Quotes of the day

What was driving unemployment was clearly deficient aggregate demand. [Larry Summers and I] wondered where [President Obama's misplaced belief that high unemployment was caused by productivity gains] could be coming from. We both tried to convince him otherwise. He wouldn’t budge.--Christina Romer

[McCain] didn't have a clue about the economy. I just assumed the guy [Obama] could do it. I thought he was going to be more Clinton-like in his economics and politics. I was caught by surprise by how far left the guy is and how much he's hung onto it and, I would say, at considerable cost to his own standing. ... The president keeps focusing on transitory things. He grudgingly says, 'OK, we'll keep the Bush tax cuts on for a couple years.' That's just the wrong thing to say. What I care about is what's the tax rate going to be when my project begins to bear fruit?--Robert Lucas

Scale matters--you can't take billion-dollar fliers on too many ideas. Appropriateness matters--retirees shouldn't put their living expenses in tech stocks. And the potential payoff matters--we should not invest billions to develop a slightly better form of white-out, or into experiments that have a 1-in-a-trillion chance of developing a low-cost way to turn lead into gold. I think Solyndra flunks on all three counts.--Megan McArdle

As of this moment, which do you think is more likely — that neutrinos can travel faster than light, or that the South won the Civil War?--Steve Landsburg

Our existence today requires that the North won the Civil War, therefore it’s unthinkable they actually lost. Likewise, our atomic existence today requires that neutrinos do not surpass the speed of light, therefore it’s unthinkable they somehow went faster. It’s just that most people comprehend the former and not the latter, and thus don’t see how absurd the latter is.--Sean

Many people, when the pressure is on as hard as it's been, decide that the first thing they have to do is try to hang on to their job. Anything interesting and risky can wait until after the mortgage payment has cleared and the tuition checks have been written. The behaviors most associated with "Don't get laid off" are not the ones that are best associated with "Keep the company going", much less "Discover something new". That last set of behaviors, in fact, might be one of the first to go, along with the people who exemplify them.--Derek Lowe

Here's what the 1936 government pamphlet on Social Security said: "After the first 3 years -- that is to say, beginning in 1940 -- you will pay, and your employer will pay, 1.5 cents for each dollar you earn, up to $3,000 a year. ... Beginning in 1943, you will pay 2 cents, and so will your employer, for every dollar you earn for the next 3 years. ... And finally, beginning in 1949, twelve years from now, you and your employer will each pay 3 cents on each dollar you earn, up to $3,000 a year." Here's Congress' lying promise: "That is the most you will ever pay."--Walter Williams

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner may be working at cross purposes as one buys Treasury bonds and the other sells them.  The Fed plans to purchase $400 billion of longer-dated Treasuries in a bid to reduce yields. At the same time, the Treasury Department is selling more long-term securities to decrease its reliance on short-term borrowing. That strategy puts upward pressure on interest rates by adding to market supply.--Rich Miller

... it is clear that the Palestinian Authority now governing the West Bank cannot “deliver” a united Palestine: it cannot sign a treaty that Hamas will pledge to honor. Hamas won the last Palestinian elections; does Israel have any guarantee whatever that, after the Israelis have dismantled settlements and turned over strategic territory to the Palestinians, the Palestinian government will continue to abide by a treaty that Hamas doesn’t accept? The answer is no. Until the answer is yes it is very unlikely that Israel will make large sacrifices for what is likely to be a bogus, temporary peace. The core problem with the land for peace concept at the basis of both the Oslo Accords and every effort since to revive the moribund peace process is, simply, this: the process doesn’t offer enough land to the Palestinians or enough peace to the Israelis to be satisfactory to either side. ... It’s doubtful at this point if the President can get much done before the 2012 election. Palestinians don’t much like negotiating during US election years as they believe that Israel’s political popularity in the US makes itself felt most strongly then. (One reason President Clinton’s peace blitz was ill-timed in 2000: his wife was running for the Senate in New York and Palestinians believed he would not force Israel to make difficult concessions while his wife was running in a state where the Jewish vote is so important and while his vice president Al Gore was in a tough race against George W. Bush. After the election, Clinton was a lame duck and the Palestinians had little confidence that he could deliver on any promises he made.)--Walter Russell Mead

I think that the best way to get rid of the worst teachers(short of full-on vouchers with no government-run schools) would be to de-consolidate school districts, which would shift the balance of power toward parents and away from school administrators and teachers' unions. In my opinion, the large school district is one of the most anti-libertarian institutions in the United States today.--Arnold Kling

In general, despite extensive government subsidies, hyperprocessed food remains more expensive than food cooked at home. You can serve a roasted chicken with vegetables along with a simple salad and milk for about $14, and feed four or even six people. If that’s too much money, substitute a meal of rice and canned beans with bacon, green peppers and onions; it’s easily enough for four people and costs about $9. (Omitting the bacon, using dried beans, which are also lower in sodium, or substituting carrots for the peppers reduces the price further, of course.) Another argument runs that junk food is cheaper when measured by the calorie, and that this makes fast food essential for the poor because they need cheap calories. But given that half of the people in this country (and a higher percentage of poor people) consume too many calories rather than too few, measuring food’s value by the calorie makes as much sense as measuring a drink’s value by its alcohol content. (Why not drink 95 percent neutral grain spirit, the cheapest way to get drunk?)--Mark Bittman

Forget the Crimson Tide. It's the Crimson who's rolling.--Chris Berman

Bill Belichick went to Wesleyan. Safety school.--Cav

Quotes of the day

This magnificent grace, this expansive grace, this 'Amazing Grace' calls me to reflect. And it calls me to pray. It calls me to ask God for forgiveness for the times that I’ve not shown grace to others, those times that I’ve fallen short. It calls me to praise God for the gift of our son -- his Son and our Savior.--President Obama

Speaking as a conflicted McCain voter, I'd say Obama's election captures the five things I love most about my country.--William Stuntz

You may be incompetent at your job, but your 5 year old will still need you very much. There is a basic appreciation for one’s biological parents, regardless of how much they actually hang out (note Obama's elevation of his sperm-donor dad), and the littlest things a grandparent does for a child is often looked back at with profound appreciation. For example, in The Education of Henry Adams, the author recounts an episode from when he was six or seven. He vaguely remembers throwing a tantrum about not wanting to go to school. His frail 80 year old grandfather, the American President John Quincy Adams (son of President and Founding Father John Adams), appears, and takes his hand, and walked him silently a mile to the schoolhouse. No lecture, just a walk, but right to school, and the tantrum was over. Looking back, Henry Adams notes that “the seeds of a moral education would at that moment have fallen on the stoniest soil in Quincy”. These are the things parents and grandparents strive for, hoping that when they are long gone a consciousness truly appreciates something they have done in a profound way. ... This gets down to what, specifically, is in a person's utility function. The traditional objective function takes one's consumption as the primary objective, and then present values the 'utility' of this consumption. This leads to weird convolutions, where one 'consumes' children, and actually doesn't enjoy their company but still prefers them. I think a more reasonable approach would be to assume people are maximizing their external appreciation in society. This is going to be increasing in wealth, because the more money one has, the more favors one can do, the more people will flatter you to get business or use your boat. And it all gets back to maximizing status. A status maximizer maximizes his appreciation in this world. Someone looking merely at their consumption bundle should consider themselves rich in the West even if they are at the bottom of society working as a parking attendant, but of course they would not feel rich at all, they would feel very poor. As people crave appreciation from others, maximizing their status is a direct path to that end. So is having children.--Eric Falkenstein

Photo link here.

Quotes of the day

So even the regulator with the best intentions comes to see issues in much the same way as the corporate officers he deals with every day. You require both an abrasive personality and considerable intellectual curiosity to do the job in any other way. And these are not the qualities often sought, or found, in regulators.--John Kay

... the damage done to the Air Force’s reputation, and indeed to the entire military procurement system, may be longstanding. The people who know this [refueling tanker] contract well believe that military officials are being influenced by members of Congress, who have taken sides in the deal along party lines. Politics has always factored into Pentagon programs, but never on a contract of this size that was already stained by corruption and criminality.--Shane Harris

This brilliant line* revealed many enduring truths about political humor: that the true challenge is to determine the worst thing an opponent might say about and then to find a way to say it about yourself. That in politics, things are only as bad as things you can’t joke about. That jokes that concede the obvious cost little and earn back something valuable in terms of likeability and credibility. And that if these rules are adhered to, that the resulting joke can be as Machiavellian as anything Machiavelli might have schemed up.--Mark Katz

*Jack – Don’t spend one dime more than is necessary. I’ll be damned if I am going to pay for a landslide.--Joe Kennedy, in a fictional telegram to his son

Camille Paglia keeps making sense

on Obama, Palin, and feminism:

Eat dirt, you sour Clintons, who said Obama was "unelectable." Obama's 8 million vote margin over his Republican opponent -- miraculously sparing us endless litigation and chad counting -- was an exhilarating testimony to his personal gifts and power of persuasion. And the formidable Michelle Obama, with her electric combo of brains and style, is already rewriting first ladyhood. The warm partnership of the Obamas (wonderfully caught by the camera as they disappeared offstage after his victory) has set an inspiring standard for modern marriage.

Yes, it's true we know relatively little about Barack Obama, and his triumph is a roll of the dice. But John McCain (like Bob Dole) was a major Republican misfire -- a candidate of personal honor and heroic sacrifice who was woefully inadequate for the times. McCain's lurching grandstanding during the Wall Street crisis made him look like a ham actor on a bender. In debate, McCain was always pugnacious but too often bland or rambling, and he often missed glaring opportunities to score off Obama's vagueness or contradictions.

...

In the closing weeks of the election, however, I became increasingly disturbed by the mainstream media's avoidance of forthright dealing with several controversies that had been dogging Obama -- even as every flimsy rumor about Sarah Palin was being trumpeted as if it were engraved in stone on Mount Sinai. For example, I had thought for many months that the flap over Obama's birth certificate was a tempest in a teapot. But simple questions about the certificate were never resolved to my satisfaction. Thanks to their own blathering, fanatical overkill, of course, the right-wing challenges to the birth certificate never gained traction.

But Obama could have ended the entire matter months ago by publicly requesting Hawaii to issue a fresh, long-form, stamped certificate and inviting a few high-profile reporters in to examine the document and photograph it. (The campaign did make the "short-form" certificate available to Factcheck.org, a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.) And why has Obama not made his university records or thesis work widely available? The passivity of the press toward Bush administration propaganda about weapons of mass destruction led the nation into the costly blunder of the Iraq war. We don't need another presidency that finds it all too easy to rely on evasion or stonewalling. I deeply admire Obama, but as a voter I don't like feeling gamed or played.

...

Pursuing the truth about Ayers, I recently rented the 2002 documentary "The Weather Underground," from Netflix. It was riveting. Although the film seems to waver between ominous exposé and blatant whitewash, the full extent of the group's bombing campaign is dramatically demonstrated. It's not for everyone: The film uses gratuitous cutaways of horrifying carnage, from the Vietnam War to the Manson murders (such as Sharon Tate's smiling corpse, bathed in blood). But the news footage of the Greenwich Village townhouse destroyed in 1970 by bomb-making gone wrong in the basement still has enormous impact. Standing in the chaotic street, actor Dustin Hoffman, who lived next door, seems like Everyman at the apocalypse.

Ayers comes off in the film as a vapid, slightly dopey, chronic juvenile with stunted powers of ethical reasoning. The real revelation is his wife, Bernardine Dohrn (who evidently worked at the same large Chicago law firm as Michelle Obama in the mid-1990s). Of course I had heard of Dohrn -- hers was one of the most notorious names of our baby-boom generation -- and I knew her black-and-white police mug shot. But I had never seen footage of her speaking or interacting with others. Well, it's pretty obvious who wears the pants in that family!

The mystery of Bernardine Dohrn: How could such a personable, attractive, well-educated young woman end up saying such things at a 1969 political rally as this (omitted in the film) about the Manson murders: "Dig it. First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them. They even shoved a fork into a victim's stomach. Wild!" And how could Dohrn have so ruthlessly pursued a decade-long crusade of hatred and terrorism against innocent American citizens and both private and public property?

"The Weather Underground" never searches for answers, but it does show Dohrn, then and now, as a poised, articulate woman of extremely high intelligence and surprising inwardness. The audio extra of her reading the collective's first public communiqué ("Revolutionary violence is the only way") is chilling. But the tumultuous footage of her 1980 surrender to federal authorities is a knockout. Mesmerized, I ran the clip six or seven times of her seated at a lawyer's table while reading her still defiant statement. The sober scene -- with Dohrn hyper-alert in a handsome turtleneck and tweedy jacket -- was tailor-made for Jane Fonda in her "Klute" period, androgynous shag. Only illegalities by federal investigators prevented Dohrn from being put away on ice for a long, long time.

...

How dare Palin not embrace abortion as the ultimate civilized ideal of modern culture? How tacky that she speaks in a vivacious regional accent indistinguishable from that of Western Canada! How risible that she graduated from the State University of Idaho and not one of those plush, pampered commodes of received opinion whose graduates, in their rush to believe the worst about her, have demonstrated that, when it comes to sifting evidence, they don't know their asses from their elbows.

Liberal Democrats are going to wake up from their sadomasochistic, anti-Palin orgy with a very big hangover. The evil genie released during this sorry episode will not so easily go back into its bottle. A shocking level of irrational emotionalism and at times infantile rage was exposed at the heart of current Democratic ideology -- contradicting Democratic core principles of compassion, tolerance and independent thought. One would have to look back to the Eisenhower 1950s for parallels to this grotesque lock-step parade of bourgeois provincialism, shallow groupthink and blind prejudice.

I like Sarah Palin, and I've heartily enjoyed her arrival on the national stage. As a career classroom teacher, I can see how smart she is -- and quite frankly, I think the people who don't see it are the stupid ones, wrapped in the fuzzy mummy-gauze of their own worn-out partisan dogma. So she doesn't speak the King's English -- big whoop! There is a powerful clarity of consciousness in her eyes. She uses language with the jumps, breaks and rippling momentum of a be-bop saxophonist. I stand on what I said (as a staunch pro-choice advocate) in my last two columns -- that Palin as a pro-life wife, mother and ambitious professional represents the next big shift in feminism. Pro-life women will save feminism by expanding it, particularly into the more traditional Third World.

As for the Democrats who sneered and howled that Palin was unprepared to be a vice-presidential nominee -- what navel-gazing hypocrisy! What protests were raised in the party or mainstream media when John Edwards, with vastly less political experience than Palin, got John Kerry's nod for veep four years ago? And Gov. Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas, for whom I lobbied to be Obama's pick and who was on everyone's short list for months, has a record indistinguishable from Palin's. Whatever knowledge deficit Palin has about the federal bureaucracy or international affairs (outside the normal purview of governors) will hopefully be remedied during the next eight years of the Obama presidencies.

At this rate of truth-seeking, I think Paglia might even find God.

Apparently, Sarah Palin is a Republican, and John McCain not so much

if this is right:

Sixty-nine percent (69%) of Republican voters say Alaska Governor Sarah Palin helped John McCain’s bid for the presidency, even as news reports surface that some McCain staffers think she was a liability.

Only 20% of GOP voters say Palin hurt the party’s ticket, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey. Six percent (6%) say she had no impact, and five percent (5%) are undecided.

Ninety-one percent (91%) of Republicans have a favorable view of Palin, including 65% who say their view is Very Favorable. Only eight percent (8%) have an unfavorable view of her, including three percent (3%) Very Unfavorable.

When asked to choose among some of the GOP’s top names for their choice for the party’s 2012 presidential nominee, 64% say Palin. The next closest contenders are two former governors and unsuccessful challengers for the presidential nomination this year -- Mike Huckabee of Arkansas with 12% support and Mitt Romney of Massachusetts with 11%.

Three other sitting governors – Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, Charlie Crist of Florida and Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota – all pull low single-digit support.

These findings echo a survey earlier this week which found that Republicans were happier with their vice presidential candidate than with their presidential nominee. Seventy-one percent (71%) said McCain made the right choice by picking Palin as his running mate, while only 65% said the party picked the right nominee for president.

Quotes of the day

None of us was able to bang the drum for John McCain. He burned conservatives and sold out conservative principles too many times, he is old, and his campaign, though not nearly as bad as Bob Dole’s or even John Kerry’s, was pretty lame.--Ron Coleman

If there’s anything reporters know better than math, it’s fashion.--Ken Herman

Barack Obama's victory should once and for all finally break the notion that race is a barrier to any goal in the United States. And those who've built their power from anger and racial divisiveness, like Ayers, the Panthers, and Reverend Wright should now be mocked like the small men they are. It will be up to Obama as president to transcend the figures of his past--and it's up to the rest of us as a nation to finally put them into the rearview mirror.--Ed Driscoll

Legal racial segregation was prevalent in America within living memory, yet we appear to have just elected a black man to the position of maximum honor, authority and influence in the country. The manner of this political victory is important, as well. This was not some prize bestowed upon him, and Barack Obama didn’t just buy a winning lottery ticket; he out-smarted and out-worked both Hillary Clinton and John McCain. It is healthy that the American political system gathers the energies and talents of those who feel excluded into the nation to change it, rather than pushing them away from the nation to oppose it.--Jim Manzi

I’m off to the Mall to sell razor blades so people can scrape off their “Question Authority” bumper stickers. Just remember: Dissent is still the highest form of patriotism. Except now it will be practiced by the lowest form of people.--James Lileks

He could turn out to be a horrible President. He could turn out to be a great one. History pushes people in unexpected directions.--James Lileks

Pennsylvania and the Bradley Effect

I was speaking to several Democratic insiders over the weekend, and I was surprised to hear all of them worried about Pennsylvania, which has voted for the Democratic candidate since 1992. Dollars, phone banks, and on-the-ground campaign workers from New York are all focused on keeping Pennsylvania blue.

Perhaps Rep. John Murtha’s remarks on racism in his own constituents, along with the worriers here in New York, is suggesting some social desirability bias.

Do you think the Intrade pricing for PA is that far off? I personally don’t, but perhaps I put too much credence in prediction markets.

UPDATE: Rasmussen says that McCain must win either PA or IN, and also all of these states: CO, FL, MI, NC, OH, VA. Seems like a long shot.

UPDATE: Intrade has Indiana and Missouri going for McCain, but the other 6 states going to Obama, in some cases, very heavily for Obama.

Barack Obama's economic advisers

support John McCain's health care reforms:

"The fact that the tax subsidy, which supports the employer-sponsored system, is better than nothing is a feeble excuse for resisting any changes to the status quo." That's not John McCain's judgment. It's a quote from Jason Furman, who happens to be Mr. Obama's economic policy director. In a cri de coeur published in the journal Democracy in 2006, Mr. Furman implored fellow Democrats and other progressives to confront "a critical missing link" in their health ideology -- the same link his boss now spends most of his time demagoguing.

Mr. Furman used to portray the current system as regressive, inequitable and a subsidy for health plans that insulate consumers from the cost of their care, thus inflating health spending. When he was director of the Brooking Institution's Hamilton Project, Mr. Furman outlined a health reform -- again using tax credits -- that took the "sensible approach" of "exposing individuals to the price of health care through greater cost sharing."

When President Bush unveiled a health reform similar to Mr. McCain's in 2007, Mr. Furman co-authored a Tax Policy Center paper that called it "innovative and a step in the right direction." As recently as May, he published a long article in Health Affairs on the possibilities of health-care tax reform.

What a difference an election makes. "The choice you'll have," Mr. Obama warned of the McCain plan during one of the debates, "is having your employer no longer provide you health care." Sounds terrible. But wait, let's consult another one of Mr. Obama's advisers. David Cutler, the Otto Eckstein Professor of Applied Economics at Harvard, put it this way: "Health insurance is not something that is made better by tying it to employment. As a result, essentially all economists believe that universal coverage should be done outside of employment."

That passage comes from Mr. Cutler's 2004 book, "Your Money or Your Life," which outlined a strategy for universal health care. Not surprisingly, Professor Cutler's plan, like Mr. McCain's, also applied subsidies such as "tax credits -- people get a lower tax bill, or a refund from the government, to be used to purchase insurance." In this he was echoing many other liberal health experts such as MIT's Jonathan Gruber, another Democratic policy star.

These advisers know that Mr. Obama's claim that Mr. McCain will tax health benefits "for the first time in history" is particularly disingenuous. For people who stick with employer coverage under the McCain plan, the money employers take out of wages to pay for insurance would be taxed, but the new credit more than covers the bill. The people who decide to buy coverage on their own would see their wages rise. And everyone who joins the individual market -- many of them uninsured now -- would be equipped with new health dollars, instead of paying with after-tax income.

Obviously neither Mr. Furman nor Mr. Cutler would endorse the McCain plan outright. They are, after all, Democrats. Liberals who support rearranging the tax code for health care think it must be accompanied by other insurance reforms to protect families in the individual market that Mr. McCain doesn't include. Even so, speaking on a Tax Policy Center panel on taxes and health insurance in February of this year, Mr. Furman said that "I think we should be cheerleading" the emphasis on tax reform, "not writing it off."

He even prefaced his remarks by joking, "this talk might actually sound like a John McCain rally." Maybe Mr. Obama should be running attack ads against his own economic guru.

Howard Stern already discovered similar phenomena.

Tax uncertainty

coming from the Obama & McCain camps:

Sen. McCain, who proposes a "refundable tax credit" as the cornerstone of his health-care plan, has described Sen. Obama's proposal to offer a series of refundable tax credits as similar to offering "welfare." The Illinois senator has said 95% of Americans would benefit from some form of tax relief under his economic plan.

Sen. McCain has said his opponent's plan would give tax relief to the 38% of Americans who do not pay any federal income taxes. The Obama campaign says beneficiaries pay payroll taxes.

The McCain campaign said Mr. Goolsbee's comment reflected Sen. Obama's "willingness to say whatever is necessary in the moment." Sen. McCain on Wednesday said Sen. Obama had indicated his preference for redistributing wealth over promoting economic growth.

"It raises a question: What is their philosophy of taxation?" said senior McCain adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin. "No one would design a tax policy about mortgage interest, but say, 'If you're laid off, you're not going to become eligible anymore.'"

President-Media-Elect Obama, you are a smart man, right? What is the opposite of stimulus? Taxes! So how about lower taxes and spending?

The Economist offers some great advice to the McCain campaign

I think that the campaign may be too maverick-y to synthesize the recommendations:

First, Mr McCain should point out that his opponent is one of the least business-friendly Democratic candidates in a generation.

Second, Mr McCain should hammer away at the dangers of single-party rule in Washington, DC.

Third, Mr McCain should point out that his opponent has never once in his career said boo to a Democratic goose.

I'm posting my comment

There's something about Mary:

I don't think McCain will be much better than Obama as President. What scares me is that Obama will replace Bernanke & Paulson with Krugman and Buffett (or worse).

Quotes of the day

So if a junk mortgage originator can pool loans with down payments of less than 5 percent, carve them into tranches, and get a rating agency to rate some of the tranches as AA or higher, it can make those more attractive to a bank than originating a relatively safe loan. If you want to know why securitization dominated the mortgage market, this explains it. Regulatory arbitrage, pure and simple.--Arnold Kling

History teaches us that government engagement in times of severe financial crisis often arrives very late, usually at a point at which most financial institutions are insolvent or nearly so. In these conditions, the consequences and costs of inertia and inaction can be staggering. Fortunately, that is not the situation we face today.--Ben Bernanke

Communism is socialism that has metastasized.--pywll

Everything from comparative advantage to the Coase Theorem makes you slap your head with the inescapable logic of it, and wonder how it can have escaped the human race for so long. And still, it takes a genius to reveal these obvious truths to the rest of us poor slobs. Krugman's math is far too impenetrable for this English major, but the conclusions are as clear and lovely as a bell.--Megan McArdle

And just like in high school, it's always easier to hate the math nerds. No doubt they should get some of the blame for making the weapons, but they usually weren't the ones who pulled the trigger.--Kevin Maney

But when the tide laps at Gulliver's waistline, it usually means the Lilliputians are already 10 feet under. Before yesterday's surge, the Dow had dropped 25% in three months. But that only means it had outperformed nearly every single major foreign stock exchange, including Germany's XETRADAX (down 28%) China's Shanghai exchange (down 30%), Japan's NIKK225 (down 37%), Brazil's BOVESPA (down 41%) and Russia RTSI (down 61%). These contrasts are a useful demonstration that America's financial woes are nobody else's gain.--Bret Stephens

In his never-ending quest to be everything to nobody, John McCain has switched tactics again. He ran against Washington insiders, then he ran against the media, then he ran against Wall Street, then he ran against (different?) Washington insiders, and now McCain is running against his own tax plan.--Stephen Green

The simple but startling truth is that the major conflict of our time, democracy versus Marxist-Leninist totalitarianism--what The New York Times recently called "the holy war of the 20th century"--is almost entirely missing from American cinema. It is as though since 1945, Hollywood had produced little or nothing about the victory of the Allies and the crimes of National Socialism. This void is all the stranger since the major conflict of our time would seem to be a natural draw for Hollywood. --Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley

Projected tax rates under Barack Obama and John McCain

at TaxProf Blog.

This is not change I can believe in.

McCain not talking straight

about some of his mishaps as a naval aviator.

Quotes of the day

Sen. Obama has accused me of opposing regulation to avert this crisis. I guess he believes if a lie is big enough and repeated often enough it will be believed.--John McCain

Now our opponent's campaign is claiming for the first time Barack Obama wasn't aware of Ayers' radical background. He didn't know he launched own political career in the living room of a domestic terrorist? What's next, claiming he didn't know that two of his biggest supporters were running Fannie Mae? ... Maybe he just thought they were just guys in his Washington neighborhood.--Sarah Palin

Bless your heart, sir. My son is over in Iraq fighting for your right to protest.--Sarah Palin, to heckler

* * *

For example, the survey asked, "What poses the greatest threat to your own economic situation?" The runaway winner was "higher taxes," which 50% cited as their first or second biggest worry. "The low value of the dollar abroad" was runner-up, picked first or second by 30% of respondents. The "housing market collapse" clocked in at third, with 25%, the federal budget deficit and debt next at 20%, and "corporate fraud and abuse" at 17%.

Perhaps this explains why all that pounding by John McCain and Sarah Palin about corruption on Wall Street hasn't done much for their standing in the polls. Perhaps this also explains why Barack Obama is at such pains to conceal his plans to raise taxes.--WSJ Editorial Board

Obama ahead in the Intrade electoral college prediction markets

here:

Democrat: 269 [-4]
Republican: 200 [-27]
Dead Heat: 69 [+31]
Total: 538 (270 to win)

According to these projections Barack Obama needs only ONE of 5 states to win: Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire, Ohio, or Virginia. John McCain would need to take ALL five to tie.

In the event of a tie, the House of Representatives, which came through for the nation in defeating the economic rescue plan today, would select the next President.

McCain is an idiot for wanting Andrew Cuomo for SEC Chair

He says:

This may sound a little unusual, but I’ve admired Andrew Cuomo. I think he is somebody who could restore some credibility and lend some bipartisanship to this effort. […] He has respect, and he has prestige.

I'm so angry, I am voting for Obama today.

After all, Cuomo was the senior executive in the federal government pushing for no-money-down, no income requirement mortgages in the first place.

UPDATE: Felix Salmon on Hank Paulson's idiocy.

John McCain is an idiot for hanging Christopher Cox

out to dry:

"The chairman of the SEC serves at the appointment of the President and has betrayed the public's trust. If I were President today, I would fire him."

Wow. "Betrayed the public's trust." Was Mr. Cox dishonest? No. He merely changed some minor rules, and didn't change others, on short-selling. String him up! Mr. McCain clearly wants to distance himself from the Bush Administration. But this assault on Mr. Cox is both false and deeply unfair. It's also un-Presidential.

I'm so mad, I'm thinking of voting for Obama today.

UPDATE: Megan thinks McCain has Alzheimer's.

Risk/reward anyone?

Anyone who likes to think in terms of risk-reward should check this out:

How do the real people of America, those who do the work, raise the families, pay the taxes, defend the nation and make America the truly exceptional place that it is, feel about an arrogant young man whose self-esteem is so much greater than his accomplishments?

Do they want a president who has seldom held a real job, never run a business or done much of anything other than promote himself? And what about the young idealists preparing to cast their first votes? Do they really intend to vote for an illusion? Do any Americans want a president who regards himself as a citizen of the world and may have mixed loyalties?

The potential downside consequences of an Obama presidency are enormous. And on the upside, what is to be gained? The frisson of having voted to elect an African-American president? A last-minute slap at President Bush, who will be out of office in January anyway? A pointless protest against a war that is now being won and will soon be over?

Does anyone seriously think that Barack Obama will do better than John McCain in keeping America safe and prosperous? Surely not. Risking a lot to gain nothing is a very bad bet — potentially even fatal — but that is exactly what the Democrats and the media are asking voters to do.

McCain's radical agenda?

I'm no expert on the healthcare system but treating employer-paid health benefits as income that employees would have to pay taxes on doesn't seem like a good solution.