Party Identification Failure

Check out this picture.

Now, people have suggested that the scarf is horses, not donkeys, but still, if you have hundreds of thousands of dollars to purchase your wardrobe with, don't you think maybe it's best to avoid this scarf, even if it only LOOKS like you're subtly supporting the other party?

Liam.

P.S. The guy who sent the link to me followed it up with "Though to be fair... donkeys have longer ears." and a moment later with "oh, and the ears on the scarf are too short, too."

Al Qaeda Endorses John McCain?

Of course not. But if the news today had come out the other direction, you can be certain we'd be hearing it non-stop out of the McCain camp.

Certain al Qaeda websites have posted messages indicating glee at our current financial troubles and the fervent hope that hot-headed John McCain wins our next election, so that he'll continue to further our fiscal woes with wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

This is a non-issue, or should be. But it rings back in my head to 2004, when we heard incessantly how al Qaeda wanted Kerry to win, and it just reminds me how ugly and dirty politics have gotten, and how angry I was at the time.

So, what's good for the goose is good for the gander. To use John McCain's latest rhetorical flourish, I think the American public needs to know more about McCain's ties to al Qaeda, and to ask themselves why al Qaeda would prefer him as our next President.

Of course it's ludicrous. But if things were reversed, I'll lay good odds that the OTHER side wouldn't be so quick to call it ludicrous. Remember back in April, when McCain said Obama was the Hamas choice? He said essentially that.

Liam.

Fiscal Responsibility

Another news story that broke recently is interesting less for what it is than for what it represents to a party that took such great umbrage to John Edwards' $400 haircut, using it to paint him as elitist and out of touch with average Americans:

Since being selected as running mate for John McCain, the Republican National Committee has spent over $150,000 on clothing and make-up for Gov. Palin and her family.

That's almost $2,500 per day since she was selected, more each day than the average family spends ANNUALLY on clothing (per the Bureau of Labor Statistics). More than four times the annual income of "Joe the Plumber", if he earns the median salary for plumbers ($37,514 per salary.com).

Now, there's probably nothing LEGALLY wrong with this, as the campaign and the RNC say all of the clothing will be donated to charity once the campaign is over.

Still, for a woman who spends much of her time trying to appeal as a "joe six-pack" and "hockey mom" every-woman, this shows how out of touch she actually is with average America.

Turnabout is fair play. If Edwards was out of touch because he got a haircut which turned out to cost $400, what does this say about Palin?

Liam.

Palin v. Constitution

Check out this frightening video (below). Sarah Palin has made this mistake before, but it was caught and corrected and she's still asserting it.

At issue is the job of the Vice President. Shades of Cheney's claim that the VP was neither part of the Executive branch nor the Legislative, Palin asserts that the VP is "in charge of the U.S. Senate so if they want to they can really get in there with the senators and make a lot of good policy changes that will make life better for Brandon and his family and his classroom."

The truth is that the Constitution is clear, "The Vice President of the United States shall be President of the Senate, but shall have no vote, unless they be equally divided." That does not mean control, it means the ONLY time such officer has any control in the Senate is when the vote is exactly split, he or she casts the tiebreaking vote. That's it.

The definition or role of "President of the Senate" is not further defined and is thus left to the discretion OF the Senate. The Senate web site makes it clear that although early code of conduct rules for the Senate gave the VP (as President of the Senate) great power in shaping the agenda OF the Senate, currently the role is considered largely ceremonial, except for those critical tie-breaking votes.

And because it is defined by the rules of the Senate, it does not appear that a Vice President could change that back without agreement of the Senate, or one must surely conclude Dick Cheney would already have done it.

This is at best a level of misunderstanding of the way the job works that should give serious questions about Palin's fitness for the job, and at worst a statement of intention to further shift the balance of power in favor of the executive branch, until we end up with a monarch instead of a President.

Scary.

Liam.

Suspended Campaigns...

Now this, I think, is a legitimate reason to suspend a campaign.

Barack Obama has announced that he will be cancelling his campaign events for two days to fly back to Hawaii to visit his ailing grandmother, whose health has reportedly taken a turn for the worse.

But to me, this differs from McCain's much touted "suspension" of his campaign over the bailout bill in several important ways. There is something useful Obama can do, his grandmother isn't going to suddenly fail moments after it looks like she's going to recover just because Obama sticks his nose in.

And more importantly, I don't expect Obama to make any political hay out of this, or even to try. He announced this with little fanfare, just enough to let people who had been planning to attend campaign events he was no longer going to participate in change their plans.

I predict little further mention of it by Obama, except to answer questions asked of him. I also predict ads from the McCain camp claiming that Obama wouldn't suspend when it was "important", and that this shows a lack of proper priorities on Obama's part.

And if I'm right, and we see that, just keep repeating "these are what real family values look like" until the lie is transparent.

Liam.

More on Torture

And the last one for today... A story from the Washington Post that gives yet more evidence that the White House not only knew about the specific torture practices we were using on prisoners, such as waterboarding, it actively condoned those methods.

Read the article. It will make you proud to be an American... if you're insane.

Liam.

More Signing Statements

Here is an article from the New York Times from the past week.

It tells of a recent pair of bills President Bush signed into law, but then "issued a so-called signing statement in which he instructed the executive branch to view parts of each as unconstitutional constraints on presidential power.".

This continues to be a usurpation of both Legislative and Judicial powers. The Executive Branch executes the laws. Period. They do not determine what is or is not constitutional, that's the job of the judiciary. And they do not have a line item veto.

This signing statement business has to go. Using it as former Presidents have, to clarify their understanding of a particularly ambiguously worded bit of legalese is reasonable. Using them in lieu of a veto, as a line-item veto (which has itself been found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court), and not subject to an override vote by the Congress (which is also an unconstitutional power grab) shows just how far Bush believes his power reaches, and no one is calling him on it.

One bill was a military authorization act, and President Bush's signing statement attempts to negate parts that "forbid the money from being used to exercise United States control of the oil resources of Iraq" and "required negotiations for an agreement by which Iraq would share some of the costs of the American military operations there."

Remember when they told us that the war wouldn't cost us very much, because Iraqi oil profits would pay for it? Now he's refusing even to negotiate that the Iraqis shoulder any of the burden.

The second bill was "a measure giving inspectors general greater independence from White House control." and Bush's signing statements significantly weakened the measure.

Now, we can debate the merits of the two bills, I'm not necessarily arguing that they are good law, but the fact is that the Constitution gives the President two options only: Sign the bills or veto them (either actively or by allowing the signing time limit to expire, the so-called "pocket veto"). In either case, the Congress has the option of overriding the veto and enacting the law anyway.

This unconstitutional use of signing statements changes the fundamental balance of power, because instead of taking the risk that Congress will enact a bill the President doesn't like, he simply alters the content of the bill (something he has no constitutional right to do) by directing his Executive Branch not to follow certain portions.

This should be enough to get the man impeached. If the Democratic members of Congress had any spines at all, he would have been, long since.

Liam.

How Important is Terrorist Support to McCain?

Last week, John McCain put up this list of prominent supporters. In the section titled "FORMER U.S. AMBASSADORS FOR MCCAIN-PALIN", check out the second name.

Lenore Annenberg

Yes, the same Annenberg that is responsible for the Annenberg Foundation, supporters of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, the people who put up all of the money for William Ayres in the venture that eventually also had as a board member one Barack Obama, for which he has taken so much heat.

So apparently, if you sit on the board of a charitable foundation with someone who was a terrorist when you were pre-pubescent, that's unacceptable. But if you give large sums of money to a charitable foundation STARTED by that terrorist, then you're perfectly welcome to support John McCain.

Anyone want to guess what kind of hoopla we'd be hearing if Lenore Annenberg had supported Obama?

Liam.

P.S. Someone recently suggested to me that factcheck.org (which receives its major funding from the Annenberg Foundation) might be biased in favor of Obama, since he sat on the board of an Annenberg funded charity. I think this pretty well trumps that. I'm still willing to take factcheck.org as non-partisan and unbiased, but I certainly will not listen to people tell me that they're likely to choose to be biased towards someone who was once one member of a board of people on a charity funded by Annenberg over someone the leader of the foundation supports.

ACORN

You may have noticed, I’ve been pretty silent on here the last week or so. As long time readers will recall, I tend to go through phases. I get a lot of energy for things political, and then I get tired and need a break. I guess I’m sort of in a break right now, but there’s one story that I’ve followed and I decided I need to comment on: The whole ACORN "voter fraud" story.

There is a lot that’s been written on this, but I just wanted to throw out a few important bullet points to counteract the whole tizzy that’s going on.

First, understand that this isn’t voter fraud, this is voter REGISTRATION fraud. The whole story is that ACORN employees are defrauding ACORN, because they are paid by the number of registrations they (the employees) turn in. So ACORN is paying people for fraudulent registrations that in virtually every case will never be used. It’s not that there’s someone who is going to show up and try to vote as “Mickey Mouse”, it’s that ACORN paid someone for that registration, even though no such person will ever show up to vote. Also, the one case that has been pointed out many times, where one gentleman registered something like 50 times under his own name and address… that’s going to get him exactly ONE vote. ACORN was cheated out of 49 registration payments, but there will only be ONE registration when that man comes in to vote.

Second, people are pointing at ACORN as the source of the problem, but they are the ones who pointed out the problem. The law requires that any group that takes voter registrations turn in ALL of them. This is to prevent groups from going out, registering a lot of people, and then only turning in the ones for the party they support and leaving the other people thinking they’re registered but in fact showing up on election day and being unable to vote. So ACORN turned in all of the registration forms and flagged the ones they felt were fraudulent. ACORN did not try to defraud anyone, they merely complied with the law, while taking the additional step of telling the states which forms they considered to be questionable. The process worked.

Third, this is being used to attempt to justify "picture identification" laws, but here’s the scoop: It’s already, so I’ve read, federally mandated that if you do not register in person at your local government office (at which time you’d have to show ID), then when you go to vote you have to show ID. So all of these questionable registrations will already have to show ID when they go to vote.

Fourth, this isn’t a new story, ACORN has been registering people to vote since the primaries and has been flagging the registrations they felt were questionable all that time. However, now it makes a good story because it looks like a last minute thing. I’m virtually certain this is coming out now because McCain is so far behind in the polls. It’s being used to justify massive (and in some cases illegal) purges of the voter rolls and general voter suppression techniques, all ostensibly in the name of combating voter fraud but in fact aimed at suppressing poor and minority voting, since it will predominantly go to Obama.

Fifth, John McCain has been a supporter of ACORN until just recently, speaking at their events and praising them for their great work on behalf of the nation. But then, McCain has changed so many positions this election cycle that this should hardly surprise anyone.

So just remember all of these facts when someone starts saying "Booga booga, scary bogeyman voter fraud ACORN. Booga booga!" The facts do not support VOTER fraud, but VOTER REGISTRATION fraud. The facts do not support these registrations actually passing into the voter rolls, but that ACORN is being defrauded by some of its agents.

And the facts to not justify these wholesale voter challenges and voting roll purges which are going on, those are not legitimate, they are an attempt to remove as many Obama supporters from the rolls as possible, while claiming that any such legitimate voters who were thus removed were "unintended consequences."

They are intended consequences.

For anyone who is interested in more information on this, I've heard (although I've not been there to verify) that you can find a lot of information on this at the Brad Blog (also a good source of information about voter fraud in general and specifically the continuing problems with electronic voting machines).

Liam.

P.S. If you want to make sure that you have not been purged from the voter rolls in your state, go to votersunite.org and click on the "Are YOU Registered to Vote?" link on the right hand side, it will tell you how to verify in your home state.

Voting Proposition

This post comes out of the ACORN post I'm about to post, but I want that one to be at the top of the blog for a few days, so I'm posting this first.

I'd just like to reiterate my proposal for solving the problems with our voting machines. I do not believe electronic voting machines are bad, I actually believe they can be a force for good... subject to certain safeguards.

I suggest electronic voting machines print out a receipt like ATMs do. These receipts should be machine and human readable.

After each voter verifies that their receipt correctly represents the vote that they cast, it is then fed into a separate, un-connected system (preferably built by a different company) which keeps a second tally and then maintains the paper receipts for manual recounts where necessary.

I believe there are at least three cases when recounts should be performed:

1. In the case of challenge of the results (in close races, or where there's some statistical anomaly, like results which don't match exit polling).
2. Whenever some threshold is met in disagreement between the two separate machines(*)
3. For spot inspections, where some random set of districts during each election are selected for a manual recount to ensure the veracity of the results from the two electronic counts.

There would also be a process (hopefully rarely used) for a voter to challenge if his/her receipt does not match the vote they intended to cast.

Liam.

(*) This recount would automatically trigger any time there was a difference beyond a certain threshold between the two "official" counts. This threshold would probably be a percentage deviation or whenever the results of the two machines' counts change the results of one or more races. I say "a threshold" rather than "any discrepancy" because there will always be someone who forgets to submit their paper receipt after voting, so I'm willing to accept some small and statistically insignificant difference (although any time the "recount" machine registers a higher tally than the primary machine, that might raise an eyebrow or two)

I similarly expect that the number of challenges to results on the receipts will not be zero, both from user error of the primar e-voting machine, from those with memory or other mental infirmities who may honestly be confused, and from the occasional trouble-maker who decides to throw the system into question by voting one way and immediately (and loudly) trumpeting how the system was "obviously" rigged because he would never have voted for this particular candidate.

More on the Bail Out

Here's a nice video, detailing how Congress was pressured to pass the Bail Out bill. I meant to write about it before the vote, but I got involved in other things and forgot.

But here's the scoop, and it made me all the more opposed to the bail out bill: According to Rep. Brad Sherman (D-California), they were told in private conversations that without this bill, the market would drop 5000 points over a few days and that there would be martial law in the United States.

This is fear mongering, plain and simple, and smacks of the same pressuring that the Administration did for the Patriot Act in the days after 9/11. This Administration has used up its credibility. I wish more of our Representatives had seen this for the same sort of ham-handed coercion that went on in 2001 and had pushed back and required that more study go into the bill before it was passed.

If we've learned nothing else in the last 8 years, we've learned that when the Administration uses fear to try to urge a quick response, it's generally because there are things they want that they're afraid cooler heads will refuse to give them.

Here's one video of Sherman discussing this:



And here's a longer YouTube sound clip of Sherman on some radio show discussing the same thing...



Liam.

Still Think The Bailout Was A Good Idea?

Here is an article in the Guardian (U.K.) pointing out that AIG, the Insurance giant which received an $85 billion emergency bail-out loan from the Government a few days before the major bailout bill that we've talked about was passed, followed that up several days later by spending over $400,000 on a "lavish corporate retreat".

There have been other stories that some of the financial institutions which were pushing so hard for the $700 billion bailout package last week were busy at the same time shoring up their own "golden parachutes", making payments to, or arrangements for such payments to, senior management members.

Now let's just think about this. If you or I got hired to work for a company and completely screwed up everything we worked on, we'd be shown the door, most likely with no severance package at all. But these people at the top, who clearly were at the helm when the ship struck the reef, are being rewarded.

It makes me want to scream!

Liam.

Shredded Constitution

I read an AP article today that everyone should read. I've seen it in several papers, here is the link to one such, in the LA Times.

The story tells of three men, two U.S. citizens and one "legal resident" who have all been held in "military prisons" on U.S. soil but denied their basic Constitutional rights. (According to a different article I read on the topic, these brigs were in Virginia and South Carolina.)

One of the men, according to a military officer, was "being driven nearly insane by months of punishing isolation and sensory deprivation." According to the article, the military was ordered to treat Americans the same way as prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

All three men were interrogated by the CIA. Denied access to attorneys, mail and any human contact but for guards and interrogators. Under Bush Administration orders, they were held as "enemy combatants" for years of interrogations without criminal charges. Remember, two of these men were American citizens, and all three were being held on American soil.

To me, it is immaterial whether any of these men or all of them were ultimately terrorists or terrorist sympathizers. One of the three was released to Saudi Arabia on condition that he renounce his American citizenship, so essentially an American citizen was effectively deported from the country.

And yet there are still people in this country who think that the Bush Administration has been just great for this country. Indeed, a few of these people perhaps should consider what it would be like if they, themselves were picked up, accused of being terrorists or sympathizers, held for years without access to natural light or their families, interrogated regularly, and then finally offered the chance to get out but only if they'd leave the U.S. and renounce their citizenship.

Apparently, the Bush Administration thinks that's perfectly reasonable. I think it's another reason why large numbers of the Administration, from Bush and Cheney on down, should be in prison for life for wanton abuse of power.

Liam.

Maverick?

I've been meaning to write some more things on here, but haven't had the energy.

Until I do again, here is an article from Rolling Stone about John McCain's Maverick bona fides, or lack thereof.

Good reading.

Enjoy!

Liam.

Lectures by the Dull and Uninformed

There are few things in life more frustrating, at least to me, than being lectured by someone who has incomplete facts and has shown a complete lack of knowledge or even competence in the area upon which they are lecturing me.

I get frustrated when it is my children, who will occasionally try to tell me what some little noise or behavior on the part of my two year old son means… in spite of the fact that he’s the FIRST toddler they have ever experienced and I have dealt with three. More than half the time, they are incorrect. Of the times they have been correct, I have yet to be surprised or informed by what they told me. It’s infuriating to have someone with less information than I do lecture me.

My grandmother used to like to lecture me about my depression. She knew nothing about it, grew up in an era when the term “depression” was nearly unheard of. She didn’t understand biochemical imbalances or other legitimate causes, she was just certain that I just needed to “smile more”. I, by the summer the particular set of conversations I’m referencing occurred, was about thirty and had probably fifteen years of experience dealing with depression and various therapies and anti-depressant medications and other coping strategies. She had a barely working knowledge of the state of the art as of her youth, which is to say she had heard the word “leeches” and presumed she knew how to handle an organ which needed to be replaced via transplant. It’s infuriating to have someone with less information than I do lecture me.

And so tonight, I am extremely angry at someone who has chosen to lecture me about my relationship with my wife.

Now, I will state right off the bat, no relationship is perfect. There are ups and downs, there are the great triumphs and the great battles. You love each other, you do your best to work through the problems, and life goes on. Anyone who tells you that a good relationship has no conflict is deluded or trying to sell you something. I’m not saying Janet and I have any huge problems right now, we don’t. We have the same sorts of little problems every successful marriage goes through periodically.

However, there is a person in whom Janet sometimes confides. This person has not, in her entire life, had a successful, stable or healthy relationship. She is at best a mediocre parent to her single child (born out of wedlock, the product of one in a long string of spectacularly failed relationships). She spends hours talking with Janet about the sorts of social stupidity most teen-aged girls do in high school… but then grow out of by college, and certainly by their 30s.

And yet this person, who has at best shown the same talent for relationships that my grandmother did for quadruple bypass surgery, or my children do for the intricacies of child rearing, took a few details she got from Janet after a minor argument and decided to spin that into a series of e-mails telling me that my relationship with my wife was failing, that I was tearing both my marriage and my wife apart, and that it was all my fault. This woman who can’t keep a relationship going (except for crawling back with her dignity in her hand for sexual liaisons with one or more of her former boyfriends during dry spells) and who does not understand that there’s nothing she could tell me about my relationship with Janet that she and I had not already discussed and come to either an understanding on or at least a plan for how to work on it, thinks it is somehow useful to put her spectacularly idiotic relationship skills into suggestions for me.

It’s really infuriating when morons lecture me.

Liam.

Who Is To Blame?

I want to blame someone. I want someone to pay for doing this to our economy, for taking $2300 for every man woman and child in this country to pay for a screw up that should never have happened. I want to find the person or persons responsible and make sure they pay for their crimes.

And I'm not alone. But, in discussing this with like-minded individuals, a big problem came up, and that's how do we identify who DESERVES to be punished? I don't want a big witch-hunt with everyone looking for SOMEONE to pay, just so we'll all feel better.

Anyway, the rest of this is a slightly reworked e-mail I sent out to a group of family and friends who were thinking along the same lines, and since I exhorted them to help me figure out who the guilty are, I figured I should post it here as well, to see if anyone in my vast reading audience has any thoughts.

Liam.

* * *

OK, I've been thinking about this some more, and the very real question I've come up with is this: How do we determine who was at fault?

Was it the CEOs and other executives at the companies? They would seem an obvious choice, but the fact is that the things they were doing, although perhaps ethically questionable, were entirely legal and weren't being regulated, and you can make the argument that in any company, the executive team's job is to make as much money as possible for shareholders, and if this was a legal path to make money (and more importantly, if "everyone else was doing it" such that by NOT participating they ran a real risk of losing out to other companies), was what they were doing justification for prison?

OK, so how about the regulators? Shouldn't they have stopped it? Well, from what I understand, there's been fairly minimal regulation on these financial shenanigans, and so I'm not sure it was within the job description of the regulating authorities to put a stop to it.

You could make an argument that President Bush and the Republican rubber-stamp Congress he had for the first six years is to blame, for consistently putting people into positions of regulatory authority who have significant ties to the industries over which they are supposed to watch, but that's how his constituents wanted it, the Republicans being the party of deregulation.

You could make the same argument about President Clinton and the Democratic Congress he had at the beginning, who pushed through the laws being pointed to that required a certain percentage of all mortgages written had to go to less advantaged people.

The truth, and I've come to believe this about most of the woes in this country, is that we have two fundamentally different philosophies going on, and they are incompatible. Either would work, on its own, but they conflict in really bad ways.

As an example, take national security. As an over-simplified example, the Democratic philosophy is to be friends with everyone so that no one WANTS to attack us, and then maintain a somewhat minimal armed forces to take care of the opportunists, while being "good neighbors" to prevent everyone else from attacking.

The Republican philosophy, equally over-simplified, is to arm ourselves to the teeth and be the big kid on the block, so that no one dares mess with us. Assert our authority. Be the alpha dog. Make it just too scary a proposition to attack us.

Either philosophy could work, but when you combine them it's like combining fire and dynamite. Assert your authority until people are afraid but also angry, and then switch to the "carrot" approach. People don't react to your suddenly being good neighbors as fast as you expect, and if you cut back on defense too quickly, boom.

I think the same thing is true here, too. The Democratic plan (still simplified, this time mostly because I'm not strong on economic issues) for mortgages was to help make owning houses more available to the under privileged (something which President Bush also talked about early in his tenure), but required a lot of oversight and regulation to make sure it wasn't abused. The Republican plan (also simplified) involved deregulating, but wouldn't have set up the plan for disadvantaged borrowers to borrow money.

And when you take a plan that only works safely with a lot of regulation and combine it with people in charge who fundamentally believe in deregulation where ever possible, boom.

So really, as much as I'd love to see someone "pay" for this, to be able to point to someone and say "You, this is YOUR fault, YOU did this, now it's time for you to spend the rest of your life in a small room with a cell mate named 'Bubba' who thinks you've got a purty mouth", the fact is that I'm not sure who to point to and say that about. I'm not sure if there's any one person or group of people more at fault than any other, or that most of the people who contributed to the problem did enough on their own to cause it.

Now, all of that said, if you have any ideas as to how to identify the guilty, or who in this whole mess should have known better and fell down on the job, I’m all ears. But until I have some idea of WHO I think should be punished, I feel kind of strange writing to my Senators and Representative demanding that "someone" be held accountable, because that way lies witch hunts, seeking someone to blame to assuage our anger, rather than for justice.

Wonderful Post

A few days ago, I had not heard of Kathleen Parker. She's apparently a solidly right-wing columnist, who had the audacity to question whether Palin was good for the ticket, the party or the nation (if she wins).

Yesterday, she wrote a response column, and it has a lot of good things to say about the extent to which much of this nation has bought into partisanship and adherence to message over principles.

You can find it here. It's a great read, and one we should all think about.

I'm sure I've fallen into the trap occasionally, even though I'm not formally allied with either party, because in this particular election I feel so strongly that we need a change in party.

I know others who happily trot out the most bogus claims, the most dubious logic, the most questionable twist on the meaning of some statement or other and pounce on it as incontravertible proof that the "other guy" is one step above antichrist in status and not worthy of cleaning gum off of the bottom of our shoes.

We really need to think more about this attitude we have, or else any time we get an elected official who is good for the nation, it'll be entirely by accident.

Liam.

Reduced Sodium Posting

No more grains of salt needed.

Here is a link to video of John McCain calling for the Treasury to spend a trillion dollars without Congressional approval several times yesterday, a day after Congress denied spending 70% of that amount on the same purpose.

Amazing. I don't know if he's right or wrong on the legality of it, but the sheer HUBRIS of deciding that if the people's branch of the federal government doesn't approve of something, they should just be circumvented.

By the way, McCain yesterday also took Obama's call for increasing the FDIC insurance limit from $100,000 to $250,000 (he did give credit for it), which is interesting, in that 23 years ago when it went from $40,000 to $100,000 he OPPOSED it and claimed that the $40,000 of insurance was already responsible for the Savings & Loan failures.

McCain is clearly not a fiscal genius.

Liam.

Take This With A Grain Of Salt

I haven't been able to confirm this yet, but it's such a staggeringly bad idea that I want to mention it, just in case it turns out to be true.

Several sources are reporting that John McCain is now urging President Bush to spend about one trillion dollars to solve the current financial crisis... without Congressional approval, without oversight, and just days after Congress rejected a plan that had a 30% lower price tag.

The most reputable source I've found for this so far is this from Time, which is reputable but a little bit short on details for my taste.

Following on the heals of stating that he'd fire someone the President has no power to fire (the SEC chairman), it seems obvious that McCain views the President in much the same way Bush does, as an Imperial force with near kingly powers, rather than as one of three co-equal branches of government.

If you ever needed a good reason to vote for Barack Obama, this is it. Obama has pledged to re-balance the power the way the Constitution (or its framers, anyway) intended. While it is hard to believe that any President will willingly cede power to the other branches, at least he won't continue us down this dangerous path.

A trillion dollars. Advocated by a man who until six months ago widely proclaimed his lack of knowledge of the economy. Unregulated.

Don't let this man be President. We won't have a country left.

Liam.