Newshoggers.com

Picture of the week

By Ron Beasley

Big 3 Bail-out thoughts - As Ron sees it.

By Ron Beasley

While I agree that the Big 3 cannot be allowed to go under but I can't agree with a "bail-out" as such.  What should happen is a de-facto temporary nationalization.  To begin with the entire upper management team and the board of directors should be shown the door with only a final pay check - no parachutes.  Throwing money at the companies with the clowns that got them into the mess  in charge makes no sense.  Put a caretaker management team in place while a restructuring plan is developed.  Instead of at least some of the cash move the employees into Medicare which will reduce health care costs by 15 percent or more and begin the move to a single payer system which is essential if the US is going to be competitive in the world market.

Form a blue ribbon commission from business and engineering to determine the path to restructuring the US automobile industry. 

Here Comes the Sun

By Ron Beasley

Now that the election is over we can get back to some news that was put on the back burner the last few months. About a year ago I begin talking about the new printed thin film solar panels that made solar power competitive for the first time. 

Let me be the last in the greenosphere to note that Nanosolar has shipped its first panels, and it's no exaggeration to say that this moment will likely be seen as a historical turning point.

[.....]

Nanosolar's claim is that power from their panels will pencil out at about $0.99 a watt. The implications are pretty stunning:

"With a $1-per-watt panel," [CEO Martin Roscheisen] said, "it is possible to build $2-per-watt systems." According to the Energy Department, building a new coal plant costs about $2.1 a watt, plus the cost of fuel and emissions, he said.

I reported here that Nanosolar had increased their production but that most of that was going to Germany.

My own local utility has now jumped on the thin film solar band wagon.

PORTLAND -- Portland General Electric has rolled out its largest solar project ever in the Pacific Northwest.

Hundreds of solar panels are being installed on top of three Prologis warehouses.

Once installed, the 900 panels will produce up to 1.1 megawatts of electricity -- enough to power 100 Portland homes.

All the electricity produced on these rooftops will go straight into the grid.

PGE says this is a major step toward its goal of supplying 25 percent of its energy from renewable resources by 2025.

You can see a video of the installation at the above link.  As BJ reported below it looks like the EPA is finally going to make it more difficult for coal fired plants which will make thin film solar even more attractive.

The late great Republican Party

By Ron Beasley

My friend and former blogging partner at Middle Earth Journal, Jazz Shaw, made the New York Times yesterday.  That's the good news - the bad news is that put him in the cross hairs of über wingnut Ted Nugent. Bad rocker turned homicidal maniac Nugent declared that RINO Season Is Now Open earlier in the week.  Jazz, who left the Republican Party in 2004, responded with a post at his post MEJ venue, The Moderate Voice, with a sensible post.

While talking heads are dashing back and forth suggesting how to “fix” the Republican party, various solutions are being offered. These include suggestions as extreme as rounding up the RINOs and executing them. Most of the plans include a return to their Reagan roots of small government fiscal conservatism, which is a good plan but doesn’t speak to the real issue. Hand wringing over the fate of a party currently backed into a corner of the deep South should not focus on how to win more elections, but rather on finding a plan for America that solves real problems which Democrats are leaving on the table for them.

Item one on this agenda is the 800 pound gorilla of Social Security and Medicare. Frantic “anti-socialist” elements in the extreme fringe of the party who would see all Federal entitlement programs ended do not hold the answer, but a solution is still required. We have no need to scrap these programs, nor would America’s voters tolerate such a move, but they are still driving us toward a national economic crisis in the next 30 to 40 years which could dwarf the one currently dominating the news cycle. The Democrats have failed to field any serious proposals to fix this because the cure is seen as too painful for an entitlement minded electorate to face. But if the cure is phrased properly, people will be willing to recognize that a little pain up front is preferable to an avalanche of agony further down the line. Take the lead on these issues and you’ll start swinging some hearts and minds back in your direction.

Now while Jazz and I might not agree on "the cure" this is indeed the only way the Republican Party can recover.  But Jazz has some company in Nugent's cross hairs.  Christine Todd Whitman and Robert M. Bostock put themselves on the hit list today -

Free the GOP

The Party Won't Win Back the Middle as Long As It's Hostage to Social Fundamentalists

They recognize that the issues of the social conservatives are on the down side of demographic realities - the "pro-life, anti-black, homophobic population is shrinking through both death and enlightenment.  The wingnuts of course responded as one would expect.

Some advice to my friend Jazz - your Republican party is history.  The Frankenstein monster created by Lee Attwater and Karl Rove has taken charge of  the Republican Party and you are not going to get it back.  It is now a regional party.  The problem is there are very few people living in that region. 

Make them pay taxes

By Ron Beasley

This is just the most recent reason why the tax exempt status of Churches should be ended.

SC priest: No communion for Obama supporters

COLUMBIA, S.C. – A South Carolina Roman Catholic priest has told his parishioners that they should refrain from receiving Holy Communion if they voted for Barack Obama because the Democratic president-elect supports abortion, and supporting him "constitutes material cooperation with intrinsic evil."

The Rev. Jay Scott Newman said in a letter distributed Sunday to parishioners at St. Mary's Catholic Church in Greenville that they are putting their souls at risk if they take Holy Communion before doing penance for their vote.

"Our nation has chosen for its chief executive the most radical pro-abortion politician ever to serve in the United States Senate or to run for president," Newman wrote, referring to Obama by his full name, including his middle name of Hussein.

"Voting for a pro-abortion politician when a plausible pro-life alternative exists constitutes material cooperation with intrinsic evil, and those Catholics who do so place themselves outside of the full communion of Christ's Church and under the judgment of divine law. Persons in this condition should not receive Holy Communion until and unless they are reconciled to God in the Sacrament of Penance, lest they eat and drink their own condemnation."

During the 2008 presidential campaign, many bishops spoke out on abortion more boldly than four years earlier, telling Catholic politicians and voters that the issue should be the most important consideration in setting policy and deciding which candidate to back. A few church leaders said parishioners risked their immortal soul by voting for candidates who support abortion rights.

If organized religion feels obligated to involve itself in politics and government they should be required to pay for the services they receive from the government. 

Who needs 60?

By Ron Beasley

There is still a possibility that the Democrats could get the 60 votes they need to stop filibusters but Joe Conason makes the case that they really don't need it.  There are enough Republicans who will be afraid to block popular legislation. 

Nobody can doubt that the Republican remnant in the Senate will obstruct as soon as that seems politically safe. Right-wing pundits, from Rush Limbaugh to the Wall Street Journal editorial page are already egging them on furiously. But is there enough muscle behind that filibuster threat to block Obama's mandate?

The short answer is no -- and the new president's own political arsenal should enable him to call the Republican bluff.

Let's count the actual votes on the Republican side of the aisle, asking which senators would have both the inclination and the will to join a filibuster. Every issue calls forth different levels of resistance, of course, but in each instance the opposition would need at least 41 total. In the very worst case, should the Republicans pick up all the remaining seats, they will begin with three more than that.

For starters there are six Republicans who are up for reelection in states carried by Obama.

Judd Gregg (R-NH), Arlen Specter (R-PA), George Voinovich (R-OH), Mel Martinez (R-FL), Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Richard Burr (R-NC). Having seen their fellow incumbents fall in the last two elections, that half dozen may well consider themselves in varying degrees of political peril. Poor Gregg watched his New Hampshire colleague John Sununu drop this year as their state turned deep blue. Martinez won his seat in 2004 by a single point and is widely considered vulnerable. So are Specter, nearing his 80th birthday, and Voinovich, now 72.

And there is John McCain who is not nearly as popular in Arizona as he used to be.

His term will expire in two years as well, and at least one poll shows that he would lose his seat to Janet Napolitano, the state's popular Democratic governor. Perhaps that is why he returned home to campaign on the eve of the election.

It's not 2000 or even 2004.

As the nation rebalances its politics away from the right, Senate Republicans may well ask whether they can maintain even their diminished numbers in the next cycle. How eager will any of these endangered incumbents be to participate in filibusters that will leave them open to the "obstructionist" label that Republicans used to slap on Democrats who fought the Bush administration?

The only question that remains is how Obama and the Democrats will use this new found power.  Will we really see change?  Or will they listen to the wrong people.

The "realists"

By Ron Beasley

We have been having a little discussion here about the wisdom of keeping Robert Gates at the DOD and exactly how much the Obama administration should be listening to the Scowcroft "realists".  See here and here.  In the comments the Hoggers very own Ken Anderson referred us to a piece he wrote in 2006,

The Old American Century, Twenty Years of Realist Foreign Policy

Go read it - the entire thing, a few copy and pastes won't do it any justice. 

Dubya's Legacy

By Ron Beasley

As we noted the other day George W. Bush will leave office with the highest unapproval rating ever recorded.  Well the American Conservative magazine notes that that is probably his only legacy.

The 43rd President leaves office without a legacy to stand on.

When future historians argue over the legacy of George W. Bush, the question they confront may be just which bracket of presidential failure he belongs in. Nixon and Johnson? Or Herbert Hoover? President Bush earned his place in the pantheon of disgrace even before he presided over an epochal financial crisis. Absent the atrocities of 9/11, he might have been a mediocrity: a big spender too prone to trust his shallow instincts but able to clear the competence threshold and lacking the sophistication to be truly dangerous.

Then came that epic morning, which Bush answered by giving the hijackers far more than they could accomplish with four planes. His grand democratization plan reduced Iraq to rubble, drove Iran to arm, and provided terrorists with the ultimate recruiting tool. America, once renowned for her decency, became the aggressor her foes alleged.

At home, our failed attempt at global liberation has left us less free than ever before. Ancient liberties, cultural imperatives, even basic solvency were subsumed by the war effort. And the conservative movement that gave Bush his margin sanitized his radicalism at the cost of its soul. All he touched turned to dross. Yet he departs unbowed, still a Churchill in his own mind. It would be easy to leave him to that delusion and turn a more hopeful page. But Bush wasn’t alone in his failure: a country marched behind him and a movement cheered him on.

If the failings of the Bush era are to be corrected—or at least not repeated—we need a clear view of where we’ve been. History will render the final judgment, but herewith a preliminary damage assessment:

"But Bush wasn't alone in his failure", that's important for those who voted for George W. Bush once or twice.  And they have some specifics:

• Empty flight suit
• Fiddling while Wall Street burns
• Anything for the White House

More on Gates

By Ron Beasley

I discussed below why I thought leaving Robert Gates at Defense was a really bad idea.  Our own Anderson had this observation in comments:

Too many of these retreads are Cold Warriors, fighting imagined threats in the same old way and looking to drum up enemies that can be portrayed as "existential threats." This is exactly why Russia has been turned into the latest bad guy -- same as the old Soviet one. Stateless, rhizomatic enemies were just not concrete enough to justify massive, decades-long military budgets, but a new Russia fits that bill nicely.

Nothing has changed for the Washington FP consensus. Russia has always equated with the Soviet Union, and a resurgent Russia is the long lost hegemonic power upon which Washington can project its secret desire for constant conflict. It matters not that GM is opening automobile plants in St. Petersburg or that Europe is intimately connected by energy demands.

If we really ever wish to see a break from that thinking, a new administration will just have to boot the buggers out or we will have to waiting until they die off. I see no boot on the horizon.

Which makes this from Josh Marshall even more disturbing:

One thing to understand about Bob Gates is that he's a Scowcroft guy.

Scowcroft, to the best of my knowledge, never endorsed Obama. But he also, very pointedly, didn't endorse McCain either. And going back many months he's been an important player, far in the background and not for public consumption, in the Obama world. Remember, Hagel, who's sort of been Obama's Joe Lieberman (in the good sense) is very close to Scowcroft. He and Powell are close too. He's the guy who brings all this stuff together.

It's also worth knowing that Scowcroft has also been involved in a multi-year rearguard battle against the neocons in the Bush administration, especially in key efforts trying to block sundry wars with Iran, shut down John Bolton, etc.

This is not to say that Scowcroft is pulling anyone's strings. But to understand the Gates' decision (which I understand is going to happen) you need to look at this on-going conversation and perhaps even de facto alliance with the Scowcroft/GOP foreign policy world.

While the Scowcroft "realists" may appear sane when compared to the reign of terror of the criminally insane neocons they are really cold warriors and they too need to be given the boot.

Robert Gates

By Ron Beasley

"Anti-war" groups are concerned about talk that Obama might consider keeping Robert Gates on as Defense Secretary.  Gates has appeared to be an island of sanity in a sea of the criminally insane.  Spencer Ackerman makes an excellent case for keeping Gates on for a year but gates has a lot of skeletons in his closet going back to the Iran-Iraq war and Iran-Contra.  Digby asks:....

Seriously. There's nobody out there who hasn't been a lying Reagan Bush whore who is competent to run the defense department?

.... and refers us to this by Robert Parry

In 1991, despite doubts about Gates’s honesty over Iran-Contra and other scandals, the career intelligence officer brushed aside accusations that he played secret roles in arming both sides of the Iran-Iraq War. Since then, however, documents have surfaced that raise new questions about Gates’s sweeping denials.

For instance, the Russian government sent an intelligence report to a House investigative task force in early 1993 stating that Gates participated in secret contacts with Iranian officials in 1980 to delay release of 52 U.S. hostages then held in Iran, a move to benefit the presidential campaign of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

“R[obert] Gates, at that time a staffer of the National Security Council in the administration of Jimmy Carter, and former CIA Director George Bush also took part” in a meeting in Paris in October 1980, according to the Russian report, which meshed with information from witnesses who have alleged Gates’s involvement in the Iranian gambit.

Once in office, the Reagan administration did permit weapons to flow to Iran via Israel. One of the planes carrying an arms shipment was shot down over the Soviet Union on July 18, 1981, after straying off course, but the incident drew little attention at the time.

The arms flow continued, on and off, until 1986 when the Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal broke. [For details, see Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege. For text of the Russian report, click here. To view the actual U.S. embassy cable that includes the Russian report, click here.]

Parry has a lot more.  If only part of it is true it should be more than enough to disqualify Gates.  I'm not looking for a pacifist to run the Defense Department but I am looking for someone who is sane and I'm not convinced that's Gates.  If the Obama administration wants a Republican how about Chuck Hagel? 

Contrasts

By Ron Beasley

George W. Bush will leave office as the least popular president ever. 

On the day that President-elect Barack Obama is visiting the White House, a new national poll suggests that the current occupant at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is the most unpopular president since approval ratings were first sought more than six decades ago.

Seventy-six percent of those questioned in a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Monday disapprove of how President Bush is handling his job.

That's an all-time high in CNN polling and in Gallup polling dating back to World War II.

"No other president's disapproval rating has gone higher than 70 percent. Bush has managed to do that three times so far this year," says CNN polling director Keating Holland. "That means that Bush is now more unpopular than Richard Nixon was when he resigned from office during Watergate with a 66 percent disapproval rating."

Before Bush, the record holder for presidential disapproval was Harry Truman, with a 67 percent disapproval rating in January of 1952, his last full year in office.

The latest Gallup poll shows the contrast;

Yes, almost a mirror image.   

A Generation In The Wilderness? Part II

By Ron Beasley

Below I discussed the pragmatic advice from Arnold Schwarzenegger  which will go unheeded.  There is still more advice for the Republicans from conservative Rod Dreher of The Dallas Morning News.  He thinks that the Republicans should oppose Obama at times but they must do it with ideas and not just the same old empty platitudes.

Conservatives must return to the philosophical sources of our tradition and reinterpret its insights and truths for the world we live in now. Ideas really do have consequences - as, obviously, does the lack of same. Yes, conservatives have to oppose the Obama Democrats when they overreach, but if the only response conservatives offer is defensive and obstreperous, they will not soon recover.

But most important they must recognize the Bush presidency and the conservative movement of the last eight years for the failure that it was.

Conservatives will go nowhere until the right owns up to the failures of the Bush years. They were chiefly a failure of competence and a corruption of professed ideals. They were also a failure of ideology. In particular:

•The idea that the American military is an omnipotent tool for spreading liberal democracy died in Iraq and Afghanistan. The right's romanticization of militarism, and its crusading pieties about the universality of democratic values, are done.

•The dogmatic conviction that the globalized free market is capable of regulating itself for the greater good of society is a spectacularly costly shibboleth, as even Alan Greenspan, the high priest of this religion, confessed recently.

•The GOP's knee-jerk hostility to environmental concerns is not only a betrayal of conservative tradition but also costs Republicans credibility with young voters. Similarly, though it's tough for social conservatives like me to admit it, we've lost the gay marriage battle, especially among the young. We're going to have to come to some sort of accommodation with it to protect religious liberty.

Dreher seems to recognize that both the neocons and theocons represent a dead end.  But I see no evidence that anyone will listen to Mr Dreher either.

Over at TMV Pete Abel sees the writing on the wall.

In my evolution from a would-be reformer of the GOP to a supporter of President-elect Obama, I have been asked the inevitable “why” and “how” questions — and I have answered those questions, indirectly. But I’ve never gone so far as to admit what I will admit now: I am no longer a Republican. I am no longer a conservative.

To be clear: I still believe in many of the principles that first led me to the Republican Party. I still have a number of conservative tendencies. But of this party and movement, as they are defined today, I am no more.

There are some, I’m sure, who will ask why, rather than leaving the fold at this darkest of moments, I don’t join the countless other voices who are now in various stages of bemoaning the shape of the party, offering opinions on what went wrong, re-assessing fundamentals, and suggesting steps to reform.

Two reasons. First, I’m not convinced any of it will do any good.

Picture of the week

By Ron Beasley

Canna in Winter

A Generation In The Wilderness?

By Ron Beasley

I think it's healthy to have two relevant political parties but the Republican party is anything but healthy now and there are few signs it's going to improve anytime soon.  Joe Gandelman reports that California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has some advice for his Republican party.

“I think the important thing for the Republican Party is now to also look at other issues that are very important for this country and not to get stuck in ideology,” the governor said in an interview broadcast on CNN this morning. “Let’s go and talk about healthcare reform. Let’s go and . . . fund programs if they’re necessary programs and not get stuck just on the fiscal responsibility.”

Schwarzenegger, a social moderate, long ago earned the enmity of many California Republicans, who believe he abandoned some of the fiscally conservative views he espoused when he ran for office five years ago and began proposing new spending. They cite, for instance, his failed plan to dramatically expand health insurance in the state. Last week, Schwarzenegger angered Republicans again by proposing a statewide sales tax increase to balance the budget.

But the governor has not so openly criticized the approach of the conservative bloc that dominates his party on the national level. He said he thought Republicans had “a very good party,” and he has no plans to leave it, because he agrees with their push to reduce restrictions on business and to remain strong on crime. Schwarzenegger said, however, that the GOP should support greater investment to build roads and fix schools and other “things that the American people want to have done.”

[....]

They should not “always just say, ‘This is spending. We can’t do that.’ No, don’t get stuck with that. We have heard that dialogue. Let’s move on.”

But the Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity Republicans have taken over the Republican Party and this is what we can  expect:

GOP leader: Rebuild party based on 'sanctity of marriage' 

The Republican brand is still alive and well, Rep. Mike Pence said on Fox News Sunday.

When asked by Chris Wallace what "conservative solutions" the GOP would bring to their current minority-party status, Pence said social issues like "the sanctity of marriage" will remain the backbone of the Republican platform.

"You build those conservative solutions, Chris, on the same time-honored principles of limited government, a belief in free markets, in the sanctity of life, the sanctity of marriage," Pence said.

Yes this is the leadership of the Republican Party.  Via John Cole we have this description of Mike Pence from Matt Yglesias:

And I can tell you this about Mike Pence: he has no idea what he’s talking about. The man is a fool, who deserves to be laughed at. He’s almost stupid enough to work in cable television.

Many of the moronic Republicans with a 16th century mindset have been defeated the last two election cycles but those who remain are still in charge of the Republican party.  My 79 year old uncle who had never voted for a Democrat before cast his vote for Barack Obama.  A party success is dependent on a base of the ignorant is destined to spend a long time in the wilderness. 

Post Election Thoughts

By Ron Beasley

While the election of the first black president is significant this election is also a reminder that race as an issue is still alive in the US.  Ronald Brownstein reminds us that this election was not about Barack Obama but about George W. Bush.

It detracts nothing from Barack Obama's achievement to note that his historic electoral success rests atop the epic political failure of George W. Bush. If Obama is shrewd enough, there's a lesson for the new president in the failure of the old one.

Bush and his chief political strategist, Karl Rove, dreamed of cementing a lasting Republican electoral majority. Instead, Bush has left his party in rubble.

The 2008 election represented a final grade on Bush's bruising and polarizing political strategy. To a degree unmatched by modern presidents, Bush governed more by mobilizing his base than by reaching out to voters and interests beyond it. His legislative strategy centered on minimizing dissent among congressional Republicans; his electoral strategy revolved around maximizing his vote among Republicans and conservative independents. On both fronts, his guiding principle was deepen, not broaden.

Through Bush's first term, that approach generated undeniable successes. The congressional Republican majority, demonstrating levels of party unity unequaled since around 1900, passed key elements of his agenda. A skillfully engineered surge in Republican turnout powered his re-election and GOP congressional gains in 2002 and 2004.

But through Bush's second term, this insular strategy grew unsustainable. By targeting so many of his policies toward the priorities of his conservative base, Bush ignited volcanic opposition from Democratic voters and steadily alienated independents. Because he had done so little to court voters beyond his ardent core, he lacked a well of good will to draw on when events turned against him, first with Katrina and Iraq, later with the economy. His disapproval rating soared to heights unsurpassed in modern polling.

That ferocious dissatisfaction fueled the Democratic recapture of Congress in 2006 by stampeding independent voters in their direction. Discontent with Bush again provided a huge tailwind for Democrats this week. Exit polls showed that a breathtaking 71% of voters Tuesday disapproved of Bush's performance. Two-thirds of them voted for Obama. That in itself effectively sealed the election against John McCain.

John McCain spent a lot of time reminding us that he was not George W. Bush but what he never said what he would do differently.  Only two thirds of those who didn't approve of Bush voted for Obama.  My guess is that if Obama had been white he would have won by 15% not 7%. 

Greatness

So what will the Obama presidency be like.  The opportunity for "greatness"  is thrust on people.  George W. Bush had the opportunity on 911 and we know how that worked out.  Bush and his administration chose greed and power over greatness which resulted in Obama's opportunity.  As little as a year ago I was referring to Obama as an empty suit - I was wrong.  He has both the opportunity and the personality and intellect to be "great". 

Fools on the hill

By Ron Beasley

I've been quiet the last couple of days as I have tried to digest the events of the week.  The most interesting news comes from the losers and the most interesting, but not only, events revolve around the attacks on Sarah Palin.  I don't think she is the sharpest knife in the kitchen but I don't really buy much of the information about just how stupid she is.  More importantly I don't believe this is entirely coming from the McCain campaign - it is coming from the Romney 2012 campaign.  Go for it I say.  This activity well result in a long run for the Democrats.  They are attacking the Evangelicals own diva and the Evangelicals already don't feel comfortable with the Mormon, Romney.  They will feel even less comfortable when they realize he is trying to kneecap their very own Sarah. 

But it gets even better - the Republicans just don't get it.  Dick ( a nation of whiners) Armey is still trying to defend trickle down economics. But that's not all.  Many of us predicted that the wingnuts would claim that McCain lost because he was not "conservative" enough:

Moderates to blame for GOP losses, conservative leader says

A conservative leader Friday laid the Republican Party's poor showing at the polls at the feet of moderates who, he argues, led the party away from its core principles.

Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council told CNN that conservatives need to take back control of the GOP if the party is to return to its winning ways.

"Moderates never beat conservatives. We've seen that in past elections," he said.

Rejecting suggestions that the conservative movement was viewed as being out of touch with the electorate, Perkins says the Republican Party needs to go back to basics.

"It's a return to fundamental conservative principles that Ronald Reagan showed work and that people can be attracted to," Perkins said.

Fools on the hill indeed.  I'll have more later but for now I'll leave you with the Dixie Chicks video of the Stevie Nicks' classic "Landslide", a metaphor for the week.

Gordon Smith Concedes

By Ron Beasley

Oregon Republican Senator Gordon Smith has conceded to Democrat Jeff Merkley.

Republican Gordon Smith, who has represented Oregon in the U.S. Senate for the last 12 years, this morning called Jeff Merkley, his Democratic challenger, to concede their race.

Jon Isaacs, an aide to Merkley, said that Smith called Merkley about 8:40 a.m. to concede the hard-fought race, which came down to a few thousand votes. Isaacs described the conversation between the two men as "very cordial."

It would appear that Merkley will receive 48% of the votes to Smith's 46% with Constitution Party candidate Brownlow receiving 5%, most of which was taken from Smith.  Brownlow said that Smith was not conservative enough and that he ran to make sure Smith would lose.

Oregon Senate Final

By Ron Beasley

As I noted below Democrat Jeff Merkley has defeated Republican incumbent Gordon Smith in the Oregon Senate Race.  Smith had led until early this afternoon until the votes from the populous and largely Democratic counties in the North West corner of the state.  While Oregon is thought of as a blue state most of it is rural and ruby red but most of the people live in the few blue counties. 

Oregon Senate Race Update

By Ron Beasley

Oregon's Senate race between incumbent Republican Gordon Smith and Democrat Jeff Merkley is still too close to call.  Smith leads by just under 2000 votes  at 3:00PM PST with 74% of the vote counted.  Most of the remaining ballots are from heavily Democratic Multnomah County(Portland) so Merkley is still expected to win.

Update - 3:30 PM PST

Merkley has just taken the lead.  Looking good!

Update - 4:50 PM PST

Merkley now up buy 2500 votes with 76% of the votes counted.

Update - 6:40 PM PST

Jeff Merkley declared winner over Smith;

PORTLAND, Ore. -- The Oregonian and KGW projected Wednesday night that Democratic challenger Jeff Merkley would overtake Republican Sen. Gordon Smith to win the Senate seat in the toughest, most expensive race the state has ever seen.

Multnomah and Lane County were still counting ballots Wednesday night, after numbers started to show a lead for Merkley in Multnomah, Oreogn's most populous and liberal county.

I will update as I learn more.

Wasilla hillbillies loot Neiman Marcus

By Ron Beasley

Apparently Sarah Palin really porked out when told to buy a few suits:

NEWSWEEK has also learned that Palin's shopping spree at high-end department stores was more extensive than previously reported. While publicly supporting Palin, McCain's top advisers privately fumed at what they regarded as her outrageous profligacy. One senior aide said that Nicolle Wallace had told Palin to buy three suits for the convention and hire a stylist. But instead, the vice presidential nominee began buying for herself and her family—clothes and accessories from top stores such as Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus. According to two knowledgeable sources, a vast majority of the clothes were bought by a wealthy donor, who was shocked when he got the bill. Palin also used low-level staffers to buy some of the clothes on their credit cards. The McCain campaign found out last week when the aides sought reimbursement. One aide estimated that she spent "tens of thousands" more than the reported $150,000, and that $20,000 to $40,000 went to buy clothes for her husband. Some articles of clothing have apparently been lost. An angry aide characterized the shopping spree as "Wasilla hillbillies looting Neiman Marcus from coast to coast," and said the truth will eventually come out when the Republican Party audits its books.

Those Alaskans really do like their pork and the "bridge to nowhere" actually leads to Neiman Marcus.

2004 VS 2008

By Ron Beasley

For those of us who are still nervous it is good to remember just how close the race was in 2004 as compared to this election.  Below is the map from Electoral-Vote.com on this day in 2004.

>







As you can see it was very close with Iowa and Ohio tied.  Bush took both of those states and that was the election.

Not even close.

What and Why

By Ron Beasley

I spent the afternoon looking at the polls and playing with an interactive electoral map and came up with what I though would be the likely result tomorrow.  Before I had a chance to post I discovered I had reached the same conclusion as none other than Karl Rove, Obama - 338, McCain - 200.  Not quite a blowout but close. (note: I see that Larry Sabato is sticking to his 364 -174 prediction).  That's the what, the why, (or whys) is more complex.  There are a number of reasons but most of them are related to number one on the list:

1. George W. Bush:  A Republican with an approval rating of 25%.  This makes the R a toxic tag to begin with.  I made it clear to anyone who would listen eight years ago that I thought the election of George W, Bush was a disaster.  I didn't dream how right I would be - he exceeded my expectations.
2. The Economy: I made it clear two and a half years ago that the so called Bush recovery was no recovery at all but a credit driven unsustainable boom. It was based entirely on consumer spending driven by cheap credit.  I'm convinced that many in the Bush administration knew that the boom was going to go bust but had been trying to put it off until after the election.  As we have seen they failed in that.  After the major collapse in September McCain never had a prayer.
3. The Republican Model:  The Lee Attwater/Karl Rove model of using prejudice disguised as "Social Conservatism"  simply doesn't work like it has for years.  I'll discuss this in more detail below.

What McCain should do!

By Ron Beasley

Even this paranoid pessimist has trouble thinking that Obama won't win on Tuesday especially when Republican hack and FOX contributor Frank Luntz says:

"I cannot foresee a scenario that John McCain is elected the President of the United States."

And Charlie Cook says we are looking at something quite - quite big:

It's looks like George W. Bush has beat John McCain twice - he did it in 2000 by sliming John McCain and he did it in 2008 by spending eight years sliming the entire country.

So what should John McCain do on November fifth?  The McCain campaign has been promising a monumental comeback and win in spite of evidence to the contrary.  Daniel Larison wonders:

Presumably the insiders know that they’re going to lose and are keeping up appearances, but how shocked will McCain’s voters be when the comeback that they are being vaguely promised does not happen?

There does seem to be a real problem emerging here: if McCain supporters, encouraged by the talk radio echo chamber, believe that they are on the verge of an upset win and also believe in claims of widespread voter fraud, what are the odds that they are going to accept the results on Tuesday?  It seems to me that Obama needs to win by a significant margin in the popular vote and Electoral College to quash “stolen election” theories.

In order to both save what little may be left of his "maverick" legacy and to "put the country first"  John McCain needs to make heartfelt speech where he makes it clear that he thinks the election was not stolen and that Barack Obama is his President and the President of all of the United States.  He needs to male it clear that he will work with President Obama to help cure the ills of the country.  This will put him at odds with Sarah Palin who has her own agenda and her own group of cultists who won't be doing that.  By attempting to isolate the Palinites as a lunatic fringe he may even be able to save his own party.

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Picture of the week

By Ron Beasley

Howard Dean's Victory?

By Ron Beasley

As this election cycle comes to an end we see Obama competitive or ahead in States and regions that would have seemed impossible just four years ago.  Yes much of it is because George W. Bush has succeeded in making the Republican brand toxic and Obama's campaign has been nearly flawless while McCain's campaign has consisted of a bunch of incomplete hail Mary passes.  But dday over at Hullabaloo reminds us that Howard Dean deserves some of the credit.

This whole thing, the Democratic resurgence, the Obama campaign, is the realization of something started about five years ago in Burlington, Vermont, of all places, and continued in Washington after the Kerry loss, at a low point for Democrats.

His hypothesis was simple: To be a national political party, you have to compete everywhere. It was called the “50 state strategy,” and it was unveiled in 2005.

Remember 2005?

That’s when Karl Rove was building a permanent Republican majority, and when President George W. Bush was going to save Social Security by privatizing it.

In 2005, Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont, campaigned among grass-roots activists to become chairman of the Democratic National Committee.

Campaigned to be head of the DNC? That’s an establishment job, hand-picked.

Howard Dean? What a loser.

But politics is all about a little prescience and a little luck. Dean had both. He had the wisdom to know Democrats could win in a lot of places if they bothered to show up and make an argument. The lucky part: The public has turned on the Republican Party.

It's a simple formula, but this article doesn't fully capture what Dean did. He put paid staffers into those 50 states so he could capitalize on any opportunity. He revitalized moribund state parties and created the neighbor-to-neighbor tool that can make Democrats a presence in people's lives all year round, not just before Election Day. He helped build a voter file that now rivals Republicans' vaunted data bank. He laid all the groundwork for Obama to build on and surpass.

In many ways, Tuesday could be Howard Dean's victory as well.

That's right, Dean built the infrastructure that Obama has been able to take advantage of.  A tip of the hat to Howard Dean will be appropriate on Wednesday morning.

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Paranoia - I'm not alone!

By Ron Beasley

As I said yesterday, in spite of all the evidence of a big Obama win I'm still very nervous and why wouldn't I be after stolen elections the last two times out.  Yes it really looks like Obama can't lose - Nate Silver has McCain's possibility of winning down to 2.8 percent, a new low.  But yes, I remain nervous but I'm not alone.  My old friend Bill in DC sent me this from the NYT:

Liberals Worry as Election Approaches

Jon Downs, 53, works the electoral vote maps on Yahoo like a spiritualist shaking his Ouija board. He calibrates and recalibrates: Give Senator John McCain Ohio, Missouri, even Florida. But Virginia and Pennsylvania, those go to Senator Barack Obama. And Vermont, Democrats can count on Vermont, right?

Right.

Almost always, Mr. Downs ends with Mr. Obama, the Democratic presidential nominee, ahead, which should please this confirmed liberal and profound Obama fan. But just as often he feels worried.

“Look, I have this sense of impending doom; we’ve had a couple of elections stolen already,” Mr. Downs said. “The only thing worse than losing is to think that you’re going to win and then lose.”

He considers that prospect and mutters, almost involuntarily, “Oh, God.”

To talk with left-leaning Democrats in New Hope, San Francisco or Miami Beach, to drill deep into their id, is to stand at the intersection of Liberal and High Anxiety.

Right now, more than a few are having a these-polls-are-too-good-to-be-true, we-still-could-lose-this-election moment. Their consuming and possibly over-caffeinated worry is that their prayers and nightly phone calls to undecided voters in Toledo, Ohio, notwithstanding, Mr. Obama might fall short on Election Day.

Big Win????

By Ron Beasley

I've been quiet again and I apologize. I haven't been feeling well but it's mostly because I still can't believe the Rethuglicans will let Obama and the Democrats to win next week.  Everything would indicate that Obama should win in a near landslide next Tuesday.  I feel a little better tonight largely because Larry Sabato predicts a big Obama win.

Yes, the very reliable Sabato predicts a blowout.  He also predicts a pick up of seven or eight in the Senate - not 60 but enough to get a lot of things done.  On top of that NBC's Chuck Todd says it's easier to see how Obama could get 375 EV's that it is to see how McCain gets 270.

That said I'm still nervous. 

Two weekly polls came out today with big differences.  The CBS/NYT poll has Obama up by 11 points while the FOX poll has him up by only 3.  Of course FOX changed it's methodology to get that result. 

Hopefully I'll feel better in five days.

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Oregon's Senate Race

By Ron Beasley

The Senate Race between Republican incumbent Gordon Smith, Democrat Jeff Merkley and Constitution Party candidate Dave Brownlow is gaining national attention and has taken some interesting twists and turns.

-Details and videos below the fold-

Crashing the party!

By Ron Beasley

Now I'm a proud liberal but I'm not a registered Democrat.  I'm what's known as an unaffiliated voter here in Oregon - an independent. It's up to the political parties here in Oregon to decide if unaffiliated voters can participate in their primaries and neither the Democrats or the Republicans allow it.  As a result I had no say as to what choices I would have this November.  The good news is we have a fix on the ballot this time - measure 65 - the open primary. Former Democratic Governor John Kitzhaber  makes the case for yes on 65:

As a lifelong progressive democrat, I believe that Measure 65 – the open primary proposal -- is the one measure on the 2008 ballot that presents a truly progressive foundation for our representative form of government. This ballot measure offers an opportunity to undo a fundamental injustice in our voting system and lay the foundation for more effective governance in the future. It will immediately invite all Oregonian voters to meaningfully participate in elections and -- over the long term -- it will create a space in which Oregonians can rebuild their trust in government as a tool for positive progressive change in their communities.

In many legislative districts across Oregon, only members of the two dominant parties may help choose the nominee who – if elected in the general election – will represent all the citizens in the district.

I believe that this kind of exclusion is fundamentally wrong and is incompatible with the democratic and progressive cause. Our history has been one of expanding participation in the electoral process, not restricting it: from the 17th Amendment which provided for direct election of the United States Senate; to the 19th Amendment which granted women the right to vote; to the 24th Amendment which prohibited the restriction of voting rights due to the inability to pay poll taxes; to the 26th Amendment which lowered the national voting age from 21 to 18. This progressive record of inclusion is based on the belief that the people, not the parties they choose to join are best equipped to govern and to solve our problems.

The current closed system has practical consequences as well. When legislators are sent to Salem by the party members of their districts, rather than by all those who reside there, genuine interests go unrepresented and public trust in the legislature to represent its interests is diluted.

In a progressive democracy, we must always be attentive to the needs and concerns not only of the majority, but of those who don't have a prominent voice. Whether we are developing a framework for health care in Oregon, reworking the tax code, or improving the quality of our schools, we need to have input from all Oregonians if we hope to get it right.

But if an Oregonian never hears from their elected officials during a campaign, what reason do they have to trust the legislature to represent their interests? If we ask them to approve the expansion of a program within a government in which they have no meaningful stake, how should we expect them to respond?

The 2005 Oregon Legislature -- recognizing the low regard in which this institution is held by the general public -- convened the Public Commission on the Oregon Legislature to seek out and address the root causes of this problem. The commission’s first recommendation was to open the primary process to empowering voters without regard to their party affiliation.

Now is the time to heed this considered recommendation and pass Ballot Measure 65.

This year I would have voted for Barack Obama in the primary but there have been times that I would have voted for a moderate Republican to give me a real choice in the general election. 

Clueless

By Ron Beasley

It's really too bad that Iraq is not more in the news.  It's become obvious to anyone paying attention that the al-Maliki government is now taking it's orders not from Washington DC but from Tehran.  The most obvious example is the lack of a status of forces agreement.  The majority of the Iraqis want the US out of their country sooner rather than later.  Joe Conason explains that John McCain is just as clueless about the situation in Iraq as he is on what to do about the economy.

The absence of headlines has allowed John McCain to pretend that his insistence on maintaining the American occupation until "victory" is still relevant.

But despite McCain's claim to greater experience and judgment in foreign policy, he just doesn't seem to know what he's talking about. If he did, the latest developments in relations between Baghdad and Washington would dampen the Republican nominee's enthusiasm for a prolonged occupation.

Negotiations between the Bush administration and the government of Nouri al-Maliki over the presence of U.S. forces have reached an impasse that no longer seems certain to be resolved until George W. Bush has left office. If any resolution is achieved over the coming weeks, moreover, it will render McCain's hard-line position on the war null and void.

Bush administration folds but not John McCain:

But having presented the Iraqis with a draft treaty last spring that would have permitted an indefinite occupation, the White House has folded so completely and so often during the course of the ensuing negotiations that such warnings have little credibility.

Meanwhile the Iraqis are obviously well aware that Bush has forfeited his influence at home and abroad and will be leaving office at the end of January anyway. Their latest proposal is to ask the United Nations to "extend" the coalition mandate for one more year, allowing the Iraqis to enter talks with the incoming administration.

So much for the fantasies of the neoconservatives, who once imagined the new Iraq as a permanent base for American troops in the Middle East, with a client government that would reflect U.S. priorities. What has come to exist instead is an Iraq much closer to Iran than to the United States, one that will countenance no permanent U.S. bases and prefers that our troops depart sooner rather than later.

Yet McCain still seems to believe that we will be able to have a "conditions-based" agreement with the Iraqis that allows the withdrawal of our troops according to the judgment of American commanders and the president. Someone should try to bring him back to reality, and soon — just in case he wins this election.

So John McCain is supposed to have all the foreign policy experience but he doesn't have a clue as to what's going on.  Sorry John, the war is over and as many of us predicted from the beginning the winner is Iran.

Picture Of The Week

By Ron Beasley

Fall in the Columbia River Gorge.  (Click on Picture for Larger Image)

Accepting Reality

By Ron Beasley

Now the Republicans as we know are not very good at accepting reality.  Well David Frum may be a temporary exception - he advises the Republicans to write off John McCain and spend the money they have trying to save a few Senate seats.

There are many ways to lose a presidential election. John McCain is losing in a way that threatens to take the entire Republican Party down with him.

A year ago, the Arizona senator's team made a crucial strategic decision. McCain would run on his (impressive) personal biography. On policy, he'd hew mostly to conservative orthodoxy, with a few deviations -- most notably, his support for legalization for illegal immigrants. But this strategy wasn't yielding results in the general election. So in August, McCain tried a bold new gambit: He would reach out to independents and women with an exciting and unexpected vice presidential choice.

That didn't work out so well either. Gov. Sarah Palin connected with neither independents nor women. She did, however, ignite the Republican base, which has come to support her passionately. And so, in this last month, the McCain campaign has Palinized itself to make the most of its last asset. To fire up the Republican base, the McCain team has hit at Barack Obama as an alien, a radical and a socialist.

So none of it's working and McCain is going to lose big and take a lot of other Republicans down with him.  So what should the Republicans do?

In these last days before the vote, Republicans need to face some strategic realities. Our resources are limited, and our message is failing. We cannot fight on all fronts. We are cannibalizing races that we must win and probably can win in order to help a national campaign that is almost certainly lost. In these final 10 days, our goal should be: senators first.

Of course he's right but I hope nobody listens to him.  Of course even though he came to a logical conclusion it was for all the wrong reasons.  I think Robert Stacey McCain is right when he blames John McCain's ill fortunes on Sarah Palin and not on McCain's erratic reaction to the financial crisis.

Quote of the day

By Ron Beasley

The quote of the day is from Sully:

We will see a serious conservatism again when Bill Kristol and Karl Rove are banished from the Republican party and from the conservative media. The Republican implosion is primarily their doing, their achievement, their legacy. It was when McCain ceded his campaign to Schmidt and Palin (creatures of Rove and Kristol respectively) that he threw it all away. As long as they are given any credence, Republicanism will not recover.

This is a good time to repeat my favorite Bill Kristol quote:

"There's been a certain amount of pop sociology in America ... that the Shia can't get along with the Sunni and the Shia in Iraq just want to establish some kind of Islamic fundamentalist regime. There's almost no evidence of that at all. Iraq's always been very secular."
~Willaim Kristol, April 4th, 2003, NPR

Google clueless and the first hit should be Bill Kristol.

Why have an election "day"?

By Ron Beasley

There is an op-ed in the NYT today, Everybody’s Voting for the Weekend, where they make a great case for changing election day from Tuesday to the weekend like the rest of the world.  I say good idea but why bother.  Here in my own state of Oregon we don't have an "election day" we have a last day to turn in your ballot.  It's called vote by mail and most eligible voters in Oregon had received their ballots in the mail by Monday of this week.  I received my ballot on Saturday, voted on Monday and put my ballot in the white mail box in front of city hall on Tuesday.  I could have mailed it.  This from a  January, 2005 op-ed in the Washington Post.

While many states were embroiled in fights over touch-screen voting machines and provisional ballots and struggling to find enough people to staff polling places, Oregon once again quietly conducted a presidential election with record turnout and little strife.

Oregon's vote-by-mail system has proved reliable and popular. Critics said that vote-by-mail is prone to fraud. But signature verification of every voter before a ballot is counted is an effective safeguard against fraud.

[....]

Vote-by-mail is voter-friendly, and high turnout in every vote-by-mail election shows that voters like the convenience. Oregonians receive ballots in the mail two weeks before Election Day, allowing ample time to research issues, review and mark the ballot, and eliminating the need to stand in long lines waiting for a polling booth.

Voters are busy, but voting fits their schedule if they may return their ballot at any time during those two weeks and up until 8 p.m. on Election Day. Voters may mail their ballots or save a stamp by dropping them off in person at any of the official sites located throughout the state. The earlier that ballots come in, the more time election officials have to check for any problems and to process the ballots to ensure that every vote counts. With a large number of ballots received before Election Day, the first tally released on election night contained nearly 50 percent of the vote and proved to be an accurate predictor of the final numbers.

Vote-by-mail provides an automatic paper trail. Every vote-by-mail ballot is read by reliable optical scan machines, and the paper is available should a hand recount become necessary. Mailed ballots are not forwarded by the post office, and the constant updating of voter rolls provided by returned ballots allows Oregon to have accurate and updated voter rolls without the risk of partisan purges. 

Without polling places, vote-by-mail eliminates the expensive and time-consuming recruitment and training of poll workers. As a result, the cost of a vote-by-mail election is nearly 30 percent less than the cost of a polling place election.

Centralized supervision and control of ballot processing by elections officials in county elections offices, instead of dispersed polling places, maintains uniformity and strict compliance with law throughout the state.

It is estimated that as many as a third of voters will vote before the official election day this year so why not make it official, more convenient and save some money at the same time.

Today's Defections - 10/24

By Ron Beasley

Well John McCain got one endorsedment today - George W. Bush voted for him. Boy that's going to help. Now for the defections.  First we have Former Massachusetts Gov. William Weld, a Republican.  No real surprise here, he is one of the few remaining moderate Republicans.  But this one has to hurt:

Reagan Appointee and (Recent) McCain Adviser Charles Fried Supports Obama

Charles Fried, a professor at Harvard Law School, has long been one of the most important conservative thinkers in the United States. Under President Reagan, he served, with great distinction, as Solicitor General of the United States. Since then, he has been prominently associated with several Republican leaders and candidates, most recently John McCain, for whom he expressed his enthusiastic support in January.

This week, Fried announced that he has voted for Obama-Biden by absentee ballot. In his letter to Trevor Potter, the General Counsel to the McCain-Palin campaign, he asked that his name be removed from the several campaign-related committees on which he serves. In that letter, he said that chief among the reasons for his decision "is the choice of Sarah Palin at a time of deep national crisis."

Fried is exceptionally thoughtful and principled; his vote for Obama is especially noteworthy.

It's pretty bad when your own advisors endorse your opponent.

Todays Defections

By Ron Beasley

There were a number of new Republicans who endoresed Barack Obama today.  The first doesn't mean that much - that slimy weasel Scott McClellan who can simply see which way the wind is blowing.  The next is former Republican Governor of Minnesota Arne Carlson:

ST. PAUL, Minn. - Arne Carlson, a former Republican governor in Minnesota, has endorsed Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama.

Carlson said Thursday that the Illinois senator's stances on the Iraq war, the economy and green energy goals won him over. Carlson, who served from 1991 to 1998, also cited recent comments by GOP Congresswoman Michele Bachmann questioning whether politicians have "pro-America or anti-America views."

"Regardless of our party, regardless of our partisan inclinations, there is no interest more compelling than the interest in the well-being of the United States," Carlson said at a gathering of Obama supporters at the state Capitol.

The big one today though was the defection of much of the family of conservative icon Barry Goldwater represented by Goldwater's granddaughter and biographer CC Goldwater.  Perhaps it's not really a surprise, CC and the rest of the Goldwater family have been very critical of George W. Bush but it could have an impact in Arizona and other western states.

Being Barry Goldwater's granddaughter and living in Arizona, one would assume that I would be voting for our state's senator, John McCain. I am still struck by certain 'dyed in the wool' Republicans who are on the fence this election, as it seems like a no-brainer to me.

Myself, along with my siblings and a few cousins, will not be supporting the Republican presidential candidates this year. We believe strongly in what our grandfather stood for: honesty, integrity, and personal freedom, free from political maneuvering and fear tactics. I learned a lot about my grandfather while producing the documentary, Mr. Conservative Goldwater on Goldwater. Our generation of Goldwaters expects government to provide for constitutional protections. We reject the constant intrusion into our personal lives, along with other crucial policy issues of the McCain/Palin ticket.

Levi and the Calvinists

By Ron Beasley

I was surprised that more wasn't made of the fact that young Levi Johnson dropped out of  high school because he found himself in a fartherly way.  While few if any noticed here Muhammad Cohen of the Asia Times did.

Alaskan Gothic

But Johnston's most startling revelation in his interview was that he's dropped out of high school to work as an apprentice electrician in Alaska's North Slope oil fields due to his impending fatherhood. Back in school, Johnston was reportedly a big man on campus, star of the school hockey team. Now he's playing out the great American loser cliche embodied by Al Bundy in the TV series Married ... with Children, , a dead-ender doomed to a life of drudgery and bitterness by an accidental high school pregnancy. By all accounts, Johnston seemed marked for better things.

The Christian right can talk all about the blessing of life, but teenage pregnancy is really a cruel curse, and Johnston won't be the only victim here. Unless her mother wins the vice presidency, it's a good bet that Bristol Palin won't be going back to high school either. In the days before Christian morality held sway in the Wasilla school district and decreed abstinence-only sex education in high schools, Sarah Palin managed to avoid having her first baby until after she'd attended five colleges in six years and gestated a diploma.

Levi Johnson and Bristol Palin's inability to control their hormons may result in a "blessed event" but will condem them to a life that is much less than it could have been.

A high school graduate typically earns 50% more than a dropout. You would think that the Palins and the Johnstons would have the good sense to insist that a teenage mistake - this pregnancy was, ahem, unplanned, and the blessing of birth aside, last time I checked, the Bible calls what Levi and Bristol did a sin - doesn't ruin their futures.

This is the Calvanism of the Religious Right at work.  Faith is more important than education, you must pay for your youthful failures for the rest of your life.  And what was McCain's reaction?

In last week's debate, instead of talking about Joe the Plumber, whom he'd never met, McCain might've addressed someone he does know, Levi the Dropout. Without criticizing the accidental parents in waiting or their families, McCain could have at least made the humanizing point that the US's educational needs must be modernized to be ready for a host of 21st century situations, whether technological or personal, so that everyone can keep learning. Instead he trotted out the traditional right-wing appeal for school vouchers.

Right-wingers like the idea for its politics, not its educational outcomes. Giving public money to private schools is a blow against government services, government employees and labor unions, and a boon for religious groups that run many private schools.

If it's a return to the 16th century you want then you should vote for the Palin McCain ticket.

It's all about McCain

By Ron Beasley

The McCain campaign tried to make this election about Barack Obama because they knew they couldn't win on policy or ideology.  What happened instead was that the election became about John McCain.  A number of conservatives have said they will vote for Obama including Chris Buckley and this weekend Colin Powell because they question John McCain's judgement.  It's now reached the point where even some of the lunatics find they can't support John McCain including lifelong conservative and friend of Cheney and Rumsfeld, Ken Adelman.

Why so, since my views align a lot more with McCain’s than with Obama’s? And since I truly dread the notion of a Democratic president, Democratic House, and hugely Democratic Senate?

Primarily for two reasons, those of temperament and of judgment.

When the economic crisis broke, I found John McCain bouncing all over the place. In those first few crisis days, he was impetuous, inconsistent, and imprudent; ending up just plain weird. Having worked with Ronald Reagan for seven years, and been with him in his critical three summits with Gorbachev, I’ve concluded that that’s no way a president can act under pressure.

Second is judgment. The most important decision John McCain made in his long campaign was deciding on a running mate.

That decision showed appalling lack of judgment. Not only is Sarah Palin not close to being acceptable in high office—I would not have hired her for even a mid-level post in the arms-control agency. But that selection contradicted McCain’s main two, and best two, themes for his campaign—Country First, and experience counts. Neither can he credibly claim, post-Palin pick.

I sure hope Obama is more open, centrist, sensible—dare I say, Clintonesque—than his liberal record indicates, than his cooperation with Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid portends. If not, I will be even more startled by my vote than I am now.

Yes once again it's McCain's Hail Mary Passes, including the choice of Sarah Palin, that have even conservatives decided that perhaps McCain is unfit to serve.

Must read of the day

By Ron Beasley

My major house remodel should come to an end today and I should be back to regular posting soon.  Today I would like  to send you over to The Excrescence Of Right-Wing GOP Hate by Shaun Mullen for the must read of the day. 

Here is the intro:

The racist and xenophobic bile that has flowed from the right-wing Republican base and spokesmouths like Rush Limbaugh has been unprecedented in this campaign season, and it was easy to predict that the moment Colin Powell endorsed Barack Obama that he was no longer a war hero and brilliant diplomat but just another uppity Negro.

If the hate mongering of these people was not so destructive, the knots into which they tie themselves would be amusing.

Go read the rest.

I fear for this country

By Ron Beasley

No, I'm not afraid Palin/McCain will win, I'm afraid of what will happen when they don't.  It was not too surprising that Colin Powell endorsed Obama this morning but what he said was:

As you see is not so much an endorsement of Barack Obama but a condemnation of the current Republican party and the Rovian McCain campaign.  Lee Attwater sparked the wildfire that is the lunatic fringe of the Republican Party.  Karl Rove fanned the flames and the Palin/McCain campaign has been throwing gasoline on the fire.

What passes as the Republican party these days is attempting to do is make the almost inevitable Democratic sweep illigitimate.  This from Bilmon :

With the prospect of a bone-crushing election defeat staring them full in the face, the diehard rump of the conservative movement is already busy fashioning a narrative to explain the dissolution of its world -- the one that Ronald Reagan built and that George W. Bush (with an assist from Wall Street) has thoroughly trashed.

And the emerging story line appears to be, roughly, that ACORN did it.

Given the underlying proclivities of the modern conservative movement (Sarah Palin division) we should have understood that sooner or later it would come to something as absurd as this. Failed authoritarian movements needs scapegoats the way fecal coliform bacteria need a steady supply of raw sewage, and this one has a lot of failures that need explaining.

The remarkable thing, of course, is the right's effort to make the ACORN boogie man do double duty: responsible not only for the looming "theft" of American democracy (per John McCain) but also for bringing the US and global financial system to its knees (per any number of conservative quacks economists and cranks pundits).

You have to admit: That's a damned impressive revolutionary track record for an obscure group of community organizers operating on a shoestring budget. I mean, who needs the Red Army when you've got ACORN and the Community Reinvestment Act?

So what will this do to Karl Rove's lunatic fringe?

We don't need to hark back to the unfortunate history of a certain Central European country in the 1930s to understand how poisonous this kind of political myth making can become. Powerful elements of the Republican Party and the conservative "movement" aren't just preparing themselves to go into opposition, they're preparing themselves to dispute the legitimacy of an Obama presidency -- in ways that could, if taken to extreme, lead to another Oklahoma City.

It's hard to tell to what degree the GOP high command fully understands or is trying to feed these dynamics (indeed, it's becoming increasingly difficult to even tell who the GOP high command is these days). The last thing I want to do is get into an arms race with the wingnut right when it comes to paranoid conspiracy theories. (That's one race the left will always lose). Still, the recent statements of John McCain and his Bircher-influenced running mate aren't exactly reassuring:

My opponent's answer showed that economic recovery isn't even his top priority. His goal, as Senator Obama put it, is to "spread the wealth around."

You see, he believes in redistributing wealth, not in policies that help us all make more of it. Joe, in his plainspoken way, said this sounded a lot like socialism.

I've been following politics for going on 35 years now, and I don't think I've ever heard a Republican candidate publicly refer to his Democratic opponent as a "socialist" -- not even while hiding behind a cardboard cutout like "Joe the Plumber". This from a man who told the entire nation on Wednesday night that believes an obscure nonprofit group is "perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy."

Likewise, I don't think there's ever been an American vice presidential candidate who explicitly referred to entire regions of the United States as "pro-American" -- with the clear implication that other regions are something less than "pro-American." Not since the Civil War, anyway.   

We've crossed some more lines, in other words -- in a long series of lines that have made it increasingly difficult to distinguish between the ultraconservative wing of the Republican Party and an explicitly fascist political movement. And John McCain and his political handlers appear to have no moral compunctions whatsoever about whipping this movement into a frenzy and providing it with scapegoats for all that hatred, simply to try to shave a few points off Barack Obama's lead in the polls.

To call this "country first" only works if you assume your opponents (and scapegoats) are not really part of that same country. And we all know where that leads.

Now not all or even most of the Palin/McCain lunatics are going to resort to violence - but it only take a few of them as was demonstrated years ago in Oklahoma City.  And we can expect that the Secret Service is going to be very busy trying to keep Barack Obama alive the next few years.

Picture of the week

By Ron Beasley

Senator Smith's Dilemma

By Ron Beasley

One of the hotest Senate races is on my own state of Oregon.  Incumbent  Republican Gordon Smith is in a battle for a third term.  Now most Republicans are running from George W. Bush and the Republican Party this year but as I noted here this is nothing new for Gordon who is a reliable wingnut for four years but makes a left turn before the next election.  His ads this year have shown him with Democrats including Ted Kennedy and Barack Obama but John McCain and George Bush have been absent.  Well it may not be working this time.  He may be picking up a few independents but he may have lost the uber wingnut faction of the Oregon Republican Party to the Constitution Party candidate David Brownlow.

Will Constitution Party candidate swing Oregon's Senate race?

U.S. Senate candidate David Brownlow doesn't have any TV advertising, didn't participate in the debates and isn't accepting campaign donations. But polls show the Constitution Party candidate picking up as much as 8 percent of the vote, and he could end up playing a crucial role in determining whether Sen. Gordon Smith, R-Ore., or Democratic challenger Jeff Merkley wins Oregon's red-hot Senate race.

The polls show that Democrat Merkley is leading Smith by three to five points which would qualify Brownlow as a spoiler and his is the wingnuts dream.

In some respects, Brownlow is far to the political right. He wants to phase out Social Security, Medicare and other federal entitlement programs, saying they are unconstitutional. He wants to abolish the Federal Reserve and return to "sound money." And he supports outlawing abortion, even in cases of rape or incest.

Ans how does Brownlow feel about being a spoiler?

Brownlow said he doesn't see much difference between Merkley and Smith on the issues. But Brownlow, a former Republican who campaigned for Smith when he first ran for office 12 years ago, is particularly disdainful of the senator.

"I want Gordon Smith to lose, big time," said Brownlow, 51, an industrial automation salesman who speaks in staccato bursts. "Gordon Smith, for too many reasons, has lost the right to a third term. ... Conservatives don't like Gordon Smith, and you've got to make a decision: Are you willing to put him back again, even though you really don't like him and he's done a poor job?"

Gordon Smith may be about to learn that you can't have it both ways.

Spreading The Wealth

By Ron Beasley

After eight years of the wealth being spread to the top one or two percent the majority of voters is probably ready to have some of it spread their way.  That's why I thought it was strange that the McCain Campaign and The Weekly Standard Republicans thought they had a game changing issue when Obama suggested he was going to spread the wealth down to the middle.  I was going to do a post on it but as usual I procrastinated long enough and someone did it for me - The American Conservative's Daniel Larison:

There is an idea circulating out there that the killer combo of Joe the Plumber and “spread the wealth” may save the election for McCain.  Now you might say that this is just whistling past the graveyard, but that doesn’t do it credit.  This is really more like four-part harmony singing in a freshly-dug grave as the dirt is being piled on.

This is something that I didn’t elaborate on last night, but the idea that the message of Spread The Wealth would be a political loser at the present time is bizarre, which makes McCain’s insistence on identifying Obama as the “spread the wealth” candidate even more bizarre.  I mean, does McCain want to get crushed in a landslide?  Let’s think about this.  There is an economic downturn coming on the heels of an era of wage stagnation and growing economic inequality, the financial sector has imploded thanks to the combined blunders of government and holders of concentrated wealth and Obama’s use of a phrase that on its own could easily be mistaken for an expression of neo-Harringtonian distributism is supposed to be politically radioactive?  Consolidation of power, concentration of wealth and centralism all stand condemned for having created the present fiasco, and there is supposed to be a political downside to talking about distributing wealth?

It took eight years of the Bush administration and their smoke and mirrors recovery to hopefully discredit trickle-down economics one and for all.

Et Tu Fredus

By Ron Beasley

The Washington Post has endorsed Barack Obama.  There was a time  - pre Fred Hiatt - where this would not have been a surprise but with Fred at the helm of the editorial page it is.  Now the reasoning is sound and not surprising:

There are few public figures we have respected more over the years than Sen. John McCain. Yet it is without ambivalence that we endorse Sen. Barack Obama for president.

The choice is made easy in part by Mr. McCain's disappointing campaign, above all his irresponsible selection of a running mate who is not ready to be president. It is made easy in larger part, though, because of our admiration for Mr. Obama and the impressive qualities he has shown during this long race. Yes, we have reservations and concerns, almost inevitably, given Mr. Obama's relatively brief experience in national politics. But we also have enormous hopes.

Mr. Obama is a man of supple intelligence, with a nuanced grasp of complex issues and evident skill at conciliation and consensus-building. At home, we believe, he would respond to the economic crisis with a healthy respect for markets tempered by justified dismay over rising inequality and an understanding of the need for focused regulation. Abroad, the best evidence suggests that he would seek to maintain U.S. leadership and engagement, continue the fight against terrorists, and wage vigorous diplomacy on behalf of U.S. values and interests. Mr. Obama has the potential to become a great president. Given the enormous problems he would confront from his first day in office, and the damage wrought over the past eight years, we would settle for very good.

Obama's threat at this point is not from John McCain or the Republicans but from his own supporters.  If they think the game is over and not vote he could still lose.  If he does win he will need a mandate to do the things that need to be done - a mandate that he will only have if each one of his supporters actually votes.  The only thing that is between Obama and that mandate are his own supporters. 

Quote of the Day

By Ron Beasley

The quote of the day comes from conservative Rick Moran:

McCain needed Obama to show up drunk. He didn’t.

And Rick has more:

Last May, when it appeared that Obama had the nomination wrapped up, I wrote a post predicting how the race in the fall would unfold:”Party Like it’s 1980 All Over Again” wasn’t breaking any new ground nor was it necessarily prescient. Democratic strategists had been predicting for months that the mood of the country and the trends were all breaking their way and that the November election had an excellent chance of being a “change” election.

But what really resonated with me back then and what recalled similar feelings from 1980 was the nature of the matchup between McCain and Obama; untested and relative unknown versus incumbent (experience). The way the 1980 race developed, people were unsure of the unknown commodity until after the one debate held between Carter and Reagan. When Reagan showed himself to be a reasonable alternative to the status quo, the floodgates opened and he won going away.

I believed then and believe now that Obama’s comfortable 6-8 point lead will mushroom in the next 3 weeks and make election day a holy living hell for the GOP with a landslide in both the popular vote and electoral college for Obama and a sweeping away of many Republican stalwarts in the House and Senate. It will be an historic repudiation of Republicans and will place the party in a position where it will probably spend a decade or more in the wilderness.

Obama won all three debates because he proved to enough people that he wasn't too inexperienced or too scary to be president.  The issues were always on Obama's side.  On FOX last night Charles Krauthammer said he didn't even think Ronald Reagan could have won this year.

Rick says it's time for the Republicans to try to prevent more loses in the House and Senate, especially try to avoid a filibuster proof majority in the Senate.  He thinks McCain could help with that but will he.

A case for regulation

By Ron Beasley

Yes there are still a few real conservatives who are sane.  For an example I'm going to take you on a field trip to The American Conservative magazine where Eamonn Fingleton makes a case for government regulation of Wall Street.  Now I suggest in the strongest terms that you go read the entire commentary but I'll give you a few teasers.

The amazing aptitude of Wall Street insiders to feather their own nests at the taxpayers’ expense should be a crucial concern as legislators try to craft a stable and productive future for the American financial system. A key question is how Wall Street’s greed can be reined in. In truth, there is no substitute for regulation.

This isn’t a view that will find immediate favor with conservative readers. But it is being espoused by no less a plutocrat than Michael Bloomberg, the former Wall Street insider who has recently morphed into a budget-cutting mayor of New York. More significantly, it has been vociferously championed by Paul Craig Roberts, the chief architect of President Ronald Reagan’s economic program.

Now those of you who used to read Middle Earth Journal know that Paul Craig Roberts was one of the first to warn us about the Bush administration and was usually even more shrill than the lefty blogs. But more from Fingleton:

More generally, the evidence of American history strongly suggests that judicious financial regulation can be a powerful force for good. It is surely not an accident that beginning in the latter half of the 1930s, the United States enjoyed a respite of nearly 50 years in which there was not a single serious banking crisis and no serious stock-market setbacks except those triggered by the oil shocks of the 1970s. This period coincided exactly with America’s era of tightest financial regulation. It is notable, moreover, that for most of the period the United States enjoyed a unique combination of fast growth at home and unquestioned economic leadership abroad. With the exception of a few radically libertarian economists, no one questioned the basic case for regulation. During the Eisenhower years it was taken for granted by Republicans and Democrats alike that though regulatory restraints could be a nuisance at times, the positives overall greatly outweighed the negatives. The same went for the Reagan administration, which, as Paul Craig Roberts recently pointed out, “most certainly did not deregulate the financial system.” Roberts went on to name the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations as the instigators of the radical deregulation being widely blamed for the current crisis. (An earlier piece of deregulation was passed during Jimmy Carter’s term.)

If I didn't know better I would think that Thom Hartmann was now writing for The American Conservative as the bold section above is a point Hartmann has been making on his radio show for some time. 

So why is regulation necessary?  Fingleton nails it:

A key problem is the notoriously asymmetrical nature of financial knowledge. Put another way, your broker knows more than you do. If he wants to do well for you, that is fine. But few securities salespersons become rich that way, and they have often preferred to prey on their customers’ ignorance. Usually this is done subtly, at least where Wall Street’s more reputable firms are concerned, and in recent years the tool of choice has been the invention of ever more esoteric “new products” that just happen to be ever more difficult to price accurately.

Yes, the so called conservatives who oppose all regulation are not conservatives at all but just pro greed.  That's what the conservative movement has become  under George W. Bush and there are still a few conservative who don't like it much.

The Stink Of Loserdom

By Ron Beasley

OK, I'm an optimist at this point and convinced the Barack Obama will be the next president.  Why you might ask.  Even the conservative Real Clear Politics has Obama with 304 electoral votes.  But that's not the real reason.  BJ had the excellent circular firing squad montage from JED below.  But there is more from Kieth Oberman:

And we have this from the latest ABC/Washington Post Poll:

* Obama's favorable rating are rising (!) while McCain's are faltering. Nearly two-thirds of voters (64 percent) view Obama favorably in the latest poll while 33 percent view him unfavorably. In a September Post poll, Obama's fav/unfav was at 58/36. Compare that to McCain's favorable ratings, which slipped from 59 percent in September to 52 percent now, and his unfavorable ratings, which rose from 36 percent last month to 45 percent now.

* Obama has substantial edges over McCain when voters are asked which candidate is better equipped to handle the issues of the day. That includes a 16-point edge on the economy and a 29-point margin on health care -- the two issues nearly six in ten voters cite as most critical in the fall election. McCain's lone advantage over Obama comes on the issue of terrorism. Forty-nine percent of Americans believe the Arizona senator is better equipped to handle that issue while 43 percent name Obama.

* Nearly seven in ten voters believe Obama is "mainly" addressing the issues while just 26 percent say he is attacking his opponent. McCain, on the other hand, is seen as "mainly" attacking his rival by six in ten voters while just 35 percent said he is focused on issues.

* Fifty-five percent of the voters believe Obama is a "safe" choice for president while 45 percent said he would be a "risky" choice. On McCain, the sample split right down the middle; 50 percent said he was a "safe" and 50 percent said he would be a "risky" pick for the White House.

That last one is the big one - more voters think Obama is the "safe" choice.  McCain's entire campaign revolved around making Obama dangerous.

I don't think this election is about Obama, it's about John McCain.  His age has become an issue not because of anything Obama has said but because McCain looks, sounds and acts old. That only makes his choice of Sarah Palin even more damaging.

The "Stink Of Loserdom" could have a down ticket impact - if demoralized Republicans don't vote even more Senators and Representatives are more likely to be Democrats. 

Picture Of The Week

By Ron Beasley

A Picture and some Henry David Thoreau:

I rejoice that there are owls.  Let them  do the idiotic and maniacal hooting for men.  It is a sound admirably suited to swamps and twilight woods which no day illustrates, suggesting a vast and undeveloped nature which men have not recognized.
They represent the stark twilight and unsatisfied thoughts which all have.

All day the sun has shone on the surface of some savage swamp. where a single spruce stands hung with usnea lichens, and small hawks circulate above, and the chickadee lisps amid the evergreens, and the partridge and rabbit skulk beneath;  but now a more dismal and fitting day dawns, and a different race of creatures awakes to express the meaning of Nature there.

Looking Out For Number One

By Ron Beasley

This is amusing and telling:

McCain tussles with Palin over whipping up a mob mentality

With his electoral prospects fading by the day, Senator John McCain has fallen out with his vice-presidential running mate about the direction of his White House campaign…

So what does it all mean?  That's easy - they both know they are going to lose.  As a result they have different goals.  The 72 year old McCain is looking at how history will see him - his legacy.   The governor from Alaska is looking for a career as a red meat baiter on FOX - look out Hanity and O'Riley, the "cuda" has her eye on your job. 

Some thoughts and Quotes

By Ron Beasley

I've been absent the last couple of days.  It's true that the real world has been intruding - a major house remodel, a good time to do it if you have the money. But that's not the real reason, I just haven't had much to say.  I gave up my own blog because I didn't like being under pressure to produce when I really didn't have anything to add to the conversation. That said I have a little bit of my voice back.

I'm not sure how excited I am about it but I'm convinced that Barack Obama will be the next president of the United States.  It does excite me however that John McCain will not be the next president of the US.  Even FOX News knows that McCain is toast -  the current non stop coverage of ACORN on FOX is just to give the knuckle draggers an explanation as to why the black guy won.  The defections from McCain on the right have been increasing from the intellectual right the latest being Christopher Buckley:

Obama has in him—I think, despite his sometimes airy-fairy “We are the people we have been waiting for” silly rhetoric—the potential to be a good, perhaps even great leader. He is, it seems clear enough, what the historical moment seems to be calling for.

Others like Daniel Larison may not like Obama but they like McCain even less:

There is basically no positive case for Obama, because I don’t think a conservative can actually make one, except to say that he might do slightly less damage than another Republican.

Buckley’s remarks on McCain are interesting in what they tell us about the pervasive nature of the McCain myth: McCain used to be authentic, you see, but now he is not (not true–he has always been the same person!); he showed tremendous bravery in backing the “surge” (not true–it was enormously popular among GOP regulars and primary voters!); McCain has changed (see the first point).  This is the sort of whinging justification Obama supporters on the right often have to make to save face, which further reinforces the old McCain myth: if only McCain had remained true to himself, I would have supported him, but now he has sacrificed his integrity!  What few seem willing to accept is that McCain has always been like this, and his past admirers have blinded themselves to his flaws because they found him useful or were swayed by his biography, and until very recently most have had no problem with McCain’s flaws.  Indeed, they seem incapable of admitting that McCain has any flaws of his own, but are insistent that whatever is wrong with him is the function of the pressures of the campaign.

They have been wrong about him for a very long time and don’t want to admit that, so they make the less insulting choice of endorsing his opponent.  It is much more generous to McCain to pretend that the presidential campaign has somehow forced him to become someone he isn’t.  It is a compliment to say that one is endorsing Obama only because McCain has betrayed his true self.  None of this is true, and it reflects a remarkable deference to McCain even at this late stage of the game that so many people are saying it.  Of course, this myth also helps to excuse their support for McCain for so many years.

As a McCain supporter on 2000 Larison's comments make me feel really stupid as it should.

And now for the quote of the day which is from Steve Soto   

Down 678 yesterday, and perhaps down another 400-500 points today, and yet the only case McCain/Palin can make for themselves is to run attack ads on Ayers and have Palin tell us she's cleared herself with a self-investigation on Troopergate.

The country is on the verge of moving on without the GOP.

The real John McCain

By Ron Beasley

With his new campaign strategy of avoiding the issues John McCain runs the risk of not only alienating independents but thoughtful Republicans as well.  James Fallows:

In these circumstances, and with a presidential election four weeks away, is it conceivable that candidates will waste time arguing whether one of them has been in the same room with a guy who had been a violent extremist at a time before most of today's U.S. citizens were even born? (William Ayres was a Weatherman in the late 1960s. Today's median-aged American was born around 1972.) Of course, it's not only conceivable: it's the Republican plan for this final push -- "turning the page" on economic concerns and getting to these "character" and "association" questions about Barack Obama.

Grow up. If John McCain has a better set of plans to deal with the immediate crisis, and the medium-term real-economy fallout, and the real global problems of the era -- fine, let him win on those. But it is beneath the dignity he had as a Naval officer to wallow in this mindless BS. I will say nothing about the dignity of a candidate who repeatedly winks at the public, Hooters-waitress style.  A great country acts great when it matters.  This is a time when it matters -- for politicians in the points they raise, for journalists in the subjects they write about and the questions they ask of candidates. And, yes, for voters.

Sorry Jim, now you see the real John McCain.

Is It Over?

By Ron Beasley

Over at The Moderate Voice my friend Jazz asks Is Election 2008 Over?  Jazz doesn't think so:

But it is also worth remembering that John McCain was up in the polls only a couple of weeks ago. American politics can and does turn on a dime and few are prescient enough to predict when and where those coins will fall. There is still nearly a month to go, and in political time that may as well be a century. Swings states tend to swing, and, like any good pendulum, what goes one way should not surprise any of us if it turns around and heads back in the other direction. While the Obama inaugural celebrations are being planned, I would remind his supporters about the rule regarding counting chickens before beaks are visible. Congratulations to you if you prevail, but you’ll excuse me if I don’t order my inaugural ball tickets just yet.

Now to give Jazz a break some new polls have come out showing Obama up in Virginia by 10% or more and the McCain campaign wrote off Florida when it announced it would cut medicare.  Most of the daily tracking polls show Obama with 50 percent or more and an eight to ten point lead.  For the first time Pollester.com shows Obama over the magic 270 EVs needed to win and Steve Lombardo points out that the issue is the economy and there's not going to be any improvement in the next four weeks.

We believe that when the history of this election is written, September 15th will be seen as the day Obama won (or perhaps the day McCain lost the election). The previous Friday morning it was announced that Lehman was filing for bankruptcy. As the markets prepared to open it looked like we were headed for a downturn. In an apparent effort to bring some stability to the markets, at approximately 9:00 in the morning - during a stump speech in Jacksonville - McCain said "the fundamentals of our economy are strong." That marked the beginning of the end for his campaign. By 2:00 p.m., at his next stop in Orlando, he was backtracking, saying, "The economic crisis is not the fault of the American people. Our workers are the most innovative, the hardest-working, the best-skilled, most productive, most competitive in the world, that's the American worker. My opponents may disagree, but those fundamentals, the American worker and their innovation, their entrepreneurship, the small business, those are the fundamentals of America and I think they're strong." The stock market dropped 505 points that day.

And about the character assassination:

The window for challenging Obama's character may have closed. Media reports indicate that Team McCain is going to take the gloves off (they have begun by launching attacks on Obama's connection with Bill Ayers). However, it is our sense that this should have been done in August and September, and that at this point it will likely fall on deaf ears. We are not saying that this is not a solid campaign tactic, but in light of the serious (and potentially catastrophic) issues facing the country it seems off-key at best. At worst it seems desperate. Voter opinions of Obama started to shift and harden (in his favor) after that first debate. He became substantially more acceptable. Since that time, the economic situation has made Obama a more acceptable alternative. Character attacks are part of politics and often work, but not when the country is at war and mired in an economic recession.

If it's not over already it could be after the debate tomorrow night.  McCain needs an exceptional night and he needs for Obama to have a really bad one.  Neither of those are likely.  Unless the debate is a real game changer in McCain's favor expect the Republican Party to cut the McCain campaign lose and spend what money the party has trying to save some Senators.

Poison Pill

By Ron Beasley

When Paulson first presented his bail out plan he said that any limits on executive compensation were off the table because banking executives would be too greedy to participate.  Well Paulson and the administration had to accept executive compensation limits but it looks like Paulson may have been right.

Now Wall Street may shun $700bn bail-out 

Fears are mounting that many Wall Street banks and financial firms will refuse to participate in the US government's $700bn bail-out package, leaving global markets and world economies in a perilous state for months to come.

'There is a growing feeling that banks ... might instead decide to tough it out,' said Thomas Caldwell, chairman and CEO of Caldwell Financial, a $1bn-plus fund manager.

For the past two weeks all eyes in the market have been focused on US Congress and its attempts to pass Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's bail-out package - a bill to allow the US government to buy up to $700bn of toxic mortgage-related assets from American banks, which would in theory free the credit markets and set the gears of global commerce spinning once more.

Last Monday, after the bill was thrown out by the House of Representatives, more than $1 trillion was wiped off the value of US stocks as the market was gripped by panic. The bill was passed on Friday afternoon, however, after the inclusion of $149bn of tax breaks and strict rules for participating banks.

But Wall Street analysts, believe the addition of so many terms to the bill might deter potential participants.

One of the least attractive elements is a section designed to curb executive pay at banks that participate in the bail-out package. These include limiting stock-related pay and banning 'golden parachutes' for executives.

'I think this hodge-podge of regulations and rules will be enough to put many [chief executives] off participating,' Caldwell said.

Sources close to Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch indicated the banks might choose not to participate in the bail-out as there is a growing view on Wall Street that the market may be bottoming out.

Of course another reason might be that they really don't want to open up their books.  They are saying that the reason is they think things have bottomed out anyway.  It's a good thing those elements were included or they would have been happy to take our money anyway.  Now I guess we will see if they are right.

H/T John Cole

It's the Senate Stupid

By Ron Beasley

The Republican Party has had some good fund raising numbers the last few weeks but one has to wonder how much of that money they will be willing to throw at the sinking campaign of John and Sarah.

GOP dread: Dems could hit 60 Senate seats

The possibility that Democrats will build a muscular, 60-seat Senate majority is looking increasing plausible, with new polls showing a powerful surge for the party’s candidates in Minnesota, Kentucky and other states.

A poll out Friday shows Sen. Norm Coleman could now easily lose his Minnesota seat to comedian-turned-candidate Al Franken. A Colorado race that initially looked like a nail-biter has now broken decisively for the Democrats. A top official in the McCain camp told us Sen. Elizabeth Dole is virtually certain to lose in conservative North Carolina.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky has seen his race tighten dangerously close over the past week — and Democrats are considering moving more money into the state very soon. And there is even talk that Republican Sen. Saxby Chambliss is beatable in conservative Georgia after backing the economic bailout package opposed by many voters.

“Before the economic crisis, we had a number of races moving our way,” said Matthew Miller, communications director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. “But now we’re seeing Republican numbers plummet.” GOP officials largely agree.

Senate races don’t grab national attention like the White House battle does. But if these trends hold, the Senate outcome could be almost as important to Washington governance as the presidential winner will be. It takes 60 votes to pass anything through the slow-moving Senate. So the closer the Democrats get to the number, the more power they will have next year to put their stamp on the country.

One of those Senate races is right here in my State of Oregon where incumbent Gordon Smith is in the fight of his life and falling behind.  As I noted here Smith is running as fast and as far as he can from George Bush and the Republican Party.  The major daily in Oregon, The Oregonian, leans right and has always been a Smith supporter.  In a piece today even the Oregonian was only luke warm.

Smith's record and accomplishments will confront a complicated terrain of mixed signals, victories large but mainly small, ambiguous acts and outright contradictions.

Smith voted to invade Iraq, but three years later the famously reserved senator called the war "criminal" in a speech memorable both for its content and his rare display of emotion.

He's repeatedly voted in favor of huge spending bills to finance the war. Yet in 2007, Smith co-sponsored an amendment written by Democratic Sens. Carl Levin of Michigan and Jack Reed of Rhode Island that would have required bringing most troops out of Iraq within nine months. The measure failed on a 47-47 vote when only two other Republicans joined Smith.

And about that voting record, The Oregonian:

Smith's Democratic opponent, Jeff Merkley, speaker of the Oregon House, has hammered the Republican incumbent for months as a reliable proxy for the Bush administration. In ads and on the stump, Merkley says that Smith votes with Bush more than 90 percent of the time.

Yet an analysis of key votes in 2007 by the Beltway-focused National Journal shows Smith in the middle. On a scale of 100, he earned a composite conservative score of 52.8 and a liberal composite score of 47.2. Those scores make him the 46th most conservative among the Senate's 100 members and the 51st most liberal.

But that only tells part of the story.  More often than not Smith voted against his party and Bush when his vote wouldn't make any difference.  But more important you have to look at how Smith voted when and this modified chart from the Oregonian article tells the story.

Now Oregon is a blue State - George W. Bush never won here.  As you can see Smith is conservative for the four years after an election and makes a left turn a couple of years before an election.  He made a very sharp left after the Republican loses in 2006.  Smith ads are being run by his campaign, the RSCC and the Republican Party.  Although Smith was the chair of McCain's campaign until recently McCain or any other Republican have been mentioned in his ads although Barack Obama and Ted Kennedy have.  Smith had been leading until recently but his opponent, Jeff Merkley, is now leading.  I would expect the Republican Party to send more of it's cash to Gordon Smith instead of John McCain.   

Picture of the Week

By Ron Beasley

Gothic Pears

Let the mud slinging begin

By Ron Beasley

The Republicans and John McCain can't win on the issues and they know it.  So they will do what they always do - sling mud and hope enough of it sticks.  Looking into the not too distant future they see not only a loss but an electoral college rout so what will they do?

McCain Plans Fiercer Strategy Against Obama

Sen. John McCain and his Republican allies are readying a newly aggressive assault on Sen. Barack Obama's character, believing that to win in November they must shift the conversation back to questions about the Democrat's judgment, honesty and personal associations, several top Republicans said.

With just a month to go until Election Day, McCain's team has decided that its emphasis on the senator's biography as a war hero, experienced lawmaker and straight-talking maverick is insufficient to close a growing gap with Obama. The Arizonan's campaign is also eager to move the conversation away from the economy, an issue that strongly favors Obama and has helped him to a lead in many recent polls.

"We're going to get a little tougher," a senior Republican operative said, indicating that a fresh batch of television ads is coming. "We've got to question this guy's associations. Very soon. There's no question that we have to change the subject here," said the operative, who was not authorized to discuss strategy and spoke on the condition of anonymity.

In the past character assassination has worked well for the Republicans but there are reasons to believe it won't this time.

• Much of McCain's historic popularity with independent/swing voters has been his character - he was above that.
• It may simply be too late and people have heard it already.  It didn't work for Hillary.
• Most important, "Swift Boat" campaigns require active participation of the media.  The networks seem less willing to go along this time, perhaps in part because of their treatment by the McCain campaign.  If the media sees the contest is already over they will be less willing to soil themselves.  The network to watch in this regard is Murdoch's FOX News.  We have already seen two of the FOX "All Stars", Charles Krauthammer and Fred Barnes, concede that Obama is probably going to win.

In the end the mud may stick but not to Obama.  The causality will be John McCain's character and place in history.

Advice From The American Conservative

By Ron Beasley

As I discussed below Sarah Palin is a bit weak on foreign policy.  Well the editors of The American Conservative have some advice for her - specifically who not to listen too.

Now you’re the latest object of their attention, and you’re probably finding the program a bit confusing. They tell you that the U.S. is fighting “World War IV,” a struggle against “Islamofascism.” We can win, they say, as long as we’re prepared to bomb Iran and build up the national-security establishment at home, just like Reagan did.

Trouble is, your tutors also believe we’re still engaged in “World War III,” the Cold War with Russia. So maybe the Gipper didn’t win that one after all. In fact, neoconservatives like Norman Podhoretz chided Reagan for appeasing Moscow. And when terrorists struck the Marine barracks in Lebanon in 1983, Reagan, instead of “staying the course,” withdrew our troops. Your Beltway suitors prescribe the opposite of Reagan’s strategy.

And as they would have it, we’re not only waging World Wars III and IV, we’re still fighting World War II. At least, that’s the way it sounds when Robert Kagan opens a Washington Post op-ed by likening Russia’s conflict with Georgia to Hitler’s invasion of Czechoslovakia. 

But Russia is not Germany, Georgia is no innocent Czechoslovakia, and Vladimir Putin is not Adolf Hitler—no matter what your guru Randy Scheunemann says. (He probably forgot to tell you that he used to lobby for the government of Georgia.)

Here’s a hint: don’t believe everything you read in the papers, especially if the byline is Kristol or Krauthammer. Russia is not an expansionist, ideological empire. It’s a traditional, semi-authoritarian great power intent on preserving its influence in its own backyard and its prestige on the world stage. That’s why Russia intercedes in the domestic disputes of unruly states on its periphery. Putin balks at Poland hosting our antimissile systems for the same reason we would bristle at Cuba or Mexico receiving Chinese antitank missiles.

With more validity, some of the people whispering in your ear tell you that Moscow wants to corner the European markets for oil and natural gas. And what nefarious end does Putin have in mind? Raising prices and reinforcing Moscow’s political clout, not with nuclear blackmail but with good, old-fashioned economic power. We have plenty of that ourselves (or at least we used to). Putin, far from being a totalitarian ideologue, is an economic nationalist, as the leaders of great powers traditionally have been.

Then there’s the Middle East, where only American arms (and lives) can prevent little Israel from being swept into the sea by Muslim hordes. Surely that’s what AIPAC told you that night you left Phyllis cooling her heels. But again, it isn’t true. Israel has nuclear weapons, for one thing, and can outfight her neighbors even without resort to atom bombs. Israel’s problem isn’t external threat so much as internal security and demographics. When the Jewish state was founded, tens of thousands of Palestinians—Christians as well as Muslims—lost their homes. Palestine was no wide-open Alaskan frontier: when the newcomers moved in, Arabs were moved out, often by force. Terrorism didn’t come to the region with Hamas or Hezbollah; decades earlier groups like the Stern Gang and Irgun used violence to clear the way for Israel’s creation. Nor was Palestinian Authority leader Yassar Arafat the first terrorist to lead a state in the Holy Land. Israeli Prime Ministers Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir had unclean hands as well.

Since Sarah is not going to be Vice President I think she should forward the letter to Barack Obama and Joe Biden.  There is some great advice for them there too.

Palin and Foreign Policy

By Ron Beasley

We all know that Sarah Palin is totally clueless when it comes to foreign policy but there was a comment in last nights debate on Afghanistan that has not attracted any attention.  Well Daniel Larisson noticed and mentioned it in his original post debate comments last night and dedicates an entire post to it tonight.

Incredibly, Palin keeps reiterating her claim that Obama has been “reckless” in saying that airstrikes in Afghanistan have killed civilians, which serves to show that she seems genuinely to have no clue that our use of air power there has resulted in significant civilian casualties and that this has undermined NATO’s mission with the Afghan government.  As her running mate would say, she seems not to understand.  Even more remarkably, no one else seems to be noticing that she is absolutely wrong in her attack.  As I said earlier today, it is completely unacceptable for anyone running for such an office to be this ignorant about a war zone where Americans are fighting.

She is so unqualified that only idiot hacks like David Broder and Hot Air bloggers like Ed Morrissey can continue to defend while even neocon wingnuts like Krauthammer are running for cover.

Excuse Me!

By Ron Beasley

If there was ever any doubt David Brooks proved today that he is not only a political hack but an idiot as well.  Rather than cut him to ribbons myself I'll let my favorite new blogger, Daniel Larison do it for me.  As an added benefit he take on Peggy Noonan as well.

She is not a person of thought but of action. ~Peggy Noonan

On Thursday night, Palin took her inexperience and made a mansion out of it. From her first “Nice to meet you. May I call you Joe?” she made it abundantly, unstoppably and relentlessly clear that she was not of Washington, did not admire Washington and knew little about Washington. She ran not only against Washington, but the whole East Coast, just to be safe. ~David Brooks

Noonan and Brooks actually fall over themselves trying to compliment Palin on the modest success of being coherent, but these excerpts are striking in that someone might have written them as withering, sarcastic criticism and instead they are supposed to be a celebration of her virtues.  Noonan complains that Biden showed too much forbearance, but this is exactly what Noonan and Brooks show in their efforts to tip-toe around the obvious that for all her mastery of the non-answer and glittering generalities, to borrow Halcro’s language, she did not do very well.  Incredibly, her fans don’t seem to mind debasing the meaning of excellence if it allows them to call what we saw last night excellent.

On FOX this morning the morning blond bimbo was interviewing someone from Rasmussen.  She went ballistic when he said last night's debate would have little if any impact on the polls or the election.  He correctly stated that the best Palin could hope for last night was to not inflict any additional damage.  Larison also knows this:

There ought to have been some acknowledgement that it didn’t matter, that McCain was already fumbling and crumbling under the weight of his own mistakes, but instead we are treated to newfound, baseless enthusiasm:

Sarah Palin saved John McCain again Thursday night. She is the political equivalent of cardiac paddles: Clear! Zap! We’ve got a beat! She will re-electrify the base. More than that, an hour and a half of talking to America will take her to a new level of stardom.   

Well, there’s certainly no accounting for why people become excited about celebrities, but it seems to me that if the base is electrified any more it will begin to suffer permanent damage to its already clogged heart.

Update

Even Charles Krauthammer has thrown in the towel:

Part of reassurance is intellectual. Like Palin, he's a rookie, but in his 19 months on the national stage he has achieved fluency in areas in which he has no experience. In the foreign policy debate with McCain, as in his July news conference with French President Nicolas Sarkozy, Obama held his own -- fluid, familiar and therefore plausibly presidential.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. famously said of Franklin Roosevelt that he had a "second-class intellect, but a first-class temperament." Obama has shown that he is a man of limited experience, questionable convictions, deeply troubling associations (Jeremiah Wright, William Ayers, Tony Rezko) and an alarming lack of self-definition -- do you really know who he is and what he believes? Nonetheless, he's got both a first-class intellect and a first-class temperament. That will likely be enough to make him president.

Debate Wrap Up II

By Ron Beasley

Well there were no deer in the headlight moments and the format really didn't allow for long periods of incoherence, that said Biden won easily.  Palin once again did little but repeat canned folksy talking points that frequently had little or nothing to do with the question.  She was unable to give even one example of how a McCain administration would be any different than a Bush administration.  The base will love her but there isn't enough of the base left to win an election.

The snap polls would indicate that a majority saw it that way too.

CBS polled 473 uncommitted debate-watchers, and found that 46% say Biden won, 21% say Palin won, and 33% say it was a tie.

While both candidates saw their images improve, 98% saw Biden as "knowledgeable" after the debate, while only 66% saw Palin as knowledgeable, an admittedly high number, given what folks thought of her before tonight.

Meanwhile, CNN's poll of debate-watchers found that far more thought Biden did the best job in the debate (51%) than Palin did (36%).

And here's a really key number from CNN. While a startling 84% said Palin did better than expected, it still wasn't enough for her to clear her basic hurdle tonight: Only 46% said she's qualified to serve as president, up only four points from before the debate. And a clear majority, 53%, say she is not qualified.

I think too much significance was placed on this debate.  McCain's problem is John McCain not Sarah Palin.  He is the one who has been erratic and incoherent the last two weeks.

Update

Conservative Daniel Larison gets it right:

Not a Disaster

How’s that for a compliment?  There’s no question that Palin was outmatched the entire time, and I am fairly sure that viewers will come away thinking that Biden was the winner and was more qualified for the VP role.  Give her credit–she held on through the entire thing, clutching to her prearranged attack points for dear life, and she didn’t say anything that was fantastically horrible.  Her statement on civilian casualties caused by airstrikes in Afghanistan would have been atrocious if I believed that she knew any better, but I feel confident that she does not know anything about the situation in Afghanistan.  McCain’s campaign is already in terminal decline, so it probably didn’t matter that much anyway.  Had she completely failed, it would have made the result more lopsided, but I expect that there will be only a marginal boost for Obama in the next few days.

McSnippy

By Ron Beasley

Cernig pointed out the discussion about McCain's physical health below.  I think of even more concern is his mental health. He has a long history of temper tantrums.  He has flipped flopped on nearly every issue.  His campaign has been erratic and incoherent.  And then of course is his choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate.  I really have to question his mental health after reading his interview with The Des Moines Register. It reminds me of George W. Bush at his most delusional except worse.  He really comes across as someone who is living in his own universe.

First we have this when he was asked about Sarah Palin:

When it was suggested that Palin's lack of experience worried voters, McCain turned sarcastic.

"Really? I haven't detected that in the polls, I haven't detected that among the base," he said. "If there's a Georgetown cocktail party person who, quote, calls himself a conservative who doesn't like her, good luck. I don't dismiss him. I think the American people have overwhelmingly shown their approval."

Now I know St John doesn't do the Internets but there has been plenty of questions about Palin in the old media - a lot of it from his own party.

And then there is this:

At another point, McCain was asked if he's strayed from his "straight talk" image with advertising that some have labeled deceptive. McCain dryly responded, "It would be valuable if you gave some examples for an assertion of that nature."

He went on to say: "I have always had 100 percent, absolute truth, that's been my life and putting my country first. I'll match that record with anyone and an assertion that I have ever done otherwise, I take strong exception to."

As examples, a questioner at the Register noted a McCain commercial that suggested Obama favored comprehensive sex education for kindergartners and assertions by his campaign that a "lipstick on a pig" comment Obama made was a reference to Palin. News media fact-checking the sex education ad deemed it deceptive and a distortion of Obama's position.

"It certainly is your opinion and I respect your opinion, but it's not the facts," McCain said in the interview. "I respect your opinion. I strongly disagree with your assertion."

And of course he had to use the remember I was a POW defense:

He also sarcastically referred to his five years as a prisoner of war when answering a question about his having government-financed health care throughout his military and congressional career.

"The answer is that most of my life, in serving my country, I have had health care," he said. "I did go for a period of time when the health care wasn't very good."

Now I expect Republicans to lie, that doesn't surprise me, but what scares the hell out of me is that I think McCain actually believes what he is saying.

Update

GOP consultant and McCain senior strategist in 2000, Mike Murphy, questions the competence of the McCain campaign and asks the following question:

What the Hell was McCain even doing there in the first place?

1.) Obama is going to win Iowa.

2.) Editorial board meetings are usually pure trouble to begin with and result only in newspaper endorsements that persuade very few voters beyond the immediate family members of the editorial board.

3.) Within the rarified category of newspaper editorial boards, the Des Moines Register is one of the most liberal in the country. I'm rather surprised that halfway through the McCain interview they failed to switch over to Esperanto, the peace-loving language of all nations.

So, 35 days left and McCain is in Iowa? Why put McCain in the wrong state, at the wrong place? No surprise the result is the wrong message and the wrong tone.

Some good points but I think it's less the venue and more the candidate.  What does that say about McCain if he can only handle interviews where he will get softball questions.  The point about why he was in Iowa was a good one.  McCain really should be spending his time in states where he at least has an outside chance. Could it be that McCain is so delusional he simply can't except the fact there are states he can't win.  The McCain campaign is still spending money here in Oregon.

Update II - Why Sarah Palin can't hurt John McCain, he's just as bad.

The video is even worse than the transcript.

How we got here

By Ron Beasley

There are conservatives I respect even though we may disagree most of the time.  One of those is Rick Moran.  He has an excellent post, Faith Of Our Fathers, that I suggest you read in full.  Since I know that most of you won't, (yes there are ways I can tell), I'll give you a snip.

In truth, our unity after 9/11 was a mirage, a temporary respite from the culture wars, the political wars, the ideological wars – the war for the soul of America. The natural equilibrium of political combat to the death reasserted itself within a matter of weeks and any sense of togetherness we felt was extinguished in a flood of partisan poison. And you can draw a straight line from the post 9/11 falling out to our current crisis where what ails us as a nation has only been exacerbated by war and crisis.

I blame Bush. And the Democrats. And the liberals. And the conservatives. And I blame us for enabling the catastrophe, where it becomes easy to lose faith, trust, and even hope – hope that there was a way through this morass of hate and distrust so that we could emerge on a far distant shore, free of the infection that has sickened the body politic of America to the point that now, we teeter on the edge of a precipice, looking down into the blackness of an unknowable, unknowing future.

The internet is at fault. So is talk radio. So is the liberal/conservative/lazy media. So is the consolidation of information sources. So am I.

Am I taking the easy out? A typical Moran “a pox on both your houses” screed? Examine your consciences and you tell me where it’s all Bush’s fault or all the Democrats fault. Or where conservatives or liberals are blameless. Or even where one party or another is “more” at fault – as if you can place catastrophe on a scale and weigh it out, carefully loading one side or the other with rancor, bitterness, lies, exaggerations, political gamesmanship, and cynicism thus hoping to determine the “real” culprit of our current predicament.

That kind of stupidity is silly and self defeating. And it only reveals that those who try it are part of the problem, not the solution.

Now that's what David Brooks and David Broder would be writing if either of them had half a brain.  (Yes Rick, you can use me as a reference)

Now I'm sure that Rick and I will not agree on this but the road to our current economic woes started the day Ronald Reagan took office and the government became part of the axis of evil.  That is when the pre Great Depression laissez-faire capitalism once again took control and safe guards and regulations became the enemy.  It culminated in the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Financial Services Modernization Act that while authored by conservative Republicans and passed by a Republican controlled congress was signed by Bill Clinton.  The result was that by the time George W. Bush took office we were back to where we were in the 1920's and the result was the same. 

Yes, there is plenty of blame to go around.  While most of FDR's reforms were undone the Democrats either went along with it or did nothing. 

Growing Optimism

By Ron Beasley

No, I'm not talking about the economy but about the election.  Over at The Left Coaster CA Pol Junkie has a daily scorecard on the Electoral Vote and that's what really counts.  He gives the states EVs to whatever candidate has the lead on that date.  Todays results show Obama receiving 375 EVs to McCain's 163.  That of course is not going to happen but there was some very significant data there never the less.

• Obama doesn't need any state where his lead now is less than six percent.
• Obama doesn't need Virginia, Ohio or Florida

Yes, the election is five weeks away and a lot can happen.  But up to this point all of the mistakes have been made by the McCain campaign and the big issue is the economy where Obama kicks McCain's ass. 

This is not that far from FiveThirtyEight's projection of Obama 330 - McCain 207.

The beginning of the end?

By Ron Beasley

No, I'm not talking about the economy but conservative laissez-faire capitalism.  Howard Fineman suggested it and some of the Republicans may have voted against the Paulson plan because they saw it moving the country in that direction.

Ross Douthat is not optimistic about what this means for his party:

The most likely scenario, as of 3 PM this afternoon: The stock market continues to drop. Some version of the bailout passes in the next week. The American economy staggers into a recession, but passes through the storm without 1930s-style suffering; the Republican Party is not so fortunate. Even though most Americans claim to oppose the bailout [update: not anymore], the House GOP's obstructionism is widely viewed as having worsened the economic situation; the fact that these are contradictory positions does not faze an electorate that wraps all of the country's current troubles up, ties them with a bow, and lays them at the feet of the Bush-led GOP. John McCain loses by a landslide in November. The Democratic Party regains years or even decades worth of ground among the white working class, consolidates the Hispanic vote, and locks up a large chunk of highly-educated voters who might otherwise lean conservative. The much-discussed liberal realignment happens. And a politician running on a Ron Paul-style economic platform does very, very well in the GOP primaries of 2012.

Of course Bill Kristol, who is almost always wrong, sees it differently:

No one wants to take ownership of the task of rescuing the economy right now. The Bush-Paulson plan has failed. The administration, House Democrats, and House Republicans (above all) have all proved unable to deliver. But there is someone who might be able to save the economy--and incidentally the Republican party: John McCain.

He should come back to D.C. But this time he needs to take charge--either by laying out the outlines of his own plan, or presiding over meetings at which a real plan that can pass is cobbled together. He might also insist on the immediate passage of a couple of provisions (raising or removing FDIC insurance limits, for example) that could mitigate the damage that could be done over the next few days.

It’s time for McCain to act decisively, and to lead, as he did with the surge. No one else seems up to it.

Douthat all but laughs at Kristol:

Per Kristol: John McCain flies back to Washington and finds a way to get the bailout passed. The markets recover; the papers trumpet McCain's heroism, and he's elected by a thin margin in November.

Unfortunately, I'd place the odds against this happening at roughly - oh, what the hell, I'll just choose a really large number at random - seven hundred billion to one.

Now I don't know if it will be as bad for the Republicans as Douthat suggests but it does appear that the gambler John McCain put all his money (campaign) on the wrong number.

Why did it fail?

By Ron Beasley

So why did the House Reject the Bailout plan today?  An overwhelming number of both Republican and Democratic voters didn't want it.  That's the simple answer.  A more important answer is that the Bush administration has zero credibility.  When they started screaming that the sky was falling last week, after saying everything was just peachy the week before, no one believed them.  In addition since a majority of the voters hold the Bush administration responsible for the problem they don't trust them with 700 million billion dollars to fix it.

The first mistake the congress made was not to just throw the Paulson plan out - period.  They should have held hearings with economists with few if any ties to the administration or the Wall Street to determine if there really was a problem and if so the best way to deal with it.

Congress listened to the voters - how could they not this close to an election?   An administration and a Federal reserve with no credibility could not make the sell.

If there is a big loser here I think it is probably the grandstanding John McCain.   

Let Her Talk

By Ron Beasley

Earlier BJ was talking about the danger of the low expectations game and the Palin-Biden debate.

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.

Over at FiveThirtyEight Sean Quinn has some advice for Joe Biden - let Palin talk.

Joe Biden doesn't need to do much in this debate. Everyone, Republicans included, know the guy knows policy detail and foreign relations cold. He really doesn't need to do much to prove he has mastery.

Normally, "time of possession" is a key signifier in football of which team is likeliest to win the game, but in this case the opposite seems true. Think of it -- all anyone cares about in this debate is what Sarah Palin says.

The Republican base wants to hear her because they like her and identify with her -- we've heard this chorus countless times on the road in McCain volunteer offices. She warms Republican base hearts. On the other hand, Democrats believe they're about to witness an epic train wreck. So does the media. The expectations could not possibly be lower for this one.

And about those lowered expectations:

For those who worry about expectations being so low that she can't help but beat them, that she did well in Alaska debates (by being spunky and bluffing through with gimmicks like patting a "stack of solutions" on health care), consider this:

Capitol Hill sources are telling me that senior McCain people
are more than concerned about Palin.

The campaign has held a mock debate and a mock press conference; both are being described as "disastrous." One senior McCain aide was quoted as saying, "What are we going to do?" The McCain people want to move this first debate to some later, undetermined date, possibly never. People on the inside are saying the Alaska Governor is "clueless."

Some might be concerned that this is all about purposefully lowering expectations... and then you watch that Couric interview. That was not some gambit, that was real. If this is an elaborate expectations-setting ruse, I'm sure the multiple days of ridicule leading up to the debate aren't worth it.

It's not necessary for Biden to attack Palin - she will do it to herself.  Now I wouldn't be surprised if she looks a little better on Thursday but I won't be surprised if she doesn't. 

Glass Houses

By Ron Beasley

One senior McCain adviser said the entire flap could have been avoided if the campaign had resisted attacking Barack Obama for his ties to two former Fannie Mae executives, which prompted the media to take a second look at Davis. "It was stupid," the adviser said. "A serious miscalculation and an amateurish move."

Now we all know that the McCain Campaign has made a big deal of Obama's ties to Freddie Mac -  some of them real and some of them not so much.  The above quote is from Michael Isokoff's piece on John McCain's main man, Rick Davis.

Last week, though, McCain's trust in Davis was tested again amid disclosures that Freddie Mac, the troubled mortgage giant that was recently placed under federal conservatorship, paid his campaign manager's firm $15,000 a month between 2006 and August 2008. As the mortgage crisis has escalated, almost any association with Freddie Mac or Fannie Mae has become politically toxic. But the payments to Davis's firm, Davis Manafort, are especially problematic because he requested the consulting retainer in 2006—and then did barely any work for the fees, according to two sources familiar with the arrangement who asked not to be identified discussing Freddie Mac business. Aside from attending a few breakfasts and a political-action-committee meeting with Democratic strategist Paul Begala (another Freddie consultant), Davis did "zero" for the housing firm, one of the sources said. Freddie Mac also had no dealings with the lobbying firm beyond paying monthly invoices—but it agreed to the arrangement because of Davis's close relationship with McCain, the source said, which led top executives to conclude "you couldn't say no."

The McCain campaign told reporters the fees were irrelevant because Davis "separated from his consulting firm … in 2006," according to the campaign's Web site, and he stopped drawing a salary from it. In fact, however, when Davis joined the campaign in January 2007, he asked that his $20,000-a-month salary be paid directly to Davis Manafort, two sources who asked not to be identified discussing internal campaign business told NEWSWEEK. Federal campaign records show the McCain campaign paid Davis Manafort $90,000 through July 2007, when a cash crunch prompted Davis and other top campaign officials to forgo their salaries and work as volunteers. Separately, another entity created and partly owned by Davis—an Internet firm called 3eDC, whose address was the same office building as Davis Manafort's—received payments from the McCain campaign for Web services, collecting $971,860 through March 2008.

But it gets even better - Josh Marshall

In that Newsweek piece (noted below), which details Rick Davis's continuing financial ties to mega-lobby firm Davis Manafort, Mike Isikoff reveals that in addition to paying Davis's salary directly to Davis Manafort, the McCain campaign has paid almost a million dollars to 3eDC, a web development company, part owned by Davis.

That's a decent chunk of change for web development. So TPM Reader UB looked up 3eDC's website. And as you can see, for a firm in the business of billing $1 million for high-end design work, their own website appears to be one of those off-the-rack professional firm template sites you can by for $19.99.

I'm not saying it's Jukt Micronics exactly. But 3eDC's existence as an actual company seems rather thin.

So is Davis taking money from the McCain campaign and indirectly putting it in his own pocket.  Now I looked at 3eDC's own website and I could have whipped that out in less than an hour with my free HTML editor and I'm really bad at CSS.  But that's not too surprising:

And there's a bit more. According to a July 2007 article in the Wall Street Journal, 3eDC was a "start-up ... with one customer -- the [McCain] campaign." The Journal further reported that within the campaign it was understood that 3eDC was essentially a pass-through, that it had a series of other 'partner firms' that did the actual work.

Perhaps not surprisingly, in June, the Post's Matthew Mosk reported that shortly after McCain took over the Republican National Committee in his role as de facto nominee, 3eDC resurfaced with its second client to date -- the Republican National Committee -- with a contract potentially worth as much as $3 million.

While Rick Davis is not taking a salary from Davis Manafort he is certainly pumping a lot of McCain campaign and Republican money into companies he still owns.

Obama lead continues to grow

By Ron Beasley

Joe Gandelman has done the post I was going to do on todays poll numbers so head over there and read it.  Joe notes that this has been an up and down race and there is still over a month to go which is true.  But I think what many are missing is that John McCain no longer controls his own destiny.  The only way he can win now is for Obama to screw up and I think it's more likely McCain will lose it. He may try another hail Mary pass but we have seen how those work out. The Tax and spend Liberal meme won't fly after the last eight years and the polls show the voters give Obama a big plus on the economy. The not prepared to be commander in chief meme didn't seem to stick when he tried it in the first debate. The best that Palin can do for him at this point is not hurt him anymore.

here are today's numbers via TPM

• Gallup: Obama 49%, McCain 44%, with a ±2% margin of error. Yesterday, Obama was up 48%-45%.

• Rasmussen: Obama 50%, McCain 44%, with a ±2% margin of error, compared to an Obama lead yesterday of 50%-45%.

• Hotline/Diageo: Obama 48%, McCain 43%, with a ±3.2% margin of error, compared to a 49%-42% Obama lead yesterday.

• Research 2000: Obama 49%, McCain 43%, with a ±3% margin of error. Yesterday, Obama was up 48%-43%.

Picture Of the week

By Ron Beasley

This weeks picture is of food.  It may not look like food but it's called chicken of the woods.  In addition to being edible it can also be incredibly beautiful.

The mushroom can be prepared in most ways that one can prepare chicken meat. It can also be used as a substitute for chicken in a vegetarian diet. Additionally, it can be frozen for long periods of time and retain its edibility. In certain parts of Germany and North America, it is even considered a delicacy.

Hail Mary II - Instant Flop

By Ron Beasley

The poll results today show that McCains hail Mary pass last week was an instant flop.

• Gallup: Obama 49% - McCain 44%
• Hotline/Diago: Obama 48% - McCain 43%
• Research 2000: Obama 49% - McCain 43%
• Rasmussen: Obama 50% - McCain 44%

Obama has a statistical lead and the polls are consistent.  This is before the debate and I would be surprised if there were not even a bigger spread.  Even the FOX people had to admit that Obama did what he needed to do, convince people he could be President, and they were not optimistic that McCain could close the gap by the election.

James Fallows thinks that Obama won the tie:

When the details of this encounter fade, as they soon will, I think the debate as a whole will be seen as of a piece with Kennedy-Nixon in 1960, Reagan-Carter in 1980, and Clinton-Bush in 1992.

In each of those cases, a fresh, new candidate (although chronologically older in Reagan's case) had been gathering momentum at a time of general dissatisfaction with the "four more years" option of sticking with the incumbent party. The question was whether the challenger could stand as an equal with the more experienced, tested, and familiar figure. In each of those cases, the challenger passed the test -- not necessarily by "winning" the debate, either on logical points or in immediate audience or polling reactions, but by subtly reassuring doubters on the basic issue of whether he was a plausible occupant of the White House and commander in chief.

I see that as exactly what happened.

That brings us back to hail Mary pass one, Sarah Palin. 

Next up: Biden and Palin debate in St. Louis

Sen. Joe Biden and Gov. Sarah Palin will face off Thursday at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri.

There's a lot of anticipation surrounding the VP debate because Palin has remained largely on script in her first month on the campaign trail.

Although Biden has a reputation for impetuous and brutally honest remarks, he's also a long-time senator with decades of experience in the public eye.

As chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, the 65-year-old Delaware senator is well versed on foreign policy.

Biden has done nearly 100 interviews since being picked as Obama's VP on August 23.

Palin, on the other hand, did her third interview with a national television network last week. On Wednesday, she held her first media availability with her traveling reporters.

The Republican VP candidate has received less than stellar reviews in the few interviews that she has done.

Palin's interview Wednesday with CBS' Katie Couric drew criticism when the Alaska governor was unable to provide an example of when McCain had pushed for more regulation of Wall Street during his Senate career.

How things can change in two short weeks.  This from Chuck Todd on September 12th.

Palin's bubble: Will it bulge or bust? 

Obama wants the spotlight off her and back to the top of the ticket

But big questions remain: Is this Palin bubble going to burst, and if so, when?

And if it does burst, will it be a full-fledged bust?

Will the collapse be reminiscent of famous internet bubble stock drops like DrKoop.com and Pets.com? Or will there be a soft landing, like with AOL and Amazon?

Well the big question has been answered.  The big question today is will she still be the nominee on Thursday and if she is will she show up at the debate.

Update

Fareed Zakaria says Palin is Ready?  Please.

Can we now admit the obvious? Sarah Palin is utterly unqualified to be vice president. She is a feisty, charismatic politician who has done some good things in Alaska. But she has never spent a day thinking about any important national or international issue, and this is a hell of a time to start.

Why?

By Ron Beasley

So why did McCain decide to end his stunt?  Maybe this is why - it was a flop:

• Hot Line Poll: Obama - 49%, McCain - 42%
• Rasmussen: Obama - 50%, McCain - 45%
• Gallup Daily: Obama - 48%. McCain - 45%

Or Perhaps it was this:

McCain needs to prove tonight that he's not a crazy hot headed old man who might drop dead in the next few years.

Update

I think McCain was successful at not looking like a crazy hot headed old man.  That said there is nothing worse than the newly converted like X Republican John Cole:

McCain looked cranky and old, regurgitated talking points, and seemed to cycle between grumpy and phony.

But John and I agree on this:

According to what I saw on CNN, McCain tanked with the Independents. This was a clear win for Obama, at worst a tie. McCain needed a win, and did not get it.

And John gets this wrong:

Next week, Palin talks for 90 minutes. Think about that.

Sorry John, ain't gonna happen.

Fuel From Pond Scum - Update

By Ron Beasley

A few months ago I reported on efforts to make biofuels from algae.

You can get about 370 gallons of ethanol per year per acre [of corn]. The ethanol economy of Brazil is based on sugar cane which will produce about 900 gallons per acre per year; better but still not a great use of arable land.

But what if you could get six to ten thousand gallons of ethanol per acre per year and use a green house gas to do it. Well it looks like that is possible.

Well my local electric utility, Portland General Electric,  is going to give it a try.

PGE aims to turn Boardman coal-plant pollution into biofuel

In the energy equivalent of turning a pig's ear into a silk purse -- and a very green one, at that -- Portland General Electric is testing how to use pollutants from its Boardman coal plant to grow algae for biofuel production.

PGE and renewable energy developer Columbia Energy Partners announced Thursday that they had begun a pilot project for the algae venture at the utility's Boardman facility in Morrow County.

The experiment siphons off some of the coal plant's CO2 emissions and feeds them to six 12-foot-long tubs of algae sitting on a nearby flatbed truck.

During photo synthesis, the algae gobble up the CO2 and release oxygen into the air. Oil is squeezed out of the mature algae and used to produce a clean-burning biodiesel.

The residue -- a starchy goo -- is turned into ethanol, an alternative to gasoline, and livestock feed.

"This is an opportunity to make a real meaningful difference," said Steve Corson, a PGE spokesman.

He emphasized, however, that the pilot project is "tiny" and that more tests must be conducted before determining whether a full-blown production facility is feasible.

The 600-megawatt Boardman facility, about 150 miles east of Portland, is Oregon's only coal plant. It generates about one-fifth of PGE's power and is the state's largest stationary source of CO2, a major contributor to climate change.

The plant has come under fire not only for its CO2 emissions, but also for haze-causing pollutants such as sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides. A study released early this year concluded that the plant is responsible for more than half the haze in the eastern Columbia River Gorge at certain times in the winter.

Jon Norling, vice president of Columbia Energy, said he approached PGE more than two years ago about using Boardman's CO2 emissions to grow algae. Norling owns Portland Biodiesel and said he was quick to recognize algae as a potentially valuable biodiesel feedstock.

Algae's attraction to CO2 is a natural, Norling said. "It needs it," he said. "It really likes it."

The pilot project won't make much of a dent in Boardman's CO2 emissions, which total about 5 million tons a year. But, a full-scale plant -- at least 21/2 years away -- could use up to 60 percent of the emissions during daylight hours and produce 20 million gallons of biodiesel annually, Norling said.

As was pointed out in the original post the power plant connection is vital.

Trying to grow concentrations of the finicky organism is a bit like trying to balance the water in a fish tank. It’s also expensive. The water needs to be just the right temperature for algae to proliferate, and even then open ponds can become choked with invasive species. Atmospheric levels of CO₂ also aren’t high enough to spur exponential growth.

Solix addresses these problems by containing the algae in closed “photobioreactors”—triangular chambers made from sheets of polyethylene plastic (similar to a painter’s dropcloth)—and bubbling supplemental carbon dioxide through the system. Eventually, the source of the CO₂ will be exhaust from power plants and other industrial processes, providing the added benefit of capturing a potent greenhouse gas before it reaches the atmosphere.

See Fuel From Pond Scum for the details of the process.

Incomplete

By Ron Beasley

Seeing that his latest hail Mary pass was incomplete John McCain has agreed to participate in tonight's debate.

Senator John McCain’s campaign said Friday morning that he will attend tonight’s debate with Senator Barack Obama at the University of Mississippi, reversing his earlier call to postpone the debate so he could participate in the Congressional negotiations over the $700 billion bailout plan for financial firms.

Mr. McCain had thrown debate preparation into turmoil on Wednesday afternoon after he announced that he intended to skip the debate in order to be in Washington for the negotiations. His campaign issued a statement Friday morning saying he was now “optimistic” that a bipartisan bailout agreement would be reached soon, citing “significant progress” in the talks.

So What happened?  I think this editorial in the Roanoke Times nails it.

More than John McCain's poll numbers are slipping. So is his grip on leadership qualities Americans expect in their next president.

McCain must have thought he'd look maverickishly presidential when he announced he would suspend his campaign in order to rescue the economy. This, from the same man who last week was so detached from Wall Street's meltdown that he claimed "the fundamentals of the economy are sound." His actions this week confirm he remains out of touch.

McCain claims finally to get it. He said Wednesday he would cancel his ads and appearances, wriggle out of tonight's presidential debate, put his personal ambitions behind duty to country and rush to Washington, D.C. to ... what? ... save the economy?

On the way, though, he dropped by CBS to do damage control after his running mate bombed an interview with Katie Couric on his economic record, of all things, and to meet with a deep-pocket campaign supporter.

So does this mean the VP debate will go on?  Not a chance!  Don't be too surprised is Sarah Palin takes the advice of Kathleen Parker and decides she really needs to spend more time with her family.  Short of that the campaign will come up with some lame excuse to justify canceling the debate.  They simply can't let it happen.

Good for them

By Ron Beasley

It's not often I am thankful for conservative Republicans but today is an exception.

Deal May Be Dead

After days of bipartisan negotiations and meetings today at the White House, the deal to bail out staggered investment banks may be dying amid partisan finger-pointing.

The Paulson Deal was a bad deal.  If it took the House Republicans to kill it I applaud them.  As Fox Business Network's Neal Cavuto said chill out and let the financial sector try to work it out themselves.  But everyone is worried about Wall Street.  Let it fall, even though it's costing me a bundle, as I said several months ago Wall Street ≠ Economy but is little more than a ponzi scheme.  Paulson's bailout is little more than an attempt to keep the ponzi scheme going until the incompetent Bush administration is safely out of office.

But what about John McCain's electioneering stunt?   I find it hard to believe that I'm agreeing with the Weekly Standard's Fred Barnes who said the only way McCain wins on this is if there is a John McCain/Barney Frank plan that the conservative Republicans will support but for once I think he's right.

Update

Comrade John Cole has some great advice for the Democrats:

Your Boots Are Made For Waliking

If this is not a big enough crisis that McCain and the GOP can play games with it, it is not a crisis at all.

Walk away, Democrats.

And there is more here.

Walk away.

Oh My God! - Continued

By Ron Beasley

Yesterday I said this:

I originally thought she was probably pretty smart and they could pump a few facts into her head before the debate and before she had to do any "real" interviews.  Well I was wrong - she's a moron.  She actually makes George W. Bush look smart.

Well today Glenn Greenwald admits that he was wrong when he said this:

Sarah Palin isn't Dan Quayle. She is extremely smart -- much smarter than the average media star who will eventually be interviewing her -- and she is very politically skilled as well. She didn't go from obscure small-town city council member to Governor to Vice Presidential nominee by accident. She'll be more than adequately prepared for the shallow, 30-second, rote exchanges that pass for political interviews in our Serious mainstream discourse. Anyone expecting her to fall on her face or be exposed as some drooling simpleton is going to be extremely disappointed. That might (or might not) happen with real questioning, but she's not going to face that.

Glenn still thinks she is "probably perfectly smart", whatever that means, but he is still frightened:

But Sarah Palin's performance in the tiny vignettes of unscripted dialogue in which we've been allowed to see her has been nothing short of frightening -- really, as I said, pity-inducing. And I say that as someone who has thought from the start that the criticisms of her abilities -- as opposed to her ideology -- were much too extreme. One of two things is absolutely clear at this point: she is either (a) completely ignorant about the most basic political issues -- a vacant, ill-informed, incurious know-nothing, or (b) aggressively concealing her actual beliefs about these matters because she's petrified of deviating from the simple-minded campaign talking points she's been fed and/or because her actual beliefs are so politically unpalatable, even when taking into account the right-wing extremism that is permitted, even rewarded, in our mainstream. I'm not really sure which is worse, but it doesn't really matter, because with 40 days left before the election, both options are heinous.

What seems most likely is that she's perfectly conversant in the exceedingly narrow and parochial range of issues she's concerned herself with as Wasilla Mayor and Alaska Governor -- oil drilling on the North Slope, specific local budget items, corruption issues inside the Alaskan State GOP, and evangelical and religious matters. She really doesn't seem to have any thoughts about anything outside of that -- or if she does, she is suppressing them -- and is thus capable of spouting little more than empty right-wing slogans.

I think Glenn is still giving Palin too much credit and over at The Left Coaster Turkana agrees with me.

Sarah Palin is an idiot. It's okay to say it. Because it's true.

I still don't think the VP debate will ever happen.  There will be some blowback if it doesn't but it will be worse if it does.

Oh My God!

By Ron Beasley

Today John McCain tried to reschedule the first Presidential debate to the night Sarah Palin and Joe Biden were supposed to debate.  That's no too surprising since it is becoming obvious she is a train wreck and the McCain campaign knows it.  She looked bad when she was interviewed by Charlie Gibson.  She even looked bad on the Sean Hannity infomercial.  And it's not getting any better.  John Cole, Elrod and dday have clips and comments on the Couric interview and it's shocking.

I originally thought she was probably pretty smart and they could pump a few facts into her head before the debate and before she had to do any "real" interviews.  Well I was wrong - she's a moron.  She actually makes George W. Bush look smart.  Now this is her I'm an idiot and proud of it moment:

The McCain campaign knows they are in deep shit.  Jonathan Martin thinks they are trying to buy more prep time for Palin.  He's wrong - the campaign knows there is not enough time.  If nothing else works expect Governor Palin or one of her kids to get really sick the day of the debate.  They know they can't go through with it.

Update

Jonathan Martin has more:

Sarah Palin's interview with Katie Couric, the first portion of which airs tonight, won't give Republicans any reassurance that she's ready for prime time.

It will, however, reassure McCain aides that they're ollowing the right course of action by keeping her shielded.

Not only did Palin say the country could be facing another Great Depression without a bailout, but she offered a painful silence when pressed about campaign manager's Rick Davis's ties to Freddie Mac.

And, at the end, she had no good answer when asked by Couric for examples of what McCain has done to regulate Wall Street.

First, she reminded Couric that McCain had been "known as the maverick."

Pressed for details, Palin threw in the towel.

Hail Mary Pass II

By Ron Beasley

Both candidates have been marginal players; McCain, though, seems to have the potential to make himself a major one, and his move is a mark, most of all, that he doesn't like the way this campaign is going.

But in terms of the timing of this move: The only thing that's changed in the last 48 hours is the public polling.

~Ben Smith

BJ reported on John McCain's latest Hail Mary Pass below.  Well it appears that this pass will at best be incomplete and in fact may have been intercepted by Obama.

The economic crisis and raw politics threatened to derail the first presidential debate as John McCain challenged Barack Obama to delay the Friday forum and join forces to help Washington fix the financial mess. Obama rebuffed his GOP rival, saying the next president needs to "deal with more than one thing at once."

[......]

"It's my belief that this is exactly the time when the American people need to hear from the person who, in approximately 40 days, will be responsible for dealing with this mess," Obama said at a news conference in Clearwater, Fla. "It's going to be part of the president's job to deal with more than one thing at once."

It would appear that the US Voters agree with Obama.

Question 1, Should the Debate be held as scheduled?

• Held as scheduled......................50%
• Held with focus an the economy..36%
• Postponed.................................10%

Question 2, Should the campaigns be suspended?

• Suspend campaigns........14%
• Continue campaigns........31%
• Refocus campaigns.........48%

This was a move of pure political theater on McCain's part.  He knew he had to do something since he was going south in the polls.

New Dollar Bill

By Ron Beasley

LOST

By Ron Beasley

ABC reports that the latest NIE on Afghanistan concludes that things in Afghanistan are "grim".

US intelligence analysts are putting the final touches on a secret National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Afghanistan that reportedly describes the situation as "grim", but there are "no plans to declassify" any of it before the election, according to one US official familiar with the process.

Officials say a draft of the classified NIE, representing the key judgments of the US intelligence community's 17 agencies and departments, is being circulated in Washington and a final "coordination meeting" of the agencies involved, under the direction of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, is scheduled in the next few weeks.

According to people who have been briefed, the NIE will paint a "grim" picture of the situation in Afghanistan, seven years after the US invaded in an effort to dismantle the al Qaeda network and its Taliban protectors.

Now since the news is bad it won't be declassified.

Mike McConnell, the director of National Intelligence, has made it his policy that such key judgments "should not be declassified", although several have recently, including a report on Iran's nuclear ambitions.

Of course if it was good news is would have been leaked already but it's not.

"We are now at a tipping point, with about half of the country now penetrated by a range of Sunni militant groups including the Taliban and al Queida," Jones said. Jones said there is growing concern that Dutch and Canadian forces in Afghanistan would "call it quits."

"The US military would then need six, eight, maybe ten brigades but we just don't have that money," Jones said.

So Afghanistan is lost unless we send troops we don't have - that is Afghanistan is lost.

Maybe he should have brought his gun

By Ron Beasley

It's a bitch being a lame duck bully:

House GOP rises up against Cheney

There was a time when Dick Cheney could turn back a Republican revolt on Capitol Hill.

That time is gone.

House Republicans rose up en masse against their vice president on Tuesday morning to blast an administration proposal that would grant Treasury historic authority to start buying hundreds of billions of dollars in devalued mortgage-related assets, according to members present.

The lines to speak were long, the questions many and sentiment in the Cannon Caucus Room Tuesday swayed heavily against the Treasury proposal.

Afterward, Texas Rep. Joe Barton took the unusual step of telling reporters that he had politely given Cheney a piece of his mind – the sort of dissent Republicans considered unthinkable during much of the Bush administration's reign.

The Bush administration is toxic and it's too late in the game to attempt a power grab.

Hot Head

By Ron Beasley

Did George Will just say John McCain is too hot headed to be President? 

Under the pressure of the financial crisis, one presidential candidate is behaving like a flustered rookie playing in a league too high. It is not Barack Obama.

He goes on to talk about McCain's shoot from the hip reaction last week and then concludes with this:

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

It is arguable that, because of his inexperience, Obama is not ready for the presidency. It is arguable that McCain, because of his boiling moralism and bottomless reservoir of certitudes, is not suited to the presidency. Unreadiness can be corrected, although perhaps at great cost, by experience. Can a dismaying temperament be fixed?

That certainly sounds like an un-endorsement of John McCain to me.  McCain has made his temperament an issue.

Poking The Monkey

By Ron Beasley

At a place I used to work we had a fellow worker who had a short fuse.  It could be amusing when he went ballistic so there were some who tried to set him off for the entertainment value.  We refereed to this as poking the monkey.  There were times when this resulted in unpleasant consequences. 

The McCain campaign looked at some polls and realized the media was not held in very high regard so when they lied if they simply attacked the media for reporting the lies they would gain an advantage.  What they failed to take into consideration was that it's that media that determines what most people see and hear.  They may be finding out that they poked the wrong monkey.

From the right leaning Politico:

McCain camp criticism rife with errors

Sen. John McCain’s top campaign aides convened a conference call today to complain of being called “liars.” They pressed the media to scrutinize specific elements of Sen. Barack Obama’s record.

But the call was so rife with simple, often inexplicable misstatements of fact that it may have had the opposite effect: to deepen the perception, dangerous to McCain, that he and his aides have little regard for factual accuracy.

The errors in McCain strategist Steve Schmidt’s charges against Obama and Sen. Joe Biden were particularly notable because they seemed unnecessary. Schmidt repeatedly gilded the lily: He exaggerated the Biden family's already problematic ties to the credit card industry; Obama’s embarrassing relationship with a 1960s radical; and an Obama supporter’s over-the-top attack on Sarah Palin when — in each case — the truth would have been damaging enough.

“Any time the Obama campaign is criticized at any level, the critics are immediately derided as liars,” Schmidt told reporters.

But as he went on to list a series of stories he thought reporters should be writing about Obama and Biden, in almost every instance he got the details wrong.

The McCain campaign specifically attacked the New York Times because:

On Monday, the paper published an article on page A18 tying a McCain campaign manager, Rick Davis, to lobbying group set up by troubled mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Yes, they have poked the wrong monkey.  We have seen McCain spokes people called on all the networks - unheard of in recent history.  Everything they say is questioned, not a good thing when most of what you say is a lie.  Say it often enough and people will believe it has worked well for the Republicans but it only works when the media plays ball.

Kodachrome

By Ron Beasley

Kodachrome
You give us those nice bright colors
You give us the greens of summers
Makes you think all the world's a sunny day, oh yeah!
I got a Nikon camera
I love to take a photograph
So Mama, don't take my Kodachrome away

Mama, don't take my Kodachrome away
~Paul Simon - 1973

I have been a photographer for over 40 years.  A few years ago I was forced to make the switch to digital.  There are many advantages but it's just not the same.  I have boxes of 35mm Kodachrome slides that for the most part look as good as they day I took them. Below is a slide I took at Grand Canyon is 1983 and just scanned today.

Well Kodachrome is soon to be a thing of the past - the end of an era.

McHoover

By Ron Beasley

I don't think that John McCain realized he was quoting Herbert Hoover a week ago when he said the "fundamentals of the economy are strong", but of course Hoover was wrong then and McCain is wrong now.

We have this from USNews/AP.

In hard times, tent cities rise across the country

RENO, Nev. (AP) -- A few tents cropped up hard by the railroad tracks, pitched by men left with nowhere to go once the emergency winter shelter closed for the summer.

Then others appeared - people who had lost their jobs to the ailing economy, or newcomers who had moved to Reno for work and discovered no one was hiring.

Within weeks, more than 150 people were living in tents big and small, barely a foot apart in a patch of dirt slated to be a parking lot for a campus of shelters Reno is building for its homeless population. Like many other cities, Reno has found itself with a "tent city" - an encampment of people who had nowhere else to go.

From Seattle to Athens, Ga., homeless advocacy groups and city agencies are reporting the most visible rise in homeless encampments in a generation.

Nearly 61 percent of local and state homeless coalitions say they've experienced a rise in homelessness since the foreclosure crisis began in 2007, according to a report by the National Coalition for the Homeless. The group says the problem has worsened since the report's release in April, with foreclosures mounting, gas and food prices rising and the job market tightening.

"It's clear that poverty and homelessness have increased," said Michael Stoops, acting executive director of the coalition. "The economy is in chaos, we're in an unofficial recession and Americans are worried, from the homeless to the middle class, about their future."

Picture of the week

By Ron Beasley

I'm so angry and disgusted I can't really discuss anything rationally so here is the weeks picture.

President McCain

By Ron Beasley

The polls have shifted once again in Barack Obama's direction and there is no way in hell that a Republican much less a dottering old fool and knowledge less beauty queen should be able to win in November. That said I still think that John McCain is an odds on favorite to be the 44th president.  The race should not even be close but it is.  The reason is simple - Obama is black.  I was going to do this post before I saw this:

Racial views steer some white Dems away from Obama

Deep-seated racial misgivings could cost Barack Obama the White House if the election is close, according to an AP-Yahoo News poll that found one-third of white Democrats harbor negative views toward blacks — many calling them "lazy," "violent," responsible for their own troubles.

The poll, conducted with Stanford University, suggests that the percentage of voters who may turn away from Obama because of his race could easily be larger than the final difference between the candidates in 2004 — about two and one-half percentage points.

Certainly, Republican John McCain has his own obstacles: He's an ally of an unpopular president and would be the nation's oldest first-term president. But Obama faces this: 40 percent of all white Americans hold at least a partly negative view toward blacks, and that includes many Democrats and independents.

Yes I know this from AP and Republican hack Ron Fournier but I think it's probably pretty accurate.  The election results will more than ever depend on the youth vote - people under 40 or 50.  They don't share the bigotry of their parents.  I still think that many of the younger voters are not showing up in the polls because so many of them have only cell phones but historically they have not been as likely to show up to cast a ballot either.  It is also possible that John McCain and Sarah Palin will demonstrate that they are so unfit for office that prejudice can be overcome or that many simply won't vote at all.

Update

Anderson makes a good point in the comments section:

Think of this as yet another explication of the brewing plans for stealing the election.

The writing is on the wall, the charge: voting while Democrat:

-- Michigan foreclosures wielded by state GOP as a tool of voter disenfranchisement.

-- 600,000 in Ohio face pending purge, "disproportionately voters of color and young voters." based on voter caging.

-- fraudulent absentee ballots sent to Democratic voters by the McCain campaign,

-- Jewish voters targeted in two states, smearing Obama as having ties to the PLO

-- Restrictive Voter ID laws, designed to disenfranchise targeted Dem demographics. Indiana's new, Supreme Court blessed, law is expected to hit some 143,000 likely Dem voters.

-- Phony RNC mailings in Virginia, like those used in Florida 2000, to justify purges and poll challenges.

-- With newly tightened ID laws, Florida named "most hostile state in the nation to new voters."

And even today, votes are being "lost" by electronic voting machines:

-- 100,000 votes disappear in CA primary

-- 16,00 votes disappear in a FA primary in Palm Beach county on Sequoia machines.

-- 3500 votes disappear in FA primary in Sarasota county; Diebold machines.

Diebold itself admits that their own tabulator software doesn't count votes correctly.

Beware people. This is all being ignored in the mainstream in favour of narratives that have little to do with the ground game currently being laid by the GOP. They are smoke and mirrors, just like the mythical "values voters" story used by the media to "explain" Bush's hacked and jacked win in Ohio. Those values voters never existed, but they provided the cover story.

This would explain Ron Fournier's involvement.

 

Palin an anchor?

By Ron Beasley

Obama increased his lead over McCain again today.  Some of this may be the result of the economic turmoil but I have suspected that Sarah Palin's rapid descent may have had more to do with it. Jay gave us some evidence that Palin was becoming an drag below.  In Florida that certainly seems to be the case.

One thought pushes fence-sitters to the left: Palin

Five weeks ago, the St. Petersburg Times convened a group of Tampa Bay voters who were undecided about the presidential election. Their strong distrust of Barack Obama suggested it was a group ripe for John McCain to win over.

Not anymore. The group has swung dramatically, if unenthusiastically, toward Democrat Obama. Most of them this week cited the same reason: Sarah Palin.

"The one thing that frightens me more than anything else are the ideologues. We've seen too many," said 80-year-old Air Force veteran Donn Spegal, a lifelong Republican from St. Petersburg, who sees McCain's new running mate as the kind of "wedge issue" social conservative that has made him disenchanted with his party.

"I'm truly offended by Palin,'' said 37-year-old Republican Philinia Lehr of Largo, a full-time mother with a nursing degree who voted for George Bush in 2004. Like Palin, she has five children and she doesn't buy that the Alaska governor can adequately balance her family and the vice presidency.

"You're somebody's mom and what are you going to do, say, 'Excuse me, country, hold on?' ... She's preaching that she's this mom of the year and taking that poor little baby all over everywhere. And, you know, what she's doing to her 17-year-old daughter is just appalling.'' Lehr said she's bothered by the way Palin's pregnant daughter has been brought into the national spotlight.

Of the 11 undecided voters participating in the free-wheeling discussion one recent evening at the Times — four Republicans, five Democrats, and two registered to no party — only two Republican men applauded the selection of Palin.

Nobody had finalized a choice, but seven of the panelists said that McCain's running mate selection had made them more likely to vote for Obama, and in several cases much more likely.

Now the Palin selection may result in more Christian Conservatives voting and McCain needed this demographic but she is turning off the Independents, Democrats who might have been tempted to vote for McCain and even some Republicans.    I watched some of the "townhall meeting" and Hanity the other night and her performance was pathetic.  I originally thought the McCain campaign would be able to crib her enough to debate Biden but I'm beginning to think she may just be unteachable.

Born again regulator

By Ron Beasley

As I noted below John McCain has made a major flip flop on government regulation.  After opposing it for his entire life he is suddenly all for it.  Crooks and Liars reports that it is such a major change in just a few days that even GOP friendly ABC had to notice.  Of course I'm sure this new found religion will only last until November.

The bounce is over(Updated)

By Ron Beasley

Obama has taken the lead in most of the polls again - The Gallup Daily has him up by two again. I really don't think that McCain got a convention bounce it was all the novelty Palin bounce.  Over at Hot Air Allahpundit wonders if Palin is becoming "a bit of an anchor".  Indeed her favorablity has plummeted in the last week.

Sept. 11: +17 (day the Gibson interview airs)

Sept. 12: +14

Sept. 13: +9

Sept. 14: +5

Sept. 15: +4

Sept. 16: +1

Sept. 17: -1 (today)

It would appear that Sarah Palin has something in common with Rudi Giuliani -  the more the see and hear her the less they like her.

The New York Times/CBS News Poll  has even more bad news for McCain.  The Palin bounce is officially over and the race is right back where it was before her selection.  In addition most don't see McCain as an agent of change.

Despite an intense effort to distance himself from the way his party has done business in Washington, Senator John McCain is seen by voters as far less likely to bring change to Washington than Senator Barack Obama. He is widely viewed as a “typical Republican” who would continue or expand President Bush’s policies, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News Poll.

Polls taken after the Republican convention suggested that Mr. McCain had enjoyed a surge of support — particularly among white women after his selection of Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska as his running mate — but the latest poll indicates “the Palin effect” was, at least so far, a limited burst of interest. The contest appeared to be roughly where it was before the two conventions and before the vice-presidential selections: Mr. Obama had the support of 48 percent of registered voters, compared with 43 percent for Mr. McCain, a difference within the poll’s margin of sampling error, and statistically unchanged from the tally in the last New York Times/CBS News Poll in mid-August.

The woman and independents that had jumped to McCain after the selection of Palin and the convention have all returned to Obama.  With the economy the number one issue:

The poll was taken during a period of extraordinary turmoil on Wall Street. By overwhelming numbers, Americans said the economy was the top issue affecting their vote decision, and they continued to express deep pessimism about the nation’s economic future. They continued to express greater confidence in Mr. Obama’s ability to manage the economy, even as Mr. McCain has aggressively sought to raise doubts about it.

Is there more too it?

By Ron Beasley

There is very little doubt that the media has turned on John McCain.

• Long time cheerleader, Richard Cohen, has had enough.
• The WAPO has called him on his latest flip flop.
• The Associated Press is calling him two faced.
• CNN is documenting his lies.

And there are many more examples, even some from FOX.  Is all of this because the corporate media is fed up or is there more to it?  Digby has been wondering if perhaps the "big money boyz" are worried about a McCain presidency and the Palin selection can't make them feel any better.  War can be profitable but a never ending war against most of the world is not.  Corporate America would much prefer trading with Iran than bombing it.  John Cole asked a very good question this morning, Is McCain Just Dumb?  Now the corporate types probably don't really care if McCain is dumb but they may be less than excited about the neocons he will be taking his direction from.  Has the corporate media sent down the word from on high that it's OK to go after McCain?  Are they making a serious attempt to prevent McCain's election.

McCain's latest flip flop

By Ron Beasley

After years of opposition to government regulation the WAPO documents McCain's latest flip flop - he is now a born again regulator, at least until November.

McCain Embraces Regulation After Many Years of Opposition

A decade ago, Sen. John McCain embraced legislation to broadly deregulate the banking and insurance industries, helping to sweep aside a thicket of rules established over decades in favor of a less restricted financial marketplace that proponents said would result in greater economic growth.

Now, as the Bush administration scrambles to prevent the collapse of the American International Group (AIG), the nation's largest insurance company, and stabilize a tumultuous Wall Street, the Republican presidential nominee is scrambling to recast himself as a champion of regulation to end "reckless conduct, corruption and unbridled greed" on Wall Street.

"Government has a clear responsibility to act in defense of the public interest, and that's exactly what I intend to do," a fiery McCain said at a rally in Tampa yesterday. "In my administration, we're going to hold people on Wall Street responsible. And we're going to enact and enforce reforms to make sure that these outrages never happen in the first place."

And as I discussed here it's impossible to talk about the current situation without the name of John McCain's good friend and adviser, Phil Gramm, coming up.

In 2002, McCain introduced a bill to deregulate the broadband Internet market, warning that "the potential for government interference with market forces is not limited to federal regulation." Three years earlier, McCain had joined with other Republicans to push through landmark legislation sponsored by then-Sen. Phil Gramm (Tex.), who is now an economic adviser to his campaign. The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act aimed to make the country's financial institutions competitive by removing the Depression-era walls between banking, investment and insurance companies.

That bill allowed AIG to participate in the gold rush of a rapidly expanding global banking and investment market. But the legislation also helped pave the way for companies such as AIG and Lehman Brothers to become behemoths laden with bad loans and investments.

McCain now condemns the executives at those companies for pursuing the ambitions that the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act made possible, saying that "in an endless quest for easy money, they dreamed up investment schemes that they themselves don't even understand."

He said the misconduct was aided by "casual oversight by regulatory agencies in Washington," where he said oversight is "scattered, unfocused and ineffective."

And yes, this is a very recent flip flop:

But he has usually reverted to the role of an unabashed deregulator. In 2007, he told a group of bloggers on a conference call that he regretted his vote on the Sarbanes-Oxley bill, which has been castigated by many executives as too heavy-handed.

In the 1990s, he backed an unsuccessful effort to create a moratorium on all new government regulation. And in 1996, he was one of only five senators to oppose a comprehensive telecommunications act, saying it did not go far enough in deregulating the industry.

As chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee for more than a decade, McCain did not have direct oversight of the financial sector. But he sat at the center of arguments between telephone, cable and satellite companies, almost always pressing for more competition.

"I'm always for less regulation," he told the Wall Street Journal in March. He added: "I'd like to see a lot of the unnecessary government regulations eliminated."

Quote of the Day

By Ron Beasley

Digby on McCain-Palin

I'm beginning to think George W. Bush is a deeply nuanced thinker by comparison. And I'm less concerned that Palin might become president if McCain passes on before his term is up. I don't see how she can be any worse than he is. They are pretty much the same person --- proudly ignorant, aggressive egomaniacs.

Laissez-faire leads to nationalization

By Ron Beasley

The Republicans, including until this week John McCain, are quick to extol the virtues of laissez-faire capitalism and just as quick to condemn nationalization of private companies.  Well what if laissez-faire policy forced the government to nationalize.  It looks like that is what has happened.

Fed Readies A.I.G. Loan of $85 Billion for an 80% Stake

In an extraordinary turn, the Federal Reserve was close to a deal Tuesday night to take a nearly 80 percent stake in the troubled giant insurance company, the American International Group, in exchange for an $85 billion loan, according to people briefed on the negotiations.

All of A.I.G.’s assets would be pledged to secure the loan, these people said, and in return, the Fed would receive warrants that could be exchanged for an ownership stake. Stock of existing shareholders would be diluted, but not wiped out.

I'll give you one guess on who has his fingerprints all over the A.I.G. failure.  Of course, it was none other than John McCain's good friend and economic adviser Mr Deregulation, the prince of laissez-faire, Phil Gramm.

This is not an accident -- it is a direct result of political leadership -- on both sides of the aisle. Neither the Clinton administration nor the Bush administration was interested in regulating credit derivatives. As Salon reported more than six years ago, one Clinton appointee at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), Brooksley Born, did attempt to bring derivatives trading under the CFTC's regulatory ambit, but she was shot down by a powerhouse of government officials, including Fed Chair Alan Greenspan, SEC head Arthur Levitt, Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and Senate Banking Committee chairman Phil Gramm.

A bipartisan effort, no doubt about it. But nobody made it more of a sacred mission to ensure that credit derivatives were kept unregulated than Senator Gramm, long recognized as the key force in the passage of the Commodities Future Modernization Act of 2000, which specifically exempted new derivative markets from government oversight. As Mother Jones' David Corn reported earlier this year:

The act, he declared, would ensure that neither the SEC nor the Commodity Futures Trading Commission got into the business of regulating newfangled financial products called swaps -- and would thus "protect financial institutions from overregulation" and "position our financial services industries to be world leaders into the new century."

So the next time you hear John McCain rant about excesses and greed on Wall Street just remember who the big player was in making it all possible.

Update

Via Steve Soto we have this from Reuters

McCain lays out principles for Wall Street reform

Republican presidential nominee John McCain said on Tuesday he would set up a commission like the one that investigated the September 11 attacks to study what led to the current U.S. financial crisis and offer solutions.

McCain would craft Wall Street reforms based on several principles including better corporate governance, consumer protection, a "derivatives clearing house" and an effective safety and soundness regulator for every financial institution, a senior adviser to the Arizona senator said.

Of course he fails to note that his dear friend and adviser, Phil Gramm, is the one who made sure there was little or no regulation.  And then he simply lies once again.

"I warned two years ago that the situation was deteriorating and was unacceptable, and the old boy network and the corruption in Washington is directly involved," he said.

Of course there is one little problem - there is no record of McCain even talking about it much less than warning against it.  Once again McCain is just making stuff up.  And of course he and his buddy Phil are charter members of that old boy network.

Foot Shooting

By Ron Beasley

The Gallup Daily Tracking poll shows that the Palin bounce is gone and it remains to be seen how the current economic problems will impact the race.  Not a good time for self inflicted wounds but we a couple today.  First, Joe Gandelman reports that John McCain is attacking reporters and looking like a grumpy old man in the process.

When a politician goes after a newsperson or anchor who asks a journalistic question so basic that a student from a journalism school could have it as part of an assignment in interviewing a politician it means several things:

(1)The politician is feeling the heat and trying to deflect a question that is not helpful to his campaign s he tries to discredit the reporter. (2)The politician is tired and testy…something that will not help McCain if he is seen as brittle in public at a time when he is under fire for ads that are less than truthful. (3)He either has handlers who are not doing their work or they’re underestimating who actively going after reporters can stiffen the resolve of news and morning show editors editors, reporters to ensure that the candidate will be asked the tough questions that are “out there”).

Next Sam Stein tells us that Carly Fiorina may think that Sarah Palin is qualified to run the country but not qualified to run a major corporation like HP.

As Sam says Fiorina just gave the Obama campaign a great commercial.

Update

Fiorina just kept digging that hole:

But then the former HP chief dug herself a deeper hole during an interview on MSNBC, attempting to explain away the Palin remark by saying, hey, McCain couldn't run HP either. "I don't think John McCain could run a major corporation ...

Barack Obama's camp jumped into the melee. “If John McCain’s top economic advisor doesn’t think he can run a corporation, how on Earth can he run the largest economy in the world in the midst of a financial crisis? Apparently even the people who run his campaign agree that the economy is an issue John McCain doesn’t understand as well as he should,” said Obama campaign spokesman Tommy Vietor.

The Real McSame - Part II

By Ron Beasley

In The Real McSame I pointed out how Sarah Palin was very much like George W. Bush.  Writing in Haaretz Bradley Burston comes to the same conclusion.

George Bush, who spoke incessantly about leadership before his election, has had more than seven years to prove himself a leader, and managed to prove conclusively only that he was not.

This is what is truly frightening about Sarah Palin. There is something in the smugness, the faith-based rigidity, the dismissiveness, that suggests that once again, we may have a national leader who knows better how to divide than to rule.

[......]

Asked during the interview if she had the ability and the experience to serve as president of the United States, she replied without hesitation, without reservation, without contemplation - and without knowing, on a profound level, what that would, in fact, entail. "I'm ready."

Here is the answer that is truly frightening. It lets us know that the nation may be in danger of electing another leader bearing the most profound of George Bush's shortcomings: blindness to one's own shortcomings.

McCain has lost another cheerleader

By Ron Beasley

The media talking heads have been McCain's base.  They created the myth of the maverick.  Among that base there was no bigger cheerleader than Richard Cohen but now even Cohen has had enough.

McCain has turned ugly. His dishonesty would be unacceptable in any politician, but McCain has always set his own bar higher than most. He has contempt for most of his colleagues for that very reason: They lie. He tells the truth. He internalizes the code of the McCains -- his grandfather, his father: both admirals of the shining sea. He serves his country differently, that's all -- but just as honorably. No more, though.

.........

His opportunistic and irresponsible choice of Sarah Palin as his political heir -- the person in whose hands he would leave the country -- is a form of personal treason, a betrayal of all he once stood for. Palin, no matter what her other attributes, is shockingly unprepared to become president. McCain knows that. He means to win, which is all right; he means to win at all costs, which is not.

Even FOX news is calling the McCain Campaign on their lies and Karl Rove hints they may have gone too far. Will David Broder be next?

Update

Some more observations:

Justin Gardner

If McCain thinks the media is turning on him, he’s right. But it’s because they’re being forced to report on the realities of John McCain’s campaign, instead of the mythical John McCain they once revered.

Steve Benen on Cohen's flip flop

In June, Cohen argued that McCain may be a flip-flopper, but we shouldn't question him because he's also a former prisoner of war. In April, Cohen described McCain as an "honorable man who has fudged and ducked and swallowed the truth on occasion," which Cohen described as "understandable." (He didn't say why McCain's mendacity is "understandable," but simply granted absolution.) In July, Cohen said McCain is the superior presidential candidate because he knows McCain better than Obama.

But as of this morning, Cohen's done. Finished. Fed up. Disgusted. Cohen was in the tank for McCain -- we know this because Cohen admits in his column that he was "in the tank for McCain" -- but the scales have been lifted from his eyes.

Insulation or Radiation

By Ron Beasley

John McCain not only wants to drill drill drill he wants to build build build nuclear plants.  Tree Hugger suggests that we don't have to do either - all we have to do is insulate insulate insulate:

Bloomberg suggests, and Joe Romm reiterates, that McCain's plan to build 45 nuclear reactors by 2030 might cost the taxpayers almost a third of a trillion dollars, or $ 315 billion. Now that's not much these days, considering what is being racked up for the Iraq war and the Fannie Mae debacle, but to paraphrase Everett Dirkson, a trillion here, a trillion there, pretty soon you're talking about real money.

And it would be nice if it could be done, but as Bloomberg and TreeHugger noted earlier, the only company in the world that can make the reactor vessels is already booked up to 2015.

As we also noted in an earlier post, perhaps there is more energy to be made by fixing what we have, by eliminating waste, by increasing efficiency. Perhaps we don't have to Drill, drill drill! as some suggest, or Invent, Invent, Invent! as Tom Friedman calls for. Perhaps all we really have to do is Insulate, Insulate, Insulate!

Of course there is not as much money to be made at the public trough so it's little wonder that McCain and the Republicans want to drill and build nukes.  If the rich can't get richer why bother.

Tip of the hat to Big Gav

Socialism For The Rich

By Ron Beasley

As we watch yet another Republican financial crisis unfold before our very eyes, everybody needs to employ Mr Google to read up a little bit on the Keating Five scandal. McCain was big, big pals with Charles Keating. He spoke up for Keating with the regulators, buying him more space to defraud his investors --- and the taxpayers --- even more than he already had. He has not changed his philosophy since then. In fact, his closest economic advisor, Phil [Gram], apparently believes that these firms should be completely unregulated and then bailed out by the taxpayers on a regular basis.
~Digby

The market lost over 500 points today - the biggest loss since 911.  Now there is plenty of blame to go around - both Democrats and Republicans, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.  But if you had to come up with one individual  that had the most fingerprints over every financial calamity of the last 8 years it would be Phil Gramm.  He was a crusader when it came to deregulating the energy industry - the result was ENRON.  He was a crusader when it came to the deregulation of the financial markets - the result was the mortgage crisis and the collapse of the US financial industry.  More details can be found here and here. And who is John McCain's "unofficial" economic advisor and the man he may chose to be the Secretary of the Treasury?  none other than Phil Gramm.  Here is McCain channeling Phil Gramm this morning.

So what does John McCain mean when he says he will never put America in this position again, that he will clean up Wall Street since his economic advisor is the one who got us into this mess to begin with and still doesn't think there is a problem.  Yes, I'm still talking about Phil Gramm.

The Obama campaign needs to start talking about Gramm's part in the economic mess we are in and tying McCain to Gramm.  Secretary of the Treasury Phil Gramm should terrify everyone.

Update

Jay has some policy suggestions for Obama below.

Update II

John Cole has some thoughts on the economy, Phil Gramm, John McCain and Sarah Palin

Don't Worry Yet

By Ron Beasley

Libby explained below that there were "signs of hope for Obama supporters".  I for one have not been too concerned.  It's not too surprising that McCain received a Palin bump - she certainly was a novelty but even conservatives like Daniel Larson of The American Conservative and David Frum of the National Review see her as George W. Bush with lipstick.  Now like all novelty acts she was bound to start getting stale and that seems to be happening.  Her favorability rating is plunging - +17 four days ago, +5 today.  A Sean Hannity interview is not going to help.  No one watches Hannity except the hard core kool-aide addicts and I predict the interview will be openly mocked in much if not most of the media.  The McCain campaign has chosen to burn the bridges with McCain's only real constituency, the media.  They made him the "maverick"  and don't see him as one anymore.  The constant lies and distortions are too much for even Karl Rove.  As people see Sarah Palin as an opportunistic bad choice they will increasingly question John McCain's judgment. 

I have been guilty of overestimating the intelligence of the American voter in the past but I would be surprised if the polls did not once again favor Obama in a week or two.

Tina Fey for VP

By Ron Beasley

I was going to post this SNL clip of Tina Fey as Sarah Palin but I was trying to figure out what to say.  Before I had a chance Sarah Hepola at Salon did it for me,

So, OK, Tina Fey, you win. You are the funniest woman on the planet. You are smart and sexy and interesting and you just happen to be a dead ringer for the most fascinating personality of this current news cycle. Oh, and also? You can knock it out of the park with your imitation of her. I figured Tina Fey would be appearing on "Saturday Night Live." I just didn't figure it would be THIS GOOD. Enjoy:

Ike - Powerless

By Ron Beasley

I told you yesterday that I have a sister is Houston.  Well I had a sleepless night but I'm glad to report that I heard from her today and both she and her house are fine except for the fact she is powerless.  A couple of trees and her landscaping are a little worse for wear. 

Picture of the week

By Ron Beasley

There is a part of me that still thinks of photography as a black and white media.  The picture below is from a scanned 2¼ square negative taken about 25 years ago. Yes, I have every negative and slide I have taken for the last 40 years.  (Click on picture for larger image.)

They Know That Sully

By Ron Beasley

In response to this nonsense from Bill Kristol Andrew Sullivan writes this:

Memo to Kristol: you may think Palin is sophisticated enough to grasp the high-level fantasies and abstractions that you have devised in your own head to defend the indefensible. But she isn't, buddy. She has a degree in sports journalism from the University of Idaho, and went to several colleges in several years. She thinks Leo Strauss is a brand of jeans. She doesn't have a clue what she's talking about. Remember: she doesn't know what the Bush Doctrine is and heard about the surge "on the news."

This is your lipsticked pitbull, buddy. Own it. And all the immense incuriosity, minimal education, and fact-resistant ambition that comes with it.

Earth to Sully - Kristol is aware of all of that and he is thrilled.  As I said here Sarah Palin is Bush V2.0, lacking knowledge and lacking the curiosity to learn.  Since she lacks any foreign policy experience or knowledge she will have to depend on others just like George W. Bush and Kristol and the neocons see that as an opportunity to continue their "high-level fantasies.

Posthumous milestone

By Ron Beasley

Although there hasn't been a new post at Middle Earth Journal for over four months I see it has gone over the quarter of a million hits mark. MEJ still averages over 50 hits a day.

Don't forget the pamphleteers are still busy.

Ron here at Newshoggers

Jazz at The Moderate Voice

Chuck at Chuck For....

Ike

By Ron Beasley

Professionally I'm busy but mentally I'm preoccupied.  My sister lives in Houston.  She has storm proofed her house as best she can and gone over to a friends to ride out the storm.  I talked to her this afternoon and that may be the last contact for a few days.  It's in the low 80s and sunny here in the Portland area but my heart and my mind are in another place.  The politics and international events don't seem to have the same attraction they normally do.

The real McSame

The real Bush clone is not John McCain but Sarah Palin.  As I noted below James Fallows observed that Palin performance with Charles Gibson was much like George W. Bush.

A further point. The truly toxic combination of traits GW Bush brought to decision making was:

1) Ignorance
2) Lack of curiosity
3) "Decisiveness"

That is, he was not broadly informed to begin with (point 1). He did not seek out new information (#2); but he nonetheless prided himself (#3) on making broad, bold decisions quickly, and then sticking to them to show resoluteness.

We don't know for sure about #2 for Palin yet -- she could be a sponge-like absorber of information. But we know about #1 and we can guess, from her demeanor about #3.   Most of all we know something about the person who put her in this untenable role.

Well Fallows isn't the only one to see the similarities.  Daniel Larson of The American Conservative:

Both of these assessments are right, but they point to a more serious danger for Palin and for us than mere lack of interest or ignorance would pose.  Worse than being simply uninterested and uninformed about foreign affairs, Palin is now in a position where she will have to be utterly dependent on the “expertise” of McCain foreign policy advisor's for her understanding of these matters, and these just happen to be some of the most irresponsible and dangerous advisor's she could have.  As I said at the start of the month:

Folksy governors with little acquaintance with foreign affairs unfortunately seem to make for easy targets for interventionist advisor's; their own non-Washington credentials persuade them that they need to listen to “experts.” The “experts,” of course, have their own agenda.   

Benen’s observation confirms my Bush/Cheney-in-reverse interpretation of this ticket, so it is worth revisiting Candidate Bush, the Texan governor who talked about Grecians and was vaguely aware of some general running Pakistan, to remember the laughable arguments made by Bush’s defenders about why his lack of preparation was irrelevant.

And from NRO we have David Frum's take on Palin:

A president does not need to know everything. In fact, it's certainly impossible for him (or her) to know everything that he might possibly need to know. That's what the White House staff - and beyond them the whole vast apparatus of the US government - is for. Collectively, the US government knows a lot. And all of that knowledge is at the service and disposal of the president. All the president has to do is - is ask.

But that's not as easy as it sounds.

Somebody who knew President Bush well once remarked to me. "You'll notice he never asks questions."

"Why not?" I said.

"Because he doesn't know what it's okay for him not to know."

**

Again and again through the ABC interview with Sarah Palin, Gibson asked questions to which an evasive answer would have been perfectly appropriate.

What's your view on South Ossetia?

Charlie, I am number two on this ticket. It's not appropriate for me to advance personal views in a public interview like this. I'm here to help John McCain with the issues he's asked me to work on - like energy and government reform. I'm glad to answer any question you may have there.

Or

What should we do about a nuclear Iran?

Charlie, that's an incredibly difficult question. That's why I am so grateful for the leadership of John McCain. I think we'll all feel safer with President McCain deciding on issues like these than we would with an untested and unready candidate like Senator Obama.

But Palin never punted. She tried to bluff her way through, pretending to know what she obviously did not know. It's an understandable impulse, and in the context of a single interview, not so very terrible. But is it an impulse that she'd lay aside once in office? Or is it a deeper habit? A lot may turn on the answer to that question.

Is it any wonder the neocons are excited about Palin.  What they see is a Bush puppet V2.0. 

Clueless

By Ron Beasley

Gibson was trying to help her but to his credit he kept at it when he realized she didn't have a clue.(via TPM)

She is a novelty act not a serious candidate.  The only question is if the novelty will fade before November.

Update

If the novelty doesn't wear off  then Cernig is correct, she will be The Most Dangerous Woman In The World.  Sorry Condi!

More Deep Thoughts

I suspect that Gibson assumed that Palin had been properly prepared and that it took.  When it became obvious that was not the case the comedic tragedy became even too much for Gibson.  Apparently the absurd McCain campaign has become even too much for Bill O'Riley.

Still More

I think publius at Obsidian Wings gets it right:

But the point is not so much the answers, but the more general ignorance (not lack of intelligence) on display tonight. It reveals that she’s never really thought about any of this stuff — she’s never engaged it at the level that presidents should have engaged it.

And James Fallows comes to the same conclusion:

What Sarah Palin revealed is that she has not been interested enough in world affairs to become minimally conversant with the issues. Many people in our great land might have difficulty defining the "Bush Doctrine" exactly. But not to recognize the name, as obviously was the case for Palin, indicates not a failure of last-minute cramming but a lack of attention to any foreign-policy discussion whatsoever in the last seven years.

Fallows points out that this should remind us of someone else.

A further point. The truly toxic combination of traits GW Bush brought to decision making was:

1) Ignorance
2) Lack of curiosity
3) "Decisiveness"

That is, he was not broadly informed to begin with (point 1). He did not seek out new information (#2); but he nonetheless prided himself (#3) on making broad, bold decisions quickly, and then sticking to them to show resoluteness.

We don't know for sure about #2 for Palin yet -- she could be a sponge-like absorber of information. But we know about #1 and we can guess, from her demeanor about #3.   Most of all we know something about the person who put her in this untenable role.

911

By Ron Beasley

Sorry for my AWOL status the last couple of days.  One of the advantages of doing contract work is you have days with no activity.  Those periods are separated by days where you are working 16 hours and I'm in the middle of one of those.  That said I have some thoughts on 911 seven years latter.

Now I can't be sure one Osama bin-Laden considered a victory when he and his associates planned and carried out the atrocities of 911.  That said I think he got everything he wanted and more.

1. The US constitution has been shredded. Nearly everything that made the US what it is is now history.
2. More Americans have died in unnecessary wars than died on 911.
3. The US military is at it's lowest state of readiness since before WWII.
4. US influence in world affairs is at a low point.
5. While the events of 911 temporally united the country in a way not seen since WWII those same events were used by the administration to divide the country more than ever.
6. The middle east in more unstable than before the attacks.
7. The US economy is headed for a major recession or even depression.

I'm sure I left some things out but still we have enough to declare Osama bin-Laden the winner.

Bob Barr on McCain the "Maverick"

By Ron Beasley

Libertarian candidate Bob Barr on McCain and Palin.

Quote of the day

By Ron Beasley

By picking Sarah Palin for a running mate, John McCain has turned over a rock to expose a festering, primitive insanity in our country.

~PZ Myers

Go check out the scary video that inspired that quote.

Kim Jong Il Ill?

By Ron Beasley

The deteriorating situation in Pakistan is not the only thing being ignored .  North Korean leader Kim Jong Il has not been seen since August 14.

Western officials confirm to FOX News that there is intelligence suggesting that North Korean leader Kim Jong Il suffered a stroke on Aug. 14 and could be incapacitated — even wheelchair bound.

Sources tell FOX News that Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill's emergency visit to Beijing last week was more to talk about how to approach North Korea in the event of Kim's incapacitation, and less to talk about the reassembling of the Yongbyon nuclear facility.

A U.S. intelligence official told the Associated Press that there is reason to believe Kim is sick after he failed to show up at a North Korean national celebration on Tuesday. That official and another U.S. source spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity.

Kim has not been seen in public for a month and U.S. officials were closely watching Tuesday's military parade for signs to the leader's health or a shift in power.

North Koreans call Kim the "Dear Leader" and he holds absolute power in the Stalinist regime.

An official told FOX that one of the intelligence community's primary concerns is the line of succession in North Korea if, in fact, Kim is unable to rule or dies.

Now you might think this is good news but you would probably be wrong.  McClatchy explains what might happen now.

Kenneth Gause, who's studied North Korea's leadership for 20 years, said there were a half-dozen scenarios for the impoverished country's future if Kim died. They range from a collective leadership taking over to a senior general seizing power to complete collapse, he said.

If the latter were to happen, "it'd be more like a slow-motion collapse as opposed to something violent," said Gause, who directs the foreign-leadership studies program at CNA, a federally funded research group.

He said those who might succeed Kim, perhaps as part of a collective leadership, included Kim's brother-in-law, Jang Song Taek, who'd been under house arrest for reasons that were unclear, and Kim Yong Nam, who had significant foreign affairs experience and was the president of the Presidium of the Supreme People's Assembly.

Gause said another possibility was a takeover of North Korea by a military strongman, who'd have to be someone with access to closely guarded information about Kim's condition and to military resources.

You may recall that North Korea is a nuclear power and more important the reports that North Korea had restarted it's nuclear program coincide with the disappearance of Kim Jong Il.  Just what the world needs -  another nuclear country that may come unglued. 

Candidates include Gen. O Kok Yul, whose position puts him in charge of the country's elite special forces, Gause said.

Novelty Act

By Ron Beasley

Joe Gandelman points out that the McCain campaign is getting a bump from the American Idol vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin.  But can it last for two months?  Novelty acts grow stale.  She is little more than more of the same with a pretty face from the mysterious north.  She continues to use the same lies and even the WSJ is calling her on them.  Over at Newsweek Andrew Ramono points out that repeating the same lie over and over again isn't working like it once did.

That said, the most interesting thing about today's give-and-take is not that Palin and McCain are misleading the public. In politics, that happens all the time. It's that the Internet--and, through the Internet, the Obama campaign--is forcing major media outlets to repeatedly reject the Bridge to Nowhere deception. In the past, Time and NEWSWEEK and the Times and the Post would've run a thorough factcheck the first time the falsehood surfaced. But then they would've ignored subsequent repetitions. We've already covered that, they'd say. It's old news. Meanwhile, the McCain camp would keep airing the same ads in swing states across the country--reaching millions of credulous voters who'd never read the original fact-checks. But now sites like TPM are (in their own words) forcing "the same news orgs that debunked the original Bridge to Nowhere falsehood" to "aggressively stay on McCain and hold him accountable every time he and his campaign repeat it." That's a certain kind of progress.

And there is still more problems on the horizon - the Religious Right got their candidate but they are still not happy.

McCain must embrace Palin's beliefs, evangelical leader says

Her faith is one of the reasons many evangelical Christians are excited about Sarah Palin's addition to the Republican presidential ticket, but the Alaska governor's evangelical beliefs have also drawn scrutiny.

Evangelicals are closely watching whether the McCain campaign embraces Palin's religious views or shies away from them, Tony Perkins, president of Family Research Council, told CNN.

Perkins sat down with CNN's John Roberts on Tuesday to discuss how the vice presidential pick's faith could influence the presidential election.

Roberts: For a couple of decades, she was a member of the Pentecostal Assembly of God church. Six years ago, she changed to the Wasilla Bible Church. I read an article in which one of her former pastors suggested [the McCain campaign] may be playing down her faith because there may be some misunderstanding about her Pentecostalism. What do you think about all of this?

Perkins: Obviously people, the polling data would suggest people want a leader or leaders that believe in God [and] pray, and I think there's some sense that there's a greater accountability there. But I think the campaign, John, is at a critical point. John McCain made an incredible selection. He has turned around the campaign that I think was moving south, and there's enthusiasm, excitement and hope among social conservative voters.

But ... the next few days, next couple of weeks will be very critical because as you pointed out, her faith has become an issue. It's being attacked, being used as a weapon against her. People are watching. It will be very important how the McCain campaign handles this. If they become defensive and run from it and try to hide the fact that there is this element of faith, then I think it's going to turn off social conservatives, evangelicals, orthodox Christians.

If they say, "Hey, why should someone have to check their faith at the door and move towards the base," I think it's going to energize, you know, the socially conservative voters more. It's very important how they deal with this in the next few days.

The McCain campaign must either chose to please the Perkin's Taliban and lose the independents or try to avoid the issue and lose the Religious Right.  And Palin's religion could cost the campaign Florida.

Koch backs Obama, calls Palin 'scary'

Koch said he'd visited six states for Bush in 2004, primarily Florida, but also several others. ("Why they sent me to Iowa, I don't know.") He said he'd be happy to campaign for Obama "if they ask me to."

Koch is a member of a set of secular, swing-voting Jewish Democrats who may have been pushed away by the selection of Palin, and his endorsement may be a marker of an opportunity for Obama to strengthen his campaign among older Jewish voters in Florida.

Once the novelty wears off expect to see the polls shift back to Obama.

You Must Be Crazy

By Ron Beasley

Many if not most would agree that you would have to be crazy to want to be president.  That probably applies this time around more than ever.  No matter who is elected in November the country is going to be as bad off and probably worse off than it is now.  There is simply no way the mismanagement of the Bush administration can be fixed in four short years.  A couple of days ago I wrote the following:

Eighty percent of Americans think the country is on the wrong track and they are right.  After eight years of the Bush administration, and in fact we could go back 28 years, the country is not only on the wrong track it is going down the track very fast.  Fighting that forward motion and getting the US on the right track again will take years and be very painful.  Politicians who inflict pain on voters are shown the door.  While McCain will change nothing about the best we can expect from Obama are some cosmetic changes that will be too little to late because he knows the American voter will not put up with the pain.

Over at Crooks and Liars this morning our own Cernig  had the interview with Mort Zuckerman . Go over there and listen to the entire interview but in short what he said is that we are f**ked.

But he also says that “this is not the end of the real problem”, which is $5 trillion plus in mortgage loans with record foreclosures and falling house prices. In other words, America’s piggy bank is broken. Zuckerman says that no-one should think the bailout is the end of the story: “this problem is still not measurable, we still don’t know where the bottom is,” and that the only way out in the long term is to “force savings upon the American people, and that’s called taxes.”

The panel immediately said that raising taxes would screw up the economy - the typical supply sider response.  Well I'm not convinced that is true and we've had the tax cuts and the economy is about as bad for most as it's been since the great depression.  He did get one thing right however, the housing problem was the result of a lack of regulation and he assigned the blame to congress and the lobbyists who convinced them to do away with it.  Think Phil Gramm!

It really doesn't matter who is elected in November, he will be a one term president.  The American voter expects instant results and fixes that aren't painful.  The candidate elected in November will not be able to produce that.  Now McCain will be the same as Bush and that train will continue racing down the same track.  If Obama is elected he will be under constant attack from the media and won't really be able to govern and the House and Senate won't let him do anything that would result in too much pain endanger their own elections.  You would have to be crazy to want the job.

Picture of the week

By Ron Beasley

This is a picture I took in Munich, Germany almost 40 years ago.  It was always one of my personel favorites.

Reform

By Ron Beasley

REFORM is the way politicians spell bull shit.  Now we spend a lot of time here talking about how John McCain represents more of the same and won't reform anything but do we honestly think Obama is going to reform Washington?  Many run for office and talk about reform.  Some of them may actually mean it but soon get sucked into the way things are.  To most reform is just a catchy word they use when they campaign.  The word reform has been replaced with the word change this time around but it's really the same thing.  The reality is no matter who gets elected there will be nearly zero reform and very little change.  Politicians start running for re-election the day they are elected.  Eighty percent of Americans think the country is on the wrong track and they are right.  After eight years of the Bush administration, and in fact we could go back 28 years, the country is not only on the wrong track it is going down the track very fast.  Fighting that forward motion and getting the US on the right track again will take years and be very painful.  Politicians who inflict pain on voters are shown the door.  While McCain will change nothing about the best we can expect from Obama are some cosmetic changes that will be too little to late because he knows the American voter will not put up with the pain. 

That said I will still vote and work for Barack Obama because it will mean the neocons and the theocons will at least have less power - the lunatics will no longer be in charge of the asylum.  But I really don't see things changing very much.

Update

I must be right because David Broder said just the opposite.

Who's missing?

By Ron Beasley

Barack Obama, John McCain and Joe Biden will all be on the Sunday talk shows but Sarah Palin won't be.

As is The Ticket's custom, a post listing the entire roster of appearances on this Sunday's interview programs will pop up Saturday at noon PDT (3 p.m. EDT).

But here's an advance heads up, in part because of who WON'T be found on any of the chat shows.

Three of the four now-official candidates on the major-party presidential tickets are scheduled to sit down for questions: Democrat Barack Obama on ABC's "This Week," his running mate, Joe Biden, on NBC's "Meet the Press" and Republican John McCain on CBS' "Face the Nation."

Absent from this list, of course, is the GOP's star of the moment, the not-so-long-ago obscure governor of Alaska who is McCain's running mate, Sarah Palin.

Since she was thrust onto the national stage a week ago, her appearances on it have been tightly regulated by the McCain campaign: a few side-by-side campaign stops with him and, of course, her big speech to the GOP's convention Wednesday night.

Shaun Mullen reminds us this is day 8 of the Palin Cone of Silence Watch.

It has been eight days since vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin has been allowed to say anything in a public setting that is not carefully scripted or controlled. No interviews. No taking questions from the news media. Palin has read one prepared statement twice and delivered an address written by George Bush's speechwriter.

McCain spokeswoman Nicole Wallace asserts that voters don't care if Palin can answer questions about foreign and domestic policy, let alone the string of troubling allegations that cling to her shoes like so much oily kelp washed up on a beach in Alaska.

What does the campaign not want us to know about a woman whom fate may dictate becomes the next president? What is it trying to hide? How much longer will Palin be kept inside this Cone of Silence?

Tim F at Balloon Juice has the answer I think:

But. The guy is a campaign flack managing an embarrassment. You have to assume that he’s shading the truth to cover up something worse. Taking a wild guess, the answer most likely has to do with Palin’s problem with telling the truth. In her short time on the national stage Sarah Palin has lied about practically everything. She lied about opposing the Ketchikan bridge, she lied about selling a state plane on eBay and about making a profit on the sale, she lied about visiting Ireland (her plane refueled there), she lied about fighting lobbyists and pork (she set a record for both), she lied about Obama’s legislative accomplishments.

More, it now appears indisputable that Palin lied her moose hunting ass off about inappropriately using her authority to fire Alaska’s public safety chief. The public record already has more than enough proof that she lied to the Alaskan people about not putting pressure on the commissioner to fire her ex-brother in law. Then she lied about cooperating with the commission. This poses a vexing problem because even Larry King or Chris Wallace have to bring this up and there is literally nothing that Palin can say. If she repeats her earlier denials the evidence will damn her now and the looming investigation report will damn her even worse. The only credible answer would be to come to Jesus on national TV, except that she risks admitting to an impeachable offense.

She can’t lie, she can’t tell the truth. I don’t envy the campaign for the tough spot that McCain’s rash decision left them in. At the same time I don’t much sympathy for Alaska’s lying, power-abusing tinpot Bush.

And the longer Palin avoids the press the deeper they are going to dig.

Reformed Maverick

By Ron Beasley

Speaks for itself.

Who needs lipstick?

By Ron Beasley

Sarah Palin may be a pit bull with lipstick but Joe Bidden is a pit bull with substance.  If you missed it here is Joe Biden today.

Can they get Palin ready to take on Biden in a month? 

Still more lies!

Alaska gas project hailed by Palin still embryonic

A long-delayed natural gas pipeline championed by Gov. Sarah Palin that would carry supplies from Alaska to Canada and then to the lower 48 states exists in concept only and is years away from fruition.

The vice presidential hopeful, in her speech Wednesday to the Republican National Convention, said she fought to bring about "the largest private-sector infrastructure project in North American history" to bolster America's energy security.

"And when that deal was struck, we began a nearly $40 billion natural gas pipeline to help lead America to energy independence," Palin said.

But plans for the pipeline that would ship gas from Alaska's North Slope -- a project envisioned since the 1970s -- remain on the drawing board.

"No, it hasn't been started, and that's on the record," said Paul Laird, executive director of the Alaska Support Industry Alliance, an oil field service trade group.

As I said below Palin is the perfect Republican - just lie and make stuff up and hope it sticks.  This may be the real problem with the McCain campaign's media boycott - it just gets the media digging deeper and so far they haven't had too dig that deep.

St Sarah - the perfect Republican

By Ron Beasley

Sarah Palin is the perfect modern day Republican - she is a pathological liar.

Plane Not Sold on eBay

One of the compelling anecdotes about Sarah Palin is that she auctioned off the Alaska governor's jet on eBay after taking office -- a swift move made by a reformer hoping to clean up the excesses of her predecessor.

But in fact, the jet did not sell on eBay. It was sold to a businessman from Valdez named Larry Reynolds, who paid $2.1 million for the jet, shy of the original $2.7 million purchase price, according to contemporaneous news reports, including a story in the New York Times.

Dan Spencer, the director of administrative services for Alaska's Public Safety Department, said that the Republican speaker of the Alaska House, John L. Harris, brokered the deal.

What happened? It appears that, as promised during her bid for governor in 2006, Palin did try to sell the plane on eBay but that doing so was not as easy as it might have sounded. After putting it up to auction, there was one serious bid, in December 2006, and it fell through. Still, the Westwind II was sold about eight months later, achieving Palin's goal of ridding the state of a luxury item.

But that hasn't stopped Palin, or McCain, from implying -- and, on Friday, claiming outright -- that Palin did sell the jet on the Internet.

"You know what I enjoyed the most? She took the luxury jet that was acquired by her predecessor and sold it on eBay -- and made a profit!" McCain declared in Wisconsin at a campaign stop on Friday. It could not be immediately determined what that profit was.

So, she not only didn't sell it on eBay for a profit she sold it for a loss to a Republican contributor.

Not Ready For Prime Time

By Ron Beasley

Over at TMV my friend Jazz pointed out that the McCain campaign is not going to let the media anywhere near St Sarah.  In fact they are shipping her back to Alaska. Of course the reason for this is simple - the press asks questions and Gov Palin has few if any answers.  Marc Ambinder has more:

A senior McCain campaign official advises that, despite the gaggle of requests and pressure from the media, Gov. Sarah Palin won't submit to a formal interview anytime soon. She may take some questions from local news entities in Alaska, but until she's ready -- and until she's comfortable -- which might not be for a long while -- the media will have to wait. The campaign believes it can effectively deal with the media's complaints, and their on-the-record response to all this will be: "Sarah Palin needs to spend time with the voters."

Not out of the question are appearances on lighter, fluffier television shows. But -- not for a while.

Of course by fluffier they meant Oprah but Oprah isn't buying.

Not even wingnut Robert Stacy McCain is happy:

If she can't handle a press conference, how can you argue she's ready to be vice president?

This fear-based, defensive, curl-up-inside-your-shell posture toward the press is killing the GOP. It's insane: Treat the press like the enemy and then complain about media bias. Oh, I wish Tony Snow were still alive to explain to these "senior campaign officials" why this approach doesn't work.

Good question the other McCain.

John McCain - Hero?

By Ron Beasley

A few months ago John Cole said this:

McCain gets a pass because is supposedly “a hero.” I’ve never been sure why he is a hero. He graduated 4th or 5th from the bottom of his class. He wrecked three of his own aircraft (if I remember correctly) and he was captured in Viet Nam. Unless I missed the part where he jumped on a grenade to save the lives of his fellow servicemen, I don’t know where the hero part comes in.

A few week later I said this:

I am a Vietnam era veteran I a knew some heros.  They were not fighter pilots who dropped bombs on people they couldn't see from several thousand feet. They were the points on long range patrols, they were men like Chuck Hagel who spent a year wading through rice paddies and jungles, they were the men like John Kerry on the swift boats in the delta and in the air it was the helicopter pilots who put their lives on the line everyday to get soldiers in and out of the fight.

M.J. Rosenberg doesn't see John McCain as a hero either and in fact sets the bar a little higher.

You would never know it from the media coverage but John McCain is not one of America's greatest war heroes. He is a former POW who survived, heroically. He deserves to be honored for that heroism.

But one thing distinguishes McCain from other war heroes, the kind whose heroism changes history rather than their life stories.

America's two greatest war heroes were Ulysses Grant and Dwight Eisenhower. Grant saved the union. And Ike saved civilization.

And neither one ever bragged about their experience. (Can you imagine Ike smacking down Adlai Stevenson by saying that while Adlai ran a nice medium-sized state, he was the Supreme Allied Commander who ran D-Day, defeated Hitler, and liberated Europe?).

Impossible. Like Grant, Eisenhower did not brag.

Real heros don't talk about it non-stop - they don't brag.

Thanks Sarah

By Ron Beasley

Palin raises $8 million — for Obama

Obama's coffers have been filling since Sarah Palin attacked him repeatedly in St. Paul last night.

An Obama aide confirms Drudge's report that Obama has raised about $8 million from more than 130,000 donors and is on pace to raise $10 million by the time McCain reaches the stage tonight.

Good job Sarah, you fired up the base alright - the wrong one! Several callers to Thom Hartman's show this morning said they had sent money to the Obama campaign after Palin's speech.  I guess they weren't kidding.

Football

By Ron Beasley

John McCain and the Republicans had better hope that most people were watching the football game.

Nuff said for now - more later as required.

She's no Margret Thatcher

By Ron Beasley

I watched Sarah Palin's speech tonight and I've been burned a few too many times over estimating the intelligence of the US voter so I hesitate to predict how it will go over.  The convention goers loved it but as part of the hive they have to.  Lots of red meat for the base and she did come across as a soccer/hockey mom. I guess the question is do the US voters really want a hockey/soccer mom as the next in line?  Time will tell.  Not much bible thumping end of times stuff but the base knows she's a member in good standing of the flat earth society because Dobson already said so.  Did it work?  No predictions here - the polls next week may give us a clue.

I'm an X soccer dad.  My wife could never handle the early Saturday morning wake ups or the Western Oregon rain. And yes I was a pit bull - a few red cards and ejections.

McCain the GOP and the press

By Ron Beasley

Joe Klien talks about McCain's deteriorating relationship with those he made him a "Maverick."

So what's going on here? Two things. McCain is just plain angry at us. By the evidence presented in the utterly revealing Time interview, he's ballistic. This is a politician who needs to see himself as the man on the white horse, boldly traversing a muddy field...any intimations that he's gotten muddied in the process, or has decided to throw mud, are intolerable.

The second thing is more insidious: Steve Schmidt has decided, for tactical reasons, to slime the press. He wants the public to believe that there is an unfair--sexist (you gotta love it)--personal assault going on against Palin and her family. This is a smokescreen, intended to divert attention from the very real and responsible vetting that is taking place in the media--about the substance of Palin's record as mayor and governor. Sure, there are a few outliers--and the tabloid press--who have fixed on baby stories. That was inevitable....the flip side of the personal stories that the McCain team thought would work to their advantage--Palin's moose-hunting and wolf-shooting, and her admirable decision to have a Down Syndrome baby. And yes, when we all fix on the same story, whether it's a hurricane or a little-known politician, a zoo ensues. But the media coverage of the Palin story has been well within the bounds of responsibility. Schmidt is trying to make it seem otherwise, a desperate tactic.

My friend Joe Gandelman had a post on the same subject this morning.  Now Joe points out that attacks on the press have worked before but will it work this time.

As someone who was in the news media for a while (TMV has several writers who also worked in it in the U.S. and in India) it is a fact that when a news source — particularly one who wants something from the news media (i.e. coverage that explains a certain viewpoint) — decides not to talk or to go on the offensive to turn the press into the issue editors will view that as meaning the source has things he/she wants to hide. That conclusion usually begets more scrutiny, and tougher questions. Not a pullback.

Towards the end of Joe's post he says this:

Many Americans hate reporters but the mainstream media still is the key information gate keeper: note how blogs (such as this) quote and link to it all the time.

Man cannot live on bread alone; candidates cannot thrive by Fox News alone.

Well guess what?  Not even FOX is on board.  I was just listening to FOX - yes I do so you don't have to - and Chris Wallace ripped Palin a new one on earmarks and the bridge to no where.  He gave her entire earmark history and said that if she mentions earmarks tonight the media should be all over her.

Update

Too much even for the AP

Huh? The Republican message about the Palin offspring comes across as contradictory: Hey, media, leave those kids alone — so we can use them as we see fit.

If you doubt this scenario, consider this: On Wednesday morning, a teenage boy from Alaska stood in a receiving line on an airport tarmac, being glad-handed by the potential next president of the United States — because he got his girlfriend pregnant. TV cameras were lined up in advance. The mind boggles.

Quote of the Day

By Ron Beasley

So what do the paleocons and Libertarians think of Sarah Palin?  The associate editor of the American Conservative and Ron Paul supporter Daniel McCarthy gives us a hint.

The one novelty to the Palin phenomenon is this: she takes the American Idolization of politics to a new level. We may become the first empire in history to select our rulers in a literal beauty contest. From Miss Wasilla 1984 to Miss America today – and Miss World tomorrow. Vote for the sexiest emperor or empress.

Well, if you must vote, other things being equal, cast your ballot for the most repellent politician available. Let’s have more stumpy, squinty, sausage-fingered Denny Hasterts and Bella Abzugs. Inner beauty and outer beauty don’t always accord, but let’s do our best to see to it that they do in politics. There shouldn’t be anything glamorous about the class that inflates away our currency and stirs up hornets’ nests around the world. It probably is no coincidence that the more presentable our blow-dried pols have become the more complacent the public has grown.

Which is why Sarah Palin may actually be worse than her superannuated running-mate. No one has shown any substantial policy differences between the two of them. But whereas McCain is cranky, stale, and cadaverous, Palin puts a sweet seductive smile on executive aggrandizement and perpetual war. She’s a spoonful of sugar to mask the bitter taste of strychnine. But, make no mistake, that’s what a John McCain presidency will be – lethal poison for what’s left of our republic.

Change You Can Believe In?

By Ron Beasley

Bushies Come to Palin's Aid 

The McCain team has hastily assembled a team of former Bush White House aides to tutor the vice-presidential candidate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, on foreign-policy issues, to write her speeches and to begin preparing her for her all-important Oct. 2 debate against Sen. Joe Biden.

Steve Biegun, who once served as the No. 3 National Security Council official under Condoleezza Rice at the White House, has been hired as chief foreign-policy adviser to the Alaska governor, campaign officials told NEWSWEEK. After taking leave from his job as vice president for international affairs at Ford Motor Co. last Friday, Biegun flew to St. Paul and, together with McCain’s foreign-policy guru Randy Schuenemann, began briefings for Palin on national-security issues—an area where her resume is conspicuously thin.

So this means we are going to hear the same stuff we have been hearing for the last eight years.  Change you can believe in indeed.

Sarah Who?

By Ron Beasley

I just heard Thom Hartmann on the radio and he had just been part of an RNC conference call.  The RNC was giving the revised speaking schedule and Sarah Palin was not mentioned.  A reporter from Reuters asked a direct question about when Palin would speak and what the subject would be.  At first the RNC official said he couldn't hear the question and then said no decision had been made.

Time magazine reports that Palin was a dud in Frank Luntz's focus group.

Another week, another Frank Luntz/AARP focus group of undecided voters--this one in Minneapolis and with some bad news for John McCain: they don't like the choice of Sarah Palin for vice president. Only one person said Palin made him more likely to vote for McCain; about half the 25-member group raised their hands when asked if Palin made them less likely to vote for McCain. They had a negative impression of Palin by a 2-1 margin...a fact that was reinforced when they were given hand-dials and asked to react to Palin's speech at her first appearance with McCain on Friday---the dials remained totally neutral as Palin went through her heart-warming(?) biography, and only blipped upwards when she said she opposed the Bridge to Nowhere--which wasn't quite the truth, as we now know.

Greg Sargent has a good run down on all the sh*t that has hit the fan since the Palin announcement.

I suggested here that there was a 50 - 50 chance that Palin would not be the nominee.  I think that's up to 80 - 20.

It's really about John McCain

By Ron Beasley

The Sarah Palin choice for VP is not about her it's about John McCain - his judgment and about who is pulling his strings.  John McCain once joked that his constituency was the media and in large part that's was true.  It was the media that created the myth of the maverick.  St John was already losing that media constituency in part because of the POW response for each and every criticism but the justification of Sarah Palin for VP is becoming too much.  Now in spite of what the Republicans might say there is nothing liberal about CNN or Campbell Brown but Ms Brown has obviously had just about enough nonsense from the McCain campaign.  This is just pathetic:

Thanks to TMP

The "vetting" of Sarah Palin

By Ron Beasley

Yes Sarah Palin was vetted all right but not by the McCain Campaign.  I think DDay gets it right:

That's all this was about. Forget the press reports grasping at straws trying to figure out this pick, whether it represents a new reform message or was targeted to exurban voters. This was a wet kiss to the religious right. There was only one group doing the vetting. The theocons were waiting for a signal to start up the phone banks and the ground work and now they have it. They probably would have done so anyway, but this was the tipping point.

And so the fact that Todd Palin has a DUI record is just a sign of temptation followed by redemption. The pregnancy of the Palin's 17 year-old daughter, which should show the failures of abstinence-only education (which the Governor opposes), just shows the importance of coming down on the side of life. The fact that she thinks the Founding Fathers wrote the Pledge of Allegiance means that she believes this is a Judeo-Christian nation. The fact that she's appeared at a secessionist movement meeting in Alaska means simply that she is appalled by the cultural decline of America.

Oh, she was vetted all right. By the religious right. The question is whether or not Palin's extreme, radical philosophy is distasteful to the wide swath of Americans. In a sane world, the support for creationism and questioning of man-made global warming and rejection of birth control would indeed be disqualifying.

...What this also means is that she was totally forced on John McCain, which must call into question his erratic, shoddy judgment, and his ability to carry out anything but the most extreme agenda.

This decision was forced down John McCain's throat - he wanted Lieberman but the theocons insisted on a flat earther.  Josh Marshall makes an excellent point, if the McCain campaign had known about Bristol's pregnancy there was a much better way to handle it.

Vetting works in a fairly established way with most campaigns. The standard procedure in a case like this would have been for the campaign to have gone to a trusted reporter -- and by that I don't mean a hack but someone the campaign knew would deal with the story in an appropriate way -- and given them the story about the family drama the Palins are going through, how the daughter is planning to have the baby, how it confirms the family's values, etc. In an ideal world, the daughter's life would be her own business. But in the world we live in the best for all concerned would be to give it a respectful airing on day one or two and take it off the table rather than have it come out in some more jagged and painful way.

I think there is a 50-50 chance that Palin will decide "she want's to spend more time with her family."  I say 50-50 because this is a real no-win situation for McCain.  He looks like a fool regardless.  If she stays it will hurt him in November but if she goes it will infuriate the Religious Right.  This was one last grab for power the the Mullahs of the Evangelical movement and all they succeeded in doing was bring down John McCain.

So much for abstinence only education

By Ron Beasley

John McCain claims he knew but I find it hard to believe.

Palin confirms daughter's pregnancy

The Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin has announced that her 17-year-old daughter is pregnant, in an announcement intended to knock down rumors by liberal bloggers that Palin faked her own pregnancy to cover up for her child.

Bristol Palin, one of Palin's five children with her husband, Todd, is about five months pregnant and is going to keep the child and marry the father, the Palins said in a statement released by the campaign of Republican presidential candidate John McCain.

Bristol Palin made the decision on her own to keep the baby, McCain aides said.

"We have been blessed with five wonderful children who we love with all our heart and mean everything to us," the Palins' statement said.

"Our beautiful daughter Bristol came to us with news that as parents we knew would make her grow up faster than we had ever planned. As Bristol faces the responsibilities of adulthood, she knows she has our unconditional love and support," the Palins said.

I'm not sure how this is going to impact things.  Do you have any ideas?

Update

Reuters has more

ST. PAUL (Reuters) – The 17-year-old daughter of Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin is pregnant, Palin said on Monday in an announcement intended to knock down rumors by liberal bloggers that Palin faked her own pregnancy to cover up for her child.

Update II

Well the wingers are already saying NO PROBLEM

Update III

Judging from the reaction over at the WSJ Washington Wire it looks like it may indeed be a problem.

Just who is Sarah Palin?

By Ron Beasley

Just who and what is Sarah Palin?  The Nation's Katha Pollitt tells us:

Here's the reality: Palin is a rightwing-Christian anti-choice extremist who opposes abortion for any reason whasoever, except to save the life of the girl or woman. No exception even for rape, incest, or the health of the woman. No exception for a ten-year-old, a woman carrying a fetus with no chance of life, a woman on the edge of suicide-- let alone the woman who is not ready to be a parent, who is escaping domestic violence, who is already stretched to the limit as a single mother. She wants to force over one million women and girls a year to give birth against their will and judgment. She wants to use the magnificent freedom the women's movement has won for her at tremendous cost and struggle--the movement that won her the right to run those marathons and run Alaska -- to take away the freedom of every other woman in the country.

And how do we know she is a theocon wingnut extremist?  Theocon wingnut extremist James Dobson is now onboard after saying for months he would never vote for John McCain.

And what does this choice say about John McCain?  Again Pollitt has a good take:

Her selection does not tell us McCain is a "maverick" who is just stringing the Christian right along, wink-wink. It tells us that he has thrown in his lot with James Dobson, the Family Research Council, the Catholic hierarchy and others for whom criminalizing abortion is the number-one issue. His record of votes against abortion and birth control--125 votes out of 130 in his congresssional and Senate career-- apparently wasn't quite enough for them. By choosing Palin, he wins their enthusiastic support.

McCain is gambling that women will vote their gender, and no