How can we pressure McCain to debate this Friday and not postpone?

Two words: Barack Obama. I would love to hear everyone’s ideas about how we can pressure McCain to follow through. If the Collective acts, I’m in!

Tell hem the winner gets to have a threesome with ms. Obama and Palin.

McCain just made a HUGE mistake! This is going to backfire on him BIG TIME!

SuperMouse has it, he’s afraid of Obama. And while I think we can try to, he’s saying that even if Obama shows, he just won’t. And it’s not really a debate if only Obama is there.

Can someone please explain what is going on? I thought there was a debate scheduled for Friday night. Did McCain back out?

yes, for the good of the country…..

Oh my. That doesn’t exactly impress, does it?

For anyone else who is in the dark

Send Tonya Harding’s hubby over with a baseball bat?

I don’t think he will cancel the debate.

He’s already getting a major backlash from saying that he will pull out and it will come to light very quickly that he can’t do anything about the situation whether campaigning or not.

It is more posturing that is intended to keep the focus off of his falling poll numbers. If he stops campaigning, he can attribute his decline to “supporting the country”

Plus, the press time is already scheduled. If McCain doesn’t show up, then Obama should be given the full air time to address the nation.

If McCain’s smart, he will show up just to avoid that situation.

Technically couldn’t we just get a doll that says “I was in a prison war camp”, “I don’t understand economics” “The economy is just fine” and that smiles and leaves when a question is to hard, to replace him.

It might actually do better.

Barrack should say “Hey lets move the debates to washington. You can spare one hour, right John? All we need is a room with some podiums….”

We are sitting on the precipice of a global economic breakdown, and your big concern is whether they’re going to postpone your horse race. I don’t think you fully understand your predicament. There are, however, others fervently trying to address it for you. (By the way…their real concern is “Main Street”, not Wall Street.)

@ roadventer – may I ask where you are from?

This “horse race”, as you called it, may very well decide the fate of the global economic breakdown you speak of. Who facilitates it, or who saves us from it.

It will decide who helps us and everyone else recover from the mess that the previous administration left.

And exactly why, in this day and age, would McCaine have to be there? He isn’t on any committees.

We are talking about two people running for the highest office in the country. One of them will be trying to save us from this. They can participate on the level they need to from wherever they are, and at any given time be there in less than 6 hours.

Yes. The horse race will determine the person who will be making the decisions starting 4 months from now.

Again, I don’t think you understand our predicament.

What they’re going to do is get Obama and McCain in a room on thursday to convince them to push Congress to enact the bailout.

I think that it is right for Congress to delay the proceedings a bit since the last few hasty plans from this administration haven’t been so successful. Especially if the FBI is running investigations into the very institutes that this money would be going towards.

@ roadventer – your response, or lack there of, has not convinced me or educated me to the fact that you do know. You denounce my point but offer no example of what you mean buy “I don’t think you understand our predicament”. On that level of argument, I would be justified by responding “do to”.

I pointed out that both candidates indeed CAN participate from where they are at the speed this is taking place. CAN be there when needed for crucial action. And, as you said will begin laying the ground work for resolving the problem in four months.

Please elaborate on what would be accomplished by their physical presence in DC?

What specifically don’t I understand, I truly want to know. Ask anyone. I am new to this politic thing.

It would be hard to explain. Briefly, bankers know the uncertainty of their debt now, and lack confidence in their underlying value. It is a crisis of confidence. As a result, inter-bank lending virtually ceased starting last week. This loss of circulation of capital will cause defaults in commercial lending and breaking of covenants (contracts), which will then trigger penalty clauses including increased costs and asset forfeitures. Within about three weeks, the cascading effects will be so impressive (and visibly compounding) that all global banks and creditors will have doubts about where it will end. Then, there will be a day very soon thereafter when our Treasury will try to perform its regular auction of our debt to the institutions that traditionally accept our I.O.U. (e.g. the Bank of China), and on that day, the investors will take a wait-and-see approach (kind of like you) instead of buying the full offering (which NEVER happens). And that day will be the last day of our economy as we know it. Because even though our government has no money, it has had the ability to borrow what it needs, and that’s what makes us solvent. But the day those securities don’t FULLY sell is the day the Unites States is declared bankrupt.

I am simplifying here. The workings are complex and intricate beyond anybody’s ability to manage. But the problem here is quite simple and quite real: bad mortgage debt is so large and thus far sufficiently bottomless that bankers have lost confidence. Shortly, if something dramatic doesn’t change, that problem of confidence will spread more broadly. And for better or worse, the highly leveraged nature of our economy (and the global economy at large) is predicated upon confidence; without it, the system dies.

By my estimate, there’s a 90% chance that, barring major macroeconomic action, this catastrophic collapse will happen in under 6 weeks, and may happen in as few as two weeks. But that’s just me (and Ben Bernanke, and Hank Paulson, and other people more familiar with how our economy works than me).

“It would be hard to explain”, you did a fantastic job!

So what your saying is ( and thank you for taking the time to type that out it really really helped ) with all that in play, and it is in play now, the best thing they have to reassure their doubts or look to for solutions is the government.

Without that, the first domino falls and you have a runaway catch up holy shit situation. I can understand your point about the severity of the situation.

Thank you for taking the time. I can appreciate your concerns with where this is going, and definitely respect that opinion.

So, a $700 billion package that we also can’t afford will help to perpetuate this system anyways right?

So, either Congress gives in or they don’t, hence the meeting tomorrow with McCain and Obama. Once they meet, might as well face the country.

It will still be up to the next president to provide a strategy for changing the reliance on this type of a system, no? Or will we just wait for the next big bubble to burst?

I definitely appreciated that last answer.

All the suspicions and doubts and recriminations about what’s happened here are well-founded. But please understand these two points: 1) the meltdown has already begun, and 2) this isn’t about saving the banks; it’s about saving our economy (read: ourselves).

I think we’re a country of debtors that don’t deserve to be saved, but in my heart I can’t wish the kind of misery on us that a collapse will cause. So to your point about the $700 billion we “can’t afford,” the alternative cost is associated with defaulting on the $10 TRILLION debt that we’re already carrying. So your options here don’t leave you a choice between good and bad; they are between bad and worse.

I still have trouble shoveling money into the same furnace that burned the rest of it without taking the time to review the situation and put safety measures in place as well as better oversight.

Instead, we are being asked to close our eyes for a minute while the government slips some cash across the table and then when we open our eyes again, the Market will be still be King.

Does this plan have any long term safeguards? Limiting executive pensions seems like a no brainer, but it was not something readily agreed upon. What else is in there?

I am afraid that I still feel at least one of the candidates are capable of both campaigning and working on the economic crises.

Please refer to this statement

http://www.youtube.com/user/barackobamadotcom?ob=4

He is in touch with washington. Probably with greater immediacy than some senators who are there. He speaks of nothing but working across parties. He has been working with the house since sept. 21 as shown in this article.

http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalradar/2008/09/obama-picks-up.html

He has, what I think, is an excellent plan, also shown in the above article.

He also makes a good point that they would bring presidential politics to DC which could very well interfere with and distract from things.

Remember, “We’ve got to go into Iraq NOW, they have Mobile Labs for chemical warfare and missiles…Oops, I guess we didn’t need to rush”?

There’s an assertion in military strategy that generals tend to fight the last war. Having learned the mistakes of the prior war, their strategy for the next war reflects those lessons learned.

Unfortunately, this tendency to fight the last war reflects a weakness in human behavior, in that we address a situation today as if it were the same as a situation yesterday. There are likenesses, and there are differences. But time doesn’t do replays, and we should always do our best to identify the likenesses AND the differences in order to make our responses are appropriate to the current situation.

This is to say that there are situations in life that require fast action if they are to be effectively addressed. And there are situations in life where we act fast and ineffectively. One must not infer from this latter case that acting fast is bad. It simply carries elevated risk.

Be careful not to fight your last war. We’ve never been here before.

Uh, ok.
All I’m saying is that there is enough time for them to discuss the plan that Congress is expected to enact because it will be a long term plan.

It looks like the President and both candidates agree on that

Hopefully a bipartisan discussion will allow them to create a strong plan that will put some safeguards in place for the future.

@Bri-L – check out how similiar the wording on the joint statement is to the last links you posted

The thing is, as horrific as the economic situation is, McCain has missed the vast majority of the Senate votes in the past six months; and his presence or absence on Friday is not going to make or break the entire proposal—most of which is already ready to go.

This is nothing more than an attempt to avoid actually debating Obama in the public view, and the economic situation is just a handy excuse to make him not look like a coward.

@cwilbur I don’t disagree w/ what you are saying but I would also add that Obama, H Clinton, etc. didn’t bother to do much of their jobs (e.g. vote, etc.) while on the campaign trail.

Politicians of all parties spend a signficant amount of their time in office campaigning and courting donors…....for their next political race.

@ fireside – yes. So while McCain was scattering and trying to step up and make bold statements. Obama stayed calm, spoke with the appropriate people and came up with a solution that reaches across party lines.