McCain's Tampa Speech

This guy is bullshit. He's bitching about Lehman Bros. filing for Chapter 11, but he signed bills that were put into place, with the help of his buddy Phil Gramm, that assisted to put us into the lending crisis we're in right now.

Phil Gramm, by the way, is known as the Foreclosure King. Gramm, up until VERY recently, was McCain's financial adviser and is one of the leading people they're speculating to be the Treasury Secretary if McCain wins. This is NOT good stuff.

This is a paragraph I found on him:

  But Gramm's most cunning coup on behalf of his friends in the financial services industry—friends who gave him millions over his 24-year congressional career—came on December 15, 2000. It was an especially tense time in Washington. Only two days earlier, the Supreme Court had issued its decision on Bush v. Gore. President Bill Clinton and the Republican-controlled Congress were locked in a budget showdown. It was the perfect moment for a wily senator to game the system. As Congress and the White House were hurriedly hammering out a $384-billion omnibus spending bill, Gramm slipped in a 262-page measure called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act. Written with the help of financial industry lobbyists and cosponsored by Senator Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), the chairman of the agriculture committee, the measure had been considered dead—even by Gramm. Few lawmakers had either the opportunity or inclination to read the version of the bill Gramm inserted. "Nobody in either chamber had any knowledge of what was going on or what was in it," says a congressional aide familiar with the bill's history.

  Source: http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2008/07/foreclosure-phil.html


I don't like the prospect of Phil Gramm handling our Treasury. Nor do I like the cut of McCain's jib with regards to his response over Lehman Brothers or the rest of the lending market problems. He had a hand in deregulating it. That isn't to say that there weren't people from both sides with complicity in the matter...

We can look back and remember the Keating Five scandal from the Savings and Loan crisis in the 80s. Read this information... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keating_Five ... Five assholes all in a row, including another "American Hero," John Glenn.

He needs to be called on the floor for what he said today, really and truly. I'm a bit worked up about this because I had already been reading about Gramm and the other twenty lobbyists in McCain's employ, as well as the Keating Five stuff and McCain's association with lenders.

Reposted email from Mugsy

My friend Mugsy, who is on an email list with me, wrote the following. It hits the nail on the head.

I'm a little confused. Let me see if I have this straight . . .

* If you grow up in Hawaii , raised by your grandparents, you're 
"exotic, different."
* Grow up in Alaska eating mooseburgers, a quintessential American story.

* If your name is Barack you're a radical, unpatriotic Muslim.
* Name your kids Willow , Trig and Track, you're a maverick.

* Graduate from Harvard law School and you are unstable.
* Attend 5 different small colleges before graduating, you're well grounded.

* If you spend 3 years as a community organizer, become the first 
black President of the Harvard Law Review, create a voter 
registration drive that registers 150,000 new voters, spend 12 years 
as a Constitutional Law professor, spend 8 years as a State Senator 
representing a district with over 750,000 people, become
chairman of the state Senate's Health and Human Services committee, 
spend 4 years in the United States Senate representing a state of 13 
million people while sponsoring 131 bills and serving on the Foreign 
Affairs, Environment and Public Works and Veteran's Affairs 
committees, you don't have any real leadership experience.
* If your total resume is: local weather girl, 4 years on the city 
council and 6 years as the mayor of a town with less than 7,000 
people, 20 months as the governor of a state with only 650,000 
people, then you're qualified to become the country's second highest 
ranking executive.

* If you have been married to the same woman for 19 years while 
raising 2 beautiful daughters, all within Protestant churches, you're 
not a real Christian.
* If you cheated on your first wife with a rich heiress, and left 
your disfigured wife and married the heiress the next month, you're a 
good Christian.

* If you teach responsible, age appropriate sex education, including 
the proper use of birth control, you are eroding the fiber of society.
* If , while governor, you staunchly advocate abstinence only, with 
no other option in sex education in your state's school system while 
your unwed teen daughter ends up pregnant , you're very responsible.

* If your wife is a Harvard graduate lawyer who gave up a position in 
a prestigious law firm to work for the betterment of her inner city 
community, then gave that up to raise a family, your family's values 
don't represent America's.
* If your husband is nicknamed "First Dude", with at least one DWI 
conviction and no college education, who didn't register to vote 
until age 25 and once was a member of a group that advocated the 
secession of Alaska from the USA , your family is extremely admirable.

OK, that makes LOADS of sense.