Looks like McCain has sewn up the Republican nomination, it also looks like he might make Huckabee his running mate. If conservative blogs are to be believed in most ways McCain and Huckabee are more liberal than either Obama or Clinton. Of course if McCain wins say goodbye to Roe v. Wade and hello to a milatary draft.
On the Democratic side it seems like the winner by a slim margin was Obama. By keeping it close in the number of delagates awarded he is creating a situation where the nominatin will be decided by super delagates, which are basically all the elected officials in the democratic party. My sense is that most of the elected officials would rather run with Obama at the top of the ticket rather than Clinton. Then again I also thought the Patriots would trounce the Giants so my pronostication skills are somewhat lacking.
I was pleased by Barack Obama’s victory yesterday. I don’t agree with him on anything that I can think of, but I would probably rather have him as President than John McCain.
Conservatives seem to really dislike McCain, and I am not so sure that liberals like Hillary, this could be a really low turn out election with a lot of negative ads.
A big part of me agrees with you nap15. I donated to Obama’s senate campaign after his brilliant DNC speech in 2004, and have never regretted it. He might be a little junior for the White House, though. It reminds me of what David Rubenstein, Jimmy Carter’s aide, said, that Carter was unqualifed for the White House, having only been governor for GA for 4 years.
I’m glad to see that Coulter, Dobson, and Limbaugh do not hold much sway, given that their anti-McCain diatribes did not influence Super Tuesday. Nor did Kennedys for Obama, I might add.
My main problem with McCain is that he is unconstitutional when it comes to free speech, a la McCain-Feingold. Sarbox is a big disaster, too.
It’s amazing to me how we progressed as a species from not being able to read or write, eventually becoming smart enough to build something that flew to the moon and back, only to regress in such a way that even with the benefit of computers and the automation of mathematical and bookkeeping processes, suddenly accounting is simply beyond the scope of our abilities.
If a company has people on payroll who claim to be accountants and lawyers, but can’t understand how one complies with the law, then it’s time to fire them and pay a little more for people who can manage to figure it out.
To me it’s like having to fear that a nurse is going to stab you seven times without finding a vein…these particular professions have been around for hundreds of years. Wall Street fucked up twice in a row, with the “analysis” being served up on hollow stocks with nosebleed P/E ratios and not a piss bucket’s worth of book value during the .com debacle, and the other shoe that dropped happened to land on thousands of innocent people who had worked hard at places like Enron…why?
Because Americans are too stupid to perform these tasks? Maybe this work isn’t valued enough in the market (ala teaching) so the most talented pursued more lucrative professions…or maybe there were a lot of empty suits steering a lot of ships back then…either way, I’m never going to buy that this law is too complicated and therefore it needs to go.
I never said it was “too complicated”. Is avoiding the strawman fallacy too complicated for you, Al?
It’s a tinfoil hat. Just a lot of make-work legislation. Sure, all this extra paper and all these extra auditors will prevent Enron-type fraud and job losses …
Do you see what’s going on with CDOs and rating agencies? Even with all the extra controls, accountability and disclosure, it doesn’t help to slam barn doors loudly after all the stock has escaped.
That’s a completely different thing altogether. A corporation is something that produces something, employs people, makes money…a CDO is a credit product.
The government can regulate what level of liquidity a bank must have at all times. The CDO itself isn’t something the government should even try to regulate. Moody’s and S&P are supposedly able to tell the market whether or not the paper is risky or not. Of course, their thing is more of a racket than anyone cares to acknowledge (mostly out of fear that if they talk, their company’s rating will get slashed…and be very scared if you happen to decline their offer that you pay for them to rate your company)…
Bottom line – it’s not just “extra paperwork” for the sake of nothing. The law performs a duty for the public AND the financial markets. It makes us feel good knowing that the game isn’t rigged to the point where pulling numbers out of Bloomberg and feeding them into a model isn’t a foolish exercise. So that a balance sheet can be trusted, and a company’s book value can be accurately stated…
A level playing field is ideal, is it not? If not the added reporting requirements, then what would you suggest be put in place to keep everyone honest? Since Sarbanes-Oxley went into effect, have corporations continued to drop like flies after everyone finds out they’d be cooking the books?
Options backdating…no Enron-style collapses. So why be so cynical about something that does what its writers intended for it to do? Why dump on success when correctable failure is all around?