I decided last year that I was voting for Barack Obama. I am upfront about that.
We the People democracy doesn't successfully serve its people when the people are not informed about their elected officials in their representative government.
We went to war in Iraq without asking necessary and accounting questions.
We accepted by complicity the Patriot Act that meant we lost U.S. Constitutional rights all in the service of saving ourselves from terrorists.
We accepted that waterboarding wasn't torture as long as we were the ones subjecting others to it. We accepted our torture of POWs in Iraq without our public outcry.
We now are being asked two more things by our Republican leaders to accept without necessary and accounting questions.
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Sarah and the Press....reported by David Shuster
One) Accept Sarah Palin as Vice President without knowing her. She has been protected from the media asking her questions short of Charlie Gibson and Sean Hannity. She met with foreign leaders today while they were at the United Nations, but Sarah wasn't allowed to speak to us - the USA people or the USA media. What's up with that?
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Two) Accept (beyond the bill of the Iraq war debt) the $700 billion bail-out paid by us the USA taxpayers for Wall Street run amuck because of lack of common sense, self-regulation and lack of governmental regulation.
Government isn't the problem as Ronald Reagan is known for saying, but lack of accountability within our government is the problem, as is our disengagement in our democracy. We gave up ownership of our democracy big time within the time of King George and his Co-King Cheney.
While I was in the doctor's office for a follow-up fun mammogram today, I was reading an old Businessweek magazine article (December 24, 2007) that was in the waiting room. The article, The Fed's Mild Medicine - Its plan may give some relief to banks but won't do much to revive growth started with these words by by Peter Coy:
Give Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke an "A" for creativity. As the credit crunch worsened this fall, Bernanke saw a financial system in shock but an economy that seemed relatively healthy. He wanted to restore confidence in the banks without flooding the system with money, which would risk an outbreak of inflation.
Then there was an article The Fed's Plan: More Talk by Peter Coy
written June 11, 2008, which includes this text:
Cashing In on Credibility
Bernanke's goal, it appears, is to achieve an elusive balance between conflicting objectives, doing just enough on each of his many battlefronts to show he means business but not doing so much that he loses ground on the other fronts.
If Bernanke is lucky, he will be able to get through the next few months by drawing on the credibility that the Fed has achieved and stored up over the years. The beauty of credibility is that if you have enough of it, you can achieve your objective just by jawboning. The danger, of course, is that credibility can be lost in an instant.
Dirty Secret of the Bailout: Thirty-Two Words That None Dare Utter
A critical - and radical - component of the bailout package proposed by the Bush administration has thus far failed to garner the serious attention of anyone in the press. Section 8 (which ironically reminds one of the popular name of the portion of the 1937 Housing Act that paved the way for subsidized affordable housing ) of this legislation is just a single sentence of thirty-two words, but it represents a significant consolidation of power and an abdication of oversight authority that's so flat-out astounding that it ought to set one's hair on fire. It reads, in its entirety:
Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.
In short, the so-called "mother of all bailouts," which will transfer $700 billion taxpayer dollars to purchase the distressed assets of several failed financial institutions, will be conducted in a manner unchallengeable by courts and ungovernable by the People's duly sworn representatives. All decision-making power will be consolidated into the Executive Branch - who, we remind you, will have the incentive to act upon this privilege as quickly as possible, before they leave office. The measure will run up the budget deficit by a significant amount, with no guarantee of recouping the outlay, and no fundamental means of holding those who fail to do so accountable.
Is this starting to sound familiar? Robert Kuttner cuts through much of the gloss in an article in today's American Prospect:
The deal proposed by Paulson is nothing short of outrageous. It includes no oversight of his own closed-door operations. It merely gives congressional blessing and funding to what he has already been doing, ad hoc. He plans to retain Wall Street firms as advisors to decide just how to cut deals to value and mop up Wall Street's dubious paper. There are to be no limits on executive compensation for the firms that get relief, and no equity share for the government in exchange for this massive infusion of capital. Both Obama and McCain have opposed the provision denying any judicial review of decisions made by Paulson -- a provision that evokes the Bush administration's suspension of normal constitutional safeguards in its conduct of foreign policy and national security. [...]Read the entire article at www.huffingtonpost.com
The differences between this proposed bailout and the three closest historical equivalents are immense. When the Reconstruction Finance Corporation of the 1930s pumped a total of $35 billion into U.S. corporations and financial institutions, there was close government supervision and quid pro quos at every step of the way. Much of the time, the RFC became a preferred shareholder, and often appointed board members. The Home Owners Loan Corporation, which eventually refinanced one in five mortgage loans, did not operate to bail out banks but to save homeowners. And the Resolution Trust Corporation of the 1980s, created to mop up the damage of the first speculative mortgage meltdown, the S&L collapse, did not pump in money to rescue bad investments; it sorted out good assets from bad after the fact, and made sure to purge bad executives as well as bad loans. And all three of these historic cases of public recapitalization were done without suspending judicial review.
McCain Loses His Head
Tuesday, September 23, 2008; Page A21
"The queen had only one way of settling all difficulties, great or small. 'Off with his head!' she said without even looking around."
-- "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland"Source: www.washingtonpost.com
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."
To read the Journal's details about the depths of McCain's shallowness on the subject of Cox's chairmanship, see "McCain's Scapegoat" (Sept. 19). Then consider McCain's characteristic accusation that Cox "has betrayed the public's trust."
Perhaps an old antagonism is involved in McCain's fact-free slander. His most conspicuous economic adviser is Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who previously headed the Congressional Budget Office. There he was an impediment to conservatives, including then-Rep. Cox, who, as chairman of the Republican Policy Committee, persistently tried and generally failed to enlist CBO support for "dynamic scoring" that would estimate the economic growth effects of proposed tax cuts.
In any case, McCain's smear -- that Cox "betrayed the public's trust" -- is a harbinger of a McCain presidency. For McCain, politics is always operatic, pitting people who agree with him against those who are "corrupt" or "betray the public's trust," two categories that seem to be exhaustive -- there are no other people. McCain's Manichaean worldview drove him to his signature legislative achievement, the McCain-Feingold law's restrictions on campaigning. Today, his campaign is creatively finding interstices in laws intended to restrict campaign giving and spending. (For details, see The Post of Sept. 17; and the New York Times of Sept. 19.)
By a Gresham's Law of political discourse, McCain's Queen of Hearts intervention in the opaque financial crisis overshadowed a solid conservative complaint from the Republican Study Committee, chaired by Rep. Jeb Hensarling of Texas. In a letter to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, the RSC decried the improvised torrent of bailouts as a "dangerous and unmistakable precedent for the federal government both to be looked to and indeed relied upon to save private sector companies from the consequences of their poor economic decisions." This letter, listing just $650 billion of the perhaps more than $1 trillion in new federal exposures to risk, was sent while McCain's campaign, characteristically substituting vehemence for coherence, was airing an ad warning that Obama favors "massive government, billions in spending increases."
The political left always aims to expand the permeation of economic life by politics. Today, the efficient means to that end is government control of capital. So, is not McCain's party now conducting the most leftist administration in American history? The New Deal never acted so precipitously on such a scale. Treasury Secretary Paulson, asked about conservative complaints that his rescue program amounts to socialism, said, essentially: This is not socialism, this is necessary. That non sequitur might be politically necessary, but remember that government control of capital is government control of capitalism. Does McCain have qualms about this, or only quarrels?
On "60 Minutes" Sunday evening, McCain, saying "this may sound a little unusual," said that he would like to replace Cox with Andrew Cuomo, the Democratic attorney general of New York who is the son of former governor Mario Cuomo. McCain explained that Cuomo has "respect" and "prestige" and could "lend some bipartisanship." Conservatives have been warned.
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?
John McCain's Campaign Manager, Rick Davis being paid by Freddie Mac until last month...................................................
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Sept 23, 2008: There are new reports from the New York Times and Newsweek Magazine that a lobbying firm at which Senator John McCain's campaign manager Rick Davis was once a partner was paid $15,000 a month by mortgage giant Freddie Mac until last month. Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff speaks with Rachel Maddow.
Two things I would like to be accounted for and by my government
are Truth and Justice.
Palin on Thin Ice
By Ruth Marcus | September 23, 2008; 5:29 PM ETSource: voices.washingtonpost.com/postpartisan/2008/09/palin_on_thin_ice
With today’s kerfuffle over the media being kept away from Sarah Palin’s meetings with foreign leaders -- like there was a risk she’d answer their shouted questions? -- I’ve been mulling over Colby’s post about the Hannity-Palin “100 percent pure infomercial” interview. I watched both nights, then read the transcripts, and I think the interview hasn’t gotten nearly the attention it deserved. While I agree with Colby’s assessment that the audience was “treated to a political advertisement aimed at serving the interests of the Republican presidential ticket,” I think the Hannity love-fest offered a valuable look at Palin, perhaps more revealing because she was on such friendly territory. For all the softballs Hannity tossed her way, Palin did not come off very well, in my view. If this was a political commercial, I wasn’t buying the product.
The way she answers questions brings to mind -- I have Alaska on the brain, admittedly -- the image of a polar bear, jumping from rhetorical ice floe to ice floe, drifting some but eventually managing to get safely to dry land. No flubs, but you get the sense that she could plunge into the icy water at any moment. Palin has an odd tendency to use the same word twice in a sentence, as in, “The people of American realize that inherently all political power is inherent in the people,” or, about John McCain, “He can surpass the partisanship that must be surpassed to deal with an issue like this.” Or, combining word repetition with another Palin verbal tic, word dropping, this about the economic meltdown: “Well, you know, first Fannie and Freddie, different because quasi-government agencies there where government had to step in because the adverse impact all across our nation, especially with homeowners, is just too impacting.”
Ok, not everyone is Daniel Webster. Palin isn’t the first politician to dwell in the land of anodyne clichés such as, “We sort of have a do-nothing Senate right now where nobody is really wanting to pick up the ball and run with it.” Yet I always got the sense listening to George W. Bush tying himself up in rhetorical knots that his problem was more in the nature of getting the words to come out of his mouth correctly, not so much that he didn’t know what to say. Palin -- I’m not so sure.
An Alaska friend tells me that Palin has always benefited from being underestimated. Maybe I’m doing that. Maybe I’ve been around polished politicians too long to appreciate the unvarnished authenticity that obviously appeals to many voters. But there’s no Palin interview I’ve listened to, before or after her selection, that gave me the sense that she had anything but a millimeter-thin understanding of the issues facing the country she hopes to help lead.
Consider this exchange.
Hannity: What is our role as a country as it relates to national security?
Palin: Yes. That's a great question, and being an optimist I see our role in the world as one of being a force for good, and one of being the leader of the world when it comes to the values that -- it seems that just human kind embraces the values that -- encompass life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and that's just -- not just in America, that is in our world.
And America is in a position because we care for so many people to be able to lead and to be able to have a strong diplomacy and a strong military also at the same time to defend not only our freedoms, but to help these rising smaller democratic countries that are just -- you know, they're putting themselves on the map right now, and they're going to be looking to America as that leader.
We being used as a force for good is how I see our country.
Whew. Made it to the other side of that one.
Can’t wait for the debate. I bet it will be impacting.
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OBAMA - BIDEN 2008
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Did you see Bill Clinton Part I, Part II,
Part III, last night on David Letterman (September 22, 2008)? He mentioned Hillary's economic plan, but not Barack Obama's
Uploaded by Mango77774
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OBAMA - BIDEN 2008
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Fact:
700 Billion Euros Better Than 700 Billion Dollars...
The best place to watch the debates will be C-span
Presidential Debate ~ Friday Night ~ September 26, 2008
www.c-span.org/Politics
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