Steve Benen “catches a bit of slyness”: on the part of Sarah Palin:
Couric asked, “If a 15-year-old is raped by her father, do you believe it should be illegal for her to get an abortion, and why?” Palin dodged, explaining that she’s “pro-life,” and wants to help “women who find themselves in circumstances that are absolutely less than ideal.” Couric asked again. Palin dodged again, before saying she’s uncomfortable with sending a woman to jail for having an abortion. “That’s nothing I would ever support,” she said.
So here’s the thing. If you believe that abortion is murder, and you believe it should be illegal, what does it mean when you say that you’d never send a woman to jain for committing the “crime”? Leave aside the core question of the legality of the procedure, and instead focus on the punishment.
To me, it’s absurd to say that you want to make something illegal, but when a woman does it, you don’t intend to consider jail as an option. If the concept is so abhorrent that you compare it with murder, why not? Would you say “oh darn, you shot that man, but that’s OK, I don’t like sending to jail”. Does she really believe what she says, or is she trying to play both sides at the same time: tacit criminalization with zero enforcement?
Without comment, I bring you Tina FeySarah Palin being interviewed:
Seriously, this just keeps getting more and more painful. The transcript affirms the stupid:
COURIC And when it comes to establishing your world view, I was curious, what newspapers and magazines did you regularly read before you were tapped for this—to stay informed and to understand the world?
PALIN I’ve read most of them again with a great appreciation for the press, for the media—COURIC But what ones specifically? I’m curious.
PALIN Um, all of them, any of them that have been in front of me over all these years.
COURIC Can you name any of them?
PALIN I have a vast variety of sources where we get our news.
Serious? Can’t name a single newspaper or magazine? Not even USA Today? This is a woman who seems to not only actively avoid knowing anything, but also seems strangely proud of it. This woman makes George W Bush look “well informed”.
WTF?
Comments Off
Roger Ebert sums up the meta-issues of the debate:
I do not like you, John McCain. My feeling has nothing to do with issues. It has to do with common courtesy. During the debate, you refused to look Barack Obama in the eye. Indeed, you refused to look at him at all. Even when the two of you shook hands at the start, you used your eyes only to locate his hand, and then gazed past him as you shook it.
Obama is my guy. If you are rude to him, you are rude to me. If you came to dinner at my house and refused to look at or speak with one of my guests, that would be bad manners and I would be offended. Same thing if I went to your house. During the debate, you were America’s guest.
What was your problem? Do you hold this man in such contempt that you cannot bear to gaze upon him? Will you not even speak to him directly? Do you think he doesn’t have the right to be running for President? Were you angry because after you said you wouldn’t attend the debate, he said a President should be able to concern himself with two things at the same time? He was right. The proof is, you were there. Were you angry with him because he called your bluff?
What little I saw of the debate—I intentionally avoided it because these aren’t real debates—confirmed my suspicion: that John McCain is really George Everett Wilson with the complexion of cottage cheese.
There’s no other way to say it than Sarah Palin was channeling Gabby Johnson.
Truly authentic frontier gibberish.
Comments Off
Economist Alex Tabarrok writes about the mythical credit crunch:
A credit crunch does exist in the sector of the market based on short-term, asset backed securities. In addition, interbank lending is unusually risky. But in light of what I have just said the “credit crunch” takes on a new meaning and potential new solutions are suggested. The first question I have is this. Investment banks were selling these securities and using the money to lend to whom? I do not know the answer. But let’s suppose that the money being raised in these markets was being lent to productive businesses. If so, then any solution should focus on feeding those businesses that are starved for credit.
[...]
Now here is a hypothesis. It may be that there just aren’t that many firms in need of funds. First, one reason that bank lending is up may be that firms with good projects have already turned to the substitute bridge of ordinary bank loans. Second, I wonder how much real lending was actually being generated by asset backed securities. Could it not be that most of the funds generated were used to buy more asset backed securities? (The growth in these securities is certainly suggestive of that possibility). If that is the case then it explains why the real economy has been remarkably resilient to the “credit crunch.”
As always, I wonder whether we’re just seeing more pigs at the trough, and it’s time to make bacon instead of keep feeding them.
Comments Off
For those who aren’t really sure what $700 billion means when you talk about the scale of the insanity being proposed:
This is based on research from ProPublica on bailouts normalized to 2008 dollars. Your eyes don’t deceive you, the bailing being proposed is bigger than all others combined.
Anyone else think this just can’t be a good idea?
Perhaps I’m showing my literature nerdiness), but this story in Time magazine has the best headline ever:
McCain’s supposed “strength” in foreign policy seems to be crumbling into a pile of missteps, misstatements, lies, fabrications and things which can only kindly be called “senior moments”.
Comments Off
A conservative endorses Barack Obama. On the surface it would appear to be another day, and yet it’s not. This is not just any conservative, this is the former publisher of The National Review, a magazine which describes itself as “America’s most widely read and influential magazine and web site for Republican/conservative news, commentary, and opinion.” He currently is the publisher of D, a magazine covering Dallas-Ft. Worth. In his own words:
Barack Obama is not my ideal candidate for president. (In fact, I made the maximum donation to John McCain during the primaries, when there was still hope he might come to his senses.) But I now see that Obama is almost the ideal candidate for this moment in American history. I disagree with him on many issues. But those don’t matter as much as what Obama offers, which is a deeply conservative view of the world. Nobody can read Obama’s books (which, it is worth noting, he wrote himself) or listen to him speak without realizing that this is a thoughtful, pragmatic, and prudent man. It gives me comfort just to think that after eight years of George W. Bush we will have a president who has actually read the Federalist Papers.
Most important, Obama will be a realist. I doubt he will taunt Russia, as McCain has, at the very moment when our national interest requires it as an ally. The crucial distinction in my mind is that, unlike John McCain, I am convinced he will not impulsively take us into another war unless American national interests are directly threatened.
“Every great cause,” Eric Hoffer wrote, “begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” As a cause, conservatism may be dead. But as a stance, as a way of making judgments in a complex and difficult world, I believe it is very much alive in the instincts and predispositions of a liberal named Barack Obama.
That’s gotta hurt.
Comments Off
John McCain may not have the slightest clue as to how to use a computer, email or the web, but he did invent the Blackberry:
Asked what work John McCain did as Chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee that helped him understand the financial markets, the candidate’s top economic adviser wielded visual evidence: his BlackBerry.
“He did this,” Douglas Holtz-Eakin told reporters this morning, holding up his BlackBerry. “Telecommunications of the United States is a premier innovation in the past 15 years, comes right through the Commerce committee so you’re looking at the miracle John McCain helped create and that’s what he did.”
Seriously, WTF? Al Gore, eat your heart out.
Karl Marx got one thing right—what he said about history repeating itself. Once is tragedy, a second time is farce. John McCain is both.
Richard Cohen has been a cheerleader for McCain for a long while, and his latest editorial in the Washington Post eviscerates McCain with not even a single kind word to say about him currently. All kind words are “in the past”.
Comments Off
I am by far not an economist. I don’t pretend to understand all the intricacies of the “system” we call finance any more. It seems more like alchemy to me than anything resembling a sane, logical and ordered system. More accurately, it seems to be little more than a Ponzi scheme. That brings up the latest:
The U.S. government announced an emergency rescue of American International Group Inc.—one of the world’s biggest insurers—signaling the intensity of its concerns about the danger a collapse could pose to the financial system.
[...]
The precise details of the government’s plans were still being formulated late Tuesday. The primary option being hammered out involved the Fed providing AIG with a short-term “bridge” loan of $85 billion, according to people familiar with the situation. In exchange, the government would receive warrants in AIG representing the right to buy its stock, under certain conditions. That could put the government in a position to potentially control a private insurer, a historic move, particularly considering that AIG isn’t directly regulated by the federal government.
When an insurer fails, it is because they have completely failed at estimating risk. It is not some once-in-a-lifetime event of Nature, but a creation of greed and mendacity that caused AIG’s collapse. By bailing AIG, and everyone around them out, we are removing all risk from the system. We are, in effect, rewarding the very behavior that capitalism is supposed to weed out.
This is not the last of this sort. So for John McCain who lives in some fantasy world of “the fundamentals are fine”, it’s time to either wake up from whatever wealth-induced stupor he exists in, or get the heck out of the race.
Watch this video about the CEOs. It’s criminal, or at least should be. Hundreds of millions in bonuses to the biggest losers in the world. If they are worth this kind of money when the companies are doing well, then they should go down with the ship when it fails.
Amazing watching people attempt to defend these losers. It’s all summed up by this quote: “If you could pay a guy to spin gold for you…” You can’t. It’s fantasy. You can not create something out of nothing. That is the definition of a scam in my mind.
None of this is to say I don’t believe in the principles of capitalism, but I believe that it must come with actual risks commiserate with the reward potentials. What we’re seeing here is the people who are rewarded most—in the form of hundreds of millions in “bonuses” for a bad job—have no “skin in the game”.
That’s not capitalism. That’s not a “free market”. That’s just welfare for the rich.
Thomas Friedman, who is far from being the dumbest person writing for a major paper, writes in Sunday’s International Herald Tribune about the truly bizarre nature of the Republican’s obsession with oil:
Why would Republicans, the party of business, want to focus our country on breathing life into a 19th-century technology – fossil fuels – rather than giving birth to a 21st-century technology – renewable energy? As I have argued before, it reminds me of someone who, on the eve of the IT revolution – on the eve of PCs and the Internet – is pounding the table for America to make more IBM typewriters and carbon paper. “Typewriters, baby, typewriters.”
Because, unbeknownst to the “media”, the Republicans are not the party of business. They are the party of big business and no business is bigger in this country than oil. Follow the money and you’ll see.
Some McCain supporters criticize Obama for not having the steel in his belly to use force in the dangerous world we live in today. Well, I know this: In order to use force, you have to have force. In order to exercise leverage, you have to have leverage.
I don’t know how much steel is in Obama’s belly, but I do know that the issues he is focusing on in this campaign – improving education and health care, dealing with the deficit and forging a real energy policy based on building a whole new energy infrastructure – are the only way we can put steel back into America’s spine. McCain, alas, has abandoned those issues for the culture-war strategy.
[...]
There is no strong leader without a strong country. And posing as one, to use the current vernacular, is nothing more than putting lipstick on a pig.
Pay attention people.
Comments Off
Economist Alex Tabarrok on the wisdom of bailouts:
Thanks goodness we bailed out Bear Stearns back in March if we hadn’t we might have lost Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch and who knows what else. Oh wait…
This is what happens when you remove the feedback mechanism of capitalism: unbridled greed with no downside for those responsible for the bad decisions.
Comments Off
