Memnison Journal

The AP and others are now declaring Mark Begich, the Mayor of Anchorage (D), has beaten Senator Stevens for the Alaska Senate seat.  The margin is too wide for a free recount, and it’s unlikely that the GOP will pay for it or Stevens can - or that it would make any significant difference.

The recount for the Minnesota Senate seat starts today, with the final before the recount starts - 200-odd vote difference of nearly 3 million votes.

• A sitting member of the house was a Democratic Congressman for five years *before* they changed their registration from Republican with the local Board of Elections.  Who is this person?
• Name the last President that absolutely refused to use a telephone while in office.
• Name the President that served in the Senate before and after his term in office.
• The newly elected president left the Senate to take up his new office, and two members of nationally powerful political families fought it out for the nomination of the President’s party for that seat.  The person the President supported for the office won the nomination and the special election.   Name all three of the people involved: the President, the Senator and the other guy.   For extra points, name the guy who lost the election (who was also from a nationally powerful political family).
• What year was the last time the Democratic convention went to more than one ballot?
• Name the prominent Democratic politician who lost part of his finger to a meat slicer at Arby’s Roast Beef. (libertango got this one)
  
• How many years between the first and second set of Presidential debates?
• When in doubt, vote for the left handed candidate.  When was the last Presidential campaign where this would not have been helpful, and the last one that the leftie didn’t win?

So here’s my ideas, half-baked:

• Make the deal comprehensive, and mostly a take it or leave it scenario.  This sucker has been a political football for decades, and this ends here right now.
• All three companies essentially go into a central, nationalized receivership corporation.
• The equity in these businesses is pretty much gone, in any event.  Say goodbye to what’s left.
• The receivership corporation essentially will rehire management staff at their discretion.  Golden parachutes and stock options and excessive compensation just vanished.  Cap salaries at $250k.  We’ll talk about bonuses when you make things people want to buy.
• Immediately make interest from car loans deductible on taxes, and lean heavily on the nations banks to start making car loans again.  Offer a sizable tax rebate ($4000-5000) scaled towards more fuel-efficient cars made by the ‘corporation’ and its spinoffs.  You want a Hummer or a Corvette?  You’re on your own.
• Eliminate car financing by the manufacturers.
• The UAW and the auto makers were in the process of setting up trusts to handle retiree health costs - in 2010.  Have the government take over the gap of that trust and set it up to be self-maintaining.   This would eliminate the vast legacy costs for health care from the auto makers’ books now.
• Eliminate and standardize.  You don’t need all of the crap brands and submakes out there.  Bust out the better parts and make them their own company.    And eliminate the old dealer/line deals that mandate that you have to keep the obsolete car lines.
• Focus all R&D towards two things - serious materials / fuel efficient cars, and away from oil-based fueling systems towards electric cars / serious hybrids.

The hardest angle on this is about the union workers and where to set up the jobs that will remain, and that’s tough.  Here’s a union perspective on some of this.

I’m actively interested in your poisition on this matter.  Feel free to sound off inside *politely*.

My own struggles on this:

Political post on McCain’s campaign’s decline; more after the cut.

A good summary is here.  Short version is that everyone had negotiated a deal from the committees, but that certain House Republicans hated the idea of any sort of bailout whatsoever, to the point of preferring a crash to a bailout.  These Republicans got ahold of McCain, who got ahold of Bush and asked for the photo-op meeting with McCain and Obama present late on Thursday.

At that meeting, McCain brought along some non-committee House people, and they demanded a totally different approach that the Secretary of the Treasury said unworkable (and had never been raised during the negotiations before by the Republicans).   McCain knew that this new GOP plan would blow things up and be unacceptable, and sat on the sidelines supporting them while the negotiations totally fell apart after earlier agreement that morning.  So basically, McCain’s photo-op meeting with the President and Obama present with the negotiators was good for only two things:  a photo-op of him in the meeting, and destroying the compromise.  So much for him ‘helping’ the negotiations.

As the meeting at the White House blew up, the Secretary of the Treasury literally got down on one knee and begged Speaker Pelosi not to withdraw Democratic support for a compromise bailout.   Pelosi was angry, and said:

It’s not me blowing this up, it’s the Republicans.” Mr. Paulson sighed. “I know. I know.”

“I think Sen. McCain was hurting politically on the economic issue,” Frank just told reporters. “I think this was a campaign ploy for Sen. McCain. I think they then had this problem that there might not have been enough of a deadlock for him to resolve. I don’t know what motivated what, but the next thing we know, he’s in a position, frankly, where he’s making it harder to get things done rather than negotiate differences.

“He’s slowed it down, I don’t know whether he caused it or what,” Frank said. “We are trying to put it back together.”

If this is an example of John McCain’s ability to mediate and be helpfulin a bipartisan manner, as he claimed, God Save the Republic.

The NYT has a good editorial this morning that summarizes the problem we have vis-a-vis the Russians; the upsets over the crash between Georgia and Russia have screwed with our long term arrnagements over access to the International Space Station.  Very soon, the Shuttle is getting retired, and the only real access for at least five years will be Soyuz shots to the ISS.  We have to arrange those and cartage with the Russians WAY in advance.  Congress would have to approve a special waiver to let NASA make those arrangments.   And Congress is about to take a long recess for the elections, holidays and so on.

Wall Street Journal Op-Ed article about how McCain really *should* take part in a commission to find out what went wrong involving the mortgage / bank crash.  As a star witness, and bring his pals.  If it wasn’t so awfully true, I’d laugh like crazy.

Chris Dodd on Rachel Maddow turns the “rescue plan” talking point against McCain:

“I’m just worried a little bit about politicizing this problem, sort of flying in here, I’m beginning to think this is more about a rescue plan for John McCain than a rescue plan for the economy…Candidly, a lot of us have been working for 5 straight days around the clock and I haven’t heard a word from John McCain.”

Dodd is the Chair of the Senate Banking Committee, for what it’s worth.   Or this from the Couric interview of Palin tonight:

COURIC: You’ve said, quote, “John McCain will reform the way Wall Street does business.” Other than supporting stricter regulations of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac two years ago, can you give us any more example of his leading the charge for more oversight?

PALIN: I think that the example that you just cited, with his warnings two years ago about Fannie and Freddie–that, that’s paramount. That’s more than a heck of a lot of other senators and representatives did for us.

COURIC: But he’s been in Congress for 26 years. He’s been chairman of the powerful Commerce Committee. And he has almost always sided with less regulation, not more.

PALIN: He’s also known as the maverick though. Taking shots from his own party, and certainly taking shots from the other party. Trying to get people to understand what he’s been talking about–the need to reform government.

COURIC: I’m just going to ask you one more time, not to belabor the point. Specific examples in his 26 years of pushing for more regulation?

PALIN: I’ll try to find you some and I’ll bring them to you.

Katie.  Don’t hold your breath waiting for it, OK?

From Forbes.com:(emphasis mine)

“The secretary and the administration need to know that what they have sent to us is not acceptable,” says Committee Chairman Chris Dodd, D-Conn. The committee’s top Republican, Alabama Sen. Richard Shelby, says he’s concerned about its cost and whether it will even work.

In fact, some of the most basic details, including the $700 billion figure Treasury would use to buy up bad debt, are fuzzy.

“It’s not based on any particular data point,” a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com Tuesday. “We just wanted to choose a really large number.”

Well, the rest of it was pulled out of nowhere, so why not that?

I am stunned by the sheer levels of dumb in this.  Borrowing good, taxes bad?  Regulation bad, vague “cops in the street” mention good?  And this is not a crisis, but an opportunity for the government to make money?  For God’s sake, Minnesotans, get this guy out of office.

U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman said the massive government bailout of failing financial institutions is not only necessary but could make money for the federal government.

“The government could make 10 or 20 times what it pays on this, possibly,” Coleman said during a campaign stop at Christy’s Cafe in North Mankato Saturday morning.

One of the dozens of people who showed up for the event asked where the money would come from if Coleman stayed true to his pledge not to raise taxes.\

“It’s not an infusion of cash,” Coleman said. Instead, he said the government is incurring “shorter-term debt” through borrowing.  Coleman also said preventing such an economic catastrophe in the future would require more “cops on the streets” to regulate financial institutions. Asked by another person in attendance if that meant he supported more funding for regulatory agencies, Coleman said: “Regulation’s not the only solution,”

There was a discussion in an earlier post (lj version) about Bush’s negative impact on the economy between me and Bill Roper on a Senate bill in 2005 (S. 190) that allegedly would have prevented the whole mortgage debacle.  A year after the bill was sent out of committee with huge changes, McCain added in the Congressional Record that he supported it.

However, your intrepid reporter dug further, and found out what happened to the bill.  It died because there was a major clash between a House version of it and the Senate version. The House version (passed by the House and sent to the same Senate Banking committee) was sponsored by several in the House Republican Leadership as well as the National Association of Home Builders, who have a long history of maxing out contributions to Bush and the GOP.   The original sponsor of the House bill is now a major lobbyist for the hedge-fund industry.

The real reason the bill died is not that Democrats sank the thing, but that the House bill was supported by a huge number of  fat cats and home builder lobbyists.  The same people who now claim the Senate bill would have saved us all wrote a scathing critique of the House version.

The weakness of H.R. 1461 raises a concern that Congress may be unable to summon the political will necessary for enacting a suitable regulatory framework for these politically powerful entities.  The inability of the political process to cope with the power of the GSEs, even after their demonstrable failings in recent years, should be a matter of concern to all Americans. Either Congress controls the GSEs or the GSEs control Congress. There is only one right answer.

The whole thing died in the Senate Banking Committee, which was where the House bill was sent when passed - where the GOP had a majority at the time.  As did the Senate.

The Senate version was re-introduced in the present Congress in March, 2007, by Chuck Hagel, who was the original sponsor of the bill.  McCain didn’t join as a co-sponsor this time around.  Again, a House version passed the House by wide margins, and was sent to the Senate, where it collided with the Hagel bill.  And that’s where things were before the present crash.

I do not think that the Congress (both parties) moved to act when they should have - either on the mortgage bubble or the earlier S&L crisis.   Leaders on both sides got lobbied to a fare-thee-well on the subject - to the tune of $200 million spent in lobbying fees - and they let things get out of control.  And very few were willing to stand against the tide and demand, over and over again, some kind of controls.  There was just too much money to be made, and too many groups (the home builders, the lenders, the realtors associations, the speculators) that were making huge pots of money out of the process of this Ponzi scheme.

I’ll easily credit Chuck Hagel for having that kind of foresight.   But not McCain or his campaign staff.

Going back to my response posts,  I want to stress that I never assume that anyone voting against Obama is a racist, or that Republicans are racists, or that either on the Republican ticket is a racist.  I know better.

I’ve lived with serious racists, had racism and sexism used against me and mine (you do know that I’m a Race Traitor for adopting a non-white, right?).  I’ve listed to my daughter ask me about swastikas that she saw marked up on her school grounds, and have to explain about people who hate her for her ethnicity.  I’ve seen it in action for nearly fifty years, in all of its ugliness.  I know better than to apply that badge easily or thoughtlessly.  And that racism is something that is everywhere, in every country and racial group.

However, I do think that McCain is an opportunist without honor who has thugs working for him who are willing to pull every trick in the book and use any tool to get him elected, including racist ones to amplify the stuff Hillary first brought out and tried to use against Obama.   If McCain had any honor, he’d go out of his way to squelch it all.

The people who support Obama the most, by and large, are the young who are civic-minded and are beyond the ideas of racism or absolute adherence to a party. The people who are the most against him tend to be the older ones who can’t get past the idea of voting for a Democrat (no matter how bad the Republican) or a black (no matter how awful a candidate the white guy is) for President.

And there are people who have very specific issues.  If you are totally wrapped around anti-abortion issues, you may well feel that Palin’s basic advocacy of that position trumps anything else.  If you are fixed in the idea that taxes are an evil in all situations, and you make over $600,000 a year, you may find McCain’s low tax strategies far more important of an issue than any other.

Much more below the cut.

…with an article about how McCain has been against a particular Army tech system for a long time as unusable pork, and then tries to say that since Obama is now saying something similar, he’s now in favor of that program and that nasty ol’ Obama….

In fact, McCain has long criticized the over-budget, behind-schedule FCS program. In 2005, he blasted the Army for allowing the program to balloon to $161 billion, and forced the service to rewrite the main FCS contract.

Obama’s campaign maintains their candidate was speaking specifically about FCS, in which case McCain may be twisting his rival’s words.

Loren Thompson of the Lexington Institute called it deceitful.

“McCain’s interpretation of Obama’s position is typical of the way in which the Republicans have twisted Democratic views in order to undercut their opponents and at the same time obscure the past positions of the Republicans,” Thompson said. “Future Combat Systems is the centerpiece of Army modernization. However, McCain has been more critical of it than anyone else in the chamber. Obama has been much more detailed and thoughtful in his comments about future military investment than McCain’s very superficial statements.”

Of course, this is the same guy who opposed the new GI Bill that was passed in the Senate 75-22; only Bush and the most hardline Bushies stood against it becasue - well, the benefits were so good that they might lose men in the military because they might quit to take advantage of the benefits.  When the actual vote came up, Hillary and Obama voted for it, and McCain, as usual, didn’t vote.

On the Senate floor, Obama questioned why McCain opposed the bill. “I can’t believe why he believes it is too generous to our veterans,” Obama said. “There are many issues that lend themselves to partisan posturing, but giving our veterans the chance to go to college should not be one of them.”

McCain’s web site:

John McCain has voted consistently to increase funding for veterans’ benefits, recognizing that the people who serve our country should get priority over the disgraceful amounts of spending on corporate subsidies and wasteful pork barrel spending. He also pushed for various initiatives to ensure that veterans who are eligible for benefits know what they are entitled to and have the resources to obtain their benefits.

The final version of the bill went up in June, and was passed in the Senate 92-6, and McCain wasn’t present to vote for it.  The next day he went before a veteran’s group, and pointed to the passage of the bill he had fought against and never voted for and claimed it as a personal victory for his efforts and continued support of veterans. He later went before the VFW (which had supported the bill) and said the same stuff, claiming his efforts made the bill better.

Here’s how McCain IS building a bridge to somewhere (after the cut)

And reformers can be undone by machines, when they trade their aspirations for power: