Newshoggers.com

The Great Fall of China

By BJ

The great economic engine of China is starting to grind to a halt.

For decades, the steamy Pearl River Delta area of southern Guangdong Province served as a primary engine for China’s astounding economic growth. But an export slowdown that began earlier this year and that has been magnified by the global financial crisis of recent months is contributing to the shutdown of tens of thousands of small and mid-size factories here and in other coastal regions, forcing laborers to scramble for other jobs or return home to the countryside.

Furthermore, the slowdown inhibits China’s ability to work with other nations in alleviating the worldwide crisis.

The Pearl River Delta, known as the world’s factory, powered an export industry that pushed China’s annual growth rate into the double digits and provided work for migrants from interior provinces with poor farmland. But circumstances have changed quickly. The slowdown in exports contributed to the closing of at least 67,000 factories across China in the first half of the year, according to government statistics. Labor disputes and protests over lost back wages have surged, igniting fear in local officials.

The fuel for China’s economic growth, as it has been for many other nations, has been the appetite of the American consumer, and those consumers are tightening their belts.

Retail sales and prices of goods imported to the U.S. dropped by the most on record, signaling the economy may be in its worst slump in decades.

Purchases fell 2.8 percent in October, the fourth straight decline, the Commerce Department said today in Washington. Labor Department figures showed import prices dropped 4.7 percent, pointing to a rising danger of deflation, and a private report said consumer confidence this month remained near the lowest level since 1980.

. . .

Retailers have now logged the longest string of monthly declines since the Commerce Department's comparable data series began in 1992. Excluding automobiles, purchases decreased 2.2 percent, almost twice as much as the 1.2 percent decline anticipated and also the worst performance on record.

Declines were broad based as furniture, electronics, clothing and department stores all showed loses.

Demand at automobile dealerships and parts stores plunged 5.5 percent after falling 4.8 percent in September.

Car sales are among the most affected as banks make it harder to borrow.

Little wonder the Big 3 are looking for bailouts.

However bad this economic slowdown is going to be for North America, the consequences in China are likely to be far worse.  The ruling communist government has been able to maintain their grip on power in large part by providing the promise of greater and continuing prosperity to more and more of its citizens.  Basically, so long as it ain’t broke, you don’t need to send tanks to Tiananmen Square to fix it.

An economic slowdown means people start thinking about changing their leadership, in China just like everywhere else, and China’s rulers are understandably worried.  Places like Tibet and East Turkmenistan are already volatile, and several other regions where prosperity never reached, and where it is about to go into retreat, are likely to start agitating themselves.

A China without (relatively) rich foreign customers is a country on the brink of implosion.  Definitely a place to keep an eye on.

Dirty Coal Takes a Hit

By BJ

Looks like everyone will be able to breathe a little easier in the future.

In a landmark action, the Environmental Protection Agency’s final decision-making board has ruled that all new and proposed coal-fired power plants must have their carbon dioxide emissions regulated. The Environmental Appeals Board ruled today that the EPA has no valid reason for refusing to place limits on the global warming emissions from Desert Power’s proposed 110-megawatt coal-fired power plant in Vernal, Utah.

. . .

The 69-page decision described the Bush administration’s arguments as “weak,” “questionable,” “not sustainable,” and “not sufficient,” and rebuked EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson for failing to issue CO2 regulations, repeatedly recommending an “action of nationwide scope.”

As Matt Stoller puts it:

One of the claims of the coal industry - that there's some capacity to use coal without emitting carbon dioxide using fancy new technology - is about to be tested in a big way.  One sign to look for is squealing; if the industry gets very upset, it means they weren't really telling the truth about the ability to use clean coal technology in the first place.  If they don't squeal, then it looks like we're going to get a whole bunch of coal plants that don't emit carbon.

I’m sure we’ll hear squealing regardless, because whether or not the technology is workable, you can bet it is more costly than just allowing the coal plants to pollute away freely.  So not only will we hear squealing, we’ll be hearing how the Obama administration, (which isn’t yet in power), and the Democratic Congress, (who had nothing to do with this decision), are causing people hardship by raising energy prices because they won't allow the power companies to pollute without paying for it.

Still rather good news for the moment.

Another Tipping Point Too Soon

By BJ

All the happy and not-so-happy news about the election having sucked up most of our time and energy, it is always harsh to realize there are several real world issues that aren't going too well.

Australian researchers have discovered that the tipping point for ocean acidification caused by human-induced carbon dioxide emissions is much closer than first thought.

. . .

Ben McNeil, senior research fellow at the UNSW's Climate Change Research Centre, says the ocean is an enormous sink for carbon dioxide, but unfortunately this comes at a cost. "The ocean is a fantastic sponge for CO2, but as it dissolves in the ocean it reduces the pH of the ocean, so the ocean becomes more acidic."

This acidification makes life especially hard for marine creatures such as pteropods — an important type of plankton found in the Southern Ocean — whose shells are made up largely of calcium carbonate.

. . .

This so-called 'tipping point' of acidification had been predicted to occur when atmospheric CO2 levels hit 550 parts per million, around the year 2060.

However, the new research shows levels of the carbonate that these creatures need to build and maintain their shells drops naturally in winter, due to natural variations in factors such as ocean temperature, currents and mixing, and pH.

This means the tipping point is likely to be reached at far lower atmospheric CO2 levels — around 450 ppm, says McNeil, which also happens to be the target set by the IPCC for stabilisation of CO2 emissions.

. . .

"They're at the base of the food chain ... so right now we don't really know the ramifications."

Well, I think we can say that if the base of the food chain gets knocked out, the ramifications are going to be quite severe.

Just something to keep in mind when the usual suspects start moaning that Obama and other world leaders can't do anything to help save the environment because it may adversely affect the economy.

No Audit for Obama?

By BJ

This story tugs at the old sense of fairness.

The Federal Election Commission is unlikely to conduct a potentially embarrassing audit of how Barack Obama raised and spent his presidential campaign’s record-shattering windfall, despite allegations of questionable donations and accounting that had the McCain campaign crying foul.

Adding insult to injury for Republicans: The FEC is obligated to complete a rigorous audit of McCain’s campaign coffers, which will take months, if not years, and cost McCain millions of dollars to defend.

Obama is expected to escape that level of scrutiny mostly because he declined an $84 million public grant for his campaign that automatically triggers an audit and because the sheer volume of cash he raised and spent minimizes the significance of his errors. Another factor: The FEC, which would have to vote to launch an audit, is prone to deadlocking on issues that inordinately impact one party or the other – like approving a messy and high-profile probe of a sitting president.

McCain, on the other hand, accepted the $84 million in taxpayer money, which not only barred him from raising or spending more – allowing Obama to fund many times more ads and ground operations – but also will keep his lawyers busy for a couple years explaining how every penny was spent.

Now, for obvious reasons, the government should exercise its oversight capability on anything the taxpayers are funding, and since McCain’s campaign was taxpayer-funded, he has to bite the bullet on this one.  I don’t know if such an audit will finally get to the bottom of complaints about his potential misuse of public financing to secure a loan during the primaries, but at least all those folks getting worked up about Sarah Palin’s wardrobe should get an answer or two.

But for the Obama campaign to sidestep this strikes me as unfair, and to some extent unwise.  The right has already been twisting itself into knots over how Obama was able to raise such large sums of money, and will use this lack of an audit to confirm in their own minds that the stories they’ve spun for themselves are therefore true.

While I have little faith that an audit with its pesky “facts” will do anything to change their minds, since such things will always produce findings that are unflattering to the audited, it would at the very least put to rest any questions about bias for those of us not in the non-persuadable category.

And quite frankly, we’ve just spent the last eight years bitching about a White House occupant whose fetish for secrecy was more than “We the People” should allow from any public servant.  If Obama really wants to show us all a new era of open and accountable government, he can start by opening his campaign books to an independent review.  Fair is fair, and if I were one of the 3.1 million people who donated money to the campaign, I would very much like to know that there was some kind of independent oversight in place to provide assurance that the money was accounted for properly.

In the meantime, as Alan Stewart Carl suggests, maybe John McCain can rewrite his election finance laws so that the billion-dollar industry of electing the US President will be assured of seeing the auditor’s flashlight.

Remembrance Day

By BJ

The day the Great War ended 90 years ago, set aside to remember the fallen from all the wars, before and since.  For this year, a tune that, while more melancholy than I generally like, seems to fit the spirit.

In Remembrance

Corporal Nicolas Raymond Beauchamp
Private Michael Levesque
Gunner Jonathan Dion
Corporal Éric Labbé
Warrant Officer Hani Massouh
Trooper Richard Renaud
Corporal Étienne Gonthier
Trooper Michael Yuki Hayakaze
Bombardier Jérémie Ouellet
Sergeant Jason Boyes
Private Terry John Street
Corporal Michael Starker
Captain Richard Steven Leary
Captain Jonathan (Jon) Sutherland Snyder
Corporal Brendan Anthony Downey
Private Colin William Wilmot
Corporal James Hayward Arnal
Master Corporal Joshua Brian Roberts
Master Corporal Erin Doyle
Sergeant Shawn Eades
Sapper Stephan John Stock
Corporal Dustin Roy Robert Joseph Wasden
Corporal Andrew Paul Grenon
Corporal Michael James Alexander Seggie
Private Chadwick James Horn
Sergeant Scott Shipway

 

Self-destructive greed

By BJ

John Robb does a pretty succinct job of explaining a good part of America’s economic woes.

At a micro level, McDonalds is a great example of decay brought on by the global marketplace. My local McDonalds recently made a wholesale transition to employing exclusively illegal Brazilians sporting fake documentation (as are most chain stores in the area). Due to competition from these illegal workers, there isn't any compunction to providing a living wage (in the range of $20 an hour), which could be done through a very small hike in prices (I calculated that it would only make the burgers 6-7% more expensive).

Without that level of income, these employees can't even afford to eat in their own restaurant. I suspect this imbalance is being repeated throughout the entire economy. The problem only reveals itself when the bubble that supported the imbalance bursts. Fortunately, for McDonalds, the downdraft hasn't hit it yet. Eventually it will, when most of its former customers earn as much as their current employees.

Pretty cool how markets, essentially dumb systems, can ultimately destroy themselves.

The old saw has it that when Henry Ford got the idea of mass-producing cars, he figured out that he’d have to pay his workers far better than the going rate if they were going to be able to afford to buy even these cheaper horseless carriages.  That kind of thinking was one of the things that led to the massive boom in manufacturing and consumerism in North America.

Recently, the CEOs began to note that they could get the same work done for far cheaper overseas, which would lead to higher profit margins for their shareholders.  Smart business in the short term, but as everyone jumped onto the bandwagon, we rapidly moved to a world were most of the people manufacturing products can no longer afford to buy them.  The wealth effect of the housing bubble managed to hide that for a time, but it is about to come home pretty hard over the next couple of years.

Between a Rock and a Minefield

By BJ

Cernig has already covered the news that President-Elect Obama is looking at ways to close down the prison at Guantanamo Bay and create some kind of system to deal with the tricky class of prisoner that nobody really wants to release but that no court following due process as it is generally thought to exist would be able to convict.

If the US cannot get convictions in either civil or military courts under the full panoply of law, even if those trials have to be held partially in camera to protect necessary national security secrets as provided for in law already, then the US has scewed the pooch and tainted those prosecutions indelibly with torture, illegal rendition and kangaroo justice.  Under those circumstances even Hannibal Lecter would walk - and anyone who understands why these things are anathema to normal jurisprudence would say that was a good thing as a universal standard even if no-one would be happy about individual instances.

If the Obama administration cannot see that, then they will have made themselves complicit in the massive crime that the Bush administration has perpetrated through Gitmo, Bagram , Abu Graib, and a host of secret prisons and illegal torture flights. It doesn't matter whether travesties of justice are conducted on the mainland U.S., at the resort in Cuba or in some undisclosed location - they're still travesties of justice. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet and any "hybrid" having any relationship to Bush's rigged tribunals would stink just as highly.

I certainly understand the slippery slope that is the result of abridging the universal standards of jurisprudence.  Hell, the Bush administration has provided us all with many of the examples if you needed them.  Still, as a practical matter, there are very few people who would agree that allowing the actual worst of the worst to walk is necessarily prudent.  I don’t envy Obama the task of trying to close this sorry chapter of American history without either allowing known killers to be freed to kill again or allowing the American system of justice to be permanently stained.  One suspects there will be a lingering stench.

As Tim F. put it in a must-read post on the subject, "We have thousands of prisoners that we cannot keep and we cannot charge."  And in a fair number of cases, we can’t even be sure who the really dangerous ones are.  Some we knew before they were captured, but there are a goodly number who were innocent when captured, but after years of harsh treatment are likely to be dangerous now.

And the prisoners are just part of the minefield Obama needs to navigate.  There is also the not-insignificant issue of what to do about all of the Bush administration officials and other personnel that took part in the illegal activities at Gitmo and the other black and not-so-black sites.  Do you let them walk free or do you prosecute them?

Operate under the strict interpretations that Cernig does above, and you wind up with a lot of known terrorists walking free and a goodly number of intelligence and military personnel heading behind bars.  And maybe that’s for the best.  Certainly some price needs to be paid by those who engaged in illegal activity, but I wouldn’t want to imagine the backlash that would inspire.

McClatchy’s round-up of the potential minefields awaiting the Obama administration does offer a rather unique scenario.

He predicted that Obama might sidestep the controversy with the Bush administration's help. If President Bush issues pre-emptive pardons to prevent prosecutions, the Obama administration should form a bipartisan panel, similar to the Sept. 11 commission, to oversee an inquiry, he said. Once pardoned, officials implicated in the controversy would be required to discuss details of the policies because they'd be unable to assert their Fifth Amendment right to avoid self-incrimination.

The best person to lead such a commission? Levinson thinks it's John McCain, who condemned the interrogation techniques when he was running against Obama.

"There would be widespread support if the Obama administration did reach out to someone like McCain," Levinson said. "More people would regard it as not so much of a Democratic vendetta but as a necessary cleansing of an episode in recent American history that has had phenomenal costs to us around the world."

Maybe that will work.  Whatever happens, I’m almost certain there won’t be many people too happy with the results.  But then I can’t see too many ways to digest a sh*t sandwich that would leave a smile on your face.

Schadenfreude

By BJ

Jim Cunningham offers A Progressive's Guide to Gloating for the next few years.

The Double-Edged Sword of the Imperial Presidency

By BJ

The Washington Post is reporting that Obama is set to hit the ground running in regards to reversing many of the none-to-popular Bush administration presidential decrees on things like stem cell research, climate change, and reproductive rights.

From what I can see, I don’t have any objections to the actual policy goals, which is why I probably see a lot of reactions like Hilzoy’s this morning.

These are wonderful changes. After the last eight years, the very idea that they might occur not as the result of a long drawn-out battle, but just like that, is amazing.

Sure, it is nice to see your chosen policy goals being enacted without all the fuss and muss of drawn-out Congressional battles, but must I remind everyone that it was Bush enacting his policy goals without consulting Congress that got a lot of us upset about how they were concentrating authority in the Executive Branch?

Now, I’m not going to complain too bitterly about Obama using the very same power to reverse the worst excesses of Bush’s administration, but ultimately we should be working to see that this kind of power in the Executive Branch is again constrained.  One of the arguments others and I always used to try and convince so-called conservatives that Bush’s usurpation of power wasn’t a good thing was to imagine that power being wielded by a liberal Democrat.  Obama’s more of a centrist, but to the far-right that counts as a radical leftist in most matters, so they will soon be getting a taste of what we were warning about, even if they fail to understand that it was their uncritical support of the Imperial Presidency principles that handed Obama the tools he will be using.

So the right is likely to suddenly rediscover the founder’s preference for checks and balances and rail incessantly against the powers they so happily supported accruing to their own guy.  Call them hypocrites if you wish, but note that it is the right position.

The old saw about power corrupting holds ever true, and with power shifting to the left in a couple of months, you can all but smell the salivating of those looking to use that power to do what they think of as good.  It is one of the reasons that it is far easier to accrue power to the government than it is to take it away.  Once in power, people want to use it, not give it up.  It is also why I figure under even the best of circumstances, the powers accumulated to the presidency under the Bush/Cheney years will never be fully dissipated, but we need to work hard to ensure that Obama replaces at least some of the checks and balances, even if it makes passing his agenda that much harder.

Because sooner or later, power will again shift, and someone whose agenda you don’t agree with will be sitting in the Oval Office, and if Obama simply continues Bush’s legacy, then all of those “wonderful changes” will disappear at the stroke of a pen, and what could replace them may be far, far worse.

Because as the founders could tell you, you don’t put checks and balances in place because you believe the current leader is a tyrant, you do so because you can’t guarantee that no tyrant will find his way to power in the future.

Whether or not the left remembers that in the coming months will be a test of their hypocrisy.

My side is better than your side, or is it?

By BJ

In my meanderings through the blogosphere, I came across this post at the PoliGazette where Michael van der Galien tries to explain why conservatives were so much more gracious in accepting Obama’s win than “the left” were in accepting Bush’s victories in 2000 and 2004.  The comment thread, to say the least, was quite interesting, and I have to feel sorry for Justin Gardner of Donklephant, who pointed out that 2000 wasn’t exactly the cleanest election victory in US history and that the 2004 re-election of Bush was an entirely different animal than a non-incumbent coming to power and has spent the rest of thread futilely trying to get some kind of productive discussion going.

Gardner did force the gazetteers to admit that there are some right-wing blogs that engage in hyper-partisan hackery, but of course the left is so much worse.  A couple of comments from Jason in the thread are indicative of the argument:

Cutting Environmental Protections

By BJ

Fester had a couple of ideas yesterday about shortening the time between the election date and the date of the inauguration, with a couple of clauses to prevent CYA-type Presidential pardons during the lame-duck period, and in order to avoid this kind of chicanery.

— In the next few weeks, the Bush administration is expected to relax environmental-protection rules on power plants near national parks, uranium mining near the Grand Canyon and more mountaintop-removal coal mining in Appalachia.

The administration is widely expected to try to get some of the rules into final form by the week before Thanksgiving because, in some cases, there's a 60-day delay before new regulations take effect. And once the rules are in place, undoing them generally would be a more time-consuming job for the next Congress and administration.

I’d noted the proposed changes to the Endangered Species Act before, but the scope of proposed changes go well beyond that.  The “relaxation” of both the uranium and mountain-top mining regulations will put the drinking water of millions of people at risk.  And that’s not the only parting gift Bush is giving to the coal industry.

Under the Clean Air Act, plants that are updated must install pollution-control technology if they'll produce more emissions. The rule change would allow plants to measure emissions on an hourly basis, rather than their total yearly output. This way, plants could run for more hours and increase overall emissions without exceeding the threshold that would require additional pollution controls.

January 20th can’t come soon enough.

That new guy with the “tan”

By BJ

Well, Italy’s Prime Minister certainly knows how to step in it.

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi gave an enthusiastic, if unconventional, welcome on Thursday to the election of Barack Obama, citing among his attributes youth, good looks and a "suntan."

Speaking at a joint news conference with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in Moscow, the 72-year-old media tycoon also said Obama's election to the White House had been "hailed by world public opinion as the arrival of a messiah."

Little surprise many American conservatives really like Berlusconi.  I’d say he was being particularly insulting, but as the article notes, he rather makes a habit of inappropriate remarks regarding other world leaders, which again makes his popularity among the Republican party of Bush not too surprising.  (Okay, technically, his popularity is because they see a kindred spirit ideologically, such as his tough line on illegal immigrants.  We’ll avoid mentioning what his policy of sending troops onto the streets says about the American right.)

In any case, reading about how Berlusconi joked about seducing the Finnish President and figured the Danish Prime Minister was handsome enough to pass his wife off to; I can’t help but feel sorry for Sarah Palin.  After all, had the Montreal comedy duo who punked her impersonated Berlusconi instead of Sarkozy, she could be forgiven for not catching on to the hoax when the imposter mentioned how good his wife was in bed and how much he enjoyed the Hustler “documentary” porno, Nailin’ Palin.

The Tests to Come

By BJ

I’ve been watching the reaction to Obama’s election from around the world.  As might be expected after eight years of Bush’s cowboy diplomacy, the reaction is mostly highly positive, and while the domestic right wing won’t be allowing him any honeymoon, (at least when the pro- and anti-Palin camps remember to stop sniping at each other), he will to some extent have a much easier go of it with America’s traditional allies and those that don’t hold any particular enmity.

For those who have reason to oppose the US, on the other hand, this transition period between the Bush and Obama presidencies presents numerous opportunities to push the envelope.  Cernig noted yesterday Russia’s announcement to possibly deploy missiles near the Baltics and Poland in response to the Bush administration’s ABM deployment.  While he’s right that this is a mess almost entirely of Bush’s making, it is also clear that this will prove to be one the first major tests of an Obama administration.

Assuming the Bush administration doesn’t muck things up more in an attempt to lock in certain options as they did over Syria recently, Obama will still face considerable pressure at home not to take the reasonable route of scrapping the ABM boondoogle and improving relations with Russia.  Cries of “appeaser!” will be shouted from the highest rooftops by probably more than just the right.  For that matter, Poland and the Baltic states may feel abandoned should the US pull out of the agreements they have with them.  It’s also hard to say what reaction places like Iran and China will have to any move he makes.

Frankly, Obama’s reaction during the Georgia crisis, while not as knee-jerkingly belligerent as McCain’s, was hardly something I was impressed with.  The anti-Russian tact of the foreign policy crowd in the US seemed to infect Obama as much as everyone else.

So will he choose reasonable compromise or unreasonable confrontation?  If he’s smart and can get away with it, he’ll do as Kennedy did and go with reasonable compromise while selling it as unreasonable confrontation, but that’s a lot harder to get away with in these days of new media.

Whatever he does, it will tell us a great deal about how much change his administration will actually bring.

A Pictorial Representation

By BJ

Of how I spent yesterday afternoon.

Nader needs to go away

By BJ

I am far too tired trying to recover from staying up far too late last night and then getting up early for work to get too angry, but what the hell was Ralph Nader thinking?

It's a pretty sad end to a career and man that was once worthy of respect

The Morning After

By BJ

And the hangover begins.

Not the political one yet, just the one from staying up late last night celebrating.  I’d be interested to see what kind of dive productivity numbers take for the day.

As to election results still trickling in that are surprising.  It looks like convicted felon Ted Stevens will hold onto his Senate seat.  And here Alaskans thought people’s view of their state couldn’t sink any lower.  They’re now in a league with Louisiana, which keeps electing a guy found with bribe money in his freezer.

For Barack Obama, he is going to be glad of all of that “presumptuous” preparation he put into the transition team.  As CNN points out, Obama will have little spare time to savor his victory, (and on a sober note, there is a funeral for him to attend in the very near future).

As for Obama’s speech, it was notable for its unifying theme, but then so was George Bush’s not so long ago.  Obama’s mandate is far clearer than any Bush won, and I’m certain there are more than a few on the left who are eager to repay the right for the slights of the last eight years.  While I have much more faith in Obama’s sincerity than I did in Bush’s, it remains for him to prove himself now, and the transition team and picks he makes in the next few weeks will begin to show us which way he intends to lead the country.

As for world reaction, the Moderate Voice has a good round-up here, and another great round-up post here.

And to cap things off, world markets are experiencing a surge.

Late-Night Election Thoughts

By BJ

Well, it is all over but the lawsuits, though they’re unlikely to change anything.  As I write this, Obama holds slim leads in both Indiana and North Carolina with 99% of the precincts reporting.  That will push him to 364 Electoral Votes, assuming he loses Missouri and Montana.  If he does carry Missouri, it takes him to 375.  As the vote in the three west-coast states is being counted, Obama’s margin in the popular vote is also increasing, and should end up over 5%.  All in all, a pretty damned good night.

McCain’s concession speech was good, (though I have to disagree with Fester in that I don’t think it out-shined Obama’s acceptance speech, but then few can match Obama on public speaking).  McCain was the gracious and honorable “maverick” that only showed up once or twice during the campaign such as his convention speech.  There have been a lot of pre-mortems and there will be a stream of post-mortems for his campaign, but in the end it is not wrong to point out that no other Republican would have made the race even this close.

On that note, I do fear what will become of the Republican Party now.  While McCain was gracious in defeat, his supporters were far less so, and reading around the right-wing blogs, graciousness seems in very short supply.

I know that some are congratulating Obama on his win, such as our own John McCain. Yes, that’s fair, but if you listened to the concession speech the reasons this is such a “great moment” is because Obama is black, not because he was qualified, or even able to handle the Presidency. As I said before that makes this election even more pathetic. It was all about electing the first “Affirmative Action” candidate to office.

I can't wait to see the quality of discourse from the right over the next four years.

As for Obama, what can be said about his acceptance speech?  In the words of one of the commentators at CBC, seems to be going for the title of poet-laureate as well as President of the United States.  As with many of speeches, it was powerful, moving, inspiring, and included a call to action and for sacrifice that we haven’t heard for a long time from a politician.  Whether or not people understand just what he means by that is still debatable, but I like what I hear.  That said, I don’t envy him the task ahead.

And just for the hell of it, I’ll leave the final word tonight to my buddy salvage:

I can't believe y'all elected a secret Muslim Manchurian Marxist Fascists Liberal Black Panther Bastard spawn of Malcolm X ant-Semite terrorist radical man-dater who wasn't even born in America making him completely unconstitutional as your President.

Right now I wish I was the guy who owned the biggest paper and data shredding concern in the DC area. I would tell my guys that they'd be working straight through 'till the New Year.

Oh the wignuts, this is going to be a complete phase-shift, they will suddenly fall in hate with government "jackboots" all over again. It will be like the Clinton years only louder and oh so crazier.

Everything good that happens from now on will be because GW Bush was President, everything bad because Obama, yes we are going through the looking glass.

But that just means more things to laugh at.

First Results are In

By BJ

And it looks like we're in for an upset!

Voting Machines Elect One Of Their Own As President

In seriousness however, a quick message for America from your friendly northern neighbours.

Update:

Since we're still in the nail-biting phase of tonight's early results, allow me to offer a couple of positive signs for all you Obama supporters out there.

First, McCain's support among white Evangelical voters, though still very high, is apparently six points lower than what Bush had.

Second, Obama is clearly outperforming Kerry in the rural Indiana ridings, keeping things very close, and we still haven't heard from the cities and areas where Obama is expected to do well.

Finally, whoever the hell came up with the idea for the holograms on CNN should be shot.  Or at least the news crews' for their over-enthusiastic explanations of it.

 

The Big Day is Finally Here

By BJ

Via the Swing State Project, a handy guide for when the results will start to come in.  Well, except for the first two towns to vote, which both went for Obama.

Speaking of maps, the one over at 270towin should prove a useful toy for the evening.  Regardless whether or not the networks decide to call things early on or not, such a map will make it pretty obvious which way the night is going to go.

Now we just get to sit around and worry for a few hours.

The Obama Imperative

By BJ

Gregory Djerejian has composed a monster post on Election Eve that I would recommend to any and all to read.  I'll give you two extended quotes as teasers:

So tomorrow we Americans will have a choice. And while it seems too easy to say McCain represents continuity, and Obama an opportunity at a major course correction and even something of a shot at redemption, we must reluctantly conclude this is the core essence of the matter. I say reluctantly because John McCain, after all, has had a storied life, whether his service as fighter pilot, tenacity in captivity, long Senate career of some distinction, and more. And yet none of this matters finally, as he is nevertheless the standard-bearer of today’s Republican Party, alas. And today’s Republican Party is a disgrace, a dim shadow of its former self.

Indeed, the cautiously deliberative, fiscally conservative, great internationalist party one associates with names like Dwight D. Eisenhower is simply dead. Replacing it we have a cacophony of imbecilic voices like Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh (ask yourself—if you were a serious politician with a smidgen of intellect—would you even entertain questions from this veritable moronic inferno, or prefer to steer clear of such cheap carnivals?). Essentially, today’s Republican party is little more than a reincarnation of the Know-Nothing party (like the one of yore, this one too particularly outraged by immigrants, illegal ones only we are led to believe, of course…), a confused morass of vindictiveness crossed with fear crossed with abject ignorance (think Joe the Plumber, the supposed Country First Everyman who rants incoherently about how Barack Obama’s victory would mean the death of Israel, perhaps the greatest inanity I’ve overheard of all in the awful din of this painfully long election season, and this in a season rife with them).

And

Into this cauldron, and on the other side of the aisle, we have Mr. Obama. He is not perfect, he is no messiah delivered from the heavens, and it is true his resume is relatively thin (to which one might respond, who had bigger, more experienced resumes than Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld?). But let us be very clear: Mr. Obama has nonetheless been a tremendous gift to us, and we would be foolish in the extreme not to hope dearly for his victory. He himself is a consummate professional with undeniable potential for greatness. To have already achieved what he has been able to speaks volumes, getting to where he's gotten to alone, given all the road-blocks in his way. Yet he is humble too, and is evidently surrounding himself by very serious and knowledgeable people on the economy (think Paul Volker, Larry Summers, or Warren Buffett). On foreign policy while his posture on issues like Afghanistan and even Georgia have given me some concerns, his overall world-view and appetite to engage in robust diplomacy is light years better than the McCain approach.

Let us be plain: one man offers a continuation of the Bush Doctrine, in the main, the other, a repudiation of it. Mr. Obama's main stress on diplomacy as a neglected tool in our arsenal is of the highest importance, and lives in stark contrast to breezy 'bomb, bomb, bomb' Iran cretinism (as the saying goes, there is always a litle truth in every joke). And his election alone—in one major, fell swoop—would immediately go a long way towards helping restore much of America’s lost soft-power, by reminding the world that an African-American who was just a state senator a few years back, whose middle name is Hussein and last name rhymes with Osama, can, not only unseat the current premier Democratic dynasty (the Clinton’s, of course, who’d replaced the Kennedy’s), but then take on and likely prevail (fingers crossed!) over the hard-hitting, hyper-aggressive Republican Party, this only seven short years after the greatest terror attack ever inflicted on the American homeland.

There is a lot more where that came from, and it makes me once again wish that Mr. Djerejian would resume his blogging ways on a regular basis rather than just popping up every major international crisis or so.

I also would have preferred he put this up about a week ago so more people would have had the chance to read it before the vote, but I suppose late is better than never.

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Manufacturing the Vast Left Wing Conspiracy

By BJ

Polls will start closing in less than 24 hours, and barring Supreme (Court) intervention, Barack Obama will be named the victor a few short hours later.  But to follow up on Cernig’s post below, the right is most certainly not looking to take defeat lightly.  Rather, they are already working towards a narrative as to how the election was “stolen” from them.

WHETHER or not Barack Obama wins election tomorrow, his campaign has exposed some gaping weaknesses in the electoral process

All too true, and Jay and Libby have listed many of the problems right here; voter suppression and purges, unverifiable electronic voting machines which just happen to switch votes only one way, all serious issues, but of course not the one's the right is interested in.

On the electoral side, we've seen allegations of massive voter fraud, often backed up by actual arrests and investigations. The FBI has opened an investigation into the Obama-friendly group ACORN, which has been associated with fraudulent registrations and other misconduct in many jurisdictions.

Yep.  Be prepared to hear a whole lot more about ACORN from the right wing noise machine starting Wednesday night.  Politico writer John Fund has went through the trouble to create a passably respectable argument of the ACORN allegations, and I have little doubt such stories are going to become far more common in the coming months and years

Of course, as has been pointed out before, there is no evidence that fraudulent registrations actually lead to fraudulent votes of any magnitude, but as we've seen all too often over the years, such things as "facts" and "evidence" are no deterence to the true beleivers.

So after eight years of telling Democrats to, "jus get over it", regarding Florida in 2000, the Republican base is preparing their own storyline of a stolen election to nurse their hatred on.  In the meantime, the real problems with voting in America are staring people in the face will probably continue to be ignored.

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Obama's Grandmother Has Died

By BJ

Sad news for the Obama family a day before what is likely to be a great triumph.  Madelyn Dunham has died at the age of 86.

"She was the cornerstone of our family, and a woman of extraordinary accomplishment, strength, and humility," their statement said.

"She was the person who encouraged and allowed us to take chances. She was proud of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren and left this world with the knowledge that her impact on all of us was meaningful and enduring. Our debt to her is beyond measure."

This wasn't entirely unexpected, given Obama's decision to suspend his campaign for a few days to go see her a little over a week ago, but it adds a sobering dimension to tomorrow's events.

Rest in peace.

And the Purge goes on

By BJ

Supporting Barack Obama can carry a heavy price these days.

The namesake of Montana-based Cooper Firearms has been asked to resign as president of the company after he expressed support for Barack Obama.

The company said it asked Dan Cooper, founder and part owner of Cooper Firearms, to resign as president after he voiced support for the Democratic Illinois senator's bid for president in a USA Today interview published Tuesday, USA Today reported Friday.

. . .

"There is nothing on this earth I will not do for my employees ... When the Internet anger turned on these innocent people, I felt it was important to distance myself from the company so as not to cause any further harm," he said.

Out of curiousity, does anyone know of any corporate heads forced to resign because they voiced support for John McCain?

Not only does this kind of stupidity help ensure Barack Obama's victory on Tuesday, but it makes it far harder for the Republicans to recover and become a counter-balancing force in American politics in the future.

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The Great Disappointment

By BJ

I’m not paranoid like Ron, and I don’t get spooked by Zogby’s ever-fluctuating poll predictions that the right grasps onto whenever they happen to swing their way.  In fact, I rather like the fact that they keep pushing these kinds of outliers, since their outsized prominence in the discussion these last few day makes it less likely that Obama supporters will think the election is in the bag and stay home instead of getting out there and voting.

For my money though, the election is in the bag, (and Gallup’s latest numbers do help in that regard), which gets me wondering as to what the fallout on the right will be when they awaken to the reality of a President Obama.  John Rogers is having much the same thought.

I don't think I'm far off in pointing out that a lot of the mainstream conservative rhetoric here is downright apocalyptic. A lot -- not all, but a lot -- of McCain/Palin supporters are utterly convinced that Barack Obama's America will be the socialist wasteland they've been fearing their entire adult lives.

So what happens when ... it doesn't happen?

Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein can disagree all they want, but when push comes to shove, most of Obama's policies are magnificently boring. I had a friend just today say "But John, you're in that top 1%! Your taxes are going to go up!" To which I replied: "Strangely, I can live with the idea of my taxes going from 36% to 39.5%. That's not exactly nationalizing the means of production."

. . .

But the best monsters are always the ones just offscreen. In their thrashing for purchase against Senator Obama, Senator McCain's campaign may have over-reached. An awful lot of conservative leaders have declared that an Obama presidency is October 22, 1844 in the great battle of freedom versus socialism. Interesting to see what happens when the people who've been fed a steady diet of terror images -- state-run medical care with month-long waits, abortion kiosks in the mall and forced gay-friendly kindergarten education -- encounter instead a higher minimum wage, guaranteed health care, and the occasional bit of science-based policy.

Of course, as the first comment points out, many of those screaming the S-word are like the dog that barks incessantly at the mailman, the reality of a centrist Obama will just never penetrate their clouded brains.  Hell, most of them still think Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were best buds who planned 9/11 together.  One suspects rather than be disappointed they will instead choose delusion and convince themselves that Barack Obama's America is a socialist wasteland.

On the other hand, there are no small number of folks out there actually hoping Obama is some kind of radical lefty socialist, (well, by American standards).  They are likely to find delusion much harder, and therefore their disappointment much greater.

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Locking in Belligerence

By BJ

A little over a year ago, the Israeli military historian Martin Van Creveld looked into the possibility of pursuing a peace settlement between Israel and Syria as a way to peel the Syrians away from the Iran-Hezbollah alliance.  The argument basically breaks down to the fact that Syria, as a secular, (and majority Sunni), country, has little in common with the Shiite fundamentalists leading Iran and making up Hezbollah, but is the key linking the two together. And as links go, it is a very weak one.  Syria has neither the natural resources nor access to Saudi money that allows Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon to stave off the pressure of international isolation.  All of this makes Syria more dependent on Iran, a dependency the Syrians seem to be hoping to get out from under of.

And this isn’t some far-fetched wishful thinking, as the recent talks between Israel and Syria showed.  French President Sarkozy has also been reaching out in an effort to normalize relations between Syria and the rest of the world, and the story just came out yesterday that General Petreaus was looking to go to Damascus to discuss security in the region.  Given all of that, it would seem the realist school of foreign policy wonks see this as a highly viable option.

Not too surprisingly, the Likud right in Israel and the neocons in the Bush administration in Washington are very much opposed to such a normalization, and it is in that context that we should probably view the recent cross-border assault by the US into Syrian territory.  As fester noted earlier, "it is not a common response for Country A that is attacked by Country B to help out Country B's objectives"

As Slate's Fred Kaplan noted, this was a very high-risk operation for very little in the way of rewards and his column with:

Maybe the next president will reconsider the costs and benefits.

Assuming that president is Obama, such a reconsideration is probably assured, but that doesn't mean he will be able to do anything about it.  This stike, and possibly others in the near future if Kaplan can be believed, have set back whatever progress may have been made towards wedging Syria away from Iran, and it will take time for a President Obama to repair that damage and move forward.  Time he is unlikely to have.

Because any such progress cannot be made without considering what is happening in Israel itself.  And what's happening there is that the (currently) more diplomatically-focused Kadima party is entering an election where they are likely to lose ground and quite possibly the government to Likud, who will almost certainly throw up roadblocks to any Obama administration overtures to Syria.  (If you want a truly terrible scenario baed on this, read Bill Lind.)

Basically, the Bush adminstration has just ensured that relations with Syria remain in a state of belligerence for at least the foreseeable future.  One of its many not-so-pleasent legacies to the world.

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Beyond Parody

By BJ

This last week of the campaign, the desperation of the right is causing them to go completely off the rails.  A day or so ago, in response to McCain/Palin’s “socialist” charge, Obama hit back with a bit of humour.

McCain has “called me a socialist for wanting to roll back the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans so we can finally give tax relief to the middle class,” Obama said. “I don’t know what’s next. By the end of the week he'll be accusing me of being a secret communist because I shared my toys in kindergarten.”

By using such a ridiculous example, Obama was hoping to deflect the attacks, but he has most definitely misunderestimated the right-wing brain!

Ha ha.

Only, in this passage Obama revealed precisely why he is vulnerable to such charges: he can't seem to tell the difference between a gift and a theft.

Who knew?

However ridiculous the above, it can’t hold a candle to the exhaustive research performed by Pamela Gellar of Atlas Shrugs in determining the True Origins of the Obama Menace!

He is the son of Malcolm X!   (H/T - Ezra Klein, and for the picture)  Seriously, reading the extraordinary long rant Gellar posted, one can only marvel at what someone like that could accomplish if they actually chose to look into something of even passing importance and why such detective skills are never employed to verify claims made by right-wing politicians.  Then again, comparatively, even the furthest right politician is highly unlikely to spout anything near as crazy as the above.

And to round out the craziness, John Cole found a 67-page treatise called “An Examination of Obama’s Use of Hidden Hypnosis Techniques in His Speeches”  I can only hold out hope that as the right spirals into greater and greater absurdity, they will eventually reach a point where the mainstream starts treating them like the lunatic fringe they should be.  Only then will true parody be able to make a comeback.

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Praying for Poor Polling

By BJ

With only six days left before the marathon 2008 election season finally ends, and after a solid month of Obama well ahead in the national polls, we seem to be finally seeing some of the predicted tightening towards the end of the race in the national numbers.  That part is good news for McCain, who needs something to boost the morale of a Republican Party that’s devolving into splinters looking out for their own future and firing thinly veiled attacks against each other.

Rather less encouraging for the McCain camp, the state polls in the all-too-many states McCain needs to carry or turn around to his favor in order to have a chance at winning just aren’t going his way.  Hell, they’re running ads in Montana and doing robocalls in Arizona!

The right-wing blogs are leaping at every national poll that shows some tightening or a close race, while ignoring the very same polls or dismissing them as inaccurate if a day or two later they widen again.  The vast majority of polls they need to ignore outright as they show Obama with massive and insurmountable leads.  The main argument is to question the polls accuracy, that we’re heading to another Truman-Dewey upset because the pollsters are over-representing Obama’s support and under-representing McCain’s.  They point to the fact that many pollsters are using models predicting far greater turnout of African-American, youth, and new voters, never mind that McCain is also losing under the models using traditional turnout models.  To listen to them, McCain is both winning and coming back simultaneously, (belief in mutually exclusive options seems to be a trademark of true believers).

This isn’t an unusual phenomenon.  In 2004, Kerry was losing in most polls, if by far narrower margins, but his supporters convinced themselves that he was in fact doing better than he really was.  So much so, in fact, that many people now seem to accept as common wisdom that Kerry was actually up in the polls and Bush’s win was somehow unexpected.

I’m even forced to admit that I fell under the same kind of wishful thinking delusion during the primaries when I half-convinced myself that the polls were under-reporting Obama’s support in states like Ohio and Pennsylvania and he was in fact on the verge of finally ending the long and horrifically damaging, (well, it certainly seemed so at the time!), Democratic primary season.  Instead, the polls turned out to be depressingly accurate.  Professional pollsters, it turns out, aren’t complete idiots who don’t know what they’re doing.  There were a few slip-ups early on, but mostly things went as predicted.  Worse for those who support McCain, the times things did go awry, it was usually Obama who benefited, though all they probably see now is Hillary’s upset in New Hampshire.

Nowhere is this attitude more prevalent than when discussing McCain’s chances in Pennsylvania.  Despite virtually every poll showing double-digit leads for Obama, the McCain campaign and its supporters continue to hold out hope that somehow, some way, the race is in fact much closer and winnable for McCain.  Yesterday, the Boston Globe treated the race as though it were still up in the air.

Obama on defense in Pa. as McCain senses an opening, goes the headline.  But why should we believe that?

One of Obama's top surrogates here, Governor Ed Rendell, said yesterday that McCain's heavy campaigning in the state, especially in southwestern counties around Pittsburgh, was whittling away Obama's lead.

"I never thought it was a 10-plus lead to begin with," Rendell said in an interview. "This is still not a given."

. . .

McCain's political director, Mike DuHaime, said that the campaign, which operates a "Democrats for McCain" headquarters in Scranton, has detected greater unease with Obama among Democrats as part of the McCain campaign's direct contact with voters - in phone calls and door knocks - than is evident in media surveys showing sizable leads for Obama.

"Like us, they see it closer than the public polls," DuHaime said of the Obama campaign.

Former Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge, a close McCain ally, added yesterday, "If they thought it was a slam-dunk, they wouldn't be spending so much time here."

Is it true?  Well, at the very least it allows both campaigns a reason to continue pushing their supporters to get out there and vote and the media the ability to keep some drama in a race that otherwise would be a foregone conclusion.  Still, some have the suspicion that the “Pennsylvania is tighter than it looks” theme some Obama surrogates like Rendell are pushing may in fact be part of an elaborate rope-a-dope.

Apparently McCain drew less than 500 people to a rally in suburban PA two days ago. Then he went to Western PA and flubbed the attack lines against John Murtha's comments so that the sound bite was completely incoherent. On Monday he drew crowds of about 2000, then 15 people at an airport rally (yes, that is correct--no zeros), and then his third rally of the day was described as "sparsely attended."[...]

The Obama campaign is doing a major head fake in PA. They "accidentally" leaked an "internal" poll showing Obama up by only 2 percent in PA. I guarantee you that no such poll exists and that this was done both to motivate volunteers in the state (and maybe elsewhere) and prevent them from getting too complacent and also to sucker the McCain campaign into spending more time there. Ed Rendell has asked Obama to come back and campaign in the state-another major ruse. They know that McCain makes most of the decisions for his campaign and that they can goad him into spending more time in PA by pretending that it is close there. Let's see if Obama actually returns to PA before November 4th, but I sincerely doubt it. They are brilliant.

There is more than a little evidence for this idea.  Look at Florida, which was once solidly on McCain’s side of the Electoral College ledger, but moved to where Obama is now leading, in large part, as the New York Times put it a few days ago, because McCain wasn’t paying attention and only belatedly came to the realization that the 27 Electoral Votes there were in jeopardy.  (Speaking of Florida, there’s another story buzzing around memorandum with the catchy title that a poll shows an early voting advantage for McCain.  The catch? “Only a tiny fraction of the Florida respondents reported voting early, leaving McCain's lead [49-45] subject to a wide margin of error. A Quinnipiac University poll, released Wednesday, showed early voters favoring Obama 58-34, another small sample with a potentially wide margin of error.”)

At the bottom of the Boston Globe story is this:

One consequence of Obama's plan to compete in as many states as possible, Rendell said, is that it limits the time he can spend to protect a place like Pennsylvania.

"This disadvantage of contending in so many states," he said, "is it spreads you around a lot thinner."

What’s hidden in that is the advantage that contending in so many states gives.  McCain must win Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania to even have a chance.  Obama, thanks to his strength in places like Virginia and Colorado, can still win even if McCain succeeds in all three big states, which is by no means certain.

And for the polls and turnout models, we know from the early voting that Democratic turnout is up, and that in particular, the turnout of African-Americans is going through the roof.  And I’ll leave the last word to Nate Silver of 538.

With no fewer than 45 polls released since our last update, covering essentially all of the major swing states, we have a pretty good idea of where this race stands -- a far better idea than you'll get by trying to discern the meaning of John Zogby's divining rod or paying any attention to what you see on the front page of Drudge Report. What we can say, when we put all this information together, is that there are two things that John McCain is NOT doing.

Number one, John McCain is NOT closing Obama's margin as quickly as he needs to (if indeed he is closing it at all). This appears to be a 6- or 7- point race right now ... that's where we have it, that's where RCP has it, that where Pollster.com has it. In order to beat Barack Obama, John McCain will need to gain at least one point per day between now and the election. Our model does think that McCain has pared about a point off Obama's margin -- but it has taken him a week to do so. Now, McCain needs to gain six more points in six more days. And he needs to do so with no real ground game, no real advertsing budget, and no one particularly strong message. Not easy.

Number two, John McCain is NOT gaining ground in the states that matter the most. The top tier of states in this election are Virginia, Colorado and Pennsylvania. There is lots of lots of polling in these states, particularly in Virgnia and Pennsylvania, and it's all coming up in roughly the same range, showing Obama leads in the high single digits (in VA and CO) or the low double digits (in PA). The second tier of states is probably Ohio, Florida and Nevada. McCain seems to be getting a bit stronger in Florida; Obama seems to be getting a bit stronger in Ohio and Nevada.

And even if by some miracle McCain can get things close to even by election day, what can he do about the millions of people who have already voted?

It ain't over 'til its over, of course, but unless Obama's supporters don't actually show up to vote, John McCain isn't going to be too happy on November 5th.  (Well, assuming he isn't secretly relieved that he won't have to deal with the mess he helped create.)

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Well, that's a relief!

By BJ

You know, I’ve been very concerned about all of those financial stocks I’ve been carrying in my portfolio.  Not only has their value dropped considerably over the last few weeks, but I had assumed with their taking on billions of government handouts and buy-ins, the odds of my seeing any dividends in the near future were looking pretty bleak as well.  So you can imagine how pleasantly surprised I was to read this in the Washington Post this morning.

U.S. banks getting more than $163 billion from the Treasury Department for new lending are on pace to pay more than half of that sum to their shareholders, with government permission, over the next three years.

The government said it was giving banks more money so they could make more loans. Dollars paid to shareholders don't serve that purpose, but Treasury officials say that suspending quarterly dividend payments would have deterred banks from participating in the voluntary program

Way to go!  And thank-you the American taxpayer for sending your hard-earned dollars into my wallet!  I bet that gives you warm and fuzzy feelings all over.  The only way you could make me happier would be to elect John McCain, who plans to cut the share of taxes I’d have to pay on those dividends.  That’s the kind of redistribution I can believe in!

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It's Finally Happened

By BJ

As if the 2008 campaign season wasn't long enough, we've already had the first candidate toss her, (presumably stylish and expensive), hat into the ring for 2012.

I mean seriously, couldn't you at least wait until you've finished losing 2008 first?

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Delusions are fun

By BJ

Well, fun to mock anyway.  You do have to feel somewhat sorry for the poor buggers who believe in them.  First up is Michael Graham at the Boston Herald, who asks some very important questions:

Did you see that amazing video obtained by the Los Angeles Times of Sen. Barack Obama toasting a prominent former PLO member at an Arab American Action Network meeting in 2003? The video in which Obama gives Yasser Arafat’s frontman a warm embrace, as Bill Ayers look on?

Um, no, not that I recall.  How about you?

You haven’t seen it? Me, neither. The Los Angeles Times refuses to release it

Those bastards!  How dare they hold on to what apparently is the only extant copy of a clearly damaging videotape instead of providing it to the McCain campaign to turn into negative ads?  I bet they’re behind the inexplicable failure of Scott Johnson to produce the “Whitey” tape, too!  And while we’re at it, where is that tape of Obama sacrificing his grandfather’s goats to Allah when he returned to his birthplace in Kenya?  We demand that the media stop withholding these tapes and show Obama for the Islamofascist, terror-loving, anti-non-American pacifist commie we believe him to be!

He blathers on for a time about how much he loves journalists, even as he acknowledges he isn’t one of them, and points to a couple other conservative opinion columnists who agree with him that the media hasn’t been pushing their storyline vetting Obama as much as they think they should, he brings up the recent Pew study that Republicans are grasping at like drowning men at straws.

At the risk of violating union rules, allow me to do a bit of reporting: A new study by the Pew Research Center found that, while 71 percent of Obama’s recent media coverage has been “positive” or “neutral,” almost 60 percent of McCain’s coverage over the same period has been “decidedly negative.”

And how much positive coverage did the media give McCain? Fourteen percent.

Note how he cleverly adds the neutral coverage to Obama’s positive coverage while ignoring it with McCain to make the gap seem even larger than it is.  The actual number of positive coverage for Obama was 36%, which, to be fair, is more positive coverage for Obama than McCain, but as the guys at Politico put it when confronted with the very same data,

There have been moments in the general election when the one-sidedness of our site — when nearly every story was some variation on how poorly McCain was doing or how well Barack Obama was faring — has made us cringe.

As it happens, McCain’s campaign is going quite poorly and Obama’s is going well. Imposing artificial balance on this reality would be a bias of its own.

Or as Campbell Brown roughly said last night on The Daily Show, “When one side says its raining and the other says it’s sunny, I should be able to open the door and when I see it’s sunny, saying so isn’t bias.”

Of course, back when Obama was getting harsher treatment from the media back when the Jeremiah Wright story blew up, the Republican complaint was that he was getting more coverage than McCain, it’s negativity notwithstanding.  Spin doesn’t have to be consistent, just consistently tilted in your favour.

In that I suppose calling Graham delusional is a bit harsh.  He just has his ideological blinders on, and there is at least the suspicion that he knows it.

No, for sheer delicious delusional thinking, one has to go to the folks over at Hillbuzz, who have this to say about Pennsylvania.

On November 4th, the news networks are going to be spinning and sputtering and playing catchup, but everything we see on the ground in PA is what we saw during the primaries: Obama has no shot of winning the Keystone State.

Here is specifically what we talked about tonight: never in any of our careers have any of us ever seen members of one party switching sides and voting for the other party as we see in this election with Democrats for McCain. There has never been anything like it.  Not even the “Reagan Democrats” who voted for Reagan over Carter, for the simple fact that these “Reagan Democrats” weren’t identified and labeled until AFTER the election.

No, Democrats for McCain are real, are voting for McCain right now, and are open and organized, as well as self-identifying.  Lynn Rothschild might be our poster gal, as one of the most prominent of our ranks, but it’s telling that everyone from Team Hillary that we know now works for McCain.  ALL OF US. Whether they are open about it, like we are, or are working quietly behind the scenes, we can’t think of a single person we worked with on a daily basis for Hillary who is now working on behalf of Obama.

Now, I’m sure some of you naysayers out there may feel inclined to point out that whatever their labeling, the “Reagan Democrats” were actually noted in the polling swinging towards Reagan before the election, and that for all their self-identifying and organization, no such phenomena seems to apparent in the polling this time around.  Well you of little faith, the folks at Hillbuzz have news for you!

Union members repeatedly tell all of us that they are lying to pollsters because the unions have been polling these people — and the unions will threaten people’s jobs if they don’t tow the union line. So, the people lie when asked whom they are supporting. But, the unions can’t control who they vote for on Election Day. And that’s when things are going to get interesting.

See!  Nothing to worry about.  All those polls showing McCain getting his ass handed to him are just because the union members are lying to the union pollsters!  (Since when are the polling companies run by the unions?)  Shut up inner troll!

Now, of course some of you out there might be wondering just why all of these DEMOCRATS, particularly of the unionized variety, are rushing to support a man on the opposite side of the ideological spectrum from them and promises to continue the ruinous policies of the last eight years that haven’t been very kind to them, all in direct contradiction to the stated preference of the woman they claim to be the die-hard supporters of.  Well, they provide the answer:

There are two things Hillary Clinton and John McCain have in common that we’re thinking about right now: (1) both love America more than anything and truly want what’s best for the country, and not themselves and (2) Clinton has a framed photo of McCain in her office, while McCain has a similar photo of Clinton in his.

Oh.

Well.

Framed photos of each other.

Well.

How can you argue with framed photos?

The Three Ashleys

By BJ

This pretty much sums up the race and what we'll be seeing for the next week until its over.

Well done.

Socialists For McCain!

By BJ

And you thought the endorsement by al Qaeda was going to be the worst news McCain got this election cycle.  Man, you haven't seen nothing yet.

The plan took shape during a particularly intense criticism/self-criticism session at our 2000 annual convention in a booth at an Akron IHOP. We realized that we'd been recruiting no more new members per year than the Green Bay Packers and that, despite all our efforts, more Americans have been taken aboard UFOs than have embraced the historic promise of socialism. So we decided to suspend our usual work of standing on street corners and hissing, "Hey, how'd you like to live in a workers' paradise?" Instead of building socialism, one worker at a time, we would focus on destroying capitalism, hedge fund by hedge fund.

First, we selected a cadre of crusty punks from the streets of Seattle, stripped off their Che T-shirts, suited them up in Armanis and wingtips and introduced them to the concepts of derivatives and dental floss. Then we shipped them to Wall Street with firm instructions: Make as much money as you can, as fast as you can, and as soon as the money starts rolling in, send it out to make more money by whatever dodgy means you can find--subprime loans, credit default swaps, pyramid schemes--anything goes. And oh yes: Spend your own earnings in the most flamboyantly gross ways you can think of--$10,000 martinis, fountains of champagne--so as to fan the flames of class resentment.

. . .

Things were going swimmingly until about a week ago, when the capitalists suddenly staged a counter-coup. We had thought that the nationalization of the banks would bring capitalism to its knees, but instead, the capitalists were craftily using it to privatize the government.

. . .

Ah well, we socialists still have the election to look forward to. After months of studying the candidates' economic plans, we have determined that one of them, and only one, can be relied on to complete the destruction of capitalism. With high hopes and great confidence, the Socialist International Conspiracy endorses John McCain!

Remind me I have to read Barbara Ehrenreich more often.  (h/t Levenson)

Monday Morning Musing on Syria

By BJ

Following up on a couple of points Cernig noted in his Instahoglets round-up yesterday, I find myself asking why the US would, after more than five years engaged in Iraq, and after the flow of foreign fighters to Iraq has dwindled to a trickle, decide to launch an attack against Syria within a week of a presidential election that promises a new and temporarily vulnerable administration regardless the winner.  You would almost think that they were trying to provoke some kind of international crisis

Of course, one of the presidential candidates has indicated that provoking a crisis is just the kind of thing he’d like to do, and not too surprisingly, it’s the one with close ties to the current White House.  Of course, that’s a large part of the reason many people don’t want such an irresponsible hothead to win next Tuesday.

And the musings don’t stop there, as any international incident with Syria is certain to affect its neighbour Israel.  The two countries have been moving towards peace talks through Turkey, which the current US government has been very much set against, and it just so happens that Israel is soon to go to the polls as well, an election where the hard-right led by Likud is predicted to make significant gains, though it is still slightly short of Kadima in the polls.  As elsewhere, a close-fought election is likely to be nasty, and as with the US, the distraction that the turmoil of electioneering and manoeuvring to form a new government causes is the kind of opportunity a country’s enemies salivate over.  Just the kind of time you’d want an ally to throw matches on the kindling, isn’t it?

I doubt things will grow into some kind of conflagration, since few leaders are as dangerously irresponsible as the US’s appears to be.  Still, it is another in a long list of reasons why everybody will be much better off the sooner those matches are passed to an adult who won’t make reckless plays with America’s and its allies future.

Woo-Hoo!

By BJ

University Researchers Developing Cancer-Fighting Beer

I've always said beer is health food, and here they are making it even healthier!  And to think some people don't understand why we fund scientific research.

The coming battles for on-line freedom

By BJ

While most of the on- and off-line communities have heard of the Great Firewall of China, perhaps not enough of them realized that it was probably only a matter of time before the same technologies came to be used in what we like to think of as free and democratic countries.  It appears that Australia may be the first to see the internet fall under the censors muzzle.

Is the Rudd government about to erect a Great Firewall of Australia - introducing a form of internet censorship that will infringe upon the freedom of computer users to browse the worldwide web?

That is the concern of online civil liberties groups, as the Rudd government prepares plans for a field trial of internet service provider (ISP) filtering products, with a view to introducing them nationally.

ISP filtering is the blocking of certain sites which the government deems illegal or inappropriate, and is the central plank of the Rudd government's "Plan for Cyber-Safety".

As with similar plans being proposed in North America, it is being done in the name of protecting children, either through child porn or just the regular stuff deemed inappropriate for minors, but as with everything governments do, there is always more than meets the eye with these plans.

Much of the angry online chatter and speculation has centred on whether internet users will be able to opt-out of the filtered "clean feed".

Senator Conroy has stated that Australians would be given the opportunity to opt-out, and that the scheme would therefore not be mandatory.

But a network engineer from one of Australia's leading net suppliers, Internode, has challenged that assertion, arguing that there would be two black-lists. One would contain unsuitable and harmful material for children; the other would include inappropriate material for adults.

Mark Newton of Internode wrote in an online forum: 'The much-touted 'opt-out' would merely involve switching from blacklist number 1 to blacklist number 2….Regardless of your personal preference, your traffic will pass through the censorship box.'

Senator Conroy has since indicated that there would be a two-tier system: a mandatory one that would block all "illegal material" and an optional tier that would block material deemed unsuitable for children, such as pornography.

So everything the government can access will be going through these filters, and they’ll be the ones determining what gets passed.

Of course, in its initial phase, it is very hard to argue against such a system.  I mean, who is in favour of child porn?  How could you possibly be against a system that protects children?  But the issue isn’t about where the system starts, its about where it will evolve to.

"Even if the filtering system only targets child pornography to begin with, we have no confidence it will stay that way," says Dale Clapperton of the online civil liberties organisation, Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA). "It will be subject to creep. Everyone with any lobbying clout will be after the government to ban their pet peeve websites.'

It doesn’t take too much imagination to think of things that social conservatives would like to see removed from public access, from “inappropriate” language and nudity to euthanasia, abortion, and even ordinary and legal birth control methods.  But the liberal-minded shouldn’t be the only ones concerned about this kind of thing.

Take all of those right wing sites screaming hysterically at the coming Democratic take-over and how those dastardly radical leftists will use their newfound power to silence right-wing blogs and media outlets.  And while I think a fair bit of that is projection of what they themselves would like to do given the power, there certainly is a subset of the left who take the term "politically correct" to clearly absurd levels and wouldn't blink at shutting down sites based on their own interpretations of what is "inappropriate". 

In very simple terms, it does nobody any good to give government, (or anyone else), the power to control what information you can access.  Be prepared to fight for it.

Quote of the Day

By BJ

Daniel Larison discovers the key to understanding the McCain Campaign.

Lost, I also like Lost. ~John McCain in an interview with Radar magazine

This explains so much.  Now we have found the real reason why McCain’s campaign has been an interminable series of twists and turns that promises some payoff but always leads nowhere.

What is with the Pennsylvania GOP?

By BJ

It would appear that the Pennsylvania GOP has got some pretty serious issues.  Most recently in the news because they attempted to push an exaggerated version of the race-baiting hoax perpetrated by one of their staffers, they’re back again today with another piece of absurdity.

A new e-mail making the rounds among Jewish voters in Pennsylvania this week falsely alleged that Mr. Obama “taught members of Acorn to commit voter registration fraud,’’ and equated a vote for Senator Barack Obama with the “tragic mistake” of their Jewish ancestors, who “ignored the warning signs in the 1930’s and 1940’s.”

At first blush, it was typical of the sorts of e-mails floating around with false, unsubstantiated and incendiary claims this year.

But where most of the attack e-mails against Mr. Obama have been mostly either anonymous or from people outside of mainstream politics, this one had an unusually official provenance: It was sponsored by the Pennsylvania Republican Party’s “Victory 2008” committee.

And it was signed by several prominent McCain supporters in the state: Mitchell L. Morgan, a top fund-raiser; Hon. Sandra Schwartz Newman, a member of Mr. McCain’s national task-force monitoring Election Day voting, and I. Michael Coslov, a steel industry executive.

Now apparently the state party fired the guy who drafted said e-mail after being contacted repeatedly about it, but they don’t seem too put out by it.

“There were some points that were accurate, there were two that we cannot substantiate, however; as a result of them we’ve let him go,” said Michael Barley, the communications director for the Pennsylvania state Republican Party, who said other issues had contributed to Mr. Rudnick’s dismissal. “There are points that could have been made and he touched on some of them, but he definitely went a little bit farther than the facts would support.”

So comparing Obama to Hitler and accusing him of conspiracy to commit fraud is not enough in itself to account for the guy’s dismissal.  After all, its only a little bit farther than they probably though they could get away with.

Man, I hope they get the proverbial shit kicked out of them on Nov. 4th.  (Somewhere between a whipping and rout will do, though I'd settle for a thumping.)

A Quick Question

By BJ

A quick question

Which do you think hurts McCain’s campaign more:

a)    The endorsement from al Qaeda?
b)    The endorsement from George W. Bush?

I've having a hard time trying to figure out which would be worse.  I'm leaning to the Bush one, because there isn't any way the McCain camp can spin it as not being sincere.  Over and above that, you have to say that the last week really hasn’t been too kind to the McCain campaign, as Kevin Drum notes:

Let's summarize the past couple of days: (a) Politico reports that La Palin has spent $150,000 on campaign outfits, (b) John McCain's brother calls 911 to complain about a traffic jam and then curses at the operator for telling him to get off the line, (c) the New York Times reports that Palin also spent $30,000 or so on hair and makeup over a period of two weeks, and (d) a white woman who claimed she was attacked by a black Obama supporter admits that the whole thing was a hoax.

It’s hard not to feel a little sorry for the guy.  He’s way behind in the polls with very little time left to turn things around, his campaign is beginning to devolve into finger-pointing to the targets for back-stabbing, and pretty much every major news story coming out that effects his campaign does so in a negative way.

But never fear!  The right wing blogosphere is on the case with ever-more tenuous relationships from Obama's past and apparently a mission to "expose" Obama's mistress.  (Boy, the next few years are going to be fun.)

What a Shock!

By BJ

Turns out the Bush administration has decided it doesn’t feel the need to comply with yet another law designed to protect American’s privacy rights.

The Bush administration has informed Congress that it is bypassing a law intended to forbid political interference with reports to lawmakers by the Department of Homeland Security.

The August 2007 law requires the agency’s chief privacy officer to report each year about Homeland Security activities that affect privacy, and requires that the reports be submitted directly to Congress “without any prior comment or amendment” by superiors at the department or the White House.

But newly disclosed documents show that the Justice Department issued a legal opinion last January questioning the basis for that restriction, and that Michael Chertoff, the homeland security secretary, later advised Congress that the administration would not “apply this provision strictly” because it infringed on the president’s powers.

There’s nothing really new here.  It is the same pattern of ignoring any law they don’t like that has defined the Bush/Cheney administration, with particular emphasis on any regulation that might require oversight of their actions.  The theory being, if you don’t have to report your crimes to anyone, you can never be held accountable for them.

What does make me wonder, is that this news comes when in just over a week from now, the US is highly likely to be electing Barack Obama to the Presidency.  All of that massive concentration of power without proper oversight that the Republicans have imbued the Executive Branch with is about to fall into somebody else’s hands.

Will any of those who pushed so hard and defended at every turn this “Executive Privilege” have any second thoughts now that they won’t be calling the shots?

Well, of course they will.  Such concentrated power is only okay when it is they themselves who get to wield it, but it would be nice to think that somewhere out there, there are a few rational observers who will come to understand why so many of us were opposed to these kinds of power grabs all along.

The Pre-Election Post-Mortems

By BJ

I have to admit, much like Tim F. and Cernig, watching the circular firing squad forming in the Republican ranks is rather amusing.The Politico story on this phenomena looks at several of the decisions that have led to McCain’s implosion, but its this explanation that catches my attention.

One current senior campaign official gave voice to this “Law of the Jungle” ethic, defending the campaign against second-guessers who say it was a mistake to throw away his "experience" message in an attempt to match Obama’s “change” mantra.

"Everybody agreed with the strategy,” said this official.  “We were unlikely to be successful without being aggressive and taking risks.”

Running as a steady hand and basing a campaign on Obama’s sparse résumé was a political loser, it was decided.

“The pollsters and the entire senior leadership of campaign believe that experience vs. change was not a winning message and formulation, the same way it was no winning formula with Hillary Clinton.”

Let’s call this what it is, bull! This election was always going to be a tough slog for McCain, but during the summer, with the assistance of the war in Georgia, suddenly the steady hand with the foreign policy reputation that McCain has built up was looking pretty good to people and he had all but ate away at Obama’s poll leads. Even Obama’s selection of Biden as VP candidate was being spun as an acknowledgement of his weakness in this area, and all sorts of comments that McCain wouldn’t need any “on the job training”.

So what really happened to cause such a massive swing in their strategy? Two words: Sarah Palin. The whiplash-inducing turnaround of the Republican party faithful on the issue of experience when the non-vetted Palin was announced as McCain’s VP choice was stunning to watch. In one fell swoop, McCain undercut what was becoming a reasonably effective campaign storyline and a plausible strategic path for victory for a short-term tactical bounce. When the economic crisis hit, McCain was no longer the steady hand at the helm, and his dice-rolling instincts got the better of him and fed into the risky, erratic theme that the Obama camp was peddling, and that the VP pick was the paramount example of.

Look at many of the conservative newspaper endorsements, or the endorsements of former big-name Republicans like Colin Powell’s for Obama, and they nearly all list this irresponsible choice of Sarah Palin among their reasons for not backing McCain.

It isn’t that McCain didn’t face other problems or make other mistakes, but they were generally of the survivable type. Whatever else the coming post-mortems of McCain’s campaign bring up, it was the pick of Palin that turned the race from a close-run thing into a probable rout.

In Defense of Racism

By BJ

You know, there’s been times during this election, watching some of those opposed to an Obama presidency, that I’ve been embarrassed to be a white male.  Granted that I’m far less moronic when it comes to race than these idiots, but I certainly recognize the attitudes, and I lament the fact that people could look at me and privately wonder if I was one of them.

Now, I was also of the opinion that people with attitudes like that are a terrible drag on society, preventing others from reaching their fullest potential.  However, Ta-Nehisi Coates points out that these kinds of folks actually do serve a greater purpose.

Here is the thing. We've all noticed that the public persona of black folks has taken a tumble over the past few decades. We went from Otis Redding and the Four Tops, to 50 Cent and Dip Set. We went from Jesse Owens and Joe Louis to Pacman Jones and Mike Tyson. Are today's Negroes of a lesser breed? Nope. What's changed is that white folks are now letting anybody through the gate. White racists have taken a lot of heat on this blog. But the truth of the matter is that they may be the single biggest promoters of black excellence in this country's history. There is a reason Tony Dungy was the first winning coach in Tampa Bay's history--he had to be.

Think about this whole Joe The Plumber foolishness. There's no way in the world Barack Obama could pull off the same trick with, say, Rashid The Barber. Rashid would be laughed off the stage--as he should be--and Barack's campaign would be dead. Joe The Plumber is stupid and it isn't working. A little bit of bigotry would have prevented all of this. So to all the Ferraros out there I have one request--more racism please. It improves our stock. It makes black people, a better people.

It’s a good point.  If it weren’t for the still-present bigotry out there, there wouldn’t have been any need for the Democrats to nominate someone as inspiring as Barack Obama, and we could be left facing a nation run by a guy who thinks Sarah Palin is the most qualified VP candidate ever.

And as to those who like to bitch about “reverse racism”, seeing that all too many of my white brethren also seem to think Palin is not only qualified for the VP slot, but are salivating at the chance of her running in 2012, it is pretty clear that we have set the bar way too low and should consider encouraging such an effect so as to improve our stock as well. [/snark]

Who's really ready to be President?

By BJ

A couple of days ago, Joe Biden made the comment that Obama would be tested by an international crisis within six months of taking office.  (What, the economic meltdown and two ongoing wars don’t count?)  Rightwing blogs leapt upon the statement as proof that Obama is in fact a weak-willed Chamberlain appeaser whom America’s enemies will leap to take advantage of.  Daniel Larison did an excellent take-down of such a piece by Ralph Peters, which while worth reading in full, can be most easily summed up with the following line:

Maybe, if everyone in the region is as clueless as Obama’s domestic critics (this would be difficult), but why exactly would that be the case?

Replace region with world and you have the right-wing argument against Obama as a “strong” President in a nutshell.  The right has done its best for quite some time to paint Democrats as being “soft” on national security, that as soon as a Democrat is elected President, all of America’s opponents will feel that they have carte blanche to run roughshod all over the planet and the weak appeaser in the White House will be left stuttering, “C-c-c-can’t we all just be friends?”.

Of course, the caricature doesn’t fit the reality, but they’ve fallen for their own propaganda, and assume that America’s enemies are buying the same lines they’ve peddled to their base.  As Larison points out in his column, there is very little to suggest that Obama is much less hawkish than Bush.  (That McCain is Bush without even the minimal foresight is probably why he gets the coveted al Qaeda endorsement.)

Not that the same problem isn’t going to plague the left, who probably think Obama is actually less hawkish than the evidence would suggest, but while he’ll be metaphorically eviscerated, he’ll probably still get the pass as the lesser of the two evils on that front.

But the question of readiness brings me to another point that Cernig included in his post about the Al Qaeda endorsement of the “impetuous McCain”, the quote from Michael Chertoff noting that the upcoming transition phases between administrations is the most vulnerable time for the United States.

“Any period of transition creates a greater vulnerability, meaning there's more likelihood of distraction,'' Chertoff said in an interview yesterday. ``You have to be concerned it will create an operational opportunity for terrorists.''

You see, whatever the right-wing glee that stemmed from Biden’s remarks that Obama might be tested in the early months of his administration carried with it the assumption that America’s enemies wouldn’t dare to test their man McCain in such a fashion.  But as Chertoff points out, the risk is the same with either man assuming a new presidency, and the question that arises from that is; which of the two candidates is better prepared to make the transition to President?  As it happens, someone has already looked into this, and much like the election itself is beginning to look, it isn’t even close.

As the 2008 campaign nears its conclusion, the presidential transition efforts of the two major candidates have become a study in contrasts: Sen. Barack Obama has organized an elaborate well-staffed network to prepare for his possible ascension to the White House, while Sen. John McCain has all but put off such work until after the election.

The Democratic nominee has enlisted the assistance of dozens of individuals -- divided into working groups for particular federal agencies -- to produce policy agendas and lists of recommended appointees. As evidence of their advanced preparations, officials provided a copy of the strict ethics guidelines that individuals working on the transition effort are required to sign.

John McCain, by contrast, has done little. Campaign spokespersons did not respond to requests for elaboration. But one official with direct knowledge, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, expressed concern with McCain's approach. The Arizona Senator has instructed his team to not spend time on the transition effort, according to the source, both out of a desire to have complete focus on winning the election as well as a superstitious belief that the campaign shouldn't put the cart before the horse.

. . .

Governance scholars consider the process invaluable, particularly as the nation struggles with a major economic crisis, two active wars, and a range of domestic security threats. "Our enemies understand how potentially vulnerable we are in the transition from one administration to the next," Clay Johnson III, former Executive Director of the Bush-Cheney Presidential Transition, said recently at a forum on transition planning. "This is something we need to be very, very seriously prepared for."

. . .

"Government is becoming more complex and the time it is taking to put a leadership team in key departments is taking longer," said P.J. Crowley, who heads the Homeland Security Presidential Transition Initiative at the Center for American Progress. "I think that if a campaign is waiting until November 5 to start the transition process, they are going to be behind. It is not being presumptuous -- it is being prudent to be prepared before the election so that you can at least make the transition process effective as possible and be ready to govern on January 20."

. . .

But [McCain’s] approach could create significant obstacles down the road. For example, as Crowley notes, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had only a fraction of his leadership team in place on 9/11 - roughly eight months after President Bush took office.

Now absorb all of that and then tell me who you think would be better prepared to face a possible terrorist attack on the US, or any other (further) major crisis for that matter, in the early spring of 2009?  Or really anytime thereafter.

The New Space Race - in Asia

By BJ

India just launched an unmanned mission to the Moon, where its probe is set to join those launched by Japan and China.  China, of course, recently launched its third manned mission and included a spacewalk among its feats.  Even South Korea is eying the lucrative satellite launch business, and where India goes, Pakistan is sure to attempt to follow.

All are putting considerable resources into their space programs. looking at them as symbols of national prestige, much as the US and former Soviet Union did back in the day.  Those old workhorses, with their current substantial lead in this area, seem to be spending most of their time plugging away at the monstrosity of the ISS, and the US particularly is looking at a future without a manned space capsule for several years as the Shuttles go into retirement and they have no replacement on stream to replace it.

Outside of private ventures, space exploration in North America, with all of the attendant scientific advances that accompany such exploration, seems to have lost its luster.  I wonder if we'll live to regret that?

Socialism is Racist?

By BJ

Well at least according to some guy at the Kansas City Star

The "socialist" label that Sen. John McCain and his GOP presidential running mate Sarah Palin are trying to attach to Sen. Barack Obama actually has long and very ugly historical roots.

J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI from 1924 to 1972, used the term liberally to describe African Americans who spent their lives fighting for equality.

Now, maybe its just me, but this seems a bit of a stretch. Now, certainly as the author points out later, McCain and Palin are doing their level best to make Obama out to be un-American and his supporters as not belonging the to “real” America, but that’s not about his being black. Its about his being a closet Arab/Muslim/baby-killing/terrorist loving radical leftist. Or in other words a Democrat.

I mean, when you’ve got things like this, this, this, this, this, this, and these folks in the clip below to work with, the whole, “Socialism means Black”, business just helps the Republican apologists pretend there’s nothing to see here.

OTOH, Kyle E. Moore feels its worth taking a look at.

Today's Must Read

By BJ

The Rev. Paperboy analyzes, predicts, and offers sage advice on the US political scene.  Enjoy.

Watch your back, Senator McCain

By BJ

Because you’re likely to find more than few knives in it.  One of the many reasons McCain is likely to rue the day he ever decided to gamble on Sarah Palin as his VP pick is her tendency to turn on her benefactors when she sees advantage in it.  With John McCain’s electoral chances looking as likely as Angelina leaving Brad for me, his back is apparently too inviting a target.

Wearing a gray hooded sweatshirt and standing on a breezy tarmac, Palin said that if she had her way, the McCain campaign and the Republican National Committee would not be flooding battleground states with automated phone calls tying Barack Obama to former radical William Ayers, as they have done over the last week.

. . .

"If I called all the shots, and if I could wave a magic wand," Palin said, "I would be sitting at a kitchen table with more and more Americans, talking to them about our plan to get the economy back on track and winning the war, and not having to rely on the old conventional ways of campaigning that includes those robocalls, and includes spending so much money on the television ads that, I think, is kind of draining out there in terms of Americans' attention span.

Palin is also on record criticizing McCain for abandoning Michigan and for not “taking the gloves off” enough during the debates.  Of course, her sudden opposition to the robocalls linking Obama and Ayers stand in stark contrast to her earlier calls to make the Ayers association a bigger part of their campaign, but that merely shows how much of a true disciple of Bill Kristol she really is.  She has all of the answers so long as she can’t be held to account for their failure.

When this is all over, McCain’s back is going to look like a pincushion as the party turns him into a scapegoat for the loss, (far easier than examining their lack of ideas), and Palin is lining herself up to be on the side of dagger-wielders so as to avoid as much blame as possible and set herself up well for the future.

No idea whether or not it will work, of course.  Those Republicans of sense, (a vanishingly rare breed these days to be sure), are smart enough to realize that Palin was one the major anchors dragging McCain’s prospects down these last several weeks.  Still, it is hard not to be awed by the sheer gall of the move, in a sickly, slightly horrified way to be sure, but awed none the less.

Powell's Endorsement

By BJ

Added to the record fundraising totals announced earlier, the Obama campaign has to be smiling at how the day is progressing. Powell's reasoning for backing Obama is both powerful and persuasive, and well worth watching.

The important points against McCain are his erratic responses to the economic crisis, his pick of Palin for VP, campaign tactics that have went over the line, (his story of the mother weeping over the grave of a Muslim-American soldier was particularly powerful), the increasingly narrow focus of said campaign, and a Republican Party that's moved too far to the right for him to be comfortable with. Obama's considered response on the economy, his excellent pick of Joe Biden for VP, and the more inclusive nature of his vision for America all count in his favor.

Granted that many on the left aren't too fond of Powell due to his invaluable role in helping to start the Iraq War, but he remains one of the most popular and recognizable Republicans out there, and is still highly respected by many. And while endorsements haven't meant all that much this election cycle, his is among the last, if not the last, of the really big names out there to be won.

I don't expect all of this good news will actually impact the poll numbers too much. As noted some time ago, Obama has been scraping up against his ceiling for a while now. However, it should solidify his support among the moderates and independents that have swung his way recently.

$150 Million

By BJ

Wow.  Just wow.

The Obama campaign announced this morning that it had raised a record $150 million last month, and had added 632,000 new donors to its total.

The amount shattered the campaign’s previous record from August.  The McCain campaign also had a record-breaking month in August, but is now operating with the $84 million provided by public financing for the general cycle and assistance from the Republican National Committee under certain limits.

In announcing the Obama figure, David Plouffe, the campaign manager, said the average donation for September was less than $100.

Little question now how it is that Obama has been going 3 or 4 to 1 in its TV ad buys.  All that and he probably still has a healthy reserve. 

It is impossible to say at this point, but I would be willing to bet that the negative tone of the McCain campaign helped drive that number to its record-breaking level.  There has been more than a few times during this election cycle where attacks on Obama have resulted in boosts to his campaign contributions, and the McCain camp got steadily uglier as September progressed.

In any case, Obama now has the ability to simply overwhelm McCain's ads during the last couple of weeks and continue to be aggressive in more states than McCain can possibly defend.  The L-word is looking more and more likely.

Hopkins-Pavlik

By BJ

I just finished watching the broadcast of the boxing match between Bernard Hopkins and Kelly Pavlik.  I have a long history with the sport of boxing, and I have to say that it was wonderful to watch a master at the game perform his craft.  Hopkins was the master strategist, and Pavlik was simply out of his league.  Of course, Pavlik did have a few moments during the bout, and did manage to close the gap between the two towards the end, but Hopkins was simply too far ahead and capped his performance with some brilliant flurries during the last round.

A couple of quotes from the broadcast that made me perk up were from quotes that Bernard Hopkins made to the reporters prior to the fight.

“When it comes to ring generalship, I’m the Harvard grad and Pavlik is the guy from the community college.”

“When I beat Kelly Pavlik, I will bring hope to the hopeless.”

"Hopkins says that in the corner, he's the President and the other guys are his cabinet."

And regarding the fight itself:

Pavlik seems to be taking more risks.  He has to if he is to have any chance.”

“Pavlik just ran into something they never anticipated they would and they haven’t been able to adapt.”

In the eighth round, one of the commentators said that it looked like Pavlik would need some kind of bailout if he were to have any hope of winning, to which another quipped, “Well, at least it shouldn’t cost $700 billion”.

Perhaps not too surprisingly, Hopkins corner men were wearing Obama/Biden T-shirts, and Hopkins gave a shout out to Obama and Michelle after the fight.  And much like Obama, Hopkins is known for being very conservative with his finances, and just bought a rather nice house out of foreclosure that just happens to make him a next-door neighbour to Joe Biden.  The analogy seems just too easy, though in this case, Hopkins was actually the old guy, even if he didn't look it tonight.

In the end, the scoring was a landslide for Hopkins.

McCain and Obama Roast Each Other

By BJ

I have to say, had these been the two guys who showed up at the three previous debates, I would have certainly have been happy rather than feel obligated to tune in.

Barack Obama

John McCain

And on this one, I have to say McCain probably won.

Do we know the real Barack Obama?

By BJ

While Jay has been doing his best to expose the real story behind the ACORN scandal and Obama’s relationship with Bill Ayers, new information has come to light about Obama’s past activities and connections that put all the previous work to shame.

A few examples:

In 1969, Obama was indicted and put on trial along with Hoffman and Rubin and other activists who together became known as the Chicago Seven.

"They were originally known as the Chicago Seven and a Half Men," said Hazelbaker, "But Obama's lawyer succeeded in having his case severed from the others and ultimately dismissed on the grounds that he was missing too much school."

. . .

But Hazelbaker says the McCain campaign has uncovered evidence that the young Barack's hatred for his country began well-before third grade.  In fact, Hazelbaker says, it may go back to his infancy.

"We think he was just born not one of us."

Hazelbaker produced computer enhanced enlargements of several key frames from the Zapruder film that she claimed clearly depict a two year old Barack Obama in his stroller beside the man with the umbrella on the grassy knoll in Dallas on November 22, 1963.

Hazelbaker says that the enlargements show the sun glinting off of what can only be the telescopic sight of a rifle in the toddler's hands, although some experts not affiliated with either candidate suggest that it could be the sun glinting off a baby bottle.

There’s far more details and other stories at the link, including how Barry O’Bama may be tied to the IRA and plotted an elaborate scheme to take down Richard Nixon.

Why does the MSM continue to ignore this?  We must do everything we can to keep this terrorist-loving America hater from completing his nefarious plan to hide his sordid history so he could sneak into the White House and destroy America.

Pipelines being targeted in Northern BC.

By BJ

It appears someone is targeting the oil and gas industry around Dawson Creek, possibly using explosives stolen from a nearby work site a few months ago.

A second explosion has occurred along an EnCana pipeline east of Dawson Creek, B.C.

RCMP say the explosive charge was deliberately set next to a natural gas pipeline and detonated sometime overnight Wednesday, but was not discovered until 9 a.m. MT Thursday.

Investigators believe it is linked to an incident on the weekend that damaged but did not rupture a sour gas line in the same area.

The sour gas line that was targeted was a particularly dangerous target given the toxicity of hydrogen sulphide.  When I first heard about the original attack, my mind went to the “Nigeria North” video, but this is on the opposite side of the province.  Still, this is exactly the kind of tactics local people anywhere in the world can use to disrupt oil and gas operations, and its use in northern Canada shouldn’t be too unexpected.

And talk about protecting such critical infrastructure should be taken with a grain of salt.  Pipelines run thousands upon thousands of miles.  There simply isn’t any cost-effective way to properly guard them, as we’ve seen in Iraq and Nigeria.

Now, this is probably just one individual or small group at this point, but if the idea catches on in other areas where the local people are not too happy about multi-nationals and the government turning their lakes into toxic waste dumps, things have the potential to get really, really ugly, particularly in tight economic times.

Oops! That's going to smart

By BJ

Turns out the newly-famous "Joe the Plumber" isn't the "Joe Six-Pack" type, but the "Joe Keating-Five" variety.

Turns out that Joe Wurzelbacher from the Toledo event is a close relative of Robert Wurzelbacher of Milford, Ohio. Who’s Robert Wurzelbacher? Only Charles Keating’s son-in-law and the former senior vice president of American Continental, the parent company of the infamous Lincoln Savings and Loan. The now retired elder Wurzelbacher is also a major contributor to Republican causes giving well over $10,000 in the last few years.

All right, that isn't actually fair to poor old Joe, given one doesn't get to choose one's family, but in the guilt-by-association game that the presidential race has devolved into, this isn't going to help the McCain campaign any, and they aren't exactly in a position where they can recover from further shooting themselves in the foot

My Two Cents on the Debate

By BJ

The final debate is now behind us, and if the polls can be believed, it is now a clean sweep for the Obama/Biden team, (partisan mileage may vary).  I have to admit, I never listened to much of last night’s debate, so I will leave comments regarding any actual substance that managed to slip in between the rehearsed talking points to my colleagues.  (Fortunately I did read enough live-blogs to not be entirely surprised, though somewhat amused, to find that “Joe the Plumber” is the story of the day on Memeorandum.)

However, while I didn’t listen to the debate, I did watch it, with the sound off, and I do have a few comments related to what I saw.

There’s a recent commercial for some laundry detergent or aid where a guy is being interviewed for a job, and instead of listening to the quite substantive answer the interviewee is giving, the employer is staring at the stain on the guy’s shirt, which is drowning out the answer with its own ramblings.

Like it or not, we make a lot of our decisions based upon almost unconscious reactions to people’s body language and appearance.  Appearance being a determining factor has been a truism of the presidential debates since Kennedy-Nixon, and it is almost sad that while Obama has pushed beyond TV into new media, McCain hasn’t progressed out of the radio era.

The reaction shots were particularly brutal.  Obama relaxed and smiling,  McCain eye-rolling, grimacing, sneering, and so forth.  What really astounds me about this, is that it’s the same story over and over.  McCain has been lambasted for his poor performances in the previous two debates, (and even during the few primary debates the Republicans had), on just these kinds of reactions, and yet he can’t help himself but make the same mistakes yet again.  McCain just seems incapable of learning.

Contrast with Obama, whose performance in debates has improved dramatically since last year.  The stumbling stutterer of a year ago now looks the master of the game.

Finally, I have to ask, what the f**k is with McCain’s eyes?  Did he have an eye exam just before the debate and the dilation drops hadn’t worn off?  The few times he actually opened them all the way, the pupils looked unnaturally large.  The rest of the time his eyelids were fluttering so much I was beginning to suspect he was sending out secret messages by blink-code.  Seriously, that was disturbing.

CNN's Electoral Map

By BJ

I just clicked on the Electoral Map feature that CNN has.  It's defaulted to what they project as safe and leaning states for each candidate with the rest as toss-ups.  What I found interesting is that they now have Obama over the magic 270 number with just his base of safe and leaning states.

An interesting precedent for one of the major networks.

Update:

Okay, turns out they actually announced this.

For the first time in the election cycle, CNN’s Electoral Map estimates that Democrat Barack Obama has moved over the 270 electoral vote threshold needed to win the White House. The hotly contested state of Virginia moves from “tossup” to “lean Obama.” North Dakota moves from “safe McCain” to “lean McCain,” and New Jersey moves from “lean Obama” to “safe Obama.”

As a result, 13 electoral votes swing from the tossup column to the Obama column. Obama now leads McCain by 103 electoral votes, up from 90 when the CNN Electoral Map was last updated on October 7. CNN now estimates that if the presidential election were held today, Obama would win 277 electoral votes and John McCain 174. There are 87 electoral votes up for grabs. Again, 270 electoral votes are needed to win the White House.

A Modern Day Robin Hood

By BJ

You won't find it in his campaign ads, but Barack Obama let slip his plans to become a modern-day Robin Hood in the White House, confiscating money from the rich to give to the poor.

I’m not entirely sure they’ve thought this framing through, though given it’s the New York Post, that shouldn’t come as a surprise.  I mean, have you not paid any attention to all the books, movies, and TV series about Robin Hood over the past several decades?  He’s the hero.

Yes, when you consider it objectively, the whole, “rob the rich to feed the poor”, thing is a very socialist mantra at that. And granted that the stereotypical, hardhearted, “you’re on your own”, “tough luck”, “need the money for our crusade and creature comforts”, Sheriff of Nottingham does fit well with the current Republican Party.  Not to mention the all too easy “King John” jokes.

But given just how bad McCain’s situation is at this point, do you really want to cast the Obama campaign as a band of merry, honorable warriors looking to usurp the power of a bunch of corrupt, greedy, out-of-touch, and unpopular hacks who only got their positions because their fathers and grandfathers did well?

Hmmm.

Anyone know how Obama would look like in a green cap?

Initial Thoughts on the Canadian Election

By BJ

All over but the recriminations now, and as expected, the Conservatives come out with a slightly expanded minority government, which will be spun as a great victory, but given expectations going in, has to be disappointing.  In truth, this is about as close to a lose-lose-lose election as I’ve ever experienced.  While some of the numbers changed, the overall situation changed very little.  This spells considerable trouble for the leadership of the opposition Liberals and quite likely the Conservatives as well.

For the Liberals, they lost considerable support and seats.  Their last major stronghold in Ontario is broken, and the party seems to be surviving mostly on brand loyalty at this point.  It still remains fractured from the vicious infighting that accompanied the Chretien/Martin leadership battle of a few years ago and the party has never united behind Stephane Dion as it needed to if it wanted to truly compete.  It’s a safe bet the long knives will be out for Dion in the very near future, which will again leave them unable to mount a terribly serious or united opposition for some time.

For the Conservatives, they blew what was likely their best chance to secure a majority.  Harper broke his own election law to call an early election after handing out billions of goodies to boost his party’s poll numbers into what should have been comfortable majority territory, promised tens of billions more in election promises, only to bleed support during the short campaign and wind up with yet another minority, albeit a slightly stronger one.  Worse, Harper now gets to preside over the coming economic downturn, which won’t do his party’s support any favours, and without the majority he needs to cement any legacy.  All that, plus the investigations into electoral spending fraud from the previous election and numerous other scandals that he managed to pre-empt with his election call will start coming out of the woodwork in the near future.  Barring some kind of miracle, this is likely the Conservatives high-water mark for the foreseeable future, and its debatable if Harper will stick around once he sees the party’s fortunes diminishing.

The third, and probably biggest, loser is the Canadian public.  Massive amounts of money, time, and energy wasted to leave us not very far from where we started.  I’m betting there’s going to be lots of unhappy folks waking up this morning.

If there are any winners, the NDP can claim success for doing better than last time, and the Bloc held onto their support.  The Greens?  Well, they remain hapless and seatless despite improving their voter share.

Perhaps the best rundown of the futility of the election comes from Matthew Yglesias.

You’ll see that the three left of center parties (Liberals, NDP, and Greens) got between them 53 percent of the vote. Yet combined they have just 111 seats whereas the Conservatives got 145 seats with 37 percent of the vote. The Greens got 0 seats with 6.5 percent of the popular vote, while since the Bloc Québécois’ supporters are geographically concentrated they get 50 seats with just 8.5 percent of the vote. Basically, the distribution of political power has only a vague relationship to the underlying state of public opinion. If the 25 percent of the population that’s currently voting NDP or Green became more conservative and decided to vote Liberal, then political power would shift left.

Granted the Liberals are not really left-of-centre, (the Bloc is, btw), but they are certainly left of the Conservatives, who have moved considerably to the right in recent years.  Otherwise, that pretty much sums things up.

In any case, this is now the third minority government in a row, and it is probably a safe bet we’ll be back doing this all over again in the not-near-distant-enough future.

Obama over McCain by 14 points

By BJ

A pretty sweet number from the CBS/NYTimes poll just released.

The Obama-Biden ticket now leads the McCain-Palin ticket 53 percent to 39 percent among likely voters, a 14-point margin. One week ago, prior to the Town Hall debate that uncommitted voters saw as a win for Obama, that margin was just three points.

Of course, Nate Silver has to go and rain on my parade.

Presently, our best estimate is that Obama has about an 8-point national lead. However, CBS polls have leaned about 3 points more Democratic than the average this year. In other words, our baseline expectation is that a CBS poll should be showing about an 11-point for Obama right now.

You wind up to the Obama side of the +/- 3 point margin of error, and that's how you get to 14 points.

Ah well, it's still a nice number, and even with Nate's generous interpretation, hardly good news for McCain.

What a great time for a vote

By BJ

Election Day in the Great White North, (literally white in my case).  Given recent polls, it is probably safe to say that the Conservative Party will return to power with another minority government.  It says something about how screwed up an electoral system we have when somewhere between 65-70% of the population will be voting for parties and policies far to the left of the Conservatives and yet they'll be the party given the mandate to govern.  You just can't help but love the first-past-the-post system when there are four or five major parties.

Should be a fun night.

Schadenfreude Alert

By BJ

I really couldn't help but laugh when I read this.

McCain campaign attacks Bill Kristol: 'He's bought into the Obama campaign's party line.'

As John Cole said a little while back, the circular firing squad is going to be fun to watch, and to some extent it already is.

A More Disciplined America

By BJ

There is a lot to like in Fareed Zakaria's latest column for Newsweek. He is, cautiously, optimistic that the current trial by fire the financial industry is forcing on the world and the US particularly will result in some important lessons learned.

Amid all the difficulties and hardship that we are about to undergo, I see one silver lining. This crisis has—dramatically, vengefully—forced the United States to confront the bad habits it has developed over the past few decades. If we can kick those habits, today's pain will translate into gains in the long run.

. . .

At some point, the magical accounting had to stop. At some point, consumers had to stop using their homes as banks and spending money that they didn't have. At some point, the government had to confront its indebtedness. The United States—and other overleveraged societies—have now gotten the wake-up call from hell. If we can respond and change our behavior markedly, this might actually be a blessing in disguise. (Though, as Winston Churchill said when he lost the election of 1945, "at the moment it appears rather effectively disguised.")

And one of Fareed's main suggestions for helping the US to help tide people over during the crisis will be familiar to anyone who read Cernig's post yesterday.

In the short term, all the solutions to the current crisis require that governments take on more debts and larger obligations. This is inevitable and necessary. But that doesn't mean we should, as some noted economists advocate, stimulate the economy with more tax cuts. That would be only one more way to keep the party going artificially—like asking a drunk to go to AA next year, but in the meantime to have even more whisky. A far better stimulus would be to announce and expedite major infrastructure and energy projects, which are investments, not consumption, and therefore have a much different effect on the country's fiscal fortunes. (They are not listed separately in the federal budget, but that's just bad accounting.)

This is actually of double benefit, as North America's infrastructure is a decaying mess that has been chronically underfunded for decades as governments hoped to avoid causing themselves pain at the polls for the cost of upkeep. As the linked Popular Mechanics article puts it:

Americans need to face the sobering reality that the country’s infrastructure is in trouble. Most of it was built in the 20th century, during the greatest age of construction the world has seen. The continent was wired for electricity and phone service, and colossal projects, including the Hoover Dam, the Golden Gate Bridge and the interstate highway system, were completed—along with thousands of smaller bridges, water tunnels and more. We are living off an inheritance of steel-and-concrete wonders, grander than anything built by Rome, constructed by everyday giants bearing trowels, welding torches and rivet guns.

Basically, investing in infrastructure projects would be both good for getting people working and therefore spending again, plus a necessity given the appalling shape much of America's inheritance from previous generations hard work is in.

And Zakaria still has one other important nugget of wisdom.

A new discipline would benefit America in a more general sense, too. Ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States has operated in the world with no constraints or checks on its power. This has not been good for its foreign policy. It has made Washington arrogant, lazy and careless. Its decision making has resembled General Motors' business strategy in the 1970s and 1980s, a process driven largely by a vast array of internal factors but little sense of urgency or awareness of outside pressures. We didn't have to make strategic choices; we could have it all. We could make blunders, anger the world, rupture alliances, waste resources, wage war incompetently—it didn't matter. We had more than enough room for error—lots of error.

But it's a different world out there. If Iraq cast a shadow on U.S. political and military credibility, this financial crisis has eroded America's economic and financial power. In the short run, there has been a flight to safety—toward dollars and T-bills—but in the long run, countries are likely to seek greater independence from an unstable superpower. The United States will now have to work to attract capital to its shores, and manage its fiscal house better. We will have to persuade countries to join in our foreign endeavors. We will have to make strategic choices. We cannot deploy missile interceptors along Russia's borders, draw Georgia and Ukraine into NATO, and still expect Russian cooperation on Iran's nuclear program. We cannot noisily denounce Chinese and Arab foreign investments in America one day and then hope that they will keep buying $4 billion worth of T-bills another day. We cannot keep preaching to the world about democracy and capitalism while our own house is so wildly out of order.

A disciplined foreign policy? With checks on America's power? That will be bitter medicine for those who prefer to believe the glory days will never end and America's hegemony will remain forever unassailable. Given the reins, they would likely continue the disastrous policies that led to this turn of events and thus ensure the inevitable fall would be even further down. Fortunately it appears that there will be an adult in charge for at least the next four years, though I don't envy him the mess that he will inherit.

McCain calls for a "do-over"

By BJ

Do you ever get the feeling sometimes that the Republican Party has been taken over by the editors of The Onion? The Obama campaign has, over the last several weeks, done a fairly good job of painting McCain as being erratic and less-than-dependable in a crisis. In this, McCain himself has been Obama's most significant ally.

McCain's responses, (and the plural is the point), to the economic crisis have been all over the map, and the campaign continued to flail about over the weekend. And now, with only three weeks to go until election day, and tanking in the polls, McCain is apparently going to call for a mulligan.

Bill Kristol, (always wrong, never responsible), leads the charge for McCain to revamp his campaign from the "stupid" attacks Kristol himself called for. To save you the pain of reading through Kristol's column, Tbogg was kind enough to summarize the whole thing:

Since John McCain's campaign to date is totally FUBAR he should just scrap it and start over to demonstrate his sound judgment and steady-handed leadership

And just what is this new "happy warrior" stump speech tack that McCain is about to take?

“The national media has written us off.,” McCain says in excerpts released by the campaign. “Sen. Obama is measuring the drapes and planning with Speaker Pelosi and Sen. Reid to raise taxes, increase spending, take away your right to vote by secret ballot in labor elections and concede defeat in Iraq.

Well, at least he's decided to stop the negativity, eh? I guess he'll leave that to the TV ads.

But they forgot to let you decide. My friends, we’ve got them just where we want them.”

Thanks for the encouragement General Custer. Seriously, you're out making this speech in Virginia and North Carolina, and you sent our VP candidate to West Virginia recently. West Virginia! I don't think Obama is even trying to win that state.

The latest poll from the Washington Post and ABC has Obama up by ten points, improving his favourabilty scores while McCain's are suffering. In short, McCain's odds are looking increasingly long. Near as I can tell, the only real chances for McCain to turn this around are to hope for some externalities like a national security disaster or a great deal of covert racism.

If this is where McCain wanted the race to be, I'm frankly terrified to consider where things would have to be to cause him concern.

Ah well, maybe he has a plan to suspend his campaign again and refuse to participate in the vote on November 4th while there's such a serious economic crisis going on, and that if Obama doesn't follow suit, it will be proof that he's more interested in winning the election than solving America's problems.

VDH: McCain's vicious campaign a myth

By BJ

You can't help but love the VD man. He's such an easy target, and his latest assault on reason is no exception, as he expresses complete befuddlement over why many moderates are being turned off by McCain's negative campaigning and the disturbing tone his campaign rallies have had over the last week or two. The funny part is that his main defense seems to be that Republicans have been far more racist and ugly in the recent past.

A couple of thoughts: the George Bush, Sr. / Willie Horton campaign was far tougher; so were the Bush 2000/2004 efforts. If anything, McCain’s campaign is subdued in comparison to what we’ve seen on both sides in past years.

After all, talking about how someone would rather lose a war than lose an election, or how they don't see America as we do, or how they pal around with terrorists, have speakers who repeatedly make use of Obama's middle name, and whose volunteers send out letters claiming he's an Arab/Muslim terrorist really shouldn't reflect on McCain and the Republicans, should it? I mean, it isn't like like they're going out there linking their opponent to Osama bin Laden, is it? Oh, right.

With so much at stake, and time running short, Frederick did not feel he had the luxury of subtlety. He climbed atop a folding chair to give 30 campaign volunteers who were about to go canvassing door to door their talking points — for instance, the connection between Barack Obama and Osama bin Laden: "Both have friends that bombed the Pentagon," he said. "That is scary."

But hey! Like Hanson says, it's just a few random nutcases out there, (that the Secret Service has to look into), and it's nothing like the mean and horrible things Obama's supporters are spreading about McCain!

Second, for about 3 months all we’ve heard are references to McCain’s age, with adjectives and phrases like confused, can’t remember any more, disturbed, lost his bearings, etc.

I mean, honestly! Can you imagine the gall of people going around implying McCain may be getting on in years! Clearly the Obama camp can't make any protests. The fact that McCain, Palin, and their supporters are out there claiming Obama hates America, hates the troops, and may in fact be linked to al Qaeda is just self-defense to these outrageous smears about McCain being not-young! I mean, anyone who can't see the equivalence of that just isn't looking hard enough.

And truly, what would be the response if some bigoted white minister like Hagee, or Robertson, or this guy were to pledge their support to McCain?

At a McCain event, as the crowd waited for McCain himself to arrive, Pastor Arnold Conrad of the Grace Evangelical Free Church of Davenport, Iowa, gave an invocation that included the following: "I would also pray, Lord, that your reputation is involved in all that happens between now and November, because there are millions of people around this world praying to their god—whether it's Hindu, Buddha, Allah—that his opponent wins, for a variety of reasons. And Lord, I pray that you will guard your own reputation, because they’re going to think that their God is bigger than you, if that happens. So I pray that you will step forward and honor your own name with all that happens between now and Election Day."

Really! Can you imagine the outrage? I'm sure we'd see nothing else on the major networks and blogs for weeks!

I suppose we can only hope, as VDH does, that in years to come, those who have been decrying the clearly not-nasty McCain's campaign tactics will come to see the light of how ruthless and unfair a campaigner Obama has been. Alas, it is probably too late now to keep the n****r out of office.

I mean, . . . uh, . . . uh, . . .

Aw, screw it!

The Wisdom of Mobs

By BJ

It is nice to see that after his media base was getting scared of the kinds of crowds he was attracting, John McCain decided to try and dampen down the formation of the lynch mobs. I'm going to hold off being too impressed for a few days at least, given McCain's made these kinds of moves towards decency before, only to turn right around and continue his previous actions.

It doesn't help that if you watch the videos, it almost looks like McCain is forcing himself to say these things through gritted teeth. It doesn't help that McCain's campaign is out there defending the people who have been shouting out the most incendiary remarks. And it really doesn't help that McCain's running mate, who has been at the forefront of these smear attacks all along, is out there continuing to fan the very flames McCain is supposedly trying to damp down. As Khalid Hosseini puts it:

The McCain-Palin ticket has given toxic speeches accusing Obama of being a friend of terrorists, then released short, meek repudiations of some of the rough stuff, including McCain's call Friday to "be respectful." Back in February, the Arizona senator apologized for the "disparaging remarks" from a talk-radio host who sneered repeatedly about "Barack Hussein Obama" before a McCain rally. "We will have a respectful debate," McCain insisted afterward. But pretending to douse flames that you are busy fanning does not qualify as straight talk.

What I find most unconscionable is the refusal of the McCain-Palin tandem to publicly condemn the cries of "traitor," "liar," "terrorist" and (worst of all) "kill him!" that could be heard at recent rallies. McCain is perfectly capable of telling hecklers off. But not once did he or his running mate bother to admonish the people yelling these obscene -- and potentially dangerous -- words. They may not have been able to hear the slurs at the rallies, but surely they have had ample time since to get on camera and warn that this sort of ugliness has no place in an election season. But they have not. Simply calling Obama "a decent person" is not enough.

Now, I expect that McCain will offer a few more of these grit-teethed calls for respect so that his media base will be able to forgive and forget all of his actions this election cycle and go back to the buddy-buddy BBQ days, but the real person to watch at this point is Governor Palin.

This is McCain's last grasp for the ring, and he'll start fading away when the run is over. Palin, on the other hand, has tasted the national spotlight and soaked up the adoration of the far-right base, and is no doubt looking to 2012 as an opportunity. She's the one out there telling her supporters, (and they are her supporters), that McCain should "take the gloves off", and as such, she'll be in excellent position on November 5th to claim that the reason McCain lost was because the campaign wasn't nasty enough.

Fester noted earlier the article by Paul Krugman speculating that the bile that will be heaped upon Obama after the election will make even the insanity of the Clinton years look tame in comparison. I'm far less sanguine about fester's conclusion that such tactics won't be effective this time out. Given the clear trajectory we're all on into some serious economic hardships over the next few years, the framing of it all being the fault of an illegitimate usurper who befriends terrorists and waves the white flag of surrender to America's enemies will likely find some powerful resonance. Scape-goating our problems always does, which is why we're entering such dangerous times, and it wouldn't surprise me to see Palin carrying the banner for all that insanity as she is now.

The GOP base loves her for it, and are already lining up to defend Palin from the consequences of her abusing power in Alaska, just as she'll be able to count on blaming McCain's "too honorable" campaign as the reason they lost. Get used to her. It's a safe bet you're looking at the future of the Republican Party.

Bugs and Daffy

By BJ

The contrast between the two major candidates for president is growing increasingly obvious, and I can't help but go back to a comparison from much earlier this year that used the iconic cartoon characters to make the point:

Bugs and Daffy represent polar opposites in how to deal with the world. Bugs is at ease, laid back, secure, confident. His lidded eyes and sly smile suggest a sense that he knows the way things work. He's onto the cons of his adversaries. . . . Bugs never raises his voice, never flails at his opponents or at the world. He is rarely an aggressor. When he is pushed too far and must respond, he borrows a quip from Groucho Marx: "Of course, you realize this means war." And then, whether his foe is hapless hunter Elmer Fudd, varmint-shooting Yosemite Sam, or a raging bull, Bugs always prevails.

Daffy Duck, by contrast, is ever at war with a hostile world. He fumes, he clenches his fists, his eyes bulge, and his entire body tenses with fury. His response to bad news is a sibilant sneer ("Thanks for the sour persimmons, cousin!"). Daffy is constantly frustrated, sometimes by outside forces, sometimes by his own overwrought response to them. In one classic duel with Bugs, the two try to persuade Elmer Fudd to shoot the other—until Daffy, tricked by Bugs' wordplay, screams, "Shoot me now!"

You honestly couldn't get a much better description of the two candidates if you tried, right down to the recent Obama-Biden calling out McCain and all but questioning his manhood to see if they can get him riled up enough to shoot himself in the foot again. You suspect it's the equivalent of Bugs enticing the bull to charge with the red cape that just happens to have an anvil parked behind it.

McCain's temper is legendary, and his actions of the past few months; the Palin choice, the campaign suspension, the incoherent and ever-changing response to the credit crisis, have "Daffy" written all over them.

Meanwhile, "Bugs" Obama leans back, smiles, and carries on about his business of winning the election.

I love the smell of Panic in the morning

By BJ

I guess all of those bailout plans haven't exactly restored confidence in the marketplace for a lot of people. The Dow crashed below 9,000 yesterday, and this morning brings news of other markets following suit.

Stock markets across Europe have fallen steeply after dramatic share price falls in Asia.

The FTSE 100 share index was down 8% at 3,964 points. It opened 9.8% lower at 3887 points, below the 4,000-point level for the first time in five years.

There were similar falls across Europe - Paris was down 8.4% while Germany was down 9.1%

Investors fear a global slowdown, despite interest rate cuts and huge cash injections by central banks.

In other major developments:

* Tokyo's shares plunged 24% during the week, double their weekly fall during the 1987 market crash
* Oil prices plummeted to a one-year low in European trading, with the price of US crude oil falling below $83 a barrel.
* The three-month rate at which banks lend dollars to each other - known as Libor - has risen to 4.8%
* Finance ministers from the G7 are to meet in Washington later and President Bush is to make an address to the American people.
* Moscow and Jakarta stock markets remain suspended because of excessive volatility
* Trading in the Vienna market was suspended until Friday afternoon.

At this point a global slowdown is pretty much a guarantee, though it should be interesting to see what the whiz kids come up with over the weekend to try and stem the tide. In the meantime, I would continue the preparations.

Things I wish I had written

By BJ

The time has come to ask: What might happen to our country if we elect a black Muslim terrorist president?

Polls and Ceilings

By BJ

Since Barack Obama is doing almost obscenely well in the polls these days, (his lead in Gallup's particularly seems just too high to maintain), it is probably worth noting that we shouldn't be expecting it to remain so, and Chris Bowers of Open Left has an excellent post for those of us who get caught up watching the daily tracking polls. Among his specific points:

8.5% is the maximum victory:

Polls aren't static:

Peaks are called that for a reason:

Read the whole thing, it is too good and detailed for me to be able to summarize. However, Nate Silver makes a pertinent point about the current state of the race:

The better a candidate's standing in the polls, the harder it ought to be pick up additional support. In part, this is simply because the more voters that you have in your column, the fewer there are available to convert. But this is still a highly partisan country, we tend to have close elections, and things certainly aren't going to be any easier for a black candidate.

If Obama is ahead by something like 7-8 points ahead nationally, that means that he has persuaded just about all of the persuadables, and he's left looking to covert people like those in Ben Smith's anecdote.

An Obama supporter, who canvassed for the candidate in the working-class, white Philadelphia neighborhood of Fishtown recently, sends over an account that, in various forms, I've heard a lot in recent weeks.

"What's crazy is this," he writes. "I was blown away by the outright racism, but these folks are f***ing undecided. They would call him a n----r and mention how they don't know what to do because of the economy."

If those sorts of people are the undecideds -- and when Obama is winning Pennsylvania by 12 points or something, that's probably what we're looking at -- then Obama really is scraping the bottom of the barrel. Further gains are going to be difficult to come by, which means that his polls are more likely to go down than to continue going up. (Indeed, our model assumes that the race will tighten some).

Basically, even though it is widely acknowledged that Obama won the debate last night, we shouldn't expect to his lead widen even further, and it is more likely that the race will tighten as it did in most of the national trackers today. Meaning we all shouldn't panic when that happens. It will take something far more significant to put McCain in actual striking distance.

On the other hand, it never hurts to have an escape plan prepared.

The E.L.I.T.E. Plan

By BJ

This probably would have been a bit funnier, (or scarier), a few weeks ago when it looked like McCain was a lot closer to winning then he does now, but its still worth a few laughs.

Of course, it would make more sense were it not for the fact that we in the Great White North weren't about to shortly re-elect our own Republi-clone to another term as Prime Minister. On the bright side, it appears that we won't be giving Harper his much sought after majority.

Stéphane Dion's Liberals have crept closer to the Conservatives in public support, while Canadians' increasing fears over an uncertain economy appear to be carving away at Stephen Harper's electoral hopes, a new poll suggests.

The latest Canadian Press/Harris-Decima poll gave Harper's Conservatives 31 per cent support across Canada, just four percentage points clear of the resurgent Liberals, who rose to 27 per cent support.

"It's a very interesting and tightening race," said the CBC's David Taylor, who is covering the various public opinion surveys ahead of the Oct. 14 federal election.

The New Democrats had 20 per cent support, with the Greens at 12 and the Bloc Québécois at eight per cent.

Four of every 10 poll respondents — particularly women, city-dwellers and older, affluent voters — say the roller-coaster markets are causing them to rethink their vote, largely at the expense of the Tories, said Harris-Decima president Bruce Anderson.

I must admit to some small satisfaction that the more uncertain the economic climate, the less likely people are to trust their leadership to someone who espouses the same economic ideals as Bush and McCain. Also somewhat ironic that if it weren't for the fact that we Canadians were fortunate enough to spend the majority of the last eight years under the fiscally Small-c conservative, (i.e - responsible), Liberals, we'd be feeling the pain of the current crisis far worse than we are so far, and the Cons wouldn't stand a chance.

In any case, i take some succor in the knowledge that the Republi-clones control of our government will be limited, and hopefully short-lived.

(PS - You can head over to The Beav' for a catchy tune along the lines of the above video)

Counterpunching Works

By BJ

It will take a little while to see if they really mean it, but it appears that the McCain campaign has decided to back off the Ayers/Wright/Rezko attacks:

It's hard to know for sure what the thinking is behind all of this. It's possible that the McCain campaign talked up these attacks just to reintroduce the concept to voters and reporters, and never had any real intention to pursue this tack. Given Sarah Palin's recent rhetoric, though, this seems unlikely. This really was going to be a major offensive.

So why pull back? Probably because it was a spectacularly bad idea to shift the campaign's focus away from the economy in the midst of a financial meltdown and deep voter/consumer anxiety.

Greg Sargent added that the shift "suggests that the McCain campaign's internal polling on how the Ayers stuff is playing is just brutal, likely among independents. It also suggests that Obama's counter-attack -- lambasting McCain's campaign for wanting to change the subject from the economy to personal attacks -- has been effective."

Personally, I think the Republicans haven't had to deal with a Democrat who is willing and able to counter their attacks so effectively. As I said earlier:

I've always thought Obama was at his best as a counterpuncher, and one of the main goals of the counterpunch is to make your opponent think about running into a sharp counter whenever they unload their own punches, resulting in their becoming more hesitant to unleash attacks. If your opponent is undisciplined, such counters can also provoke them into doing something rash. We'll see over the next few days if McCain is feeling the sting and how he deals with it.

It looks like they're definitely feeling the sting.

Another Debate, Another Obama Victory

By BJ

First, I feel sorry for anyone who actually tunes into these things hoping for a substantive discussion of the issues. By now it should be obvious that the debates mostly gloss the issues over. You’d get as much information by watching the debate on mute. It would be nice if the debates actually did provide some actual substance, but the truth of the matter is that neither candidate wants to admit that we’re headed into the shitter and there’s nothing they can really do about it.

And let’s be honest. The reason they are unwilling to do so is because the voters will punish them for it. We may know that the outlook is bleak, but we still want our leaders to provide reassurance that they can correct the problem, even if we suspect they’re lying.

Frankly, I’m of the opinion that if you truly are basing your vote on the candidate’s stance on the issues, you’ve long since decided. What’s left now is people’s comfort level with the candidates, which is a big part of the reason the McCain campaign is into character assaults now.

So for Obama, appearing more “Presidential”, more professional, less angry, cool under fire, and so forth, is a direct rebuke to the character attacks. It is also of some note that McCain can’t manage to bring up said attacks in the debate format. In this as in many things, John Cole says it best:

Finally, I guess what it boils down to is that, McCain, for all his tough guy talk, is just a tired old wimp. Given ninety minutes to go after Obama like he and his partner and his surrogates have the past few days, and he said nothing. Given all that time to question Obama’s patriotism, to question his background, to suggest he does not support the troops, and McCain refused to do it. Why didn’t he look him in the eyes and call him Sen. Hussein like his surrogates are doing? Or is that just supposed to be in the background, to make Obama look suspect, to accuse him of being in league with terrorists- but like every punk and every bully he can’t own up to it himself.

On the other hand, Obama, every time he landed a punch, it was something he has done above board, in public. There is no scummy underbelly launching into questions of character- all his punches were fair, legitimate, and issue based. All his punches were on things he had mentioned before, publicly, things he is man enough to put in his commercials and repeat right in John McCain’s face.

What a sad, pathetic, small man John McCain has turned into right before our very eyes.

As another commentator noted before the debate, McCain is caught in a catch-22. He desperately needs a game-changer, but if he comes out with the nasty attacks that his die-hard haters supporters want him to launch, he looks like the nasty, erratic old man that the Obama camp has been portraying him as, and if he doesn’t do so, he’s the sad, pathetic, small man Cole describes above.

So while Obama hasn't won yet, McCain has less and less time to turn things around, and this debate certainly didn't help him do that. As such, I think McCain’s position is best summed up by this line:

John McCain may not be toast, but he’s certainly approaching English muffin territory.

Let's Get Ready to Rumble!

By BJ

Not satisfied with Silly Season, it appears the last month of the campaign is going to be Nasty Season. While it is unfortunate to see that the campaign for President has come to this, I’m also forced to agree that Obama is handling the McCain campaign’s easily foreseeable assault in the right way.

McCain, by his campaign’s own admission, is desperately trying to “turn the page” on the campaign focus from the economy to Obama’s character and to raise as many questions about that character and his past associations as they can.

Now, it doesn’t matter that they’re so bankrupt for ideas that they’re recycling already debunked attacks, or that most of what they’ll fire Obama’s way are groundless or made up, and it doesn’t matter how well the Obama campaign responds and further debunks the attacks. All people would see from the media is:

(Strong) McCain on the attack. (Weak) Obama on the defensive.

McCain's goal was to take the initiative in the campaign and force Obama into a defensive crouch responding to his attacks. Instead, the Obama camp is launching what appears to be a long-planned counter-attack.

The message is plain. If you want to attack us on our past associations, we’ll attack right back with your past actions, and our attacks are going to be all the more powerful because they are about you and your actions and not just what somebody you knew did back when you were a child. All the better that Obama's attack also ties in well with the economic mess the McCain camp is so desperate to get off the front page.

Now instead of merely sharpening their attacks on Obama, McCain and Palin are going to have to defend against Obama’s counterattacks, and we already know how little McCain likes to deal with more than one issue at a time. As an added bonus, this can’t be doing McCain’s already angry and annoyed temperament any good.

And now the media narrative is at worst a tale of dueling assaults rather than a one-sided beat-down.

I've always thought Obama was at his best as a counterpuncher, and one of the main goals of the counterpunch is to make your opponent think about running into a sharp counter whenever they unload their own punches, resulting in their becoming more hesitant to unleash attacks. If your opponent is undisciplined, such counters can also provoke them into doing something rash. We'll see over the next few days if McCain is feeling the sting and how he deals with it.

McCain to cut Medicare and Medicaid

By BJ

You almost have to wonder if McCain is just giving up at this point. As Josh Marshal notes, this announcement isn't going to help McCain make up lost ground in Florida.

John McCain would pay for his health plan with major reductions to Medicare and Medicaid, a top aide said, in a move that independent analysts estimate could result in cuts of $1.3 trillion over 10 years to the government programs.

The Republican presidential nominee has said little about the proposed cuts, but they are needed to keep his health-care plan "budget neutral," as he has promised. The McCain campaign hasn't given a specific figure for the cuts, but didn't dispute the analysts' estimate.

In the months since Sen. McCain introduced his health plan, statements made by his campaign have implied that the new tax credits he is proposing to help Americans buy health insurance would be paid for with other tax increases.

But Douglas Holtz-Eakin, Sen. McCain's senior policy adviser, said Sunday that the campaign has always planned to fund the tax credits, in part, with savings from Medicare and Medicaid. Those government health-care programs serve seniors, poor families and the disabled. Medicare spending for the fiscal year ended Sept. 30 is estimated at $457.5 billion.

Of course, you should expect that McCain would look to gut any semblance of government-run healthcare programs in the US, but Americans aren't quite as afraid of getting the kind of government-sponsored, guaranteed health care that John McCain has enjoyed his entire life. This is the campaign equivalent of shooting yourself in the foot.

Climate News

By BJ

A couple of important stories from the last couple of weeks regarding the deteriorating state of our climate. The first notes that carbon dioxide output is at record levels.

The world pumped up its pollution of the chief man-made global warming gas last year, setting a course that could push beyond leading scientists' projected worst-case scenario, international researchers said Thursday.

The new numbers, called "scary" by some, were a surprise because scientists thought an economic downturn would slow energy use. Instead, carbon dioxide output jumped 3 percent from 2006 to 2007.

That's an amount that exceeds the most dire outlook for emissions from burning coal and oil and related activities as projected by a Nobel Prize-winning group of international scientists in 2007.

Meanwhile, forests and oceans, which suck up carbon dioxide, are doing so at lower rates than in the 20th century, scientists said. If those trends continue, they put the world on track for the highest predicted rises in temperature and sea level.

The quote at the very bottom is the most telling.

If this trend continues for the century, "you'd have to be luckier than hell for it just to be bad, as opposed to catastrophic," said Stanford University climate scientist Stephen Schneider.

Given our track record so far, I'd bet on the catastrophic, and part of the reason for that is contained in the second story. Because while carbon dioxide is the gas we've been trained to look at when discussing Climate Change, it is far from the only greenhouse gas, and one of the bigger menaces resulting from a warming Arctic is now clearly raising its head.

The first evidence that millions of tons of a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide is being released into the atmosphere from beneath the Arctic seabed has been discovered by scientists.

. . .

Underground stores of methane are important because scientists believe their sudden release has in the past been responsible for rapid increases in global temperatures, dramatic changes to the climate, and even the mass extinction of species. Scientists aboard a research ship that has sailed the entire length of Russia's northern coast have discovered intense concentrations of methane – sometimes at up to 100 times background levels – over several areas covering thousands of square miles of the Siberian continental shelf.

In the past few days, the researchers have seen areas of sea foaming with gas bubbling up through "methane chimneys" rising from the sea floor. They believe that the sub-sea layer of permafrost, which has acted like a "lid" to prevent the gas from escaping, has melted away to allow methane to rise from underground deposits formed before the last ice age.

. . .

The amount of methane stored beneath the Arctic is calculated to be greater than the total amount of carbon locked up in global coal reserves so there is intense interest in the stability of these deposits as the region warms at a faster rate than other places on earth.

But remember, to actually do anything to mitigate or adapt to these kinds of changes might be harmful to our economy, (what's left of it).

We are so screwed.

Poison Pill - Continued

By BJ

To build a bit on Ron's post below, one of the reasons the executives say they are having second thoughts about the bailout is because they believe the market is bottoming out. Right now, I'd lay the odds of the market having hit bottom already as next to non-existant. As this story in the LA Times notes, the bad news is probably only beginning.

Even if the financial bailout plan begins to work, the nation will be lucky if all it experiences is a bad slowdown. The alternative, economists say, is something much worse -- a contraction that might go on for years.

The latest sign of trouble came Friday when the government reported that American employers sliced September payrolls by 159,000 jobs, the ninth straight month of losses and one that puts the country on track to shed a million jobs this year.

But jobs are only part of the trouble; almost every major player in the economy -- which had been growing until recently, if only slowly -- is now beating a hasty retreat:

* Consumers, who account for more than two-thirds of the nation's total economic activity and who boosted their spending earlier in the year thanks in part to more than $100 billion in government stimulus checks, have reversed course and begun cutting expenditures. Real consumption, after adjustment for inflation, slipped two-tenths of a point in June, a half-point in July and flat-lined in August, the latest month for which numbers are available, according to the government's Bureau of Economic Analysis.

* Manufacturers, many of whom had managed to profit because the weak U.S. dollar helped boost exports, have seen their business begin to dry up in recent months. New factory orders unexpectedly dropped 4% in August, the Commerce Department said Friday, the biggest decline in two years. Capital goods orders, a key indicator of companies' future investment plans, slipped 2.4%, the biggest drop in more than a year and a half.

* Governments, especially state governments, have begun making steep cuts. In all, 29 of the 50 states had already cut spending, raised taxes or tapped emergency funds to balance their budgets for the fiscal year that began July 1, said Nicholas Johnson, an analyst with the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington. But 15 of those states, including Arizona and New York, are back in the red; stalling economic growth has caused their already shrunken tax revenues to contract further.

The combination of consumers hunkering down, manufacturers losing orders and states making cuts has economists slashing their growth forecasts for the coming months and years.

This is all part of the cycle that makes really bad recessions so hard to pull out of. More people out of work, means fewer people buying things, means fewer products being produced, means fewer jobs, means even less money to reinvigorate the economy. So whatever reluctance the fat cats are having to seeing their executive compensation cut, they had best consider the consequences of trying to wait it out. Or, as John Cole says:

If they are wrong, and bring about financial armageddon due to sheer greed, well, at least we know who to blame.

I find myself wondering if I should stock up on the torches and pitchforks.

Georgia not so Rosy Anymore

By BJ

Way back in August when the major fighting between Russia and Georgia died down, I had this to say about Georgian president Saakashvili:

How much Saakashvili will pay personally for his blunder is as yet hard to say. The people of Georgia followed the old pattern of "rally 'round the flag" while the bombs were dropping, but once the war starts to recede, so does the rationale for rallying around the guy who started it. At a guess, his remaining in power "democratically" seems rather unlikely.

As I expected, now that the Russian Bear is no longer mauling the Georgian military infrastructure, the internal divisions that the West has done its best to ignore in favour of the narrative of, "Saakashvili the freedom-loving democrat", have started to show signs of opening up again.

An influential group of Georgian opposition leaders has mounted a blistering political campaign against U.S.-backed President Mikheil Saakashvili, accusing his government of running an autocratic regime that tramples human rights and stifles democracy.

The timing could embarrass the Bush administration, which is pressing NATO members to approve an action plan for Georgia — a key step toward full membership — at the organization's meeting in December.

The claims by many in the opposition, some of which have been affirmed by a top Georgian human-rights official, go to the heart of Washington's rationale for backing Saakashvili as a democratic force in a region where Russia is trying to re-establish dominance.

And proving just how well they've learned from their mentors, the Georgian government is quick to claim that any dissenters in their "democracy" are agents of the enemy, whether knowingly or not.

The Ground Game

By BJ

Like Ron, I find myself growing more optimistic at the prospect of getting used to saying "President Obama" over the four years. It is a guarded optimism, as there are still a number of things that could change the race's dynamics.

It is also clear that the McCain campaign has clearly decided that they can't win over any more people to their sinking cause and have now went into 100% smear mode for the rest of the month until election day.

As a result of this and other factors, I would expect the poll numbers to tighten over the next week at least. However, while McCain and the Republicans are masters of the kind of tactics that in the short-term can win elections, Obama has shown the clear edge in strategic vision and planning that set up for a real victory over the long-term.

For any who have been whining about how it is that Obama hasn't pulled away in a year that highly favours the Democratic Party, remember that we're talking about a Black man with an Arabic sounding name in post-9/11 America running against a very popular war hero on top of one of the most effective electoral machines in American political history. The fact that he now has a clear lead is as impressive an accomplishment in politics as I've ever seen in my admittedly short adult life. Obama's ability to take the strategic view is the main reason for that, and one of the most important aspects of that strategic groundwork he's laid is one of the major reasons for my optimism.

Here's Sean Quinn from fivethirtyeight:

Let’s be clear. We've observed no comparison between these ground campaigns. To begin with, there’s a 4-1 ratio of offices in most states. We walk into McCain offices to find them closed, empty, one person, two people, sometimes three people making calls. Many times one person is calling while the other small clutch of volunteers are chatting amongst themselves. In one state, McCain’s state field director sat in one of these offices and, sotto voice, complained to us that only one man was making calls while the others were talking to each other about how much they didn't like Obama, which was true. But the field director made no effort to change this. This was the state field director.

Only for the first time the other day did we see a McCain organizer make a single phone call. So we've now seen that once. The McCain organizers seem to operate as maître Ds. Let me escort you to your phone, sir. Pick any one of this sea of empty chairs. I'll be sitting over here if you need any assistance.

. . .

The McCain offices are also calm, sedate. Little movement. No hustle. In the Obama offices, it's a whirlwind. People move. It's a dynamic bustle. You can feel it in our photos.

Up to this point, we’ve been giving McCain's ground campaign a lot of benefit of the doubt. We can’t stop convincing ourselves that there must – must – be a warehouse full of 1,000 McCain volunteers somewhere in a national, central location just dialing away. This can’t be all they’re doing. Because even in a place like Colorado Springs, McCain’s ground campaign is getting blown away by the Obama efforts. It doesn't mean Obama will win Colorado Springs, but it means Obama's campaign will not look itself in the mirror afterward and ask, "what more could we have done?"

You could take every McCain volunteer we’ve seen doing actual work in the entire trip, over six states, and it would add up to the same as Obama’s single Thornton, CO office. Or his single Durango, CO office. These ground campaigns bear no relationship to each other.

This is probably one of the most under-reported stories of this election cycle and may yet prove to be one of the most significant factors in outcome. I read somewhere that a good ground campaign can make up for up to a five-point deficit in the polls. As Ron pointed out, there already isn't a state Obama needs where he isn't already up by SIX points, and its clear that McCain's ground campaign isn't going to outmaneuver Obama's.

Finally, a note on early voting.

From what I've read, it is estimated that as many as one-third of all voters will be casting their ballots early this year. That casting is going on right now while Obama has a clear lead in many polls, which is tantamount to Obama putting votes in the bank. Every day that McCain continues to trail is a day he has to play even more than catch-up to be competitive on election day.

So all in all, I'd say that optimism is warranted.

Terror Attack in South Ossetia

By BJ

Another in the long line of indicators that in the world today, wars don't end just because the armies have stopped fighting. The situation in Georgia still hasn't fully played out.

A blast in Georgia's breakaway region of South Ossetia killed seven Russian soldiers, a Russian commander says.

The deaths happened when a car full of explosives blew up near a Russian military base in the regional capital, Tskhinvali, local officials said.

Granted "Terror Attack", may be the wrong term to use. After all, the perpetrators were most certainly Christians and it was Russian soldiers being killed instead of American ones. Maybe this is one those good, "freedom-type" bombs that the forces of democracy use. After all, as we've been told over the last several years, terrorism isn't so much a tactic as it is the philosophy behind the attacks, or something.

Now, it is too early to say who is ultimately responsible for this attack, but you can be certain that the American response to any possible Georgian government role will be far different than the kinds of charges they throw out routinely to nations like Iran whenever a bomb goes off in Iraq or Afghanistan. Perhaps someone can ask them after we've given them membership in NATO? (Granted none too likely these days.) Hypocrisy in action is ever amusing to observe.

The Downward Spiral of Afghanistan

By BJ

It remains to be seen whether or not the war in Afghanistan will displace Iraq as the defining campaign issue for foreign policy. (Any more than one and journalists might have to do some research instead of just repeating the conventional wisdom they help to create.) What isn’t a question is that the fighting on the ground is far worse in Afghanistan than in Iraq, and there is more proof of that out today.

British forces are now being killed in Afghanistan at a faster rate than during the invasion of Iraq.

This year has been the bloodiest year so far in Afghanistan for the Nato and US missions there since the Taleban was removed from government in 2001, with senior defence officials in the UK admitting that the Taleban are proving "more resilient" than expected.

Parts of Afghanistan are on a "spiral downwards", according to the incoming US Commander of Centcom, General David Petraeus, in charge of a wide area including all US operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The death toll amongst American soldiers has been higher in Afghanistan than Iraq for months already, which is even more significant when you consider that the number of US troops in Afghanistan is only about a fifth of what they are in Iraq. As noted here a while back, the death rate in Afghanistan has surpassed the rate of the bloodiest fighting in Iraq.

I noted here several months ago that one of the main differences between McCain and Obama on foreign policy was that Obama had a sense of the greater strategic picture while McCain focused inordinately on individual states and tactics. You can see this most blatantly when McCain refuses to acknowledge that to get more troops into Afghanistan, you would have to remove them from Iraq. He’s all about the tactics. The troops to carry those tactics out will apparently just magically appear.

One thing last night’s VP debate did do was make this difference between the Obama and McCain camps views a little more stark. Palin was in talking point territory the entire time, so it makes for easy reference. Iraq? The Surge! Afghanistan? Afghan Surge! The tribal regions in Pakistan? Let’s talk about that Afghan Surge! Your god only knows what she would have come up with had a question came up about Somalia.

The ability to see this in an overall strategic way is important in part for the reason that Bill Lind explores in his latest “On War” installment. The US faces a war on two fronts without the advantage of interior lines to shift forces rapidly from one front to the other. With interior lines, a nation can shift forces back and forth between the two fronts rapidly to deal with outbursts of violence. In America’s case, a shift in forces is a long-term proposition. The forces are needed in Afghanistan, but if the forces are shifted there and violence in Iraq goes back up, the US will be stuck without a reserve to deal with it.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we had a President who understood that going in?

Pre-Debate Prediction

By BJ

In a word: Anti-climatic.

I honestly don't know how the expectations game is going to work for Palin. On the one hand, her interview segments with Couric have driven expectations of her down so far that clearing them should be as difficult as a high jump over a garter snake. But on the other hand, there have been a spate of stories over the last few days pumping up her abilities as a debater. I would assume the former will outweigh the latter on the expectations game, but as another commentator noted recently, there is still a minimum bar people expect a VP candidate to meet, and it is as yet unknown if Palin can approach that bar with just one half-decent debate performance.

It probably does say something that I can't find anybody expecting her to be more than mildly competent tonight.

However, the real advantage for Palin, (and disadvantage for voters), is that the debate format tonight is basically designed to avoid much in the way of real answers. To summarize the Slate article linked above, the format allows for short sound-bite answers and discourages follow-ups. Palin only really got into trouble with Katie Couric because Couric would repeat questions or ask follow-ups that forced Palin to try and come with an actual answer. For the most part, she'll be able to avoid that problem for the 90 minutes this debate lasts, though there is of course still the possibility she'll make some unforced errors.

It should be noted that the time-limited answers should also help motor-mouth Biden from planting his feet in his mouth overly often as well.

Basically, the format is conductive to producing boredom, and given that up here in Canuckistan our leaders are set to bash each other over the heads tonight as well, I'll probably wind up watching that "debate" instead. (Or more likely, flip back and forth between the two while wondering how much rum I can safely consume and still show up for work in the morning. Unfortunately, I'm sure the answer isn't enough to make either debate tolerable.)

Ultimately, I'm back to where I started, the debate itself will be anti-climatic and change next to nothing, though I'm sure there will be some furious spinning from both sides to claim the contrary.

McCain to Surrender Michigan?

By BJ

Sorry Fester, it appears that the McCain camp has decided to pull out of Michigan instead of Pennsylvania.

John McCain is pulling out of Michigan, according to two Republicans, a stunning move a month away from Election Day that indicates the difficulty Republicans are having in finding blue states to put in play.

McCain will go off TV in Michigan, stop dropping mail there and send most of his staff to more competitive states, including Wisconsin, Ohio and Florida.   Wisconsin went for Kerry in 2004, Ohio and Florida for Bush.

I’m somewhat surprised at the timing of this.  I would have expected McCain to hold on for at least another week or so, but as Fester mentioned in his post, McCain’s finances are constrained, and so we see him starting to abandon pick up opportunities, which, excepting some of the truly long-shot cases, are always interpreted as a sign that a campaign is in trouble.

Blowback Brewing from the Horn

By BJ

Granted that we’ve already had the “foreign policy” debate for this presidential race, but I’d really like to hear the candidates views on that other conflict the “War on Terror” inspired, the one in the Horn of Africa whose main belligerents are Ethiopia and Somalia, but also involves Eritrea and Kenya, along with the US, of course.

The latest news involves a rendition-type program between Kenya and Ethiopia with CIA involvement.

In late 2006, the Bush administration backed a full-scale Ethiopian military offensive that ousted the Islamist authorities from Somalia's capital, Mogadishu. The fighting caused thousands of Somalis, including some who were suspected of terrorist links, to flee across the Kenya border.

Kenyan authorities arrested at least 150 men, women and children from more than 18 countries -- including the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada -- in operations near the Somali border, and held them for weeks without charge in Nairobi. In January and February 2007, the Kenyan government then unlawfully put dozens of these individuals -- with no notice to families, lawyers or the detainees themselves -- on flights to Somalia, where they were handed over to the Ethiopian military. Ethiopian forces also arrested an unknown number of people in Somalia.

Those rendered were later transported to detention centers in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa and other parts of Ethiopia, where they effectively disappeared. Denied access to their embassies, their families and international humanitarian organizations such as the International Committee of the Red Cross, the detainees were even denied phone calls home. Several detainees have said that they were housed in solitary cells, some as small as two meters by two meters, with their hands cuffed in painful positions behind their backs and their feet bound together any time they were in their cells.

An unknown number of them -- likely dozens -- were questioned by the Central Intelligence Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation agents in Addis Ababa. From February to May 2007, Ethiopian security officers daily transported detainees -- including several pregnant women -- to a villa where U.S. officials interrogated them about suspected terrorist links. At night the Ethiopian officers returned the detainees to their cells.

As horrid as some of the treatment of these men and women was and probably still is, the importance to Americans lies in the involvement, and even more the perception of involvement, of the US in these kinds of activities.

Almost everyone I spoke with assumed -- whether true or not -- that the United States backed the arbitrary arrest and unlawful rendition of men like Ishmael and the still-detained Kenyans. Almost everyone assumed that the Ethiopians operate with America's blessing. Their stories have circulated, fueling anger and resentment. As one man, whose childhood friend became one of the rendition victims, told me, "Now when I go to the mosque, I pray to God to punish the Americans."

To be sure, the United States is not the main culprit when the Kenyans unlawfully render suspects or the Ethiopians torture them. But when U.S. officials interrogate rendition victims who are being held incommunicado, the United States becomes complicit in the abuse. The U.S. is funding the Ethiopian military, supporting its activities in Somalia and training Kenyan security forces in counterterrorism -- so as U.S.-backed military and police forces in the region brutalize their domestic opponents in the name of fighting terrorism, the United States is often blamed.

America’s activities in the Horn have potential blowback written all over them. Among the recommendations to the US government in the report the above story is taken from are the following:

Repudiate the use of rendition without due process as a counterterrorism tactic.

Withhold counterterrorism and security-related funding from the Ethiopian security forces until the Ethiopian government publicly discloses the identities, fates, and whereabouts of all persons rendered by Kenya or Somalia to Ethiopian custody since January 2007.

Withhold counterterrorism and security-related funding from the Kenyan security forces until the Kenyan government publicly discloses the identities and last known whereabouts of all persons rendered to Somalia or Ethiopia since January 2007.

The Bush administration is a lost cause, of course, but it would be nice if the US elected somebody with at least a passing familiarity with international law and the willingness to hold its allies up to some standards of behaviour before their actions cause irreparable harm to America's own interests.

Then again, who pays any attention to Africa?

Ooops!

By BJ

So Agence France-Presse sent out a story on Sarah Palin's interview performance saying she was hesitant, troubled, and clumsy/gaffe-prone, (my French isn't that great). Not a big deal, given we've all had some amusement at Palin's expense over her "answers".

No, the problem is the picture they sent out along with the story was of Tina Fey's performance on SNL. Granted Fey does a damned good impression of Palin, but with Amy Poehler in the shot, you would have thought somebody may have picked up the error?

Can't wait for the reactions.

Grumpy Old Guy

By BJ

Granted McCin's temper was legendary long before he reached the age where he can collect Social Security, (and as an aside, how do you think the current financial mess would have looked like had the Republicans succeeded in privatizing Social Security in 2005?), but the meme of McCain being an old grump is certainly gaining traction.

First, there was his refusal to make eye contact with Obama throughout their entire debate and other annoyed body language, not to mention his repeated condescending remarks and insulting tone. Now we have him getting "testy" with the Des Moines Register's editorial board. The video footage is online and is worth watching. The text of his answers, particularly the ones where he's confronted about having spent his entire life on taxpayer-funded health insurance, and when he's confronted about the lies his campaign have been spreading convey some of the anger, but its watching the video and his sarcastic tone, and particularly his body language that conveys the impression of suppressed rage McCain must be feeling.

As an example, here's a clip where he answers about the truthiness of his campaign ads, complete with a retreat to his POW status to deflect further follow-ups.

Watch the rest here.

A Trap Sprung Too Soon

By BJ

Cernig wondered earlier if the bailout was a deal or a trap. Now we know:

The Republican National Committee's new advertisement critical of the the Wall Street "bailout" was produced and sent to television stations in key states before the package failed, officials at two stations said.

"Wall Street Squanders our money. And Washington is forced to bail them out with -- you guessed it -- our money. Can it get any worse?" asks the ad's narrator, as the words "BAILOUT WITH OUR MONEY" cross the screen. (The answer: Obama's plans would make it worse.)

The ad, however, seems to assume that it can safely attack a successful plan. And the reason may be the timing: Though it started airing this morning, the spot was released to stations yesterday morning, ad executives at stations in Michigan and Pennsylvania said.

Kae Buck of WLNS in Lansing said her station received the at at 7:55 a.m. Monday.  Luanne Russell of Pittsburgh's WTAE said her station received it at 10:49 Monday morning.

Basically the Republicans were planning to run against this plan even while they pretended to want to pass it. They are now in the rather interesting position of both blaming the Democrats for not passing the bailout while simultaneously attacked the very same bailout as a massive waste of taxpayer dollars. Granted that they've long since proven that they can hold mutually contradictory points in their heads repeatedly over the last few years, but the utter shamelessness of this move should cause any sane supporters to at least blush a little.

Of course, for a trap to work, the mark has to actually accept the bait first. This trap was sprung prematurely, and the Republicans have most certainly injected partisanship into any subsequent proceedings to try and come up with another deal. Adding to the fun is that the RNC ad is now directly contradicting their presidential candidate.

The ad taps into deep resentment of the plan, but it comes at a time when the candidate it supports, John McCain, is urging its package, and asking that it not be referred to as a "bailout," but a "rescue."

Five weeks to the election. How many more times do you think McCain and the Republicans can shoot themselves in the foot?

OIG Report on the US Attorney Firings

By BJ

It wasn't all that long ago that I would have thought that this report being released would have been bad news for the Bush administration and the Republicans running for office this election cycle. Instead, thanks to the attempted bailout and continuing financial mess, this rather egregious example of partisan firings didn't even make for a blip on the news horizon.

Fortunately, the folks at TPM have been doing a bang-up job of going over the report and its repercussions. Just go to the top of this page and scroll down.

For myself, a relatively simple question. Knowing how blatantly the system was abused to fire professionals who didn't toe the Republican party line and replace them with partisan hacks, do you think a McCain administration will hold anyone accountable or reverse a single partisan hiring or firing decision?

Batten Down the Hatches

By BJ

As the US House of Representatives, (and one the presidential candidates), continues to play partisan chicken with America's economic future, I thought it may be useful for everyone to take a long look at this post from the Agonist. Read the whole thing, as they say, but let me give you the conclusion.

At some point most Americans will be forced to downsize. It is inevitable and you won't have any choice. This process will take an enormous toll on people's health, families and savings (if they are so lucky to have any). Take my personal experience and multiply it several hundred thousand, or even a million times and that's what the next ten years are going to look like. Certainly lots of plain old destruction, and less than creative, if you ask me. Never in all my time blogging about and predicting the coming financial crisis did I ever imagine it would be this bad. I knew something bad was coming, but this? Nope, never imagined it. I guess that's the optimist in me.

And while I am not in the business of offering financial advice anymore perhaps you might learn something from my experience(s). For I am one of the lucky ones. . . . That's not something to build a future on. Waiting around for luck also isn't a good strategy, either.

But common sense, something I often lack in volumes, can overcome luck. And in that vein may I be so bold as to make a suggestion: downsize now while you have a choice and prepare your family, because nothing is as important as they are. Choose to do so now, because when you don't have a choice it's disastrous.

Besides, the Fed isn't going to bail you out. Trust me, I know.

My advice to friends who have asked me for it has been on the order of, "start saving two to three years ago, put off those big purchases if you can, and find a good steady job you can hold onto, 'cause the rough times are coming." Some listened, some didn't, but at least I know they're all listening now.

Regardless what kind of bailout package Congress comes out with, the economy is going to contract over the next several years, thanks in no small part to the effective, and not entirely inaccurate, fear-mongering of the leadership the last couple of weeks. People believe that things are going to get worse, and when enough people believe such things, they become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

As an anecdotal example, a friend's sister works in real estate, and while things were tanking in the US, the Canadian market was still doing pretty well up until a couple months ago. The last couple of weeks, she's reported that people are no longer buying and even deals where all the paperwork has been completed are falling through. People believe the market is going to fall, so they've stopped buying. From there, it's simple supply and demand as sellers either drop their prices or take their homes off the marketplace, and lo and behold, the market drops.

Take the same dynamic to people holding off on that new car, that big-screen HDTV, or that next iPod or cellphone, or the new gaming system for the kids, new exercise equipment, new furniture, new carpet, new whatever. Things start grinding to a halt, or at least a pretty major slowdown. And once that starts happening, the layoffs get started and things start contracting further.

To some degree the panic is psychological, but the pain will be real, and I don't look forward to having to live through it.

Palin the Post-Turtle

By BJ

Finally, I've found the perfect way to explain Sarah Palin's position on the national stage.

While suturing a cut on the hand of a 75-year old Texas rancher whose hand was caught in a gate while working cattle, the doctor struck up a conversation with the old man. Eventually the topic got around to Sarah Palin and her bid to be a heartbeat away from being President. The old rancher said, "Well, ya know, Palin is a post turtle."

Not being familiar with the term, the doctor asked him what a post turtle was. The rancher said, "When you're driving down a country road and you come across a fence post with a turtle balanced on top, that's a post turtle."

The old rancher saw a puzzled look on the doctor's face, so he continued to explain. "You know she didn't get up there by herself, she doesn't belong up there, she doesn't know what to do while she is up there, and you just wonder what kind of dummy put her up there to begin with."

Amusing anecdotes aside, there is a danger that going into Thursday's debate with Joe Biden, as Andrew Malcolm put it, the Democrats,

have so successfully mocked, derided and lowered expectations for Palin in Thursday night's VP debate that if she doesn't drool or speak in tongues, many millions still open to persuasion will be impressed.

Granted that just aiming for something around the level of run-of-the-mill incompetence of the Dan Quayle/George W Bush variety isn't exactly what the Republicans had planned for their VP candidate, but at this point it will be beating expectations, which will be more than enough for some.

And the downside for the Democrats is that there really isn't any way for them to "win" this cycle. Joe Biden mopping the floor with Palin is more or less what everybody expects now. If he doesn't clearly win, he winds up looking bad. If he does win easily, he risks looking the bully and being smeared with charges of sexism and so forth. (I mean, sure, they'll attack him for that anyway. They're already pre-emptively attacking the debate moderator for being biased days before the debate even takes place! The attack ads on Biden's, and by extension Obama's, sexism are probably already in the pipeline.)

Style over substance is unfortunately the way these things get decided, and I don't envy Biden the task of beating Palin without being in the least bit condescending or belittling. In the end, I assume Palin will avoid a total meltdown on stage, and as such it will be enough to give the Republicans a slight boost.

It still won't change the fact that she's a post-turtle.

Debate Watchers

By BJ

McClatchy reports that as many as 57 million people tuned into Friday's presidential debate. However, I have to wonder at the guy they have writing their reviews.

The city with the highest percentage of viewers was St. Louis, where 52 percent of the TVs were tuned to the debate, reflecting either an inordinate civic-mindedness or a complete lack of actual lives, take your pick. The lowest was Phoenix, with only about 24 percent, which might mean that they're confident their guy McCain has already won, or that they're sick of him, take your pick again.

Only too true, of course.

Wearing out their welcome

By BJ

Some potentially good news from the Pakistani front of the battle against the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Tribal forces are now rising up in opposition to the extremists, mostly in response to the heavy-handed tactics the Taliban has been using in the area.

A popular resistance movement is emerging in Pakistan's North West Frontier Province to challenge Islamic extremists, who now exercise control over whole districts and maintain a stranglehold over the local population.

The movement in both the province and the lawless tribal territory bordering Afghanistan relies on fierce tribal customs and widespread ownership of guns in the north west of the country, to raise traditional private armies, known as a lashkar, each with the strength of hundreds or several thousand volunteers.

. . .

Last weekend around 200 elders from the Payandakhel tribe met in Wari, a small town in the north of the region. In the dusty front yard of a high school, they held a traditional tribal meeting, or jirga, and made rousing speeches that resulted in a resolution to assemble their own lashkar. Among the decisions was that anyone sheltering Taliban in the area would be severely punished.

. . .

Many of the men at the jirga arrived with machine guns, some dating back to the 1980s Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. The meeting was called in response to a scare a few days earlier, when a group of Taliban tried to seize a local school and take 300 children hostage. Without waiting for the authorities to act, tribesmen themselves successfully tackled the assailants.

. . .

In Bajaur, a hotbed of Taliban and al Qaida fighters, an army operation that began in early August against militants has encouraged the locals to rise up. The Salarzai tribe gathered a 4,000-strong lashkar to chase Taliban out of their part of Bajaur. It was perhaps the first sign of an organized resistance in the tribal belt, which had looked lost to the Taliban. This week, the resistance movement spread to Khyber, another tribal area, where in the Malagori district, a lashkar destroyed militant bases and arrested Taliban.

Initially the Salarzai welcomed the Taliban for its emphasis on strict law and order, but after experiencing life under a particularly savage local commander, they rebelled.

Debate Reaction

By BJ

I'm more in line with Ron's take than Cernig's here. I think Obama did more than enough to call this a win, but before I explain that, I do need to take exception to one of Cernig's points.

Other than the Iraq withdrawal - to which he's too firmly committed to backtrack - and the "negotiate with our enemies" which is standard Democratic fare even for hawks, he took a decidely belligerent line:

The "negotiate with our enemies fare" is decidedly not standard Democratic fare. Not anymore anyway. If you need evidence of it, go back to the Democratic primaries when Obama first made his statement that he'd meet with America's enemies without preconditions. Hillary Clinton lambasted him over it, as did his current running mate. While it may have once been firmly in the centre of American foreign policy thought, over the last eight years it has become an almost radical idea. Obama is the only major candidate this cycle who has consistently been on the right side of this one.

While I won't dispute there were a few things about Obama's foreign policy positions that bother me, he still came across as far more diplomacy-focused and knowledgeable than McCain did. It is the fundamental difference between the two, and while I would have liked to see the difference highlighted even further, I think Obama did enough. Another great moment was when he hammered McCain over trying to shrink the Iraq debate to simply the question of the "surge", and his "you were wrong" repetition over the starting of the Iraq War is one of Obama's best moments.

The major problem with all foreign policy debates in the US is that so much of the "Conventional Wisdom" runs on the side of the most hawkish positions. Why do you think foreign policy is considered a Republican strong point in general and McCain's strong point specifically? Because they are the ones most willing to send young people out to get killed. Debate against that too far, and you wind up being relegated to the fringe with the elves Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich. While Obama running too close to the "CW" will disappoint many of the Democratic doves, his job tonight was to win over, or at least not lose, the middle, who get their "CW" from the media that helps create it.

Now, thanks to that "CW", McCain's rambling incoherence and hawkish talking points and misinformation were probably enough that he held his own in that part of the debate, but the real icing on the cake is that, for the first thirty minutes or so, the talk was about the economic situation the US is in, and Obama was clearly trouncing McCain in that area. That's where the future debates are going to be focused on, where McCain will have less opportunity to fall back on the beltway's accepted "Conventional Wisdom" to bail him out of tough spots as he had tonight. For that reason alone, the Obama camp should be smiling.

In the end, this was the best forum and topic choice McCain will see vis-a-vis Obama this election. Obama more than held his own, which is all he really needed to do, while McCain failed to get any kind of game-changer like he needed, particularly after his "suspending" stunt. That adds up to a good night for Obama.

And you can add the fact that Biden is out doing the post-debate rounds of the networks while Palin is glaringly absent.

Update:

Larison's take on the debate is a must-read.

Oh My God! - Part D'uh

By BJ

Take a gander at Sarah Palin trying to answer the question about how living close to Russia is supposed to somehow increase her foreign policy cred.

Watch CBS Videos Online

Much as John Cole says, this isn't even funny anymore. And the unprepared schoolkid analogy is spot on. You can even see it in the way that Couric is asking the follow-up questions, which reminds me of the tone I use when trying to walk a young child through a complicated subject. As Steve Benen notes, its like she's getting worse at answering questions, (though it may just be that the questions are a little tougher than the puff pieces she's had to face so far).

Much as Ron did, I actually expected that the McCain campaign would be able to prep Palin up to the level where she could at least fake an aura of competence. That they haven't managed to do so after three-plus weeks of intensive tutoring doesn't bode well for their chances of pulling it off before she has to face Biden in a debate.

Granted that's assuming they don't come up with some reason why the VP debate has to be postponed indefinitely, until hopefully sometime after the election maybe. In any case, it is becoming increasingly clear why they want to limit press access to Palin. Either that, or they are setting up the mother of all lowered-expectations settings.

It All Falls Down

By BJ

Cernig has already noted earlier that the financial implosion engulfing Wall Street will likely be enough to end the hegemony of the US as the sole financial superpower. It is not the only area in which America's influence is starting to unravel.

The deepest freeze in U.S.-Russia relations since the Cold War has brought diplomatic efforts to halt Iran's nuclear ambitions to a halt just as Western governments and U.N. inspectors are warning that Tehran could be gaining the ability to build a nuclear weapon.

. . .

The Bush administration's other major effort to curb the spread of nuclear weapons suffered a significant setback Wednesday, when North Korea, which has tested a crude nuclear device, told the International Atomic Energy Agency that it plans to restart a reprocessing plant that produces plutonium for nuclear weapons.

An IAEA spokeswoman North Korea told the IAEA that the U.N. agency's inspectors "will have no further access to the reprocessing plant," IAEA spokeswoman Melissa Fleming said in a statement.

The North Korean move appears to be in response to the US not removing North Korea from its list of state sponsors of terrorism as promised in the disarmament for aid deal. However, I can't think of a nation with less credibility than North Korea, and its hard to say just what they hope to accomplish with their latest moves.

The situation regarding negotiations over Iran, on the other hand, is an easily foreseen result of America's and much of the West's response to the conflict in Georgia.

Russia's sense of grievance over the Georgian war stems from Western governments' unwillingness to acknowledge publicly what many say privately -- that Tbilisi started the conflict.

Adding insult to injury for the Russians is strong Western support for Georgian leader Mikheil Saakashvili -- loathed by Moscow -- and Western media coverage which has overwhelmingly favored Georgia during the conflict.

. . .

Further stoking resentment is a string of recent Western moves seen as hostile by Moscow.

In Russian eyes, the West snubbed it by recognizing the independence of Kosovo, ignored its objections to a U.S. anti-missile system in eastern Europe, didn't listen to its criticism of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and broke a promise made to Moscow in the 1990s not to expand NATO to its borders.

Now Russia's patience has snapped.

Top diplomats stationed in Moscow privately despair over how, as one put it, "we have lost Russia completely over Georgia." Even normally pro-Western intellectuals and their own Russian embassy employees had turned against them.

"There's no one in this society who sees things our way," one senior Western diplomat commented.

"Russians are reacting to 18 years of condescension and being ignored by the West. They have had enough."

Many of us warned that the over-the-top anti-Russian bais of the West over the Georgian conflict was bound to have serious repercussions in areas where Russian cooperation was a necessity, and more than a few of the remaining realists have made the plea to restore a good working relationship with the Russians. The pleas have fallen on deaf ears in Washington, and the Iran talks appear to be one of the first major casualties to result. There are number of other areas such as the increasing Islamic militancy in the Caucasus, Afghanistan, and energy security which the Russians have an important roles to play, and will have increased incentive to play spoiler should the West continue on its, "demonize the Russian Bear", tack.

If the US is to be successful in any of its future international endeavours, it is going to have to adapt to the new multi-polar world the Bush administration's recklessness has created. The US can't afford to do otherwise, but it remains to be seen if its leadership will understand that.

Remember when $25,000,000,000 was a lot of money?

By BJ

I ask the question because I'm reading this story about the planned $25 billion lifeline for the Big 3 automakers, and I have to agree with this quote:

"It seemed like a lot when we first started pushing this," says Democratic Sen. Debbie Stabenow of Michigan, one of the bill's sponsors. "Suddenly, it seems so small."

And she's right, you know? Thanks to the gargantuan $700 billion bail-out package being proposed for Wall Street, (a number they choose because, you know, it's really big!), $25 billion no longer seems to be that big a deal.

And think what this does to us writers. We can't call it a "massive" bail-out package, because almost overnight it has become an order of magnitude too small to be considered "massive" anymore. Does this mean we have to qualify our adjectives now? "kind of big", "relatively large", "near massive"? They just don't have the same oomph anymore. I shudder to think what that will mean for the size of future bail outs from the public trough.

How Desperate is the McCain Campaign?

By BJ

As the reality that the next president will have to deal with some pretty major economic issues has become increasingly apparent over the last week and a half, McCain's convention/VP pick bounce became little more than a memory and Obama has begun to surge again in the polls.

Suddenly, McCain wants to suspend his campaign and delay the foreign policy debate? And this after Obama apparently reached out privately to issue a joint statement of principles on the bail-out provisions. As Josh Marshall puts it:

Isn't this the campaign equivalent of faking an injury when you're down late in the 4th quarter? Note too that McCain was in the midst of debate prep when he made this decision.

Say what you will about the McCain campaign, they do political stunts like no other campaign I've witnessed. Steve Benen has a good take as well.

So, this morning, Obama called McCain with a straightforward idea: if both candidates supported similar provisions, the two sides could endorse a joint set of principles. McCain, this afternoon, agreed. Obama did this quietly, away from the media spotlight, and without leaking anything to the media. Just one candidate looking for a bipartisan solution with a rival candidate. Everyone was happy.

And almost immediately after an agreement was reached, McCain, in the middle of debate prep, decides it's time for a stunt. How very sad that McCain's desperation has become this transparent.

It is sad, and it is also becoming predictable. It remains to be seen if it will be reported as such.

Update:

Damn! Can't believe I missed this part of McCain's announcement:

McCain went on to compare the current crisis in the financial markets with the attacks of Sept. 11 and called on politicians to draw on the bipartisan spirit created during those times in order to solve the economic problems of the country today.

"Following September 11th, our national leaders came together at a time of crisis," McCain said. "We must show that kind of patriotism now. Americans across our country lament the fact that partisan divisions in Washington have prevented us from addressing our national challenges. Now is our chance to come together to prove that Washington is once again capable of leading this country."

The Great Financial Unravelling

By BJ

Something seems a little off-kilter here.

By a margin of almost two-to-one the American public thinks the government is doing the right thing in investing billions of dollars to try to keep financial institutions and markets secure. Reacting to initial reports of the federal bailout plan over the weekend, 57% said the government was doing the right thing, while 30% said it was doing the wrong thing.

Americans oppose government rescues of ailing financial companies by a decisive margin, and blame Wall Street and President George W. Bush for the credit crisis.

By a margin of 55 percent to 31 percent, Americans say it's not the government's responsibility to bail out private companies with taxpayer dollars, even if their collapse could damage the economy, according to the latest Bloomberg/Los Angeles Times poll.

Confused yet?

If your not, then there plan may not be working as well as they’d hoped. (Granted this does assume they have a plan, which is as ever debatable. It is just that it is hard to believe they could screw up everything so badly by accident.)

This whole mad rush to DO SOMETHING! and push through a $700 billion dollar taxpayer give-away without oversight or review before anyone thought to question why they need that much money or what it will be used for. (And don't even answer why you happen to need that much!) It seems they may have failed to do that, but odds seem good that some sort of handout to the biggest screw-ups will still be in the offing.

One of the biggest problems with this proposed scheme is that so far it really doesn’t deal with any of the root problems that have led to the mess. The financial institutions are in trouble because they took a bunch of bad mortgages and sliced, diced, and repackaged them so many times that nobody seems entirely certain where all the bad debt really is any more. Rather than creating anything of real value, they made money by pushing the same piece of paper around four, five or six times in creative ways that they could attach fees to.

Dumping all that paper onto the taxpayers is just a massive waste of money as the mortgages will remain bad. The bail-out just becomes a black hole to stuff worthless financial instruments nobody wants anymore.

Add to that that this effectively rewards the people who screwed up the biggest and gives an incentive for institutions to make their finances appear worse than they really are to take advantage of the government's largess, and the price tag for this scheme just starts looking bigger and bigger.

And to top things off, there are the truly laughable attempts to sell this plan as somehow being profitable for "Main Street". If the banks could afford to offload the paper at discounted rates that somebody else could profit from, there wouldn't be any need for a government bail-out The whole reason the government has to get involved is that if the financial institutions were to try and sell the paper at a deeply discounted rate rational investors would be willing to spend, they'd still end up bankrupt.

Whatever the bail-out package winds up being, kiss the money good-bye and apologize to your grandkids for the debt load you've just dumped on them.

Also, you might want to start thinking about the answers to these questions.

Spotting the Liars

By BJ

Thanks to a laptop malfunction, I spent last week traveling without any internet access. I had forgotten just how annoying it is to have to depend upon the television as your major source of news information. No blogs, RSS readers, even Memeorandum, and its not like there isn't anything going on. (At least I know there are others out there with similar pain.)

In any case, the week wasn't a total loss. The reason for my travels was for a course, part of which included instruction on how to determine if someone is trying to deceive you while being interviewed. Most of the "tells" are non-verbal, such as excessive blinking, jerky hand movements or twitches, certain head movements, and so forth. Our instructor mentioned that the best way to train yourself to spot these "tells", is to watch the talking heads on TV with the sound on mute.

At long last, I've found a reason to watch TV news coverage!

In Bed With the Oil Industry - Literally!

By BJ

Ah, nothing like a scandal involving sex and drugs to spice up the offshore drilling debate.
 

Interior Department officials, while handling billions of dollars in oil and gas royalty payments, engaged in illicit sex with industry employees and accepted meals, drinks, ski junkets and golf outings from major oil companies, internal investigators reported Wednesday.
 
Interior Department Inspector General Earl Devaney's release of three reports, which stem from a $5 million investigation dating to 2005, implicated at least 19 current and former employees of the Minerals Management Service in unethical relationships with industry, frolics that included marijuana and cocaine use.

 
Not that it should be a huge surprise given the amount of money involved, but still, as one of the Representatives on the Natural Resources committee put it, it "reads like a script from a television miniseries — and one that cannot air during family viewing time.''
 

Devaney said that his investigators had "discovered a culture of substance abuse and promiscuity'' in the recently created "Royalty in Kind'' program, in which the government forgoes royalties and takes a share of the pumped oil and gas for resale. Several of the program's staffers, based in Washington and Denver, "admitted to illegal drug use as well as illicit sexual encounters.''
 
From 2002 to 2006, nearly a third of the RIK staff "socialized with, and received a wide array of gifts and gratuities from, oil and gas companies with whom (the program) was conducting official business,'' Devaney said in a memo to Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne. While the dollar amounts of the gifts were "not enormous,'' he wrote, the gifts came with "prodigious frequency,'' with two RIK marketers accepting gifts and gratuities on at least 135 occasions.
 
. . .
 
Danielle Brian, the executive director of the Project on Government Oversight, a nonpartisan watchdog group, said that "given the billions of dollars at stake, and number of people involved, this is easily the worst instance of government misconduct that POGO has seen."
 
. . .
 
Chevron, Shell, Gary-Williams Energy Corp. and Hess Corp. gave gifts to RIK staffers although they conducted business with the unit, either producing oil or buying it. Last May, investigators found that RIK staffers sometimes decided which company should win an oil contract in informal discussions among themselves and that dollar values of 118 of the sale contracts were later revised downward, costing taxpayers more than $4 million.

 
It is also worth noting that the Bush administration’s Justice Department declined to prosecute any of the individuals involved.  It’s just one more piece of the culture of corruption that the next President will have to deal with, (or not, depending on who wins, I guess).

Conflict on the Arctic Horizon?

By BJ

I’ve never been too worried that the conflict over Arctic resources becoming more attractive and available thanks to the ever-retreating sea ice would ever get beyond the diplomatic stage, particularly in Canada’s case.  As Liberal leader Stephane Dion said recently in regards to Stephen Harper’s all-military, all-the-time strategy, we can’t beat the Russians, and we’re not about to start shooting the Danes.  You can use either or both in regards to our territorial disputes with the US.
 
Between the US and Russia, on the other hand, things may be a bit different, and thanks to the conflict in Georgia, relations between the two big powers are a great deal chillier than they were even a couple of months ago, causing some to be concerned.
 

Speaking to the BBC during an Arctic patrol flight, Rear Adm Gene Brooks, in charge of the Coast Guard's vast Alaska region, appealed for a diplomatic deal.
 
"The potential is there with undetermined boundaries and great wealth for conflict, or competition.
 
"There's always a risk of conflict," Adm Brookes said.
 
He added that this was especially the case "where you do not have established, delineated, agreed-upon borders".
 
. . .
 
Admiral Brooks told me he enjoys good working relations with his Russian counterpart across the Bering Strait - with regular email exchanges - though a friendship port visit to the Russian Far East has been put on hold, and may be cancelled, following the conflict in Georgia.
 
The new chill in relations in this sensitive region could not have come at a worse time.
 
The admiral said his hope was that he could keep relations warm with his Russian and Canadian neighbours, "and allow the capitals to work the larger issues of who owns what and where".
 
"The philosophy has got to be one of co-operation, because competition or conflict in the Arctic is not going to help anyone and it's going to do a lot of damage to an otherwise fragile ecosystem."

 
Now, I wouldn’t be too worried if I knew the US would soon pass into the leadership of someone who is known for careful forethought and sober decision making rather than someone who is known for having a hair-trigger temper and making snap decisions on impulse.  The former is behind in the polls, and the latter chose a running mate who wants to snap up and exploit more and more of the resources in question, all at a time when bellicose rhetoric and pseudo-nationalistic patriotic pandering tends to be rewarded by better and better poll numbers.
 
So we'd all do well to keep an eye on things.

Some North of the Border Rhyming

By BJ

All right, it turns out we're going to have an election north of the border as well. Stephen Harper had parliament dissolved on Sunday, and Canadians will be marking their paper ballots on Oct. 14th. Yup. 36 days between the election call and the vote, which having followed the two-year long marathon that is the US Presidential race, seems just far too straight forward.

Not that the election is going to be cheap. You see, this election call wasn't too much of a surprise given that Harper was out spraying taxpayer money out with a fire-hose, a little under $9 billion in new spending since June with a mind to improving their poll numbers. It seems to have worked, which is why Harper called an election. One of the quirks of the parliamentary system being that elections can be called at any time, and usually the government of the day likes to time it when they're doing well to increase their chances of winning again.

Now, back when the Liberals did this sort of thing back in 2006, Harper and his Conservatives were all over them for gaming the system and wasting taxpayer money. Harper even pushed through a law creating fixed election dates as they have in the US to avoid this kind of gaming. Of course, much like his heroes in the Bush administration, Harper believes laws are for other people, even the ones he passed himself.

And in another nod to the American presidential race, one of the first things Harper has promised on the campaign trail? Gas tax relief!

Tories will cut excise tax on diesel fuel in half

Pretty impressive, well impressive-sounding anyway. You might ask what the excise tax on diesel fuel actually runs. Turns out its four cents, meaning Harper's big promise is to cut all of two cents off a litre of fuel, sometime over the next four years, if he's re-elected. Makes this gimmick even more laughable than the "gas tax holiday" McCain and Hillary Clinton were pushing in the early summer, not to mention more blatant given Harper has had the power to do what he's promising to do all along.

In any case, expect a few more postings about Canadian politics over the next few weeks. I'm sure we'll be able to mix in some moose-hunting at some point.

Crusade to Nowhere

By BJ

While everybody has been busy speculating what mooseburgers taste like, (personally I prefer muskox when I can get it), the real story of the McCain-Palin ticket, or the Palin-McCain ticket, is that there isn't any there, there.

John McCain hit the "reform" theme hard in his speech last night, and I couldn't help but wonder: What does McCain actually plan to change about government? I get that Sarah Palin is a nice person and doesn't like sleaze—except when she's hitting up corporate donors on behalf of Ted Stevens or hiring earmark lobbyists for her hometown... No, but seriously: Back in 2000, McCain could reasonably claim to be a "reform" candidate by touting his campaign finance bill—he had a specific proposal to address a concrete problem. As it turns out, McCain-Feingold didn't alter the role of money in politics in any fundamental way, and the issue's still there for the taking, but the Republican base is intransigent on this subject, and McCain's not poking that bear again. So what does that leave?

It leaves his biography, and Palin's. It's the Maverik-POW/Moosehunter-Hockey Mom ticket! Washington will change just by the very force of their personalities, apparently. Granted they have no plans to actually change anything that the Bush administration has done, and no plans to hold anyone in the Bush administration accountable for what laws they've broken, but who's going to press them for specifics? As Daniel Larison notes, the GOP has found a candidate to make their own cultish chants to, and the real problem is that their candidates aren't saying much more than the chanters.

However, that’s been the m.o. of the McCain campaign since last year: biography politics together with sloganeering and rote talking points instead of policy substance.  This was more or less how McCain’s primary campaign went: “Surge! Victory! Surge, Earmarks Are Bad, Surge, I Was a POW, Victory, Tax Cuts, Surge, Cause Greater Than Oneself, Surge!”  Since securing the nomination, he has not given many major policy addresses.  One of the few that he did give involved laying out his mad confrontational foreign policy vision, which has now boiled down to vilifying Russia and sabre-rattling against Iran.  A candidacy built almost entirely on the appeal of biography and character is not going to turn into a campaign that lays out a serious policy agenda.

. . .

When McCain doesn’t know much about policy, and the VP nominee has to be brought up to speed to be on McCain’s level of policy ignorance, their speechwriters aren’t going to burden them with a lot of specific details, since these might prompt questions and require the candidates to understand what they just said.  When McCain does not understand that his own preferred policy of cap-and-trade involves mandatory restrictions on emissions, can’t keep straight which forces Iran is supposed to be backing inside Iraq and admits that he knows little about economics, first among the many other subjects about which he knows little, what is he going to talk about?  He will talk about being held captive and he will talk about reform–beautiful, nebulous, undefined reform.  Not to mention drilling.

As Joe Biden put it, it isn't what you hear from the Republican candidates, but what you don't hear, and what you don't hear is anything approaching a specific policy to deal with the problems they are most responsible for creating.

In a sense, it makes the pick of Sarah Palin a fitting one for McCain. Bill Clinton ran in 1996 on the promise to "Build a Bridge to the 21st Century". The slogan for McCain-Palin could be, "Building a Bridge to Nowhere", and hoping nobody notices.

Palin and the Press

By BJ

Yeah, she's gone into hiding, and that should raise questions about Palin's readiness to become Vice-President. The problem is that it won't, not really anyway. Glenn Greenwald lays it out in a great post at Salon:

Of course Carney is right in theory that anyone running for Vice President ought to submit to questioning from the media. But the idea that her doing so will be some great blow against propaganda is wrong for numerous reasons. Who are these great, aggressive journalists who are going to question her in a meaningfully adversarial way in order to expose the falsehoods behind the image that is being created around her?

When they decide in a couple of weeks that Palin is ready to do so, she'll go and sit down with Brit Hume or Larry King or Charlie Gibson or some other pleasant, accommodating person who plays a journalist on TV and have a nice, amiable, entertaining chat about topics that are easily anticipated. Having been preceded by all sorts of campaign drama about her first interview and the excitement that she's not up to the task, her TV appearance will be widely touted, score big ratings, and will be nice entertainment for the network that presents it. It will achieve many things. Undermining propaganda isn't one of them.

This idea that she's some sort of fragile, know-nothing amateur who is going to quiver and collapse when subjected to the rough and tumble world of American journalism is painfully ludicrous, given that -- as the Canonization of the endlessly malleable Tim Russert demonstrated -- that imagery is a fantasy journalists maintain about themselves but it hardly exists. The standard journalistic model of "balance" means that the TV journalist asks a few questions, lets the interviewee answer, and then moves on without commenting on or pointing out false claims, i.e., without exposing propaganda (Carney can check his own magazine to see how that sad, propaganda-boosting process works -- here, here, and here). Few things are easier than submitting to those sorts of televised rituals.

. . .

Carney is exactly wrong. Propaganda thrives -- predominates -- in our democracy for many reasons, the principal reason being that we don't have the sort of journalist class devoted to exposing it. Anyone who wants to contest that should examine the empirical data above, or more convincingly, just look at what the Bush administration has easily gotten away with over the last eight years -- the systematic deceit, the radicalism, the corruption, the crimes.

The ideological extremism and growing ethical questions that define Sarah Palin -- and especially the discredited, rejected core beliefs of John McCain -- means that the McCain campaign should have much to worry about in this election. Having Sarah Palin face the mighty, scary American press corps certainly isn't one of them. That's just a melodramatic distraction, one that will redound to the GOP's benefit. Palin will "face" our media soon enough, and it will probably be the easiest thing she'll have to do between now and November.

Palin's background and education was in media, a few interviews with what passes for a press in the US isn't going to throw her off her game, particularly when they generally fail to call out politicians when they lie. Why do you think she keeps repeating the lie about being against the "Bridge to Nowhere" and that she's not a major earmark hog? Because she knows she'll never see a headline in the Washington Post or New York Times saying, "Palin Lies Again!". Instead, they'll just write what she says, and possibly, somewhere near the bottom of the story, they might, might, mention that what she says is "stretching the truth".

And I can pretty much guarantee that any interview she does will focus more on her daughters pregnancy than on Palin's (lack of) foreign policy views and experience, health care, taxes, jobs, financial plans, Social Security, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. And they won't be particularly tough because they're afraid they might lose that all-important access.

So forget the idea that the press will actually do its watchdog role. It hasn't for the last eight years at least, and if there is anything the Republicans have learned, and the rest of us should have learned, it's that hiding from the press doesn't make them more aggressive, as Greenwald points out, it makes them more eager to please.

Update:

No sooner posted than proof arrives. Via Steve Benen at the Washington Monthly, the Fact Checker has this to say about Palin's claim that she championed an end to earmarks and opposed the "Bridge to Nowhere"

The Republican vice-presidential candidate is overstating her opposition to earmarks and the Bridge to Nowhere.

As Benen puts it:

That's an exceedingly polite way of saying she isn't telling the truth at all -- Palin supported the bridge project, campaigned on a pledge to build the bridge project, and took the federal money even after the project was scrapped. What's more, she didn't "champion reform" of congressional earmarks, Palin hired a lobbyist to help get her town $27 million in pork-barrel projects, some of which were condemned by none other than John McCain.

Just as importantly, the claims about Palin and earmarks have been definitely disproven, but Palin and McCain keep repeating them anyway, making their dishonesty all the more breathtaking.

What's more, Benen notes that these outright lies ar being lumped in with a quote from Joe Biden that's totally accurate:

In the Post's fact-checking piece, these two claims, Biden's and Palin's, are offered as relative equivalents. The reader is left with the impression that all the candidates for national office are fudging and spinning on the campaign trail.

But this is a false equivalency. Biden's claim is completely accurate -- McCain really has voted with Bush 95% of the time. Palin's claim is complete false -- she really didn't reject earmarks.

Why lump them both together as "questionable claims"?

Ah, my friend, because there must be balance.

Not yet VP and already using "security" to stonewall investigations

By BJ

It's no wonder the Republican party faithful love Sarah Palin, not only is she proving to be a pathological liar, but has learned well from the Bush-Cheney cabal how to try and hide behind "security" concerns to stonewall investigations into abuses of power.

Gov. Sarah Palin's lawyer, Thomas Van Flein, made an absurd threat in his battle to get the Legislature to back off its ethics investigation of the governor and her staff.

Van Flein said legislative investigator Steve Branchflower tried to call First Gentleman Todd Palin directly on "a secure and confidential line. This represents a serious security breach that we may be obligated to report to the Secret Service."

Hello? Branchflower is acting on behalf of the Legislature. That's a security breach?

Lawyers are supposed to vigorously represent their clients, but claiming that a legislative investigator's phone call may be a security matter worthy of Secret Service attention is ridiculous.

Yes, but so is continuing to claim that she opposed the "Bridge to Nowhere" long after it has been proven she ran her gubernatorial campaign on supporting it, and kept the money in any case. Making ridiculous claims is what the modern Republican Party does, and they've found a perfect acolyte in Sarah Palin.

As an aside, I can't help but wonder just how much of a boost for business this has been for the Alaska newspaper industry. I mean, before last Friday, how many of us would have thought to look to the Anchorage Daily News for scoops on the national political scene?

Poles to Investigate CIA Prisons

By BJ

It appears the Poles are set to begin investigating the secret CIA prisons where al Qaeda suspects were "disappeared" for some "aggressive interrogations".

The Polish prosecutor's office is investigating allegations that there was a CIA prison in Poland where al Qaeda suspects were questioned and guards might have used methods close to torture, the prime minister's top adviser said on Friday.

Polish media reported earlier on Friday that a classified note written by the Polish secret service had proved the existence of a U.S. Central Intelligence Agency base in Poland.

"Close to torture" only under the highly twisted Bush administration use of the word, as the CIA has already admitted to waterboarding, which the US prosecuted war criminals for during WWII. And the existence of the prisons themselves isn't really in doubt anymore. Their existence was confirmed over a year ago. The Poles however have steadily denied the prisons were on their soil, likely due to this little tidbit:

All Polish political parties have played down speculation about the existence of a CIA prison. Under Polish law, a Pole who was party to an agreement allowing the CIA to torture suspects could be sued in the regular courts or even in the State Tribunal, a special court for government officials.

It's like the new way to avoid paying for your crimes. Make sure that all of the parties are guilty so that none of them will be willing to prosecute you. Also likely why Bush, Cheney, and the rest of the torture brigade will never answer for their normalization of such techniques.

Compare and Contrast

By BJ

Forget all the spin and partisan rhetoric. At the end of the day it comes down to two men, who within a week of each other, both got up and told everybody what their vision for America was. Watch them both, side by side, what they said and what they didn't say, without any commentary. This is both of them making their best case for why they should lead the United States.

John McCain:

Barack Obama:

McCain's Acceptance Speech

By BJ

Watching McCain's speech, two different Einstein quotes came to mind. For McCain himself:

We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.

And for the crowd:

He who joyfully marches in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would suffice.

Other than that, I'm going to miss that hour of my life.

Blowing the Opportunity

By BJ

I'm thinking this will be my last Palin post for a while. (I won't say last, because your god only knows what more may yet come out of the woodwork about her.) In the main, it is her speech last night that makes it far easier to ignore her. To be fair, some of the credit goes to Rudy Gulliani, who, as Elrod notes, loves his own voice so much that the GOP had to cancel the "soft-sell" biographical video and moved right into the, as Palin herself put it, pit bull with lipstick.

Mocking, sarcastic, and over-the-top, and it is the last that puts her off the table for now. As noted earlier, she didn't just fire up the GOP base, she fired up the Dems. Steve Benen put it this way:

Judging a speech like this, it's probably best to consider the goals and the audience. Going into the speech, I expected Palin to try to connect to a mainstream audience, demonstrating competence, credibility, and readiness. She already enjoys the support of the GOP base; Palin has to work on convincing everyone else.

And yet, she (or, more accurately, the McCain campaign aides who wrote her speech) went in a different direction, aiming to shore up the party's base even more. Instead of seriousness, Palin went for biting and sarcastic partisanship. Instead of presenting herself as a trustworthy leader, Palin proved herself an attack-dog ideologue. Instead of answering questions about readiness, she answered questions about who she hates and how much. Palin not only steered clear of the concerns of swing voters, she practically thumbed her nose at them.

What's more, Palin did this with a strikingly dishonest speech, filled with the kind of obvious and transparent falsehoods that even half-way knowledgeable observers can debunk off the top of their heads. Palin didn't just lie, she lied brazenly, as if to say, "I don't care."

And John Cole, as is often the case, points out why Palin's speech wasn't the home run the delirious GOP faithful are claiming it to be.

I suppose it will thrill the dead-enders in the blogosphere and shore up the base, but I simply can not see how it is going to play well to the independents and undecideds. America learned not one thing about Sarah Palin last night other than that she is a willing foot soldier for more of the same. There was no way forward. There was no sense of understanding of the challenges. There were no solutions. There was only divisiveness, nastiness, and sneering, which somehow is acceptable because it was delivered by someone in a dress (“See how tough she is!” they will all exclaim). Thank goodness the McCain campaign chose this path, because Palin could have been an effective weapon with the right message. Now, with their own words that they wrote for her, they have turned her into more of the same. While I am disgusted with them, I am also relieved that this is the path they have chosen. This will be rejected by the American public.

Again, I ask, this is the face of the GOP future? Thank goodness I got out when I did.

The Republicans took a fresh face with considerable potential and filled it with all the same old, tired attacks, blaming all of the ills of the last eight years they've been in charge on the people running to replace them.

Tonight, the same old, tired candidate they had before Hurricane Palin will take the stage and probably deliver a speech just as substance free as his VP pick's with even less charisma, and we can get back to pointing out that it is the guy at the top of the Republican ticket that doesn't have a clue.

The Reality-Free Pit Bull

By BJ

I think Libby pretty much nailed it with her predictions.

Sarah Palin will give a great speech. She will lie her face off.

A few in the blogosphere have had the gall to actually note many of the lies in Palin's scripted speech, and the Obama campaign was quick to offer a rebuttal, but it remains to be seen if the MSM will bother to include any fact-checking in their coverage, (Ha! Who am I kidding? Of course they won't!), even if Time's Joe Klien urged them otherwise.

I hope my colleagues stand strong in this case: it is important for the public to know that Palin raised taxes as governor, supported the Bridge to Nowhere before she opposed it, pursued pork-barrel projects as mayor, tried to ban books at the local library and thinks the war in Iraq is "a task from God." The attempts by the McCain campaign to bully us into not reporting such things are not only stupidly aggressive, but unprofessional in the extreme.

So, probably not a the strikeout it should be if we had a media that did its job, but also not a homerun given its extremely partisan nature. Call it a double.

In fact, given her fact-free approach to smearing her opponent, I'd have to call her a typical Republican of the Rove machine years. We'll see if that's enough once more.

How do you like the Attention?

By BJ

It doesn’t seem all that long ago that the right-wing shills were pointing to the disparity in coverage between the Obama and McCain candidacies as proof that the media was biased and complaining that their candidate needed more coverage. It led McCain to time his VP announcement for the morning immediately following Obama’s acceptance speech, a speech that managed to overtop even the very high expectations of it, in an attempt to pre-empt any “bounce” or favourable coverage the DNC might have gave Obama.

And it worked!

Look at Memeorandum. McCain’s choice for Vice President of the United States has made it hard to find anybody talking about anything else. Circus or soap opera, it’s been all Palin, all the time. Try to find anybody covering Obama’s convention speech that had nearly everybody practically gushing on Thursday night.

Of course, all of that coverage hasn’t been exactly kind to McCain. The right is now learning first-hand that it isn’t the quantity of coverage that matters, but the type. More usually means more negative, and McCain has been moved into throwing tantrums as a result of reporters actually asking serious questions about his choice.

The whole shamble is likely to become a case study in how not to announce a VP candidate. First and foremost among its lessons, surprise announcements shouldn’t catch your own side just as off-balance and unguarded as your opponents are supposed to be.

A large part of the reason this choice has been turning into a slow-motion train wreck is because the surprise pick was also an unknown. As bad or entertaining as most of Palin’s abuses of power and other little scandals happen to be, objectively they aren’t that big of a deal compared to the dirty laundry of most of the other potential VP’s or even McCain himself. The difference between Palin and say Lieberman, is that Lieberman’s laundry has already had airing. The media knows where most of his skeletons are buried, so they don’t feel compelled to go digging for more.

When Obama picked Biden, the media didn’t have to go searching to figure out who Biden is or what his strengths and weaknesses are. As a result, the conversation immediately progressed to: Will X help Obama with voter sub-group A?, will Y hurt him with voter sub-group D? and so forth.

When McCain picked Palin, the question most everybody had was, who the f*ck is Sarah Palin? And so now everybody, including apparently the McCain campaign, is rushing off to dig and find out.

What’s worse, thanks in large part to the fact that Palin is rather clearly unprepared for the role she’s been thrust into, she’s been cloistered by the Republicans so she can be prepped for what would ordinarily be the VP candidates only two other big moments on the campaign, her speech tonight and the debate with Joe Biden. As a result, she’s not available to the press to answer all the questions people have and to shape people’s impression of her. So while I expect her speech to go quite well, it’s effect as her introduction to the country has been blunted by the media storm of the last five days.

The press has had a blank slate to fill up with their own impressions and numerous damaging discoveries, and the Republicans are reduced to sending out their flacks to look ridiculous in their attempts to defend someone they barely know anything about.

Ultimately, much like the “number of houses” gaffe, this is a McCain own goal. His attempt to steal Obama’s thunder has blown up in his face and left him playing a desperate defence, and the Obama campaign didn’t have to do a thing.

Pass the popcorn.

Ice Shelves Collapsing

By BJ

The hits just keep coming on the Climate Change front.

The ice shelves in Canada's High Arctic have lost a colossal area this year, scientists report.

The floating tongues of ice attached to Ellesmere Island, which have lasted for thousands of years, have seen almost a quarter of their cover break away.

One of them, the 50 sq km (20 sq miles) Markham shelf, has completely broken off to become floating sea-ice.

…

Unlike much of the floating sea-ice which comes and goes, the shelves contain ice that is up to 4,500 years old.

A rapid sea-ice retreat is being experienced across the Arctic again this year, affecting both the ice attached to the coast and floating in the open ocean.

The floating sea-ice, which would normally keep the shelves hemmed in, has shrunk to just under five million sq km, the second lowest extent recorded since the era of satellite measurement began about 30 years ago.

"Reduced sea-ice conditions and unusually high air temperatures have facilitated the ice shelf losses this summer," said Dr Luke Copland from the University of Ottawa.

"And extensive new cracks across remaining parts of the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf mean that it will continue to disintegrate in the coming years."

Add that to this, this, and this, and remember that the yearly ice retreat isn't over yet.

Quote of the Day

By BJ

Slate's John Dickerson on the Palin pick:

observers have called it a "Hail Mary pass" so often, I'm starting to think it's a play for the Catholic vote

As for this little pool, forget it. Palin's in for the long haul. As Libby has noted here before, McCain is a gambler, and this pick was all-in. The Republicans are going to have to do their best to try and convince everyone that it wasn't a big mistake, because the alternative of Palin stepping aside to "spend time with her family" will be admitting that it was a big mistake, (not to mention pissing off the folks who truly vetted her). And that will bring McCain's shoddy judgement to the fore even more than it already is.

(Yeah, Yeah, it's a circus, but people love the circus!)

Palin's Social Views

By BJ

Cernig already noted Sarah Palin's less-than-knowledgable answer regarding "Under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance on the Eagle Forum's questionnaire, but to truly appreciate just how far to the right Palin is on social issues, you really need to read all of her responses, though I'll note the first four questions and answers as they have some bearing on recent news and her position on women's rights.

[The first question asks whether or not abortion should be legal at varying stages of pregnancy or banned completely]

SP: I am pro-life. With the exception of a doctor’s determination that the mother’s life would end if the pregnancy continued. I believe that no matter what mistakes we make as a society, we cannot condone ending an innocent’s life.

2. Will you support the right of parents to opt out their children from curricula, books, classes, or surveys, which parents consider privacy-invading or offensive to their religion or conscience?
SP: Yes. Parents should have the ultimate control over what their children are taught.

3. Will you support funding for abstinence-until-marriage education instead of for explicit sex-education programs, school-based clinics, and the distribution of contraceptives in schools?
SP: Yes, the explicit sex-ed programs will not find my support.

4. Will you support efforts to raise or lower the mandatory age of education? Why or why not?
SP: No, again, parents know better than government what is best for their children.

The rest of her responses include an unwillingness to expand hate-crime legislation, and a couple of slams against same-sex couples. McCain has clearly decided to throw in with the "agents of intolerance" this time around.

More Arctic Climate Change News

By BJ

I noted yesterday a couple of signs that the Arctic may have reached an irreversible tipping point in terms of becoming ice-free. Cernig e-mailed me an article that shows that I may have been understating the effects.

Open water now stretches all the way round the Arctic, making it possible for the first time in human history to circumnavigate the North Pole, The Independent on Sunday can reveal. New satellite images, taken only two days ago, show that melting ice last week opened up both the fabled North-west and North-east passages, in the most important geographical landmark to date to signal the unexpectedly rapid progress of global warming.

Last night Professor Mark Serreze, a sea ice specialist at the official US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), hailed the publication of the images – on an obscure website by scientists at the University of Bremen, Germany – as "a historic event", and said that it provided further evidence that the Arctic icecap may now have entered a "death spiral". Some scientists predict that it could vanish altogether in summer within five years, a process that would, in itself, greatly accelerate.

It bears repeating that many scientists didn't think the ice loss would be quite as bad this summer. Indeed, the overall temperatures for the Arctic have been cooler than they were last year, which means the precipitous drop in ice cover may have more to do with the albedo effect.

Not an impulse pick, honest

By BJ

Earlier today the Washington Post put out a story quoting some folks from the McCain campaign claiming that Palin had been thoroughly vetted by the campaign and was not in fact a impulse, spur-of-the-moment choice.

Well, whoever was doing the vetting certainly didn't turn over all the stones, so to speak.

On Saturday, a Democrat tasked with opposition research contacted the Huffington Post with this piece of information: as of this weekend, the McCain campaign had not gone through old newspaper articles from the Valley Frontiersman, Palin's hometown newspaper.

How does he know? The paper's (massive) archives are not online. And when he went to research past content, he was told he was the first to inquire.

"No one else had requested access before," said the source. "It's unbelievable. We were the only people to do that, which means the McCain camp didn't."

Add to that, this little nugget.

The campaign of John McCain has sent a staff of eight people into Alaska to conduct background checks and vetting on Governor Sarah Palin.

Word is they have have eight rooms reserved at a Wasilla hotel.

On the bright side, I can't wait to see the partisan faithful come up with excuses for why careful, considered vetting of a VP candidate is no longer important. Their flip-flop on the experience question came fast enough to cause whiplash, not to mention saying something else about them and McCain.

We all know that modern political campaigns choose their issues from the cafeteria line, after market-testing them, and then having them professionally framed. Rarely, though, are we offered such a clear and unarguable example. How could anyone truly believe that Barack Obama's background and job history are inadequate experience for a president, and simultaneously believe that Sarah Palin's background and job history are perfectly adequate? It's possible to believe one or the other. But both? Simply not possible. John McCain has been—what's the word?—lying. And so have all the pundits who rushed to defend McCain's choice.

Tipping Points in the Arctic

By BJ

While Gustav slamming into the Gulf Coast and reminding everybody of Katrina will likely cause a lot of bloviating about Climate Change effects, the real movement is happening in the far north. First, there is the ever-dwindling sea ice.

Arctic sea ice has shrunk to the second smallest extent since satellite records began, US scientists have revealed.

The National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) says that the ice-covered area has fallen below its 2005 level, which was the second lowest on record.

Melting has occurred earlier in the year than usual, meaning that the iced area could become even smaller than last September, the lowest recorded.

. . .

The area covered by ice on 26 August measured 5.26 million sq km (2.03 million sq miles), just below the 2005 low of 5.32 million sq km (2.05 million sq).

But the 2005 low came in late September; and with the 2008 graph pointing downwards, the NSIDC team believes last year's record could still be broken even though air temperatures, both in the Arctic and globally, have been lower than last year.

As bad as that is, it doesn't scare me near as much as this news,

Methane, a potent greenhouse gas, is leaking from the permafrost under the Siberian seabed, a researcher on an international expedition in the region told Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter on Saturday.

“The permafrost now has small holes. We have found elevated levels of methane above the water surface and even more in the water just below. It is obvious that the source is the seabed,” Oerjan Gustafsson, the Swedish leader of the International Siberian Shelf Study, told the newspaper.

The tests were carried out in the Laptev and east Siberian seas and used much more precise measuring equipment than previous studies, he said.

Methane is more than 20 times more efficient than carbon dioxide in trapping solar heat.

Scientists fear that global warming may cause Siberia’s permafrost to thaw and thereby release vast amounts of methane into the atmosphere. The effects of global warming are already most visible in the Arctic region.

This is bad.

The Tooth Fairy Ticket

By BJ

I said in my first post about the Palin pick that it is almost impossible to determine just what Palin's views on foreign policy are due to the nearly complete lack of data on her. A far more detailed critique on that point can be found in this post by Elrod.

In government, like in business, executive leadership requires VISION as well as competency.

So, how does one move up from one level to the next? Not just by showing the ability to “run things” at a lower level, but by developing and advancing a vision for how things should be run at a higher level. When mayors run for Governor, they step beyond the parochial needs of the municipality and press for a vision of the state. . . .

The same, of course, is true for Governors who run for President. Yes, their competency in delegating authority and managing budgets and priorities is critical to the Presidency of the United States. But to justify the move from the State House to Washington, they must show a vision and agenda for the nation as a whole. The executive responsibilities of the Presidency are so much grander than that of any Governor, and so require an extensive vetting process where the candidate sells his or her ideas across the country and offers a specific plan to implement those ideas. It’s a big task and it often takes years.

So, does Sarah Palin’s executive experience really make her qualified to be President of the United States?

Being Governor of Alaska is perfectly fine; the sparseness of Alaska’s population doesn’t disqualify her.

Even being Governor for 18 months doesn’t totally disqualify her, though it does lessen the number of examples of her supposed executive strength.

Much more problematic is that she has never offered a VISION of the country beyond the parochial needs of Alaska.

She has literally no position on foreign policy and national security. Not wrong positions. No positions.

She has no stated positions on the economy, or ideological outlook for the role of government in managing it.

Her positions on energy policy are driven not by national needs, but by the peculiarities of Alaska. Nowhere has she suggested how those needs may transfer to the country as a whole.

She has offered no position or vision on health care, arguably THE defining issue for Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Again, she doesn’t have a “wrong” position. She has NO position beyond what is required under Alaskan law.

McCain's Harriet Miers?

By BJ

I'm still trying to wrap my head around McCain's choice of Sarah Palin for the Vice-Presidential slot on the GOP ticket. It seems more like pandering for novelty than a serious choice.

And it is not a question of experience, even though McCain has chosen the one candidate for VP with a resume so slim that even Obama's looks like the Encyclopedia Britannica in comparison. (I mean, I live in a town of 8,000 people. Mayor isn't even a full-time job!)

Obama has been fighting off the charges of his inexperience from the time Palin first took state-wide office, (and yeah, it's been a long campaign, but not that long!), by arguing the true test for leadership should be about judgement.

Obama had the judgement to foresee the consequences of attacking Iraq and opposed the decision. He had the judgement to make Afghanistan rather than Iraq the focus of the "War on Terror", something that both Bush and McCain have had to follow his lead on. He had the judgement to understand that negotiations with Iran were the way to go, and despite being ridiculed as naive by the "serious" folks in the White House and McCain camps, negotiations with Iran are what even Bush has had to acknowledge as the way to go.

Time and again, Obama has shown that he has the sound judgement necessary to lead the United States in the right direction. McCain's more of a hothead than a sound thinker, but at least you can't say you don't know which way he'll jump. Biden also has long track record to review. But Palin? What kind of judgement has she shown in regards to Iraq? Iran? Afghanistan? Pakistan? Russia-Georgia? Israel-Palestine? China? Hell, even Canada?

Do you really want the person who is one heartbeat from the Presidency to be a blank slate when it comes to foreign policy judgement? Not to mention someone who doesn't even know what her position is supposed to be?

A colleague of mine noted today that when compared to Michelle Obama, Palin looked like a junior high student next to a University graduate, and Michelle isn't even the Obama running for office. The colleague who was a Hillary supporter is insulted and thinks McCain just showed that he is an idiot.

For myself, the Harriet Miers nomination keeps coming back to me, though there doesn't appear to be the long-standing relationship and loyalty issues that Miers nomination had for Bush. And I'm not sure if that doesn't make the selection even worse. Bush at least could say that he had a long relationship that made him believe Miers was up to the task, while McCain barely knows Palin.

We'll know more soon, but from first impressions, Palin looks like someone being pushed into a role well past her current level of competence or ability, and there are only two months left to prove otherwise.

Reflections on "The Speech"

By BJ

Thanks to visiting family and the joys of home renovation, I have had little time to watch the DNC in Denver this week, but I made a commitment to tune in last night.  Obama had promised a more workmanlike speech, and that is exactly the adjective I would use to describe it, though with Obama, even a workmanlike speech comes off pretty well.
 
From what I’ve been reading this morning, pretty much everybody outside of the Associated Press and more obvious Republican operatives figured the speech was both substantive and successful.
 
Cernig has already posted the text of the speech, and I’m sure there will be a YouTube of it up shortly.  It is worth either watching or reading in full to come to your own conclusions, but I did want to share a couple of reactions.
 
The first is from one of my co-workers who has been among the most die-hard of Hillary supporters of the near-PUMA type, promising to vote McCain if Obama won, enraged that Hillary wasn’t chosen as VP, and so forth.  (As you can imagine, this led to some rather interesting discussions in the office over the primary season.)  This morning she came over and apologized for her previous comments and is now hoping that Obama will win.
 
The second is from my father, who, much like John Cole’s mom, didn’t spend the evening watching the convention.  When I mentioned the speech to him, he had some short but effusive praise for Obama.
 

“You know, he just strikes me as being really intelligent.  I really hope he wins.  I think most Canadians hope he wins.  Hell, I think most people in the world hopes he wins, not because of the good he can do in the US, which he can do, of course, but for the good he can do for the world!”

 
America, while weakened by eight years of piss-poor management, is still an 800lb gorilla on the world stage, and where it leads, others follow, for good or ill.  We’ve had enough of the ill.

A Familiar Rhyme in Somalia

By BJ

While the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have been the main focus of the Bush administration’s “War on Terror”, there was a third war started in Somalia that continues to rage and go just as poorly for the US-backed Eithiopian-and-Somali-exile government as the others have. Most recently, the Islamists took control over the third largest city and a major port, Kismayo:

The reason given for starting the war in the Horn of Africa was much like that in Iraq, the claim that the Islamic Courts Union, which was consolidating control of southern Somalia from US-backed warlords, was said to be in close league with al Qaeda. It was a dubious claim at the time, but today I spotted this story in the LA Times, which posits that it may be more true today:

Conventional wisdom long held that Somalia was so inhospitable that even Al Qaeda gave up trying to gain a foothold amid feuding clans, erratic warlords and a wily population hardened by years of anarchy.

Now, in the wake of an aggressive U.S. counter-terrorism program that has alienated many Somalis, there are signs that Al Qaeda may have its best chance in years to win over Islamic hard-liners in the Horn of Africa nation.

. . .

U.S. Ambassador Michael E. Ranneberger acknowledged growing links between Shabab and Al Qaeda, but said ties remained in the early stages.

"There are indications of a fairly close Shabab-Al Qaeda connection, though it's not clear to what extent they've been operationalized," he said. "Is Shabab taking orders from Al Qaeda? I would say no. They are still running their own show."

. . .

"Once we end the holy war in Somalia, we will take it to any government that participated in the fighting against Somalia or gave assistance to those attacking us," he said.

Analysts say such talk highlights a growing radicalization of Somalia's Islamists. Although Somalia has long had hard-liners, most of the population practiced a moderate form of Islam, and even extremists limited attacks to inside the country or against Ethiopia, a longtime rival.

But some worry a more radical agenda in Somalia has been aided by U.S. counter-terrorism efforts during the last two years, including half a dozen airstrikes against suspected terrorist targets that often killed civilians.

Somalia's citizens are also outraged by the ongoing occupation of Mogadishu by Ethiopian troops, who came in 2006 to defeat a short-lived Islamic government that had taken power largely with help from Shabab fighters.

Funny how conventional wisdom had long held the exact opposite of what the Bush administration was saying. For those of you keeping score at home, the US backed and supported an Eithiopian invasion of Somalia to overthrow a government they said was closely linked to and supporting al Qaeda, but are now saying that the links are only just now beginning and are starting to grow in response to US actions.

Basically, the invasion and continued foreign occupation has caused the radicalization and movement towards al Qaeda that it was supposed to prevent. Something about that sounds awfully familiar.

Doing Some Health Care Math

By BJ

A couple of weeks ago, Fester posted a story about a 7-month old infant being denied health insurance. In the comments, I remarked how glad I was that my great-grandparents had the good sense to move north into Canada. The kind of situation described in Fester's post is practically incomprehensible to most Canadians, (and pretty much every other part of the developed world). On Sunday, my sister got me to watch Michael Moore's Sicko, (I intended to watch it eventually, honest!), and again I was struck by the fact that for the most part, Canadians have lost the ability to truly appreciate what a private, profit-driven health care system really means.

The problem with this is that there are those looking to use that ignorance to remake the Canadian health care industry to their own advantage. There is, after all, very good money to be made in the health care industry. People will pay a great deal not to die or live in pain.

An Offshore Drilling Example

By BJ

While it probably didn't make the news down south, the Province of Newfoundland and Labrador signed a major offshore oil deal yesterday.

The government of Newfoundland and Labrador is estimating the province will gain at least $20 billion in royalties and up to 3,500 jobs from the Hebron offshore oil project, after a final agreement was signed Wednesday in St. John's.

While the US presidential race in the last few days has been far more concerned over whether or not some guard scratched a cross in the dirt back in the late sixties, or which candidate would be more likely to start WWIII, it wasn't all that long ago that the McCain campaign's big idea was to open up new areas of the US continental shelf to offshore drilling exploration to help ease gas prices. Well, here you have a present-day example of a new offshore field being developed, so I thought it might be instructive to see how long it takes for the 700 million barrels of oil there to start influencing gas prices.

The field was actually discovered back in 1981. For the better part of two decades it sat there undeveloped for economic reasons, but thanks to rising oil prices, it grew attractive again a few years ago.

What followed was one of the bitterest disputes over control of an oil field in recent Canadian history. The demand by Newfoundland Premier Danny Williams for an ownership stake in the project, and a refusal to give Chevron and Exxon a half billion in tax breaks had them walking out of the negotiations in 2006 and calling Williams the North American Hugo Chavez. Newfoundland and Labrador has been the poorest Canadian province for close to 50 years, and the companies no doubt thought that the apparent loss of such a potential windfall would either force Williams to come to their terms or see his opposition take over. Neither happened, and oil just kept rising, and suddenly the oil executives are all smiles as they sign the agreement with Williams.

More to the point when it comes to McCain's claims of opening up new areas of the shelf for oil exploration to affect gas prices, the agreement signed yesterday, for an oil field discovered almost 30 years ago, won't start pumping oil until at least 2017. How much do you think that will help you out when you next hit the gas station?

Be careful who you wish to be allies with

By BJ

Kevin Sullivan has a post up today arguing basically that Georgia and Ukraine should be allowed under NATO’s security umbrella so that they can have greater confidence in their sovereignty. His argument seems to be based on the fact that the Baltic states and other former Warsaw Pact members who have been most vocal in their criticisms of Russia are still pushing for diplomatic solutions, while Ukraine is apparently acting in a more aggressive fashion by offering to join the missile defence system. His update to the column:

Just to add to my point here, check out Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili's rhetoric in his respective WSJ and WaPo columns on the invasion. Rather than framing the conflict as a regional, niche problem for Georgia to deal with, he inflates it (rightly or wrongly) into a test of Western values. This rhetoric is perfectly consistent with the American hawk community.

I think it's safe to say that his rhetoric would be slightly different were Georgia a NATO member today.

Says who? How exactly do you think giving somebody an iron-clad security guarantee will make them less likely to be confrontational? If Ukraine’s offering of cooperation with the US missile defence system is a sign of the government there rushing into the arms of the American unilateralist community, what do you call Poland’s sudden signing on to that very same system?

A few days ago, the guys at Fistful of Euros wrote the following:

The Russian-Georgian war should remind everyone of a very important point regarding NATO and the European Union. Specifically, just as John Lewis Gaddis said about the Cold War, reassurance was as important as deterrence, and this made self-deterrence very important indeed.

NATO members benefited from a common deterrent towards the Soviet Union, . . . the balance of power was so stable because as well as the prospect of a formidable conventional defence and a devastating nuclear counteroffensive, NATO also offered the Soviet Union confidence that nobody would do anything stupid. Reassurance was as important as deterrence, and its most important form was self-deterrence.

Self-deterrence? Yes. It was a provocative way of saying it, but what was meant was that everyone agreed to observe a policy of non-provocation towards the other side. The results of actually triggering the common deterrent were, after all, so awful that nobody would take the risk. The upshot, in Europe, was that the European club’s entry requirement is as follows: you must hand in your historical baggage to be searched. If they find any irredenta in there, you’ll have to get rid of them before you’re coming in.

Look at that in the light of Saakashvili’s decision to take South Ossetia by force. What would have happened had Georgia been a part of NATO and the assurances of Western support Saakashvili thought he had been legally binding? Sullivan seems to believe that being in NATO would soften the Ukrainian and Georgian leaderships’ stances versus Russia, but how sure can you be that it wouldn’t just harden them?

In the days after the conflict began, a senior envoy from a European state opposed to Georgian NATO entry told Reuters: “Thank heavens we didn’t take them in… No one in NATO wants to be dragged into a war in the Caucasus because of (President Mikheil) Saakashvili’s miscalculations.”

They say chains are as strong as their weakest link. In the same vein, alliances are as safe as their most reckless member. I, for one, would be very cautious about the possibility of handing NATO’s future over to another Gavrilo Princip.

French Troops Ambushed in Afghanistan

By BJ

While the news of the last week and a half has allowed all of the old Cold Warriors a chance to re-live their glory days, this morning comes with a major reminder that the hot wars Bush started under the "War on Terror" theme are still ongoing, and in the case of Afghanistan, gathering steam.

Ten French soldiers have been killed in an ambush by Taleban fighters east of the Afghan capital, Kabul, the French president's office has confirmed.

A further 21 French soldiers were wounded in the attack - the heaviest loss of troops France has suffered since deploying to Afghanistan in 2002.

. . .

The ambush came amid signs of deteriorating security in Afghanistan.

Taleban fighters have become more active near Kabul

Despite increased security in Kabul, two rockets were fired on the city overnight, landing close to the Isaf headquarters.

In the southern province of Kandahar a Nato patrol was struck by a roadside bomb.

And in the south-eastern province of Khost six suicide bombers were killed while attacking a Nato military base, Camp Salerno, Nato says.

This comes a month after militants stormed a US outpost near the Pakistan border, also with relatively heavy causalities on the coalition side. And this post by Pat Lang describes a "disaster waiting to happen" on another under-resourced outpost in the border area.

Maybe its all just a karmic reminder of the results of the last time we decided to arm and train a guerilla force to kill Russians.

What's up in the Ukraine?

By BJ

While a lot of the world's focus has been on Georgia this last week, for obvious reasons, the Ukraine is seen by many as another potential crisis-in-the-making between the West and Russia. And it looks as though the pro-Western Ukrainian President is already using the threat of the Russian bear to attack his most likely challengers.

Aides to Ukraine's President Viktor Yushchenko have accused Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko of working in Russia's interests in a bid to become president.

. . .

"Last week, we announced that we had information about Yulia Tymoshenko's systematic work in the interests of Russia. Unfortunately, that information is now confirmed," said Mr Kyslynsky, quoted by the Interfax-Ukraine news agency.

"We will hand over the material we have to the law enforcement bodies, for detailed study," he said.

"Society has the right to get an answer to the question: How far can politicians go beyond the point where political campaigning ends and betrayal of national interests begins?"

For those with short memories, Tymoshenko was one of Yushchenko's biggest allies when he came to power during the "Orange Revolution", overturning the election of Viktor Yanukovych. At the time, Yanukovych and his Russian backers were accused of poisoning Yushchenko, something Yushchenko promised to launch a full investigation into once he came into power. Somehow, I've never heard anything more about it. Once Yushchenko became President, the story basically disappeared and the investigation, near as I can tell, either never happened or never found anything. If anybody knows different, I'd be curious to know.

In any case, Yanukovych, rather than fading away like a good defeated rival, came back to win the parliamentary elections and become Prime Minister. This sparked a power struggle between the two, which led to Yushchenko dissolving parliament and ordering troops into the streets of Kiev.

Still-an-ally Tymoshenko became Prime Minister after another narrow loss for the pro-Russian Yanukovych, but it appears that eyeing Yushchenko's Presidency is enough to flip someone from being "pro-democracy" to a "Russian traitor". It is a situation that bears watching, particularly given the apparent rush to bring both Ukraine and Georgia into NATO before they've really dealt with their internal issues arising from what were once meaningless borders that the Soviet leaders drew on a map nearly a century ago.

An Incomplete Analysis

By BJ

The New York Times has a military analysis of the Russian assault on Georgia. About the