Tina Fey as Sarah Palin: "Can I call you Joe?"

And this one:

Gotcha? You Betcha!

By Marty Kaplan, Huffington Post
John McCain and Sarah Palin have been complaining that there's too much "gotcha journalism" going around.
If only.
When they say "gotcha journalism," what they're really trying to do, of course, is to demonize journalism itself -- to de-legitimize asking tough questions, and following up with more tough questions when the answers are mealy-mouth evasions, and holding politicians accountable when they inadvertently emit a truth.
McCain says gotcha journalism is reporting that Palin, at a public event, told a voter her thoughts about attacking terrorist targets in Pakistan -- which inconveniently is the same view that McCain is excoriating Obama for holding.
The McCain camp cried gotcha journalism when Charles Gibson asked Palin whether she agrees with the Bush Doctrine, and when Katie Couric asked her what Supreme Court cases she disagrees with, and when Gwen Ifill asked her about the powers of the vice president. But I didn't hear Republicans complain about gotcha journalism when debate moderator George Stephanopoulos twice asked Obama, "Does Reverend Wright love America as much as you do?"
If gotcha journalism means asking presidential candidates which of their dreams will have to be deferred because of the $700 billion bailout, as a frustrated Jim Lehrer did again and again, then maybe we need more of that kind of questioning, not less.
We certainly could have used more gotcha journalism during the decade leading up to the worst economic debacle since the Great Depression.
In 1999, when the Glass-Steagall Act was repealed, letting commercial banks go into the investment banking and insurance businesses, the country would have been a lot better off if the mainstream media had paid gotcha attention to the downside of deregulation, instead of being obsessed by the mythical Y2K bug.
In 2000, when Senator Phil Gramm slipped a measure forbidding the SEC and the CFTC from regulating credit default swaps into the omnibus spending bill, imagine if the press had blown the whistle on that lobbyist-owned legislator taking advantage of the final moments of a lame-duck session of Congress instead of focusing single-mindedly on the hanging chads story.
In 2003, when Alan Greenspan told global investors that he was going to keep the Fed Funds rate at an unappetizing one percent, thus opening the global floodgates to the mortgage backed securities industry, just think what might have happened if the surge in no-income-no-asset mortgages had been covered as intensely as the goings-on at Michael Jackson's Neverland Ranch.
In 2006, when the size of the global collateralized debt obligation market approached $2 trillion, with Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch and Wachovia becoming the top CDO underwriters, consider how investigative journalism might have revealed the fatal vulnerability of those houses to toxic assets when the housing bubble would inevitably burst, rather than spending its energies falsely convicting the Duke lacrosse team of rape.
In 2007, when the subprime mortgage fiasco hit, think how things might have played out differently at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac if cable news had spent as much time covering the liquidity crisis as it did the death of Anna Nicole Smith.
In 2008, when SEC chairman Chris Cox told the Senate Banking Committee that he wanted no increased authority and no increased budget to oversee conflict-of-interest riddled credit rating agencies like Moody's, what if the consequences of Cox's emergency ban on naked short-selling - bizarrely lasting only one month and affecting only 19 companies -- had been pursued as aggressively as the first photos of the Brangelina twins?
We could have used a whole lot more gotcha journalism about Wall Street and banking deregulation than most people regularly encountered over the past decade. And we would have been better served as citizens if terms like "naked short selling" and "mark-to-market" and the rest of the gobbledygook now haunting us had long ago become part of the minimum daily dose of financial literacy delivered to us by the news media.
The exceptions to this journalistic inability to know what's important, and to explain what's difficult, are worth celebrating. Chief among them are public radio programs like This American Life and Planet Money, and public radio reporters like Alex Blumberg and Adam Davidson.
There's no better way for a lay person to understand the current crisis than by listening to two episodes of This American Life - "The Giant Pool of Money," which aired last May, and "Another Frightening Show About the Economy," which aired last weekend. And while you're at it, check out the "Now You SEC Me, Now You Don't" segment of This American Life from last month, and the two interviews with former CFTC director Michael Greenberger that Fresh Air host Terry Gross did in April and September.
Yes, reporters for business publications like The Wall Street Journal have also kept their eye on the ball, but the real need was and is for mass media to serve as storytellers for general audiences, as Paul Reveres to warn ordinary citizens when the redcoat-wearing masters of the universe are coming. If the kind of gotcha journalism that so irritates John McCain and Sarah Palin were more woven into the fabric of our civic life, we might not be in the mess now consuming us.
The benign explanations for this failure of journalism are the inherent complexity of the financial story, and the imperative of media conglomerates to maximize profit, which means cultivating and satisfying the audience's appetite for entertainment.
But there's also a less benign explanation for the media's negligence, and it's captured by something President Andrew Jackson said nearly two centuries ago: "If the people only understood the rank injustice of our money and banking system, there would be a revolution before morning."
"If the people only understood": that's the news media. "A revolution before morning": that's the opposite of sucking it up for a $700 billion bailout.

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Obama, McCain Clash Over Job Losses

Obama fans in Alaska
(AP) Democrat Barack Obama used word of the nation's worst monthly job loss in over five years Friday to argue the polices of his Republican opponents "are killing jobs in America every single day." Republican John McCain retorted that Obama's tax and spending plans won't solve the problem.
The government reported employers cut 159,000 jobs last month, the ninth straight month of job losses for a total of almost 800,000. The crowd gathered to hear Obama at a Pennsylvania high school football field booed when he told them the numbers and again when he told them McCain recently said the economy is fundamentally strong and has made great progress under President Bush.
The Illinois senator encouraged voters to change the Republican leadership in the White House that he said hasn't worked. He disputed McCain running mate Sarah Palin's claim in a debate Thursday night that own spending plan would be a job killer.
"When Sen. McCain and his running mate talk about job killing, that's something they know a thing or two about," Obama said. "Because the policies they've supported and are supporting are killing jobs in America every single day."
Hours later at a town hall meeting in Pueblo, Colo., McCain himself said Obama's plans would hurt the economy.
"He wants higher taxes, more government, higher spending, and frankly that record is not something which has been good for America and we won't let it happen," McCain said.
Obama is proposing tax increases only for those earning more than $250,000 but would cut taxes for those making less - details that McCain and Palin don't mention.
You can check the plans of Obama on his website to find the truth about what Obama's plans are.

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McCain's Own 60's Radical Pal

By Marc Cooper
The McCain campaign shows no shame in engaging in a tired guilt-by-association tactic as Sarah Palin accuses Obama of "palling around with terrorists." This desperate calumny derives from Obama once serving on the same non-profit board as former 60's radical Bill Ayers, one of the founders of the Weather Underground.

But what about McCain's own associations with former 60's radicals. Indeed, until just a few years ago, McCain openly boasted not only about his passing friendship but also his deep collaboration with one of the most prominent of Vietnam-era student radicals, David Ifshin. The same David Ifshin who denounced America on Radio Hanoi as McCain sat locked up as a POW.

I met Ifshin about the same time he came into McCain's life. But under very different circumstances. In 1970, as president of the left-leaning National Student Association, Ifshin traveled to North Vietnam with other anti-war radicals and it was then that he went on Radio Hanoi to denounce his own country's war effort. That broadcast was piped directly into POW McCain's cell in the Hanoi Hilton and he was understandably enraged by what he thought was a traitorous act by a fellow American.
I crossed paths with the same David Ifshin a few months later when he showed up in Chile with folksinger Phil Ochs and Yippie leader Jerry Rubin. We spent some days together n Santiago and I can personally attest that while Ifshin never went as far as Ayres did in becoming a literal bomb-thrower, he was very much emblematic of a generation of radical dissidents. Ifshin had risen to notoriety by leading the takeover of his Syracuse university campus. He opened up his NSA offices to radicals trying to shut down Washington DC with streets protests in May 1971. Just after their sojourn in Chile, Ifshin and Ochs went on to Uruguay, joined a local university takeover and were arrested and deported.

As the years passed, Ifshin - just like Ayers-- eventually moved into the American political mainstream. Ayers came out of the underground, took up education as a profession and staked himself out on the non-violent political left. Ifshin moved more quickly to the center and eventually became General Counsel to the Bill Clinton campaign as well as a prominent leader in pro-Israeli causes. But until the day he died, at age 47 in 1996, Ifshin never renounced nor apologized for his youthful, radical past.

In the meantime, and much to his credit, Senator John McCain forged a close personal friendship with Ifshin, as well as a working political alliance. Together they worked to establish the Institute for Democracy in Vietnam and partnered up on the issue of normalization of relations with Vietnam.

As recently as two years ago, speaking at Columbia College, McCain affectionately and warmly recalled his relationship with Ifshin saying:

"We worked together in an organization dedicated to promoting human rights in the country where he and I had once come for different reasons. I came to admire him for his generosity, his passion for his ideals, for the largeness of his heart, and I realized he had not been my enemy, but my countryman . . . my countryman ...and later my friend. His friendship honored me. We disagreed over much. Our politics were often opposed, and we argued those disagreements. But we worked together for our shared ideals."

That John McCain is unrecognizable from the man who today stands behind the scurrilous attacks suggesting that Barack Obama pals around with terrorists because Bill Ayres - when Obama was literally eight years old--stupidly fancied himself an armed revolutionary.
The old John McCain was able to overcome his own repulsion against a young man who went on the radio station of the enemy who was holding and torturing him and built a warm friendship with him. If Obama were to run commercials today criticizing McCain for hanging out with the Tokyo Rose of the Vietnam era, it would be nearly as execrable as the McCain campaign's current smears around Bill Ayres.

Agency’s ’04 Rule Let Banks Pile Up New Debt

Christopher Cox, left, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, and Roel C. Campos at a House hearing in 2007. Mr. Campos was on the commission in 2004 when a decision was made to change the net capital rule for big investment banks.
Many events in Washington, on Wall Street and elsewhere around the country have led to what has been called the most serious financial crisis since the 1930s. But decisions made at a brief meeting on April 28, 2004, explain why the problems could spin out of control. The agency’s failure to follow through on those decisions also explains why Washington regulators did not see what was coming.
On that bright spring afternoon, the five members of the Securities and Exchange Commission met in a basement hearing room to consider an urgent plea by the big investment banks.
They wanted an exemption for their brokerage units from an old regulation that limited the amount of debt they could take on. The exemption would unshackle billions of dollars held in reserve as a cushion against losses on their investments. Those funds could then flow up to the parent company, enabling it to invest in the fast-growing but opaque world of mortgage-backed securities; credit derivatives, a form of insurance for bond holders; and other exotic instruments.
The five investment banks led the charge, including Goldman Sachs, which was headed by Henry M. Paulson Jr. Two years later, he left to become Treasury secretary.
A lone dissenter — a software consultant and expert on risk management — weighed in from Indiana with a two-page letter to warn the commission that the move was a grave mistake. He never heard back from Washington.
One commissioner, Harvey J. Goldschmid, questioned the staff about the consequences of the proposed exemption. It would only be available for the largest firms, he was reassuringly told — those with assets greater than $5 billion.
“We’ve said these are the big guys,” Mr. Goldschmid said, provoking nervous laughter, “but that means if anything goes wrong, it’s going to be an awfully big mess.”
Mr. Goldschmid, an authority on securities law from Columbia, was a behind-the-scenes adviser in 2002 to Senator Paul S. Sarbanes when he rewrote the nation’s corporate laws after a wave of accounting scandals. “Do we feel secure if there are these drops in capital we really will have investor protection?” Mr. Goldschmid asked. A senior staff member said the commission would hire the best minds, including people with strong quantitative skills to parse the banks’ balance sheets.
Annette L. Nazareth, the head of market regulation, reassured the commission that under the new rules, the companies for the first time could be restricted by the commission from excessively risky activity. She was later appointed a commissioner and served until January 2008.
“I’m very happy to support it,” said Commissioner Roel C. Campos, a former federal prosecutor and owner of a small radio broadcasting company from Houston, who then deadpanned: “And I keep my fingers crossed for the future.”
The proceeding was sparsely attended. None of the major media outlets, including The New York Times, covered it.
After 55 minutes of discussion, which can now be heard on the Web sites of the agency and The Times, the chairman, William H. Donaldson, a veteran Wall Street executive, called for a vote. It was unanimous. The decision, changing what was known as the net capital rule, was completed and published in The Federal Register a few months later.
With that, the five big independent investment firms were unleashed.
In loosening the capital rules, which are supposed to provide a buffer in turbulent times, the agency also decided to rely on the firms’ own computer models for determining the riskiness of investments, essentially outsourcing the job of monitoring risk to the banks themselves.
Over the following months and years, each of the firms would take advantage of the looser rules. At Bear Stearns, the leverage ratio — a measurement of how much the firm was borrowing compared to its total assets — rose sharply, to 33 to 1. In other words, for every dollar in equity, it had $33 of debt. The ratios at the other firms also rose significantly.
The 2004 decision for the first time gave the S.E.C. a window on the banks’ increasingly risky investments in mortgage-related securities.
But the agency never took true advantage of that part of the bargain. The supervisory program under Mr. Cox, who arrived at the agency a year later, was a low priority.

Obama to call McCain 'erratic in crisis'

Branding his opponent as “erratic in a crisis,” Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) is preempting plans by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) to portray him as having sinister connections to controversial Chicagoans.
Obama officials call it political jujitsu – turning the attacks back on the attacker.
McCain officials had said early in the weekend that they plan to begin advertising after Tuesday’s debate that will tie Obama to convicted money launderer Tony Rezko and former Weathermen radical William Ayers.
But Obama isn’t waiting to respond. His campaign is going up Monday on national cable stations with a scathing ad saying: “Three quarters of a million jobs lost this year. Our financial system in turmoil. And John McCain? Erratic in a crisis. Out of touch on the economy. No wonder his campaign wants to change the subject.
“Turn the page on the financial crisis by launching dishonorable, dishonest ‘assaults’ against Barack Obama. Struggling families can't turn the page on this economy, and we can't afford another president who is this out of touch.”
Then Obama says: “I'm Barack Obama and I approved this message.”
McCain officials told the press that the new offensive is likely to focus on Rezko and Ayers. The officials said the campaign will not bring up the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s former pastor, because McCain has forbade them from using that as a weapon. Without being specific, the officials said outside groups may focus on Wright.
When word of the planned attacks leaked Saturday, Obama officials said within hours that it was an attempt by McCain to distract voters from the economy.
“We think the McCain campaign made a huge error by telling the press that their strategy was to distract from the most important issue facing voters,” a senior Obama official said. “Every attack going forward will be easy to characterize for what it is – an attempt to distract from the Bush-McCain economic record."
McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds hinted at the tough new line Saturday on “Fox & Friends.”
“There are associations that are important to who Barack Obama is as a candidate, who he’d be as president,” Bounds said.
Obama-Biden communications director Dan Pfeiffer said about the new ads: “If John McCain thinks he can ‘turn the page’ on the economic crisis facing American families, he is even more out of touch than we imagined. Now there may be no good answers for John McCain due to his erratic response to the financial crisis, but his desire to avoid discussing the economy is something we will remind voters of everyday for the next month.”

Dems could hit 60 Senate seats

The possibility that Democrats will build a muscular, 60-seat Senate majority is looking increasing plausible, with new polls showing a powerful surge for the party’s candidates in Minnesota, Kentucky and other states.
A poll out Friday shows Sen. Norm Coleman could now easily lose his Minnesota seat to comedian-turned-candidate Al Franken. A Colorado race that initially looked like a nail-biter has now broken decisively for the Democrats. A top official in the McCain camp told us Sen. Elizabeth Dole is virtually certain to lose in conservative North Carolina.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky has seen his race tighten dangerously close over the past week — and Democrats are considering moving more money into the state very soon. And there is even talk that Republican Sen. Saxby Chambliss is beatable in conservative Georgia after backing the economic bailout package opposed by many voters.
“Before the economic crisis, we had a number of races moving our way,” said Matthew Miller, communications director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. “But now we’re seeing Republican numbers plummet.” GOP officials largely agree.
Senate races don’t grab national attention like the White House battle does. But if these trends hold, the Senate outcome could be almost as important to Washington governance as the presidential winner will be. It takes 60 votes to pass anything through the slow-moving Senate. So the closer the Democrats get to the number, the more power they will have next year to put their stamp on the country.
Democrats say their candidates are benefiting from the wipeout on Wall Street with a single message in every region of the country: “These are the Bush policies coming home to roost.” Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, told Politico: “Americans know that in economically difficult times, we need a change from George Bush’s policies. And incumbents who have voted for six years with Bush, up and down the line, are having a difficult time trying to convince the electorate that they’ve changed their spots."
The trends reflect the growing fear of among top Republicans that their prospects could crater on Nov. 4, with Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) running weakly at the top of the ticket, President Bush as unpopular as ever and the economic crisis serving as a last-minute propellant for the change message of Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.).

With Republicans fearing the loss of 17 to 21 House seats, January 2009 could bring Democrats a dominance over Washington that neither party has experienced since the Reagan years.

Another Bird and Fortune: "Washington Diplomat"

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How did these comedians see it coming in 2007 when financial reporters did not?

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