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.

The Man Who Will Be President

Telling it like it is...

Another spectacular Republican failure

I think the whiny House Republicans may have just sealed the fate of John McCain’s floundering presidential campaign.
Two hours before Republican leaders failed to deliver the number of votes they said they would, McCain was on the stump taking credit for building a winning coalition in support of the bill.
After the bill fell short in the House, the Dow tumbled 777 points, the worst single-day drop at least since the day after 9/11.
The bailout legislation, while extremely unpopular, is vitally necessary. The Democrats are not going to approve the package cleaning up Bush’s mess without substantial Republican support as well. At the same time, both parties want to protect their weaker members from the wrath of voters who will get stirred up by populist sentiments on the right and left. So the leaders cut a deal such that Democrats would produce a certain number of votes and Republicans would too, just enough to pass, and allowing members in unsafe districts to vote no. But the Republican leadership fell short and didn’t produce the number of votes they said they would. Afterwards they whined and threw a fit and blamed Speaker Pelosi saying she gave a “partisan” speech just before the vote that hurt their widdle feelings. BooHoo.
And so, Republicans admit that they place petty, partisan politics above the economic health of the nation.
So what is next? Does McCain suspend his campaign again? Does he send Sarah Palin to Washington to negotiate with House Republicans so that she can skip Thursday’s scheduled debate with Joe Biden? The possibilities are endless.
Meanwhile, I though Barack Obama’s response was the most reassuring.

"It's important for the American public and the markets to stay calm, because things are never smooth in Congress, and to understand that it will get better...We are going to make sure that an emergency package is put together, because it is required for us to stabilize the markets... So I'm confident that we are going to get there, but it's going to be a little rocky."

Obama pulling away

It is quite heartening to see the latest polls showing Obama pulling away from McCain here in the final leg of the race. He is at 50 percent or better in three of the four major daily tracking polls while McCain’s is dwindling in the low to mid-40s.
It is like the last leg of a marathon when one of the runners suddenly breaks away and opens up a large lead right at the finish.
The so-called-liberal media has been trying very hard to convince everyone that the first presidential debate was a tie. But the polls have consistently shown that a substantial majority believes that Obama won.
I think there was no question that Obama won. He came across as being smart, knowledgable and consistent. He had a clear and logical response to every one of McCain’s attacks and his counterattacks were rarely deflected in return.
By harping on $18 billion in earmarks while ignoring the $300 billion in tax cuts for the rich that his economic plan calls for, McCain came across as disconnected and foolish on the economy.
He seemed more knowledgable on foreign policy, but even then he focused on one thing “the surge” in Iraq, as if that was the trump card and the answer to everything. The “surge” did indeed reduce violence in Iraq, but that was just a tactic towards a strategy - to give the Iraqi government “breathing room” to reconcile its differences between Sunni and Shia and Kurds - and that has ultimately failed. So as a tactic the surge worked, as a strategy it did not. McCain is hoping that most people won’t be able to distinguish the difference.
But ultimately, what should clue people in is that if the surge had really worked then we would be able to withdraw our troops now without having everything unravel and fall to pieces. Since that is not the case, it clearly has not worked as intended.

E.aR.rrgghhhh!

I’ve been watching E.R. on television almost since it began nearly 15 years ago. But I haven’t always been happy with the choices the show’s writers make. I always hate it when a popular show feels the need to arbitrarily kill off a major character, like they did to Dr. Green (Anthony Edwards) some years ago with a long drawn out death from brain cancer. Or the time they had a helicopter arbitrarily fall on Dr. Romano, another one of my favorite characters.
But this season’s premier, which aired last week, is probably the worst I have seen. Last season, they ended with an ambulance exploding. You knew that either Dr. Pratt or Nurse Taggart was on board, but you didn’t know which one.
When the show started, they quickly showed that Nurse Taggart was fine. But then there seemed to be some hope when Pratt was found still in one piece in the front of the bombed out ambulance. But that was just so that they could drag out his death through the entire show as first one thing went wrong and then another until he died on the operating table.
I knew they would kill off Pratt (Mehki Phifer). Why? Because he was happy, and the first rule of TV writers these days is that you cannot have happy characters. If a character has something good happen to them, you can bet that a tragedy is just around the corner. If there is a happy couple, they are guaranteed to be broken up. It never fails. Pratt was about to become the new chief of the ER and he was about to propose marriage to his long-time girlfriend. So naturally he had to die.
I’ll finish watching the 15th and final season of E.R., but after this pathetic beginning I won’t be nearly so sad to see the show go away.

Voluntary regulation

In the NYTimes the other day, I read that SEC Chairman Chris Cox is
admitting that maybe the oversight and deregulation of the Securities industry was a problem.

“The last six months have made it abundantly clear that voluntary regulation does not work,” Cox said in a statement. The program “was fundamentally flawed from the beginning, because investment banks could opt in or out of supervision voluntarily. The fact that investment bank holding companies could withdraw from this voluntary supervision at their discretion diminished the perceived mandate” of the program, and “weakened its effectiveness,” he added.

What!?! Voluntary regulation??? What genius came up with that bright idea in the first place? And why did it have to come to this before they figured out that it was a stupid idea to begin with???

The program Mr. Cox abolished was unanimously approved in 2004 by the commission under his predecessor, William H. Donaldson. Known by the clumsy title of “consolidated supervised entities,” the program allowed the S.E.C. to monitor the parent companies of major Wall Street firms, even though technically the agency had authority over only the firms’ brokerage firm components.
The commission created the program after heavy lobbying for the plan from all five big investment banks. At the time, Mr. Paulson was the head of Goldman Sachs. He left two years later to become the Treasury secretary and has been the architect of the administration’s bailout plan.

Voluntary regulation was the genius idea of a Republican administration and a Republican congress. Just remember that.

In the meantime, it seems that eliminating the rule now is pointless since all the major investment banks it applied to are now gone - either gone belly up, or changed their charters to become normal commercial banks under federal regulation.

Paul Newman

Paul Newman, who died yesterday at age 83, was one of my heroes.
He had a long and wonderful life, but if anyone deserved to live into their 90s it was him. He was a wonderful actor, but that was only a small part of his character. An outspoken liberal, he defied all the Hollywood stereotypes and put his money where his mouth was. His nonproft foundations funded by his "Newman's Own" brand food products gave away more than $200 million in profits to numerous charities and worthy endeavors.
If he had to go, he picked a good time. Now he will get a good write up in all the Sunday papers and I look forward to reading them. I'll also have to go out and get some more of his movies to add to my collection. I have Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Hustler, Hombre and Cool Hand Luke, but there are many more I need to get and watch.

The responsible adults vs. the rebellious teenagers

The financial crisis on Wall Street is a direct result of the radically irresponsible Republican policies of the past dozen years. Now that the the bill is coming due on their malfeasance, it is left mainly to Democrats to clean up the mess.
And instead of pitching in to help out, Republicans are sitting back and throwing potshots at Democrats while continuing to advocate for the same failed policies that got us into this mess in the first place. Seriously.
What we have today is the Responsible Adult Party (Democrats) vs. the Rebellious Teenagers Party (Republicans).
The Democrats are like parents who come home after a weeklong vacation to find that a group of teenagers have trashed their house with a big, long party. They get to work trying to clean up the mess and the teenagers only response is to sit back and say “Party On, Duuuuuudes!”

Considering the Republican’s latest proposal for fixing the Wall Street crisis (i.e. more tax cuts for the rich and more deregulation) I think that “Party On, Duuuuudes!” should be the GOP’s new motto.

Hide Sarah Palin!

I thought that Matthew Yglesias was kidding when he posted this infamous YouTube video

of the South Carolina teen beauty pageant contestant trying to fake her way through a Q and A that she clearly has no idea about and said it was a preview of Sarah Palin’s interview on CBS with Katie Couric.
But now it appears that Yglesias was being very prescient.

Couric asked Palin, "Why isn't it better, Governor Palin, to spend $700 billion helping middle-class families who are struggling with health care, housing, gas and groceries? Allow them to spend more, and put more money into the economy, instead of helping these big financial institutions that played a role in creating this mess?"

Palin, in a rambling and largely incoherent response, responded, "That's why I say I, like every American I'm speaking with, were ill about this position that we have been put in. Where it is the taxpayers looking to bail out. But ultimately, what the bailout does is help those who are concerned about the health care reform that is needed to help shore up our economy. Um, helping, oh, it's got to be about job creation, too. Shoring up our economy, and getting it back on the right track. So health care reform and reducing taxes and reining in spending has got to accompany tax reductions, and tax relief for Americans, and trade -- we have got to see trade as opportunity, not as, uh, competitive, um, scary thing, but one in five jobs created in the trade sector today. We've got to look at that as more opportunity. All of those things under the umbrella of job creation."

My God!
I think the teen beauty pageant contestant made better sense!
Hell, Dan Quayle could have given a better, more coherent response!
No wonder John McCain is in panic mode. Sheesh!

What if a candidate suspended his campaign and nobody noticed...

Except for David Letterman who was obviously ticked when McCain bailed out on appearing on his show at the last moment.



McCain lied to Letterman and told him he had to immediately fly back to Washington to deal with the Wall Street crisis, but instead he went next door to the CBS studio to do an interview with Katie Couric. And Letterman caught him! It was a classic moment with Letterman watching a live feed of McCain getting ready for his Couric interview and yelling “Hey, Senator, I have a question! Do you need a ride to the airport?”

But the best line of the night was when Letterman said “What are you going to do if you’re elected and things get tough? Suspend being president?”

Ouch!!

Meanwhile, there is a sinking suspicion that the real reason for McCain’s desperation move to put off the debates is to Hide Sarah Palin!
Probably not a bad idea.

Chicken!!!!!!

This has got to be the most desperate political stunt by a presidential candidate in our nation’s history!

Republican presidential candidate John McCain announced Wednesday that he is suspending his campaign to return to Washington and focus on the "historic" crisis facing the U.S. economy....
McCain also urged that organizers of Friday's presidential debate at the University of Mississippi to postpone the event.

The Wall Street collapse began 10 days ago, but only now does McCain decide it is imperative that he “suspend” his campaign and postpone Friday’s debate. The truth of the matter is that McCain is getting his butt kicked in the polls and he doesn’t have a prayer of a chance of turning things around in a head-to-head debate on the issues with Obama.
So he is pulling this desperation stunt hoping it will distract people from all the other problems besetting his campaign, like the fact that his campaign manager is suddenly ensnared in a new scandal:

One of the giant mortgage companies at the heart of the credit crisis paid $15,000 a month from the end of 2005 through last month to a firm owned by Senator John McCain’s campaign manager, according to two people with direct knowledge of the arrangement.
The disclosure undercuts a remark by Mr. McCain on Sunday night that the campaign manager, Rick Davis, had had no involvement with the company for the last several years.
Mr. Davis’s firm received the payments from the company, Freddie Mac, until it was taken over by the government this month...

$15,000 a month!!! For doing nothing!!??!!! What the heck is going on here?

Meanwhile, Sarah Palin’s pathetic attempts to bone up on her foreign policy knowledge by exchanging pleasantries with a handful of foreign leaders at the U.N. became a sad spectacle when her handlers refused to allow media more than 30 seconds at each photo-op and No Questions!!!

So let’s see, Palin is running scared from investigators in Alaska looking into her abuse of power scandal during her brief tenure as governor. And now McCain is running scared at the prospect of having to face Obama in a formal debate on foreign policy.
And the most amazing thing of all is that there are still people out there willing to vote for these people to lead our country for the next four years.
How deeply disturbing that is.

Landslide dreaming

All the national polls have swung back Obama’s way which would explain the noticable absence of TTFKAM (The Troll Formerly Known As Mark) from the comments. He apparently only crawls out from under his rock to pick at me whenever the polls show John McCain leading. Now that the tide has turned he has slithered away again.
I
There is a cool website here that allows you to color each state red or blue to see how the election would play out under different scenarios.
Right now you start off giving each candidate their gimme states. McCain gets Texas, the Deep South, and most of the Mountain West. Obama gets California and the Pacific Coast, Illinois, New York and all of New England.
Then you have to figure out how to divvy up the “swing” states.
If Obama can lock up the Mid-West and Great Lakes region (minus Indiana, plus Pennsylvania). He wins by the slimmest of margins. That means Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Iowa and Missouri.
But there are other pick-ups more likely than Missouri, such as New Mexico and Colorado; Virginia and North Carolina; Ohio and maybe even Indiana; and, of course, Florida.
If any of those state combinations start to flow to Obama, then get ready for a landslide.
Right now, I have high hopes for Virginia. Mark Warner is doing so well in his Senate race over hapless Republican Jim Gilmore that I think he could deliver the state for Obama on his coattails.

Update

The polling news just keeps getting better.
The new Washington Post/ABC News poll has Obama up a whopping 9 points — 52 to 43.
And Hotline/Diageo has Obama opening up a six point lead — 48 to 42, the biggest spread in their polling to date.
And even Rasmussen finally shows Obama starting to pull away 49 to 47.

The end is near

At least as far as my TV viewing habits are concerned.
For several years now the television network executives have relentlessly hacked away at the kinds of TV programming that I find pleasurable or even tolerable. They have slowly canceled all the shows that I used to watch regularly and replaced them with unwatchable “reality show” dreck. New shows that I would find somewhat interesting would get canceled in the middle of a season. This had the effect of teaching me not to invest my time in watching new shows until they are well established.
Then last season I found that I was left with just three shows that I took the time to watch on a regular weekly basis — ER, Lost and Boston Legal. (And to my chagrin, ER and Lost air at the same time). ER, it was announced, was in its final season and they had already declared that their would be a limited lifespan for Lost. So this just left Boston Legal.
Now I have learned that this will also be the final season for Boston Legal, and a truncated one to boot. They only produced half as many Boston Legal shows this season plus a two-hour finale to wrap it all up.
And with that I guess I can just sell my television set. Nothing else that is coming out new this season looks even halfway interesting, and even if it did I know better than to invest my time watching it just to have the networks pull the plug halfway through.
So I give up. After this season I will not have any traditional TV programming to watch. Oh, there will still be plenty of stuff to watch - news shows like Countdown with Keith Olbermann, The Rachel Maddow Show, The Daily Show, The Colbert Report - Home and Garden channel, Discovery Network, Sports, classic movies on AMC and TCM, etc.
But the era of traditional TV programming is being undermined by the greed and stupidity of today’s clueless network executives who wouldn’t know a hit TV show if it bit them on the ass.

Electing Republicans is costly

First there is the $500 billion (and climbing) price tag for the Quagmire in Iraq. And don't forget the $4 a gallon gas prices that came along with the turmoil in the Middle East as an added bonus.
Now we have a $700 billion bailout of the U.S. financial system thanks to the Republicans' slavish devotion to deregulation and "unfettered" free markets. And that may just be the first installment of what could wind up being $1 trillion before all is said and done.
And let's not forget the Bush/McCain tax giveaway to the rich that left a huge hole in our budget even before these other expenses started piling up. Tax giveaways that were supposed to spur an economic bonanza that would trickly down to all of us. Instead, we got a recession followed by a weak, jobless recovery and then another recession. During which time most American's average earnings have gone done while the cost of living has continued to climb.
And in between there has been a steady stream of corruption as Republicans handed the purse strings over to the K Street lobbyists and allowed them to author whatever legislation their hearts desired.
So now, in light of all this, is it any wonder that my jaw is agape when I hear Republican devotees charge that Barack Obama is going to tax us to death and break the bank with all kinds of new social programs? While it is true that Obama will want to redirect some spending toward education and healthcare initiatives that have been long neglected, but that spending pales in comparison to the hundreds of billions that Republicans have been flushing away on a needless war and an economic catastrophe largely of their own making.
Republicans like McCain try to conceal their freespending ways by making overhyped attacks on earmark programs (which Sarah Palin used to pig out on in Alaska) which are just chickenfeed compared to the gusher of funds being splurged elsewhere. The elimination of these earmarks would make no more difference in the size of our federal deficit than opening up more areas for drilling will make in the price of gasoline. In other words, barely a discernable difference if any.
So why would people want to keep Republicans in power for another four years? I dare say that we can't afford it.

Republican economics have FAILED

Republican economic policies have failed, utterly and completely. Free market deregulators like John McCain finally got their wish and for the past eight years Wall Street has been sputtering along completely unfettered by government oversight. We were told that this would allow the economy to grow to new heights of prosperity for everyone. Instead, it ran itself into the ground. Greed, stupidity, mismanagement, or whatever you want to blame it on, it clearly did not work out the way Republicans have said it would all these years.
And now what do the big Wall Street mavens do? Do they trust the free market to right itself and turn things around? Heck no. They go running to the federal government for a bailout.

...much of Washington appears to have decided that government isn’t the problem, it’s the solution. The unthinkable — a government buyout of much of the private sector’s bad debt — has become the inevitable.

And I have to sympathize with John Cole who is really ticked.

I do not ever want to hear another damned word about the free market. I don’t want to hear another thing about letting the market regulate itself. I don’t want to hear about the free flow of capital. I don’t want to hear about government getting out of our lives.
None of it. From superfunds to super-bailouts, I am tired of other people getting rich being irresponsible and then being told I have to pay to clean it up.

Now John McCain wants to fire the SEC chairman, who happens to be rightwing former Republican Congressman Chris Cox, a Bush appointee. But as Obama quickly noted, we shouldn’t stop there. We need to fire the whole team that allowed this disaster to unfold - the entire Republican administration has got to go. And the last thing we would ever want to do at this point, is elect a whole new batch of like-minded Republicans to keep running our economy into the ground for another four years.

More charts and graphs

Former FCC Chairman Reed Hundt has even more charts and graphs to show Why It Matters: McCain vs. Obama and the Problems of the American Economy

The bottom line for the Bush Administration is that it has not fulfilled its primary purposes: it did not improve the standard of living for most Americans; it was hardly a prudent steward of the taxpayers' money; it did not carefully regulate financially institutions that are important to the well-being of our economy; and it did not suppress foreign terrorism or catch bin Laden.

John McCain would be not just more of the same, but much worse. Of the many concerns about his candidacy, perhaps the most damning is that he does not realize that at a fundamental level the critical trends that underlie the future of our economy and society need to be changed. We are heading in the wrong direction, and yet John McCain thinks it is the right direction, and would have us move faster down the declining path.

Americans earn less than they should, pay more than they should for necessities, and work less than they want or need to do. They have less choice and opportunity to get education after high school. They have too hard a time getting trained for work in the modern economy. They should get, and they don't get, ever better, ever faster and ever cheaper transportation and communications services. They should get, and they don't get, easy, widely available and reasonably priced access on a long term basis to green electricity, high mileage vehicles and energy efficient buildings, including residential housing. They should have reliable and secure health care and pensions and savings plans; they don't.

When the national economy produces more and more, as it does most years, Americans should all see their incomes rise at more or less the same rate that the economy grows. They don't. The Bush economic policies that John McCain wants to continue enable people at the very top of the income ladder to take a disproportionate share of the growth and increase the value of their assets. People in the middle do not get a fair shake.

Click through and check out all the charts and graphs he has to back up what he is saying.

Democrats vs. Republicans, the stats

Everybody fares better under Democratic presidents and Michael Kinsley has the charts to prove it.

On average, in years when the president is a Democrat, the economy grows faster; inflation is lower; fewer people can't find a job; the federal government spends a smaller share of GDP, whether or not you include defense spending; and the deficit is lower (or—sweet Clinton-years memory—the surplus is higher). The one category that Republicans win is, unsurprisingly, federal taxes as a share of GDP. But it is no trick to lower taxes if you don't lower spending.

And over at Daily Kos, we are reminded again why that is. Because Conservatism Is An Utter Failure - or at least the brand of “conservatisim” practiced by Republicans today.

In the meantime, I think we should all be concerned that John McCain just forget where Spain was.
And also disturbing is the fact that Sarah Palin thinks the bailout of insurance giant AIG had something to do with construction bonds.
Are these people for real??? This must be why the McCain campaign won’t let Palin anywhere near a reporter or a microphone without a script.

And then there is McCain’s bizarre effort this week to reinvent himself in the mode of John Edwards and claim that he is going to take on the “Good Ol’ Boy” network in Washington.
Here is Barack Obama’s response:

A Conservative for Obama

This is for my conservative friends. It is from D Magazine

My party has slipped its moorings. It’s time for a true pragmatist to lead the country.
By Wick Allison, Editor In Chief
THE MORE I LISTEN TO AND READ ABOUT “the most liberal member of the U.S. Senate,” the more I like him. Barack Obama strikes a chord with me like no political figure since Ronald Reagan. To explain why, I need to explain why I am a conservative and what it means to me.

In 1964, at the age of 16, I organized the Dallas County Youth for Goldwater. My senior thesis at the University of Texas was on the conservative intellectual revival in America. Twenty years later, I was invited by William F. Buckley Jr. to join the board of National Review. I later became its publisher.

Conservatism to me is less a political philosophy than a stance, a recognition of the fallibility of man and of man’s institutions. Conservatives respect the past not for its antiquity but because it represents, as G.K. Chesterton said, the democracy of the dead; it gives the benefit of the doubt to customs and laws tried and tested in the crucible of time. Conservatives are skeptical of abstract theories and utopian schemes, doubtful that government is wiser than its citizens, and always ready to test any political program against actual results.

Liberalism always seemed to me to be a system of “oughts.” We ought to do this or that because it’s the right thing to do, regardless of whether it works or not. It is a doctrine based on intentions, not results, on feeling good rather than doing good.

But today it is so-called conservatives who are cemented to political programs when they clearly don’t work. The Bush tax cuts—a solution for which there was no real problem and which he refused to end even when the nation went to war—led to huge deficit spending and a $3 trillion growth in the federal debt. Facing this, John McCain pumps his “conservative” credentials by proposing even bigger tax cuts. Meanwhile, a movement that once fought for limited government has presided over the greatest growth of government in our history. That is not conservatism; it is profligacy using conservatism as a mask.

Today it is conservatives, not liberals, who talk with alarming bellicosity about making the world “safe for democracy.” It is John McCain who says America’s job is to “defeat evil,” a theological expansion of the nation’s mission that would make George Washington cough out his wooden teeth.

This kind of conservatism, which is not conservative at all, has produced financial mismanagement, the waste of human lives, the loss of moral authority, and the wreckage of our economy that McCain now threatens to make worse.

Barack Obama is not my ideal candidate for president. (In fact, I made the maximum donation to John McCain during the primaries, when there was still hope he might come to his senses.) But I now see that Obama is almost the ideal candidate for this moment in American history. I disagree with him on many issues. But those don’t matter as much as what Obama offers, which is a deeply conservative view of the world. Nobody can read Obama’s books (which, it is worth noting, he wrote himself) or listen to him speak without realizing that this is a thoughtful, pragmatic, and prudent man. It gives me comfort just to think that after eight years of George W. Bush we will have a president who has actually read the Federalist Papers.

Most important, Obama will be a realist. I doubt he will taunt Russia, as McCain has, at the very moment when our national interest requires it as an ally. The crucial distinction in my mind is that, unlike John McCain, I am convinced he will not impulsively take us into another war unless American national interests are directly threatened.

“Every great cause,” Eric Hoffer wrote, “begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” As a cause, conservatism may be dead. But as a stance, as a way of making judgments in a complex and difficult world, I believe it is very much alive in the instincts and predispositions of a liberal named Barack Obama.

The Palin coverup

Shadowy forces are at work trying to undermine the investigation into Sarah Palin’s abuse of power scandal in Alaska. The latest word is that some loopy wingnut legal outfit from Texas called Liberty Legal Institute has gone north to try and intimidate the lawmakers who are looking into this scandal.
Steve Benen has a good rundown but thinks the media should be paying more attention.
I think the timing on this couldn’t be better. It is turning into a really nasty, first-rate cover-up scandal with Palin’s spokesperson now viciously attacking the former top police officer in Alaska:

You really can't experience the full effect of Monday's news conference featuring Palin spokeswoman Meghan Stapleton unless you hear it for yourself. Stapleton passionately attacked former Commissioner of Public Safety Walt Monegan. Her rhetoric was plain, desperate, and obvious. Her tone, pure shrill.
With intensity, urgency, and alarm in her voice, Stapleton described Monegan's behavior as commissioner as egregious insubordination, full of obstructionist conduct and a brazen refusal to follow instructions.
Did Walt Monegan, former Marine, and lifetime crime fighter deserve this? Of course not.
But history has proven, get in the way of Sarah Barracuda's political ambition, and you won't know what hit you.

The question now is whether they truly believe that this kind of heavy-handed obstructionism and nasty politics is going to make this scandal go away before election day? More likely, it will just exacerbate it. They want to keep the report from coming out before election day? Go ahead. That will just make everyone assume the worst. The more effort they put into squelching the investigation, the more attention will be drawn toward it. It’s a vicious circle and one that is partly of their own making.

Meanwhile, the shine has come off of Palin’s candidacy and her approval rating is dropping like a rock. She had a brief window of time to get a bounce out of an appealing personal story and a mostly-made-up professional one. Now that the truth is starting to leak out and penetrate the electorate’s conscience she is not as appealing as she once was. It is the same thing that Obama already went through, except he ultimately had more substance and more promise once the initial hype faded away.

Woo Hoo!!

Tracking Polls: Momentum Shifts to Obama
Gallup finally has Obama back on top, catching up with Diageo/Hotline and Research 2000. Only Rasmussen still gives McCain a slim lead, but it is clear that the momentum has Poshifted back to Obama and now with no more conventions and no more surprise VP picks I don’t see how McCain expects to get another bump before election day. His current strategy of lying his tail off is clearly not working.

Not cooperating and not qualified

Sarah Palin has flip-flopped on her promise to cooperate with the investigation into the Troopergate scandal back in Alaska.
I actually think it is unfair to say that Palin flip-flopped on this issue. Now that we know her better, it is obvious that she was just lying when she initially said she would cooperate.
When she was first tapped to be McCain’s runningmate, wingnut bloggers were reassuring everyone that the Troopergate scandal was no big deal and would be quickly resolved. Palin’s promise to cooperate with the investigation seemed to give that particular spin some credibility.
Now it appears that was all B.S. and the scandal is actually much worse for Palin than we were initially led to believe.

In other news, Carly Fiorina, the former CEO of Hewlett-Packard and now a flack for the McCain campaign, doesn’t think that Sarah Palin is qualified to be the CEO of a Fortune 500 company.

Lyle Larson gets down and dirty with the pigs

I got my first campaign flyer from Republican Lyle Larson’s campaign last week. He is the one trying to unseat Democrat Ciro Rodriguez and reclaim the 22nd Congressional District for the Rs after Henry Bonilla lost it in 2006.
The flyer is little more than a rehash of the stuff that is on his website which I discussed in this post.
But now it seems that Larson is out with a television ad, although he already had to pull it once, temporarily, because he failed to approve it on air as required by federal law.
But the ad itself deserves further comment:

The 30-second TV spot features Larson standing behind several pigs on a farm.
The ad never mentions Rodriguez, D-San Antonio, but it likens Congress to hog farming, with special interests feeding at the trough “on our tax dollars.”
“It's time to put the feed away,” Larson says in the ad.

I guess we should note that one of the biggest hogs at the trough should rightfully be Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, whose state pigs out on more pork-barrell projects per capita than any other state in the union.
But more importantly for San Antonio, what this ad is making explicitly clear is that if he is elected to Congress, Larson WILL NOT fight for the vital federal funding that San Antonio needs to complete work on the San Antonio River channel or to protect Camp Bullis from encroaching development. Nor will he fight for the other earmark projects for San Antonio like funding to expand Brooke Army Medical Center or any of the other military projects so important to the city’s economic future.
In other words, Larson is either lying right now or he would be a major disaster as a congressman once in office. Either way he should not be trusted with your vote.

Wall Street Woes

We need to be very clear about this latest economic catastrophe. The blame falls squarely on the Republican economic policies - practiced by George Bush and advocated by John McCain. For 28 years, Republicans have chanted the deregulation mantra and fought every reasonable effort to reassert any kind of effective government oversight that would have prevented this ongoing travesty.
This is yet another example of the massive and total failure of Republican ideology which, as Joe Biden points out, has led to “fewer jobs, increased foreign debt and skyrocketing oil prices.”
Via, Steve Benen at Political Animal I found this excellent article in the NYTimes by Jackie Calmes, who used to be one of the best reporters at the Wall Street Journal before it was taken over by Rupert Murdoch.
Essentially, if you are concerned about fixing things for the better and preventing these kind of things from happening in the future, you had better not vote for the guy who wants to keep doing the same thing they have been doing all this time. Obama is the only one offering a plan that would keep the country from going even further down the tubes, and he has been making that same case for over a year now while McCain has been totally silent.

Wasilla Hockey Moms for Truth

Yes, this is a parody
But it is funny as all get out.

TPA Roundup 9-15

It's Monday, and that means it is time for yet another edition of the Texas Progressive Alliance Weekly Round-Up.

This week, many bloggers in Houston and in the Gulf Coast region are without power and digging out from Hurricane Ike. We extend our best wishes for a speedy recovery not only to our member bloggers in these regions but to all citizens in the areas hit by Ike. Please consider making a donation to the Red Cross to help relief efforts.

Why does Sarah Palin hate wolves? The Texas Cloverleaf clues us in.

Everybody knows that this year's wedge'em and hate'em issue is Hispanics immigration. CouldBeTrue at South Texas Chisme says Texas leads the way with banning rents in Farmers Branch, denying passports to citizens in the Valley and threatening document checks during an evacuation.

During the preparations for Hurricane Ike, Off the Kuff noted yet another lawsuit filed against Farmers Branch for its ongoing war against immigrants and apartment renters.

Sen. John Cornyn claims to be voting "Texas values" when he consistently rubber-stamps Bush in the U. S. Senate. Eye On Williamson asks, since when have torture, spying on Americans and misleading the country on matters of war and peace been Texas values?

PDiddie survived Ike almost exactly as he predicted.

BossKitty at TruthHugger wonders if disaster lessons recently learned, will be used as we watch Hurricane Ike Recovery, Texas Style

Colloquialisms are a wonderful rhetorical device to create an instant sense of commonality within the minds of the voting public. However, they can at times be misconstrued (right, Governor Swift?) which is why McBlogger took some time to offer Sen. Obama (The BEST!) a phrase he could use that can't possibly be interpreted as anything other than an attack on John McCain and his worthless ideas, proposals and suggestions.

North Texas Liberal examines in-depth the Palin pick, comparing and contrasting her with Obama's VP pick of Joe Biden, and dissecting the media's coverage of Sarah Palin.

jobsanger writes about how United States interference into Bolivia's internal affairs have gotten American ambassadors kicked out of two countries in South America, and how some politicians can't refuse even a bad photo op.

Vince at Capitol Annex notes that State Rep. Phil King (R-Waxahachie), chair of the House Regulated Industries Committee, is having a fund-raiser at the home of a lobbyist for telecom giant AT&T. King's committee just happens to regulate telecommunications in Texas.

The McCain/Palin honeymoon is over

There were two highly disturbing portraits of Sarah Palin out today, one in the NY Times and one in the Washington Post.
Both reveal someone who is vindictive and prone to cronyism. Neither are good qualities to have in a national leader.
From the NYT:

an examination of her swift rise and record as mayor of Wasilla and then governor finds that her visceral style and penchant for attacking critics — she sometimes calls local opponents “haters” — contrasts with her carefully crafted public image.
Throughout her political career, she has pursued vendettas, fired officials who crossed her and sometimes blurred the line between government and personal grievance, according to a review of public records and interviews with 60 Republican and Democratic legislators and local officials.

The NYT story provides example after example of Palin's "governing style" by which she avoids interacting with most other government officials who relies on a small coterie of close advisors, led by her husband Todd, when making key budget decisions. Todd, it should be noted, was for seven years a card-carrying member of a radical, right-wing, America-hating secessionist group in Alaska.

The WaPo story gives us more details about Palin's actual responsibilities when she was mayor of tiny Wasilla.

The universe of the mayor of Wasilla is sharply circumscribed even by the standards of small towns, which limited Palin's exposure to issues such as health care, social services, the environment and education.
Firefighting and schools, two of the main elements of local governance, are handled by the Matanuska-Susitna Borough, the regional government for a huge swath of central Alaska. The state has jurisdiction over social services and environmental regulations such as stormwater management for building projects.
With so many government services in the state subsidized by oil revenue, and with no need to provide for local schools, Wasilla has also made do with a very low property tax rate -- cut altogether by Palin's successor -- sparing it from the tax battles that localities elsewhere must deal with. Instead, the city collects a 2 percent sales tax, the bulk of which is paid by people who live outside town and shop at its big-box stores.
The mayor oversees a police department created three years before Palin took office; the public works department; the parks and recreation department; a planning office; a library; and a small history museum. Council meetings are in the low-ceilinged basement of the town hall, a former school, and often the only residents who show up to testify are two gadflies. When Palin was mayor, the population was just 5,500.

And despite the sparcity of responsibilities facing the mayoral position for Wasilla, Palin insisted on hiring a city administrator once she took office to handle all the "day-to-day" chores of the city.
Knowing this, it becomes all the more appalling that she had the gall to stand up at the RNC and belittle Barack Obama's work as a community organizer in Chicago before serving two terms in the Illinois State Senate.

I know of course that all the brainwashed wingnuts will try and dismiss these stories as partisan attacks by the "liberal media", but I know full well that these highly respected establishment papers would have had no problem writing positive puff pieces about Palin if there had been anything positive to puff about. But what they found instead was that nearly her whole story was mostly smoke and blue mirrors.
And as the electorate finally starts to wipe the smoke out of their eyes, they are going to see the McCain/Palin ticket for what it is - a dishonest charade.

Moose in headlights

Sarah “Quayle” Palin was totally stumped in her first big media interview when asked whether or not she supports the Bush Doctrine.
Following is the type of ad that Republicans would put out if a Democrat ever demonstrated that level of cluelessness about a major foreign policy position.



But, but, but.... They said that Palin has all this foreign policy experience because Alaska is next to Russia!!
Has she ever been to Russia? Nooooo.
Has she ever met with any Russian government officials? Nooooooo.
Or ANY foreign leaders for that matter? Nooooooo.
Does Russia give a rat’s ass who the governor of Alaska is? Noooooo.

Uppity and disrespectful

The McCain campaign ads just keep getting worse and worse. I'm just waiting for the equivalent of the infamous "Willie Horton" ad to hit the air.
The lastest ad comes very close in my opinion.
I call it the "Uppity Black Man Disrespects a White Woman" ad.
It is a complete crock. Obama has never said anything remotely disrespectful of Palin. What this ad is clearly trying to do is appeal to the deeply embedded racial animosities of the electorate by raising the specter of an "uppity" black man trying to rise above his place who commits what was once considered a lynching offense in the South - "disrespecting" a white woman.
This is truly sickening. John McCain has forfeited any and all sense of decency in this race and is no longer morally fit to be president of the United States.

Political Slugfest

It’s going to be a slugfest from here on out. The Republicans have demonstrated once again that they have no scruples when it comes to political campaigns. John McCain’s most recent attack ads against Obama have been nothing short of despicable. And their recent effort to gin up a phony controversy over a completely innocent remark made by Obama is just the tip of the Rovian iceberg.
So while Obama has done well at defending himself against these attacks, he can’t sit back and restrict himself to running an exclusively positive, issue-based campaign. He is going to have to hit back hard. That doesn’t mean that he should lie and lie and lie like Sarah Palin does. And it doesn’t mean that he should just make stuff up like John McCain does. We Democrats have to maintain some standards. But he will need to go on the offensive and not let up until election day.
He doesn’t get any credit whatsoever for playing nice. The average uninformed voter just assumes that both sides play dirty anyway. So he might as well get his hands dirty, he just doesn’t have to swim around in the raw sewage like the other side.

Today is the 7th anniversary of 9/11 and so there will be no campaign attacks launched today. But starting tomorrow expect the gloves to come off.
I want to see some pro-Obama 527 groups unleashed to go after McCain/Palin. There is no shortage of fair-game targets right now.

How about an add highlighting Sarah Palin’s close ties and affiliation with a radical, America-hating seccessionist group in Alaska?

Let’s see a series of adds on the TrooperGate scandal that the Republicans are desperately trying to cover up now.

Let’s highlight all the endless lies about the Bridge to Nowhere and Palin’s earmark record, and all of McCain’s flip-flops and lockstep support of Bush’s policies.

It is a shame that it has to come to this, but the sad truth is that so many people are so blithely ignorant of what is really going on and how it will effect them that the only way to reach them is with hard-hitting attack ads.

A really bad Disney movie

Matt Damon gets it right.



Oh, and now it turns out that Palin’s claim to fame that she sold the governor’s plane on eBay wasn’t even her idea to begin with. The state government had been routinely selling big ticket items on eBay long before Palin came to office.
And, of course, Palin’s plane didn’t sell on eBay and had to be pawned off by an aviation broker at a loss to the state government.
Lies, Lies, Lies, Lies.

The "socialist" canard

Your campaign issues are pretty well covered in the writings of Karl Marx and most have been pretty well refuted. the one basic issue which Marx and Obama total agree on "From each according to his ability to each according to his needs", which your guys calls "neighborliness" is the only issue your guy is running on. That is what a "community organizer" does, spread the socialist word.

The above is a comment from my conservative friend jimmyk who blogs at but, that's just my opinion. I find it interesting and perturbing at the same time, this sentiment that Democrats in general are “socialists.” Most people who level that charge don’t even know what socialism is and just equate it with any and all government welfare programs.
At least jimmyk can accurately identify the quote “From each according to his ability to each according to his needs" as coming from Marx. In past surveys, most people have assumed the quote comes directly from the U.S. Constitution. So should those people be aghast that it actually comes from Marx?
No, not really. Not if you know what the real inspiration for the quote was (which didn’t even originate with Marx). It might upset jimmyk to learn this, but the quote was inspired by a couple of passages from the New Testament:

…the inspiration for this slogan lies in Christianity. An earlier exposition of the idea is found in the Bible, in Acts of the Apostles. Luke describes the organization of the first Christian congregations following the death of Jesus:
And all that believed were together, and had all things common; And sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need. (Acts 2:44-45)
...
Neither was there any among them that lacked: for as many as were possessors of lands or houses sold them, and brought the prices of the things that were sold, and laid them down at the apostles' feet: and distribution was made unto every man according as he had need. (Acts 4:34-35)

Oh my! I guess this means that Jesus' disciples were all a bunch of Communists!!!
But that doesn’t mean that Obama and the Democrats are proposing anything of this sort. In fact, Obama’s economic plan and tax proposal recently got a thumbs up from Business Week Magazine in a head-to-head comparison with John McCain’s plan.

According to a new analysis by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, a joint venture between the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution, two Washington think tanks, this round goes to Obama. The TPC took a look at the various tax proposals put forth by the two candidates and estimated that Obama's plan would lead to a boost in aftertax income for all but the highest earners, while taking a smaller bite out of government tax revenues than would McCain's plans.
Len Burman, a former Treasury tax official who is now a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, says if Obama's proposals—which include plans to rescind the Bush tax cuts on couples making more than $250,000, close corporate tax loopholes, and tax private equity earnings known as "carried interest" as ordinary income—were adopted in 2009, for example, married couples with earnings in the lowest quintile of the population would see their aftertax income rise 5.8%. Those in the next quintile would see an increase of 4%. Those breaks would be paid for by those with high incomes: the top 1% of taxpayers would see aftertax income fall 8.4%.
Under McCain's proposals, by contrast—including an extension of the Bush tax cuts for all taxpayers, a corporate tax cut, and a larger reduction in estate taxes than Obama would support—far more of the benefits would go to the top. If his plans went into effect in 2009, married couples in the bottom fifth of the population would see aftertax income go up just 0.2%, while those in the next quintile would see a 0.7% hike. But those in the top quintile would see a bump up in aftertax income of 2.7%.
"It's just flat wrong" to say people would do worse under Obama, says Burman. "Most lower- and middle-class people would pay less taxes under Obama than they would under the proposals being put forth by McCain."

So, most people would end up paying LESS in taxes under Barack Obama than they would under John McCain. Let that sink in for a minute.
If you are planning to vote strictly out of self interest, then unless you make more than $250,000 per year, you are better off voting for Obama.

Now let’s look at some of the other things Obama is proposing to do.

* Provide a "Making Work Pay" Tax Cut for America's Working Families: Obama will restore fairness to the tax code and provide 150 million workers the tax relief they need. Obama will create a new "Making Work Pay" tax credit of up to $500 per person, or $1,000 per working family.

There’s a $1,000 tax credit I will be eligible for. That should help make up for the disparity in the way Social Security taxes are paid. Social Security taxes are capped at $102,000. That means if you make less than $100,000 per year, then 100 percent of your income is taxed for Social Security. But if you are rich like Donald Trump or John McCain, then you only have a tiny smidgen of your total income taxed for Social Security.

* Expand the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit: The Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit provides too little relief to families that struggle to afford child care expenses. Barack Obama will reform the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit by making it refundable and allowing low-income families to receive up to a 50 percent credit for their child care expenses.

Another tax credit I would be eligible for. Making child care more affordable is one of the best ways to help struggling two-income families during these hard times (i.e. the Bush years).

* Make College More Affordable: Barack Obama will make college affordable for all Americans by creating a new American Opportunity Tax Credit. This universal and fully refundable credit will ensure that the first $4,000 of a college education is completely free for most Americans, and will cover two-thirds the cost of tuition at the average public college or university. Recipients of this credit will be required to conduct 100 hours of public service a year.

My kids are only 5 and 2, but I am already worried about how I am going to pay for them to go to college. It would be nice if the country wasn’t swamped in debt by the time they are ready to go off to school. But John McCain wants to keep flushing billions of tax dollars away in Iraq while also trying to start a new war in Iran.

* Create a Universal Mortgage Credit: The current mortgage interest deduction excludes nearly two-thirds of Americans who do not itemize their taxes. Barack Obama will ensure that anyone with a mortgage, not just the well-off, can take advantage of this tax incentive for homeownership by creating a universal mortgage credit. This 10 percent credit will benefit an additional 10 million homeowners, the majority of whom earn less than $50,000 per year. Non-itemizers will be eligible for this refundable credit, which will provide the average recipient with approximately $500 per year in tax savings.

I’ve got a mortgage, so I can get another tax credit.

Enact a Windfall Profits Tax to Provide a $1,000 Emergency Energy Rebate to American Families:Barack Obama will enact a windfall profits tax on excessive oil company profits to give American families an immediate $1,000 emergency energy rebate to help families pay rising bills. This relief would be a down payment on Obama's long-term plan to provide middle-class families with at least $1,000 per year in permanent tax relief.

Ooooh! A $1,000 rebate from the robber baron oil companies! Count me in. It’s just like what Sarah Palin did in Alaska, except it will be for the whole country.

OK, so I must have missed all the “socialism” in there. All I saw was that I will personally be doing much better under an Obama administration than I would under a McCain one. What about you, jimmyk?

Don’t cross Sarah Palin

Or else she will FIRE you!!



So it seems that there really is something to the story of Palin wanting to ban books and firing the librarian who got in her way.
Meanwhile, keep in mind that Wasilla, Alaska has (or had at the time that Palin was Mayor) a population equivalent to Boerne, Texas.

Meanwhile, John McCain has decided to run a vicious, mean-spirited, despicable campaign devoid of serious issues.

Sarah Palin’s sweet deal

John McCain can’t keep track of how many homes he owns. Now we find that his running mate Sarah Palin bills the state of Alaska for nights she spends at home.

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has billed taxpayers for 312 nights spent in her own home during her first 19 months in office, charging a "per diem" allowance intended to cover meals and incidental expenses while traveling on state business.

What a sweet deal! Not only does the state pay her a salary and reimburse her for all travel and business expenses, but she even gets to charge a per diem for living at home. That is the mark of someone who knows how to game the system! But I’m sure Palin is not concerned about this because Alaska can afford it...

Sarah Palin’s Alaskonomics

Of the 50 states, Alaska ranks No. 1 in taxes per resident and No. 1 in spending per resident. Its tax burden per resident is 21/2 times the national average; its spending, more than double. The trick is that Alaska's government spends money on its own citizens and taxes the rest of us to pay for it. Although Palin, like McCain, talks about liberating ourselves from dependence on foreign oil, there is no evidence that being dependent on Alaskan oil would be any more pleasant to the pocketbook.

Alaska is, in essence, an adjunct member of OPEC. It has four different taxes on oil, which produce more than 89% of the state's unrestricted revenue. On average, three-quarters of the value of a barrel of oil is taken by the state government before that oil is permitted to leave the state. Alaska residents each get a yearly check for about $2,000 from oil revenues, plus an additional $1,200 pushed through by Palin last year to take advantage of rising oil prices. Any sympathy the governor of Alaska expresses for folks in the lower 48 who are suffering from high gas prices or can't afford to heat their homes is strictly crocodile tears.

As if it couldn't support itself, Alaska also ranks No. 1, year after year, in money it sucks in from Washington. In 2005 (the most recent figures), according to the Tax Foundation, Alaska ranked 18th in federal taxes paid per resident ($5,434) but first in federal spending received per resident ($13,950). Its ratio of federal spending received to federal taxes paid ranks third among the 50 states, and in the absolute amount it receives from Washington over and above the amount it sends to Washington, Alaska ranks No. 1.

Yeah!! What he said!

Hunter at Daily Kos:

We know, for a fact, that Sarah Palin lied about being "against" the infamous Bridge to Nowhere. I don't mean that she flip-flopped. I don't mean she waffled, or equivocated, or mislead, or was disingenuous, or misspoke. I mean she lied outright. Period. She was, in fact, a supporter of the now-mocked symbol of pork and earmarks. She was a supporter during the entire process, up until the now-magical point when the entire thing had devolved into farce, and not even Republicans could attach themselves to such a boondoggle without paying a political price. Then, and only then, did she distance herself from it.

And by "distance herself", we mean "kept the money".

We know, for a fact, that Sarah Palin lied about being "against" earmarks. As mayor of her small Alaskan town, she hired a Team Abramoff lobbyist to squeeze Washington for generous funds, funds far in excess of what the average American small town could expect. The lobbyist delivered nearly $27 million worth of earmarks to the town of less than ten thousand people: a fine haul, indeed. She said so herself, in her own handwriting.

So she lied. Baldly and repeatedly. McCain is now on a multistate tour, repeating the very same lies -- and for Republicans, they are applause lines. Huzzah to the "anti-pork" governor whose state is more dependent on pork than any other state. Hooray for the "anti-earmarks" candidate who made a name for herself as a champion of the earmark.

The question is: what of it?

There is absolutely no penalty for lying, in politics. None. Zip. Nada. Sarah Palin could stand atop a stage and declare herself moon-goddess of Endor, and it wouldn't make a bit of difference. Yes, the papers would correct her. There would be a few cable stories on how there was no prior record of her being declared a moon-goddess. In the end, however, it would not matter, and it would not matter because Republicans have decided that it does not.


For Republicans, there is no longer any moral taboo whatsoever against lying outright. The only relevant question is whether the lie is effective -- not whether it should have been done in the first place. Karl Rove can rail against the inexperienced nature of one vice presidential candidate -- a Democrat -- and without the slightest bit of explanation (or shame), but happily pipe up with praise for an unequivocally, plainly less experienced Republican pick. It is not expected that he be self-consistent in the slightest. Everyone understands from the outset that his role is to say bad things about Democrats, and good things about Republicans, and if the two things conflict spectacularly it is not considered a symbol of his dishonesty or evidence of a histrionic maliciousness towards factual discourse. It is merely spin. He can make a farce of his own prior arguments -- what does it matter? If he is comfortable with it, and the people who look to him for guidance rally behind it, then we can Newspeak our way into and out of any argument as neat as you please.

So what of it, if offshore drilling will not reduce gas prices. It's fine to say it anyway -- it doesn't matter. So what if the President of the United States says "we do not torture", and then we discover that the White House itself authorized acts that are torture under any rational definition of the word. He's the President, he can lie about anything he likes, as long as it has nothing to do with sex. And honestly, even if it does.

So what of it, if Sarah Palin says crooked things with a straight face? Name me one Republican who will object. Name me one -- just ONE -- diehard conservative who will be angry at the lie, instead of praising her for it. To hell with facts, there is another election to be won.

This is why I consider the Republican Party to be, at this point, a wrecked party. There is no self-consistent philosophy other than the acquisition and protection of their own power: there are certainly no moral or ethical boundaries that the party will internally enforce. John Edwards, a Democrat, had his political career effectively terminated when news of an affair came to light; a Republican can visit a prostitute wearing a diaper, and find himself easily forgiven. You can lie, you can staff your government with morons and ideologues, you can give a speech saying one thing while doing the exact opposite (a Bush specialty, in his State of the Union speeches. We bemoan constantly the Democrats' failure to keep a unified front, in order to pass a more meaningful agenda -- but you would be hard pressed to find even a single, lone Republican in Washington willing to buck the moral collapse of their own party. Such people once existed: they were voted out of office. All that remain are "mavericks" like McCain, figures who will countermand every previous belief in order to regain the support of his own party.

Palin may be an unapologetic liar, but there isn't anything even slightly surprising about that.

Lies, Lies, Lies, Yeah!

Sorry for sticking that Thompson Twins song in your head, but it’s the first thing that comes to mind when I consider the McCain campaign strategy with regards to Sarah Palin’s involvement with the boondoggle “Bridge to Nowhere.”

How is it that Palin got away with telling a blatant lie about her support for the “Bridge to Nowhere” during her first appearance with McCain shortly after being tapped to be his runningmate? And then, even after her claim was exposed as a lie, she repeated it during her speech to the convention. And now, despite all evidence to the contrary, the McCain campaign is making the same fallacious claim in its latest TV ad.

Obviously, the truth does not matter to them. But how can they get away with it?
I think, as Greenwald points out today, they can get by with this because the wingnutsphere controls our national media:

The single dumbest claim in our political culture is that the huge corporations which own our establishment media outlets promote a "liberal" ideology. Why would General Electric ever use NBC and its other media assets to promote political liberalism? They lavishly benefit from the whole panoply of right-wing policies -- from endlessly expanding defense spending to deregulation. Their multiple businesses depend upon maintaining good relations with the right-wing ideologues who run our Government. Even ignoring all of the above-documented empirical facts, the very idea that a corporation like GE -- or Viacom (CBS), Disney (ABC) and Time Warner (CNN) -- would actively promote a left-wing agenda in its news divisions and undermine the very Government power centers on which they rely has been the most self-evidently moronic premise one can imagine. And yet that myth persists, and even intensifies.

When people get all their news from Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck and all the other professional progagandists working for and on behalf of the corporate power structure, they become easy to manipulate and are easy to lie to. Gullible and easily duped, these are the people who sway with the prevailing breeze and the media’s corporate masters make sure it always comes from a rightward direction.

What I’m wondering now is how they expect to deal with this during the vice presidential debates. Do they hope to get the format such that Biden will not have an opportunity to make hay out of the issue? Will she repeat the lie, proffer a lame excuse or just ignore it? Or, more likely, she will take the preferred Republican method and just “attack, attack, attack”, ignoring her own hypocrisy and leveling charge after charge at the opposition.

TPA Roundup 9-8

It's Monday, and that means it is time for another edition of the Texas Progressive Alliance weekly round-up. This week's round-up is compiled by Vince from Capitol Annex.

Two Bartonville (or is it Argyle?) Republicans are indicted for voter fraud, a 3rd degree felony. The Texas Cloverleaf follows the story.

Vince at Capitol Annex notes that right-wing Republican, anti-immigrant, 14th Amendment-hating State Rep. Leo Berman (R-Tyler) is taking steps to launch a campaign for governor in 2010.

jobsanger points out that McCain may not want to use the "P" word but still wants to privatize social security, and tells us the investigation into Palin's ethics is getting messy (and weird).

Harry Balczak has another Reminder to You People over at McBlogger. In this edition, Joementum Loserman, disrespectful Republicans and their hatred of Veterans.

Off the Kuff looks at some polling data and suggests there isn't much room for a Palin bounce, especially in Texas.

CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme sees Republican love/hate over the Hispanic vote. Meanwhile, some Hispanics say a pox on both your houses.

Texas Liberal asks just how is it the government could come and take you gun.

BossKitty at TruthHugger is suspicious, What Is Condeleeza Rice REALLY Doing Over There?, and why the media puts this on the back page.

nytexan at BlueBloggin points out the recent activity with the McCain Palin team in Alaska is the continuation of the Bush administration corruption in McCain Palin Troopergate Stonewall Is Bush Cheney 2.0

dembones at Eye On Williamson posts a synopsis of this week's candidate forum in HD-52, Maldonado and Daniel make their case before Hutto EDC.

Harris County Commissioner Jerry Eversole declares himself a dead man walking, and PDiddie at
Brains and Eggs notes his pending exit with a heartfelt "so long, and thanks for all the fish".

refinish69 at Doing My Part For The Left tells everyone who is who's fired up.

North Texas Liberal listens in on Republican commentators Peggy Noonan and Mike Murphy as they tell us how they really feel about McCain's VP pick Sarah Palin when they think the cameras are off.