Month: September 2008

No Guts, No Glory: It’s Stupid Season

While Obama and McCain stand around with egg on their faces, Bob Barr and Ralph Nader are the only candidates who showed Presidential judgment in rejecting the terms of Congress’s bailout bill before it came to a vote.
And what’s with Obama’s nonsequitur about increasing the level of FDIC insurance or the McCain campaign’s blaming Obama for Congress’s most recent exercise in self-destructiveness and irrelevance.
Meanwhile, Nancy Pelosi had to give her enemies yet another excuse to complain about her leadership style. Her attack on the Republicans was unproductive and pointless.
Yup, it’s the end of September, all right.

Home Brewed Coffee

These days, it’s almost impossible to avoid preachy advice columns about how to save money, and coffee shop prices seem to be a favorite target.
“Better to home brew”, although the lady who drank her morning cuppa after it was filtered through a bat that had hidden in her coffeemaker might disagree.
These discussions remind me of a group of masochistic housemates I met years ago who were insanely, nuttily frugal.
One of their economies was to brew coffee only once every several days. I don’t recall the exact schedule, nor why they thought that this saved money. I do recall their otherwise dour faces breaking into dreamy smiles when they thought about being able to drink coffee on the day it was brewed.
An example of collective insanity, which is perhaps why this particular memory is paradigmatic for this particular point in time.

Videos on the Subprime Mess, McCain Supporters in Manhattan

Who’s responsible for the subprime mess? Check it out.
The world of tolerance that the Obamaites want us to embrace, filmed at New York’s Upper West Side on September 21 of this year.
By the way, am I the only person in the United States who questions the assumption that credit will dry up if Congress doesn’t bail out the banks? Anyone else ever heard of private capital?

Gone Insane

The MSM, docile for so many years about the Bush administration, has flipped its collective lid about Sarah Palin, making itself the focus of so-called “news” stories while ignoring events of actual substance, like her visits this week with Colombian President Alvaro Uribe and Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
Sarah Palin can’t win for losing. She’s treated with venomous condescension on the one hand for her supposed lack of foreign policy experience, then excoriated when she meets with heads of state, and why? Because her campaign hasn’t given the press the access they, in their infinite wisdom, believe they deserve.
As far as John McCain’s wish to postpone the first Presidential debate until the negotiations on the infamous bailout deal are over: seems to me that the next President, be it McCain or Obama, really needs to be involved in this, and postponing the debate for a week wouldn’t be the end of the world.
Whether or not McCain or Obama has economic expertise is totally beside the point: that’s not their role. Rather, as the titular heads of their respective political parties, they have to have a seat at the table.
This bailout is historic, both in terms of its size – potentially over a trillion dollars – and its precedent-setting nature. It is a shift to pure socialism in the ravaged, beating heart of world capitalism. It is also at the center of this campaign’s major issue: the state of the economy.
Thus, first-hand knowledge of both the negotiation process and those involved with that process are not just political niceties, they are crucial components in setting the context for the next President’s economic policies.
Anyone who doesn’t understand and support the importance of participating in the development of “corporate memory” probably has never been in a leadership or policy-making position themselves. And, as is the case with Palin, the media’s inability to grasp this is makes me more than a little sick with disgust.
Furthermore, I don’t appreciate the Obama campaign’s temper tantrums in reaction to McCain’s wish to postpone – not cancel – the first debate. It doesn’t portend well for Obama’s ability to roll with the punches or to distinguish between important versus trivial matters in responding to the unexpected. It certainly says nothing good about his leadership abilities.
The Obama campaign’s current emotional overreactions to virtually every obstacle or slight, real or imagined, are wearing me out.
According to the Chicago Tribune, Obama’s original political strategy was the “2010-2012-2016” plan: Governor or re-election to the Senate in 2010, then a bid for the White House in 2012 at the earliest.
Too bad for the rest of us that he didn’t stick to it.

The Sleaze Goes On

Both the Obama and McCain campaigns continue their ignominious barrage of silly, finger-pointing nonsense, and the press hasn’t seemed to learn to ignore it.
Obama’s latest ad to the Latino community is the most egregious in that it’s composed of bold-faced lies about McCain’s position on immigration. See Ruben Navarrette Jr.’s guest editorial at CNN.com for details.
Meanwhile, McCain’s claim that campaign contributions have put Obama is in the tank for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is a real stretch of a sensible person’s credulity. Here’s the details, also from CNN.