I’m not voting for Obama because I agree with all of his positions on the issues, or because I believe he is truly a progressive candidate, or because I’ve become part of his sometimes disturbing cult of personality. I’m voting for him because he’s not John McCain, a man who apparently wants to do everything G.W. Bush has done, only moreso. Since I’m going down to my local polling station to vote for my Congressman and vote against Connecticut ballot question 1, I’ve decided that I may as well do my part to push up the popular vote for Obama. If he’s elected to office with a landslide victory, and with both the House and the Senate even more firmly in the hands of his fellow Democrats, maybe the next four years will prove once and for all whether or not the Democrats are really capable of keeping even the modest promises they make to the American voters. The pathetic performance by the Democratically controlled Congress over the last two years leads me to believe that the answer will be that they aren’t, but I’d be happy to be proven wrong.

1. “Shall there be a Constitutional Convention to amend or revise the Constitution of the State?”

This is the important one. Right now the Connecticut State Constitution can only be changed by a yes vote on an amendment in the General Assembly followed by a yes vote from the voters of the state. However, if this ballot question passes there would be a Constitutional Convention during which the delegates (who would be chosen by state legislators) would be able to change the State Constitution without further input from regular voters.

Not surprisingly, a yes vote on this question is supported by organizations that want to ban gay marriage, get rid of abortion rights, add special tax breaks for businesses, and take away rights for workers. All things that would not pass if the citizens of Connecticut were able to vote on them directly during the regular amendment process.

In addition, the Constitutional Convention process will be expensive, and the state government certainly has better things on which to be spending its limited resources.

If you’re a Connecticut voter, vote NO on Question 1, and make sure your friends and family understand what’s truly at stake. On it’s face, the idea of a Constitutional Convention doesn’t sound like a bad idea, but once you understand what’s truly involved it’s easy to see why a no vote is the way to go. Read more at: http://ctvoteno.org

2. “Shall the constitution of the state be amended to permit any person who will have attained the age of eighteen years on or before the day of a regular election to vote in the primary for such regular election?”

In other words, seventeen year olds would be able to vote in the primaries if they would be of legal voting age in time for the general election. This one’s an easy yes, as it certainly makes sense that first-time voters should be able to participate in the primary process as well as the general election.

via Wil Wheaton

If you’re a California voter, be sure to go out and vote NO on Proposition 8 tomorrow.

More than that, what we are seeing with the crash on Wall Street, I believe, should be for Friedmanism what the fall of the Berlin Wall was for authoritarian communism: an indictment of ideology. It cannot simply be written off as corruption or greed, because what we have been living, since Reagan, is a policy of liberating the forces of greed to discard the idea of the government as regulator, of protecting citizens and consumers from the detrimental impact of greed, ideas that, of course, gained great currency after the market crash of 1929, but that really what we have been living is a liberation movement, indeed the most successful liberation movement of our time, which is the movement by capital to liberate itself from all constraints on its accumulation.

So, as we say that this ideology is failing, I beg to differ. I actually believe it has been enormously successful, enormously successful, just not on the terms that we learn about in University of Chicago textbooks, that I don’t think the project actually has been the development of the world and the elimination of poverty. I think this has been a class war waged by the rich against the poor, and I think that they won. And I think the poor are fighting back. This should be an indictment of an ideology. Ideas have consequences.

It’s a long read, but there’s a lot of interesting stuff in there.

Oh, wait, no, my mistake, you made this speech, in which you said the current bill isn’t perfect, but you’re going to vote for it anyway, and maybe someday down the road you’ll work to make sure this bailout for Wall Street doesn’t screw over everyone else in the country.

I think everyone who reads this blog who’s American, first thing on Monday morning, needs to call their Representatives and Senators and say: No. Blank. Checks. For. Crooks.

The current bailout plan, as presented, is a farce. Does something need to be done to keep the current financial system from collapsing under the weight of the failed gambles of the ridiculously greedy financial titans? Probably, yes. You can read more about how we got to this point here (the key phrase is “Gramm-Leach-Bliley”).

That doesn’t mean that the Bush plan is the right plan. In fact, if the events of the last 7+ years have taught us anything, it’s that any plan invented by the Bush administration is almost certainly the wrong plan. As the details of the bailout are released, it’s becoming increasingly obvious that the current plan is exceedingly flawed. As Paul Krugman says:

I hate to say this, but looking at the plan as leaked, I have to say no deal. Not unless Treasury explains, very clearly, why this is supposed to work, other than through having taxpayers pay premium prices for lousy assets.

Calculated Risk notes:

We definitely do not want the Treasury to buy RMBS and CDOs at anywhere near the value on the bank’s books. Buying at those prices would help keep the banks lending, but it would also severely impact the taxpayers, it would be a transfer of wealth from the many to the few, and it would also encourage future excessive risk taking.

The bailout plan as currently written would apparently have the government taking on the financial institution’s bad bets (what Atrios refers to as “The Big Shitpile”) at the ridiculously inflated values currently on their spreadsheets, which is nowhere near any sort of fair market value. And it’s now looking like the Treasury would be covering bad bets made up through this past Wednesday (long after it was apparent that the house of cards was collapsing) and possibly those made by foreign banks and even foreign governments.

Glenn sums it all up pretty well (as he so often does):

I don’t pretend to know anywhere near enough — in terms of either raw information or expertise — in order to opine on the necessity or lack thereof of The Latest Plan in terms of whether the alternatives are worse. But what I do know is that an injustice so grave and extreme that it defies words is taking place; that the greatest beneficiaries are those who are most culpable; and that the same hopelessly broken and deeply rotted institutions and elite class that gave rise to all of this (and so much more) are the very ones that are — yet again — being blindly entrusted to solve this.

He also explains why, once again, the Democratic leadership in Congress is more than likely to prove that they are either willfully complicit in the worst of the Bush administration’s crimes or are simply a bunch of little sheep that will barely even bleat when the Republicans push them around. I recommend that you read the entire post for Glenn’s insight into the whole mess.

William Greider adds this:

Financial-market wise guys, who had been seized with fear, are suddenly drunk with hope. They are rallying explosively because they think they have successfully stampeded Washington into accepting the Wall Street Journal solution to the crisis: dump it all on the taxpayers. That is the meaning of the massive bailout Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson has shopped around Congress. It would relieve the major banks and investment firms of their mountainous rotten assets and make the public swallow their losses–many hundreds of billions, maybe much more. What’s not to like if you are a financial titan threatened with extinction?

If Wall Street gets away with this, it will represent an historic swindle of the American public–all sugar for the villains, lasting pain and damage for the victims. My advice to Washington politicians: Stop, take a deep breath and examine what you are being told to do by so-called “responsible opinion.” If this deal succeeds, I predict it will become a transforming event in American politics–exposing the deep deformities in our democracy and launching a tidal wave of righteous anger and popular rebellion. As I have been saying for several months, this crisis has the potential to bring down one or both political parties, take your choice.

As much as I would love to see a major transformation in American politics, bailing out the rich at the expense of everyone else seems like a bad way to get there, so any help the Democrats can get at maybe stiffening their spines is a welcome thing.

I actually think that an Obama victory would be substantially better than any of the other main candidates. I do think his antiwar position on Iraq is important, even if I’m not convinced that he is a principled ‘antiwar’ candidate - one recalls his statements on Iran before the NIE, and notes his various pro-Israel statements, which are kind of obligatory. And actually, yes, of course it does matter that he is the only black candidate and the first one to have had a serious chance of winning. It counts, even if it doesn’t count for all that much. And it counts that he isn’t an outright neocon, whereas I think the neoconservative faction would actually do very well under both McCain and Clinton, who are the two other serious candidates. His campaign seems to be promising, though he will not deliver, an end to the nightmare. I personally hope Nader’s campaign does something more than implode on the first few steps - if nothing else because by raising a serious radical campaign, it will drive the agenda further to the Left. If Democrats want to whinge about this, as they can always be relied upon to do, they have to be able to make a case to would-be Nader voters why should not vote for a radical left-wing campaign, and it should be something better than ‘you’re ruining it!’ But Obama, while he doesn’t differ on a lot of principle with Clinton and McCain, is different enough that it matters.

Which is sort of the whole thing in a nutshell. I would prefer a candidate whose actual positions were further (a lot further) to the left, but when the other choices are Hillary Clinton and John McCain, it’s really no choice at all. Plus Obama is definitely a better candidate than either Kerry or Gore (2000 version) were.

And this one’s not bad either:

It’s nice to have a Democratic candidate for President who actually thinks it’s important to inspire people.

I do have some reservations about just what Obama might be able to do as President, in part because his talk of compromise and bipartisanship is enough to raise red flags after seeing what many Democrats in Congress seem to think those words mean, especially during the past year. I also wish that Obama’s positions on several issues were more (and in many cases a lot more) progressive. There’s really not much distance between his stated positions and Clinton’s, and in some cases she’s further to the left than he is. So, I have not drunk any of the Obama kool-aid, but he’s done a lot to energize the electorate so far with a message of hope and change, and, whether or not he can deliver on substance if he becomes President, I think it’s been an important contribution. After all, since when have Presidential elections actually been about issues?

What it comes down for me is that with Obama there’s at least a chance of moving forward, while with Clinton it’s back to the same tired DLC-driven and lobbyist-owned crowd. For now, that’s enough to decide my vote.

Senate Democrats today took a stand for their procedural rights, not against telecom immunity or warrantless eavesdropping. After all, many of the Senate Democrats who voted to filibuster this bill were more than ready last week to vote for that bill, and they will vote for it again soon enough. Moreover, while they were upset that they were denied the right to vote on these amendments, many of them intend to vote against those very same amendments and will ensure that most, if not all of them, fail, so that the bill arrives at the White House in a form acceptable to the Leader.

As indicated, it’s preferable for several reasons that the Cloture Motion failed today — and one can still praise Senate Democrats for refusing to capitulate fully (at least yet) — but it isn’t the case that Senate Democrats collectively took a stand here for anything more substantive than their own institutional customs. Many of the Democratic Senators whom you like today for voting against cloture will be voting soon enough in favor of telecom amnesty and for warrantless eavesdropping. The House is the real hope for stopping these measures.

Yes, better the right vote for the wrong reasons than the wrong vote, but it’s more than a little sad that apparently the only really important things for many Senators (good examples are Rockefeller and Specter) are their precious privileges. I’m sure though that more than one of the Senators who in the future casts votes in favor of telecom amnesty will issue a press release pointing to their vote on Monday as evidence that they stood up for the rule of law, when in fact they couldn’t really care less. For now, the important thing is to keep the pressure on, and give the Senate Democrats another chance to continue on the long road to redemption. I’m skeptical that they actually want to be redeemed, but there’s little harm in trying.