T1B

Tom In VA wrote:FDR wouldn't have done this in 1929.

R-Jack wrote:

mvscal wrote:The old coot stole a march on the schvoogie. There no way for Onogga to come out of this without looking like the tool that he is.

"Call me if you need me." Oh....OK. Verry Presidential.

PRESENT!!!

Mikey wrote:Is he still trying to chicken out on the Friday night fights?

R-Jack wrote:OK,

I've had enough.

BSmack wrote:

Mikey wrote:Is he still trying to chicken out on the Friday night fights?

At last report McCain is still attempting to weasel out of Friday night's debate.

PSUFAN wrote:Seriously - I think we need a different approach - strong, intelligent, principled, and fresh. Obama seems to fit the bill for me best at this point.

Tom In VA wrote:I think this just shows the difference between a veteran, senior Senator and a young upcoming rookie Junior Senator.

Sirfindafold wrote:R-Jack,
Don't hold your breath waiting on an intelligent response from Bri. Better yet, maybe PUSFAN's rationale will make your voting decision a bit easier.

PSUFAN wrote:Seriously - I think we need a different approach - strong, intelligent, principled, and fresh. Obama seems to fit the bill for me best at this point.

PSUFAN wrote:Not that I feel any diferently when it comes to McCain v. Obama...

Tom In VA wrote:
I don't see Obama calling for a "putting aside of differences" and focusing on this situation at all.

Mikey wrote: impressionable fools like you

BSmack wrote:I'm not going to waste my time trying to sway anybody.

88 wrote:There are some other things he's hoping to change in a way you can believe in, but I can't remember them now. I think he used to be in favor of pulling our troops out of Iraq on a very short time table, but I think he's changing his mind and hoping to bring them home sometime later.

88 wrote: Obama is all about change. The kind of change you can believe in. And he's all about hope too. Hope you can believe in. Change and hope, mostly.

Hope and change, the kind of change you can believe in... hopefully

Tom In VA wrote:

88 wrote:There are some other things he's hoping to change in a way you can believe in, but I can't remember them now. I think he used to be in favor of pulling our troops out of Iraq on a very short time table, but I think he's changing his mind and hoping to bring them home sometime later.

Yeah he changed his mind right about the time he realized if they started coming home before he was elected it would steal his thunder.

mvscal wrote:

BSmack wrote:

Mikey wrote:Is he still trying to chicken out on the Friday night fights?

At last report McCain is still attempting to weasel out of Friday night's debate.

Yeah, I'm sure he was just trembling with fright to debate Buuuhhhhhrack on foreign policy.

mvscal wrote:

BSmack wrote:

Mikey wrote:Is he still trying to chicken out on the Friday night fights?

At last report McCain is still attempting to weasel out of Friday night's debate.

Yeah, I'm sure he was just trembling with fright to debate Buuuhhhhhrack on foreign policy.

LTS TRN 2 wrote: Face it, McBush is a moron. Not like the Chimp, or Harry Truman, but close.

...and of course the galling case of charging a rape vitim for her rape kit!

Tom In VA wrote:

Mikey wrote: impressionable fools like you

Oh Christ, that argument. Look dude, you really need to consider growing the fuck up with all this "impressionable fool" bullshit. It's fucking childish for a man in your advanced years. If you really think that you're somehow not impressionable or being "persuaded" by Obama's handlers, strategies, and spin then you are a deluded unfortunate man and I feel sorry for you.

I see it for what it is, it's posturing. Leaders and leadership use it all the time, have throughout history and will continue to do so. Do I see this as grandstanding and posturing ? Yes of course it is, all leaders do it when they see the necessity to do so. McCain obviously sees the need to do so. I believe that is his motivation - based upon his experience and knowledge of leadership - moreso than "running from a debate".

Now kindly go fuck yourself and drink your Cherry Kool-Aid, while I drink my Grape Kool-Aid.

R-Jack wrote:Maybe you should be here to sway somebody, because you fucking suck at running smack.

Far be it from me to call myself any type of expert, but I doubt anyone's idea of "running smack" is going Newslink42 for anti-Republican spins and posting YouTube links. Last checked, most people who "run smack" do so with a pinch of humor and actually offer a little scathing insight.

McCain's Scapegoat

John McCain has made it clear this week he doesn't understand what's happening on Wall Street any better than Barack Obama does. But on Thursday, he took his populist riffing up a notch and found his scapegoat for financial panic -- Christopher Cox, the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

To give readers a flavor of Mr. McCain untethered, we'll quote at length: "Mismanagement and greed became the operating standard while regulators were asleep at the switch. The primary regulator of Wall Street, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) kept in place trading rules that let speculators and hedge funds turn our markets into a casino. They allowed naked short selling -- which simply means that you can sell stock without ever owning it. They eliminated last year the uptick rule that has protected investors for 70 years. Speculators pounded the shares of even good companies into the ground.

"The chairman of the SEC serves at the appointment of the President and has betrayed the public's trust. If I were President today, I would fire him."

Wow. "Betrayed the public's trust." Was Mr. Cox dishonest? No. He merely changed some minor rules, and didn't change others, on short-selling. String him up! Mr. McCain clearly wants to distance himself from the Bush Administration. But this assault on Mr. Cox is both false and deeply unfair. It's also un-Presidential.

Take "naked" shorting, in which an investor sells a stock short -- betting that it will fall in price -- without first borrowing the shares he is selling from an investor who owns them. The SEC has never condoned the practice, and since 2005 it has clamped down on short selling in any stock that shows evidence of naked shorting. The SEC further tightened its rules against naked shorting just hours before Mr. McCain excoriated Mr. Cox for doing nothing.

The rules announced Wednesday will increase penalties and close loopholes that exempted broker-dealers from the rules against naked shorting. They also make it clear that deliberately selling short a stock whose shares cannot be borrowed is fraud under the Securities Exchange Act. That's all to the good, we suppose; fraud is fraud. But regular short selling is not fraud. It adds valuable information to the market about what investors believe to be the price direction of a stock. Demonizing short-sellers as a band of criminals, or barring short-selling outright in financial stocks, as regulators in the U.K. did Thursday, removes information from the market.

Then there's Mr. McCain's tirade against the "uptick rule," a Depression-era chestnut that investors could only short stock after a rise in that stock's price. The SEC staff studied the effect of the uptick rule on prices for years, in a controlled experiment involving thousands of stocks. It found the rule had no effect. Other studies, including those that examined the uptick rule's effect on stocks disclosing bad news, also found that it "protected" no one. The SEC's permanent staff has long supported repeal and the SEC's commissioners voted to do so unanimously in June 2007.

While he was at it, Mr. McCain added the wholly unsupported assertion that "speculators pounded the shares of even good companies into the ground." It wasn't very long ago that he blamed speculators on the long side for sky-high oil prices. Then oil prices fell. Now Mr. McCain wants voters to believe speculators are responsible for driving mismanaged financial companies to ruin. The irony is that this critique puts Mr. McCain in the same camp as some of the Wall Street CEOs who have led their firms so poorly. They also want someone (else) to blame.

In case Mr. McCain is interested, overall short interest in financial companies actually declined by 20% between July and the end of August. That's right: Far from driving this crisis, shorts were net buyers of financial stocks this summer, as they must buy stocks back to close their positions and realize their gains (or losses).

In a crisis, voters want steady, calm leadership, not easy, misleading answers that will do nothing to help. Mr. McCain is sounding like a candidate searching for a political foil rather than a genuine solution. He'll never beat Mr. Obama by running as an angry populist like Al Gore, circa 2000.

Mikey wrote:I guess it's important for Sarah to be there to discharge her Senatorial responsibilties.

PSUFAN wrote: As for McCain...there is no reason for him to "go to Washington" this week and try to help here. He will not bring clarity or purpose to what they have to do there...that is a fact.

Tom In VA wrote:
However, people in the "know" consider McCain's actions to be motivated by a sense of duty.

PSUFAN wrote:It's not as if moving the poli threads out of this forum will automatically result in a thicket of smack threads being started to replace them.

Mikey wrote:

Tom In VA wrote:
However, people in the "know" consider McCain's actions to be motivated by a sense of duty.

Suddenly Bill Clinton is "in the know"?