Happy Halloween!

Here is what my kids are wearing for Halloween.



A pink Zebra and a Panda Bear.
I'll be passing out treats and watching old Frankenstein movies.

Can Obama outperform in Texas?

Barack Obama is not trying to win in Texas. We have clearly been written off as a solid red McCain state, and I can’t much blame them. Texas hasn’t voted for a Democrat for president since Jimmy Carter in 1976. I have no expectations that is going to change this year, especially with the campaign making no effort in this state. But I am curious how well Obama will do despite not trying. Will he do better than previous Democrats?
The high-water mark for a Democrat in Texas since 1980 was the 44 percent of the vote that Bill Clinton drew in 1996 during his successful re-election race against Bob Dole and Ross Perot. Every other Democrat has drawn less support as a percentage (I’m not sure about total votes). In 1980, Carter won 41 percent of the vote in Texas. Four years later, Walter Mondale set the low mark with just 36 percent of the vote. Hell, I didn’t even vote for Mondale that year.
In 1988, Michael Dukakis (with some help from Lloyd Bentsen) managed to get 43 percent of the Texan vote. Clinton took an unimpressive 37 percent his first time around in 1992 against Carpetbagger Bush and Ross Perot at the height of his popularity.
Since 2000, Democrats have been stuck at 38 percent which is what both Gore and Kerry polled against the former Governor of Texas.
But what about this year? There are no Texans on the ticket on either side for the first time since 1976, and the polling average for the state currently has Obama at 43.5 percent. So will he do better than Clinton in ‘96? What’s your guess?

Closing argument

This is sooooooo embarrassing...

Here is evidence that nearly a quarter of my fellow Texans are complete and utter morons.

When asked to identify Obama's religion, 45 percent of respondents accurately identified him as Protestant; however 23 percent erroneously identified him as Muslim.

Please, people, stop watching Fox News! You are making all the rest of us Texans look bad.

Beneath contempt

Yesterday Republicans launched two new attacks that were beneath contempt.
First, Sen. Liddy Dole, R-N.C., released an ad attacking her Democratic opponent Kay Hagan because a member of an atheist advocacy group was one of 40 sponsors of a fundraiser that she attended. The ad accuses Hagan of taking “Godless money” and goes so far as to have a voice impersonator make it sound like she says “There is no God.” at the end of the ad.
Kay Hagan is a Sunday school teacher and an elder in her church. The ad is despicable and Liddy Dole has disgraced herself by airing it.
But guilt by association is all the rage now on the Republican campaign trail and Sarah Palin tried to spook her audiences the other day by noting that while he was a professor at the University of Chicago, Barack Obama actually knew and had cordial relations with a MUSLIM!!!!! Shreeeeeeeeeeeek!!!!!!!!!
I assume that the only acceptable thing that Obama could have done in that case would have been to spit in the guys face everytime he saw him. Apparently that is what Republicans do when they see a Muslim, assuming they dare to get that close. Most probably just point, screech “TERRORIST!!” and run for cover.

Update

SLAM!! Back atcha, Liddy!

Bitter and misleading attacks

Jonathan Gurwitz sure is bitter. Like most Republicans these days, he has given up on McCain/Palin winning the presidency. But he is still using his gold-plated soapbox on the Express-News editorial page to lash out at Barack Obama with unfair and misleading statements.

Here is the first example from today:

....recent events have broken Obama's way — amazingly, since Democrats have controlled both houses of Congress for the past two years, and Obama has been a Fannie Mae patron, while John McCain has been one of the few voices calling for reform.

First, Gurwitz acts like Democrats having control of the House and slim control of the Senate for the last two years means they and not the Republicans should be held responsible for the mess that Bush and the Republican policies have created. He knows better. The change in congressional leadership in 2006 has kept Republicans from putting any new policies in place, but it has not allowed for the reversal or elimination of any of the existing policies due to veto threats and filibusters.
Second, he knows full well that it is ridiculous to call Obama a “Fannie Mae patron” when it is McCain whose campaign staff is filled with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac lobbyists (including Chief of Staff Rick Davis who was on Fannie’s payroll up until just a few months ago.)
And it just boggles the mind to hear him call McCain a voice for reform when his chief economic advisor, Phil Gramm, was the author of the bill that created the deregulation disaster to begin with.

Obama promises everything to everyone: entitlement reform and full benefits; spreading the wealth and a tax cut for all; a unilateral rewrite of treaties and free trade; gun ownership and a ban on handguns.

Like most rightwingers today, Gurwitz falls into the fallacy of treating everything like it is only black or white, all or nothing. You can have entitlement reform and maintain full benefits for those that need it. You can have a tax cut for most by rolling back the tax cuts for the wealthiest. You can rewrite treaties and still have free trade. You can have responsible gun ownership while supporting common sense restrictions that protect the public and law enforcement. All you need is someone in charge who doesn’t where ideological blinders and only sees the world in black or white.

Obama's meager record of legislative accomplishments, his non-existent record of bipartisanship and his lengthy record of working with and seeking the counsel of individuals and organizations far outside the American mainstream.

The Walter Annenberg Foundation is far outside the American mainstream!?!? Whatever.
Spew on, Jonathan. It’s all you have left.

Endorsement extravaganza

Barack Obama has been mopping the floor with John McCain when it comes to newspaper endorsements.
According to the latest tally from Editor & Publisher, Obama has been endorsed by 222 newspapers with total circulation of more than 20 million compared to just 93 newspaper endorsements for John McCain with circulations of just over 6 million.
Obama’s total includes 43 papers that have switched from endorsing Bush in 2004.

Four years ago I compiled a list of celebrity endorsements for the 2004 presidential race.
This time around Wikipedia has done the job for me with Obama supporters here and McCain supporters here.

Bonilla threatened government bank on behalf of swindler

In the Better Late Than Never category comes this Express-News story over the weekend about former Republican Congressman Henry Bonilla doing favors for some guy who was swindling a government-sponsored bank out of millions of dollars.

A San Antonio businessman, while defrauding a government bank of millions of dollars, convinced a member of Congress to help put pressure on the bank so it would speed up processing loans to his clients, a San Antonio Express-News investigation has found.

Then-Rep. Henry Bonilla, R-San Antonio, intervened on behalf of Andrew Maxwell Parker, president of San Antonio Trade Group, in 2005 as the Export-Import Bank in Washington was growing suspicious of Parker's business.

Greater scrutiny had slowed the bank's backing of his clients' loans, so Parker wasn't making money.

Bonilla's letters to the Export-Import Bank, written at the behest of Parker, were followed by e-mails from one of Bonilla's staffers, Patrick L. Anderson. He left Bonilla's staff in November 2005, and by the next month Parker had paid him $20,000 to lobby for SATG.

The Export-Import Bank discovered many of his clients were defaulting on loans it had backed, forcing the taxpayer-funded agency to make good on them.

Officials also found Parker had manipulated information in the loan paperwork before submitting it. So the bank stopped or delayed considering applications involving his firm.

So the Ex-Im Bank was suspicious of this guy and was trying to back off on making loans to his clients who were defaulting on their loans and leaving the taxpayers to pick up the tab.

So what did Congressman Henry Bonilla do after jumping into the fray?

Parker complained to lawmakers, prompting Bonilla to propose a $7 million cut to the bank's budget in June 2005.

Unbelievable! The bank is trying its best to be a good steward with the taxpayers’ money, and Henry Bonilla, like some Mafia enforcer, is punishing them for it by trying to slash $7 million out of their budget.

And Bonilla was ENDORSED by the Express-News Editorial Board over Ciro Rodriguez while all this was going on.

Bonilla’s response to all of this? He doesn’t recall. Can’t remember a thing. Probably some low-level flunkies on his staff are to blame. Pass the buck. Whatever.

What a great public servant you were, Henry Bonilla! Thank you so much E-N Editorial Board for trying to foist this guy on us again and again.

Rivard: It's Not My Fault!

In his latest column, San Antonio Express-News Editor Robert Rivard blames the Publisher Tom Stephenson for the paper's ill considered endorsement of John McCain for president.
Already, the dopey decision has caused more than 40 people to cancel their subscriptions to the local newspaper - the only daily serving the 7th largest city in the U.S.
Rivard makes no excuses for the endorsement and only tries to distance himself and his news staff as far from the decision as possible, noting that the editorial board staff is not even in the same building as the newsroom. Heh! I'd want to shun them too.
I certainly do not condone people canceling their subscriptions, however. I think that is ultimately self-defeating and you end up with an even poorer newspaper that is unlikely to improve. What we need is more readers flooding the paper with letters and emails expressing their disdain for an editorial board that has continued to try and steer us off of every cliff that comes along at full speed. Rivard says the publisher is just conservative, but McCain/Palin/Bush/Cheney are not conservatives but radicals and wrongheaded to boot.
Spare us the excuses, Mr. Editor. I find it hard to believe that the top editor at the paper has absolutely no sway in the editorial direction of the newspaper. Someone needs to grab that steering wheel and put us back on the right path.

Obamacons

The list of Republicans and conservatives abandoning the GOP and throwing their support behind Barack Obama is growing steadily as this article in The Economist notes - The rise of the Obamacons and this earlier piece in The New Republic.

Here is my tally of Obamacons so far:

Colin Powell - former Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff for Reagan; Sect. of State for George W. Bush
Arne Carlson - Gov. of Minnesota ‘91-’99
Larry Hunter - former chief economist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce; helped devise Newt Gingrich’s “Contract With America” in 1994.
Richard Whalen - conservative author
Scott McClellan - former Press Secretary for W.
Bruce Bartlett - Domestic policy advisor to Reagan and Treasury official under Bush Sr.
Douglas Kmiec - Head of Office of Legal Counsel under Reagan and Bush Sr.
Lincoln Chafee - former Sen. from Rhode Island
Rita Hauser - Bush fundraiser and former member of Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.
Jim Leach - former Congressman from Iowa
Jim Whitaker - Mayor of Fairbanks, Alaska
Susan Eisenhower - Granddaughter of former president.
Christopher Buckley - son of William F. Buckley Jr., founder of National Review magazine.
William Weld - Gov. of Massachussetts ‘91-’97
Ken Adelman - foreign policy advisor to Reagan
Frances Fukuyama - neocon author and scholar
Michael Smerconish - Rightwing Radio host
Christopher Hitchens - Former leftist turned Clinton hater and Bush booster.
Charles Fried - Harvard Law professor and former Solicitor General for Reagan.
U.S. Rep. Wayne Gilchrest - R-Maryland
Linwood Holton - Governor of Virginia ‘70-’74
Andrew Sullivan - conservative blogger
David Friedman - son of Milton Friedman
Jeffrey Hart - senior editor of National Review and former Nixon/Reagan speech writer
Wick Allison - former publisher of National Review
Andrew Bacevich - Boston University professor

Update

Former U.S. Sen. Larry Pressler, R-S.D., the first Vietnam Vet to serve in the Senate throws his support to Obama.

The Best Celebrity Endorsement Ever

See more Ron Howard videos at Funny or Die

Update

Commenter Dervish is a musician who made this music video endorsing Obama. I think it’s pretty good. Check it out.

Bold presidential prediction time

We are still 12 days out from the election, but I’ve already cast my vote and there isn’t much more to do than make predictions.
So here goes my BOLD PREDICTION OF THE 2008 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION.

(Drumroll, please)

Barack Obama will win!

OK, that was too easy. What states will he win? How many electoral votes will he get? Those are the hard questions.
So here goes my best guestimate on how the chips will fall on election night.

Obama will win all the Kerry states — Washington, Oregon, California, Hawaii, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New York, D.C., Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachussetts, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine — plus the following Bush states:

Iowa, New Mexcio, Colorado, Nevada, Ohio, Florida, Virginia, North Carolina, Missouri and Indiana.

There are recent polls that have show Obama with leads in West Virginia, North Dakota and Montana, and he seems to be catching up in Georgia. But I’m going to assume these are all outliers and will just fall short of switching to Obama on election night.
I might change my mind before the election, of course, but right now I think that is the safe bet.

The above scenario gives Obama 375 electoral votes to McCain’s 163.

I had held out hopes for West Virginia to switch back to the side of light and goodness this election, but a recent survey revealed that more than 40 percent of respondents still think Obama is a Muslim.
My God. It’s like these people are living in North Korea or something. How ignorant can you get?

Colin Powell changes direction

I didn’t have a chance to note Colin Powell’s glowing endorsement of Barack Obama over the weekend. But Vara has an excellent article about it at her place - Voices from Russia.
Powell didn’t just laud Obama, he slammed McCain as this excerpt makes clear:

He criticised Senator McCain for not being able to grasp the economic woes facing the country or offer the public a clear and coherent response to the problem. He criticised Governor Palin for clearly not being qualified for the job (not to mention what this said about Mr McCain’s judgment, he added). He further criticised the negative tone of much of the McCain campaign, specifically decrying their attempts to somehow smear Mr Obama with so called associations to the likes of 1960s radical Bill Ayers, and finished off by commenting that he was uncomfortable with the way in which he felt the entire Republican Party was being taken over by the right wing.

McCain was quoted the other day speaking about the Republican control of government for the past eight years saying:
"We just let things get completely out of hand."
That is true, of course, but it should be noted that this was not just a case of incompetent governance. The Republicans didn’t screw up what they were trying to do. They did exactly what they planned and it just didn’t work the way they claimed it would. That is the most important point that is still eluding most people. It wasn’t just Bush that failed. The Republican policies failed. They would have failed regardless of who was in office pushing them forward. Bush can be blamed for not recognizing this failure sooner and changing course (instead he just stubbornly said “Full Steam Ahead!). But it is not that he was incompetent and failed to administer the policies properly. He did exactly what the Republican policies called for to a T.

Maybe people like Colin Powell are starting to understand this and change direction. We can only hope.

My vote

It took three tries, but I finally got the voting machine to register my vote for Barack Obama the other day. The first two times I tried it highlighted McCain/Palin instead, almost like in this Simpson’s episode:



Fortunately, I got it changed and was very careful where I touched the screen from that point on. But it was disturbing to think that if I had not paid careful attention I could very easily have cast a vote for McSame.
I also cast votes for Rick Noriega for U.S. Senate; Ciro Rodriguez for U.S. Congress; and all the Democrats running for the Texas Supreme Court. I also voted against State Rep. Frank Corte Jr.; for Chip Haas for county commissioner and for extending city term limits to eight years.

I did vote in all the judicial races although I resent having to do so. I believe judges should be appointed because the electorate simply doesn’t have the time or interest to stay informed on the issues in those races and make intelligent choices.

Now I just have to wait two weeks to find out the results.

Expensive clothing, haircuts and hypocricy

I wonder how many of my rightwing friends have contributed to the Republican National Committee this year?
I wonder how they feel about it now knowing that the RNC paid $150,000 to put Sarah Palin in high-fashion clothing for the campaign?
As Atrios points out, this is just rich with hypocricy. The same rightwingers who were outraged when John Edwards campaign reportedly paid $400 for a fancy hair stylist are now faced with a Republican running mate who goes on shopping sprees at Nieman Marcus and Saks Fifth Avenue all on their tab.

The Republican National Committee has 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.

Is this sexist or what? Do you think the Obama campaign had to spend $150,000 accessorizing Joe Biden? Did they even so much as buy him a new suit?

Remember, this is the party that is supposedly going to bring back fiscal responsibility to Washington! The Express-News said so in their endorsement! Nevermind that they ran up the federal debt $4.5 trillion while they had complete control of every branch of government, Republicans are the ones you can trust with your money. Just look how well their policies are playing out on Wall Street!

The race is tightening!!!!

Baloney. This is a common news meme during the final leg of a long campaign season and the Republicans are going to pick it up and run with it as hard as they can. They are desperate for any thread of hope to dangle in front of their supporters to keep them from sulking at home on election day.
There are something like eight different daily tracking polls out now and they fluctuate continuously. So you can always pick up one of the polls on any day and claim that “the race is tightening”. And then the next day when the same poll shows Obama pulling away again you just ignore it and grab a different poll that is fluctuating the direction you want.

More Tina, less Sarah

After watching Saturday Night Live the other night I can honestly say that I much prefer watching Tina Fey’s impersonation of Sarah Palin to watching the real thing. Tina actually makes her Palin character empathetic. The real Sarah Palin comes across as cold and calculating and even less human than the parody character.

Another awful Express-News endorsement

First they endorsed George W. Bush in 2000. Then they endorsed him again in 2004. Now the San Antonio Express-News is endorsing John McCain.
Clearly the editorial board at the E-N has not learned its lesson. After eight years of what has been without a doubt the worst presidential administration in modern times, the E-N is endorsing someone who was in lockstep with Bush 90 percent of the time and promises to carry on the same economic and international policies.
The E-N says McCain would bring fiscal responsibility to the White House (I could swear they said the same thing about Bush in 2000) and point to his demagoguery on “wasteful earmarks” which make up less than 1 percent of the federal budget. But they ignore the fact that McCain is right with Bush on the two biggest contributors to the ballooning deficits of the past eight years — (1) Bush’s fiscally irresponsible tax giveaway to the rich - which almost overnight wiped out a $236 billion surplus and put us back on the road to record annual deficits all without delivering on the promised boost to the economy; and (2) the $10 billion per month that we continue to flush away on the quagmire in Iraq which has gone on longer than our total involvement in World War II. McCain wants to make Bush’s tax cuts permanent and has no plans to extract the U.S. military from the Iraq debacle.
Barack Obama, on the other hand, has promised to pull us out of Iraq and has a plan to reverse Bush’s disasterous tax cut policies, raising taxes on the wealthy back to the level they were under that oppressive socialist Ronald Reagan.
The E-N also goes on to praise McCain as the only candidate “willing to speak the unpopular truth” about entitlement spending. And what truth is that? That it would be insane for us to privatize Social Security and invest it all in the stock market like Bush and McCain wanted to do?
Under President Bush and the Republicans, the federal debt has increase by $4.5 trillion. That is more than was accumulated under Carter ($337 billion) Reagan ($1.6 trillion) Bush Sr. ($1.6 trillion) and Clinton ($1.5 trillion) combined. I can assure you that was not a result of runaway spending on “earmarks”.
As bad as George W. Bush has been, McCain has the potential to be much worse. He is a 72-year-old with serious medical problems who tapped as his running mate someone who is supremely unqualified to take over as president.
He is admittedly clueless when it comes to economic issues and takes his advice from people like Phil Gramm, one of the architects of the deregulation fiasco that led to the current collapse of our financial system. His campaign is filled with lobbyists who had a direct role in undermining the regulatory framework of our financial markets.
The fact that you can point to a couple of areas like immigration policy and global warming where he has bucked his parties wrong-headed views does not excuse the fact that he would continue leading us down the same path in every other instance.
The fact that the Express-News would make such an awful endorsement has caused me to lose all respect for the paper and its current leaders.

E-N endoresment speculation

The Express-News editorial board has so far stuck with its rule of endorsing Republicans and incumbents almost exclusively. If you are an incumbent Republican, you are guaranteed an endorsement from the E-N. If you are a Democratic incumbent, you have about a 50-50 chance. And if you are a Democrat challenging a Republican, forgetaboutit.
The other day, the E-N endorsed all the incumbent Congressmen from San Antonio except for Democrat Ciro Rodriguez, which is the only race that is being seriously contested. Today they endorsed Republican John Cornyn for the U.S. Senate over challenger Rick Noriega.
The only question now is how they will come down Sunday when they are do to make their presidential endorsement. Will they continue their Republican tilt and endorse John McCain? Or have they been endorsing all Republicans up until now in an effort to innoculate themselves from criticism that they are too liberal if they endorse Barack Obama?
As lousy as their endorsements have been so far, I think there is still a chance that they could endorse Obama for the simple reason that they can see the writing on the wall and will want to present themselves as having been on the winning side. That is pretty much why the wingnutty editorial board at the Washington Post just endorsed Obama.
Nevertheless, I will still be somewhat surprised if it does go that way. I fully expect they will continue their hard-right tilt led by the Cheneyesque Neo-con Jonathan Gurwitz who calls all the shots there these days.

McCain wins one

Watching excerpts of John McCain and Barack Obama’s remarks at the 63rd annual Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner last night made me realize how quickly McCain will be able to rebound from what will undoubtedly be a trouncing in this election. He’s a funny guy. And he can be very charming when he is being self-effacing.
McCain clearly gave the better performance at the dinner. Whether it was due to having a better speechwriter or a more practiced and comicly-timed delivery I’m not sure, but if we were voting on an after-dinner speaker rather than a president, Obama might be in trouble right now. McCain’s years of being on the lecture circuit at just these kinds of events, plus his numerous appearances on the David Letterman and Jay Leno show’s clearly showed last night.
His best line of the night was probably when he deadpanned that despite being amongst a group of Manhattan Democrats he felt that there were some out there who were pulling for him. He then paused a moment to allow some light applause before looking over into the audience with a big smile and saying “Hillary! I’m so glad to see you here tonight!”
I also liked when he kidded himself about calling Obama “That One” during one of the debates, saying that it was just a pet name that he has for him and noted that Obama has a pet name for him too — George Bush.
Obama wasn’t bad, but it was hard to match McCain who seemed to turn on a dime from being a grouchy, angry old man to a debonair and witty dinner host.

Speaking their language

What struck me about last night’s debate was not that McCain was throwing everything including the kitchen sink at Obama, but that he seemed to be going to great lengths to appeal to his right-wing fundamentalist base by touching on many of their pet issues as he could and using buzz words that only really mean anything to that small demographic group.
It was a given that McCain was going to raise the non-issues about William Ayers and ACORN (though interestingly nothing about Rev. Jeremiah Wright), and Obama was ready with his responses which effectively neutralized those attacks. But McCain went further by raising Obama’s vote in the Illinois Senate against the so-called Born Alive Infant Protection Act which is really only familiar to people on the far fringes of the anti-abortion movement. Why McCain thinks he needs to appeal to people like TTFKAM is beyond me.
Nevertheless, Obama’s answer was definitive, noting that state law already protected the life of a baby born alive (not to mention the Hippocratic Oath) and that the act was simply an attempt to chip away at abortion rights and was unConstitutional in its present form.
McCain then decided to throw himself under a bus by mocking concerns about a woman’s health in respect to abortions. His complaint that the definition of “health” is stretched too far is a common tactic of the far right, but it is not commonly discussed in polite society so he came across sounding crass and cold. Obama, on the other hand, made it clear that he wants to seek a middle ground that will help reduce the number of abortions without taking away a woman’s choice in the matter.
Ultimately, I thought it was clear that Obama won the debate as the polls later confirmed.


On a side note, I was disappointed to see that infant mortality rates in the U.S. are still high.

Infant deaths in the United States declined 2 percent in 2006, government researchers reported Wednesday, but the rate still remains well above that of most other industrialized countries and is one of many indicators suggesting that Americans pay more but get less from their health care system.
Infant mortality has long been considered one of the most important indicators of the health of a nation and the quality of its medical system. In 1960, the United States ranked 12th lowest in the world, but by 2004, the latest year for which comparisons were issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, that ranking had dropped to 29th lowest.

It is interesting to note that the U.S. is even behind Cuba in this all-important measure of our nation’s health.

Their vilest hour: The GOP's Ayers attack

There’s a great column in the Wall Street Journal today by Thomas Frank defending William Ayers.
Not his actions when he was a radical in the 1960s, but his life since then in which he has been a model citizen and respected university professor in Chicago.

I am a friend of Mr. Ayers. In fact, I met him in the same way Mr. Obama says he did: 10 years ago, Mr. Ayers was a guy in my neighborhood in Chicago who knew something about fundraising. I knew nothing about it, I needed to learn, and a friend referred me to Bill.

Bill's got lots of friends, and that's because he is today a dedicated servant of those less fortunate than himself; because he is unfailingly generous to people who ask for his help; and because he is kind and affable and even humble. Moral qualities which, by the way, were celebrated boisterously on day one of the GOP convention in September.

Mr. Ayers is a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), where his work is esteemed by colleagues of different political viewpoints. Herbert Walberg, an advocate of school vouchers who is a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, told me he remembers Mr. Ayers as "a responsible colleague, in the professional sense of the word." Bill Schubert, who served as the chairman of UIC's Department of Curriculum and Instruction for many years, thinks so highly of Mr. Ayers that, in response to the current allegations, he compiled a lengthy résumé of the man's books, journal articles, guest lectures and keynote speeches. Mr. Ayers has been involved with countless foundation efforts and has received various awards. He volunteers for everything. He may once have been wanted by the FBI, but in the intervening years the man has become such a good citizen he ought to be an honorary Eagle Scout.

Rightwingers insist that Ayers is “unrepentent” which is disingenuous. Mr. Ayers has in fact repudiated the violent actions of the Weathermen (which, by the way, did not harm anyone except for some of their own members who were killed when a bomb accidently went off).
What he has not repudiated is his opposition to the Vietnam war. When rightwingers say Ayers is unrepentent, this is what they really mean. The only way he could truly reform himself in their eyes would be to come out and say that he was wrong to oppose the Vietnam War. And then vote Republican.
Short of that, the rightwingers are extremely unforgiving and will hold a grudge to the bitter end.

Frank goes on to express his disgust over the Republican campaign to try and vilify Ayers today in an attempt to drag Obama down.

...in its haste to convict a man merely for associating with Mr. Ayers, the GOP is effectively proposing to make the upcoming election into the largest mass trial in history, with all those professors and all those do-gooders on the hook for someone else's deeds four decades ago.
The McCain campaign has made much of its leader's honor and bravery, but now it has chosen to mount its greatest attack against a man who poses no conceivable threat to the country, who has nothing to do with this year's issues, and who cannot or will not defend himself. Apparently this makes him an irresistible target.
There are a lot of things to call this tactic, but "country first" isn't one of them. The nation wants its hope and confidence restored, and Republican leaders have chosen instead to wave the bloody shirt. This is their vilest hour.

I’m not sure what rightwingers expected Obama to do back when he was first introduced to Ayers, who at the time was an established and highly respected academic and social activist.
Refuse to shake his hand? Spit in his eye?
Is that what John McCain would have done?

But the point is that Repubicans don’t want anyone to think that deeply about this issue. All they want is some excuse, no matter how contrived, to associate Obama with a “terrorist” and make people question his patriotism or what have you.

Who's “paling around” with terrorists?

You’ve got to be kidding me. This is insane.

William Timmons, the Washington lobbyist who John McCain has named to head his presidential transition team, aided an influence effort on behalf of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein to ease international sanctions against his regime.
The two lobbyists who Timmons worked closely with over a five year period on the lobbying campaign later either pleaded guilty to or were convicted of federal criminal charges that they had acted as unregistered agents of Saddam Hussein's government.

So, McCain’s choice to head his transition team is a guy who used to lobby on behalf of Saddam Hussein.

And McCain is trying to make a big deal out of Barack Obama serving on the same board with William Ayers once?!?!?!

William Ayers was a radical anti-war activist in the late-60s whose group set off some bombs but never hurt anyone other than the time a bomb accidently went off and killed some of their own members. I’m not sure how or why Ayers escaped punishment for his activites back then, but he eventually went on to become a respected professor in the Chicago area where he once served on a board with Barack Obama as part of a school reform initiative sponsored by Republican philanthropist Walter Annenberg.
And Ayers once hosted a fundraising “coffee” for Obama during one of his state Senate campaigns.
That is the full extent of their relationship. And of course Ayers has no connection whatsoever with Obama today or with his presidential campaign.

But here we have John McCain who taps as the leader of his transition team a guy who used to be a lobbyist for Saddam Hussein! Talk about ‘paling around with terrorists’! Sheesh!
This is not some guy that McCain had a fleeting and tenuous relationship with in the distant past. He is set to be a leader in a McCain administration. The people who head the transition team for the president-elect invariably wind up with key positions in the administration.
Key positions! A lobbyist for Saddam Hussein!!!
Have I stressed this point enough?

Needless to say, I don’t want to hear another word from Republicans about William Ayers.

Express-News thumbs nose at Ciro

The Express-News editorial board outdid itself today with a glowing endorsement of Republican Lyle Larson for the 22nd District Congressional seat held by Democrat Ciro Rodriguez.
Nevermind that Democrats are in the majority and are on the verge of substantially increasing there majority next term and for the forseeable future. Nevermind that Ciro sits on the coveted House Appropriations Committee which is vitally important for San Antonio and all of its military bases.
No, the E-N thinks we need to pitch our veteran congressman out on his rear and replace him with a freshman Republican who will be stuck in the minority with no power and no influence for who knows how long.
In the editorial, they don’t say one word that is critical of Ciro and give no explanation for why they want to turn him out of office. It is just all glowing praise of Larson and how wonderful and independent he is. Bullshit! He will be just like John Cornyn and vote with the rightwing of his party on each and every issue.
What’s more is he is parroting John McCain’s moronic stance against “earmarks” without considering that those so-called earmarks are what is funding many of the big military projects here that are propping our local economy up - the same projects which the Express-News is always touting and raving about.
I am completely disgusted with the local paper and its rightwing neocon editorial board. They endorsed Bush twice and have been consistent cheerleaders for the quagmire in Iraq. Now I am just waiting for their John McCain endorsement next weekend. It should be good for a few laughs.

GOP - Party of fiscal irresponsibility

This was a great post over at Daily Kos....

The national debt when Jimmy Carter arrived at the White House:

$660 billion.

Added during Carter's four years: $337 billion.

Added during Ronald Reagan's eight years: $1.6 trillion.

Added during George H. W. Bush's four years: $1.6 trillion.

Added during Bill Clinton's eight years: $1.5 trillion.

Added during George W. Bush's seven years, nine months: $4.5 trillion.

Portion of the $9.5 trillion added to the national debt during the past 31 years and seven months that came during Republican presidencies: $7.7 trillion.

Percentage of that $7.7 trillion added during George W. Bush's two terms: 58%.

Good Lord! When you look at the numbers like that it is just astonishing. Ronald Reagan set us on this mega-debt rollercoaster and Bush Sr. went along for the ride. Bill Clinton was just managing to put the brakes on when Bush Jr. got in there, threw the breaks away and sent us over a cliff.

The Shrill One wins a Nobel prize

I was thrilled this morning to see that one of my favorite columnists - Paul Krugman - won the Nobel prize in economics this year.
This starts to make up for the Nobel committee’s snubbing of John Kenneth Galbraith while giving its top prize to Milton Friedman many years ago.

Throw the bum out!

What a moroon!

West Palm Beach Congressman Tim Mahoney (D-FL), whose predecessor resigned in the wake of a sex scandal, agreed to a $121,000 payment to a former mistress who worked on his staff and was threatening to sue him, according to current and former members of his staff who have been briefed on the settlement, which involved Mahoney and his campaign committee.
Pic: Congressman Tim Mahoney and his alleged former mistress, Patricia Allen
The affair between Congressman Tim Mahoney and Patricia Allen began, according to current and former staffers, in 2006 when Mahoney was campaigning for Congress against Foley, promising "a world that is safer, more moral."
Mahoney, who is married, also promised the woman, Patricia Allen, a $50,000 a year job for two years at the agency that handles his campaign advertising, the staffers said.

The guy has an affair while winning a congressional seat he would not have won otherwise except for the fact that the incumbent (Mark Foley) was involved in a sex scandal. Idiot!!
I don’t care if it means giving the seat back to the Republicans, I don’t want an idiot like Mahoney in Congress. representing my party. He should resign his seat immediately.

Impeach Sarah Palin!

The Troopergate report is absolutely scathing in its assessment of Gov. Palin's chronic abuse of power during her brief tenure as Alaska's governor.
When somebody is as demonstratable vindictive as that with that kind of power, the last thing you want to do is hand them even more power.
The citizens of Alaska who thought they were cleaning our their corrupt government by electing Sarah and Todd Palin were sadly mistaken.

Another term limits rant

San Antonio has the most godawful, stupidest term limits restrictions of any major city in the nation. The four-years-and-you’re-out rule keeps San Antonio’s city government permanently handicapped with inexperienced leaders focused on short-term goals.
There is not another entity of any kind in the nation that would tolerate such a ridiculous restriction.
Who would invest their money in a company that pitched out all of its top executives every four years and started fresh with green-behind-the-ears newbies?
What if the San Antonio Spurs tossed out all their veteran players every four years and started over with a team of rookies? How many NBA titles do you think they would win?
The people who are trying to keep this term-limit stranglehold on our city government are either grossly ignorant as to the impact their stubborness is having on the city or they just flat-out hate muncipal government and want to see it constantly fail.
We have got to loosen this noose around our city government’s neck if we want our city to continue to be healthy and vibrant going into the future.
If you live in San Antonio and you care about our city, please go out and vote Nov. 4 for the very reasonable compromise extending term limits to eight years.

Filibuster-proof Senate

The Democrats appear to have an outside shot at a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate next session by winning enough races to bring their total to 60.
Right now the Senate is split 49-49 with two Independents who caucus with the Democrats — the Socialist Bernie Sanders of Vermont, and the Neo-Con Joe Lieberman of Connecticut.
It is unclear whether Lieberman will continue to caucus with the Democrats next year in light of his support for John McCain this election season, going so far as to speak at the Republican National Convention last month. A lot of Democrats want to kick Lieberman out of the caucus and strip him of his chairmanship.
Since the Republicans are not likely to win this election, the next best thing that could happen for Lieberman is if the Democrats come within one vote of that magic 60-vote number. Then they would have to continue holding their noses and allowing him to chair a committee so that he would stay in the caucus.

Here is how the Senate races are shaping up so far:
There are no Democrats in danger of losing their seats. Even Sen. Mary Landrieu in Louisiana, once considered to be the weakest link, is running well ahead of her Republican opponent.
Republicans, on the other hand, are in a world of hurt. Two formerly Republican seats are already considered to be locked up by Democrats - Mark Warner in Virginia and Tom Udall in New Mexico.
Two more are considered highly likely to flip to the Democrats — Mark Udall in Colorado and Jean Shaheen in New Hampshire.
Then there are four more races that are very close but have recently been trending in favor of the Democrats:
Kay Hagan in North Carolina threatening to topple Elizabeth Dole;
Mark Begich in Alaska facing the scandal-plagued Ted Stevens;
Jeff Merkley of Oregon has moderate Republican Gordon Smith on the run;
and Al Franken of Minnesota has taken a slim lead over Norm Coleman.

If the Democrats win all these contests it would be considered a fantastic triumph for the party. But it would still leave them one short of the 60-vote supermajority even counting the two independents.

So now we turn to four long-shot races that look like they could flip if there is a tidal wave of support for Democrats on election day. Those include Ronnie Musgrove in Mississippi; Bruce Lunsford in Kentucky; Jim Martin in Georgia and Rick Noriega in Texas.
If the Democrats pick up one of those, they have 60wL (with Lieberman). If they win two of the four they have 60 and they can ditch Lieberman.

Realistically, I am not getting my hopes up that high. But the fact that this scenario is even possible now is quite remarkable.

Virginia is turning blue

The latest polls show Obama up by double digits in Virginia!
To understand the significance of this you have to be versed in some of the number-crunching statistics of electoral politics.
So far in this campaign Republicans have failed to make any headway in the so-called Kerry states, or those states won by John Kerry in 2004. In addition, Obama seems to have a lock on Iowa and New Mexico which both went narrowly for Bush in 04.
Assuming that does not change, Obama can win by picking up any one of the following states - Virginia, Ohio, North Carolina, Florida, Missouri or Indiana. He is currently leading in all of those states with the exception of Indiana where McCain still has a narrow lead but was never before considered to be a swing state in the first place.
To repeat, anyone of those states can push Obama over the top. If all or even most of them go for Obama, we are talking landslide of historic proportions not seen by a Democrat since LBJ.
And did I mention that I am not even counting New Hampshire, Colorado or Nevada in the Obama column, even though he is leading in those states as well? My current dream number for an Obama landslide is 364. He only needs 270 to win.
When people look at an electoral map of the U.S., it always looks more red than blue. But that is misleading because the map emphasizes land mass which does not matter rather than people. For example, the New England block which Democrats have a lock on - Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Connecticut - has as many electoral votes as Texas. If you throw in some of the other reliably Democratic states just below that region - Delaware, Maryland, D.C., New Jersey - you have a block of electoral votes the same size as California. And when you add in the big population states like California, New York and Illinois which are currently gimmees for Democrats and throw in the reliably Democratic Midwest states like Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan, then it comes down to who can win Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, North Carolina and Florida.
Fun stuff!

Gun nuts for McCain!

Here is some shocking news. The National Gun Nuts Association (NGNA) has endorsed John McCain for president.
I never would have seen THAT coming!
Legitimate gun owners, of course, have nothing to fear from Democrats or a Barack Obama administration. It is just the complete whack jobs like Wayne LaPierre, president of the NGNA, who advocate for unrestricted, total deregulation of the gun industry (we saw how well that worked out for the financial industry) who have something to worry about. If your dream is to one day walk into my kid’s elementary school carrying a military assault rifle, or board a commercial airliner with a plastic gun and a round of armor piercing cop-killer bullets in your belt, then you are probably going to be out of luck under an Obama administration because he will support COMMON SENSE gun laws that won’t restrict in any way the activities of legitimate hunters or the ability of people to protect themselves in their homes.
It is a real shame. There used to be a respected gun owners group called the National Rifle Association or NRA, but it no longer exists today having been overrun by crazy people like Wayne LaPierre. I think they may even still use that name, but don’t be fooled. It is not the same organization that it was.

What’s Left? Part III

This column was published on Aug. 3, 1995

Promotions unnecessarily lure players to state ‘lootery’

I soured on the lottery about four years ago. That was back before Texas took the plunge. I was living in Connecticut at the time, a different world for a South Texas native, working for a chain of newspapers along the coast.
One day as I was standing in line at a small grocery market, I noticed an elderly woman ahead of me with a meager offering of groceries. I assumed from her pauper-like appearance that she was of less than substantial means. As the cashier rang her up, she glanced into her purse and suddenly looked up startled. Stopping the cashier, she picked up a package of meat and asked to take it back so she could buy her daily allotment of lottery tickets.
I couldn’t believe it! This woman was taking food off of her table so she could purchase some worthless lottery tickets. I was beside myself with outrage and disgust, so I decided to look into the matter more thoroughly.
As it turns out, Connecticut was making a killing on lottery tickets that year, raking in an estimated $525 million. That’s a lot of money to squeeze out of a little bitty state like Connecticut. Texas lottery officials are boasting about bringing in $927 million in lottery revenues last year and that from a state with a population four and a half times the size of Connecticut.
Mind you, this was going on in the midst of a really bad recession in the Northeast. Despite having approximately 40 percent of this mountain cash flowing directly into the state treasury, Connecticut was still struggling to make ends meet and was faced with the biggest budget deficit in its history. Obviously the lottery, which had been around for 18 years there, was not the cure all for the state’s fiscal woes.
Could it be, I wondered, that the lottery was more of a drain on the state’s economy than a benefit? People were struggling with massive layoffs, unemployment, low wages and high cost of living; and yet they were spending more on lottery tickets than ever before.
Where does all of this money come from anyway? Well, it’s not appearing out of thin air. In many cases, like the example above, it’s coming straight off the tables of people who can’t afford it. It is also the discretionary income of thousands of working class and middle income people who might have found better and more productive things to do with it. The lottery does not create wealth, it just soaks up whatever is already out there and redistributes about half to a very small group of people.
The money spent on lottery tickets might otherwise have gone towards a night out at the movies, a meal at a nice restaurant, some new clothes, a family vacation, savings for a child’s education and so on. In other words, it is money that could have been reinvested in the community to support local businesses or put into savings which helps banks make loans to new businesses and to people buying new homes.
Instead it is money that is being frittered away on one of the oldest con games known to man. Any professional gambler could tell you that the lottery has the worst odds of any form of gambling ever devised. Your odds of being killed in an automobile accident tomorrow are much better than your chances of winning the big Lotto jackpot. Think about it.
But it is not my place to tell people how to spend their money. And I know that some people would even argue that playing the lottery is worth losing their money on because of the enjoyment they get from those few moments of anticipation as they scratch their numbers or listen to the winning numbers on the nightly news. It reminds me of the time when I was a youth buying packages of baseball cards at the concession stand during Little League games. You could never tell if that next pack of cards might be the one containing the Johnny Bench or Pete Rose cards that I so highly valued.
So my gripe is not with the people that play the lottery. My frustration is with the state government which has decided to tap into people’s weaknesses for this type of entertainment to make some easy money for the state coffers. Silly me, I was naive enough to think that the government was supposed to protect people from being taken advantage of like this. Instead, the government is spending millions of dollars a year ($34 million this past year) on advertising and promotion to entice people to gamble their hard-earned money away.
Oh sure, it raises money for the government, some of which can be used for good things like education. (The ‘profits’ are added to the general fund and not applied to any particular budget item). But if the lottery is to serve as a new form of taxation, we should judge it accordingly and recognize that it is extremely regressive and inefficient. It is regressive because the people who play most frequently tend to be poor and less educated. It is inefficient because less than 40 percent of every dollar collected makes it into the state treasury, unlike most other taxes where it costs less than 2 percent to collect and administer and 98 percent ends up in the treasury.
So here in a nutshell is what I would like to see done. Let the government continue to run a lottery for those people who choose to play, but eliminate all advertising and promotion so as not to entice people into playing who otherwise would not. If that means that ticket sales decline, then all the better. Taxes that are needed should be collected in a fair and efficient manner, otherwise leave people alone to pursue more productive interests with their income.

What’s Left, Part II

This column was published on July 27, 1995.

No sympathy for schools fighting admission of women

The administrators at The Citadel probably should have seen it coming.
The application for admission from Shannon Faulkner to the all-male military academy in South Carolina met all the criteria — all but one, that is.
Somehow it slipped by the admissions officials that Faulkner’s application made no reference to gender. It was only after sending out notification of acceptance that school officials realized that in this case, the person with the gender-neutral name “Shannon” was in fact a Ms.
Now the state-funded school is embroiled in a costly legal battle to keep its all-male “tradition” from being defiled by the admission of a female cadet.
Enough of this nonsense! I haven’t a shred of sympathy for The Citadel or its sister outfit, The Virginia Military Institute, which finds itself in a similar predicament. The wailing and gnashing of teeth at The Citadel and VMI are amplified only because they are the oddities. Every other military school and academy went through the pains of gender integration long ago, including my alma mater, Texas A&M’s Corps of Cadets.
The administrators at The Citadel and VMI (urged on no doubt by their respective alumni associations) made a poor decision years ago when they chose to ignore the dictates and direction of the U.S. Military which was then struggling to integrate women more thoroughly into its ranks at the same time that it was adjusting to the all-volunteer concept of personnel recruitment.
It makes no sense today to have a segregated military school when its purpose is to train people to be leaders in the non-segregated U.S. Military. In fact, it would seem that the cadets at these two institutions are being done a great disservice. How will graduates from these schools react to their female peers and superiors in the military when they have been indoctrinated in the belief that they cannot work with female cadets?
Texas A&M began allowing women into the Corps of Cadets in the early 1970s, although it would be years later before they would gain anything close to equal status with the male cadets. I was there to see a good portion of it in the mid-1980s.
During my freshman year in 1983, there were two all-female outfits that stayed in separate dormitories, which they shared with non-cadet female students. They had their own separate women’s drill team and could not be in the Texas Aggie Band.
But during the next three years things began to change. In 1985, a handful of female freshmen cadets joined the Aggie Band. At least one that I know of stuck it out to her senior year and she was followed by more. A female cadet from my class was the first to be admitted to the Ross Volunteers, the official honor guard for the governor of Texas. Then the women’s drill team was disbanded and even the ultra-macho Fish Drill Team was integrated.
Another female cadet from my class was the first to be elevated to the rank of Corps staff, directing operations for the entire Corps. I still remember the fretting and worrying about whether she could stay in the same dorm with the other members of Corps staff. The old Corps-style dorms had communal bathrooms and showers, two per floor, so that meant one would have to be closed off for the exclusive use of just one person.
The thing that made the biggest impression on me at the time was how efficient the military was at instituting these “big” changes once it set its mind to it. During my sophomore year the word came down from the higher ups that the term “waggie” would no longer be tolerated as a reference to the female cadets. That was final, no questions asked. To disobey at that point would mean big trouble, not because your immediate superiors were die-hard feminists, but because obeying orders regardless of what they were was tantamount to maintaining discipline.
By the time I left in 1987, the Trigon (the Aggie version of the Pentagon) was making plans to break up the two female outfits and combine them with other male outfits. Troubles did eventually develop as I surmised from reading news reports after graduating. There was at least one sexual harassment lawsuit filed, perhaps more. But the Corps survived and even thrived during this time.
The arrogance and short-sightedness of the leaders at The Citadel and VMI means that their transition will be all the more painful. The first female cadet at these institutions, be it Shannon Faulkner or someone else, will not be willing to wait 10-plus years to take full advantage of all that the school has to offer.

Addendum
This column generated my first piece of “fan mail” reprinted below:

30 July 95
Mike W. Thomas (Michele?)
I read you’re editorial “No sympathy for schools fighting admission of women” 29 July 1995 i.e. The Citadel and VMI (wonderful old military schools).
It seems a lot of the Liberals, Woman’s Libers, pro queer, integrators and the like flock to the Kerrville Times.
I believe anyone, whether corporate or private club etc., should have a choice of who they want - black, women, men, queer, or what have you and no one should have to accept who they do not want!
Also, the TV is on you’re side all of commercials seem to show groups of whites and blacks buddying up to each other. Not me I befriend who I want and don’t believe in any kind of integration of blacks, women or the other creeps!
I imagine you’re patron saint is St. Francis of A-Sissy.

I hope you guys have the guts to publish this.

(Name withheld)

What’s Left, Part I

During the summer of 1995 I was working as a reporter and editorial writer for the Kerrville Daily Times and I had the rare privilege of writing a weekly opinion column for the paper. I had written a couple of columns previously, including the one on the JFK assassination, but now I had a regular column with my picture on it and even a name. I called it “What’s Left?”
Alas, it was short-lived. A couple of months after I began writing the column, I got a job at the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal and moved away. So there were only 11 “What’s Left?” columns published over a three-month period.
For my own edification, I am going to publish those old columns on my blog as I have time to transcribe them. Here is one of the first, published on July 20, 1995.

Choices few for those who decline alcohol

Despite the gray patches that have begun showing up in my hair, most people still tell me I look young for my age. That goes double for my wife, what at 27 still looks like she should be in high school.
When we go out to a nice restaurant, it’s not unusual for the waiter or waitress to assume that we are just kids out on a date. Their suspicions of our youthfulness always seem to be confirmed when we decline to order an alcoholic beverage. The general assumption is that if we were old enough to drink we would, so therefore we must be too young.
This is irritating for several reasons, not least of which is that from that point on we generally receive poor service. After all, we are just a couple of kids probably using our parent’s credit card and aren’t likely to leave a good tip.
But the most annoying aspect is the idea that we could somehow have demonstrated our age and maturity by drinking. Is it any wonder that we have a serious problem today with underage drinking — not to mention drinking in general — when drinking is constantly used as the yardstick that measures the difference between youth and adulthood?
In today’s alcohol-soaked culture, the very term “drink” has come to mean the consumption of liquor. In college, students learn quickly that they have to drink to fit in with the in crowd. Every party I ever went to in college revolved around alcohol and I spent much of the time holding a half-empty glass of lukewarm beer so that people would not continually harass me about “not having a good time.”
All through my college years there seemed to be an invisible barrier separating my friends who would drink and my friends who did not. There were few social activities we could find to do together after our freshman year. It seemed quite apparent in those days, too, that the drinking crowd was more popular with the opposite sex. Their continuous parties always attracted lots of young women while those of us who did not drink saw ourselves as the geeky, nerdish-types who could never find dates.
Today, the pressures on our youth to drink in order to fit in, have fun and show their maturity are no less daunting. Raising the drinking age to 21 appears to have made the activity seem all the more alluring to youth seeking to be treated as adults.
I’m not persuaded that any change in the laws, whether it be tightening or loosening restrictions, will make a big difference as long as our societal mindset is such that alcohol is the requisite for any get together involving two or more people. And I would not even begrudge anyone a drink who chooses to do so. My biggest gripe is with the way our society and our culture so often treat the non-drinkers like social misfits.
For a perfect example, go to most any fancy restaurant and see what they have to offer in the way of beverages. For the drinker it is typically a paradise — dozens of beers from around the world, a completely separate menu for all the wines and champagnes and every imaginable mixed drink available at the well-stocked bar.
But for the non-drinker? Well let’s see... There’s tea, one kind only — take it or leave it; a handful of sodas, including diet drinks; and coffee (see reference to tea above). Sometimes you can get milk if you beg and plead with the waiter and don’t mind waiting 30 minutes before they will serve it to you.
There is one clear message that comes out of that and it is quite simple — drinking is cool and non-drinkers are losers. It’s the same message that is pounded every day into the public’s conscience by the constant barrage of beer commercials on television and radio and the hard liquor ads on the billboards and magazines.
I understand that restaurants make a lot of their profit margin off of liquor sales, but wouldn’t it be nice if just once there was a restaurant that catered at least as much to the non-drinkers?
Imagine for a minute if the tables were turned. You walk into a restaurant and they hand you a separate menu for the non-alcoholic beverages. It contains a mile-long list of teas — herbal, fruit, Oriental, English, Irish, etc. — served hot or cold; fruit drinks and juices made from a dozen native and tropical combinations; coffees and espressos and cappuccinos with dozens of flavors to choose from; and along with the usual array of sodas there are numerous off-brands and natural sodas typically found only in health food stores.
When it comes time to order, ask for a beer and watch as they bring you your one and only choice of generic, no-name beer.
Such an arrangement would certainly take a lot of the glamour and mystique out of drinking alcohol.

Ineffective advertising

I saw one of these bumper stickers on a truck the other day and I just had to laugh.

If Republicans want to distribute lots of these stickers then it is just fine with me. On first glance, the red “N” is hard to see and it appears to be just another pro-Obama sticker. That is what I thought when I first saw it and I’m sure most people not versed in the insider politics of the campaign see it the same way.
I also like how they screwed up the grammar in the bottom line, remembering to add an apostrophe for he’s, but leaving it out for it’s.

There have actually been a lot of these anti-Obama stickers floating around that try and mock his campaign using the same imagery in his ads. But most of them amount to basically insider jokes that fly over the heads of the average voter, so to most people they just seem to be promoting Obama rather than tearing him down.

I think it is symptomatic of the fact that most Republicans are unhappy with their candidate and would rather have an anti-Obama sticker on their car instead of a pro-McCain sticker.

Losers.

What’s the matter with Texas?

The McCain campain is tanking in the polls and Obama is running away with the race now.



McCain’s big bounce from the GOP Convention and the Sarah Palin nomination is now just a little glitch in a dominating performance by Obama since early this summer. States that were once considered tossups like Virginia, North Carolina and New Hampshire are now showing double digit leads for Obama. And McCain is steadily losing ground in Ohio and Florida which means he is toast.

So, what’s up with Texas?


McCain’s actually getting more popular here? That’s just crazy.

By the way, this is pretty funny.

Was his nickname “Crash”?

The L.A. Times is reporting on a neglected part of John McCain’s history, that being his penchant for wrecking his airplanes during his career in aviation.

In today's military, a lapse in judgment that causes a crash can end a pilot's career. Though standards were looser and crashes more frequent in the 1960s, McCain's record stands out.
"Three mishaps are unusual," said Michael L. Barr, a former Air Force pilot with 137 combat missions in Vietnam and an internationally known aviation safety expert who teaches in USC's Aviation Safety and Security Program. "After the third accident, you would say: Is there a trend here in terms of his flying skills and his judgment?"
Jeremiah Pearson, a Navy officer who flew 400 missions over Vietnam without a mishap and later became the head of human spaceflight at NASA, said: "That's a lot. You don't want any. Maybe he was just unlucky."

Unlucky! Yeah, that’s what I was wondering when I wrote about just that thing earlier this year after reading through McCain’s bio on Wikipedia.

Imagine if McCain had not been the son of an admiral (and the grandson of another admiral), those mishaps might have ended his flying career before he was sent to Vietnam where (surprise, surprise) he crashed his jet one last time and got taken prisoner.
The whole John McCain story would have been different in that case. If they had grounded him like they would have done with any other military airman at the time, he would never have been a POW and thus probably would not have gone into politics and thus would not be running for president today.

VP Debate

I think it is clear that Joe Biden won the VP debate hands down. Unlike Sarah Palin most of the time, Biden actually answered the questions. He also gave effective rebuttals to Palin's attacks while her typical rebuttal was to say "No, I disagree," and then change the subject.
Honestly, you can't expect to "win" a debate if you don't even answer the questions being asked by the moderator. On several occasions Palin simply ignored the question posed by Gwen Ifill and launched into some prepared statement that was totally unrelated to the topic at hand. It got old quick.
I used to debate in high school. Then I judged debates at UIL speech competitions years later. You can't just ignore the topic at hand and talk about whatever you want to talk about. Palin may not have fallen flat, like many people feared (or hoped), but exceeding such low expectations does not automatically result in a win.
The early polling showed a clear victory for Biden. I expect that won't change, but I also don't expect it will change many minds one way or another either.

Subprime crisis recalls S&L scams of the past

The subprime lending crisis has its roots in the S&L Crisis of the late-80s, early-90s. When I read descriptions of the lending schemes that were going on they remind me of stuff that was happening back in the Reagan-era. Here is a good description of the current crisis:

It is useful to reflect on the nature of the crisis. It is a tale that can be as complicated as you wish to make it, but it is in essence simple and elegant. As interest rates declined in recent years, investors — particularly conservative ones — sought to increase their return without giving up safety and liquidity. They wanted something for nothing, and the market obliged. They were given instruments ultimately based on mortgages on private homes. They therefore had a very real asset base — a house — and therefore had collateral. The value of homes historically had risen, and therefore the value of the assets appeared secured. Financial instruments of increasing complexity eventually were devised, which were bought by conservative investors. In due course, these instruments were bought by less conservative investors, who used them as collateral for borrowing money. They used this money to buy other instruments in a pyramiding scheme that rested on one premise: the existence of houses whose value remained stable or grew.

That is not terribly different from what was happening with the S&L Crisis. I have my own personal connection to that crisis that I want to relate here.

Everybody remembers Madison Guaranty. That’s the Arkansas-based Savings and Loan that was run by Jim and Susan McDougal in the late 1980s. We remember it because the McDougal’s were partners with the Clintons in the Whitewater land deal that went sour. When Madison Guaranty failed during the S&L crisis it cost the government an estimated $60 million to go in and pick up the pieces.

But does anyone remember Chas. Schreiner Bank of Kerrville, Texas? It too failed around the same time period and its collapse cost the U.S. government $154 million — more than twice what Madison Guaranty cost.
And yet, no one remembers Schreiner Bank or the details of its failure. A Google search will come up empty.
But I remember because I was there in 1993 working at the Kerrville Daily Times covering the aftermath of the collapse.
On Sept. 14, 1993, I wrote a story detailing a lawsuit filed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC) against the seven former directors of Schreiner Bank. In the lawsuit, the FDIC alleged that the former bank officials were negligent and that “imprudent operations and unsafe and unsound lending practices” led to the bank’s demise.
That was putting it nicely. What these folks were really doing was running a scam operation and treating the S&L like a great big government-guaranteed cookie jar. The following is an excerpt from my story minus the names:

As an example of unsound lending practices, the FDIC complaint details a series of loans to two of the bank’s directors, and to a principal shareholder. The suit alleges that the former bank officials approved lines of credit to (the bank directors and shareholder) “without even a minimal amount of underwriting.” Further, it alleges that these loans did not comply with the bank’s lending criteria and were subject to numerous extensions and rollovers before ultimately culminating in charge-offs....
“Typically, the lending scheme involved a systematic pattern of origination, renewal, extension, rollover and consolidation of loans, rubberstamp approval, no reduction in principal whatsoever and final charge off of unpaid loans,” the FDIC said in the complaint. During the five-year period, there were 296 specific instances of loan renewals and extentions (to the bank directors and their companies) without reduction in principal.

I wrote another story the next day further detailing how these “loans” worked for the bank directors:

As a specific example of alleged improper conduct by the former directors of the Charles Schreiner Bank involving an insider loan, the FDIC details a series of loans to (a company owned by a bank director - let’s call it Mohair Inc.)
On Jan. 14, 1985, the bank originated loan 9048 for $100,000 to Mohair Inc. and funded it the next day, before the loan committee had reviewed and approved the loan application per bank policy. On Jan. 23, 1985, this process was repeated for loan 9049, also for $100,000. The purpose for the loan was reportedly for working capital and was purportedly secured by the inventory of Mohair Inc., which consisted mostly of wool and mohair stored in a warehouse in Ingram.
The original term for the loans was six months but they were repeatedly renewed and extended six times over a three-year period between 1985 and 1988. The extensions were approved each time by a single loan officer without review by the loan committee. To maintain credit, the company was only required to make interim interest payments without any reduction in principal.
“This cycle was repeated like clockwork every six months,” the FDIC complaint states. In January 1987, (the director) added his personal guaranty to further secure the loans and at final maturity in July 1988 the two loans, 9048 and 9049, were consolidated and rolled over into a new loan 9070 for $200,000.
Loan 9070 was extended for one year until December 1989 when the bank charged it off as a loss. This same pattern was repeated over and over again on numerous loans, according to the FDIC complaint.

Pretty sweet deal, huh? The bank was able to make it look like it was retiring old loans by simply rolling them over and consolidating them into new loans. Over time these loans added up to millions of dollars. And this entire ponzi scheme was backed up by a warehouse that was supposedly filled with mohair and that nobody ever bothered to look at. That warehouse, by the way, mysteriously burned to the ground around the time that the Schreiner Bank failed. How convenient!

What was most maddening about all of this was that these bank directors eventually got off scott free. The FDIC decided that it had too many other bigger fish to fry and determined that Schreiner Bank wasn’t worth the time and effort it would take to pursue its case. Remember that the Schreiner collapse was twice as big as Madison Guaranty.
As it turns out, the only punishment the bank directors suffered was the slight embarrassment from having me write up their story in the local paper. When I look them up today I find many of them are still doing quite well, making big financial donations to the Republican Party of Texas.
Yes, these bank directors were big time Republicans, no doubt. And how did the politicians respond to this mess back then? Republican State Rep. Kenny Marchant sponsored a law the next year EXEMPTING bank directors from future charges of negligence. Ain’t it wonderful?

Is Sarah Palin pro-choice?

Does this mean Sarah Palin is pro-choice now?

Palin on Early Show:

COURIC: Palin says she makes no apologies for her pro-life views and opposes abortion, even in the case of rape or incest.

Gov. PALIN: I'm saying that personally I would counsel that person to choose life, despite horrific, horrific circumstances that this person would find themselves in. And if you're asking, though, kind of foundationally here should anybody end up in jail for having had an abortion, absolutely not. That's nothing that I would ever support.

Doesn’t she realize that the whole point behind Republican opposition to abortion is to make it illegal? To criminalize it and punish people who would defy the law? Has she never thought this through?

It makes you wonder.