400-408 – Jerry Bowyer nationally-syndicated columnist and chief economist for benchmarkfinancialnetwork.com, on the $639B bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers and the all-stock sale of Merrill Lynch to Bank of America for $50B ($29 a share).
• Fox Business (9/15/08), Lehman Files for $639B Bankruptcy. The biggest bankruptcy in American history, easily surpassing Enron and WorldCom combined. Lehman's assets are $639B to $613B liabilities.
• WSJ Online (9/15/08), Lehman Files for Bankruptcy, Merrill Sold, AIG Seeks Cash.
• Reuters (9/15/08), Lehman CEO Fuld's hubris contributed to meltdown. Dick "Gorilla" Fuld, 62, was awarded a $22 million bonus in March 2008 for overseeing the bank's 5% rise in profits during 2007 to a record $4.2B. Analysts are saying he had numerous opportunities to sell part of Lehman, to China and to South Korea, but he stubbornly declined.
413-423 – Jerry Bowyer
• WSJ Online (9/15/08), See You Later, Speculator. The Commodity Futures Trading Corporation (CFTC) issued the results of their analysis of millions of transactions worth billions of dollars between January and June of this year. Bottom line: traders and swap dealers were betting the price of future oil would go down, not up. And, commodity index funds are not the 70% of the oil market as many feared, they are just 13%, moreover, since the trades are matched, the volume is irrelevant. (I.e., there's a buyer for every seller, and vice versa.) So, it wasn't profiteers, middlemen, and speculators that were driving up the cost of oil – they were all betting it would go down!
• Fox News (9/15/08), Oil Falls Below $97 on Low Ike Damage. Oil falls below $100 for the first time since April 2. Only 10 platforms were damaged, a small fraction of the 3,800 in the Gulf. (In '05, more than 100 were knocked out.)
428-437 – Robert Micone/Bill O'Conner, "The Money Guys" at Applied Financial (866-SEEK-COUNSEL, AppliedFinancialPlanning.com), explain today's market news.
443-452 – David Rosales, pastor of the 10,000-member Calvary Chapel of the Chino Valley (calvaryccv.org), on the "all church" prayer service Friday night at 7:00pm as they lift the sanctity of marriage and family before the Lord as our vote on Proposition 8 nears (protectmarriage.com).
458-508 – • Karl Rove (9/14/08), Both Campaigns' Ads Are Over The Top.
Political strategist Karl Rove said Obama may not have consciously wanted to attribute Palin with porcine traits when he used the "lipstick on a pig" analogy to describe the McCain campaign's policies, but it sure looked like "a deliberate slap" at the Alaska governor.
"The only time this word has intruded in recent months in the campaign was in her, you know, self-deprecating remark at the convention. So for him to use the lipstick remark less than two weeks after she used it struck me as too much of a coincidence not to have been a deliberate attack," Rove told "FOX News Sunday."
The ex-White House deputy chief of staff also said Obama is fair in suggesting that McCain is a longtime Washington insider — since McCain has been in Congress since 1982 — but went over the line in attacking the Republican candidate as out of touch because he doesn't send e-mail or use a computer.
McCain's "war injuries keep him from being able to use a keyboard. He can't type. You know, it's like saying he can't do jumping jacks. Well, there's a reason why he can't raise his arms above his head. There's a reason why he doesn't have the nimbleness in his fingers," Rove said.
(1:18) BO 1-2b, "you know you can put lipstick on a pig, it's still a pig…you can wrap an old fish in a piece if paper and call it change, it's still gonna stink. After 8 years, we've had enough of the same old thing. It's time to bring about real change to Washington."
(:30) BO McCain Old, he doesn't know how to send an email.
• Charles Krauthammer (9/13/08), Charlie Gibson's Gaffe. Krauthammer coined the phrase "Bush Doctrine" on June 4, 2001 in reference to Bush unilaterally withdrawing from the ABM Treaty and rejecting the Kyoto protocol. He says it has gone through three revisions since then: 1) the "your with us or against us" address Bush gave to congress nine days after 9/11; 2) the doctrine of preemptive war against Iraq (which Gibson thinks is THE Bush Doctrine); and 3) the spread of democracy throughout the world as our best defense posture Bush gave in his Second Inaugural. Gibson gaffed, not Palin.
512-523 – Assemblyman Chuck Devore, (R-70th Irvine. republican.assembly.ca.gov), is currently a Lt. Col. in the Army National Guard, on the budget deal reached in Sacramento.
• LAT (9/15/08), California lawmakers reach compromise on budget: The proposed state spending plan involves no new taxes. Votes on the plan are scheduled for Monday.
528-539 – • Mark Levin (9/11/08), EXCERPTS: Charlie Gibson Interviews Sarah Palin – The Bolded & Underlined Parts Were Edited Out Of The Interview.
544-554 – (2:00) SNL, Tina Fey does Sarah Palin.
558-608 – Pastors Desiree & Mel Ayers of In His Presence Church (ihpchurch.org) in Woodland Hills. Special offering?
612-623 – (1:00) Whoopi Friday on "The View" asked John McCain if she needed to be worried about becoming a slave if he was elected President. Then Barbara Walters patted her on the knee and said, "don't worry ... us white folk will take care of you."
628-639 – Do we not teach American History any more?
644-655 – • Amir Taheri (NYPost, 9/15/08), Obama Tried To Stall GIs' Iraq Withdrawal.
• IHT (9/14/08), U.S. pushing through dozens of foreign weapons deals.
• Michael Barone (9/13/08), McCain Flies His Campaign Past Obama: A Top Gun political maneuver.
• James Taranto (9/12/08), The War Against the Normal: Latest attack on Palin: She prays!
• Peter A. Brown (9/14/08), Palin Stokes Class War Among Women.
The traditional women's groups and Democratic-aligned women are understandably worried that if she is elected, the face of American feminism will be a gun-toting, sexual abstinence-teaching, abortion-opposing Wal-Mart shopper.
She doesn't eat sushi like they do, but she does catch salmon.
This election will go a long way toward settling the question of whether groups that purport to speak for American women really do, or merely represent a narrow band of those who tend to be politically active, upper-middle-class and left-leaning.
…
The fact that Gov. Palin doesn't come from Washington, D.C., New York, Los Angeles or San Francisco; that she didn't go to an Ivy League school; that her husband works with his hands; and that she has family problems to which many of these 52 million can relate on a nonpolitical plane makes her attractive to them.
Much more so than Sen. Hillary Clinton or House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who are now the country's highest-profile women politicians. Their views, values and way of life could not be more different from those of Gov. Palin.
If Gov. Palin becomes Vice President Palin, the clearly political National Organization for Women, the National Abortion Rights Action League and Planned Parenthood, as well as a host of other officially nonpolitical but left-leaning women's groups, have a problem.
How could such groups and their political allies claim to speak for American women when the country's highest-profile female politician represents everything they don't?
• Dick Morris (9/15/08), GOP's Gaining - Why The Trend Goes Beyond Ticket.
• LAT (9/15/08), Pink Floyd member Richard Wright dies at age 65.
