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It's probably too late to worry about piling on with Sarah Palin, but this story might just be the final word for me. At least, until the debate.

It's a WaPo piece about how Palin has gained her understanding of the world. She points out that as she only got her first passport two years ago, she has had to gain most of her experience through reading. However, on what must have been the least interesting episode of Charlie Rose ever, she reveals that her favorite authors are:

1. CS Lewis (the poor man's Tolkien)
2. Dr. George Sheehan (Runner's World)
3. Garfield. From a desk calendar.

Yes, that's right, Palin's worldview has been shaped by a desk calendar. Never mind that Garfield isn't, properly speaking, an author, or that calendars sort of stretch my understanding of a medium capable of sustaining literary narrative. I can't claim much acquaintance with Sheehan, but once upon a time I read both Garfield and Lewis. Neither was exactly "The Prince." Maybe this explains why having seen Russia counts as international experience- everything is relative.

*update 1 October 2008, 8:20am*

Katie Couric also discovers that journalism major Palin can't name a single news source that she reads, well, ever. Continue to be amazed here.

Rising Tide

The international markets opened dizzily this morning. In Russia, they were suspended after plunging. The FTSE plunged, but appears to have largely recovered, at least in part responding to a 9 billion dollar government infusion from Belgian banks. The Bank of Japan pumped 29 million USD (3 trillion yen) into its money markets. At least the price of oil is tanking. Guess all those outside investors are feeling the pinch too. Yay, deregulated markets.

But the national mood continues to darken.

David Brooks discusses the Republican revolt yesterday here, and the desert of leadership authority it suggests. Getting compared to Smoot and Hawley should give many of these lawmakers more pause than I suspect it will.

The WaPo here suggests that the problem is that Republicans, bending to the will of powerfully negative voter calling, are essentially reflecting the reality that average Americans just don't understand the complexity of the current crisis. Steven Pearlstein is probably right about that, but then how many of those voters understand the farm bill that congressfolk renew every year? The whole reason we have representative government is so that the people we send to Washington can become specialists in complicated things and make informed decisions.

Richard Cohen muses on the socio-political influence of The Great Depression here.It's an interesting piece. Perhaps the best reflection:

"The Great Depression was not just a period of wholesale unemployment and incredible poverty -- of bread lines and apple-peddlers and women selling brief intimacy for 10 cents a dance. It was also the period of Hitler and Mussolini and, in this country, of Huey Long and Father Charles Coughlin, and the belief among otherwise sane people that communism was the remedy for what ailed us. An economic crisis is like war. It's impossible to contain. It affects everything it touches."

Clearly, Fascism isn't about to leap back out of some hidden political crevice (sorry, Stephen Ambrose), but the link between financial downturn and political instability cannot be denied.

Will they start calling it the First Depression, or Great Depression I? Neither seem very catchy.

*Update*
8:42am

So a couple of hours have elapsed, and the world's markets appear to be correcting. Not at all prepared to feel out of the woods, but it does raise one interesting question- what if the fundamental assumption of most of the world's economists, specifically that without some sort of bailout the US and probably world economy implode, is wrong?

with friends like these

So as the VP debate draws nearer and Sarah Palin's Saturday Night Live video becomes the most popular thing that has ever happened on my Facebook page by a considerable margin, Palin seems poised on the edge of becoming perceived as a national farce.

The NYT seems to be in general agreement that the stakes for McP seem to be getting higher, and when you have conservatives of no less stature than David Frum saying things like:

“I think she has pretty thoroughly — and probably irretrievably — proven that she is not up to the job of being president of the United States,” David Frum, a former speechwriter for President Bush who is now a conservative columnist, said in an interview. “If she doesn’t perform well, then people see it."

So...yeah. It's hard to imagine anyone offering a more biting critique than that. Guess that vetting thing kinda does matter after all.

*Update*

It also emerges that apparently there are unaired clips from the Katie Couric interview, including a moment when we discover that Palin can't name - not can't explain, but can't even name- any supreme court decisions other than Roe V. Wade. See this blurb here. So there may even be a chance that more pseudo-comedy is to follow at periodic intervals.

not dark yet, but it's getting there

Just when you think this whole economic collapse thing can't get any more strange. Politically, Still President Bush might as well make the remainder of his public appearances wearing a bill and oversize novelty webbed feet. The lame part will take care of itself. He's lost control of the party that voted him nearly unrestricted war powers. Surely it couldn't get much worse?

Then you look at the economic impact. Both the Dow and NASDAQ closed today lower than they were when Bush took office, meaning that 8 years of value have been wiped from the markets in the last few weeks. There is little to add to this stunning verdict other than context for this statement:

"It's a striking phenomenon," said Robert Shapiro, undersecretary of commerce during the Clinton White House years. "The reckless negligence and mismanagement of the country's financial markets by the White House, the Treasury and the Fed over the last several years has now produced a crisis that has wiped out all of the increase in the market value of America's companies from five years of record corporate profits, strong productivity gains, and reasonable growth. Bush has now run the table on presidential failure."

Read that context here.

Bailout Collapse

Looks like the bailout bill failed in the House. I’m not entirely sure what happens from here. Do they bring it back up for a vote? According to Marc Ambinder, more than 131 Republicans and 94 Democrats voted against. The Dow is dropping like a rock. That’s a pretty large block – I’m not sure that they can really bring this back from that.

Paul Kruman has said that the bill is sufficiently not terrible to be worth passing. It’s not exactly the second coming of the New Deal, but it’s what’s needed right now. If nothing else, it was a pretty remarkable step back from the original Paulson plan. Dodd and Frank were under some pretty tight constraints in what was politically doable, with the president and the Treasury secretary where they are.

The bill really had to have bipartisan support – Krugman talks about this above – because without it, the dissatisfied party can always go and hang a sign reading “$700 Billion Handout” around the other party’s neck. It seems that the Republican backbenchers didn’t feel like they can go home with this plan behind them. I guess we’ll see if they end up ruing that decision here in a month or so.

Yar!

Oh, and those Somali pirates who nabbed a ship full of tanks and heavy weapons? They want 20 million US to release it.

Were is Iron Man, Chuck Norris, or the governor of California when we need them?

In fact, now that I think about it, didn't the marines cut their teeth as an organization suppressing African piracy? Sounds like a job opportunity.

See the story here.

By the Numbers

I could embellish these numbers with several hundred words, but they really don't require that. Obama emerges with a statistically significant lead, Palin's favorability ratings plunge to -10, mostly stopping there because that's as low as the poll allows them to go...

Read em and weep (or cheer, as appropriate) at Kos.

The obvious ground for speculation rests with what McPalin do next. I've been rather surprised by the number of calls for Palin to withdraw- I can't see her doing that. McCain might as well suspend his campaign for real if she does, unless he can resurrect Ronald Reagan and convince him to take the job. On the other hand, allowing her more press time seems to be nearly as damaging. I'm actually glad I don't have to resolve that one.

Having decisively lost the debate, and with Palin turning into an anchor of the first order, it will be interesting to see what they come up with for next week.

Obama and the Defensive Crouch

I think Daniel Larison makes some good points in this post about progressives, Obama and the role of a hawkish pose in this election. He has a very on spot summary of the Democratic “defensive pose” that has dominated Democratic and Republican campaigns since Reagan and how Obama breaks the mold a bit.

Obama has essentially been following in this same tradition: opposed to the war in Iraq, but otherwise in favor of a very active role in the world up to and including new military engagements and very keen to declare his support for military action in places other than Iraq by the U.S. and allied militaries. So when progressives listen to Obama’s answers on foreign policy, they tend to cringe because they recognize perfectly well that Obama sounds just like the opposition on most issues related to U.S. policies abroad.

There are two big reasons that Obama was in a unique position to counter McCain this year. The first one being, of course, that he had opposed the war from the beginning – he was against it before it began, unlike all the other serious Democratic candidates for the candidacy. Obama could legitimately point to that stance and say, “I was correct and John McCain was not,” and not get hit for changing their minds when the winds blew foul. The second is that, as Larison points out, Obama has long supported a rather hawkish, liberal interventionist foreign policy vision. Progressives like myself who would like to see a much more restrained use of US military force outside our borders may cringe a bit at that (and extremely limited interventionists like Larison will of course move from cringing to wincing), but the fact is that Obama has a legitimate history of pro-military opinions.

It’s a sorry state of affairs, but the simple fact is that, in general, Americans like wars. We usually win them and they allow people to feel morally superior to other nations. The stab-in-the-back narrative that conservatives have carefully built up around the failure of the Vietnam War and the rosey-hued paeans to World War II and “the greatest generation” have left Americans with an extremely warped sense of what it means to fight a war, let alone the kind of grinding counterinsurgency that the Iraq War has turned into. Americans are used to wars that resemble videogames – quick, on television, and over when the TV goes off. The Iraq war has not done much to inconvenience people yet. We’re still waiting for the bill to come due. Right now, it’s popular to be on the side of war.

There is a popular narrative surrounding Democrats that says they’re weak and aren’t able to carry through wars, unlike the tough, manly Republicans who can get the job done. There’s a lot of blame for this prevailing attitude, not least of which lands squarely on the shoulders of Democrats themselves for constantly running away from this fight. John McCain himself certainly hasn’t done the nation any favors with his constant reiteration of “country first,” as if the Democrats were intending to put someone else (Iran, maybe? Hollywood?) in front of “real” America. I think that John McCain, as a citizen and a human being, should be ashamed of himself, but I won’t loose any sleep waiting for an apology.

The problem comes from the fact that before this mentality can change we have to have a strong Democrat to disprove it. This meme has been an unusually hardy one, and just like the one that insists that Republicans are the party of fiscal sanity, it seems to be a pretty hardy weed. It’s taken a long time for both of these to change. I would love to see a candidate articulate a muscular, responsible and non-dogmatic noninterventionism. When that candidate appears on the scene, I’ll be happy to vote for them. But I don’t think anyone running on such a platform could be elected in this United States. The Republicans, while being manifestly more irresponsible, would have a field day. The media would have none of it in their constant quest for a charismatic strongman. And I don’t think the public would take it seriously.

I think Larison is incorrect, however, when he says that Obama sounds just like the other side. As someone even more committed to noninterventionism than I would call myself, I think he too quickly falls into painting both with the same brush. Obama is far more likely to be considered in his application of force, and far more likely to seek out accord in utilizing it. I don’t think that this will in and of itself lead to a more judicious and just use of force – bad wars can certainly be started this way – but I do think it’s far less likely than what John McCain will offer us.

Perhaps Obama isn’t the candidate I’d want in all respects. Maybe the next guy would be. But Obama can’t be worse than the candidate who promises to double down on all of Bush’s mistakes.

Paul Newman

I was very sorry to read this afternoon about the death of Paul Newman. Newman was without a doubt one of the greatest actors of his generation. One of my most interesting movie watching experiences was the 1961 film The Hustler, staring Newman, Jackie Gleason, George C. Scott and Piper Laurie. The film isn’t entirely successful, but what’s fascinating about it is the way it seems to be on the cusp of something new. The direction of the film seems to move back and forth from the stagey, more abstracted filmmaking of the first half of the century and the more realistic, vérité filmmaking that would come in with the French New Wave. Newman was right there.

The First Debate

I have a hard time caring much about debates as such. For the most part, the candidates have both solidified their talking points to such an extent that there’s not much else to be said by the time the debates roll around. Debates exist mostly for those who haven’t paid attention, and I’ve always found that curious. How can they know whether or not the candidates are being truthful, are presenting themselves in an accurate way? If you haven’t paid attention up until now, what’s the point in tuning in at this point?

All that being said, having watched it from last night, I have to say I think Obama came off the better of the two. This is not surprising, as I think Obama would make a good president and John McCain is a crazy old man. It doesn’t make much difference to me how the two perform – I know where the two stand on the issues I care about. I have my problems with Obama in a lot of respects (he’s more hawkish than I would prefer), but there really isn’t a comparison with McCain – he’s wrong on pretty much all the issues, he is a dangerous personality, loves war and has little interest in or aptitude for domestic policy questions, which would leave his administration open to the hands of the extreme right wing of his party.

McCain’s performance reinforced a great deal of that last night. He was exacerbated where Obama was civil and calm, he was arrogant, dismissive and rude while Obama should him a great deal of deference, probably more than was warranted. If the primary question was, “Will McCain act like a crazy person?” and “Is Obama experienced enough?” both of them walked away with a strong performances. But while McCain didn’t hit anyone or randomly suspend the debate, Obama had a good night. Solid, competent and boring. After eight years of George W. Bush, I think Solid, competent and boring sounds just about right.

The real fireworks, of course, come next week. The vice presidential debates should be one of the more noteworthy presidential election events of the last twenty-five years. I doubt that Palin will do as spectacularly bad as many progressives (and conservatives) are expecting. If you’re predisposed towards seeing her in a positive light, she’ll do surprisingly well. If you’re inclined the other way, she’s going to choke. But right now the expectations for her are so exceedingly low that I wouldn’t be surprised if she did better than I would expect. As long as she doesn’t come out and burst into tears she’ll be on the winning side of expectations.

Tanks, But No Tanks

In news more appropriate to the opening scenes of a super-hero film, pirates off the Somalian coast have seized control of a tanker ship hauling 31 Russian made T-72 tanks, the BBC reports.

The ship has subsequently disappeared.

The tanks, along with an assortment of anti-aircraft weapons and RPGs, are not surprisingly worth a fortune according to the Times.

Less sensational, but ultimately more interesting, is that Russia has announced the beginning of anti-piracy naval patrols along the Somali coast. Isn't that precisely the sort of job the US navy should be all over, as part of their effort to keep the world's sea lanes open? Are we ceding a zone of influence in the Indian ocean, along Europe's oil shipping lanes to the Russians? Potentially, that would be far bigger news than what's been going on in Georgia.

You Put Your Right Foot In...

So McC is back in.

It's hardly surprising. By all that is just, the national media had better hold him over the coals with regard to the whiplash-inducing events of the last couple days.

One has to wonder to what degree all this flying to DC has disrupted the candidates' preparations for the debates, to say nothing of the negotiations to, you know, save the economy.

We await the judgment of the three-day tracking...conveniently summarized here.

Playing On...

So as the inscrutable tactical circling in Washington continues, Washington Mutual collapses and is devoured at fire-sale prices by JP Morgan.

I don't know if a bailout plan could have saved WaMu. I do know I passionately dislike their most recent ad campaign, and am therefore disappointed that the commercial side of their operations appears to be unaffected.

Still President Bush just gave another speech regarding the impending bailout plan that will no doubt pass any...minute...now...but it just made him sound even less in control. There is a certain poetry to watching the man who has done so much to extend the boundaries of the imperial presidency overtaken by events I suspect he only partially understands. Ideological certainty, it turns out, is a poor substitute for a clear-eyed evaluation of reality.

An interesting question I would like to see someone answer, or try to answer, in an official capacity, since we are all just waiting around for a compromise bill to emerge is this: WHY is there a sweeping financial crisis of epic proportions? Acceptable answers would not be able to rest on vague concepts like "greed" or "a hangover on wall street." Which policies, exactly, allowed this to happen? Which policies, exactly, will prevent it from happening again? Oh, I realize that's impolitic, but for 700 billion I think we can demand the policy equivalent of some heads on stakes.

Further, as we swing toward our own rapidly improvised version of European socialism, what has the gaping hole in the budget done to both candidates' financial plans? Surely McCain's tax cuts are out. Surely many of Obama's spending priorities in health care and education are now either delayed by years, or only possible in the face of substantial tax increases far further down the income ladder than he originally wanted to go. Either way, it would be interesting to hear how their plans have been altered by our impending economic collapse.

Finally, fallout from the continuing revelations of Palin's ignorance of the world. Is there a chance that middle America, who also knows nothing about McCain's legislative record or the intricacies of Russo-American relations, identify with her befuddled answers and turn toward her in a wave of sympathy and anti-media rage? I don't know for sure- but I still like to believe, in spite of evidence to the contrary, that people will ultimately prefer candidates who give the impression they will be competent at the jobs they want to do.

A Tale of Two (or Three) Plans

It’s incredible to look at the text of the deal that Dodd and Frank hashed out, that was broadly agreed upon, and that apparently John McCain helped scuttle, () and contrast it with the “plans” that House Republicans presented as an alternative. The Democrat plan is not without flaws, I’m sure, but it has most of the things that progressives have been saying it needs to have: homeowner relief, equity stakes for the government, oversight mechanisms, and a handle on the money spigot. This is about as different from the original Paulson plan as it’s possible to get. It was never going to be everything that progressives wanted, but it seems far better than it could have been.

Contrast that with the Republican plans, of which there seem to be two. The first is little more than a joke: a two year suspension in the capital gains tax – despite the fact that the problem is that the assets these mortgages are backing are worth less now than the mortgages themselves. They don’t need to suspend the capital gains tax, because these assets aren’t going to be making any capital gains. The other is slightly less idiotic, and seems to come down to an elaborate, just as expensive plan that avoids more regulation or Congressional oversight.

These Republicans are fundamentally unserious. They’re trapped by rigid, ossified orthodoxies that prevent them from actually engaging the real world on anything other than the most basic, tactical, political level. They aren’t fit to govern and are simply another example of the idea that when you send people who don’t believe government works to run the government, you just get government that doesn’t work.

Is McCain throwing his weight behind them, or is he trapped in a mavericky labyrinth of his own making? My guess is the later. I can’t imagine anyone who seriously expected to be able to compete in the upcoming election to swing from “the fundamentals of the economy are strong” to “We need more regulation!” to a total abandonment of any sort of regulation. It’s entirely possible that McCain is simply this clueless about what’s going on. After all, it takes the kind of interest in detail, patience and willingness to learn that McCain has never possessed to follow this crisis and come up with a reasonable response.

More Mavericky Hijinks

According to Talking Points Memo, McCain’s “suspension” of his campaign was even more of a shame than I had first assumed. The McCain camp has instructed TV stations to begin reairing their ads on Saturday. And, since it takes a little while to take those kinds of things out of rotation – as in, they were still running as of last night – it looks like about the only McCain has suspended is his appearance on David Letterman and his ads for one (1) day. Not exactly the cessation of partisan politics it was represented as, is it?

The whole thing leaves us, where, exactly? McCain pulls a political stunt, never really comes through on it, goes down to Washington in time to rally the conservative backbenchers and scuttle a bipartisan agreement on the credit market crisis. Now he’s left trying to decide whether or not he goes to the debate or stands by his “this is too important to ignore” stance and allows Obama an hour and a half of primetime television to hold a question and answer session with Jim Lehrer or with an audience.

I have no doubt that McCain will show up in Mississippi tonight. He’ll mouth some platitudes about Obama once again putting his campaign before the country, just like when he didn’t agree to the townhalls that McCain wanted. There really isn’t any other option. If he doesn’t show up, he might as well pack up the tent, because this dog and pony show is over. It would be the height of absurdity for McCain, who has been avoiding the media like the plague and his running mate, who has yet to answer serious questions from a press gaggle (and after her interview with Couric, I don’t know how they can allow her to – it would be a disaster of epic proportions).

It’s been noted before that McCain’s campaign seems to be running to win the news cycle while ignoring the larger picture. McCain is all about tactics and Obama has been about strategy. We’ve seen in the last forty-eight hours the logical endpoint of this mentality. McCain does something that looks very mavericky in the first thirty seconds that you think about it. Any longer than that, though, and it just looks dangerously unhinged. McCain really is too irresponsible to be president. I can’t help but think that if Obama behaved like this, he would have been laughed off the stage by now.

Well well...

What a surprise...

Apparently, the timeline for yesterday goes something like this: a decision on an economic deal is nearly reached, John McCain arrives in Washington, and sits through a 40 minute meeting on the proposal barely speaking, and suddenly the deal falls apart as the Republicans suddenly counter-propose a vaguely worded, clearly rushed alternative.

See my last post for comments on the political expediency of that maneuver for McCain. You might have heard it here first, depending on whether you read us before other news sources.

So we are left with the last great outstanding question regarding the bizarre fiasco that is fast becoming the McCain campaign: will he show in Mississippi tonight?

I'm guessing he does. I'm guessing there will be a fair bit of fallout from that, but far less than if he leaves the stage empty.

David Letterman

It’s a shame we don’t have more media figures like David Letterman. If you haven’t seen his show from last night, when John McCain canceled on him, telling him he was off to Washington to fix the economic crisis and then ended up doing an interview with Katie Couric – and in fact not flying to Washington until the next morning – you’re doing yourself a disservice. Letterman was extremely funny in his early years, less so for a long time, but seems to have come back into his own in the last few years. His riffing on McCain’s lies is amazing. His interview with Paris Hilton from a while ago is even better. And, best of all, I think, one of his latest interviews with Richard Simmons is simply amazing. At this point, he’s pretty much a national treasure.

At any rate, check out Letterman’s reaction to McCain’s suspension last night.

Halftime?

So the bizarre story arc of the last 48 hours appears to be nearing a middle. After suspending (what does that even mean?) his campaign and rushing back to Washington, we find ourselves in the breathing space between when it becomes clear to the McCain campaign that they have made a terrible mistake, and wondering how to get out of it.

The suspension itself is just one more example of McCain hitting on 18, responding to crisis with overly severe, and questionably considered, abruptness. There's no reason at all to believe that his presence in DC is going to facilitate a legislative resolution - by most accounts, he's greatly exaggerated the severity of the problem anyway- but may in fact make it politically necessary for the Republicans to slow the process down. If there really was no crisis, what did he make all this noise for?

Obama, by contrast, seems far more in control of his own impulses, and certainly to the voter who only casually follows the campaign, McCain looks flighty by comparison. And it isn't the first time he's tried to change the beat of the campaign with unexpected moves- canceling the first day of the convention, Palin, careening around the political deck like a loose cannon on almost every policy position. The pattern emerges. This guy's just a little unstable.

Imagine, though, what kooky hi-jinks he'll be pulling from the White House- I'd love to give the State of the Union, but I am currently confronted with a most serious desire to eat a shrimp cocktail, and the government shall be suspended until I'm finished. Really? You still think that sounds absurd? I don't know anymore...

At the moment there seems to be some confusion over whether or not congress and the President have reached a workable deal, about what you'd expect if McCain was somehow working to draw things out a little.

Tomorrow will be interesting. Certainly, McCain stands to inconvenience me, as I've been planning much of my week around debate viewing on Friday. Attempting to cancel both his own, and Palin's next week, is also flaky. Is McCain really going to cede the stage to Obama, and spend the next 40 days fighting the images of Obama running the house next to a darkened podium? Even if the networks only ran it for 10 minutes, the image would dominate the news for days. If McCain does opt to return for the debate, no doubt he will claim that as the crisis is over (if in fact it is), it's now safe to resume reciting his memorized talking points, and no doubt many people will buy that. I won't be among them. It would strike me as yet another example of indecision on the part of McC.

That said, I don't begrudge McCain any tactic, any tactic at all, to try to keep Palin's debate off prime-time television. If her interviews leading up to this point are any predictor, Biden should make rhetorical hamburger out of her. Unless she shoots him first.

After a day of general confusion, it feels like what McCain has really demonstrated isn't his maverick leadership potential, but that he's playing with authority he isn't ready to wield.

Trainwreck

This is just sad. Palin’s responses to Charlie Gibson’s questions were often trite recitations of canned talking points, but largely they were coherent. With Palin’s interview with CBS’s Katie Couric, we seem to have crossed that particular Rubicon. It’s just depressing me to watch her now. I feel sorry for her. She seems like a nice enough woman. McCain, by playing for the evangelical base has really done her a disservice. I don’t think she ever would have been ready for the big time – as has been noted, she doesn’t seem to have any interest in things outside her very narrow, Alaska centered worldview. I guess that’ll be okay when the Rapture drives all the believers from the Lower 48 up into Alaska. But right now, it’s just depressing.

Not Doing Enough

After spending almost the entire editorial blasting Bush and McCain for their complicity in the financial crisis, and McCain’s manic swings from position to position, the New York Times editorial board throws this in:

Mr. Obama has been clearer on the magnitude and causes of the financial crisis. He has long called for robust regulation of the financial industry, and he said early on that a bailout must protect taxpayers. Mr. Obama also recognizes that the wealthy must pay more taxes or this country will never dig out of its deep financial hole. But as he does too often, Mr. Obama walked up to the edge of offering full prescriptions and stopped there.

This is almost as if they have to say something negative about Obama in an editorial that also lays (far more severely) into McCain. As best I can tell, what the NY Times editorial board is saying here is that, “Obama seems to understand what the problem is and how large it is, has long advocated our preferred cures for the current crisis and has been, in short, right on this before even the current crisis came about. But he hasn’t offered a specific, detailed plan.”

It’s not the job of presidential candidates to offer specific, detailed plans. In fact, I think it’s foolish to do so for a couple of reasons, not least of which being it has no chance of becoming law. Obama (and, lest we forget, McCain) are not on the relevant committees to deal with this crisis and the bailout deal. Sen. Dodd seems to be doing a fine job without either of them, and I think it would be best if they both avoided getting involved and trying to blatantly take credit for a plan that they A) didn’t write and B) aren’t in charge of.

Obama, should he be elected, won’t be president until January. He’s currently a senator, but he isn’t on any of the right committees. Offering his own plan on this would be entirely presumptuous and would open himself to attack by Republican surrogates of McCain, as well of McCain’s campaign itself. There’s no reason for Obama to go stepping on the toes of Chris Dodd or Barney Frank. The best thing he could do is exactly what he has done: outline what he feels like the major problems are, the things he’d like to see the bailout address and then step back and let the rest of his colleagues in Congress hash out the details.

McCain Pulls the Emergency Break

Up until now, McCain’s campaign has been unusually focused on the daily news cycle and winning the week. This monomaniacal quest for a good day’s coverage reached its natural endpoint today when McCain dominated the headlines … by stopping his campaign.

This is very, very weird.

McCain’s devotion to the cycle has included completely ignoring what’s going on in the wider world or anything that doesn’t affect how things will look on the evening news. McCain has lurched from absurd strategy to absurd strategy, from choosing a wholly unqualified woman to be his vice presidential pick, keeping her hidden from the press, dismissing the New York Times as a pro-Obama organization and now reaches its apogee with his contention that, in order to save the nation, John McCain, member of the minority party who hasn’t made a vote in over five months, must return to oversee the bailout plan. Okay, then.

I’ll be very curious to hear what the reactions are tomorrow. It’s too early to say how it’s going to play, although I can’t see anyone falling for such a transparently cynical ploy as this one. Will McCain be at the debates? Will Obama just be up there by himself? Will people really believe that McCain needs to put his stamp of approval on this bill, or that the Democratic Congress even wants him there? These are all interesting questions. I think we’ll find out here in a day or two.

Interesting times.

Eeeeewwww....

I find the recent move by PETA to request that Ben & Jerry's start using human breast milk instead of cow milk more than a little creepy. Inspect for yourself here.

To occupy several minutes of your work day, imagine some of the new flavor names this would make possible though...not likely to expand market share, are they?

Moby Dick Blogging

Moby Dick is one of my favorite novels. It’s fascinating the way it combines a huge number of genres and sources of information into one cohesive whole, from the history of the word “whale” to discussions of (at the time) scientific theories about whales, the process of hunting, butchering and transporting whales, the place of whales in the global economy. And that is just the stuff surrounding the main narrative, the story of a man who’s barely there surrounded by a representatives from all over the globe, stuck on a ship captained by a madman at war with nature. It’s epic stuff.

Matt Yglesias and Ross Douthat are worried about a particularly dire sounding adaptation of Moby Dick into a movie. Of course it’s not going to be a good movie. Most great works of literature can’t be turned into successful films. It’s absurd to think that they could. Most great works of art are extremely medium specific. This is why it’s so rare to hear a great cover of a great song, especially one as idiosyncratic as something like Moby Dick. It’s much easier to turn a bad book into a great movie (say, The Godfather, Fight Club or The Shining) than a great book into a good movie (Wings of the Dove, perhaps. An okay movie, but an amazing book). I’ve only seen a couple of films that truly topped good to great novels that they were working from: No Country for Old Men to name a recent example, but also Blade Runner, Election and American Psycho.

If Patrick Stewart and the CBC couldn’t kill Moby Dick, I think we’ll live through this one as well.

Reign in Hell

Daniel Larison answers a question I asked:

I think they might have avoided mentioning how beautiful Obama finds the Islamic call to prayer, I think they might have eschewed ever referring to his middle name, and I think they could have worked much more strenuously to stress how embarrassingly “pro-Israel” Obama’s positions on Palestine, Lebanon, Iran and the like have been. I take it for granted that his admirers and supporters want him to win, and I assume they are savvy enough to understand that imputing sympathy with Muslims is exactly what Obama’s opponents want people to believe about him, so I have never understood why they have been so keen to talk about those aspects of his life and family history that separate him from most Americans’ experience.

I think this reveals a few things about the two major parties, their approach to campaigning and the American public. Obama’s appeal to the rest of the world and his engagement with the outside world on a level deeper than “USA #1” sloganeering isn’t a bug, it’s a feature for progressives. The idea that the Obama campaign should have actively tried to hide that to appease a group of bigots who are unlikely to vote for him is absurd. As someone who currently lives outside the US, I can say that people here in Eastern Europe are much more excited about Obama than McCain – and with good reason. Obama at least gives the rest of the world the courtesy of pretending that they have cultures worthy of respect. And as a side note, I live close to a mosque, and the call to prayer is beautiful. If Obama loses the election because of people and attitudes like the ones Daniel discusses, it doesn’t have anything to do with Obama and his supporters.

In campaigning, Democratic candidates tend to be more principled than Republicans. (“Republicans,” as opposed to “conservatives”) Look at the campaigns this year. Democrats are always knocked for being weak and on the defensive, because Republicans are more than happy to lie, slander and play political hardball. This is often presented as an admirable trait. When progressives say they like Obama in part because he has an understanding of and even an appreciation for Muslim culture it’s not because we think that it’s going to help Obama get elected. It’s because that’s what we think. The idea of hiding that because it would make Obama more electable is absurd and distasteful to me. Now, could this cause Obama to lose the election? I suppose. I think that would be a real tragedy for the country. But I would much, much prefer that Obama and his supporters run a campaign where they don’t try and pull a white curtain across their candidate’s problematic characteristics.

I don’t think that the Democrats are the holders of all good thoughts, or that the Republicans are simply cynical power addicts (I think they’re much more than just simple cynical power addicts), but clearly they don’t have a problem with naked cynicism when it suits their purposes. Progressives have only recently had much say in the mainstream of the Democratic Party. Up until Bush, most progressives were content to say, “I’m taking my ball and going home” when candidates didn’t carry through on promises (see Nader, Ralph). Evangelicals are much more closely tied to their party’s powerbase and are hence much more reluctant to leave the coalition, even though it’s not as if the GOP has ever followed through on all those sweet nothings they whispered into Christians’ ears before taking advantage of them.

What it comes down to is: where progressives see a qualification, others see a liability. What is disgusting about the whole thing – even more than the thought that people would not vote for a candidate who is not Muslim based on how they feel about Islamic culture – is the fact that there are people out there willing to take advantage of those people to gain power. I think we already know that quite a few Republicans are familiar with Milton.

Voter Registration

I’m from Ohio and remember all too well Ken Blackwell’s voter suppression shenanigans from the 2004 election. He did a lot of stuff, some of it worse than others and some of it just stupid. His nonsense about trying to ignore voter registration cards because they weren’t printed on 80lbs cardstock was absurd then as what Ohio’s current secretary of state is up to. She’s disqualified about a thousand McCain printed voter registration cards because people didn’t check the box that says, “I would like to register to vote.” That’s just silly. It’s clear they intended to register. This is an awful reason to disenfranchise someone. Not as bad as the foreclosure thing in Michigan, perhaps, but not something I want my state engaging in, either.

We should not be in the business of trying to disqualify legitimate voters. People voting twice or more, dead people voting: fine. But that wasn’t Blackwell was after, and that isn’t what’s going on now. Just because a group of voters is less likely to back your pick doesn’t mean you should try and prevent people who have a legitimate reason to vote from voting.

Beyond that, why do people have to register to vote anyways? It’s always baffled me that there are so many things we could do to encourage and increase voter turnout – moving the day to a weekend instead of Tuesdays, making registering easier. The BMV has a huge list of state residents and they know how old they all are. You have to have a driver’s license in the United States today, or if not, at least a valid state ID (also issued by the BMV). Why don’t we simply register people to vote when they turn eighteen? The only objection I can think of is that people often move and don’t update their driver’s licenses. That seems like a fairly minor objection to me, however.

So: is there any legitimate objection to automatic once-you’re-eighteen voter registration?

TV on the Radio

One of my favorite bands of the last decade, the aforementioned TV on the Radio released a great new album this week, Dear Science. The lead single, “Golden Age,” has a video, which I recommend that you check out below. Anything that can combine creepy mysticism, Arrested Development’s Hot Cops, the Care Bears, Voltron and mystic vision quests is okay in my book.



It is all at once the best, dumbest, most awesome video I’ve seen in a very long time. It succeeds at getting weirder the entire time, which is more than you can say for most videos. Check it out, and check out the band. I saw them live one week before I left the United States a year and a half ago, and it was a great show. It was ending things on a high note.

McCain, Temperment and Judges

George Will express some doubt about McCain’s reaction to the Paulson buyout scheme:

Conservatives who insist that electing McCain is crucial usually start, and increasingly end, by saying he would make excellent judicial selections. But the more one sees of his impulsive, intensely personal reactions to people and events, the less confidence one has that he would select judges by calm reflection and clear principles, having neither patience nor aptitude for either.

Judicial appointments aren’t something we’ve heard a lot about in this campaign, but Will is exactly right: the next president is going to radically reshape the Supreme Court. In all the ways that I think a McCain administration could be a disaster for our country, his influence long after his time in office would rest on the appointments he would make. Will rightly decries McCain’s “boiling moralism and bottomless reservoir of certitudes,” an incredibly dangerous combination in anyone, let along someone as important as the President of the United States.

A lot of the problems with George W. Bush have flowed from a very similar source. McCain, like Bush, has a rigid worldview that depicts himself, and those who follow him, as being morally pure, no matter what they actually do, and those who work against them as more than simply misguided on policy. Opponents aren’t merely misguided – their opposition is morally corrupt.

As long as McCain was in the senate, in a safe seat, it didn’t matter what kinds of random moralistic quests he undertook. Even if he was wrong (as he almost invariably was), his ability to actually affect change was severely limited. McCain seems wholly disinterested in the actually process of governing – despite his extremely long tenure in national government, his actual list of accomplishments is fairly paltry. Placing a man like this in the executive branch – especially a branch strengthened beyond all reason by Bush – is a scary thought.

Will is talking about how McCain’s worldview would affect the temperament judicial nominees, but you can see this tendency all over McCain’s campaign, especially this week with their was against the New York Times and Ben Smith personally. These are not people who are able or willing to deal with criticism, contradiction or even oversight. If you know in your heart of hearts that you’re right, throwing a few lies around to help out the greater good (or a few wars) isn’t that big a jump.

The whole thing just underscores how dramatically wrong the standard read on John McCain was, and just how much his personality and temperament make him unsuitable for the job that he’s trying so hard to get.

Cracks in the Wall

It's 7:05am here, and the news suggests that the 700 billion bailout plan is not getting the job done. The US dollar suffers its largest single day drop in 7 years on CNBC. The price of oil jumped up in a single day record. The Dow lost some 370 points yesterday. See those fun stories here.

The scary part, is that while the US government debates, the bleeding continues abroad. The Royal Bank of Scotland Group and Deutchebank both lost some 3% of their value overnight, and the international recriminations have only just begun in the NYT. I'm still waiting on other media sources to pick up the European banking declines. Similar numbers are coming from Singapore and Tokyo.

So far, the MSM story of the day is about the argument about to play out between the President and congress. Let's hope that argument actually matters. Here's the first think piece in The Weekly Standard musing on the "D" word. Here's more good news from Politico: there really is no plan B. None of this is exactly good news.

I suspect markets and commodity prices will continue to swing wildly, and keep these unpleasant doubts alive.

All Sorts of New Developments

Man, you go away for a few days and things just keep getting crazier. Catching up on the news about the Bush plan to bailout financial companies to the tune of seven hundred billion dollars with little to no oversight is obviously insane. We can only hope that the Democrats seize on this issue and ride it as far as it’ll go. The idea of McCain jumping onto the regulation bandwagon is absurd. I wonder how that will play with fiscal conservatives like Phil Gramm? Obviously he wasn’t all that concerned about regulating the economy up until a few days ago. I wonder what happened?

Who is Responsible for Stupidity?

Daniel Larison takes progressives to task:

To the extent that his admirers never really appreciated how damaging being identified as a Muslim would be politically, and to the extent that they refused to accept that an overwhelming majority of the public was going to reject a candidate they perceived to be a Muslim, they share in the responsibility for driving up these numbers who are confused about Obama’s religion.

I find the displacement of this strange. It’s progressives who caused this problem, talking up Obama’s story. No where in there is there any responsibility for conservatives who have mendaciously contributed to this “misunderstanding.” The fact of the matter is that the writers who discussed Obama’s upbringing and praised his understanding of different cultures in no way contributed to people thinking he’s Muslim. If people are so foolish that they can’t read past the first few sentences and walk away with the wrong impression, that’s their own fault – not that of progressives.

What are progressives to do? Act like these aspects of Obama’s character aren’t positive? The whole argument presupposes that a closed minded, insular, bigoted worldview is the standard and people talking about Obama’s past didn’t do enough to court closed minded, insular, bigoted people. I have no doubt that a Muslim running for US president would find very little traction. The fact that a significant number of people think Obama is a Muslim underscores a very scary aspect of our culture.

Perhaps Obama should begin each speech with a tag, like in ads: “I am Barack Obama, and I am not a Muslim.” I would like to know what Larison thinks these writers should have done to prepare the Obama-is-a-Muslim section of the public. What more can the man do, other than, I dunno, profess at every opportunity that he’s Christian?

While They Last...

newsmax.com is giving away Sarah Palin's book, "Sarah Palin: How A Hockey Mom Turned the Political Establishment Upside Down."

Get your copy early, presumably.

In the book world, "free" and "good," in the Platonic sense, so rarely appear together. I assume the first words on the dust jacket of this volume are, "Written overnight,..."

Cheney, Black Flagged

Score one for the historians - a judge has ordered Dick Cheney to preserve his records while litigation pertaining to his ever having to reveal them to the public moves forward.

See the story here.

I don't know what they are so worried about. The historians who WILL be judging the Bush administration have already largely spoken. 98% of them in this poll rate the Bush presidency as a failure, before the economic dislocations of the last week. 61% see him as the worst president ever, and if the US historian next to my office is at all typical, many of the remainder put him in a debatable top three. See this story, and it's pretty graphs, here.

Why do we always come here?

It was with heart-in-my-mouth, suddenly transported back to the age of 7 and getting to stay up later than my bedtime to watch the end of the show excitement that I read the headline---The Muppets are returning to television! Prepare your ticker tape and champagne, people of the United States!

But then I read the story. The Muppets were purchased by Disney, and are being given what the reporter termed, "...the “Hannah Montana” treatment, being blasted into every pop-culture nook and cranny that (Disney) owns or can dream up..."

I realized The Muppets were hokey even when I was a kid- they were rollicking and fun, and although I didn't realize this at the time, rather too odd to be products of a corporate rating committee. Life is change, and I fear the disappointment likely associated with the ones Disney is no doubt making. At least one of the new characters pictured with the story appears to be modeled vaguely on Daisy Duke.

And the crossovers have already started. Kermit and The Little Mermaid were never meant to occupy the same universe, no matter how well it plays in panels, and muppets appearing with "High School Musical" stars bodes nothing good.

Like we needed another reason to be suspicious of a place where no one is allowed to die...

Through The Looking Glass...

The interest rate on Federal 10 Year Treasury Bonds went negative this morning. That means that investors are paying the federal government money to hold their money.

Also, I ate some of the brownies in the tupperware container, and now the lamp won't stop staring at me.

Both sentences suggest madness. Only the first one is true. I mean, the point of investing is to gain money, not lose it more slowly in one place rather than another. If George Bush calls a press conference this afternoon and tears off his face, revealing that a cabal of insectoid aliens have been running the government ever since the Nixon administration, it will not be an appreciable addition to my amazement.

Watch the lights flicker off on the ticker at RealClearMarkets.

Mississippi Supreme Court and the Ballot Shenanigans

Politico reports that the questionable Mississippi ballot placing the special Senate election at the end of the ballot has been overturned by the state Supreme Court. Good for them. The Democratic candidate will still probably loose, but I can’t see how this kind of absurd, illegal voter suppression efforts bodes well for the long term future of the GOP.

The New McCain

It’s pretty easy to understand what the political media liked about John McCain. He was available in a way that most politicians are not. While McCain’s “maverick,” go-against-the-party status is largely imaginary, the fact that he was willing to talk with reporters – not just repeat talking points – was not. For people who spend their careers covering politicians determined to stick to a script, to not let anything off the cuff or against message slip out, I’m sure this was an amazingly refreshing change of pace.

There’s something else that must have made McCain popular with reporters: he was a loser. It is much easier to champion an underdog than a winner. McCain ran in 2000 with a real outside chance. The fact that he didn’t win isn’t surprising, nor the fact that Bush ran such a sleazy campaign in South Carolina. What is surprising is the fact that McCain got as far as he did in the first place. Here is a man who married an heiress, ran for Congress in a state he’d never lived in before, doesn’t seem to have any coherent political philosophy and is given to making decisions nearly at whim. The fact that he was willing to sit down and have off the cuff discussions with the media covering him was what his campaign was based on. That kind of pose is novel in the political world for good reason: it’s incredibly dangerous for a politician in the US to do that. Innocuous statements have a tendency to become blown entirely out of proportion to their intent and relative meaning.

But the fact remains: McCain is good at it. By all accounts, he’s a very personable and funny guy, quick on his feet when discussing things (as long as it’s not the location of Spain) and willing to give reporters a good sound bite. Anyone who’s seen him on one of his numerous appearances on The Daily Show can attest to that.

Which makes it even more curious that he has decided to forgo that skill – more than anything the skill that has brought him to where he is – in favor of dogged repetition of carefully scripted stump speeches.

Mr. McCain’s once easygoing if irreverent campaign presence — endearing to crowds, though often the kind of undisciplined excursions that landed him in the gaffe doghouse — has been put out to pasture. He takes far fewer chances, meaning there are fewer risqué jokes, zingers at a familiar face in the crowd, provocative observations on policy or politics, or exercises in self-derogatory humor. By every appearance, this Mr. McCain is, or at least is struggling to be, disciplined and on message in a way befitting of American politics today, if not quite befitting of the McCain of yesterday.

There may be a price for all this. After his running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, riveted the overflow crowd for 16 minutes on Tuesday at an airplane hangar here, it was Mr. McCain’s turn, and people in his audience began murmuring and drifting away midway through a 14-minute speech that was flat and cheerless. When Mr. McCain made his first appearance without Ms. Palin, on Monday morning in Jacksonville, Fla., he faced an arena that was one-quarter full.

This whole thing makes the Palin boomlet even more understandable. Palin is a charismatic public speaker. She’s able to deliver a speech from a teleprompter without looking like she’s getting ready for a root canal. McCain, as any one of his big set speeches can attest, isn’t able to do that. He’s halting and wavering, weak sounding. His sudden rediscovery of populism in the wake of the Lehman Brothers collapse throws his new, stilted, Republican base-approved style in sharp contrast.

If this is the McCain we’re going to see for the rest of the campaign, it makes sense that McCain is still harping on Obama declining the joint town hall format. It plays McCain’s strengths. Set speeches and message discipline obviously don’t.

Still Crazy After All These Years

McCain’s unwillingness to commit to meeting Spanish Prime Minister Zapatero (and, of course, the fact that he can’t seem to recall where Spain is) is amusing and all, but it brought something interesting up that I hadn’t realized – Bush has been shutting out Zapatero for years. This is, frankly, insane. Even at this late stage, I find it hard to believe that the president is a man so petty and so vindictive that he refuses to meet the leader of a European ally because of a decision well within the rights of the Spanish government. My hat is off to you, President Bush. Who knew you could keep the romance in the relationship after all this time?

Corruption, Neoptism, Earmarks and Dairy Farms

Timothy Egan has a fascinating op-ed piece in the New York Times today about the political culture in Alaska under Sarah Palin. It’s some shocking stuff, from the state subsidized dairy farms to connecting Anchorage to an uninhabited peninsula that would speed up Sarah Palin’s trip home – and cost two billion dollars. Then there’s this charming story:

As the Wall Street Journal reported this week, Governor Palin overturned a decision to shutter a money-losing, state-run creamery — Matanuska Maid — when her friends in Wasilla complained about losing their subsidies. She fired the board that recommended closure, and replaced it with one run by a childhood friend. After six months, and nearly $1 million in fresh losses, the board came to the same conclusion as the earlier one: Matanuska Maid could not operate without being a perpetual burden on the taxpayers.

It is honestly unbelievable to me that this woman has not been laughed off the national stage. From everything I’ve read, Alaska operates in some sort of bizarre elseworld where corruption, nepotism and incredible, pointless projects funded by the rest of the country are common place. Let us not for get, as Egan points out, that Palin appointed a childhood friend to be her secretary of agriculture. The friend claimed she was qualified because she loved cows as a child.

Perhaps Palin does qualify as a reformer, but that can only be true in regards to Alaska. The fact that John McCain and Sarah Palin are still going around and fighting the good fight on earmarks (which, let us not forget, make up a whopping .05 percent of the federal budget) and able to keep a straight face is astounding to me. It’s really very impressive.

The fact of the matter is that people do hate earmarks – other people’s earmarks. Constituents, however, love earmarks that build projects and fund all sorts of things in their communities. I really don’t think there’s anything wrong with the practice in general. Who doesn’t like extra stuff? But Alaska has gotten so good at it – in part because of the seniority of Sen. Ted Stevens – that it’s kind of an obscene distortion of what earmarks actually do. It’s pretty much the same as how people have negative views of Congress, but have positive opinions about their congressman. The McCain campaign’s obsession with earmarks is so deeply trivial it amazes me the press hasn’t made more hay out of it.

No End in Sight?

This is the best writing I have seen thus far on what has been happening to the economy over the last year.

It uses phrases like "...worst crisis since the 30's," and "...no end in sight."

And it uses those phrases with clinical precision.

I believe this is what the ancient Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times," refers to.

Seriously?

So, after much fanfare earlier in the day, McPalin produced their defecting Hillary supporter who now supports their campaign: Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild.

Her problem with Obama? "...frankly, I don't like him. I feel like he is an elitist."

Oh, Lady Rothschild. Maybe if he was a Hapsburg.

You are married into one of the wealthiest banking families on Earth, a family so wealthy their credit used to make European wars possible. You were a Hillraiser, which probably puts you in the top thousandth percentile of American political contributors. There is a type of cigar named after your husband's great grandfather. Not a brand of cigar- a type.

See the story here.

You Can Feel the Straight Talk

Alaska Attorney General Talis Colberg (great name) has told the investigators in the firing probe that state employees subpoenaed will not testify, because “This is an untenable position for our clients because the governor has so strongly stated that the subpoenas issued by your committee are of questionable validity.” Because the person being investigated objects to the investigation is now a reason to refuse to testify?

Dick Cheney’s office has brought the art of ignoring investigative subpoenas to an art form, and it seems to have seeped up north as well. It amazes me that this kind of nonsense is going to work. All they have to do is delay this stuff until the second week in November. Then, whatever the result, it pretty much won’t matter. But, for those of you playing along at home, just make sure that your accomplices know that you object to the legitimacy of the proceedings. It seems to have worked well for Republicans so far.

Bankrupt

I don't want to take this point too far, but if you had told someone 8 years ago when the Bush administration took office that by the end of its time there, and even as its would-be successors attempt to get elected on a platform that calls for smaller government and less regulation, it would have for all practical purposes nationalized America's leading investment banks, I for one would not have believed you.

I would have argued that nothing short of a world war, or possibly a natural disaster on a truly biblical scale, could have prompted that outcome.

And yet, with the federal buyout of AIG this morning, adding to the recently propped up Freddie and Fanny Macs, we find the US treasury calling the shots at all three.

As David Leonhardt suggests here, the staggering events of this week would in theory have heralded a far more serious economic calamity than has thus far occurred, and in that respect the federal response has been reasonably effective.

What is has not done, in the course of putting the American taxpayer on the hook for hundreds of billions of dollars, is address any of the underlying causes of slack regulation that allowed this situation to occur in the first place. So, embracing their perceived economic imperatives, the Bush administration has inadvertently transformed the US banking system into something rather closer to the Asian Tiger economies, in which governments and the banking systems have poorly defined boundaries. In both Japan and China, the system has created massive and still undisclosed liabilities that distort their national economies in only guessed-at ways.

And still, no one seems to know what this will ultimately mean here in the US. Is the flood dammed, or only only diverted to break through in some new, unforeseeable place in another week? Will this fix, as Hong Kong's leading bankers are suggesting, save the economy immediate pain only to contribute to the long term decline of the dollar (and US economy) as billions more in currency is printed to fill the balance sheets? Now that the Fed is running our major investment houses, what does it do with them? Sell them off at sweetheart prices? Continue to run them as they currently are, almost certainly entailing massive taxpayer loss? Or some new model, necessarily experimental, yet to be revealed? This is a brave new financial world, in which the American taxpayer is being asked to pay for the fairly egregious mismanagement of people whose massive salaries and bonuses largely insulate them personally from the outcomes of their decisions. It should also render utterly laughable Republican calls to continue, let alone extend, their financial model of non-regulation. After 8 years of the invisible hand, the market has bankrupted itself, and we can't live with the consequences. In another 8, we might all be buying our lunches with Euros, Renminbi, or bartering with goats.

Financial Fallout

Next week, Rep. Barney Frank is going to hold hearings on the feasibility and the desirability of creating a new federal agency to absorb some of the bad, mortgage-based liability that Wall Street currently finds itself under.

“The question is, and it’s just a question, is, ‘Are we at the point where the private market has made so many bad decisions and is so depressed that it can’t get out from under?’ “ said Mr. Frank, who is planning to hold a hearing next week to explore whether Congress should create an agency to help the markets dispose of hard-to-sell assets.

This gets at something that I’ve been thinking about with regards to the financial crisis. As I understand it, this whole thing stems from two things: the bursting of the housing market bubble and investment banks’ decision to create a new type of revenue stream based upon mortgages. Once the pool of solid, sanely based mortgages had been exhausted, though, the investors looked around for more people to buy houses. As their need to continue the expansion of this new revenue stream increased, their criteria for what constituted a safe bet on a mortgage declined: No down payment? No problem. Don’t want to prove that you have a job? We’ll trust you. Why would you lie about that?

All this lead to a couple of different, rather predictable in hindsight, results. People who did not really possess the means to purchase a home were getting loans of extraordinary size to buy houses that were priced way beyond what was a realistic market value. And, as long as the prices of the homes kept rising, this looked like a good deal. Even if buyers who couldn’t afford their mortgages in the long term failed, the investment banks would be left holding paper on a house worth more than what they’d underwritten it for.

Of course, when the bubble burst and suddenly everyone was trying to sell their $450,000 McMansion, the price of those homes dropped dramatically – and the banks found that all their investments were worth far less than what they’d put into. Usually not a good situation for an investor to be in.

The Times article above discusses the question I’m really curious in: who should the government try and protect? The investors who encouraged people who had no business buying homes to take the plunge? Or the homeowners who suddenly find themselves head over heels in debt with a house they can’t sell and which isn’t worth as much as they paid for it?

There is certainly plenty of blame to spread around, but one thing is true: the people who are really going to suffer from this are the homeowners. Whatever happens to the investment banks, whether they government breaks them up or they’re absorbed by another, even larger firm, the people who made the decisions that lead us here are going to turn out just fine. The homeowners were foolish to take a risk that they couldn’t afford, but that’s an understandable, personal flaw. The investors who made these decisions all along the line are at least as guilty for encouraging them and creating the means of their destruction. But they’re not going to pay anything close to the price of the average homeowner in this.

It may be that the government needs to step in and make sure that all this loose debt is consolidated in one place. They also need to make sure that this doesn’t happen again. Is there anything that can be done for the homeowners? The corporations are falling apart, but the people ran them will be fine. The same can’t be said for the homeowners

The whole thing has convinced me of one thing. If a company is too big to fail, it’s too big period. Deregulation and consolidation have brought us to an ugly point. I don’t think anyone went into this whole thing with a will to see people destroyed. However, this whole episode just proves a firm point of human nature: if people can do it, they will. If you don’t stop them from making sausages with tainted meat, they will. If you don’t stop them from putting children to work, they will. If you don’t prevent them from pouring toxins into the drinking water, they will. And if you don’t stop them from giving bad loans to people who can’t afford to repay them, they will.

McCain Hiding From Press?

I didn't realize it until Politico just told me, but it's been over a month since John McCain held a press conference. The Democratic Party are helping keep us up to date with a new counter, here. It's glacially slow advancement keeps it from being interesting, but also suggests the time spans involved. 34 days is like a geological epoch in campaign time.

A Hasty Retreat...

Here's an interesting follow-up to the Michigan voting story discussed last week. Seems that the Michigan Messenger's story has been enough to motivate Michigan's Dems to file a legal challenge against the concept of using foreclosure as sufficient basis to deny voting rights, and...wait for it...the Republicans have not only now denied they ever entertained such a plan, but are claiming that the Messenger just fabricated the original story. That sounds plausible. I assume the Republicans in Ohio, referenced in the original story, have also recently discovered they didn't have any similar plans. I hope someone from the Messenger sleeps very well tonight indeed. Nice to see the people (or at least the pols) of Michigan aren't taking that one lying down. Link to the updated story here.

Stereotypes are Fun!

David Brooks today:

Palin is the ultimate small-town renegade rising from the frontier to do battle with the corrupt establishment. Her followers take pride in the way she has aroused fear, hatred and panic in the minds of the liberal elite. The feminists declare that she’s not a real woman because she doesn’t hew to their rigid categories. People who’ve never been in a Wal-Mart think she is parochial because she has never summered in Tuscany.

Look at the condescension and snobbery oozing from elite quarters, her backers say. Look at the endless string of vicious, one-sided attacks in the news media. This is what elites produce. This is why regular people need to take control.

I’m sure there are people who qualify as more culturally elitist than I am, but they probably work at MOMA. () So, perhaps I just have my cultural bias blinders up, but this reminds me of exactly no one that I’ve ever heard speak about Palin. “Condescension and snobbery oozing from elite quarters”? Why? Because people implied (correctly!) that she doesn’t know anything about things going on outside Alaska? And apparently inside it, as well? Brooks says that Palin doesn’t have the kind of experience that is needed to run the country (it turns out that it’s hard), but can’t we put this nonsense about Tuscany away? If there were any Democratic politicians – or even progressive commentators as prominent as David Brooks – out there implying that people who vote Republican walked around in their overalls and straw hats, barefooted and carrying a jug of moonshine, we’d never hear the end of it. So why is it alright to accuse progressives and “elites” of being chardonnay sipping, effete, condescending pricks? This “real” America nonsense is irritating me. I don’t think Palin is qualified for the job – and yet, I’ve never been to Tuscany. I feel like I’m missing out on the finer things.

Meanwhile, Jeeves, I shall take my tea in the sunroom.

Ch-ch-changes

I thought this was an interesting comment from Daniel Larison:

Another thing to note: 2002 serves as an important date in Palin’s career. This is the year when she ran for lieutenant governor. It is also the year she left her Assemblies of God church in Wasilla for a less controversial non-denominational church and the year her husband dropped his Independence Party registration. Some of the things that are invoked as reasons to hold out hope for the Palins are either already long gone, or they were dropped easily for the sake of making Palin more viable as a statewide candidate. Now that she has reached the national stage, what else will she drop to accommodate herself to the demands of a McCain administration?

I’ve noticed that, too. It seemed like in 2002, Palin and family suddenly got very serious about cutting out some of the odder deadwood in their lives. My question is, why? The Independence Party thing I can understand – when you’re running in Republican elections, I’m sure it helps if the whole family is Republican – but switching churches strikes me as odd. I had previously been unaware that running as an evangelical was a detriment in Republican circles. Perhaps Palin’s former church was too hot for the Alaskan Republican contingent? I’d be very curious to hear what prompted the change, which I haven’t seen so far in any of the coverage – especially considering the roll that her former church apparently played in her election as mayor of Wasillia.

As a side note, watching Larison lose his mind in real time over the whole Palin thing has been very entertaining.

Awaiting the Economic Fates

For those who follow such things, today is a sweet combo meal day. Huzzah!

So back to the bad news. I've been trying to make sense of the simultaneous implosion of America's major banking houses- I still have not succeeded in doing this. To a degree which seems unnatural in a western Democracy, we mortals await the verdict of our financial gods, whose ways are inscrutable in the extreme.

In case the collapses Monday were not excitement enough, Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan continue to struggle to save the monstrous AIG, whose collapse would by most accounts make the hits to Lehman Brothers look like small beer. If the NYT is to be believed, it isn't going well. Although even the Times has to admit the story might well be a leak to facilitate some hidden agenda.

The world's markets hang in the balance.

Undecided voters of America: does this economic outlook strike you as "fundamentally sound?" Can you, the nation, or the international system of credit that allows you to have a mortgage survive eight more years of this?

I really wanted to move the public debate past lipstick, but this is all getting a little too serious.

Lying Isn't What It Used to Be

So now McCain thinks he can simply ignore direct questions about the lies his campaign is telling? I have to wonder what the media fallout of this is going to be. One other thing I’ve been thinking about: does it matter? It clearly doesn’t seem to matter for Republicans – they like the Palin pick for all sorts of reasons, but one of the main ones definitely seems to be the fact that she drives progressives crazy. This must be some kind of conservative catnip. Perhaps they feel the same way about lies?

One thing I do think, though, is that the media is going to get tired of this. I would really love to see evening news broadcasts discussing how long it’s been since McCain had a press conference. You’d think they would have raised a bigger stink about getting kicked off his tour bus. Perhaps this will let them know that McCain really doesn’t love them and will finally walk out on this abusive relationship. You’ve got to hit rock bottom before you can start getting better.

The Right Stuff, the Wrong Budget

When I was a kid, I was obsessed with space, NASA, the Space Shuttle and pretty much science in general. I had an eight foot tall poster of the Space Shuttle on my bedroom wall at my parent's house (still do, in fact). I still love it, which is why it pains me to read about manned space flight coming to an end – at least for the United States. That part doesn’t pain me, although I think it makes the world substantially less cool. What pains me is the fact that I can’t really mount an argument for manned space flight that rises above, “But it’s so cool!” That would work and be adequate reason for an eight year old, but I just don’t think it’s a rationale that an adult should embrace (at least not by itself).

As undeniably sweet as it is to have a space station, I don’t think the science it produces justifies the cost. There are tons of things that NASA is doing – from sending a probe to the sun to all the various Mars probes going on – that are producing good science at reasonable costs. I don’t think this should be the end for NASA. I do think we should reconsider what we get out of something in a clear, levelheaded way. Although, if NASA were to decide that they wanted to send me into space, I would consider changing my mind.

Sunday Afternoon Music

It was quiet and dark today. The first time it’s been cool in I don’t know how long, and it rained for a lot of the day. Stars of the Lid are the perfect band for a day that's had me thinking a lot about loss and how things change. They're a duo from Texas, and they create slow, lethargic, sad and incredibly beautiful music. This track is off their most recent album, And Their Refinement of the Decline.

Fighting One

When I started reading Andrew Sullivan years ago, I never thought we'd eventually find ourselves on the same page.

Refighting the Monkey Trial in Third Period Biology

This is an interesting article about the difficulties of teaching evolution in high schools today. It seems like a completely unfamiliar environment from me. Not only did I not grow up in Missouri, but I graduated from high school during the Clinton years, before half of the country apparently decided to lose their minds and think that evolution is false. Teaching high school age students is hard enough, I can’t imagine also having to deal with this kind of thing.

Half of Americans believe that evolution is false. Just let that roll around in your brain for a minute.

It’s an unbelievable statistic. Is this simply a religious fad? For the most part, religious groups didn’t have a problem with evolution for almost all of the twentieth century. Even the Catholic Church supports the teaching of evolution. Why is it that these evangelical, protestant groups have a problem with evolution? And why just evolution? Why are they not protesting tectonic plate theory, carbon dating, geological science or mineralogy? Why do they still cling to discredited dates made up by an Irish bishop in 1654? It just seems like a strange, nonsensical place to decide, “This far, no further.”

Taxes

Ezra Klein has a good summation of the candidates’ tax policy. I think this is always worth looking at, and this one is especially worth checking out because it comes with a handy graph! We all love graphs, right? So, go over and check that out. What he’s basically pointing out is that, while McCain will lower taxes across all the brackets, the vast, vast majority of those tax cuts are saved for the top bracket. McCain will dump buckets of money over the head of eagerly waiting millionaires.

Obama, on the other hand, will lower taxes on everyone except the top bracket – and by substantially more than McCain, especially for the first three brackets. So, basically, when it comes down to it, unless you know where to buy spats and monocles, Obama is the guy you want setting tax policy. I really don’t understand why this hasn’t gotten any more play. Oh, perhaps it’s because of things like this, a clip from CBS News’ “Where They Stand” segment. The segment takes three families in Ohio and explains what would happen to them under both Obama and McCain’s tax plan. Only, for the family making the most ($214,000 a year), instead of telling them what would happen under Obama (no change), they decide to explain what would happen if, instead of being this family, they were another, different family making more money (their taxes would go up!). What is the point of having three families to illustrate your point if you simply say, “But if they were different, you’d get different results”? It’s balancetastic.

Writer Redux

I have to say, I was very saddened this morning reading the title of Aaron's post. I can count on one hand the number of times I've felt similarly saddened by the death of artists I'd never met. I read pretty much all of DFW's work during my first year in graduate school, which coincided with meeting and becoming friends with Aaron (who turned me onto him -- I'd previously only read Infinite Jest).

He was among my favorite living writers, and was young enough that his best work may have yet been ahead of him. Not anymore to be sure, which really is the legacy of suicide -- the foreclosed promise of unfinished effort.

David Foster Wallace

One of my favorite authors, David Foster Wallace, has apparently committed suicide. The article doesn’t speculate why, which is appropriate – who can possibly know? I obviously didn’t know Mr. Wallace except as an author of amazing skill and range. His gigantic 1996 novel, Infinite Jest is a great book, worthy of its comparisons to Pynchon and DeLillo. His essays, however, were equally accomplished, exploring subjects as diverse as lobsters, cruise ships and John McCain. That last essay, recently published in its own paperback volume, is really worth checking out. Wallace gets at the essential strangeness of McCain and the way he presents himself. It’s an excellent read.

It’s strange when people we don’t know, but have had an impact on us die. I’ve read a lot of Wallace’s writing. It’s meant a lot to me over the years. On a human level, I feel sorry for his wife and his family – but I didn’t know them, so that kind of sympathy can only be distant and general. But I did read his writing, and I do feel very sorry for the world that there won’t be any more.

Dick's Parting Shot

OK, and then this is it for today...

VP Cheney has apparently decided that since he does not consider himself to be part of the executive branch of the government, he does not need to comply with the 1978 Presidential Records Act which requires him to turn over the documents generated during his time in office to the Library of Congress, which seals them for at least 12 years and then releases them to government historians, who will keep them for additional years writing official histories.

The idea that we might never really understand what the most active and powerful vice-president in US history actually did during his time in office, not just while he is there, but ever, is a fitting ambition for a man who has sought to use his time in office, so far as one can tell, to trample any effort by the other branches of government or the public to restrain him in any way.

A coalition of historians, archivists, and some sort of legal watchdog group in Washington DC, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, have sued the VP's office in an effort to prevent him from hauling off his papers and burning them in his back yard at the Naval Observatory. See their press release here.

Considering that Cheney continues to refuse to submit to congress a list of his staff on the grounds that he is free to ignore the legislative branch, these guys face an uphill battle.

More on this to come, I suspect.

DARPA Fischer- Tropsch

As a follow-up to an earlier post regarding alternative energy, DARPA, the DoD's research wing, has implemented a research project looking into cleaner alternatives to Fischer Tropsch conversion. The budget, a miserly 4.5 million, seems unlikely to produce many breakthroughs. See the full story in Aviation Week, one of the most misleadingly named publications ever and my new favorite magazine.

Tribes

I read this piece by Judith Warner this morning, and it's been floating around in my head ever since. Specifically, the line I keep returning to is this one, a statement made by a mother in a crowd with regard to the liberal bias of some children: “So often these kids that are so incredibly full of themselves, I find their parents are Democrats. The Democrats, they hate ‘us,’ the United States, but they love ‘me,’ that is, themselves.”

I am unsettled by this sentiment. One expects that people who strongly identify with different political parties are going to have different ideas on a range of issues, but this woman's hatred and identification of Democrats as being outside her conception of true Americans suggests a dangerous tribalization.

Again, political rallies are probably a pretty good place to look for partisan extremists, but this hatred is what is allowing McPalin to run a campaign based on increasingly lengthy series of statements which are now universally acknowledged to be lies. I will not use the many more polite terms others have been using. They are not exaggerations, or misstatements, or elasticities of truth. They are statements depicting a reality diametrically opposed to actual events ("I said no thanks...") and repeated for weeks in the face of clear and contrary evidence.

And it doesn't seem to matter. McPalin continue to climb in the polls. Their small lead on the RCP average board has lasted long enough to move past being convention bounce or daily irregularity. The lead, if commentary is to be believed, comes from predominately blue collar voters who seem to prefer "the composite image of the candidate" to their policies.

I don't know what income bracket that mom quoted above finds herself in, but nothing in her statements suggests that she was there hoping to preserve Bush's tax cuts. We do a very poor job of dealing with class in American public discourse, largely because 80% of us identify as "middle class," rendering the effort to address meaningful demographic probabilities useless. But far fewer Americans have the kind of income mobility they like to imagine they do. There are real demographic indicators that indicate your strong probability of living in poverty and with limited hope of improving your lot, or the prospects for your children. Pretending these indicators don't exist, or could never apply to me, doesn't make them go away. Identifying with the Republican party not only casts blue collar support behind a party that has demonstrated repeatedly that it really isn't interested in doing very much to redress that lack of opportunity, but in fact prefers to work to increase the already yawning chasm between upper and middle income brackets. Obama is eloquent enough to seek out the language to attack that very illogical support structure, and he should try to do so. It shouldn't be so hard to get people to vote in their own self interest.

A Weather Report

I’d like to mention that it is raining here for the first time in about two months. Fall is on the way! Summers here are incredibly hot and dry. Once it starts raining, though, the weather changes pretty radically. I look forward to it not being a hundred degrees any longer. Falls here are pretty short before the dull, gray and mild winter sets in, but it will be a nice change of pace.

Other than that, I’d like to apologize for yesterdays run of no posts. School starts on Monday and I’ve been busy getting reading for the new year. Should be fun. Plus, I’m teaching eight grade this year! They’re going to enjoy my hand turkeys when Thanksgiving comes around.

Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain

I find I don’t really have much to say about Sarah Palin. PW covered that well enough. It’s become clear for anyone who wants to see that she’s ludicrously unprepared to be vice president, let alone president. The New York Times has a good editorial about why, if you’re curious about the details. It’s pretty horrific when you step back and take it all in. I mean, if she’s lost Ross Douthat ...

There are two things that I find much more interesting, though. The nomination of Sarah Palin is indicative of two things, one about John McCain and the other about the citizens of the United States. The thing about McCain is simple. For all his vaunted (and largely mythical) maverick status, for all that he prattles on about “honor” and “country first,” picking Palin tells us exactly what he thinks about governing the United States: contempt. The only reason McCain picked Palin was because, in descending order of importance, the core of the Republican Party, evangelical Christians, loves her because she is one of them in a way McCain never was and never can be; McCain desperately needs to shore up that base, because without them the 50 percent plus 1 equation of the Bush years won’t work; and her pick was wacky and unexpected, just what a maverick would do. You’ll notice that “competence” and “ability” are not on that list.

For McCain, those terms, “honor” and “country first,” are just phrases, props to be brought out when he needs to score points. The point for McCain is, and always was, power – being an important man who people fete and fawn over, especially the media. McCain doesn’t have anything else. He doesn’t want to make the world a safer place, or to leave the country in a better state than he found it. I don’t think he’s a sociopath – I’m sure that if those things happen, he’d be pleased about it. But not to such an extent that he’d let them get in the way of the greater glory of John McCain, Maverick. His long tradition of taking stands against his party and against the establishment does not reflect any sort of truth-telling or commitments. This is why those stands have so often been so ideologically inconsistent. There isn’t any ideology underpinning them. He simply goes with what will get the most press coverage.

The second thing that Palin’s pick reflects is the long tradition of anti-intellectualism in the United States. Since the end of the Vietnam War, when the technocrats who got us into that (chronicled in David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest) fell from favor in a major way, we’ve seen the rise of Barry Goldwater’s conservatism. David Brooks talked about this aspect of conservatism this week. The current conservative establishment has no use for technocrats. It goes against the conservative belief that all one needs are the right convictions, the right upbringing, the right first principles and everything else flows from that. Ronald Reagan. George W. Bush. John McCain. Sarah Palin. These people don’t value knowledge because their creed has no use or place for it. From mocking of Al Gore in 2000, the contempt for John Kerry’s military service in 2004 and now the criticism that Obama is too cold, too calculating and too much like a scolding teacher. For the life of me I’ve never understood this aspect of the US – from school yard bullies mocking those who do too well in school to Fox News … well, pretty much everything Fox News does. It’s been a frustrating trend to watch. Here’s hoping we’re seeing its apogee.