Marc has some good campaign bullet points. Here’s a sample:
The press has decided that McCain’s distortions are more consequential than Obama’s distortions, and they are calling McCain out for them. A "narrative" has been created. This turn has been accompanied by cheers from the pundit class that Obama has gotten meaner. Conservative activists may retrench.
"Perhaps a once-in-a-century event" – Alan Greenspan.
Felix Salmon’s take on the banking crisis:
This isn’t like Y2K, when if computers were still working at 1am, you knew that they’d survived the test. If AIG hasn’t collapsed after New York markets open and the broader stock market is down less than 5%, all that will mean is that there hasn’t been a systemic meltdown yet. It’s going to take a long time to liquidate Lehman and unwind all of its positions, and nobody has a clue how that’s going to play out. Specifically, there might well be a levered-to-the-eyeballs multi-billion-dollar hedge fund or two with enormous Lehman Brothers counterparty risk, and if they start defaulting on their derivatives contracts, delayed contagion could spread very quickly indeed.
It’s not just hedge funds, either, which could end up being the vector by which crisis is spread. It could be a big insurance company, or it could be a series of failures of small and medium-sized banks. Or it could come out of left field entirely: the "shadow banking system" is now so big and so global that for all we know a series of bad decisions by a mid-level technocrat in Kazakhstan could precipitate cataclysm across America and the world.
The crunchy conservative feels his reason overcoming his emotion:
Damn, I love her, but this is a big downer … your blog host is significantly more conflicted about his enthusiasm for Sarah Palin. I completely dig her, and wish she were my governor. But my vice president? Hmm.
The saner conservatives are off the Palin Express:
There’s no way to look at her performance as anything save supporting evidence for the non-hysterical critique of her candidacy – that it’s just too much, too soon – and a splash of cold water for those of us with high hopes for her future on the national stage.
Nate Silver wonders if Obama misallocated resources.
And Karl McCain started it. Kos responds to one of my reader’s e-mails:
To all the concerned people emailing me about "being played", don’t waste your time. I’m not about to revert to writing puff pieces about Obama thinking that his magic "new politics" bullshit will carry us to victory. He may or may not believe that crap, but I don’t. We’re going to win this thing the way campaigns are won — by playing hardball. Politics is a blood sport.
Republicans understand this and never flinch from flinging the shit. We won’t win until we learn to fight back in kind. And I’m more than happy to get down in the mud with our friends on the Right so Obama doesn’t have to.
Recent history vindicates the "tough and aggressive" path. We went toe to toe against Rove and his machine in 2006, and our math beat his. I have no doubt we’re in for a two-peat this year, and it’ll happen because we won’t back off from exposing the GOP for the den of lies and corruption it has become.
I tend to agree more with Nate Silver. But I do think that Moulitsas’ distinction between what the Obama campaign can do and what the rest of us can do is a fair one. I intend to be relentless for the next six weeks, morning, noon and night, weeks and weekdays, exposing the lies of the McCain-Palin campaign and showing their unfitness – in terms of competence, decency, intelligence, and experience – to become president and vice-president of the US. I will be making arguments and presenting facts in ways I do not expect and do not want Obama himself to engage him.
But these last two weeks – and this absurd, insulting pick for veep – has roused me. As I know it has roused many. McCain needs to be more than defeated. He needs to be exposed as the dishonest, despicable, desperate and dishonorable cynic he has become.
Jill Greenberg is, er, eccentric in an unpleasant way. But it’s a free country and she can post whatever she wants on her own blog. The only salient thing for the Atlantic at all is that the photograph selected by my colleagues is perfectly respectful and actually quite fetching. Jeffrey’s article, in my totally unbiased view, is a very insightful look into the militarism that defines McCain. So read it.
Ezra has a good post on high fructose corn syrup:
Over the past 10 years alone, Congress has appropriated more than $50 billion to encourage farmers to grow the stuff. But people don’t want to eat $50 billion in subsidized corn. And if the cobs just sat around developing mold, Congress would cut off the spigot. Enter high fructose corn syrup, which sucks up the subsidies and created a world in which calories from a sweet, highly caloric additive have become the cheapest of all energy sources. That’s the primary way the syrup contributes to obesity: Not by being more fattening, but by being so heavily subsidized that it makes it far cheaper to sustain yourself on sweetened carbohydrates than on nutritious food. That might be fine if the sweetener were naturally cheap, but instead, taxpayers are funding a concerted effort to flood grocery stores with unnaturally cheap, utterly unhealthy, foods.
(Hat tip: Poulos)
Jesse Bering, a gay experimental psychologist, lists a few of the odder evolutionary theories for homosexuality. This is my favorite:
John Maynard Smith is often credited with what is colloquially called the "sneaky f*cker theory," which argues that gay men in the ancestral past had unique access to the reproductive niche because females let their guards down around them and other males didn’t view them as sexual competitors. (I rather like this one: remember, we’re not infertile, we’re just gay. Although in my case, it’d take a lot of gin to work.)
The Dish 