The Gun Show Loophole Remains -- And You Should be Angry About That

Reading through the reactions to yesterday's successful obstruction of an expanded background checks bill, there's one thing you notice right away. Normally, stories like this are peppered with words like "saddened," disappointed," or "discouraged." That's not the case today. Today, people are opening their papers or visiting their favorite online news source and reading words like "angry," "disgusted," and "furious."

The pro-crime lobby may think they've beaten us, but all they really managed to do is make us mad.

For her part, Gabrielle Giffords has spent her time cultivating the image of a happy warrior, a friendly hero overcoming tremendous adversity and senseless tragedy. While the hero part of that persona remains, "happy" doesn't describe her op-ed on the issue in the New York Times:

Speaking is physically difficult for me. But my feelings are clear: I’m furious. I will not rest until we have righted the wrong these senators have done, and until we have changed our laws so we can look parents in the face and say: We are trying to keep your children safe. We cannot allow the status quo — desperately protected by the gun lobby so that they can make more money by spreading fear and misinformation — to go on.

I am asking every reasonable American to help me tell the truth about the cowardice these senators demonstrated. I am asking for mothers to stop these lawmakers at the grocery store and tell them: You’ve lost my vote. I am asking activists to unsubscribe from these senators’ e-mail lists and to stop giving them money. I’m asking citizens to go to their offices and say: You’ve disappointed me, and there will be consequences.

Giffords writes that "if we cannot make our communities safer with the Congress we have now, we will use every means available to make sure we have a different Congress, one that puts communities’ interests ahead of the gun lobby’s." The issue of partisanship does not come up. Democrat, Republican, or Independent, if you sided with the pro-criminal gun lobby, we want your head.

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A Super Committee of One

The way things are going, it looks like the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction (i.e., the "super committee") will be able to accomplish one thing -- reinforce my belief that Blue Ribbon Panels are useless. When that panel is advisory -- think the 9/11 commission -- their recommendations are generally ignored. When that panel is legislative, the results are no different from what the full congress would achieve. In the latter case, it's like a poll; you take aside a smaller sample of the larger group and find that the opinions break down pretty much the same way and in the same proportion. So, if congress is deadlocked, creating a smaller version of congress from that same congress isn't going to make things any easier. All you've really done is take that deadlock and concentrate it. With seven days to go until a deadline, the super committee is spinning its wheels.

How depressingly predictable.

Steve Benen reports that Republicans are actually fighting amongst themselves over the method to trim $1.2 trillion from the deficit. The bad news is that neither camp is willing to accept a deal that doesn't include tax cuts. That's right, a committee that's designed to reduce the deficit is also supposed to produce tax cuts somehow. "The GOP divide is between right-wing members (those willing to trade $250 billion in new revenue for $3.7 trillion in tax cuts, mostly benefiting the wealthy) and very right-wing members (those who want to reduce the debt without accepting any revenue at all)," he writes. Math hates Republicans.

At the center of all this is a nasty, corrupt individual named Grover Norquist.

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Cheney's Chernobyl

Let's be clear here, drilling five miles beneath the ocean surface is a desperate move. It's the sort of thing you'd do if you couldn't find oil any place else. Despite what Republicans like Sarah Palin have been saying, environmentalists didn't force drilling offshore by opposing drilling on land in places like the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge. Like deepwater drilling, drilling in ANWR would be a desperation move. Of the leases of federal land that oil companies hold, 68 million acres are unused. ANWR isn't the only place left. And the final nail in the coffin of "we have to do deepwater drilling" is oil price. If we were really so desperate for oil that we absolutely had to drill deep in the ocean, supply and demand would dictate that oil prices would be through the roof in historical terms. Nearly the exact opposite is true:



There is no logical reason to be drilling this deep. We don't need oil that badly.





As we see the environment in the Gulf Coast slowly poisoned, a common refrain is that this is our fault. It's our unending thirst for oil that forces us to do this -- I've walked down that road myself. But, again, the historical facts and further thought cast doubt this. If demand had forced this to happen, oil prices would reflect that. And, of course, with barrel after barrel after barrel spilling out into the Gulf by the minute, that waste isn't jacking up the price either. Turns out we can pour all that "necessary" oil down a drain and not have it make a dent. Sure, Americans burn oil as if it were our religion and that's a major problem, but to say that our demand has forced this upon ourselves isn't entirely accurate.

The fact of the matter is that the big black cloud of oil darkening the Gulf of Mexico exists for no good reason. A nearly unimaginable fortune of oil is lost and the only impacts are in public health and environment. No gas lines exist, no price spike is breaking us, no engine goes thirsty. Gusher aside, we now see what the world would be like if there were no Deepwater Horizon and we find it changed not at all. Throw in the gusher and we find it would've been a better world without it. I think we can stop talking about the "necessity" of offshore drilling now.

So why do we do this? Because it's expensive. And if something's expensive, then there's a lot of money to be made. You just need to figure out how to pass on that expense, so construction companies like Halliburton can cash in. So you get an army of lobbyists and have government create incentives for oil exploration. Suddenly, a big waste of time and money isn't so personally expensive anymore. It helps to have a corrupt corporate stooge like Dick Cheney to help you out. He actually let lobbyists write energy policy, which turned out to be awesome for the "drilling where we don't need to" industry.

CNN, July 2005:

As the energy bill moves closer to becoming law, debate is still raging over the first overhaul of national energy policy in a decade.

Supporters say the $14.5 billion bill will pave the way for more exploration and ultimately less reliance on foreign oil. Critics say it will enrich the already wealthy oil industry without addressing the need for relief from record oil and gasoline prices.

But if there's one thing that both parties can agree on, it's that the oil industry as a whole stands to benefit from its passage -- which could be an attractive point for investors looking to share the wealth.

"The bill will provide an elimination of royalties that oil and gas companies pay the government for drilling in the deep water in the Gulf of Mexico," CNN reported. "While details still need to be finalized, those companies that drill deeper will receive more relief, said KeyBanc vice president Kim Pacanovsky." The American Petroleum Institute estimated ending royalties amounted to a $5 billion giveaway to oil companies. And the only way oil companies could get that money was to drill where they had no business drilling.

The media has started calling Deepwater Horizon "Obama's Katrina." This is inaccurate.

It's Cheney's Chernobyl.

-Wisco


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The Future of Evan Bayh

Evan Bayh is running for president.

For about five minutes early this week, that story got a little traction. And then it fell apart on examination. It all began when Larry Sabato, a respected political scientist at the University of Virginia decided to twitter, "When Bayh said, 'I'm an executive at heart,' might have been hinting at POTUS run in '16, not just an IN GOV bid in '12." So maybe, in the far-flung future, Evan Bayh might consider running for president. Then again, maybe not. The bigger question would be, at this point in time, who even cares?

That story got picked up by Ryan Grim at Huffington Post, who grabbed the wheel of the baseless-speculation-mobile and floored it. "Let's stir [the rumor pot] even harder," Grim wrote. "Could Bayh, who backed Hillary Clinton for president in 2008, jump into a primary against Obama in 2012 from a conservative direction? His resignation speech touched all the Clintonian bases, from welfare reform, to budget cutting to a strong national defense with a reference to 9/11 thrown in." A centrist Democrat managed to sound like another centrist Democrat -- what are the odds? As evidence for a presidential run goes, it was pretty weak.

As I said, this lasted about five minutes, political time. By Monday morning, the rumor was dead. On MSNBC's morning yack program, Evan Bayh himself shoveled dirt into the grave. Asked on Morning Joe if he had any plans to run for president, Bayh answered, "None, whatsoever."

So that was fun while it lasted...





Of course, it was obvious that Bayh wouldn't run in '12, because -- as Matthew Yglesias points out -- "talk of Evan Bayh somehow challenging Barack Obama for the 2012 Democratic nomination is bizarre. No incumbent president has ever been defeated in a primary." This means that it's a purely activist endeavor. You do it to try to pull the incumbent to the left (assuming said incumbent is Democrat Barack Obama). There's no reason to run to the right of the incumbent in the primary, since he's certain to run against a conservative in the general. Evan Bayh, a conservative-leaning Democrat, would have absolutely no reason to want to do that -- especially considering that his reason for quitting was that things are too contentious and partisan in Washington. Why on Earth would he want to run a doomed, ideologically-driven leftist campaign in '12?

And, despite his complaining about DC partisanship, his timing in retiring -- whatever his reasons -- was deeply partisan.

The Hill:

Republicans are livid about the timing of Sen. Evan Bayh’s (D-Ind.) retirement announcement.

They have at least four candidates in the upcoming primary while the Indiana Democratic Party will get to decide its nominee.

Indiana required nominating petitions to be filed by noon Tuesday. Bayh announced Monday he would not seek reelection, giving would-be candidates less than 24 hours to get on the ballot.

Republicans have four candidates who made the deadline and a fifth whose signatures are being validated. Democrats had no serious successor in position, given that Bayh had already his filed his nominating petitions and had $13 million in bank.

No Democrat was able to meet Indiana's filing requirements. Those requirements are completely insane -- seriously, this is awful for a citizen-based democratic process. In order to get on the primary ballot, you have to collect 500 signatures from each congressional district -- 4,500 in all. So the Indiana Democratic Party gets to choose the candidate they think has the best chance of winning. No primary battles to be won or lost and no money to be wasted in those battles. This is a tremendous advantage.

But, as good as that is for Democrats, I'm not extremely happy with it. The primary system was designed to do away with this exact thing -- party flacks chosen in the infamous "smoke-filled room" by other party flacks. It's a formula for corruption. As much as I enjoy hearing Republicans squeal, I have to concede their point. If the situations were reversed, I'm certain I'd complain about it too.

What Bayh will do with his $13 million is an open question. He can hold onto it and use it for a run for a different office, but that seems unlikely. Speculation aside, he's said he has his eyes on the private sector. I'm inclined to take him at his word. A Bayh spokesperson says he hasn't decided what he'll do with the warchest, "But you can expect him to be helpful to the nominee." A chunk -- if not all -- of $13 million to spend in the general election, with no primary opponents to worry about. Pretty sweet.

No wonder people think Evan Bayh might become a lobbyist. That makes way more sense than a presidential candidate.

Because, if everything works out in the end, he'd have at least one senator already bought and paid for.

-Wisco


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John McCain's Plan to Come Up With a Plan

On September 17, 2007, Barack Obama went to Wall Street and said that our capital markets could not function without the confidence and trust of the public. Nearly one year later, a wave of economic crises has sapped the public's trust and led us into the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. The turmoil in our financial markets threatens our economy's ability to create good-paying jobs, help working Americans pay their bills and mortgage payments, and achieve the American Dream. Barack Obama believes that America's workers and our free market system have always been the engine of America's economic progress. Yet that progress has come only because we have made choices to invest in our people and guide the market's invisible hand with rules of the road that help both Main Street and Wall Street. Over the past several years, we have abandoned these rules in favor of a governing philosophy intent on shredding consumer protections, loosening oversight and regulation, and encouraging outsized bonuses to CEOs while ignoring middle-class Americans. President Bush and John McCain share this reflexive anti-regulatory approach and have been asleep at the switch as our economy has spiraled downward.
-First paragraph of Barack Obama's response to the market meltdown, "Restoring Confidence In Our Markets And Changing Our Economic Course" [PDF].

We’re going to need a 9/11 Commission to find out what happened and what needs to be fixed.
-John McCain's response on ABC's Good Morning America

A recent ABC News/Washington Post poll asked respondents, "Regardless of who you may support, who do you trust more to handle an unexpected major crisis: Obama or McCain?" 37% thought Barack Obama would do a better job, compared with 54% who thought John McCain would do better. Judging from the reactions above, it's hard to imagine how these respondents could've been more wrong.

While Obama reacts to the crisis with a detailed plan to deal with it, McCain proposes we study the problem with a blue ribbon panel who -- you assume -- would come up with a detailed plan to deal with it. The 9/11 commission was created in 2002. Its findings came out in 2004. I don't know about you, but I don't think we should let the market burn for two years before we have some idea how to put out the fire. We kind of have to deal with this now, not two years from now. In this crisis, at this time, John McCain is pretty useless.

Of course, I don't think this is what people had in mind when asked about an "unexpected major crisis." They probably thought of natural disasters or some sort of attack, but I guess that's the nature of the unexpected -- what you imagine it to be is wrong. Since it's unexpected, you can't prepare for it. And, since it's unexpected, you can't guess the reaction to it with any accuracy. The only way to find out which candidate would flinch is to take a swing.





In this unexpected major crisis, it's definitely John McCain who flinched. Obama's plan came out yesterday, McCain's would come out at some undefined point in the future -- perhaps, far in the future. As I pointed out yesterday, McCain served on the Senate Commerce Committee -- for four years. How can he be so clueless about economic issues? He's been in Washington forever. What kind of a learning curve is that? John McCain seems to be a delegator and his choice of delegates would seem to be worth looking into.

Over at MoJo Blog, David Corn, Jonathan Stein, and Nick Baumann put together a list of 83 Wall Street lobbyists working for McCain's campaign. At the same time, McCain is trying to play economic populist by running against Wall Street. You may not recognize the lobbyists' names, but you'd recognize many of the interests they represent. Five from AIG, nine from Merrill Lynch, one from Lehman Brothers. Possible future debacles Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs also make appearances with one and five lobbyists respectively. McCain's bona fides as a champion of the common man are questionable at best.

Meanwhile, this champion of the common man -- with his newfound sidekick -- has been going around the country telling people that Obama's tax plan will ruin the economy. But as economic journalist Dean Baker points out, this is ridiculous BS.

It would have been worth pointing out under President Clinton the economy had tax rates in place that were comparable to those proposed by Senator Obama. On average, the private sector created almost as many jobs in each year of the Clinton administration as it has created during the entire Bush administration. In other words, Governor's Palin claims that Obama's proposed tax increase on the wealthy would destroy jobs has no basis in reality...

Given a choice between a Clintonian domestic economic policy and a Bushian "let Wall Street do whatever the hell they want" policy, I think we can see which one would be wiser. McCain's talking about regulation now, but he was all for deregulation before. This is what we liberal elitists refer to as "closing the barn door after the horse got out."

McCain's 9/11 commission on the economy was actually his second reaction to the crisis. His first was to, like Herbert Hoover before him, deny there even was a crisis. His second is to pass the buck. But it's that first reaction that John McCain is working to live down.

L.A. Times:

Under fire for his assertion that the American economy is fundamentally sound, John McCain moved Tuesday to assure voters of his empathy and accused Barack Obama of attempting to take political advantage of the roiling Wall Street crisis.

Obama on Tuesday castigated McCain as having been "scornful" of the very Wall Street regulations he was now espousing, and he launched television ads mocking McCain's Monday statement.

The Arizona senator spent seven national TV interviews and two campaign events seeking to make it clear that he understood the depth of concern about the rocky economy.

Of course, his second reaction isn't any better. John McCain would go back to the Wall Street lobbyists and ask them how to fix the mess unregulated Wall Street created. I suppose you could argue this is like turning to Hannibal Lecter to bust Buffalo Bill, but you couldn't argue that very well. It's more like asking Hannibal to help bust Hannibal. He's not really going to have your best interests in mind.

Barack Obama took McCain's uncertainty and reliance on lobbyists and turned it into what I consider to be yesterday's quote of the day.

“This is somebody who’s been in Congress for twenty-six years, who put seven of the most powerful Washington lobbyists in charge of his campaign, and now he tells us that he’s the one who will take on the ol' boy network,”Obama said before a crowd in Elko, Nev.

"The ol’ boy network? In the McCain campaign, that’s called a staff meeting," Obama said.

And that ol' boy staff meeting would in turn be called a blue ribbon panel, set to study the crisis and come up with a plan -- in, maybe, two years. Meanwhile, Obama comes up with a plan the same week.

Who's better in any hypothetical unexpected crisis? I guess it's impossible to say. It is unforeseen, after all. But who's better in this crisis?

Barack Obama. Hands down.

-Wisco

Vote McCain, Re-Elect Lobbyists

Sometimes I think I need to work on my headlines. I pretty much wait until I've finished the post, then wonder what the hell I'm going to call it. I went through and tagged some posts and articles last night about an op-ed written by the McCain-Palin team (or, as it's being marketed by that side, Palin-McCain) and signed off on by the candidates. Their title -- or maybe it's the headline the Wall Street Journal editorial staff gave it -- is "We'll Protect Taxpayers From More Bailouts." You kind of get the feeling that someone suggested an exclamation point, but that was voted down as being too much.

Think Progress has a better headline. In fact, it's so dead on that you almost don't have to read the post. "McCain Op-Ed: Lobbyists Like My Campaign Manager Are 'Primary Contributors' To Fannie-Freddie Crisis." I guess "I'll protect you from me" was still a little too vague.

Palin's name is on the op-ed mostly because she's become a crutch for McCain. She's not especially knowledgeable when it comes to the housing crisis. Speaking of headlines, Sam Stein explains the problem in a piece titled "Palin Makes Her First Gaffe":

Gov. Sarah Palin made her first potentially major gaffe during her time on the national scene while discussing the developments of the perilous housing market this past weekend.

Speaking before voters in Colorado Springs, the Republican vice presidential nominee claimed that lending giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had "gotten too big and too expensive to the taxpayers." The companies, as McClatchy reported, "aren't taxpayer funded but operate as private companies. The takeover may result in a taxpayer bailout during reorganization."

Economists and analysts pounced on the misstatement, which came before the government had spent funds bailing the two entities out, saying it demonstrated a lack of understanding about one of the key economic issues likely to face the next administration.

In this case, I've got the better headline, "Sarah Palin Doesn't Know Her Fannie Mae From A Hole In The Ground."





So, it's basically an op-ed from McCain, with Sarah Palin chiming in like the kid in the Shake'n'Bake commercial, "And I helped!" And what Sarah helped with is a hopeless mish-mash of crazy statements and out and out self-contradiction. First and foremost, that federal bailouts are a bad thing, which is why we've got to bail these guys out. The very first sentence starts off the cognitive dissonance fest; "The bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is another outrageous, but sadly necessary, step for these two institutions."

It's typical of McCain to try to take both sides of an issue, but in the very first sentence? Things go south from there. The second paragraph reads, "We are strong advocates for the permanent reform of Fannie and Freddie. For years, Congress failed to act and it is deeply troubling that what we are now seeing is an exercise in crisis management rather than sound planning, and at great cost to taxpayers."

For years? Golly, that's one helluva coincidence, seeing that one of the authors of this piece has been in Congress all those years. It's also coincidental that this author hasn't tried to enact any of this badly needed reform over those years. Maybe he's been busy. He sure has been this year -- McCain is the most absent member of the Senate. During his Senate term so far, he's used those rare moments that he's on the job to vote the party line 88% of the time. That McCain, boy is he ever a maverick. As much of a maverick as Lindsey Graham, Trent Lott, and former RNC chair Elizabeth Dole, among others who served during that term. I guess maybe the entire Republican party are mavericks, which kind of makes you wonder how they're defining that word. I guess in a "I want to be different and unique, too!" sort of way.

You'd think all of these mavericks in the maverick party would've done something about this somewhere along the line. To explain why they haven't, we go back to Think Progress's piece.

The feigned outrage of McCain and Palin at the inaction of Congress and the influence of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac lobbyists is ironic considering the fact that "at least 20 McCain fundraisers have lobbied on behalf of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac" in recent years.

More troubling is the fact that McCain's campaign manager, Rick Davis, "served as president of an advocacy group led by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac" that worked to cripple regulatory initiatives in Congress because the two institutions feared that "Congressional meddling would lower their healthy profits."

McCain and Palin are so hip deep in lobbyists that, come November, they could take that campaign team, scratch the "'08" off all their signs, and open McCain-Palin Associates, LLC. McCain fired several members of his campaign because of criticism of his ties to lobbyists and conflict of interest, among other reasons, and that campaign is still made up largely of lobbyists. He fired one for ties to Saudi Arabia, two for ties to the military junta in Burma, a lobbyist for energy companies, and one who was with a group attacking Obama and Clinton. Later, he fired Phil Gramm -- a former senator and a lobbyist for... wait for it... the banking industry -- for saying that the economy was just fine and the US was a "nation of whiners." Gramm, who was McCain's economic adviser, was instrumental in our current crisis. He wrote what's become known as "the Enron Loophole" and has earned the name "Foreclosure Phil." All this attrition still leaves McCain-Palin with seven lobbyists as top advisers and, as Think Progress points out, 20 as fundraisers.

So McCain and Palin (excuse me, Palin and McCain) are going to go clean up Washington and reform the way everything works? How, by making it even more lobbyist-ridden, even more representative of corporations above people, even more corrupt?

Thanks, but no thanks. My temptation is to call this post "Palin-McCain Publish Laughable Bul**hit." But I guess the one I chose was more family friendly.

-Wisco

Who Vetted Palin?

Yesterday, Republicans put politics aside and decided to push back their convention in response to Hurricane Gustav. People in stupid hats, wearing buttons with goofy sayings, and whooping it up would be unseemly. Yesterday, as Gustav hit land near New Orleans, was not the time for politics. We can imagine solemn GOPers burning candles and praying, putting America first with all their little hearts.

Except they weren't.

Even as Republican John McCain sharply scaled back his party's national convention here out of concern over Hurricane Gustav, the parties and receptions for delegates and donors continued.

On Sunday night, for instance, delegates from Southern states were entertained by rock musician Sammy Hagar at a corporate-sponsored party at a Minneapolis nightclub. Scheduled for Wednesday: a Charlie Daniels Band concert to raise money for an entertainment industry advocacy group.

Many also attended a lobbyist group's -- the American Trucking Associations' -- shindig featuring Hookers and Blow. That's not an extra fun smorgasborg, that's the name of a local band. It's an unfortunate name, given recent GOP scandals, but there ya go.

So the party, although unofficial, went on. And that should surprise no one. The decision to put politics aside was in itself a political decision. Party conventions went on during a lot more disastrous crises. In fact, this is the first time in American history that outside events have changed the schedule of a major party's convention.

But the Ghost of Republican Disasters Past was threatening to haunt the Xcel Energy Center. In the end, any decision regarding a political event must logically be a political decision. In their defense, the Republicans couldn't actually put politics aside -- that would be impossible.



But the party's back on tonight. Gustav turned out to be an average hurricane, not the ghost of Katrina come to haunt the Republican convention. It's safe for the righties to come out from under their beds, put on straw boaters, and accuse everyone who's not sufficiently Republican of hating America. That's what they do when they aren't trying to get you to wet your pants in fear.

So on the convention goes, as if there were ever any doubt it would. The BS factory's gears will turn and the media spotlight will burn just as brightly as it would've anyway. War, terrorism, 9/11, a POW of the Viet Cong, "everyone freak out!" with a side of drill, drill, drill. The message isn't hard to predict.

But hovering over this political convention is the shadow cast by Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. This was an astonishingly awful choice that's being shown as more astonishingly awful by the hour. It may have been the worst weekend of Palin's life, exacerbated by being extended an extra day. The Governor of Alaska, seemingly unexamined by Team McCain, was examined by the media. And it wasn't pretty.

This is by no means comprehensive, but the short list of Palin problems are that she's an abstinence-only education advocate with a pregnant teenage daughter, she was for the "Bridge to Nowhere" before she was against it, she's under an ethics investigation at home and will probably be deposed right before the elections, she backed Ron Paul, and she also backed Obama's energy plan (that link's a Google cache, the original article -- from the State of Alaska's website -- has been scrubbed).

As I say, that's the short list. There's a longer one here and, frankly, I think it's a little padded. Some of these aren't so much scandalous as typically Republican (she supports Creationism and denies global warming, for example). Still, there are more scandals and reversals worth mentioning, but I'm not interested in repeating a laundry list of problems with Sarah Palin.

No, my purpose is to ask (and hopefully answer) how the hell this disastrous decision was made. And the answer is simple, if confusing when put into a single sentence. Sarah Palin both was and wasn't vetted.

It turns out that Team McCain didn't vet Palin at all. McClatchy Newspapers asked around and found that people who would likely have been contacted in a typical vetting process weren't contacted.

They spoke to two of Palin's neighbors, a former US attorney for Alaska, a former Speaker of the Alaskan House, and the man at the heart of the aforementioned ethics investigation -- none had been contacted by the McCain campaign. In fact, according to the former Speaker, they didn't seem to have contacted anyone:

Republican Gail Phillips, a former speaker of the Alaska House, said that she was shocked by McCain's selection of Palin and told her husband, Walt, "This can't be happening because his advance team didn't come to Alaska to check her out." She said she would've heard had someone been poking around.

"We're not a very big state," Phillips said. "People I talk to would've heard something."

But, as I said, Sarah Palin both was and wasn't vetted. Team McCain didn't investigate her, but farmed that job out -- to religious crazies James Dobson and Tony Perkins, among others. Max Blumenthal reports that the vetting process was outsourced to the Council for National Policy -- a religious right group founded by end-of-days nut Tim LaHaye. These were the people who investigated Sarah Palin, not anyone who knew what the hell they were doing. In fact, it's seems likely that they were the ones who chose her. Or, at least, included her in a list of acceptable candidates.

After the Palin announcement was made, James Dobson -- who had previously said he wouldn't vote for McCain "under any circumstances" -- declared that McCain had suddenly become acceptable.

"If flip-flopping is a sin, then I am a sinner," Dobson said. Writing for TIME, Michael Scherer noted, "The announcement comes just hours after McCain picked Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate. Palin has been widely cheered by conservative activists for her pro-life views and conservative governance record."

Here's what I think happened. You could argue that it's speculation, but given the facts, I'd say it was more accurately described as deduction. McCain was down and he rightly predicted that following the Democratic Convention, he'd be way down -- Obama now stands at 50%, with advantages on several issues. Coming from a statistical tie, this isn't so much of a bounce as a launch. McCain needed every vote he could get, so he made a trip to the special interests well.

The special interests, in the form of the religious nuts, demanded that they either choose the candidate or limit the choices. McCain agreed. The nuts vetted Palin for ideological purity, not political viability, and McCain got stuck hugging this anvil as Obama's poll numbers rose. The ideologically insane, being insane, had made an insane choice. And McCain, being a fool, went with it. That the crazies chose a crazy seems to be a complete surprise to him.

So there's what McCain's experience gets him. That's how good his judgement is. He allowed himself to be saddled with an ideologically correct political lightweight with a pretty damned crazy past. That's what McCain thought would be the best thing for America -- to delegate the responsibility of choosing a running mate to a bunch of Bible-drunk morons with loud mouths and few brains.

Those are the sort of choices McCain would likely make as president -- really, really bad ones. The "McSame" label becomes even more apt. Not only is McCain Bush's political twin, but he shares his inability to recognize a completely boneheaded idea.

Sarah Palin is McCain's version of a good idea. Remember that in November.

-Wisco

The [Your Name Here] Candidate

The big foreign policy expert in the 2008 presidential race is John McCain... Right? Of course, the problem with putting yourself across as an expert means that people are going to expect you to know what you're talking about. So, when the going gets tough, the tough get going -- to Wikipedia.

Taegan Goddard reports that Mr. Big Fancy Foreign Policy Expert seems to have turned to the open source encyclopedia to get the skinny on Georgia in the Russo-Georgian crisis. "A Wikipedia editor emailed Political Wire to point out some similarities between Sen. John McCain's speech today [August 11] on the crisis in Georgia and the Wikipedia article on the country Georgia," Goddard writes at his Congressional Quarterly blog. "Given the closeness of the words and sentence structure, most would consider parts of McCain's speech to be derived directly from Wikipedia."

Of course, Team McCain denies any Wiki-plagiarism. They claimed it was entirely coincidental. "Nonetheless, at least two political science professors have weighed in saying the similarities are more than coincidental and wouldn't be tolerated from their own students," writes Goddard.

It may be Matthew Yglesias who had the best reaction to the McCain copy-and-paste job; "Given that McCain, by his own admission, can't use the internet it's a bit of an ironic situation though perhaps it counts as progress of some sort."

Isn't that nice? McCain's learning to use the google.



The odd thing about all of this is that Team McCain has a Georgia expert on board. How do we know that? Because Georgia pays this McCainiac to be an American expert on Georgia. McCain's chief foreign policy adviser, Randy Scheunemann, is a paid lobbyist for Georgia. And that pro-Georgian lobbying seems to be influencing McCain's stand on the issue.

A CNN piece titled " McCain pushes hard line against Russia; aides attack Obama" gives a perfect example of how Scheunemann's expertise is being used by Team McCain:

On Tuesday, Randy Scheunemann, McCain's top foreign policy adviser, attacked the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee's response to the situation in Georgia, saying his experience with the region amounted to a handful of paper statements.

On the other hand, McCain's experience with Georgia runs deep, Scheunemann said, noting that McCain and the Georgian president were friends.

"There's a depth of knowledge, a breadth of knowledge and an extent of historical experience that doesn't compare between the two on Russia policy," Scheunemann said. "You can't compare a 15-year historical record to three or four statements over the course of 15 months."

Of course, this is CNN -- that paragon of lazy American journalism -- so the piece doesn't mention the inconvenient fact that Scheunemann is an agent of a foreign government that goes by the name of "Georgia." It also fails to note that McCain is such a good, dear friend of Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili that he can't even pronounce the man's name.

McCain's obvious ignorance of Georgia doesn't stop him from making insane claims about the crisis -- claims that put Russia in the worst possible light.

Boston Globe:

Republican John McCain yesterday [Aug. 13] phoned Georgia's president to tell him that Americans are supporting his "brave little nation" against Russia's military attacks -- and blasted Russian leader Vladimir Putin, whom he accused of wanting to restore the czarist empire.

In fact, McCain's defense of Georgia and bellicosity toward Russia is so vigorous that he's wound up saying really, really stupid and hypocritical things about the crisis. Just yesterday, McCain told reporters at a press conference, "In the 21st century, nations don’t invade other nations."

No, really. I can prove it. There's video.

But if Scheunemann being on the Georgian payroll (a blatant conflict of interest at this point) is influencing McCain's stand on the conflict, you have to wonder what other issues members of Team McCain are being paid to take. I've written before that "McCain is a candidate openly for sale."

And his campaign team is for hire. A new analysis by the Public Campaign Action Fund found that McCain campaign aides and fundraisers have earned nearly $1 billion as lobbyists over the last decade.

"The McCain campaign relies on big money lobbyists, and they’ll rely on him," said David Donnelly, director of Campaign Money Watch. "In the ‘you-scratch-my-back, I’ll-scratch-yours’ world of Washington, $931 million gets the special interests the best government money can buy. But just think of the payday these lobbyists might expect in a McCain Administration."

With that much special interest support, McCain's positions could almost be safely assumed to come straight out of the wallets of nations and industries. If Scheunemann's any indication, we can take comfort in the fact that they aren't very good at it.

When you have to turn to Wikipedia to get background on your own client, you really haven't done your homework. Of course, it makes you wonder how much homework they've done on anything else.

Maybe McCain should turn to Wikipedia more often. Then he'd know the difference between Sunni and Shia, Iran and al Qaeda, or that Pakistan doesn't border Iraq. Until Mr. Foreign Policy Expert figures these sorts of things out, the nations that bought him should ask for their money back.

-Wisco