I think it’s real, but only because I choose to accept uncritically anything that makes the candidate I oppose look bad. I think Sarah Palin would agree with my philosophy.
In reference to Palin’s alleged SAT scores
Heehee:
If you had purchased $1,000.00 of Delta Air Lines stock one year ago, you would have $49.00 left.
With Enron, you would have had $16.50 left of the original $1,000.00.
With WorldCom, you would have had less than $5.00 left.
But, if you had purchased $1,000.00 worth of beer one year ago, drank all of the beer, then turned in the cans for the aluminum recycling REFUND, you would have $214.00 cash.
Based on the above, the best current investment advice is to drink heavily and recycle.
It’s called the 401-Keg.
Be sure to read this piece from Newscoma as well.
Biden came off as human, honest, and working for the right side of history — even if wonkish and boring.
Palin came off as a great salesperson.
Thing is, Republicans will love her pitch, but the independents in the middle here know a stupid superficial infomercial when they see it.
Biden won, handily.
“Congress really let the American people down, or really stood up for them. Honest to god, I got no fuckin’ clue anymore.”
Somehow I got this song stuck in my head this morning, so I had to find it and give it a listen.
Politico reports on a ‘recoupment’ provision sought by the Blue Dogs
The Blue Dogs, a group of conservative House Democrats, want Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) to include a “recoupment” provision in the Wall Street bailout package.
In a letter that will be sent to Pelosi and Boehner, the Blue Dogs, led in this case by Rep. John Tanner (D-Tenn.), are calling for a future tax to be imposed on financial services companies if taxpayers lose money on the bailout package.
[...]
Tanner and other Blue Dogs see this provision as an “insurance policy” for taxpayers, and it would amount to a 2 percent “fee” on taxable income of financial services firms.
[...]
“A recoupment clause, as we envision it, is essentially an insurance policy for the taxpayer. Three to five years after enactment of TARP, the Secretary of the Treasury shall report on the program’s net gain or loss to the taxpayer. If the plan results in the taxpayer showing a loss, then the amount of that loss would be recouped by a small fee imposed by the Internal Revenue Service on the financial services industry until the taxpayer recoups the loss. If the taxpayer comes out even or makes a profit, there would be no recoupment necessary.”
Sounds like an excellent idea to me. Now, in a philosophically pure vacuum I might prefer a higher tax on the specific institutions who received aid and none on those that did not, but I realize that in the real world that would hamper the possibility of getting it done, and really, a 2% tax even on the uninvolved companies is hardly draconian given that they will have benefited indirectly at least by the act of, you know, not letting the entire economy collapse.
The Blue Dogs are really good to have around on an issue like this, and I might even say they’re the ideal people to look to here for leadership — representatives of the conservative taxpayer who nonetheless recognize that doing nothing isn’t an option, and aren’t inflexibly bound by a rigid dogma that retards their ideas.
If only they weren’t so often god-awful on issues of war and human rights.
I saw Trouble the Water tonight — excellent, deeply moving film. I think the tag line sums it up nicely –
It’s not about a hurricane… it’s about America
I mean just damn, what more can be said? Katrina showed us our worst and our best all at once, and they’ve captured it masterfully in this documentary centered around two survivors who camcorded their own documentary as the disaster hit.
On other subjects, I finally watched the debate when I got home from the flick. What’s striking me is all the pundits in the after talking about McCain “winning on points” and such, and I gotta say I just don’t see it. Sure, he dominated the agenda, and spent the whole night throwing punches — but if the punches don’t land, what have you got?
Which ties to a greater metaphor I think for the campaign as a whole. The chattering classes want a boxing match, and their adrenaline starts to pump whenever they see McCain throw a punch, and time after time they throw up their hands and groan in exasperation when Obama declines to punch back, afraid that he’s losing, never seeing the fight for what it is.
Look — I know we’d all love to see that jab to the chin that takes McCain to the mat, but the problem is, Obama can’t afford to pummel McCain. First for the minor reason that as a black man, he treads a fine line when showing aggression. Like it or not, right or wrong, there are a whole lot of subconscious fears about “the angry black man” that he can’t afford to engage. But even more importantly — to be the sort of leader he wants to be, to bring the country together in the way that we need, to make sure that come January 2009 he doesn’t have half the country bitterly engaged against him — he has to win this thing by being the bigger man, not the meaner one.
After the debates, just like during the Palin bounce, the pundits criticize him for failing to give them a boxing match. But Obama’s not a boxer — he’s a martial artist. Don’t waste energy on punches that won’t work. Block when you have to, but prefer tai sabake. Use your opponents movements against themselves, sometimes a mere inch worth of shifting is all it takes to send your opponent careening.
After 90 minutes of bluster, anger, and flailing strikes that never seem to land, McCain was exhausted, flustered, his knuckles bruised from striking the wall. And that’s why the polls tell us Obama won the match, no matter how many “points” Pat Buchanan thinks McCain won.
Sensei teaches us that the ideal fight is won with one single strike. I trust Obama to hit McCain with a solid, pinpoint blow to the solar plexus on November 4th.
Last night brought nearly three hours of Henry Rollins doing his uproariously funny spoken-word gig last night. I’d seen the Rollins Band play many moons ago (Lollapalooza ‘91, back when the ass-kicking What Am I Doing Here was on my shortlist of favorites), but never had the chance to see him do his spoken word live.
He really is a master storyteller. He has this way of nesting stories-within-stories, three, four, five levels deep, to the point where it almost comes off as rambling — until he starts winding them back, closing each one out in proper reverse order, like nested methods in a piece of program code returning in succession.
With his energy, his intelligence, his curiosity about the world and his willingness to actually put his feet to the pavement — well I’m not going to call him a hero of mine, because I don’t do hero worship. I’ll just say he inspires me to want to be better — to be stronger, more active, more determined, more willing to get my ass off the couch and actually work for the sort of world I want.
Surprisingly he didn’t get too overtly political, at least not as much as he has in some previous material. He took some potshots at McCain for trying to chicken out of the debate, and had a few barbs for Palin, and even did a not-half-bad Bush impersonation in a few places, but it was almost always one-liners and zingers, the real meat being his stories from the road. Of course that road took him into Syria, Lebanon, Pakistan, and Laos, among other places, so the political baggage he brought with him as an American was always certainly an inextricable part of the story.
I can’t begin to relate it all to you, but I do want to share one thing, partly because it really struck me and partly because it was near the end of the show and thus remains freshest on my mind — :)
He was telling us about visiting the Killing Fields in Cambodia, and told us about a conversation with the native who was showing him around. The native told him that his mother had been killed by the regime — she was a teacher, and was executed for being “an intellectual”. And Henry ties it back to how it seems to be the case that nearly every despotic regime makes a priority of taking out the intellectuals.
Something to think about whenever you hear the right wing thugs call someone an “elitist”.
March 2007:
WASHINGTON, DC — U.S. Senator Barack Obama today sent a letter to Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Paulson urging them to immediately convene a homeownership preservation summit with key stakeholders to fight foreclosures driven by growth in the subprime mortgage market.
The text of the letter is below:
Dear Chairman Bernanke and Secretary Paulson,
There is grave concern in low-income communities about a potential coming wave of foreclosures. Because regulators are partly responsible for creating the environment that is leading to rising rates of home foreclosure in the subprime mortgage market, I urge you immediately to convene a homeownership preservation summit with leading mortgage lenders, investors, loan servicing organizations, consumer advocates, federal regulators and housing-related agencies to assess options for private sector responses to the challenge.
The rest: Obama Urges Bernanke, Paulson to Fight Foreclosures, Hold Homeownership Summit
Seven years in Florida making music.
Seven years in Nashville recovering.
Then began the current era.
