Good News/Bad News

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The good news is that yesterday House Republicans rebelled against Dick the Dick.

The vice president traveled to Capitol Hill on Tuesday to silence a chorus of GOP complaints about Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s $700 billion plan. But House Republicans who walked into a closed-door meeting with Cheney steaming over the plan walked out just as angry, and they described what happened in between as both “a bloodbath” and “an unmitigated disaster.”

The bad news is that House Republicans are going to play the partisan politics game with the financial crisis.

Republican leaders are now hoping Democrats load the legislation with unrelated measures that would give them the political cover to oppose it, members and aides said. At the same time, party leaders are using back channels in the business community to gauge member support for a “clean” bill.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) warned his former colleagues that they would pay a price in November for backing the bailout now — and that John McCain could ride to victory over Barack Obama by persuading voters that the bailout is really the “Obama-Bush plan.”

Maybe I haven’t had enough coffee yet, but I find it baffling that some Senate Democrats are waiting to see how McCain votes on the measure before they decide how they will vote. See also Digby.

Back to good news/bad news. The good news is that Obama has a clear lead over McCain in the latest Washington Post-NBC News poll. Much of this lead is coming from white women switching their preference from McCain to Obama. Obama now has a small lead among white women.

The bad news is that media are still going with the “white women don’t like Obama” story.

File this under “weird news.” Michelle Malkin blames illegal immigrants for the financial crisis. The girl belongs in a carnival freak show.

More weird news, although I’m not surprised. Pew Research says 57 percent of the public favors the Wall Street bailout. On the other hand, the latest Bloomberg/Los Angeles Times poll says 55 percent of the public is opposed to the Wall Street bailout.

The Pew poll told respondents that the government is “potentially investing billions to try and keep financial institutions and markets secure” and asked whether that’s the right thing to do. The Bloomberg/Los Angeles Times poll asked whether “the government should use taxpayers’ dollars to rescue ailing private financial firms whose collapse could have adverse effects on the economy and market, or is it not the government’s responsibility to bail out private companies with taxpayers’ dollars?”

I extrapolate from this that about two-thirds of the public doesn’t know what the hell is going on. Anyway, the good news/bad news I see here is that, politically, it doesn’t much matter what Congress does. All that matters is how it’s explained. This opens the door to the possibility that Congress could do the right thing without political penalty. It also opens the door to the possibility that Congress could do the wrong thing without political penalty.

Sort of bad news: The Right thinks the Fannie-Freddie issue can be blamed on Democrats.

The good news is that John McCain’s campaign manager has been on Freddie Mac’s payroll from the end of 2005 until last month.

Bring it on, righties.

Update: The McCain campaign is slamming the New York Times for running the story about the campaign manager’s ties to Freddie Mac. Not true, says Michael Goldfarb. Freddie Mac did pay a monthly retainer of $15,000 to Rick Davis’s firm, Davis Manafort, but Davis himself did not take any of that money.

For the record, the New York Times story published a statement from the McCain campaign saying David is not receiving income from his company. The Times also said, however, that Davis “as a partner and equity-holder continues to benefit from its income.”

Goldfarb is having one major hissy fit and complaining that the New York Times has not published any nasty investigations into whatever nefarious things David Axelrod, Obama’s campaign manager, is into. Press bias!

David Isikoff at Newsweek is biased also, apparently.

See also John Cole.

Dead Skunk in the Middle of the Road

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Emptywheel:

Hidden in an article reporting that Cheney’s going to go hunt up some support for the $700,000,000,000 bailout is this admission that the Bush Administration has been sitting on it for some time:

    Fratto insisted that the plan was not slapped together and had been drawn up as a contingency over previous months and weeks by administration officials. He acknowledged lawmakers were getting only days to peruse it, but he said this should be enough. [my emphasis]

So, for months the Administration has been telling everyone they’ve got the financial situation under control, then all of a sudden Congress has to pass a $700 billion giveaway to the financial sector right now don’t think about it just do it now now now. And Congress is warned that if it doesn’t act now now now and pass this bill as the Administration wrote it with no changes there will be terrible consequences and they would be Congress’s fault. And Congress can’t take any time to read the bill, even though it’s been sitting around in Cheney’s desk drawer for months.

Uh huh.

Let’s Target “Stupid”

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Captain Ed says the rate of abortion in the U.S. has dropped again, according to the Los Angeles Times, citing an Alan Guttmacher report. However, the decline has been most dramatic among white women. The rate of abortion among African American women is 5 times that of whites, and among Latinas is 3 times that of whites.

Why? Some experts point to poverty and life stresses in general. Nah, says Captain Ed. These minorities are targeted for abortion services. By way of documentation, he quotes another guy who claims minorities are being targeted for abortion services. Well, that proves it then.

However, everyone’s a bit vague on exactly how minorities are being “targeted.” Are abortion clinics in minority neighborhoods handing out free toasters?

For perspective, see this Alan Guttmacher report of October 2007: “Abortion Declines Worldwide, Falls Most Where Abortion Is Broadly Legal.”

I’d like to repeat that last part — abortion rates fell most where abortion is broadly legal.

For every 1,000 women of childbearing age (15–44) worldwide, 29 were estimated to have had an induced abortion in 2003, compared with 35 in 1995. The decline was most substantial in Europe, where the rate fell from 48 to 28 abortions per 1,000 women, largely because of dramatic declines in Eastern Europe. On the whole, the abortion rate decreased more in developed countries, where abortion is generally safe and legal on broad grounds (from 39 to 26), than in developing countries, where the procedure is largely illegal and unsafe (from 34 to 29). Significantly, the abortion rate for 2003 was roughly equal in developed and developing regions—26 and 29, respectively—despite abortion being largely illegal in developing regions. Health consequences, however, vary greatly between the two regions, since abortion is generally safe where it is broadly legal and mostly unsafe where restricted. …

… The lowest abortion rate in the world in 2003 was for Western Europe (12 per 1,000 women aged 15–44), where contraceptive services and use are widespread and safe abortion is easily accessible and legal under broad grounds. The rate was 17 for Northern Europe and 21 for the Northern America region (Canada and the United States). Africa, Asia and Latin America had the highest regional abortion rates, even though abortion is generally legally restricted and often unsafe in those regions. Abortion rates in Africa, Asia, and Latin America and the Caribbean have declined since 1995, but the estimated number of abortions has increased in Africa because of the increasing number of women of reproductive age and a possible underestimate of abortions in 1995. Because the world’s population is concentrated in Asia, most abortions occurred there—about 26 million yearly; China alone accounted for nine million procedures.

To drive the point home, The uber-liberal, anything-goes Netherlands in 2007 had an abortion rate among residents of 8.6. The most recent data says the abortion rate for the U.S. is 20. It’s higher than that in most nations where abortion is illegal.

I remember reading a report that said abortion rates tend to be higher in cultures that are conservative and authoritarian and lower in cultures that are liberal and egalitarian. I can’t put my hands on that report now, but the stats do tend to bear that out. See also “Abortion in the Netherlands and the United States: Worlds Apart.”

Let’s go back to Captain Ed:

The most interesting aspect of this will be the effect it has on politicians who pay lip service to seeing fewer abortions while blocking any and all attempts to limit them. Will they cheer this drop in abortions, or will they claim that it proves that more intervention is needed to ensure “access”?

We can’t tell from the numbers if the fall in abortion rates in the U.S. is from anything the so-called “Right to Life” movement is doing or if it’s just part of the worldwide trend of falling abortion rates. However, what we see over and over again is that “blocking access” to abortion doesn’t stop abortion. If Captain Ed is serious about lowering abortion rates even further, he should help promote a more liberal culture that openly promotes contraceptive use and makes contraceptives easily obtainable by anyone who is sexually active.

On the other hand, if he wants to increase abortion rates, the way to go is to criminalize abortion to drive it underground, support “abstinence-only” sex ed in public schools, discourage contraceptive use and, even better, make contraceptives difficult for teenagers to obtain without parental permission or a court order. That should do it.

Finally, remember that the report says African American and Latina women have higher abortion rates than whites? I give you this Hot Air commenter: “Crime rate will greatly increase in about 15 yrs.”

In some quarters the stupid rate is already through the roof.

Is Anyone FOR the Bleeping Bailout?

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There seems to be nearly unanimous disapproval of Paulson’s $700 billion bailout, henceforth called “Plan B.”

The Wall Street Journal reports that “Liberal advocacy groups have mobilized to stop the financial bailout package, just as Bush administration officials are urging lawmakers to act quickly and decisively.” At Salon, Glenn Greenwald documents “Growing right-wing opposition to the Paulson plan.”

Righties opposed to Paulson include Little Lulu, who calls Paulson a “wrong-headed, ChiCom-promoting, liberal Democrat-installing, Gore global warming alarmist” (in keeping with Lulu’s understanding of political science — if she doesn’t like it, it must be liberal) and who wants a return to conservatives principles. Yes, I see the oxymoron, too.

One of Little Lulu’s readers responded to the question, “Will the real fiscal conservatives please stand up?” with “There aren’t any. Phil Gramm retired long ago.” They’re still willfully refusing to see that Phil Gramm and “conservative principles” caused the bloody mess to begin with. Oh, and a lot of Lulu’s readers seem to think illegal aliens are behind this, somehow.

But the point is that, wonder of wonders, the Right and the Left halves of the blogosphere are moving toward the same opinion, which is that Paulson’s plan must be stopped.

I’ve been surfing around for a respectable economist, i.e. one not on the Bush Administration’s or Republican Party’s payroll, who supports the plan. The only favorable comments I find are from last week, before details were announced. Now there is near unanimity among economists and finance experts that Plan B is a bad plan.

So, who’s for Plan B? Via Josh Marshall, the Wall Street Journal (behind firewall) says,

House Republican staffers met with roughly 15 lobbyists Friday afternoon, whose message to lawmakers was clear: Don’t load the legislation up with provisions not directly related to the crisis, or regulatory measures the industry has long opposed.

“We’re opposed to adding provisions that will affect [or] undermine the deal substantively,” said Scott Talbott, senior vice president of government affairs at the Financial Services Roundtable, whose members include the nation’s largest banks, securities firms and insurers.

A deal killer for the group: a proposal that would grant bankruptcy judges new powers to lower the principal, interest rate or both on a mortgage as part of a bankruptcy proceeding.

So, says Josh, “finance industry lobbyists are already giving orders to Republican hill staffers not to allow any meaningful reforms or protections for taxpayers. So, just the money. No strings attached.”

(Don’t tell Lulu about not lowering principal or interest rates on mortgages in bankruptcy, or she might change her mind about the evilness of the Plan. Sticking it to the poor and distressed is what righties live for. It makes them feel superior.)

Some things don’t change —

President Bush this morning warned lawmakers against trying to make too many changes to the proposed financial bailout legislation, but Senate Democrats announced that they would add provisions to the plan that could spur opposition from the administration or congressional Republicans and bog down the measure.

In Bush World, Congress is redundant.

Dan Froomkin:

Does President Bush’s support for a radical financial bailout represent a reversal in his political ideology? Not likely.

For one, it seems to be less a reversal than a recusal. Bush appears ideologically spent, rather than transformed. He has for all intents and purposes become the bystander-in-chief, letting others in his administration do the heavy lifting.

Furthermore, the plan concocted by two Bush appointees features some distinctive characteristics of major Bush initiatives past: It would be spectacularly expensive, primarily benefit the very rich, and grant the executive branch unlimited power with no transparency or accountability.

Explained that way, one would think righties would like it. They supported just about every other plan like that that the Bushies have come up with.

See also Sean-Paul Kelley.

Beyond Meltdown

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Paul Krugman’s column explains Henry Paulson’s $700 billion rescue plan for the U.S. financial system. The title of the column provides a hint of Krugman’s opinion — “Cash for Trash.”

Basically, after having spent a year and a half telling everyone that things were under control, the Bush administration says that the sky is falling, and that to save the world we have to do exactly what it says now now now.

Once again, the Bush Administration and right-wingers in Congress are using a crisis to shift more wealth to the extremely wealthy. “Plan B” will reward the people who got us into this mess with a penalty-free bailout. Taxpayers and America in general will be the poorer for it.

Is there any reason outside avarice and corruption that the feds are pursuing this course? A conservative blogger (whose analysis of the crisis is reasonably sane) says,

Of course the almost hysterical urgency is partially because the locks on the coffers change in January. If Obama wins, so will the tax code. The administration’s preferred version of the bailout would be one last Wall Street giveaway before higher taxes and a tougher regulatory environment.

In other words, if Obama wins they’ll no longer be guarding the henhouse, so they’re making off with as many chickens as they can carry while they still can.

Dems in Congress are making noises about help for homeowners and caps on top executive compensation. Will they once again get railroaded into doing what the administration wants? Sean-Paul Kelley says there is room for hope. Very little room, I say. I don’t see what the Dems could lose by sticking to principles, and there is much they could gain, but we’ve been here too many times before, haven’t we?

Elsewhere: You know we’re approaching the End of Days when Sam Donaldson, George Will and Cokie Roberts trash a Republican and praise a Democrat. WTF? you say. My guess is that this trio lost a whole lot of money this week and realized that if they don’t want to be wiped out entirely they do not want to put John McCain in charge of the economy. “John McCain showed his personality this week,” Will said, “and made some of us fearful.” I know the feeling.

Meanwhile, most of the Right Blogosphere remains oblivious to the details of the financial crisis and the atrocity the feds are about to commit to “fix” it. Rather than concern themselves with understanding the issues, they’ve gone into hyper-blame mode. Clif give us his version of the shorter Right Blogosphere: “[T]he reason for the current financial crisis is that the Community Reinvestment Act passed by the Democrats forced banks to lend money to a bunch of shiftless darkies who couldn’t repay their loans.”

My version of the shorter Right Blogosphere: “The elitist Left is behind this. We hates them. We hates them, precious.”

Nothing much else to do but laugh.

Reverting to Type

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More information about the feds response to the financial crisis has been released, and Paul Krugman says it’s a bad plan (emphasis added).

Here’s the thing: historically, financial system rescues have involved seizing the troubled institutions and guaranteeing their debts; only after that did the government try to repackage and sell their assets. The feds took over S&Ls first, protecting their depositors, then transferred their bad assets to the RTC. The Swedes took over troubled banks, again protecting their depositors, before transferring their assets to their equivalent institutions.

The Treasury plan, by contrast, looks like an attempt to restore confidence in the financial system — that is, convince creditors of troubled institutions that everything’s OK — simply by buying assets off these institutions. This will only work if the prices Treasury pays are much higher than current market prices; that, in turn, can only be true either if this is mainly a liquidity problem — which seems doubtful — or if Treasury is going to be paying a huge premium, in effect throwing taxpayers’ money at the financial world.

And there’s no quid pro quo here — nothing that gives taxpayers a stake in the upside, nothing that ensures that the money is used to stabilize the system rather than reward the undeserving.

Sebastian Mallaby:

With truly extraordinary speed, opinion has swung behind the radical idea that the government should commit hundreds of billions in taxpayer money to purchasing dud loans from banks that aren’t actually insolvent. As recently as a week ago, no public official had even mentioned this option. Now the Treasury, the Fed and congressional leaders are promising its enactment within days. The scheme has gone from invisibility to inevitability in the blink of an eye. This is extremely dangerous.

The plan is being marketed under false pretenses. Supporters have invoked the shining success of the Resolution Trust Corporation as justification and precedent. But the RTC, which was created in 1989 to clean up the wreckage of the savings-and-loan crisis, bears little resemblance to what is being contemplated now. The RTC collected and eventually sold off loans made by thrifts that had gone bust. The administration proposes to buy up bad loans before the lenders go bust. This difference raises several questions.

You can read the rest of the column for the questions.

As I understand it, the economic pundit guys had thought the feds would come up with a plan by which the taxpayers would get some value back eventually. Plan B pretty much guarantees we won’t. And why do I think the White House is pushing Plan B with all it’s got?

Speaking of which: The White House released a statement on “The Administration’s Unheeded Warnings About the Systemic Risk Posed by the GSEs [government-sponsored enterprises].” The Administration wants us to know that it saw the financial crisis coming. Yes, and we all appreciate the visible, robust and tireless efforts of President Bush to prevent the financial crisis … oh, wait …

I dimly remember that last Wednesday, John McCain blamed the financial crisis on overcompensated executives and their “golden parachutes.” The Dems tried to inject some language about compensation caps into Plan B, and Treasury Secretary Paulson rejected it as a “poison pill.” Let’s see if McCain has anything to say about that.

Some Dems also are trying to get some help for homeowners into Plan B. I’m not holding my breath.

Finally, if anyone wants to reflect on whatever Jeff G. is ranting about here, be my guest. It looks as if his hatred and resentment of all things “progressive” is overriding any concern he might have for, you know, the financial crisis, which somehow must be liberals’ fault.

Update: Sorry, I left out the link to Jeff G.

Quote of the Decade, and Other Stuff

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From an article written by John McCain and published in the current issue of the journal of the American Academy of Actuaries:

Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation.

I’m starting to look forward to the debates.

At Salon, Joe Conason writes,

Now that we’re all about to take on hundreds of billions or perhaps a trillion dollars in new public debt to redeem the nation’s super-smart corporate financiers, there is one thing I hope we can expect in addition to postponing the apocalypse. Will they all please shut up about the wonders of the unfettered free market and the horrors of big government?

The die-hards will not shut up, of course. I just dropped by Lew Rockwell to see if there were any lights in the attic. Nope. They will all go to their graves believing that free markets solve everything.

Going by Memeorandum, right-wing bloggers aren’t saying much about the financial crisis. Today the leftie blogs are all over it. The top three concerns of rightie blogs are (1) Charlie Rangel said something nasty about Sarah Palin; (2) Sandra Bernhard said something nasty about Sarah Palin (she’s a standup comic, people! that’s what they do); (3) liberals hate God.

Yesterday there was some shrieking from the righties about the bailouts and how taxpayers (i.e., them) are getting soaked. There was not a glimmer of recognition from any of them that they had anything to do with what caused the financial crisis. They sounded like juveniles who had a party that trashed their parents’ house, and now Mom and Dad are telling them they have to clean it up and do without an allowance. Poor babies.

Speaking of Sarah Palin — Kos posts Palin’s favorability trajectory. Enjoy.

Democrats are better for the economy than Republicans. The record is clear. I especially liked …

The Ranking of the Last 13 Presidents by Job Creation (as of 2002)

1) Roosevelt (1933-45): +5.3%

2) Johnson (1963-69): +3.8%

3) Carter (1977-81): +3.1%

4) Truman: (1945-53): +2.5%

5) Kennedy (1961-63): +2.5%

6) Clinton (1993-2001): +2.4%

7) Nixon (1969-75): +2.2%

8) Reagan (1981-89): +2.1%

9) Ford (1975-77): +1.1%

10) Eisenhower (1953-61): +0.9%

11) Bush (1989-93): +0.6%

12) Bush (2001-present): -0.7%

13) Hoover (1929-33): -9.0%

Looks like a pattern to me.

The Last Vacation

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By now it’s obvious that George W. Bush, who never quite got the hang of his POTUS job, or what a job is for that matter, can barely be bothered to go through the motions. He had to be pried out of the White House yesterday to deliver two minutes of platitudes about the financial crisis, an appearance Chris Matthews compared to a cuckoo popping out of a clock.

BTW, this is how a real president speaks to the nation about a financial crisis.

Things Are Being Done, but there’s grumbling that they aren’t the right things. I think we’re seeing a lot of fingers poking into a lot of holes in the dyke.

John McCain’s response so far has been so bone-headed that even Sebastian Mallaby is shocked.

John McCain has just demonstrated his vulnerability as a presidential candidate. Speaking from prepared remarks at an Iowa rally today, he said that he would fire Chris Cox, the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. This outburst demonstrates McCain’s ignorance, his impetuousness and his vindictive streak. Not bad for one remark. …

…McCain is a loner rather than a team player. He is a political brawler rather than a manager. The financial turmoil is raising questions about how he’d perform in a crisis.

Are you watching this, America?

Obama’s response:

The Illinois senator said he would be discussing the Fed-Treasury proposal with his top economic advisers on Friday morning. Among those who have been advising Obama on his response to the financial crisis are former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker and former U.S. Treasury secretaries Lawrence Summers and Robert Rubin.

“Given the gravity of this situation, and based on conversations I have had with both Secretary Paulson and Chairman Bernanke, I have asked my economic team to refrain from presenting a more detailed blue-print of how an immediate plan might be structured until the Treasury and the Federal Reserve have had an opportunity to present their proposal.”

Obama said it was critical that the markets and public have confidence in the Fed and Treasury’s efforts and that their work be “unimpeded by partisan wrangling.”

There’s a lot more to this statement; read at the link.

McCain’s surrogates on the cable television politics shows: “Taxes liberal taxes liberal boogaboogaboogabooga.”

McCain campaign: Barack Obama is black and will steal money from your sweet white grandmother.

Help.

Related links:

Sean-Paul Kelley, “The Day Capitalism Died”

Joseph Stiglitz, “The Fruit of Hypocrisy”

Paul Krugman, “Crisis Endgame”

Eugene Robinson, “Failing Econ 101”

Update: Why Lehman Brothers crashed.

Now Running in Michigan

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More like this, please.

McCain also has a new ad out, which you can view here. I did watch it this morning. It mostly consists of photos of Obama with the word “TAXES” across his face and a long, dark shadow of something that might be the Capitol Building. The voiceover is something like “Taxes. More taxes. Evil Taxes. Evil flesh-eating taxes. Evil flesh-eating taxes that are hiding under your bed with the bogyman and gonna GETCHA.”

That’s how I remember it, anyway.

Meanwhile, Joe Biden made the reasonable observation that for upper-income people, paying taxes is patriotic. I have to link to the AP again, sorry —

Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Biden said Thursday that paying more in taxes is the patriotic thing to do for wealthier Americans. In a new TV ad that repeats widely debunked claims about the Democratic tax plan, the Republican campaign calls Obama’s tax increases “painful.”

Under the economic plan proposed by Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, people earning more than $250,000 a year would pay more in taxes while those earning less — the vast majority of American taxpayers — would receive a tax cut.

Although Republican John McCain claims that Obama would raise taxes, the independent Tax Policy Center and other groups conclude that four out of five U.S. households would receive tax cuts under Obama’s proposals.

Again, we see the startling new movement among journalists to do, um, journalism, and provide actual information. It’s been a while.

Anyway, Biden’s connection of taxes with patriotism has inspired many snorts and hoots of derision from the Right. Give money to the government? Puh-leeze.

Let’s see — They want a strong military and they want to run the military into the ground in the Middle East, but they won’t volunteer to fight — better things to do, you know — and they don’t want to pay for the war but instead want to continue to borrow money from China and cripple their children with debt.

Sing along —

Wing-nuts, yeah
What are they good for
Absolutely nothing
Uh-huh
Wing-nuts, yeah
What are they good for
Absolutely nothing
Say it again, y’all

Wing-nuts, good God
What are they good for
Absolutely nothing
Listen to me

Etc. They’re parasites, I say.

McCain Can’t See Spain From His House

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Somebody pass this on to John McCain —

McCain confuses Spain with Mexico and seems to think the prime minister of Spain is a Latin American guerrilla. Early stage Alzheimer’s, I’m sayin’.

Or, McCain in Spain has fuzzies in the brain.

Update: Several hours behind the blogs, the professional press catches up.

Time, “The Pain in Spain Falls Mainly on McCain”

Washington Post, The Trail, “McCain Slights Spanish Prime Minister” Boring head.

The Guardian, Thursday memo: Barack’s back (Subhead: McCain’s Spain brain-pain)