Have I Entered a Parallel Universe?

Last night as I was falling asleep I caught a few minutes of the film "Bowfinger," particularly the scene where the Hollywood star played by Eddie Murphy becomes convinced that aliens are determined to swoop down and steal his reproductive organs for scientific study.

Turns out it was a fitting way to end the day. For what I witnessed today had me truly wondering whether I had entered a strange alternative universe, one that looked and felt very much like ours except for the fact that every living soul had irretrievably lost his marbles (but, thankfully, not his privates).

First, I finally got around to viewing a bit of Sarah Palin's interview with Katie Couric, particularly the passage lampooned on Saturday Night Live this past weekend by Tina Fey. I am simply flabbergasted. The video speaks volumes. Watch it here.

This woman simply is not qualified to serve as vice president. I have no other words to describe my utter incredulousness in the face of her candidacy.

Of course, we have the freedom to not vote for Palin. What our elected leaders in the House of Representatives did today by voting down the $700 billion bailout package that the Bush administration and congressional leaders hammered out over the weekend is an example of ineptitude and malice on the grandest of scales — and, unfortunately, there is little we can do about it in the near term.

With giant, blue-chip financial institutions falling like dominoes on a daily basis, countless others on the brink of failure, credit markets seized up and securities markets plummeting worldwide, a majority of House members stared into the abyss this afternoon and said "Bring it On!" The stock market responded with its worst day in two decades. We are in uncharted financial territory here. People are worried that the money in their savings accounts will disappear. The price of oil plummeted on widespread fears of a deep global recession.

Legislators, after scuttling the bailout for craven political reasons last week, had a second chance to behave like adults who cared more about their country and their fellow human beings than about their re-election prospects, and they blew it. Republican or Democrat, it does not matter. Our leaders have failed us and have thrown the United States and the rest of the world within a hair's breadth of a serious economic depression. Citizens should punish every last legislator who abandoned his country today by voting them out of office at our very next opportunity.

Barney Frank's CEO Pay Fantasy

I think Barney Frank is a good man with fine intentions. But he is dead wrong to have insisted upon attaching limits on financial executives' pay to the $700 billion plan reached yesterday to bail out the country's troubled financial institutions. Frank, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, is wrong not only about the wisdom of the government regulating what private companies pay their CEOs, but also about Congress' history of meddling with private-sector paychecks. 

"This is the first time in the history of the United States that anything has been done by the Congress to curtail excessive CEO compensation," Frank said about the plan yesterday. 

Wrong. 

Set aside for a moment the quite thorny issue of how to define "excessive" — as well as the general consensus among our elected leaders that the bailout is an unfortunate, if necessary, incursion by government into the free market — and consider the following: 

In 1993 Congress enacted legislation that drastically altered the tax law surrounding executive compensation, rescinding the tax-deductibility of any cash compensation over $1 million. Supporters of the measure thought it would force companies to curb runaway executive compensation. Instead, it prompted smart people in private sector, chiefly in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street, to begin granting executives gobs of stock options, which were not subject to the new tax. 

So, rather than keeping executive pay down, this measure contributed to the orgy of options grants in the late 1990s and early 2000s that fueled the dot-com bubble and a wave of accounting frauds involving companies such as Enron, WorldCom, Tyco International and Adelphia Communications. In many of these cases CEOs and other top-level executives had so much financial gain riding on their stock prices that they succumbed to accounting chicanery that would artificially inflate those stock prices. The collapses of these corporations and the collateral damage to financial markets cost investors — including mutual fund shareholders and beneficiaries of union pension plans, 401(k)s and IRAs, the very Joe Sixpacks that Frank and other Democratic members of Congress are pandering to with this addition to the Paulson bailout plan — tens of billions of dollars.  

Frank is right to complain about the prolonged failure of government to sufficiently regulate the financial-services sector, a failure that contributed greatly to the crisis from which we are now struggling to emerge. He and his peers should push for more sensible oversight as part of a broad restructuring of our financial-regulatory infrastructure, once the dust settles from this bailout. I believe firmly that a limited dose of thoughtful, balanced government regulation of the private market is absolutely necessary to prevent capitalism, the best organizing principle mankind has yet devised, from eating itself. But attaching unrelated, willy-nilly limits on the free market such as this harebrained executive-comp measure — and then claiming such nonsense as an unprecedented victory for the Little Guy against The Man — is disingenuous at best and, indeed, as the history of legislative unintended consequences illustrates, potentially harmful to our country.  

Irresponsible. Reckless. Dangerous. McCain.

I know this is supposed to be a non-partisan, fair-minded blog. I'm really, really, really trying to keep it that way. But I'm getting angry. Very angry. 

As I write this stock markets around the world are plummeting in response to Washington's failure to agree on a rescue package for the badly battered global financial system. 

My reading of the events of the past few days leads me to the conclusion that McCain is primarily to blame for this outcome. 

The market crisis deepens with every hour: today the federal government seized Washington Mutual, which has so many bad mortgages on its books it can no longer fund itself. This is the biggest bank failure in American history. 

Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson unveiled his bailout plan on Sunday. In an interview on Tuesday McCain said he couldn't say whether he supported it or not because he'd not yet read it:

Hmmmmmm. He hadn't had a chance to see it "on paper" yet. Well, what if we try "The Google?"

Hold on, be right back. 

There. In 0.31 seconds I found the text of the plan in an article from Sunday's New York Times

Senator, the plan is two and a half pages short. It took me about three minutes, just now, to read from beginning to end. So, in less than four minutes, while writing this post, I learned more about the plan than you did in the two days after its release. 

As a United States Senator, and ranking member of the Commerce Committee, shouldn't you have been paying more attention? Granted, you're not particularly facile with them newfangled computers, but I'm willing to bet 1,000 shares of WaMu that Paulson probably would have picked up the phone and read the whole plan to you, the old-fashioned way, had you thought to ask. 

Yet on Wednesday we were supposed to believe that you had grown so concerned with the imminent threat to the economy that you had to suspend your campaign, including Friday's debate with Senator Obama, and rush to Washington to fix things. (But not before an interview with that hard-hitting journalist Katie Couric, a sample of whose award-winning work is embedded below).

 

Then, on Thursday, House Republican leader John Boehner, during the White House photo-op you and your party orchestrated so that you might somehow glom the credit for a bailout that already looked all but certain to pass, announced that his caucus could not support the bailout plan. Why? Because they felt that the Democrats wanted to speed up announcement of the agreement to head off your brazen attempt at exploiting this crisis for political gain. 

So, in summary, our leaders in Washington had finally come to their senses and appeared ready to behave like adults for a fleeting moment to solve a major crisis and you, Senator McCain — the self-styled problem solver who is supposedly above politics-as-usual — have singlehandedly derailed that effort. 

Congratulations on undoing an entire career of honorable service to our nation. 

A Rare McCain Interview

Thanks to a Citizen in Maine for passing along this link to an interview with John McCain by a local TV news anchor there. 

I'll mostly let you all judge his statements for yourselves, but I thought the two most interesting lines were:

1. The interviewer asks what qualifications Sarah Palin has to help McCain fight what he has defined as the world's foremost challenge: Islamic extremism. To paraphrase McCain: "Hey, can we talk about the economy instead?" Hope he does better than that if he decides to show for the foreign-policy-bee in Mississippi tonight. 

2. McCain on his running mate: "She knows probably more about energy than anybody else in the United States of America." 

Discuss.

 

Talk To Me

"What must I do

What does it take

To get you to

Talk to me?"

—Bruce Springsteen, "Talk to Me" (From the 1978 Southside Johnny & the Asbury Jukes album Hearts of Stone).

I'm getting lonely in here. 

Sure, it's fun for me to express my thoughts on this blog. But I want it to be more than just an outlet for me. 

I know that several of the folks I email my posts to have become regular readers. Some have been kind enough to share the blog with their friends and family, and to email me back with their thoughts on whatever I'm going off about at the moment. To those of you who have done so, thanks. I appreciate it.  

But for this thing to really work you need to tell me and everyone else who reads Citizen what you think. Post a comment. Keep a dialogue going. We can learn from one another and be better citizens but it just takes a little bit of effort. 

At least one of my readers has said it's "intimidating" to respond with comments. Hogwash. No law requires you to attach your name to your comments. Post anonymously. If you have something to say, say it. It doesn't have to be profound. Pretend we're at a cocktail party and say what you'd say there. 

As Frasier Crane would say, I'm listening...