Yesterday, senile candidate for the presidency John McCain was supposed to appear on David Letterman.
He didn’t.
Why? Well, he personally called Dave to tell him that he was headed to Washington DC to help with the financial crisis. The problem is, they don’t NEED his help with this crisis… and he didn’t even leave New York! He went to do an interview with Katie Couric instead.
Dave was rightfully furious. The good news for us is that Couric also works for CBS, and around there Dave is king. He got a live feed of the McCain interview and called him out for lying to him: “Hey John, do you need a ride to the airport?!”
Here is the video from last night’s show:
Earlier in the day, Barney Frank, who is the House Financial Services Committee Chairman, was asked by David Gregory:
Was McCain’s announcement today political leadership? Or just politics?
Frank answered:
It’s just a stunt. Frankly it sounds like he is setting himself up to take credit for something that is happening without him. We just finished a hearing this afternoon where [the members] agreed on certain things we have been critical of. This is Mr. McCain seeing bad polls and attempting to come in and take credit for something that is happening without him.
Barney Frank on McCain and the bailout:
“Country First?” Sounds to me like CAMPAIGN first.
Yesterday at a rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin, Barack Obama outlined his plans for instituting economic reform.
This was more than a standard stump speech, it was a new vision for government. The content of the speech, not necessary the delivery, was what impressed me, although he speaks with tremendous power and confidence about his ideas. He listed one idea after the other, spelling out his intentions to overhaul the current practices and open up the door to new and better ones.
The way he is looking to open government to the American people to participate and review what he is doing sounds like a dream, but the chance that this could be reality really does excite me.
He truly seems to be on a mission to dismantle the old way of Washington, but will they let him?
There’s a lot at stake and the ideas he’s putting forward will threaten the status quo tremendously. He’s spelling it out clearly and putting them on notice, as of now.
John McCain couldn’t hold a candle to this.
Please take 22 minutes of your time (less time than it takes to watch a sitcom) and see what this man is all about:
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Here’s a summary of the speech:
*Members of the administration will not be able to work on regulation related to the work of previous employers, and when they leave they will not be able to lobby the administration at all.
*Transparency. Make pork barelling impossible. Put bills online for five days before they are passed by the president. Meetings between lobbyists and government agencies should be put online. Tax bills should mention which corporations will benefit and by how much.
*Makes mention of improving health care access, college affordability and energy independence (no details on implementation).
*We are spending $10 billion a month in Iraq, we should be using that money to improve infrastructure here in the US. No mention of how he intends to reduce costs of war in Iraq.
*Reduce Medicare fraud (equals about $15 billion a year). Use money to make prescription drugs affordable.
*End $3 billion in government subsidies to banks for providing student loans.
*Reduce farm subsidies
*Reduce waste - promised to cut government programs that don’t work (mentions only the Bush reading program but nothing else). Wants government bodies to work better at a lower cost by improving efficiency (by firing underperforming managers and using technology).
*Private contracts are inefficient. Metions story of Haliburton printing logo on towels for the US military because the government is willing to pay whatever it costs.
*Shut down corporate abuse in tax system. Close loopholes and offshore tax havens.
*Income tax - 95% will get tax cut. Anyone under $250,000 will not pay more tax. Seniors earning < $50,000 will not pay any income tax.
*Financial Regulation: If the government is going to lend money to the banks, they must subject themselves to greater government oversight. Credit rating agencies must disclose conflicts of interest. Streamline overlapping government agencies (which ones?). Regulation needs to be reformed (Mortgage brokers have less regulation than Thrift and Savings with regard to the same things). Stop market manipulation, toughen up SEC. Establish agency that evaluates risk and advises congress and the president so that financial disasters are avoided.
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This isn’t going to be easy.
All the Republicans have to do is mention abortion, gays, and remind their drooling supporters that they alone have a monopoly on patriotism and morality. The US has been split in half over the past 8 years and reason has been cast aside.
Where is John McCain’s detailed plan? He is probably too busy worrying about how he is going to try to pass the lie that he is a regulator and reformer when his entire campaign is crawling with asshole lobbyists and his record is riddled with deregulation (google McCain Keating 5).
In the last couple weeks it has been CLEAR that McCain’s strategy is to play both sides of every argument so he can later say that he was for or against something (whenever it is convenient). This way he can appeal to both is drooling neocon supporters and try to pander to national audiences. I really hope that 51% of my country is smart enough to see this… but I’m not holding my breath.
I’m voting Obama but I’m close to despairing for much of my fellow Americans. They’ve all gone stupid crazy.
If this guy doesn’t make it… the US as a country has failed.
Wall Street rallied in a stunning late-session turnaround Thursday, shooting higher and hurtling the Dow Jones industrials up 400 points following a report that the federal government might create an entity to absorb banks’ bad debt.
What does this mean? Essientially this: “Dear Taxpayers, Congratulations on absorbing all the bad debt in the Finance Market. Sincerely, The FED“ (Articles Here and Here)
That was yesterday. This is today:
46 days before the presidential election, the agency that The Economist called the “Selective Enforcement Commission” has proposed blocking short sales of shares in financial companies.
This is not the temporary restraint of “naked” shorts on a handful of companies, but a broad ban with the net effect of manipulating the stock market upward during the period leading into the election.
In simpler terms, they’re manipulating the stock market upward to make you wonderful citizens think everything is just fine. It’s not.
They’re basically saying it’s OK to speculate on oil futures as long as all kinds of profits are being made, but now the govt. has to step in because these same vultures are losing their shirts. The rich folks’ portfolios are taking a hit; please Mr. Government Man step in and stop this! It’s fine when the middle class loses everything, but not us rich, speculator types, after all, we are the ones that finance your reelection campaigns…
This temporary ban is a bullshit ploy to make Joe Average Investor believe the market is secure. It is also a convenient distraction from what caused the hollow market in the first place.
This is corporate welfare. This is SOCIALISM. This is scary.
McCain is still fucking clueless and claims that the ‘fundamentals of the economy are sound.’ He’s fucking senile. How senile? Yesterday he tried to look all tough and said that if he was president today he would fire the Chairman of the SEC. The problem is the president DOESN’T HAVE THE AUTHORITY TO FIRE THE CHAIRMAN OF THE SEC. Try again, Johnny. Obama seems to understand things and genuinely want to patch up the weak parts of the system. That is not enough either. Band-aids on a system so thoroughly fucked will only delay the inevitable.
Very few politicians have been truthful to us and actually understand this situation… Ron Paul being one of them:
He is right. The end to this comes when people reject the dollar. This will be worse than the great depression of the ’20s. I have sold off all my stock and am quickly looking for a way to get both my savings account and my 401k into foreign currencies. I suggest you do the same.
This edition of Republicans vs. Facts is dedicated to Sarah Palin, or as I like to call her “caribou barbie”.
Is this a hug? Or a Jr. High dance?
LIE #1: “I SOLD THE GOVERNOR’S JET ON EBAY” -Sarah Palin
LIE #1.5: “She took the luxury jet that was acquired by her predecessor and sold it on Ebay—and made a profit!” -John McCain
No, no you didn’t, barbie. You LISTED it on eBay THREE TIMES with no takers.
After the failed eBay attempts, she put the plane up for sale through a conventional airplane broker. The plane was finally unloaded at a substantial loss. (Murkowski had purchased the plane for $2.6 million. McCain’s latest howler to the side, it sold for $2.1 million.)
Meanwhile, the state had continued to pay a $62,500 quarterly note on the plane during the months when Palin’s eBay gambit failed. Using eBay had sometimes worked in the past, but it failed when the hockey mom tried it for this major asset; the “pitbull in lipstick” forgets to say that when she pimps her brilliant maneuver. And McCain misstated the basic facts when he pimped Palin’s brilliance last week. No, she didn’t sell it on eBay. And no, it wasn’t sold at a profit.
Sarah, you fooled McCain so that he would repeat your lie and then the RIGHT WING MASS MEDIA just took the lie and ran with it over and over and over and over. It’s SIMPLY NOT TRUE. (reference articles HERE and HERE)
Also, which should be noted, it’s not a rare thing for the state of Alaska to list big ticket items on eBay due to how easy it is and its large audience. It’s not like Craigslist Anchorage is hopping with potential airplane buyers. As of right now, Alaska has 38 items on eBay… including 3 aircraft. Maverick my ass.
LIE #2: Sarah Palin stopped the ‘bridge to nowhere’
The reference is to a proposed bridge to a remote Alaskan community that would have cost the U.S. government more than $223 million. Palin has said repeatedly that she told the federal government: “Thanks, but no thanks.” In fact, the money for the bridge WAS given to Alaska, only to be spent on other projects, including a $25M “road to nowhere” that leads up to the empty beach where the bridge was going to be. Quite a maverick, indeed.
As a candidate for governor, however, Palin supported the bridge.
We need to come to the defense of southeast Alaska when proposals are on the table, like the bridge, and not allow the spinmeisters to turn this project or any other into something that’s so negative,” Palin said in August 2006, according to the Ketchikan Daily News.
LIE #3: Sarah’s heartwarming story about how she had to fire her chef at the governor’s mansion.
NOT TRUE.
Palin didn’t fire the chef - she transferred her to the Republican state legislature to cook gourmet meals in their legislative lounge.
Aside from having listed a state plane on eBay, the most popular anecdotal example of Sarah Palin’s credentials as a reformer has been her firing the governor’s chef. This has been quickly seized on by
clueless Lower 48 Palin partisans as a colorful example of belt-tighting via downhome folksiness: Palin didn’t just kick out the “uppity” gourmet chef, she claimed she planned on cooking herself, with her kids chipping in to make sandwiches.
As you might expect, this turns out to be another Palin fabrication. The 6/29/07 Anchorage Daily News article about the firing actually reveals the shocking truth behind the deception. First, firing the governor’s chef saved no money at all, because the chef was transferred, not fired. In the article, an e-mail from the
fired chef, Stefani Marnon, to friends and colleagues is quoted as saying “Friday will be my last day at the house, but I will still be employed with the state.”
The chef Sarah fired in fact still prepares elitist gourmet meals in Juneau for government employees, just not in the Governor’s Mansion.
According to an item in this ADN article from 1/20/08:
“Stefani Marnon was first reassigned as a ‘constituent relations assistant’ in the governor’s office and later to the state museum. Earwigs report she’s finally landed where they really appreciate a good chef: the Legislative Lounge. Lawmakers were smacking their lips in anticipation, according to Sen. Kim Elton’s newsletter.”
Sarah Palin, far from being a down-home fiscal hawk standing up to a decadent government culture, first placed Marnon in a make-work job, then placed the chef where her presence would most appeal to political
insiders, literally catering to the finicky taste buds of state politicians.
LIE #4: The banks the government just took over were “too big and too expensive to the taxpayers”
FALSE.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac weren’t taxpayer funded but operated as private companies. The takeover may result in a taxpayer bailout during reorganization. The takeover itself is what is going to fuck over taxpayers.
Speaking before voters in Colorado Springs, the Republican vice presidential nominee claimed that lending giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had “gotten too big and too expensive to the taxpayers.”
Economists and analysts pounced on the misstatement, which came before the government had spent funds bailing the two entities out, saying it demonstrated a lack of understanding about one of the key economic issues likely to face the next administration.
“You would like to think that someone who is going to be vice president and conceivable president would know what Fannie and Freddie do,” said Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. “These are huge institutions and they are absolutely central to our country’s mortgage debt. To not have a clue what they do doesn’t speak well for her, I’d say.”
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Ok, ok, I know you’re wondering why all of this matters.
Here is why. So far they have defined Sarah as a hockey mom, a maverick reformer, and a challenger to Washington politics. All of her claims to support the last 2 have been debunked.
That just leaves us with a hockey mom. That fucking scares me.
UPDATE:
FINALLY Obama is fighting back. What the hell took so long? Here is the latest ad from the Obama camp:
The republicans wasted 4 days of convention using grade school slander to bash Obama. They didn’t mention anything that mattered like the economy or health care or the middle class. Joe Biden calls them out on this.
It’s not so much what I heard… it’s what I didn’t hear. The silence of the republican party was deafening. On jobs, on healthcare, on the environment. [] What do you talk about when you have nothing to say? What do you talk about when you cannot explain the last 8 years of failure? You talk about the other guy. -Joe Biden 11/5/2008
I can’t WAIT until October 2nd when Joe debates the 6-year-5-school-journalism-degree hockey mom. No wonder she’s such a woooonderful speaker. If I had 6 years of journalism school under my belt I could belch out lies for an hour and make it sound good too.
Last night I was watching the Rethuglican convention and it made me ill. For an hour I heard nothing but slander and hate topped with lie after goddamn lie. I’m sick of this shit. How retarded to they think we are? Maybe that’s the wrong approach. How retarded are THEY?
Here’s a little breakdown of some things said last night and how they match up against the facts:
PALIN:
“I have protected the taxpayers by vetoing wasteful spending … and championed reform to end the abuses of earmark spending by Congress. I told the Congress ‘thanks but no thanks’ for that Bridge to Nowhere.”
THE FACTS: As mayor of Wasilla, Palin hired a lobbyist and traveled to Washington annually to support earmarks for the town totaling $27 million. In her two years as governor, Alaska has requested nearly $750 million in special federal spending, by far the largest per-capita request in the nation. While Palin notes she rejected plans to build a $398 million bridge from Ketchikan to an island with 50 residents and an airport, that opposition came only after the plan was ridiculed nationally as a “bridge to nowhere.”
PALIN:
“There is much to like and admire about our opponent. But listening to him speak, it’s easy to forget that this is a man who has authored two memoirs but not a single major law or reform — not even in the state senate.”
THE FACTS: Compared to McCain and his two decades in the Senate, Obama does have a more meager record. But he has worked with Republicans to pass legislation that expanded efforts to intercept illegal shipments of weapons of mass destruction and to help destroy conventional weapons stockpiles. The legislation became law last year. To demean that accomplishment would be to also demean the work of Republican Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana, a respected foreign policy voice in the Senate. In Illinois, he was the leader on two big, contentious measures in Illinois: studying racial profiling by police and requiring recordings of interrogations in potential death penalty cases. He also successfully co-sponsored major ethics reform legislation.
PALIN:
“The Democratic nominee for president supports plans to raise income taxes, raise payroll taxes, raise investment income taxes, raise the death tax, raise business taxes, and increase the tax burden on the American people by hundreds of billions of dollars.”
THE FACTS: The Tax Policy Center, a think tank run jointly by the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute, concluded that Obama’s plan would increase after-tax income for middle-income taxpayers by about 5 percent by 2012, or nearly $2,200 annually. McCain’s plan, which cuts taxes across all income levels, would raise after tax-income for middle-income taxpayers by 3 percent, the center concluded.
Obama would provide $80 billion in tax breaks, mainly for poor workers and the elderly, including tripling the Earned Income Tax Credit for minimum-wage workers and higher credits for larger families.
This makes it a little easier for you people who don’t know what to believe:
So sure, Barack Obama is going to raise your taxes… IF YOU MAKE MORE THAN $603k/year. If you make less than $112k/year you will get a larger tax break under Obama than you would McCain.
MCCAIN:
“She’s been governor of our largest state, in charge of 20 percent of America’s energy supply … She’s responsible for 20 percent of the nation’s energy supply. I’m entertained by the comparison and I hope we can keep making that comparison that running a political campaign is somehow comparable to being the executive of the largest state in America,”
he said in an interview with ABC News’ Charles Gibson.
THE FACTS: McCain’s phrasing exaggerates both claims. Palin is governor of a state that ranks second nationally in crude oil production, but she’s no more “responsible” for that resource than President Bush was when he was governor of Texas, another oil-producing state. In fact, her primary power is the ability to tax oil, which she did in concert with the Alaska Legislature. And where Alaska is the largest state in America, McCain could as easily have called it the 47th largest state — by population.
MCCAIN:
“She’s the commander of the Alaska National Guard. … She has been in charge, and she has had national security as one of her primary responsibilities,”
he said on ABC.
THE FACTS: While governors are in charge of their state guard units, that authority ends whenever those units are called to actual military service. When guard units are deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, for example, they assume those duties under “federal status,” which means they report to the Defense Department, not their governors. Alaska’s national guard units have a total of about 4,200 personnel, among the smallest of state guard organizations.
FORMER ARKANSAS GOV. MIKE HUCKABEE:
Palin “got more votes running for mayor of Wasilla, Alaska than Joe Biden got running for president of the United States.”
THE FACTS: A whopper. Palin got 616 votes in the 1996 mayor’s election, and got 909 in her 1999 re-election race, for a total of 1,525. Biden dropped out of the race after the Iowa caucuses, but he still got 76,165 votes in 23 states and the District of Columbia where he was on the ballot during the 2008 presidential primaries.
FORMER MASSACHUSETTS GOV. MITT ROMNEY:
“We need change, all right — change from a liberal Washington to a conservative Washington! We have a prescription for every American who wants change in Washington — throw out the big-government liberals, and elect John McCain and Sarah Palin.”
THE FACTS: A Back-to-the-Future moment. George W. Bush, a conservative Republican, has been president for nearly eight years. And until last year, Republicans controlled Congress. Only since January 2007 have Democrats have been in charge of the House and Senate.
I love Dennis Kucinich. I hope he gets a cabinet position if/when Obama/Biden get in the whitehouse. Who has more energy and better ideas than this man?! Wake up, America!
This just gives them something more to broadcast and skew. I like how the ‘reporter’ willingly walked in to the middle of a protest to try to get an interview. That was a maneuver. Of course he wouldn’t get a reply. Of course he would get yelled at. It makes the Democratic party look bad, and that’s just what Fox News wants.
Someone should call the FCC and make sure Fox News gets fined for broadcasting a dirty, dirty word.
