Explain this to me

Why would banks want to evict paying tenants from foreclosed properties! What's wrong with these people?

Oh, right (and with apologies to my friend BW, though he's just a lawyer for bankers and may even agree), they're bankers. They screwed this up in the first place, and now they want to sell their foreclosed properties into a glutted and falling market. In a year, when these homes are all sitting vacant, accruing property taxes and utility bills with no revenue streams from rent to offset the costs, these idiot bankers (what rhymes with 'wanker'?) will be crying for a government bailout of their nonperforming real estate.

Uh, no.

Holy shit!

Red Sox pull eight rabbits out of the hat.

Do not go gentle into that good night!

Forty percent solution

Why would the RNC fight to hold traditionally Republican states if they think McCain is still going to lose? What difference does it make if Obama takes 370 electoral votes or "only" 320?

If you fail to hold your base, you're less viable - or not viable at all - in the next election. The RNC is looking forward to 2012. McCain may be burnt flesh (in the electoral sense), but the RNC still wants to preserve Sarah Palin and the rest of its potential candidates by this triage of resources.

It also doesn't want its voters to get into the habit of staying home or voting for Democrats.

Update (10/17): More tacit surrender:

After quick forays to the traditional battlegrounds Thursday, McCain and Gov. Sarah Palin headed south to states President Bush carried handily in 2004 and ones that haven't voted for a Democratic presidential candidate in more than four decades.

Then there's this:

According to CNN's latest analysis of the electoral map, only six states are up for grabs (Nevada, Colorado, Missouri, Ohio, North Carolina and Florida) and they were all won by President Bush in 2004. That means even if McCain were to go 6-for-6 in the current tossup states, he would still fall short of the 270 electoral votes needed to capture the White House.

Time to slam the door

Sure, I've sounded cocky here, here, and here. But let me tell you that there's an undercurrent of paranoia and apprehension that's keeping me awake at night. As Obama says:

"We've got 19 days. We're going to have to work absolutely as hard as we've ever worked in our lives in order to just to get to the start of what is going to be a very difficult and very challenging but ultimately a very fulfilling four years where we can get this country back on track."

Feets don't fail me now!

Update: One reason for my apprehension is that my reports of John McCain's demise have been premature before.

Defense of Sarah Palin

Yep, stop the presses.

The Europeans are right overall about Wasilla's own vapid beauty queen. But this is just a condescending bit of culture-bound silliness:

Anybody with the money to own an SUV, hunt moose and drive a snowmobile has the money to travel.

In Alaska, there's a strong case that all these things are necessities, not luxuries. It's not as though Alaskans only have to slog through a little London fog in their SUVs. Maybe a few Europeans should visit the great white north. (Yes, maybe I should, too.)

Choose your poison

For all those bleating sheep who pulled the wool over their own eyes and refused to believe the obvious fact that torture was (and, thanks to the likes of John McCain, still is) the policy of the Bushists, there are two choices:

1. Admit that fact, or
2. Deny it until you've been waterboarded, and then admit it.

I recommend option 1.

For this, George Tenet and Donald Rumsfeld received the Medal of Freedom. An all-expenses-paid trip to the Hague in a barely heated cargo hold would have been more appropriate.

Even Rush Limbaugh knows it's over

In fact, even John McCain and Sarah Palin know that they have two chances, slim and none. Meanwhile, Palin is scaring voters away. Of course, Rush would never ask her about that.

Republican preference

As always, Republicans would rather prevent 100,000 legitimate votes that they're going to lose most of, in order to prevent a dozen fraudulent votes. They don't believe in democracy.

Update (10/18): Yep, those wingnuts are simply trying to protect civilization by destroying it.

Not a rubber stamp for Likud

Jesse Jackson's choice of right now to put words into Barack Obama's mouth seems a little like cutting off his balls. Even so, I would be happy with a pro-Israel policy that stops well short of approving whatever Likud wants. Israel is an important ally and friend, but friends don't let friends choose perpetual war over continued readiness for peace.

John McCain, of course, pretends to have such a Judea and Samaria policy, and that's much worse.

Long three weeks

Click image for full Tom Tomorrow cartoon in Salon.

The whole thing about Republicans banking on your stupidity? They think you wingnuts are too hidebound to consider the evidence. They think you'll go on swallowing the bullshit and telling your friends and neighbors how good it tastes.

So please pardon me if I insult your intelligence, but at least my insults are not as derogatory as the GOP's.

Issues?

Hillary gives a good interview to CNN. Here's my favorite part, especially the part I've italicized:

[John McCain] has to decide what is best for him to do. Certainly one thing that I hope is that at the debate Wednesday night and in next three weeks is that we have a clash of ideas here -- differing policies. Defend your proposal to privatize Social Security. Defend your health care plan, which would undermine employer-based health care. If you think these are good ideas for America, then go out there and present them and see whether you can convince people.

That's what campaigns should be about, in my opinion, and I hope that's what the next three weeks is about, and I'm confident that when the American people compare the Obama-Biden ticket with the McCain-Palin ticket and what each stands for, they are going to support Sen. Obama.

Like Hillary, I also look forward to a woman President, but actual policy positions are much more important than race or gender.

Devil you know

Since McCain doesn't have anything else, he goes back to making the argument that the devil you know is better than the one you don't know. I thought he was supposed to come out with something new. Oh, well. This story could have been published in almost exactly the same form in August. Or in February.

The problem for McCain is that Americans now know Obama. We've seen his calm seriousness. Except for the credulous wingnuts, we don't find him devilish, despite droning constant repetition from the Republican amen chorus.

Maybe, just maybe, McCain has decided that there are many worse things for America than his losing the Presidency, and one of them is the disgraceful campaign that he has run since the Palin nomination. Maybe McCain is finally beginning with the end in mind. (God, I'm an optimist today. More likely he's trying to have it both ways.)

Of all the things in doubt about the result of next month's election, the most important will be whether we wind up with a governable polity. If we don't, we won't be able to solve any of the other problems we face, and the late ugliness from the right has not been leading that way.

Even Harvard libertarians

... live in a fool's paradise unrelated to real life. Hell, Harvard libertarians are probably even more immune to empirical contradiction. Jeffrey Miron would prefer a world-wide, deep, decade-long depression if that's what it takes to cling to his precious, simplifying, too-simple theory of economics.

Markets are self-stabilizing within certain bounds. (Define these predictively, and you'll win a Nobel Prize someday.) Outside these bounds, their players panic and make what individually are rational decisions. But these decisions collectively lead to positive feedback and more panic, a self-perpetuating loop that brings free-fall. Everyone winds up hurt. Everyone winds up in a cash economy with drastically reduced productive activity. Many people wind up as Okies.

Intervening in the markets in a centralized way when required can cut short the fall. What comes after a massive debt overhang collapses still hurts, but it hurts less. The social price is that some of the guilty escape market punishment along with the innocent. That's a regrettable price because it encourages them to try some other scheme, but it beats punishing everyone. And we can surely find some fine-grained mechanisms to find the guilty and hold them to account.

Or you can just accept the extremes of an unregulated business cycle and the depressions that wipe out a third of the economy every decade or two. You pick.

Wingnut proof

Here's the kind of deranged lunatic that the wingnuts believe in.

For those of us who learn from experience, the first response to any new claim from the right should be, "Oh, I hadn't heard that, but based on past claims, it's almost sure to be bullshit just like the rest."

No money for you

Seven hundred billion dollars for Wall St., not a penny for you and me. Every time you turn around, that's what Republicans are saying.

Even at a time when capital gains taxes are the least of our worries, the oily John Boehner wants to cut them. Has anyone seen a capital gain lately?

No, the long war that the Republicans actually fight every day is not the global war on terror. It's class war. They know that eventually their wealthy base will once again have capital gains - maybe soon if the Democrats don't oversee the bailout closely enough - and then they'll need the tax cuts to start the next bubble.

A friend writes

Yes, a friend really did send me a link to the New Yorker:

At a moment of economic calamity, international perplexity, political failure, and battered morale, America needs both uplift and realism, both change and steadiness. It needs a leader temperamentally, intellectually, and emotionally attuned to the complexities of our troubled globe. That leader’s name is Barack Obama.

Liberal bias

Of course, the Swedish Academy's bias is well known, never moreso than today. Why, oh why, is important research so often liberal?

Congrats to Paul Krugman, who remains much more clear-sighted than most professional journalists. Could a Pulitzer be next?

Not with a bang

... but with a whimper.

Duhbya was never equipped to handle the difficult duties and choices of the Presidency, but he still has them, now that a strong majority have finally cottoned onto his lack of ability.

It's a very bad time to have such a dismal and unconvincing President.

Smack checking

McCain and Obama are both talking smack about each other. McCNN says it's all even-steven, all fair in love and war, a pox on both their houses, they all do it.

Never mind that much of Obama's ad budget is going to contrast ads about their actual positions, while most of McCain's is going to character assassination. Just tot up the spending for ads that cast the respective candidates in a bad light - that's McCNN's method.

Never mind that the McCain campaign cannot show one single positive ad. Of course, they won't admit this; they just won't call you back. Well, actually, their flacks in the field will tell you that you'll have to talk to HQ to get a comment on that one story, and then HQ won't call you back. But if you're a reporter, don't worry; they'll still hand-deliver their latest spin on everything else, not to mention the catering schedule.

Never mind that Biden's assertion is about proportion, not total amounts. McCNN "reasons" that Alexander Mooney, one of its producers, found that the Obama campaign is spending double the McCain campaign, so the fact that it's spending half on so-called negative ads means it's keeping pace with McCain.

Never mind that people with an ordinary middle school understanding of basic arithmetic can see that this finding confirms Biden's claim.

Never mind that even this claim from Mooney of McCNN is false. His numbers are vague estimates, not backed up by ... anything. The group that actually studied the question says that Obama is spending a third of his budget on negative ads, which is only "roughly half" if you're republishing a Republican press release and pretending against all experience that it could be accurate.

McCNN still claims that Joe Biden is stating a falsehood when he says that 100% of McCain's ads are negative. It's McCNN's claim that's bullshit.

Never mind that it's bullshit. Swallow it whole. Assuming you like the taste.

Minitru

See, what a Republican means by "cleared of any legal wrongdoing, any hint of any kind of unethical activity there" is this:

"Governor Palin knowingly permitted a situation to continue where impermissible pressure was placed on several subordinates in order to advance a personal agenda," the report states.

Stuffed with mildewed straw

Sarah Palin stars in a new one-woman show, The Wizard of Id. She plays Dorothy even though she can't sing. She can't even dance around reporters' questions. She plays the Tin Man, a natural for every Republican. She plays the Scarecrow, stuffed with straw, although not with knowledge. She plays the Cowardly Lyin'.

Even so, her favorite part is playing the Wicked Witch of the Northwest Passage. Who needs that Arctic ice anyways, besides a few sponging unchristian polar bears! She's so talented that monkeys fly out of her butt. Speaking of which, she couldn't find her ass with both hands even if she was already sitting on them.

Will somebody puh-leeze throw a hogshead of dirty dishwater on this fraud!

At what, shuffleboard?

John McCain writes another check with his mouth that his body can't cash. I guess he's now afraid that he has to shore up his standing among macho assholes, and you know if he has that much trouble in the bully faction of the Republican base, this election is over.

Trapped in a maze of twisty passages, all different

Being a maverick means never having to say you're sorry.

What McCain has had all these years is certitude in everything he says, no matter how often he completely contradicted himself - in five minutes, five days, or five years.

This story enumerates McCain's nonsensical mix of positions. In one way, he is heir to Reagan, who promised lower taxes, a balanced budget, and a large increase in military spending all at once. McCain similarly can't count.

You might say McCain's positions bespeak a lack of any core convictions. I just call his platform bullshit.

Shocked, I tell you

"I'm shocked, shocked that a black leader of the civil rights movement would notice that we Republicans have been fishing for anger from our supporters."

"Sir, here're your Southern strategy winnings."

(sotto voce)
"Oh, thank you."

Extremity

Sarah Palin says that Barack Obama is extreme on abortion rights. Yet her position - no exception for rape or incest - is one that only 10% of Americans agree with.

Of course, it isn't a surprise any more when a Republican accuses a Democrat of something that's more true of the Republican.

Wear her disdain as a badge of honor

The oath that Barack Obama will take on January 20, 2009, will require him to swear (or affirm) that he will preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. Not a problem, he has already been doing that: He has said both publicly and privately to Iraqi leaders that the Bushist status of forces agreement was not binding without Congressional approval.

Salient quotes from the (formerly enforceable) Constitution:

All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives. (Article I, section 1)

All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with Amendments as on other Bills. (Article I, section 7)

[The President] shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur. (Article II, section 2)

Sarah Palin thinks Obama puts ambition before country. As usual, she - and the Washington Times - are completely full of bullshit. Obama put America and its founding ideals first. The Bushists, not so much. They put power before country.

Why gamble?

Barack Obama is buying major air time on multiple TV networks. The question is: Why?

He's running away in the polls. McCain keeps flailing in desperation as his campaign goes down in flames. At the poker table, we'd say that he's on tilt, but craps is his game, so I guess we're stuck with him crapping out. (And I don't know enough about

Conventional political strategy would keep Obama doing what he has been doing, pressing his advantage steadily and incrementally. Buying a half hour of national TV time, simply because it's a big step, looks risky, and most campaigns that are leading become increasingly risk averse.

I don't think Obama is doing just because he can afford the cost and McCain can't answer. (How do you Republicans feel about Reagan's killing of the Fairness Doctrine now?) I don't think Obama is trying to pump up turnout enough to get the Democrats to 60 Senate seats, though I hope that's one outcome.

I think there are two things going on. For one, Obama and his people have proven to be one step ahead of conventional thinking since our interminable election season began. They've seen how risk aversion often leads to stagnation and loss. They've got a clear path to the basket, they trust in their candidate's ability, and they're going to finish this fast break with a slam.

The other factor is more important. The economy is committing suicide, where every individual actor is rationally retrenching and that sends the whole cascading over the falls. There's no one home in Washington who can calm the sweeping, blinding fears. Duhbya's approval rating is in Cheneyesque territory. He couldn't calm Barney, no matter how far south he's willing to scratch Barney's belly.

Obama cannot wait until January 20 to lead the country. Come what may, for the good of America, presumptuous or not, he has to start now, or he'll be the first black President of economic rubble.

He's doing it because it's his responsibility now, and there's no one else who can possibly do it. No one else has the stature. It's just a bonus that he will not only look Presidential but actually be Presidential doing it.

Alleged

I'm all for punishing the guilty. But first you have to find them.

Every election cycle, the Republicans place a story about massive voter fraud. Up till now, it has always been the stories that are frauds. Instead of thousands of illegal votes, there have been a handful, maybe a dozen.

This story will probably turn out the same way. If not, full force of law.

Meanwhile, the media should be more skeptical.

Update: Ask and ye shall receive:

ACORN spokesman Brian Kettenring said that in most cases the bogus registrations were flagged by ACORN supervisors during a review, brought to the attention of the local officials when they were submitted, and ACORN fired "probably a couple of dozen" employees who fabricated them. Under most state laws, the organization must submit every card an employee collects, he said.

(h/t Philosoraptor)

Why believe this?

You can believe that our government has had us under surveillance if you want. But I'd have to believe then that the Bushists are lying to us about everything, and ...

Adrienne Kinne, a former U.S. Army Reserves Arab linguist, told ABC News the NSA was listening to the phone calls of U.S. military officers, journalists and aid workers overseas who were talking about "personal, private things with Americans who are not in any way, shape or form associated with anything to do with terrorism."

David Murfee Faulk, a former U.S. Navy Arab linguist, said in the news report that he and his colleagues were listening to the conversations of military officers in Iraq who were talking with their spouses or girlfriends in the United States.

Better prosecute these bad apples before they make this man look bad:

"There is a constant check to make sure that our civil liberties of our citizens are treated with respect," said President Bush at a news conference this past February.

Definitely don't let this get out:

"By casting the net so wide and continuing to collect on Americans and aid organizations, it's almost like they're making the haystack bigger and it's harder to find that piece of information that might actually be useful to somebody," she said. "You're actually hurting our ability to effectively protect our national security."

Missed it by that much

Speaking of under water, here's another dope whose credibility checks are returned marked "insufficient funds."

Right about now, we're really handicapped by our inability to vote no confidence in a President we have no confidence in. I'm not a fan of parliamentary democracy, and the past nearly eight years of unified Republican government haven't moved me in that direction, but it is a big advantage to be able to take down an ineffectual government pronto and put another one in its place.

Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.

No liberal dog in this fight

McCain wants to give away $300 billion to irresponsible lenders and loan purchasers. Even the National Review recognizes this as a "gift to lenders who abandoned any sense of prudence during the boom years." Even Douglas Holmes-Eakin, whose own intellectual capital is now well under water, openly states, "The original plan relied on lenders taking the hit. This bypasses that step."

That's not liberal, as much as conservatives everywhere want to lay their movement's sins off against liberalism.

This fight is between corporate Republicans and laissez-faire Republicans. No matter how much bullshit Michelle Malkin and Matt Lewis may use to muddy up the blame, this ain't got nuthin' to do with us liberals.

Dana Bash and two minutes of total bullshit

Even by McCNN's standards, this report from Dana Bash is gag-and-vomit-level fetid runny sulfurous bullshit. Every major point in it is bullshit, including the headline.

First, Bash says McCain's plan is to buy toxic mortgages from homeowners. Neat trick, that. Homeowners don't own mortgages; the lenders do. This small sleight of hand is hard to explain without imputing the malign intent to hide the fact that McCain is proposing a gift of $300 billion to the exact people who made the stupid, bad, dangerous loans - or at least to the fools who bought them. This is nothing short of paying off the profiteers who, of all the people who contributed to this clusterfuck, are the ones who should have the most knowledge of risk and for whom market punishment is most appropriate.

Then, Bash attributes this plan to liberals! She shows a clip of Hillary Clinton that purports to show Clinton proposing the same thing. But it doesn't. Not even close. Hillary advocates instead that bankruptcy judges be empowered to rewrite loan terms, not to bail out lenders. In fact, Hillary's proposal, which is a mainstream Democratic proposal, leaves some of the right people holding the bag they very much deserve to hold.

Last, Bash brings on Penelope Patsuris for no apparent reason, and Patsuris makes some vapid point about how many mortgages $300 billion would buy if we Americans were stupid enough to elect the economically clueless John McCain. She can't even come up with an estimate, but she can ask rhetorically whether Henry Paulson is going to inspect every one of them. Uh, Penelope, how does $300 billion make that a harder problem than $700 billion?

Seriously, these people think we all have the IQ of a century-old chestnut stump - combined.

Bash has a nice voice, but I'd fire her ass and let her look for a graveyard shift AM DJ job. I'd fire her with no notice and no severance and no bullshit politesse, as in clean your fucking desk out in the next 10 minutes under supervision of security and don't ever darken my door or ask for a reference. I don't care whether she's dishonest or just stupidly incompetent (though I'd bet on dishonest). I'd fire her producer's ass, too.

There is no excuse for this disgraceful tissue of lies.

Diapers

Most of the noise about Obama's youth and McCain's, uh, maturity have focused on the negatives of both. Obama's barely out of diapers, and McCain's practically back in them. Obama needs Joe Biden to burp him after meals and make sure he gets his naps; McCain needs Sarah Palin to floss his dentures and make sure he gets his naps.

This sentence, which is really an afterthought in this story about McCain's age, has me rethinking the Obama's youth in light of history:

Democratic Sen. Barack Obama, is 47 and the fourth-youngest major party nominee. (emphasis added)

OK, who were the younger three?

1. JFK, who took office at age 44
2. Teddy Roosevelt, who took office after winning his own term at age 46 and 4-plus months
3. Bill Clinton, who took office at age 46 and 5 months

Even though I think Clinton was made more historically attractive by his good fortune to come between the two dismal Bushes, that's a pretty good trio. If you look at the entire list of U.S. Presidents, especially those from the resolutely mediocre century between 1837 and 1933 (with exceptions, of course), those three look magnificent. What we really need is more youth and vigor.

Of course, insight and knowledge are still essential, too, which is why I'm not in favor of Obama-Palin.

You might also notice that all three of the previous young candidates won.

Family jewels

Looks as though wearing a cup all those years while playing baseball and fast-pitch softball was a good hedge against the day when I come down with senile dementia or cancer or type I diabetes (unlikely at this point, but I did wait till almost 50 to part with my appendix). Heck, I could already use some shiny new cartilage in my knees.

Still, this new knowledge does complicate playing serve and volley. If a hot shot comes back, which area gets the better protection of my racket - my head or my family jewels?

Mother's maiden name

The hacking of Sarah Palin's Yahoo account should be a teachable moment for people who really are regular people. Don't use stuff that other people know to "secure" your data!

When your bank or your credit card or your service provider asks you to choose a challenge question on your account and they offer you vintage 1950 questions - mother's maiden name, place of birth, high school graduated from, last four digits of SSN, etc. - it's pretty clear that either (1) they don't know what they're doing, or (2) they don't care, and their real goal is to fob responsibility for security off on you. (Of course, CNN sanitizes the story, hiding how the hacker reset the password and pretending that the contents of Palin's account only appeared "briefly.")

The hacker committed a crime, and David Kernell is probably guilty as alleged. This level of foolishness should be best resolved by a misdemeanor plea agreement and a slap on the wrist, say public service, much as has happened in various past illegal taping cases involving partisans of both sides.

The crime exposed the fact that Palin has indeed used unofficial email for official acts, shades of the Bushists. She's an apt pupil. I seriously doubt that this is a crime in Alaska (though it's clearly an evasion of law in Washington), but it's a legitimate subject for political controversy even if it isn't illegal.

At least Palin can send email, even though her writing skills are right in line with her extemporaneous speaking skills. Which is to say, right up with some of the wingnut commenters on this blog.

Strong partisan

Yeah, I admit it. I'm a strong partisan. Duh. So this applies to me:

The only voters who like to hear the jabs, [Merle] Black said, are "the strong partisans. They like to see the other candidate, the other side, criticized."

The fundamental problem in the CNN story - and probably in the swing voters themselves - is that no one makes even a theoretical distinction between drawing a strong contrast with your opponent and attacking your opponent. It's all "negative campaigning." So, calling your opponent a sleazy, cow-tipping, alcoholic pederast is the same as showing how he'll implement his health care plan in an unpopular or expensive way.

I find it credible that the so-called persuadables don't make this vital distinction either. They don't want politicians saying bad things about each other even if they're both fair and true. Frankly, I just don't understand how adults can possibly be so timorous. What we're deciding is important. It would be weird and unnatural if we strong partisans didn't get passionate about the issues and the candidates.

Once again, our political discourse is pitched to those who have the least interest in it and who are least equipped to deal with both the pros and the cons, both of which need to be heard.

Blogger flushes

I had written a screed about Todd Palin's superficial answers to questions about the firing of Walt Monegan. But after reading Palin's submission (PDF), I wasn't happy with it, so I saved it for later consideration, and Blogger flushed it. Maybe Blogger did me a favor.

Make no mistake, Sarah Palin fired Monegan, despite Todd's pleading that Monegan resigned rather than be reassigned to Nome or wherever. And the appearance that the Palins used their position to settle a personal score is an important issue.

But there's another important issue that the media need to look into, and that's Mike Wooten, who does indeed sound like the worst kind of cop, one who also used his position to settle personal scores.

Todd makes a lot of serious allegations. Could the media please look into both issues at once? Or are they too busy interviewing non-voters? Specifically, is there credible evidence that Wooten made death threats, or did someone overreact to having an armed adversary.

Update: Well, it wasn't Blogger. It was me. But I'm still glad I reconsidered.

Zoe Kentucky returns

Demagogue is back, and that's good news even if only one of the bloggers is back. So far.

Memory hole

Get John McCain off of a simple formulaic message, and he often stumbles. Does this mean he's suffering from dementia? I don't know, but he didn't always do this. A Bill Clinton style policy wonk he never was, but he must have made sense on the 2000 straight talk express, when he wasn't getting so much careful political management. Else what did they talk about? Sex, drugs, and Abba?

What I really have trouble understanding is how McCNN can point to Ronald Reagan's famed age quip in 1984 without acknowledging the ample evidence that Reagan was already suffering from cognitive decline at the time, and of course, it's public record that he did turn out to have Alzheimer's. But here's the sum total of all Reagan references:

Or McCain might take a page from Ronald Reagan, who was 73 when he ran for re-election in 1984. During a televised debate against Walter Mondale, then 56, Reagan famously began by saying, "I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I will not hold my opponent's youth and inexperience against him." The audience laughed. Reagan went on to win the election.

Did the reporter think that wasn't relevant? Or did he just not want Tucker Bounds or Nicolle Wallace yelling at him and his editor?

Confession

Normally, I hate stories like this. They're trying to poll what reality is. They purport to tell us what we should be able to see and judge ourselves. The non-rational truth is that many people are influenced by social consensus to believe things they didn't actually conclude themselves. (See Cialdini, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion.) In evolutionary terms, this is adaptive for social species (humans, ants, etc.), but I digress.

In politics, the usual rule is that perception is reality, but I obstinately resist the claim that anything besides reality is actually reality. Yeah, I'm old fashioned that way. My blog-friend Winston Smith at Philosoraptor (we've exchanged links, but it doesn't mean we're married) may be relieved to hear that I believe this, despite my occasional hedged defense of the phrase 'socially constructed'.

Still, the CNN polling story does show at least that people are seeing through the bullshit that we call our mass media. But, sure, I agree that Obama's more compassionate, better at the economy, smarter, a better leader, etc., so of course I like it.

Everybody rationalizes. Why shouldn't I?

Update: Ditto this story about the debate.

Sense of entitlement

Remember when Republicans made a big show of concern about the poor having a sense of entitlement to welfare? Well, I guess they fixed that.

Rescued

Great thing about a dog is she'll get you out of the house and away from the TV, in tonight's case the Presidential "town meeting." I put "town meeting" into quotes because I've been to town meetings, and they're nothing like this format, although some moderators are as mumble-prone as Tom Brokaw.

So I missed most of the debate, and the part I saw didn't really hold my interest. Obama gave a pretty lackluster performance in the few minutes I did see. McCain was a little better relative to expectations.

Reading is a better way to get real information than sound bite manufactured for the still indecisive middling, muddled, mediocre voter who only turns out every four years. McCNN reports this:

"We will kill bin Laden, we will crush al Qaeda," [Obama] said.

McCain responded in equally strong terms: "I'll get him. I know how to get him. But I am not going to telegraph my punches as Sen. Obama did."

Now that's comedy! No difference in content or intent, except for the chip on McCain's shoulder. Yep, that silly Obama - he revealed the intelligence assets he'd use to find Osama. Not.

The delusional McCain?

Apparently, Cindy McCain has forgotten the way the Bushists' allies slimed her daughter and her family in South Carolina in 2000. As a parent, I would find that unforgivable even with the White House at stake. (Another reason I'll never be President!) There is no way I could ever greet warmly the man who permitted my daughter to be used against me the way Bushists used Bridget against John McCain.

Still, according to Cindy, what Obama is saying about her husband is worse. Bullshit. There are a large number of what Karl Rove would call character issues that Obama has left alone against John McCain:

• Cindy's drug addiction (without legal consequence)
  
• John's infidelity
• John's temper
• John's gambling
• John's rambling
• John's dismal flying record
• John's dearth of academic achievement
• John's willingness to exploit the protection of his admiral father
  

Yet Obama is running the "dirtiest campaign in American history." I suppose it's only natural for people who believe in Republican economics - we earned our inherited wealth - to believe that they are entitled to their own facts.

But Cindy's lack of perspective could only come from someone who has always had the field tilted in her favor and who can't remember as far back as 2000 - or chooses not to.

Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.

Justice delayed

The Bushists run out the clock on another legal proceeding. For a long time now, we've needed to speed up the glacial pace of the courts in this country.

Sauce for the gander

How can a man who swoons over Ronald Reagan on a regular basis (and twice in this column he sets Ronnie as the standard) write this?

[Obama] was the newcomer and the stranger, he rose above the crowd on pure special effects: dazzling rhetoric, natural charisma and a magic carpet ride of transcendence and hope.

It worked for two reasons: Democrats believe that nonsense, and he was new.

Charles Krauthammer, like many conservatives, lacks that essential germ of morality that applies the same set of rules to himself that he wants to apply to others. This lack is why the morality of these particular conservatives, such as it is, is a pastiche of taboos that must be received from authority rather than reasoned about. It's also why they don't believe in the concept of law as binding even the king.

GOP doctrine of total political war

John McCain has a choice: lose honorably or generate a furious shitstorm of mudslinging to change the race's undeniable trend.

Ed Rollins advocates another way, not a bomb-dropping attack, but a return to Republican ideology. This is a stunning rejection of the orthodox GOP core doctrine of total political war, and no one in the McCain camp appears to be listening.

McCain tasted total political war from the Bushists in 2000. Now, the hero of the Hanoi Hilton can rationalize any means to his own ends - because he's a hero, after all. If he gave up his conscience on torture in order to gain the nomination from the pro-torture Republican base, how bad is a little gutter politics?

Why liberals think Republicans harbor racists

Because they do. Get them anti-macaca voters to the polls. Too bad McCain has a black baby, but Obama has two. Feh.

(h/t Philosoraptor)

Wingnut Supreme Court

What's the likelihood that 88-year-old John Paul Stevens will still be on the Court four years from now? He's as close as the Court gets to a real liberal.

Contrary to the press's conventional story that the Court has conservative and liberal wings, it really divides like this from right to center:

• Scalia, Thomas, Alito - hard right, no apologies, screw you
  
• Roberts - hard right pretending to be merely conservative
• Kennedy - conservative
• Breyer - centrist, pro-corporate
• Souter - centrist
  
• Stevens, Ginsburg - liberal, sort of

There's not the slightest populist leaning anywhere in sight.

As Bill Mears says rather more elliptically, if McCain wins one term, expect a hard-right majority of at least five and probably six, which Kennedy is likely to follow to avoid irrelevancy. This would probably remain the case more or less for at least twenty years. Two terms would mean no centrist or tepid liberal wing at all.

If Obama wins, he probably cannot move the median of the Court at all. Instead, he can extend the current conservative balance and merely prevent it from lurching further to the extreme right. In a second term, he might possibly replace a conservative. Might.

(Yeah, and I won't bring the irrelevancy of Tony Rezko into this story even if someone else does me the favor of providing a canned non sequitur about him. This was bad journalism on Mears's part. It didn't belong in this story just because someone with no reputation said it.)

Projection

The RNC knows that if they could find this much money, they'd be cheating.

Update (10/6): Since Obama has contributions from millions of Americans, that's going to be some serious labor-intensive auditing. Could be a stimulus program using government jobs all by itself!

Dispatches from clueless-land

CNN missed the 2000 McCain experience so much that they commissioned Bob Greene to tour on their own leased bus. So far, the results of Greene's conversations with ordinary Americans have been, well, to call them ordinary would be an insult to ordinary people.

Mainly, Greene's interviews have been with people who don't have a clue about anything. For instance, today we hear from a woman in the age of expensive gasoline who drove five hours for a meal of "throwed rolls" (pronounced "thowed" for those of you not born, as I was, in the Cape Girardeau broadcast area). At least she cares a little about politics, unlike some previous interviewees. She wants to change completely how we elect leaders so that we can take all of them. Mitt Romney and John Edwards can compare hair products, I guess, but that's about all they have in common.

If she has a real idea, let her try to pass it. But no, she's just carping out vague dissatisfaction signifying nothing.

Frozen assets

Will someone, preferably a Democrat, please freeze this man's assets! He's an embarrassment to everyone who believes in good government.

Want some wahhabi with that?

Is it just me, or does the idea of the House of Saud bringing "peace" to Afghanistan give anyone else the willies? Is anyone out there not named Bush actually convinced that the Saudis are an ally of anything more than ephemeral convenience?

Entitlement

... to their own facts, free of charge.

Click image for Danziger cartoon.

Devil's tail

No, I meant 'tale'.

Click image for Mike Luckovich/AJC cartoon.

Reaction shot

At least cartoonists can get the details right. Check out her feet! And of course the reaction of the short Republican.

Click image for full Mike Luckovich/AJC cartoon.

Coming to a gutter near you

More Republican bullshit, the smearing ugly kind! Let's see, Obama runs into radical Bill Ayers by accident on the street. Sarah Palin does the nasty with an Alaska secessionist, her husband.

This is only going to get worse as the election nears. McCain and Palin can't win on the merits, but by damn they'll try mud-slinging. Even worse, they'll be proud of it.

Tucker Bounds, unrepentant liar

Tucky Bounds is in love with his $42,000 lie on behalf of John McCain. So in love that he repeats it in all sorts of contexts, including accusing Joe Biden of an "outright lie." If you're going to be a Republican spokesman, you need the satanic ability out of "The Exorcist" to induce head-swivelling like this. Imputing your sins to everyone else is their standard method of making me projectile vomit.

The truth, which big media mostly refuses to tell us, is here (in the economy tab), reported for children, who actually need facts, unlike adults, whom we allow to make up their own out of their impressions. Here's the Washington Post's table:

Change in Yearly Taxes
1) 0 to $18,981	-$21	-$567
2) $18,982 to $37,595	-$118	-$892
3) $37,596 to $66,354	-$325	-$1,118
4) $66,355 to $111,645	-$994	-$1,264
5) $111,646 to $2.87 million plus	-$6,498	+$3,017
$111,646 to $160,972	-$2,584	-$2,135
$160,973 to $226,918	-$4,437	-$2,796
$226,919 to $603,402	-$8,159	+$121
$603,403 to $2.87 million	-$48,862	+$93,709
More than $2.87 million	-$290,708	+$542,882

Yeah, that's Obama's tax plan on the right. Hmm, which one helps the middle class?

(h/t MediaMatters, via Atrios)

See you in four years, Michigan

Sarah Palin thought bubble: People tell me I sound like I'm from Michigan, so I know I can compete up there. They'll vote for me in 2012. And, heck, yeah, the UP is just like Alaska, right next to Canada, cold in the winter, and hardly anybody lives a-way up there. They even have some moose for me to shoot. Now that would be a photo op.

The truth is: So what, so Palin wouldn't leave Michigan. Who cares about that level of disagreement with John McCain? If she couldn't defend McCain's healthcare plan or his tax plan or his Afghanistan policy or whatever, that would matter. Oh, right...

Analyze this

There is a real story hidden in this silly "analysis" of the language Joe Biden and Sarah Palin used in their debate. But first the bullshit detection.

Text readability metrics are not bunk - until you try to use them this way. They measure text complexity and map it onto grade level. The sort of opaque, self-interrupting sentences that politicians in general - and both Biden and Palin in particular - often utter look complex to the algorithm. Gibberish is often complex, but the readability algorithm doesn't care about underlying meaning.

Paul Payack and CNN appear to be praising Palin's grade level. Instead, they should spend time on clarity of presentation, which Palin can only manage in the most superficial way. CNN and Payack barely scratch that story. After all, it's a judgement call, not something Microsoft Word can give you at the touch of a button.

By the way, Payack apparently did not use Word. When I used its built-in Flesch-Kincaid algorithm, his example sentences gave significantly different scores than he reported. That's another problem with text metrics; there are several of them.

(Note: Word says that this entry's grade level is 8.6. With a little tinkering, I can get it down to 7.5, but that doesn't make it better. A little tinkering in the other direction gets me to 10.5 with little change in meaning.

Also, if you have nothing better to do, you can play on your own with the transcribed text from here.)

Avoidance behavior

It's important to have debates, but it would be better to have revealing debates. No, I'm not talking about the pundit-fueled faux revelation we've seen so often in the past.

Still, I have to confess that the only part of the VP debate I've seen so far was an image of Sarah Palin shining off a widescreen TV through the window of a house I used to live in, as I drove by at 10:20 on the way home from tennis.

Well, I thought, she didn't collapse and need to be wheeled off the set, so she must have exceeded expectations.

Yes, I have it on the DVR - I think. That didn't go well for the first Presidential debate, so I can't be sure. I promise to watch it someday. I'm guessing that she completely met my expectations - since I didn't have any positive ones.

(Note: I got a helpful email that C-SPAN has a mash-up site for the debates, and the VP debate is there, too.)

Credit needs, small and large

Every year at Annual Town Meeting, we pass an article that authorizes the Treasurer with the approval of the Selectmen to borrow in anticipation of revenue to meet short-term cash needs. In all the years I've been going to TM, this has been controversial once, when some bad feeling spilled over from another article. But what if there were no loans to be had?

The town would miss payroll, furlough workers, and wait for liquid tax receipts to come in. The suddenly unemployed workers would tighten their belts, and you can bet they wouldn't pay their taxes on time.

The private sector is even more sensitive to the absence of credit. Its ex-employees would be holding onto every dime, too.

Writ large, California is already in this situation.

State Treasurer Bill Lockyer issued a statement a day earlier saying because of the national financial crisis, California "has been locked out of credit markets for the past 10 days."

The crisis is picking up speed, and that's not good. When the Bushists tell me the sky is falling, I'm skeptical. But they aren't the only people pulling fire alarms these days.

Anything to avoid learning

Big media personality Gwen Ifill is now in the sights of the right. Big deal.

Ifill is hardly a reliable liberal. In fact, she's only reliable at playing that vital Beltway game of speaking troth to power.

Ifill moderated the 2004 debate between Darth and John Edwards, and she once appropriately enforced the rules against Darth using tones that the vaporous wingnut punditry found insufficiently respectful.

But these are facts, and facts don't matter. This new, trumped-up bullshit controversy is about giving weak-minded people excuses to discount the obvious inadequacy of Sarah Palin. It's an attempt to lower expectations by the tried-and-true Republican means of patronizing the voting public.

A few pearls from Warren Buffett

Quotes selected according to my biases:

I don’t think [the bailout is] perfect, but I don’t know that I could draw one that’s perfect. I’d rather be approximately right than precisely wrong, and it would be precisely wrong to turn it down.

...

95 percent of the people at least are worse off in terms of their residential wealth plus stock wealth from a year ago or two years ago. That is bleeding into the real economy. I mean, that’s bleeding into auto sales and jewelry sales and furniture sales and all that. But that wave is just starting to hit. And if the paralysis we have in the credit markets, if every company continues to feel all we want to do is get our balance sheet down, sell assets, you know, it’s just the start of what can happen. Unemployment’s going to go up under any circumstances. I mean, the 6.1% is going to go higher.

...

We may need another stimulus - if we do, it’s - it should go to the lower and middle-income people. I mean, the truth is, I’ve never had it so good in terms of taxes. I am paying the lowest tax rate that I’ve ever paid in my life. Now, that’s crazy. And if you look at the Forbes 400, they are paying a lower rate, accounting payroll taxes, than their secretary or - whomever around their office.

...

I think it’s terrible for people in effect to say that income from investment should be taxed at a much lower rate than income from labor...

In truth, the rest makes a lot of sense, too, but I can't quote it all and adhere to copyright law.

How low are expectations?

They are sooo low.

Sarah Palin can't name a newspaper she reads. She can't name a Supreme Court decision other than Roe v. Wade that she disagrees with. (Hmm, you think those two things might be connected?) On her behalf, smarmy Tucky Bounds can't name a single decision she made about the Alaska National Guard.

The thing is, these omissions are all easily remedied. What's not easily crammed for is the habit of a lifetime of taking in information in your field that someday might be useful to have at your fingertips. Palin, like Duhbya, is a proud ignoramus. She's like that high school cheerleader no one has ever said no to, who wants to run the yearbook because ... no reason, she just wants to run it.

Palin can walk out on stage tonight and not fall off her heels, though, and the captive media will intone with all seriousness that she exceeded expectations in her first (!) chance for America to get to know her.

Obama girl commercialized

Sometimes selling out works!

Artificial sweeteners

Only one of the proposed new features of the Senate bailout bill even pretends to address the credit crisis, and that's the increase in the FDIC limit.

Some of the others are good ideas, and some are bad, but their purpose is to get votes - and voter acquiescence - not to solve the acute economic problem.

An aura of fragile loveliness

Please take this sweet, sad trip outside of politics. It will repay the short time you spend reading it.

Not long ago, I drove by shortly after a high-speed motorcycle accident. There were already so many good samaritans working on the victim I couldn't tell her gender (which I found later on line), but I didn't have much hope for her after a helmetless 75-mph dismount stopped by the guardrail. Nonetheless, she survived, how well the news is equivocal about. But she has lingered with me, too, as Alma did with Garrison Keillor.

Reasons to be cheerful

"New polls show Obama breaking away in key states" --CNN

FiveThirtyEight.com shows Obama with 336 electoral votes after today's polls and projects Obama winning in 85% of scenarios. A different type of projection gives Obama 51% of the eventual vote, and that's a hard number to beat for McCain.

Update (10/2): Essentially a repeat of the CNN story above, with a little commentary added. Bill Schneider chalks Florida up to storm surge from recent candidate visits. He seems to think this couldn't possibly be a trend away from his pal, John McCain.

Touching faith

Because Ron Paul is an acolyte of Ayn Rand's pure and simple-minded economic libertarianism, he cannot conceive of a government intervention in the market that would help the aggregate economy. He has a touching faith that the free market will always provide the best of all possible economies.

It's bunk, and the current crisis proves it. The market, freed from rules restraining the leverage of capital and keeping risk visible, inevitably corrects itself with a nasty recession. Paul won't admit it, but he is willing to countenance a depression in order to save his worldview.

Paul is right about one thing: Real estate has been overpriced, and the resulting bubble is the proximate cause of our current financial situation. What he doesn't seem to understand is that, just as easy credit causes markets to overshoot, lack of credit kills markets and businesses that would otherwise be solvent and very useful to sustained economic activity.

The bad thing about a bailout is that it does not punish the guilty, those who have caused the bubble. The good thing about a bailout - one that works, anyway - is that it prevents nasty damage to the economy that all of us rely on to make our lives.

The brief history of this bailout:

• Paulson proposes a typical Republican approach: Give money to the market with no strings attached and have faith the market will take care of us.
• Congressional leaders add some elements of a typical Democratic approach, though pretty centrist at that: Spend the money instead of giving it away. Get equity, limit deductibility of executive pay (which John McCain supports for the first time in his life for faux populist political reasons), provide fig leaf oversight of the power-mad Bushists.
• Republicans in the House promise to deliver a majority of their caucus, but they fail, duplicitously or otherwise.
• Democrats in the Senate offer tax cut and tax credit sweeteners to the Republicans. Once again, the Dems choose to lose to hardball Republican tactics. You might call them responsible enablers. If they had picked other items, you might be right, but the new provisions do hardly anything to actually address the credit problem. Thus the new bill is worse than the old one - more expensive with no more effectiveness.
  

It's pretty clear that the Europeans have the right idea: Recapitalize the credit markets by taking equity stakes. Yeah, that's socialist. But when the credit markets have been stable for a while, unwind those positions back to the private capital that is currently too afraid to lend itself out for useful economic purposes. Oh, when unwinding, make a profit if possible off the very people who made all this fun stuff into news. That would be a mixed economy's best revenge.

Update: More good sense from Paul Krugman.

Update: My CNN comment threads stay open long after CNN closes theirs.

Palin misses again

The Massachusetts Environmental Police had to shoot a bull moose in rut (no, not this fellow) this morning to keep it from endangering commuters. This bunch of liberals didn't even need Sarah Palin for her one proven ability.

Too bad about the moose though. But there's nothing we hate more than someone or something messing with our traffic.

Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.

Eternal verities

Even in a parallel universe, some things are inescapable. Aieee!

Click image for full Tom Tomorrow/Salon cartoon.

Me, too

McCain says, "Me, too," about Obama's FDIC insurance increase. McCNN leads with McCain.

Incredible.

So, why is $250,000 of FDIC deposit insurance an obvious idea? CNN doesn't bother to say, but the goal is to prevent a bank run. We're already in a deeply dry credit market. A run could not only kill banks that are basically healthy, it could also tighten credit even further as more and more people and institutions flee risk into cash or T-bills, where they are no longer loanable to stimulate business activity.

Better late than never

The Presidential election will determine whether this investigation ever goes anywhere. If McCain wins, why would his AG provide resources or back-up to Nora Dannehy.

For now, Mukasey's just trying to get his reputation back at a time when it's too late to hurt the Bushists. That's not all that's too late.

Lalalala, I'm not listening

They'd rather be dumb than intellectual.

Republicans say the complaints are coming from "intellectual" conservatives -- not Main Street Republicans, who they insist love the "hockey mom," from Alaska, as Palin describes herself.

Truth is, though, it's too late. Not to worry, they're stuck with Palin. So no one will be smearing them this cycle by calling them intellectuals.

Update (9/30): If this post isn't meaty enough (and, honestly, it is a little thin), take a look here or here. Even better, start Halloween a month early with "Spooky".

Update (10/4): Joe Conason disses the dumbing down.

Mean Nancy hurt their feelings

That mean Nancy Pelosi lauded her caucus for defending Main St. from the predations of Wall St. This made Republicans pout, so they voted against the bailout, says John Boehner. Waaah! You'd think they'd be ashamed to admit what a bunch of children they are (no slur intended against the majority of children, who are much more stalwart).

Already, I have heard colleagues channelling this bullshit, blaming the Democrats for not passing the bill, when 60% of them voted for it and only 30% of Republicans. While angrily blaming the Democrats, they were incensed that the Democrats would care about who got the blame! It's boggling to me how people who let the GOP manipulate them like this fail to notice it.

Was this a good bill? No. In point of fact, it sucked. The only rationale I've read that made it worth passing is Paul Krugman's: It was needed, and it was the best that the perennially irresponsible Republicans would permit.

As just punishment, the Democrats should now put forward a good bill (Krugman beats me to this, though without repeating his definition) and let it be voted on party lines. A good bill would have:

• a lower price tag, doled out in relatively small chunks
  
• real standards for pricing of bad paper
  
• mandated equity stakes for us citizens, the recapitalizers, mixed with temporary socialization of failed financial institutions
  
• punitive, confiscatory, regurgitative taxes on those who profited from this bubble
  

Then let Duhbya veto it.

Update: Barney Frank noticed the bullshit coming from the ever-oily John Boehner.

Update (9/30): For all the people in comments who are incensed with the Democrats, check out how two-faced, irresponsible, and focused only on politics the Republicans are. They were telling the Democrats they had a deal, but they were busy before the so-called deal failed planning to screw the Dems. Republicans, dishonest to the core. (h/t Americablog via Eschaton)

Update: Michelle Bachman defends her fellow Republicans against Boehner's slur on their toughness:

We are not babies, sucking our thumbs," Bachmann said.

No? In any case, they are just plain sucking.

Triangulation

I'm hesitant, too, hesitant to call Bill Clinton a great man. In fact, I'd go one step further and say that he is not a great man. That's just not a status I give automatically to Presidents. I don't even think Clinton was a great President, just a good one.

Look at the men who have held that office during my lifetime, and there's really only one great man - Eisenhower, and I wasn't yet three when his Presidency ended. Besides that, Ike's greatness was made in the ETO, not in Washington. JFK might have been great, too, but we have to dream of Camelot instead of remembering it.

This means I superficially agree with Bill that Obama is not a great man. Not yet. I think he could be, though I think he more likely will be successful President without attaining greatness.

I think Obama is a good man, and I've seen with my own eyes and heard with my own ears that he's a smart man. I suspect that he has far more self-possession and self-control than Clinton, despite some similarities in their backgrounds (single mother, absent father, life on the margins of poverty), and maybe that's part of what galls Clinton. If Clinton had had what Obama has, maybe he could have been a great man.

McCain is not a great man, either. He was heroic thirty-five years ago, though I'm always wary when a pall of myth is cast over human frailty. After all, he did break under torture, too (as all eventually do). He is a human, not some demigod of resistance. For another, people who are willing to torture you are clearly willing to lie to you. There's no reason to credit the North Vietnamese offer of early release to McCain. More likely, they were trying a softer psy-op to divide him from his fellow POWs. He and his buddies would have seen this before, they would have been trained about it, and they would have been obliged to resist it.

But really, it's transparently obvious that Clinton would rather be passive-aggressive like this to try to get Hillary another shot in 2012 before she ages out of eligibility. He's back to triangulation, and it's pretty ugly.

Rejoinders

If it's coming out of Tucker Bounds's mouth, it's a lie:

"John McCain repeatedly pointed to Sen. Obama's vote in favor of higher taxes on families making just $42,000 a year, and his proposal for $860 billion in lavish new government spending which is a crushing burden on middle class families and the Main Street economy," spokesman Tucker Bounds said in a statement Saturday.

He might possibly slip and tell the truth by accident, but he'd never repeat the truth. The Republican message machine is about repetition, not about accuracy. Using the well-honed techniques of advertising and tobacco industry denial, they judge their attack lines only be effectiveness, not by something so retro and hoary as being true.

So, when Obama attacks McCain's middle class cred, they don't merely parry. They counter. Like Feyd-Rautha, with poison on the blade.

Democrats are really poor at this. They parry with a sound reasoned argument and think they've won. Innocents!

Every time Tucker Bounds or another of the professional liars who speak for Republicans says something like what's above, Democrats at least must counterattack against the credibility of the whole Republican message, something along these lines:

Tucker repeats yet again a proven lie about Obama's tax plan, which raises taxes on people making more than $200,000 a year. What he and the Republicans will never tell you is that the one person making $42,000 who'll see a tax increase is a teenager with a BMW whose trust fund billionaire daddy is trying to use to launder his capital gains. Republicans will never tell you the whole truth about this. Can you trust them about anything else?

Democrats should have been explicitly attacking the core credibility of Republicans for thirty years. The Republican Party message is founded on three true things:

• lower taxes for the wealthy
• gun rights
• personal responsibility for non-wealthy knocked-up women and girls

Even the last is close to a lie. Republicans would really rather retain Roe v. Wade as a perpetual burr under the fundie saddle. That's why they've moved so slowly to actually overturn it. Keeping that burr in place is why they have started to push even more extreme views that would prohibit most forms of birth control.

The rest of the Republican platform requires consistent deception of the voters, especially the part about tax cuts for the middle class that consist entirely of leftovers from the tables of the wealthy. That's why Tucky and his ilk prosper and the rest of us don't.

Spooky

Republicans don't demand a lot of their Presidential candidates. They're looking for a figurehead, a national daddy or mommy to blow them a kiss. They're even o.k. with a shadowy apparat of operatives running the President, just as long as the animatronics don't show. Toto, get away from that curtain.

In normal times, Sarah Palin would have been perfect - and the reaction of the die-hards shows that she still is for the base. Hits her mark. Looks good. Down to earth in a Stepford kind of way. Not too smart.

The part about not being too smart is part of the Republican job description for President, which is predicated on riding wave after wave of advisers to do the thinking for you. Not being too smart is an advantage. Knowing stuff that "ordinary" people don't know (the ones who can't tell that the Republicans are patronizing them) is as dangerous to popularity as making an A in 7th grade math, especially if that means you know trickonom-- trigamonetry-- angles and stuff. If you know stuff, you may have to explain your thoughts, and the Republicans know that Americans want entertainment, not explanations.

Palin would have been perfect ten years ago. No one would have cared that she's already confirmed the Peter Principle by reaching the level of her incompetence as governor of Alaska. No one would have cared that she has so far proven to be less trainable than Dan Quayle even to give foolishly simplistic answers that succeed at staying on a sound-bite message.

Ten years ago was before Duhbya screwed it up for really dumb people everywhere. Even the political Rip Van Winkles who sleep for four years between elections - even lapdog political journalists - have been enlightened like the slowest Grasshopper thumped in the head in a Zen koan. Electing someone too dumb for the job can have really, really bad consequences. Even Republicans want to hurry home to daddy in the form of Ronald Reagan, because by god he could read a cue card with the best of them.

Why am I being so mean to Palin?

First, I saw the Tina Fey send-up of Palin's latest mind-blowing disinterview with Katie Couric. Hysterical! What a send-up of Palin's irresistible tendency to descend into a gibberish of phrases so disconnected that you might expect to find them if you spilled your Magnetic Poetry kit into the garbage dispose-all.


Then, I watched the actual answer from St. Sarah of 600 miles from Russia.


Verbatim.

I already liked Tina Fey, just from the commercial where she ran back and forth putting out fires. Now I find out that she hardly even deserves a writing credit for her skit. She does however deserve kudos for having the judgement to let the unsatirizable Palin absurdities speak for themselves.

It doesn't take a genius to run a good government. FDR was famously dubbed a second-rate intellect by Oliver Wendell Holmes, who nonetheless appreciated his first-rate temperament. But it does take someone with something serious on the ball. Sarah Palin ain't got it, and it looks as though she never will.

Tina Fey on the other hand? She's got brains and judgement. I'd vote for her.

(Thanks, Tom!)

C-SPAN blues

My DVR recording of the debate carried the helpful crawl to tell me now that C-SPAN's coverage had been moved to C-SPAN2, so I guess I'm SOL. No, I didn't feel like listening to throwaway speeches from the House of Representatives. There's only so much praise across the aisle for retiring long-time Republicans that I can stand, and that's measured in nanoseconds.

Ah, hell, probably all the insight into the performance has already been said somewhere. But I've been holding off reading from the great soup of punditry so that I could write something fresh for me and uncolored by all the other commentary.

So, on this rainy Sunday when the Pats have a bye and the Red Sox are locked in a scoreless and meaningless duel with the Yankees, when my tennis club is booked solid, when the dog didn't even want a walk, I'm listening to a little John Mayall. (Yeah, the laws must change one day, but not that CD.)

I'm not a big fan of debates anyway. They're not aimed at me; they're aimed at the muddled and unanalytical middle, at people who don't know enough or think hard enough to need anything approaching information or argument that would be useful to a political junkie like me.

Usually a general election Presidential debate has me cringing at both contestants. The Republican spews a fog of atomized bullshit in a spray so fine you'd think it came out of a snow-making machine, and I guess that's not far off the truth. The Democrat tries to reduce his positions to the sort of Splenda-sweetened sound bites that appeal to the lowest common denominator. Since I fancy 75% cacao dark chocolate, treacly sweetness makes me say, "Yuck!"

Much of the trouble in our politics stems from the need of both sides to appeal to the worst, dumbest voters of all, the ones who start as clean slates for the debates. The bases on both ends are locked up, and the left and right are fighting over voters who are marginal in several senses. They only vote in Presidential elections, they get their news if any from the most pandering TV outlets, they can't remember who did what last year, much less ten years ago (unless it involved a soap opera), and they believe all sorts of myths that would be demonstrably untrue if you could actually demonstrate anything to them that differed from the opinions they have been filled with by rote repetition, starting with their parents but culminating in their becoming perfect foils for advertising of every kind.

This marginal middle won't notice if their decision process, such as it is, results yet again in the choice of yet another image-driven establishment bullshitter. Rational actors would re-examine how they decided and think about changing. These people are more likely to "remember" that they voted for the guy they actually voted against.

So, debates often devolve into pandering contests. I don't mean that the politicians can pander to small audiences. What they can to, though, is pander to the short attention span and lack of depth of citizens who meet the very minimum standard of social engagement and vote once every four years.

But you go to the election with the citizens you have, not the ones you wish you had.

And, hey, I'm actually guardedly optimistic about November 2008. Given the McCain-Palin ticket's dismal and transparently manipulative performance over the past two weeks, even voters who choose based on tie color are noticing that the Republicans are full of bullshit. Still, while that's better, it's not even up to half a loaf.

Obama and Biden really should be twenty points ahead.

Ridicule

John McCain and the rest of the Republican screw-ups are really getting stung by cartoonists and comics. Once you become the object of universal ridicule, it's pretty hard to get up off the mat. Go to the Boston Globe's cartoon roundup - of the thirty-eight cartoons, not one is a real stinker, and easily thirty are worth a belly laugh. In this time of promiscuous LOLs, you may think I'm exaggerating or taking mind-altering substances, but go see for yourself.

I'd feel bad for Tina Fey since Sarah Palin is going to vanish back into well-deserved obscurity, but Fey is plenty talented enough to keep right on prospering. Maybe in sixty years her obit will say that she played an important role is saving America from its own stupidest instincts. Dana Carvey won't even be able to say that.

David Vitter watch, day 443

Every time Eliot Spitzer is in the news for screwing his brains out, I wonder why David Vitter is not in the news for consorting with call girls, too. He was a two-time two-timer, besides.

I also wonder what their wives are doing still married to them.

Disclaimer not enough

At the bottom of Ruben Navarrette's useless apologia for John McCain's nakedly political ploy to make himself the story, McCNN disclaims:

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the writer.

I'm sorry, if you had a liberal writing commentaries about which you made the same disclaimer, you could make that stick. But given that you're consistently printing many more conservative viewpoints than liberal ones, those opinions are your responsibility.

And Navarrette repeatedly proves himself to be a Kool-Aid-drinking dipshit.

Reporters notice

What's this? The truth? Where did that come from?

CNN has a couple of people who don't simply plug in to the McCain campaign spin. Rebecca Sinderbrand is one of them, and she shows how McCain's non-suspension suspension is obvious bullshit.

It's amazing how beneficial it is to actually keep your eyes open. Hell, even Adam Nagourney and Elisabeth Bumiller manage, after a fashion, to notice that McCain is posturing, even if they have to throw in a couple of darts at Obama in the name of false equivalence.

Spoiler

Krugman nails it again:

[O]ne non-rank-and-file Republican, Senator John McCain, is apparently playing spoiler. Earlier this week, while refusing to say whether he supported the Paulson plan, he claimed not to have had a chance to read it; the plan is all of three pages long. Then he inserted himself into the delicate negotiations over the Congressional plan, insisting on a White House meeting at which he reportedly said little — but during which consensus collapsed.

If you need convincing that all of this matters, see this. The key point left open is:

... placing everyone who depends on credit under strain.

The bursting of the housing bubble has strongly deflated housing prices. The deleveraging of financial institutions and the parallel flight of credit to T bills is how deflation spreads throughout the economy.

Nifty number 80

Anyone who can make Bill Belichick choke up is someone special. What Troy Brown did was anything asked of him. I admired him most as he aged and adjusted to it with intelligence, versatility, and grit.

Debate bail bondsmen

McCain to Congressional Republicans:

"Please, puh-leez, do not make a deal. I really, really don't want my bail revoked. Mississippi wants me, but I can't go back there."

Which is exactly why McCain's craven introduction of Presidential politics into the credit crisis was the opposite of everything he claimed it was.