mccain repeats keating era mistakes, regulator warns

Disturbing news via HuffPo:

 

As the stock market recovers from its biggest single-day drop since the crash of 1987, a former federal regulator who had a front-row view of John McCain’s role in the Savings and Loan scandal says he is repeating some of the same mistakes.

William Black — a deputy director of the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation during the “Keating Five” scandal that nearly ended McCain’s political career — says the Arizona Republican’s chief errors at the time were underestimating the importance of regulation and relying too heavily on slanted advice from captains of industry.

“In the S&L crisis, he took his advice from the worst [kind of] criminal. Charles Keating is the person he went to for his policy advice,” Black said. “Now, he certainly is getting advice from Phil Gramm, Carly Fiorina, Rick Davis — the whole group of economic and top political advisers are lobbyist types. He just doesn’t seem to get it, ever, that the advice is going to favor their clients. Even if they just stop being lobbyists, you can’t just turn that off instantly. It’s their mind state that develops. … The biggest lesson is that, when you deregulate and de-supervise, you create an environment where control fraud emerges. You hyper-inflate bubbles; you get criminalization.”

Oh, and it gets better, as you learn more about the guy who just jumped on the let’s-raise-the-FDIC-insurance-to-$250,000 bandwagon yesterday:

 

. . . In 1991, McCain railed against raising the FDIC insurance limit from $40,000 to its current $100,000 level. “The perversity of Federal deposit insurance is exemplified by the taxpayer bailout of the savings and loan industry,” McCain said, while omitting his own role in the scandal that actually precipitated the S&L crisis.

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palin tries to rewrite alaskan history

and Alaskan Representative Les Gara tries to set it right again. An excerpt from his full (though by no means exhaustive! there’s so much ground to cover) account of Palin’s record over at Mudflats:

 

Here’s what else I know about my state.  We have the third worst children’s health insurance program in the nation.  The Governor wouldn’t support cost-effective measures to extend insurance to the 10,000 children of Alaskan working parents who cannot afford coverage.  She campaigned against a recent proposal to prevent large strip mines from spilling toxic chemicals into Alaska’s salmon waters – something that’s raised the ire of fishermen and Alaska Natives in remote Southwest Alaska communities.  Thirty-five to forty percent of our kids don’t graduate from high school, and we can’t convince Governor Palin to join the 41 other states that have accepted the science showing statewide pre-k education helps kids succeed when they don’t have other good options at home. 

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the russians are coming! the russians are coming!

“As Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where do they go? It’s Alaska.” –Sarah Palin

from Kos.

 

If you don’t know your comedic history, you are doomed to repeat it. Yesterday’s subs are today’s . . . big Putin head in our airspace.

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david brooks has some choice words for house republicans

The man takes the House GOP (not exclusively, but they get the brunt of it) to task:

 

And let us recognize above all the 228 who voted no — the authors of this revolt of the nihilists. They showed the world how much they detest their own leaders and the collected expertise of the Treasury and Fed. They did the momentarily popular thing, and if the country slides into a deep recession, they will have the time and leisure to watch public opinion shift against them.

House Republicans led the way and will get most of the blame. It has been interesting to watch them on their single-minded mission to destroy the Republican Party. Not long ago, they led an anti-immigration crusade that drove away Hispanic support. Then, too, they listened to the loudest and angriest voices in their party, oblivious to the complicated anxieties that lurk in most American minds.

Now they have once again confused talk radio with reality. If this economy slides, they will go down in history as the Smoot-Hawleys* of the 21st century. With this vote, they’ve taken responsibility for this economy, and they will be held accountable. The short-term blows will fall on John McCain, the long-term stress on the existence of the G.O.P. as we know it.

 

*If, like me, you were going to have to look up Smoot-Hawley, here’s a bit from Wiki: The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act (sometimes known as the Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act) was an act signed into law on June 17, 1930, that raised U.S. tariffs on over 20,000 imported goods to record levels. In the United States 1,028 economists signed a petition against this legislation, and after it was passed, many countries retaliated with their own increased tariffs on U.S. goods, and American exports and imports plunged by more than half. In the opinion of most economists, the Smoot-Hawley act was partially responsible for the severity of the Great Depression.

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rachel maddow wonders who’s in charge of the GOP

Maddow beautifully skewers the Republicans’ political blame game and b.s. today. Like Countdown, her whole show is strong on today’s sad, sad state of affairs, including the little problem I’m calling Palinitis.

 

Vodpod videos no longer available.

more about “Speaker Pelosi Should Have Brought Re…“, posted with vodpod

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countdown: paul krugman on the failed bailout vote

Vodpod videos no longer available.

 

more about “Countdown: Krugman on the Bailout Fai…“, posted with vodpod

 

Thank heavens for Paul Krugman, a voice of sanity and knowledge giving the hoi polloi some understanding of the tangled economic-political mess that is the bailout.

 

If I could figure out how to post MSBNC clips directly from msnbc.com I would, but it doesn’t seem to work via WordPress (suggestions, anyone?). At any rate, tonight’s entire Olbermann is all good stuff, which you can view here, including today’s nauseating record of McCain’s hypocrisy, which I just can’t bear to post because it makes my blood boil. Sometimes you have to do the little things to lower your blood pressure. It’s all I can manage to refrain from unleashing a string of obscenities about the Republican candidate.

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more palin gaffes with couric. set them free!

According to Politico.com today,

 

Of concern to McCain’s campaign, however, is a remaining and still-undisclosed clip from Palin’s interview with Couric last week that has the political world buzzing. The Palin aide, after first noting how “infuriating” it was for CBS to purportedly leak word about the gaffe, revealed that it came in response to a question about Supreme Court decisions. After noting Roe vs. Wade, Palin was apparently unable to discuss any major court cases. 

This news along with the announcement that the campaign plans to let Palin stray as far as conservative talk radio interviews this week. Stay tuned for gaffe-o-mania…

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palin on biden: “he looks pretty doggone confident”

Of course! He incorrectly predicted a ballgame outcome, so he’s sure to tank in the debate (sheesh.) From NYT Caucus blog:

 

“And I do look forward to Thursday night, and debating Senator Joe Biden,’’ said Ms. Palin, whose uneven performance in interviews and unscripted events have sown seeds of doubt in recent days among some conservative commentators who support her.

“I’m looking forward to meeting him, too,’’ she said. “I’ve never met him before, but I’ve been hearing about his Senate speeches since I was in, like, second grade.’’

“I have to admit, though, he’s a great debater, and he looks pretty doggone confident, like he’s sure he’s going to win,’’ Ms. Palin, 44, said of Mr. Biden, 65. “But then again, this is the same Senator Biden who said the other day that University of Delaware would trounce the Ohio State Buckeyes. Wrong!”

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get your palin name and palinisms here

This one’s been around for awhile; but now that everyone who reads Mudflats has probably already had their fling with it (and hilariously started to use their Palin handles in comments), and in honor of Palin debate week, I will duly post it here. Go get your own Palin name if you have not yet. Yrs, Tarp Lazer Palin (call me Tazer!). P.S. If you don’t like the combo you first get, add your middle name, or just use first or last name.

 

The Sarah Palin Baby Name Generator: http://politsk.blogspot.com/2008/09/sarah_13.html

 

And with this new piece of brilliance (h/t Daily Dish), you can enjoy the Sarah Palin interview randomizer. As the website creators say, “The answers are computer generated based on probabilities calculated from Sarah Palin’s actual speech. The Markov chain generated answers are surprisingly close to her actual answers.”

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krugman: the (economic) 3 a.m. call

Read the whole thing here.

 

It’s 3 a.m., a few months into 2009, and the phone in the White House rings. Several big hedge funds are about to fail, says the voice on the line, and there’s likely to be chaos when the market opens. Whom do you trust to take that call?

I’m not being melodramatic. The bailout plan released yesterday is a lot better than the proposal Henry Paulson first put out — sufficiently so to be worth passing. But it’s not what you’d actually call a good plan, and it won’t end the crisis. The odds are that the next president will have to deal with some major financial emergencies.

So what do we know about the readiness of the two men most likely to end up taking that call? Well, Barack Obama seems well informed and sensible about matters economic and financial. John McCain, on the other hand, scares me.

. . . Now, to a large extent the poor quality of Mr. McCain’s advisers reflects the tattered intellectual state of his party. Has there ever been a more pathetic economic proposal than the suggestion of House Republicans that we try to solve the financial crisis by eliminating capital gains taxes? (Troubled financial institutions, by definition, don’t have capital gains to tax.)  

But even President Bush has, in the twilight of his administration, turned to relatively sensible people to make economic decisions: I’m not a fan of Mr. Paulson, but he’s a vast improvement over his predecessor. At this point, one has the suspicion that a McCain administration would have us longing for Bush-era competence.

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