Category Archives: The Nation

Video of that awful Pelosi speech

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Kelly Davis with thestate.com noticed my post about the Nancy Pelosi speech Monday — the one that was an outrageous example of partisan ranting at the worst possible moment, but certainly no excuse for those whiny Republicans to vote against a bill of great importance to the country — and felt like something was missing: video. So he sent me the imbed code.

I actually haven’t seen it myself yet — I just read the transcript that I shared with you earlier — and don’t have time to watch it now. But I don’t see any reason for y’all to wait any longer. Kelly sent me this early yesterday afternoon and I’m just seeing his e-mail, so we’re already behind the curve enough…

Which was stupider — Pelosi’s speech, or the Republican reaction to it?

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Dem_leaders

Reading through various accounts of the breakdown in Washington yesterday, I kept running across the fact that some Republicans blamed a speech by Nancy Pelosi at the outset of the voting for so many Republicans voting against the bailout plan. And sure enough, it was pretty awful:

$700 billion. A staggering number. But only a part of the cost of the failed Bush economic policies to our country. Policies that were built on budget recklessness. When President Bush took office, he inherited President Clinton’s surpluses — four years in a row, budget surpluses, on a trajectory of $5.6 trillion in surplus. And with his reckless economic policies, within two years, he had turned that around.

And now eight years later, the foundation of that fiscal irresponsibility, combined with an anything goes economic policy, has taken us to where we are today. They claim to be free market advocates, when it’s really an anything goes mentality. No regulation, no supervision, no discipline. And if you fail, you will have a golden parachute, and the taxpayer will bail you out.

Those days are over. The party is over in that respect. Democrats believe in a free market. We know that it can create jobs, it can create wealth, it can create many good things in our economy. But in this case, in its unbridled form, as encouraged, supported, by the Republicans — some in the Republican Party, not all — it has created not jobs, not capital, it has created chaos.

One has to ask, what the hell was the woman thinking? After days of leaders of both parties struggling to come up with a deal that could pass the House, she talks like that as the voting starts? Was she trying to make it fail? Did she think the only problem at that point was that she needed to get the more angry, partisan Democrats to vote for it, and they needed to be whipped up? What?

Or was it just the usual — that people who live by partisanship just don’t even notice themselves when they say stuff like this; it just comes out?

I don’t know, but I do know this — that’s a lousy excuse for Republicans to use to vote against it, because, as Barney Frank put it, their feelings were hurt. No, the Speaker should not have said those things. But if this was the plan that Republican negotiators had agreed was the thing to do, you don’t just throw that out because somebody on the other side spouts a bunch of foolishness. The economic health of this nation is not a tool for you to express your displeasure with your opponents’ rhetoric.

Just disgusting all around. Every time I look at this situation, I just get more and more disgusted. I realize that’s not a particularly constructive reaction, but that’s the one I have.

Gop_leaders

Biggest one-day Dow drop in history (nice going there, Washington)

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Wall_street_wart

Robert was finishing up a late-breaking cartoon for tomorrow (combining the Friday night debates with the collapses in Washington and New York today), and he mentioned he’d heard that the Dow had its biggest one-day drop in history today.

I said nah — it was bad, but not that bad. He was right; I was wrong. Turns out that was the GOOD news. Other indexes did worse than the Dow.

Here’s the WSJ version. The NYT version sugarcoated it a little, saying it was the biggest drop "in two decades" (I haven’t checked their math). And here’s the AP version:

By TIM PARADIS – AP Business Writer
NEW YORK — Wall Street’s worst fears came to pass Monday, when the government’s financial rescue plan failed in Congress and stocks plunged precipitously – hurtling the Dow Jones industrials down nearly 7 percent. The almost 780-point decline was the largest one-day point drop ever for the index.

The percentage declines for the Standard & Poor’s 500 and Nasdaq composite indexes were even larger. And credit markets, whose turmoil helped feed the stock market’s angst, froze up further amid the growing belief that the country is headed into a spreading credit and economic crisis.

Stunned traders on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, their faces tense and mouths agape, watched on TV screens as the House voted down in midafternoon the administration’s $700 billion plan to buy up distressed mortgage securities. Activity on the floor became frenetic as the "sell" orders blew in.

The Dow told the story of the market’s despair. The blue chip index, dropped by hundreds of points in a matter of moments, and by the end of the day had passed by far its previous record for a one-day drop, 684.81, set in the first trading day after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

The selling was so intense that just 162 stocks rose on the NYSE – and 3,073 dropped.

It takes an incredible amount of fear to set off such an intense reaction on Wall Street, and the worry now is that with the rescue plan’s fate uncertain, no one knows how the financial sector hobbled by hundreds of billions of dollars in bad mortgage bets will recover….

Nice going there, Washington. Nice leadership. Got any more tricks up your sleeves? You hammerheads…

Wall_street_wart2

Bailout deal collapses, and so does Wall St.

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Remember way back this morning when all those "leaders" of both parties in Washington had worked out a bailout deal. Well, never mind:

WASHINGTON — The House on Monday defeated a $700 billion emergency rescue for the nation’s financial system, ignoring urgent warnings from President Bush and congressional leaders of both parties that the economy could nosedive into recession without it. Stocks plummeted on Wall Street even before the 228-205 vote to reject the bill was announced on the House floor.

Bush and a host of leading congressional figures had implored the lawmakers to pass the legislation despite howls of protest from their constituents back home. Despite pressure from supporters, not enough members were willing to take the political risk just five weeks before an election.

Ample no votes came from both the Democratic and Republican sides of the aisle. More than two-thirds of Republicans and 40 percent of Democrats opposed the bill.

But just in case you’re now thinking that politicians are a bunch of jumpy, lily-livered cowards who can’t be relied upon to be cool in a crisis, take a look at what’s happening on Wall Street:

NEW YORK — Fear swept across the financial markets Monday, sending the Dow Jones industrials down as much as 705 points, after the government’s financial bailout package failed to survive a vote in the House.

As the vote was shown on TV, stocks plunged and investors fled to the safety of the credit markets, worrying that the financial system would now keep sinking under the weight of failed mortgage debt.

"Clearly something needs to be done, and the market dropping 400 points in 10 minutes is telling you that," said Chris Johnson president of Johnson Research Group. "This isn’t a market for the timid."

While investors had some worries that the vote would be close, many on Wall Street appeared to believe it would ultimately pass. The proposal wasn’t been seen on the Street as a panacea for the deepening problems in the financial sector that have led to the failure of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. and Washington Mutual Inc. and the forced sale of Merrill Lynch & Co. and Wachovia Corp. – and that still pose a threat to many other banks.

The markets turned highly volatile as it became clear the measure wouldn’t find the necessary support. The Dow regained ground then fell back again, trading down 524.88, or 4.71 percent, to 10,618.25. At its low, it was down 705.06, not far from its previous record for an intraday drop, 721.56, set during the first trading day after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. Still, in percentage terms, the decline remained well below the more than 20 percent drops seen on Black Monday of October 1987 and the Depression.

Broader stock indicators also tumbled. The Standard & Poor’s 500 index declined 74.52, or 6.14 percent, to 1,138.75, and the Nasdaq composite index fell 139.00, or 6.37 percent, to 2,204.34.

The Federal Reserve declined to comment on the market’s decline.

With Wall Street in turmoil, the yield on the 3-month Treasury bill fell to 0.32 percent from 0.87 percent on Friday. That showed that investors were prepared to get meager returns on an investment as long as it was secure. The yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note, which moves opposite its price, fell to 3.69 percent from 3.84 percent late Thursday.

Investors also faced other worries about the banking system. Wachovia became the latest big bank to be rescued from its overwhelming bad mortgage debt, agreeing to a Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.-brokered buyout of its banking operations by Citigroup Inc.

Marc Pado, U.S. market strategist at Cantor Fitzgerald, said investors are worried about the spread of troubles beyond banks in the U.S. to Europe and other markets.

"Things are dying and breaking apart while they sit there and vote on this thing," he said.

So nice going all around, fellas. Ya bunch of feckless twits…

‘Boogie Man:’ Atwater film coming to Cola

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Atwaterlee_2

You probably already read in the paper that "Boogie Man," the documentary about Lee Atwater, is coming to the Nickelodeon. A fresh reminder came in via e-mail from Judy Turnipseed:

This movie which starts this week at the Nickelodeon about
the famous Lee Atwater features Tom Turnipseed with a lot of other South
Carolinians.  Tom will be on a panel about the movie on Friday night. 
 
Here is a review of
it in the New York Times
 
 
Here is a link to a trailer of the movie and how to buy
tickets at the Nick if you want to see the movie.

http://www.boogiemanfilm.com/ 

 

Tom, of course, was the object of one of the most outrageously mean things Atwater ever said. Here, from a 1991 story by our own Lee Bandy, is a short version of that bit of history:

Tom Turnipseed, a liberal Democrat who ran for Congress in South Carolina, once accused Atwater of engineering a survey of white voters in which they were pointedly informed of Turnipseed’s membership in the NAACP. Atwater denied the charge, but also said that he did not want to deal with allegations made by someone who had once been "hooked up to jumper cables," referring to shock treatments Turnipseed had received years before as a suicidal teenager.

He said that in 1980, when Turnipseed was running against Floyd Spence.

Earning that first piece of plastic

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By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
Credit used to make sense to me, and now it doesn’t. Here’s the way it once worked, according to my sepia-toned memories:
    When I got out of college in 1975, I went to work for The Jackson Sun in West Tennessee as a copy editor for the lordly sum of $130 a week. That’s $6,760 a year. After a three-week trial period I got a $15-a-week raise, which was quite a thrill at the time. I was married, my wife was in graduate school, and our first child would arrive about a year later.
    My first week, a woman who also worked on the copy desk, taking me under her wing, told me her husband worked at one of the banks, and to contact him if I needed help in that line. As it turned out, I did soon need a loan to pay for a used Vega (yes, I know, a bad call there).
    After the baby came, we decided we needed a credit card to help us through the weeks when my pay (by then $160!) didn’t meet the necessities. So I went to see Paul at the bank, but he said I couldn’t get one until I had established more of a credit record. The car loan helped, and so did the fact that we paid the hospital for the baby in installments. But that wasn’t enough to get a BankAmericard.
    Paul suggested I go to Sears, because they’d give a credit card to anybody. So I did (after which we rewarded Sears’ faith in the proletariat by buying most of the children’s clothes, and all tools and appliances, from there for years to come). Once I produced my Sears card at the bank, I got my “real” credit card.
    My wife, who handles the accounts and pays the bills at our house, now curses the day that piece of plastic came into our house — she has told me more than once in the past week, and apparently will keep telling me until it sinks in, that at our current rate of payment, we will not live long enough to pay off our credit card debt, according to all the actuarial tables or something like that (in one ear, out the other).
    But back then the card was helpful, and actually earning the privilege of having one seemed a sort of milestone. I was now someone deemed worthy of credit.
    In the intervening years a lot has changed. For instance, the Sears card morphed into a Mastercard that I no longer use (under threat of bodily harm) because the usurious rate is high even for a credit card, but that I carry in my wallet for sentimental reasons: It still says “member since 1976.”
    That’s a distinction that wore off long, long ago, though. Today, on the rare occasions when I get to the mail before my wife does, there is always at least one offer of a new credit card, and usually more than one. My children have been getting those come-ons at our house since they entered their teens. Even with all of them moved out, they still come. And my wife still throws them away.
    But that’s credit cards. Let’s talk mortgages.
    My understanding of mortgages does not extend beyond the explanation offered by George Bailey in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” which Robert Ariail lampoons in his cartoon today. Here’s the original dialogue:

    No, but you’re… you’re, you’re, you’re thinkin’ of this place all wrong, as if I had the money back in a safe. Th-th-the money’s not here… why, your money’s in Joe’s house, that’s right next to yours, and in the Kennedy house, and Mrs. Maitland’s house, and, and a hundred others…. Why, you’re lending them the money to build, and then they’re gonna pay it back to you as best they can, now what’re you gonna do, foreclose on them?

    That I understand. And while my mortgage might not be with ol’ George down the street, I did take it out with a very nice person in an office that I could go to and ask questions later if I needed to. But before long my mortgage and yours got bundled up with a thousand others and turned into a financial product that greedheads would buy and sell back and forth across the country as though the biggest contract I’ll ever enter into were merely another drop in a barrel of oil.
    Meanwhile, mortgages were being extended as casually and promiscuously as those credit card solicitations, without regard to the buyers’ ability to pay back, which eventually, as near as I can make out, led to this bizarre situation in which the president of the United States went on the TV last week to tell us that if we don’t come up with $700 billion in one quick hurry, we’ll all soon be living in Pottersville instead of Bedford Falls.
    Apparently, this happened in part because as a nation we decided that everybody ought to have a mortgage, whether they could afford one or not. That sounds really nice and egalitarian and everything. It also sounds just like the arguments I hear from the payday lending industry — that they have to exist because everybody needs to be able to take out loans, and you don’t want to be all paternalistic and tell them they can’t afford it.
    But I’m of the paternalistic school, I guess, if that’s what you want to call it. For years, I was on the local Habitat for Humanity board, and we didn’t sell those houses to just anybody. We made sure that while the families were low-income enough to need our service, they had enough income to make their payments. We provided counseling. We required that they pile up sweat equity by working to build other people’s houses before their own foundation was laid.
    Those hurdles existed to keep the unwary from getting into debt over their heads, just as Paul’s bank once required certain demonstrations before I could have that card.
    And now, apparently the whole nation is being sucked into a vortex of bad decisions chasing each other ’round and ’round.
    And to me, that just doesn’t make sense. But that’s because I don’t understand credit. Not anymore, anyway.

Go to thestate.com/bradsblog/.

Scattered thoughts on the debate

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First, I’ll refer you to video from the panel discussion last night, where you will find Joshua Gross and others offering their thoughts.

I was wiped out last night, and didn’t stick around to talk to folks after the discussion ended a little before midnight. Long day. I hope folks didn’t think I was rude, but I’d been fighting a cold and had no resources left. I’d told everyone at the start that I was just there to observe; it was the newsroom’s show.

On my way out I did run into our own Norm Ivey, who was there sporting an Obama ’08 T-shirt. You can see some of Norm’s recent comments on this post, and this one, and this one.

As I said last night from my Treo, I don’t think this was a debate that changed any minds — although Norm raised the interesting point that the candidates were speaking to voters who hadn’t paid attention until now, and that on that score he thought McCain did better. I can’t say, because I wasn’t looking for that while I watched.

Nor do I have an overall observation or theme. I thought each candidate exhibited some strengths and weaknesses, as follows:

McCain strengths:

  • Having been right about the Surge. There’s so much more to that than the fact that by sending those extra troops, and using them properly, we created a stituation in which we can start talking about drawing down and leaving behind a stable Iraq. It goes to the core fact that McCain was right, and Bush was wrong, for four years before the president finally got rid of Rumsfeld and switched to a strategy that would work. This narrative (and so many other things) gives the lie to the Democrats’ "McCain equals Bush" nonsense. It communicates that he won’t give up on our nation’s commitments, or let American blood be spent for nought. And it shows he knows the differences between approaches likely to work, and those not to.
  • The constant reminders of his long experience with these issues. The answer he gave to the "bomb, bomb Iran" remark was his best moment. He gave the history of his judgments of major decisions involving the deployment of our military, from being against sending the Marines to Lebanon in 83 to backing Clinton on Bosnia in defiance of many in his party. It strongly suggested the thought, "Oh, yeah — and Obama just got to the Senate…"
  • His long-held opposition to earmarks and wasteful spending, and clear willingness to use his veto and the bully pulpit to fight it. Lehrer was irritating with his constant hammering on "if the bailout passes, what will you give up," but McCain gave the best answer.
  • The reminder that he and Biden pushed through the 9/11 commission, again in spite of the Bush administration.
  • His answer on the initial economic question, emphasizing how encourage he was that Democrats and Republicans were working together finally, made Obama’s answer about "failed policies" of Republicans look petty.

McCain weaknesses

  • One overrides all others, and he did it repeatedly and intentionally — his condescending references to Obama "not understanding" issues. Obama is a smart man, but even if he weren’t, McCain’s constant attempts to put him down would have been unseemly, and beneath him. Yes, I believe there are some things Obama "doesn’t get," but that’s not a gentlemanly way of putting it, and I’m betting it created a lot of sympathy for Obama. Most of all, it was inconsistent with the sort of man McCain is — he is usually deeply humble and gracious to those who disagree with him (something that I think is all the more admirable because of his natural temper; he has chosen to be mild in disagreement, and it speaks well of him). This was artificial and offensive, and whoever talked him into taking this approach should not be listened to again.
  • As we knew already, he is not as smoothly articulate as his opponent. He lost himself in his sentences a number of times, particularly toward the end, and that did him no good.

Obama strengths

  • His argument that Iraq has sapped our resources to the point that we can’t "project force" where we need to elsewhere in the world. Yes, Democrats have long said this in regard to Afghanistan, but he took it beyond that. This remains the strongest argument that critics of our involvement in Iraq have, and he used it well, doing an excellent job of distancing himself from those in his party who are reflexively against ANY military action, and that’s something he has to do to be credible as a candidate for commander in chief.
  • Beyond exhausting the military, he also made a good argument that Iraq has enabled and strengthened Iran — a familiar argument, but he presented it well.
  • His gracious acknowledgment of the courageous leadership McCain showed in standing up to the administration on torture. The normal Democratic position is that McCain "caved" on the issue, and is no better than Bush. That’s a deeply unfair characterization, and Obama showed himself to be above that.
  • More articulate, as always (see "McCain weaknesses").

Obama weaknesses

  • Continuing to be wrong on the Surge, and not acknowledging it, hurts him with everyone else except his base. Trouble is, that base will go nuclear if he acknowledges it. (The thing is that logically, he could still assert it was wrong to go INTO Iraq, but that the Surge was the thing to do.) The "worked beyond wildest expectations" earlier helped, but McCain turned that against him well, noting that it was no surprise to HIM.
  • Probably no one else noticed this, but when he tried to excuse his failure to hold hearings on Afghanistan (a weakness in itself), he said that’s not the practice on the committee chaired by his veep candidate. That made me fully realize, in a way I hadn’t before, just how upside-down the ticket is in terms of qualifications — the number two guy on the ticket is the number one guy’s CHAIRMAN. If I had been McCain, I might have succumbed to the temptation to point out the irony.
  • This is a silly one, but the "professor" was much in evidence in his pedantic insistence on trying to pronounce foreign names and terms the way natives of those countries might, but doing it with such an obvious American accent (the bad guys in Afghanistan were the "Tollybon," said as only an English-shaped tongue could say it). Maybe you couldn’t hear it; it’s something from my childhood when I lived in South America and was bilingual — even though I can hardly speak it now, hearing other gringos try to be SO proper in their pronunciation and fail still grates on my ear.

Yeah, I know — I gave McCain more strengths, and Obama more weaknesses. But each item does not have equal value, and overall, I think they came out even. That’s bad news for McCain, because the subject of most of the debate was his personal area of strength, and he needed to clearly win this one.

I don’t think he did that, but then I can’t speak for all independent voters.

Meanwhile, back in the world: We’re now having firefights with Pakistan

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Folks who have been looking back and forth between the presidential election and the crisis on Wall Street, only to see the two merge, may be surprised to know that things have gotten hairier over on the Afghan-Pakistan border. We’ve been sending commandos and other assets after al Qaida over there (you may recall that’s where Osama bin Laden is supposed to be hiding out), and Pakistan has been getting madder and madder over it.

And now, apparently, we’re shooting at each other … although Pakistan claims it was just shooting flares at our helicopters — to start with, anyway .

I just thought I’d mention this in case there is a debate tomorrow night, and in case anybody thought there wasn’t anything important besides the economy to talk about.

Bill Clinton explains why Palin is ‘hot’ (and praises McCain, too)

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Clintonbill

Consider this post to be a taste of sorbet to cleanse the palate between courses of history-making political/economic news.

Katherine Q. Seelye on the NYT’s Caucus blog says "Barack Obama might be forgiven for wondering which side Bill Clinton is on," since the former president has taken advantage of several opportunities to praise John McCain this week. Finally he DID say some good stuff about Obama, but still…

This reminds me of a tidbit I read in the WSJ this morning, in which Bill had some nice stuff to say about Sarah, too:

"I come from Arkansas. I get why she’s hot out there, why she’s doing well. People look at her, and they say: ‘All those kids. Something that happens in everybody’s family. I’m glad she loves her daughter and she’s not ashamed of her. Glad that girl’s going around with her boyfriend. Glad they’re going to get married. . . .’ [Voters will think] I like that little Down syndrome kid. One of them lives down the street. They’re wonderful children. They’re wonderful people. And I like the idea that this guy does those long-distance races. Stayed in the race for 500 miles with a broken arm. My kind of guy."

Seems to me Bill had best hush before he gets himself into some more trouble with Mamanem.

So I guess we’ll have a debate now

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If one views McCain’s decision to suspend campaigning as a campaign gambit — and it’s hard, in this cynical world, to see it outside that context — it appears to be one that paid off.

Congress reaches a deal, he appears at the White House with an air of having gotten the job done (WITH Obama, thereby emphasizing bipartisanship over grubbing for personal electoral advantage), and he goes ahead with the debate Friday night, having made the gesture to put the nation’s business first, yet not having the painful choice of either a) blinking first and showing up without a deal on the bailout or b) being the cause of the absurd spectacle of Obama standing there facing an empty lectern.

If nothing else, he’s shifted the focus to himself more than otherwise — which can easily work against him still, of course. Instead of "leader who puts the country ahead of politicking" he can look like "reckless gambler who will risk it all on a throw of the dice."

But we’ll see. Things are moving fast today.

Bipartisan bailout deal reached

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Maybe this did turn out to be our fiscal 9/11, pulling Democrats and Republicans together to act in the interests of the country rather than their respective parties. If so, kudos all around. We’ll no more later in the day after the historic confab at the White House with congressional leaders and both presidential candidates.

For now, here’s what The Wall Street Journal is reporting.

Here’s The New York Times version.

And here’s AP’s:

WASHINGTON (AP) — Key Republicans and Democrats reported agreement Thursday on an outline for a historic $700 billion bailout of the financial industry, but there was still resistance from rank-and-file House Republicans despite warnings of an impending panic.

"I now expect we will, indeed, have a plan that can pass the House, pass the Senate, be signed by the president and bring a sense of certainty to this crisis that is sill roiling in the market," Sen. Bob Bennett, R-Utah, said as members of both parties emerged from a two-hour negotiating session.

Negotiators planned to present the outline at a White House meeting later Thursday with President Bush and the rivals to replace him, Republican John McCain and Democrat Barrack Obama.

"We’re very confident that we can act expeditiously," said Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., the Banking Committee chairman.

Not everyone in the closed-door talks was as optimistic. Rep. Spencer Bachus of Alabama, the only House Republican in the bargaining meeting, stopped short of saying he agreed with the other lawmakers on an imminent deal.

"There was progress today," said Bachus, the senior Republican on the House Financial Services panel.

Later, he issued a statement saying he was not empowered to strike any deals and there was "no agreement other than to continue discussions."

Both houses’ Republican leaders, Rep. John Boehner and Sen. Mitch McConnell, also issued statements saying there was no agreement.

Still, the White House called the announcement "a good sign that progress is being made."

"We’ll want to hear from (Treasury) Secretary (Henry) Paulson and take a look at the details. We look forward to a good discussion at the meeting this afternoon," said Tony Fratto, the deputy White House press secretary.

A Treasury spokeswoman said the proposal was being reviewed there.

On Wall Street, stock prices were up late in the trading day, but not by as much as earlier in the day.

The core of the plan proposed by the administration just a few days ago envisions the government buying up sour assets of shaky financial firms in a bid to keep them from going under and to stave off a potentially severe recession.

Obama and McCain called for a bipartisan effort to deal with the crisis, little more than five weeks before national elections in which the economy has emerged as the dominant theme.

McCain on Wednesday asked Obama to agree to delay their first debate, scheduled for Friday, to deal with the meltdown. Obama said the debate should go ahead.

Congressional negotiators said Thursday there were few obstacles to a final agreement, although no details of an accord were immediately available.

"There really isn’t much of a deadlock to break," said Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee.

But there were fresh signs of trouble in the House Republican Caucus. A group of GOP lawmakers circulated an alternative designed to attract private money back into the credit markets with less government intrusion.

Under that proposal, the government would provide insurance to companies that agree to hold frozen assets, rather than purchase them directly as envisioned under the administration’s plan. The firms would have to pay insurance premiums to the Treasury Department for the coverage.

"The taxpayers haven’t done anything wrong," said Rep Eric Cantor, R-Va., adding that rather than require them to bear the cost of the bailout, the alternative "pretty much puts the burden on Wall Street over time."

Boehner, R-Ohio, the minority leader, was huddling with McCain on the rescue. When asked whether the GOP presidential nominee could corral restive Republicans to support the plan, Boehner said, "Who knows?"

Bush told the nation in a televised address Wednesday night that passage of the package his administration has proposed was urgently needed to calm the markets and restore confidence in the reeling financial system.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said Bush’s agreement with Democrats on limiting pay for executives of bailed-out financial institutions and giving taxpayers an equity stake in the companies cleared a significant hurdle.

It was not immediately clear how lawmakers had resolved differences over how to phase in the unprecedented cost — a step demanded by Democrats and some Republicans who want stronger congressional control over the bailout — without spooking markets. The idea of letting the government take an ownership stake in troubled companies as part of the rescue, rather than just buying bad debt, also has been a topic of intense negotiation.

Frank told The Associated Press Thursday both elements would be included in the legislation.

Bush acknowledged Wednesday night that the bailout would be a "tough vote" for lawmakers. But he said failing to approve it would risk dire consequences for the economy and most Americans.

"Our entire economy is in danger," he said.

Should Friday’s debate be postponed?

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McCain wants to postpone Friday night’s debate until a bipartisan consensus can be reached on the bailout plan. Obama wants to go ahead. Both are meeting with President Bush Thursday.

Should they debate the next night? What do you think?

Here’s a story on the subject:

The economic crisis and raw politics threatened to derail the first presidential debate as John McCain challenged Barack Obama to delay Friday’s forum and unite to help Washington fix the financial mess. Obama rebuffed his GOP rival, saying the next president needs to "deal with more than one thing at once."

The White House rivals maneuvered Wednesday to claim the leadership role in resolving the economic turmoil that has overshadowed their campaign. Obama said he would proceed with his debate preparations while consulting with bailout negotiators and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. McCain said he would stop all advertising, fundraising and other campaign events and return to Washington and work for a bipartisan solution.

"It’s my belief that this is exactly the time when the American people need to hear from the person who, in approximately 40 days, will be responsible for dealing with this mess," Obama said at a news conference in Clearwater, Fla. "It’s going to be part of the president’s job to deal with more than one thing at once."

But McCain said they must focus on a bipartisan solution as the Bush administration’s $700 billion bailout proposal seemed headed for defeat. If not, McCain said ominously, credit will dry up, people will no longer be able to buy homes, life savings will be at stake and businesses will not have enough money to pay workers.

"It has become clear that no consensus has developed to support the administration’s proposal," McCain said. "I do not believe that the plan on the table will pass as it currently stands, and we are running out of time."

President Bush invited both candidates to the White House on Thursday, along with congressional leaders, in hopes of securing a bill to rescue the economy. Bush took the unusual step Wednesday night of calling Obama directly to invite him, White House press secretary Dana Perino said. An Obama spokesman said the senator would attend.

In a joint statement Wednesday night, the candidates said the country faces "a moment of economic crisis," and called for political unity to solve it because "the jobs, savings and the prosperity of the American people are at stake." Both said the Bush plan was "flawed."

"We cannot risk an economic catastrophe," they said. "Now is our chance to come together to prove that Washington is once again capable of leading this country."

Sen. Lindsey Graham, McCain’s representative in debate negotiations, said McCain will not attend the debate "unless there is an agreement that would provide a solution" to the financial crisis. Graham, R-S.C., told The Associated Press that the agreement would have to be publicly endorsed by Obama, McCain, the White House and congressional leaders, but not necessarily given final passage by the House and Senate.

Asked whether the debate could go forward if McCain doesn’t show, Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs said: "My sense is there’s going to be a stage, a moderator, an audience and at least one presidential candidate."

Buffett move is best argument yet against bailout

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Buffettwarren

Suddenly, it becomes harder for Henry Paulson to sell his $700 billion taxpayer bailout. With Warren Buffett willing to invest $5 billion of his money — rather than the taxpayers’ — in a Wall Street institution that made the right calls, don’t we have a powerful argument that the market is working, and correcting itself?

Buffett Deal at Goldman Is Seen as a Sign of Confidence

Warren E. Buffett, the country’s most famous investor and one of the world’s richest men, announced on Tuesday that he would invest $5 billion in Goldman Sachs, the embattled Wall Street titan, in a move that could bolster confidence in the financial markets.

Until now, Mr. Buffett, who has navigated the stock market with legendary prowess, has largely refrained from investing in the stricken financial industry, saying repeatedly that things could get worse.

Thousands of people on and off Wall Street follow Mr. Buffett’s moves, so his decision to invest in Goldman immediately heartened investors….

I’m no expert on capitalism, but how do you argue that it’s breaking down and needs a government takeover if firms that made bad decisions are failing, and those that made good decisions are attracting capital?

Yes, I know it’s more complicated than that. But I’ll be watching to see what effect this has on the debate.

Obama, Ayres, and another kind of ‘school choice’

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Now that everyone has been totally desensitized by the ranting of Lee et al. about Obama, probably not much attention will be paid to an accusation of substance that appeared in The Wall Street Journal today. But if you do pay attention, it’s intriguing — and disturbing. It’s an op-ed piece headlined "Obama and Ayers Pushed Radicalism On Schools."

Basically, it provides fairly strong evidence to believe that Bill Ayres — unrepentant Mad Bomber and live-in of Bernardine Dohrn — has been considerably more than "a guy who lives in my neighborhood" to Barack Obama. Sen. Obama was the chairman, from 1995-99, of a foundation that the author, Stanley Kurtz, describes as Ayres "brainchild":

The Chicago Annenberg Challenge was created ostensibly to improve Chicago’s public schools. …. Mr. Ayers co-chaired the foundation’s other key body, the "Collaborative," which shaped education policy.

… The Daley archives show that Mr. Obama and Mr. Ayers worked as a team to advance the CAC agenda.

… Mr. Ayers was one of a working group of five who assembled the initial board in 1994. Mr. Ayers founded CAC and was its guiding spirit. No one would have been appointed the CAC chairman without his approval.

The CAC’s agenda flowed from Mr. Ayers’s educational philosophy, which called for infusing students and their parents with a radical political commitment, and which downplayed achievement tests in favor of activism. In the mid-1960s, Mr. Ayers taught at a radical alternative school, and served as a community organizer in Cleveland’s ghetto.

In works like "City Kids, City Teachers" and "Teaching the Personal and the Political," Mr. Ayers wrote that teachers should be community organizers dedicated to provoking resistance to American racism and oppression. His preferred alternative? "I’m a radical, Leftist, small ‘c’ communist," Mr. Ayers said in an interview in Ron Chepesiuk’s, "Sixties Radicals," at about the same time Mr. Ayers was forming CAC.

Until now, the Obama/Ayres connection had been a minor worry at the back of my mind. This rachets that up a notch.

On a less serious note, I was amused to see that Ayres shared with Gov. Mark Sanford the goal of divorcing school funding from the institutional model: "Instead of funding schools directly, it required schools to affiliate
with "external partners," which actually got the money. Proposals from
groups focused on math/science achievement were turned down. Instead
CAC disbursed money through various far-left community organizers, such
as the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (or Acorn)."

No, it’s not the same as what Sanford would do. Of course, if we did have vouchers and tax credits, parents would be free to spend it on Mr. Ayres’ idea of a good education, or some other loony alternative, with no accountability to the public from whose school coffers that funding would be diverted. Maybe that’s why I was reminded.

The United States of France

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A thoughtful reader shared this with me, from TIME magazine:

How We Became the United States of France

By Bill Saporito Sunday, Sep. 21, 2008
This is the state of our great republic: We’ve nationalized the financial system, taking control from Wall Street bankers we no longer trust. We’re about to quasi-nationalize the Detroit auto companies via massive loans because they’re a source of American pride, and too many jobs — and votes — are at stake. Our Social Security system is going broke as we head for a future in which too many retirees will be supported by too few workers. How long before we have national health care? Put it all together, and the America that emerges is a cartoonish version of the country most despised by red-meat red-state patriots: France. Only with worse food.

Note the piece that the phrase "We’ve nationalized the financial system" links to. That one photo of Henry Paulson is rapidly becoming ubiquitous. I used it for the Daddy Warbucks thing, and I also put it on tomorrow’s op-ed page with a column by Robert Samuelson headlined "Paulson’s panic."

Hey, that’s the United States of Freedom to you, mon ami.

WHAT election?

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As anyone who was paying attention knows, the crisis on Wall Street pushed aside the presidential election in news coverage last week — for only the second time this year, according to the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, which reports:

The Wall Street
meltdown captured more media attention than the presidential campaign last week,
and the crisis re-directed the campaign narrative toward a focus on economic
issues, according to a new report from the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism.

For only the second
time this year, another event eclipsed the campaign as the top story. Market
woes led the press agenda for the week of Sept. 15-21, filling 37% of the
newshole. Additionally, the state of the economy became the leading campaign
narrative last week, accounting for 43% of the campaign newshole. The previous
week (Sept. 8-14), the economy only accounted for 4% of campaign
coverage.

The sudden burst of
coverage of the economy marks only the second time since early June that the
issue has been a top weekly campaign theme. Indeed, last week was only the
fourth time that a policy issue has been the No. 1 storyline in general election
coverage…

Why even I, in spite of my extreme reluctance, have been writing about it, which probably accounts for a slight dropoff in blog traffic the last few days. Mind you, it hasn’t dropped to anywhere near pre-Sarahmania levels, but it’s tapered slightly — 15,010 page views last week, compared to 15,128 the week before, and 15,981 the week before that. Before the day that the Palin choice was announced, 11,000 a week was about our speed here. The drop I speak of seems hardly worth mentioning, except that it matches my intuitive belief that we’re on the cusp of a significant drop, unless something more arresting to the attention of normal people occurs in the next few days. One can take only so much of intense back and forth between Bernanke and Paulson and Chris Dodd et al.

The Granny within us all

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By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
KILLING TIME during my too-short stay at the beach over the summer, I flipped on the tube and vegged out briefly over an episode of “The Beverly Hillbillies:”
    Granny became suspicious of banker Milburn Drysdale. To reassure her, Jed accompanied her to the bank and asked that Mr. Drysdale show Granny her money. Mr. Drysdale sputtered that he didn’t have it, that it had been invested, that it would take weeks to gather that much cash. Jed, deeply disappointed, soberly told him he’d best do so right quick; Granny felt bitterly vindicated in her lack of trust.
    Oh, those silly, unsophisticated Clampetts! What a laugh! They thought those millions were in actual notes and coins in the vault! What rubes.
    Too lowbrow for you? Consider Shakespeare’s Polonius, who advises Laertes:

    Neither a borrower, nor a lender be;
    For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
    And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry….

    Oh, that silly, pompous old windbag and his cliches! If he’d minded his own business, “Hamlet” wouldn’t have turned out as a tragedy.
    Of course one cannot have a modern economy without a whole heap of borrowing and lending — only the richest of us could own homes, or go to college, or drive cars; businesses couldn’t grow; factories would shut down for the lack of raw materials. No one could trade in stocks or commodities.
    And all wealth is based on the sort of trust that Granny was so reluctant to extend to Mr. Drysdale. Most who have achieved middle-class status seldom hold in their wallets an amount equal to even a single paycheck. If you do direct deposit, your compensation consists of 1s and Os transferred from one financial institution to another, and the only reason your debit card works at the grocery store is that everyone involved, from your employer to your bank to the store, plus various middlemen, trusts that those blips of data represent something of real and quantifiable value.
    And yet, it seems that on some level, the crisis on Wall Street that so threatens our entire economy is the result of major financial institutions not having sufficient assets to balance their debts — no cash to show Granny, even given time to gather it, in terms I can understand — leading the normally trusting Jeds of the world to say “Hold on!” to such an extent that Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke saw all borrowing and lending about to come to a screeching halt. In the prosaic wording of The Wall Street Journal over the weekend, what those officials saw was “the circulatory system of the U.S. economy — credit markets — starting to fail.”
    So it was that Messrs. Paulson and Bernanke went to Congress late last week to ask for a $700 billion bailout of our financial infrastructure.
    Congress was at first deeply impressed. Speaking of a presentation by Mr. Paulson, Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., said, “When you listened to him describe it, you gulped.” Over the weekend, though, the usual sorts of reflexes kicked in, questions were raised, and more than one voice said, “Hold on.”
    As one who would have trouble coming up with $700 on such short notice, I find myself wondering whom I trust in all this. And I wonder that even as I remain convinced that I must trust someone. In fact, the restoration of a healthy state of affairs seems to my mean understanding dependent on a multilateral restoration of trust throughout the system.
    On Monday morning, I read everything I could get my hands on trying to decide what I think Congress should do. Unfortunately, everything I read caused me to question whether I trusted the source.
If Mr. Paulson and Mr. Bernanke know what they’re doing, how did things get this bad? Congressional Democrats make sense when they say the bad behavior of executives at these failed financial firms should not be rewarded by the taxpayers, but how much of that is populist demagoguery? And conservatives are right to say that there are limits to the extent that government can shield us from risk and consequences, but at what point do their objections become mere ideological pedantry in the face of a crisis of this proportion?
    Consider the piece on the opposite page by Paul Krugman. I chose it because it broke down the situation into elements even I could understand. But given his oft-demonstrated animus toward the Bush administration, am I at all surprised that he concludes that he doesn’t like its plan?
    The really awful thing is that it was trusting the experts — from the Masters of the Universe on Wall Street to an administration headed by, as Gail Collins of The New York Times wrote over the weekend, “the-first-president-with-an-MBA-and-a-lot-of-good-it-did-us” — that got us here.
    The even awfuler thing is that our only way out of this mess is to trust. We have to rely upon the “experts” in the administration, and members of Congress and their staffs, to draft the right plan and make it work. And then we have to trust our bankers and brokers and each other going forward, or nothing the government can do can get our economy back on its feet.
    That means we’re going to have to hush up the Granny within us, and given present circumstances, that’s not going to be easy.

Go to thestate.com/bradsblog/.

Who’ll resurrect the electric car? Chrysler says IT will

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Just as everyone is ready to write off Detroit, Chrysler (of all companies) tells the WSJ that it’s going to have a fleet — "portfolio" is the term it used, actually — of electric cars and trucks year after next:

Chrysler LLC is aiming to launch a full "portfolio" of electric cars and trucks, and sports-utility vehicles starting in late 2010, a person familiar with the company’s plans said.

The lineup will include front-wheel drive and rear-wheel drive cars as well as so-called "body-on-frame" trucks, this person said.

At least one of the models will be a pure electric vehicle with a rechargable battery pack that Chrysler expects to have a range of 150 to 200 miles, this person said.

Others will have a battery that can last for about 40 miles and a small gasoline engine to provide power and recharge the battery for longer trips.

Chrysler expects these "range-extended" electric vehicles to go about 400 miles on eight gallons of gasoline, this person said….

I’m guessing that there will be a great deal of interest in this "portfolio" if it materializes. After all, my video short "Who Resurrected the Electric Car?" is my second-most watched video EVER on YouTube, with 27,748 views. (Which is first? Don’t ask. What that says about America is more disturbing, and a subject for another day.)

When I saw this breaking news on my Treo this morning, I thought it particularly ironic in light of the three letters to the editor I read in that same paper this morning, trashing Detroit all the way around for failing to do such things as this. I agreed with the letter writers, by the way.

I’ll believe Chrysler can pull this off when it does so. But the news is encouraging, from an Energy Party perspective.

No change in 4 battleground states

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Some of you have quite rightly cried "irrelevant!" when I have passed on national polls, seeing as how the POTUS is not chosen by a national popular vote. I have said I would pass on info on battleground states as I run across it. The WashPost today brings the following to my attention:

A new poll by Washington Post, Quinnipiac University and the Wall Street Journal shows that the presidential race between John McCain and Barack Obama in four key battleground states remains remarkably stable despite a month of politically significant developments, with the Illinois senator running ahead of or even with his Republican rival.

In Colorado, Obama takes 49 percent to 45 percent for McCain while in Michigan Obama stands at 48 percent as compared to 44 percent for McCain. The contest in Minnesota, once considered a lock for Obama, is also quite close with Obama at 47 percent and McCain 45 percent. Only in Wisconsin does Obama have an edge — 49 percent to 42 percent — outside the statistical margin of error for the poll.

Those results are remarkably similar to data from July Quinnipiac polls in each of the four states and suggest that despite the massive media coverage surrounding the two parties’ national nominating conventions as well as the vice presidential selections — especially that of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, which many presumed would alter the campaign’s dynamic — little has changed in the race for the White House.

Here’s a link to the story in the Post. And here’s the Wall Street Journal version.

I have only two things to say about this:

  1. So much for Sarahmania, which has boosted traffic on this blog significantly, but apparently has left voters in Colorado, Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin unmoved.
  2. I’m pretty sure that this is the first time I’ve ever heard of Quinnipiac University.