It takes a great writer to enrage you and make you laugh out loud at the same time.
People should stop picking on vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin because she hired a high school classmate to oversee the state agriculture division, a woman who said she was qualified for the job because she liked cows when she was a kid. And they should lay off the governor for choosing another childhood friend to oversee a failing state-run dairy, allowing the Soviet-style business to ding taxpayers for $800,000 in additional losses.
What these critics don’t understand is that crony capitalism is how things are done in Alaska. They reward failure in the Last Frontier state. In that sense, it’s not unlike like Wall Street’s treatment of C.E.O.’s who run companies into the ground.
Look at Carly Fiorina, John McCain’s top economic surrogate — if you can find her this week, after the news and her narrative fused in a negative way. Dismissed as head of Hewlett-Packard after the company’s stock plunged and nearly 20,000 workers were let go, she was rewarded with $44 million in compensation. Sweet!
Thank God McCain wants to appoint a commission to study the practice that enriched his chief economic adviser. On the campaign trail this week, McCain and Palin pledged to “stop multimillion dollar payouts to C.E.O.’s” of failed companies. Good. Go talk to Fiorina at your next strategy session.
Much more, and it gets funnier. Comments are worth a read, too.
Will try to get back to China blogging soon. The US needs me more at the moment, I’m afraid.
1
By Kellen
and here i thought this would be about chinese milk.
what i’m really waiting to see is if all of this actually does sink the mccain campaign. as far as i can recall, these things tend to be forgotten and replaced by voting for your view on abortion rights instead of how a country will be run. and so i wait.
September 19, 2008 @ 7:06 pm | Comment
2
By Raj
Good article from the National Journal today:
http://www.nationaljournal.com/njmagazine/openingargument.php
September 19, 2008 @ 7:26 pm | Comment
3
By Richard
Yeah, I love the National Journal. Here’s another of their great articles from today,
September 19, 2008 @ 11:50 pm | Comment
4
By Lindel
Is not Stuart Taylor a republican lawyer and one of the key Clinton bashers during the impeachment/lewinski scandal?
Nice of him to write an article pointing out how we should all feel guilty about being too mean to John and Sarah.
After reading articles like the one in your national journal link these articles intended to make democrats feel guilty and goad them into studying their navels, suck their thumbs and be more concerned about hurting john and sarah’s feelings, I just turn on Fox and watch five minutes of hannity and replay the O’Reilly “Interview” of Obama. Hey check out the deference O’Reilly is showing to Obama. Then I think about how Obama was set up at the Saddleback Political Forum and conclude that Palin and McCain deserve all they are getting.
In 2000 I received a letter from the RNC with a photo of GW and Laura asking me for a donation. I mailed the envelop back empty just so they would get charged for the postage paid envelop and receive no money. Since then I have been on the RNC’s mailing and phone list. Working for DOD and living in Virginia the RNC assumed I was a soulmate with the holy cause against the evil foreign/communist/liberal/media pundit boogeymen. The Republicans do not play fair or nice and every uneducated yokel at a little evangelical church in slackjawville, virginia are receiving coordinate sleaze attack memos from the McCain (formerly Rove/Bush) operatives to write to newspaper editors and fill the airwaves with. In the next month there will be daily phone calls to every phone in virginia using every slur they can think of for Barack Obama, including accusations of being a muslim. The real challenge for McCain will be to see that no one from his campaign gets caught making a public racial slur like George Allen and his Macaca moment in 2006.
The rednecks in Virginia actually still have a grudge against Jim Webb because George Allen said macaca and lost the election.
Who do you think McCain was talking to when he said the election is not about issues, but is about identity?
It is not going to be pretty. The RNC has to accept that a lot of voters know they have been manipulated with their tricks in past elections and are angry and ready to give it back to them in kind whether Obama likes it or not. The Palin like republicans running washington today will fight sleazy to hold onto their power, only this time there are more angry democrats and independents such as myself who plan to dish it out in kind.
September 20, 2008 @ 2:28 am | Comment
5
By Raj
Almost as good as the RealClearPolitics polling averages:
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/maps/obama_vs_mccain/#data
September 20, 2008 @ 2:29 am | Comment
6
By Raj
Nice of him to write an article pointing out how we should all feel guilty about being too mean to John and Sarah.
Actually he wrote an article saying that both sides have misrepresented each other in terms of comments and actions.
If you disagee with the article, perhaps you could tell us which parts that would be – especially any of the examples he cites.
September 20, 2008 @ 2:40 am | Comment
7
By Richard
Don’t worry Lindel, your points come out loud and clear to me.
September 20, 2008 @ 9:31 am | Comment
8
By Buck
“During the last five years of his tenure as CEO of now-bankrupt Lehman Brothers, Richard Fuld’s total take was $354 million. John Thain, the current chairman of Merrill Lynch, taken over this week by Bank of America, has been on the job for just nine months. He pocketed a $15 million signing bonus. His predecessor, Stan O’Neal, retired with a package valued at $161 million, after the company reported an $8 billion loss in a single quarter. And remember Bear Stearns’s Chairman James Cayne? After the company collapsed earlier this year and was up for sale at bargain basement prices, he sold his stake for more than $60 million. “
September 20, 2008 @ 2:27 pm | Comment
9
By Richard
And now we bail out the firms they plundered. God bless America.
September 20, 2008 @ 3:16 pm | Comment
10
By Buck
I guess that what’s happened is basically the equivalent of a coup d’etat of an Obama presidency? Another 9/11, but in a different form. Now there’s no money for anything—no money for health care reform, no money to cover the baby boomers’ retirement, no money for education, no money for clean, renewable energy. Nothing.
I suspose that it was a bit naive to imagine that they’d ever let a black man have a chance at real change?
September 21, 2008 @ 4:56 pm | Comment