October 2008 Archives

Well, he's "post-partisan" when he has no other choice. The rest of the time, Arnold is a jerk, calling out girlie-men and skinny boys, as he does here. But I wonder if Sen. McCain's supporters will proudly remind Arnie that they have a strict policy of not caring what people from other countries think of our presidential race anyway. Or maybe our next president will just send him back home, since Arnie's obviously so crestfallen about what's happening to this nation.

Many libertarians and conservatives are shocked, shocked that the greatest nation in history could stoop to what they dismiss as "socialism." And they are alarmed that Joe the Plumber hasn't woken everyone up yet. What this story and this one show is that such persons are simply a minority within America in terms of their disdain for progressive taxes. One interesting snippet:

In fact, when the McCain campaign criticizes Obama for raising taxes (or letting tax cuts lapse, as the Obama campaign prefers to frame it) for high income Americans, they may be treading on dangerous ground. When respondents to this survey were asked whether high income Americans pay their fair share in taxes, 58% of registered voters said that they paid less than their fair share. Just 18% of registered voters said that high income Americans paid more than their fair share. As the chart below indicates, this sentiment was particularly prominent among Democrats and independents. From this perspective, it is not surprising that McCain hasn't gotten much traction by criticizing the fact that Obama wants to increase taxes for high income Americans. Most Americans, particularly those beyond the Republican base, appear to think that high income people should be shouldering more of the tax burden than they are.

Jonathan and I have both argued that it's a red herring to say that Obama is scary because he's liberal by the standards of the stodgy, conservative U.S. Senate.

By contrast, Gail-Tzipporah says here that "It doesn't matter how many leftist bills get passed through Senate, Rob. What matters and what scares the bejeezus out of me most is that we may be on the verge of electing a leftist President who will then pass leftist bills. If I wanted a leftist regime, I would have moved to Russia when it was in the throes of communism or Cuba long ago."

My initial reaction involves wondering whether Gail-Tzipporah had strong feelings against the hoarding of executive power by Bush and Cheney over the past eight years - an accumulation of power that seemed to negate the Founding Fathers' intent on checks and balances.

During those years, I've asked my Republican friends if they could hold to a Golden Rule about executive power: "Will you still support a strong executive concept once Hillary is in power?" Their disingenuous answer was, "Sure, especially if she uses it for the noble purposes that Bush and Cheney for which intend to use it."

Well... Now the American public is on the verge of electing someone that many Republicans are convinced is a commie. Looks like you'll have to live with communism, then, because you set up the rules this way.

For my part, I just don't buy the idea that Obama is a communist or even a hard leftist, or that he has the ability to push through a radical agenda, even through a 62-member Democratic majority.

***

A Republican friend of mine quibbled a few years ago with how so many liberals were complaining about how Bush would suspend the Constitution and impose wartime emergency rule that crushed all civil liberties. This friend argued that this was a psychological projection on the part of liberals, who he felt were quite inclined to using coercive power (think of PC rules, for example).

Maybe. But the shoe's now on the other foot. Staunch Republicans are writing on message boards that "you're going to need to hold on to your guns, gold and ammo if Obama is elected." It's a similar, overreacting psychological projection

As for Obama's associations, apparently nothing I can say will convince you that he's a sane person, and I imagine that nothing you can say will make me take seriously that he's a commie pacifist rat.

And I'm not sure whether Gail-T is as prone as I to quibble with Palin's church crowd or with her husband's associations.

What could be more "un-American" than a substantial public association by both of them with an AIP group that is split between die-hard secessionists and subtle secessionists? I guess this conversation is a non-starter, though, because some people will always see Apple Pie Sarah as all-American, even if she has publicly, on video, supported those who want "out" of America.

Reality is working really hard to put satirists out of business. How, after all, could anyone compete with a Christian call to worship Mammon? Yes, some Christians who think Halloween is too pagan are trying to repurpose it to serve the Lord. Well maybe not the Lord you might be thinking of, or to be fair, they may think they're serving.

Believing, correctly, that the economy is in a shambles, they called for a "Day of prayer for world economies." They are praying for a divine force to help us, heal us, renew our souls, reinvigorate our lines of credit and make the stock market rise from the grave--even like unto Brother Lazarus.

Free of either irony or biblical information, they gathered at the idol of Mammon, the Golden Bull icon and trademark of Merrill Lynch. Were they unaware of how unhappy God was with the people when they worshipped a Golden Calf? I mean, God waxed quite wroth as I remember--and it was only a little calf. This is a great big bull. I'd stand clear of that thing. I'm thinking lightening, earthquakes, floods and other acts of God's displeasure.

If you're going to worship idols and blaspheme, at least go to the Statue of Liberty and worship Liberty--something of real worth.

Sen. McCain condemns how Sen. Obama talks openly about doing what the Bush administration is, um, doing openly. I haven't heard him condemn the President, though. See link here.

....and no heads are cooler than those of the calm and reserved Brit-based Financial Times. Here, these unrepentant free-marketeers don't even bother acknowledging the socialist-baiting of the GOP as they toss their support to Barack Obama. Link here (subscription required), fair-use snippets are below:

US presidential elections involve a fabulous expense of time, effort and money. Doubtless it is all too much - but, by the end, nobody can complain that the candidates have been too little scrutinised [Rob's note: obviously the hard right can complain]. We have learnt a lot about Barack Obama and John McCain during this campaign. In our view, it is enough to be confident that Mr Obama is the right choice.

At the outset, we were not so confident. Mr Obama is inexperienced. His policies are a blend of good, not so good and downright bad...

Mr Obama fought a much better campaign. Campaigning is not the same as governing...
Nonetheless, a campaign is a test of leadership.

Nor should one disdain Mr Obama's way with a crowd. Good presidents engage the country's attention; great ones inspire....

We applaud his main domestic proposal: comprehensive health-care reform. This plan would achieve nearly universal insurance without the mandates of rival schemes...

Mr Obama is most disappointing on trade. He pandered to protectionists during the primaries, and has not rowed back....

In responding to the economic emergency, Mr Obama has again impressed - not by advancing solutions of his own, but in displaying a calm and methodical disposition, and in seeking the best advice. Mr McCain's hasty half-baked interventions were unnerving when they were not beside the point.

On foreign policy, where the candidates have often conspired to exaggerate their differences, this contrast in temperaments seems crucial. For all his experience, Mr McCain has seemed too much guided by an instinct for peremptory action, an exaggerated sense of certainty, and a reluctance to see shades of grey...

Rest assured that, should he win, Mr Obama is bound to disappoint. How could he not?...
The challenges facing the next president will be extraordinary. We hesitate to wish it on anyone, but we hope that Mr Obama gets the job.

Republican presidential contender John McCain got one thing right about Democratic rival Barack Obama. He told Larry King that he didn't think race would be much of an issue in the final vote. As McCain put it only "a tiny, tiny, minority" will vote against Obama because he's black. McCain was not just campaign bloviating to puff up his oft touted credential as a play it straight on race guy. The notion that because millions of whites passionately back Obama race is permanently off America's table is more hope and prayer than reality.
Still despite endless and obsessive speculation that race could derail Obama in his slog to the White House it won't and it probably never would have. Start with McCain and Obama; McCain made the personal and pragmatic choice not to make race an issue either directly or indirectly through code words, snide hints, and racial guilt by association attacks. When the Jeremiah Wright flap cropped up, he could have hammered Obama as a stealth race baiter. He turned thumbs down on that. Later when VP mate Sarah Palin and some others in his campaign were etching to unload on Obama-Wright again, he still said no.

That decision was not totally due to honor and noble intent. A too frontal racial attack would have brought instant screams of foul from Democrats, and millions of voters who demanded that the campaign be a clean, issues focused campaign. McCain read the political leaves correctly and saw the political peril in flipping the race card. The occasions that he slipped and rapped Obama as a socialist and a terrorist fellow traveler brought universal condemnation that he was going negative or worse running a dirty campaign.
Obama helped things even more. The firm message in his signature slogan of hope and change, campaign literature, TV ads, rallies, in pitches to contributors, his core of advisors, and major endorsers was that the Obama presidential campaign and an Obama presidency would be broad, non-racial and issues driven. Anything else would have instantly stirred horrifying visions to many of Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson. His candidacy would have been DOA.

But McCain and Obama's best efforts to make race a non issue in the campaign would have fallen short without the sea change shift in public attitudes. The decade since the Rodney King beating, the O.J. Simpson trial, and the urban riots, has been a period of relative racial peace in America. During that time polls consistently showed that more whites than ever are genuinely convinced that America is a color-blind society, equal opportunity is a reality, and blacks and whites if not exactly attaining complete social and economic equality, are closer than ever to that goal. Though the figures on income, education and health care still show a colossal gap between poor blacks and whites, the perception nonetheless is that racism is an ugly and nasty byproduct of a long by-gone past.

The passage by huge margins of anti-affirmative action measures in California, Michigan, and Washington, was not simply a case of whites engaging in racial denial or a cover for hidden bias. Many white voters backed the initiatives because they honestly believed that color should never be in the equation in hiring and education, and that race is divisive.
It's is easy to see why they believe that. "Whites only" signs and redneck Southern cops unleashing police dogs, turning fire hoses on and beating hapless black demonstrators have long been forgotten. Americans turn on their TVs and see legions of black newscasters and talk show hosts, topped by TV's richest and most popular celebrity, Oprah Winfrey.

They see mega-rich black entertainers and athletes pampered and fawned over by a doting media and an adoring public. They see TV commercials that picture blacks living in trendy integrated suburban homes, sending their kids to integrated schools and driving expensive cars. They see blacks such as former Secretary of State Colin Powell and his successor Condoleezza Rice in high-profile policy-making positions in the Bush administration. They see dozens of blacks in Congress, many more in state legislatures and city halls. They see blacks heading corporations and universities. And those blacks who incessantly scream racism about their plight are roundly reviled for feeding racial paranoia.
There is even some talk that the so-called Bradley Effect, the penchant for whites to lie to pollsters about their true racial feelings and vote against a black candidate, may actually turn into a reverse Bradley Effect this election. That's that many whites will vote for Obama because he's black. That notion is just as dubious as the Bradley Effect. But to even raise the possibility tells much about changing times and attitudes.

If Obama wins and that seems likely, race will be, as McCain says, only a tiny, tiny factor. That's a tribute to him, Obama and the millions of America voters that were determined to make sure that race did not hurt Obama on November 4th.
.
the Race to the White House (Middle Passage Press, February 2008).

So Obama is a leftist and a socialist? I'm quaking in my boots. There is no left in the country. Look at Europe where there is a very broad political spectrum. There are intellectuals on the left and on the right. Where is our left in America? If Barack is the best example, the old left is deader than dead.

We've got one out of the closet socialist in Congress. Bernie Sanders (I don't know, he's just a vowel away from Saunders). He is the enemy? He is supposed to haunt our dreams? He is a one-man movement, and he is from a different generation. Trotting out the label "socialist" just will not create the necessary frissons on the night before Halloween.

Here's the thing about our labels and libels. Socialism as it was practiced in Cuba and the old Soviet Union was indistinguishable from Fascism as practiced in Germany and Italy. These were all powerful statist societies without freedom, justice and the only real equality was the suffering of the masses.

Voting for Obama is like a vote to move to Cuba or the former Soviet Union? In what way? He wants universal healthcare? Okay. McCain says we don't want a bureaucrat to make our health care decisions. I agree. But who makes these decisions today? Who says who will live and who will die? A bureaucrat who works for an accountant who is employed by an insurer whose business it is to invest premiums and not pay benefits.

Under what American government has there been the greatest aggregation of power to the federal government and rejection of state's rights? Yes, this one. Which government has come up with the theory of the unitary executive, arrogating all power to the executive? Yes, this government. Bonus question: Which government has effectively (if ineffectually) socialized our banks, brokerages and insurance companies? Once more, this government. Are they socialists? Are they fascists? No and I'm not making that charge. I'm simply pointing out how our American right is too often without a sense of irony.

It doesn't matter how many leftist bills get passed through Senate, Rob. What matters and what scares the bejeezus out of me most is that we may be on the verge of electing a leftist President who will then pass leftist bills. If I wanted a leftist regime, I would have moved to Russia when it was in the throes of communism or Cuba long ago.

Also according to some, his economic plan, which hinges on taxing the beejezus out of the rich just doesn't add up because some business owners have said that they'll cut jobs if they have to pay more taxes. McCain plans to tax everyone evenly and taxes is just one ugly fact of life. Or how else would we get roads and schools and libraries and all those other things?

Then there are his affiliations, and I would no more vote for someone who befriended all those questionable characters than I would one who had befriended David Duke or any other friendly assortment of the Klan.

My friend John Galt posts this comment about why he feels Bill Ayers is a real campaign issue:

Perhaps we should discuss this offline. First off, I'm not sure how you got the impression that I'm agitating. Secondly, when I say Ayers is an unrepentant terrorist, I'm saying he's not in the least bit remorseful about his Weather Underground activities; I've never said that he's still a terrorist. Third, and most importantly, the issue is not Bill Ayers, but rather Barack Obama. I'm bothered by the fact that Obama has an obvious affinity for the likes of Bill Ayers, Reverend Wright, and now Rashid Khalidi - extreme leftists all. Add to that the most liberal voting record in the Senate and you have someone who should go back to community organizing.

He knows my number, so he can certainly call at any time to clarify, if he feels I'm misguided in how I'm addressing this. But I also do want to tackle this publicly.

I'll let slide the odd distinction between Ayers being an unrepentant terrorist and a current terrorist.

But John's final sentence is something I'm hearing a lot from the anti-Obama "fright" crowd -- the readers at TownHall.com and American Spectator and WorldNetDaily and other conservative sites who say that election of Obama will be the final black nightfall for the America they've loved.

Yet there are many, many conservatives who are now "Obamacons," like here. This summer, the conservative Economist of England looked at an Obama-McCain matchup and called it "America at its best" -- it later took back those words because it felt McCain was acting like a cheap demagogue, not because they realized Obama is a Marxist.

Obama has been vetted and supported by some of conservatism's finest minds, and too many of them have preferred him to McCain for anyone to credibly dismiss him as a radical. And not all of these people share Colin Powell's skin color, needless to say. (And if Powell's ulterior motives seem an unconvincing basis for an endorsement of Obama's foreign policy, what about this very conservative guy?)

So Obama has the most "liberal" voting record in the Senate? How many Marxist bills have been coming through the Senate? Voting liberal within the U.S. Congress is not the same as being a European leftist. What exactly is the most leftist action Obama has taken in Congress to date?

So Obama is proposing a 39.6% top marginal tax bracket? How, then, did the pro-America crowd survive the "Marxist Reagan" years, which featured a 50% top bracket for the vast majority of his two terms? How did they survive Bush Sr. raising their taxes in a manner that made it possible for Clinton to finally balance our budgets for the only time since 1980?

So Obama can be gracious and close to angry people like Rev. Wright and Ayers and Khalidi and left-wing University of Chicago professors, while also being friends with Warren Buffet and Colin Powell and the Google CEO and Mary Poppins? That strikes me as a sign of character and emotional intelligence, not danger.

As for Obama as being so obviously repulsive to fiscal conservatives, here's a link for an interesting article by Robert Novak:

The prototypal Obamacon may be Larry Hunter, recognized inside the Beltway as an ardent supply-sider. When it became known recently that Hunter supports Obama, fellow conservatives were stunned. Hunter was fired as U.S. Chamber of Commerce chief economist in 1993 when he would not swallow Clinton administration policy, and he later joined Jack Kemp at Empower America (ghostwriting Kemp's column). Explaining his support for the uncompromisingly liberal Obama, Hunter blogged on June 6: "The Republican Party is a dead rotting carcass with a few decrepit old leaders stumbling around like zombies in a horror version of 'Weekend With Bernie,' handcuffed to a corpse."

These Obamacons are obviously less attracted to Obama than disgusted by their own party's ongoing failures. But the point remains that they look at McCain, who not long ago ridiculed Bush's tax cuts for the rich and has always supported a progressive tax system, and don't see a worthwile contrast with Obama. In fact, the recent over-the-top demagoguery of the McCain campaign increases their desire to outmaverick the erstwhile maverick and take their vote elsewhere.

Bottom line: When looking at how the mainstream of America sees Obama and how the conservative intelligentsia is looking at Obama, it seems that those who dismiss him as too liberal for America may themselves be too conservative for America.

This possibility was less obvious when such persons felt they were the vanguard of a growing conservative movement. But now...?

I like what Jon Stewart implied tonight -- that, if the Obama critics are serious about the charges they're making, then they'd have to accept an Obama victory next week as a legitimate "mandate for socialism."

Okay, John, you can call me now if you want to take this offline.

I was moved by this photo of a couple of Pakistani men grieving for children lost in Pakistan's latest catastrophe -- a quake that would have done minimal damage in Los Angeles due to better construction standards. As I told my mother a few days ago, still there in Islamabad, that country seems to be under a dark cloud.

When will people get that hanging people in effigy, no matter what the skin color of the original, is irresponsible and deeply offensive? The people who put up this of Sarah Palin in West Hollywood ought to be ashamed.Yes, we get that WeHo is probably not leaning McCain-Palin. So why this?

One of the creepiest parts of this election is that people seem to think that advocating violence is an acceptable way of disagreeing with a candidate. How so NOT far have we come since 1908. Sad.

Barney's Beanery has again launched its Rock the Beer Vote, an informal poll of presidential preference based on which beer customers choose.

McCain supporters can get a frosty draft of Bud Light. Obama endorsers can pull the spigot for a Stella Artois.

Now, really, in Los Angeles (or more accurately West Hollywood, Santa Monica and Pasadena where the venerable restaurant is located), which beer do you think more people will drink? Stella, of course!

Couldn't the Beanery have selected a slightly tastier beer than Bud Light? I know, John McCain's wife, Cindy, is the chair of Hensley & Company, the third largest distributor of Anheuser-Busch beers in the nation. But Anheuser-Busch also distributes Red Hook, Bass and, for that matter, Stella.

Ah well, at least voters will have better choices this time around. In 2004, the beer electorate had to choose between MGD for Bush and Pabst Blue Ribbon for Kerry.

This Politico piece is the best article I've seen on media bias. Bottom line: Sure, there may be ideological bias, but it doesn't drive coverage nearly as much as other biases do. (And those who most detest the media's ideological bias are the ones who have "scalding biases" of their own, so there's no pleasing them.)

I can, at some fuzzy level, understand the questions some people have about Obama and Bill Ayers.

For the most part, though, I've been sensing that it's simply a visceral distaste for liberalism, even liberalism that may have grown up and left behind extremism.

But I'm willing to keep having that discussion with Ayers-haters. First, though, I'd need to know the Golden Rule of the political game. How close and how recent does a "bad apple" acquaintance need to be?

And what would that mean for Sarah Palin and her relationship with the felonious Ted Stevens, detailed in troubling fashion here....?

In the same way, why aren't the many secessionists within Todd Palin's beloved AIP being seen as nearly as anti-American as Jeremiah Wright? Me, I see AIP's leaders' claim that 'we don't necessarily oppose being part of the U.S., we just want to vote on it' as a very weak sauce.

In both cases, I suspect that a generalized contempt for liberalism is driving the criticism of Obama, whereas the associations of Palin are somehow more "apple pie" in the eyes of conservatives.

But, if conservatives can give me a coherent and consistent standard for political conduct, we can have a meaningful discussion here.

The then freshly elected President Clinton had barely dropped his arm after taking the oath of office in January 1993 before they started in on him. The "they" was Rush Limbaugh (Remember his "Day one of America held hostage" daily rant), packs of radio shock jocks, legions of Christian broadcasters, and, of course, the Fox Network. Clinton was allegedly too pro abortion, too pro big government, too pro tax and spend, too unpatriotic, too personally sleazy, and too married to Hillary. But his greatest crime was he was a Democrat. The Fox holy crusade against him didn't end until he closed the door for the last time on his way out of the White House.

Now it's Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama's turn. The cast of the anti-Clinton holy crusade warriors remains unchanged. They are gnashing their teeth in horror while rubbing their hands in glee at the prospect of a President Obama. They'll soon likely get their wish and when they do they'll dust off the Clinton bash script with all the same "too" hits that were leveled against him. Some may even be tempted to sneakily toss the race card into the script.

Obama won't be able to keep the wolves totally at bay. He's a centrist Democrat like Clinton. For the hardcore conservatives that alone is enough to send red flags shooting to the top of the pole and keep them there. The added plus is that an anti-Obama feeding frenzy is a potential ratings bonanza for Fox.

There are five things then that Obama can do to damp down the yelps against him.
1. The economic mess. He's not Houdini and he can't magically make it go away. It will be tough if not impossible to deliver on the ritual debate and campaign stump promise he made to virtually cut taxes for everyone while keeping tax increases to the bare minimum. That defies fiscal logic.

He can though arm twist banks to renegotiate, impose a moratorium on, delay payments, or repackage loans for thousands of foreclosed challenged homeowners. There's even some talk about government intervention to use some of the bailout money to create a homeowner foreclosure relief fund to provide government guaranteed loans to directly aid those in most immediate danger of losing their homes. He can prod Congress to use some bailout money to help these severely distressed homeowners. He can act on the proposal to create a government sponsored small business credit fund to make readily available loans and lines of credit to credit worthy small and medium sized businesses that have been refused loans by banks.

Infrastructure Stimulus. Obama can take the Senate up on its offer to call a lame duck special session after the elections to pass an economic stimulus bill which includes more than 10 to 16 billion dollars for the federal-aid highway program, transit, and airport capital improvement projects. It's not exactly the second coming of the old Roosevelt Great Depression job creation WPA but it will stimulate business, contractors, and suppliers, create thousands of jobs, and potentially ramp up tax revenues for cash strapped cities and counties.

Rein in Wall Street. He can push and prod the Fed to better monitor and enforce provisions that clamp a lid on dubious trading, lending practices, and investments by some banks and brokerage houses. That includes imposing severe penalties for those who break the rules.

The Iraq war. He can't end the war in the six months as he promised when he was a middle of the pack Democratic presidential contender and then backpedaled from that promise when he became the lone Democratic presidential contender with a real shot at the presidency. But he can beef up Iraqi's security forces and then conduct a phased withdrawal of American troops. This is a good faith step toward winding down the war without compromising Iraqi security and American troop safety.

Neutralize Fox News. In an off the cuff quip in mid October, Obama said he'd be much better off if Fox News didn't dog him mercilessly. Obama's pique at Fox was understandable since he's been their number one punching bag for months.
But Obama can and should turn the tables on Fox. Carping and complaining about their legendary anti-Democratic Party bias, or trying to pretend they don't exist isn't going to change Fox, let alone make it go away. Instead, keep Fox in the loop. Obama should talk to the Fox guys like he routinely talks to the New York Times, the Washington Post and CNN. That won't make them sheath their daggers. It might though make them pull them out a tad slower.
These five things are time and cost effective doables. They will do much to help smooth out some of the bumps in President Obama's road ahead, Fox notwithstanding.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His new book is The Ethnic Presidency: How Race Decides the Race to the White House (Middle Passage Press, February 2008).

As best as I can tell, California's Proposition 8 is about "respect."

This means that each side says, "The Law has to respect my concept of marriage, and it has to avoid affirming the other side's concept of marriage."

This prop isn't about how we want to live, it's about how we want to think about how we live.

"Some of my best friends," as they say, work at Focus on the Family... and some of my best friends are gay.

I'm not convinced that how marriage is seen in the eyes of the law makes any real difference in a society, except psychologically.

Dennis Prager is in a lather about how societies have always defined marriage as between two sexes.

But what's the problem if it gets defined differently? Will you or I accidentally marry the same sex? "Aw, nuts, I got confused by these shifting definitions..."

What is more intriguing to me is why conservatives, who in theory despise excessive government, want to use government as a weapon in the culture wars -- regarding marriage, what happens within the walls of a woman's body, and so on. Don't like government? Fine -- let people live their lives. But if you need to make laws that protect your definition of morality, you're not a small-government person.

....John McCain, according to the NY Times' Nicholas Kristof, here. Kristof explains why that could be so:

An American president who keeps troops in Iraq indefinitely, fulminates about Islamic terrorism, inclines toward military solutions and antagonizes other nations is an excellent recruiting tool. In contrast, an African-American president with a Muslim grandfather and a penchant for building bridges rather than blowing them up would give Al Qaeda recruiters fits.

During the cold war, the American ideological fear of communism led us to mistake every muddle-headed leftist for a Soviet pawn. Our myopia helped lead to catastrophe in Vietnam.

In the same way today, an exaggerated fear of "Islamofascism" elides a complex reality and leads us to overreact and damage our own interests.

Yet this supple form of reasoning will always seem like dangerous malarkey to most people, due to cognitive biases that are detailed here in this famous Foreign Policy article on "Why Hawks Win."

So the dilemma of a democracy is this: You can usually win an election by being tougher-than-thou, and you will usually lose by talking about finding ways to get along with real and perceived rivals. How can you govern sensibly, how can you avoid being bankrupted over the long haul (see bin Laden's statement here), when hawks will accuse you of treason if you attempt to govern sensibly?

Gangs are a terrible problem in Los Angeles and in many of our major cities. Gangs import, create and market drugs. They fight each other and slaughter innocent civilians. Some are based on race, some ethnicity and some bring race and crime together with drugs and motorcycles.

Marlon Brando in the Wild One looks quaint by today's standards. Westside Story is a picnic in the park compared to the violence and killing of our gangs. Crips and Bloods get lots of publicity and MS-13 represents imported gang activity in LA and across the nation. However, right now in Los Angeles the gang of the moment is The Mongols--a violent assemblage of Latino motorcycle thugs.

They are not necessarily the biggest or baddest gang. They are in the news because law enforcement believes that they have found a new and potent weapon in combating their terror. Threats of jail don't stop them. Repeated arrests don't even slow them down. The violence of La Vida Loca is no deterrent. So what do we do with intractable criminals who fear neither law nor death? We have a plan.

You see, they made a fatal mistake in their development. They designed a logo, a visible emblem of their criminal association. And then they did what any smart entrepreneurs--criminals or regular (increasingly difficult to tell the difference)--would do; they trademarked their logo. I suppose they did this in an abundance of caution, reserving the right to sue if some other gang misappropriated their sign. Normally they shoot the competition but maybe they thought they could go make few bucks by using the legal system.

This is where we got them. Some judge took their logo away, confiscated it, seized their trademark. Where injunctions hadn't been observed, where jail hadn't deterred, where drive-by shootings didn't discourage, there is nothing, the anti-crime mavens of Los Angeles concluded, like the prospect of being sued for illegal use of a trademark to keep violent motorcycle gangs in line. I'm sure the Mongols are quaking in their steel-toed boots.

Who knew that intellectual property lawyers would be in the forefront of fighting crime? Well, I guess there is a kind of precedent. Al Capone went down as a tax cheat not a mobster murderer. It could work. I just wonder though, how much hard time do you get for trademark infringement?

(Sung to the tune of "La Bamba" by Richie Valens)

Ai yi yi yi yi Obama
Ai yi yi yi yi Obama

It's no necessario to put him in office-ito
in office-ito

Ai yi yi yi yi Obama
Ai yi yi yi yi Obama

He has done things to toy with our coffer--itos
Coffer-itos

Ay yi yi yi yi Obama
Ay yi yi yi yi Obama
Yo no tengo dineros, yo no tengo dineros
Por capitol, por capitol

Ai yi yi yi yi Obama
Ai yi yi yi yi Obama
El ACORN-ito
ACORN-ito

Ai yi yi yi yi Obama
Ai yi yi yi yi Obama
When ACORN made the banc-itos
Give loans to the pauvricitos.
Who went belly-up-ito
Belly-up-ito

Ay yi mortgage
Ay yi mortgage
Ay yi mortgage
Out the window-ito, window-ito

Ai yi Obama
Ai yi Obama

Problemas for the domicilios
Domilicios

Ay yi yi yi Obama
Ay yi yi yi Obama
That man in Iran is no amigo
No amigo

Ay yi, Obama
Ay yi ,Obama
Ay yi, Obama, Obama

(Copyright, Gail Saunders, one day in 2008)

Google: Barrack Obama, ACORN, Home loans for the poor
or forget that and go to: http://www.newsmax.com/politics/obama_voter_fraud/2008/09/22/133091.html

I want to post this AP story, because it's good fodder for some discussion here. Bottom line -- most Americans favor "spreading the wealth."

No wonder you're hearing GOP activists talking more about "pro-America" parts of the country -- apparently most of us are commie pinkos.

I'll be the first to admit that the $150,000 spent by the Republican National Committee on wardrobe and other sundries for GOP VP candidate Sarah Palin has not exactly been squandered.

By that I mean she looks good and isn't being chided for wearing pantsuits. I wonder what's better, pantsuit comments or an association with Neiman-Marcus?

At any rate, today's campaign story is about Gov. Palin's personal stylist, Amy Strozzi, who has worked on TV's "So You Think You Can Dance?" and who seemingly is paid more than John McCain's foreign-policy adviser Randy Scheunemann.

Does Randy know the difference between a Jimmy Choo and a Manolo Blahnik? Can he spray an "up-'do" into shape before a campaign rally? Does he know what scarves go with a St. John Knits suit?

I'm sure Scheunemann didn't go into foreign-policy think-tankery for the money ...

I'm sure some Obama bashers will say, "Well, for every fake story about a black man attacking a white woman and branding her with a scarlet "B," five such real events take place without drawing MSM coverage."

I did have a good talk yesterday with my pseudonymous friend "John Galt," and we both understood each other better about what can push our buttons when engaging in "friendly fire" on this site. I admitted that I can be oversensitive when I feel that I'm being mocked: Sure, I may make fun of Sarah Palin, but I long ago figured she's not reading my posts and taking them personally. John for his part noted that some of his well-intentioned sarcasm can be taken the wrong way.

I do still believe that anonymity is problematic and excessive in this era of message boards and chatrooms. It makes it easier to jab harder than we might if there were an Internet trail back to our real name.

In the next few days, I do intend to discuss here, with John, some of his contentions about how Obama would hurt the free markets and tax system. I believe Greenspan's testimony yesterday signifies that a reappraisal of market economics is inexorable.

At first glance it seems absolutely incredible that Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama can't shake Republican rival John McCain. Yet an AP poll calls the race a statistical dead heat. That's only one poll, of course, and the mish mash of other polls show Obama with either a respectable lead or a near rout of McCain. But that nagging AP poll hints at something that has bedeviled the Obama campaign from day one, and that's the inability too put McCain away.

How could that happen? Obama has smashed every record in netting campaign contributions, gotten nearly every major newspaper endorsement, is fawned over by millions in other countries, was generally regarded as the clear winner in his three debates with McCain, and draws record crowds to his campaign rallies. He is running against an aged, at times physically challenged opponent with a vice presidential mate with a phone book length of negatives that have made her a laughing stock in many circles. Both belong to a party which most voters blame for wrecking the economy and waging a costly, failed, and flawed war.

The last Democratic presidential candidate to have so many pluses stacked up in his election bank against a GOP opponent was Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1932. His opponent was the hapless, Depression blamed Herbert Hoover. But Hoover at least was a sitting president. McCain isn't.

The formula answer for McCain's staying power is that it's because Obama's black. From the moment he announced his candidacy in February 2007, race has been biggest X factor endlessly talked about and agonized over as the thing that could torpedo his chances. In countless surveys, African-Americans have virtually made it a mantra that that if he loses it's because he's black. Certainly, there are enough closet and open bigots who won't vote for him purely on race. But that's not enough to explain why McCain still hangs around.

Republican influence, party loyalty, voter tradition, conservative values, personal and individual preferences are powerful and compelling factors that determine why people make candidate choices, and they obviously work for McCain among a wide swatch of Americans voters.

For many voters McCain plainly fits the tradition bound stereotype of what a president should look and sound like; namely older, mature, and more experienced (a big GOP hit point against Obama). Psychologists have found that what people think about themselves and what they believe others think about them can influence how they perform and how they expect others to perform.

There's another explanation for McCain's fingernail grip on the race. That's the power of negatives. McCain has been roundly hammered for going dirty, and at times he has. Obama has been smeared with the Ayers guilt by terrorist association, the Rezko crooked deal tie, the charge of socialist wealth redistribution, the ACORN vote fraud connect, the knock that he will abandon the troops in Iraq to their fate, and that he's soft on Iran, Cuba, and Venezuela and the slew of other supposed rogue's list enemies.
The question is does smearing a candidate really work? The two best known examples are the Willie Horton hit against Democratic presidential contender Michael Dukakis in 1988 and the Swift Boat blindside of Democratic presidential contender John Kerry in 2004. One stoked the fears of crime (Dukakis). The other planted doubts about character (Kerry). In both instances, they worked.

Even without these extreme cases, there's evidence that going negative can work. Though surveys show that the overwhelming majority of voters abhor personal smears against candidates and are turned off by them, far too many voters also can be influenced by the negative stuff they hear about a candidate. The trick is that the smear must be directly linked to the candidate's political position on the issues, or style, or personality. The smear must be based on a twisted fact or a wildly exaggerated tinge of truth to make it work. In each of the smears against Obama--Ayers, Iran, Rezko--there is just enough of a hook to hinge the smear on and hope that it sticks. The internet bristles with loads of anonymous racist and derogatory comments, cracks, and slanders about Obama based on this stuff and more.

The Snopes website has color coded the rumors, myths, and outright lies about Obama as true, untrue or partially true. Nearly all are coded as false or as a stretched half truth. Yet, fact and truth is one thing, but when they clash with an individual's doubts, suspicions, fears, and prejudices then an implanted negative slur against a candidate often will be taken as gospel.

A lot of voters plainly back McCain for the right reasons. They like his positions on health care, taxes, the war, think he's more experienced, and are Republican loyalists. Unfortunately, a lot more will back him because of the slander hits on Obama. Either way, it's a vote for McCain, and it's a big reason why Obama can't shake McCain.

I actually empathize with the impulse that makes the Palin crowd feel not everyone is a "real American." But the part they won't like is that, in the world's mind, they are the irrelevant Americans.

Those silly "Old Europeans" or pagan Third Worlders do not envy Wasilla or Walla Walla. But they lust after New York and San Francisco. They wouldn't fit in in Tuscaloosa as well as they'd fit in around Portland. They love the Blue States.

The America that makes the world turn turquoise in envy, the America that makes the world go round, is Blue State America. When the little guy from Liverpool or the little girl from Karachi or the young prodigy from Singapore dreams about America, he or she dreams about the America that is captured in images of New York, Hollywood and that dreaded Boston. Places marked by opportunity and equality and openness unseen in other parts of the world or in many parts of Red State America.

Sorry, Sarah, but the world doesn't share your view about what (and who) makes America great. (And it would be good for you to care what they think beyond your own shores.)

In a much-talked about exchange between Minnesota Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann and Chris Matthews this week, Bachmann suggested that there are certain "anti-American" congressfolk. Bachmann later said that she didn't mean it. (I'll give her the benefit of the doubt that she didn't. Under the heat of the TV cameras, it's easy to say things you don't quite mean.)

At a campaign rally, another Republican Rep. Robin Hayes or North Carolina told a crowd that "liberals hate real Americans." He later said he didn't mean it either. Gov. Sarah Palin has been making oblique references to "real America" as part of her stumping for the election, which seems to categorize everyone in California and other non-heartland areas an "unreal" Americans.

This raises some obvious questions. First, what exactly is a real American? Someone who loves America? If so, that means just about all of us, not to mention a good many illegal immigrants who are so happy to live in America they would break the law to come here. But clearly, "liberals" aka Democrats, can't be real Americans, so that would subtract roughly half of the country's actual population.

I assume from the cited comments above that I am not a a real American by virtue of living in California and especially because I choose to live in the Los Angeles (Worse, I went to college in San Francisco, the city that made goofball liberalism famous)? But I wonder if I can get a half-point for being born in Indiana, which seems to be one those "real" American places that Palin was referring to? Or is that negated by owning a hybrid car and having a Spanish surname? Can I get points for having a sister in the Navy? Or does my grandmother who gives to the Heifer Project in my name eclipse that "real" American association?

If this post is starting to sound ridiculous, that's because debating who is a real American is ridiculous. Real Americans are a diverse and motley bunch who defy categorization. They come in all colors. They come in all ages. They come in every religious faith. They come in every political ideology. They live in the cities and the towns, the suburbs and the farms, the mountains and the swamps. In all their collective glory, and warts, they represent the Real America. God bless em all.

(To be read with baritones singing "America, the Beautiful" in the background. "Oh beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain, for purple mountain majesties above the fruited plane... America, America...)

In its most pared down version, a real American is someone who was born here or who applied for and was granted citizenship.

By way of analogy, it is no different than being a real hot dog, pork, beef, combo, vegetarian or kosher. The difference is in the content.

Barack Obama is a real American as is John McCain. Osama bin Laden, not. Abbie Hoffman was a real American, as is Patty Hearst. David Duke is a real American, too (and we know how he's going to vote). Unfortunately, so are half the criminals in our jails (the ones that are here legally, anyway).

But being a real American goes beyond that. (Hoist up the flag; dust off the picture of Ronald Regan.) It is also someone who is decent, kind, honest and hardworking and who loves his neighbor as much as he loves himself and would contemplate giving up his life to defend the values of this country.

This bit about who is a real American did not originate with the wacky harebrained muttering of a Vice Presidential candidate, or with a few screwball congresspersons. Nor is simply a not so thinly veiled knock at a guy who's multi-ethnic, African-American, had a Kenyan father, allegedly attended a Muslim school, has the middle name of Hussein, has an outspoken African-American wife, has a daughter who at one time sported braids, went to effete Harvard, and worked in a hardcore, poverty area, in rock solid Blue State city. That guy by chance is the odds on favorite to bag the White House.

Actually, there's long been the suspicion that Latinos, Asians, and especially African-Americans are somehow different than real, red-blooded (white) Americans. I say especially African-Americans not because that's how Obama identifies, but because of the eternal suspicion that African-Americans are perennial, unpatriotic malcontents and racial rebels. The notion that blacks are America's ritual outcasts has been immortalized in the title of the towering classic, the Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison. But I guess when you think about it maybe it's better to be a fake American, than invisible.

My grandparents were Jewish immigrants from Poland and Russia. My wife Helene was born in Germany to Polish Holocaust survivors. We are real Americans. Call me a Brie-eating, Chardonnay-drinking liberal but my iconic food is actually the jalapeno cheese bagel.

My son Adam is a real American. His late mother, Barbara, was Scotch/Irish/German and American born. His wife Su-Yun is certainly a real American. She, unlike my wife, was born here. Unlike the Jonathans, Lindas and Isaiahs all around, people ask her if she has an "American name." What could this mean? Are only English names American? Su-Yun is as American as Susan, Sarah or Sylvia. Juan, Sean, Ivan and Hanan all have equal claim with John.

We Americans are a mighty gumbo of peoples, cultures and ideas. My family is Democratic, Republican, tall, short, gay and straight. Cousin Richard married Fera, an Iranian Muslim, and their daughter Linda is a real American. Cousin Nancy's son, Isaiah, is half white, half black, Jewish and All American. My granddaughters Roxie and Iris are Asian, Caucasian and Semitic. They are Americans. We rejoice that we are enriched by our differences. We are real Americans, united but thank God, not the same.

I have a good friend of more than two decades who has recently tested the concept of "Friendly Fire."

He has taken the pseudonym "John Galt." As less than a fan of Ayn Rand, I had to do a little research to find that he was a hero in Rand's mind for protesting high taxes or something of the sort.

I don't much like pseudonyms on the Internet, as I don't respect commenters who find it easy to take angry potshots at me while cloaked in secrecy.

I find it problematic that my longtime friend ___ (fine, I'll let him keep his precious anonymity) would protect himself with a pseudonym that, while no secret to me, allows himself to leave no Internet track record for others to judge him by. And I think it's why he can pop off about the "leftist drivel" that this site is allegely spewing out.

This Washington Post writer says better than I can why the Palin clothing issue strikes some of us as problematic, but which struck him as one drop in a river of drivel.

As for Ayers, I accept Obama's response about how he's not particularly more tied to Ayers than are the Republicans who associate with Ayers on boards, and that he listens to endorsers such as Warren Buffett and Colin Powell rather than Ayers. You, "Mr. Galt," are free to disbelieve him. But most Americans disagree with you, and I am not sure what more you would demand of us in this matter.

I will apologize if I stated my thoughts in a smug or haughty way that struck someone like "John Galt" as "leftist drivel." But it would seem that anyone who has known me over the long haul would be aware that I'm not a leftist; and people who respect me don't dismiss my stuff as "drivel." I certainly don't engage in Friendly Fire with such persons.

Americans often feel that they should be able to be friends with those who disagree vigorously with them. Sure. But I think we've taken it too far; now, we mock other people easily and casually and in over-the-top manners while expecting them to still be friends. That is precisely why we now have so much out-of-control partisanship -- and it's aggravated by the cloak of anonymity (or quasi-anonymity) donned by John Galt and others.

The very fact that this is America (cue the italics, cue the banjos, bring in the piccolos) means that wrapping oneself in an unburnable flag, movements like our current penchant for hegemonic expansionism (and thinking that other countries just love having us invade them) and any notion that the government is always right (or Right) simply don't fly.

Rather than define patriotism as a sloganeering, mavricky conservatism, as Gov. Sarah Palin seems to be so fond of doing, we need to remember that the definition of "true patriot" in our coarse political discourse at any given time is a rapidly moving target.

Protest. Free expression. Criticism. They're all American in the deepest sense.

We can disagree. We don't all have to be evangelical Christians. Hell, we can even be Muslims or Jews or ... God forbid, atheists.

Let the majority rule but let the minority live free. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

The Republican Party's definitely been "spreading the wealth around" by making the small town girl and her family look good.

The expenses include $75,062 spent at Neiman Marcus in Minneapolis Minn., and $41,850 in St. Louis in early September. The committee also reported spending $4,100 for makeup and hair consulting. The expenses were first reported by Politico.com.

"With all of the important issues facing the country right now, it's remarkable that we're spending time talking about pantsuits and blouses," said McCain spokeswoman Tracey Schmitt, who has been traveling with Palin.

She's right. We could be talking more about serious issues, like Bill Ayers and terrorist fist-bumps and the so-called Marxist threat posed by the standard-bearers of America's largest political party.

The Los Angeles Times today unveiled their makeover and redesign. I'm sure that lots of time was devoted to this nose job, this elective cosmetic surgery, this colorful liposuction. I'm sure that the salaries saved by the firing and forcing out of actual news writers, editors, proofreaders and reporters more than covered the costs. I'm also sure that the addition of more color and color-coded sections and the eventual addition of caricatures of the few remaining by-lined columnists will neither increase circulation nor staunch the bleeding of circulation and advertising revenues.

More color with less content is the news equivalent of junk food. Strangely however as the junk increases the paper slims down. There is less news, fewer stories and little recognition of quality writing. But think of the money they are saving on news while spending it on design and color. The list of writing and analytical talent lost is shocking: from international news to local political writers, from business to sports, from entertainment to opinion, we are left with fewer reasons to buy or read the Times.

A once great paper, with a national and international reputation, is being vivisected before our eyes. The Tribune Empire is being taken apart and sold off for scrap and we are left watching our Los Angeles Times bleed out. But at least we can see the red. I know I'm seeing red--red-hot anger, red blood and the fatal flow of red ink. They can now put their USA Today style color graph/pie-chart on the front page to document their shrinking presence, increasing irrelevancy and immanent demise.

One amiable and discerning reader wanted to know why I endorse McCain and not just why I am against Obama. The amiable and discerning opinion editor of this paper also wanted to know the same thing, and since I am blogging for them, here goes:

I endorse McCain because he doesn't think that all Americans deserve a college education. There are some Americans who don't deserve to go to college because they don't have the grades and haven't earned the right to do so.

I endorse McCain because he doesn't associate with nimrods like Reverend Wright and a host of others from the pro-Palestinian front.

I endorse him because in the long run, his tax program may help create more jobs. McCain wants to reduce taxes evenly across the board whereas Obama plans on raising them for the 5% of the populattion who who earns more than 250K a year. Right now, they are paying about 60% of the taxes, but he plans on raising their taxes. This may sound enticing for the bulk of us who earn less, but it may not create more jobs.

"People who earn over $250,000 a year are the ones who create jobs and open or expand businesses," said Gary Aminoff, President of the San Fernando Valley Republican Club, "and if you take more capital away from them for tsxes, then there is going to be less business expansion, fewer jobs and less total tax revenue."

I also endorse McCain because he wants to get out of Iraq, not suddenly, which may cause the country to sink into further ruin, but slowly and gradually. Besides, should something happen to Barack Obama that would leave us with Joe Biden, who looks like he's on his way out anyway, which would then lead to that big mouthed broad, Nancy Pelosi, and I'd rather have Sarah Palin in office than her. She may shoot from the hip, but she's basically sensible and appears to be a quick study.

It's nice that Barack Obama's cool, calm, collected and photogenic, but we are looking for someone to lead the country, not for someone to jitterbug with at a country club.

Barack Obama may seem like a nice guy, but underneath, I keep questioning the company he keeps then distances himself from once trouble arises.

It takes a true believer of the neocon variety to think that the Guardian chart below is the result of us being so shiningly good that even our allies are blinded by our virtue. And it takes a true Obama hater to spin our allies' affection for Obama as a bad thing.

Yet ironically, if the rest of the world wanted McCain as prez, don't you think conservatives would be trumpeting that? They'd be saying, "All our allies know the world is too dangerous a place to be entrusted to Obama."

Again, it's good to see a contrarian Republican such as Colin Powell add some healthy perspective to the accusations that Obama is some kind of socialist wolf in the henhouse.

Partisan GOP types are angrily scrambling for ways to rationalize being wrong about pretty much every prediction or prescription they coughed up over the past eight years. Demagoguery, as Powell pointed out today, is what has resulted.

Much of the demagoguery relates to the notion that Obama just lives to institute a highly progressive tax, with rich folks being taxed back to the Stone Age -- taxed so exorbitantly that they'd rather stay at home eating bon bons than creating new jobs for stiffs like you and me. I even saw one letter-writer to a conservative newspaper threaten to to sit on his hands and "let China make some money for a change."

Boy, we should be frightened by these rich people's sudden threats to become middle class. But when exactly can we expect them to start downsizing and stop attempting to keep up their home in the Hamptons? And, unless you were being taxed, oh, around 97% on every dollar over $100,000 a year, why would you stop working so hard...?

The Obama-bashers need to realize that Adam Smith himself favored a progressive tax. Smith, the father of modern capitalism, felt a progressive tax was appropriate and moral, given how a society's haves are naturally more invested in that society than the have-nots.

Think about it: Who has more to lose by an invasion by foreign powers -- Warren Buffett or a street person? The homeless guy is happy to take his chance on the next regime.

And who places greater demands on local police -- a poverty-wage single mother or a Beverly Hills tycoon?

If Adam Smith understood this, why don't today's Republicans?

As a quasi-libertarian, I'm actually more of a flat-tax person than Smith. But, for most sane and responsible people, all bets are off when even a country's "small-government conservatives" don't believe in paying as you go. At that point, the door opens for progressive taxes and other remedies.

"Socialist"? No. Let's have a real discussion here.

This CNN.com piece about Colin Powell's endorsement is must-reading for those who have taken the bait about how "un-American" Obama is. Some salient passages (emphasis mine):

Reporter: Sir, what part did McCain's negativity play in your decision, the negative tone of the campaign?

Powell: It troubled me. We have two wars. We have economic problems. We have health problems. We have education problems. We have infrastructure problems. We have problems around the world with our allies. So those are the problems the American people wanted to hear about, not about Mr. Ayers, not about who's a Muslim or who's not a Muslim. Those kinds of images going out on Al-Jazeera are killing us around the world.
And we have got to say to the world, it doesn't make any difference who you are or what you are, if you're an American, you're an American. And this business, for example, of the congressman from Minnesota who's going around saying, "Let's examine all congressmen to see who is pro-America or not pro-America" -- we have got to stop this kind of nonsense, pull ourselves together and remember that our great strength is in our unity and in our diversity. And so, that really was driving me.

And to focus on people like Mr. Ayers and these trivial issues, for the purpose of suggesting that somehow Mr. Obama would have some kind of terrorist inclinations, I thought that was over the top. It was beyond just good political fighting back and forth. I think it went beyond. And to sort of throw in this little Muslim connection, you know, "He's a Muslim and, my goodness, he's a terrorist" -- it was taking root. And we can't judge our people and we can't hold our elections on that kind of basis.
So, yes, that kind of negativity troubled me, And the constant shifting of the argument. I was troubled a couple of weeks ago when in the middle of the crisis, the [McCain] campaign said, "We're going to go negative," and they announced it, "We're going to go negative and attack [Obama's] character through Bill Ayers." Now I guess the message this week is, "We're going to call him a socialist, Mr. Obama is now a socialist, because he dares to suggest that maybe we ought to look at the tax structure that we have."

Taxes are always a redistribution of money. Most of the taxes that are redistributed go back to those who paid them, in roads and airports and hospitals and schools. And taxes are necessary for the common good. And there is nothing wrong with examining what our tax structure is or who should be paying more, who should be paying less. And for us to say that that makes you a socialist, I think is an unfortunate characterization that isn't accurate.
I don't want my taxes raised. I don't want anybody else's taxes raised. But I also want to see our infrastructure fixed. I don't want to have a $12 trillion national debt, and I don't want to see an annual deficit that's over $500 billion heading toward a trillion. So, how do we deal with all of this?

So Powell has forcefully used his American military-hero credentials to refute the bizarre and contradictory "commie/terrorist/pacifist/Muslim/angry-Christian" characterization of Obama.

Here's what I saw when I looked at the Common Cause eye popping list of the principal corporate, banking, and brokerage house donors to Barack Obama and John McCain--virtually the same names. The list reads like a who's who of the top Wall Street con artists, cheats, shills, and deadbeats. All of whom are now giddily gorging themselves at the taxpayer $700 billion (and still climbing) trough. This is the same bunch that Bush, Paulson, Pelosi, Dodd, and yes Obama and McCain tell us will lead us out of the financial and economic morass.

The bitter reality is that other than color, age, mild stylistic differences, and rhetorical flourishes, there is no substantive difference between the two; in fact there really couldn't be. They are two sides of the same corporate-entrenched Washington Beltway establishment. That's hardly a surprise. Politics is a billionaire's game dominated by mega corporate and labor PACs, strangled by high rolling special interest groups and lobbyists, and clamped down by equally mega defense and military contractors. To think that Obama and McCain could break free of their moneyed and Beltway chains and deliver on their anemic version of hope and change is to think that you can win the Big Spin lottery without buying a ticket.

The two candidates that have got it right in their cry for real reform i.e. out of Iraq, guaranteed national health care, tough re-regulation of banks and Wall Street, crackdown on corporate polluters, massive spending on education, infrastructure, and urban redevelopment, and real criminal justice system overhaul are not named Obama or McCain. They are named Nader and McKinney. A vote for either of them is not a wasted vote, but a vote for true hope and change.

I liked John McCain eight years ago. He even seemed okay four years ago. Today's McCain isn't yesterday's McCain; rather, he is a cynical pragmatist.

By selecting Sarah Palin -- after little due diligence -- he confessed that his party is dominated by social conservatives who will shortly tear it apart.

Obama's budgets don't add up. He talks easily about where to invest, but never about how to divest. But it's not as if McCain has been noticeably better here.

Obama is an inspiring and gracious and irenic leader, in a relative sense. He supports Israel and he cares openly for impoverished and angry Palestinians whose homes routinely get razed -- and Israel's supporters should realize that such balance will go further in stabilizing their region than the "hammer the Arabs" bluster of neocons and McCain rally attendees.

This is the time for the handoff of leadership to a new generation. As with the Kennedy in 1960, this is a pivotal moment. Like JFK, Obama represents a hitherto excluded demographic. Forty-eight years ago we elected a Roman Catholic amid the fears and smears that he would not be loyal or a "real American who thinks like us."

Electing Obama will not put racism behind us or heal all our divisions. This is not a messianic moment, but it could be truly historic and say both to the world and ourselves that we have come a very long way towards healing.

Obama has been on the racial divide and has worked with people of all faiths and ethnicities. He's succeeded by dint of grace and intelligence from Honolulu to Occidental, from cerebral Columbia and Harvard to the hurly-burley of Chicago politics. He's a statesman with cool, reason and integrity.

Call me a pragmatic centrist. Since Barack Obama appears to be one, too, he gets my vote. Cool and deliberative beats hair-trigger and hot.

Democrat Obama has positioned himself as a quasi-liberal appealing to the center. At the same time, Republican John McCain has been running away from the center-right and pandering to a conservative base that's never been too comfortable with him.

Obama wants the U.S. out of Iraq. McCain steeps all of his Iraq War talk in a frothy mug of "honor."

McCain doesn't want to raise my taxes. Obama wants to lower them. McCain calls this "class warfare," but isn't his promise to lower taxes even more for the wealthy an attack on the rest of us? (Hint: it is.)

Democratic VP candidate Joe Biden is a mess. Obama should've tapped Hillary. But Biden's nothing compared to the GOP's Sarah Palin. If anything scares me, it's the prospect of McCain dying in office.

Being a born and bred Chicagoan, I seldom get scared. After all, we are the ones whose city has been synonymous with the mob for years, we are the ones who have lived through rugged winters, the Daley Dynasty, and we are the ones from the city where the dead once voted and often.

But now I am getting scared. It isn't the kind of fear you get from walking down the street at night, but the kind you get when you see a funnel cloud inching ahead in the distance.

It's the kind of fear over what will happen should Barack Obama become president. It's not because of his race because I am not a racist. It's because of his politics and the fact that he leans so far to the left that I am waiting for him to fall into the Pacific Ocean one fine day.

I am afraid of his affiliations and the paltry excuses he uses to cover them up. First there was the Reverend Jeremiah Wright debacle. It is almost impossible to believe that one person can associate with one another for twenty years and have no idea of his politics. Yet Obama said he knew nothing about it. What did they talk about all those years, carburetors and the weather?

As a Jewish person and the daughter, granddaughter and niece of Holocaust survivors, I am afraid of his politics as well. Earlier this year, he said that "Nobody is suffering more than the Palestinian people," which is hard to believe coming from a group that settles their grievances with others by blowing up and murdering civilians and children. I am afraid that even they want him to become president.

I am also afraid for the economy. Some may say that the housing market and all those forfeited loans, which nearly caused the world economy to collapse was because of the Republicans. What most people don't realize is that it was President Clinton who pressured the banks to give loans to those who could barely scrape together the month-to-month rent on an apartment let alone a mortgage.

Barack Obama's campaign slogan is "Change we need." With a Democratic Congress and a Democratic President with questionable affiliations and politics including a bill he sponsored making it illegal for a person to defend himself in his own home with a gun that is not registered, the concern is that they may be the wrong changes.

Campbell Brown is the smart person's Sarah Palin. Here she points out something obvious -- yet obscured -- about the manner in which John McCain denied that Obama was secretly an Arab:

When did that become a disqualifier for higher office in our country? When did Arab and Muslim become dirty words? The equivalent of dishonorable or radical?

Good for McCain for trying to shrink that timetable, although it's unfortunately revealing that he defended Obama from the "Arab" charge by instead arguing that he's "a decent family man." You can't be both? I wonder if his handlers will put out a commercial touting that "Obama is a great family man -- to all four of his wives!"

Hmm, this Reuters story about a new survey suggests that rich Americans aren't buying into the line that Obama will make America so much more socialist that they will all lay around in their pajamas rather than go make more money...

Despite plans to boost tax rates for the wealthiest 5 percent of Americans, Sen. Barack Obama is making the deepest inroads into wealthy voters in more than a decade for any Democratic presidential nominee, suggesting the November 4 election could mark a fundamental shift in voting patterns.

...McCain had 40 percent of the "affluent and wealth vote," compared with 33 percent for Obama, and given the recent stock market slide Taylor says he would be surprised if Obama's support hadn't risen further in the past few weeks.
In the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, in contrast, about 80 percent of the wealthy supported the Republican nominee, Taylor said.

.... Some rich Americans expect taxes to rise regardless of who wins the White House race, and some expect it even if the foundering U.S. economy tips into recession.

"Everybody believes that taxes are going up ... no matter who gets elected," said Timothy Vaill, chairman and chief executive of the wealth management arm of Boston Private Financial Holdings, a money-management firm.

Some wealthy foreign investors with big investments in the United States are unnerved by McCain's running-mate, Alaska governor and self-described 'hockey mom' Sarah Palin, said Charles Lowenhaupt, chairman of St. Louis-based Lowenhaupt Global Advisors, which advises ultra-high-net-worth families.

In the face of this economic crisis all of McCain's pain pales in comparison with his Palin problem. Yes, she's done her job and energized the base--and brought out some pretty base emotions from both sides. But she throws out of serious consideration McCain's most precious asset: His, till now, credible claim that he always puts country first and ahead of being elected.

His campaign has become a pep rally of preaching to the angry choir of the social conservatives. He cannot get the middle and undecided voters with this red meat negative approach. He needs to add to his pre-existing foreign policy bona fides (deserved or not is another issue). This election would belong to him were Mitt Romney his VP. McCain's final chance is for Sarah Palin to drop out--for any number of really good reasons: Plan her daughter's wedding, deal with the troopers at the gate or fight her crippling winking disorder. This would then be the moment for Romney to come in.

This is the time for people who know something, have a nuanced understanding of economics and finance and project calm assurance. Sarah may excite, but she is not a calm, steady hand on the tiller and even economic conservatives quake at the thought of her becoming president.

McCain needs a Mitt to catch his falling campaign.

The sky is falling. The market is tanking. The banks are failing. The global system of finance has lost the faith of the people. No. No. All is well. The international community has saved the day. Welcome to panic in the year 2008.

I know it's easy to be cynical about Kippling's famous line, "If you can keep your head while all about you people are losing theirs, then you're a man." Aside from the sexism from the old colonialist, in this case it's a good observation. The best indicator of when the pros sell is when the market, any market, gets pumped up by amateurs who believe that they can only make money and no special knowledge, talent or research is necessary. When you see people identifying themselves as day traders and earning their living churning their own portfolios, when you see ads for playing the futures market, trading in commodities and foreign currency, you know to rush for the exits because the bubble is about to burst. The pros will make money as the bubble inflates and short the market on the way down. The late entries, the smart kids, the amateurs will get slaughtered.

The pros buy when the market hits bottom--or as close to the bottom as they can guess. Well, guess isn't really the right word. They actually know stuff and so while facts don't always determine the outcome, they are pretty handy to have at one's disposal--before the market, any market, disposes of you. You see, at some point, most companies or commodities have an intrinsic worth.

Think about your house. It may have had a price at a million and a half. Its appraisal may have fallen to a million or even 750, 000. But at some point, it has some value. Now when it was 1.5 million, you were not rich. You didn't make money if you didn't sell it. When it falls in value, you won't lose money if you don't sell it. Everyone is panicked by being upside down in their houses, that is having the loan being greater than the value. Oh horrors. Oh uncharted situation. Really?

Anyone who buys a new car is upside down the moment you drive off the lot. Your new car, that you just paid say 50k for, is now, by dint of having been registered to you, a used car. You are upside down by about 15k. Yet you're still paying the monthlies. There is no problem unless you have to sell. Then you're in trouble. But you are neither rich when prices go up, nor poor when they fall--if you do not sell.

You see the pros study what things are actually worth--not simply what they sell for today. Bubbles are sometimes obvious. The most famous is the tulip bubble when bunches of people bid up tulip bulbs. When push came to shove and the fad faded, the bubble burst. The Dotcom bubble of the 90s was another predictable disaster. Certainly some companies would find a path to profitability, but most wouldn't, and there was no intrinsic value to most Dotcoms. Every successful high tech company knows it is one innovation away from irrelevancy and therefore bankruptcy. This is why the giants are relentless in buying up or strangling in its crib any other company in its ecological niche.

Too many amateurs believed that cool ideas in cutting edge industries would inevitably succeed. Too many amateurs thought that enthusiasm was enough to hold up the value way past any rational value.

So right now, as the market climbs steeply the pros are buying companies that have good price earnings ratios. They are not buying everything. They don't know if this is a suddenly reborn Bull Market (not the way to bet) or what they call "A dead cat bounce." What they do know is that there are some bargains and that their time to buy is when the amateurs get frightened and panic sell. No market is designed for amateurs. This market has revealed too many self-proclaimed pros to be, in fact, amateurs. How do you tell the difference? The pros don't panic. Note that Warren Buffett bought in when the panic was setting in.

Sarah Palin was angry that she was being heckled today. Her predictable response was this: "I hope those protesters have the courage and honor to give veterans thanks for their right to protest."

Well, they probably did. Because all they were protesting was their inability to hear her. "Louder, louder," they were saying. Sarah, a big fan of defense, got a little defensive.

Whoops. Well, who ever lost a point in the polls by saluting our veterans? And I'm sure it was Barney Frank who was messing with the sound system anyway.

At the same time, hasn't it seemed that the Republicans have lost their decades-old edge in smoothness and logistics? Dems used to be the disheveled, fly-by-the-seats-of-their-pants organization. Now they seem to get the visuals and the aurals right, and the GOP doesn't.

I've been puzzled, even stunned, to see so many people use the "S" word to criticize Obama lately: "Socialist."

Even moderate friends, even progressive vegan friends, have been using the "S" word, and not as a compliment.

When I ask others how they define socialism, they say, "heavy governmental control."

What, then, is the Bush administration's approach? See here for breaking news.

Everyone believes in heavy governmental control these days, as a practical matter. Even the GOP is trying to pin the blame on Dems for not (!!!) regulating Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac enough.

True socialism, however, is an economic approach in which there are no winners or losers, no rich and no poor. Do people really think Obama is willing or able to push through such an agenda?

...in the dictionary, and you'll see a map of Pakistan.

Now, even the Pakistani police's antiterrorism squad is getting bombed.

LA has to work to remain relevant. In an age of globalism cities cannot rest on laurels or neglect either physical or intellectual infrastructure.

The rail line that does not go to LAX was planned to service our permanent aircraft industry. Now gone. A major port is being built in Baja, movies go on location and so can studios.

As jobs dry up, the flow of immigrants--legal and not--slows, and low-end housing opens up, and rents decrease as vacancies increase. Meanwhile, as per Earl, the schools are sinking and the establishment is fighting Charters and traffic is worse than ever.

Now is the moment when our charismatic mayor confesses to political impotence. The other kind doesn't seem to be a problem.

Antonio basically delivered the "malaise" talk that Carter never actually did. However, irony of ironies, he shared his gloom here in the Valley, where, I'm sure he assumed, no one of importance would be listening. Wrong again. Antonio is like LA--glitzy, hyperactive, easily distracted and apparently easily discouraged. He should study Mayor Bloomberg, slow down and get to work.

Why would anyone be surprised that Mayor Tony would say there isn't much the city's leadership can do about hard times and the even harder times to come? After all, this is a mayor who hasn't done very much when times were good. Check the record, with much fanfare he promised to: transform the schools which are not, never should have been and shouldn't be now under his thumb, end the traffic gridlock that takes a battle plan worthy of Ike to get from point A to Point B in the city, gang cleanse the streets many of which still count more candlelight vigil flowers in tribute to murder victims than trees, jumpstart business growth in South L.A. much of which still looks like a scene out of the flick the Land that Time Forgot, and to give real teeth to neighborhood councils which are still just as toothless as ever.

Now again remember Tony made these promises to turn L.A. into a New Jerusalem when the good times supposedly rolled in the city. But you can bet your fast shriveling 401K that Mayor Tony will be a tiger in action when it comes to snatching TV face time while working the fat cat corporate and labor circuit to bank millions for his re-election bid. That's a hardship that Tony certainly knows how to avert.

LA as a future Baltimore, Rob? Like a snowball in hell. Politicians or not, apathy or not, LA is a nut magnet. It's like an expression I once heard:

"Whatever I go, whatever I do, I create a little dent in the Earth, and all the loose nuts and bolts come rolling down."

This place will never have a population implosion so long as global warming doesn't kick in too much, the sun keeps shining and there are no monsoons or major earthquakes to level the place off (though, in all honesty, it could be an improvement.) That's because LA is a land of dreams, and the Three Stooges could be running affairs, and people would still come flocking here.

...but Mayor Villaraigosa says it can pour, as Rick Orlov notes in an article on the mayor's speech in Woodland Hills. Orlov says the mayor "warned business leaders the city is in for continued hard times," and admitted there isn't much that the city's leadership feels it can do to avert hardship.

Los Angeles has promising weather and location in its favor, as well as a charismatic way that captures the imagination of the planet. But working against it is a lack of vision among the politicians of the region and the state.

Los Angeles and California become victims of their own hare-like success, unable to realize that tortoises are catching up.

Passing through the Dubai airport a short while back, I was struck by how a backwater nation used oil revenues to build physical and economic infrastructure that can sustain it as a global center for the long haul.

L.A. and California must learn to compete in the global economy. It may not look as pretty or as fair or as environmentally friendly as some would like. But, I ask my Friendly Fire colleagues: Is there any other way to ensure we don't become a Baltimore in coming years?

...for Obama. Yes, that amounts to an admission that I was wrong in my previous many months of predicting that McCain would win, despite polls and prevailing trends. I simply had felt that McCain would come across as a more reassuringly "American" candidate at a time that America is feeling anxious about its place in the world.

The economy's nose dive is helping Obama, as we all know. And in the pres and vp debates, he and Biden have outperformed Team GOP, laying waste to the notion that they are "wet behind the ears" novices.

The media seem oblivious to this fact, which is why their post-debate analysis is unwatchable. So cowed are they by conservative hammering of their biases that they can't call what the American public is calling in virtually every survey: Obama and Biden show the commanding presences and savvy intellects that instill confidence in most any species of mammal. I'm puzzled and amused by how media "experts" attempt to achieve balance by refusing to admit that the Dem candidates are winning these debates.

McCain needed to show that he was clearly in command to reverse the course of this campaign. That didn't happen.

I watched the debate at USC tonight, surrounded by undergraduates who were mostly positive about Obama. Most of them scoffed and chuckled at McCain throughout the evening, with some students groaning about "how old" he seems. What a change from when I was a USC undergrad, surrounded by conservative mobs who idolized an aging Ronald Reagan. Tonight, the few McCain candidates that I talked to afterward seemed to feel as outnumbered today as USC's liberals did in the mid-80s.

In the wake of Bill Kristol's "no more tears" gentle lathering of Sarah Palin this week ("The Wright Stuff," viewable here), it seems clear that the New York Times and other leading newspapers are being manipulated by political opportunists.

Palin sniffs at the Times in her stump speeches, sparking mass mockery of a leading newspaper for refusing to political propaganda along, unfiltered. Kristol, representing the hated Times, then passes along, unfiltered, Palin's denunciations of leading newspapers.

I suppose Spiro Agnew would be an MSM personality today if he were still with us. Instead that job falls to Kristol, Karl Rove, Michael Gerson and others. They now happily burnish their own credentials at respected publications, having spent years dividing our nation by condemning the veracity of these same publications. Kristol in particular benefits from the Times' brand while trying to destroy that same brand.

This parasitic arrangement will neither mollify political extremists nor advance the integrity of journalism.

In the first vote for the $700 billion Wall Street bailout, U.S. Rep. Brad Sherman, D-Sherman Oaks, was one of the San Fernando Valley delegation's three holdouts.*

During a House floor speech on Tuesday, Oct. 2, which can be seen in the YouTube video above (found by me at BoingBoing), Sherman criticizes the way the bailout bill was sold to legislators. Specifically, he points to threats that the country would fall under martial law without the bill being passed. I'm not sure who was telling members of Congress that the Dow would drop thousands of points per day, and that martial law would be imposed, but he says that somebody was using these kind of threats to get lawmakers in line.

Here are Sherman's remarks:

"The only way they can pass this bill is by creating and sustaining a panic atmosphere. That atmosphere is not justified.

"Many of us were told in private conversations that if we voted against this bill, on Monday that the sky would fall, the market would drop 2,000 or 3,000 points the first day, another couple thousand the second day, and a few members were even told that there would be martial law in America if we voted no.

"That's what I call fear-mongering — unjustified, proven wrong. We've got a week, we've got two weeks to write a good bill. The only way to write, to pass a bad bill — keep the panic pressure on."

When the powers that be have to threaten the imposition of martial law, it makes the timeworn tradition of using earmarks to sweeten a bill and earn it votes look like the most civilized thing in the world.

In other words, I congratulate Rep. Sherman for hanging tough on this one. His formation of a self-described "skeptics caucus" and heightened media presence could signal his transformation from anonymous Valley congressman to perennial cable-news guest.

I first met Sherman many years ago when, as a member of the state Board of Equalization, he was fighting the snack tax. I always knew he had a little showboat in him, despite his accountant demeanor. This last vote won't endear him to Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco. But it seems that he's lived down the JDate incident of 2005.

So, when it comes to the legislative aftermath of the mortgage-banking crisis, how big a role do you think Rep. Sherman will have?

* In the original vote, Reps. Howard Berman, D-Van Nuys, Henry Waxman, D-Los Angeles, Howard McKeon, R-Santa Clarita voted yes; Sherman, Elton Gallegly, R-Thousand Oaks and Adam Schiff, D-Pasadena voted no. On Friday, Oct. 3's second vote, Schiff voted yes, leaving Sherman and Gallegly as the area's two congressmen who voted no.

Gail-Tzipporah makes the following point:

... [I]f Charlie Sheen were running at this point, he would probably get some votes as well... Either way, Obama has already won. He has broken certain barriers and now sits on the holy order of sainthood.

The funny thing is that many diehard Republicans are now sounding like Dems have sounded for years, "blaming the voter." David Frum here notes how Dems have historically blamed the voter for bad taste rather than blaming their candidates or their policies. He hasn't yet recognized that we have now done a 180.

It reminds me of how many diehard college football fans in "hotspots" like Happy Valley or Lincoln used to mock USC fans for leaving games early or for booing their team. That happened during USC's bad times in the '80s and '90s. "Typical LA weenies," they said. "Where's their loyalty?"

Then USC became strong again, and the other teams fortunes' began to suffer. Yes, the fans in those supposed strongholds began booing and leaving early.

In the same way, Republicans are now booing the American population, and heading for the exits.

And it will get worse in coming years, as the civil war between the religious right and the small-government libertarians begins to escalate.

And I say this, as I always love to point out, as a registered Republican. A "Maverick" Republican.

Point well taken, Rob, but it is not Obama the man I am concerned about, but Obama the politician.

To help clarify thinga at least in my own mind, I've come up with a list of his plusses and minuses.

Plusses:

Nice dresser (Hey, what can I say? Most women are going to notice.)
Excellent Speaker
Uses the parallel structure well
Nice economic plan

Minuses:

Liberal
Bobbing Adam's apple (Sorry, but most women are going to notice that, too.)
Hangs out with the wrong crowd
Could be influenced by them as well.
Wants to send everyone and his cousin to college

It's probably going to be the lesser of two evils for most people, and if Charlie Sheen were running at this point, he would probably get some votes as well. For me it is not about the color of a candidate's skin but about the political action plan. Either way, Obama has already won. He has broken certain barriers and now sits in on the holy order of sainthood.

When I was a student at USC a young medical student, John Betinis, ran for student body president on the platform of eliminating student government. This being the 60s we were accustomed to the Zen contradictions of policy. We burned villages in order to save them, so why not lead student government into oblivion? John campaigned on how wasteful the student government was, how much it raised our fees and misspent our money and how, politically, it was a sham, a farce and a mockery. It had no real power and created only the illusion that the students had a say in the governance of the university. All this was, of course, true.

As I was reviewing this perverse impulse to become the leader of an institution that you say you want to shrink, if not eliminate, I naturally thought of Republicans. The Republican platform has been and still is mired in the same contradiction and irony. And, no, I'm not talking specifically about the present candidates. It's a tradition. There is no acknowledged sense of the cognitive dissonance of running to be the leader of an institution that one holds in low regard. Government, they keep telling us, is the problem and not the solution.

This has been the mantra from Ronald Reagan to George W, from McCain to Palin--and while we're at it, throw in Bob Barr, Phil Gramm and the whole "deregulate and loose the genius of American enterprise" gang. As Dr. Phil rhetorically asks, "So, how's that work'n for ya?" At the moment, not that well.

The more pressing question for all of us is how's this working politically in this season of sleaze and anxiety? Also, not so well. Government got out of the way of the energy business and the genius of American ingenuity created ENRON that manipulated markets, inflated prices, created nothing and lost fortunes. They got out of the way of the airline industry and destroyed competition, while reducing routes and almost eliminating direct trips--and they bankrupted major carriers. They got out of the way of the banking and finance industry--and I don't need to review the mess that unbridled greed and unregulated markets are creating both home and abroad.

They wanted government to get out of the way of Social Security and get people to put their retirement in the stock market. Hmmm. Wonder how far behind they'd be now, had that dream been implemented? McCain wants to do with healthcare what they did for the finance markets and let capitalism and the self-regulating market create healthcare programs--and not the evil, inefficient government. Again without any sense of irony, the government provided for McCain's healthcare from birth, as the child of a military officer, to the present as a senator. Yes, with the exception of his years in captivity.

Under conservative, smaller government, fiscal responsibility Republicans from Reagan to George W, we have grown both government and deficits in numbers truly unprecedented--whether you calculate the numbers on present dollars or on constant dollars. They have done virtually everything they have campaigned against. And they are still campaigning against their own record. How else can "change" be their theme?

Okay, that's a rhetorical question. Change can be their theme because they're changing our dreams into nightmares, changing our IRAs into if not worthless pieces of paper, certainly pieces of paper that are worth less. They are changing our reputation as a nation into ashes and finally leaving us as individuals asking for spare change.

Can this running against their record and against the institution they disparage possibly work for them? Well, it is chastening when I remember that John Betinis won the election on his promise to eliminate student government. Naturally, he did not eliminate it. He grew it. La plus ca change.

In this Reuters article, it's the Brits who call for negotiations with the Taliban in Afghanistan, and it's the Taliban that rejects it.

Refusing to negotiate with the enemy sure sounds patriotic when Bush or McCain boastfully articulate it, but it sure seems like a petty and irrational principle when the enemy articulates it.

In the end, I've found that hawks are pretty much the same, in whichever country you find them. They simply employ their hawkishness based on the accident of where they were born and what they were brought up to love and hate.

Oh, believe me, I'd rather live under Bush's hawkishness than Mullah Omar's. Bush's hawkishness is the lesser of two evils; but I don't pretend that Bush's hawkishness is somehow the greatest virtue found in humanity. As increasing numbers of Americans agree with me, we're seeing the Palins of the world search frantically for new ways to demonize would-be peacemakers.

The Tamil Tigers, a separatist group in Sri Lanka, remind us here that not all suicide bombers are Muslim. As some savvy terrorism experts have noted, suicide bombs tend to be the domain of people protesting an occupation. That's why Palestinians tend to be suiciders but not Iranians, though the latter are even more religious than the former.

Interestingly, the U.S. response involved advice that we would do well to heed ourselves:

The United States condemned Monday's attack, but encouraged the government to find a political solution. "Only a political solution, not further violence, can provide a way forward to ending the country's deadly conflict," the U.S. Embassy said in a statement.

Imagine if we took that more seriously throughout the Mideast and South Asia, rather than posturing about how "talking to enemies" would undercut us.

How fascinating to see our clear-headedness when we are not the ones immediately under threat.

When I stand trembling before G-d on Erev Yom Kippur, as I judge myself and submit to a higher judgment, what will the criteria of judgment be? What will count for me and against me? Which are more important my sins of commission or omission? I am pretty confident that the decree of either heaven or self will not be based primarily on the company I've kept.

Yet this seems to be an important issue during this increasingly nasty presidential campaign. Republicans want to judge Obama by his former minister and a former radical. Democrats want to judge McCain on his lobbyist friends and the Keating Five.
If I apply this standard to my self, I quake indeed. I will confess to you, Dear Reader, my own sins of friendships and social intercourse. Let me know what you think before I have to share this with G-d.

I had lunch with the Rev Jesse Jackson. But I also had dinner with Ehud Olmert. I was friends with Richard Perle of the Reagan Administration and the Carlyle Group. Somewhere there is a picture of me with OJ--our arms on each other shoulders. I was president of a large fundraising organization that supports Israel, and I was buddies with Richard Dreyfus who attended a Peace Now rally 18 years ago. A good friend from USC was indicted in Water Gate.

While in the Peace Corps in Tunisia, I studied Islam with the Imam of Nabeul, and I'm afraid that some of my former students may have turned into radical Islamists. In Berkeley in the 60s I knew people who did lots of drugs and plotted the overthrow of the government--but were mostly too stoned to get up off their beanbag chairs or roll out of their waterbeds to do any harm. I studied at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley with an Episcopal priest who was part of the G-d is dead movement, I hang with a rabbi who said to an atheist that he probably didn't believe in the same G-d the atheist didn't believe in.

In my own family I have to live with the fact that one uncle (at least) was a card-carrying communist, my mother was married to an unsuccessful Democratic candidate for congress and a cousin was married to a Chinese communist-- a real one and not an American of Chinese origins who was a communist, but a member of Mao's government. Another cousin is married to a Muslim. More critically, I must also confess that I have a dear cousin or two who will vote the Republican party-line.

Oh G-d, please forgive me my sins of association and my inability to lead all to the straight path. Please look kindly upon me for not overly judging others. Oh whoops, that's from the Christian Scriptures. It's okay if I reference that, isn't it? Actually, if I remember correctly didn't Jesus hang out with sinners, with tax collectors and publicans? (Note: Publican is not a shortened form of Republican. It refers to people who hang out in pubs) I'm sure this was done with Your approval. I seek the same. Let me be judged by my actions and inaction, by my sins and not those of others. Most of all give me the strength during this coming month of sleight of hand, misdirection and mudslinging to believe, to believe in democracy, the wisdom of the people and the fairness of our elections.

Great to see Gail-Tzipporah get on board with a fascinating post today. I agree that it's time for the GOP to back away from how Obama may feel about radical movements that were active during his childhood.

I point to this fascinating Haaretz column, though, for the sort of perspective we often can only get from our friends who watch us from a distance.

Gail-Tzipporah's questions for Obama are perfectly fair. But I wonder if her fellow Republicans can digest honest answers in the proper spirit. Disdain for Obama will soon exceed Clinton-rage. It already may have, frankly. As Haaretz columnist Bradley Burston sarcastically puts it:

1. Vote against Obama because you fear and loathe Muslims

2. Vote against Obama because you fear and loathe Arabs.

3. Vote against Obama because you've had all you can take of affirmative action, immigrants, names which defy pronunciation, pluralism, and bend-over-backwards tolerance.

4. Vote against Obama because liberal Democrats are hypocritical wimps, not real Christians, and, in fact, closet gays - and deserve to be punished.

5. Vote against Obama because the New York media and Hollywood deserve to be exposed and disgraced.

6.Vote against Obama because in this day and age in America, white people get the short end of the stick.

7. Vote against Obama because the one group facing the worst discrimination is the community of believing Christian Republicans.

8. Vote against Obama because blacks hate whites.

9. Vote against Obama because even though Jews once helped blacks, blacks hate Jews.

10. Vote against Obama because the Left hates America. Because liberals are ruining America's core institutions, schools, the military, the economy.

I know, this will seem to be an unfair and chilling slam of anyone who dares question "The One." Then again, the sorts of insinuations being made about Obama are chilling in and of themselves.

Obama, as a black man, has been sensitive to the underdog. Some of his friends and associates are terribly angry about what has happened to some of our world's underdogs.

The GOP exploits this anger as a wedge issue, in order to comfort the comfortable and afflict the afflicted. Obama is supposed to cut off all contact with angry people, and his willingness to be friends with an angry person is seen as a secret agenda that binds them all.

Obama may need to do a better job of explaining the nature of his relationships with them, but he does not need to apologize for being a person who's trying to bring different groups together -- even the angry ones. (And let's face it, no one is angrier today than neoconservatives who can never bring themselves to admit the hardships they've caused for millions of innocents; and I don't see McCain cutting all of them off...)

Hello, Lord:

It's me. I'm sure you already know, but I am now a minority. Yes, I am a Republican, but I've come to you to ask you to plant some things in my fellow Republicans' noggins to lead us to greener pastures and so no one will be afraid of walking through any valleys.

First, when they talk about the economy and our hourly bread, make sure they let people know that the whole economic mess started when Bill Clinton deregulated the banks in 1993. Clamp their mouths shut or at the very least send down a lightning bolt when they bring up things that happened when Obama was only eight years old. Make anything before 1970 verboten.

Instead, have them ask him why he voted to excuse gang members from the death penalty in 2001 if they killed someone to help their gang, or why he voted against allowing people to use unregistered handguns in their home to ward off intruders in 2004. Plant it in their cerebellums to ask Barack Obama about his friendship with pro-Palestinian activist, Rashid Khalidi or Reverend Wright. He may have said he didn't know what the reverend's philosophies were, but after twenty years of friendship, they must have talked about more than the aluminum siding and sod. I myself wasn't there, but I think you were.

And while we're at it, help them come up with an economic plan that is not only going to benefit their pals and cronies. I know it's slim pickings this time around, but most of all, give us someone who's going to improve this country all the way around, not just give speeches that would make a hardened criminal cry.

Thank you, amen and over and out.

Sinclair Lewis: "When facism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross."

Here are some salient passages from the AP article:

Palin's words avoid repulsing voters with overt racism. But is there another subtext for creating the false image of a black presidential nominee "palling around" with terrorists while assuring a predominantly white audience that he doesn't see their America?

a post-Sept. 11 America, terrorists are envisioned as dark-skinned radical Muslims, not the homegrown anarchists of Ayers' day 40 years ago. With Obama a relative unknown when he began his campaign, the Internet hummed with false e-mails about ties to radical Islam of a foreign-born candidate.

Whether intended or not by the McCain campaign, portraying Obama as "not like us" is another potential appeal to racism. It suggests that the Hawaiian-born Christian is, at heart, un-American.

The fact is that when racism creeps into the discussion, it serves a purpose for McCain. As the fallout from Wright's sermons showed earlier this year, forcing Obama to abandon issues to talk about race leads to unresolved arguments about America's promise to treat all people equally.

That sounds like a "fair and balanced" analysis to me.

As much as I mock Republicans, you'd be surprised to know that I am a registered Republican. ["I'm just a MAV-er-ICK, like John and Sarah..."]

I believe in limited government and personal responsibility, and I believe that many leftist formulas do not work well in practice. But unlike the right wing of the GOP, I admire liberals -- those who represent the idealistic spirit of Atticus Finch, those who fight for the oppressed when such a cause is unpopular. I think a society needs to respect its mix of heritage-loving conservatives and forward-thinking progressives. We are in a load of manure precisely because we lack that ability at a crucial hour.

And frankly, that is why the Palin attacks on Obama sicken me. It reveals that the GOP machinery is more bankrupt than the Wall Street tycoons they sought to prop up. Yes, Sinclair Lewis was right. And frankly, if the word fascism went over well in focus groups, the GOP strategists, with their toy mavericks, would throw out the cross and the flag middlemen and brand themselves with large F's, while condemning the "commies" on the other side.

I can't say why, in what must've been the '80s, I watched so much "Firing Line," that erudite William F. Buckley Jr. debating society meetup that aired on PBS, I think, way back. Michael Kinsley, later of Salon.com, the L.A. Times editorial pages (albeit briefly) and now Time magazine, was the moderator.

Who wants to play the part of WFB Jr.?

Here's what the AP is moving now on the signed, sealed and delivered $700 billion bailout:

Congress OKs historic bailout bill; Bush signs it

By JULIE HIRSCHFELD DAVIS and DAVID ESPO, Associated Press Writers

With the economy on the brink and elections looming, Congress approved an unprecedented $700 billion government bailout of the battered financial industry on Friday and sent it to President Bush who quickly signed it.

"We have acted boldly to help prevent the crisis on Wall Street from becoming a crisis in communities across our country," Bush said shortly after the vote, although he conceded, "our economy continues to face serious challenges."

Underscoring that somber warning, the Dow Jones industrials, up more than 200 points at the time of the House vote, had fallen into negative territory an hour later. They fluctuated as the afternoon wore on.

The final vote, 263-171 in the House, capped two weeks of tumult in Congress and on Wall Street, punctuated by daily warnings that the country confronted the gravest economic crisis since the Great Depression if lawmakers failed to act. There were 58 more votes for the measure than an earlier version that failed on Monday.

"We all know that we are in the midst of a financial crisis," House Republican leader John Boehner of Ohio said shortly before casting his vote for a massive government intervention in private capital markets that was unthinkable only a month ago.

"And we know that if we do nothing, this crisis is likely to worsen and to put us into an economic slump like most of us have never seen," he said.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said the bill was needed to "begin to shape the financial stability of our country and the economic security of our people."

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson pledged to begin using his new authority quickly, and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said the central bank would work closely with the administration.

Wall Street welcomed the action, but investors also were buffeted by a bad report on the job market. The Labor Department said employers slashed 159,000 jobs in September, the largest cut in five years and further evidence of a sinking economy.

At its core, the bill gives the Treasury Department $700 billion to purchase bad mortage-related securities that are weighing down the balance sheets of institutions that hold them. The flow of credit in the U.S. economy has slowed, in some cases drying up, threatening the ability of businesses to conduct routine operations or expand, and adversely affecting consumers seeking financing for mortgages, cars and student loans. Some state governments have also experienced difficulty borrowing money.

The House vote marked a sharp change from Monday, when an earlier measure was sent down to defeat, largely at the hands of angry conservative Republicans.

On Friday, 91 Republicans joined 172 Democrats to support the bill, while 108 Republicans and 68 Democrats opposed it. Twenty-five Republicans and 33 Democrats switched their votes from "no" to "yes." One Democrat who supported Monday's version, Rep. Jim McDermott of Washington, opposed the bill Friday. One Republican who didn't vote Monday, Rep. Jerry Weller of Illinois, voted "yes" on Friday.

Several of the Democrats who switched were members of the Congressional Black Caucus who said presidential candidate Barack Obama had pledged to support legislation easing the burden on consumers if he wins the White House.

Republican presidential candidate John McCain also lobbied for the measure, according to aides who declined to release a list of lawmakers he called.

Following Monday's vote, Senate leaders quickly took custody of the measure, adding on $110 billion in tax and spending provisions designed to attract additional support, then grafting on legislation mandating broader mental health coverage in the insurance industry. The revised measure won Senate approval Wednesday night, 74-25, setting up a furious round of lobbying in the House as the administration, congressional leaders, the major party presidential candidates and outside groups joined forces behind the measure.

In addition, the measure was changed to broaden the federal government's deposit insurance program, and the Securities and Exchange Commission loosened a regulation to ease the impact of the distressed assets on the balance sheet of financial institutions.

Despite occasionally strong criticism of the added spending and tax measures, the maneuvers worked -- augmented by a sudden switch in public opinion that occurred after the stock market took its largest-ever one-day dive on Monday.

"No matter what we do or what we pass, there are still tough times out there. People are mad -- I'm mad," said Republican Rep. J. Gresham Barrett of South Carolina, who opposed the measure the first time it came to a vote. Now, he said, "We have to act. We have to act now."

Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., another convert, said, "I have decided that the cost of doing nothing is greater than the cost of doing something."

Critics were unrelenting.

"How can we have capitalism on the way up and socialism on the way down," said Rep. Jeb Hensarling of Texas, a leader among conservative Republicans who oppose the central thrust of the legislation -- an unprecedented federal intervention into the private capital markets.

It was little more than two weeks ago that Paulson and Bernanke concluded that the economy was in such danger that a massive government intervention in the private markets was essential.

White the main thrust of their initial proposal was unchanged, lawmakers insisting on greater congressional supervision over the $700 billion, measures to protect taxpayers and steps to crack down on so-called "golden parachutes" that go to corporate executives whose companies fail.

Earlier in the week, the legislation was altered to expand the federal insurance program for individual bank deposits, and the Securities and Exchange Commission took steps to ease the impact of the questionable mortgage-backed securities on financial institutions.

In the moments before the vote, Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, pledged "serious surgery" next year to address the underlying causes of the crisis.

If anything, the economic news added to the sense of urgency.

The Labor Department said initial claims for jobless benefits had increased last week to the highest level since the gloomy days after the 2001 terror attacks. The news of the payroll cuts came on top of Thursday's Commerce Department report that factory orders in August plunged by 4 percent.

Typifying arguments the problem no longer is just a Wall Street issue but also one for Main Street, lawmakers from California and Florida said their state governments were beginning to experience trouble borrowing funds for their own operations.

Pelosi said, "We must win it for Mr. and Mrs. Jones on Main Street."

One month before Election Day, the drama unfolded in an intensely political atmosphere.

Members of the Congressional Black Caucus credited Obama with changing their minds.

Reps. Elijah Cummings and Donna Edwards, both Maryland Democrats, were among them. They said Obama had pledged if he wins the White House that he would help homeowners facing foreclosure on their mortgages. He also pledged to support changes in the bankruptcy law to make it less burdensome on consumers.

Obama's rival, Republican Sen. McCain, announced a brief suspension in his campaign more than a week ago to try and help solve the financial crisis.

Republican Rep. Sue Myrick of North Carolina, who switched her vote to favor the measure, said, "I may lose this race over this vote, but that's OK with me. This is the right vote for the country."

Myrick said she hadn't heard from McCain as she made up her mind about how to vote. "They told me he was going to call me. He didn't," she said.

The vote on Monday had staggered the congressional leadership and contributed to the largest one-day stock market drop in history, 778 points as measured by the Dow Jones Industrials.

Associated Press writers Jim Abrams, Charles Babington, Alan Fram, Suzanne Gamboa, Kimberly Hefling, Andrew Miga, Andrew Taylor, and Erica Werner contributed to this story.

I've been with the Daily News off and on for longer than is probably healthy. My most recent tour began in 2002, after two years at a trade publication, with my return to the paper's Features copy desk. Since September 2006, I've been blogging about technology at Click. In April 2008, I started writing a weekly tech column for the newspaper.

Since about March 2008 (things are blurring, big time), I've been a Web developer, working on the main Daily News site as well as this blogging platform.

I also write for Come on Feel the Nuys and Friendly Fire, and I have a handful of dormant personal blogs ready for anything I might kick out during a spare moment.

A quick perusal of Click would reveal that I'm deeply involved in the use of free, open-source software, including the GNU/Linux and OpenBSD operating systems and the many applications that go with them. I'm a contributing editor at LXer, which is the best place on the Web to find news about Linux and other open-source matters, and where you'll find links to hundreds of Click posts.

I wrote my first political pieces back in the early '80s while a student at Grant High School in what used to be Van Nuys for a photocopied newsletter called The Irregular Bulletin. Don't look — you'll never find them.

I learned a valuable lesson from last night's debate. I may only criticize one woman at a time. When I go for two, my wife's defenses kick in and I could get kicked out of the room.

I was fine while ranting at Sarah Palin's non-answers and evasions. It was definitely working for me to work her over for her style of country cuteness that would make Dan Rather blush like Texas steroid-crazed armadillo having been caught in coitus with a randy jackrabbit.

However, when I offered a nuanced critique of Gwen Ifll's, I thought, awful performance, I got the hate stare and the suggestion that I take it outside--which I took to mean that I could go outside all by my lonesome.

Sarah Palin exceeded her low expectations by not having her head rotate 360 degrees while puking Anderson's Split Peas Soup and speaking in tongues. She was coherent, if off the point of the questions, and spoke her set-pieces well. She was just cuter than a rutting moose cavorting over the once frozen now soggy tundra. (See what happens when Dan Rather goes to Alaska!)

All the Republican criticism of Gwen Ifill before the debate worked. She failed to follow up either Sarah's or Joe's evasions. The Republican operatives had gone after Gwen for writing a book about this new era in American politics for Blacks. They acted surprised that she had been chosen as moderator. The operative word here is "acted." Her book was announced in July and publicized widely. They knew. This, in sports, is called, "working the refs." You argue calls not to get them changed but to get a favorable ruling in the future. They did not expect her to drop out; they expected her to go soft. She did.

Sarah Palin's jaw-dropping assertion that there was room in our "flexible Constitution" for, well, flexibility and an expanded role for the VP didn't get picked up or followed up. It was not Iffle's job to prosecute Palin or fact check every assertion, but this was way too passive a performance.

I thought Palin was pallid, Ifill was awful and Biden just bidin' his time. Sounds like bad Sondheim and made for bad debate.

The whole evening just made me feel sadder than prairie dog on a flooded bayou with a crazed crock on the prowl. Still, all's well that ends well. I did get to sleep indoors.

It was Sarah Palin's debate to lose, and by not melting down, by expressing pride in her middle-class origins and flying the McCain flag, she did what she's there to do: energize the base.

By showing America that she could prep for this debate and hold her own on the stage with foreign policy expert Joe Biden, by not overselling herself (and a big part of that was talking about her tenure as a governor and mayor), she at least showed that she's a quick study, able to learn and wouldn't be as much of a horror as you'd think, were she actually called upon to serve as president.

Whenever asked to tell about myself at parties, barbecues and such, I always feel like singing, "I was born in a ditch by a mother who left me there, naked and cold and too hungry to cry. I never blamed her, I'm sure she left hoping that I had the good sense to die."

There is not a grain of truth to it, but I always liked the song especially when sung by the soprano in "Man of La Mancha."

The straight skinny is that I was born and raised in the heartland of the US, otherwise known of as Chicago, and traveled to California at the tender age of adulthood. I have been writing since childhood and have penned columns for various papers around the country shortly after moving to So Cal.

As a "libertarianish" person, I'm not clear why taxpayer money is needed to offset a belt-tightening that either must happen now or soon after. Increasing our national debt now is pointless if we don't have a more credible plan to lick our addiction to easy-but-fake-money in the near future.

What also irks me is the notion that we're going further into debt in order to play a coddling nanny to panicky Wall Street managers. They are holding my (once) large 401k in their hands, and they are shrinking it by screaming like little schoolgirls. The market psychology vexes me. Forget the fancy MBA talk; why don't more fund managers see investments as long-term matters that don't require short-term freaking out?

Couldn't politicians like Bush and McCain, who just days ago insisted the economy's fundamentals are strong, focus more effort on lecturing Wall Street about these ostensibly strong fundamentals, and less effort on suddenly throwing billions at them to cheer them up?

How many more examples like this do we need to prove that the MSM has a diabolically deceptive agenda?

Thank heaven that the truth came out. Now we can get back to bailouts and presidential debates.

Regarding the latter issue, here's the advice I'd give Joe Biden: Respect Sarah Palin, right to the point of trying to win her over to your side. Criticize John McCain's policies and flip-flops about "the sound economy," as if to say, "C'mon, Sarah, I know that you're way too savvy to be associated with his approach; let's find a better way to do things."

That will both disarm her, at a personal level, and force her to defend McCain in a way that will expose her lack of command of McCain's actual policies.

Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi loudly claims that the Democrats should get no blame for the Wall Street financial mess. That's laughable. Democratic president Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton and Congressional Democrats just as eagerly as the GOP cut sweetheart deals with financial industry lobbyists to gut lending and stock trading regulations, winked and nodded at the banks and brokerage houses as they engaged in an orgy of dubious stock swapping, buys, and trading, conned millions of homeowners into taking out catastrophic sub prime loans, and watered down the oversight powers of government regulatory agencies.

In 2005, Senate Democrats killed a bill to give regulators the power to require companies to shed their investments in risky assets. Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Banking Committee Chair Christopher Dodd and other Congressional Democrats have been on the Wall Street dole to the tune of millions.

Make no mistake, when the phony Bush bailout swindle passes, Pelosi, Dodd and other Congressional Democrats will be its biggest cheerleaders.

There is something for everyone to hate in the bailout bill. Having metastasized from three pages to four hundred, there are plenty of devils in the details and ample opportunities for mischief in its administration.

We know we have a strange new world (but not a brave one) when more Democrats vote with Bush than Republicans. It does make liberals second-guess our instincts. With Sherman, Schiff, and the Sanchez sister against, with Kucinich outraged at the bill, we must wonder what we are doing. I can tell you with absolute certainty that I am not sure of the best way out of this mess.

The two parties generally have different approaches to helping the economy--and I think coffee making (instead of sausage making) is an apt metaphor. Republicans are drips--that is like making drip coffee they want to put the money in at the top and believe it will filter down. Democrats, on the other hand, are perky. They put the water in at the bottom and expect it to percolate up through the system. For coffee both methods work-through I'm a drip guy myself. In economics an awful lot of money seems to stay up in the cone and not come down to the masses.

The conservatives who oppose this rescue and the populists of Main Street are outraged that taxpayers are "rewarding the failure of the greedy Wall Street elites" and rescuing those "irresponsible people who took out mortgages they couldn't afford." Please note whatever the merits or demerits of the plan and its ultimate efficacy, that these criticisms are code words.

"Irresponsible people," particularly customers of subprime loans, means minorities. Fannie May and Freddy Mac were designed to allow poor people, who couldn't get conventional loans, into the ownership society. These were well-intended programs for people who had been redlined. Since the face of poverty in America is portrayed in dark hues, this is a clear code and a weapon to be used against Obama.

"Wall Street elite" is code for Jews. From Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs, and Wisener, Herzog and Frankle of AIG the face of this massive failure of our finance system will be portrayed as Jewish.

The only bright light here is that maybe this will reunite the historic Black/Jewish alliance as Main Street lumps us together and give us lumps. How do you like your coffee?

Public diplomacy involves the concept of using "soft power" to get a nation's point across. It involves those aspects of international relationships that go beyond "hard power" (military solutions) and formal diplomacy. In a sense, it involves the larger discourse among nations, including news and entertainment media, cultural connections, and so on. Public diplomacy, at its essence, is a productive two-way conversation that ultimately allows you to hear and be heard.

I'm coming on board USC's Center for Public Diplomacy as a researcher, and have posted there some thoughts relating to the West's public diplomacy challenge in Pakistan.

Breaking: The Wall Street bailout measure appears at this point to be headed to passage in the Senate tonight. Word is that the House will follow due to a bit of sweetening:

• Raising the FDIC insurance cap for savings accounts from $100,000 to $250,000 (Interesting aside: France and Ireland guarantee an unlimited amount)
• Easing rules about how companies count devalued (read: mortgage-backed) assets on their balance sheets
• An extension of some GOP-friendly tax relief

Also breaking (literally): YouTube is getting absolutely hammered right now, so the above video barely plays in the air-conditioned splendor of Daily News HQ in lovely Woodland Hills, Calif.

And now we begin this Friendly Fire rant:

Republicans contend that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's baldly partisan floor speech before the White House's Wall Street bailout bill came up for a vote blew a big hole in whatever was keeping restless Republicans on board the measure sent to them by their own president.

I won't point out the president's popularity ratings, if only because those for Congress are as low, if not lower.

The fact that Speaker Pelosi was supposed to carry water for President Bush aside, remember triangulation as practiced by President Clinton? Before Monica (should we call it "BM"?), President Clinton was the master of working with a Congress from the opposing party. Now we have a president, albeit the most lame of ducks, not able to get his own party in line behind a measure he says is critical to the economic life of the country.

Yeah, I know that the Democrats have the slimmest of slim majorities in the House. Maybe its too slim. It sure isn't enough to get much done. If the Dems had their own brand of triangulation in place, there might be more happening on the House floor, but Rep. Pelosi and company seem to be waiting for the November election to sweep in enough new members from their party to allow them to not just control the agenda but marginalize the GOP in the process. (Hint: Don't count on it).

Ever since Social Security reform (remember that?) failed, we haven't heard much from President Bush either in terms of game-changing legislation about ... anything. "Surge is working" ... that's about it, right?

From the way the lending industry has conducted itself over the past five or more years to the dependence of the entire financial sector on mortgage-backed securities and other doomed financial instruments that depended on the continued, unabated rise of real-estate values, even as the rest of the economy remained stagnant, there have been plenty of signs that the country was headed for an economic thumping.

Who knew that the thumping would be this hard — and felt worldwide.

We weren't the only ones throwing the old lending rules out and turning the land under our feet into a continually barfing money machine.

Bottom line: Housing prices didn't shoot as high as they did because the properties got more valuable; banks made the money needed to move into them way, way less valuable by giving more and more of it to people with less and less ability to pay.

Endlessly increasing "flip this house" equity was supposed to cure all ills.

It was a pyramid scheme, pure and simple, and those who got in too late and didn't get out are now holding the bag. If prices were such that the traditional 30-year-fixed, 20-percent-down loan would work, most would choose that. But the no-money-down, equity-in-5-years-or-bust loans flooding the market kept pushing up prices for no reason other than that banks made money — lots of it — with every new loan, every refinance job.

Too bad America's banks and investment houses set themselves — and the rest of us — up.

Here's the scorecard:

• President Bush would get a pass ... if he weren't in the eighth year of his eight-year presidency
  
• The Democratically controlled Congress would get a pass if it had sent any legislation at all on mortgage reform to the president's desk
  
• Wall Street? Sure, they didn't have regulation stopping them, but it's pure, unadulterated greed: No pass for them.

Bush, Congress and the financial industry: Get a crow-filled feedbag and start eating.

An interesting point here by Christopher Caldwell of the Financial Times and the conservative Weekly Standard:

The point of intelligent design is to take science down a peg. To warn enthusiasts that they risk "discrediting science itself" is a bit dense. For them, evolution is a potent symbol of the way "scientific materialism" leaves people feeling demeaned, disenfranchised, stripped of prerogatives and less free. This feeling is not groundless. Dostoyevsky and Marx said similar things....

The anti-evolution activists in America's small towns are wrong on the science - but wrong in a way that is of absolutely no consequence to them unless they choose a career in horse-breeding or molecular biochemistry. Their feelings of disenfranchisement, on the other hand, are real and consequential. Experts control an ever larger share of decisions about where roads can be built, what people can ingest, what can be taught and whether the decisions of democratic bodies pass constitutional muster. Like so much else in US public life, the battle over evolution is a class conflict disguised as a religious or moral conflict. It is comforting to look at the fight over evolution as one that pits the educated against the ignorant. It is that. But it is also a fight that pits technocrats against democrats.