The gwen ifill meet the press mccain obama john

Republican presidential candidate, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., shakes
hands as he arrives at Independence Hall in Philadelphia, Sunday,
Sept. 21, 2008. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

McCain says economic crisis worst since World War II … Obama pledges
deep cuts in spending to fix economy … Obama and McCain attack each
other in new television ads … Biden calls for stronger voice for
National Guard within the Defense Department … McCain suggests NY
Democrat Cuomo could be SEC chief … AP-Yahoo Poll: Blacks, whites
still see society through different lenses

SCRANTON, Pa. (AP) — Republican John McCain on Monday called for
greater oversight of the Bush administration’s proposed bailout of
U.S. financial markets, saying the massive $700 billion plan being
crafted by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson needed broader
supervision.

“Never before in the history of our nation has so much power and money
been concentrated in the hands of one person. This arrangement makes
me deeply uncomfortable,” the presidential candidate said at a rally
here. “We will not solve a problem caused by poor oversight with a
plan that has no oversight.”

McCain praised Paulson and said he had spoken to him several times
over the weekend. But the GOP presidential hopeful nonetheless called
for a bipartisan oversight board to supervise the proposed bailout, to
be led by Warren Buffett or another widely respected business leader.

McCain suggested his one-time rival for the GOP nomination, former
Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg
be part of the effort as well. Both men made multimillion-dollar
fortunes in business before entering politics.

GREEN BAY, Wis. (AP) — Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama
moved to claim the mantle of fiscal responsibility in a roiling
economy, vowing on Monday to slash federal spending on contractors by
10 percent and saving $40 billion.

Urging members of his own party to be just as fiscally tough as the
most conservative Republicans, Obama said the $700 billion economic
bailout plan proposed by the Bush administration and congressional
leaders is forcing a renewed look at federal spending.

As president, Obama said he would create a White House team headed by
a chief performance officer to monitor the efficiency of government
spending.

“I am not a Democrat who believes that we can or should defend every
government program just because it’s there,” Obama said at a rally in
Green Bay. “We will fire government managers who aren’t getting
results, we will cut funding for programs that are wasting your money
and we will use technology and lessons from the private sector to
improve efficiency across every level of government.”

Obama focused tightly on the economy in recent days, and he has urged
Democrats and Republicans to join forces to approve a bailout of the
troubled financial industry that not only saves the industry but
protects taxpayers.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Presidential candidates Barack Obama and John
McCain are criticizing each other in television ads announced Monday.

McCain portrays his Democratic opponent as a product of corrupt
Chicago machine politics. Obama says McCain’s proposal to deregulate
health care could have disastrous effects like the deregulation of
Wall Street.

The commercials come as the two candidates are locked in a tight race
with six weeks until Election Day. Both campaigns say they are airing
as part of national buys, meaning they aren’t targeted to battleground
states and are probably meant to drive negative news coverage of each
other as much as reach key voters directly on television.

The Obama spot shows photos of McCain with President Bush and quotes
an article written by McCain in Contingencies Magazine that argues for
more deregulation of the health care industry just “as we have done
over the last decade in banking.”

McCain’s ad begins, “Barack Obama: Born of the corrupt Chicago
political machine.” That’s an inaccurate statement — Obama wasn’t a
machine candidate in the state Senate or in the U.S. Senate primary.
However, he has been backed by Chicago Mayor Richard Daley and other
establishment Democrats since he got the Senate nomination in 2004 and
has worked with them.

BALTIMORE (AP) — The National Guard deserves a stronger voice within
the Defense Department, given its role in the war on terror,
Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Biden said Monday.

Addressing the annual conference of the National Guard Association of
the United States, Biden noted that more than half of the veterans of
Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom are guardsmen
and reservists.

With citizen soldiers carrying such a burden, Biden said Lt. Gen.
Craig McKinley, slated to become the first four-star general to head
the National Guard, deserves a seat at the table with the Joint Chiefs
of Staff.

“Tell me why there’s any rational reason why you shouldn’t have a seat
at that table,” Biden said, speaking one day after Republican
presidential candidate John McCain addressed the group.

ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — Republican John McCain has said he could use New
York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, the product of a family with deep
Democratic Party roots, to head the Securities and Exchange Commission
in his administration.

“We have a number of investigations on cases we are now doing on Wall
Street with the SEC, so I don’t think it would be appropriate for me
to comment at this time,” Cuomo said Monday at a news conference in
Syracuse. “I’m happy doing what I’m doing as attorney general. There’s
a lot to do. We are making progress.”

McCain is wooing Democrat and moderate voters in part by promising a
bipartisan administration if he’s elected president. “I’ve admired
Andrew Cuomo,” he said in an interview aired Sunday on CBS’ “60
Minutes.”

It shows that a substantial portion of white Americans still harbor
negative feelings toward blacks. It also shows that blacks and whites
disagree tremendously on how much racial prejudice exists, whose fault
it is and how much influence blacks have in politics.

One result is that Barack Obama’s path to the presidency is steeper
than it would be if he were white.

More whites apply positive attributes to blacks than negative ones,
and blacks are even more generous in their descriptions of whites.
Racial prejudice is lower among college-educated whites living outside
the South. And many whites who think most blacks are somewhat lazy,
violent or boastful are willing or even eager to vote for Obama over
Republican John McCain, who is white.

Democrat Barack Obama holds a slight edge over Republican John McCain
— Obama has 48 percent to McCain’s 44 percent — among registered
voters in the presidential race, according to the latest Gallup Poll
daily tracking update.

John McCain held a town-hall style meeting in Scranton, Pa, before
joining Sarah Palin at a rally in Media, Pa.

“We cannot give a blank check to Washington with no oversight and
accountability when no oversight and accountability is what got us
into this mess in the first place.” — Barack Obama, on the nation’s
economic crisis.

Undecided voters and those who say they might switch candidates
preferred Democrat Barack Obama to be their child’s schoolteacher over
Republican John McCain by 18 percentage points, according to an AP-
Yahoo News survey.

The truculent means sat lemann test

Molly Munger graduated from Harvard Law School in 1974, a member of
the school’s first class that was more than 10 percent female. She
was atypical at Harvard for another reason, too: She had grown up in
Southern California. In The Big Test, Nicholas Lemann uses Munger as
an example of what he calls the new “American meritocracy.” According
to Lemann, an excellent reporter and former staff writer atThe
Atlantic, this group consists of those who succeed based on their
“aptitude,” as measured by standardized tests, without being held
back by such 19th-century standards as breeding, inherited money, or
religion.

Munger certainly fits Lemann’s bill. Though her father ended up quite
wealthy as a top lieutenant to super-investor Warren Buffett, she was
raised comfortably middle-class by her mother and stepfather. She was
smart, succeeding well enough in high school and at Radcliffe to get
into Harvard Law despite being a woman and a non-New Englander. She
was motivated after graduation, too, and eventually became a partner
in the L.A. office of the prestigious law firm Fried, Frank, Harris &
Shriver.

But even as she was living out an upper-class American dream, she
wasn’t satisfied. Her experiences mentoring disadvantaged young black
girls made her wonder how she could stand to benefit so much from a
system that still let race and poverty stand in the way of merit.
Success in a culture as rotted as ours, she concluded, was a
meaningless distinction, one better rejected than embraced. So after
nearly 20 years as a standard legal eagle, she quit her lucrative job
and entered the affirmative action battlefield, as a lawyer for the
NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund.

Lemann makes much of Munger’s midlife crisis. For him, she personifies
one of the ironies of the meritocracy envisioned by Harvard President
James Bryant Conant in the 1930s. Conant, one of the central
characters of Lemann’s book, reformed Harvard’s scholarship policy,
changing the place from essentially a finishing school for fancy lads
to the academic powerhouse it is today (it was only in the 1960s that
Conant’s revolution fully triumphed throughout the Ivy League).
Conant thought that everyone atop the new meritocracy would do
immediately what it took Munger 20 years to get around to. That is, he
expected them to emulate the “Episcopacy,” Lemann’s term for the
quasi-aristocratic gaggle of Episcopalian “good families” who
comprised proper society and dominated America’s elite institutions
before World War II. Conant assumed that his meritocrats, not content
to enjoy the benefits of their positions, would act like a moral
elite as well, reforming a truculent society that wasn’t as good as
it ought to be. He especially expected them to go into government and
the law, where their talents would have the greatest uplifting
effects.

But most of the meritocrats, like Munger in the beginning, took the
perks and ran, seeking the time-honored American prerogatives of
success for themselves and their families. They’ve proven comfortable
with letting the commonweal take care of itself. Pace Conant, America
is the better for it. More overall wealth and progress comes from
smart young men and women entering the world of business and seeking
their fortune there than from further clogging the corridors of
government and law, whose denizens mostly place barriers in the path
of achievement.

Lemann’s book is subtitled “The Secret History of the American
Meritocracy.” The “secret history” in question lays out in detail
just how Conant and his right-hand man, Henry Chauncey, transformed
the Ivy League from relatively mediocre schools more concerned with
social connections than with smarts into academic powerhouses with
diverse student bodies. Their primary weapon was the SAT, the “big
test” of the title. With smooth segues all the way, Lemann tells the
story of the SAT and the personal stories of Molly Munger and others
from the first generation to benefit from the Ivys’ more open
admission policies. The book concludes with some inspired political
reporting on the fight over California’s Proposition 209, which ended
affirmative action in admissions to state colleges there. Lemann’s
topic is probably too big–he raises more questions than he has space
to answer–but his book is interesting throughout.

In the 1930s, Conant and Chauncey began to shake up the Ivy League’s
ossified order by admitting more of the “wrong people”–initially
just Midwesterners, but later Jews, Catholics, and Southerners. Both
men believed in a natural aristocracy of educational talent, and
neither could swallow the notion that it could all be found among
rich Episcopalian boys from New England. In 1934, the pair found
their revolutionary weapon: the exam then known as the Scholastic
Aptitude Test. The SAT had been developed in 1926 by Carl Brigham, a
psychometrician with an interest in eugenics; it was an immediate
descendant of the infamous Army IQ tests of World War I, which
Brigham had worked on and which, to his mind, gave scientific support
for prejudices against Jews, blacks, and Southern and Eastern
Europeans.

The SAT was no overnight success, but by the 1970s it was the dominant
admissions consideration for colleges that needed a way to weed out
large numbers of applicants. This is a smaller set than widely
perceived. While the test looms large in the public’s consciousness,
most students attend colleges where test scores and even high school
grades do not matter much. Indeed, fewer than 100 four-year colleges
–out of more than 2,200–reject more than half their applicants.

Henry Chauncey was far more dedicated to standardized testing in
general than to the SAT in particular. That’s one reason why the
Educational Testing Service–the hugely successful nonprofit he
founded in 1947 and which still writes and sells the SAT–peddles a
wide range of other psychometric wares, ranging from professional
licensing tests to the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
Chauncey believed standardized tests could accurately measure
creativity, and he was suitably impressed by one test maker’s asserted
ability to apply his psychological testing theories to winning horse
races.

Chauncey retired from ETS in 1970, and with him went the sense of
psychometric mission that spurred the organization to measure any and
all human talents. These days, as Lemann documents, ETS is more
dedicated to hyping its products than to plumbing their limitations;
it even suppresses negative data generated by its own researchers.
For instance, in the 1970s, researcher Winton Manning produced for
ETS a book in which he concluded that the SAT was “inadequate.” ETS
had second thoughts about publishing the book and shredded the entire
print run. At the same time, ETS has faced enough assaults–from
agitators such as Ralph Nader (who sponsored the 1980 book The Reign
of ETS), from scholars such as James Crouse and Dale Trusheim
(authors of 1988’s The Case Against the SAT), and from SAT prep
organizations such as Stanley Kaplan and Princeton Review–to have
retreated from its original claim that the SAT tested “aptitude.”
Hence, in 1994, ETS renamed its most famous product the Scholastic
Assessment Test.

More interested in the political issues surrounding the SAT than the
intellectual ones, Lemann does not wade into the debate over the SAT’s
efficacy, even in his long discussion of the Prop. 209 controversy, in
which the test figures prominently. SAT scores are, after all, the
primary criterion by which applicants have long been admitted to
California’s more selective state schools. They are, in effect, the
reason why affirmative action was necessary to maintain a significant
non-Asian minority presence at those schools. There is a huge and
continuing racial imbalance in SAT scores. On average, blacks score
around 100 points lower than whites on both the math and verbal
sections. Latinos average about 60 points lower than whites on each
section.

Is the SAT actually helpful in identifying successful college
students? Books have been and will continue to be written on this
topic, but there’s a rough consensus that if you want to predict a
prospective student’s grades for the first year of college–that’s
what ETS claims the SAT does–then the test adds a small degree of
accuracy to reliance on the applicant’s high school transcript alone.
In a 1991 Harvard Educational Reviewarticle, Crouse and Trusheim
found that considering SAT scores in addition to high school grades
would cause selective colleges to change their admissions decisions no
more than 16 percent of the time. Still, most colleges love the SAT,
partly due to historical inertia, partly because of the aura of
psychometric precision it creates, partly because it lets them brag
that “x percent of our students got over y on the SAT.” It also
provides a “second opinion” in addition to high school grades, even
if that opinion agrees almost all the time.

I suspect Lemann avoids the efficacy question mostly because the SAT
data undermine his latent egalitarianism, his apparent belief that
almost anyone can do almost anything if he puts his mind to it and is
given access to higher education of any sort. Indeed, taking a page
from Conant and Chauncey, The Big Test conjures a world in which
prestigious positions such as high-powered lawyer jobs and State
Department berths would be open to any talented outsider with hustle,
whether or not he had good educational credentials. Lemann evades the
question of how employers are to judge beforehand how well employees
will do in a position without the cultural markers of credentials.
Since he seems to think such predictive metrics are unnecessary,
Lemann instead raises the question: Regardless of its predictive
value, is our emphasis on “the big test” really worth all the money,
effort, and social ferment that it costs?

Such a query relates to The Big Test’s larger theme: “Who succeeds in
America, and why?” Lemann identifies three tracks to success,
represented by three types of citizens: Mandarins, Talents, and
Lifers. Mandarins go to the best schools and think that, by dint of
their education, they are indispensable to managing the massive
machinery of the modern state. Just about any Rhodes Scholar would
qualify. Lifers succeed through dogged determination, usually rising
slowly through the ranks of public or private institutions. They are
people who struggle to top positions in corporations or bureaucracies
or law firms without the catapulting start of impressive Mandarin
credentials. Talents are entrepreneurs: Bill Gates, David Geffen, and
that guy in your town whose face is on all the real estate
billboards.

Lemann is really concerned only with Mandarins, even as he recognizes
that Lifers and especially Talents are not only more abundant but
ultimately more important to the shape of American life. Indeed, even
in the days of a relatively fixed Episcopacy, many–perhaps even most
–of the entrepreneurs who radically transformed society started out
as relative outsiders: Rockefeller, Du Pont, Ford, Guggenheim,
Kennedy. This reality is disguised somewhat by the quickness with
which such people move to the center of the establishment. It’s also
masked by the Mandarins’ dominance of government and the media, where
going to the right schools still seems to carry more weight than it
does in many other areas of activity. But the prizes of the
Mandarinate–especially status and regard among themselves–mean more
to them than to the rest of America, who tend to mistrust them as
busybody eggheads.

More to the point, that emphasis on the Mandarin path explains why the
SAT looms so large–disproportionately large–in Lemann’s success
scheme. If you want to advance the Mandarin way, you really do need
to do pretty well on the SAT (less well if you can take advantage of
affirmative action). As important, you need to know that you should
do well on the SAT. Interestingly, the means to boost your scores–
prep courses, guide books to the prep courses, and libraries and
bookstores that contain the guide books–are more widely available
than ever, suggesting a certain democratization of the testing
process.

The gains realized through such methods can be quite substantial. The
Princeton Review, for instance, claims that its typical student posts
a 140-point gain on his combined SAT score; if you see less than a
100-point jump, you can retake the course for free. Still, it’s a
given that some people will always do better than others–and that
those relative performances will have real effects on what sorts of
schools people attend and what sorts of jobs they’ll get after
graduating.

But contrary to Lemann, the real problem isn’t the emphasis our
society puts on the SAT–or even on academic performance in general.
It’s the emphasis that people like him put on that college-dominated
Mandarin path. While it’s true that the lifetime financial returns to
bachelor’s, professional, and advanced degrees continue to grow, they
are hardly preconditions for having satisfying, interesting, and
remunerative careers. Indeed, in a country where only about one-
quarter of people have a bachelor’s degree–a percentage that is
growing far more slowly than most people recognize–Harvard-trained
lawyers such as Molly Munger are perhaps less representative of
American life than Lemann presumes. Not all Americans need Mandarin
credentials to succeed and thrive. Most Americans can be perfectly
happy building their own businesses, or working for others, being
creative and hard-working without an impressive diploma–or any
diploma, for that matter–on the wall.

Yet in The Big Test’s afterword, Lemann presents a policy prescription
that implies that the Mandarin path is the only viable way to a
worthwhile and rewarding life: He wants everyone not simply to go to
college but to graduate from college. That would be an enormous waste
of the time and resources for many people who would prefer to be
elsewhere. Nor would it even level the playing field of success that
much: An overwhelming social consensus that everyone has to attend
college would just make a bachelor’s degree as meaningless as an
earlier social consensus has made a high school diploma. It wouldn’t
stop social sorting; it would simply bump it up to a higher level.

More to the point, and despite Lemann’s myopic focus, America still
has, as much as ever, those other venues to success: the vibrant,
idiosyncratic Talent track and the more systematized but also more
open Lifer track. Of course, as The Big Test shows, the Mandarin
track is alive and well, too, with fine people from good schools–
Lemann himself is, unsurprisingly, a Harvard graduate–striving to
manipulate the social order to create their utopia.

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Google’s percent today market

Apple: Down 18 percent. Google: Down 9 percent. Yahoo: Down 9 percent.
Amazon: Down 12 percent. Yeah, that was a pretty ugly day in the
market, as the House of Representatives stunned the world by killing a
bailout deal that everyone assumed was a given. Then again, it was
ugly even before the voting started, perhaps on murmurs that the deal
would fail, though maybe investors felt it wouldn’t have done
any good.

The good news: If you’re Apple () or anyone else with an actual
product, you can’t have a run on your business. You can’t
fail overnight just because your partners lose confidence in
you—unlike the various banks that went from business as usual to
bankrupt in a matter of hours. But as Warren Buffett recently said
artfully, the economy is like a bathtub. You can’t have it warm
in the back and cold in the front.

And it’s clear that the financial sector is getting splashed
with ice water. Take a look at the regional banks today. These are
normal, everyday, retail banks whose business does not revolve around
running hedge funds and other bizarre activities. Ohio-based Fifth
Third was down over 33 percent today. Sovereign Bancorp, just a
regular bank, fell over 70 percent today. Those declines create a
feedback loop, since their customers are now wondering whether
they’ll actually fail. Try checking to see if the bank’s
customers get concerned about their deposits

If you were switching back and forth between CNBC and C-SPAN today,
you’ll have heard many pundits say that the stock market
isn’t where you want to look to gauge the panic. The big fear is
the credit markets—particularly short-term lending. This is the
money that companies borrow Thursday to make payroll on Friday, which
they promise to pay back by Monday. It’s what makes it all flow.
And if that flow freezes over, that affects everyone. Explaining how
the media sector is exposed to every other sector of the economy
hardly needs an explanation.

Besides exposure via advertising, it’s worth pondering the state
of deals. Certainly leverage deals are through, but then again, that
story is basically a year old already. Financing will get tougher, but
barring Armageddon, lending isn’t done. Put it this way: If
Microsoft were to revisit its Yahoo bid and it wanted to finance
several billion of it, it’d have no problem taking on debt.
There are still plenty of lenders that would love to park some of
their cash with a company like Microsoft (). On the VC side, funds
still need to invest the cash that they hold. And though the IPO
market is dead, that’s another old story.

All that being said, it’s still hard to imagine the government
not doing something quickly. Politicians aren’t used to the
swift discipline of the market. Typically, they’ll make a vote,
and at worst, they’ll have to answer for it at a low-ratings
debate a year later. Usually, the result of bad decisions aren’t
felt until well after the vote is made. Today, cause and and effect
was pretty clear. The vote failed and the markets tanked. Plenty of
politicians have legitimate philosophical oppositions to this deal.
And supposedly calls to congress have been running “100 to
1” against the deal. Let’s see how fast that resolve wilts
in this market.

Meanwhile, our , an index of the top 100 digital media-related firms
fell a stunning 9.4 percent to 697.90. That’s pretty comparable
to the 9.14 percent decline in the NASDAQ.