John McCain still proud of his vote to deregulate Wall Street in 1999

Just me, or is anyone else starting to think that McCain's turned into kind of an himbo?



John McCain on 60 Minutes, 9/21/08

Scott Pelley: In 1999, you were one of the senators who helped pass deregulation of Wall Street. Do you regret that now?

John McCain: No, I think the deregulation was probably helpful to the growth of our economy. Read the rest of this post...

Paulson bailout plan fails to add any regulation to Wall Street

Well, I hear regulations only hold down business anyway, as McCain-Palin tell us. John McCain brags about his experience with deregulation and it sounds like he has his hands all over this bailout as well. Why should anyone sign up to a bailout that doesn't begin to address this critical issue? Does Paulson think that we're just supposed to wing it and hope against hope that it's all going to somehow work out? This is a terribly important issue to ignore considering where we are today. In the John McCain-Keating Five S&L; bailout, we did add regulations, so not now? Let the Republicans properly defend their actions the next time they try to remove regulations and oversight but for now, add them.

The plan, which is still being hammered out with Congress, raises a number of red flags. First and foremost, unlike the process then, there’s no accompanying re-regulation of the financial services industry.

"We educated ourselves enough — we were able to build a competent structure,” says Donald Riegle, who chaired the Senate’s Banking Committee at the time. "We built a legislative package that worked quite well. FIRREA (Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery and Enforcement Act) included creation of a regulator as well as the RTC.”

Though history shows the S&L; crisis was resolved successfully, there was considerable skepticism about the FIRREA law, the new regulator it created, the Office of Thrift Supervision, and the bailout entity, the Resolution Trust Corp., at the time of their creation.

It also wound up costing less than many expected.

In the current rescue plan, the absence of regulatory reform is no small matter, given the size of the problem and the complexity of investment instruments today.

Read the rest of this post...

I agree with Barney Frank - no bailout while bonuses are flowing

Paulson is going to have to do much better if he wants to bail out his old friends on Wall Street. The Bear Stearns CEO walked away with $61 million (some failure there, huh?), Merrill Lynch's top three are looking at a cool $200 million for the fire sale to Bank of America and now Lehman, the company that supposedly was on the rocks, now has a $2.5 BILLION bonus plan. Looking at these numbers, most Americans would be living a dream so they would never imagine that's what some of the biggest failures are receiving for crashing the US economy. If Paulson wants fast action, maybe he ought to start re-thinking about his plan because I'm not hearing much pain out of Wall Street yet. Millions and billions in bonuses tells me that they're still having fun and living well though maybe for an ex-Goldman guy like Paulson it's all chump change and he thinks we're all chumps.

Democrats said they understood the need for urgency but insisted that the measure needed to provide help for homeowners threatened with losing their homes, perhaps by changes in bankruptcy laws to allow for mortgages to be modified, and by capping pay and benefit packages for executives at the huge Wall Street firms that will be selling their bad debt to the government.

"I don't want the American taxpayer to get this bad debt and then the guy (whose company once held the bad loans) gets millions of dollars on his way out the door," said House Financial Services Chairman Barney Frank, D-Mass.

Read the rest of this post...

How John McCain admitted that he helped cause the economic meltdown

McCain is an idiot when it comes to the economy, but that doesn't mean he was fully involved in helping deregulate it. He was. McCain was chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, a key committee in overseeing government regulation of the economy. And McCain sided, over and over again, with those who would deregulate Wall Street - who DID deregulate Wall Street - helping to cause the current economic meltdown. America simply can not afford yet another Republican who believes the magic of deregulation will solve all of our problems. And worse, he believes it because he's just not that bright, at least about economic matters. And with the economy being the number one issue, can we really afford a president whose sum total of experience in this area is his participation in the Keating Five scandal, helping to cause the last banking crisis before this one? John McCain likes to remind us that he was a POW. But he's never made clear how his military experience forty years ago will help create jobs and fix the economy. That's because as laudable as it is, it won't. Read the rest of this post...

UPDATE: McCain lied about only buying American cars all his life

At this point, we ought to have an open and honest debate as to whether McCain has simply become a serial liar, willing to do anything and say anything in order to be president, or whether McCain is having serious problems with his memory and overall cognitive abilities due to old age, a recurrence of his cancer, initial Alzheimer's or some other illness.

Is it dementia, confusion, or what that is causing McCain to atypically say repeated falsehoods - from placing Spain in Latin America, to claiming that Palin was against the Bridge to Nowhere, to now saying that he's always bought American. We now know that at least 3 of the McCain's 13 cars - yes, McCain has 13 cars - are foreign cars (a Honda, a VW, and a Lexus). Now, I don't personally have a problem with someone buying a foreign car - though you know the Republicans would be all over Obama if his car were foreign (it's not, Obama owns one car and it's a Ford hybrid). But the issue here is that McCain has once again lied about yet another fact in his life, in order to get elected.

The old McCain didn't appear to be this much of a liar, or this confused about the facts. The new McCain has either decided to jettison his honor overboard, or is quite literally beginning to lose his mind. At 72 years of age with 4 bouts of rather serious cancer, the latter can't be ignored for much longer. Especially since there's a very real possibility that electing John McCain would make Sarah Palin president. Read the rest of this post...

McCain refuses to rule out appointing Phil "Nation of Whiners" Gramm as Treasury secretary

Not only is Phil Gramm the guy who called Americans a "nation of whiners" for being concerned about the economy, and who said that the economy is fine and anyone who thinks otherwise is simply suffering from a "mental recession." But Phil Gramm is also one of the chief architects of the deregulation of Wall Street (that John McCain supported), and which directly led to the current economic meltdown. Read this transcript. It's actually quite horrifying the degree to which McCain's spokesman is refusing to say that Gramm won't be in McCain's cabinet. Folks, there's a very real possibility that one of the architects of our current economic crisis will be appointed as John McCain's top guy to fix the same crisis. The transcript follows the video:



DAVID SHUSTER: You can make it clear right now. Can you assure that John McCain will not pick Phil Gramm as treasury secretary if John McCain wins this election?

TUCKER BOUNDS: He’s not even an adviser on this campaign, David. I don't know where these sorts of rumor mills come from –

DAVID SHUSTER: Why don't you put them down and say that he’s –

TUCKER BOUNDS: – but I think they come from the Obama campaign straight to you straight to a question on air.

DAVID SHUSTER: Well Tucker, you can make your point better. Just say Phil Gramm – John McCain has told me Phil Gramm will not be treasury secretary under any circumstance in a McCain administration.

TUCKER BOUNDS: It is an absurd thing to say. It would be as if I was to say Franklin Raines is going to head up the Housing and Urban Development wing for Barack Obama.

DAVID SHUSTER: Right, but the difference, Tucker, is the Obama campaign says that’ll never happen. And I have yet to hear you say –

TUCKER BOUNDS: If I were to make that accusation, David, you would call it a lie. You’d call it a lie. And I’m not making it, but Barack Obama is.

DAVID SHUSTER: The difference is the Obama campaign will tell us flat out that he will not be part of an Obama administration. And I still haven't heard you say that Phil Gramm will not be part of a McCain administration.

TUCKER BOUNDS: I think it is inherently true. He stepped down from this campaign. He’s not advising this campaign. I mean, these are the sorts of absurdities that we’re talking about and it’s all because Barack Obama gets away with saying things that aren’t true and then people believe them to be some way based in fact. It’s absurd.

DAVID SHUSTER: Alright. Tucker Bounds, spokesperson for the McCain campaign. Read the rest of this post...

John McCain has 13 cars. Barack Obama has 1.

Who has 13 cars? I'm only counting 12 cars in the article, but it's hardly much of a difference. Huff Post has put together a slide show of the McCain fleet.

2004 Cadillac
2005 Volkswagen convertible
2001 Honda sedan
2007 half-ton Ford pickup truck
vintage 1960 Willys Jeep
2008 Jeep Wrangler
2000 Lincoln
2001 GMC SUV
three 2000 NEV Gem electric vehicles
Lexis

Read the rest of this post...

Krugman is right - to hell with this bailout deal

Whoever thinks Paulson will fairly negotiate a deal with his old pals on Wall Street - fair for the American public, that is - I have some toxic debt to sell you for a great deal. We need to go way back to the start and look at what is fair for the taxpayer, not for Wall Street. And again, if we're going to have control of their sorry businesses, we need much more control of this situation. Remember, the American taxpayer did not ask for this, but were forced into this dreadful situation due to the failures of Wall Street. We should not help Wall Street continue their lifestyle, especially if it's only a very short term boost, as many are suggesting. The panicked intervention will not stop this economy from unraveling and may only delay the inevitable.

More from Krugman:

I hate to say this, but looking at the plan as leaked, I have to say no deal. Not unless Treasury explains, very clearly, why this is supposed to work, other than through having taxpayers pay premium prices for lousy assets.

As I posted earlier today, it seems all too likely that a “fair price” for mortgage-related assets will still leave much of the financial sector in trouble. And there’s nothing at all in the draft that says what happens next; although I do notice that there’s nothing in the plan requiring Treasury to pay a fair market price. So is the plan to pay premium prices to the most troubled institutions? Or is the hope that restoring liquidity will magically make the problem go away?

Looking forward, when every other industry comes to Washington for their latest installment of corporate welfare (such as Detroit and the airline industry) we also need to seriously review executive compensation. If the taxpayers are going to be on the hook for bailing them out, it is only fair that the Mr. $21 million in four weeks at Ford either refuses compensation for this period or is paid a very low salary. The Detroit CEOs and senior executives have all blown it, so come back to planet earth instead of living the high life. Live on the salary of a line worker without all of the side benefits and then talk to us about a bailout. Read the rest of this post...

So Lehman collapsed but "key players" to get $2.5 BILLION in bonuses

This is yet another example of why we should let all of these bastards rot on the vine and go penniless, without any direct or indirect help. Not until the taxpayers get their profit from stepping up to save Wall Street. I don't care if $2.5 BILLION is a fraction of what they would have received had the miracle of miracles (their pyramid scheme worked) succeeded. Again, there is no reason why we should trust Wall Street insider and former Goldman Sachs executive Hank Paulson. No reason at all. What this latest story does is show us that no, bailouts somehow always end up reinforcing bad behavior. As Noriel Roubini says, it's a matter of "privatizing profits and socializing losses."

Wall Street invested hundreds of millions over years, lobbying Republicans and Washington for a supposed "free market" economy. They got what they wanted, so let them live with the goddamn results of it. None of them ought to profit one penny - not one - from this mess. If anyone deserves to profit, it ought to be the American public, who is getting shafted here. Before one more damned penny is given out to Wall Street, let the US get it's money and then some. Let them all live on government wages for a while before they start shopping at Tiffany again. They've already been paid more than enough. Read the rest of this post...

Changing Media World Yet Unchanging Politics

Even Tom Shales at the Washington Post, one of the more respected TV critics, gets that the old TV-dominated media world is dead. How long do we think it's going to take the political consulting class in DC to get it? From today's Washington Post, Shales writes about the death of the Fall TV season and the rapid change of consumer's TV viewing behavior:

Television is not the medium it was even a mere year ago, and we are not the audience we were, either. We are all evolving, television and us together.

We don't watch television; instead, we access program material through content providers. Viewers accustomed to the cellphone and iPod and DVR and OnDemand don't watch TV the way earlier generations did. We don't even receive it the way our foreviewers did, via the old cathode-ray tube-in-a-box. TV now seeps into our lives through hand-held gadgets and laptops, on "webisodes" and YouTube snippets and fragmented downloads.
...
But no matter what path TV takes to our eyeballs, one requirement remains: There must be programs, even if some are only 2 1/2 minutes long.

Even there lies changes, though. The old, tidy arrangement of a TV season lasting from fall through spring -- with reruns filling up the viewer-scarce summer -- is long gone. Even as new shows are making their debuts, such basic-cable series as "The Closer" (appropriately enough) will be serving up their season finales. Old rules are broken so often that they are no longer rules at all; so-called seasons blur together into one big stream of semiconsciousness.

The old days of television are truly past us - though you wouldn't know it looking at how basic television ads still dominate campaign communications.

There really is no excuse. Within the industry, there has been an acknowledgment of the new media landscape. NBC Universal has completely shifted their thinking about shows - as Shales noted now called content - and changed how they approach advertisers. Gone is the dominance of the Fall and Spring season TV cycle. Instead NBC Universal is looking at media much more holistically - more time and location independent. From Variety:

NBC will also try to one-up other nets by announcing what it promised would be "a full, 52-week primetime programming schedule" in early April.
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"The traditional primetime presentation shines a light on only one piece of what our company has to offer,"

It's a different world, yet our political advertising always seems to look like more of the same. It's kind of pathetic actually. At one of the most creative times in advertising, most political work remains relegated to mediocre 30 second voice-over television ads that make you want to get a DVR if you don't have one yet.

To be fair we have seen some creativity. Lots of "web ads" that traditional media are treating as if they were TV ads. But let's be honest, those ads aren't designed to talk to the public, they talk to the media and the politically active. Most online advertising is even pretty mediocre - almost always about raising money or joining a campaign, rarely about persuasion.

What little creativity we've seen in this years campaign has really been around ad format. Though the 30 second format still dominates, we've seen the use of 1 and 2 minute ads a few times throughout the campaign. Most recently Obama has put out a 2 minute ad that Morning Joe really didn't like last week. Here's the ad:



The Morning Joe analysis was that it was too boring, no one pays attention, that every campaign falls for this "if you just talk to the camera" trick. I think that they were right in part (what a bland set), but missed the point overall. With the economy, war on multiple fronts, and corruption as far as the eye can see, one would expect Obama to be up 15-20. Polls suggest that the public doesn't yet trust Barack Obama to lead, hence the close race with McCain.

In a media landscape of noisy and foreboding 30 second voice-over ads, an ad like this breaks through the clutter and counter-intuitively demands more attention. Instead of trying to cram too many ideas into a 30 second spot, the ads purpose is really simply to give voters an opportunity to cleanly and clearly hear from Barack Obama on what he thinks and where he wants to take the country. Not just a soundbite or a snippet, but a more thorough telling of his plans and a call to action to learn more. It's an opportunity to build trust, hard to do in 2 minutes, but probably impossible to do in 30 seconds.

Will many people turn the channel? Sure, but for those that are undecided, those that are leaning one way or the other but aren't quite sure yet, it gives the candidate an opportunity to bypass the media commentary and speak directly to the voter. It's a creative use of the TV ad buy to get a shot at talking to voters who are still willing to listen.

But even for Obama this ad is the exception, not the rule. And therein lies the issue. Even though television has so fundamentally changed and we've watched the meteoric rise of the Internet, Washington political consultants still promote politicians like they did in 1988 - unaware of the shift or unable to know how to respond. When Tom Shales gets it, you know change isn't coming, it's already happened and mainstream. Whether politicians get that and demand more from their advertising remains to be seen. Read the rest of this post...

More on the "new" John McCain. One hint: He's "a parody of the worst sort of political flim-flam artist"

Adam Nagourney at the New York Times thinks the new John McCain is like the old Bob Dole.

Joe Klein at Time Magazine takes a crack at the differences between the "new" John McCain and the "old" John McCain:

One of the big differences between the old John McCain and the current edition is that the old one (1) would admit error and (2) would admit there were things he didn't know. That was a good part of his charm. The current edition--a parody of the worst sort of political flim-flam artist--not only lies about his own positions, but attempts to camouflage those lies by mischaracterizing his opponent's positions. It is appropriate, then, that the American Association Academy of Actuaries--a group devoted to the precise calculation of death rates--has exposed McCain's extravagant fraudulence of the past week for what it was.

Read the rest of this post...

McCain cuts new ads as he opens Saturday Night LIve

With some help from Al Franken:

Read the rest of this post...

Sunday Talk Shows Open Thread

The theme for the Sunday shows: It's the economy, stupid. And, how the stupid Bush/McCain economic agenda almost destroyed the economy. And, how the stupidity of Bush/McCain economics is going to cost U.S. taxpayers at least another $700 billion. And, how John McCain doesn't have a clue about the economy. I think that sums it up rather succinctly.

Note to the four hosts interviewing Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson: This happened on his watch.

Here's the lineup:

ABC's "This Week" — Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson; Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn.; Rep. John Boehner, R-Ohio.

___

CBS' "Face the Nation" — Paulson; Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass.; Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala.

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NBC's "Meet the Press" — Paulson; New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

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CNN's "Late Edition" — Douglas Holtz Eakin, adviser to John McCain; former Rep. Rob Portman, R-Ohio.

"Fox News Sunday" _ Paulson; Sens. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., and Charles Schumer, D-N.Y.; Bonnie McElveen-Hunter, chair of the American Red Cross.

Read the rest of this post...

My food geek August

Looking up at the blue sky while walking through the old quarter in Nice.

A morning cafe and "socca" from Lou Pilha Leva in the old quarter. Joelle and our friend have wheat allergies so socca is perfect. It's made from chic pea flour and was brought to the southern coast centuries ago from North Africa. We also bought fresh panisse and fried it up at home.


Buying garlic at the market in Nice. So many more choices than we can find (easily) in Paris.


Our friend Chris (from Toronto) talking with a shopkeeper in Italy about the gnocchi roller thingy. (That's a technical term in professional kitchens, of course.) Chris taught us how to make gnocchi and then use that little device to make them look nice. Chris and his husband David have done cooking classes (formal and informal) around the world and those guys cook better than anyone I know.


We had a few visits to the covered market in Menton, just next to the Italian border. This cheese shop was so friendly, loved our Canadian friends ("têtes à claques" was the response- more on têtes à claques). The artisanale "Rouelle" was divine. Lasted about 10 minutes and we practically licked the gooey bits from the plate.


Our friends from Toronto had been told this olive shop in Nice was the best, so we dropped in so they could buy a few liters to take home. We're a bit more accustomed to a quarter of the price so only window shopped.
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Barclays to buy Lehman and "save jobs"

Oh thank goodness, because saving jobs at Lehmman is what's most important. I'm all tingly because Barclays will "save" jobs and provide severance pay to those who are sacked. Whew. If only the money lost could be "saved" so easily. If only the trickle down job losses across the US and the world could be "saved" so easily. Barclays, Lehman and everyone else on Wall Street can go Cheney themselves. Give us back our money, our job losses, our lost retirement plans and then we'll start to give a damn about what happens to the gamblers on Wall Street. Read the rest of this post...

Is it acceptable for failed CEOs Prince, Mozilo, Cayne and O'Neal to keep their millions?

The failed CEO's of Citi, Countrywide, Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch all walked away from sinking ships with tens and hundreds of dollars. It was all built upon bad business that eventually humbled or completely ruined their respective companies. The US taxpayers have been forced to cover their billions in corporate losses but besides a few embarrassing sessions in front of Congress, they're all just fine. As Nouriel Roubini has said, it's a system of "privatized profits and socialized losses." None of those former CEOs feel an ounce of pain for the economic ruin that is taking down the US economy and eventually the world economy. They are sitting on a gold mine that never should have happened. Even without the gamble, they all could have lived a comfortable retirement but now they are living beyond our wildest dreams.

When is Congress going to step in and re-visit this situation? Forget about blowing hot air for the TV, legal action is necessary. Why should they be able to walk away so easily and pain free? Don't even give me the old "they had a contract" nonsense because lots of contracts exist and plenty of them are revisited in court. The extraordinary acts of nationalizations, bailouts, debt purchases, etc have put us into new ground. Failing to take action will be a failure on behalf of the American public. Surely Congress will bring some accountability to this once in a lifetime event, no? Much like 9/11 when nobody was ever held responsible, I get the feeling we're looking at the same here. What does this say about us as a country that we so easily dismiss such obvious failures? Read the rest of this post...

Limbaugh is pissed at Obama

Okay, now Obama has really made this week complete, getting Limbaugh all pissy. Limbaugh wrote a long article, that I won't be linking to, in which he's downright apoplectic that Obama put him in an ad, linking him to McCain. Limbaugh is upset that the ad made him look like he wasn't a friend to minorities. Uh huh. The man who played the song "Barack the Magic Negro" on his show is now upset that Obama - yes, Obama - made him look like he might be a racist. (And let's not forget the last election when Limbaugh mocked people with Parkinson's.) I'm gonna go out on a limb here and suggest that maybe, just maybe, Obama made Limbaugh look like Limbaugh. Anyway, kudos to the Obama campaign for ticking off Limbaugh. Let's see more ads like that. Lord knows it wouldn't be hard to tie McCain to Coulter and the rest of them too. Read the rest of this post...