In another brief moment of clarity, Bush cited the reason, in his mind anywoay, for the mortgage debacle.  He blames Wall Street. The NYTimes reports:

 “Wall Street got drunk — that’s one reason I asked you to turn off your TV cameras,” the president said at the fund-raiser, held at a private home on Friday to benefit Pete Olson, the Republican who is challenging Representative Nick Lampson. “It got drunk, and now it’s got a hangover. The question is, How long will it sober up and not try to do all these fancy financial instruments?”

 Bush was at a political fundraiser for held at a private home on Friday to benefit Pete Olson, the Republican who is challenging Representative Nick Lampson.  The video tape "surfaced" from a amature video, then onto the local station in Houston (an ABC affiliate).  BBC World news broadcast it tonight, thus reinforcing the redneck nature of our current leadership.

A White House employee accidentally sent out an email titled "Iraqi PM backs Obama troop exit plan".  Ooops.  So much for the inexperienced Obama.  Especially since Bush himself has announce support for an Iraqi pullout on a schedule he’s calling a "general time horizon".  So much for not surprising the enemy with a withdrawal timetable.

According to Bloomberg,

Obama’s 16-month window is “the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes,'’ Maliki said in interview with Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine published on its Web site yesterday. U.S. troops should leave the country “as soon as possible,'’ Maliki said.

The McCain camp responded quickly and shamelessly tried to take credit for the whole situation.  Tucker Bounds, McCain spokesman (until he sticks his foot in his mouth, aka Phil Gramm) sent out an e-mail response statement:

The only reason that the conversation about reducing troop levels in Iraq is happening is because John McCain challenged the failed Rumsfeld strategy in Iraq and argued for the surge strategy that is responsible for the successes we’ve achieved and which Barack Obama opposed.

Shameless indeed. 

You hear this thrown around just about every day coming out of every pundit’s mouth, but what are the real numbers? First you need to know there are basically two types of public debt - public and intergovernmental.  Public debt is a mix of t-notes, savings bonds, t-bills, etc.  This is the debt that is owned by foreign countries.  Intergovernmental debt consists of medicare obligations, military retirements, the FDIC program, etc.  According to the Treasury Department as of May 2008, there was $5.3 trillion in public debt and $4.1 trillion in intergovernmental debt.

How much can we spend?  Congress sets the limit.  Congress just raised the debt ceiling in September of 2007 by $1 trillion dollars, raising it to $9.815 trillion from $8.965 trillion.  From the May 2008 numbers above you can see we quickly used our new credit limit.

To get an idea of who owns the public debt, let’s look at t-notes.  The US Treasury department released a report of major foreign holders of Treasury Securities.  As of May 2008, there were $2.6133 trillion dollars in outstanding Treasury Securities.   Here are the top 4 foreign owners by percentage:

1. Japan owns $578.7 billion, or 22.1%.
2. China owns $506.5 billion, or 19.4%. 
3. The United Kingdom owns $272.5 billion, or 10.4%. 
4. The next category is oil exporters that own $164.3 billion or 6.3%.  The oil exporters category includes Qatar, Oman, Kuwait, Iraq, Iran, Bahrain, Indonesia, Venezuela, and Eqcuador.

Next time you are at a cocktail party, you can whip this out over a frozen margarita.

There is not much written about McCain’s first wife, Carol.  With good reason.  The story is a sickening example of a childish man stealing his buddy’s wife (Carol), then abandoning her, crippled and tattered, for a beauty queen beer heiress.   It sounds like a cruel political sound bite, but it is frightenly true.

Carol McCain gave the London mail an interview.  Here she tells of her car accident, recovery, and gaining weight all while McCain was a POW.  McCain returned from capture to cast Carol aside.  Carol says of the marriage:

My marriage ended because John McCain didn’t want to be 40, he wanted to be 25. You know that happens…it just does.

Carol McCain, strapped financially by the accident, has a clause in her divorce settlement barring her from being vocal about the terms of the separation.  Carol’s marriage to McCain was not her first.  She was married to an Annapolis classmate of McCain and had two children.  McCain felt it was sporting to lure her away and married her….only to dump her for the next heiress that came along.

With values like that, we should all hide our loot should McCain become president.

In an interview with Wolf Blitzer of CNN yesterday, Nancy Pelosi called Bush "a total failure". 

God bless him, bless his heart, president of the United States — a total failure, losing all credibility with the American people on the economy, on the war, on energy, you name the subject

Anybody born and raised in the south knows that "bless his heart" is polite code used to describe a person that just a bit pitiful.  As Pelosi speaks frankly about the leader of the free world (sigh), I look forward to the end of his reign as he limps pitifully, bess his heart, into the sunset.  Hopefully he will make it there without screwing anything else up.