[Quote:]

McCain revealed in an interview with a Cleveland TV station Tuesday that he hadn’t yet read the administration’s three-page bailout proposal.

“I have not had a chance to see it in writing,” McCain said. “I have to examine it.”

So, you really had no fucking clue why you suspended your campaign, right?

[Quote:]

[Quote:]

A grander pattern is emerging as to what was motivating McCain’s Hail Mary publicity stunt today. For starters, we now have the first look at Sarah Palin’s interview with Katie Couric. Palin is in so far over her head, it isn’t even funny. Watch especially at 4 minutes 30 seconds into the interview (video is below) when they have the following exchange after Couric asks Palin for examples of John McCain leading the charge for oversight of Wall Street:

Couric: You’ve said, quote, “John McCain will reform the way Wall Street does business.” Other than supporting stricter regulations of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac two years ago, can you give us any more example of his leading the charge for more oversight?

Palin: I think that the example that you just cited, with his warnings two years ago about Fannie and Freddie - that, that’s paramount. That’s more than a heck of a lot of other senators and representatives did for us.

Couric: But he’s been in Congress for 26 years. He’s been chairman of the powerful Commerce Committee. And he has almost always sided with less regulation, not more.

Palin: He’s also known as the maverick though, taking shots from his own party, and certainly taking shots from the other party. Trying to get people to understand what he’s been talking about - the need to reform government.

Couric: But can you give me any other concrete examples? Because I know you’ve said Barack Obama is a lot of talk and no action. Can you give me any other examples in his 26 years of John McCain truly taking a stand on this?

Palin: I can give you examples of things that John McCain has done, that has shown his foresight, his pragmatism, and his leadership abilities. And that is what America needs today.

Couric: I’m just going to ask you one more time - not to belabor the point. Specific examples in his 26 years of pushing for more regulation.

Palin: I’ll try to find you some and I’ll bring them to you.

[Quote:]

Republican presidential candidate John McCain on Wednesday said he would “suspend” his presidential campaign to come to Washington to help negotiate a financial bailout bill and argued Friday’s first presidential debate should be scrapped — a dramatic move designed to seize a powerful issue.

McCain said he called on the Commission on Presidential Debates to postpone the debate scheduled for Friday in Mississippi, to ensure quick congressional action.

“I have spoken to Senator Obama and informed him of my decision and have asked him to join me,” McCain said in New York City Wednesday. “I am calling on the president to convene a meeting with the leadership from both houses of Congress, including Senator Obama and myself. It is time for both parties to come together to solve this problem.”

Preparing for the debate in Florida, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama held a previously unscheduled news conference, arguing the debate should go on.

“I believe that we should continue to have the debate,” Obama said. “It’s my belief that this is exact time when the American people need to hear form the person who in approximately 40 days will be responsibly for dealing with this mess and I think that it is going to be part of the President’s job to deal with more than one thing at once.”

[Quote:]

Obama also said he, McCain and other officials could address the crisis in a bipartisan fashion and still go on with the campaign, noting that multi-tasking comes with the office.

“It is going to be part of the president’s job to deal with more than one thing at once,” he noted.

[Quote:]

Dishonesty is nothing new in politics. I spent much of 2000 — my first year at The Times — trying to alert readers to the blatant dishonesty of the Bush campaign’s claims about taxes, spending and Social Security.

But I can’t think of any precedent, at least in America, for the blizzard of lies since the Republican convention. The Bush campaign’s lies in 2000 were artful — you needed some grasp of arithmetic to realize that you were being conned. This year, however, the McCain campaign keeps making assertions that anyone with an Internet connection can disprove in a minute, and repeating these assertions over and over again.

[..]

Why do the McCain people think they can get away with this stuff? Well, they’re probably counting on the common practice in the news media of being “balanced” at all costs. You know how it goes: If a politician says that black is white, the news report doesn’t say that he’s wrong, it reports that “some Democrats say” that he’s wrong. Or a grotesque lie from one side is paired with a trivial misstatement from the other, conveying the impression that both sides are equally dirty.

They’re probably also counting on the prevalence of horse-race reporting, so that instead of the story being “McCain campaign lies,” it becomes “Obama on defensive in face of attacks.”

Still, how upset should we be about the McCain campaign’s lies? I mean, politics ain’t beanbag, and all that.

One answer is that the muck being hurled by the McCain campaign is preventing a debate on real issues — on whether the country really wants, for example, to continue the economic policies of the last eight years.

But there’s another answer, which may be even more important: how a politician campaigns tells you a lot about how he or she would govern.

[Quote:]

Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, who has not held a press conference in nearly four weeks of campaigning, on Tuesday banned reporters from her first meetings with world leaders, allowing access only to photographers and a television crew.

CNN, which was providing the television coverage for news organizations, decided to pull its TV crew, effectively denying Palin the high visibility she had sought.

McCain’s Economic Plan For Nation: “Everyone Marry A Beer Heiress”

[Quote:]

“Here’s the thing about Americans. You can send their kids off by the thousands to get their balls blown off in foreign lands for no reason at all, saddle them with billions in debt year after congressional year while they spend their winters cheerfully watching game shows and football, pull the rug out from under their mortgages, and leave them living off their credit cards and their Wal-Mart salaries while you move their jobs to China and Bangalore.

“And none of it matters, so long as you remember a few months before Election Day to offer them a two-bit caricature culled from some cutting-room-floor episode of Roseanne as part of your presidential ticket. And if she’s a good enough likeness of a loudmouthed Middle American archetype, as Sarah Palin is, John Q. Public will drop his giant sized bag of Doritos in gratitude, wipe the sizzlin’ picante dust from his lips and rush to the booth to vote for her. Not because it makes sense, or because it has a chance of improving his life or anyone else’s, but simply because it appeals to the low-humming narcissism that substitutes for his personality, because that image on TV reminds him of the mean brainless slob he sees in the mirror every morning.

[Quote:]

Sen. John McCain’s top campaign aides convened a conference call today to complain of being called “liars.” They pressed the media to scrutinize specific elements of Sen. Barack Obama’s record.

But the call was so rife with simple, often inexplicable misstatements of fact that it may have had the opposite effect: to deepen the perception, dangerous to McCain, that he and his aides have little regard for factual accuracy.

[..]

“Any time the Obama campaign is criticized at any level, the critics are immediately derided as liars,” Schmidt told reporters.

But as he went on to list a series of stories he thought reporters should be writing about Obama and Biden, in almost every instance he got the details wrong.

Schmidt criticized the press for the relatively sparse coverage of the fact that one of Biden’s sons, Hunter, is a registered federal lobbyist.

“His son is a lobbyist for the credit card and banking industry,” Schmidt said.

But Hunter Biden’s lobbying clients don’t include any banks or credit card companies. He did work, as a vice president and then as a consultant, for MBNA, a Delaware-based bank and credit card giant to which Biden had close ties. But he does not appear to have lobbied for the firm.

“Steve Schmidt lied — or just got it flat wrong,” said Biden spokesman David Wade. “Hunter Biden has never — never — been a lobbyist for the credit card or banking industry.”

[..]

Asked about the series of errors, McCain aides could not provide evidence to back up Schmidt’s assertions.

One McCain aide, Michael Goldfarb, said Politico was “quibbling with ridiculously small details when the basic things are completely right.”

PDF of the magazine this ad references.

[Quote:]

The financial crisis that began in the United States spread to many corners of the globe. Now, the American bailout looks as if it is going global, too, a move that could raise its cost and intensify scrutiny by Congress and critics.

Foreign banks, which were initially excluded from the plan, lobbied successfully over the weekend to be able to sell the toxic American mortgage debt owned by their American units to the Treasury, getting the same treatment as United States banks.

On Sunday, the Treasury secretary, Henry M. Paulson Jr., indicated in a series of appearances on morning talk shows that an original proposal introduced on Saturday had been widened. “It’s a distinction without a difference whether it’s a foreign or a U.S. one,” he said in an interview with Fox News.

The prospect of being locked out of the bailout set off alarm bells among chief executives of overseas banks whose American affiliates also hold distressed mortgage-related assets, like Barclays and UBS. The original text provided access to the $700 billion bailout for any financial institution based in the United States.

As the day wore on, some raised their concerns with the Treasury Department, arguing that foreign institutions were both big employers and major players in the American capital markets. By Saturday evening, the language had been changed to allow any financial institution “having significant operations” in the United States.

Okay, let’s follow the money a little bit. First, Why is UBS in this list? Well….

[Quote:]

Former Texas Sen. Phil Gramm has emerged as the key behind-the-scenes economics/Wall Street guy for John McCain and is being touted as the treasury secretary in waiting. Since 2002, Gramm has been an executive with the U.S. operations of UBS, the giant Swiss Bank. An unintentionally hilarious interview with Gramm on the Wall Street Journal editorial page last week asserted that Gramm has “been a key instigator of some of the biggest money-making UBS deals of recent years.”

So, who is Gramm?

[Quote:]

McCain counts Gramm as one of his top economic advisers. Gramm advocates tax cuts, supply-side economics and less government regulation.

Ah, that Gramm! The one who claimed the recession was all in our heads, and we should stop whining!

[Quote:]

On Gramm’s watch, UBS became so enmeshed in financial folly it’s laying off more than 5,000 workers. Somewhere below him, employees file out, clutching pink slips that to Gramm are merely pink elephants for a nation drunk on worry.

[..]

And Gramm helped make it all possible. Not by himself, of course. The financial crisis is so large that blame abounds. But it wouldn’t have been possible without the policy decisions of the past decade.

As a senator, Gramm championed two pieces of legislation that, more than any others, enabled the crisis.

First, he got top billing on the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, the 1999 law that eliminated the Depression-era restrictions preventing banks from owning securities and insurance firms.

As such, Gramm played waterboy for Sandy Weill, then head of the insurer Travelers Group, who needed legal legitimacy for his purchase of Citibank a year earlier.

And you know who else he met while he was working with the McCain team?

[Rick Davis:]

Senator John McCain’s campaign manager was paid more than $30,000 a month for five years as president of an advocacy group set up by the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to defend them against stricter regulations, current and former officials say.

[Quote:]

The Obama and McCain campaigns have agreed to an unusual free-flowing format for the three televised presidential debates, which begin Friday, but the McCain camp fought for and won a much more structured approach for the questioning at the vice-presidential debate, advisers to both campaigns said Saturday.

At the insistence of the McCain campaign, the Oct. 2 debate between the Republican nominee for vice president, Gov. Sarah Palin, and her Democratic rival, Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., will have shorter question-and-answer segments than those for the presidential nominees, the advisers said. There will also be much less opportunity for free-wheeling, direct exchanges between the running mates.

McCain advisers said they had been concerned that a loose format could leave Ms. Palin, a relatively inexperienced debater, at a disadvantage and largely on the defensive.

[Quote:]

A new AP-Yahoo poll deals with the sensitive subject of race, the real third-rail of American politics. Polling on the subject is difficult. Asking “Are you a bigot?” doesn’t usually turn up a lot of bigots. The polls were conducted online because experience has shown people are less willing to admit to prejudice to a human interviewer than to a computer. Psychological techniques were also used, such as displaying images of people of various races before coming to a neutral screen. The bottom line is that Obama’s race may cost him about 6% of the vote.

Since the current “national” poll on CNN has Obama on 47% and McCain on 44%, that would mean the “real” numbers might have been 53% vs 38%, if the US hadn’t been as racist as it is. Which is more in line with what the rest of the world would expect of this race…

[Quote:]

A Pew Research Center survey released a few days ago found that only half of Americans correctly know that Mr. Obama is a Christian. Meanwhile, 13 percent of registered voters say that he is a Muslim, compared with 12 percent in June and 10 percent in March.

More ominously, a rising share — now 16 percent — say they aren’t sure about his religion because they’ve heard “different things” about it.

[..]

In conservative Christian circles and on Christian radio stations, there are even widespread theories that Mr. Obama just may be the Antichrist. Seriously.

[..]

What is happening, I think, is this: religious prejudice is becoming a proxy for racial prejudice. In public at least, it’s not acceptable to express reservations about a candidate’s skin color, so discomfort about race is sublimated into concerns about whether Mr. Obama is sufficiently Christian.

The result is this campaign to “otherize” Mr. Obama. Nobody needs to point out that he is black, but there’s a persistent effort to exaggerate other differences, to de-Americanize him.

So *that*’s what she wants… or is it just another gaffe? Either way, we’re not going to find out, because suddenly Sarah’s ducking more events than Todd’s ducking subpoenas.

Two cancellations in Florida.

Two in California.

Two in Washington state.

At least one in Colorado.

And one in Wyoming.

[Quote:]

Last week the public learned through an inspector general’s report about the antics of a group of Bush political appointees in senior positions at the Department of the Interior. One of the subjects, Gregory W. Smith, managed relations with the oil and gas industry and was found to have taken gifts from clients. The IG report also detailed Smith’s illicit sexual relationships with subordinates, his purchases of cocaine at his office, and improper outside consulting deals that allowed him to earn more than $30,000. The IG report suggested a pattern in which bribes and sexual favors were used to help secure valuable government contracts.

So the ever vigilant Public Integrity Section at the Bush Justice Department is right on top of this matter, prosecuting the wrongdoers to uphold standards of public decency, right? Wrong. To the shock of the Inspector General, the Justice Department has decided that it will take no action in the case involving Smith and another senior political appointee at Interior. Why? The Justice Department believes it doesn’t owe the public any explanations, and it has the power to prosecute or not to prosecute as it sees fit.

Similar good news is arriving at the doorstep of former Florida Representative Mark Foley, whose sexually suggestive text messages to House pages stirred a national sensation in 2006. Foley refused to waive his legislative privilege, making it very difficult for law enforcement officials to probe much further into the matter. Now the Associated Press reports that the Justice Department appears prepared to let the Foley matter drop without criminal prosecution. If you’re trying to understand why the Justice Department under Bush has reached a modern low water level in public confidence, look no further.

[..]

So how to differentiate the decision not to prosecute the coke-snorting, party-animal Bush appointees at Interior and the party-animal Congressman chasing after young pages from the 63-year-old school teacher in Alabama who kept bad time records and the prominent Pittsburgh medical examiner who had the indecency to make personal use of his fax machine? The latter two are Democrats.

[Quote:]

OK, a correspondent directs me to John McCain’s article, Better Health Care at Lower Cost for Every American, in the Sept./Oct. issue of Contingencies, the magazine of the American Academy of Actuaries. You might want to be seated before reading this.

Here’s what McCain has to say about the wonders of market-based health reform:

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.

So McCain, who now poses as the scourge of Wall Street, was praising financial deregulation like 10 seconds ago — and promising that if we marketize health care, it will perform as well as the financial industry!

[Quote:]

Maybe they can create “MRI default swaps” or “collateral knee surgery obligations” or some other fun packaged security that could be sold to China. After all, why shouldn’t they have a say over whether or not you get your medication?