War-mongering pigs are to chicken for bailout vote?
Anyone surprised by this? I hope not.
Candidates likely to skip bailout vote
By VICTORIA MCGRANE | 9/22/08 3:39 PM EDT
Politico.com
Congress is poised to vote on the biggest government intervention in the financial markets since the Great Depression, but it’s unlikely that any of the three senators vying for the White House will be there – even though all three have talked of little else for over a week.
Sen. John McCain (R- Ariz.) has no plans to return to Washington this week, even though on Monday he expressed discomfort with Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s trillion-dollar bailout plan and has offered his own rescue proposal.
“Sen. McCain is monitoring the situation closely,†said campaign co-manager Steve Schmidt on a conference call Monday. “We will see how this unfolds this week.â€
McCain “retains his rights to evaluate it as it goes along and make a final decision,†said co-manager Rick Davis.
Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) also looks like a no-show.
Senior Obama strategist Robert Gibbs said the campaign would be monitoring the process as it unfolds this week, but as of Monday, the campaign would not commit to Obama making the trip back to Washington – even though the bailout proposal has taken a central role in Obama’s stump speeches.
“It’s safe to say people will know where we are,†Gibbs said.
Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.), Obama’s vice presidential running mate, is also “monitoring†the bailout situation, said spokesman David Wade, calling the rescue legislation “a critical issue.â€
Clearly, the looming first presidential debate is the major factor in encouraging the top-ticket candidates to stay put. The debate, slated for Friday in Oxford, Miss., presents perhaps the biggest chance for either candidate to pull decisively ahead in the race and both are busy rehearsing.
Obama is scheduled to fly to Tampa, Fla., where he will stay until Friday morning to prepare for the debate. He has only one public event scheduled between now and then.
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McCain will travel to Ohio and Michigan to tour factories Tuesday, then to New York Wednesday to visit the United Nations and appear on David Letterman. McCain heads to Mississippi Wednesday night for debate prep.
Indeed, the Senate bailout vote could fall on Friday itself, creating a huge logistical headache for both candidates even to make sure they’re on stage when the curtain goes up at Ole Miss. Much less disciplined than the House, the Senate has a bad habit of delayed and ever-changing vote times.
But even without a high-pressure debate on the calendar, the candidates would be reluctant to take precious time away from campaigning with a mere 40-odd days left before Election Day.
Neither candidate trekked back to Capitol Hill to cast another important economic vote on July 26, when the Senate cleared a massive housing bill that aimed to shore up mortgage markets and prevent hundreds of thousands of foreclosures.
Biden, who had not yet been tapped as Obama's running mate, was there for the rare Saturday vote, voting “yea.â€
Obama, however, did return to the Senate July 10 to vote in support of stalled Medicare legislation, which had failed on an earlier attempt to clear the 60-vote filibuster hurdle. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, recently diagnosed with a brain tumor, also made a dramatic appearance to vote for the bill, which blocked a scheduled 10.6 percent cut in Medicare reimbursements for physicians.
The legislation passed, 69-30. McCain was the only “not present†on the Senate vote tally that day.
An Obama aide suggested that for the bailout, Obama would repeat that past pattern of returning for votes where the margin is close.
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Scholars speculate on an electoral college 'doomsday'?
The underlying assumption by all of the scholars is that McInsane will take Texas' 34 electoral votes. Apparantly, Texas has been set up to be the new Florida-style election fiasco state. If you haven't heard, both the Democratic and Republican parties missed the filing deadline for their respective candidates as required by Texas law. Here's a primer:
September 17, 2008 9:31 am EST
Atlanta, GA – Bob Barr, the Libertarian Party's nominee for president, has filed a lawsuit in Texas demanding Senators John McCain and Barack Obama be removed from the ballot after they missed the official filing deadline
http://www.bobbarr2008.com/press/press-releases/133/bob-barr-files-suit-...
269 tie: An electoral college 'doomsday'?
Scholars speculate on scenario
http://www.washtimes.com/news/2008/sep/23/an-electoral-college-doomsday/
On Nov. 5, the presidential election winds up in a electoral-college tie, 269-269, the Democrat-controlled House picks Sen. Barack Obama as president, but the Senate, with former Democrat Joe Lieberman voting with Republicans, deadlocks at 50-50, so Vice President Dick Cheney steps in to break the tie to make Republican Sarah Palin his successor.
"Wow," said longtime presidential historian Stephen Hess. "Wow, that would be amazing, wouldn't it?"
"If this scenario ever happened, it would be like a scene from the movie 'Scream' for Democrats," said Democratic strategist Mary Anne Marsh. "The only thing worse for the Democrats than losing the White House, again, when it had the best chance to win in a generation, but to do so at the hands of Cheney and Lieberman. That would be cruel."
Sound impossible? It's not. There are at least a half-dozen plausible ways the election can end in a tie, and at least one very plausible possibility - giving each candidate the states in which they now lead in the polls, only New Hampshire - which went Republican in 2000 and Democratic in 2004, each time by just 1.5 percent - needs to swap to the Republican column to wind up with a 269-269 tie.
There are currently 10 tossup states, according to RealClearPol-itics.com, which keeps a running average of all state polls. If Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain wins Ohio, Virginia, New Hampshire and Indiana - not at all far-fetched - and Mr. Obama takes reliably Democratic states Pennsylvania and Michigan, and flips Colorado (in which he holds a slight poll lead), with the two splitting New Mexico and Nevada, the electoral vote would be tied at 269.
Absurd? Possibly, and there is not complete agreement among constitutional experts on whether a newly elected Congress or the currently sitting House and Senate would make the decision.
So try this scenario: The newly elected House, seated in January, is unable to muster a majority to choose a president after a 269-269 tie, but the Senate, which is expected to be controlled by Democrats, picks Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. from the Democratic ticket. If the House is still deadlocked at noon on Inauguration Day, Jan. 20, Mr. Biden becomes acting president.
Or try this one on for size: Neither the House nor the Senate fulfills its constitutional duty to select the president and the vice president by Jan. 20, so House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, California Democrat, becomes acting president until the whole mess is sorted out.
"That would cause all kinds of lawsuits: We would have 50 Floridas, and we might not know who the president is for two years," said Judith Best, a political science and Electoral College specialist at the State University of New York in Cortland.
The archaic system in the Constitution was set up in the days of oil lamps and horse-drawn carriages. After the presidential vote on the first Tuesday in November, electors have until the Monday after the second Wednesday in December, this year Dec. 15, to reach the state capital, where they cast their ballots for president.
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"I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corpora