No Blank-Check Bailout

The bill for decades of American greed has just come due, and deadbeats at every level of society are trying to avoid paying their share.

From street-level avaricious buyers of bigger homes than they could afford with zero down and mortgage brokers and banks willing to bilk them to the covetous upper-echelon insurance companies, Wall Street houses and hedge funds that packaged all-but-worthless indebtedness at a markup for free-lunch investors, all eyes are now on Congress to pick up the tab with taxpayer money--to buy all that trash for cash without any safeguards.

Moreover, it has to be done in a super-hurry with no questions asked or the freeloaders in the markets will go into a swoon, as they did today.

Before Congress gives the Bush Administration an economic blank check comparable to the 2002 carte blanche to shoot up the Middle East, saner Senators are asking for more supervision of the Treasury handouts, more equity from the Wall Street casinos that lost their bets and more emphasis on helping responsible home owners who got caught in the squeeze.

Henry Paulson may tell them the sky is falling, but that doesn't mean that our lawmakers have to respond like Henny Pennies in a panic.

Can Hillary Be a Healer?

As they hold their private summit in Washington tonight, the question that hangs in the air, whether she is on Obama's ticket or not, is: Can Hillary Clinton rise above a lifetime of experience to help heal the Democratic Party?

As someone who has had to fight all her public life, from the 1992 health care fiasco through her husband's impeachment and a year and a half of brass-knuckles campaigning, who has had to show voters she is tough enough to be Commander-in-Chief, who has had to carry the accumulated anger and resentments of her gender, and now their bitter disappointment, is it humanly possible for one woman, however resilient, to turn away from all that and use her strength to bring peace to a fractured party?

This moment is as much a test for Hillary Clinton as her 2002 vote for the resolution authorizing Bush to invade Iraq. Back then, none of the potential Democratic candidates could summon the courage to oppose it for fear of appearing weak. They all failed, but how much more pressure did she feel then as a woman in that position and five years later not to admit it was mistake?

As it turned out, the need to appear tough hurt her candidacy, and in the past few weeks, her posture as "a fighter" in the face of impending defeat and in the past few days her refusal to acknowledge the reality of it have damaged her even further.

But now, in these next days, Hillary Clinton has a chance to turn away from all that. As her backers try to blackmail Obama into putting her on the ticket, her statement today that the choice is his alone is a good start.

It would be heartening to see her rise above the politicking of this moment and show the wisdom and leadership her party needs to start repairing the damage that eight years of nasty Bush-Rove politics has done to the country.

Senator Byrd's Decision

A 90-year-old man, who once wore the robes of the Ku Klux Klan and whose constituents voted for Hillary Clinton last week by a margin of more than 2-1, endorsed Barack Obama for president today.

Sen. Robert Byrd of West Viriginia, third in line of presidential succession, may well be the most superdelegate of them all, in deciding the Democratic nominee.

“I believe," he said, "Barack Obama is a shining young statesman, who possesses the personal temperament and courage necessary to extricate our country from this costly misadventure in Iraq, and to lead our nation at this challenging time in history...Barack Obama is a noble-hearted patriot and humble Christian, and he has my full faith and support.”

Byrd, who led the opposition to the 2002 Senate resolution giving George W. Bush a blank check to invade Iraq, was apparently not swayed by Hillary Clinton's conversion to his point of view and co-sponsoring a resolution last year to "de-authorize" the war.

More than four thousand lives and half a trillion dollars after her vote for the original authorization, the Senator from West Virginia must have decided that was too little and too late.

Iraq, Iraq, Iraq

Exit polls tomorrow night will undoubtedly show voters went into the booths worried about health care, home foreclosures, job security and other fallout from an impending recession.

Their concerns are understandable, but they may want to recall that a little over a year ago, in November 2006, their ballots gave control of Congress to Democrats with a mandate to stop the war in Iraq.

That did not happen and since then voters have been lulled by an Imperial President, using Gen. Petraeus as a human shield, into forgetting that American deaths there now total 3,945 at a cost to taxpayers exceeding $10 billion a month.

All the Republican candidates, except Ron Paul, are in favor of continuing to do that.

As for the Democrats, in 2002, I wrote to Sen. Hillary Clinton pleading with her not to give George W. the power to invade Iraq and warning that, if she did, I would never vote for her for any office. Tomorrow I will keep that promise.

Democratic Sleepwalking in Washington

Now that the month of decision about Iraq has come and gone in a Petraeus-MoveOn cloud of dust, the United States government starts October in a worse stupor than ever.

Democrats who took over Congress in a fever to stop the old war and expose Bush-Cheney lawlessness have just opened the door to a new war and, after months of bloviating about Administration scandals, have only the sorry scalp of Alberto Gonzales to show for their efforts.

The Presidential front runners are still wagging fingers at George Bush without promising to be out of Iraq by 2013 while the frontmost runner of all, the new, improved Hillary Clinton of 2007, casts a vote for Kyl/Lieberman aggression against Iran that looks very much like the one for invading Iraq in 2002.

Only a party elder and a Senate newcomer are awake enough to sound an alarm. As Mario Cuomo reminds Congress of its Constitutional power and responsibility, freshman Senator Jim Webb speaks up about last week’s move against Iran:

“This proposal is Dick Cheney’s fondest pipe dream. It’s not a prescription for success. At best, it’s a deliberate attempt to divert attention from a failed diplomatic policy. At worst, it could be read as a back door method of gaining Congressional validation for action without one hearing or without serious debate.”

Whatever Bush and Cheney have put into the Washington water supply, it has most Democrats pushing the snooze button on their 2008 alarm clocks. They may wake up with the worst political hangover ever.

Cuomo Calls Out the Democrats

The man who should have run in 1988 and spared us both Bushes is now telling Democrats to keep the mutant son from illegally getting us into a war with Iran as he did in Iraq.

Mario Cuomo broke his political silence Friday night after the Lieberman/Kyl vote with an impassioned reminder that the Constitution gave war-making power to Congress to avoid having it exercised by one man who “may be mad, an egotist, misguided or stupid.”

“That power cannot be delegated,” he said on MSNBC’s Hardball. “You can’t adopt a resolution and say well, the Founding Fathers wanted us to do it, but it’s too heavy a lift for us, so we empower you, Mr. President, if you feel like doing it, to do it.”

He enjoined Democrats not to repeat their 2002 mistake of abdicating their will to a President who misjudged everything about going to war in Iraq:

“(H)e was wrong about the reason for it, he was wrong about complicity, he was wrong about how many troops we needed, he was wrong about how we would be greeted when we got there, he was wrong about the civil war, wrong about how much it would cost, wrong about how long it would last and now you’re saying maybe he can start another war.”

A new generation may not remember the former Governor of New York who dropped out of public life after electrifying the 1984 Democratic convention with his “shining city on a hill” keynote speech and in 1992 going as far as keeping a plane waiting to fly to New Hampshire to run against the reelection of the first President Bush.

Cuomo changed his mind at the last minute and, after Bill Clinton’s election, declined a likely nomination to the Supreme Court.

When a man of that caliber reminds this year’s Presidential hopefuls to go to the mat with Bush about Iran, they would do well to listen.

Congress' Sound of Silence

The theme music in the halls these days should be the Simon and Garfunkel lament about “People talking without speaking/People hearing without listening/People writing songs that voices never share/And no one dared/Disturb the sound of silence.”

The post-Petraeus mood in both Houses is restless despair with Senate Democrats losing interest in the bill to “de-authorize” the war and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi poignantly asking centrists to propose some new plan to break the stalemate over getting us out of Iraq.

Meanwhile, Democrat Presidential candidates are talking about health care, immigration, anything but the war on the campaign trail.

It’s been a long, long time from May to September, and the party that took control of Congress with promises to get us out of the Middle East mess is well on the way toward owning it in the public’s eyes.

They may want to recall another line from the old song: “Silence like a cancer grows.”

Bush's Blitzkreig

The Pentagon has plans for massive air strikes against 1,200 targets in Iran, designed to annihilate the Iranians’ military capability in three days, according to “a national security expert,” which is Washingtonese for a Bush flack who works for something called the Nixon Center.

Will somebody please hide Dick Cheney’s copy of “Mein Kampf” and remind him of what happened after shock and awe annihilated the Iraqis’ military capability.

If his Neo-Cons want to play soldier again, send them off to camp with spray guns and tell Congress to start working on a resolution to make it clear that attacking Iran is not covered by the blank check they gave the Administration to go into Iraq.