The Newtman cometh.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich was working aggressively behind the scenes to defeat the Wall Street rescue plan minutes before he himself released a public statement in support of the package, NBC's Andrea Mitchell reported on Tuesday.

Gingrich was whipping up votes for the opposition, Mitchell said, apparently without the knowledge of the current GOP leader, John Boehner, who was responsible for recruiting enough support from his caucus to help ensure the bill's passage. Ultimately, the GOP was only able to rally roughly a third of its members.

"Newt Gingrich," she said on MSNBC, "I am told reliably by leading Republicans who are close to him, he was whipping against this up until the last minute, when he issued that face-saving statement. Newt Gingrich was telling people in the strongest possible language that this was a terrible deal, not only that it was a terrible deal, it was a disaster, it was the end of democracy as we know, it was socialism -- and then at the last minute [he] comes out with a statement when the vote is already in place."

. . .

The rest of the set of Morning Joe had some interesting takes on the news nugget. Joe Scarborough called Gingrich's backstabbing of John Boehner "undercutting his own."

Mike Barnicle offered his own bit of reportorial insight: "Andrea, I could hug you for saying that, because I was told last night by two or they members of Congress that this was the opening salvo of Newt Gingrich's presidential campaign four years hence."

Boy, won't that be something to look forward to?

There's a little bit more here.

Another charming out-take.

Katie Couric: What happens if the goal of democracy doesn't produce the desired outcome? In Gaza, the U.S. pushed hard for elections and Hamas won.

Sarah Palin: Yeah, well especially in that region, though, we have to protect those who do seek democracy and support those who seek protections for the people who live there. What we're seeing in the last couple of days here in New York is a President of Iran, Ahmadinejad, who would come on our soil and express such disdain for one of our closest allies and friends, Israel ... and we're hearing the evil that he speaks and if hearing him doesn't allow Americans to commit more solidly to protecting the friends and allies that we need, especially there in the Mideast, then nothing will.

I guess her point is that, contra the Hamas example, democracy in the Middle East will automatically lead to nations that will stand with Israel against Iran? Maybe?

Those who cannot remember the Bush administration are condemned to repeat it.

Quick and dirty post-mortem stuff.

There's a write-up of the political breakdown behind the bailout collapse here; it doesn't state it directly, but it seems to support something I've heard elsewhere: that Boehner and Roy Blunt thought, or at least told Nancy Pelosi, that they had enough Republican votes to pull this one over the line. I suspect it's true - for all that they're blaming Nancy for her hurtful speech, it's the Republican leadership that comes off looking really bad here - and not just because their party is apparently comprised of slaves to irrational economic ideology! They seem to be incompetent, too! Democratic turnout wasn't great, but at least Pelosi delivered the numbers she promised - and, of course, she didn't preside over the deregulatory excess that led to all this mess (which isn't to say that Tip O'Neill, Jim Wright and Tom Foley are necessarily off the hook - I don't know enough legislative history here).

Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor under Clinton, thinks that the tanking Dow will add more urgency, and that some sort of legislation will pass within the week, and polling I've seen suggests that the American public has started to swing hard toward supporting a fairly major mortgage-backed securities buyout. Krugman looks ahead and wonders if Pelosi will get behind some genuinely good legislation if a second vote on a compromise package goes down in flames, but the poor man's writing like he's hung over; one doesn't see a lot of optimism there.

Pray for pleasant surprises.

Somewhere in Connecticut, another prosecutor gets her wings.

Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey on Monday appointed a federal prosecutor to continue an investigation into the dismissals of nine federal prosecutors in 2006 as an internal Justice Department inquiry concluded that political pressure drove the action against at least three of them.

The internal investigators said that the White House’s refusal to cooperate in the high-profile investigation produced significant “gaps” in the understanding of who was to blame and that they did not have enough evidence to justify recommending criminal charges in the affair. Now the task of determining if anyone should be prosecuted will fall to Nora Dannehy, the federal prosecutor in Connecticut.

The 356-page report, prepared by the department’s inspector general and its Office of Professional Responsibility, provides the fullest account to date of a scandal that dogged the Bush administration for months last year over accusations that it had politicized the federal justice system by ousting prosecutors seen as disloyal.

It provided particular detail in the dismissal of David C. Iglesias, a former New Mexico prosecutor who was let go at the prodding of Republican leaders in Washington and New Mexico who were dissatisfied with his work in investigating accusations against Democrats. Despite the denials of the Bush administration, the political pressure was “the real reason” for Mr. Iglesias’s dismissal, the report said.

The investigators acknowledged, however, that they could not answer some critical questions because the White House refused to turn over internal documents and to allow interviews with some crucial figures.

Gonzales' attorney seems confident his client will escape any more blowback - which I'd consider more of a sign of vindication if the White House weren't blocking other Justice Department personalities from even being interviewed - but it seems like Karl Rove is back in the hot water. It's badly flawed, but not quite the shameless whitewashing I'd feared, so far.

The rape kits.

According to this, I've taken the case too far. Mea culpa.

That said, rape kits aren't primarily medical; this is a law enforcement tool, as much as anything else, and billing insurance companies represents a really unhealthy approach to privatizing legitimate government business - and that's what Palin's appointee was advocating. Never mind the fact that it's all too easy to imagine women's premiums going up in a state with as much sexual assault as Alaska.

So, I'm apologetic - but not that much.

Of concern . . .

Of concern to McCain's campaign, however, is a remaining and still-undisclosed clip from Palin's interview with Couric last week that has the political world buzzing.

The Palin aide, after first noting how "infuriating" it was for CBS to purportedly leak word about the gaffe, revealed that it came in response to a question about Supreme Court decisions.

After noting Roe vs. Wade, Palin was apparently unable to discuss any major court cases.

There was no verbal fumbling with this particular question as there was with some others, the aide said, but rather silence.

Super.

I really do not look forward to the vice presidential debates. The House Republicans have exacerbated the greatest financial crisis the country's endured since FDR came into office, and there's no way Palin has the experience needed to deal with the firestorm thoughtfully; I expect she'll demonstrate a lot of aggression to cover that up, and I don't expect I'll enjoy watching it.

More.

Krugman:

I’m being asked two big questions about this thing: (1) Was it really necessary? (2) Shouldn’t Dems have tossed the whole Paulson approach out the window and done something completely different?

On (1), the answer is yes. It’s true that some parts of the real economy are doing OK even in the face of financial disruption; big companies can still sell bonds (and have lots of cash on hand), qualifying home buyers can still get Fannie-Freddie mortgages, and so on. But commercial paper, which is important to a lot of businesses, is in trouble, and I’m hearing anecdotes about reduced credit lines causing smaller businesses to pull back. Plus there’s a serious chance of a run on the hedge funds, which could make things a lot worse. With the economy already looking like it’s headed into a serious recession by any definition, the risks of doing nothing look too high.

It’s true that we might be able to stagger through with more case-by-case rescues — I think of this as the “two, three, many AIGs” strategy; in fact, we might not be at this point if Paulson hadn’t decided to make an example of Lehman. But right now it’s not even clear who to rescue, and the credit markets are freezing up as you read this (1-month t-bill at 0.04 %, TED spread at 3.5)

On (2), the call is tougher. But putting myself in Barney Frank or Nancy Pelosi’s shoes, I’d look at it this way: the Democrats could start over, with a bailout plan that is, say, centered on purchases of preferred stock and takeovers of failing firms — basically, a plan clearly focused on recapitalizing the financial sector, with nationalization where necessary. That’s what the plan should have looked like.

Maybe such a plan would have passed Congress; and maybe, just maybe Bush would have signed on; Paulson is certainly desperate for a deal.

But such a plan would have had next to no Republican votes — and the Republicans would have demagogued against it full tilt. And the Democratic leadership cannot, cannot, be seen to have sole ownership of this stuff.

So that, I think, is why it had to be done this way. I don’t like it, and I don’t like the plan, but I see the constraints under which Dodd, Frank, Pelosi, and Reid were operating.

Chaser by Clay Risen:

I think, though, that in the long run we're screwed one way or the other. The failure of the plan in the face of guys like Texan Republican Jeb Hensarling, who called the bill creeping "socialism," will permanently discredit our financial system in the world's eyes. If the U.S. government won't step in when things are really bad, how can it be expected to make the long, tedious effort to dig into the system and fix it?

If the electorate were more rational, it would start by kicking out the likes of Jeb Hensarling. Since it's not, I guess the real question has more to do with how much President Obama could do by executive order alone.

Good God.

Here's John Judis.

From TNR:

Financial crises are always the result of multiple causes. Historians and economists are still debating what caused the great crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed. But the inability of key political actors to recognize the depth of the crisis and what had to be done about it was clearly a factor. We may be seeing this fall a recurrence of the palsied debates in Washington during 1929 and 1930 that helped to lay the groundwork for a decade of global economic ruin and political extremism, culminating in world war.

Today's failure of Congress to pass a bailout bill reflected the paralysis in Washington. There is currently no leadership in Congress and certainly in the Bush administration capable of proposing a bill that could win public support and arrest the growing panic on Wall Street and overseas. First, of course, comes the role of the Bush administration. By defining the effort initially as an attempt to bail out Wall Street, the Treasury Department--with the cooperation of leading Democrats in Congress--made its failure almost inevitable.

You don't have to have a Ph.D. in history to know that even in moments of irrational exuberance, Wall Street has never been popular among Americans. That's part of America's populist legacy and it runs deep in the electorate. So it was virtually impossible for liberal proponents of the bailout like Representative Barney Frank to make the point that the bill was not aimed at rescuing Wall Street, but at preventing a financial panic that would undermine the entire system of credit on which consumer demand and business investment depend. That point simply didn't get across.

Secondly, you have among Republicans, and some Democrats, a lingering adherence to 19th century laissez faire capitalism that bars acceptance of any viable proposal for stemming the crisis. As Washington Post columnist Stephen Pearlstein wrote, the Republican plan for addressing the crisis--consisting at its heart of tax breaks to firms on income they no longer have--looked like "a parody of what Republican wing nuts might come up with." Some Republicans clearly opposed the bailout in this spirit. According to his press release, Texas Representative Louis Gohmert informed Secretary of Treasury Henry Paulson that "a socialist solution to this problem should not be an option."

Other Republicans might have banded together for more craven partisan reasons. That was suggested by statements after the vote from the Republican leadership that put the blame for the vote's failure on Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi's presentation of the issue. Said Minority Leader John Boehner, "I do believe we would have gotten there had the Speaker not made this partisan speech on the floor of the House." In curiosity, I read Pelosi's statement. It certainly lacks eloquence, but she notes that "over the past several days, we have worked with our Republican colleagues to fashion an alternative to the original plan of the Bush administration." Hmmm.

Thirdly, however, one has to look at the bill itself and wonder. Even before the vote was taken this morning, the Dow Jones average had begun to plunge. That was attributed to skepticism about the bill's passage, but more properly, it may have been due to skepticism about the bill's effect if it did pass. This morning, influential economist Nouriel Roubini, who along with Paul Krugman, was among the first to warn that the subprime mortgages and what was being done with them could undermine the financial system, wrote in his newsletter that "the current financial crisis is becoming more severe in spite of the Treasury rescue plan (or maybe because of it as this plan is totally flawed.)"

Roubini's argument, echoed by other economists, is that the Treasury plan would simply not inject enough capital into the system to permit a recovery. Roubini argues--and with good evidence of bailouts and bankruptcies that have begun in Europe--that the crisis is global and not merely confined to the United states. "When a nuclear option of a monster $700 million rescue plan is not even able to rally stock markets (as they were in free fall today), you know this is a global crisis of confidence in the financial system."

What to do next? Roubini wants mergers between tottering American firms (including Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs) and solvent foreign banks and insurance companies. Krugman argued that support for the bailout, given the leadership in Washington, was the best available alternative, but he has also advocated a more far-reaching approach--modeled upon one undertaken by the Swedes in the 1990s in response to their banking crisis--that would involve the government's, in effect, nationalizing tottering institutions by buying stock in them.

I know too little to comment on what proposals might or might not work, but it seems clear that the Democrats face a pretty stark choice: whether to continue fiddling with the Treasury plan to make it more acceptable to a score of Republicans or Democrats, or to refashion a plan of their own that is not defined as a "Wall Street bailout" and that does goes further in attempting to infuse capital into the credit system. It is a question of policy, but also of leadership--and it becomes more acute in the context of a looming change in administration.

What will the candidates do? John McCain's campaign has already blamed Barack Obama for the failure of the Democratic-sponsored bill. That's to be expected. And Obama has promised that the Democrats in Congress will get the job done. McCain clearly has nothing substantive to offer, but Obama might have to consider whether he should attempt to fill the leadership vacuum in Washington. That would be risking a presidential election that looks more and more favorable to him; but he must recognize, if he hasn't already, that the country is gravely in risk from the paralysis in Washington.

It should be added that the McCain camp has said that their candidate selflessly and single-handedly arranged the bailout package, taking no credit for it as he went because . . .

"John McCain understands that had he looked like he was going to be the key to the success, that Democrats would attack him and kill the deal," Holtz-Eakin said. "That's what you saw today. They were not going to let John McCain do the job that he was trying to do: deliver a bill that would help the American people."

Sixty percent of Democrats voted for the bill; thirty-three percent of Republicans did. There are lies, and then there are lies.

Chechnya: still making Russia look awful.

The Times has the latest on cutting edge collective punishment. Not all breakaway provinces are created equal.

A legitimate point.

Andrew Sullivan today gave McCain a nod for coming out so squarely against torture in the debate, and, yeah, he's right to do so. McCain's legislative record there isn't as clean as he'd like to pretend it is, but for a Republican it's excellent, and it really is genuinely good for the country that this particular facet of the Bush-Cheney era be repudiated often and from every side.

The strange case of Sarah Palin and the crushed caveman.

Soon after Sarah Palin was elected mayor of the foothill town of Wasilla, Alaska, she startled a local music teacher by insisting in casual conversation that men and dinosaurs coexisted on an Earth created 6,000 years ago -- about 65 million years after scientists say most dinosaurs became extinct -- the teacher said.

After conducting a college band and watching Palin deliver a commencement address to a small group of home-schooled students in June 1997, Wasilla resident Philip Munger said, he asked the young mayor about her religious beliefs.

Palin told him that "dinosaurs and humans walked the Earth at the same time," Munger said. When he asked her about prehistoric fossils and tracks dating back millions of years, Palin said "she had seen pictures of human footprints inside the tracks," recalled Munger, who teaches music at the University of Alaska in Anchorage and has regularly criticized Palin in recent years on his liberal political blog, called Progressive Alaska.

The idea of a "young Earth" -- that God created the Earth about 6,000 years ago, and dinosaurs and humans coexisted early on -- is a popular strain of creationism.

. . .

Her aides say Palin's caution at the intersection of religion and governance is a studied effort to share her beliefs without forcing them on Alaska.

"She's obviously an intensively religious person," said Bill McAllister, Palin's chief spokesman as governor. "She understands that she's the governor and not preacher in chief. Religion informs her decisions, but she is not out to impose her views on Alaska."

McAllister said that he never heard Palin make such remarks about dinosaurs and that Palin preferred not to discuss her views on evolution publicly.

"I've never had a conversation like that with her or been apprised of anything like that," McAllister said. He added that "the only bigotry that's still safe is against Christians who believe in their faith."

Well, whining about bigotry is pathetic and self-serving, but there is a point in there that's worth addressing: the greatest single problem I have with the stuff above isn't the creationism, per se - though I do have a problem with that - but with the "pictures of human fossils inside the tracks" justification. If she could demonstrate that she was actually cognizant of the real evidence that supports scientific theory and simply chooses to disregard it in favor of a cosmological scheme that she finds more personally fulfilling, that would be one thing, but instead she's either uncritically embracing or actively producing disinformation. That's not a practice I find admirable in an average citizen, and it's something I find absolutely terrifying coming from a potential president. It's a job that requires its possessor to be able to perceive reality and to address it effectively; if the last seven and a half years have done nothing else, they've shown us what happens when the executive branch instead embraces a policy of comfortable denial (with a dose of torture on the side, to be sure).

So, there's that.

In all fairness, the argument that Palin generally keeps her religion out of her politics would be a reassuring one, if we could take it at face value. Here again, though, there are questions - about efforts to get books out of the Wasilla library, about blocking government sponsorship for rape kits because of the included contraceptives, and, yeah, even about abortion. Her moral code dictates whatever it dictates, and more power to her for that, but respect for her beliefs doesn't extent to showing presumtpive deference to the policy choices she's indicated she's likely to support.

I don't think her apparent belief in creationism is the main reason to vote against her, and it's certainly not the main reason to vote against McCain, but it surely isn't a point I feel embarrassed about taking into consideration.

The incoherence in the House.

There's a bit more at McClatchy on why the House Republicans' bid for tax cuts and as-yet vaguely defined insurance wouldn't actually seem particularly well configured to, y'know, do anybody any good.

Krugman, meanwhile, seems to think the plan the House Republicans scuttled on Thursday was just about on the right side of the line of doing more good than harm. Make of that what you will.

Meanwhile, just north of the rule of law . . .

With state officials again defying legislative subpoenas in the investigation of whether Gov. Sarah Palin abused her power, the war between state lawmakers and Alaska's attorney general is escalating.The governor's chief of staff, Mike Nizich, and six other Palin aides didn't show up Friday to honor subpoenas ordering them to testify in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee. The committee chairman, Anchorage Democratic Sen. Hollis French, said they could be found in contempt when the full Legislature convenes in January, a finding that carries potential jail time.

Alaska Attorney General Talis Colberg, a Palin appointee, filed a lawsuit late Thursday asking the courts to declare the subpoenas invalid so the state employees would not be punished for ignoring them.

Colberg said his office has told the employees they had a choice to disobey the legislative subpoenas - advice that has state legislators furious.

That's from McClatchy, if you're curious.

The stories of her stretching executive power past conventional limit apparently go back at least to the renovation of her bordello-like office (her predecessor's choice of words, not mine) at the start of her career as Wasilla's mayor . . .

Flashback: She said, "I'm the mayor, I can do whatever I want until the courts tell me I can't."

. . . so one can't just blame it on the pernicious example of the Bush administration, but it certainly seems to be an outlook of the same kind. Just not quite as dramatic, so far - all she and the McCainiacs have done here is call for ignoring valid subpoenas, even going so far as to supply faux-legal pretext; it's sleazy, but Gonzales, Addington and Yoo are capable of acts far more diabolical than that in their sleep.

Natural sidebar: if you haven't caught it, there're more details out about the antics of the masters of malfeasance, over at the Atlantic. Check it:

In March 2004, White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales made a now-famous late-night visit to the hospital room of Attorney General John Ashcroft, seeking to get Ashcroft to sign a certification stating that the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program was legal. According to people familiar with statements recently made by Gonzales to federal investigators, Gonzales is now saying that George Bush personally directed him to make that hospital visit.

The hospital visit is already central to many contemporaneous historical accounts of the Bush presidency. At the time of the visit, Ashcroft had been in intensive care for six days, was heavily medicated, and was recovering from emergency surgery to remove his gall bladder. Deputy Attorney General James B. Comey has said that he believes that Gonzales and White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card, who accompanied Gonzales to Ashcroft’s hospital room, were trying to take advantage of Ashcroft’s grievously ill state—pressing him to sign the certification possibly without even comprehending what he was doing—and in the process authorize a government surveillance program which both Ashcroft and the Justice Department had concluded was of questionable legality.

Gonzales has also told Justice Department investigators that President Bush played a more central and active role than was previously known in devising a strategy to have Congress enable the continuation of the surveillance program when questions about its legality were raised by the Justice Department, as well as devising other ways to circumvent the Justice Department’s legal concerns about the program, according to people who have read Gonzales’s interviews with investigators. The White House declined to comment for this story. An attorney for Gonzales, George J. Terwilliger III, himself a former deputy attorney general, declined to comment as well.

Now, the article stresses that Gonzales has reason to exaggerate Bush's direct involvement - not least because having the president's fingerprints in evidence substantially diminishes the odds that this'll ever become a criminal matter, but if Fredo's actually on the record it matters enough to note, regardless.

People suck.

For the record, this morning's blogging was called off on account of malware.

That said, the subject heading shouldn't be taken as an incrimination of all people; said malware blocked me from pulling in your fancy-pantsy Norton and McAfee purgatives, but bulletin boards led me to freeware and freeware saved my sorry ass and the people responsible are therefore wonderful beyond all comprehension.

In fact, consider this a formal Wall plug: Malwarebytes is the single finest organization ever created by human beings and/or their elegent and glittering robot servants. So you know.

On substance . . .

Neither candidate mentioned the express will of the Iraqi people and government when it came to discussing the merits of timelines for withdrawal. I'll excuse Obama, since his goals are to all intents and purposes identical to what Maliki and the Iraqis have been demanding, but McCain? He's arguing that we should stay indefinitely and doesn't even mention the fact that it would be contrary to the official policy of the Iraqi leadership. Does he really think that staying there under those circumstances would automatically contribute to regional stability? [Of course, he also thinks that by "winning" in Iraq we've staved off increased Iranian influence, so it may just be that he doesn't pay any attention at all to Iraqi politics.]

As long as I'm picking on McCain, I'd also add that Pakistan isn't generally considered to have been a "failed state" when Musharraf tossed out Nawaz Sharif; it wasn't incredibly stable, obviously, and Sharif was certainly moving in authoritarian (and pro-Islamist) directions, but we're not talking about Afghanistan. Musharraf may've been more palatable to Western tastes in most ways, but I don't think it's fair to suggest he saved Pakistan from outright anarchy - particularly since his administrations don't seem to've done much to address the causes of long-term destabilization.

First thoughts on the debate.

First of all, it's hard to know what the impact is going to be - the way debates are covered tends to reflect how the candidates perform against prevailing expectations, rather than how they perform against each other . . .

[Not too surprising, with an electorate as polarized as this one; it's easier to be convinced that your guy is a dunce than it is that the other guy is right.]

. . . and I'm not entirely sure what the expectations were for McCain. Foreign policy is meant to be his great area of expertise, but he's been so erratic over the last several days that even I found myself giving him points for simple coherence.

That said, both men did pretty well by the usual standards. Both were relatively poised, and both were generally able to cite facts to support their theses (or were able to dodge the question at hand with a reasonable degree of assurance); McCain tried harder to set up straw men and make Obama play defense, but the latter wasn't rattled in the way Democrats often tend to be. McCain's passionate belief in the surge was surprisingly compelling, even if I'm still by no means convinced he really understands what's going on in Iraq.

If Obama was the unknown quantity in this for American audiences, if this was his introduction and his test and is framed as such, he can probably be said to have won. McCain didn't intimidate him and didn't out-argue him, and this was meant to be the elder senator's home ground.

On the other hand, yes, if twenty-four hours from now all the networks are showing is the argument over what Henry Kissinger said about diplomatic contact with Iran, then Obama's screwed.

So here's hoping that the spinning is kept within rational bounds.

Ezra on point.

I've been trying to figure out how anyone could be taking seriously the Republican Study Group's proposal to address the financial crisis by suspending the capital gains tax for two years. The Republican Study Group says it will "encourag[e] corporations to sell unwanted assets." As Justin Fox explains, this has got to be a joke. "The toxic mortgage securities clogging up bank balance sheets are worth less now than when they were acquired. Meaning that no capital gains tax would be owed on them anyway. If you repealed the tax, banks would have even less incentive to sell them because they wouldn't be able use the losses to offset capital gains elsewhere. Seriously, where do these people come up with this stuff?" For the answer to that question, you've got to turn the floor over to Paul Krugman, who says: "if a party runs on economic nonsense for 25 years, eventually many of its foot soldiers will be people who actually believe the nonsense."

Say it again: This is not a competing proposal. It is nonsense, and it is presuming the indulgence of a press corps that will not call it nonsense, because that would be biased. But though there are plenty of reasons to oppose the bailout bill, there are no reasons to suggest a two-year cut in the capital gains, and if you do suggest it, saying it will spur corporations to sell unwanted assets -- and what the hell does "unwanted" mean here, anyway? -- a technical foul should be called, and the other team should get two percentage points in the popular vote.

Thank you.

Well, this is reassuring.

The Federal Election Commission on Thursday granted Sarah Palin a four-day extension of the deadline for revealing her personal finances, allowing her to wait until the day after her debate with Democrat Joe Biden to file the required forms.

The federal financial disclosure report was initially due Monday. Now Palin has until Oct. 3, the day after her debate in St. Louis with Biden, the Democratic vice presidential nominee.

This is, of course, assuming that the debate is neither postponed nor simply called off.

I feel like I should be trying to make a party game out of Palin topics of which the McCain campaign is trying to suppress informed debate. We've already got messes with witch-hunting clerics (seriously) and Troopergate and medical records (hers and others', as it happens) and financial records - we could all have so much fun guessing what worries are hinted at next!

Man, I hope it's allegations of cannibalism. We don't get enough of those!

A snapshot from the Ukraine.

I repeat: why do people think bringing these guys into NATO will do anyone any good?

Two more vast and trunkless legs of stone stand in the desert.

Look upon Washington Mutual's works, ye mighty, and despair.

I'm almost embarrassed for him.

Even the House's Republican leader, John Boehner of Ohio, passed up a chance to praise McCain's leadership powers shortly before the two met in the Capitol at midday Thursday. Asked by reporters if McCain could help win House Republican votes for the proposed package, Boehner shrugged and said, "Who knows?"

Heh.

Asif and Condi, thinking on their feet.

Pakistani forces Thursday fired at U.S. helicopters and traded shots with U.S. troops and Afghan police on the Afghan-Pakistan border in the latest blow to cooperation between Washington and Islamabad, U.S. officials said.

Neither side reported casualties in the incident, which occurred when the helicopters crossed into the Pakistani tribal agency of North Waziristan, the Pakistan army said.

In New York, Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari said that Pakistani soldiers only fired "flares" to demarcate the mountainous border for the helicopter pilots.

"Sometimes the border in so mixed that they don't realize they have crossed the border," he told reporters as he sat down to talks with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Rice agreed that the border "is very, very unclear."

Also? I understand the sun was in everyone's eyes.

Anyway, no one seems to've been hurt, which keeps this as a metaphorical tropical storm (and a weak one, at that) rather than full-blown hurricane - but it's not the first report in the last several days of shooting on the border. Some worry is probably called for.

What happened.

One take:

When Congressional leaders and Senators John McCain and Barack Obama, the two major party presidential candidates, trooped to the White House on Thursday afternoon, most signs pointed toward a bipartisan agreement on a grand compromise that could be accepted by all sides and signed into law by the weekend. It was intended to pump billions of dollars into the financial system, restoring liquidity and keeping credit flowing to businesses and consumers.

“We’re in a serious economic crisis,” Mr. Bush told reporters as the meeting began shortly before 4 p.m. in the Cabinet Room, adding, “My hope is we can reach an agreement very shortly.”

But once the doors closed, the smooth-talking House Republican leader, John A. Boehner of Ohio, surprised many in the room by declaring that his caucus could not support the plan to allow the government to buy distressed mortgage assets from ailing financial companies.

Mr. Boehner pressed an alternative that involved a smaller role for the government, and Mr. McCain, whose support of the deal is critical if fellow Republicans are to sign on, declined to take a stand.

The talks broke up in angry recriminations, according to accounts provided by a participant and others who were briefed on the session, and were followed by dueling news conferences and interviews rife with partisan finger-pointing.

In the Roosevelt Room after the session, the Treasury secretary, Henry M. Paulson Jr., literally bent down on one knee as he pleaded with Nancy Pelosi, the House Speaker, not to “blow it up” by withdrawing her party’s support for the package over what Ms. Pelosi derided as a Republican betrayal.

“I didn’t know you were Catholic,” Ms. Pelosi said, a wry reference to Mr. Paulson’s kneeling, according to someone who observed the exchange. She went on: “It’s not me blowing this up, it’s the Republicans.”

Mr. Paulson sighed. “I know. I know.”

It was the very outcome the White House had said it intended to avoid, with partisan presidential politics appearing to trample what had been exceedingly delicate Congressional negotiations.

Senator Christopher J. Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut and chairman of the Senate banking committee, denounced the session as “a rescue plan for John McCain,” and proclaimed it a waste of precious hours that could have been spent negotiating.

But a top aide to Mr. Boehner said it was Democrats who had done the political posturing. The aide, Kevin Smith, said Republicans revolted, in part, because they were chafing at what they saw as an attempt by Democrats to jam through an agreement on the bailout early Thursday and deny Mr. McCain an opportunity to participate in the agreement.

Okay, set aside the bullshit about denying McCain an opportunity to participate in a process that he'd simply ignored for a week - there's an admission that the Republicans in the House were sticking it to the country for political gain. Fine.

"McCain declined to take a stand." Let's look more closely at that. Let's see how John McCain acted on his promise to put his country first and fly to Washington to do the right thing, oh so inconveniently threatening to force him to skip the debate he hadn't prepared for. In a separate article, the Times reports:

At the bipartisan White House meeting that Mr. McCain had called for a day earlier, he sat silently for more than 40 minutes, more observer than leader, and then offered only a vague sense of where he stood, said people in the meeting.

In subsequent television interviews, Mr. McCain suggested that he saw the bipartisan plan that came apart at the White House meeting as the proper basis for an eventual agreement, but he did not tip his hand as to whether he would give any support to the alternative put on the table by angry House Republicans, with whom he had met before going to the White House.

He said he was hopeful that a deal could be struck quickly and that he could then show up for his scheduled debate on Friday night against his Democratic rival in the presidential race, Senator Barack Obama. But there was no evidence that he was playing a major role in the frantic efforts on Capitol Hill to put a deal back together again.

David Kurtz has a little bit more:

During the late afternoon meeting at the White House (a meeting which was McCain's idea), McCain sat silently at the table until nearly the end, according to a Hill source who was briefed on the meeting. At that point, I'm told, McCain vaguely brought up the proposal being pushed by the Republican Study Committee, the group of House conservatives that is bucking the GOP leadership. But McCain didn't offer any specifics and didn't necessarily advocate for the plan, according to the Hill source.

Responding to McCain, Treasury Secretary Paulson said that the RSC proposal was unworkable, my source says, at which point McCain didn't really advocate for it or state his own position. The meeting adjourned soon after, amid confusion over where negotiations could go next.

Leadership, baby!

In all fairness, it's entirely possible that the House Republicans simply told McCain that they were going to torpedo the plan the grownups put together, and that he could either play along or look totally unable to control his own party; there are plenty of proverbs about riding tigers I could cite, were I not too pissed off for cuteness.

Whatever. If the best you can say about John McCain is that he naively stumbled into a situation he didn't fully understand and couldn't control because he thought by force of character alone he could resolve it, and that he shouldn't be assumed to have intended the stock market volatility we're no doubt gonna see on Friday, then I don't see how he deserves anything less than ostracizing. Hell, even if he believes in the House Republicans' pre-discredited insurance plan, he didn't have the wherewithal to honestly argue for it; he just sat close to Boehner, mumbled something about the alternative plan, and hoped the right-wingers would ultimately take note.

What a disgrace.

The rhetoric of Sarah Palin.

That’s why I say I, like every American I’m speaking with, we're ill about this position that we have been put in. Where it is the taxpayers looking to bail out. But ultimately, what the bailout does is help those who are concerned about the health care reform that is needed to help shore up our economy. Um, helping, oh, it’s got to be about job creation, too. Shoring up our economy, and putting it back on the right track. So health care reform and reducing taxes and reining in spending has got to accompany tax reductions, and tax relief for Americans, and trade — we have got to see trade as opportunity, not as, uh, competitive, um, scary thing, but one in five jobs created in the trade sector today. We’ve got to look at that as more opportunity. All of those things under the umbrella of job creation.

Say no more!

Never mind, maybe.

House Republicans say that Senate leaders spoke too soon when they said a deal had been reached on a Wall Street bailout package.

In addition, a key Republican lawmaker stated that Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) wants to explore new ideas, like loaning money to financial institutions or insuring the companies, rather than buying their toxic debt.

So, House Republicans are planning to scuttle the deal and hope that that'll McCain look like a leader? Nice.

The bailout, and that which follows.

House and Senate negotiators from both parties said Thursday that they had reached general agreement to move forward with the administration’s proposed $700 billion bailout of the financial system, authorizing unprecedented government intervention to prevent what President Bush warned could be a widespread economic collapse.

Emerging from a nearly three-hour meeting in the Capitol, Republicans and Democrats said the legislation would include limits on the pay packages for executives of firms that seek assistance and a mechanism for the government to take an equity stake in some firms, so taxpayers have a chance to profit if the bailout plan works.

. . .

The bill would authorize the full $700 billion requested by President Bush, lawmaker said, but that Congress was intent on disbursing the money in installments.

One plan under consideration would release $250 billion immediately, with another $100 billion available at the discretion of the president.

They also said that there would be limits on pay packages for executives whose firms seek assistance from the government and a mechanism for the government to be given an equity stake in some firms so that taxpayers have a chance to profit if the companies prosper in the months and years ahead.

On Wall Street, shares, which had opened higher, rose sharply on expectations of a rescue plan. The Dow Jones industrial average closed up 196 points.

Senator Dodd, who's been out front on this one all along, seems fairly happy with the plan; for what little it's worth, I find that extremely reassuring.

Meanwhile, McCain is still apparently claiming that the fate of the nation depends on him blowing off the debate scheduled for tomorrow night - though, to be fair, it also depends on "suspending his campaign," which seems to consist of having surrogates attack Obama on television, keeping all campaign offices open and running, airing all the day's planned advertisements, giving a political speech in New York, and doing interviews on all the networks, so maybe he's actually planning to do the debate and it's just that his take on the English language is full of really idiosyncratic implied negatives.

Just in passing, let me add that coverage his decision to cancel the debate seems to hint at real, almost irrational cockiness (not that that's a surprise anymore). From the Times:

The debate on Friday was to focus on Mr. McCain’s perceived strength, foreign policy. Mr. McCain had not planned to devote large blocks of time to debate practice as did Mr. Obama, who was holing up with a tight circle of advisers at a hotel in Clearwater, Fla., on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday to prepare. Mr. McCain had a preparatory session on Wednesday afternoon at the Morgan Library in Manhattan, but advisers said it had been interrupted by his decision, announced immediately afterward, to suspend his campaign.

Seems like kind of a complacent approach from a man who needs Joe Lieberman at his shoulder to help him tell Sunnis from Shi'ites.

The wave of pardons comes ever closer.

Senior White House officials played a central role in deliberations in the spring of 2002 about whether the Central Intelligence Agency could legally use harsh interrogation techniques while questioning an operative of Al Qaeda, Abu Zubaydah, according to newly released documents.

In meetings during that period, the officials debated specific interrogation methods that the C.I.A. had proposed to use on Qaeda operatives held at secret C.I.A. prisons overseas, the documents show. The meetings were led by Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser, and attended by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Attorney General John Ashcroft and other top administration officials.

The documents provide new details about the still-murky early months of the C.I.A.’s detention program, when the agency began using a set of harsh interrogation techniques weeks before the Justice Department issued a written legal opinion in August 2002 authorizing their use. Congressional investigators have long tried to determine exactly who authorized these techniques before the legal opinion was completed.

Cheney, unsurprisingly, was apparently also often present at these meetings. Bush probably won't need to pre-emptively expunge his criminal liabilities before leaving office, though; I'm sure David Addington has long since worked out exactly how the powers of the vice presidency necessarily include immunity from the investigative and prosecutorial powers of the executive branch.

More here.

In case you missed it, the other shoe dropped.

McCain supporter Sen. Lindsey Graham tells CNN the McCain campaign is proposing to the Presidential Debate Commission and the Obama camp that if there's no bailout deal by Friday, the first presidential debate should take the place of the VP debate, currently scheduled for next Thursday, October 2 in St. Louis.

In this scenario, the vice presidential debate between Joe Biden and Sarah Palin would be rescheduled for a date yet to be determined, and take place in Oxford, Mississippi, currently slated to be the site of the first presidential faceoff this Friday.

Huh. You'd almost think they were wary of letting her speak in public.

How very odd.

The open lack of regard for the electorate is almost refreshing!

"Governor Palin has no history of health problems," [McCain campaign spokesman Michael] Goldfarb says. "We believe that a candidate should be able to preserve some privacy in this process, and we're confident the American people will validate that judgment come election day."

So, as a matter of principle, the McCain campaign is refusing to release Palin's medical records.

It's an interesting point - it's not at all uncommon for presidential candidates to lie about their health; the twentieth century alone gave us Woodrow Wilson, who hid a history of minor strokes and then suffered a (secret) debilitating one in office, and FDR, who suffered from heart problems as well as the damage to his legs from polio, and JFK, who had Addison's Disease, and Thomas Eagleton, who'd undergone shock therapy, and Paul Tsongas, who would've died of cancer in his first term in office, had he been elected.

As far as I can tell, it was Ronald Reagan who started the tradition of actually making his records open to the public - presumably as a way to combat worries about his age - and that's more recent than I'd expected. Still, once it was introduced, it caught on; even Cheney, our secrecy czar, seems to've submitted his records to public scrutiny back in 2000. Why? Well, in practice, because it's pretty damn hard to argue that the physical fitness of a candidate to serve in office isn't something the public has a legitimate right to know. When candidates are ambivalent about the stories their records have to tell, you get obstructions, you get delays (see Biden, Joe), you even get weird, constricting preconditions (see McCain, John, and the three-hour closed room review), but this is the first time I can ever recall hearing a campaign say that the candidate's claim to privacy simply trumps the public's right to know what might be in store.

I guess we shouldn't worry. The McCain campaign knows best, right?

. . .

It's really hard to type that without laughing.

Anyway, Andrew Sullivan's sense of outrage seems to've found still another new plateau here; I don't expect the subject to go away.

And so another good man departs from Tribunal Land.

A military prosecutor involved in war crimes cases here has quit his position, citing ethical concerns about his office's failure to turn over exculpatory material to attorneys for an Afghan detainee scheduled to go to trial in December.

Army Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld, a reservist, who declined to be interviewed, filed a declaration with a military court here Wednesday, laying out his concerns about the case and procedures in the military prosecutor's office, according to defense attorneys.

"My ethical qualms about continuing to serve as a prosecutor relate primarily to the procedures for affording defense counsel discovery," wrote Vandeveld in his filing. "I am highly concerned, to the point that I believe I can no longer serve as a prosecutor at the Commissions, about the slipshod, uncertain 'procedure' for affording defense counsel discovery."

Vandeveld's departure is the latest blow to the military trials process and a prosecutor's office that has been buffeted by resignations over issues of fairness. Other officials have alleged that the leadership of the military commissions is sacrificing principles of justice in a rush to secure convictions.

Vandeveld is apparently the fourth Guantanamo prosecutor to resign in protest; it's almost mind-boggling that the Post doesn't mention that - and, indeed, that they're only running the story of his resignation on page six.

It's worth adding that the LA Times alleges that part of the background here is a campaign of "retaliation" directed against Vandeveld by senior embarrassment Brig. Gen. Thomas Hartmann (whom, you'll recall, the powers that be sorta vaguely sanctioned and/or promoted for misconduct in other Guantanamo trials). This is wretched little show is probably the greatest single open diplomatic wound the U.S. is suffering now (unless you count the Bush presidency as a whole), and so much of it could be at least partially corrected, if not erased, with simple professionalism.

Instead, the professionals are quitting.

Good news from Iraq? Really?

Apparently so!

After months of negotiation, Iraq’s Parliament passed a crucial election law on Wednesday, but only by setting aside for future debate the most divisive political issues.

The law could clear the way for provincial elections to take place in much of the country early next year. The elections are viewed by many Iraqi and American officials as crucial for the nation to heal its deep-running political and religious fissures and also to shore up the fragile security gains that have been achieved in recent months.

The question of how to settle a fierce dispute over control of the ethnically mixed and oil-rich northern city of Kirkuk, however, was given to a committee for further study. And an article in an earlier version of the law that provided a limited number of provincial council seats for Iraq’s Christians and other minorities was eliminated from the new bill, stirring outrage among the groups.

Still, the bill’s passage represents a significant achievement for a country that has more often resorted to violence than political negotiation in resolving its differences.

Again, the big issues aren't settled, but this still seems to amount to better news than we've seen in a very long time. Hell, in a likely sign of the end of days, even Marc Lynch seems upbeat!

Sigh.

It seems that today during the time Barack Obama was waiting to hear back from Sen. McCain about their planned joint statement -- and while McCain says he was meeting with key advisors and becoming increasingly concerned about the financial crisis facing the country -- he was actually holding a special meeting with Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild, the expat international financier who once supported Hillary Clinton but now is supporting McCain because she thinks Obama is "elitist".

c/o Josh Marshall.

Quoth Ezra:

The contrast here is a clear one. Obama argued that the presidential candidates should recede into the background, agree on a common position and let Congress work without the impediment. It was a bipartisan stunt meant to construct a protected space for the congressional negotiations, where they could proceed without relative freedom from the presidential contest.

McCain loudly proclaimed the need to set aside politics, focused cameras by demanding a suspension of the debates, and promised that both candidates would fully insert themselves and their entourages and their media power and their electoral interests into the negotiations. The McCain campaign has politicized the bailout debate even as it volubly denounces politics. It is astonishingly reckless. In that, it is par for the course. Whenever the polls turn, they seek comfort in chaos. They speak of the experience and seasoning needed for governance but pick Sarah Palin. They call for an end to politics amidst crucial congressional negotiations then fling the crush of the presidential campaign atop an already-delicate process. In their attempts to define themselves as above politics, they will politicize anything.

Good stuff.



ADDENDUM: As I went deeper into the weeds of Ezra's archives, I came across this post from earlier in the day that does slightly change the way I see the context of McCain's decision. Apparently the Democratic leadership in Congress, concerned about suffering demagoguery from the Republicans for whatever bailout bill ultimately gets passed, were indicating that McCain was going to have to personally sign on to whatever legislation they finally produced to ensure that it would have the stamp of bipartisanship.

Now, that's certainly not the same as saying that he can skip a debate and credibly claim he's doing it for the good of the country, but it did create the opening for him to claim that he's the indispensable man in the process. It was also a little bit cowardly - rather than being prepared to defend whatever vote they make, they wanted to be able to hide behind the presidential candidates. I'm no more impressed with McCain than I was an hour ago, but it seems to me that the anonymous "leadership" sorts that tried to game the press on this deserve some whacks on the wrist as well.

Lovely.

Obama was lynched in effigy at George Fox University, though it seems to be widely understood that the real targets of intimidation are the campus' minority scholarship students. There's a little bit more here from Adam Serwer, if you can stomach it.

So, wait, am I getting this right?

At first glance, it looks like while I was away from the computer today . . .

1) the Obama campaign got in touch with the McCain campaign and proposed issuing a joint statement outlining the provisions both candidates agree should be in the bailout package. Shortly thereafter,

2) Sarah Palin announced we were on the verge of a second Great Depression. After that,

3) the McCain people announced that their candidate was suspending his campaign (and, more importantly, calling for postponing Friday's debate) so that he could go back to Washington and address the crisis, despite the fact that he's not a member of the committee that's actually crafting the legislation.

Huh.

So I guess they've just gone nuts.

Incidentally, as of yesterday, McCain apparently hadn't actually gotten around to reading the proposed legislation. So much for urgency.

Meanwhile, in Iraq . . .

. . . the Awakening Councils are apparently getting a bit restive.

Another note from the campaign.

For the record, yesterday the McCain campaign tried to bar the press from putting reporters in a room with Sarah Palin and Hamid Karzai, apparently for fear that she'd say something damaging while indulging in small talk about parenthood. Seriously.

On another Palinian front: there's a decent update on Troopergate (from an Alaskan perspective) here, by the way.

Figures.

One of the giant mortgage companies at the heart of the credit crisis paid $15,000 a month from the end of 2005 through last month to a firm owned by Senator John McCain’s campaign manager, according to two people with direct knowledge of the arrangement.

The disclosure undercuts a remark by Mr. McCain on Sunday night that the campaign manager, Rick Davis, had had no involvement with the company for the last several years.

"Undercuts." I like that - very understated.

And how did this become relevant, you might be asking? Why are they picking on poor McCain's poor campaign manager for accepting honest work?

Mr. McCain’s campaign has been attacking Mr. Obama for ties to former officials of the mortgage giants, both of which have a long history of cultivating Democratic and Republican allies alike to fend off efforts to restrict their activities. Mr. McCain has been running a television advertisement suggesting that Mr. Obama takes advice on housing issues from Franklin D. Raines, former chief executive of Fannie Mae, a contention denied by Mr. Raines and the Obama campaign.

Actually, the definitive Obama-Raines account so far, as far as I can tell, is this . . .

So what evidence does the McCain campaign have for the supposed Obama-Raines connection? It is pretty flimsy, but it is not made up completely out of whole cloth. McCain spokesman Brian Rogers points to three items in the Washington Post in July and August. It turns out that the three items (including an editorial) all rely on the same single conversation, between Raines and a Washington Post business reporter, Anita Huslin, who wrote a profile of the discredited Fannie Mae boss that appeared on July 16. The profile reported that Raines, who retired from Fannie Mae four years ago, had "taken calls from Barack Obama's presidential campaign seeking his advice on mortgage and housing policy matters."

Since this has now become a campaign issue, I asked Huslin to provide the exact circumstances of the quote. She explained that she was chatting with Raines during the photo shoot, and asked "if he was engaged at all with the Democrats' quest for the White House. He said that he had gotten a couple of calls from the Obama campaign. I asked him about what, and he said 'oh, general housing, economy issues.' ('Not mortgage/foreclosure meltdown or Fannie-specific,' I asked, and he said 'no.')"

By Raines's own account, he took a couple of calls from someone on the Obama campaign, and they had some general discussions about economic issues. I have asked both Raines and the Obama people for more details on these calls and will let you know if I receive a reply.

. . . which seems somewhat different in kind from having a campaign manager receiving payouts from Freddie Mac until the month it was nationalized. In all fairness, it's not like he seems to have done much work for them.

The two people with direct knowledge of Freddie Mac’s post-2005 contract with Mr. Davis spoke on condition of anonymity. Four outside consultants — three Democrats and a Republican, also speaking on condition of anonymity — said the arrangement was widely known among people involved in Freddie Mac’s efforts to influence policy makers.

As president of the Homeownership Alliance, Mr. Davis received $30,000 to $35,000 a month. He, along with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, have characterized the alliance as a coalition of many housing industry and consumer groups to promote homeownership, but numerous current and former officials at both companies say the companies created and bankrolled the operation to combat efforts by competitors to rein in their business. The companies dissolved the group at the end of 2005 as part of cost-cutting in the wake of accounting scandals and, at Freddie Mac, a lobbying scandal that forced out its top Republican lobbyist.

. . .

After the Homeownership Alliance was dissolved, Mr. Davis asked to stay on a retainer, the people familiar with the deal said. Hollis McLoughlin, who was chief of staff to Richard F. Syron, Freddie Mac’s chief executive, arranged for a new contract with Davis Manafort at the reduced rate of $15,000 a month, they said.

. . .

The only thing that Freddie Mac officials could recall Mr. Davis’s doing for the company was speaking at the October 2006 pre-election forum, attended by midlevel and senior executives who contributed to Freddie PAC, the company’s political action committee.

An electronic invitation to those employees, read to The Times by a Freddie Mac official, said, “Please join us for political food for thought” with Paul Begala, a longtime Democratic consultant, “and Rick Davis, former 2000 presidential campaign manager and current adviser to Senator John McCain.” Mr. Begala, who was also a paid consultant to Freddie Mac until this month, confirmed that the event had taken place.

Why keep him on salary, then? At least in the pre-2005 period, it's a funny story:

“The value that he brought to the relationship was the closeness to Senator McCain and the possibility that Senator McCain was going to run for president again,” said Robert McCarson, a former spokesman for Fannie Mae, who said that while he worked there from 2000 to 2002, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac together paid Mr. Davis’s firm $35,000 a month.

Yep.

I should probably add that the newly appointed head of McCain's transition team headed a lobbying company that served Freddie Mac until its seizure as well.

Again, the striking thing is that - given all this - McCain tried to use Obama's paper-thin ties to Raines to discredit him, and when the details about McCain's team started coming out, they upped the ante by tarring the New York Times and daring various and sundry to conduct a deeper investigation. That's not just cynical, that's stupid.



EDIT: Sorry. Davis is apparently still collecting cash from Freddie Mac. My mistake!

Words just fail me.

A McCain administration would discourage Israeli-Syrian peace talks and refrain from actively engaging in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

That was the message delivered over the weekend by two McCain advisers -- Max Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and Richard Williamson, the Bush administration's special envoy to Sudan -- during a retreat hosted by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy at the Lansdowne Resort in rural Virginia.

One of Barack Obama's representatives -- Richard Danzig, a Clinton administration Navy secretary -- said the Democratic presidential candidate would take the opposite approach on both issues.

In an interview with the Atlantic magazine over the summer, U.S. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) insisted that in his presidency he would serve as the chief negotiator in the peace process. But at the retreat, Boot said pursuing an Israeli-Palestinian deal would not be a top priority in a McCain administration, adding that as many as 30 crises across the globe require more urgent attention.

Boot called the Bush administration’s renewed efforts to promote Israeli-Palestinian talks a mistake. He also cast Israel's talks with Syria as betraying the stake that the United States has invested in Lebanon's fragile democracy.

"John McCain is not going to betray the lawfully elected government of Lebanon," Boot said.

Okay, so, when Israel was launching military actions in Lebanon that catastrophically backfired, crippling Siniora's government and weakening Olmert's, McCain was all for it. [McCain money quote from 2006: "'I have confidence in this president (Bush) and I have confidence in his team that they will lead us through this crisis,' McCain said . . . ."] When Israel, a sovereign nation, proposes to conduct its own diplomacy, though, it's to be "discouraged?" Really?

Well, yes. And we can tell a lot from the fact that McCain is sending out Max Boot as a spokesman. Here's another goodie from 2006:

On July 30, the Jerusalem Post reported that President Bush pushed Israel to expand the war beyond Lebanon and attack Syria. Israeli officials apparently found the idea “nuts.”

This idea was not exactly secret. In support of the Israeli offensive, the office of the White House Press Secretary released a list of talking points that included reference to a Los Angeles Times op-ed by Max Boot, senior fellow for national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. The article, “It’s Time to Let the Israelis Take Off the Gloves,” urges an Israeli attack against Syria. “Israel needs to hit the Assad regime. Hard,” argues Boot. “If it does, it will be doing Washington’s dirty work.”

John McCain's foreign policy advisor, ladies and gentlemen.



EDIT: More here and here, if that's not enough Boot for you!

Looks like North Korea's off its meds again.

North Korea has barred international inspectors from its nuclear reprocessing plant and intends to begin introducing nuclear material to the plant in a week, the International Atomic Energy Agency said on Wednesday.

It's hard enough to read North Korean tea leaves under ordinary circumstances, but with the Dear Leader's condition still up in the air the latest news out of Yongbyon seems to me to represent a whole new plateau of uncertainty. Is it just the usual, strangely adolescent demand to be taken seriously (this time over American resistance to taking them off the "state sponsors of terrorism" list)? Is it a calculated attempt to reposition the nuclear diplomacy before a new American administration comes into office? Is it a symptom of an otherwise hidden power struggle between the hardliners and the insane hardliners?

I've been scanning the usual sources, and I haven't come across anyone who even claims to have a good guess.

One more time . . . the Wall Street socialism roundup!

If you're interested in the bailout showdown, read Krugman (here, here and here, for example). We don't have many reliable economists with prominent venues hereabouts; we need to treasure the few.

Ten Fernholz has some worthwhile comments over here as well, while Dana Milbank covers the sillier (i.e., Congressional) side of yesterday's doings here.

Meanwhile, Warren Buffet is trying to save the world, five billion dollars at a time.

A scandal in twenty-two words.

In other words, Bush successfully pressured Maliki to push the withdrawal date back specifically in order to aid John McCain’s presidential campaign.

Because in George Bush's America, foreign policy should always be subordinate to partisan politics.

More here and here.

The new emerging consensus . . .

. . . is that Chris Dodd's proposed intervention is vastly better than Paulson's. I'm scanning the thing now, and from the depths of my ignorance I tend to concur - as Krugman says, the equity provisions seem more flexible than the straight asset buyout of the original plan. There's a lean oversight board proposed (Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve; chairpeople from the FDIC and the SEC; and two appointments made from Congress, one for each party), and (IIRC) it would make considerably more frequent reports to Congress and the public than Paulson had envisioned. And, yes, there's at least an acknowledgement that the government should try to avert and forestall foreclosure on mortgages over which it gains control, though that presumably wouldn't do more than stanch the bleeding.

Hm. My big problem here is that I don't have a broad enough sense of the legislative and financial framework to be able to tell how much impact these measures would have, but I at least don't see anything that looks profoundly irresponsible. People who know more than I do - Krugman, DeLong, and the like - seem to be offering thumbs up, though, which I take to be a positive sign (though, as Atrios says, a Bush hissy fit could scuttle it in an instant).

As usual, I'd recommend keeping an eye on Krugman's blog for further commentary.

Thank you, Barney Frank.

Rep. Barney Frank (D., Mass.) on Monday sounded a word of caution about rushing to pass Treasury’s $700 billion bank rescue plan. In an interview on CNN, the House Financial Services Committee chairman said while he hoped they could get it passed in a week, the notion of doing “one of the most important things ever done in America in two days really doesn’t work.” Frank mentioned three areas to be addressed: he repeated comments from Friday about the need for limitations on executive compensation to put a stop to encouraging risky investments; he said there was a need for oversight in executing the plan - no two, or even six individuals should be invested with that amount of power; and he reiterated that if the government is going to step in, then individuals who are under stress because of the threat of foreclosure should get some relief.

Good start.

John McCain's foreign policy instincts: a flashback.

From 1996:

Motivated by romantic, anachronistic notions of Irish republicanism, some prominent Irish-Americans persuaded the president (over the objection of the State Department) to jump headfirst into the Northern Ireland problem, severely straining our relations with London...[through our] mistaken involvement in the Northern Ireland problem, President Clinton has deepened the risk to his credibility and further damaged relations with our British allies.

Naturally, this is being dredged up now because he seems to be misrepresenting his original position.

Is the campaign over yet? Please?

Turn off the laser light show on your way out.

Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, the last big independent investment banks on Wall Street, will transform themselves into bank holding companies subject to far greater regulation, the Federal Reserve said Sunday night, a move that fundamentally reshapes an era of high finance that defined the modern Gilded Age.

The firms requested the change themselves, even as Congress and the Bush administration rushed to pass a $700 billion rescue of financial firms. It was a blunt acknowledgment that their model of finance and investing had become too risky and that they needed the cushion of bank deposits that had kept big commercial banks like Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase relatively safe amid the recent turmoil.

It also is a turning point for the high-rolling culture of Wall Street, with its seven-figure bonuses and lavish perks for even midlevel executives. It effectively returns Wall Street to the way it was structured before Congress passed a law during the Great Depression separating investment banking from commercial banking, known as the Glass-Steagall Act.

More here.

By the way . . .

Funny story! Turns out the president and prime minister of Pakistan were nearly assassinated in Saturday's bombing!

. . .

Okay, that wasn't actually funny.

It is, however, surreal. Assuming this is the work of al-Qaeda or the Pakistani Taliban (i.e., Baitullah Mehsud's Waziri organization) - and that is what I assume - it's hard to imagine moves like this doing anything other than undermining the members of the Pakistani establishment who're actually politically on their side. I mean, maybe there's a cold calculation that killing enough of the government will bring about a coup led by a more anti-Western faction within the security services than that which Musharraf represented, but that seems like a stretch.

Nah, this looks like exactly the kind of ham-fisted thuggery that made al-Qaeda loathed in Jordan not that long ago; blowing up big chunks of civilian Islamabad is just irreconcilable cruelty (presumably born from a weird kind of hubris that followed murdering Benazir Bhutto without grave repercussion). Nobody wins.

. . .

Unless, of course, the Pakistanis end up blaming the U.S. for it. I probably shouldn't be so quick to rule that out.

Accidental terrorism.

Nearly 53,000 children in China are now known to have been made ill by milk powder contaminated with the industrial chemical melamine, officials say.

About 13,000 of the victims remain in hospital, the health ministry added. Four children have died.

More here; God help the afraid.

We won't have Thabo Mbeki to kick around anymore!

Robert Mugabe has officially outlasted him. Between his AIDS policies and his Zimbabwe policies, I'd say Mbeki has done more than his share of harm, but he's also done as much as anyone to keep South Africa relatively steady during its transition from apartheid state to a reasonably functional modern democracy, complete with rule of law and moderately healthy economy. He's following in Nelson Mandela's political path rather than Robert Mugabe's, and that was by no means a given. For all the moments of frustration he's given me, I find I rather hope that history looks upon him forgivingly.

Next up is likely to be Jacob Zuma, and he's a whole other kettle of fish. He's been strong on the Mugabe crisis, and he's been making reassuring noises to foreign investors, but his history is scarred with allegations of corruption and rape (and the occasional startling demonstration of ignorance of how HIV/AIDS works). No criminal charges ever stuck, and I don't mean to treat him as though they had, but I certainly think it's fair to worry that his ascent might signify a kind of lapse in regard for dull, technocratic professionalism in South African politics.

The other thing that apparently might come of this in the relatively near term is a split within the ANC, with Mbeki loyalists withdrawing from the party and creating their own. I make no guarantees that it'll come about smoothly (if at all), but . . . well, it's been starting to look like the ANC was planning to settle in for a surprisingly LDP-like stay in power for near perpetuity, and that's not the sort of thing that's really healthy for the principle of accountability in government. I don't know enough about South African politics to risk allowing myself to feel optimism here, but I do think a party split is - in the abstract - necessary but not sufficient to keep S.A. politically healthy in the medium term.

I have a bad feeling about this.

Congressional Democrats considering the Bush administration's emergency plan to shore up the U.S. financial system countered with their own demands yesterday, presenting draft legislation giving the government power to cut salaries of chief executives at firms that participate in the bailout and slash severance packages for their top management.

Democratic leaders have broadly embraced the administration's proposal to spend up to $700 billion to take troubled assets off the books of faltering firms and are not questioning the need to give the Treasury Department expansive authority to halt the meltdown in world markets. But by attempting to limit executive pay, they risk alienating key Republicans who object to such restrictions and delaying passage of the rescue plan, which in turn may stir renewed fear in the markets.

Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. was working last night to press House leaders to strike an agreement on the bailout bill by early this morning, according to three sources familiar with the matter. No deal with the Senate appeared close last night.

Sources familiar with Treasury's thinking said that the department is also continuing to monitor troubled financial firms and may have to intervene in the markets again this week, before Congress acts on the bailout, to address specific flash points.

Democrats sought to add oversight provisions and taxpayer protections to the proposal, which amounts to the largest government intervention in the private markets since the Great Depression. "We will not simply hand over a $700 billion blank check to Wall Street," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said in a statement.

Under the proposal drafted by House Democrats, the Treasury would be required to force faltering firms that want to sell their troubled assets to the government to "meet appropriate standards for executive compensation." Those standards would include a ban on incentives that encourage chief executives to take "inappropriate or excessive" risks, a mechanism to rescind bonuses paid for earnings that never materialize and limits on severance pay.

Although Democrats have long sought to revamp the structure of compensation on Wall Street, their current demands are focused more narrowly on those financial firms choosing to avail themselves of the bailout.

The Democratic measure also would require the Treasury to use its status as the new owner of billions of dollars in mortgage-backed assets to reduce foreclosures by forcing banks to rewrite loans for distressed homeowners and forgive a portion of their debt. And it calls for a strict regimen of oversight, including independent audits and regular reports to Congress.

I'm all for trying to keep this from turning into a federal giveaway to the kleptocracy that's been gaming this particular system, but if that's really the biggest bone of contention between the Democrats and the Republicans, then I'm very concerned that the Dems may've decided to go for a nice symbolic, populist gesture at the expense of enacting - or even trying to enact - any real, systemic reforms. At the risk of evoking Greenwald again: maybe the bailout bill itself isn't the place for that kind of thing, but I'd sure like to hear at least some discussion of what's going on here that isn't couched almost entirely on the Republicans' terms.

Glenn Greenwald sums up the plan.

It's elegantly simple. The three key provisions: (1) The Treasury Secretary is authorized to buy up to $700 billion of any mortgage-related assets (so he can just transfer that amount to any corporations in exchange for their worthless or severely crippled "assets") [Sec. 6]; (2) The ceiling on the national debt is raised to $11.3 trillion to accommodate this scheme [Sec. 10]; and (3) best of all: "Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency" [Sec. 8].

Put another way, this authorizes Hank Paulson to transfer $700 billion of taxpayer money to private industry in his sole discretion, and nobody has the right or ability to review or challenge any decision he makes.

I feel better already!

Lots more here.

Bad news for the fourth branch of government.

Cheney's push to have his office exempted from the Presidential Records Act on the grounds that, really, it's part of the legislative branch (except for when that's inconvenient) has apparently taken a hit. Alas.

Meanwhile, in Iraq . . .

Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that after months of wrangling in parliament over the enabling legislation for provincial elections, parliament has failed to find a mutually agreed-upon formula. Worse, the parliamentary debates on this issue have deepened the dispute between the Kurds and a Sunni-Shiite Arab coalition. There are fears that the sectarian civil war (between Shiites and Sunnis) will now be followed by an ethnic one, between Arabs and Kurds. The escalation of this conflict has been in significant ways impelled by the imposition of the Kurdish paramilitary, the Peshmerga, on areas outside Kurdistan proper. Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said of the Kurds 2 days ago, "It is impossible for a state to arise without a central power," adding "political participation does not mean a vet excersized by one side against another . . ." Al-Maliki's spirited defense of a strong central government angered many Kurds. Al-Hayat says that US military commanders are petrified that the Shiite-Kurdish political alliance will fall apart and Arab-Kurdish fighting lead to a deterioration of the security situation.

So says Juan Cole; if this holds up, I'd expect to see Marc Lynch chime in sooner rather than later.

The emerging consensus . . .

. . . is that the White House's Wall Street rescue plan . . .

The Bush administration on Saturday formally proposed a vast bailout of financial institutions in the United States, requesting unfettered authority for the Treasury Department to buy up to $700 billion in distressed mortgage-related assets from the private firms.

The proposal, not quite three pages long, was stunning for its stark simplicity. It would raise the national debt ceiling to $11.3 trillion. And it would place no restrictions on the administration other than requiring semiannual reports to Congress, granting the Treasury secretary unprecedented power to buy and resell mortgage debt.

. . . is shaping up to be something of a disaster; apparently, in its current form, it makes the taxpayers responsible for all the banks' toxic sludge while making no provisions to correct the practices that led the meltdown. [Hell, according to Krugman, it's structured in such a way that the government could end up paying more than market value for the assets in question, presumably offering nice little going away presents to Bush's friends in the world of Xtreme high finance.] And, of course, there's no doubt this is by design - the following comes from the WSJ (care of Josh Marshall):

House Republican staffers met with roughly 15 lobbyists Friday afternoon, whose message to lawmakers was clear: Don't load the legislation up with provisions not directly related to the crisis, or regulatory measures the industry has long opposed.

"We're opposed to adding provisions that will affect [or] undermine the deal substantively," said Scott Talbott, senior vice president of government affairs at the Financial Services Roundtable, whose members include the nation's largest banks, securities firms and insurers.

A deal killer for the group: a proposal that would grant bankruptcy judges new powers to lower the principal, interest rate or both on a mortgage as part of a bankruptcy proceeding.

Kevin Drum has a roundup of other haters (with legitimate points to be addressed) over here. The big concern (or, at least, my big concern) is that - as with the Patriot Act - Congress could get panicked and sign off on provisions we'd all come to regret; early calls for scrutiny are just good sense.

And now, grudgingly . . .

. . . I guess I should mention that Obama's been having his knuckles rapped recently over misleading ads of his own. They're not untrue to the same extent McCain's worst have been, but I think there are legitimate concerns with one or two - here's a fairly extensively argued case in point.

I disagree with a fair amount of the argument presented on the other side of that link, by the way. I always took promising to defer immigration reform until "after the borders are secure" as basically McCain's way of reassuring the Republican nativist base that he was never going to enact immigration reform, and I'm pretty sure that's how they took it, as well; I personally hope he wasn't sincere, and they no doubt hope he was, but, regardless, it strikes me as disingenuous to treat that quote as though it were made in a wholly neutral context.

As for conflating Limbaugh's opinions with McCain's - okay, the point is well taken. Still, I would point out that the difference (or, y'know, the most relevant different for our purposes here) between Rush Limbaugh and Bill Maher is that Limbaugh genuinely represents an organizational force on the right; Republicans court him because he's genuinely influential with their base. Maher - much like Jon Stewart - is a satirist, and (insofar as I can speak for the lefty community here) a reasonably well respected one, but his viewers don't call themselves "dittoheads," and they're not terribly likely to embark on weekly crusades just because he says so. McCain and Limbaugh might not like each other, but it's a mistake to assume that the latter is just a gadfly in Republican politics, or that McCain is likely to be able to disregard him and the forces he represents completely; hell, the backsliding referenced above would seem to indicate exactly the contrary.

All of that said, there is a certain stink to Obama's ads these days, and that's kind of a shame - not least because McCain's aimless and Limbaugh's odiousness would still come through in much more easily defended ad formulations. Andrew Romano has more tut-tutting here, if you're in the mood. [Though, again, I think he's giving McCain way too much leeway on his regulatory posture.] And, of course, Steve Benen has thoughts on the matter as well.

Another bad night for McCain-Palin (part two).

Meanwhile, Paul Krugman has found an instructive quote from John McCain, newly minted paladin of regulation, from the current issue of Contingencies, the American Academy of Actuaries' trade magazine. Says the candidate (or, rather, said the candidate sometime before the last week):

Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation.

How very awkward for him.

Another bad night for McCain-Palin (part one).

On Tuesday, you may recall, there was a little flurry around Sarah Palin's third justification for the firing underlying Troopergate - her story was that Walt Monegan was canned not for failing to fire her ex-brother-in-law, but rather for defying her orders when it came to combating sexual predators, and securing funding thereto. I thought at the time that there was probably "enough truth to be genuinely revealing" - because I was in a snarky mood, I tossed out the whole post mostly to impart a sense of foreboding.

As it was, though, maybe I wasn't snarky enough. It turns out there may not've been as much truth as I'd thought.

An internal government document obtained by ABC News appears to contradict Sarah Palin's most recent explanation for why she fired her public safety chief, the move which prompted the now-contested state probe into "Troopergate."

Fighting back against allegations she may have fired her then-Public Safety Commissioner, Walt Monegan, for refusing to go along with a personal vendetta, Palin on Monday argued in a legal filing that she fired Monegan because he had a "rogue mentality" and was bucking her administration's directives.

"The last straw," her lawyer argued, came when he planned a trip to Washington, D.C., to seek federal funds for an aggressive anti-sexual-violence program. The project, expected to cost from $10 million to $20 million a year for five years, would have been the first of its kind in Alaska, which leads the nation in reported forcible rape.

The McCain-Palin campaign echoed the charge in a press release it distributed Monday, concurrent with Palin's legal filing. "Mr. Monegan persisted in planning to make the unauthorized lobbying trip to D.C.," the release stated.

But the governor's staff authorized the trip, according to an internal travel document from the Department of Public Safety, released Friday in response to an open records request.

Fool me three times, shame on you! Fool me a fourth, and I'm just going to hide under my bed until November fourth comes and goes . . . .