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bob2559 wrote:

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No responses to the article about Obama being a hypocrite concerning reform?

I hadn't seen your post before yet, but I'll gladly respond.

As far as the article you posted about Obama not actually being a reformer but a product of the Chicago machine my response is thus:

1. I know that Dennis Byrne is a partisan Republican writer so when he criticizes Democrats I do view his writing with some skepticism first off. And he proves he's a partisan hack by bringing Jeremiah Wright into this article for no apparent or logical reason as Jeremiah Wright has absolutely nothing to do whatsoever with pay-to-pay politics or campaign finance reform. Though I do agree with his general feeling that Emil Jones and Rod Blagojevich suck ass as public servants (Blagojevich also as a person) and Illinois politics are fucked up.

2. He doesn't really have the context of this right at all in his article. In the case of the legislation that is in limbo right now, the person who is REALLY at fault in this is our own insane and incompetent governor Rod Blagojevich (who I personally voted against in the primary and in the general). If he had just signed the original ethics legislation that passed through Emil Jones's chamber once already rather than totally gutting it with his amendatory veto privilege to protect his own campaign coffers/legal fund this whole mess wouldn't have happened. Now Emil Jones *is* being a dick in not calling this bill for another Senate vote (which also is probably being engineered in part by Blagojevich's people), but I have no idea if his stalling tactics are really that he wants to stall reform or it's just more petty squabbles between him and House Speaker Michael Madigan (who is at war with Jones and Blagojevich).

3. I wouldn't be surprised if Blagojevich created this whole flap just to embarrass Obama after the DNC where Blagojevich wasn't allowed to speak or do anything at all because he's so politically toxic and so personally douchebaggish. It was widely known that before Obama burst onto the scene the way he did in 2004 that Rod had his own big ambitions for national office and he was upset Obama stole his thunder, at least in his own megalomaniacal mind. Just last week he was criticizing the Obama campaign for criticizing Palin's executive experience because he as a governor knew how important that executive experience was (now that's a ringing endorsement!!! and now that I think of it he's kind of like Palin if you replace the hockey mom thing with him being a huge Elvis fan and the lipstick with a blowdryer) There's also hostility between them between the whole Rezko thing. You see, if it wasn't for Blagojevich, you wouldn't hear about Rezko at all in this political campaign. It's outrageous illegal things that Rezko was able to do with state government in exchange for engineering Blagojevich's campaign fundraising and picking his Cabinet that has him on trial, not anything to do with Obama though Rezko did happen to send some campaign cash his way along with a bunch of politicians in Illinois of both parties and the house thing, though totally legal, was politically dumb. But anyway... Blagojevich resents that the Rezko scandal is going to kill his political career while it hasn't yet really had much effect on Obama at all.

4. To anyone independent or intellectually honest who actually knows or understands Illinois and Chicago politics it's downright laughable to claim Obama is a "creature of the Chicago Machine" and doesn't ever do anything to challenge Democrats.
First of all:
-Unlike the mayor of Chicago, our Illinois governor, Illinois attorney general and Illinois comptroller, Obama did not essentially inherit his political power because of who his father or father-in-law was the way that all three of these people did (though the ones not named Blagojevich are competent). Whatever political power he has had he has had to FIGHT the Democratic establishment to get a seat at the table and when he has got that power he has used it to do things for the public like pass ethics and campaign finance reform laws, laws that increase government and campaign transparency and just generally often tackling important, complicated but not really sexy issues... like in Illinois reforming some major flaws in the death penalty system and in Washington working to secure loose nukes.
-When he ran for the Senate the first time, he didn't step down when the incumbent who had just lost a Congressional primary demanded he step aside because she felt she was entitled to that Senate seat.
-He felt like Bobby Rush wasn't doing a good enough job representing his district, so despite all odds and little backing from the establishment he took him on in a Congressional primary he lost big in a move many thought would end his political career.
-In the 7-way Democratic Primary for the U.S. Senate, Obama defeated a field that included a top Blagojevich fundraiser Blair Hull, Comptroller Dan Hynes (son of a former Illinois Senate president) and Mayor Daley's former chief of staff and public schools chief Gery Chico. You think the Chicago Democratic machine in 2004 thought it was a great idea to run an anti-war candidate named Barack Hussein Obama? Hell no.
-It is too bad Obama didn't endorse Claypool over Stroger for Cook County board chairman. I admit that. But since I don't live in Cook County, it's not something I get terribly outraged about. So he hasn't reformed Cook County. I'm still psyched at the reforms of the Democratic Party he's putting into place.

5. As an Illinois voter and taxpayer who voted to send him to the Senate to work on my behalf, I am honestly way more concerned that Obama works non-stop to ensure John McCain does not win the presidency so he can then work to smooth over America's relationships with the rest of the world and reform Washington way more than I am worried about him brokering political peace between Blago, Jones and Madigan in their perpetual pissing contest --- in this case over reforming Springfield.

Why I am wasting this much time on an in-depth response in OT, I have no idea. But you asked for it.

SurvivorLDog93 wrote:

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Anyone else seeing the similarity between 1968 and 2008 GOP tickets?

McCain = Nixon.

Career pols, both with a notorious stubborn streak, both with the reputation for being mean-spirited, both beyond their "best used by" date, both making an unexpected comeback to nab the GOP nomination. Both dispatched a competitor named Romney early in the party nomination process.

Palin = Agnew.

Relatively obscure Governors, both tapped early in their first term as Governor, both with short political resumes, both were executives on a local level before becoming governor, both had investigations brewing in their respective home states at the time they joined the ticket.

I would totally love to hear Palin call out the "sexist" press for being nattering nabobs of negativism in that accent of hers. Richard W. McHoover - Sarah Agnew '08!

Although earlier tonight I saw former Nixon speechwriter Ben Stein on Larry King ostensibly as a McCain supporter railing against all of McCain's economic policies and economic record and agreeing with Obama supporting Robert Reich on every economic issue to the point Reich asked Stein if he'd join the Obama side and Stein said the right to life issue prevents it. But earlier in the show McCain got Donald Trump's endorsement so of course we can trust McCain to regulate Wall Street.

Btw, no matter how hard Vic and Pahrump/Lloyd try to push the Fannie/Freddie talking points they got about McCain, it won't change that the biggest culprit of all in this mess is McCain's main economic man, Phil Gramm, the one who dubbed us all the "nation of whiners."

http://www.motherjones.co.../07/foreclosure-phil.html

Who's to blame for the biggest financial catastrophe of our time? There are plenty of culprits, but one candidate for lead perp is former Sen. Phil Gramm. Eight years ago, as part of a decades-long anti-regulatory crusade, Gramm pulled a sly legislative maneuver that greased the way to the multibillion-dollar subprime meltdown. Yet has Gramm been banished from the corridors of power? Reviled as the villain who bankrupted Middle America? Hardly. Now a well-paid executive at a Swiss bank, Gramm cochairs Sen. John McCain's presidential campaign and advises the Republican candidate on economic matters. He's been mentioned as a possible Treasury secretary should McCain win. That's right: A guy who helped screw up the global financial system could end up in charge of US economic policy. Talk about a market failure.

Gramm's long been a handmaiden to Big Finance. In the 1990s, as chairman of the Senate banking committee, he routinely turned down Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Arthur Levitt's requests for more money to police Wall Street; during this period, the sec's workload shot up 80 percent, but its staff grew only 20 percent. Gramm also opposed an sec rule that would have prohibited accounting firms from getting too close to the companies they audited-at one point, according to Levitt's memoir, he warned the sec chairman that if the commission adopted the rule, its funding would be cut. And in 1999, Gramm pushed through a historic banking deregulation bill that decimated Depression-era firewalls between commercial banks, investment banks, insurance companies, and securities firms-setting off a wave of merger mania.

That bill, which got rid of the Depression-era Glass-Steagal Act, is what gave birth to our new Depression.

But Gramm's most cunning coup on behalf of his friends in the financial services industry-friends who gave him millions over his 24-year congressional career-came on December 15, 2000. It was an especially tense time in Washington. Only two days earlier, the Supreme Court had issued its decision on Bush v. Gore. President Bill Clinton and the Republican-controlled Congress were locked in a budget showdown. It was the perfect moment for a wily senator to game the system. As Congress and the White House were hurriedly hammering out a $384-billion omnibus spending bill, Gramm slipped in a 262-page measure called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act. Written with the help of financial industry lobbyists and cosponsored by Senator Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), the chairman of the agriculture committee, the measure had been considered dead-even by Gramm. Few lawmakers had either the opportunity or inclination to read the version of the bill Gramm inserted. "Nobody in either chamber had any knowledge of what was going on or what was in it," says a congressional aide familiar with the bill's history.

That gave us the Enron loophole. Thanks Gramm!

Gramm's record as a reckless deregulator has not affected his rating as a Republican economic expert. Sen. John McCain has relied on him for policy advice, especially, according to the campaign, on housing matters. The two have been buddies ever since they served together in the House in the 1980s; in 1996, McCain chaired Gramm's flop of a presidential campaign. (Gramm spent $21 million and earned only 10 delegates during the gop primaries.) In 2005, McCain told a Wall Street Journal columnist that Gramm was his economic guru. Two years later, Gramm wrote a piece for the Journal extolling McCain as a modern-day Abraham Lincoln, and he's hailed McCain's love of tax cuts and free trade. Media accounts have identified Gramm as a contender for the top slot at the Treasury Department if McCain reaches the White House. "If McCain gets in," frets Lynn Turner, a former chief sec accountant, "we'll have more of the same deregulatory mess. I like John McCain, but given what I know about Phil Gramm, I wouldn't vote for McCain."

As a thriving bank exec and presidential adviser, Gramm has defied a prime economic principle: Bad products are driven out of the market. In John McCain, he has gained an important customer, so his stock has gone up in value. And there's no telling when the Gramm bubble will burst.

Stick your heads in the sand if you want.