Obama leaves campaign to spend time with dying elderly opponent

I've gotta add this site to my blogroll.

Presidential candidate Barack Obama surprised political observers yesterday by suddenly withdrawing from the campaign trail to spend some time with his elderly rival John McCain. McCain who is 97 years old and very frail is said to be fading fast and Obama wanted to see him one last time before he was gone forever. ‘Barack knows that he could never have got this far if it hadn’t have been for old man McCain. He owes everything to him.’

Obama reportedly sat at the bedside of the dying Republican nominee trying to make sense of the confused ramblings coming from the old man’s mouth, according to an assistant to the Illinois senator. ‘Grandpa McCain’s mind had gone unfortunately, he just kept claiming everyone was a terrorist and then he’d go off on some incomprehensible rant about dividing up a pie or making a bigger pie or something. He’s completely lost it.’

Who's he kidding?

Thanks to DailyKos, here's John McCain's flip-flop on taxes. (Or is it simply flimflam?)

"Don't tell Matt Drudge or FOX News, but John McCain himself took the same basic approach to taxes as Barack Obama -- at least until the 2008 presidential campaign brought about some changes in his views."

In other words, he was for middle-class tax relief before we was against it.

McCain knows a middle-class tax cut is better than the Bush give-away to the wealthy that he voted against. Yet now he parrots the party line to keep the GOP's real base from revolting. This is a man who will say anything to get elected.

McCain stranded on campaign bus

John McCain Accidentally Left On Campaign Bus Overnight

Is the bailout really about loosening credit?

So the $700B bailout (which actually weighs in at over $800B, with its added pork) is suposed to get credit flowing again, right? I mean, that's what it's all about, isn't it?

Well, maybe. It appears that a good portion of that money will be used to line the pockets of investment bankers and to fuel acquisitions.

TIME reports:

Uncle Sam has a new name on Wall Street — Sugar Daddy. Bonuses for investment bankers and traders are projected to fall by 40% this year. But analysts, compensation consultants and recruiters say the drop would be much more severe, perhaps as much as 70%, had it not been for the government's efforts to prop up the financial firms.

Bonuses? The economy is in the shitter, and the taxpayers are funding bankers' bonuses? What's wrong with this picture?

The Wall St. Journal says:

The Treasury's bailout plan is fueling a long-simmering war between financial institutions, prompting fears among small banks that big banks getting rescue money will be encouraged to buy smaller rivals.

Big banks say the purchase of smaller, ailing institutions by larger ones promotes the recovery of the sector. But representatives of some 8,000 community banks -- the bulk of which remain financially sound -- worry that a taxpayer-subsidized consolidation could sweep up healthy institutions that are too small to fight back.

And Bloomberg quotes an industry insider:

Government funds may be used to finance acquisitions, prompting a potential “wave” of deals, Colin Devine, an analyst with Citigroup Inc. said yesterday in a research note.

Just what we need: another round of megabanks buying up local and regional institutions. We wouldn't want want local dollars supporting local economies, would we?

And the New York Times (among others) points out that all of this is actually intended by the administration:

In point of fact, the dirty little secret of the banking industry is that it has no intention of using the money to make new loans...

Treasury wants banks to acquire each other and is using its power to inject capital to force a new and wrenching round of bank consolidation. As Mark Landler reported in The New York Times earlier this week, “the government wants not only to stabilize the industry, but also to reshape it.”

I'm suspicious whenever this administration wants to "reshape" an industry, because inevitably it means one thing: the rich get rich. Redistribution of wealth is nothing new; they've been redistributing it for years - from working stiffs to fat cats.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer has something to say about this. In an editorial published today, they say the "bailout is already off the beam."

The federally forced sale of Cleveland's National City Bank to a Pittsburgh rival Friday requires urgent congressional hearings to force federal regulators to reveal why they've veered so far from the intent of the $700 billion bailout. Instead of vacuuming up troubled assets, the bailout is being funneled into bank acquisitions.

Such bank sales might make sense if the banks being bought out genuinely were failing. But using the taxpayers' dime to sink wounded banks that might otherwise survive is a far more questionable and inefficient way to rid the system of bad debt. It also runs directly counter to how the Treasury promised to use the money.

I have to agree. The backbone of the economy is on Main Street, where the goods and services are produced, and not on Wall Street where they are commoditized and made the objects of speculation. I agree with the Plain Dealer that Congress needs "to force federal regulators to reveal why they've veered so far from the intent of the $700 billion bailout."

In fact, I'll go the Cleveland paper one better. Congress needs to re-enact Glass-Steagall and take additional steps to introduce some adult supervision into the out-of-control greedfest of casino capitalism that is the banking industry. And Justice should start enforcing anti-trust regulations in the finance sector and elsewhere. It's time to recognize that, as Bernie Sanders puts it, "too big to fail" is too big to exist.

The Sinking Ship

At Salon.com, Gary Kamiya sums up "The Republican Shipwreck" pretty well:

There's something surreal about how fast the GOP has gone from arrogant triumphalism to its death throes. Just yesterday, the GOP's mighty Titanic was cruising along, its opulent decks lined with fat-cat financiers and neoconservative warmongers, all smoking cigars, drinking champagne and extolling the deathless virtues of their fearless captain. The compliant media issued glowing dispatches. Karl Rove cackled with glee as he plotted out a permanent Republican majority.

Then the luxury liner hit an iceberg known as reality. The biggest damage was done by the Wall Street crisis, which happened just in time to tilt a close race toward Obama. But the economic meltdown was only one of the disasters for which the GOP is largely responsible. The war that was going to establish American hegemony forever turned out to be one of the worst foreign-policy blunders in our nation's history. The GOP's free-market idolatry led to the gravest financial crisis since the Depression. Its ideological insistence on cutting taxes for the richest Americans ran up a record deficit. Its embrace of torture and denial of due process assaulted the Constitution and eroded America's moral standing. Its doctrine of the "unitary executive" concentrated unprecedented power in the hands of the executive branch. Its anti-scientific denial of global warming endangered the entire planet.

Of course it's more than a little premature to exult in the demise of the Grand Oil Party - they've stolen elections before and they could do it again - indeed, they're trying* - but it does seem that a clear majority of Americans now realize what a house of cards "movement conservatism" was and is. If we're lucky, we may see the Republican Party move backs towards the political center and away from its dual (laissez-faire and religious) fundamentalist base. That would be a step forward for America and the world.

* (For information on how you can stop them from stealing this one, see STEAL BACK YOUR VOTE!)

UPDATE: GOP uses trumped-up ACORN allegations to distract from their efforts to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of legitimate voters... and the "liberal media" gives them a pass, as usual

Here's Your Sign

I finally understand what Bill Engvall has been talking about all this time. They really do hand out signs to certain people!

The Obama Flag - O Noes!

Over at DailyKos they've pointed out a column by Mark Levin at the National Review that decries, among other things, the existence of "special Obama flags."

Here's the flag they're talking about. Obama was seen speaking in Toledo with this flag behind him, and a number of right-wing loonies went nuts over it.

Hey Mark, in case you haven't heard: that flag has flown in those parts since 1902 and the O has nothing to do with Obama. It actually stands for Ohio. Not too surprising since it's their state flag! Obama had as much to do with that O being on the flag as he had to do with a backwards B ("for Barack," said the McCain campaign) scratched onto the face of Ashley Todd.

In Defense of Bill Ayers - and of the '60s

I found this article at The Smirking Chimp, defending Bill Ayers from the "terrorist" label Sarah Palin likes to throw at him (while refusing to hang the same label on bombers of abortion clinics and family planning centers), and revealing the attacks on Ayers for what they are: an attempt to recast '60s dissenters as unpatriotic when in fact they helped usher in the Civil Rights movement and get the US out of an ill-advised war that was destroying our country and damaging our standing in the world.

People over 50 remember that period very well, and many much younger people view it with envy and fascination. After all, today's youth listen to the Beatles, Stones, Doors, Jefferson Airplane and Grateful Dead, considering them their own. (We in the '60s rarely listened to the music of the '20s, '30s and '40s.) College students flock to courses on the '60s, viewing that decade as one of turmoil, excitement, and progressive change. The verdict's in: the war was wrong, segregation and all racism was wrong, sexism and homophobia were wrong—and the limited social progress as we've seen since the '60s is largely rooted in the tireless efforts of the activists of that decade. The '60s were good!

But McCain doesn't see it that way. Nor does Sarah Palin. She of course is 44 years old, but obviously atypical of her generation. There's no reason you can't be the popular governor of a state of 676,987 while expressing contempt for such '60s fixtures as "community organizers," sexual liberation and the questioning of wars of aggression. Palin, the lipstick-painted pit-bull, has chosen to attack Ayers as a "terrorist" decades after the demise of the Weather Underground, after he's become a Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and received a Citizen of the Year award (1997) from the city of Chicago for his work on education reform. Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley (son of the infamous Mayor Daley who ordered the police attack on antiwar protesters at the Democratic Convention in 1968), who regularly consults Ayers on school issues, says: "He's done a lot of good in this city and nationally." But for Palin, he's a terrorist, present-tense.

Like the attempts to smear Barack Obama as a Muslim or an ACORN supporter or a Socialist, the attempts to link him with Ayers presume there would be something wrong with that if it were true - and any attempt to deny the purported connection only reinforces the implied evil of the person or group they're trying to associate him with (as in "No, he's not an Arab, he's a decent family man...").

What to do? For the next ten days, we have to content ourselves with pointing out the absurdity of the allegations; but after that, we need to work to correct the implicit (an sometimes explicit) slander against ACORN, Arabs, Ayers, and Islam. We also need to expose the creeps behind this stuff for the hypocrites they are. Most of the people who fall for their bullshit really are decent family people, after all. Their only error has been to put their trust in scoundrels who have led them down the garden path.

We may get some help from moderate Republicans and real conservatives, as they attempt to rescue the party of Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt from the ruins wrought by "movement" Republicans - but don't count on it. As Shakespeare had it, "we have scotch'd the snake, not killed it." America won't be safe until Coulter, Hannity, BillO, Rush, and their hate-mongering ilk are rejected even by the right. The message to decent people everywhere must be "America is better than that. You are better than that."

Who is this idiot?

This story would be hilarious if not for the fact that it ties up emergency lines that should be used only for... well, emergencies. A motorist calls 911 to complain about a traffic tie-up on the Wilson Bridge... hey, doesn't that voice sound eerily familiar?

[Update: the original post had an edited-for-TV condensation of the 911 calls involved. I have replaced it with a more complete version. Wouldn't want to quote the man out of context, after all...]

Quote of the week: McCain on negative ads

"Sooner or later, people are going to figure out that if all you run is negative attack ads, you don't have much of a vision for the future, or you're not ready to articulate [it]."

John McCain

February, 2000