Month: October 2008

Dishonorable Revisionism

by dday

So I watched the Obama campaign’s Keating documentary, and it’s a fairly good recitation of the scandal, and the connection to the financial crisis of the present.

What’s more, the research section of the “Keating Economics” site includes a wealth of information and documents, including personal letters from McCain to White House colleagues and federal regulators asking for them to back off Charles Keating. This letter to then-WH Chief of Staff James Baker in 1985 is particularly striking, if only for the line “I believe it to be unwise, and I think it flys (sic) in the face of our recent efforts to remove the hand of government from the affairs of private enterprise.” That sentence alone explains much of the current crisis.

Now, what’s been very interesting is the McCain campaign’s reaction to this. Rewriting 20 years of history, they have trotted out surrogates, including McCain’s lawyer in the case John Dowd, to claim that the entire affair was a classic political smear job on the Arizona Senator. This makes no sense, considering that McCain’s very cultivated media image was entirely launched on his admission of guilt in the Keating case. As usual, Billmon puts it best.

But I was around, and following congressional politics rather closely (by which I mean professionally) when McCain first popped up on the political radar screen in 1986 during the so-called Keating Five scandal. In exchange for various regulatory favors, Keating, a wealthy and politically, um, generous, S&L executive, turned himself into the special friend of a bipartisan group of sleazebag Senators, with five in particular, including McCain, reaping most of the benefits. By modern standards (i.e. Jack Abramoff’s and Ted Steven’s standards) it was actually pretty tame stuff, but it was considered a big deal at the time.)

In a sense, the scandal marked the birth of the McCain “brand,” because unlike the other four of the Five, he stood up in the Senate and more or less admitted he was guilty (not nearly as guilty as the others, he hastened to point out – but still, he felt bad about what he had done.) This went over really big with the media (“Senator admits guilt” outranking even man bites dog on the news-o-meter.)

Now, if you go back and look, you’ll see that if Keating didn’t comp McCain as generously and vigorously as he did the other four, it was probably because McCain was a very junior senator at the time, with relatively little influence to peddle. But it wasn’t because Honest John was shy about accepting the favors that were offered him. If John McCain had a problem with the way lobbying (i.e. legalized prostitution) was being done in Washington, you definitely won’t find it in the record of the Keating investigation. McCain’s fit of Puritan self-righteousness (or political calculation, depending on your view) came after the fact, once he’d already been caught. And yet, from that single Senate speech sprang the shoot that eventually grew into the sturdy tree of John McCain’s media image.

You have to admit it was a neat trick: Happily accepting the naughty goodies while they were being handed out, but then winning brownie points for admitting he took them – after the world had already found out he took them. But that’s precisely what McCain did. He’s never looked back since.

Until today, when he flip-flopped on his own contrition, and basically used the time-honored political trick in describing an investigation against him as a “witch hunt.”

This is the usual move for McCain. He admits his own failures only when it’s politically convenient. In the moment he’s as dishonest and dishonorable as the rest, probably more. But at the proper moment, he returns to the lecturn and somberly recounts his moral failings, weeping at the altar of honor for all to see, and the media responds in Pavlovian fashion with a handkerchief for their fallen warrior and a flurry of encomiums to his great character. Whether that will happen this time around is unclear. But McCain reverting back to the “I did nothing wrong” side of the Keating Five scandal should make it pretty obvious that to him, “honor” is a coat that is worn only in winter, only when necessary.

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Punishment For Being Human

by digby

It is very dispiriting that California’s Prop 4 requiring parental notification for abortions seems to be in danger of passage considering how how high the stakes are for some of the most vulnerable people in our population. It seems that the anti-choice forces are on the verge of another successful chipping away of a woman’s right to own her own body and choose her own reproductive future.

The ad to the left tells the whole sad story and I encourage you to click through and read it. But let me just say that it is a tragedy for any teenager to be forced to bear a child against her will. And that is a very likely outcome for some girls if this proposition passes.

Everyone would prefer that a young woman or girl would have a relationship with her parents that would allow her to seek their help and support if she became pregnant. Many girls probably have that. But an awful lot of them don’t. They have abusive parents or those whose values would require them to make an irrevocable decision to bear a child against her will. Girls are, by definition, immature and don’t always understand how time works — they live in denial past the moment when they can explore all their options. Being kids, they don’t fully understand the consequences of failing to face reality, and if they have to confide in their parents they may wait longer than they otherwise would, out of embarrassment or fear. And, of course, there is the problem of incest and abuse, which makes it nearly impossible for some girls to tell their parents.

The anti-abortion crusaders are now flogging what they call “The Juno Option” (thanks Hollywood!) but I think it’s fair to say that there are few teen age girls as self possessed and mature as that movie character. Most women, of any age, are emotionally torn to some degree or another, at the prospect carrying a child to term and giving it up for adoption. Even if they feel that it is the right thing to do and are happy that someone will have the great happiness of raising a child through their generosity, it isn’t easy. Most likely, their future children will have a sibling they do not grow up with, and even in the case of open adoption the relationship is fraught with complexity. Certainly, as much as the anti-abortion zealots claim that having an abortion “damages” a woman (and some do have regrets) adoption is no less difficult. Indeed, for a great many women, it is far more difficult.
Most people agree that the best solution for everyone is to reduce unwanted pregnancies. (Unfortunately, the anti-abortion zealots are working to deny women and girls access to birth control and the morning after pill as well.) But even under the status quo, teenagers are the least liable to be cognizant of their options and the most likely to take chances because they just don’t fully understand the ramifications of unprotected sex. Being compulsive and irresponsible is nearly the definition of adolescence. Sexual activity is almost a given. It will never change.

What has changed is the hopes and aspirations of women. We don’t see very many young women like Bristol Palin getting married these days, because somewhere along the line we recognized that forcing marriage on two young people was a disastrous waste of two young lives when we knew the marriage was very unlikely to be successful. So now, most teenage girls who decide to keep their baby do so on their own as single parents. That is certainly their right and nobody would ever say they shouldn’t. But that decision is hugely life altering. Certainly, a teenager keeping and raising a child against her will is a tragedy for her and the child.

Polling says that the vast majority of people are in favor of abortion rights in the case of rape or incest. So, clearly the anti-abortion cause has little to do with “murder” of a fetus. There can be no moral difference between a child conceived in rape and one who is not. What most “pro-life” people don’t favor is abortion because of unwanted pregnancy. It’s as if the act of sex must be “punished” with childbirth and delivery if the woman did it willingly. But pregnancy shouldn’t be punishment, certainly not for a teenager who did something that is so natural and so common, it’s akin to taking pleasure in the warm the of the sun or the taste of chocolate. To punish a teenage girl for life by forcing her to carry to term, give birth and either become a parent far too young or give up her child and live with the consequences is extreme.

The bottom line is that if this passes, a lot of girls lives are going to be ruined because they couldn’t tell their parents, or thought they couldn’t tell their parents, and they waited until it was too late. It’s just how teenagers are. It could result in a new form of back alley abortion, with girls going to dicey, unregulated practitioners so they don’t have to face their folks. It will cause tragedies in any numbers of ways.

Vote No On Prop 4. There are young women out there whose futures depend on it.

And if you some how think that the pro Prop 4 people are sincere upstanding folks, take a look at this dishonest, manipulative piece of garbage:

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Flying Through Hysteria

by digby

I’m traveling today and got off a plane to see that the Dow had plunged 800 points. It looks like the hysteria continues apace. It sure would be useful if the richest, most powerful nation in the world had a president that had some credibility and an administration that knew what it was doing. But no such luck…

Maybe these guys will be listened to instead? From Floyd Norris, live blogging amid panic:

“The Market Has Flopped”: The Group of 30, a group of former regulators and government officials, and current and former corporate chieftains, is out with a long report on financial regulation today. It offers no conclusions, but is interesting in describing the weaknesses of all the systems used around the world. At a news conference today, the people in charge of writing the report, Paul Volcker, a former Fed chairman, and Roger Ferguson, a former Fed vice chairman who now runs TIAA-CREF, a money management firm, along with the chairman of the Group, Jacob Frenkel, a former governor of the Bank of Israel and now, unfortunately, vice chairman of A.I.G., had some interesting things to say. Mr. Frenkel noted that “things are highly contagious today,” and that the old distinction regulators used, between solvency and liquidity, was badly blurred. Mr. Ferguson observed that none of the financial regulatory systems had worked especially well, and that they would need to be restructured almost everywhere. But he added that even the best regulation would not stop financial institutions from making mistakes. The best lines, as usual, came from Mr. Volcker, the only living ex-Fed chairman who still has a good reputation for financial wisdom. “The Treasury has become the lender of last resort in the United States, which I think is appropriate,” he said. He noted that in Britain, with the most consolidated regulatory scheme, the Financial Services Authority still seemed to have trouble communicating with the Treasury and the Bank of England and that regulatory communication may have been better in the United States, despite its fragmented nature. Mr. Volcker’s skepticism of the new financial system has been well known for years, and was ignored by its biggest fan, Alan Greenspan, who succeeded Mr. Volcker at the Fed. Mr. Volcker recalled the “intense lobbying process” that had largely allowed markets to supplant banks as providers of funding with minimal regulation. “In the U.S., the market took over,” he said. “The market has flopped.” When things got tough, he added, “everybody is running back to Mother, the commercial banking system.”

update: It looks like we had a bit of a rally. I can’t say I’m surprised. Greed eventually supercedes panic and there must have been some serious bargains out there this afternoon.

Torture Training

by digby

POLICE zapped a runaway sheep that was blocking traffic with a Taser stun gun, a weapon issued for use in violent situations.

Motorists trapped in the traffic jam caused when the sheep got out of a field in north Wales in Britain were horrified to see the sheep stunned by police then carried to the side of the road where it continued to convulse, the Daily Mail reported.

They and animal welfare advocates say police did not have to use the weapon on a defenceless sheep.

But officers said they had to prevent the ram “causing major disruption and possible danger to motorists” on the A55, the Mail reported.

Motorist Mark Faulkes said his 13-year-old daughter Amy was distressed after seeing the sheep Tasered.

“We came across a traffic jam and we saw there was a sheep in the road. Everyone had stopped their cars and a few people had got out and were trying to herd the sheep away from the carriageway.

“The police then arrived and they went towards the sheep but it moved away from them. Then one of the officers got out his Taser gun and fired it at the sheep. Then he carried it to the side of the carriageway.

“Amy was very distressed. I don’t know if the sheep was all right. When we left it was lying by the side of the road, shaking.

“I thought it was excessive to use a Taser on a defenceless sheep,” he said.

A north Wales police spokeswoman said Sparky, as the sheep was nicknamed by locals afterwards, was unhurt.

I just don’t now what say about this anymore. Maybe we can start using tasers in kindergarten to make the kids behave. After all, by these standards, they too will be “unhurt.”

Oh wait:

Police departments use the x26 Taser to shock unruly suspects into submission, but Lorain residents are stunned that an officer used one on a school bus to subdue to 12-year-old boy, reported NewsChannel5.

According to the police report, police were called to remove the boy from the bus after he tried to steal another boy’s CD case.

Police Capt. Russ Cambarare said the boy cussed at the officers and then threatened her.

“Then he made a threat that he was going to kill her, he bucked his head backwards and hit her on the chin and broke one of his arms free,” said Cambarare.

That’s right:

a 12-year-old girl… was skipping school was found drinking and smoking in a swimming pool, Miami-Dade police officer William Nelson stated in an incident report. He said he responded to an anonymous call about the activities.

He said he told the girl he was taking her to school. As they walked to the police car, she ran away.

“I advised her to stop several times,” he said in the report. She “continued running even to the point of starting to run into lanes of traffic.”

Nelson said he used the Taser for his and the girl’s safety, striking her in the base of the neck and lower right back.

The girl was released into her mother’s custody and taken to a doctor.

“I couldn’t breathe, and I was, like, nervous, and I was scared at the same time,” the girl told CNN.

About two weeks earlier, a first-grader was shot with a Taser at school when he threatened to cut his leg with a piece of broken glass, authorities said. The boy’s family said he vomited after the jolt.

“If there’s three officers, it’s nothing to tell a 6-year-old holding a glass, if you feel threatened, ‘Hey, here’s a piece of candy, hey, here’s a toy. Let the glass go,'” the boy’s mother told CNN.

But police insisted using the gun was the only option.

It’s already happening.

h/t to pastordan

From Bad To Worse

by dday

John McCain’s health care idea is to get employers to throw their workers off of their health plans by taxing the benefits, leaving employees to the wilds of the individual insurance market armed only with a tax credit that is too small to actually pay for health insurance. Barack Obama’s campaign has been hammering this of late, so McCain’s team adjusted the tax hit, applying it to income taxes and not payroll taxes. But I guess the budget numbers didn’t match up, so to pay for that too-meager tax credit, it turns out that McCain wants to cut Medicare.

John McCain would pay for his health plan with major reductions to Medicare and Medicaid, a top aide said, in a move that independent analysts estimate could result in cuts of $1.3 trillion over 10 years to the government programs.

The Republican presidential nominee has said little about the proposed cuts, but they are needed to keep his health-care plan “budget neutral,” as he has promised. The McCain campaign hasn’t given a specific figure for the cuts, but didn’t dispute the analysts’ estimate.

To be clear, creating efficiencies in the marketplace and applying cost controls would reduce Medicare spending in the same way it would reduce overall health care spending, but McCain isn’t advocating that. He just wants to cut Medicare. To fill in his budget gap for his insufficient health care tax credit. I guess when Sarah Palin used a Reagan quote about how “if we aren’t vigilant, we’ll end up telling our children and our children’s children about a time when America was free,” wherein Reagan was talking about what would happen if Medicare were enacted, she was being descriptive and not allusive.

Paul Krugman further explains McCain’s dangerous health care plan today, and he wrote it even before this attempt to gut health care entitlements:

The good news, such as it is, is that more people would buy individual insurance. Indeed, the total number of uninsured Americans might decline marginally under the McCain plan — although many more Americans would be without insurance than under the Obama plan.

But the people gaining insurance would be those who need it least: relatively healthy Americans with high incomes. Why? Because insurance companies want to cover only healthy people, and even among the healthy only those able to pay a lot in addition to their tax credit would be able to afford coverage (remember, it’s a $5,000 credit, but the average family policy actually costs more than $12,000).

Meanwhile, the people losing insurance would be those who need it most: lower-income workers who wouldn’t be able to afford individual insurance even with the tax credit, and Americans with health problems whom insurance companies won’t cover.

And in the process of comforting the comfortable while afflicting the afflicted, the McCain plan would also lead to a huge, expensive increase in bureaucracy: insurers selling individual health plans spend 29 percent of the premiums they receive on administration, largely because they employ so many people to screen applicants. This compares with costs of 12 percent for group plans and just 3 percent for Medicare.

By the end, Krugman announces himself “terrified” by the McCain campaign’s ideas. You should be too.

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Keating Economics

by digby

If you haven’t seen this film on McCain and Keating yet, I urge you to watch it and pass it on. I’ve been groaning about Keating for some time and I can’t tell you how happy I am that the Obama campaign is firing back with both barrels after McCain started his October smear campaign.

The thing is that McCain really does have a history of being involved in exactly the same kinds of deregulation schemes that brought us to this current financial crisis. After Keating, he created his come-to-jesus “reform” persona around campaign finance reform, which is all well and good, but he did absolutely nothing to rein in the excesses of the marketplace. He’s a maverick in name only. He toed the GOP company line when it came to the really important stuff.

People don’t know this story and they need to. This is a good place to start:

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Bold Progressives

by digby

As the exciting prospect of an Obama presidency after eight long years of Republican rule begins to look as if it might actually happen, progressives must remember the words of another Democratic president:

FDR was, of course, a consummate political leader. In one situation, a group came to him urging specific actions in support of a cause in which they deeply believed. He replied: I agree with you, I want to do it, now make me do it. He understood that a President does not rule by fiat and unilateral commands to a nation. He must build the political support that makes his decisions acceptable to our countrymen. He read the public opinion polls not to define who he was but to determine where the country was – and then to strategize how he could move the country to the objectives he thought had to be carried out.

To that end, online progressives are organizing around this concept:

Anyone with common sense will vote for Barack Obama and Democratic congressional candidates this November. But it’s time for citizens to fight back and take this pledge — will you join in signing it?

“In 2009 and beyond, I will be part of the movement that pushes Democrats to be bold progressives — and that helps pass a bold progressive agenda into law.”

What does taking the pledge mean? It means that when Democratic “leaders” tell Americans we must settle for watered-down solutions while bold back-benchers in the House or Senate are pushing strong progressive alternatives, we will clamor for those bold alternatives together until they are passed into law.

What else does it mean? It means we will turn those bold back-benchers into leaders. Just as grassroots progressives fueled Howard Dean’s election as Democratic National Committee chair and pushed aside insiders who wanted more of the same, we will make sure that Democratic “leaders” are the ones who actually show bold progressive leadership.

What else does it mean? It means we will no longer just write checks to the Democratic Party and assume they know how best to spend it. We’ll give our money to bold progressive candidates — bypassing the influence of corporate lobbyists and entrenched Democratic insiders who are used to picking the winners and using their purse strings to make bold progressives in Congress fall in line.

Sign the pledge…

The netroots and grassroots going to take FDRs advice and make them do it.

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St. John

by tristero

Think there’s some truth behind the myth of St. John McCain? Don’t you believe it:

Following his failed presidential bid in 2000, McCain needed a vehicle to keep his brand alive. He founded the Reform Institute, which he set up as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit — a tax status that barred it from explicit political activity. McCain proceeded to staff the institute with his campaign manager, Rick Davis, as well as the fundraising chief, legal counsel and communications chief from his 2000 campaign.

There is no small irony that the Reform Institute — founded to bolster McCain’s crusade to rid politics of unregulated soft money — itself took in huge sums of unregulated soft money from companies with interests before McCain’s committee. EchoStar got in on the ground floor with a donation of $100,000. A charity funded by the CEO of Univision gave another $100,000. Cablevision gave $200,000 to the Reform Institute in 2003 and 2004 — just as its officials were testifying before the commerce committee. McCain urged approval of the cable company’s proposed pricing plan. As Bradley Smith, the former chair of the Federal Election Commission, wrote at the time: ‘Appearance of corruption, anyone?’

RTWT.

A Pathological Liar

by tristero

In a long discussion two nights ago with longtime Finnish friends, I tried to explain what makes Sarah Palin so exceedingly awful. “It’s not that she’s completely unqualified,” I said, adding, “And isn’t it incredible that’s not the worst thing about her?

“And it’s not that she is so far to the right she has direct ties to the Alaska secessionist movement. That, too, makes it simply unbelievable that she is a major party candidate.

“No,” I said. “The worst thing about Sarah Palin is that she is a pathological liar who, no matter what, cannot tell the truth.” And, sure enough, as fast as you can say, “Waterboarding isn’t torture if Bush says it isn’t,”a new Palin lie is uncovered.

Blaming Everyone But Their Liege Lords

by digby

From Edroso:

Barney Frank used to live with a top executive at Fannie Mae. Though this had been reported as far back as 1992, conservatives are working it hard now, perhaps feeling that if their attempt to blame the financial crisis on black people doesn’t work, they can get some traction blaming it on manlove.

“PART OF WHY THE USA GOT IT UP THE YOU KNOW WHAT,” bellows The Astute Bloggers. “HOMO BARNEY FRANK WAS SLEEPING WITH MALE FANNIE MAE EXEC FOR YEARS.” Ace O’Spades is of course on it like Lindsay Lohan on Samantha Ronson, and his commenters spray milk (at least we think it’s milk) out their noses (“This sickens me on so many levels”). Dad29 assails “back-door-banditry” and asks, “Why should THEY worry about imposing a huge national debt on children?” (Please don’t tell Dad29 they’re allowed to adopt now, or he’ll wear out his slur thesaurus.)

So, far we have blacks, Mexicans and ngays being blamed for the financial crisis. Surely, they can’t mean to leave out environmentalists and feminists? What about atheists? The conservatives are in such disarray they haven’t even managed to find a way to blame Hollywood? They really are losing their touch.

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