Debate Reaction: The pundits I saw last night on the TV machine (as our beloved Rachel Maddow calls it) all seemed to see the thing as a tie. I didn't. I thought McCain clearly won.
Why?
In my mind, McCain went into the debate as a crazily unreliable batshit insane guy who is all over the map on everything. But he was completely coherent in all of his foreign policy-related comments, and not just coherent in a Republican sense, but coherent in a reality-based community sense. I disagree with him, but he was clear and was not struggling at all to make his points. He may very well have been heavily prepped, but the prep just made his answers deeper, rather than bubbling to the surface, -like, in a tumble of non sequiturs.
Yes, he told a string of lies about Obama's record, but that's what Republicans do these days.
But for me, he regained a level of respectability that he had lost in the past two weeks of flailing over the economic crisis. Whether or not the undecided voters see it that way, I can't say.
Obama, on the other hand, seemed to me a lot like Kerry. He had the facts and he had coherent answers, but he just wasn't direct enough in his answers.
And $deity spare us the awful "talk to each other" format. It may have looked really great on The West Wing, but when your debators are not actors delivering pre-scripted lines, it maybe doesn't work so well.
What I'd like to see is a debate that is fact checked in real time, maybe with a single moderator and a panel of bloggers with computers researching every claim, so they could provide documentation on the lies to the moderator so he/she could call the candidates on them. In this debate, Obama might have been called on 2 or 3 misrepresentations at most, while McCain would have been called on at least a dozen outright lies and myriad other misrepresentations.
Of course, it will never happen.
Regulation vs. Good Business Sense: With all this talk about the financial crisis, I can't help but wonder how stupid the people running these firms really are. Couldn't they tell that the mortgages and investments that have gone bad were bad ideas in the first place?
Take the so-called "liar loans," where there was no effort to verify income of potential borrowers, and borrowers were encouraged to inflate their income so that they'd be able to get bigger mortgates (and, hence, bigger houses). Why did anyone think it was a good idea to disconnect the mortgage from a realistic assessment of the borrower's ability to pay?
Of course, it's not like this tendency in lenders is new. In 1987 I bought a used car (with an insurance settlement to replace an old beater that was stolen), and I had to fight with the car dealer over the price I was willing to spend. I had so much money from the insurance settlement, and wanted to pay a certain amount per month in car payment and no more. But the dealer kept arguing with me, saying my income would allow me to afford a lot more car (with a much longer loan period and a higher monthly payment). I kept insisting that I didn't *want* to pay more. This was met with a blank stare, something the salesman couldn't seem to comprehend. I eventually got exactly what I asked for, and a $110/month car payment (I think it was a 2-year loan period, but can't recall for certain).
Why would any sensibly-run lender want to loan not just more than what the borrower wants, but more than the borrower's income justifies? Is that not just a really bad business decision?
This is why it annoys me that the government seems to be stepping in to buy the bad investments, and so many commentators seem so willing to say "there's enough blame to go around for everybody." No, there *isn't* -- if the lenders had followed good business practices, none of this would have happened. They didn't and now the whiny-assed titty babies want to be rescued from their bad judgement.
It pisses me off a lot, especially given that the same people championing the bailout (I mean *you*, John McCain) were perfectly happy last Spring to tell the borrowers that they didn't deserve a bailout themselves because they'd made bad decisions in taking out these mortgages.
NOTE: I found this post in draft stage today. It's apparently been sitting there since early 2004. It is just as relevant today as it was then.
Those Wacky Catholics: Bishop Raymond Burke of the diocese of La Crosse, Wisconsin has issued an order that prohibits priests in his diocese from administering communion to Catholic representatives who have voted for legislation that allows individual choice on the subject of abortion (see article here).
It has often been said that Catholics in general do not know their Bible, and it seems to me that such a decree as this ignores the lesson of one of Jesus Christ's parables, the lesson of which is "Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's and unto God that which is God's." This parable, and this lesson, is included in 3 of the 4 Gospels (the exact verse in each case being Matthew 22:21, Mark 12:17 and Luke 20:25.
Now, it seems to me that the general principle established here by Jesus is that there are secular realms in which one has secular duties that do not in any way conflict with one's sacred duties. Indeed, that principle is enshrined in the US Constitution, and is at the very heart of all the civic and governmental structures of our nation.
Officeholders, like Roman taxpayers, have duties to their constituents that are independent of their religious duties.
This despicable Wisconsin bishop has undone, in a stroke, all the progress that was made in the last half of the 20th Century in debunking the lie that Catholic lawmakers would be beholden to the Pope, rather than to those who elect them. John F. Kennedy was the first Roman Catholic president, and this was a major stumbling block for many voters. But his words and actions demonstrated that in his duties as civic officeholder, there was no conflict, as demonstrated by the words of Jesus himself.
Now, it seems that this is no longer the case. Roman Catholic officeholders must now shirk their civic duties and let their Church's decrees rule their voting decisions, or face separation from the central sacrament of their church, and, thus, can never be fully in a state of grace.
The Pope has taken the same position on the issue of gay marriage, ignoring that the question being considered by officeholders worldwide is not a religious one, but a civic one, the question of the definition of civil marriage (which is distinct from religious marriage).
Roman Catholics always seem to want it both ways. When the Act-Up protesters disrupted mass at St. Patrick's in New York City in 1989, this was seen as a dreadful intrusion into the religious space. Indeed, it was exactly that, but it came as a response to the Church's intrusion into the civic realm. If the Church insists on trying to shape lawmaking, which has an impact on all citizens, Catholic or not, they open themselves to interference and disruption from outside, in just the same fashion as their own actions interfere with and disrupt the lives of those who are not under the authority of the Church.
Roman Catholics in the US need to learn that they cannot interfere in civic affairs without there being a corresponding reaction from non-Roman Catholic citizens. The result of the bishop of La Crosse's decree and the Pope's recommendations on gay marriage is that Roman Catholics are now disqualified from public office, as they are now under the kind of pressure from their Church that we as non-Catholic citizens can simply not expect them to endure. They now are required to have duel allegiance, and as voters, we cannot vote for any candidates whose allegiance is to anything but the consituency that elected them.
