Month: September 2008

One in six Americans tuned in. And Obama won.

Tim Russert said it best in his last lecture at Notre Dame in April:

"[After] all my discussions with presidents, both while in office and after they left, and their advisors, while in office and after they left, and in my reading of history, particularly presidential history, I am ever more convinced that a leader cannot make tough decisions unless he or she is asked tough questions.  It is the only vehicle that brings them to closure, that forces any sense of intellectual rigor, that forces them to find a way to reconcile the political advice or the political pressures brought to bear. It will not be enough in a democratic society to simply have those on the left or right who are the pamphleteers and unwilling to challenge the views of people they support.  Tough questions need not be the loudest or most sensational or the most theatrical, but rather probing and, hopefully, incisive."

Until Sarah Palin agrees to a full and open press conference, she should not even be considered as a possible vice-president of the United States. What has been going on with her and access to her is an outrage to democratic discourse and the entire electoral system. Since she was selected, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has held more press conferences with American reporters than she has. Forget all this debate spin or pre-spin. Just give her a microphone, a roomful of inquisitive reporters and be done with it.

If she were a man, this wouldn’t even be debatable.

That we are being told these lower standards are acceptable for a woman candidate is sexist cant. When will the press simply stop cooperating with this farce?

Ezra Klein chides my posting of this graph. He says we don’t know for sure how much the bailout would cost. But isn’t that the problem?

Here is his direct-from-McCain reporting on the Palin decision a month ago:

[W]hat [McCain] saw when he looked at her, according to the people I spoke to, is someone who fights the same fights I fight. The first gateway sort of fight that he thought they have in common was the bridge to nowhere. He’s been talking about that for years. She’s the one who killed it.

Except she didn’t, as everyone now knows. She lobbied for it and kept the money when the feds killed it. You have to wonder about a vetting process that didn’t even get past step one.

Radley Balko has the maverick’s number. He asks some questions one only wishes the White House press corps would ask.

Will Wilkinson reviews Nudge:

Thaler and Sunstein’s best idea is the Save More Tomorrow Plan. Psychologists say folks really hate losing what they already have but don’t so much mind forgoing an equivalent gain. There is also a well-known tendency to postpone efforts at self-control; the diet always starts tomorrow. These findings, Thaler and Sunstein argue, recommend an ingenious scheme benevolent employers can use to help their workers put more money in the bank.

Employees are offered the option to have a rising portion of future pay raises automatically deducted and placed into a savings or investment account. Since participants need do nothing now and are not required to cut back in order to save more, the percentage of total income saved increases more or less painlessly as pay goes up over time. Tests of the program show excellent results: Very few choose to stop their savings rate increases, and many end up maxing out their contributions to the plan. These results strongly support the idea that people would save more if savings programs were structured to work with the grain of our predictably crooked timber.

Larison sizes up the bailout failure:

…if things are indeed as bad as the proponents say, and if they are the responsible, sober voices of wisdom that they pretend to be, the truly irresponsible thing was to wait up until the last weeks before the recess, rush out a terrible plan, demand immediate adoption of this terrible plan (which they were happy to admit in public was a terrible plan) and then not even correctly gauge the level of support for the legislation before bringing it to a vote.  Calling the question when there likely wasn’t enough support (as opponents of the bill had said yesterday!), if you believe what these people claim to believe, was an act of brazen recklessness.  If they are wrong about the consequences of not adopting this plan, they are merely politically incompetent.

Anonymous Liberal mulls it over:

Given the way he’s run his campaign, I’m convinced [McCain] would authorize any attack he thought would work. I think the reason we haven’t seen the Wright card played yet is that McCain and his advisers are genuinely not sure how it would go over. Could it scare some voters away from Obama? Certainly. Could it look like an overt appeal to racism and generate a backlash, especially among the media? That’s also a distinct possibility.

In other words, it’s a big gamble, too big a gamble to make while you’re within shooting distance in the polls. But big gambles start to look better when you’re trailing by a lot and running out of time. If Obama continues to maintain a decent lead in the polls, I would not be surprised to see the good reverend make an appearance in a McCain ad soon.

That may end up being the last hurdle Obama faces on his way to the White House.

Andrew Lee Butters:

Often when a terrorist or violent act occurs in Syria, I feel like an astrologist watching a volcanic eruption on a distant planet for omens and portents. Today’s car bombing in Damascus that left 17 people dead is a reminder that under the surface of that seemingly airless, unchanging place, there’s molten fire. But beyond that, it’s hard to know what signifies…

Syria is in the middle of a delicate diplomatic moment after having initiated indirect peace talks with Israel, and the region is rife with speculation about two unsolved major assassinations in Syria so far this year: of Hizballah’s military operations chief, and of the a top military aid to President Assad. Were these house-cleaning gestures by the Syrian regime to show that it would be willing to cut its ties with Hizballah and sign a peace deal with Israel, or are hardliners within the regime acting out against detente?

Fallows:

…in the wake of her catastrophic performance in the Katie Couric interview, Sarah Palin has set expectations so low that she is very likely to do "surprisingly" well against Joe Biden on October 2. That is, to seem more flustered and incoherent than she did against Couric, Palin would have to move herself into "Eagleton zone," where her presence on the ticket would no longer be sustainable.

We passed that moment three weeks ago.