Vested Id wrote:

just curious wrote:

It's low hanging fruit to point out that a big chunk of his supporters are dimwit social media activist types, but his philosophy reflects their simplistic attitudes.

This is certainly a factor in why I am voting for him, the sound of many well-fed people saying "well we all know this guy is impractical" when his approach on these issues is exactly what the political and certainly the widespread popular reaction should have been. Remember how the Occupy movement "accomplished nothing" except pushing wealth inequality to the front burner?

It's a special kind of mind control to associate having wits with playing ball, and being outraged with stupidity. Call it the Barzini Point of No Return, where you pivot from being sickened by a moral universe to being a conspirator in it.

I am not going to strive for eloquence or poetry. I am not going to back up my assertions, conjectures, paraphrased quotes or invective with links or citations. I am not going to spell-check beyond what I can catch as I sweep through and lay down words. I will fuck up homynyms.

The name is: I now hate John McCain.

I have not gotten much sleep this week. I am very tired.

I have watched approximately 100 hours of C-SPAN coverage this week collectively, concurrently watching the Senate and House on two televisions. On sits on the right hand side of my desk and one about twenty feet away from me, next to a big bay window. Between me and the latter television is a long wooden table the surface of which is covered by a piece of glassing lying atop. At the end of the table and next to the television, a palm tree made of shiny foil, with broad green leaves at the top and numerous ribbons streaming down that make up the trunk, hangs from the ceiling. It dates from before my time, probably from a Christmas party with a leiu theme.

I have the two televisions blaring C-SPAN (and C-SPAN 2, which broadcasts the action on the Senate floor) because I am tracking, in real time, the progress of pieces of legislation that are of interest to the clients of my firm. The number that is of importance to me differs from week to week but as we approach the end of the 110th Congress, it has swollen to over 70 separate bills that I must know - at an instant - the exact status of. Bills are passed at a tremendous rate in the final weeks of a session - agreements breached, differences smoothed over and sausage made - and clients are anxious to know the exact second that situations regarding legislation that could drastically affect their operation.

A parenthical note, slackly placed: those 70 bills are a fairly small proportion of the over 7000 bills introduced this Congress in the House and near 3000 introduced in the Senate - and that doesn't include the non-binding resolutions, rules, nominations and other sundry business of those august bodies.

Aiding me in my tasks are numerous alerts I've set up, lists of bills introduced each morning that I sort through, the morning whip notices sent to member's offices that I get forwarded, calls to the Cloak Rooms to get updates about scheduling (Once I called the Senate Democratic Cloak Room and was put on hold. Sen. Durbin (IL-D), the Deputy Majority Leader picked up and asked what I wanted. I asked him when a vote I was interested would occur and he politely handed the phone over to a staffer, laughing), Hill rag schedules I print out and mark up and the like. On week's like this week, my desk is covered in these sorts of things, along with facebooks containing all the members and their office numbers, lists of interest areas (health, defense, etc.) and the partners related to them, client codes, sticky pads, invoices for the library, a tattered rolodex and a legal pad filled with hundreds of obscure rows of numbers like so:

224 | 3
180 | 22 1 present
404 | 25

which indicates a vote result - Democrats on the top row, then Republicans and then the total.

My desk is messy.

Rising out of the midst of this paper spew is my monitor, where the mess is replicated as best I can electronically. I most commonly have several dozen tabs open - like most of us, I think I am fair in assuming - along with up to 48 open emails (I am certain about the number because if I open any greater amount than that then I have to scroll up and down to see them in XP when I roll over the Outlook tab on the bottom of my screen) that I am dumping news clips, floor updates, synopsis of press briefings, pdfs of bills, responses to research requests and furious emails to the Wall Street Journal about their site redisign. I also tend to have a handful of Gmail chat windows open, I'll admit, a remnant of a youth that is rotting away precipitously.

Today I sent approximately 150 emails, which probably seems fairly slight but, in my defense, some of those emails contained up to 30 articles on a single topic.

I am fairly busy at work.

And yet, compared to many people, my job is extremely easy. I don't dig ditches, for instance.

I also am not a staffer for House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank. Today, they went to bed at around 5:30 in the morning because they had meetings in an attempt to cobble together a solution to the fucked up financial system of this country until 5 a.m.. This sleep, a sweet respite from a week of similarly late nights, was brief however. The meetings resumed at 8 a.m..

This insane workload was not without its achievements, however. Since Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Fed Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke released their completely politically tone-deaf and almost certainly irresponsible proposal to buy up a vaste swath of assets, up to $700 billion at a time, they had accomplished great progress in reaching rapprochment with the other parties involved - House and Senate leadership of their party and the Republicans, the Administration and lobbyists for the entire universe of interests that sought to influence the effort.

By Monday, they had released their own draft bill, along with a version offered by their counterparts in the Senate. Both of these bills expanded the famously terse and expansive three-page Treasury proposal into 40 and 50 page documents that included executive compensation provisions, mortgage foreclosure mitigation, and far greater oversight over the process.

I want to reiterate this: although numerous parties - particularly the Presidential campaigns - bloviated about the principles that they demanded be in the bill, the working copies of what was actually being negotiated included limits to compensation and 'golden parachutes', a bipartisan oversight board, equity in firms assisted by the plan and the possibility of lowering the scope of the bailout so that only a portion of the $700 billion would be advanced. The outraged statements about the bailout, the anger and panic they whipped up and the press-conference proposals were all directed at a version of the bill that had been immediately discarded.

Yesterday, our tired and plucky FSC staffers had managed to get Treasury to accept their proposal in a general form. This moved the process forward a great deal and was able to withstand dumb ol' Chris Dodd, the Senate Banking Chair, lumbering in and demanding to get some loving attention from Paulson and Frank.

This framework culminated in a joint press conference early this afternoon whose luminaries included Frank, Dodd, FSC Ranking Member Spencer Bachus, Republican Senator Bob Bennett (a lobbyist who somehow managed to find himself a Utah senator and who was standing in the stead of Don Rickles-lookalike, former Democrat and earmark sponge Senate Banking Ranking Member Richard Shelby of Alabama, who has seen the $700 billion abyss and has run away in terror) and other key negotiators. They announced that there was agreement on the path forward and a very good possibility that a rescue package could pass by the weekend.

It was all a coincidence of course that this agreement was announced before John McCain, whom I earnestly hate, could meet with the President, Barack Obama and other interested parties.

I hate John McCain. He is a contemptible person. I want to see him in pain.

Imagine the joy that the FSC staffers must have felt today. Imagine all the work that they have undertaken, painstakingly and carefully, to try and solve an imminent crisis to the country that they love. Imagine the dedication to work as hard as they have for relatively little pay. Imagine the sacrifices that they have carried, the responsibility.

They must adore their general, Barney Frank, whose unkempt appearance led many unfamiliar with him to remark with shock at how tired he looked. While he certainly was fatigued, he always looks like shit. He is a chunky bedraggled Jewish homosexual with a speech impediment and someone I admire as a hero.

Yesterday, on a day in which he had to stay up and delay negotiations in order to hear the President deliver a USA Today rundown of the crisis and ask Congress to fix it for him, Frank responded to a question about John McCain's decision to announce that he was pulling out of the debate tomorrow and tell people that his campaign was suspended. Frank said that it was "the longest Hail Mary pass in the history of either football or Marys."

John McCain had a remarkably bad day yesterday. It began with a desperate conference call in which his pollster tried to bluster away an ABC/W Post poll that showed him dropping 9 points back of Obama. It ended with David Letterman juggling his ripped off balls on the air while offering a squirming Keith Olbermann a bite. In between saw him delay responding to a effort by Obama to set up a joint statement because he was meeting with a baroness, an act of extreme personal cowardice to try and shirk the debate and tired negotiators telling him not to come to Washington because it would just fuck things up.

John McCain came to Washington.

John McCain fucked things up.

The one group of interested parties who have not fully been involved in the negotiations have been House Republicans. This is largely because they are a death cult who should be put to the flame by rational men. The proposal that the Republican Study Group, a conservative caucus that makes up slightly more than half of the full House Republican delegation, issued early in the week suggested that the key was to have a capital gains tax holiday for two years and to drill in ANWR. Clearly the financial crisis would be solved if banks and fund managers stopped paying taxes. The poor dears were holding toxic securities from all the worry that they'd have to contribute a cent to the upkeep of their nation. John Campbell, a contender for the chairmanship of the RSC in the next Congress, has probably completely killed off his chances by supporting the general idea of a bailout.

Spencer Bachus, the senior Republican on the Financial Services Committee, was the main - and often only - House Republican involved in the negotiations. He had acceeded to the principles of the agreement reached today. Then he admitted that he "was not authorized by [his] colleagues to make any agreement on behalf of House Republicans."

That left their stance on the negotiations "fuzzy" in Barney Frank's words.

When John McCain arrived in Washington, the first thing he did was meet with House Republican Leader John Boehner and a group of RSC members. Later on in the day, he said very little of importance at a meeting with the President, Barack Obama and the negotiating partners. Meanwhile, House Republicans demanded that the entire negotiation begin again, bearing a new proposal that they had not mentioned at all up until that point.

RSC members held a press conference this evening to discuss their plan. They loudly asserted that McCain had not expressed support for the RSC proposal and had not told them to delay the negotiations. It was just one of those things that happens.

Their proposal would be to create a new federal insurance program to back toxic mortgage-backed securities. They say that since the federal government insures subprime loans through Fannie and Freddie, it would be easy. And it wouldn't cost a thing because the insurance pool would be filled with premiums paid by securities holders.

Although several members of the group of RSCers that held the press conference are members of the FSC and asked questions at the hearing held this week featuring Paulson, Bernanke and SEC Chairman Chris Cox, none had brought up the idea at the time.

Perhaps they knew that it would have been savaged. I am not a financial expert, so I speak from ignorance, but perhaps Paulson would have suggested that there would be no way to value the insured assets - the whole problem at the root of the crisis - and that CDOs wouldn't be covered. Perhaps they would have looked like insane ideologues who were unwilling to confront a crisis.

We don't know, of course. We do know that negotiations will continue through tomorrow night and that this may cause McCain to duck out of the debate. We do know that McCain has done absolutely nothing to advance the negotiations and whose appearance and interference has severely compromised advancements that were being made. We do know that he is an unforgivable little shit, contempible and hate-filled.

We do know that McCain (HOW FUCKING DARE HE) has single-handedly invalidated and trod over the incredibly difficult work of hundreds of people. People who are trying, in a totally thankless and anonymous way, to help save a part of their country.

I didn't hate him. Honestly, it was more about the Ds and the left-wing shit that is my heritage.

But I want to punch his fucking kids right about now. I want to scream at him until I pass out.

What a fucking dick.

I work tomorrow and I have fucked over my chance to get my first full night's sleep this week. It looks like I'll be in on Saturday and Sunday too. I will probably be working late on my birthday next week. What I'm saying is, I hope you weren't a mccain and read the whole thing. It may have taken a while and been completely unworth doing, but still.