Wall Street will not trouble its collective consciousness with worry over the Constitution. But this bailout bill is virtually unprecedented in its assumptions and its reach for unchecked power.
Before this is over, we will need a special prosecutor with an ample budget to find, prosecute and imprison the criminals responsible for this disaster and ultimately deter such criminals in the future.
The candidates heading into Friday’s scheduled debate should heed the politician who first conquered the format, John F. Kennedy, who believed that the images portrayed via TV were “likely to be uncannily correct.”
Troy Anthony Davis was scheduled to die by lethal injection Tuesday. Two hours before the state of Georgia was to execute him, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a stay until Monday. It had earlier agreed to hear Davis’ case on Sept. 29, but Georgia set his execution date six days before the hearing.
When it comes to politics, there is a mad love of mediocrity in this country. “They think they’re better than you!” is the refrain that (highly competent and cynical) Republican strategists have set loose among the crowd, and the crowd has grown drunk on it once again. “Sarah Palin is an ordinary person!” Yes, all too ordinary.
Does it really matter which party is in charge when it comes to bailing out the Wall Street hustlers whose shenanigans have bankrupted so many ordinary folks? Not if the Democrats roll over and cede power to the former head of Goldman Sachs, the investment bank at the center of our economic meltdown.
In Barack Obama’s presidential candidacy, the fact that he is African-American has seemed to be an obstacle that could be overcome with a good campaign, a few breaks and the issues turning his way. That’s what is happening now.
Let’s be clear about why we’re facing a crisis that could pull down the global financial system. The irresponsibility of individuals who bought houses they couldn’t quite afford pales in comparison to the irresponsibility of the financial wizards who built on those shaky mortgages a towering edifice of irrational faith.
Unless something very strange happens, Congress will pass a massive bailout of the financial system by the end of this week simply because every other option is worse. But the content of the bailout package matters enormously.
I’m not sure of this, but I think—I suspect and feel—that the Great War, the war of 1914-1918, is beginning to dominate our lives even more than the terrible and infinitely more costly conflict of 1939-1945. The Second World War may haunt our lives. The First World War, it seems to me, imprisons us all.
The lobbyists and corporate lawyers, the heads of financial firms and the crooks who control Wall Street, all those who spent the last three decades assuring us that government was part of the problem and should get out of the way, are now busy looting the U.S. treasury.
I’m sorry to be the one to have to say this, Gov. Palin, but you are so earlier-this-month. It’s your partner, John McCain, who’s back in the news. And not in what you call your good way.
GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin said today that she was “delighted” with her performance in a much-publicized ABC News interview with Charlie Gibson and gave credit to her “trusty Magic 8-Ball” for helping her come up with answers to “some darn tricky questions,” according to this satirical report.
This latest report from the “Secret Money Project,” an ongoing joint project by the Center for Investigative Reporting and National Public Radio, follows the money trail to the sources behind independently funded political advertisements on hot-button issues like abortion and religion that are cropping up as the Nov. 4 election approaches.
Has the war on terrorism become the modern equivalent of the Roman Circus, drawing the people’s attention away from the failures of those who rule them? Corporate America is a shambles because deregulation, the mantra of our president and his party, has proved to be a license to steal.
John McCain was telling the truth when he said that economics wasn’t his strong suit. In response to what many economists have called the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, the Republican nominee has sounded—and let’s be honest here—totally, embarrassingly and dangerously clueless.
Karl Marx, were he still about, would surely be interested in the report that unregulated free-market capitalism has died in a flash, by its own hand; whereas it took 70 years and a Cold War to bring down the Marxist economy established in the Soviet Union following the Bolshevik Revolution.
Gen. Petraeus’ oft-declared uncertainty about the future stability of Iraq is genuine. It is the Shiites and their Iranian backers, not the Americans, who are the true victors in the Iraqi war.
Obama shows more promise than McCain, if only because he correctly sees deregulatory zeal as a culprit. But Obama’s economic strategy simply can’t be implemented now: He wants to spend on necessary investments such as health care, but would have no money to do it.
Three weeks after the nomination of the Candidate From Nowhere, one week after the robo-interview with Charlie Gibson and days after the “Saturday Night Live” skit, there is still a flood tide of women choking on the possibility that Hillary Clinton paved the way for Sarah Palin.
With the markets in frightening turmoil and the public outraged by financial irresponsibility and excessive greed, John McCain has suddenly rediscovered the importance of strong, watchful government.
Class Bigotry Mars Auto Debate
