The Alaskan Anchor Around McCain’s Neck

John McCain’s blunder, also known as his veep running mate, Sarah Palin, is dragging the Old Geezer down, quite possibly permanently. The Alaska governor hasn’t travelled well (as the wine folk say) and the more Americans have come to know her the less they see to like.

The latest New York Times/CBS News poll found 59% of respondents now consider Sarah Palin unfit to serve as vice-president. That’s not good news with the election just six days away.

“In a possible indication that the choice of Ms. Palin has hurt Mr. McCain’s image, voters said that they had much more confidence in Mr. Obama to pick qualified people to serve in his administration than they did in Mr. McCain.

“The survey suggested that the historic candidacy of Mr. Obama, who would be the first African-American president if elected, has changed some perceptions of race in America. Nearly two-thirds of those polled said that white and black people have an equal chance of getting ahead in today’s society, up from the half who said that they thought so in July. And while 14 percent still said that most people they know would not vote for a black presidential candidate, a question pollsters often ask to try to gauge bias, the number has dropped considerably since the campaign began. “

You know, he might just smash his way through the racist vote and actually win this thing.

 

And If He Doesn’t Win?

If Barack Obama doesn’t win next Tuesday, I’ll be okay with that. I’ll take it for what it is and, to me, that’s at least another eight to twelve years in darkness. America and the world will have a president who’s lost his marbles and a veep who was never very heavy on that score to begin with.

We, as in all of us, haven’t got an awful lot of time left to see some traction on the really pressing issues of the day and you can be damned sure that the “drill, baby, drill” camp isn’t going to make anything happen. Whatever cojones McCain had going into this campaign are now neatly preserved in the same jar as the cojones of the pre-Palin mayor of Wassila and the pre-Palin governor of Alaska, both of whom learned the hard way the lesson about keeping your friends close and your enemies closer.

I believe that our planet absolutely needs progressive leadership in Washington of a very high order. We, the world, need America fully engaged in the pressing issues of the day, all of them, not one here and one there. We face critical security issues. We face critical environmental issues, a lot of them and not limited to just global warming. We face critical energy issues. We face critical population issues and critical food supply issues. We face critical economic and social issues.

We face such an array of issues, all of them critical, all demanding effective response, that it would make any leader’s head spin if they were tackled individually. But they’re all to some degree, often to a remarkably large degree, interrelated and in that may just lie the answer.

Precisely because there’s so much overlap, such a degree of commonality and interrelation in these problems, it may be possible to define a set of core principles to guide the resolution of each in a manner that is coherent, complimentary and even synergistic to all the others. In other words, if we have a solution to problem “A”, the answer to problem “B” may be sufficiently similar in principle as to be mutually reinforcing with the “A” answer. The operative word there is, of course, “principle.”

One of the main reasons we’ve landed ourselves in this mess is our reluctance during the “greed is good” era to accept principles of broad, even mass application to guide us not just for a year or two but for decades, generations even. That’s precisely how we now find ourselves beset on all sides by generational problems, challenges for which effective responses will have to be generational in scope.

Let me explain. In much of the world we’ve fished out the oceans. We have so overfished as to bring stocks to exhaustion, in some cases to the verge of extinction. It’s a problem of enormous proportions that impacts adversely on other problems we’re facing and it admits of just two responses. One option is to do nothing which will pretty much complete the devastation now so far advanced. The other option is to enact policies to sharply limit our predation of endangered stocks and permit their recovery. That just doesn’t happen in a few years or even in a decade. It’s a generational challenge that’s chock full of problems and pitfalls that will have to be overcome.

We need policies that acknowledge the problem and identify the resolution, the objective to be achieved. From that can flow a series of principles that will, for generations, shape policy and the inevitable changes in policy that occur over time. Principles that encompass both adaptive and remedial measures.

We might prefer a steak or chicken, but large swathes of the world are utterly dependent on fish as their source of protein. Unless you want them camping in your backyard, you have to recognize their needs, their reality and make it part of your own. We have to find ways to get more fish to these people and there’s a lot we can do right now. We can stop enormously destructive bottom trawls. We can begin to tackle the by-catch problem. It’s no longer acceptable to rely on fishery techniques that waste a ton of fish in order to catch a hundred pounds of an allowable species.

Look at the arms races underway right now – in China, in India, Russia and America. Do we really think that China and India can’t find a better use for the resources they’re pouring into new submarines, aircraft carriers, combat aircraft, nuclear weaponry and missiles? Do we really think that advancing our interests by setting countries up as strategic, military rivals is somehow going to enhance our ability to get the essential cooperation we need from them on challenges such as overpopulation and global warming? Are we mad? Did we learn nothing from the past half century about the risks, dangers and profligate waste of resources inevitable in arms races and cold wars?

What about Islamist extremism? Is it better to just keep swatting away at something we’re not going to defeat or, instead, to find out what’s driving moderate Muslims to give the extremists the support without which they cannot function? Why do we support oppressive, undemocratic regimes like Mubarak’s in Egypt that drive moderates in frustration into the arms of their only alternative, the Islamists? Are we stupid? Do we not want to solve this problem or at least shrink it where we can? What do we get out of it by not yanking the rug out from beneath the feet of terrorists? Believe it or not, there is an answer to that.

It’s pretty clear to me that we have to resuscitate some of the values our great grandparents understood, values that somehow got discarded as quaint and ridiculous. Foremost among them is posterity, shaping the world today for the benefit of generations to follow. We’ve done an astonishing job at making the future worse, wouldn’t it be grand (my long-departed granny’s favourite word) if we focused instead on making the future better, of at least undoing some of the damage we’ve bequeathed to those generations to come?

I sure hope Obama wins on Tuesday and I sure hope that he is the leader that America, and the world, so badly need right now.

 

Obama Would-Be Assassins Nabbed

I guess it’s begun.

Agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms have arrested two Tennessee men alleged to be plotting to assassinate Barack Obama. From Reuters:

Law enforcement arrested two men in Tennessee who had plans to rob a gun dealer to shoot Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama and “as many non-Caucasians” as possible, an official said on Monday.

An official from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives said police found the men in the Jackson, Tennessee area with a number of guns, including a sawed-off shotgun, in their car.

“They wanted to go to a place where they could shoot as many non-Caucasian as they could,” the official said, noting that the men first planned to rob a gun dealer. “They also had a plot to assassinate Sen. Obama.”

 

Powell: Obama, "Transformational "- McCain, "Over the Top"

Retired 4-star general, former Republican Secretary of State Colin Powell has endorsed Barack Obama as president of the United States.

From The New York Times:

Powell, “endorsed Senator Barack Obama for president on Sunday morning as a candidate who was reaching out in a “more diverse and inclusive way across our society” and offering a “calm, patient, intellectual, steady approach” to the nation’s problems.”

While Powell has been a friend and advisor to McCain for decades, he criticized the McCain campaign’s attempts to smear Obama for his passing acquaintance with William Ayers. “I thought that was over the top,” Mr. Powell told reporters. “It was beyond just good political fighting back and forth.”

Powell added that McCain would simply be a new face pasted on the “orthodoxy of the Republican agenda.”

I suspect we’re beginning to see the Republican Party undergo a healthy re-alignment with the moderates – Powell, Chuck Hagel, even the Chicago Tribune, rejecting the neo-conservative movement of Bush/Cheney now embraced by John McCain. Sounds like they want their party back. They’re drawing a line in the sand, telling the neo-cons that they would prefer to back a Dem than allow their party to languish in the far right of extremism. I wonder when progressive Conservatives will catch on.

 

The Republican Spectacle

To Americans who watched last night’s third and final McCain/Obama debate, it seems the Illionois senator made it 3-0 over “Crash” McCain.

From what I saw of it, McCain was certainly at his best for a while until he lapsed back into default mode – frantic anger. The double whammy for McCain is that, when you get angry and you’re that old, you come away looking like the scary old man who sits in his rocker on the porch yelling at the kids playing in the street. McCain’s age really makes him look like an Old Geezer, furious but really wobbly, or, as Obama would call him, “erratic.”

Republican pundits who were able to overlook the Geezer factor may have been right when they claimed that McCain won the debate on points but that’s sort of like saying, “Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?”

McCain was clearly out to provoke an “angry black man” response from Obama. A racist ploy? Hell yes. But it didn’t work. Obama didn’t go for it and, in that, showed himself presidential while McCain showed himself the Old Geezer that he is.

Another thing that became apparent in the second debate and was utterly proven last night is that McCain isn’t up to a 90-minute intellectual battle. He’s fair enough for the first 30-minutes. After that he runs out of steam and reverts to default, angry old man mode. He just gets so wound up that he loses it.

I think last night reinforced a lot of minds that were already in Obama’s camp or leaning that way. As for the Arizona senator it was sad to watch a man who has served his country all his life squander his integrity and debase his character only to come up empty-handed.

I think the White House is Obama’s barring the race factor rearing its ugly head on November 4 to derail America’s best hope for the future.

 

McCain Opens the Wrong End of a Can of Whupass!

McCain/Palin are running scared. They can’t run on the issues because they’re squarely on the opposite side of the electorate. That “maverick” BS has worn gossamer thin. McCain can’t shake his Republican/Wall Street connections. After two years of free ride as the Great American Hero, people are beginning to put the spotlight on Johnny and what really happened and it looks like he’s been patting himself on the back way too much.

So what are the Geezer and the Hairdo going to come up with? They decided to scrape the very bottom of their barrel and go for the last resort of all reprobates and degenerates – smear politics.

They’re going to try to link Obama with a 60’s radical – because that’s about all they’ve got. Now they’ll have to lie through their teeth and resort to sleazy innuendo to make something out of absolutely nothing – but when there’s no integrity, they’ll literally stoop to anything. Next up with be a rehash of Obama’s minister. Anything, they’re scared out of their wits.

Witless? Oh indeed. You see it’s McCain who has the real skeletons in his closet and they’re just the kind of skeletons you don’t want anyone looking at right now. There’s the bones of Charles Keating, the Lincoln Savings & Loan swindler that McCain carried water for back in the day when mom & pop life savings were getting – is “stolen” too strong a word? Nah.

Then there’s McCain’s close buddy and campaign economic advisor Phil Gramm, who did more than any other American to facilitate the Wall Street collapse by using his authority as then Senate Banking chairman to introduce and push through a bill allowing totally unregulated Credit Default Swaps, the 60 Trillion dollar scam that derailed everything.

McCain’s the one who can’t stand up to scrutiny and, fortunately, Obama is hitting back, reviving the record of McCain-Keating for starters. He’s got a month’s worth of revelations and trips down McCain’s Memory Lane to fill the rest of the campaign and it’s all killer stuff.

So, John, bring it on. You’ve already abandoned Michigan. Then you abandoned the issues. All you’ve got left is smear and that’s a game that you can only lose.

 

Mending Fences

Whoever succeeds George w. Bush is going to have his hands full cleaning up after the Wrecking Crew. Literally everything Bush/Cheney have touched has turned toxic. The US economy, its foreign policy, its military, its environmental policies – the lot. That’s why you don’t let the ignorant – like Bush and Palin – into the top ranks of your government. There’s simply too much damage they can cause before anyone can stop them.

The next president already had atop his agenda mending fences with America’s traditional allies. Germany’s Merkel and France’s Sarkozy had already shown themselves amenable to American overtures. Of course that was then, this is now.

Whatever goodwill George w. Bush managed to restore in his last two years in office has been thoroughly trashed in the current economic meltdown. Read any of the English-language European papers. Read accounts of the leaders’ session at the U.N.

Even America’s closest allies (Boss Harp excepted) are furious with the United States. It’s as though Washington had sent them shiploads of counterfeit currency. France, even Germany are feeling the sting of bogus commercial paper floated by American securities giants. Worse they see the global economy headed for a crunch caused by wantonly reckless American regulatory negligence.

America’s Savings & Loan fiasco was internalized. So was the Enron/Worldcom corporate fraud scandal. The Dot.Com debacle was largely confined within the U.S. The “Made on Bush’s Watch” meltdown is not only much larger but vastly more widespread and its impact reaches to the core of the global economy.

Europeans are hopping mad about this. Latin and South Americans are hopping mad. Asians are hopping mad. Everyone, it seems, except Stephen Harper, is hopping mad. That Steve stands out is kind of curious. He’s not only extraordinarily silent on the subject, he doesn’t even want to discuss it with Canadian voters. Better yet, he’s adopted John McCain’s line that “the fundamentals of our economy are strong.” What’s the message in that, folks?

Steve, one of the core fundamentals of our economy is a strong US economy. When the US economy heads into the tank, the economy of our one and only major trading partner is in the tank. When our sole major trading partner goes in the tank, the fundamentals of our economy are no longer strong. You know that Steve so why lie about the biggest immediate threat to Canada’s economy? This is no time for fanciful tales, Steve.

But I digress. Just how angry are America’s friends in France and Germany? Here’s the take from Spiegel Online:

“Even America’s closest allies are distancing themselves — first and foremost the German chancellor. When push came to shove in the past, Angela Merkel had always come down on the side of the United States.

…There was no mention of loyalty and friendship last Monday. Merkel stood in the glass-roofed entrance hall of one of the German parliament’s office buildings in Berlin and prepared her audience of roughly 1,000 businesspeople from all across Germany for the foreseeable consequences of the financial crisis. It was a speech filled with concealed accusations and dark warnings.

Merkel talked about a “distribution of risk at everyone’s expense” and the consequences for the “economic situation in the coming months and possibly even years.” Most of all, she made it clear who she considers the true culprit behind the current plight. “The German government pointed out the problems early on,” said the chancellor, whose proposals to impose tighter international market controls failed repeatedly because of US opposition. “Some things can be done at the national level,” she said, “but most things have to be handled internationally.”

The German magazine contends that America, as we’ve known it for six decades, is kaput:

“This is no longer the muscular and arrogant United States the world knows, the superpower that sets the rules for everyone else and that considers its way of thinking and doing business to be the only road to success.

A new America is on display, a country that no longer trusts its old values and its elites even less: the politicians, who failed to see the problems on the horizon, and the economic leaders, who tried to sell a fictitious world of prosperity to Americans.

Also on display is the end of arrogance. The Americans are now paying the price for their pride.”

The author contends that the Bush Doctrine of perpetual American omnipotence is now in ashes scattered around Bush’s feet. As Reagan transformed the United States from the world’s largest creditor nation to the world’s largest debtor nation, Bush has completed the job, transforming his country from the sole superpower that he inherited from Clinton into a global pariah scorned even by its closest allies.

Can this be undone? Certainly not by John McCain. He still believes in an America long past. This problem is way over his head. Can Obama undo this? Perhaps in part but I doubt that there’s anything in his playbook that can restore America to the pride of place it enjoyed so recently during the Clinton era. That said, he has to do as much as he can. This is a tough pill to swallow for the “We’re Number One” American people. Reality won’t come easy.

 

Round One- McCain v. Obama – Even

I expect that everybody was happy with the performance of their guy in last night’s presidential debate. My assessment is that viewers saw that debate pretty much according to the leanings they had when they came into it. I can’t see that it would have shifted too many voters one way or the other.

One network said Obama won their focus group of undecideds 60-40 but there’s no way of knowing how reliable those numbers are, at least not until some serious polling is conducted.

McCain, as expected, took the low road and, at times, looked very much the wizened up Old Geezer, the kind who yells at the kids in the street from his front porch rocker. In my view, Obama wasn’t nearly as aggressive as he ought to have been but, of the two, he alone seemed presidential. McCain didn’t even look at his opponent. He couldn’t look him in the eye as he told some genuine whoppers.

Then again, it was the “foreign policy” debate which the McCain camp maintains is their guy’s real strong suit. On that basis it was probably up to McCain to trounce Obama – to put him away – and he didn’t do it.

 

McCain Tries to Duck Friday Debates

You can’t blame John McCain for wanting to put as much distance as possible between his campaign and the credit meltdown now underway. He damned near went apoplectic today when The New York Times revealed this his key campaign aide, Rick Davis, was getting money from Freddie Mac almost right up to the day it got taken over by the Feds.

The economic crisis appears to have broken the stubborn deadlock between Obama and McCain. Latest results have Obama up 9% and climbing while Captain Sound Fundamentals heads for the tank.

So McCain has announced he wants to postpone the debates scheduled for Friday evening. Sure he does. McCain claims America badly needs him in Washington to sort out this mess. Sure it does. Must “man the post” and all of that. Not that a guy who’s shown such a weak grasp of “fundamentals” could make any difference anyway.

It’s pretty obvious that, where his political survival is at stake, McCain is as good with the old “cut and run” as they come. Oh I so hope Obama doesn’t let the Old Geezer off the hook.

 

Steinem on Palin

Another feminist icon has denounced McCain VP nominee, Sarah Palin. This time it’s Gloria Steinem. Excerpted from Steinem’s op-ed piece in the LA Times:

“This isn’t the first time a boss has picked an unqualified woman just because she agrees with him and opposes everything most other women want and need. Feminism has never been about getting a job for one woman. It’s about making life more fair for women everywhere. It’s not about a piece of the existing pie; there are too many of us for that. It’s about baking a new pie.

Selecting Sarah Palin, who was touted all summer by Rush Limbaugh, is no way to attract most women, including die-hard Clinton supporters.

Palin shares nothing but a chromosome with Clinton. Her down-home, divisive and deceptive speech did nothing to cosmeticize a Republican convention that has more than twice as many male delegates as female, a presidential candidate who is owned and operated by the right wing and a platform that opposes pretty much everything Clinton’s candidacy stood for – and that Barack Obama’s still does. To vote in protest for McCain/Palin would be like saying, “Somebody stole my shoes, so I’ll amputate my legs.”

This is not to beat up on Palin. I defend her right to be wrong, even on issues that matter most to me. I regret that people say she can’t do the job because she has children in need of care, especially if they wouldn’t say the same about a father. I get no pleasure from imagining her in the spotlight on national and foreign policy issues about which she has zero background, with one month to learn to compete with Sen. Joe Biden’s 37 years’ experience.

She was elected governor largely because the incumbent was unpopular, and she’s won over Alaskans mostly by using unprecedented oil wealth to give a $1,200 rebate to every resident. Now she is being praised by McCain’s campaign as a tax cutter, despite the fact that Alaska has no state income or sales tax. Perhaps McCain has opposed affirmative action for so long that he doesn’t know it’s about inviting more people to meet standards, not lowering them. Or perhaps McCain is following the Bush administration habit, as in the Justice Department, of putting a job candidate’s views on “God, guns and gays” ahead of competence. The difference is that McCain is filling a job one 72-year-old heartbeat away from the presidency.

So let’s be clear: The culprit is John McCain. He may have chosen Palin out of change-envy, or a belief that women can’t tell the difference between form and content, but the main motive was to please right-wing ideologues; the same ones who nixed anyone who is now or ever has been a supporter of reproductive freedom. If that were not the case, McCain could have chosen a woman who knows what a vice president does and who has thought about Iraq; someone like Texas Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison or Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine. McCain could have taken a baby step away from right-wing patriarchs who determine his actions, right down to opposing the Violence Against Women Act.

Palin’s value to those patriarchs is clear: She opposes just about every issue that women support by a majority or plurality. She believes that creationism should be taught in public schools but disbelieves global warming; she opposes gun control but supports government control of women’s wombs; she opposes stem cell research but approves “abstinence-only” programs, which increase unwanted births, sexually transmitted diseases and abortions; she tried to use taxpayers’ millions for a state program to shoot wolves from the air but didn’t spend enough money to fix a state school system with the lowest high-school graduation rate in the nation; she runs with a candidate who opposes the Fair Pay Act but supports $500 million in subsidies for a natural gas pipeline across Alaska; she supports drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve, though even McCain has opted for the lesser evil of offshore drilling. She is Phyllis Schlafly, only younger.

I don’t doubt her sincerity. As a lifetime member of the National Rifle Assn., she doesn’t just support killing animals from helicopters, she does it herself. She doesn’t just talk about increasing the use of fossil fuels but puts a coal-burning power plant in her own small town. She doesn’t just echo McCain’s pledge to criminalize abortion by overturning Roe vs. Wade, she says that if one of her daughters were impregnated by rape or incest, she should bear the child. She not only opposes reproductive freedom as a human right but implies that it dictates abortion, without saying that it also protects the right to have a child.

So far, the major new McCain supporter that Palin has attracted is James Dobson of Focus on the Family. Of course, for Dobson, “women are merely waiting for their husbands to assume leadership,” so he may be voting for Palin’s husband.

Being a hope-a-holic, however, I can see two long-term bipartisan gains from this contest.

Republicans may learn they can’t appeal to right-wing patriarchs and most women at the same time. A loss in November could cause the centrist majority of Republicans to take back their party, which was the first to support the Equal Rights Amendment and should be the last to want to invite government into the wombs of women.

And American women, who suffer more because of having two full-time jobs than from any other single injustice, finally have support on a national stage from male leaders who know that women can’t be equal outside the home until men are equal in it. Barack Obama and Joe Biden are campaigning on their belief that men should be, can be and want to be at home for their children.

This could be huge.”