Friday, September 19, 2008

A Disaster Waiting to Happen: Placing John McCain and Sarah Palin into office is utterly impossible to comprehend. The qualification of the Democratic ticket is so far and above what the Republican party can offer it extends into the stratosphere. The Republican party has shown its true face over and over again. Some part of the American public fails to see. Voting Republican, for all but a tiny few of the very wealthy, is national suicide. Here is a party who has maintained power over the last eight years, touting the glories of a free market economy but has created one of the worst financial debacles in the modern history. Now all of a sudden they are willing to suspend the cerebral high of its free market philosophy and happily take what could be a trillion bucks from us, the taxpayer, to bail out Wall Street. The blunderings of the financial sector with a nod from a Republican Washington could now, if left unregulated, lead to not only systemic recession but to a worldwide Depression as well. Keep electing those men behind the curtain. They want us to THINK they are country first but they are really themselves first and country last.

Phil Gramm, one of John McCain's dearest friends and advisers and possible Treasury Secretary if McCain should win, has been advocate and architect supreme for the deregulation of the financial industry. According to journalist David Corn in the July/August edition of Mother Jones magazine "in 1999, Gramm pushed through a historic banking deregulation bill that decimated Depression-era firewalls between commercial banks, investment banks, insurance companies, and securities firms. ... But Gramm's most cunning coup on behalf of his friends in the financial services industry was slipping in a 262-page measure called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, written with the help of financial industry lobbyists." This has been a huge factor in our current financial mess. In addition, as McCain has said many times he "doesn't really understand economics." He would probably rely on those foxes who guard our very vulnerable chicken coop to monitor our money. McCain is about people like McCain and people who would advise him are a mirror reflection of him.

Stir into this toxic brew the extraordinarily unqualified Sarah Palin one heart beat away from this elder presidential hopeful, well, the ramifications are more than catastrophic. This No. 2 woman on the ticket touts openness but she and her cronies, including her husband, refuse subpoenas, go against the law and do not testify before the Alaska legislature on a subject matter about which she heretofore said she would have no problem openly discussing. What does openly mean? It means have Washington high power Republican attorneys shut down the information before the presidential election because ethics and other violations possibly committed in Alaska by Governor Palin might prove dangerous to the McCain/Palin ticket. Why won't they testify if they have nothing to fear on a so called-by-them trivial matter. How many times do we need to see the flagrant abuse of the law? How many times can a party get away with illegalities? How many times will it pull the wool over the eyes of a public not wanting to see? There are no appropriate words in our English language to describe the disaster of the Bush years and yet more years to follow if the McCain/Palin ticket succeeds.

If the McCain/Palin incompetents are elected we will shake our heads in dismay once again and think how on earth did we get into this same mess yet another time. Now the lives at stake, though, may be our very own.

Democratic Presidential Convention--On to November

  I watched the Democratic convention last evening until my body's demand for sleep overtook me around midnight.  Having followed thin...