Skip to content

Tragedy Averted

Tuesday, October 21, 2008

If this doesn’t play in your browser, you can view it here.

John McCain Accidentally Left On Campaign Bus Overnight

Filed in The Real McCain, Video | | Comments (1)

Yet another Palin story (and yet another) that would sink any Democrat

Tuesday, October 21, 2008

We never heard the end of John Edward’s haircuts, though he paid for them himself. We never heard the beginning of John McCain’s shoes, though they tend toward the pricey. So don’t be surprise if both these stories are deposited in the memory hole:

First:

The Republican National Committee appears to have spent more than $150,000 to clothe and accessorize vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin and her family since her surprise pick by John McCain in late August.

According to financial disclosure records, the accessorizing began in early September and included bills from Saks Fifth Avenue in St. Louis and New York for a combined $49,425.74.

The records also document a couple of big-time shopping trips to Neiman Marcus in Minneapolis, including one $75,062.63 spree in early September.

As the folks at Americablog point out, she spent more on clothes in a month than the average family spends in 80 years.

Or how about this:

Gov. Sarah Palin charged the state for her children to travel with her, including to events where they were not invited, and later amended expense reports to specify that they were on official business.

The charges included costs for hotel and commercial flights for three daughters to join Palin to watch their father in a snowmobile race, and a trip to New York, where the governor attended a five-hour conference and stayed with 17-year-old Bristol for five days and four nights in a luxury hotel.

In all, Palin has charged the state $21,012 for her three daughters’ 64 one-way and 12 round-trip commercial flights since she took office in December 2006. In some other cases, she has charged the state for hotel rooms for the girls.

Alaska law does not specifically address expenses for a governor’s children. The law allows for payment of expenses for anyone conducting official state business.

As governor, Palin justified having the state pay for the travel of her daughters — Bristol, 17; Willow, 14; and Piper, 7 — by noting on travel forms that the girls had been invited to attend or participate in events on the governor’s schedule.

But some organizers of these events said they were surprised when the Palin children showed up uninvited, or said they agreed to a request by the governor to allow the children to attend.

Several other organizers said the children merely accompanied their mother and did not participate. The trips enabled Palin, whose main state office is in the capital of Juneau, to spend more time with her children.

…

State Finance Director Kim Garnero told The Associated Press she has not reviewed the Palins’ travel expense forms, so she could not say whether the daughters’ travel with their mother would meet the definition of official business.

Quick answer for the Finance Director: the answer is that bringing your kids along is not official business. The story goes on to say that when the Alaska press started asking questions:

Palin ordered changes to previously filed expense reports for her daughters’ travel.

In the amended reports, Palin added phrases such as “First Family attending” and “First Family invited” to explain the girls’ attendance.

It’s alright when Republicans do it.

Filed in Sarah Palin | | Comments (0)

Long waits in Florida

Tuesday, October 21, 2008

You have to take your hats off to the early Florida voters:

The second day of early voting was marked with hours-long lines in South Florida as voters — some with books to read, umbrellas to shade themselves from the sun and water bottles — waited for their chance to cast their ballots.

At some polling sites, wait times reached four hours. Lines stretched around buildings.

Hooray for the voters. But this raises the question: why are the lines so long? Why can’t the state of Florida provide enough voting booths and enough voting locations to accommodate the demand. The punditocracy constantly criticizes low American voter turnout, but the fact is that we don’t spend the money we should to make voting easy. There’s a lot of people out there who can’t spare four hours to vote.

I will venture a prediction that this problem will not be unique to Florida. There’s no early voting in Connecticut. Four years ago at least one of the polling places in Groton had lines more than an hour long. Poll workers are well meaning geriatrics who work at a molasses pace. They work from 5:00 AM to 10:00 PM and are paid peanuts. By the end of the day they’re wiped out. Every voter has to pass through the bottleneck created by the fact that there is only one voting list, from which each voter’s name must be scratched. The process could be streamlined if we had more voting machines and there were more check in tables. That could be done by splitting voters alphabetically and routing them to the appropriate check in table. This would mean, of course, attracting more and better poll checkers, which means paying a reasonable amount of money to them.

There will be high turnout this year, even in this deep blue state. There’s no question in my mind that some people will turn away because of long waits.

Filed in Presidential Politics | | Comments (1)

Who needs more than one bank?

Tuesday, October 21, 2008

Once again I venture to comment on an economics issue. Beware.

In today’s Times we learn that Henry Paulson will be using some of our money (well, lots of our money) to facilitate bank mergers. (U.S. Is Said to Be Urging New Mergers in Banking) While I understand that some banks are in bad shape, I can’t help but doubt that creating ever larger, and ever fewer banks is the way to go. I know that this is an attractive thing to folks like Paulson, who love capitalism as long as they can monopolize it, but what’s in it for us.

Our present crisis was caused in great part by the fact that mortgage lending was in the hands of fewer and bigger players. It is extremely doubtful that we would have had this mad lending spree were we back in the days of many small banks that knew their communities and actually had an interest in making sure that loans they made were repaid. Were we still in such an environment there would be fewer institutions that were “too big to fail” and this crisis may not have grown so big so fast.

If the end result of all this is even fewer, yet ever larger, institutions, what happens when the inevitable happens: the Republicans return to power, they abandon or ignore regulations, and Wall Street goes wild again? If we only have a few banks, a failure of any one will be monumentally significant. Aren’t we setting ourselves up for an even bigger hit in the future?

Finally, giant institutions tend to acquire inordinate political power. it’s not like banks have had a really tough time making their voices heard, but if there are only a few of them, just as there were only a few investment banks (now there’s almost none) then each of those institutions will wield enormous political power. It hardly needs saying that such power will not be wielded in the public interest.

The Times article raises a number of questions. For instance, it states:

Providing capital to help facilitate a merger, officials say, is also a way to track how the capital is used. Some analysts have questioned how much control the government can exert over its investment, when it is injected into banks in return for nonvoting preferred shares

Talk about a false choice. It’s probably true that forcing a specific action gives you more control than simply buying nonvoting stock, but that’s a choice we didn’t have to make. Nothing is stopping Paulson from taking voting shares, except his own desire to shower money on his old friends.

Filed in Economics | | Comments (0)

Silver Linings

Monday, October 20, 2008

I’m still groggy from staying up last night to watch the Sox go down in flames. A valiant effort, but it was not to be. However, it’s an ill wind that blows no good. Has the Rays lost, Obama might not have benefitted so much from having six of the Rays standing with him in Tampa this morning. Obama already has Massachusetts, the heart of the anti-American belt, in the bag, so a Red Sox victory would have done him no good.

I’m a Sox fan of the old school. It’s less important that the Red Sox win than that the Yankees lose. Which they did. So we can rest easy. If the Ray’s victory turns out a few Florida votes for Obama, so much the better.

As to the Series, I’m a Phillies fan, just like Obama.

Filed in Presidential Politics | | Comments (1)

Apocryphal

Monday, October 20, 2008

Apocryphal: “1. Of questionable authorship or authenticity. 2. Erroneous; fictitious: “

Recently my wife told me a story that she had read at a Kos diary. It was a weird kind of story, since it engendered a sort of perverted hope. Here it is:

So a canvasser goes to a woman’s door in Washington, Pennsylvania. Knocks. Woman answers. Knocker asks who she’s planning to vote for. She isn’t sure, has to ask her husband who she’s voting for. Husband is off in another room watching some game. Canvasser hears him yell back, “We’re votin’ for the n***er!”

Woman turns back to canvasser, and says brightly and matter of factly: “We’re voting for the n***er.”

In a weird sort of way, this story signifies a bit of progress. Sure they’re bigots, but even bigotry can be cast aside in a crisis, which is a bit of a step up.

Then I read this story at Americablog:

A friend was telling me about calling people in Northern Fla. to ask how they’re voting.

One woman had to ask her husband (first tipoff, ask her husband?)… the response was “We’re voting for the ni***r”

That kinda says something about the repugnican ticket. These people still refer to Obama as ‘the ni***r’, but they’re going to vote for him anyway.

It is, of course, always possible that these events happened in both Pennsylvania and Florida. It’s a big country after all. Personallly, I’m now inclined to think that this story, which I myself have spread since I first heard it, must be categorized as an urban legend, though we’re all free to believe (at least until November 4th) that it exemplifies an underlying reality.

Filed in Politics | | Comments (0)

Obama Party (sort of)

Sunday, October 19, 2008

Obama lawn signs have been flying out of headquarters as fast as we can get them. We scheduled an event today to give out the signs we expected to arrive on Friday, along with any other Obama paraphernalia anyone wanted. The signs did arrive, but by 2:00 today, when the event started, the signs were mostly gone. Nonetheless, we had a good time, ingesting sugar and watching the talking heads on MSNBC obsess about Colin Powell. This is how I spent my day, along with doing my treasurer duties, since a report is due soon. Therefore, no thinking, and no blogging, though some, I suppose, would say I often blog without thinking.

In lieu thereof, some pictures of folks at headquarters mugging with Obama. I’ve inserted these pictures as a “gallery”. Click on a thumbnail once to see the full picture (they seem to get arbitrarily cropped) and again to see it even larger.

p1000288
p1000282
p1000280
p1000276
p1000275
p1000268
p1000267
Filed in Local issues | | Comments (0)

Rewards for good work

Saturday, October 18, 2008

This morning I told my wife I was sure that the Wall Streeters would be pulling down big bonuses this year, despite the fact that, objectively speaking, they’re performance has not been, shall we say, all that great. Via Americablog, I see that I was right, but that particular prediction was like shooting fish in a barrel. The story is from the Guardian. Some highlights:

Financial workers at Wall Street’s top banks are to receive pay deals worth more than $70bn (£40bn), a substantial proportion of which is expected to be paid in discretionary bonuses, for their work so far this year – despite plunging the global financial system into its worst crisis since the 1929 stock market crash, the Guardian has learned.

…

The sums that continue to be spent by Wall Street firms on payroll, payoffs and, most controversially, bonuses appear to bear no relation to the losses incurred by investors in the banks. Shares in Citigroup and Goldman Sachs have declined by more than 45% since the start of the year. Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley have fallen by more than 60%. JP MorganChase fell 6.4% and Lehman Brothers has collapsed.

At one point last week the Morgan Stanley $10.7bn pay pot for the year to date was greater than the entire stock market value of the business. In effect, staff, on receiving their remuneration, could club together and buy the bank.

The Free Market at work, I guess. Since the market is making it happen it is right and just that it should happen. Lest we forget, according to John McCain, the real cheaters would be middle class people who might benefit from Obama’s proposed tax cuts, which would be nothing else but welfare.

Filed in Economics, The Real McCain | | Comments (0)

Palin’s real Americans speak out

Saturday, October 18, 2008

Via Jesus’ General:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jE9FV-5VAU[/youtube]

Filed in The Real McCain | | Comments (0)

Good news, terrible news

Saturday, October 18, 2008

A lot of strange things are going on beneath the surface this election year.

On the bright side, newpaper endorsements usually favor the Republicans. Four years ago, after George Bush had already proven his bona fides as a candidate for worse ever, John Kerry managed only a slim margin of editorial endorsements, and even that was unusual. Editor and Publisher has been following developments this year, and right now it looks like a landslide:

[Recent endorsements] brings [Obama’s] lead over McCain-Palin by this measure of daily papers to well over 3-1, at 64-18, including most of the major papers that have decided so far. In contrast, John Kerry barely edged George W. Bush in endorsements in 2004, by about 213 to 205.

Of course, this could turn around, and I’ve never believed editorial endorsements have much effect, though I suppose they might confirm some undecideds who might be leaning one way or another.

On a darker note, and once again under the surface, the Republicans are once again planning to steal the election. One more sign from Colorado, where Greg Palast and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. have found the following:

Republican Secretaries of State of swing-state Colorado have quietly purged one in six names from their voter rolls.

Over several months, the GOP politicos in Colorado stonewalled every attempt by Rolling Stone to get an answer to the massive purge—ten times the average state’s rate of removal.

– While Obama dreams of riding to the White House on a wave of new voters, more then 2.7 million have had their registrations REJECTED under new procedures signed into law by George Bush. Kennedy, a voting rights lawyer, charges this is a resurgence of ‘Jim Crow’ tactics to wrongly block Black and Hispanic voters.

– A fired US prosecutor levels new charges—accusing leaders of his own party, Republicans, with criminal acts in an attempt to block legal voters as “fraudulent.”

It is practically a law of nature that Republicans always loudly accuse Democrats of the crimes in which they themselves engage. Palast has been covering these issues since 2000, but he is widely ignored by the mainstream. Were this sort of thing exposed to widespread media scrutiny, it would probably stop. If Palast’s report is true, and there’s no reason to think it’s not, we can probably kiss-off Colorado.

It is an odd thing that the due process clause requires notice and hearings before a person can be deprived of their rights or property, but there does not appear to be any due process rights for people stricken from the voting rolls.

Filed in Presidential Politics | | Comments (0)