"Senator Obama and his allies in Congress infused unnecessary partisanship into the process. Now is not the time to affix the blame. It’s time to fix the problem. "
As the debate over a $700 billion bank bailout rages on in Washington, one of the nation's largest banks — Washington Mutual Inc. — has collapsed under the weight of its enormous bad bets on the mortgage market.
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. seized WaMu on Thursday
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Seattle-based WaMu, which was founded in 1889, is the largest bank to fail by far in the country's history.
ANCHOR: As for the massive Wall Street bailout McCain insists it have...
JSM: Oversight that is effective and transparent. We need people like Warren Buffet and Mike Bloomberg and Mitt Romney to have an oversight of this. We can’t put that responsibility in the hands of one person.
ANCHOR: The crunch question. Would you vote for it as it’s presently constructed?
JSM: I have not had a chance to see it in writing so I have to examine that.
McCain suspends his campaign, and asks to postpone Friday's debate, to address the financial crisis.
Both candidates have been marginal players; McCain, though, seems to have the potential to make himself a major one, and his move is a mark, most of all, that he doesn't like the way this campaign is going.
But in terms of the timing of this move: The only thing that's changed in the last 48 hours is the public polling.
it's worth pointing out that while the Enquirer may or may not be scrupulous in its choice of stories — that's in the eye of the beholder — it is pretty scrupulous about its facts. They win lawsuits. They've broken a host of stories the MSM guys couldn't.
Senator John McCain’s campaign manager was paid more than $30,000 a month for five years as president of an advocacy group set up by the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to defend them against stricter regulations, current and former officials say.
Mr. McCain, the Republican candidate for president, has recently begun campaigning as a critic of the two companies and the lobbying army that helped them evade greater regulation as they began buying riskier mortgages with implicit federal backing. He and his Democratic rival, Senator Barack Obama, have donors and advisers who are tied to the companies.
Incensed by the advertisements, several current and former executives of the companies came forward to discuss the role that Rick Davis, Mr. McCain’s campaign manager and longtime adviser, played in helping Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac beat back regulatory challenges when he served as president of their advocacy group, the Homeownership Alliance, formed in the summer of 2000. Some who came forward were Democrats, but Republicans, speaking on the condition of anonymity, confirmed their descriptions
In 2007, Wall Street’s five biggest firms — Bear Stearns, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, and Morgan Stanley — paid a record $39 billion in bonuses to themselves.
That’s $10 billion more than the $29 billion loan taxpayers are making to J.P. Morgan to save Bear Stearns.
Those 2007 bonuses were paid even though the shareholders in those firms last year collectively lost about $74 billion in stock declines — their worst year since 2002.
STAFF at Lehman’s New York office who helped to cause the world’s biggest corporate bankruptcy are to share in a $2.5 billion bonanza.
The Treasury Secretary is authorized to give out money to anybody for any reason as long as he states that it is "mortgage-related".
And there is no proposal to take over management and/or ownership of the institutions holding these toxic mortgages in exchange for taking the bad loans off their books, which is the only way to keep them from writing more toxic mortgages. Instead, it's just money thrown at the same bastards who got us into this situation in the first place.
Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation.
a new study in the prestigious journal Science says that people with right wing views blink and flinch far harder than liberals when confronted with startling stimuli.
In the first study to directly link politics and physiology, the University of Nebraska led study suggests that people who hold conservative views on things like foreign policy and gun control, are more frightened than those with a more left-leaning bent on those issues.
She is a liar with theocratic tendencies, sports an intellect that makes Bush look like a Mensa member, and features an obvious fondness for Cheney-style abuses of power.
So McCain is the candidate with the foreign policy experience ready to lead on day one. But he doesn't know who the leader of Spain is. He gets confused in an interview, apparently thinking Zapatero is someone from Latin America who is an enemy of the United States and manages to create a minor international incident.
Since Reagan almost all of us are getting poorer, while a very few get vastly richer. Wages have largely stagnated since Reagan's election even as GDP and productivity have gone up. Pensions are a thing of the past. Health insurance is becoming a thing of the past as well.
As a result of the Reagan and now Bush tax cuts for the rich the government's debt is just about $10 TRILLION.
the U.S. government agreed Tuesday to provide an $85 billion emergency loan to rescue the huge insurer AIG. The Federal Reserve said
So here’s the record – 12 years of Republicans, including John McCain being a committee chairman for much of that period. Zero – zero enactment of any reform. Democrats take power, and in a year and a half, we have passed a bill that did everything the administration asked for, in terms of enhancing the regulatory structure.
Senator John McCain has drawn some of the biggest crowds of his presidential campaign since adding Alaska Governor Sarah Palin to his ticket on Aug. 29. Now officials say they can't substantiate the figures McCain's aides are claiming.
McCain aide Kimmie Lipscomb told reporters on Sept. 10 that an outdoor rally in Fairfax City, Virginia, drew 23,000 people, attributing the crowd estimate to a fire marshal.
Fairfax City Fire Marshal Andrew Wilson said his office did not supply that number to the campaign and could not confirm it. Wilson, in an interview, said the fire department does not monitor attendance at outdoor events.
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The McCain campaign said 10,000 people showed up at the Consol Energy Arena in Washington, Pennsylvania, home of the Washington Wild Things baseball team.
The campaign attributed that estimate, and several that followed, to U.S. Secret Service figures, based on the number of people who passed through magnetometers.
``We didn't provide any numbers to the campaign,'' said Malcolm Wiley, a spokesman for the U.S. Secret Service.
If you try to sit down and make sense of John McCain’s tax and budget proposals, you’ll find that they don’t make any sense. There are assertions that certain kinds of cuts could save way more money than is in fact there, you’ll find budget figures that count on eliminating all U.S. aid to Israel, inconsistent projections, goofy talk about balancing the budget by achieving “victory” in Iraq, etc. But everyone in the press “knows” that John McCain is responsible, so he doesn’t get asked about this stuff. But Sarah Palin’s not in the club, so Charlie Gibson asks her some basic questions about the budget and it turns out that there’s no there there. But this has nothing to do with her, and everything to do with policies outlined by McCain before Palin joined the ticket:GIBSON: So let me break some of those down. You talk about spending. How much smaller would a McCain budget be? Where would you cut?
PALIN: We’re going to find efficiencies in every department. We have got to. There are some things that I think should be off the table. Veterans’ programs, off the table. You know, we owe it to our veterans and that’s the greatest manifestation that we can show in terms of support for our military, those who are in public service fighting for America. It’s to make sure that our veterans are taken care of and the promises that we’ve made to them are fulfilled.
GIBSON: So you’d take military off the table, the veterans’ benefits. That’s 20 percent of the budget. &Do you talk about entitlement reform? Is there money you can save in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid?
PALIN: I am sure that there are efficiencies that are going to be found in all of these agencies. I’m confident in that.
GIBSON: The agencies are not involved in entitlements. Basically, discretionary spending is 18 percent of the budget.
PALIN: We have certainly seen excess in agencies, though, and in — when bureaucrats, when bureaucracy just gets kind of comfortable, going with the status-quo and not being challenged to find efficiencies and spend other people’s money wisely, then that’s where we get into the situation that we are into today, and that is a tremendous growth of government, a huge debt, trillions of dollars of debt that we’re passing on to my kids and your kids and your grandkids … It’s unacceptable.
I suppose in practice a McCain administration’s budgets would just look like George W. Bush’s budgets or Ronald Reagan’s budgets — tax cuts and huge deficits. But it is telling that the woman John McCain chose as his running mate doesn’t seem to understand what “entitlements” are. Clearly, just as most citizens don’t know what the Bush Doctrine is, most people probably aren’t all that familiar with the meaning of the entitlement/discretionary distinction in federal budgeting. But it’s a big deal for people who actually pay attention to political and policy issues in the United States. I wonder if McCain chatted with Palin at all about her views on entitlement reform before adding her to the ticket?
The UK TimesOnline has posted a video of the aftermath of the killings of dozens of villagers in the Afghan village of Nawabad (called Azizabad in other stories). The U.S. has maintained that seven civilians and three dozen Taliban militants were killed in the combined U.S. Special Forces/Afghan Army/U.S. air operation last August 21. The United Nations and local villagers insist that 92 civilians were killed, over half of them children.
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Perhaps the most amazing political news surrounding the Nawabad massacre is that the Pentagon says it relied for its account, in part, on corroborative evidence by the embedded journalist on the scene: Fox News "reporter" Oliver North! The Times portrays North as coming "to prominence in the 1980s Iran-Contra affair."
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.
The governor also has charged the state for travel expenses to take her children on official out-of-town missions. And her husband, Todd, has billed the state for expenses and a daily allowance for trips he makes on official business for his wife.
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The governor's daughters and husband charged the state $43,490 to travel and many of the trips were to and from their house in Wasilla and Juneau, the capital city 600 miles away, the documents show.
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She wrote some form of "Lodging -- own residence" or "Lodging -- Wasilla residence" more than 30 times at the same time she took a per diem, according to the reports. In two dozen undated amendments to the reports, the governor deleted the reference to staying in her home but still charged the per diem.
Palin charged the state a per diem for working on Nov. 22, 2007 -- Thanksgiving Day. The reason given, according to the expense report, was the Great Alaska Shootout, an annual NCAA college basketball tournament held in Anchorage.
My fellow Alaskans have vouched for Palin as a charming, interesting person. I can add to that that she is perfectly friendly. But now she is running for the highest office and so it must be noted that Sarah Palin the Friendly Neighbor is different from Sarah Palin the Executive. The latter is a woman with intense agendas guided by a narrow set of culturally conservative and extreme religious values. She believes that abstinence should be the only form of sex education taught to teenagers; she believes that creationism should be taught alongside science in our schools; she is against a woman’s right to choose even in the cases of incest and rape; and her church believes gay and lesbian Americans can and, one assumes, should be corrected by prayer (“pray away the gay” is their cheery slogan).
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She did try to use her power to ban books. Wasilla’s popular public librarian rightly objected, and the community rightly backed the librarian. The books were never banned, though Mrs. Palin did fire the librarian for not agreeing with her political views, then rescinded the firing after it was clear she’d made an unpopular decision.
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In recent days, Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin have directed accusations of elitism at the Democratic ticket as well as at the media, suggesting that there is something undesirable about a presidential candidate with extensive knowledge of foreign policy, inner city community struggles, constitutional law, and the complexities of the major domestic crises. This is baffling. Don’t we want an elite leader? Don’t we want a White House made transparent by an elite press? We are a large and complex nation with large and complex problems. Common sense suggests, and the last eight years have shown, that perhaps the president should be something of an elite leader.
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For just 22 months Sarah Palin has been the governor of a state of just 680,000 people that is “awash” in money (as former Alaska governor Tony Knowles put it) and receives more pork-barrel money per capita than any other state. Alaska has no tricky border or immigration issues with the remote parts of British Columbia and the coast of Siberia. There are no inner cities struggling with poverty and daily violence. There is a lot of drunk driving (Alaska is dark and cold much of the year), though the state police force is well funded and the road system they patrol is startlingly simple; I can’t think of a stretch of highway lasting 15 miles that has more than 4 lanes.
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John McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin shows that he is moving farther and farther to the right of mainstream America. If he’s doing it for political reasons, he’s no maverick.
Forget whether or not Sarah Palin is ready to be president. She's not even ready to be a candidate for vice president.
John McCain’s campaign on Wednesday angrily called for an end to questions about its review of Sarah Palin’s background, deriding a “faux media scandal designed to destroy the first female Republican nominee” for vice president.
