So the government decides to heed their foreign paymasters and bail out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which is really a proxy bailout of the entire financial industry, which would have been on the hook for all of their bad loans. This adds to the list of the government, in recent years, bailing out the airlines and various banks. And there are plans – bipartisan plans – to bail out the U.S. auto industry, as well as the national highway fund. As a result of the Fannie and Freddie bailout, the stock market goes wild.
This is known as “capitalism.” Not corporate Marxism. How dare you. And everyone knows that what we need is less government.
John McCain made a quick stop at the Capitol one day last spring to sit in on Senate negotiations on the big immigration bill, and John Cornyn was not pleased.
Cornyn, a mild-mannered Texas Republican, saw a loophole in the bill that he thought would allow felons to pursue a path to citizenship.
McCain called Cornyn’s claim “chicken-s—,” according to people familiar with the meeting, and charged that the Texan was looking for an excuse to scuttle the bill. Cornyn grimly told McCain he had a lot of nerve to suddenly show up and inject himself into the sensitive negotiations.
“F— you,” McCain told Cornyn, in front of about 40 witnesses.
It was another instance of the Republican presidential candidate losing his temper, another instance in which, as POW-MIA activist Carol Hrdlicka put it, “It’s his way or no way.”
There’s a lengthy list of similar outbursts through the years: McCain pushing a woman in a wheelchair, trying to get an Arizona Republican aide fired from three different jobs, berating a young GOP activist on the night of his own 1986 Senate election and many more.
McCain observers say the incidents have been blown out of proportion.
Read the whole article for a long, shocking list of incidents, most of which I’d never heard about before. He’s a mean bastard. Here’s one:
In 1992, McCain sparred with Dolores Alfond, the chairwoman of the National Alliance of Families for the Return of America’s Missing Servicemen and Women, at a Senate hearing. McCain’s prosecutorlike questioning of Alfond – available on YouTube[above] – left her in tears.
Four years later, at her group’s Washington conference, about 25 members went to a Senate office building, hoping to meet with McCain. As they stood in the hall, McCain and an aide walked by.
Six people present have written statements describing what they saw. According to the accounts, McCain waved his hand to shoo away Jeannette Jenkins, whose cousin was last seen in South Vietnam in 1970, causing her to hit a wall.
As McCain continued walking, Jane Duke Gaylor, the mother of another missing serviceman, approached the senator. Gaylor, in a wheelchair equipped with portable oxygen, stretched her arms toward McCain.
“McCain stopped, glared at her, raised his left arm ready to strike her, composed himself and pushed the wheelchair away from him,” according to Eleanor Apodaca, the sister of an Air Force captain missing since 1967.
Yikes. That seems to me to be a perfect thing to highlight in a chain email. This guy is not in control.
Now, hard core conservatives actually like this behavior. They think it means that McCain will kick some enemy ass, whether wives or Democrats or Russians or terrorists or any of the others on their long line of hated adversaries. But the non-political swing voters out there, particularly women, might just think twice if they knew this about him. And I don’t think they do.
Unfortunately, we have a little problem:
“Yeah, he has a temper,” said Democratic vice presidential nominee and Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joseph Biden of Delaware. “It’s obvious. You’ve seen it.
“But is John whatever his opposition painted him to be, this unstable guy who came out of a prisoner of war camp not capable of (acting rationally)? I don’t buy that at all.”
Somebody needs to tell Joe that he can kiss and make up after the election, but that all these personal testimonials for the guy who is running on his superior character aren’t helpful to get that done.
And in any case, being president requires control:
“Diplomacy is not often dealing with reasonable people,” said Steve Clemons, an analyst at the New America Foundation, a centrist public policy group.
“In the nuclear age, you don’t want someone flying off the handle, so it’s a critical question: Can McCain control his temper?” asked Thomas De Luca, professor of political science at Fordham University in New York.
This is where Obama’s “coolness” becomes an attractive characteristic. I think most people really do want someone with an eve, rational temperament to run the most powerful country in the world. And even the most hot tempered of presidents never nearly punched a disabled woman in a wheelchair or called his own wife a cunt in front of reporters.
History is an inexact guide, because little evidence is available tying temper to action.
Smith, the historian, has found that according to Tobias Lear, George Washington’s secretary, “few sounds on earth could compare with that of George Washington swearing a blue streak.”
On the other hand, Smith said, Washington could control himself. “One reason George Washington is this cold-blooded marble figure is that he became expert in controlling his temper,” he said.
Other presidents have similar histories. Thomas Jefferson, Smith said, could be a “red-faced chief executive throwing his hat on the floor before stomping on it.”
Truman had his angry letters, and one that got out showed quite a temper.
“It seems to me that you are a frustrated old man who wishes he could have been successful,” Truman wrote Washington Post music critic Paul Hume in 1950, after Hume had panned first daughter Margaret Truman’s singing performance.
Added the angry father, “Some day I hope to meet you. When that happens you’ll need a new nose, a lot of beefsteak for black eyes and perhaps a supporter below!”
Bill Clinton’s infamous red-faced tirades tended to be endured by staffers in the privacy of the White House rather than public displays.
The important question, Dallek said, is whether and how McCain controls his outbursts. Though his aides insist that his temper is simply a way of expressing passion – and that he sometimes uses it for effect – some observers remain concerned.
“It seems the only way to deal with John McCain is to think the way he does,” said Hinz, the former Arizona GOP official who now runs an insurance reform advocacy group in Phoenix. “If he gets more power, what’s going to make him suddenly become a fuzzy, nice guy?”
Nothing. He’s obviously always been an uncontrolled, undisciplined personality with a mean streak a mile long that goes far beyond the normal boundaries of political — hell, any boundries — of proper behavior. It’s not just blowing off steam or venting like the incidents described above with Washington or Clinton and neither is it done for political effect as it almost certainly was with Truman. This is real and it’s apparently uncontrolled and that’s a very big worry.
At this point we have to hope he doesn’t sit down and talk to our enemies if he becomes president because he will in all likelihood start World War Three.
Look, the McCain campaign want to run this entire race on the issue of character — specifically his character. I say, bring it. His temperament is unstable and his behavior is erratic. This man is entirely unsuited to a position of great power and people need to know that. And once you know it, you look at him and see that it’s absolutely true. His anger and arrogance are written all over his face.
The mainstream media know all about this, of course, and have protected him all these years because they are immature fanboy twits who think McCain’s antics are awesomely manly acts of awesome manliness. But the mainstream media aren’t responsible for nearly 15% of the country believing Obama is a muslim, but the word got out anyway.
Copy and paste this article and send it to everyone you know. Include the Youtube url so they can see him snarl. Some people may like it, true. But regardless, it puts a dent in his heroic character theme. All American heroes don’t shove ladies in wheelchairs no matter how mad they get. They just don’t.
Am I saying the election is lost? Well, despite Biden’s effusive praise of McCain which overshadows all his criticism that follows, and despite Clinton’s bizarre refusal to attack an extreme rightwing ignoramus for being, you know, an extreme rightwing ignoramus, I still think Obama can win.
Why? Because there happen to be millions upon millions of people in this country who are genuinely terrified about the prospect of four more years of McCain-Bush. And they just may be far more numerous than the polls show. And they are not prepared to to accept four more years of catastrophic McCain-Bush governance.
And also because there happen to be millions upon millions of people in this country who are genuinely inspired by Obama’s extraordinary character, vision, and proposals.
Cue a few commenters to note it’s still a good idea for Democrats to let a news cycle slide. Cue a few others to urge Democrats to take the high road, ignore personal attacks, and refuse to attack lies and corruption. Workin’ real well, isn’t it?
MSNBC tried a bold experiment this year by putting two politically incendiary hosts, Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews, in the anchor chair to lead the cable news channel’s coverage of the election.
That experiment appears to be over.
After months of accusations of political bias and simmering animosity between MSNBC and its parent network NBC, the channel decided over the weekend that the NBC News correspondent and MSNBC host David Gregory would anchor news coverage of the coming debates and election night. Mr. Olbermann and Mr. Matthews will remain as analysts during the coverage.
The change — which comes in the home stretch of the long election cycle — is a direct result of tensions associated with the channel’s perceived shift to the political left.
It was obviously also a result of the spitting and hissing between the two anchors during the coverage, but it’s pretty clear that NBC is taking some serious heat from the GOP and this is, after all, the house that Jack built. They’ll keep Matthews and Olberman on, of course, and they’ve added Maddow. But the word has gone forth and there will be adjustments, many of them small and nearly subconscious. They will hardly even know they’re doing it.
There is a truly brilliant short article about Georgia by George Friedman in the current NY Review of Books. It also includes a simple map [with a color scheme we colorblind folks can perceive, thank God] that makes it quite clear how serious the two areas of conflict – Abkhazia and South Ossetia – are for regional stability. Even for those of us who have no illusions that Bush foreign policy is in any way competent, the sheer stupidity of contemporary American diplomacy towards Russia is breathtaking. [And as noted earlier , the incompetent Rice has now been shoved aside by the dangerously incompetent Cheney.]
First, Friedman summarizes the recent conflict. Basically, Russia was baiting Georgia. Georgia, stupidly, bit. Then he asks the question everyone should be asking, but with rare exception, doesn’t:
Why did the Georgians choose to invade South Ossetia on August 7? There had been a great deal of shelling by the South Ossetians of Georgian villages for the previous three nights, but while possibly more intense than usual, such artillery exchanges were routine. The Georgians might not have fought well, but they committed fairly substantial forces that must have taken at the very least several days to deploy and supply. Georgia’s move was deliberate.
The United States is Georgia’s closest ally. It maintained about 130 military advisers in Georgia, along with civilian advisers, contractors involved in all aspects of the Georgian government, and people doing business there. (The United States conducted joint exercises with Georgian troops in July, with over a thousand US troops deployed. The Russians carried out parallel exercises in response. US troops withdrew. The Russian maneuver force remained in position and formed the core of the invading force.) It is inconceivable that the Americans were unaware of Georgia’s mobilization and intentions. It is also inconceivable that the Americans were unaware that the Russians had deployed substantial forces on the South Ossetian border. US technical intelligence, from satellite imagery and signals intelligence to unmanned aerial vehicles, could not miss the fact that thousands of Russian troops were moving to forward positions. The Russians clearly knew that the Georgians were ready to move. How could the United States not be aware of the Russians? Indeed, given the deployments of Russian troops, how could intelligence analysts have missed the possibility that Russia had laid a trap, hoping for a Georgian invasion to justify its own counterattack?
It is difficult to imagine that the Georgians launched their attack against US wishes. The Georgians rely on the United States, and they were in no position to defy it. This leaves two possibilities. The first is a huge breakdown in intelligence, in which the United States either was unaware of the deployments of Russian forces or knew of them but—along with the Georgians—miscalculated Russia’s intentions. The second is that the United States, along with other countries, has viewed Russia through the prism of the 1990s, when its military was in shambles and its government was paralyzed. The United States has not seen Russia make a decisive military move beyond its borders since the Afghan war of the 1970s and 1980s. The Russians had systematically avoided such moves for years. The United States had assumed that they would not risk the consequences of an invasion.
Imagine Bush’s surprise. No one could have anticipated, etc, etc, etc.
Read the whole thing. Much that is puzzling about this strange war gets clarified.
I love County Fair, the new blog written by Jamison Foser and Eric Boehlert. Here’s a good reason why. And here’s another. These guys are the best in the business at dissecting the media kewl kidz’s eccentric folkways and mores.
I’ve been trying to suss out what the likely October Surprise might be and recently wrote that I thought the stepped up incursions into Pakistan might be the clue. But a reader sent me an analysis from Stratfor that actually sounds more plausible. They claim that a deal with Iran may be in the works.
The report cites as evidence the fact that the Bush administration has gone silent on Iran since the Russia-Georgia war and that the US either engineered or did not not step in when Iraq has expelled the anti-Iranian terrorist group, the MeK, which has been a long standing Iranian requirement.They also point out that Iran, unlike Syria, has not sent an envoy to Moscow in aftermath of the Georgian war and have been unusually low key. There are even rumors that Cheney will meet with some Iranian envoy in Italy during his midnight train to Georgia tour.
This is, obviously, all rumor and speculation. But I wouldn’t be surprised in the least if they pulled a stunt just in time for the election and this one seems as if it might actually be possible. After all, it’s the United States that wouldn’t take yes for an answer on most of these issues up to now.
Given that the GOP never goes tit for tat but escalates, we can expect, at minimum, 2nd tier Republicans to start calling Obama a liar. After all, racist GOP CongressCritters already feel emboldened enough to call Obama “uppity” – and not apologize. And they’ve called into question his patriotism.
So Obama’s campaign, and the Dems in general, will need to double down and not back away from calling out lies when Republicans spread them (ie, whenever they open their traps). We’ll see if they do.
Oprah Winfrey has said she will not interview Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, the hottest political star in the firmament, and the decision is drawing negative reviews from many fans of the doyenne of daytime television.
Later, in the same post, Seelye writes:
…it is clear that Ms. Winfrey doesn’t want her.
That is simply untrue and Seelye knows it. In short, Seelye’s lying.
TRUE: Winfrey did express intense interest in interviewing Palin. After the election.
SEELYE KNOWS IT: Later in the same post, she writes:
Ms. Winfrey said she would be happy to interview Ms. Palin, but only after the November election.
Nor, despite what Seelye implies elsewhere in the post, is this evidence of “liberal media bias” because, as she writes:
[Winfrey] had pledged after endorsing Senator Barack Obama last year that she would not use her TV show to promote political candidates. Honoring that pledge, she declined to interview Senator Hillary Clinton during the primaries while she battled Mr. Obama for the Democratic nomination.
Ergo, Seelye is both lying outright and misleading elsewhere in her post.
Promising a ‘very bipartisan approach’ to how he’ll run his administration, Sen. John McCain said in an interview broadcast Sunday that he would appoint Democrats to his Cabinet.
Democrats like the “Independent Democrat” Joseph Lieberman. Or maybe quisling Democrats.
Apparently, working class Hillary voters don’t think Palin is all that. What a surprise:
UNIONTOWN, PA. — Trish Heckman, a 49-year-old restaurant cook and disappointed Hillary Rodham Clinton supporter, watched last week as the country’s newest political star made her explosive debut.
She followed the news when John McCain introduced Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his vice presidential running mate, paid attention to the raging debate over her qualifications, even tuned in to watch her dramatic speech at the Republican convention.
BBut when it came down to an issue Heckman really cares about — sending a daughter to college on $10.50 an hour — her desire to see a woman reach the White House took a back seat to her depleted savings account.
“I wanted Hillary to win so bad, but I saw Sarah, and it just didn’t work for me,” said Heckman, taking a break in the empty courtyard of J. Paul’s restaurant in a downtown struggling to revive. “I have no retirement. Obama understands it’s the economy. He knows how we live.”
[…]
Interviews with some two dozen women here after Palin’s convention speech found that these voters were not swayed by the fiery dramatic speeches or compelling personal biographies that marked both the Republican and Democratic conventions. Instead, they were thinking about the price of milk — nearly $5 a gallon — or the healthcare coverage that many working families here cannot afford.
Even if they admire Palin’s attempt to juggle political ambition, an infant son with Down syndrome and a pregnant unwed daughter, these women say that maternal grit is not enough to win their votes.
Waitress Judy Artice, “Miss Judy,” as she is known at Glisan’s roadside diner, declared Palin “the perfect candidate” after watching her Wednesday speech. That said, Artice had already decided that her vote would go to the first candidate who mentioned gasoline prices.
“And — I’ll be danged — it was Obama,” Artice, 46, said between servings of liver and onions during the lunch rush.
Both campaigns have signaled that these blue-collar hamlets could be where the election will be decided, an assessment made even more likely when the nation’s unemployment rate hit a five-year high in August.
[…]
Life here is basic and hard. Coal miners still work the mountains. The upscale Nemacolin Woodlands Resort just down the road is replete with shops and restaurants that Uniontown residents can’t afford.
And residents describe their downtown, where a portrait of native son and five-star general George C. Marshall covers a building several stories high, as “quaint but sad.”
If these women are any indication, the threat to Obama’s camp is not that they will side with McCain but that they will stay home, as Heckman, the restaurant chef and single mother of two, says many people on her block plan to do.
But those disenchanted voters could be balanced by newly inspired ones, such as Jennifer Glisan, 23, an emergency medical technician who saves lives every week but cannot afford health insurance. Clinton’s gender was enough to awaken her political interest, but Palin’s failed to hold it.
“I think Palin is a fake. She will run the economy into the ground,” Glisan said after catching glimpses of the vice presidential nominee’s speech between emergency calls.
“I have to kill myself every day at work to earn enough to pay for gas to get there. I think Obama is sincere. I think we need a change.”
I have thought from the beginning that the Palin choice was more about getting the base motivated than going after disaffected Hillary voters. That just didn’t scan for me. The women in those Ohio and Pennsylvania towns and hamlets who voted for Hillary were Democrats, after all. If they were far right social conservatives, they would be firmly in the Republican camp already.
I think McCain’s appeal to swing votes and independents isn’t going to be on the basis of Palin’s gender (which does help inoculate her in the media after their sexist overkill during the Dem primary)but the more general appeal to “reform.” He wants to portray himself as the kind of guy who will think outside the box (like picking someone with very little experience to be the first female on the GOP national ticket!) and do things differently. I doubt that’s going to be enough. He’s still a Republican and Republicans got us in this mess.
Carville said on CNN today that the pitch is simple: “If you think that what America needs is another tax cut for people making over half a million dollars a year, then vote for McCain. If you think middle-class people are struggling, that their incomes are going down and they need help, vote for Obama. It’s a very simple choice out there, I think.”
The Bush administration seized control Sunday of troubled mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, aiming to stabilize the housing market turmoil that is threatening financial markets and the overall economy.
…I was once a loudmouth on the young-earth creationist bandwagon…
Is it “indoctrination” if we teach the history of the Holocaust and do not give equal time to the deniers of the Holocaust?
Is it indoctrination if we teach astronomy and make no mention of astrology?
Is it indoctrination if we teach the heliocentric view of the solar system without giving equal time to geocentrists?
Asking for equal time for “alternatives” to evolution is in exactly the same category. It is asking that a point of view with nothing but questions and complaints to offer be treated as the equal of a scientific field of research that has been remarkably productive and consistently confirmed by all sorts of evidence not available when the theory was first formulated. The media makes much of being “fair” in trying to always hear another side of the story, and there is something indeed laudable about checking to see if there is an opposing viewpoint. Too many of us forget to do that, and forget too often. But not every opposing viewpoint has merit, and the reason we have education standards is to ensure that educators do not waste time on nonsense to the detriment of things that are truly important, valuable, and (ultimately) true.