Watching John McCain’s economics speech in Wisconsin. It’s like watching a modern day Herbert Hoover live. He really doesn’t get it. (I’ll be writing more as review on Tivo):

– What’s up with McCain’s left eye?

– John McCain is giving us his “educated guess” on what started the current financial crisis – this from the man who said: “I’m going to be honest: I know a lot less about economics than I do about military and foreign policy issues. I still need to be educated”

– So John McCain just said that Fannie and Freddie are to blame for our current economic crisis. Seriously? That was the big problem?

– McCain just lied and said that Franklin Raines has been advising Obama on housing policy. From Franklin Raines: “I am not an advisor to Barack Obama, nor have I provided his campaign with advice on housing or economic matters.” Obama’s campaign put that out in a statement last night. (link coming)

– McCain just said Obama should “admit to his own poor judgment in contributing to these problems” – Right, it’s Obama’s fault, not McCain who has been in Washington for decades and was Chairman of the Commerce Committee – McCain really has no shame.

– He’s going on about the lack of transparency in the financial markets – that would come in the form of regulation – something that McCain and the Republican Party have argued against for a generation. And the public is supposed to believe that this John McCain is different from the John McCain who Tuesday said don’t bail out AIG. Oh of course, because this is the John McCain who on Wednesday said we should. Wonder which John McCain would become President? The deathbed convert or the decades long deregulating Republican?

– McCain just said that the regulatory agencies were lax at carrying out their responsibilities. Maybe a Republican administration is going to encourage that environment? Say like they did during the Keating Five scandal? When John McCain was in the room with the regulators pressuring them to be more lax? Uh huh…

– “The Chairman of the FEC should resign and be replaced.”

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhmwSBBPmq0]

Clearly he was talking about the SEC’s Chris Cox, but even still, this financial crisis goes WAY past just the SEC and McCain doesn’t get it. He’s standing behind a huge gaffe, just like the Spain one. He’s really being reckless in covering up these mistakes. When is the media going to start calling him out on this stuff?

– McCain is proposing a Homeland Security-style single regulatory body for all financial markets. Yeah, Katrina didn’t show the failure of that approach.

– He went through a castigation of the Fed and basically told them to stay out of this – I mean, does he really not understand that the Fed was designed to regulate the financial markets? These investment and insurance companies, given their enormous size, are effectively a part of the financial services system. That was the rationale for nationalizing them instead of letting them fail. The Fed has been doing exactly what they are supposed to. Now the Treasury Department, that’s a different question – does McCain know the difference? After years on the Commerce Committee one would expect so, but maybe not.

– McCain is saying that his tax plan, a xerox copy of Bush’s, is better than Obama’s middle class tax cut? And his health care, another copy of Bush’s tax credit-style way to pay for huge health care costs, is better than Obama’s? He’s offering up nothing but more of the same. How does he think people can’t see this? This isn’t reform at all.

– McCain went on about a strong dollar and now he’s talking about how 1 in 5 jobs are export related – doesn’t he get that a stronger dollar is bad for exports, making them more expensive? I’m not taking a policy position one way or the other, I’m just saying that these two things are opposite and yet they are in the same speech.