Oh F*cking F*ck!

OK, I can understand the sentiment that we should not bail out those who got us into this mess, thereby encouraging further irresponsible behavior down the road. But the fact that the arsonist is among the people trapped inside the burning house is no reason not to put out the fire. Much more is at stake here than the mere survival of a few banks who made a few boneheaded bets.

Because real estate assets were overvalued, and risks inherent in mortgage-backed securities undervalued, many financial institutions are undercapitalized and have had to adjust their balance sheets, leading to cash shortages and downgrades, which in turn lead to a general lack of lending. The pinnacle of this "credit crunch" came last week when the commercial paper market all but came to a grinding halt. Commercial paper is short-term debt which is literally the grease that lubricates the wheels of our economy. Manufacturers borrow money for a day in order to pay subcontractors for costs which they will recoup tomorrow when they sell the final product to the end customer; retailers issue commercial paper to pay suppliers while they wait for cash to come in from sales; and so forth. If our financial institutions cannot get bad assets off their books and recapitalize quickly thus freeing up cash for lending, then commerce is at risk of breaking down.

In other words, all of this nonsense about Wall Street versus Main Street is hogwash. Main Street has always been inextricably linked with Wall Street. One way or another, Main Street will end up paying a large part of the bill for Wall Street's misdeeds, whether by way of a bailout or by seeing its savings and its income dwindle towards zero. So, while the proposed bailout plan is far from perfect, it at least represented the most realistic workable compromise and one that was unfortunately necessary.

I know my 401K has already dropped more than my tax share of the $700 billion bailout would have been. The question is whether voters will see that connection and punish House Republicans for their failure to either craft a more palatable deal or sign on to an imperfect but necessary rescue package. Never mind his alleged skill in "reaching across the aisle", for all of McCain's self-proclaimed leadership and crisis management skills, his parachuting into Washington still didn't manage to convince his own party to support the government's plan. In effect House Republicans sent both Bush and McCain a big "Fuck You!" today.

PS: This episode of "This American Life" from Chicago Public Radio is still the best summary of the entire subprime mortgage mess. Do yourself a favor and listen to the show online.

[UPDATE:] File this one in the What-the Fuck?! Department: If you thought this election campaign couldn't get more surreal, get a load of this:

"Barack Obama failed to lead, phoned it in, attacked John McCain and refused to even say if he supported the final bill," McCain adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin said in a statement after the House of Representatives voted 228 to 205 against the plan.

That's right. Barack Obama was supposed to lead the opposite party's House Representatives to support a plan crafted by Bush's cabinet members! I guess when you're morally (and financially) bankrupt you look to the other guy to lead your party.

[UPDATE 2:] It seems that opposition to the bailout plan was particularly strong among those House Republicans fighting a close race for reelection this year.

Dutoit Returns

Current Philadelphia Chief Conductor, Charles Dutoit, just wrapped up a two-week stint with the CSO before heading off to Philly to open his orchestra's new season (ex-Philly MD Christoph Eschenbach, meanwhile, has just been named new music director of the National Symphony Orchestra). I missed opening night, as well as today's Beyond the Score, but caught Dutoit's Thursday evening performance of Rossini, Lalo and Tchaikovsky.

I have always enjoyed Dutoit's approach to the Russian romantics and last Thursday was no exception. In his hands, Tchaikovsky's fifth symphony was tightly structured and well paced without overwrought emotionality, yet always with a compelling narrative thread throughout. The orchestra showed no signs of travel fatigue following its successful European tour with Haitink, and was once again in top form. Dutoit coaxed some especially cultivated playing out of the woodwinds. The trumpets sounded stellar as usual, while Clevenger's second movement horn solo was perhaps not quite at the exalted level it could have been.

By contrast, the opening "La Gazza ladra" overture came away sounding a bit wooden, without the rhythmic energy one would want in Rossini. CSO concertmaster Robert Chen continues to impress me as a supremely natural and elegant violinist. His traversal of Lalo's Symphonie espagnole, as uneven of a piece as it is, was a marvel of technical ease and natural sense of phrase. I hope this (and other recent CSO principal performances) make it onto another "From the Archives - Soloists from the Orchestra" release.

Dutoit returns to the CSO at the end of next month for a highly anticipated set of concert performances of Berlioz's "La Damnation de Faust".

The End of Perpetual Growth

Seven years ago - coincidentally, just the week before the attacks of September 11 - I happened to be on vacation in Istanbul. As I strolled the old cobblestone streets of this fascinating melange of cultural influences, I wondered what it must have been like living in this metropolis at the height of the Byzantine empire, just before the invasion of Mehmet the Conqueror's troops. I wondered what the inside perspective would have been in the capital of a realm that was past its peak, rendered ineffectual by internal corruption and by a myopic inability to interpret the clear signals foretelling its eventual demise. I wondered, again, how life in Istanbul was different several centuries later, as its new Turkish rulers faced a similar outlook and the Ottoman empire gradually deflated from its decadent peak.

As they say: be careful what you wish for!

Here we are now in 2008 watching the most recent chapter of the decline of the American empire. Just weeks ago, Russia reminded us that US military hegemony has been relegated to paper tiger status; not so much by the rise of any other great power, but by its own pointless squandering of military resources in Iraq that has left the US unable to respond militarily in places that might actually matter. Today we see that America's economic prowess was built on a house of cards, fuelled by a speculative bubble, its obligations not supported by realistically valued tangible assets or adequate capital reserves.

Laissez-faire American economists' favorite argument against stricter regulation was to compare the wonderful American growth rates and low unemployment with the anemic growth rates and higher unemployment numbers in more regulated Europe and East Asia. But if one were to look at the American economy of the last twenty-five years (from the beginning of the Reaganite deregulation frenzy) to the present, and adjust the growth rates by deducting government military spending and the speculative dotcom and housing bubbles, American economic growth would not look much different from Europe's. Likewise, were one to count persons "out of the labor force" - as the convenient actuarial euphemism is termed - as unemployed in the US, the unemployment rate would also be similar to that of Europe.

I have no idea at this point what exactly the proposed $700 billion economic CPR kit will look like once Congress is done with it. I know what won't happen as a result of this crisis: even with the financial system teetering at the brink, the severity of the crisis is still not sufficient to change the prevailing American economic mentality of "perpetual growth". This is unfortunate, for this mentality is the root cause of the crisis.

In an advanced wealthy economy, economic growth is structurally limited by a factor of population growth and real terms productivity gains, plus any gains from technological innovation, plus increases in exports. This is different from a second-tier or third world economy that can realize double digit growth just by technologically and socio-economically catching up to the leading economies. In an advanced economy, such growth rates are simply not possible. The problem is that, as economies mature, markets tend toward equilibrium prices and accordingly toward very slim profit margins. At that point, traditional economic assets lose their attractiveness as investment vehicles. And this is where the Wall Street whiz kids get creative.

It is little understood in the West that Reaganism in fact put America on a straight path toward becoming the second loser of the Cold War. Reagan, in order to get the country out of the doldrums of the oil-crisis, embarked on the largest Keynesian government intervention in the market ever in the form of vastly increased military spending. All of this was financed by issuing government bonds to foreign buyers, while the focus on military industry neglected civilian innovation thus leading to an unprecedented trade deficit. At the same time, the Reagan administration started a gradual process of dismantling banking regulations - first and foremost the protections of the Glass-Steagall Act - which allowed investment banks to flourish. But this sudden availability of capital (which was in fact only borrowed), combined with abnormal growth rates in the military-industrial sector, lulled Wall Street into believing that high yields on investment could be maintained in perpetuity.

Reductions in military spending after the end of the Cold War and a drop in value of the US dollar during Bush I threatened to put a dent in this story of perpetual growth. But then came the deregulatory zeal of the "Republican Revolution" which further eroded Glass-Steagall and privatized large parts of our retirement and insurance system, thus turning retirement money and insurance premiums into investment capital for Wall Street bankers to gamble with. (You should know that John McCain and his buddy Phil Gramm were vanguards of this crazy deregulatory front.) The result of this was to effectively co-opt all American workers into the Wall Street investment system, since nearly everybody's retirement now depends on the performance of Wall Street investment banks.

Essentially, what we ended up with in the 90s was too much investment capital chasing too few worthwhile assets. Too much capital invariably leads to two things: inflation and speculative bubbles. First we had the doctcom bubble. Primarily, this was fuelled by the total inability of most Wall Street types to actually understand the technology in question and value internet companies realistically. Large sums of money were invested in companies with flimsy products, or no products and no paying customers at all. Yet, while the going was good, a lot of people were making so much money in the internet business that their suddenly flush wallets sent real estate prices sky high in desirable locations like Silicon Valley and Silicon Alley. Fearful after 9/11 that the economy would not grow without stimulus, the Fed and other central banks around the world kept interest rates low or even lowered them further, thus in effect exacerbating the problem by making credit easier to come by and allowing Americans to spend even more recklessly on overinflated real estate. Due to this sudden inflation in home prices, real estate came to be seen as a profitable, seemingly low risk investment. In essence, the doctom bubble begat the real estate bubble.

Under normal circumstances, a healthy and powerful economy could deal with the losses resulting from such speculative bubbles. But what is so economically life-threatening about the present situation is that the deregulatory zeal of Republicans in the 80s and 90s created a landscape of undercapitalized but dangerously interdependent financial institutions holding a lot of paper based on assets and risk assessments conjured out of thin air. The problems that resulted from the packaging of good and bad loans in opaque securities with fictitious credit ratings have been explained elsewhere at length and I won't belabor them here, except to point out that the seemingly Byzantine structure of these financial products and the large number of parties involved is not at all unusual, but rather par for the course on Wall Street.

Of course, what we have seen so far in the way of reactions to the financial crisis on Wall Street is more likely to reinforce this interconnectedness in the future. Bank of America has bought Merril Lynch, JP Morgan is acquiring a large chunk of Washington Mutual and further mergers are certain to happen. At the end, we will have fewer players, less competition and more bad assets concentrated in larger houses of cards. If you thought AIG was too big to be allowed to fail, just wait until you see some of the behemoths that will come out of this reshuffling.

The sad thing is that all of this was preventable. The American paradox of the new millennium is that while America's leading universities continue to be highly influential global intellectual leaders, America is the last place where their ideas are being transformed into political action. From global warming to financial regulation, the best ideas often come out of Boston, New York or the Bay Area, but it's Brussels that acts on them first, not Washington. It was the Americans that initially pushed for tighter regulation of banks which resulted in the accord known as "Basel II", issued by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision in 2004. This accord comprises three elements: increased requirements for capital reserves to more accurately reflect risks; greater transparency and disclosure requirements; and more effective regulatory and oversight tools for the agencies tasked with overseeing banks. The EU ratified Basel II in 2006 and it became the law in all member states on January 1, 2007. The US initially agreed to implement Basel II in gradual steps. But the free market zealots in the Bush administration succeeded in postponing implementation again and again, such that at present Basel II is unlikely to go into effect in the US in full before 2009.

Basel II is no magic bullet. But at the very least it could have compelled more realistic risk assessments of the liabilities resulting from various mortgage-backed securities, as well as from credit default swaps, and would have required the relevant institutions to keep larger cash reserves on hand to guard against failure. Had we passed Basel II in full sooner, we might still be in a hole today, but the hole would have been smaller and easier to get out of. Instead, the US is now resorting to buying out private debt with public debt. Whatever figure the administration and Congress agree on in the end, it will have to be financed by issuing more government debt in the form of government bonds. In other words, we yet again depend on the kindness of strangers to buy these bonds. How long they will be willing to do so depends to a large measure on how successfully we pull ourselves out of this slump and how well the next administration manages the budget, and accordingly how the dollar fares in the next few years. The next president will be in the unenviable position of facing utterly contradictory fiscal demands: keep the dollar low to increase exports and restart the economy or keep the dollar strong to be able to raise money from foreign governments?; invest in education, health care and infrastructure at home or cut government spending and get the budget and debt under control?; raise taxes to pay for the bailout or lower them in order to jumpstart consumer spending?

The failure of a timely implementation of Basel II, and the need to finance the buyout with foreign money, illustrate yet again that America pursues its unilateral exceptionalism at its own risk. Perhaps the silver lining on this gigantic storm cloud is that in light of the patently socialist market intervention about to be enacted by the Bush administration, the American public will in future be smart enough to see the right-wing laissez-faire propaganda for the sick joke that it is.

El Sistema, California Edition

Gustavo Dudamel hasn't started his tenure at the helm of the LA Phil yet, but his rise through the Venezuelan music education system has already inspired a similar project in LA. Joanna Lin from the LA Times has the story.

Eight Years Too Late

Well, the Republican National Convention is over, and even on the right some agree that this was one of John McCain's worst speeches. It was stiff, formulaic, without substance or concrete policy proposals, lacking passion and waxed excessively on his POW experience - although the same McCain four years earlier advised Kerry not to milk his own Vietnam experience too much for political purpose. But mostly, McCain was just evidencing all too obviously that he is the candidate of yesteryear. He was anointed as his party's presidential candidate at least eight years late.

In 2000, McCain could have run with the slogans of change he's using today. He could have touted his maverick image when it still had credibility - before he had aided and abetted Bush's imperial presidency; before he turned over control of his party to the Christian right and control over his campaign to Karl Rove's minions, the same Rovians who sullied his good name in 2000; before he picked a pathetically underqualified proto-fascist VP with a subpar and inconsistent academic career, who as mayor and governor milked the federal government for all it was worth even while McCain was fighting against those same earmarks. Indeed, eight years ago McCain would have been a formidable opponent to the wooden Al Gore. He could have beaten him in a year of Clinton fatigue by a sizable margin. And had he not, he would have shown far more grace and decency than Bush and would have conceded a narrowly lost election, rather than to permanently damage the country's democratic system by using a politicized Supreme Court to play referee and appoint him president against the public will.

But that train left the station long ago. Today, McCain just looks old. Overshadowed not just by the gleaming charisma and youthful enthusiasm of Obama and by the feistiness of his own VP, but overshadowed even by the death-defying energy of his 96-year old mother who leaped to her feet with the energy of a rabble of kids a tenth her age when her name was called at Invesco Field.

Obama in his speech in Denver hit it out of the park. He went way beyond his usual (well crafted) rhetoric and provided specific ideas of how to fix the economy and move the country forward. But most importantly, he was not a shrill partisan. He emphasized the commonalities and similarities where all Americans can connect with his vision. McCain, after two days of shrill partisan attacks from his surrogates needed to at least match Obama's effort. Instead, his speech - interrupted at the beginning by Code Pink activists, hardly mentioned in the mainstream press - offered half-hearted bromides for the party faithful, more militarism and no new ideas. On the economic malaise of the country, as my friend the Octopus puts it:

Mostly, he was promising that government would "not get in the way". Well, that's been the problem, hasn't it? Government did "not get in the way" of the subprime mortgage madness and rampant, largely unregulated, Byzantine, and fantastical flights of financial gimmickry that have put us on a death spiral into a massive economic downturn.

Only once did the old McCain, the real maverick briefly show through, when he criticized his own party - albeit very abstractly - for its own leadership failures. Not surprisingly, these lines drew no applause in St.Paul.

The NYT is right in more than one way that the Republicans are running against themselves. It's not just that "the difficulty for the Republican ticket in talking about change and reform and acting like insurgents is that they have been running Washington — the White House and Congress — for most of the last eight years." It's also that McCain is effectively running against his former, more moderate self, as his selection of "pit-bull-with-lipstick" Palin as his running mate underscores. John Kerry was a weak candidate because his platform was compromised by his prior political behavior on one central issue. McCain, the candidate, is politically compromised by McCain, the senator of the last eight years, across the board. And it's not just on issues that the center would care about. He is compromised also on issues dear to the Republican base, like global warming, offshore drilling or same sex marriage. And his VP choice undercuts his strongest positive: his experience and presumed foreign policy and military prowess.

It remains to be seen whether McCain, even with Palin, can mobilize the Republican base in numbers anywhere near the ones Bush was able to bring to the polls. Meanwhile, the Democrats keep registering more and more voters. They now enjoy a 900,000-person advantage on Ohio state voter rolls.

Other Election Tidbits:

Paul Krugman redeems himself for months of shameless Obama-bashing during the primaries with an intelligent piece on the hypocritical polemics of the RNC speakers. One anonymous poster on the NYT website points out, however:

But you're missing a crucial subtext. The Rs want you to resent Barack Obama for thinking he's better than you. He's black and he should know his place. In other words, he's an uppity n* and should step aside for John McCain, son of an admiral and war hero. Usually, this is just subtext, but a congressman just woopsied and called Obama "uppity" out loud. It's time to call out this racism and denounce it.

More Palin Stuff:

I dug up a 1997 Alaska Daily News article on Palin's attempts to get Wasilla's librarian and police chief fired. Really, after what Alberto Gonzales did over at DOJ, the Reps should know better than to appoint someone like Palin as their VP candidate.

Here's another interesting ADN article on Palin's boneheaded and financially disastrous plan to build a sports complex in Wasilla before having clear title to the land in question.

Oh, she was also once on the board of a Section 527 fundraising group for the now indicted Senator Ted Stevens, a.k.a Mr. Pork Barrel Earmark himself.

Rovian Politics Implode

We certainly live in interesting times. I guess John McCain was not happy about having pulled virtually even with Barack Obama in the polls. So now the woman who only a week earlier admitted having no clue what the Vice-President actually does has been nominated as McCain's running mate in order to remedy that problem.

Never mind the questions about the inadequate vetting Sarah Palin received from the McCain team. What were they thinking? This was a patently transparent ploy to get the hardcore evangelical Christian base sufficiently aroused to enthusiastically go to the polls. But, as the Tonic Blotter observed earlier, it was also a pathetic attempt at capturing the votes of a few potentially disgruntled Hillary supporters. Never mind that Hillary, and especially Bill, made a slam dunk case at the Democratic convention last week as to why their supporters should back Obama. What is truly pathetic is that the McCain team is apparently so chauvinist in their thinking that they actually believe women would vote entirely based on chromosomes, ignoring completely the fact that Palin politically represents the polar opposite (pun intended) of Hillary Clinton. Leave it to Gloria Steinem to clear up that little bit of confusion: "Feminism has never been about getting a job for one woman. It's about making life more fair for women everywhere.":

Selecting Sarah Palin, who was touted all summer by Rush Limbaugh, is no way to attract most women, including die-hard Clinton supporters. Palin shares nothing but a chromosome with Clinton. Her down-home, divisive and deceptive speech did nothing to cosmeticize a Republican convention that has more than twice as many male delegates as female, a presidential candidate who is owned and operated by the right wing and a platform that opposes pretty much everything Clinton's candidacy stood for -- and that Barack Obama's still does. To vote in protest for McCain/Palin would be like saying, "Somebody stole my shoes, so I'll amputate my legs."

[...]

She opposes just about every issue that women support by a majority or plurality. She believes that creationism should be taught in public schools but disbelieves global warming; she opposes gun control but supports government control of women's wombs; she opposes stem cell research but approves "abstinence-only" programs, which increase unwanted births, sexually transmitted diseases and abortions; she tried to use taxpayers' millions for a state program to shoot wolves from the air but didn't spend enough money to fix a state school system with the lowest high-school graduation rate in the nation; she runs with a candidate who opposes the Fair Pay Act but supports $500 million in subsidies for a natural gas pipeline across Alaska; she supports drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve, though even McCain has opted for the lesser evil of offshore drilling. She is Phyllis Schlafly, only younger.

Or as an anonymous poster on the NYT website put it: "This woman is Karl Rove in a Gidget costume." Speaking of Karl Rove, that dickhead is so excited about Sarah Palin's social conservatism, he doesn't mind contradicting himself completely. Watch this clip of Rove a few weeks ago dismissing the possibility of Tim Kaine as Obama's running mate on the grounds of his inexperience as a Virginia's governor for three years and former mayor of Richmond, VA. Now watch Rove on Palin saying the exact opposite. (h/t to Jon Stewart) But then again, to have cognitive dissonance, you must first be capable of cognition.

As we know from the past two elections, by the Rovian playbook, professional competence has never been a requirement for office. (Indeed the anniversary of Katrina and the near miss of Gustav were timely reminders of the monstrous failure of Dubya's pal, Heckuva-Job Brown.) But even by Rovian standards, the spin to turn this Alaskan greenhorn into a trustworthy, experienced leader ready to be a cancerous 72-year-old's heartbeat away from the presidency is beyond grotesque. My favorite so far has been the attempt to recast Palin as the decisive "commander-in-chief" of that formidable force known as the Alaska National Guard. Watch how McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds is utterly unable to explain to Campbell Brown of CNN what decisions exactly Palin made as "commander-in-chief" of the Alaska National Guard. Well, as the Alaska Daily News found out, the answer - not surprisingly - is none, really.

What Palin has done in other areas of Alaskan governance under her purview, on the other hand, is very disturbing. I join my friend the Octopus in being totally aghast that a mainstream political party of a first world democracy in the 21st century would consider for the vice-presidency a person who advocates censorship by banning books from public libraries. Far from being the crusader against wasteful spending as which her party would like to portray her now, Palin not only didn't oppose earmarks, she actively fought for earmarks for the state of Alaska, including those which McCain vigorously opposed. But her claims of co-maverick-hood are not the only way in which Palin's comments in her acceptance speech stretch the truth. In addition, now that Palin has been appointed as McCain's sidekick, she's doing her darndest to stall the investigations into her firing of an Alaska Public Safety Commissioner allegedly over a family feud. Indeed, her unavailability to face the probing questions of the national press are awfully reminiscent of the controlled public handling of a certain current White House incumbent. And the last thing the country needs is a VP who is likewise convinced that the war in Iraq and construction of a pipeline from the North Slope are "God's will". (See the video here)

While the ploy to energize the Christian base seems to have succeeded, Palin has so far clearly turned off undecided centrists. Following Palin's appointment, McCain's one-time three-point lead in the Gallup polls turned into a seven-point disadvantage in a matter of days. CBS even gave Obama a fourteen-point lead. McCain seems to have undercut his own appeal to the center by trying to woo the rabid social-conservative, Christian right. While the old fiscal conservative guard is aghast at her appointment, as evidenced in the candid comments of conservative pundits Mike Murphy and Peggy Noonan caught on a live mike at MSNBC, I don't think Palin will be the Republicans' Eagleton. Times have changed. Remember, this is now the party that cannot admit mistakes under any circumstances. The last thing they will do is to allow Palin to be replaced, lest it undercut their macho posturing about decisiveness and strength.

But there are some potential strengths for the Republicans in Palin's appointment. For one, she partially neutralizes Biden's edge as a strong and aggressive debater. It is hard to attack a likeable, hard-working "hockey-mom" of five without coming off as a total jerk. Or as Jon Stewart put it "We should not even be talking about Sarah Palin because it's sexist!" McCain might just as well have appointed a puppy. Biden himself has been playing a shrewd game so far. He has wisely joined Obama in correctly condeming the sexism of some of the attacks on her and her family. He seems to have already made the calculation that Palin is perfectly capable of self-destructing on a national stage on account of her extreme positions with little need for aggression from him, allowing him to concentrate his venom at the top of the Republican ticket.

As of yet unknown additional skeletons in her closet aside, Palin herself still has the potential to turn off yet more swing voters. The New York Times, reviewing Palin's acceptance speech, appropriately wonders if the "sharp and often mocking tone of her attacks — combined with her general avoidance of such key issues as the economy — might turn off swing voters across the country" and goes on to argue that the toughest bit of her task is still ahead. Her speech was preaching to the choir. She won't have the luxury of primed adoring crowds of likeminded conservatives when she faces a critical press in her upcoming debate with Biden.

The truly sad thing about the Palin spectacle is that it evidences with undeniable clarity that the old Republican Party of Theodore Roosevelt and Nelson Rockefeller is dead. What is left today is an undemocratic, uncompromising power-machine wholly-owned by rabid social conservatives. Their thinking is purely theological and as such cannot accept compromise. Not only do these extremists own the party now, they, in Gloria Steinem's words, own and operate John McCain, his past history of independent political thinking and bipartisanship receding more and more into the realm of mythology. What struck me as most notable about the Republican Convention so far is how unimaginative the speeches have been. Since Ronald Reagan, it seems, nobody has been able to come up with any genuinely new conservative slogans. The constant talk of Republican strength in national security issues, the false allegations that Obama will raise taxes and increase government - all of that could have been said at any other Republican convention in the past twenty-eight years and you would not have known the difference.

In the meantime, hardly reported by the press during the convention hubbub, the Republican delegates have passed what is without doubt the most extreme far right wing party platform in postwar history. It slipped so much under the radar of the American press that you have to look to foreign papers to get a more detailed account. On just about every subject - from renewable energy to amnesty for illegal immigrants, to constitutional amendments banning same-sex-marriage - the new platform hews far to the right even of McCain's own stated policy positions.

It's unfortunate that the Bush administration wants to gut the Endangered Species Act. The fiscally conservative, socially liberal, inclusive, "Big Tent", Nelson Rockefeller conservatives would have made the list this year. They are most certainly an endangered species in this poisoned and atrophied political ecosystem.