TO THE "STIMULATED" JOHN MCCAIN; LEARN FROM BOTH ROOSEVELTS

On "This Week With..." John McCain decries the system of earmarks but says he probably would have voted for them after being against them. He wouldn't approve the stimulus package until he read it, oh...but when he was given the preliminary plan last Monday (it was a whole three pages) by Tuesday evening he “hadn't had a chance” to read it. He alleges one of the crucial ongoing problems is the decline of home prices, and he may just face nine times the problem with that many homes.

Now by the way he's a "Teddy Roosevelt Republican" who will do "what little I can," and he "won't claim a bit of credit." A number of Congressional insiders from both parties agree that would be an accurate assessment of his actual contributions. The fact is that this crisis is what Warren Buffett has called "a financial Pearl Harbor," but what's really killing the high-rolling, all the time lower tax, Bush-booster bunch are several things. First, it's obvious there will need to be more regulation of financial institutions in the foreseeable future. Second, the system of giving CEOs excessive bonuses and stock rewards for what is essentially failure in performance is essentially a failure itself. And third, regarding many more decisions with which they will have to live, the conservative theorists will have to admit in private what they are simply not honest enough to do publicly. And that is that on so many levels FDR was so much more evolved on such crises (pardon the reference to evolution) than all those who’ve spent their intellectual careers trying to undo and discredit his legacy.