and spending 150,000 hard dollars on designer clothes when congressional Republicans are struggling for money, and when your senior campaign staff are blaming each other for the loss in The New York Times [Magazine] 10 days before the election, you’re not doing much to energize your supporters.
The fact is, when you’re the party standard-bearer, you have an obligation to fight to the finish. I think they can still win. But if they don’t think that, they need to look at how Bob Dole finished out his campaign in 1996 and not try to take down as many Republicans with them as they can. Instead of campaigning in Electoral College states, Dole was campaigning in places he knew he didn’t have a chance to beat Clinton, but where he could energize key House and Senate races. I think you’ll find these sentiments shared by MANY of my fellow Republican strategists.”
The Republican establishment, in other words, has not learned its lesson and still clings to the belief that its policies are wise and its ideology correct. They don’t want to change. They see no reason to change. They still believe they have the support of the American people. And that’s always been part of the problem with McCain’s candidacy.
To some degree, McCain does have maverick inclinations. To some degree, he does “get it” about the collapse of the GOP world view.
But if elected president, McCain would be a captive of the same party apparatus that created and protected Bush, a fact he has confirmed in the way he has run this campaign. He chose Sarah Palin not because she was most qualified or even qualified at all, but to placate the GOP base. He embraced the Bush tax cuts he once rejected as unfairly tilted toward the rich. He publicly kissed the ring of Jerry Falwell, the man he once described as an agent of intolerance. And the pool of Washington Republicans he would draw from to man his administration would be the same pool of Republicans that filled the Bush administration. Nothing would change.
Nothing.
Libertarian Radley Balko, writing in Reason, reaches the same conclusion in a piece headlined “Why the Republicans Must Lose.”
“First, they had their shot at holding power, and they failed. They’ve failed in staying true to their principles of limited government and free markets. They’ve failed in preventing elected leaders of their party from becoming corrupted by the trappings of power, and they’ve failed to hold those leaders accountable after the fact. Congressional Republicans failed to rein in the Bush administration’s naked bid to vastly expand the power of the presidency (a failure they’re going to come to regret should Obama take office in January). They failed to apply due scrutiny and skepticism to the administration’s claims before undertaking Congress’ most solemn task—sending the nation to war. I could go on.
As for the Bush administration, the only consistent principle we’ve seen from the White House over the last eight years is that of elevating the American president (and, I guess, the vice president) to that of an elected dictator. That isn’t hyperbole. This administration believes that on any issue that can remotely be tied to foreign policy or national security (and on quite a few other issues as well), the president has boundless, limitless, unchecked power to do anything he wants. They believe that on these matters, neither Congress nor the courts can restrain him.
That’s the second reason the GOP needs to lose. American voters need to send a clear, convincing repudiation of these dangerous ideas….. Big-government conservatism has bloated the federal government, bogged us down in what will ultimately be a trillion-dollar war, and set us down the road to European-style socialism. It’s hard to think of how Obama could be worse. He’ll just be bad in different way.”
I’m struck by the fact that so many Republicans absolutely refuse to believe that the American people would elect Barack Obama as president. It is utterly inconceivable to them, and that disbelief is the source of much of the anger you see at McCain-Palin rallies. They have been fed a distorted, twisted idea of what this nation is all about, and only a resounding rejection of their approach at the voting booth can force them to “true up” their image of America with reality.
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Who’s your daddy, John?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
John McCain says George Bush has been a disaster.
“Spending, the conduct of the war in Iraq for years, growth in the size of government, larger than any time since the Great Society, laying a $10 trillion debt on future generations of America, owing $500 billion to China, obviously, failure to both enforce and modernize the [financial] regulatory agencies that were designed for the 1930s and certainly not for the 21st century, failure to address the issue of climate change seriously,” Mr. McCain said in an interview with The Washington Times aboard his campaign plane en route from New Hampshire to Ohio.
“Those are just some of them,” he said with a laugh, chomping into a peanut butter sandwich as a few campaign aides in his midair office joined in the laughter….
In addition to the long list of failures he attributed to Mr. Bush, Mr. McCain blamed the president for supporting the Medicare prescription-drug bill, saying, “They didn’t pay for it.”
“They put a trillion-dollar debt on future generations of Americans, then allowed the liberals to expand it so they’re paying my — they’re paying for my prescription drugs. Why should the taxpayers pay for my prescription drugs?” he said with exasperation.
He rejected Mr. Bush’s use of issuing “signing statements” when he signs bills into law, in which the president has suggested that he would ignore elements of the bills, labeling them potentially unconstitutional….
The Republican also targeted his own party, saying they got drunk with power ….
“I think, frankly, the problem was, with a Republican Congress, that the president was told by the speaker and majority leaders and others, ‘Don’t veto these bills, we need this pork, we need this excess spending, we need to grow these bureaucracies.’ They all sponsor certain ones. And he didn’t do what Ronald Reagan used to and say, ‘No’; say, ‘No. We’re not going to do this.’”
OK, but where were you when it counted, John? Some of us have been pointing this out for years, years in which we were attacked as unAmerican and unpatriotic, as people so blinded by Bush hate that we could not see how wonderful and wise ol’ George really was as a leader. Years in which you and your colleagues continued to give Bush free rein to drive this country into the ground. On the rare occasion on which you challenged him, such as on signing statements, you quickly backed down out of obedience and political calculation.
But now you join the parade? Three months from the end of this eight-year reign of error? Thanks a heap, John. Country First.
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AP poll puts margin at 1 point — is that possible?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
A new AP poll has given conservatives hope and liberals palpitations, putting Obama up by just one point among likely voters.
So far, though, that result’s an outlier. The latest Washington Post/ABC poll puts the margin among likely voters at 11; a new Fox poll puts it at nine, also among likely voters. So the tricky part seems to be in how you define a likely voter. (Among total respondents, the AP poll puts the margin at 10 points.)
To see how that can affect a poll, take a look at Gallup’s tracking poll, which slices its data three ways. Among registered voters, Gallup puts the margin at nine points. Among those judged as likely voters by their own statements, the margin is eight points. And among those judged as likely voters based on their own statements AND their history of voting, the Gallup margin is five. In that third version, a voter who has never voted but insists she will vote this time may not be classified as a likely voter.
So in other words, how much credence does a pollster give to those who claim to be motivated to participate this time, even though they don’t have a record of voting in the past?
Based on turnout in early voting, I’d say that a lot of those people are actually showing up. But AP is less convinced. Maybe they’re right — we’ll know in 12 days and a few hours.
By the way, there’s a hilarious piece by Roger Simon at Politico, headlined “Democrats’ gloom deepens,” about the refusal of many Obama supporters to believe the poll numbers.
“The Democrats are poised on the brink of victory. And they cannot stand it. The news is too good. Something has to go wrong.
On Saturday, Charlie Cook, an independent analyst and author of the Cook Report, wrote: “This election isn’t over, but it is looking very bad for Republicans — and seems to be getting worse.”
This plunged the Democrats into a deep gloom. Good news is always bad news for them.”
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Palin’s $150,000 wardrobe upgrade
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
From Politico’s Jeanne Cummings:
The Republican National Committee has spent more than $150,000 to clothe and accessorize vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin and her family since her surprise pick by John McCain in late August.
According to financial disclosure records, the accessorizing began in early September and included bills from Saks Fifth Avenue in St. Louis and New York for a combined $49,425.74.
The records also document a couple of big-time shopping trips to Neiman Marcus in Minneapolis, including one $75,062.63 spree in early September.
Does “real America” drop 75 grand at Neiman Marcus? Does “small-town America” shop at Saks Fifth Avenue?
I was torn about even posting on this story, in part because it’s only natural that Palin and her family would need a wardrobe upgrade to play the parts they’ve been handed on the national stage. Washington ain’t Wasilla.
But $150 grand does seem excessive, particularly given Palin’s claim that she is the candidate answering the call of the little man, ready to grasp the broom of reform to sweep this country clean. You can’t play the part of anti-elitist populist wearing outfits that cost more than many voters make in a year of hard work.
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“I’ll take GOP presidential candidates for $500, Alex”
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
This is the first year since 1972 that the Republican presidential ticket has not included a Bush or a Dole.
But Mark Halperin of Time magazine asks: What was the last winning Republican ticket that did not include a Nixon or Bush? And here’s his answer.
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McCain gets big endorsement…
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
.
from al Qaeda, according to the Washington Post:
“Al-Qaeda will have to support McCain in the coming election,” said a commentary posted Monday on the extremist Web site al-Hesbah, which is closely linked to the terrorist group. It said the Arizona Republican would continue the “failing march of his predecessor,” President Bush.
… the comments summarized what has emerged as a consensus view on extremist sites, said Adam Raisman, a senior analyst for the Site Intelligence Group, which monitors Islamist Web pages. Site provided translations of the comments to The Washington Post.
“The idea in the jihadist forums is that McCain would be a faithful ‘son of Bush’ — someone they see as a jingoist and a war hawk,” Raisman said. “They think that, to succeed in a war of attrition, they need a leader in Washington like McCain.”
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‘Liberals hate real Americans’
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“Folks, there’s a real America, and liberals hate real Americans that work, and accomplish, and achieve, and believe in God.” — U.S. Rep. Robin Hayes, R-N.C., warming up a crowd for a McCain rally
Hayes claims he has no memory of saying that, even though the comments were recorded on tape. I believe it’s probably true that he doesn’t recall. Such sentiments are so engrained in certain people that they recite it without thinking about it, as they were rattling off their phone number or directions to their house.
And people who have been indoctrinated to think that way will naturally get angry at the thought that their “real America” might get taken over by “liberals who hate real Americans,” especially if that takeover of their country is led by a black guy named Barack Hussein Obama.
As a poster in another AJC blog put it recently, “I can only hope Hussien likes to ride around with the top down.”
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Using the Bible to keep girls in “their place”
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
As you can see from the video above, 14-year-old Kacy Stuart has some serious game. That’s an impressive performance by a young high school freshman of any gender. I coached girls’ soccer for a lot of years, and you don’t see that kind of talent often.
Unfortunately, Kacy has become famous not for her leg but her gender. Initially, she was barred from playing in the Georgia Football League, comprising teams of home-schoolers and small Christian academies, because she’s a girl. She was reinstated by the league only after the threat of a lawsuit.
That part of the story is fairly familiar, repeated elsewhere around the country in recent years in schools both public and private. But it took a twist last weekend when Kacy returned to the field for her first game with her New Creation team only to meet objections by her opponents.
“The East Atlanta Mustangs didn’t play us under protest but they were allowed to read a statement on their beliefs about female football players,” according to New Creation coach, Coach Ken Townley. “They used biblical verses from the book of Romans. I was very stunned by that.”
I read through Romans looking for anything about female football kickers and found nothing. My best guess is that the Mustangs cited Romans 1:26, “For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature.”
The next team on New Creation’s schedule, the Bartow Generals, have bowed out for unspecified reasons.
Some may see this as a story about Christian intolerance, but that’s a gross and unfair generalization. There are Christians on both sides of the issue, and in fact I suspect that most Christians would support letting young Kacy play.
But the story does illustrate how easily Scripture can be abused by those seeking justification for their own narrow personal beliefs. Because as you can see below in this interview with Ellen DeGeneres, there is nothing “unnatural” — whatever that means — about young Kacy.
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How to fix the U.S. election system
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Richard Hasen, an expert in election law and a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, surveys the U.S. electoral process and sees a crisis in public confidence that undermines our system’s legitimacy and poses “a small, but serious, risk of election meltdown in the case of a close election.”
His recommendations are sound:
“We can start with a uniform ballot for federal elections, applicable in all elections. To eliminate voter registration fraud and incompetence, we can move to a national, universal voter registration model. More ambitiously, too, states should consider creating the conditions for nonpartisan election administration, and cleaning up ambiguities and holes in the rules for running our elections.
The swings in voter confidence in the electoral process are troubling, and present a real national crisis. Once this election is over, we need to move to fix the process. Unfortunately, once the election is over, the press will doubtless stop paying attention to our election problems, only to return to election experts, just before the 2012 election, to ask us why things haven’t been cleaned up yet. Part of our reply should and will surely be that coverage of these problems shouldn’t follow the election cycle; it should persist until they are fixed.”
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Iraq to U.S.: Go! No, stay. No, go! Stay!
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The Iraqi government needs U.S. forces to stay, at least for a while longer, for military reasons.
But for political reasons, it can’t admit that fact to its own people.
As a result, Iraqi approval of a new status-of-forces agreement has been postponed and may not happen at all, a possibility that is making U.S. officials nervous. With no agreement, U.S. forces would legally be required to leave by Jan. 1.
Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned Iraqi leaders Tuesday that “we are clearly running out of time.”
“It’s time for the Iraqis to make a decision,” he said.
As written, the draft agreement calls for US forces to withdraw from Iraqi cities and towns by June — that’s just eight months from now — and be gone altogether by the end of 2011. But apparently many Iraqis want even that timetable pushed up.
However the short term problem is resolved, it’s pretty clear that in the long run the U.S. will not attain permanent bases in Iraq, which had been the hope of many top American officials in launching the invasion.
John McCain was clearly among that group. He had been pushing for the removal of Saddam Hussein long before before Sept. 11, and like others he seized upon the attacks on New York and Washington as a pretext for that strategy. His later infamous statement that he was willing to stay in Iraq for 100 years was not a commitment to a 100-year war, as Barack Obama suggested, but it did reflect McCain’s plan to keep US forces in Iraq long-term, just as they have been stationed in Germany, Italy, Japan and other nations since the end of World War II.
That had been the plan from the beginning. In launching the invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration and its supporters believed they were also permanently expanding U.S. military power in the Middle East, to the point that they would be able to impose military solutions to the region’s many problems. In one of the more ludicrous statements of the time, it was even argued that the road to peace in the Middle East ran through Baghdad, with Iraq becoming a pro-Israel ally in the Arab world.
We’ve spent a lot of lives and resources learning the folly of that line of thinking.
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The real Lincoln, not the e-mail Lincoln
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
A list of bogus Lincoln quotes is making the e-mail circuit, including statements such as “You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong” and “You cannot lift the wage earner up by pulling the wage payer down.”
If you’ve ever read Lincoln, you know he could never write such trite garbage. The language is wrong and sounds nothing like the man. The sentiments are also clearly not those of Lincoln.
“Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital,” our greatest president said in his first annual message to Congress. “Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.”
He also had a profound understanding of true liberty and its challenges.
“The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep’s throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as his liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act…,” he once said. “Plainly the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of liberty.”
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Judith Miller signs on at Fox News
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I see where Judith Miller, the author of widely discredited pre-war reporting on WMD in the New York Times, has taken a job with Fox News.
It’s an association that diminishes both parties.
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Most Americans reject Bizarroland
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The right-wing claim that the media are hiding the real truth about Barack Obama just cracks me up. For one thing, most of what the conservatives actually know for a fact about Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright and Tony Rezko were dug up by the same mainstream media they claim to be hiding the truth. (On the other hand, the things the right wing BELIEVES about Obama — that he was educated in a madrassa, was born overseas, is a Marxist/Muslim who hates America, etc., are their own invention.)
But you know what happened? The American people have read the facts and seen the Wright videos and they’ve decided that they just don’t care about such things. They’ve seen Obama for themselves and they’ve decided that he is not the radical that the right wing has attempted to paint him as.
However, to a conservative base obsessed with such matters, that thought is literally inconceivable. They cannot open their minds wide enough to allow that thought to enter. If the American people don’t share their obsessions, it can only be because the American people haven’t been told enough times!! Yeah, that’s the ticket!! It’s the media’s fault!!
It’s the same old paranoia that preached that Hillary was a lesbian who killed Vince Foster, that Bill was running cocaine out of Arkansas and raped a woman. It’s life in Bizarroland, and if Obama becomes president the paranoid ranting will be dialed up to 11.
Speaking of 11, that’s now the margin in the Gallup tracking poll …. about time for that “whitey tape?”
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15 days out, Obama reverses slide; Palin a drag on McCain
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
As expected, Barack Obama has halted and even reversed John McCain’s rise in the wake of their performances in the third and final debate, according to at least two tracking polls.
In the latest Gallup three-day tracking numbers released Sunday, Obama’s lead is back up to 10 points. It had fallen to six points before the poll began to reflect reaction to the debate.
Obama has also doubled his lead in the latest Zogby tracking poll released this morning, with the Illinois senator reaching 49.8 percent. That’s Obama’s highest support level in the poll’s 14 days of surveying.
“This three-day rolling average of telephone polling now includes a sample taken entirely after the final presidential debate last Wednesday,” Zogby notes.
A new Washington Post/ABC News poll suggests that the McCain campaign may be preaching to its own choir, pleasing the already converted but not the independents they need to win Nov. 4.
“Overall, 52 percent of likely voters said they are less confident in McCain’s judgment because of his surprise selection of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin; 38 percent are more confident because of it. That is a stark reversal from the initial, positive public reaction to the pick,” the Post reports.
“Just after the GOP convention, 52 percent of independents, and 64 percent of independent women said the Palin pick made them more confident in how McCain would make presidential decisions - those numbers have now dipped to 39 and 37 percent, respectively.”
Voters who say they may still be persuadable are “among the least apt to see the new GOP focus on 1960s radical William Ayers and the community group ACORN as legitimate campaign issues.”
“Nearly seven in 10 movable voters said Obama’s past relationship with Ayers is not a legitimate issue; likewise, a narrow majority see the Obama campaign’s association with ACORN as not germane,” the poll found.
The party base will no doubt complain that Palin’s numbers have been driven down by a hostile media. On the other hand, the rest of America thinks the party base should open their damn eyes and ears and listen to what that woman actually says.
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Thought for the day
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
We live in a country in which more than 50 percent of Americans are apparently anti-Americans who don’t live in the “real America.”
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Gen. Powell endorses Obama
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Colin Powell, appearing on “Meet the Press” this morning, endorsed Barack Obama as a “transformational figure” more prepared than John McCain to address the issues confronting our country.
“I strongly believe that at this point in America’s history we need a president that will not just continue, even with a new face and with some changes and with some maverick aspects, will not just continue basically the policies that we have been following in recent years,” Powell said.
“I think we need a transformational figure, I think that we need a president who is a generational change, and that’s why I’m supporting Barack Obama. Not out of any lack of respect or admiration for Senator John McCain.”
However, Powell did criticize McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate, noting that Palin would not be prepared to assume the presidency. He also expressed unease with McCain’s response to the economic crisis.
“Almost every day he had a different approach to the problems we were having,” Powell said.
U.S. Rep. Michelle Bachmann, R-Minn., immediately announced plans to investigate former war heros, secretaries of state and chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for possibly anti-American sentiments. (OK, that last part isn’t true. At least it wasn’t true as of 10 a.m. Sunday morning. But I bet if you wait a few hours….)
UPDATE: “John and Dagny’s Love Child” at 10:38 wins the secret contest!! You just knew someone would go there, and J&D was the first! Congratulations!! Because as everyone knows, with Colin Powell it’s ALL about race!
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A clean new ballfield, freshly mowed and lined just for you…
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
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Obama right man for tough times
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The AJC’s endorsement of Barack Obama:
The 44th president of the United States will take office in an uncertain and dangerous time for this country. The challenges we face both overseas and here at home are complex and unfamiliar, and the road ahead is likely to be very different from the road we have traveled to get here.
Leading the country in such a time will require someone of intellect, creativity, honesty and passion for those traits that have made America great. That person is U.S. Sen. Barack Obama.
In the past eight years, the policies and ideologies that have animated the Bush administration have proved disastrous in almost every field of endeavor, from foreign policy to economics to relatively straightforward tasks such as responding to natural disasters. As a consequence, President Bush’s approval rating is as low as or lower than that of any other president in the history of polling.
Naturally, both Obama and his opponent, U.S. Sen. John McCain, have promised to take the country in a new direction. Both are honorable men fully qualified and competent to be president.
McCain, however, faces a hurdle in his claim to be an agent of change because he shares a political party with Bush. To offset that fact, McCain has wisely chosen to campaign on his reputation as a maverick, a reputation that he once fully deserved.
However, in his current role as Republican nominee, McCain has yet to explain how most of his proposed policies and approaches differ from those of the current president. From deregulation of Wall Street and tax cuts that favor the richest 5 percent of Americans to a more aggressive foreign policy, McCain’s approach now reflects the same Republican orthodoxy that has governed this country since 2000. Time and again, he has been offered chances to explain how his philosophy differs from that of the current president, and he has not been able to do so.
And it’s not just a matter of policies. A third term under another Republican president would inevitably be populated by much the same cast of GOP staffers, executives and bureaucrats that has run Washington for so long and with such disastrous results. McCain’s campaign staff illustrates that problem perfectly because it is populated by many of the same people who ran previous Bush campaigns. They are also still trying to run the same basic Republican playbook that the party has used since 1980.
In fact, the competence of McCain’s campaign staff is itself cause to question the candidate’s executive abilities. To some degree, the rigors of creating and running a campaign organization can be a test of the skills needed to create and run an administration. And even many Republicans acknowledge that the McCain campaign has been poorly organized and erratic, lurching from one crisis to another without the sense of a strong hand at the tiller.
Columnist William Kristol, a longtime McCain backer, calls the McCain campaign “close to being out-and-out dysfunctional,” concluding that “its combination of strategic incoherence and operational incompetence has become toxic.”
And of course, the most unfortunate evidence of that “strategic incoherence and operational incompetence” was McCain’s selection of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate, a person utterly unprepared for the high post in question.
The contrast with the campaign run by Barack Obama could not be more stark. More than a year ago, when he was still a long shot without much money, Obama somehow managed to attract a staff talented and disciplined enough to defeat Hillary Clinton and the Clinton machine in the Democratic primaries. It has since gone on to demonstrate a great deal of political discipline, skill and innovation, running a 21st century campaign that appeals to 21st century America.
Different challenges require different strengths. Obama has demonstrated a calm, thoughtful leadership style that fits this time and this challenge well. He has laid out a wiser, more measured approach toward foreign policy that elevates diplomacy and negotiation while reserving the use of force if necessary to protect this country and its allies in a dangerous world. He understands that international respect and admiration can’t be forced at gunpoint.
Economically, Obama is better equipped to deal with a rapidly changing global situation, and his policies focus directly on the problems confronting the American working and middle classes. His tax plan, for example, proposes to cut taxes on 95 percent of American households while raising taxes only on households with an income of more than $250,000. That plan may have to be adjusted in light of a harsh new fiscal reality, but it demonstrates where Obama’s instincts and values lead him.
The same is true of his health-care proposal. It requires a comprehensive approach, including financial assistance to help small businesses buy insurance for their employees. It would also require large employers that do not offer health insurance to help their workers with the cost of buying insurance on their own.
Those are new approaches, crafted by a new generation of leaders drawn to Obama by the chance to write their own chapter in the American story. Their time has come. His time has come. Obama is a leader of rare potential, and that’s precisely what the job of our 44th president demands.
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GOP terrified of American voters
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
John McCain’s statement in the debate that ACORN and the liberals are “on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history … maybe destroying the fabric of democracy” is probably the most overwrought, ridiculous statement by a major-party nominee in living memory.
If you make a charge that serious, you better have something to back it up. McCain has nothing. Nada zero zilch.
There is no evidence of any attempt to rig or steal this election. Just think about the scale of the effort it would take to do what McCain describes.
On a statewide level, you would need an army of thousands of co-conspirators willing and able to vote repeatedly and illegally just to have any hope whatsoever of altering the outcome, and according to the GOP fantasy, those thousands consist of homeless drunks and drug addicts.
Yet out of this alleged conspiracy of thousands in which lowlife drunks and dopers play a large part, the GOP and its allies in the Justice Department and other governnment agencies can’t find a single participant willing to admit to the conspiracy and cough up the truth?
To rational people, that would suggest that no such conspiracy exists. But rationality has nothing to do with it.
There’s something in the psyche of the GOP base that needs to believe they are victims of some ill-defined but clearly treacherous group plotting against them and the country. How else can they explain the fact that they’re losing? It can’t be because they have proved themselves incompetent at governance, or that they have lost touch with the reality of life in 21st century America. There has to be some other reason, and if there isn’t they’ll invent one.
In the 2006 cycle, that need was fulfilled by Moveon. org. The rightwing blogs and punditocracy couldn’t utter a paragraph without weaving Moveon into their narrative somehow. It was never quite clear how Moveon could possibly do all the nefarious things it was alleged to be doing, but that uncertainty made the right-wing fantasy all the more alluring.
This year, Moveon still exists — it’s still doing what it was doing before, yet the group is rarely if even mentioned. That’s because ACORN has now been cast to replace it in the role of designated villain.
On Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously against Ohio Republicans in their effort to try to challenge 200,000 voters. Two hundred thousand!! Republican officials fear the verdict of the American people. They fear the wrath of those Americans drawn into political participation by anger at the direction that the GOP has tried to take their country. And they are trying desperately, frantically, to try to prevent that verdict from being delivered.
Seventeen days to election day.
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Rove’s “math” still looks dire for McCain
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Karl Rove — you remember, the guy who claimed to have “THE math” back in 2006? — has gotten a lot of attention for his piece yesterday in the Wall Street Journal. A lot of people seized upon it as evidence that Obama’s lead may not be quite what it seems.
Said Rove:
“Barack Obama holds a 7.3% lead in the Real Clear Politics average of all polls, but the latest Gallup tracking poll reveals that there are nearly twice as many undecided voters this year than there were in the last presidential election. The Investor’s Business Daily/TIPP poll (which was closest to the mark in predicting the 2004 outcome — 0.4% off the actual result) now says this is a three-point race.”
But Rove’s bottom line was a lot more sobering for the GOP. He lists a string of states that McCain must focus on — Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, Ohio, Missouri, Colorado and Nevada, “If he carries those states, while losing only Iowa and New Mexico from the GOP’s 2004 total, Mr. McCain will carry 274 Electoral College votes and the White House. It’s threading the needle, but it’s come to that,” says Rove.
But if you look, McCain is losing in all of those must-have states, some by just a bit, but Virginia, Florida and Colorado by five points or more. And in his conclusion, Rove acknowledges the dire situation for the McCain campaign.
“Whether it can find the right formula in the next 19 days to dig out is a question. If Mr. McCain succeeds, he will have engineered the most impressive and improbable political comeback since Harry Truman in 1948. But having to reach back more than a half-century for inspiration is not the place campaign managers want to be now.”
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Sarah Palin: When worlds collide
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin plans to appear on Saturday Night Live this weekend, multiple sources told CNN Thursday.”
Well that ought to be a ratings bonanza….
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McCain closes Gallup gap, but debate may halt his momentum
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The latest Gallup polling puts the spread between Obama and McCain at six points, down considerably from the 11-point spread of a few days ago. I’m not at all surprised that the gap has closed, but I suspect that last night’s debate may squelch whatever momentum McCain might have been building.
Against his better political judgment, McCain let the GOP base bully him into attacking on the Ayers stuff, just as he earlier let them bully him into picking Sarah Palin. In both cases, he made the base happy at the expense of the rest of the electorate, and there’s every reason to think he would govern that way if elected. The “maverick” campaign has been anything but.
In the debate, McCain did go out of his way to try to separate himself from George W. Bush, and to some degree he succeeded. But as the debate went on, he reversed any progress he might have made in that direction by reiterating the same basic GOP ideology of the past 30 years. In essence, he argued that government is the problem.
McCain made that point bluntly. But as I mentioned last night, “the truth is that under these circumstances, he will probably lose because conservative principles just aren’t all that attractive to voters at this point in our history. After eight years of Bush, that approach has lost all credibility.”
Joe Klein of Time magazine, among others, makes the same argument:
“But 2008 has proved to be a new and frightening moment for the American electorate, and having the government help in finding, and funding, health care doesn’t sound like such a bad idea anymore. … This is simply not a good year to say, ‘Joe, take care of your health care yourself.’ It seems an impossible year for McCain’s Reagan Republican philosophy.”
The impact of the debate won’t start to be seen in polls until tomorrow’s three-day tracking numbers are released, and its full impact won’t be seen until Sunday. But I suspect we’ll see that gap start to widen again.
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Dems try to hang FairTax around Saxby’s neck
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I was wondering whether this would happen. Now it has. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has weighed into the Chambliss-Martin race with a lot of money and a new attack ad, focusing on Saxby’s support for the FairTax.
Politically, I think it’s a great idea. Chambliss has long allowed himself to be listed as a sponsor of the heroically bad FairTax idea in hopes of keeping the peace with FairTax cult members among Georgia conservatives. But as far as I know, he’s never done a thing to actually try to enact the plan.
But if you take the idea outside the core of FairTax fanatics, I bet it polls terribly. Theoretically, FairTax supporters ought to be thrilled with this, because it gets the idea some badly needed publicity.
But if it ends up contributing to Chambliss’ defeat, that publicity won’t be favorable.
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Libyan parrots leave mark on democracy
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
A flock of trained Libyan parrots came to roost Wednesday night on the campus of Hofstra University, site of the third and final presidential debate.
Libyan parrots, you ask? At a debate? Yup.
The story of the Libyan parrots goes back to ancient times, to a man named Apsethus who wanted to convince the locals that he was a god. So, according to the early Christian writer Hippolytus, the wily and ambitious Apsethus of Libya captured hundreds of wild parrots, caged and fed them and taught them all to repeat the same message: “Apsethus is a god.”
When he released the birds into the wild, the parrots endlessly repeated their newly learned talking point (parrots being very good at staying on message). And for a while, it worked.
Today, modern political lingo gives us other words for those trained Libyan parrots, words such as “surrogate,” “contributor,” “consultant” and on occasion, sadly, “journalist.”
After events such as debates, parrots from both sides gather at the TV cameras and microphones to repeat their message. It doesn’t matter what actually took place; it doesn’t matter how dishonest or nonsensical the message may sound: Their guy still won; their guy ought to be a god, or at very least president. The better parrots even take a peculiar pride in their shamelessness. Going into last night’s debate, for example, this cycle’s reigning king of Libyan parrots has to be former New York Mayor Rudy Guiliani. After the vice presidential debate, he told interviewers that Palin delivered one of the best debate performances he had ever seen.
“Only the liberal media could deny her this victory,” he squawked.
Libyan parrotry is a sad, tragic use of the freedom of speech that so many have fought to preserve, but it has come to epitomize our nation’s political discourse. The parrots you see on TV aren’t there despite their refusal to speak honestly and independently. Too often, that dishonesty and message discipline are job requirements.
In recent weeks, though, the story has taken a bit of a twist. On the Republican side, the official message has become so nonsensical that, to their credit, a growing number of professional parrots have decided they can no longer utter such things as “Sarah Palin is qualified to be vice president” and “John McCain is a steady leader.”
Instead, people such as Kathleen Parker, Christopher Buckley and David Brooks have expressed honest reservations about the GOP ticket and the party’s direction.
“I no longer have any clear idea what, exactly, the modern conservative movement stands for,” conceded Buckley. “Eight years of ‘conservative’ government has brought us a doubled national debt, ruinous expansion of entitlement programs, bridges to nowhere, poster boy Jack Abramoff and an ill-premised, ill-waged war conducted by politicians of breathtaking arrogance.”
For such honesty, Buckley and others are being attacked as traitors. (The same is true of attacks from the left on Joe Lieberman, by the way). But those who make that claim have lost sight of what treason really is.
Stating your honest opinion about what is best for this country is not treason. Those who argue otherwise value loyalty to a political movement above loyalty to country, and that’s just the kind of distorted thinking that got us into this mess.
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The post-debate polling numbers
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Here’s what I could find:
The CBS poll of uncommitted voters gave the nod to Obama. Fifty-three percent thought the Illinois senator won the debate, while 22 percent thought McCain won.
Politico’s poll of undecideds by Georgia-based Insider Advantage had it basically tied, 49 percent for Obama and 46 for McCain. Among independent voters in that poll, McCain won 51-42.
The CNN poll gave it to Obama, 58 percent to 31 percent for McCain.
A polling outfit named mediacurves.com gave it to Obama among independents, 60-30.
And from Fox, via Politico: “On Fox, pollster Frank Luntz asked his group to raise their hands who won, and overwhelmingly, the group gave the victory to Obama. “This is a good night for Barack Obama,” Luntz said.”
Now we’ll see if any of that moves the tracking polls. Nineteen days to election day.
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That debate was really something
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Well, that was fascinating. The most entertaining and informative debate in the series. The American people got a real sense of the differences between these two men. Schieffer did a very good job as moderator.
My own sense is that Obama carried the day, but that’s to be expected. The test of the debate will be how the American people respond to what they heard, because both men laid out their version of our country’s future pretty plainly and succinctly. The question is which version the people of America find more convincing.
The most surreal moment, of course, was the discussion of William Ayres, etc. McCain’s segue from bashing Obama in deeply confrontational and personal terms to his claim that his campaign was focused on the economic plight of the American people — well, that was special.
Now come the Libyan parrots (see tomorrow’s column).
UPDATE, 11 p.m.: After a few minutes to absorb it all, I think McCain’s performance was in a sense both a concession to Obama in this general election yet an honorable rallying of the Republican base to its basic principles. He told the American people that he is willing to win or lose on the basis of conservative principles, even though the truth is that under these circumstances, he will probably lose because conservative principles just aren’t all that attractive to voters at this point in our history. After eight years of Bush, that approach has lost all credibility.
And that’s not McCain’s fault.
UPDATE II: In CBS’ snap poll of 638 undecided voters (how they found that many uncommitted voters I’ll never know)”
“Fifty-three percent … identified Democratic nominee Barack Obama as the winner of tonight’s debate. Twenty-two percent said Republican rival John McCain won. Twenty-five percent saw the debate as a draw.
More uncommitted voters trusted Obama than McCain to make the right decisions about health care. Before the debate, sixty-one percent of uncommitted voters said that they trust Obama on the issue; after, sixty-eight percent said so. Twenty-seven percent trusted McCain to manage health care before the debate; thirty percent said so afterwards.
Sixty-four percent think Obama will raise their taxes, while fifty percent think McCain will. Before the debate, fifty-four percent thought Obama shared their values. That percentage rose to sixty-four percent after the debate. For McCain, fifty-two percent thought he shared their values before the debate, and fifty-five percent thought so afterwards.”
I’ve been leery of those snap polls, but in the previous two presidential and one vice presidential debates, their findings have been validated by later poll work.
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Final debate: On with the show, this is it!
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Well, here we go. In its latest tracking poll, Gallup puts the gap at seven. This will be McCain’s last big shot at changing the dynamics. As they used to sing on the Bugs Bunny cartoons, “on with the show, this is it!”
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Stage set for final debate
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The Dow Jones average fell more than 700 points today, the second largest fall in market history. (The largest fall came just two weeks ago.) Roughly 90 percent of Americans now believe our country is headed in the wrong direction. Tonight, the two men vying for the right to lead us out of this mess meet for their final debate.
And what’s the biggest question? Whether they will talk about some aging radical from the ’60s.
Discuss. We’ll put a fresh thread up just before the debate commences.
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Mahoney may not seek reelection
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“Embattled Democratic Rep. Tim Mahoney may not seek reelection in Florida next month after ABC News broke a story earlier this week that the congressman had paid a former aide to keep quiet about their alleged affair, according to a Democratic leadership aide with ties to his campaign.”
If so, good. What a creep.
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Early voters strong for Obama, and possible good news for Jim Martin
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
According to a new poll by Survey USA, McCain leads Obama here in Georgia by eight points, 51-43. But the poll also breaks down the margin among those who have voted early, and those results echo the anecdotal evidence about a strong Obama tilt at early-voting sites.
According to the poll, 18 percent of Georgians have already voted, and Obama leads among those voters by 52-46 percent. In what may be good news for Jim Martin — who is down by three points overall in the poll — a similar pattern holds in the Senate race.
The internals also suggest that fears of a conservative backlash against Saxby Chambliss may be real. McCain — not a favorite of Georgia conservatives — gets 82 percent of the vote from self-described conservatives while Chambliss gets only 71 percent. Libertarian Allen Buckley draws off six percent on his own.
In other states, the tilt toward Obama by early voters is even more dramatic. Obama is up four in Ohio among those who haven’t voted yet, according to Survey USA, but up 18 among those who have voted already. In North Carolina, McCain is up five among those who haven’t voted yet, but Obama is up 34 percent among early voters.
For Obama, those early votes are money in the bank (a phrase admittedly not quite as reassuring as it used to be.) They also indicate a significant advantage in enthusiasm and operational skill among the Democrats. As Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com points out, this isn’t a typical voting pattern.
“According to a study by Kate Kenski at the University of Arizona, early voters leaned Republican in both 2000 and 2004; with Bush earning 62.2 percent of their votes against Al Gore, and 60.4 percent against John Kerry. In the past, early voters have also tended to be older than the voting population as a whole and more male than the population as a whole, factors which would seem to cut against Obama or most other Democrats.”
Maybe that’s why state Sen. Eric Johnson, a Republican, is now talking about ending or severely curtailing early voting in Georgia, just months after voting in favor of the bill that greatly expanded the practice.
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“W” won’t be “winner” at box office
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I acknowledge that I’m probably not the target audience for “W.” I’ve never liked Oliver Stone movies. I’ve also never been happy with how George W. Bush has done his job as president. So an Oliver Stone movie about George W. Bush?
So while I’m probably not the best person to judge such things, I expect that movie to tank. During the Great Depression, Hollywood made Shirley Temple movies to distract their audiences. They didn’t make movies about Herbert Hoover. I just don’t think people are going to pay money to go see a movie about a guy they can’t stand seeing on their TV screens for free.
But maybe that’s just me….
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How a PSC candidate cheated you of millions
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
One of the more important races on the ballot pits Lauren “Bubba” McDonald against Jim Powell for an open seat on the Georgia Public Service Commission. Voters who cast ballots in that race based on party identification alone may do themselves a great disservice. Here’s why:
Back in 2001, PSC members were trying to set electricity rates charged by Georgia Power. A lot of money was at stake: Georgia Power wanted a $100 million rate increase, while some PSC staff members advocated $400 million in cuts.
At the time, McDonald was PSC chairman. At the last minute, he proposed a surprise 40-page agreement that he supposedly drafted himself and hadn’t shared with anyone, even members of his own staff.
In the interests of fairness, McDonald said, he would adjourn the hearing to give Georgia Power lawyers time to read over his plan. When they returned, they pronounced themselves satisfied with the deal, which the commission quickly approved. It cut Georgia Power rates by only $5 million a year.
Later, McDonald was defeated for re-election in 2002 by Republican upstart Angela Speir. In the six years since then, Speir has been a powerful advocate of reform and ethical behavior on the PSC. Thanks to a little detective work with e-mail and public documents, she also helped expose what had happened in the 2001 rate case.
Remember the deal that McDonald allegedly wrote himself? It had actually been drafted almost word for word by Georgia Power lawyers — the same lawyers later allowed to read the “surprise” document — and e-mailed to McDonald to propose as his own. Not only had McDonald secretly done the utility’s bidding, he created a lie to hide that fact from the Georgia public.
Unfortunately, Speir has decided not to seek re-election. McDonald is trying to regain his seat, and has switched party affiliation to run as a Republican this time. He is also collecting a lot of campaign money from utility lawyers and employees. Speir, a longtime Republican, has endorsed Democrat Jim Powell.
“If you look at Bubba McDonald’s [financial] disclosure, it reads like a Who’s Who list of utility lobbyists and lawyers,” Speir says. “If Georgia consumers want to have a voice that is not beholden to the utilities, then I firmly believe that Jim Powell is the best candidate.”
Powell is experienced and knowledgeable on energy issues, having retired as a U.S. Department of Energy executive. Just as important, he will bring an independent outlook to the commission at a time when the PSC may be asked to approve multibillion-dollar investments by Georgia Power and others for nuclear and coal plants. If Georgia voters want somebody to look out for their wallets and pocketbooks, Powell is the clear choice.
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McCain to Palin: “Stifle yourself!”
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
In an interview with Sarah Palin today, Rush Limbaugh claimed that the mainstream media was trying to shut Palin up because she is too effective in making her case. Palin agreed, saying that “yeah, I guess that message is they do want me to sit down and shut up. But that’s not going to happen. I care too much about this great country.”
No, Gov. Palin, the media don’t want you to shut up. To the contrary, every media outlet in the country is begging you to appear on their show. If you want to go on Meet the Press, Face the Nation, This Week, Late Edition, if you want to hold your first actual press conference, if you want to join the free-for-all tomorrow night spinning the aftermath of the presidential debate, the media would welcome you with open arms.
Speak, Sarah. Speak. If you care so much about this great country, tell the McCain campaign to stop stifling you and speak.
And yet she doesn’t. The “pitbull with lipstick” runs and hides.
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Six years later, it still boggles the mind
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Six years ago, Saxby Chambliss used this ad to directly question the courage of U.S. Sen. Max Cleland, a man who had fought for his country in Vietnam, earning the Silver Star and Bronze Star and losing three limbs in the process.
Chambliss did not serve, claiming a draft exemption during Vietnam because of a trick knee.
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It wasn’t Fannie and Freddie’s fault
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Barry Ritholz, a well-respected Wall Street analyst who warned about a lot of the current crisis and posts at his Big Picture blog, takes on the absurd claim that the Community Reinvestment Act or other government action led to the housing collapse and thus to Wall Street’s collapse. The problem was instead in private industry and its get-rich-quick mentality, he argues.
As Ritholz puts it:
“Understand this simple fact: In an ultra-low rate environment where prices are appreciating rapidly and mortgages are being securitized, ALL THAT MATTERS IS THAT THE BORROWER NOT DEFAULT IN 90 days (or 6 Months). The goal was to make a loan that did not default in that period of time, so it cannot be put back to the originator.
As a mortgage salesman, you only lose your fee if a borrower defaults within 3 or 6 months. What do you do to maximize your returns? The best way to do that — to put people in houses that would not default in 90 days — was the 2/28 ARM mortgages. Cheap teaser rates for 24 months, then the big reset. By then, it was no longer your problem.
Can you grasp what a monumental change this was? Instead of making sure that borrowers could pay back ALL OF THE 30-YEAR FIXED MORTGAGE, you only had to find people who could afford the teaser rate for a a few months. THIS WAS AN ENORMOUS AND UNPRECEDENTED SHIFT IN LENDING.”
Again, I have yet to see a top financial or housing expert make the claim that the CRA had any major role in this calamity. It is argued by right-wing partisans looking to once again make poor people their scapegoat, but I haven’t seen anybody with any real expertise or credibility in the field make that claim.
But the good news is, so far the market is holding its gains from yesterday.
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GOP draws line at holding 40 in Senate
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
National trends are so bad in the presidential and congressional races that the Republican National Committee is trying to decide on a firewall to protect its last source of political power in Washington, the 40 votes they would need in the Senate to filibuster legislation.
As Jonathan Martin of Politico writes:
“The Republican National Committee, growing nervous over the prospect of Democrats’ winning a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, is considering tapping into a $5 million line of credit this week to aid an increasing number of vulnerable incumbents, top Republicans say….”
But that the party would use new money to block a Democratic triumph in the Senate rather than boost the odds of its presidential nominee speaks volumes about what many Republicans think is still salvageable. And some in the GOP, especially those working on House and Senate races in which their candidates’ poll numbers swoon during the financial crisis, are increasingly agitated about money being spent on what all observers, including McCain, acknowledge is an uphill fight on top of the ticket.
“They should pull the money from ÂMcCain like [former RNC Chairman] Haley Barbour did in ’96, when Dole slid away, and funnel it to save some Senate and House seats as best they can,” said one longtime GOP strategist who is working on congressional races.
“There are seven or eight [seats in danger],” a top Republican said of the upper chamber. “What’s it going to be a week from now?” Party officials see GOP Senate seats at risk in North Carolina, Kentucky, New Hampshire, Colorado, Minnesota, Mississippi, Alaska, Oregon and Georgia.
The inclusion of Georgia on that list would have been stunning until a couple of weeks ago. But a series of polls have now put Jim Martin close or within the margin of error to Saxby Chambliss, and with black turnout already high in the race, it is now considered a tossup state by Pollster.com and other sites. Pollster’s aggregate of polls in the race gives Chambliss a narrow 1.4 point lead and well below 50 percent. Typically, late deciders in a race break away from the incumbent.
In an election night that promises surprises, this one would be one of the biggest.
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Dow booms, at least for today
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I’ve had CNBC on mute all day long, and I didn’t have to check the ticker to see how the market was doing. Those folks were actually smiling!
I hadn’t seen smiles on CNBC since Hector was a pup, as my Dad would say. Dow closes up more than 930 points!! Now the test will be to see how much of that gain we keep tomorrow.
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‘Senate and House Republicans are going to get crushed’
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Erick Erickson of Macon is editor of redstate.com, which calls itself “the most widely read right of center blog on Capitol Hill and … the most cited right of center blog in the media.”
So I guess I’ll cite it too. Here’s the opening to an Erickson post today:
“With only a few weeks left until election day, let’s be blunt: McCain-Palin ‘08 does not seem to be making headway against the polling. McCain has one more debate in which he could, and we should hope that he does.
At the same time, the Senate and House Republicans are going to get crushed. They just are. You can say the polls are biased. You can say the polls are rigged. But do so at your peril. Ignore the numbers and look at the trends.”
Erickson goes on to ask readers for donations to GOP candidates to help them survive what’s coming. But he’s at least candid about the situation.
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Obama’s Gallup lead back to double digits
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Gallup has released its latest tracking numbers — Obama’s lead is back up to 10 points, up three from yesterday. It’s the tenth consecutive day in which Obama has polled at 50 percent or better. Over that same time frame, McCain has never done better than 43 percent.
And correct me if I’m wrong — some of you will no doubt try to correct me even if I’m right — it seems to me that I saw an awful lot of Obama ads over the weekend, and few if any McCain ads. Anybody else see the same thing?
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Why Ayers, Wright, etc., just won’t work….
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
From the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll:
“Registered voters by a 24-point margin, 59-35 percent, now say McCain is more focused on attacking his opponent rather than addressing the issues. That’s grown from a roughly even 48-45 percent split on this question in late August.
There’s far less criticism of the tone of Obama’s campaign: Registered voters by 68-26 percent say he’s mainly addressing the issues, not attacking his opponent, a slightly more positive rating than in August.
The deciding factor, as ever in presidential politics, is independents. They see McCain as mainly attacking his opponent, by 61-33 percent, but Obama as mainly addressing the issues, by 68 -26 percent.”
The diehards on the right will dismiss such findings as more liberal media disinformation. But you can tell by its actions that the McCain camp’s internal polling is telling it the same thing. Attacking Obama is worse than useless — it ends up hurting McCain. But they don’t seem to have a more viable option.
Even the ever-smarmy Bill Kristol — days after insisting that McCain had to go negative — is now preaching a turn to sunny positivism. In his NY Times column, he advises McCain to “do town halls, do the Sunday TV shows, do talk radio — and invite Obama and Biden to join them in some of these venues, on the ground that more joint appearances might restore civility and substance to the contest.”
Kristol goes on:
“The bad news, of course, is that right now Obama’s approval/disapproval rating is better than McCain’s. Indeed, Obama’s is a bit higher than it was a month ago. That suggests the failure of the McCain campaign’s attacks on Obama.
So drop them.”
Of course, that advice comes shortly after Kristol drops this little neutron bomb:
“(McCain’s) campaign is totally overmatched by Obama’s. The Obama team is well organized, flush with resources, and the candidate and the campaign are in sync. The McCain campaign, once merely problematic, is now close to being out-and-out dysfunctional. Its combination of strategic incoherence and operational incompetence has become toxic. If the race continues over the next three weeks to be a conventional one, McCain is doomed.”
And speaking NY Times columnists, congratulations to Paul Krugman, winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize for economics. Not too shabby, Mr. Krugman, not too shabby….
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Seasons change, and so do other things
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
It’s been a weird fall by almost any measure, with the economy in a historic plummet and a wild and woolly presidential race dominating the news.
But I confess that in some ways, the drama on Wall Street and the campaign trail have been welcome diversions from a strange, disorienting silence back on the home front.
Our two downstairs bedrooms are empty now, their occupants both gone off to college for the first time. The doors are always shut when you walk past them now, a symbolic reminder of the emptiness inside.
Even the dogs are a little off their feed, having lost their favorite playmates. The downstairs bathroom, once cluttered with makeup and curling irons and other girlish accoutrements, now stays bizarrely pristine day after day, like some roped-off exhibit in a museum.
The bedrooms have become museums as well. Last weekend, when I ventured inside to close off the heating vents, I took a moment or two to look around. It was odd —- spaces that were recently brimming with life had become little collections of history and moments frozen in time.
On the walls were movie posters from a decade ago, starring the adolescent crush of that era. Josh Hartnett, anybody? On the desk and bureaus were pictures of their friends, and of our family when they and we were younger.
It was all familiar yet somehow artificial, like those recreations of the Oval Office that you find at presidential libraries. I didn’t want to touch anything, didn’t want to disturb it from its proper place. I just closed the door.
Another thing you discover: Phone calls and e-mails and Facebook messages are poor substitutes for a hug or a smile.
But things change, right? Life cycles through, and sometimes it’s change you want; sometimes it’s not. You deal with it either way, and try to do so gracefully. And change that you once thought would come gradually can instead hit you all at once, making the world and your role in it seem suddenly diminished.
For more than 20 years, for example, you think of yourself as a parent first and foremost, never letting that responsibility out of your head. And then suddenly, that daily responsibility is lifted. You’re now a bench player, to be called upon as needed. Your role has changed.
King Solomon, as the story goes, once asked his wisest adviser for a magic ring, a ring that could sadden him whenever he was happy and cheer him whenever he was sad.
Much to Solomon’s surprise, the adviser later produced just such a ring, engraved with four words:
“This too shall pass.”
Solomon, being a wise man himself, recognized that the sentence applied even to the king.
So things change; roles change. Bottom rail on top now, as the saying goes, and a little while later the roles will be reversed yet again.
By tradition, Solomon also authored the Bible’s Book of Ecclesiastes. Most of us are probably familiar with its most famous passage, even if we don’t recall its source:
“To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven,” it says in part.
“A time to kill, and a time to heal… A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.”
As a nation, we are engaged for the moment in what amounts to “a time to hate, a time of war,” at least in political terms. But this too shall pass, to be followed in the nature of things by what we hope will be a season of healing and relative peace.
It’s important to remember that. Should we get too heedless in our anger or arrogance over the next few weeks, should fear of loss or change drive us too far, we may find ourselves inflicting wounds and divisions that are too deep to heal easily.
Yes, change and loss are hard. But I can tell you they are easier to accept than we sometimes think.
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Is Palin already eyeing 2012?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The post-election narrative begins to take shape early…. from the Times of London:
With his electoral prospects fading by the day, Senator John McCain has fallen out with his vice-presidential running mate about the direction of his White House campaign.
McCain has become alarmed about the fury unleashed by Sarah Palin, the moose-hunting “pitbull in lipstick”, against Senator Barack Obama. Cries of “terrorist” and “kill him” have accompanied the tirades by the governor of Alaska against the Democratic nominee at Republican rallies….
Palin, 44, has led the character attacks on Obama in the belief that McCain may be throwing away the election and her chance of becoming vice-president. Her supporters think that if the Republican ticket loses on November 4, she should run for president in 2012.
A leading Republican consultant said: “A lot of conservatives are grumbling about what a poor job McCain is doing. They are rolling their eyes and saying, ‘Yes, a miracle could happen, but at this rate it is all over’.
“Sarah Palin is no fool. She sees the same thing and wants to salvage what she can. She is positioning herself for the future. Her best days could be in front of her. She wants to look as though she was the fighter, the person with the spunk who was out there taking it to the Democrats.”
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McCain backers raise spectre of total Democratic control
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
From Jonathan Martin at Politico:
“Implying that the GOP won’t win back either the House or Senate, two McCain backers this morning sounded out a new talking point by raising the specter of Democrats in control of both the Congress and White House.
Rick Davis, McCain’s campaign manager, posed it as a question.
“Do we really believe that the American public is going to feel safe by having both the head of the Congress and the head of the White House from the same party that has had so many challenges with the way they’ve run Washington over the last couple of years?” Davis asked in an appearance opposite Obama adviser David Axelrod in an appearance on “Fox News Sunday.”
In the show’s next segment, Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, a frequent McCain surrogate and vice presidential runner-up, fleshed out the argument.
“I don’t think the country is going to like the Democratic Party running the table on taxes, on education, on health care and have kind of the liberal, unchecked, imbalanced approach to all of those issues,” Pawlenty said. “It’s going to be bad for the country. I think having John McCain as president to balance that out and be able to work across the aisle as he has throughout his career to get things done would be a good compromise, a good balance.”
I think balance can be a powerful argument for downticket Republicans, but it works against McCain. Most people will vote for their first choice as president, and if they’re concerned about balance they may then switch parties in voting for Congress. But it doesn’t work the other way around. Balance concerns won’t make them change their vote for president.
Oh, and the Gallup margin is now seven, down four its peak a few days ago….
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Amuse each other … (and that’s amuse with an ‘m’, not abuse with a ‘b’, although I know with some of you there’s no real difference…)
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
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Update on polls, blame for the subprime collapse
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Gallup’s latest three-day tracking results put Obama’s lead at nine, down two from its high of 11 a few days ago but still significant.
And McClatchy’s Washington bureau dispels the notion that the Community Reinvestment Act had any major role whatsoever in the subprime crisis. Its key findings:
“Subprime lending offered high-cost loans to the weakest borrowers during the housing boom that lasted from 2001 to 2007. Subprime lending was at its height from 2004 to 2006.
Federal Reserve Board data show that:
_ More than 84 percent of the subprime mortgages in 2006 were issued by private lending institutions.
_ Private firms made nearly 83 percent of the subprime loans to low- and moderate-income borrowers that year.
_ Only one of the top 25 subprime lenders in 2006 was directly subject to the housing law that’s being lambasted by conservative critics.
The “turmoil in financial markets clearly was triggered by a dramatic weakening of underwriting standards for U.S. subprime mortgages, beginning in late 2004 and extending into 2007,” the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets reported Friday.
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The horror that lies within
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
It’s sitting there, on the kitchen counter. And it won’t go away.
I see it out of the corner of my eye every time I walk past, but I pretend I don’t. I pretend it’s not there.
But it is. And it’s waiting for me.
Just waiting…
Maybe today? Maybe today I’ll rip open the envelope and take a look at what has happened to my 401-K?
Nah. Not today. It’s Saturday. The market can’t go down on a Saturday.
Can it?
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Palin abused her power, inquiry concludes
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The investigation of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s behavior in attempting to force the firing of her former brother in law as a state trooper has been released to the public:
“Finding Number One
For the reasons explained in section IV of this report, I find that Governor Sarah Palin abused her power by violating Alaska Statute 39.52.110(a) of the Alaska Executive Branch Ethics Act….
Finding Number Two
I find that, although Walt Monegan’s refusal to fire Trooper Michael Wooten was not the sole reason he was fired by Governor Sarah Palin, it was likely a contributing factor to his termination as Commissioner of Public Safety. In spite of that, Governor Palin’s firing of Commissioner Monegan was a proper and lawful exercise of her constitutional and statutory authority….
Finding Number Four
The Attorney General’s office has failed to substantially comply with my August 6, 2008 written request to Governor Sarah Palin for information about the case in the form of emails….”
“….I conclude that such claims of fear (of Trooper Wooten) were not bona fide and were offered to provide cover for the Palins’ real motivation: to get Trooper Wooten fired for personal family related reasons.”
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A touching column by the NYT’s David Brooks…
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
… in which a saddened Mr. Brooks slowly comes to the realization that the party he has long favored actually kind of hates his guts.
As he puts it a bit more mildly in his final paragraph:
“And so, politically, the GOP is squeezed at both ends. The party is losing the working class by sins of omission — because it has not developed policies to address economic anxiety. It has lost the educated class by sins of commission — by telling members of that class to go away.”
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Obama up in West By God Virginia?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
My father was born and raised in West Virginia, and since I grew up as a military brat always moving from place to place, West Virginia was a kind of home place for us, the closest thing we had to roots.
It’s a conservative place. My grandmother, for example, at first didn’t much cotton to the girl my dad brought home because my mom was raised Catholic. And I won’t even get into my relatives and the race thing.
The state is also strongly pro-military, because for a long time, West Virginia kids had two career paths: the coal mines or the service. It’s still that way to an extent.
All of which is to say that the latest ARG poll out of West Virginia is astonishing. They put Obama up eight in West Virginia, after having him down by four less than a month ago.
If that’s true, it may be getting time to call in the dogs and put out the fire, as folks would say.
UPDATE: For the record, the latest Gallup tracking number puts the spread at 10, down one from the last couple of days. Gallup has also posted its post-debate polling, reporting that 56 percent of those who watched say Obama won, while 23 percent gave the nod to McCain, which confirms the results of earlier snap polls. The venerable polling company says the margin is “one of the more decisive Gallup has measured” in presidential debates.
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Palin’s Troopergate scandal was fabricated by Bill Ayers — really, read it here first!
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The Palin Troopergate report will be made public later today, once the folks in Alaska wake up.
And no, that’s not a political comment, although I guess it could be.
Now, I know how our conservative friends will respond to that news: “Oh yeah, why don’t you tell the truth about Bill Ayers? How come the mainstream media never write the truth about that, huh!”
Indeed, the right-wing blogs and email networks are all abuzz this morning with the latest theory on that front, the claim that Ayers and Obama are so close that Ayers, not Obama, actually wrote the senator’s best-selling memoir “Dreams From My Father.”
The claim originates here, and it’s based in large part on the notion that the book is too well-written for someone of Obama’s obviously limited talent and intellect:
“The public is asked to believe Obama wrote “Dreams From My Father” on his own, almost as though he were some sort of literary idiot savant. I do not buy this canard for a minute, not at all. Writing is as much a craft as, say, golf. To put this in perspective, imagine if a friend played a few rounds in the high 90s and then a few years later, without further practice, made the PGA Tour. It doesn’t happen.”
Of course, we in the MSM have known this all along. The fact that Ayers wrote Obama’s autobiography and has masterminded his career was on the top-secret list of things we are never allowed to talk about. I have that list right here, printed on special Dharma Initiative stationary.
However, since the truth is now out and the reporting ban has been breached, I might as well tell you about some other things on the list. If I get fired for this, so be it. Maybe Fox will take me in.
Are you ready? Here goes:
1.) Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone. The mysterious Man with the Umbrella was actually William Ayers. And if you look closely in the Zapruder film, you can see a two-year-old black child holding what the FBI has long dismissed as a toy gun. Don’t believe it. That second shot had to come from somewhere — those evil madrassas teach kids to shoot before they’re even potty trained.
If you want more proof, remember who “covered” the JFK assassination for CBS, who just “by coincidence” happened to be nearby when it happened? That’s right — Dan Rather. Need I say more?
2.) You think it’s an accident that the TelePrompter had already been in use for more than 50 years when Barack Obama came along? As his dismal performance in the debates has proved, Obama could never have gotten this far without it. Knowing that, Bill Ayers invented the device back in the ’50s just to throw off suspicion.
How could that be true, since Ayers was himself a child back then? Two words: Time machine.
3.) You know who was responsible for those butterfly ballots down in Florida that got George Bush elected president? Yup. Bill Ayers again. It was all part of the master plan: To elect Obama, they first had to put somebody in as president who would run the country into the ground and thoroughly discredit modern conservatism.
You don’t think this all happened by accident, do you?
There’s more, but I fear I’ve revealed too much already. Those of you who care for the truth should do an immediate screengrab on this post, because it won’t stay long once Ayers gets wind of it.
And if you never hear from me again, you’ll know why.
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Obama swinging for the fences?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
This is fascinating — from the Live Feed (since confirmed by CBS):
Barack Obama has purchased a half-hour of airtime on CBS, sources confirm.
“The Obama campaign will air a half-hour primetime special on Wednesday, Oct. 29, at 8 p.m.
Sources say the Obama camp is also in talks with NBC and Fox. NBC is said to be very near a deal. With Fox, the matter is likely to remain uncertain as the time period could conflict with Game 6 of the World Series.
In the past 12 years, much of the billions of dollars in political advertising spent has gone to local TV stations in battleground states. While some money has gone to national cable channels, the thinking has always been that it would be more prudent to target battleground states’ voters instead of addressing the entire nation, including states that reliably vote for one party or another.”
I’m not sure how to interpret that move — campaign media buys are a mysterious art. However, it brings to mind two thoughts:
One, the Obama campaign has an awful lot of money.
And two, going national instead of concentrating on battleground states smacks of someone going for the Big Win and trying to create very large coattails. If so, it’s an act of confidence, some would say overconfidence.
I don’t know. Polls are still holding — Gallup had it at 11 points today, same as yesterday. I keep expecting that to tighten, but who knows?
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Another terrible, horrible, no good very bad day
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The Dow fell more than 650 points today. It is now down below 8600.
And the McCain camp wants to talk about William Ayers.
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Slouching toward Bethlehem
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
According to the Washington Post’s Dana Milbanks, a minister at a McCain rally in Bethlehem, Pa. offered this opening prayer:
“O God, we are in a battle that is raging for the soul of this nation. You, O God, have raised up Senator John McCain and Governor Sarah Palin for such a time as this … Help them, O God, to strengthen our economy, to keep our taxes and spending low … and grant them the privilege of being elected the next president and vice president.”
That’s a far cry from the wisdom of a previous Republican leader, Abraham Lincoln, who was perhaps the greatest American of us all. In his humility, Lincoln said he would not presume to know which side God had taken.
“My concern is not whether God is on our side,” he said. “My greatest concern is to be on God’s side, for God is always right.”
We should all strive to be on the side of right, “as God gives us to see the right,” as Lincoln put it. But claiming God has raised up one side in a political race implies the opposite about the other side.
And claiming He cares about lower taxes? Well…
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Tribal politics, distilled to its essence
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
In the column/blog post below, I wrote about the GOP’s reliance on “tribal politics,” the notion that the party rallies its faithful by pointing out that “they” aren’t like “us.”
This morning I came across the perfect distillation of that approach. It’s a column by Quin Hillyer of the American Spectator, who I cited a few days ago for being honest about Sarah Palin’s inadequacy as a candidate for high office. In the piece, Hillyer lays out his prescription for saving the McCain candidacy:
“Without putting it as bluntly as this sentence does, McCain’s campaign must pound home the message, in a coherent way, that Obama is not ‘one of us’ — meaning that he is estranged from, not part of, middle America. And the way to make that message relevant is to say that when times are tough it is not any one economic theory that will get Americans through the crisis, but rather that it is our American-ness, our exceptionalism, our national character that guarantees that we shall overcome.”
Hillyer then goes on to cite alleged examples of Obama’s “otherness”, concluding that “every one of these issues is an indicator of culture. Every one of them is an indicator that Obama himself can’t possibly empathize with most of us as we struggle with an economic crisis, because he not only misunderstands how we feel and how we see the world but also has contempt for our very point of view.”
Tribal politics: The last refuge of the intellectually bankrupt.
And then there’s this:
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Why the GOP stands at the abyss
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The Republican Party has held the White House for the last eight years, the House for 12 of the last 14 years and the Senate for most of that time as well. But if trends continue as they have, that run is about to come to an end.
With less than four weeks to Election Day, polls today suggest that Democrat Barack Obama will sit in the White House come January, enjoying enhanced majorities in both the House and Senate. And if that’s how things play out, John McCain is doomed to be cast as the scapegoat by his fellow Republicans, in part because they never really liked him much in the first place.
Sarah Palin, by contrast, will reign as the party’s crown princess.
You can already see the mythology beginning to take shape. Palin is being positioned by conservative media outlets as the stalwart defender of the faith, the true believer who is fighting the infidel with all her power but lacks a committed partner in McCain.
Palin’s the one making the arguments that conservatives most want to hear, such as accusing Obama of “palling around with terrorists.” When the McCain campaign decided to pull out of Michigan, it was Palin who repeatedly and publicly disagreed, insisting that the cause was not yet lost and that she could turn things around.
Palin’s star will shine even brighter in defeat than in victory, and that would not bode well for her party.
The GOP’s political problems have many causes, but distilled to its essence, it can be stated in one sentence: The Republican Party hasn’t taken seriously the responsibilities of governing.
In fact, if the Republicans could govern as expertly and as diligently as they campaign — if they simply cared as much about governing as campaigning — the country might today be reaping the benefits of great prosperity and global respect, and the Democrats would have gone the way of the Whigs.
But look around: That’s not exactly how things are.
The foundations of Republican success on the campaign trail have been appeals to tribal politics — “they” aren’t like “us” — and the easy answers of ideology. But once in power, tribal politics, fixed ideology and a disdain for the hard work of governance have proved disastrous.
Unfortunately, Palin epitomizes that mindset. Tribal politics, easy ideology and disdain for governance define her as a candidate.
In the wake of Tuesday’s debate, Joe Biden was making the rounds of the morning talk shows, chatting up his candidate’s performance, while Sarah Palin was nowhere to be found. Why? Because she is an icon incapable of conversing as an intelligent adult on the issues of the day. Yet the Republican base loves her anyway, as a symbol.
In response to such criticism, Palin’s defenders point out that Barack Obama is also short on experience. It’s a legitimate point —- it is certainly fair to question whether Obama has the experience to do well as president of the United States.
However, there is no question whatsoever that Obama has studied the issues and knows them backward and forward. He takes the job seriously. You may disagree with the conclusions he has reached, but as the campaign has demonstrated, he knows the issues and has thought them through.
Palin can’t even make a good pretense of that.
This country needs a more effective Republican Party. The Democrats need a more effective Republican Party to protect them from their own excesses. But to become effective again, the Republicans have to change, and they show no sign of doing so. Quite the contrary.
If the GOP loses seats in the House and Senate, those losses are likely to come in more moderate districts, distilling the GOP caucus even closer to its ultraconservative base. If McCain loses, conservatives will explain his loss by the fact that he tried to repudiate rather than celebrate party ideology.
And if Republicans designate Sarah Palin as the face of the party’s future, as they seem eager to do, they will confirm the belief that they just aren’t serious enough to trust with power.
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Is McCain running a racist campaign?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I think there’s some truth to this piece from Politico:
“John McCain is damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t. He could never mention Jeremiah Wright and ensure his campaign aides don’t either, and he’d still be accused of running a racist campaign.
Have his tactics against Obama in recent days gotten more personal and hard-edged? Yes. Are his top surrogates, including his running mate, suggesting that the Democrat is a terrorist sympathizer who is not a patriot? Yes.
But is McCain doing anything overtly racist? No.”
I don’t think it’s overtly OR covertly racist. It’s stupid, but not racist.
I also thought that the AP reporter was way off base in his analysis a couple of days ago claiming that Sarah Palin’s attacks “carried a racially tinged subtext that John McCain himself may come to regret.”
Douglas K. Daniel went on to write:
“Palin’s words avoid repulsing voters with overt racism. But is there another subtext for creating the false image of a black presidential nominee ‘palling around’ with terrorists while assuring a predominantly white audience that he doesn’t see their America?
In a post-Sept. 11 America, terrorists are envisioned as dark-skinned radical Muslims, not the homegrown anarchists of Ayers’ day 40 years ago. With Obama a relative unknown when he began his campaign, the Internet hummed with false e-mails about ties to radical Islam of a foreign-born candidate.
Whether intended or not by the McCain campaign, portraying Obama as “not like us” is another potential appeal to racism. It suggests that the Hawaiian-born Christian is, at heart, un-American.”
Republicans have been calling Democrats unAmerican for a long long time. And most of those Democrats have been white. Daniel doesn’t come close to justifying his incendiary opening thesis.
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Gallup tracking poll puts gap at 11?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Something serious is going on out there. If numbers like that hold, a lot of down-ticket Republicans are going to be washed away in the tsunami.
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Allow me a non-political vent
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Last night I dumped the new bag of dry dog food into our plastic storage bin, just as I’ve done countless times before. Every other time, the bag has filled the bin to overflowing.
This time, it came a few inches short. I’d been ripped off again.
I hate these companies who pump up their bottom line by cheating their customers. The eight-oz yogurt that suddenly becomes six ounces. The 16-oz can that quietly becomes 14.5 oz. A half-gallon of ice cream that isn’t actually a half-gallon.
And the large bag of dog food that isn’t so large anymore.
The market is supposed to penalize such behavior, but I don’t think it works well in that regard. Nonetheless, I’d like to offer congratulations and encouragement to Blue Bell ice cream for its TV ad campaign pointing out that a half gallon of Blue Bell is actually a full half-gallon.
It’s good ice cream too. Go buy some. Fight the power.
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Debate polls say Obama, but as Kenny Rogers reminds us, “There’ll be time enough for countin’ when the dealin’s done”
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
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According to CNN’s poll, 54 percent of those watching thought Barack Obama won, while 30 percent gave the nod to John McCain.
A CBS poll produced similar results — 40 percent saying Obama won, 26 percent saying McCain won.
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Nashville townhall, the aftermath
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Can they both lose a debate?
It was a pretty flat performance by both, but the format that supposedly favored McCain didn’t do him any favors here. For the first time, I thought his age showed. He didn’t show the flashes of vigor and energy that you’ve seen from him in previous townhalls. He didn’t seem to enjoy himself.
Overall, the discussion didn’t change a thing, and that’s a lost opportunity for McCain, who doesn’t have that many opportunities left to turn this around. I’m sure the TV audience numbers dropped significantly as time went on.
So this time, advantage Obama.
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Nashville townhall, McCain vs. Obama
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
It’s not the bottom of the ninth for McCain, but it’s late enough that the closer is in the bullpen warming up. He needs to score a few runs.
I’ll pop in at the end with a wrapup, but won’t be doing a blow by blow this time. Feelin’ a mite peaked.
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Polls turn up the heat on explosive McCain
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The latest Gallup tracking poll puts Obama up nine points. The electoral college maps are looking ever grimmer for McCain — with 270 the magic number, Pollster.com has Obama at 320; Politico.com puts Obama at 364, which is landslide territory.
McCain is down in Virginia, North Carolina, Florida…. states he cannot afford to lose. Even Georgia is now listed as leaning red instead of solid red. There’s still almost four weeks to election day, and things could change, but for McCain they HAVE to change and change a lot.
That sets the stage for tonight’s townhall debate, the forum in which McCain is most comfortable. As others have noted, it’s not a format that rewards confrontation, but McCain doesn’t seem in the mood to keep it friendly.
Any predictions? We’ll put a fresh debate thread up tonight, but for now, have it at.
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The “half of Americans pay no income tax” fraud
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
One of the right-wing’s favorite talking points is the claim that 50 percent of American households don’t pay income taxes. From that claim flow a couple of other points: First, it’s impossible to “cut” taxes for those households because they don’t pay any tax in the first place; second, those households are somehow less deserving of respect or even a voice in politics because they aren’t paying their own way.
That claim is bogus both in its details and its general charge.
The actual figure of “taxable units” who don’t pay the standard income tax — a taxable unit being a couple filing jointly or a person filing — is somewhere around 38 percent. Even that number is grossly exaggerated, because it excludes what people pay through the payroll tax.
That tax, in total, amounts to 15.3 percent of earned income up to a gross income ceiling that this year is $102,000. Above the ceiling amount, a taxpayer pays only 2.9 percent. (Employers technically contribute half the 15.3 percent, but economists classify the entire amount as a tax burden on the worker because it is a tax on their labor. If you’re self-employed, you have to pay that entire 15.3 percent yourself.)
Because of that income ceiling, high-income workers end up paying the tax only on a relatively small part of their income, while poor and many middle-income households pay it on everything they earn, so the payroll tax is to some degree a surtax on the poor and middle-class worker.
How much does the payroll tax amount to? Well, last year the standard income tax brought in $1.17 trillion, while the payroll tax brought in $873.4 billion.
Technically, payroll tax receipts are supposed to be reserved for paying for Social Security and Medicare, which is what allows some people to claim it is not an income tax. However, in practice that distinction was abandoned long ago. For decades now, the payroll tax has been bringing in a lot more revenue than needed for Social Security, and the excess has been siphoned off for general fund use like any other government money.
Last year alone, $190 billion in payroll tax receipts was diverted to general fund use, paying for everything from Iraq to the salaries of park rangers.
As of 2007, a total of $2.25 trillion of payroll tax money paid into the Social Security and Medicare trust funds had been diverted to general fund use and replaced with government IOUs. In effect, the trust funds are an illusion. Payroll taxes and income taxes go into the same pool of money and are withdrawn from that same pool of money to fund government.
And for that reason, the claim that 50 percent, or even 38 percent, of Americans pay no income tax is flat out wrong.
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U.S. grip on Afghanistan slipping
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Obscured by the presidential elections and the drama on Wall Street, our grip on Afghanistan seems to be slipping.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai has publicly invited Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader, ally of Osama bin Laden and one of the top people on the U.S. most-wanted list, to return to Afghanistan under Karzai’s protection to run for president. Secret peace talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government were reportedly held in Saudi Arabia last week.
Our top NATO allies are making it clear that their patience is running out. Brigadier General Mark Carleton-Smith, Britain’s top general in Afghanistan, told the Sunday Times of London that the war against the Taliban cannot be won.
“We’re not going to win this war. It’s about reducing it to a manageable level of insurgency that’s not a strategic threat and can be managed by the Afghan army,” the British commander said.
That echoes a leaked assessment by Britain’s ambassador to Afghanistan that the present NATO policy is “doomed to fail.” And last week Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper warned that NATO could not stay in Afghanistan forever.
“One of the things I disagree with some other Western leaders is that our [NATO] plan can be somehow to stay in Afghanistan militarily indefinitely,” Harper said.
American officials don’t seem much more optimistic. There is widespread recognition that the current Afghan government has lost legitimacy in the eyes of its people, a serious if not fatal problem that is impossible for Americans to fix. And Gen. David McKiernan, the commander of NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan, says he needs another 10,000 troops in addition to a combat brigade scheduled to arrive in-country in January. With the administration committed to keeping a high troop total in Iraq, he’s not likely to get them anytime soon.
Without them, McKiernan says, security conditions in the south and east of Afghanistan continue to deteriorate.
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Chambliss on the endangered list
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
This analysis of the Chambliss-Martin Senate race is plausible to me. It consists of a series of “ifs” regarding voter turnout, which is always dangerous, but each “if” does seem reasonable.
Bottom line: He thinks it’s become a toss-up race, a conclusion supported by three consecutive polls showing the race within the margin of error. It’s also consistent with Democratic surges in places such as North Carolina and Virginia.
A lot depends on whether such surges are temporary or will last into November. Every day for the past two weeks, I’ve thought that this must be Obama’s peak in the polls, and instead every day his numbers get better.
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Wall Street excess: Symptom or cause?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I’ve usually thought of excessive corporate compensation as merely a symptom of larger problems in the corporate world. Among other things, it revealed a lack of proportion, an arrogance and an irresponsibility toward the shareholder, who is the supposed owner of the company. But the compensation numbers, while large in terms of pay, weren’t so large as to do serious damage to the company.
However, in hearings today before the House Oversight and Reform Committee, you heard a case that at Lehman Brothers, executive compensation may have been more than a mere symptom of excess; it may have contributed to the firm’s demise.
According to the New York Times coverage:
“Even as the investment bank Lehman Brothers pleaded for a federal bailout to save it from bankruptcy protection, it approved millions of dollars in bonuses for departing executives, a congressional committee was told Monday….
“One Lehman document among thousands reviewed by the House committee showed that four days before the bank filed for bankruptcy protection, Lehman’s compensation committee was asked to grant $20 million in ‘special payments’ for three executives who were leaving.”
That’s the excess-as-symptom argument: Twenty million in bonuses for people leaving the company? The sum was insignificant in terms of the company’s overall financial health, but it illustrates just how free and easy Lehman execs became with other people’s money. The fact that the bonuses were approved even as the company prepared to beg for a federal buyout from taxpayers only makes it more outrageous.
Now here’s the excess-as-cause argument:
“Another document showed that executives were warned in a January 2008 meeting that the company was facing liquidity problems. Yet the firm moved forward with capital outlays, including $5 billion in bonuses, $4 billion in shares (buybacks) and $750,000 in dividend payments between 2007 and the firm’s bankruptcy filing on Sept. 15.”
They knew they had liquidity issues, yet they paid out $5 billion in bonuses and another $4 billion in stock buybacks anyway? The truth is, those huge bonuses had become so engrained in the Wall Street culture that employees felt entitled to them regardless of how the company itself performed.
The Times made another important point when it reported that committee Republicans used the hearing to call for an investigation into Congress’ role in the scandal involving Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
“’The reason we haven’t scheduled hearings on these two institutions, and haven’t requested documents from either, is because their demise isn’t someone else’s fault, it’s ours, and we don’t want to own up to it,’ Rep. Christopher H. Shays, Republican of Connecticut, said.”
Shays is exactly right. There’s a lot of blame to go around in this mess, and nobody, including Congress, should be exempt from exposure. Congress absolutely should hold hearings into the problems at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and if the finger points back at them, so be it. It won’t, but it should.
The Associated Press coverage of the hearing got a little more specific about the discussion of bonuses at Lehman, including the details of a suggestion from inside Lehman that maybe employees should forego the lucrative payouts.
The AP writes:
“That suggestion came from Lehman’s money management subsidiary, Neuberger Berman. (House Committee Chair Henry) Waxman quoted George H. Walker, President Bush’s cousin and a Lehman executive who oversaw some Neuberger Berman employees, as responding with a dismissive tone to the idea of going without bonuses.
‘Sorry team,” he wrote to the executive committee, according to Waxman. ‘I’m not sure what’s in the water at 605 Third Avenue today…. I’m embarrassed and I apologize.’”
You read that right: The idea of foregoing bonuses when the company was in bit of trouble was so clearly foolish and outlandish that it drove an embarrassed Walker to the point of having to apologize.
And you thought they had no shame.
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Thanks, Mr. President, we feel better now (and the Dow closes under 10,000)
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
In San Antonio today, President Bush made a few comments for the press about the ongoing economic crisis, trying to reassure the American people that he was working to solve the problem.
“That’s why people sent me to Washington, D.C.,” he reminded us. “When you see a problem, put a team together and solve it.”
“I’m glad to be back here in Texas,” the president said. “I miss my friends in Texas. I am — you know, people say, are you looking forward to coming home. Yes, I’m looking forward to living here, but in the meantime, it looks like I’m going to have a lot of work to do between today and when the new president takes office.”
That new president will have a lot of work to do as well. The latest polls portray a continuing, even startling, shift toward Obama. Two polls just released give Obama a double-digit lead in Virginia.
Virginia hasn’t gone Democratic since 1964.
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Does the Dow have a bottom?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
DJ Industrials down more than 400 this morning, breaking the 10,000 mark. It’s scary out there, folks.
Just in case you didn’t know that.
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Wall Street crisis will impose new sobriety
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
In the wake of the attacks of September 11, you heard a lot of musing that our days of frivolity and cynicism had ended with the collapse of the World Trade Towers. Suddenly, it was time to get serious.
“I think it’s the end of the age of irony,” Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter proclaimed, a statement that would itself looks ironic seven years later.
“To look at anything published before Tuesday at 8:45 a.m. — People magazine’s cover on Ben Affleck’s struggle with alcoholism, Time’s cover on Venus and Serena Williams, Business Week on the ‘Wine War’ — is to realize how suddenly, dramatically, unalterably the world has changed,” wrote Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz. “And that means journalism will also change, indeed is changing before our eyes.”
“The most important thing is that it will introduce a new seriousness into the world,” another writer proclaimed. “Over the past 10 years, since the defeat of communism and the collapse of the various walls, we have been told that there is no more history and it was all right to indulge in fun and frivolity. A decade of unreality has been blown away.”
It was a nice sentiment, but little of that change proved permanent.
Now, with the crisis on Wall Street and stern-faced warnings from Washington that we teeter on the edge of another Depression-like collapse, you’re once again hearing talk of a cultural sea change under way. As House Speaker Nancy Pelosi warned Wall Street on Friday, “the party is over.”
This time, it might be true.
As traumatic as Sept. 11 had been, few Americans outside of New York and Washington felt a direct impact. The blow had come out of the blue, like a sucker punch, and once we recovered our wits its impact was short-lived.
By contrast, the foreclosure crisis, the collapse of the stock market and the end of easily available credit are being felt first hand in every community and neighborhood in the country. And the effects are likely to be long-lasting.
Jobs are disappearing —- almost 160,000 in September alone —- and many may never come back. Retirement funds are evaporating. Local and state governments are facing significant revenue shortfalls and are having trouble selling bonds on Wall Street. According to Bloomberg News, “tax-exempt borrowers this week sold less than 15 percent of a typical week’s sales” because Wall Street refused to buy their bonds.
The credit squeeze is so tight that California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger even warned the U.S. Treasury last week that his state may have to borrow billions from the federal government to make ends meet.
More ominously for the long term, this calamity is going to make the rest of the world look at us differently. We have financed a lot of our prosperity on the willingness of the rest of the world to loan us billions because they saw our country as all but invulnerable economically. Foreign governments and private investors happily bought our government bonds, our corporate bonds and bonds derived from millions of home mortgages.
Last week, just by coincidence, our national debt exceeded the $10 trillion mark, and a lot of that money is owed to foreigners. The tide of money that washed away any sense of proportion or ethics on Wall Street also came in part from overseas. When critics of the $700 billion bailout complain that it was passed just to keep foreign banks happy, there’s some truth to that. It’s a chilling sign of just how much national sovereignty we’ve signed away in return for overseas capital.
With recent events, however, that confidence in the economic stability of America has now been compromised, and once lost, confidence is a hard thing to recover. Unlike Sept. 11, this is a setback of systemic origins, going to the core of what we do and how we do it. We’re going to feel its consequence for years to come.
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Obama tax cuts aimed at the less-than-wealthy
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Given what’s happened to the economy in the past few weeks — and the fallout that’s likely to continue between now and January — it’s tempting to take the economic and tax plans proposed by John McCain and Barack Obama and toss them both in the trash can.
After all, the plans were conceived and drafted for an economic reality that no longer exists. The political world in which they were imagined has changed dramatically as well, as have public attitudes toward business and government. Regardless of who wins the election, the next president of the United States will face a situation that few could have predicted a year ago and that even fewer fully comprehend even now.
Understandably, with barely four weeks left in the campaign and the economic situation in such flux, neither candidate has tried to go back and update his plan. However, those plans do tell us something about how the two candidates perceive the economy, where their values lie and how they would generally approach the challenges ahead.
McCain’s plan represents a reversal of sorts for the Arizona Republican. Back in 2001, he was one of only two Senate Republicans to vote against the $1.35 trillion Bush tax cuts, due to expire in 2010.
“I cannot in good conscience support a tax cut in which so many of the benefits go to the most fortunate among us, at the expense of middle-class Americans who most need tax relief,” McCain said at the time.
But seven years later, given the chance to draft a tax plan of his own, McCain extends and enhances the Bush approach. In fact, according to a computer analysis by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, “Sen. McCain’s tax cuts would primarily benefit those with very high incomes. … Many fewer households at the bottom of the income distribution would get tax cuts.”
To conduct its analysis, the Tax Policy Center conferred in detail with top economic advisers in both campaigns, trying to ensure that they got it right. In some cases, as it noted, the platforms described by economic advisers differed from those described by the candidates themselves on the stump.
“Sen. McCain’s proposals on the stump are often far more sweeping than the more measured options outlined by his campaign,” notes the TPC analysis, available at www.taxpolicycenter.org. “Sen. Obama also often proposes new taxes on high-income households to extend Social Security solvency, but his staff insists that no specific policy exists.”
In general, the analysis concludes that “Sen. Obama offers much larger tax breaks to low- and middle-income taxpayers and would increase taxes on high-income taxpayers. The largest tax cuts, as a share of income, would go to those at the bottom of the income distribution, while taxpayers with the highest income would see their taxes rise significantly.”
On specific items, the differences are equally stark. McCain would make the Bush tax cuts permanent for everyone. Obama would make the cuts permanent only for taxpayers with incomes of less than $250,000, allowing taxes to rise significantly for the fewer than 5 percent of Americans with incomes above $250,000.
McCain would leave the current capital gains tax at a maximum of 15 percent. Obama would leave the rate at 15 percent for most Americans, but raise it to somewhere between 20 percent and 28 percent for those with incomes above $250,000. He would also “enact new and expanded targeted tax breaks for workers, retirees, homeowners, students and new farmers,” according to the TPC analysis.
McCain proposes an estate tax of 15 percent on estates greater than $5 million; Obama would set the rate at 45 percent, with no tax on estates of $3.5 million or less. And under McCain, the top tax rate on individual earned income would be 35 percent; under Obama, it would be 39.6 percent.
The TPC also analyzed the impact of the McCain and Obama tax proposals on the deficit. Compared with current tax policy — in other words, if the “temporary” Bush tax cuts are considered permanent — “Sen. Obama’s proposals would raise $800 billion and Sen. McCain’s proposals lose $600 billion” over the first 10 years.
(Under the rules of its analysis, the Tax Policy Center did not adjust deficit estimates to account for spending cuts proposed by either campaign.)
Even in normal times, such campaign proposals would be subject to great change once a candidate takes office and has to compromise with Congress. And again, these are anything but normal times. Under these new conditions, no one can say with any certainty what proposals McCain or Obama would advocate once in office.
But what they’ve proposed in the past tells us that McCain has now embraced the Reaganomics approach that he rejected back in his “maverick” days, and that under Obama, tax increases would be far more targeted and limited than his opponents have tried to claim in this campaign. His general approach — trying to ease the burden on low- and middle-income households, while trying to bring the deficit under control — seems the wiser course no matter what the future may hold.
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SNL Palin/Fey comedy genius, link fixed
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Starbursts bouncing around the living room …. they nailed Joe Biden pretty well too.
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Live, from New York, Sarah Palin!
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
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I’ll betcha that there Tina Fey, bless her heart, will rear her head again tonight, playing the role of me, Sarah Palin for the third time, understanding of course that the other two times were in the past and we don’t want to be finger-pointing at the past but looking ahead at the future that is ahead of us.
That Tina, I mean, her reward is in heaven, right?
Also, I want to preference my remarks by saying that those Saturday Night Live folks, they’re a team of maverick cutups, doncha know, and Gwen Ifill will be playing Queen Latifah, and they told me what country of which she was queen but I forget because they’re telling me so much stuff. Like, did you know that nuclear weaponry would be the be all, end all of just too many people in too many parts of our planet?
Also, I know that millions of Americans wonder what the things are that attribute to my being vice president, yeah, but I’m one to just think they’re being funny and anyway, I don’t want to argue about the causes. What I want to argue about is, how are we going to get there to positively affect the impacts?
Say it ain’t so, Joe.
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Obama’s margin seems to be firming up, says Gallup
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The newest Gallup tracking poll has Obama up eight, up one from yesterday:
“Obama has now held a statistically significant lead over McCain for the last eight days, one shy of his campaign-best streak of nine days with a lead around the time of the Democratic National Convention.”
And the margin seems to hardening.
“Voter preferences appear somewhat stable at the moment, as Obama has held similar advantages over McCain in each of the last three individual nights’ polling. That includes Friday polling, the first interviews conducted following Thursday’s widely viewed vice presidential debate, the passage of the economic rescue bill supported by both Obama and McCain, and Friday’s bleak jobs report.”
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‘I love the smell of napalm in the morning’
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I think some of you have been pleading for something like this:
“Sen. John McCain and his Republican allies are readying a newly aggressive assault on Sen. Barack Obama’s character, believing that to win in November they must shift the conversation back to questions about the Democrat’s judgment, honesty and personal associations, several top Republicans said….
‘We’re going to get a little tougher,’ a senior Republican operative said, indicating that a fresh batch of television ads is coming. ‘We’ve got to question this guy’s associations. Very soon. There’s no question that we have to change the subject here,’ said the operative, who was not authorized to discuss strategy and spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Palin wasn’t a game-changer, at least in a positive sense. The debates haven’t been a game-changer. So with time slipping away and the polls looking bad, this move was inevitable. Here come Bill Ayers, Rezko, etc.
The tactic might have had more effect back in the summer, before a public image of Obama took hold in voters’ minds. Now, not so much. But it will be interesting to see just how much of a scorched-earth approach McCain is willing to take, because his own reputation is on the line as well.
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Amuse each other…
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
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Go watch some October baseball…
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I’ll be rooting for the Red Sox to go up 2-0 on the Angels.
Unlike those White Sox, who look to be going down 0-2 to the Rays. Some people just don’t know how to pick ‘em.
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Wall Street gets bailout — now we wait
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Well, the unacceptable has been accepted. Following the lead of the Senate, the House passed the Wall Street bailout bill by a vote of 263-171, with this version drawing significantly more support from both Democrats and Republicans than the first bill.
“I have decided that the cost of doing nothing is greater than the cost of doing something,” said U.S. Rep. John Lewis, an Atlanta Democrat who voted against the first bill. And that’s about right. There’s no guarantee that this is going to work, just an understanding that failure could have grave consequences and we better take our best shot at avoiding it.
President Bush will apparently sign the bill into law before the day ends. The markets will take the weekend to digest the effort, and we’ll see what happens next week.
UPDATE: All seven of Georgia’s Republican congressmen voted against the bill again.
“We are not convinced that this legislation is the best answer for hard-working taxpayers,” according to a joint press release. “We cannot preserve our free-market economy by sacrificing the very principles that underlie it.”
UPDATE II: And the Dow Jones average closes down 157 points for the day, after being up 300 points just as the bill was passing.
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Krauthammer tosses in the towel
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Charles Krauthammer, the neocons’ neocon, gives it up for Obama:
“Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. famously said of Franklin Roosevelt that he had a ‘second-class intellect, but a first-class temperament.’ Obama has shown that he is a man of limited experience, questionable convictions, deeply troubling associations (Jeremiah Wright, William Ayers, Tony Rezko) and an alarming lack of self-definition — do you really know who he is and what he believes?
Nonetheless, he’s got both a first-class intellect and a first-class temperament. That will likely be enough to make him president.”
UPDATE: Obama continues to stretch his lead in the top tracking polls. Gallup just released its latest three-day poll, with Obama’s advantage growing from five points to seven points. That’s about the tracking poll average.
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One of the signs of a sick culture….
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
…is that we pay people millions of dollars to be professional jerks.
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The morning after, Palin-palooza
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Rudy Giuliani says that last night’s performance by Sarah Palin was one of the best debate performances he’s ever seen.
Seriously.
“Only the liberal media could deny her this victory,” said Mr. 9-1-1.
So I have a question: After saying something so foolish and dishonest, how does Giuliani look at himself in the mirror this morning? How does he expect people to take him seriously?
Really. I’ve seen better debate performances from a street wino. And he was arguing with himself, not with Joe Biden.
Of course, the same could be said of Palin. She had two opponents last night. She wasn’t in the same class with Joe Biden, and it showed. But more important for her, she did manage to defeat the Sarah Palin we saw with Katie Couric and Charlie Gibson, and for that her supporters are immensely grateful. She avoided another YouTube moment, an accomplishment perhaps but a pretty low standard for success.
In any other election year, with any other candidate for major office, people would have been appalled by Palin’s recital. Imagine her on the debate stage during the GOP presidential primaries with a performance like that — she would have been forced out of the race before the sun rose the next morning.
She showed no mastery or depth in any field, only a capacity to skate over the issue with memorized talking points. And even then she was often skating on thin ice.
Both early poll results confirm that impression. In a CBS poll of uncommitted voters, 46 percent called Biden the winner, while only 21 percent gave it to Palin. (I bet none any of those 21 percent called it one of the best debate performances in history.)
According to a CNN poll, 51 percent thought Biden did the better job, while only 36 percent called it for Palin. I’d be surprised if any later polls reversed that conclusion. Palin beat Palin, but she did not prove herself competent or qualified to be vice president of the United States of America.
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The Palin-palooza debate thread…
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
in which Joe Biden will play a supporting role no matter what he does … almost.
UPDATE: The bailout question and the economy, and McCain’s claim that the fundamentals were strong. The McCain explanation — that he meant the American worker was strong — was a weak argument, and it’s not Palin’s fault she had to repeat it.
UPDATE II: Biden scores on deregulation, and Palin goes off the track, says she’s not going to answer the questions that are asked, she’s going to say what she wants. Interesting tactic.
UPDATE III: I think Biden’s winning on content, and Palin is reciting well. But if she can continue to do that, she’ll escape unscathed.
UPDATE IV: So an evangelical conservative Republican supports equal benefits for same-sex couples? Great. But then maybe not, she ducks the question when asked to clarify.
UPDATE V: Iraq. I don’t think this is a good issue for the Republicans, and Palin isn’t their best spokesman for it. She says victory is within sight, so she must have very good eyesight.
UPDATE VI: Biden hits the Pakistan/Iran question out of the park. His experience shows. Palin accuses Obama of naivete. That’s rich. Biden really showing his stuff on the foreign policy issues. The story of the night may not be Palin failing but Biden succeeding.
UPDATE VII: I’m sorry — there is no comparison between these two. One is ready to step into the Oval Office today if necessary. The other ain’t even close. And the American people are more than smart enough to figure that out.
UPDATE VIII: Biden on raising a family as a single parent — very real, and trumps Palin in the process. He is handling the whole thing perfectly. Very impressive.
Conclusion: Biden’s night. Maybe the American people will disagree, but I very much doubt it. And it was Biden’s night because of how well HE did, not because of how poorly Palin did. She did OK, under the circumstances. But there was simply no comparison between the two.
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Your pre-debate thought for the day…
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
… is from Quin Hilyer, senior editor at the conservative American Spectator, writing on the Spectator blog:
“I’m on a lonely island here. Conservative activists refuse to acknowledge any fault with the choice of Palin for Veep. Those of us who express doubts are barely tolerated. But, dammit, the reason she has sounded so godawful in some of these interviews is because she did a godawful job in those interviews. And until shown otherwise, it is fair to surmise that she did a godawful job because she doesn’t know what she is talking about. And THAT should worry all of us, even as we heartily wish for this woman of high character and principle to rise to the challenge.”
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Because it’s been a tough week for our conservative friends….
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
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Every trend looking good for Obama
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
You get the sense in watching the polls that the presidential race may be on the brink of breaking toward Barack Obama. The independents and undecideds are beginning to make up their minds, and they’re going in Obama’s direction.
So are the swing states where many of those voters live. To cite just one example, Politico’s latest swing-state map gives Obama 353 electoral votes, compared to 185 for McCain. Of the 13 swing states they list, McCain is ahead in only two, Indiana and Missouri. And when Indiana is a swing state, the Republican candidate is already facing an uphill fight.
At Pollster.com they’re reaching a similar conclusion. In the site’s “Online 100,” which it calls “the most authoritative daily tracking poll of leading online voices in the United States … weighted evenly between right-leaning, left-leaning and non-aligned bloggers,” opinion is coalescing behind the conclusion that Obama will win.
The “Online 100” includes people such as Karl Rove, Arianna Huffington, The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank, National Review’s Jonah Goldberg and the Wall Street Journal’s John Fund.
As recently as Sept. 16, the site reports, the panel was almost evenly split, with 49 percent believing Obama would win and 48 percent predicting McCain. Today, 87 percent on the panel are predicting an Obama victory, with only 8 percent predicting McCain will win.
“Most notably, 75% of right-leaning panellists concede that Obama is most likely to win. 89% of center-aligned panelists said that Obama will win; but none said that McCain would win.”
Sarah Palin’s performance tonight could erase any remaining doubt. Both she and Joe Biden have the potential to commit gaffes, and it won’t be hard to judge the outcome. If one of them is a YouTube star come Friday morning, that’s your loser.
If that person is Biden, it could stop but not reverse the slide toward Obama. If it’s Palin, the race is all but over.
So far, her public appearances have greatly lowered expectations, which is to her benefit. But they have also created a narrative that questions whether she can handle the basic requirements of the job. With another blunder or two, she will cement the notion that by bagging the veep nomination, she shot more moose than she could carry home.
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American people alarmed by Palin
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“With the vice presidential candidates set to square off today in their only scheduled debate, public assessments of Sarah Palin’s readiness have plummeted, and she may now be a drag on the Republican ticket among key voter groups, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.
Though she initially transformed the race with her energizing presence and a fiery convention speech, Palin is now a much less positive force: Six in 10 voters see her as lacking the experience to be an effective president, and a third are now less likely to vote for McCain because of her.
The 60 percent who now see Palin as insufficiently experienced to step into the presidency is steeply higher than in a Post-ABC poll after her nomination early last month. Democrats and Republicans alike are now more apt to doubt her qualifications, but the biggest shift has come among independents.
In early September, independents offered a divided verdict on Palin’s experience; now they take the negative view by about 2 to 1. Nearly two-thirds of both independent men and women in the new poll said Palin has insufficient experience to run the White House.”
We’ll have a thread up for tonight’s debate. There’s a lot riding on it.
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Early signs of enthusiasm for Obama
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
According to Secretary of State Karen Handel’s office, black turnout in early voting has been disproportionately strong. Black Georgians make up 29 percent of our population and slightly less of our voter turnout, but so far they comprise almost 40 percent of those who have voted early or by absentee.
(As Jim Galloway explains at the Political Insider, Georgia is required by federal law to track voter turnout by race, as a consequence of its legacy of voter suppression).
That’s even more significant when you consider that in normal years, black voters have been less likely than their fellow Georgians to take advantage of early and absentee voting. If that turnout surge holds, it could play a significant role in the outcome of down-ticket races.
Of course, most of those black Georgians will probably be voting for Barack Obama, a fact that a few of our less thoughtful readers will try to depict as some sort of black racism. (Yes, they are actually that silly — see comments below). It takes a pretty perverse outlook to see things that way, but some people do manage the trick.
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With economic calamity, Bush seals title of worst president ever
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I’ve been saying for a long time now that George W. Bush would go down as the worst president in American history. His record is abysmal. He started a war in Iraq that we didn’t need to fight, a decision that will probably prove to be oue single biggest foreign policy blunder ever. Then he fought that war incompetently. He took a budget surplus that was projected to last for years and turned it into a consistent deficit — in eight years’ time, he will have racked up almost as much debt as the previous 42 presidents combined. And his administration’s inept response to Hurricane Katrina epitomized a lax management style that infected the entire federal government.
Nonetheless, some people still tried to disagree, citing such losers as James Buchanan or Herbert Hoover to prove that Bush wasn’t the worst.
Well, with the economy now tumbling down around his ears as Bush prepares to leave office, I’d say the argument is pretty much settled. He is James Buchanan AND Herbert Hoover both, setting a standard for incompetence that should never be matched.
Unless Sarah Palin somehow becomes president…
UPDATE: We’re having server problems, which is why comments appear to be closed. Please bear with us, and I apologize.
UPDATE II: Problem solved, have at it.
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US attorney scandal rivals Watergate (and yes, Karl Rove is in the middle of it)
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
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In any other administration, at almost any other time in U.S. history, the report released this week by the Justice Department’s inspector general would constitute a major Page One scandal.
The abuse of power, the ethical nonchalance and the possible criminal behavior by top officials documented within the Bush Justice Department rivals that of the Nixon administration.
The investigation focused on the removal of nine U.S. attorneys in 2006, a step that the administration and its defenders at the time tried to dismiss as routine. This report proves it was anything but. To the contrary, the inspector general has recommended a special prosecutor to investigate criminal charges of wire fraud, obstruction of justice and perjury, among others. Based on the narrative in the report, possible targets include former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and perhaps even former White House aide Karl Rove.
Consider just one of the nine cases, that of David Iglesias, who was removed as U.S. attorney for New Mexico. The Bush administration tried to explain his ouster on grounds that Iglesias was a poor manager, a claim that the inspector general says was utterly groundless. The report says such claims “were disingenuous after-the-fact rationalizations that had nothing to do with the real reason for Iglesias’ removal.”
So what was the real reason? New Mexico Republicans had complained to Rove and others at the White House, including possibly President Bush, that Iglesias had not been aggressive enough in pressing alleged voter fraud and corruption cases against Democrats in the state.
“Based on these complaints alone,” the report said, Iglesias was fired.
In clear and convincing detail, it documents a case that New Mexico Republicans and their allies in the White House tried to use the awesome powers of the U.S. attorney’s office to persecute their political enemies and influence the outcome of elections.
“We believe Departmental leaders abdicated their responsibility to ensure that prosecutorial decisions would be based on the law, the evidence and Departmental policy, not political pressure,” the report concludes.
In addition, the report also lays out a pattern of stonewalling by top administration officials, made possible because the inspector general does not have the subpoena powers that a special prosecutor can employ.
“It is important to note that our investigation … was hampered, and is not complete, because key witnesses declined to cooperate with our investigation,” the report states. “In particular, former White House officials Harriet Miers and Karl Rove … refused our requests for an interview.” The White House also refused to release important documents requested by investigators.
Attorney General Mike Mukasey, who was brought in to clean up the Justice Department, has now appointed a special prosecutor as requested in the report.
“It is true, as the report acknowledges, that an administration is entitled to remove presidential appointees, including U.S. attorneys, for virtually any reason or no reason at all,” Mukasey said. “But the leaders of the department owed it to those who served the country in those capacities to treat their careers and reputations with appropriate care and dignity. And the leaders of the department owed it to the American people they served to conduct the public’s business in a deliberate and professional manner. The department failed on both scores.”
History’s verdict — and the verdicts of the criminal justice system — may be considerably harsher.
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