Appearing on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Davis said, “I’d never commit to anything in the future. … Our strategy is in our hands, not the media’s. We’re going to do what’s in our best interests to try to win the election. If we think going on TV news shows are [sic] in our best interests, we’ll do it. If we don’t, we won’t.”

So, maybe putting Sarah Palin out there in public where she has to answer questions from a reporter, as opposed to running circles around a fast-reeling TelePrompTer, isn’t in McCain’s “best interests?”

Palin, conspicuous by her mere absence: This booking strategy may speak volumes about the McCain campaign’s confidence in the governor from Alaska.

“War hero” McCain voted against healthcare funding for veterans in 2003, ‘04, ‘05, ‘06 and ‘07. Now veterans are confronting him on his record.

When retired Army First Sergeant Wes Davey arrived, in uniform, at the Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul to deliver a letter to fellow veteran John McCain, it didn’t take long for him to be turned away. “They wouldn’t even meet me,” he said later, standing on the steps of the Minnesota State Capitol, on what was to be day one of the Republican National Convention. Instead, the 28-year veteran of the Army Reserve and former St. Paul police officer was escorted off the premises.

Davey had come to the site of the RNC along with 60 fellow members of Iraq Veterans Against the War, who marched in formation, chanting cadences and leading hundreds of peaceful fellow protesters, including members of Veterans for Peace, Gold Star Families for Peace, and others who came to stand in solidarity with the veterans. Unlike IVAW’s action in Denver a few days earlier, in which they scored a conversation with Obama’s national veterans liaison, Phil Carter, who promised to try to set up a meeting with the campaign to discuss their goals of immediate withdrawal, benefits for veterans, and reparations for the Iraqi people, IVAW’s objectives when it came to McCain were slightly more modest. “We actually chose not to pressure him on the issue of withdrawal,” T.J. Buonomo, one of IVAW’s Philadelphia-based organizers said. “There’s nothing that’s very controversial about the things we were asking. There’s nothing that’s very controversial in asking that people get the discharge they deserve, that people with PTSD not have it held against them.”

Since China owns $1 trillion worth of U.S. Treasury bonds and $340 billion of mortgage-backed debt, when China gets a cold, the U.S. catches pneumonia. And — as I posted — when we think about the $800 billion bailout bazooka for Fannie Mae (NYSE: FNM) and Freddie Mac (NYSE: FRE), we should remember that our money is going to help China out of an investment jam. But since we are at China’s mercy, it may be self-help.

This comes to mind in reading the New York Times, which reports that China’s central bank, the People’s Bank of China, has kept its capital modest as it has gobbled up assets. Now it seeks a bailout from China’s finance ministry. According to the Times, “those [$1 trillion worth of U.S.] investments have been declining sharply in value when converted from dollars into the strong yuan, casting a spotlight on the central bank’s tiny, [$3.2 billion] capital base [that] has not grown during the buying spree, despite private warnings from the IMF.”

This need to replenish capital puts the U.S. economy in the middle of a bureaucratic battle on the other side of globe. The People’s Bank wants a stronger yuan while the finance ministry wants a weaker yuan. The Times writes that “as the yuan slips in value, China’s exports gain an edge over the goods of other countries.” Treasury Secretary Paulson has been on the side of the People’s Bank, advocating for a stronger yuan, so his push to bail out Fannie and Freddie can be seen as using U.S. taxpayer money to help it in its battle with China’s finance ministry.

What can China do? It could lower its capital requirements for the People’s Bank or it could dump its dollar-denominated holdings. Lowering the capital requirements would just make China’s central bank less able to withstand a decline in the value of its dollar-denominated holdings. And dumping those assets would cause the dollar to plunge and increase U.S. interest rates.

The lesson for the U.S. should be clear: you can create the illusion of prosperity by borrowing money (U.S. debt has nearly doubled to $10 trillion since 2000), but eventually the bank you borrowed from will get the upper hand. Now we face the consequences of living on borrowed time. Our fate is in Beijing’s hands.

Senate Democrats hinted at payback Thursday for Sen. Joe Lieberman, who called Barack Obama an untested candidate beholden to Democratic interest groups in a prime-time Republican National Convention address.

Lieberman, a Democrat-turned-independent and a close friend of Republican presidential candidate John McCain, still caucuses with Democrats, which allows them to control the Senate with a 51-49 majority . A spokesman for Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., indicated Thursday that Lieberman may no longer be welcome.

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The government has formulated a plan to put troubled mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac under federal control, dismiss their top executives, and use government funds to prop them up, government officials told the two companies yesterday, according to sources familiar with the conversations.

Under the plan, the federal government would place the firms in a legal state known as conservatorship, the sources said. The value of the company’s common stock would be diluted but not wiped out while the holdings of other securities, including company debt and preferred shares, would be protected by the government.

Jack Cafferty isn’t here today for the Cafferty File because of some tragic news.

His wife of 35 years, Carol, passed away unexpectedly this morning. Carol was everything to Jack. The dedication of his book reads, “for Carol, my wife, my life.â€

Jack wrote about how she was the inspiration for him to get sober and straighten up his life: “In all the years that we’ve been married, she has always brought to the table her unshakable grounding in something a lot more real than being on television or being recognized in the corner drugstore. She has been my rock, having done a magnificent job of keeping me from getting full of helium and drifting off the surface of the earth… She was all the incentive I needed to make painful but transforming changes – to get sober and stop smoking. I knew that I’d lose her if I didn’t. She’s an amazing woman who simply wasn’t worth losing.â€

One story Jack loves to tell is how he and Carol met – when he was a local news anchor in Kansas City. They started to meet regularly for a quick meal between his shows and became good friends. Whenever Jack had to leave, his exit line was “We’d better wrap this up. Got to get back to the station.†One night Carol finally asked, “What kind of a gas station do you work at? You’re always wearing a tie.â€

Jack explained it was a television station. He loved the fact that she had no clue and couldn’t care less that he had been on air there every night for four years. He later described that as one of his life’s “twenty-four-carat moments†that made his heart soar. He said to himself then that he might marry her because “it can’t get any more honest and pure than that.â€

Our deepest sympathies go out to Jack and to their two daughters, Leslie and Leigh. Our thoughts are also with Jack’s other two daughters, Julie and Jill, and his grandchildren.

Carol was an animal lover. If you’d like to make a donation in her memory, the family asks you give to the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. You can contribute at aspca.org.