Congress has apparantly made a deal to bail out Wall Street. Warren Buffett thinks they had no choice.
Billionaire Warren Buffett told congressional negotiators that if they can’t agree on a proposed financial bailout, the nation will face “its biggest financial meltdown in American history,” two sources familiar with the talks said.
Word of Buffett’s omen came hours before Democrats posted a draft of the bailout bill online and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Sunday afternoon she hoped the chamber would vote Monday.
Buffett, whom Forbes magazine has placed at No. 2 on its 2008 list of richest Americans, was one of several business experts whose opinions were sought, Sen. Kent Conrad, D-North Dakota, told reporters Saturday.
Buffett is chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. His wealth is estimated at $50 billion. Buffett was consulted by telephone, Conrad said.
The whole thing stinks, but they really didn’t have much of a choice.
Update: The House has rejected the bailout deal. It seems some are happy to play chicken with our financial system.
Both candidates did well tonight. McCain’s campaign was imploding, and he needed to get back in the game tonight. He accomplished that, despite a slow start. Obama needed to demonstrate a working knowledge of foreign policy, and he accomplished that.
I think Obama did a little better. Both had good points on Iraq, and each was able to make their respective arguments. Given that McCain has the edge on experience and foreign policy, this is a win for Obama. Along those lines, here’s the best moment of the debate for Obama.
McCain did a good job of emphasizing his experience and knowledge of the issues, and he repeated over and over his argument that Obama did not understand the issues. That said, Obama was able to deflect those by being able to speak intelligently about the issues.
We’ll see how this plays out. McCain did not hide his utter contempt for Obama. McCain always hates his opponents, and he was barely able to even look at Obama. The grouchy candidate rarely wins, so this might hurt him. Obama, on the other hand, was confident and tough without being arrogant or antagonistic.
This past Sunday, George Will ridiculed John McCain on This Week for McCain’s foolish claim that he would fire the head of the SEC. He called McCain’s actions “unpresidential.”
Under the pressure of the financial crisis, one presidential candidate is behaving like a flustered rookie playing in a league too high. It is not Barack Obama.
Channeling his inner Queen of Hearts, John McCain furiously, and apparently without even looking around at facts, said Chris Cox, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, should be decapitated. This childish reflex provoked The Wall Street Journal to editorialize that “McCain untethered” — disconnected from knowledge and principle — had made a “false and deeply unfair” attack on Cox that was “unpresidential” and demonstrated that McCain “doesn’t understand what’s happening on Wall Street any better than Barack Obama does.”
George Will is a respected conservative, but he has never been a fan of John McCain. He has been especially critical of McCain for campaign finance reform, and he hasn’t been shy in the past about questioning McCain’s temperment. Nevertheless, he seemed willing to give McCain the benefit of the doubt - until now.
Conservatives who insist that electing McCain is crucial usually start, and increasingly end, by saying he would make excellent judicial selections. But the more one sees of his impulsive, intensely personal reactions to people and events, the less confidence one has that he would select judges by calm reflection and clear principles, having neither patience nor aptitude for either.
It is arguable that, because of his inexperience, Obama is not ready for the presidency. It is arguable that McCain, because of his boiling moralism and bottomless reservoir of certitudes, is not suited to the presidency. Unreadiness can be corrected, although perhaps at great cost, by experience. Can a dismaying temperament be fixed?
Will is arguing that John McCain is unfit to be president of the United States. Throw in Sarah Palin and you have the scariest ticket in American history, following perhaps the worst president of our lifetimes.
John McCain’s latest stunt is to suggest postponing tomorrow night’s debate so that he and Obama can deal with the financial crisis. Last week he said the fundamentals of our economy were strong. Now he’s acting the the roof is falling, and Sarah Palin has apparently concluded that we face another Great Depression without this bailout.
Meanwhile, it looks like the McCain campaign might try to use this as an excuse to scuttle the VP debate.
McCain supporter Sen. Lindsey Graham tells CNN the McCain campaign is proposing to the Presidential Debate Commission and the Obama camp that if there’s no bailout deal by Friday, the first presidential debate should take the place of the VP debate, currently scheduled for next Thursday, October 2 in St. Louis.
Have we reached the point of absurdity yet? Can anyone defend John McCain and Sarah Palin with a straight face?
Joe Biden has been a gaffe machine over the past several days. He said he didn’t approve of one of Obama’s ads about John McCain, and he jumped the gun saying that the government shouldn’t bail out AIG.
Fortunately, Biden has rebounded impressively this morning, with a powerful speech on foreign policy. He delivered a blistering attack on John McCain’s foreign policy positions while providing a very persuasive argument for a new approach under a Barack Obama administration. More importantly, he attacked McCain’s judgement, explaining how McCain’s bluster is counterproductive. He also ripped Bush and McCain for ignoring al Qaeda and Afghanistan. We must find and kill Bin Laden, and Biden made that absolutely clear.
The themes in this speech were clear and powerful. I suspect Obama will be repeating all these themes on Friday in the first presidential debate.
Democrats aren’t the only ones asking questions about the latest bailout plan. Newt Gingrich has some tough questions, and he offers some suggestions as well.
Watching Washington rush to throw taxpayer money at Wall Street has been sobering and a little frightening.
We are being told Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson has a plan which will shift $700 billion in obligations from private companies to the taxpayer.
We are being warned that this $700 billion bailout is the only answer to a crisis.
We are being reassured that we can trust Secretary Paulson “because he knows what he is doing”.
Congress had better ask a lot of questions before it shifts this much burden to the taxpayer and shifts this much power to a Washington bureaucracy.
Imagine that the political balance of power in Washington were different.
If this were a Democratic administration the Republicans in the House and Senate would be demanding answers and would be organizing for a “no” vote.
One of Newt’s proposals includes repealing Sarbanes-Oxley. It’s not a bad idea.
The AIG bailout was probably necessary to avert a complete meltdown. The new proposal from Paulson deserves much more scrutiny.
Hillary just held a private conference call with Ohio Governor Ted Strickland and dozens of donors to her campaign and to Ohio Dems, urging them to plow funds into the coffers of the Ohio state party so it can help execute the ground game on Barack Obama’s behalf, a Hillary aide confirms to me.
“There isn’t any doubt that Ohio once again will be the pivotal state in this election and I know that it’s extremely close in the state,” Hillary told the donors, according to excerpts of the call sent our way by her office.
Hillary also promised extensive future visits to the state on Obama’s behalf. “I will be back campaigning up and down the state to make the case that the failed leadership of the last eight years should not be rewarded with another four,” she told the donors.
Obama’s team has been working closely with Hillary and Governor Strickland. They have an excellent ground game and lots of new voters. It will be interesting to see if that puts Obama over the top. I still think he has better opportunities in Virginia and Colorado, but he can probably lock up the election with wins in either Ohio or Florida.
The national polls are starting move back towards Obama, as the Palin hysteria subsides, the economy moves back into the spotlight and reporters start to hold John McCain accountable for his disgraceful campaign.
Ruth Marcus, another former fan of McCain, sums it up nicely.
Both candidates are guilty of playing trivial pursuit in a serious season, campaigning from gotcha to gotcha. Obama also has eagerly taken every cheap shot — McCain wants to stay in Iraq for 100 years, doesn’t get the economy, can’t count his own houses. Neither candidate is running the honest, confront-the-hard-questions campaign he promised.
McCain’s transgressions, though, are of a different magnitude. His whoppers are bigger; there are more of them. He — the easy out would be to say “his campaign” — has been misleading, and at times has outright lied, about his opponent. He has misrepresented — that’s the charitable verb — his vice presidential nominee’s record. Called on these fouls, he has denied and repeated them.
The most outrageous of McCain’s distortions involve Obama on taxes. He asserts that Obama’s new taxes could “break your family budget,” and that an Obama presidency would inflict “painful tax increases on working American families.” Hardly. Obama would lower taxes for most households, and lower them more than McCain would. The only “painful tax increases on working American families” would be on working families making more than $250,000.
Likewise, the McCain campaign has its story about Sarah Palin, and it’s sticking with it — facts be damned. She said “thanks but no thanks” to that “Bridge to Nowhere,” except that she didn’t: She backed the bridge until it was unpopular, then scooped up the money and used it for other projects. More than a year after McCain began railing against the bridge, Palin, then a gubernatorial candidate, said the state should build it “now — while our congressional delegation is in a strong position to assist.”
Palin sold the gubernatorial jet, on eBay and for a profit — except that she didn’t. She didn’t take earmarks as governor — except for the $256 million she sought last year, and the $197 million wish list for 2008.
The McCain campaign has been hoping that the media’s obsession with presenting both sides would hide their blatant lies. But they’ve gone so far that John McCain himself got caught in a blatant lie about Sarah Palin and earmarks by the hosts of the View!
Another member of the John McCain fan club in the press has seen the light. Richard Cohen admits to being a fan of McCain for years, citing his integrity. He now acknowledges that McCain has abandoned everything he once stood for.
Following his loss to George W. Bush in the 2000 South Carolina primary, John McCain did something extraordinary: He confessed to lying about how he felt about the Confederate battle flag, which he actually abhorred. “I broke my promise to always tell the truth,” McCain said. Now he has broken that promise so completely that the John McCain of old is unrecognizable. He has become the sort of politician he once despised.
Read the entire column, then ask yourself if McCain is fit to be president.
Do we really want someone this extreme in the White House? ABC reports how Sarah Palin asked the librarian at a city council meeting what she would do if Palin asked her to remove certain books from the library’s collection. The librarian made it clear she would not remove any books. Several months later Palin fired her, but then reinstated her after an uproar in the town.
She’s quite a reformer! Sarah Palin’s earmarks rank up there with some of the stranger ones we’ve seen.
According to Alaska’s 2009 catalog of earmark requests the state’s sea life are in great need of federal money. As Politico points out, Palin’s office requested $2 million in federal monies to study crab mating habits; $494,900 for the recreational halibut harvest and $3.2 million for seal genetics research.
Again, this stuff is very routine, but on a daily basis they are repeating the lie that she is a “reformer” when it comes to earmarks. It doesn’t pass the smell test.
If you voted for George W. Bush, and now realize his campaign promises were mostly BS, how can you believe the BS coming from this campaign, which is being run by the same people?
This campaign is no different from a campaign for low-fat potato chips. The marketer hypes up lower fat content, and gullible consumers think they’re eating health food. Then they look in the mirror and wonder why they’re still fat.
Look in the mirror, and ask yourself if you’re buying their bullshit.
You know things are getting bad when Fox News gets in on the act. John McCain has not held a press conference for one month. Sarah Palin has held a single press conference. They cry about attacks, but they are unwilling, or unable, to defend their own positions.
For a candidate who once railed against “stale soundbites, staged rallies and over-managed messages,” John McCain seems to have turned over a new leaf.
Today marks the four-week anniversary since McCain held his last press conference (8/13 in Birmingham, MI) and three weeks since his last public town hall meeting (8/20 in Las Cruces, NM).
McCain’s new campaign strategy: staged rallies with thousands of supporters. Since announcing Sarah Palin as his VP choice on August 29, McCain’s has appeared at 11 rallies with his new running mate where both members of the ticket delivered a 10-15 minute stump speech.
While shifting to rallies is inevitable for any party nominee during a general election, McCain has always touted town hall meetings and interactions with the press as reasons for his success.
Throughout the spring and summer, then-presumptive nominee McCain enabled the public and the media an opportunity to question him on an almost daily basis, holding town hall meetings open to supporters and critics and conducting press conferences and media sessions aboard his bus.
Though he was also criticized at the same time for lacking a coherent message and constantly undercutting his own message by reacting to the news of the day and sometimes critiquing his own campaign. Even during interviews with national press in recent weeks McCain has been thrown off message (e.g. the houses controversy and an awkward TIME Magazine interview).
The McCain campaign is doing everything they can to control the message. McCain and Palin and just repeating the same simple script every day, even though much of it has been debunked. Meanwhile, conservatives sit back and drink up the story that the McCain campaign is peddling. All the McCain campaign has to do is attack the media, and conservatives fall right into line.
