Year: 2008

The government is doing the necessary thing. I think it will work. Calamity will be averted. Tough times will not. It will take years to climb out of the hole that’s been dug. The sun will come out tomorrow, along with some likely succession of inflation, recession, and stagflation, in what order and to what heights, depths, and angst I obviously don’t know. Meanwhile, the astounding updraft of technology will continue to improve most of our lives in many, resource-nonintensive ways. And if we’re smart, we’ll set people to work renewing our infrastructure and achieving energy independence.

I feel certain we will do better economically with Obama/Biden and the people who would run their Administration than with McCain/Palin.

AND HOW IS THAT HEARTBEAT, ANYWAY?

Now here’s a shock: John McCain has high blood pressure. (He’s not quite at the level of my pal Jim Cramer, whose head could explode at any minute, but close.) And it seems there is quite a bit more to his medical history his campaign doesn’t want voters to know about. Click here for a short video reviewing the Senator’s health.

Which is relevant, because if he were elected and something happened to him, Sarah Palin would be leader of the free world.*

*A job George W. Bush has proved requires more than self-assurance and a belief in low taxes.

MEMORABLE LINES

For Governor Palin the line is that she can see Russia from her house.

For Senator McCain, the line may come from his promise to ‘take on the ol’ boys’ network.’

As Senator Obama put it:

‘Yesterday, John McCain actually said that if he’s President, he’ll take on the – and I quote – ‘ol’ boys network’ in Washington. I am not making this up. This is someone who’s been in Congress for 26 years – who put seven of the most powerful Washington lobbyists in charge of his campaign – and now he tells us that he’s the one who will take on the ol’ boys network. The ol’ boys network? In the McCain campaign, that’s called a staff meeting.’

MEMORY FUNCTION

This is a touchy subject, but being President of the United States arguably entails even more responsibility than being a brain surgeon or airline pilot – and it’s a four-year gig (you don’t get to hire him ‘on probation’ for the first 90 days as some employers do, to be sure they’ve made a good choice). So even though I have an obvious partisan bias, I don’t see how it’s not relevant to consider this post:

. . . I’m hardly alone in noticing the changes that have occurred in John McCain. People are whispering about his confusion, his slow delivery, his deterioration, but . . . it is not being openly discussed. . . .

The latest example was the gaffe over Spain. ‘Finally, Senator, let’s talk about Spain,’ says the interviewer. Would he be willing to invite President Zapatero to the White House?

In fairness to Senator McCain, she says Zapatero’s full name quickly – and it’s a mouthful.

But she did preface it very clearly with ‘let’s talk about Spain.’

So when Senator McCain answered as if Zapatero were President of Mexico or someplace to its south, it suggested he might not be as sharp as a U.S. President ideally would be. (‘McCain Proposes Sending Troops to South America to Invade Spain,’ Andy Borowitz reported.)

Same thing when, repeatedly, on separate occasions, he confused whether Iran is predominantly Sunni or Shiia (it’s Shiia). Or when Senator Lieberman had to help him get straight whom the Iranians were arming (the insurgents, not Al-Qaeda).

Here is a site that’s collected 16 foreign policy gaffes you don’t picture President Kennedy making. Or President Nixon or President Carter or President Bush 41 or President Clinton – or President Obama. But which you can picture President Reagan, especially in his second term, having made. There is little reason to think Senator McCain will get sharper under the stress of the Presidency.

McCAIN’S CHIEF ECONOMIC ADVISOR

One of the good ol’ boys Senator McCain has most confidence in is Phil Gramm (who told us this summer we’re a nation of ‘whiners’). It was he who quarterbacked the McCain economic plan.

I have previously noted that all Enron roads seem to lead to Phil Gramm. This post takes the story all the way to the current meltdown. In part:

How did we get here?

That’s pretty easy to answer. His name is Phil Gramm. A few days after the Supreme Court made George W. Bush president in 2000, Gramm stuck something called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act into the budget bill. Nobody knew that the Texas senator was slipping America a 262 page poison pill. The Gramm Guts America Act was designed to keep regulators from controlling new financial tools described as credit “swaps.” These are instruments like sub-prime mortgages bundled up and sold as securities. Under the Gramm law, neither the SEC nor the Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) were able to examine financial institutions like hedge funds or investment banks to guarantee they had the assets necessary to cover losses they were guaranteeing.

This isn’t small beer we are talking about here. The market for these fancy financial instruments they don’t expect us little people to understand is estimated at $60 trillion annually, which amounts to almost four times the entire US stock market.

And Senator Phil Gramm wanted it completely unregulated. So did Alan Greenspan, who supported the legislation and is now running around to the talk shows jabbering about the horror of it all. Before the highly paid lobbyists were done . . . every one from hedge funds to banks were playing with fire for fun and profit.

Gramm didn’t just make a fairy tale world for Wall Street, though. He included in his bill a provision that prevented the regulation of energy trading markets, which led us to the Enron collapse. There was no collapse of the house of Gramm, however, because his wife Wendy, who once headed up the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, took a job on the Enron board that provided almost $2 million to their household kitty. And why not? Wendy got a CFTC rule passed that kept the federal government from regulating energy futures contracts at Enron.

If John McCain gets elected and chooses Phil Gramm as his Treasury Secretary, which many politico types see as likely, they will be able to talk about the good old days when Gramm was in congress and McCain was in the senate and they were in the midst of the Savings and Loan crisis.

The S&L scandal, which may look precious when compared to our present cascade of problems, isn’t hard to understand, either. But it is impossible to take John McCain seriously on our current financial Armageddon since he was dabbling in the historic collapse of 747 S&Ls that occurred during Ronald Reagan’s era. In the early 80s under the Republican president, congress deregulated the savings and loan industry in much the same way that Gramm made sure there were no laws hindering our current financial malefactors on Wall Street. S&Ls simply lobbied until they had less regulation and then began making rampant, unsound investments.

The guy who was going the wildest with financial freedom was Charles Keating, who headed up Lincoln Savings and Loan of California. Because the S&L industry had managed to get congress to increase FDIC insurance from $40,000 to $100,000 on deposits, the irresponsible investing of people like Keating began to put taxpayer insurance funds at great risk of loss. Keating placed money in junk bonds and questionable real estate projects and because so many other S&Ls started acting the same way the Federal Home Loan Bank Board (FHLBB) began to push for a regulation that limited these dangerous speculative “direct” investments to 10% of an S&L’s assets.

And Keating didn’t like it; he called on a private economist named Alan Greenspan, who promptly produced a study saying that there was no danger in “direct” investments.

But that didn’t convince the FHLBB and as further scrutiny showed Lincoln Savings and Loan was making even more historically bad investment decisions, a federal investigation was launched.

So Keating called his home state senator John McCain.

McCain and four other US senators (known to history as the Keating Five) met with Edwin Gray, then chairman of the FHLBB. McCain had been hesitant to attend but had reportedly been called a “wimp” behind his back by Keating. The message to the FHLBB and Gray from the Keating Five was to lay off Lincoln and cool the investigation. Gray and the FHLBB did not relent but Lincoln stayed in business until 1989 when it collapsed with the rest of the S&L industry. The life savings of more than 20,000 elderly investors disappeared with the failure of Lincoln. Keating went to prison for five years.

Charles Keating was John McCain’s pal. They met in 1981 and Keating dumped $112,000 in the McCain campaign bank accounts between ’82 and ’87. A year before McCain met with the FHLBB regulators, his wife Cindy and her father, according to newspaper reports at the time, invested about $360,000 in one of Keating’s shopping centers. The Arizona Republic reported McCain and his wife and their babysitter took nine trips on Keating’s private jet to the Bahamas to stay at the S&L liar’s decadent Cat Cay resort. The senator didn’t pay Keating back for the plane rides until years later when he was under investigation.

McCain wasn’t found guilty of anything but bad judgment, which is an historic understatement. Republicans, who led deregulation of the S&L industry, delayed the bailout until after the 1988 election to make sure George H. W. won the White House. The cost to taxpayers for helping these 747 bad actors in the S&L industry was finally estimated at $1.4 trillion. If the bailout had begun in 1986 instead of after the presidential election, the cost would have been contained at $20 billion.

☞ That excerpt might be even more effective if the tone weren’t quite so angry. But you know what? We have a lot to be angry about.

ANOTHER OF McCAIN’S TOP ECONOMIC ADVISORS

Conservative economist Kevin Hassett is another of the Senator’s top advisors and a truly nice guy – I know him a little. He is the co-author of Dow 36,000: The New Strategy for Profiting From the Coming Rise in the Stock Market, published in 1999, when the Dow was around 11,000. According to Business Week at the time, the book argued that the Dow was already worth 36,000, and should head there in three to five years. Nine years later, it is 11,000.

MYM VISTA

Can I ask those of you using MYM under Vista – or who tried to use it under Vista but failed – to me-mail me with your experiences? Thanks!

I think Sarah Palin may be in over her head. Which is a problem, because I think John McCain may be, too. John McCain has said the Governor ‘knows more about energy than probably anyone else in the United States of America.’ Yet the Governor told the country that Alaska accounts for 20% of America’s energy production, when the true number, as noted on last night’s NBC Nightly News, is 3.5%.

Shouldn’t the nation’s foremost energy expert be at least fairly close to right about something so basic to her field of expertise? It’s like an astronomer saying the earth is 16 million miles from the sun when it is in fact 93 million miles from the sun. The ratio of inaccuracy is the same. Not something the average person might know – but one Senator McCain looks up to as an expert?

The Palin campaign told us she’s been to Iraq and Ireland. But the Alaska National Guard, which she commands, says no, she never set foot in Iraq (it was Kuwait) – and that her visit to Ireland consisted of touching down to refuel.

Perhaps most telling is her decision to keep repeating the campaign’s McCain-approved lie – it is really hard to call it anything else – that when others favored the Bridge to Nowhere, she shut it down.

In fact, as you can see in the NBC report, this is simply not true.

And before some of my friendly antagonists – whose readership I do appreciate – rush to email me, yet again, that Obama once referred to ’57 states,’ I would remind you, first, that 57 is much closer to 50 than 20% is to 3.5% (and much closer to accurate than going to Iraq is to not going to Iraq, or than stopping a bridge is to not stopping a bridge) . . . and, second, that what Obama was referring to, in the context of the primary campaign, was the 57 entities in whose primary contests he had to compete (except that I think it was actually 56 – the 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, Guam, the Virgin Islands and Democrats Abroad – who cares?).

Remember when the Republicans skewered Al Gore for claiming to have visited a disaster site with FEMA head James Lee Witt when in fact it turned out he had visited 17 disaster sites with Witt but this particular one, with Witt’s deputy? This was supposed to show that Gore wasn’t trustworthy – you should vote instead for the guy promising a humble foreign policy, a balanced budget, and tax cuts skewed to those at the bottom end of the economic ladder. You know: the kinda guy you could trust, and who, unlike Gore, would be on hand with a crack FEMA Administrator like James Lee Witt if disaster struck. NOT!

So now they’re doing it again. You can’t trust Obama – he was President of the Harvard Law Review. That makes him an elitist (raised by a single mother on food stamps). You want John McCain, who’s an average Joe like you (with $520 loafers, too many houses to count, and a private jet).

You can’t trust Joe Biden – he is Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. You want Sarah Palin, the nation’s foremost energy expert, who can see Russia from her house.

MISS CONGENIALITY

Roberta Taussig: ‘You may like Sarah Palin, but I sure don’t. I’ve known women like her in church – always bright smiles and high energy but cold as ice and stubborn as that lipstick-less pitbull and absolutely certain she knows right from wrong on everything from God’s will to how to decorate the pews to how to raise everyone else’s children. She scares the bejesus out of me.’

THE REAL McCAIN – 2

If you haven’t seen this video, you should.

AIG

The government did the right thing. And given that this company once had a market cap of $180 billion, buying 80% of it for $85 billion could, conceivably, not be the worst investment the taxpayers ever made. (Plus it prevented a global meltdown.)

THE FINANCIAL MESS

Greg Bandy: ‘This column from your archives late last year seems appropriate.’

☞ Jeez! Why didn’t I read that?

THE FINANCIAL MESS – 2

Few things are more obnoxious than a writer quoting himself. (And few writers more fear being thought obnoxious, because of the scar left in the seventh grade after Mr. Theodore had left the room and Danny Shindler – I think it was Danny – led the class in a full bore discussion of how obnoxious I was.) But now that Greg’s got me going, here‘s another, from June 24. It concludes:

And what about even just a plain old vicious cycle of falling housing prices leading to less consumption leading to recession leading to job loss leading to more foreclosures and bigger government deficits leading to even less faith in the dollar leading to inflation leading to higher long-term interest rates leading to higher mortgage rates leading to yet lower home prices leading to . . . a new, youthful Administration, swept into office with a huge mandate to redirect our deficits away from Iraq and tax-cuts-for-the-wealthy, toward rebuilding America’s infrastructure; setting bold goals; and inspiring and empowering our estimable citizenry to rise to the very real challenges we face.

It is a uniquely American mantra: Yes, we can.

Have you seen and read these two? Each takes five minutes, but I found them to be 10 minutes well spent.

TO A HAMMER, EVERY PROBLEM LOOKS LIKE A NAIL

This video starts out feeling alarmist and manipulative, both of which, to a certain extent, it probably is. But the more I thought about it, the more I decided it is alarming. War is what John McCain knows. War is what he predicts. And watching this, it’s a little hard to picture his being any more cautious in his definitions of ‘imminent threat’ and ‘last resort’ than George W. Bush was.

EXPLOSIVE V. UNFLAPPABLE

BETWEEN THE LINES
Jonathan Alter
A Reality Check On ‘Change’
Being labeled a ‘maverick’ sounds good to the public, but it makes it hard to forge bipartisan deals.
NEWSWEEK issue date Sep 22, 2008

So far the fall campaign has majored in Sarah Palin, with a minor in the false ads launched (though rarely widely aired) by John McCain. Rather than debating whether Barack Obama voted to teach sex education to kindergartners (he didn’t) or called Sarah Palin a pig (he didn’t), it would be nice if the central dynamic of this contest were about, say, the record and temperament of each candidate. Is that asking too much?

To that end, let’s go back to Palin’s acceptance speech in St. Paul. “Listening to him [Obama] speak, it’s easy to forget that this is a man who has authored two memoirs but not a single major law or reform-not even in the state Senate,” Palin said. “In politics there are some candidates who use change to promote their careers. And then there are those, like John McCain, who use their careers to promote change. They’re the ones whose names appear on laws and landmark reforms, not just on buttons and banners, or on self-designed presidential seals.”

That last crack refers to the Obama campaign’s idiotic effort last spring to make their man seem presidential with a silly seal. As zingers go, Palin’s was justified. But the rest of what she said in that section of her speech is as phony as a moose in Manhattan.

Obama served eight years in Springfield, and has been in Washington nearly four so far. In the Illinois state Senate, he authored about a half-dozen “major laws” on issues ranging from ethics to education. The best example of his leadership style was bipartisan legislation to require the videotaping of police interrogations, which is now a national model. Obama brought together police, prosecutors and the ACLU on a win-win bill that simultaneously increased conviction rates and all but ended jailhouse beatings. In Washington he has his name on three important laws: the first major ethics reform since Watergate; a much-needed cleanup of conventional weapons in the former Soviet Union, and the “Google for Government” bill, an accountability tool that requires notice of all federal contracts to be posted online. Besides that, Obama hasn’t been around long enough to get much done.

McCain served four years in the House and has been in the Senate almost 22 so far. But he, too, has authored fewer than a half-dozen major laws. Trying to fix immigration counts for something, but nothing passed. So while McCain deserves credit for the landmark 2002 McCain-Feingold campaign-finance reform bill, the only other major law on which his office says his “name appears” (Palin’s standard) is the “McCain Amendment” prohibiting torture in the armed forces. But that has little meaning because of a bill this year, supported by McCain, that allows torture by the CIA. Under longstanding government practice, military intelligence officers can be temporarily designated as CIA officers (“sheep-dipped” is the bureaucratic lingo) when they want to go off the Army field manual. In other words, the government can still torture anyone, any time. McCain caved on an issue he insists is a matter of principle.

The single domestic issue that McCain gets passionate about is pork-barrel politics (“earmarking”), the 200-year-old process by which members of Congress slip in goodies for their constituents outside the normal appropriations system. Earmarks account for less than 2 percent of the budget; the “Bridge to Nowhere” is offensive but amounts to the cost of a few hours in Iraq. McCain claims he has never sought earmarks for Arizona. This is mostly true. But the vast majority of all the bills he has sponsored in Congress have been favors for Arizona’s Native American population. While the Indians deserve it, the difference from earmarks is procedural. Both amount to bringing home the bacon.

McCain did important work with John Kerry in 1995 to pave the way for normalization of relations with Vietnam, and he’s been a fierce if occasional enemy of Pentagon waste. But that’s about it. Given his claims of two decades of “making change,” his record of legislative achievement is surprisingly thin. Nothing big on the economy, education, health care, law enforcement or other major issues.

One reason for the sparse record is McCain’s history of unpopularity with his GOP Senate colleagues. Being labeled a “maverick” sounds good to the public but makes it hard to get bills passed. Besides helping pave the way for some judicial nominees in 2005, he isn’t known for forging bipartisan deals that stick. Consider the 2002 McCain-Bayh national-service bill to expand AmeriCorps to 250,000 participants. At last week’s Service Nation Summit in New York, McCain grudgingly endorsed his own bill, now called Hatch-Kennedy. But he’s rarely mentioned it on the trail or done anything to advance it.

Part of the problem is McCain’s explosive temper. He blows up, then apologizes and is quickly forgiven. The forgiveness is “directly related to an appreciation of what he has suffered [in Vietnam],” says a Democrat who didn’t want to be named talking about a colleague. “The thought of his being president sends a cold chill down my spine,” Republican Sen. Thad Cochran told The Boston Globe in January. “He is erratic. He is hotheaded. He loses his temper and he worries me.” Cochran, a McCain supporter, now says McCain has learned to control his emotions better. But I’ve spoken to four senators and two former senators in recent weeks who believe Cochran’s concerns are widely shared in the Senate. Five of the six think that McCain is temperamentally unsuited to the presidency. None would speak for the record.

Palin’s right that McCain has at least tried to “use his career to promote change,” even if he hasn’t succeeded. But she’s wrong to deny the same to Obama. The faith-based community organizing Obama undertook (and that Palin continues to trash) exemplifies the very idea of putting social change before selfish career. Why else take a job for a fraction of what he could have made elsewhere? As for temperament, Obama is unflappable, perhaps to a fault.

Record and temperament. They might not be campaign issues, but they tell us a lot more about the future president than all the trivia that passes for news at the moment.

© 2008 Newsweek

Whatever the polls show going into Election Day, we won’t know the results until late that night. In recent years that’s always been true; but it will be even more true this time, for two reasons.

• First is that it’s hard to know how much the polls may be skewed by people saying they will vote for Obama, because in their heads they know they should; but not voting for him because, well .. . you know.

• My hope is that as people get to know Obama over the 50 days ahead, this factor, however large or small it currently is, will diminish as they increasingly come to see him as so many of us already do: the warm, wise, steady, exceptionally talented American success story – and loving dad – that he is.

• Second is that it’s hard to know just how powerful the Democratic under-the-radar grass roots effort will prove to be.The polls can’t weight heavily as “likely voters” millions who’ve never voted before, or millions of “sporadic” voters.  But this time they might turn out.  (To encourage them in your neighborhood, sign up for the Neighbor to Neighbor program.)

• We’ll just have to see.

So today I offer two items, one touching on each of these unknowables:

WHY WE MAY WIN COLORADO

There are lots of reasons, but this one – another field report from Alex, my pediatrician pal who took six weeks out to organize for Obama – puts it in very human terms:

I have been home in Los Angeles for 24 hours. I finished my Obama Organizing Fellowship, and wanted to send out one last reflection on my time working on Obama’s Campaign for Change in South Eastern Colorado.

I am going to miss the friends I made. I enjoyed my colleagues on the campaign; we worked side-by-side almost 100 hours a week.  But I also developed a few deep friendships with community members.  The Obama Campaign’s mantra is “respect, empower, include.”  At first I thought this was a little weird to hear staffers refer to this, but I now get it.  The Campaign focuses on building relationships with people in the community and empowering them.  As an organizer I spent most of my time sitting down in coffee shops, in living rooms, and on front porches talking with people. I would explain why I decided to forgo my first job after Residency and work for free for 6 weeks on The Campaign.  At the end of our “one on one,” I would do the “hard ask.”  I would explain that it’s not enough for the two of us to agree that our country needs change.  I would ask that they host a house meeting and invite everyone they know so we can recruit more volunteers.  If they didn’t want to do this, then I would invite them to attend a training session to learn to register people to vote or to help with phone calls.  I saw this as advocating for that person in the same way I advocate for my patients.  I also try to empower my patients to take control of their children’s lives.  Pediatricians practice community organizing daily.

The focus on relationship building works.  I left CO having made a few close friendships with locals. Theresa is a 55 year old Latina woman who is hard drinking, chain smoking, and has a loving family.  She is an ex-Army vet and ex-medic.  At the foot of her driveway is a sign that reads “I am Latina and I vote.”  She is Catholic and pro-life, but disagrees with Bush/ McCain’s foreign policy, economic policy, and basically the whole Republican domestic agenda.  Her house is decorated with crosses (she explained to me, “I am Mexican, after all”).  After visiting her on my last day in CO, she handed me a two-foot faux stone cross and said, “I have no idea what religion you are, but you gave me the power to become politically active and I just wanted to give you something that is special to me.”  She gave me her favorite cross.

Another volunteer I recruited became very active in The Campaign.  I spoke to her almost every day because she volunteered a few hours of work a day.  Every few days, she would tell me that on reflection, she could not believe that she had become so politically active.  I trained her to teach voter registration to her neighbors and she led regular training sessions out of her living room.  She is a special-ed teacher, in her 40’s, living in Rocky Ford, a town of a few hundred people.  But now she is also a community leader for Obama in Southern Colorado and vital to our winning in her county.

☞ Multiply this story hundreds or thousands of times in every state, and you get a sense of what might be possible.  If you’d like to inspire your neighbors to get involved, I repeat: sign up.

HOW RACISM WORKS

This letter to the editor recently appeared in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram:

What if John McCain were a former president of the Harvard Law Review? What if Barack Obama finished fifth from the bottom of his graduating class?

What if McCain were still married to the first woman he said “I do” to? What if Obama were the candidate who left his first wife after she no longer measured up to his standards?

What if Michelle Obama were a wife who not only became addicted to painkillers, but acquired them illegally through her charitable organization?

What if Cindy McCain graduated from Harvard? What if Obama were a member of the “Keating 5”?

What if McCain were a charismatic, eloquent speaker?

If these questions reflected reality, do you really believe the election numbers would be as close as they are?

This is what racism does. It covers up, rationalizes and minimizes positive qualities in one candidate and emphasizes negative qualities in another when there is a color difference.

— Kelvin LaFond, Fort Worth

☞ And to a certain extent, it likely always will.  But how much?  And how much, specifically, on November 4?   We’ll just have to see.

…(Third Estimated Tax Payment Due Today)…

THE BIG PICTURE

Kennedy lowered Eisenhower’s top federal income tax bracket from 90% to 70%.

Johnson, Nixon, Ford and Carter left it there until Ronald Reagan lowered it to 50% in his first term – still too high – and then to 28% in his second, which overshot and launched us on our disastrous National Debt spiral.

(Less than a trillion dollars when Reagan and the Republicans took charge, it will be TEN trillion by the time Bush finally leaves. That’s a nation-damaging 70%-of-GDP-and-rising, up from a much more manageable 30%.)

Clinton took the top rate back up to 39.6%, turned the deficits into surpluses by the end of his Administration, and urged that we use that surplus to ‘Save Social Security first,’ which was another way of saying, ‘shore up the nation’s finances and economic reserves.’ Empirically, the Clinton/Gore tax rates seemed about right: Almost everyone prospered, very definitely including ‘the rich’; and our finances were sound.

His successor, our very own George W. Bush, immediately went back to the old Republican let-our-kids-and-grandkids-pay-the-bill ways, lowering the top bracket on earned income modestly, but slashing the top bracket on income from wealth.

• If you were an heiress with a $40 million capital gain, he cut your tax on that gain from $8 million to $6 million, adding the $2 million difference to our National Debt.

• If you were that same heiress with $4 million a year in dividends, you saw your tax slashed from about $1.6 million to $600,000 – with, again, the extra $1 million a year added to our National Debt.

These are the tax cuts Senator McCain wants to make permanent, adding to them by letting the estate tax expire – so billionheirs inherit tax-free – and lowering the corporate income tax so that, if you are that heiress, the corporation you own stock in will be able to pay you a higher dividend.

All of which might be fine, if we could afford it. I like rich people.  By some measures – though not remotely by Senator McCain’s – I am a rich person.  (Asked to define the point at which one moves from being middle class to being rich, Senator McCain answered, “if you’re just talking about income, how about five million?”)

But we can’t afford it.  We are watching our country go down the tubes, month by month, and we need a strong, smart, inspiring young leader – who gets it – to set a new course and get us all pulling together (or as close together as a democracy ever pulls) toward the brighter days that are absolutely possible . . . but – if the last eight years of Republican stewardship have proven anything – are by no means assured.

MORE OF THE SAME – TWO 30-SECOND SPOTS

You won’t see this ad in safely-blue states, but in the toss-up states the point is being made that McBush both think the economy is strong. They just don’t get it.

And in this rather delightful one, the point is made that McCain, while not precisely the same as Bush, is pretty darn close – a point that Barack Obama has been making at practically every event this week. As in:

Now, for nineteen months of this campaign, we’ve been talking about changing the ways of Washington.  Changing the policies of George W. Bush.  Changing this country we love.  And you know what, folks?  We must be on to something – because now everyone’s talking about change.

I don’t know if you caught any of the performances in St. Paul last week, but it basically looked like every other convention they’ve had for the last few decades.  Lots of yelling.  Lots of name-calling.  Lots of saying things that aren’t true.  But this time, a whole lot of folks who’ve been running Washington for the last eight years actually got up there and told us that they are just the people to change it.  They are basically asking us to put the bull back in charge of the China shop.

Seriously.  John McCain, who’s been in Washington for twenty-six years, actually got up there on stage with what looked like his eight or ninth house in the background, and he said,  “I’ve got news for the old, do-nothing crowd in Washington: change is coming.”  Ok, Senator,   well you let us know when it gets here because after twenty-six years we haven’t seen any signs of it yet.

Then John McCain stood up and said that if he’s President, it’s over – over – for the all the special interests and lobbyists in Washington – which I guess means that his campaign manager’s out of a job.  And his campaign chairman.  And the five other corporate lobbyists who actually run his campaign.  They better watch out because John McCain’s coming for them.

He said that, quote, “We were elected to change Washington.  But we let Washington change us.”  And you know what?  He’s right.  Because today, the John McCain who once showed occasional independence from his party has racked up a record of voting with George Bush 90% of the time.

There’s a lot of words you can use to describe that kind of judgment, but change isn’t one of them.

Change isn’t four more years of tax breaks for the richest corporations in America, but not one penny of tax relief for more than 100 million middle-class families.

Change isn’t four more years of an energy policy that feeds our oil addiction with more oil and $4 billion more for the oil companies.

Change isn’t four more years of tax breaks for the very companies that ship American jobs overseas.  That’s not change.

I know something about change.  I’m a candidate who’s actually taken on the lobbyists and special interests, and I’ve won.  I did it in Illinois, when I passed reform to stop politicians from pocketing campaign contributions for their own private use.  I did in Washington, when I stood up to leaders in both parties to pass reform that stopped the lobbyist gift-giving and the free meals and the fancy jet rides subsidized by big corporations.  Washington lobbyists do not  run my campaign, they have not funded my campaign, and they will not drown out the voices of working people when I am President.  That’s what I call change.

Change is a tax code that doesn’t reward the lobbyists who wrote it, but the American workers and small businesses who deserve it.  I cut taxes for working families and I will cut taxes – cut taxes – for 95% of working families when I am President.  That’s change.

Change is creating jobs in America by giving tax breaks to the companies that actually stay here.

Change is an energy policy that will eliminate the oil we import from the Middle East in ten years by investing in wind power and solar power and the fuel-efficient cars of the future that we will build right here in America.  That’s change.

Change is a health care plan that will lower your premiums and cover you no matter what.  Change is when your pensions are protected ahead of CEO bonuses, and when we finally keep the promise of equal pay for an equal day’s work in this country, because I want my daughters to have exactly the same opportunities as your sons.

That’s the change I’m offering in this race.  That’s the change we need in this country.  And that’s the change we’ll have when I am President of the United States.

MAVERICKS?

Nun-uhn.

DINOSAURS

All actors are idiots, of course, so their views should be ridiculed (well, except Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger and the late Charlton Heston), but here is a clip from Matt Damon (who must be an idiot, because he went to Harvard) – and he asks an interesting question.

(The truth is, of course, actors are not idiots and neither is Sarah Palin. There’s lots to like about her. But as President of the United States? As the most powerful person on a planet in crisis? Just because Dan Quayle never got tapped doesn’t mean it can’t happen.  It several times has – once, after just 31 days.)

LIES

And one last video for your weekend entertainment, showcasing some of the messages John McCain has approved.

THE REAL McCAIN

Buy it for everyone you know – lest we make another colossal error and choose the wrong man.

WHAT’S IN IT FOR YOU

Click here to see whether your taxes would decrease – and by about how much – if Obama were elected.

The site then goes on to contrast the McCain and Obama tax plans.

GRABBING A BEER WITH THE PRESIDENT

Of course, there’s more to this election than your taxes, but let’s face it: for many people, that – and which candidate they just like better – is how they make up their minds.

It’s an interesting dynamic. If you were selecting a brain surgeon for your child, would you choose the one that left the most money in your pocket? The one with whom you’d most like to grab a beer?

I’m not saying being President is brain surgery, but you’re definitely entrusting your children’s lives to your choice. And it is the most important job in the world. So I tend to go for intellect and temperament over likeability.

The good news is that, first, as that tax calculator shows, Obama will likely leave more money in your pocket. And that, second – at least in my view – Obama just happens to be the more likeable candidate. He has that great unforced smile, attracts enthusiastic crowds, and, at the end of the day, just seems to be more comfortable in his own skin.

LIPSTICK

The Republicans have put lipstick on a pig and called it a plan for change. Where’s the change in making tax cuts for the wealthy permanent? Where’s the change in saying you don’t mind staying in Iraq for 100 years? Where’s the change in vowing to appoint ‘clones’ of the Bush Supreme Court Justices? That was Senator McCain’s word: clones. Clones are not about change, clones are about more of the same. And frankly, where’s the change in mocking and belittling Democrats like Al Gore (who never said he invented the Internet, but actually did more to nurture it than almost anyone) and like John Kerry with his three purple hearts? (Remember the purple-heart Band-Aids Republican Convention-goers were all supplied with to mock his service?) Where’s the change in mocking community organizers who spend their youth trying to lift people up? Or in mocking Democrats for their ties to Hollywood. Didn’t Ronald Reagan have a tie to Hollywood? Hmmm. What was it? It’s on the tip of my tongue. Oh! I know – he was an actor!

APOLOGY

They want an apology for using the word lipstick? How about an apology for what they’ve done to this country these last eight years? They’ve cut the value of the dollar nearly in half. They’ve borrowed $4 trillion from our kids to give tax cuts to billionaires. They’ve sent thousands of our kids to die invading the wrong country. They’ve diminished our standing in the world. They’ve done nothing on health care. They’ve held back stem cell research. They’ve fought against worker protections and against benefits for returning veterans. They’ve installed corporate lobbyists as regulators. (Their Interior Department, we learned on last night’s news, was literally in bed with the oil industry.) They’ve dug us into a deep, deep hole. And they want an apology? The only thing more ridiculous than their wanting an apology from us is their wanting four more years.

AND YES . . .

I do remember what day this is – and our great friend, Rob Deraney, whom we lost that day. (It was actually Rob who introduced Charles and me.) But the best way to honor the memory of those we lost is not, as former Mayor Rudy Gu911iani recently did, mock community organizers – the same mayor who insisted on putting the City’s emergency control center in the World Trade Center – but rather to help get our great country back on track.

Tomorrow: The Big Picture

RUNWAY TO CHANGE

Click here to see 26 designer Obama T-shirts and tote bags, priced to win.

THE REAL McCAIN

Buy it for everyone you know – lest we make another colossal error and choose the wrong man.

FIVE McCAIN VIDEOS

They play one after another. With more here.

Tomorrow: The Big Picture and More Boiling Water

THE PROUD BOYFRIEND (AGAIN)

Remember Dara Torres, the 41-year-old mom who won three silver medals swimming at last month’s Olympics? Click here to see her walking down the runway of Charles’s spring show this past Sunday. I love that Newsweek led the day’s fashion coverage with this – but how could they not? Dara turns out to be about the nicest, most positive, down-to-earth woman you’ll ever meet.

Dara Torres went for fashion gold on Sunday, when she modeled two looks in Charles Nolan’s utterly charming collection. Nolan’s show is always enjoyable, thanks in part to his commitment to the inclusion of “real” people along with models on the runway. This season’s batch included a holistic healer, a grandmother, a ferry boat captain, and oh yeah, a 12-time Olympic medalist.

His inspiration was sportswear of the 1920s, with fanciful — yet eminently wearable — dropped-waist dresses, beautifully tailored topcoats, and slouchy, cropped chinos, in rich shades of olive, khaki, cream and navy, with flashes of intense turquoise and neon green for good measure.

Nolan’s line is sold at Saks Fifth Avenue in Beachwood Place. One of the many things I like about his collection from season to season is its agelessness. Through impeccable cut and a light hand with fabrics, Nolan’s clothes look equally at home on models who range in age from 15 to 70-something.

Talk about Olympic caliber.

☞ Meanwhile, Charles’s Dalmatian-like nose and quick wit saved the day last night, in a totally unrelated incident (but since I’m bragging). We were walking on West 56th Street when Charles said he smelled something burning. I smelled it, too, once he mentioned it, but made no connection between smelling it and doing anything about it. This is New York. All kinds of smells. And fires are handled on the 11 o’clock news, by firefighters – how did this concern us?

Even so, Charles traced the smell to a pile of black plastic garbage bags outside a restaurant, more or less neatly placed next to a tower of cardboard recyclables, all awaiting the night’s garbage pickup. Someone had apparently tossed a still-lit cigarette butt onto the pile of garbage bags, and it had apparently melted through to some now-smoldering rags inside.

I was slow to grasp the potential problem (’12-alarm fire consumes midtown block; film at eleven’), but Charles ripped open the bag and flung himself atop the blaze – well, he carefully extracted the smoldering rag and stomped it out – and it was, in all, a complete non-event. But it was interesting . . . because as we were walking away, and I finally focused on the situation, I realized that within a few minutes, the smolder would likely have become a blaze, igniting the adjacent tower of cardboard, which in turn could have ignited the wooden scaffolding overhead, which in turn could have led to live coverage on Eyewitness News.

SOLD OUT

Apologies to those who saw yesterday’s link to this evening’s event for Barack Obama with Sarah Jessica Parker – by noon, the last of 400 tickets was gone.

THE REAL McCAIN

Buy it for everyone you know – lest we make another colossal error and choose the wrong man.