McCain and his supposed sidekick Palin are, in a word, unscrupulous.
With their inability to get any traction on the issues troubling American voters, they've decided to "change the subject" to smearing Obama.
Palin, whose integrity has never been questioned if only because no one can find a sign of it, is now accusing Obama of "palling around with terrorists." There's something you had better worry about, no? She's referring to one Bill Ayers, who had been a member of the radical Weather Underground during the 60's - and an education professor at the University of Illinois for two decades afterwards.
Harold Meyerson, writing in today's Washington Post, puts that despicable smear under a spotlight:
The story of Obama's interaction with Ayers is drenched in irony, since it is basically a tale of Obama being co-opted into Chicago's civic establishment. In 1995, Obama, then a young lawyer with political ambitions but as yet no office, was recruited to chair the board of a school reform organization funded and established by the Annenberg Foundation -- a group that distributes the wealth of the estate of Walter Annenberg, Richard Nixon's ambassador to Britain. It was only then that Obama met Ayers, who already was a board member and a figure in Chicago's education-policy elite. (Mayor Richard Daley, that known radical, told the Times that he had consulted Ayers on education issues for years.)
But, Meyerson notes, if we want to examine the candidates' relationship with scurrilous types who've caused great damage to America, we could always start with McCain's close pal and onetime campaign advisor, Phil Gramm:
"Gramm was always Wall Street's man in the Senate. As chairman of the Senate Banking Committee during the Clinton administration, he consistently underfunded the Securities and Exchange Commission and kept it from stopping accounting firms from auditing corporations with which they had conflicts of interest. Gramm's piece de resistance came on Dec. 15, 2000, when he slipped into an omnibus spending bill a provision called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act (CFMA), which prohibited any governmental regulation of credit default swaps, those insurance policies covering losses on securities in the event they went belly up. As the housing bubble ballooned, the face value of those swaps rose to a tidy $62 trillion. And as the housing bubble burst, those swaps became a massive pile of worthless paper, because no government agency had required the banks to set aside money to back them up.
The CFMA also prohibited government regulation of the energy-trading market, which enabled Enron to nearly bankrupt the state of California before bankrupting itself. "
As Steve Croft showed on 60 Minutes, it was those very Credit Default Swaps - deviously unregulated insurance policies - that brought down Wall Street because the outfits that sold them - remember Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, AIG - never had the resources to make good on them, never, ever.
Thanks to McCain's close pals - and he and Gramm were tight, very tight - the American taxpayers for generations to come will be paying off the trillion dollar Wall Street bailout.
If clowns as disreputable as McCain and Palin can take over America's executive branch, that country is screwed beyond redemption.
With their inability to get any traction on the issues troubling American voters, they've decided to "change the subject" to smearing Obama.
Palin, whose integrity has never been questioned if only because no one can find a sign of it, is now accusing Obama of "palling around with terrorists." There's something you had better worry about, no? She's referring to one Bill Ayers, who had been a member of the radical Weather Underground during the 60's - and an education professor at the University of Illinois for two decades afterwards.
Harold Meyerson, writing in today's Washington Post, puts that despicable smear under a spotlight:
The story of Obama's interaction with Ayers is drenched in irony, since it is basically a tale of Obama being co-opted into Chicago's civic establishment. In 1995, Obama, then a young lawyer with political ambitions but as yet no office, was recruited to chair the board of a school reform organization funded and established by the Annenberg Foundation -- a group that distributes the wealth of the estate of Walter Annenberg, Richard Nixon's ambassador to Britain. It was only then that Obama met Ayers, who already was a board member and a figure in Chicago's education-policy elite. (Mayor Richard Daley, that known radical, told the Times that he had consulted Ayers on education issues for years.)
But, Meyerson notes, if we want to examine the candidates' relationship with scurrilous types who've caused great damage to America, we could always start with McCain's close pal and onetime campaign advisor, Phil Gramm:
"Gramm was always Wall Street's man in the Senate. As chairman of the Senate Banking Committee during the Clinton administration, he consistently underfunded the Securities and Exchange Commission and kept it from stopping accounting firms from auditing corporations with which they had conflicts of interest. Gramm's piece de resistance came on Dec. 15, 2000, when he slipped into an omnibus spending bill a provision called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act (CFMA), which prohibited any governmental regulation of credit default swaps, those insurance policies covering losses on securities in the event they went belly up. As the housing bubble ballooned, the face value of those swaps rose to a tidy $62 trillion. And as the housing bubble burst, those swaps became a massive pile of worthless paper, because no government agency had required the banks to set aside money to back them up.
The CFMA also prohibited government regulation of the energy-trading market, which enabled Enron to nearly bankrupt the state of California before bankrupting itself. "
As Steve Croft showed on 60 Minutes, it was those very Credit Default Swaps - deviously unregulated insurance policies - that brought down Wall Street because the outfits that sold them - remember Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, AIG - never had the resources to make good on them, never, ever.
Thanks to McCain's close pals - and he and Gramm were tight, very tight - the American taxpayers for generations to come will be paying off the trillion dollar Wall Street bailout.
If clowns as disreputable as McCain and Palin can take over America's executive branch, that country is screwed beyond redemption.
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