“I think there’s a really good chance that Sarah Palin could be president, and I think that’s a really scary thing, 'cause I don’t know anything about her -- I don’t think in eight weeks I’m going to know anything about her. I know that she was a mayor of a really, really small town and she’s the governor for Alaska for less than two years. I just don’t understand. I think the pick was made for political purposes.... Do the actuary tables and there’s a 1 out of 3 chance, if not more, that [John] McCain doesn’t survive his first term and it’ll be President Palin…. It’s like a really bad Disney movie. The hockey mom, you know, ‘Oh, I’m just a hockey mom’… and she’s facing down President Putin [of Russia]…. It’s totally absurd …. It’s a really terrifying possibility.”

-- Matt Damon, Associated Press

MEMO FROM ROBERT REICH

The Almost-Done Deal, and the Era of Angry Populism

Wednesday 01 October 2008

Posted by Mark from today's truthout.org.

by: Robert Reich, Talking Points Memo

Economist Robert Reich. (Artwork: The Economist)

Editor's Note: The Senate passed the $700 billion economic bailout plan on Wednesday, while the House is expected to vote by Friday. -TO/ms

The Senate will vote tonight; the House is scheduled to vote tomorrow morning. Will the deal fly? Probably. Wall Street's gyrations since Monday have scared the hell out of a number of holdouts, notwithstanding all the negative emails and phone calls they continue to receive from constituents.

An important distinction here. While more Americans are coming around to "supporting" the bailout bill, the vast majority still hate the idea of bailing out Wall Street. They're for the bailout bill now only because they fear that a failure to pass it will have worse consequences -- drying up credit at a time when Main Street is struggling. But make no mistake: America is mad as hell. They resent what they perceive as extortion by the Masters of the Universe.

Angry populism has always been a potent force in American politics. And now, with wages dropping, jobs insecure, fuel and food and health-insurance costs soaring, and millions of homes in jeopardy -- and what's perceived to be a massive tax-payer bailout of some of the richest people in the land -- angry populism is about to explode. McCain has already tried to cast himself as an angry populist, even though he still wants to give the very rich a bigger tax cut than George W. gave them, and cut taxes on big corporations (oil companies alone would reap $1.2 billion a year under McCain's plan). Barack Obama, whose plans for middle-class tax relief and affordable health care will genuinely help America's middle and working classes, has been expressing more indignation lately on behalf of them. But anger doesn't come as easily to Obama as it does to McCain -- even though McCain seems quite ready to aim his anger anywhere and everywhere.

Democrats should be angry populists, given their traditional role of protecting and championing the underdogs in American politics, and especially considering the absurdly wide gap that's opened up between the rich and everyone else. But in recent years Democrats have ceded the mantle to Republicans, who now mimic the faux populism of Sean Hannity and other right-wing talk show demagogues. (The recent maneuvering in the House over the bailout bill is really over this. House Democrats are getting the same angry mail that House Republicans are receiving, and don't want to be seen as lending their support to this ugly bill without Republicans signing on.)

In fact, the bailout bill isn't really taxpayer supported. It will be funded by additional federal debt, issued mostly to foreign governments -- especially the Chinese and in the Middle East. And, strictly speaking, it's not even a bailout. The Treasury will buy and hold mortgage-backed securities whose value is now unknown because there's no market for them, until housing prices start rising again, by which time the securities should be worth something -- perhaps even more than the Treasury pays for them. (Note that there continues to be great confusion about the extent to which the Treasury will hold a reverse auction, paying banks the minimum price at which they're willing to sell the securities -- perhaps 20 cents on the dollar -- or whether the Treasury will buy the securities outright for their face values and take warrants or shares of stock in return.)

But whatever it's called and however it's financed, it's still an outrage. America's foreign policy is made no more flexible by going into deeper hock to the Chinese and the Middle East. And the deal still subjects American taxpayers to some risk, especially if the housing market doesn't bounce back for many years. Worse, the bill can't help but prop up the earnings many Wall Street executives whose malfeasance, greed, and stupidity got us into this mess in the first place. And it does nothing for average Americans except avoid economic calamity. (The provision ostensibly helping distressed homeowners is to be used at the discretion of the Treasury Department, so it's mostly a sham.)

The larger economic outlook is not encouraging. All signs point to the economy worsening, bailout or no bailout. Unemployment will continue to rise. Median earnings will continue to drop, adjusted for inflation. More Americans will lose their health insurance.

The Era of Angry Populism has only just begun. Let's hope Obama wins, and is able to mobilize the anger into fierce pressure on Congress to get his agenda enacted, as well as reform Wall Street and Washington.

B'ROCKIN' WITH MCAIN

MCCAIN LOSES HIS TEMPER

John McCain is notorious in the Senate for his prolific displays of anger. "The thought of his being president sends a cold chill down my spine," Mississippi Republican Senator Thad Cochran said in January. "He is erratic. He is hotheaded. He loses his temper and he worries me."

McCain has done his best, throughout the presidential campaign, to tamp that anger down. However, as he struggles in the polls, McCain is beginning to show some stress. First there was his combative and condescending debate performance against Obama, and now there's an interview from yesterday with the Des Moines Register editorial board where McCain is especially irritable and testy.

When asked about Sarah Palin's lack of experience, McCain goes on a memorable rant, comparing Palin's 20 month tenure as Governor of Alaska to Ronald Reagan (8 years as Governor of California) and Bill Clinton (10 years as Governor of Arkansas).

When asked about his campaign's increasingly dishonest tenor, McCain grew even testier.

Perhaps McCain was in a bad mood because polls in the Hawkeye state (which Bush narrowly won in 2004), show him losing to Barack Obama by double-digits. If he keeps up this kind of behavior, McCain may find himself losing by that much everywhere.

Posted by Mark from today's Nation

THE ALARM BELLS ARE DEAFENING

Study Finds States Purging Millions of Voters in Secret, Often Erroneously
Brennan Center Reveals Wild Inconsistencies in Maintenance of Voter Registration Lists
Issues Public Records Requests in 12 States with Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law

NEW YORK - October 1 - Today the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law released one of the first systematic examinations of voter purging, a practice-often controversial-of removing voters from registration lists in order to update state registration rolls-click here for report. After a detailed study of the purge practices of 12 states, Voter Purges reveals that election officials across the country are routinely striking millions of voters from the rolls through a process that is shrouded in secrecy, prone to error, and vulnerable to manipulation. Upon the release of Voter Purges, today the Brennan Center and the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law began filing public records requests with election officials in 12 states in order to expose the purges that happened this year.

"Purges can be an important way to ensure that voter rolls are dependable, accurate and up-to-date," said Myrna Pérez, counsel at the Brennan Center and the author of the report. "Far too frequently, however, eligible, registered citizens show up to vote and discover their names have been removed from the voter lists because election officials are maintaining their voter rolls with little accountability and wildly varying standards," Myrna Pérez stated.

According to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, between 2004 and 2006, thirty-nine states and the District of Columbia reported purging more than 13 million voters from registration rolls. While the secret and inconsistent manner in which purges are conducted make it difficult to know exactly how many voters have been stricken from voting lists erroneously, Voter Purges finds four problematic practices with voter purges that continue to threaten voters in 2008: purges rely on error-ridden lists; voters are purged secretly and without notice; bad "matching" criteria mean that thousands of eligible voters will be caught up in purges; and insufficient oversight leaves voters vulnerable to erroneous or manipulated purges. The report reveals that purge practices vary dramatically from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, that there is a lack of consistent protections for voters, and that there are often opportunities for mischief and mistakes in the purge process.

"The voter rolls are the gateway to voting, and a citizen typically cannot cast a vote that will count unless his or her name appears on the rolls. Purges remove names from the voter rolls, typically preventing wrongfully purged voters from having their votes counted. Given the close margins by which elections are won, the number of people wrongfully purged can make a difference. We should not tolerate purges that are conducted behind closed doors, without public scrutiny, and without adequate recourse for affected voters," said Wendy Weiser, Deputy Director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center.

Voter Purges reviews the state statutes, regulatory materials, and news reports in 12 diverse states: Florida, Kentucky, Indiana, Michigan, Missouri, Nevada, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Washington, and Wisconsin. In five states-Kentucky, Missouri, Nevada, Ohio, and Washington-the Brennan Center study also draws on extensive interviews with state and local election officials charged with the maintenance of voter registration lists.

The list of states in which the Brennan Center and the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law began filing public records requests for purge records today includes 12 states. They were chosen because they had flawed purges or voter registration practices in the past, they use problematic purge procedures with insufficient protections for voters, they recently conducted large-scale purges, or they have specific practices in place that warrant further examination.

"Every year, the Election Protection hotline receives calls from across the country from eligible voters whose names have been removed from the voter rolls. We need to take the lid off the secret process of voter purges so we can remedy any problems we discover and ensure that they don't recur in the future," said Jonah Goldman, Director of the National Campaign for Fair Elections at the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which coordinates the national Election Protection program.

"Nearly every purge that has come to light has bumped eligible voters off the rolls. Because purges are done in secret on an ad hoc basis, the only way to find out what is actually happening and if eligible voters have been wrongfully purged in droves is through public records requests," said Wendy Weiser of the Brennan Center.

Several examples of recent purges made public reveal that purge practices are in dire need of improvement:

* In Mississippi earlier this year, a local election official discovered that another official had wrongly purged 10,000 voters from her home computer just a week before the presidential primary.
* In Muscogee, Georgia this year, a county official purged 700 people from the voter lists, supposedly because they were ineligible to vote due to criminal convictions. The list included people who claimed to have never even received a parking ticket.
* In Louisiana, including areas hit hard by hurricanes, officials purged approximately 21,000 voters, ostensibly for registering to vote in another state, but did not provide adequate opportunity to contest the records.

Flawed purges are sometimes caused by erroneous government lists. For example, even though Hilde Stafford, a Wappingers Falls, New York, resident, was still alive and voting in 2006, the Social Security Administration's Death Master File-a database of 77 million deaths dating back to 1937-lists her date of death as June 15, 1997. Indeed, from January 2004 to September 2005, the Social Security Administration had to "resurrect" the records of 23,366 people wrongly added to its Death Master File.

Another cause of erroneous purges is flawed procedures for generating purge lists. In the infamous Florida purge of 2000-for which conservative estimates place the number of wrongfully purged voters close to 12,000-Florida registrants were purged from the rolls if 80 percent of the letters of their last names were the same as those of persons with criminal convictions. Those wrongly purged included Reverend Willie D. Whiting Jr., who, under the matching criteria, was considered the same person as Willie J. Whiting.

In 2004, Florida planned to remove 48,000 "suspected felons" from its voter rolls even though many of those identified were in fact eligible to vote. When the flawed process generated a list of 22,000 African Americans to be purged-and only 61 voters with Hispanic surnames, in spite of Florida's sizable Hispanic population-it took pressure from voting rights groups to stop Florida officials from using the purge list.

Voter Purges contains several recommendations to improve the transparency, accountability, and accuracy of purges, including notice to individual voters and the public, strict and uniform criteria for the development of purge lists, and "fail-safe" provisions to protect voters from erroneous purges. An overall fix is the establishment of a system of universal voter registration, with protections for voters erroneously left out.

"It is essential that we put in place standards for voter purges to ensure public accountability and protection for voters," said Myrna Pérez of the Brennan Center.

"There really are no effective national standards to govern voter purges, and the result is a chaotic, whimsical approach to the maintenance of voter rolls," said Michael Waldman, Executive Director of the Brennan Center. "The lack of consistent rules and procedures means that Americans across the country lack basic protections against erroneous purges. We encourage election officials, legislators, advocates and concerned members of the public to use this report to improve voter purge practices and ensure that the rights of eligible voters are not jeopardized," Waldman concluded.

A full copy of the Brennan Center's analysis of purge practices and recommendations is available here: www.brennancenter.org/purges. The Brennan Center's website is www.brennancenter.org.

The website for the Election Protection program is www.866ourvote.org, and for the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law is www.lawyerscommittee.org

LOOKING GOOD!

Online100: Obama will win the election

It has been tumultuous week for the economy and the nation's focus has turned towards the fate of the $700 billion bailout bill. Now that both candidates voted to pass the Senate version of the bill, the Online100 has weighed in.

At this point, 87% of panelists believe Senator Barack Obama is most likely to win the Election.

At this point, who do you think is more likely to win the Presidential election?
10/02/2008

96% of left leaning panelists agree, losing previous concern about McCain from previous surveys. Most notably, 75% of right leaning panelists admit that Obama is most likely to win.

89% of center aligned panelists said that Obama will win; but none said that McCain would win.

The only group that picked McCain as likely to win was 25% of right leaning panelists, making McCain's a mere 8%.

5% of the panel said that they didn't know who was likely to win at this point.

This marks a dramatic change since we first asked this question on September 16 when the candidates were nearly tied as seen in the following graph

At this point, who do you think is more likely to win the Presidential election?
10/02/2008

THERE GOES OHIO

Posted from today's Opinion section of the LA Times

Abolish the vice presidency

The founders messed up. We should do away with the office.

By Bruce Ackerman
October 2, 2008

» Discuss Article

Sarah Palin is the product of a design flaw -- the unintended consequence of the founders' decision to create the vice presidency.

For two centuries, presidential nominees have used the office to balance the ticket by naming a running mate from a different region, or one who speaks with a different ideological accent to a specific constituency. This means that a president's death generates a double shock: The nation not only mourns a fallen leader, it must deal with a replacement who may push politics in a new direction.

Teddy Roosevelt -- who replaced William McKinley when he was assassinated in 1901 -- may have been a great progressive president, but he had been named as vice president by the arch-conservative McKinley simply to carry New York. The country elected a right-winger but ended up with something else entirely.

Similar perverse logic led Abraham Lincoln to choose Andrew Johnson as a running mate. Lincoln knew that Johnson was a racial conservative, but he was more interested in carrying Tennessee. This tragic blunder clouds Lincoln's claim to greatness. When Lincoln was killed, Johnson's bitter opposition to Reconstruction helped poison race relations for generations.

Recent elections have lulled us into a false sense of security. Both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush nominated like-minded, known-quantity running mates, as has Barack Obama this time around. But John McCain's surprising choice should lead us to think again. Mexico and France see no need for a vice president. We should designate the secretary of State to be in charge until a special election can be held to replace a president.

This isn't a question on which the founders deserve any deference. They designed their system for a very different political world.

Their electoral college aimed to give the power to choose the president to wealthy, important men in each state. But politics was emphatically local in the 18th century, and the founders feared that each state's electors would cast their ballots for a favorite son -- depriving the leading candidate of a majority.

To solve this problem, they hit upon an ingenious scheme. The original Constitution gave presidential electors two votes, not one, and provided that they could only vote for one nominee from their own state. The idea was that electors would use one vote to flatter a local favorite and the other to select a national leader like, say, George Washington, giving him a strong majority.

But alas, the two-vote system could be sabotaged. Electors could simply vote for their favorite Joe Schmoe and cast a blank second ballot, thereby maximizing Schmoe's chance for success. Enter the vice presidency, a consolation prize for favorite sons (or whoever polled second in the electoral college). It was meant to assure the election of a proper president; providing a replacement executive was a distinctly secondary objective.

This clever scheme did not survive the rise of political parties. By 1800, electors followed the instructions of the national Democratic-Republican and Federalist parties, generating a crisis. The Democratic-Republicans won the election, and their 73 electors all wrote the names of Thomas Jefferson and his running mate, Aaron Burr, on their ballots, without having the power to say that they wanted Jefferson to be president. This created a tie for the top spot, and Jefferson and Burr were obliged to compete for the presidency in what turned out to be a bitterly contested runoff in the House of Representatives.

After the smoke cleared, Congress and the states merely tinkered with the election system. Their 12th Amendment simply told electors to cast one ballot for president and one for vice president. This made a repeat of the Jefferson-Burr crisis impossible, but it paved the way for the vice presidential shocks that have redirected our national history.

If McCain wins the presidency, we can only wish him a long life. But however the race turns out, we should recognize that the founders didn't have the slightest idea that the vice presidency would episodically explode in our face, and it's about time we fixed it.



Bruce Ackerman is a professor of law and political science at Yale and the author of "The Failure of the Founding Fathers."

MAKES YA THINK

BARACK CLOSING THE DEAL IN RENO

BATTLEGROUND EUPHORIA

Here are some exciting results from brand new polls conducted by Quinnipiac in Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania - three critical battleground states. He doesn't have to win all three, or for that matter any of them, to win (if he gets Virginia instead of PA, that is), but it would make it so much easier if he could pull it off, and it looks like he just might. Of course, yesterday's post from truthout.org, written by Robert Kennedy, should scare us all because we know the Republicans will do what they can to suppress the vote in these key states. Oh well. Sorry the post is so "dry" looking. October 1, 2008 - Obama Over 50 Percent In Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania Quinnipiac University Swing State Poll Finds; Debate, Palin's Fade, Economy Put Democrat On Top ---

FLORIDA: Obama 49 - McCain 43 pre-debate; Obama 51 - McCain 43 post-debate; OHIO: Obama 49 - McCain 42 pre-debate; Obama 50 - McCain 42 post-debate; PENNSYLVANIA: Obama 49 - McCain 43 pre-debate; Obama 54 - McCain 39 post-debate Friday's presidential debate, Gov. Sarah Palin's sagging favorability and more voter confidence in Sen. Barack Obama's ability to handle the economy are propelling the Democrat to wider likely voter leads over Republican John McCain in Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania, according to simultaneous Quinnipiac University Swing State polls released today.

No one has been elected President since 1960 without taking two of these three largest swing states in the Electoral College. Results from the independent Quinnipiac (KWIN-uh-pe- ack) University polls conducted before and after the debate show:

Florida: Obama up 49 - 43 percent pre-debate and 51 - 43 percent post-debate; Ohio: Obama up 49 - 42 percent pre-debate and 50 - 42 percent post-debate; Pennsylvania: Obama ahead 49 - 43 percent pre-debate and 54 - 39 percent post-debate. Pre-debate surveys ended at 8 p.m. Friday with post-debate surveys Saturday-Monday.

More than 84 percent of voters in each state say the debate did not change their mind. But by margins of 13 to 17 percent, voters in each state say Obama did a better job in the debate. And by margins of 15 to 27 percent, independent voters in each state say Obama won.

"It is difficult to find a modern competitive presidential race that has swung so dramatically, so quickly and so sharply this late in the campaign. In the last 20 days, Sen. Barack Obama has gone from seven points down to eight points up in Florida, while widening his leads to eight points in Ohio and 15 points in Pennsylvania," said Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute.

"Sen. John McCain has his work cut out for him if he is to win the presidency and there does not appear to be a role model for such a comeback in the last half century," Brown added.

"Sen. McCain's problem is not with this or that demographic group. Although he still leads among white men, albeit by a smaller margin, his problems are across the electorate.

"Sen. Obama clearly won the debate, voters say. Their opinion of Gov. Sarah Palin has gone south and the Wall Street meltdown has been a dagger to McCain's political heart. Roughly a third of voters, and almost as large a share of the key independent vote, say McCain did more harm than good in trying to resolve the financial crisis, and the share of voters who see the economy as the top issue has risen from roughly half to six in ten."

MESSAGE OF THE DAY

Tom Friedman, in his op-ed piece in today's New York Times, gets it right in this excerpt:

"Well, you say, “I don’t own any stocks — let those greedy monsters on Wall Street suffer.” You may not own any stocks, but your pension fund owned some Lehman Brothers commercial paper and your regional bank held subprime mortgage bonds, which is why you were able refinance your house two years ago. And your local airport was insured by A.I.G., and your local municipality sold municipal bonds on Wall Street to finance your street’s new sewer system, and your local car company depended on the credit markets to finance your auto loan — and now that the credit market has dried up, Wachovia bank went bust and your neighbor lost her secretarial job there....We’re all connected..."

QUOTE OF THE DAY

This is an excerpt from Michael Winship's piece from truthout.org, appearing in his essay on Roosevelt, posted earlier on this blog. I think it's kind of profound.

"In these bailouts, there is no altruism but cynicism, the same attitude that scorns the Constitution and tramples civil liberties, that uses national tragedy to advance an unrelated global agenda, that doesn't give a damn as it tries to game and subvert the electoral process because deep down it fundamentally disdains democracy. Winning isn't everything; it's the only thing."

JEWISH JOKE OF THE DAY

In the spirit of the jewish holidays, here's a excerpt from Tom Friedman's op-ed piece in today's New York Times.

"My rabbi told this story at Rosh Hashana services on Tuesday: A frail 80-year-old mother is celebrating her birthday and her three sons each give her a present. Harry gives her a new house. Harvey gives her a new car and driver. And Bernie gives her a huge parrot that can recite the entire Torah. A week later, she calls her three sons together and says: “Harry, thanks for the nice house, but I only live in one room. Harvey, thanks for the nice car, but I can’t stand the driver. Bernie, thanks for giving your mother something she could really enjoy. That chicken was delicious.”

LETS FACE IT, THE GUY'S A TOTAL MCFUCK-UP

Watch:

ECONOMICS FOR DUMMIES

Thursday 25 September 2008
by: Patrick Lagacè, La Presse

Posted today by Mark from today's truthout.org

"There's too many of you!" (Art: Pancho / Le Monde)

O.K., let's begin at the beginning, all right? Let's begin with the cost of this Wall Street rescue plan by Uncle Sam.

We're talking about 700 billion American dollars.

Gigantic.

Astronomical.

Unimaginable.

Yeah! Seven hundred billion dollars is Taiwan's GDP; it's the equivalent of the world's 21st economy. It's only slightly less than the 829 billion US dollars that circulate as bills and coins in the world.

I know; it's still rather vague. It's still abstract.

Let's bring it down to what we can understand: Laying 700 billion US one dollar bills end to end would allow us to go two-thirds of the distance from the Earth to the Sun, or 104 million kilometers. They would weigh the same as seven American aircraft carriers.

O.K., I see in your eyes that this all is still hazy. I'll try to do a better summary.

You see, the problem is credit. The banks don't have enough dough and so they are reluctant to lend any. The value of houses has fallen; that of securities backed by mortgage payments also. So those assets are no longer salable by the banks. Financial institutions are choking.

They're choking so much that some have had to renounce the market's invisible hand to embrace - kiss kiss - the government's, which came to the rescue of giants like AIG.

So, American banks hesitate to lend what dough they have.

In an economy based on credit and $20 DVD players sold at Wal-Mart - so many $20 financed by mortgage loans against their house - Americans can't not borrow the money to finance their legitimate pursuit of happiness, guaranteed, as everyone knows, by the Declaration of Independence.

This happiness, as everyone knows, is guaranteed by the purchase of $20 DVD players (but that's not in the Declaration because Wal-Mart didn't exist in 1776) and - up until just recently - by the purchase of $200,000 houses for $450,000, the price set by the market, which market is always perceptive and right.

So, to correct the excesses of an economy doped-up by a real estate bubble, itself doped-up by the easy credit banks were giving their clients like Santa Claus giving out presents to kids on December 25, the American government has decided to administer horse medicine.

I mentioned those 700 billion dollars intended to reestablish the era of easy credit with the goal of allowing every American to buy a new $20 DVD player at Wal-Mart every day. And perhaps even to go back to paying $450,000 for houses worth $200,000 (with no down payment).

That's basic, right?

Good, now we're on the same wavelength.

That's why President George W. Bush took desperate remedies, that is, to delay the extreeeeeemely popular show, America's Got Talent (referring to talent in singing, dancing, acting, of course, not to talent in financial planning) 17 minutes.

So, Mr. Bush, with all the conviction he is famous for, no doubt after having prattled with his personal friend, Mr. Jesus-Christ, addressed the American people in one of those solemn speeches the Americans adore.

"Our economy is in danger," he soberly announced, with a sincerity rivaling that which he displayed before the invasion of Iraq. Then, the 43rd president assured the American people that the present dead-end was, "according to most economists," the fruit of problems that had been developing over the last ten years linked to the massive influx of foreign capital into the chosen country of God Himself.

Strangely, Mr. Bush did not mention that these last 18 months, all the ornaments of his administration snubbed the (many) economists who dared assert that a significant part of the American economy resembled a kind of pyramid scheme based on too-easy access to home ownership and, more properly, a defective government regulatory framework.

Why did Mr. Bush forget to mention that? No doubt an omission on the part of the technician in charge of parading Mr. Bush's text through the teleprompter.

So there we are, blissfully wondering whether 700 billion dollars stuck together can trace a path to the Sun. And whether the American economy will not experience a black and white period like the Great Depression.

Of course, we could worry. After all, if the Americans catch a cold, it's well-known, Canada ends up sneezing. Imagine when they have a Depression: that's the schizophrenia in store for us ...

Personally, I see absolutely no reason to worry: if George W. Bush conducts the war on economic gloom with the same dexterity with which he conducts the war on terrorism, I think we can rest easy.

Mr. Bush, after all, is the man who struck down Saddam Hussein. No little credit crisis is going to scare him; that's for sure.

Franklin Roosevelt, a Nation Turns Its Lonely Eyes to You

Saturday 27 September 2008

by: Michael Winship, t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Franklin Delano Roosevelt. (Photo: macslegalhistory.com)

We thirst for leadership, vision, someone who can speak to us in a way that refuses to avert its eyes from the crisis but shines a light of truth upon the problem, then offers hope and possible solutions.

If this is indeed an economic 9/11, as some have suggested, we need that voice now. Right now. And so far it has yet to be heard. Not from McCain, or Obama, or President Bush.

After September 11, 2001, the President stood on a pile of debris with a megaphone and said that the whole world could hear the rescue workers and shared their grief. Soon, words of sorrow degenerated into bumper sticker rhetoric: Axis of Evil, Wanted Dead or Alive, Mission Accomplished. Nor, at a time when people were ready to do whatever needed to be done, was there a call for national sacrifice. Instead, the President invoked not poets or statesman past, but variations on a tee-shirt slogan: when the going gets tough, the tough go shopping.

Over the last two weeks, he has been seen infrequently and when he has spoken his words have rung false. This Harvard MBA speaks Economics as though he were phonetically reading a foreign language.

The President has seemed underinformed, disconnected and not, you should excuse the word, invested. In his address to the nation Wednesday evening, he said that the government was blameless for the financial crisis; it had done what it was supposed to do but had been victimized by overseas lenders, greedy banks and Americans taking on more credit than they could carry. And as he has done too often before, he tried to make us afraid.

"The government's top economic experts warn that without immediate action by Congress, America could slip into a financial panic, and a distressing scenario would unfold." President Bush said. "More banks could fail, including some in your community. The stock market would drop even more, which would reduce the value of your retirement account. The value of your home could plummet. Foreclosures would rise dramatically. And if you own a business or a farm, you would find it harder and more expensive to get credit. More businesses would close their doors, and millions of Americans could lose their jobs."

Contrast what he had to say with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt when he was sworn into office for the first time, in 1933, during the Great Depression. Rather than foster anxiety and panic, FDR proclaimed, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself," despite the fact that 13 million were unemployed, nine million had lost their savings and a quarter of the banks had closed. Wages had plummeted 60 percent. "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself" is the phrase that everyone remembers, but here's a little more of what FDR had to say:

"This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today. This great Nation will endure, as it has endured, will revive and will prosper ...

"In such a spirit on my part and on yours we face our common difficulties. They concern, thank God, only material things. Values have shrunk to fantastic levels; taxes have risen; our ability to pay has fallen; government of all kinds is faced by serious curtailment of income ... More important, a host of unemployed citizens face the grim problem of existence and an equally great number toil with little return. Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment ...

"The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of that restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit ... If I read the temper of our people correctly, we now realize, as we have never realized before, our interdependence on each other; that we can not merely take, but we must give as well."

Idealism and truth-telling intersected in FDR's speech. There was no equivocation, no pass-the-buck. But as decades passed, the belief in government as an instrument to advance the common good was rejected. Ronald Reagan became President, proclaimed that government was not the solution but the problem, and joked that, "The 10 most dangerous words in the English language are, "Hi, I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help."

Now, like a last-minute, battlefield conversion, the White House has rediscovered the value of government as backstop - not to relieve the misery of the people but the agonized indigestion of financial institutions suffering morbid obesity because they ate too much at the big shot banquet.

In these bailouts, there is no altruism but cynicism, the same attitude that scorns the Constitution and tramples civil liberties, that uses national tragedy to advance an unrelated global agenda, that doesn't give a damn as it tries to game and subvert the electoral process because deep down it fundamentally disdains democracy. Winning isn't everything; it's the only thing.

We need solutions, not sound bites or pandering. We need inspiration and hope, not spin or cant. The way things are going, we may have to find it within ourselves. But in the next five weeks, if one of the candidates can discover how to articulate that hope without pandering, can define our national trauma and tell us how to try to make it better without terrifying us, can give us something to believe in without false expectations, he will be our next President.

--------

Michael Winship is senior writer of the weekly public affairs program Bill Moyers Journal, which airs Friday nights on PBS. Check local airtimes or comment at The Moyers Blog at www.pbs.org/moyers.

YOUTH ACTION LAB AT MUSEUM OF TOLERANCE IN LOS ANGELES

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IF YOU THINK THE ELECTION HASN'T BEEN STOLEN, THINK AGAIN!

RFK Jr., Mike Papantonio: "Is Your Vote Safe?"

Kennedy is a genius. I've seen him speak many times over the years in many venues, large and small, in different countries. No one knows more about the environment than he. No one understands politics better than he does. And no one has done more - and exposed more - to show us what's really going on behind-the scenes so that our present course can be changed. If we don't pay attention to him, we're fools. Mark

Monday 22 September 2008

by: Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Ring of Fire

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has expressed concern for the safety of the vote in the 2008 election. (Photo: wikimedia.org)

Transcript from Ring of Fire on Air America Radio

Bobby: "There are about 30 scams the Republicans are deliberately using, particularly in the swing states to get Democratic voters off the rolls. These scams originate in the so-called Help America Vote Act which was passed after the Florida debacle in the year 2000. It was originally suggested by Democrats and Republicans but it was passed by a Republican congress with a Republican senate and a Republican president. And instead of reforming what happened in Florida it basically institutionalized all the problems that happened in Florida. And institutionalized a series of impediments that make it very difficult for Democrats to register, for Democrats to vote and then for Democrats to have their vote counted.

"One of these requirements under HAVA is called "the perfect match" and what that does is little known but it is devastating. A quarter of the voters in Colorado have just been removed from the rolls because of this - just this one scam. And what it does is they use a computer system to compare your registration application to all other government records of you in the state. So they'll look at your social security records, your motor vehicle records and any time you've had any interaction with the government and if there is any information on your voter registration that is different than the information on another government record that they find they remove you from the voting rolls.

"For example, if I registered as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and yet my motor vehicle license said Robert Frances Kennedy Jr. I'd be removed from the rolls. If your initial is different, if you leave an initial out, if you leave a "Jr." out, if you leave a hyphen out in your name. And what they've done is a study in New York that said 80% of the errors are errors that were done by state clerks who are taking down this information. And particularly immigrant communities that people tend to vote Democratic, people have names … spell Muhammad with an "o" instead of a "u" (crosstalk)

Pap: "Are the Democrats Suing to Stop This?"

Bobby: "No, the Democrats are doing nothing to stop it. In New Jersey, which is a swing state, 300,000 voters in New Jersey were just sent letters saying that they are now ineligible to vote. New jersey is nice enough to actually notify them - most states will not even notify them. And New Jersey intends to send out 870,000 letters so that is three quarters of a million people off the voting rolls in a state that could decide this vote by 50,000 votes. And these are Democrats that are being pushed off the rolls.

Bobby: "Let me tell you about one other of these scams people should know about. If you're a newly registered voter - and of course the Democrats have done these gigantic registration drives - 12 million people on registration - if you're a new voter you MUST include your license or some other state I.D. when you come to vote. What that means is that if you're a college kid (and college kids now - they're sending in absentee ballots - they're not going to the voting place, they do everything online or they do everything remotely - they don't dream of going to the precinct house voting on election day and waiting in a long line) so if they send in the absentee ballot and they don't include a color copy of their license their vote is going to be thrown into a trash can. And none of these people know this because you have had to read the law in order to know it. So there is no notification for when you fill out your registration form, so all of those 12 million people that the Democrats have registered: those ballots are going to be just thrown out.

Pap: "And if Democrats won't talk about this how the hell's anybody gonna know about it? I'm involved with this kind of thing every day - I didn't know that until you just told me. The media is not talking about it. How in the hell is somebody gonna find this out? It's just incredible.

Bobby: "Hopefully - Obama is getting 66 million dollars a month - hopefully somebody in the Democratic organization is going to pay some attention to this before election day.

Posted by Mark from truthout.org

THE REAL VERDICT AWAITS

How Obama Really Did It Social technology helped bring him to the brink of the presidency. By David Talbot

What's Wrong With the Battleground Poll?
This polling organization has been showing up in realclearpolitics average for the past week or so. The results have been curious. Here's the explanation from today's lead story on fivethirtyeight.com. Mark

EXPLANATION
I have gotten an increasing number of questions about the GWU/Battleground Poll, which presently gives John McCain a 2-point national lead, even as essentially every other current national poll shows Barack Obama with a lead of at least 5 points.

Just because a poll is an outlier doesn't necessarily mean that it's doing something wrong. Pollsters may have legitimate reasons for having a different perspective on the election, and they may also occasionally produce odd results due to chance alone.

In this case, however, the poll seems to be making a relatively fundamental mistake: it is not weighting by age.

Take a look for yourself at the "weighted tables" that Battleground released a couple of days ago (PDF). These crosstabs provide a ton of detail -- kudos to Battleground for doing so -- but unfortunately there is one red flag. This is the age makeup of their weighted sample:

18-34    17%
35-44    12%
45-64    40%
65+      31%

Intuitively, this probably looks fairly wrong to you -- almost twice as many age 65+ voters as age18-34 voters? And in fact, it almost certainly is wrong. By comparison, here is the approximate age composition of the electorate in 2004, as according to the US Census Bureau**:

18-34    26%
35-44    17%
45-64    38%
65+      19%

Battleground's numbers are not even close. About 19 percent of voters were aged 65 and older in 2004, as compared to the 31 percent in the Battleground sample. On the other hand, 43 percent of voters were aged 18-44, as opposed to Battleground's 29 percent. These differences are much, much too large to be attributable to chance alone. (And all of this is assuming that turnout in 2008 will match that in 2004, even though youth turnout increased markedly in the primaries and is at least somewhat probable to do so in the general election.0

OBAMA CONTINUES HIS CLIMB

9/30 Daily Kos R2K Tracking Poll: Obama 51, McCain 41

by DemFromCT

Tue Sep 30, 2008 at 04:19:20 AM PDT

Today's Daily Kos Research 2000 tracking poll has Obama up over McCain 51-41. All trackers are data from three days prior to posting, with R2K numbers from today (yesterday's numbers in parentheses) and the other trackers are from yesterday (previous day's data). LV=likely voter, RV=registered voter.

Today's trackers will have Sat-Mon post-debate data, and will not fully reflect post-debate sentiment. The trackers do, however, include McCain campaign suspension/resumption days, and it's the financial crisis that is driving these numbers.

Obama McCain MoE +/- RV/LV
Today
Research 2000: 51 (51) 41 (42) 3 LV

Yesterday
Rasmussen: 50 (50) 45 (44) 2 LV
Diageo/Hotline: 47 (47) 42 (42) 3.2 RV
Gallup: 50 (50) 42 (42) 2 RV

On successive days, Obama was up +9 Sat, +11 Sun and +11 Mon (MoE +/- 5.1 for individual days.)

One poll to highlight today: Gallup on the assessment of crisis response (click the pic for more readable graphic.)

Stephanopoulos: Voters blame Republicans for bill failure

07:19 | 30/09/2008

George Stephanopoulos

ABC, Good Morning America

Stephanopoulos stated that the earliest anything can get done in Congress will be Wednesday. He said that "the power is in Wall Street now" as "another dropoff in the market on Wall Street would create more pressure" on Congress and force action in Congress.

Stephanopoulos revealed that a new ABC News poll coming out this morning asked voters who they blame for the failure of the vote. "The voters seem to be blaming the Republicans in Congress more than the Democrats in Congress" and "for the overall economic situation...voters tend to blame President Bush."

QUOTE OF THE DAY

There's been a lot written about the new gilded age we live in. Is it over? Can the Republicans come to terms with the failure of their trickle-down obsession or will they let the last bits of pocket change trickle out of America's rusty spickets and run for the hills, their pockets filled with gold? This is a quote from Bob Herbert's op-ed piece in today's New York Times.

"These were the reckless clowns who led us into the foolish multitrillion-dollar debacle in Iraq and who crafted tax policies that enormously benefited millionaires and billionaires while at the same time ran up staggering amounts of government debt. This is the crowd that contributed mightily to the greatest disparities in wealth in the U.S. since the gilded age."

QUESTION OF THE DAY

If there are two democrats I wish would go away, they'd be Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. I understood the appeal of Pelosi, but she's proven herself an utter failure as both a communicator and principled leader. She's seen this storm coming, and she's done nothing to prevent it. Reid is simply a loser. Anyway, here's a question posed in David Brooks op-ed piece in today's New York Times that asks and says it all.

"Pelosi’s fiery speech at the crucial moment didn’t actually kill this bill, but did she have to act like a Democratic fund-raiser at the most important moment of her career?"

FROM LA'S RENOVATED MUSEUM OF TOLERANCE

SHOULD CONGRESS PASS THE BAILOUT PACKAGE?

A Very thoughtful piece written by Robert Kuttner, in today's American Prospect.
Both presidential candidates are leaving themselves wiggle room to change their mind, and House Republicans are still on the fence.

Will Congress pass the Paulson-Pelosi package? Will both presidential candidates vote for it? And will it work?

At this writing, passage is still far from certain. There is still open rebellion on the Republican right, and a lot of progressive Democrats don't really like it either. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi needs at least 80 of the 199 House Republicans, or the package becomes more the Democrats' baby. Even if the rescue plan keeps markets afloat through the election, a proposition that I'd put at 50-50, there will be a rolling taxpayer backlash that Republicans will milk for all it's worth.

For any House Republican facing a tight re-election race, the easier vote is No. The alternative Republican plan is a joke. It's billed as a "free market" solution, but it depends on government tax breaks and government insurance to bribe more investors into buying this junk. It's hardly a free market -- if it were, they wouldn't need the tax subsidy or the insurance. And it is even less likely to work than the Paulson plan. But angry taxpayers don't follow the fine print. They only know that Wall Street is getting $700 billion and they are not.

Pelosi has one trump card. Wall Street desperately needs this plan, and Wall Street is not wrong to fear Great Depression II. In normal times, Wall Street has pretty good lines to the Republican Party. But in these times, Republican members are willing to gamble with the economy in order to appease angry voters. However, if Republican legislators will not share the credit and blame, there will be no bill and we can look forward to a deepening crisis.

A similar drama is playing out in the presidential campaign. Both McCain and Obama said they were inclined to support the package, but both left themselves just a bit of wiggle room. Imagine the scene at McCain Headquarters. The phones are ringing off the hook from opposite quarters -- captains of finance urging him to support the plan, and the Republican pseudo-populist right-wing demanding that he stand with them.

If Obama declares his intentions first, there will be great temptation for McCain to double-cross him. As McCain slips further and further in the polls, it's desperation time. McCain could easily give a speech saying he hopes the measure works, but he can't in good conscience vote for it be because it's too tilted to the fat cats and doesn't do enough for ordinary working Americans. Since the vote will be far closer in the House, which votes first, McCain would have the luxury of voting no, but knowing that the bill will pass. This then sets up the mantra of the campaign's final month: McCain=Principled Independent who speaks for You; Obama=Washington Club that bails out Wall Street.

Obama, who views himself more as a steward and is already thinking about where the economy will be in January, will very likely vote for it. But in announcing his support, we can expect him to say that the package is far from what he wanted; that it is at best a stopgap; that in round two, when he is president, we will need to come back and do this right; and that any politician who plays politics with this vote is playing Russian roulette with the economy. Voters and pundits can then draw their own conclusions about whether McCain is a populist hero or cynical opportunist.

But what about the plan itself? Ever since the plan was unveiled, I have been urging that critics of it not festoon it with more benefits for homeowners and more limits on executive compensation -- but offer a whole other approach. The road not taken included direct government refinancing for homeowners instead of government mopping up of junk securities. With that approach, stability trickles up. The money markets get the same relief. But it's far more just to ordinary people and far better politics. The Democrats, alas, were not able to add more than modest additional homeowner help to the package.

The second basic difference in the alternative approach is the idea that government should become a part or full owner in failing financial institutions. Variants of this have been proposed by Jamie Galbraith, former Soros associate Rob Johnson, and Douglas Elmendorf of the Brookings Institution.

But Congress did not follow this path. So is the package worth voting for? It is, in my view, but just barely and only as a stopgap. Congress did add tighter controls, and does not permit Paulson to go out and spend the whole $700 billion at once.

My crystal ball says that markets stabilize for a few weeks, credit begins unlocking, but the deeper rot in the system comes back to produce persistent crises. One place to look is hedge funds, as investors gradually begin exercising their right to withdraw their money. Another source of continuing crisis is the huge market in exotic derivatives. Because Wall Street financial engineers created highly leveraged and unregulated products at multiples many times the value of underlying mortgages, this process is still unwinding. The collapse of the insurance giant A.I.G. was the consequence of one small unit in London writing over $300 billion of these contracts, and taking down the entire company when its bets went bad. The best primer ever written on this subject is Gretchen Morgensen's recent Times piece. You owe it to yourself to read it carefully. The problem is that there is a lot more such rot in the system, and we don't yet know what will unravel next, only that it will be something big.

Given the choice of voting this rescue package up or down, the responsible vote is Aye. It's what's for breakfast. And we will have something else for lunch.

The new regulatory regime will also have to be global, and here our European friends are way ahead of us. They are not exactly thrilled that a made-in-America crisis threatens to create a global financial depression. Last week, Poul Rasmussen, the former Danish prime minister who is now leader of Europe's social democrats in the European Parliament, was in the U.S. explaining the re-regulation package that his committee on economic and monetary affairs had just pushed through the Parliament. All three blocs in the EU's parliament -- social democrats, conservatives, and liberals, voted for tough principles, extending regulation to all categories of financial institutions, limiting leverage, and treating hedge funds and private equity companies as fully regulated institutions.

So the best outcome is that this bailout buys several weeks or perhaps months, that both parties' fingerprints are on this hasty and flawed package, that Paulson runs through only a hundred billion or two by the time Congress grasps that it's time to go back to the drawing board. And that the incoming president starts thinking now about how to do this right. My hunch is that the eventual rescue will include one part direct refinancing for homeowners, one part direct government takeover of financial institution, and one part explicit prohibition of entire categories of financial instruments, such as credit default swaps (see Morgensen's explanation), which multiplied a housing bubble into a full-blown financial panic.

A very good model is the FDIC, as both a tough supervisor, and one which takes over failed banks that it insures. If government extends the financial safety net to all large institutions, it should extend FDIC-style supervision.

Think of this package as a bridge -- not an Alaska-style bridge to nowhere, but as a just-barely-viable bridge to the Obama administration -- which can then begin the arduous task of getting it right.

Posted by Mark from LATIMESBLOG/Culturemonster

A political 'Rivalry' for the ages

1:45 PM, September 28, 2008

It's a war of words between two great American politicos — one a charismatic newcomer, the other a savvy Washington veteran — squaring off over racial equality, states' rights, media manipulation and other hot topics.

No, it’s not Barack Obama and John McCain, but Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas in Norman Corwin’s “The Rivalry.” The play, which opened on Broadway in 1959, revolves around a series of debates during the race for an Illinois seat in the U.S. Senate in 1858. And instead of a university stage, the two candidates will face off at the Skirball Cultural Center as part of L.A. Theatre Works’ latest offering.

Lincoln, the upstart, will be played by David Strathairn, who, it just so happens, narrated the biographical video that introduced Obama at last summer’s Democratic convention. Douglas, one of the most powerful senators of his time, will be played by Paul Giamatti, who last week picked up an Emmy for portraying another political heavyweight, President John Adams.

“Rivalry” director Eric Simonson won an Oscar for his 2006 documentary about the 98-year-old Corwin, one of America's most versatile men of letters. Corwin has written for newspapers, newscasts, film, TV, stage — and, of course, radio. That ties nicely into Theatre Works' mission of recording contemporary and classic plays for broadcast and CD through radio-style readings.

And if one debate just isn't enough for you? On Oct. 15, opening night, you can enjoy a double bill by buying tickets for a 6 p.m. dinner and big-screen viewing of the third scheduled debate between Obama and McCain; Lincoln and Douglas will take the stage at 8.

--Karen Wada

Photo credit: University of Chicago via Lincoln/Net

THERE SHE GOES AND HERE SHE IS!

WATCH:

QUOTE OF THE DAY

Spoken by Dennis Kucinich on the House Floor Sunday.

"The $700 billion bailout for Wall Street, is driven by fear not fact. This is too much money in too a short a time going to too few people while too many questions remain unanswered. Why aren't we having hearings on the plan we have just received? Why aren't we questioning the underlying premise of the need for a bailout with taxpayers' money? Why have we not considered any alternatives other than to give $700 billion to Wall Street? Why aren't we asking Wall Street to clean up its own mess? Why aren't we passing new laws to stop the speculation, which triggered this? Why aren't we putting up new regulatory structures to protect investors? How do we even value the $700 billion in toxic assets?

Why aren't we helping homeowners directly with their debt burden? Why aren't we helping American families faced with bankruptcy. Why aren't we reducing debt for Main Street instead of Wall Street? Isn't it time for fundamental change in our debt based monetary system, so we can free ourselves from the manipulation of the Federal Reserve and the banks? Is this the United States Congress or the board of directors of Goldman Sachs? Wall Street is a place of bears and bulls. It is not smart to force taxpayers to dance with bears or to follow closely behind the bulls."