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.
Out of Touch: McCain has 13 (THIRTEEN!) cars
Report: McCain Has 13 Cars, Obama 1
Email
ShareABC News’ Tahman Bradley Reports: After the brouhaha over Sen. John McCain’s struggle to recall how many houses he owns, Newsweek wondered how many cars might be parked at the presidential candidate’s multiple homes.
The weekly newsmagazine checked vehicle registration records for both McCain and Sen. Barack Obama and found that when you include the candidates’ spouses, McCain owns 13 cars, Obama 1.
McCain has a 2004 Cadillac CTS, a 2007 half-ton Ford pickup truck, a 1960 Willys Jeep, a 2008 Jeep Wranger among other American cars. He’s got a few foreign vehicles in his fleet as well, owning a 2005 Volkswagen convertible and a 2001 Honda sedan.
The only vehicle registered in Obama’s name is a 2008 Ford Escape hybrid.
McCain’s wife, Cindy, an heiress to a beer distribution company, has her name on 11 vehicles but actually only drives one car – a Lexus with the personal plates MS BUD.
Read the Newsweek HERE.
John McCain is too dumb to pull this country out of its financial mess
He graduated 894th out of 899 in his class at the Naval Academy.
He’s admitted he doesn’t know much about economics.
The other day he declared “the fundamentals of our economy are strong.”
Lobbyists for all of the financial institutions that have recently failed or been bought or bailed out are McCain’s top advisors.
He doesn’t think more regulations are required to fix America’s financial mess.
Phil Gramm, who worked in favor of DEregulation and said that all the Americans feeling the crunch were a “bunch of whiners”, is also a top McCain advisor.
Palin: Anti-Abortion even in cases of rape or incest
I get being anti-abortion–no one is PRO-abortion. I do not get thinking the government should make that decision. Abortion will happen even if it’s illegal–as a civilized country, we should make sure it’s safe and legal.
Most anti-choice people will admit that there need to be exceptions for cases when the mother’s life is in danger or a woman has been raped. Not Sarah Palin! If you’re raped, she thinks you should be denied the right to a safe and legal abortion:
Under Palin’s Administration, “Life Begins at Rape”
I do realize there is a lot of speculation surrounding the allegation that Palin, as Mayor of Wasilla, ended the city paying for rape kits because they contained emergency contraception. (See article here)
But the FACTS are:
1. her budget CUT the funds previously allocated to paying for rape kits
2. she is staunchly against legal and safe abortions
Can you even IMAGINE being a rape victim, being swabbed, then being sent a bill for $500-$1,200?
But it gets even better. As [DailyKos's] DemocraticLuntz has reported, the McCain campaign’s answer to troopergate is that Palin fired Monegan not because of personal reasons relating to state trooper and former Palin brother-in-law Mike Wooten, but because Monegan lobbied Congress for an earmark that Palin didn’t request or approve of. And what was that earmark?
The McCain campaign says it can prove Monegan was fired in July because of insubordination on budget issues
…
The “last straw,” the campaign said, was a trip Monegan planned to Washington in July to seek federal money for investigating and prosecuting sexual assault cases.
See, also: Alaska: rape capital of America
The things you learn these days. So it turns out that Alaska is the forcible rape capital of the United States, by some distance in fact, with 76 instances per 100,000 inhabitants. The state-by-state list from the FBI is here.
So today ABCNews.com moves a piece by Justin Rood reporting that the Palin administration has done very little about this. The governor did increase funding for victim assistance by 2% this year. But a larger and much more comprehensive anti-rape effort put together by the state’s Department of Public Safety stalled when it reached the governor’s office last summer.
Why? Because Palin famously didn’t like the man who headed the department.
McCain: 19th Century Goals
Op-Ed Columnist
Making America Stupid
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: September 13, 2008
Imagine for a minute that attending the Republican convention in St. Paul, sitting in a skybox overlooking the convention floor, were observers from Russia, Iran and Venezuela. And imagine for a minute what these observers would have been doing when Rudy Giuliani led the delegates in a chant of “drill, baby, drill!”
I’ll tell you what they would have been doing: the Russian, Iranian and Venezuelan observers would have been up out of their seats, exchanging high-fives and joining in the chant louder than anyone in the hall — “Yes! Yes! Drill, America, drill!” — because an America that is focused first and foremost on drilling for oil is an America more focused on feeding its oil habit than kicking it.
Why would Republicans, the party of business, want to focus our country on breathing life into a 19th-century technology — fossil fuels — rather than giving birth to a 21st-century technology — renewable energy? As I have argued before, it reminds me of someone who, on the eve of the I.T. revolution — on the eve of PCs and the Internet — is pounding the table for America to make more I.B.M. typewriters and carbon paper. “Typewriters, baby, typewriters.”
Of course, we’re going to need oil for many years, but instead of exalting that — with “drill, baby, drill” — why not throw all our energy into innovating a whole new industry of clean power with the mantra “invent, baby, invent?” That is what a party committed to “change” would really be doing. As they say in Texas: “If all you ever do is all you’ve ever done, then all you’ll ever get is all you ever got.”
I dwell on this issue because it is symbolic of the campaign that John McCain has decided to run. It’s a campaign now built on turning everything possible into a cultural wedge issue — including even energy policy, no matter how stupid it makes the voters and no matter how much it might weaken America.
I respected McCain’s willingness to support the troop surge in Iraq, even if it was going to cost him the Republican nomination. Now the same guy, who would not sell his soul to win his party’s nomination, is ready to sell every piece of his soul to win the presidency.
In order to disguise the fact that the core of his campaign is to continue the same Bush policies that have led 80 percent of the country to conclude we’re on the wrong track, McCain has decided to play the culture-war card. Obama may be a bit professorial, but at least he is trying to unite the country to face the real issues rather than divide us over cultural differences.
A Washington Post editorial on Thursday put it well: “On a day when the Congressional Budget Office warned of looming deficits and a grim economic outlook, when the stock market faltered even in the wake of the government’s rescue of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, when President Bush discussed the road ahead in Iraq and Afghanistan, on what did the campaign of Senator John McCain spend its energy? A conference call to denounce Senator Barack Obama for using the phrase ‘lipstick on a pig’ and a new television ad accusing the Democrat of wanting to teach kindergartners about sex before they learn to read.”
Some McCain supporters criticize Obama for not having the steel in his belly to use force in the dangerous world we live in today. Well I know this: In order to use force, you have to have force. In order to exercise leverage, you have to have leverage.
I don’t know how much steel is in Obama’s belly, but I do know that the issues he is focusing on in this campaign — improving education and health care, dealing with the deficit and forging a real energy policy based on building a whole new energy infrastructure — are the only way we can put steel back into America’s spine. McCain, alas, has abandoned those issues for the culture-war strategy.
Who cares how much steel John McCain has in his gut when the steel that today holds up our bridges, railroads, nuclear reactors and other infrastructure is rusting? McCain talks about how he would build dozens of nuclear power plants. Oh, really? They go for $10 billion a pop. Where is the money going to come from? From lowering taxes? From banning abortions? From borrowing more from China? From having Sarah Palin “reform” Washington — as if she has any more clue how to do that than the first 100 names in the D.C. phonebook?
Sorry, but there is no sustainable political/military power without economic power, and talking about one without the other is nonsense. Unless we make America the country most able to innovate, compete and win in the age of globalization, our leverage in the world will continue to slowly erode. Those are the issues this election needs to be about, because that is what the next four years need to be about.
There is no strong leader without a strong country. And posing as one, to use the current vernacular, is nothing more than putting lipstick on a pig.
McCain: Not Exactly a Listener
Here’s a clip of McCain refusing to answer a reporter’s question:
