Another Thing To Worry About

An economic crisis throughout the Middle East. However the leaders there handle this latest crisis, they will undoubtedly and assuredly act in a manner to aid the spread of Islamofascism and accompanying terrorism. And Our Leaders are doing what, besides dancing in Africa? And does John McCain know anything about this yet?

Myself, I don't quite understand why increased income necessarily causes significant inflation....

The story (without an answer to my question, though):

Even as it enriches Arab rulers, the recent oil-price boom is helping to fuel an extraordinary rise in the cost of food and other basic goods that is squeezing this region’s middle class and setting off strikes, demonstrations and occasional riots from Morocco to the Persian Gulf.

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Times Topics: Oil (Petroleum) and Gasoline

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Bryan Denton for The New York Times
Many in Jordan are feeling the squeeze of higher prices. At a mall in Amman, the empty aisles reflect people’s inability to spend.
Here in Jordan, the cost of maintaining fuel subsidies amid the surge in prices forced the government to remove almost all the subsidies this month, sending the price of some fuels up 76 percent overnight. In a devastating domino effect, the cost of basic foods like eggs, potatoes and cucumbers doubled or more.

In Saudi Arabia, where inflation had been virtually zero for a decade, it recently reached an official level of 6.5 percent, though unofficial estimates put it much higher. Public protests and boycotts have followed, and 19 prominent clerics posted an unusual statement on the Internet in December warning of a crisis that would cause “theft, cheating, armed robbery and resentment between rich and poor.”

The inflation has many causes, from rising global demand for commodities to the monetary constraints of currencies pegged to the weakening American dollar. But one cause is the skyrocketing price of oil itself, which has quadrupled since 2002. It is helping push many ordinary people toward poverty even as it stimulates a new surge of economic growth in the gulf.

“Now we have to choose: we either eat or stay warm. We can’t do both,” said Abdul Rahman Abdul Raheem, who works at a clothing shop in a mall in Amman and once dreamed of sending his children to private school. “We’re not really middle class anymore; we’re at the poverty level.”

Some governments have tried to soften the impact of high prices by increasing wages or subsidies on foods. Jordan, for instance, has raised the wages of public-sector employees earning less than 300 dinars ($423) a month by 50 dinars ($70). For those earning more than 300 dinars, the raise was 45 dinars, or $64. But that compensates for only a fraction of the price increases, and most people who work in the private sector get no such relief.

The fact that the inflation is coinciding with new oil wealth has fed perceptions of corruption and economic injustice, some analysts say.

“About two-thirds of Jordanians now believe there is widespread corruption in the public and private sector,” said Mohammed al-Masri, the public opinion director at the Center for Strategic Studies at the University of Jordan. “The middle class is less and less able to afford what they used to, and more and more suspicious.”

In a few places the price increases have led to violence. In Yemen, prices for bread and other foods have nearly doubled in the past four months, setting off a string of demonstrations and riots in which at least a dozen people were killed. In Morocco, 34 people were sentenced to prison on Wednesday for participating in riots over food prices, the Moroccan state news service reported. Even tightly controlled Jordan has had nonviolent demonstrations and strikes.

Inflation was also a factor — often overlooked — in some recent clashes that were seen as political or sectarian. A confrontation in Beirut between Lebanese Army soldiers and a group of Shiite protesters that left seven people dead started with demonstrations over power cuts and rising bread prices.

In Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, inflation is in the double digits, and foreign workers, who constitute a vast majority of the work force, have gone on strike in recent months because of the declining purchasing power of the money they send home. The workers are paid in currencies that are pegged to the dollar, and the value of their salaries — translated into Indian rupees and other currencies — has dropped significantly.

The Middle East’s heavy reliance on food imports has made it especially vulnerable to the global rise in commodity prices over the past year, said George T. Abed, the former governor of the Palestine Monetary Authority and a director at the Institute of International Finance, an organization based in Washington.

Corruption, inefficiency and monopolistic economies worsen the impact, as government officials or business owners artificially inflate prices or take a cut of such increases.

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What It Says

Link.

Liar, Liar....

In journalism, it’s a safe bet that if you write a story with the suggestion that a prominent male politician is bedding an attractive female lobbyist, whatever other point you hoped to make will be overlooked.

That appears to have been the case with the New York Times article on Feb. 21, which led with suspicions held by some McCain staffers that the Arizona senator had gotten too cozy with lobbyist Vicky Iseman. The Times story then veered off into a historical examination of McCain’s over-confidence about his own moral rectitude.

Yet, despite the Times’ best efforts to explore this complicated history of McCain as both ethics sinner and ethics reformer, the public and pundits never got much past the sex angle, an insinuation that McCain, 71, and Iseman, 40, both adamantly denied.

Thus, McCain succeeded in deflecting the story’s more significant question: Is McCain’s reputation as a straight-talking politician a sham?

Put differently, is the presumptive Republican presidential nominee – like Colin Powell – a media darling whose reputation for honesty is largely undeserved? The question is not an insignificant one.

In 2003, Secretary of State Powell exploited his sterling image to help mislead the nation into the Iraq War. [For details on Powell, see our book Neck Deep.] Now, McCain hopes his “straight-talk-express” appeal will help keep U.S. troops in Iraq indefinitely.

So, there’s urgency for Americans to know whether John McCain is a sanctimonious phony and a self-assured liar, who’s just masquerading as the guy who tells it like it is and disdains the self-serving ways of Washington.

Evidence of Lies

Though no new evidence has surfaced about McCain and Iseman as a romantic item, McCain’s blanket denial about assisting Iseman and other lobbyists is fast disintegrating.

As we noted in an article on Feb. 21, McCain’s assertion in response to the Times article -- that during his quarter-century congressional career, he “has never violated the public trust, never done favors for special interests or lobbyists” -- just isn’t true.

For instance, the Times story recalled how McCain helped one of his early financial backers, wheeler-dealer Charles Keating, frustrate oversight from federal banking regulators who were examining Keating’s Lincoln Savings and Loan Association.

At Keating's urging, McCain wrote letters, introduced bills and pushed a Keating associate for a job on a banking regulatory board. In 1987, McCain joined several other senators in two private meetings with federal banking regulators on Keating’s behalf.

Two years later, Lincoln collapsed, costing the U.S. taxpayers $3.4 billion. Keating eventually went to prison and three other senators from the so-called Keating Five saw their political careers ruined.

McCain drew a Senate reprimand for his involvement and later lamented his faulty judgment. “Why didn’t I fully grasp the unusual appearance of such a meeting?” he wrote in his 2002 memoir, Worth the Fighting For.

But some people close to the case thought McCain got off too easy.

Not only was McCain taking donations from Keating and his business circle, getting free rides on Keating’s corporate jet and enjoying joint vacations in the Bahamas – McCain’s second wife, the beer fortune heiress Cindy Hensley, had invested with Keating in an Arizona shopping mall.

In the years that followed, however, McCain not only got out from under the shadow of the Keating Five scandal but found a silver lining in the cloud, transforming the case into a lessons-learned chapter of his personal narrative.

McCain, as born-again reformer, soon was winning over the Washington press corps with his sponsorship of ethics legislation, like the McCain-Feingold bill limiting “soft money” contributions to the political parties.

However, there was still the other side of John McCain as he wielded enormous power from his position as chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, which helped him solicit campaign donations from corporations doing business before the panel.

Pressure on the FCC

The Times story suggested that McCain did favors on behalf of Iseman’s lobbying clients, including two letters that McCain wrote in 1999 to the Federal Communications Commission demanding that it act on a long-delayed request by Iseman’s client, Florida-based Paxson Communications, to buy a Pittsburgh television station.

In the furious counter-offensive against the Times article, McCain’s campaign issued a point-by-point denial, calling those letters routine correspondence that were handled by staff without McCain meeting either with Paxson or anyone from Iseman’s firm, Alcalde & Fay.

"No representative of Paxson or Alcalde & Fay personally asked Senator McCain to send a letter to the FCC," his campaign said.

But that turned out not to be true. Newsweek’s investigative reporter Michael Isikoff dug up a sworn deposition from Sept. 25, 2002, in which McCain himself declared that “I was contacted by Mr. Paxson on this issue. … He wanted their [the FCC’s] approval very bad for purposes of his business. I believe that Mr. Paxson had a legitimate complaint.”

Though McCain claimed not to recall whether he had spoken with Paxson’s lobbyist [presumably a reference to Iseman], he added, “I’m sure I spoke to [Paxson],” according to the deposition. [See Newsweek’s Web posting, Feb. 22, 2008]

McCain’s letters to the FCC, which Chairman William Kennard criticized as “highly unusual,” came in the same period when Paxson’s company was ferrying McCain to political events aboard its corporate jet and donating $20,000 to his campaign.

After the Feb. 21 Times article appeared, McCain’s spokesmen confirmed that Iseman accompanied McCain on at least one of those flights from Florida to Washington, though McCain said in the 2002 deposition that “I do not recall” if Paxson’s lobbyist was onboard.

First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams, who conducted the deposition in connection with a challenge to the McCain-Feingold law, asked McCain if the benefits that he received from Paxson created “at least an appearance of corruption here?”

“Absolutely,” McCain answered. “I believe that there could possibly be an appearance of corruption because this system has tainted all of us.”

Sticking to the Story

When Newsweek went to McCain’s 2008 campaign with the seeming contradictions between the deposition and the denial of the Times article, McCain’s people stuck to their story that that the senator had never discussed the FCC issue with Paxson or his lobbyist.

“We do not think there is a contradiction here,” campaign spokeswoman Ann Begeman told Newsweek. “It appears that Senator McCain, when speaking of being contacted by Paxson, was speaking in shorthand of his staff being contacted by representatives of Paxson. Senator McCain does not recall being asked directly by Paxson or any representative of him or by Alcalde & Fay to contact the FCC regarding the Pittsburgh license transaction.”

That new denial, however, soon crumbled when the Washington Post interviewed Paxson, who said he had talked with McCain in his Washington office several weeks before McCain sent the letters to the FCC.

The broadcast executive also believed that Iseman had helped arrange the meeting and likely was in attendance. “Was Vicki there? Probably,” Paxson said. [Washington Post, Feb. 23, 2008]

A day earlier, the Post also noted the discrepancy between a central tenet of McCain’s campaign – his denunciation of lobbyists and the corrupt revolving-door ways of Washington – and his reliance on lobbyists for his congressional work and his campaign.

“When McCain huddled with his closest advisers at his rustic Arizona cabin last weekend to map out his presidential campaign, virtually every one was part of the Washington lobbying culture he has long decried,” the Post reported on Feb. 22.

In its article about McCain and Iseman, the New York Times also noted that in 2001, McCain helped found a non-profit organization called the Reform Institute supposedly to advance McCain’s signature cause of political ethics.

But the institute drew much of its funding from companies trying to ingratiate themselves with McCain and his Commerce Committee. Though denying any impropriety, McCain severed his ties to the Reform Institute in 2005 because of the “bad publicity.”

So, one of the pressing questions for American voters as they look toward the formal nomination of McCain as the Republican presidential candidate is whether he is a phony who’s long been protected by his gilded reputation or whether he suffers from severe – or at least convenient – memory loss.

McCain also may have learned some tricks from watching his former rival, George W. Bush, whose tendency to lie grew increasingly brazen after 9/11.

As Commander in Chief for a nation at war, Bush brushed aside questions about his statements not squaring with the facts: From his insistence that waterboarding is not torture to Saddam Hussein not letting the UN inspectors in. [See, for instance, Consortiumnews.com’s “Bush’s Favorite Lie.”]

Since McCain as Commander in Chief would ensure that the United States remains at war for the foreseeable future, he might expect a Bush-like pass when his words diverge almost 180 degrees from the facts. Endless war will justify endless lies.

Or maybe he just believes his own press clippings – that he is such a straight-talker that whatever comes out of his mouth must be the truth.

Link.

Capitalism's Crisis Creates A Solution To A Second Problem

Actually, this is a solution for those who can't keep up on their mortgage payments too.

The nation's foreclosure crisis has led to a painful irony for homeless people: On any given night they are outnumbered in some cities by vacant houses. Some street people are taking advantage of the opportunity by becoming squatters.

Foreclosed homes often have an advantage over boarded-up and dilapidated houses that have been abandoned because of rundown conditions: Sometimes the heat, lights and water are still working.

"That's what you call convenient," said James Bertan, 41, an ex-convict and self-described "bando," or someone who lives in abandoned houses.

Link.

Is It Possible To Measure The Dementia Of The Right??

This is, how you say, fucked up, majorly. I mean, this is one seriously sick chick, as are the nutjobs that publish her fecal spew:

Sometimes I read old articles from the National Review and I think, where did that spirit of frank, open racism go? Why must John Derbyshire be restrained by political correctness when he "wraps his silk dressing gown tightly about his withered frame and totters onto the balcony to address the Negro Question"? But along comes sweet, sweet Lisa "Clinton really was running drugs through Mena AK" Schffrin to pour some sugar on me. She's got that old-time religion, friends. I wanted to excerpt but it was too good:

Until I came across this article by Cliff Kincaid of Accuracy in Media, which I regard as factual — with all that that implies [????] — the questions about Obama's background that should have come naturally never quite rose to the surface of my mind. Barack Obama is the new man, of course. His mixed race is a symbol of that. Just like Tiger Woods — as we have read, endlessly. What's to wonder about?

But maybe it's not so simple. Obama and I are roughly the same age. I grew up in liberal circles in New York City — a place to which people who wished to rebel against their upbringings had gravitated for generations. And yet, all of my mixed race, black/white classmates throughout my youth, some of whom I am still in contact with, were the product of very culturally specific unions. They were always the offspring of a white mother, (in my circles, she was usually Jewish, but elsewhere not necessarily) and usually a highly educated black father. And how had these two come together at a time when it was neither natural nor easy for such relationships to flourish? Always through politics. No, not the young Republicans. Usually the Communist Youth League. Or maybe a different arm of the CPUSA. But, for a white woman to marry a black man in 1958, or 60, there was almost inevitably a connection to explicit Communist politics. (During the Clinton Administration we were all introduced to then U. of Pennsylvania Professor Lani Guinier — also a half black/half Jewish, red diaper baby.)

I don't know how Barak Obama's parents met. But the Kincaid article referenced above makes a very convincing case that Obama's family, later, (mid 1970s) in Hawaii, had close relations with a known black Communist intellectual. And, according to what Obama wrote in his first autobiography, the man in question — Frank Marshall Davis — appears to have been Barack's own mentor, and even a father figure. Of course, since the Soviet Union itself no longer exists, it's an open question what it means practically to have been politically mentored by an official Communist. Ideologically, the implications are clearer.

Political correctness was invented precisely to prevent the mainstream liberal media from persuing the questions which might arise about how Senator Obama's mother, from Kansas, came to marry an African graduate student. Love? Sure, why not? But what else was going on around them that made it feasible? Before readers level cheap accusations of racism — let's recall that the very question of interracial marriage only became a big issue later in the 1960s. The notion of a large group of mixed race Americans became an issue during and after the Vietnam War. Even the civil-rights movement kept this culturally explosive matter at arm's distance.

It was, of course, an explicit tactic of the Communist party to stir up discontent among American blacks, with an eye toward using them as the leading edge of the revolution. To be sure, there was much to be discontented about, for black Americans, prior to the civil-rights revolution. To their credit, of course, most black Americans didn't buy the commie line — and showed more faith in the possibilities of democratic change than in radical politics, and the results on display in Moscow.

Time for some investigative journalism about the Obama family's background, now that his chances of being president have increased so much.

The truly beautiful thing about this is that it incoherently wavers between two poles of repulsive slander: is it Communist Negroes having sex with our white women? Or are Communist Jewesses subverting black Americans who, patriotic though modestly ill-treated, would have been able to resist had the party not offered them the tempting fruits of miscegenation? Whatever it is I imagine it's music to WFB's ears. His trembling hand hoists a generous 7:30am brandy and milk to you, Lisa!

Link.

Maybe This Photo Will Help The Saint Remember Rick Renzi

Link.

The Golden Age Our Leaders Brought Us

In one brief phone call, Nancy Corazzi's lender yanked away what was left of the $95,000 home equity line of credit that she and her husband took out five months ago.

The lender informed her that her Howard County home had plummeted in value and the company did not want the risk that she would owe more than the house was worth.

"I got off the phone and I was shaking," said Corazzi, who was using the money to pay preschool tuition for her twins ."I was near tears. We needed this credit line to get us through some tough times."

Several of the nation's largest lenders, along with smaller ones, are shutting off access to home equity lines in areas where home values are declining. It's an unusually aggressive move as the industry grapples with fallout from the mortgage crisis that began unfolding last year.

Now that home prices have dropped in many parts of the country, lenders are nervous that they may never collect the money that they extended to borrowers. They are responding by freezing or lowering the credit limits on home equity lines, leaving thousands of borrowers like Corazzi in the lurch.

"Nearly all the top home equity lenders I know of are doing this or considering doing this," said Joe Belew, president of the Consumer Bankers Association, which represents some of the nation's largest home equity lenders. "They are all looking at how to protect themselves as real estate values go down, and it's just not good for the borrowers to get so overextended."

Countrywide Financial, the nation's largest mortgage lender, suspended the home equity lines of 122,000 customers last month after reviewing their property values and outstanding loan balances. The company, like others, has an internal automated appraisal system that tracks values.

The company declined to disclose how many of the affected borrowers lived in the Washington area. About 381,000 borrowers in the region had home equity lines at the end of last year, according to Moody's economy.com.

USAA Federal Savings Bank froze or reduced credit lines for 15,000 of its customers, including Corazzi, and will not reconsider its decisions until "real estate values improve substantially," the company said in a statement.

Bank of America is starting to do the same and is contacting some borrowers, said Terry Francisco, a bank spokesman.

"We know this can cause hardship to our customers," Francisco said. "If they used the credit to make payments that are in the pipeline, we will work with them to make sure the payment goes through."

The appeal of home equity lines has always been their flexibility.

They operate like credit cards, with the home as collateral. Borrowers can use the money when they want, up to a limit, then repay it over time. The limit depends on the amount of equity they have in the house. Home equity lines, which grew popular in the late 1980s, have typically attracted educated borrowers with above-average incomes and job stability who tend to repay what they borrow in a timely manner, industry studies show.

Since the crisis in the housing and mortgage markets started, however, delinquencies on home equity lines reached 0.84 percent in the third quarter, the highest level in a decade, the American Bankers Association said.

Because missed payments are often a precursor to foreclosure, lenders are spooked. Companies that hold credit lines typically recoup little, if any, of their money in a foreclosure, hence the retreat on home equity lending.

Larry F. Pratt, chief executive of First Savings Mortgage in McLean, said most mortgage documents he has seen give lenders wide latitude to suspend or freeze credit lines.

"A layperson would not recognize the language because it's not that blatant," Pratt said. "It talks about deterioration of the value of the asset or the value of the collateral. . . . It's not boilerplate language by any means."

Maggie DelGallo did not realize that when she took out a home equity line a few years ago on her home in Loudoun County. Her lender recently froze the line.

DelGallo, a real estate broker, has used some of her credit line over the years. Had she known the freeze was coming, "I would have drained it," she said. "I would have taken every dime and possibly placed it in a money-market vehicle."

DelGallo said she does not think she is in dire straits. "It's more like a huge disappointment," she said. "I have this line of credit attached to my home that's useless."

Last year, 34 percent of borrowers said they used their home equity lines to pay off other debt and 29 percent used them for home renovation, according to a survey of lenders by BenchMark Consulting International. Another 31 percent used them to pay for other things, such as medical bills, weddings or vacations.

Corazzi initially used her line to consolidate debt. She and her husband took out the credit line in October because they thought her job was in jeopardy.

It was. In December, her salaried position as a loan-processing manager at a local mortgage bank changed to a commission-only job.

Given the slowdown in the industry, Corazzi has collected only one paycheck since then. Her husband, Ron, sells large-format copiers and printers to builders, and his salary alone cannot support them and their four children, ages 4 to 8.

By the time their lender called, the couple had $45,000 remaining unused on the credit line. Ron Corazzi is now looking for a second job, and his wife is hoping to pick up work as a substitute teacher.

Meanwhile, they are trying to open a new home equity line elsewhere, but chances are slim given the change in Nancy Corazzi's job status and the drop in their home's value. Five months ago, the Ellicott City house was appraised at $560,000; the lender says it is now worth $469,100.

"I told them, 'You guys are wrong,' " Nancy Corazzi said. "They said, 'Sorry, this is what we're doing in the entire area.' "

Corazzi said she was blindsided by what's happened. "I didn't know they could do that. I thought I was too smart to have something like this happen to me."

Link.

Straight Lyin'

If The Saint stopped with the bullshit about being a maverick, a straight talker, no lobbyist's errand boy, he'd be just another lying pol.

But is all the above, so that makes him unusually dishonest.

And it's been a Goddam busy week for him, having to lie about so many issues....

As The Washington Post reported on Saturday, John McCain's campaign struck a canny deal with a bank in December. If his campaign tanked, public funds would be there to bail him out. But if he emerged as the nominee, there'd be no need for public financing, since the contributions would come flowing.

It's an arrangement that no one has ever tried before. And it appears that McCain, who has built his reputation on campaign finance reform, was gaming the system. Or as a campaign finance expert who preferred to remain anonymous told me, referring to the prominent role that lobbyists have as advisers to his campaign, "This places McCain’s grandstanding on public financing in a new light. True reformers believe public financing is a way to replace the lobbyists’ influence, not a slush fund that the lobbyists use to pay off campaign debts."

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Regime Front! A Third Front!

What intelligent insight does The Saint have to offer about this?

If it was ever truly sincere about promoting democracy, the Bush administration has clearly abandoned that policy at this point. In Iraq, the administration has backed an incompetent, quasi-democratic regime that was imposed at gunpoint. In the Palestinian elections, it didn't like the results, and has joined Israel in refusing to even speak to Hamas. In Lebanon, the presence of elected members of the Hezbollah party in the government was used by Bush policymakers to justify giving the green light to Israel's use of U.S.-supplied weaponry to dismantle large parts of the country's infrastructure and inflict large-scale civilian casualties. Not exactly "democracy promotion."

And in Pakistan, where opposition parties have overwhelmed the ruling party of Pervez Musharraf in this week's elections, this step forward for democracy came despite Bush policies, not because of them. When Musharraf imposed emergency rule and jailed opposition figures ranging from the head of the Supreme Court to leading players in the parties of Benazir Bhutto to Nawaz Sharif, the Bush administration made critical noises, but took no action. Calls to suspend military aid were ignored, and State Department spokesperson Richard Boucher described Musharraf as "indispensable" to U.S. interests in the region, as reiterated in an article in today's New York Times.

Now that Musharraf is for all practical purposes about to be dispensed with, the Bush administration needs to take a new approach.

A good start would be to adopt Sen. Joseph Biden's proposal to triple U.S. economic aid to Pakistan to $1.5 billion per year. A second step should be to acknowledge that flooding military aid into the country -- to the tune of $10 billion since the beginning of the Bush presidency -- has done more harm than good. In this administration -- if possible -- and certainly in the next, the United States needs to shift from "democracy promotion" to "democracy support." Instead of trying to impose pro-U.S. regimes by force, U.S. policy should involve supporting indigenous democratic forces with non-military assistance, taking its cues from the needs of these movements rather than trying to manipulate the results.

Going forward, the Bush administration should be pressed to support the new elected government; Sen. Joseph Biden's call for a tripling of U.S. economic aid to $1.5 billion a year is a good place to start. In addition, there should be an acknowledgment that the flood of U.S. military aid into the country -- as much as $10 billion since the Bush administration took office -- has done more harm than good. If the threat from Islamic extremism in Pakistan is to be effectively neutralized, much more will be accomplished by providing accountable governance that delivers basic services and, as a result, helps dry up any reservoirs of support for Al Qaeda and Taliban operatives. A shift in approach in Pakistan could usher in a new era of "democracy support," in which U.S. policy helps bolster indigenous democratic forces rather than attempting to manipulate the internal dynamics of other countries in an effort to install or prop up pro-U.S. regimes.

Link.

See How The Saint Feels About Obama

See it here.

Skewered

The story behind the media skewering (or media "lynching) from Kirk Watson himself:

So . . . That really happened.

On Tuesday night, after an important and historic victory in the Wisconsin Presidential Primary by Senator Barack Obama, I appeared on the MSNBC post-election program. “Hardball” host Chris Matthews (who is, it turns out, as ferocious as they say), began grilling me on Senator Obama’s legislative record.

And my mind went blank. I expected to be asked about the primary that night, or the big one coming up in Texas on March 4, or just about anything else in the news. When the subject changed so emphatically, I reached for information that millions of my fellow Obama supporters could recite by heart, and I couldn’t summon it.

My most unfortunate gaffe is not, in any way, a comment on Senator Obama, his substantial record, or the great opportunity we all share to elect him President of the United States.

Had I not lost my mind, here are the accomplishments I would have mentioned:

• Senator Obama’s fight for universal children’s health care in Illinois.
  
• His success bringing Republicans and Democrats together (a huge selling point for me in general) on bills such as the one in Illinois requiring police interrogations and confessions to be videotaped.
  
• His leadership on ethics reform in Washington (the bill that lobbyists and special interests are complaining about right now has his name on it).
  
• His bill to make the federal budget far more transparent and accessible to Americans via the Internet – we could use that openness in Texas.
  
• And his vital work with Republicans to lock down nuclear weapons around the world.
  

Of course, it would have helped to remember all of this last night. I encourage anyone who wants to know more (especially Mr. Matthews) to log onto texas.barackobama.com.

In the meantime, let’s not lose focus on what’s important in this election. It’s not my stunning televised defeat in “Stump the Chump.” Thankfully, it has nothing at all to do with me.

What’s important is the direction our country is headed. What’s important are the priorities, methods, and, yes, accomplishments of those seeking the highest office in the country.

Senator Obama has a vision for this nation, and we would be fortunate to fulfill it. He has the commitment to work with everyone from across the political and demographic spectrum to achieve it. And he has the strength to defend us, our security, and our values against all who will challenge them.

But most of all, he has the record to prove that all of this is possible. It’s something no one should forget.

. . . Even though I did.

. . . On national television.

How The Saint Gets Away With It; Big Journo Gives Him A Pass

Josh Marshall:

As I've noted a few times before, one of the key dynamics of the coming general election race is the unwillingness of most reporters to scrutinize John McCain's claims and statements to determine whether they are either accurate, contradicted by other public statements or even if they make any sense. One example is the current tussle between McCain and Obama over a pledge to opt in to the public financing system for the general election. McCain is insisting Obama honor his 'pledge' to opt in to the public financing system if his Republican opponent (McCain) agrees to do the same. Now, Obama's going to have to deal with the pledge issue on his own. But it's impossible to report on this gambit of McCain without at least one spit take. And probably a few more.

Back in August McCain opted into the public financing system for the primaries. Then in December he needed to come up with some cash quickly. Well, no problem. He was already guaranteed over $5 million from the feds. So all he needed to do was put that guarantee down as collateral for the loan.

Only McCain didn't want to do that because once he formally made the federally-guaranteed money collateral then he gave up his right to later opt back out of the system.

But, he really, really needed the money. So McCain, along with his campaign finance lawyer Trevor Potter (whom I've met and is a very sharp guy) came up with a workaround. It went like this. McCain wouldn't make the guarantee collateral. But he promised that if his campaign tanked he would opt out of the system and then opt back in. This would mean remaining a candidate even after he knew he wasn't really in the race in order to a) get back the public money to pay his creditors and b) assure he could sign the original loan note with the de facto collateral while nonetheless maintaining his ability to once again opt out of the public financing system at any one of many possible future junctures at which his campaign might pop back from life support and it would be in his interest to go back to raising money from donors.

Of course, McCain's campaign did come off the mat. And since he now wants to raise and spend as much as possible before the end of the summer, earlier this month he did actually opt back out. The FEC, the outfit that enforces the campaign finance laws, says McCain's not allowed to opt out. But whatever, he opted out anyway.

Explain to me how this guy gets out of the gate attacking anyone else about honoring pledges tied to the campaign finance system.

McCain's other angle over the last few days has been to call Obama naive for saying he would take military action in Pakistan, even without the Pakistanis' permission if they wouldn't give it. But according to the Post, that's exactly what the administration did only a month ago when they used Hellfire missiles to kill Abu Laith al-Libi, a top al-Qaeda commander in Pakistan. Here was McCain's response ...

Asked about that account as he drove to this small town to address a snowbound crowd at Young's Jersey Dairy, known for ice cream, McCain demurred, saying he did not know the facts of the situation. But he said Obama was still wrong in speaking publicly about the option.

"The one thing you want to do is not embarrass them," he said. "I've known these people and I have known them for many years. I know I can work with them for the good of the security of the United States. I would not broadcast to the world that I am going to bomb a sovereign nation in order to accomplish my goal."

A Reminder For The Saint

Josh Marshall, 1,000,000 years ago:

In late March, when the National Association of Broadcasters held its annual Futures Summit in Pebble Beach, California, the assembled pack of Wall Street financial-analyst invitees presented the broadcasters with an astonishing but presumably welcome fact: Recent auctions in Europe and the United States indicated that the market value of the spectrum space--the airwaves over which television and radio are broadcast--that the license holders currently occupy could be as much as $367 billion. (To put that in perspective, the entire local broadcasting industry itself is worth only $100 billion.)

The owners of the roughly 1,600 local television stations across the country are no longer just broadcasters. Rather, they are spectrum lords, rentiers of the digital age, sitting atop hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of prized spectrum space, which many plan to use not only for traditional broadcasting but for new, nonbroadcasting, high-tech services like wireless phones and computers, or which they plan to sell to the highest third-party bidders.

What makes this so appalling is that the spectrum is public property. It was given to broadcasters--on loan--in exchange for the transmission of programming in the public interest; as part of long-established law, broadcasters must explicitly forgo any claims to ownership of the spectrum they use. The already absurdly minimal requirements for public-interest broadcasting--such as offering a certain number of hours per week of "educational" or public affairs shows--are routinely abrogated or honored only in the most technical sense, as with product-shilling cartoons that are designated educational kids' programming. But at least in the old days the stations were using the spectrum for broadcasting, the purpose for which it had been granted them.

Not anymore. Two converging technological trends have changed the economics of the spectrum and multiplied the number of its possible uses. The first trend is the move toward digital television broadcasting. DTV, as it is commonly called, requires new television sets and new broadcasting equipment but can transmit TV signals on much less spectrum space and send signals with much sharper resolution and clarity. Beginning in the mid-1980s, broadcasters began clamoring for more spectrum space in order to start broadcasting standard-definition digital signals and eventually to begin transmitting in the super-sharp format now known as high-definition TV (HDTV). Each local-broadcast licensee already held six megahertz of spectrum space to broadcast its analog signal. Then, as part of the legislative logrolling that accompanied the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the federal government agreed to give each broadcaster an additional six megahertz. In order for viewers who had yet to buy digital televisions not to get cut off, the Telecommunications Act stipulated that broadcasters could hold on to their extra six megahertz until 2006. The understanding was that in 2006, both the industry and the viewing public would have switched over to digital broadcasting--so at that point, the analog spectrum would be returned to the government, which would then be able to deploy that portion of the spectrum for other uses.

But there was a catch: If DTV hadn't penetrated 85 percent of the market by 2006, the broadcasters could hold their double allotment of spectrum space until it did. Currently, less than 1 percent of the U.S. population has all-digital TV; market penetration probably won't reach 85 percent for many, many years. So broadcasters will be able to hold on to their extra spectrum space more or less indefinitely, according to Michael Calabrase, director of the Public Assets Program at the New America Foundation.

Why would they want to keep so much spectrum? Here's where the second technological trend comes in. Even as demand for digital television is lagging, demand for wireless communications--mobile phones, laptops, palm computers, and other hybrid technologies--is exploding. And these high-bandwidth communications require space on the same spectrum currently occupied by the broadcasters. Thus, the demand by wireless communication services (and their consumers) to take hold of the old analog space has been immense.

If all had gone as originally planned, the broadcasters would simply have returned their analog spectrum to the government as they started using their digital spectrum instead; the government, in turn, could have auctioned the spectrum to wireless-service providers. But with the development of digital television effectively stalled, the broadcasters don't have to leave. And many of them are now arguing that they should not only receive compensation for the expense of moving off their analog space (which might be reasonable) but actually get paid something close to the market value of the spectrum the government loaned them. (Never mind that this is akin to your loaning me your car and my selling it to someone else.) And the broadcasters are so politically powerful, it looks like this is what they're going to get.

But the scandal doesn't end there. When Congress agreed in 1996 to give the broadcasters another six megahertz of spectrum space, it was with the understanding that they would be broadcasting HDTV--one channel of which takes up the full six megahertz. Some stations will do that or will fill up their allotment with several standard-digital signals. But it's likely that many will broadcast one or two standard-digital signals, which take up only one megahertz each, and then farm out the remaining space to nonbroadcast services at an enormous profit. The broadcasters do have to pay 5 percent of their gross revenue to the government for selling nonbroadcast services. But this is a nominal price when you consider that the government gave them the product they're selling, on the condition that it would be used for a different purpose entirely.

The first allotment of analog space that will be auctioned off is now occupied by channels 60 through 69 on your UHF television dial. Some of those stations are niche broadcasters, such as foreign-language stations; but most show infomercials and reruns of old sitcoms. With cable television now prevalent, only about 15 percent to 20 percent of viewers even get channels 60 to 69 over the airwaves as opposed to via cable, satellite, or some other subscription service. Almost everyone agrees that the benefits of turning this spectrum space over to wireless services outweigh the costs of denying a small number of viewers the ability to watch reruns of Eight Is Enough. The question is, who should get all the money the wireless services are willing to pay at auction for that spectrum? By rights, it should go to the government, since the airwaves are public property. But the stations in the 60–69 channel range are demanding that most of it go to them.

The man who'll likely be the first to cash in is Lowell W. "Bud" Paxson, chairman of Paxson Communications Corporation, which owns 18 stations nationwide in the 60–69 range. The company also owns PAX TV, "the nation's seventh broadcast television network" and "America's only family friendly TV network." Paxson Communications and about 60 percent of the other license holders in the 60–69 range are willing to move exclusively over to digital--for a price.

The market value of spectrum space used for those channels is between $15 billion and $30 billion. Paxson proposes an auction in which most of the money goes to the broadcaster-occupants. He is currently working with Spectrum Exchange Group, a company that specializes in coordinating private spectrum auctions, on an auction that would allow bidders simultaneously to buy out the individual broadcasters and pay the federal government for the rights to use the space. If Paxson and his partners are able to pull this off, they will make billions of dollars. When Paxson was charged with extorting a ransom in exchange for giving back what he never owned in the first place, he responded with a startling candor that made a mockery of broadcasters' claim to operating in the public interest: "We are entrepreneurs hoping to reward our shareholders who invested in our business of amassing spectrum."

As this column goes to press, Paxson, his fellow broadcasters, and Spectrum Exchange are trying to bring their auction concept to fruition. Meanwhile, the Bush administration's recently released budget proposed a delay of the next spectrum auction from September 2001 until as late as 2004. But given the political clout of the broadcaster lobby and the intense pressure on all sides to get spectrum space into the hands of the wireless-service providers, Paxson and his cronies look like they are holding all of the cards.

The Answer Man Explains How The World Works

Dear Mister Answer Man: I can’t believe the liberals’ faux outrage over Bill O’Reilly. First the man stands up for racial equality, noting that black people in Harlem restaurants are just as polite as white people, and as Fox News executive Bill Shine pointed out, “left-wing outlets” stirred up “false racism accusations for ratings” in response. Now O'Reilly explicitly says that he will wait for evidence before conducting a lynching party against Michelle Obama, and the Democrat party is screaming for his head. As Andrew Malcolm of the Los Angeles Times has explained, “Much of the current online attention to this incident on his Tuesday show has focused on O'Reilly, who is also disliked by many for his success, and on his bold use of the word ‘lynching’ in regards to a black woman, as in, ‘I don't want to go on a lynching party against Michelle Obama unless there's evidence, hard facts, that say this is how the woman really feels.’” Malcolm asks some important questions, Mister Answer Man: “What in the world is going on in talk radio when someone wants to make an unverified slur on the air and the host, the notorious confrontational and not very shy Bill O'Reilly, won't let them say it until he checks out the details? Is some kind of irresponsible responsibility creeping into the nation's chattering airwaves in an emotional election year? Has something called fairness reared its ugly head in a world usually bereft of nuance?” And Malcolm is right, O’Reilly stopped that caller in her tracks and held the line for fairness and nuance. But I think there’s another important question here, too: shouldn’t O’Reilly be commended for demanding that a lynching party observe rules of evidence? He explicitly said he would wait for “hard facts” before proceeding. As I recall, lynching parties didn’t always do that. So shouldn’t we be applauding O’Reilly for holding everyone to a higher procedural– I might even say “civil”– standard? – T. Bilbo, Mississippi

Mister Answer Man replies: Yes. Thank you so much for this detailed question! You seem quite knowledgeable about the history of lynching, Ms. Bilbo, and I’m moved to add that liberal ignorance of this issue is truly appalling. It appears that the only thing liberals know about “lynching” is to complain every time someone uses the word. The truth, of course, is that O’Reilly was doing what he does best– looking out for you, Ms. Obama, by keeping his callers honest. More generally, I think we as a nation really have to stop indulging these petty identity-group obsessions with words. I feel quite sure that Mr. O’Reilly would use the same kind of language for any uppity person– black, white, or half-Communist/ half-Jew.

Link.

Watch The Saint Flip-Flop!

A Note To The Reader

If I refer to something but don't include a link, you're free to check me out by researching it yourself.

Thank you.

More Flip-Floppery

I was wondering when we'd hear from Isikoff on this McCain business. (Remember, he was one of the other reporters in the hunt, one or more of whom seems to have prompted the Times to pull the trigger.) It seems that one of McCain's sweeping denials from that presser yesterday morning is contradicted by a very good source: a deposition McCain gave back in 2002. Isikoff's got the details.

Let's step back for a moment from this particular 'misrecollection'. Watching McCain over the last couple days particularly and in general over many years, the guy really has a problem with making blanket and obviously false denials. In fact, the obviousness is often so extreme that it can't be a matter of strategy, at least not in a very thought out sense. In this case, he makes a blanket statement and there's a written record of McCain himself contradicting his statement. You'll notice also yesterday he grandly stated that he'd never spoken with the Times about the story. Then about 30 seconds later a reporter brought up the pretty obvious point that, well ... the article discusses McCain's talk with Bill Keller. And of course McCain quickly backtracks, since clearly what he had just said was completely ridiculous.

You'll also notice, though I'm not sure anyone has really made this point that clearly, that he also claimed that he and his office hadn't tried to prevent the Times from publishing the story. Well, pulling out all the stops and having all these conversations with the Times and hiring Bob Bennett to go toe to toe with them probably counts as trying to stop the story.

Then there's this video ThinkProgress came up with yesterday where McCain tells a New Hampshire townhall meeting that he says: "Everybody says that they’re against the special interests. I’m the only one the special interests don’t give any money to."

It's almost too ridiculous to even try refuting. Needless to say McCain gets tons of money and always has from pretty much all the same special interests that everyone else gets money from.

There's no way of getting around the fact that McCain routinely, almost constantly, issues categorical denials that are demonstrably false. The very volume and clarity of the bogusness of so many of these statements might even be viewed as his best defense.

Link.

The Saint -- Of Lies

Pathological? Pandering? Just doing what the Missus and her daddy told him to?

A sworn deposition that Sen. John McCain gave in a lawsuit more than five years ago appears to contradict one part of a sweeping denial that his campaign issued this week to rebut a New York Times story about his ties to a Washington lobbyist.

On Wednesday night the Times published a story suggesting that McCain might have done legislative favors for the clients of the lobbyist, Vicki Iseman, who worked for the firm of Alcalde & Fay. One example it cited were two letters McCain wrote in late 1999 demanding that the Federal Communications Commission act on a long-stalled bid by one of Iseman's clients, Florida-based Paxson Communications, to purchase a Pittsburgh television station.

Just hours after the Times's story was posted, the McCain campaign issued a point-by-point response that depicted the letters as routine correspondence handled by his staff—and insisted that McCain had never even spoken with anybody from Paxson or Alcalde & Fay about the matter. "No representative of Paxson or Alcalde & Fay personally asked Senator McCain to send a letter to the FCC," the campaign said in a statement e-mailed to reporters.

But that flat claim seems to be contradicted by an impeccable source: McCain himself. "I was contacted by Mr. [Lowell] Paxson on this issue," McCain said in the Sept. 25, 2002, deposition obtained by NEWSWEEK. "He wanted their approval very bad for purposes of his business. I believe that Mr. Paxson had a legitimate complaint."

While McCain said "I don't recall" if he ever directly spoke to the firm's lobbyist about the issue—an apparent reference to Iseman, though she is not named—"I'm sure I spoke to [Paxson]." McCain agreed that his letters on behalf of Paxson, a campaign contributor, could "possibly be an appearance of corruption"—even though McCain denied doing anything improper.

McCain's subsequent letters to the FCC—coming around the same time that Paxson's firm was flying the senator to campaign events aboard its corporate jet and contributing $20,000 to his campaign—first surfaced as an issue during his unsuccessful 2000 presidential bid. William Kennard, the FCC chair at the time, described the sharply worded letters from McCain, then chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, as "highly unusual."

The issue erupted again this week when the New York Times reported that McCain's top campaign strategist at the time, John Weaver, was so concerned about what Iseman (who was representing Paxson) was saying about her access to McCain that he personally confronted her at a Washington restaurant and told her to stay away from the senator.

The McCain campaign has denounced the Times story as a "smear campaign" and harshly criticized the paper for publishing a report saying that anonymous aides worried there might have been an improper relationship between Iseman and McCain. McCain, who called the charges "not true," also told reporters Thursday in a news conference that he was unaware of any confrontation Weaver might have had with Iseman.

The deposition that McCain gave came in the course of a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of his landmark campaign finance reform law, known as McCain-Feingold. The suit sheds no new light on the nature of the senator's dealings with Iseman, but it does include a lengthy discussion of his dealings with the company that hired her, including some statements by the senator that could raise additional questions for his campaign.

In the deposition, noted First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams (who was representing the lawsuit's lead plaintiff, Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell) grilled McCain about the four trips he took aboard Paxson's corporate jet to campaign events and the $20,000 in campaign contributions he had received from the company's executives during the period the firm was pressing him to intervene with federal regulators.

Asked at one point if Paxson's lobbyist (Abrams never mentions Iseman's name) had accompanied him on any of the trips he took aboard the Paxson corporate jet, McCain responded, "I do not recall." (McCain's campaign confirmed this week that Iseman did fly on one trip returning to Washington from a campaign fund-raiser in Florida.)

At another point Abrams asked McCain if, "looking back on the events with Mr. Paxson, the contributions, the jets, everything you and I have just talked about, do you believe that it would have been justified for a member of the public to say there is at least an appearance of corruption here?"

"Absolutely," McCain replied. "And when I took a thousand dollars or any other hard-money contribution from anybody who does business before the Congress of the United States, then that allegation is justified as well. Because the taint affects all of us." Elsewhere McCain said about his dealings with Paxson, "As I said before, I believe that there could possibly be an appearance of corruption because this system has tainted all of us."

Abrams's purpose at the time was not especially damaging to McCain. The lawyer's argument, which he later unsuccessfully made to the Supreme Court, was that the "appearance of corruption" was relatively commonplace in Washington and therefore too amorphous a standard to justify the intrusion on free speech that Congress made by passing a law that restricted big-money campaign donations and last-minute campaign advertising by outside groups.

In his deposition McCain got the opportunity to emphasize some of the same points his campaign made in 2000 and again this week about his letters to the FCC at Paxson's behest: that he never pressed the agency to rule in Paxson's favor, only to make a decision one way or another.

"My job as chairman of the committee, Mr. Abrams, is to see that bureaucracies do function," McCain said. "Bureaucracies are notorious for not functioning and not making decisions. I believe that Mr. Paxson had a legitimate complaint. Not about whether the commission acted favorably or unfavorably, but that the commission act."

But despite McCain's own somewhat detailed descriptions of his conversations with Paxson about the matter in the deposition, his campaign Thursday night stuck with its original statement that the senator never discussed the issue at all with the communications executive or his lobbyist.

"We do not think there is a contradiction here," campaign spokeswoman Ann Begeman e-mailed NEWSWEEK after being asked about the senator's sworn testimony five and a half years ago. "We do not have the transcript you excerpted and do not know the exact questions Senator McCain was asked, but it appears that Senator McCain, when speaking of being contacted by Paxson, was speaking in shorthand of his staff being contacted by representatives of Paxson. Senator McCain does not recall being asked directly by Paxson or any representative of him or by Alcalde & Fay to contact the FCC regarding the Pittsburgh license transaction.

"Senator McCain's staff recalls meeting with representatives of Paxson, and staff was asked to contact the FCC on behalf of Senator McCain," Begemen continued. "The staff relayed to Senator McCain the message from Paxson's representatives. But we have checked the records of the Senator's 1999 schedule and it does not appear there were any meetings between Senator McCain and Paxson or any representative of Paxson regarding the issue."

There appears to be no dispute that Paxson lobbyist Iseman did indeed contact McCain's top communications aide at the time about the Pittsburgh license issue. Mark Buse, who then served as McCain's chief of staff at the Commerce Committee and is now chief of staff in his Senate office, recalled to NEWSWEEK that Iseman came by his office, talked to him about the issue before the FCC, and left behind briefing material that he used to draft the letters under McCain's signature. He said there was nothing unusual about this. "That's Lobbying 101," Buse said. "You leave paper behind."

But the campaign's insistence that McCain himself never talked to Paxson about the issue seems hard to square with the contents of his testimony in the McCain-Feingold case.

Abrams, for example, at one point cited the somewhat technical contents of one of his letters to the FCC and then asked the witness, "where did you get information of that sort, Senator McCain?"

McCain replied: "I was briefed by my staff."

Abrams then followed up: "Do you know were they got the information?"

"No," McCain replied. "But I would add, I was contacted by Mr. Paxson on this issue."

"You were?"

"Yes."

Abrams then asked McCain: "Can you tell us what you said and what he said about it?"

McCain: "That he had applied to purchase this station and that he wanted to purchase it. And that there had been a numerous year delay with the FCC reaching a decision. And he wanted their approval very bad for purposes of his business. I said, 'I would be glad to write a letter asking them to act, but I will not write a letter, I cannot write a letter asking them to approve or deny, because then that would be an interference in their activities. I think everybody is entitled to a decision. But I can't ask for a favorable disposition for you'."

Abrams a few moments later asked: "Did you speak to the company's lobbyist about these matters?"

McCain: "I don't recall if it was Mr. Paxson or the company's lobbyist or both."

Abrams: "But you did speak to him?"

McCain: "I'm sure I spoke with him, yes."

Link.

Flip-Flopping On The Campaign Reform He Wrought

We noted this yesterday. But The Washington Post does a good job today in sizing up the situation and its possible mammoth consequences for McCain's campaign.

There are really two completely separate issues here.

First, McCain opted in to the public finance system for the primaries last year. It meant that his struggling campaign would get $5.8 million in public matching funds in March. Now that he's effectively the Republican nominee, he wants out, because the system entails a spending limit of $54 million through the end of August. He's almost spent that much already, according to the Post.

So the McCain campaign sent the Federal Election Commission a letter (pdf) earlier this month saying that he was opting out. But there's a problem. And FEC Chairman David Mason, a Republican, made it plain in his letter (pdf) yesterday: McCain can't tell the FEC that he's out of the system. He can only ask.

And the FEC, which normally has six commissioners, can't give him an answer until it has a quorum of four commissioners. It currently only has two. That's because the Senate has been deadlocked over four nominees; Democrats insist on a separate confirmation vote for vote-suppression guru Hans von Spakovsky, and Republicans insist on a single vote for all nominees.

The second issue has to do with McCain's tricky loan and whether the FEC will conclude that it locked him into the system. But for now, that's really ancillary to the first issue.

It is a serious issue. As the Post reports, "Knowingly violating the spending limit is a criminal offense that could put McCain at risk of stiff fines and up to five years in prison."

It's really unclear as to what might happen next. McCain's lawyer says he's out of the system and that's that. It's unclear if they'll respond to Mason's letter. And it's unclear if the FEC can do anything or be forced to do anything, without the necessary quorum. It's literally an unprecedented situation.

For now, however, the consequences for the dispute are mostly political for McCain, as election law expert Rick Hasen writes:

McCain faces at least a political problem. More than anyone else, Sen. McCain's name is synonymous with campaign finance reform (think McCain-Feingold). If he's arguably in violation of the law, that will tarnish his reputation. He may be able to make technically correct arguments that he is not in violation, but the smell is bad.

Note: Hasen cites Mark Schmitt on a certain irony. Pretty much everyone agrees that the public financing system for the primaries is broken -- the spending limits are too low and the payouts are too late (March). As Steve Weissman of the Campaign Finance Institute put it to me, the primary system in its current state is "basically only for losing candidates" -- candidates without the fundraising wherewithal to really compete.

But McCain has refused to support efforts to fix the system, so in a way, he has himself to blame for the fact that the system is so unworkable that he's possibly bent the rules to get out of it.

Link.

Is The Saint Really That Stupid?

You decide.