Personal Observations About Last Night’s Debate
1. McCain never looked at Obama. So much for being someone who can work across the aisle. Or maybe he’s just deaf in his left ear and wasn’t really sure of the format of the debate?
2. Each one of McCain’s answer’s was tied to Obama. So much for being a break-away maverick.
3. One of McCain’s snarky comments was something along the lines of “wait ’til you hear what (Obama’s) definition of ‘rich’ is.”
Yes, let’s look at this one. This is one of my biggest beefs with McCain and Republicans in general.
The Obamas earned somewhere around $250,000 last year, mostly due to the sale of Obama’s books (as in, he earned it).
The McCains? Their combined net worth is somewhere around $100 million. If you’re like me, $200,000 sounds like a lot… until you think about $100 MILLION.
So when McCain was asked HIS definition of “rich”, he said $5 million.
Obama’s tax plan includes cutting taxes for almost all Americans, but raising taxes on people making over $250,000 a year.
McCain’s tax plan will cut everyone’s taxes BUT, for average Americans like me, he’ll cut my taxes by muh less than Obama would because he reserves his most significant tax breaks for the wealthy.
All this being said, how many people are “rich”?
American wages
Percentages of U.S. households below certain income levels:
* Under $10,000: 7.5%
* Under $20,000: 19.3%
* Under $30,000: 31.0%
* Under $40,000: 41.9%
* Under $50,000: 51.4%
* Under $60,000: 59.6%
* Under $70,000: 66.4%
* Under $80,000: 72.3%
* Under $90,000: 77.0%
* Under $100,000: 80.9%
* Under $150,000: 92.4%
* Under $200,000: 96.5%
* Under $250,000: 98.1%
So, ALMOST ALL AMERICANS EARN LESS THAN $250,000/year. This doesn’t surprise me. Does it surprise you?
So, it seems that Obama’s definition of rich isn’t that far off. But I bet you dollars to donuts most of McCain’s friends and cronies are in that bracket and that’s why, during the debate, he was trying to goad Obama into admitting this definition of rich. McCain is far enough out of touch with the American people that he thinks Obama’s definition of rich includes many more Americans than it actually does.
Again: John McCain and wife Sally (just kidding. Considering I have yet to hear her speak, it doesn’t really matter to me what her name is) are MILLIONAIRES. They own SEVEN HOUSES and THIRTEEN CARS. He thinks it’s a joke that anyone earning over $250,000 a year is considered RICH. So tell me: who really believes that John McCain is thinking about THEM??
Go, Harry!
Reid: “We have Sen. Bennett who is a high-ranking Republican Senator standing before all of you saying, ‘We’ve got a deal in principle. All we have to do is put it down in writing and this is almost over with.’ And then Guess Who came to town, and that completely fell apart.
…people who constructively engaged in the process were castigated in the Republican Caucus by people who aren’t here a lot, at least a person who isn’t here a lot of time…”
Embedded video from CNN Video
Palin: The U.S. Should Never Second-Guess Israel
Embedded video from CNN Video
Washington says “Thanks, but No Thanks” to McCain
Is it just me or did McCain’s idea to suspend his campaign and head to Washington end up making him look like a loser?
First of all, HOW LONG has it been since you’ve been in Senate, Mr. McCain? I applaud your idea to help, but having been out of the recent work and discussions among your fellow senators, isn’t it a TAD presumptuous to imply they need you?
Some fellow lawmakers said McCain hasn’t contributed much to the financial debate, and senior campaign advisers told CNN they believed it was politically crucial that McCain show up at the debate in Oxford, Mississippi.
A senior adviser to McCain agreed that McCain seemed to be hindering the negotiating process rather than helping it: “We understand that what we need to do is get McCain out of here, get him out of town, because the minute that McCain is somebody seen as brokering this, that’s going to kill it.”
Also, it seemed to me that McCain hadn’t even gotten off the plane before senators announced they had reached an agreement. HA!
Alarming new conservative talking point: blame it on black people
This post was written by my husband. It’s GENIUS in its proposed responses.
There is a new conservative meme out there trying to explain the financial meltdown on, get this… black folks.
Yes, you read that correctly. The poorest segment of the American population has apparently outwitted America’s great financial institutions, and took them for all their worth.
This is the new talking point initiated by Neil Cavuto at Faux News. A few days ago, he suggested that giving home mortgages to minorities was the underlying problem. Since the same argument was parroted by both Laura Ingram and John Stossel this evening, discussed at length by the ultra-conservative Investor’s Business Daily, and traceable to a Cato Institute rag from January 2008, I thought I ought to look into the matter a bit.
The argument suggests that the Community Reinvestment Act (first passed in 1977, and strengthened in 1995) is responsible for much of the crisis because it supposed “empowered banking regulators to punish banks which do not lend to the poor and minorities at the level that Obama’s fellow community organizers would like.” Banks were thus given “numerical quotas,” which made our powerful financial corporations quake in their boots. Oh no, Big Gummit is comin’ to town. And so, the argument goes, “loans started being made on the basis of race, and often little else”
(Pause for laughter and ridicule.)
What was the result? According to conservatives, them minorities just jumped into the market and diluted all our good mortgages with their own bad juju. Since those ingrates refuse to pay back their loans, good white folk are left high and dry.
Here are a few useful and brief responses:
1) “Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha haaaaaaaa! What a joke. Oh my god, you CAN’T be serious!”
2) “Black folks owned 9% of the homes in 1994. Eleven years later, they owned the exact same percentage. So there really wasn’t any huge racial disparity. And if there wasn’t a huge racial disparity, you can’t really blame blacks can you? Sorry, no.”
3) “Of the subprime loans, only 20% were connected with the Community Revitalization Agency. In other words, 80% of these ‘bad’ loans had little to no connection to the agency you said caused this thing. Now don’t you feel silly?”
4) “If risky loans were a problem, why did Bush change FHA rules in 2005 to allow the government to provide federally-backed, zero-money-down loans for the first time ever? Man, that would have been exceedingly dumb.”
5) “The loans themselves aen’t the problem; the problem is what happened after the loans were made. Thanks to new rules, loans were swapped and resold dozens of times over, and that’s how $1 trillion in subprime loans become a $40 trillion house of cards.”
6) “The financial industry earned $3.5 trillion in profits from 1995 to 2007, yet now cry about $2 billion in potentially-bad loans. Since all those profits went in their pockets, shouldn’t the bailout come from the same place?”
Oh, those crazy Republicans. They sure know how to divert attention, play on racial stereotypes, and stick their snouts into the public trough, don’t they? They’ll tell you that the market is king and government should stay out of it, but when those salad days end, they’re first in line for a handout. Instead of “trickle down” economics, we just get to “trickle up” our tax dollars.And then magically, the government should just stay out of the market again.
I say no! No to the Wall Street bailout, and yes to helping borrowers and ordinary folks as needed. We really don’t need to pay the fat cats first, or listen to claptrap about deregulation. Greed can be both helpful and doleful, which is why regulations are essential for a well-ordered market that serves society.
Palin’s foreign policy experience adds up to the same as every other Alaskan citizen
I’m not here to argue the fact of Alaska’s geography: “Alaska has a very narrow maritime border between a foreign country, Russia, and on our other side, the land boundary that we have with Canada”. But I am pretty sure if Pootin (her pronounciation, not mine) flew over Alaska, the Governor would tell someone to call Washington.
McCain lied about opponent’s top donors
The statement:
Barack Obama got more campaign contributions from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac “than any other member of Congress, except for the Democratic chairmen of the committee that oversees them.”
John McCain on Friday, September 19th, 2008 in Green Bay, Wis.
The facts:
Corporations cannot give to candidates. Instead, the Center for Responsive Politics compiled a list of which political leaders received the most money from employees of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
Obama is No. 2 on the list, with $126,349, right after Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, who had $165,400.
But, remember, these are contributions made by the employees (and their families) of these companies.
The New York Times looked at contributions from Fannie and Freddie’s boards of directors and lobbyists, who are technically not employees. That analysis found Fannie and Freddie-related contributors gave $169,000 to John McCain and his related committees, compared with $16,000 to Obama and his related committees.
McCain would apply deregulation to healthcare
Yes, John McCain actually said this:
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.
McCain thinks deregulating the health insurance industry will be great just like it was for the deregulation of the banking industry. The “we” he refers to would include his economic adviser who called us a nation of whiners, Phil Gramm. This article was just published in the Sept./Oct. issue of Contingencies, the magazine of the American Academy of Actuaries. Here’s the pdf.
Vote for McCain and Prepare for the Economic Downfall of the U.S.
Not only does McCain know nothing about the economy, he is being advised by lobbyists for the companies requesting bailouts* (*see below). His fundraiser, Carly Fiorina, admitted he isn’t qualified to run a company (let alone the U.S. economy!). But wait!–there’s more!
- on the day before the Federal Reserve System bailed out American Insurance Group with an $85 billion loan, McCain insisted that taxpayers’ money should not be used to rescue AIG. The next day, he said it was appropriate to protect the millions of Americans who have insurance policies and accounts at AIG.
- On Thursday, the Arizona senator said he would “fire” Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Chris Cox. However, while the president nominates and the Senate confirms the SEC chair, a commissioner of an independent regulatory commission cannot be removed by the president. Trying to recover the next day, McCain confused the SEC with the FEC, the Federal Election Commission. “I believe that the chairman of the FEC should resign and leave office and be replaced,” McCain said Friday during a speech to the Green Bay Chamber of Commerce, a verbal goof immediately posted on YouTube.
- The most damaging gaffe came Sept. 15, when McCain said “the fundamentals of our economy are strong,” which was a hard sell because it occurred on the same day that venerable firms Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch were collapsing.
- He forgot how many houses he owns.
- He owns 13 cars.
“The question is who in this crisis looked more presidential, calm and unflustered. It wasn’t John McCain,” ABC News’ Sam Donaldson said Sunday on “This Week With George Stephanopoulos.”
“His talking points have gotten all mixed up and I think the question of age is back on the table,” Donaldson said. McCain is 72.
*John Green, the senator’s chief liaison to Congress, and Wayne Berman, his national finance co-chairman, billed more than $720,000 in lobbying fees from 2005 through last year to Ameriquest Mortgage through their lobbying firm, disclosure forms reviewed by the Daily News show.
Ameriquest, which since has been bought out, was forced to settle suits with 49 states for $325 million. More than 13,680 New York homeowners got taken for a ride by the company, records show.
“They would be defined as the most blatant and aggressive predatory lenders out of everybody,” said Bruce Marks, head of the nonprofit Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America.
But the migration of Green and Berman to McCain’s campaign comes as the Arizona senator faces criticism on other fronts for aligning himself with lobbyists, whom McCain often derides – but relies upon to staff his campaign.
They include McCain campaign manager Rick Davis, a former telecommunications lobbyist, as well as Thomas Loeffler, McCain’s national finance co-chairman, who recently helped Europe’s Airbus consortium land a deal for Air Force tankers.
McCain on the economy
Well, I guess we can toss aside the notion that John McCain is going to reinvent himself as a support of tough new regulations, because on 60 Minutes last night he defended deregulating Wall Street as “helpful to the growth of our economy.”
PELLEY: In 1999 you were one of the senators who helped pass deregulation of Wall Street. Do you regret that now?
McCAIN: No, I think the deregulation was probably helpful to the growth of our economy.
