Debate Live Blog: Kitchen Sink Edition

Men for Palin (Version 2)

2008 Issue Briefing: Health Care

"Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation."
-John McCain, in a September article about his health care plan

If that doesn't tell you all you need to know about why Barack Obama is better for the American health care system than John McCain, check out LegCom's 2008 Issue Briefing on Health Care.

VP Debate Liveblog!!

It's Funny Because It's True

Obama Runs Constructive Criticism Ad Against McCain

--Is Obama going to bring up any of these points of contention in his next debate with McCain?
--No, he'd be too nervous to say them out loud to McCain's face.

Maybe I'm being too harsh on Obama's debate timidity?

2008 Issue Briefing: Taxes and the Economy

We all know John McCain is out of touch personally - par for the course when you can't remember how many houses you own. But did you know McCain's economic policies are equally out of touch? Actually, you probably did - but we bet you haven't yet seen it presented in shiny PDF form. Well, now all of your dreams have come true!

The Harvard Dems Legislative Committee proudly presents the first in a series of weekly briefings on issues in the 2008 election. Download the fact sheet here.

Debate Liveblog!!

John McCain has gone into the phonebooth changed out of his cape and is quickly flying down to Oxford Mississippi for the debate!

The debate is about to begin!! Go to the comments section and blog away!

The Great Schlep (or, the greatest campaign idea EVER)

I've never been prouder to be Jewish:
(Warning: super-duper NSFW)

The Great Schlep is real. It's the brainchild of the Jewish Council for Education and Research. Which is real.

Don't believe me? The LA Times has a fun column about it:

Hundreds of Jews will make the Southern exodus on Columbus Day weekend, Oct. 10-13. They will travel to the Fort Lauderdale area, where they will visit their grandparents, organize political salons in their condos and eat incredibly bad food. The grandkids also will meet up at a bar one night, which -- if the psychological impact of spending a few days with frail, elderly, widowed relatives is taken fully into account -- may do more to repopulate the world's Jews than the creation of Israel.

[snip]

To persuade Mama Ann to vote for Obama, I used many of the talking points suggested to me by Great Schlep organizer Mik Moore. These included the fact that Obama went to Columbia and Harvard, and McCain got bad grades in college; that Obama has been criticized by the Rev. Jesse Jackson; and that Obama ran the business side of his campaign better than any other candidate. I did not know that I could be so racially offended by my own people.

How the McCain Campaign Continues to Squander Their Candidate's Honor

The 2008 Presidential Election has gotten to the point where John McCain can no longer claim to have the integrity to be the leader of our nation. Put aside experience and judgement, what most people would say are the two most important questions a candidate has to face. Integrity would surely be the third question, and in my view, the most important. If a person has no integrity, how can we trust anything a person says? For everyone leaning towards McCain, I have to say that if you like any of his policies, do you really believe he is telling the truth about what he says he will do? Do you really believe he is telling the truth about what he says Barack Obama will do? The answer to both of those questions should be an emphatic "no!"

Stretching the truth in politics is not to be unexpected but it should be discouraged. Lying should not be tolerated, anywhere. While John McCain is free to lie all he wants, American voters should realize that, in the marketplace of ideas, John McCain shouldn't even be allowed to sell his product. His lies have brought cynicism and disgrace to all politics, and all politicians, for their own sake and for our nations' sake, should condemn McCain's tactics as wreckless unless they want us to believe that such tactics belong in political discourse. Surely, when the campaign is over, no speech given by McCain this time around will ever be put into a book on political discourse or debate, simply by the fact that John McCain will from now on be known as a liar.

The evidence against John McCain is so abundant that one only needs to type John McCain's name into a Google Search Engine and numerous cases would show up. Of course, the McCain campaign would like you to believe that the media is paying too close attention to what is true and what is a lie. The evidence against John McCain is so abundant that one only needs to type John McCain's name into a Google Search Engine and numerous cases would show up. Of course, the McCain campaign would like you to believe that the media is paying too close attention to what is true and what is a lie.

Politico reports: 

"We’re running a campaign to win. And we’re not too concerned about what the media filter tries to say about it.” [Brian] Rogers [McCain Spokesman], who hung tough with McCain through the dark days of the primary and has lived through every high and low of this turbulent and unpredictable race, argues that they tried to run a high-ground campaign and sought to keep the candidate in front of the media in the fashion he enjoys. His point: No one paid any attention. “We ran a different kind of campaign and nobody cared about us. They didn’t cover John McCain. So now you’ve got to be forward-leaning in everything,” he said.

I suppose "forward-leaning" means lying, and pretty much on everything he has said since the convention, John McCain has fallen flat on his face with so much "forward- leaning." Someone needs to tell John McCain to stop being "forward-leaning" and start being forward-thinking.  Someone needs to tell John McCain to lean back and remember he represents his family, the U.S. Senate, the U.S. Navy, and the United States of America, and his lies are an embarrassment on all of those things.

Indeed, when the McCain camp ran on its record and on its boring candidate, nobody would listen to it and nobody cared about it.  What does it tell you when John McCain runs an honorable campaign against the Obama campaign?  Obama wins handily.  The same would have happened in 2004 has George Bush run an honorable campaign: Kerry wins.  But John McCain has been here before: in the 2000 Republican primaries, John McCain did it the right way, with truth and honor.  And Bush went the low road, people voted on their fears instead of their dreams, and John McCain lost.  So what I hear from the man "who would rather lose an election than lose a war" is that he would rather lose his integrity than lose an election.

Let me simply list all of the "forward-leaning" claims John McCain and his campaign have put out (drawn from today's NY Times article entitled The Politics of Lying):

LIE #1: Obama supports sex education for kindergarteners. TRUTH: The plan he supported in the Illinois State Legislature taught Age-appropriate Sex Education and specifically aimed at teaching kindergarteners how to avoid abuse.

LIE #2: Obama used the colloquial phrase "lipstick on a pig" to describe Sarah Palin.  TRUTH: Obama was making an analogy to describe George Bush's policies as the pig and John McCain's attempts to differentiate himself from Bush's policies as the lipstick.  

LIE #3: Sarah Palin refused federal earmarks as Governor of Alaska. TRUTH: While she has lower the total amount of earmarks since the previous governor, she still requested nearly a half-billion dollars work of earmarks.

LIE #4: Obama will raise middle-class families' taxes.  TRUTH: Obama will cut taxes on all families below $200,000.

LIE #5: Sarah Palin visited Iraq and Ireland and this gave her foreign policy experience.  TRUTH: The trip to Ireland was to refuel the plane she was on and her trip to Kuwait stopped at the Iraqi border.

LIE #6: Obama's health care plan will force people into a federally-run health care system.  TRUTH: Everyone who currently has insurance would be allowed to keep their insurance as it is, and the only people required to have insurance would be children.  Even then, it wouldn't be a federally-run health care system, but people could buy the same health insurance that federal employees have.

LIE #7: Sarah Palin said "Thanks, but no thanks" to the congressional earmark for building Alaska's Bridge to Nowhere. TRUTH: As Mayor of Wasilla, she supported the bridge until the media discovered the embarrassment; when the federal government pulled the plug on the project but still gave Alaska the money to use on things other than the bridge, she kept the money.

Seven lies from "the Straight-talk Express."  This is what John McCain has resorted to.  I don't think that anyone would argue that these lies help America; they, in fact, hurt America.  And since John McCain can't get any press coverage, and what he wants press coverage, he is resorting to hurting America in order to win this election.  And he won't say that they are in fact lies, much in the same way the Bush Administration won't fess up to any of its lies over Iraq, political firings, and countless other issues.

And now, Stephen Colbert takes it away:

Black Monday

While Markus has a tendency for laughing at I-Banking recruits as banks collapse , Instead I'm more worried about the possibility of total financial system failure. As Paul Krugman noted over the weekend before the news broke, right now Mr. Paulson is playing Russian Roulette (and no, that's not a good thing):

But Henry Paulson, the Treasury secretary, was adamant that he wouldn’t sweeten the deal by putting more public funds on the line. Many people thought he was bluffing. I was all ready to start today’s column, “When life hands you Lehman, make Lehman aid.” But there was no aid, and apparently no deal. Mr. Paulson seems to be betting that the financial system — bolstered, it must be said, by those special credit lines — can handle the shock of a Lehman failure. We’ll find out soon whether he was brave or foolish.

The real answer to the current problem would, of course, have been to take preventive action before we reached this point. Even leaving aside the obvious need to regulate the shadow banking system — if institutions need to be rescued like banks, they should be regulated like banks — why were we so unprepared for this latest shock? When Bear went under, many people talked about the need for a mechanism for “orderly liquidation” of failing investment banks. Well, that was six months ago. Where’s the mechanism?

And so here we are, with Mr. Paulson apparently feeling that playing Russian roulette with the U.S. financial system was his best option. Yikes.

The cliche works very well, as some people are already calling September 15th, 2008 the next Black Monday, and Barack Obama has already called it the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression. The Dow has already fallen over 250 points within the first hour of trading. The surprise simultaneous takeover of Merrill Lynch might soothe things a bit, but the shock of the double whammy is still a little much to process, and panic has already set in. Of course, there's the potential failure of AIG down the road as well, and bearish speculators attempting to short-sell aren't helping the market either (and may drive things further towards collapse). And as the New York Times noted:

Now, the risk for the financial firms is that investors will respond by trying to do exactly what they are trying to do — minimize their risk. If enough investors do that and choose to sell, stocks could plummet in markets worldwide, thus increasing the risks rather than easing them

At least the banks are finally taking this problem seriously:

Ten banks-- Bank of America, Barclays, Citibank, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley and UBS-- each agreed to provide $7 billion "to help enhance liquidity and mitigate the unprecedented volatility and other challenges affecting global equity and debt markets."

If we're going with cliches, we might as well add in "too little, too late", but it at least serves as a nice gesture. It's been a dark (but widespread) secret since Bear Stearns that Lehman Brothers was heading towards collapse, so it would have been nice to see these measures sooner.

Why should we care? For starters, as a New Yorker, I can say that as the financial system goes, so goes my city (and state), because our tax revenue depends largely on it. We're already dealing with huge budget deficits, and the loss of thousands of jobs won't exactly help our fiscal situation. We're already seeing ads from the states' entrenched interest groups who are all hoping that their budgets won't disappear. I wouldn't want to be Governor Paterson right now; even though he's managed to cut a billion out of the budget already (which is amazing enough, if you don't know New York politics), he still faces tough choices on education, health-care, and other obligations.

So no, I'm not exactly laughing right now. The only upside I see is that Mr. Obama should be getting a big boost in the polls as McCain and Bush take the blame for the deregulation-induced economic failures.

Update: Mr. Greenspan noted that the United States couldn't afford John Mccain's tax cuts and called this the greatest crisis he had seen in his career. With the focus of the election going to the economy, his words will be very important. Barack's campaign should be salivating over this policy critique. I suggest you read the piece at the very bottom of the article:

"I'm not in favor of financing tax cuts with borrowed money," he said. "I always have tied tax cuts to spending."

Rep. Westmoreland is Stupid and the Internet is weird

So Rep. Lynn Westmoreland rose from congressional obscurity to fame this week for calling Barack Obama uppity. Eugene Robinson now reports that

A spokesman for the congressman said later that his boss didn’t realize that term has long been used to describe African Americans who don’t know their place. If so, he is the only born-and-bred Southerner alive who is so oblivious.

Wow.

But have no fear, Lynn Westmoreland is not only racist, he is also stupid. While pushing a bill to have the Ten Commandments posted in courthouses, Stephen Colbert asked him to name the Ten Commandments. He could not

And god bless you tube, for having this with German Translation and weird classical music playing in the background.

I Was There

I still can't find the words to describe it, but here's what I saw:

It was so emotional, and something I'll never forget.

Annals of Procrastination

Today, I would like to pay homage to Al Gore. Not for his environmental stand, although its awesome, but for inventing the internet.

But the internet is not only for porn! According to this article in the NYT magazine a couple months back it is actually the lack of porn that is what makes youtube so awesome.

One look at YouTube’s eccentric offerings, and I figured its days as a free-for-all “video-sharing site” were numbered. Sooner or later it would become a porn depot. But it did not. Chen and Hurley were committed to taking down videos that users objected to, and they maintained their own standards, too. Chief among the site’s assets, in fact, were top-secret pattern-recognition technologies that block porn uploads...By keeping obscenity in check, YouTube teems with video of near infinite variety, stuff that thrives when pornography, which is hard to contain once it takes root, has been banished. YouTube risked losing millions of viewers when it made rules against pornography. But it has gained radical variety, the kind that defines the most robust ecosystems.

So in the absence of infinite varieties of bizarro porn subgenres, youtube has become the site every other bizarre subgenre including my new favorite!

Real life enactments of free procrastination computer games!

First: Minesweeper

Favorite line:
"Soldier, why are you here?"
"Because I want to clear mines!"
"No, why are you really here?"
"Because, I'm bored"
"Good"

Second: Tetris

This is just weird. I am pretty disappointed, tetris definitely offers opportunities for much better drama.

Third: Frogger

I am speechless

P.S. Baracky II is out!!!!

P.P.S I am a big nerd and watch CSPAN at 3 am. But I happened to catch the replay of Dennis Kucinich's speech to the DNC last night and it was actually one of the best I have seen so far. It is only six minutes long, but it is a great concise explanation of what the Democratic Party should stand for.

Not buying it

My sister alerted me to this brand-new McCain ad:

I'm not sure where to start. There's one thing to be said about the fact that the GOP now thinks it's appropriate to use Hillary Clinton, circa New Hampshire, as their attack dog for John McCain, in the present. There's another lesson to learn about the dangers of an overly negative primary (forgive me, I just finished reading Josh Green's dissection of the Clinton implosion, so the whole Mark Penn thing is still stuck in my head). There's some gendered reading, which maybe I'll get to.

But the most obvious point is: This is very, very clear gender-baiting, and race certainly isn't absent from the picture, either. This is as close as the campaign can get to openly calling out women who are still unhappy with Hillary's primary loss without tossing around the word "bitter" (remember how that worked for Obama?). The subtext is: "Ladies, still upset about the primary? Vote your revenge - McCain '08!" I can think of no other reason why the McCain campaign would suddenly lionize a woman with whom its candidate has virtually no policy agreements. The ad reads remarkably like Jesse Helms' infamous "Hands" ad, which showed a pair of white hands crumpling a job rejection letter while the somber-voiced narrator blames it on affirmative action. Here again, the young upstart snatches the job from the deserving candidate, the one who had been waiting patiently in line (if you're a little uncomfortable with Obama's race) or the one who had overcome so much prejudice and broken so many barriers just to become a contender (if gender is your bag). He doesn't deserve it; he stole what is rightfully ours. John McCain will put things right again.

Here is how I wish we would respond: We're not buying it, and John McCain can't manipulate us. It's true that, no matter how hard we've tried to pretend, gender has been omnipresent in this election. Millions of women supported Hillary Clinton not only because they believed she would be the best leader for America, but also because they believed it was damn well time for a woman to break the highest glass ceiling in American politics. Millions of other women, including me, supported Barack Obama even as we recognized that Hillary's achievement was historic, inspirational, and groundbreaking. Gender was and still is a factor, yes, but John McCain can't just trot out photos of the most high-profile woman in American politics and expect to tug so strongly at our heartstrings that we'll just swing on over to his side. We won't buy that cheap trick, and here's why.

We won't buy it because, no matter what the GOP's strategists might think, women, just as well as men, can see right through emotional appeal when the facts demonstrate that John McCain has consistently stood in the way of equal rights and equal opportunity for women. If the Democrats do their job, women in the United States will be aware that John McCain, at least when he can recall, voted not once but twice against requiring insurance companies to cover birth control, so that income will not prevent anyone from gaining control over her body. We should know that McCain skipped the vote on, and would have opposed, the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which would have helped women seeking legal remedies to pay discrimination. We ought to realize that McCain has an abysmal record when it comes to protecting a woman's right to choose, instead presuming that his belief that life begins at conception ought to be enshrined in policy rather than left for women to decide. We will remember that McCain supports federal funding for abstinence-only education, even though the curricula are ineffective and riddled with factual errors. The list goes on, but suffice it to say: Those of us who look at the facts are well aware that John McCain can try to exploit us by using Hillary Clinton's image, but we simply aren't having it any more.

My observations on the Obama/Biden rally:

1. Joe Biden is perhaps the best attack dog the Democrats could have. Brilliant.

2. Obama and Biden emphasized Biden's Scranton connection like five times. It's a good play to bolster their support in Clinton Country, PA.

3. I didn't realize Biden played a major role in writing the Violence Against Women Act. That and the rest of his record on women's rights need to be emphasized more to win over the understandably disappointed female Clinton voters.

3. I love that Biden's not completely getting rid of his free-wheeling style. The comment about his wife being "drop-dead gorgeous" cracked me up.

4. CNN's online coverage started their post-rally analysis by replaying the clip of Obama calling Biden "the next President of the United States" and saying that that was their favorite moment. REALLY CNN? IS THAT THE MOST IMPORTANT THING YOU GOT OUT OF THAT? MAYBE INSTEAD OF "CNN = POLITICS" YOUR SLOGAN SHOULD BE "CNN = A POORLY EXECUTED VERSION OF 'BEST WEEK EVER'"

Update: I take back my anger at CNN just a smidge because their "make a T-shirt out of an online headline" thingy allows for this.