Fenger Pointing
Becky Fenger | October 1, 2008
Questions for McCain
Last week I posed questions for presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama, so it would follow to likewise query Sen. John McCain. Here is what I want to know from him:
How on earth could you even think of appointing New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo to head the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)? You told “60 Minutes” on Sept. 21 that he “did a good job” as Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary under President Bill Clinton.
Are you daft, man? As HUD Secretary he pushed the funky, flukey mortgages that got us into the financial mess that the housing industry is in today. Just because you like the fact that Cuomo wants an investigation into short selling in the financial market is no reason to start picking out furniture with him. Come to your senses.
Another reason you gave for naming Andrew Cuomo to head the SEC is that he is “somebody who could lend some bipartisanship to this effort.” Again, get a grip. Every time that a Republican has picked a liberal Democrat just to show how he can reach a hand across the aisle, the ingrates have lifted a leg on it in return.
When you said last Friday in the Big Debate in Mississippi that “Ya, sure,” you would probably support the bailout of financial institutions, did you mean you would force taxpayers to buy the bad debt, or did you mean that you would lend the bankers cash to cover their current losses (while making them keep the bad debt on their books) and insure them against losses in the future? The distinction is all important.
Your cap-and-trade system on carbon emissions would cripple us appreciably more than our financial meltdown and not do anything measurable to affect climate change. Do you really not know that? Seriously. I have to know if you just don’t know better, or if you are playing to the “global warming” hysteria of the moment.
You write: “I believe policy should be based upon sound science.” Sound science shows that an increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has followed any global warming by a few hundred years, not the other way around as Al Gore claims. Yet you want to drastically reduce carbon emissions and bring our economy to its knees. Why?
When I asked you some years ago what Americans are going to do when SUVA, the replacement for Freon, is outlawed soon by the environmental extremists and told you man has not yet invented a viable replacement for SUVA, your reply was: “We’ll have to return to Freon.” Was that a joke? Do you not know that Freon should never have been banned, since it never did cause “holes” in the ozone layer? Or are you unaware that it costs supermarkets an average of $40,000 each to make the switch?
You wrote to me that light rail projects in the nation have mostly come in “on time and on budget.” Are you aware of how laughable that statement is? Are you interested in learning about the pathetic cost/benefits ratio of light rail, now that the vested rail interests are pushing for even more miles of it?
Your horribly mislabeled “Campaign Finance Reform Act” has ensured that your constituents here in Arizona have no say in the general election, since mailers by independent groups can’t be sent out within sixty (60) days prior to an election. Your fellow Arizonans have a compressed election schedule with the general election following the primary by only 60 days. Yes, we are gagged, but the newspapers aren’t. Given your love of the New Times and the Arizona Republic, are you sorry the press gets a say before the general election but your constituents don’t? If you had it to do over, would you?
