In conjunction with partner, Brave New Pac, which shares office space with Brave New Foundation, an organization that lists Acorn, Code Pink,and DFA among others on their partners page, and Brave New Films, DFA has shown how low they will go to with this, the second of two attack ads so far. The Brave New folks, on the other hand, have loads of attack ads of their own on their webpages. This is the first:
Two liberal political action committees are making an issue of John McCain’s past bouts with skin cancer in a television commercial that features his facial scar and demands that the Republican presidential nominee release his medical records to the public.
The 30-second ad, so far airing for $50,000 only on MSNBC, is paid for by Brave New PAC and Democracy for America, a political group headed by James Dean, the brother of Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean.
Hey, Howie, here’s a thought. Why not spend some dough promoting your guy instead of ripping the other guy? But then, there’s not enough time or money in the world to make that work, is there, Howard?
When is a deal not a deal? When everybody’s lying about it, that’s when. It seems that in our current economic crisis, image is everything. President George Bush (he is still president, isn’t he?) bluntly admitted as much, says The Boston Globe.
“The market is not functioning properly,” the president said. “There has been a widespread loss of confidence, and major sectors of America’s financial system are at risk of shutting down.”
In that kind of climate, care must be taken to insure that skittish investors see some light at the end of the tunnel. Hence, talk of a deal. From The New York Times:
House leaders and the White House on Thursday announced a tentative agreement on an economic stimulus package of roughly $150 billion that would pay stipends of $300 to $1,200 per household, and more for families with children, plus provide tax incentives for businesses to encourage spending.
Financial markets grew more upbeat Thursday as political leaders said they struck an agreement in principle on a massive spending plan to revive the crippled financial system. The Dow Jones industrial average jumped about 200 points on optimism about the bailout, and demand for safe-haven assets remained high but eased slightly as some investors placed bets that a deal would help unclog credit markets.
US lawmakers were still working Thursday to agree an unprecedented Wall Street bailout package, Democrats and Republicans said after White House crisis talks.
Lawmakers are “working on it,” said Jim Manley, spokesman for Senate Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid, as he emerged from the talks called by President George W. Bush.
“Still have a lot of issues to be worked on. Making progress. A lot more to discuss,” he added.
And now that the markets are way closed for the day, from AP:
Key members of Congress claimed agreement Thursday on an outline and crucial details of an urgent multibillion-dollar plan to stave off national economic disaster, but a historic White House meeting with President Bush, the two men fighting to replace him and other congressional leaders broke up with conflicts in plain view.
And while perceptions are being furiously managed, Democrats and Republicans are still bickering over the merits of John McCain’s decision to suspend his campaign until the problem is resolved, even though Newsbusters is reporting that he was asked to do just that:
John McCain got involved in the bailout negotiations after Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson told Sen. Lindsey Graham yesterday that the bailout plan would fail unless McCain came in and brought balky Republicans aboard. That’s what Bob Schieffer reported on this morning’s Early Show. Schieffer’s account stands in stark contrast with the allegation by Dems like Barney Frank and their MSM cohorts that McCain’s moves of yesterday were nothing more than a political “stunt.”
Bailouts? Earmarks? Gas profits? If we’re going to concentrate time and effort looking into misappropriation of funds, why not determine how much money “journalists” make to report stories like these? AP-Yahoo News wants to know why Sarah Palin kept a $1,000 donation from a guy she “urged to resign” for corruption:
Sarah Palin felt so strongly about the public corruption indictment of a Republican state senator this summer that she urged him to resign — but not strongly enough to return the $1,000 he gave to help elect her governor.
The donation from John Cowdery was one of three from Alaska legislators who contributed to Palin’s 2006 campaign weeks after the FBI raided their offices. The sprawling public corruption scandal that followed became a rallying point for candidate Palin, who was swept into office after promising voters she would rid Alaska’s capital of dirty politics.
The article points out that while the contribution does not suggest any wrongdoing, both John McCain and Barack Obama have “given back” money in the past.
Over the years, both McCain and Democratic nominee Barack Obama have returned campaign donations tied to corruption, expressing regret in both cases. Obama’s campaign says he’s given to charity $159,000 tied to convicted Chicago real estate developer Antoin “Tony” Rezko. In the early 1990s, McCain returned $112,000 from Charles Keating, a central figure in the savings and loan crisis, after a Senate ethics inquiry.
By those standards, maybe Obama should have sold Rezko back his land. AP-Yahoo also has this story (horrors!) of Palin being “blessed from witchcraft.”
A video on her hometown church Web site shows Sarah Palin being blessed three years ago by a Kenyan pastor who prayed for her protection from “witchcraft” as she prepared to seek higher office.
Good to know she was elected in spite of not being a witch. In more pressing news, the Chicago Tribune has the “exclusive:” Barack Obama prefers the Stones over the Beatles! On his way to the White House for meeting with the president about the nation’s economic woes, the press put the question to the Democratic nominee:
Now the news: apparently there were a few Capitol Hill reporters waiting outside his office. He was asked by one whether he was a Rolling Stones or Beatles guy. “Stones,” Obama reponded to a CQ reporter, per Psaki. She said he also said that he would make some comments after the White House meeting about the bailout agreement.
Nice to know he had time to work something in about that bailout stuff. Not to be outdone, The New York Times, on it’s blog, The Caucus had to share this “news” about David Letterman’s snit over McCain’s cancellation from his show in order to deal with that pesky bailout thing.
David Letterman was so unhappy that Mr. McCain canceled his scheduled appearance on his show Wednesday night that he spent much of the first segment assailing the senator’s decision and suggesting “something doesn’t smell right” about the Senator’s plan to go to Washington to work on the financial crisis.
Mr. Letterman told his audience that Senator McCain had called him directly on short notice Wednesday, to tell him he had to cancel his appearance. After expressing his admiration for Mr. McCain and his sacrifice as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, Mr. Letterman said, “When you call up at the last minute and cancel, that’s not the John McCain I know.” He repeated that “something smells right now” and he suggested “somebody must have put something in his Metamucil.”
If it wasn’t for that damned First Amendment, I’d say it was time for some government oversight into this question of who pays these “journalists,” how much, and why?
Traveling around from internet news site to internet news site, a thought occurred to me: be afraid, be very afraid. Not only is there the threat of a major, global economic collapse hanging over our heads, even with the tentative agreement lawmakers just reached, the entire rest of the political news is just as frightening, in a goofy scary kind of way.
Politico’s Ben Smith, seeming more annoyed today by his perpetually twisted knickers than ususal, says Bill Clinton’s not sufficiently being Barack’s surrogate. Awwwwww…Ben, who always seems to be in a snit about something, is stomping his widdle foot at the former president for having the temerity to refuse to carry Barack Obama’s water. The nerve of that Clinton guy, huh?
Introducing John McCain at the Clinton Global Initiative in Manhattan, Bill Clinton doesn’t mention that he’s endorsed another candidate, or that there’s a campaign on.
Actually, it’s Politico’s Jonathan Martin giving flavor to Ben’s words, since for some reason, Jonathan chose to do a seperate post basically reprinting Ben’s post, with ‘tude. Both mention Clinton’s defense of McCain on Good Morning America, which is not surprising, since they’re the same frigging post.
Then there’s the Harry Reid’s “I want you, stay, I hate you, go away” strange courtship of John McCain.
Yesterday, ABC’s Jake Tapper reported Harry Hippy now says McCain’s help wasn’t needed or welcome.
A Democrat tells ABC News that, in a phone call late this afternoon, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., told Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., that it would NOT be helpful for him to come back to Washington, D.C., to work on the Wall Street bailout bill.
Meanwhile, back at CNN, yesterday Florida Congressman, Alcee Hastings, told a Jewish audience that they should be as afraid of Sarah Palin as black people are:
Rep. Alcee Hastings told an audience of Jewish Democrats Wednesday that they should be wary of Republican VP nominee Sarah Palin because “anybody toting guns and stripping moose don’t care too much about what they do with Jews and blacks.”
snip
“For those of you like me that supported Sen. Hillary Clinton, she lost! Get over it!”
Get over this, Alcee. Anyway, looks like Obama may be losing a little luster, just using his name is no longer enough to guarantee huge crowds. Seems his Faith Tour flopped on it’s first stop.
For the new Barack Obama “faith tour” to have any success, it needs to be able to draw young and evangelical voters. Yet, at its first stop in the Virginia back yard of well-known pastor Jerry Falwell, just 15 people showed up for the event.
Hey, all the guys in my neighborhood like to hand out millions of dollars to people who were only eight years old when they bombed stuff. RBO has more on this here.
And who the hell is Khalid Al-Mansour, and why does his name keep coming up?
When the talking heads, politicians and pundits talk about the “economic crisis,” the “housing bubble,” “sub-prime loans” and “bailouts” why do they always act surprised? Don’t these people watch TV? I admit freely, I’m no economic expert; though I have owned properties before, I haven’t been a homeowner for years, for a number of personal reasons. But I’m not stupid. Which you would have to be not to have seen this coming years ago. And you don’t have to be a CNBC junkie either, Home and Garden tells you all you need to know.
For years, I’ve been watching homebuying shows where people too easily purchased too much house for too much money. There you have it, the whole housing bubble in a nutshell. Nothing complicated about it. People on these shows from every socio-economic class got 100% financing on homes with too many bedrooms and bathrooms, huge yards, lavish kitchens, “bonus” rooms, outdoor living space to rival other people’s indoor living space, offices, pools, and closets you could set up shop in. And the “experts” didn’t “see it coming?”
Then there were the “flippers.” Nobody, it seems, can buy a house, fix it up to their tastes, for their purposes and just live in it. Nope, uh-uh, no way. For one thing, if they do, they’ll never be able to sell it, and selling it is the only reason to buy it. Get it? First, somebody else has to buy it, (at 100% financing) “renovate” it, which could mean anything from applying fresh paint to ripping up floors and knocking down walls, then sell it at a profit. Then the people who can’t afford it, buy it to live in it, and have to pay too much for stuff they probably don’t even want (at 100% financing). Then, they can get another loan to redecorate it the way they want it, laying new floors and putting walls back up, and end up not being able to pay for any of it. Well, duh. Yet, nobody knows nuttin’.
Right.
Of course, that doesn’t take into account the fact that by the time the new suckers buyers get it, the mortgages have already been sold a gazillion times to people who make money buying and selling mortgages on houses they’ve never even seen. And we’re supposed to believe that this whole economic crisis is the fault of the little guys who just want to own a home, but are the ones getting screwed royally, nine ways to Sunday, by people they’ll never meet?
Puh-leeze.
Who’s gonna bail them out? Why should they trust anybody when everybody lied to them? “The housing market is sound.” “Real estate is always a good investment.” “Always buy as much house as you can afford.” “Interest rates are steady.” “You can always refinance.” “God’s not making any more land, ha, ha, ha.” Ha, ha, hell. “The check’s in the mail” and “I won’t come in your mouth” are more trustworthy statements than those.
Now, everybody’s money is in jeopardy, whether they fell for the schemes or not. And taxpayers are supposed to trust the government to bail them out of their individual economic crises with their tax money by bailing out the very people who put them in this predicament in the first place at the same time? What’s wrong with this picture? Who cares if some CEO gets his ridiculous salary or not when all the rest of the mortgage-moving scam artists are flying under the radar with everybody’s money in their pockets? And why is everybody focusing on the big banks and lenders when the whole damned system is corrupt? Realtors, builders, E-Z Credit ripoff artists, contractors, banks, mortgage holders, investment brokers, escrow holders, home-improvement stores, and all the rest of the corporate rapists, big and small, had a jolly good time thugging the electorate for the past few years, but nobody in a position to do anything about it “saw it coming,” so now they all want to point fingers and shrug shoulders and look pitiful until we all pitch in to help them out in order to save ourselves?
Pardon me if I’m having a hard time giving a shit.
