Christopher Hitchens: America the Banana Republic

Christopher Hitchens: America the Banana Republic

Posted: 10 Oct 2008 10:46 AM CDT

I love the illustration for Christopher Hitchens' Vanity Fair story, "America the Banana Republic." It's based, of course, on the beautiful Jack Davis poster for Woody Allen's Bananas from 1971.

Hitchens' piece is well worth reading, too.

I was very struck, as the liquefaction of a fantasy-based system proceeded, to read an observation by Professor Jeffrey A. Sonnenfeld, of the Yale School of Management. Referring to those who had demanded -— successfully -— to be indemnified by the customers and clients whose trust they had betrayed, the professor phrased it like this:

These are people who want to be rewarded as if they were entrepreneurs. But they aren't. They didn't have anything at risk.

That's almost exactly right, except that they did have something at risk. What they put at risk, though, was other people's money and other people's property. How very agreeable it must be to sit at a table in a casino where nobody seems to lose, and to play with a big stack of chips furnished to you by other people, and to have the further assurance that, if anything should ever chance to go wrong, you yourself are guaranteed by the tax dollars of those whose money you are throwing about in the first place! It's enough to make a cat laugh.

America the Banana Republic (Thanks, Dale!)

press corps has yet to report on how far-reaching Sarah Palin's ties are to contemporary radicals

Meet Sarah Palin's radical right-wing pals

Posted: 10 Oct 2008 02:10 PM CDT

(Video: Interview with former Alaskan Independence Party chairman Mark Chryson)

Esther Kaplan, Investigative Editor for The Nation Institute, says:

While the McCain camp continues to hammer home Barack Obama's ties to a former '60s radical, the press corps has yet to report on how far-reaching Sarah Palin's ties are to contemporary radicals -- specifically, the paranoid anti-government figures behind the Alaskan Independence Party. Reporters Max Blumenthal and David Neiwert found that AIP activists played a critical role in Palin's election as Wasilla mayor and that Palin in turn sought to reward them with plum political appointments and appearances, as recently as this year, at AIP conventions.

Their story, "Meet Sarah Palin's Radical Right-Wing Pals," below, was supported by a research grant from the Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute and appeared this morning at Salon.com.

Meet Sarah Palin's radical right-wing pals

When Fascism Comes To America

March 15, 2008 

The Grand Lake Theater in Oakland, CA has gained fame for using half of it's Marquee to display political messages. Following the 2000 election owner Allen Michaan displayed a message saying "This Is America — Every Vote Should Be Counted". Since then Michaan has regularly displayed messages save for a brief lapse between the midterm elections of November 2006 and January 2007.

I’m Very Good At Research

April 15, 2008 

10 Hilariously Fat Goths

10 Hilariously Fat Goths

February 12, 2008 

It's a pretty universally held belief that goths are hilarious, but it's the fat goth that I find the most amusing.

I think this is mostly because of the cognitive dissonance involved in dressing in black and acting pissed off at the world but still managing to find plenty of time to visit with Little Debbie. The apathetic and depressed don't tend to eat themselves into a diabetic state, but the fat goth perseveres anyway. Here are ten great examples of what I'm talking about:

10. Lonely Goth

9. Trailer Park Goths

8. Fat Acceptance Goth

7. Gangsta Goth

6. Clown Goths

5. Sly Goth

4. Cranky Goth

3. Bad Poetry Goth

2. Sultry Goth

1. Jesus Christ My Eyes Goth

it’s Worth The Extra $3.05

October 9, 2008 

Mayor Daley of Chicago has praised Ayers

Mayor Daley of Chicago has praised Ayers

from Politics in the Zeros. Anti-war, global warming, peak oil, progressive politics by Bob Morris

WaPo. The quotes speak for themselves. Whoever Bill Ayers was then, he is not now. Like many of us forty years later.

Ayers is an informal adviser to Mayor Richard M. Daley and has been awarded more than $50 million in charitable grants for his promotion of small schools as a solution to a crisis in education.

In Chicago, however, Ayers is considered so mainstream that Daley issued a statement on Thursday praising him as a "distinguished professor of education" and a "valued member of the Chicago community."

"I don't condone what he did 40 years ago, but I remember that period well," said Daley, an Obama supporter whose father, Richard J. Daley, was a favorite target of the antiwar movement when he was mayor in the '60s. "It was a difficult time, but those days are long over. I believe we have too many challenges in Chicago and our country to keep refighting 40-year-old battles."

"Judges who were lifelong ardent conservatives had no trouble recognizing that the work that Bernadine and Bill are now doing is completely divorced from anything in their background" [said a law professor]

Continuity of Government plans have been afoot to suspend the Unites States constitution - you need to watch this video

Continuity of Government plans have been afoot to suspend the Unites States constitution - you need to watch this video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgMx2F41XD0

Sheriff Dart Sued To Enforce Evictions

Sheriff Dart Sued To Enforce Evictions

from Chicagoist by Marcus Gilmer

Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart, who made waves by announcing Wednesday he wouldn't enforce evictions of rent-paying tenants when the evictions were aimed at indebted landlords, was sued yesterday by Accredited Home Lenders so as to enforce Dart to move forward with such evictions. In a statement by attorneys, Accredited Home Lenders said:

Sheriff Dart may have concerns about the orders that he is charged with enforcing, but he simply cannot refuse to carry them out. The orders of the court must be enforced. This lawsuit is necessary to ensure that.

Also on Thursday, Dart met with Cook County Judge Dorothy Kirie Kinnaird to discuss Dart's new policy.

At that meeting, Dart told Kinnaird that too often his deputies are evicting renters who have not been given notice the property is in foreclosure. The sheriff suggested Kinnaird require banks to file an affidavit saying the homeowner and potential renters all have been given notice of the pending eviction before calling on deputies to evict residents.

For now, Dart will continue his new practice of not enforcing the evictions. Neither Dart nor his spokesman Steve Patterson had any comment on the lawsuit.

Photo of Sheriff Dart from the Cook County Sheriff Home Page

"Just at a moment in history when the country needs a trustworthy leader, none is around to boost its confidence."

Bush Speaks on the Economy, But Who's Listening?

from The Washington Independent by Mike Lillis

He's no Smith Barney.

In another of what has been a long string of uncomfortable Rose Garden speeches, President George W. Bush this morning tried to reassure Americans that the economy is sound, that their investments are safe.

Here's what the American people need to know: that the United States government is acting; we will continue to act to resolve this crisis and restore stability to our markets. We are a prosperous nation with immense resources and a wide range of tools at our disposal. We're using these tools aggressively … Fellow citizens: We can solve this crisis — and we will.

Trouble is, fellow citizens aren't listening.

After eight years of Bush — years that saw the administration lie to go to war, ignore the balance of powers, spy on citizens without warrants, etc. — Americans simply don't trust this White House.

It's bad timing.

Just at a moment in history when the country needs a trustworthy leader, none is around to boost its confidence.

John Morton Blum, professor emeritus at Yale University who once had Bush in his classroom, said recently that his former pupil is a worse president than James Buchanan — the infamous 19th-century figure who fiddled while the South seceded.

Over the course of Bush's eight-minute speech, the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 84 points. Ten minutes later, it was down another 170. For the day it's down 290 (as of 12:25 pm).

The only question now is which Bush administration debacle will go down in greater infamy: the ruination of the economy or the disastrous Iraq War.

Rove legacy, indeed.

McCain's Lobbyists Drive Anti-Middle Class Policies

McCain's Lobbyists Drive Anti-Middle Class Policies

from Political Affairs Magazine

During the presidential debate this week, John McCain appeared to debate his own record on the question of lobbyists. At one point, McCain said, "There is too much special interests and too many lobbyists working there." But no presidential campaign has had more ties to Washington's lobbyist culture than John McCain's.

Obama Called "Traitor" Again At McCain Rally

Obama Called "Traitor" Again At McCain Rally
ohn McCain's rally on Friday once again inspired furious reactions from his supporters, with one woman screaming "traitor!" as McCain criticized Barack Obama's tax record.

"He promised higher taxes on electricity," McCain charged at the event in La Crosse, Wisconsin. "He voted for the Democratic budget resolution that promised to raise taxes on people making just $42,000 a year." At that point, the woman yelled "traitor," and both McCain and his wife Cindy appeared to look in her direction.

The Arizona Senator continued with his stump speech without referencing her.

video here:

CNN’s Misleading Report on ACORN

CNN's Misleading Report on ACORN

from The Washington Independent by Daphne Eviatar

Anyone watching CNN last night might have thought that ACORN (Assn. of Community Organizations for Reform Now) is trying to steal the upcoming presidential election for the Democrats.

"ACORN accused of voter fraud" read last night's CNN headline. Then anchor Campbell Brown gravely presented the results of the cable channel's "special investigative unit."

It's not exactly a tribute to CNN's investigative team that it was able to come up with a set of allegations against ACORN.

As I reported two days ago, the Republican attorney general in Nevada conducted a high-profile raid on the community organizing group's headquarters in Las Vegas. Twenty boxes of documents and eight computer drives were seized.

Months before that, Republicans were regularly claiming that ACORN, which aims to register mostly low-income and minority voters, is trying to steal the presidential election for Sen. Barack Obama.

Now, the GOP is widely distributing the YouTube clip of last night's CNN show, under the Banner headline, "CNN Exposes How ACORN Steals Votes & Ties to Obama".

Once again,  CNN and the Republican operatives neglect to mention this: Even if thousands of ACORN workers register thousands of non-existent voters simply to make a quick buck — and the evidence points to that as the workers' motive — those non-existent people are NOT showing up to vote on election day.

The fraud, then, is on ACORN, who pays these workers, not on the electoral process or on the American people, as the Republicans want you to believe.

The Republicans have two goals in going after ACORN.

One, they want to tar Obama because his campaign gave $800,000 to ACORN to support its massive voter-registration drive. Given ACORN's reach around the country with potential Democratic voters, that's not surprising. (The Obama campaign now says it's no longer supporting ACORN's efforts.)

And, with the help of CNN, they want to play the guilt-by-association card. Years ago, Obama was on a team of lawyers that represented ACORN, among others, in a lawsuit against the state of Illinois for refusing to implement the federal motor-voter law.  Obama and ACORN won the case.

The Bush administration's Justice Department sided with ACORN (and Obama) in that case, so I guess it is guilty of trying to steal the election for the Democrats too?

It's not surprising that the Republican Party would try to smear Obama by attacking a community organizing group that specializes in registering low-income voters.

But CNN's "investigative team" ought to do a little of its own investigating before it buys into the Republican's claims of "voter fraud" and suggests that community groups are trying to steal the election for the Democrats.

"Paul Rieckhoff of IAVA sits down with Rachel Maddow to discuss his group's 2008 report card on how members of Congress voted on Veterans issues. John McCain: D. Barack Obama: B. "

Rachel Maddow Show: John McCain's Terrible Record on Veterans Issues

from Crooks and Liars by SilentPatriot

Download | Play    Download | Play

Paul Rieckhoff of IAVA sits down with Rachel Maddow to discuss his group's 2008 report card on how members of Congress voted on Veterans issues. John McCain: D. Barack Obama: B.

RIECKHOFF: There were 53 original co-sponsors on both sides of the aisle [for the new GI Bill]. Eventually, right-wing folks like Senator Warner got involved with folks on the left like Senator Webb. Every major veteran services organization in the country supported it, more ¾ of the House. So, this was kind of a legislative locomotive. And one of the only blocks along the way consistently was Senator McCain.

So, it's not a partisan issue here. The G.I. bill had tremendous support. And he was just really behind this legislative issue. Now, he's made attempts to go back and say he was holding out for transferability. Transferability, being able to transfer your G.I. bill benefits to your family members. It was already in the law. It was at the discretion of the Department of Defense.

So, it's kind of a red herring there. But the reports are out there now. Everybody can check the vote. Go to VeteranReportCard.org, you can check their votes and everybody else who's up for reelection this year.

I know Senator Obama didn't serve in the military or endure years of torture thirty years ago, but isn't it time everyone acknowledge that John McCain simply doesn't own the veterans issue because of his history? His service is certainly admirable, but in order to claim that you support the troops, you actually have to, you know, support the troops -- not be one of the only "road blocks" standing in the way of the most important veterans bill of the past 40 years.

Full transcript below the fold:

MADDOW: To a significant number of veterans, John McCain does appear to be the preferred candidate of the choice between Barack Obama and John McCain. What boils my blood here is the prospect that voters' assumptions drawing from John McCain's biography and his legislative record are too very, very different things. And in the end, what I need to be talked down about, is the idea that John McCain is getting credit that he really is not due.

Here to attempt to Talk Me Down is Paul Rieckhoff, executive director and founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America.

Hi, Paul. Nice to see you.

PAUL RIECKHOFF, IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN VETERANS OF AMERICA: Hi, Rachel. Great to be with you.

MADDOW: The new report card that you had put out on the legislative record on veterans' issues for 2007-2008 congressional year, gives John McCain a "D." How do Barack Obama and Joe Biden do?

RIECKHOFF: Barack Obama gets a "B," Joe Biden also gets a "B." But 50 folks in the Senate did get "A's." Overall, it was a very good year for Congress. They passed a largest funding increase in 77 years and they passed the historic G.I. bill.

But for McCain and for Obama, the most critical issue here was attendance. McCain missed six of nine of our key votes. And Obama actually missed four of nine. Senator McCain missed more votes than Tim Johnson who was in a coma, OK? Senator Obama and Senator McCain both missed more votes than Senator Ted Kennedy who had a brain tumor.

So, it's about showing up. You can't support vets if you're not there to vote on their key issues. And unfortunately, Senator McCain was absent for six of those nine key votes.

MADDOW: And talk about a key issue, one of the votes that he

missed, that Senator Obama did not miss, I should point out, was the new

G.I. bill. Senator McCain had a sort of unusual role on the formation of the G.I. bill this year. He did, in the end, try to take sort of credit for it. He was thanked at the outset at the signing ceremony, but he was not involved as an original co-sponsor on this legislation, isn't that right?

RIECKHOFF: Correct. There were 53 original co-sponsors on both sides of the aisle. Eventually, right-wing folks like Senator Warner got involved with folks on the left like Senator Webb. Every major veteran services organization in the country supported it, more ¾ of the House. So, this was kind of a legislative locomotive. And one of the only blocks along the way consistently was Senator McCain.

So, it's not a partisan issue here. The G.I. bill had tremendous support. And he was just really behind this legislative issue. Now, he's made attempts to go back and say he was holding out for transferability. Transferability, being able to transfer your G.I. bill benefits to your family members. It was already in the law. It was at the discretion of the Department of Defense.

So, it's kind of a red herring there. But the reports are out there now. Everybody can check the vote. Go to VeteranReportCard.org, you can check their votes and everybody else who's up for reelection this year.

MADDOW: Paul, I know that IAVA is a totally nonpartisan organization. You guys do not make endorsements. You don't make political contributions.

But I have to ask you, politically, looking at this presidential race, when you see things like John McCain going over and touching that man on the shoulder, sort of ostentatiously in the audience last night.

RIECKHOFF: Right.

MADDOW: When you see him talked so frequently about his love for veterans and you know, their painful experience, the distance between the way he talks about them, sort of the symbolism that he wraps himself in around veterans' issues and what he has done as a politician, do you think there's any hope of bridging that gap in people's minds, to making people recognize that he hasn't actually been that great on veterans' issues as a politician?

RIECKHOFF: I hope so. You know, that's why we created this report. And not just for Senator McCain but for everybody. There's a lot of empty rhetoric in Washington about people who support the troops. And looking through these records, looking through Defense appropriations votes, looking through votes on the G.I. bill, it's not a sexy thing.

But we kind of done the hard work and made it completely transparent and let the votes speak for themselves. But being a veteran alone doesn't mean you are strong on veteran issues. You can be Dennis Kucinich got a good grade and he's been against this war as much as anyone. It's about the votes, not about your veteran status. And we made it entirely transparent.

MADDOW: Paul Rieckhoff from Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, it's nice to see you.

RIECKHOFF: You, too. Thanks so much.

MADDOW: I should mention, as a programming note, just to be fair that Paul appears weekly on my radio show on Air America Radio. And I never get to see his pretty bald face.

So, it's nice to see you, Paul.

RIECKHOFF: You, too.

Health Department Pwns Another Bar Louie

Health Department Pwns Another Bar Louie

from Chicagoist by Chuck Sudo

The Health Department shut down another Bar Louie yesterday, this time at 741 W. Randolph (a press release from Tim Hadac at the CDPH says that it's still shut down as of post time). The major violation was the discovery of over 1,000 rat droppings in a basement storage area. Inspectors also found doors with gaps allowing insects and rodents easy access, fruit flies, overflowing dumpsters, no hot water and no sanitation solution in an automatic dishwashing machine.

This is the second Bar Louie to be shut down in two weeks and the third since August 28. One get the feeling at this point that the Health Department wanted to shot fish in a barrel they could inspect the Wrigleyville and Dearborn Station locations and make it a clean sweep.

McCain Adviser: ‘Can’t Imagine’ Talking About the Stock Market Daily

McCain Adviser: 'Can't Imagine' Talking About the Stock Market Daily

from The Washington Independent by Matthew DeLong

McCain campaign manager Rick Davis, in a conference call with reporters today, boldly confronted the big issue on the minds of American voters: Sen. Barack Obama's connection to the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now (ACORN.)

However, after he and Missouri's Republican Gov. Matt Blunt finished denouncing ACORN as a "fraudulent, law-breaking organization" — for a more balanced assessment of what ACORN does, look here — Davis answered a question from MSNBC's Norah O'Donnell about why the McCain campaign has not been saying much lately about the stock market.

John McCain talked yesterday at length about what he's trying to do to help stem the financial crisis that exists today, and announced on Monday and talked aggressively every day since then about his new mortgage proposal. There's very little a candidate for president, and frankly, after watching today, very little even the president can say about what's happening in the stock markets other than to hope that they correct themselves.

I think John's recommendation for the government to get involved with the purchase of mortgages before they default is probably the best elixir for doing that. Obviously, I can't imagine a situation where, on a daily basis, a campaign would put out statements related to whatever the market was doing. We hope the market gets better. We think we've got the economic policies that, if John McCain is elected president, will improve the markets because they will actually add stability to the financial system that is in so much turmoil today…

I don't know if you really want to turn a campaign into a CNBC news show on the stock market. It doesn't mean that we don't care and aren't trying to something about it. It's just I'm not exactly sure what you'd say every day.

Well, I have an idea of what you might say.

You get out there and you demonstrate that you're engaged with what's going on. You reassure people that you understand that their IRAs and 401(k)s lost a substantial percentage of their value in the last week. Even if you don't necessarily have any idea what to do about the crashing stock market, it's probably best to at least talk about it — rather than spend all your time trying to gin up phony controversies about your opponent that nobody really cares about anyway.

Now, I have to go. The McCain campaign has scheduled another conference call about Bill Ayers.

"Nash Finch, a Minneapolis-based supermarket chain, adds a 10% fee to the bill at its stores catering to Hispanic shoppers in Colorado"

Supermarket Chain Adds 10% At Register, But Only In Some Stores [Avanza]

from Consumerist by Chris Walters

Nash Finch, a Minneapolis-based supermarket chain, adds a 10% fee to the bill at its stores catering to Hispanic shoppers in Colorado, reports 9News in Denver:

The Nash Finch stores Avanza, Food Bonanza and Wholesale Food Outlets add the 10 percent charge to food at the register and specialize in serving Hispanics, according to store workers.

However, the Nash Finch stores Sun Mart Foods, Econo Foods, Family Fresh Market, Pick N Save and Prairie Market stores do not charge extra at the register and do not cater to Hispanics, according to the store workers.

"Jim," a store manager, told the news station that the fee is to offset other costs, but it's clear that the 10% charge is at least partly a way to offer steeper "discounts" throughout the store that are effectively removed when you pay.

Nash Finch denies it's doing anything skeevy or illegal with its unclear pricing, but 9News points out their attempt at full disclosure is confusingly worded, perhaps deliberately so:

"The 'shelf-plus' pricing program is only used in certain store formats. These stores tend to be located where consumers are more price-conscious, as compared to our more conventional supermarkets," said Brian Numainville, Public Relations for Nash Finch Company. "The pricing policy is explained, not just in English, but also in Spanish, so that no customer is caught unaware at the cash register."

The stores do advertise that they are going to add a 10 percent fee in signs posted across the store, on the store shelves below the price of a food item on the store shelf and in flyers and circulars. However, the wording is confusing to many. For example, the flyers read, "A great way to save - Plus 10 % at the Register."

What do you think—is this an acceptable way to price groceries? In a series of questions Nash Finch answered for 9News' story, they claim that they're not the only chain to do this, and that it's not just Hispanic markets. Here's their final justifaction for the practice:

Question 9: Wouldn't it be more honest/up front to just add 10 percent to the price of all of the products—so that people can see the actual price on the shelf and on the sticker?

Answer: The grocery industry is extremely competitive. Stores vie for customers. Customer loyalty is highly valued. Given the need to attract and retain customers, our stores cannot afford to alienate its customers by charging unexplained fees or unanticipated mark-ups. Our pricing is attracting customers—rather than losing them—demonstrating that the pricing policy is in fact fair, obvious, and well-understood by our shoppers.

"Some grocery stores add 10 percent fee" [9News.com] (Thanks to Randy!)

"both Eddie Bauer and Target are selling survival kits, and a reader emailed to note that survival preparation has gone even more mainstream"

We're All Soldiers of Fortune Now - TCS Daily

Survival kits and disaster preparedness used to be something out of the disaster-collage mainstream. After a brief (and heavily-mocked) period of fallout-shelter construction in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the notion of private disaster preparedness retreated from the mainstream. Survival kits and equipment were available, but mostly through military surplus stores and other specialty sources.

But now that seems to have changed. As I noted on my weblog last week, both Eddie Bauer and Target are selling survival kits, and a reader emailed to note that survival preparation has gone even more mainstream:

You know survival kits are mainstream when Costco is selling them. And last weekend at my local Costco, in the food section, there was a front of the aisle display of survival food buckets. They were going for $110 and had about 275 servings of freeze dried vegetarian meals.

10 years ago, this was the stuff of Soldier of Fortune.

That seems exactly right to me. The kind of survival-oriented disaster preparedness thinking that once flourished in subcultures like Soldier of Fortune seems to be going mainstream. And why is that?

There are some obvious reasons, of course. The Y2K runup got some people interested in the subject, and although those fears amounted to nothing, I imagine it gave the whole survival-supplies industry a big boost. More recently, the 9/11 attacks, hurricanes like Katrina, and the New York and Memphis blackouts, along with scary stories about avian flu and bioterrorism, have served to remind people that things do go wrong, that the government can't always help them, and that fortune tends to favor the well-prepared.

The federal and state governments have been pushing this, too. The Department of Homeland Security -- see its www.ready.gov site -- is pushing survival kits, (there's even a special preparedness page for kids, complete with fuzzy -- but prepared --cartoon animals) and so are many states. My brother recently got a mailing from the State of Ohio telling him to have a month's worth of food put away, in case of avian flu And the government is pushing Community Emergency Response Team training. (September was National Preparedness Month). Most such things wind up being ignored, of course, but enough people pay attention to make a difference.

There's also a political angle. Back in the 1990s, it was the Soldier of Fortune crowd that was preparing for some sort of apocalyptic scenario. Back then, the Democrats were in power, and much of the apocalypticism we heard was from the right. Now, with the Republicans in power over the past six years, the apocalypticism has shifted leftward. A quick perusal of Amazon demonstrates this: Where once people on the right were worried about the shock troops of the socialist New World Order or the breakup of America into racial enclaves, now it seems like it's mostly lefties worrying about self-reliance in the face of collapsing unsustainable technology, and the dangers of suburban extinction in the face of high oil prices. As with some of the righty books from the 1990s, there's a curious push-pull here: Though these are warnings of catastrophes to come, there's a sense that to some extent those catastrophes involve society getting what it deserves for its sinful ways, perhaps coupled with an opportunity for purification in the wake of the crisis -- with the virtuously prepared having the upper hand, of course.

One reason this kind of thinking may have become more mainstream lately is that, for better or worse, what the left is thinking has more impact on mainstream culture and media than what the right is thinking. Today's media are more diverse than they used to be, but the big cultural bullhorns are still controlled by the left, so that when lefties are talking about something, everybody is talking about it, while when righties are talking about something, well . . . righties are talking about it. In this case, it's just as well that this mood has gone national: It seems clear, as I've argued here in numerous columns, that America could do with more preparation on the part of its citizens. But I do think that political factor is giving it extra resonance right now.

I predict that if Democrats do better in coming elections, much of the lefty apocalypticism will diminish. Unfortunately, that may lead to a loss of consciousness about the importance of disaster preparation among the larger populace. But maybe not. It's a dangerous world out there, and there are lots of reasons, beyond politics, for doing what we can to be ready for it. Perhaps that message will persist, regardless. It should.

The author is a TCS Daily Contributing Editor.

Bottled Water at Issue in Great Lakes

Bottled Water at Issue in Great Lakes - washingtonpost.com

CHICAGO -- Even as a 10-year campaign to block wholesale export of Great Lakes water came to a successful conclusion in Congress last week, some legislators and environmentalists vowed to continue their fight to close a "bottled-water loophole," a campaign that taps into a national debate over sales of H2O in disposable containers.

A provision of the Great Lakes Compact allows water to be diverted from the basin if it is in containers holding less than 5.7 gallons. The question is whether bottling water from the aquifers that feed the lakes, the largest repository of fresh water on Earth, should be seen as ordinary human consumption, commercial production, or export of a treasured natural resource.

In August, Nestle Waters North America was granted permits for a new well and pipeline at its Ice Mountain facility in Mecosta County, Mich., where it bottles 700,000 gallons a day. Nestle also recently renewed permits for its plant in Guelph, Ontario. Both have sparked vocal opposition from those who say the industry is privatizing a public good and harming the environment.

Americans drank 8.8 billion gallons of bottled water in 2007, up 7 percent from 2006, according to the Beverage Marketing Corp. But bottled water has drawn increasing criticism, leading San Francisco, Salt Lake City and Ann Arbor, Mich., among other municipalities, to ban buying bottled water with city funds.

Nestle spokesman Brian Flaherty said the industry is being unfairly singled out, since it is only one of many commercial sectors that use and export water. More Great Lakes region water goes into soda and beer cans, he said.

"How do you define a product?" he asked. "Water goes into beer in Wisconsin and radiators in Detroit. Why would you have a separate standard for bottled water versus soda?"

Bottled water accounts for less than 0.02 percent of groundwater withdrawals nationally, according to a 2004 University of Maryland study cited by the International Bottled Water Association. Fourteen times as much bottled water is imported into the Great Lakes basin than is exported, a U.S.-Canadian commission reported in 2000.

But opponents of bottled water say soda and beer are different because the water is consumed in making something else, whereas they view Nestle as taking a public good, paying very little for it, and making a profit on it.

They also fear that since the compact officially treats water as a "product," the door could be opened to further commercialization and sale. It was such fears that in 1998 launched the process that led to the compact, after the tiny company Nova Group obtained a permit from the Ontario government -- later withdrawn -- to ship up to 158 million gallons of Great Lakes water per year to Asia.

Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.), who led opposition to the compact because of the bottled-water loophole, has requested comments from the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative and the State Department about how international trade issues will play out.

"Call me all wet, but I say, why don't we get the answers? Why are we rushing this?" he said.

Anu Bradford, a University of Chicago law professor, said international trade law cannot force a country to extract its natural resources -- such as water "in its pristine form in a lake." But once it is bottled and becomes itself a product, she said, trade agreements would prevent a ban on exports.

"How do we decide when water is a product?" she asked. "Under the WTO and NAFTA, there is no obligation for a state to extract its natural resources. The difference comes when it makes the decision to allow an entity to commercialize it and they do commercialize it. Then it is a product and you can't ban the export."

Doug Roberts Jr., director of environmental and energy policy at the Michigan Chamber of Commerce, agrees.

"We think it's critical that you are able to make products and ship them all over the world," Roberts said. "That's what you do in a free-market economy. We were very concerned groups would target one product and say that product can't be shipped. What's the difference between bottled water and beer or cherry juice? Those all have water in them."

Nestle is the biggest water bottler in Michigan but not the only one. PepsiCo and Coca-Cola bottle Detroit municipal water for their Aquafina and Dasani brands, respectively. Coca-Cola and PepsiCo have water-bottling plants in Quebec and Ontario.

Opponents say Nestle's pumping is lowering water levels in local creeks and lakes -- systems that feed the Great Lakes. In Ontario, a hydrologist hired by a group opposing the Nestle plant reported that the company was using 7 percent of the local water supply and depleting the flow of a creek.

"As long as the bottled-water loophole remains, it's a gaping hole in the Great Lakes Compact that would lead to potentially sucking the Great Lakes dry," said Meera Karunananthan, national water campaigner for the Council of Canadians, a citizen group.

In both Ontario and Michigan, many residents are also angry that Nestle gets the water at low cost, paying the same rate as any other water user. But Terry Swier, president of Michigan Citizens for Water Conservation, said she doesn't necessarily want the company to pay for the water. "Then with the financial situation Michigan is in, we would just open up the state to any water bottler," she said. "We have to preserve and protect the waters for future generations."

Flaherty said he doesn't think bottled water, in or out of the Great Lakes basin, should get a bad rap.

"We're one of 70,000 different types of beverages you can buy," he said. "We use the least amount of water and the least amount of plastic, and we're good for you."

"Listeria exists in 100 percent of all (meat) plants, and it is impossible to eliminate it,"

CEO says listeria in Toronto meat plant no surprise | Health | Reuters

WINNIPEG, Manitoba (Reuters) - Maple Leaf Foods Inc Chief Executive Michael McCain said on Thursday it was not surprising to find listeria bacteria lingering in a Maple Leaf meat plant in Toronto whose products have been linked to at least 20 deaths in a food-poisoning outbreak.

"Listeria exists in 100 percent of all (meat) plants, and it is impossible to eliminate it," McCain told reporters, noting the company sanitizes its plants for six to eight hours a day to reduce the risk of the bacteria contaminating food at levels high enough to cause illness or death.

Maple Leaf, one of Canada's largest meat processors, and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency announced late on Wednesday that four samples of meat products at the plant had tested positive for the bacteria.

Earlier this summer, contaminated meat from the same plant caused an outbreak of listeriosis.

The company said two slicers in the plant were behind the outbreak, which prompted one of the largest meat recalls in Canada's history.

"What occurred a month ago was not about the existence of listeria in the plant," McCain said. "It was about a harborage point ... deep inside a slicer that avoided our sanitation process."

Maple Leaf shares have plunged more than 30 percent since the outbreak, and were down 43 Canadian cents at C$7.31 on the Toronto Stock Exchange on Thursday.

The plant resumed processing three weeks ago and has been running at 30 percent capacity as government officials rigorously test meats produced there, all of which are being held in warehouses.

Maple Leaf has not been permitted to distribute any meat products from the plant as government officials try to make sure it has eliminated the source of the outbreak.

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency is evaluating the findings, and a senior official declined to speculate on what impact they would have on the decision on when to allow meat from the plant to be sold to the public.

"What we want to understand is, in terms of the plant and its environment and its production, if the issues that may have contributed to the original contamination event have been addressed," said CFIA official Paul Mayers.

The four new findings were "somewhat routine," McCain said, One to 10 percent of all ready-to-eat foods contain the bacteria, and most people do not get sick from consuming it, he said.

Officials are taking 60 samples from each production line every day, which is one sample every 8 to 12 minutes, McCain said, or a total of 3,850 tests.

"We understood the day that we opened the door that this plant was going to be a fishbowl," McCain said.

The new findings are within accepted limits for meat processing plants in Canada and the United States, said Mansel Griffiths, a food scientist with the University of Guelph.

($1=$1.15 Canadian)

Attorneys, Scholars, Activist Groups Call for Impeachment if Bush Pardons Himself or His Subordinates

Attorneys, Scholars, Activist Groups Call for Impeachment if Bush Pardons Himself or His Subordinates | AfterDowningStreet.org

Please add your name as an individual or organization by registering / logging in, and then signing the petition.

The Steering Committee of the Justice Robert Jackson Conference On Prosecution of High Level War Criminals plans to demand the immediate impeachment of George W. Bush if he issues any last minute pardons covering himself or any of his subordinates. The president can be impeached and convicted even after leaving office.

The Steering Committee has released the following statement:

The presidential pardon power must not be distorted to include the power to self-pardon the president, or to pardon any staff or contractors of the executive branch, including the vice president, for crimes authorized by the president. The unconstitutionality of self pardons is discussed at length in "Pardon Me? The Constitutional Case Against Presidential Self-Pardons," by Brian C. Kalt in the Yale Law Journal, December 1, 1996: http://www.jstor.org/pss/797310

A self pardon by the President for himself or those who carried out his illegal orders to commit war crimes, said the Steering Committee of the Robert Jackson Conference, would make a mockery of the rule of law. It would, in fact, largely put an end to the rule of law. It is frankly inconceivable, said the Steering Committee, that the framers, who sought the rule of law instead of kingly tyranny, could have intended this.

The Steering Committee noted that Bush's commutation of the sentence of Lewis "Scooter" Libby, who helped carry out Bush's plans, suggests the possibility of an attempted self pardon by Bush in the future. Also, the famed journalist Stuart Taylor has suggested a self pardon covering war crimes committed by Bush and his colleagues. A self pardon covering Bush and/or his subordinates, however, would require an immediate impeachment and conviction of the culprits in order to disqualify them from holding any U.S. office in the future and to avoid setting an awful precedent for future presidents to pardon their own crimes and those of subordinates.

Please add your name as an individual or organization by registering / logging in, and then signing the petition.

Repubs Will "Challenge" Obama Victory

Repubs Will "Challenge" Obama Victory | AfterDowningStreet.org

As predicted (here and elsewhere), the Republicans are using their huge propaganda apparatus to accuse the Democrats of planning to steal this election. To anyone who knows what's actually been going on these last eight years, the charge is laughable -- or would be, if it weren't so dangerous.

It's dangerous because so many of our fellow-citizens still haven't learned the facts about the stolen races in 2000, 2002, 2004 and 2006, or about the GOP's long preparations to subvert the next election, too. Such facts are still unknown because the press has not reported them, nor have most leading Democrats even acknowledged them. That silence has now made it very easy for the GOP to pose as victims of election fraud and vote suppression -- and thereby to suppress more votes, and perpetrate an even greater fraud this time around.

What the party's done thus far is use the myth of Democratic "voter fraud" not just to cloud the issue, but to justify the passage of Jim Crow legislation, like the photo ID law in Indiana, the birth certificate requirement in Pima County, Arizona, and other measures meant to disenfranchise Democratic/Independent voters by the tens of thousands.

And now the party plans to push that strategy to its ultimate expression: an effort to undo a Democratic victory on Election Day.

On Wednesday, Investor's Business Daily posted an editorial, "Is ACORN Stealing The Election?" The tease: "ELECTION FRAUD: A radical group Barack Obama used to work for is committing voter-registration fraud in several states, ahead of the election. What does Obama know about this scam?"

The whole piece is a tissue of such shrill crapola, which it would take much precious time to blow away. Suffice it to say (one more time) that ACORN has, all along, been scrupulous in its observance of the laws (necessarily, since every move they make is under hostile scrutiny); and that the outfit has prevailed in every lawsuit brought against them by the GOP. As noted earlier, moreover, these recent ACORN "scandals" are a load of rubbish, patently contrived for propaganda purposes. In short, there's nothing there, as any rational observer will discover right away.

But the GOP is not engaged in rational debate or honest inquiry, but dealing in sensational canards, so as to lay the groundwork for another stolen race--just as in Florida eight years ago, when Bush/Cheney's men deployed exaggerations, lies and livid buzzwords (and a telling moment of mob violence) to subvert the true result
of that election and install themselves in power. The strategy for this election is laid out explicitly in the last paragraph of the Investor's Business Daily editorial:

"McCain would be wise to start preparing a challenge to voter registration rolls should he lose the race in a close contest. He'd be crazy not to contest the results in light of these events."

And so we would be crazy to allow the GOP to play that trick on us again. It's therefore time to set the record straight: about what Bush & Co. has done to our elections in this century, and what they're doing now (the Democrats, as usual, colluding in such evil by just sitting there). Only by aggressively exposing the Big Lie that the Republicans are pushing can we keep them from reversing their quite possible defeat on this Election Day--a loss that they apparently foresee, or they would not be getting ready to "contest" it.

Dr Doom has spoken again

RGE - The world is at severe risk of a global systemic financial meltdown and a severe global depression

Nouriel Roubini | Oct 9, 2008

The US and advanced economies' financial system is now headed towards a near-term systemic financial meltdown as day after day stock markets are in free fall, money markets have shut down while their spreads are skyrocketing, and credit spreads are surging through the roof. There is now the beginning of a generalized run on the banking system of these economies; a collapse of the shadow banking system, i.e. those non-banks (broker dealers, non-bank mortgage lenders, SIV and conduits, hedge funds, money market funds, private equity firms) that, like banks, borrow short and liquid, are highly leveraged and lend and invest long and illiquid and are thus at risk of a run on their short-term liabilities; and now a roll-off of the short term liabilities of the corporate sectors that may lead to widespread bankruptcies of solvent but illiquid financial and non-financial firms.

On the real economic side all the advanced economies representing 55% of global GDP (US, Eurozone, UK, other smaller European countries, Canada, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Japan) entered a recession even before the massive financial shocks that started in the late summer made the liquidity and credit crunch even more virulent and will thus cause an even more severe recession than the one that started in the spring. So we have a severe recession, a severe financial crisis and a severe banking crisis in advanced economies.

There was no decoupling among advanced economies and there is no decoupling but rather recoupling of the emerging market economies with the severe crisis of the advanced economies. By the third quarter of this year global economic growth will be in negative territory signaling a global recession. The recoupling of emerging markets was initially limited to stock markets that fell even more than those of advanced economies as foreign investors pulled out of these markets; but then it spread to credit markets and money markets and currency markets bringing to the surface the vulnerabilities of many financial systems and corporate sectors that had experienced credit booms and that had borrowed short and in foreign currencies. Countries with large current account deficit and/or large fiscal deficits and with large short term foreign currency liabilities and borrowings have been the most fragile. But even the better performing ones – like the BRICs club of Brazil, Russia, India and China – are now at risk of a hard landing. Trade and financial and currency and confidence channels are now leading to a massive slowdown of growth in emerging markets with many of them now at risk not only of a recession but also of a severe financial crisis.

The crisis was caused by the largest leveraged asset bubble and credit bubble in the history of humanity were excessive leveraging and bubbles were not limited to housing in the US but also to housing in many other countries and excessive borrowing by financial institutions and some segments of the corporate sector and of the public sector in many and different economies: an housing bubble, a mortgage bubble, an equity bubble, a bond bubble, a credit bubble, a commodity bubble, a private equity bubble, a hedge funds bubble are all now bursting at once in the biggest real sector and financial sector deleveraging since the Great Depression.

At this point the recession train has left the station; the financial and banking crisis train has left the station. The delusion that the US and advanced economies contraction would be short and shallow – a V-shaped six month recession – has been replaced by the certainty that this will be a long and protracted U-shaped recession that may last at least two years in the US and close to two years in most of the rest of the world. And given the rising risk of a global systemic financial meltdown the probability that the outcome could become a decade long L-shaped recession – like the one experienced by Japan after the bursting of its real estate and equity bubble – cannot be ruled out.

And in a world where there is a glut and excess capacity of goods while aggregate demand is falling soon enough we will start to worry about deflation, debt deflation, liquidity traps and what monetary policy makers should do to fight deflation when policy rates get dangerously close to zero.

At this point the risk of an imminent stock market crash – like the one-day collapse of 20% plus in US stock prices in 1987 – cannot be ruled out as the financial system is breaking down, panic and lack of confidence in any counterparty is sharply rising and the investors have totally lost faith in the ability of policy authorities to control this meltdown.

This disconnect between more and more aggressive policy actions and easings and greater and greater strains in financial market is scary. When Bear Stearns' creditors were bailed out to the tune of $30 bn in March the rally in equity, money and credit markets lasted eight weeks; when in July the US Treasury announced legislation to bail out the mortgage giants Fannie and Freddie the rally lasted four weeks; when the actual $200 billion rescue of these firms was undertaken and their $6 trillion liabilities taken over by the US government the rally lasted one day and by the next day the panic has moved to Lehman's collapse; when AIG was bailed out to the tune of $85 billion the market did not even rally for a day and instead fell 5%. Next when the $700 billion US rescue package was passed by the US Senate and House markets fell another 7% in two days as there was no confidence in this flawed plan and the authorities. Next as authorities in the US and abroad took even more radical policy actions between October 6^th and October 9^th (payment of interest on reserves, doubling of the liquidity support of banks, extension of credit to the seized corporate sector, guarantees of bank deposits, plans to recapitalize banks, coordinated monetary policy easing, etc.) the stock markets and the credit markets and the money markets fell further and further and at an accelerated rates day after day all week including another 7% fall in U.S. equities today.

When in markets that are clearly way oversold even the most radical policy actions don't provide rallies or relief to market participants you know that you are one step away from a market crack and a systemic financial sector and corporate sector collapse. A vicious circle of deleveraging, asset collapses, margin calls, cascading falls in asset prices well below falling fundamentals and panic is now underway.

At this point severe damage is done and one cannot rule out a systemic collapse and a global depression. It will take a significant change in leadership of economic policy and very radical, coordinated policy actions among all advanced and emerging market economies to avoid this economic and financial disaster. Urgent and immediate necessary actions that need to be done globally (with some variants across countries depending on the severity of the problem and the overall resources available to the sovereigns) include:

- another rapid round of policy rate cuts of the order of at least 150 basis points on average globally;

- a temporary blanket guarantee of all deposits while a triage between insolvent financial institutions that need to be shut down and distressed but solvent institutions that need to be partially nationalized with injections of public capital is made;

- a rapid reduction of the debt burden of insolvent households preceded by a temporary freeze on all foreclosures;

- massive and unlimited provision of liquidity to solvent financial institutions;

- public provision of credit to the solvent parts of the corporate sector to avoid a short-term debt refinancing crisis for solvent but illiquid corporations and small businesses;

- a massive direct government fiscal stimulus packages that includes public works, infrastructure spending, unemployment benefits, tax rebates to lower income households and provision of grants to strapped and crunched state and local government;

- a rapid resolution of the banking problems via triage, public recapitalization of financial institutions and reduction of the debt burden of distressed households and borrowers;

- an agreement between lender and creditor countries running current account surpluses and borrowing and debtor countries running current account deficits to maintain an orderly financing of deficits and a recycling of the surpluses of creditors to avoid a disorderly adjustment of such imbalances.

At this point anything short of these radical and coordinated actions may lead to a market crash, a global systemic financial meltdown and to a global depression. At this stage central banks that are usually supposed to be the "lenders of last resort" need to become the "lenders of first and only resort" as, under conditions of panic and total loss of confidence, no one in the private sector is lending to anyone else since counterparty risk is extreme. And fiscal authorities that usually are spenders and insurers of last resort need to temporarily become the spenders and insurers of first resort. The fiscal costs of these actions will be large but the economic and fiscal costs of inaction would be of a much larger and severe magnitude. Thus, the time to act is now as all the policy officials of the world are meeting this weekend in Washington at the IMF and World Bank annual meetings.

Thursday midnite update: A few hours after I had written this note the market crash that I warned about is underway in Asia: the Nikkei index in Japan is down 11% and all other Asian markets are sharply down. This reinforces the urgency of credible and rapid policy actions by the G7 financial officials who are meeting in a few hours in Washington and the need to also involve in such global policy coordination the systemically important emergent market economies.

"Sandy Chen, a banking analyst at Panmure Gordon, this morning described the prospect of mass payment failures as “key drivers of the current apocalypse”"

cryptogon.com » Archives » Lehman Credit Default Swap Auction Bomb Drops This Afternoon

Holy crap. Somehow, I hadn't heard about this until just now. This could get very interesting over the next several hours.

Via: Guardian:

A major factor behind today's plunging stock markets is anxiety before a settlement pricing tonight for an estimated $440bn of credit derivatives linked to failed US investment bank Lehman Brothers.

Analysts have predicted the Lehman settlement will trigger gross payouts of $350bn to $400bn. Meanwhile, the recent rash of Icelandic banking failures could bring further derivative payouts estimated at $200bn in the coming weeks.

No one is sure where the heaviest losses will be felt — and net losses are expected to be much lower than the headline payout estimates — but there remain fears the recent run of large-scale defaults may leave many hedge funds with payout demands they cannot meet. This, in turn, will force writedowns for those failing to receive payouts, many of them major banks.

Sandy Chen, a banking analyst at Panmure Gordon, this morning described the prospect of mass payment failures as "key drivers of the current apocalypse". He pointed to Barclays and Royal Bank of Scotland as being most exposed among the UK banks to the credit derivative market. Both have bought and sold, in roughly equal measure, £2.4tn of such contracts.

An explosion in the largely unregulated credit derivatives market in recent years has seen potential payouts balloon to levels that far outstrip the potential losses from the underlying bonds they reference.

Lehman had $110bn of senior bonds outstanding before filing for bankruptcy last month. Since default, those bonds have been trading between 15 cents and 20 cents in the dollar. Analysts estimate there are $440bn of credit default swaps (CDS) outstanding in relation to Lehman senior bonds.

In theory, a CDS is a contract in which a bondholder buys insurance — known as protection — against that bond defaulting. In practice, however, CDSs have become hugely popular among investors trading on the likelihood of a bond default without holding the underlying bond. The market has proved particularly popular with hedge funds, in part because it offers an opportunity to "short sell" bonds.

Derivatives specialists insist it is impossible to predict which investors will be hit hardest by the losses on Lehman CDSs, which are spread far and wide, as Lehman was one of the most actively traded credit default swaps.

Chen believes Barclays and Royal Bank of Scotland are likely to be prominent among those required to pay out on Lehman CDSs. Meanwhile, counterparties failing to meet their CDS obligations to the two banks could lead to significant writedowns. "Against this, tangible shareholders' equity bases of £20bn to £30bn seem like cloth tents in a hurricane," said Chen.

More: Lehman CDS: It Won't Be Over Today

Lehman Swap Auction Initial Results Show Payout of 90.25 Cents

cryptogon.com » Archives » Lehman Swap Auction Initial Results Show Payout of 90.25 Cents

What antics await us over the weekend?!

Via: Bloomberg:

Sellers of credit-default protection on bankrupt Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. would be forced to pay holders 90.25 cents on the dollar under initial results of an auction today, setting up the biggest-ever payout in the $55 trillion market.

Preliminary results of the auction to determine the size of the settlement on Lehman credit-default swaps set an initial value of 9.75 cents on the dollar for the debt, according to Creditfixings.com, a Web site run by auction administrators Creditex Group Inc. and Markit Group Ltd. A final price is scheduled to be announced at 2 p.m. New York time.

"The Current Stock Market Decline - What should concern you deeply, however, is the ever-growing TED Spread"

The Current Stock Market Decline…

from The American Scene - Main by Jim Manzi

…should not freak you out, at least in and of itself. This is a ferocious bear market, but, so far, it is an almost exact repeat of what happened after the collapse of the .com bubble about 5 years ago. In fact, if we were to repeat that experience, we would see further declines from where we are today:

There were, in the grand scheme of things, pretty limited consequences of that equity bubble popping for most people in America. Partly, of course, this is because both the Fed and the Chinese government decided to make credit very easily available to U.S. consumers, and therefore many people who got a lot "poorer" in their 401K statements, suddenly got a lot "richer" in home equity. A ton of this increase and decrease in wealth was illusory. I agreed to say your house was $10 million if you agreed to say mine was worth $9 million, and suddenly we were both richer. It's great until many people try to convert this wealth into other kinds of goods at once. In this way it was a lot like the .com bubble. My guess (and it's only a guess) is that these two events will come to be seen as two sequential manifestations of the same underlying imbalances in the financial system.

What should concern you deeply, however, is the ever-growing TED Spread, as per a prior post. It is now well over 400 basis points, or about 50% above its historical peak at the time of the 1987 stock market crash, and about 10 times its "normal" level. It has continued to rise every week throughout the past month, indicating further worsening of the credit crisis, and rising perceived risk of contagion. We've injected so much debt into the system over the past decade that not only can't we borrow our way out of the consequences of the real estate bubble popping, but we're going to have to start paying off a lot of the existing debt in the face of a poor economy. What Paulson and Bernanke are doing is to make this adjustment only painful instead of catastrophic.

Yes, It is Time to Panic

Yes, It is Time to Panic

from The Washington Independent by Mary Kane

Today should be another scary day on Wall Street, but we've got bigger problems. Across the board, economists are calling for global action on the credit crisis — and soon. Very soon. Like no later than this weekend.

From Nouriel Roubini, famous for having predicted this whole mess:

At this point severe damage is done and one cannot rule out a systemic collapse and a global depression. It will take a significant change in leadership of economic policy and very radical, coordinated policy actions among all advanced and emerging market economies to avoid this economic and financial disaster.

Paul Krugman was equally blunt:

Why do we need international cooperation? Because we have a globalized financial system in which a crisis that began with a bubble in Florida condos and California McMansions has caused monetary catastrophe in Iceland. We're all in this together, and need a shared solution.

Why this weekend? Because there happen to be two big meetings taking place in Washington: a meeting of top financial officials from the major advanced nations on Friday, then the annual International Monetary Fund/World Bank meeting Saturday and Sunday. If these meetings end without at least an agreement in principle on a global rescue plan — if everyone goes home with nothing more than vague assertions that they intend to stay on top of the situation — a golden opportunity will have been missed, and the downward spiral could easily get even worse.

What should be done? The United States and Europe should just say "Yes, prime minister." The British plan isn't perfect, but there's widespread agreement among economists that it offers by far the best available template for a broader rescue effort.

And the time to act is now. You may think that things can't get any worse — but they can, and if nothing is done in the next few days, they will.

Here's British Prime Minister Gordon Brown on the British plan, which calls for injecting money directly into banks.

Don't look just to Wall Street for developments in this crisis. Watch to see if the Treasury Dept. and the U.S. government take some aggressive steps in the next few days — including coordinating a global response.

If they don't, yes, it is time to panic.

McCain Camp Clears Palin of ‘Troopergate’ Wrongdoing

McCain Camp Clears Palin of 'Troopergate' Wrongdoing

from The Washington Independent by Matthew DeLong

A probe investigating whether Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin used her office to settle family vendettas has cleared Palin of any wrongdoing in the "Troopergate" scandal.

There's just one catch. The investigation was conducted by the McCain campaign, and released its findings Thursday. The Alaska state legislature is expected to release its own report today on whether Palin dismissed a public official, Walter Monegan, for resisting pressure to fire her estranged brother-in-law, Mike Wooten, an Alaska state trooper.

From The Associated Press:

Lawmakers are expected to release their own findings Friday. Campaign officials have yet to see that report — the result of an investigation that began before she was tapped as McCain's running mate — but said the investigation has falsely portrayed a legitimate policy dispute between a governor and her commissioner as something inappropriate.

"The following document will prove Walt Monegan's dismissal was a result of his insubordination and budgetary clashes with Gov. Palin and her administration," campaign officials wrote. "Trooper Wooten is a separate issue."

All right, there you have it. Monegan was relieved because he was a bad employee. But, if the charges are baseless, then why the big investigation, led by the GOP-controlled legislature?

The campaign's report instead blames former campaign opponent, Andrew Halcro, who has a blog, of conspiring with Wooten to pin Monegan's dismissal on the family's dispute with Wooten. Three days after Monegan was fired, they say, Wooten told his ex-wife, Palin's sister, that: "You guys are going down. Get ready for the show."

Two days after that confrontation, they say, Halcro and Wooten met at a hotel bar in Anchorage for more than three hours — and that evening, Halcro posted the first accusations on his blog that Monegan had been fired because of a vendetta against Wooten by the Palin family.

"It is tragic that a false story hatched by a blogger after drinks with Trooper Wooten led the legislature to allocate over $100,000 of public money to be spent in what has become a politically driven investigation," the 21-page report concludes.

Although the report describes Wooten as a separate issue, the McCain campaign goes into great detail about the "rogue" trooper and his "long history of unstable and erratic behavior." The campaign describes allegations of violence, including threatening Palin's family and shooting his stepson with a stun gun.

The report also includes allegations that Wooten cheated the workers' compensation system. Todd Palin has said he had numerous conversations with government officials about why Wooten was allowed to stay on the job.

So, basically, according to the McCain campaign, Palin dismissed Monegan for perfectly legitimate reasons, and didn't actively pressure him to fire Wooten. But, just for good measure, Wooten was an unstable rogue who — though Palin had no interest in getting him fired — deserved to be fired anyway.

After initially agreeing to cooperate and publicly welcoming the investigation, the Palin administration began stone-walling after becoming the Republican vice presidential nominee. Ultimately, Palin's husband, Todd, and seven of Palin's aides testified in the legislature's probe. The McCain campaign has been accused of interfering with the investigation to stall the final report until after the election.

The campaign has denied being worried about the potential fallout from the investigation's final report — but this last-minute release to get out its side of the story, appears to be an effort to lessen the impact of the official report.

We should know what that impact will be later today.

Watch for TWI's Laura McGann on this.

Palin Exonerated -- By McCain-Palin Campaign!

Palin Exonerated -- By McCain-Palin Campaign!

from TPMmuckraker by Zachary Roth

The McCain-Palin campaign, with an eye on the possible release today of the Alaska legislature's report on Trooper-Gate, last night unveiled its own "report" into the matter. And guess what? It clears Sarah Palin of any wrongdoing!

Campaign officials wrote:

The following document will prove Walt Monegan's dismissal was a result of his insubordination and budgetary clashes with Governor Palin and her administration. Trooper Wooten is a separate issue.

The use of the word "dismissal" is noteworthy. Lately, the campaign had seemed to settle on the story that Monegan was not dismissed, but rather was asked to take a new assignment, and quit instead of doing so. Todd Palin told the same thing in written answers to Steve Branchflower, the legislature's investigator, according to news reports yesterday.

The campaign's report blames Andrew Halcro, a blogger and political rival of Governor Palin, for conspiring with Jim Wooten -- the trooper whose ongoing dispute with the Palin family is at the center of the affair -- to make it appear that Palin fired public safety commissioner Walt Monegan because Monegan refused to fire Wooten.

Fake IRS Fax Demands Your Bank Account And Passport

Fake IRS Fax Demands Your Bank Account And Passport [Scams]

from Consumerist by Chris Walters

Nick has written in to warn us about a fake IRS scam that lately has been targeting nonresident aliens (e.g. teachers and researchers) working in the U.S., as well as American citizens working abroad. In the scam, which has been going on since at least 2002 (pdf), the target receives a faxed request from the IRS to provide his name, SSN, and pretty much every other bit of data you'd need to take over a person's financial identity.

If you have a friend who's working overseas, let her know to watch out for this:

I'd like to tip you about a scam going around Japan right now, and possibly Asia (I live and work in Japan), and maybe other places. It's a fax from being sent to foreigners, and in my case to schools. I've received it once and many of my friends have too.

The form is attached [pdf], claiming to be from "Internal Revenue Service IRS.gov", and prompts the recipient to complete form W-8BEN, which is a tax withholding form. Sure, sounds legit at first, but scroll to the 2nd page (page 1 of the fax) which has a W-8BEN "Substitute Form" that asks for personal info including your bank account number, SSN, and a copy of your passport among other things.

Then it asks the person to fax the form back to +1-206-888-1766 within one week to get a ficticious w-9095. Please inform your readers that this is a scam! I (nor my boss) don't know how this person got the fax numbers, and one of my friends recieved this even though she's from England so perhaps they are trying random numbers.

If you receive one of these faxes, report it to the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration at ustreas.gov/tigta.

'Is McCain’s Mortgage Plan Even Legal? "

Is McCain's Mortgage Plan Even Legal?

from The Washington Independent by Matthew DeLong

In an interview with ABC's Charlie Gibson Thursday, Sen. John McCain said his "Homeownership Resurgence Plan" to allow the federal government to buy up bad debt from banks and allow people to refinance mortgages they can no longer pay, may require $300 billion in "new money."

New money, as in, additional to the $700 billion already appropriated by Congress to bailout failing Wall Street firms.

From ABC:

Asked if his mortgage plan would be "new money or part of the $700 billion" already appropriated by Congress for the Wall Street bailout, McCain said, "part of the $700 billion, new money, if necessary."

"Look," he continued, "in one day they wiped out $1.2 trillion when it dropped 700 points. And I'm not throwing this money around lightly. But if the housing values continue to go down, there's no floor. There's no turnaround here. We all know what was the catalyst for this catastrophe. And that was Fannie and Freddie."

McCain's plan, announced Tuesday at the presidential debate in Nashville, has come under criticism for putting taxpayers on the hook for bad loans made by banks.

However, The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder raises the possibility that the plan may already be illegal:

Folks who are much more savvy on the specifics of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) wonder whether the government's $700 billion bailout/rescue program expressly prohibits what John McCain now says he wants to do — and that is to have the government buy distressed mortgages at face value from banks and renegotiate their terms with homeowners.

They point me to Section 101e of the law, which requires the Secretary of the Treasury to "take such steps as may be necessary to prevent unjust enrichment of financial institutions participating in a program established under this section"

Here's the key part…

… "including by preventing the sale of a troubled asset to the Secretary at a higher price than what the seller paid to purchase the asset." Any loan that is not held by the originator, and the vast majority loans are not, would fall under this provision."

So — if the bank gave you a 100 dollar loan…. and sold it for 80 bucks last year, and it's trading at 50 dollars now, the law prohibits the government from buying it at $100 — face value — because that would "unjustly enrich" the entity which purchased the mortgage from the bank.

Under TARP, the government wouldn't be able to buy it for more than $80… which isn't face value.

So if they buy it at face value, wouldn't they violate the law?

If this is the case, it could be back to the economic drawing board for McCain. It's no secret the financial crisis is killing him in the polls.

If the "William Ayers"-strategy of diverting attention from the nation's economic woes turns out to be the non-starter that it appears to be, McCain has 25 days and counting to start connecting with voters on the issues that really matter to them — like remaining their homes and being able to retire.

If he can't do that, he can probably kiss the presidency good-bye.

This is what the hate from Right wing talk radio, bloggers and FOX News creates

This is what the hate from Right wing talk radio, bloggers and FOX News creates

from Crooks and Liars by John Amato

I wonder if the media will ever do a cover story of the effects on our society that is produced by the right wing media. The hate is palpable with these people. But it doesn't stop in Bethlehem, PA.

As Glenn brilliantly documents, it's happened at many Republican events.

Just look at the videotapes of the angry, hateful hordes attending these rallies — screaming that Obama is a socialist; that he's both a Muslim and a terrorist as proven by his "bloodline" and his name; that his supporters are "commie faggots"; that he's guilty of treason; underscored by increasing racial invective and even punctuated in one case by a call from an audience member for someone to be killed. These aren't just isolated individuals; these sentiments are common at these rallies and becoming increasingly virulent and enraged — at the rallies and otherwise:

A billboard in West Plains, Mo., showing a caricature of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama wearing a turban has caused quite a stir in town.

The sign, located south of West Plains on U.S. 63 across from the Dairy Queen, says: "Barack 'Hussein' Obama equals more abortions, same sex marriages, taxes, gun regulations."

And worst of all, all of this rage and this innuendo is taking place in the most volatile climate of all — one of severe economic distress and anxiety — and these mobs are increasingly becoming convinced, because the Right and the McCain/Palin campaign is leading them to believe it, that this economic crisis is the fault of the black candidate — Obama — for making banks give mortgages to racial minorities.

And McCain's hands are soiled as well after his appearance with Sean Hannity where he joins in the Ayers mob. Since this reflects so badly for Republicans, look for plants at Obama events very soon because you never hear this kind of low brow commentary coming from them. And if a few people acted in kind to McCain, you know it would be looped 24/7 on cable.

Comcast Filled My House With Raw Sewage

Comcast Filled My House With Raw Sewage [Comcatastrophe]

from Consumerist by Meg Marco

Tressy Campbell of Woodstock, Georgia has a kitchen. In this kitchen is a lot of raw sewage. It's been this way since June. As you might imagine, Ms. Campbell is somewhat annoyed about this, and would like the Comcast contractor who drilled a hole in her pipe and ran a cable through it to pay for the repairs.

WSBTV says that the contractor, Madison Communications, has offered her $12,000 to fix the kitchen, which she would gladly accept — were it not for the fact that the estimates she's gotten say that it will take her at least $15,000-$16,000 to clean up the mess.

We hope she's able to get this resolved, but there is one ray of hope — the limit for small claims court in Georgia is $15,000. Go get 'em, Tressy!

Homeowner Says Cable Mistake Filled Kitchen With Raw Sewage [WSBTV] (Thanks, Tim!)

"Sen. Barack Obama has organized an elaborate well-staffed network to prepare for his possible ascension to the White House, while Sen. John McCain has all but put off such work until after the election"

Obama, McCain Transition Efforts Are Worlds Apart

As the 2008 campaign nears its conclusion, the presidential transition efforts of the two major candidates have become a study in contrasts: Sen. Barack Obama has organized an elaborate well-staffed network to prepare for his possible ascension to the White House, while Sen. John McCain has all but put off such work until after the election.

The Democratic nominee has enlisted the assistance of dozens of individuals -- divided into working groups for particular federal agencies -- to produce policy agendas and lists of recommended appointees. As evidence of their advanced preparations, officials provided a copy of the strict ethics guidelines that individuals working on the transition effort are required to sign.

John McCain, by contrast, has done little. Campaign spokespersons did not respond to requests for elaboration. But one official with direct knowledge, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, expressed concern with McCain's approach. The Arizona Senator has instructed his team to not spend time on the transition effort, according to the source, both out of a desire to have complete focus on winning the election as well as a superstitious belief that the campaign shouldn't put the cart before the horse.

Virtually every modern non-incumbent presidential candidate has organized, during the course of the campaign, a transition effort to prepare for the early months of a potential administration. These teams help build lists and vet individuals who could serve in key government posts. They hammer out proposals to facilitate policy making from day one. And they work closely with outgoing administration officials to better understand the true lay of the political land.

Governance scholars consider the process invaluable, particularly as the nation struggles with a major economic crisis, two active wars, and a range of domestic security threats. "Our enemies understand how potentially vulnerable we are in the transition from one administration to the next," Clay Johnson III, former Executive Director of the Bush-Cheney Presidential Transition, said recently at a forum on transition planning. "This is something we need to be very, very seriously prepared for."

With 100 or so days before the next president takes office, Obama's transition effort has been organized into roughly a dozen teams of six to eight people to plot out the approach for each agency, according to a Democratic official. The ethics code governing the process prohibits staff from working on subjects that could be deemed a financial conflict of interests, either to that member or that member's family.

Under the code - a copy of which can be viewed here - lobbyists will be able to serve on the Obama transition team provided it has been more than a year since he or she lobbied on the subject to which they have been assigned. Current federally registered lobbyists will not be "permitted to serve in a titled role for the Obama Transition Project," nor for that matter will they be allowed to "contribute to or collect contributions for the Obama Transition Project."

There is less known about what the McCain campaign has been doing, partially because there are fewer details to unearth. The GOP nominee has tasked his transition to William Timmons, a well-known Washington hand and long-time lobbyist. According to a source close to the effort, Timmons has held conference calls with campaign officials and is plotting out various aspects to the impending transition. There is not, at this time, an ethics policy in place, the source says.

A call to Timmons went unreturned. "Bill does not talk to the press but I'll tell him you called," said his secretary. "Thank you."

The disparate approach that each campaign has taken to the transition process is in some ways a reflection of the personality of the candidates themselves. Obama's efforts have been criticized as presumptuous by the McCain campaign. But veterans of the process argue that the well-organized plan that Obama is pursuing will help ensure smooth continuity between administrations, not to mention avoid embarrassing political hiccups.

"Government is becoming more complex and the time it is taking to put a leadership team in key departments is taking longer," said P.J. Crowley, who heads the Homeland Security Presidential Transition Initiative at the Center for American Progress. "I think that if a campaign is waiting until November 5 to start the transition process, they are going to be behind. It is not being presumptuous -- it is being prudent to be prepared before the election so that you can at least make the transition process effective as possible and be ready to govern on January 20."

The president and CEO of the Center for American Progress, former White House chief of staff John Podesta, is reportedly heading up Obama's transition team.

McCain, in contrast, appears willing to tackle important aspects of his potential transition in real time. It is a stance that fits the Senator's sometimes ad hoc approach to politics, and one that allows him to focus staff and resources on the pending election. McCain's transition would also be less drastic than Obama's since, in all likelihood, there will not be as vast an ideological and staff shift.

But this approach could create significant obstacles down the road. For example, as Crowley notes, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had only a fraction of his leadership team in place on 9/11 - roughly eight months after his President Bush took office.

"It is irresponsible not to have a well organized, thoughtful vigorous transition, right now," said Mickey Kantor, a Clinton administration official who was there for the 1992 transition and who has consulted with the Obama campaign about its efforts. "I am surprised that John McCain would take that position. This government is very complicated. And I don't care how many years you have spent on it you don't truly understand it until you get to the middle of it."

"Former Oklahoma Gov. Frank Keating, a McCain campaign co-chairman, edged up to an explicitly racial attack on Barack Obama on Thursday, describing the Illinois Senator as a "guy of the street" "

McCain Co-Chair Calls Obama "A Guy Of The Street," Raises Drug Use

Former Oklahoma Gov. Frank Keating, a McCain campaign co-chairman, edged up to an explicitly racial attack on Barack Obama on Thursday, describing the Illinois Senator as a "guy of the street" before raising his youthful drug use.

Appearing on Dennis Miller's radio show, Keating charged that the Democratic nominee was covering up his "very extreme" record, and urged Obama to be more honest with Americans. "He ought to admit," Keating said, "'You know, I've got to be honest with you. I was a guy of the street. I was way to the left. I used cocaine. I voted liberally, but I'm back at the center.'"

Keating began to address Obama's former pastor Jeremiah Wright -- a topic that John McCain himself has said should be off-limits -- but Miller interrupted him to return to the discussion of cocaine.

Listen to the audio here.

The criticism is the latest in a spate of increasingly aggressive attacks from the McCain-Palin camp.

It's unclear what Keating meant by "a guy of the street," but his assertion that Obama should "admit" his brief drug use in high school makes little sense, since it was Obama himself who did disclose it in his memoir published 12 years ago.

Keating was one of McCain's earlier supporters, endorsing the Arizona Senator even before he officially launched his 2008 presidential bid. Keating is a member of McCain's National Campaign Committee, and serves as co-chair for various campaign groups, such as Catholics for McCain and Sportsmen for McCain.

Here's the transcript from Miller's program today:

MILLER: It's the most liberal, let's just say that. We're talking to Frank Keating, former Oklahoma Governor, John McCain supporter. Frank, let's just say, it's the most liberal. The thing that bothers me the most about all this with Barack Obama is not the -- I know he's the most liberal guy. You know, I know he's gotten this close to the White House and I know most people don't realize he's probably the most liberal senator we have. The thing that bothers me the most is I recognize the obfuscation and the smoke and mirrors as Clinton-esque. When I hear him reduce Ayers to "this is a guy who lives in my neighborhood" or Rev. Wright, "I was there 500 times and never saw him." The acts themselves don't bother me as he's starting to treat me like an idiot too when he's blowing this smoke my way. He ought to just come clean and say, "listen, I came up through Chicago, you make some errors there." I'd almost be able to absolve it more easily then.

KEATING: Well, and that's what concerns me, Dennis, because when I was in the State Senate and statehouse of my state, if someone had voted against the entire state budget because it had too much money for corrections, all of us would have, you know, strained our necks to find out who is this because that would have been a very extreme position, basically saying to a law enforcement officer as I was or my son was a state trooper, "you know, you make an arrest, you risk your life, for nothing" because we're going to make sure that person doesn't go to prison even though the laws of the state require it. So, that puzzles me. Just he ought to admit, "you know, I've got to be honest with you. I was a guy of the street. I was way to the left. I used cocaine. I voted liberally, but I'm back at the center." I mean, I understand the big picture of America. But he hasn't done that...

MILLER: He's copped to that...

KEATING: Jeremiah Wright is...

MILLER: Wait, I've got to jump in Frank. He has copped to the blow use, right? I mean, he did so in his own book he said he did blow.

KEATING: Oh yes, he did.

MILLER: Well, I'm just saying that doesn't enter this to me.

"Across this country this is the agenda I have set before my fellow prisoners," he declared.

"My Fellow Prisoners," McCain Calls Americans | AfterDowningStreet.org

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYFm5kK4f1k

Note: Watch Palin react.

"My Fellow Prisoners," McCain Calls Americans

After referring to the various proposals that comprise his domestic policy agenda, John McCain offered an absolute head-scratcher of a line during a campaign speech on Wednesday.

"Across this country this is the agenda I have set before my fellow prisoners," he declared. In the prepared remarks he was supposed to say "fellow citizens."

McCain didn't skip a beat, lambasting Obama for, of all things, being "less clear" about his vision for the country. "The same standards of clarity and candor must now be applied to my opponent," he declared.

The remark came during the Senator's campaign stop in Pennsylvania in what was already a controversial appearance. An hour before McCain took the stage, an introductory speaker revved up the crowd by referring to Barack "Hussein" Obama twice. McCain's campaign has distanced themselves from the remark.

"Bush’s role was diminished just a bit more today when he signed an executive order that officially begins the transition of his administration to either Sen. Barack Obama or Sen. John McCain"

It's Official: Bush is Transitioning Out of the White House

from Pensito Review by Trish

Another reason to celebrate! As if this day weren't wonderful enough, it just got better.

Unlike us, W seems down in the mouth about his impending freedom to cut brush from sun up to sun down.

Bush's role was diminished just a bit more today when he signed an executive order that officially begins the transition of his administration to either Sen. Barack Obama or Sen. John McCain, the two men battling to succeed him.

The executive order creates a transitional coordinating council consisting of ranking officials from key White House agencies, including intelligence, defense, homeland security, budget, justice and other departments. Those officials will start working with the Obama and McCain camps so that whoever is elected can begin preparing to take over the reins of government on Jan. 20.

Hear that? He's really leaving! Here's your hat, Georgie, what's your hurry?

Unlike us, W seems down in the mouth about his impending freedom to cut brush from sun up to sun down.

Like many presidents in their last months, Bush has visibly aged and has a thinner schedule than his first seven years in office. He hasn't held a news conference since July 15 and his spokeswoman says it's partly because he doesn't want to get entangled in the presidential race.

Well boo frickin' hoo. But is it humility that's keeping him from butting into the campaign or that fact that no one wants him to?

He is no longer the undisputed leader of the GOP. Administration officials check in with John McCain's campaign nearly every morning to walk through schedules and talking points to ensure the party message matches.

Hardly seems necessary to me but it certainly confirms the lockstep nature of the McCain campaign and Bush White House. Like we needed that confirmed.

"Oh noes, McCrankypants! Your "base" is tuning you out, just like the rest of America. That's gotta hurt."

McCain Media's Collective Yawn At McCain's Big "News"

from Crooks and Liars by Nicole Belle

Oh noes, McCrankypants! Your "base" is tuning you out, just like the rest of America. That's gotta hurt.

Last night, the McCain campaign issued an announcement, dutifully reported upon by Jonathan Martin of the Politico and elsewhere, that McCain would have "big news" in the morning.

The blogosphere was a-twitter. Would it be that Sarah Palin is stepping down? Or that McCain was finally making public his medical records? Or maybe that he would be REALLY maverick-y and declare with his mortgage bailout plan his official independence from the Republican Party? Oh, the possibilities were endless!

But sadly, the reality was far more humdrum. Jonathan Martin, this morning:

That "news" in the morning
Sure enough, it's Bill Ayers.
The McCain campaign is launching a web ad accusing Obama of trying to hide his ties to the 60s-era radical.

I'm loving the use of quotes around news. Another lame-ass attempt, debunked everywhere already, to tie Obama to Ayers. The McCain camp spent God knows how much money to produce a one and a half minute ad that no one cares about (including rightwingers like Michael Smerconish), that makes them look desperate and flailing and the best part, Martin and Mark Halperin over at Time didn't even bother to link up in their coverage.

My friends, that's not the work of a winning campaign. Steve Benen shows how the McCain camp really doesn't want to go there:

The web ad comes about 24 hours after top McCain campaign aides seemingly took the Ayers "issue" (I use the word loosely) off the table.

But as long as we're on the subject, McCain's associations continue to be increasingly interesting as well. We've known for a while that McCain has befriended a convicted felon who advised his supporters on how best to shoot federal officials, used the money of a convicted criminal to help buy a house, befriended a radical anti-Catholic televangelist, befriended a radical anti-American televangelist, was a long-time associate of Charles Keating, and hired for his campaign the publisher of a Confederate nostalgia magazine who has described Nelson Mandela as a "terrorist." This week, we also learned about McCain serving on the board of the extremist U.S. Council for World Freedom, where he worked alongside Iran-Contra figures, and a eugenics researcher studying "white superiority."

"They're trying to knock me off the rolls," said Democrat Beverly Jambois, of Middleton. "I can't tell you how upsetting it is to me. This is how you win elections? By disenfranchising other voters?"

McCain's Mailer Creates Controversy | AfterDowningStreet.org

The state elections agency is investigating complaints about a massive campaign mailing Republican Sen. John McCain's presidential campaign has directed toward Wisconsin Democrats and other voters.

Each mailing includes at least one copy of the state application for an absentee ballot that has the address of a local clerk and a box for postage printed on the other side.

But in some cases, the incorrect clerk's address is printed on the application, leading some Democrats to wonder if the Arizona senator's campaign is deliberately trying to get them to apply for absentee ballots in places where they aren't eligible to vote.

"They're trying to knock me off the rolls," said Democrat Beverly Jambois, of Middleton. "I can't tell you how upsetting it is to me. This is how you win elections? By disenfranchising other voters?"

Her household received the flier this week addressed to her husband, Robert, a lawyer for the state Department of Transportation. The couple are registered to vote in Middleton, but the absentee ballot application was addressed to the city clerk's office in Madison.

A McCain campaign spokeswoman said in a statement the mailing mistakes are "certainly not intentional" but she wouldn't answer questions. The statement also said the mailing went to "potential supporters across the spectrum."

Mark Jefferson, executive director of the state GOP, said the mailing is not intended to keep people from the polls and that the wrong absentee ballot applications resulted from incorrect information in databases used for the mailing.

"You do the best with the lists you have, and no list is perfect," Jefferson said. "There is certainly no type of suppression effort going on."

Jefferson said the mailing was directed to hundreds of thousands of voters.

Clerks around the state are currently processing absentee voting applications, and absentee ballots won't be sent out until about four weeks before the Nov. 4 election.

Kyle Richmond, a spokesman for the Government Accountability Board, which oversees elections in the state, said voters can only use absentee ballots in the locality for which they are registered.

The board has received 10 complaints in the last two days from people who received the McCain flier, and the board's staff is investigating them, he said.

Doug Chapin, director of electionline.org, which provides nonpartisan analysis of election reforms, said he suspected the misdirected mailings were likely a mistake.

"Given the choice between evil and a mistake, always bet on a mistake," Chapin said. "If I had to guess, sitting a thousand miles away, I'd bet it was a mistake."

Nancy Zastrow, the Milton clerk and the president of the Wisconsin Municipal Clerks Association, said she has not heard whether clerks around the state have already received absentee ballot requests from voters outside their municipalities because of the mailing.

"Take a bow, Mr. Greenspan. Your policies led inexorably to this day."

Greenspan-bashing goes mainstream

from Politics in the Zeros. Anti-war, global warming, peak oil, progressive politics by Bob Morris

Finally

We continue to see the wreckage caused by Greenspan's no-regulations, cheap money, extreme right-wing Ayn Rand philosophy. I remember being at a client, a precious metals dealer, during the peak of his regime, and being baffled at why the traders treated his deliberately indecipherable pronouncements with such awe. He was then, and remains, an extremist charlatan who believes greed is good and the common good should be ignored, if not spat upon. (He was an early disciple of Rand, part of her inner circle, and that was her philosophy.)

The credit markets are still dangerously frozen. One reason: Credit default swaps from Lehman and WaMu settle this month. Institutions who sold these financial instruments of mass destruction, which pretended to be insurance on what is now toxic waste, may face losses of 80-85 cents on the dollar. $400 bn of Lehman swaps unwind on Friday, so losses for some could be catastrophic (assuming they even have the money to pay, if not, then the other side on the transaction gets hurt.)

Banks are believed to be hanging on to cash both to pay for their own settlement and out of fear that their counterparties may take irreparable damage in the Lehman settlement process. There may be some relief if the financial community passes this test, but with another big settlement, WaMu, later this month, banks are still likely to remain on high alert.

TED Spread at record. Translation: The big banks don't even trust each other for short-term loans.

Take a bow, Mr. Greenspan. Your policies led inexorably to this day.

"A 26-page report released by the city's Inspector General David H. Hoffman completely skewers the Bureau of Sanitation department, documenting widespread goofing off and falsification of time records amongst sanitation employees"

Sanitation Report: "Extensive Waste and Falsification of Time"

from Chicagoist by Prescott Carlson

A 26-page report released by the city's Inspector General David H. Hoffman completely skewers the Bureau of Sanitation department, documenting widespread goofing off and falsification of time records amongst sanitation employees. The Inspector General's Office investigated 77 garbage truck drivers and 145 laborers across 10 wards between May and September of this year in an effort to see if they were putting in their full time. The results showed an astonishing average of 26 percent of the work day -- 2 hours and 3 minutes -- was spent not working. Even the best ward had an average of 1 hour and 38 minutes of non-work time. Spreading out this average over all 50 wards, the IGO estimates an annual loss of $14.3 million in wages -- $20.9 million when factoring in benefits, truck maintenance and fueling costs. Hoffman places blame squarely on the shoulders of Bureau of Sanitation supervisors.

Workers were seen sitting in their cars after clocking in, with some actually swiping their time card and then returning home. Many would drive home for lunch, and stay there for over an hour past their allotted 30 minute lunch break. Others would just stop working well before their time to go home, and sit around waiting to clock out. Investigators saw not one laborer work a full day. This example from the report is especially galling:

IGO observations showed that after the two Laborers sat in their vehicles for about 30 minutes in the morning after swiping in, the crew worked for about 4 hours. For the remaining 3 1/2 hours of the work day, the truck driver spent part of the time simply sitting in the parked garbage truck on the street. The laborers spent almost two hours at their homes and then, after meeting up with two other non-working-but-on-the-clock garbage truck laborers, drank beer, urinated on the street, and went to the ward yard to finally swipe out for the day.

Lou Phillips, business agent for Laborers Local 1001, thinks that the report is just a scapegoat for the expected 300 layoffs in the Sanitation department due next week. Chicago Federation of Labor leader Dennis Gannon agrees, claiming it's a "cheap shot." Streets and Sanitation Commissioner Michael Picardi says that the problem is only due to "a few bad apples," a claim that must be so laughable by the egregiousness detailed in the report that even Mayor Daley was forced to show outrage (well, that and the fact that he's a bit sensitive in regards to Streets and Sans employment issues):

"No one should be sleeping, loafing, drinking, quitting early or anything else. This deals with criminal activity. This deals with cheating. This is not overall management. Leaving early, drinking. This is really kind of criminal activity," Daley said. "They have great jobs. If they don't want the job, just quit. When they identify these individuals, we're going to discipline and fire them. That's what we're going to try to do."

But if he does that, who will be left to pick up the garbage? Read the entire Inspector General report here [PDF]. [S-T, Trib]

“John McCain could not bring himself to look Barack Obama in the eye and say the same things to him,” he said to cheers. “In my neighborhood, you got something to say to a guy, you look him in the eye and you say it to him.“

Balloon Juice » Blog Archive » John McCain is a Coward

I am glad higher profile bloggers are beginning to recognize what I have been saying for days. John McCain is a coward:

He ever swaggered on for a couple days about how he was going to 'take the gloves off' when he met up with Obama in Nashville. But when the two of them were there in each others physical presence … nothing. By a myriad of gestures and reactions Obama owned him.

Nor is it a matter of shifting off the tactics, because as soon as McCain made his hasty retreat from the stage at Debate #2 he was right back at it. In every other aspect of life, high and low, refined and unlovely, we have a word for that kind of behavior: cowardice.

And now Obama can lightly taunt McCain with that very cowardice, his inability to just say it to his face. And if my take on the inner workings of McCain's mind at the moment is right that should simply unhinge him even more.

John McCain is not man enough to own his shit. John McCain will not openly confront Obama with his smears and lies and innuendo. John McCain will not come out and talk about Ayers, he has to be asked. That is why he goes to places like Fox News, so he can be asked. What a coincidence.

John McCain is a coward.

John McCain would rather hide behind his wife and Sarah Palin than say it himself.

He would rather produce 2 minute ads that his campaign will never pay to air anywhere, and hope that the tire-swinging media will bring up the topic so he doesn't have to do it himself.

John McCain just wants to throw shit out there, and "raise questions" about Obama, and hope his supporters connect the dots, because he is too much of a coward to directly push this toxic stew. He would rather hide behind right-wing bloggers, surrogates, and scummy websites staffed with wingnut welfare recipients like the NRO and the Weekly Standard.

John McCain had 90 minutes to bring this stuff up to Obama, to his face, and passed.

John McCain is a coward.

*** Update ***

Joe Biden is right:

"All of the things they said about Barack Obama in the TV, on the TV, at their rallies, and now on Youtube and everything else," Biden said — referring to McCain and Palin tying Obama to Weatherman bomber Bill Ayers and accusing him of "palling around with terrorists."

"John McCain could not bring himself to look Barack Obama in the eye and say the same things to him," he said to cheers. "In my neighborhood, you got something to say to a guy, you look him in the eye and you say it to him."

Coward.

*** Update #2 ***

And the nonsense starts. No one is debating that John McCain at one time exhibited great bravery in Vienam that I don't think I would have possessed. How that changes what he has done the past few weeks, inciting his supporters to call Obama a terrorist while refusing to engage Obama directly on the matter, hiding behind surrogates and their sleazy innuendo, not mentioning the subject even though the gloves are "off" yet hoping upon hope that someone will ask him about it, is beyond me. It was one thing with Kerry- what McCain is doing now is dangerous, and he won't even own it. Take that 2 minute commercial you released on the web, and pay for a national airing. If you want it out there, have it out there with your name on it and with your money backing it. Say something at the next debate. Own it. McCain is acting like a coward, and what he and his campaign are doing is a disgrace. Period.

And you can take extra special pleasure in the fact that Mr. Pent Up Jammies is chucking out the phrase keyboard commando.

More McCain handiwork.

"Keating wrote in response: “You can call me anything, write anything or do anything. I’m yours till death do us part“:"

Think Progress » Keating to McCain in 1986: 'I'm yours til death do us part.'

The Washington Times reports that in 1986, John McCain wrote a note on House stationery to Charles Keating, chairman of a failed savings and loan association who went to prison in the late 1980s. In the letter, McCain apologized for listing Keating as part of his Senate campaign finance committee. Keating wrote in response: "You can call me anything, write anything or do anything. I'm yours till death do us part":

McCain has acknowledged his friendship with Keating, who helped funnel campaign contributions to McCain in the 80s. After Keating turned to McCain to try to stave off government intervention during the scandal, the Senate Ethics Committee admonished him for seemingly intervening with federal regulators on behalf of Keating.

The McCain campaign is stealing this election as we speak - they're sending misleading ballots that will cause your vote to not be counted

Beware of Vote Caging | AfterDowningStreet.org

Beware of Vote Caging - A Warning Posted on AOL

The story is all over Progressive Talk Radio today about the McCain campaign sending absentee ballot applications to registered democrats or people that have donated to Obama's campaign. These ballots are deliberately misleading and have postage paid return addresses that are for an election clerk that is outside of your city or town. What this will end up doing is either having your vote not counted, or if you return one of these, they will cite you for election fraud, saying that you already voted absentee. These ballots are only being sent out in 'purple states' and this is a big deal.. This is called voter caging, and is a huge problem.

The McCain campaign is stealing this election as we speak. Please get this information out to as many people as you can ,and tell anyone you know who has received one of these ballots that they need to contact their city election clerk or the supervisor of elections immediately. Also call the local media and let them know what is going on.

The main stream media is never going to cover this so we have to depend on our ground campaign to get the word out to our voters.

WTF?! "Wachovia Corp confirmed it was extending $8 million loan to the cash-strapped National Republican Congressional Committee for last-minute activities to support GOP House candidates."

Facing South: FACING SOUTH INVESTIGATION: How did Republicans get an $8 million bailout from failing Wachovia?

UPDATE: A version of this story is now the top-ranked diary at DailyKos -- go visit for more information and discussion

Wachovia Corp., a once-thriving financial giant now teetering on the brink of collapse, confirmed today that it was extending an $8 million loan to the cash-strapped National Republican Congressional Committee for last-minute activities to support GOP House candidates.

Wachovia's decision to lend money to the NRCC -- itself reeling from a damaging financial scandal earlier this year -- is sure to draw charges of favoritism, as Wachovia denies credit and freezes assets for thousands of other customers.

Allegations of favoritism are especially delicate for Wachovia, given the disproportionate support of Republican campaigns and organizations by the company's leadership.

What's more, Wachovia's loan to the NRCC comes as Wachovia awaits the outcome of precarious buyout negotiations which have relied on federal backing -- inviting questions over the political activities of companies whose survival depend on public support.

WACHOVIA'S BIG FALL

In a year of spectacular finance industry failures, the fall of Wachovia Corp. -- the 4th-biggest bank in the country -- was one of the biggest. This past July, Wachovia announced staggering 2nd-quarter losses totaling over $9 billion -- the second-largest bank losses in history. The crisis forced the financial giant to slash over 11,000 jobs and cut $2 billion in expenses.

Wachovia's economic tailspin this year also caused them to drastically cut back on making loans. By July 2008, Wachovia branches were turning down most loan requests that came across their desk, as The New York Times reported:

Banks struggling to recover from multibillion-dollar losses on real estate are curtailing loans to American businesses, depriving even healthy companies of money for expansion and hiring. [...]

Drew Greenblatt, president of Marlin Steel Wire Products, figured it would be easy to get a $300,000 bank loan to finance a new robot for his factory in Baltimore. His company, which makes parts for makers of home appliances, is growing and profitable, he said. His expansion would add three new jobs to an economy hungry for work.

But when Greenblatt called the local branch of Wachovia -- the same bank that had been aggressively marketing loans to him for years -- he was distressed by the response.

"The exact words were, 'We're saying no to almost everybody,'" Greenblatt recalled. [emphasis added]

But Wachovia hadn't hit bottom yet. For the next three months, stock prices kept falling and losses mounted. By the time Washington Mutual failed on September 25, investors had lost all faith in Wachovia, too. Wachovia faced a "silent run" as businesses and institutions began pulling out vast sums of money.

The possibility of total collapse was so real that the FDIC, for the first time ever, used its authority to prevent a failure that could pose a "systemic risk" to the financial system by forcing Wachovia into a rescue buyout by Citigroup.

Wachovia's dramatic fall -- and uncertainty around the Citi buyout -- has forced it to further slash access to capital and credit. In a widely-publicized move, Wachovia announced days later that it was freezing the short-term accounts of nearly 1,000 colleges who invested in the Commonfund -- generating panic at campuses nation-wide, as the Chronicle of Higher Education reported:

The move has left 900 institutions unable to get access to billions of dollars they depend on for salaries, campus construction, and debt payments.

Making matters worse, Wachovia's situation has grown even more precarious over the last week, as the FDIC-engineered buyout by Citi fell apart amid a storm of lawsuits after rival Wells Fargo made a counter-offer for Wachovia's takeover.

BAILING OUT THE NRCC

It was in this context that yesterday, in a little-noticed item in Roll Call (and noted by Chris Bowers at OpenLeft), that it was announhced that the National Republican Congressional Committee had obtained an $8 million loan from Wachovia to help out House Republican candidates in the final weeks of the 2008 elections:

The National Republican Congressional Committee, trailing its Democratic counterpart considerably in cash on hand, has secured an $8 million loan to spend on House races during the last few weeks of the campaign, according to sources.

The NRCC reported $14.4 million in cash on hand as of Aug. 31, compared to $54 million in the bank for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. As it did last cycle, the NRCC is procuring its loan from Wachovia Bank, sources confirmed.

The announcement that Wachovia is throwing a lifeline to the RNCC for the home stretch of the 2008 elections is remarkable for several reasons.

First, the timing – shortly after Wachovia had cut off credit to nearly 1,000 colleges and in the middle of precarious and bitterly-contested buyout negotiations – is a PR problem and financially risky for a company that is still on financial life support.

Wachovia's loan also raises questions about the political involvements of businesses that get the support of the federal government.

In the Citigroup buyout arrangement, the FDIC has agreed to absorb any losses Citi may incur beyond $42 billion -- and therefore ensuring Wachovia's ability to operate and make loans. Financial analyst Karen Petrou described the federal government's central role on the radio show MarketPlace:

[The FDIC-arranged Citigroup buyout of Wachovia] is not a private sector transaction. This is a government rescue.

In order to get Citi to buy Wachovia, the FDIC promised to shoulder most of the potential losses. There are a lot of them. Wachovia purchased a California lender in 2006, which was riddled with bad mortgages. That's added to what is now $312 billion in loans on Wachovia's balance sheet.

Citi is at risk for only $42 billion of that portfolio. The rest of the $312 [billion] goes to the FDIC. [emphasis added]

Since the FDIC first pushed the Citigroup buyout, rival Wells Fargo stepped forward with an alternative proposal that doesn't include federal backing. Citi and Wells Fargo are still trying to iron out a compromise.

But the Citi deal is still one the table. And most importantly, it's only due to the FDIC's promise of support that Wachovia is alive at all, as New York Times business writer Steven Davidoff observes:

According to an affidavit of Wachovia's chief executive, Robert K. Steel, Wachovia would have filed for bankruptcy protection on Sept. 29 without some kind of government assistance. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation arranged to support the Citi transaction on an open bank assistance basis. [...]

It is uncertain whether Citi would have stepped up to the plate to acquire Wachovia without this assistance. From the affidavit of Mr. Steel filed with the federal court over the weekend, it appears that Wells Fargo initially stated that it would not.

By providing this assistance, the F.D.I.C. allowed Wachovia to survive as a whole entity outside bankruptcy.

In other words, Wachovia is only able to operate and make loans today because the federal government has its back. That Wachovia would turn around and use its financial position to bolster the NRCC at a critical moment in the 2008 elections raises the specter of public resources and influence being used to serve partisan ends.

A TROUBLED CLIENT

Finally, Wachovia's extraordinary move to help the NRCC now is especially interesting given that the NRCC has been a troubling client for Wachovia in the past.

Wachovia also gave the RNCC a loan for $9 million in 2006 (which it didn't pay back until March 2008). But shortly after receiving the loan, the NRCC was wracked by an embarrassing and widely-publicized financial scandal.

In what The Washington Post would describe as "the biggest campaign swindle ever recorded," evidence emerged of widespread financial improprieties. The FBI was brought in to investigate.

It was eventually revealed that the NRCC's Treasurer, Christopher Ward, had embezzled as much as $725,000. Among other misdeeds, to cover up his tracks Ward and the NRCC submitted forged audit reports to Wachovia in 2006 to obtain their loan.

But it wasn't just one bad apple: As Politico reported in February, the problem stemmed from years of financial mismanagement at the NRCC:

The accounting scandal now haunting the National Republican Congressional Committee was preceded by a series of decisions over the past decade to relax internal financial controls at the committee, according to numerous Republican sources familiar with the NRCC's operations during those years.

As of this spring, the NRCC had failed to conduct an independent audit since 2003.

The NRCC says it has since reorganized and cleaned up its financial systems. But others seeking loans from Wachovia – including those now being denied credit or see their assets frozen – may wonder if they'd be given a similar second chance.

REPUBLICAN CONNECTIONS

The possibility that the NRCC may have benefited from favoritism at Wachovia, especially given the precarious position of both parties, is particularly relevant given the political leanings of Wachovia's leadership.

Like most financial companies, Wachovia spreads its political giving to both parties. But in 2008, Wachovia's PAC contributions to Republicans have been nearly double that given to Democrats. According to campaign finance reports at OpenSecrets.org, 62% of contributions in 2008 from Wachovia's biggest PAC went to Republican candidates and 38% to Democrats.

Wachovia's newly-installed CEO, Robert K. Steel is also a major supporter of the Republican Party. A North Carolina native, in 2006 Steel was appointed by President Bush to serve as Under Secretary of Domestic Finance in the U.S. Department of the Treasury, where he served from October 2006 to July 2008. In July 2008, Steel resigned from the Treasury and was named President and CEO of Wachovia.

According to OpenSecrets.org, Steel has contributed $99,600 to candidates and parties in the 2004, 2006 and 2008 election cycles. Of those contributions, $94,600 -- 95% -- have gone to Republicans and only 5% to Democrats, and that includes a $1,000 donation to Democrat John Edwards that was returned.

Steel's contributions to Republicans include a $25,000 gift to the National Republican Senatorial Committee and a $10,000 donation to John McCain's Straight Talk America PAC in 2006. All of Steel's 2008 donations have been to GOP candidates.

None of these facts prove that Wachovia's loan to the NRCC was politically motivated. But given the grim financial circumstances facing both parties -- and the central role of the federal government in Wachovia's fragile future -- it certainly raises lots of questions.

"McCain is sending pre-paid FedEx envelopes to Goldman Sachs’ employees — the few who are left, anyway — demanding $5,000 checks

Wonkette: The D.C. Gossip » Blog Archive » McCain Begging Money From Goldman Sachs Employees

McCain Begging Money From Goldman Sachs Employees

Well, this is ludicrous: John McCain is sending pre-paid FedEx envelopes to Goldman Sachs' employees — the few who are left, anyway — demanding $5,000 checks. Oh, Walnuts, you're doing it wrong. Let us investigate this absurdity.

Somebody at Goldman Sachs sent this note to the PhilFiles blog:

This is amazing. McCain sent me an URGENT package at my work address (?) today, begging for money. The package included a pitch (attached for your reference) to his 'dear friend' for $$$, and a PRE-PAID Fed-Ex envelope with which to deliver the $$$. You might note that the third paragraph asks for a donation of $5,000. I thought the individual limit was $2,300…

I'm considering what I should send in my pre-paid envelope — any suggestions?

Hmm, how much does a shit sandwich weigh? That might be something good to ship back to McCain HQ.

There are probably piles of these pre-paid FedEx mailers sitting outside the abandoned headquarters of Lehman Bros., too. Why not pick up a few and send McCain your "donation"?

McCain Peddling at the Soup Lines [philfiles]

" warns that unresolved ethnic and sectarian tensions in Iraq could unleash a new wave of violence, potentially reversing the major security and political gains achieved over the last year,"

Latest Iraq NIE Warns Of New Wave Of Violence | Crooks and Liars

McClatchy reports that the new National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq is almost complete and that it " warns that unresolved ethnic and sectarian tensions in Iraq could unleash a new wave of violence, potentially reversing the major security and political gains achieved over the last year," directly contradicting John McCain's claims in Tuesday's debate that the Surge has been a success and victory has been attained.

That's not a major surprise to anyone who follows events in Iraq without neocon rose-tinted glasses. Deep conflicts between the central government and Kurdish region, Awakening groups and Sadrists have all been put on a knife-edge by expectations for the upcoming provincial elections, which have been gerrymandered to keep the existing incumbents in the Green Zone in power. The Turks are looking down a gunbarrel at the Kurds and the Awakening is looking at losing its source of income - being paid not to be insurgents - while even the Green Zone elites are falling out among themselves over Maliki's newfound Napoleon complex. The chances of Iraq lasting another year without another significant outbreak of violence are small to none.

All of those sources of conflict are outlined in the draft NIE, according to more than "a half-dozen officials" who spoke to McClatchy on condition of anonymity because NIE's are very restricted circulation documents.

The NIE findings parallel a Defense Department assessment last month that warned that despite "promising developments, security gains in Iraq remain fragile. A number of issues have the potential to upset progress.",

Trouble spots include whether the former Sunni insurgents, also known as the Sons of Iraq, find permanent employment; provincial elections scheduled for January; Kirkuk's status; the fate of internally displaced people and returning refugees; and "malign Iranian influence," the unclassified Pentagon report said.

The intelligence agencies' estimate also raises worries about what would happen if Sadr, the anti-U.S. cleric, attempts to reassert himself, according to senior intelligence officials familiar with its contents.

General Petraeus, who is the focus of an unholy amount of revered hype by John McCain, says the the situation is "fragile" and "reversible" and says he will never declare victory there. Not that even his Saint's words of caution have stopped Mccain doing so loudly and often, however. But Petraeus, in a talk to the neocon Heritage Foundation today, ruffled feathers by repeatedly seeming to back Obama's foreign policy prescriptions over McCain's.

Unbidden, Petraeus discussed whether his strategy in Iraq — protecting the population while cleaving apart the insurgency through reconciliation efforts to crush the remaining hard-core enemies — could also work in Afghanistan. The question has particular salience as Petraeus takes over U.S. Central Command, which will put him at the helm of all U.S. troops in the Middle East and South Asia, thereby giving him a large role in the Afghanistan war.

"Some of the concepts used in Iraq are transplantable [to Afghanistan] while others perhaps are not," he said. "Every situation is unique."

Petraeus pointed to efforts by Hamid Karzai's government to negotiate a deal with the Taliban that would potentially bring some Taliban members back to power, saying that if they are "willing to reconcile," it would be "a positive step."

In saying that, Petraeus implicitly allied with U.S. Army Gen. David McKiernan, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan. Last week, McKiernan rejected the idea of replicating the blend of counterinsurgency strategy employed in Iraq. "The word that I don't use in Afghanistan is the word 'surge,'" McKiernan said, opting against recruiting Pashtun tribal fighters to supplement Afghan security forces against Al Qaeda and the Taliban. "There are countless other differences between Iraq and Afghanistan," he added.

... Petraeus also came out unambiguously in his talk at Heritage for opening communications with America's adversaries, a position McCain is attacking Obama for endorsing. Citing his Iraq experience, Petraeus said, "You have to talk to enemies." He added that it was necessary to have a particular goal for discussion and to perform advance work to understand the motivations of his interlocutors.

And, as McClatchy notes, whether the news is good or bad  and no matter what the commanders might have to say about it, Republicans will always find an excuse to stay just a little bit longer.

The findings seem to cast doubts on McCain's frequent assertions that the United States is "on a path to victory" in Iraq by underscoring the deep uncertainties of the situation despite the 30,000-strong U.S. troop surge for which he was the leading congressional advocate.

But McCain could also use the findings to try to strengthen his argument for keeping U.S. troops in Iraq until conditions stabilize.

It's always a reason to stay. We've had countless variations on "the surge is working; we should stay until we've done the job," or "even if we can't maintain the surge, we're making progress, so we should stay" or "the Surge hasn't done what we thought it would but we can't leave - there will be a bloodbath when we leave" already. How about this instead? The Surge didn't do what it was supposed to, it never will because the irreconcilable faction fights behind the violence are beyond U.S. control, but it's the Iraqis country and they get to break it if they want to or fix it if they wish - their choice.

Not that we'll get a chance for that debate based upon this NIE, like the Afghanistan NIE which was comparably "grim" it will be buried, with not even the summary conclusions released to the public.

Crossposted from Newshoggers

Wall Street Bull Had Blue Balls Today

PHOTO: Wall Street Bull Had Blue Balls Today [Money Meltdown]

from Consumerist by Ben Popken

The balls of the famous Wall Street bull got painted blue today. Before they were cleaned, a Gothamist reader snapped this pic. In terms of the creative comic output it's sparked, this may be the funniest economic meltdown ever.

Wall Street Really Needs Relief [Gothamist]

"Low-income beneficiaries in Medicare's prescription drug program have fewer plans to choose from next year in every state except Wisconsin, raising concerns among advocates that millions will be forced to change plans - and may find skimpier coverag

Medicare Drug Options Shrink for Low-Income Members

from Truthout - All Articles

    Low-income beneficiaries in Medicare's prescription drug program have fewer plans to choose from next year in every state except Wisconsin, raising concerns among advocates that millions will be forced to change plans - and may find skimpier coverage.

    An analysis out this week by Avalere Health, a for-profit research firm in Washington, found 308 stand-alone drug plans nationwide next year eligible to serve low-income residents, down about 200 from this year. Those beneficiaries are subsidized by the government.

read more

"Will Colorado be next? "

Is Colorado the Next Florida?

from Truthout - All Articles

    Watchdogs worry huge turn-out and a new untested voter database could spell disaster on Election Day.

    First there was Florida. Then there was Ohio. Will Colorado be next?

    The state has a brand new voter database system, the longest ballot in the nation and hundreds of thousands of new voter registrations to contend with, all of which raise the specter of chaos at the polls come November.

read more

I am broke: "Dow Closes Under 8,600 "

Stocks Plunge Again; Dow Closes Under 8,600

from Truthout - All Articles

    Stocks fell sharply in late afternoon trading in New York on Thursday as concerns about the global financial system mounted and investors priced in a deep recession.

    The Standard & Poor's 500 stock index was down nearly 7.6 percent and the Dow Jones industrial average was down 678.91 points, or about 7.3 percent, both posting one of their worst days in post-war history. The Nasdaq composite was down 5.4 percent.

read more

"Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart announced that he would stop enforcing evictions of rent-paying tenants when the order is actually aimed at a landlord who are being foreclosed on for not paying their mortgage"

Cook County Sheriff Refuses To Evict Tenants

from Chicagoist by Marcus Gilmer

Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart announced that he would stop enforcing evictions of rent-paying tenants when the order is actually aimed at a landlord who are being foreclosed on for not paying their mortgage. In a column published in the Sun-Times, Dart wrote:

What isn't part of our job, however, is to carry out work on behalf of the multi-billion-dollar banks and mortgage industries.

Too many times, our deputies arrive at a home to carry out a mortgage foreclosure eviction, only to find a tenant -- dutifully paying their rent each month -- who is unaware their landlord stopped using that rent money to pay the mortgage. They had no fair warning that they were about to be thrown out of their home.

That's because, in many cases, the banks have done nothing to determine, in advance, who's living in the building -- even though it's required by state law. Instead, those banks expect taxpayers to pay for that investigative work for them.

That stops today.

We won't be doing the banks' work for them anymore.

We won't surprise tenants with an eviction order intended for their landlord.

I may be held in contempt of court over this. If that's the case, I'm willing to accept it though I believe most judges in Cook County share my desire to find a solution for this mess.

Photo of Sheriff Dart from the Cook County Sheriff Home Page

Chicago Sheriff Halts Foreclosure Evictions, Won't Toss Innocent Renters

Chicago Sheriff Halts Foreclosure Evictions, Won't Toss Innocent Renters [Vigilantes]

from Consumerist by Chris Walters

Chicago's sheriff has placed a moratorium on evictions for mortgage foreclosures, angering bankers who say he's breaking the law.

Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart said he understood he was flouting the law in refusing to have deputies carry out the rising number of eviction requests, but mortgage holders must be accountable.

"These mortgage companies only see pieces of paper, not people, and don't care who's in the building," Dart said.

By halting the evictions, he's preventing about 500 notices that were scheduled over the next 6 weeks.

Mortgage foreclosure cases filed in Cook County are likely to exceed 43,000 this year, compared to some 18,000 in 2006, the sheriff said.

The president of the Illinois Bankers Association, Linda Koch, points out that they have to have the ability to "take over collateral upon default" or they won't make loans—which of course is absolutely true, but may not be the most realistic, or humane, or in this case enforceable, position at this moment in our country's history.

Update: I have edited the headline to include a reference to renters, because my original post didn't explicitly mention this and it's important to the story.

"Sheriff in Chicago halts foreclosure evictions" [Reuters]

Video of Joe Biden kicking ass...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5eIWZXakkU

"The digital counter marks the national debt level, but when that passed the $10 trillion point last month, the sign could not display the full amount. "

Dow Plummets as Debt Soars

from Truthdig: Drilling Beneath the Headlines

After seven straight drops, the Dow landed at 8579.19 on Thursday, a year to the day after hitting a record of more than 14,000 points. The owners of the national debt clock in New York, meanwhile, announced they will add two digits to the board in order to display a quadrillion—because that's where we're headed.

---

BBC:

The digital counter marks the national debt level, but when that passed the $10 trillion point last month, the sign could not display the full amount.

The board was erected to highlight the $2.7 trillion level of debt in 1989.

The clock's owners say two more zeros will be added, allowing the clock to record a quadrillion dollars of debt.

Read more

"Looks like McCain ought to do a little disclosure himself before he starts lecturing Obama"

John McCain's Secrets

from Emptywheel by emptywheel

Under the premise that Obama has not been fully forthcoming, John McCain is raising on Bill Ayers every chance he gets (except to Obama's face).

GIBSON: Do you think the relationship with Ayers is a critical issue in this campaign or factor in this campaign?

MCCAIN: I think it's a factor about Sen. Obama's candor and truthfulness with the American people. That's what I think it's about. As I say, I don't care about Mr. Ayers who on Sept. 11, 2001 said he wished he'd have bombed more. I don't care about that. I care about him being truthful about his relationship with him. And Americans will care.

But here are some of the things that John McCain hasn't been forthcoming about himself.

There's his own relationship with terrorists--McCain didn't disclose his ties to the Contra-funding US Council for World Freedom.

As a freshman congressman in the early 1980s, John McCain did not disclose his connections to a controversial group that was implicated in a secretive plot to supply arms to Nicaraguan militia groups during the Iran-Contra affair.

McCain did not list his service on the board of the U.S. Council for World Freedom on mandatory congressional disclosure forms asking about positions he held outside government.

McCain's aides said he wasn't required to report the affiliation.

[snip]

McCain joined the board of the U.S. Council soon after Singlaub founded it in McCain's adopted hometown of Phoenix in November 1981 as the U.S. branch of the World Anti-Communist League. The league billed itself as a supporter of "pro-Democratic resistance movements fighting communist totalitarianism," but it had also been branded by critics as a haven for extremists, racists and anti-Semites.

[snip]

A review of the personal financial disclosure forms McCain filed after his election to the U.S. House in 1982 show that he did not list the group in the section of his 1982, 1983 and 1984 reports in which he was required to disclose all positions he held outside of government.

The instructions on the form require filers to report "the identity of all positions held on or before the date of the filing during the current calendar year as an officer, director, trustee, partner, proprietor, representative, employee, or consultant of any corporation, firm, partnership, or other business enterprise, any nonprofit organization, any labor organization, or any educational or other institution." [my emphasis]

And despite his noted big money gambling habit, McCain has never reported any gambling winnings on his Senate disclosure reports. 

Today, CREW filed a complaint against Senator John McCain (R-AZ) with the Senate Ethics Committee.  CREW wants that committee to investigate whether Senator McCain violated federal law and Senate rules by failing to disclose gambling winnings on his Senate financial disclosure reports.   In contrast to House rules, Senate rules allow outsiders to file ethics complaints. Senate rules also require the Ethics Committee to conduct a preliminary inquiry of the complaint.  A copy of our complaint can be found here.

According to a recent article in The New York Times , Sen. McCain is an avid gambler, who frequents casinos as often as once a month. The article states that in the winter of 2000, at the Foxwoods Casino in Connecticut, "[Sen. McCain] and his entourage emerged with thousands of dollars in winnings." Sen. McCain also reportedly spent a weekend at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada in 2007, playing craps while there.

In July, Time reported that over the past decade, Sen. McCain has gambled on Mississippi riverboats, on Indian land, in Caribbean craps pits and on the Las Vegas strip, allegedly playing "for a few thousand dollars at a time." In 2005, The New Yorker reported that while in New Orleans in the spring of that year, Sen. McCain gambled at Harrah's Casino.

Federal law and Senate rules require all income to be reported on annual financial disclosure reports. The Senate Ethics Manual states that winnings, such as those derived from a lottery or a game show, are gifts that must be reported as income. Knowingly filing a false report is a crime punishable by up to five years in jail.

Nevertheless, Sen. McCain reported no income derived from gambling on the personal financial disclosure reports he filed with the Senate between 2000 and 2007. [my emphasis]

I guess it's possible that McCain has never ever won in the last seven years of gambling. But unless he's a colossal loser throwing Sugar Momma's money away in amounts that could fund entire families for a year, then he should have noted the spoils of his gambling habit. (It's worth noting: although prosecutors seem determined to throw their case against Toobz Stevens, he was charged for not disclosing gifts on his disclosure reports.)

Looks like McCain ought to do a little disclosure himself before he starts lecturing Obama.

HAHA" Walter E Smithe commercial (that will never see the light of day) celebrating a Cubs 2008 World Series victory

Thursday Evening Diversion: Walter E Smithe Jumps The Gun With The Cubs

from Chicagoist by Marcus Gilmer

You know how every year they make up championship t-shirts for both teams in the Super Bowl? Except one of those teams has to lose, right, so their championship t-shirts end up being donated to children in third world countries? And those kids are now walking around in "New England Patriots 19-0" shirts? Well, consider this video kind of like that. Courtesy of our hilarious friends at Schadenfreude [who have a new show coming soon we'll be previewing] comes this Walter E Smithe commercial (that will never see the light of day) celebrating a Cubs 2008 World Series victory. Enjoy while you wait to see if Sarah Palin is gonna show up on that SNL special.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHfJ6AG4n7E

"this is an absolute disaster in the making. The Treasury does not have enough to take care of many of the nation’s largest banks. The Fed does not either. As you can see they are OVER their heads in Level 2 and Level 3 ‘assets’, of which much has no

Mr. Mortgage's Guide to the TRUTH! » America's Mark-to-Model (Level 2) Banking System

Is $700bb really enough?  How insolvent are the nation's leading banks?

Level 1, 2, and 3 assets are ways of classifying a company's assets based on the degree of certainty around the assets' underlying value. For example, Level 1 assets can be valued with certainty because they are liquid and have clear market prices. At the other end of the spectrum, Level 3 assets are illiquid and estimating their value requires inputs that are unobservable and reflect management assumptions. Think of it like Prime, Alt-A and subprime mortgage loans for example.

Somehow we have skipped right over Level 2 and are judging bank risk by looking at Level 3. Maybe in a robust credit market full of securitizations and leverage like 2006 this would have been just fine, but not now.  Perhaps this is unfolding in a linear way just like the mortgage crisis beginning with subprime (level 3), now onto Alt-A (level 2), then to Prime (Level 1).  Walls Street did a similar thing last year when it went right to focusing on CDO's and forgot about all of the toxic whole loans and MBS on the balance sheet.

In the past several months, banks have been very focused on 'selling assets and bringing down leverage' with the primary focus being on their mostly toxic Level 3 'assets'.  That would be fine and dandy if their Level 2 'assets, which in this market may be equally as hard to value as Level 3, were not up to 20 times greater in Bank of America's case for example.

The chart below show total Level 1, 2 and 3 'assets'. I have been keeping this for many quarters but shown is only Q2. However, if you look at level 2 assets/equity percentages it has been a road map to troubled banks with the exception of a few…but are those really exceptions.

**Note: This chart is a couple of months old numbers may have changed.

Level 2 'assets' are by definition "Assets that aren't actively traded, but have quoted market prices for similar instruments - otherwise known as 'mark to model.'"  Could this be more mortgage debt?  We all know that all 'modeling' systems are broken and have been for years so how accurate are these marks, especially if much of this is mortgage debt. Look at the Wachovia line above. They have $160 billion in Level 2 assets.  That number is eerily similar to the amount of toxic Pay Option ARMs they hold.

The Level 2 numbers are so staggering that even a 7.5% haircut across the small group banks below would equal the total write downs by all banks worldwide to date!

Back on May 2nd I posted a story on Merrill playing 'hide the CDO' for reference and have updated my chart on 25 of the top financials and their Level 1, 2 and 3 exposure. What I found was astoundinig.  Of the 25 companies I studied, their total assets were $14.6 Trillion, Level 1 assets were a total of $1.3 Trillion, Level 3 assets were only $802 Billion but Level 2 Assets were $7.3 TRILLION!

Are you kidding me! 50% of the group's total assets were Level 2 "assets that aren't actively traded, but have quoted market prices for similar instruments - otherwise known as 'mark to model."

Wouldn't it be great if the banks let you mark your investment portfolio to what you believed the assets to be worth on those dreaded days on which you receive a margin call?

All joking aside, this is an absolute disaster in the making. The Treasury does not have enough to take care of many of the nation's largest banks.  The Fed does not either. As you can see they are OVER their heads in Level 2 and Level 3 'assets', of which much has not been able to be priced for months. Much of it never will. -Best, Mr Mortgage

Level I: Mark to Market - readily observable market prices.

Level II: Assets that aren't actively traded, but have quoted market prices for similar instruments - otherwise known as 'mark to model.'

Level III: Assets that have model derived valuations in which one or more significant inputs or significant value drivers are unobservable-otherwise known as 'mark to myth' or 'mark to management's best guess,' 'mark to a hope & a prayer,' etc…

The media cannot approach Palin supporters because the rest of us will see how dumb and retarded they are...

The Palin-McCain Mob | Crooks and Liars

It was reported on Monday that the McCain campaign was restricting the media from talking to Palin supporters at recent events. This video may show why.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjxzmaXAg9E

It really is like a lynch mob. Truly scary stuff. Great job by Blogger Interrupted on this one. That blonde girl that keeps popping up is hilarious.

Taking a Hard New Look at the Greenspan Legacy

t r u t h o u t | Taking a Hard New Look at the Greenspan Legacy

"Not only have individual financial institutions become less vulnerable to shocks from underlying risk factors, but also the financial system as a whole has become more resilient." - Alan Greenspan in 2004

    George Soros, the prominent financier, avoids using the financial contracts known as derivatives "because we don't really understand how they work." Felix G. Rohatyn, the investment banker who saved New York from financial catastrophe in the 1970s, described derivatives as potential "hydrogen bombs."

    And Warren E. Buffett presciently observed five years ago that derivatives were "financial weapons of mass destruction, carrying dangers that, while now latent, are potentially lethal."

    One prominent financial figure, however, has long thought otherwise. And his views held the greatest sway in debates about the regulation and use of derivatives - exotic contracts that promised to protect investors from losses, thereby stimulating riskier practices that led to the financial crisis. For more than a decade, the former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan has fiercely objected whenever derivatives have come under scrutiny in Congress or on Wall Street. "What we have found over the years in the marketplace is that derivatives have been an extraordinarily useful vehicle to transfer risk from those who shouldn't be taking it to those who are willing to and are capable of doing so," Mr. Greenspan told the Senate Banking Committee in 2003. "We think it would be a mistake" to more deeply regulate the contracts, he added.

    Today, with the world caught in an economic tempest that Mr. Greenspan recently described as "the type of wrenching financial crisis that comes along only once in a century," his faith in derivatives remains unshaken.

    The problem is not that the contracts failed, he says. Rather, the people using them got greedy. A lack of integrity spawned the crisis, he argued in a speech a week ago at Georgetown University, intimating that those peddling derivatives were not as reliable as "the pharmacist who fills the prescription ordered by our physician."

    But others hold a starkly different view of how global markets unwound, and the role that Mr. Greenspan played in setting up this unrest.

    "Clearly, derivatives are a centerpiece of the crisis, and he was the leading proponent of the deregulation of derivatives," said Frank Partnoy, a law professor at the University of San Diego and an expert on financial regulation.

    The derivatives market is $531 trillion, up from $106 trillion in 2002 and a relative pittance just two decades ago. Theoretically intended to limit risk and ward off financial problems, the contracts instead have stoked uncertainty and actually spread risk amid doubts about how companies value them.

    If Mr. Greenspan had acted differently during his tenure as Federal Reserve chairman from 1987 to 2006, many economists say, the current crisis might have been averted or muted.

    Over the years, Mr. Greenspan helped enable an ambitious American experiment in letting market forces run free. Now, the nation is confronting the consequences.

    Derivatives were created to soften - or in the argot of Wall Street, "hedge" - investment losses. For example, some of the contracts protect debt holders against losses on mortgage securities. (Their name comes from the fact that their value "derives" from underlying assets like stocks, bonds and commodities.) Many individuals own a common derivative: the insurance contract on their homes.

    On a grander scale, such contracts allow financial services firms and corporations to take more complex risks that they might otherwise avoid - for example, issuing more mortgages or corporate debt. And the contracts can be traded, further limiting risk but also increasing the number of parties exposed if problems occur.

    Throughout the 1990s, some argued that derivatives had become so vast, intertwined and inscrutable that they required federal oversight to protect the financial system. In meetings with federal officials, celebrated appearances on Capitol Hill and heavily attended speeches, Mr. Greenspan banked on the good will of Wall Street to self-regulate as he fended off restrictions.

    Ever since housing began to collapse, Mr. Greenspan's record has been up for revision. Economists from across the ideological spectrum have criticized his decision to let the nation's real estate market continue to boom with cheap credit, courtesy of low interest rates, rather than snuffing out price increases with higher rates. Others have criticized Mr. Greenspan for not disciplining institutions that lent indiscriminately.

    But whatever history ends up saying about those decisions, Mr. Greenspan's legacy may ultimately rest on a more deeply embedded and much less scrutinized phenomenon: the spectacular boom and calamitous bust in derivatives trading.

    Faith in the System

    Some analysts say it is unfair to blame Mr. Greenspan because the crisis is so sprawling. "The notion that Greenspan could have generated a totally different outcome is naïve," said Robert E. Hall, an economist at the conservative Hoover Institution, a research group at Stanford.

    Mr. Greenspan declined requests for an interview. His spokeswoman referred questions about his record to his memoir, "The Age of Turbulence," in which he outlines his beliefs.

    "It seems superfluous to constrain trading in some of the newer derivatives and other innovative financial contracts of the past decade," Mr. Greenspan writes. "The worst have failed; investors no longer fund them and are not likely to in the future."

    In his Georgetown speech, he entertained no talk of regulation, describing the financial turmoil as the failure of Wall Street to behave honorably.

    "In a market system based on trust, reputation has a significant economic value," Mr. Greenspan told the audience. "I am therefore distressed at how far we have let concerns for reputation slip in recent years."

    As the long-serving chairman of the Fed, the nation's most powerful economic policy maker, Mr. Greenspan preached the transcendent, wealth-creating powers of the market.

    A professed libertarian, he counted among his formative influences the novelist Ayn Rand, who portrayed collective power as an evil force set against the enlightened self-interest of individuals. In turn, he showed a resolute faith that those participating in financial markets would act responsibly.

    An examination of more than two decades of Mr. Greenspan's record on financial regulation and derivatives in particular reveals the degree to which he tethered the health of the nation's economy to that faith.

    As the nascent derivatives market took hold in the early 1990s, and in subsequent years, critics denounced an absence of rules forcing institutions to disclose their positions and set aside funds as a reserve against bad bets.

    Time and again, Mr. Greenspan - a revered figure affectionately nicknamed the Oracle - proclaimed that risks could be handled by the markets themselves.

    "Proposals to bring even minimalist regulation were basically rebuffed by Greenspan and various people in the Treasury," recalled Alan S. Blinder, a former Federal Reserve board member and an economist at Princeton University. "I think of him as consistently cheerleading on derivatives."

    Arthur Levitt Jr., a former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, says Mr. Greenspan opposes regulating derivatives because of a fundamental disdain for government.

    Mr. Levitt said that Mr. Greenspan's authority and grasp of global finance consistently persuaded less financially sophisticated lawmakers to follow his lead.

    "I always felt that the titans of our legislature didn't want to reveal their own inability to understand some of the concepts that Mr. Greenspan was setting forth," Mr. Levitt said. "I don't recall anyone ever saying, 'What do you mean by that, Alan?' "

    Still, over a long stretch of time, some did pose questions. In 1992, Edward J. Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts who led the House subcommittee on telecommunications and finance, asked what was then the General Accounting Office to study derivatives risks.

    Two years later, the office released its report, identifying "significant gaps and weaknesses" in the regulatory oversight of derivatives.

    "The sudden failure or abrupt withdrawal from trading of any of these large U.S. dealers could cause liquidity problems in the markets and could also pose risks to others, including federally insured banks and the financial system as a whole," Charles A. Bowsher, head of the accounting office, said when he testified before Mr. Markey's committee in 1994. "In some cases intervention has and could result in a financial bailout paid for or guaranteed by taxpayers."

    In his testimony at the time, Mr. Greenspan was reassuring. "Risks in financial markets, including derivatives markets, are being regulated by private parties," he said.

    "There is nothing involved in federal regulation per se which makes it superior to market regulation."

    Mr. Greenspan warned that derivatives could amplify crises because they tied together the fortunes of many seemingly independent institutions. "The very efficiency that is involved here means that if a crisis were to occur, that that crisis is transmitted at a far faster pace and with some greater virulence," he said.

    But he called that possibility "extremely remote," adding that "risk is part of life."

    Later that year, Mr. Markey introduced a bill requiring greater derivatives regulation. It never passed.

    Resistance to Warnings

    In 1997, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a federal agency that regulates options and futures trading, began exploring derivatives regulation. The commission, then led by a lawyer named Brooksley E. Born, invited comments about how best to oversee certain derivatives.

    Ms. Born was concerned that unfettered, opaque trading could "threaten our regulated markets or, indeed, our economy without any federal agency knowing about it," she said in Congressional testimony. She called for greater disclosure of trades and reserves to cushion against losses.

    Ms. Born's views incited fierce opposition from Mr. Greenspan and Robert E. Rubin, the Treasury secretary then. Treasury lawyers concluded that merely discussing new rules threatened the derivatives market. Mr. Greenspan warned that too many rules would damage Wall Street, prompting traders to take their business overseas.

    "Greenspan told Brooksley that she essentially didn't know what she was doing and she'd cause a financial crisis," said Michael Greenberger, who was a senior director at the commission. "Brooksley was this woman who was not playing tennis with these guys and not having lunch with these guys. There was a little bit of the feeling that this woman was not of Wall Street."

    Ms. Born declined to comment. Mr. Rubin, now a senior executive at the banking giant Citigroup, says that he favored regulating derivatives - particularly increasing potential loss reserves - but that he saw no way of doing so while he was running the Treasury.

    "All of the forces in the system were arrayed against it," he said. "The industry certainly didn't want any increase in these requirements. There was no potential for mobilizing public opinion."

    Mr. Greenberger asserts that the political climate would have been different had Mr. Rubin called for regulation.

    In early 1998, Mr. Rubin's deputy, Lawrence H. Summers, called Ms. Born and chastised her for taking steps he said would lead to a financial crisis, according to Mr. Greenberger. Mr. Summers said he could not recall the conversation but agreed with Mr. Greenspan and Mr. Rubin that Ms. Born's proposal was "highly problematic."

    On April 21, 1998, senior federal financial regulators convened in a wood-paneled conference room at the Treasury to discuss Ms. Born's proposal. Mr. Rubin and Mr. Greenspan implored her to reconsider, according to both Mr. Greenberger and Mr. Levitt.

    Ms. Born pushed ahead. On June 5, 1998, Mr. Greenspan, Mr. Rubin and Mr. Levitt called on Congress to prevent Ms. Born from acting until more senior regulators developed their own recommendations. Mr. Levitt says he now regrets that decision. Mr. Greenspan and Mr. Rubin were "joined at the hip on this," he said. "They were certainly very fiercely opposed to this and persuaded me that this would cause chaos."

    Ms. Born soon gained a potent example. In the fall of 1998, the hedge fund Long Term Capital Management nearly collapsed, dragged down by disastrous bets on, among other things, derivatives. More than a dozen banks pooled $3.6 billion for a private rescue to prevent the fund from slipping into bankruptcy and endangering other firms.

    Despite that event, Congress froze the Commodity Futures Trading Commission's regulatory authority for six months. The following year, Ms. Born departed.

    In November 1999, senior regulators - including Mr. Greenspan and Mr. Rubin - recommended that Congress permanently strip the C.F.T.C. of regulatory authority over derivatives.

    Mr. Greenspan, according to lawmakers, then used his prestige to make sure Congress followed through. "Alan was held in very high regard," said Jim Leach, an Iowa Republican who led the House Banking and Financial Services Committee at the time. "You've got an area of judgment in which members of Congress have nonexistent expertise."

    As the stock market roared forward on the heels of a historic bull market, the dominant view was that the good times largely stemmed from Mr. Greenspan's steady hand at the Fed.

    "You will go down as the greatest chairman in the history of the Federal Reserve Bank," declared Senator Phil Gramm, the Texas Republican who was chairman of the Senate Banking Committee when Mr. Greenspan appeared there in February 1999.

    Mr. Greenspan's credentials and confidence reinforced his reputation - helping him to persuade Congress to repeal Depression-era laws that separated commercial and investment banking in order to reduce overall risk in the financial system.

    "He had a way of speaking that made you think he knew exactly what he was talking about at all times," said Senator Tom Harkin, a Democrat from Iowa. "He was able to say things in a way that made people not want to question him on anything, like he knew it all. He was the Oracle, and who were you to question him?"

    In 2000, Mr. Harkin asked what might happen if Congress weakened the C.F.T.C.'s authority.

    "If you have this exclusion and something unforeseen happens, who does something about it?" he asked Mr. Greenspan in a hearing.

    Mr. Greenspan said that Wall Street could be trusted. "There is a very fundamental trade-off of what type of economy you wish to have," he said. "You can have huge amounts of regulation and I will guarantee nothing will go wrong, but nothing will go right either," he said.

    Later that year, at a Congressional hearing on the merger boom, he argued that Wall Street had tamed risk.

    "Aren't you concerned with such a growing concentration of wealth that if one of these huge institutions fails that it will have a horrendous impact on the national and global economy?" asked Representative Bernard Sanders, an independent from Vermont.

    "No, I'm not," Mr. Greenspan replied. "I believe that the general growth in large institutions have occurred in the context of an underlying structure of markets in which many of the larger risks are dramatically - I should say, fully - hedged."

    The House overwhelmingly passed the bill that kept derivatives clear of C.F.T.C. oversight. Senator Gramm attached a rider limiting the C.F.T.C.'s authority to an 11,000-page appropriations bill. The Senate passed it. President Clinton signed it into law.

    Pressing Forward

    Still, savvy investors like Mr. Buffett continued to raise alarms about derivatives, as he did in 2003, in his annual letter to shareholders of his company, Berkshire Hathaway.

    "Large amounts of risk, particularly credit risk, have become concentrated in the hands of relatively few derivatives dealers," he wrote. "The troubles of one could quickly infect the others."

    But business continued.

    And when Mr. Greenspan began to hear of a housing bubble, he dismissed the threat. Wall Street was using derivatives, he said in a 2004 speech, to share risks with other firms.

    Shared risk has since evolved from a source of comfort into a virus. As the housing crisis grew and mortgages went bad, derivatives actually magnified the downturn.

    The Wall Street debacle that swallowed firms like Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, and imperiled the insurance giant American International Group, has been driven by the fact that they and their customers were linked to one another by derivatives.

    In recent months, as the financial crisis has gathered momentum, Mr. Greenspan's public appearances have become less frequent.

    His memoir was released in the middle of 2007, as the disaster was unfolding, and his book tour suddenly became a referendum on his policies. When the paperback version came out this year, Mr. Greenspan wrote an epilogue that offers a rebuttal of sorts.

    "Risk management can never achieve perfection," he wrote. The villains, he wrote, were the bankers whose self-interest he had once bet upon.

    "They gambled that they could keep adding to their risky positions and still sell them out before the deluge," he wrote. "Most were wrong."

    No federal intervention was marshaled to try to stop them, but Mr. Greenspan has no regrets.

    "Governments and central banks," he wrote, "could not have altered the course of the boom."

"362's journey is remarkable: it represents a forceful effort by members of Congress - prodded by grassroots groups - to turn back the tides of impending war. "

t r u t h o u t | In Reversal, Democrats Shelve Iran Resolution

Falling from shoo-in status to widely rejected legislation within the space of four months, a resolution that would have opened the door for a naval blockade on Iran was officially shelved at the end of September, after several of its cosponsors withdrew their support. House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Howard Berman has promised not to bring the bill, House Concurrent Resolution 362, before the committee until concerns about the text are addressed.

    Given the scare-tactic-laden climate of the past eight years, 362's journey is remarkable: it represents a forceful effort by members of Congress - prodded by grassroots groups - to turn back the tides of impending war.

    "The game-changer occurred when lawmakers realized that the resolution would lead to a naval blockade and war," Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council, told Truthout. "The mood in Congress is similar to what it is in the country as a whole - the appetite for another war in the Middle East simply isn't there."

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"State Department Arms Control Board Declares Cold War on China"

Owe Trillions to China? Why Not Nuke Em? | AfterDowningStreet.org

State Department Arms Control Board Declares Cold War on China
China

After planning the war against Iraq, former Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz now heads the State Department's International Security Advisory Board that recommends a Cold War against China.

By Hans M. Kristensen, Federation of American Scientists

A report from an advisory board to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has recommended that the United States beefs up its nuclear, conventional, and space-based posture in the Pacific to counter China.

The report, which was first described in the Washington Times, portrays China's military modernization and intentions in highly dramatic terms that appear go beyond the assessments published so far by the Defense Department and the intelligence community.

Although the Secretary of State asked for recommendations to move US-Chinese relations away from competition and conflict toward greater transparency, mutual confidence and enhanced cooperation, the board instead has produced a report that appears to recommend policies that would increase and deepen military competition and in essence constitute a small Cold War with China.

China's "Creeping" Nuclear Doctrine

Although the report China's Strategic Modernization - written by the International Security Advisory Board (ISAB) - deals with China's overall military modernization, its focus is clearly on nuclear forces. What underpins China's expansion of its offensive nuclear capabilities, the report says, is an "emerging creep toward a Chinese assured destruction capability" to create a "mutual vulnerability relationship" with the United States.

The objective is, an interpretation the authors say is supported by "numerous Chinese military statements," for Beijing to get enough nuclear capability "to subject the United States to coercive nuclear threats to limit potential US intervention in a regional conflict" over Taiwan and oilfields in the South China Sea.

Yet "assured destruction," to the extent that means confidence in a retaliatory capability against the United States and Russia, has been Chinese nuclear policy for decades. Increasing US and Russian nuclear capabilities, however, convinced Chinese planners that their deterrent might not survive. The current deployment of three long-range ballistic missile versions of the mobile DF-31 is supposed to restore the survivability of their strategic deterrent.

The "mutual vulnerability relationship" the authors say China is trying to create to deter the United States from defending Taiwan or limit US escalation options is a curious argument because it implies that the United States has not been vulnerable to Chinese nuclear threats in the past. In fact, US bases and allies in the Western Pacific have been vulnerable to Chinese attacks since the 1970s and the Continental United States since the early 1980s.

It is tempting to read the authors' use of the terms "assured destruction" and "mutual vulnerability relationship" as borrowed components of "mutual assured destruction," or MAD, the term for the nuclear relationship that existed between the United States and the Soviet Union during much of the Cold War.

But in responding to China's nuclear modernization and policy, it is very important not to resort to Cold War-like worst-case analysis. To that end, two of the best analyzes on Chinese nuclear policy are Iain Johnston's China's New 'Old Thinking:' The Concept of Limited Deterrence, and Michael S. Chase and Evan Medeiros' China's Evolving Nuclear Calculus: Modernization and Doctrinal Debate. The ISAB members should read them.

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"A close examination of Palin’s record on such issues as health care, the minimum wage, taxes and retirement funds shows that she has remained silent on proposals that would channel public money to programs beneficial to working-class Alaskans. In ot

The Washington Independent » Palin: Working-Class Hero?

ANCHORAGE, Alaska — On the campaign trail over the past two weeks, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has been courting the working-class vote.

"I know what Americans are going through," she said after the stock markets took another dive last week. "Todd and I, heck, we're going through that right now even as we speak — which may put me again kind of on the outs of those Washington elite who don't like the idea of just an everyday, working-class American running for such an office."

As economic forecasts remain bleak and the foreclosure rate continues to rise, the McCain campaign needs to shore up support among blue-collar workers in such key battleground states as Ohio and Pennsylvania. Palin's folksy language and personal anecdotes are clearly part of that effort.

Palin often calls herself working class and a regular "Joe Six Pack." But her income, assets and access to health care place her higher up the economic ladder. While she describes herself as a member of the working class, when faced with policy choices on issues important to blue-collar voters, Palin, over the course of her political career, rarely breaks in their favor.

A close examination of Palin's record on such issues as health care, the minimum wage, taxes and retirement funds shows that she has remained silent on proposals that would channel public money to programs beneficial to working-class Alaskans. In other instances, Palin supported programs that favored wealthy Alaskans over low-income families.

Financially, Palin and her husband, Todd, are far from being members of the working class. In America, where class is usually defined by household income, a middle-class family earns about $49,000 a year. In Alaska, the median income for a family is about $60,000. The Palins made $166,000 last year, putting them in the top 20 percent of U.S. earners, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. When including the $17,000 Palin received in per diem payments as governor, the family is bumped into the 95th percentile. The Palin's assets total $1.2 million, including a lakefront house valued at about half a million dollars, a snowmobile and a float plane.

Todd, a union worker on the North Slope, and Sarah Palin both have jobs that include comprehensive health benefits for their family. And, unlike most Americans, Todd Palin and the Palin children are entitled to federally funded comprehensive health care because of Todd's Native Alaskan ancestry. The Dept. of Health and Human Services provides comprehensive coverage through the Indian Health Service for people like Todd Palin and his children, who trace their Yup'ik heritage back to Todd Palin's maternal grandmother.

Many working-class advocates in Alaska say that Palin's affinity for the working class has not resulted in increased funding for programs that benefit working families.

Instead, as her supporters say, Palin has established her fiscal conservative bona-fides in resisting spending on social programs — even when the state's budget surplus is expected to reach between $5 billion and $9 billion next year in a state of about 650,0000 people.

Palin has been specifically criticized for allowing Alaska to remain one of the least generous states in a federally backed health-care program for the children of working-class families; for remaining silent on a proposal to raise the state's minimum wage; for tacitly supporting the privatization of public employee pensions; and for implementing a regressive tax in her hometown of Wasilla while mayor.

HEALTH CARE

Lack of health care is a hallmark of an hourly, working-class job in America.

Both Sen. John McCain and Sen. Barack Obama have taken up the health-care issue in the presidential campaign. Palin noted during the vice-presidential debate that her family has gone through periods when they were uninsured. She said she understands what it's like for Americans "to sit around the kitchen table" figuring out how to "pay out-of-pocket for health care."

While this may resonate with many voters, it's unlikely that Palin or her family has gone for long without health insurance. Todd Palin has had high-paying union jobs on the North Slope for much of the Palins' marriage. Now, as governor, Sarah Palin qualifies for state coverage.

Even if they did lack insurance, the family would likely have qualified for a federally funded state-based program, Alaska Area Native Health Service, because of Todd Palin's Native Alaskan ancestry.

Residents are eligible for the program's free services if they hold stock in one of four native Alaska corporations, including the Bristol Bay Native Corp. According to public disclosure forms that Sarah Palin filed with the state of Alaska, her husband and their children are BBNC shareholders, meaning they would likely qualify for the health service program.

The McCain-Palin campaign has not replied to repeated inquiries, left over the course of four days, requesting comment about the native health-care program.

As governor, Sarah Palin has not sought to dramatically expand coverage for the children of working-class Alaskans.

By next year, Alaska's state budget surplus is expected to be between $5 billion and $9 billion because of the high price of oil. Taxes on oil production and oil royalties account for the bulk of the state's revenue. Alaskans do not pay income tax.

A separate fund of just under $40 billion holds oil royalties that are distributed yearly to all Alaskans, even children. This year payments hit $2,000 per person. The state also dispensed an additional $1,200 per person to help offset the same high energy prices fueling the budget boon.

During this boom time in Juneau, Palin has proved herself to be a staunch fiscal conservative, rather than a populist politician of the working class.

For example, Alaska is one of the nation's least generous states when it comes to working-class children's health-care programs, according to a report from the non-partisan health-care research group Kaiser Family Foundation.

Alaska allows children of parents earning up to 175 percent of the poverty level, or about $30,000 a year, to participate in the program. Only two states in the nation, North Dakota and Nebraska, have less generous programs. Another 40 states cover up to at least 200 percent of the poverty level, around $42,000 nationally.

In May 2007, Palin signed a bill that re-instated 1,300 of 2,500 children who had been cut from the state's version of the federal "SCHIP" program — the State Children's Health Insurance Program — during tight financial times a few years before.

Under SCHIP, the federal government grants states 70 percent of the cost of providing health-care for the children of the working-class.

Palin's critics say that during a time of budget surplus the program should be expanded, not just partially reinstated.

"[SCHIP] is a very cheap way of getting health-care for working families," said Rep. Les Gara, a Democrat from Anchorage who is critical of Palin's policies affecting the working class. Gara said he thought Alaska should cover children up to 200 percent of the poverty level, as most other states do.

MINIMUM WAGE

One cornerstone of Palin's campaign on the national stage has been "job creation."

While mayor of Wasilla from 1996 to 2002, Palin supported growth and job creation as well. Her policies ushered in rapid commercial development — particularly the construction of new big box stores. Today, the biggest employer in Wasilla is Wal-Mart, employing more people than the city.

Palin supports job creation, but she has not supported government's role in setting wages.

Though the cost of living in Alaska is higher than most other states in the United States, because most basics have to be shipped in, Gov. Palin regularly remained silent on efforts to raise the Alaska state minimum wage from $7.15 an hour to $8 an hour last year. In rural parts of Alaska, like the town of Nome, milk recently topped $7.50 a gallon and gasoline cost $5.36 a gallon. About 5 percent of the Alaska workforce makes minimum wage, some 14,000 people.

Next summer the Alaska state minimum wage will fall below the federal minimum wage if it remains the same. The hourly rate is lower than that of 35 other states – and the lowest minimum wage on the West coast.

RETIREMENT PRIVATIZATION

In an interview with Hugh Hewitt last week, Palin sympathized with Americans whose retirement plans are in the market, noting how she felt the pain too.

"The relatively low number of investments that we have, looking at the hit that we're taking, probably $20,000 last week in his 401(k) plan that was hit. I'm thinking, geez, the rest of America, they're facing the exact same thing that we are." When asked why things are tight for her family, she said, "It's just the great financial crisis that America is in as our savings accounts also, and a 401(k), they're being hit."

Palin didn't mention that she did not intervene when state lawmakers attempted to reinstate a state pension plan supported by labor unions and public employees, for which Palin qualifies.

In 2005 President George W. Bush wrote to state legislatures across the country urging them to privatize state pension programs. Alaska lawmakers, led by then-Gov. Frank Murkowski, adopted such a plan for all new state employees.

Three years later, there is little public support for the system. A coalition of unions, state employees and public policy analysts has formed to push the legislature to re-adopt the old system.

Though both Republican and Democratic leadership has agreed the privatized system probably does not save the state money, a vote to return to a standard pension plan broke along party lines.

Palin did not weigh in during the debate.

"I think with some leadership," Gara said. "We'd be able to reverse that Murkowski rule." Gara pointed out that Palin had an 80 percent approval rating at the time of the vote, and her backing could have been vital.

REGRESSIVE TAXATION

Palin's signature project as mayor of Wasilla was a sports complex, complete with an indoor hockey rink. The project was meant to be a community focal point, particularly in the long, dark winters here. It's popularity has taken off recently.

To pay for the rink, Palin took out a $14.7 million bond. She raised local sales tax by half a percent to cover the cost of the project.

The move perhaps paints a slightly different picture from what Palin's has presented on the national stage.

"As mayor, every year I was in office I did reduce taxes," Palin said during the vice presidential debate. "I eliminated personal property taxes and eliminated small business inventory taxes and as governor we suspended our state fuel tax."

At a press conference in Wasilla, the town's current mayor differentiated the sales tax hike from other types of taxes, noting that it will be eliminated once the bond is repaid.

The tax, though temporary, is still regressive as opposed to progressive. There is no sliding scale adjusted for income level. Federal income taxes, for example, are structured so that those who make more money pay a higher percentage of earnings in taxes. Low-income people, with less disposable money, pay a smaller portion of their overall pay.

"The tax is unfair," said Bob McIntryre, the director of the non-partisan Citizens for Tax Justice.

McIntyre explained that the tax disproportionately affects low-income families, who generally spend everything they make. "Things that you spend money on that are subject to sales tax goes down dramatically as income rises," McIntyre said.

In a 2003 report, McIntyre studied Alaska tax policies from 1989 to 2002 and found that regressive tax policies are common in the state. McIntyre found that the poorest Alaskans, those making under $15,000 a year, paid 3.8 percent of their income in Alaska state and local taxes. Middle-income earners paid about 3 percent of their income. Wealthy Alaskans paid roughly 2.8 percent.

With no progressive income tax in place, working-class Alaskans end up paying a higher percent than their wealthy counterparts.

On the campaign trail, in battleground states across the nation. Palin is running as a strong advocate of the working class. This is an essential part of her message. But her record in Alaska, as both a mayor and governor, shows someone who has not been eager to push for pro-working-class policies.

Update: This story has been corrected to say Gov. Sarah Palin signed a health care bill in 2007, not 2004.

“The Senate Ethics Committee should investigate whether Sen. McCain deliberately failed to report gambling winnings, and if so, the matter should be turned over to the Department of Justice for a criminal investigation.”

CREW REQUESTS SENATE ETHICS COMMITTEE INVESTIGATE SEN. MCCAIN'S FAILURE TO DISCLOSE GAMBLING WINNINGS | Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington

October 9, 2008

Contact: Peter Bjork // 202.408.5565

9 Oct 2008 // Washington, DC - Today, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) asked the Senate Ethics Committee to investigate whether Senator John McCain (R-AZ) violated federal law and Senate rules by failing to disclose gambling winnings on his Senate financial disclosure reports.

According to a recent article in The New York Times [1], Sen. McCain is an avid gambler, who frequents casinos as often as once a month. The article states that in the winter of 2000, at the Foxwoods Casino in Connecticut, "[Sen. McCain] and his entourage emerged with thousands of dollars in winnings." Sen. McCain also reportedly spent a weekend at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada in 2007, playing craps while there.

In July, Time [2] reported that over the past decade, Sen. McCain has gambled on Mississippi riverboats, on Indian land, in Caribbean craps pits and on the Las Vegas strip, allegedly playing "for a few thousand dollars at a time." In 2005, The New Yorker [3] reported that while in New Orleans in the spring of that year, Sen. McCain gambled at Harrah's Casino.

Federal law and Senate rules require all income to be reported on annual financial disclosure reports. The Senate Ethics Manual states that winnings, such as those derived from a lottery or a game show, are gifts that must be reported as income. Knowingly filing a false report is a crime punishable by up to five years in jail.

Nevertheless, Sen. McCain reported no income derived from gambling on the personal financial disclosure reports he filed with the Senate between 2000 and 2007.

In contrast, other members of Congress, including Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH), House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) and Rep. Paul Kanjorski (D-PA) all reported winnings on their financial disclosure reports.

CREW's executive director Melanie Sloan stated, "Given Sen. McCain's long history of gambling, the fact that he never included gambling income on his financial disclosure forms suggests he is either the unluckiest gambler ever or, more likely, he failed to report the income."

Sloan continued, "The Senate Ethics Committee should investigate whether Sen. McCain deliberately failed to report gambling winnings, and if so, the matter should be turned over to the Department of Justice for a criminal investigation."

---

Source URL:
http://www.citizensforethics.org/node/34665

Links:
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/28/us/politics/28gambling-web.html
[2] http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1819898-1,00.html
[3] http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/05/30/050530fa_fact_bruck?currentPage=all

CREW REQUESTS SENATE ETHICS COMMITTEE INVESTIGATE SEN. MCCAIN’S FAILURE TO DISCLOSE GAMBLING WINNINGS

McCain Ethics Complaint.pdf (application/pdf Object)

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, in a letter to Barbara Boxer, are urging for an investigation of Sen. McCain's failure to disclose gambling winnings in required federal disclosures.

http://www.citizensforethics.org/files/McCain%20Ethics%20Complaint.pdf

VoteVets.org: "By voting against better medical care, expanded education benefits, and adequate body armor, John McCain and other Republicans have failed America's troops, say veterans groups. "

Political Affairs Magazine - Veterans Hammer McCain, Dole in New Ads
The political action fund of VoteVets.org, a veterans advocacy organization that helps elect politicians that will support US troops and veterans' issues, released three new ads this week targeting Republican candidates for failing to side with veterans on several key issues. By voting against better medical care, expanded education benefits, and adequate body armor, John McCain and other Republicans have failed America's troops, say veterans groups.

The first ad is set to run in Virginia and will target John McCain for his opposition to the 21st Century GI Bill, an update of the veterans' education package that will aid hundreds of thousands of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans with education benefits. John McCain, the ad points out, deliberately missed the vote on final passage of the new GI Bill after weeks of opposing it, to speak at a fund raiser held by wealth Republican Party donors in California.

The ad features Jason Bensley, an Iraq war veteran and actor Matt Damon look-a-like, reminds the audience that during McCain's generation, war veterans had their access to college. "But when a GI Bill came up in Congress to help today's vets go to college, John McCain, you skipped the vote to go to a political fundraiser in San Diego," Bensley charges. "I used to respect you John McCain, but with your seven houses and lobbyist friends, you're just a Washington guy now."

"Vet to vet, Senator McCain," Bensley concludes, "when you put money from your rich friends before vets like me, how is that 'country first'?"
A radio ad in both English and Spanish that will air in New Mexico also challenges McCain's voting record on veterans issues. In the ad, veteran Romeo Rocha reminds listeners that McCain voted against improved medical care for veterans that would have been paid for by closing corporate tax loopholes.

"Me and the millions of veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan never asked for much in return, just that the politicians would keep their end of the bargain and provide troops with the care we were promised when we got home," Rocha says. But John McCain has failed to live up to that promise.

The ads will appear just as other veterans groups leveled sharp criticism of John McCain's voting record on veterans issues, including poor marks from Disabled Veterans of America and Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. The Veterans of Foreign Wars also expressed strong reservations about McCain's proposal to end guaranteed medical care for many veterans by privatizing some medical services.

Both Virginia and New Mexico, which George W. Bush won in 2004, are considered battleground states with polls show Barack Obama with a growing lead.

A startling third ad set to run in North Carolina challenges Sen. Elizabeth Dole's (R-NC) decision to vote against providing modern body armor for troops in Iraq. In it, Iraq war veteran Pete Granato demonstrates the effect of an AK-47 round on body armor US troops deployed to Iraq with in 2003 compared to modern body armor. After firing several rounds into both, Granato shows that the old armor allowed rounds to get through potentially injuring or killing the troop, while modern armor stopped all of the AK-47 rounds.

"The difference is life or death," Granato says. "Senator Dole voted against giving our troops this [holding up the more protective body armor]. Our troops deserve better."

Dole has slipped as much as nine points behind her Democratic opponent Kay Hagan.

See the VoteVets.org ad here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnvQ_4G8l4w

Visit the VoteVets.org Web site here.

Check out this flier comparing the votes of Barack Obama and John McCain on veterans issues.

McCain Fiction: “We’ve had a ‘Bridge to Nowhere,’ a $233-million bridge in Alaska, which I’m happy to say this governor stood up against.” Of course, it is well-documented that there is far more to that story than McCain indicated.

The Washington Independent » The 'Bridge To Nowhere' Returns

With Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin at his side, Sen. John McCain just brought up the infamous "Bridge to Nowhere" for the first time in quite a while at a town-hall meeting in Waukesha, Wis.

McCain was talking about earmarks and corruption.

"We've had a 'Bridge to Nowhere,' a $233-million bridge in Alaska, which I'm happy to say this governor stood up against."

Of course, it is well-documented that there is far more to that story than McCain  indicated.

An Op-Ed in the Austin [Texas] Statesman-Journal dates Palin's last use of the "Thanks, but no thanks for that Bridge to Nowhere" line in early September a week after the Republican National Convention — and well after it became clear that Palin didn't really say "no thanks" to the project.

Apparently, the McCain campaign believes the American public's collective memory only extends back a few weeks.

"New Autobot Revealed as Skids? "

Transformers 2: New Autobot Revealed as Skids?

from /Film by orfilms@gmail.com (slashfilm.com)

Jalopnik has a few new photos from the Davis-Monthan Air Force Base set of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. The big news is that the photos reveal the license plates of the Chevrolet Beat, giving us the possible identity of this new alt mode Autobot…

SKIDS

The name Skids has been used for four characters in the Transformers universe, so I'm not sure what, if any, characteristics, will be used on the movie autobot.

"Joe Scarborough on last night's Colbert Report saying "it's too late" for McCain because he can't win on tax cuts or a sexy VP or terrorist fearmongering or just general demagoguery when voters are scared of starving in the streets."

'Too Late' For McCain To Win? [Dirty Tricks]

from Gawker by Ryan Tate

So how the hell does John McCain pull this one out of the bag? Even the conservative commentators think the national economic crash has doomed him. Bill O'Reilly said Tuesday the Republican presidential nominee needed to do well at the debate or "say goodbye," and he didn't do well at all. Now comes Joe Scarborough on last night's Colbert Report saying "it's too late" for McCain because he can't win on tax cuts or a sexy VP or terrorist fearmongering or just general demagoguery when voters are scared of starving in the streets.

Setting aside his tactical blunders, McCain heads a party deeply divided on the campaign's central issue, the economy. If the showdown between Bush and Congressional Republicans over the Wall Street bailout didn't illustrate the fissure clearly enough, the public loss of faith by populist conservatives O'Reilly and Scarborough should do the job nicely.

For all his problems, one can't escape the uneasy feeling that McCain may very well sacrifice what remains of his dignity in a desperate, last-ditch shot at victory-via-dirty tricks. It almost certainly wouldn't work. But an October Surprise — well beyond the attempt to brand Obama a Bill Ayers-loving terrorist — would cause real pain in a nation that has already had more than enough this month. And that, my friends, would suck!

be prepared for the onslaught from the GOP if Obama wins that the election was stolen; how ironic....

Your Grievance For the Next Four Years: "Voter Fraud" [Predictions]

from Gawker by Pareene

If the Democrats pull this off and win the presidential election, the Republican "noise machine" will not simply give up and devote themselves to charity. They will need to undermine and delegitimize President Obama as much and as loudly as possible, non-stop, for the entirety of his term. Early predecessors of this strategy include claims that John Kennedy stole the 1960 election with Chicago Mayor Richard Daley's corrupt machine and reminding everyone that Bill Clinton didn't win a majority of the vote in 1992. But the 2008 version will be even nastier and so much more toxic! Thanks, then, to Roger Stone, old-school GOP Political Operative, for giving us a sneak preview of the complaints you'll be hearing until 2012:

Democratic voter fraud will be greater this year than in any Presidential election since Mayor Richard Daley stuffed the Chicago ballot boxes for JFK in 1960 while Lyndon Johnson had hundreds of thousands of Texas absentee ballots burned before they could be counted.

ACORN, a left-wing activist group that supports Obama, is literally dragging homeless people, people from drug rehab centers, soup kitchens and women in domestic abuse shelters to the polling places for early voting. In Ohio any warm body can register and vote on the same day-an open invitation for voter fraud.

Yes, Voter Registration Drives are indicative of massive fraud! Homeless people may be humans but that doesn't mean they should be allowed to vote. Some of them might be immigrants or something!

The conservative obsession with ACORN obsession has already crossed from the wingnuttier right-wing sites to the slightly less wingnutty right-wing sites and soon it'll be part of the almost-legitimate conversation. With FBI raids of ACORN offices already underway, the very name of the occasionally shady low-income housing community organization will soon become shorthand for the voter fraud that stole the election for Obama.

While Democrats complain of Diebold and voter suppression, Republicans have their terrifying visions of poor black homeless junkies dragged to polling places in exchange for needles. Republican state legislatures have been passing or trying to pass Voter ID laws for years now.

But their campaigns are barely concealed rehashes of the Poll Tax. There's no epidemic of voter fraud, and, as Slate pointed out in 2006, where there is voter fraud it's the kind that isn't stopped by asking everyone to have a birth certificate and drivers' license.

Regardless! It's an easy line for people shocked, shocked that 51% of the country likes Barack Obama. And so, just as for four tedious years liberals bitched about how Bush stole the election just because he lost the popular vote, conservatives have already pre-approved their anti-Obama argument. And more power to them! Because it worked so fucking well for us in 2004, right?

"John McCain would pay for his health plan with major reductions to Medicare and Medicaid, a top aide said, in a move that independent analysts estimate could result in cuts of $1.3 trillion over 10 years"

McCain Plans Federal Health Cuts - WSJ.com

John McCain would pay for his health plan with major reductions to Medicare and Medicaid, a top aide said, in a move that independent analysts estimate could result in cuts of $1.3 trillion over 10 years to the government programs.

The Republican presidential nominee has said little about the proposed cuts, but they are needed to keep his health-care plan "budget neutral," as he has promised. The McCain campaign hasn't given a specific figure for the cuts, but didn't dispute the analysts' estimate.

Getty Images

John McCain arrives at a town-hall meeting Friday at Colorado State University.

In the months since Sen. McCain introduced his health plan, statements made by his campaign have implied that the new tax credits he is proposing to help Americans buy health insurance would be paid for with other tax increases.

But Douglas Holtz-Eakin, Sen. McCain's senior policy adviser, said Sunday that the campaign has always planned to fund the tax credits, in part, with savings from Medicare and Medicaid. Those government health-care programs serve seniors, poor families and the disabled. Medicare spending for the fiscal year ended Sept. 30 is estimated at $457.5 billion.

Mr. Holtz-Eakin said the Medicare and Medicaid changes would improve the programs and eliminate fraud, but he didn't detail where the cuts would come from. "It's about giving them the benefit package that has been promised to them by law at lower cost," he said.

Both Sen. McCain and his Democratic rival, Sen. Barack Obama, have recently sought to refocus on health care. The issue once ranked at the top of voters' domestic concerns, but has in recent months been eclipsed by energy and the economy.

Sen. McCain charges that the Obama plan, which would create a government-run marketplace in which people could buy coverage, would lead to government-run health care. Sen. Obama charges that Sen. McCain's plan would leave many people unable to get insurance.

Sen. Obama's campaign turned up the volume in a major push on health care over the weekend with two days of attacks from the stump, four new television advertisements, a series of health-care events across the country and fliers to voters' homes in swing states.

Sen. Obama is focused on Sen. McCain's plan to offer a new tax credit of $2,500 per person and $5,000 per family toward insurance premiums. This would allow people to buy health coverage on the open market, where they may have more choices and might look for a better bargain.

In exchange, the government would begin taxing the value of health benefits people get through work. If an employer spends $10,000 to buy a worker health insurance, the worker would pay taxes on that money.

"It's a shell game," Sen. Obama told an outdoor rally of 28,000 people Sunday in Asheville, N.C. "Sen. McCain gives you a tax credit with one hand -- but raises your taxes with the other."

Sen. McCain's plan actually would lower taxes for most people. But that means the plan wouldn't pay for itself, because it cuts certain taxes more than it raises others.

The federal government imposes two taxes on wages, generally: an income tax, which funds the government's general operations, and the payroll tax, paid for by employers and employees, which funds Social Security and Medicare. If Sen. McCain were to apply both of these to the value of health benefits, he could fully pay for his new tax credits. That is what aides have in the past suggested he would do.

In April, when Sen. McCain gave a major speech about his health plan, Mr. Holtz-Eakin, the senior policy adviser, said the tax provisions alone were budget neutral -- meaning that health benefits would have to be subject to both income and payroll taxes.

Campaign officials have regularly implied since then that the tax plan was a wash. In the vice-presidential debate last week, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin described Sen. McCain's proposed tax credits and said: "That's budget neutral. That doesn't cost the government anything, as opposed to Barack Obama's plan to mandate health-care coverage and have this universal, government-run program."

Mr. Holtz-Eakin said the campaign never intended to apply the payroll tax to health benefits. That means that most people would see a net tax cut, contrary to Sen. Obama's assertions. Only those with very rich benefits packages are likely to see a net increase in taxes. But it also means that Sen. McCain must fill a huge budget hole -- which the campaign says will come from cuts to Medicare and Medicaid.

The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, a Washington think tank, estimates that the McCain plan would cost the government $1.3 trillion over 10 years. The plan would allow as many as five million more people to have insurance, it estimates.

Mr. Holtz-Eakin said the plan is accurately described as budget neutral because it assumes enough savings in Medicare and Medicaid spending to make up the difference. He said the savings would come from eliminating Medicare fraud and by reforming payment policies to lower the overall cost of care. He said the new tax credits will help some low-income people avoid joining Medicaid. The campaign also proposes increasing Medicare premiums for wealthier seniors.

Sen. Obama also would rely on some Medicare savings to pay for his health-care plan, which would offer subsidies to help consumers pay for premiums. The Tax Policy Center estimates that his plan would cost $1.6 trillion over 10 years and cover 34 million more people.

"Golden Rule Insurance has lavished campaign funds on Gingrich and the GOP in order to promote its medical savings account scheme--and destroy Medicare.

MediKill
MediKill
Golden Rule Insurance has lavished campaign funds on Gingrich and the GOP in order to promote its medical savings account scheme--and destroy Medicare. "

Why the GOP's "reform" plan will create a "death spiral," killing Medicare

Deep inside the gleaming, lakeside Indianapolis headquarters of Golden Rule Insurance Co., the elevator doors open with a swoosh and a worried-looking man in a trench coat hurries in. "Trouble in Washington," he says to a colleague, with the air of someone who has seen Washington trouble before. "We're in pretty good shape in the House, but the Senate's giving us some problems. Gotta work on them, gotta work on the Senate." The man is Darrell Richey, general counsel at the billion-dollar insurer. And today Richey is very concerned about the fate of a few provisions in the Medicare bill before Congress--provisions that could mean tens of millions of dollars to Golden Rule's bottom line.

As the GOP's plan to dismantle Medicare has moved forward, no other corporation has lobbied as effectively, nor positioned itself as well to reap big dividends from the Republican legislation, as Golden Rule. While doctors, hospitals, drugmakers, and other, larger insurers are going to garner pieces of the Medicare carcass, the relatively obscure Midwestern company--thanks to its unique alliance with the Republican leadership and a network of far-right think tanks and industry groups--is poised to gain a disproportionate chunk.

Golden Rule is an intensely political company, from its patriarchal chairman, J. Patrick Rooney, down to its most junior employee. Behind the fresh-scrubbed, Midwestern faces of Golden Rule's workers lies a hard-edged, ideological fervor whose tone is set by Rooney's own libertarian, free-market views. For years, the company has been known for its unusually aggressive underwriting policies and its battles against regulators and insurance reform legislation in states across the country.

Since the start of the decade, Golden Rule has funneled a staggering amount of cash into the GOP's campaign coffers--including nearly $1 million in the last election cycle alone--to win hearts and minds for Rooney's pet project, Medical Savings Accounts, a kind of medical IRA that heavily benefits the healthy and affluent. Rooney himself has led Golden Rule's political and free-market jihad in Washington, jetting to the capital almost weekly for meetings with key members of Congress--including House Speaker Newt Gingrich, the top recipient of Golden Rule's largesse.

The payoff: Rooney has forged a close working alliance with Gingrich and other leading Republicans, and his MSA scheme, although derided as a kooky idea by most economists and health care experts, is now the ideological crown jewel of the Republican Medicare plan.

MSAs and Medicare

In a rare moment of candor last October, Newt Gingrich outlined his vision for eliminating Medicare funding. "We don't want to get rid of it in round one because we don't think it's politically smart," he said. "But we believe that it's going to wither on the vine because we think [seniors] are going to leave it voluntarily."

And what is Gingrich counting on to draw seniors out of Medicare? Golden Rule's Medical Savings Accounts.

As part of their headlong effort to balance the federal budget by 2002, House and Senate Republicans agreed last summer to slash Medicare spending by an astronomical $270 billion over seven years. By cutting spending that much, the Republican plan will dramatically reduce Medicare payments to doctors and hospitals. That, in turn, will collapse the current system of fee-for-service care, because health care providers will no longer be able to care for patients at the lower rates paid by Medicare. The cuts will send shock waves across the entire Medicare system, so severe that most patients will be forced out of the traditional doctor-patient relationship in one of two directions.

First, they may move into an HMO or some new hybrid of "managed care" in the form of doctor-owned corporations that will be allowed to charge patients fees above and beyond their Medicare payments. Second, they may set up Medical Savings Accounts, and thus run straight into the waiting arms of Patrick Rooney and the Golden Rule Insurance Co.

Essentially, an MSA is a form of "anti-insurance." Under an MSA system, instead of buying a traditional insurance policy with a low deductible (say, $250), an individual purchases a "catastrophic," high-deductible insurance policy that pays only for costs in excess of perhaps $3,000. To pay for health care costs below that amount, the individual sets up a tax-free MSA account. (Employers can also offer an MSA health care plan to their employees. In this case, the employer funds the employee's MSA and pays for the catastrophic policy.)

But here is the trick: The MSA would probably contain an amount much smaller than the catastrophic policy's deductible, perhaps $1,500, making MSAs a kind of gamble on good health. If policyholders stay healthy, whatever they do not spend on health care during the year, they get to keep. But if they become sick, they rapidly use up their MSA funds and are stuck facing a large amount in uncovered medical costs until the catastrophic insurance policy kicks in.

Golden Rule began selling catastrophic health insurance linked to MSAs in 1994. In an effort to expand its market, the company has lobbied hard for a bill now before Congress that will declare MSAs tax free. (The bill is sponsored by Rep. Bill Archer, R-Texas, chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, and Rep. Andy Jacobs, D-Ind., whose district includes Golden Rule's headquarters.)

More significantly, early last year the Republican leadership seized the opportunity to include MSAs as the "free-market" option in its plan to dismantle Medicare. Under current Medicare rules, Golden Rule cannot sell health insurance to Medicare recipients. But under the changes proposed by Gingrich & Co., Golden Rule would get a crack at millions of Medicare recipients, on whose behalf the government spends more than $100 billion each year. Under the Republicans' new "Medicare Plus" program, the federal government would put money into MSAs for seniors who opt for them, and would also foot the bill for the accompanying Golden Rule catastrophic insurance policies.

What the Republican leadership doesn't mention is that allowing Medicare recipients to choose MSAs could bankrupt Medicare. At present, the vast majority of Medicare spending is used to provide care for a small portion of Medicare enrollees. Just over 3 percent of Medicare enrollees (i.e., the very sick) use 40 percent of Medicare's annual spending, while about 53 percent (the relatively healthy) use less than $500 each in Medicare funds per year.

If a substantial portion of healthy Medicare recipients choose to enroll in MSAs--as MSA proponents believe they will--they will find themselves with bank accounts holding, say, $1,500, most or all of which they will not spend on health care and will therefore get to keep. This money, sitting in the MSA accounts of healthy people, will no longer be available to Medicare. To provide care for sick people, Medicare will either have to radically increase its per capita spending (highly unlikely) or ratchet back medical care. That, in turn, will drive more people out of the traditional Medicare system into MSAs or managed care programs, further eroding Medicare. This process feeds on itself, becoming a "death spiral" in which the very ill are left alone in an expensive and rapidly collapsing Medicare system. "It creates a risk in the long run of just wiping out comprehensive insurance," says Joseph White, who has studied MSAs for the Brookings Institution.

Republican hatred of Medicare is nothing new. Going back to Franklin Roosevelt's Depression-era New Deal, conservatives have opposed each and every attempt to guarantee health insurance to any group of Americans. The creation of Medicare in 1965 was the result of a compromise in which the federal government agreed to finance health care only for Americans over the age of 65, a plan that passed over the bitter objections of the far right.

Even three decades later, much of the right has never come to terms with Medicare. Newt Gingrich, for example, recently compared Medicare to Soviet-style "centralized command bureaucracy." Said Gingrich, "It's everything we're telling Boris Yeltsin to get rid of."

The Economics of MSAs

Rooney and the Republican leadership in Congress argue that MSAs will reduce health care spending. Instead of relying on insurance to pay doctors, hospitals, and drug stores, holders of MSAs will use the money in their accounts to buy health care. Because they get to keep whatever money is left over in the MSA at the end of the year, the reasoning goes, they'll be more careful about what they spend: They'll shop around, try to get better prices from health care providers, and forgo unnecessary trips to the doctor or emergency room.

But few health care analysts, accountants, insurers, or government number-crunchers think MSAs will work. Studies by the Brookings Institution, the American Academy of Actuaries, the respected health research firm Lewin-VHI, Blue Cross, the magazine Health Affairs, and others have declared MSAs to be everything from marginally unworkable to outright ludicrous. "It's a screwball idea," says Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, a Harvard health care expert. "A lot of its right-wing appeal is that it ends up being a big reward for affluent, healthy persons."

Even the Republicans' own Congressional Budget Office found recently that not only would MSAs fail to reduce Medicare savings, they would actually increase costs to taxpayers "by about $4 billion over seven years." That finding stands in sharp contrast to some of the more outlandish claims by MSA advocates, including one by a Rooney-funded think tank, the National Center for Policy Analysis, which says MSA programs could save the government "as much as $195 billion." Actuary Mark Litow (whose work is also paid for by Golden Rule) is the source for NCPA's figure, but Litow's calculations are so far out of line with other, more levelheaded estimates that an audience at a press conference in Washington last October burst into laughter when he tried to defend them.

MSA opponents point out that the GOP seems ready to gamble Medicare's billions on a plan that hasn't been tested in the real world. Although Golden Rule claims that 1,000 American firms already offer MSA plans to their employees, all but a handful are tiny businesses with only a few employees. Larger companies that have looked at the possibility of MSAs for their workers have generally dropped the idea. Frank McArdle, a health care consultant with Hewitt Associates, says that for most large companies MSAs would end up significantly raising health care costs.

One company that has had experience with an MSA-like plan is DuPont. According to Kenneth Porter, an actuary with the Delaware corporation, when DuPont offered the option to employees, fewer than 4 percent selected it, and they tended to be young, single people with no history of medical problems. Noting that MSAs "are not a wildly attractive option," Porter adds DuPont was concerned that if many people chose the MSA-type option, it would drive up costs for everyone else, since healthy people would still draw money out of the system.

Golden Rule offers MSAs to its own employees, as do a few right-wing think tanks and policy shops. Yet none of these small entities provides anything like a laboratory to generate reliable data on how MSAs would work for a large population. Further, when the American Academy of Actuaries asked Golden Rule for concrete numbers on its employee MSA plan, the company refused to give them.

J. Patrick Rooney's Plan

That Congress is giving serious consideration to an idea as flawed as MSAs is a tribute to one man, J. Patrick Rooney, whose figure looms over everything Golden Rule does. "This company is almost his child," says a former staffer. (Indeed, the company itself is a family-owned affair.)

Many Golden Rule employees exhibit fierce loyalty. "Pat Rooney is my personal hero," says one aide. Others, however, including people who have left the company, think Rooney creates a climate of fear and intimidation. One former employee, reached by phone, feared retaliation for talking to a reporter, explaining, "We have a comfortable life now, and we don't want to do anything to jeopardize that."

"Rooney is nothing if not impatient and single-minded," says a former lobbyist. "He doesn't take no for an answer. He drives people hard and he wants results."

"There's always an undercurrent that he's called to a mission," says Carl Schramm, the former head of the Health Insurance Association of America. "He has a preset agenda. Here's a person in a company with a small voice, who has moved the national policy agenda virtually single-handed."

Rooney's evangelical passion for MSAs dates back to a meeting he had in early 1990 with John Goodman, founder of the Dallas-based NCPA, which has been the chief ideological advocate of MSAs. Rooney decided that backing Goodman's research and promotional efforts would be a good investment. That summer, according to Goodman, Rooney joined the center's board and started making annual contributions of $60,000.

For Golden Rule, the opportunity provided by MSAs could not have come at a better moment. Faced with intense competition from the national trend toward managed care (which elbowed out many small and midsize insurers like Golden Rule in the late 1980s and early 1990s), the company was beginning to feel squeezed. Insiders say company officials worried that the future looked bleak. To make matters worse, politicians from both parties favored HMOs and other forms of managed care. Golden Rule saw this as a life-and-death threat. To push MSAs forward, Golden Rule launched

its own political action committee, the Golden Rule Financial Corp. "We called it the Golden Rule Survival PAC," explains Shelli Johnson, the PAC's administrator.

From almost nowhere in 1989, Golden Rule has emerged as one of the country's largest single political donors, especially to the GOP. According to The Indianapolis Star, Golden Rule's total political donations rose from $81,000 in 1989-90, to $277,000 in 1991-92, to a sky-high $1,069,000 during 1993-94.

Rooney and Gingrich

Sensing that Newt Gingrich would be invaluable in the pursuit of pro-MSA legislation, Rooney became one of the largest donors to Gingrich's campaigns and to GOPAC, the political action committee Gingrich headed until last year. According to Rooney's stepdaughter Megan Garrett, Golden Rule became a "charter member" of GOPAC. (After working for Golden Rule's PAC, Garrett spent six months as GOPAC's deputy finance director.)

From 1991 to 1993, Rooney and Golden Rule President John Whelan chipped in more than $117,000 to GOPAC's coffers. Their support has continued since the GOP captured Congress in 1994. In the first quarter of 1995, Rooney gave $25,000 to GOPAC, and in the second quarter, Whelan made a $10,000 donation. In addition, the insurer and its leading executives have lavished support on Gingrich's personal campaigns, donating $42,500 to Gingrich from 1989 through 1994, according to a Common Cause study and records gathered by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics in Washington, D.C.

Rooney has also curried favor with the speaker by supporting his think tank, the Progress and Freedom Foundation. A PFF executive says that Golden Rule contributed $20,000 through the foundation to sponsor "Progress Report," Gingrich's talk show on National Empowerment Television.

Gingrich promoted Golden Rule in his televised "college course"--even showing a promotional video supplied by Rooney. The speaker also touts Rooney's company and praises MSAs in his book To Renew America: "Every American ought to have the opportunity to belong to [an MSA] system."

"Newt looks to Pat [Rooney] as an adviser on health care," says Garrett. "Socially, they are mutual friends. If Newt is close to Indianapolis, he will try to stop by." Others who have observed the two men together offer similar views. "Newt relies on people for ideas and Pat is an idea person," says Suzanne Katt, a former vice president for government relations at Golden Rule who now works directly for Rooney. Gingrich, Katt says, recently asked Rooney to come up with some hypothetical case studies the speaker could use to show senior citizens how they would benefit under various Medicare options in the GOP plan.

Ed Kutler, Gingrich's top health aide, is very solicitous of Rooney, according to former Golden Rule pollster Kellyanne Fitzpatrick. Fitzpatrick recalls one meeting in which Kutler kept asking Rooney "if it would be OK with him" if MSAs were not the only alternative option in the Republicans' Medicare plan.

Rooney, knowing Golden Rule could not rely just on Gingrich, has made other contacts that have proven useful in promoting MSAs. Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole's Campaign America was a big recipient of Golden Rule's largesse, receiving $30,000 in the last election cycle, while Senate Finance Committee Chairman William V. Roth (R-Del.) reaped $10,000. Sen. Rick Santorum, a brash young conservative from Pennsylvania and one of the earliest and most ardent champions of MSAs, was similarly rewarded. In the last election cycle, he received $24,600.

Building Industry Muscle

In addition to his new allies on Capitol Hill, Rooney realized he would need more insurance industry lobbying muscle. Golden Rule was a member of the giant Health Insurance Association of America, but the group's large size frustrated Rooney, and he didn't like playing second fiddle to the big companies that dominated the trade group. More importantly, HIAA wasn't interested in MSAs and was flirting with moderate reforms that were anathema to Rooney.

In 1989, Rooney pulled out of HIAA and began brainstorming about launching a trade group devoted mainly to the MSA cause. In early 1992, he hooked up with other small insurers and founded the Council for Affordable Health Insurance. According to CAHI lobbyist Jack Strayer, Golden Rule tossed in about $100,000 of the council's $800,000 budget last year.

Golden Rule also supports the American Legislative Exchange Council, a group that provides lobbying support for MSAs. According to a council executive, Golden Rule gives between $10,000 and $20,000 a year to the group, which boasts a membership of 3,000 conservative state legislators and has helped spur the passage of bills favoring MSAs in about a dozen states.

All of these contributions, of course, are in addition to the money Golden Rule spends on a large stable of lobbyists. The company has paid at least one of these lobbyists, Robert Thompson, more than $250,000 since 1991. According to Katt, Thompson has been particularly effective at getting Rooney appointments to see legislators. (Thompson, a former aide to George Bush, gained a dubious reputation in Washington after representing James M. Fail, one of the sleazier S&L owners of the late 1980s. Among the questionable dealings in which Fail and Thompson were involved: Thompson invested $100,000 in a partnership with a former Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. official who had ruled favorably on Fail's acquisition of an Oklahoma bank--on the very day of the official's resignation from the FDIC.)

Torpedoing the Clinton Plan

In 1993, Rooney's fight for MSAs took a back seat to the struggle to defeat the Clinton administration's health care reforms, which Rooney saw as potentially lethal to Golden Rule. After more than a decade of rapid growth (revenues shot up from $330 million in 1987 to $820 million in 1993), Golden Rule's growth had flattened out, even declining slightly in 1994. Under the Clinton plan, Golden Rule would have been in danger of being squeezed out of the health care market altogether by large insurance companies that operate HMOs and other managed care programs. These big companies (Aetna, Prudential, MetLife, Cigna, Travelers, Kaiser, etc.), flexing their own Washington muscle, had won both George bush and Bill Clinton to managed care. Clinton's reform would have all but handed them the health care system.

Golden Rule and other small and mid-size insurers decided early on to take an active role in the fight against the Clinton health care plan, joining many industry groups and the Republicans. The company used the opportunity to recruit new allies for its pro-MSA crusade.

Billed as the major free-market alternative to managed care, MSAs attracted the attention of such conservative activists as Phyllis Schlafly, the head of the 80,000-member Eagle Forum, who began trumpeting MSAs in her newsletter. (Schlafly concedes that Rooney contributed a few thousand dollars to the forum and has given between $10,000 and $20,000 to an anti-abortion group she also runs.)

So, in 1993-94 Golden Rule's political contributions soared to finance the anti-Clinton health care wars and to promote MSA legislation, with the money sloshing heavily into right-wing and GOP coffers. In that election cycle, Golden Rule, its executives, affiliates, PAC, and Rooney family members gave the Republicans almost $1 million, nearly four times the amount they gave the party in the previous cycle. (Only Amway and Philip Morris gave the GOP more during the 1993-94 elections.) In October 1994 alone, when many close races were being fiercely contested, Golden Rule delivered $416,000 in soft money to the GOP.

Golden Rule makes no apologies for Rooney's blatant use of cash to get his way in Washington. "We wanted to get their attention," says Katt. "The money gave us that opportunity originally, and once you find allies, you support them."

Above all, money was critical in cementing Rooney's alliance with Newt Gingrich. "To get access to just about any political figure, you've got to find a way to reach them," says Katt, blithely admitting that Rooney might never have had a chance to win Gingrich as a convert had it not been for Golden Rule's large donations. "You pay to go to GOPAC."

The Endgame

As Mother Jones goes to press, President Clinton and the GOP-led congress are heading into a year-end showdown over Medicare. Although the exact fate of MSAs is still uncertain, it appears they will be included in some form in any Medicare reform legislation.

In late October, Democrats succeeded in pulling the MSA provisions out of the Senate Medicare bill. But within days, a hodgepodge of right-wing groups, including the American Conservative Union, Americans for Tax Reform, the Eagle Forum, the National Taxpayers Union, Citizens for a Sound Economy, and the Family Research Council, held a news conference to declare that without MSAs the Republican Medicare plan was merely "warmed-over Clintonism" and would be unacceptable to the right.

Following this blast from the pro-MSA forces, Gingrich and Dole conferred on a strategy to restore MSAs to the joint House-Senate bill that would be sent to the White House. (According to Peter Ferrara of Americans for Tax Reform, who coordinated the pro-MSA news conference, the right was concerned about Dole. Earlier, the Senate majority leader had expressed some hesitation about MSAs. But Dole, Ferrara said, could not afford to alienate conservatives while he was running a presidential campaign, and Ferrara boasted that he had "friends in Dole's campaign" who would make sure the Kansas Republican got the message on MSAs.)

The Republicans working on the final version of Medicare reform are aware that the bill faces a certain, and pre-announced, veto by the White House. But according to many observers, the president primarily opposes the size of the GOP's spending cuts, and does not consider MSAs a make-or-break issue in the battle over Medicare.

Meanwhile, the Archer-Jacobs bill, which makes MSA tax-free for the non-Medicare part of the population, is also moving forward despite objections from congressional Democrats.

As Republican leaders maneuver to insure that MSAs are included in the final health care legislation, no doubt J. Patrick Rooney is among the first to hear of each new development.

Robert Dreyfuss is a contributing writer to Mother Jones. Peter H. Stone covers money and politics for the National Journal.

McCain's voting record on social security and medicare is appalling; as shown below his record belies a hostility towards the common good for Americans. Gov. Palin's record, though shorter, is just as bad. These are not "friends" of Americans.

ProgressiveAccountability.org » John McCain and Sarah Palin's Policies Will Hurt Seniors

McCain-Palin Policies Raise Concerns For Seniors

• McCain believes Bush's privatization scheme is the only way to save Social Security
• McCain said Social Security "is a disgrace," denouncing the program as originally created
• McCain will begin taxing health care coverage provided by our employers, creating a $3.6 trillion tax increase
• McCain has voted AT LEAST 28 TIMES to cut, restrict, or underfund Medicare
• McCain has voted AT LEAST 28 TIMES against Medicare prescription drug coverage
• McCain prioritized tax cuts for the wealthy over saving Medicare

McCain Believes Social Security "Is A Disgrace"

McCain Said Social Security As It Was Originally Set Up "Is A Disgrace." At an event on July 7, 2008, Senator McCain said, "Americans have got to understand that we are paying present day retirees with the taxes paid by young workers in America today. And that's a disgrace. It's an absolute disgrace, and it's gotta be fixed." [Town Hall Meeting, Denver Colorado, 7/7/08]

• Washington Post: If Social Security "Is A Disgrace, It Has Been One Since Social Security Was Created." The Washington Post reported, "John McCain once said economics was not his strong suit. Well, today, Social Security became a problem for the presumptive Republican nominee, too. In remarks at a town hall meeting in Denver Monday, which are only now catching up to him, the presumptive Republican nominee laid out what he likes to call 'a little straight talk.' 'Americans have got to understand that we are paying present-day retirees with the taxes paid by young workers in America today. And that's a disgrace. It's an absolute disgrace, and it's got to be fixed,' he said. If that payment system is a disgrace, it has been once since Social Security was created during the Great Depression. For as long as the popular program has existed, today's workers have paid the benefits of today's retirees." [Washington Post, 7/9/08, emphasis added]

McCain Will Privatize Social Security In Order To "Fix" The System

McCain Said Privatization Was The Only Way To Save Social Security. During a 2004 speech in New Hampshire, John McCain was asked, "Will privatizing Social Security be a priority for you going forward?" McCain said, "Without privatization, I don't see how you can possibly over time make sure that young Americans are able to receive Social Security benefits." [C-Span, "Road To The White House" via YouTube.com, accessed 6/18/08]

McCain Supports Privatization. According to his website, www.JohnMcCain.com, "John McCain supports supplementing the current Social Security system with personal accounts." [McCain Website, accessed 5/14/08]

WSJ: McCain Backs Bush's Plan for Privatization As "Main Solution To Reducing Obligations For Social Security." As reported by the Wall Street Journal, "[McCain] also backs President Bush's proposal for private retirement accounts as the main solution to reducing taxpayer obligations for Social Security." [Wall Street Journal, 3/26/08]

McCain Said "Private Savings Accounts Work." While appearing with President Bush in Tucson, Arizona in 2005, McCain said, "Private savings accounts work. They have been proven to work not only in America but all over the world, and we ought to really strongly support it." [Presidential speech in Tucson, Arizona, 3/21/05; Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents]

McCain Defended Bush Plan, Said "Personal Savings Accounts Are Workable And Have Worked In Other Countries." McCain said, "Well, I think the president wants to take a comprehensive approach to start with, but, second of all, these personal savings accounts are workable and have worked in other countries. They could pay a much greater return than the present 1.8 to 2 percent. We members of Congress and federal employees can invest our money into these five different — and we're doing fine, between seven and nine percent return. The president is willing to look at a comprehensive fix" [CNN, "Inside Politics," 3/03/05]

McCain Would Consider Benefit Cuts, Tax Increases For Social Security Fix

McCain's Top Economic Advisor Said Social Security Benefits Must be Cut. The Nation reported: "McCain's economic aide, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, poured a little more oil on the fire by explaining that Social Security benefits must be cut to keep the system solvent. 'You can't keep promises made to retirees,' Holz-Eakin said." [The Nation, 3/4/08]

McCain Said Increasing Payroll Taxes Was An Option. According to the Sioux City Journal, McCain "said raising the payroll tax that goes into Social Security is a last resort," but didn't rule it out as an option. [Sioux City Journal, 10/26/07]

McCain Said Lifting Cap on Payroll and Social Security Tax "Should Be Something That's On The Table." In 2005, when asked about the possibility of lifting the cap so that people would pay payroll tax, Social Security tax, not just on the first $90,000 of income, but perhaps even higher, McCain answered, "As part of a compromise I could, and other sacrifices, because we all know that it doesn't add up until we make some very serious and fundamental changes. … So my answer is, if everything's on the table, certainly that should be something that's on the table because, according to polls I've seen, that's the one thing that most Americans agree is probably a viable option, but not by itself but with other changes that need to be made. And if we don't, then we might as well say, 'Look, it's not going to change.'" [NBC, 2/20/05]

McCain Voting Record Jeopardizes Social Security

McCain Voted In Favor Of Establishing Private Social Security Accounts. In 1998, McCain voted for an amendment that expressed the sense of the Senate that any federal budget surplus should be used to reduce the Social Security payroll tax and to establish personal retirement accounts. The measure passed 50-48. [SCR 86, Vote #77, 4/2/98]

McCain Voted To Create Personal Retirement Accounts. In 1998, McCain voted for legislation expressing that the budget surplus can be used to establish a program of personal retirement accounts for working Americans to reduce unfunded liabilities of Social Security program. [SCR 86, Vote #56, 4/1/1998]

McCain Voted Against Increasing Social Security Survivor's Benefit In 2000, McCain voted against an amendment that would increase the Social Security survivors' benefit to at least 75 percent of the combined benefits of the husband and wife. It also would allow workers to take time off to raise a child or care for a dependent relative, and dedicate interest savings from paying off the national debt to Social Security. The amendment failed 42-54. [H.R. 8, Vote #192, 7/14/00]

McCain Prioritized Tax Cuts Over Guaranteeing Social Security for Future Generations. In 2005, McCain voted against an amendment that would make the consideration of new tax cuts or net mandatory spending that would increase the deficit subject to a 60-vote point of order unless Congress restored the solvency of Social Security for 75 years. The amendment fell 45-55. [S.C.R. 18, Vote #47, 3/15/05]

McCain Opposed Protecting Social Security

McCain Voted Against Protecting The Social Security Trust Fund

McCain Voted Against Protecting The Social Security Trust Fund. In 2004, McCain voted against a measure that would have created a point of order against any direct spending or revenue legislation that increases on-budget deficit in any fiscal year until budget is balanced without counting Social Security surplus. The measure fell 46-51. [SCR 95, Vote #33, 3/9/04]

McCain Voted Against Efforts To Provide Safeguards For Social Security Surpluses. In 2000, McCain voted against a measure that would provide procedural obstructions to any measure which decreases Social Security surpluses below levels established in resolution or that amends Budget Act to allow Social Security surpluses to be decreased below the levels established in resolution. The amendment fell 44-56. [SCR 101, Vote #65, 4/7/00]

McCain Voted Against Requiring A 3/5 Majority Vote In The Senate For Any Bill Pertaining To Social Security. In 1998, McCain voted in opposition to a measure that would provide a supermajority point of order against any change in the off-budget status of social security. The measure fell 42-58. [SCR 86, Vote #58, 4/1/98]

McCain Health Care Plan Threatens Americans' Coverage

McCain's Plan Would Remove Incentives For Employers To Provide Health Insurance. According to the New York Times, McCain's health care plan calls "for eliminating the tax breaks that currently encourage employers to provide health insurance for their workers." They added that, "His proposal to move away from employer-based coverage was similar to one that President Bush pushed for last year, to little effect." [New York Times, 4/30/08]

McCain's Plan Would Force Patients To "Buy Health Insurance On Their Own." McCain's healthcare plan is an attempt to force patients to "buy health insurance on their own instead of receiving it from their employers." [New York Times, 5/1/08]

McCain's Plan "Would Seek To Lure Workers Away From Their Company Health Plans." While describing the health care plan proposed by John McCain, The Washington Post wrote, "McCain's prescription would seek to lure workers away from their company health plans." McCain would provide families with a $5,000 tax credit to purchase their own health insurance on the free market. [Washington Post, 4/30/08]

McCain Would Classify Employer-Provided Insurance As Taxable Income; Would Equal A $3.6 Trillion Tax Increase. McCain's attempt to eliminate the employer-based health care system would include classifying employer-provided insurance as taxable income. McCain's chief economic advisor, Douglas Holtz-Eakin said that the new tax would raise an estimated $3.6 trillion in revenues. [Associated Press, 4/29/08; emphasis added]

• Despite "No Taxes" Pledge, Admitted His Health Care Plan Would "Have The Effect" Of Increased Taxes. The New York Times wrote, "Though Senator John McCain has promised to not raise taxes, his campaign acknowledged Wednesday that JPthe health plan he outlined this week would have the effect of increasing tax payments for some workers, primarily those with high incomes and expensive health plans." Holtz-Eakin said that, for some, McCain's health care plan would be unable to cover the costs associated with the elimination of the employer-based system. [New York Times, 5/1/08]

• "Anyway You Cut It, If You Make Health Benefits Subject To Taxation, That's A Tax Increase." McCain has asserted that his plan to tax employer-provided health coverage is consistent with his "no taxes" pledge. "Some scholars say otherwise. 'Anyway you cut it, if you make health benefits subject to taxation, that's a tax increase,' said Jonathan B. Oberlander, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 'You can argue with lots of merit that it's a responsible increase, that it takes away an inequitable exclusion, but it's still a tax increase.'" [New York Times, 5/1/08]

• McCain: "I'm Sure The People That Had To Pay It, Whether They Called Them Bananas, They Still Had To Pay $730 Million Extra." During the Republican primary battle, McCain often criticized Mitt Romney for increasing taxes while he was governor. Romney, referred to them as "fees," but McCain insisted that it amounted to a tax increase. During a debate, McCain said, "He called them 'fees.' I'm sure the people that had to pay it, whether they called them bananas, they still had to pay $730 million extra." [CNN, Republican Debate at the Reagan Library, 1/30/08]

McCain's Plan "Could Be Problematic" For Seniors And Those With Preexisting Conditions. While reporting on McCain's plan to force Americans to purchase their own insurance, The Wall Street Journal wrote, "That could be problematic for older people and those in poor health, who are routinely denied health insurance on the individual market, or charged very expensive premiums, because insurance companies know they will be costly to care for." Karen Pollitz of the Georgetown University said that, "those with cancer, diabetes, heart disease, HIV, epilepsy and other more serious problems are rejected outright 99% of the time." [Wall Street Journal, 4/30/08]

• McCain's Plan Could Allow Insurers To Exclude Patients With Preexisting Conditions. According to a report published by the Center for American Progress Action Fund, "Employers do not charge workers or their families different premiums based on their age, gender, health status, or health history. They also offer equal benefits and choices of plans. The individual market, however, plays by different rules. Individual insurers in most states can exclude people with pre-existing conditions directly by denying them coverage or indirectly by charging them exorbitant premiums." [Center for American Progress Action Fund, 4/29/08]

• People With Serious Health Problems Face Premiums That Are 43% To 50% Higher. According to a report published by the Center for American Progress Action Fund, "Compared to people in excellent health, premiums in the individual market are 43 to 50 percent higher for people with major health problems." [Center for American Progress Action Fund, 4/29/08]

McCain's $5,000 Credit Would Not Cover The Average Family's Health Insurance. Many health policy experts say that McCain's plan would not cover health insurance costs for the average American family. The Kaiser Family Foundation stated that the average cost of an employer-funded family insurance plan is $12,106, far more than McCain's proposed $5,000 tax credit. The New York Times quoted Paul B. Ginsburg from the Center for Studying Health System Change as saying, "For a lot of people, the tax credits he's talking about would not be enough to afford coverage." [New York Times, 4/30/08]

McCain's Plan Could Force Middle-Income Workers To Pay More For Health Coverage. In an article analyzing McCain's health care plan, the New York Times noted that, "analysts point out that middle-income workers with conventional coverage could conceivably pay more in regions where insurance costs are high. Over time, that might depend on how the tax credits are adjusted for inflation, a detail Mr. McCain has not discussed." [New York Times, 5/1/08]

McCain's Deregulation Plan Could Result In Insurance Companies Offering Fewer Patient Services. According to the New York Times, "McCain also wants to let people buy insurance from companies in other states, so they could shop for cheaper plans. That could lead some insurers to relocate from highly regulated states to states that would allow them to cover fewer services." [New York Times, 4/30/08]

McCain's Plan Won't "Make A Dent In The Number Of Uninsured Americans." While describing McCain's attempt to end the employer-based health care system, The Wall Street Journal wrote, "The plan isn't expected to make a major dent in the number of uninsured Americans, and questions remain about how the plan would help older, sicker people who can't find insurance on the open market." [Wall Street Journal, 4/30/08]

McCain Has A Dismal Record On Medicare

McCain Has Voted To Cut, Restrict, Or Underfund Medicare At Least TWENTY-EIGHT Times. [S. 1932, Vote #363, 12/21/05; S. 1932, Vote #303, 11/3/2005; S. 1, Vote #253, 6/26/03; S. 1, Vote #247, 6/26/03; SCR 23, Vote #89, 3/25/03; HJR 2, Vote #21, 1/23/03; H.J.R. 2, Vote #21, 1/23/03; H.C.R. 83, Vote #73, 4/5/01; HCR 83, Vote #73, 4/5/01; S.C.R. 86, Vote #53, 4/1/98; H.C.R. 178, Vote #156, 5/23/96; H.C.R. 178, Vote #159, 6/13/96; H.R. 2491, Vote #584,11/17/95; H.R. 2491, Vote #556, 10/27/95; H.C.R. 67, Vote #296, 6/29/95; S.C.R. 13, Vote #232, 5/25/95; S. 1357, Vote #499, 10/26/95; HCR 178, Vote #159, 6/13/96; HCR 178, Vote #156, 5/23/96; S 1357, Vote #524, 10/27/95; S 1357, Vote #499, 10/26/95; HCR 67, Vote #296, 6/29/95; SCR 13, Vote #232, 5/25/95; SCR 13, Vote #218, 5/25/95; S.C.R. 13, Vote #173, 5/22/95; H.R. 2491, Vote #584, 11/17/95; H.R. 2491, Vote #556, 10/27/95; S. 1932, Vote #363, 12/21/05; SCR 13, Vote #173, 5/22/95]

McCain Voted To Restrict Access To Medicare At Least TWO Times. [S 947, Vote #112, 6/24/97; S 947, Vote #115, 6/25/97]

• McCain Voted To Raise The Medicare Eligibility Age From 65 to 67. In 1997, McCain voted in favor of raising the eligibility age for receiving Medicare from 65 to 67 with the change being phased in between 2003 and 2027. The motion passed 62-38. [S 947, Vote #112, 6/24/97]

McCain Voted Against Medicare Prescription Drug Coverage At Least TWENTY-EIGHT Times. [S 1, Vote #262, 6/26/03; S1, Vote #259, 6/26/03; S 1, Vote #254, 6/26/03; S 1, Vote #253, 6/26/03; S1, Vote #250, 6/26/03; S 1, Vote #240, 6/24/03; S 1, Vote #239, 6/24/03; S 1, Vote #236, 6/24/03; S 1, Vote #234, 6/24/03; S 1, Vote #229, 6/19/03; S 1, Vote #227, 6/18/03; S. 1932, Vote #363, 12/21/05; S 1932, Vote #302, 11/3/05; S 1054, Vote #159, 5/15/03; SCR 23, Vote #89, 3/25/03; SCR 23, Vote #82, 3/25/03; SCR 23, Vote #63, 3/20/03; S 812, Vote #199, 7/31/02 ;S 812, Vote #187, 7/23/02; S 812, Vote #186, 7/23/02; S 812, Vote #182, 7/18/02; HCR 83, Vote #66, 4/3/01; HCR 83, Vote #65, 4/3/01; HR 4810, Vote #206, 7/17/00; HR 8, Vote #186, 7/13/00; HR 4577, Vote #144, 6/22/00; SCR 101, Vote #52, 4/5/00; S 1429, Vote #231, 7/29/99]

• McCain Voted Against Lowering Prescription Premiums for Medicare Recipients. In 2003, McCain voted against an amendment that would authorize $2.4 billion a year for four years to lower premiums for enrollees in a Medicare prescription drug benefit plan. The amendment failed 39-59. [S 1, Vote #254, 6/26/03]

• McCain Voted Against Ensuring Drug Coverage for Cancer Patients. In 2003, McCain voted against an amendment that would prevent any loss of drug coverage for beneficiaries with cancer before catastrophic care begins. The motion to table the amendment passed 54-44. [S1, Vote #250, 6/26/03]

• McCain Voted Against Guaranteeing Affordable Prescription Premiums for Seniors. In 2003, McCain voted against an amendment that would limit any increase in prescription drug premiums to 10 percent of the national average monthly prescription drug premium. The amendment failed 39-56. [S 1, Vote #229, 6/19/03]

McCain Has Voted Against Ensuring Medicare's Future By Opposing Efforts To Extend Its Solvency At Least NINE Times. [H.R. 1836, Vote #137, 5/22/01; H.R. 4577, Vote #162, 6/29/00; S. 1429, Vote #228, 7/29/99; H.C.R. 68, Vote #84, 4/13/99; S.C.R. 20, Vote #66, 3/25/99; S.C.R. 20, Vote #61, 3/24/99; S.C.R. 20, Vote #59, 3/24/99; S. 947, Vote #125, 6/25/97; S. 947, Vote #124, 6/25/97]

McCain Voted Against Using the Budget Surplus to Extend Medicare's Solvency. In 1999, McCain voted against including provisions that would allow targeted tax relief for low- and moderate-income working families and that would reserve a sufficient portion of projected non-Social Security surpluses to extend Medicare's solvency significantly before any budget surpluses could be used to give tax breaks that mostly benefited wealthy Americans. The motion to table passed 54-45. [H.C.R. 68, Vote #84, 4/13/99]

McCain Prioritized Tax Cuts for the Wealthy Over Saving Medicare. In 1999, McCain voted to kill an amendment that would strike the Budget Resolution's proposed $320 billion in tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans over ten years and direct the funds to Medicare or debt reduction. The motion to table passed 53-46. [S.C.R. 20, Vote #66, 3/25/99]

McCain Voted Against Protecting Social Security and Medicare. In 1999, McCain voted against an amendment that would reserve 40 percent of the non-Social Security budget surplus to ensure the solvency of Medicare through 2020 and would establish a Senate point of order against spending money reserved for Social Security or Medicare. The amendment failed 45-54. [S.C.R. 20, Vote #61, 3/24/99]

McCain Has A Record Of Opposing Access To Care For The Uninsured

McCain Voted To Deny Basic Health Protections To More Than 100 Million Americans. In 1999, McCain voted for an amendment which stated findings that attempted to justify excluding 113 million Americans from patient protection legislation and supported enacting legislation that affects only 48 million self-insured Americans; and speeds previously scheduled deductibility of health insurance costs of self-employed individuals. The amendment passed 53-47. [S 1344, Vote #202, 7/13/99]

McCain Opposed Expanding COBRA Coverage to Retirees. In 2000, McCain voted against an amendment that would have expanded COBRA coverage to include retirees whose employer-sponsored health care coverage was terminated. The amendment failed 30-68. [HR 4810, Vote #202, 7/17/00]

McCain Voted Against Increasing Benefits For Children With Special Needs In The Social Security Act. In 1997, McCain voted to table an amendment that would revise the Social Security Act to include additional benefits for children with special needs, including mental health services, as well as physical, speech and language therapy. The motion to table passed 57-43. [S 947, Vote #128, 6/25/97]

McCain Voted Against Families Who Rely On HMO-Based Health Coverage

McCain Voted Against Requiring Continued Care For HMO Patients. In 1999, McCain voted against an amendment that would require HMOs to provide at least a 90-day extension of coverage for patients undergoing treatment if their plan changes or their doctor's contract with the plan is terminated. The amendment failed 48-52. [S 1344, Vote #209, 7/15/99]

McCain Voted Against Prohibiting HMOs From Interfering In Decisions Between Doctors And Their Patients. In 1999, McCain voted for an amendment that prevented the establishment of protections to prevent inappropriate interference between health care professionals and their patients. The amendment passed 54-46. [S 1344, Vote #208, 7/15/99]

McCain Voted Against Holding HMOs Accountable For Denial Of Treatment Decisions That Lead To Death Or Injury. In 1999, McCain voted to prohibit patients from suing in state courts for damages if they are harmed by an HMO plan's denial of treatment. The amendment to strike language allowing patients to sue passed 53-47. [S 1344, Vote #206, 7/15/99]

McCain Opposes Health Care For Kids

McCain Opposed Extending Coverage To Uninsured Children. On October 31, 2007, after President Bush vetoed the first SCHIP reauthorization, McCain again opposed expanding SCHIP to millions of additional children. He voted against a motion to invoke cloture and bring the reauthorization forward for a vote before the Senate. The motion passed 62-33. [H.R. 3963, Vote #401, 10/31/07]

McCain Opposed Reauthorizing SCHIP And Providing Insurance For Millions Of Uninsured Children. In August 2007, McCain voted against passage of H.R. 976, which would have reauthorized the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). According to Knight Ridder, "The Senate proposal would provide coverage to 3.2 million" uninsured children and renew coverage for the 6 million children already covered by the program. The legislation passed 68-31. [H.R. 976, Vote #307, 8/2/07; Knight Ridder, 8/2/07]

• McCain Opposed SCHIP Because It Would Cover Too Many Children. McCain not only voted against SCHIP, he went to the Senate floor to argue against covering millions of additional children, arguing "the program has expanded beyond what Congress first intended. In some cases, SCHIP coverage has been extended to middle-income children." [Congressional Record, 8/2/07]

• McCain: Covering Uninsured Children Is Too Expensive. According to the Washington Post, McCain said, "[what] was supposed to be for low- income Americans is now up to 400 percent of the poverty level, just like the Medicare prescription drug program, an unfunded liability." [Washington Post, 10/10/07]

• McCain's Looked Out For Tobacco Industry Over American Children. The New York Times reported, "Senator John McCain opposes the so-called S-Chip bill to expand children's health care coverage, in part because it widely expands the eligibility criteria and would cost some $35 billion… But what really sets him off is the way Congress proposes to finance the measure, which President Bush vetoed and is facing a veto override vote: an added tax on cigarettes." [New York Times, 10/16/07]

• McCain Then Skipped Vote On Passage Of The Bill. After clearly registering his opposition to the SCHIP reauthorization by voting against the cloture motion, McCain skipped the vote on passage of the legislation. The bill passed 64-30. The Kansas City Star reported the bill would "provide health insurance to an additional 4 million lower-income children." [H.R. 3963, Vote #403, 11/1/07; Kansas City Star, 11/2/07]

McCain Voted Against Expanding Health Care For Pregnant Women. In 2003, McCain voted against allowing states to expand the States' Children's Health Insurance Program to include low-income pregnant women. He also voted against authorizing $10 million for a program to educate public health organizations, providers and the public about the availability and effectiveness of emergency contraceptives; allow state public health agencies to apply for grants for further programs; require private health plans to cover prescription contraceptives and related medical services; and require hospitals to make emergency contraceptives and information about them available to rape victims. [S 3, Vote #45, 3/11/03]

McCain Voted Against Allowing Uninsured Parents To Enroll In The Same Plans As Their Children. In 2000, McCain voted against an amendment would allow states to expand coverage under the Medicaid and State Children's Health Insurance Programs (S-CHIP) to the parents of the children enrolled in the program. The amendment failed 51-47. [HR 4810, Vote #204, 7/17/00]

McCain Skipped A Vote To Expand Children's Health Insurance Program to Cover Low-Income Adults. In 2000, McCain missed the chance to cast the deciding vote on an amendment that would have reduced $150 billion in tax relief by $11.2 billion over 5 years in order to increase total Federal spending by that amount to expand the Children's Health Insurance Program to cover adults as well as children. (In 1997, Congress passed the CHIP program to pay for health insurance for children in lower-income families who don't qualify for Medicaid.) The amendment failed 49-49. [SCR 101, Vote #78, 4/7/00]

McCain Voted Against Increasing Cigarette Taxes To Provide Funding For Children's Health Insurance Programs. In 1997, McCain voted against an amendment to increase the excise tax on cigarettes by 43 cents per pack to provide $12 billion for children's health insurance programs through fiscal 2002. The amendment failed 30-70. [S 949, Vote #149, 6/27/97]

McCain Voted Against Increasing The Tobacco Tax To Provide Health Insurance To Low And Moderate Income Children. In 1997, McCain voted to table an amendment that would raise an additional $30 billion in revenue by increasing the tobacco tax. Of that, $20 billion would be used to provide health insurance for low- and moderate-income children. The motion to table passed 55-45. [SCR 27, Vote #76, 5/21/97]

McCain Voted Against Efforts To Crack Down On Violent Crime

McCain Voted Against The 1994 Crime Bill That Included Comprehensive Crime Prevention Measures. In 1994, Senator McCain voted against H.R. 3355, the Violent Crime Control and Enforcement Act. The legislation passed and was signed into law by President Clinton. [H.R. 3355, Vote #295, 8/25/1994]

• McCain Voted Against $3.94 Billion For Violent Offender Incarceration. Sections 20103 and 20109 of H.R. 3355 authorized $3.94 billion for Violent Offender Incarceration Grants for Fiscal Years 1995-2000. The legislation stipulated that funds be targeted to states with the greatest need and based on the number of violent crimes reported. [H.R. 3355, accessed 9/26/08]

• McCain Voted Against Anti-Crime Initiative For Rural Areas. USA Today reported that H.R. 3355 included "$245 million for rural anti-crime efforts." [USA Today, 8/29/94]

1996: McCain Voted Against Extending Violent Crime Reduction Trust Fund. In 1996, McCain voted against extending the Violent Crime Reduction Trust Fund by an additional two years. McCain cast the deciding vote. The motion to kill the amendment passed 51-49. [S.C.R. 57, Vote #123, 5/22/1996]

McCain Voted Against Efforts To Recruit New Police Officers & Put More Cops On The Streets

McCain Voted Against The 1994 Crime Bill That Included Measures To Increase The Number Of Police Officers On The Streets. In 1994, Senator McCain voted against H.R. 3355, the Violent Crime Control and Enforcement Act. The legislation passed and was signed into law by President Clinton. [H.R. 3355, Vote #295, 8/25/1994]

• McCain Voted Against Adding 100,000 Police Officers Nationwide. USA Today reported that H.R. 3355 included funding "to add 100,000 police officers nationwide for police patrols." [USA Today, 8/29/94]

• McCain Voted Against $100 Million For Police Officer Scholarships. USA Today reported that H.R. 3355 included "$100 million for college scholarships for future and current police officers." [USA Today, 8/29/94]

2006: McCain Voted Against $16.5 Billion in Funding for State and Local First Responders. In 2006, McCain voted against providing an additional $16.5 billion for state and local first responder grant programs to be paid for by reducing some of the Bush tax cuts for people making more than $1 million per year. Both Senators Obama and Clinton voted in favor of the funding. The motion failed 38-62. [H.R. 5441, Vote #197, 7/12/2006]

2005: McCain Voted Against Additional Law Enforcement Funding. In 2005, McCain voted against increasing funding for the Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) program by $1 billion, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children by $10 million, and the Office of Violence Against Women by $9 million. Both Senators Obama and Clinton voted in favor of the additional funding. The motion failed 41-56. [H.R. 2862, Vote #226, 9/13/2005]

2003: McCain Voted Against Increasing Spending on COPS Program by $1 Billion. In 2003, McCain voted against increasing spending on the Community-Oriented Policing Services programs by $1 billion in Fiscal Year 2004 and put $1 billion toward deficit reduction. The spending would be offset by a $2 billion reduction in tax cuts. The amendment failed 48-52. [SCR 23, Vote #78, 3/21/2003]

1999: McCain Skipped Close Vote to Extend COPS Program. In 1999, McCain skipped the vote on an amendment to extend the COPS program from Fiscal Year 2000 to Fiscal Year 2005 and authorize $1.15 billion annually for 2001-2005. The amendment would have authorized $600 million annually to fund up to 50,000 police officers, including hiring new officers. It also would have authorized $350 million annually for new law enforcement technology. The amendment failed 48-50. [S. 254, Vote #139, 5/20/1999]

1999: McCain Voted Against Extending COPS Program. In 1999, McCain voted against expanding the COPS program for two years to help hire 25,000 new police officers. The amendment also would have increased penalties for drug sales to children and for sales near schools, and increased penalties for transferring handguns and assault weapons to juveniles. The motion to kill the amendment passed 54-44. [S. 254, Vote #109, 5/12/1999]

1996: McCain Voted Against Cops on the Beat Program. In 1996, McCain voted against providing $1.8 billion for the Cops on the Beat program in Fiscal Year 1996. The program aimed to put 100,000 police officers on the street and was established by the Crime Control Act of 1994. The cost would be offset by reducing law enforcement block grants in the bill. The motion to kill the amendment passed 52-48. [H.R. 3019, Vote #31, 3/13/1996]

McCain Voted Against Efforts To Crack Down On Gangs

McCain Voted Against The 1994 Crime Bill That Included Measures To Crack Down On Gangs. In 1994, Senator McCain voted against H.R. 3355, the Violent Crime Control and Enforcement Act. The legislation passed and was signed into law by President Clinton. [H.R. 3355, Vote #295, 8/25/1994]

• McCain Voted Against Funding For "Safe Haven" After School Program For Kids. USA Today reported that H.R. 3355 included "$567 million for after-school, weekend and summer 'safe haven' programs for kids; and $243 million for in-school programs providing positive activities and alternatives to crime and drug abuse." [USA Today, 8/29/94]

• McCain Voted Against Anti-Gang Programs. USA Today reported that H.R. 3355 included "$377 million to be used for anti-gang programs, midnight sports leagues, boys and girls clubs and other projects." [USA Today, 8/29/94]

McCain Voted Against Funding for After-School Programs to Reduce Juvenile Crime. In 1999, McCain voted to table an amendment to authorize $600 million in each of FY 2000-2004 for after-school programs. The programs' goals included reducing juvenile crime, increasing academic success of students, promoting safe and productive environments for students, and providing alternatives to drugs, tobacco, and gangs. Motion to table agreed to 53-47. [S 254, Vote #132, 5/19/99]

McCain Voted Against Increasing Funding for After-School Programs. In 1999, McCain voted to kill an amendment that increased funding for the 21st Century Learning Center Program from $200 million to $600 million to help additional 1.1 million children participate in after-school and summer school programs. The funding would permit mentoring, academic assistance, drug, alcohol, and gang prevention programs to be funded through 21st Century Learning Center Program. Motion to table agreed to 55-44. [S 280, Vote #44, 3/11/99]

Governor Sarah Palin's Policies Hurt Alaska's Families

As Governor, Palin Stripped Over $1 Million In Funding For Seniors

Palin Personally Cut Nearly $250,000 For Seniors In S.B. 53:

Amount Palin Cut	Purpose Of Funding Cut By Palin
$100,000	AARP Ketchikan – Access Road for Ketchikan Senior Housing Project
$20,000	Catholic Community Services - Angoon Senior Center Stove, Refrigerator, and Freezer
$15,000	Kodiak Senior Center Facilities Repair and Equipment
$75,000	Sterling Area Senior Center, Inc. (SASCI) - Sterling Senior Center Improvements
$39,000	Wrangell - Medical Center 12-Passenger Handicapped Bus

[S.B. 53 Vetoes via Legis.State.AK.us, accessed 9/1/08]

Palin Personally Cut More Than $1.16 Million For Seniors In S.B. 221:

Amount Palin Cut	Purpose Of Funding Cut By Palin
$20,000	Catholic Community Services - Angoon Senior Center Stove, Refrigerator and Freezer
$300,000	Ketchikan Senior Citizens, Inc. - Access Road for Pioneer Heights
$50,000	Alaska State Hospital & Nursing Home Association - Anchorage Medical Clinic Study
$20,000	Alpha Omega Life Care, Inc. - Delivery Van and Moveable Building
$150,000	Anchor - Age Center - Study of Future Needs
$50,000	Homer Senior Citizens Senior Housing Land Purchase
$162,000	Inuit Circumpolar Council Youth and Elder Program
$20,000	Older Persons Action Group - Senior Voice Equipment Upgrade
$125,000	Statewide Independent Living Centers - Assistive Technology for Alaska's Centers for Independent Living
$270,000	Haines Senior Assisted Living Center for removal and disposal of the Alaskan and Proud buildings in Haines

[S.B. 221 Vetoes via Legis.State.AK.us, accessed 9/9/08]

As Governor, Palin Stripped Nearly $4 Million For Programs For Women & Families

Palin Personally Cut $52,000 For Women & Families In S.B. 53

Amount Palin Cut	Purpose Of Funding Cut By Palin
$52,000	Salvation Army Alaska Division - Booth Memorial Youth and Family Services Facility Upgrade

[S.B. 53 Vetoes via Legis.State.AK.us, accessed 9/1/08]

Palin Personally Cut More Than $3.71 Million For Women & Families In S.B. 221

Amount Palin Cut	Purpose Of Funding Cut By Palin
$50,000	Alaska Family Services, Inc - Vehicle, Fencing and Furniture for The New Behavioral Health Services Building
$150,000	Catholic Community Resources - Fairbanks Counseling & Adoption
$3,500,000	Cook Inlet Housing Authority - Workforce Development Student Housing and Day Care Facility Services
$15,840	Resource Center for Parents and Children - Women, Infant, and Children (WIC) Program

[S.B. 221 Vetoes via Legis.State.AK.us, accessed 9/9/08]

As Governor, Palin Stripped Over $100,000 For Victims' Programs

Palin Personally Cut $94,000 For Victims' Programs In S.B. 53

Amount Palin Cut	Purpose Of Funding Cut By Palin
$50,000	Victims for Justice - Program Support
$44,000	Interior Alaska Center for Non-Violent Living - Facility Improvement Grant

[S.B. 53 Vetoes via Legis.State.AK.us, accessed 9/1/08]

Palin Personally Cut $25,000 For Victims' Programs In S.B. 221

Amount Palin Cut	Purpose Of Funding Cut By Palin
$25,000	Victims Assistance Academy Establishment

[S.B. 221 Vetoes via Legis.State.AK.us, accessed 9/9/08]

Governor Palin Stalled Health Care Reform

Palin's Hometown Paper Criticized Her For Stalling Health Care Reform. According to Think ProgressJP, "Five months ago, Gov. Sarah Palin's (R-AK) home town newspaper, the Anchorage Daily News, strongly criticized the governor for stalling comprehensive health care reform. The editorial argued that while Palin promised to 'tackle tough health care problems head-on' during her election bid, she failed to 'get behind the most significant piece of health legislation offered – a proposal to ensure that all residents have health insurance, without disrupting the coverage that many Alaskans already have.'" [Think Progress, 9/4/08]

Legislation Signed By Palin Maintained Eligibility Level For Children's Health Care That Kept Alaska Among Worst In The Nation. According to Think ProgressJP, "Palin also signed legislation updating Alaska's SCHIP program, Denali KidCare. SB-27 maintained the eligibility level-which had dropped to an effective rate of almost 150 percent of the poverty line due to inflation. However, by limiting eligibility to families living below 175 percent of the poverty line, Alaska's eligibility criteria are still among the lowest in the nation. Unfortunately, Palin did not support legislation to expand eligibility to higher levels." [Think Progress, 9/4/08]

• Palin Was Not Involved In 2007 Children's Health Care Debate. According to Think ProgressJP, "Indeed, a review of Palin's health care record suggests that Palin has done little to increase access to affordable coverage. During the national debate about expanding the State Children [sic] Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), for instance, Palin offered little leadership in comparison to her colleagues and failed to advocate for expanded children's coverage." [Think Progress, 9/4/08]

McCain Camp Denies Plans for Massive Medicare Cuts

CQ Politics | McCain Camp Denies Plans for Massive Medicare Cuts

A published report suggesting that Republican presidential nominee