Archive for September, 2008

Why is this man smiling?

So, apparently Slippery Jim isn’t quite as tone deaf as one might have thought. He voted no as the house rejected the $700 billion bailout plan — and the stock market plummeted. Ooops.

Well, now we know: it’s everyone for themselves now in the GOP — and Gerlach tossed John McCain overboard, which from a purely political standpoint, made some sense, as the GOP nominee is doomed now, thanks to the economic meltdown.

Will the failed vote get Congress to put together a meaningful bill, one that addresses the foreclosure crisis and requires fiscal transparency in our financial institutions? One would hope so — but I dunno what’s going to happen. Were it not for all of the innocent people who will lose jobs and homes, I’d probably favor letting Wall Street take a bath — but sadly, punishing them properly punishes all of us much worse, and we’re going to start feeling it more in the coming days as companies start having trouble meeting payrolls later this week as credit continues to dry up.

But either way, McCain is toast, and deservedly so. How Gerlach’s move to abandon the GOP nominee plays among the rock-ribbed Republicans, after they get a couple of days to digest all of this, is hard to predict. We shall see.

An unfortunate Web marketing choice by Jim Gerlach

Look, I’m the first to acknowledge that a government intervention is needed to save Wall Street from its greed. But the bill presented — and made much worse by the whiny Republicans in the House — should be defeated.

Why? All of the relief is for companies and rich fats cats — and there’s nothing for average homeowners. Nada. The GOP whiners insisted — with John McCain’s help — that any provision in the bill that might actually help average people be removed from the bill. Since it doesn’t help the underlying credit problem — and the real estate crisis, the bill won’t do what is intended and it will be days — before the finger pointing starts about who screwed who — and the Republicans are going to hammered in the end.

Okay, fine, McCain clearly is looking for free time, as the lack of help for average people dooms the Arizona senator’s presidential hopes — but this also hits close to home. Right here in the sixth congressional district of Pennsylvania, a race that seemed little better than a long shot for Bob Roggio against incumbent Jim Gerlach now will likely turn on his vote on the proposal.

Put simply, if Gerlach votes for this mess, he’s done for. A kindergartner could shred the three-term incumbent over this issue — and it will be interesting to see if Gerlach is as tone deaf to policy as he has seemed to be since 2002.

Both Barack Obama and John McCain say they support the $85 billion buyout of insurance giant AIG — and on the face of it, because of the impact on the world economy — it’s hard to argue against it. And I suppose that the new regulations on shorting — and government buyout of bad loans is a little bit like picking up the survivors of a ship sinking.

But there’s a couple of problems with it, the first and foremost being: where’s the money coming from to pay for this? The second is this: these companies lobbied and fought for deregulation that allowed them to play in risky markets — such as investing in poor-credit risk mortgage bundling funds — and now expect the government to take on the risk when the gamble fails.

Read the rest of this entry »

John McCain, as seen in his commercials

I decided to wait a few days to post anything, mostly because the last few days of the presidential campaign have made me so angry — I’m not sure I can trust myself not to say something I’d regret later.

Granted, the whole mess is frustrating and leads to a sense of de ja vu all over again — where we enter the bizarro world of presidential elections when facts stop mattering and whomever can lie the best wins. Just so we’re clear on this: John McCain is a bald-faced liar. As are his campaign trolls, who lacking anything like a semblance of fact on their side, are basically just making things up.

I suppose having it done to me four years ago should have made me less annoyed to see it again. And it’s a good thing that Obama continues to strike back, instead of stammering uselessly as both John Kerry and I did.

Read the rest of this entry »

Ronald Reagan

Many years from now, when historians look back and try to identify the precise end of the Reagan Revolution, many will probably point to Election Day, 2008 as the day the era ended. Truth be told, though, the real time of death will be at some point this week, probably sometime Wednesday night.

Like the death of the New Deal, which destroyed itself by excess, loss of vision and finally an intellectual bankruptcy that rendered the true-believers into little more than mantra-repeating sychophants, the death of the modern conservatism has been such a gradual slide that few have noticed the decline or the warning signs of the end, no matter how profound they might be.

Both eras lasted more than 40 years, even managing to overlap a bit, as one waned and the other picked up steam. The so-called Reagan Revolution really began with Barry Goldwater and an attack on the supposedly liberal media. One last time into the breech went the adherants this week, attacking the media for noting, rather gently, I might add, that the former party of small government had exploded the deficit, spent wildly and created a much-more intrusive government.

Read the rest of this entry »

When life imitates art.

We all went to high school with Sarah Palin. Maybe we aren’t all members of the Wasilla class of ’82 — but we all share that memory.

Whatever your Sarah was named, you know what I mean. Mine was a particularly ruthless girl named Sue. She was the head cheerleader, the editor of the high school paper. She liked to pretend she was all sweetness and light — but inside: cold, hard steel and ambition. Nothing much was going to get between her and what she wanted. Don’t be surprised if that reminds you a bit of the movie Election — which no one in the media has been savvy enough to pick up on outside of MSNBC’s Keith Olberman — although the reality is a bit more like the novel of the same the film is based on.

Read the rest of this entry »

This has all played out, I suppose, the way you might have predicted: the Republicans as ranking playground bully run right to momma when someone socks ‘em in the nose. I’m just impressed that the GOP media operatives are able to make the claims they’ve made with a straight face. While the GOP media strike team has made more than its share of blunders in the past two weeks, you have them give them points for sheer ballsyness.

But everything does seem to be going to form: the Palin revelation of the day — and you’d think this stuff would slow down, but it keeps coming fast and furious.

Read the rest of this entry »

God, I can’t believe today’s events have forced me to write three times today. Three times! It’s not like I don’t need to get prepped for football practice or anything. Oh, wait, I do (yeah, I’m coaching six and seven year olds in the local Y league).

But, sometimes you just have to go with the flow. Wolf Blitzer, one of America’s great self-parodying personalities (every other word is “thebestpoliticalteamontelevision”) had to just come on the air and announce that John McCain refused to do an interview with Larry King because CNN’s Campbell Brown was “mean” to a McCain campaign stooge last night.

Read the rest of this entry »

Sen. Joe Lieberman

Well, then. So it seems that John McCain’s first choice for the GOP Vice Presidental nomination was Sen. Joe Lieberman, who was the Democratic nominee for the same job in 2000. It would have been a gutsy pick — and been smart politically, too, as it would have changed the entire dialog of the race.

But, Rush Limbaugh threatened a jihad and that was that. Just in the way that the tales of Sarah Palin being a reformer are unraveling before our eyes (and the news gets worse, it seems), the claims that John McCain is some sort of maverick, willing to buck his party or the right-wing, hardcore elements of the party is fiction. If you can’t stand up to people in your own party to what you think is right, how are you going to stand up to the Russians or the Chinese?

I’m beginning to wonder whether McCain might be the first presidential candidate in ages to get a downward bounce coming out of his convention. Between the Palin fiasco, the Lieberman stories and all of the other issues cropping up this week, I don’t how McCain and Republicans avoid taking a big hit in the coming weeks.

The Palin Family.

Barack Obama, God love him, argued yesterday that the families of the candidates are off-limits in politics. The truth of the matter — which I suspect he knows deep down — is that they are very much in play. If you trot out the kids to show what a loving, wonderful family person you are (and what politician doesn’t — me included) and then something happens, they get shoved into the spotlight. That’s just the way it is.

And I’m sorry that Bristol Palin is being forced into the spotlight. It has to be lousy to be a 17-year-old girl, a senior in high school, and pregnant. Multiply the factor of awfulness when your mom is the governor. Now take that number and cube it when your mom becomes the GOP nominee for Vice President. I personally, as a father, feel awful for Bristol Palin.

Read the rest of this entry »