A black comic pretends to introduce John McCain in St Paul. Made me spit half my latte on my laptop in a car somewhere in New Jersey now. Money quote (but read the whole thing):
Look at this place. I can’t believe this shit! Y’all couldn’t find one single brother? (shouting)
There is? Where? (shouting)
Yo, what up, brother! Looks like you the only chocolate chip in the cookie. (laughter)
You look like a fly in a glass of milk, yo. Swim! Swim for your life!
Obama tries to silence his critics. This is a disgraceful attempt to intimidate journalists trying to get at facts and air them. There is nothing to fear from journalists asking questions or raising issues that campaigns should be eager to engage and refute if necessary – especially in the last six weeks of a campaign where the onus should not be on reporters’ not asking questions but on candidates’ refusing to answer them. The demonization of the press, the intimidation of bloggers and the smears of writers is the McCain-Palin-Rove campaign’s modus operandi. It should not be Obama’s. It’s McCain and Palin who won’t hold press conferences and Palin who won’t allow herself to be questioned by real journalists in uncontrolled settings.
Obama’s campaign is about transparency. McCain’s and Palin’s is about secrecy, and contempt for a free and unfettered press. It would be foolish for Obama to abandon his principles now.
Felix Salmon is worried:
The message is loud and clear: AIG is toast. This is the massive counterparty failure everybody’s been scared of, and frankly I’m astonished that the broader stock market isn’t plunging as a result. No one is prepared for the repercussions here: the failure of AIG is likely to be an order of magnitude more harmful than the failure of LTCM would have been. And it’s not even happening on a Friday, where we could have yet another Emergency Weekend to try to work things out.
Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Robert Mueller listens during a House Judiciary Committee hearing on Captiol Hill September 16, 2008 in Washington, DC. The committee asked Mueller about the FBI’s anthrax investigation, allegations of improper collection of information on reporters, the Bureau’s approach to the mortgage fraud crisis, and the expanded investigative and intelligence gathering powers resulting from the proposed Attorney General Guidelines concerning the FBI’s domestic operations. By Chip Somodevilla/Getty.
I know that the partisan right is now taking their cues from the lies of the McCain and Palin campaigns, but this sentence from Victor Davis Hanson demands a response:
We’ve seen that with the Atlantic Monthly pictures and blog rumors about Palin’s recent Down Syndrome pregnancy …
The only Atlantic Monthly picture of McCain is perfectly respectable, and the essay written by someone deeply fond of the man. And our editor has apologized for the photographer’s extra-curricular activities, even though he had, in my view, no reason to. And that’s a sign of media derangement? It’s more class than NRO has ever displayed. By equating the picture selected with those that were rejected and calling them all "Atlantic Monthly pictures," Hanson is deliberately smearing this magazine. I won’t let that stand, especially since Hanson must know that these editorial decisions were made long ago, well before the current war between the press and the McCain camp.
As for blog "rumors" about a Down Syndrome pregnancy, all this blog has done is ask for facts and context about a subject that the Palin campaign has put at the center of its message, facts about a baby held up at a convention as a political symbol for the pro-life movement, and cited in Palin’s acceptance speech. You do that, you invite questions about it. I make absolutely no apologies for doing my job.
I find the account of her pregnancy and labor provided by Palin to be perplexing, to put it mildly, and I have every right to ask questions about it, especially since we have discovered that this woman lies more compulsively and less intelligently than the Clintons. If a story does not makes sense or raises serious questions about the sincerity of a candidate’s embrace of a core political message, it is not rumor-mongering to ask about it. It is journalism. And in the absence of any information from the Palin campaign, I have aired every possible view trying to explain it. What else am I supposed to do? Pretend these questions don’t exist? Pretend her story makes sense to me? I owe my readers my honest opinion. That’s not rumor-mongering, it’s fulfilling my core commitment to my readers.
The reason the press is finally angry is because they are sick of being lied to so aggressively and contemptuously and being denied any meaningful access to a person who could be elected vice-president in six weeks and technically assume the presidency within a few months. All my factual questions of more than two weeks ago, moreover, remain unanswered by the McCain campaign. They are all factual questions demanding simple factual answers that any campaign that wasn’t bent on deceit and lies would be more than eager and perfectly able to provide.
Why haven’t they? When will they?
Andrew Romano makes an important point about the economic crisis:
Now that the press and the public are finally paying attention, Obama can’t just say that McCain is out of touch and call it a day. He has to explain what he would do differently–and better. He has to sell his plan for righting an economy still reeling from the real estate and mortgage crises–something he shied away from doing today, preferring instead to rely on the "same vague… pitc[h] he has sounded over the past few months for fixing what ails the country.”
My advice: give a speech offering concrete solutions followed by a press conference. I think Obama and Biden should be giving many more press conferences. It is bizarre, to my mind, that one vice-presidential candidate has never given a national one – and we have only six weeks to go. More than bizarre: outrageous.
A reader adds:
I think your answer lies in the reader who stated that Palin was also at risk for a neural tube defect. While a baby at risk for DS may not force a woman to have an amnio, a neural tube defect certainly will. That kind of defect is often something a baby cannot survive and is a major reason someone would have a abortion in the last trimester. The baby with that kind of defect could have no chance of survival outside of the womb.
Palin could’ve been looking at a situation where she was carrying to term a fetus that had essentially died. I don’t know what her pro-life conscience would’ve told her to do in that situation, but it could’ve been a reality that she had to face.
Thanks. I can certainly understand the difficulties. Nonetheless, an opponent of abortion in all circumstances would not, surely, have an abortion in the third trimester anyway, unless the mother’s life was at risk. If a pro-life woman has a miscarriage that is as much a tragedy as it is for every pregnant mother. But, again, a real pro-lifer would not do anything to increase the chances of such a miscarriage – unless, in Palin’s own words, is could affect not the health but the actual life of the mother.
One option: as a public figure, and perhaps a president of the US next January, she could always, you know, explain. The baby was a major prop at the convention and is constantly used to appeal to pro-life voters. The pregnancy has been in the New York Times, People, and the Anchorage Daily News. It’s not like this is a secret, or that the pro-life debate isn’t one Palin is eager to have. So why won’t she tell us more? If she intends to be a representative of parents with children with special needs, and wants to persuade other women not to abort children with DS, telling us more about her pregnancy, the choices she faced, and the decisions she made would be very helpful.
From St Paul, home of Larry Craig’s wide stance and Cindy McCain’s $300,000 outfit:
He met her in the bar of the swank hotel and invited her to his room. Once there, the woman fixed the drinks and told him to get undressed. And that, the delegate to the Republican National Convention told police, was the last thing he remembered. When he awoke, the woman was gone, as was more than $120,000 in money, jewelry and other belongings.
"Fascist writer Westbrook Pegler, an avowed racist who Sarah Palin approvingly quoted in her acceptance speech for the moral superiority of small town values, expressed his fervent hope about my father, Robert F. Kennedy, as he contemplated his own run for the presidency in 1965, that "some white patriot of the Southern tier will spatter his spoonful of brains in pubic premises before the snow flies." It might be worth asking Governor Palin for a tally of the other favorites from her reading list," – Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (Hat tip: Danny.)
Justin Wolfers posts competing charts on the candidates’ tax plans. Chartjunk’s is very helpful, especially when adjusted for the actual contribution to revenues that the successful make:
The Dish 