New and Improved 3-ply election thread...

[LouieB]

I sure hope that the polls are totally wrong in any event and that all the young people with only cell phones that can't be accessed by pollsters get their butts to the polls on election day. I think we could see Obama doing far better in some places than we have any idea about..

 

Meanwhile, the bailout in its present form sucks.....

 

LouieB

[viatroy]

Chin up, Lou.

 

 

And we're finally seeing some press and legal action on election theft scenarios. Hope it's enough.

[bobbob1313]

haven't we learned not to count on young people voting?

[Party @ the Moontower]

Chin up, Lou.

 

 

And we're finally seeing some press and legal action on election theft scenarios. Hope it's enough.

I hope so, election fraud is a scary threat to our country.

 

So it looks like Palin's learning field trip today with world leaders will also include Bono. That's one dude that I really respect most of the time, working with both parties to accomplish great things.

 

"Some of my activist friends will be jumping on one leg rather than jumping on two because it's never enough and etc., etc.," Bono said in a phone interview with USA TODAY from Fez, Morocco, where he's recording with his band, U2. "But I'm standing up and I'm applauding the president and Congress."

[embiggen]

haven't we learned not to count on young people voting?

 

 

it's all your fault.

[Beltmann]

I thought I was hallucinating when I heard Newt blasting the bailout and found myself agreeing with him.

Yeah, I read Newt's post at The National Review yesterday and thought to myself, "Dude is making sense."

[viatroy]

haven't we learned not to count on young people voting?

 

 

"young people"

 

 

The administration admits they are railroading congress, again.

 

White House Dispatches Team to Push Economic Bill

 

The White House today is drumming up extraordinary pressure on Congress to approve its plan to enact a $700 billion mortgage bailout fund, suggesting the markets cannot wait much longer and dispatching Vice President Cheney and other top officials up Pennsylvania Avenue to jawbone lawmakers.

 

[White House Deputy Press Secretary Tony] Fratto said it would be "unthinkable" for Congress not to pass legislation this week, asserting the result would be a "very, very serious situation" for the U.S. economy.

 

Fratto insisted that the plan was not slapped together and had been drawn up as a contingency over previous months and weeks by administration officials. He acknowledged lawmakers were getting only days to peruse it, but he said this should be enough.

 

 

 

 

 

Listen to Rep. Marcy Kaptur rip apart the bailout scheme. Time for Wall Street's reckoning

[kwall]

Yeah, I read Newt's post at The National Review yesterday and thought to myself, "Dude is making sense."

i think a local congressman here put it best when he said, "first, i want to know who's going broke and who's going to jail."

[John Smith]

So it looks like Palin's learning field trip today with world leaders will also include Bono. That's one dude that I really respect most of the time, working with both parties to accomplish great things.

 

My brother in law (one of the die hard 30%) velieves Bono is a comitted conservative since he has met with Bush several times.

[viatroy]

strange things afoot.

[Good Old Neon]

The always excellent Glen Greenwald on the right wing response to the current crisis:

 

On Saturday morning, I noted -- quoting Atrios -- the almost complete lack of debate over the ever-changing dictates issued by Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson. Last week, whatever Paulson said on any given day -- no bailouts; only selected bailouts; massive $700 billion bailout plan -- immediately became the unchallenged conventional wisdom.

 

That has all changed. Prominent economists, who had previously been defending Paulson for the most part, began voicing serious doubts about his plan. As the AP put it yesterday: "Many of the same economists and opinion-makers who'd provided a bipartisan sheen of consensus to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's previous moves have quickly begun casting doubts on the wisdom of a policy that would allow Treasury to purchase without oversight hundreds of billions of dollars of difficult-to-price assets from financial institutions." Not only Paul Krugman, who was a skeptic from the start, but conservative economic experts have also now expressed opposition, including former Bush and Romney advisor Greg Mankiw and -- in an excellent column on Saturday -- Sebastian Mallaby, who described the rapid move to embrace Paulson's plan as "extremely dangerous."

 

And now, some of the most rabid ideologues on the Right are voicing increasingly strident opposition as well. At National Review last night, Newt Gingrich wrote that "watching Washington rush to throw taxpayer money at Wall Street has been sobering and a little frightening" and said he "hopes Congress will slow down and have an open debate." Thereafter, NR's Yuval Levin proclaimed that nobody could read through the Paulson proposal "without concluding that everyone in Washington has lost their minds." In The New York Times today, Bill Kristol said he's "doubtful that the only thing standing between us and a financial panic is for Congress to sign this week, on behalf of the American taxpayer, a $700 billion check over to the Treasury," while Michelle Malkin posted a lengthy alarmist screed warning that "Hank Paulson must be contained."

 

Right-wing opposition to the Paulson plan is vital for having any meaningful chance to stop it. Does anyone have any confidence at all in the Democrats' willingness and/or ability to impede this bailout train if the Bush administration and the Right were vigorously behind it, warning the nation of impending doom unless we submit to vast, unchecked government power of the type Henry Paulson is demanding? The instances of complete Democratic acquiescence under those circumstances -- including when they "controlled" the Congress -- are far too numerous to allow any rational person to think Democrats, standing alone, would stop the Paulson plan. As sad as it is, meaningful right-wing opposition is critical for that to happen.

 

More interesting are the reasons why these right-wing polemicists have decided they have real doubts about the wisdom of the Paulson plan. In opposing the plan, each of them cited -- with alarm -- the provision which vests full, unfettered and unreviewable discretion in the Treasury Secretary to determine how the $700,000,000,000 is allocated: Levin (plan gives "essentially unlimited power to use $700 billion to make purchases the scope of which is defined very loosely and vaguely"); Gingrich ("We are being reassured that we can trust Secretary Paulson 'because he knows what he is doing'. Congress had better ask a lot of questions before it shifts this much burden to the taxpayer and shifts this much power to a Washington bureaucracy"); Kristol ("There are no provisions for

[Party @ the Moontower]

My brother in law (one of the die hard 30%) velieves Bono is a comitted conservative since he has met with Bush several times.

Don't think Bono is that nuts. Fighting world poverty and such takes working with whatever sits in the Whitehouse.

[mountain bed]

haven't we learned not to count on young people voting?

We'll see. I know if my kids don't get to the polls their shit will be out in the street on Nov. 5.

[jc4prez]

Open the debates!

 

eh?

 

[mountain bed]

Open the debates!

 

eh?

 

Thanks for posting that jc4 - someone did some homework there!

[Good Old Neon]

Sarah Palin's experience in 12 minutes (video) - Lawrence Lessig"

 

http://blip.tv/file/1287551

 

Also - the 12 as of yet to be explained lies of Sarah Palin - from Andrew Sullivan's blog:

 

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_...twelve-odd.html

[John Smith]

Don't think Bono is that nuts. Fighting world poverty and such takes working with whatever sits in the Whitehouse.

 

Exactly, but he does not see that.

 

Anyhow anyone notice how the right wingers when complaining about the bail out use paulsons name freely but not Bush? They keep saying Washington wants... The implication they want to sell is that congress wants the cash. But it is Bush and his administration but they can not bring themselves to say so.

[viatroy]

We'll see. I know if my kids don't get to the polls their shit will be out in the street on Nov. 5.

 

 

 

 

I agree the debates should be open, and there should be a lot more of them.

[sweetheart-mine]

That is what has been so tragically missing from our political process for the last eight years: while the GOP sought greater and greater government power, Democrats acquiesced almost completely when they weren't complicitly enabling it. While the Executive was off the charts in terms of the power it seized, the Congress was off the charts in its passivity and eagerness to relinquish its Constitutionally assigned powers to the Bush White House. That's what has caused the extreme imbalance, with a bloated Republican Party and virtually unlimited presidential power: the failure of Democrats and the Congress to serve as a check on any of that. As their newfound contempt for unlimited power makes conclusively clear, the executive-power-worshipping Republicans of the last eight years -- if there is an Obama presidency -- will quickly re-discover their limited government power "principles" and won't be nearly as accommodating.

 

UPDATE: I should add that Congressional Democrats, while largely on board with the fundamentals of the bailout plan, have been making noises about demanding some limits and oversight on how this fund is managed, and the political climate is certainly part of what is motivating the Right to voice these doubts, as illustrated by the bizarre and deeply cynical spectacle of the GOP presidential nominee -- of all people -- joining with the Democrats to demand limits on CEO compensation. The point, though, is that Democrats typically make noises of this type and then capitulate at the end if they stand alone. This Paulson bill can be stopped only with widespread opposition that cuts across the standard ideological/partisan lines, and it shouldn't be that hard to argue why handing over $700 billion to the very people who caused this disaster, while allowing them to walk away soaked with profits, is not a good idea, and that vesting unlimited power in the Bush administration to manage that is a particularly bad idea. If Democrats can't win that argument, what argument can they win?

not sure whose words these were, of the people quoted, but they sum it up nicely. the democrats' refusal or inability to stand up to the power grabs that have gone on for the last eight years -- or their actually supporting them -- has been just as appalling as the power grabs themselves. we've had sit-ins at our democratic rep's office here several times during these years, trying to get the democrat to do the right thing on votes concerning war funding, the patriot act, and more. he'd talk one way and vote another, making himself just as much a part of the larger problem as anyone else in washington. so frustrating. yes, and if this week's bipartisan agreeing regarding the bailout doesn't result in serious changes to what the white house (and thus the money czar) is demanding now, the power-grab situation in washington is even worse than i already thought.

[Good Old Neon]

not sure whose words these were, of the people quoted, but they sum it up nicely. the democrats' refusal or inability to stand up to the power grabs that have gone on for the last eight years -- or their actually supporting them -- has been just as appalling as the power grabs themselves. we've had sit-ins at our democratic rep's office here several times during these years, trying to get the democrat to do the right thing on votes concerning war funding, the patriot act, and more. he'd talk one way and vote another, making himself just as much a part of the larger problem as anyone else in washington. so frustrating. yes, and if this week's bipartisan agreeing regarding the bailout doesn't result in serious changes to what the white house (and thus the money czar) is demanding now, the power-grab situation in washington is even worse than i already thought.

 

That would be Salon

[sweetheart-mine]

george will, in case anyone missed it:

 

 

George Will: McCain shows he's not presidential

 

05:05 AM CDT on Wednesday, September 24, 2008

 

Under the pressure of the financial crisis, one presidential candidate is behaving like a flustered rookie playing in a league too high. It is not Barack Obama.

 

Channeling his inner Queen of Hearts, John McCain furiously, and apparently without even looking around at facts, said Chris Cox, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, should be decapitated.

 

This childish reflex provoked The Wall Street Journal to editorialize that "McCain untethered" – disconnected from knowledge and principle – had made a "false and deeply unfair" attack on Mr. Cox that was "unpresidential" and demonstrated that Mr. McCain "doesn't understand what's happening on Wall Street any better than Barack Obama does."

 

Perhaps an old antagonism is involved in Mr. McCain's fact-free slander. His most conspicuous economic adviser is Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who previously headed the Congressional Budget Office. There he was an impediment to conservatives, including then-Congressman Cox, who as chairman of the Republican Policy Committee persistently tried and generally failed to enlist CBO support for "dynamic scoring" that would estimate the economic growth effects of proposed tax cuts.

 

In any case, Mr. McCain's smear – that Cox "betrayed the public's trust" – is a harbinger of a McCain presidency. For Mr. McCain, politics is always operatic, pitting people who agree with him against those who are "corrupt" or "betray the public's trust," two categories that seem to be exhaustive – there are no other people.

 

Mr. McCain's Manichaean worldview drove him to his signature legislative achievement, the McCain-Feingold law's restrictions on campaigning. Today, his campaign is creatively finding interstices in laws intended to restrict campaign giving and spending. (For details, see the Washington Post of Sept. 17 and The New York Times of Sept. 20.)

 

Mr. McCain's Queen of Hearts intervention in the opaque financial crisis overshadowed a solid conservative complaint from the Republican Study Committee, chaired by Rep. Jeb Hensarling of Texas. In a letter to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, the RSC decried the improvised torrent of bailouts as a "dangerous and unmistakable precedent for the federal government both to be looked to and indeed relied upon to save private sector companies from the consequences of their poor economic decisions."

 

This letter, listing just $650 billion of the perhaps more than $1 trillion in new federal exposures to risk, was sent while Mr. McCain's campaign, characteristically substituting vehemence for coherence, was airing an ad warning that Mr. Obama favors "massive government, billions in spending increases."

 

The political left always aims to expand the permeation of economic life by politics. Today, the efficient means to that end is government control of capital. So, is not Mr. McCain's party now conducting the most leftist administration in American history? The New Deal never acted so precipitously on such a scale.

 

On 60 Minutes Sunday, Mr. McCain said he would like to replace Mr. Cox with Andrew Cuomo, the Democratic attorney general of New York who is the son of former Gov. Mario Cuomo. Mr. McCain explained that Mr. Cuomo has "respect" and "prestige" and could "lend some bipartisanship." Conservatives have been warned.

 

Conservatives who insist that electing Mr. McCain is crucial usually start by saying he would make excellent judicial selections. But the more one sees of his impulsive, intensely personal reactions to people and events, the less confidence one has that he would select judges by calm reflection and clear principles, having neither patience nor aptitude for either.

 

It is arguable that, because of his inexperience, Mr. Obama is not ready for the presidency. It is arguable that Mr. McCain, because of his boiling moralism and bottomless reservoir of certitudes, is not suited to the presidency.

 

Unreadiness can be corrected, although perhaps at great cost, by experience. Can a dismaying temperament be fixed?

 

 

Washington Post columnist George Will's e-mail address is georgewill@washpost.com.

[sweetheart-mine]

That would be Salon

[embiggen]

http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/09/24/pal...here/index.html

[MrRain422]

Yeah, Greenwald deserves to be read daily.

[Party @ the Moontower]

http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/09/24/pal...here/index.html

 

 

She's finally killing that bit from her propaganda spit this week. Does she seriously think the American people don't see the lie(s)?

 

Sarah Palin's experience in 12 minutes (video) - Lawrence Lessig"

 

http://blip.tv/file/1287551

 

Also - the 12 as of yet to be explained lies of Sarah Palin - from Andrew Sullivan's blog:

 

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_...twelve-odd.html

 

 

Thanks