Category: News and Opinion

A lot of hue and cry has been raised about the format of tonight’s Vice Presidential debate, specifically about the brevity of the answers and the lack of follow-up questions.

Pish-tosh says I.

Forcing concision on both Joe Biden and Sarah Palin cuts both ways, since hearing more of Palin generally subtracts, rather than adds, to the sum total of the world's knowledge, while cutting off Joe Biden’s amount of words is often somewhat analogous to limiting the supply of rope to someone who is chronically depressed.

Most importantly, follow-up questions serve no useful purpose in explicating the thoughts of Sarah Palin, who usually has run out of things to say on the first go-round and then just endlessly repeats her buzzwords without any form or substance until one cries uncle.

http://news.aol.com/story/_a/prominent-nyers-run-ad-supporting/n20081002112009990012

NEW YORK (AP) – A group of prominent New Yorkers has taken out an ad calling on the City Council to change the term-limits law so Mayor Michael Bloomberg could run again.

NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg had been somewhat coy of late, as questions swirled about the overturning of the city’s term limits law. This uncharacteristic reluctance -on Bloomberg’s part- to verbally engage the issue lately, led many to speculate that the fix was in to overturn term limits: the will of the people, twice expressed via referendum. Well; it sure was. Today, the mayor announced that he will support a change in the law, which -for elected officials- will extend the limit from eight years to twelve.

This is the same mayor, who once deemed “disgusting”, any attempt to overturn this law without going back to the voters via referendum. This is the same mayor, who has expressed many a time and over again, that the voters of New York City have spoken on this issue: twice. Now he will seek a third term; after saying umpteen times that he will not. Didn’t he say that he was riding off into the land of philanthropy, after his term ended on December 31st, 2009? Didn’t he publicly say this at least a dozen times already? It looks like Mike Bloomberg may be evolving into another duplicitous politician inebriated by political power: right before our unbelieving eyes.

Many blame the Republicans for the failure of the distasteful, but necessary, Bush Bailout the other day in the House. And surely, those spineless weasels deserve whatever blame they got. “We would have stood tall like real men, but Nancy Pelosi made fun of our penis size and we just couldn’t get it up.”

OK fuckers, find just one Republican member of Congress who will admit that’s what caused his change of heart. Just one.

It would be easier to get Sarah Palin to admit to Katie that she wants to incarcerate doctors or ban the morning-after pill; or to get Palin to admit she doesn’t want to incarcerate doctors or ban the morning-after pill.

One would think that in this day and age, political party organizations would go out of their way to avoid the appearance of impropriety, if not actual impropriety itself.

One would be proven wrong. At least in Brooklyn.

I’ve just gotten my hands on a questionnaire sent out by the Party to prospective candidates for Brooklyn Borough President. The questionnaire includes a section on “Land Use”. The section notes that “Borough Presidents appoint representatives to local community boards and the City Planning commission, which vote on land use and zoning actions under the NYC Uniform Land Use Review Procedure.”

“John McCain listened to all sides so he could help focus the debate on finding a bipartisan resolution that is in the interest of taxpayers and homeowners. The Democratic interests stood together in opposition to an agreement that would accommodate additional taxpayer protections"—Statement by the McCain campaign.

It’s a funny kind of bi-partisanship that depends upon demonizing the people you’re purportedly committed to working together with. McCain may be extending his hand and reaching across the aisle, but the hand doing the reaching is grasping a baseball bat.

Perhaps I’d underestimated John McCain.

Yesterday, I made fun of McCain's “suspending” his campaign until Congress passed some sort of plan to address the meltdown of our markets. At the time McCain made his announcement, Congress seemed poise to pass a flawed plan which bore some resemblance to the even more flawed proposal put forward by the President.

As negotiations proceeded, leaders from both parties announced that a piece of the action was at hand. Robert Bennett, the ranking Republican on the Senate Banking Committee said “I now expect we will indeed have a plan that can pass the House, pass the Senate, be signed by the president." Calling it “one of the most productive sessions”  he'd ever seen, Bennett said “we focused on solving the problem, rather than posturing politically.”

As a kid, I remember that while growing up in Trinidad, there was a very popular song on the radio, which simply -but deeply- dealt with “economics” in a populist way. I always found it intriguing, and maybe that was because I grew up on the left side of the political spectrum. Anyway, part of it went like this: “there’s nothing surer, the rich gets rich and the poor gets poorer; in the meantime, in the springtime: we got to have fun.”  And maybe we poor and middle-class working-folk do need to have fun; if only as a way to avoid facing up to the reality that greedy rich people daily screw us over and over; as they arrogantly exploit how this capitalist economic system works in their selfish interest and benefit. Often times they illegally drill the screws in to booth. But it isn’t funny anymore; it really isn’t. And maybe it is again time in US history, for ordinary folks to stand up and say: enough. 

So I took a two week hiatus from writing any columns here: whoop dee damn doo. And now I am back; but I am still pissed. I think my editors here (Ben Smith and Gur Tsbar) are making big mistakes that could eventually lead to this site’s decline in popularity; but who am I to say? I already believe that our continuous failure to attract new and younger writers isn’t positive, as it relates to our future well being. I also believe that we need to recruit political activists from all over the state, who are willing to come up here, and write about what’s really going down in their respective areas; stuff that you won’t find on mainstream media sources/entities. We also need to recruit writers who are unafraid to speak out on salient issues of the day. Yet, I am committed to this writer’s colony, and I am hopeful that we can one day build this site, to one where serious political thinkers and activists come to express themselves and to inform others. Politics is the only game in town folks.

According to Bloomberg News, a former advisor the Chinese central bank is calling for leaders Asian nations to get together in cooperate in managing the collapse of the bankrupt United States. "Japan, China and other holders of U.S. government debt must quickly reach an agreement to prevent panic sales leading to a global financial collapse," he said. He also wondered "why are we piling up these IOUs if they may default?" China's "export-growth strategy has run its natural course" since Chinese who worked and saved may end up with nothing in return from Americans who borrowed and spent.

Just imagine the consequences of this for a country where everyone's entire value of life depends on spending 6% more than they take in every year. Today, there was a wild rumor that the Chinese government had ordered Chinese banks to stop lending to U.S. banks, to stop the losses. The next President will have to travel on his knees to places where people save money, and beg for loans, and then to oil producing countries, to beg for oil. This isn't over until we no longer have a federal budget deficit, no longer have a current accounts deficit, and are no longer able to issue no state and local bonds.