Philly ADA

Today we had planned to publish part three in our look at the "Where's Waldo of Financial Ruin" with a look at McCain's involvement in the Dot-Com stock market crash. Instead, we'll take a look at the latest foot-in-mouth moment suffered by John McCain and what it means for Pennsylvania and Philadelphia specifically.

Since 2004, President Bush has refused to meet with Spain's Prime Minister Jose Zapotero. Despite the fact that Spanish troops fight alongside Americans in Afghanistan, President Bush holds a grudge against the Spanish Prime Minister because of his decision to withdraw Spanish troops from Iraq after Bush's 2004 declaration of "Mission Accomplished."

Putting at risk thousands of Philadelphia manufacturing jobs, McCain has apparently committed to continuing the Bush Administration's hostile diplomatic policies toward Spain.

Sooner or later, we figured the news cycle would catch up to the fact that John McCain has been at the center of every major financial crisis of the last quarter century. It's fair to say, McCain's the "Where's Waldo" of financial ruin.

First, there was the Savings and Loan crisis which ended up costing U.S. taxpayers $1.4 TRILLION. That's the subject of tomorrow's post.

Then, there was Enron and the bursting of the tech bubble that resulted in a loss of approximately $7.1 TRILLION. McCain's involvement in that mess will be documented on Friday.

And now, we're struggling yet another fiscal crisis - the sub-prime mortgage meltdown which has caused an approximate 20% decline in the value of the U.S. real estate market. In dollars, that's approximately $4.5 to $6 TRILLION and the subject of today's post.

That's a total of somewhere around $14.5 TRILLION lost as a result of policies championed by John McCain.

But who's counting?

If you happen to be one of the thousands of Pennsylvanians who have come to rely on mass transit to offset increased fuel costs, John McCain is not the candidate for you.

With commuters seeking a break from high gas prices and gridlocked highways, ridership on SEPTA's regional rail system is up 15% from last year. The same is true nationwide where light rail has seen an increase of over 10% in the last year. Even Amtrak has seen a 14% increase in ridership.

Despite the double-digit increases in ridership, our country's passenger rail system is on the verge of collapse.

Less than two months ago, Amtrak was forced to shut down its North East corridor train service because of an equipment problem that caused a power outage from Philadelphia to Connecticut.

Travel from along the corridor from New York to D.C. is constrained by what Amtrak's chairman describes as "a Civil War-era set of Baltimore tunnels."

In the same interview, the Amtrak chairman acknowledged that our rail lines are so overburdened that a slight delay in New Rochelle will have effects that "ripple all the way" to Pennsylvania.

France has trains that go as fast as 357 miles an hour. Japan has had bullet trains in operation since the 1960s. China just opened a high-speed line that hits 220 MPH. Even South American countries like Argentina have high-speed passenger rail lines that reach speeds twice as fast as Amtrak's Acela.

Why is it that the rest of the world has fast, inexpensive, effective and reliable train systems and the best we can do is Acela which struggles to reach a paltry 150 MPH and only does it reach that speed in isolated areas of Massachusetts and Rhode Island?

Because John McCain, as chairman of the Senate Science, Commerce and Transportation committee, has consistently killed appropriations that would have funded the infrastructure needed to support our passenger rail system.

Folks may have heard of this little prison the Bush Administration created in Cuba to house "enemy combatants."

At Gauntanamo, the Bush Administration has refused to respect its prisoners' basic human rights, including the right of habeas corpus. The Bush Administration's treatment of prisoners was enabled by legislation authored by John McCain. As a result of McCain's law, the Bush Administration has imprisoned innocent civilians, drawn international scorn upon the United States and eroded our moral standing in the world.

When we at the Philly ADA originally conceived of the 64 Days of McCain, we thought that each day's post would stick highlight some policy position that McCain had taken and demonstrate why if he was elected and had a chance to implement said policy, it would be bad for America. Depending on how these examples were presented, we began the campaign with somewhere around 40 or so themes we were ready to run with.

Admittedly, that's short of the 64 we'd need to make it to election day.

While we expected the McCain campaign would give us enough fodder to fill out the three weeks we left open, we never expected what has in fact transpired. Or rather, what the McCain campaign and the Republican party has voluntarily reduced itself to.

And to be honest, we're dismayed.

And so we begin week two of the ADA's 64 Days of McCain and with it we take a look at McCain's core issue - his claim to be the candidate that stood up to special interests and will end the rule of Washington lobbyists.

In convention speech, McCain promised that if elected, he would ensure lobbyist would no longer be running Washington. The problem is that despite McCain's words, the lobbyists have all along been running McCain's campaign.

Literally.

You may have heard - over the weekend the federal government embarked upon what has been described by the NYTimes as "the biggest and costliest government bailout ever of private companies." The quote refers to the takeover by the Treasury Department of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two largest buyers of mortgages. The two giants failed because of the collapse of the housing bubble.

Needless to say, how McCain campaign spins plays the Freedie Mac/Fannie Mae takeover should be fairly interesting considering their previous gambit on our present economic crisis. They denied its existence.

Seriously, McCain and his surrogates have consistently attributed the country's economic woes to some sort imaginary mental ailment. The way McCain sees it - when it comes to the economic hardships faced by Americans, we're all under some sort of collective hysteria. They treat us if we are all a bunch of three year-olds who needed scolding because we refused to go to bed because of the monster in the closet.

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When we started this campaign, we had identified fewer than 64 days worth of material. And to be honest, in our zeal to make sure we started out strong, we collapsed a few facts to make our inaugural posts extra special. But, here at the Philly ADA, we were never worried that we'd run out of facts. We were certain that even if we didn't dig up any new stuff, McCain would surely give us new material during the course of this campaign.

And sure enough, less than 24 hours into ADA's 64 Days of McCain, John McCain delivered to us material for our Day 4 post - John McCain and the rest of the Republican party think that community organizers are deserving of scorn and ridicule.

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Since the appointment of the Sarah Palin as John McCain's running mate, there has been a lot of talk about her being pro-life. For example, in yesterday's Daily News, Jill Porter wrote:

Palin's appointment to the ticket - a cynical, desperate ruse to appeal to women voters - is a vivid reminder of another part of the past that will be resurrected if the GOP wins. Because she's pro-slavery.

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Since we began ADA's 64 Days of McCain, we've already received several requests to delve into the various scandals that now surround McCain's running mate, Sarah Palin. As most know, the most lurid scandal involving Palin implicates her 17-year-old daughter.

Here at Philly ADA we believe that the privacy of family members and especially children should be afforded the highest respect. While we recognize that candidates themselves will be inevitably subject to such scrutiny, the politics of personal destruction should never be extended to a candidate's family members, let alone her children. For this reason, we agree with Barack Obama and consider Palin's children "Off Limits."

With that said, we cannot help but comment upon how this episode demonstrates McCain's self-serving hypocrisy and highlights a particularly offensive chapter in his personal political history.