One Nation Under Investigation

:=):=) :=) :=) :=) :=) :=) :=) :=) )=: )=: )=: )=: )=: )=: )=: )=: )=:

"Turns out there are a lot of links in the financial system."

GWB 9.20.2008

“If money isn’t loosened up, this sucker could go down.”

GWB 9.25.08

:=):=) :=) :=) :=) :=) :=) :=) :=) )=: )=: )=: )=: )=: )=: )=: )=: )=:

This site broke my heart in 2004 - But, check out

Personality variation by region (USA)

And Anne Brown points me to: Topography of Faith

:=):=) :=) :=) :=) :=) :=) :=) :=) )=: )=: )=: )=: )=: )=: )=: )=: )=:

Palin fact checking: Mark Kleiman, Hilzoy, Anne Kilkenny of Wasilla, LA Progressive, Steve Benen, Anchorage Daily News

Once Elected, Palin Hired Friends and Lashed Foes NYT

Women Against Sarah Palin and, of course, SNL

“Are You Sure You Three Guys Know What You’re Doing?” Nell Scovell:Vanity Fair

:=):=) :=) :=) :=) :=) :=) :=) :=) )=: )=: )=: )=: )=: )=: )=: )=: )=:

9.30.2008 Anonymous Liberal:

Has the Republican Party Written Off John McCain?
The more I think about the events of yesterday, the more I'm convinced that a substantial faction of the GOP has essentially written off John McCain and instead has its eyes on a 2010 and 2012 resurgence. How else can you explain the RNC releasing an ad attacking the very bailout bill that John McCain is trying to rally support and take credit for?
anonymousliberal.com

9.30.2008 Aaron "This wasn't a revolt by the fringes of the House Republicans. This was the television strategy of the RNC itself. They were playing team Pelosi for idiots."

Gentle Reader: This explains Barney Frank's comment: (paraphrase) By some quirk of numerology, the votes cast by the maverick, independent Republic "No" voters, exactly added up to the number of votes required to defeat the measure.

9.30.2008 Foggo bites the dust

9.30.2008 Cheney's Head (Or: Looking At It From The Goldman Sachs Side)

9.29.2008 "Fed Pumps Further $630 Billion Into Financial System"

See also NYT:

"Even before the House stunned the world on Monday by rejecting the Bush administration's bailout bill, the Fed was already resorting to the oldest action in its book: printing money."

9.30.2008 Jeffrey A. Miron, senior lecturer in economics at Harvard University:

... The costs of the bailout, moreover, are almost certainly being understated. The administration's claim is that many mortgage assets are merely illiquid, not truly worthless, implying taxpayers will recoup much of their $700 billion.
If these assets are worth something, however, private parties should want to buy them, and they would do so if the owners would accept fair market value. Far more likely is that current owners have brushed under the rug how little their assets are worth.
...
The right view of the financial mess is that an enormous fraction of subprime lending should never have occurred in the first place. Someone has to pay for that. That someone should not be, and does not need to be, the U.S. taxpayer. CNNPolitics.com

9.29.2008 "Mars dust resembles seawater, NASA extends mission"

9.26.2008 Murray Waas regarding the midnight ride to Ashcroft's bed: What did Bush Tell Gonzales?

One scenario feared by the White House is that the IG or OPR could send a public report to Congress concluding that Gonzales or some other official may have committed a crime. At a minimum, that would make the conduct of Gonzales, or of any other official deemed to be under suspicion, the subject of a criminal investigation.
...
In addition to the Justice Department's IG and OPR investigations regarding the surveillance program, Gonzales is also under investigation by the IG as to whether he lied to Congress about the politicized firings of nine U.S. attorneys. Fielding has told White House colleagues that there is an outside possibility that a special prosecutor could be appointed to conduct a broader investigation.
theatlantic.com via Anne Brown

This possibility has become a reality: September 29, 2008 "Mukasey Names Prosecutor to Probe Attorney Dismissals"

9.29.2008 Michael Moore:

This so-called "collapse" was triggered by the massive defaulting and foreclosures going on with people's home mortgages. Do you know why so many Americans are losing their homes? To hear the Republicans describe it, it's because too many working class idiots were given mortgages that they really couldn't afford. Here's the truth: The number one cause of people declaring bankruptcy is because of medical bills. Let me state this simply: If we had had universal health coverage, this mortgage "crisis" may never have happened
MichaelMoore.com

9.29.2008 Paul Krugman:

... The odds are that the next president will have to deal with some major financial emergencies.
So what do we know about the readiness of the two men most likely to end up taking that call? Well, Barack Obama seems well informed and sensible about matters economic and financial. John McCain, on the other hand, scares me.
NYT

9.28.2008 Frank Rich takes off the gloves

9.28.2008 MAUREEN DOWD

It was quite a memorable moment in history for the M.B.A. president and the nominee of the party of business. Who would have dreamed that when socialism finally came to the U.S.A. it would be brought not by Bolsheviks in blue jeans but Wall Street bankers in Gucci loafers?
...
On the surge, he could have said that McCain was the arsonist who wanted to be praised for the great job he's doing putting out the fire he started.
NYT

9.26.2008 Garrison Keillor:

Some say the tab might come to a trillion dollars. Nobody knows. And Mr. McCain has not one moment of doubt or regret. He switches from First Deregulation Church to Our Lady of Strict Vigilance like you might go from decaf to latte. Where is the straight talk? Does the man have no conscience?
...
Never mind the persistent cheesiness of his attack ads. And now this chasm of debt and loss and the gentleman pretends to be shocked. He was there. He turned out the lights. He sent the regulators home.
Salon

9.26.208 Paul Krugman: So what we now have is non-functional government in the face of a major crisis, because Congress includes a quorum of crazies and nobody trusts the White House an inch.
NYT

9.23.2008 Aaron Silverstein:

"We let the banks fail. This time around we are not talking about the banking system, we are just talking about a group of specific banks that made bad bets. It is like letting some high rollers in the casino go bust. It doesn't kill the casinos. Tell the American public that if the banks go down, then everyone gets to own their homes outright and their credit card debt disappears. Alternatively, they can pay a trillion dollars to keep the banks around to hassle them over their payments and take their houses. See what the average taxpayer chooses.
The current plan is not a bailout. A bailout gets the water out of the sinking ship. This is the drunken captain telling everyone to let him and his buddies into the lifeboats first, arguing that unless we save the incompetent crew that ran us into the icebergs, there will be nobody to row us to safety."

9.22.2008 Glenn Greenwald:

Apparently, the same political faction that has cheered on every instance of unchecked, absolute executive power over the last eight years -- which demanded that the President, and he alone, decide which citizens, including Americans, can be spied on, detained, even tortured, and that no oversight or disclosure was needed for any of that -- has suddenly re-discovered their desire for checks on federal government power. The reason? They say it themselves: with the looming prospect of an Obama presidency, they may no longer be in charge of that Government and these "small government conservatives" have thus suddenly re-awoken to the virtues of checks and balances, oversight and other restraints.
Salon

9.22.2008 Anonymous Liberal

This is from an August 2004 press release that's still on the White House website:
Expanding Homeownership. The President believes that homeownership is the cornerstone of America's vibrant communities and benefits individual families by building stability and long-term financial security. In June 2002, President Bush issued America's Homeownership Challenge to the real estate and mortgage finance industries to encourage them to join the effort to close the gap that exists between the homeownership rates of minorities and non-minorities. The President also announced the goal of increasing the number of minority homeowners by at least 5.5 million families before the end of the decade. Under his leadership, the overall U.S. homeownership rate in the second quarter of 2004 was at an all time high of 69.2 percent. Minority homeownership set a new record of 51 percent in the second quarter, up 0.2 percentage point from the first quarter and up 2.1 percentage points from a year ago.

Pat Buchanan:

Well, my basic philosophy is that you don't give mortgages to people who have no credit worthiness, who have incomes that show that they cannot handle the mortgages, who don't put any money down. This was Liberalism run wild in a lot of ways. I mean pushing all that money into sub-prime mortgages-- that's not conservative banking in my opinion!
Poll Junkie via Rachel Maddow Show

9.22.2008 Paul Krugman: Cash for Trash

Some are saying that we should simply trust Mr. Paulson, because he’s a smart guy who knows what he’s doing. But that’s only half true: he is a smart guy, but what, exactly, in the experience of the past year and a half — a period during which Mr. Paulson repeatedly declared the financial crisis “contained,” and then offered a series of unsuccessful fixes — justifies the belief that he knows what he’s doing? He’s making it up as he goes along, just like the rest of us.
So let’s try to think this through for ourselves. I have a four-step view of the financial crisis:

This is a must read article! NYT

9.21.2008 Cernig:

The administration are looking more and more likely to face bipartisan objection to the "blank check" - in particular to section 8, also known as the "God calls me God" clause.
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.
Here's what Yuval Levin wrote a short time ago over at The Corner:
Even if Hank Paulson were the all knowing god of economics, would it make sense to give this kind of power to the treasury secretary for the next two years just forty days before an election? Shall we go through our mental list of who an Obama administration (or a McCain administration for that matter) is likely to put in that post? And doesn't it make sense to establish some kind of process for deciding how specifically to use the money? To put in place some criteria of prioritization? Some real-time oversight? Isn't transparency crucial to the proper functioning of our modern financial system? And how is everyone in both parties suddenly satisfied that this approach is the only one that could work?
Even Republicans don't trust Republicans with that much power.
Newshoggers

9.21.2008 Paulson Bailout Plan a Historic Swindle

... A serious intervention in which Washington takes charge would, first, require a new central authority to supervise the financial institutions and compel them to support the government's actions to stabilize the system. Government can apply killer leverage to the financial players: accept our objectives and follow our instructions or you are left on your own - cut off from government lending spigots and ineligible for any direct assistance. If they decline to cooperate, the money guys are stuck with their own mess. If they resist the government's orders to keep lending to the real economy of producers and consumers, banks and brokers will be effectively isolated, therefore doomed.
Only with these conditions, and some others, should the federal government be willing to take ownership - temporarily - of the rotten financial assets that are dragging down funds, banks and brokerages. Paulson and the Federal Reserve are trying to replay the bailout approach used in the 1980s for the savings and loan crisis, but this situation is utterly different. The failed S&Ls held real assets - property, houses, shopping centers - that could be readily resold by the Resolution Trust Corporation at bargain prices. This crisis involves ethereal financial instruments of unknowable value - not just the notorious mortgage securities but various derivative contracts and other esoteric deals that may be virtually worthless.
Despite what the pols in Washington think, the RTC bailout was also a Wall Street scandal. Many of the financial firms that had financed the S&L industry's reckless lending got to buy back the same properties for pennies from the RTC - profiting on the upside, then again on the downside. Guess who picked up the tab? I suspect Wall Street is envisioning a similar bonanza - the chance to harvest new profit from their own fraud and criminal irresponsibility.
William Greider:The Nation

9.21.2008 Johne:

Devilstower at Dailykos has the whole history of banking shenanigans tied together with a big bow. And John McCain, Phil Gramm, Alan Greenspan, and even Fred Thomspon are under the ribbon:
...
Do you want to know why comparisons made to the Great Depression are so appropriate? Because the laws enacted to prevent that from happening again were eviscerated by these guys. In short, this led to Enron, blackouts in California, the recall of Governor Gray Davis, the housing, and now financial meltdowns. Above is just a quick excerpt of some of the more damning passages. You really have to read the whole thing. But in summary, these thieves enabled legislation that brought down several sectors of our economy not once, not twice, but three times now. Why is John McCain even getting up in front of a podium anymore?
Square State

9.20.2008 "Judge orders Cheney to preserve records"

9.20.2008 100 Year Crash: McCain advisor spurred $62 trillion derivatives market that will swamp global markets

9.20.2008 Bradley Burston: What is truly frightening about Sarah Palin

... Asked during the interview if she had the ability and the experience to serve as president of the United States, she replied without hesitation, without reservation, without contemplation - and without knowing, on a profound level, what that would, in fact, entail. "I'm ready."
Here is the answer that is truly frightening. It lets us know that the nation may be in danger of electing another leader bearing the most profound of George Bush's shortcomings: blindness to one's own shortcomings.
Blindness, that is, to the breadth and depth and height and shape of what one does not know. Say what you will about Donald Rumsfeld, the former defense secretary knew an unknown unknown when he saw one. Sarah Palin, for whom appearance is understandably significant, has one in her mirror.
Haaretz.com

9.19.2008 McCain on banking and health

"Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation."
Via Paul Krugman:NYT

9.19.2008 Anonymous Liberal:

If we're going to do this, though, Congress needs to make sure it is not just postponing the day of reckoning. If we're going to buy up the Big Sh*t Pile, we better make sure that we buy it at the deepest discount possible and make companies show their cards and take their losses now. Transparency is key. The full extent of the damage needs to be apparent and not masked until some later date. The goal should not be to prop up the stock market or restore investment losses but rather to prevent catastrophic failure and no more.

9.16.2008 McCain Lies About Commerce Committee Jurisdiction Matthew Yglesias:Think Progress

9.16.2008 NYT Editorial: As for Wall Street, Mr. McCain blamed the meltdown on “unbridled corruption and greed.” He called for a commission to find out what happened and propose solutions. His diagnosis and his cure are misguided. The crisis on Wall Street is fundamentally a failure to do the things that temper, detect and punish corruption and greed. It was a failure to police the markets, to enforce rules, to heed and sound warnings and expose questionable products and practices.

The regulatory failure is rooted in a markets-are-good-government-is-bad ideology that has been ascendant as long as Mr. McCain has been in Washington and championed by his own party. If Mr. McCain adheres to some other belief system, we would like to hear about it.

9.16.2008 Ezra Klein:

John McCain's contention is that Wall Street has, for years, been rotting in a toxic mixture of greed and overreach and corruption. Simultaneously, a 70-year-old regulatory structure has proven inadequate at checking the institution's excesses. This is, in other words, a crisis composed of trends, rather than a singular, unpredictable, catastrophe.
Three years ago, John McCain signed on to George W. Bush's efforts to privatize Social Security. He surveyed Wall Street and decided that it was a stable enough institution to entrust with the nation's pension funds. Three years ago. And this wasn't just an attempt to cozy up to Bush: McCain was arguing for privatization in 1999. So McCain's argument is that Wall Street is built atop an unstable regulatory foundation and is shot through with most of the seven deadly sins. That the situation has been allowed to fester so long is evidence that "people were asleep at the switch." Even so, McCain has consistently argued that much of Social Security should be turned over to...Wall Street. Either he wanted to tank the nation's pensions funds or he was one of the people asleep at the switch. But those are really the only two options here.
American Prospect

9.16.2008 Per Huffington Post:

"Do you think [Sarah Palin] has the experience to run a major company, like Hewlett Packard?" asked the host.
"No, I don't," responded Fiorina. "But you know what? That's not what she's running for."

9.16.2008 Eugene Robinson:

In her interview with ABC's Charles Gibson, Palin 'fessed up. It was "not inappropriate" for a mayor or a governor to work with members of Congress to obtain federal money for infrastructure projects, she argued. "What I supported," she said, "was the link between a community and its airport."
Case closed. Except that on Saturday, days after the interview, Palin said this to a crowd in Nevada: "I told Congress thanks but no thanks to that Bridge to Nowhere -- that if our state wanted to build that bridge, we would build it ourselves."
That's not just a lie, but an acknowledged lie. What she actually told Congress was more like, "Gimme the money for the bridge" -- and then later, after the whole thing had become an embarrassment, she didn't object to using the money for other projects.

And again on 9.15.08:

The Bridge to Perjury was extended a little farther, as Sarah Palin trotted out the most discredited lie of this cycle. Speaking in Colorado, she once again denied the truth about her well documented support for "The Bridge to Nowhere"
...
(Video of "Thanks, but no thanks") 9.15.08
...
Everyone, including FOX News' Chris Wallace, the Wall Street Journal, and The New Republic, have fact-checked this and found her claim to be garbage. Aaron Silverstein:Square State

9.15.2008 Conflict Over Spying Led White House to Brink

Barton Gellman:WaPo

9.14.2008 Sarah Palin in her own words

9.14.2008 Garrison Keillor:

When you check the actuarial tables on a 72-year-old guy who's had three bouts with cancer, you guess you may be looking at the first woman president, a hustling Evangelical with ethics issues and a chip on her shoulder who, not counting Canada, has set foot outside the country once -- a trip to Germany, Iraq and Kuwait in 2007 to visit Alaskans in the armed service. And who listed a refueling stop in Ireland as a fourth country visited. She's like the Current Occupant but with big hair. If you want inexperience, there were better choices.
Salon

9.11.2008 "Please Sign For This Package—It’s 56,300 condoms"

9.11.2008 Dave Gilson:Are Any 9/11 Conspiracy Films Plausible?

... But the most annoying thing about the movies—and the Truthers—is that the actual truth, in all its awful complexity, isn't enough for them. No matter that 3,000 Americans died because of bungling and blowback, or that the Bush administration twisted their deaths into pretexts for unnecessary war and executive power run amok. The Truthers want more. They've missed the real lesson of the Bush administration, which is not that a secretive cabal runs the White House, but that its diabolic intent has been trumped by its staggering incompetence. Seven years on, the neocon notion that imperial power can reshape reality has been fully exposed as a fantasy. Yet the Truthers cling to the myth of official omnipotence, making them some of the last Americans who still believe that this administration could successfully pull off anything bigger than T-ball on the South Lawn.
Mother Jones

9.11.2008 VETERANS GROUPS ATTACK BUSH ADMINISTRATION PLAN TO OUTSOURCE GI BENEFITS

9.11.2008

'PRIMARY CONTRIBUTORS': In an op-ed in yesterday's Wall Street Journal, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and Gov. Sarah Palin (R-AK) reluctantly endorsed the federal takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, arguing that the two institutions' lobbyists are the "primary contributors to this great debacle." McCain and Palin wrote that, should they be elected, their administration would "no longer use taxpayer backing to serve lobbyists, management, boards and shareholders." Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac "spent a combined $170 million" over the past 10 years on lobbying activities aimed at creating "a sort of regulation-free zone around their businesses." Although McCain and Palin are correct in naming lobbyists as "primary contributors" to the current crisis, their feigned outrage rings hollow because "at least 20 McCain fundraisers have lobbied on behalf of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac" in recent years. In all, these 20 fundraisers earned "at least $12.3 million in fees" from the two institutions. More troubling, however, is the fact McCain's campaign manager, Rick Davis, "served as president of an advocacy group led by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac" that worked to cripple regulatory initiatives in Congress. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac founded the lobbying organization because they feared that "congressional meddling would lower their healthy profits." During his tenure, Davis moved to challenge even the smallest measures to make sure that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are be held more accountable for their actions. In July 2003, for example, Davis "wrote to the American Banker, taking issue with an opinion piece...arguing that Fannie and Freddie should operate with greater transparency." Such transparency and greater regulatory controls could have helped avert the current crisis.
...
McCain and Palin lament that "Fannie and Freddie's lobbyists succeeded and Congress failed" and claim that "under our administration this will not happen again." However, their pattern of endorsing dramatic and expensive federal bailouts, while shunning the regulatory measures needed to prevent them, suggests otherwise.
Progress Report

9.11.2008 Wendy Doniger:

... But I object strongly when anyone (and especially anyone with political power) tries to take their theology out in public, to inflict those private religious (or sexual) views on other people. In both sex and religion (which combine in the debates about abortion), Sarah Palin's views make me fear that the Republican party has finally lost its mind.
As for sex, the hypocrisy of her outing her pregnant daughter in front of millions of people, hard on the heels of her concealing her own pregnancy (her faith in abstinence applying, apparently, only to non-Palins), is nicely balanced by her hypocrisy in gushing with loving support of her teenage daughter after using a line-item veto to cut funding for a transitional home for teenage mothers in Alaska.
Her greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman. The Republican party's cynical calculation that because she has a womb and makes lots and lots of babies (and drives them to school! wow!) she speaks for the women of America, and will capture their hearts and their votes, has driven thousands of real women to take to their computers in outrage. She does not speak for women; she has no sympathy for the problems of other women, particularly working class women.
...
Joe Biden's views are most relevant to the question at hand, since, as a Catholic, he shares much of Palin's embryological theology: he believes life begins at conception. But he has gone out of his way to insist that he would not impose his personal views on others, and has indeed voted against curtailing abortion rights and against criminalizing abortion. That is the right answer. It's in the Constitution. It's not in the Bible, or the Qu'ran, or the Bhagavad Gita. It's in the mother-lovin' Constitution
newsweek.washingtonpost.com

9.10.2008 Hilzoy: "A Culture Of Ethical Failure"

Apparently, one of the reports also contains this memorable phrase: "sexual relationships with prohibited sources cannot, by definition, be arms-length." Indeed.
Washington Monthly

9.10.2008 Mocking Constitutional Rights

"Al-Qaeda terrorists still plot to inflict catastrophic harm on America,” Palin said, “and he’s worried that someone won’t read them their rights.”
...
Over several days of the convention, primarily peaceful Americans protesting the war in Iraq and the broader Republican agenda were targeted by aggressive police decked out in full riot gear and armed with Tasers, pepper spray, rubber bullets and tear gas.
...
Several independent journalists were also arrested and manhandled, including Pacifica’s Amy Goodman, the host of “Democracy Now!”
As Goodman describes what happened to her and two of her colleagues, “I was at the Xcel Center on the convention floor, interviewing delegates. I had just made it to the Minnesota delegation when I got a call on my cell phone with news that Sharif (Abdel Kouddous) and Nicole (Salazar) were being bloody arrested, in every sense.
“Filmmaker Rick Rowley of Big Noise Films and I raced on foot to the scene. Out of breath, we arrived at the parking lot. I went up to the line of riot police and asked to speak to a commanding officer, saying that they had arrested accredited journalists.
“Within seconds, they grabbed me, pulled me behind the police line and forcibly twisted my arms behind my back and handcuffed me, the rigid plastic cuffs digging into my wrists. I saw Sharif, his arm bloody, his credentials hanging from his neck.
“I repeated we were accredited journalists, whereupon a Secret Service agent came over and ripped my convention credential from my neck. I was taken to the St. Paul police garage where cages were set up for protesters. I was charged with obstruction of a peace officer. Nicole and Sharif were taken to jail, facing riot charges.”The implication was that those suspected of being terrorists have no rights under domestic or international law. The line elicited thunderous approval from the party faithful gathered in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Nat Parry:Consortiumnews.com

9.10.2008 Robert Scheer: GOP policies come home to roost in Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae bailout

Amazingly, the turmoil in the housing market, which has led to the socialization of the nation's revered homeownership market in a massive expansion of the role of big government, has apparently not troubled McCain's conservative supporters. Like I said, ignorance is bliss, and evidently not just for the newbie Palin.
The S.F. Chronicle

9.4.2008 Michele S: Abortion & Personhood Amendment: Surrogate for many unspoken issues

... Marty Nalitz, former Colorado Christian Coalition associate director and Independence Institute adjunct, is among those who advocate one vote per household, "preferring not to see women in public office." "Strict constructionists" like Nalitz harken to the time of the founding fathers, when only property-owning white males enjoyed the right to vote. "Every one of those guys was a right-wing Bible-thumping fundamentalist!" he enthused. Women and minorities have been denigrated as "14th Amendment citizens" by ultrarightists. No doubt that while some on the right recoil at the idea of electing a woman, others welcome the cooperation of a woman intent upon undermining the rights of women.
At core, Weyrich's anti-abortion, anti-contraceptive and abstinence-only prescription serves as cornerstone of the right-wing's anticipated male supremacist theocracy. It is the platform upon which the majority of Republican candidates continue to run in 2008. Though his rhetoric has waivered, John McCain has a "two-and-a-half-decade-long perfectly anti-abortion voting record" -- his record on contraception is "no better," writes Sara Blustain in The New Republic. John McCain's Web site states: "John McCain believes Roe v. Wade is a flawed decision that must be overturned, and as president he will nominate judges who understand that courts should not be in the business of legislating from the bench." On this issue, he and his vice presidential choice, Sarah Palin, are in sync.
Square State

9.10.2008 Bush's Reign of Error: A Timeline

By Nick Baumann and Dave Gilson:Mother Jones

9.10.2008 Kevin Drum: THE BRIDGE TO SOMEWHERE

....ThinkProgress reports that the McCain campaign has now repeated the lie about Sarah Palin opposing the Bridge to Nowhere 23 times since Friday last. That's as of an hour ago, though, so the total might be higher by now.
And not get too sanctimonious about this, but this really is a test of some kind for the press. This lie is unusually egregious given the plain facts of the situation (Palin was eagerly supportive of the bridge until after Congress pulled the earmark, at which point she reluctantly decided to take the money but use it for other projects), and if the media allows the McCain campaign to get away with this — if they relegate it to occasional closing paragraphs and page A9 fact checks — well, that means McCain knows he can pretty much get away with anything. The press will be writing its own declaration of irrelevance. Interesting times indeed.
Mother Jones

9.9.2008 Colonel W. Patrick Lang:

I am reminded of the Cary Grant character in the film, "Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House." Ah, Myrna Loy.... Who could forget her? In this epic, Mr. Blandings (CG) is a Madison Avenue advertising man who has to devise a slogan with which to sell "Wham" a kind of pork based canned meat. He suffers mightily with this until his cook inadvertantly suggests "Wham! The Ham What Am!" All is saved! The world devours mountains of the slaughter house scraps and Myrna gets the house of her dreams in Connecticutt. You should see it (the film).
The American peple are being sold a lot of "Wham." They seem to like it. pl
Sic Semper Tyrannis

9.7.08 Frank Rich: How long before we learn she never shot a moose?

NYT

9.5.08 Glenn Greenwald:

Every four years, the GOP unleashes unrestrained personality attacks on Democrats and exploits cultural resentments. Every four years, Democrats tell themselves that such attacks don't work and are counter-productive. And every four years, that belief is disproven. These "character" issues end up mattering largely because Democrats, in election after election, allow wars over "character" to be waged in a largely one-sided fashion.
Salon

9.5.08 Colonel W. Patrick Lang:Cheney in the Caucasus and Ukraine

... Rubbish! We don't actually need a vice president. The presidential succession is well established in law. There are cabinet officers in charge of Defense and State. There is a foreign policy section in the NSC. There is not enough time on the president's day? Rubbish. The incumbent spends half his day working out in the gym.
Palin is already talking about the McCain/Palin Administration.
Cheney is "cruising" the Caucasus looking to see what he can still do to promote the apocalyptic dream in his head.
This vice president has tried to make the argument that his unique office stands outside the normal tri-partite structure of the federal government, neither Executive nor Legislative.
Do we need this office? pl

9.5.08 Dover Bitch:

Every Democrat on television or answering questions by the press should ask themselves first before every question What is the point of staying on this topic and is there something better to talk about?
If the answer to that is "There is no point in talking about this when I could talk about that," then they will control the conversation and win the day.
I just watched Michael Smerconish explain to David Gregory that McCain selected Palin in part to make people talk about Obama's experience. David responded by turning to Rachel Maddow and asking her about... Obama's experience. Perfect example.
Doverbitch.blogspot.com

9.5.08 Fester: "Success" in Iraq

"Success" in Iraq John McCain argues that the Surge has produced magical ponies and lower levels of violence. Besides the fact that the strategic aim of the Surge was to produce political reconciliation which has not happened, the reduction in violence has only been sufficient to bring Iraq back towards the level of violence that is common in some of the world's bloodiest conflicts and ongoing hot spots instead of being in a class of its own. This success is extraordinarily fragile as there are massive ethnic/sectarian tensions that have not been resolved and some which are boiling towards conflict. This may be a lull, but this is what McCain calls success:
Washington Monthly

9.5.08 Steve Benen: There's been plenty of talk over the last eight days over whether Palin is prepared to be vice president. Perhaps the more salient question is whether she's prepared to be a vice presidential candidate.

9.3.08 Jewish voters may be wary of Palin

"There is almost always an inverse proportion between a candidate's popularity among conservative Christians and secular Jews," said Jeff Ballabon, a Republican lobbyist long active in Jewish politics who supports McCain.
An illustration of that gap came just two weeks ago, when Palin's church, the Wasilla Bible Church, gave its pulpit over to a figure viewed with deep hostility by many Jewish organizations: David Brickner, the founder of Jews for Jesus.
...
Brickner also described terrorist attacks on Israelis as God's "judgment of unbelief" of Jews who haven't embraced Christianity.
"Judgment is very real and we see it played out on the pages of the newspapers and on the television. It's very real. When [Brickner's son] was in Jerusalem he was there to witness some of that judgment, some of that conflict, when a Palestinian from East Jerusalem took a bulldozer and went plowing through a score of cars, killing numbers of people. Judgment — you can't miss it."
Ben Smith:Politico

9.3.08 And now something completely different:

The View on Palin from an Alaskan Anti-Real ID Activist and Democrat ...
The Republicans hate her. If you go and talk to the Alaska delegation here, they despise her.
Q: Really?
A: Hate her. Oh my god! This whole thing about her retarded son really being her daughter's was started by Lyda Green, who is president of the senate, a Republican. [...]
She gave a two-finger salute to Conoco Phllips and Exxon Mobile, raised their taxes on their oil, put in place a transparent way to bid for the seed money and the licenses to finally, finally, put in a natural gas pipeline in Alaska. And it was won by a Canadian company. And she went to the mat and made it happen. She has been systematically pulling the drilling licenses of Conoco Phillips and Exxon Mobile for areas that they haven't touched. I mean, they've been hoarding reserves, and she says, you know, use it or lose it, and she has been sending the attorney general time after time to revoke these things. It's absolutely fascinating.
Matt Welch:Reasononline.com

9.3.08 Palin’s Start in Alaska: Not Politics as Usual

Ann Kilkenny, a Democrat who said she attended every City Council meeting in Ms. Palin’s first year in office, said Ms. Palin brought up the idea of banning some books at one meeting. “They were somehow morally or socially objectionable to her,” Ms. Kilkenny said.
The librarian, Mary Ellen Emmons, pledged to “resist all efforts at censorship,” Ms. Kilkenny recalled. Ms. Palin fired Ms. Emmons shortly after taking office but changed course after residents made a strong show of support. Ms. Emmons, who left her job and Wasilla a couple of years later, declined to comment for this article.
William Yardley:NYT

9.3.08 Palin Slashed Funding for Teen Moms

WaPo/The Trail

9.2.08 Amy Goodman Violently Arrested Today at RNC

Tom D'Antoni:HuffPo

See also: 8.31.08 Police raids enrage activists, alarm others

Aided by informants planted in protest groups, authorities raided at least six buildings across St. Paul and Minneapolis to stop an "anarchist" plan to disrupt this week's Republican National Convention.
...
The show of force was led by the Ramsey County Sheriff's Office in collaboration with the FBI, Minneapolis and St. Paul police, the Hennepin County Sheriff's Office and other agencies.
...
But a St. Paul City Council member described it as excessive, while activists, many of whom were detained and then released without charges, called it intimidation designed to quash free speech.
Star Tribune.com

9.3.08 Johne: An intimate chat among friends with Jared Polis and Steny Hoyer

... To compromise, Hoyer suggested allowing leases in the places oil companies want to drill but in return they'd have to give up an equal amount of current leases. Nope, Exxon-Mobil wanted nothing to do with that deal. Indeed, they want it all folks. It has nothing to do with more supply, drilling in areas that are easier to drill or areas that have bigger reserves, they just want it all.
...
The conversation also touched on T. Boone Pickens. The consensus: He's trying to convince people his huge investment in natural gas drilling is a good idea. Being a swift boat funder, he clearly doesn't care one lick about the environment except where it can make him money, such as with wind turbines, and trying to push extra uses for natural gas. Apparently Pickens also expects the federal government to pick up the tab for transmission lines to his new wind turbines.
Square State

9.2.08 Sarah Palin's welcoming address to the Alaskan Independence Party

9.2.208 Palin's Historical Ignorance

9.1.08 Paul Krugman:

Earlier this year Mr. McCain, as part of his strategy of distancing himself from the current administration, condemned Mr. Bush’s response to Katrina. If he’d been president at the time, he says, “I would’ve landed my airplane at the nearest Air Force base and come over personally.”
Um, that completely misses the point. The problem with the Bush administration’s response to Katrina wasn’t the president’s failure to show up promptly for his photo op. It was the failure of FEMA and other degraded agencies to show up promptly with food, water and first aid.
...
What we really need is a government that works, because it’s run by people who understand that sometimes government is the solution, after all. And that seems to be something undreamed of in either Mr. Bush’s or Mr. McCain’s philosophy
NYT

:=):=) :=) :=) :=) :=) :=) :=) :=) )=: )=: )=: )=: )=: )=: )=: )=: )=:

Minimum Daily Requirement

emptywheel

Glenn Greenwald -- Now writing at Salon.com