Confessions Of A Politics Geek

From the Daily Kos:

Harry is a friend of mine. He’s 41 years old, married, three kids, occupation: data processing. Doesn’t really care all that much about interest rates or credit swaps, but being of the engineer background, he can calculate a mortgage payment given a rate of interest. In 2005 Harry bought a modest four bedroom house in an inland neighborhood called Port Saint John, Florida. It’s nowhere near the beach, it’s a normal, middle-class Floridian family community. Harry is not a financial analyst, but he’s not stupid either. If the mortgage broker who landed him the deal had explained his loan could jump 5 or 6 points, his payments almost doubling, in a matter of a two years, he might have bought a smaller home or looked for a cheaper lender. But the broker didn’t, and Harry did.

Harry now works two jobs. He works right beside me from 8 in the morning until 5 in the afternoon. Then he drives across the street and works from 5:30 to 1:00AM. Even so he can barely keep up with the mortgage payments, and health insurance, and daycare, etc. The following is Harry’s plea to a government he thinks doesn’t give a hoot about him, and frankly, I think he’s right:

All I want is the government to help me lower my interest rate. I can’t afford it, I need a normal rate. But when I tried to get one the FHA, FNMA, they all told me no, my house isn’t worth what I owe on it. All the banks said the same thing. I couldn’t refinance without a huge down payment. And I’m stuck. Then I heard the government was going to bail out the people who created this mess with 700 billion dollars, it made me real angry. I can’t get a few hundreds dollars a month of help on my own home for my family, but the richest people in the world who got a bunch of people like me over the barrel are going to get 700 billion dollars of our tax money? Disgusting.

Full Article/Post

I am currently listening to McCain speaking in Ohio, lying through his teeth at the rate of a lie every 10 seconds.  The straight talk express is the most misnamed campaign in history.  He is a true jerk and even though I used to half way like the guy now I despise him.

A new USA TODAY/Gallup Poll shows 46% of people who watched Friday night’s presidential debate say Democrat Barack Obama did a better job than Republican John McCain; 34% said McCain did better.

Obama scored even better — 52%-35% — when debate-watchers were asked which candidate offered the best proposals for change to solve the country’s problems.

More than six in 10 people or 63% in the one-day poll, taken Saturday, said they watched the first faceoff in Oxford, Miss. For those 701 people, the margin of error was +/- 4 percentage points.

The poll suggested the debate was to some extent a wash for McCain: 21% of those who watched say it gave them a more favorable view of him, 21% say less favorable and 56% say it didn’t change their opinion much.

Three in 10 said their opinion of Obama became more favorable after seeing the debate, compared to 14% who said less favorable and 54% who said it didn’t make much difference.

More than one-third of viewers, or 37%, said they had less confidence in McCain to fix economic problems after seeing the debate; 23% said more. For Obama, the survey results were 34% more confidence, 26% less.

More

Watch CBS Videos Online

McCain is currently speaking at Clinton’s Global Initiative conference and he is going on and on about the bailout is in danger of not getting passed.  Of course everyone involved, the President and the leaders of Congress have been on the record that they are very close to a deal.  It is more than obvious Senator McCain is trying to change the subject that he is dropping in the polls so he has created another wild move to cause a distraction. If the McCain campaign insists on replacing the VP debate with a postponed Presidential debate (as has been reported) I think the Obama campaign should refuse. The guy is throwing huge “Hail Marys” and he is due for an interception.

Breaking news at this time is that Obama called McCain at 8:30AM this morning to suggest a JOINT statement on the economic crisis.  McCain comes out at 2PM and has this brilliant idea to return to Washington and asks Obama to do the same.  Of course he was trying to beat Obama to the punch even though it seems it was Obama’s idea to come together for a solution.  This guy is so desperate in is sickening.

Obama spokesman Bill Burton emailed reporters:

At 8:30 this morning, Senator Obama called Senator McCain to ask him if he would join in issuing a joint statement outlining their shared principles and conditions for the Treasury proposal and urging Congress and the White House to act in a bipartisan manner to pass such a proposal. At 2:30 this afternoon, Senator McCain returned Senator Obama’s call and agreed to join him in issuing such a statement. The two campaigns are currently working together on the details.

From a pool report, via Jonathan Martin, it seems during John McCain and Palin’s meeting with Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili and Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko Palin was kepth from answering questions again:

McCain then looked around the room and gestured as if to welcome questions. The AP reporter shouted a question at Gov. Palin (”Governor, what have you learned from your meetings?”) but McCain aide Brooke Buchanan intervened and shepherded everybody out of the room.Palin looked surprised, leaned over to McCain and asked him a question, to which your pooler thinks he shook his head as if to say “No.”