Don't Ask Me No Questions

Both sides are doing it. First, Sarah Palin:

Palin told WMAL-AM that her criticism of Obama’s associations, like those with 1960s radical Bill Ayers and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, should not be considered negative attacks. Rather, for reporters or columnists to suggest that it is going negative may constitute an attack that threatens a candidate’s free speech rights under the Constitution, Palin said.

“If [the media] convince enough voters that that is negative campaigning, for me to call Barack Obama out on his associations,” Palin told host Chris Plante, “then I don’t know what the future of our country would be in terms of First Amendment rights and our ability to ask questions without fear of attacks by the mainstream media.”

So...criticism is a threat to the First Amendment? I'm no fan of the MSM, but this makes no sense. Then there's Obama.

The Obama campaign has decided to heave out three newspapers from its plane for the final days of its blitz across battleground states—and all three endorsed Sen. John McCain for president!

The NY POST, WASHINGTON TIMES and DALLAS MORNING NEWS have all been told to move out by Sunday to make room for network bigwigs—and possibly for the inclusion of reporters from two black magazines, ESSENCE and JET, the DRUDGE REPORT has learned.

Harry Truman once said that if you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. Unfortunately, today's politicians seem to have forgotten that you need a thick skin to go for the brass ring.

Surfing With The Alien

I guess it was bound to happen:

In a shocking reversal with major implications for the U.S. presidential election, political kingmaker, the Alien has switched his endorsement from Barack Obama to John McCain amid furor. Both political camps are buzzing about the implications, as the Alien has correctly predicted the winning president in every election for the past 28 years.

Well, maybe not this time. Still, McCain needs all the help he can get.

Gun Shy

Politico wants to know why McCain is staying away from an issue that could help him:

The Washington Post on Monday reported that while Americans are cutting back on purchasing some items because of a bad economy, purchases of “firearms and ammunition have risen 8 to 10 percent this year, according to state and federal data.”

One reason, the articles says, may be fear “that if Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois wins the presidency, he will join with fellow Democrats in Congress to enact new gun controls.”

But has McCain really exploited this? McCain did make a speech to the U.S. Sportsmen’s Alliance on Sept. 28, in which he did whack Obama over guns, but the speech did not get a lot of coverage and I don’t recall McCain devoting much time to the issue since.

True, the NRA is running its own ads against Obama, but voters expect that. Where are the McCain ads, lending his voice to this issue?

It may be because McCain realizes that Obama will not send the police out to round up every firearm. But this has never really been an issue in the campaign anyway. If the Supreme Court is any indication, it won't be in the future. Liberals won't like it, but the 2nd Amendment will most likely survive an Obama administration.

Dawkins Versus Dumbledore

Professional atheist gadfly Richard Dawkins is concerned about that old black magic.

The 67-year-old, who recently resigned from his position at Oxford University, says he intends to look at the effects of 'bringing children up to believe in spells and wizards'.

'I think it is anti-scientific - whether that has a pernicious effect, I don't know,' he told More4 News.

'Looking back to my own childhood, the fact that so many of the stories I read allowed the possibility of frogs turning into princes, whether that has a sort of insidious affect on rationality, I'm not sure. Perhaps it's something for research.'

However, the outspoken atheist said he hadn't even read Harry Potter and admitted he 'didn't know what to think about magic and fairytales'.

I agree with him about the irrational and unscientific part-after all, we have a VP candidate whose preacher protects her from witchcraft-but sometimes atheists can go a bit too far in putting logic over magic. After all, imagination is a part of being a kid.

From The Big House To The State House

There may be some twisted logic to this:

If Ted Stevens, who was found guilty on Monday of filing false Senate financial disclosure forms, is defeated in next week's election, he will be replaced by his Democratic opponent, Anchorage Mayor Mark Begich. But if he wins and then resigns, there will be a special election that a Republican might win.

Here's another scenario: Stevens is re-elected and refuses to resign, forcing his colleagues to vote on whether to expel him. They can muster only 66 votes, one shy of the two-thirds majority required. Stevens continues to serve in the Senate while serving his prison term, which he completes in 2011 or so, and is re-elected in 2014, when he turns 90. I'm no Stevens fan, but for sheer entertainment value this could be the best thing to come out of this year's election.

At least when he's 90 Stevens would probably be too old to do any more damage. But you never know.

Final Pitch

What McCain and Obama's boil down to, respictively:

Obama would coddle Castro....Joe the Plumber is good....America needs a new energy policy...the LA Times coddles the PLO and Obama ...McCain has the support of experienced military leaders....Obama would govern leftward with Pelosi and Reid....the pundits are wrong....
....

McCain=Bush and more of the same.

Desperation versus consistency? In this instance, desperation most likely loses.

Shoot The Handler, Not The Buyer

It's always someone else's fault:

Palin has taken to blaming the entire ['clothing'] incident – as well as her introduction to the nation – on her “handlers,” presumably meaning Nicolle Wallace ... McCain allies say that Palin allies talked to Fox News commentator Fred Barnes to further throw Wallace under the bus. Barnes yesterday said, “the person who went and bought the clothes and, as I understand it put the clothes on her credit card, went to Saks and Neiman Marcus...the staffer who did that has been a coward” for not coming forward and accepting the blame for the $150,000 shopping spree. Barnes clarified that he was talking about Wallace.

That's funny, nobody seemed to mind when it was all in the name of campaigning.

Bloggin' In The Years: 1992

Has the fat lady sung? Not yet, according to Team Bush and its friends in the Keystone State.

Elsie Hillman of Pittsburgh, a longtime Republican National Committeewoman from Pennsylvania, pooh-poohed the pessimists in her party with the comment, "I think we're going to surprise everyone again and carry this state." She sees Mr. Perot, who made one of his few campaign speeches in Pittsburgh last weekend, splitting the anti-Bush vote and pulling as much as 20 percent of the total.

"In 1988, they wrote us off," she said. "President Reagan never came into the western part of the state to campaign for Bush, and we had no advertising to speak of. It was dead again this year until the last debate. Until then, people didn't think the President had any fire in his tummy, but now they sense he's caught fire."

Gov. Robert P. Casey, a Democrat, said that Mr. Clinton still "has to be favored in Pennsylvania, overwhelmingly." But he added that "something is definitely happening out there, and he's losing ground, because Bush has succeded in framing the end-game issue, not as jobs but as trust and taxes."

A major problem for Mr. Clinton, the Governor said, was the widespread suggestion earlier this month that a Clinton landslide was imminent. Talk like that, he said, "makes it hard to get your traction --

"Talking about landslides and mandates is the political equivalent of talking to the pitcher about his no-hitter in the bottom of the ninth," Mr. Casey said. "You have to run hard until the last possible minute."

Agreed, but Bush seems to have run his course before the race is done. Of course, anything could happen over the next few days, but right now this is the pot-smoking, draft-dodging Governor's to lose.

Some Friendly Advice

Ross Douthat has some words of warning for conservatives:

Whatever direction you think conservatism should be going in from here on out, the absolute worst thing the members of a losing political movement can do - if they ever want to win again, at least - is attempt to pre-emptively close off debate about the movement's future. Conservatives need to have arguments, not promise excommunications, or else pretty soon there won't be very much worth arguing over.

Good advice. But the question is, will activist conservatives listen?

Baby You Can Buy My Car

What hath bailouts wrought?

General Motors and Cerberus Capital Management have asked the U.S. government for roughly $10 billion in an unprecedented rescue package to support a merger between GM and Chrysler, two sources with direct knowledge of the talks said on Monday.

The government funding would include roughly $3 billion in exchange for preferred stock in the merged automaker, according to one of the sources, who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

The U.S. Treasury Department is considering a request for direct aid to facilitate the merger and a decision could come this week, sources familiar with the still-developing government response said earlier on Monday.

An injection of $3 billion in equity to support a GM acquisition of Chrysler would be roughly equivalent to the current, depressed value of the top U.S. automaker.

Apparently you can't be too big to fail. But what about companies that might be too small to save? Isn't everyone entitled to corporate welfare these days?

Bloggin' In The Years: 1960

So Nixon and Kennedy are no longer on speaking terms? What are they going to do, stick their tongues out at each other until election day?

Roadkill Buffett

I'm kind of surprised this doesn't happen more often in my neck of the woods:

Health officials shut down a suburban Buffalo restaurant after an inspector found employees butchering a dead deer inside the business. Erie County Health Department officials said they got a tip Friday about a dead deer in the China King restaurant in the town of Hamburg, just south of Buffalo.

An inspector soon arrived and saw the deer being butchered in the kitchen.

State health laws prohibit butchering an animal inside a restaurant.

Officials don't know whether the deer had been killed by a hunter or a vehicle. They said there was no indication the deer meat was served to any customers.

Roadkill. It's what's for dinner...

Old Nukes

What should we do about our elderly nuclear arsenal?

Defense Secretary Robert Gates wants the next president to think about what nuclear middle-age and decline means for national security. Gates joins a growing debate about the reliability and future credibility of the American arsenal.

Gates is expected to call for increased commitment to preserving the deterrent value of atomic weapons.

The stockpile now serves mainly to make any other nation think twice about developing or using even a crude nuclear device of its own. But at the same time, international efforts to contain the spread of such weapons look ineffective.

It's definitely a valid concern, for safety and other reasons.

Get A Job, Ya Bums

Economic reality may kill the desire for online freelancing.

It will result in the rise of online media businesses that reward their contributors with cash; it will mean the success of Knol over Wikipedia, Mahalo over Google (Nasdaq: GOOG), TheAtlantic.com over the HuffingtonPost.com, iTunes over MySpace, Hulu over YouTube Inc. , Playboy.com over Voyeurweb.com, TechCrunch over the blogosphere, CNN’s professional journalism over CNN’s iReporter citizen-journalism... The hungry and cold unemployed masses aren’t going to continue giving away their intellectual labor on the Internet in the speculative hope that they might get some 'back end' revenue. 'Free' doesn’t fill anyone’s belly; it doesn’t warm anyone up.

Hard times hit everyone. But a free market can still provide solutions. Welcome to capitalism, Web style.

From Tubes To Bars

Ted Stevens, you're done.

A jury found U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska guilty Monday of all seven counts in his federal corruption trial.

The jury found Stevens guilty of “knowingly and willfully” scheming to conceal on Senate disclosure forms more than $250,000 in home renovations and other gifts from an Alaska-based oil industry contractor.

Stevens faces a maximum sentence of up to to 35 years in prison—five years for each of the seven counts.

Legal experts note the judge has the discretion to give Stevens as little as no jail time and probation when he is sentenced.

It couldn't have happened to a nicer scumbag.

Sick At The Top

Ima Dinnerjacket is apparently feeling poorly these days.:

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has fallen ill due to his heavy workload, a close associate told the Iranian state news agency late Saturday, as doubts surface about whether he will run for another term.

Parliament member Mohammad Ismail Kowsari, an ally of the president, told IRNA that Ahmadinejad is feeling under the weather because of the strain of his position.

"The president will eventually get well and continue his job," said Kowsari, who last September accompanied the president on his trip to the U.N. General Assembly. "Every human being can face exhaustion under such a workload."

I wonder if he'll join Mini Me and Castro in "Retirement". Being a dictator is hard work, after all.

A Beer A Day

Homer Simpson was right: There is literally nothing it cannot do:

A team of researchers at Rice University in Houston is working to create a beer that could fight cancer and heart disease. Taylor Stevenson, a member of the six-student research team and a junior at Rice, said the team is using genetic engineering to create a beer that includes resveratrol, the disease-fighting chemical that’s been found in red wine.

A beer gut as a sign of being cancer-free? I love the age in which we live.

Too Large To Save

Jerry Pournelle asks a question with regards to corporate socialism:

Pure capitalism leads to business cycles, in which the low point is generally better (in terms of standard of living) than Socialism (and certainly preferable to Communism, if only because the low points in a business cycle are considerably shorter than the reign of the bureaucrats in either Socialist or Communist states, even if the Communism has a human face, which it seldom does. . . . One does wonder whether the efficiency of having a few very large financial institutions outweighs the cost of the disasters that ensue when a Black Swan appears; whether it might not be better to have, instead of one institution so large that it justifies paying its top executives $100 million a year, one hundred such institutions paying executives $1 million a year? Certainly this would be less efficient. The highs would not be as high. But would the lows be as low? Why must there be institutions so large that they cannot be permitted to fail, and must be rescued by the common purse?

When you get too big for your britches, why should the rest of us pay for you to get a new pair of britches? Why, indeed.

States We Can Believe In

A point by point plan on how McCain can keep his chances alive in the time he has left.

1. Give-Ups. McCain should concede Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Iowa.

2. Offensive Targets. McCain should remain engaged in New Hampshire and New Mexico.

3. Defensive Targets. Some reasonably vigorous defense is required in Viginia, Colorado, Nevada, Ohio and North Carolina.

4. Gambles. McCain should limit his activity in Florida, Missouri and Indiana, and hope a national surge of some kind brings those states back into his column.

One cannot live on Pennsylvania alone, and McCain needs to redeploy his resources if he doesn't want to go down like the Titanic.

"What's Wrong, Dave?"

In space, nobody can hear your therapy sessions.

scientists are working on giving a computer the ability to offer some of the understanding guidance - if not all the warmth - of a human therapist, before psychological problems or interpersonal conflicts compromise a mission.

Clinical tests on the four-year, $1.74 million project for NASA, called the Virtual Space Station, are expected to begin in the Boston area by next month.

The new program is nothing like science fiction's infamous HAL, the onboard artificial intelligence that goes awry in '2001: A Space Odyssey.' The Virtual Space Station's interaction between astronaut and computer is far less sophisticated and far more benevolent.

In the project, sponsored by the National Space Biomedical Research Institute, a recorded video therapist guides astronauts through a widely used depression therapy called 'problem-solving treatment.'

The recording helps astronauts identify reasons for their depression. Then the program helps them make a plan to fight the depression, based on the descriptions the astronauts type in about their problems.

I agree that this is an important step forward. Ship's Counselor applications, anyone?

Son Of New Deal

Trying to stay relevant, John Kerry argues for old-school intervention:

The nation’s battered economy needs an old-fashioned “Rooseveltian lift” of regulatory reforms and government spending on the infrastructure, clean energy and other sectors, U.S. Sen. John Kerry said yesterday.

Kerry, facing a re-election challenge from Republican Jeff Beatty, rejected GOP calls for more tax rebates to stimulate the economy, as was done last spring.

“I am for a stimulus package. I am not for a stimulus package that just sends out checks,” said Kerry at a Boston Herald editorial meeting yesterday.

Hmm, isn't that just what Democrats want to do?

You Can't Handle The Verifiability

Simson Garfunkle explains one of the main problems with the encyclopedia that anyone can edit.

Unlike the laws of mathematics or science, wikitruth isn’t based on principles such as consistency or observability. It’s not even based on common sense or firsthand experience. Wikipedia has evolved a radically different set of epistemological standards–standards that aren’t especially surprising given that the site is rooted in a Web-based community, but that should concern those of us who are interested in traditional notions of truth and accuracy. On Wikipedia, objective truth isn’t all that important, actually. What makes a fact or statement fit for inclusion is that it appeared in some other publication–ideally, one that is in English and is available free online. “The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth,” states Wikipedia’s official policy on the subject.

Truth seems to be a lost cause on much of the Internet these days all around...

Say It Ain't So, O

Did Obama supporters try to dig into Joe The Plumber's background?

State and local officials are investigating if state and law-enforcement computer systems were illegally accessed when they were tapped for personal information about 'Joe the Plumber.' . . .

Public records requested by The Dispatch disclose that information on Wurzelbacher's driver's license or his sport-utility vehicle was pulled from the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles database three times shortly after the debate.

Information on Wurzelbacher was accessed by accounts assigned to the office of Ohio Attorney General Nancy H. Rogers, the Cuyahoga County Child Support Enforcement Agency and the Toledo Police Department.

It was bad enough when Bush and co. did this stuff. It's disappointing if Team Obama is just rehearsing for their turn.

Money, Money, Money

Brother, can you spare Obama a few trillion?

Excluding the Obama health plan, the NTUF estimates that Mr. Obama would raise spending by $611.5 billion over the next five years; the 10-year total (aside from health) would surely exceed $1.4 trillion, because spending typically grows at least as quickly as nominal GDP.

A trillion here, a trillion there, and pretty soon you're talking about real money.

Altogether, Mr. Obama is promising at least $4.3 trillion of increased spending and reduced tax revenue from 2009 to 2018 -- roughly an extra $430 billion a year by 2012-2013.
How is he going to pay for it?

Good question. Unfortunately, it's one we most likely won't get a straight answer on.

Let Them Eat Landlines

If you're starving in North Korea, keep it to yourself.

North Korea is clamping down on mobile phones and long distance telephone calls to prevent the spread of news about a worsening food crisis, according to the United Nations investigator on human rights for the isolated communist country.

In a report to the UN General Assembly, Vitit Muntarbhorn, a Thai law professor who has never been allowed to visit North Korea, said that its government is using public executions as a means of intimidating the population, and using spies to infiltrate and expose religious communities.

His report came two days after the World Food Programme said that two thirds of North Koreans do not have enough to eat, in the country’s worst crisis since as many as three million people died of famine a decade ago.

I assume Mini Me will send up smoke signals if he wants aid.

"We Can't Do This To Us!"

Obama hasn't won yet, but the Republicans already seem to be crying "No Mas!"

Top Republican officials have let it be known they are distressed about McCain’s organization. Coordination between the McCain campaign and Republican National Committee, always uneven, is now nearly dysfunctional, with little high-level contact and intelligence-sharing between the two.

“There is no communication,” lamented one top Republican. “It drives you crazy.”

At his Northern Virginia headquarters, some McCain aides are already speaking of the campaign in the past tense. Morale, even among some of the heartiest and most loyal staffers, has plummeted. And many past and current McCain advisers are warring with each other over who led the candidate astray.

One well-connected Republican in the private sector was shocked to get calls and resumes in the past few days from what he said were senior McCain aides — a breach of custom for even the worst-off campaigns.

“It’s not an extraordinarily happy place to be right now,” said one senior McCain aide. “I’m not gonna lie. It’s just unfortunate.”

“If you really want to see what ‘going negative’ is in politics, just watch the back-stabbing and blame game that we’re starting to see,” said Mark McKinnon, the ad man who left the campaign after McCain wrapped up the GOP primary. “And there’s one common theme: Everyone who wasn’t part of the campaign could have done better.”

“The cake is baked,” agreed a former McCain strategist. “We’re entering the finger-pointing and positioning-for-history part of the campaign. It’s every man for himself now.”

Personally, I won't be writing any formal obituaries for the Straight Talk Express until the last vote has been counted, but at this point the Fat Lady seems to be warming up backstage.

Long Division

The good news: Most people still prefer divided government.

There is one question in the poll where Republicans did better than Democrats, who probably will still control Congress after the election. Voters were asked whether it would be better to have a Democratic president working with the Democratic-controlled Congress to get things done, or to have a Republican president keeping Congress in check. Forty percent of those surveyed said a Republican president would be better; 32 percent chose a Democratic president.

The bad news (for Republicans, anyway): More people prefer one nation under Obama.

But the results were different when the question about divided government was posed another way. When voters were asked whether they preferred for Obama to be president and work with a Democratic Congress or for McCain to be a check on the Democratic Congress, Obama narrowly won, 49 percent to 44 percent.

I don't know why they think a Democratic-controlled government would be any better than the Republican one we had for six years, but I guess it shows how far the GOP's fortunes have fallen that people have lost this much respect for them. Will four years be enough to turn things around?

It's Hard To Be A Big Government Pimp

Where's Milton Friedman when you need him?

Is there better irony than an imprudent Washington 'investing' about a trillion dollars of debt funded tax money into the banking system and telling them how to run a business?

The same federal government confiscated the Mustang Ranch bordello in Nevada in the 90s and then promptly ran it into bankruptcy. If the feds cannot make a profit in a monopoly business of selling sex and booze, my guess is the complexities of banking will totally perplex them—especially when they have to follow the convoluted regulations they themselves impose.

Well, if it made sense, Government wouldn't do it. This stuff was around long before Obama came along and I doubt either he or McCain would be able to undo it in four short years.

Liar, Liar

Well looky here:

Pittsburgh police said a 20-year-old woman who originally said she was robbed and assaulted at knifepoint in Bloomfield because of her political views made the story up.

Ashley Todd -- who has a backward letter 'B' scratched into her right cheek -- confessed to faking the story and will be charged with filing a false report, Assistant Police Chief Maurita Bryant said at a news conference Friday.

Todd, of College Station, Texas, admitted there was no robbery or attacker and said she had prior mental health problems, according to Bryant.

There are already enough crazies on the left who would do something like this. McCain doesn't need help from the nuts who claim to be on his side.

The Green Patrol

To paraphrase Sting, they'll be sniffing you:

"Essential surveillance kit for the new green police: the Energy Saving Partnership has taken out a patent on Heatseekers, thermo-imaging vehicles which, at full potential, have the capacity to identify 1,000 properties an hour, or 5,000 properties a night, that are leaking carbon. 'Once the property has been scanned, a dedicated team of energy advisers will visit householders to show them the thermal image scan of their homes,' says Inspector Knock-on-the-Door."

First they came for the non-recyclers, and I said I wasn't a non-recycler. Then they came for the non-hybrid users, and I said I was not a non-hybrid user. Then they came for the carbon leakers, and I realized there wasn't anyone else left.

McBush Basher

Better late than never:

"Spending, the conduct of the war in Iraq for years, growth in the size of government, larger than any time since the Great Society, laying a $10 trillion debt on future generations of America, owing $500 billion to China, obviously, failure to both enforce and modernize the [financial] regulatory agencies that were designed for the 1930s and certainly not for the 21st century, failure to address the issue of climate change seriously," Mr. McCain said in an interview with The Washington Times aboard his campaign plane en route from New Hampshire to Ohio.

It's nice for him to remember that he's not running for a third term for Bush. But he should have remembered it earlier.

Don't Know Much About The Economy

Economists, educate thyselves:

Economists ought to admit that we do not know much about what is going on today. Neither do the Fed Chairman and the Treasury Secretary. Of course, the market demand is for 'strong' leaders and for 'strong' economists, who can fool the public into believing that they have great knowledge. The ones who do this best are those who have fooled themselves.

Self-delusion has become an art form when it comes to the economy. It's tough enough for the average person to wade through the waters without the supposed experts muddying them up.

Saved By Sam

The evil Wal Mart may save us from bad Chinese exports.

Mike Duke, vice chairman of Wal-Mart's international division, said the company is expecting 'greater transparency...from our supplier partners' [in China] beginning next month.

They will be required to 'tell us the name and location of every factory they use to make the products we sell,' according to Duke's prepared remarks delivered at a company conference in Beijing. 'Essentially, we expect you to ask the tough questions, to give us the answers and, if there's a problem, to own the solution.'

Wal-Mart will apply the new standards to apparel first and eventually use them on all its products, Duke said. No other details were given.

Who says responsible capitalism is dead?

Movin' On Up

Kerry Howley, writing in response to a study of work-related migration patterns in developing countries, sums up why a "Brain drain" can be a good thing:

As it turns out, human beings do not seek education purely for the betterment of their eternal souls. People locked in poor countries do not fail to invest years studying theoretical physics because they lack the appropriate imaginative capacity. If no one can afford to hire a cardiologist, no sane person is going to waste a decade studying to be one. Mobility transforms a questionable investment into one worth making.

Why stay poor if you can avoid it? Nowadays many are, much to the chagrin of Western liberals.

Here Come De Judges

A look at when Supreme Court Justices should act as opposed to when they shouldn't.

When the legislative or executive branch exceeds its legitimate enumerated powers, the courts have the authority, indeed the duty, to declare that exercise of power unconstitutional. Deference in the face of excesses by the political branches, coupled with an allegiance to precedent, through a cramped interpretation of the Constitution, means that conservatives are rarely willing to overrule prior cases, leaving entrenched the very foundations of the regulatory and redistributive states they rail against. In practice, judicial restraint has mutated into judicial passivism, with a predictable result: more government power and fewer constitutionally protected individual rights.

The fact of the matter is, there are people on both sides who want activist judges for their own pet causes. But the Constitution is what it is and wasn't written to play favorites when it came to the Supreme Court. Some people seem to have forgotten that.

Club Saudi

Are they the worst of the worst? Not according to the Saudis, whose justice system isn't exactly what we'd consider enlightened.

Almost a quarter of the Guantánamo detainees who have been released have been sent back to Saudi Arabia. Facing a substantial threat from terrorism in their own country, the Saudi authorities have been rigorous—some might say harsh—in imprisoning and punishing any terrorist deemed a danger. Yet in new statistics provided to us by the Ministry of Interior in Riyadh, zero of the 121 Guantánamo detainees received by the Saudis were deemed dangerous and ineligible for release.

Well, clearly they just support the terrorists. I mean, it couldn't be for mundane reasons like lack of real evidence against these people, could it?

Son Of Bush?

Larison makes a valid point, IMO:

...what is worrisome is that Obama, already perfectly hawkish and interventionist on his own, will feel compelled to take even harder lines and be even more confrontational than he would otherwise be in order to demonstrate that he is not the weak, accommodating President that Peters et al. are making him out to be. Having learned nothing from the Bush years, these critics may box Obama in and lead him to take positions that are more aggressive even than those of Mr. Bush to secure his “credibility” on national security.

In these times, it wouldn't be too hard to imagine an otherwise well-intentioned Obama trying to overcompensate. Hopefully he'd be smart enough to avoid the trap, but you never know.

Grading Time

The Cato Institute has issued a report card on the spending habits of American governors. Their findings?

Three governors were awarded an 'A' in this report card – Charlie Crist of Florida, Mark Sanford of South Carolina, and Joe Manchin of West Virginia. Eight governors were awarded an 'F' – Martin O'Malley of Maryland, Ted Kulongoski of Oregon, Rod Blagojevich of Illinois, Chet Culver of Iowa, Jon Corzine of New Jersey, Bob Riley of Alabama, Jodi Rell of Connecticut, and C. L. 'Butch' Otter of Idaho.

Republican governors, on average, received slightly higher grades than Democratic governors. More importantly, there has been a disappointing lack of major spending reforms among governors of both parties in recent years.

I suppose the good news is that there are still some Republicans who understand fiscal common sense. They're just not in Washington these days.

Hung Out To Dry

Keeping your kid green isn's as easy as it seems, after all:

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has instructed civil servants not to publicise the conclusions of the £50,000 nappy research project and to adopt a “defensive” stance towards its conclusions....

To reduce the impact of cloth nappies on climate change parents would have to hang wet nappies out to dry all year round, keep them for years for use on younger children, and make sure the water in their washing machines does not exceed 60C.

Chin up, Mum. Your yard may stink but at least it would be environmentally friendly, eh what?

The Pure Principle

Jacob Weisberg has some unkind words for liberetarians in writing about the economic crisis.

Utopians of the right, libertarians are just as convinced [as Marxists were after the fall of communism] that their ideas have yet to be tried, and that they would work beautifully if we could only just have a do-over of human history. Like all true ideologues, they find a way to interpret mounting evidence of error as proof that they were right all along.

...

The best thing you can say about libertarians is that because their views derive from abstract theory, they tend to be highly principled and rigorous in their logic. Those outside of government at places like the Cato Institute and Reason magazine are just as consistent in their opposition to government bailouts as to the kind of regulation that might have prevented one from being necessary. "Let failed banks fail" is the purist line. This approach would deliver a wonderful lesson in personal responsibility, creating thousands of new jobs in the soup-kitchen and food-pantry industries.

The worst thing you can say about libertarians is that they are intellectually immature, frozen in the worldview many of them absorbed from reading Ayn Rand novels in high school.

While it is true that many libertarians (including those like me who consider themselves right-of-center libertarians) believe that bad businesses should fail, it does not make all libertarians as rigid as their left-wing counterparts (although some are). Libertarianism at its core is basic conservatism of the kind that the Republican Party used to follow. Most honest libertarians are more than willing to concede when they are wrong. I'm afraid the same can't be said for journalists.

"It's Only Welfare When They Do It"

John McCain goes after Obama's tax plans:

Senator Obama claims that wants to give a tax break to the middle class, but not only did he vote for higher taxes on the middle class in the Senate, his plan gives away your tax dollars to those who don't pay taxes. That's not a tax cut, that's welfare.

More liberal tax-and-spend, right? But how does McCain propose to pay for this?

I will provide every single American family with a $5000 refundable tax credit to help them purchase insurance. Workers who already have health care insurance from their employers will keep it and have more money to cover costs.

Granted, McCain's health care plan is actually preferable from a conservative standpoint. But part of his message has been a populist one that has also criticized "The wealthy," just in different ways. One man's welfare is another man's tax break, I suppose.

The Short Arm Of The Law

It must be a sign of the times.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is struggling to find enough agents and resources to investigate criminal wrongdoing tied to the country’s economic crisis, according to current and former bureau officials.

The bureau slashed its criminal investigative work force to expand its national security role after the Sept. 11 attacks, shifting more than 1,800 agents, or nearly one-third of all agents in criminal programs, to terrorism and intelligence duties. Current and former officials say the cutbacks have left the bureau seriously exposed in investigating areas like white-collar crime, which has taken on urgent importance in recent weeks because of the nation’s economic woes.

The pressure on the F.B.I. has recently increased with the disclosure of criminal investigations into some of the largest players in the financial collapse, including Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The F.B.I. is planning to double the number of agents working financial crimes by reassigning several hundred agents amid a mood of national alarm. But some people inside and out of the Justice Department wonder where the agents will come from and whether they will be enough.

So depleted are the ranks of the F.B.I.’s white-collar investigators that executives in the private sector say they have had difficulty attracting the bureau’s attention in cases involving possible frauds of millions of dollars.

Between the crooks on Wall Street and the crooks in office, I'd say the Feds have their hands full either way.

The Anti-Wright

Why does Colin Powell's endorsement of Obama matter for Obama? Because of who Powell isn't as much as who he is.

Politically Powell disinfects Obama from the Wright and Ayers and other assorted stains he picked up this year. You might get an e-mail claiming Obama is a terrorist, but if Colin Powell says he isn't, well, that e-mail is probably a hoax. If all Powell does is knock back McCain for a day or two, then, as Mark Halperin points out, that's 20 to 25 percent of the remaining news cycles before election day that he's lost. Expect them to spin something like how they'd rather have Joe the Plumber's endorsement than that of Colin Powell. Spin like that will turn Joe from a political asset to the latest McCain gimmick.

The Powell endorsement shouldn't be all good for Obama. Powell's tenure at State was, in retrospect, a disaster. Obama's rise began when he gave an anti-Iraq War speech. Powell's career started spiralling when he made the case for war at the United Nations. But Powell is still a folk hero because of the narrative that's been spun since them. You get a good example of it in Oliver Stone's W., which I saw last night, and which portrays Powell as a fallen saint who literally pounds a table ('LET ME FINISH!') making an argument against invading Iraq. The country sees Powell not as a patsy, but as a guy who would, after all, have made a better president than Bush.

Perhaps most importantly, Powell still has the kind of gravitas that many Republicans have lost. He also represents the sane part of the Republican Party that has been overshadowed by the activist neocons and religious fringe. He has become a reminder of the best of what they used to be, and that, more than whatever mistakes he made, is why he is now, like so many other decent folks, on the outside looking in.

The Best Outcome?

A repeat of the Clinton Years?

Overall I'd say the best case for conservatives is an Obama Presidency whose overambitious agenda provokes a GOP backlash in the 2010 midterms, causing a chastened Obama Administration to focus on bipartisan entitlement reforms that only a Democratic president could pass. As I think about it, what I'm saying is the best we can hope for is another Clinton Administration sans the affairs while the right regroups, casts aside the corrupt yes men who enabled the Bush Administration to do so many un-conservative things, and develops a coherent, appealing domestic agenda.

The only way for the Republican Party to recover from its self-inflicted wounds is to rebuild it from the ground up. Goldwater, Reagan and Newt Gingrich all had simple, effective messages that eventually caught on and brought the party back. I believe this can happen again, but it will take time.

Paper Trail

For those who complain about the durn librul media, consider this.

The Denver Post, which had backed George W. Bush in 2004 and is owned by Republican-leaning William Dean Singleton, this evening endorsed Barack Obama for president. So did the Chicago Sun-Times, Kansas City Star. Southwest News-Herald (Ill.) and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. And to top it off: another Bush-backing in 2004, The Salt Lake Tribune.

John McCain is getting his butt kicked because it's all the media's fault? I think not.

Red State Blues

More bad news for the GOP from Georgia:

Upstart Democratic Senate challenger Jim Martin raised more money than Republican Sen. Saxby Chambliss in the most recent three-month period, according to finance reports filed this week.

In by far his best fundraising haul of the campaign, Martin took in more than $1.3 million from July through the end of September. Chambliss took in $1.1 million.

The silver lining for Chambliss is that Martin spent almost all of his money and had just $92,340 in the bank heading into the final month of the campaign. Chambliss had about $1.2 million in his treasury.

Most of Georgia is NOT Democratic territory, in spite of the fact that they gave us Jimmy Carter. If Georgia is to be used as a bellweather, the days of the Republican "Solid South" may be coming to an end.

"That Wasn't Part Of The Plan"

Hawaii has discovered that entitlement for all doesn't work.

HONOLULU (AP) - Hawaii is dropping the only state universal child health care program in the country just seven months after it launched.

Gov. Linda Lingle's administration cited budget shortfalls and other available health care options for eliminating funding for the program. A state official said families were dropping private coverage so their children would be eligible for the subsidized plan.

'People who were already able to afford health care began to stop paying for it so they could get it for free,' said Dr. Kenny Fink, the administrator for Med-QUEST at the Department of Human Services. 'I don't believe that was the intent of the program.'

It's never the intent, but that's what it always seems to lead to.

Senator Stuart Smalley?

Don't laugh (not that I ever found Franken to be all that funny). The way things are going, it could happen.

Democrats didn't used to think Al Franken could win a Senate seat from Minnesota, but in the last month polling and fundraising have started to move his way. Incumbent Republican Norm Coleman, who beat Walter Mondale to win the seat six years ago, tried to pummel Franken into submission with a negative ad campaign and a steady drip of stories about his scandals and hypocrisy. It didn't work, so Coleman's dramatically announced an end to negative ads from his shop.

Reason has more, including a video history of the campaign in question.

History's Next Worst Monster

J.D. Tucille says that we shouldn't get our hopes up either way:

What kind of president will the winner of November's national popularity contest be? If history is any judge, the nation's next chief executive, whether Democrat Barack Obama or Republican John McCain, will be something of a monster.

It's not because either of these men are overtly evil. I very much doubt that Obama or McCain is secretly plotting to create the American Reich after Inauguration Day, no matter what dire warnings are floating around the Internet about the supposed dictatorship to come. But both men are likely to leave the government more powerful and intrusive than they found it, and to do some measure of damage to our liberty.

One could argue that, after the last eight years, that would be kind of hard to do.

We Are All Plumbers Now

The Obama campaign seems to have touched a nerve.

As Democratic nominee Barack Obama pulled into the Roanoke Civic Center on Friday, he was greeted by the usual McCain campaign supporters that show at Obama rallies. But this time, those waving McCain-Palin signs were joined by dozens of people waving standard-issue plungers. Some wore white t-shirts emblazoned with 'I AM JOE THE PLUMBER' on the front. The protesters all said they were volunteers and not paid by the McCain campaign.

Obama seems to have a habit of letting his elitist side show right after he talks about how he wants to help working families. Meanwhile, McCain is speaking out.

"Last weekend, Senator Obama showed up in Joe's driveway to ask for his vote, and Joe asked Senator Obama a tough question. I'm glad he did; I think Senator Obama could use a few more tough questions," McCain told supporters in Miami this afternoon.

"The response from Senator Obama and his campaign yesterday was to attack Joe. People are digging through his personal life and he has TV crews camped out in front of his house. He didn't ask for Senator Obama to come to his house. He wasn't recruited or prompted by our campaign. He just asked a question. And Americans ought to be able to ask Senator Obama tough questions without being smeared and targeted with political attacks.

"The question Joe asked about our economy is important, because Senator Obama's plan would raise taxes on small businesses that employ 16 million Americans. Senator Obama's plan will kill those jobs at just the time when we need to be creating more jobs. My plan will create jobs, and that's what America needs."

Who would have thought that the election would have come down to Joe Versus "O"?

Down With The Sickness

Sanity comes to New Jersey, and as is to be expected in this hysterical age, the ignoramouses are out in force.

As flu season approaches, many New Jersey parents are furious over a first-in-the-nation requirement that children get a flu shot in order to attend preschools and day-care centers. The decision should be the parents', not the state's, they contend.

Hundreds of parents and other activists rallied outside the New Jersey Statehouse on Thursday, decrying the policy and voicing support for a bill that would allow parents to opt out of mandatory vaccinations for their children.

'This is not an anti-vaccine rally - it's a freedom of choice rally,' said one of the organizers, Louise Habakus. 'This one-size-fits-all approach is really very anti-American.'

No, what's anti-American is saying that somebody else's kids don't matter. Strange, I thought liberals were for the children.

Have A Shrink On Me

I guess it's official: Drinking makez yu dum no matter watz.

Increasing alcohol intake was associated with loss in total brain volume greater than expected from age alone (P<0.001), reported Carol Ann Paul, of Wellesley College, and colleagues in the October issue of the Archives of Neurology.

In the cross-sectional study, women were affected more strongly than men by moderate alcohol intake averaging one to two drinks a day (eight to 14 per week).

The cardiovascular benefits of low to moderate alcohol intake are thought to result from increasing blood flow rates, which would have been expected to benefit the brain also, Paul said.

But rather than preventing normal age-related volume reductions, the effects of moderate drinking were closer to those of heavy drinking, which has been linked to brain atrophy and cognitive decline, the researchers noted.

There are probably some famous drinkers, like Ted Kennedy, Homer Simpson and Peter Griffin, to whom this research wouldn't apply. After all, haven't they always been pea brains to begin with?

A Fraud Grows In Liberal Land

Democrats trying to steal an election? No way!

The FBI is investigating whether the community activist group ACORN helped foster voter registration fraud around the nation before the presidential election.

A senior law enforcement official confirmed the investigation to The Associated Press. A second senior law enforcement official says the FBI was looking at results of inquiries in several states, including a raid on ACORN's office in Las Vegas, for any evidence of a coordinated national effort.

Both officials spoke on condition of anonymity because Justice Department regulations forbid discussing ongoing investigations particularly so close to an election.

Why couldn't the Acornheads have just stuck to using dead voters like other Democrats?

Caffeine Unplugged

Coffee growers in Hawaii claim victory against those evil GM foods.

Coffee growers testified that the planting of genetically engineered coffee would contaminate and damage markets for their premium Kona coffee, costing them their livelihoods. Many cited past episodes where biotech rice and corn have contaminated conventional varieties, resulting in marketplace rejection, dramatically lower prices, and large losses to farmers.

Coffee farmers argued that they would lose their 'specialty coffee' status and/or organic certification if biotech coffee were ever planted on Hawaii Island. The Kona coffee industry brings more than $25 million into the state each year.

Some coffee is more equal than others...and they'd better hope that nature's little critters don't do to their livelihood what they thought that GM brew would.

Comrade W

How screwed up is the plan to at least partially nationalize the banking industry? It's given Hugo Chavez some new ammunition:

Socialist Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez mocked George W. Bush as a 'comrade' on Wednesday, saying the U.S. president was a hard-line leftist for his government's intervention of major private banks in the U.S. financial crisis.

...

'Bush is to the left of me now,' Chavez told an audience of international intellectuals debating the benefits of socialism. 'Comrade Bush announced he will buy shares in private banks.'

If Obama is indeed a socialist, then he's had plenty of precedent to draw from.

Bloggin' In The Years: 1984

From the second Reagan-Mondale debate, I think this was the line of the night.

Last Chance

Round Three is tonight, and Culture 11 has some last-minute advice for McCain:

Attack Obama’s economic recovery plan, in detail. Attack his abortion stance, in detail (maybe, unavoidably, in gruesome detail). He’ll squirm, if you can pin some responsibility on him. Have you seen the primary debates? God, he loathes it when people do that to him. Make the young guy seem prickly and unattractive for once. You’ll still lose this thing, probably, but you won’t be the guy who spent the twilight of your career squealing about the Weather Underground.

Considering what his surrogates have become reduced to, it's questionable whether McCain can still do this. But he has one more shot at going out in style, so we'll see.

Method Mafioso

Now this is what I call preparing for your role.

An actor who played a Godfather in a new smash Mafia movie is among seven people arrested in a police crackdown.

Bernardino Terracciano, 53, plays a boss in 'Gomorrah', a hard-hitting blockbuster on the Naples Mafia known as the Camorra, released this week in Britain.

He was seized over the weekend on suspicion of extorting protection money and having ties to the Casalesi clan, part of the Camorra mafia.The latest arrests came a month after six Africans were gunned down outside a clothes shop in Castel Volturno near Naples by the ruthless Casalesi clan.

It's nothing personal...it's strictly acting...

Lessons From The Great White North

Canadian Conservatives win big. Ilya Somin explains why:

Their policies are probably more pro-market than those of Bush's 'big government conservative' GOP. . . . In addition, the Canadian Conservatives don't have nearly as much of a social conservative/religious right streak as the Republicans do. And libertarians have to give at least a little love to a prime minister who took a lot of flak for cutting government subsidies to the arts - a goal the Republicans weren't able to achieve with their campaign against the NEA.

Add this to the Tories' recent gains in the UK (although the financial crisis seems to be helping Gordon Brown right now) and you have to wonder how long it will take our conservatives to learn the same lessons. I wish I could be certain that it wouldn't take several losses for them to get it right again.

None For Me, Thanks

Not everyone is on board the Bailout Express.

Community banking executives around the country responded with anger yesterday to the Bush administration's strategy of investing $250 billion in financial firms, saying they don't need the money, resent the intrusion and feel it's unfair to rescue companies from their own mistakes....

Peter Fitzgerald, chairman of Chain Bridge Bank in McLean, [Virginia,] said he was 'much chagrined that we will be punished for behaving prudently by now having to face reckless competitors who all of a sudden are subsidized by the federal government.'

At Evergreen Federal Bank in Grants Pass, Ore., chief executive Brady Adams said he has more than 2,000 loans outstanding and only three borrowers behind on payments. 'We don't need a bailout, and if other banks had run their banks like we ran our bank, they wouldn't have needed a bailout, either,' Adams said.

I guess the bigger you are, the less constrained by common sense you are.

Let 'Em In

Ross Douthat tries one last time to talk some sense into the folks over at The Corner.

If I were Hanson or Levin or Steyn I'd be devoting a little less time to ritual denunciations of heretics and RINOs, and at least a little more time to figuring out how to build the sort of ship that will make the rats of the DC/NY corridor want to scramble back on board, however much it makes you sick to have them back.

It's the purists who have given conservatism and the Republican Party a bad name; the so-called "RINOS" (and I'm not talking about liberals who only became Republicans in order to win votes) used to be part of the Republican mainstream. Not anymore, sadly.

Feed Your Head

Now this is cool:

The U.S. Army is developing a technology known as synthetic telepathy that would allow someone to create email or voice mail and send it by thought alone. The concept is based on reading electrical activity in the brain using an electroencephalograph, or EEG.

We are all Professor X now...

Pressing The Panic Buttons

How to keep a conspiracy theory going:

It looks like Jeremiah Wright was just the tip of the iceberg. Not only did Barack Obama savor Wright’s sermons, Obama gave legitimacy — and a whole lot of money — to education programs built around the same extremist anti-American ideology preached by Reverend Wright. And guess what? Bill Ayers is still palling around with the same bitterly anti-American Afrocentric ideologues that he and Obama were promoting a decade ago.

Meanwhile, Tucker Carlson asks for more Wright.

The McCain campaign’s attempt to tie Barack Obama to terrorist-turned-professor Bill Ayers appears to have failed. Most people still don’t seem to know who Ayers is. And there still isn’t evidence that the two were more than acquaintances. By the end of the week, McCain will likely have moved on to another line of attack. The obvious question is: Why not Jeremiah Wright?

Maybe because that horse has been beaten to death, too? And maybe it's why Chris Buckley was forced to step down from his old job.

So, I have been effectively fatwahed (is that how you spell it?) by the conservative movement, and the magazine that my father founded must now distance itself from me. But then, conservatives have always had a bit of trouble with the concept of diversity. The GOP likes to say it’s a big-tent. Looks more like a yurt to me.

While I regret this development, I am not in mourning, for I no longer have any clear idea what, exactly, the modern conservative movement stands for. Eight years of “conservative” government has brought us a doubled national debt, ruinous expansion of entitlement programs, bridges to nowhere, poster boy Jack Abramoff and an ill-premised, ill-waged war conducted by politicians of breathtaking arrogance. As a sideshow, it brought us a truly obscene attempt at federal intervention in the Terry Schiavo case.

Real conservatives still understand that the GOP has been taken over by wing nut rumor-mongerers. But they're the ones forced into exile. Go figure.

It's A Small Election After All

Talk about a Mickey Mouse operation:

Mickey Mouse is as American as apple pie, and he has starred in films, TV shows and video games. But apparently he can't vote.

Florida elections officials rejected Mickey's application this summer. It is unclear whether Mickey tried to register as a Democrat or a Republican. But the application included a stamped logo of ACORN, the community organizing group that is facing accusations of voter registration fraud.

ACORN -- which has a history of voter fraud allegations -- acknowledged its logo was on the application but said its workers routinely scan all suspicious applications.
'We don't think this card came through our system,' Brian Kettenring, ACORN's head organizer in Florida, told the St. Petersburg Times.

No word yet on who Donald Duck or Goofy support.

Shut 'Er Down

Chicago is closing up shop.

Facing a huge hole in Chicago's current and upcoming budgets, Mayor Richard Daley announced on Tuesday a plan to partially shut down city government for six days.

Along with several other measures, the mayor's plan was aimed at saving $62 million for the city's corporate or operating fund, which currently faces a $469 million shortfall.

Under the plan, city employees, with the exception of mostly public safety workers, would not work and would not be paid for the day after Thanksgiving or for Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve this year and in 2009.

Daley also said the fiscal 2009 budget he will unveil on Wednesday will eliminate 1,346 currently vacant positions and will include various cost-cutting or revenue-raising measures.

'I know that no one will be completely satisfied with our recommendations,' the mayor said in a statement. 'But, if we work together and responsibly cut spending this year, we'll be taking an important step toward addressing the financial challenges we'll still face in the years ahead.'

Maybe Washington should consider something like this. There might be less damage that the taxpayers would have to pay for afterwards.

It's About The Dignity, Stupid

John McCain has rediscovered the importance of being respectful.

John McCain is to be congratulated for that--apparently the fact that his rallies were turning into hate-a-thons while his poll numbers dropped caused the good Senator to step back from provocative lines like, 'We don't know who Barack Obama really is...' (Crowd response: 'He's a terrorist.').

If he sticks with it, and the campaign turns around, it will be a victory for civility. If the campaign doesn't turn around--a more likely scenario--McCain will be able to return to the Senate with a few stray threads of dignity intact.

The problem for McCain is, it may have come too late. And then there's the little matter of his running mate:

[McCain] knows, in his gut, that he put somebody unqualified on the ballot. He knows that in his gut, and when this race is over that is something he will have to live with... He put somebody unqualified on that ballot and he put the country at risk, he knows that.

But he won't admit it. That's what's causing his campaign to go into freefall.

The Train To Nowhere

Alaska's not the only state where a Republican can support a boondoggle.

With credit markets in New York in crisis last week, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger sent an extraordinary letter to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson asking for $7 billion. Although the governor has since withdrawn that request, it testifies to the dire state of his budget.

Yet days before penning his note, the governor told an audience at the Commonwealth Club of California not to worry about the state's budget crunch and to approve $9.95 billion in new debt on the November ballot to build a bullet train to connect Los Angeles to San Francisco: "Just because we have a problem with the budget does not mean people should vote 'no' on high-speed rail." (A spokeswoman confirmed Monday that, despite the request for federal money, the governor still supports the initiative.)

(snip)

The Golden State's finances are a mess. California's general obligation debt has tripled in the past six years and is now almost equal to the state's $145 billion annual budget. Even without any new loans, in three years the state will spend a record 6.1% of its budget just to service the debt it already has. What's more, with the economic slowdown, the state is now expecting a deficit larger than $1.1 billion for the first three months of this fiscal year. The state's rainy-day fund is running dry, which has hurt its credit rating.

Under such circumstances, the prudent course would be to avoid taking on new debt, even for worthwhile projects, much less sure-shot losers such as the high-speed rail. But in California, prudence is in short supply.

But support for grandiose and questionable schemes apparently isn't.

The Short Road Home

It looks like the U.S. is running out of options for keeping troops in Iraq.

With time running out for the conclusion of an agreement governing American forces in Iraq, nervous negotiators have begun examining alternatives that would allow U.S. troops to stay beyond the Dec. 31 deadline, according to U.S. and Iraqi officials.

(snip)

Negotiators have been stuck for months on the question of legal jurisdiction over U.S. troops and immunity for possible crimes. But even if the sides reach a deal in the next few days or weeks, it is not clear that a formal status-of-forces agreement could be approved by the end of the year. Maliki has pledged to submit an accord to Iraq's divided parliament before he signs it -- a promise he reaffirmed last week during a visit to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, Iraq's most influential Shiite cleric. Sistani has said he will not endorse any document without the support of Iraq's population and political factions.

If the parliament refuses, Maliki would have "no choice" but to request a U.N. extension "because the American forces will lose their legal cover on Dec. 31," he told the Times of London in a weekend interview. "If that happens, according to international law, Iraqi law and American law, the U.S. forces will be confined to their bases and have to withdraw from Iraq," Maliki said.

U.S. officials do not dispute that the absence of an agreement would probably require an immediate end to combat operations and, at a minimum, confinement to bases on Jan. 1. Officials refused to discuss the sensitive issue on the record while negotiations are ongoing.

"I am actually reasonably optimistic we will come to closure on this in a very near future," Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates told reporters Friday as he returned from a five-day trip to Europe. A month earlier, on Sept. 8, Gates told Congress that he expected an agreement "within the next few weeks."

"But I had hoped that some weeks ago," Gates added.

If handled correctly, ending the occupation sooner rather than later could help the next President immensely, no matter who it is. Let's hope that's the case.

Breaking Away

And now, Ohio.

Barack Obama has pulled ahead of John McCain in Ohio, the weekly FOX News/Rasmussen Reports Battleground Poll shows.

This week's poll shows a very stable race whose underlying dynamic strongly favors the Democratic presidential candidate. Obama holds a narrow advantage ranging from two to five percentage points in Ohio, Florida, Virginia and Missouri, and he is tied with McCain in North Carolina. Keep in mind that George W. Bush won all five of these states in 2004.

The only notable change this week was in Ohio, where Obama is now on top, 49 percent to 47 percent, overcoming a one-point deficit in each of the previous two weeks and an even larger lead for McCain in the Buckeye State in the weeks prior to that. The race for Ohio's 20 Electoral College votes is now well within the margin of sampling error, but trending toward the Democrat.

When all you've got left are wingut conspiracy theories and kooks on your side, it tends to turn people off. Funny, that used to be the Democrats' problem.

Prove My Innocence, Please

Is he sure he really wants to do this?

In his first statement since the sex scandal broke, Florida Rep. Tim Mahoney is calling for the House ethics committee to probe allegations of impropriety in the hiring and firing of a female staffer with whom he allegedly had an affair.

While criticizing ABC's report as based on 'hearsay,' he didn't deny anything.
His statement:

I was notified this afternoon about a story that ran on ABC News' website reporting allegations about a former employee. While these allegations are based on hearsay, I believe that my constituents need a full accounting. As such, I have requested the House Ethics Committee to review these allegations. I am confident that when the facts are presented that I will be vindicated.

What, does he have another mistress who can alibi him?

All They Need Is Cash

Bailouts really are for everyone these days, it seems.

The Republican National Committee, growing nervous over the prospect of Democrats’ winning a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, is considering tapping into a $5 million line of credit this week to aid an increasing number of vulnerable incumbents, top Republicans say.

With party strategists fearing a bloodbath at the polls, GOP officials are shifting to triage mode, determining who can be saved and where to best spend their money.

And with the House and Senate Republican campaign committees being drastically outspent by their Democratic counterparts, and outside groups such as Freedom’s Watch offering far less help than was once anticipated, Republicans are turning to the national party committee as a lender of last resort.

A decision is imminent because television time must be reserved and paid for upfront, and available slots are dwindling.

Republicans, heal thyselves, indeed.

Calling All Amazons

Barack Obama wants everyone to have equal opportunity in wartime.

Even as the U.S. confronts two long wars, neither Sen. John McCain nor Sen. Barack Obama believes the country should take the politically perilous step of reviving the military draft.

But the two presidential candidates disagree on a key foundation of any future draft: Mr. Obama supports a requirement for both men and women to register with the Selective Service, while Mr. McCain doesn't think women should have to register.

Also, Mr. Obama would consider officially opening combat positions to women. Mr. McCain would not.

'Women are already serving in combat [in Iraq and Afghanistan] and the current policy should be updated to reflect realities on the ground,' said Wendy Morigi, Mr. Obama's national security spokeswoman. 'Barack Obama would consult with military commanders to review the constraints that remain.'

According to his campaign, Mr. McCain supports the current Department of Defense restrictions on women in combat units, including armor, field artillery and special forces.

I don't like the idea of a draft, but why shouldn't women have the same chance to fight the bad guys? What could be more humiliating to a Jihadist than to get his butt kicked by a woman?

You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet

They've apparetnly only just begun to fight:

McCain advisers say they're saving their best material for the last ten days of the race, when, the campaign hopes, three quarters of the remaining undecided voters will make up their minds, and their minds will be concentrating on Barack Obama. When the urgency of the presidential election impresses itself, the hope is that these voters will swing back to the familiar, rather than the unknown. The last ten days, according to a McCain aide, are when the 'imponderables' come into play.

The Imponderable Strategy? I must have missed that one.

President Who?

They may be about to win, but Obama might want his Number Two to check his mouth at the door when they do:

Joe Biden is enjoying himself so much on the campaign trail that occasionally he gets to thinking he's about to become president. 'In a Biden...an Obama-Biden administration,' he said during an event at an American Legion hall here in Rochester, New Hampshire this morning, catching himself just in time.

'We know, we know,' he responded jovially as the crowd realised what he'd said. 'It's hard to get used to. We got his thing the right way.' He pointed at a group of men who were barracking him good-naturedly. 'These are my old buddies over here from the shipyard.'

Last month at an event in Fort Myers, Florida, he referred to the 'Biden administration' before correcting the phrase and adding as he laughed and crossed himself: 'Believe me, that wasn't a Freudian slip. Oh Lordy day, I tell ya.'

Well, old people do tend to ramble...

Greed Is Still Good

Ah, just in time.

As Wall Street continues to capture headlines due to market volatility, 20th Century Fox is moving forward with a 'Wall Street' sequel.

Allan Loeb ('21') has been tapped to pen the screenplay, which is being fast-tracked by the studio as a Michael Douglas starrer, though the actor is not formally attached.

The modern-day story will again center on Gordon Gekko, who has recently been sprung from prison and re-emerges into a much more tumultuous financial world than the one he once lorded over. The Bud Fox character, played by Charlie Sheen in the original, will not appear in the latest incarnation.

Who needs Charlie Sheen when you'll have a whole country that wants to see Gordon back in jail?

Dear Dad

Ann Althouse, in discussing the candidates' memoirs, asks:

Strange -- isn't it? -- that both candidates wrote a memoir with the word 'father/s' in the title. Is there something about a struggle to come to terms with his father that drives a man to the top position?

Well, Bill Clinton had father issues, as did Ronald Reagan...hmmm.

Burgers 'N' Beer

Homer Simpson would love this:

Whopper Bars are going to be smaller than regular Burger Kings and only sell Whoppers, 'grab-and-go' products, and possibly beer. Am I missing something here? Other than Vegas and a few places in Florida, can you get beer to go?

That might be kind of awkward if you got pulled over...

Yes, He's Still With Us

Nadermania lives!

Ralph Nader, independent candidate in the 2008 U.S. presidential election, held a campaign rally at Dartmouth Monday, reminding his audience that Democratic nominee Barack Obama and Republican nominee John McCain are not the only options for voters presidential election.

Nader noted that fewer than 10 of the approximately 40 audience members appeared to be Dartmouth students. He criticized the “sterile political debate at Dartmouth,” adding that the College is known as the most conservative school in the Ivy League.

Nader commented on the government’s role in the current financial crisis. He repeatedly criticized “corporations” for having an overwhelming influence over the economy and the upcoming election, and described Obama and McCain as “two puppy dogs subservient to the corporations.”

“Wall Street is an orgy of excess and speculative behavior,” he said at the rally.

Hmm, that sounds suspiciously like...what one of the aforementioned puppy dogs has already said. Say good night, Ralph.

About Schmidt

James Fallows examines how the agony of likely defeat is starting to affect the man who would be the next kingmaker:

Rationalization and excuses ("We were ahead until the financial crisis began"). More excuses ("We have the handicap of wearing the 'R' label this year" -- I mean, think about that for a moment, and imagine Karl Rove saying it). More and more excuses ("When someone says something inappropriate at our rallies, the media is all over it. When someone does it at an Obama rally...") A "we'll do our best" tone as opposed to confidence about being able to win. A rote quality to the pep talk about victory ("Senator Obama is known as a weak closer, and Senator McCain is a strong finisher!").

Can you imagine any Republican talking about their "Brand" being a handicap in 2004? How times have changed.

Goodnight, Miami

As Florida goes, so goes the election.

For the first time in more than a decade, Florida Republicans are considering the almost unthinkable: Their presidential nominee could lose the state.

The economy, an unpopular president, a strong opponent, and the inability of John McCain to reverse poll numbers despite repeatedly revising his strategy has top state Republicans looking for someone to blame.

''There are a lot of folks who have never been in a foxhole before and are clearly nervous,'' said Brian Ballard, a major McCain fundraiser. ``There is some finger-pointing going on a little bit too soon.''

Even Gov. Charlie Crist, who helped deliver Florida for McCain during the primary, said he will be spending more time minding the state's weak economy than campaigning for the Arizona senator in the final weeks before Election Day.

''When I have time to help, I'll try to do that,'' Crist said last week, after he flew around the state with McCain running mate Sarah Palin. Saturday, he skipped a McCain football rally and instead went to Disney World.

Once considered a potential running mate, Crist had pledged to do all he could for McCain and spent several days this summer campaigning for the Republican nominee in and outside Florida. He faults the tough economic times for McCain's difficult time in Florida, where he trails rival Barack Obama by about 5 percentage points in the polls.

No Republican has won the White House in modern times without carrying Florida. The last to lose the state was McCain's former colleague, Sen. Bob Dole, in 1996.

The ghost of Presidential races lost seems to be haunting McCain more and more in these closing days.

We CAN Handle The Truth

A friendly tip for Maverick:

You want a truly 'game changing' stunt, senator? Forget unveiling some new brash nationalization plan at the next debate or replacing Sarah Palin with the Rally Monkey. How about just telling the harsh economic truth, something that Americans seem much more willing to discuss and accept than the two pander bears running for president.

The individual voter is often smarter than the average pander bear. I suspect McCain knows that, but he's too wedded to the Palinmaniacs to freely admit it.

Son Of Foley

It's Mark Foley, the sequel:

West Palm Beach Congressman Tim Mahoney (D-FL), whose predecessor resigned in the wake of a sex scandal, agreed to a $121,000 payment to a former mistress who worked on his staff and was threatening to sue him, according to current and former members of his staff who have been briefed on the settlement, which involved Mahoney and his campaign committee....

Mahoney was elected two years ago following the abrupt resignation of his disgraced predecessor, Republican Mark Foley, whose lewd internet messages to teenage boys and Congressional pages created a national outrage.

Well, at least this guy stayed away from the hired help...

Bloggin' In The Years: 1908

The two Presidential candidates have recorded their views for posterity. Some of the differences are startling.

For example, this is Secretary Taft's view on the banking crisis. And here is Senator Bryan's.

Will economic populism win out over Roosevelt's legacy? Only the next few weeks will tell.

R.I.P. Kyoto

One good thing about the economic turmoil may be that it will allow European industry to get back on its feet:

Representatives of German business have called for a moratorium on any European Union legislation that would impose higher costs on companies at a time when they are grappling with the fallout from the financial crisis. . . . Meanwhile, heavy industry has stepped up its condemnation of proposals endorsed last week by the European parliament's environment committee that would force businesses to pay for the carbon dioxide they emit.

Everybody says they hate Big Industry-until they need it to save their economy.

"Why Are You Blaming Me, Dave?"

The NY Times says it was Skynet's fault.

Somehow the genius quants — the best and brightest geeks Wall Street firms could buy — fed $1 trillion in subprime mortgage debt into their supercomputers, added some derivatives, massaged the arrangements with computer algorithms and — poof! — created $62 trillion in imaginary wealth. It’s not much of a stretch to imagine that all of that imaginary wealth is locked up somewhere inside the computers, and that we humans, led by the silverback males of the financial world, Ben Bernanke and Henry Paulson, are frantically beseeching the monolith for answers. Or maybe we are lost in space, with Dave the astronaut pleading, “Open the bank vault doors, Hal.”

As the current financial crisis spreads (like a computer virus) on the earth’s nervous system (the Internet), it’s worth asking if we have somehow managed to colossally outsmart ourselves using computers. After all, the Wall Street titans loved swaps and derivatives because they were totally unregulated by humans. That left nobody but the machines in charge.

Maybe, but people built those machines and put the information in them. To paraphrase the Bard, the fault lies not in our laptops, but in ourselves.

Move Over, Penguins

Antarctica, the next Down Under?

Refugees are moving to Antarctica by 2030, the Olympics are held only in cyberspace and central Australia has been abandoned as too dry, according to exotic scenarios for climate change on Monday.

British-based Forum for the Future, a charitable think-tank, and researchers from Hewlett-Packard Labs, said they wanted to stir debate about how to avert the worst effects of global warming by presenting a radical set of possible futures.

'Climate change will affect the economy at least as much as the 'credit crunch',' their 76-page report study said.

The scenarios range from a shift to greater energy efficiency, where desalination plants run on solar power help turn the Sahara green, to one where refugees are moving to Antarctica because of rising temperatures.

'We still have the chance to alter the future,' Peter Madden, head of the Forum, told Reuters. 'This is what the world could be like and some of these options are not very pleasant.'

Millions of years ago Antarctica was wet, swampy and humid. In other words, a lot like Florida is today. If it becomes that way again, the Democrats could have a new place to rig, er, find, votes.

The Other Side Of Crazy

We've heard about the kooks who have been showing up at McCain rallies. Now for the lefty version of dangerous behavior:

Vandals spray-painted the words “Republican means slavery” on the door of the York County GOP campaign headquarters overnight Friday.

Party volunteers called police after discovering the message when they arrived at the office on Rock Hill’s Oakland Avenue. The vandals also stole about 45 candidate signs from the front yard and spray-painted over a banner that carried a picture of Republican presidential nominee John McCain. Their messages included lettering and symbols sometimes used by gangs.

The culprits could face charges on petty larceny and damage to property, said Rock Hill police Sgt. Roderick Stinson. No one appears to have entered the office.

I'm sure that if they're caught, the perps will use justifiable anger as an excuse. Hey, it works in England...

Bloggin' In The Years: 1933

From this past January, a former "Big Executive" (as he puts it) speaks of the "Good Old Days" and how they contrast with the current situation.

In these latter days, since the downfall, I know that there will be much talk of corruption and dishonesty. But I can testify that our trouble was not that. Rather, we were undone by our own extravagant folly, and our delusions of grandeur. The gods were waiting to destroy us, and first they infected us with a peculiar and virulent sort of madness.

Already, as I try to recall those times, I cannot quite shake off the feel that they were pages torn from the Arabian Nights. But they were not. The tinseled scenes through which I moved were real. The madcap events actually happened—not once, but every day. And at the moment nobody thought them in the least extraordinary. For that was the New Era. In it we felt ourselves the gods and the demigods. The old laws of economics were for mortals, but not for us. With us, anything was possible. The sky was the limit.

Looking back now, I see how naive were our godlike airs. Most of us were really simple folk, of humble origin. Going the circuit of our walnut desks, one would hardly have found a single executive who had not worked his way up from the ranks. They had begun in small towns as owners or operators of little companies. The companies had been bought up by Amalgamated International, and the owners annexed as super-executives. To maintain the power and glory of their new estate, they felt that it was their duty to carry on like Oriental princes.

The Crash had all the elements of both a Shakespearean tragedy, and a farce. The Bard would have seen the irony of the fate that befell so many who fell so far, often by their own design, as would have Mark Twain. Too late, it seems, did the honest businessmen of the day heed the warning signs of what was to come.

The Right To Abstain

The right not to believe is the right to be neutral:

Secularism is neutral. It is neither a dogma nor a doctrine. If anything, it's an abstention. Secularism abstains from favouring one religion over another, or favouring atheism over religious belief. It is a political principle that aims at guaranteeing the largest possible coexistence of various freedoms.

I would disagree in the sense that there are secularists who can be just as fanatical as fundamentalists. But secularism does give one an advantage in that it allows one to acknowledge other beliefs. Hardcore Fundamentalism doesn't.

Born In The U.S.A.

Desperate times call for desperate conspiracies:

A lawsuit, Berg v. Obama, brought by Philip J. Berg, a Philadelphia attorney, alleges Obama is not eligible to be president.

Instead of producing records proving Obama is a natural born citizen, Obama and the Democratic National Committee have filed a motion seeking a protective order to block production of documents until a motion to dismiss is the law suit is ruled on by the court. Obama and the Democratic National Committee also claim attorney Berg has no standing – has no right – to bring the lawsuit.

At this rate, it won't be long before these loons claim he was born on Mars. That would really make him an alien, wouldn't it?

It Begins With An O

Whoops:

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama's last name is spelled 'Osama' on hundreds of absentee ballots mailed out this week to voters in Rensselaer County. he misspelling, which elections officials on both sides of the aisle insist was simply a typo, is causing embarrassment for the county.

These days, one has to wonder how unintentional it was...

Where Politeness Ends

When it comes to their politics, Canadians are discovering that the opposition can be just as nasty as it is down here.

Last weekend, Toronto residents woke to find the brake lines on their cars severed, their telephone and cable television lines cut, and political graffiti scratched into automobile paint and scrawled on their homes. The sole link between the victims: a lawn sign promoting a Liberal candidate in the current federal election.

The attacks came in two leafy, upper-middle-class residential neighborhoods, including Waltman Daschko's, where raccoons raiding garbage pails are normally a bigger concern than crime. While the sabotage led to only near-misses rather than any deaths or injuries, episodes have provoked a mixture of bafflement, anger and defiance. They have also brought an unwelcome tinge of nastiness to an election campaign that has been short on drama.

Waltman Daschko briefly removed her lawn sign last Saturday evening at the suggestion of the police after the first attacks, which occurred over Friday night and early that morning. But she stuck it back into a planter near the sidewalk before going to bed, partly after considering the history of her Jewish ancestors.

'Perhaps because it's the High Holidays, but I thought of my parents and my grandparents and what they went through to assert their faith,' she said. 'It's shocking that in Canada, in Toronto and in the 21st century that this could happen when all we're doing is supporting a very mainstream political party.'

What's the difference between a political campaign and a Mob operation? The Mob are at least honest thugs.

Green And Red

Frank Rich gets it:

Now even the dimmest bloviators have figured out that Americans are riveted by the color green, not black — as in money, not energy. Voters are looking for a leader who might help rescue them, not a reckless gambler whose lurching responses to the economic meltdown (a campaign “suspension,” a mortgage-buyout stunt that changes daily) are as unhinged as his wanderings around the debate stage.

I thought that McCain might be that leader. Part of me hopes he still can be. And, to his credit, McCain has finally started to denounce the koolaid drinkers again. But it may be too little, too late.

Hooray For Subsidies

Do taxpayers really need to pay Brad Pitt?

Already on the hook for billions to bail out Wall Street, taxpayers are also finding themselves stuck with a growing tab for state programs intended to increase local film production.

One of the most shocking bills has come due in Louisiana, where residents are financing a hefty share of Brad Pitt’s next movie — $27,117,737, to be exact, which the producers will receive by cashing or selling off valuable tax credits.

As the number of movies made under these plans multiplied in recent years, the state money turned into a welcome rescue plan for Hollywood at a time when private investors were fleeing the movies. But the glamour business has not always been kind to those who pick up the costs, and states are moving to rein in their largess that has allowed producers to be reimbursed for all manner of expenditures, whether the salaries of stars, the rental of studio space or meals for the crew.

Louisiana, one of the most assertive players in the subsidy game, wound up covering that outsize piece of the nearly $167 million budget of Mr. Pitt’s “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” — the state’s biggest movie payout to date — when producers for Paramount Pictures and Warner Brothers qualified the coming movie, a special-effects drama, under an incentive that has since been tightened. Separately, Louisiana’s former film commissioner is set to be sentenced in January to as much as 15 years in federal prison for taking bribes to inflate film budgets (though not that of “Button”) and, hence, pay higher subsidies.

Well, I guess it could be argued that one man's bribe is another's percentage of the gross...

Super Troopesrgate

This is what comes of personal attacks: Sarah Palin committed a darn boo-boo.

A 263-page report released Friday by lawmakers in Alaska found that Ms. Palin, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, had herself exerted pressure to get Trooper Michael Wooten dismissed, as well as allowed her husband and subordinates to press for his firing, largely as a result of his temperament and past disciplinary problems.

But didn't the McCain campaign say she didn't do anything wrong? That must be a nice gig, being able to clear your own like that.

Putting Prosperity On Hold

It seems that the Left's favorite President may have had a hand in keeping the Depression going.

Two UCLA economists say they have figured out why the Great Depression dragged on for almost 15 years, and they blame a suspect previously thought to be beyond reproach: President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

After scrutinizing Roosevelt's record for four years, Harold L. Cole and Lee E. Ohanian conclude in a new study that New Deal policies signed into law 71 years ago thwarted economic recovery for seven long years.

'Why the Great Depression lasted so long has always been a great mystery, and because we never really knew the reason, we have always worried whether we would have another 10- to 15-year economic slump,' said Ohanian, vice chair of UCLA's Department of Economics. 'We found that a relapse isn't likely unless lawmakers gum up a recovery with ill-conceived stimulus policies.'

In an article in the August issue of the Journal of Political Economy, Ohanian and Cole blame specific anti-competition and pro-labor measures that Roosevelt promoted and signed into law June 16, 1933.

'President Roosevelt believed that excessive competition was responsible for the Depression by reducing prices and wages, and by extension reducing employment and demand for goods and services,' said Cole, also a UCLA professor of economics. 'So he came up with a recovery package that would be unimaginable today, allowing businesses in every industry to collude without the threat of antitrust prosecution and workers to demand salaries about 25 percent above where they ought to have been, given market forces. The economy was poised for a beautiful recovery, but that recovery was stalled by these misguided policies.'

Given what our current administration is doing, such a recovery plan might not be so unimaginable today. Those who don't learn from history, and all that.

The Case For Space

Stephen Hawking says we need to get out there:

Hawking, in an exclusive CNN interview, said that if humans can survive the next 200 years and learn to live in space, then our future will be bright.

'I believe that the long-term future of the human race must be in space,' said Hawking, who is almost completely paralyzed by the illness ALS.

'It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster on planet Earth in the next 100 years, let alone next thousand, or million. The human race shouldn't have all its eggs in one basket, or on one planet. Let's hope we can avoid dropping the basket until we have spread the load.'

Hopefully the real estate market on Mars will be more sound than it was here...

The Zombie Vote

I know it's close to Halloween, but this stuff is getting old.

Linda Kay Hill, a homemaker and Louisiana native, died Aug. 2, 2006, of a heart attack, her husband recalled, and is buried at Houston Memorial Gardens in Pearland. But Harris County voter records indicate she –- or someone using her identity –- cast a ballot in the November election that year. Linda Hill of Woodwick Street voted in person on Election Day, records show.

She is among the more than 4,000 people whose names are listed both on Harris County’s voter rolls and also in a federal database of death records, a Texas Watchdog analysis has found.

And dozens of those people, like Linda Hill, have apparently cast ballots from beyond the grave, records since 2004 show. One expert says the number of deceased names used to cast ballots may be higher than what Texas Watchdog’s analysis found.

Instances of dead voters’ names being used to cast ballots were most frequent in three elections, the November 2004 general election, the November 2006 general election and the March 2008 Democratic primary, the analysis found.

Less than a month away from an election to decide the highest office in the land, some advocates worry that such errors in the voter records open the door for fraud, compromise the integrity of results and lessen voter confidence in the system.

The findings come as the group ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, has faced scrutiny in multiple states for allegedly improper voter registrations — including players for the Dallas Cowboys, not in the Lone Star State, but in Nevada. The group’s Nevada offices were raided by state officials earlier this week.

At least the Democrats are sticking to tradition.

The Liar's Club

Maybe they should have accepted the offer:

Two challengers for an Indiana congressional seat have agreed to be hooked up to lie detectors during a debate, but an official with the incumbent's party dismisses the idea as 'bizarre.'

Ninth District Republican Party Chairman Larry Shickles on Wednesday proposed the political polygraphs for Democratic Rep. Baron Hill, GOP challenger Mike Sodrel and Libertarian candidate Eric Schansberg. The three are scheduled to debate Oct. 21, but an official with a debate co-sponsor said lie detectors won't be included.

'Our planning committee worked up the format and rules, and we are not inviting negotiations from the candidates,' Alan Johnson, dean of Vincennes University's Jasper Campus, told The Herald of Jasper.

Too bad. It should be a requirement in all elections, quite frankly.

Two More Years

A loss for the Republicans now may be a good thing later on:

...what might the economy look like on Election Day 2010, the midterms? Global Insight, for instance, thinks that although the economy will expand at a 2.4 percent pace in 2010 vs. 0.2 percent in 2009, unemployment will actually be higher in 2010 at 7.4 percent vs. 7. 2 percent next year. If 2008 is 1980 in terms of a big presidential win for the challenging party, 2010 might be like 1982, when Democrats won 27 house seats or even 1994 when Democrats lost control of Congress.

It's an argument that serious conservatives have been making lately, and a valid one. The question is, where will the next Newt Gingrich come from? Will the Republican Party still have the capacity of producing one, sans baggage, within the next two years?

The Mob Rules

A former McCain advisor tries to appeal for a return to reason.

“People need to understand, for moral reasons and the protection of our civil society, the differences with Sen. Obama are ideological, based on clear differences on policy and a lack of experience compared to Sen. McCain,” Weaver said. “And from a purely practical political vantage point, please find me a swing voter, an undecided independent, or a torn female voter that finds an angry mob mentality attractive.”

“Sen. Obama is a classic liberal with an outdated economic agenda. We should take that agenda on in a robust manner. As a party we should not and must not stand by as the small amount of haters in our society question whether he is as American as the rest of us. Shame on them and shame on us if we allow this to take hold.”

A bit late for that, I'm afraid.

Turn And Face The Strange Changes

Chris Buckley discusses McCain's downfall:

John McCain has changed. He said, famously, apropos the Republican debacle post-1994, “We came to Washington to change it, and Washington changed us.” This campaign has changed John McCain. It has made him inauthentic. A once-first class temperament has become irascible and snarly; his positions change, and lack coherence; he makes unrealistic promises, such as balancing the federal budget “by the end of my first term.” Who, really, believes that? Then there was the self-dramatizing and feckless suspension of his campaign over the financial crisis. His ninth-inning attack ads are mean-spirited and pointless. And finally, not to belabor it, there was the Palin nomination. What on earth can he have been thinking?

To be fair, I don't think McCain himself changed that much-but the people around him told him what he should run on, and unfortunately he listened to them. He had the opportunity to wage the kind of honorable, meaningful campaign that the Republican Party needed, and now he's blowing it.

Listening In

Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't spying on you.

Despite pledges by President George W. Bush and American intelligence officials to the contrary, hundreds of US citizens overseas have been eavesdropped on as they called friends and family back home, according to two former military intercept operators who worked at the giant National Security Agency (NSA) center in Fort Gordon, Georgia.

Intercept operators allege the NSA is listening to citizens' phone calls.The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), called the allegations "extremely disturbing" and said the committee has begun its own examination.

"We have requested all relevant information from the Bush Administration," Rockefeller said Thursday. "The Committee will take whatever action is necessary."

"These were just really everyday, average, ordinary Americans who happened to be in the Middle East, in our area of intercept and happened to be making these phone calls on satellite phones," said Adrienne Kinne, a 31-year old US Army Reserves Arab linguist assigned to a special military program at the NSA's Back Hall at Fort Gordon from November 2001 to 2003.

Kinne described the contents of the calls as "personal, private things with Americans who are not in any way, shape or form associated with anything to do with terrorism."

She said US military officers, American journalists and American aid workers were routinely intercepted and "collected on" as they called their offices or homes in the United States.

There must have been a lot of suspicious activity on the part of American officers that I wasn't aware of. Or maybe the government just wanted some hot phone sex without having to call an 800 number.

Rich Man, Poor Economy

In the midst of economic turmoil, bling may be going bye-bye.

Not even the richest people are feeling untouched by our current financial crisis. In their personal lives, as in business, the purveyors of luxury are sizing up what it all means. Some of the questions: Is it unseemly to spend money publicly? Will people still shop for the all-important holiday season? Is this the end of bling?

....

The answer may have a lot to do with how these consumers want to be seen. It's not necessarily a good thing to show up at the tennis club with a new $30,000 crocodile handbag when your friends' net worth has been halved and the Federal Reserve is spending billions to keep the banking system afloat.

What can I say? Let them eat Spago.

The Economy Down Under

There seems to be at least one place that's being protected from the economic meltdown.

Amid turmoil in the world financial sector, the International Monetary Fund predicted Wednesday that China's economy would grow at more than 9.0 percent next year while much of the West faces recession.

That's good news for Australia, whose own economic boom has been driven for years by China's insatiable demand for mineral resources such as iron ore for steelmaking and coal to fire up its industries.

'China is now a major influence in the world economy and it's significant that the IMF doesn't downgrade its growth prospects,' Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner told national radio Thursday.

'So we are well positioned to continue to sell an awful lot of exports to China and we believe that that's one of the important factors that's protecting Australia, to some extent, from the influences of the US financial crisis,' he said.

Saved by socialists. I'd chuckle at the irony, but our own government is too busy trying to play catch-up.

Son Of FDR

Remember, this has all happened under a Republican administration in its final days.

Washington has done what is needed to prevent the collapse of the US economy. It has taken over the entire credit system, after all, surpassing Roosevelt's New Deal.

The US has guaranteed the $3.5 trillion money market funds. It has nationalised the $5.3 trillion pillars of the mortgage market, Fannie and Freddie. The Fed is accepting any junk as collateral at its lending window. This week it went the whole hog after panic hit the $1.6 trillion market for commercial paper. It is now offering loans without any security at all. The US government has become a bank. Yes, this is US socialism. What is the alternative?

Is it any wonder that Obama is in some ways starting to sound like Ronald Reagan compared to these guys? The sad part is, the author of the article may be right-there may be no real alternative for either Obama or McCain by the time this thing is over.

Just Breathe

This should make Al Gore happy.

Atmospheric scientist Paul J Crutzen, who has in the past floated the possibility of blitzing the stratosphere with sulfur particles to cool the earth, said clouds gathering over the world economy could ease the earth's environmental burden.

Slower economic growth worldwide could help slow growth of carbon dioxide emissions and trigger more careful use of energy resources, though the global economic turmoil may also divert focus from efforts to counter climate change, said Crutzen, winner of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on the depletion of the ozone layer.

'It's a cruel thing to say ... but if we are looking at a slowdown in the economy, there will be less fossil fuels burning, so for the climate it could be an advantage,' Crutzen told Reuters in an interview.

'We could have a much slower increase of CO2 emissions in the atmosphere ... people will start saving (on energy use) ... but things may get worse if there is less money available for research and that would be serious.'

So economic collapse is good for the Earth? Just not for the people living on it. At least he acknowledges that hard times could hit the scientific community, too.

Uncle Maverick

Tina Brown notes:

During the campaign McCain has aged dramatically. Like Dorian Gray, the bargains he has made with his conscience are reflected in the mirror. He has developed a strange Jimmy Cagney rasp and new verbal eccentricities that seem to have fused the speaking styles of Bob Dole and Ross Perot. Critics have already pounced on the explosive contempt of his jab, “You know who voted for [the energy bill]? ... THAT ONE.” The younger man watched him from his Frank Sinatra stool with the look of a family visitor marveling at the antics of the household’s resident crazy uncle.

It is very frustrating, as someone who is still considering voting for the guy, to watch what has happened to McCain in these final days of the campaign. He may indeed come from behind and pull off a win, but what shape, intellectually and otherwise, will he be in when he does?

Selling The Denial

Hugh Hewitt finds it's not so easy to sell a victory that might not happen.

The literary agent Curtis Yates sent [it] to publishers in New York last week. When Media Mob reached Mr. Yates by phone on Monday, he'd already given up on trying to sell the book.

"The idea was to tell the story behind the effect that Sarah Palin has had on this election and how it is and why it is that she has basically turned the election around for McCain and why it is that she is resonating with so many people in the country," he said. "The intent was to finish the book by a week after the election, and to have it out before the inauguration."

The title of this opus? "How Sarah Palin Won The Election...And Saved America." I kid you not.

Just Chill

David Frum offers some much-needed counseling:

Anger is a very bad political adviser. It can isolate us and push us to the extremes at exactly the moment when we ought to be rebuilding, rethinking, regrouping and recruiting.

I’m not suggesting that we remit our opposition to a hypothetical President Obama. Only that an outgunned party will need to stay cool. A big part of Obama’s appeal is his self-command. It’s a genuinely impressive quality. Let’s emulate it. We’ll be needing it.

The problem is, the McPalianacs may be beyond that point now.

From Her Cold, Dead Hands

Hillary Clinton as the new Charlton Heston?

The National Rifle Association is turning to Hillary Rodham Clinton to bolster its criticism of Barack Obama's positions on gun issues.

The NRA's Political Victory Fund planned a national newspaper ad Thursday reviving a Clinton mailing that accused Obama of waffling on gun issues. Clinton's campaign sent the mailing when the New York senator was challenging Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination. It accuses Obama of changing his statements on gun issues to try to fit the audience he was addressing.

'Hillary was right: You can't trust Obama with your guns,' says the NRA political action committee's ad, scheduled to run in USA Today. The PAC has spent at least $2.3 million on anti-Obama efforts, including more than $100,000 on the new USA Today ad.

They do know she's not running for anything, right?

The Next Front

Obama has been mocked for implying that he'd invade Pakistan. But the way thing are going, the next President, whoever it is, may not have much of a choice:

The terrorist attacks in Pakistan are striking closer and closer to home, this time the highly secure police headquarters in Islamabad. There's lots of speculation about what impact the domestic attacks will have on the Pakistani leadership's approach to the extremist elements they've been otherwise cultivating for many years. My hunch is that it will be a lot like the American approach in Iraq, and what's increasingly being proposed for Afghanistan and the FATA: buy out the ones who have a price, and fight the ones who don't.

The problem with that approach is, the people you buy may eventually bite the hand that feeds them.

The Other Bailout Plan

Not to be outdone by the Bush Administration and John McCain's attempts to nationalize the real estate business, Nancy Pelosi is trying to remind voters of who created big government first.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Wednesday praised the Federal Reserve's decision to cut a key interest rate by a half percentage point but said more must be done to bring relief to Americans affected by the worsening economy.

'Last month, the House passed an economic recovery and stimulus package that creates jobs by rebuilding our roads, bridges and highways, prevents cuts to health care coverage resulting from state budget crises, extends unemployment benefits and helps families afford rising food costs,' Pelosi said in a written statement.

'While Senate Republicans blocked our plan, the growing evidence of the spreading harm of the current economic crisis on Americans should persuade the president and those members of Congress who have opposed our efforts of the need for immediate, bipartisan action,' she continued.

Pelosi said Congress may need to go back into session to pass a stimulus package worth about $150 billion.

I wish I could complain about how liberal this is, but the Republicans aren't too far behind these days.

The Other War

Michael Yon ponders the task ahead for the man who helped straighten out Iraq.

Gen. David Petraeus, who recently assumed command of Centcom, responsible for U.S. forces in Afghanistan and Iraq (and many other countries), knows that these two countries present different challenges. The counterinsurgency manual he revised, and his own doctoral dissertation on the effects of Vietnam on the American military and foreign policy, show an intellect that is subtle enough to recognize a paradox and honest enough not to try and hide behind it. One of the paradoxes described in the counterinsurgency manual is: 'Tactical success guarantees nothing.'

If anyone can unravel Afghanistan, it's Petraeus. But that might be beyond even his talents.

Describing his successful partnership with the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker, Petraeus recently said: 'There has to be absolute unity of purpose, unity of effort, even if there cannot be and will not be unity of command.'

Right now, our enemies have unity of purpose: They want to kick us out of here. Meanwhile, we can't even agree about whether or not this war can be won.

Afghanistan has never been fully conquered or managed by any foreign power. I doubt that our efforts, however justified, will end much differently.

Food Wars

They will literally accuse the Israelis of anything, won't they?

Lebanon plans to charge Israel with violating a food copyright by marketing provisions such as hummus and falafel as Israeli, Fadi Abboud, the president of the Lebanese Industrialists Association announced Monday. Abboud contends that these foods are historically Lebanese, and that Israel's appropriation of them has cost the Levantine country profits "estimated at tens of millions of dollars annually."

Lebanon's case will likely rely on "the feta precedent," said Abboud. Six years ago, Greece was able to win a monopoly on the production of feta cheese from the European Parliament by proving that the cheese and had been produced in Greece under that name for several millennia.

I'm sure the Hummus Struggle will go down as one of the great Muslim battles.

Flower Power

I imagine there will be a big market for this.

It has long been a happy alternative for those reluctant to pop pills for depression.

But the herbal extract St John's wort now has more than just cheerful converts to testify to its mood-lifting powers.

In what is billed as the most thorough study of the plant, scientists have found it is just as effective as Prozac at treating depression.

It also had fewer side effects than many standard drugs used to help those battling despair.

Researchers compared the effects of the plant hypericum perforatum - popularly known as St John's Wort - with placebos or a wide range of old and new antidepressants, including those from the new generation of SSRI drugs, such as Prozac and Seroxat.

The findings could prompt more GPs to prescribe St John's wort. In Germany, it is commonly given to children and teenagers.

Experts do not know exactly how the plant lifts depression, although most believe it probably works by keeping the chemical serotonin, which is linked to positive moods, in the brain for longer.

Happy gardening, everyone.

Our Money Well Spent

Well, they had to use it for something.

Less than a week after the federal government had to bail out American International Group Inc. (AIG), the company sent executives on a $440,000 retreat to a posh California resort, lawmakers investigating the company's meltdown said Tuesday.

The tab included $23,380 worth of spa treatments for AIG employees at the coastal St. Regis resort south of Los Angeles even as the company tapped into an $85 billion loan from the government it needed to stave off bankruptcy.

The retreat didn't include anyone from the financial products division that nearly drove AIG under, but lawmakers were still enraged over thousands of dollars spent on catered banquets, golf outings and visits to the resort's spa and salon for executives of AIG's main U.S. life insurance subsidiary.

'Average Americans are suffering economically. They're losing their jobs, their homes and their health insurance,' House Oversight Committee Chairman Henry Waxman, D-Calif., scolded the company during a lengthy opening statement. 'Yet less than one week after the taxpayers rescued AIG, company executives could be found wining and dining at one of the most exclusive resorts in the nation.'

It's nice to see how well the bailout is working, isn't it?

Crisis Management

I don't know if this makes me feel better or not.

George Bush is expected to summon Gordon Brown and other European leaders to an emergency summit to discuss the economic crisis.

The prospect of a high-level global meeting came as the US central bank launched a new bid to unfreeze credit markets by effectively lending billions of dollars to US companies.

The Federal Reserve moved after lending in the commercial paper market - where companies raise money from the open money markets - all but ceased, raising a serious threat to many American businesses' operations.

'This facility should encourage investors to once again engage in term lending in the commercial paper market,' the Fed said.

The Fed's move -- which puts billions of dollars of US taxpayers' money at risk -- was the latest sign of how desperate American leaders are to unblock the global financial system and avert a severe recession.

Maybe I don't know enough about world economics, but it just seems to be that sending more good money after bad, or buying up debt from people who culdn't afford to pay it in the first place, just doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

Bloggin' In The Years: 1984

Reagan seemed to fumble here. The good news for Republicans is that Mondale is most likely still beatable. We'll see how things turn out after Round Two.

Nationalization Is The New Conservatism

Matt Welch asks:

So, what other economic Hail Marys can we expect to see before Election Day? Guaranteed federal insurance for those who bet it all on red? A new green job from Barack Obama for every American who reduces his or her carbon footprint? McCain offers to nationalize Starbucks because "they just don't seem to be doing as well these days"?

It does seem that McCain's idea of government responsibility is different only in the degree that he thinks taxpayers should fund it. Meanwhile, David Weigel notes what may be Obama's greatest asset:

He's liberated in a way that Bill Clinton was not in 1992: He doesn't need to apologize for being a liberal, because, hell, why not give the liberals a chance after the utter collapse of conservatism?

It doesn't help the Republicans' case that their most electable candidate doesn't seem to believe in free markets, either.

Malaise, The Next Generation

The 1979 time warp continues.

only 9% of Americans are satisfied with the way things are going in the United States -- the lowest such reading in Gallup Poll history.

The previous low point for Gallup's measure of satisfaction had been 12%, recorded back in 1979, in the midst of rising prices and gas shortages when Jimmy Carter was president. Gallup has recorded a 14% satisfaction level at several points -- once in the senior Bush's administration in 1992, and several times earlier this year.

The reason for Americans' extraordinarily low level of satisfaction is straightforward: the economy. Asked in the weekend Gallup Poll to name the most important problem facing the country today, almost 7 in 10 Americans mentioned some aspect of the economy, far ahead of any other problem mentioned.

All we need now is for disco to make a comeback...

Flexing FlexFuel Muscle

Zurbin notes a positive aspect of Obama's energy policy.

"...there is one part of the Obama plan which is absolutely splendid, and that is his explicit promise to require flex fuel capability on all new cars sold in the USA by the end of his first term. This is indeed a potential real game changer, especially if the flex fuel standard is written to include not only automobile compatibility with gasoline and ethanol, but methanol as well."

This is one area where Obama seems to be ahdead of the curve when it comes to McCain and his "Drill, baby, drill" message. Whether Obama can get this done is another matter.

The Second Rate Age

Brendan Loy muses on why we seem to have so much failed leadership these days:

It isn't just that McCain and Obama are flawed candidates; it's that there aren't really any better alternatives. Who would you rather see up there? Hillary Clinton? Mitt Romney? John Edwards? Mike Huckabee? Joe Biden? Sarah Palin? Nancy Pelosi? John Boehner? Harry Reid? Mitch McConnell? George W. Bush? John Kerry? Dick Cheney? Al Gore?

It does seem that the age of mediocrity is here to stay for awhile. And the sad part is, the alternatives do seem worse by comparison.

The Wright Thing

You knew this was coming.

I asked, if Ayers is a legitimate issue, what about Reverend Wright?

She didn’t hesitate: “To tell you the truth, Bill, I don’t know why that association isn’t discussed more, because those were appalling things that that pastor had said about our great country, and to have sat in the pews for 20 years and listened to that — with, I don’t know, a sense of condoning it, I guess, because he didn’t get up and leave — to me, that does say something about character. But, you know, I guess that would be a John McCain call on whether he wants to bring that up.”

I'm pretty sure he will, now. And the slide down the sewer continues.

Der Shield

Didn't they learn anything?

Germany's finance minister said Monday he is considering creating a 'shield' that would protect the country's entire financial sector, arguing it would not be possible to continue to address troubled financial institutions on a case by case basis.

However, Finance Minister Peer Steinbrueck made clear that Germany does not envision making its move as part of a U.S.-style bailout plan for all of Europe. He said he and Chancellor Angela Merkel agree that the German government must remain the sole 'master of the process.'

Steinbrueck spoke after the government on Sunday put together a new 50 billion euros ($69 billion) rescue package for distressed lender Hypo Real Estate AG. Steinbrueck's ministry reached a deal with private banks late Sunday to infuse an additional line of credit worth up to 15 billion euros ($21 billion).

'We must now try—beyond a single solution at Hypo Real Estate—to stretch a shield across Germany as a whole, so we do not stagger from one case to the next,' Steinbrueck said on Deutschlandfunk radio.

Well, I'm sure they'll find a way to make it work. I mean, it's not like the Germans ever became unhinged by a bad economy, right?

Throw The Bums Out

The old adage is true: You can't fool all of the people, all of the time.

If they could vote to keep or replace the entire Congress, 59% of voters would like to throw them all out and start over again. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that just 17% would vote to keep the current legislators in office.

Today, just 23% have even a little confidence in the ability of Congress to deal with the nation’s economic problems and only 24% believe most Members of Congress understand legislation before they vote on it.

But if we got rid of our Congressctitters, where would our Vice Presidential candidates and professional blowhards come from?

The Beer Can King

Who says recycling can't be profitable?

If you had purchased £1000 of Northern Rock shares one year ago it would now be worth £4.95, with HBOS, earlier this week your £1000 would have been worth £16.50, £1000 invested in XL Leisure would now be worth less than £5, but if you bought £1000 worth of Tennents Lager one year ago, drank it all, then took the empty cans to an aluminium re-cycling plant, you would get £214. So based on the above statistics the best current investment advice is to drink heavily and re-cycle.

Homer Simpson was right-there is nothing beer cannot do...

Save The Presses

How to save your local newspaper in the online age:

A smaller, less frequently published version packed with analysis and investigative reporting and aimed at well-educated news junkies that may well be a smart survival strategy for the beleaguered old print product.

A little more fairness and objectivity might help, too.

Terrorist Like Me

Sarah Palin goes there.

"Our opponent ... is someone who sees America, it seems, as being so imperfect, imperfect enough, that he's palling around with terrorists who would target their own country," Palin told a group of donors in Englewood, Colo. A deliberate attempt to smear Obama, McCain's ticket-mate echoed the line at three separate events Saturday.

"This is not a man who sees America like you and I see America," she said. "We see America as a force of good in this world. We see an America of exceptionalism."

I don't think Ayers is a good guy. But the insinuation here is a return to the thinly disguised argument that Obama himself is one of them secret terrists what wants to destroy Amurka. I don't care what your views on the guy's politics are, I don't think he's a terrorist sympathizer. Enough with this nonsense. Can we get back to the issues, please?

The Eye Has It

If thy eye offends them, cover it up.

A Muslim cleric in Saudi Arabia has called on women to wear a full veil, or niqab, that reveals only one eye.

Sheikh Muhammad al-Habadan said showing both eyes encouraged women to use eye make-up to look seductive.

The question of how much of her face a woman should cover is a controversial topic in many Muslim societies.

The niqab is more common in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, but women in much of the Muslim Middle East wear a headscarf which covers only their hair. A Muslim cleric in Saudi Arabia has called on women to wear a full veil, or niqab, that reveals only one eye.

Sheikh Muhammad al-Habadan said showing both eyes encouraged women to use eye make-up to look seductive.

The question of how much of her face a woman should cover is a controversial topic in many Muslim societies.

The niqab is more common in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, but women in much of the Muslim Middle East wear a headscarf which covers only their hair.

Saudi Arabia really is like the ultimate boy's clubhouse. And it comes with real clubs to keep those icky girls out.

Primary Tactics

It's the second coming of McNasty:

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

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

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

I'm sorry, but didn't we already go through this during the primaries? While Wright and Ayers may indeed be dispicable, whatever is known about them is already out there-and it hasn't really hurt Obama. This sounds like desperation at the eleventh hour, IMO.

Big Tax Collector Is Watching You

Along with a host of goodies unrelated to saving the economy, the bailout bill has this for your consideration.

The bailout bill also gives the Internal Revenue Service new authority to conduct undercover operations. It would immunize the IRS from a passel of federal laws, including permitting IRS agents to run businesses for an extended sting operation, to open their own personal bank accounts with U.S. tax dollars, and so on. (Think IRS agents posing as accountants or tax preparers and saying, "I'm not sure if that deduction is entirely legal, but it'll save you $1,000. Want to take it?") That section had expired as of January 1, 2008, and would now be renewed.

(snip)

There's another section of the bailout bill worth noting. It lets the IRS give information from individual tax returns to any federal law enforcement agency investigating suspected "terrorist" activity, which can, in turn, share it with local and state police. Intelligence agencies such as the CIA and the National Security Agency can also receive that information.

The information that can be shared includes "a taxpayer's identity, the nature, source, or amount of his income, payments, receipts, deductions, exemptions, credits, assets, liabilities, net worth, tax liability, tax withheld, deficiencies, overassessments, or tax payments, whether the taxpayer's return was, is being, or will be examined or subject to other investigation or processing, or any other data received by, recorded by, prepared by, furnished to, or collected by the Secretary with respect to a return."

Hey, it's the IRS. We can trust them, right?

Failure Is Always An Option

Leave it to the government to turn boondoggles into an art form.

The U.S. House Science Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight report is referenced as 'Questions regarding technical flaws, poor government oversight and potential contractor mismanagement on the National Counterterrorism Center's RAILHEAD information technology program.'

As that language suggests, it chronicles a series of missteps in a US$500 million upgrade to a key government database: the National Counterterrorism Center's terrorist watch list, which holds data on some 400,000 known or suspected terrorists. Indeed, it collects data from some 30 intelligence agencies, earning the moniker, 'the mother of all databases.'

So why is this project, which falls under the umbrella name of 'Railhead,' failing? And failing it is. '[R]ailhead may actually degrade the ability to provide intelligence data for use in the consolidated terrorist watch list,' according to the subcommittee report.

If it seems as though the U.S. has been down this road before, that's because it has. Large IT projects in agencies from the FBI to the Census Bureau spectacularly -- and, it seems, regularly -- crash and burn, much to taxpayers' disgust.

It is easy enough to make jokes about government failures and then dismiss them as more evidence of individuals' ineptitude.

It seems there are certain aspects of government culture that make IT failure more likely. It just may be that failure is built into the system.

Remember, this is the same government that people expect to rescue the economy. Scary thought, isn't it?

A Man's Home Is His Artistic Statement

Tell me again, why do people do stuff like this?

Tourists press up against the construction fence on the corner of 53rd and Sixth, staring speechless as a giant crane lifts an entire bathroom into the air and deposits it in what will be a master bedroom. Cellophane House is five stories tall, with floor-to-ceiling windows, translucent polycarbonate steps embedded with LEDs, and exterior walls made of NextGen SmartWrap, an experimental plastic laminated with photovoltaic cells. Its aluminum frame was cut from off-the-shelf components in Europe, assembled in New Jersey, then snapped together in 16 days on a vacant lot next to the Museum of Modern Art — joining four other full-size houses onsite through October as part of the exhibit Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling. It looks as if a suburban cul-de-sac took a wrong turn at the Holland Tunnel.

Well, the good news is, the way the housing market is these days it will at least be an affordable piece of crap for whomever dares to live in it.

Blogrolling In Cash

Blogging seems to be the last frontier of capitalism:

Blogs with 100,000 or more unique visitors a month earn an average of $75,000 annually—though that figure is skewed by the small percentage of blogs that make more than $200,000 a year. The estimates from a 2007 Business Week article are older but juicier: The LOLcat empire rakes in $5,600 per month; Overheard in New York gets $8,100 per month; and Perez Hilton, gossip king, scoops up $111,000 per month.

I'm guessing they don't need any bailouts.

God Is My Co-Signer

Maybe this is proof that God doesn't like stupid people.

Has the so-called Prosperity Gospel turned its followers into some of the most willing participants — and hence, victims — of the current financial crisis? That's what a scholar of the fast-growing brand of pentecostal Christianity believes. While researching a book on black televangelism, says Jonathan Walton, a religion professor at the University of California Riverside, he realized that Prosperity's central promise — that God would 'make a way' for poor people to enjoy the better things in life — had developed an additional, toxic expression during sub-prime boom. Walton says that this encouraged congregants who got dicey mortgages to believe 'God caused the bank to ignore my credit score and blessed me with my first house.' The results, he says, 'were disastrous, because they pretty much turned parishioners into prey for greedy brokers.'

Unfortunately, the "Prosperity Gospel" which seems to operate on some theory of economics that I'm not familiar with, permeates throughout most liberal thinking-namely, that God (ri.e., Big Government) will ultimately provide if you hope for it long enough. Blind faith in any form can be bad for you.

Return To Reagan

Grover Norquist finally gets it.

Mr Bush’s consistent bent towards spending, and failure to reduce the regulatory burden, saw him limp to re-election with 51 per cent of the vote and led to the 2006 loss of the House and Senate, won on behalf of Reaganism in 1994. Senator John McCain won the Republican nomination running as “Not Bush”. If he wins the presidency, it will be in large part because of his distance from Mr Bush.

Parties redirect themselves towards success and away from failure. When Mr Bush leaves the White House, the modern Republican party will snap back to being the Reagan Republican party. His experiment in big government Republicanism will be seen like Richard Nixon’s example before him – as an aberration, a detour in the march from Goldwater to Reagan.

Well, maybe. Given their ongoing behavior, however, I'm not holding my breath.

Pennies From Palin

Palin as an intellectual penny pincher?

What is most striking about her is that she seems perfectly untroubled by either curiosity or the usual processes of thought. When answering questions, both Obama and Joe Biden have an unfortunate tendency to think on their feet and thereby tie themselves in knots: Palin never thinks. Instead, she relies on a limited stock of facts, bright generalities and pokerwork maxims, all as familiar and well-worn as old pennies.

I don't think the problem is that Palin doesn't think or that she's not a bright person, but her way of thinking is representative of the current Republican view on gray matter-namely, that curiosity and inquisitiveness aren't necessary for leadership, only actions are. But that does a disservice to the office of someone who may become President. Sometimes a little curiosity can go a long way when you're in charge.

Bloggin' In The Years: 1995

I guess it was to be expected.

LOS ANGELES (CNN) -- Orenthal James Simpson is a free man (2M QT movie). He was acquitted Tuesday in the brutal stabbing murders of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ronald Goldman, outside her luxury townhouse on the night of June 12, 1994 (512K AIFF sound or 512K WAV sound).

Flanked by defense attorney Johnnie Cochran and longtime friend Robert Kardashian, Simpson stood and faced the jury as a court clerk read two 'not guilty' verdicts shortly after 10 a.m. PDT. He mouthed the words 'thank you' after each verdict was read. Members of Simpson's family cried tears of joy in the courtroom as the family of murder victim Ron Goldman wept just a few feet away. Simpson hugged Cochran. Prosecutors studied jurors as each was asked individually if the verdicts were accurate. Each juror said yes.

The verdict was in a sealed envelope handed to Judge Lance Ito on Monday by the jury forewoman, a 51-year-old local government employee.

Testimony in the trial took almost nine months, encompassing about 120 witnesses, 45,000 pages of evidence and 1,100 exhibits. But the jury of 10 women and two men, comprising nine blacks, two whites and one Hispanic, took less than four hours to reach the verdicts.

The stunt with O.J. trying on the bloody glove didn't help the prosecution's case. At least we won't see any more of those Dancing Judge Itos on the Tonight Show. This whole thing was a circus, and Simpson can now go off to the golf course, presumably to look for "The real killers". Maybe in the future he'll do something stupid enough to go to prison for, but for now, this really sucks.

Keep It Pristine

You just can't please some people:

Solar companies proposing large power plants in the Mojave Desert are facing opposition from conservationists. They say a rush to build solar here threatens to tear up large tracts of desert habitat and open space.

The squabble is likely to intensify now that Congress this week moved forward on a long-term extension of the solar tax credit. Two other proposed bills would fast-track solar power projects looking to build on federal lands. State mandates on utilities to provide more renewable energy has created an enormous market for solar, an energy that requires two things the Mojave has in spades – acreage and sunshine. But the desert’s defenders argue that solar panels should be located on city rooftops rather than pristine lands.

Hmm, maybe they'd be happier with a nuke plant?

Bloggin' In The Years: 1988

Hoo boy. Bush will probably win, but that was a painful moment for Danforth. Hopefully future Veep candidates won't allow themselves to get so owned during debates.

He Lives

Most people haven't forgotten.

In his first inaugural address, President Ronald Reagan delivered a line succinctly capturing the sentiment that elected him: “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”

A generation later, that attitude still resonates with a solid majority of Americans. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 59% of voters agree with Reagan, and just 28% disagree.

Support is found across a wide range of political and demographic groups. Sixty-seven percent (67%) of men agree with Reagan, as do 52% of women. A majority of voters in all age and income groups agree.

If only the party that he once led remembered.

Ignorance Is Bliss

Larison tries one last time to talk some sense into the Republican base.

I...implore conservatives to stop ignoring reality just because they happen to like a candidate’s personality and biography. Besides being bad for the quality of conservative thought, it embraces the caricature that conservatives are indifferent to knowledge and have no use for expertise, which has become an all too legitimate critique of how conservatives have responded to the misrule of the Bush administration. That was not always the case, but if conservatives insist on making elaborate arguments that understanding and knowledge are not significant criteria when choosing our top elected officials they will lose whatever credibility they may still have. More than that, they will be crippled by their embrace of cheerful ignorance when it comes time to oppose the policies of the Democratic administration that is surely about to be elected.

I think honest conservatives have been raising questions about her qualifications. It's the diehard Republicans and Bush-era "Conservatives" who seem to be in denial, which means they may be in for a very rude awakening on Election Day.

Alms For The Governator

Oh, Arnold. Not you too.

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, alarmed by the ongoing national financial crisis, warned Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson on Thursday that the state might need an emergency loan of as much as $7 billion from the federal government within weeks.

The warning comes as California is close to running out of cash to fund day-to-day government operations and is unable to access routine short-term loans that it typically relies on to remain solvent.

(snip)

"Absent a clear resolution to this financial crisis," Schwarzenegger wrote in a letter Thursday evening e-mailed to Paulson, "California and other states may be unable to obtain the necessary level of financing to maintain government operations and may be forced to turn to the federal treasury for short-term financing."

The letter, obtained by The Times, came on the eve of a vote by the House of Representatives on a $700-billion rescue package, but it was too soon to know how the package would affect the nation's paralyzed credit markets. The Senate approved the so-called rescue bill Wednesday night.

A top Schwarzenegger aide followed up the letter with a call to the Treasury secretary Thursday night. Treasury Department officials could not be reached for comment.

I guess even Terminators need to borrow for their upgrades.

The War On Nasal Congestion

The Drug War gets another dangerous criminal type off the streets.

Gary Schinagel has suffered from chronic nasal congestion from the time he was a youngster.

When he was a child growing up in Sheffield his family doctor told him, “Gary, this is something you’ll be dealing with all your life.”

Little did he know.

Last Wednesday, Schinagel, 47, a senior investment associate at Principal Financial Group in Mason City, was arrested for the illegal purchase of pseudoephedrine.

He routinely buys a generic brand of medicine to deal with his nasal condition and to help alleviate sinus headaches that are often a part of his condition.

(snip)

Schinagel isn’t sure which law he broke. What he is sure of is that on Wednesday, his niece called him and told him his name was in a story she read on the Globe Gazette Web site.

The story said he was one of the suspects still at large after a police pseudoephedrine roundup of violators.

He went to the sheriff’s office thinking he would clear up what was surely a mixup. Instead he was arrested, put in a holding room and told he needed $1,000 bail to get out.

“It is a sinking feeling to be placed under arrest,” said Schinagel. “I’m not a stick-in-the-mud but I’ve tried all my life to abide by the law and not cross any lines I shouldn’t cross.

“I’ve tried all my life to avoid situations like I find myself in now. And I still don’t know which line I crossed,” he said.

He crossed the line that keeps moving further afield of its original intent. That's what the War on Drugs hath wrought.

Sarah Cheney

Sarah Palin apparently has big plans.

"Well, our founding fathers were very wise there in allowing through the Constitution much flexibility there in the office of the vice president. And we will do what is best for the American people in tapping into that position and ushering in an agenda that is supportive and cooperative with the president's agenda in that position. Yeah, so I do agree with him that we have a lot of flexibility in there, and we'll do what we have to do to administer very appropriately the plans that are needed for this nation. And it is my executive experience that is partly to be attributed to my pick as V.P. with McCain, not only as a governor, but earlier on as a mayor, as an oil and gas regulator, as a business owner. It is those years of experience on an executive level that will be put to good use in the White House also."

Who's supposed to be the running mate, again?

From Russia With Gloating

The Russians may be sniggering at our economic turmoil, but perhaps they shouldn't be so quick to cheer our impending demise.

President Dmitri Medvedev said Thursday that the U.S. crisis showed that 'the times when one economy and one country dominated are gone for good.' Speaking of the United States, Medvedev said the world no longer needed a 'megaregulator.'

Russia has argued that the freewheeling Anglo-American style of capitalism is to blame for the crisis, a position echoed by Germany and other Continental European nations. Medvedev even called it financial 'egoism.'

A drumbeat of similar pronouncements has been heard in Russia in recent days. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin made a major speech Wednesday on U.S. financial 'irresponsibility,' blaming the plunge of more than 50 percent in the Russian stock market on the global economic slowdown and U.S. financial turmoil, rather than on any troubles endemic to Russia.

(snip)

But in contrast with other European countries Russia's own financial system has been in steep decline over the past weeks, and regulators suspended stock trading three times. As in other emerging markets during periods of turmoil, investors have had a tendency to pull money out of Russia and to deposit it in U.S. Treasury bills.

Since the second week in August, when the war in Georgia and political tension with the West heightened concerns about stability in Russia, $52 billion in net private capital has left Russia, according to an investor note from Goldman Sachs.

Russia has promised a total of about $150 billion for loans to banks, tax cuts and other measures. The moves seek to stimulate the economy, restore liquidity to the banking sector and return confidence in the stock market.

Still, the global credit crisis could trim about 1 percent from Russian growth next year, according to Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin.

Welcome to the collapsing club, boys.

St. Elmo's Election

Static is the new dead voter:

326 people voted at the Reeves Center precinct on primary election day in September. Their votes were captured on a computer cartridge, but the Board of Elections says when it put the cartridge into the citywide computer to be counted, 1,500 write in votes appeared from nowhere. The board completed its investigation of what might have happened and blames static electricity.

Maybe the static opened a portal to a parallel universe where the extra votes came from? It makes about as much sense as this explanation.

Sunspot Baby

Where have all the sunspots gone?

The Sun has been strangely unblemished this year. On more than 200 days so far this year, no sunspots were spotted. That makes the Sun blanker this year than in any year since 1954, when it was spotless for 241 days.

The Sun goes through a regular 11-year cycle, and it is now emerging from the quietest part of the cycle, or solar minimum. But even for this phase it has been unusually quiet, with little roiling of the magnetic fields that induce sunspots.

“It’s starting with a murmur,” said David H. Hathaway, a solar physicist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.

As of Thursday, the 276th day of the year, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colo., had counted 205 days without a sunspot.

Maybe old Sol is just taking a long nap?

Life After Conservatism

Michael Malone worries about the long-term conequences of bailout politics:

From where I sit, the United States government has embarked on two pieces of social engineering in the last few years. One was to make oil expensive as expensive as possible to drive people to greater use of alternative energy sources – because anything less would be irresponsible and destructive to the environment. The other was to enshrine home ownership (i.e., easy-to-obtain mortgages) as a new American right – because anything less would be unequal and racist.

None of us voted on these decisions – indeed, neither was even spoken about directly, much less debated. But nevertheless, both became national policy . . .and both have sparked national, now international, crises. Then, once they became crises, both were blamed on ‘greedy capitalism’, instead of what they really were: legislative interference into market forces. . . . To my mind, what makes this economic crisis different from ones in even the recent past is that it has exposed the fact that there are, apparently, no real leaders left in Washington – that the intellectual capital in the National Capitol has fallen to a new low – if that’s possible. Most of all, it shows that we can no longer look to D.C. for leadership into the rest of the 21st century.

Well, some of us have known that for a long time. But the real issue here is what will happen to what is left of fiscal conservatism. Granted, something had to be done to keep the economy from really collapsing. But what about the future?

Bring On The Number Two's

So who won? Weigel says it was Joe:

When John McCain picked Sarah Palin, what did he want? An instant star who'd blow up the electorate, peel off Hillary voters, and purloin the 'change' message from Obama.

On those terms there's no question that the Democrats won tonight. Biden spent the night attacking John McCain's record and building up (with detachable honesty) Obama's. Palin spent the night re-selling Sarah Palin.

Michelle Malkin, however, disagrees:

She was warm, fresh, funny, confident, energetic, personable, relentless, and on message. She roasted Obama’s flip-flops on the surge and tea-with-dictators declarations, dinged Biden’s bash-Bush rhetoric, challenged the blame-America defeatism of the Left, and exuded the sunny optimism that energized the base in the first place.

That may be fine for the base, but what about the rest of the country? Ben Smith probably has the most realistic take:

Palin passed a pass-fail test, though she flagged as the debate went on. Though she was chosen for her emotion connection, she was the drier of the two candidates. But if the central worry was that she'd be a drag on the ticket, she likely returned herself to the same status as Biden and every other running mate in memory: Not, ultimately, a major factor at the polls.

My own feeling is that this was the opposite of the first Presidential debate-here it was Palin who was the challenger going up against the person with experience and managed to hold her own. Both basically sounded the same themes as their would-be bosses, but then again, people aren't voting for the running mates. Still, both candidates' respective supporters were probably pleased either way.

Class Dismissed

This might explain a few things:

A Center for Economic and Entrepreneurial Literacy (CEEL) analysis of economic education among congressional members revealed that less than 15% of current members have degrees in the business, economics, or finance fields. The research showed that 30.5% of congressional members studied politics and government, while 18.1% majored in humanities. In fact there are more members who studied science (7.5%) than economics (6.7%).

You'd think they'd have studied more in school. After all, they're pretty good at separating us from our money when they want to.

In Bad Company

At least we're not alone.

It took a weekend to shatter the complacency of German finance minister Peer Steinbrück. Last Thursday he told us that the financial crisis was an 'American problem', the fruit of Anglo-Saxon greed and inept regulation that would cost the United States its 'superpower status'. Pleas from US Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson for a joint US-European rescue plan to halt the downward spiral were rebuffed as unnecessary.

By Monday, Mr Steinbrück was having to orchestrate Germany's biggest bank bail-out, putting together a €35 billion loan package to save Hypo Real Estate. By then Europe was 'staring into the abyss,' he admitted. Belgium faced worse. It had to nationalise Fortis (with Dutch help), a 300-year-old bastion of Flemish finance, followed a day later by a bail-out for Dexia (with French help)....

We now know that it was French finance minister Christine Lagarde who begged Mr Paulson to save the US insurer AIG last week. AIG had written $300 billion in credit protection for European banks, admitting that it was for 'regulatory capital relief rather than risk mitigation'. In other words, it was underpinning a disguised extension of credit leverage. Its collapse would have set off a lending crunch across Europe as banking capital sank below water level.

It turns out that European regulators have allowed even greater use of 'off-books' chicanery than the Americans. Mr Paulson may have saved Europe.

I don't know that's necessarily a good thing. Do we really want to play catch-up with European socialists at this point?

The Top Ten

It's a milestone, of sorts:

President Bush signed legislation in July that raised the debt ceiling to $10.615 trillion. Meanwhile, the financial bailout legislation passed by the Senate last night would raise the debt ceiling further to $11.315 trillion.

Here's something else worth knowing. The gross national debt as a percentage of the gross domestic product has, under the Bush Administration, hit a 50-year high.

I'm sure that Obama is grateful to Bush for giving him such an example to follow.

Opening The Gates

If true, this would be a good move on Obama's part.

A senior adviser to Sen. Barack Obama said Thursday that the Democrat might see Defense Secretary Robert Gates as a candidate to remain at the Pentagon if Obama wins the White House.

Without explicitly endorsing Gates for the job or predicting Obama's selection, Richard Danzig told reporters that Gates has exhibited leadership qualities that an Obama administration would value.

Danzig, who served as Navy secretary in the Clinton administration and is a senior national security adviser to the Obama campaign, cited Gates' pragmatic approach and his advocacy for closing the Guantanamo Bay prison for terror suspects. He said Gates has been a good defense secretary.

''He'd be an even better one in an Obama administration,'' Danzig said. ''Why do I think that? Because many of the kinds of efforts he's made are in tune with what we are trying to do.''

Danzig mentioned Gates' push to increase U.S. forces in Afghanistan and to increase greatly the size of the Afghan national army. "These are things that Sen. Obama agrees with and I agree with."

Gates has proven to be the kind of realistic Secretary of Defense that a president needs these days. Obama would be well advised to follow through on this.

Meeting And Greeting

Mr. Nice Guy meets Maverick.

As the two shared the Senate floor tonight for the first time since they won their party nominations, Obama stood chatting with Democrats on his side of the aisle, and McCain stood on the Republican side of the aisle. So Obama crossed over into enemy territory. He walked over to where McCain was chatting with Republican Sen. Mel Martinez of Florida and Independent Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut. And he stretched out his arm and offered his hand to McCain.

McCain shook it, but with a “go away” look that no one could miss. He tried his best not to even look at Obama. Finally, with a tight smile, McCain managed a greeting: “Good to see you.” Obama got the message. He shook hands with Martinez and Lieberman — both of whom greeted him more warmly — and quickly beat a retreat back to the Democratic side.

I guess he found out who his friends are...

"If Not Us, Then Who?"

Greenwald challenges contemporary big-government conservatives:

The liberal uses crises, real or manufactured, to expand the power of government at the expense of the individual and private property. He has spent, in earnest, 70 years evading the Constitution's limits on governmental power. If conservatives don't stand up to this, who will? If they don't offer serious alternatives that address the current circumstances AND defend the founding principles, who will?

Good point.

Gene Delinquent

Are some kids really born to be bad after all?

Criminological research has long linked antisocial, drug-using and criminal behavior to delinquent peers -- in fact, belonging to such a peer group is one of the strongest correlates to both youthful and adult crime. But the study led by Beaver is the first to establish a statistically significant association between an affinity for antisocial peer groups and a particular variation (called the 10-repeat allele) of the dopamine transporter gene (DAT1).

However, the study's analysis of family, peer and DNA data from 1,816 boys in middle and high school found that the association between DAT1 and delinquent peer affiliation applied primarily for those who had both the 10-repeat allele and a high-risk family environment (one marked by a disengaged mother and an absence of maternal affection).

In contrast, adolescent males with the very same gene variation who lived in low-risk families (those with high levels of maternal engagement and warmth) showed no statistically relevant affinity for antisocial friends.

The more we learn about ourselves, the more we may have to accept that our genes make up a large part in defining who we are. Of course that doesn't totally excuse bad behavior. But it could go a long way towards preventing it with a little tweaking at birth. Whether that's actually a good thing or not is something we'll have to decide.

Brother, Can You Spare A Bonus?

Things are tough all over:

[State Rep. Livvy] Floren, who represents some of the richest neighborhoods in America, said she is more concerned about the younger bankers with large mortgages and little children. She bumped into three people during the past week who are now unemployed — two from Lehman and one from the investment firm Bear Stearns. With no bonuses that they once relied on, the mid-level Wall Street workers will likely pull back from buying the fanciest cars and the largest boats.

Pardon me while I try to give a damn...nope, didn't work.