Liberal and proud of it.
In case people aren't aware, Hurricane Ike left devastation in its path that is not being covered due to a media blackout ordered by the Bush administration. There is absolutely no excuse for this situation. These people are in trouble and need help from their country. There is no power or water, and little gas and food. This needs much more national attention.
Before:
After:
They need to be branded with this every day between now and the election. Republicans: the party that wrecked America.
It turns out the real hurricane blew through Wall Street last week, not Galveston. This morning, Manhattan is strewn chest-deep with the debris of banking and at this hour (seven a.m.) nobody knows how far, deep, and wide the damage will spread. The fear, of course, is that we are witnessing a classic "house-of-cards" or "dominos-in-a-row," situation, and that the death of Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch will cascade into a generalized collapse of the entire consensus of value that supports mediums of exchange.John McCain wants us to believe that he will fix the problem:
At least one thing ought to be clear: this has happened due to the negligence and misfeasance of the regulating authorities, namely the Republican Party, and that now all the hoopla surrounding Sarah Palin can be swept away revealing that group to be what they actually are: the party that wrecked America.
[...]
Some group of somebodies will have to clean up this mess. Moving toward a major election, it is hard to imagine the American people giving the clean-up task to the very group that created the mess -- no matter how many cute little faces Sarah Palin can make on TV. Both parties have so far managed to ignore the gathering crisis of banking and money, but they can't ignore the sequoia trees crashing down around their ankles and shaking the earth they stand on.
At issue now will be the question of legitimacy in all its human social dimensions. Is our money legitimate? Is the authority of our elected officials legitimate? Are our values and ideas legitimate? These are the things that will determine what kind of future we find ourselves in.
"We will never put America in this position again. We will clean up Wall Street. This is a failure."However, let's remember who enabled this and how it was done.
Given that today John McCain once again said that the "fundamentals of the economy are strong," I think it's clear that he doesn't even recognize that there is a problem. His campaign is being run by lobbyists, but he wants us to believe that he'll be a reformer? I simply cannot understand why anyone who isn't filthy rich supports this guy. Given what happened today, I can't see why even wealthy people support him.If McCain wants to hold someone accountable for the failure in transparency and accountability that led to the current calamity, he should turn to his good friend and adviser, Phil Gramm.
As Mother Jones reported in June, eight years ago, Gramm, then a Republican senator chairing the Senate banking committee, slipped a 262-page bill into a gargantuan, must-pass spending measure. Gramm's legislation, written with the help of financial industry lobbyists, essentially removed newfangled financial products called swaps from any regulation. Credit default swaps are basically insurance policies that cover the losses on investments, and they have been at the heart of the subprime meltdown because they have enabled large financial institutions to turn risky loans into risky securities that could be packaged and sold to other institutions.
Lehman's collapse threatens the financial markets because of swaps. From Bloomberg:
Bond-default risk soared worldwide as the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. sparked concern than the $62 trillion credit-derivatives market will unravel....Lehman, the fourth-largest securities firm until last week, has been one of the 10 largest counterparties in the market for credit-default swaps, according to a 2007 report by Fitch Ratings. The market, which is unregulated and has no central exchange where prices are disclosed, has been the fastest-growing type of so-called over-the-counter derivative, according to the Bank for International Settlements."The immediate problem is the derivative default swaps market, in which a plethora of institutional accounts and dealer accounts are at risk,'' Bill Gross, manager of the world's largest bond fund at Pacific Investment Management Co. in Newport Beach, California, said in an interview with Bloomberg Radio yesterday. "It induces a tremendous amount of volatility and uncertainty.''Barclays Capital analysts have estimated that if a financial institution with $2 trillion in credit-default swap trades were to fail, it might trigger between $36 billion and $47 billion in losses for institutions that traded with the firm. So the Lehman fiasco--caused in part by the use of unregulated swaps--could lead to ruin elsewhere in the economy.
Gramm is responsible for the rise of the wild and woolly $62 trillion swaps market. And he was chairman of the McCain campaign and a top economic adviser for McCain--until he dismissed Americans worried about the economy as "whiners." After that comment, McCain dumped Gramm. But was Gramm truly excommunicated from McCain land? Last month, he attended a meeting of McCain's top supporters in Aspen, Colorado. And at a dinner that day, McCain singled out Gramm for praise. Last week, failed Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul revealed that Gramm, now an exec for Swiss banking giant UBS (which also lost billions of dollars due to subprime loans and swaps), had recently called him as part of a McCain effort to win Paul's endorsement. Paul turned Gramm down.
From Jon Stewart. This would be funny if it weren't so serious.It’s all sort of ironic, when you think about it. When you fly, you are inspected quite thoroughly. Whereas the plane itself is perhaps occasionally vacuumed. See, with this administration, if a passenger blows up a plane, it’s a failure in the War on Terror. But if a plane just blows up on its own, eh, that’s the market self-regulating.
I want my country back.
I about popped a blood vessel in my head after reading this today:
President Bush said Thursday the country is not recession-bound and, despite expressing concern about slowing economic growth, rejected for now any additional stimulus efforts. "We acted robustly," he said."We'll see the effects of this pro-growth package," Bush told reporters at a White House news conference, acknowledging that some lawmakers already are talking about a second stimulus package. "Why don't we let stimulus package 1, which seemed like a good idea at the time, have a chance to kick in?"
It "seemed like a good idea at the time"? WTF? This paints a very disturbing mental picture. A bunch of Bush cronies (none of whom have a background in economics) sitting around a conference room with him tossing out random ideas on how to fix the economy. Someone chimes in with "Hey, why don't we give everyone an advance on next year's tax refund. People will just go out and spend it on big screen TVs, which will pump up the economy." Bush ponders for a few seconds. "That's genius. By the time the Amurican public figgers out they have to pay it back next year, the Dems will be in charge and we can blame it on them!"
Why can't more people understand this:
The NYT’s Bob Herbert had an important column on a recent congressional hearing that barely generated any attention at all. The focus was on the cost of the war in Iraq, which is likely to reach $2 trillion, if not more.
On Thursday, the Joint Economic Committee, chaired by Senator Chuck Schumer, conducted a public examination of the costs of the war. The witnesses included the Nobel Prize-winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz (who believes the overall costs of the war — not just the cost to taxpayers — will reach $3 trillion), and Robert Hormats, vice chairman of Goldman Sachs International.
Both men talked about large opportunities lost because of the money poured into the war. “For a fraction of the cost of this war,” said Mr. Stiglitz, “we could have put Social Security on a sound footing for the next half-century or more.”
Mr. Hormats mentioned Social Security and Medicare, saying that both could have been put “on a more sustainable basis.” And he cited the committee’s own calculations from last fall that showed that the money spent on the war each day is enough to enroll an additional 58,000 children in Head Start for a year, or make a year of college affordable for 160,000 low-income students through Pell Grants, or pay the annual salaries of nearly 11,000 additional border patrol agents or 14,000 more police officers.
What we’re getting instead is the stuff of nightmares.
Noting this, Matt Yglesias added, “Few people seem to appreciate it, but it’s quite literally true that al-Qaeda’s strategy is to cripple the U.S. economy by dragging us into quagmires abroad. Osama bin Laden himself has said this, and it’s the only strategy that makes sense. A smallish number of people with no base of resources can’t possibly defeat us unless we shoot ourselves in the foot repeatedly as Bush and McCain propose.”
A Republican lawmaker in Florida introduced a bill last week to honor its history with "Confederate Heritage" license plates.
With the elections coming up, Republicans are desperate for attention and are no doubt hoping for a public outcry to help solidify their base. Or something. Princess Sparkle Pony liked the design so much that she's submitted some of her own for consideration.
"I can't wait until it's Obama vs. McCain.
It's gonna be Youtube vs. Feeding Tube!"
- Bill Maher
Uh oh. Saint McCain might have a little problem. Hopefully this story will have legs and will be another nail in McCain's political coffin.
And Republican operative Bay Buchanan is fall-on-the-floor-laugh-out-loud funny:
Buchanan: This is not the Democratic Party, this is a party of values. We assume our candidates have been loyal to their family.
The Party of Values. HAHAHAHAHAHA!!! Please stop! My side hurts!
Republicans sure seem to have a lot of memory problems. Maybe that's because the GOP is the party of Old White People. No worries, though. The Internets have a very long memory:
Donna Edwards' primary win in Maryland's 4th District over incumbent Al Wynn should serve as a wake up call to the Blue Dog Democrats. You are not safe. Your support for George Bush and all of his corporation-loving, warmongering, trample-the-constitution, shit-on-working-Americans policies might cost you your political lives. Even with the support of Democratic heavyweights Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer, Al got pwned. And Nancy, you'd better watch your ass, too. We'll remember that you put politics ahead of the constitution. You can be ousted just like Al Wynn.
If you aren't outraged by what's going on, you're not paying attention.
Presidential Tax CutsFor Dick, that works out to a tax rate of 5.6%. And he thinks he's paying too much and needs more tax breaks. Life is tough for the rich in this country. I just don't know how they survive.
For 2005, George W. and Laura Bush reported income of $738,880, paying $187,854 in taxes - about $26,000 less than they would have paid before the tax cuts he initiated. That same year, Dick and Lynne Cheney reported income of $9,120,960, paying taxes of $517,287, saving about $1,100,000 because of the tax cuts. Part of this savings was from charitable contributions he made that, due a law designed to benefit Katrina victims, qualified for deduction from his income. None of his contributions went to hurricane victims.
