Check out his thinking, and a very optimistic EV map that we hope will be blazing across TV screens on the evening of Nov 4th. But we have lots to do before then.

Excerpt (read rest at link): The core of the issue isn't even solvency. It's the way in which the debt causing the banking insolvency distorted, distended and hollowed out economies around the world. It caused a huge misallocation in the English-speaking economies into real estate, and into consumption that could only seem to make sense to people drunk on the appreciation of property prices. It caused a less huge but still significant misallocation elsewhere; I think we will see that a lot of what was being produced by Europe and Asia's vibrant export industries were products that the United States and Britain will find they can do without, or with much less of.

Kristoff at the IHT (the international version of the NY Times) on how this summer's decision by the Bush administration to name birth control pills as a form of abortion is playing out in Africa. Remember that US help in third world countries for abortion is against the law. So the extra mouths to feed that could lead to backroom abortions and other dangerous situations cannot even be prevented. You have to ask why the religious right feels a need to overpopulate the world so that more living children will die. Are they hoping for more wars which would need more soldiers with which to fight them?

Excerpt: John McCain has long been torn between wanting to succeed and serving a higher cause. Right now, the drive to succeed is trumping any loftier aspirations. He cynically picked a running mate with less care than theater directors give to picking a leading actor’s understudy. And he has been running a seamy campaign originally designed by the bad seed of conservative politics, Lee Atwater. Atwater relished teaching rich, white Republicans to feign a connection to the common man so they could get in office and economically undermine the common man.

Excerpt: So what should be done? Barack Obama offers incremental reform: regulation of insurers to prevent discrimination against the less healthy, subsidies to help lower-income families buy insurance, and public insurance plans that compete with the private sector. His plan falls short of universal coverage, but it would sharply reduce the number of uninsured. Mr. McCain, on the other hand, wants to blow up the current system, by eliminating the tax break for employer-provided insurance. And he doesn’t offer a workable alternative. Without the tax break, many employers would drop their current health plans. Several recent nonpartisan studies estimate that under the McCain plan around 20 million Americans currently covered by their employers would lose their health insurance.

There is really a Maverick family. No they don't live off Dixie Queens. Well not according to this report. Nor do they ramble through smaltzy exclamations of how much you know I'm suffering, which claiming you'll go to Hell to get bin Laden or promise a mortgage relief program you have no intention of really creating. But they were known as rebels, progressive ones, from fighting for the rights of the indentured to protecting draft resisters. And one of them did refuse to brand his cattle, making their family name synonymous with being unbranded. Excerpt: Considering the family’s long history of association with liberalism and progressive ideals, it should come as no surprise that Ms. Maverick insists that John McCain, who has voted so often with his party, “is in no way a maverick, in uppercase or lowercase.” “It’s just incredible — the nerve! — to suggest that he’s not part of that Republican herd. Every time we hear it, all my children and I and all my family shrink a little and say, ‘Oh, my God, he said it again.’ ”

Kristof says that people aren't necessarily racist, but tend to favor their own kind without knowing it. I hope he's wrong. This article was based on information that he acquired from a poll at Stanford University. It seems to me that the good news would be that a person who doesn't know he or she is a bit racist doesn't have to lie to pollsters about it right? So that 'nonracism' should be already factored in, and in fact some of Kristof's words seem to indicate that to be true.

Excerpt: She dangles gerunds, mangles prepositions, randomly exiles nouns and verbs and also — “also” is her favorite vamping word — uses verbs better left as nouns, as in, “If Americans so bless us and privilege us with the opportunity of serving them,” or how she tried to “progress the agenda.” Poppy Bush dropped personal pronouns and launched straight into verbs because he was minding his mother’s admonition against “the big I.” Palin, by contrast, uses a heck of a lot of language to praise herself as a fresh face with new ideas who has “joined this team that is a team of mavericks.” True mavericks don’t brand themselves.

Would the Republican Right convince a John McCain to step aside for the testosterone flush Sarah Palin for the good of the part (er) country? Frank Rich has succeeded in frightening me again. Unfortunately Rich usually does know what he's writing about. Read it and see if you don't feel in your gut that the scenario is possible.

Sarah Palin really really likes the kind of power Dick Cheney has. Thinks it's constitutional.

Excerpt: Those Wall Street financial alchemists who turned garbage into gold must have helped John McCain prepare for his debate with Barack Obama last Friday. Senator McCain’s insistent claims that the US is winning the war in Iraq thanks to his "surge" strategy are the military-political equivalent of the junk securities that Wall Street’s shady financiers have been selling around the globe.

Oh yeah, you could see whenever you checked donations for any candidate, some of the top donors would be from and/or Merrill Lynch nearly 100% of the time and the rest of the top 8 banks would usually be some where in the top 20.

Excrpt: Accomplished Googlers can probably find the original talking points off which dozens of conservatives made essentially the same case: The Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 caused the financial crisis. For example, a Wall Street Journal editorial lumped CRA together with far more plausible causes of the meltdown. This liberal-inspired law, it complained, "compels banks to make loans to poor borrowers who often cannot repay them." In fact, the CRA had about zero to do with today's problems. Its accusers are "know-nothings," Aaron Pressman writes on BusinessWeek.com. He says the law "was actually weakened by the Bush administration just as the worst lending wave began."

Ms. Palin rightly dismisses looking back since the Bush/Cheney administration looks a bit too much like a prelude to a McCain/Palin administration.

Don't Mess With Oliphant. There are toonists, there are good toonists, and then there's Oliphant. I even have to admit he's good when I don't agree with him.

Pretty good explanation gets goings right after the exposition on the New Jersey Insurance plan bailout (which may be necessar for some.

Excerpt: Obama made big gains after his first debate with McCain, according to the new Quinnipiac University poll. In a survey after the debate, Obama leads McCain, 54 percent to 39 percent. He led McCain 49 percent to 43 percent in a survey before the debate. "Obama clearly won the debate, voters say," said Peter Brown of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute. Polls indicate that voters believe Obama would be the best candidate to handle economic issues. The post-debate survey included 832 likely voters from Sept. 27-29. The pre-debate poll surveyed 1,138 likely voters from Sept. 22-26. Both polls had a margin of error of about 3 percentage points.

He has a compelling case. I've been loathed to link and cite all the pro bailout stuff that is flooding the news papers, since they get so much of their advertising from banks and expensive property developers. But Kristoff has a good argument here.

Excerpt: ...these two sides of McCain make it hard to discern how the politician who boasts of delivering "straight talk" would govern from the Oval Office. It is unclear if a McCain administration would be led by the small-government crusader who claims President Reagan as his touchstone, or the energetic regulator who once advocated a new federal agency to license professional prizefighters.

Excerpt: Although he is frantically trying to distance himself from President Bush, Mr. McCain, by his own accounting, would be more Bushian in foreign policy than even Mr. Bush is now. While Mr. Bush has been forced to accept more sensible policies in his second term, Mr. McCain has become steadily more of a neocon in the cowboy role that Mr. Bush played in his first term, prone to solving problems with stealth bombers rather than United Nations resolutions.

Excerpt: "[Community Organizer]Bonny changed the way Anchorage thinks and plays in such a positive way," a city official said when Sosa died in August at age 50, just a few days after being diagnosed with a brain tumor. Only a few weeks after her death, Sarah Palin, the governor of Alaska, ridiculed Sen. Barack Obama for his days as a community organizer. She and other GOP operatives belittled the very idea of such work...

Personally, I'm beginning to like lame duck leaders. They tend to become more reasonable. Excerpt: Israel will have to give up "almost all" of the West Bank areas it occupies and accept the division of Jerusalem in order to take advantage of a rapidly closing window of opportunity for peace with the Arabs, outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said in an interview published Monday.

Excerpt: Then there’s the frightening Mr. McCain — more frightening now than he was a few weeks ago. We’ve known for a long time, of course, that Mr. McCain doesn’t know much about economics — he’s said so himself, although he’s also denied having said it. That wouldn’t matter too much if he had good taste in advisers — but he doesn’t.

Excerpt: [George] Will mocked the Republican standard-bearer as a veritable Queen of Hearts (a la "Alice in Wonderland") for demanding the head of Christopher Cox, a former Republican congressman who is chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. The Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist argued that such impulsiveness sows doubts about McCain's ability to apply "calm reflection and clear principles" to important decisions. He ended his broadside by all but declaring McCain unfit for the Oval Office.

I guess Senator McCain hasn't been paying attention to the news about Iceland.

Iceland isn't just having a crisis.  They're  well either bankrupt or almost bankrupt depending on which article you're reading right now.

There was a little fly buzzing around my head when I read that especially because I heard Senator McCain claim in clips from Tuesday's debate that energy independence is the key to economic recovery. 

But there was something that I'd learned earlier about Iceland.  

They, in fact,  are virtually energy independent. 

In line with the US, Iceland has allowed a lot of freedom in it's banking sector.  

It might not have as much land, or as many workers to skim money from for enriching fat cats or starting wars, but it had what John McCain now says is essential for a healthy economy, energy independence.

I confirmed earlier information I remembered  at TimesOnline report "Iceland: the land of cool turns bitter "

Now John McCain claims that nuclear energy is the key to energy independence and the cure to global warming, but the industry is full of greenhouse emissions from the expensive, slow, and heavy equipment and concrete dependent building to extracting uranium from the ground, deconstruction of old plants, and transport of all affected materials.  It is also virtually a monopoly in that people end up under the thumb of huge companies, often the same ones that have scammed the public before, and who require big subsidies up front and can manipulate prices in their own favor, not to mention dole out immense political contributions to the politicians who promote their agenda of getting big government handouts and supression of smaller, cheaper, more easily and rapidly built, and more efficient forms of locally produced energy such as solar and wind energy.

I grant you that Barack Obama also talks about nuclear energy as part of a plan of helping to create more energy self-sufficiency, but he isn't making it a centerpiece, I believe.  Obama is also more beholden to you and I because we gave him a much larger percentage of his donations.   I think the good of the country instead of the good of fat cats will mean much more to the Illinois Senator than it will to John McCain who is dependent on donations from such big contributors and the Oil and Gas and Nuclear Power Industry.

But the strange juxtiposition of McCain saying that nuclear power is the cure for our banking industry problems seems like a clear signal that he would continue the same banking deregulation practices as the Bush administration.

The purpose of the surge was to reduce violence in Baghdad.  Other reports have shown that much of that had occurred through sectarian division and the Sunni Awakening before the Surge had reached an "effective level".  But still the reduction of violence in the capital by massing troops in Baghdad was acknowledged to not be an end in itself, because it would never be certain and permanent unless the troops continued to mass in Iraq.

The surge had a purpose which was to allow the Iraqi leaders time and less violence so that they could concentrate on creating a fair and just Iraq.  This would need to include a nation that treats all of its people in the same way and which distributes it's resources or the money from the sale of it's resources equally.

The Iraqi government's part was not optional, or a game, maybe they should get it done or not.  It was a necessary move.  And they didn't do it.  Now that that surge is gone they have gone back to their old games. 

And now an NIE shows that all the gains of the surge and counter insurgency could be erased according to an AP report at the Mirami Herald "Lingering tensions could reverse progress in Iraq, U.S. intelligence analysis finds ".  It seems clear it's because the US government did not insist that the Iraqi government keep up it's part of the bargain.  

Excerpt report linked immediately above:

A nearly completed high-level U.S. intelligence analysis warns that unresolved ethnic and sectarian tensions in Iraq could unleash a new wave of violence, potentially reversing the major security and political gains achieved over the last year.

...

The findings seem to cast doubts on McCain's frequent assertions that the United States is "on a path to victory" in Iraq by underscoring the deep uncertainties of the situation despite the 30,000-strong U.S. troop surge for which he was the leading congressional advocate.

Now John McCain would love this if he becomes president.  His deal with Big Oil is to find some reason to make sure the troops are kept in Iraq for an indefinite time so that they are there to hold the nation down while Big Oil extracts the crude.

But don't forget that there was another plan that was promoted just as Bush started talking about "a surge".  It was to warn the Iraqi government that if they didn't start running their nation in a more equitable manner, our troops would leave and they could deal with all the consequences of that by themselves.  Remember how the Iraq Study Group decided on that plan.  Well, al Maliki says get out of Iraq within 16 months, The Iraq Study Groups said we should try at least pulling troops back to bases and see how the Iraqis manage their nation all alone. We should give it a try. 

There is no mother of invention of an equitable government better than necessity.  Or if they try managing with cruelty, greed, and graft, then they won't be any different than they are now, and the American taxpayer won't have to foot the bill anymore.

For more on Iraq see McClatchy search: Iraq .

The Democratic candidate may take the state out of the red column.

Excerpt Danville News Report "Poll: Obama breaks tie in Va., takes 8-point lead over McCain ":

While a Mason-Dixon poll issued last week showed Virginia tied in the presidential race, a new survey shows Sen. Barack Obama increasing his lead.

The Democratic candidate is ahead of Republican Sen. John McCain 51 percent to 43, according to Public Policy Polling.

How come? Because of the failing economy, 63 percent of those polled said.

“Virginia is showing the same trends as pretty much every other battleground state,” Dean Debnam, of Public Policy Polling based in Raleigh, N.C., said. “Voters are turning toward the Democrats as concern over the economy mounts, and they’re also a lot less enamored with Sarah Palin than they were shortly after the Republican convention.”

Local Democrats are pleased with the results, but are taking nothing for granted.

“I am not surprised by the poll. When you factor in the newly registered voters that are not being polled, I believe Obama’s margin should be even greater,” Sheila Baynes, chairman of the Danville Democratic Committee, said. “Referring to Northern Virginians as ‘communists’ is no way to earn votes. The economy is bad, middle-class Americans are sinking fast — sound bites and name calling is no solution.” 

The same kind of extra legal maneuvering we've seen for over 8 years with the Republicans is still in play and as usual with the McCain camp with an extra dash of sleaze.  In fact, given that the Bush people became worse after he was  elected you'd have to wonder what depths of fascism we would find ourselves in if we elect McCain/Palin.

Thursday Sarah Palin's campaign declared she did nothing wrong in firing the respected Alaska public safety commissioner.

I think we are going to have to dispatch some teams to Alaska to see if we can find some limits up there to Governor Palin's ambition and readiness to act upon it.

See AP report "Palin pre-empts state report, clears self in probe ."

Excerpt:

Palin's critics say that shows she used her office to settle family affairs.

"When you're the governor, you leave your household hat at home and you become governor," said state Senate President Lyda Green, a Republican who has frequently clashed with Palin.

McCain spokesman Taylor Griffin, who distributed the campaign's report, said it was based on public filings and Todd Palin's affidavit.

The report blames former campaign opponent, Andrew Halcro, who has a blog, of conspiring with Wooten to pin Monegan's dismissal on the family's dispute with Wooten. Three days after Monegan was fired, they say, Wooten told his ex-wife, Palin's sister, that: "You guys are going down. Get ready for the show."

Two days after that confrontation, they say, Halcro and Wooten met at a hotel bar in Anchorage for more than three hours — and that evening, Halcro posted the first accusations on his blog that Monegan had been fired because of a vendetta against Wooten by the Palin family.

"It is tragic that a false story hatched by a blogger after drinks with Trooper Wooten led the legislature to allocate over $100,000 of public money to be spent in what has become a politically driven investigation," the 21-page report concludes.

Now remember that news released on Thursday has a lot better chance at wide distribution than that released on Friday or Saturday.  

 

Fudged.  A new way for mainstream press to say "lied".

The Washington Post's Fact Checker reads an LA Times report and something falls on their head.  Eureka!

John McCain is a liar.   Er well, a fact fudger

(The Times laid it out even more subtly than the Post's fact checker. But the Times report goes on to suggest slightly in sotto voice why John McCain may be a serial fact fudger.  It's the same reason that George W. Bush is one...)

But first about a virtually proven lie by 'truth teller' McCain.

Excerpt Washington Post FactChecker report "McCain fudges his Navy record".

"I crashed a plane in Corpus Christi Bay one Saturday morning. The engine quit while I was practicing landings...I took a few painkillers and hit the sack to rest my aching back for a few hours....I was out carousing, injured back and all, later that evening.
--John McCain, "Faith of My Fathers."

Controversy has surrounded a series of crashes involving planes piloted by John McCain while serving in the U.S. Navy. In his autobiography, the Republican presidential candidate maintained that a couple of the accidents were caused by engine failure. But an official investigation by the Naval Aviation Safety Center makes clear that the first accident, in March 1960, was caused exclusively by pilot error.

Someone want to ask Senator Married the Richest Little Heiress in Arizona that question?

The FactChecker is not faulting McCain for the aircraft that were destroyed while he was in the war zone, and neither does the Times.

The Los Angeles Times in Mishaps mark John McCain's record as naval aviator  talks about the Corpus Christi crash, but goes on to the crash in Spain and beyond.  At least McCain doesn't seem to have lied about the last two.

FactChecker covered some of the information surrounding the first crash.  The Times continues with the reason that military investigators cite for the first incident:

 The West Coast paper also notes:

[The] examination of his record revealed a pilot who early in his career was cocky, occasionally cavalier and prone to testing limits.

In today's military, a lapse in judgment that causes a crash can end a pilot's career. Though standards were looser and crashes more frequent in the 1960s, McCain's record stands out.

"Three mishaps are unusual," said Michael L. Barr, a former Air Force pilot with 137 combat missions in Vietnam and an internationally known aviation safety expert who teaches in USC's Aviation Safety and Security Program. "After the third accident, you would say: Is there a trend here in terms of his flying skills and his judgment?"

Gee willikkers, now why would a cocky young  pilot get away with so much?  Was he considered special?

McCain, the son and grandson of admirals, had a privileged status in the Navy. He was invited to the captain's cabin for dinner on the maiden voyage of the Enterprise in 1962, a perk other aviators and sailors attributed to his famous name, recalled Gene Furr, an enlisted man who shared an office and went on carrier deployments with McCain over three years. 

"Ah yes, Young Grasshopper .  Children of privilege often know that those above them will look the other way when they screw up.

"Hey, that's just like what we've been facing for the last 8 years.  Someone was always supposed to be around to pick up after Lil' Bushy, and it was usually you and I taxpayer.

BTW, be sure to read both reports (if not blocked at WP because of lack of registration) for full details.

 

 

 

Comment LA Lady:

What Barack Obama says  (according to NPR report "Obama's Links To Ex-Radical Examined"):

"This is a guy who lives in my neighborhood, who is a professor of English in Chicago, who I know, and who I have not received some official endorsement from. He is not someone I exchange ideas (with) on a regular basis."

Obama went on to say Ayers "engaged in despicable acts 40 years ago when I was 8 years old," and to suggest that "that reflects on me and my values doesn't make much sense."

What Sarah Palin said (part 1):

"Barack Obama said Ayers was just someone in the neighborhood. But that's less than truthful. His own top adviser said they were 'certainly friendly.'

Sounds pretty incriminating, right?

But lets get the entire quote:

"Bill Ayers lives in his neighborhood. Their kids attend the same school," he said. "They're certainly friendly, they know each other...

"In fact, Obama held one of the first meetings of his political career in Bill Ayers' home."

I forgot that I had to wait, not only the standard 20 minutes for an update after the close, but also for the length of time after that in which my program takes to update itself.

Dow is down 189.01

NASDAQ -14.55

S&P  -11.29

All Declined pretty rapidly since the last time my chart had refreshed.

(Rest of original post below.  I've left it here so that people won't get a 404 or get confused when trying to access the former post.

It's a miracle, a miracle!

 The Nasdaq and S&P are actually higher than they started in the morning.

I think the most horrifying words I have been reading in the past months is the words telling people to get out of the stock market.  It is disconcerting to read or hear those when I know most Americans have a large majority of their retirement savings tied up in 401k packages, because they were the only way to save for retirement without getting stuck with paying higher taxes on them. IIRC they can only be switched once a year.  The owners already pay fees on the plans which reduce the money saved.  And I've always figured that the managers were probably using the stocks for short selling anyway.  I mean what person or business who was in control of some stock would knowingly lend it to a short seller.  You would be very likely to lose, unless you had inside information that the shorters hopes would be dashed.

The 2 trillion above includes all kinds of retirement plans (excepting "golden parachutes" as Rep George Miller D-CA notes in the report linked above) 401ks, defined benefit, and defined contribution styles. 

The Post notes that with the old classic defined benefits which no one, but high level executives and government workers seem to have these days, the Post notes that someone will still have to pay to make up the shortfall between what is left after the stock market is finished descending, and what is needed to cover them. Either the consumer, the worker, or the shareholders. Since most executives have a lot of stock in their own companies, I doubt the latter will get stuck with much of the bill at all.

For more read Washington Post report "Retirement Savings Lose $2 Trillion in 15 Months" (not that there is much more except for explaining how deeply screwed we all are as the hit on retirement 'savings' will cause people to stop people from spending in a nation that is almost entirely dependent on consumer consumption for it's economy)  I will look for a usenet copy for those who can't get in because of lack of registration.

Interesting how this global depression came about even though we were assured that globalism would stop depressions from developing. You know how they wailed that protecting our jobs at home would cause something like this.  Liberal programs would cause something like this.  Well the first Great Depression started at the end of a long era of an ever widening gulf between rich and poor (and with repercussions from WW1 still lingering).  Now we've had another long period of widening gap and a war that lasted longer and cost more than WW2.

Boy, is that ever an argument for peace and equality.  Lets change the old chant around to

"No Justice, No Peace, No Money"!  

Maybe that will get the attention of the greedy and the racist people that have been propping up the Bush administration and other Republicans for so many years.