Golden line

From Gail Collins' column in today's NYT (links added by me):

Palin has been pressing the line that people don’t really know “the real Barack Obama,” and who could make the argument better than a woman who we’ve already known for almost six weeks? Really, she’s like one of the family.

We’ve gotten so close we’ve already learned that she didn’t actually sell the plane on eBay, didn’t actually visit the troops in Iraq and didn’t really have a talk with the British ambassador. As soon as we get the Trooper thing and Alaska Independence Party thing and the tax thing figured out, she’ll be an open book.

*drum sting*

PS: Economists who once backed McCain's economic plans are now balking at his proposal to buy mortgages directly from banks.

PSS: Someone should lose a hand (or at least a finger) over this.

Politics stuff

This is your GOP government in action:

Keep an eye on the TED spread to see how bad things will get. It is basically a quick snapshot of the liquidity crisis. It shot up to 2.01 within a few hours yesterday from near 1.0. That's a bad sign.


A few points:

• The collapse on Wall Street can be laid squarely at the feet of people like Phil Gramm, who inserted deregulation language covertly into finance bills:

  If McCain wants to hold someone accountable for the failure in transparency and accountability that led to the current calamity, he should turn to his good friend and adviser, Phil Gramm.
  
  As Mother Jones reported in June, eight years ago, Gramm, then a Republican senator chairing the Senate banking committee, slipped a 262-page bill into a gargantuan, must-pass spending measure. Gramm's legislation, written with the help of financial industry lobbyists, essentially removed newfangled financial products called swaps from any regulation. Credit default swaps are basically insurance policies that cover the losses on investments, and they have been at the heart of the subprime meltdown because they have enabled large financial institutions to turn risky loans into risky securities that could be packaged and sold to other institutions.
  
  Lehman's collapse threatens the financial markets because of swaps.

  Don't forget McCain's role in the Keating 5 scandal was basically to deregulate the market, which ended up costing taxpayers about $165 B total in the S&L scandals. And don't forget how people like McCain cheered as bankers took chainsaws to the regulation laws that King W and congressional Republicans did away with. Their libertarian philosophy tells them, "all regulation bad," but reality tells a different story, doesn't it?
  


• The DNC has a great "Count the Lies" site up documenting McCain's mendacity. As others have noted, he's basically trying to reinvent himself, going from "honorable man who happens to be a politician" to "sleazy dishonorable politician who will fulfill W's 3rd term"...


• Even David Brooks thinks Palin is not the woman for the job:

  Sarah Palin has many virtues. If you wanted someone to destroy a corrupt establishment, she’d be your woman. But the constructive act of governance is another matter. She has not been engaged in national issues, does not have a repertoire of historic patterns and, like President Bush, she seems to compensate for her lack of experience with brashness and excessive decisiveness.
  
  The idea that “the people” will take on and destroy “the establishment” is a utopian fantasy that corrupted the left before it corrupted the right. Surely the response to the current crisis of authority is not to throw away standards of experience and prudence, but to select leaders who have those qualities but not the smug condescension that has so marked the reaction to the Palin nomination in the first place.

  Preach it brother.


• Bob Herbert's column on McCain's disastrous health care "plan" is worth reading in its entirety. Here's a snippet:

  Talk about a shock to the system. Has anyone bothered to notice the radical changes that John McCain and Sarah Palin are planning for the nation’s health insurance system?
  
  These are changes that will set in motion nothing less than the dismantling of the employer-based coverage that protects most American families.
  
  A study coming out Tuesday from scholars at Columbia, Harvard, Purdue and Michigan projects that 20 million Americans who have employment-based health insurance would lose it under the McCain plan.
  
  There is nothing secret about Senator McCain’s far-reaching proposals, but they haven’t gotten much attention because the chatter in this campaign has mostly been about nonsense — lipstick, celebrities and “Drill, baby, drill!”
  
  For starters, the McCain health plan would treat employer-paid health benefits as income that employees would have to pay taxes on.
  
  “It means your employer is going to have to make an estimate on how much the employer is paying for health insurance on your behalf, and you are going to have to pay taxes on that money,” said Sherry Glied, an economist who chairs the Department of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health.
  
  Ms. Glied is one of the four scholars who have just completed an independent joint study of the plan. Their findings are being published on the Web site of the policy journal, Health Affairs.
  
  According to the study: “The McCain plan will force millions of Americans into the weakest segment of the private insurance system — the nongroup market — where cost-sharing is high, covered services are limited and people will lose access to benefits they have now.”
  
  The net effect of the plan, the study said, “almost certainly will be to increase family costs for medical care.”
  
  Under the McCain plan (now the McCain-Palin plan) employees who continue to receive employer-paid health benefits would look at their pay stubs each week or each month and find that additional money had been withheld to cover the taxes on the value of their benefits.
  
  While there might be less money in the paycheck, that would not be anything to worry about, according to Senator McCain. That’s because the government would be offering all taxpayers a refundable tax credit — $2,500 for a single worker and $5,000 per family — to be used “to help pay for your health care.”
  
  You may think this is a good move or a bad one — but it’s a monumental change in the way health coverage would be provided to scores of millions of Americans. Why not more attention?
  
  The whole idea of the McCain plan is to get families out of employer-paid health coverage and into the health insurance marketplace, where naked competition is supposed to take care of all ills. (We’re seeing in the Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch fiascos just how well the unfettered marketplace has been working.)
  
  Taxing employer-paid health benefits is the first step in this transition, the equivalent of injecting poison into the system. It’s the beginning of the end.
  
  When younger, healthier workers start seeing additional taxes taken out of their paychecks, some (perhaps many) will opt out of the employer-based plans — either to buy cheaper insurance on their own or to go without coverage.
  
  That will leave employers with a pool of older, less healthy workers to cover. That coverage will necessarily be more expensive, which will encourage more and more employers to give up on the idea of providing coverage at all.
  
  The upshot is that many more Americans — millions more — will find themselves on their own in the bewildering and often treacherous health insurance marketplace. As Senator McCain has said: “I believe the key to real reform is to restore control over our health care system to the patients themselves.”
  
  Yet another radical element of McCain’s plan is his proposal to undermine state health insurance regulations by allowing consumers to buy insurance from sellers anywhere in the country. So a requirement in one state that insurers cover, for example, vaccinations, or annual physicals, or breast examinations, would essentially be meaningless...

  How's this even a close race? Do people care about the issues? Sadly, I'm starting to conclude, "No."

Palin is empty and McCain is a liar

Watching Sarah Palin's part two tonight was painful: an exercise in vague platitudes and duplicity.

Watching the erosion of McCain's character as he continues to tell lie after lie about Barack Obama is more painful. He lies about Barack's bill to protect kindergartners from sex predators and he lies about Barack's tax CUT for those making under $250K / yr and basically everything else:

It's time to vote for someone whose campaign doesn't point towards Bush III.

Palin's dangerous ignorance on foreign policy

Sitting at home watching this, I knew that Charlie referred to the justification given by Bush for pre-emption. Sarah Palin didn't. I know more about key foreign policy stances than her. Perhaps I should run for VP?

She doesn't know what pre-emption is and is willing to start World War 3 with Russia if they invade Georgia. How awesome! Let's put her in the WH!

Ripping John McCain a new one

Frank Rich is good today. He basically rips McCain a new one over the spin and lies and rashness known as Sarah Palin.

Jon Stewart was also good:

(or see this version)

Don't let them lie to you that she has more overall experience than Obama. He was in the Illinois legislature for 8 years and has been in the US Senate for almost 4 years. He went to Harvard Law and was the first black president of the prestigious (though under-read) Harvard Law Review.

From an interview on AC360:

“My understanding is that Gov. Palin’s town, Wassilla, has I think 50 employees. We've got 2500 in this campaign. I think their budget is maybe 12 million dollars a year – we have a budget of about three times that just for the month,” Obama responded.

Actually, according to ADN, Wasilla's budget was only $6M / yr. The point of this being that her "executive experience" as mayor doesn't really even compare to the decisions and strategy Obama has had to form as a result of running the campaign.

She's been governor for 20 months of a state with 950,000 caribou and 670,000 people. She was a mayor for six years of a town of 5,000. She went to five different schools before finally graduating with a Journalism BA after six years from the U of Idaho.

[UPDATE: Check out the 63-page vetting report (PDF, 275KB) that was compiled on Palin when she ran for Governor of Alaska in November 2006.]

We report, you decide. (retch)

This is "reform"?

The whole narrative that McCain's gimmick revolves around is that he chose Palin because she is a "reformer" and "maverick" and so is he. I thought mavericks bucked their party's orthodoxy, rather than representing an extreme version of them, but hey, what do I know?

The problem with that is these damned stubborn facts.

They're shutting down the investigation into how she used her office to punish subordinates in a way very reminiscent of King George's use of power in the Justice Dept. That's hardly the sort of transparency in government and ethics reform we'd expect from this supposed duo of do-goodism.

In addition, with the facts piling up about Palin's use of pork and advocacy of the "Bridge to Nowhere", opposing it only late in the game and keeping the money after the project itself was shut down, it is becoming a literal laughingstock to call this woman an agent of reform against earmarking. She lies.

Besides this, there's the fascist way she used her position as mayor and governor to try to censor the town's library and fire political opponents.

Like it or not, despite the cable news lovefest for her, the disaster that is Sarah Palin will continue to linger like a stench over this election.

Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.

John Adams, 'Argument in Defense of the Soldiers in the Boston Massacre Trials,' December 1770 (source)

In the same way that the Right insisted on looking at Obama's record and proposals rather than his character, let's look at the facts surrounding Palin's "reformer" label rather than her biography.

Call me a bleeding heart liberal

Go ahead. Call me a bleeding heart liberal if you want to. But supporting this grotesque mockery of "sport" -- shooting wolves from airplanes -- is just abominable. And Palin supports it.

There's hunting for food then there's bloodsport. I'm all for the 2nd Am protecting gun rights and all, as well as reasonable hunting laws. However, these beautiful animals are viciously tortured, not cleanly and painlessly killed for any good purpose.

That's ignoring all the other reasons to vote against the McCain-Palin ticket.

Obama on unilateral action in Pakistan

Am I the only one who remembers when Obama said that if high value targets in Pakistan could not be acted on by the Pakistani forces, that he'd act with or without Pakistan's permission:

"If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won't act, we will," Mr Obama said.

Okay, and after that he got hammered by others, including McCain, for being wrong about this? Yet, everyone in the crowd cheered when McCain famously claimed he'd chase Osama bin Laden to the "gates of hell". I guess as long as the gates of hell aren't inside Pakistan...

Last Thursday, Obama mentioned that McCain "wouldn't even follow OBL to the cave where he lives" in reference to this logical disparity. The US has conducted aerial assaults inside Pakistan for months, and as of reports yesterday, the US has now invaded there with ground forces to carry out a raid. So, it's now time for McCain to make clear his position: would he agree with Obama on this raid, or would he oppose his own President's call?

This has been the case on many things: Obama was right about getting out of Iraq and reinforcing our troops in Afghanistan, about talking with Iran without requiring that they stop what they're doing first (precondition), about talking with North Korea, and about basically every other foreign policy decision that McCain has gotten wrong. And that's why I'm voting for Obama-Biden this November.

Palin lied about Obama's record last night: he has passed many bills as a state and federal legislator, including many while working with Republicans. All personal and family issues aside, the arguments in favor of Palin have all turned out to be based on false premises. She is not a reformer. She is in the pocket of Big Oil. She is a creationist who is ultra-right (well to the right of McCain) on many environmental issues, including ANWR and protecting polar bears. She opposes abortion rights for women who have been raped or are the victims of incest. She has zero national security or foreign policy experience, and would be one sick old man's heartbeat away from the Presidency...on this line of reasoning, even Expelled star Ben Stein thinks very little of Palin...not that any of us think enough of him to care what he thinks...

Time mag. asks, and I answer: Palin = disaster

Barack says that Bristol Palin's teenage pregnancy is off-limits:

MONROE, Michigan (CNN) – Barack Obama told reporters firmly that families are off-limits in this campaign, reacting to news that Sarah Palin’s 17-year-old daughter is five months pregnant.

“Let me be as clear as possible,” said Obama, “I think people’s families are off-limits and people's children are especially off-limits. This shouldn't be part of our politics. It has no relevance to Gov. Palin’s performance as governor, or her potential performance as a vice president.”

Obama said reporters should “back off these kinds of stories” and noted that he was born to an 18 year-old mother.

“How a family deals with issues and teenage children, that shouldn't be the topic of our politics and I hope that anybody who is supporting me understands that’s off-limits.”

The Illinois senator became aggravated when asked about rumors on liberal blogs speculating that Palin’s fifth child - Trig - is actually her daughter Bristol’s. A Reuters report Monday quotes a senior McCain aide saying that Obama’s name is in some of posts, “in a way that certainly juxtaposes themselves against their 'campaign of change,’”

“I am offended by that statement,” Obama shot back, not letting the reporter finish his question. “There is no evidence at all that any of this involved us.”

“We don’t go after people’s families,” Obama said. “We don’t get them involved in the politics. It’s not appropriate and it’s not relevant. Our people were not involved in any way in this and they will not be. And if I ever thought that there was somebody in my campaign that was involved in something like that, they’d be fired.”

Although McCain's campaign insists that they knew about this, I remain skeptical, not the least reason being that they're now sending an army of lawyers to Alaska to try to contain this...which is something they should've done beforehand. Time magazine asks whether McCain's pick was "bold or disastrous?" I think that answer is becoming more clear. Let's have a run-down of the woman's baggage:

1. Late addition: She was a member of a fringe Alaskan political group that seeks its independence from the US, and was involved in their 2008 conference
   
2. Late addition: It looks like independent voters are seeing through the nonsense
   
3. She had a shotgun wedding as she got pregnant with her first kid out of wedlock
4. Her husband was arrested on a DWI
5. She's a staunch "abstinence-only" advocate whose teenage daughter got pregnant, the political fallout from which is still to be determined
   
6. Troopergate: She used her authority as governor to try to have her sister's ex-husband fired, then fired his boss when the boss refused, then lied about it [apparently the ex-husband was a dickhead, but the last two points are more important here]
7. She claimed in her first public appearance as VP candidate that she opposed the "Bridge to Nowhere" but this turns out to be a lie, and a bad one, at that
8. She claims to have opposed corruption in Alaska, but said that calling for Ted Stevens resignation would be "premature" after his arrest and received his endorsement, which she paid to run as an ad
9. She directed Ted Stevens' 527 group on his behalf and appeared with him in July after his indictment to appeal for him politically
10. A few months ago, she claims to have no idea what the VP does everyday
    
11. In a 2006 gubenatorial questionaire, she said that she opposed abortions for incest and rape, only giving an exception if it could be proven that the mother might die from childbirth. The Religious Right loves her. Re-read that.
12. From the same source, and many others, she claims that teaching creationism in science classes is the way to go, "teach both."
    
13. On the same anti-science note, she is a global warming denialist
14. She is to the right of McCain on drilling in ANWR, protecting polar bears and protecting the environment in general (yet another anti-science Republican)
15. On the same line of reasoning, she semi-opposed the surge in Iraq, hailed as one of the only things that McCain has not failed at in the past decade or so
16. There is zero national security experience involved in being governor, so quit repeating the "commander-in-chief of the national guard" line. Campbell Brown stumped Tucker Bounds today (H/T: Kos) who tried to equivocate on this -- she didn't command troops to go to Iraq. Not even close. I'm the "commander-in-chief" of my classroom, but that doesn't make me an education policy wonk.
    
17. She is clearly and unequivocally unqualified to be president should something happen to McCain, the oldest presidential candidate ever nominated for a first term whose four bouts with cancer should make everyone think twice

Go Obama-Biden '08! (pic source)

17 yo unwed Bristol Palin is pregnant

Bristol Palin is five months pregnant. The McCain camp claims they knew...

...great judgment, McCain ;-)

In seriousness, I read the rumors that she (rather than her mom) had been pregnant with Trig with a lot of skepticism but a little bit of hope from a purely political perspective: I thought that such a scandal would be good for November. After talking to a friend of mine, I started to realize that the RR would just say, "It's better than an abortion." The same probably applies here.

The absurd policies of the Religious Right bear rotten fruit: 1 in 4 teenage girls who are sexually active have at least one STD. The rates of teen pregnancy are rising again after years of decline during the Clinton years with comprehensive sex ed. There's also a sad race gap: more than one half of black girls have one, compared to only 20% of whites and Latinos. The teenagers themselves aren't in the least surprised. See this or this piece of mine for more stats related to "abstinence only" education and abortions.

See this excellent item on the RR's policies of "marriage promotion" as well.