The Hollywood Liberal

Late Late Nite FDL: End of the Line
Traveling Wilburys – End Of The Line.

What’s on your mind tonight?

ps – Jane wants ya’ll to see the The Great Bilerico Soap Drive – one of their readers is deployed in Afghanistan and her unit needs soap! 

Traveling Wilburys – End Of The Line.

What’s on your mind tonight?

ps – Jane wants ya’ll to see the The Great Bilerico Soap Drive – one of their readers is deployed in Afghanistan and her unit needs soap! 

Overnight
Rock on.

Robert Scheer: McCain Enabled Our Economic Meltdown
McCain voted for abolishing all of the significant rules put in place at the time of the Great Depression designed to prevent a repeat.

Has the U.S. Invasion of Pakistan Begun?
The Bush administration in its waning months seems intent on a slo-mo launching of a third war in the border regions of Pakistan.

RNC’s Clock On Obama’s Iraq Trip Is Wrong By Over 900 Days
In yet another piece of evidence that the GOP really needs to get its online act together, the RNC’s Web site still has their counter of how long it’s supposedly been since Barack Obama went to Iraq, going all the…

Confessore in the Times … Four Spitzer administration officials violated the state’s ethics law when they used the State Police last summer to gather travel documents they hoped would tarnish Joseph L. Bruno, then the State Senate majority leader, according…

Our economy isn’t fundamentally sound

For the last 2 1/2 weeks, John McCain and the Republicans have been riding the Governor Sarah Palin wave. They have said nothing of substance. They have put out a series of ads that can only be summarized as a pack of lies. Now, the Dow Jones industrial average falls 500 points on Monday. Republican candidate John McCain states that the fundamentals of our economy remains strong. Later on, yesterday afternoon, he decides to tweak his analysis and states that the fundamentals that he is referring to is the innovation of the American worker. Therefore, the American worker remained strong. Barack Obama and Joe Biden tied John McCain to the failed policies of the Bush administration.

This is an excellent opportunity for the Democrats to focus the attention of the American people on the economy. There is a reason that Lehman Brothers is filing for bankruptcy today. There is a reason that Merrill Lynch was bought out by Bank of America. The fundamentals of our economy are not strong. The economy over the last eight years has been built on the housing market. The economy required Americans to build and sell houses. We needed cheap labor to build houses. This is one of the reasons why politicians have talked about immigration reform but have done nothing. (John McCain originally proposed a reasonable immigration policy that he now opposes.) Then, we needed to sell everyone on the vision of a new home. We needed easy money and cheap mortgages. Say hello to subprime mortgages. This whole industry is relatively crazy where your loan money to people who would not normally qualify for loans. The only way the loans don’t default before the ink is dry is to have ever increasing home valuations. Your home value must increase in order for the loan not to implode. Mortgage companies and sell these subprime mortgages to other financial companies. These companies then bundle these bad loans and sell them in packages to other financial companies like Bear Stearns or Lehman Brothers.

This is where government regulation must step in and control the financial markets. As Americans, we’ve been sold a truckload of garbage that capitalism cures everything. It doesn’t. Controlled capitalism is great. Unfettered capitalism equals the robber barons of the 1920s, the Savings and Loan collapse of the 1980s and the subprime mortgage collapse. There’s only one candidate that is offered to rein in this unfettered capitalism. There’s only one candidate who has offered to stand up for the average American and that’s Barack Obama.

Video: Rachel Maddow hosts Bill Maher
Rachel: On the economic crisis: “Obama offers a 6-pt. plan, while McCain’s campaign says that he invented the Blackberry, and his plan is to appoint a commission to study it. Neat.” Maher: “You’re caught between a rock and a hard place with Sarah Palin, as a critic because if you describe her accurately, there’s no way you can do that and not sound condescending. Because she is not very bright about things that a person in this position should be bright about, and she’s completely not ready to take over this job.” Video at the link…

Matthews Pushes Cantor On Bush?s Handling Of The Economy: ?He?s Pulling One Of These Katrinas Again?
In a contentious segment on “Hardball” tonight, host Chris Matthews accused Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) and his conservative allies of “taking off your uniforms,” pretending they’re not Republicans, and running against President Bush. “I’m not going to let anyone get away with that kind of foolery,” Matthews said. He asked Cantor at least five times […]

In a contentious segment on “Hardball” tonight, host Chris Matthews accused Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) and his conservative allies of “taking off your uniforms,” pretending they’re not Republicans, and running against President Bush. “I’m not going to let anyone get away with that kind of foolery,” Matthews said. He asked Cantor at least five times whether he supported the job Bush is doing — and all five times Cantor refused to answer.

Noting that a “normal president” would be more visible during such a crisis, Matthews compared Bush’s response to the current financial turmoil to his handling of Hurricane Katrina:

MATTHEWS: I’m just asking you where’s the President of the United States tonight? You got Paulson out there. Where’s the President? He’s pulling one of these Katrinas again. Where is he? The country’s worried like hell when you lose this amount of value in the wealth of this country in a matter of days. You’d think the President would come on television and explain the situation to the American people. I’m just asking where he is. That’s all I’m asking.

CANTOR: Chris, you’ll have to ask — I don’t know where he is. I assume he’s in the White House.

Watch it:

Matthews was visibly frustrated, telling Cantor, “You have to take responsibility, sir, for the policies of this Administration that have gotten us into this mess. You can’t walk away and say, Oh we had nothing to do with this, can you? Say it if you want to. It’s your right.”

Matthews noted Cantor’s refusal to even mention the President: “You haven’t used the word Republican tonight, your party didn’t use it in the acceptance speech,” he said. “John McCain never said the word Republican, he never said the word Bush. You’re trying to take off your uniforms and run from the field of political battle and claim you’re not Republicans.” The GOP steered clear from both Bush and Cheney at their convention last month, mentioning Bush only once and never mentioning Cheney.

Lula’s Oil Dream
SAO PAULO, Brazil — In the United States, offshore drilling is so controversial that it has become the stuff of heated presidential campaign debate. But in Brazil, it is so popular that everyone wants a piece of it. The Tupi oil field, an underwater formation discovered in Brazil’s Santos Basin at the end of last year, contains some of the world’s largest known reserves. And it is fast eroding some myths about Brazil. The Brazilian government owns the majority of the voting shares in Petrobras, the company that discovered Tupi, but about 60 percent of the total shares are traded publicly. President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and his supporters are not happy with the idea that Petrobras should get its hands on the Tupi reserves because much of the profits would go to private investors. They want a new state-owned energy company to own and exploit those reserves.

The Book-Banners Hollywood Ignores
Have you ever heard Hollywood liberals talk about suspected Islamic jihadists the way they talk about suspected Republican “book-banners”? The September 11 terrorist attacks didn’t turn celebrity leftists into hawks. But the minute they started reading false rumors about Sarah Palin restricting unfettered access to “Daddy’s Roommate” and “Heather Has Two Mommies” in her hometown library, Tinseltown’s docile doves became militant warmongers. Actor Matt Damon, parroting left-wing Internet lies about Sarah Palin censoring novels while mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, took a defiant stand against the “terrifying possibility” of a McCain-Palin victory. “We can’t have” book-banning, he inveighed.