Month: September 2008

You thought this surreal candidacy couldn’t get any weirder? Heh. Just be deferent and believe!

What Bainbridge doesn’t understand. He asks a series of very good questions:

It would be great if we could get answers from Paulson and Bernanke on these issues. But I’ll probably have to settle for hashing them out in the blogosphere.

I know the feeling.

A man exits an American International Group (AIG) building September 17, 2008 in New York City. The Federal Reserve rescued American International Group yesterday from a probable collapse by lending the U.S.’s largest insurer up to $US85 billion. By Spencer Platt/Getty.

Daniel Kennelly responds to my post on Obama, Pakistan, and international goodwill.

Jacob Sullum calls out Palin for her pot smoking hypocrisy:

Palin got to smoke pot without worrying about legal consequences and now wants to deny that assurance to fellow Alaskans doing exactly the same thing. "Palin doesn’t support legalizing marijuana," the Anchorage Daily News reported in 2006, because she worries about "the message it would send to her four kids."

It’s Palin’s job to teach her children that certain pleasures are reserved for grownups. The government should not continue to arrest adults who are harming no one simply because her children are easily confused.

If I were Palin, I wouldn’t be going around pontificating about the responsibility of adults to send the right messages to their kids, would you?

Yes, Obama now has a narrow lead in a few daily tracking polls. We should wait and see how this plays at the state level:

(Diageo, Rasmussen, Gallup, Research 2000) currently give about a 3-point swing toward Obama compared with McCain’s post-convention peak last week. However, it’s not clear what this means for the race. Just as McCain’s bounce was disproportionately concentrated in red states, this “unbounce” might also not be evenly distributed. We won’t know until next week.

For real! The candidate for vice-president of the United States actually responded to a question from the press! Amazing:

Though she has been on the campaign trail for nearly three weeks, Palin has yet to hold a press conference, and this morning’s stop marked the first time she answered a question from the press on the fly, prompting concerned looks from staffers.

What twilight zone are we in?

Scott Horton interviews Bart Gellman, author of Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency. One snippet:

A lot of critics call Cheney and Addington contemptuous of the Constitution. I think that’s completely wrong–a cartoon that misses something important, because it fails to take them seriously. The vice president has an unyielding conviction, to which he has devoted substantial thought, about what the Constitution means. He occupies an extreme position in the usual separation-of-powers debate, sometimes beginning with widely accepted tenets but carrying them beyond the bounds of accepted scholarship. In his own frame of reference, the Constitution not only permits but compels him to help Bush break free of restraints on his prerogatives as commander in chief and leader of the unitary executive branch. But where Cheney does show contempt is for public opinion, the capacity of the citizenry at large to make rational decisions.

The whole interview is fascinating, especially how Cheney manipulated the vetting process for veep to persecute his personal enemies.

Leonhardt:

At its core, the current crisis stems from two problems. Regulators, starting with Alan Greenspan, assumed that a real estate bubble couldn’t happen and that Wall Street could largely police itself. And households, struggling with incomes that haven’t kept up with inflation in recent years, said yes when those lightly regulated banks offered them wishful-thinking loans. No bailout can solve either problem.

This is a deep and very wide crisis – rooted in Americans’ refusal to accept that in a globalized world, their free lunch is over. And so they borrowed for free lunches on the basis first of stock speculation and then real estate insanity – and the absence of any sober conservatism in fiscal and economic policy enabled them.

To my mind, what is happening now in the economy is the same as what happened in Iraq after the invasion. The denial of the American people of the reality of the world they live in has finally caught up with them. Real conservative leaders do their best to remind people of their delusions. But the Bush Republicans – the party supposed to say no and talk of limits and responsibility – did the opposite, betraying core principles for the sake of power. They enabled the delusions and encouraged the denialism in economics and war. Hence our current impasse in the economy and the Middle East: a fatal and toxic combination of a feckless, short-attention-span public and an irresponsible, denialist, anti-conservative government.

This is what reality feels like. And I have a feeling – both in the war and in the economy – the worst is yet to come.

(Hat tip: Perry)