Bachmann taped an apology ad

Excellent. Apparently Michele Bachmann knows that the Hardball rant was extremely damaging, and she's made an ad in which she apologizes for it.

This is like that Tom Feeney thing, but even better because he was just involved in a far-reaching scandal, whose stain was old but hard to get out. She, on the other hand, either forgot or didn't know that most Americans, even the ones in her heavily Bush-supporting district, aren't raving lunatics who want Democrats investigated for disloyalty.

It hasn't been released yet. Looking forward to seeing it.

"This is cleared by HQ."

High-ranking McCain campaign spokesman (and Ahmed Chalabi's lobbyist) Randy Scheunemann, in an email to Marc Ambinder:

Just read your post. This is on the record. This is cleared by HQ. It is a fact that Barack Obama was palling around with terrorists. It was a fact before Governor Palin said it in a fully vetted speech and it is fact today. It is bullshit to claim or write anything else.

Awesome.

"Tokyo Rose of Al Qaeda"

That's what the totally hopeless Republican challenger to incumbent Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) decided to call him at a "debate" of sorts arranged by Iowa Public Television. Aiding and abetting terrorists, etc.

After the cameras were turned off, Harkin calmly told Reed: "you're a nice young man and I thought you had a political future ahead of you but that just ended your political career right there" and walked away. Reed said nothing.

This is of apiece with my new favorite down-ballot story of the 2008 campaign: the self-immolation of Michelle Bachmann, whose seat went from being a comfortable Republican hold to a tossup at best.

I mean this Reed clown was doomed already, but Bachmann is an incumbent who was doing fine until her crazy rant on Hardball. Then all of a sudden she's in a dead heat (she's actually polling slightly behind now) against an opponent who's now a national cause celebre. It doesn't matter that his name is Elwyn Tinkelberg. It just matters that he's not Michelle Bachmann. The system works!

h/t TPM

Not bad, Joe. Not bad.

There's a new McCain ad (web or "real" I'm not sure but what difference does it make at this point?) that's focused entirely on Joe Biden's "tested" gaffe.

Given his track record, I think it's a tremendous credit to Biden that it's October 24 and this is the first McCain ad he's starred in.

Not an especially shiny silver lining

WSJ:
McCain's silver lining certainly lies in Florida where the race is more competitive, especially among seniors. Among Floridians 55 years old and above, Obama leads by only two percentage points, a number that's statistically insignificant.

If the good news for McCain is that Florida seniors only favor Obama slightly, the bad news must be very, very bad.

Hitting harder now

Back when things weren't looking quite so good on the polling front, there was a lot of speculation that the Obama campaign was just too reluctant to really go after McCain aggressively. Well I'm no expert, but to me this ad appears to be filmed from the viewpoint of an old man staggering around the Oval Office with his vision going dark at the edges:



Strong stuff.

Straight Talk Air bans Joe Klein

When there was a "debate" (I still can't believe it) about whether or not it was okay for the federal government to intercept the electronic communications of Americans without obtaining a warrant, Joe Klein was on the wrong side of it. Moreover, he took the wrong side without even first familiarizing himself with the laws involved, and only admitted as much in a fit of pissy self-justification ("I have neither the time nor inclination…" etc.) after taking heaps of well-deserved abuse.

But since then, he's done a lot to endear. My rough estimate is that, since maybe June or July, 80% of Joe Klein's posts that have included the words "John McCain" have also included one or more of the following: "shameful," "shameless," "dishonorable" and "despicable." It's not a love-fest anymore. Not even a little bit.

For his trouble, he's now been banned from McCain's campaign plane. Keep up the good work, Joe.

Band of Horses - Our Swords

Claire McCaskill has pretty serious game

Just watched Claire McCaskill on "Late Edition" with Wolf Blitzer, appearing opposite fellow Missourian Roy Blunt, the Republican minority whip. (The Blunts and the McCaskills, it turns out, have something of a political blood feud going on. Blunt's son Matt beat McCaskill for governor in 2004 and his father Leroy unseated McCaskill's mother Betty Anne in a 1978 statewide race. Wikipedia is awesome.)

She's not my favorite Democrat by a long shot. In fact, she's one of my least favorite. I could look up specific quotes or votes to defend my antipathy to her, but it's basically that she's further to the right than I would like. Entirely predictable, given that she was elected to the Senate from a reddish state.

But for what she offers up: a center-left domestic agenda served with heaping helpings of respect and admiration for cultural conservatives, she does it with a great deal of skill. Her pitch seems a little bit corny to my effete sophisticate taste, but not that corny. I can get over my innate distrust of someone so wide-eyed and cheerful because she's also capable of being sharp and convincing.

She was one of the first senators aboard the Obama bandwagon, officially announcing in mid-January, just after his loss in New Hampshire. This reflects both sound political instincts and the the simple fact that Obama's political style really is incredibly similar to her own.

With Obama still (and I hate the recent downtick in the national trackers) looking likely to beat John McCain on November 4, that's probably a good style to have. I can't say that I'm enthusiastic about the prospect, but if I had to put money right now on who the first female president will be, I'd bet on her.

Colin Powell's endorsement is worthless

Colin Powell was wrong about Bush, wrong about Iraq, and is still not abjectly apologetic about either. When Tom Brokaw played the clip of Powell saying "Dick Cheney will be a great vice president" etc. at the 2000 RNC, his question was whether Powell regretted making that speech. The real question to ask after that clip is why anyone should assign any value to his endorsement of any subsequent presidential ticket. As digby said, only the Villagers will care, and they will care deeply because Colin Powell is very serious.

Joe Scarborough made the point in the roundtable that the effect on the news cycle itself will help Obama because McCain needs as much positive attention as possible, but I still resent being asked to care what Colin Powell thinks about anything until he owns up to what he did.

What if they really, really deserve it?

Charlie Cook:
Devastating back-to-back election cycles are truly rare: They have happened only twice in the past 80 years (40 elections) -- to Republicans in 1932 and 1934 and to Democrats in 1950 and 1952. Usually, when voters kick the heck out of one party, their anger is satisfied and they move on. Voters rarely come back the very next time and kick the same party hard again.

via Sam Boyd

He's just so damnably folksy!

Buffett takes to the pages of the NYT (note: not the WSJ) to tell America to get long:

Let me be clear on one point: I can't predict the short-term movements of the stock market. I haven't the faintest idea as to whether stocks will be higher or lower a month — or a year — from now. What is likely, however, is that the market will move higher, perhaps substantially so, well before either sentiment or the economy turns up. So if you wait for the robins, spring will be over.

Think about it.

Nat gas in 2H08: a visual aid

Toro!

Sherrod Brown: More like this

As I've written before, I understand that Obama can't really do things like, say, encourage his supporters to watch Fox News on election night so they can breathe in the sobs and wails of Hannity and O'Reilly like so much expensive perfume. But thank God not every Democrat in national politics is so constrained.

You'd think the junior senator from what is still notionally a swing state might have to be a little more circumspect about getting his culture war on, but he was widely considered the most populist member of the '06 Democratic class and he beat the incumbent Republican DeWine handily.

Anyway it's good to see. The post itself (on one of Fox's own blogs) is also worth checking out for the comments. A sampler:

FOX News is the ONLY fair, unbiased network out there. It's the only channel I watch to get BOTH sides of the stories. All the other channels bash McCain and give Obama a "pass" on the very legitimate concerns we should all have about Obama's judgement!

Take the Kool Aid away from Sarrod and let's prove the polls ABSOLUTELY WRONG!!!
The numbers are skewed - the the LEFT is gonna be SHOCKED!!
The stock market is UP- Bad news for Barry.
And at the McCain-Palin rally today, when the crowd said "The Pledge of Allegiance"- you should have heard them ROAR "One Nation UNDER GOD!!!"

WE URGE ALL OF THE KOOL AID DRINKERS FROM THE OTHER BIAS NEWS CHANNELS TO TUNE IN TO FOX.

Overheard on "Hardball"

"If they're unable to convict him, I think he's got a real shot, yeah."

- Unknown pundit on Ted Stevens' (R-AK) prospects, should he beat what sounds like a pretty solid corruption case.

Don't forget to turn in your secret decoder ring

Christopher Buckley's career as an Obama-supporting National Review contributor lasted four days, which has to be considered a pretty good run.

I'm kind of sympathetic to the NR readers who inundated him with hate mail though. Sensible centrist David Broder types love nothing more than wringing their hands about ideological rigidity, but backing the other party's nominee for president is not small potatoes.

Buckley whines:
So, I have been effectively fatwahed (is that how you spell it?) by the conservative movement, and the magazine that my father founded must now distance itself from me. But then, conservatives have always had a bit of trouble with the concept of diversity. The GOP likes to say it’s a big-tent. Looks more like a yurt to me.

First of all, the problem with "fatwahed" isn't that it's spelled wrong it's that it's not even the right part of speech. I thought conservative intellectuals were supposed to know that sort of thing.

Regarding "the concept of diversity," for the purposes of the Republican base it means not using the n-word. It doesn't involve sending hard earned dollars to the National Review for the opinions of an Obama supporter, no matter who his daddy was.

I'm sympathetic to the angry emailers because nothing pissed me off about Joe Lieberman quite so much as being told by ostensibly disinterested parties that it's a shame the Democratic party wasn't a "big enough tent" for poor Joe. As if parties are supposed to include members who are prone to suggesting that it (i.e. the party) is rife with terrorist-sympathizing traitors. (Incidentally, he's now not only campaigning with McCain, he's writing op-eds for the endangered Norm Coleman. What an other-team player!)

Granted, Buckley hasn't as far as I know gone that far in his criticism of Republicans, but as litmus tests go supporting the right presidential candidate doesn't seem too unreasonable. Why would someone who's even considering voting for Obama want their work for Rich "Starbursts" Lowry anyway?

You're better off without'em, Chris. Suck it up and take the hate mail like a man.

Update:
And another thing: If you offered to resign, especially in an email entitled "A Sincere Offer" as Lowry claims then you resigned and you shouldn't title your ensuing post "Sorry Dad, I Was Fired."

Shane Victorino

As role players go, that guy is pretty damn good.

I don't much care who goes to the World Series from the junior circuit. I was thinking that Manny vs. the Red Sox would be entertaining, but now it's not at all clear that the Sox will hold up their end of the bargain.

Breaking - Matt Stairs, professional hitter. 7-5 Phillies

Trooper-whatever

It's painfully clear that people just do not give a rat's ass who Sarah Palin fired or why when she was governor of Alaska. It was a one day story that won't have any influence on who the next president is or how much Obama may or may not win by. It's nice that the investigation wasn't suppressed, but you can only lead a horse to water.

She is predictably arguing that the report doesn't say what it says. Conservatives(!), to the extent they engage the issue at all, argue that a government official with firing power can fire whomever they want for whatever reason, including political affiliation (U.S. Attorneys) or personal vendetta (Monegan). But there's not even a debate about the investigation really going on.

On the positive side, the indifference may owe something to the fact that her public image as a ditz is, with Tina Fey's help, already so deeply ingrained. That's a bad image for a potential vice president to have, but it makes it harder for people to register stories in which she's also a ruthless tyrant.

Plus there's the possibility that it's just getting lost in the overarching, McCain is in dire, dire straits narrative.

What is the deal with the McCain campaign?

Not many people I know are Republican operatives, and it would be kinda rude to ask the one who is, but what the hell is the McCain campaign doing?

Lindsey Graham, a guy in the inner circle if ever there was one, comes out and promises strong new language on taxes, but none is forthcoming. The candidate gets his first jolt of positive press in ages by scolding the crazy-cat lady who called Obama "an Arab," and then today turns around and declines to distance himself from a comparison of Obama to Osama bin Laden. And this is all while fighting a rearguard action against Bill Kristol, who was, deliciously, human anchor Sarah Palin's biggest champion. (The only bad thing about a Pfotenhauer-Kristol Smackdown is that it's never bloody enough. Oh and there's Kristol flying off the top turnbuckle with a devastating Knee-o-con on an unsuspecting but richly deserving Tucker Bounds! This is the kind of carnage they should make Pay-Per-View.)

I have to believe that the people running the McCain campaign are at least a little bit good at what they do. I'm not just going to settle on "Because they're total hacks that can't do anything right" as an explanation. But any secret strategy in an encrypted file on Steve Schmidt's laptop must involve doing a lot of stuff that doesn't make immediate sense.

Update:
Ambinder is harsh: "It's never good to overpromise to Mike Allen on Saturday, back track a little on Sunday, fail to give Lindsey Graham the message, whet everyone's appetites, offer new rhetoric Monday, throw your own campaign under the bus, facilitate your burned surrogates' leaking to the New York Times, and have nothing to put up against your opponents' four new policy proposals."

Michael Scherer on Levi Johnston

Michael Scherer is one weird dude. It's usually the totally undiminished McCain love, and maybe that's why this jumped out at me, but I don't think so. Here's the opening of his post entitled "Levi Johnston Was Nervous at First, But Then He Was Like, 'Whatever'":

Easily one of the best, non-political stories of this election cycle has been the tale of Levi Johnston, an 18-year-old kid from Alaska, who was living his life, going to high school, watching his friends tend to his MySpace page, playing hockey, and hanging out with his girlfriend, Bristol, until everything suddenly changed.

Wanting to give this as charitable a reading as possible, I assumed that by "best" he meant "ickiest," but the rest of the post suggests he was genuinely enthusiastic about it.

Bob Wright was talking about the Bristol-Levi story and said it was Bad For America because should they form a loving, cohesive family it would be a positive example of out of wedlock pregnancy. I don't even care about that angle, but there's still something kind of embarrassing about it for everyone involved. Not least of whom being the VP candidate mother who's such a big believer in abstinence-only education.

By sheer coincidence, Josh Marshall wrote a post within an hour of Scherer just to muse about how bizarre the thing was:

I was taking a few moments to think over the most surreal moments of the campaign so far. And this was certainly high on the list: John McCain's tarmac embrace of Levi Johnston, Wasilla's high school hockey star who impregnated Sarah Palin's daughter Bristol ...

Totally unprovoked "Man wasn't that f'ed up?" reminisence. Now whether or not you might personally use something more euphemistic than "impregnated" when describing the situation, Scherer's unalloyed, and by all appearances unironic glee can't be that common a response.

Week off to a good start

The G7 meeting seems to have done the trick (at least on the equity markets), Paul Krugman won the Nobel Prize for economics (can't wait to read the wingnuts' bleating about that one), and the ABC/WaPo poll has the presidential race at 53-43 ("Even McCain's supporters are now less enthusiastic about his candidacy, returning to levels not seen since before the Republican National Convention.").

Excellent.

Bill Ayers for Secretary of Education

Some good news

Gay hedge funders across Connecticut can take some solace in the fact that, while they may be down 37% YTD, they are now allowed to get married.

GWB Unit

Commenting on the McCain campaign's receipt of multiple cease and desist requests from popular musicians, Yglesias points out that one problem may be that it's looking in all the wrong genres:

It’s somewhat counterintuitive, but I think conservative politicians would actually do better to turn to the world of commercial hip-hop, where key conservative values like greed and violence are frequently lauded.

Indeed, was there ever a more thugged out president than George W. Bush? Were it not for the lack of demographic overlap between hip hop fans and even potentially Republican voters, I think Trick Daddy would have had the ideal theme song for his 2004 reelection campaign:

Middle Class

Rachel Maddow is going after McCain for never using the term "middle class" during last night's debate. He didn't say it in the first debate either, and Obama hit him for it.

I don't object to this being a Democratic message but on the merits it's very stupid. One of Rudy Giuliani's most annoying lines, and he used it constantly, was that Democrats never used the words "Islamic terrorists." Well Democrats aren't inclined to use "Islamic terrorists" out of a desire to be clear that it's the terrorism that is the problem rather than the Islam, and out of respect for people who might consider it a contradiction in terms. It's a semantic dispute not a national security dispute.

Republicans, for their part, don't talk about the "middle class" very much because Republicans like to stress that we're all one big American family, baby. This whole navel-gazing exercise of looking at a three-tiered distribution of wealth where some are "rich" and others "middle class" (and let's not even get into the poor), especially for taxation purposes, is irredeemably flawed. You logically can't do it because any definition of rich is too low.

Goldilocks

Larry Kudlow cannot be a happy man these days. The guy had literally branded his macroeconomic outlook on every episode of his show in 2006 and 2007: Goldilocks. That was where the economy would slow slightly from the unsustainable recent growth (not too hot) but it wouldn't decline either (not too cold).

From his post on the Corner from July, 2007, entitled "Triumphant Goldilocks" four months before the top:

What we are witnessing here, in virtually every corner of the globe, is the success and the spread of unbridled free market capitalism. It is a dynamic worldwide march toward lower tax rates, deregulation, and, as market strategist Don Luskin put it on last night’s show, the “interconnectedness” of global economies through free trade, the free flow of capital, and the robust free exchange of information.

Do not bother asking him if unbridled free market capitalism should now take the blame. It's good enough that a majority of voters seem to.

Anyway, getting back to Goldilocks, the worse things got, the more he started personalizing her, insisting that "she" would pull through after annotating a chart showing whatever happened to be the least-damning set of economic data he could find.

Well it's clear enough now she didn't pull through. The bears ate her, and it wasn't pretty. But Larry's still putting on a brave face, waiting until they find the body (which of course they won't) before he admits she's not coming back. He's talking about his cautious optimism, just above a CNBC-imposed Wall St. Crisis: Is Your Money Safe? logo with a radioactive orange glow.

We're #1! We're #1!

via PK

Preliminary debate impressions

Obama won handily. McCain declined to go all scorched-earth with the Ayers stuff, which I applaud but may signal he's bringing it in for a landing, and he also looked small, old and frail in the wider-angle TV lens used for the pseudo-town hall. And, of course, he doesn't really know or care that much about domestic policy and it showed. More to follow after work hours.

TV on the Radio - Dancing Choose

Running the okie dokie

Heh:
“We’re not going to let John McCain distract us. We’re not going to let him hookwink you or bamboozle you. We’re not going to let him run the okie dokie on you,” Obama said, a subtle dig at Palin’s folksy language that sparked a huge applause from the Southern crowd. “The American people are too smart for that.”

Underplayed Senate race of the century

According to Nate Silver, there's about a 20% chance of the Democrats winning a 60-seat majority in the Senate. If that happens, The Leader, Comrade Reid and Fraulein Pelosi will finally have unchecked power over their piddling adversaries. But in order for it to happen, a relatively innocuous Republican incumbent is going to have to lose to Al Franken.

There are a lot of ways to think about an Al Franken Senate run that make it seem funny. One is when you think of him in the Coke-bottle glasses and the pastel sweaters of Stuart Smalley, whose "Daily Affirmations" were one of the more famous SNL schticks of all time and, weirdly, were even turned into a feature film in 1995.

Then there's his later career as an Air America radio host and author of such books as "Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot" and "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right."

The premise that the United States is fundamentally a center-right country was damaged badly in the 2006 elections. If Al Franken gets elected to the U.S. Senate in a state John Kerry barely won, it's all over.

I was pessimistic that it was going to happen, especially when he was getting hammered on the back-taxes issue, and there are polls that still have him behind, but now at least one poll has him up comfortably. The CW is that Coleman's priggish attack ads focusing on Franken's naughty language have backfired, on top of the economic crisis that's helping Obama and all downticket Dems.

It just goes to show how big a story the presidential race is that the national media hasn't been following this one more closely. I haven't seen one lousy "Is he good enough? Smart enough? And do people like him?" headline yet.

Taking John Cornyn seriously: Can it be done?

In sea of silly political ads, there's something about John Cornyn's in particular that get at me in a profound way. First it was "Big Bad John", now it's John Cornyn: bipartisan change agent.

It's gratifying to see one of Bush's most stalwart henchmen realize he needs to run the hell away from him. The last rat and whatnot. But watching him standing out there alone, in black and white, in Palo Dure Canyon, TX, silently, comfortingly thrusting his chin out towards the camera, I couldn't help but wonder whether there was a Jeep commercial being shot at the same time or if the senator actually went out to the middle of nowhere with a camera crew to shoot this ad.



h/t publius

Campbell Brown in the NYT

I don't watch much CNN, being a mouth-foaming partisan, and thinking theirs is closer to the Worst Political Team on Television, but for some reason I was watching Campbell Brown live when she pantsed Tucker Bounds and became queen for a day in the liberal blogosphere.

Well the New York Times has a profile on Brown today which is kinda interesting. She distinguishes herself from Olbermann and O'Reilly by saying "[you're] not going to see me ever be partisan. I’ll never take a position on a candidate or an issue." I have philosophical doubts about the feasibility of the second claim, but in general more-neutral-than-Olbermann is a worthy and attainable goal.

The great part, though, is this little bit, which I hope more journalists (especially on TV) take to heart:

“So when you have Candidate A saying the sky is blue, and Candidate B saying it’s a cloudy day, I look outside and I see, well, it’s a cloudy day,” she said. “I should be able to tell my viewers, ‘Candidate A is wrong, Candidate B is right.’ And not have to say, ‘Well, you decide.’ Then it would be like I’m an idiot. And I’d be treating the audience like idiots.”

Good for her.

Partial vindication

I predicted that the wingnuts would be pleased with Sarah Palin's performance, and have been kind of surprised there hasn't been even more celebration. Maybe it was the instapolls that brought them right down to earth after it concluded. We'll never know.

David Brooks turns in a spirited effort, going as far as to say that she "established debating parity with Joe Biden" and that "[b]y the end of the debate, most Republicans were not crouching behind the couch, but standing on it." But it feels somehow perfunctory, as if he's just going to go back to burying the GOP ticket and/or the GOP generally in his next column.

And besides that the response to Palin on the right has been pretty subdued... except for one man. One man answered the call and lost all perspective on what he had just witnessed. Ladies and gentlemen, Rich Lowry of the National Review:

Palin too projects through the screen like crazy. I'm sure I'm not the only male in America who, when Palin dropped her first wink, sat up a little straighter on the couch and said, "Hey, I think she just winked at me."

There's much more. When even the very serious Marc Ambinder is snarking, you know you've embarrassed yourself.

Brand management

This is on Drudge. How do you say "Cease and desist" in French?



























- AP

Adventures in "citizen journalism"

I don't own Apple stock anymore (which has been a good thing this past couple weeks) but if I did I can't imagine how pissed I'd be about this nonsense.

Friday catblogging

Yeah, she's sentient, but...

For the first 10 minutes of the debate I was a little bit worried that Sarah Palin would go the whole debate without making a fool out of herself. She didn't, but she gaps between the transparent gibberish or painful silences were longer than I was hoping for. I haven't checked yet, but my guess is the wingnuts will be extremely pleased. There will be internal discipline enforced on the Palin skeptics in the party.

But remember back about three weeks ago, how central the Sarah Palin boost was to McCain's campaign. When he last held the national lead, people were joking that he was going take the White House on her coattails (Palin/McCain). That story is over as soon as the standard for success in the debate becomes not putting on a pyrotechnic display of stupidity.

After a bumbling start, Biden settled in, and even when he was having trouble speaking he was on message (fairness, middle class, kitchen table). And even though he wasn't all that aggressive in general, I really thought he landed the harder hits on McCain than she did on Obama.

The closest he came to going after Palin was on the Dick Cheney fourthbranch issue, where he let a little exasperation creep into his voice. Palin may have managed to avoid explicitly endorsing the idea that the vice president isn't a member of the executive branch, but she didn't reject it either and she kept using the word "flexibility" to describe the office.

Palin: Well, our founding fathers were very wise there in allowing through the Constitution much flexibility there in the office of the vice president. And we will do what is best for the American people in tapping into that position and ushering in an agenda that is supportive and cooperative with the president's agenda in that position. Yeah, so I do agree with him that we have a lot of flexibility in there, and we'll do what we have to do to administer very appropriately the plans that are needed for this nation...

Biden: Vice President Cheney has been the most dangerous vice president we've had probably in American history. The idea he doesn't realize that Article I of the Constitution defines the role of the vice president of the United States, that's the Executive Branch. He works in the Executive Branch. He should understand that. Everyone should understand that.

Update: Yes, the executive branch is Article II, but that's not the issue here dude.

Trying not to get too excited about the current polls

But up by 9 in Virginia???

The Catholic Lobby

I have a question about this Al Smith Dinner thing: If it's true John Kerry was not invited because of his support for reproductive rights, then why is Obama attending?

The ultimate Sarah Palin interview clip

This one's my favorite. For one thing, it's hilarious, and it contains the ultimate Palin answer ("All of 'em."). But it also has a more troubling side to it: the way she flips it on Katie by pretending the question bespeaks anti-Alaskan snobbery. "You fancypants city folk think we Alaskans don't have newspapers!"

Well she didn't just read one newspaper...



BTW, I don't watch the evening news and if I did Katie Couric would be my third choice, but at this point I'd have to say she did a fantastic job of exposing Sarah Palin. I don't know, maybe any interview would have gone that badly, but from the clips Katie was really not as deferential as Steve Schmidt would have liked.

Blaming minorities for the financial crisis

I just want to go on record with a brief post about this, even though it's pretty old news, because when the historians pore over my blog I don't want to have been silent on the subject:

The idea that the primary culprits for the housing crisis are minorities and/or bleeding heart liberal concern for minorities is an idea I'd never have thought could survive in nature. It's the kind of idea I imagine could only be produced after the construction and activation of an $8 billion Large Wingnut Collider. And even then, only for a fraction of a second, before it collapses under the weight of its own wrongness.

But no it's apparently quite hearty. In fact pretty much anywhere you hear or read a conservative opining about the root causes of the financial crisis, you will hear about the Community Reinvestment Act and how poor brown people hoodwinked the mortgage industry. It's not even a fringe view.

Perlstein, Gordon, and Yglesias have the details.

LCD Soundsystem called it

New York, you're perfect
Don't please don't change a thing
Your mild billionaire mayor's
Now convinced he's a king.

And indeed, it looks like Mayor Mike is not about to let some two-term limit get in the way of his threepeat.

I wish I had strong feelings about this one way or the other, but I have no knowledge of New York City politics. All I know about Bloomberg is that he was mayor when I moved here, and I haven't detected much improvement or deterioration since then. Oh, and his reelection campaign was a brutal display of financial power. There was grousing about running up the score.

[Update: Uber-crook Tom DeLay is on Hardball talking to Chris Matthews about the importance of government transparency, in the course of defending the GOP's bailout bill ambush. So foul.]

Maybe it would be interesting to have a competitive race, but my sense is that the absence of municipal news from the front page of the Times means Bloomberg is doing a good job. The constant barrage of anti-smoking propaganda has been the one personal initiative of his I'm aware of, and now that I've quit (no, I don't give him any credit) it won't be so annoying.

More on the No vote

This is incredibly frustrating.

The Republicans are going to stick to their story that they opposed the bailout because it lacked sufficient protections for the American taxpayer. They're going to attempt this even though they are simultaneously claiming that the overly partisan tone of Nancy Pelosi's floor speech was responsible for the dearth of Republican votes.

All of the Republican leaders at their press conference today: Putnam, Boehner, Blunt and Cantor, did their bit of righteous indignation at the partisanship of Nancy Pelosi. Cantor, when it was finally his turn to speak, actually waved around a printed out copy of her speech like it was DNA evidence in a murder trial. Nevermind that Pelosi's tone is a completely separate reason from any provision of the bill. The way you know Cantor either doesn't understand or is negotiating in bad faith about the legislation at hand is that his brilliant "third way" insurance proposal didn't make any fucking sense.

I'm not entirely sure what happened today. It looks like the sheer unpopularity of the bailout among voters weighed heavily on a lot of incumbents currently in tight races. People who opposed it are finding this to be proof that the system works, but I'm not at all sure. In general it's good if policy is responsive to public opinion, but this situation seems like a textbook exception to this rule. For representatives who are convinced (as many claim to be) that federal dollars are needed to stave off another Great Depression, the bailout shouldn't require popular support to get their vote.

Watching Boehner and co speak last night, I was struck at how noncommittal they seemed about their ability to deliver Republican votes. Boehner declined to guess at the numbers. They said they'd be "making clear" to their members that they'd be voting yes, etc. etc., but they did not marry it. Minority whip Blunt said before the vote “We’ll do everything we can to make sure members of both parties [???] in substantial numbers vote for this bill.”

It makes enough sense to me why the Republicans would not want to give Democrats full bipartisan support for anything, even in legitimate crises like this. Lots of people have been pointing out that it would have been nice if Democrats had this reflex in 2002-3, and I agree with the sentiment even though if the parallels aren't there. But I thought they were just going to just put up enough resistance to make it Democratic-branded legislation. Now it looks like a Republican-branded legislative impasse followed quickly by a Republican-branded implosion of the stock market.

Complicating my reading about this crisis has been the terribleness of so much of the coverage by the liberal blogosphere. I'm not going to name names but pretty much everyone except BooMan has either been consistently anti-bailout for stupid reasons or, worse, used to be outraged until Krugman relented and Republicans started playing the spoiler.

Oh well. The silver lining is that this should be excellent news for Barack Obama.

House appears to be voting no on bailout

Fucking idiots. S&P down 7%.

Update:
Barney Frank deals with the GOP "Nancy was mean to us" excuse nicely:

Scariest financial news of the day

Yeah, yeah, Wachovia's a goner. No real shocker there.

This, on the other hand...

AdAge reports the banking crisis is threatening to take a rather surprising hostage: McDonald's big-budget coffee rollout. Tightening credit conditions, have prompted Bank of America to halt loans to McDonald's franchisees. They need the capital to frantically build coffee bars in the chain's 14,000 locations for what was planned to And although it won't derail the launch altogether, it is likely to delay it nearly into summer -- hardly optimal timing for a hot-beverage introduction. It also could force the company to postpone a huge marketing push it's been planning to support the java drive, as the company generally waits until 60% of its stores have been outfitted to undertake a national ad push. The fast feeder maintains that everything is on track. According to an internal memo from McDonald's executive Cindy Fuller, Bank of America's franchisee-loan program, known as "Eagle," had reached funding limits faster than expected. She warned that market volatility was affecting the bank's ability to "fund additional growth."

McDonald's has been killing it lately. Just monster same-store-sales numbers. Plus, it's McDonald's! Yet BofA isn't able to fund new coffee bars for their franchisees. Not at all good.

via Briefing.com

Mets miss the playoffs on the last day, again.

You know how sometimes when you have a nightmare, but you forget some of the details until you go to bed the next night? Pretty much the same situation today with the last day of the regular season coming against the Marlins, with an occasionally surprising but unreliable lefty on the mound for the Mets.

Last year, Tom Glavine wasted no time putting the faithful out of their misery. This year, it was a close game throughout, with the Mets falling behind by two before tying in the bottom of that very inning with a Beltran two-run home run. Having regained the momentum, Charlie Manuel called on the inexcusable Scott Schoenweis to maximize the Marlins' chances of hitting one out (which Wes Helms did). Luis Ayala was then brought on to surrender another solo homer to Dan Uggla. The Mets threatened but didn't score in the bottom of the 8th and 9th, and that was all she wrote.

Seriously, I want the Wilpons to fire Minaya and get someone who knows what they're doing.

Bill Clinton

What a scumbag. He's on Meet the Press, talking about how great McCain is for not asking for special treatment because he was a POW. I'm fine with him saying nice things about John McCain, but how about sticking to things that aren't blatantly false? You couldn't watch the Republican convention for more than five minutes without hearing a graphic retelling of the beatings he took at the hands of the North Vietnamese. I don't blame McCain for this, but the last thing any Democrat needs to be doing is reinforcing the absurd idea that he is honorably declining to exploit his captivity every chance he gets. He used it to explain his fondness for ABBA, for Christ's sake.

Then Bill is asked about Obama, and he starts with his "unlimited potential," like he's a fucking sophomore small forward declaring for the NBA draft. Brokaw picks up on the seemingly less-than-ringing endorsement, and asks why he thinks Obama isn't "great" yet. Then Bill goes into "I'm not allowed to say what I really mean so here's how I'm going to hint at it" mode, and he mentions right off the bat that Obama was a state senator five years ago. But of course, Bill assures us, as soon as he becomes president (a prospect he characterizes as probable but no sure thing), he will surely improve people's lives in such a way as to reveal his greatness.

Next time I see Bill Clinton on teevee talking about Barack Obama, I want him to pause from lavishing superlatives only long enough to savage John McCain as a dishonest and mentally deteriorating asshole. I think painting the "O" campaign logo on his face would also be a nice touch, to prevent the kind of confusion that could arise from interviews like this about which candidate he supports.

Santana comes up huge on three days rest

Complete game shutout, three days after he threw 125 pitches over eight innings, dominating the Cubs. The game took just over two hours. The Mets are still mathematically alive in the division and within a half game of the Brewers for the wild card.

The Cubs just jumped out to a 2-0 lead on Milwaukee on a Daryle Ward home run. Sheets is pitching for the Brewers, so the Cubs may have to make that stand up.

Chris Matthews is insane

McCain is apparently just like some boxer called "The Mongoose"? Archie somebody?

Update:
Oh man. Tweety is dialed in. He's asking a guest repeatedly if John McCain is "too troll-like"! Troll-like! Also "kind of a codger." That's awesome.

Questionable message

This ad takes numerous clips from the debate of Obama saying John McCain "is absolutely right" about this or that (before getting to his disagreements). It then asks the viewer to consider whether someone with this pattern of agreeing with John McCain can be trusted to lead. I'm having a hard time figuring out how this works as a McCain ad.

Rudy Giuliani, Shadow Veep

MSNBC just announced that the post-debate spin matchup will be Joe Biden and Rudy Giuliani. It was also Rudy Giuliani on the campaign plane this morning.

Weird that he would pop up like that at the same time Sarah Palin is getting thrown to the wolves.

Anyway the debate went pretty well I thought. I'm still surprised at how much less demented John McCain seems when he's not reading a prepared speech. He's still quite spry.

Obama seemed to be on offense more often, although there were times where I wished he'd stop trying to interrupt, on the theory that whatever McCain is going to say won't be that good and it makes BO look anxious.

Also, of all McCain's many deliveries of the "criminal or paternity" bear DNA joke, this one was far and away the angriest. People were too scared to laugh.

Through the looking glass

Fox calls out the AP for an unfair attack on... Joe Biden.

h/t County Fair.

Cognitive dissonance

When the bailout plan was first conceived, the reaction to it in the liberal blogosphere was extremely negative. The argument was that any bailout would necessarily be a handout from everyday Americans to the rich Wall Street assholes who were themselves responsible for the mess, and that would be bad. The whole notion that there is a "credit crisis" was largely derided as a ploy to get Uncle Sam to reach for his billfold faster.

Now that it appears it's going to be Republicans, including possibly John McCain, that are providing the opposition to the plan, everyone's worried about the consequences of inaction.

Sure, the bailout has been chopped into installments and made more taxpayer-friendly, but it's still a massive transfer of wealth from the Treasury to a bunch of struggling banks, which a lot of people were screaming bloody murder about on principle just a few days ago.

Thanks for playing

WaMu eats it.

Or rather, JP Morgan eats WaMu at the government's behest.

Omar Minaya needs to be fired

That's it. Send him packing.

The Mets depth in the outfield, the infield, the bullpen and the rotation has just been horrible. Starting Fernando Tatis was bad enough. Counting on Fernando Tatis was totally inexcusable.

Argenis (pron. Are-Heinous) Reyes? What is this poor guy doing in the stadium, let alone the starting lineup? .218/.259/.245 over 110 at bats probably means that even for a second baseman he can't hit.

The bullpen issues are well known. My pet peeve in that department is Scott Schoenweis, but there's a lot of suck to choose from.

And then there's the rotation, where after Santana there were no sure things. Maine was good, but not great and then he got hurt. Oliver Perez is still liable to give up 5 runs at a moment's notice. Mike Pelfrey looks much improved; gotta give him credit there. But Pedro hurts to watch these days. He's done. He's a liability.

That makes our "playoff" rotation (and I mean that to have the Jim Mora inflection) Santana-Pelfrey-Perez as far as I can see, which might not be that bad, but it's not that good either and behind them it's just scary.

Last night's loss and what looks like it's going to be tonight's loss to the Cubs have been especially painful, but it just...

Wait a second... Ryan Church just tied it by going around the tag into home. That was awesome.

Developing...

Update:
Mets win! Mets win!

I hope they sign Omar to a long term deal pronto. Robinson Cancel? Ramon Martinez? The guy's a visionary.

Palin as "Nell"

Man that's cold.

The Mittens Counterfactual

Generalissimo Kos makes an under-appreciated point:

But think, what if McCain had picked Mitt Romney as his veep choice, like so many of us were fervently hoping?

Sure, the rollout wouldn't have give McCain a fraction of the attention and excitement that Palin generated. The GOP ticket's (now evaporated) post-convention bump would've been smaller, and maybe Romney would've been less effective at revving up the fundy base.

But right now? Romney would be kicking ass. The media would treat him with deference as an economic expert, and let's be honest, he does looks straight out of central casting for the role of "serious businessman who we should defer to on the economy". McCain wouldn't have to hide him. Romney could make the media rounds, being taken seriously no matter what GOP gibberish he spouted. Rather than flail and cower, a McCain/Romney ticket would look sure-footed and confident, projecting gravitas in a time of uncertainty.

As I think I wrote at the time, I was not among those who were all but begging John McCain to pick Romney. I just never saw the comically hapless figure that others did. And that was well before the financial crisis had moved to the front pages. You have to think he's looking at that ABC/WaPo 52-43 print and laughing his billionaire ass off.

52-43

That's what I'm talking about.

"Hi, I'm corrupt Republican Tom Feeney..."

I was just sitting here having having a cup of coffee. Just reading the paper, next to some fruit, in a douchebaggy lavender open-collar dress shirt... Anyways I just wanted to tell you, the good people of FL-24, that I'm really sorry about that Abramoff thing. I didn't know what the deal was. Really.



Via Chris Cillizza, who writes:
Politicians, as a rule, don't like to apologize, and they certainly don't like to apologize in front of tens of thousands of viewers. And, there is recent evidence that a mea culpa by an endangered politician doesn't make things better...

Oh no, I'm sure "I embarrassed you" (he actually says this in the ad) is actually a stunningly effective bit of political messaging. But time will tell.

Update:
“Obviously, the ‘mea culpa’ ad is not a huge genre in American politics,” said Ken Goldstein, director of the Wisconsin Advertising Project, a University of Wisconsin project that collects and codes political ads. “If someone has done something bad enough that they think they need to apologize for it with a television ad, they’ve usually decided not to run.”
via

Supremes for the win

Adam Serwer, today:
Troy Davis will be executed tonight for a crime he most likely didn't commit. Davis was implicated in the murder of police officer Martin McPhail in Georgia. Since Davis' conviction, 7 out of the 9 witnesses in the case recanted. Two witnesses confessed to fabricating their accounts, three of the four who testified at trial have signed affadavits recanting, and others have implicated the ninth witness, a Sylvester "Red" Coles, as the real gunman.

CNN, just now:
The U.S. Supreme Court granted a last-minute reprieve to a Georgia man fewer than two hours before he was to be executed for the 1989 slaying of an off-duty police officer.

Troy Anthony Davis learned that his execution had been stayed when he saw it on television, he told CNN via telephone in his first interview after the stay was announced.

Indeed

h/t Tristero

Pull yourselves together!

William Greider's "Paulson Bailout a Historic Swindle" is a pretty good case study in liberals going absolutely bananas about the proposed remedy to the financial crisis. It worked poor Bradrocket into such foaming rage that he threatened to withhold his vote for Obama if he acquiesced to the $700 Billion Blank Check.

A few points:

1) A lot of people, Greider included, are overstating the extent to which the people who actually work "on Wall Street" were the primary beneficiaries of the housing/credit bubble. Yes, they made a lot of money, but the total amount of wealth creation from the rise in housing prices and the overextension of credit was huge and widespread. The dot-com bubble was actually not as major as the housing bubble, and a lot of people sold houses from 2002-2006. If profiting from asset price inflation per se is a sin, there was plenty of sinning going on off Wall Street as well.

2) Related to this tendency to be blinded by the hubris of super-rich people is overstating the extent to which large capital infusions for major financial institutions benefit the executives of the banks personally. Yes, they make huge amounts of money, but it's not as though the $700b is going right into Jamie Dimon's expense account. It's overcompensation, not rampant embezzlement. That money is going on the balance sheets of the banks, in place of their Monopoly money Level 3 assets, so they can slow down their deleveraging and relieve the market of some forced selling. This isn't being proposed solely to make super-rich people feel super-rich again. I'm not sure how many cents on the dollar the Treasury will eventually recover, but if Barney Frank suggests (as he did this morning on TV) that it could be approach breakeven then I'm convinced it's at least plausible.

3) The spite factor seems to loom large as Greider dwells on the fact that the government could, if it wanted to, crush all these banks like so many grapes:

Government can apply killer leverage to the financial players: accept our objectives and follow our instructions or you are left on your own--cut off from government lending spigots and ineligible for any direct assistance. If they decline to cooperate, the money guys are stuck with their own mess. If they resist the government's orders to keep lending to the real economy of producers and consumers, banks and brokers will be effectively isolated, therefore doomed.

Yeah, no kidding. The government could doom the banks, but that's not the object of the game now, is it? That would be counterproductive in the extreme. Everybody likes a solvent banking system, not just bank CEOs. It's pretty much Paulson's talking point from his tour of the Sunday shows, but the American taxpayer is already in dire financial trouble. I'm all for Congressional hearings when this is over, but people need to realize that massive bank failures would also suck in their own way.

Most Americans come out behind in their dealings with both Wall Street and Washington, but neither can just be given up on. You can't call John McCain the second coming of Herbert Hoover while also insisting that the banking industry be left to its own devices. Yes it's a blank check. Yes it's a taxpayer giveaway to investors. What taxpayers get in return is a new, substantially-less-doomed financial system, which can survive to be thoroughly overhauled afterward.

I'd like to see some strings attached to the money, but the Democrats' decision to focus on executive pay limits almost makes me wish they had just laid down completely. What a feckless, superficial demand. The big question is how should the deal be structured to minimize moral hazard and economic damage to those who didn't own this crap. That the funds are to be administered at Hank Paulson's discretion doesn't strike me as prima facie evidence that those goals won't be met.

Given how many much smarter people whom I usually agree with oppose this plan, it's likely I'm wrong about it. But from where I'm sitting (i.e. in the financial industry), the outrage is completely out of proportion and largely misdirected.

Update:
The Politico has a roundup of economist skepticism about the plan, but there's some pretty notable concessions made by two of the quoted skeptics:

Prof. Zingales of U. Chigago, in the linked piece entitled "Why Paulson is Wrong": "The Paulson RTC will buy toxic assets at inflated prices thereby creating a charitable institution that provides welfare to the rich—at the taxpayers’ expense. If this subsidy is large enough, it will succeed in stopping the crisis."

Nouriel Roubini: “He's saying, ‘Trust me, I'm going to do it right if you give me absolute control.' This is not a monarchy.” (Roubini told the New York Times that despite these concerns, he also thought the plan could help stave off a recession.)

And the Financial Times likes it outright. But other than that, it is quite unpopular.

Yeah... Those aren't getting preserved.

Star Tribune: "Federal judge orders Cheney to preserve broad range of records from time as vice president."

I hear Lockheed Martin custom built the OVP paper shredder with the lasers they were going to use for Star Wars.

The Walkmen - In the New Year

h/t Metacritic

Bob Schieffer nails it

I didn't think his questioning of Paulson was especially tough, but Bob Schieffer's editorial bit at the end of FTN was pitch perfect. I'll try to find the video, but basically he said that whatever needs doing to fix the current crisis, the fact that it was created without any laws being broken suggests we need better laws.

I'm less worried than most of left blogistan (especially Prof. Atrios) seems to be that Hank Paulson's m.o. in all this is to enrich his former peers at the big banks. It obviously seems fishy that there's a section in the proposed legislation that would forbid any kind of congressional or judicial review of any action Paulson might take, and I'd like to see that clause nixed, but you can't blame him for trying.

I like the sound of some alternative plans, put forward by Krugman and others, that provide the government greater upside when things improve. But there's also something necessarily messier about government equity ownership as opposed to government ownership of this crappy debt.

What I'm more concerned about is getting some meaningful regulation on mortgage origination, securitization, credit ratings, bank leverage, etc. The banks will not want it, but this is the moment where their political influence is at its absolute nadir. They are desperate for government help, and are in no position to put up much of a fight. So as long as any bailout is accompanied by (if not conditioned on) those reforms, I don't really care about the particular form it takes.

Update:
I do share Prof. Atrios's appreciation of this (sadly anonymous) email from a congressional Dem to Matt Stoller. My favorite graf:

I also find myself drawn to provisions that would serve no useful purpose except to insult the industry, like requiring the CEOs, CFOs and the chair of the board of any entity that sells mortgage related securities to the Treasury Department to certify that they have completed an approved course in credit counseling. That is now required of consumers filing bankruptcy to make sure they feel properly humiliated for being head over heels in debt, although most lost control of their finances because of a serious illness in the family. That would just be petty and childish, and completely in character for me.

SEC short-selling ban

What Ritholtz said:

"This is nothing short of a total panic by people who have no clue what they are doing."

Much better

Nate Silver's projections now produce an Obama win 62% of the time.
The recent improvement really has been showing up in pretty much all
the national numbers and in enough state polls to move the needle
significantly even since 10 days ago.

I never wrote about this, because the subject had become so painful
and it requires a link to Mickey Kaus, but in those dark hours when
McCain had a 5 point lead the Feiler Faster thesis was a great source
of comfort.

And what do you know, some combination of the Palin Effect (positive)
being in large part replaced by the Palin Effect (negative), the
financial collapse, and people simply coming to their senses, BO is
back on top. The only problem: still plenty of time for him to give it
back.

Bess Levin is a national treasure

From her open letter to Goldman's Lloyd Blankfein and Morgan Stanley's John Mack:

You fuckers didn't want an actively regulated market when you were splicing and dicing toxic debt and selling this shit as if its shinola to unwitting third world countries who have difficulty with potable water (which I'm cool with, no playa hatas here). Then, the market bitch slaps you one down day after five years of offering up its fake breasts for you to snort the toxic lines of cocaine that is shit debt like Tony Montana and you get your undescended testicles in bind and go crying to the paradoxically named Chris Cox.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Vice President of the United States

via TAPPED

Seems oddly familiar

Well last night I was at the Yankees game, but my eye kept wandering up to the out of town scoreboard. I assumed something was wrong with it because it kept showing WAS 1, NYM 0 even as the inning kept getting later. This is even though the Mets are in a close playoff race and were facing a scrubby LHP who last looked like a good pitcher when he was a Los Angeles Dodger. Imagine my surprise when I got home and discovered the problem was not with the scoreboard or its operator, but the Mets offense.

When I saw the highlights, there were a lot of hard-hit balls with runners on base that just happened to have been directed right at the Washington outfielders. But you know what the answer to that problem is? Home runs!

At least even in the worst case scenario it won't be as big a disappointment as last year.

Pakistani Army threatens to shoot

You have to admire their spunk, but the only thing shooting at U.S. troops is going to accomplish is to turn their soldiers from solid to liquid state in a matter of seconds. The smart move is to pretend not to see the guys in night vision goggles.

Via ThinkProgress

Bankruptcy: Officially bad for morale

As one would expect.

"He did this."

Awesome.

Welcome back, Brian

The 50 Cent of the liberal blogosphere is back in action.

Is an "immediate tsunami" bad?

24/7 Wall St.:
Bond king Bill Gross of Pimco believes that a failure of Lehman (LEH) will lead to "the risk of an immediate tsunami.. related to the unwind of derivative and swap-related positions worldwide in the dealer," according to Reuters.

The reason Mr. McIntyre here is writing that a Lehman failure "will lead" as opposed to "would lead" is because the government isn't going to put itself on the hook for Lehman's liabilities in any takeover plan, as they did in the case of Bear Stearns. Without that backstop, there's apparently just no way that BofA, Barclays, or any other of these relatively solvent banks can buy Lehman without violating their fiduciary duty to their own shareholders. They just hold too many crappy assets.

I don't know what's going to happen when the market opens tomorrow, but it seems there's a real possibility it joins Fannie and Freddie in the penny stock category.

Rest in peace, DFW

I checked out Atrios and saw he'd written an uncharacteristically long post about why his blog was called Eschaton. I wondered what brought that on, and then scrolled down and the immediately preceding post was a link to this:

David Foster Wallace, the novelist, essayist and humorist best known for his 1996 tome "Infinite Jest," was found dead last night at his home in Claremont, according to the Claremont Police Department. He was 46.

Jackie Morales, a records clerk at the Claremont Police Department, said Wallace's wife called police at 9:30 p.m. Friday saying she had returned home to find her husband had hanged himself.

Claire and I went to see him do a reading from "Consider the Lobster" at the Strand bookstore a couple of years ago. It's a collection of short stories, and he read "The View From Mrs. Thompson's," which is about 9/11, and it was the quietest crowded room I've ever been in. When we left I told Claire my fondness for him was "officially hero worship," and I meant it.

GOP I love you but you're bringing me down

David Brooks is just mad-dogging the Republican party these days. Matt Yglesias noted two earlier comments, a reference to the GOP as "intellectually unfit to govern" and another deeming it short on "experts," both variations on the Republicans-are-stupid theme, but neither fleshed out to Yglesias's satisfaction.

Yesterday's column seems to offer a more in depth criticism of at least the pure, uncut version of conservative ideology, and it seems to have been practically plagiarized from Jacob Hacker (note to Dr. Hacker: time to scrub the John Edwards endorsement):

If there’s a thread running through the gravest current concerns, it is that people lack a secure environment in which they can lead their lives. Wild swings in global capital and energy markets buffet family budgets. Nobody is sure the health care system will be there when they need it. National productivity gains don’t seem to alleviate economic anxiety. Inequality strains national cohesion. In many communities, social norms do not encourage academic achievement, decent values or family stability. These problems straining the social fabric aren’t directly addressed by maximizing individual freedom.

I don't know how much government can do on the social norms front, and national productivity gains should have only been expected to alleviate economic anxiety if they were matched by commensurate increases in incomes, which they haven't been, but other than that it's good stuff.

What's a bit hard to take is being asked to seriously consider that the Republican party is actually going to "modernize" and recant all that stuff about supply side tax policy and cutting/privatizing Federal entitlement programs. I don't care if Reihan Salam and idiot boy Ross Douthat make noises about the middle class. It's not going to happen, at least not until they start getting marginalized as a political party so badly that it's their only chance at survival, and as is becoming depressingly clear that hasn't happened yet.

A blast from the past

Ran across a ZDnet article dated October 13, 2000, entitled "Deflating Bandwidth Glut Predictions".

It's a treasure trove of dot-com era craziness. One of the main arguments in support of the idea that there was no oncoming glut of network capacity (which of course there was) was that so many providers were still spending billions to add more capacity as quickly as possible. The very fact that companies like Lucent (still alive but not well) and Global Crossing (went into and out of bankruptcy) were making the investments was presented as evidence that those investments were sound.

As you would expect, the telecom execs quoted in the piece disputed the notion that the network had been overbuilt:

"If you believe the Internet is going to be the dominant force driving bandwidth demand, then you realize that no matter how big a pipe you have, you will fill it," said Jian Li, senior director of emerging technology at Qwest.

That's right, internet demand = infinite demand. If you need harder numbers to be convinced, some guy at Nortel has them in spades:

Based on these factors and other online usage trends, Ramani calculates bandwidth demand will grow to 100 to 200 times today's rate in the next four to five years. At the same time, even if next-generation equipment makers were able to light their total arsenal of fiber in the next five years, capacity would only increase by about 70 times existing levels, he said.

You might be tempted to question the rigor of any calculation that produces a range of "100 to 200 times", but who is the author to say he knows bandwidth demand better than sellers of bandwidth? Finally, a defense that sounds eerily topical:

Ramani said predictions of bandwidth surpluses also fail to acknowledge that the public network is segmented into several regions. "They treat the entire network as if it's one big black box," he said.

This is apparently a common refrain at the tail end of massive asset bubbles, because it's exactly what the National Association of Realtors says today about residential real estate: "Every market's different!"

Epilogue:

January 15, 2002 - More than two dozen North American carriers are in Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Long-haul carriers owe some $75 billion in debt, with some $7 billion of interest required this year alone. According to the Financial Times, some 436,000 jobs have been eliminated from the global telecom industry this year. Bandwidth prices are dropping by as much as 80% annually and long-distance prices in the United States have fallen to as low as 2 cents per minute.

Manna from MSM heaven

What an excellent press day looks like:

• Charlie Gibson's interview of Sarah Palin is not groveling, as was feared after the McCain camp said it wanted interviews that showed "deference." Gibson actually kind of overtly quizzes her on the "Bush doctrine" among other topics, pressing her for answers that are clearly never going to deviate from the ones she was given. It was a stupid gotcha question, even if you'd still like it not to be way over the vice president's head.
  
  
• The AP's headline is "Palin Tries to Defend Qualifications in Interview", prompting TPM to hand their AP-criticism duties over to the Pantload. (n.b. "riding the tire swing" is the former's term for writing pro-McCain copy.)
  
  
• WaPo's Anne Kornblut, before getting to the humiliating bill of particulars in the Gibson interview, puts Palin on blast for linking Iraq to 9/11, a link that has "been rejected even by the president himself." This is even though the audience for the remarks in question was an Iraq-bound brigade including her son. I don't have a problem with it, exactly (although that lie was better corrected when it was Bush telling it to the country), but it's a nice surprise. [Update: Bill Kristol is hopping mad about this one, which is always a good sign]
  
  
• The AP's Charles Babington, whose piece on Obama's convention speech was so negative that Keith Olbermann wanted to fight the guy, now writes an "Analysis:" piece that begins "The 'Straight Talk Express' Has Veered Into Doublespeak." It's literally a story about how much McCain and his campaign have been lying, which is about all one could hope for.
  
  
• All one could hope for... except the fabled expose of Cindy McCain's drug habit, "A Tangled Story of Addiction"! The web version is five pages. The interview that appeared to have been scrubbed earlier today is just one source for what I'm sure is a very fair and evenhanded account of Cindy McCain's drug addiction, the inappropriate measures John McCain took to score for her, and the lives it ruined.

If there has to be an undeserving MVP...

Simon:
Sky Kalkman, now of SB Nation saber site Beyond the Boxscore, throws cold water on the whole "Carlos Delgado for MVP" bandwagon. Sky points out what everyone already knew: based on season-long stats, Delgado has no business even being mentioned in the MVP conversation. His cumulative stats are not impressive, and even his second-half stats pale in comparison to those of Albert Pujols, who has quietly hit .362/.467/.655 this year while providing better defense and baserunning than Delgado.

I completely agree that there's no real argument for Delgado being the best player in the National League, but I've also been paying enough attention to the MVP award process to know that's hardly a disqualifier. The year that Shannon Stewart was traded to the Twins from the Blue Jays midseason, and then (not thus) the Twins went on a ridiculous run to the playoffs, Jayson Stark opined that he deserved consideration. If he did, then after the second half he's put up (.295/.387/.628), Carlos Delgado should too.

Sure, in principle it would be nice to see the MVP award get awarded a bit more regularly to the actual best performance over a season. It's downright stupid that players on non-playoff or (gasp) sub .500 teams are disqualified just because their teammates happen to suck. But why return to sanity now, when the potential beneficiary of the stupid system is a Met?

Plus, despite my earlier, horribly wrong, assessment that his career was overcooked, I like the guy personally for some reason.

Lehman Brothers deathwatch

There are rumors it's going down for reals today or tomorrow, in some form of takeover, a la Bear Stearns.

I just hope it's not today so people don't make tawdry, "financial 9/11" type comments.

Playing offense

The Politico:
South Carolina Democratic chairwoman Carol Fowler sharply attacked Sarah Palin today, saying John McCain had chosen a running mate "whose primary qualification seems to be that she hasn’t had an abortion.”

Take a Load Off, Fannie

There's pretty wide agreement that the government takeover of Fannie and Freddie, in and of itself, kinda had to be done. Still, the privatized gains/socialized losses phenomenon is pretty galling. All the more so given that, even in the face of these massive-even-for-Wall-Street liabilities taxpayers are absorbing, the chances of even reasonable sounding banking regulations getting passed seems pretty dim.

via DealBreaker

Paul Begala can't take it no mo'

I've never been that big a fan, but he did real good work here. I don't know if the outrage was really sincere or not, but it was convincing, and I appreciated it.

He really made John King look like an asshole, too. He had already started in on the "false debate" line when King had only gotten out "We've got 56 days..." out of his mouth. It's as if he knew that King was going to leave the question open.

Reports of United's death

Pretty funny, unless you were the guy who sold at $3.00. If markets are so efficient...

VP CW

So the conventional wisdom on the VP debate is pretty well congealed: "Joe Biden is in big trouble because if he's too combative he'll look like he's picking on the poor little lady."

Serious people really come out and say this on television. It's annoying enough but today I heard someone mention that Biden also has to avoid going too easy on her, because that will be seen as condescending towards women. Obviously, the commentators who keep talking about how Biden has to play nice don't have to worry about that.

So while Joe Biden is "boxed in" and has to "navigate between the Scylla of belligerence and Charybdis of condescension" (okay that's not really a quote), no one seems to be mentioning that when Sarah Palin was asked about the Iraq War in March 2007, she said she hadn't really been following it that closely.

Word is Joe Lieberman has been brought in to coach her on the finer points of accusing Democrats of treason.

Gov. David Paterson on Colbert

I haven't really closely followed Eliot Spitzer's replacement, but he just did an appearance on Colbert and the guy is extremely funny and smart.

Will it be enough to get me to care about state politics now? Outlook not so good.

Bah!

I had dutifully composed a medium length post for today on my iPhone (not being home), but then I got an incoming call and it didn't survive.

The gist was that McCain's speech was awfully dull but that may not matter because the shiny creationist object that is Sarah Palin is dominating the zombies' attention anyway.

New York Sun on death's door

Good.

h/t County Fair.

Wow is she unpleasant

They're doing the postgame on the Palin speech. Chris Matthews thinks it will play in Scranton. I'm not so sure. She was pretty tough on the O-man. Tougher than she should have been, I think. The lines devoted to mocking Obama clearly got the lion's share of the speechwriters' attention. They did pretty good.

But there were so many of them, plus the bit about voting for John McCain out of spite for Harry Reid, whom not enough people know to be much of a lightning rod... it just seemed offputting even coming from a hockey mom (of five!) from Alaska.

Eugene Robinson said afterward that her speech was good where she talked about her biography, but not when she was on the attack, or as he put it "when he wasn't the real Sarah Palin." I don't know how any pundit gets comfortable talking about the "real" Sarah Palin at this point. For all we know that was just the speech she wanted to give.

It's entirely possible that my sensitivity to criticism of Democrats is higher then the average American's, but I don't feel the same way about Rudy Giuliani's speech. Rudy did a phenomenal job. Pat Buchanan was practically foaming at the mouth when asked to comment. He talked about Rudy "tearing and ripping" and it was a pretty good description.

I appreciated that, in addition to all the ridiculous and offensive attacks, he made the effort to dig up some legitimate ones. The public financing reversal was a big story, so you'd expect that. But he called him out for caving on FISA, which is a little suprising/galling since the shift was toward the Republican side, and the "undivided Jerusalem" statement which was quasi-accidental and had to be walked back the next day, was a true gaffe.

Josh Marshall wrote that Rudy "seems to get genuinely angrier the longer the speech goes on," which is definitely true. But that works for Rudy. We know he's mostly in it for the crowd's love. He went on so long they had to scrap Palin's introductory video.

Anyway. A for Rudy. B+ for Palin.

Lieberman hours away from his Zell Miller moment

The Caucus's Kate Phillips:

Senator Joseph I. Lieberman’s speech tonight will likely be a testament to his deep alliance and friendship with Senator John McCain, but it also will likely fray even further — if not sever — his longstanding affiliation with the Democratic Party.

One would hope. There's been rumblings about Harry Reid stripping him of his committee assignments or whatever but the slim Senate majority created a disincentive to antagonize him. As we get closer to an election that's almost certain to result in more than 49 proper Democrats, and as Lieberman prepares to speak at the Republican convention, where he is sure to accuse Obama of treason and extol the manly virtues of John McCain, I think it's time to start treating him as hostile.

Finding good snark in the unlikeliest of places

Richard Cohen: "Still, you have to admit that in all that time, especially since Palin became governor about two years ago, no Russian invasion force has come across the strait, maybe because she was in charge of the Guard, maybe because she herself is a hunter and an athlete."

Via Yglesias

Pat Buchanan's 1992 RNC speech

I was reading a Slate article that tries to establish where McCain's use of "my friends" ranks as a rhetorical tic in American political history, and it makes a reference to Pat Buchanan's convention speech at the 1992 RNC. It had 6 instances of "my friends," but is pretty interesting for other reasons as well.

As someone who finds himself agreeing with a lot of what Buchanan says on MSNBC, I sometimes let myself forget that he's the same Pat Buchanan who was too hot for the Republican party in the mid-90s. This is right after the Democrats nominated Bill Clinton. Stirring stuff:

"Like many of you last month, I watched that giant masquerade ball at Madison Square Garden--where 20,000 radicals and liberals came dressed up as moderates and centrists--in the greatest single exhibition of cross-dressing in American political history."

"And what does Hillary believe? Well, Hillary believes that 12-year-olds should have a right to sue their parents, and she has compared marriage as an institution to slavery--and life on an Indian reservation. Well, speak for yourself, Hillary."

and my favorite:

"In New York, Mr Gore made a startling declaration. Henceforth, he said, the 'central organizing principle' of all governments must be: the environment. Wrong, Albert!"