Focus on Politics

ABC News reports

Berman: You’re a very persuasive man, you have a certain amount of influence with your own party, could you have done more, should you have done more, before the House vote yesterday to lobby for votes?

Obama: Oh, absolutely, not because — if you think about it, there was a deal struck between [House Speaker] Nancy Pelosi and Republican [Minority House] leader [John] Boehner.

The Democrats were supposed to get 120 votes, they got 140 so there was no sense on the Democratic side that we weren’t following through on our commitments and apparently there were some problems on that side. I don’t think me calling House Republican members would have been that helpful, I tend not to be that persuasive on that side of the aisle.

This is the guy that was so excited about Obamacrats and proped them up as a testament to his ability to cross party lines.

He can cross party lines as long as they agree with him. After 20 years in church I guess he only learned how to preach to the choir.

McCain and Obama sparred a little bit over “preconditions” in the context of meeting with foreign jerks like Amalamajihad. Obama claimed as President he could talk to anyone he wanted whenever he wanted. That may be true but that’s a really dumb thing to say.

What McCain was trying to explain to newbie over there is that you, the President, do not meet with foreign terrorists. You send a lower level person. The reason, for people who know anything about diplomacy, is simple: the person being met is viewed as important as the lowest person meeting them.

If you want to show your disdain for someone you send over a bag boy to listen to what they have to say. You don’t send the CEO. That tells the other guy that they’re not important enough for the CEO’s time.

“Preconditions” are used as a way to make it worth the CEO’s time. By refusing to meet with foreign jerks personally, the President is saying that the other guy is not worth their time. So they send someone over who’s time is a little less valuable. Or a lot less valuable depending on who the other guy is.

The whole exchange really highlighted how ignorant Obama is on foreign relations. He probably thinks he’ll shake his hand with whomever he wants as well. And keep his shoes on if he darn well pleases.

After all, he’s the President.

The left likes to put Main Street first. The right likes to put Wall Street first.

Let’s think for a second. How did your retirement account look when Wall Street was doing good? Looked pretty good didn’t it? How does you retirement account look now that Wall Street isn’t doing good? Pretty bad isn’t it?

Hmm… Seems Wall Street dictates Main Street. Not the other way around. Corporations give money to consumers who distribute it amongst various corporations. And round and round it goes.

What the left wants to do is take money from the government and give it to people so they give it to corporations who then give it to people. What the right wants to do is give it to corporations who give it to people who give it back to corporations.

The key difference being that corporations are better at investing money which yields a higher economic return than people who just mindlessly spend it. A corporation will dump a pile of money into specific areas allowing those areas to spend it on hiring people or whatever. Joe Blow who gets $1000 from the government will spread it across 10 different stores which means each store gets around $100 which isn’t enough to do anything. Lots of Joe Blows have to spend their money at the same place in order for that place to be able to really benefit. Where do most people shop? The big corporations. Unfortunately, by the time the corporations start getting the money, much of it has been trickled into various other entities none of which can do much with it. So a lot of that money is “wasted.” The economic value of the money went down. Instead of one company getting $100,000 and hiring 2 or 3 more people 100 stores get $1000 which isn’t enough to justify hiring anyone.

Few if any places now got enough to hire more people.

So the money needs to start with Wall Street. They know where the money should go to allow more people to be hired and boost the economy.

The people who think Wall Street isn’t their ticket to retirement are the people who mindlessly spend money and don’t invest it.

Nobody complained about Wall Street being greedy when it benefited them. But when Wall Street’s greed got the best of them, now you complain. Well you can count on Wall Street’s greed to get the system back on track.

Investing in Wall Street is like riding in the car with someone who only cares about themself. You can be assured that you will get to your destination safetly because if you get hurt, chances are they’re hurt and they don’t want that. Looking out for number one is sufficient to protect everyone else in the car as well. Of course if you’re outside the car, then you may just get run over because it doesn’t affect number one.

Wasn’t he just criticizing McCain for saying the same thing?

According to Harry Reid, John McCain is responsible for the failure of the bail out bill being agreed upon.

Thank you John McCain.

$700 Billion is not something you agree to blow on a 2.5 page document written in a week or less. If the Democrats had actually worked with the Republicans instead of trying to railroad the American people they wouldn’t have been stopped at the last minute when Republicans finally shoved their alternative proposal in their face and forced them to deal with it.

The Democrats were hoping they would be able to create a partisan bill without having to deal with those pesky people who disagree.

McCain is right to go back and debate. He can point out that Congress needs a break anyway so they can come back next week and actually work on a plan. He’s not needed there today because congress has thankfully been stopped.

They need to think a lot harder about what they’re doing before they go print $700 billion dollars and charge the bill to the American taxpayer.

Bush wants to give various companies around 700 billion to buy otherwise unsellable securities. Those securities contain a bunch of home loans of various qualities. Most of them are probably very risky. Bush is assuming that most of them will eventually be paid off and that their actual value will be more than they were bought for.

So what does that mean? Yes, it’s going to cost 700 billion or so now. But we’re going to get back a reasonable amount over the life of the loans. The government may actually make money on the deal. But at the end of the day it’s very unlikely that the government will not get back a good chunk of the money. So at the end of the day the bailout will not end up costing 700 billion.

Banks can’t take the risk because they need actual money to do business. They’d go broke waiting to see how those 700 billion dollars worth of loans turn out.

So the question is: do you believe that the $700 billion is a good investment?

Considering what the government is buying is mostly houses, in the worst case scenario those foreclosed homes you see could end up being government property. The government can deal with owning land that is considered worthless today. Eventually it will be worth something.

So I think in theory this may be a good idea. In practice we may only get back 40-50% of the money. But I think it’s far more likely we’ll get it all back.

Fox News reports

John McCain announced that he will suspend his presidential campaign on Thursday to return to Washington to help with Wall Street bailout negotiations. He urged his opponent Barack Obama to do the same.

The Arizona senator also asked the Presidential Debate Commission to postpone Friday’s scheduled debate with Obama so that he can work on the financial crisis bailout plan now on Capitol Hill.

Obama has since refused to cancel the debate. McCain offered weekly debates with Obama a month or two ago and he refused. Now the Obamatrons want to try to spin this as McCain trying to avoid the debate. Obama has been avoiding debates up until now. We could have had 3 or 4 debates already if Obama hadn’t turned them all down.

I think McCain should refuse the debate and if Obama wants to go by himself, let him. Let him look like a dope.

McCain’s campaign slogan is “Country First” and that’s what he’s doing.

Later in the report

Within minutes of McCain’s statement, Obama’s campaign issued its own statement suggesting that the idea to work together came from that camp.

This is Obama’s pathetic new strategy: try to take credit for everything. Sun came up this morning? Obama’s idea. Earth revolves around sun? Obama’s idea.

There has been a bipartisan effort to fix this problem for at least a week now. McCain’s idea was to stop campaigning to focus on that problem.

Obama refuses to do that. So I’m not sure what part of McCain’s idea is Obama’s idea.