Mitty Mitt Mitt

Ah, Mitt. Seems you may have removed Newt Gingrich's rationale for the GOP Presidential nomination tonight -- Newt is not the greatest debater since Lincoln-Douglas after all.

As for your own rationale, that somehow you have the phenomenal business acumen that will make you a better President than Barack Obama...not so much:

• You claim you have not even seen the campaign ad with your own voice saying you approved it. Not exactly stellar detail-oriented CEO work -- it's impossible to imagine Steve Jobs, for instance, making that same mistake. Might even be a campaign finance law violation.

• You finally release your taxes after claiming your campaign's personal finance disclosure form was enough...and it turns out you lied left accounts off of that form.

How bad is it?

A review by the Los Angeles Times/Tribune Washington Bureau found that at least 23 funds and partnerships listed in the couple's 2010 tax returns did not show up or were not listed in the same fashion on Romney's most recent financial disclosure, including 11 based in low-tax foreign countries such as Bermuda, the Cayman Islands and Luxembourg.

The campaign has stressed that Romney has paid all required U.S. taxes on his foreign funds.

Many of the funds are affiliated with Bain Capital, the Boston-based private equity firm Romney ran for 15 years. Several others are apparently unrelated offshore entities with mysterious names such as Babson 2006-1, which is based in the Cayman Islands, and Barracuda Investments, which has an address in Dublin, Ireland, but appears to be solely owned by Golden Gate Capital, a private equity firm based in San Francisco.

Again, is (a) lack of attention to major (not minor) details ill-becoming of a CEO and downright dangerous in a President, (b) an attempt to obfuscate for some yet-to-be-uncovered reason, meaning we'd have an untrustworthy President or, worse, (c) you're some kind of crook, and one who would immediately under investigation upon taking office.

So what's the great rationale for a Mitt Romney candidacy now, other than generic Republican Obama hate?

Anyone?

99%

Gotta love #occupywallstreet as the anti-Tea Party protest with real truth behind it -- that an unbridled Wall Street serving the 1% at the top got us into the current financial mess and they have paid no real price for it, not one that counts. Not one that will keep them from doing this again.

This weekend it spread to other cities and also intensified in NYC, with 700 arrests at the Brooklyn Bridge. People of all ages are represented and one has to wonder if the cops really want to be doing this where there's real crime going on all the time in NYC, and not just in the those towers being protested. Not to mention that those cops are the ones who get hurt when those big money-backed Republicans like those in Wisconsin start taking away public union rights. And how come 700 people have been arrested for protesting, yet not one indictment has been handed down to the high finance crooks themselves.

In the age of online social media, there is a huge amount to look at, to learn from, to help connect with the organizing. The Facebook page, the Twitter handle, the Tumblr. Here's some great pics at The Atlantic showing the sweep of the protest. Help pay the movement's media costs here.

Most importantly, the grievances. Peaceful and damning. We have yet to see if it lasts or fizzles, if it leads to change or fractures, if the authorities start sending in undercover thugs to turn things violent as they did regularly in the 1960's and the repressive Middle East regimes have done during Arab Spring, to discredit the movement.

If nothing else, it does the heart good to see there are protesters in America who aren't carrying posters of President Obama with a black toothbrush mustache.

Banks: Guilty

Investigation results, courtesy HuffPo:

A set of confidential federal audits accuse the nation’s five largest mortgage companies of defrauding taxpayers in their handling of foreclosures on homes purchased with government-backed loans, four officials briefed on the findings told The Huffington Post.

The five separate investigations were conducted by the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s inspector general and examined Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citigroup and Ally Financial, the sources said.

The audits accuse the five major lenders of violating the False Claims Act, a Civil War-era law crafted as a weapon against firms that swindle the government. The audits were completed between February and March, the sources said. The internal watchdog office at HUD referred its findings to the Department of Justice, which must now decide whether to file charges.

New York State's Attorney General to take his own action?

Officials in Eric T. Schneiderman’s, office have also requested meetings with representatives from Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, according to people briefed on the matter who were not authorized to speak publicly. The inquiry appears to be quite broad, with the attorney general’s requests for information covering many aspects of the banks’ loan pooling operations. They bundled thousands of home loans into securities that were then sold to investors such as pension funds, mutual funds and insurance companies.

It is unclear which parts of the byzantine securitization process Mr. Schneiderman is focusing on. His spokesman said the attorney general would not comment on the investigation, which is in its early stages.

I'm not betting on justice, but I'm hoping some pain, maybe, to act as a future deterrent? Or, more likely, more gutting of protective laws thanks to the all-powerful Wall Street lobby...

New Meets Newer

This ought to create shockwaves:

The Huffington Post, which began in 2005 with a meager $1 million investment and has grown into one of the most heavily visited news Web sites in the country, is being acquired by AOL in a deal that creates an unlikely pairing of two online media giants.

The two companies completed the sale Sunday evening and announced the deal just after midnight on Monday. AOL will pay $315 million, $300 million of it in cash and the rest in stock. It will be the company’s largest acquisition since it was separated from Time Warner in 2009.

The deal will allow AOL to greatly expand its news gathering and original content creation, areas that its chief executive, Tim Armstrong, views as vital to reversing a decade-long decline.

I recently saw founder Arianna Huffington speak at a thinkLA breakfast event and she was brilliant. Happy to see this come along, although just hoping there's no diminishment in the quality of HuffPo coverage or POV. Per Arianna:

By combining HuffPost with AOL's network of sites, thriving video initiative, local focus, and international reach, we know we'll be creating a company that can have an enormous impact, reaching a global audience on every imaginable platform.

Remember my New Year's resolution? It's coming true - and it's only the beginning of February. Let's go down the checklist: Local? AOL's Patch.com covers 800 towns across America, providing an incredible infrastructure for citizen journalism in time for the 2012 election, and a focus on community and local solutions that have been an integral part of HuffPost's DNA. Check.

Original video? AOL's just finished building a pair of state-of-the-art video studios in New York and LA, and video views on AOL have gone up 400 percent over the last year. Check. More sections? AutoBlog, Music, AOL Latino, Black Voices, etc, etc, etc. fill gaps in HuffPost's coverage. Add all that to what HuffPost is doing with social, community, mobile, as well as our commitment to innovative original reporting and beyond-left-and-right commentary, and the blending will have a multiplier effect. Or, as Tim and I have been saying over the last couple of weeks: 1 + 1 = 11.

Far from changing our editorial approach, our culture, or our mission, this moment will be for HuffPost like stepping off a fast-moving train and onto a supersonic jet. We're still traveling toward the same destination, with the same people at the wheel, and with the same goals, but we're now going to get there much, much faster.

New media...meet newer media. And now procreate.

Have I Got a Deal for You

Yet another language taboo falls, courtesy Goldman Sachs and Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI):

What will be the last taboo word?

Thieves

This Rolling Stone article by the incomparable Matt Taibbi, Looting Main Street, tells of how big banks like JP Morgan are acting like Tony Soprano in driving places like Jefferson Country, Alabama (the case Taibbi chronicles) to massive debt on top of debt, well beyond the actual cost of any infrastructure improvements needed:

...In 1996, the average monthly sewer bill for a family of four in Birmingham was only $14.71 — but that was before the county decided to build an elaborate new sewer system with the help of out-of-state financial wizards with names like Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase. The result was a monstrous pile of borrowed money that the county used to build, in essence, the world's grandest toilet — "the Taj Mahal of sewer-treatment plants" is how one county worker put it. What happened here in Jefferson County would turn out to be the perfect metaphor for the peculiar alchemy of modern oligarchical capitalism: A mob of corrupt local officials and morally absent financiers got together to build a giant device that converted human shit into billions of dollars of profit for Wall Street — and misery for people like Lisa Pack.

And once the giant shit machine was built and the note on all that fancy construction started to come due, Wall Street came back to the local politicians and doubled down on the scam. They showed up in droves to help the poor, broke citizens of Jefferson County cut their toilet finance charges using a blizzard of incomprehensible swaps and refinance schemes — schemes that only served to postpone the repayment date a year or two while sinking the county deeper into debt. In the end, every time Jefferson County so much as breathed near one of the banks, it got charged millions in fees. There was so much money to be made bilking these dizzy Southerners that banks like JP Morgan spent millions paying middlemen who bribed — yes, that's right, bribed, criminally bribed — the county commissioners and their buddies just to keep their business. Hell, the money was so good, JP Morgan at one point even paid Goldman Sachs $3 million just to back the fuck off, so they could have the rubes of Jefferson County to fleece all for themselves.

It's an amazing article, which also shows you what happened to Greece -- now causing massive bankruptcy/bailout pain for the EU, threatening the Euro itself:

Now if the euro was a company, the Greek division would be closed or sold off. The product line had not lived up to expectations. It was important therefore to protect the core business. Other weaker divisions might have to go too. Now some economists like Paul Krugman, who is an admirer of Europe, opined recently that the problem was that Greece had joined the Euro before it was ready. We are now living out the consequences of a fudge ten years ago.

One big question: will Goldman Sachs be indicted in Europe?:

Greece's debt managers agreed a huge deal with the savvy bankers of US investment bank Goldman Sachs at the start of 2002. The deal involved so-called cross-currency swaps in which government debt issued in dollars and yen was swapped for euro debt for a certain period -- to be exchanged back into the original currencies at a later date.
...
But in the Greek case the US bankers devised a special kind of swap with fictional exchange rates. That enabled Greece to receive a far higher sum than the actual euro market value of 10 billion dollars or yen. In that way Goldman Sachs secretly arranged additional credit of up to $1 billion for the Greeks.
...
At some point Greece will have to pay up for its swap transactions, and that will impact its deficit. The bond maturities range between 10 and 15 years. Goldman Sachs charged a hefty commission for the deal and sold the swaps on to a Greek bank in 2005.

At what point do we start using the f-word to describe what these huge "masters of the universe" banks have done? As in, F is for Fraud?

Reform Really Coming?

So financial industry reform...how tough will it be? (Break 'em up!!)

Senate progressives offer hope, if their amendment passes:

Stressing the need for more competition among smaller banks and increased business lending, the senators believe that the largest financial institutions present too much risk to our economy to keep them around. They have the support of the Main Street Alliance, a group of progressive-leaning small business owners who have advocated for strong financial reform and set themselves up in opposition to the Chamber of Commerce.

The bill's central points:

• Imposing a strict 10 percent cap on any bank-holding-company’s share of the United States’ total insured deposits
• Reducing the maximum amount of non-deposit liabilities at financial institutions (to 2 percent of United States GDP for banks, and 3 percent of GDP for non-bank institutions)
• Setting into law a 6 percent leverage limit for bank-holding companies and selected non-bank financial institutions

These steps would require several of the largest banks to, in effect, break themselves up to come in under the limits that this law would create. While most of the existing legislation in the House and Senate contains gestures toward these ideas, this is the first time they've been proposed as statutory limits, something called for by a number of public figures, including several Midwestern regional Federal Reserve presidents and former Fed Chair Paul Volcker.

Godspeed.

Moving On It

How about this: reconciliation of health insurance reform is about to kick in:

The House Budget Committee will begin marking up the reconciliation bill on Monday, beginning the first step in the legislative process to pass reform.

It'll be exciting to see what hateful Republican and Faux News nonsense starts to come out in their desperation to kill it.

Part of this move forward is House Speaker Nancy Pelosi giving up on Rep. Bart Strupek's almost incomprehensible drive to load up the bill with anti-choice language, even as it's been proven that protections already exist to keep government subsidies from covering abortions. Nice, Nancy, and about time.

Also about time that the Senate moved ahead on banking reform without Republican interference...nice move, Chris Dodd.

PS: MoveOn members on passing the bill:

Should MoveOn support or oppose the final health care bill if it looks like the plan recently proposed by President Obama?

Support 83
Oppose 17

Take that, Dennis Kucinich.

From the Inside Out

According to the creators of the new SyFy show, Caprica, the premise of the series is that Caprica is beautiful and technologically advanced on the outside, but completely corrupt to the core on the inside.

Think maybe that might be a comment on our times?

I just watched The Daily Show report on how banks are jacking up credit card fees right and left, in advance of new regulations going into effect. They can even charge you for underutilizing your credit card -- charging you for not buying things!

Good luck to Obama attempts to reform Wall Street, which is clearly rotten on psychotic profiteering and won't change their ways without a deathmatch loss.

And I just watched the moron who made a name for himself by moronic behavior, Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC) repeating over and over again that we have the best health care system in the world, when that is demonstrably false. (Credit to Dylan Rattigan for calling him out.) Meanwhile the GOP is playing pouty games over the possibility that we actually get comprehensive reform, saying instead there should be either no real reform or, worse, piecemeal reform -- the kind that doesn't work because it doesn't address all the interrelated elements of the existing system.

Hey, but the health insurance companies are currently -- I kid you not -- exempt from anti-trust laws! So we must have the best system!

Then we've got red states going nuts expanding gun rights for nuts, playing on the fear that Obama will someone take their guns away -- even though he doesn't talk about the issue and has neither proposed nor offered support for any new gun restricting legislation. This, as more guns go off in Littleton, CO schools.

And can you believe that the U.S. military is riddled with private mercenaries, i.e. armed contractors? Good luck to House Dems trying to phase them out -- when the Republicans in the Senate have bottled up 290, count 'em, 290 pieces of legislation passed by the House.

Per BAGnewsNotes, you just can't deal with these people. It's all about money, that and inability to synthesize new information and grow with it. It's a recipe for disaster for America's future, and that includes any Democratic enablers.

It'll leave us to continue rotting from the inside out.

Big Stuff

None of these items may eventually play out exactly as I'd like, but all are potentially big news:

• The Senate is moving ahead with a healthcare reform bill resulting from merging with the House version. On the face of it, it appears that key Dem concerns have been addressed, and full steam ahead to the floor. Any filibuster, hello reconciliation.

• A House panel has approved curbs on "Too Big to Fail" banking firms. About time.

• China appears to be ready to cooperate with President Obama and the U.S. on curbing global-warming emissions.

• Attorney General Eric Holder goes before Congress to reiterate and explain the decision to try the 9/11 masterminds in NYC where the crime was committed, showing more spine than all the conservative fear-infected detractors put together.

And meanwhile, in the alt reality that is The Sarah Palin Network a.k.a. FNC, her book-signing crowd sizes are being inflated, once again, by using footage from other events...a.k.a. bald-faced lying.

Transparency

There's a lot of mojo to report out there, from Obama's decision not to release the torture photos as threatened (I agree with Joe Klein that he made the right decision but I still think there need to be investigations, prosecutions and, if those first two fairly result, disbarments convictions) to Obama announcing a July 31st deadline for action on what is now being called "Healthcare Reform" (as opposed to a "National Healthcare Plan" or, horrors, "National Health Insurance"). There's Obama at Arizona State University with typical aplomb and call to service and his derivatives regulatory announcement, and testimony from both a former Bush official and an FBI interrogator that torture not only doesn't work, it's a disaster on many levels. As in FAIL.

But what interests me is this blog announcing video from Budget Director Peter Orszag:



If the Obama Administration leaves us with nothing else, may it please leave us with fiscal transparency, everywhere possible. Orszag understands that blogging is now the fastest and most direct form of mass communication, with little time for artifice or room to avoid accountability. This is the big change of our age, we're all citizen journalists or at least citizen columnists, when we drop a status update on Facebook. Messages of this size have never in the history of the world traveled so far so inexpensively, and so unmediated.

This is the ball to keep your eye on and yes, torture photos do count. The next Administration may be a step backwards in transparency, but I'm thrilled by how much more citizen access to information, even the in-the-mix thoughts of the darn Budget Director himself, we are increasingly receiving under Obama's change, and I hope that we, the citizenry, avail ourselves of the access, like the Congressional Budget Office blog and (yep, still live) the Recovery Act site.

"But you must remember, my fellow-citizens, that eternal vigilance by the people is the price of liberty, and that you must pay the price if you wish to secure the blessing. It behooves you, therefore, to be watchful in your States as well as in the Federal Government." -- Andrew Jackson, Farewell Address, March 4, 1837

Overdue, Andrew.

The Boss

It's been almost 100 days and with his swift, decisive action on a multitude of fronts, our new President has established himself as being the boss.

Just at the end of this past week spanked down the credit card companies over their hurtful practices, and reminded GOP Congressional leaders that absolutely none of them supported his stimulus bill, zero -- with healthcare is nearing the table. The message: be there or be lost.

Here's this week's video message:



Thanks, Mr. President.

Cramed Him

Jon Stewart went well beyond any comic's usual job tonight on The Daily Show, but more importantly he went far beyond any cable newsperson. Any.

The feud with CNBC and Jim Cramer had been building for almost two weeks, and one has to give Cramer credit for coming on the show to try and end it, but Stewart took Cramer, CNBC and, by extension, the entire entertainment-industrial complex to task. Stewart essentially represented the American people -- everyone who lost half their IRA in four months thanks to massive, massive Wall Street greed -- while Cramer revealed in his whipped-dog response to the grilling a number of things:

1. He doesn't realize that he is "them."
2. He's not a responsible financial journalist, he's just a guy with opinions for hire.
3. When the faux-anchor of a fake news show is asking tougher questions than an entire financial news network, that network loses whatever reputation it may have thought it had as a responsible financial journalistic outfit, and instead appears to be just another cheap sales job on those rubes we call the American people.
   

The whole uncut interview (they lost maybe 8 minutes for TV) will be up by the morning on the show's website -- you can watch the whole thing -- here's a hefty taste:



Stewart's a hero for standing up and challenging the media powers, even it through their court jester.

Oh, and the markets are up significantly this week. Does that mean that Obama is a hero, or at least can the stupid people on TV stop blaming him for the crash now?

Ponzi Network

I'm not sure how long this video will be available, since Viacom always pulls them from YouTube, so go to this HuffPo link if it disappears below, but Jon Stewart's evisceration of CNBC in the wake of Wall Street mouthpiece Rick Santelli's Daily Show guest appearance cancellation is one of the finest and most visceral explanations of everything wrong with today's financial cable news ever created -- better than any created by any news organization:



And to think it was on a "comedy" show...

Knockovers

You want to just say fuck 'em all, but there is the credit issue, the oil that lubricates the whole system all the way down to the guy with the local bank loan. And maybe that's what it has to get back to. Because the hell with every one of those obscenely wealthy corporate bankers and everyone else feeding off their feudal system if they're doing shit like this:

The 20 largest banks that received government rescue funds slightly reduced their lending to consumers and businesses in the last three months of 2008, the government said Tuesday.

The Treasury Department said the banks reduced their mortgage and business loans by a median of 1 percent each, while credit card lending rose by a median of 2 percent. The median is the point halfway between the banks that lent the most and those that lent the least.

And the White House, the Obama Administration, wants to water down the bank executive bonus restrictions in the the stimulus package?

Read my lips, you guys who got us into this: Step Off.

Maybe it's all grand kabuki, make the bankers think this before you nationalize the whole thing, with the guy who presided blithely over this meltdown, Alan Greenspan as your cover. Maybe Geitner's only just figured out his strategy (not necessarily a bad thing to deliberate for your first week in the job) and all will go well. But the massive greed of the money class is lying low there, like flames ready to slip around wall or through a crevice, just give it even a whiff of oxygen.

That said, the stimulus transparency website, Recovery.gov, features the boss putting his face on it, YouTube style, the first cyberbuck stops here Presidential moment ever in history, a model for all time. What's so striking is the overview graph where I first saw that the #1 largest element of the stimulus package is tax relief -- $228 billion, as seen in proportion to the other categories.

(Second is State and Local Fiscal Relief -- similar to tax relief, not a pure spending measure -- at a distant $144 billion, Third is $111 billion for Infrastructure and Science, again more of our money coming back to us.)

The auto makers are next, America's post-industrial horror show, and that's going to hurt no matter what happens, but look at where we're at compared to just a month ago. Our President is strong, he is implementing the agenda the American people voted for, on the side of transparency for the people, the year is still young.

And here, after three weeks on the job, is our new, young President signing the largest non-military spending bill in our nation's history:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

"It is great to be back in Denver. I was here last summer to -- we had a good time -- to accept the nomination of my party and to make a promise to people of all parties that I would do all that I could to give every American the chance to make of their lives what they will. To see their children climb higher than they do. And I'm back today to say that we've have begun the difficult work of keeping that promise. We have begun the essential work of keeping the American Dream alive in our time and that's what we're doing here today."

Obama's gaining strength, every day. It's like his Barack powers are zapped up by Presidential booster beams. He's not losing strength at all -- that the Republicans.

He's still growing.

This Year's Lay

Bernie Madoff is every bit as emblematic of this financial era as Enron CEO Kenneth Lay was of his. Is anyone really all that surprised that such a Ponzi scheme could exist in this era of electronic purchase and transfer of derivatives based on bullshit? Especially when Bernie was one of the inventors of electronic trading?

Paul Krugman hits the nail on the head:

Most of all, the vast riches being earned — or maybe that should be “earned” — in our bloated financial industry undermined our sense of reality and degraded our judgment.

Think of the way almost everyone important missed the warning signs of an impending crisis. How was that possible? How, for example, could Alan Greenspan have declared, just a few years ago, that “the financial system as a whole has become more resilient” — thanks to derivatives, no less? The answer, I believe, is that there’s an innate tendency on the part of even the elite to idolize men who are making a lot of money, and assume that they know what they’re doing.

So as we've always suspected, nobody knows anything, and with this debilitating crisis, they know even less.

If there's any lesson of intelligentsia on the Internet, it's that the experts so often aren't, that there's trumping intelligence outside of the career track. In the political Web, it really started with the 2000 Gore-Bush recount and developed over the course of the Bush Administration to fully bloom in this past year.

And now for the financial world.

Failout

So Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's $700,000,000,000 bailout of the finance industry is entirely without oversight. They don't even have office space for the Congressional oversight-ers. And now the Detroit auto bailout is running into major roadblocking from Senate Republicans because they want the auto workers to accept deep cuts in wages.

Yep...it still pays to be rich.

McToast

It didn't have to happen this way. He didn't have to jam himself into the process last Thursday in a lurching attempt to distract attention from his now understood as horrific first "Presidential" decision to choose Sarah Palin as his running mate. He didn't have to act like he had the power to reschedule the first debate and then show up anyway. He didn't have to act like a contemptuous old man all throughout the debate.

But most of all, he didn't have to take credit for passing the $700,000,000,000 finance bailout bill this morning, several hours before it went down in flames on the House of Representatives floor.

With even North Carolina trending towards Obama, I shudder to think what party Johnny will try to crash next. In the meantime, the stock market crashes the largest point loss in history, a rather novelistic 777 points, something like Gamblin' John likes to roll 'em, and the Republican Party appears to be entirely leaderless.

To rephrase that, there is no single individual leading the Grand Old Party. President Bush may try to speak tomorrow (before the West Coast even wakes us), but no matter his address last week, he's a ghost, unable to control the flow of events, let alone communicate in a clear, credible and compelling fashion to America why this piece of legislation he seems to so desperately want is anything more than the largest transfer of public money to the privately wealthy. He's leaving the U.S. as many of us predicted he left Harkin Energy back when he was a "businessman" -- in financial collapse.

House Minority Leader John Boehner seems to be a semi-leader, any more or less than Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. Semi as in not really.

And in a system where each nominee assumes control of their party's hearts, minds, direction and apparatus, McCain is clearly flying without controls. He's casting blame on Obama in yet another attempt to distract from his distraction from the uber-distraction of choosing Palin. While claiming that this isn't the time to assign blame. Weird.

Meanwhile, y'course, Obama continues to be calm, centered, smart and rational while calling firmly for renewed action by our elected representatives.

The fact is that there were a lot of real reasons to vote against this hastily assembled bill, and hopefully there will be a more incremental solution, by proportion if still staggering in number, as Robert Reich predicts, hopefully with accuracy. There's even a chance (shudder!) that McCain could have seized victory from the jaws of defeat should a better bill be enacted and the stock and credit markets recover quickly enough, say by the election. But that's tough now that he put his foot in it this morning, seeming to glom credit, even as now he tries to distract away blame.

I'm not one for the hardcore Libertarian position of allowing total bankruptcy, as I've seen pictures and movies of the 1930's breadlines. I'd rather see an equity solution (oh, horrors, how socialiste!) where the taxpayers get the most brutal deal for the spoils, since we're being asked to take the risk.

In the short term, i.e. through the election, this may have been a bold stroke on the part of the Dems, to set up an adult solution nobody wanted to vote for just before their own re-election days and then let the President's party take the fall for not supporting the President's plan. For the rest of us it may mean no auto loans, massive job loss, inability to finance new businesses. For John McCain it may mean the end of his Presidential hopes.

And, most of all, for George W. Bush it means that he's the disastrous frontrunner for Worst President in the history of our Democratic Republic.

McOver

I desperately want to write about Paul Newman because he was the coolest movie star when I was a kid and maybe until today, but I hope to do so soon when I have my thoughts collected. But have to note his sad passing -- a great life, but one of the guys you always want around, and it sucks a little more to live in a world without him.

But, Presidential politics junkie that I've been ever since 1968 when my buddy from next door and I argued Humphrey vs. Nixon at the morning bus stop, I can't help but note the watershed it appears (and I believe will be proven on Election Day) happened last night, when John McCain was forced to be on a stage with Barack Obama and, in McCain's own terms for why he never wants to meet with an enemy like Iran, de facto legitimized him.

To put a scalpel to it, McCain created the opening for Obama to legitimize himself to maybe 30 million Americans who may have seen him rarely or never before and had all those lingering preconceptions about him being weightless, elitist, implicitly dangerous. Because if Obama hadn't performed as cleanly as he did, addressing the needs of the American Middle Class while seeming toe-to-toe knowledgeable about foreign affairs, it wouldn't have worked. If he had landed the so-called "knockout blow" to McCain, he would have been seen as an aggressor, opening the "angry black man" meme again.

Instead, when he landed a blow, it was a counterpunch -- most effectively in the bracelet exchange. And, as the theme of this debate was who does or doesn't understand the difference between strategy and tactics, Obama's strategy was fine, mainly because by attacking Obama with lies and aggressive condescension, McCain provided Barack with a target rich environment where he could effective use a scalpel, not a hatchet.

What makes this debate so much more of an epic showdown than most folks I've read or spoken with is that this was quite possibly the most extraordinary weeks you'll ever witness in Presidential politics. You had the collapse of the American investment banking system providing both backdrop and catalyst for the crumbling of the McCain Presidential campaign. Read Frank Rich for a tremendously valuable and searingly entertaining documentation of this past Wednesday, September 24th, the first act in a three-day drama that climaxed Friday night.

Essentially what happened is that the disastrous backstory choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate, once the initial flush of gambler's high dissipated into negative approval ratings of the Alaska Governor, has congealed into a failed product, her inability to appear on national television in front of any but the most in-the-bag journalist (Hannity) without bleeding credibility like a hemophiliac in a knife fight.

This hits McCain like a ton of bricks so he goes all in. (This poker metaphor will work even better by Sunday night, as The New York Times article on McCain's gambling and relationship to the Indian and Vegas casinos gets finished being read.) He uses the bailout crisis as a way to grab the headlines away from her (Katie Couric interview) and, it appears, to pretend to suspend his campaign as a tactic to get the first debate suspended, with the dice roller's hope that he'll be able to get the VP debate scuttled and get her elected Vice President without once having to appear again outside of Dominionist fundraisers.

He goes to D.C. and -- this is the most interesting part of the Second Act -- gets humiliated by Obama (and his own lack of preparation) in front of the President, the leaders of the House and Senate, the House Republicans -- everyone in the conference room at the White House. He's supposed to stay for a photo op, but he leaves without speaking to anybody.

So on Friday night the ninety-minute climax turns on McCain's unwillingness to acknowledge his competitor, because he only thinks of him as a challenger and has been shamed by this challenger once this week already. In front of the biggest student council meeting of them all.

A reader identified as a "researcher on social cognition and behavior in primates" sent Josh Marshall the most telling analysis:

I think people really are missing the point about McCain's failure to look at Obama. McCain was afraid of Obama. It was really clear--look at how much McCain blinked in the first half hour. I study monkey behavior--low ranking monkeys don't look at high ranking monkeys. In a physical, instinctive sense, Obama owned McCain tonight and I think the instant polling reflects that.

Pwned, to put it in videogamer terms.

So what next? Will Palin drop out and maybe Rudy step in? Is he the only guy with ego enough to think he would keep McCain from going down and get co-painted with loser colors? Is that why he and his wife just flew with the McCains?

Or is there going to be more tabloid-style distraction from Angry Johnny, i.e. the campaign paying godknowswhat money to Levi Johnston to force a Bristol Palin celebrity-style shotgun wedding before the election? Anything to capture as many news cycles as possible -- is that a strategy of flailing tactictry?

The polls on Monday morning will be telling, because if Obama did indeed turn the dial, adding maybe three more states as likely to vote for him, then McCain either knows he's lost and just lets it play out (which might be reflected by the GOP establishment not pressuring him to drop Palin from the ticket, just let her burn with him) or he makes another insane lurch.

I'd bet on the lurch.

Now, as to the next Obama/McCain debate, the Town Hall-style one that is again supposed to favor McCain, I'm betting you'll see Johnny forcing himself to make a lot of ungainly eye contact with Barack, maybe even use his name, maybe even seem natural or gracious for a moment. But I'm guessing it'll come across as a personality flip, which implies either inauthentic or crazy, while Obama will be the exact same person everybody met in the first debate. It'll be a bit like Al Gore too obviously shifting gears from one debate to another. And I expect Obama to pull some sort of ripcord in the final debate that calls back to some narrative he set up in the first debate.

Strategy.

The Obama campaign, to its great credit, takes nothing for granted even in apparent advance and unleashes a video ad that's strikes at the heart of the Obama supporters lead vocalized fear: what it like on November 5th we all wake up to John McCain as the President Elect?

I can't say with total certainty that Barack Obama will win this crucial election. It's often said that a week can be a lifetime in politics, and this past week surely proved it. But I am certain about one thing, that if Barack Obama wins outright on November 4th and John McCain loses, Sarah Palin and family will suddenly find themselves with a lot fewer friends when they get back home to Alaska, because all those GOP/McCain campaign operatives who are forcing her Attorney General appointee to sue to scuttle the Troopergate investigation, who are keeping a lid on her fiefdom-type acts as Governor, who are keeping Levi Johnston from getting caught with another girl in public and Todd & Sarah out of jail will suddenly evaporate into Alaska Air.

If they do lose, and the drama's finally over, will McCain ever even call her again?

McLurch

It's not just that McCain is lurching around from Hail Mary to Hail Mary, he lurched into DC to sit silently at the table like lurch on The Addams Family while the jittery House Republicans objected to the plan the Dems worked up with the President and when pressed offered their bizarro version, featuring suspending capital gains taxes and loosening regulation -- like a Vegas roller shooting for one more wild ride.

Per BAGnewsNotes, the problem is rooted in McCain's Gen. Jack D. Ripper-esque character flaw:

Speaking as a clinician now and not just a visual analyst, what McCain demonstrates time-and-again -- as the hallmark of his psychology -- is oppositional-defiant disorder. What McCain gets off on, also reflected in the expression above, is throwing over the status quo. (Although the disorder is primarily attributed to children and closely fits McCain's repeated, indulgent descriptions of his earlier acting out, his touchiness, anger and authority issues are all still very much in evidence.)

Without an appreciation for the psychopathology underlying this behavior, people tend to chalk up the swerve-after-swerve in McCain's career to independence of mind or this ridiculous "maverick" label. I say ridiculous because what we are seeing play out once more is not a constructive trait but an impulsive pathological reaction -- one which manifests itself in a pernicious and destructive way.

Are we living through John McCain's 6th plane crash? It's all very weird. Check out the photo from this NYTimes analysis:

Senator John McCain had intended to ride back into Washington on Thursday as a leader who had put aside presidential politics to help broker a solution to the financial crisis. Instead he found himself in the midst of a remarkable partisan showdown, lacking a clear public message for how to bring it to an end.

At the bipartisan White House meeting that Mr. McCain had called for a day earlier, he sat silently for more than 40 minutes, more observer than leader, and then offered only a vague sense of where he stood, said people in the meeting...

...Mr. Obama might not have fared much better. He had come to Washington only reluctantly, opening himself to criticism by Republicans that he was putting his election bid ahead of the need to resolve the Wall Street crisis, and prompting concern among Democrats that his reaction to the events was simply too measured, considering the stakes.

Still, by nightfall, the day provided the younger and less experienced Mr. Obama an opportunity to, in effect, shift roles with Mr. McCain. For a moment, at least, it was Mr. Obama presenting himself as the old hand at consensus building, and as the real face of bipartisan politics.

“What I’ve found, and I think it was confirmed today, is that when you inject presidential politics into delicate negotiations, it’s not necessarily as helpful as it needs to be,” Mr. Obama told reporters Thursday evening. “Just because there is a lot of glare of the spotlight, there’s the potential for posturing or suspicions.”

Make no mistake about it -- the Republican Party is fractured right now:

Things grew so heated within the caucus, the Politico reported, that "some House Republicans are saying privately that they'd rather 'let the markets crash' than sign on to a massive bailout."

One GOP lawmaker, referring to his defiant colleagues, asked rhetorically: "For the sake of the altar of the free market system, do you accept a Great Depression?"

Of course they do. It's what they did that caused The (First?) Great Depression.

"At the end of the day, there's a lot of people thinking about how to rebuild this party," said GOP strategist Ed Rollins on CNN, "and do we want to rebuild it with John McCain, who's always kind of questionable on the basic facts of fiscal control, all the rest of it, immigration. And I think to a certain extent this 110, 115 members of this study group are saying, here's the time to draw the line in the sand."

"That's pretty scary stuff that they're thinking about party right now and not country, is that what you're saying?" responded host Anderson Cooper.

"I think they're, yes, they're thinking about themselves," said Rollins. "I think they don't think that the threat is as great as a lot of other people do."

Country first, baby.

Oh, and a reminder of McCain's role in the last great banking scandal:



To paraphrase Paris Hilton, "See you at the debate, bitch!"