Category: Blog

Wow…when the king of the sleazy political attacks says you’ve gone to far…

CNN.com

Former Bush adviser Karl Rove said Sunday that Sen. John McCain had gone “one step too far” in some of his recent ads attacking Sen. Barack Obama.

And all we are getting from the politicos and the media covering them is the great lipstick on a pig debate? Aren’t there some more important things to talk about?

NYTimes.com

In one of the most dramatic days in Wall Street’s history, Merrill Lynch agreed to sell itself on Sunday to Bank of America for roughly $50 billion to avert a deepening financial crisis, while another prominent securities firm, Lehman Brothers, filed for bankruptcy protection and hurtled toward liquidation after it failed to find a buyer.

The humbling moves, which reshape the landscape of American finance, mark the latest chapter in a tumultuous year in which once-proud financial institutions have been brought to their knees as a result of hundreds of billions of dollars in losses because of bad mortgage finance and real estate investments.

But even as the fates of Lehman and Merrill hung in the balance, another crisis loomed as the insurance giant American International Group appeared to teeter. Staggered by losses stemming from the credit crisis, A.I.G. sought a $40 billion lifeline from the Federal Reserve, without which the company may have only days to survive.

Yahoo! News

U.S. hospitals and long-term care facilities annually flush millions of pounds of unused pharmaceuticals down the drain, pumping contaminants into America’s drinking water, according to an ongoing Associated Press investigation.
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These discarded medications are expired, spoiled, over-prescribed or unneeded. Some are simply unused because patients refuse to take them, can’t tolerate them or die with nearly full 90-day supplies of multiple prescriptions on their nightstands.

Hmmm…does this sound at all familiar? Sounds like she’d fit into the Bush White House culture just fine.

NYTimes.com

Interviews show that Ms. Palin runs an administration that puts a premium on loyalty and secrecy. The governor and her top officials sometimes use personal e-mail accounts for state business; dozens of e-mail messages obtained by The New York Times show that her staff members studied whether that could allow them to circumvent subpoenas seeking public records.

Getting gouged by high gas prices because someone’s taking advantage of Hurricane Ike? Report it!

DOE’s Gas Price Watch Hotline

ProPublica

“What the media isn’t reporting is that the project isn’t dead,” Roger Wetherell, spokesman for Alaska’s Department of Transportation, said. In a process begun this past winter, the state’s DOT is currently considering (PDF) a number of alternative solutions (five other possible bridges or three different ferry routes) to link Ketchikan and Gravina Island.

The DOT has not yet developed cost estimates for those proposals, Wetherell said, but $73 million of the approximately $223 million Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK) and Rep. Don Young (R-AK) earmarked for the bridge in 2005 has been set aside for the Gravina Access Project.

….

Peter Feldman, a spokesman for the McCain campaign, did not respond directly to questions about whether Palin was aware that the project had begun anew or that $73 million in federal funds had been set aside for it. “The fact is that once Governor Palin was elected and had an opportunity to look closely at the project, she killed it,” he said in an e-mailed statement. “She fought for Congress to kill the provision, but they sent the funds anyway. Palin fired the kill shot by not using a dime of that money on the bridge.” Gov. Palin’s state office referred questions about the project to Alaska’s DOT.

The project was killed by Congress in 2005; Palin was elected Governor in 2006. How then, as the McCain rep states below, did Governor Palin (who ran as a pro-bridge candidate) have an opportunity to look closely at the project and kill it? How can she kill something that’s been dead for a year? Oh wait, but it’s not dead yet! Some of the money was put aside to fund an access project…the rest was spent on…?

Some was spent before she took office.

Gov. Frank Murkowski (R), Palin’s predecessor, was the first to confront what to do with the federal money. He redirected $48 million of the sum to be spent on various state transportation projects. He also, three days before he left office in December 2006, used about $26 million on a contract to build an access road from the airport to the bridge.

And it does look like she’s spent the money on other worth-while projects and directed the DOT to develop a more reasonable access plan. The bottom line, however, is that her often repeated line about how she is the one responsible for cutting the extravagant bridge project is an out and out lie.

Here’s a good sum-up of the bridge time-line.

Bloomberg.com: Politics

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said the country can’t afford $3.3 trillion of tax cuts proposed by Republican presidential nominee John McCain without corresponding spending reductions.

Greenspan, a lifelong Republican and longtime friend of McCain, said today on Bloomberg Television’s “Political Capital With Al Hunt” that “I’m not in favor of financing tax cuts with borrowed money.”

NYTimes.com

In an interview Friday on the NY1 cable news channel, a McCain supporter, Senator Orrin G. Hatch of Utah, called “ridiculous” the implication that Mr. Obama’s “lipstick on a pig” comment was a reference to Ms. Palin, whom he also defended as coming under unfair attack.

“The last month, for sure,” said Don Sipple, a Republican advertising strategist, “I think the predominance of liberty taken with truth and the facts has been more McCain than Obama.”

FactCheck.org

Palin says Alaska supplies 20 percent of U.S. energy. Not true. Not even close.

The FactCheck Wire

Out on the campaign trail, John McCain has been criticizing Barack Obama for proposing cuts in defense spending. But his criticism relies on a potentially misleading quote. And we found that McCain is dinging Obama for reducing spending on a program that McCain plans to eliminate entirely.