Our Afghan quagmire

How different the outcome of this election might have been had Stephen Harper not taken Afghanistan off the table at the outset, vowing a 2011 "date certain" for withdrawal of Canadian troops. How different if the opposition parties had pressed the issue, just the same, asking repeatedly (a) what exactly is our goal in Afghanistan, and (b) how realistic are our chances of success?

We learn now that the Tories, out of deceit or incompetence, grossly understated to the public the true financial costs of our Afghan mission. We now know the Tories under-estimated the cost to Canadians, calculating that some $12 billion had been spent to date.

Now the Parliamentary budget officer, Kevin Page, estimates the total cost by 2011 to be $14 billion to $18 billion, due to over-runs and items conveniently not included in the Tories' calculations. That's equal to $1,500 per Canadian household.

Worse, Page met resistance from the government - specifically, the Department of National Defense - in doing his Parliament-mandated work. He was unable, for instance, even to obtain such basic information as the number of our troops in Afghanistan and what type of equipment they have. Is it any wonder the mainstream media have been so frustrated in reporting to Canadians our "progress" in Afghanistan?

Worse still - and shades of the sponsorship-scandal and gun-registry fiascos - Ottawa's bookkeeping on our Afghan-related expenses is a shambles. Our government itself likely doesn't grasp the true costs to taxpayers of this hastily undertaken mission. As the Globe reported Friday,

And Mr. Page's report indicates that federal government accounting on Afghanistan is a mess; he told reporters it 'has not met any appropriate standard, There's a lack of transparency and also some inconsistences in the numbers."

It's an excellent bet that if we don't know what we're spending, and how and where, Ottawa also cannot know if our 2,500 troops in Afghanistan are deployed as effectively as they should be. And what the true nature and impact of our modest humanitarian efforts has been.

These are your tax dollars at work, diverted from other urgent causes at home and abroad, and our precious daughters and sons on the front lines. Yet somehow, as this site has marvelled before, our troubled Afghan mission is not an election issue - the very time we have the best opportunity to ask the tough questions required.

All this might be academic if positive reports were emerging from Afghanistan. But all year the news has gotten worse. Finally, on Friday, came the sort of report we were dreading: A preliminary draft of the U.S. National Intelligence Estimate - the joint effort of 16 U.S. intel agencies - concluding that we and our NATO coalition partners are making no progress in in Afghanistan against the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

There remains no national government worthy of the name in a country still controlled mostly by regional warlords. The country's opium crop, which has registered record yields during the U.S-led occupation dating from 2001, continues to supply about 80 per cent of the European heroin market. The "government" in Kabul is corrupt beyond description. The Afghan army is nowhere near ready to assume the task of protecting the country from Taliban insurgents who with impunity strike inside Afghanistan from their sanctuaries in bordering Pakistan.

Our NATO partners, meanwhile, long reluctant to fight, continue to be absent from the most dangerous provinces of Kandahar, where the Canadian forces are, and neighbouring Hellmand, where the British are concentrated. Now we learn the NATO forces have been prohibited by their contributing nations even from relatively risk-free humanitarian and police work in the safer parts of the country.

The U.S. has pushed for NATO's 50,000 troops to take on a counter-narcotics role to hit back at the Taliban, whose increasing attacks have cast doubt on the prospects of a western military victory in Afghanistan.

However, Germany, Spain and others were wary and their doubts led to NATO imposing conditions on the anti-drug mandate for ISAF.

Without a total rethink of what we're trying to accomplish there, our Afghan mission is a lost cause, and a costly one that is risking the lives of Canadians, draining our treasury, and earning us scant if any international goodwill. Indeed, the killing of civilians by NATO forces, including Canadians, is having the opposite effect, no matter that it has been accidental. The many civilian deaths have been a convenient excuse for the Karzai "government" in Kabul to resist reforms including anti-corruption measures. The Americans are beginning to acknowledge a failed strategy, if comments Thursday by the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff are any indication. Why aren't we?

Shame on the Tories for keeping us in the dark, and on the opposition for acting as if we're not a country at war. 

Esquire endorses Obama

"We thought this election would be a serious fight over the future of this country, but only one candidate showed up."

The Spoiler and the Turncoat

Popped into The Big Picture's in-box is this Bob Rae letter, below, reminding us that it was Jack Layton who forced the 2006 election and ushered in the The Harper Years.

No mention that Paul Martin made it impossible for Layton to support him. Or that the Grits subsequently ran one of the worst campaigns in history. Or that the Liberals have since propped up the Harper government.

Kind of ungracious, after the Dippers propped up the Martin government.

Rae says Layton has an Obama complex, which we hadn't noticed. The sole substance for this might be that Layton did attend the Democratic National Convention in Denver. Rae accuses Layton of "advancing his own political ambitions," which as you know is rare among politicians. Certainly it's something Rae himself studiously avoided, except for that time he was instrumental in bringing down Joe Clark's government in 1979. Certainly at Queen's Park, Rae didn't advance his interests. I mean, he didn't plan on being Ontario's least successful premier.

Anyhoo, what's important here is that the Grits see the NDP gaining ground on them and must therefore smear Layton. And who better than a former Dipper to do the deed?

"As for Jack Layton's delusion about being Barack Obama, he could not be further from the mark. If there is an analogy to be made, it's with Ralph Nader, whose candidacy for the U.S. presidency in 2000 was perhaps most responsible for George Bush's narrow win over Al Gore."

So that's it. The CCF/NDP, which has been around for 76 years, is supposed abandon the field to let the Grits handle the Tories on their own. Which they did such a triumphant job of in the past two elections.

Oh, and not that it matters, but while Nader may or may not have been decisive in 2000, there were bigger factors in Gore's loss:

• Gore ran such a lousy campaign he failed to carry even his own state of Tennessee. Had he done so, he would have become President.
• Disgusted by Lewinskygate, Gore distanced himself from the Clinton record of unprecedented job creation (23 million new jobs from 1993 to 2001), budget surpluses, annual double-digit declines in crime rates in almost every major American city, and so on. Instead, Gore ran on a promise to protect Social Security ("I'll put it in a lockbox"), which only Gore and close family members regarded as a compelling campaign issue.
• Republican goons at the direction of James Baker and Karl Rove, dispatched to Florida during the recount there, verbally and physically assaulted the volunteer vote recounters for days until increasing numbers of the intimidated volunteers stopped showing up.
• The five Republican-appointed members of the U.S. Supreme Court installed Bush as President, with the four Democrat appointees dissenting. In doing so, the Court broke with its states-rights philosophy and practice, overruling a Florida Supreme Court ruling that the recount continue. The Supremes then reverted to their states-rights prediliction. Bush v. Gore, one of the thousands of Supreme Court cases Sarah Palin was unable to cite when asked to name even one case other than Roe v. Wade, is widely recognized as the second-worst Court jurisprudence after Dred Scott.

That Rae, a careful student of history, knows all that makes his letter all the more farcical:

The House Jack Built

Le français suit Dear David, Jack Layton says he wants to be Prime Minister. He's even trying to pretend he's Barack Obama. It's time for a reality check. Jack’s problem is that there’s an obstacle in his way: the Liberal Party of Canada. He knows he can’t get anywhere until he tears down the Liberals. So time and time again, he’s undermined initiatives he claims are important to him and allowed Stephen Harper’s Conservative government to cancel programs and tear up agreements that should be at the core of any progressive government. He forced the 2006 election and campaigned to defeat the Liberal government, knowing full well that Harper’s Conservatives would cancel the Kelowna Accord and the National Early Learning and Child Care agreements, and abandon the Kyoto Protocol on climate change. Since then, Jack Layton has done everything in his power to condemn Liberal policies, even those that are supported by the progressive thinkers he admires. Jack claims to be serious about the climate change crisis, but environmental leaders like David Suzuki have said the Liberal green shift plan is exactly the right thing to do. Jack’s positioning is not principled. It is aimed at advancing his own political ambitions, even if, time and again, that means real setbacks for the people he claims to be helping.  Thankfully, there are many former New Democrats who see through this tactic, and know how short-sighted and counterproductive this approach really is.  As for Jack Layton's delusion about being Barack Obama, he could not be further from the mark. If there is an analogy to be made, it's with Ralph Nader, whose candidacy for the US presidency in 2000 was perhaps most responsible for George Bush’s narrow win over Al Gore. There is only one viable alternative to the Conservatives: a Liberal government under the intelligent, principled leadership of Stéphane Dion. Please support us in building a richer, fairer, greener Canada. Don’t let Jack Layton and Stephen Harper hold us back any longer. Sincerely, Bob Rae, Liberal Party of Canada Authorized by the Federal Liberal Agency of Canada, registered agent for the Liberal Party of Canada

Bobby Clarke's kinda gal

Sarah Palin will drop the puck Saturday in Philadelphia for the Flyers home opener against the New York Rangers. Explains Ed Snider, Flyers owner and McCain campaign donor:

"Because of the tremendous amount of publicity she has brought to our sport, we invited the most popular hockey mom in North America to our home opener to help us get our season started."

Snider apparently took a poll of Canadians, Americans and Mexicans and determined that Palin is indeed the most popular hockey mom on the continent. At least, we assume he did. Cause the hockey moms we know are, well, really different from what we know of Palin. I mean, they don't lie, whip up xenophobic hatred for African-American candidates for the U.S. presidency, or bill the office for room and board in their own homes.

This blessed, unhappy land

The other day, New Zealand declared itself to be in recession. Japan, the world's second-largest economy, had done so three weeks earlier. No one will do business with Iceland's banks, and the country itself is near bankruptcy. So is Pakistan. Britain has just partially nationalized eight of its largest banks. You likely have heard of them. They include Barclays, Lloyds and Royal Bank of Scotland. The latter was to have helped finance the biggest leveraged buyout in world history, the $51-billion deal to take our very own Ma Bell private. Turns out that RBS is suddenly tapped out, like Merrill Lynch, Bear Stearns, Wachovia, AIG, and all the other wreckage. Venerable, giant American financial institutions with control of $11 trillion in assets have, in the past few weeks, been forcibly merged into even larger firms, nationalized by the U.S. Government, or collapsed into bankruptcy. Germany has just declared it will make good on losses suffered by any customer of a deposit-taking institution in the land. The world's third-largest economy is reacting to sudden developments in Ireland, where there now is no ceiling on the amount of deposits Dublin will reimburse on hehalf of customers of failed financial institutions. This has European leaders in a panic that depositors from Budapest to Lyon will now race to transfer their life savings to County Cork. A comparative miserly Uncle Sam has abruptly raised the U.S. bank-deposit insurance ceiling to $250,000 from $100,000. The financial-emergency summit Sarko hosted over the weekend was a shambles. Now it's hoped that the two dozen or so members of the European Union can somehow agree on a common rescue strategy where the dozen or so members of the eurozone could not. The American workforce has lost about 600,000 jobs this year. It is estimated that about six million Americans will lose their homes through foreclosure by the end of next year. Russia closed its principal stock exchange on Wednesday. It will remain closed until Friday. Australia's central bank cut its key lending by a full percentage point this week, for the first time in 17 years, in a bid to jump-start a stalled economy.

Then there's Canada, the land misery forgot, with apologies to the approximately 350,000 manufacturing and foresty workers to lose their jobs since 2002. But from 2002 to 2007, Canada has created a net 1.5 million new jobs. We have created 87,000 new jobs so far this year. Our unemployment rate is, by Canadian standards, a modest 6.1 per cent. None of our major banks or insurers have required a bailout, because our financial regulations are more strict than elsewhere in the world, our financial management is on the whole more prudent, and our greed culture, such as it is, has Canadian corporate CEOs earning about 30 or 40 times the pay of shopfloor workers, compared with about 400 times in the U.S. The home-mortgage delinquency rate in Canada is 0.3 per cent, compared with between 2 and 3 per cent in the U.S. House prices have not plummeted 30 per cent to 70 per cent in major Canadian markets, as they have in the U.S., Britain, Spain, Ireland and other countries with housing bubbles that have burst, because we did not have a housing bubble, merely about five or six years of gradually rising home values which now are plateauing or dipping a bit.  Most of the world is or soon will be in official recession - two or more quarters of "negative growth" in economic output. But a gloomy International Monetary Fund makes an exception in its global forecasts for Canada, which will, it says, outpace its G-7 peers with 1.2 per cent growth next year. The Royal Bank of Canada is projecting growth of 1.5 per cent. The Toronto stock market is off some 36 per cent, about the usual for a bear market, and in line with or less severe than plunges at bourses elsewhere, despite Canada's reliance on the export of commodities whose world prices have tumbled. Demand for those commodities will begin surging again in a year or two, because developing-world demand for them - not just in China and India - will remain insatiable for another two or three decades.

And yet, if polls in our current federal election keep trending as they have for the past two weeks, we are poised to fire our prime minister, or at the least consign him to another minority government in a campaign that began with him avoiding the "M" word, for majority, lest his party's initial 38 per cent to 41 per cent popularity scare off voters not willing to give him absolute power. Think about it. Who campaigns worrying, correctly, that the people fear him obtaining a majority?

What exactly has Stephen Harper done to deserve this rebuke?

It's not a mystery for the ages.

Stephen Harper has given the back of his hand to his own cabinet and caucus, sabotaged the workings of his minority government in order to create the false impression that this transparently unnecessary election was justified, shown only contempt for the media - which the public doesn't like, either, but of necessity must be relied upon to convey Harper's message to 33 million of us - and by turns looked frustrated, impatient and generally unhappy in his job. He was like this as the Reform's first policy chief, as a quarrelsome colleague of fellow Reform MPs Deb Gray and Preston Manning, as head of the nutter National Citizens Coalition, as leader of the Canadian Alliance, as abettor of Peter MacKay's betrayal of the Progressive Conservatives, as official oppositon leader and since January 2006 as prime minister.

Walter Stewart wrote a biography of a past prime minister, Shrug: Trudeau in Power, about a PM who so often appeared to care not a whit about the circumstances of the people he ostensibly led. The label stuck. But Pierre Trudeau was a visionary, the most cerebral of his global peers. And we suffered his insolence for 15 years because we took pride in his ambition for us, and in the renown he brought our neglected country beyond our borders. We've had other such leaders, Macdonald and Laurier. Harper, alas, is another George Brown or Arthur Meighen, stubbornly grumpy, mean spirited, evincing no spirit of collegiality. Even Mulroney had friends, lots of them.

So when the financial End Times appear to being engulfing us, once-mighty banks toppling and leaders elsewhere as panic-stricken as the man whose head is on fire and he tries to put it out with a hammer, we swiftly let our anxiety about the harrowing events abroad be transformed into our own contempt for a local leader so lacking in empathy, compassion, hope. A politician, of all things, at a loss for the right words. Who appears not even to search for them.

Trudeau had the good fortune to coincide with the likes of Richard Nixon. It's Harper's misfortune to be contrasted with a self-described "hope-monger" whom 80 per cent of us say we hope will be the 44th U.S. president, a thoughtful, empathetic, visionary man. If we didn't know from Trudeau's legacy and Obama's promise, we might have settled for less in these times so much more difficult for others than for ourselves. But we have known better.

This will always be Stephen Harper's dilemma. It would take the better part of a day to explain to him what Hubert Humphrey meant by "the politics of joy." Harper is a fairly competent administrator, but not a natural politician. No one so consumed with petulance can last long at his chosen trade. The people smell it, the technocratic, ideological grandiosity of a man willfully out of touch even with those closest to him. And so, in his third attempt, Harper will again be denied a majority.

He is a perfectly decent family man. But Harper is not one of us, not particularly happy to lead Canadians or even to be one, if his past writings and speeches are any guide. We tolerate him because of the alternatives. And even at that, only just. 

What did they teach Harper when he got his University of Calgary economics degree?

In the debates, Harper accused Dion of having "panicked" by trying to discuss an economic-emergency contingency plan during the debates, as if (a) there's nothing to panic about, or (b) you wouldn't want to share such a plan with a national television audience.

Harper later said as PM it's not his job to go around the country talking about an economic crisis that doesn't exist.

Yesterday, Harper allowed that, "We are putting some secondary plans in place if that becomes necessary," without letting us in on what they might be.

Today, Harper was back to mocking contingency plans, telling a joint meeting of the Canadian and Empire Clubs in Toronto that, "If you are making up [policy] in response to the latest news, or the latest changes in the stock market, then it is obvious you really don't have a plan."

Back to Monday, when Finance Minister Jim Flaherty acknowledged that, "The deterioration of global credit markets is beginning to squeeze the ability of even the strongest of financial institutions to raise longer-term funds, which could limit the provision of longer-term credit in Canada to businesses and households."

So, our big question: If, according to the minister of finance, Canadian banks are being sucked into the global credit crisis, and can't or soon won't be able to serve their customers, why isn't that some kind of national emergency?

And why isn't it appropriate to have the emergency summit called for by Dion and Layton, but mocked by Harper?

And to develop and communicate to the public a contingency plan?

What part of "leadership" does Harper fail to understand?

Oh, by the way, the "latest changes in the stock market" began in mid-June. That's when the S&P/TSX Composite began its 32-per-cent slide. And the global credit crisis? That began 15 months ago. It's time for Harper to stop acting like his campaign has been ambushed by unforeseen events.

Can't anyone here play this game?

It's not just you. Nobody, it appears, has the Street smarts to understand markets that have gone haywire. So notes David Rothkopf in Tina Brown's latest venture, The Daily Beast, a new Web-aggregator rival to the Huffington Post:

"First, you couldn’t pick better guys than Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson or Federal Reserve chief Ben Bernanke to be at the helm. Paulson has run the alpha firm of the financial world, Goldman Sachs. Bernanke is brilliant, a leading expert on financial crises.

"And yet they have been wrong at virtually every turn…late to recognize the crisis, late to act, vacillating, failing to communicate the seriousness of the issue effectively to Congress, and, in the eyes of some critics, triggering a further meltdown by letting Lehman Brothers fail.

"Alternatively, consider that had the bill passed, as it was thought it might, week before last, Washington Mutual still would have failed two days later and the headline across America would have been “Bailout Fails to Stop Biggest Bank Bust in US History.”

"Or consider that a group of institutional investors with whom I work, some of the biggest in the US, regularly indicate when polled that their boards literally do not understand the risks that new securities and investment strategies pose to their organizations.

"Or that Alan Greenspan, über-guru of the financial universe for two decades, claimed the new system of complex financial instruments distributed risk more effectively than before.

"Or that the masters of the universe that ran the hottest investment shops in the world got it wrong to the extent that today more than 20 have bitten the dust, institutions that once controlled more than $11 trillion in assets.

"It is not surprising that the bailout is rife with problems, given that it was created without a single deliberative hearing by a Congress that had failed grotesquely to meet its most fundamental market oversight responsibilities, that was in turn being led by an administration that had itself been wrong throughout the evolution of this debacle." 

The Tories' happy-face platform

I think one comment of Stephen (Stay The Course) Harper's before unveiling his platform today says it all. "If you are making up [policy] in response to the latest news, or the latest changes in the stock market, then it is obvious you really don't have a plan."

It's possible this was FDR's thought on learning America had just lost its Pacific Fleet. Don't be hasty. It will look like you're panicking. All the same, FDR was on Capitol Hill the next day, Dec. 8, 1941, with what turned out to be a hugely successful proposal, seeking Congressional approval to make war on the Empire of Japan. Change of plans.

The ability to adapt, and quickly, to an abrupt change in circumstances, is one of the qualities by which we define "leadership," the vague term the Tories have campaigned on since the writ was dropped. Also hope and empathy, which, as Bob Rae said today, Harper doesn't do well. (Neither did Rae, come to that, while Ontario premier during the province's worst recession since the Depression.)

What's striking about Harper's platform is its determinedly minimal impact. Its $8.6 billion in new measures, spread over four years, works out to 1.08% of the approximately $200-billion annual federal budget. And three-quarters of that sum is tax cuts. As we saw from the U.S. stimulus package earlier this year, which George W. Bush insisted be in the form of tax credits, and which was utterly ineffectual in boosting the economy, you can't tax-cut your way out of a downturn.

This might be one of the major distinctions between conservatives and progressives, although neither speak much of it. Progressives understand that people with little or no income derive little or no benefit from tax relief, because they don't have income to tax. What such folks need is money - a job, more generous jobless benefits, daycare subsidies, a hike in the minimum wage...

The only thing more prolific in the Tories' thin platform "brochure," as Dion dismissed it, than photos of Stephen Harper (22, no less) is promises that don't cost money, the easiest kind to make, which in many cases are hollow because they won't come to fruition.

For instance, there's a renewed Tory promise (threat?) to remake the Senate as an elected body with term limits. Putting aside the fact there are maybe 17 Canadians overwrought by this issue at this moment of collapsing financial institutions and stock markets worldwide, Harper knows he can't reinvent the Senate without reopening the constitution and negotiating with the provinces - inviting another Meech Lake psychodrama. He pledges more Commons seats for growing provinces - Ontario, Alberta and B.C., which won't happen because Quebec, with its declining population, won't allow it. The Tories propose an impressive sounding Charter of Open Federalism that merely re-states the constitution's original division of powers among the provinces and Ottawa. (How about a new Commonwealth of Canada that formally enshrines the existence of 10 provinces and three territories while they're at it?) The Tories will "allow" Canadian victims of terrorism to sue terrorists and rogue nations that harbour them, something they don't need Ottawa's permission to do. And the Tories will drop their planned film-tax changes that would have enabled the feds to indirectly censor film projects the Harperites didn't like. Now there's a promise: A promise not to do something we earlier promised to do.

With just a week before Election Day, Harper is rolling the dice that Canadians will put their anxieties about a looming recession aside and vote for a do-nothing Tory agenda. There's something spooky about how Harper has let elections slip away at the last minute - in merely reducing Paul Martin to a minority, in failing to gain a majority in 2006, and now blowing a commanding 41 per cent in the polls in Week One, reduced as of today to 31 per cent out of perceived insensitivity to the concerns of everyday Canadians. All for having shown little empathy or hope, which, ironically enough, also are cost-free.   

An Evening With Dr. Chutzpah

Sad to say, I won't be able to make it to "An Afternoon With Alan Greenspan," Greatest Central Banker in World History, at a Toronto hotel Nov. 7, sponsored by folks who should know better, including TD Bank and the Ivey business school.

In this time of extreme financial distress, I'll be hoarding the $450-per-seat cost of seeing the Maestro, so dubbed by a fawning biographer Bob Woodward in a more serene era that seems many centuries ago. Truth be told, I would shove a pencil in my ear before enduring the dronespeak of Dr. Greenspan, the least competent chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve Board in history, the only one, to my knowledge, to have inflated not one but two asset bubbles that each collapsed with a loss of trillions of dollars - the dot-com/tech/telecom bubble of the late 1990s, and the biggest-ever U.S. housing bubble of 2002-2007, the cause of the current global financial crisis.

Greenspan, of course, was a champion of the deregulation in financial markets that led us to the abyss. "Why do we wish to inhibit the pollinating bees on Wall Street?" Greenspan once asked. As for subprime mortgages, the weapon of mass financial destruction at the root of our present difficulties, Dr. Greenspan in April 2005 pronounced them a miraculous device, "representative of the market responses that have driven the financial services industry throughout the history of our country." Amen.

It's no small irony that Ed Clark, CEO of TD Bank and lead sponsor of the Maestro's visitation, purged all the junk mortgages, the collateralized debt obligations and other evil spawn of subprimes from his bank's portfolio the moment he got wind that his minions were acquiring them, in contrast to the unfortunate CIBC, which ended up writing off more than $8 billion worth of the toxic waste. What possesses Clark to waste the bank's good money on the tables for 10 it will purchase at this event obviously is beyond my poor powers of imagination.

Dr. Greenspan does have at least one other fan, John McCain, who last year suggested having the Maestro head up a tax-reform committee. As we know from the Sarah Palin pick, the Arizona senator has flawless judgment in selecting people for positions of towering responsibility. Such is McCain's admiration of the Greenspan mystique - as opposed to what Greenspan is actually on about, since by his own admission McCain is behind the curve in matters economic - McCain said "If he's alive or dead it doesn't matter. If he's dead, just prop him up and put some dark glasses on him."

Tony Robbins wasn't available?

 

Don't even think about it

Late last week, McCain operatives told reporters that in these late stages of the campaign their only option was to go heavily negative on Obama. Sarah Palin was deployed Saturday in Colorado and Sunday in Florida to smear Obama as an associate of unrepentant former Weatherman bomber Bill Ayers.

Asked last week about the McCain camp's decision that tearing Obama down was their last best hope, Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.), co-strategist with U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer (D.-N.Y.) of the Dems' success in retaking Congress in 2006, said simply words to the effect, "Don't try it. You'll profoundly regret it."

Palin was still smearing in Clearwater as Obama ads broke in selected markets tying McCain to the Wall Street crisis arising from his having carried water for years for financial companies craving deregulation, drawing a straight line from McCain's role in the so-called "Keating Five" U.S. Senators who abetted fraudster Charles Keating and the current crisis.

Here's the longer, mini-documentary from which the 30-sec. Obama spots are drawn. Four years after the Swift-boating of John Kerry, the Dems for once are fighting back, big time.