Thanks, Josh for flagging the Rolling Stone article on the facts about McCain, Who would think the GOP would come up with a nominee less honest and fit for the Presidency than George W. Bush or Richard Nixon?

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Sarah Palin's ridiculous performance in the debate only underscores our need to know if John McCain can survive four years in the White House. Not that I think he's more qualified than she is, it's just that if Palin will be President -- and not Mc Cain -- we should know it now.

Actually, I suspect that psychologically she's in better shape (none of her colleagues say she's off her rocker). But intellectually I think McCain may be better suited for high office.

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From WaPo:

Sen. John McCain and his Republican allies are readying a newly aggressive assault on Sen. Barack Obama's character...."We're going to get a little tougher," a senior Republican operative said, indicating that a fresh batch of television ads is coming. "We've got to question this guy's associations. Very soon."

First, these ads are going to be chockablock with distortions, innuendo, and lies -- as John McCain knows, because the people he brought in to smear Sen. Obama include the same people who smeared McCain in 2000. So the real news is the announcement of a coming attempt to deceive the American people, drag down public discourse, and dampen turn-out. That's what the WaPo should report.

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When I heard about the flap regarding Governor Palin's inability to cite a Supreme Court case, I paused to reflect on how many case names I could come up with. After a period of some duration, which on television would have looked like an eternity, I came up with Brown v. Board of Education. So I don't put much in that flap. Its currency is yet another flag to the inanity of our campaign discourse, liberal edition.

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At first, Jewish rightwingers tried to portray Barack Obama as anti-Israel. That fizzled after he delivered a speech to AIPAC, picked Joe Biden for Vice President, and when the anti-Obama machine could find no evidence whatsoever that he was unfriendly, in any way, to Israel.

Of course, the Republican Jewish operatives never believed Obama was hostile to Israel. What they were -- and are -- counting on is that Jews won't vote for Obama because he is African-American. They are having some success with that approach. The race issue is all they have but it's something.

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Dear Café Clatch--

Thank you so much for joining me. To paraphrase Bob Dylan, you can be on my truth commission, if I can be on yours.

I wanted to leave you with the final thought, borrowed from Hannah Arendt, about why this business of getting the truth, and preserving it, is so important particularly in the darkest times. Before quoting her, let me also make the obligatory point that nothing the Bush Administration has done is remotely equivalent to the Nazi period. That said though, I think her point resonates in less horrific times too. In Eichmann in Jerusalem, she argues that one of the goals of police states is to establish "holes of oblivion into which all deeds, good and evil, would disappear." It is our duty, according to Arendt, to preserve history by descending into those holes, rescuing those individual deeds and recounting them to ourselves and our children. As she put it:

Under conditions of terror most people will comply but some people will not, just as the lesson of the countries to which the Final Solution was proposed is that 'it could happen' in most places but it did not happen everywhere. Humanly speaking, no more is required, and no more can be reasonably asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation.

Okay, let's hear from all those media commentators and politicians who screamed about the stock market plunge on Monday in response to Congress' rejection of the bailout. With the market closing lower today than it did on Monday should we assume that the bailout didn't work?

Should we be screaming about the hundreds of billions of dollars lost in retirement accounts and pensions? Or was that just something they talked about when they were pushing for a Wall Street bailout?

The list of the overwhelming challenges President Bush is leaving for the next president was long enough before he added, with the acquiescence of the U.S. Senate, providing India with nuclear material and knowhow. There are so many ways this is a dangerous policy that it is hard to know where to start. The "winner" is the fact that Pakistan's military responded by deciding that it must keep up with India, and hence will seek to expand its nuclear program, one way or another. This is a truly alarming development, in a world in which alarms abound, because Pakistan is by far the country in which terrorists are the most likely to get their hands on nuclear arms, either by capturing them, having them slipped to them by cooperative elements in the military or intelligence services, or by overthrowing the failing government.

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Astonishing. Women are more than half the population. Yet the vice-presidential debate, which featured a woman running for the VP, and moderated by a respected female journalist, barely even mentioned any of the issues that concern female voters.

Amazingly, it was Sarah Palin who uttered the words "women's rights" as part of her robotic explanation as to why the world doesn't like the United States. Sen. Joseph Biden, who authored the Violence Against Women Act, hardly took the time to stress the significance of what he had achieved.

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On Friday, I watched as the two presidential candidates squared off for their first debate. As an Iraq veteran and as the Executive Director of the nation's first and largest group for veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I have a vested interest in the future direction of our foreign policy.

But in a debate that bounced from fiscal responsibility to off-shoring drilling and nuclear energy, one thing was notably absent: any real discussion of the overall readiness of our military or veterans' issues. And this was supposed to be the debate on national security? Over and over again, we heard about Wall Street and Main Street. Well what about Range Road? Even Senator Biden and Governor Palin, who will both have sons deployed by Election Day, failed to address these issues in last night's debate.

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In the debate, Sarah Palin promised that she would never "allow another Holocaust. John Mc Cain has repeatedly said he would not permit "a second Holocaust."

What offensive bull! There is not going to be another Holocaust for a host of reasons including the fact that Israel has 200 nuclear weapons and the 4th strongest army in the world. . (There would have been no first Holocaust if the Jews of Europe had the bomb). Jews are no longer helpless flowers who can be annihilated by some tinpot dictator with a big mouth. That was the whole point of creating Israel. And it is Israel's most significant success. No one can destroy Israel without themselves being destroyed. Using the term Holocaust implies that Jews are still helpless victims who can be led like sheep to the slaughter. We aren't.

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Senator McCain says he'll lead us out of this crisis by freezing federal spending on everything but "defense" and entitlements. He will (and this now seems just a corollary) end earmarks as we know them: no new spending on schools and colleges, health insurance, hospitals and claims processing, bridges (to somewhere), bullet-trains, dikes, and green power--in short, on none of Senator Obama's promised investments in next generation infrastructure and intellectual capital.

On the surface, this seems a responsible, if unfortunate, plan. Jim Lehrer's relentless, smug debate question--"What are you prepared to give up?"--implicitly pointed to McCain's answer. But the question was simple-minded. And McCain's response shows that he understands how we got here about as well as he understands how Iraqis get to democracy.

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The good news is that Sarah Palin lost the debate to Joe Biden. The bad news is that she didn't self-destruct in the way she had in the Katie Couric interviews. It was observed by many of the post-debate analysts that she basically repeated the same talking points regardless of the question at hand -- but of course if we got rid of every politician who did that we wouldn't be able to muster up enough folks to fill the House and Senate.

What I wished I had done to make the debate more entertaining--although I'm not really drinking these days--is to have played a drinking game during last night's debate, in which everyone would have to take a drink whenever one of the candidates said a key word like "Main Street" or "Wall Street" or "middle class."

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As my friends know, I can't stand Charles Krauthammer. First, he's a neocon who has about as much regard for American interests as Nick Sarkozy (i.e, he likes America. He just doesn't identify with it). Second, (stop me if I told this before) he bellowed at the rabbi in synagogue on Yom Kippur 2001 for expressing the hope that Jews and Arabs could coexist peacefully. I mean, he started screaming from his seat in the middle of services. Unforgettable.

But today I give him credit for the best analysis of why Barack Obama should be President: "Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. famously said of Franklin Roosevelt that he had a 'second-class intellect, but a first-class temperament..'" Barack Obama, is better than that. "He's got both a first-class intellect and a first-class temperament. That will likely be enough to make him president."

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Sitting in London watching the collapse of Wall Street, the global financial markets and the U.S. presidential race is a useful lesson. It helps to physically be across the ocean to feel how incredible the U.S. power is to the rest of the world. The waves on one side of the Atlantic rippling are felt here on the other side. Lead stories in the news are dated Washington or Wall Street with 10 Downing Street as second, even at a time of great uncertainty in the political system here in Britain. Still, some interesting lessons for progressives in the U.S.

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If Congress passes the bailout it will be demonstrating an extraordinary belief in the power of redemption. In the past, I have noted the fact that Secretary Paulson's failure to recognize the housing bubble, and the economic and financial havoc that would be created by its inevitable collapse, contributed to the disaster we now face.

It turns out that Secretary Paulson played an even more direct rule in bringing down our financial system. The NYT has a superbly timed piece reporting on how a 2004 change in an SEC rule allowed Bear Stearns, Lehman, and the other major investment banks to leverage themselves to unprecedented levels. Among the highlights of the story is the fact that Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson was one of the main people pushing for this change in SEC rules.

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I always liked Joe Biden but, I'll admit it, I worried about how he would do in the debate with Palin.

It was a difficult situation. It was imperative that he give the Republicans no openings at all to portray him as condescending, arrogant, sexist or a bloviator.

He gave them none.

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I don't think we'll know whether the dog has yet to bark for a while yet. Let's give the new president time to take office and muster up the mettle, to use Hitch's word, to excavate the Bush skeletons. If they've all been ground to bits already, a la the interrogation tapes we already know were destroyed, then prosecutors, have at the perpetrators.

And if incriminating, horrifying photos and videos do come to light sometime during a future administration? Then the biggest question won't be whether Bush has shielded his wrongdoers by granting them pardons--though that will sting. It will be whether Congress and all of us summon the will to make sure that routinized torture never happens on our government's watch again. Jane, it's true that the Abu Ghraib photographs were a game changer. But did we get definitive, binding-for-the-future legislation out of them?

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Your thoughts?

If the choice is between a lousy bailout bill and economic Armageddon, I'd vote for the lousy bailout bill.

But make no mistake: This is a lousy bill. It doesn't do the most important thing -- help distressed homeowners avoid foreclosure (that role is given to the Treasury Department, which is the equivalent of putting it into the permanent circular file). It doesn't make Wall Street more transparent (there's almost no word in it about improved transparency and
capital requirements, or avoiding conflicts of interest and market
manipulation). It doesn't control the most egregious aspects of executive
salaries (the bill contains a contorted detour for controlling certain
golden parachutes when the government has made direct equity purchases of
financial companies rather than taken their bad paper through an auction).
It does have provisions designed to protect taxpayers should the bad
securities continue to be bad, but the responsibility for acting on this
is left up to the next President. And the Senate version has lots of
additional stuff -- some good (extending deposit insurance), some
unnecessary (extending certain tax credits), but most of which should
never have been added.

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The essential point that Christopher and Jane have been making is correct: the public needs to be patiently brought along on this issue. That's not a small point. It drives the process. So those who care about the torture issue serve their cause best by pushing to fully expose the facts. What, exactly, was done. Who gave the directions for it to be done. What did those high up in the Administration know, and what did they do when they learned. I expect the ultimate evidence will be extremely damning, as suggested by the statement that John Bellinger gave to Senator Levin last week, and I am certain that the most damning things are still being suppressed on bogus claims of national security.

Figures in the CIA who supported destruction of the torture tapes were largely driven by the same concern: when the public sees this, we won't look good. So it is imperative that the public see all this evidence and form its own views.

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Very briefly indeed - because, damn it all, I actually am going to attend a VP debate-watching party - I think that Jane may indeed be right about evidence yet to come, but that she also may be missing or understating the importance of what old Sherlock identified as the case of the dog that did NOT bark, and thus by indirection clinched the matter. I have to say that the single most shocking thing to me, not about the torture but the cover-up, was the calm admission that Langley had destroyed so many interrogation tapes. Whence came the permission for THAT? Who was present when it happened? Everybody understands that the deliberate destruction of pre-trial evidence is either prima facie evidence in itself or at least a very strong suggestion of guilt if not by suggestio falsi then at the very least suppressio veri, if that's the distinction I am looking for. In other words, only banana republics burn or shred state papers when lawsuits are impending.

As always,

Christopher

I agree that at the bottom of it all, the stumbling block to accountability is the complicity of the American public - AT THE MOMENT. But call me naïve, because I think that public opinion could shift if the next administration released certain explosive documents. The case of Abu Ghraib has hammered home the cliché about a picture being worth a hundred words. Humbling though it is for a writer, nothing written has matched the impact of those photographs. The international revulsion they stirred forced President Bush to publicly denounce them, and for the first time, call for some kind of investigation and punishment. As Eric Umansky and others have noted, it was only when President Bush acknowledged that a scandal had taken place, that the mainstream media - including network television news shows -- reacted as if something was wrong.

The CIA clearly understood the potential power of incriminating pictures, which is why they destroyed them. I am told that if the CIA's videotapes of Muslim detainees being waterboarded were seen by the public, the international political reaction would have been, as one former CIA office put it, "unmanageable." It was bad enough watching Hitch sputtering away. So- this brings me to the question of other photographic evidence. What's still in the federal cupboard?

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Even the cheerleaders on CNBC are going to start having to use the "R" word. Yesterday, automakers announced their worst results since the depths of the 1993 recession. Not even Toyota was spared. This morning the Labor Department announced that last week's new jobless claims soared to 497,000, the most since the weeks after 9/11. And finally the crucial ISM manufacturing index slipped 4% (as against the expected 2%) for the month of September.

We need to be really clear. We have two problems--a credit crisis and a cyclical recession. The two are connected, but solving the credit crisis will not stop the recession. It will just keep it from turning into a depression.

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I've read all the sober explanations of why we must hold our noses and support the bailout. I've watched Barack Obama intone the same on the Senate floor. Sorry, but it all fits into a neoliberal paradigm whose adherents haven't noticed that it's over. Watching the Senate's pompous porkers play populist with the package was like watching Hapsburgs greet their subjects in July, 1914.

True, we're all tethered into the dance: We love our cars -- couldn't imagine reconfiguring our lives to save energy, enhance walking, reduce obesity, end road rage. Yet the car culture is only a sample of what an increasingly manic, drugged, violent, and stupid America of sovereign consumers has been choreographed into "choosing."

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Not everyone recognizes that we have a universal health care plan in this country-- approved and in operation in the city of San Francisco. Since it went into effect this year, it has been enrolling residents at a rate of 600 per week with the goal of covering everyone in the city up to 500% of the poverty line (about $100,000 per year for a family of four) by early 2009.

The good news is that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals on Tuesday upheld the law after a challenge by the business lobby that it violated federal ERISA benefits law, because employers not providing health care for their employees are required to pay $1.17 to $1.76 per hour to the city in order to cover their employees' costs under the city-provided health care plan. In Golden Gate Rest. Ass'n v. San Francisco upheld these employer responsibility provisions as in compliance with federal law.

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My friend, John Cullinane, is one of the most successful Irish business people in American history. Forty years ago, he began a successful computer software business that soon dominated the field. He is also a great philanthropist who made a singular contribution to peace in Northern Ireland and is seeking to do the same in Israel-Palestine.

The following is a letter he has sent out to his friends on Barack Obama's behalf. I think it is worth sharing with yours (especially if they are of Irish descent).

MJ,
If I were asked to summarize the candidates' relative strengths in a few words, they would be that John McCain has considerable experience but very poor judgment, and that Barack Obama has limited experience but very good judgment, and good judgment wins over experience, every time.

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It's just one more reason that John McCain cannot be President. He has contempt for the democratic process.

By refusing to acknowledge Obama, Mc Cain sends a clear message that he hates his opponent for having the temerity to run against him.

Politicians usually go to some length to avoid the suggestion of personal contempt or hate for their opponents. Why? Because this is a democracy. The "my honorable opponent" phrase is intended to show respect, not necessarily for the opponent, but for the system. And for the voters, the people of the United States.

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Today's the big vote. The nation's political leadership has carried out a full court press for this bailout. They have frequently ignored the facts and commonsense (since when do we make policy based on stock market swings?) and repeatedly tossed out the specter of the Great Depression to push their case.

It's clear that the overwhelming majority of the public thinks that this Wall Street bailout stinks, but Wall Street has immense political power and it is likely that it will get its way.

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The Senate will vote tonight; the House is scheduled to vote tomorrow morning. Will the deal fly? Probably. Wall Street's gyrations since Monday have scared the hell out of a number of holdouts, notwithstanding all the negative emails and phone calls they continue to receive from constituents.

An important distinction here. While more Americans are coming around to "supporting" the bailout bill, the vast majority still hate the idea of bailing out Wall Street. They're for the bailout bill now only because they fear that a failure to pass it will have worse consequences -- drying up credit at a time when Main Street is struggling. But make no mistake: America is mad as hell. They resent what they perceive as extortion by the Masters of the Universe.

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Well the thing is, as Rosa Luxemburg wrote to Lenin in 1918, all regimes have the temptation to take what they will always call "emergency measures", and then let these short-term hysterias harden into permanent laws, and then into routine practices.

I noticed this when I was a part of the ACLU suit against warrantless wiretapping. Probably very few people would NOT have demanded to know, on 12 September 2001, who was calling whom on US territory, from US territory, to US territory and so forth. A government that didn't also demand to know might have been impeachable for other reasons, and would certainly have been kicked to death by public opinion as it then stood. But then the urgent and the contingent become bureaucratic everyday reality, and it turns out that Congress and the courts didn't - ahem - actually know about any of or most of that.

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This evening at 7:30 p.m., the United States Senate is scheduled to vote on its own version of the economic rescue plan that the House voted down on Monday.

The new version comprises virtually all the provisions of the House plan, but with the following key add-ons:

• FDIC: an increase in the ceiling on bank deposits insured by the FDIC from $100,000 to $250,000

• The Extenders: an extension of tax breaks - known as the "extenders" - for renewable energy, research and development, the state sales and college tuition deductions, and numerous other provisions

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The Federal Reserve Board chairman described the credit squeeze as being "as severe as any supply-induced constraint ever, other than from policy actions." That statement should help to prompt Congress into quick passage of the bank bailout bill, except this quote is from February of 1991, and the chairman at the time was Alan Greenspan.

The economy is in a recession and banks always tighten up on credit in a recession. When the economy's growth prospects are in question, it puts the health of any particular business into question. Therefore, banks will be far more hesitant to make loans during a period of economic weakness. There were literally hundreds of news stories about the credit squeeze in the 1990-1991 recession.

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Christopher is right to remember Jackson's very powerful words. Let's recall them exactly:

If certain acts of violation of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them. And we are not prepared to lay down the rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us. We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow. To pass these defendants a poisoned chalice is to put it to our own lips as well.

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I love them. And I'll take care of them. And they know that I'll take care of them."

The other day, I posted a refutation of this claim of McCain's about veterans during the Sept. 27 debate.

A friend came up with more. I haven't vetted (sorry) this compilation of McCain's votes on troops and veterans, but at a glance, and then again at a second and third glance, it looks pretty impressive, putting the lie to yet another blusterbash from the Crooked Talk Express. See the website of Veterans for Common Sense for all the links.

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Agreed, Christopher, that Biden and Palin aren't made of the stuff of Cheney, and that Obama and McCain wouldn't welcome a vice presidency like his anyway. Still, I think there's a bit more to play out in Jane's question, at least on the Republican side. Last week, when Palin got into a spat with the press over covering the handshake pleasantries before her sit downs with foreign dignitaries, I made the Sarah-to-Dick connection. Albeit for different reasons, they share a penchant for secrecy and obfuscation. Palin's has a different basis at the moment--she's turning tail, whereas Cheney barks and bites. At the moment it seems laughable to imagine her as the Cheney in "The Dark Side" and "The Angler." She's all puppet and no puppet master--that's her problem. But as governor, she had a governing style that sounds like Cheney lite, prizing loyalty and discretion above other attributes.

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I took a deep breath before writing here last night that a second House bailout bill will deserve to die like the first, even if it gets emergency medical assistance from a United States Senate that is scheduled to rush through a package this evening. (Yes, there's still time to call your Senators, whose phone numbers are at the end of this post). I was expecting some in TPM's "shadow audience" to call me a populist demagogue.

Shadow audience? Beyond those who post comments are many who don't, and some among them are bankers, politicians, and others who never would. But I'm hearing from several of them directly, and their comments are surprising.

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As it happens, pace Scott and Christopher, I stopped to get an egg sandwich at the deli next to my office and who should walk by but Donald Rumsfeld. This marks the third time I've seen Rumsfeld jaunting down Connecticut Avenue in the mornings, a goon in wraparound shades three steps behind him, death's-head grimace (his version of a smile?) chiseled onto his face. Is a citizen's arrest for war crimes a non-concept? I'd cite Jane's book in my indictment.

Christopher's point about the need for universally-applicable rules of global behavior is as unassailable as it is politically unachievable. (At least insofar as I understood it: Christopher, were you advocating such a need or merely urging the rest of us to take up the argument?) Imagine if Barack Obama said, "We ought to follow Justice Jackson's exhortation against creating one international system for us and another for the rest of the world." The avalanche of demagoguery would be overwhelming. Everyone remember the hyperventilation over John Kerry's (predictably misquoted) "global test"? In keeping with Cheney's elevation of the expansion of executive power to a first principle, the right -- by which I mean not simply the conservative movement but the leadership and the membership of the national Republican Party -- holds any challenge to American hegemony to be a first-order national security threat. Several in the Bush administration -- including, remember, Jack Goldsmith, despite his current use as a liberal hero -- believe international law to be little more than "lawfare," a method of unconventional attack on American interests.

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What I had meant to add in my last post was the famous remark made by Justice Robert Jackson - our man at Nuremburg - to the effect (even if these were not the ipsissima verba) - that the United States sets no standard in these matters by which it is not itself prepared to be judged.

Now obviously the United States is not guilty on the main charge at Nuremburg, on which all other "war crimes" verdicts ultimately depended, of the crime of conspiring to wage a war of aggression in the first place. (At least, I am not among those who think it is guilty in this way.) And I myself prefer an administration that overthrows dictatorships to one which, a la Kissinger, imposes them where democracies once used to be. However, the Jackson standard appears to me to be one that we ought to have cited and gnawed over by now. After all, with most important treaties and conventions and declarations concerning human rights, the United States is not only a signatory itself but is the power that most strongly urges that others become signatories as well.
Night thoughts for a dark time....

Readers of TPM Cafe may recall my posts on HRes 362, the resolution that would have imposed a full blockade on Iran. Although the bill's authors claimed it was not a "war resolution," my take was that a blockade is an act of war, no matter what the sponsors said.

I expected the resolution to pass because AIPAC made it the centerpiece of its lobbying efforts for 2008. At its huge Washington confab, it tasked its membership with getting co-sponsors for the bill with the goal of speedy passage. But look what happened.

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That's easy. You ask them how failure to pass the bailout will give us a Great Depression.

The odds are that your favorite DC intellectual type has uttered some dire warning like that. After all, they all heard some authority like President Bush or a highly respected news reporter make such a claim. All right-thinking people know that we just have to give $700 billion to the Wall Street crew or the economy will collapse.

While all right-thinking people might know we need the bailout, just about all right-thinking people don't have a clue as to what they are talking about.

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