In Line to Be President

From today’s Washington Post:

Katie Couric asked Ms. Palin to explain how Alaska’s proximity to Russia “enhances your foreign policy credentials.”

“Well, it certainly does,” Ms. Palin replied, “because our, our next-door neighbors are foreign countries, there in the state that I am the executive of. And there—”

Gently interrupting, Ms. Couric asked, “Have you ever been involved in any negotiations, for example, with the Russians?”

“We have trade missions back and forth,” said Ms. Palin. “We do. It’s very important when you consider even national security issues with Russia. As Putin rears his head and comes into the airspace of the United States of America, where do they go? It’s Alaska. It’s just right over the border. It is from Alaska that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia, because they are right there. They are right next to our state.”


Ever since John McCain named Sarah Palin to the ticket, it has been a given that she has energized conservatives, particularly conservative women. So nationally syndicated conservative columnist Kathleen Parker's blistering assessment in the National Review Online today is sure to sting -- especially coming on the heels of growing discontent among other conservative intellectuals who had been "wildly stoked" about her selection just weeks ago.

Parker, after a scalding critique of Palin's readiness for high office, begs the Alaska governor to step down from the Republican ticket. "Only Palin can save McCain, her party, and the country she loves. She can bow out for personal reasons, perhaps because she wants to spend more time with her newborn. No one would criticize a mother who puts her family first," Parker advises, pleading: "Do it for your country."

Palin has given virtually no free-form interviews, but her sit-downs thus far have provided critics with ample fodder. Until quite recently, those critics have been largely partisans. Republicans have not just stood by her -- they have adored her.

Parker says: No more. She has declared her cringe reflex exhausted. Palin's recent interviews with Charles Gibson, Sean Hannity, and now Katie Couric have all revealed an attractive, earnest, confident candidate. Who Is Clearly Out Of Her League," Parker writes.

"Palin filibusters. She repeats words, filling space with deadwood. Cut the verbiage and there's not much content there," she continues. "Here's but one example of many from her interview with Hannity: 'Well, there is a danger in allowing some obsessive partisanship to get into the issue that we're talking about today. And that's something that John McCain, too, his track record, proving that he can work both sides of the aisle, he can surpass the partisanship that must be surpassed to deal with an issue like this.'

"When Couric pointed to polls showing that the financial crisis had boosted Obama's numbers, Palin blustered wordily: 'I'm not looking at poll numbers. What I think Americans at the end of the day are going to be able to go back and look at track records and see who's more apt to be talking about solutions and wishing for and hoping for solutions for some opportunity to change, and who's actually done it?'"

"If BS were currency," Parker concludes, "Palin could bail out Wall Street herself."

The Financial Crisis and McCain’s Response

Just because the Bush Administration has a track record of demanding that Congress immediately pass legislation, which they define as vital to the national interest, and which turned into fiascoes for the American Public, such as going to war in Iraq, establishing the Homeland Security Department, and the Patriot Act, does not mean that their latest push to pass a $700 billion bailout plan is wrong. But it ought to give everyone pause. Robert Reich described the bad assets that the Paulsen/Bush proposal wants purchased by Treasury as creating a Yucca Mountain of bad debt to house the financial toxic waste in Washington, DC. Even congressional Republicans are balking.

The most egregious part of the plan is that it is the only proposal. Maybe it is the best solution, but there is no discussion of alternatives and their good and bad aspects, nor any reasons presented that led the administration to this particular recommendation. It just smacks of one more handout to the people who got Bush elected. First a tax decrease that greatly benefited the richest people in the country, quite a few of them on Wall Street; then an unnecessary war that filled the coffers of big business; and now a massive handout from US taxpayers to the people who caused this problem in the first place.

The alternative solutions that are being proposed sound a lot better than the handout.

1. The AIG model seems like it is worth considering – a government loan that has to be paid off within two years with an 11% interest rate and an 80% equity stake in a very successful insurance business.

2. Instead of taking over the bad assets owned by banks, trying to figure out what no one seems able to do – assess their true value – leave them in the banks and let the banks figure out how best to manage them. This way Treasury doesn’t have to hire ten thousand asset managers to figure out what to do. The banks get a loan to get past the crisis and the government gets stock warrants that will pay back some or the entire loan assuming the economy ever recovers.

3. Spend the $700 billion on the people who took out mortgages (that they shouldn’t have) to help them pay off their obligations in an orderly fashion, which will stop foreclosures from hurting the economy and free the banks to offer credit again.

These may or may not be better than the proposed solution, but they need to be considered and thought through thoroughly before a hasty decision is made to put this country even deeper in debt then it is now.

The latest poll from the Washington Post/ABC has Obama moving into the lead on the heels of the depressing economic news and the Republican advantage following their convention fading, with Palin’s negatives rising. John McCain must be feeling desperate as he has just announced that he wants to postpone Friday’s first Presidential debate so he can ‘concentrate’ on the financial crisis. He knows the economy is hurting his chances and does not want to be placed on the defensive in a debate.

The mere mention of the current economic condition during the debate is going to be deleterious for McCain. I’m sure Obama has memorized all the McCain quotes about how the market should dictate everything and how regulation by government bureaucrats should be eliminated. The deregulation of the Bush years is a primary cause of the problems we are in, as deregulation in the Twenties was prior to the Great Depression, and deregulation in the Eighties was prior to the S&L Crisis, which was not one of John (one of the Keating Five) McCain’s shining hours.

Is he running for the Presidency, the Senate, or is he just running away as fast as he can? Right now he needs to participate in the debates and give the voting public some insight into his view of Presidential leadership and his qualifications for the job. But if instead he insists on playing politics with the election, maybe he should return to the Senate and send Sarah to substitute at the debate with Obama, sort of like a trial run if she ever had to assume the Presidency.

Whatever happened to John McCain, the American hero?

McCain Economics

Jonathan Cohn in The New Republic published Wednesday, September 24, 2008 analyzed the McCain economic strategy and concluded it is rehashed Bush and GOP policy that has gotten us into our present failed economic condition. Some excerpts from the article:

John Goodman is a conservative economist who thinks all the fuss over people without health insurance is just hooey. As Goodman explained to a reporter from The Dallas Morning News last week, everybody can get medical care from an emergency room, so why not just stop tallying the uninsured altogether? "Voilà," Goodman quipped. "Problem solved."

Goodman had offered advice to McCain. But it was on an unpaid, voluntary basis, and McCain had since made clear that Goodman's input was not necessary. It wasn't the first time this campaign season that McCain distanced himself from a conservative adviser over controversial statements. Former Texas senator Phil Gramm, as a top economic adviser, told a reporter that the economy was stronger than most Americans realized. The real problem, he suggested, was a "mental recession"--that "we have sort of become a nation of whiners."

Goodman and Gramm had, of course, committed political crimes. But, while they were guilty of ill-chosen rhetoric, they had also told the truth. Whatever their actual advisory roles, their statements were perfectly consistent with the thinking behind McCain's official economic agenda--a mix of supply-side tax cuts and conservative reforms of health care as extreme as any put forth by the Republicans in modern times. McCain might seem an odd vessel for such radicalism, given his notorious opposition to President Bush's first round of tax cuts and his reputation for bucking the GOP. But that all happened before he started running for president again. This campaign has shown how McCain intends to strike a balance between corralling his political base and actually governing the country. And it's not much of a balance. Hard as it may be to believe, after the mounting debt and rising inequality of the Bush era, McCain has indicated he wants to preserve Bush's conservative legacy on economic policy--and then take it even further.

To understand the absurdity of this proposition, it's important to remember just how awful that legacy is. When Bush took office in 2001, the federal government was running substantial surpluses--that is, it was taking in more money than it was spending. It also had a relatively progressive tax code, meaning that the wealthy paid significantly higher rates than the middle class and poor. During the presidential campaign, Al Gore had proposed putting the government's surpluses aside in order to avoid excessive future borrowing, which might slow down the economy, and to prepare for the retirement of baby- boomers, whose aging would soon strain Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. Bush rejected that idea, arguing--as many Republicans did--that the government couldn't be trusted with surpluses (i.e., it might spend the money instead). When Bush took office, he pushed for, and won, massive tax breaks. Even though most of the benefits went to the wealthiest, Bush vowed they would promote a strong economy that would ultimately benefit all Americans.

It was the same argument conservatives had been advancing for more than two decades, ever since Ronald Reagan first made supply-side economics a cornerstone of Republican Party dogma. But, as in the past, the theory didn't turn out so well in practice. Predictions of self-financing tax cuts proved utterly wrong, as the Clinton-era budget surpluses quickly turned back into the deficits we still have now. Today, the government is digging itself into a deeper fiscal hole. If allowed to persist, high deficits could actually hinder growth in the long run, as the government soaks up money that businesses would like to borrow for their needs, while making future entitlement costs less manageable. The short-term picture isn't so pretty either. The economy grew following a recession that hit during Bush's first term, but it was a notoriously anemic expansion. Wealthy Americans made out like bandits, but the typical American's wages did not grow at all relative to inflation, something that hadn't happened in any expansionary period since World War II. Job creation under Bush has been the worst since Herbert Hoover's time, and the percentage of families living in poverty has actually increased.

No, you can't blame all of this on the Bush tax cuts. Economic inequality has been growing on its own, and the deficits reflect, in part, high spending on everything from the war to the new Medicare drug benefit. But, if the Bush tax cuts aren't the only reason for our current economic woes, they are an important one. It's hardly surprising that the poor and middle-class would fall behind just as the tax code started showering more benefits on the rich. Nor is it coincidental that deficits would reappear at the very same time tax revenues declined, relative to the economy as a whole.

When history so clearly refutes your economic doctrine, the intelligent response is to reassess your thinking. A case in point is the Democrats. Even though their policies were pretty successful during the 1990s, particularly compared to the recent Bush record, in the last few years leading Democratic thinkers realized that they could do better still. Precisely because the economy is heading in the direction of inequality--and because, absent other forces, the poor and middle-class will struggle--Democrats today are putting more emphasis on aggressive efforts to protect average Americans, even if that means meddling with the economy in ways they thought unwise a decade ago.

But Republicans have reacted differently. Instead of taking the last few years as a cue that maybe it's time to offer something besides more Bush-style tax cuts, they decided that what the country really needs is ... more Bush-style tax cuts! And McCain's agenda indicates that he agrees wholeheartedly. After extending Bush's tax reductions, which are set to expire in 2011, McCain would trim taxes on corporate income and estates. He's also proposed creating a new, parallel tax system into which any American could opt. While he's been a bit fuzzy on the details, it, too, would cut taxes disproportionately for wealthy Americans.

If all these proposals took effect, according to the independent and highly respected Tax Policy Center, 80 percent of the McCain tax cuts would go into the pockets of the richest quintile of Americans. They would see their after-tax incomes go up by an average of 6 percent. By contrast, somebody in the middle quintile would see his or her income rise by 1.4 percent while somebody in the poorest quintile would realize a yield of just 0.6 percent. To put these statistics in human terms, a multimillionaire--say, a wealthy landowner in Sedona, Arizona--would get enough money to buy a luxury car. (The top 1 percent of taxpayers would reap an average bonus of more than $100,000 per year under McCain's plan.) But a tool-and-die maker working for a Detroit auto supplier would get about $600, maybe enough to cover half a month's mortgage. Somebody in the lowest income quintile--say, a single waitress in rural Virginia--would, with her $65 windfall, get an extra trip or two to the grocery store.

But that's just half the story. Those tax cuts would cost money--a lot of money. McCain has, at times, invoked the thoroughly discredited supply-side argument that his tax cuts can help pay for themselves by generating more growth. Mostly, though, McCain has emphasized his intention to pay for the new tax cuts by slashing wasteful spending. And it's hard to overstate how laughable this is.

McCain may have a strong record of opposing pork-barrel spending, but there simply isn't enough pork in the budget to make up this kind of money. After consulting with budget experts, the Annenberg Public Policy Center's website factcheck.org concluded that McCain would have to cut discretionary spending-- including things like secondary education and veteran's health benefits--by 20 percent just to realize the $100 billion savings he's claimed he could find. And that $100 billion wouldn't even come close to offsetting the enormous tax cuts--which, according to the Tax Policy Center, would cost the federal government around $700 billion per year.

So, if McCain is serious about paying for his tax cuts, he'd have to look elsewhere--to the three big entitlement programs: Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. McCain has frequently indicated an interest in doing just that, suggesting that, as president, he'd convene a bipartisan commission on entitlement reform. He's called the present financing of Social Security--which relies on contributions from present workers to pay for present retirees--a "disgrace," even though it's the way the program has always run. McCain has also long supported efforts to privatize Social Security, an initiative that would erode the basic income guarantee that Social Security provides and result in reduced benefits. It may not sound so drastic, given that some Social Security recipients are pretty well-off. But remember that, for about two- thirds of elderly Americans, Social Security represents approximately half of their incomes. Even modest benefit reductions would affect these retirees.
Of course, it's possible McCain wouldn't slash entitlements, perhaps because it'd be politically impossible. But, if he left entitlements intact, he'd simply be reprising Bush's feat--that is, he'd run up more debt. The Tax Policy Center estimates that, absent offsetting cuts, the McCain tax agenda would add more than $8.5 trillion in new debt over the next ten years--more than double what Obama would add. And this would hit the poor and middle-class just as surely as spending cuts today would. Sometime in the future, the sky-high interest payments on that borrowed money (not to mention the depressed tax receipts from reduced growth) would force the government to choose between slashing entitlements for retirees or slashing spending that benefits everybody else. "He hastens the day of reckoning when government resources are too small to sustain current commitments," says Henry Aaron, a Brookings Institution economist. "The right analogy here is the kid who kills his parents and then asks for mercy as an orphan."

The ultimate question about McCain's agenda, then, is not whether it's deeply conservative but whether he'd really pursue it. He has reportedly admitted he "doesn't really understand economics" and has never shown the kind of passion for it that he has, say, for national security issues. And, while McCain has at times surrounded himself with the likes of Goodman and Gramm, he also has more sensible voices in his orbit. Most notable among them is chief economic adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who gained a (well-deserved) reputation for integrity as head of the Congressional Budget Office by refusing to countenance fiscally irresponsible arguments--even when they came from fellow Republicans. Maybe this is a sign that, if elected, McCain would stop listening to the ideological zealots on economic policy--and start listening to saner, more moderate voices.

It's a comforting theory, but not, ultimately, a convincing one. Whether it's ambivalence, ignorance, expediency, or conviction that has propelled McCain to the right, there's no reason to think his behavior will change after Election Day. Remember, we've seen this all before. In 2000, Bush ran on a deeply conservative agenda of slashing taxes, gutting Social Security, and peeling back health insurance coverage even for middle class Americans. But, despite valiant efforts from writers like Paul Krugman to point this out, both the press and the public fell for the myth that Bush was a "compassionate conservative." And, while McCain will have to confront a more ornery Democratic Congress than Bush did in his first term, McCain's margin for error will also be a lot smaller. Bush was fortunate in that he took office after the Clinton boom, when the federal treasury was relatively flush and a long expansion had fattened people's pocketbooks. Now, the budget is back in the red, and the public is desperate for financial assistance and security. Dismissing McCain's declared agenda as empty rhetoric would be a huge gamble--one this country can ill afford.

The Election

The McCain/Palin ticket has gotten a bounce following last week’s convention. It comes primarily from white women reacting to the selection of Sarah Palin as Vice President. It appears to have nothing to do with her record or qualifications and is the complete opposite of what most women have been seeking for themselves. Here is what we know so far about Sarah Palin:

She is opposed to abortion.

She is opposed to stem cell research.

She is opposed to same-sex marriage.

She is opposed to laws in favor of equal pay for women.

She is in favor of teaching creationism in the schools as an equal theory to evolution.

She admits to having no knowledge of foreign affairs, and has said we are carrying out a task from God by being in Iraq.

She claims to be a reformer but she actually is continuing the Republican tradition of saying whatever will help you, regardless of its truth. In her acceptance speech she claimed to have rejected the notorious “bridge to nowhere” as proof that she is a reformer. Subsequently it was demonstrated that she supported the bridge while campaigning for Governor. After being elected and seeing the negative Congressional reaction to this earmark, she came out against it, but kept the $398 million for future use by Alaska. Despite the widespread coverage of these facts, she keeps restating the claim in every speech she delivers.

Her executive and major life experience is in Alaska, a state that barely resembles the other 49 states. It has two major sources of revenue, oil and earmarks, and is doing very nicely in these difficult economic times. Its oil resources are benefitting from the high prices enough so that she is able to provide $3,000 payments to each of its citizens. Its (now indicted) Congressman and Senator have assaulted the US Treasury for years to obtain earmarks for their state well beyond the per capita amounts in the earmarks of other states. Governor Palin hired lobbyists to obtain earmark funds for Wasilla when she was Mayor and managed to get $27 million in earmarks and a subsequent $200 million as Governor. Earmarks come from US taxpayers and at least ought to be distributed evenly throughout the country, if they are not stopped outright.

Her reformist zeal did not prevent her from claiming and receiving travel per diem for over 300 days when she actually lived at home. The justification is that the capital is in Juneau, which is 200 miles from Anchorage, but in fact she spends most of her time as Governor working out of an office in Anchorage and commuted daily from there to her home in nearby Wasilla. She also collected per diem for her children and husband when they were with her although per diem is supposed to be limited to Alaskan state employees.

Part of her image is based on her being a hockey Mom who is able to raise five children and take on the job of Governor. She has done this in part because she has had jobs (Mayor and Governor) where she could bring her young children to work with her as often and as long as she wanted. This option is not exactly available to the average working Mom, married or unmarried. Most working women also have working husbands, if they are not on their own, who cannot afford to take off from their jobs to help with child care. This advantage doesn’t seem to register with Palin or the Republicans, who fail to support programs that would help working mothers manage their complicated lives and deal with the family pressures that men are usually not subject to.

All of the above is not to demonize Palin, who has accomplished much in her career; who has taken on established politicians in her own party; and is an effective campaigner. But making her into someone she is not, ignoring the contradictions in her record, and coloring over her lack of qualification to be Vice President ought to be of major concern to every voter in this election.

She lacks the credentials to be President of the United States in the event that the 72 year-old John McCain fails to survive his term in office. If she was the male Governor of Alaska, with the exact same credentials, she would never have been considered for this post. McCain has chosen political advantage over concern for the country.

The critical factor in this election should not be the battle over “family values’ – reproductive rights and the role of women, important as they are. Unfortunately, they are among the most divisive issues in this country, but they pale compared to the problems that the next President of the United States will be facing.

We are finishing eight years of the George Bush Presidency and that experience has left us in horrific shape. We are still in Iraq, a war we should never have entered that has cost 4,100 American deaths, 10,000 American wounded, tens of thousands of Iraqi deaths, and over a million displaced Iraqi citizens. This war is costing us $10-12 billion a month. This major effort in Iraq to fight a war that was not in our strategic interest shifted us away from Afghanistan, where we should have stayed after the initial success. Now we are faced with a major problem as the Taliban and Al-Qaeda regroup in the tribal areas of Pakistan. Had we stayed and defeated them when they were on the run and spent a fraction of the money that we wasted in Iraq, Afghanistan would be well on the road to being a successful ally instead of being the next drain on our soldiers and treasury.

The budget deficit stretches into the unforeseeable future and is being financed, not by the American taxpayer, but by foreign governments. Our military is stretched so thinly that we have lost any leverage military strength ought to give us as we deal with a resurgent Russia and a recalcitrant Iran.

The economy is either in recession or quickly heading there. The Bush tax cuts, continued despite the costs of Iraq, have created excessive income inequality between the richest Americans and the middle class. This year’s budget deficit is going to be $407 billion and 2009 is now estimated to be $500 billion. The unwillingness to deal with our dependence on oil has gas prices soaring.

An administration that has subverted government regulation is seeing the result of those decisions in the sub-prime mortgage crisis and the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac catastrophe. Those institutions did what they want in the search for profit and gambled that the government would bail them out using taxpayer money if the risk they assumed proved fatal.

The Administration’s anti-science bias contributes to climate warming and destroys the environment. They’ve constantly ignored consensus scientific advice and chose the narrow and self-serving interests of business supporters instead.

At the start of Bush’s term, the US was the most powerful country in the world, and if not loved, was respected and listened to. Today that strength has been lessened substantially. Even our friends are reluctant to support our strategies and our enemies have multiplied, because they have been able to use our presence in Iraq as a recruiting tool.

What does this failed eight years have to do with this election? The answer is just about everything. McCain is running from this record with everything he has but he is a Republican who got his party’s nomination by adopting Bush policies and a belief that he will revert back to what he once was is self-deluding. Early in the Administration, McCain disagreed with a number of Bush policies – tax cuts being the major one. But his path to the nomination required that he change that position to its opposite. He now supports Bush economics and tax policy completely. This is a flip-flop that goes light years beyond what John Kerry was accused of four years ago.

In Iraq, McCain was a supporter of the war from prior to the invasion through today. In Jan. 2, 2003, McCain was on the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt in the Arabian Sea, yelling to a crowd of sailors and airmen: “Next up, Baghdad!” He speculated that the Anthrax scare might have emanated from Iraq and jumped on claims, later disproved, that Saddam had met with Al-Qaeda. The lack of WMD is never mentioned.

He supported the surge from its start and claims it is the cause of reduced violence in Iraq and has led us to victory. General Petraeus was quoted today saying he did not know that he would ever use the word "victory": "This is not the sort of struggle where you take a hill, plant the flag and go home to a victory parade... it's not war with a simple slogan." Whether it is victory or not, it now appears that at best the surge was only one of a number of actions that eased the security situation – the major three being the Sunni’s rising up against Al-Qaeda, successful counter-intelligence operations against Al-Qaeda, and the restraint shown by al-Sadr’s militia. Even if Iraq becomes the sought after democratic state of our dreams (although it will probably align with Iran) it will not have been worth the cost in lives and money we have expended and realistically we should admit it is a defeat and move on.

McCain has voted for Bush programs in Congress about 90% of the time. Not as much as other Republicans, but not enough to claim he is significantly different. The Republicans need to be held accountable for what they have done to this country. Even if their nominee claims to be different, he should not be rewarded by being elected. A McCain administration will be staffed throughout by people connected with Bush who have been involved deeply in the past eight years and if McCain is elected, there will be no change, and no reform in anything that matters.

On a final note, what bothers me as much as the above discussion is the tenor of the McCain/Palin campaign. It is based on demeaning opponents, rather than on debating policies. It features repeated lies that have been discounted by responsible parties under the assumption that most voters don’t follow the election closely. After all, about 50% of the American populace still believes that Iraq was behind the 9/11 attack. So Palin keeps talking about her bridge; McCain tells his audiences that Obama will raise their taxes, even though Obama states that he is going to raise taxes only on people earning more than $250,000 per year, and McCain equates the surge with victory.

The latest McCain ad states that Obama’s only achievement in the Illinois legislature was to pass legislation ensuring "comprehensive sex education" for kindergartners. It turns out that Obama didn’t sponsor the bill, but did vote for it. The “sex education” for kindergartners is a section that trained teachers to make kindergartners aware of the risk of inappropriate touching and sexual predators. This practice of attack politics based on lies and distortion is becoming the predominant characteristic of the McCain campaign.

The contest is made out to be between people who are just like us – people you would want to have a beer with (the George Bush mantra), or are just Mom’s with similar cares to your own, versus elite Ivy League educated out-of-touch people. Why would anyone choose to put people just like themselves into such vital offices rather than someone smarter, more accomplished, and with better judgment is an idea I just can’t grasp.

So we are left with the spectacle of speakers at the Republican convention disdaining Obama for being a community organizer and obtaining the desired response of hoots and jeers from the audience of convention goers made up of 80-90% white people who no doubt were appalled that a Harvard Law graduate would turn down lucrative law firm jobs to help people living in poverty. That is as clear a statement as I can find of the values of the Republican Party and its standard bearers who allowed those scenes to happen.

Hypocrisy

Tom Toles in today’s Washington Post (click on post title above to see the cartoon) summed up the contradiction at the heart of McCain’s new campaign strategy. He showed McCain and Palin in front of the White House stating "Watch out Mr. Bush! With the exception of economic policy and Energy Policy and Social Issues and Tax Policy and Foreign Policy and Supreme Court Appointments and Rove-Style Politics, We're coming in there to shake things up".

How does a candidate in the party that has been in office for eight years run in favor of change when that Party created the conditions that you now claim you want to change? Unless you are one of the ones who is drinking the Kool Aid, it can't be done with a modicum of thought. But since thinking is not a strong suit of these politicians and their supporters first you say in your acceptance speech that you admire your opponent, immediately after your choice for Vice President and every other major convention speaker belittled Obama. Then you claim to be a maverick despite having voted for Bush policies 90% of the time, publicly supported the war in Iraq, and pledged to follow Bush economic programs. Finally you have the audience hold up Service signs a few hours after Palin and Giuliani mocked Obama’s community organizing. Listening to the Republican convention goers hoot and boo at the mention of community organizing reveals this group for what it is: Party members made up of 95% white people with no idea of what the average person in the US faces in these economic times.




The ability of Republicans to say what they think will benefit today’s issue in complete contradiction to what they said at an earlier time is without parallel. This video of the John Stewart show uses recent clips of Republican speakers contrasted with earlier clips by the same speakers. It’s funny, but it is the key to how they approach policy and politics.

Palin Again

The issue is not Bristol’s pregnancy, other than it ought to be a warning that abstinence only coupled with no sex education in school is not an effective policy position. The issue is not that Sarah Palin has insufficient time as Vice President to care for her children. (My prediction is that she would not be taxed by a McCain administration to provide counsel to John McCain and should have plenty of quality time with the kids).

The issue is the unquestioning acceptance of this event by the admiring hordes at the Republican Convention. To get an idea of their hypocrisy, just imagine the reverse of this situation: A Democratic Presidential nominee choosing a liberal feminist whose 17-year old daughter announced her pregnancy.

Dan Quayle was incensed that Murphy Brown (a TV series character!) was having a baby without being married and he berated the event as indicative of a Democratic “poverty of values”. Phyllis Schlafly and the Eagle Forum believe that sex should only occur between married adults and that woman should have babies before they are thirty, and of course, stay home to care for them.

But the Republican conventioneers have promoted Palin to goddess stature and are defending her as if none of their past criticisms of liberal values ever occurred. Of course, six months from now, they will have forgotten this episode, and will be full-throated decrying the erosion of values in the US, unmarried sex, and women working instead of caring for their families. Values to them are what everyone but they should be doing.

This ignoring of facts and saying whatever you think will benefit your position is endemic with Conservatives. Last night Palin boasted how she turned down the “bridge to nowhere”. She didn’t mention that she supported that earmark when she was campaigning for governor, nor did she mention that she did not bother to turn back the money allocated for the bridge, but kept it for Alaska to use somewhere else. She was for it before she was against it.

Her purported role as a reformer needs to be countered by the realization that she has sought these funds throughout her tenure as a “chief executive”. $27 million for Wasilla; over $200 million for Alaska. Has anyone figured out that earmarks come from US Treasury courtesy of taxpayers in the rest of the US?

I’m looking forward to hearing her defend, before a not so enraptured audience, her statements that Iraq is a task from God; that drilling is the solution to the gas crisis; that the jury is still out on global warming; and that the theory that the earth is six thousand years old is a theory equal to evolution.

So far my favorite Palin quote is her reaction to a question about whether “under God” should remain in the Pledge of Allegiance. She said if the Founding Fathers were for it, so was she and she would fight to keep it in with whatever it takes. The Pledge was actually written in 1892 (a bit more than 100 years after the founding, and “under God’ was added in 1954).

The main Republican argument in favor of Palin is that she is a Mom who has learned deep lessons from being a parent. (Something like George Bush being a guy you would like to have a beer with. We know how well that bit of voting logic worked out). How that translates into being qualified to rectify the problems that the Bush Administration has created is unanswered. The new McCain strategy is that he and Palin are mavericks who will clean up the mess in Washington. Not to get to subtle, but wasn’t that mess created by the Republicans? How in the world do you now reward them by giving them four more years in the White House heading our government?

Last week James C. Dobson’s organization Focus on the Family issued a video imploring its followers to pray to God for a rain of biblical proportions in Denver to inundate Barack Obama’s acceptance speech. While I won’t suggest praying to God, I will be rooting for the Redskins to reverse their futile pre-season performance and rise up to force tonight’s opening game with the NY Giants into overtime, thereby, delaying the start of McCain’s speech past prime time.