Sarah Palin's Greatest Hits

In honor of tonight's debate, here's Keith Olbermann's salute to Sarah Palin . . . so far. Enjoy!

My Musings On Experience

A good friend of mine said to me the other day of Sarah Palin, something along the lines of, "Just because she's inexperienced doesn't mean she's unknowledgable or incapable." My friend was right, and it got me to thinking. I concluded that it's not really experience that has me concerned, as much as capableness.

What if McCain's running mate was Bobby Jindal instead of Sarah Palin? Jindal was a congressman for three years, and became Louisiana governor 8 months ago. Less experience, I think, than Palin's two years as governor of Alaska, even if you leave out her years as president of the PTA.

Jindal graduated with honors from an Ivy League school, and received a master's degree in political science from Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, having turned down acceptances to Harvard Medical School and Yale Law School. Palin attended FOUR different schools (University of Idaho twice, having transferred out then back in to graduate) before finally receiving her bachelors.

Jindal, though I disagree with his positions, is a thoughtful man who would clearly be capable as an executive. Someone who could manage a meeting with world leaders, without being on the receiving end of mockery and outright cringing on the part of the American people. Someone who I think is qualified to run the country. I'm not worried about his lack of foreign policy experience as governor, because I'm confident that he follows world issues, is interested in them, and forms opinions, and can converse knowledgably about a range of issues, even those not directly affecting his constiuents in Louisiana.

Palin, though, is a train wreck. She can't answer simple questions, like, "What newspapers do you read?" She's barely conversant on even the big talking points associated with her ticket, much less an in-depth conversation about complex issues affecting the country. It's been reported that she had a thirty minute attention span during Alaska Gubernatorial debate prep. I think, perhaps, she can't be bothered to pull facts out of her head, or maybe she has such an intense lack of interest in global issues that it all just flies right out the window.

Since George W. Bush has made the United States a laughingstock for the past eight years . . . I, for one, don't want ANOTHER "Joe six-pack" running the country. I want someone a whole lot smarter than myself. I want someone with intellectual curiousity and interest in the issues s/he is asked to manage. Wouldn't you rather see the former President of the Harvard Law Review take office than someone who had to transfer back and forth FIVE times between different third-rate colleges, just to get her undergraduate degree? Wouldn't you rather have the guy who is conversant on a range of issues, over the person who can't name a Supreme Court case other than Roe v. Wade, even though she's been busy mouthing off about "activist judges?" Does she even know what that means? I'll take the smart guy, thanks.

The Deregulator

Drop The Regulations!

Phil Gramm and Financial Services Deregulation

One of the reasons that the stock market crash of 1929 caused so many banks to fail during the Great Depression was that banks had invested their deposits in speculative stocks during the bubble years of the 1920s. When the stock bubble burst, the banks lost their money, and the government had to step in and start insuring our bank deposits to make banks safe again. Another reform was to prevent banks from getting involved in speculative securities. If banks were too important to let fail and the government was going to insure our deposits, the government wanted to regulate the kinds of risks that banks would be allowed to bear. Force the banks to bear their own risks and not pass them on in the securities market, and they’d be careful not to enter into risky mortgages with people who can’t afford them, right?

This worked great for the next 50 years, until the stock market bubble years of the 1990s, when there was so much money to be made in the market that bank lobbyists and friendly legislators got together to remove the regulations that prevented banks and securities firms from getting too intermingled in each other’s businesses. McCain economic advisor and former Senator Phil Gramm was one of the leaders of this effort. In fact, the legislation which deregulated the financial services industry was named the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. Yes, President Clinton signed the bill, there’s blame to go around.

So mortgage banks (IndyMac) were freed from the usual free market risk/reward incentive to be careful about who they gave mortgages to, because they could simply pass the risks on to investment firms (Bear Stearns, Lehman Bros.) who could bundle enough risky mortgages together to make they seem safe to investors. Everything would be fine unless a whole lot of mortgages defaulted, and THAT will never happen!

Phil Gramm removed the very regulations that prevented banks from assuming too much risk and then went to work for one of the biggest mortgage banks in the world (UBS). And this is the result of Gramm’s deregulation: The banks assumed too much risk, failed, and are now running to the taxpayers to save them from their own bad mortgage decisions. And once again, the banks are too important to let fail.

Now McCain wants to deregulate the health insurance industry just like his advisor Gramm deregulated the banks. Oh, and Gramm's name is floated all over the place to be McCain's Secretary of the Treasury. Sound good to you?

Those Pigs Didn't Oink

From MSNBC's First Read:

Those pigs didn’t oink: Notice how the McCain campaign tried to change the subject yesterday? It cut its first Tony Rezko ad, which tied Obama to the “corrupt Chicago machine”; it angrily denounced the New York Times on a conference call with reporters; and it brought up Obama’s tenuous ties to ‘60s radical William Ayers on that same conference call. But unlike two weeks ago, when the McCain camp’s “lipstick on a pig” and “sex-ed for kindergartners” TV ad dominated the political discussion, those weapons of mass distraction got very little attention yesterday. The economy and the current Wall Street crisis have become THE story, and nothing right now is going to stop that. All the cable outlets will be covering the Paulson/Bernanke hearings as big news today -- making subject-changing efforts much more difficult.

The media is finally starting to cover the story of how McCain would rather distract us all than discuss the issues -- losing issues for him. Hopefully, the media will continue to ignore his attempt at diverting our attention, and continue to cover the important stuff. A big win for American voters, whatever party we support.

McCain Still Wants To Deregulate Health Insurance?

Quote from an article John McCain wrote for the CURRENT issue of Contingencies, the magazine of the American Academy of Actuaries (look at the top right column of page 30):

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.

Deregulate? After the week Wall Street has had, after Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch and AIG have collapsed, he wants to do to the health care industry what his former chief economic advisor, Phil Gramm, did to the mortgage and banking industries. Yikes.