“Anybody who believes that the Republicans, whoever they are, can fix the mess they created probably believes that the iceberg could have saved the Titanic,” said Hillary Clinton, campaigning Monday for Barack Obama in Florida and also amending her convention line to say, “No way, no how, no McCain, no Palin!”
But more than a few somebodies seem to believe in Republicans at the moment, judging from the RealClearPolitics average of polls showing John McCain ahead of Obama by 2.7 percent.
“The just-announced federal takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the giant mortgage lenders, was certainly the right thing to do — and it was done fairly well, too,” wrote columnist Paul Krugman. “The plan will sustain institutions that play a crucial role in the economy, while holding down taxpayer costs by more or less cleaning out the stockholders. But Sunday’s action needs to be seen in a larger context — that of the attempt by the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department to contain the fallout from the ongoing financial crisis. And that’s a fight the feds seem to be losing.”
Krugman explained that falling home prices have led to “debt deflation,” in which “prices are going up at the checkout counter, but the prices of assets, which are what matter for balance sheets, are dropping fast.” He likened the current crisis to the real estate crisis that hit Japan at the end of the 1980s and led to a decade-long economic slump.
John McCain’s pick of Sarah Palin may have endeared him to hockey moms, but it’s taken the GOP ticket out of the running in the green sweepstakes, argues New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman.
By choosing Palin, who supports drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (McCain has opposed it, although he’s now reconsidering) and doesn’t believe in human-caused global warming (McCain does), McCain “has completed his makeover from the greenest Republican to run for president to just another representative of Big Oil.”
And Friedman notes that for all of McCain’s stump talk about boosting clean renewables, he has studiously avoided supporting eight different votes to extend crucial tax credits for wind and solar.
It sounds like common sense: A candidate for elective office ought to enjoy the freedom of speech. There’s a problem, though, when the job is being a judge and the views to be stated freely are on the hottest topics of our time — including abortion, gay marriage, pornography and assisted suicide. Then common sense favors the right of citizens to a fair and impartial judge, which is compromised when an individual goes on record as a candidate on issues that he may have to handle once on the bench. The Kansas Supreme Court is weighing what kinds of questions judicial candidates ethically can answer in Kansas, in the latest round of a 2-year-old challenge brought by the Andover-based conservative group Kansas Judicial Watch. While Kansans await the court’s answer, they should question why half the counties in the state — including Sedgwick County — choose their District Court judges not via merit selection but via the ballot box, where candidates’ irrelevant ideological positions can end up mattering more than legal smarts and professional qualifications.
If Barack Obama’s former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, thinks less of the Democratic presidential candidate for his harsh remarks last spring, Wright didn’t let it show Sunday from the pulpit of a New Jersey church: “Twenty years ago, a scrawny little kid, pointed nose, big-eared, mama from Kansas, daddy from Kenya — the Lord told him, an ordinary black boy, ‘You can be a state senator and you can bring folk to the bargaining table who not only do not talk to one another, these folk don’t like one another.’ He did what the Lord said, an ordinary black boy like Mary was an ordinary little girl. Not only did he become a state senator, this black boy with an African daddy from Kenya and a white American mama from Kansas, he had the audacity to hope, so he ran for the United States Senate. And now, oh, my God, and now — whoo!”
“Anybody who believes that the Republicans, whoever they are, can fix the mess they created probably believes that the iceberg could have saved the Titanic,” said Hillary Clinton, campaigning Monday for Barack Obama in Florida and also amending her convention line to say, “No way, no how, no McCain, no Palin!”
