Cheney in lipstick indeed:

GOP lawmakers file appeal to halt Troopergate case

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — Six Alaska lawmakers filed an emergency appeal Friday asking the state's Supreme Court to halt an investigation into abuse of power allegations by Gov. Sarah Palin before the findings are released next week.

The independent investigator conducting the probe plans to turn over his conclusions by next Friday to the body that authorized the it, the Legislative Council. The six Republican lawmakers, none of whom are on the Legislative Council, claim the investigation is being manipulated to damage Palin before Election Day on Nov. 4.

Good thing the McCain campaign is blowing all their resources in Alaska!

It's a damn shame that we can't post graphics here, so for your Friday afternoon happy moment you'll have to go to this diary at Daily Kos and check out the screen-grab from today's Washington Post ad:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/10/3/155145/046/127/619244

It appears that the McCain campaign's PR people are as careless as their factcheckers!

Ha!

The list gets longer:

"The [Palin] administration killed our bill," said Alaska state representative Les Gara, D-Anchorage. Gara and state Rep. Bob Lynn, R-Anchorage, co-sponsored a resolution early this year to force the Alaska Permanent Fund – a $40 billion investment fund, a portion of whose dividends are distributed annually to state residents – to divest millions of dollars in holdings tied to the Sudanese government.

Read all about at abcnews.com

Having just tuned in to MSNBC to watch the coverage of the passing of the Paulson Bail-Out/Rescue bill, I happened to catch the tail end of a discussion on just when it was that John McCain's poll numbers began to fall. Right wing pundit Joe Scarborough pointed specifically to the Monday two weeks ago when McCain uttered his now infamous statement, "The fundamentals of the US economy are strong."

No matter how many ways the McCain campaign has tried to spin this, particularly, and repeated by Sarah Palin in the VP debate last night, that he was somehow referring to the American worker as the "fundamentals" he was talking about (yeah, right), it is pretty easy to see that this was the point that McCain lost a lot of credibility with the both right and center, and most importantly, with undecided voters.

I realize that the comparison has been made recently in regards to the whole "appeasement" debate, but in regards to a major political figure having a defining moment in which all credibility is lost, I can't help but think of poor Neville Chamberlain, who negotiated the Munich Pact of 1938 with Adolf Hitler. 

When he returned to England in triumph, he proclaimed, “I believe it is peace in our time,” but his optimism had no basis and the failure of appeasement became obvious when Hitler invaded and conquered Czechoslovakia in 1939. (US Military Dictionary)

For most of us, McCain's "The fundamentals of the American economy are strong," rings as true as Chamberlain's "I believe it is peace in our time." A quick Google search on Chamberlain turns up this assessment in his biographical entry at http://www.answers.com/topic/neville-chamberlain (yes I know, not the most scholarly of sources):

"His premiership was dominated, and destroyed, by his handling of foreign affairs. He had no grounding in the subject but was driven by a belief in his own rightness...He was destroyed by a disastrous incapacity to handle foreign affairs. He was unwilling to listen to others. Macmillan recalled that he was "quite sure of himself … at all times he was a difficult man to argue with … He knew he was right on all occasions."

Of course, we are not talking about foreign affairs in regards to the current crisis, but one simply has to substitute "economic affairs" in the above paragraph, to get an comparable and equally apt description of John McCain's personality as well as his erratic and reckless approach to the latest financial meltdown.

Having spent the past eight years with a president who also has had "no grounding in the subject but was driven by a belief in his own rightness", who can be described as "unwilling to listen to others," as well as having exhibited the hubris of being "quite sure of himself … at all times he was a difficult man to argue with … He knew he was right on all occasions," can we finally say that America has woken up to the fact the John McCain really does present nothing more than more of the same?

His name was on the guest list, so that counts as "having talks with the British ambassador"? From the UK's Mail Online:

Sarah Palin has committed yet another political blunder after claiming she had held talks with a British ambassador - talks that never actually took place.

In an answer to questions about her foreign policy experience ahead of tonight's make-or-break vice presidential TV debate, her aides listed numerous contacts with foreign officials - including Britain's ambassador to Washington, Sir  Nigel Sheinwald.

However the meeting never occurred. Officials at the embassy swiftly contacted the  McCain-Palin campaign to inform them of the discrepancy.

A British Embassy spokesman said the error arose after Sir Nigel's name

I have no idea. During the primaries, the Bill Clinton I saw was quick to anger and pointing that big finger of his everytime it seemed that he wasn't succeeding in getting across whatever point he was trying to make.

Lately it has become a favorite pastime of the media, and the rest of us, watching Bill make the media circuit and waiting for him to mention Obama's name, or even just say something nice about him.

But today Bill appeared before a crowd in Florida and began (I think) to go on the offensive for Obama. From the article now up on Huffington Post:

 

Former President Bill Clinton revved up a crowd on behalf of Barack Obama in Florida Wednesday, his first since the Democratic convention. And though he repeated his mantra that Democrats don't have to "say one bad word" about their Republican opponents to win the election, Clinton actually snuck in a dig against Sarah Palin.

"So he's got a better philosophy. He's got better answers. He's got a better understanding, and better advisers on these complex economic matters. He's got a better vice presidential partner," Clinton said to a crescendo of applause.

So now I find myself asking: Is Bill Clinton a master of playing the expectations game? Has it been his plan all along to make multiple appearances on the talk show circuit and elsewhere, and to hold back on giving us his opinion of Obama? Is there a game plan in place where you get everyone's ear tuned in to your every utterance, just to build the suspense, and then when it's time to make that first campaign stop, the media and the public are now hanging on to your every word because they think you have it in for Obama?

Or am I just hoping that the Clinton's are over their selfish, "us first" mentality, and are now ready to swallow their pride and do what is best for the Democratic Party and the people of the United States?

I still have no idea.

It sure has been interesting to watch this political chess match taking place. There is a move commonly referred to as a "fork", where you move one of your pieces into a postion that puts two of your opponents pieces in immediate risk, forcing them to choose to lose one piece, or the other. It's a move guaranteed to make them look bad regardless of what they choose to do, and usually guarantees a very pissed off opponent.

So it has been interesting to watch the GOP blustering the past few days over the position that Pelosi's and the Dems have put them in, considering that the Republicans set up pretty much the whole chessboard in the first place.
 
There is a great diary up over at Daily Kos right now that is required reading, mainly becaue it points out two of the huge poison pills that were buried in the bill. First off, the bailout of the energy speculation sector, and secondly, an amazingly frightening addition that would have moved up the action date and language of a Republican sponsored piece of legislation from 2006 that would have made the current situation so much worse, not better.

From the diary:

You dirty apes.

You mean to tell me that each depository institution can maintain zero reserves against its transaction accounts?

You put it right there in writing! Sure you buried it across three bills, but you are now allowing for the possibility that banks can hold zero reserves!

This is how the bank code would have read had the bill passed today:

Each depository institution shall maintain reserves against its transaction accounts as the Board may prescribe by regulation solely for the purpose of implementing monetary policy—
(i) in a ratio of not greater than 3 percent (and which may be zero) for that portion of its total transaction accounts of $25,000,000 or less, subject to subparagraph (C); and
(ii) in the ratio of 12 per centum, or in such other ratio as the Board may prescribe not greater than 14 per centum and which may be zero, for that portion of its total transaction accounts in excess of $25,000,000, subject to subparagraph (C).

So you plan on restoring confidence in the banks by allowing the banks not to have any reserves to match people’s checking and savings accounts? What, was the FDIC just going to cover that all? Wait, don’t answer that, I already know the answer.

But remember the effective date! The original Relief Act of 2006 called for a date of October 1, 2011 to allow banks zero reserves, if the Federal Reserve Board thought it fit. This bill would have moved that up to tomorrow!

Tomorrow people! Do you hear me! Tomorrow we could have all woken up to the possibility of zero holdings in our banks and it being legally allowed!

I'm no financial expert, but this sounds about as bad a policy as one could ever imagine. It looks to me that the Dems completely outmaneauvered the GOP on this one, from every angle. They voted against a bad bill, and now get to suffer the consequences, even though it was from the start, a very bad bill.

Bravo, Speaker Pelosi!