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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.