Beware, I Live!

"[A]s Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America [....]" -- Sarah Palin

I know I'm a bit late to this one, but just saw it and cannot get rid of the image of a giant putin-head floating into alaskan airspace. All I can think of is [turn your volume up]: this, and this, and this.

"He recused himself...."

Really, really painful to watch Palin taking even the first questions from legendarily hard-hitting Katie Kouric. If you turn the sound all the way up during the long pause after the very first followup question, you can hear Palin thinking, "I said what they told me to say, and it's not working! It's not working! What do I do?!?? .... I'll just repeat it again."

Secret Republican Brass Meeting

"Ok, screw it. We don't like McCain and never have. He's turning out to be even worse as a candidate than we feared. The last thing we need after Bush is more embarrassment. So let's call it an election and start working on getting Obama out of office in 2012."

eBailout

I have some more great ideas about how to use public funds to bolster the economy.

1. Treasury promises to meet the reserve on every item listed on ebay. The inability to move undervalued secondhand goods is crippling our economy. Once private owners get these items off of our books, our balance sheets will look much better.
2. Treasury will buy up soup overstock. Everybody loves soup. Lack of turnover impacts (ahem) liquidity in the soup offerings. Guaranteed soup repurchase will encourage restaurant creativity and menu changes, stimulating custom and getting the "stay at home and eat catfood" crowd back on the path of helpful consumer spending.
3. Treasury will fund professional sports stadiums. Too many sports stadiums are funded by cities and states. It is excellent that these privately-owned, profitable franchises are receiving direct public benefit, but why at only the local level? Federal public monies should do their fair share to help the sports industry, too.
4. Hank Paulson will reglaze my windows. They're getting a bit shabby. I'll paint them, but I expect the feds to repurchase if I buy too much paint.
5. Treasury will buyout distressed 401k investment choices. My retirement balance sheet is looking better already.
6. Houses for Polar Bears. When fed helicopters are not busy dropping money onto wall street, they will be used to airlift foreclosed homes to the arctic circle.
   

Quite A Week For Financials

High drama.

• The Lehman building in midtown is a tourist stop now. Lots of people stopping to take photos of it, even after all the TV crews finally lost interest. I personally don't see the attraction of having a snapshot of it proudly displayed in your home albums, but I guess people want documentary evidence that they were there, or something.
  
• Also noteworthy is how crappy the NYT coverage was. As a general NYT fan and an IHT subscriber, I was appalled.
  
• I kind of felt bad for McCain. He was trying to keep up, sort of, but was obvious he had no idea wtf he was talking about, especially as he struggled to read aloud various scripted proposals his people had telepromptered in front of him. I was hoping someone would ask him to describe what the SEC, the Fed, and the Treasury actually do. Especially seems like a fair question after he called for Cox to resign. I wouldn't bet that he knows.
  

Accurate Campaign Description

On news this morning, a reporter from thestreet.com was asked about McCain's blaming "wall street fat cats", and she noted that this was how you might, incorrectly, explain it when "talking to a 5-yr-old".

Panic on the streets of midtown.... (a singalong)

Hang the blessed banker
because the instruments they constantly trade
add nothing of value to society
hang investment bankers
and the instruments they constantly trade

hang the banker hang the banker hang the banker....

Lie About Everything

There's growing dismay over the McCain campaign's increasingly blatant strategy to lie about anything and everything, no matter how provably false any given claim is. DailyKos suggests this is a test for the press. It's not. It's a test for the public. The NYT could cover nothing but McCain campaign sleaze between now and November, and for the depressingly large segment of the public that is informed solely by talk radio and a bit of tv news, it won't matter. So we'll see.

New Wii Games

One of my many next careers will be game designer. The boys and I already have 2 in the product development pipeline:

1. Pleasant Evil -- a world with lots of zombies, but instead of shooting them in the head, you train them to do housework and such.
   
2. Dr. Shinbone's Annoyathon -- we admit we haven't gotten past the title and the high concept that no mothers will like this game.

Proximity Effect

I'm still intrigued by the notion that proximity = experience in the realm of international affairs. The Kremlin is actually closer to the capital of Maine than it is to the capital of Alaska. Which state fosters the most international experience by virtue of proximity? Do borders count or just distance? Do we use the least squares method to calculate international exposure for a given place? So, for example, would Kansas rank higher than either North Dakota or Texas? Does water count differently than land? Would Hawaii be at an advantage or disadvantage? If "seeing" counts, do states with higher viewership of BBC shows or other international content get bonus points?

Football Injuries

With Tom Brady out for the year after a few minutes in the first game of the season, there's renewed talk about injuries in football and how to prevent them. The unintended consequence of more and better "protective" equipment in the sport was a corresponding rise in injuries. The only rule that will ultimately reduce injuries is one that bars the use of protective equipment. No helmets, no pads.

Can't Wait For Debate

Have calmed down now. Palin is a distraction. Lord help us if the general election turns into a referendum on whether Americans "like" Sarah Palin or not.

Where Are The Ron Paul Supporters?

Why aren't more Ron Paul supporters backing Obama? I admit I haven't studied his positions, so I could be way off the mark, but I assumed he was mostly libertarian. On the question of "small government", I don't think they'll get what they want from either McCain or Obama in terms of federal spend. On the question of civil liberties, Obama clearly wins. On the question of constitutionality, Obama clearly wins. So why are they faking smiles for McCain?

and back to the stupid

Noticed on DailyKos a link to some trite political analysis by Charlie Cook, that concludes:

But resistance to Obama is making it close--just as a stool with only three of its legs can stand but is shaky. Whether the fourth leg is defined as whites over 50, working-class whites, or whites over 65, McCain's challenge this week is to firm up his grip and keep Obama from adding the final leg to the stool.

Never mind that 3-legged stools can be really stable, what concerns me most is the thought of McCain wanting Obama to have loose stool.

Sportsetizer

Thank goodness the football season has started again! Nice break from politics, although I have to point out that NFL pre-season coverage, including fantasy football league draft analysis, has been galactically more thorough, robust, fact-based, even-handed, and higher-quality than election coverage. Oh well. That said, there's so much coverage of sports that it's still easy to find some really bad bits, too. Funniest example: an article predicting Notre Dame will do well because they have 16 returning starters. 16! That sounds good, except that those 16 starters laster year won only 3 games. So at least someone out there is excited that the same incompetent people will be getting yet another stab at screwing things up. Wait a minute-- I think I've gone back to talking about Republicans again....

Depressing

I intended to watch the RNC speeches but ended up not being able to stomach much. As Glenn Greenwald accurately put it, they were "mocking, scornful, derisive, demonizing and deeply personal". The Democrats had taken a few stabs, but the theme was that McCain was a good American who is out of touch and outright wrong on the issues. Republicans can't win on the issues, again, so they portray Obama as worthy of contempt. Who are these people? Why does this work? Again, the DNC was castigated by armchair strategists for not doing the same, but, really, I'd prefer they didn't. Even mild, cornball, non-political jabs such as "McSame" are hard to say without a cringe. I mean, we're all adults, right? I guess not. And that's depressing.

P.S. Was Huckabee's big worry about "European ideas" a coded shout-out to the anti-semites in the audience, or simply a deep fear that the US will get all fancy-pants and civilized?

Not Sold In The US

Nice review of the new Seat hatchback, gets 74 mpg per British figures (better than prius, and lower emissions than prius). Converting to non-imperial gallons, that's about 61 mpg in the US, although the US EPA estimates don't use the same "combined" algorithm that the UK ones do I'm sure. Still, it's cheap, very low emisions, and astoundingly fuel efficient. US availability: never.

More Loathing

As a followup from previous post, please enjoy this editorial from 9 years ago. Given McCain's angry grudge-mongering, and given Palin's similar approach to dissent -- first impulse: you're fired (even without the trooper issue, she has a real track record here, from firing the town librarian in Wasilla for not banning books, to firing the police chief for political reasons, to firing Alaska's entire Board of Agriculture and Conservation in order to overturn the decision to close the Matanuska Maid Dairy, which was subsequently closed anyway) -- if McCain wins, this could be the most vendettarific whitehouse ever! And given the Bush and Nixon track records, this would be an impressive achievement for his party.

Loathing in AZ

Since McCain is getting such a free pass from the gullible, the credulous, and the press when he claims to be a "maverick" and vows to "clean up washington" [cough, cough], I found this article very interesting.

governing

Mocking is easy. Governing well is hard.

Republicans have proven astonishingly good at mockery, and crap at governing. The body of evidence is clear on both counts.

Northern Decider

Evidence against the decline of the US as a superpower: Americans' ability to say anything with a straight face. Yes, Russia and China are good at this, too, but do not yet have the top to bottom mastery on display in the US -- from the craftiest high-level political operative to the common American dumbass. Rarely a better example than the support of Palin. What I've learned from both spinners and credulous corkheads:

• being a governor is just like being president... a mini-president!
• alaska doesn't have a lot of people, but it has a lot of land, and that counts for... something; and besides, small populations do not matter, unless the state is Vermont
  
• a governor is COMMANDER IN CHIEF of the state's national guard, which counts for both military and commandery-in-chief experience
• a governor is an expert on international affairs if the governor's state borders on a separate country, such as Canada, unless the state is Vermont
• because it's so executivey, governorship is better experience than senatorship, but only up to a point... it counts more than double senate experience, but then senate experience also works in reverse once you get much past a couple dozen years, so, 4 yrs senate: worthless! 20 months governor: awesome! 21 years senate: even awesomer! 35 years senate: too much, omg, wtf, lol!
• a state pondering secession is engaging in admirable old-timey patriotic thought, just like our founding fathers did every day after reciting the pledge of allegiance, unless the state is Vermont
• family values.... actually, there's too much for me to learn here, as I have no clue what this is supposed to mean! I will have to do some more research and get back to this one.
• anyway, when McCain gets mini-raptured straight to heaven moments after delivering his visionary inaugural address, Sarah Palin is going to be the Best President Ever!

The New Decider's Corrector

Does this mean Palin has to be the one to whisper corrections to McCain when he starts making stuff up, or will Lieberman be kept on staff to keep fulfilling that role?

question this

So the McCain campaign is getting vindictive over CNN doing a bit of actual pushback when an operative doesn't answer the question. This bit of questioning is fairly tame by British standards, but no matter, it's shockingly horrific affrontery! Let the umbrage begin....