Category: Politics

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A bailout I do understand

I don’t want to dwell too much on the $700 billion bailout/buy-in/rescue package to save the markets and the economies of the world, mainly because there are plenty of other places to read all about it. But I will say this:

  • I think this is an excellent example of poor explanation, communication, and/or rhetoric. I consider myself to be a reasonably smart guy who keeps up with the news, though I will freely admit that money and economics are not exactly my strong suit. But as far as I can tell, no one has really explained just what the hell this money is for, why this is necessary, why it would work, and why spending $700 billion (or so– as best I can tell from what I’ve heard, this number is essentially made up) on banks would be a better way to help the economy than spending $700 billion on nearly anything else. But I am planning on listening to This American Life this weekend because they are going to do a show that attempts to actually do what the politicians should be doing: explaining this to constituents.
  • What we’re seeing here, IMO, is what happens after we forced through the Patriot Act without debating/thinking about it, and after the White House flat-out lied to get us into Iraq, the most disastrous war in our history, and after Paulson, Bush, etc. are now saying “the sky is falling” when just a few months ago they were saying everything was hunky-dory. Every American toddler knows the story of Chicken Little and the boy who cried wolf; why the current administration doesn’t understand that is a mystery to me.
  • The only bailout I have understood lately is Charles Bernstein’s proposed poetry bailout. Bernstein writes:

    As we know, lax composition practices since the advent of modernism led to irresponsible poets and irresponsible readers. Simply put, too many poets composed works they could not justify. We are seeing the impact on poetry, with a massive loss of confidence on the part of readers. What began as a subprime poetry problem on essentially unregulated poetry websites has spread to other, more stable, literary magazines and presses and contributed to excess poetry inventories that have pushed down the value of responsible poems.

    Though I think going all the way back to 1904 to clear out the glut of poems might be a few years too far.

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Who won?

I thought last night’s debate was a draw, but this was a very interesting clip that I found via dailykos:

Now, if the very conservative pollster Frank Luntz on the very VERY conservative Fox News suggest Obama won, then maybe he did.

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Do you need another reason to be scared of McCain?

Are you sure? Okay, check out this from Paul Kurgman; I’ll quote him quoting from an essay that McCain wrote for Contingencies Magazine, which is published for/by the American Academy of Actuaries (yeah, my subscription ran out):

Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation.

Yes, because deregulation has worked out so well for the banking industry. And btw, this article where McCain says this just came out– this isn’t something he said a year or two ago.

A slight addendum:

I came across this via Mark Maynard’s blog:

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What’s happened to McCain (again)?

Finally, there’s a little bit of “strike back” against the lies of the John McCain campaign and the utter confusion and flip-flops of the candidate himself. Take a look at this new ad from Obama:

Thanks to Mark Maynard for posting this; and thanks also for posting this little snippet of video that was on Huffington Post where Karl “the meaning of evil” Rove even said that McCain et al are going too far.

I’d like to see something even a more aggressive, personally. I think it would be completely fair game for Obama to go on, look straight into the camera, and say something like “John McCain and his campaign are flat-out lying and they owe me and the American people an apology for sinking to these low and desperate tactics.” Or something like that.

And something needs to be made of this too: there was a story on NPR this morning with the misleading headline, “McCain: ‘I Know Americans Are Hurting Now.” Be sure to take a listen. The stock market dropped 500 points yesterday and a slew of economists and experts have been parading through radio and TV shows saying that this is the worst financial crisis since the great depression. And yet, as this story clearly reports, McCain was muddled at best. At the same time they were running an ad about the failed economy, McCain was at a rally in Florida where he said (more or less) “I still think the U.S. economy fundamentals remain strong.” An hour or so later, he gave a different speech at a different rally where McCain repeats the phrase “our economy is at risk” over and over. Un-freakin-believable.

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Daily Show pegs the hypocrisy issue

After Pallin spoke last night, I switched over to The Daily Show, which was absolutely brilliant. Boing-boing agreed and posted this fantastic segment:

This was followed up with a chat with that night’s guest, Newt Gingrich, and the whole thing with Palin’s pregnant daughter came up. Stewart pointed out that Palin said that keeping the baby was her daughter’s choice, which, hypocritically enough, would not be a choice at all if Palin had her way. After all, she supports the most extreme of anti-choice positions where women couldn’t get an abortion under any circumstances– rape, incest, endangering the life of the mother, nothing. If Palin’s view of the world was the way things were, there’d be no choice on the matter at all.

McCain presses along in a drowsy manner. Some protesters were removed early on. His education policy sounds a lot like the failed “No Child Left Behind” to me. Everyone got very excited about “drill now,” which might have some unintended connotations.

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As I brace myself for Sarah Palin….

I am typing this just as Sarah “the Moose Hunter” Palin is taking the stage at the RNC. I have braced myself for the affair with a cocktail.

I’m not going to bother any live blogging– perhaps there will be a little reflection afterwords depending on how it goes. But I thought I would instead share a few videos I came across. First, there is this one, which I came across via Daily Kos but which is a straight-up mainstream media report on Palin:

It’s been pretty interesting seeing the mainstream media going after McCain lately, especially on Palin, and which is especially ironic since McCain and the media have had quite the lovefest over the last couple years. This has been reported in a couple of places, but McCain has apparently pulled out of a few interviews with CNN over this interview by Campbell “cute as a button” Brown with McCain spokesperson Tucker Bound. Here’s some entertaining video on that:

And then there’s this funny and “not safe for work”/filled with potty-mouth parody that might be a little too true about how the Palin choice really came to pass:

You got to watch it through to the end where Palin yells out “who wants to go polar bear hunting?”

Anyway, her speech so far has been kinda boring, at least to me. I am sure she is still exciting the base, but I doubt she’s changing minds out there in undecided-land, and there seems a lot of people in St. Paul who don’t look that excited either.

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John McCain, because he cares so much

The Republicans are having a “subdued” convention start because of Hurricane Gustav, but let’s be clear about this: the reason the GOP is taking this approach is because W. et al screwed up the response to Hurricane Katrina was so completely. We know that during Hurricane Katrina, W. was busy congratulating Brownie for doing a heck of a job.

Happy Birthday, McCainBut what about John McCain? Well, as Salon.com reminds us here, Johnny was sharing a little cake with George while New Orleans was turning into a disaster zone. And as this clip (via boing-boing) makes clear, McCain must have been on some kind of frosting sugar-high when contemplating the seriousness of the mistakes FEMA was making in 2005:

So what have we learned? McCain really likes birthday cake and horses. And apparently he’s okay with unwed mothers, too.

It’s interesting because Republicans would say that the big plus that McCain has over Obama is experience– his wisdom, his statesmanship, his good judgment, etc. But when we actually look back at his judgment about some particular issues like Katrina, like saying we’ll be in Iraq for 1,000 years, like any number of other weird things McCain has done and said, Republicans say we should give him a break for speaking off the cuff.

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Obama “Seven” ad: This one might have legs

Or so I can hope:

The upshot here is that McCain was asked during a press conference where he said everything was “okie-dokie” with the economy, someone asked him how many houses he owned, and he said he couldn’t remember and to “get back” with him on that. Here’s the video:

To be fair, the Obamas are hardly paupers themselves, though I have to assume that they own only one home. It’d be a pretty bad “don’t throw rocks if you live in glass houses” sort of political move if that weren’t the case. And, as I heard clarified on NPR this evening, the McCains really have “only” four homes they use on a regular basis: one in Virginia, two in Arizona, and one in California. The McCain spokesperson said that there were other “investment properties” in the mix.

Still, this whole thing raises a couple of important points.

First, John McCain is rich— like really freakin’ rich. Well, at least his wife is really rich– she inherited one of the largest beer distributor businesses in the country– but that seems like fair territory to me since so much was made of Kerry’s rich wife by George “my family has more money than God and Satan combined” H.W. Bush. Obama has had his own quasi-shady real estate dealings, but as FactCheck.org suggests, there’s really not a there there.

Second, how full of dementia do you have to be to forget and/or not be able to clearly answer the simple question “how many houses do you own?”

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The war on terror takes on “War On Terror: The Game”

A couple months ago, I went with my friend Chris to a gaming conference for a day in Columbus. One of the many games I saw that I almost bought was War on Terror. I didn’t get it because it looked a little too expensive for me. Well, I learned via boing-boing this morning, that had I bought it, I might have had it confiscated.

War on Terror GameNot really. But at least one version the game was seized by police in the UK because the balaclava, which is the little hat thing that says “evil” on it and which is one of the satirical props of the game, could be used in a criminal act. Here’s a link to the article in the Cambridge News, and here’s the blog entry from the War On Terror boardgame web site.

Perhaps the criminal could hit someone with a snow globe. Dirty bastards.

By the way, the photo featured here comes from the WOT web site and is part of contest they’ve had for creative pictures featuring gamers wearing the evil balaclava.