"I have a scheme"
16 minutes ago
On MONDAY, September 8, U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York will campaign in Florida on behalf of Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama. Her visit will include a Change We Need rally for voters in Tampa and a community event on the economy in Kissimmee.Read More......
At both events, Sen. Clinton will address the choice we have in this election – between a new direction for our economy or four more years of the Bush failed economic policies that McCain-Palin is offering. She will talk about the Obama-Biden plan for immediate and lasting relief for America’s working families.
Senior officials from the Bush administration and the Federal Reserve on Friday informed top executives of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage-finance giants, that the government is preparing a plan to seize the two companies and place them in a conservatorship, officials and company executives briefed on the discussions said.Here's the Washington Post's take:
The plan, effectively a government bailout, was outlined in separate meetings that the chief executives were summoned to attend on Friday at the office of the companies’ new regulator. The executives were told that under the plan, they and their boards would be replaced, and their shareholders virtually wiped out, but that the companies would be able to continue functioning with the government generally standing behind their debt, people briefed on the discussions said.
It is not possible to calculate the cost of any government bailout, but the huge potential liabilities of the companies could cost taxpayers tens of billions of dollars and make any rescue among the largest in United States history.
The government has formulated a plan to put troubled mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac under federal control, dismiss their top executives, and use government funds to prop them up, government officials told the two companies yesterday, according to sources familiar with the conversations.Read More......
Under the plan, the federal government would place the firms in a legal state known as conservatorship, the sources said. The value of the company's common stock would be diluted but not wiped out while the holdings of other securities, including company debt and preferred shares, would be protected by the government.
Instead of giving each company a big capital infusion up front, the government plans to make quarterly infusions as the companies' losses warrant, the sources said. This would be an attempt to minimize the initial cost of the rescue.
Jack Cafferty isn’t here today for the Cafferty File because of some tragic news.Read More......
His wife of 35 years, Carol, passed away unexpectedly this morning. Carol was everything to Jack. The dedication of his book reads, “for Carol, my wife, my life.”
Jack wrote about how she was the inspiration for him to get sober and straighten up his life: “In all the years that we’ve been married, she has always brought to the table her unshakable grounding in something a lot more real than being on television or being recognized in the corner drugstore. She has been my rock, having done a magnificent job of keeping me from getting full of helium and drifting off the surface of the earth… She was all the incentive I needed to make painful but transforming changes – to get sober and stop smoking. I knew that I’d lose her if I didn’t. She’s an amazing woman who simply wasn’t worth losing.”
One story Jack loves to tell is how he and Carol met – when he was a local news anchor in Kansas City. They started to meet regularly for a quick meal between his shows and became good friends. Whenever Jack had to leave, his exit line was “We’d better wrap this up. Got to get back to the station.” One night Carol finally asked, “What kind of a gas station do you work at? You’re always wearing a tie.”
Jack explained it was a television station. He loved the fact that she had no clue and couldn’t care less that he had been on air there every night for four years. He later described that as one of his life’s “twenty-four-carat moments” that made his heart soar. He said to himself then that he might marry her because “it can’t get any more honest and pure than that.”
John McCain just accepted the Republican nomination and adopted the most conservative platform in the history of his party.Watch Biden tear into the Republicans. Jed's right. Joe is on fire:
After days of negative attacks -- and no mention of real proposals to fix our economy, get more people health care, or make America safer -- the party that brought you eight years of disastrous policies is asking for four more.
Well, not if we have anything to say about it.
Across this nation, people like you have joined this movement because you believe that we are better than the past eight years. And now that we are entering the final stretch, it's going to take all of us to bring the change we need.
Will you make a donation of $100 or more at this crucial moment to change our country?
After the last eight years, it's up to you to keep America's promise alive.
How can John McCain pull us out of the deep hole we're in when he voted with George Bush more than 90% of the time?
The American people deserve more than a 10% chance at change.
No matter what McCain says, we can't bring about change by relying on the same ideas that have failed us for the last eight years.
Show the McCain campaign that people coming together, giving what they can afford, and working toward a common purpose will transform this country.
Change begins with you. Please make a donation of $100 or more now.
The Palin administration in recent days has shown resistance to the legitimacy of the legislative investigation.Palin is becoming Bush-like in her capacity to just say things that aren't true.
A press release today from [GOP State Rep. Ray] Ramras and Sen. Hollis French, the Anchorage Democrat who is managing the Branchflower investigation, says subpoenas are necessary to compel cooperation with Branchflower.
Says the press release:
"This week, seven key witnesses informed Mr. Branchflower through their attorneys that they would not provide depositions. Their depositions, which had been agreed to and scheduled earlier with Mr. Branchflower, were cancelled within the last 72 hours.
"Additionally, the governor's lawyer has stated that he represents the governor and the governor's office, and has forbidden any contact by Mr. Branchflower with any member of that office.
"Mr. Branchflower wishes to depose some of those employees. The issuance of the subpoenas is intended to get at the truth and to expedite the completion of his report to the public."
Another member of the House Judiciary Committee, Eagle River Republican Rep. Nancy Dahlstrom, said lawmakers talked and agreed not to issue a subpoena to Palin.Don't count on Palin wanting to be accommodated. Read More......
"She has told the public that she intends to cooperate with the investigation. Indeed, she has told the public that she welcomes the investigation, and I have every faith that she means it," Dahlstrom said. "If necessary we can send Mr. Branchflower to wherever the governor is, or she can give her statement to him over the telephone, whatever is most convenient for her. We recognize that her schedule is extremely busy, and we want to accommodate that."
“It’s a time-honored marketing ploy and, every time they bash the media, it means they’re not talking about a vision or a plan,” CNN president Jon Klein said. “But the best antidote to cynical marketing is solid reporting.”Read More......
CNN had a dustup with the McCain campaign earlier this week after Campbell Brown’s persistent questioning of McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds on Palin’s foreign-policy experience as governor of Alaska prompted the campaign to cancel McCain’s scheduled appearance on Larry King Live. (Bounds and CNN have since patched thing up.)
“America has been presented with a total unknown who might be a heartbeat away from the presidency,” Klein said of Palin, “and Americans have every right to expect as much information as possible about this person so that they can make an informed choice. Certainly our critics are in favor of Americans making an informed choice, aren’t they?”
While I was at it, I got rid of a few things in the governor's office that I didn't believe our citizens should have to pay for.Just because she put it on eBay, doesn't mean she sold it on eBay. In fact, she didn't sell it on eBay. That gimmick failed.
That luxury jet was over the top. I put it on eBay.
"McCAIN-PALIN: A BRIDGE TO NOWHERE"Read More......
Can you help get this meme out into the world at large - PLEASE???
Excuse my ego-tripping, but this is the kind of catchphrase that will stick right into people skulls once it starts spreading. It ties together that freakin' bridge she was on both sides of (hey, there's ANOTHER metaphor!) with Bob Dole's loser '96 campaign. (Remember his bridge to a better past vs. Clinton/Gore's 'bridge to the 20th century'?).
Home foreclosures and the rate of homes entering the foreclosure process rose to record highs in the second quarter, the Mortgage Bankers Association said on Friday.Read More......
"The national foreclosure numbers continue to be driven by the hardest-hit states continuing to get much worse," Jay Brinkmann, MBA's chief economist and senior vice president for research and economics, said in a press release.
I think she’ll ultimately be a polarizer. After last night’s smash, Republicans are in deep love. Nothing thrills ‘em like a good “us vs. them” speech. But I’d guess that most Democrats had the opposite reaction. In a year where the Democrat generic numbers are 10+ points better than the Republican, I don’t like the math of a strategy that just polarized the election along party base lines. Among the vital sliver of voters in the middle, I think Palin’s rock solid social conservatism will be a turn off. And while voters may value vision over experience, Palin’s inexperience is a weakness, denying McCain an argument that has been helping him against Obama. It's not a real poll and therefore should be taken with an Alaska sized boulder of salt, but the Detroit Free Press asked a few swing voters to watch Gov. Palin's speech and then opine. You can read their reactions here:Read More......
So that’s my concern with Sarah Palin. Interesting person, bad strategic choice to win the election.
What did not one member of the faux, support-the-troops line-up mention -- not even one time?Read More......
The sacrifice of our military families, the number of troops who have returned home in coffins since Bush lied us into the Iraq disaster and the trials of Iraq war Veterans.
To steal from the shrill Rudy Giuliani's speech on Wednesday, they said "nada, nothing."
For a party that wants to convince Americans that the entire Iraq debacle can somehow be reduced to the small amount of time spent on the "surge," every major speech was missing any acknowledgement whatsoever of the troops who have died and those still serving on the ground in Iraq -- except the couple of instances where they used the troops to lie about Barack Obama's record.
Even Veteran John McCain who had run the entire Republican convention under the "Country First" marketing label, spent much of his acceptance speech focusing on himself and his POW resume, without one word for the troops still serving in a war of his party's making. He also said nothing about the nearly 4,200 troops who have died or the Veterans who have come back to neglect and mistreatment under the Bush administration.
Forget whether or not Sarah Palin is ready to be president. She's not even ready to be a candidate for vice president.And, the McCain campaign is proving that point.
The road-show intro of Palin to the lower 48 as part of the official ticket will begin in Wisconsin and Michigan Friday.So, the NY Daily News says the "road show" stops because of the son. That's the spin we'll hear over and over and over. (Even though reporting on a deployment date is very dicey and possibly illegal as Jon Soltz explained.)
It will move west to Colorado and New Mexico tomorrow, a region where the Alaska governor was expected to do the heavy lifting for November.
After that, Palin was expected to break from the trail to return to Alaska and see off her oldest son, Track, 19, who is deploying to Iraq with his Army unit on Sept. 12.
"Alaska Governor and Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin has been quietly undermining the ethics inquiry into her firing of Public Safety Commissioner Walter Monegan from the beginning, even as she publicly pledged her full cooperation. "CREW has a lot of documentation, check it out via the link above. Read More......
However, even without reset difficulties, subprime and Alt-A loans are slipping into default at very high rates. The concern about future resets has given way to concern about borrowers equity erosion."Read More......
However, the Option ARMs and Interest Only (IOs) loans scheduled to reset in the next few years will add more trouble. These loans represent about 15% of securitized loans and some have negatively amortized, increasing the payments and making refinancing more difficult. According to data from Barclay's, about $300 billion in option ARMs and $820 billion in IO's are set to recast. The results could be payment shocks over 80% for option ARMs and over 60% for IOs according to Barclay's.
This afternoon, the McCain campaign issued a Palin fundraising solicitation for the joint McCain-Palin-RNC fund. (After this week, McCain no longer can raise money after accepting $84.1 million in public funds, but the Republican National Committee and state parties can.) "I cannot tell you how special last night was for me and how enthused I am to be John McCain's running mate," Palin said in the email solicitation, adding: "Unfortunately, as you've seen this week, the Obama/Biden Democrats have been vicious in their attacks directed toward me, my family and John McCain. The misinformation and flat-out lies must be corrected." Unless we're mistaken, neither Obama nor Biden nor the campaign has attacked Palin's family. In fact, Obama said this after it was revealed that Palin's 17-year-old daughter is pregnant: "I have said before and I will repeat again: I think people’s families are off limits, and people’s children are especially off limits. This shouldn’t be part of our politics, it has no relevance to governor Palin’s performance as a governor or her potential performance as a vice president. And so I would strongly urge people to back off these kinds of stories." Reached for comment about the charge, RNC spokesman Danny Diaz cited a comment Obama's Florida spokesman made noting (incorrectly, it seems) that Palin supported Pat Buchanan, whom Jews -- at least according to this spokesman -- have called a "Nazi sympathizer." But Diaz didn't cite a single Obama or Biden charge against Palin's family.Read More......
Last week, almost before Obama had finished his speech, AP's Charles Babington pumped out a hatchet job. Watch how quickly the article praising McCain gets published tonight. It's probably already written. You know Sidoti and Fournier fought over who got to write it.Sidoti won. Tonight, the McCain speech is being widely panned. Yet, as expected, Sidoti delivered for John McCain:
Not merely a Republican. Not merely a candidate. John McCain cast himself as a leader for all Americans, regardless of party or status.Sidoti's admiration for McCain is unwavering. And, while I'm not comparing the AP writer to Shakespeare, she could have just used this passage from Julius Caesar and saved some time:
Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow worldMcCain should be delivering donuts and coffee to Sidoti. Read More......
Like a Colossus; and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs, and peep about
To find ourselves dishonourable graves.
“I thought it was the worst speech by a nominee that I’ve heard since Jimmy Carter in 1980. I thought it was disorganized, I thought it was it was theme-less, I thought it was very, very boring…I personally cannot remember a single policy proposal that he made because they had nothing connecting them. I found it shockingly bad.”Read More......
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