It’s embarrassing that the McCain campaign is clinging to Joe the Plumber in a final act of deperation. Mr. Plumber hit a new low when he agreed with a loon at a rally that the election of Barack Obama would lead to he death of Israel.
Shep Smith, one of the few voices of reason at Fox News, interviews Joe about his statement and unmasks him as a complete fool.
Tom Friedman writes about the huge problems facing Iran now that oil prices have collapsed.
I’ve always been dubious about Barack Obama’s offer to negotiate with Iran — not because I didn’t believe that it was the right strategy, but because I didn’t believe we had enough leverage to succeed. And negotiating in the Middle East without leverage is like playing baseball without a bat.
Well, if Obama does win the presidency, my gut tells me that he’s going to get a chance to negotiate with the Iranians — with a bat in his hand.
Have you seen the reports that Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is suffering from exhaustion? It’s probably because he is not sleeping at night. I know why. Watching oil prices fall from $147 a barrel to $57 is not like counting sheep. It’s the kind of thing that gives an Iranian autocrat bad dreams.
After all, it was the collapse of global oil prices in the early 1990s that brought down the Soviet Union. And Iran today is looking very Soviet to me.
As Vladimir Mau, president of Russia’s Academy of National Economy, pointed out to me, it was the long period of high oil prices followed by sharply lower oil prices that killed the Soviet Union. The spike in oil prices in the 1970s deluded the Kremlin into overextending subsidies at home and invading Afghanistan abroad — and then the collapse in prices in the ‘80s helped bring down that overextended empire.
This is an example of the tremendous leverage we get by destroying domestic demand for oil by switching to alternative fuels.
Some of the polls have tightened a little, but most are holding steady and we have some outliers showing a huge lead for Obama. The state polls also look great.
Meanwhile, the McCain campaign has finally started to talk about the economy, but they can’t even get that right.
If McCain had not opposed the Bush tax cuts in the past, and if he was proposing a flat tax, he might have some credibility on this idiotic charges of “socialism.” One wonders whether he really is senile. Also, when you add in the economic genius of Sarah Palin (she must have shaken hands with Mitt Romney), your argument looks even more ridiculous, given that Sarah Palin raised taxes on the oil companies in Alaska in order to redistribute the tax dollars to all Alaskans in the form of a check.
Of course, she’s too stupid to understand the irony here, and McCain has no trouble repeating any charge trumped up by his idiotic advisors. So, they continue to stomp around the country calling Obama names and revealing themselves as utter fools.
This campaign is a disgrace. Many conservatives have already come to that conclusion. Others are so blinded by their own idiology that they drink up the silly name-calling, hoping for a dramatic comeback. Fortunately, their numbers seem to be shrinking.
The polls looks grim, and it appears that some in the Republican Party are losing their marbles as they pull out all the stops in a desperate attempt to win this election. With this story, they may have reached a new low.
With Rove and Bush the Republicans have been peddling fear for years, and McCain and Palin have been more than happy to use the same tactics. It shouldn’t be surprising when some nuts in their party escalate the attacks to even more offensive extremes.
The most recent poll in Ohio has some interesting news regarding the issue of immigration.
Let illegal immigrants stay here.
That’s what 56 percent of Ohioans said in a poll conducted this month by the University of Cincinnati Institute for Policy Research — and people polled in Southwest Ohio topped that figure.
In this corner of the state, 60 percent said they favored a government policy that allowed undocumented immigrants to stay in the country and become U.S. citizens if they met unspecified requirements in a certain timeframe.
That puts Ohioans in sync with the rest of the nation, according to a Gallup Poll last year, said Eric Rademacher, the institute’s interim co-director.
If you only listened to Fox News, Lou Dobbs and talk radio, you would assume that the entire nation is outraged by the conecpt of earned citizenship for illegals (which some call amnesty). Last year many in the media assumed that this issue would be crucial in the 2008 elections. Yet we don’t hear anything about it.
All of the Republican candidates who tried to exploit conservative anger about immigration flamed out in the primaries. Even one-time “moderates” like Rudy Giuliani flipped last year and tried to demogogue the issue in order to get the Republican nomination. He got crushed in the primaries.
America is getting serious again. We’re going through tough economic times, so it’s harder for politicians to distract the electorate with side issues like Bill Ayers, guns and illegals.
The next president will have a huge opportunity to pass a common-sense compromise on this issue that beefs up border security and provides a rational method for illegals to earn the right to stay in this country. The political rewards from such a compromise would be significant as well.
William Weld, the former Republican governor of Massachusetts, has endorsed Barack Obama.
Former Massachusetts Gov. William Weld, a Republican, endorsed Democrat Barack Obama for president on Friday, citing the senator’s good judgment, “deep sense of calm” and “first-class political temperament.”
Weld said he’s never endorsed a Democrat for president before, but in the last six weeks or so, it became “close to a no-brainer.” Obama has a history of bringing Democrats, Republicans and independents together and is the best choice at a time when America’s standing in the world is at a low point, he said.
“It’s not often you get a guy with his combination of qualities, chief among which I would say is the deep sense of calm he displays, and I think that’s a product of his equally deep intelligence,” he said in a phone interview.
I’m a little surprised by this one. Bill Weld has always been a more moderate Republican, but he was once considered a rising star in the GOP. Earlier this week, former Minnesota Gov. Arne Carlson also endorsed Obama. Carlston was also a moderate Republican governor. It’s telling that both of them are willing to buck their party and endorse Obama.
This obviously won’t have as much effect as the Powell endorsement, but it adds to the narrative of Republicans coming out for Obama. Earlier today, several granddaughters of Barry Goldwater endorsed Obama as well.
We will be spending the next several years trying to understand the various causes of the financial collapse. As most agree, there’s plenty of blame to go around.
There’s no doubt that the credit rating agencies played a huge role in this crisis. I worked on bond deals in the 90’s that were very similar to the mortgage-backed securities at the root of this scandal. The role of the rating agencies was very clear. It was up to them to assess the risk tied to each security, and that process involved quite a bit of due diligence regarding the underlying income streams.
It has been clear for years that the rating agencies were not doing their jobs with respect to pooled mortgages. Now Congress is holding hearings in order to learn more about what happened. Needless to say, you can learn quite a bit by following the money.
Conflicts of interest were largely responsible for the disastrous performance of credit rating agencies in assessing the risks of mortgage-backed securities, two former high-ranking officials at Moody’s Investors Service and Standard & Poor’s said in Congressional testimony on Wednesday.
The agencies are paid to issue ratings by the securities issuers, whose interests can eclipse those of investors, Jerome S. Fons, former managing director of credit policy at Moody’s until 2007, told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
“While the methods used to rate structured securities have rightly come under fire, in my opinion the business model prevented analysts from putting investor interests first,” he said.
And Frank L. Raiter, former head of mortgage ratings at Standard & Poor’s for 10 years, characterized the failures at that company by saying simply: “Profits were running the show.”
This reminds me of the problems we had with the accounting firms in the 1990’s. It was impossible to expect accounting firms getting huge deal fees to be objective when they were auditing the same client. Efforts were made to block this conflict of interest back then, but Congress blocked the reforms. Things didn’t get fixed there until we had the Enron and Worldcom debacles.
With the rating agencies, it’s painfully clear that more regulations are needed here as well. Let’s hope that we get it right going forward.
So much for small-town Sarah! This news story is hilarious.
The Republican National Committee appears to have spent more than $150,000 to clothe and accessorize vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin and her family since her surprise pick by John McCain in late August.
According to financial disclosure records, the accessorizing began in early September and included bills from Saks Fifth Avenue in St. Louis and New York for a combined $49,425.74.
The records also document a couple of big-time shopping trips to Neiman Marcus in Minneapolis, including one $75,062.63 spree in early September.
The RNC also spent $4,716.49 on hair and makeup through September after reporting no such costs in August.
Politico asked the McCain campaign for comment, explicitly noting the $150,000 in expenses for department store shopping and makeup consultation that were incurred immediately after Palin’s announcement. Pre-September reports do not include similar costs.
One could argue that this is “shocking” in light of our economic crisis, but it shouldn’t be surprise. Sarah Palin has always been a prop in this campaign. We now know that she’s totally unqualified to be president. Not because she has little experience, but rather that she doesn’t appear to have the requisite intellect.
The fact that the campaign wanted to dress her up makes sense. Her job was to look and sound good - to recite the campaigns attack lines with a smile.
Of course, the strategy fell apart when she couldn’t handle simple interview questions without a scripted response.
The disclosure of these ridiculous expenditures just puts an exclamation point on the most absurd VP choice in history - even worse than Admiral Stockdale.
Rachel’s new show on MSNBC is doing quite well in the ratings. She’s obviously tapping into the enthusiam on the left, which will likely continue if Obama closes on the deal on November 4th.
John McCain’s campaign manager says he is reconsidering using Barack Obama’s relationship with Reverend Jeremiah Wright as a campaign issue during the election’s closing weeks.
In an appearance on conservative Hugh Hewitt’s radio program, Davis said that circumstances had changed since John McCain initially and unilaterally took Obama’s former pastor off the table. The Arizona Republican, Davis argued, had been jilted by the remarks of Rep. John Lewis, who compared recent GOP crowds to segregationist George Wallace’s rallies. And, as such, the campaign was going to “rethink” what was in and out of political bounds.
“Look, John McCain has told us a long time ago before this campaign ever got started, back in May, I think, that from his perspective, he was not going to have his campaign actively involved in using Jeremiah Wright as a wedge in this campaign,” he said late last week. “Now since then, I must say, when Congressman Lewis calls John McCain and Sarah Palin and his entire group of supporters, fifty million people strong around this country, that we’re all racists and we should be compared to George Wallace and the kind of horrible segregation and evil and horrible politics that was played at that time, you know, that you’ve got to rethink all these things. And so I think we’re in the process of looking at how we’re going to close this campaign. We’ve got 19 days, and we’re taking serious all these issues.”
John McCain’s campaign is already a joke, and he’s willingly tarnished his reputation with his campaign tactics. Colin Powell cited McCain’s tactics as one of the reasons he decided to support Obama.
Now McCain is ready to throw away what’s left of his integrity. At this late stage I suspect this desperate attack will backfire.
Powell cites Obama’s temperament and intellectual vigor, while noting McCain’s erratic response to the financial crisis. He also cites the selection of Sarah Palin as a reason to vote for Obama.
The movie is just as bad as the Bush presidency. Josh Brolin gives an inspired performance, but most of the film falls flat.
The film works best when focusing on Bush’s life story and his rise to the presidency. His relationship with his father was central to his life, and his interactions with his parents and Laura inspired the more interesting parts of the film.
Regarding his presidency, however, all we see are caricatures of the people around him. Scenes are invented based upon public statements we saw in other contexts, but they seem forced and inauthentic. Historians can rightfully criticize the roles of administrations officials like Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, but the portrayals of these men in the film are ridiculous.
Someday, we’ll see a serious movie that delves into the disasterous Bush presidency and the march to war, but “W” is not that movie. Oliver Stone goes for a lighter touch, but he doesn’t deliver enough laughs to make this a successfult comedy. In the end, it’s mostly a waste of time.
I guess the Republicans won’t be able to claim they’re all Germans, though Sarah Palin might argue St. Louis is not part of the pro-American part of the United States.
Christopher Buckley, the son of William F. Buckley, endorsed Barack Obama last week. Naturally, this was a shock to many conservatives, and the National Review was flooded with hate mail. Buckley offered his resignation to the magazine that was founded by his famous father, and the resignation was accepted.
My point, simply, is that William F. Buckley held to rigorous standards, and if those were met by members of the other side rather than by his own camp, he said as much. My father was also unpredictable, which tends to keep things fresh and lively and on-their-feet. He came out for legalization of drugs once he decided that the war on drugs was largely counterproductive. Hardly a conservative position. Finally, and hardly least, he was fun. God, he was fun. He liked to mix it up.
So, I have been effectively fatwahed (is that how you spell it?) by the conservative movement, and the magazine that my father founded must now distance itself from me. But then, conservatives have always had a bit of trouble with the concept of diversity. The GOP likes to say it’s a big-tent. Looks more like a yurt to me.
While I regret this development, I am not in mourning, for I no longer have any clear idea what, exactly, the modern conservative movement stands for. Eight years of “conservative” government has brought us a doubled national debt, ruinous expansion of entitlement programs, bridges to nowhere, poster boy Jack Abramoff and an ill-premised, ill-waged war conducted by politicians of breathtaking arrogance. As a sideshow, it brought us a truly obscene attempt at federal intervention in the Terry Schiavo case.
So, to paraphrase a real conservative, Ronald Reagan: I haven’t left the Republican Party. It left me.
