. Maybe your children are bloody retards but mine are brilliant. I fully expect that they will take the world by the b*lls and make it theirs

jmarcure on August 2, 2008 at 7:15 AM

I don’t want to rain on anybody’s parade, but isn’t that what Barak Obama’s momma said about her child? How did that work out? Well I guess we will find out.

MB4 on August 2, 2008 at 12:58 PM

The Republicans should have made a MUCH bigger deal of this – and refused to leave.

grtflmark on August 2, 2008 at 1:17 PM

It was Friday Night Happy Hour. They had to leave. I warned that someone should bring them some booze but no one listened.

MB4 on August 2, 2008 at 1:31 PM

That’s what the Democrats tell us, anyway.

NoDonkey on August 2, 2008 at 1:45 PM

Do some liposuction on Al Gore’s belly. That should be enough to power your car for a month right there.

MB4 on August 2, 2008 at 1:50 PM

Economic Free Fall?

Treasury Secretary Paulson proposed and Democratic leaders have agreed to make the insulated Fed the “supercop” that oversees not only commercial banks and banking conglomerates but also the largest investment houses or anyone else big enough to destabilize the system. This “reform” would definitely reassure club members who are already too cozy with the central bankers. Everyone else would be left deeper in the dark.

The political system, once again, is rewarding failure. The Fed is an unreliable watchdog, ideologically biased and compromised by its conflicting obligations. Is it supposed to discipline the big money players or keep them afloat? Putting the secretive central bank in charge, with its unlimited powers to prop up troubled firms, would further eviscerate democracy, not to mention economic justice.

If Congress enacts this concept early next year, the privileged group of protected financial interests is sure to grow larger, because other non financial firms could devise ways to reconfigure themselves so they too would qualify for club membership. A very large manufacturing conglomerate–General Electric, for instance–might absorb elements of banking in order to be covered by the Fed’s umbrella (GE Capital is already among the largest pools of investment capital). Private-equity firms, with their buccaneer style of corporate management, are already trying to buy into banking, with encouragement from the Fed. A new President could stop the whole deal, of course, but John McCain has surrounded himself with influential advisers who were co-architects of this financial disaster. For that matter, so has Barack Obama.

The nation, meanwhile, is flirting with historic catastrophe. Nobody yet knows how bad it is, but the peril is vastly larger than previous episodes, like the savings and loan bailout of the late 1980s. The dangers are compounded by the fact that the United States is now utterly dependent on foreign creditors–Japan and China lead the list–who have been propping us up with their lending. Thanks to growing trade deficits and debt, foreign portfolio holdings of US long-term debt securities have more than doubled since 1994, from 7.9 percent to 18.8 percent as of June 2007. If these countries get fed up with their losses and pull the plug, the US economy will be a long, long time coming back.

The gravest danger is that the national economy will weaken further and spiral downward into a negative cycle that feeds on itself: as conditions darken, people hunker down and wait for the storm to pass–consumers stop buying, banks stop lending, producing companies cut their workforces. That feeds more defaulted loan losses back into the banking system’s balance sheets. This vicious cycle is essentially what led to the Great Depression after the stock market crash of 1929. I offer not a prediction but a warning. The comparison may sound far fetched now, but US policy-makers and politicians are putting us at risk of historic deflationary forces that, once they take hold, are very difficult to reverse.

MB4 on August 2, 2008 at 2:57 PM

If the McCain strategists were smart they’d stop directing their criticisms at Obama. They’d begin to lump him together with all the other screw-ball dems.

Darvin Dowdy on August 2, 2008 at 3:13 PM

I think your are absolutely right. McCain has got about as much millage as he can from “Paris and Britney”, “Moses” and “The One” without it backfiring in his face.

Obama will try to run against Bush, McCain should, as you say, run against the Dems who control both the Senate and the House.

I am not sure that McCain will be able to bring himself to attack his friends though.

MB4 on August 2, 2008 at 3:22 PM