689 Days until Election Day

December 14, 2008

QUOTE OF THE DAY:

"That’s more than a quarter of what McCain could spend on his entire campaign.  If you look at all the swing states, it was a 3-to-1, 4-to-1, 5-to-1 advantage."

- Ken Goldstein, Director, Wisconsin Advertising Project about Obama spending more than $25 million in the final week of the campaign.

MORNING UPDATE:

SUNDAY’S TALK SHOW SCHEDULE…see the talk show schedule below.

EXCELLENT NEWS SOURCE….a friend on Twitter shared this excellent news source about "All the top political news" from major publications…links with no summaries, but a great source for more information.

RNC POLL…if you want to vote online for your favorite candidate for RNC chair, here is your chance (I know 2 who don’t have to botherJ).

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FOR THE LATEST NEWS, COMMENTARY & INFORMATION:

Check…out…our…online Articles of Interest………News…you…can…use………

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THE REST OF THE STORY:

NBC: Lt. Gov. Pat Quinn (D-IL), Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan, roundtable with Chicago Sun Times’s Mary Mitchell and NBC’s Chuck Todd, economic discussion with Gov. Jennifer Granholm (D-MI), former Gov. Mitt Romney (R-MA), former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, Wal-Mart President & CEO Lee Scott, and Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

ABC: Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), roundtable with PBS’s Gwen Ifill, New York Times’s Paul Krugman, Wall Street Journal’s Gerald Seib, and ABC’s George Will.

CBS: Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN), Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI), Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH), Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan, Georgetown University’s Michael Eric Dyson.

FOX: Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN), Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI), Illinois House Republican leader Tom Cross, Judge Abner Mikva, Special Assistant Attorney General on the Blagojevich case, and roundtable with the Fox News All Stars with Fox’s Brit Hume, NPR’s Mara Liasson, NPR’s Juan Williams and the Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol.

CNN: Sen. John Ensign (R-NV), Sen. Bob Casey (D-PA), UAW President Ron Gettelfinger, Clinton economic adviser Gene Sperling and WSJ columnist Stephen Moore, strategy session with CNN’s James Carville, Ed Rollins, and David Gergen, political panel with CNN’s John King, Dana Bash, and Bill Schneider.

TODAY’S TOP STORIES

The following stories and more are available at my Articles of Interest online.

Government must restart auto industry

BY SUSAN J. DEMAS

December 12, 2008

Polls show most Americans don’t want Uncle Sam to help the Big Three and I couldn’t care less.They’re wrong, plain and simple, but it’s not entirely their fault. The amount of misinformation floating out there on ye olde information superhighway and from TV anchors who should know better is staggering.

Certainly there’s a bit of bailout fatigue. The $15 billion bridge loan that cleared the U.S. House on Wednesday is a lot of money. Senate Republicans slayed it Thursday and the deal looks dead.

This would be utterly devastating for the U.S. economy - not just Michigan’s.

Politicians shoot Michigan the bird

You can’t scream (expletive deleted) in the newspaper, but you can in the chambers of the U.S. Capitol.

For most of the past two years, as the presidential campaign raged around us but rarely crossed our borders, we begged for national attention.

We actually believed that if the politicians and policy makers would just come here, see the struggles of our sustenance industry, talk to our laid-off workers and drowning business owners, walk over our devastated landscape, the scales would fall from their eyes and they’d rush to our rescue.

Boy, we really had that nailed, didn’t we?

Here come the car czar wars

Steven Greenhut

I recall my kids having a heated argument over some factual matter, and I suggested they simply look up the question at hand. If something’s demonstrably true, there’s not much point arguing over it. Kids do this all the time, and even adults sometimes argue over ideas that have been debunked.

On the comment section of the Register’s Orange Punch blog, for instance, some readers recently debated whether government or the private sector operated in a more consumer-friendly manner. Of course, the nations with government-dominated economies produce the worst products and are least able to meet the demands of consumers. Arguing over this is like arguing with someone who believes that O.J. Simpson is still looking for the real killer.

5 Myths About Our Sputtering Economy

By James P. Moore Jr.
Sunday, December 14, 2008; Page B03

1. The United States has lost its competitive edge.

Not by a long shot. By almost any measure, the United States continues to outperform other countries around the globe (including rising giants China and India) in such areas as innovation, technology, higher education, worker training, the ability of the labor force to move from job to job, and more. Just this fall, the Swiss-based World Economic Forum released its latest global competitiveness report, and once again, the United States easily topped the list. The study noted that despite the current financial turmoil, the United States is blessed with strong productivity and can "ride out business-cycle shifts and economic shocks" better than other countries.

Time to tell it like it is

By Joan Vennochi

AS PAUL NEWMAN said at the climax of "Cool Hand Luke": What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate.

The economic news grows worse. But from the White House to Capitol Hill - and all the way to Chicago and the office of the president-elect - there’s no coherent message or overall rationale for turning things around.

The lucky get life preservers. The unlucky drown in red ink. Washington plays God, yet no one can explain the diabolic whimsy of it all.

President Bush was against using the Wall Street bailout fund to help the Big Three automakers. Now he’s for it. Why?

BLAGOJEVICH’S SIN CITY

By JONAH GOLDBERG

There are so many things to love about the Rod Blagojevich scandal it’s hard to know where to begin.

Wait. That’s not right. There are so many bleeping things to love about this bleeping-bleep Blagojevich scandal it’s hard to know where to begin.

For starters, the folks at the Chicago Tribune are Christmas Pony Happy because Blago tried to strong-arm Trib ownership to fire members of the editorial board. Instead, Trib editors will get to have a big tailgate party outside Blago’s cell window.

Being Rod Blagojevich

Rod Blagojevich tells his friends that he has two heroes, Richard Nixon and Elvis. it’s hard to know what Nixon and Elvis have in common with a Democratic hack politician, aside from paranoia, delusions of grandeur and, in the case of Elvis and Blagojevich, at least, quite a head of hair. But politicians say and do strange things. Why did former New York governor Eliot Spitzer, who has a beautiful and loyal wife, hire hookers? Why did Bill Clinton have sexual relations with an intern next door to the Oval Office?

The Unlikeliest Congressman

by Kevin Vance
12/22/2008, Volume 014, Issue 14

After devastating losses on November 4, Republicans finished the 2008 election cycle on a high note. Immigration lawyer and community leader Anh "Joseph" Cao (pronounced "gow") last Saturday narrowly defeated indicted Democratic congressman William "Dollar Bill" Jefferson in Louisiana’s Second District, becoming the first Republican to represent New Orleans in over a century. When he’s sworn in, Cao will also have the distinction of being the nation’s first Vietnamese-American member of Congress.

The election was pushed back to December 6 because of Hurricane Gustav. In this majority African-American district, turnout collapsed without Barack Obama at the top of the ticket. Cao acknowledges that low turnout was a major factor in his victory, since voters embarrassed by Jefferson were more likely to turn out than voters supportive of Jefferson. Consider that Jefferson won reelection two years ago after federal officials found $90,000 in $100 bills in his freezer (the cash had come from an FBI informant as part of a bribery investigation).

Obama is no centrist

Barack Obama has garnered praise from center to right — and has highly irritated the left — with the centrism of his major appointments. Because Obama’s own beliefs remain largely opaque, his appointments have led to the conclusion that he intends to govern from the center.

Obama the centrist? I’m not so sure.

Take the foreign policy team: Hillary Clinton, James Jones, and Bush holdover Robert Gates. As centrist as you can get. But the choice was far less ideological than practical. Obama has no intention of being a foreign policy president. Unlike, say, Nixon or Reagan, he does not have aspirations abroad. He simply wants quiet on his eastern and western fronts so that he can proceed with what he really cares about — his domestic agenda.

Similarly his senior economic team, the brilliant trio of Tim Geithner, Larry Summers and Paul Volcker: centrist, experienced and mainstream. But their principal task is to stabilize the financial system, a highly pragmatic task in which Obama has no particular ideological stake.

Will Mumbai cause second thoughts in terror war?

Will the horrors unleashed by Islamic terrorists in Mumbai cause any second thoughts by those who are so anxious to start weakening the American security systems in place, including government interceptions of international phone calls and the holding of terrorists at Guantanamo?

Maybe. But never underestimate partisan blindness in Washington or in the mainstream media where, if the Bush administration did it, then it must be wrong.

Contrary to some of the more mawkish notions of what a government is supposed to be, its top job is the protection of the people. Nobody on 9/11 would have thought that we would see nothing comparable again in this country for seven long years.

Many people seem to have forgotten how, in the wake of 9/11, every great national event– the World Series, Christmas, New Year’s, the Super Bowl– was under the shadow of a fear that this was when the terrorists would strike again.