Golden Parachutist

John McCain explains to NBC’s Meredith Viera when $40 million golden parachutes are a good thing, and when they are not.

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Alrighty Then

John McCain forgot to wear his faux populist regulator cloak last night on CBS’s 60 Minutes.

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ABC News Gets It Spectacularly Wrong

In an article on Barack Obama’s rally today in Florida, ABC News gets the date of John McCain’s article in Contingencies magazine spectacularly wrong.

ABC News writes:

Obama used McCain’s words – and the financial crisis against him – reading a quote from McCain which was published in "Contingencies" magazine last year.

"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, McCain said in the magazine in their September/.October 2007 issue.

Wrong! John McCain penned his article pushing deregulation of the health insurance market, citing his support for deregulation of the banking sector, in the September/October 2008 issue of Contingencies magazine. That is this month’s issue. The fact that McCain is urging deregulation this month in an article while proclaiming himself a pro-regulation populist on the stump is the story. And ABC News completely misses it because they can’t get basic facts right.

 

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Sarah Palin: Unplugged And Incoherent

Yesterday John McCain gave his speech on the economy in Green Bay, Wisconsin. He was introduced by Sarah Palin. She gave a brief 4 minute speech before McCain spoke.

Perhaps she was off the teleprompter. Perhaps she was simply out of her depths. The speech sounded like a 5th grader in front of a class delivering a book report on a book he hadn’t read. It was a speech made up of incomplete sentences wrapped around a few buzz words, repeated over and over again. It was clear that she had little understanding of what she was talking about. Her performance yesterday may explain why her future campaign events have been hastily cancelled. I am sure the McCain campaign does not want to risk putting her in future events where she may have to speak without a teleprompter.

I’ve transcribed the speech below, but to get the full Sarah Palin experience you really need to watch the video above. It is a frightening prospect that this candidate may be one heartbeat away from the presidency in a time of economic crisis and major foreign policy challenges.

Thank you, thank you, thank you so much.

Good morning and I thank you very much for that welcome and holy moly after last night’s event here that – nothing could beat that – that was just amazing. But we are here this morning to talk about some very important and serious news as Senator McCain explains to you our plan to stop the corruption on Wall Street and get our economy back on track. So, Paul, Jane, I appreciate that introduction, and he being a former mayor also we have a nice connection right there in what it takes in terms of being held accountable and being on the front lines of a community and the expectations that people have that you are going to actually take action, not just talk about solutions but implement solutions to the challenges facing the community. And then as Governor of course its been my job on a state level and I so look forward to working with John McCain. Hopefully we will be serving you as president and vice president and we will be able to implement the solutions to the challenges facing us in our economy. Very very grave concerns of course that we have and you’re going to hear from him good news there on our plan.

So we’ve been talking with citizens of course all over this great country and yesterday – couple of days ago – we had a town hall meeting in Michigan where we heard directly from folks who shared with us their stories of some economic woes that affect their lives. A college student who cannot afford healthcare…a young doctor, twenty six year old guy who just graduated med school and he’s left with a quarter million dollar debt. He of course is worrying about how in the world will he repay that and how these economic shifts will affect his ability to practice and to pay his loan at the same time. Uh, we heard from citizens worried about earmarks and wasteful spending and of course we all know that John McCain is the man there too to get in there and reform a corrupt earmark process and the excess of spending by Congress. So, we are hearing from Americans all across this great country with their concerns being shared with us and it is absolutely paramount that we have a leader in these next four years getting our economy back on track. And, again, not just talking about it but having the commitment to reform and take action. And that’s based on somebody’s track record – whether you can believe they are going to be the maverick, the one willing to even buck their own party if need be in order to do the right thing for the people whom they are serving and, of course, that’s John McCain.

Times are tough right now across our country. And Americans are facing kind of a elements of a perfect storm that we’ve got to make sure don’t all come together at this time. High taxes – that’s one of the elements that can result in a perfect storm that will not be good for the future of America. High gas prices. Dependence on energy sources from foreign sources. Foreign sources that don’t necessarily like America – they certainly don’t have our best interests at heart.

We’ve got too little courage in Washington. That’s another one of these elements if all put together at the same time will not be good for America. And then too much greed on Wall Street. Excess on Wall Street. And kind of that status quo politics as usual acceptance of what’s been going on Wall Street.

It was John McCain two years ago. He started warning everybody. Fannie and Freddie have got to be shored up, there have got to be changes in those organizations or you are going to see what exactly is happening today. He warned – he had that foresight. He’s got some great foresight on a whole lot of other fronts also – the war in Iraq and so many other things affecting America and our future.

I want to introduce to you my running mate, my friend, Senator John McCain. You will hear from him a sound policy plan that can be implemented and can help cure these ills that we are facing today in our economy. So, ladies and gentlemen, without further ado let me introduce to you the next president, John McCain.

 

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John McCain Indicts John McCain

[Via Paul Krugman and Kos]

Trying to bamboozle the American public into believing that he had nothing to do with Republican policies that precipitated the Wall Street meltdown, John McCain has donned the cloak of a regulator – an outsider who will march into Washington and fix the banking sector.

There is just one problem. The truth has a way of reasserting itself.

John McCain and his friend Phil "Americans are a bunch of whiners" Gramm have been leading the charge on deregulation of the banking sector for the last decade. John McCain’s campaign manager, Rick Davis, has been paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to lobby for deregulation of the banking sector. But, John McCain would have you forget all that as he bobs and weaves to keep his waning campaign afloat.

Unfortunately for John McCain, he decided to pen an article for this month’s Contingencies magazine. In the article he bragged that he would do to healthcare what he had done to banking: he would deregulate it. He wrote:

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.

It is too bad the magazine has already gone to press. I am sure the newly remade John McCain – the maverick regulator – would like to take that article back.

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