"I don't think me calling House Republican members would have been that helpful. I tend not to be that persuasive on that side of the aisle."

- Barack Obama, acknowledging he doesn't know how to do bipartisanship and that his whole post-partisan gestalt is about as fact-based as the Easter Bunny. But he does know hope and change!

Politico's Crypt blog reports both Obama and McCain will be back in D.C. for a vote on the bailout. This is the plan according to a Senate GOP aide:

The Senate will vote on the economic rescue plan tomorrow night after a series of stacked votes starting at 7:30.

The structure is this:

The Senate will call up H.R. 1424, the text of which will be substituted with the economic rescue plan (a Dodd amendment which must have the consent of both the Majority and Minority Leaders). The only other amendment in order will be a Sanders amendment that will be handled by a voice vote.

If we can't trust her to tell the truth about her lip liner, what can we trust her on?

H/t Allahpundit, whom I am sparing the musical stylings of Hinder by not adding a "Lips of an Angel" YouTube to this post.

Regardless of whether a bailout passes, this is a message that has to get out, not just for McCain's sake, but for the sake of capitalism in our country.

In the clip used in this ad, Clinton was asked if the Democrats weren't being just a bit disingenuous by saying it was "unbridled capitalism" that caused the crisis instead of acknowledging their part in propping up Fannie and Freddie. Clinton was honest in saying that they do bear some responsibility for the conundrum we're in now.

The message of Republicans (+ Bill Clinton) and Democrats on what got us here are diametrically opposed. Democrats want to evade responsibility and are brazen enough to blame the markets for their own meddling, thereby justifying—surprise!—loads of government intervention even beyond a possible bailout. Republicans have somewhat tepidly offered the notion that it was not the market, but government intervention in the market, that caused the problem. They are right, but conservative blogs, commentators, and honest reporters have done a lot of the heavy lifting in this department, as Republicans on the Hill tried to play bipartisan softball (and got hit with a series of partisan pitches for their efforts).

McCain has not helped by following the Democrat model of blaming Wall Street greed for all of our problems. I understand his need to sound a populist note, but what would also be rather populist is to explain how liberal elites in Washington had crashed the credit markets you and I depend upon as part of another failed social engineering experiment, which by the way yielded their party millions in campaign donations. They repeatedly ignored warnings of a crisis and, in many cases, worked against greater regulation of Fannie and Freddie only to claim it was John McCain's (yes, the McCain of McCain-Feingold) strict adherence to deregulation that got us here.

The unfortunate part of the messaging has been that until this ad from McCain, Bill Clinton (ostensibly a Democrat and Obama supporter) had been one of the best political figures at articulating the truth about Fannie, Freddie and culpability of Dems.

I watched floor speeches yesterday by Republicans for and against the bailout, and saw little of it. McCain pointedly missed the opportunity to wallop Obama on the issue in the first half of the debate Friday. When Obama trumpeted his own alleged calls for reform and blamed the crisis on deregulation, McCain demurred, only saying, "I supported reform also."

Even with markets holding strong today (and let's hope things stay that way), we may be on the brink of a huge, depressing, but necessary intervention in the markets. I strain against the idea, and hope it won't be necessary in its gargantuan form, but many conservatives I trust (Tom Coburn, Paul Ryan, Eric Cantor, The Heritage Foundation), have conceded that something probably must be done. McCain and Republicans cannot allow the lesson taken from this to be that if it hadn't been for those dastardly markets granted all that pesky freedom, everything would have been fine.

McCain making that argument will get more coverage than anything out of the mouths of conservative House or Senate members. I'm glad to see him going there, both on a philosophical and political level.

The McCain campaign has a new "web ad" out that mocks Barack Obama for a comment he made yesterday. After weeks of mocking John McCain for his claim that the fundamentals of the American economy are strong, Obama said yesterday:

"After this immediate problem, we've got the long-term fundamentals that will really make sure this economy grows."

It's not surprising that he would say this. Although his political advisers have urged him to use McCain's words on the campaign trail, his economic advisers have been saying, in effect, that McCain was right. And sometimes they say it in public. Last week, Obama economic adviser Jason Furman told the Washington Post: "This is a major fiscal problem in the short run, but it doesn't alter the long-term fiscal picture."

Sounds a lot like "the fundamentals of the economy are strong."

Here's the ad script:

ANNCR: Who's Barack Obama?

First, Obama attacked McCain.

Then said:

BARACK OBAMA: "We've got the long term fundamentals that will really make sure this economy grows."

ANNCR: Strong fundamentals?

Is Obama saying McCain's right?

Or is Obama saying his own attacks are shameless?

Either way, Obama's a hypocrite.

JOHN MCCAIN: I'm John McCain and I approve this message.

I'm eager to read the lengthy, front-page story in tomorrow's New York Times on the mixed messages from the Obama campaign and how such poor communications reflects a campaign in disarray.

With an assist from Bill Clinton:

On MSNBC this morning, John McCain said: “I think Americans have yet to fully understand this [bailout] is not in the interests of Wall Street or Washington insiders." During his remarks today in Des Moines, McCain provided a couple examples of how the credit crunch affects ordinary voters: keeping businesses and students from getting loans. Policy wise, McCain said the Treasury should exercise its recently granted authority to purchase mortgages and use the Exchange Stabilization Fund as "creatively as possible to provide backstop for accounts across our financial system to maintain confidence on the part of savers and investors." He also endorsed raising the FDIC deposit insurance cap to $250,000.

Full remarks here:

We are in the greatest financial crisis of our lifetimes. Congressional inaction has put every American and the entire economy at the gravest risk. Yesterday the country and the world looked to Washington for leadership, and Congress once again came up empty-handed.

I am disappointed at the lack of resolve and bipartisan good will among members of both parties to fix this problem. Bipartisanship is a tough thing; never more so when you’re trying to take necessary but publicly unpopular action. But inaction is not an option.

Businesses all over the country cannot borrow to finance their own operations and pay their bills. If we do nothing, many may fail.

Sonic Corporation, a drive-in restaurant chain based in Oklahoma, learned on Thursday that one of its lenders, GE Capital, had stopped extending new loans to the chain's franchisees. That will block plans to rebuild restaurants, add equipment and open new locations. When small businesses like Sonic franchisees can't borrow, contractors don't get the remodeling work, equipment-makers lose sales, and restaurants go out of business. It hurts the entire community.

When financing dries up, students can’t get loans.

In Wisconsin, more than 100 Milwaukee Area Technical College students couldn’t access private loans to fund their education. Fortunately the school was able to come up with emergency loans, but this temporary arrangement cannot continue. Markets need to work so that people can get financial help and students can be educated.

From Ezra Klein’s blog comes this lovely“let them eat cake” gem from Robert Borosage, co-Director of the lefty activist group Campaign for America’s Future:

The bail out will take place simply to avoid that depression. But depressions have some salutary effects - the scoundrels go belly up, the weakest get purged. And, in the wake of the disaster, people demand strict regulation of the money lenders to keep their greed in check, and government spends money on the real economy to put people back to work.

Ah yes – the many wonderful “salutary effects” of a depression. I especially love the really macho stuff about the “weakest getting purged.” At the risk of providing Mr. Borosage with a clue, the “weakest” aren’t the guys at Lehman who were pulling down eight figures a year until a couple of weeks ago and whose comeuppance so obviously thrills Mr. Borosage. The weakest among us are those on the economic margins. While a depression might not “purge” them, it will surely hit them hardest. They’ll be the ones without jobs and without the means to heat their homes. Actually, those who are truly the weakest won’t have homes to heat.

But as Mr. Borosage would probably argue, you can’t make a delicious omelet of government hyperactivity without breaking a few eggs. It’s funny. Organizations like Campaign for America’s Future are supposed to care about the weakest among us. Perhaps they do. But obviously they care a whole lot more about their political agenda and ambitions.

If he manages to get through Thursday's debate without saying something insane, I will be floored:

As he exited the hotel for his dinner break, Biden was asked “Senator, can we get your reaction to the House bill not passing?”

Biden interrupted the question with a “Hey folks,” to reporters and then said “Oh, things are going well.”

His press secretary later said he misheard the question. Here's to his mishearing a few things on Thursday.

Via Drudge, children are taught to sing praises of The One:

Creepy.

There's an astounding admission buried in this NYT account of the failed bailout vote yesterday:

Aides to Mr. Obama said he had not directly reached out to try to sway any House Democrats who opposed the measure. But where Mr. McCain had accused Mr. Obama of taking a hands-off approach to the financial crisis, Democratic advisers said they believed that Mr. McCain now had a role in the legislation’s failure.

Really? The man who was ostensibly working the phones such that he was confident enough to predict the passage of the bill in prepared remarks sent to reporters yesterday, in fact, made no phone calls to assure the passage of said bill. The man whose party has no particular philosophical aversion to government interference in the markets and is in control of Congress. The man who's been assuring voters of his very serious weighing in by phone from the campaign trail...didn't actually pick up a phone. This is the real Obama. He is a leader of crowds, not crises.

This won't be a story, but it should be, and Republicans and McCain should point it out. The argument against Dems is the utter lack of competent leadership by Obama and Pelosi, not whining about a Pelosi speech.

Pelosi lost more than 12 of her fellow California Democrats, close friends and allies, and Committee chairs in this vote. Obama failed to take a public position on the vote or to convince any teetering Democrats with promises of a trip to their Districts or other help from the Messiah himself, losing Dems from the Chicago area and much of the Congressional Black Caucus with whom he could have had sway.

And yet, the guy who got his hands dirty, tried to make a few things happen, and didn't quite get the ball across the goal line is the one who takes the political heat for this. Which is why, as Bill Kristol and Dean Barnett have suggested, McCain may as well go all-out on the leadership front. It's where he's comfortable working, and where Obama will never dare to walk ahead of him.

Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, Maxine Waters, and Nancy Pelosi willfully ignored the impending crisis for years before they suddenly saw the light and were able to blame a politically palatable entity for it—Republican embrace of "unbridled" capitalism and deregulation. They too seem to have reaped the benefits of inaction, succeeding in pinning the blame on the markets they meddled with, letting their vulnerable members oppose an unpopular bill, and possibly getting a second run at a bailout bill filled with the pork they cut out the first time around.

In Washington, sometimes "leadership" ain't all its cracked up to be. But isn't the political windfall of inaction—conveniently kvetching without responsibility—usually a privilege reserved for the minority party? Pelosi and Co. seem to be enjoying it no matter the circumstances. Maybe that's the "change" Obama's been talking about bringing to Washington.

Mark Leibovich reports:

There were a few cringes within Obama World over the weekend after Bob Shrum, the longtime Democratic operative, essentially placed Barack Obama in the White House. ...

It was Mr. Shrum who planted this memorable Election Night kiss of death onto John Kerry in 2004: 'Can I be the first to call you Mr. President' Mr. Shrum said to the Massachusetts senator after early exit polls showed him defeating George W. Bush.

After television networks called Florida for Al Gore four years earlier, Mr. Shrum declared to a group of Gore aides in Nashville that 'We’ve finally pushed the boulder up the hill,' he said, according to two people who were with him that night. He was seen hugging and offering congratulations to several people at the Loews Hotel.

Shrum is famously 0 for 8 in the presidential elections with which he's been associated. Luckily for Obama, Shrum has stayed on the sidelines this year. The Obama machine - one of the most effective and efficient campaigns in recent memory - is run by Chicago operative David Axelrod and longtime Gephardt hand David Plouffe. This may be the year the curse of Shrum is broken.

The rise of new powers in recent years has led to the theory of economic decoupling. The theory says that, as places like China, India, Brazil, Russia, and to a lesser extent Vietnam and other southeast Asian countries rise, they are less dependent on the American economy. Problems in the American economy therefore matter less to these new powers, as they can always trade with one another. They don't require American capital or even confidence in American economic power and leadership. They've "decoupled."

Interesting theory. Except recent events have exposed it to be, what's the word, totally false.

The presidential race remains highly volatile. A recent Diageo/Hotline poll found 23 percent of voters are undecided and another 9 percent saying they still might change their minds.

Now, that doesn’t mean over a third of the electorate are truly swing voters. Partisans in this crowd will probably vote for the party they have supported in the past. But even half that number could swing the race from nail-biter to landslide depending on how these voters break.

Second, we probably won’t know much about these voters for several more weeks. Research indicates a high percentage of self-identified independents, often one-fourth or more, won’t decide until the last two weeks before the election or even Election Day.

Finally, undecided voters harbor very different questions about the two candidates. Mark Blumenthal posted this interesting nugget yesterday:

The results I found most interesting involved the voters that are undecided or uncertain about Obama and McCain:

[T]hese voters harbor doubts about the shortcomings they perceive in Obama and in McCain. By a 34-point margin (52 percent to 18 percent), they see McCain as "more prepared to lead the country" than Obama. And by a nearly opposite 31-point margin (50 percent to 21 percent), they say that Obama "better understands the needs and priorities" of people like them.

The key difference, omitted from the print piece, is that the Obama numbers on the "prepared" question was much lower among the uncertain voters than among all voters. Similarly, the McCain number on the "understands" question was lower among the uncertain voters than among all voters on the full sample.

In the end, these swing voters will have to pick which of these two questions--“who is better to lead” vs. “who understands people like me”--matters more. That choice will decide the next president.

First, some bad news: TWS contributing editor P.J. O'Rourke has been diagnosed with cancer. The good news: The cancer is highly curable, and O'Rourke has written a very funny and thoughtful LA Times op-ed in light of his diagnosis.

Get well soon.

(Hat tip: Mark Hemingway)

Drop what you're doing and read Republican consultant Mike Murphy's extremely entertaining column in this week's Time magazine. It's about the strange rituals associated with prepping candidates for debates. Here's a taste:

It is vital that your candidate not hear your opponent's answers for the first time onstage, since that will often lead to panic if a candidate feels the opponent's answer is far better than his or her own. Hmmm. Great answer. I've got nothing like that. I'm a loser. I'm going to lose this debate. In high school, Belinda would have wanted to go to the prom with him, not me. Anger. MUST ... ATTACK ... NOW!!! At that point something very bad usually happens.

Classic.

Marc Ambinder notes that both Obama and McCain now favor raisng the FDIC cap from $100,000 to $250,000.

Jonathan Martin reports the RNC will spend $5 million airing the ad in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Virginia and Indiana.

Wise words from Megan McArdle on Nancy Pelosi's failure of leadership yesterday on the bailout vote:

Pelosi screwed up royally. She is the Democratic Tom DeLay. Newt Gingrich was an ideologue, but Tom DeLay was simply a partisan, most keenly interested in maximizing his party's political power. Pelosi cut a deal in which, as far as I can tell, every single Republican in a safe seat had to vote yes so that the Democrats could maximize their no votes. Given that the Republican caucus is pretty much in open revolt, this was beyond moronic. She then spent a week openly and repeatedly blaming the Republicans and the Bush administration for the current crisis. The way she set things up, it was "Heads I win, tails you lose": vote for the deal and I'll paint you as heartless reactionaries bailing out our fat cat friends. If you're going to do that, you'd better make sure you have some goddamn margin for error in your own party. She didn't. Then she got up and delivered yet another speech blaming the Republicans for the bailout deal she was about to pass.

As Karl Rove said on the radio yesterday, there were a number of Democrats Pelosi should have been able to win over had she tried:

I think criticism of Pelosi would have gained a lot more traction had House Republicans simply voted against the bill out of principle. But the Republicans trotted out a petulant argument that some members voted against the bill because Pelosi gave a partisan speech prior to the vote. And their folly rather than Pelosi's failure of leadership understandably became the center of attention.

(Hat tip: Johnny Dollar's Place; Hot Air.)

So here’s the state of play as the Great Depression redux edges ominously closer. The Paulson Plan failed today, with a solid majority of Republicans voting against it. The opposition Republicans fall into two camps:

1) The Mike Pence doctrinaires who welcome a free market curative like a Depression for our current woes. I guess they view it as sort of the economic equivalent of that stuff you drink the night before a colonoscopy. As misguided as Pence and his minions are, they at least have a certain nobility complementing their foolishness. I would be remiss if I didn’t note that a significant subdivision of the Pence camp rejects the counsel of virtually everyone who knows anything about economics and instead believes that our current situation isn’t so dire. Call it conservative magical thinking.

2) A bunch of other Republicans who would have voted for the Paulson Plan had Nancy Pelosi not said some stuff that hurt their feelings just prior to the roll call. They had thought passing the Paulson Plan was an urgent national priority. Then, the Speaker said some stuff that made personal pique take priority. Outdumbing the Pence Republicans was a tall task – this coterie of GOP representatives was up to the task.

So what will happen? We’re in uncharted territory here, and I don’t want to tacitly posit an economic competence that I lack. However, the many people I’ve spoken with who do understand economics and our financial system are gravely concerned – all of them. The only place you can find people who aren’t gravely concerned are on Capitol Hill and in the media, the two places in our society where people are paid to offer opinions on things they know nothing about. Suffice to say that if our banking and financial system doesn’t recover its footing, the overwhelming consensus is that we’re headed for very rough times.

Here’s what’s been lost in the debate while people on both the right and left have offered ignorant jeremiads about “bailing out Wall Street.” If the economy tilts into a deep recession or even a depression, it’s not the wealthy or even Barack Obama’s cherished middle class who will pay the deepest price. In any such circumstance, it’s the people on the economic margins who get hurt the most. The ones without a nest-egg and without a 401(k) are the ones who have no safety net when they lose their jobs and health insurance. If unemployment goes from 6% to 10%, it won’t be the investment bankers who start heating their homes at 56 degrees in January. Populist rhetoric is almost always misguided. That has never been more the case than over the past week.

In case you’re looking for political ramifications, the news is not good if you’re of the Republican persuasion. As much as I would like to lay all of our forthcoming problems at the feet of the House members whose feelings Nancy Pelosi so easily bruised, they’re a bit player in this drama. A Republican occupies the White House, and the buck stops with him. It’s a Republican economy, and it’s a law of political physics that we will pay the price for its shortcomings.

In case you’re looking for ways forward, there are plenty out there. A few days ago, Bill Kristol linked to a provocative piece by Harvard professor Lucian Bebchuk that suggested the best way to recapitalize our faltering financial institutions would be via rights offerings backstopped by the federal government. Translated into English, this plan would address the financial system’s most urgent need – recapitalizing the financial institutions that need it – directly. What’s more, the recapitalization would come from shareholders, not taxpayers. It likely wouldn’t cost Joe Sixpack a red cent. It would also keep the federal government out of the banking business, a matter rightly near and dear to the hearts of libertarian leaning Republicans. And yet they never considered this plan, such is the state of their current non-constructive pose.

The Paulson Plan only addresses (or should I say addressed) the need for recapitalization indirectly, by providing the funds necessary by gobbling up presently undesirable mortgage backed securities. The Republicans could have spent the past two vital weeks coming behind a plan like Professor Bebchuk’s (or another one) assuming Paulson’s plan was unacceptable. Instead, they dithered. Some in the GOP obviously would rather have a Great Depression redux instead of taking the necessary steps to prevent it. Call it a twisted matter of principle. My point here isn’t to lobby for the Bebchuk Plan. My point is to show that there are potential solutions out there that the political class hasn’t seriously (or even frivolously) addressed.

There’s an opportunity here for the McCain campaign. Of course, there’s also an opportunity for the Obama campaign. Answers are needed, and lord knows the two senators have a big enough platform to provide them. But as far as Obama is concerned, his “prudence” by now is a known quantity. We won’t see any game changing propositions emanate from this preternaturally cautious politician. Obama lags events - he doesn’t lead them.

That leaves it up to McCain. Frankly, whether he can politically overcome a millstone the size of this economic crisis is questionable. Let’s face it – the financial meltdown is the equivalent of Mark Foley’s salacious instant messages on stilts. But there remains the matter of duty. House Democrats, House Republicans, Senate Democrats, Senate Republicans and the White House have all been unable to move the ball forward. Collectively, they’ve spent the past ten days squabbling over a badly flawed bill that even if passed may still not have saved us from a very deep recession or worse.

The only guy out there with the political juice to offer something new and get it seriously considered is John McCain. Even if he got a good bill passed, it might not be enough for him to win the election. But it would be his finest hour.

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

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

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

UPDATE: The following statement from the McCain campaign is fair enough, as far as it goes. But surely its logic is this: if this is really “a national economic crisis,” and others have failed to lead, then McCain should lead—by re-suspending his campaign (fine, let observers mock him when he announces this), and leading his party and the Congress towards a solution. They won’t mock if he can pull this off:

All: Please see the following statement by McCain-Palin senior policy adviser Doug Holtz-Eakin:

“From the minute John McCain suspended his campaign and arrived in Washington to address this crisis, he was attacked by the Democratic leadership: Senators Obama and Reid, Speaker Pelosi and others. Their partisan attacks were an effort to gain political advantage during a national economic crisis. By doing so, they put at risk the homes, livelihoods and savings of millions of American families.

“Barack Obama failed to lead, phoned it in, attacked John McCain, and refused to even say if he supported the final bill.

“Just before the vote, when the outcome was still in doubt, Speaker Pelosi gave a strongly worded partisan speech and poisoned the outcome.

“This bill failed because Barack Obama and the Democrats put politics ahead of country.” --McCain-Palin senior policy adviser Doug Holtz-Eakin

UPDATE II: John McCain is having a “Small Business Roundtable Discussion” in Des Moines, Iowa tomorrow morning. Should be an upbeat discussion!

McCain can explain why his fellow Republicans defeated legislation that McCain had basically endorsed, apparently because Nancy Pelosi was mean to them. Is the McCain campaign sure he wouldn’t be better off coming back to D.C. and trying to help solve the problem?

Reps. Boehner, Blunt, and Cantor just held a press conference, during which each of them blamed the loss of at least 12 Republican votes on Pelosi's floor speech, which struck a partisan tone that made teetering Republicans set their teeth and vote against her.

Republicans largely pulled their punches during the floor debate today, avoiding blaming the Democrats who deserve some blame for this crisis. They clearly felt the delicate bipartisan nature of the project was betrayed by Pelosi's fire-breathing, and they called her on it, Cantor holding up her speech in his hands as the "reason this did not pass today."

Democrats have been blaming Republicans for sinking the effort, but 97 Democrats voted against the bill. Cantor placed the blame, not only on Pelosi's inability to listen to Republican members, but her inability to lead her own party, claiming Republicans brought important bills to the floor when they were in the majority only when they were ready to deliver votes.

"We could have gotten there today had it not been for the partisan speech that the speaker gave on the floor of the House," House Minority Leader John Boehner said. Pelosi's words, the Ohio Republican said, "poisoned our conference, caused a number of members that we thought we could get, to go south."

I'm looking for text of Pelosi's speech. Update: Very rough transcript below the fold.

Update: I think the House Republicans handicapped themselves by not making the central thrust of their argument against Pelosi about her inability to lead her own party. The criticism of Pelosi's speech is an easy one to parry for House Dems, who will say, "Really, one little speech is all that was required for you to endanger your country?" Even if the speech did matter, and it was undoubtedly a petty, impolitic move, it's hard to make that argument too loud without looking like they're whining.

Pelosi's inability to lead her own party and, indeed, her inability to even read them— she evidently believed she had the votes to make it happen— is closer to a political winner as an argument for Republicans. She is just an utter hot mess of a leader, and the opinion polls on Congress show it.

The argument:

Pelosi has 235 members. She needed 218. She could spare 17 members and still pass the bill.

The GOP spotted her 65 members, for a bill that made most Republicans' skin crawl in both broad outline and in terms of detail.

That meant Pelosi could afford to lose 82 Democrats.

She lost 95.

Regardless, we're going to be covering this bickering for another week or so, and who knows where the markets will go. Where are McCain and Obama right now?

The tally with just a few seconds remaining in the original voting time is 213 Nays and 192 Yeas with only 26 votes remaining.

Update: In the words of President Bush, "this sucker's going down." 228 against, 205 for, with one not voting. There would have to be some serious arm-twisting in the next few minutes to get this passed.

Now, what do they do?

Update: 227-206 was the final vote, with one abstention. The Dow was down 700 at its lowest point today. It's now down 550.

The extent to which Rep. Barney Frank, Sen. Chris Dodd, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Barack Obama himself are avoiding blame for this crisis despite symbiotic relationships with those who caused it is truly amazing.

The nerve with which they hold forth about "unbridled capitalism" and "deregulation" while conveniently forgetting their culpability in government interference in the market, which first pressured banks (via Community Reinvestment Act) and then incentivized banks (via Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) to make risky loans to people with troubled credit history.

Obama has been heavily involved with a certain group of community organizers that encouraged such behavior since the very beginning of his career— ACORN. I'm going to pull out a little bit of Stanley Kurtz's piece on this connection, but read the whole thing. The details are devastating, even if you know the basic outline already:

[Prominent Chicago ACORN activist Madeline] Talbott continued her effort to, as she put it, drag banks "kicking and screaming" into high-risk loans. A September 1993 story in The Chicago Sun-Times presents her as the leader of an initiative in which five area financial institutions (including two of her former targets, now plainly cowed - Bell Federal Savings and Avondale Federal Savings) were "participating in a $55 million national pilot program with affordable-housing group ACORN to make mortgages for low- and moderate-income people with troubled credit histories."

What made this program different from others, the paper added, was the participation of Fannie Mae - which had agreed to buy up the loans. "If this pilot program works," crowed Talbott, "it will send a message to the lending community that it's OK to make these kind of loans."

Well, the pilot program "worked," and Fannie Mae's message that risky loans to minorities were "OK" was sent. The rest is financial-meltdown history.

IT would be tough to find an "on the ground" community organizer more closely tied to the subprime-mortgage fiasco than Madeline Talbott. And no one has been more supportive of Madeline Talbott than Barack Obama.

As for Frank and Co., watch them deny, deny, deny the crisis in 2004, a year after the Bush administration tried to tighten up Fannie/Freddie oversight, so they could keep the gravy train moving. Republicans are not blameless in this by any means, as they still had a majority when reforms were suggested, but the brazenness with which Democrats are blaming today's crisis on the market they manipulated for their own gain should not be overlooked. Spread this video.

The Sunday Times reports that over the weekend book publisher Martin Rynja had his London home firebombed by three Muslims who found one of the books his firm is publishing to be blasphemous:

Security officials believe Rynja was targeted for assassination because his firm, Gibson Square, is preparing to publish a romantic novel about Aisha, child bride of the Prophet Muhammad. The Jewel of Medina, by the first-time American author Sherry Jones, describes an imaginary sex scene between the prophet and his 14-year-old wife.

It was withdrawn from publication in America last month after its publisher there, Random House, said it feared a violent reaction by “a small radical segment” of Muslims. It said “credible and unrelated sources” had warned that the book could incite violence.

Random House reacted after Islamic scholars objected to its contents, saying it treated the wife of the Prophet as a sex object. One of them, Denise Spellberg, of the University of Texas at Austin, described the novel as “soft-core pornography”, referring to a scene in which Muhammad consummates his marriage to Aisha. She called it “a declaration of war” and a “national security issue”.

At the time, her warnings were dismissed by the author. “Anyone who reads the book will not be offended,” said Jones. “I wrote the book with the utmost respect for Islam.” However, Jones admitted receiving death threats after the book was withdrawn.

It would have been perfectly reasonable for Random House to spike this book if it had a general policy against publishing smut or religiously insensitive material. But how shameful is it that a major American book publisher openly admits it decided not to publish a book simply because it feared the violent reactions of radical Muslims? How shameful is it that an American author has to travel overseas to exercise her First Amendment rights?

Post-debate “snap” surveys aimed at determining a “winner” are in vogue given the proliferation of polling by media outlets this election cycle. But what do the results really mean for the November election?

Pollster.com summarizes the five post-debate polls (and a focus group) from last Friday night and provides several points to consider in interpreting these numbers. Read the full analysis here.

Two of the five surveys, Gallup/USA Today and CNN, gave the edge to Obama on the question of “who did a better job.” Two others, Los Angeles Times and Zogby reported much closer results in their surveys. The CBS/Knowledge Networks poll was a little unique, focusing only on “uncommitted” voters in its sample. It also gave the advantage to Obama on the “who performed better” question. (Democrat Stan Greenberg conducted a focus group with “undecided” voters in Missouri, and his results are also discussed in the Pollster.com post).

The first question anyone should ask when reading these results: Does “who did a better job” contain any real electoral consequences? Mark Blumenthal sums it up well:

What does "winning" a debate mean? Is it about which candidate "did a better job" as perceived by the voters? Or is it about which candidate made the most progress in growing or solidifying their support? While most of the pollsters have emphasized their results on the "who did a better job" question, what most of us want to know is whether the debate made a difference in overall vote preference. That latter issue is much harder to gauge from these first "snap" surveys.

Post-debate polls often just reflect partisan predispositions and don’t mean the candidates changed a lot of minds. Blumenthal points out the configuration of the underlying survey samples shapes the results. A couple of the polls noted more self-identified Democrats than Republicans watched the debates, another likely producing a pro-Obama tilt. CNN notes this, for example, about its survey:

The results may be favoring Obama simply because more Democrats than Republicans tuned in to the debate. Of the debate-watchers questioned in this poll, 41 percent of the respondents identified themselves as Democrats, 27 percent as Republicans and 30 percent as independents.

No doubt the media will report at least this many polls picking the “winner” of Thursday night’s vice presidential debate (and the two remaining presidential debates). Blumenthal raises some important caveats about how we interpret these results, especially when it comes to their ultimate electoral implications.

If you think it’s just the mainstream American media that are strongly biased against Governor Sarah Palin you need to take a look at Palin's press coverage on the other side of the Atlantic. Journalists and commentators in Europe have now gone completely negative on John McCain’s female running mate.

Germany’s influential Der Spiegel provided two examples of the anti-Palin sentiment gripping the press. The first Spiegel Online piece, titled “Palin chit-chats herself into world politics”--the difficult-to-translate German title “Palin plauscht sich in die Weltpolitik” is even more condescending--mocks Sarah Palin’s recent trip to the UN General Assembly meeting in New York. In essence, Der Spiegel argues that Palin’s “crash course in foreign policy” left her completely clueless, forcing the Alaska Governor “to chit-chat with Afghan President Hamid Karzai about the meaning of the name of his son Mirwais” (which, as we learn, translates to “Light of the House”). While the German magazine admits at least that the press was only privy to the first 29 seconds of the Palin-Karzai bilateral, it should be a no-brainer that there is nothing wrong in opening a first-time meeting with a visiting foreign dignitary from an allied country with some “get-to-know-you” conversation. The correspondent unfairly casts judgment on Sarah Palin Palin after 29 seconds into her meeting with President Karzai.

Then, to top the day off, Spiegel Online also posted a photo album titled “America’s Power Women: Wise Letters and Dead Caribous” covering 13 U.S. female political leaders ranging from, inter alia, Abigail Smith Adams, Eleanor Roosevelt, Jackie Kennedy, Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama and Sarah Palin. The article portrays all the women very favorably, with the exception of Sarah Palin.

Ahem, this is not a parody entitled "The Seduction of the Swing States" (emphasis mine):

The rain pouring down, his jacket off, his white dress-shirt clinging to his body, Barack Obama played to a crowd in a state that hasn’t elected a Democrat since 1964.

At this rate, how long before press accounts of Obama aren't even safe for work anymore?

After you shake that image out of your head, move onto this delightfully Freudian passage about a possible Biden slip:

As the rain began to pour harder, Obama noticed his running mate’s stool close to the edge of the slippery stage.

"I'm gonna ask Joe to move that stool up because I don't want to have to choose another vice-president," Obama joked. "I don't want him slipping over, toppling over there."

Yes, no one would want that, would they, Barack? "Nice gaffe-prone vice presidential nominee you got here...Shame if anything should happen to him."

Given that the bailout bill is largely agreed upon as a necessary "crap sandwich" that "sucks," it is worth noting that conservative outrage did succeed in stripping the most egregious pork from the bill— funds in an "affordable housing trust fund" that could have gone to Democrat-allied and often nefarious advocacy groups like ACORN.

All possible proceeds from the sale of these toxic assets will now go toward the national debt, not to affordable housing groups that pressure politicians to pressure banks to offer risky loans to low-income families, so those families can get into mortgages they can't afford. Hmmm, doesn't that sound familiar?

Unhappy with the revocation of another round of gorging at the government teat, ACORN is releasing angry press releases, which is at least one reason to smile:

“Members of Congress worked tirelessly over the weekend to rid Wall Street of its toxic assets, which are responsible for the worst financial crisis since the 1930s. Unfortunately, families who fell victim to Wall Street’s toxic lending practices and now risk losing their homes were largely left out. ACORN members are extremely disappointed that the bailout package does little to assist these homeowners, such as providing them relief through the bankruptcy courts.

Although weak, there is language in the bailout package authorizing Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson to facilitate more loan modifications. ACORN members plan to hold Secretary Paulson accountable and ensure he uses this authority to make streamlined loan modifications a priority for struggling American families.”

ACORN will undoubtedly mobilize all of the dead people, cartoon characters, pets, historical figures, and illegal immigrants it has registered to vote in order to achieve this goal.

A 110-page bailout bill, negotiated by Congress under the glare of global investors and an election-year spotlight, will come up for a vote in the House Monday. A week into wrestling over how to save the financial sector from a meltdown while simultaneously shielding themselves from the political fallout of an unpopular bill, negotiators settled on plan they claim includes increased oversight, limited CEO pay for participating companies, an insurance option as an alternative to buying toxic assets, and less pork than previously considered versions.

Democrats patted themselves and each other on the backs generously Sunday as they announced the accord in a press conference about as charismatic and crowd-pleasing as open-mic night at the morgue. It's leadership like this that leads a party to nominate the junior senator from Illinois for President.

At least some House Republicans, particularly conservatives, who had been the hold-outs on a deal until Sunday, sounded poised to cast their votes for the bill.

Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio) reportedly called the bill a "crap sandwich" twice during a final meeting of House Republicans on the subject, but said he'd vote for it on the floor.

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), a prominent opponent of the bill made a similar argument in the same meeting:

"It sucks," he said before saying it has to be passed to stave off collapse of the financial system.

Other former opponents said to be backing the new version of the bill are Rep. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) and Rep. Eric Cantor, (R-Va.) The former negotiated on behalf of the House GOP and the latter was a lead proponent of the insurance option central to the GOP's alternative plan, which was eventually included in the final bill language.

The GOP's press release on the final version of the bill says this about the insurance option included: "Treasury is mandated (Section 102) to establish an insurance program and set risk-based premiums. This will protect taxpayers by requiring the beneficiaries of the insurance program to pay risk-based premiums."

But the bill language seems only to require the establishment of the insurance program, which Treasury Sec. Henry Paulson and participating companies would then have the option to employ or not. Though on the surface it seems a good development that the House GOP's insurance option was included, it's unclear to me why Paulson would choose to use it when he's publicly expressed doubts about its efficacy or why companies would opt into it instead of just getting bought out by Paulson. (Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. I'm no expert on the insurance plan or the bill language, but that's what I gathered from my read-through.)

Other members expressed less antipathy and more urgency:

“If we don’t pass it, we shouldn’t be in Congress,” snapped Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.), the lead negotiator for Senate Republicans.

John McCain and Barack Obama are still undecided about whether they'll be back in the Capitol to vote for the bill when it comes to the Senate on Wednesday, but urged the bill's passage by the House. Obama somewhat mischaracterized the conflict as one between Congress and the White House (about a week past that, Barry!), no doubt in an effort to meet his personal goal of fitting either the word "administration" or "Bush" into every single campaign statement of the year:

“The breakthrough between Congress and the administration is the culmination of a sorry period in our history, in which reckless speculation and greed on Wall Street and lax oversight from Washington led to a meltdown of our financial markets,” Obama said. “But regardless of how we got here, a failure to deal with the current crisis would have devastating consequences for our economy, costing millions of Americans their jobs and retirement security.”

On ABC's "This Week," McCain used an economy of words with which his opponent is unfamiliar to express an appropriate combination of disgust and necessity: “This is something that all of us will swallow hard and go forward with.”

Both candidates were on the phone with lead negotiators during the Saturday-night sessions, along with leading economists and market experts such as Warren Buffet, said Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.)

Bush called the compromise a "very good bill" that does what's necessary to "protect our economy against a system-wide breakdown."

Critics from the left held a meeting of the "Skeptics' Caucus" today, during which Rep. Dennis Kucinich claimed there were not enough votes for the bill to pass, and expressed uncharacteristic solidarity with conservative House Republicans:

“There is an attempt to create a fake partisan dichotomy here. This is not about Democrat versus Republican. This is about Main Street or Wall Street,” said Kucinich.

Support among Democrats will not be unanimous, it seems, no matter how Nancy uses those famed leadership skills.

Update: Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.) remains staunchly against the bill:

Economic freedom means the freedom to succeed and the freedom to fail.

The decision to give the federal government the ability to nationalize almost every bad mortgage in America interrupts this basic truth of our free market economy.

Republicans improved this bill but it remains the largest corporate bailout in American history, forever changes the relationship between government and the financial sector, and passes the cost along to the American people. I cannot support it.

Before you vote, ask yourself why you came here and vote with courage and integrity to those principles.

If you came here because you believe in limited government and the freedom of the American marketplace, vote in accordance with those convictions.

Duty is ours, outcomes belong to God.

Nancy Pelosi announced today at a Democratic press conference long on self-aggrandizement and short on self-awareness, that the deal is done, and the text is online.

Predictably, the government we're counting on to rescue world markets with a plan crafted in one week has not been able to craft a website that can handle such an announcement.

Nonetheless, keep refreshing if you want to eventually see what these guys will be voting on.

Well, this would be welcome news.

That would be in line with the new, more fiscally conservative direction of talks today, according to the Post:

Talks also focused on a new issue: how to cover the cost of the program so taxpayers don't get stuck with the bill.

As to the "Wall Street tax," which might be implemented five years into this deal if the $700 billion isn't recovered:

Paulson and some Republican lawmakers were said to be cool to the idea, though House Republicans also have expressed serious concerns about the cost of the program and have suggested other ideas for limiting taxpayer exposure.

But whether it was finally incorporated or not, it did not seem to cramp negotiations:

"While we do believe the Congress needs to act to avert this crisis, we also believe we should not be bailing out Wall Street on the backs of American taxpayers," House Majority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) said.

But even staunch opponents of the emerging tax plan said they expected it to pass.

Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.), the senior Republican on the Senate Banking Committee, who has refused to participate in the talks, said a "critical mass" was forming behind the measure because of fears that Congress's failure to act would cripple financial markets and devastate the economy.

Secretary Paulson's statement, delivered alongside Pelosi, Frank, Blunt, and others;

Madame Speaker, Mr. Leader, let me add to what you have said, and we begin with a very important task, a task to stabilize the markets, to protect all Americans. and do it in a way in which it protects the taxpayers to the maximum length possible. And so we've been working very hard on this, and we've made great progress toward a deal which will work and will be effective in the marketplace, and, you know, effective for all Americans. So, again, I -- you know, I thank the speaker, I thank the leader, I thank, you know, all of the leaders in the Senate and the House, and we've been working on this for a long time. want we've still got more to do to finalize it. but i think we're there, and our staffs will be working all night, and, again, so far, so good.

They're reportedly in the pen-to-paper stage right now and will work through the night. They expect they may have a written deal tomorrow, and vote Sunday or Monday, although Roy Blunt sounds slightly less sanguine than others:

Well, as you all know, House Republicans were very concerned this week we do everything we could to bring free-market principles and protections for the taxpayers to the table, and other people in these negotiations wanted to do many of those same things. We need to look and see where we are on paper tomorrow, but through the day and the evening today with...others, we were talking about how we could make these things work in a way that our conference could together. We'll be looking at the final wording of this tomorrow, talking to my colleagues, and really I'm grateful -- we're where we are. I think we are going to be able to have an announcement tomorrow, but these are difficult issues, and everybody showed lots of patience. I've been involved in the last few years in a lot of these conferences that could be pretty tense and pretty complicated. and people really showed patience in this one that got us to where we are tonight. and I'm grateful for that. and look forward to what we're going to see on paper tomorrow, and presenting these ideas to my colleagues and getting the reaction from them that we'll have in the morning and during the day tomorrow.

Update: Wow, will the new taxpayer protections be enough to change this dismal 24-percent support number? If anyone can convince the public, it's the lowest-rated Congress in history, right? Although, if the bailout plan has minimal taxpayer protection and manages to help the market, most will likely be forgiven.

Reports are coming in that a deal is on the horizon, due to a marathon negotiating session that went through much of Saturday evening and into Sunday morning:

House and Senate negotiators have reached tentative agreement on a financial rescue plan after a marathon Capitol negotiating session that started Saturday afternoon and stretched into early Sunday morning.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said the deal still had to be “committed to paper,” a process that will continue throughout the night.

Republican Whip Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), the chief Republican negotiator, said he was “looking forward to what we’re going to see on paper” but said he was optimistic that it would be something House Republicans could support.

Said Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson: “We’ve been working very hard on this and we’ve made great progress toward a deal which will work and will be effective in the marketplace and effective for all Americans . . . .We’ve still got a lot to do to finalize it, but I think we’re there.”

In case you're wondering what Congressional negotiators eat at a time of economic crisis, it's Cosi, which was delivered around 8 p.m. Fairly reflective of the economic hard times, though it's a step above Subway.

Limitations of executive pay, more oversight than the original Bush administration plan, and the opportunity for the government to get a kick-back from a possible turn in the market are in the agreed-upon plan. Also probably included, to grab House Republican support, a concession to the insurance idea:

To help win the support of House Republicans, the deal also likely includes an option under which Paulson and future Treasury secretaries could choose to sell companies government-backed insurance to cover securities – thereby improving their value – rather than buy the assets as initially proposed.

Earlier today, Pelosi was pushing a new "Wall Street tax" that would be implemented if taxpayers got hosed on the $700 billion:

"If after five years ... the CBO decides that the American taxpayer has lost money in this, then there would be a fee on financial institutions," Pelosi said, adding that she hoped the provision could be part of a final bailout deal.

Pelosi said that the Secretary of the Treasury could determine how to assess the fee.

And, the insurance idea was apparently gaining momentum at some point during the earlier negotiating today:

The idea of charging large financial firms fees to set up an industry-funded rescue insurance fund was gaining momentum as key House and Senate negotiators continued to meet Saturday evening to iron out the final details of a $700 billion rescue package for Wall Street.

Lawmakers and staff reconvened their meeting around 7:30 p.m. EDT in the offices of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.), hopeful they could broker a deal on the much anticipated but exceedingly difficult-to-negotiate legislation that would have the federal government buy up billions of dollars of soured assets.

McCain was on the phone with various negotiators today, but not on the Hill.

Mr. McCain remained in his condominium in Arlington, Va., until 12:30 p.m. Saturday, when he emerged and made a one-minute trip in his motorcade to his campaign headquarters around the corner.

Mr. McCain, who arrived home at 4 a.m. Saturday from the presidential debate in Oxford, Miss, could be seen in his car talking on his cell phone. But there was no word from his campaign on who he was talking to, or the extent of his involvement in ongoing negotiations.

By mid-afternoon, Mr. McCain’s closest adviser, Mark Salter, told reporters that Mr. McCain would not go to Capitol Hill on Saturday but would make phone calls to try to push the deal along. “He’s calling members on both sides, talking to people in the administration, helping out as he can,’’ Mr. Salter said.

Asked why Mr. McCain did not go to Capitol Hill after coming back to Washington to help with negotiations, Mr. Salter replied that “he can effectively do what he needs to do by phone.’’

I confess to being confused once again by McCain's strategy, which makes it harder for him to argue that he was taking the crisis more seriously than Obama who was doubtless working the phones today as well, but from the campaign trail. I do think he deserves credit for getting House Republicans in on this deal, bringing them to the table, and some credit for any insurance deal included, given that that was central to House GOP concerns, but it's going to be hard to claim it against the inevitable media coverage.

And it's a whopper! Jules Crittenden provides the report:

Washington Post’s live fact check finds Obama out-and-out wrong on several counts but has to parse and pick apart assiduously to find McCain at fault. Whatever. A telling exercise. Where it gets bizarre is in the grand finale, this astonishing McCain bash:

"John McCain kicked the evening off with a wild exaggeration by describing the allied invasion of Normandy as “the greatest invasion” in history.

"Such historical comparisons are always dangerous. In scale, the D-Day landings were far exceeded by Operation Barbarossa, the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union, in June 1941, and the Soviet invasion of Germany at the end of World War II.

"A total of 326,000 allied troops took part in the initial D-day Landings in June 1944. By comparison, Hitler’s sent an army of 4.5 million men into the Soviet Union in June 1941along a 1,800 mile front."

If you really want to get into it, the Siegfrieds and the Ivans did it across land. The western allies did it over water. Universally regarded as the greatest sea invasion of all time, in contention for the greatest single technological and organizational, a massive, highly complex operation conducted under strict secrecy, cloaked by highly successful deception. Different. Greater. And on unconditional greatness alone, it’s important to note that the jackbooted sausage-eating bucketheads, several months in, when it started snowing and they were all still in their summer uniforms and not in Moscow as planned, weren’t feeling so great any more. The Soviets didn’t launch an invasion of Germany as much as they pushed multiple fronts forward over a period of two years. Sort of like we did after we invaded Normandy.

I've received phone calls in the last hour from two economists I respect, one of them Larry Lindsey, the other in a position where he'd prefer not to be named. Both have government experience, neither is alarmist by nature, and they say this:

The huge European bank Fortis is apparently about to fail. The ripple effect on the American banking system could be disastrous, with bank runs, liquidity crises, and stock sell offs possible Monday. Wachovia may well fail next week. As Larry put it, this really will be 1933 soon if we don't move rapidly to stabilize the banking system.

And here's the bad news: the current bailout bill, whatever its merits and likelihood of passage, does nothing to address this.

Congress should pass by Monday simple legislation doing two things:

1. Giving the FDIC authority to provide unlimited deposit insurance through the FDIC for transaction accounts in banks.

2. Authorizing the Secretary of the Treasury to provide unlimited protection of principal in money market funds through the Treasury's exchange stabilization fund.

Maybe my acquaintances (and I) are too worried; maybe this legislation wouldn't quite be the right solution. But I wanted to sound what may be, unfortunately, a needed alarm.

Far be it from me to differ with the punditocracy’s mainstream, but I happen to feel that last night’s debate was a pretty big win for John McCain. I’m aware that most observers have called it a draw, agreeing that both men performed rather ably. I’m also aware that the polls show a majority of watchers thought Obama “won.” But still, it was a big night for McCain. Or more precisely, it was a bad night for Obama.

Judging these things like a high school debate is a fool’s (or CNN’s) errand. Who cares who “won” the debate? We’re not electing a debater-in-chief. A more probative inquiry is who won more votes. Or to ask a related question, who lost fewer votes.

I agree with the multitudes of analysts who say that both men performed ably. The strength of Obama’s performance, especially in the debate’s first half, came as something of a surprise. He must have cut his normal quotient of “ums” and “ahs” by at least 50%, and he put himself across in a relatively forceful manner. At the other end of the stage, McCain’s competence in this kind of forum came as no surprise to people familiar with John McCain’s skills. (As a Romney supporter during the primaries, McCain’s supple mind and command of details constantly provided frustration.)

But again, you don’t determine the winner of these things by calculating who most skillfully evaded taking a position on the Paulson Plan. We might as well skip ahead to the real goal which isn’t winning a debate but rather winning votes.

Like I said, McCain came across well as he always does at these things. Low end news gatherers who were expecting a doddering old warmonger got a surprise. McCain looked and sounded presidential.

McCain’s running attack on Obama did serious damage, especially given the way Obama’s behavior played right into the attack’s theme. Throughout the evening, McCain said that Obama “didn’t understand” things. The message was as subtle as a Howard Dean scream – on one part of the stage you had the old Warhorse who has been around the track; on the other end of the stage, according to McCain, you had a neophyte. McCain was making a frontal assault on Obama’s maturity and judgment.

The assault only directly drew blood in a couple of instances. Obama looked silly when he couldn’t distinguish between “tactics” and “strategy,” and his endless parsing on preconditions and preparations came across as patently disingenuous. But the real damage came with the debate’s optics. Having his maturity frontally challenged, Obama by his own creative antics often came across as childish, petulant and a little odd.

Let us count the ways:

1) Several times during the debate, Obama would smirk and laugh while McCain spoke. The optics of this were just awful. If Obama had wanted to come across as an arrogant jerk, this is the strategy he would have chosen. Frankly, it’s rather shocking that Obama repeatedly made such a mistake. Al Gore cost himself the 2000 election with his first debate performance where he derided everything George W. Bush said with a series of sighs and smirks. Oh yeah – the polls and the pundits said Gore “won” that tussle right after it concluded, although history has rendered a different verdict.

Gore’s antics were completely unprecedented. Up until that time, every other presidential candidate had managed to comport himself in a reasonably mature fashion while doing a televised debate. And yet in 2004, George W. Bush took the Gore tactics out for a test drive during his first debate with John Kerry, scowling virtually every time Kerry spoke. Bush’s lead in the polls quickly evaporated.

The voters expect a certain level of decorum from their candidates. Obama didn’t demonstrate that decorum last night. While he debated more effectively than he has in the past, he came across poorly.

2) On a related note, Obama kept referring to McCain as “John” while the older candidate referred to his foe as “Senator.” Again, I don’t understand the thought process here. Maybe Obama thought he would appear more presidential and less a lightweight by treating his more seasoned opponent in an overly familiar manner. But the difference in the two candidates’ approaches grated as the evening wore on.

3) Obama often refers to himself as “we.” What’s up with that?

4) Obama pronounces Pakistan like a high school civics teacher trying to show of his erudition – “Pah-kee-stun.” Whenever he does this, he comes across as a smarty-pants showoff. Besides, I would argue that in America, we know and commonly refer to the country in question as, you know, Pakistan, not Pah-kee-stun. Obama is only right on this if he also calls Spain “la España.”

5) The “two bracelets” moment showed Obama at his “I have to be the smartest guy in the room” worst. This could emerge as the signature moment of the debate, where Obama’s insecurities and insincerity combined to create a perfect storm. (Apparently, he couldn’t recall the name of the soldier he was purportedly honoring until he looked it up on his bracelet.)

America is still getting to know Barack Obama. Last night, the candidate did himself no favors. Mind you, I’m not a habitual hater of Obama. I’ve never called him “despicable” or “evil,” the terms most currently in vogue on the left to describe John McCain. In fact, as I’ve written many times, from everything I’ve heard Barack Obama is a good guy. But he didn’t come across as one last night.

John McCain said several times during last night's debate that Barack Obama simply doesn't understand many of the subjects at the heart of the presidential race. It was quite clear that McCain was trying to paint Obama as naive and risky and he hammered that theme -- Obama "doesn't understand" -- again and again through the 90-minute affair.

After the debate, Linda Douglass took great offense on Obama's behalf, calling the language "insulting." Then she used it to describe McCain. Here is the exchange with MSNBC's Rachel Maddow.

Rachel Maddow: “We’ve heard a phrase repeated ad nauseum tonight from Senator McCain – Senator Obama didn’t understand, that he didn’t grasp the issues. What’s the rejoinder to that from the Obama side?”

Linda Douglass: “I would say that Senator McCain doesn’t get it. He’s demonstrated in every way that he’s completely out of touch. He’s somebody who’s giving tax cuts to the wealthy when it’s the middle class who needs tax cuts. He is somebody who doesn’t understand that Americans need to be free of their dependence on foreign oil – he’s talking about just drill, baby, drill. He’s demonstrated that in so many ways. He thought the fundamentals of the economy were strong. Just last week he thought the fundamentals of the economy were strong. So, he doesn’t get it. That’s what he has demonstrated. He’s out of touch. And when you try to use sort of insulting language as he did tonight it doesn’t really appeal to voters who are looking for a positive solution to their own lives and the struggles that they’re going through.”

Got that? The Obama campaign can say that John McCain "doesn't get it" but McCain's language is "insulting" when he says that Obama doesn't understand.

Douglass will not find herself in any trouble with her boss on these kinds of attacks because he said the same thing in his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention. "It's not because John McCain doesn't care. It's because John McCain doesn't get it."

Perhaps the Obama-Biden campaign would be better off accusing McCain of plagiarizing their rhetoric. Then again, maybe not.

In the first presidential debate between Barack Obama and John McCain, the two men who would lead America for the next four years, one of the main points of contention was the worldview of a man who shaped U.S. foreign and national security policy three decades ago.

And Henry Kissinger is not happy.

Obama claimed that Kissinger approved of his view that an American president should meet with adversaries without preconditions. John McCain disagreed. And Kissinger, who is advising McCain’s presidential campaign, not surprisingly thinks that McCain is right.

“Senator McCain is right,” said Kissinger. “I would not recommend the next President of the United States engage in talks with Iran at the Presidential level. My views on this issue are entirely compatible with the views of my friend Senator John McCain. We do not agree on everything, but we do agree that any negotiations with Iran must be geared to reality.”

Indeed, in a recent appearance at George Washington University, Kissinger said that while he is “in favor of negotiating with Iran,” he “preferred doing it at the secretary of state level.”

The dispute over Kissinger was one of several points of sharp contention in the debate, which lasted a little more than 90 minutes. Although the debate was supposed to focus on national security and foreign policy, moderator Jim Lehrer used the first 40 minutes to ask the candidates questions about the increasingly fragile economy. Given the events of the past two weeks, Lehrer had little choice but to focus on the economy at the outset. The changes to the format undoubtedly worked to Obama’s advantage, allowing him to get comfortable on stage before turning to the issues on which McCain is far better informed.

Despite this, I thought each candidate performed better in those areas where he was not expected to excel. So McCain outperformed expectations on the economy and Obama did better than many anticipated he would do on foreign policy.

Still, Obama had several moments where he was either at a loss for words or seemed to have forgotten what he was supposed to say. One particularly bad exchange for Obama came when Lehrer asked what programs Obama would cut in light of the tight budgets that will almost certainly result from the current economic crisis. At first, Obama said nothing. Then he brought up energy, but initially just said that he wanted to be sure the U.S. is still investing in energy. Finally, he seemed to remember the question and said that while he’s committed to investing in energy some of those investments might have to wait. Awkward.

In the very next sentence, he referred to McCain as “Tom”--saying “Tom called me wildly liberal.” He said this in reference to McCain’s claim that Obama was the Senate’s most liberal member and explained that he probably just seemed liberal because he was opposing George W. Bush. (Weak.) Obama followed that by citing his bipartisan work with Tom Coburn, a conservative senator from Oklahoma. It’s fair to wonder whether he jumbled them a bit.

McCain, for his part, sometimes seemed to get lost in his own answers--after making his point with his first couple of sentences, he was uncertain what to say next. I thought McCain’s worst answer came, ironically, when Lehrer asked him about the lessons he takes away from the Iraq war. Rather than immediately using the question to attack Obama for his opposition to the surge--even after the surge had succeeded--McCain said that the central lesson of Iraq was that it’s important not to have a failed strategy that almost loses the war. Well, thanks. McCain later came back to the surge and knocked Obama for his opposition to it, but his attack was convoluted and, making matters worse, he made a mistake in doing so. Immediately after McCain pointed viewers toward Obama’s recent comment that he the surge succeeded beyond his wild expectations, McCain claimed that Obama had never admitted the surge worked. Confusing. As one smart conservative put it: "McCain needs to say, ‘If Senator Obama had been president two years ago, America would have lost the war and been forced to come home in defeat.’ He needs to be clear on danger posed by Obama, and needs to attack Obama's judgment.” McCain did level those attacks, but they were muddled and not precise.

Overall, John McCain did fine, and Barack Obama did well. Each candidate did what he needed to do in this first debate. McCain’s strong performance during the economic section of the debate may help him get beyond a very difficult two weeks. Barack Obama seemed like he belonged on stage with McCain and came across as a plausible president. For that reason, he probably walks away from the first debate a winner.

Jim Lehrer asks the candidates what spending programs, if any, they might limit or cut in light of the $700 billion bailout and other budget constraints. John McCain suggests a partial budget freeze. Barack Obama responds: “The problem with a spending freeze is you're using a hatchet where you need a scalpel. There are some programs that are very important that are under-funded. I want to increase early childhood education....”

We’re in a major financial crisis, and Barack Obama wants to increase spending in an area where there’s notoriously little evidence that spending has paid off, an area that in any case isn’t a primary responsibility of the federal government (or perhaps of any level of government). Obama’s ritualistic invocation of early childhood education as deserving ever more funding is a reminder, one might say, of the deep childishness of contemporary liberalism.

Round 1: Where do you stand on the Paulson bailout plan?
Obama says that Main Street was suffering long before Wall Street and that we have to move swiftly and wisely. Also, he says that he's put forward proposals to make this plan work better, most importantly to make sure we bail out the deadbeats who are being foreclosed on, too, and not just the Richie Riches at Lehman. Oh, and by the way and Bush and McCain caused this whole thing.

McCain opens by saying that he wishes Ted Kennedy all the best, signaling that he believes Sarah Palin has brought the GOP base onboard for good. He then points to the bipartisan nature of the modified Paulson package. And says that this is only the end of the beginning of the financial crisis. Neither guy answered the question, prompting Lehrer to re-ask.

On redirect, Obama says he can't say whether he's for it or not because he hasn't seen the details. But that it's important to remember that he warned of the crisis two years ago. Which kind of leaves one wondering why, if he knew that the "worst economic crisis since the Great Depression" was coming down the pike, all he did was write a letter to Paulson instead of acting to head it off.

McCain says that he is going to vote for the bailout and then talks about how important it is to hold people accountable for their actions. This is a close one since neither guy conveys any deep understanding of the situation or insight into the solution.

Round to Obama

Round 2: Are there fundamental difference between your two approaches to the crisis?

McCain goes right after spending, hitting his reform theme and blaming Republicans for their earmarks, out of control spending, and scandals. It's like he's daring Obama to be harder on the GOP than he is.

Obama says that earmarks are bad--though not as bad as "the special interests"! But Obama maintains that McCain's tax cuts for evil corporations and the rich are a worse source of waste than earmarks. Standing traditional supply-side economics on its head, Obama says he wants to grow the economy from the "bottom up."

The two then go back and forth on McCain's business tax cuts, culminating in McCain pointing that the U.S. business tax is 35 percent, Ireland's is 11 percent, and that lowering business taxes is one of the ways you keep businesses in America and create jobs. When Obama challenges this, he says that all of the "loopholes" actually make business taxes too low--suggesting that he'd like to make the U.S. less hospitable to businesses. Then McCain hits Obama for talking and not doing. Obama looks peevish.

Round to McCain

Round 3: As president, what will you give up to pay for the $700 billion bailout?

Obama says, quite nonsensically, that he's going to give up foreign oil by turning to wind, solar, and alternative fuels. He then goes on to talk about all the other things he is going to spend money on. If you were at all concerned that Obama's "no new taxes" pledge might not be written in stone, he isn't setting your mind at ease.

McCain says that we have to get spending under control and that he'd examine every agency of the government. Then, just throw an elbow at Iowa voters, he says that the first thing he'd do is cut the ethanol subsidy. Also, in an attempt to drive Michael Goldfarb from his staff, he singles out the DDX program in a long list of government waste that he'd go after.

When asked again what he would give up, Obama ducks the question, saying, again, that he will invest in ending our dependence on foreign oil. Not to pick nits but technically, that's new spending. Lehrer seems perturbed.

McCain then goes on the offensive saying we ought to consider a spending freeze (minus defense, entitlements, and veterans affairs). Thinking he has an opening, Obama pounces, saying that he wouldn't endorse a spending freeze because there are lots of under-funded programs that need more money from the federal government. It's not clear how this is helping reassure people that he won't raise their taxes.

Round to McCain

Round 4: What are the lessons of Iraq?

McCain says that you need to be mindful that strategies can fail and that flexibility is important. He says that we're winning in Iraq and that we will come home with victory and honor and a newly-minted ally in the region. He gives Gen. Petraeus and the troops all the credit.

Obama says that this is a fundamental difference between the two men because six years ago he stood up the salons of Hyde Park and bravely opposed the war. He then paints a picture of American defeat around the globe and claims that al Qaeda is stronger than it's been at any time since 2001. For whatever it's worth, this last assertion is counter to recent analysis of al Qaeda's strength. It betrays a staggering ignorance on Obama's part; his position deteriorates from there.

Round to McCain

Round 5: About that Afghanistan . . .

Obama says we need more troops in Afghanistan, which is why we need to pull out of Iraq and get tough with Pakistan.

McCain says that he regrets the mistake we made by neglecting the Afghanis after they drove the Soviets out, allowing the Taliban to take hold. He then paints Obama as reckless for wanting to cut off aid to a tottering nuclear power. The knowledge gap is beginning to show and it gets worse when Obama mangles pre-Musharraf Pakistani history.

As the exchange goes on it becomes clear that these guys like each other about as much as Ali and Foreman did.

Round to McCain

Round 6: How big a threat is Iran?

McCain says that a nuclear Iran is an existential threat to Israel and a strategic threat to the stability of the region. He notes that Russia is blocking action at the U.N. and touts a "League of Democracies" which could implement serious and tough sanctions on Iran. But "have no doubt," he's ready to throw down. He gallantly doesn't mention that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad seems to prefer Obama.

Obama says that we need Russia and China to help with sanction. But the real thing we need with Iran is--hold on to your seats--tough, direct diplomacy!

McCain hits Obama for pledging to talk with Ahmadinejad without preconditions. Obama should just take his lumps here--this is the cost of winning the Democratic nomination. But instead he tries to weasel out of it, saying that he'll "sit down with anybody" but that there have to be "preparation." Then he tries to get cute by saying that Ahmadinejad may not be the most important person in Iran.

It's a weird pride that keeps Obama committed to a losing position when he should just find different ground to fight on. You'll notice, by the way, that whenever he loses his way, he blurts out "President Bush."

McCain says that his opponent's views aren't "just naive, but dangerous." Obama isn't doing anything to dispel this notion.

Round to McCain

Round 7: Russia. Competitor? Enemy? Partner? Discuss.

Obama says that the evidence of recent weeks says we need to reevaluate our relationship with Russia and that we should start expanding NATO immediately. But that we can't return to a Cold War posture.

McCain says that Obama's first reaction to the Russia-Georgia conflict was to urge both sides to show restraint, evincing further "naiveté." It's pretty rough, particularly when he starts talking about the specifics of South Ossetia.

Round to McCain

Round 8: What is the likelihood of another 9/11?

McCain says it's "much less than it was the day after 9/11" and that we are a safer nation, even though we are not safe. He talks about how he pushed for the creation of the 9/11 Commission against the wishes of President Bush and how he worked with Democrats to pass most of the Commission's recommendations. Most gratifyingly, he talks about how important it is to bolster American intelligence capabilities, particularly in the area of HUMINT.

Obama says that we are safer in some ways, but still have a long way to go. He smartly points out that we have yet to harden transportation points (excluding airports), chemical facilities, and other attractive targets. He also talks about the need to focus on nuclear proliferation, in order to keep nuclear materials out of the hands of terrorists. This is the most comfortable and commanding he's been all night.

McCain goes back to Obama's desire to withdrawal from Iraq, saying that Obama doesn't realize how interconnected Iraq is to the wider terrorist threat. Obama responds that Iraq is a huge disaster and hindrance to everything America needs to do in the world.

Then McCain throws down the gauntlet with what I suspect will be the only line people take away from the night: "There are some advantages to experience and knowledge and judgment. And I honestly don't believe that Sen. Obama has the knowledge or experience and has made the wrong judgments in a number of areas."

Then he takes another big swing: "You know we've seen this stubbornness before in this administration, to cling to a belief that somehow the surge has not succeeded and failing to acknowledge that he was wrong about the surge shows to me that we need more flexibility in a president of the United States than that. . . . I don't think I need any on-the-job training."

This round is a Rorschach. If you love Obama, he acquitted himself well. If you have questions about Obama, you found McCain's assault devastating. The big question is how undecideds will see this last exchange.

Round to McCain


My scorecard says that McCain won the night 7-1, which frankly surprises me. On paper that looks like a rout, but McCain didn't seem that dominant as it was happening. Certainly there was nothing in the debate that Obama will worry about as having been a big blow. I saw McCain winning the debate pretty handily, but I doubt he scored any larger strategic victory.

Here's the video of an awful moment for Obama. I'm surprised more haven't mentioned it in post-debate coverage, but it's something that likely hit some viewers on a gut level and could easily go viral.

His answer was flippant and his gesture embarrassing.

Henry Kissinger believes Barack Obama misstated his views on diplomacy with US adversaries and is not happy about being mischaracterized. He says: "Senator McCain is right. I would not recommend the next President of the United States engage in talks with Iran at the Presidential level. My views on this issue are entirely compatible with the views of my friend Senator John McCain. We do not agree on everything, but we do agree that any negotiations with Iran must be geared to reality."

In post-debate wrap-up, I'm getting a couple things from most commentators. One, all three networks have mentioned the fact that Obama repeated, "John is right," throughout the debate. The McCain campaign has already released an ad to capitalize.

I noticed several sound bites that stood out, but most commentators say none struck them. In the absence of others, "John is right," will be the one that defines this night, and it will be largely because the campaign competently noticed and packaged it—but quick.

Most commentators say McCain performed well and Obama fairly, but that a virtual tie benefits Obama. However, even liberal commentators conceded that Obama had some problems. McCain got under his skin. Paul Begala said that, during the discussion on Iraq, Obama "sounded like the man of yesterday," like he was "stuck in the past," noting the irony of the fact that Obama's image is about the future.

It seems to me that if Obama's camp and allies are saying all he needed was a tie and he almost got it, it was not a good night for him.

More striking to me was the fact that the economic debate, which should have been Obama's strong suit by a mile, was steered to earmarks, taxes, and spending almost to the exclusion of all else by John McCain. Obama and Lehrer followed McCain's lead by talking on his turf for at least 10 minutes. If Obama can't direct a debate with John McCain toward his self-interest, how could we possibly expect him to stand up for America's interests across the table from Ahmadinejad (which is where he wants to be sitting)? He's far too apt to follow the leader. He may respond eloquently when he does, but he's not directing the conversation.

I think McCain missed an opportunity to explain why he was in Washington and exactly what he was fighting for, but the direction the conversation went certainly didn't hurt him.

Last question. The conventional wisdom is that the guy who's ahead in polls need only tie to "win" a debate. Obama committed no major flubs tonight (with the possible exception of 'Jim, I have a bracelet, too," which required that he check the name on the bracelet before he got misty.) But Obama's central vulnerability in this election is on foreign policy. Was a tie enough to assure voters that he's not the risk McCain implies he is, or did he need to pull off a more solid win?

My favorite moment of the night (which admittedly may only appeal to conservatives like myself) was when McCain scolded Obama over his agreement to meet with Ahmadinejad without preconditions. Obama, of course, attempted once again to rewrite his answer, and McCain headed him off at the pass:

"Let me get this straight. We sit down with Ahmadinejad and he says, 'We're gonna wipe Israel off the face of the Earth' and we say, 'No, you're not?' Please."

McCain hammered Obama on Obama's pledge to meet the leaders of Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Syria, and Cuba without precondition; Obama responded that Kissinger supports this policy.

Goldfarb points out that Kissinger actually said: "I actually have preferred doing it at the secretary of state level"

McCain was very strong on this point, though I wish he would have shot back that Obama's own running mate thinks this policy is "naive."

I didn't catch exactly what Obama said, but I thought he said he favors funding missile defense. That seems to contradict this pledge he made during the primaries.

I will cut tens of billions of dollars in wasteful spending. I will cut investments in unproven missile defense systems. I will not weaponize space. I will slow our development of future combat systems.

Update: The McCain Report points out that in 2001 Obama said in a TV interview: "I, for example, don't agree with a missile defense system."

From Obama: "John is right."

From McCain: "What I don't think Obama understands is..."

One lends itself to an ad better than the other one, no?

Update: Dang, that was fast!

There's been a bit of back and forth between McCain and Obama on Obama's failure to hold any hearings on NATO or Afghanistan in the foreign relations committee. Obama pointed out that he's merely the subcommittee chairman; Joe Biden is the chairman. But Biden slammed Obama during the primaries for his failure to attend committee hearings on Afghanistan:

Biden's letter brought attention to the fact that Obama did not attend two of those three hearings -- and for the third, on March 8, 2007, Obama only asked one question, one unrelated to Afghanistan.

How do I know the latter fact? From an August 2007 press release from Biden himself, when he was running for president.

"BIDEN CAMPAIGN CONGRATULATES SEN. OBAMA FOR JOHNNY-COME-LATELY POSITION," it read. Noting that at the March 2007 hearing, "Sen. Obama asked one question that was unrelated to Taliban or Afghanistan."

Wow, that is not how Obama should have followed up on John McCain's poignant and personal story about a mother of a soldier killed in Iraq, who asked McCain not to let her son's death be "in vain." I've got to believe that sound bite did not sit well with many people listening— pro-mission families who've lost loved ones in Iraq, many soldiers currently in the region, or Vietnam vets who identify with McCain's regrets about defeatism in that conflict and don't desire to repeat it.

It characterized most of the discussion about Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, which had McCain sounding like a smart statesman and Obama sounding rather petulant and stuck in the past. He has repeatedly seemed the teacher to Obama's student by talking about Iraq's impact on the rest of the region, claiming the success of the surge and the fact that it is now the same strategy (that Obama once opposed) that will work in Afghanistan.

The discussion of Pakistan came with a direct scold about Obama's position on carrying out attacks within Pakistan:

"George Schultz once said that if you put a gun to man's head, you better be ready to pull the trigger. I'm not ready to cut off funding to Pakistan, so I'm not ready to threaten them, as Barack Obama is."

I was glad to see McCain make some of these contrasts so successfully.

McCain: I have fought against earmarks for my entire career, and he's asked for $932 million.
Obama: Hey, have I told you about how I oppose tax cuts?

McCain: Lowering business taxes is necessary because if a business can get an 11 percent tax in Ireland, and must endure 35 percent here, that business will leave the U.S. We must prevent that by giving American businesses a chance to give plenty of people jobs and opportunity.
Obama: Dear American Business Owners, Your taxes aren't really high or onerous. It's in your imagination. I'm getting rid of your "loopholes." Sincerely, Barack Obama

McCain: I will lower spending in the aftermath of this bailout plan by putting a spending freeze on everything but military spending, vets' programs, and entitlements.
Obama: Um, that's using a hatchet when you need a scalpel. Um. Um. I'd cut some stuff, too.

Obama's best moment of the debate is when he tied McCain to Bush, much less ham-handedly than usual, by saying it was "hard to swallow" that he's standing up for spending cuts now when he voted for Bush's budgets.

What was meant to start as a discussion of the serious financial crisis turned into a 10-minute discussion of John McCain's fiscal strong suit— earmarks. He has been able to tout his anti-pork record, while Obama has had to try to change the subject, and endured his $932 million-dollar figure being pounded into the audience's conscience.

This should be Obama's part of the game, and he's following McCain's lead to a remarkable extent.

On the other hand, I know McCain was trying to be bipartisan and fairly nice to start off the debate, but he missed an opportunity to lay out the fact that he had, in concrete ways, sought to change Fannie and Freddie regulations while Obama remained silent. He could have made that point politely, but made it nonetheless.

Instead, his first punch was landed on earmarks: "Obama didn't happen to see that light (on earmarks) until after he started running for President."

He seems to have gotten under Obama's skin several times, from the get-go, which is a good omen for McCain's night.

will be live-blogging the debate.

The media is finally amending reporting from yesterday that claimed there was a deal on the bailout package yesterday, the evidence for which was that Barney Frank and Chris Dodd said there was a deal and the media believed them.

ABC's Jake Tapper, one of the good ones, says "Sen. John McCain's role in the current dealings on Capitol Hill should not be overstated positively or negatively."

Democrats are blaming McCain, R-Ariz., for the disastrous meeting yesterday.

They claim there was a deal until McCain showed up.

Not so.

House Republicans were always in large part opposed to the bill.

Rep. Spencer Bachus, R-Ala., had no authority (or command) to negotiate for his House GOP colleagues.

Fox's Carl Cameron is reporting the same, backed up by Democratic sources.

I wonder if that information will wind its way to Jim Lehrer before he asks a question premised upon the early reports. Speaking of Lehrer, here are some of his greatest debate hits. "Sen. Kerry, what colossal misjudgments, in your opinion, has President Bush made in these areas?”

Will there be a deal by Sunday? Err, WEDNESDAY?

Whew, just in time to pander in Pa.:

Campaigning in Pennsylvania coal country on Thursday, the Democratic vice presidential nominee said the government should steer more money to clean coal — a term used to describe a variety of emerging technologies that burn coal for electricity without producing as much pollution.

"I am for clean coal," he told The Associated Press following a speech in Wilkes-Barre.

It's an issue that resonates with some working-class voters in Pennsylvania, a group that Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama has had trouble connecting with. Pennsylvania Democrats gave Sen. Hillary Clinton a 10-point victory in the April primary.

Pennsylvania is the nation's No. 4 coal-producing state; the industry employs more than 7,000 people at nearly 800 mines, and many voters come from coal-mining families. The administration of Gov. Ed Rendell has invested millions of dollars in clean coal technology in the state.

The House GOP is still pitching alternatives, the most prominent of which is Eric Cantor's, R-Va., insurance plan. After meeting today, the GOP emerged with a new negotiator who claimed support from McCain on the House Republicans' new tack:

GOP leader John A. Boehner, whose members gave him a standing ovation during the session, told the assembled lawmakers that Minority Whip Roy Blunt would be their lead negotiator before fielding concerns about the overarching Treasury plan, according to people in the room.

The most prominent idea floating around is a plan drafted by Virginia Rep. Eric Cantor and Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan that would federally insure all mortgage-backed assets at a price and premium established by the government. Cantor and Ryan both received kudos from their colleagues during the meeting.

But it remains to be seen where the caucus stands on this alternative. After the meeting, New Jersey Rep. Scott Garrett, who has offered his own set of alternatives, said, "The mood in the conference is that we should move toward a more fundamental" overhaul of the administration's plan. But Virginia Rep. Tom Davis said his colleagues were "in flux" about what to do, predicting everyone will use their own judgment in voting on the eventual plan.

Rich Lowry has serious questions about the GOP alternative.

Blunt declared McCain "with us," but I just saw Cantor on CNN, and he studiously avoided saying McCain was backing their proposal. Rather, he said McCain understands the need for a deal, but is also interested in taxpayer protection measures. Sounds like Blunt may have exaggerated McCain's definite support.

Now, we will find out exactly how much Pelosi's political cover is worth to her. She could pass the bill without broad bipartisan support, but that saddles the Dems with the political fallout of passing a bailout plan opposed by up to 55 percent of Americans, according to polls.

If, indeed, McCain is behind the taxpayer-protecting principles of the GOP's alternative plan, are there not some of them he could pitch to the public tonight? If he can get enough normal Americans behind some elements of the conservative proposal (and they seem inclined that way), phones might stop ringing off the hook at the Capitol with angry constituents, and both Democrat and Republican representatives could feel better about voting for the package. This is one of those moments where McCain has the opportunity, as he has been wont to do during this campaign, to go straight to the American people with a message without much filter from the media. The campaign has used such situations to its advantage in the past. What will he do with it tonight?

How far would Pelosi be willing to go to shield her party's precious hindquarters from a public that is extremely unhappy at the moment? If nothing passes, Republicans will surely get the blame even though Nancy could have acted without them, but it seems the stakes are high enough and the field ripe for some more compromise on this measure. Even pressing them to get the ACORN-related and other such pork out of this thing would be a small victory.

Pelosi is on CNN right now signaling willingness to consider "all proposals," but not the capital-gains tax relief Republicans have suggested (which is kind of the opposite of "all," but I digress). She seemed to say that all of the other conservative proposals could be under consideration.

At the very least, it sounds like Pelosi and Co. are talking to House GOP members now, who were pointedly not involved in the mythical, magical "deal" of yesterday, which is why there was actually no deal at all.

Ben Smith reports that Seamus Boyle, president of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, has sent John McCain an angry letter in response to the senator's telling of an Irish joke in Scranton:

It was a great meeting but when you began your speech with a joke about the Irish, I and many of our fellow Irish Americans in the Ancient Order of Hibernians, were shocked. It was really an insult to a whole nationality to be stereotyped as drunks. The Irish are a jovial people who enjoy life, work hard, help the needy, support our community and our country yet get depicted as drunkards and partiers. As you stated in your speech yesterday the Irish have a great education and work ethic.

Senator, I was not the only one offended and I received numerous complaints from a variety of people throughout Pennsylvania and other parts of the country. On behalf of these people, the Ancient Order of Hibernians and myself and my family, I wish you would refrain from demeaning the Irish or any other ethnic group by telling such jokes in the future. I think an apology is in order to those millions of Irish in the United States who were offended by your joke.

Thanks for sullying our reputation as a "jovial" people with your grievance-mongering, Seamus. My ancestors were shanty Irish, and I approve this message:

My only complaint for McCain is that I thought this joke was much funnier the first time me father told it to me with an affected Irish accent. Full joke after the jump.

This is Day Two of his snit fit over McCain's "Late Show" cancellation. McCain, of course, decided that Wednesday night, in the face of an impending economic crisis, might not be a great time for him to be yukking it up with a late-night host. Letterman was peeved enough to bring noted McCain-basher Keith Olbermann on in McCain's place.

This is what Letterman had to say last night:

"Here's how it works: You don't come to see me? You don't come to see me? Well, we might not see you on Inauguration Day," Letterman said.

Letterman: The new crucible for Electoral College contenders. A McCain campaign spokesman was generous in her reaction, openly identifying Letterman's show as "comedy."

McCain spokeswoman Nicolle Wallace said the campaign "felt this wasn't a night for comedy."

Name the talking point, he's on it. Yesterday, he laid at least some of the blame for the subprime mess on Congressional Democrats mess:

CHRIS CUOMO, ABC NEWS: A little surprising for you to hear the Democrats saying, "This came out of nowhere, this is all about the Republicans. We had nothing to do with this." Nancy Pelosi saying it. She signed the '99 Gramm Bill. She knew what was going on with the SEC. They're all sophisticated people. Is that playing politics in this situation?

BILL CLINTON: Well, maybe everybody does that a little bit. I think the responsibility the Democrats have may rest more in resisting any efforts by Republicans in the Congress or by me when I was President to put some standards and tighten up a little on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Also speaking with Cuomo, Clinton tagged McCain's trip to Washington as a "good-faith" effort instead of a political stunt:

"We know he didn't do it because he's afraid because Sen. McCain wanted more debates," Clinton said, adding that he was "encouraged" by the joint statement from McCain and Sen. Barack Obama.

"You can put it off a few days the problem is it's hard to reschedule those things," Clinton said, "I presume he did that in good faith since I know he wanted -- I remember he asked for more debates to go all around the country and so I don't think we ought to overly parse that."

Speaking of arguing against interest...This article shall be there defense against cries of bias from now until Election Day. "Bias? Remember that one time we wrote about Barack Obama's ads critically? Now, leave me alone while I investigate Sarah Palin's aunt's citation for hunting out of season."

Two weeks ago, Senator Barack Obama’s presidential campaign gleefully publicized a spate of news reports about misleading and untruthful statements in the advertisements of his rival, Senator John McCain. Asked by a voter in New Hampshire if he would respond in kind, Mr. Obama said, “I just have a different philosophy, I’m going to respond with the truth,” adding, “I’m not going to start making up lies about John McCain.”

Yet as Mr. McCain’s misleading advertisements became fodder on shows like “The View” and “Saturday Night Live,” Mr. Obama began his own run of advertisements on radio and television that have matched the dubious nature of Mr. McCain’s more questionable spots.

It touches on the egregious Spanish-language ad about immigration and the dishonest ad about Social Security, each about a week too late, but credit where credit is due. I have a feeling the timing may have had more to do with the McCain campaign's blasting of the NYT as an openly partisan, pro-Obama organization just days ago.

In all, Mr. Obama has released at least five commercials that have been criticized as misleading or untruthful against Mr. McCain’s positions in the past two weeks. Mr. Obama drew complaints from many of the independent fact-checking groups and editorial writers who just two weeks ago were criticizing Mr. McCain for producing a large share of this year’s untruthful spots (“Pants on Fire,” the fact-checking Web site PolitiFact.com wrote of Mr. Obama’s advertisement invoking Mr. Limbaugh; “False!” FactCheck.org said of his commercial on Social Security.)

Democrats quoted in the story profess to be pleased to see Obama fighting back in "eye-for-an-eye" fashion because, after all, who ever really bought that "new politics" stuff anyway?

I wonder if the reporters on this story, Jim Rutenberg and Julie Bosman, get to sit at the cool-kids table in the Sulzberger lunch room anymore?

Well, I confess I didn't think John McCain would debate tonight. The deal seemed too far off this morning to plausibly claim that it was close enough for him to fly down to Mississippi. It undercuts his original argument about the paramount importance of coming to an accord on a bailout that he's now meeting up with Obama to argue about Ukraine's NATO inclusion.

Lindsey Graham was lowering the bar for success this morning, saying all they would require is an "outline or proposal that will protect the taxpayer" instead of a true agreement.

Before that news broke, former Clinton adviser Hank Sheinkopf argued on Fox & Friends, against interest and conventional wisdom, that Obama standing on that stage alone tonight would have looked like a self-indulgent boob and McCain would have looked like a hero. "And, voters are looking for a hero," he added.

Now that that point is moot, what pray tell, are they going to talk about? And, what must McCain say to come out on top, here? Pundits can throw out all those "5 keys to a McCain win" columns they wrote Monday.

McCain has suffered, fairly or not, a bad week of press, with the MSM buying the Dems' argument that there was a magical, mythical deal until McCain got to Washington, "injected presidential politics," and blew everything up leaving Hank Paulson to suffer the indignity of kneeling at the feet of Nancy Pelosi. There was, of course, a deal only in the sense that there was an agreement between everyone on the Hill except for the very people Pelosi and Dems need to back the bill— House Republicans.

The press, which always viewed McCain's suspension as purely political, will hammer him again for suddenly deciding the deal could wait until after the debate. (And, why must they debate tonight? Doesn't it feel as if we're indulging a MSM/Obama temper tantrum in the face of economic doom?)

But there's still work to be done, and McCain can still position himself as a leader in a mighty unorthodox way, from the debate stage. He reportedly met with a bunch of GOP leaders this morning. The debate will necessarily touch upon the economy and the bailout, probably as the first topic, so why not use the debate as a platform for introducing a new formulation of the bailout, including taxpayer protection and some conservative concessions, to the 50 million viewers? Message: "While Barack was at the gym today, I and some of my colleagues came up with a plan we think will work better for you, the American taxpayer, and I'd like to tell you a little bit about it."

One of the principal problems with the original Paulson package is that no one even attempted to sell it to the American people. The reason it has gone down in flames is because citizens are mad about that, making calls, and forcing Pelosi and Co. to seek the broad support of Congressional Republicans even though they could pass it without them.

It would seem to me that Oxford, Miss. might not be a bad launching pad for Bill Kristol's Option No. 3— a new, improved plan that would place McCain at the center of the solution, make voters happier, and get taxpayers at least partially off the hook. It's risky, but no one is happy with the current plan, and there's no reason a new one couldn't gain significant support if the American people were substantially happier with it than the Paulson plan. Obama, although cool under pressure, has been anything but influential in this debate. He's still in danger of looking impotent if McCain actually delivers something.

It just feels like that's about the only way to gain by stepping on that stage tonight after having staked so much on the argument that the debate in Washington was what mattered. The McCain camp has spent the summer living by a modified mantra of tournament play: "surprise and advance." Surprise us again, Maverick.

Update: Hey, good news. McCain already won the debate.

McCain will fly to Memphis this afternoon for the debate. The campaign's statement after the jump.

Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center argues 2008 is the most unpredictable election in decades. “In every recent election the public has accurately picked the winner by this time in the cycle,” he wrote yesterday. And as the chart below demonstrates, since 1992, by pretty healthy margins:

Not so this year. When Pew asked voters two weeks ago to put aside their own preference and just crystal ball the winner, 39 percent picked Obama and 39 percent predicted McCain.

Why all the uncertainty? Kohut writes this:

For starters, voters are unsure whether John McCain, if elected, would govern differently from President Bush: 44% think he would, but an equal number think he wouldn't. And opinion about this basic question has not changed at all since March.

Second, while the country leans Democratic because of strong discontent with President Bush and the condition of the country, only 47% of the electorate thinks that Barack Obama is well qualified to be president.

Both of Kohut’s explanations suggest unease with the candidates. But I also believe most undecided voters also like both Obama and McCain, which leads to additional fluidity in public opinion.

Voter uncertainty about the outcome is validated by yesterday’s Gallup poll finding the race back to a 46 percent to 46 percent tie.

Read the full Pew report here.

I've always maintained that if we wait long enough, eventually we'll see George W. Bush blamed for everything that has gone wrong in the world, ever. Exhibit #5,246 is this: magician/mentalist/oddball David Blaine blames Bush for the failure of "Dive of Death" stunt on Wednesday night.

The McCain campaign is now trying to broker a deal between House Republicans, Treasury Secretary Paulson, and the Democrats. This will be tough--but it’s worth a shot.

If it works, fine. If it fails, McCain will have, I think, three alternative paths:

1. Support Bush/Paulson/the Democrats. The rationale would be that the emergency is grave, the markets require action, and this is the only legislation that can pass. This is where most observers expect McCain to end up, it may well be where he has to end up, and it may be the right place to end up--IF the emergency is so grave and IF this is the only alternative that can pass. McCain could still stipulate he’ll improve the plan when he becomes president, that Bush and the Democrats messed this up, etc., etc. This outcome becomes likely if the markets start to meltdown today. It’s not particularly attractive substantively or politically, but....

2. Support House Republicans. Very dicey, obviously. For one thing, I’m not sure that their plan of letting banks buy insurance on mortgages they’ve written makes sense--isn’t that in effect a buy back at par? But it’s also politically risky: If the bailout legislation passes over McCain’s (and House Republicans’) opposition, and the markets (in the short term at least) like it, McCain hasn’t been part of the solution. If nothing passes, McCain can be blamed--which isn’t necessarily so bad if the markets don’t melt down, but if they do....

3. Improve on both Paulson and House Republicans with a new offer. This, based on my admittedly imperfect understanding of all this (but McCain has access to people with really good understanding), might be a combination of Larry Lindsey’s refinance-home-owners proposal and Lucian Bebchuk’s (and others’) proposal for direct bank recapitalization through Treasury security purchases and right offerings to shareholders. Introducing a new alternative at the eleventh hour might seem pretty bold and risky, but a) it’s probably better policy than what’s on the table now, b) who’s to say it couldn’t get a lot of support quickly, and c) there’s something attractive about opposing Henry Paulson and Barney Frank at once (sort of like opposing both Donald Rumsfeld and Harry Reid on Iraq a couple of years ago), and proposing a better course. It might be worth at least trying this alternative today, rather than focusing exclusively on trying to broker a deal between warring parties both of whose ideas aren’t great, or having to default to options 1 or 2.

There aren’t many outfits as arrogant, self-important, and aggrandizing as the unelected Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD), sponsor of tonight’s debate between Barack Obama and John McCain. When John McCain said Wednesday the debate might have to be delayed so he could work on the financial bailout, the commission responded, in effect, “Sorry, John, the debate must go on, whether or not financial markets collapse. The debate is more important.”

That was just the latest example of high-handedness by the commission, which has hijacked the debates from the candidates, the campaigns, and the news media. The commission picked the sites for the debates (three presidential, one vice presidential) and charged the colleges involved $1.5 million for the honor. Then CPD announced the moderators for each debate without consulting with Obama or McCain campaigns or even informing them ahead of time.

The moderators are all nice people: Jim Lehrer, Gwen Ifill, Tom Brokaw, Bob Schieffer. But all four of them are liberals, more or less, of the mainstream media variety. Plus, the commission picked no one from cable news, where millions of people who follow campaigns and elections most closely go for their political news.

The McCain and Obama campaigns had little trouble working out their own differences on debate format. Their negotiations were amicable. When the commission stepped in, the talks became less friendly.

Getting the commission to go along with the format agreed upon by the candidates was a problem. In fact, the McCain campaign was so upset by the commission’s overbearing attitude that it briefly considered dumping the commission and finding another vehicle for the debates. But the Obama campaign wasn’t interested and the McCain folks dropped the idea.

The commission had its own plans for the format. The CPB honchos--Republican Frank Fahrenkopf, Democrat Paul Kirk, and who-knows-what Janet Brown--wanted Obama and McCain to be seated for tonight’s debate. The campaigns wanted them to stand, and prevailed on this point. Representatives of Obama and McCain also forced the commission to allow the first debate to be on foreign policy, not domestic issues. And they insisted, against the commission’s wishes, to have more questions asked at the town hall presidential debate.

But those changes came about only after a struggle. The commission was set on imposing its own preferences. After all, the commission regards the presidential debates as its property now and forever.

The CPB took over the debates in 1987 after the League of Women Voters was sacked as the sponsor. The league had often irritated the campaigns, especially the campaign of President Carter in 1980. Carter aides privately mocked the league as “the plague of women voters” and “the league of women vultures.”

The commission ran the show in 1988, 1992, 1996, 2000, and 2004. One of the biggest complaints this year was the selection of sites in Mississippi, Tennessee, and New York--not battleground states. The vice presidential debate is scheduled for next Thursday in St. Louis, Missouri.

Harry Reid on Tuesday:

"We need the Republican nominee for president to let us know where he stands and what we should do."

Reid on Wednesday:

“it would not be helpful at this time to have [Barack Obama and John McCain] come back during these negotiations and risk injecting presidential politics into this process or distract important talks about the future of our nation’s economy. … We need leadership; not a campaign photo op.”

Reid on Thursday afternoon:

With the economic news only getting worse each day, I call on the President, Senator McCain and Congressional Republicans to join us to quickly get this done for American families.

Reid on Thursday afternoon

Harry Reid says he’s not scheduling any votes in the Senate for Friday.

The reason: He says he wants to give John McCain “no excuse” for missing Friday night’s presidential debate.

Reid on Thursday night:

“I would suggest that anyone in that meeting who tried to understand what John McCain said at that meeting, couldn’t,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada told reporters Thursday evening.

McCain was the last one to speak at the White House meeting, Reid said, and he “didn’t say anything substantive. ... John McCain did nothing to help, he only hurt the process,” Reid said, further chastising McCain for calling for a delay in Friday’s presidential debate in Mississippi. “We should not let this little effort to avoid participating in the debates sidetrack this most important issue,” Reid said.

Is it just me or is Harry Reid cynically trying to score points against John McCain in a time of national crisis?

But there really isn't much of a record of Harry Reid placing partisan politics above the national interest, right? So maybe it's not about politics. Maybe it's just about Reid's petty personal dislike for McCain. As Reid said on August 21: "[Sen. Lieberman] has a close personal relationship with John McCain. I don't fully understand why he does. ... I can't stand John McCain."

That statement sheds a little more light on the classiness of Reid's reference on Wednesday to his "friend John McCain."

I can't stand Harry Reid.

Watch the Fox News report John posted on how we got into this mess, and then chuckle at Obama's quote to the AP:

"Keep in mind House Democrats and Senate Democrats and me and the leadership are all pretty burned up about this thing," Obama said at a news conference after the TV interviews. "This wasn't happening on our watch. We weren't preventing some of the regulatory reforms that might have prevented us from getting here."

Audacity indeed.

Meanwhile Frank and Dodd are finding out what happens when you come to an "agreement" without talking to the very people who have objections. After today's contentious White House meeting, many fear any deal is breaking down:

Paulson walked into the room where Democrats were caucusing after today's meeting at the White House and pleaded with them, "Please don't blow this up."

Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., chair of the House Financial Services Committee was livid saying, "Don't say that to us after all we've been through!"

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said, "We're not the ones trying to blow this up; it's the House Republicans."

"I know, I know," Paulson replied.

Never fear, though, as Frank will gladly pin his own failures on McCain as the Hill goes into an all-nighter to try to get this solved. Predictably, there are already attempts to lard up the bill with plenty of handouts to those who helped get us here in the first place. The markets will not like this news in the morning.

While Obama himself is refraining from knocking McCain, his campaign certainly isn't:

So make no mistake: John McCain did not “suspend” his campaign. He just turned a national crisis into an occasion to promote his campaign. It’s become just another political stunt, aimed more at shoring up the Senator’s political fortunes than the nation’s economy. And it does nothing to help advance this critical legislation to protect the American people during this time of economic crisis.

There's some indication that McCain backs something along the lines of the House GOP's plan:

[A] key Republican lawmaker stated that Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) wants to explore new ideas, like loaning money to financial institutions or insuring the companies, rather than buying their toxic debt…

Rep. Spencer Bachus (Ala.), the ranking Republican on the House Financial Services Committee, attended the meeting at which some say a deal was reached. But he later issued a statement saying he wasn’t authorized to negotiate or approve any deals for House Republicans…

He added that McCain is interested in using loans or insurance rather than having the government purchase the toxic debts of Wall Street institutions.

These are the main principles of the House GOP alternative, which Paulson has said he doesn't think will work:

1. Government should be providing mortgage insurance instead of buying up toxic debt
2. The companies that hold the assets should be paying premiums for that insurance, not taxpayers
3. Cut down on regulations and taxes that are keeping capital on the sidelines during this crisis, allowing for private investment to come into the market instead of just tax dollars
4. Temporary tax relief for companies to allow them to invest and create jobs

Politico's Patrick O'Connor reports that Democratic House financial services committee chairman Barney Frank slammed John McCain for engaging in the bailout negotiations:

"McCain is Andy Kaufman in his Mighty Mouse costume - 'Here I Come to Save the Day,'" Frank said as he left a Thursday morning caucus meeting with House Democrats, saying the Republican presidential candidate's decision to enter the mix "is not helpful."

"He hasn't been involved," Frank said. "He doesn't know anything about it."

Why does Barney Frank think he's in a position to say McCain is unqualified to be at the negotiating table? Check out this Fox News report, via Ace, focusing on Frank's role in thwarting efforts to avert this crisis:

Yesterday afternoon, I went to CNN to talk about bailout politics. When I arrived, I was surprised to learn from the other two panelists -- CNN's Gloria Borger and the Washington Post's Dana Milbank -- that a deal on an amended version of the Treasury Department's $700 billion bailout plan was close. I was surprised because I had been hearing the opposite -- that House Republicans were increasingly opposed to a deal and that such a deal seemed less likely yesterday than it was when the plan was originally proposed. But others, including the Associated Press, were reporting that a deal was imminent.

Then, earlier today, the AP reported that such a deal had, in fact, been reached. The Washington Post soon followed, in an article that strongly suggested McCain was irrelevant to the process and reported that he had arrived after a deal had been struck.

McCain's "Straight Talk Air" landed at National Airport just after noon, and McCain's motorcade sped toward the Senate. But by then, senior Democrats and Republicans colleagues were already announcing that a deal in principle had been reached.

The Obama campaign gleefully sent the Post story out to reporters at 4:22 and affixed its own headline: "'Straight Talk Air' lands after deal was announced."

So what happened? I'm not sure anyone knows the full story, but here is my take. When John McCain announced that he was suspending his campaign, Democrats moved quickly to portray the decision as strictly political. (Senator Chuck Schumer said as much in an interview on CNN.) An important element of their case was convincing reporters that a deal was close and McCain presence was (a) unnecessary, (b) potentially detrimental, or (c) both.

But that's a hard case for them to make for two reasons. First, Harry Reid. On Wednesday Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid had explicitly called for McCain to use his influence as party leader to bring House Republicans along. "We need, now, the Republicans to start producing some votes for us," Reid said. "We need the Republican nominee for president to let us know where he stands and what we should do." Reid explained that McCain was crucial to any deal because his approval of a deal would give congressional Republicans political cover necessary to sign on to a bipartisan agreement. The second reason: House Republicans were never on board. Earlier this week, they gave Vice President Dick Cheney an earful about their opposition to the deal. Yesterday morning, a group of about 50 conservative House Republicans got together and when one speaker asked for a show of hands from those who support the bailout, less than a handful said they were likely to support it. One staffer for a Republican in House leadership said: “Understand one thing. House Republicans were never on board.”

By this morning, Senator Christopher Dodd and Representative Barney Frank -- the two lead congressional Democrats on this issue -- were telling reporters that a deal was close. But according to House sources, those claims were nonsense. "This was a smart political move by Senator McCain -- working in a bipartisan fashion to try to get something done," says a senior House Republican aide. "It's something he's done in the past." Democrats, this Republican says, immediately began plotting to deny McCain credit for a deal if one was reached and to blame him if a deal was not reached.

At least temporarily, we are seeing an interesting partnership between House Republicans and John McCain. When I asked one GOP Hill staffer whether McCain was serving as a proxy for House Republicans, I was told that such a claim would be too strong but that McCain is, at the very least, trying to give voice to House Republicans skeptical of the bailout. And if that's true, McCain will have an opportunity to bring them along -- or some of them -- to get a deal.

The real question, in the face of increasingly intense media hostility, is whether he’ll actually get credit for doing so.

The Obama campaign's legal counsel has demanded that radio and TV stations ban anti-Obama ads produced by the NRA.

Bush says he hopes everyone will reach an agreement "very shortly." He spoke briefly to reporters at the beginning of the meeting with the presidential candidates and Congressional leaders.

Negotiators are starting to define the strings attached to this package:

The tentative accord would give the Bush administration just a fraction of the $700 billion it had requested up front, with half the money subject to a congressional veto, congressional aides said. Under the plan, the Treasury secretary would get $250 billion immediately and could have an additional $100 billion if he certified it was needed. The last $350 billion could be blocked by a vote of Congress under the arrangement, designed to give lawmakers a stronger hand in controlling the unprecedented rescue.

The aides described the details on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

Meanwhile Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has followed on the heels of Rep. John Boehner with his own statement saying, "Nope, no deal yet."

“Members from all sides of the aisle continue to talk. There was constructive progress among some members of the Banking Committee and we will review these and other ideas with the Congressional Leadership, the Secretary of the Treasury, the President and the two Presidential candidates.”

Press coverage is quick to paint the tentative agreement on principles as a sewn-up situation, thereby depriving McCain of any possible political credit for delivering a deal, but the folks whom McCain might try to sway are still circulating other ideas with less government involvement:

A group of GOP lawmakers circulated a less government-focused alternative. Their proposal would have the government provide insurance to companies that agree to hold frozen assets, rather than have the government purchase the assets. Rep Eric Cantor, R-Va., said the idea would be to remove the burden of the bailout from taxpayers and place it, over time, on Wall Street instead.

The statements of Boehner and McConnell seem to suggest it's not just stalwart conservative fighters who aren't yet falling into line. Barney Frank's boasting about his newfound status as the "biggest mortgage holder in town" surely didn't inspire their confidence:

Under the bailout bill, which will let the government buy huge amounts of toxic mortgage-related assets, "we're now the biggest mortgage holder in town, and we can do serious foreclosure avoidance," Frank said.

Here's the gang at the big table. Bush: Who's lame now, huh?

If you’ve been reading the Arts section of any newspaper, you’ve probably read about Damien Hirst’s auction at Sotheby’s, (in)famous for bypassing galleries and dealers and for racking in so many pounds—111.5 million, to be exact. Hirst named the show “Beautiful Inside My Head Forever,” but Lee Rosenbaum had it right when she called it “Beautiful Inside My Wallet Forever.”

Even if you think Hirst’s work is subpar, you have to admire him for his gall and genius when it comes to getting people to pay so much money for his work. And now, to rake in even more money and build his name even further, Hirst is opening a shop in London right next to Sotheby’s where the big auction happened. The shop will be run by Other Criteria, Hirst’s publishing and merchandising company, and open on October 6.

If you can’t make it to London and are just dying to break your piggy bank to smithereens, you can buy a silkscreen of “For the Love of God” (the diamond-encrusted skull) for 10,000 pounds, or an 18-carat gold charm bracelet jingling with casts of pills for 25,000 pounds. But, alas, in an age when our American piggybanks are going on a major diet, it looks like the 15 pound postcard set is a bit easier to stomach--if you want to support Hirst, that is.

Mark Blumenthal updates his battleground state poll of polls this morning. Like Real Clear Politics, he loads new surveys in his modeling every day to produce a new “average” result by state. According to Blumenthal, 12 states now fall into the “toss-up” category:

Four show a statistically insignificant Obama lead: Colorado, Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania. And in the remaining eight, McCain holds a statistically insignificant lead: Virginia, New Hampshire, Nevada, Indiana, Ohio, North Carolina, Florida and West Virginia.

Mike Allen writes that over the past week Obama has opened up a lead in the presidential horserace.

But as the McCain campaign argued yesterday, averaging a number of polls – like Blumenthal does – gives a more accurate picture of the race.

And here’s something to think about. Just for fun, I plugged Blumenthal’s winner for each of the 50 states into The American Research Group’s electoral calculator, allocating toss-ups based on the albeit “statistically insignificant” leads. Using Blumenthal’s estimates, and comparing them to 2004 results, it looks like Colorado, New Mexico and Iowa switch from Republican to Democrat. New Hampshire is the only state that moves from Democrat to Republican.

The result: a 269-269 Electoral College tie.

In the wrestling match for credit, Dodd and Barney Frank got out in front this morning, declaring a deal on basic principles for a bailout before McCain's and Obama's meeting with President Bush, and overselling the extent of the agreement somewhat in the process:

House Financial Services Chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.) said he was happy to attend this afternoon’s White House meeting, which is expected to include presidential candidates Sens. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.), but he said there was little need for it now.
“I’m glad we’ll be able to go and tell them that there’s really not much of a deadlock [in Congress] to break,” Frank said.

John Boehner hastened to remind them about House conservatives, at whom McCain will have to be aiming a bunch of his negotiating power. Pelosi had hinted that she would not have her Democrats backing the Administration's bailout plan without Republican support. McCain met with Boehner this morning and is set to meet with Bush and Obama today at 4 p.m.

“As I told our Conference this morning, there is no bipartisan deal at this time,” House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) said. “There may be a deal among some Democrats, but House Republicans are not a part of it.”

Meanwhile, Harry Reid, who can nearly always be counted upon to make the wrong political move just when you need him to, is doing anything but putting country first in the tussle on the Hill.

He has vowed not to schedule any votes for Friday so that John McCain has "no excuse" for missing the debate Friday. This move assumes wrongly that McCain's main purpose in coming to the Hill was simply to vote when his purpose has been to help lead a coalition to an acceptable deal and also makes the scheduling of votes at a very critical time contingent upon a purely political consideration for the Democrats.

He's also reportedly trying to tack an extension of the ban on oil shale development on to the CR appropriations bill despite Dems having previously relented on extending such bans. Nice priorities, huh?

Politico's Martin Kady II reports that top negotiators in the Senate, Republican Robert Bennett and Democrat Chris Dodd, have reached an agreement

on a government bailout of the nation's financial system, granting extraordinary powers to the secretary of Treasury to purchase hundreds of billions in bad debt while attempting to stem foreclosures for homeowners struggling on Main Street. ... But Dodd cautioned that this is still a "set of principles" and not completed legislative language.

Sen. Robert Bennett (R-Utah), the top GOP negotiator in the Senate, said, "We have a plan that will pass the House, pass the Senate and be signed by the president, and bring certainty to the markets."

Dodd said the agreement includes a crackdown on executive compensation, but it does not appear to have a bankruptcy provision, coveted by liberal Democrats, which would allow judges to restructure mortgages for people facing foreclosure.

A few weeks ago I suggested to my blog friend Kathy Nelson that she read the excellent SNL oral history, Live From New York, as it contains some revealing bits about Al Franken. I had read the book years ago, however, and had forgotten how damning some of the stuff in it was. Kathy has the goods. Here are a couple choice excerpts which seem to point to defining character traits of Franken's:

Franken: There was not as much cocaine as you would think on the premises. Yeah, a number of people got in trouble. But cocaine was used mainly just to stay up. There was a very undisicplined way of writing the show, which was staying up all night on Tuesday. We didn't have the kind of hours that normal people have. And so there was a lot of waiting until Tuesday night, and then going all night, and at two or three or four in the morning, doing some coke to stay up, as opposed to doing a whole bunch, and doing nitrous oxide, and laughing at stuff.

People used to ask me about this and I'd always say, "No, there was no coke. It's impossible to do the kind of show we were doing and do drugs." And that was just a funny lie that I liked to tell. Kind of the opposite was true, unfortunately, for some people, it was impossible to do the show without the drugs.

And then there's this:

Franken: I had heard Spiro Agnew was going to be on Tom Snyder's show, so I just wanted to meet him and harass him a little bit. I brought a tape recorder and went down to their studios on six. Agnew was in the makeup room, so I sat down in the next makeup chair as he was getting made up and I said something like, "You called student protesters bums, and aren't you the bum?--I think that's what I said--"because you took money?" And he just said, "I never called them bums. That was Nixon." It was like beneath his dignity to address this kid with long hair and to spend too much time on it.

I thought I'd pressed the button to start the tape recorder, but I didn't. I'd had it on and turned it off or something. So I didn't get it on tape. And then I also felt stupid because I checked it out and I was wrong: Nixon had called students bums. At least I did get to say to Agnew that he was a bum.

Leave aside the cocaine and the unpleasant image of a 23-year-old employee running around confronting people who are guests of his employer. What's striking is Franken's casual disregard for the truth. He didn't just use drugs, he also admits to lying about not using them. (But it was a funny lie?) Then Franken accuses Agnew of saying something that he didn't say. Agnew calls him on it. Yet when Franken later realizes his mistake he revels in having made the false accusation anyway.

So in this election year, cannot even the crossword puzzle escape bias? As Americans across the country take their pencils to the daily puzzle, they are more likely to find themselves filling the grid with the name of the senator from Illinois for its "wonderfully convenient alternating series of commonly used vowels and consonants." McCain is simply not "crossword friendly" according to Diane McNulty of the New York Times. It is of course difficult to say how many times puzzle constructors at the Times and others have tried to make McCain's name fit. The science of the crossword is tricky and delicate, and it certainly is no one's fault that the Republican nominee's name is so ill-fitted for the grid. If only he had those evenly spaced consonants and vowels... I don't suppose "Maverick" would fit either.

Here’s the situation we McCain-sympathizing/Paulson-plan-skeptics/populist-inclined/but we’ve-got-to-be-responsible-in-a-crisis types face:

1. Something probably needs to be passed soon.

2. There are almost certainly superior alternatives to Paulson or even (especially?) to Paulson-as-modified (see, for example, this).

3. There’s not enough time to write a new plan, get a consensus behind it, etc.

So: 4. We need to pass Paulson-as-modified ASAP.

McCain will throw his weight behind it and help get it through. But he will also makes clear that, as president--while of course standing behind all obligations incurred and transactions committed to under the Paulson regime--he’s going to take a fresh look. He’s going to convene the best people, he’ll take a look at all the best ideas that have been put forward (ranging from Hillary Clinton’s to Newt Gingrich’s, from direct aid to housing to rights offerings by banks to changing accounting rules, etc.), and he will then plan on modifying/improving/adding to the Paulson plan going forward. This is delicate: McCain needs to reassure markets about the current commitments as well as promise further and better reforms. But this is the right position substantively and, I think, politically. It combines the best of McCain’s impulses, and the twin requirements of presidential leadership: taking responsibility for what has to be done now, and committing to energetic and bold reform in the near future.

Jim Treacher has a fall-over-funny, Onion-esque item:

Misspelling Found in Palin's Personal Journal
By Markos Moulitsas
Special to the New York Times
Saturday, September 20, 2008; A1

Media Bubble, Sept. 20 -- John McCain's presidential campaign is reeling this morning upon allegations that his running mate, Alaskan Gov. Sarah Palin, is a poor speller. The charge stems from a passage found in her personal journal, which was obtained by the New York Times via an anonymous source.

"Trig was born one week ago today," the journal's Apr. 25, 2008 entry reads. "I love him so much. This is such a joyus [sic] time for our family."

Merriam-Webster.com has no entry for "joyus." However, "joyous" is defined as "joyful." Palin has ignored all requests for comment on the controversy which has been dubbed "Dummygate."

"I am gobsmacked," said the NYT's source. "Little did I realize when I bought a plane ticket to Alaska, broke into the governor's house, and vetted through her personal belongings that I would find such a startling, stunning bombshell."

There's more!

Via Byron York, Bill Clinton was asked by ABC about McCain's decision to postpone the debate and said:

"I presume [McCain] did that in good faith since I know he wanted — I remember he asked for more debates to go all around the country, and so I don't think we ought to overly parse that."

Video via Hot Air.

I can't believe it.

From the "If Sarah Palin had said it" files: Fox News's Aaron Burns reports that during a speech in which Biden accused McCain of being "dangerously wrong" on foreign policy, the Delaware senator's gaffes "included saying that President Bush sent a US envoy to Iran, and that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said we were losing the war in Iraq (he actually said we were losing in Afghanistan)."

Criticizing McCain for opposing negotiations with Iran, Biden said even the Bush administration now favors such talks — which Obama has long supported.

“After seven years, in which our senior diplomatic personnel were not allowed to make a single contact with Iranians, the Bush administration realized the absurdity of its own policy and sent our leading diplomat to Iran,” he said. “The Assistant Secretary of State as he went to Tehran, sat down at the instruction of the President of the United States.”

It sounds great for Obama and Biden that the president came around to something so close to their position on talks with Iran; trouble is, the event Biden described never actually happened.

Of course, Biden meant to say Pyongyang rather than Tehran. He must not know the Bush Doctrine 6.0 dictates that we fecklessly negotiate with one rogue regime at a time--not to be confused with the "naive" Obama Doctrine of meeting with all of our worst enemies without precondition in the span of a year.

Bob Schieffer reports:

I am told, Maggie, that the way McCain got involved in this in the first place, the Treasury Secretary was briefing Republicans in the House yesterday, the Republican conference, asked how many were ready to support the bailout plan. Only four of them held up their hands. Paulson then called, according to my sources, Senator Lindsey Graham, who is very close to John McCain, and told him: you've got to get the people in the McCain campaign, you've got to convince John McCain to give these Republicans some political cover. If you don't do that, this whole bailout plan is going to fail. So that's how, McCain, apparently, became involved.

File this in the ever-growing "it-would-be-funny-if-it-weren't-so-serious" that characterizes the Bush administration's second-term foreign policy. After North Korea publicly promised earlier this week to restore its nuclear facilities "to their original state," senior US negotiator Chris Hill characterized the move as North Korea striking a "very tough negotiating position." The Agence France Presse headline notes: "US bewildered, disappointed over North Korean nuclear defiance."

How is it that anyone could possible find themselves "bewildered" by North Korean nuclear defiance? And yet that is where Condoleezza Rice and the White House find themselves these days. "The North Korean actions are very disappointing and run counter to the expectations of the members of the six party talks and the international community," said a White House spokesman earlier this week.

If the North Korean actions "run counter to the expectations" of the Bush administration and others facilitating the appeasement, they were utterly predictable to anyone who has read the newspaper regularly for the past decade.

Here's a three-sentence summary of just the past two years: In October 2006, North Korea tested a nuclear weapon and earned the condemnation of the world and stern warnings from the Bush administration. Then, last spring, after promising better behavior, North Korea was caught proliferating nuclear technology to Syria, the world's second-leading state sponsor of terror, and the Bush administration, after keeping this information secret for months in order to protect its diplomatic efforts with Kim Jong Il, once again thundered warnings against further nuclear development and proliferation. Then, in a triumph of the diplomacy of dreams, the Bush administration proposed even more concessions -- offering to lift key economic sanctions on North Korea and remove the rogue regime from the list of state sponsors of terror.

And now, to the surprise of few outside the State Department, North Korea has refused to honor its obligations under the six-party talks and seems as determined as ever to continue its nuclear program.

So how long until the State Department offers new concessions?

It's Joe Biden spokesman David Wade's thankless job to defend his garrulous gaffe-master of a boss. Here's Wade in action:

"Joe Biden is getting the job done every day, and I guarantee Joe Biden will be Mr. October. He's a closer. He's the vice presidential nominee you want slugging it out in the late innings when proven campaign skills, intestinal fortitude, expertise, and experience matter most. In a big issue election where the small bore ghosts of elections past seem trivial, this is about substance not splash, steak not sizzle."

Obviously, Mr. Wade gets paid by the mixed metaphor. Shouldn't Biden slug it out in the late rounds rather than the late innings? And don't closers pitch rather than slug? Ow - my head hurts. And my heart goes out to poor David Wade, the most underpaid man in America regardless of whatever financial remuneration he receives.

Radley Balko argues that our current mess isn't due to the failures of capitalism, but to a "corporatist socialism" abetted by the fiscal irresponsibility of the same elected officials who now want to "solve" the mess with more government.

If any private corporation employed the same accounting tricks Congress and the White House use to hide the government's massive debt and financial liabilities, its board and executive officers would all be in prison. In the government, it's common practice. And that's not even considering the funding of our two ongoing wars, which somehow emanates from outside the normal budget process.

If the government were required to abide by the same accounting standards as private industry, its debt would be in the trillions, not billions. Last May, Dallas Fed President Richard Fisher said that the government's unfunded liability for Social Security and Medicare alone comes to a staggering $99.2 trillion, or $330,000 for every man, woman, and child in the United States. It's an impossible figure.

So when congressional leaders and presidential candidates Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) call for more government oversight of our struggling financial institutions, go ahead and laugh. You know you want to. The idea that the private sector would be in better shape today if only we demanded more oversight from our politicians is preposterous. Our politicians wouldn't recognize "fiscal responsibility" if it spat in their ears.

Wall Street moguls may be "greedy," as both John McCain and Barack Obama have described them, but at least there are real consequences when their greed becomes excessive. They go out of business.

He continues:

When you, Joe Citizen, spend frivolously and default on your loans, the bank takes your house. When the government spends your tax dollars frivolously, it simply cooks the books to cover its excesses. When the books are left in ashes, the government just takes more of your money, or it prints more money, leaving the money it hasn't already taken from you devalued. Over the last few weeks, we've learned that you now face the prospect of an additional indignity: When your neighbor's bank spends frivolously and defaults on its loans, the government's going to take your money then too, to keep the bank in business.

There's a reason voters in presidential races tend to shy away from electing senators. The primary skills of a legislator--talking, compromising, "representing"--are different from those of an executive--deciding, choosing, "executing." There are individuals who have the ability both to deliberate patiently and act energetically--but it's a rare combination. The best legislators tend not to be great executives, and vice-versa.

This year, for the first time in U.S. history, both major party nominees for president are sitting senators. The winner may be the one who can convince some portion of the electorate that he's less "senatorial," and more "presidential," than the other.

That's why McCain's action Wednesday--announcing he would come back to Washington to try to broker a deal to save our financial system--could prove so important. The rescue package that was so poorly crafted and defended by the Bush administration seemed to be sliding toward defeat. The presidential candidates were on the sidelines, carping and opining and commenting. But one of them, John McCain, intervened suddenly and boldly, taking a risk in order to change the situation, and to rearrange the landscape.

Of course his motives were partly election-related. But "the interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place." If candidate McCain, for whatever mixed motives, ends up acting in a way that results in a deal that is viewed as better than the original proposal, and that seems to stabilize the markets and avert a meltdown--he'll benefit politically, and he deserves to. For McCain will have acted presidentially in the campaign--which some voters, quite reasonably, will think speaks to his qualifications to be president.

As for the question of Friday night's debate, which some in the media seem to think more important than saving the financial system--if the negotiations are still going on in D.C., McCain should offer to send Palin to debate Obama! Or he can take a break from the meetings, fly down at the last minute himself, and turn a boring foreign policy debate, in which he and Obama would repeat well-rehearsed arguments, into a discussion about leadership and decisiveness. And if the negotiations are clearly on a path to success, then McCain can say he can now afford to leave D.C., fly down, and the debate would become a victory lap for McCain.

So the action of these few days becomes more important than the talk of that hour and a half Friday night. One could even say the contrast between the two men in action becomes the true debate over who should be president. The media, being talkers and debaters, love debates, overestimate their importance, and are underestimating the possible effect of McCain's dramatic action. In the debate itself, McCain should mock the media's greater concern for gabbing than solving our economic problems, and should associate Obama with such a talk-heavy media-type approach to politics. If the race is between an energetic executive and an indecisive talker, the energetic executive should win.

John Podhoretz takes on the already congealing conventional wisdom that McCain suspended his campaign in response to a couple of bad polls.

From the Boston Globe:

In response to a question from an American student about whether he supports Democratic nominee Barack Obama or Republican John McCain, Ahmadinejad did not explicitly name Obama but said: “The American government 28 years ago decided on its own to cut its ties with Iran . . .We do prefer to have relations, whereas one of the candidates in this election would prefer that.”

Recordings of bin Laden reciting his penwork were found on some of the 1,500 cassettes discovered in Kandahar, Afghanistan following the 9/11 attacks. Flagg Miller, an assistant professor at University of California, Davis, has been studying them and will publish his findings next week in the October issue of Language and Communication. Yale is currently cleaning and digitizing the cassettes.

Miller affords us the insight that “Bin Laden is an entertainer with an agenda” and “uses poetry to tap into the cultural orientation, the history and the ethics of Islam,” while BBC gushes a bit, saying “…Saudi-born Bin Laden [is] a skilled poet who weaves mystical references as well as jihadist imagery into his verse, reciting 1,400-year-old poetry alongside more current mujahideen-era work.”

He weaves? If so, there are more than a few unseemly strands in the fabric. Check out his work below:

Tomorrow, William, you will discover which young man
[will] confront your brethren, who have been deceived by [their own] leaders.
A youth, who plunged into the smoke of war, smiling
He hunches forth, staining the blades of lances red
May God not let my eye stray from the most eminent
Humans, should they fall, Djinn, should they ride
[And] lions of the jungle, whose only fangs
[Are their] lances and short Indian swords
As the stallion bears my witness that I hold them back
[My] stabbing is like the cinders of fire that explode into flame
On the day of the stallions’ expulsion, how the war-cries attest to me
As do stabbing, striking, pens, and books.

An unnamed Arabic specialist quoted in the Times says that the poems are a “adolescent and brutal,” “a disgrace,” and don’t merit publishing. You can say that again.

Sen. Joe Lieberman on Hannity:

I think this is a great act of leadership by John McCain, this is the guy I've come to know and love for 20 years here in the Senate, over and over again when there's a problem not being solved he gets in the middle of it. And I'll tell you that this thing will not be solved, and there won't be an agreement, without John McCain and Barack Obama here. Maybe McCain can do it on his own--it'd be unfortunate. I repeat what I think I said earlier.

Harry Reid said to me, "I'm not going to pass this bill without Republican support and I need John McCain's help." I gather Harry just said that John McCain suspending his campaign is a stunt. It's not a stunt, it's an act of leadership without which this problem will not be solved in the right way, so I'm proud of my guy and I'm glad he's coming back to work here, that's what the people want

Newt Gingrich:

Today John McCain showed what it meant to put country first.

He put everything on the line to try to put together a bipartisan sizable economic package to replace the failed Paulson bailout package.

This is the greatest single act of responsibility ever taken by a presidential candidate and rivals President Eisenhower saying, ‘I will go to Korea.’

Every House and Senate Republican should join him in seeking the best ideas and the best solutions from across the country.

Gov. Arnold Shwarzenegger:

There is nothing more important to Californians and the American people right now than the state of our economy. This is about the jobs, paychecks, and retirement plans of my constituents. This crisis will not be solved with finger pointing, political posturing, or campaign slogans. This is a time for unity and leadership, not politics and partisanship. I commend Senator McCain for suspending his campaign and returning to Washington to help Congress take the quick and decisive action needed to put America's financial sector back on track.

Rep. Barney Frank:

“I think it's the longest Hail Mary in the history of football or Marys.”

Sen. Mitch McConnell:

“That’s really an outstanding idea. The threats to Americans and their homes, savings and retirements are really not a partisan problem, and it won't be fixed with a partisan approach.”

Today, after John McCain announced that he's suspending his campaign and returning to D.C. to focus on passing legislation to address the economic crisis, Harry Reid said that it wouldn't be helpful to have the presidential candidates at the negotiating table: “it would not be helpful at this time to have them come back during these negotiations and risk injecting presidential politics into this process or distract important talks about the future of our nation’s economy. … We need leadership; not a campaign photo op.”

But yesterday, Reid demanded that the White House made sure the legislation had John McCain's backing, and Reid floated this bogus piece of news clearly intended to force McCain's hand: "I got some good news in the last hour or so … it appears that Sen. McCain is going to come out for this." McCain flatly denied that he had endorsed the plan.

So Harry Reid says that it's essential that John McCain backs legislation designed to avert the greatest economic meltdown since the Great Depression. And when McCain says the legislation, in its current form, is not good enough, Reid tells McCain to stay away from Capitol Hill. Who's playing politics with the economic crisis?

Update: McCain spokesman Brian Rogers points out that Reid also said yesterday: "We need the Republican nominee for president to let us know where he stands and what we should do."

Rogers says in a statement: “Unfortunately, Senator Reid is putting partisan politics ahead of the business of the American people. But there should be no mistake: 24 hours ago Reid and his Democratic colleagues on the Hill couldn't have been more desperate for Senator McCain's help in resolving this crisis. Now they've got it.”

Well, John McCain has thrown his "country first" curveball, suspending his campaign, taking his ads down, and saying the debate should be delayed if necessary.

At first I thought Obama's only decision was between looking like a superficial spoilsport by continuing the campaign as planned or coming to Washington as a follower to John McCain once again (just as he was on the Russia/Georgia situation, and similar to the way he followed by laying out principles for the bail-out).

But Obama, feeling he is on a roll no doubt, is saying the debate is on: "We can walk and chew gum at the same time," is the message.

McCain's political director Mike Duhaime:

“Quite frankly, I think you could ask Sen. Obama if he’s going to do what he thinks is right. I mean, he has never -- I believe -- never once made a decision that is an unpopular decision or went against the orthodoxy of his party, and was one that was one that was a tough decision to make. . . . Sen. McCain has done that throughout his entire career, his entire life -- not just in politics, but his life.”

This is where John McCain feels comfortable. He's taking a big risk and making an unconventional move for what he feels is right, and banking on the fact that his leadership in Washington, which has brought sides together in the past, will help again.

But classic McCain moves can come with classic McCain complications. Yes, John McCain is a leader, and yes, he can bring people together, but to what end? The turn on the bail-out bill, which looked like it would be grudgingly passed just a day ago, suggests Congress is getting a lot of calls instructing them that they'd better not pass any such thing.

Policy aside, however, this is McCain's ballgame. Though I have not often agreed with the ends for which he has brought together both sides of the aisle in the past, if there's one person who can form a coalition to pass something acceptable, he's the guy. The picture of McCain at work on the Hill on a truly tough problem in a truly bipartisan way will likely put independents in mind of the McCain they like. The McCain who is the man Obama claims to be, in practice instead of just in theory.

Once again, he is putting his political neck on the line to achieve a tough, complex Congressional consensus because he believes it's right for the country. In doing so, he has a chance to once again convincingly take on the leadership mantle which has slipped from his shoulders during the last week.

Update: Obama's press conference had him pushing the idea that this is exactly the time the American people need to hear from their prospective leaders about this crisis, so the debate Friday should go forward.

The question unasked by the press corps: "Mr. Obama, the debate topic for Friday was changed last week, at your behest, from the economy to foreign policy. If you argue the debate should go forward so Americans can hear from their leaders about this crisis, would you agree to change the topic back to the economy?"

This is what playing the race card looks like:

Rep. Alcee Hastings told an audience of Jewish Democrats Wednesday that they should be wary of Republican VP nominee Sarah Palin because “anybody toting guns and stripping moose don’t care too much about what they do with Jews and blacks.”

“If Sarah Palin isn’t enough of a reason for you to get over whatever your problem is with Barack Obama, then you damn well had better pay attention,” Rep. Alcee Hastings of Florida said at a panel about the shared agenda of Jewish and African-American Democrats Wednesday. Hastings, who is African-American, was explaining what he intended to tell his Jewish constituents about the presidential race. “Anybody toting guns and stripping moose don’t care too much about what they do with Jews and blacks. So, you just think this through,” Hastings added as the room erupted in laughter and applause.

John McCain is suspending his campaign and wants to delay the first debate (now scheduled for Friday night) in order to focus on the financial crisis. Here are McCain's remarks as prepared for delivery in New York City today:

America this week faces an historic crisis in our financial system. We must pass legislation to address this crisis. If we do not, credit will dry up, with devastating consequences for our economy. People will no longer be able to buy homes and their life savings will be at stake. Businesses will not have enough money to pay their employees. If we do not act, ever corner of our country will be impacted. We cannot allow this to happen.

Last Friday, I laid out my proposal and I have since discussed my priorities and concerns with the bill the Administration has put forward. Senator Obama has expressed his priorities and concerns. This morning, I met with a group of economic advisers to talk about the proposal on the table and the steps that we should take going forward. I have also spoken with members of Congress to hear their perspective.

It has become clear that no consensus has developed to support the Administration’s proposal. I do not believe that the plan on the table will pass as it currently stands, and we are running out of time.

Tomorrow morning, I will suspend my campaign and return to Washington after speaking at the Clinton Global Initiative. I have spoken to Senator Obama and informed him of my decision and have asked him to join me.

I am calling on the President to convene a meeting with the leadership from both houses of Congress, including Senator Obama and myself. It is time for both parties to come together to solve this problem.

We must meet as Americans, not as Democrats or Republicans, and we must meet until this crisis is resolved. I am directing my campaign to work with the Obama campaign and the commission on presidential debates to delay Friday night’s debate until we have taken action to address this crisis.

I am confident that before the markets open on Monday we can achieve consensus on legislation that will stabilize our financial markets, protect taxpayers and homeowners, and earn the confidence of the American people. All we must do to achieve this is temporarily set politics aside, and I am committed to doing so.

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

Update: An announcement from Obama spokesman Bill Burton:

At 8:30 this morning, Senator Obama called Senator McCain to ask him if he would join in issuing a joint statement outlining their shared principles and conditions for the Treasury proposal and urging Congress and the White House to act in a bipartisan manner to pass such a proposal. At 2:30 this afternoon, Senator McCain returned Senator Obama’s call and agreed to join him in issuing such a statement. The two campaigns are currently working together on the details.

Update II: Obama's campaign says the debate is on.

In response to Joe Biden's statement that he and Barack Obama are not supporting clean coal because it's "killing" Americans, the McCain campaign produced this ad:

Very nicely done.

Via Ben Smith, Bill Clinton tells CNN's Larry King in an interview about his plans to help Obama win Florida:

"You know, they think that because of who I am and where my politic[al] base has traditionally been, they may want me to go sort of hustle up what Lawton Chiles used to call the 'cracker vote' there."

Is Clinton intentionally trying to stir up racial resentment by saying that "they" (presumably the Obama campaign) want him to "hustle up ... the 'cracker vote'"? According to a search in Nexis, Clinton has never publicly used the phrase "cracker vote" before now. Lawton Chiles did use the word "cracker" in a non-pejorative manner, once during a campaign event with Clinton in 1996 according to a Hearst newspapers story:

"I know this fella from Arkansas," boasted Florida Gov. Lawton Chiles as he introduced Bill Clinton to a Democratic fund-raising reception in this GOP stronghold. "And I can tell you he knows how to speak cracker."

There's been a lot of paranoid speculation in this election that certain people are trying to play the race card. Clinton's usage is the latest evidence that it's the Democrats who are the race-obsessed party in this cycle.

Rather than simply donate money to a campaign, you can purchase an accessory from a company that gives part of the proceeds to your candidate or political party.

Designer BYLU created chunky, colored enamel bracelets stamped with gold graffiti-style “Obama ’08.” The bracelets cost $100 each and $50 from each purchase will be donated to the Obama campaign. While the red, white, and blue bangles are chic and patriotic, a large accessory emblazoned with your political candidate won’t be too stylish after November 4, no matter who wins.

And if you’re a McCain-Palin supporter, you can buy lipstick and other trinkets from Pit Bull Mom, a company inspired by “a woman with beliefs so strong that a Pit Bull really is the closest comparison. A woman whose determination and strength resonated in a vibrant, empowering way. A woman who loves God, her country and her family.” The lipsticks retail for $9.99 and Pit Bull Mom will donate a portion of the proceeds to the Republican Party and the Special Olympics. While I commend the company for supporting a Republican candidate (which is rare in the fashion and beauty world), I unfortunately can’t see stylish Sarah Palin wearing either the 80s-esque Pale N’ Pink or the garish fuchsia Republican Red lipsticks.

H/T Refinery 29 and The Cut

McCain-Palin campaign lead pollster, Bill McInturff, and Director of Strategy, Sarah Simmons, conducted a conference call this morning in response to the ABC News/Washington Post poll released today showing Barack Obama opening up a 52 percent to 43 percent lead over John McCain. McInturff sees the national numbers very differently, arguing the race overall and in the battleground states is relatively stable--particularly when many polls are averaged. Even looking at just the last week, an average of the public polling suggests the campaign is within the margin of error, and has basically been that way for the month of September.

McInturff believes the ABC News/Washington Post poll is clearly an outlier. He reminded listeners that survey samples are within the margin of error 95 percent of the time; 5 percent of polls are just out of whack. This is one of those, he said. McInturff argues the 16-point Democratic party ID advantage in the poll is the root of the problem. There is no evidence of a party ID shift that would justify that much of a Democratic edge. He said this survey reminded him of a Los Angeles Times survey conducted in June that similarly overestimated the percent of Democrats in the electorate. This poll is also out of line with additional polls McInturff says his company (Public Opinion Strategies) conducts every night for other political campaign clients.

A couple other points:

This Friday night John McCain and Barack Obama meet in the first presidential general election debate in Oxford, Mississippi. The subject: national security. The stakes are high for both camps--or are they?

Political scientist Tom Holbrook argues that despite all the emphasis on the debates, these events move the numbers less than many might think. Analyzing movement in national polls following debates in the past five presidential elections (1988-2004), he writes:

These data suggest that the norm is for very little swing in candidate support following debates. Across all thirteen presidential debates the average absolute change in candidate support was 1 percentage point. There are a few notable exceptions, of course. Two that stand out are the second debate in 1992, following which George H.W. Bush lost 2 points, and first debate of 2004, after which George W. bush lost 2.26 points. Other debates with above average (but still small) vote shifts are the first debate in 1996 and the second debates in 1988 and 2000.

However, Holbrook also notes the “cumulative” effect of all three debates might produce more movement in the polls.

Focusing on single debate bumps may be obscuring a more general, cumulative effect of debates. The last column in the table

shows the change in candidate support from one week prior to the first debate to one week after the final debate. Here we see that the debate period generated a 2.42 point bump for George H. W. Bush in 1988, cost Al Gore 3.52 points in 2000, and cost George W. Bush almost 2 points in 2000

Bottom line according to Holbrook:

I don't expect to see large swings in candidate support following the individual debates, barring something really spectacular happening. However, even relatively small shifts in the same direction over the three debates could make this relatively tight race even tighter (if the shifts favor McCain), or could blow it open (if the shifts favor Obama).

I don’t care; I’m still watching!

Read Holbrook’s entire post here.

Please don’t construe what follows as an endorsement of the richly flawed Paulson Plan, but…

Over the years, we’ve all gotten accustomed to Democrats referring to every single spending boondoggle as “an investment.” You know the drill – we need to invest in infrastructure or we must invest in midnight basketball. Of course, such things were never investments but rather expenditures. Perhaps they were good expenditures and perhaps not, but they certainly didn’t qualify as “investments” unless you wanted to torture the definition of a well known term.

It thus comes as no small irony that the Paulson Plan which actually calls for literal investments is instead routinely referred to and calculated as pure expenditures in the media. Perhaps decades of John Kerry-types endlessly braying about “investments” in education or whatever other spending plan caught their fancy has hopelessly corrupted the language. Or perhaps some purportedly wise people really don’t understand the difference between investing and spending.

ABC's Jake Tapper and Matt Jaffe report that Joe Biden is the gift that keeps on giving:

"I think we're going to be up very late counting votes," Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., told a kettle of lawyers Tuesday night at a fundraiser for the Democratic Victory Fund hosted by the American Association of Justice in Washington, D.C. "And so, your help means a big deal. The last help we need you for, is you're the best legal minds in the country. We're going to need you going into election time, because we're going to mobilize thousands of lawyers to make sure they don't steal another election." [...]

"[McCain] has never, never, never, never, never, never, never shared the values set that you share," Biden said. "He's an honorable, decent man, but John McCain truly believes, truly believes that you are corporate America's problem," he said to the trial lawyers. "And thank God you are."

Biden said that he's "done more than any other senator combined" for trial lawyers.

"There are two people -- you've heard me say it before -- two groups that stand between us and the barbarians at the gate," Biden said. "It's you and organized labor. That's it. That is it. So, mark my words, mark my words, if we lose this election, you are going to continue to see a continuation of the onslaught on everything we care about. For real. For real. So, I'm not only thanking you for your help. I would think you're all absolutely brain-dead if you didn't help. And I mean it."

Who are the barbarians at the gate? And how have trial lawyers and union bosses stopped them?

Via Hot Air, Fox News's Jim Angle reports:

"Our nation has a long and proud tradition of news organizations that are ideological and partisan in nature, the Huffington Post and the New York Times being two such publications."

--- The McCain Report

A Democratic legislator in Alaska who sponsored a bill to require the state to pay for the cost of examining the victims of rapes and collecting evidence has told the press that Wasilla, the town where Sarah Palin was mayor, resisted this measure:

"It was one of those things everyone could agree on except Wasilla," Croft told CNN. "We couldn't convince the chief of police to stop charging them."

CNN cites a report that Wasilla's police chief said he wanted to charge the rapists rather than the taxpayers for these bills. But Jim Geraghty reports there appears to be no evidence that victims were actually billed. He writes: "in six committee meetings, Wasilla was never mentioned, even when the discussion turned to the specific topic of where victims were being charged." Also:

The deputy commissioner of Alaska’s Department of Public Safety told the State Affairs Committee that he has never found a police agency that has billed a victim. In light of Wasilla’s low number of rapes according to available FBI statistics (one to two per year, compared to Juneau’s 30-39), and the fact that the Wasilla Finance Department cannot find any record of charging a victim for a rape kit, it is entirely possible that no victim was ever charged.

Del Smith, the state’s deputy commissioner at the Department of Public Safety, testified in support of the rape-kit-charging-ban legislation during multiple hearings. During one, state representative Jeannette James asked if she “understood correctly that Mr. Smith is saying that the department has never billed a victim for exams.”

Smith replied that “the department might have been billed, but he has not found any police agency that has ever billed a victim.”

To clarify: In preparation to attend a hearing and support the bill, one of the state’s top law-enforcement officials found no case of a rape victim ever being charged. And roughly a month after 30 Democratic lawyers, investigators, and opposition researchers, not to mention reporters from every major news agency in the country, landed in Alaska, we still have no instances to consider.

The allegation against Palin in the nation’s most widely distributed paper a couple weeks ago — “An aide to a Democratic state legislator tells USA Today that women in Wasilla did pay out of pocket for their rape kits” — is clearly not sufficient, considering the gravity of the charge, the obvious motive to paint Palin badly, and the lack of any corroborating evidence.

There is no indication that Sarah Palin was aware that these costs weren't already covered by the government by law, but if CNN and USA Today want to write this kind of story, perhaps these news outlets should cover reports that in 2004 there were cases in Barack Obama's Illinois of caseworkers "reporting that rape victims continue to be charged for their forensic exams."

Mark Steyn has some rather pointed observations regarding John McCain’s political maneuvers during the economic crisis:

I dunno about a nine-point lead, Kathryn, but clearly the Obama campaign self-destruct effort managed to stall during Bailout Week.

As a general rule, when economic matters are in the news, I would recommend Senator McCain go to Bermuda for a few days and play canasta on the veranda until everything quietens down. Obama and Biden are just as witless on the subject but at least their platitudes and class warfare don't actively depress their base - unlike McCain's nutty improvisations re Andrew Cuomo*. If only we could get back to the heady days when the Democrat-media axis was demanding Sarah Palin's obstetrician produce the birth video.

(*By the way, this is what I loathe about long-serving senators: Politics is all Rolodex.)

The nine-point lead Steyn references is in regards to a new ABC poll that shows McCain trailing Obama by – you guessed it – nine points. Like Steyn, I also “don’t know” about the nine-point lead that ABC finds. With the reliable Rasmussen and more volatile Gallup tracking polls both showing a tightening race over the past week, the ABC effort seems like an outlier.

But that surmise shouldn’t obscure what a dismal week it’s been for the McCain campaign. For reasons of space, I won’t document all of the Maverick’s pratfalls since the Lehman bankruptcy, but I will observe that McCain sure has shoved a lot of campaigning clumsiness into ten short days. It’s hard to believe a candidate not named Biden could produce twin whoppers along the lines of Chris Cox being the economy’s grand villain and Andrew Cuomo being its savior in such a brief span of time.

So what has happened politically in the week and a half that we’ve danced along the cusp of financial calamity? The past fortnight has been the equivalent of the Olympics – no one has paid any attention to the presidential candidates or their increasingly tiresome race. Low end news gatherers (i.e. normal people) will only tackle so much news at one time. Obama’s equivocations and McCain’s serial stumbles happily haven’t made the cut with the Great Depression redux looming. That’s why we’ve seen the race revert back to its historic mean of Obama holding a very slight lead.

But the game will likely resume on Friday with the first presidential debate. If Warren Buffet’s show of support combined with the looming passage of some governmental plan settles the markets by the end of the week – admittedly a big “if” - Obama and McCain will have the stage to themselves when they tangle on Friday. Even though the debate is supposed to focus on foreign policy, I have a feeling the economy will come up. Obama will doubtlessly offer up some palaver about Main Street and Wall Street – I love it when he talks about those two places since he understands neither.

As for McCain, who knows what he’ll say? We can only hope and expect that he’ll improve on his efforts of the past ten days.

Politico's Ryan Grim reports:

After months of demanding that Democrats lift the ban on offshore drilling, Republicans have gotten their wish.

House Appropriations Committee Chairman Dave Obey (D-Wis.) told reporters Tuesday evening that Democrats were removing the ban from the continuing budget resolution because of a White House veto threat.

But they've vowed to fight another day.

"Chairman Obey negotiated the best package he could get with the White House to take a budget standoff off the table so we can address the larger Bush financial crisis,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s spokesman, Drew Hammill “The White House made it clear any new drilling provision was a non-starter. The future resolution of offshore drilling will have to be addressed with a new President.”

In blog post on Barack Obama's (very misleading) ad attacking John McCain on stem cell research, Ben Smith writes: "Though Palin and the largely irrelevant Republican platform are staunch opponents of stem cell research, McCain has historically supported the research -- the source of the McCain camp's complaints."

Smith does not mention that Palin and most pro-life politicians are staunch proponents of stem-cell research that does not require the destruction of human embryos. As a matter of science, embryonic stem-cell research is largely irrelevant due to breakthroughs in research that does not require the killing of human embryos. Though as a matter of politics, stem cell research may remain a relevant wedge issue for Democrats--at least as long as the country's most respected reporters ignore the distinction between embryonic and non-embryonic research.

Jason Furman, a senior economic adviser to Barack Obama, didn't use those exact words. But how else to interpret this comment about the current financial mess that he gave the Washington Post?

"This is a major fiscal problem in the short run, but it doesn't alter the long-term fiscal picture."

Following the July 2007 Democratic debate during which Barack Obama said that as president he would meet with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea without precondition, Joe Biden told National Review's Byron York that Obama's statement was "naive":

Sen. Joseph Biden, who has emerged as the clear-eyed antiwar realist in the Democratic race, told National Review Online that the idea of a president meeting with Ahmadinejad, Chavez, and others was “naïve.” “World leaders should not meet with other world leaders unless they know what the agenda is, so you don’t end up being used,” Biden said. “When I went to meet with Milosevic before the war, the condition I met with him was that no press would be available, I’d only meet him in his office late at night, and I wouldn’t dignify being seen with him.”

The last 24 hours have amounted to Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day for Joe Biden, so I doubt anybody in the press corps would be so cruel as to ask Biden if he still stands by his words.

But hopefully John McCain will remind everyone of Biden's assessment of Obama's "naive" foreign policy during Friday night's debate.

In response to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's speech at the UN, Barack Obama says in a statement released by his campaign that he's disappointed Ahmadinejad was allowed to speak (emphasis mine):

"I strongly condemn President Ahmadinejad's outrageous remarks at the United Nations, and am disappointed that he had a platform to air his hateful and anti-Semitic views. The threat from Iran's nuclear program is grave. Now is the time for Americans to unite on behalf of the strong sanctions that are needed to increase pressure on the Iranian regime.

"Once again, I call upon Senator McCain to join me in supporting a bipartisan bill to increase pressure on the Iranian regime by allowing states and private companies to divest from companies doing business in Iran. The security of our ally Israel is too important to play partisan politics, and it is deeply disappointing that Senator McCain and a few of his allies in Congress feel otherwise," said Senator Barack Obama.

But Obama supported Ahmadinejad's right to speak at the UN in September 2007:

The other point I'd make about President Ahmadinejad's presence here in New York is that although I probably would not have invited him to speak [at Columbia]--he's got other forums, he's got the United Nations available to him--hateful lies that he may utter about Israel or the Holocaust, the answer to those lies is for us to promote the truth and show the world the kind of values and ideals that we hold dear. ... We don't need to be fearful of the rantings of somebody like Ahmadinejad.

Asked by a reporter why he wouldn't have invited Ahmadinejad to speak at Columbia University, Obama said: "Because he has other forums in which to speak. He's here for the United Nations meeting. He's going to get ample publicity."

You can watch the September 2007 press conference here:

What exactly has changed that led to Obama to shift his position--besides the fact that he is now running in the general election instead of the Democratic primary?

Update: The McCain-Palin campaign responds:

...wolves are more equal than caribou, says the Humane Society in its endorsement of Barack Obama. The Humane Society Legislative Fund's president writes that the group has never before endorsed a presidential candidate, but Sarah Palin simply poses too great of a threat to animals:

While McCain's positions on animal protection have been lukewarm, his choice of running mate cemented our decision to oppose his ticket. Gov. Sarah Palin's (R-Alaska) retrograde policies on animal welfare and conservation have led to an all-out war on Alaska's wolves and other creatures. Her record is so extreme that she has perhaps done more harm to animals than any other current governor in the United States.

Palin engineered a campaign of shooting predators from airplanes and helicopters, in order to artificially boost the populations of moose and caribou for trophy hunters. She offered a $150 bounty for the left foreleg of each dead wolf as an economic incentive for pilots and aerial gunners to kill more of the animals, even though Alaska voters had twice approved a ban on the practice. This year, the issue was up again for a vote of the people, and Palin led the fight against it -- in fact, she helped to spend $400,000 of public funds to defeat the initiative.

As noted earlier on the blog, the program Palin supported killed 124 wolves and saved an estimated 1,500 moose and 3,000 caribou. Granted, the program's intent was to provide more caribou and moose to be hunted by Alaskans, but I'm guessing that not all of those 4,500 moose and caribou not killed by wolves were shot by hunters.

Accompanying the endorsement are these Obama and Palin photos:

Given the Humane Society's decision to veer off into PETA territory, I wonder what the group thinks of Obama's admission than he's gone spearfishing.

AP

"I believe if the credit markets are not functioning, that jobs will be lost, that our credit rate will rise, more houses will be foreclosed upon, GDP will contract, that the economy will just not be able to recover in a normal, healthy way." —Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke

"Nobody is happy." — House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md.

"I understand speed is important, but I'm far more interested in whether or not we get this right." — Rep. Chris Dodd, chairman of the Senate banking committee

"What he is saying here is, this program that they think is very important, we need it to get the economy out of the doldrums, but if it is going to nick them of a couple of million of the millions that they already have, they are going to boycott it." — House Financial Services Committee Chairman Rep. Barney Frank on Paulson's objections to restrictions on CEO pay-outs

"Just because God created the world in seven days doesn't mean we have to pass this bill in seven days," said Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas.

"You worry about taxpayers being on the hook?" he replied at one point. "Guess what - they're already on the hook." — Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson

“If we get consensus and everybody is popping champagne, then I’ll probably go back to campaign with folks who are having a tough time in Ohio and Michigan,” Mr. Obama said. “If this ends up being a close vote or a vote where the outcome is at all in question, then obviously this is a top priority.” — Sen. Barack Obama

“Whether calling for a bipartisan oversight board or prohibitions on golden parachutes, Barack Obama is simply following in John McCain’s footsteps while trying to respond to this financial crisis, as he followed in John McCain’s footsteps when he attempted to respond to the recent crisis in Georgia.” — Tucker Bounds, spokesman for the McCain campaign

"The truth is, every time somebody tells you that you've got to do the deal right now, it usually means they're going to get the better part of the deal." — Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind.

"The party is over for this compensation for CEOs who take the golden parachute as they drive their companies into the ground. ... The party is over for financial institutions taking risks [and] at the same time privatizing any gain they may have while they nationalize the risk, asking the taxpayer to pick up the tab." — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.

"This massive bailout is not a solution. It is financial socialism and it's un-American." — Sen. Jim Bunning, R-Ky.

"I think you should think of that as unthinkable." — Tony Fratto, White House spokesman, when asked what would happen if the bail-out didn't pass

"They are saying this is failure of the free markets of capitalism when, in fact, this is a failure because government injected itself into the free market, created this easy credit, these guaranteed loans, and these loans are what have turned into the bad paper that are bringing all these financial institutions down." — Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C.

"Nobody wants to do this. Nobody wants to be involved in this. Nobody wants to take the chance, but I would argue... if we do nothing, we are jeopardizing our economy, jobs and people's retirement security." — Minority Leader Rep. John Boehner, R-Ohio

"What troubles me most is that we have been given no credible assurances that this plan will work. We could very well spend $700 billion and not resolve the crisis." — Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala.

Blogger "Angry Bear" has received an explosive communiqué:

Dear American:

I need to ask you to support an urgent secret business relationship with a transfer of funds of great magnitude.

I am Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of America. My country has had crisis that has caused the need for large transfer of funds of 800 billion dollars US. If you would assist me in this transfer, it would be most profitable to you.

I am working with Mr. Phil Gram, lobbyist for UBS, who will be my replacement as Ministry of the Treasury in January. As a Senator, you may know him as the leader of the American banking deregulation movement in the
1990s. This transaction is 100% safe.

This is a matter of great urgency. We need a blank check. We need the funds as quickly as possible. We cannot directly transfer these funds in the names of our close friends because we are constantly under surveillance. My family lawyer advised me that I should look for a reliable and trustworthy person who will act as a next of kin so the funds can be transferred.

Please reply with all of your bank account, IRA and college fund account numbers and those of your children and grandchildren to wallstreetbailout@treasury.gov so that we may transfer your commission for this transaction. After I receive that information, I will respond with detailed information about safeguards that will be used to protect the funds.

Yours Faithfully Minister of Treasury Paulson

In light of the decision in the UK to provide preliminary sex education for six-year old schoolchildren, the Times Online asks five children where babies come from and gets some priceless answers.

In Southwest Virginia on Sunday, Joe Biden told the United Mine Workers:

"I am a hard-coal miner, anthracite coal, Scranton, Pa.,” Biden said. “It’s nice to be back in coal country. … It’s a different accent [in Southwest Virginia] … but it’s the same deal. We were taught that our faith and our family was the only really important thing, and our faith and our family informed everything we did.”

But Biden was singing quite a different tune while talking to an environmentalist in Ohio last week. Biden contradicted the Obama campaign's pledge to develop more clean coal plants, telling the activist that he and Barack Obama are "not supporting 'clean coal.' ... No coal plants here in America. Build them, if they're going to build them over there [in China] make 'em clean because they're killing you."

During a speech in Ohio today, John McCain dinged the Democratic ticket on Biden's opposition to clean coal. The Obama-Biden campaign responded that McCain's remarks were “another ham-handed lying attack from the McCain campaign.” Biden spokesman David Wade added: “This is yet another false attack from a dishonorable campaign.”

The Obama-Biden campaign's hysterical (and false) reaction that McCain is "lying" shows that they're afraid that Biden's remarks could do some significant damage. This Department of Energy map shows that coal is found in a lot of swing states:

Obama's poll numbers have been hurt badly because of his opposition to offshore drilling: Over the summer, polls showed a 22-point swing in McCain's favor on the question of which candidate can reduce gas prices. Biden's remarks can only help drag the Democratic ticket down further in a broader energy debate. The Department of Energy reports:

Today, more than half of the electricity generated in the United States comes from coal. For the foreseeable future, coal will continue to be the dominant fuel used for electric power production. The low cost and abundance of coal is one of the primary reasons why consumers in the United States benefit from some of the lowest electricity rates of any free-market economy.

Does Joe Biden want the cost of electricity to soar like the price of gas? An ad asking that question is waiting to be made.

Via Ben Smith, another brilliant Biden quote from his interview with Katie Couric:

"When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn't just talk about the princes of greed," Biden told Couric. "He said, 'Look, here's what happened.'"

As Reason's Jesse Walker footnotes it: "And if you owned an experimental TV set in 1929, you would have seen him. And you would have said to yourself, 'Who is that guy? What happened to President Hoover?'"

Can you imagine the commentariat's reaction if Sarah Palin had made this gaffe?

No one knows how long it will take the real estate bubble to fully deflate. But it will happen. It is happening. Here's a very hopeful data point from Washington D.C.'s outer suburbs.

In Prince William County, the number of residential sales in June, July and August was roughly double the comparable months in the summer of 2007. You can see the numbers here as well as comeuppance for an astonishingly inept bit of reporting in the Washington Post.

The sales are up because prices have collapsed, which is actually a sign of health for the housing market and a prelude to recovery. The median price for those 1,000 August sales in Prince William and the city of Manassas was $205,600, down 43 percent from the year-earlier median of $362,500 and a level not seen since 2003. See the complete data set here at the extremely informative Northern Virginia Housing Bubble Fallout blog.

David Frum does an excellent job puncturing Josh Marshall's hilarious contention that the Paulson plan is aimed at bailing out the "GOP's Wall Street Friends." Hardy-har-har.

For an even more laughable bit of partisan finger-pointing, see Jim Cramer's otherwise entertaining New York Magazine piece, "The Great Shakout." Writes Cramer:

How was all of this allowed to happen? Where were the regulators, the agencies that rate these bonds, the early warnings to the investors that maybe this paper was more dangerous than the brokerages let on? First, not only was there no regulation to speak of at any level—federal, state, or local—but the much-worshipped Alan Greenspan and current Fed chairman Ben Bernanke actually encouraged this kind of securitization even as they raised rates ever higher, seventeen times, to stop the very house-price appreciation these securities depended on to be viable. They shared the Republican ideology that promoted homeownership for everyone—including those who couldn’t afford it—and minimal market regulation. [emphasis added]

What's Barney Frank--chopped liver? Not to mention those famously Democratic hotbeds, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. See the comments that follow Cramer's piece for well-deserved hoots of ridicule.

In addition to contradicting Obama's platform on clean coal and backtracking on the computer ad, Biden was publicly
rebuked by Obama over his initial comments on AIG (in which Biden hastily opposed the AIG bail-out while Obama's statement carefully danced around a commitment on the issue). The Obama campaign later hit McCain for flip-flopping on the same subject. This from an interview with Matt Lauer this morning:

Lauer was talking about how Obama hit Sen. McCain for flip-flopping on the AIG bailout -- saying he opposed it one day then announce he supported it the next day.

But, as Lauer pointed out, scarcely three minutes after McCain said he opposed the AIG bailout last week, "in an interview with Meredith Vieira, Joe Biden, your running mate was asked the exact same question, 'should the federal government bailout AIG?' And he said, 'No, the federal government should not bailout AIG.'" (As we noted at the time.) "And I think that in that situation," Obama said, "I think Joe should have waited as well."

"But it's the kind of thing that drives people crazy about politics," Lauer said. "It sounds like you were trying to score some political points against John McCain using his words, when your own running mate had used very similar words."

Hey, everyone said the VP candidate was going to need weeks of briefings and monitoring just to get up to speed on basic policy positions and campaign messages. They were just wrong about which veep it would be.

Update: And, the hits keep on comin'...

Pollster Steve Lombardo makes some noteworthy points about the presidential race in a post yesterday at Pollster.com. First, he argues the contest is “on the verge of becoming a single-issue election.” Lombardo cites the most recent CBS News/New York Times poll showing “economy and jobs” (48%) trumps terrorism and national security (14%), gas prices and energy policy (10%), healthcare (10%) and the war in Iraq (8%) as the most important issue to voters.

While this issue matrix would seem to benefit Obama, it’s unclear that it does. Lombardo writes:

Obama has failed to convert the nation's deep economic anxiety into an electoral advantage (yet). The same CBS-NYT poll gave Obama a five-point lead (48% to 43%). While this is a modest lead it is surprisingly shallow given the Democratic lead in party identification and on the generic ballot. It certainly means (without benefit of the cross-tabs) that a large chunk of voters who think the economy is the most important issue are voting for McCain.

He also references some comparable Gallup data from this point in September 2000 and 2004 that underscores the closeness of the 2008 race and how it could still significantly shift.

Sept 16 - 18 2008: Obama 48%, McCain 44%

Sept 13 - 15 2004: Bush 52%, Kerry 44%

Sept 16 - 18 2000: Gore 49%, Bush 41%

Lombardo observes, "In 2000 the debates and intervening campaign events turned the tide; in 2004 they did not. McCain needs to do well in the debates or it will be very difficult to buck the current environment." Finally, he points to the pivotal nature of Colorado:

In 2004 Bush beat Kerry in Colorado by 52% to 47%. He beat Gore by ten points in 2000 (Nader had a sizable impact, garnering five percent of the vote in the state).

There has been a lot of talk about Colorado being the new Florida. Several smart political commentators have suggested that the race may come down to this one state. It is an interesting analysis. Certainly the state has moved from a "safe red" to a toss-up. Here are some demographics to consider:

o Only 41% native to the state, so the electorate is shifting with new arrivals
o 75% white, 4% black, 17% Hispanic
o 14% military vets is high, not to mention lots on active duty, especially in Colorado Springs
o Thought of as a rural state, but population is actually 85% urban, mostly in Denver and its suburbs
o Colorado Springs is the state's second-largest city
o 33% of state is college graduates, a bit below the national average
o 21% blue collar, 65% white collar, 15% gray collar, so, again, it defies traditional perception as blue-collar/rural

I disagree with Lombardo on one point. He believes McCain can’t win without Colorado, and thinks the election might come down to Virginia.

Yes, Colorado is important and is truly a toss-up in this election. But it is no more important than Ohio, Virginia or Florida. Given the recent historical presidential voter pattern, if this state moves into Obama's column it will mean an electoral blowout for the Illinois senator. Virginia is more likely to be the state that settles this race.

I see a McCain path to victory even if he loses Colorado, but that makes Virginia a must-win.

Read Lombardo’s full post here.

Joe Biden issued a pretty muddled statement walking back his remarks that this Obama campaign ad mocking John McCain's inability to send an email was "terrible":

“Having now reviewed the ad, it is even more clear to me that given the disgraceful tenor of Senator McCain’s ads and their persistent falsehoods, his campaign is in no position to criticize, especially when they continue to distort Barack’s votes on an issue as personal as keeping kids safe from sexual predators.”

So does Biden think that mocking McCain's inability to email--something that is difficult for McCain because of his war injuries--isn't terrible? Or just that it's fair game because the McCain campaign has supposedly distorted Obama's votes?

Patrick Healy of the pro-Obama advocacy organization New York Times explains that Biden "was referring to a McCain campaign ad that distorted Mr. Obama’s position on sexual education; that ad asserted that Mr. Obama favored sex education for little children, based on his support for a comprehensive sex education bill as an Illinois legislator. As for kindergarten students, the bill was intended to teach them about sexual predators, and parents of children of all ages would have been allowed to withdraw their children from the classes."

Actually, that's Obama campaign spin. The text of the sex-ed bill Obama supported reads: "Each class or course in comprehensive sex education in any of grades K through 12 shall include instruction on the prevention of sexually transmitted infections, including the prevention, transmission and spread of HIV." But it's probably not fair to blame the Times for ignoring the text of the bill. Really, we should blame the McCain campaign for the media's decision to lap up Obama's talking points.

"If something stupid can be said, you can believe someone on Daily Kos has said it." — Markos Moulitsas, founder of DailyKos.com

The founder of the biggest liberal blog on the 'Net, often a breeding ground for smears, conspiracy theories and alleged astroturfing, admitted what many blogosphere observers have been saying for years. The quote came from Moulitsas via IM in response to a Talking Points Memo item about a McCain fundraising e-mail, which accused "Obama-Biden Democrats" of attacking Palin and her family.

In their defense of the charge, the McCain campaign offered to TPM, among other things, the recent Daily Kos conspiracy-mongering about Trig, Sarah Palin's 5-month-old baby. Several Daily Kos bloggers alleged Sarah Palin had actually faked her pregnancy to cover for her 17-year-old daughter's pregnancy. The theory was based on news reports and pictures of the governor looking fairly trim throughout her pregnancy. The Palin family later announced the very real pregnancy of Bristol Palin, who is set to marry her boyfriend and father of the baby, to head off such rumors.

The McCain campaign also mentioned Atlantic blogger Andrew Sullivan's perpetuation of the rumor and Howard Gutman's questioning of Palin's parenting ability as justifications for the e-mail's charge.

Markos responded to the McCain campaign by saying "stupid" things show up on all community sites, including the conservative Free Republic. The last sentence of his retort will live on just like his famous 2004 denunciation of Blackwater "mercenaries" killed in Fallujah in 2004 ("Screw 'em.") and is further evidence that folks on the right are fortunate this guy's political instincts are a force within the Democratic Party.

One contest Ralph Nader can win, hands down:

H/t Times Online

Barack Obama pledges on his website that his administration will:

Develop and Deploy Clean Coal Technology.
Obama’s Department of Energy will enter into public private partnerships to develop five “first-of-a-kind” commercial scale coal-fired plants with clean carbon capture and sequestration technology

But in Ohio, Biden was asked by a voter: "Wind and solar are flourishing here in Ohio, so why are you supporting clean coal?"

Biden replied: "We're not supporting 'clean coal.' Guess what. China's building two every week. Two dirty coal plants. And it's polluting the United States. It's causing people to die. ... China is burning three hundred years of bad coal unless we figure out how to clean their coal up. Because it's going to ruin your lungs and there's nothing we can do about it. No coal plants here in America. Build them, if they're going to build them over there make 'em clean because they're killing you."

Watch it:

Hat tip: Huffington Post

There he learned very quickly about the eminent reasonableness of all Obama ads, including the one that derided McCain for his alleged technological ineptitude, an ad which Biden declared "terrible" just yesterday:

I was asked about an ad I’d never seen, reacting merely to press reports. As I said right then, I knew there was nothing intentionally personal in the criticism of Senator McCain’s views which look backwards not forwards and are out of touch with the new economic challenges we face today. Having now reviewed the ad, it is even more clear to me that given the disgraceful tenor of Senator McCain’s ads and their persistent falsehoods, his campaign is in no position to criticize, especially when they continue to distort Barack’s votes on an issue as personal as keeping kids safe from sexual predators.

Is it just me, or does it seem that both Biden gaffes and clarifications thereof redound to McCain's benefit?

How's that for a red-meat headline? It has the virtue of being true, according to the research of Stanley Kurtz into Ayers' foundation, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, chaired by Barack Obama:

One unsettled question is how Mr. Obama, a former community organizer fresh out of law school, could vault to the top of a new foundation? In response to my questions, the Obama campaign issued a statement saying that Mr. Ayers had nothing to do with Obama's "recruitment" to the board. The statement says Deborah Leff and Patricia Albjerg Graham (presidents of other foundations) recruited him. Yet the archives show that, along with Ms. Leff and Ms. Graham, Mr. Ayers was one of a working group of five who assembled the initial board in 1994. Mr. Ayers founded CAC and was its guiding spirit. No one would have been appointed the CAC chairman without his approval.

The CAC's agenda flowed from Mr. Ayers's educational philosophy, which called for infusing students and their parents with a radical political commitment, and which downplayed achievement tests in favor of activism. In the mid-1960s, Mr. Ayers taught at a radical alternative school, and served as a community organizer in Cleveland's ghetto.

In works like "City Kids, City Teachers" and "Teaching the Personal and the Political," Mr. Ayers wrote that teachers should be community organizers dedicated to provoking resistance to American racism and oppression. His preferred alternative? "I'm a radical, Leftist, small 'c' communist," Mr. Ayers said in an interview in Ron Chepesiuk's, "Sixties Radicals," at about the same time Mr. Ayers was forming CAC.

So, to whom did CAC's money go?

CAC translated Mr. Ayers's radicalism into practice. Instead of funding schools directly, it required schools to affiliate with "external partners," which actually got the money. Proposals from groups focused on math/science achievement were turned down. Instead CAC disbursed money through various far-left community organizers, such as the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (or Acorn).

The records also indicate grants went to Obama's community organizing alma mater, the Developing Communities Project, where CAC's goal was to turn parents into activists, because the family that agitates for socialism together, stays together.

And, the results for Chicago schoolchildren?

CAC's in-house evaluators comprehensively studied the effects of its grants on the test scores of Chicago public-school students. They found no evidence of educational improvement.

The Obama campaign has tried repeatedly throughout the campaign to downplay his relationship with Ayers, and has cried foul over ads like those from American Issues Project, that connect the two for voters.

But his only executive experience to date has come at the CAC, which makes close inspection necessary. And, associations with unrepentant domestic terrorists aside, the fact that his only executive experience came at the head of an organization whose mission was to radicalize schoolchildren is relevant.

Maybe women voters—considered a battleground demographic— would be interested in what the Hope 'n' Change ticket might wish to do with their children's education, and should have information about his past efforts in this vein.

Why take the trouble to invest my own time looking for stories on the financial meltdown, when Greg Mankiw has already provided a handy list this morning?

Also, see any number of good things posted by Arnold Kling at EconLog, especially the entry, "Delusions on Both Sides" ("Financial institutions thought that they were getting rid of risk, but instead they were just passing it around, as in the card game Old Maid") and the post on "systemic risk," to which it links.

In a discussion of panicked investors pulling money out of 401(k) accounts, and subjecting themselves to the 10 percent penalty attendant on such early withdrawals, the Wall Street Journal this morning quotes Massachusetts Secretary of State William Galvin, who would like to see Congress eliminate this penalty:

Mr. Galvin said relief for individual investors is especially appropriate given the $700 billion bailout fund being proposed to aid financial institutions in the crisis. "If we are providing amnesty to financial services," then "we ought to provide a few breaks to these people."

It used to be the case that ambitious politicians prefaced every argument with the phrase, "If we can put a man on the moon . . . " For years--perhaps decades--to come, they will use some variation on the formula above: "If we can bail out Wall Street to the tune of $700 billion . . . " Trust me, you're going to be hearing this a lot.

From a lengthy profile of "Regular Joe" on the trail in Ohio, in the LAT:

Here in the union hall, where CBS anchor Katie Couric has shown up in another sign of the fading Palin mystique, he repeats a remark that caused a stir days before: that wealthier Americans should be "patriotic" and pay more taxes to give those earning less a break.

Among other revelations, Biden is an "exquisitely tailored" "close talker" who wants to take many Republicans "to the schoolyard, you know what I mean?"

Update: On the Counterproductive Talking Point Perpetuation Watch, I found reporters calling swing states and rural regions "bitter" in two stories. Good doing guys:

The Washington Post on Scranton:

More than is sometimes acknowledged, residents say, this is a region wrestling with bitterness and backwardness, the kind that Aunie Frisch, who has Chinese ancestry, sometimes finds maddening.

The LAT on Obama's strategic redeployment from North Dakota, Georgia, Idaho, and Alaska:

Exactly 44 years after Lyndon B. Johnson became the last Democrat to capture the state of North Dakota in a presidential election, it looks like Barack Obama won't be the next.

The Associated Press reported this evening and an Obama spokeswoman confirmed that the Chicago-based campaign is pulling its 50-some staffers out of the heavily Republican state full of embittered small towns and shipping the workers east to Minnesota and Wisconsin, where the Democrat's prospects seem brighter and closer.

Isn't it great to have one of the "greatest political minds and talents of our time" working on behalf of John McCain? He is working for him, right?

Here's Bubba on "The View" yesterday, leaving the gals in a state of slightly confused swoon as he finds no end of ways in which to praise John McCain while Barack Obama becomes little more than a parenthetical.

Elsewhere, Clinton commented on Palin's "hotness:"

"I come from Arkansas, I get why she's hot out there," Clinton said. "Why she's doing well." ...

"People look at her, and they say, 'All those kids. Something that happens in everybody's family. I'm glad she loves her daughter and she's not ashamed of her. Glad that girl's going around with her boyfriend. Glad they're going to get married.'"

Clinton said voters would think, "I like that little Down syndrome kid. One of them lives down the street. They're wonderful children. They're wonderful people. And I like the idea that this guy does those long-distance races. Stayed in the race for 500 miles with a broken arm. My kind of guy."

"I get this," Clinton said. "My view is ... why say, ever, anything bad about a person? Why don't we like them and celebrate them and be happy for her elevation to the ticket? And just say that she was a good choice for him and we disagree with them?"

And, why say anything good about Obama? Um, ever?

On Letterman later that night, Clinton praised Biden, but skipped over Obama again. Here he is, responding to a question about the Palin pick:

McCain, one of the things that I like about him, and I think Americans like about him, is that he is an intuitive politician. and I think he instinctively thought that she would help him, No. 1, excite the people who were potentially his voters. and number two, demonstrate that he could be a change candidate... So he needed to somehow get people's attention. and I think he thought this would do it. and so and it certainly has been interesting. It's been interesting because it generated more enthusiasm on the part of Republicans and being active in politics—more had been giving to Sen. Obama, the enthusiasm gap closed and the only kind of potentially negative thing is you know, when you get a lot of emotion in a campaign it tends to generate more heat than light. And, right now we all need to be thinking here.

The press has a couple courses of action, here, given that Clinton seems to be actively working against their goal, which is to elect Barack Obama. Do they do their best to ignore him entirely? That would certainly turn Clinton more vengeful than even the primary turned him, and let's face it, a former president named Bill Clinton could find a spotlight in the Marianas Trench. They could stop asking him questions about the Hillary pass-over, the Palin pick, and anything about John McCain. But that just leaves them with the option of asking about Barack Obama, and Lord knows what the man will say if you give him an excuse to spout off. For that matter, Lord knows what he'd studiously avoid saying such that it would become a news story regardless.

His talking points seem to be about the general admirability of John McCain and the political gifts of Sarah Palin, and he's not veering. Welcome to the team, Bill!

Update: Celebs turn on the Clintons, who now represent the tragically un-hip, media-bashed, old-and-busted brand of the Democratic Party to Obama's new hotness. They're the Republicans of the Democratic Party, bless their hearts. Chris Rock, appearing after Bill Clinton on Letterman last night, took the former president to task, reminding him that Hillary lost, while the Clinton team doubtless cringed and fumed backstage. Warning: The clip is from network TV, so it's safe, but observe a general Chris Rock warning of basic saltiness in content.

Joe Biden has already joined the Hillary 2012 team, apparently, judging by the way he keeps undercutting his own campaign.

Patrick Ruffini and I were colleagues at Townhall.com; he’s one of the smartest young conservatives on the web. Thus, I found the following blog post he authored utterly dismaying. Here it is in full:

Republican incumbents in close races have the easiest vote of their lives coming up this week: No on the Bush-Pelosi Wall Street bailout.

God Himself couldn't have given rank-and-file Republicans a better opportunity to create political space between themselves and the Administration. That's why I want to see 40 Republican No votes in the Senate, and 150+ in the House. If a bailout is to pass, let it be with Democratic votes. Let this be the political establishment (Bush Republicans in the White House + Democrats in Congress) saddling the taxpayers with hundreds of billions in debt (more than the Iraq War, conjured up in a single weekend, and enabled by Pelosi, btw), while principled Republicans say "No" and go to the country with a stinging indictment of the majority in Congress.

This creates pressure on the "change" message. If this issue is made controversial, and Obama is not the first to make it an issue, how exactly is a Washington deal backed by Bush's Treasury Secretary "change?"

But for this to be actionable, it has to be controversial. So this can't be a few lonely voices like Coburn and DeMint. It needs to be the bulk of the Republican conference. In an ideal world, McCain opposes this because of all the Democratic add-ons and shows up to vote Nay while Obama punts.

History has shown us that "inevitable" "emergency" legislation like the Patriot Act or Sarbanes-Oxley is never more popular than on the day it is passed -- and this isn't all that popular to begin with. All the upside comes with voting against it.

A bailout may be inevitable, but so to can be the political benefit for Congressional Republicans if played correctly.

If you watched Fox News Sunday yesterday, you may have noticed that Republican John Kyl and Chuck Schumer were practically holding hands and belting out a few choruses of “Kumbaya,” such was the spirit of bipartisanship that dominated the morning. Little wonder. The threat of a Great Depression redux has a way of focusing the mind of even the most eager partisan like New York’s other senator.

I assume the senators had spent the previous few days much as I had. They probably spoke to a bunch of people on Wall Street. They realized that the economy was teetering on the brink of calamity. They knew that if promised government action didn’t soothe Wall Street’s panic, then partisan concerns would look very small. Moreover, the senators likely knew that if Wall Street perceived the way out of the financial crisis had become a political football, the panic could easily resume.

That fact still stands today. That’s why you’re seeing unusual things like John Conyers and Bill Kristol agreeing on some matters of import. And it’s why you’re seeing our congress members behaving in an unusually responsible fashion. No one wants to be responsible for creating 21st century Hoovervilles (although even in the event of a new Depression, Hoovervilles are unlikely. Besides, we could call them Obamavilles which would have a certain ring.)

But here’s the fly in our presently delightful bipartisan ointment – the Paulson Plan has a sufficient number of flaws that unless it rockets through congress, it will eventually (and deservedly) crumble under its own weight. Think of it as a parallel situation to the McCain/Kennedy immigration bill from Spring ’07. The authors of that bill knew that if it got carefully considered by either the public or congress, it would die a slow and painful death. So they tried to shove it down the body politic’s throat. Their plan failed.

Similarly, the Paulson Plan because of its many well-documented weaknesses can’t pass as is and will likely enter the political system. But here’s the problem – congress simply can’t punt on the matter like it did on immigration reform. Regardless of what awaits the Paulson Plan, Congress must act quickly to head off potential disaster. If the rescuing of our financial system becomes part of the workaday partisan wrangling, the odds of a decent plan emerging diminish. More disturbingly, the odds of no plan emerging increases dramatically.

All of the preceding is what makes Ruffini’s essay so disquieting. Just as there are Republicans crassly calculating how they can leverage the current situation to their political advantage, there are obviously Democrats doing the same (although I’m not aware of any who have been so silly as to say so publicly). Fortunately, the grown-ups in both parties have controlled the situation. If the grown-ups decide this situation has become a political opportunity rather than a legitimate national emergency, we’ll all have a problem - “problem” here being a mild euphemism for an economic disaster.

None of the foregoing means there aren’t legitimate areas of difference that members of congress (and those of us who write about them) should hash out in the coming days. But anyone who comes to the party without a first priority of staving off panic and saving the credit markets should be turned away at the door.

The NRA has released four new ads attacking Obama. This one takes aim at Obama's remarks about folks bitterly clinging to their guns and religion:

Hat tip: Hot Air

Justifying their coup against an elected president last month, Mauritania's top generals underscored not only what they claimed was creeping corruption and blatant incompetence but a soft approach to the al Qaeda franchise in North Africa, known as Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb [west]. One hundred percent Muslim, Mauritania is, more so than the other North African countries where AQIM's presence and terrorist activities have been on the rise, an example of why bin-Ladenism and its offshoots represent a threat to Muslim countries as much as to the West, if not more so. After all, Algeria and Morocco, for example, are Mediterranean nations whose economies are intertwined with Europe's (and ours). By contrast Mauritania is still comparatively isolated.

At best, the jihadists can justify war against Mauritania because it has diplomatic relations with Israel and receives U.S. help as part of the Trans-Sahara Counter-terrorism program. The simpler explanation is that the terrorists are seeking to destabilize regimes throughout the region and they think ambushing platoons of young recruits and leaving them on desert roads with their throats slit, as they are reported to have done on two occasions in the past fortnight, will advance this goal.

At The Jawa Report blog Rusty Shackleford reports that a professional PR firm appears to be spreading false attacks against Sarah Palin on the Internet.

A YouTube video that appears to have been produced by the PR firm Winner & Associates falsely claims Sarah Palin is a member of the Alaskan Independence Party. Shackleford has evidence that Jared Liu-Klein, an Associate at Winner & Associates, posted this video on website DemocraticUnderground.com more than a week after reports of Sarah Palin's membership in the party had been debunked.

I just spoke with Liu-Klein on the phone and asked him about the matter, but he said that he would have to get back to me later. I gave him my email address and asked if he could give me a simple yes or no answer if he had ever posted a video on the Internet about Sarah Palin and the Alaskan Independence Party. Liu-Klein replied: "I'll have to get back to you as soon as I can." Then he hung up the phone. I'll post Liu-Klein's response if and when I get it.

As Shackleford notes, "the million dollar question is who, if any one, paid Winner & Associates to produce this ad?" Schackleford observes that the voice used in official Obama-Biden ads as well as ads produced by chief Obama strategist David Axelrod's company sounds like it was also used in the anti-Palin Alaskan Independence ad.

Here is a YouTube video comparing the Alaskan Independence ad with an official Obama-Biden ad:

The voice in both ads sounds quite similar, but it's certainly possible that Winner & Associates could have hired a narrator who had done work for Axelrod's company and the Obama-Biden campaign. Whatever the case, it appears that Winner & Associates--a professional PR firm with extensive connections to the Democratic party--is behind false attacks on Sarah Palin.

The FBI reportedly arrived at the suspect David Kernell's Tennessee apartment at around midnight Saturday while a party was in progress. They took pictures of the apartment, took down names of the party-goers (though some reports say many of them high-tailed it out of there as soon as they arrived), and subpoenaed Kernell's three roommmates, according to witnesses.

Wired wonders whether the alleged hacker could get jail time if guilty, and concludes: not likely and not much. Due to the DOJ's previous interpretations of the Stored Communications Act, the hacker in this case may only be able to be charged with a misdemeanor under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

As mentioned above, the hacker could still be prosecuted under the CFAA, though likely for a misdemeanor, not a felony, since there was no actual loss that resulted from the hack. More specifically, he'd be prosecuted under 18 U.S.C. 1030(a)(2)(C), accessing a protected computer without authorization to obtain information.

Rasch says if the hacker were charged with a misdemeanor, he would likely face a sentence of zero to six months, depending on his history, attitude and contrition. If the hacker were to come forward and apologize to Palin and tell the FBI exactly what he did, prosecutors might take this into consideration.

"If the government treats this for what it really is, which was a kid who was curious to see if he could do this . . . then the kid should be in reasonably good shape" and face "little, if any, jail time," Rasch said.

Although there is also a possibility the government could charge the hacker with a felony under the CFAA depending on the whim of the prosecutor and whether he argued that the invasion of Palin's privacy was a tortious act.

Oil prices soairng! Yes, in light of other event this really is good news. The Wall Street Journal reports:

Oil prices soared were up more than $25 and their intraday high and finished with a gain of $16.37, or 16%, at $120.92 a barrel in New York as the likelihood of a bailout prompted bets that the economy would stay on firmer footing, keeping demand for fuel on an even keel. Expiration of contracts for October delivery also added volatility to the market, traders said.

From Bloomberg, “How the Democrats Created the Financial Crisis” by Kevin Hassett

This being a time of crisis, it is no time for finger pointing. Then again, why not?

In this searing and much-discussed piece, Hassett explores who is responsible for enabling the twin ticking time bombs of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to endanger the entire economy. Hint: One of the presidential candidates is a culprit. Additional hint: He’s not the one who served in Vietnam:

If that bill had become law, then the world today would be different. In 2005, 2006 and 2007, a blizzard of terrible mortgage paper fluttered out of the Fannie and Freddie clouds, burying many of our oldest and most venerable institutions. Without their checkbooks keeping the market liquid and buying up excess supply, the market would likely have not existed.

But the bill didn't become law, for a simple reason: Democrats opposed it on a party-line vote in the committee, signaling that this would be a partisan issue. Republicans, tied in knots by the tight Democratic opposition, couldn't even get the Senate to vote on the matter.

That such a reckless political stand could have been taken by the Democrats was obscene even then. Wallison wrote at the time: ``It is a classic case of socializing the risk while privatizing the profit. The Democrats and the few Republicans who oppose portfolio limitations could not possibly do so if their constituents understood what they were doing.''

Now that the collapse has occurred, the roadblock built by Senate Democrats in 2005 is unforgivable. Many who opposed the bill doubtlessly did so for honorable reasons. Fannie and Freddie provided mounds of materials defending their practices. Perhaps some found their propaganda convincing.

But we now know that many of the senators who protected Fannie and Freddie, including Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Christopher Dodd, have received mind-boggling levels of financial support from them over the years.

Perhaps the senators’ credulity regarding Fannie and Freddie’s propaganda and the behemoths’ campaign contributions are merely an inconvenient coincidence. Then again, perhaps not.

You’ll want to read the whole thing.

John McCain said last night on 60 Minutes that he would consider nominating Clinton Administration HUD Secretary Andrew Cuomo to chair the Security and Exchange Commission in a McCain administration.

This may be the dumbest single thing John McCain has said during the course of the 2008 presidential campaign and suggests he simply wasn't paying attention during Cuomo's corrupt tenure at HUD. Cuomo's tenure was marked by shady business associations, the deeply politicized use of taxpayer dollars that John McCain criticizes in his stump speech, and, worst of all, the kinds of high-risk loans schemes that have characterized the current housing and economic crisis.

Cuomo, who announced his run to be governor of New York just nine days after he left HUD, used the federal housing bureaucracy as his de facto campaign headquarters. HUD pumped out slick, high-dollar brochures that touted his "accomplishments" in areas that had nothing to do with housing. The photos for some of those taxpayer-financed brochures ended up on Cuomo's campaign website.

As it happens, I looked carefully at Cuomo's HUD tenure back in the spring of 2001.

As HUD secretary, he paid lavish attention to New York. He showered his home state—particularly the electorally important upstate region—with federal dollars, and essentially used HUD as his gubernatorial campaign headquarters.

In his final 13 months as HUD secretary, Cuomo made 46 official trips. More than half of those—25—were to New York. California, his second favorite destination, saw Cuomo 4 times in the same period.

"I did more for upstate New York from Washington than the [Pataki] administration has done from Albany," Cuomo said in February. And locals, at least in the short term, are grateful.

But New York housing officials are worried that Cuomo’s self-promotion could have negative, real-dollar consequences for the upstate economy. Some of the money for HUD’s $100 million Erie Canal Corridor Initiative came as so-called Section 108 loans. Through the program, small cities and towns put up future HUD allocations as collateral for present loans. If the loans go bad, the future money is lost.

"HUD has, in effect, mortgaged our future money," says Joseph Lynch, New York’s top housing official, whose career spans four decades. "There are probably more [Section] 108 loan guarantees in New York than in the entire country." Another high-ranking New York housing administrator agrees. "We’ve got a black cloud over us for the next 18 years, all so [Cuomo] could issue press releases."

Worse news for Cuomo: A report this spring from HUD’s New York-based inspector general’s office rips the entire Erie Canal Corridor project and claims, "While the Initiative has produced limited successes by means of public improvement projects, most activities have been slow moving; thus, compromising the Initiative’s ultimate success."

Cuomo frequently criticized New York Governor George Pataki for using taxpayer funds for his campaign. On the surface, it was political hypocrisy at its worst. But it was smart. By leveling those charges against his opponent -- and doing so first -- Cuomo inoculated himself from the same claims. Still, when I asked him about a congressional report detailing his misdealings, he first disputed its findings and then explained them.

"That was incorrect. That was incorrect," he said, of the congressional report. "First of all, I represented every—the airplane is different. The airplane is, look at the specifics. You say one thing, and you do another. That’s what the airplane is. You say one thing and do another. The advertising, you say one thing and do another. Vieques, you say one thing you do another. And that’s troubling. I don’t care what you believe, but believe something and then be consistent. And I can disagree with you, but at least stand in front of me and be honest.

"As far as my coming to New York, first of all I worked in every state," he explained. "Second of all I was from New York, and anyone who understands how government and politics works, knows when you’re a cabinet secretary from a certain state, the administration tends to use you in that state. That’s why you have a cabinet secretary from all different parts of the country. And when you need to communicate in that state, you use that cabinet secretary. So that’s sort of a silly, silly point. When I was HUD secretary I went into a lot of houses. Yeah, but that sorta goes with the construct."

This is the exchange McCain had with Scott Pelley last night.

Scott Pelley: I'm curious. If you wanna fire Chris Cox, the chairman of the SEC, who would you replace him with?

McCain: This may sound a little unusual, but I've admired Andrew Cuomo. I think he is somebody who could restore some credibility, lend some bipartisanship to this effort.

Pelley: He's a Democrat.

McCain: Oh, yes.

Pelley: He served in the cabinet of President Clinton.

McCain: Yes. And he did a good job. And he has respect. And he has prestige.

A good job? Now that is bad judgment.

From Dave Freddoso, noted "right-wing smear merchant" and the expert on all of Obama's misadventures in Chicago:

Last week, Sen. Barack Obama compared the Savings and Loan bailout of the late 1980s to the situation of the mortgage-securities markets today:

"Too many S&Ls took advantage of the lax rules set by Washington to gamble that they could make big money in speculative real estate. . . . [T]hey made hundreds of billions in bad loans, knowing that if they lost money, the government would bail them out. And they were right. The gambles did not pay off, our economy went into recession, and the taxpayers ended up footing the bill. Sound familiar?"

Indeed, it does sound familiar — it sounds a lot like what Barack Obama did to Illinois taxpayers as a state senator in Springfield. Using his elected office and his clout, Obama helped Tony Rezko and other unscrupulous low-income housing developers obtain millions of dollars in state grants, tax credits, low-interest loans, and regulatory advantages.

Taxpayers had no serious chance of recouping these “investments” in Rezko and other developers. And many beneficiaries went one step farther, depriving the public of even the benefits they could have gotten. These developers took government help to build low-income housing, and then let their buildings deteriorate into uninhabitable slums.

To date, the most complete account of this sad story is Binyamin Appelbaum’s piece in the Boston Globe. Not only does it demonstrate the monumental failure of the low-income-housing policy that Obama vocally championed as a state senator, it gives a detailed look at how some of Obama’s donors and friends — the beneficiaries of that policy — neglected their own housing developments at the expense of the inhabitants.

Read more for the details on the slums, which are pretty horrific: backed-up sewage, un-heated apartments in the dead of Chicago's winter.

The McCain campaign is going after Obama's unsavory associations today in an add called "Chicago Machine" (can a Wright ad be far off?):

I'd like it better, I think, if they went after Rezko specifically instead of lumping him in with others, and symbolically tied Obama's actions, as Dave has, to the irresponsible behavior that got us into the mortgage/financial crisis of today.

Remember that sneaking suspicion the media was swooning over Barack Obama this summer? Time magazine covers, coverage of Obama with Germans rediscovering their love for mass rallies, etc. Turns out, based on media mentions, the Democratic nominee did get a lot more attention. The chart below developed by University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee political scientist Tom Holbrook provides some nice visual confirmation. Looks like things evened out during the Republican convention and look a lot more balanced in September. Holbrook reminds us his data do not evaluate the content or tone of the media coverage (positive or negative), just the amount.

Read Holbrook’s full post here.

Sarah Palin was supposed to attend an anti-Ahmadinejad rally today in New York, but after Hillary Clinton backed out of the rally, Palin was disinvited. The New York Sun has printed the speech that Sarah Palin would have given. It's a good, strong speech (and not very long, but I'll highlight a few excerpts).

On Ahmadinejad:

He must be stopped.

The world must awake to the threat this man poses to all of us. Ahmadinejad denies that the Holocaust ever took place. He dreams of being an agent in a "Final Solution" — the elimination of the Jewish people. He has called Israel a "stinking corpse" that is "on its way to annihilation." Such talk cannot be dismissed as the ravings of a madman — not when Iran just this summer tested long-range Shahab-3 missiles capable of striking Tel Aviv, not when the Iranian nuclear program is nearing completion, and not when Iran sponsors terrorists that threaten and kill innocent people around the world.

On Iraq and the nuclear threat:

So, what should we do about this growing threat? First, we must succeed in Iraq. If we fail there, it will jeopardize the democracy the Iraqis have worked so hard to build, and empower the extremists in neighboring Iran. Iran has armed and trained terrorists who have killed our soldiers in Iraq, and it is Iran that would benefit from an American defeat in Iraq.

If we retreat without leaving a stable Iraq, Iran's nuclear ambitions will be bolstered. If Iran acquires nuclear weapons — they could share them tomorrow with the terrorists they finance, arm, and train today. Iranian nuclear weapons would set off a dangerous regional nuclear arms race that would make all of us less safe.

On Iran's oppression of women:

It is said that the measure of a country is the treatment of its most vulnerable citizens. By that standard, the Iranian government is both oppressive and barbaric. Under Ahmadinejad's rule, Iranian women are some of the most vulnerable citizens.

If an Iranian woman shows too much hair in public, she risks being beaten or killed.

If she walks down a public street in clothing that violates the state dress code, she could be arrested.

On how to stop Iran:

We must rally the world to press for truly tough sanctions at the U.N. or with our allies if Iran's allies continue to block action in the U.N. We must start with restrictions on Iran's refined petroleum imports.

We must reduce our dependency on foreign oil to weaken Iran's economic influence.

We must target the regime's assets abroad; bank accounts, investments, and trading partners.

President Ahmadinejad should be held accountable for inciting genocide, a crime under international law.

We must sanction Iran's Central Bank and the Revolutionary Guard Corps — which no one should doubt is a terrorist organization.

Together, we can stop Iran's nuclear program.

1) From the New York Times, “A Fine Mess” by William Kristol

2) From the American Scene, “Welcome to History” by Jim Manzi

Is it a sign that we truly are approaching the End Times that the Boss and John Conyers agree on something of vital importance? Both find the administration’s plan to give Henry Paulson a $700 billion blank check to buy up all the country’s bad mortgage debt in all of its many guises profoundly disturbing. Kristol writes:

Everyone seems to agree on the need for a big and comprehensive plan, and that the markets have to have some confidence that help is on the way. Funds need to be supplied, trading markets need to be stabilized, solvent institutions needs to be protected, and insolvent institutions need to be put on the path to a deliberate liquidation or reorganization.

But is the administration’s proposal the right way to do this? It would enable the Treasury, without Congressionally approved guidelines as to pricing or procedure, to purchase hundreds of billions of dollars of financial assets, and hire private firms to manage and sell them, presumably at their discretion There are no provisions for — or even promises of — disclosure, accountability or transparency. Surely Congress can at least ask some hard questions about such an open-ended commitment.

The Wall Street Journal finds Conyers concurring:

Draft legislation proposes sweeping powers for Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson to buy and sell mortgage-related securities however he sees fit. Aside from requiring periodic reports to Congress, the bill provides no oversight of the bailout's management -- and specifically bars any court or agency from reviewing it.

Congressional Democrats said they were wary of handing a lame-duck administration what one aide called a "blank check."

House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers Jr. (D., Mich.) "is very concerned about the breadth of the draft language, and we are working to insure that reasonable limits are included," a committee staffer said.

One must ask precisely what the administration is up to here. Was the initial deal sheet that granted Paulson such sweeping powers a mere “jumping off point” from which the administration could begin wrangling with Congress? Or did the administration sense Congress’ collective terror and figure individual Congressmen would just go along with whatever Treasury proposed? After all, Barack Obama hasn’t exactly led from the front on this matter (he’s still trying to decide what he thinks about last week’s AIG bailout), and John McCain’s clumsy efforts to offer anything substantive last week were disastrous. The typical, cautious senator has probably decided it’s in his best interest just to stay out of the way of this particular locomotive and rejoin the fray once the blame game has commenced.

So what tweaks does the Paulson “plan” cry out for? The always insightful Jim Manzi puts it plainly and simply:

What will be essential is that:

1. These (Treasury “purchases”) are temporary, and these positions be unwound as rapidly as possible. This includes not just the actions of the past two days, but also getting the federal government out of the insurance business (AIG) and the home lending business (Freddie and Fannie) as rapidly as is consistent with orderly unwinding of these positions.

2. The ultimate resolution assures that prior investors in these financial institutions and their executives bear very large financial penalties. Irresponsible homeowners should as well. Expect big political battles over the definition of “irresponsible”.

If done in this way, we can (in the hopeful case) work through the problem with limited actual costs to the taxpayers as assets are sold off, while limiting moral hazard and long-run government control of financial assets. But there are many very bad downside cases.

Add proper oversight to make sure Treasury is disposing of its responsibilities in a capable manner, and we’ve got ourselves a plan.

Everyone understands the need for prompt and serious action to make sure the American financial system doesn’t go belly-up. Well, almost everyone – you can find the stray Ron Paul-types out there who would rather see a Great Depression redux than have their libertarian principles compromised. While most of us find the thought of a massive bailout unpalatable, the thought of the American credit markets seizing up sucks far more. But thinking people should still ask whether granting a $700 billion blank check to Hank Paulson is the proper antidote.

The many individuals I’ve spoken with who have a serious understanding of financial markets have universally expressed their minimal to middling regard for Secretary Paulson’s job performance. What’s more, since Paulson is a banker and not a trader, he doesn’t seem like the guy you would give $700 billion to and say, “Go have some fun in the world’s most complex securities market.” Certainly not without proper statutory and congressional supervision.

In the spirit of coming together at a time of crisis, I suggest we all applaud Treasury’s aggressive approach to staving off a true financial catastrophe. But that doesn’t men we have to suspend common sense and prudence as we look for the best way forward.

Obama's website has made a couple of policy changes, including on the sensitive issue of Social Security:

And this week the Obama campaign modified his position on a sensitive issue: Social Security. Compare the current "Seniors & Social Security" page with the previous version. Now, tell me why, oh why, would the Obama campaign decide to delete the following sentence: "[Obama] does not believe it is necessary or fair to hardworking seniors to raise the retirement age." Is he trying to stoke anxiety about his position on Social Security?

I think this warrants a nice little McCain web ad wondering aloud about whether Obama might want to raise the retirement age for Social Security. It'd certainly be truer than Obama's widely denounced ad on Social Security this week, which Fact Check goes so far as to call a "whopper." So great is his deception that colloquialisms must needs be unleashed to describe it.

Five former secretaries of state took the stage on CNN last night to discuss the challenges facing the next president. So nuanced were their pronouncements and noncomittal their advice that I'm now anxiously awaiting the day they form the wacky cast of a cornpone sketch-comedy show about world conflicts, tentatively titled "Hem Haw."

Minnie Pearl Madeleine Albright was asked about letting Georgia and Ukraine into NATO, and the possibility that doing so would mean the U.S. would have to respond to Russian aggression in those regions:

AMANPOUR: Now you've got Russia invading Georgia. Is the advice to the next president of the United States therefore, you have to go to war against Russia in order to protect your NATO allies?

ALBRIGHT: ...I also think that countries have the right to choose whatever alliance they want to be in. And the main thing, while I fully agree that we can't go back to the Cold War and have a really very bad adversarial relationship with Russia, Russia cannot think that independent countries on its border are a threat to them.

So I think -- I personally believe that we need to go forward with the Membership Action Plan for Georgia and for Ukraine, and keep explaining that it is not a threat.

Amanpour then tossed the question to Colin Powell, saying, "if Russia is (the aggressor) and you have to, you know, keep your NATO allies' security, aren't you then committed?"

POWELL: Under Article 5 of the Washington Treaty, which is the NATO Treaty, when one member of the alliance is attacked from abroad -- meaning outside the NATO geographic limits -- then all members of NATO treat that as an attack...

We cannot say to the Russians, "We are not going to allow the Georgians or Ukrainians or anyone else to start down the path toward NATO membership." It's not for the Russians to decide that.

Oddly enough, I can find no blaring headlines this morning claiming Albright and Powell want to "go to war with Russia." Nothing along the lines of what we saw after Charlie Gibson's interview with Sarah Palin produced essentially the same answer from the vice presidential candidate.

You'll see "Hem Haw" hit primetime before you see anyone in the media point this out.

Factcheck.org: "An Obama-Biden ad says McCain supports 'cutting benefits in half' for Social Security recipients. False!" Obama continued his campaign to scare the elderly by telling another "Social Security Whopper" during a speech in Florida today.

Jay Cost looks at the polls over the past three months and sees "remarkable stability" in the presidential race.

Obama and McCain issue statements on the bombing in Pakistan.

Nate Silver runs through the problems with a new poll that suggests support for Obama would be as much as six points higher if it weren't for racism of white voters.

Joe Biden warns Barack Obama: I'll give you my gun when you take it from my cold, dead hands.

Stu Rothenberg has dubbed Colorado THE state to win this election.

I've become convinced that my initial list of five states probably can be boiled down to just one -- one state that is most likely to determine who will be the next occupant of the White House. And that state is Colorado.

If John McCain carries Colorado in November, I'd expect him to hold onto all of George W. Bush's 2000 states, with the exception of New Hampshire. If he does that, and if Obama holds all of Al Gore's states, plus New Hampshire, McCain would win 274 electoral votes to 264 for Obama.

If Obama carries the state, he has altered the arithmetic of the Electoral College so as to make it difficult for McCain to win.

So, what's going on in Colorado?

Gary Hart gave his manifesto on how to win the West to Obama's campaign but never heard back.

Obama has 29 offices there to McCain's 10 (though McCain has 23 if you count party offices being used as satellite offices).

Better get working. County clerks estimate up to one half of Colorado ballots will be filed in early voting.

Good news for those of you looking to do some chad-counting tourism in the Rockies: The Colorado ballot has a whopping 18 initiatives and referenda on it in addition to state, national, and local races, making it the longest ballot in the country and the longest in Colorado since 1912. Let's hear it for potential catastrophic confusion!

Obama has a 2.5-point lead in the RCP poll average right now, and has maintained a lead in the state throughout most of the year except for one week in mid-August. This week's polls have been widely divergent, with the Insider Advantage poll showing Obama up 10 while the Rasmussen poll had McCain up 2 points (a five-point swing for him, but the poll was published Sept. 14 before a rough week for McCain).

Obama stopped in Colorado twice on Monday and once on Tuesday. McCain was not in Colorado this week.

At the McCain Report, McCain campaign spokesman Michael Goldfarb says the campaign is willing to make an interesting deal with the Washington Post:

The Washington Post's Michael Dobbs fact checks the ad this campaign released yesterday titled "Advice":

So what evidence does the McCain campaign have for the supposed Obama-Raines connection? It is pretty flimsy, but it is not made up completely out of whole cloth.

Pretty flimsy? As Dobbs goes on to say, that "pretty flimsy" source is his own paper, the Washington Post. The Post reported that Raines had "taken calls from Barack Obama's presidential campaign seeking his advice on mortgage and housing policy matters." It then recycled that information into two more pieces, one of which was an editorial. But we're willing to make a deal. If Dobbs admits his newspaper is not a credible source, we'll take down the ad.

Via Hot Air, Tony Blair delivers a very effective defense of the Iraq war, beginning about 3 minutes and 30 seconds into the second clip, but watch the whole thing if you have time, especially if you could use a good laugh or two:

The Wall Street Journal's Laura Meckler reports:

Don’t be shocked if you see the McCain campaign pull the controversial Rev. Jeremiah Wright out of mothballs in new attacks against one-time parishioner, Barack Obama.

McCain advisers say that they see “attack by association” as fair game now, arguing that Obama’s campaign has been using that technique to go after McCain. In particular, the Obama campaign has hammered McCain on the stump and in TV ads on the number of one-time lobbyists working for his campaign. (The McCain campaign is also angry about a Spanish-language TV ad that ties McCain to Rush Limbaugh on immigration, without ever saying that McCain took on Limbaugh and others to fight for comprehensive immigration reform.)

“They played it one way, we played it another way,” said one of McCain’s top advisers, Mark Salter. “Now we’re both going to play it the same way.” [...]

Asked whether to expect attacks involved Wright, campaign spokesman Michael Goldfarb said: “We’ve seen all throughout the (Democratic) primary this guy has a lot of associations that are very problematic.”

In April, McCain said that he did not believe that Obama shared Wright’s controversial views and said he opposed an anti-Obama advertisement that invoked his name run by the North Carolina Republican party. But he also suggested that the subject was fair play after Obama said that questions about Wright were “a legitimate political issue.”

“If he believes that,” McCain said in April, “then it will probably be a political issue.”

In response to this ad on Obama's votes against a bill to protect babies who had survived abortion attempts, the Obama campaign has cut an ad that says "accusing Obama of letting infants die" is "a despicable lie."

But as an Illinois state senator Obama acknowledged that these infants who had survived abortions were displaying "movement or some indication that, in fact, they’re not just coming out limp and dead.” Yuval Levin points out Obama also said while debating the bill:

[I]f we're placing a burden on the doctor that says you have to keep alive a previable child as long as possible and give them as much medical attention as — as is necessary to try to keep that child alive, then we're probably crossing the line in terms of unconstitutionality.

It's also a very misleading to say that McCain is "running on a platform to ban abortion even in cases of rape and incest." The Republican platform is silent on the legality of abortion in the cases of rape and incest, and McCain believes that in those cases abortion should be legal.

It's pretty clear that Obama's strategy is to lie about his born-alive votes--as he has done in the past--and get the press to shift the debate to those hard cases, where Obama wins even if McCain shares his position.

Today Secretary of Defense Robert Gates signed a status of forces agreement for U.S. troops who will operate a radar system in the Czech Republic.

Do we have to wait until October to get the Ahmadinejad version of this?

Last week, the Irish foreign minister presented the details of an opinion poll analyzing the reasons behind the island’s “No” vote on the EU’s Lisbon Treaty on June 12. Three months ago, the latest EU attempt to streamline the 27-nation bloc’s institutional structures and decision-making procedures was rejected by a 53-43 percent margin. The poll was conducted in late July and involved more than 2000 Irish eligible voters. I have summarized some of the report’s key findings below:

Turnout for the Lisbon Treaty referendum was 53 percent, well in excess of the 35 percent who voted on the first Nice Treaty. The decisive issue was the increase in No voters as a proportion of the total electorate, rather than Yes voters staying at home.

The main reason cited for voting No was “lack of knowledge/information/ understanding” at 42 percent. There can be little doubt that this emerged as the primary reason for people voting No.

The main reason for abstaining in this referendum was also “lack of understanding/knowledge” (46 percent), which is far in excess of any other voluntary or circumstantial reason given for not voting.

Women recorded a stronger No vote than men (56-51 percent margin) as did the younger age groups, with 25-34 year olds being most opposed to the Treaty at 59 percent. Affluent voters were more likely to vote yes (64 percent), while blue-collar workers were strongly opposed to the Lisbon Treaty (65 percent).

Sixty percent of Irish voters believe that Ireland’s interests are best pursued by remaining fully involved in the EU. Fewer than 1 in 5 of the electorate (18 percent) believe Ireland’s interests are best served by opting to be less involved.

Twenty-six percent of No voters mentioned Treaty specific elements that were of concern to them, 20 percent cited general issues around the referendum, whilst 16 percent mentioned issues specifically to do with loss of power/independence (i.e., erosion of Irish neutrality, end of control over abortion and conscription to a future European army).

In the meantime, reports have surfaced indicating that the pro-EU government in Dublin will agree to hold a second referendum on the Lisbon Treaty in the Fall of 2009, most likely after having extracted concessions on keeping its only EU commissioner as well as sensitive issues such as abortion, taxation, and military neutrality.

Max Boot points out this New York Times report:

North Korea said on Friday that it no longer wishes to be removed from the United States’ terrorism blacklist, signaling that it is hardening its stance amid reports that its leader, Kim Jong-il, may be seriously ill.

The North Korean Foreign Ministry also confirmed what the United States and South Korea have said already: it has begun to reassemble a nuclear complex that can produce weapons-grade plutonium.

“We neither wish nor expect to be delisted as a ‘state sponsor of terrorism,’ ” the North’s state-run news agency, KCNA, quoted a ministry spokesman as saying. “We can go our own way.”

Boot writes: "It’s a shame that the 'deal' with North Korea is unraveling–but hardly unexpected. The only surprise is that the administration was so willing to abandon its first-term principles in order to pursue an accord that was widely seen as doomed. Presumably this will free up Secretary Rice’s time for another quixotic undertaking–trying to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, more than sixty years in the making, by the end of this year."

In the cover story of June 2 issue of THE WEEKLY STANDARD (In the Driver's Seat: Condoleezza Rice and the jettisoning of the Bush Doctrine.), Steve Hayes reported how the administration changed its North Korea policy and abandoned its first-term principles.

The Economist has a glowing review of David Freddoso's book The Case Against Barack Obama:

IF YOU find yourself believing that “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for”, or that “this is the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow” or even, tout court, that “yes we can”, the chances are that you are suffering from a severe case of Obamamania.

Tens of millions of Americans and an even larger number of Europeans have fallen victim to the syndrome, which involves a belief that a young black senator from Chicago can cure the world’s ills, in part because of his race, in part because of his obvious intelligence and rhetorical skill; but in no part because of any record of achievement in the past. Fortunately, an inexpensive remedy is at hand.

It comes in the form of a new book by David Freddoso, “The Case Against Barack Obama”. Unlike the authors of some of the cruder attacks on Mr Obama, Mr Freddoso works for a well-respected organisation, the online version of the National Review. Although it is a conservative publication and the author makes no secret of where his political sympathies lie, this is a well-researched, extensively footnoted work. It aims not so much to attack Mr Obama as to puncture the belief that he is in some way an extraordinary, mould-breaking politician.

Read the rest of the review here; buy the book here.

From ABC:

Before boarding his flight from Wilmington, Del., to Washington, DC, the loquacious Blue Hen [Joe Biden] displayed some Fightin' Blue Hen alumni bravado in an impromptu airport meeting with the University of Delaware football team.

"I was out in Ohio," he said, clutching a football. "I told the folks in Ohio that we'd kick Ohio State's ass!"

The Buckeyes might be coming off a 35-3 drubbing at the hands of top-ranked Southern Cal, but the Blue Hen ballers aren't exactly world-beaters themselves. Delaware is ranked sixth in the Division I-AA coaches poll, but they lost earlier this month to Maryland.

I'm sure the good people of Ohio will take this as some good-natured trash-talk coming from an underdog. Had Biden made the same statement about Ohio State's biggest rival, the Michigan Wolverines--or even the Penn State "Nittaly Lions"*--well, I think it would have been time for Obama to abandon the Buckeye state entirely. Biden just better hope that Delaware doesn't pull off an upset, which would severely wound the pride of Ohio State fans.

*Yes, I know McCain accidentally referred to the SEC as the FEC today.

Time's Karen Tumuly writes that "McCain Plays the Race Card" in an ad featuring former disgraced Fannie Mae executive Franklin Raines:

This is hardly subtle: Sinister images of two black men, followed by one of a vulnerable-looking elderly white woman.

Let me stipulate: Obama's Fannie Mae connections are completely fair game. But this ad doesn't even mention a far more significant tie--that of Jim Johnson, the former Fannie Mae chairman who had to resign as head of Obama's vice presidential search team after it was revealed he got a sweetheart deal on a mortgage from Countrywide Financial. Instead, it relies on a fleeting and tenuous reference in a Washington Post Style section story to suggest that Obama's principal economic adviser is former Fannie Mae Chairman Frank Raines. Why? One reason might be that Johnson is white; Raines is black.

And the image of the victim doesn't seem accidental either, given the fact that older white women are a key swing constituency in this election.

A few points:

1. The McCain campaign released a new ad on Jim Johnson this morning. The ad released yesterday was about who advises Obama, not who advised him. Johnson resigned from the Obama campaign on June 12. The Washington Post reported on July 17 that Raines "has been consulting with the campaign on housing issues." A Post editorial on August 28 said that Raines was a member of "Obama's political circle." The Obama campaign never disputed these reports until yesterday. Had the ad included a man who had resigned among Obama's current advisers, there's no doubt that Time would be wailing about McCain's Lies! Lies! Lies!

2. As for Tumulty's argument about the ad's inclusion of "Sinister images of two black men, followed by one of a vulnerable-looking elderly white woman", could she tell the McCain campaign what color, age, and sex is permissible for disappointed voters featured in negative ads?

3. Confronted with the facts, Tumulty stands by her racist accusation, telling the McCain campaign: "I grew up in Texas. I know what this stuff looks like." Why did Tumulty have nothing to say about Obama's ad that slandered Rush Limbaugh as an anti-Mexican bigot and suggested that McCain secretly coddles such bigots?

A sensationalistic Fox News report declares: “Britain Adopts Islamic Law.” This story is referencing a new report, in the Times of London, that the UK now has its first official sharia courts. From the Times:

The government has quietly sanctioned the powers for sharia judges to rule on cases ranging from divorce and financial disputes to those involving domestic violence. Rulin