Your folks seem to be turning on each other inode....
Senator John McCain, the Republican presidential candidate, said the S.E.C. had “kept in place trading rules that let speculators and hedge funds turn our markets into a casino” and said that the S.E.C.’s chairman, Christopher Cox, had “betrayed the public’s trust.”
Speaking at a rally in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Mr. McCain said, “If I were president today, I would fire him.”
The White House immediately said it supported Mr. Cox, who has said he will resign at the end of the Bush administration. Mr. Cox said he had moved against short sellers and was doing all he could to stem the financial crisis.
“Now is not the time for those of us in the trenches to be distracted by the ebb and flow of the current election campaign,” Mr. Cox said in a statement released by the commission. “It is precisely the wrong moment for a change in leadership that inevitably would disrupt the work of the S.E.C. at just the wrong time.”
Mr. Cox is a former White House aide to President Ronald Reagan and a former Republican congressman from California. Some conservative columnists and commentators, including Robert Novak, supported him as a running mate for Mr. McCain. Writing in the American Spectator earlier this year, Quin Hillyer said that conservatives would rally to a Cox selection and called him “the best choice, bar none.”
nytimes.com |
