Moderator's note: I find it quite striking that the Palin-ization of the campaign sparked a blog riot here for two weeks in a row. And now that this week's episode concerned an actual ISSUE in all our lives -- i.e., the economy -- there are far fewer posts. Our blog commenters are an engaged group of citizens (we're really glad you've joined us), and they're here, alongside a very few new post-ers...but this week, far fewer new people have come on board. I wonder if this is a reflection of the bigger notion that issues don't determine elections, it's all about personalities and people's feelings about the candidates. I wonder what that portends for November 4th? By the way, I have just heard about this independently operated (math-obsessed) poll aggregating site that does mathematical analysis and weighting of all polls: I am going to visit it for the first time, and wanted to share it with you: www.fivethirtyeight.com.

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.

Sucking Up to the Bankers: A Bipartisan Lovefest

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20080729_sucking_up_to_the_bankers/

Posted on Jul 29, 2008

By Robert Scheer

This is a time to condemn the bankers, not to embrace them. They are the scoundrels who got us into the biggest economic mess since the Great Depression, lining their own pockets while destroying the life savings of those who trusted them. Yet both of our leading presidential candidates are scrambling to enlist not only the big-dollar contributions but, more frighteningly, the “expertise” of the very folks who advocated the financial industry deregulations at the heart of this meltdown.

Republican candidate John McCain even appointed as his campaign co-chairman Phil Gramm, who went from being chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, where he sponsored disastrous legislation that empowered the banking bandits, to becoming one of them at UBS Warburg. Gramm was forced to resign from McCain’s campaign only after he went public with his contempt for the financial concerns of ordinary Americans, calling them “whiners” and perpetrators of a “mental recession.”

But Gramm and the Republicans couldn’t have done it without the support of leading Democrats. The most egregious of Gramm’s legislative favors to the financiers took the form of legislation named in part after him—the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which became law only after then-Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin prevailed upon President Clinton to sign the bill. The bill’s immediate major effect was to legitimize the long-sought merger between Citibank and insurance giant Travelers. Rubin’s critical support for the bill was rewarded with an appointment, within days of its passage, to a top job at Citibank (later Citigroup) paying more than $15 million a year.

That is the same Rubin with whom Democratic candidate Barack Obama met, along with other influential advisers, on Tuesday to figure out what to do about the sorry state of our economy. But what in the world did he expect to learn from Rubin? And why did he appoint Rubin’s protégé, Jason Furman, who ran the Rubin-funded Hamilton Project, to be the Obama campaign’s economic director? Hopefully, during their encounter Tuesday, Rubin offered himself as a contrite model of everything that the candidate of change needs to change.

After all, Goldman Sachs, where Rubin spent 25 years of his business career before entering the Clinton administration, has been one of the prime corporate villains in the financial shenanigans that led to the subprime mortgage scandal. As co-chairman of the firm, surely he had knowledge of the financial hanky-panky that would prove so disastrous down the road. Indeed, as Treasury secretary, he favored an extension of the deregulation that enabled this explosion of banking avarice. Not surprisingly, the current Treasury secretary, Henry Paulson, also previously headed Goldman.

When Rubin assumed a top position at Citibank after his stint at the Treasury, he was not above influencing his former employees in the government. In one notorious instance during the fall of 2001, when Enron was going down the tubes Rubin telephoned a Treasury undersecretary and asked him to consider intervening with credit-rating agencies to hold off downgrading Enron’s ratings. When the story was leaked, some media accounts noted the possibility of a conflict of interest because Enron owed Citibank $750 million, which it could not pay if bankrupt.

Despite his skills and his vaunted position as Citibank’s chairman, Rubin was not spared the disastrous consequences of Citibank’s own wild financial manipulations, which, if anything, exceeded those of Enron. Tens of billions in bad mortgage and credit card debt placed the bank at the forefront of the current economic crisis, and so it is weird that Obama would now turn to Rubin for advice.

It’s even weirder that the presumptive Democratic nominee would pick Rubin’s man Furman as his campaign economic director at a time when cleaning up the mess left by the bankers is the highest priority. Furman hardly distinguished himself four years ago in that role in John Kerry’s failed presidential campaign, with its muffled economic message that could not be blamed on the candidate’s stiff style alone.

The bigger problem is that folks such as Rubin and Furman, perhaps best known as an economist for his bold but woefully misguided defense of the Wal-Mart business model, clearly do not feel the pain of the voters who are losing their homes.

But then again, why should Rubin, or Gramm on the Republican side, be expected to care when he has made so many millions off the suffering of those voters? Not good at a time when we need a presidential candidate who sticks it to the bankers instead of sucking up to them.

Robert Scheer is author of a new book, “The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America.”

AP photo / Jae C. Hong

Sen. Barack Obama meets with his economic advisers Monday in Washington. From left: former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, Obama, Service Employees International Union Chair Anna Burger, former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine.

A Progressive Journal of News and Opinion. Editor, Robert Scheer. Publisher, Zuade Kaufman. Copyright © 2008 Truthdig, L.L.C. All rights reserved. Web site development by Hop Studios | Hosted by NEXCESS.NET

 Obama Overseas, McCain Campaign, The Poll Truth, Mortgage Bill

Photo on the left is from LA Times front page 7/25/08. Obama appears before a crowd of 250,000 fans in Berlin.

Photo on the right:  Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. makes a campaign stop to talk with small business leaders, Thursday, July 24, 2008, at the Schmidt's Restaurant and Banquet Haus in Columbus, Ohio. At left is Dan Young, owner of Youngs Jersey Dairy. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

Obama’s obvious overseas success may be a triumph of visuals over substance; will it come back to haunt him? The panelists agree that this campaign should be a walk for a Democratic candidate, so why are the polls on McCain and Obama so close? McCain’s week has been as bad Obama’s has been good – by anyone’s standards, he and his campaign have floundered. And the mortgage bill: is it socializing the downside, a banker bailout, a necessity that even free marketers must go along with for fear of a complete US economic meltdown? **This week, we invite our bloggers to weigh in on the promised discussion of media bias **– which we promised but didn't get to during the program.

  Volunteer bloggers Andi and Marisa pulled these notable quotables from today's show -- feel free to use them in your blog but please remember to credit KCRW's Left, Right & Center:

Obama's Foreign Adventure 

Tony Blankley concluded that Obama "looked like the President of the United States" and is "dubious of McCain's ability to do the same". He added that "McCain was lucky to get as little coverage as he did this week...[because he] looked smaller and less presidential." 

Why is this Race so Close??—PLEASE ADD YOUR COMMENTS TO ANSWER THIS QUESTION!!!!!

Robert Scheer stated that “Republicans have brought us disaster, they betrayed conservatism, they’ve bankrupted our economy so there is a lot for a leftist, populist candidate to campaign on….we need to hear that voice from Obama.”

 Our allies abroad have heard Obama’s voice and are once again excited about American politics, they know we “ have an incredibly attractive candidate, this guy’s being cheered on as a rock star in Berlin, now THAT is a projection of American values!”

 Domestically speaking, Tony Blankley noted that “the more the public gets to know [Obama] the lower his numbers drop.” Blankley thinks “it’s a combination of skin color, his internationalism, his arrogance and the media coverage which says we’ve already selected a president for you” that is hindering Obama’s lead in the polls. Robert Scheer agreed with Tony Blankley’s statement that “there is a racial issue with Obama; the fact that he doesn’t have a white father.”

Mortgage Relief Bill 

Robert asks “How is this going to help people with their mortgages?” This is just a “bailout for the bankers, there has been no accountability….we’re losing control of our economy.”

A really good show today. Lawrence O’Donnell sits in for Matt Miller this week and next, everyone’s in a studio and the conversation was both substantive and filled with collegial banter! Lotta love here...well, you know what I mean...and some feisty back-and-forth, too. Don't miss all the links I posted, the notable quotables and blogger Michael's summary of Mr. Scheer's comments...continue scrolling through all of today's posts -- then join the fray!!!

Oil’s Up, Market’s Down; Iran’s Missiles; Iraq’s Timetable

Today’s show raised the issue of the Presidential candidates’ response to the tanking of the Stock Market and the announcement that Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae are in free-fall. Plus, Iran shot some missiles and shot their credibility in the foot by doctoring photos. But that doesn’t mean the threat of Israel versus Iran isn’t scary and dangerous. Plus, Iraq appears to be calling for a timetable for a US departure. Is that serious--do they really want us to go?

Notable quotables from the show by bloggers Marisa and Andi:

Tony on Iranian missiles and Israeli worries: “I've been talking to Israeli officials for years and they think 6-12 months is the drop dead time” for action.

Bob questioned Tony's statement that there was "no evidence that McCain is looking forward to a conflict between Iran and Iraq" by referencing McCain's lyrics that he sung to the tune of a Beach Boys classic, "Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran." Tony snarked back "it was a joke, even if you're on the left, you have to have a sense of humor."

Arianna says: “Obama’s making a serious mistake if he ignores the foreign policy of Iraq and targets only the economy."

“Iraqis don’t want us to leave any time soon” according to Tony. And he agrees with her that Obama missed an opportunity in reacting to Iraqi government's call for a timetable for US pullout.

Matt’s out today but he’s in the Wall Street Journal, read all about it:

Obama Doesn't Have to Run as a Liberal

By MATT MILLER

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121573713663744519.html?mod=opinion_main_commentaries

Bob referenced this piece in his comments about our economic woes and McCain’s reaction to it:

McCain Adviser Refers to ‘Nation of Whiners’

Phil Gramm's July 9th, 2008 interview with the Washington Times.

Video courtesy of YouTube and talkingpointsmemo.com

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/11/us/politics/11campaign.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

The conservative blog that caught Iran photo-shopping the images of its missile launch is Little Green Footballs. They broke the story here:

Iran's Photoshopped Missile Launch

Wed, Jul 9, 2008 at 6:13:47 pm PST

http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/30597_Irans_Photoshopped_Missile_Launch

Here's Tony's editorial this week:

The Obama Glissade 7/9/08:

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/TonyBlankley/2008/07/09/the_obama_glissade

This week's hot topic hoedown included Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac foreclosure crisis; Iran and Israel and whether the former might bomb the latter, and how the latter will deal (this vis a vis the Iranian-doctored nuclear test photo; and Israel's policies moving forward...