SIXinternational.txt

All I have to say is . All I’ve ever seen in my adult life is the bitter divisions in our country, exploited on both sides but by far more explicitly by the right. I didn’t think we’d heal THIS quickly. I didn’t think that the Limbaughs and Hannitys would fade so quickly to the margins, but they have. They are a non-issue now. I’m really proud of this country. I hope that feeling will continue throughout the next four years.

Of course, for every one of these, it feels like there’s another of these. But I do feel that those attitudes are far more marginalized now than they were from ‘94 to ‘04.

Edit: And a follow-up commentary:

This is a verbatim copy of a long, fantastic post on the SomethingAwful forums explaining the steps that led us through the era of subprime mortgages and the selling of mortgage backed securities to the current crisis. Forums user razzledazzle says:

It’s ridiculous to blame the crisis on the Community Reinvestment Act or ACORN or whatever. The central thesis seems to be that the government forced lenders to give loans to risky customers, when in fact lenders chose to give loans to risky customers because there was a vast amount of profit to be made. (Reasonable people can differ on whether the CRA is good policy in principle and in practice, but that’s really besides the point here.)

It works like this:

(more…)

So here’s the situation at 2:30 PM on a Monday:

• The Republicans have voted against the bailout bill en masse, causing it to fail 205-228. As of right now, there is no bailout bill in place, and the only solution House Republicans have in return is “lower taxes”. Earlier in the weekend, Minority Leader Boehner was promising the House Republicans would vote for the bailout and ensure the markets stayed steady.
• The Dow is down 550 points and sinking.
• We are fucked.

The Republicans voted against this not because it’s a bad bill (it’s not great but a truly great bill would not pass with Republicans anyways - as I said, their proposal is to erase the fucking capital gains tax which failing institutions wouldn’t be paying anyways), but so they could sit back and say “HEY GUYS WE VOTED AGAINST IT” in case it didn’t work. Or so they could have something to run against and try to win seats in November. House leadership on both sides wanted it to pass - Republicans who voted against it wanted it to pass. They just wanted to seem like the white knights fighting against this Bush/Democrat bill.

Basically, Republicans played petty election politics and are causing our economy to tank. This is why I’m not a fucking Republican. They have the audacity to put election politics above the good of the nation. A paraphrase of what McCain despicably and inaccurately says about Obama in regards to Iraq, they’d rather lose an economy than win an election.

Oh and  this just in - Republicans are trying to blame the bill’s failure on Nancy Pelosi. Fuck these motherfuckers. I don’t know what else to say. This is amazing in its utter lack of foresight and seriousness.

The Big Lie lives on

Oh Sarah, poor lying and power-hungry Sarah. Debate it all you want, but here’s the truth: McCain is sunk. I’ll bet anything on it that picking her just sealed the deal - Nov 4th, Obama will be selected the next President of the United States, and it’ll be by a wide margin.

On Sunday retired general Wesley Clark, promoting Barack Obama on CBS’ “Face the Nation” said some pretty provocative things in regards to John McCain’s service:

CLARK: Well, I don’t think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president.

Ouch. Pretty harsh, eh? This sounds like a scandal in the making.

At least it does when twisted out of their original context:

SCHIEFFER: I have to say, Barack Obama has not had any of those experiences either, nor has he ridden in a fighter plane and gotten shot down. I mean –

CLARK: Well, I don’t think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president.

SCHIEFFER: Really?

So basically Wes Clark has to defend Obama from Schieffer who is apparently supportive of the idea that riding in a fighter plane and being shot down is a qualification to be president, and is shocked when Clark says it isn’t. But if you were to read hack gossip websites Drudge Report or Politico.com or any of the hundreds of prominent blogs that copy from them verbatim, watch NBC or ABC, or god forbid listen to talk radio, you’d think Clark came out and took a huge shit on a pile of yellow ribbons.

This is what I mean when I talk about the media being awful. They do the bare minimum required to create new content, relying on gossip and out-of-context quotes to manufacture news and controversy. It’s completely irrelevant to the task at hand but it’s easier to be a reporter on a political version of Entertainment Tonight than to do the work of Woodward and Bernstein.

And as a side note, I can guarantee this is only controversy because it’s about McCain. I’m not saying the media was never easy on Obama; please, give me that much. The media has a vested interest in ratings above all, and the best way to get ratings is to create a close race. If McCain was up, it would be the reverse against him. Of course I do think on the whole the media is friendlier to the Republican marketing of we’re-the-tough-guys-and-they’re-the-pussies and typically do anything to reinforce those stereotypes, but that’s a tangent into which I won’t currently devolve.

I’m going to straight quote a Cato Institute blog for this one:

Reading Tim Lee on FISA, I had a historical revelation. We could have avoided the long national nightmare of Watergate if only the burglars had carried letters from President Nixon stating that John Dean had determined that they had a legal right to trespass.

This is why I’ll always be saying the Bush administration has been the worst since Nixon, if not worse. At least Nixon was held accountable by the public. Back then, wiretapping used to scare people. Now even the Democrats support warrantless wiretapping. Barack Obama yesterday:

My view on FISA has always been that the issue of the phone companies per se is not one that overrides the security interests of the American people

Despite in November ‘07 when he was saying this:

One of his most passionate passages was not in the prepared text. He promised to close down Guantanamo “because we’re not a nation that locks people up without charging them. We will restore habeas corpus. We are not a nation that undermines our civil liberties. We are not a nation that wiretaps without warrants.”

His justification for denying public financing passes muster with me. This, however, seems to be a lot more spine-bending in terms of spin. Obama won’t even be present to vote on the FISA bill. Progressive leadership at its finest!

With all the uproar over Obama’s decision, has anyone noticed that John McCain is in a bit of a dust-up of his own on the very same issue of public finance? Granted, we haven’t heard word one about it since February, but again, this is because the media is just so goshdarn friendly to Obama I guess. TPM Muckraker had a few good articles on it though from back in February:

First, McCain opted in to the public finance system for the primaries last year. It meant that his struggling campaign would get $5.8 million in public matching funds in March. Now that he’s effectively the Republican nominee, he wants out, because the system entails a spending limit of $54 million through the end of August. He’s almost spent that much already, according to the Post.

…

It is a serious issue. As the Post reports, “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.”

McCain opted in to the public finance system for the primaries back when he was dead broke before New Hampshire in order to qualify for a loan (and also for free access to ballots, which cost Howard Dean approximately $3 million back in 2004). After New Hampshire when he was flush with money and it became apparent he would be the nominee, he has said that his opting in didn’t count and he wants to opt out because he didn’t want to be restricted by the spending limits. Here’s your campaign finance reformer, ladies and gents. Here’s the guy who’s so outraged by Obama opting out of public funding for the general.

Oh, and by the way, the law he’s breaking was created by the McCain-Feingold Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002. As a side note, McCain is now running not only against that bill, but also against immigration legislation passed in 2006 and 2007 based on the failed-then-reworded McCain-Kennedy bill from 2005. The man is campaigning against two bills that he himself wrote and his opponent is the “flip-flopper”?

The DNC is filing a lawsuit this week in regards to McCain’s FEC problems because the FEC board does not have enough members to vote on whether McCain broke the law or not. Aside from Countdown with Keith Olbermann, does anyone honestly expect the news to cover it? I mean, with the news being such a liberal organization like Limbaugh and Hannity are always telling us, shouldn’t this be getting constant coverage while Obama’s finance problems go under the radar?

I’m still waiting for someone to show me evidence of a liberal media on any sort of wide-scale. I’m wholly convinced that the media has been rooting for conservatives since Reagan at the very least, but you can go back throughout history til at least the beginning of the Cold War with all of the communism scares to see similar actions. It feels like we’re still in McCarthyism mode, where reporters are afraid to look even the tiniest bit anti-war or pro-socialism lest they be outed as a dreaded LIBERAL. The questions are always “is he too weak?”, “is he too left?”, “are his acquaintances a little too extreme?” and never whether McCain gets too angry or if he’s too quick to go to war or if he’s going to further the privatization of government duties that has gotten us where we are today.

Left-wing media my fucking ass.

EDIT: Perfect timing via FirstRead:

With so much attention on Obama’s reversal on public financing, liberal bloggers like Arianna Huffington and Josh Marshall have wondered why McCain’s own apparent flip flop on the subject hasn’t received as much scrutiny.

Well, the Democratic National Committee is trying to change that by filing a lawsuit in US District Court in DC to force the Federal Election Commission to investigate McCain’s decision to opt in the public matching funds system for the primaries, secure a loan based on those public funds, and then withdraw from the system after becoming the GOP front-runner. McCain, though, never actually received those public funds before opting out.

“The chairman of the FEC,” the lawsuit states, “has already advised Sen. McCain that he is not free to withdraw unilaterally from his agreement with the FEC and to ignore the legal requirements of the Matching Payments Act, without the FEC’s approval. Yet Sen. McCain cannot obtain such approval, because he already violated a key condition for dispensing with the Agreement by which he entered the matching funds program: he has pledged matching funds as collateral for a loan to his campaign.”

Let’s see if this gets covered this time for any amount of time. I’ll be watching…

EDIT 2: Quoting Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen (Via Sargent):

Obama might have a similar bottom line, core principles for which, in some sense, he is willing to die. If so, we don’t know what they are. Nothing so far in his life approaches McCain’s decision to refuse repatriation as a POW so as to deny his jailors a propaganda coup. In fact, there is scant evidence the Illinois senator takes positions that challenge his base or otherwise threaten him politically. That’s why his reversal on campaign financing and his transparently false justification of it matter more than similar acts by McCain.

There you have it, in black and white. You see, McCain’s actions are justified because he was a prisoner of war.

Wow.

Everyone’s up in arms about Obama declining public financing for the general election and instead relying on his private donation base for funding. For a little background: public financing is an opt-in system that taxpayers check a box to donate $3 towards it, and the money is collected and split between the candidates evenly. This was instituted after Nixon to reduce the influence of big money in politics. Obama signed a pledge saying the following:

My plan requires both major party candidates to agree on a fundraising truce, return excess money from donors, and stay within the public financing system for the general election. My proposal followed announcements by some presidential candidates that they would forgo public financing so they could raise unlimited funds in the general election. The Federal Election Commission ruled the proposal legal, and Senator John McCain (R-AZ) has already pledged to accept this fundraising pledge. If I am the Democratic nominee, I will aggressively pursue an agreement with the Republican nominee to preserve a publicly financed general election.

The key quote most people latch onto saying that “I will aggressively pursue an agreement with the Republican nominee to preserve a publicly financed general election” and calling it a DISASTEROUS FLIP FLOP OF EPIC PROPORTIONS. Did he technically go back on his pledge? Sure. And could we cynically say that the decisions was based solely on the fact that he’ll be able to use a ton more money from his private donations than the $80mn provided by the government? Sure. And I have no doubts that was a part of the decision. But that’s not the whole truth.

What is the point of public financing? Most people say either it is to reduce special interest influence in politics or to set the two candidates on even footing for the election with money not being the deciding factor. In regards to the first premise, I don’t think anyone can say that Obama’s contributors represent special interests. Nearly 1.5 million people have donated, with the vast majority of donors being under a few hundred bucks. (Be careful listening to the conservative news establishment - a story being referenced on cable news referred to Obama’s campaign being 55% supported by big donors, with everyone leaving out the qualifier that “big donors” represents people who’ve given more than $200; that’s a pretty meager cutoff for a big donor, and places myself in the ranks who will apparently by calling up Obama for personal favors in the near future) I would assert that 1.5 million people donating small amounts to a campaign directly follows the spirit if not the letter of campaign finance law.

As to the second premise, the candidates will never be on purely even footing with the spending by outside groups that are not controlled by law. 527 groups, such as the Swift Boat Vets for Truth from 2004, are allowed to spend as much as they’d like. Since McCain refused to even try to stop these 527 groups this round (as he knows shutting them down would put him at a major disadvantage) even while Obama was successful in shutting down most Democratic 527s, how can it be said that Obama adhering to public financing would have put them on even footing?

——

This election season is quickly devolving into petty, holier-than-thou back and forths over whose positions have changed more drastically and more often, and who should denounce whom in the others’ campaign. Mostly it has been Obama on the receiving end of the scrutiny by the aforementioned conservative media establishment, where even a guest pastor’s sermon at Obama’s church must mean that their views are similar (while McCain largely gets a pass on his religious endorsements from John Hagee and Rod Parsley). This is turning into a post for another time, but I’ll just say that for all the hype about Obama being the media’s darling, the reality seems pretty far from the truth. While we’ve spent weeks and weeks on Obama’s acquantainces and guilt-by-associations, from Tony Rezko to Jeremiah Right to Bill Ayers to Father Pfleger, I haven’t heard word one about McCain’s involvement in the Keating Five scandal (he was the one who received the most soft money if you hadn’t heard) or any stories about his first wife who stayed with him and their three children while he was a POW only for him to return, and upon seeing her disfigured from a car crash would subsequently cheat on her and divorce her for a younger, richer, not-disfigured woman. Oh, and don’t forget about the fact that he called his current wife a “trollop” and a “cunt” in public, in front of a group of reporters of all people. Family values and all that, right? Imagine if Obama had been involved in any of these stories. It would have sunk his Presidential bid. But McCain? Aw we can’t hold any of this against our beloved, decorated war hero! That’d be downright unpatriotic! Hell, let’s not even report on it so the American people don’t even have to consider this as a slight against his character which we, the media, have already deemed to be far above average. Let’s not let anything go against our pre-determined characters, ok?

Wait, what’s that? Someone spoke at Obama’s church when he was hundreds of miles away and said some things that might be racy? QUICK, GET A GRAPHIC TOGETHER! THIS IS GONNA BE PEABODY MATERIAL!