FREEDOMPOST, a lawyer's commentary

LARRY SUMMERS BAGGAGE FOR SECRETARY OF THE TREASURY.

 

The Summers Conundrum

  

We all know in the backs of our minds that Barack Obama's incredible victory will eventually be followed by disappointment. But does it have to come so soon, and hit so hard? The answer will be yes, if Lawrence Summers is named treasury secretary in the president-elect's cabinet, as many observers believe will be the case. Summers was one of the key architects of our financial crisis--hiring him to fix the economy makes as much sense as appointing Paul Wolfowitz to oversee the Iraq withdrawal. And when you look at the trail of economic destruction Summers left behind in other crisis-stricken countries who sought his advice in the past, then "terror" might be a more appropriate word than "disappointment."

 

The conventional wisdom is that Summers is the "centrist" choice--Fareed Zakaria ("I think Summers is an extraordinarily brilliant guy") and David Gergen ("Larry Summers would be superb at this job"), two titans of centrism, both weighed in Sunday on the Stephanopoulos show in favor of Summers. And yet so far the debate over Summers has been largely confined to two outrageous moments in his career: his 1991 World Bank memo calling Africa "UNDER-polluted," and his more recent declarations, while serving as president of Harvard, about women's genetic inferiority in math and science. By themselves, these two incidents might be dismissed as merely provocative in a maverick-moron sort of way, as many of Summers' supporters argue; but in the context of Summers's track record, in which he oversaw the destruction of entire economies and covered up cronyism and corruption, his Africa memo and sexist declarations aren't exceptions but rather part of a disturbing pattern.

From the start, Summers has been on the wrong side of Obama's supporters. In 1982, while still a graduate student at Harvard, Summers was brought to Washington by his dissertation advisor Martin Feldstein, the supply-side economist, to serve on Ronald Reagan's Council of Economic Advisors. Those first years in the Reagan administration were crucial in the right-wing war against New Deal regulation of the banking system and financial markets--a war that Reagan's team won, and that we're all paying for today. Although Summers eventually identified himself with the Democratic Party--albeit the right wing of that party--nevertheless, as the New York Times's Peter T. Kilborn wrote in 1988:

He worked for 10 months as a top analyst in President Reagan's Council of Economic Advisers when his mentor, Martin S. Feldstein, was running it, and his colleagues don't recall him venting anti-Reagan heresies then....

"One of the ironies of this business is that Summers's economics are quite close to Feldstein's," said William A. Niskanen, who was a member of the Feldstein council.

It's ironic if you expected Summers to be a liberal Democrat--but par for the course in the context of Summers's real record. Some fifteen years after Summers's stint in the Reaganomics war room, he reappears as one of the key villains fighting to suppress the regulatory efforts of a top official, Brooksley Born, who was trying to call attention to the dangers of the unregulated derivatives, such as credit swap defaults, which today are considered the key to the current economic crisis.

But let's return to the Summers timeline. After his stint in the Reaganomics brain trust, he returned to Harvard to serve as one of the university's youngest professors. In 1988, he was Michael Dukakis's chief economic advisor, but when that campaign failed to bring Summers to power, he turned to America's great rival, the former Soviet Union, to try out his economic experiments. In 1990, Lithuania, a restive Soviet republic seeking independence, hired Summers to advise on that country's economic transformation. Poor Lithuania had no idea what it got itself into. This was Summers's first opportunity to tackle a country in economic crisis and put his wunderkind theories into practice. The results were literally suicidal: in 1990, when Summers first arrived, Lithuania's suicide rate was 26.1 per 100,000 and falling. Just five years after Summers got his hands on Lithuania's economy, life became so unbearable under the economic transition that the suicide rate nearly doubled to 45.6 per 100,000, worse than any other ex-Soviet republic in transition. In fact, it was the highest suicide rate in the world, suggesting something particularly harsh and brutal about the economic transition in that country as opposed to the others, where suffering and pain were common. Things got so bad that in 1992, after just two years of Summers-nomics, the traumatized Lithuanians voted the communist party back into power, the first East European nation to do so--even though just a year earlier Lithuanians actually died on the streets fighting communism.

Fresh off his success in Lithuania, Summers moved to the World Bank, where he was named the chief economist in 1991, the year he issued his famous let's-pollute-Africa memo. It was also the year that Summers, and his Harvard protégé Andrei Schleifer (who worked with Summers on the Lithuania economic transformation), began their catastrophic "rescue" of Russia's crisis-ridden economy. It's a complicated story involving corruption, cronyism and economic devastation. But by the end of the 1990s, Russia's GDP had collapsed by more than 60 percent, its population was suffering the worst death-to-birth ratio of any industrialized nation in the twentieth century, and the financial markets that Summers and Schleifer helped create had collapsed in what was then the world's biggest debt default ever. The result was the rise of Vladmir Putin and a national aversion to free markets and anything associated with Western liberalism.

But that's not all. Summers, through Schleifer, was also tainted with some of that country's corruption, which resulted in a US Justice Department lawsuit against Schleifer and others. While Schleifer was being paid by US taxpayers to advise the Russians on capital markets in the 1990s, his wife, Nancy Zimmerman, bought and traded Russian equities for a Boston hedge fund she ran--they even used Schleifer's US taxpayer-funded offices to run Zimmerman's Moscow-based hedge fund operations.

How close were Larry Summers and Andrei Schleifer? According to former Boston Globe economics correspondent David Warsh, Summers and Schleifer "were among each other's best friends," and Summers taught Schleifer "as an undergraduate, sent him on to MIT for his PhD, took him along on an advisory mission to Lithuania in 1990, and in 1991, shepherded his return to Harvard as full professor, where he was regarded, after Martin Feldstein and Summers, as the leader of the next generation."

In 2000, the Justice Department sought $102 million in damages from Schleifer, one of Schleifer's Harvard associates and Harvard University in a conflict-of-interest suit resulting from Schleifer's role as the lead US adviser to Russia's economic reforms--questioning the way Schleifer and his wife profited from his position. Schleifer's Harvard team in Moscow was funded by USAID in a no-bid contract, and supported by Summers as soon as he moved into the Treasury Department in 1993. So Schleifer benefited from his relationship with Summers twice: first, by getting a choice contract as the US government's man in Moscow in the 1990s when Summers was in power in the US government, one that benefited his wife's hedge fund (earlier this year, Portfolio suggested that the Schleifers' hedge funds made them billionaires ). Then after Schleifer returned to Harvard to face the lawsuit, Summers, now president of Harvard, presided over a controversial settlement that all but let his protégé off the hook. Thanks to pressure by Summers, Schleifer kept his chair at Harvard, where he continues to teach today.

Summers's other favorite man in Russia was Anatoly Chubais--who consistently ranks at the top of Russia's " most hated man" polls. Chubais was executor of the Russian government's privatization program, in which state companies worth tens of billions of dollars were handed over to insiders for a fraction of their worth in blatantly rigged auctions. Summers praised Chubais as a "demigod" and called Chubais and his free-market cohorts "the dream team." In September 1998, after Russia's capital markets collapsed, along with billions in US-taxpayer-backed loans, Chubais boasted to a Russian newspaper, "We swindled them." By "them," he meant the Western and American aid institutions that funded his reforms.

In light of all of the corruption, cronyism and devastation that have marked his career, Summers' statements about an under-polluted Africa or intellectually-inferior women no longer seem like provocative eccentricities but part and parcel of the Summers shtick. And now there's talk that President-elect Obama may hand the keys to national treasury to Summers--meaning that he'll be in charge of overseeing a trillion-dollar taxpayer bailout of the entire financial industry, a process already rife with conflicts of interest, cronyism and corruption--as detailed by Naomi Klein.

The bailout, as currently implemented, threatens to devastate America's economy much as Russia's and Lithuania's were devastated before. The idea that this is exactly the right time and place to put Larry Summers in charge of our economy's future is so frightening that it makes the Sarah Palin vice presidential choice seem almost quaint by comparison. Let's hope the rumors are wrong.

 

OBAMA--"THE ONE"

 I woke up this morning in a cold sweat. I had a dream that Obama was truly "The One" our of a science fiction paperback. The first time I saw him was when he announced for the Presidency in Springfield Illinois followed up by inviting us to view or be told about his miraculous career.

I was attracted to him from the get go because I could never get a handle on him. Usually, I am very good in figuring out what makes people tick. I should be an FBI profiler on that TV show. This man is a total enigma to me. That is not to say that he is a bad man, but it is to say that "he is to good to be true"

I watched the Charlie Rose show last night and one of the guests was Obama's Harvard Law professor. He confirm to me my prior analysis to you as to how he became President of the Review. He was elected by his peers, some of whom were very conservative and some very progressive, all of them brilliant and competitive, and he won them over. No mean feat winning over the creme de la creme.

I believe that once he found his identity, black or white, after a long and intensive study, he planned out his route to be President of the United States. Not for his own personal aggrandizement, but to save America. He was "predestined" in that old Calvinistic way.

I am absolutely flabbergasted as to how "serene" he is, winning the election two days after his grandmother died. Outwardly, he is unshakable. Not a quiver in his voice. Very cautious, very analytical, like "The One". It is his mixture of ethnicity's and cultures that make him mysterious. There is no modern day model of him. He is of the mold of a Napoleon, a Caesar, and Alexander, all of whom at a very young age were predestined to greatness. Greatness not only for himself but for the country he serves. Neither Clinton nor McCAIN had a chance going up against him. He brilliantly and coolly beat both of them. Not an easy feat for a modern day Alexander.

I could easily write a book masquerading as a Doris Kearns Goodwin. The man dominates my thoughts. Am I crazy or what?

FAT ARROGANT PIGS GET SLAUGHTERED WHILE THE MIDDLE CLASS DIE SLOWLY. IS THIS JUSTICE?

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- October 23, 2008 Investors Flee as Hedge Fund Woes Deepen By LOUISE STORY The gilded age of hedge funds is losing its luster. The funds, pools of fast money that defined the era of Wall Street hyper-wealth, are in the throes of an unprecedented shakeout. Even some industry stars are falling back to earth. This unregulated, at times volatile corner of finance — which is supposed to make money in bull and bear markets — lost $180 billion during the last three months. Investors, particularly wealthy individuals, are heading for the exits. As the stock market plunged again on Wednesday, with the Dow Jones industrial average sinking 514 points, or 5.7 percent, the travails of the $1.7 trillion hedge fund industry loomed large. Some funds dumped stocks in September as their investors fled, and other funds could follow suit, contributing to the market plummet. No one knows how much more hedge funds might have to sell to meet a rush of redemptions. But as the industry’s woes deepen, money managers fear hundreds or even thousands of funds could be driven out of business. The implications stretch far beyond Manhattan and Greenwich, Conn., those moneyed redoubts of hedge-fund lords. That is because hedge funds are not just for the rich anymore. In recent years, public pension funds, foundations and endowments poured billions of dollars into these private partnerships. Now, in the midst of one of the deepest bear markets in generations, many of those investments are souring. Granted, hedge funds are not going to disappear. In fact, some are still thriving. Even many of the ones that have stumbled this year are doing better than the mutual fund industry, which has also been hit with withdrawals that have forced their managers to sell. But the reversal for the hedge fund industry represents a sea change for Wall Street and its money culture. Since hedge funds burst onto the scene in the 1990s, they have recast not only the rules of finance but also notions of wealth and status. Hedge-fund riches helped inflate the price of everything from modern art to Manhattan real estate. Top managers raked in billions of dollars a year, and managing a fund became the running dream on Wall Street. Now, for lesser lights, at least, that dream is fading. “For the past five or six years, it seemed anybody could go to their computer and print up a business card and say they were in the hedge fund business, and raise a pot of money,” said Richard H. Moore, the treasurer of North Carolina, which invests workers’ pension money in hedge funds. “That’s going to be gone forever.” As are some hedge funds. For the first time, the industry is shrinking. Worldwide, the number of these funds dropped by 217 during the last three months, to 10,016, according to Hedge Fund Research. Even some of the industry’s most well-regarded managers are starting to retrench. Richard Perry, who until now had not had a down year for his flagship fund in more than a decade, has laid off some employees. Mr. Perry, who began his career at Goldman Sachs, is moving away from stock-picking to focus on the troubled credit markets. Three other hedge fund highfliers — Kenneth C. Griffin, Daniel S. Loeb and Philip Falcone — suffered double-digit losses in September. Steven A. Cohen, the secretive chief of a fund called SAC Capital, has put much of the money in his funds into cash, reducing trading by some of his workers. Many hedge fund investors, particularly the wealthy individuals, are flabbergasted by their losses this year. The average fund was down 17.6 percent through Tuesday, according to Hedge Fund Research. “You’re seeing a lot of shock, a lot of inaction, a lot of reassessment of where their allocations are and what to do going forward,” said Patrick Welton, chief executive of the Welton Investment Corporation, whose fund is up double-digits this year. Many investors, Mr. Welton said, had hoped hedge funds would protect them from a steep decline in the broader market. But in many cases, that has not happened. Now Wall Street is buzzing about how much money could be pulled out of hedge funds — and which funds might bear the brunt of the redemptions. Funds have set aside billions of dollars in cash to prepare for withdrawals, and many prominent funds require their investors to leave their money in the funds for years. That could help relieve some of the pressure. But because hedge funds are largely unregulated, they do not publicly disclose the identity of their investors or whether they have received requests for withdrawals. While it might make sense to pull money out of poorly performing funds, investors might also exit funds that are doing well to offset losses elsewhere. Institutions — pension funds, endowments and the like — pushed into hedge funds after the Nasdaq stock market bust at the turn of the century. Many hedge funds had prospered as technology stocks crashed, leading these investors to believe they would in the future. In Massachusetts, for instance, Norfolk County broached the issue with the state’s pension oversight commission, said Robert A. Dennis, the investment director of the commission. Mr. Dennis was impressed that hedge funds had fared so much better than the broader stock market. Though Mr. Dennis says he recognizes the risks that come with selecting hedge funds, he thinks they remain a good investment. Next week, the state commission will vote on whether to allow some towns with pension funds below $250 million to invest in hedge funds, a move Mr. Dennis supports. “Hedge funds are having a bad year, absolutely, but they’re still holding up better than stocks,” Mr. Dennis said. “Losing less money than another investment is, while not great, it’s still something to be at least satisfied with.” But now that the days of easy money are over, some fund managers are throwing in the towel. One manager, Andrew Lahde, was blunt about his decision. “I was in this game for the money,” Mr. Lahde wrote to his investors recently. He made a fortune betting against the mortgage markets, calling those on the other side of his trades “idiots.” “I have enough of my own wealth to manage,” Mr. Lahde wrote. He did not return telephone calls seeking comment. And what wealth there has been. More than anything else, hedge funds are vehicles for their managers to take a big cut of profits. The lucrative economics of the industry is known as “two and 20.” Managers typically collect annual management fees equal to 2 percent of the assets in their funds, and, on top of that, take a 20 percent cut of any profits. Last year, one manager, John Paulson, reportedly took home $3 billion. But with the industry under pressure, those fat fees are being questioned. Mr. Moore and other investors are starting to ask whether hedge funds deserve all that money. Mr. Griffin, who runs Citadel Investment Group in Chicago, plans to offer funds with lower fees. More changes could be coming, including increased regulation. The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is scheduled to hold a hearing about regulation next month with five hedge fund managers who reportedly made more than $1 billion last year: Mr. Griffin, Mr. Falcone and Mr. Paulson, as well as George Soros and James Simons. 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WHY I CONNECTED TO OBAMA

 I just figured it out. Obama's inner passion is not power or the need to be liked, but IDEALISM. I understand that and that is why he and I connected. I am an idealist and I have struggled hard to overcome sharing a living room with my sister because my father scratched out a living by working two jobs. That translated into trying to be my own person. I started working 20 hours a week at a minimum wage for two years of high school and four years of college. For 7 summers I waited on tables and saved all the money I made. By the time I graduated college I had saved up $15,000, enough to pay my way through law school without any assistance from my parents and without a scholarship. I worked my ass off during my first year of law school and it paid dividends. I was in the top 5% of my class; invited to the Law Review; given a full tuition scholarship for my final 2 years with a matching loan from the school.

My inspiration in college was my political science professor who was a former speech writer for Harry Truman. He gave me a 95% for the class. He wrote all the letters to get me invited to the best law schools. I was accepted to 7 out of 10.

Obama is very diverse. Half white-half black. His black father deserted him when he was 2 years old. Both his mother and father gained their Phd.'s. His mother taught him the benefit of education. They lived on food stamps and then he was required to live with his mother's parents who were both white. He lived a white life but was physically black. This was his conflict about self identification. He gained admission to Columbia but instead of going to law school at that time, he took a job as a community worker for peanuts. He worked for blacks and identified with the black side of his life. After working for 3 years he was admitted to Harvard Law School where he busted his ass and graduated number 1 and was the first black president of the law review. He had it made.

However, he wanted something more than fame, glory, and getting rich. He wanted to contribute to people. He chose to do this through politics. He started at the bottom and learned politics very well. He was defeated for his first run for Congress. Did that deter him? No. He ran for the Senate and won. He made a great speech at the 2004 convention as the protegee of Durbin. That made him an up and coming Democratic politician. Then he audaciously chose to run for the Presidency against the Clintons no less. He correctly identified that America was ready for a sea change. The Clintons under estimated him and he narrowly gained the nomination. I caught on to him when he gave that speech after he won the Iowa caucus. I felt that he seized the moment and acted boldly. His idealism is his passion. His composure is Presidential.

Just think of Lincoln. Lincoln only served for 2 years as a congressman and lost the election for the Senate. He gained national prominence from his debates with Douglas. Lincoln had no experience on a national level, even less than Obama. Yet he had an idealism and courage. His Presidency began with South Carolina withdrawing from the Union. This was a period of crisis for America. He gathered around him the best and the brightest even his competitors. He chose the right time to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. A victory at Gettysburg.

I think that Obama is cool and brilliant to become President during an economic crisis and 2 wars and 8 years of Bush who spoke only to God. He has fulfilled my predictions. He won the nomination with super delegates. He will win the Presidency since he has already been through his path of fire, Hillary Clinton. McCAIN is a glory seeker and that marked his military career and his disdain for academics.

My prediction is that Obama will be elected President and he will be a great one. He has all the right stuff. He is brilliant. He is cool. He will gather around him the best and brightest and get the best from them, but he will be the decision maker. He will do what FDR did, experiment. He will do what JFK did when faced with the Cuban missile crisis. JFK called all the shots and was truly a commander. Having been led into the Bay of Pigs disaster by the Joint Chiefs, he listened to them, but rejected their recommendations to invade and bomb. Just see McNamara's "Fog of War".

He will combine Kennedy and Roosevelt, but he needs an overwhelming majority in Congress and a Supreme Court that will not over turn legislation.

I wish him luck.

CIVIL WAR IN THE REPUBLICAN PARTY BEGINS. GINGRICH STABS HIS PARTY IN THE BACK TO RUN FOR PRESIDENT IN 2012.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich was working aggressively behind the scenes to defeat the Wall Street rescue plan minutes before he himself released a public statement in support of the package, NBC's Andrea Mitchell reported on Tuesday.

Gingrich was whipping up votes for the opposition, Mitchell said, apparently without the knowledge of the current GOP leader, John Boehner, who was responsible for recruiting enough support from his caucus to help ensure the bill's passage. Ultimately, the GOP was only able to rally roughly a third of its members.

"Newt Gingrich," she said on MSNBC, "I am told reliably by leading Republicans who are close to him, he was whipping against this up until the last minute, when he issued that face-saving statement. Newt Gingrich was telling people in the strongest possible language that this was a terrible deal, not only that it was a terrible deal, it was a disaster, it was the end of democracy as we know, it was socialism -- and then at the last minute [he] comes out with a statement when the vote is already in place."

Indeed, as Mitchell noted, shortly before the bill's failure, Gingrich "reluctantly" came out in favor of its passage: "Therefore, while I am discouraged at the final collapse of the Bush Administration, and frustrated by the Democrats' passion for the taxpayer's money, I would reluctantly and sadly vote for the bailout were I still in office."

The rest of the set of Morning Joe had some interesting takes on the news nugget. Joe Scarborough called Gingrich's backstabbing of John Boehner "undercutting his own."

Mike Barnicle offered his own bit of reportorial insight: "Andrea, I could hug you for saying that, because I was told last night by two or they members of Congress that this was the opening salvo of Newt Gingrich's presidential campaign four years hence."

And Mika Brzezinski summed it up succinctly: "Talk about a crap sandwich," a reference to how Boehner described the bailout bill.

LUNATICS CONTROL THE HOUSE. WE NEED THE ELECTION TO SORT IT OUT OR TO THROW THEM OUT.

A House Divided Along Twisted Lines

By Dana Milbank
Tuesday, September 30, 2008; A03

The bailout bill was going down to defeat on the House floor yesterday, and Democratic and Republican leaders were desperately trying to twist arms and change votes when a bipartisan group of backbenchers began to heckle them.

"Regular order!" they cried, demanding that the leaders end the vote and pronounce the bill dead.

In the well of the chamber, Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), the normally genial House majority leader, turned with fury on one of his tormentors, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.), and shouted: "The market's tanking as we speak!"

So it was. The Dow Jones industrial average closed down 778 points, the largest one-day point drop in history. And no wonder: In the Congress of the United States, the insane are now running the asylum.

After the shocking vote of 228 to 205, party leaders did their usual rounds of partisan finger-pointing, but it really wasn't a partisan issue at all. The center had collapsed in favor of a coalition of far-right and far-left zealots. What was once the lunatic fringe was now a majority: 40 percent of House Democrats, going by yesterday's vote, and fully two-thirds of Republicans.

"I don't know that we know the path forward at this point," a broken House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) said in defeat.

How could he? The new majority isn't worried about ephemeral things such as 700-point drops in the Dow. "No, I'm not," Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.) declared after the vote. "The market may be down, but the Constitution is up!"

Indeed, if economic calamity results, there will be many proud authors. Begin with Gohmert, who disrupted proceedings before the first arguments yesterday. "I would move to adjourn so we don't do this terrible thing to our nation," he said. His motion went down, 394 to 8.

Another proud architect of the defeat: Rep. Paul Broun (R-Ga.), who had an earthy perspective on the bill. "Madam Speaker, this is a huge cow patty with a piece of marshmallow stuck in the middle of it," he declared. "I'm not going to eat that cow patty."

Rep. Thaddeus McCotter (R-Mich.), another opponent, found a precedent in Russian lit. "The choice is stark, and it was put forth in the book by Dostoyevsky, in 'The Brothers Karamazov,' " he said.

Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Tex.) thought the problem was on the surface. "Not even Avon or Mary Kay can compete with the cosmetics in this bill," he asserted. And Rep. Todd Akin (R-Mo.) was a one-man train wreck of colliding metaphors as he invoked animal imagery ("the horns of a dilemma . . . two sharp, shiny points we could impale ourselves on"), meteorological imagery ("the sky was going to fall") and weapons imagery ("it's nice to take a bullet for the team").

Supporters of the legislation, by contrast, had trouble mustering the same passion, although Rep. Dan Lungren (R-Calif.) did find a precedent for the bailout in his long-ago job as a lifeguard. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) became entangled in logic as he argued: "This bill offends my principles, but I'm going to vote for this bill to preserve my principles."

On the floor, the usual partisan splits gave way to two new coalitions: pragmatists and wing nuts. Far-left Rep. Dennis Kucinich (Ohio) crossed over to the Republican side to strategize with far-right Rep. Steve King (Iowa), while Gohmert made common cause with Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio), and Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.) celebrated with Rep. Walter Jones (R-N.C.).

Party leaders formed their own cross-aisle camaraderie. Democratic leaders gave Boehner a standing ovation for his speech calling the bill a "mud sandwich" that should be approved anyway. "Nobody wants to vote for this," the minority leader said. But the vote "will separate the men from the boys and the girls from the women."

Minutes later, his colleagues demonstrated their adolescence. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) went over to shake Boehner's hand after the speech, but it became obvious within minutes of the vote's start that Republicans had rejected their leader's plea. Boehner paced about the chamber, shaking his head, puffing out his cheeks and exhaling deeply. Democratic and Republican leaders held open the 15-minute vote for 40 minutes, but after several huddles on the floor, they finally surrendered.

Reporters chased leaders down the halls as they left the chamber. Republican leaders emerged several minutes after a closed-door consult with a strategy: They would blame Pelosi.

"We did think we had a dozen more votes," reasoned Roy Blunt (Mo.), the minority whip, but, "unfortunately, too many of our members were already on the floor when they heard that late speech by the speaker."

A few minutes later, Democratic leaders responded with their own news conference. Rep. Barney Frank (Mass.) ridiculed the idea that Pelosi's speech caused Republicans to turn against the bill. "Somebody hurt my feelings, so I will punish the country?" he asked. Still, he offered, "Give me those 12 people's names and I will go talk uncharacteristically nicely to them."

Leaders held out hope that the crashing market would force the opponents to reconsider. "The impact this can have on the markets will have a big impact in getting people back to wanting to work together," Blunt forecast.

"We must move forward," Pelosi agreed, "and I hope that the markets will take that message."

Nice sentiments. Except Pelosi and Blunt aren't in charge anymore. The lunatics are.

MCCAIN IS LEFT SWINGING IN THE BREEZE HUNG BY HIS OWN VIRULENT DISGUSTING BEHAVIOUR

TimesPeople

---

September 28, 2008

Op-Ed Columnist

McCain’s Suspension Bridge to Nowhere

By FRANK RICH

WHAT we learned last week is that the man who always puts his “country first” will take the country down with him if that’s what it takes to get to the White House.

For all the focus on Friday night’s deadlocked debate, it still can’t obscure what preceded it: When John McCain gratuitously parachuted into Washington on Thursday, he didn’t care if his grandstanding might precipitate an even deeper economic collapse. All he cared about was whether he might save his campaign. George Bush put more deliberation into invading Iraq than McCain did into his own reckless invasion of the delicate Congressional negotiations on the bailout plan.

By the time he arrived, there already was a bipartisan agreement in principle. It collapsed hours later at the meeting convened by the president in the Cabinet Room. Rather than help try to resuscitate Wall Street’s bloodied bulls, McCain was determined to be the bull in Washington’s legislative china shop, running around town and playing both sides of his divided party against Congress’s middle. Once others eventually forged a path out of the wreckage, he’d inflate, if not outright fictionalize, his own role in cleaning up the mess his mischief helped make. Or so he hoped, until his ignominious retreat.

The question is why would a man who forever advertises his own honor toy so selfishly with our national interest at a time of crisis. I’ll leave any physiological explanations to gerontologists — if they can get hold of his complete medical records — and any armchair psychoanalysis to the sundry McCain press acolytes who have sorrowfully tried to rationalize his erratic behavior this year. The other answers, all putting politics first, can be found by examining the 24 hours before he decided to “suspend” campaigning and swoop down on the Capitol to save America from the Sunnis or the Shia, or whoever perpetrated all those credit-default swaps.

To put these 24 hours in context, you must remember that McCain not only knows little about the economy but that he has not previously expressed any urgency about its meltdown. It was on Sept. 15 — the day after his former idol Alan Greenspan pronounced the current crisis a “once-in-a-century” catastrophe — that McCain reaffirmed for the umpteenth time that the “fundamentals of our economy are strong.” As recently as Tuesday he had not yet even read the two-and-a-half-page bailout proposal first circulated by Hank Paulson last weekend. “I have not had a chance to see it in writing,” he explained. (Maybe he was waiting for it to arrive by Western Union instead of PDF.)

Then came Black Wednesday — not for the stock market, which was holding steady in anticipation of Washington action, but for McCain. As the widely accepted narrative has it, his come-to-Jesus moment arrived that morning, when he awoke to discover that Barack Obama had surged ahead by nine percentage points in the Washington Post/ABC News poll. The McCain campaign hastily suited up its own pollster to belittle that finding — only to be drowned out by a fusillade of new polls from Fox News, Marist and CNN/Time, each with numbers closer to Post/ABC than not. Obama was rising most everywhere except the moose strongholds of Alaska and Montana.

That was not the only bad news raining down on McCain. His camp knew what Katie Couric had in the can from her interview with Sarah Palin. The first excerpt was to be broadcast by CBS that night, and it had to be upstaged fast.

But even that wasn’t the top political threat McCain faced last week. Bigger still was the mounting evidence of the seamless synergy between his campaign and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage monsters at the heart of the housing bust that set off our current calamity. Most of all, it was the fast-moving events on that front that precipitated his panic to roll out his diversionary, over-the-top theatrics on Wednesday.

What we were learning — through The New York Times, Newsweek and Roll Call — was ugly. Davis Manafort, the lobbying firm owned by McCain’s campaign manager, Rick Davis, had received $15,000 a month from Freddie Mac from late 2005 until last month. This was in addition to the $30,000 a month that Davis was paid from 2000 to 2005 by the so-called Homeownership Alliance, an advocacy organization that he headed and that was financed by Freddie and Fannie to fight regulation.

The McCain campaign tried to pre-emptively deflect such revelations by reviving the old Rove trick of accusing your opponent of your own biggest failings. It ran attack ads about Obama’s own links to the mortgage giants. But neither of the former Freddie-Fannie executives vilified in those ads, Franklin Raines and James Johnson, had worked at those companies lately or are currently associated with the Obama campaign. (Raines never worked for the campaign at all.) By contrast, Davis is the tip of the Freddie-Fannie-McCain iceberg. McCain’s senior adviser, his campaign’s vice chairman, his Congressional liaison and the reported head of his White House transition team all either made fortunes from recent Freddie-Fannie lobbying or were players in firms that did.

By Wednesday, the McCain campaign’s latest tactic for countering this news — attacking the press, especially The Times — was paying diminishing returns. Davis abruptly canceled his scheduled appearance that day at a weekly reporters’ lunch sponsored by The Christian Science Monitor, escaping any further questions by pleading that he had to hit the campaign trail. (He turned up at the “21” Club in New York that night, wining and dining McCain fund-raisers.)

It’s then that Angry Old Ironsides McCain suddenly emerged to bark that our financial distress was “the greatest crisis we’ve faced, clearly, since World War II” — even greater than the Russia-Georgia conflict, which in August he had called the “first probably serious crisis internationally since the end of the cold war.” Campaigns, debates and no doubt Bristol Palin’s nuptials had to be suspended immediately so he could ride to the rescue, with Joe Lieberman as his Robin.

Yet even as he huffed and puffed about being a “leader,” McCain took no action and felt no urgency. As his Congressional colleagues worked tirelessly in Washington, he malingered in New York. He checked out the suffering on Main Street (or perhaps High Street) by conferring with Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild, the Hillary-turned-McCain supporter best known for her fabulous London digs and her diatribes against Obama’s elitism. McCain also found time to have a well-publicized chat with one of those celebrities he so disdains, Bono, and to give a self-promoting public speech at the Clinton Global Initiative.

There was no suspension of his campaign. His surrogates and ads remained on television. Huffington Post bloggers, working the phones, couldn’t find a single McCain campaign office that had gone on hiatus. This “suspension” ruse was an exact replay of McCain’s self-righteous “suspension” of the G.O.P. convention as Hurricane Gustav arrived on Labor Day. “We will put aside our political hats and put on our American hats,” he declared then, solemnly pledging that conventioneers would help those in need. But as anyone in the Twin Cities could see, the assembled put on their party hats instead, piling into the lobbyists’ bacchanals earlier than scheduled, albeit on the down-low.

Much of the press paid lip service to McCain’s new “suspension” as it had to its prototype. In truth, the only campaign activity McCain did drop was a Wednesday evening taping with David Letterman. Don’t mess with Dave. Picking up where the “The View” left off in speaking truth to power, the uncharacteristically furious host hammered the absent McCain on and off for 40 minutes, repeatedly observing that the cancellation “didn’t smell right.”

In a journalistic coup de grâce worthy of “60 Minutes,” Letterman went on to unmask his no-show guest as a liar. McCain had phoned himself that afternoon to say he was “getting on a plane immediately” to deal with the grave situation in Washington, Letterman told the audience. Then he showed video of McCain being touched up by a makeup artist while awaiting an interview by Couric that same evening at another CBS studio in New York.

It’s not hard to guess why McCain had blown off Letterman for Couric at the last minute. The McCain campaign’s high anxiety about the disastrous Couric-Palin sit-down was skyrocketing as advance excerpts flooded the Internet. By offering his own interview to Couric for the same night, McCain hoped (in vain) to dilute Palin’s primacy on the “CBS Evening News.”

Letterman’s most mordant laughs on Wednesday came when he riffed about McCain’s campaign “suspension”: “Do you suspend your campaign? No, because that makes me think maybe there will be other things down the road, like if he’s in the White House, he might just suspend being president. I mean, we’ve got a guy like that now!”

That’s no joke. Bush has so little credibility he can govern only through surrogates (Paulson is the new Petraeus). When he spoke about the economic crisis in prime time earlier that same night, he registered as no more than an irritating speed bump en route to “David Blaine: Dive of Death.”

It’s that utter power vacuum that gave McCain the opening to pull his potentially catastrophic display of economic “leadership” last week. He may be the first presidential candidate in our history to risk wrecking the country even before being voted into the Oval Office.

THE AUDACITY OF LISTENING--OBAMA LISTENS AND LEARNS

The Audacity of Listening

By GAIL COLLINS

We have to have a talk about Barack Obama.

I know, I know. You’re upset. You think the guy you fell in love with last spring is spending the summer flip-flopping his way to the right. Drifting to the center. Going all moderate on you. So you’re withholding the love. Also possibly the money.

I feel your pain. I just don’t know what candidate you’re talking about.

Think back. Why, exactly, did you prefer Obama over Hillary Clinton in the first place? Their policies were almost identical — except his health care proposal was more conservative. You liked Barack because you thought he could get us past the old brain-dead politics, right? He talked — and talked and talked — about how there were going to be no more red states and blue states, how he was going to bring Americans together, including Republicans and Democrats.

Exactly where did everybody think this gathering was going to take place? Left field?

When an extremely intelligent politician tells you over and over and over that he is tired of the take-no-prisoners politics of the last several decades, that he is going to get things done and build a “new consensus,” he is trying to explain that he is all about compromise. Even if he says it in that great Baracky way.

Here’s a helpful story: Once upon a time, there was a woman searching for a guy who was ready to commit. One day, she met an attractive young man.

“My name is Chuck,” he said, grinning an infectious grin. “I’m planning to devote my entire life to saving endangered wildlife in the Antarctic. In five weeks I leave for the South Pole, where I will live alone in a tent, trying to convince the penguins that I am part of their flock. In the meantime, would you like to go out?”

“I have just met the man I’m going to marry,” she told her friends. She had been betrayed by poor listening skills, which skipped right over the South Pole and the tent. Of course, after five weeks of heavy dating, Chuck flew away and was never heard from again.

A year and a half of campaigning and we still haven’t heard Obama’s penguins, either. It’s not his fault that we missed the message — although to be fair, he did make it sound as if getting rid of the “old politics” involved driving out the oil and pharmaceutical lobbyists rather than splitting the difference on federal wiretapping legislation. But if you look at the political fights he’s picked throughout his political career, the main theme is not any ideology. It’s that he hates stupidity. “I don’t oppose all wars. What I am opposed to is a dumb war,” he said in 2002 in his big speech against the invasion of Iraq. He did not, you will notice, say he was against unilateral military action or pre-emptive attacks or nation-building. He was antidumb.

Most of the things Obama’s taken heat for saying this summer fall into these two familiar patterns — attempts to find a rational common ground on controversial issues and dumb-avoidance.

On the common-ground front, he’s called for giving more federal money to religious groups that run social programs, but only if the services they offer are secular. People can have guns for hunting and protection, but we should crack down on unscrupulous gun sellers. Putting some restrictions on the government’s ability to wiretap is better than nothing, even though he would rather have gone further.

Dumb-avoidance would include his opposing the gas-tax holiday, backtracking on the anti-Nafta pandering he did during the primary and acknowledging that if one is planning to go all the way to Iraq to talk to the generals, one should actually pay attention to what the generals say.

Touching both bases are Obama’s positions that 1) if people are going to ask him every day why he’s not wearing a flag pin, it’s easier to just wear the pin, for heaven’s sake, and 2) there’s nothing to be gained by getting into a fight over whether the death penalty can be imposed on child rapists.

His decision to ditch public campaign financing, on the other hand, was nothing but a complete, total, purebred flip-flop. If you are a person who feels campaign finance reform is the most important issue facing America right now, you should either vote for John McCain or go home and put a pillow over your head. However, I believe I have met every single person in the country for whom campaign finance reform is the tiptop priority, and their numbers are not legion.

Meanwhile, Obama has made it clear what issues he thinks all this cleverness and compromising are supposed to serve: national health care, a smart energy policy and getting American troops out of Iraq. He has tons of other concerns, but those seem to be the top three. There’s definitely a penguin in there somewhere.

LISTEN UP FOLKS. WE HAVE LEADERSHIP MATERIAL HERE AND THE SAME OLD THING FROM THAT TIRED OLD MAN McCAIN.

Martin S. Friedlander, Esq.

Editor and Commentator

THE OBAMA STORY

THE PARTY IS OVER—THE FAT LADY WILL SING

Asked which candidate most “shares your values,” voters in both North Carolina and Indiana exit polls opted instead for the elite and condescending arugula-eater. Bill Clinton’s small-town barnstorming tour, hailed as a revival of old-time Bubba meisters, proved to be yet another sabotage of his wife, whipping up false expectations for her disastrous showing in North Carolina. Barack Obama’s final, debate performance, not to mention the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s attempted character assassination, failed to slow his inexorable path to the Democratic nomination.

“It’s still early,” Mrs. Clinton said on Wednesday. Though it’s way too late for her, she’s half-right. We’re only at the end of the beginning of this extraordinary election year. While we wait out her exit, it’s a good time to get our bearings. The reason that politicians and the press have gotten so much so wrong is that they keep forgetting what year it is. Only if they reboot their minds as well as their computer programs to 2008 will this stunning, mind blowing upset make sense.

This is not 1968, when the country was so divided over race and war that cities and campuses exploded in violence. If you have any doubts, just look (to take a recent example) at the restrained response by New Yorkers, protestors included, to the acquittal of three police officers in the 50-bullet shooting death of an unarmed black man, Sean Bell.

This is not 1988, when a Democratic liberal from Massachusetts of modest political skills could be easily clobbered by racist ads and an incumbent vice president running for the Reagan’s third term. This is not the 1998 midterms, when the Clintons triumphed over impeachment. This is not 2004, when another Democrat from Massachusetts did for windsurfing what the previous model did for tanks. Obama came right out with the fact that he did not know whether he was black or white. He did coke, pot, and other drugs. Unlike Bill’s BS, he did inhale. Unlike Mad King George Bush, he recovered and found himself, without thumping false bibles and prophets. He is not a Jesus freak even though he was baptized and married by Reverend Wright.

Almost every wrong prediction about this election cycle has come from those trying to force the round peg of this year’s campaign into the square holes of past political wars. That’s why race keeps being portrayed as dooming Mr. Obama — surely Jeremiah Wright = Willie Horton! — no matter what the voters say to the contrary. It’s why the Beltway took on faith the Clinton machine’s strategic, organization and fund-raising invincibility. It’s why some prognosticators still imagine that John McCain can spin the Iraq fiasco to his political advantage as Richard Nixon miraculously did Vietnam.

The year 2008 is far more complex — and exhilarating — than the old templates would have us believe. Of course we’re in pain. More voters think the country is on the wrong track (81 percent) than at any time in the history of New York Times/CBS News polling on that question. George W. Bush is the most unpopular president that any living American has known. He would have done the world a favor by being still born.

And yet, paradoxically, there is a heartening undertow: we know the page will turn. For all the anger and angst over the war and the economy, for all the campaign’s acrimony, the anticipation of ending the Bush era is palpable, countering the defeatist mood. The repressed sliver of joy beneath the national gloom can be seen in the record registration numbers of new voters and the over-the-top turnout in Democratic primaries.

Obama hardly created this moment, with its potent brew of Bush loathing and sweeping generational change. He simply had the vision to tap into it. Running in 2008 rather than waiting four more years was the single smartest political decision he’s made (and, yes, he’s made dumb ones too). The second smartest was to understand and emphasize that subterranean, nearly universal anticipation of change rather than settle for the narrower band of partisan, dyspeptic Bush-bashing. We don’t know yet if he’s the man who can make the moment — and won’t know unless he gets to the White House — but there’s no question that the moment has helped make the man. Unlike Obama, I am still a Bush basher because I still feel the pain over this travesty of a man and whom and what he destroyed. I love America. Bush loves America because he was empowered by his fantasy over America. His fantasy was everyone’s nightmare.

For five years boomers have been asking, “Why are the kids not in the streets screaming about the war the way we were?” The simple answer: no draft. But as Morley Winograd and Michael D. Hais show in “Millennial Makeover,” their book about the post-1982 American generation, that energy has been plowed into quieter social activism and grand-scale social networking, often linked on the same Web page. The millennials’ bottom-up digital superstructure was there to be mined, for an amalgam of political organizing, fund-raising and fun, and Mr. Obama’s camp knew how to work it. The part of the press that can’t tell the difference between Facebook and, say, AOL, was too busy salivating over the Clintons’ vintage 1990s roster of fat-cat donors to hear the major earthquake rumbling underground.

The demographic reshaping of the electoral map, though more widely noted, still isn’t fully understood. From Rust Belt Ohio through Tuesday’s primaries, cable bloviators have been fixated on the older, white, working-class vote. Their unspoken (and truly condescending) assumption, lately embraced by Mrs. Clinton, is that these voters are Reagan Democrats, cryogenically frozen since 1980, who come in two flavors: rubes who will be duped by a politician backing a gas-tax pander or racists who are out of Mr. Obama’s reach.

Guess what: there are racists in America and, yes, the occasional rubes (even among Obama voters). Some of them may reside in Indiana, which hasn’t voted for a national Democratic ticket since 1964. But there are many more white working-class voters, both Clinton and Obama supporters, who prefer Democratic policies after seven years of G.O.P. failure. And there is little evidence to suggest that there are enough racists of any class in America, let alone in swing states, to determine the results come fall.

Obama’s favorable and unfavorable ratings from white Democrats are both up 5 points since last summer in the Times/CBS poll — a wash despite all the hyperventilating about Mr. Wright and Bittergate. (By contrast, Mrs. Clinton’s favorable rating among black voters fell 36 points while her unfavorable rating rose 17.) Gallup last week found that after the Wright circus Mr. Obama’s white support in a matchup against Mr. McCain is still no worse than John Kerry’s against President Bush in 2004.

But this isn’t 2004, and the fixation on that one demographic in the Clinton-Obama contest has obscured the big picture. The rise in black voters and young voters of all races in Democratic primaries is re-weighting the electorate. Look, for instance, at Ohio, the crucial swing state that Mr. Kerry lost by 119,000 votes four years ago. This year black voters accounted for 18 percent of the state’s Democratic primary voters, up from 14 percent in 2004, an increase of some 230,000 voters out of an overall turnout leap of roughly a million. Voters under 30 (up by some 245,000 voters) accounted for 16 percent, up from 9 in 2004. Those younger Ohio voters even showed up in larger numbers than the perennially reliable over-65 crowd.

Good as this demographic shift is for a Democratic ticket led by Mr. Obama, it’s even better news that so many pundits and Republicans bitterly cling to the delusion that the Karl Rove playbook of Swift-boating and race-baiting can work as it did four and eight years ago. You can’t surf to a right-wing blog or Fox News without someone beating up on Mr. Wright or the other predictable conservative piñata, Michelle Obama.

This may help rally the anti-Obama vote. But that contingent will be more than offset in November by mobilized young voters, blacks and women, among them many Clinton-supporting Democrats (and independents and Republicans) unlikely to entertain a G.O.P. candidate with a perfect record of voting against abortion rights. Even a safe Republican Congressional seat in Louisiana fell to a Democrat last weekend, despite a campaign by his opponent that invoked Mr. Obama as a bogeyman.

A few conservatives do realize the game has changed. George Will wrote last week that Mr. Obama was Reaganesque in the stylistic sense that “his manner lulls his adversaries into underestimating his sheer toughness — the tempered steel beneath the sleek suits.” John and Cindy McCain get it too, which is why both last week made a point (he on “The Daily Show,” she on “Today”) of condemning negative campaigning. But even if Mr. McCain keeps his word and stops trying to portray Mr. Obama as the man from Hamas, he can’t disown the Limbaugh axis of right-wing race-mongering. That’s what’s left of his party’s base.

Now that the Obama-Clinton race is over, the new Beltway narrative has it that Mr. McCain, a likable “maverick” (who supported Mr. Bush in 95 percent of his votes last year, according to Congressional Quarterly), might override the war, the economy, Bush-loathing and the bankrupt Republican brand to be competitive with Mr. Obama. Anything can happen in politics, including real potential game changers, from Mr. McCain’s still-unreleased health records to new excavations of Mr. Obama’s history in Chicago. But as long as the likely Democratic nominee keeps partying like it’s 2008 while everyone else refights the battles of yesteryear, he will continue to be underestimated every step of the way.

Martin S. Friedlander, Esq.

BLACK AMERICA BLOWS OUT THE CLINTONS AND REV. WRIGHT AS BENG OLD TIME RACISTS

Black Community Is Increasingly Protective of Obama

In black America, oh, how the mighty have fallen.

Bill Clinton is no longer revered as the "first black president." Tavis Smiley's rapid-fire commentaries on a popular radio show have been silenced. And the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., self-described defender of the black church, has been derided by many on the Web as an old man who needs to "step off."

They all landed in the black community's doghouse after being viewed as endangering Sen. Barack Obama's chances of being elected president. And the community's desire to protect the first African American ever to be in this position may only grow with his win in North Carolina and his close loss in Indiana this week.

"I have parents who are still living who are very enthusiastic about Obama," said Valerie Grim, the chair of Indiana University's Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies. "They live in Mississippi. For a time, my parents couldn't vote, and when they could, their only choice was a white person.

"This means more than just saying there's a black person on the ticket. It represents the things they had been denied. It's being able to see the unbelievable, that the impossible might be possible. It represents for them a new day, a new opportunity to see that black people can contribute, on the ultimate level, to the social order."

Given such sentiment, it has not taken much for other public figures to move from icon to pariah.

When Bill Clinton called Obama's position on Iraq a "fairy tale" in New Hampshire, "I think black people felt betrayed," said Andrea Plaid, a blogger who writes under the pen name the Cruel Secretary. African Americans continued to regard Clinton highly even after he was impeached for lying under oath. "And you turn around and do this to us?" Plaid said.

Smiley, the renowned black author and commentator, took issue with Obama for skipping his "Covenant With Black America" event in New Orleans so he could campaign in Texas and Ohio. The resulting backlash left Smiley feeling "hammered" and "barbequed" by black Americans.

"There's all this talk of 'hater,' 'sellout' and 'traitor,' " Smiley said at the time. ". . . They are harassing my mama, harassing my brother."

The animus dogged him even on the radio, where his commentaries on black causes for the popular "Tom Joyner Morning Show" were renowned. In a terse statement issued last month, Smiley announced that he was leaving the show to focus on other ventures.

Smiley "did a disservice to the black community," said L.N. Rock, the blogger known as the African American Political Pundit. He noted that Smiley billed the New Orleans gathering as an event for the people. But while the people agreed with Obama's compromise of dispatching his wife, Michelle, to speak in his stead, Smiley balked. "He should have been hammered for that," Rock said.

Wright has been hailed by many in the black clergy as a brilliant liberation theologian. But after his speech and question-and-answer session at the National Press Club last month, people commented on the blog Jack and Jill Politics -- billed as a political sounding board for the "black bourgeois" -- that the minister should have known better than to pick a fight with the media at such a crucial point in the presidential campaign.

Few of those who commented took issue with the substance of what Wright said. Rather, it was the timing of his presentation and the unapologetic showboating of a man who was already a radioactive presence for Obama that riled black people.

A few supporters called Wright a man of conscience who preached the truth. They were shouted down by others.

The backlash is not limited to the well known. Christopher Chambers, a Georgetown University professor and Obama supporter, said a woman tracked down his cellphone number, dialed it and called him a race traitor after he said Wright's performance would doom the senator's presidential run if he did not act decisively. Obama denounced Wright's appearance later that day.

Barbara Reynolds, a black columnist who brokered Wright's appearance at the press club, was also under assault. She rejected a wave of rumors that cast her as a Hillary Clinton supporter who set up Wright to damage Obama.

Although Reynolds has strongly criticized Obama, she said she is torn over which candidate to support. However, she said, she is unbowed by her critics: "They can label me, but I'm not going to shut up."

Paradoxically, African Americans wondered early on if Obama cared sufficiently about their concerns. But that was before he won the Iowa caucuses. Standing in the path of Obama's campaign has been dangerous ever since.

"Yes, I wish Wright had sat down and decided to be quiet," said Venetria Patton, director of the African American Studies and Research Center at Purdue University.

Of Bill Clinton and his wife, she said: "The more he opened his mouth, the more I was against her."

AMEN

Martin S. Friedlander, Esq