FDL Movie Night: The Land of Opportunity
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Top Ten Pickup lines for use on International Talk Like a Pirate DayRead More......
(We came up with these in an effort to interest The Other Dave (Letterman) in TLAPD. His staff liked 'em, but alas, his show was"dark" the week of Sept. 19.)
10 . Avast, me proud beauty! Wanna know why my Roger is so Jolly?
9. Have ya ever met a man with a real yardarm?
8. Come on up and see me urchins.
7. Yes, that is a hornpipe in my pocket and I am happy to see you.
6. I'd love to drop anchor in your lagoon.
5. Pardon me, but would ya mind if fired me cannon through your porthole?
4. How'd you like to scrape the barnacles off of me rudder?
3. Ya know, darlin’, I’m 97 percent chum free.
2. Well blow me down?
And the number one pickup line for use on International Talk Like a Pirate Day is
1. Prepare to be boarded.
I think it is extremely telling to read Obama's remarks (and, notably, answers to questions) in Florida today and then to read McCain's in Wisconsin. For one thing, as Obama said elsewhere on the stump, McCain can only propose attacking Obama as a solution to our problems. For another, McCain's all over the map with a hodge-podge and rehash of previous and loopy proposals, most of which are bandaids and doctor's office lollipops on a seriously bleeding artery.That seems to be the consensus. Having watched both speeches myself, there really was a sharp contrast between the angry accusatory tone of McCain and the steady, measured message from Obama. Several political reporters picked up on the fact that McCain's economic plan was basically an attack on Obama.
One the one hand, in Barack Obama we've got a statesman who wants to work together to get things done for all Americans. On the other hand, in John McCain we've got a yipping little dog (apologies to canine lovers everywhere) who will tear anything down to get ahead.
To The Editor:What did Rick Davis know and when did he know it? Actually, we already know. Joe just found this little bombshell from earlier this year. Wasn't so relevant in February when it was written. It is now. McCain's campaign manager's previous job was ensuring that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac didn't get regulated by the feds:
Yesterday, Senator John McCain released a television commercial attacking Barack Obama for allegedly receiving advice on the economy from former Fannie Mae CEO Franklin Raines. From the stump, he has recently tried tying Senator Obama to Fannie Mae, as if there is some guilt in the association with Fannie Mae's former executives.
It is an interesting card for Senator McCain to play, given that his campaign manager, Rick Davis, was paid by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac several hundred thousand dollars early in this decade to head up an organization to lobby in their behalf called The Homeownership Alliance. ...
I worked in government relations for Fannie Mae for more than 20 years, leading the group for most of those years. When I see photographs of Sen. McCain's staff, it looks to me like the team of lobbyists who used to report to me. Senator McCain's attack on Senator Obama is a cheap shot, and hypocritical.
Sincerely,
William Maloni
Fannie Mae Senior Vice President for Government and Industry Relations (1983-2004)
Davis, was president of the Homeownership Alliance, a Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac-led advocacy group which has tried to fend off regulation sought by large private banks and mortgage lenders.Read More......
The front story of the Homeownership Alliance is that it sought to make home ownership affordable to the broadest possible range of people and feared that that this mission would be compromised if Congress stepped in with too many rules.
The back story, according to critics, is that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac feared that Congressional meddling would lower their healthy profits.
People would rather watch a football game with Barack Obama than with John McCain....Read More......
[R]eflecting a sense some voters have of McCain based on the complaints of a few Senate colleagues, he added warily, "I bet he'd probably get pretty angry and lit up if his team was losing."
Democrat James Smith, 29, of Asheville, N.C., picked Obama because he believes he and the Democratic senator from Illinois have more in common.
"With McCain, I have such an age difference," said Smith of the Arizona senator, who is 72. But with Obama, 47, he said, "If things went well with the conversation, the football game would be forgotten. There'd be a lot of back and forth."
Such views are significant because in many elections, candidates considered more likable have an advantage.
McCain backers were a bit more intrigued by watching with Obama than the Democrat's supporters were with making McCain their football buddy. While fewer than one in 10 Obama backers wanted to watch with McCain, nearly one in five McCain supporters wanted to kick back with Obama.
"He seems intensely focused in a way I'm not sure he does sit down and relax," McCain supporter Lanita Linch, 41, of Harrison, Ark., said of the Republican. She said she'd rather watch with Obama because he seemed like "someone you could be comfortable and at ease with," but cautioned, "If he's not a Cowboys fan, we'd have a problem."
I think it is extremely telling to read Obama's remarks (and, notably, answers to questions) in Florida today and then to read McCain's in Wisconsin. For one thing, as Obama said elsewhere on the stump, McCain can only propose attacking Obama as a solution to our problems. For another, McCain's all over the map with a hodge-podge and rehash of previous and loopy proposals, most of which are bandaids and doctor's office lollipops on a seriously bleeding artery. But above all, Obama has a far better grasp of the actual crisis AND in his remarks manages to tie the problems of Wall Street to, as he puts it, the problems on Main Street. Stimulus for the former won't work without stimulus for the latter.Read More......
Some people complain Obama can sound didactic, like Al Gore; but in a situation like this, he's actually pedagogic, teaching Americans (and reporters) about the crisis and about what the political leadership should be addressing.
Obama transcript
McCain transcript
10) 1992 Summer Games: WORST. OLYMPICS. EVER.Read More......
9) Tapas.
8) Spanish Government banned illegal downloads of Cindy’s favorite album, Global House Diva, Volume 2: Live in Ibiza.
7) Immigrants flooding Texas and New Mexico. Can’t they manage their own border?
6) I WAS A POW I'LL ATTACK WHO I WANT. INCOMING!
5) "Compañero de Cuarto de Papa," the Spanish version of Daddy’s Roommate, rocketed to #4 on Spanish Amazon.
4) Sarah Palin saw it from the window of her plane to Kuwait and she just didn’t like what she saw.
3) “You rhyme the name of your country with my last name I’ll f--- you up.”
2) Pesky rule requiring America to defend the territorial integrity of fellow NATO allies elitist, sexist.
1) That trollop Penelope Cruz.
This morning Senator McCain gave a speech in which his big solution to this worldwide economic crisis was to blame me for it.Read More......
This is a guy who's spent nearly three decades in Washington, and after spending the entire campaign saying I haven't been in Washington long enough, he apparently now is willing to assign me responsibility for all of Washington's failures.
Now, I think it's a pretty clear that Senator McCain is a little panicked right now. At this point he seems to be willing to say anything or do anything or change any position or violate any principal to try and win this election, and I've got to say it's kind of sad to see. That's not the politics we need.
It's also been disappointing to see my opponent's reaction to this economic crisis. His first reaction on Monday was to stand up and repeat the line he's said over and over again throughout this campaign -- 'the fundamentals of the economy are strong' -- the comment was so out of touch that even George Bush's White House couldn't agree with it.
John McCain has made it clear this week he doesn't understand what's happening on Wall Street any better than Barack Obama does. But on Thursday, he took his populist riffing up a notch and found his scapegoat for financial panic -- Christopher Cox, the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission....Read More......
Mr. McCain clearly wants to distance himself from the Bush Administration. But this assault on Mr. Cox is both false and deeply unfair. It's also un-Presidential....
In a crisis, voters want steady, calm leadership, not easy, misleading answers that will do nothing to help. Mr. McCain is sounding like a candidate searching for a political foil rather than a genuine solution.
Senator John McCain gave a few new details of his economic proposals at a speech here Friday morning, but the address seemed as much a political shot at Senator Barack Obama as a policy prescription.Washington Post:
Republican presidential candidate John McCain offered few new details this morning on how he would respond to the crisis in the nation's financial markets, instead renewing his criticism of Democratic rival Barack Obama's ties to former heads of mortgage giants Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.No new details, but plenty of political attacks. That's not exactly the kind of leadership that would calm the markets and instill confidence. In the middle of the worst financial crisis since the Savings and Loan debacle, McCain's speech was just more of the same. He really is just a nasty guy with no vision for the country. Read More......
The campaign yesterday had promised more information about McCain's economic plan. But McCain, in a speech to a hastily assembled meeting of the local chamber of commerce, mostly repeated his call for a new government trust that would identify and help rescue failing financial institutions and a set of principles to guide future regulation and legislation.
What we are witnessing may be the greatest destruction of financial wealth that the world has ever seen -- paper losses measured in the trillions of dollars. Corporate wealth. Oil wealth. Real estate wealth. Bank wealth. Private-equity wealth. Hedge fund wealth. Pension wealth. It's a painful reminder that, when you strip away all the complexity and trappings from the magnificent new global infrastructure, finance is still a confidence game -- and once the confidence goes, there's no telling when the selling will stop.Read More......
- What's up with McCain's left eye?There weren't any new ideas here at all - it was all the same blather. McCain shamelessly tried to say that Obama was under the influence of lobbyists. McCain and his lobbyist packed campaign are truly shameless.
- John McCain is giving us his "educated guess" on what started the current financial crisis - this from the man who said: "I'm going to be honest: I know a lot less about economics than I do about military and foreign policy issues. I still need to be educated"
- So John McCain just said that Fannie and Freddie are to blame for our current economic crisis. Seriously? That was the big problem?
- McCain just lied and said that Franklin Raines has been advising Obama on housing policy. From Franklin Raines: "I am not an advisor to Barack Obama, nor have I provided his campaign with advice on housing or economic matters." Obama's campaign put that out in a statement last night. (link coming)
- McCain just said Obama should "admit to his own poor judgment in contributing to these problems" - Right, it's Obama's fault, not McCain who has been in Washington for decades and was Chairman of the Commerce Committee - McCain really has no shame.
- He's going on about the lack of transparency in the financial markets - that would come in the form of regulation - something that McCain and the Republican Party have argued against for a generation. And the public is supposed to believe that this John McCain is different from the John McCain who Tuesday said don't bail out AIG. Oh of course, because this is the John McCain who on Wednesday said we should. Wonder which John McCain would become President? The deathbed convert or the decades long deregulating Republican?
- McCain just said that the regulatory agencies were lax at carrying out their responsibilities. Maybe a Republican administration is going to encourage that environment? Say like they did during the Keating Five scandal? When John McCain was in the room with the regulators pressuring them to be more lax? Uh huh...
- "The Chairman of the FEC should resign and be replaced."
Clearly he was talking about the SEC's Chris Cox, but even still, this financial crisis goes WAY past just the SEC and McCain doesn't get it. He's standing behind a huge gaffe, just like the Spain one. He's really being reckless in covering up these mistakes. When is the media going to start calling him out on this stuff?
- McCain is proposing a Homeland Security-style single regulatory body for all financial markets. Yeah, Katrina didn't show the failure of that approach.
- He went through a castigation of the Fed and basically told them to stay out of this - I mean, does he really not understand that the Fed was designed to regulate the financial markets? These investment and insurance companies, given their enormous size, are effectively a part of the financial services system. That was the rationale for nationalizing them instead of letting them fail. The Fed has been doing exactly what they are supposed to. Now the Treasury Department, that's a different question - does McCain know the difference? After years on the Commerce Committee one would expect so, but maybe not.
- McCain is saying that his tax plan, a xerox copy of Bush's, is better than Obama's middle class tax cut? And his health care, another copy of Bush's tax credit-style way to pay for huge health care costs, is better than Obama's? He's offering up nothing but more of the same. How does he think people can't see this? This isn't reform at all.
- McCain went on about a strong dollar and now he's talking about how 1 in 5 jobs are export related - doesn't he get that a stronger dollar is bad for exports, making them more expensive? I'm not taking a policy position one way or the other, I'm just saying that these two things are opposite and yet they are in the same speech.
There are now not one but two drawn curtains on Mr. McCain’s plane separating his spacious quarters from the press corps. Left idle is the couch that was built in the front of the plane — called “Straight Talk Air” — to reproduce at 30,000 feet the freewheeling chats with reporters that were the stock-in-trade on his bus; the other morning it was covered with newspapers. Mr. McCain, who promised to hold weekly news conferences if elected president, has not held one in more than a month.Two curtains! How cruel. The traveling press was so looking forward to sitting in that couch.
These days, Mr. McCain sounds less like his old self than Bob Dole, another Republican senator who ran for president in 1996, sounded in the closing days of his campaign — speaking louder or repeating statements that he thinks might be overlooked. “The American economy is in a crisis!” Mr. McCain said. “It’s in a crisis!”To the press corps, McCain has become Bob Dole. Ouch. That's what McCain gets for ditching them. Read More......
Obama also mocked McCain's promise to fire the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission if elected.Read More......
"I think that's all fine and good but here's what I think," Obama said. "In the next 47 days you can fire the whole trickle-down, on-your-own, look-the-other way crowd in Washington who has led us down this disastrous path.
"Don't just get rid of one guy. Get rid of this administration," he said. "Get rid of this philosophy. Get rid of the do-nothing approach to our economic problem and put somebody in there who's going to fight for you."
Obama came up with yet another way to poke fun at McCain for his comment Monday that the fundamentals of the economy were strong. "This comment was so out of touch that even George Bush's White House couldn't agree with it when they were asked about it. They had to distance themselves from John McCain."
[T]he Democratic National Committee, using publicly available records, has identified 177 lobbyists working for the McCain campaign as either aides, policy advisers, or fundraisers.Read More......
Of those 177 lobbyists, according to a Mother Jones review of Senate and House records, at least 83 have in recent years lobbied for the financial industry McCain now attacks. These are high-paid influence-peddlers who have been working the corridors of the nation's capital to win favors and special treatment for investment banks, securities firms, hedge funds, accounting outfits, and insurance companies. Their clients have included AIG, the newest symbol of corporate excess; Lehman Brothers, which filed for bankruptcy on Monday sending the stock market into a tailspin; Merrill Lynch, which was bought out by Bank of America this week; and Washington Mutual, the banking giant that could be the next to fall. Among these 83 lobbyists are McCain's chief political adviser, Charlie Black (JP Morgan, Washington Mutual Bank, Freddie Mac, Mortgage Bankers Association of America); McCain's national finance co-chairman, Wayne Berman (AIG, Blackstone, Credit Suisse, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac); the campaign's congressional liaison, John Green (Carlyle Group, Citigroup, Icahn Associates, Fannie Mae); McCain's veep vetter, Arthur Culvahouse (Fannie Mae); and McCain's transition planning chief, William Timmons Sr. (Citigroup, Freddie Mac, Vanguard Group).
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