NEW POLL INDICATES MOST AMERICANS REJECT EVERYTHING ABOUT THE DIRECTION McCAIN HOPES TO TAKE AMERICA

First off, the just-released New York Times/CBS News is far from the worst ratings I've seen Bush get lately. More leading edge polls have had his approval ratings down in the teens-- as low as 14% when it comes to his economic job approval. Still this mass-consumption polling can't be looked at as anything but extremely bad news for the Regime, the GOP and, especially, John W. McCain. Americans haven't been more dissatisfied with the country's direction since the poll started asking the question in the early 1990s.

In the poll, 81 percent of respondents said they believed that “things have pretty seriously gotten off on the wrong track,” up from 69 percent a year ago and 35 percent in early 2003.

Although the public mood has been darkening since the early days of the war in Iraq, it has taken a new turn for the worse in the last few months, as the economy has seemed to slip into recession. There is now nearly a national consensus that the country faces significant problems.

A majority of nearly every demographic and political group-- Democrats and Republicans, men and women, residents of cities and rural areas, college graduates and those who finished only high school-- say that the United States is headed in the wrong direction. Seventy-eight percent of respondents said the country was worse off than five years ago; just 4 percent said it was better off.

So why is this such bad news for McCain since they didn't even mention his name? Dissatisfaction peaks after a recession, not when we're just entering one. The Bush Recession is just getting ready to envelope Americans in a world of hurt-- and Americans know it and they know who to blame.

The poll found that Americans blame government officials for the crisis more than banks or home buyers and other borrowers. Forty percent of respondents said regulators were mostly to blame, while 28 percent named lenders and 14 percent named borrowers.

In assessing possible responses to the mortgage crisis, Americans displayed a populist streak, favoring help for individuals but not financial institutions. A clear majority said they did not want the government to lend a hand to banks, even if the measures would help limit the depth of a recession.

That was the key-- "favoring help for individuals but not financial institutions," the exact opposite of what McCain, who angrily calls the victims of his economic policies "irresponsible," is advocating. "Respondents were considerably more open to government help for home owners at risk of foreclosure. Fifty-three percent said they believed the government should help those whose interest rates were rising, while 41 percent said they opposed such a move."

Americans want more regulation to protect society from selfish, greedy and avaricious corporations. Deregulation has long been the heart and soul of Republican economic policy and it is the only economic tune McCain knows. McBush's moronic plan to "fix" the current financial woes are accelerated deregulation, the exact opposite of what voters-- and non-partisan economists-- want.

This morning the Times condemned, albeit too mildly, the Bush Regime plans to further jigger the economy in favor of their wealthy and powerful contributors and at the expense of regular folks, who, as always, are suffering most from the Republican economic agenda.

To understand the White House’s blueprint for regulating the financial markets, start with what the Bush administration did not do. It did not offer America a plan to respond to the ongoing credit crisis or to the Federal Reserve’s dramatic intervention to prevent the collapse of Bear Stearns. It certainly did not provide a roadmap for avoiding this sort of meltdown in the future.

The Fed’s role in the Bear debacle has put taxpayers at risk of having to shoulder big losses, but the administration’s so-called regulatory reform does not address what the Bear mess made obvious: if something goes badly wrong in under-regulated or unregulated corners of the financial markets, it could topple the whole system.

In fact, the blueprint was mostly developed before the current financial crisis and accordingly comes across as outdated. The message of the administration’s proposals is that the markets will-- and should-- return to where they were before the near-collapse of Bear Stearns. It’s doubtful whether many of its suggested policies would have been apt even in that earlier context. It’s indisputable that they are inapt now.

The editors point out that it will up to a (Democratic) Congress and to the next president to come up with the new rules for a 21st century regulatory system. A confused and ignorant old man from Arizona is the last thing needed in this mix. Republicans "are complicit in the credit crisis because the anti-regulatory ethos and practices of the administration fostered the conditions for the debacle. It’s difficult to solve problems of one’s own making and impossible to respond effectively if you don’t first face up to your role in causing them. The administration apparently prefers to perpetuate the myth of self-policing, self-correcting global free markets, rather than own up to the fatal flaws that are now so evident in that myth. In the end, Mr. Bush’s regulatory blueprint will allow him to leave office with that ideology intact-- in his mind at least. The real work will be left to others." The Times, which endorsed McCain in the Republican primary, never mentions that his voting record shows that he voted in favor of every single ideological attack against the regulatory system and that he's is exactly as responsible as all the other Bush Regime rubber stamps who the Times blames for the current disaster.


UPDATE: McCAIN HEATH CARE PLANS ARE PREMISED ON EVERYONE DYING AS SOON AS HE DOES

Tomorrow, Paul Krugman dissects Republican health care, or, rather, lack thereof. Elizabeth Edwards reminds McCranky that under his health care "plan," neither of them-- both cancer sufferers (people, like so many of us, with a dreaded pre-existing medical condition)-- would be eligible for health insurance. Krugman calls it a health care plan based on voodoo economics-- "not the supply-side voodoo that claims that cutting taxes increases revenues (though Mr. McCain says that, too), but the equally foolish claim, refuted by all available evidence, that the magic of the marketplace can produce cheap health care for everyone."

Insurance companies do try to hold down “medical losses”-- the industry’s term for what happens when an insurer actually ends up having to honor its promises by paying a client’s medical bills. But they don’t do this by promoting cost-effective medical care.

Instead, they hold down costs by only covering healthy people, screening out those who need coverage the most-- which was exactly the point Mrs. Edwards was making. They also deny as many claims as possible, forcing doctors and hospitals to spend large sums fighting to get paid.

And the international evidence on health care costs is overwhelming: the United States has the most privatized system, with the most market competition-- and it also has by far the highest health care costs in the world.

Yet the McCain health plan-- actually a set of bullet points on the campaign’s Web site-- is entirely based on blind faith that competition among private insurers will solve all problems.