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: