I Hate What You Just Said

The abusurdity of Sarah Palin’s presence on a national ticket is becoming so obvious that it no longer appears to be a partisan question.  Andrew Sullivan has been beside himself ever since McCain made his choice.  But various other conservatives are beginning to sound alarms, raise questions, or even call for her to leave the ticket.

Yep - conservatives, like most other other bipedal mammals, are none too impressed with the former mayor of Wasilla.

To wit:

Kathleen Parker thinks Palin should decide, euphemistically speaking, to “spend more time with her newborn”:

As we’ve seen and heard more from John McCain’s running mate, it is increasingly clear that Palin is a problem. Quick study or not, she doesn’t know enough about economics and foreign policy to make Americans comfortable with a President Palin should conditions warrant her promotion…

When Couric pointed to polls showing that the financial crisis had boosted Obama’s numbers, Palin blustered wordily: “I’m not looking at poll numbers. What I think Americans at the end of the day are going to be able to go back and look at track records and see who’s more apt to be talking about solutions and wishing for and hoping for solutions for some opportunity to change, and who’s actually done it?”

If BS were currency, Palin could bail out Wall Street herself.

David Frum seems kind of scared:

If anything were to happen to a President McCain, the destiny of the free world would be placed in the hands of a woman who until the day before Friday was a small-town mayor.

Mr. McCain’s supporters argue that he is more serious about national security than Barack Obama. But the selection of Sarah Palin invites the question: How serious can he be if he would place such a neophyte second in line to the presidency?

Early Palin-backer Ross Douthat shows some good humor in admitting his misjudgement:

And now, an excerpt from my inner monologue, as transcribed while watching various clips from Sarah Palin’s interview with Katie Couric (I can’t link to them; they’re too painful):

And that, Douthat, is why nobody’s ever going to hire you to help pick their running mate.

Jeffrey Goldberg is worried, too:

 I want to wait and see Palin on Thursday night in her debate with Joe Biden; perhaps her performance in the Couric interview was abnormally bad. But I have a terrible feeling that John McCain has placed this country - and, of lesser importance, his campaign - in an untenable position.

Chillingly, David Brooks compares Palin to the Dummkopf-in-Chief:

Sarah Palin has many virtues. If you wanted someone to destroy a corrupt establishment, she’d be your woman. But the constructive act of governance is another matter. She has not been engaged in national issues, does not have a repertoire of historic patterns and, like President Bush, she seems to compensate for her lack of experience with brashness and excessive decisiveness.

Maybe we should have been listening to Alaskans all along.  Republican state senator Lyda Green, for example, isn’t shy about expressing her opinion of Palin: 

“She’s not prepared to be governor. How can she be prepared to be vice president or president?” said Green, a Republican from Palin’s hometown of Wasilla. “Look at what she’s done to this state. What would she do to the nation?”

Thanks, but no thanks, Palin!

Somewhere, Thomas Eagleton is smiling.

Matt Taibbi has some thoughts on Sarah Palin.

This morning the McCain campaign took credit for saving our country’s economy. The maverick White Knight paused his campaign, rode into Washington, and single-handedly fixed our economic catastrophe:

John McCain’s presidential campaign claimed credit as Congress readied Monday to vote on an emergency economic package, but Democrats said the Republican’s last-ditch intervention had been no help.

Mitt Romney, McCain’s erstwhile rival for the Republican nomination, said the deal on a Wall Street bailout worth up to 700 billion dollars would never have happened without the Arizona senator.

Speaking on NBC television, the former Massachusetts governor said “this bill would not have been agreed to had it not been for John McCain.”

“That doesn’t mean that he’s the only guy doing that. And there many people … who have been critical to it,” Romney said.

“But, you know, this is a bipartisan accomplishment, a bipartisan success. And if people want to get something done in Washington, they just watch John McCain,” he said.

“He’s been the guy whose name is at the top of major pieces of legislation for a long time.”

Oops. Too bad that the deal failed and the DOW dropped 777 points, the biggest single-day drop of all time.

I haven’t cringed this much since the first season of The Office. But this isn’t funny. This is insulting. It is an obscenity that McCain would put this person on the presidential ticket:

A concerned citizen sent us a link to an article published over at Bloomberg by a Kevin Hassett. The article is entitled “How the Democrats Created the Financial Crisis.” We are intrigued.

The title tells you all you need to know. To the manichean brain produced by 8 years of pavlovian response to the Bush administration’s clanging bells of terror and doom, the world is neatly divisible into two categories: good and evil. There is no nuance, no gray area, nothing to doubt — not a moment’s hesitation, unclarity or unease. When something goes wrong, don’t think — just point your finger at the appropriate evildoer, be he terrorist or Democrat (or both).

Hassett’s article has several points: 1) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are the cause of the subprime meltdown and our current economic crisis. 2) John McCain — a man who claims to know nothing about the economy or even how to use a computer — somehow figured out in 2005 that this economic shitstorm was coming and crafted a bill specifically designed to prevent it. 3) However, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and their lobbyists gave tons of money to Democrats in Congress which prompted key Democratic senators to vote down McCain’s bill. Therefore: John McCain = Good; Democrats = Bad.

Or, in Kevin’s own words:

Now that the collapse has occurred, the roadblock built by Senate Democrats in 2005 is unforgivable. Many who opposed the bill doubtlessly did so for honorable reasons. Fannie and Freddie provided mounds of materials defending their practices. Perhaps some found their propaganda convincing.

But we now know that many of the senators who protected Fannie and Freddie, including Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Christopher Dodd, have received mind-boggling levels of financial support from them over the years.

Throughout his political career, Obama has gotten more than $125,000 in campaign contributions from employees and political action committees of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, second only to Dodd, the Senate Banking Committee chairman, who received more than $165,000.

Clinton, the 12th-ranked recipient of Fannie and Freddie PAC and employee contributions, has received more than $75,000 from the two enterprises and their employees. The private profit found its way back to the senators who killed the fix.

There has been a lot of talk about who is to blame for this crisis. A look back at the story of 2005 makes the answer pretty clear.

Yes, pretty clear to the manichean brain.

I. Step One: Consider the Source.

Who is the author? Who does he work for? Who are his associates? What are his interests? Is he biased?

Hassett is a research fellow for AEI, a conservative think tank that, among other things, accepts donations from Exxon and tries to deny the validity of global warming science. Other notable fellows from this distinguished operation include Alan Keyes, Michael Ledeen, and Fred Thompson (ahem).

My other suspicions were confirmed when I discovered that Hassett has written a variety of other opinion pieces at Bloomberg. This one, for example, argues that the US should immediately engage in offshore drilling to lower our gas prices — an idea universally panned by economists. Hassett also wrote a book in 1999 entitled Dow 36,000 which predicted absurd increases in the stock market. Since the Dow is opening today at 10,839, I think we can safely assume that anyone who trusted Hassett in 1999 has virtually nothing in their IRA.

Does this make him biased? Perhaps not. But considering his membership in an organization whose explicit purpose is to create conservative policy for Washington, we have to now have our guard up — perhaps he’s too ideological to make an honest inquiry into the root causes of this economic meltdown. And in addition, he’s been catastrophically wrong in his previous writings.

I also discovered that Hassett was the chief economic advisor to John McCain during the 2000 primaries and is currently a senior economic advisor to the McCain presidential campaign. Is he an honest broker or a political operative? Is he trying to help us understand issues or is he trying to help get his candidate elected?

Is it at all significant that Hassett works on the McCain campaign with people like Aquiles Suarez, who was a director, and later, a lobbyist for Fannie Mae? Or Charlie Black, a top McCain aide, who was a lobbyist for Freddy Mac between 1999 and 2004? Or what about McCain’s campaign manager, Rick Davis, a “former” Freddie Mac lobbyist who was yesterday revealed to still be on the payroll for Freddie Mac to the tune of $15,000 a month? In all, there are 19 people who are former lobbyists for Fannie or Freddie now working for the McCain campaign.

Isn’t this a damning revelation? Why didn’t Hassett disclose this information? His article explicitly blames Freddie and Fannie and their influence-peddling dollars as the reason behind the economic meltdown. And yet, he continues to work intimately on the campaign with the very lobbyists who delivered the checks to Congress! Either he’s a scruple-free mercenary or he’s trying to manipulate us. Or maybe both.

I’m not saying that these individuals are ultimately to blame or that it’s somehow all McCain’s fault. Corporations hire lobbyists, they seek influence, they make donations. This is, regrettably, how our government currently works. But the specific point to be acknowledged here is that this particular source of information, Hassett, is deeply compromised and his argument should be viewed with skepticism. From where I sit, this “article” is nothing more than a piece of political casuistry designed to help McCain look good during this troubling economic time. Considering how toxic this economic news could be for a campaign that has such deep ties to Fannie and Freddie, I imagine that it is considered important strategy to try and distance McCain from it by blaming the opposition.

II. Step Two: Examine the Evidence.

Is it persuasive? Is it misused? Is it mischaracterized? Does it come from an authoritative source?

Let’s look at an aspect of the argument at closer range:

“But we now know that many of the senators who protected Fannie and Freddie, including Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Christopher Dodd, have received mind-boggling levels of financial support from them over the years.Throughout his political career, Obama has gotten more than $125,000 in campaign contributions from employees and political action committees of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, second only to Dodd, the Senate Banking Committee chairman, who received more than $165,000.

Clinton, the 12th-ranked recipient of Fannie and Freddie PAC and employee contributions, has received more than $75,000 from the two enterprises and their employees. The private profit found its way back to the senators who killed the fix.”

These are the core claims of Hassett’s argument. He clearly intends to argue that these donations bought influence or were rewards for favorable votes in the Congress. But where did Hassett get his figures from? There is a fantastic resource online that does nothing but track all of the donations that go from corporations or private donors into the coffers of politicians. The website is OpenSecrets.org. There I found the data table that Hassett used for his argument. And, as you might guess, Hassett does not seem to be a fair dealer.

If you’ll notice from the data table below, OpenSecrets divides political donations into two categories: PACs and Individuals. A PAC, or Political Action Committee, is a group specifically organized by a corporation or private group to aid in the election of public officials. The Individual category denotes political donations made by private individuals who just happen to have jobs. In this specific case, they are the employees of Fannie and Freddie.

Name	Office	State	Party	Grand Total	Total from PACs	Total from Individuals
Dodd, Christopher J	S	CT	D	$165,400	$48,500	$116,900
Obama, Barack	S	IL	D	$126,349	$6,000	$120,349
Kerry, John	S	MA	D	$111,000	$2,000	$109,000
Bennett, Robert F	S	UT	R	$107,999	$71,499	$36,500
Bachus, Spencer	H	AL	R	$103,300	$70,500	$32,800
Blunt, Roy	H	MO	R	$96,950	$78,500	$18,450
Kanjorski, Paul E	H	PA	D	$96,000	$57,500	$38,500
Bond, Christopher S ‘Kit’	S	MO	R	$95,400	$64,000	$31,400
Shelby, Richard C	S	AL	R	$80,000	$23,000	$57,000
Reed, Jack	S	RI	D	$78,250	$43,500	$34,750
Reid, Harry	S	NV	D	$77,000	$60,500	$16,500
Clinton, Hillary	S	NY	D	$76,050	$8,000	$68,050
Davis, Tom	H	VA	R	$75,499	$13,999	$61,500
Boehner, John	H	OH	R	$67,750	$60,500	$7,250
Conrad, Kent	S	ND	D	$64,491	$22,000	$42,491
Reynolds, Tom	H	NY	R	$62,200	$53,000	$9,200

Look at the donations from the PAC column. Hassett claims that

“Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Christopher Dodd, have received mind-boggling levels of financial support from [Fannie and Freddy] over the years.”

Yet, if you study the numbers, the PAC only gave Obama $6,000, Clinton $8,000, and Dodd $48,500 over a nineteen year period spanning the years 1989-2008. Not very impressive figures. The numbers increase dramatically (though not “mind-bogglingly”) only when you include individual donors who just happen to work for Fannie and Freddie. Citizens who work for these companies gave money to their candidate of choice, be they Democrat or Republican. The PAC similarly gave to members of both parties. Nothing wrong or suspicious about that. (Incidentally, I can’t help but notice that the PAC gave money to Republican candidates at much higher values than the Democrats that Hassett singles out for blame). But just eyeballing the figures in the full table (at the site), I’d say that the money was pretty equally spread around to both parties. While Hassett doesn’t say anything that is an outright lie, he is dishonest and purposefully misleading here in his selective use of the data. If Fannie and Freddie “bought” influence, they were equal opportunity investors. And it seems simply wrong and misleading to associate the donations of average citizens with the lobbying efforts of their employer.

Hassett also claims that in 2005, John McCain co-sponsored a bill that may (or may not) have worked to prevent this crisis. He states that, “if that bill had become law, then the world today would be different.” In any case, he clearly intends us to understand that the political donations from Fannie and Freddie were used to influence these key Democrats to “kill the fix” (i.e. McCain’s bill).

This is wrong on several counts. First, the McCain-sponsored bill mentioned in the article didn’t make it out of the Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs committee. If you go to the Library of Congress and look up this bill you can see for yourself. According to the official record, the bill was introduced but never scheduled for debate or vote. Hassett’s claim about Democrats “killing” the bill by a vote is false. Second, Obama and Clinton aren’t even on that committee; they didn’t “kill” anything. Third, the claim that the Democrats are responsible for preventing the bill from becoming law is absurd: in 2005, the Republicans controlled both houses of Congress and literally did whatever they wanted within the committees. It wasn’t until 2007 that the Democrats took control of Congress again. Why didn’t the Republicans just force it through? They could have given this issue the Terry Schiavo treatment. If they realized there was a problem, a crisis, they had plenty of time to fix things, but they failed. Hassett’s basis for claiming that the Democrats are at fault because they blocked this bill is utterly false.

III. Step Three: Examine other Ideas.

If you’re really interested in understanding the root cause of this problem, I heartily recommend this article from the American Prospect. The depiction there is too complicated for the lizard-brained among us, but it seems convincing to me that the cause of this subprime meltdown that is cascading through the global economy was the repeal of key New Deal-era regulations of the financial markets, most notably the Glass-Steagall Act. Its explicit intent was to prevent a “repeat of the 1920’s era scams in which banks made speculative investments, turned the debts into securities, and sold them off to unsuspecting investors with the blessing of the bank.” Sound familiar?

And guess what law repealed that Glass-Steagall Act? It was the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999. Yes, that is the same Phil Gramm that said that we’ve become “a nation of whiners” ; the same Phil Gramm that is the head economic advisor to John McCain; the same Phil Gramm whose legislation led to the Enron scandal; the same Phil Gramm who is likely the new head of the Treasury if McCain is elected.

And the vote? With one exception, it went straight down party lines: all Republicans voting “yea” and all Democrats voting “nay.”

But hey, I’m not pointing fingers.

Andrew Sullivan is on a roll - a serious anti-Palin roll. In “The Twelve Lies of Sarah Palin,” my favorite Obamacon succinctly makes the case that Palin’s pants are now a four-alarm fire:

So for the record, let it be known that the candidate for vice-president for the GOP is a compulsive, repetitive, demonstrable liar. If you follow the links, here is the proof. I repeat: proof:

- She has lied about the Bridge To Nowhere. She ran for office favoring it, wore a sweatshirt defending it, and only gave it up when the federal congress, Senator McCain in particular, went ballistic. She kept the money anyway and favors funding Don Young’s Way, at twice the cost of the original bridge.

- She has lied about her firing of the town librarian and police chief of Wasilla, Alaska.

- She has lied about pressure on Alaska’s public safety commissioner to fire her ex-brother-in-law.

- She has lied about her previous statements on climate change.

- She has lied about Alaska’s contribution to America’s oil and gas production.

- She has lied about when she asked her daughters for their permission for her to run for vice-president.

- She has lied about the actual progress in constructing a natural gas pipeline from Alaska.

- She has lied about Obama’s position on habeas corpus.

- She has lied about her alleged tolerance of homosexuality.

- She has lied about the use or non-use of a TelePrompter at the St Paul convention.

- She has lied about her alleged pay-cut as mayor of Wasilla.

- She has lied about what Alaska’s state scientists concluded about the health of the polar bear population in Alaska.

You cannot trust a word she says. On anything.

Nope. It appears that you cannot.

From today’s Times Online:

Corporate India is in shock after a mob of sacked workers bludgeoned to death the chief executive who had dismissed them from a factory in a suburb of Delhi.

Lalit Kishore Choudhary, 47, the head of the Indian operations of Graziano Transmissioni, an Italian-headquartered manufacturer of car parts, died of severe head wounds on Monday afternoon after being attacked by scores of laid-off employees, police said.

The incident, in Greater Noida, just outside the Indian capital, followed a long-running dispute between the factory’s management and workers who had demanded better pay and permanent contracts.

It is intensely irritating when Republicans - like McCain and Palin, for instance - pretend to be the champions of working-class interests.  And when they do, the inevitable result is this sort of totally unsurprising hypocrisy:

In a speech on the economy today in Scranton, PA, John McCain spat populist fire as he railed at the high executive compensation and golden parachutes enjoyed by top Wall Street executives. From the prepared remarks:

“The firms we help need accountability too. We cannot have taxpayers footing the bill forbloated golden parachutes like we see in the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, where the top executives are asking for $2.5 billion in bonuses after they ran the company into the ground. The senior executives of any firm that is bailed out by treasury should not be making more than the highest paid government official.”

Only hours earlier, however, McCain was on MSNBC, where he displayed a notable lack of concern — and a lack of awareness of the details — about the golden parachute enjoyed by former Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, one of his own leading economic advisers.

Asked if he viewed Fiorina and her $45 million golden parachute as an example of the sort of person that’s the problem on Wall Street, McCain said: “I don’t think so.”

Asked to square her golden parachute with his pledge to crack down on such compensation, McCain responded: “I think she did a good job as CEO in many respects. I don’t know the details of her compensation package but she’s one of many advisers that I have.”

Pressed further, McCain claimed: “I do not know the details of what happened.”

He does not know the details of what happened.  He also appears not to know who the Prime Minister of Spain is, or that Iraq doesn’t border Pakistan…

The current draft for the government bailout of the subprime juggernaut has been leaked. As Greenwald and Atrios and Krugman have noted, the plan is really simple:

(1) The Treasury Secretary is authorized to buy up to $700 billion of any mortgage-related assets (so he can just transfer that amount to any corporations in exchange for their worthless or severely crippled “assets”) [Sec. 6]; (2) The ceiling on the national debt is raised to $11.3 trillion to accommodate this scheme [Sec. 10]; and (3) best of all: “Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency” [Sec. 8].

Put another way, this authorizes Hank Paulson to transfer $700 billion of taxpayer money to private industry in his sole discretion, and nobody has the right or ability to review or challenge any decision he makes.

As Greenwald rightly asks:

What is more intrinsically corrupt than allowing people to engage in high-reward/no-risk capitalism — where they reap tens of millions of dollars and more every year while their reckless gambles are paying off only to then have the Government shift their losses to the citizenry at large once their schemes collapse? We’ve retroactively created a win-only system where the wealthiest corporations and their shareholders are free to gamble for as long as they win and then force others who have no upside to pay for their losses. Watching Wall St. erupt with an orgy of celebration on Friday after it became clear the Government (i.e., you) would pay for their disaster was literally nauseating, as the very people who wreaked this havoc are now being rewarded.

Privatize the profits. Socialize the losses. I. Drink. Your. MILKSHAKE!

UPDATE:

Or, perhaps not. Obama just released a statement about the bailout…and it’s good. And here’s a speech from today on the subject:

Sarah Palin, the most knowledgeable person in America about energy, fielded a question on the subject at a recent townhall meeting:

“Oil and coal? Of course, it’s a fungible commodity and they don’t flag, you know, the molecules, where it’s going and where it’s not. But in the sense of the Congress today, they know that there are very, very hungry domestic markets that need that oil first,” Palin said. “So, I believe that what Congress is going to do, also, is not to allow the export bans to such a degree that it’s Americans that get stuck to holding the bag without the energy source that is produced here, pumped here. It’s got to flow into our domestic markets first.”

I, for one, support flagging some coal and oil molecules to be diverted to our hungry market. I say “flag baby flag.”

And I’ll be goddamned if I get stuck to any energy bags that I’m holding!

Republicans everywhere are shaking with outrage because some individual broke the law by hacking into Sarah Palin’s Yahoo email account.

Just savor the irony. A bunch of lawless, authoritarian, surveillance-craving zealots suddenly get angry when someone breaks federal laws and reads someone’s webmail.

These are the same people, as Glenn Greenwald helpfully reminds us, that

cheered on every last expansion of the Lawless Surveillance State of the last eight years — put their fists in the air with glee as the Federal Government seized the power to listen to innocent Americans’ telephone calls; read our emails; obtain our banking, credit card, and library records; and create vast data bases of every call we make and receive and every prescription we fill and every instance of travel and other vast categories of information that remain largely unknown — all without warrants or oversight of any kind and often in clear violation of the law.

The same political faction which today is prancing around in full-throated fits of melodramatic hysteria and Victim mode (their absolute favorite state of being) over the sanctity of Sarah Palin’s privacy are the same ones who scoffed with indifference as it was revealed during the Bush era that the FBI systematically abused its Patriot Act powers to gather and store private information on thousands of innocent Americans; that Homeland Security officials illegally infiltrated and monitored peaceful, law-abiding left-wing groups devoted to peace activism, civil liberties and other political agendas disliked by the state; and that the telephone calls of journalists and lawyers have been illegally and repeatedly monitored.

Read Glenn’s whole post. Really worth it.

As a handy supplement to the Zapatero fiasco, we have a harrowing summary of Oily McWar’s persistent confusion from Steve Benen:

Let’s also not lose sight of the broader pattern. McCain thinks the recent conflict between Russia and Georgia was “the first probably serious crisis internationally since the end of the Cold War.” He thinks Iraq and Pakistan share a border. He believes Czechoslovakia is still a country. He’s been confused about the difference between Sudan and Somalia. He’s been confused about whether he wants more U.S. troops in Afghanistan, more NATO troops in Afghanistan, or both. He’s been confused about how many U.S. troops are in Iraq. He’s been confused about whether the U.S. can maintain a long-term presence in Iraq. He’s been confused about Iran’s relationship with al Qaeda. He’s been confused about the difference between Sunni and Shi’ia. McCain, following a recent trip to Germany, even referred to “President Putin of Germany.” All of this incoherence on his signature issue.

I’m curious. What do you suppose the reaction would be from the political establishment if Barack Obama had made these mistakes over the course of the campaign? What would reporters, pundits, and Republicans have to say about Obama’s ability to lead a complex world in a time of war and uncertainty?

Wow.

It’s a good thing that his running mate - Sarah “What the F*ck is the ‘Bush Doctrine’?” Palin - will be able to help him sort out all these complicated foreign policy thingies.

Somehow McWar continues to campaign as a foreign policy expert, and people seem to buy it.  Matthew Yglesias summarizes the ridiculous situation well:

The problem is in the underlying assumption that McCain has some deep underlying national security expertise. In conventional Washington terms, expertise and credibility on security issues basically just requires you to (a) enjoy talking about security issues and (b) support starting wars. Support for launching a war that turns out well is the best thing to do (+5 cred points), but support for launching a war that doesn’t get launched is pretty good (+3 cred points), and even support for launching a war that turns out poorly is okay (+1 cred points) — the important thing is to support launching wars.

He likes wars.  He likes oil drillin’.  That’s why I call him Oily McWar.