Vile, sickening, and filthy

As The Field blog puts it: "New Ad for John McCain Hits Pennsylvania Airwaves." Too bad it's paid for and produced by Hillary Clinton. Watch Hillary's latest kamikaze ad, then ask yourself if you'll ever vote for this woman again. Read More......

Paulson: Food price controls don't work, but bank and housing price controls do

What a complete ass and a fraud. Weeks after artificially propping up his former Wall Street friends with billions upon billions he has the nerve to tell others that food price controls only make the matter worse. Well Mr Wall Street, how fair is it to poor people across the world that never are able to join the economic boom periods and are trying to feed their families? Explain to everyone how this all works because this pontificating about his precious little "free market" that's never even close to a free market is rings hollow to everyone else. So when we give special tax rates to hedge fund traders and other Wall Street special interests, aren't we promoting the same "economic distortions" that he talks about?

Paulson would be doing himself a favor to get out beyond his Wall Street glass house and see how the rest of America and the world lives. Not everyone rakes in millions and buy without checking the price. Go fix the damned economy, promote wage increases for average people, clean up the Wall Street destruction that's dragging down the world economy and then come tell us about damaging price controls can be for the economy. Read More......

Army Times: McCain confused over Petraeus' role

The Army Times just politely ripped McCain for not understand what General Petraeus does for a living. After 30 years working on this stuff, you'd think McCain would know better. Or maybe he's forgetting.

Speaking Monday at the annual meeting of the Associated Press, McCain was asked whether he, if elected, would shift combat troops from Iraq to Afghanistan to intensify the search for al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden.

“I would not do that unless Gen. [David] Petraeus said that he felt that the situation called for that,” McCain said, referring to the top U.S. commander in Iraq.

Petraeus, however, made clear last week that he has nothing to do with the decision. Testifying last week before four congressional committees, including the Senate Armed Services Committee on which McCain is the ranking Republican, Petraeus said the decision about whether troops could be shifted from Iraq to Afghanistan was not his responsibility because his portfolio is limited to the multi-national force in Iraq.

Decisions about Afghanistan would be made by others, he said.

Watch McCain screw up, again:

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In Michigan, Obama wins and Clinton loses against McCain

This is actually pretty funny. For the past few weeks, Hillary Clinton has become the great defender of Michigan voters. She went to Detroit last month to deliver the message that she alone was fighting for them:

“The people in Michigan and particularly Democrats in Michigan know that Michigan matters in both the primary and general election,” she told a crowd of more than 300 people at the AFSCME Local 25 union hall in Detroit. “If the Democrats send a message that we don’t care about your votes, I’m sure that John McCain and the Republicans will be happy to have them.”

Huh. Interestingly, the people of Michigan have a different take -- and it's not good for Clinton. From Political Wire:

Sen. Barack Obama "holds a small lead over Sen. John McCain in the race for Michigan's 17 electoral votes, but McCain holds a significant lead over Hillary Clinton," according to a new EPIC-MRA poll.

In general election match ups, Obama leads McCain, 43% to 41%, while McCain leads Clinton, 46% to 37%.

EPIC-MRA is the polling firm for Michigan. Read More......

Conservative Berlusconi wins in Italy

It's just very sad to see Italy stumbling along. I first visited when I was 19. The place blew me away. I couldn't believe that a single country could contain so much beauty, from the landscape, to the history, to the culture, the food and the people (who were both gorgeous physically, and had an infectious spirit that I've only seen matched in Brazilians). Simply blew me away. I decided then to teach myself Italian, and did, and have been back to Italy somewhere around a dozen times. This last trip was the first time I'd been back in 5 years, and people are worried, and despondent. The country has had 60 governments since World War II - that's an average of a new national election every year. The political instability hurts business, hurts reform, hurts Italy's efforts to modernize with the new Europe. I'm told even the Mafia is back with a vengeance. Berlusconi sounds like he got enough of a mandate to perhaps push through some direly-needed changes, but many wonder why he'd follow through on promises now that he ignored the first two times he was prime minster before. Just such a lovely country. But as I've said before, Italy isn't the only great nation to fail to reach, and perhaps even squander, its potential. Read More......

Bill Clinton caught lying for Hillary, again

ABC catches him in the act. Gotta tell you, after being lied to this many times by the Clintons, I'd be bitter too. (Hat tip, Ben Smith.) Read More......

It's good to be the king

The GOP Congress and Bush years will be looked back on for years by big business as the best of times. Competition was frowned upon, government regulation was changed to self regulation, war profiteering seemed to become patriotic to the GOP, taxes were cut and companies were allowed to easily move beyond the US borders in the name of free enterprise and now, the proof is there that big business is held to another standard in terms of taxes. We have problems ranging from banks begging for cash around the world, food crisis in terms of quality and quantity, higher cost of living and stagnant pay and now small business being punished while the big guys get another free ride. The best democracy money can buy.

The tax audit rates of the largest companies are less than half what they were 20 years ago while more small and mid-size businesses are coming under scrutiny, according to an organization that monitors the Internal Revenue Service.

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McCain reportedly tells staff to leave Hillary alone - prefers her as opponent in the fall, she'll be easier to beat

Superdelegates take note:

McCain would prefer to go up against Clinton in the general election, insiders reveal.

He has instructed his campaign staff to "chill out" on countering Hillary Clinton's torrent of claims and promises as primary voting comes to an end over the next 6 weeks.

McCain made the tactical decision to downplay Clinton's tale of Bosnia sniper fire, leaving some McCain staffers frustrated and perplexed.

Instead, the critical focus has been on Barack Obama. McCain's official website features 14 press releases taking on Obama since the first of the year, only 3 for the former first lady.

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Obama: McCain is out of touch

Shorter Obama: Go ahead, make my day. Read More......

GOP House Member calls Obama "boy." That's southern for n-gger.

You don't call a black man a "boy" when you're from the south, unless you're intending to harken back to the racist language of slavery, and then segregation, when all black men were called "boy" as a prejudiced pejorative. Even worse, the GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell was there when it happened. Here's what Rep. Geoff Davis (that's really his name, talk about irony) R-KY had to say about Obama:

"I'm going to tell you something: That boy's finger does not need to be on the button," Davis said.

Again, in southern speak, everyone knows what "boy" means when it's said about a black man.

UPDATE: Davis apologized. That's nice, but why hasn't Mitch McConnell said anything? He was right there when it happened. Read More......

The myth of meritocracy, education edition

There's been some interesting blogging recently on mobility and meritocracy. A little while ago Atrios wrote, in the context of President Bush perpetuating the harmful idea that professional sports are some magical opportunity for poor people, "Lots of people in this country are basically born on 2nd and 3rd base and then manage to stay there for the rest of their lives. And many of them look down on those who start at home plate and fail to hit a home run." Yglesias, relatedly, goes further in addressing the meritocracy myth (and its stepbrother, entitlement) thusly:

[T]he merit illusion stems from the well-documented fact that people don't have a great intuitive grasp of statistics or large numbers. If your family connections boost your odds of getting into Harvard from one percent to five percent, you'll perceive that as having triumphed against the odds on merit rather than using family connections to quintuple your chances. . . . It's difficult, however, for people to keep in their heads the idea that, yes, you may have displayed considerable merit to get where you are but also you've taken advantage of a lot of undeserved privileges of birth. Similarly, if you wind up needing to compete on merit against a few hundred other people for a couple dozen highly desirable slots, the question of what happened to all those other people who got excluded from consideration for non-merit reasons sort of falls out of sight.

I think this is absolutely right, and extraordinarily important. Nobody wants to believe their successes have been handed to them, or are some kind of accident, especially those who work really really hard to get where they are. After all, successful people (defined broadly) have probably beaten out lots of competition for whatever accomplishments they've achieved. But as Matt said, tons of people never even make it to the competition. A fascinating and stark example comes from this analysis of higher education and wealth, entertainingly using AJ Soprano as an archetype. The data demonstrates that, not surprisingly, if you're rich, you're likely to go to college no matter how bad your test scores are. But that's just college in general, you might say -- dumb rich people going to college unnecessarily isn't a problem, right? So let's look at the "highly selective" colleges numbers. For kids whose test scores are in the bottom quartile, only 0.2% of those whose families make under $20,000 per year go to a selective university. And it seems about right that bottom quartile test scores wouldn't get you into a selective college. But for kids whose families make more than $100,00, in the bottom quartile of test scores, 3.5% manage to sneak their way into "highly selective" colleges. So rich kids are nearly 18 times as likely to get into selective colleges than poor kids with the same (crappy) test scores. 18 times!

The numbers aren't as stark with the next example, but for reasons I'll get to, I think they're even more important: for the second-highest quartile of grades, 27% of students go to selective colleges. This seems pretty reasonable, after all, selective colleges have to dip below the top quartile of test scores, and certainly some of those students will have money. In the under $20,000 category of second-quartile scorers, however, only 6.2% go to selective colleges, meaning if your family makes $100K+, you're more than four times as likely to go to a selective college than a kid whose family makes under $20,000.

Here's the thing, though: I would guess that if you're in the bottom quartile and you get into a highly selective college, you know it's not because you're smart, and you probably know it's because your family has money. But that second quartile group, that's chock full of kids who think they made it *purely* on merit. They had very good scores! They worked really hard! They beat out lots of other kids who came from relatively wealthy families! They don't see, though, that they're overwhelmingly more likely to get into that college than the kid with the same grades and much less money. This leads to a sense of entitlement, not only that the achievement was self-made, but that the people who didn't make it must not have really been trying. That the other kid just didn't study or work or think as hard. And some of these effects are similar with regard to race, gender, sexual orientation, or other "other" that people don't really think about when they consider class/financial/education/etc stratification.

Now, in the end, I'm not entirely sure what to do about all this, especially on an individual level. Certainly I would and do support public policy that helps create an equal playing field, and personally I find it important to recognize that my successes, whatever they have been or end up being, are in many ways tied to the fact that I hit the privilege jackpot. People who look like me and who have the financial security that my parents were able to provide don't exactly have a lot working to keep them down. But even without knowing what should be done, exactly, acknowledging these realities seems important in its own right.

Tomorrow, check back for how this relates to the blogosphere . . . Read More......

Asian markets dive on Monday

Shanghai is down well over 5% (5.6% at the moment) with the rest of Asian markets falling as well. This is where products being sold to America and Europe are produced so they just may be on to something. The severe drop by GE on Friday is going to have markets looking for any positive news to prove that was an aberration and not an indicator for the future. Read More......

Fred Hiatt Strikes Again. Attacks Obama on campaign finance while McCain is breaking the law.

This is ridiculous.

If -- and I know this is a big if -- but if Fred Hiatt and his cohorts on the editorial page of the Washington Post ever read their own paper, they would know that John McCain is in serious trouble for his campaign finance shenanigans.

The article that explains McCain's situation appeared on February 22, 2008:

But McCain's attempts to build up his campaign coffers before a general election contest appeared to be threatened by the stern warning yesterday from Federal Election Commission Chairman David M. Mason, a Republican. Mason notified McCain that the commission had not granted his Feb. 6 request to withdraw from the presidential public financing system.

The implications of that could be dramatic. Last year, when McCain's campaign was starved for cash, he applied to join the financing system to gain access to millions of dollars in federal matching money. He was also permitted to use his FEC certification to bypass the time-consuming process of gathering signatures to get his name on the ballot in several states, including Ohio.

By signing up for matching money, McCain agreed to adhere to strict state-by-state spending limits and an overall limit on spending of $54 million for the primary season, which lasts until the party's nominating convention in September. The general election has a separate public financing arrangement.

But after McCain won a series of early contests and the campaign found its financial footing, his lawyer wrote to the FEC requesting to back out of the program -- which is permitted for candidates who have not yet received any federal money and who have not used the promise of federal funding as collateral for borrowing money.

Mason's letter raises two issues as the basis for his position. One is that the six-member commission lacks a quorum, with four vacancies because of a Senate deadlock over President Bush's nominees for the seats. Mason said the FEC would need to vote on McCain's request to leave the system, which is not possible without a quorum. Until that can happen, the candidate will have to remain within the system, he said.

The second issue is more complicated. It involves a $1 million loan McCain obtained from a Bethesda bank in January. The bank was worried about his ability to repay the loan if he exited the federal financing program and started to lose in the primary race. McCain promised the bank that, if that happened, he would reapply for matching money and offer those as collateral for the loan. While McCain's aides have argued that the campaign was careful to make sure that they technically complied with the rules, Mason indicated that the question needs further FEC review.

If the FEC refuses McCain's request to leave the system, his campaign could be bound by a potentially debilitating spending limit until he formally accepts his party's nomination. His campaign has already spent $49 million, federal reports show. Knowingly violating the spending limit is a criminal offense that could put McCain at risk of stiff fines and up to five years in prison.

Today, the editorial writers at the Washington Post are trying to bully Obama on the issue of campaign finance. They want Obama to cut a deal over public financing with John McCain. But as the Washington Post itself told us in February, McCain is already in serious trouble with the FEC over his efforts to scam the public financing system.

And, putting aside the legal niceties for a moment - John McCain has already announced that he's pulling out of the public finance system (albeit illegally) because he wants to raise more money, unhindered by those pesky campaign finance rules he used to promote. But now McCain is signaling that he might just go back into the system in the fall general election, mostly because he hasn't been able to raise a dime from the public as compared to Obama and Clinton. So, McCain opted in to the system when he thought he'd get more money that way, then opted out (illegally) when he "realized" he'd make more money on the outside, and now he may opt back in again because the public is refusing to give him the big bucks he expected. But Obama is the one who the Washington Post editorial board has a problem with. Right.

McCain's illegal actions should be the subject of repeated editorials from the Washington Post editorial board. But, they still live in the bizarro world where John McCain is a campaign finance champion. In reality, John McCain is a campaign finance criminal. Obama cannot trust McCain on campaign finance. Ever. Read More......

Benedict blows off Bush

Washington is abuzz this week over the impending visit of Pope Benedict the Sixteenth Century. George Bush can't get enough of him. The Bushes are hosting a dinner in Benedict's honor on Wednesday night. One problem: The guest of honor isn't coming:

The historic visit to Washington this week by Pope Benedict XVI is a big event for millions of Americans, including President Bush and first lady Laura Bush.

The first couple will greet the pontiff as he arrives at Andrews Air Force Base on Tuesday afternoon, followed by a ceremony and private meeting at the White House the next day. Then comes a final event Wednesday night in the East Room, when the Bushes will host a dinner in honor of His Holiness.

Only one thing will be missing: the pope.

"I'm sorry, the pope doesn't attend a dinner in his honor?" one reporter asked White House spokesman Scott Stanzel during a briefing last week.

"No," Stanzel replied.

"How does that work?"

"He doesn't come into the building."

"But then it's not a dinner for the pope, is it?"

"It's in honor of his visit," Stanzel explained. "There will be leaders from the Catholic community from all over the country who are in town for that visit."

White House aides attribute the pontiff's absence from the dinner to a busy schedule during his first visit to the United States. Wednesday also happens to be Pope Benedict's 81st birthday.

Sure. Read More......

White women begin to turn away from Clinton

This is the first concrete sign, I've seen, of a voter backlash against Hillary. Well, perhaps not a backlash as much as a realization that it's over for Hillary, she lost the race two months ago. Not only do voters want to back a winner, they really don't want to back someone who has already lost - at some point, no matter how ardent a supporter, when you realize that your candidate doesn't have a chance, you hang it up and go home. This is the first sign that Hillary's strongest supporters, white women, are going home. From McClatchy:

Clinton's strongest core of support — white women — is beginning to erode in Pennsylvania, the site of the critical April 22 Democratic presidential primary, and a loss here could effectively end her White House run.

A Quinnipiac University survey taken April 3-6 in Pennsylvania found that Clinton's support fell 6 percentage points in a week among white women. Nationally, a Lifetime Networks poll of women found that 26 percent said they liked Clinton less now than in January, while only 15 percent said they liked her more.

This part of the story is particularly interesting:

A lot of white women, and for that matter white men, want the race to end and increasingly consider Obama an acceptable nominee.

"There may be a general, reluctant acceptance that things just don't look that good for Clinton," said Susan Carroll, a professor of political science and women's and gender studies at Rutgers University.

The most familiar echo among many Pennsylvania women when they discuss Clinton, however, is disappointment. Ask them when they became disillusioned with the woman who would be president, and they can cite almost the exact moment.

For Clare Howard, a meditation teacher from Southhampton, it was the night in January when Bill Clinton suggested that Obama did well in the South Carolina primary because of his race.

That went too far, said Howard, 60. "It was like they would do anything to win," she said.

Joan Schmidt, 60, a school psychologist in Levittown, grew tired of hearing Clinton tout — and exaggerate — her experience.

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98% of historians surveyed view Bush presidency as a failure

98%:

President Bush often argues that history will vindicate him. So he can't be pleased with an informal survey of 109 professional historians conducted by the History News Network. It found that 98 percent of them believe that Bush's presidency has been a failure, while only about 2 percent see it as a success. Not only that, more than 61 percent of the historians say the current presidency is the worst in American history.

98% of historians aren't wrong. Read More......

Bill attacks the middle-class, Hillary attacks Gore and Kerry

With all the talk about Obama noting, correctly, that Americans are bitter about politics and their overall economic situation (and thus turning to divisive issues like guns), it's interesting to note how Bill Clinton has repeatedly said the same thing. Will the mainstream media hold Hillary as accountable as Obama for this kind of talk?

"If [Republicans] could cut funding for Medicare, Medicaid, education, and the environment, middle-class Americans would see fewer benefits from their tax dollars, feel more resentful paying taxes, and become even more receptive to their appeals for tax cuts and their strategy of waging campaigns on divisive social and cultural issues like abortion, gay rights, and guns."

-- Bill Clinton, in his 2004 memoirs, My Life, making the same argument as Sen. Barack Obama.

Not to be outdone, Hillary (who along with her husband made $109m this decade) just had this to say about Al Gore and John Kerry (via Ben Smith):

You don’t have to think back too far to remember that good men running for president were viewed as being elitist and out of touch with the values and lives of millions of Americans.

She's likely not attacking her own husband, so she must mean Gore and Kerry. Why drag them through the mud as well? Because she can. Read More......

DNC files lawsuit against FEC to force action against John McCain's campaign finance crimes

Now, this, I like to see. John McCain is a campaign finance criminal. The punditry can't grasp that fact about their darling. But, the DNC gets it. They're going to court to stop McCain's illegal activities:

Democratic Party officials want a federal judge to order an investigation into whether Sen. John McCain violated election laws by withdrawing from public financing, saying federal regulators are too weak to act on their own.

A lawsuit against the Federal Election Commission, to be filed Monday in U.S. District Court, questions the agency's ability to enforce the law and review McCain's decision to opt out of the system. The Republican presidential candidate, who had been entitled to $5.8 million in federal funds for the primary campaign, decided earlier this year to give up that money so he could avoid strict spending limits between now and the GOP's national convention in September.

During a conference call with reporters Sunday, DNC officials said the FEC is unable to act because four of its six seats are vacant. They want a judge to either order the FEC to begin an immediate review, or allow the Democratic Party to file a lawsuit against McCain's campaign challenging his decision.

Tom McMahon, the party's executive director, said "there is a compelling public interest in determining whether Senator McCain agreed to participate in the matching funds program so he could get a loan for his campaign, then violated the terms of that agreement so he could ignore the spending cap and raise unlimited money from lobbyists and special interests."

The DNC is seeking civil fines or an order barring McCain from exceeding spending limits, said DNC general counsel Joe Sandler.

When John McCain filed his February FEC report on March 20, 2008, it became evident he had busted the FEC's public finance spending cap. Every dollar McCain spends is an illegal act. Read More......

Monday Morning Open Thread

It was a wild and distracting weekend.

To start the week, I am posting must-see YouTube -- it's the speech where Obama lets Hillary know it's over.

There are so many great lines in Obama's speech...it's worth watching all nine minutes and 21 seconds. This is a candidate who knows how to fight back.

I have to imagine this speech is causing some serious heartburn over at Clinton HQ in Arlington, VA.

This should be a wild week, too. Eight days til the PA primary. And, we won't forget about John McCain this week either.

Have at it. Stir the pot. Read More......

Subprime write-down expert RBS talks of "soft landing"

Impressive. How many times over the course of the last two bubbles have we heard this talk? Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) has had their own multi-billion dollar run-in with subprime write downs so now, surprisingly like Lehman Brothers who also have been in trouble, they are forecasting a soft landing. What are the odds of such a statement coming from a troubled institution who desperately needs positive spin? No conflict of interest there.

Forget about the billions that have been wiped away from the books. Ignore the retirement plans that have gone up in smoke. Don't even think about the bank lending that has pushed away possible clients. Pretend that people and businesses are not over-extended with credit and that the US economy - the traditional global economic engine - is not imploding. Got that? Forget about every reality that you see around you and then yes, it's easy to see that a soft landing is ahead. No one else sees the soft landing, but they're all just being negative. I hear prosperity is just around the corner too. Read More......

Spain appoints new cabinet, breaks ground

Zapatero does it again. The Scandinavian countries have been leading the way for years but Spain is shedding its old conservative imagine on numerous social issues.

Spain's re-elected Socialist Party Prime Minister, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, has broken his own record for sexual equality by appointing a predominantly female cabinet for the first time in the country's history.

His nine female ministers not only form a majority in a 17-strong cabinet, which assumes office today, but also occupy heavyweight positions, including for the first time the Defence Ministry.

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