The Hollywood Liberal

Loaded Questions
We dug into the internals on the latest Fox News poll, and some of the questions might surprise you (or might not, since it’s Fox). Example: Have you heard any of your friends and neighbors say there is something about…

The LiberalOasis Radio Show: Bailout Edition

David Pakman, who guest hosted this week’s edition of the LiberalOasis Radio Show, has the podcast up at this link on the Midweek Politics site. Pakman covered the financial crisis, more great Sarah Palin moments and the continued drumbeat of smears on right-wing radio against Obama.

Biden: National Guard head deserves ?seat at the table? with Joint Chiefs.
Today, Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE) spoke to the National Guard Association Conference. Noting that more than half of the veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have been National Guard members or reservists, Biden declared, “Your voice needs to be heard.” He said that Lt. Gen. Craig McKinley, slated to be the first four-star general […]

Today, Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE) spoke to the National Guard Association Conference. Noting that more than half of the veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have been National Guard members or reservists, Biden declared, “Your voice needs to be heard.” He said that Lt. Gen. Craig McKinley, slated to be the first four-star general to head the Guard, should have a seat at the table with the Joint Chiefs:

It’s time for a change. Change begins with giving the Guard a seat at the table. That table in the Pentagon where the Joint Chiefs sit. General McKinley, I not only want to see your fourth star — I want to see you sitting there with Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mullen. Your men and women are serving and dying. Your voice needs to be heard.

A similar proposal was made in 2006, but it was rejected by Donald Rumsfeld and Peter Pace, then-Secretary of Defense and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, respectively.

Palin’s Pluck and Pragmatism
It is clear that the press wants their man Barack Obama to win–and as a result, they have obscured rather than illuminated our attempt to make an objective assessment of who Sarah Palin is, how she thinks, and what she stands for. And as I have pointed out, the worst consequence of this transparent bias may turn out to be that the press has destroyed the credibility it would need to make valid criticisms of Palin. But there is enough information available to begin making our own independent assessment of Palin, using the bits and pieces we can discern through this veil of press partisanship. To do this, let’s move past irrelevant details of her biography and past the debatable elements in her record. Let’s look at what we can find out about Sarah Palin’s ideas and principles. The upshot of most of the smears targeting Palin is that she is a religious zealot. But we now know that she didn’t try to ban books at Wasilla’s public library, she didn’t try to mandate the teaching of creationism in public schools, and she does not, so far as anyone knows, actually think that dinosaurs are “lizards of Satan.” The one clear indication we have as to the degree of her religious commitment is the fact that she is opposed to abortion in all cases, making an exception only to protect the life of the mother. And we know she means it because she chose to give birth to her youngest child even though she knew from genetic testing that it would have Down Syndrome, a severe form of mental retardation.

The Great Confidence Game
WASHINGTON — It’s doubtful that former Princeton University economist Ben Bernanke and ex-Goldman Sachs CEO Hank Paulson imagined what awaited them when they took charge of the Fed and the Treasury in 2006. Since then, they have put their agencies on a wartime footing, trying to avert the financial equivalent of an army’s collapse. As in war, there have been repeated surprises. As in war, the responses have involved much improvisation — for instance, the $85 billion rescue of American International Group (AIG). But last week their hastily built defenses seemed threatened, and so Paulson proposed a radical solution of having the government buy vast amounts of distressed debt to shore up the financial system. It’s all about confidence, stupid. Every financial system depends on trust. People have to believe that the institutions they deal with will perform as expected. We are in a crisis because financial managers — the people who run banks, investment banks, hedge funds — have lost that trust. Banks recoil from lending to each other; investors retreat. The ultimate horror is a financial panic. Paulson aims to avoid that.

Late Late Nite FDL: Heart Attack And Vine
Tonight Swiss vocalist, Claudia Bettanglio, rocks the boat in Little Rock, Arkansas, with another Swiss native, Hank Shizzoe and band doing a cover of Tom Waits original, Heart Attack and Vine. Followed by sweet song, “All I Want To Be” from the first Mudphish concert.

Hank Shizzoe & Claudia Bettinaglio”Heartattack and Vine”

Mudphish – Claudia Bettanglio & Pink Pedrazzi “All I Wanna Be”

Tonight Swiss vocalist, Claudia Bettanglio, rocks the boat in Little Rock, Arkansas, with another Swiss native, Hank Shizzoe and band doing a cover of Tom Waits original, “Heart Attack and Vine”. Followed by sweet song, “All I Want To Be” from the first Mudphish concert.

What’s on your mind tonight?

John McCain Has a Bizarre History of Hiding Evidence About His Fellow POWs
McCain has worked very hard to hide from the public stunning information about American prisoners in Vietnam who, unlike him, didn’t return home.

Full Text Of Obama’s Berlin Speech
It’s after the jump. Dig in. Video and more soon. Late Update: Here’s the vid……

Loaded Questions
We dug into the internals on the latest Fox News poll, and some of the questions might surprise you (or might not, since it’s Fox). Example: Have you heard any of your friends and neighbors say there is something about…

The LiberalOasis Radio Show: Bailout Edition

David Pakman, who guest hosted this week’s edition of the LiberalOasis Radio Show, has the podcast up at this link on the Midweek Politics site. Pakman covered the financial crisis, more great Sarah Palin moments and the continued drumbeat of smears on right-wing radio against Obama.

Bush?s Legacy Of Squandering Taxpayer Money
Yesterday, President Bush announced his $700 billion plan to buy out troubled financial institutions. Demanding enormous faith in his administration’s stewardship, the plan “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,” and to hire outside firms “to […]

Yesterday, President Bush announced his $700 billion plan to buy out troubled financial institutions. Demanding enormous faith in his administration’s stewardship, the plan “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,” and to hire outside firms “to help manage its purchases.” Further, the proposal provides no oversight mechanism:

Sec. 8. Review: 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.

Bush is demanding unprecedented control over billions of dollars — with no oversight. His history of mismanaging taxpayer dollars should make Americans skeptical of his buyout plan:

IRAQ RECONSTRUCTION

–$142 million wasted on reconstruction projects that were either terminated or canceled. [Special Inspector General for Iraq, 7/28/08]

–“Significant” amount of U.S. funds for Iraq funneled to Sunni and Shiite militias. [GAO Comptroller, 3/11/08]

–$180 million payed to construction company Bechtel for projects it never finished. [Federal audit, 7/25/07]

–$5.1 billion in expenses for Iraq reconstruction charged without documentation. [Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction report, 3/19/07]

–$10 billion in spending on Iraq reconstruction was wasteful or poorly tracked. [GAO, 2/15/07]

–Halliburton overcharged the government $100 million for one day’s work in 2004. [Project on Government Oversight, 10/8/04]

KATRINA

–Millions wasted on four no-bid contracts, including paying $20 million for an unusable camp for evacuees. [Homeland Security Department Inspector General, 9/10/08]

–$2.4 billion in contracts doled out by FEMA that guaranteed profits for big companies. [Center for Public Integrity investigation, 6/25/07]

-An estimated $2 billion in fraud and waste — nearly 11 percent of the $19 billion spent by FEMA on Hurricanes Katrina and Rita as of mid-June. [New York Times tally, 6/27/06]

–“Widespread” waste and mismanagement on millions for Katrina recovery, including at least $3 million for 4,000 beds that were never used. [GAO, 3/16/06]

DEFENSE CONTRACTS

–A $50 million Air Force contract awarded to a company with close ties to senior Air Force officers, in a process “fraught with improper influence, irregular procedures, glaring conflicts of interest.” [Project on Government Oversight, 4/18/08]

–$1.7 billion in excessive fees and waste paid by the Pentagon to the Interior Department to manage federal lands. [Defense Department and Interior Department Inspectors General audit, 12/25/06]

–$1 trillion unaccounted for by the Pentagon, including 56 airplanes, 32 tanks, and 36 Javelin missile command launch-units. [GAO, 5/18/03]

Given Bush’s history of gross fiscal mismanagement — including an unprecedented number of no-bid contracts and Bush’s resistance to closing fraud loopholes or increasing oversight of contracts — why should Americans trust another $700 billion to his care? Paul Krugman writes, “Let’s not be railroaded into accepting an enormously expensive plan that doesn’t seem to address the real problem.”