BATON ROUGE, La. -- I assume that someone has removed the crushed blue Hyundai from the parking lot of Jimmy Swaggart Ministries. Two days after Hurricane Ike, the car was there with a tree trunk still embedded in its roof. And Ike was a pussycat next to Gustav, which had pummeled the area two weeks before.
Debate over how to resolve the nation's financial emergency is taking a salutary direction for the moment, as politicians of both parties refuse to be herded by the Bush White House into a ridiculous $700-billion swindle.
Honestly. A clean bill as requested by Treasury man Henry Paulson, along with John McCain’s oversight board, can help fix the credit-crunch problem. It needn’t be this hard.
Before or after every speech I ever give, somebody asks me: "What is O'Reilly really like?"
The mainstream media have gone over the line and are now straight-out propagandists for the Obama campaign.
It takes a major crisis for a lame duck president, especially one whose popularity is as low as George W. Bush's, to take center stage during a hard-fought presidential campaign.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the Wall Street executives you see hanging their heads have been called many things, chief among them "greedy." But in deciding their guilt, you must consider mitigating circumstances. Compare these two sets of circumstances.
I understood the Bush administration's decision to promise up to $30 billion to facilitate the fire sale of Bear Stearns. I got the administration's decision to spend as much as $200 billion to stabilize mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which are worth about $5 trillion. Ditto the $85 billion federal bailout of AIG.
But he has to fuse the issues of the economy and taxes — to show how Barack Obama’s tax proposals would lead to a catastrophic implosion of the nation’s capital base.
We can fix this. If nothing else, that's the message I hope readers take away from this column. Of course, the "this" is the run on the world banking system. Stock markets have plunged globally, gold prices have shot up, and U.S. Treasury bill rates have plummeted to 10 basis points, the lowest since the 1950s.
The bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, the sale of Merrill Lynch to Bank of America, the 500-point plunge of the Dow, the government takeover of AIG -- all these have got the presidential candidates talking about the economy. But both Barack Obama and John McCain have been vague about their solutions. And for good reason.
"The fundamentals of our economy are strong," John McCain said as Wall Street went into white-knuckle panic over diving investor confidence. Does he believe that? It doesn't really matter, because the Republican has outsourced his economic policy to the ideologues whose opposition to regulations brought the financial markets to their knees.
In early summer, the Crystal Ball took its first look at the likely November 4th Electoral College map. Our assessment was that, in the College at least, the contest appeared close. John McCain had 174 solid or likely electoral votes to Barack Obama's 200 solid or likely. The lead switched once we added in states that were "leaning" to one or the other: McCain had 227 votes to Obama's 212, with 270 needed for election. Fully 99 electoral votes in eight other states (CO, MI, NH, NV, OH, PA, VA, and WI) remained in the toss-up category.
John McCain was right when he said Monday that despite the bad news about Lehman Brothers filing for bankruptcy and AIG trolling for help from Uncle Sam, "the fundamentals of our economy are strong." As politicians running for the White House learn, honesty is a commodity best used sparingly on the campaign trail.
With the markets in frightening turmoil and the public outraged by financial irresponsibility and excessive greed, John McCain has suddenly rediscovered the importance of strong, watchful government.
Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson is the man of the hour. This weekend he drew a clear line in the sand: no more federal bailouts. Not for Lehman Brothers. Not for global insurer AIG. Not for Merrill Lynch. Not for anyone, at least as of this writing.
First Dude. That's what they call him in Alaska. It's OK. Todd's Ok. Whatever. He smiles at Greta Van Susteren. Not a touch of noblesse. More like plan old politesse.
Much has been made this year about how the fundamentals favor the Democrats. An unpopular Republican president, a war that has dragged on beyond the limits of public tolerance, a declining number of people identifying as Republicans and a worrisome economy all set the stage for the Democrats to reclaim the White House.
At age 18, an American can enlist in the military, vote, sign a contract, get married, have an operation -- hey, in California, a 14-year-old can have an abortion without telling her parents -- but he cannot buy a beer. Not legally, anyway.
John McCain was trained as a fighter pilot. In his selection of Sarah Palin, and in his convention and campaigning since, he has shown that he learned an important lesson from his fighter pilot days: He has gotten inside Barack Obama's OODA loop.
