When Does This Become a Hate Crime?

Seriously, folks, this is the robocall that the Republican National Committee has authorized and is being used in Virginia right now. I don't know if this sort of crap works, but the mere fact that McCain's party and campaign authorizes this kind of vicious lie is outrageous. Didn't you just love McCain's smarmy pitch in the last debate and on Letterman last night that he was really the victim of negative campaigning?

Meanwhile, Palin is referring to the "pro-America" parts of the country (guess which ones they are). So I guess the rest of us are...what...Iranians? Russians? Or, gasp, French? You can get the t-shirt here.

A bit of levity: This video is hilarious.

Addendum:

I just saw this post from which this excerpt is taken:

Over in Indiana, PA and Northern Cambria, PA, volunteers fielded complaints of a massive wave of ugly robocalls both paid for by John McCain's campaign and those paid for by third parties. The third party call was interactive, and purported to be from Barack Obama himself. The call starts out reasonably, and then "Obama" asks what the listener thinks is the most important issue. Whatever the response, "Obama" then launches into a profane and crazed tirade using "n***er" and other shock language.

I guess it's now official: McCain has no honor left.

El Loco: La historia verdadera

This Rolling Stone article, "The Make-Believe Maverick", is long, but definitely worth the time to read. It has a lot of detail that I was unaware of and makes it very evident both that McCain's "straight-talking maverick" image is largely a fictional creation worthy of a Hollywood studio and that the erratic behavior he has shown lately is nothing new.

This is important stuff. Please urge everyone you know to read it.

Where are They Keeping El Loco?

Is the presidential race now really between Obama and Palin? Am I wrong, or has McCain just sort of disappeared over the last week? And what happened to all the McCain TV attack ads in the DC market? Have they given up on Virginia like they did on Michigan?

I had a chance this morning to read all the newspapers placed before me (WaPo and NYT--I can name them), and was struck by the amount of chatter about Divine Sarah and the absence of much of anything about El Loco. The past week has shown conclusively that the Consumate Maverick can't exercise leadership over his own party any more than the unspeakable Dubya can. Even with both of their support and truckloads of lard, they still couldn't get even a bare majority of Republicans in the House to support the bailout bill. What does that say?

Meanwhile, Palin is all over the place. The weird inversion is that the McCain campaign has gone over big time for the very thing that they blasted Obama for: i.e., using celebrity to sell their candidate. Never mind that much of the publicity is in the form of well-deserved ridicule. Never mind that what Palin says is a bizarre mixture of lies and buzzword-laden gibberish. (Just read the transcript and see if you can find an actual thought there.) Never mind that she has not yet shown that she knows anything about anything. She gets the eyeballs on TV and that's all that matters at this point. Even supposedly veteran pundits like David Broder are talking about how "Palin did just fine" and terming the VP debate "uplifting". Huh???? Ironically, it seems that nearly everyone except TV satirists has abandoned all critical faculties in favor of an American Idol value system.

Palin acts as if she believes she is indeed running for president--which she may well be. Here she is running for commander-in-chief with a resume that consists basically of a six-year term as mayor of a town the size of La Plata, Maryland and being a rookie governor of a state with the population of Baltimore city (in its now-shrunken state). But more important, even in a format that allowed her to regurgitate prepared spoon-fed gobbets of text, she has been unable to articulate a single policy on anything. (Yeah, we know she just loves Israel.) But, as Paris Hilton would say, she's HOT.

I'm not sure if the American public is really buying it, however. With the polls showing solidifying support for Obama, the El Loco's only option is to go for Big Lies and character assassination. The Palin/McCain campaign has already shown that it has no problem with that, so get ready for things to get really ugly for the next month.

Oh, BTW, the Maverick family wants its name back. See here.

Burning Down the House

Oooowhee! Totally mesmerized by the failure of the bailout and watching the stock market drop like a rock. Haven't seen anything like this since the crash during Dubya's first term--scared even to look at what's happened to my retirement investments.

Let's see: Apparently, the American People are Mad as Hell and Not Going to Take it Any More, so they hate the bailout, even though pretty much everyone who actually knows anything about economics and financial markets says that failure to approve it will mean further foreclosures, bank failures, no credit availability, job loss--in short, a bad recession. But Average Joe either doesn't care or--more likely--doesn't even know what the consequences will be. He's just plain pissed.

Therefore, nearly everyone in Congress regards the bailout as poison Kool-Aid, with the Democrats saying we'll take ours if you'll take yours. So most of the Democrats dutifully down their dose, but 2/3 of the Republicans say "Ha-ha, fooled you, suckers," and pour theirs down the drain. Then they blame Nancy Pelosi for hurting their feelings, insisting they really would have voted for the bill if she hadn't been so mean.

Meanwhile, Bush is revealed as a dead, not lame, duck, and El Loco McCain, who claimed to have rescued the bill from defeat (which, of course, was total nonsense) just looks foolish. As of this posting, he has had nothing to say about the House vote. From my standpoint, that's the only silver lining in this very dark cloud.

I think it was Mencken who said, "no one ever went broke by underestimating the intelligence of the American people," but I think Mencken may be proved wrong in a way, when we all go broke.

El Loco Rides into Town, Guns Blazing

I admit it: I'm totally transfixed by the utter lunacy that has seized our country's political and financial spheres. So, where are we now...?

John McCain seems to have come unhinged. Here's a man who based his entire campaign on his claim to superior experience and judgment. So what does he do? He picks Britney's Mom as his vice-presidential running mate, then realizes that she seems like an absolute dingbat whenever she opens her mouth, so puts her in a bag to shut her up, but she still sticks her head out once in a while to utter something incoherent and preposterous. Then comes the financial melt down, about which he has no clue. First he says things are really fine, but when it becomes obvious they're not, he says the situation is so bad that he must suspend his campaign to go Save the Country. So he doesn't really suspend his campaign, but threatens no-show at the presidential debate and then ditches Letterman because he has to fly to Washington immediately to Save the Country. But he doesn't actually fly to Washington, but rather goes across Manhattan to do an interview with Katie Couric, who has just taped an interview with Britney's Mom revealing her once again to be more suitable for a "Jaywalking" segment on Leno than national office.

The next morning, Obama proposes that they both issue a joint statement of principles for solving the financial crisis to try to calm things down, but Crazy John won't take the call. Instead he issues his own sky-is-falling announcement and says he will fly to Washington to Take Charge of the congressional negotiations on the bail-out and Save the Country. Meanwhile, the congressional negotiations had been going pretty well because people who actually knew shit were dealing with the issues, and they had reshaped the Paulson give-me-all-your-money-or-you-die plan into something close to a plan that might actually work. But then Dubya (remember him?), in a last ditch effort to seem like a real president, summons everyone to the White House.

They all show up, but then everything goes to hell, because the white trash wing of the Republican party decides to rebel against their own administration and the president-whose-name-cannot-be-spoken by coming up with their own apeshit proposal because, by God, they ain't going to give no money to them arugula-munching Wall Street types who got us into this mess. Folks, this is more or less the equivalent of a ghetto riot where people decide to get even with the people who have been screwing them by burning down their own neighborhood.

And where is Crazy John on all this? We don't know.

Just in case you're wondering about the new Republican proposal, here are a couple of its key points that really caught my eye:
--Insure all mortgage-backed securities with a Treasury-designed system charging the holders of these (largely junk) assets premiums to finance the system, rather than using tax dollars.
--"Draw private capital into the market by removing regulatory and tax barriers...currently blocking private capital formation."
(The whole thing was in today's NYT.)

Huh? Let's see if I got this straight... The financial institutions that are foundering because they're holding billions in junk mortgage securities would save themselves by pouring money into an yet non-existent self-financing insurance company?? But these companies don't have enough capital to stay afloat as it is (which is the basic problem), so where would the premium money come from? But the second idea about "removing regulatory and tax barriers" is what really got me. Isn't that really what caused this crisis in the first place? Jesus wept.

Can't wait to see if El Loco shows up for the debate tonight.