Liberal Media Elite

I’m still trying to wrap my head around a vote that put Reps. John Kline and Maxine Waters on one side and Rep. Dennis Kucinich and a majority of the Republicans on the other.

So I’ll point out a story that on any other day would have been big news:

Attorney General Michael Mukasey appointed a special prosecuter to continue investigating the firing of U.S. Attorneys for political reasons. Evidence through emails and memos have signaled smoke to the fire that was Alberto Gonzales burning the Bill of Rights. In fact, today’s report says he “bears primary responsiblity.”

Read it for yourself here.

On a normal day this would have been the lead story and been a hot topic on the campaign trail.

It further taints anybody with a (R) behind their name as part of the “Rovian” politics of the last eight years and proves what liberals had been saying all along.

Everybody should remember that.

As of Friday, this planet became a slightly less cool place to live.

(Those of you who know my last name should appreciate my particular state of mourning)

about 38 seconds in Liberal Media Elite mentioned by name! Though they were confused on where we are located. Oh, yeah…and the rest of it is really funny.

I know my economic rantings are sometimes arcane and hard to follow. As a result I chose the above headline with great care to see if I could help make the point a little clearer.

House Republicans came forward with a bailout mini-proposal at the last minute on Thursday to change the nature of the bailout such that the government would create a huge mortgage insurance agency. McCain, because he’s stupid about all things economic enabled this particular piece of stupidity by posturing that the bailout can’t be left on the taxpayer’s front door and blahblahblahblahblah.

The House Republican proposal plays well on the surface. We, the people, don’t appear to be responsible, mortgages are insured, which sounds like people won’t get foreclosed.

The problems are legion:

1. The problem in the economy right now is, first and foremost, that credit markets are frozen. No one is issuing credit either because they are unsure of the risk of the borrower or (more common right now) the financial institutions have no fucking clue how exposed they are to bad debt in their own portfolios (which tells you something about how smart the financial wizards of Wall Street actually are). The insurance plan does nothing to inject cash into the system. Without an injection of cash the credit markets remain frozen. That means that banks will continue not to lend. This has very little direct impact on consumers…you buy a house or a car or take out a college loan very infrequently. It crushes business, particularly labor and raw materials intensive industries (i.e. industries that supply blue collar jobs). They need to borrow to smooth out cash flows associated with the cycles of their industries. They need to borrow to invest in materials, plants, and technologies that make them competitive. Without an injection of cash you will see some relatively rare examples of companies going out of business but you will see, daily, massive layoffs and downsizings, plant closings, production line interruptions, etc. Our staggering 6.1% unemployment rate (to put that in historical context the last time the rate was that high was 1994), which McCain thinks is a sign of a fundamentally sound economy, is trending up at a frightful pace (a 30% increase since the beginning of the year from 4.7% to 6.1% with the majority of that in the last four months when you usually see a seasonal drop) and will continue to do so with a bailout. With this stupid ass House Republican proposal it will go through the roof as, again, companies lose access to capital in the form of credit.
2. People will still get foreclosed. Mortgage insurance doesn’t insure the people in the homes. It insures the companies holding the mortgages so that when they kick you out of your house those entities still get the money they carry on their books. It would likely increase foreclosure rates. You boot someone out of their house right now and you, the noteholder, have an utterly worthless property. You have an incentive to work with the homeowner. In the case of the insurance scenario, you have an incentive to foreclose because the insurance on your book value (which will always be higher than the actual value in this economy) kicks in and you come out better off. Then you sit on the worthless property, wait for prices to rise, and sell it (essentially) again.
3. For the notes in the worst shape right now (and this shit is liquid and ever-changing) the insurance program provides nothing to anyone. Those 10%-15% at the bottom of the mortgage system are already worthless…they have essentially no value. Meaning that “insuring” them insures a value of zero. This is kinda not so helpful to the noteholders. Like, at all. Even an ideologically vapor locked airhead like Representative Eric Cantor (R-VA), one of the most aggressively vociferous of the House Republican Rebels, had to cop to the fact that in dealing with the worst of the securities in question the House Republican plan would accomplish nothing so that in those cases “you have to go with Paulson’s”. Again, Grumpy Old Man McCain thinks that this House Republican plan (which I assure you he does not understand and which he didn’t actually come out in support of and didn’t actually come out in opposition to the negotiated plan ’cause he doesn’t fucking understand it either) thinks this is plan, put together by pinheads like Cantor, needs to be part of the negotiating process.
4. As bad as Paulson’s bailout is, it at least has the opportunity for the taxpayers to recoup some or all of the expense a looooong way down the road. The insurance proposal does not do that. In fact, it makes the government the insurer of last resort meaning that it will be exposed to greater losses than the Paulson bailout proposal with no prayer of recoupment.

There’s more, but it gets even more arcane than those four points above.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t like the Paulson bailout. I still can’t find specific reference to what regulatory changes will be made that will shore up the financial system so that this shit doesn’t happen, again. However, the House Republican version is utterly devoid of any regulatory requirements, where Paulson’s at least refers vaguely to an ability for the government to impose “regulations and controls as needed” (there ain’t alot of mystery here as to what they should be, starting with capital reserve requirements and oversight or elimination of the credit rating services). Regulations and controls as needed would, in fact, be imposed under a Democratic President. Under a McCain administration, not so much. Still, the Paulson plan injects caqital into the markets and the House Republican Dumbfuck plan does not. Which means it does nothing to prevent the collapse of the economy.

Earmarks are bad.

Sen John McCain said in the first debate that they are like a gateway drug.

Then Sarah Palin must be Timothy Leary.

That is the lesson from the GOP. They need to be reformed. McCain/Palin are the ones to do it. It’s a an issue that they try to forge like a blacksmith hammering a hot iron.

But like everything else that McCain/ Palin is trying to sell, it’s never going to take shape. Trying to convince someone a lie is the truth is a tough proposition in the age of Google, but I guess it’s obvious they aren’t very tech savvy.

So when there was a presser at the Republican National Convention for:

Republicans Support McCain-Palin Call for Earmark Reform

I naturally went. I wanted to ask about this story from the Seattle Times:

Palin’s earmark requests: more per person than any other state

See how one headline is totally different than the other one.

The press briefing was 8 (I know the list shows only 7 but they got another person on stage to help polish this turd) congresspeople talking about how bad earmarks were, how tough Republicans were on them and how electing McCain/Palin would rid our country of earmarks and save the world.

OK It wasn’t that dramatic. But you get the idea.

Then came the Q&A period, all THREE of the Q’s that were allowed. Now, a lot of press hadn’t shown up at this thing, but I think they knew this would either be a fruitless venture or they were lazy.

I’m going to go with lazy. Anyway one of the three questions was burned up by a guy from ultra-conservative Human Events magazine. I also suspected that the deck was stacked at this deal because the last call for questions went out after I raised my hand.

I have to admit I was rather nervous had called on me. I didn’t know what kind of scene would erupt if I pointed out the truth. I was so pissed off about this obvious lie that the tension built in my throat so as to make me believe I would just utter out a screeching that would only be deciphered by dolphins.

Anyway the session ended and the Congress people headed for the door.

I caught the one I wanted and was able to pepper him with questions about the farce they were putting forth.

Who did I get but Minnesota’s own Rep. John Kline.

I gave him a softball to get things going. I asked him about how much heat he had taken from county commissioners for not asking for earmarks for needed projects in his district.

He said there are some people that had given him a hard time about it but there are also some that are supportive of what he is doing.

Then he brought up McCain. This gave me the opportunity to ask him about Palin. I asked him about why she had asked for so much money in earmarks especially when the state of Alaska RUNS A PROFIT.  Seriously, they seem to be doing pretty well on their oil money; why do they need any more tax dollars from Minnesota or the rest of the United States?

He said that’s the way the system worked and if they wanted to get money for their state that’s how they got it.

I asked why she needed so much? Alaska runs a profit that they pay to their taxpayers. He went back to about how the system worked.

I asked him then when she saw “the light” on earmarks. He said he didn’t know but then brought up “the bridge to nowhere” as evidence of her hard stance on that.

To be fair Palin had only been a national figure for less then a week when I asked him this. The “Thanks but no thanks” line hadn’t proven to be a total lie yet. Although there were some who knew it wasn’t true. Like me, who heard the truth via MPR earlier.

But instead of challenging him on that I asked why did she ask for SO MANY OTHER EARMARKS?

Which is really what I wanted to get at. How can he say he supports the “McCain/Palin plan for Earmark reform” when she is a welfare queen in Alaska? They got so much money from the Federal Government and oil that they gave all their citizens a rebate check. Shouldn’t they have paid back the Federal Government and apologized for taking so much money?

He went back to his lines about how the system is broken.

So broken, Kline admitted, that he had to build a bridge in his district with an EARMARK.

So the lessen from that press conference is: earmarks are bad; part of a bad system that Rebublicans have had total control of for 4 of the last 6 years and half of their Presidental ticket that is going to solve the problem is an expert on it because she is the biggest abuser of it.

Makes total sense.

Any bets if Palin loses and has to go back to Alaska she’ll never ask for another earmark even though her state looks to be pretty flush with cash already?

Kline wouldn’t even bet on that.

Here’s my interaction with Kline here:

kline

Senators vote. Outside of actually writing the bills they vote on it’s their main job.

Here are the top 4 to miss votes in the 110th Congress:

Missed Votes by Member

• 64.1%
  • Sen. John McCain (R-AZ)
    • Representing: Arizona
    • Votes: 412 votes missed (64.1%), 231 votes cast
• 48.4%
  • Sen. Tim Johnson (D-SD)
    • Representing: South Dakota
    • Votes: 311 votes missed (48.4%), 332 votes cast
    • Note: Sen. Johnson suffered a brain hemorrhage on Dec. 13, 2006, and spent several months recovering. He has since returned to the Senate.
• 45.9%
  • Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL)
    • Representing: Illinois
    • Votes: 295 votes missed (45.9%), 348 votes cast
• 32.2%
  • Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY)
    • Representing: New York
    • Votes: 207 votes missed (32.2%), 436 votes cast
      

Now let’s break out the excuses. Clinton and Obama have each other to blame. The never ending campaign for the highest office is an excuse I’ll give them some slack for.

Senator Tim Johnson was the victim of a stroke and has only until recently been able to get back to work.

So what the hell is McCain’s excuse? He didn’t have nearly the campaign of Clinton or Obama and he didn’t have a stroke.

But now McCain swoops in to show what a Washington outsider he is by helping out in the budget crisis. How does he help?  By actually delaying the fragile agreement that had been put together. Who did he help out? I heard CNN use the term “rank and file House Republicans.” These are the people who think instead of giving Wall Street money we should give them $700 billion in tax breaks. That’s their better idea.

I wish they had expanded the term to “rank and file House Republicans like Michele Bachmann.” That is their “rank and file” at this point.

That is, I guess, who McCain suspended his campaign for to help muck up the process.

Senate voting info courtesy Washington Post.

This is a contest. It’s sort of like Where’s Waldo? Can you find a complete sentence? Ok, that might be too hard. Let’s start with a coherent thought. Anyone who can find a complete thought in the following video wins, in the honor of Caribou Barbie’s home state, my treasured soapstone bear purchased in Alaska. I shit you not. If you can find it, the bear is yours*.

* thoughts or sentences completed by Ms. Couric are not valid entries and will not be considered for the main prize.

Seriously, Letterman says it all.

As an aside: One of these days I will do a substantive post, one that doesn’t involve the YouTube du jour . Until then, this little gem of technology makes it so easy to take potshots at the opposition.

Tom Toles is a dang genius, yo.

I am cleaning up my photo folders and noticed that I hadn’t posted this one yet:

This is how it looks when you get hit in the leg by a tear gas cartridge. I met the guy in the picture, Stacy, a day after the Labor Day protests at the RNC and he told me that he had been with a group of people in downtown St. Paul when it happened.

My idea:

I’d fund Single Payer Healthcare and let Wall Street fend for itself. Then when the depression starts, we wont have to worry about how to pay for illnesses. We shouldn’t have to worry about it now either, but we do.

We would also have all that money from not paying insurance to buy a new electric car and restart a new green economy.

Rep. Dennis Kucinich sums it up for me:

“The same corporate interests that profited from the closing of U.S. factories, the movement of millions of jobs out of America, the off-shoring of profits, the out-sourcing of workers, the crushing of pension funds, the knocking down of wages, the cancellation of health care benefits, the sub-prime lending are now rushing to Washington to get money to protect themselves.

The double standard is stunning: their profits are their profits, but their losses are our losses.”

What would you do with $700 billion?

From The Wall Street Journal:

Mr. Paulson is resisting efforts to limit the pay of executives whose firms participate in the program and plans to fight it “hard,” according to a person familiar with the matter. He fears that provision would render the program moot, since many firms might choose not to participate

So the limit of executive pay is the one item Treasury Secretary Paulson is going to fight “hard”, because firms might “not participate” in the biggest free-for-all-after-a-massive-f***-up-of-cosmic-proportions ever? Riiiight.

Something isn’t sitting well. While the money for those vultures is certainly of enormous symbolic importance to all players, it is a “minor” issue - we are still talking BOATLOADS of money, I know - compared to the rest of what’s on the table, namely the more direct assistance to home owners and stricter oversight. Paulson knows that, too, and has already been signaling that he his ready to compromise on aid for homeowners, according to the WSJ article.

So, again, why is the executive pay so important to Paulson? Shouldn’t he be fighting the proposed oversight regulations and relief for Main Street much harder that the Democrats proposed over the weekend?

There are several possible answers to this:
a) Secretary Paulson is really trying to cover his friends in need and doesn’t care about the public reaction - after all, the man was previously the CEO of Goldman Sachs, or
b) Secretary Paulson needs to show his old buddies that he really, really tried, alas…, or
b) Secretary Paulson is trying to publicly blow a comparatively minor, but highly symbolic, matter out of proportion to retain bargaining power regarding the much more important items on the Democrats’ wish list, or
c) Secretary Paulson is playing a game of Chicken with the Congress of the United States of America and therefore the American people - and they should call his bluff

Neither explanation instills confidence in me that the man can be trusted with a $700 billion bucket of taxpayers money without any checks and balances in place.

Thanks to some journalism groups, I have been able to find names of some of the other journalists that I was detained on the Marion Street bridge with.

This one is from John P. Wise. He was from a Fox News group. He was there with another Fox News person. His co-worker was released at the scene but he got the free trip down town and a PB & J sandwich. MyFox News wrote another story about it here. Not even Fox News was immune to having their freedom of press infringed.

Here is a story done by an outfit from Canada. If I recall correctly, the reporter told me she was from Australia and the photographer was from Russia. They had to come to America to get arrested covering a political event. Go figure. Full story on their website here.

The Big Ass Bailout (BAB) is cruising down the highway. The Bush Administration is asking Congress for $700BB and enormous leeway for the Fed to be able to buy the bad debt of ailing financial institutions for the next two years. Not only will the US Government become the largest private equity firm in the world, it will do so buy buying assets that have little to no value. In the written version of the plan, acquired by the AP (but I’ve not yet seen a link to that version anywhere or I’d include it here) there is reportedly zero mention of what the government would get from financial institutions in return.

I am of the mind that a bailout is needed and needed immediately. AIG failing, Fannie or Freddie failing, any of the other hurting banks and investment funds (a line that is seriously blurred) failing would have a spectacular domino effect that would eventually bleed down to us guys…wiping out savings, 401k’s, insurance protections, the works. To provide a local example, if anyone of those players above went down I’d bet my car that you’d see TCF eat shit a couple of weeks later.

This crisis is the direct result of Republican policies first inflicted on the country as part of the Contract on America years in the mid-90’s…policies that were written by Phil Gramm, John McCain’s chief economic advisor and the guy who is writing McCain’s economic plan. If the AP report is correct (and it would certainly be par for the course that this Administration and the party it represents would ask for nothing in return from big financial institutions) and there are no requirements on banking behavior or regulations that would minimize the risk of such a crisis arising again due to the horrible management of risk by these same institutions, then this bailout boils down to two things:

1. A massive transfer of debt from the exceedingly wealthy financial institutions to the exceedingly not wealthy tax base (particularly the middle class and the nearly poor). In other words a gift.
2. A signal to Wall Street that it can outsource its risk to the taxpayer which would not only keep it from happening again but would guarantee that it happens again. Without a tradeoff that would diminish the upside reward while also minimizing the downside risk, any financial institution that didn’t behave going forward as if it didn’t need to sweat the risk of bad loans, fucked up financial instruments, and risky products would be officially stupid. Why would they ever sacrifice their upside for the sake of managing their downside risk? If you know the government is going to bail your ass out every time there is no downside risk (see also: the airline industry).

The Dems are making frightening noises. Much like the run-up to the Iraq war where they showed all the spine of an invertebrate, they are sounding like they are going to cave in to Republican scare tactics and not insist on a new regulatory scheme that would address the fundamental structural issues that caused this crisis. They are correct in assuming that action must be taken quickly. They would be foolish to assume that this means they cannot exercise their obligation for oversight. There must be concessions from the industry and the Administration that there ain’t no free lunches and that this bailout for them comes at a cost…that cost being no more Wild West risk management. That means not only a comprehensive regulatory approach but full funding of the monitoring and enforcement components. A very successful tactic for the Republicans has been to approve the regulation when they know they can’t win the fight but simply defund the monitoring and enforcement on the back end so that the regulation doesn’t work.

I know that Lehman and AIG and Bear and those names can seem very far away and as if they don’t have an impact on you. They do on a number of fronts (counterparty risk, access to capital, access to credit, etc). If nothing else, think of the price tag (and it’s important to note that the same Administration that is estimating $700BB are the folks that, $2 Trillion later brought you the $50BB Iraq war). Fix the levees in New Orleans? $30BB. Upgrade the energy infrastructure (electric grid) about the same. Provide health insurance to every citizen…’bout $100BB. Fix social security for another 100 years…’bout $200BB. Eliminate childhood malnourishment? $15BB. All of these things that we allegedly can’t afford to do, will be completely off the table for-fucking-ever as we pay off the bad debts of the private sector for generations to come…while the dudes that did it kick it in their summer beach homes and whine about how their golden parachutes were diminished all the way down to silver parachutes. The Dems must insist on a new regulatory scheme, a robust monitoring and enforcement capability and should, while they are at it, insist on a say in the executive compensation packages of any top executives of companies that need to be bailed out.

The Administration is currently trying to shove down the collective throat of Congress a bailout of the financial system (meaning big ass wealthy financial services firms) with a price tag of somewhere north of $500BB (which would follow the $600BB already spent on prior bailouts this year). Following their typical scare tactics they are telling Senators and Representatives that they have to act now, can’t change a word of it, can’t add anything to it. Particularly they are threatening to pull the plan off the table (which would be hard since they haven’t published the fucking thing yet…no one…NO ONE…has actually seen it in writing) if Dems try to attach language tightening the deplorable lack of regulation on financial institutions that led to this crisis in the first place. And it’s looking like wimp ass Dems are falling for it.

Here’s hoping they don’t.

The City of St. Paul announced today that they will not prosecute journalists arrested in connection with the RNC protests on Thursday night of the Republican convention. Here is MPR’s story.

Good. I’m off the hook for that misdemeanor they charged me with. I can tell Ron Kuby to stand down.

But I am still curious why it was necessary to arrest credentialed (some credentialed by the RNC themselves) journalists at all? And why some were placed under arrest and taken down town to Ramsey County Jail; while some others were processed and released at the scene?

I was astounded to see the next day on the internet that KARE 11’s arrested photog had made their live shot for the 10 o’clock news still wearing his credentials and with his citation (ticket) in hand. Are some journalists more equal than others?

I, on the other hand, was taken downtown and had my RNC credentials taken from me. I got them back in a “Blues Brothers” type of inventorying. They listed them as “other paper.” Then, I got my citation and was dropped off in a paddy wagon at 3 AM in a desolate spot of St. Paul.

But seriously if you were going to look at this picture and guess which one was a protester and which one was a journalist which one would you pick?

I helped you out by highlighting the green RNC credential and the notepad in the white circle…. things the guys wearing bandannas on their faces don’t have.

It still didn’t stop the riot police from shooting flash bombs seemingly right at me and corraling me in a scrum of photographers, journalists and protesters. After that maneuver, they held me and almost 400 others on the bridge for 3 hours. Then, they took me downtown for another 3 hours. They finally released me at 7th and Layfette (I still don’t know where that is).

At the same time I was released into the wild with the protesters I had bonded with -we were in the joint together ya’ know- I suspect the photog from KARE 11 and several other journalists through some unknown selection process were cozily in bed.

Don’t get me wrong. I am happy they are dropping the charges. It was a pretty weird situation that could have been worse.

But as one of the cops at the St. Anthony Ave. mugshot center at the foot of the Marion St. Bridge told me, “We got $5.5 million worth of riot gear for [the RNC]. When is the next time we are going to use it?”

And from the looks of it they still had a lot left over. They did have a very orderly, although slow, system for handling protesters and “out-law” journalists. I was even offered a brown paper bag with two slices of bread, PB&J and fruit. I turned it down though and went on an immediate hunger strike in my own protest.

So, assuming the charges stay dropped, I got an involuntary display of St. Paul riot police readiness, a tour of the Ramsey County Jail and an official looking citation.

But, I think there is a lot more to this story and I still have questions.

Here’s a little end of the week quiz:

Can you name the maverick Republican Senator that said this about Gov. Sarah Palin? You know “The ONE.”

“She doesn’t have any foreign policy credentials. You get a passport for the first time in your life last year? I mean, I don’t know what you can say. You can’t say anything.”

Press the “Read It All” button for the answer.
Read it all..

(The update is the more better snarktastic tagline at the end.)

Republicans take note: Stop trying to get laid in Minneapolis. It won’t end well. Of course there’s Mr. Wide Stance himself. As an aside, salmon everywhere are dancing a jig at Senator Craig’s untimely retirement.

But today’s episode stars Denver lawyer Gabriel Schwartz, GOP convention delegate. Long story short: Picks up woman in bar at Hotel Ivy downtown. They go up to his room. She slips a mickey in his cocktail, tells him to get undressed, and then robs him blind.

Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy, too. Class act, this one.

Come-uppance is a bitch.

Also, nice shirt, dude. Does it come in brown? As far as shirts go, brown is really your color.

So you’re the Virginia GOP. You’re shitting bricks because your once happily red state might flip to the Obama column this year. You do your homework, and you realize Obama is running away with minority voters. You plan a big rally to reach out to minorities. Who do you pick be a featured speaker?

You guessed it. George Allen. Yeah, that George Allen.

As far as I’m concerned, George Allen can do all the minority outreach possible between now and November.

Courtesy Matthew Yglesias at Think Progress, we have this nugget about John McCain’s interview with the Spanish newspaper El País, in which they were talking about the Prez o’ Spain:

“The questioner asked several times about Senator McCain’s willingness to meet Zapatero (and id’d him in the question so there is no doubt Senator McCain knew exactly to whom the question referred). Senator McCain refused to commit to a White House meeting with President Zapatero in this interview,” he said in an e-mail.

As Yglesias points out, Spain is a member of NATO—meaning we’re obligated to go to war to protect the Spanish state from invasion, &c., just as Spain is obligated to do the same if we need them. In short, they’re an ally. A close ally. And McCain won’t commit to a White House meeting… WITH ANOTHER HEAD OF GOVERNMENT OF ANOTHER NATO MEMBER?!?

So, if we royally piss off Russia by bringing the Ukraine and Georgia and the rest of the hot Slavic mess into NATO and then (as Sarah Palin has suggested we might have to) go to war against Russia… the heads of government of Ukraine and Georgia and the rest of the hot Slavic mess wouldn’t get the White House’s ear? I’m sorry, that’s just… insane. Really, truly, unequivocally nuts.

It’s increasingly clear that Republicanism is just morphing into chauvinism—McCain is either covering up for saying something stupid or, worse, McCain is trying to shore up the rabid right so much that even meeting with an ally is now considered a threat to our national sovereignty and macho-man ‘tude. Either way, the Republican Party’s not even coherent any more. It’s just all strut and no walk.