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By Elliot D. Cohen
$39.10
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By Gore Vidal
$16.95
$35
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By Marie Cocco — For a steel sculpture of migrating salmon, amongst other goodies, Ted Stevens—one of the lions of the Senate—was willing to forfeit the kingdom.
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By Ellen Goodman — Have you noticed that the spookiest colors of the season are not orange and black but red and blue? As Halloween slips into Election Day, the race for the White House has scared more grown-ups than any trip to the haunted house.
Posted on Oct 30, 2008
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tickertapedigest.com
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The Dow shot up 889.35 points on Tuesday, a welcome respite from Wall Street’s month of plunges. Things could still get a lot worse: While some buyers snapped up what looked like bargain stocks, others said they expected a major drop before things get better.
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Flickr / Svadilfari
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Not everyone is feeling the credit crunch: The DNC is borrowing $10 million to spend on Senate and House races. Encouraged by polls, the party wants to win as many seats as possible before the public stops hating on the GOP.
Posted on Oct 28, 2008
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Every election season, some independent groups sizzle with controversy and impact, and others fizzle. We couldn’t tell at first, but the National Republican Trust PAC appears to be of the sizzling variety.
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By Marie Cocco — My computer will allow a letter to be displayed at a maximum 500 percent of its normal size. That isn’t big enough for a capital “H” that conveys the towering hypocrisies of the Sarah Palin political wardrobe malfunction.
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Wikimedia Commons / edited for effect
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By Chris Hedges — The old assumptions and paradigms about capitalism and free markets are dead. A new, virulent populism, still inchoate, is slowly and painfully rising to take their place. This populism will determine the future of the country. It is as likely to be right-wing as left-wing.
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By David Sirota — Is John McCain stupid, or does he believe we are? That’s the question as he criticizes Barack Obama for allegedly trying to “redistribute the wealth” with a plan to lower taxes on the middle class and raise them on the super-rich.
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npr.org / youtube
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The one form of political advertising that’s completely unregulated and free is the speech of an individual citizen, even when money amplifies that speech by putting it on the airwaves. Tim D’Annunzio, who describes himself as a “concerned North Carolina businessman,” is doing just that.
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By Joe Conason — Wherever John McCain appears on the stump in these waning days of the presidential campaign, he is always accompanied by his imaginary friend “Joe the Plumber,” but it is the specter of Karl Marx that lurks just offstage.
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By Marie Cocco — After the eye-popping fundraising revelations of the past couple of days, the need that’s far more pronounced is the imperative of acting quickly after November’s election to restore some common sense to the presidential campaign finance system—before we don’t have any system at all.
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By Amy Goodman — The candidates’ coffers are swelling with larger and larger bundles of cash, but don’t hold your breath waiting for the extended television discussions of this, because it’s the broadcasters who profit the most.
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By Marie Cocco — Conservatives fear a “period of unchecked left-wing ascendancy” should Barack Obama and the Democrats sweep in November, but the voters care more about competent government than ideology.
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AP photo / Henny Ray Abrams
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By Chris Hedges — Our oligarchic class is incompetent at governing, managing the economy, coping with natural disasters, educating our young, handling foreign affairs, providing basic services like health care and safeguarding individual rights. They have no concept, thanks to the educations they have received, of the common good.
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Flickr / Joe Crimmings Photography
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The Obama campaign announced early Sunday morning that it had raised $150 million in September, more than doubling the previous single-month record of $66 million, set by Obama in August.
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By Eugene Robinson — Grouchiness, twitchiness and haughtiness didn’t help John McCain in Wednesday’s debate, but what he said hurt him more than how he said it.
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By William Pfaff — Military and economic disasters have caused Europeans and European governments to view the United States in a new, unflattering light.
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By Marie Cocco — The last thing we need is another “economic stimulus” package. What we need is a jobs package. And we ought to start calling it that.
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By Eugene Robinson — Can any Republican candidate claim with a straight face to represent the party of small government? For that matter, can any Republican candidate plausibly explain what the party is supposed to stand for these days?
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AP photo / Gerald Herbert
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By Chris Hedges — It is no longer our economy but our democracy that is in peril. Financial collapses lead to political extremism. The rage bubbling up from our impoverished and disenfranchised working class, glimpsed at John McCain rallies, presages a looming and dangerous right-wing backlash.
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Wikimedia Commons / Hk1992
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Stock traders in Asia and Europe seemed to like the news that European governments will coordinate with one another as they throw cash at troubled banks. The euro zone plan was announced on the heels of similar British and American schemes.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Each campaign has given voters ample notice about the inclinations, temperaments, habits, philosophical leanings and advisers they would bring to the White House. That’s enough.
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By David Sirota — Is Henry Paulson a crony communist or a businessman? The answer could be the difference between economic disaster and recovery.
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By Eugene Robinson — Here’s a question I’d like to ask Barack Obama and John McCain: Is the United States destined to look and feel increasingly like a “developing country”? Is this the way it’s going to be?
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During the first presidential debate, John McCain gave a high-profile shout-out: “I suggest that people go up on the Web site of Citizens Against Government Waste, and they’ll look at those projects.” The group quickly returned the favor—its political action committee is calling McCain a “taxpayer hero” in TV ads airing over the next two weeks in Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida.
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White House / Shealah Craighead
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Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, with much prodding from Democratic Sen. Charles Schumer, is thinking about using some of that $700 billion to buy ownership stakes in shaky banks. The scheme would ostensibly give taxpayers a share in the fortunes of the bailed-out institutions.
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AP photo / Jim Bourg, pool
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By Scott Ritter — Ralph Nader is right: The two-party system is failing America. There isn’t time between now and Election Day to create a viable third-party candidate, and so the sad reality is one of two deeply flawed men, the byproduct of a deeply flawed political system, will serve as president for the next four or eight years.
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A lobbying powerhouse with an emphatically pro-Republican political action committee is pounding Democratic Senate candidates for supporting legislation that would make it easier for workers to unionize. The ads portray Al Franken in Minnesota and Tom Allen of Maine as backing Big Brother-style surveillance of American workers.
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starwoodhotels.com
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What’s $85 billion if you don’t get to spend it? Just days after taxpayers saved AIG from ruin, executives of the insurance giant spent $440,000 pampering themselves at the exclusive St. Regis resort in Monarch Beach, Calif.
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AP photo / Susan Walsh
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By Chris Hedges — The passing of the $850-billion bailout pulled the plug on the New Deal. The Great Society is now gasping for air, mortally wounded, coughing up blood. It will not recover. It was murdered by the Democratic Party.
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news.bbc.co.uk
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European leaders decided against a joint bailout of the Continent’s financial system, but that hasn’t stopped individual governments from trying to save failing and financially shaky institutions. The German government, which has been highly critical of U.S. economic mismanagement, just backed a $68-billion deal to save one of its biggest banks.
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By David Sirota — The marriage of American capitalism and democracy has always been a Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee affair—stormy and erratic since its hasty wedding. But during the debate over a Wall Street bailout this week, we watched that matrimonial knot unwind into a tangled tale of terror.
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By Eugene Robinson — We all owe a debt of thanks to the skeptics who refused to be steamrollered by the Bush administration’s $700-billion financial bailout plan until we at least had some understanding of what we were doing and why.
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By Joe Conason — The initial failure to pass bailout legislation reflected a political system as bereft of confidence as the financial markets.
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Flickr / Qfamily
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Well, that was easy: While the House had to contend with round-the-clock negotiations and a last-minute revolt, the Senate just threw more money at the problem. That was enough for 74 lawmakers to say yes to the $810-billion package. The House will take another crack at it on Friday.
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npr.org
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The nation’s most powerful labor unions are ratcheting up their efforts to elect Barack Obama with massive voter outreach campaigns. Both SEIU and the AFL-CIO have said this year’s efforts will be their largest voter mobilization campaigns ever.
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finfacts.ie
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Following days of hype-work by the Bush administration to scare taxpayers into paying for Wall Street’s failures, support for the $700-billion bailout seems to be gaining steam. Analysts believe the final bailout plan, expected in a day or two, may look eerily similar to Bush’s initial proposal, with some slight changes.
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By Ellen Goodman — Why is a welfare mother to blame for her poverty while Wall Street fat cats can count on the federal government for $700 billion?
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Scan of the "Obsession" mailer obtained by Truthdig
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The blogosphere is alive with the sound of buzz—all about an inflammatory DVD on radical Islam being distributed to millions of households at the peak of election season. Critics are calling the DVD, “Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West,” anti-Muslim hate, or politicking, or both. The obvious question: Who is behind it?
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — 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.
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By Marie Cocco — So this is how the “ownership society” works. We own all the bad stuff.
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By Eugene Robinson — 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.
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A new advocacy organization with strong ties to the oil industry is funding pro-drilling radio ads, including one criticizing the energy votes of Rep. Mark Udall, a Colorado Democrat running for the U.S. Senate.
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Flickr / gmeurope
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Forget houses, John and Cindy McCain have 13 cars to Barack and Michelle Obama’s one. McCain would point out that most of the vehicles are in his wife’s name, but still, you can’t call the other guy an elitist when you sleep with one.
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By Eugene Robinson — 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.
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By David Sirota — Barack Obama isn’t going to win any arguments about the economy if he keeps winking at the robber barons who helped wreck Wall Street.
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commons.wikimedia.org / Manfred Brückels
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By William Pfaff — 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.
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By Amy Goodman — With financial institutions begging for bailouts, taxpayers should be in the driver’s seat. Instead, decisions that will cost people for decades are being made behind closed doors, by the wealthy, by the regulators and by those they have failed to regulate.
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DoD / Pfc. Christopher Grammer
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Sarah Palin has energized the Republican base, but she’s also helped Barack Obama raise millions. Political insider Taegan Goddard uses a viral e-mail to explain why the moose hunter makes liberals nuts.
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