We Won!

Our opponent gave one of the most gracious concession speeches.  I only wish his campaign had been as classy.

Thank you, Senator McCain, for trying to bring America together behind our new president-elect.

McCain understands the middle class

From the last debate: should we be buying mortgages?

In last night's debate, Sen. McCain suggested that the Treasury Secretary should be buying up individual mortgages to help out homeowners. Seems like a winner for the middle class, until you read up a bit more. Get the skinny from economist Brad DeLong:

The McCain plan is:

• Take $300 billion.
• Pay double current market value to banks that have troubled mortgages on their books, thus:
  • Give a present of $100 billion to the bankers who made the loans.
  • Acquire and regularize the mortgages of only two-thirds as many homeowners as could have been accomplished if the $300 billion were invested wisely.

There's a big difference here: Democrats want to prevent depression and support the financial markets by investing taxpayer money in banks with troubled assets. Republicans want to give taxpayers money away to the shareholders and managers of banks with troubled assets.

His entire post is worth a read, because he explains the fundamental difference between the European actions and Secretary Paulson's plan, and why the former is a lot more likely to return taxpayer money.

McCain: how many times can you flip-flop in one interview?

Skip to 1:45 for John McCain's opinion(s) on the bailout bill that just passed. Many opinions, my precious.

Foreign policy: can experience temper belligerence?

Times columnists Nicholas Kristof frequently writes on international issues and rarely on politics, but he breaks from that tradition to warn how Sen. McCain may be a return to the foreign policy of the first Bush term.

Although he is frantically trying to distance himself from President Bush, Mr. McCain, by his own accounting, would be more Bushian in foreign policy than even Mr. Bush is now.

Let's start with Iran, with its theocratic regime, hatred of Israel, and interest in nuclear armaments. 

Iran seems determined to continue its uranium enrichment and will be vexing for any president. But Mr. Bush, under the influence of Bob Gates and Condoleezza Rice, has realized that the best hope is diplomacy and negotiation. In contrast, Mr. McCain denounces Barack Obama’s call for direct talks with Iranian leaders and speaks openly about the possibility of bombing Iranian nuclear sites. 

“There’s only one thing worse than military action against Iran, and that is a nuclear-armed Iran,” Mr. McCain has told me and others, repeating the line regularly. That’s a nice sound bite, but it suggests that if Iran continues to enrich uranium he would feel obliged to launch airstrikes...

So if Iran continues its policies as most expect, we might well find ourselves under a McCain presidency headed toward our third war with a Muslim country.

And then there's the newly belligerent Russia.

Russia underscores Mr. McCain’s penchant for risk-taking, theatrics and fulmination. Most striking, he wants to kick Russia out of the Group of 8.

Mr. McCain’s lead-with-the-chin approach to Russia reflects the same pugnacity that resulted in obscenity-laced dust-ups with fellow Republican senators, but it’s less endearing when the risk is nuclear war. Do we really want to risk an exchange of nuclear warheads over Abkhazia or South Ossetia? The Spanish prime minister, José Zapatero, told me a few days ago that what he fears most under a McCain administration is a revival of the cold war with Russia.

Anyone recall the ad, Daisy?

A great debate

If you missed it, you can still catch the first presidential campaign debate here.  The best?  Plenty of time for the candidates to go back and forth, to challenge inaccuracies and to provide point-counterpoint.  It was a DEBATE.

I hope the other two live up to this.

Oh, and if you haven't, always follow up your debate watch with a visit to Factcheck.org.  Get the truth.

Comparing presidential tax plans

Which do you prefer, tax cuts with debt or tax cuts that are paid for?  That's your choice in the tax plans of the campaign.  McCain's plans skews to the rich (in percent of income and absolute dollars) and will increase the deficit.  Obama's plan offers tax cuts skewed toward the middle class and pays for it with an income tax surcharge on the very rich.

 

2008 Campaign: Some media are aware of the lies

A stunning piece in TIME Magazine looks at the persistence of lying the presidential campaign, singling out Senator McCain for:

a ceaseless assault on his opponent's character and policies, featuring a consistent—and witting—disdain for the truth.

It's not as though the Democratic campaign and Senator Obama are innocent of the typical political monkeying with truth, but McCain has taken the lying to a new level by unreproachfully repeating falsehoods even when confronted with truth. 

John McCain has raised serious questions about whether he has the character to lead the nation. He has defaced his beloved military code of honor. He has run a dirty campaign.

McCain - sounding a lot like Herbert Hoover

Responding to the collapse of several major investment banks this week, John McCain reassured us, "I think still -- the fundamentals of our economy are strong." That move comes from an old playbook: On Oct. 25, 1929, Herbert Hoover declared, "The fundamental business of the country, that is the production and distribution of commodities, is on a sound and prosperous basis."

McCain's fault is not just a lack of perspective on the economy, but also a willful support of deregulation that caused much of today's financial crisis.

What [McCain] doesn't talk much about is how deregulation happened. It was the 1999 Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act that repealed the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act and thus eliminated the depression-era walls between between banking, investment, and insurance that made this crisis possible. Glass-Stegall erected walls between banking, investment management, and insurance, so problems in one sector could not spill over into the others, which is precisely what is happening now. The primary author of that legislation was none other than his economic advisor, former senator Phil Gramm (who thinks the country is in a "mental recession"). McCain fully supported the bill and has a decades-long track record of opposing government regulation of the financial industry. His new-found conversion to being a fan of regulation is going to be a tough sell as Obama is already pointing out that McCain got what he wanted (deregulation) and this is the consequence.

The sin of symmetry

An interesting piece from the Washington Post that notes the media's penchant for symmetry (instead of being objective, truth seekers) and how it's allowing the McCain campaign to run roughshod over the truth.

The most outrageous of McCain's distortions involve Obama on taxes. He asserts that Obama's new taxes could "break your family budget," and that an Obama presidency would inflict "painful tax increases on working American families." Hardly. Obama would lower taxes for most households, and lower them more than McCain would. The only "painful tax increases on working American families" would be on working families making more than $250,000.

Likewise, the McCain campaign has its story about Sarah Palin, and it's sticking with it -- facts be damned. She said "thanks but no thanks" to that "Bridge to Nowhere," except that she didn't: She backed the bridge until it was unpopular, then scooped up the money and used it for other projects. More than a year after McCain began railing against the bridge, Palin, then a gubernatorial candidate, said the state should build it "now -- while our congressional delegation is in a strong position to assist." 

 Obama's not innocent of stretching the truth, but he's also got enough of a conscience to stop lying when he's caught.  McCain, on the other hand, is "playing to win."

Lipstick on a pig

I'll let Obama respond to this latest example of "phony outrage":

Charting health care

Paul Krugman provides an illustration of the presidential candidates' health care plans versus "busienss as usual."  While no one covers everyone, Obama's plan is the only one that shrinks the number of uninsured.

Good questions on Iraq for Senator McCain

Courtesy of political writer Eric Black:

1. If, as you hope, U.S. troops will be in Iraq for 100 years, what will that do to the perception that the U.S. seeks to dominate Middle East? Given the widespread dislike in Iraq and in the Arab world for the U.S. occupation of Iraq, what would the 100-year bases do to the standing — among its own people and among its neighbors -- of an Iraqi government that would reach such a long-term basing deal? Are you concerned about that?


2. Your reference to the long-term U.S. troop presence in Germany, Japan and Korea is designed to illustrate that U.S. troops can be present in foreign bases without facing daily combat or casualties. My question is: How soon and at what cost in blood and treasure do you believe that the situation in Iraq — specifically the situation regarding the safety and normalcy of U.S. troops in Iraq — will resemble the situations in Germany, Japan and Korea?


3. Your stay-until-victory policy (we'll leave for another day the question of how, precisely, to describe and define "victory"), will impose more costs, new costs, in blood and treasure...what might those additional costs be, in lives lost and lives shattered and dollars extracted from U.S. taxpayers and damage to the U.S. reputation in the world, before the situation of the U.S. military in Iraq resembles the situation in Germany?

Are we really still debating experience?

Apparently the Clinton campaign is asserting that John McCain is more experienced than Obama, with the conclusion that Democrats would be better off voting for the Republican Senator than Mr Obama(?). I already covered the inanity of the experience argument, but here's another taste.

From the Votemaster, a table of presidents ranked by greatness (a consensus among many different surveys) with their respective experience. An analysis freebie: the top ten presidents averaged 10 years experience; the bottom ten had 14 years. So much for learning from your mistakes. And then there's this anecdote:

Suppose you had to choose between two Presidential candidates, one of whom had spent 20 years in Congress plus had considerable other relevant experience and the other of whom had about half a dozen years in the Illinois state legislature and 2 years in Congress. Which one do you think would make a better President? If you chose #1, congratulations, you picked James Buchanan over Abraham Lincoln. Your pick disagrees with that of most historians, who see Lincoln as the greatest President ever and Buchanan as the second worst ever...

An editor's assessment of the McCain lobbyist story

If you missed the big brouhaha yesterday, the NY Times published a piece about a longstanding (professional) relationship between Senator John McCain and a lobbyist. The point of the article was to express the disconnect between McCain's principled stand against lobbyists ever since his humiliation in the Keating Five scandal and the relationship he cultivated. The angle of the story was lost in the heated media debate about it, with many people calling it a "smear."

For those interested, the NY Times editors responded today to questions about the article. It's a nice counterpoint to those blaming the "liberal media" and is worth considering in the larger context of the story.

I should note that I think the article spent too much time hinting at a possible romantic connection between the Senator and the lobbyist, since the purported point was to illustrate the issue of his political principles.

John McCain gets "hacked" on MySpace

Republicans have gotten savvy to the internet and Senator John McCain is no exception. He recently set up a MySpace page to connect to the younger element. However, the staffer setting up the page used a template from another person without attribution and committed an internet faux pas (to which I have also been guilty) - he linked directly to the image on the other person's server.

In other words, every time someone went to Mr. McCain's MySpace page, that image was delivered through the other dude's server, at his expense.

Well, the dude struck back. Editing the original image on his own server, he effectively "hacked" McCain's MySpace page by changing the e-mail link image to one that indicated the Senator's support for gay marriage. Remote image linking justice dispensed!

Note: I'm going back through my own posts at this point to clean up my own image linking indiscretions.

Waste

1. use or expend carelessly, extravagantly, or to no purpose.
2. (usu. be wasted) fail to make full or good use of

By invading Iraq and failing to develop an adequate security plan, President Bush has carelessly expended American lives and failed to make good use of American military power that could have helped in Afghanistan.

When Republican John McCain (or Democrat Barack Obama) says we've "wasted lives" in Iraq, I don't think an apology is necessary.