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Slipping into Socialism or Sliding into Protectionism?  Obama says SHAME ON YOU to Wall Street and really: what are they doing giving $2 billion in taxpayer dollars out to their executives in the form of bonuses for failures? A very feisty discussion follows, lots of interrupting each other, but ultimately, all three agree, it’s irresponsible. Obama’s recovery plan has taken the bi out of bi-partisan, and left a wide divide between the Dems and GOP. Did he subcontract the plan to Nancy Pelosi? Were Republicans listened to at all? They voted NO in lockstep. And Tony is upset with the language Obama used in talking about Muslim nations on his Al Arabiya TV interview – says he’s gotten the history wrong.

Arianna’s in Davos and simply couldn’t get away to join the show today. Apologies.

Here's that Slate piece Matt mentioned:

The Quitter Economy

Companies are liquidating; homeowners are mailing in the keys. Have we given up?

                The Future of Capitalism: Which Way Now?

The Future of Capitalism: Which Way Now
Here’s that in-depth philosophical program you’ve been waiting for. Tony is truly over the top in his defense of capitalism; Bob brings up the nearly-verboten name of Karl Marx… Tony quotes Lord Byron…and the fireworks begin. Matt, while defending capitalism, says it’s time to rewrite the social contract, with certain guarantees of security in terms of health care and welfare, so the rest of the economy can do what it’s supposed to.. Bob defends the middle class; Arianna invokes Ayn Rand saying she would disapprove of the Wall Street orgy. Tony and Matt duke it out for awhile, too. It’s a heady show and a hell of a topic. This one’s worth hearing twice and quoting from. We really want to hear from you on this one.

Yes, they are ready for their close ups! 500 + in the audience, a great show -- enjoy! And comment, please!

A Joe-the-Plumber Free Zone! Not a word about him in today’s show!

UPDATED POST: See last entry below for an article I just received from THE NATION magazine about Voter Fraud. I know that The Nation is a left-leaning magazine but the points made in the piece are germane to discussions about ACORN and other voter fraud conversations that have been going on here on the LRC Blog.

Whole lotta linkin' (not Abe!) goin' on, see below to connect to sites Matt mentions. Arianna’s on the road today;  it’s an all-male revue.  The final debate’s over. Can McCain make a comeback? Tony sees a glimmer of hope in the polls. Bob defends the underdog, but calls some of his followers scary. Tony takes extreme exception to this characterization and says McCain’s “been running far too clean a campaign” compared to Obama, whom he says “has ruthlessly been playing the race card.” Matt says he’s heard that Colin Powell will announce for Obama this weekend. Enough politics: how ‘bout that economy? Tony says it's easy to buy equities if you've got 80 billion dollars (like Buffett, see below). Bob tells us why he bought Google, and “did the right thing” while making a 50% profit. Bob also stresses the need to help the homeowner not the bandit bankers; Matt says we need both mortgage relief and an economic stimulus, and is writing a piece about his conversion away from fiscal conservatism, “Why I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Trillion Dollar Debt…” I’ll share it once it’s published.

PS: I am planning a tiny little contest -- the person who most closely picks both the final vote percentage and the number of electoral votes for each candidate  -- deadline Nov. 3 --  could win -- hang on now -- one of TWO Left, Right & Center sun visors! Yep, it's a collector's item, only about 100 were made, and I just found the last two that I was hoarding in my closet! I'll work out the details and tell you how to enter, stay tuned to this space.

One final note: LRC is live ONSTAGE in Santa Monica, ON AIR in SoCal and ONLINE worldwide @ KCRW.com (video and audio webcasts) on Sunday, Nov. 9th starting at 5:45 pm Pacific Time (for the behind-the-scenes stuff), 6 pm live broadcast/webcast. We'll make the show available as a special podcast or you can watch it on demand later. 

Working for the Working- Class Vote by Matt Bai 

NY Times Sunday Magazine preview

For a guy who just four years ago was running his first statewide campaign, Barack Obama has made startlingly few missteps as a presidential candidate. But the moment Obama would most like to take back now, if he could, was the one last April when, speaking to a small gathering of Bay Area contributors, he said that small-town voters in Pennsylvania and other states had grown “bitter” over lost jobs, which caused them to “cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them.” That comment, subsequently posted by a blogger for the Huffington Post, undercut one of the central premises of Obama’s campaign, an argument he first floated in his famous 2004 convention address — that he could somehow erode the tired distinctions between red states and blue ones and appeal to disaffected white men who had written off national Democrats as hopelessly elitist. Instead, in the weeks that followed, white working-class primary voters, not only in industrial states like Pennsylvania but also in rural states like Kentucky and West Virginia, rejected his candidacy by wide margins, and he staggered, wounded, toward the nomination.

 “That was my biggest boneheaded move,” Obama told me recently.  (more at the link above)

Buy American. I Am. Warren Buffett, NYTimes Op-Ed 10.18.08

THE financial world is a mess, both in the United States and abroad. Its problems, moreover, have been leaking into the general economy, and the leaks are now turning into a gusher. In the near term, unemployment will rise, business activity will falter and headlines will continue to be scary.

So ... I’ve been buying American stocks.  (more at the link above)

The Bing Blog

http://stanleybing.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/

Thursday, October 16, 2008 at 12:18 pm

I walked home last night from the office. All along the route, I passed the places I used to stop in for a drink. It’s been a month now since I had a nice, frosty martini, so cold that the ice chips float to the top and the sides of the glass bead up with condensation… or a brawny glass of Johnny Walker Black, sinuous and golden in a big bottomed glass… or even a festive balloon or two of rich, big-shouldered, blood-red Zin, oaky and spicy and redolent of cinnamon and chocolate…

I walked by these places but did not go in. I figure the time to start drinking again is when I don’t feel the inexorable pull to the cozy dimness that lies beyond their inviting portals. In other words, when I don’t need a drink is precisely the moment when I’ll feel okay having one.

THE BIG PICTURE economic blog

http://bigpicture.typepad.com/

---

Remarks by Governor Ben S. Bernanke
Before the National Economists Club, Washington, D.C.
November 21, 2002

Deflation: Making Sure "It" Doesn't Happen Here

Since World War II, inflation--the apparently inexorable rise in the prices of goods and services--has been the bane of central bankers. Economists of various stripes have argued that inflation is the inevitable result of (pick your favorite) the abandonment of metallic monetary standards, a lack of fiscal discipline, shocks to the price of oil and other commodities, struggles over the distribution of income, excessive money creation, self-confirming inflation expectations, an "inflation bias" in the policies of central banks, and still others. Despite widespread "inflation pessimism," however, during the 1980s and 1990s most industrial-country central banks were able to cage, if not entirely tame, the inflation dragon. Although a number of factors converged to make this happy outcome possible, an essential element was the heightened understanding by central bankers and, equally as important, by political leaders and the public at large of the very high costs of allowing the economy to stray too far from price stability.

With inflation rates now quite low in the United States, however, some have expressed concern that we may soon face a new problem--the danger of deflation, or falling prices. That this concern is not purely hypothetical is brought home to us whenever we read newspaper reports about Japan, where what seems to be a relatively moderate deflation--a decline in consumer prices of about 1 percent per year--has been associated with years of painfully slow growth, rising joblessness, and apparently intractable financial problems in the banking and corporate sectors. While it is difficult to sort out cause from effect, the consensus view is that deflation has been an important negative factor in the Japanese slump.

So, is deflation a threat to the economic health of the United States? Not to leave you in suspense, I believe that the chance of significant deflation in the United States in the foreseeable future is extremely small, for two principal reasons.  (read complete speech at link above)

UPDATE ADDED ON 10.21:

McCain Comes Out Swinging; Is Palin this year's Rorschach Test?

I hope today’s show will engender a good deal of discussion because we get into the question of the "liberal media" and how Republicans have been able to use that accusation so successfully for so long. Tony says it’s been extraordinary week, and an election campaign without precedent, but “we don’t know yet whether Palin will be gold dust or Kryptonite to McCain. Assuming that there is nothing completely shocking in her background, it’s clear a new star was born.” Before her selection, “maybe 80% of the base was going to vote for McCain – now it’s at least 92%...but independents will still be a battleground.”  And, says Tony, now the NRA is planning to put a lot of big buck firepower into the campaign. Bob says she’s a successful speaker but she never even got a passport till 18 months ago, and Alaska is dependent on windfall oil profits; he calls it “The People’s Republic of Alaska.” She still differs from McCain on sharing oil profit revenues with the rest of America. Arianna says the Democrats will lose if they focus on Palin’s experience or the soap opera, “As Bristol and Levi Turn,” but should focus instead on Palin’s belief in creationism, her book banning at a local library -- “she’s antediluvian but a compelling antediluvian character.” And Matt’s hoping that the Dems will focus on the issues, not personalities: “The Republicans genius is that they have been able to make elections about the personal and personalities, detached from the effect of the party’s policies on average Americans.”

 

 

The Dems’ Denver Surge; McCain’s Palin Surprise

http://www.abcnews.go.com/Politics/Conventions/story?id=5686244&page=1  (link to news and video of Palin, Obama and McCain announcing Palin)

Sorry kids, no Arianna today, and Tony had to join us by phone, or we risked not having him (he had a major health issue interfere with his life in the past month and he needed to rest before heading to the Republican Convention). By the way: a plug for our other Convention coverage, which I urge you to tune into on our live stream next week or listen to in archives (available as a podcast too): http://www.kcrw.com/news/democratic-national-convention-2008...One of the cool features is that we've sent our producers off with specialized Nokia Phones that have software allowing for video recording and INSTANT uploading via KyteTV to our website -- for behind the scenes non-televised views of the conventions. 

Okay, now on to LRC:

John McCain exploded the news agenda today with the announcement of his surprising choice of running mate, Sarah Palin, Governor of Alaska. And it nearly blew Obama’s speech and the Democratic Convention right out of the headlines. Is she, as Bob said, “Hillary’s worst nightmare – a young Phyllis Schlafley breaking through the cracks in her glass ceiling”? Or was a brilliant move to wrest those alienated blue-collar women away from Hillary and over to the Republicans? But first: the Democrats! Bill Clinton gave an impassioned speech, something he’s a natural at doing, the panelists agreed. And the Clintons did their part in endorsing  him – but did they really “credential” Obama? Tony said he’d be relieved if Obama proposed Bill Clinton’s economic policies but instead, calls his program  a throwback to a pre-Clintonian pro-liberal agenda; Tony’s worried about the implied protectionism in a global economy. Matt’s worried that if elected, the expectations Obama is setting up with his ambitious agenda cannot be paid for…And Bob says, bring on the regulation for all those banking villains who’ve bankrupted America.

L-R credits: New York Times photo; ABC composite image; Los Angeles Times photo

Russia & Georgia; The Democratic Convention -- did Obama give in to the Clintons? The Democrats & Offshore Drilling; Swiftboating Obama (while he's bodysurfing!)

No Matt or Bob today; Marc Cooper sits in and takes on the issues (quite wonderfully!) with Tony and Arianna. Most notable quotable: To Arianna's teasing suggestion, with all his good advice to Obama during this show, that Tony Blankley should consider becoming Obama's campaign manager, he says: "I have no desire to be the David Gergen of the 21st Century!"

Russia continues to occupy Georgia and doesn’t appear to be backing down; is this Georgia’s fault? Tony Blankley says Russia’s the villain but that US policy has been pushing at their borders with no strength to back it up. Russia didn’t just mobilize in 48 hours – the US was unprepared for what they did have planned. Arianna Huffington says this is just a reminder that in the campaign, national security will still be the lead issue and that Obama wasn’t bold or strong enough. Was McCain strong or just bellicose? Tony says he was out front speaking persuasively, and it took Bush four days to catch up with him. Instead of windsurfing (or was it bodysurfing?) in Hawaii, say the panelists, Obama should have been making daily press statements, in a suit, with flags waving behind him. Then the big debate about the Clintons at the Convention – no hints, you have to listen, this is a really savvy AND sassy segment! Arianna says Obama should hire Tony as his campaign strategist…but retracts the offer when Tony takes a different position regarding the Dems and offshore oil drilling. But Tony is quick to say “I have no desire to be the David Gergen of the 21^st century.” Is Nancy Pelosi backtracking on offshore drilling? Arianna says elections are a teachable moment…and the Dems should not capitulate on this issue. Tony disagrees. And although Tony objects to the word "swiftboating" as a pejorative, the Republicans are definitely aiming their political guns at
Obama.

We're still in pledge drive, podcasters -- still want your support! Pledge at KCRW.com or call us 800-600-5279 (KCRW). We will, of couse, be speaking about Russia and Georgia. (See link to Tony Blankley's column below). Robert Scheer is calling the Georgia War a NeoCon election ploy...read his TruthDig column below. We'll probably get into some of the John Edwards scuffle and talk about the Democrats, new attacks on Obama, Clintons and their role at the Convention, and I am sure we'll invoke John McCain's name at least once!! It will be an unusual show in that Matt and Bob are both gone, and Lawrence O'Donnell will NOT be subbing. Join Marc Cooper, renowned as a writer for The Nation, the former host of Radio Nation, a lefty who's gotten less liberal over the years, and knows politics like the back of his hand. He, Arianna and Tony will take on the week's topics.

Tony Blankley's column:

http://townhall.com/Common/PrintPage.aspx?g=86e7c6b6-83b0-43d9-8ea4-78c3fcf33e1f&t=c

 

Georgia War a Neocon Election Ploy?

 

 

Your early reading in advance of tomorrow's show!
Here is Tony's column this week, followed by Bob's:

Townhall.com
The Destroyer of Worlds
Copyright © 2008 Salem Web Network. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/TonyBlankley/2008/07/30/the_destroyer_of_worlds

Tony Blankley
Wednesday, July 30, 2008

In the Birla Temple, a Hindu temple in Delhi, India, there is a plaque that reads: "He who is known as Vishnu the Preserver is verily Rudra the Destroyer, and He who is Rudra is Brahma the Creator." This fact (from Arthur Herman's book "Gandhi and Churchill") came to me over the weekend as I was rereading Sen. Obama's Berlin speech. Now, let me assure my easily offended friends in the Obama camp that I am not suggesting Obama is or ever was a Hindu. I take him at his word that he is whatever he says he is. (Pass out more eggshells.) But it is precisely his words regarding his philosophy of government that I find ambiguous -- and potentially disturbing.

Secular would-be leaders of men who promise transcendence and transformational change have something in common with the promises and warnings of many religions. They claim to want to preserve what is good in their people and change what needs to be changed to make their lives and souls even better. But unlike some religions, secular leaders with transforming visions of their missions often skip over the bits about what must be destroyed in order to bring those better things to man. And that is where religions are often more honest.

For instance, in Hindu, the god Rudra, who is also known as Lord Shiva, is the third god in the Hindu trinity. He destroys worlds. Specifically, he destroys the evil passions and animal instincts that usually characterize human consciousness in order to make room for divinity to enter man's world. He is believed by many Hindus to inspire people to perform acts of courage, spiritual wisdom and devotion.

Now, I am, God knows, no expert on comparative religion. But among the more popular human attributes that many religions condemn is the human desire to possess material things. (Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's oxen or wives, etc.) And most religions remind us that we are all brothers and sisters of one humanity.

But man persists in liking to have things and organizing around groups smaller than humanity. Specifically, modern Western civilization -- and the United States, in particular -- has done rather well organizing into nations and permitting its people to be free to produce and keep most of the fruits of our labor.

Reading Obama's Berlin speech, I see dangerous suggestions that he doesn't share that happy view of American prosperity. As he said, while he came to Berlin as "a proud citizen of the United States," he also came to Berlin as "a fellow citizen of the world." Putting aside the thought that a rally in Berlin in front of a quarter-million glistening-eyed, bosom-clenching, swooning Germans is a historically awkward spot for a leader to proclaim his worldwide goals for tomorrow, his actual words are disconcerting enough -- even if they had been delivered in peaceful Switzerland.

He said: "The walls between the countries with the most and those with the least cannot stand. The walls between natives and immigrants cannot stand. These now are the walls we must tear down. We know that these walls have fallen before. After centuries of strife, the people of Europe have formed a union of promise and prosperity."

That last sentence would suggest that Obama is not terribly keen about nation-states. It suggests that he believes that nation-states have outgrown their practical and moral utility. That is why, presumably, he says that we must tear down the walls between the countries "with the most" -- that would be the United States -- and those with the least. That is why he calls for tearing down walls between "natives and (illegal?) immigrants." That is why he is for strict reductions in carbon emissions for the United States, even if it reduces our prosperity more than it does poorer countries.

That is why he is a co-sponsor of Senate Bill 2433, the Global Poverty Act, a bill Obama's own Web site proudly claims would "cut extreme global poverty in half by 2015." Now, that bill would only authorize the end of gross wealth disparities between nations; it doesn't appropriate money for it or order taxes to pay for it. So technically, that promise doesn't cost a cent. But if Obama is sincere about those goals he proudly champions -- and if he has the political power next year to raise taxes and appropriate taxpayer dollars -- we could see the beginning of vast transfers of our wealth to his "fellow citizens of the world."

Sen. Obama owes it to the public to let us know how much of our hard-earned money he, in his wisdom, believes we have a moral obligation to give away to poor people around the world -- and how much of our money that he has a moral obligation to extract from our wages forcefully, through federal taxation. He has a moral obligation to do as the Hindu god Rudra did and tell his intended subjects what of ours he will destroy to make us better people.

I hope Obama is just saying stuff that he thinks sounds good to the kids. But if Obama means what he says, we should brace for the wrath of Rudra.