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Absolutely hilarious. From The Daily Show, with Jon Stewart.
If you have not had the pleasure of meeting Margaret and Helen yet, please allow me to introduce you.
Helen Philpot, 82-years-young, says her grandson taught her how to use a computer so she could “blog” with her best friend Margaret Schmechtman, a friend of 60 years. She says she has three children with her husband Harold. Margaret has three dogs with her husband Howard. Helen live in Texas and Margaret lives in Maine.
Their blog is very, very funny — and spot on.
Hello world. Well where do I begin? I am shocked at the response to my little rants. You sure do know how to make an old gal feel special. Of course there is another woman out there who feels special, but that’s only because she’s been shooting caribou out the window of her Straight Talk Express on the way to her next Republican hillbilly rally.
For crying out loud America. How bad does it have to get? Senator McCain is practically crumbling to dust before our very eyes while Governor Palin is out in the hinterland screeching about some 60’s hippie who bumped into Obama once or twice over the years. This from the woman who panders to secessionists in Alaska. Please, dear God, somebody throw a stone because that glass igloo needs to be shattered!
Ain’t that America?
Whoever they are, they’re very funny, and I appreciate their take on things.
Add them to your list of blogs to read.
We might finally see gas prices drop below $3 per gallon, just in time for the November election.
Surprise!
From the Sun-Times:
Drivers who’ve been suffering cruising anxiety may get to rev it up by the holidays, when gasoline could drop below $3 a gallon, an expert said Monday.
Gasoline in some parts of the Midwest, such as in Davenport, Iowa, is already down to $2.50.
The Chicago area, where regular unleaded is selling at $3.56 on average, will benefit from demand for gasoline “dropping off the map and plenty of supply,” said Phil Flynn, energy analyst at Chicago’s Alaron Trading. Besides dropping demand, investors have realized that oil is no hedge against a falling dollar, and supply is growing as refiners pump up their volume and hurricane season closes, Flynn said.
Is this the gas-pump equivalent of sending out the street cleaners just before election day? Forgive me if I’m a bit jaded. Are we supposed to think for a moment that this is permanent?
For the record, economist Joseph E. Stiglitz is predicting that by this time next year, gas prices will spike again, most likely higher than they are now.
The Three Trillion Dollar War is not going away any time soon.
And so it goes.
Will this be the beginning of the end of Sarah Palin’s close-up, or will the voters ignore her ethics violations?
First, it is very difficult to prosecute ethics violations, especially where there was no direct monetary gain procured by the offending party. Voters, on the other hand, should read between the lines. What Gov. Palin did was wrong – ethically, legally, and morally. Whether she ever faces prosecution or censure for her actions is irrelevant. The governor of the state of Alaska used her influence in a radically inappropriate manner to give her former brother-in-law the boot.
That says it all.
Do we want this person within a heartbeat of the presidency? And why do the Republicans want this person within a heartbeat of the presidency? What does this say of the Republican Party?
From the New York Times:
Gov. Sarah Palin abused the powers of her office by pressuring subordinates to try to get her former brother-in-law, a state trooper, fired, an investigation by the Alaska Legislature has concluded. The inquiry found, however, that she was within her right to dismiss her public safety commissioner, Walt Monegan, who was the trooper’s boss.
A 263-page report released Friday by lawmakers in Alaska found that Ms. Palin, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, had herself exerted pressure to get Trooper Michael Wooten dismissed, as well as allowed her husband and subordinates to press for his firing, largely as a result of his temperament and past disciplinary problems.
“Such impermissible and repeated contacts,” the report states, “create conflicts of interests for subordinate employees who must choose to either please a superior or run the risk of facing that superior’s displeasure and the possible consequences of that displeasure.” The report concludes that the action was a violation of the Alaska Executive Branch Ethics Act.
Look, I’ll not bash Republicans here. “Some of my best friends…,” blah, blah, blah.
But the truth is, Republicans have allowed their party to be raped by the extreme right, and that’s a shame. Was it a shameful lust for power that led the “Party of Lincoln” to slide so wickedly to the right? Was it an utter disregard for consequences that caused them to look the other way while their president took the nation on an insane and reckless spending spree while slashing the country’s income?
What was it that caused Republicans to look the other way? How are their stock portoflios now?
Here’s the thing: Now everyone, whether Republican or Democrat or Independent, is suffering.
Did John McCain really vet Palin?
Read between the lines: It’s gotta be Obama.
A rather stirring Op-Ed piece in today’s Sun-Times by Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart brings home the reality of evictions: the evicted are people, with families and stories all their own.
Dart writes that as Cook County sheriff, he is responsible for running a 10,000-inmate jail, providing patrols to unincorporated areas and securing the courts.
He continues:
But perhaps no part of our job is as difficult as the work done by our eviction units. On any given day, our deputies could be asked to throw a family out of their home, with all of their possessions left on a curb — sometimes pilfered through by those living nearby.
Where mortgage firms see pieces of paper, my deputies see people.
Yet no matter how difficult they are, evictions are part of our job.
Difficult as this work may be, an impossible situation for a family with young children, Dart understands that evictions come with the territory. Sometimes people are left out on the street.
Sometimes, however, the family is not at fault, and this angers Dart, and it should anger all tax payers, in addition to those who care the least about social justice:
What isn’t part of our job, however, is to carry out work on behalf of the multi-billion-dollar banks and mortgage industries.
Too many times, our deputies arrive at a home to carry out a mortgage foreclosure eviction, only to find a tenant — dutifully paying their rent each month — who is unaware their landlord stopped using that rent money to pay the mortgage. They had no fair warning that they were about to be thrown out of their home.
That’s because, in many cases, the banks have done nothing to determine, in advance, who’s living in the building — even though it’s required by state law. Instead, those banks expect taxpayers to pay for that investigative work for them.
Dart and his deputies have found themselves evicting people who have paid their rent in it’s entirety. The sheriff is right on this one. Tenants still may face eviction, but the fault is that of their landlord, and they deserve proper notice that their landlord is doing something else with their rent money besides paying on the mortgage.
Dart says he is willing to be held in contempt for refusing to execute evicting notices. The courts would be wrong to go after Dart. Why go after the sheriff, when the real culprit is a multi-billion-dollar bank or mortgage lender who is forcing local government to spend tax dollars, saving the institution from performing due diligence?
Springfield should take notice. Attorney General Lisa Madigan should take notice. Sheriff Dart, and others in his position throughout the state, need help on this one.
I’ve seen Dart and his deputies do their job, and it isn’t easy. In August in Park Forest, Cook County sheriff’s deputies executed 34 eviction notices. Management from the Lofts of Thorn Creek, currently under receivership, were on hand, as was Sheriff Tom Dart. Working with a crew of about 40 members of the eviction units, deputies spent the morning and early afternoon knocking on doors, and, in some cases, ramming them open. Some units in this development were vacant and had been vacant for some time. While expecting the worst, deputies met with compliant, yet unhappy, residents who were being turned out into the street.
This situation was unique in that it was the first mass test of the Village of Park Forest’s Crime Free Housing Ordinance. In other words, not all of these evictions were for lack of payment on rent.
Still, a day or two before the first school bells summoned students to class, families were losing their homes.
Banks and mortgage lenders dumping their responsibilities on the tax payers is unconscionable, a de facto bailout. There should be some penalty for lending institutions that abdicate their responsibilities.
Imagine turning children out of their homes only to realize the deed was done so the lender didn’t have to pay a few legal bills?
(Photo: ENEWSPF)
The current economic crisis demands that we understand John McCain’s attitudes about economic oversight and corporate influence in federal regulation. Nothing illustrates the danger of his approach more clearly than his central role in the savings and loan scandal of the late ’80s and early ’90s.
John McCain was accused of improperly aiding his political patron, Charles Keating, chairman of the Lincoln Savings and Loan Association. The bipartisan Senate Ethics Committee launched investigations and formally reprimanded Senator McCain for his role in the scandal. Today, John McCain is the only major party presidential nominee in US history to have been rebuked, censured or otherwise admonished after a Congressional ethics investigation.
At the heart of the scandal was Keating’s Lincoln Savings and Loan Association, which took advantage of deregulation in the 1980s to make risky investments with its depositors’ money. McCain intervened on behalf of Charles Keating with federal regulators tasked with preventing banking fraud, and championed legislation to delay regulation of the savings and loan industry — actions that allowed Keating to continue his fraud at an incredible cost to taxpayers.
When the savings and loan industry collapsed, Keating’s failed company put taxpayers on the hook for $3.4 billion and more than 20,000 Americans lost their savings. John McCain was reprimanded by the bipartisan Senate Ethics Committee, but the ultimate cost of the crisis to American taxpayers reached more than $120 billion.
The Keating scandal is eerily similar to today’s credit crisis, where a lack of regulation and cozy relationships between the financial industry and Congress has allowed banks to make risky loans and profit by bending the rules. And in both cases, John McCain’s judgment and values have placed him on the wrong side of history.
Download a Transcript (.PDF, 81KB) here.
Source: http://www.keatingeconomics.com
I’m giving this space to David Plouffe, Barack Obama’s campaign manager:
Barack Obama won a resounding victory in John McCain’s favorite debate format because he made the case for change that will rebuild the middle class. The American people asked tough questions tonight, and only Barack Obama was in touch with their struggles and offered clear and passionate answers about creating jobs, reducing health care costs, cutting taxes for 95% of working families, and responsibly ending the war in Iraq. John McCain was all over the map on the issues, and he is so angry about the state of his campaign that he referred to Barack Obama as “that one” – last time he couldn’t look at Senator Obama, this time he couldn’t say his name. The McCain campaign said, “if we keep talking about the economy, we’re going to lose.”
“That one?”
That “what”, John?
Was this a racist statement? Did he mean, “That black guy?”
Maybe not.
I agree with Plouffe. Barack won this one hands down.
The polls should reflect that over the next week or so. Barack will gain ground.
Senator McCain has consistently mistated Senator Obama’s policy on Pakistan. Obama has repeatedly stated that Al Qaida is the target, and if Pakistan can’t or won’t pursue Bin Laden or Al Qaida, then the United States must.
That’s it.
John “Bomb-Bomb-Bomb, Bomb-Bomb-Iran” McCain keeps saying Barack wants to invade Pakistan.
Horribly off base, John.
Barack Obama can see gray. Barack Obama is demonstrating a clear ability to under the complexity of many issues. McCain barely comprehends his own sound bites.
Mike Kean, a friend of mine writing from the University of Illinois, pointed this out as well, “Obama simply answered the question about going into Pakistan by saying that if the Pakistani government was incapable of fighting Al Qaeda, he would support sending troops across the border to fight them. Then, McCain spent his entire response going on and on about Teddy Roosevelt saying that he needs to talk softly and carry a big stick and claiming that Obama was saying he would invade Pakistan. That’s not at all what Obama was saying. Then Obama had a rebuttal, repeating what he already said, and McCain came back and said the same thing again, blatantly misrepresenting what Obama. I dont know what’s worse: whether McCain thinks that the American people wouldn’t notice, or that most Americans probably didn’t notice what McCain was doing.
“All around this campaign has been frustrating as hell throughout the whole damn thing.”
Amen.
The second Presidential Debate is still in progress, about 55 minutes in.
Look, we all know Tom Brokaw favors John McCain, but he has repeatedly scolded Senator Obama so far as if he was talking to the hired help. The most obvious was a few minutes ago when he reminded Barack that there are lights on stage that tell the speakers when to stop. Barack laughed politely in response.
Senator McCain is talking right now. I’m looking at a red light. McCain has talked well past the red light. McCain stops. Nothing from Brokaw. Instead, another softball lob to McCain about health care.
Barack is talking about health care. Brokaw is trying to interrupt him, “Senator, we have to move on now.”
Does Brokaw have a book coming out about McCain?
ADDENDUM: 1 hour 23 minutes in, Brokaw thanks McCain for speaking, invites Obama to respond by saying, “Senator Obama, we’re winding down so we have to keep track of the time.”
Now Senator Obama is concluding his remarks, and Brokaw just cut him off again. McCain consistently gets a free pass.
Horrible.