Day: October 30, 2008

Info Ink: Election Comment

People realize that I am a political junkie, I live for this stuff and I guess that in some circles that makes me about a boring as watching flies mate. But to me this stuff is fascinating watching the chess game that is politics.

I entered into this year with the promise of something new and a good feeling about the future of this country. Ever so slowly that warm fuzzy feeling began to wane. I liked the idea that there were populists on both sides of the stage. I liked the idea that there was a real life maverick in the fray. I was also amazed to see that there were a couple of real honest to god progressives in the contest. I even found the appearance of bored business men that wanted to play presidential politics rather amusing.

Yes but slowly the ones that made the primaries interesting began to drop like flies, either because of money problems or lack of support. They just could not break the vote barrier to stay in the race. Their messages did not play to the public and they became also rans. Finally we were down to the two eventual nominees.

The messages of something new for Washington got drowned out by the shouts of partisanship. The situation in the United States just begs for new thinking, but the candidates smack of old school. We will go to the polls and cast our votes then sit back and wait to see if anyone can pull the country out of a tail spin.

In November, someone will win the election and someone will be the runner up. In the end, the loser will be the American people. I fear that no matter which party wins it will be business as usual in Washington with minor adjustments to appear productive.

Go out and vote! Please vote for the good of the country, not for the massage of some guys overinflated ego.

YOU HAVE THE POWER—CHOOSE WISELY!

2008 Anal-ocity

Found another one for the competition for the “Assie” award.

I was watching MSNBC on 29 Oct 08 and heard McCain pollster, Bill McInturff, state, “The race is a lot closer than independent polls indicate.”

So let me see, all polls but his are wrong?  Is that about it?  Qyestion?  What would you expect a pollster for McCain to say in the closing days of the election?  Do not think he would say they were losing, riught?

Fed To Bailout Foreign Banks

The Federal Reserve agreed to provide $30 billion each to the central banks of Brazil, Mexico, South Korea and Singapore, expanding its effort to unfreeze money markets to emerging nations for the first time.

The Fed set up “liquidity swap facilities with the central banks of these four large systemically important economies” effective until April 30, the central bank said yesterday in a statement. The arrangements aim “to mitigate the spread of difficulties in obtaining U.S. dollar funding.”

“The swap lines will help unclog the liquidity pipeline and that action is boosting markets even more than” the Fed’s rate cut, said Venkatraman Anantha-Nageswaran, head of research at Bank Julius Baer & Co. in Singapore. “It’s a step in the right direction and prevents things from getting worse.”

The Fed announcement coincided with a decision by the International Monetary Fund to almost double borrowing limits for emerging market countries while waiving demands for economic austerity measures.

The Fed and IMF actions “show international resolve to support strong performing emerging-market economies adversely impacted by the current financial market turbulence,” U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said in a statement.

Emerging-market investors have created “massive demand for dollars and a reduction of liquidity in other currencies” by going back to investing in the U.S. currency, said David Spegel, head of emerging-market strategy at ING Financial Bank NV in New York.

The Fed swap lines “are designed to help restore liquidity so that a vicious negative spiral doesn’t occur,” he said.

“The Fed is there to support large emerging markets that have done their homework over the past several years like South Korea, Brazil, Singapore and Mexico,” said Alonso Cervera, a Latin America economist with Credit Suisse Group in New York. “These are large, relevant emerging countries that have followed responsible fiscal and monetary policies for the past several years and now are going through tough times.”

The Fed also created this week a $15 billion swap line with its New Zealand counterpart and removed limits this month on four existing swap lines, including one with the European Central Bank. The Fed set up a $10 billion arrangement with Australia’s central bank last month and then tripled it to $30 billion.

“The hoped-for result is that we don’t see the global financial crisis worsen still more,” said Lyle Gramley, a former Federal Reserve governor who is now senior economic adviser at Stanford Group Co. “The Fed is making dollars available to the central banks of these countries who are trying to meet the needs of their banking systems.”

What happened to Main Street?

8 Reasons Why Obama Will Win

A follow-up to the Loss piece in the Chicago Trib by Eric Zorn.

1. Obama’s supporters are more energized.

Obama draws enormous crowds wherever he goes and has energized young and first-time voters in a way that will surprise pollsters relying on traditional turnout models. A recent USA Today/Gallup poll found 74 percent of Obama voters saying they are more enthusiastic about voting this time than in previous elections. Only 48 percent of McCain voters said the same.

These jazzed Obama supporters don’t see their vote as the weary, defensive choice of the lesser of two evils, but as an exciting chance to create a brighter future.

2. Obama has a superior ground game.

In part because Sen. Hillary Clinton challenged him deep into the primary season, Obama is better organized at the neighborhood level than any Democratic presidential candidate in history.

His campaign is also making landmark use of technology—using e-mail, text messages and social-networking sites to keep in touch with supporters and urge them to the polls.

3. Obama has a superior air game.

Obama is so flush with cash that he’s able to saturate TV and radio in key markets at the end of the campaign with ads that counter McCain’s criticisms of him and launch attacks on McCain.

It’s not just the money but the determination to respond rapidly and vehemently inside the space of a single news cycle.

4. McCain has lost his brand.

Yes, he’s a volatile man running in sensitive times under the banner of troubled party. But he started off with the image of a bipartisan straight-shooter with a clear, selfless sense of proportion.

Yet he’s campaigned like a crank. His scattershot, over-the-top assaults on Obama’s character (or, rather, the character of Obama’s associates) have seemed like an effort to change the subject from important issues. And now that McCain’s finally settled on conservative tax policy as his theme down the stretch, his campaign is so desperate for traction that it’s going schoolyard—channeling Joe McCarthy and calling Obama a socialist, a Marxist and even a communist.

5. Sarah Palin is turning out to be the disasta’ from Alaska.

I’m confident historians will rank McCain’s decision to choose a rookie governor from a low-population state to be his running mate as his biggest miscalculation. Palin’s youth, spunkiness and conservative bona fides fired up the Republican base, sure. But her ignorance, on display in early TV interviews, mortified the rest of us, and polls now show her as a distinct drag on the ticket.

McCain’s appalling judgment in selecting Palin has been cited by Colin Powell, several high-profile conservative intellectuals and scores of newspaper editorial boards as a reason to support Obama.

6. Obama hasn’t lost his cool.

Historians will also note the textbook discipline of the Obama campaign, which stuck to a set of fairly simple “change” messages while the McCain campaign kept trying out new themes. This steadiness has been mirrored by Obama’s own equanimity, particularly during the debates in which he looked and sounded far more presidential than the twitchy, simpering McCain.

The more people saw of Obama, the less he seemed like the frightening, radical, terrorist sympathizer in McCain’s cartoonish rhetoric.

7. McCain hasn’t been able to fight the Bush head winds.

No matter how many times McCain said “maverick,” he still couldn’t create enough distance from the deeply unpopular president to make the sale to voters hungering for new leadership.

8. Obama has been lucky.

Things have been relatively quiet all year on the terror and national security fronts—McCain’s strengths. And the major crisis of the campaign season—the economic meltdown—not only played into one of Obama’s perceived strong suits, it also caused McCain to appear impulsive and indecisive in the face of a sudden challenge.

The Swedish Model

All the chat about the economy and the taxes and the policies of Obama have been called the “Swedish Model”.  Media pundits, talking heads and even some McCain surrogates have said the economic policies of Obama are socialism and some even said it is the model mentioned.  But what does the “Swedish Model” mean?  Is it socialism, is it something to be avoided or is it a myth?

All that said, just what is the Swedish Model?  Here is your answer.

Health care–all citizens receive high quality health and dental care with modest co-payment.  The quality is so hight that even the wealthy opt out for public health care.

Education–Free education is provided to all citizens at all levels, including college, vocational and adult education.  The quality of education is so hugh that even the KIng’s children attend public school.

Job Training–Free training is provided to all citizens who desire it.

Employment–the Swedish government feels that all citizens has the right to meaningful work.  Unemployed people receive benefits, retraining or a job in a public works project.  The unemployment rate in Sweden is about 2.4%.

Social Security–All Swedish citizens will receive a pension from the state, which pays them 75% of their income at the time of retirement.

Housing–For citizens that cannot afford a house, they are given a housing subsidy.  There are no homeless in Swedish because of their housing and anti-poverty programs have been so successful.

So far I have not seen where that is such a bad deal for the people of Sweden.  The US wishes it could provide such benefits to its citizens.  Screw ideology–the people should be the priority of the governement and you may call it whatever you would like.

Can Medicare Be Publicly Funded?

Medicare has never been a fully public program. A considerable portion of the medical bills has always been paid by the beneficiaries. In fact, on average, retirees over 65 years old are paying more out of their pockets today, with Medicare, than they did prior to the passage of Medicare in 1965. That is an astounding fact.

When the Medicare program was signed into law in 1964, Congress set a mandatory premium for Part B – physician care. They also required Medicare recipients to pay 20 percent of their medical bills. At the time the bill was up for a vote, Democrats stated that this condition was necessary in order for it to pass. The American Medical Association (those were the days when the AMA had decisive power), the insurance carriers, drug companies, and most of the rest of corporate America strongly opposed the passage of Medicare and Medicaid. Making these concessions got them to lower their opposition, but they kept the carriers and the drug monopolies in a position to do the dirty work they have been doing ever since.

One of the results of this compromise has been that Medicare Part B premium requirements have grown each year. The premium, now over $100 a month, is automatically taken out of monthly Social Security checks.

Even with Medicare, there is something like a 20 percent “gap” in coverage for recipients and is a huge financial burden. To help cover the gap, insurance companies sell so-called Medi-gap insurance, which has become a major source of revenue for private insurance companies. The dollar figure of this 20 percent gap has steadily grown to an astronomical figure, in the hundreds of billions each year.

Following the failure to win a universal health care program in the early 1990s, the insurance companies thought up a new scheme and quickly obtained federal government approval for it. The Gingrich Republican Congress, assisted by the caving in of the Clinton administration, devised a new way to satisfy the greed of the insurance companies, through health maintenance organization, or HMOs. HMOs were originally group practices, like the Kaiser programs, set up by well-meaning preventive medicine professionals.

The new HMOs of the 1990s were a whole new animal. These latter-day HMOs were created by insurance companies themselves to “offer retirees a deal.” The deal was simple. Sign up with us, we’ll pay the 20 percent gap, and we’ll give you better service.

Sounds like a good plan, but corruption was rampant. This was the heyday of corporations like Oxford Health Insurance company and other underhanded insurance carriers who, in the late 1990s, were caught raking in premium payments but refusing to provide advertised services, while doctors and hospitals went unpaid for months and even years. After the scheme was exposed, Oxford’s CEO was given a golden parachute worth millions.

Despite such enormous corruption, Republicans like John McCain, with campaign coffers over-flowing with HMO contributions, continue to champion deregulation and privatization, holding up the HMO and the supposed superior health care it provides. Americans have long known the truth, however.

In 2003, when George W. Bush pushed through his misnamed Medicare Modernization Act, expanding these private plans, he used a new Madison Avenue gimmick and called them “Medicare Advantage Plans.” Despite the fancy name, these plans have been a great disadvantage for many retirees, but have been a major new source of profits for insurance companies. Medicare recipients found themselves paying still more out-of-pocket expenses for fewer services. Some insurance carriers were allowed to exclude some Medicare recipients as bad insurance risks.
Amazingly, the Medicare Modernization Act (MMA) actually used taxpayer dollars to pay insurance carriers to set up these plans. And even with that money, the carriers demanded more, or they threatened to leave the program.

Finally, a showdown in the US Senate took place in July 2008. Senator Ted Kennedy dramatically returned from his sick bed to vote against the Bush administration’s attempt to lavish more money on the insurance companies. His was the 60th vote in the Senate to prevent a Republican Party filibuster. The mainstream media reported that Congress had voted to lower Medicare reimbursement for physicians fees, but the real deal was that Congress cut the money to the carriers. This was a major step toward Medicare reform that means something for all of us. Physician reimbursement from Medicare was frozen for 18 months.

McCain On Economics

I recently posted Obama’s approach to the economy and now in an effort to be fair I will put what I could find on McCain’s approach.  I found most of the stuff on the site of culturepress; a fine site that should be checked out.

  • Use $300 billion of the $700 billion financial rescue package recently enacted to buy troubled mortgages and replace them with manageable fixed-rate mortgages.
  • Reduce taxes on the first $50,000 of withdrawals from IRA and 401(k) retirement accounts to 10 percent for the next two years. Currently withdrawals at retirement are taxed at regular income tax rates which range from 10 percent to 35 percent.
  • Suspend rules that require retirees to begin withdrawals from retirement accounts six months after they reach the age of 70. The delay would allow retirees to ride out the current market crisis and stock market decline.
  • Increase the amount of capital losses from the sale of stocks and other assets that can be written off against ordinary income to $15,000 from $3,000.
  • Reduce the top tax rate on long term capital gains, currently at 15 percent, to 7.5 percent for two years.
  • Exempt unemployment benefits from taxes for two years
  • McCain who has typically been an opponent of government regulations, has promised new and tougher ones for the financial industry in response to the current crisis. Though he has not been specific, Mr. McCain has said he would reduce the number of federal agencies overseeing banks, thrift institutions and markets to make the chain of accountability clearer, while imposing tougher capital and disclosure requirements for financial institutions.
  • He wants more corporate-governance rules, including one to let shareholders set executives’ compensation. He supports new criminal penalties for predatory lending. He would create a Mortgage and Financial Institutions Trust to identify struggling companies to help them avoid bankruptcies.
  • When he splits up Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and sells the pieces to the private sector, as he has said he would do to help resolve the housing-loan crisis, they would be stripped of their implicit guarantees of government backing.

This was the best I could do on short notice, hopefully it will help people understand what McCain is proposing for the economy.

Olbermann On Palin

I have been writing against the whole label of socialist/Marxist/communist/un-American thing that has become ever popular in the conservative circles.  Finally, someone has come out with a critical look at it.

This is from Countdown with Keith Olbermann on 28 Oct 08.

Finally tonight, the Campaign Comment, and the real danger when you run a presidential candidate who thinks he’s Joe six-pack the Plumber, and a Vice Presidential candidate who thinks she’s Huey Long.

It’s not that the rhetoric in a desperate flailing last week on the stump can get hyperbolic and dangerous. It’s that each person on that campaign hears some of that giddying hyperbolic and dangerous rhetoric and tries to top it.

This has ended up, as it usually does, with one of the desperate candidates going so far to the right that they meet themselves coming back in the other direction.

That’d be you, Gov. Palin. You’ve finally done it. You’ve accused Obama of doing something wrong, of being something evil, something you boasted of doing, and being, yourself, just two months ago.

You try to figure out what this might have been, while I go back and talk to those good people over there. The Republicans called Obama a neophyte and then they picked a V.P. nominee with a tenth of Obama’s experience.

The Republicans called Obama a celebrity and then they bought that nominee $150,000 in designer clothes. The Republicans called Obama a terrorist sympathizer and then McCain said he was proud to be a friend of Gordon Liddy.

It’s like they’ve been unknowingly endowed with ESP and have been telling their own futures. And now the GOP has selected its last drum-thump for the remainder of the campaign although they said that about the last 17 “last drum-thumps.”Obama is a socialist!

Missouri Congressman Todd Akin, speaking near St. Louis:

“This campaign in the next couple of weeks is about one thing It’s a referendum on socialism.”

Arizona Sen. John McCain, who is apparently still running for President, at Dayton Ohio yesterday:

“Barack the Redistributor.”

Then he realized that sounded like an auto part, so, John McCain at Pottsville, Pennsylvania, later yesterday:

“Sen. Obama is running to be Redistributionist in Chief.”

No, no, go back to the first one.

Nobody you’re talking to, even understands what socialism means, Senator.

“Re-dis-tri-bu-shun-ist”is six syllables, and it sounds more like he’s recycling newspapers or something. Go simpler, like Michelle Bachmann’s only rival for “least stable member of the House of Representatives:” Steve King, R-Iowa, 5th District and 17th Century.

Warming up a crowd at a high school in Sioux City, for Gov. Palin on Saturday, King, who is amazingly still let out of the house each day without adult supervision, said of the Obama candidacy:

“When you take a lurch to the left you end up in a totalitarian dictatorship.”

“There is no freedom to the left. It’s always to our side of the aisle.”

“We choose freedom and liberty.”

Presumably that’s why the Congressman’s party was good enough to torture prisoners, eavesdrop on Americans, suspend Habeas Corpus, demonize dissent, pay news organizations to run favorable stories, and generally come as close to a totalitarian dictatorship as any American president ever has.

To choose freedom and liberty. For Congressman King and invited guests. Not for the country. Can you tell I’m stalling?

I’m trying to give Gov. Palin out there, a couple more seconds to figure out how she managed to get herself, as Shakespeare wrote of people destroyed by their own evil plans, “hoist with her own petard.”

Got it yet, Gov?

Okay, you remember Sen. Obama telling J.T. Plumber that it would help the country to “share the wealth”—a sentiment with which anybody not receiving $150,000 in free clothes would probably agree?

So you went off in Des Moines, remember this?

“See, under a big government, more tax agenda, what you thought was yours would really start belonging to somebody else, to everybody else. If you thought your income, your property, your inventory, your investments were, were yours, they would really collectively belong to everybody. Higher taxes, more government, misusing the power to tax leads to government moving into the role of some believing that government then has to take care of us. And government kind of moving into the role as the other half of our family, making decisions for us. Now, they do this in other countries where the people are not free.”

So Gov., Obama’s not just a socialist? Not just a re-distributionist re-distributor? Maybe not just a totalitarian? Maybe not just a dictator, he may be a communist?

To paraphrase you in Des Moines, Governor, Obama wants to set up, unlike other candidates, collectively owning the resources. By sharing that wealth and those resources. Collectivist sharing’ the wealth socialist communism, I’d say.

And still none of that sounds familiar to you, Governor?

“And Alaska – we’re set up, unlike other states in the union, where it’s collectively Alaskans own the resources. So we share in the wealth when the development of these resources occurs.”

Who said that, Governor?

Who was the collectivist share-the-wealther, who was boasting to the reporter visiting from “The New Yorker Magazine,”of having been able to send a check for $1,200 to every man, woman and child in the state since, quote “Alaska is sometimes described as America’s socialist state, because of its collective ownership of resources?”

Why, you said that, Governor! You’re a share-the-wealth, collectivist, Almost-Socialist-Governor, Governor! Who also believes that income, property, inventory and investments, collectively belonging to everybody else, leads to a misuse of power, and government making decisions for us, turning countries into places where the people are not free.

Places like,  Sarah Palin’s America! Governor, all sorts of choice words apply here: hypocrite, double-talker, snake-oil seller, socialist. But let me stick with just one, with which to bid you goodbye. You, governor, are a fraud.

Well said, Keith!

Child Prostitute Rings Smashed

When I read this headline I thought theat the story was about a third world country like Cambodia or Kenya or the like.  Boy!  Was I wrong!

More than 600 adults have been arrested in raids across the US targeting people who force children into prostitution.

Operations took place in 29 cities in a co-ordinated action involving federal, state and local law officers, according to the FBI.

Officials said 12 large-scale prostitution rings were dismantled in the raids and 47 children rescued.

Since 2003, 575 child prostitutes have been saved from exploitation by American criminal gangs, they added.

Officials said many of the prostitution rings broken up were operated through call centres, truck stops, casinos and websites.

The FBI generally gets involved in child prostitution cases that cross state lines.

At a news conference announcing the results of Operation Cross Country II, FBI Deputy Director John Pistole said the arrests were made possible by intelligence gathered during similar raids in June.

“Sex trafficking of children remains one of our most violent and unconscionable crimes in this country,” he said.

The 47 rescued children range in age from 13 to 17, and all but one are female.

A total of 642 people were arrested. They included 73 pimps and 518 adult prostitutes, according to the FBI.