No Confidence

From today's NYT:

Two weeks after persuading Congress to let it spend $700 billion to buy distressed securities tied to mortgages, the Bush administration has put that idea aside in favor of a new approach that would have the government inject capital directly into the nation’s banks — in effect, partially nationalizing the industry.

As recently as Sept. 23, senior officials had publicly derided proposals by Democrats to have the government take ownership stakes in banks.

The Treasury Department’s surprising turnaround on the issue of buying stock in banks, which has now become its primary focus, has raised questions about whether the administration squandered valuable time in trying to sell Congress on a plan that officials had failed to think through in advance.

Six Degrees of Desperation

If you should receive any Bill Ayers/Obama e-mails/links, I'd like to see them. It's suddenly being talked about around my office. It seems to be part of a big push (by Palin, Rove, Davis & Co.) to knock the floundering U.S. economy off the front page. The Ayers/Obama "terrorist" connection is suddenly all over the Internet on conservative blogs, though not much in the MSM .... yet. (First Little Green Footballs, then the world!) They're obviously trying to earn free media for it. The Daily Show just called the ploy "Six Degrees of Desperation."

The McCain campaign is losing air like a sighing balloon. FiveThirtyEight.com now projects NC for Obama by +1.4 pts.

Creative destruction for the better half

From Greenwald:

Anyone arguing that [the people's] views should be ignored, that their judgment be overridden by the decree of the wiser, superior ruling class (see David Brooks and Kevin Drum as good examples), is simply endorsing the continuation of the predominant framework for how our country has been run for the last decade, at least. Whatever else that is, there's nothing "wise" about that framework. Even if one believes in principle that the country is best entrusted to the elevated wisdom of a magnanimous and superior ruling class, and that majoritarian opinion should be systematically ignored, our ruling class -- the one we actually have -- is anything but wise and magnanimous. It's bloated, incestuous, reckless, inept, self-interested, endlessly greedy and corrupt at its core. Ye shall know them by their fruits. It's hard to imagine anything less wise than continuing to submit to its dictates.

Liberation from -- one could say "destruction of" -- the system run by that ruling establishment class is of critical importance.

Yesterday was the first shot. Round one.

Tomorrow, the Senate.

"Why is McCain so mad?"

From a TPM post: My 8 Year Old Son's Debate Analysis

Wall Street's Lifeboat Ethics

I hear on the news that the Obama campaign already has an ad out using clips from last night's debate. Entitled "Zero," it highlights the fact that McCain never once used the words "middle class." Implication: The omission speaks volumes about McCain's priorities. That, and having his campaign staffed by lobbyists.

More striking was this clip of an exchange this week between Larry Kudlow (CNBC, National Review; formerly with the Reagan administration, Freddie Mac and Bear-Stearns) and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders:



Sanders mocks free-marketer Kudlow as a socialist for supporting the disaster capitalist bailout of Wall Street. Ordinarily, government expenditures designed to help Main Street pay bills or provide health care for families are non-starters for Kudlow and his fellows. Benefiting Main Street is irrelevant. Such actions are un-capitalist. They present a moral hazard and tilt the country towards socialism. Conservatives oppose such actions on principle. "Oh, no!" Sanders mimics. Yet here Kudlow argues, "Every twenty or thirty or fifty years, I'm okay with it." Yes, when it is his friends in peril.

Kudlow argues [1:59] that a taxpayer-funded bailout of Wall Street moguls will "first and foremost help Main Street, middle-class people." Why the sudden concern for you and me?

"Wall Street went bust! I mean, look what happened. Bear-Stearns went under. Lehman Brothers went under. Merrill had to sell," argues Kudlow [3:58]. When Wall Street is in trouble, government must not blink before rushing to the rescue.

Uh, huh. When New Orleans went under (water) and people drowned, conservative pundits and bloggers argued that taxpayers had no responsibility for bailing out people who "irresponsibly" lived in a town established below sea level in the eighteenth century. Bush promised help. New Orleans is still waiting.

These are Wall Street’s lifeboat ethics. As the titanic U.S. economy lists badly, Wall Street brokers, bankers and speculators of the second Gilded Age want those of us in steerage to buy them lifeboats - to the tune of $700 billion - promising to come back and pick us up after the ship goes down.

We have seen that movie.

If BS were currency

"If BS were currency, Palin could bail out Wall Street herself." - conservative columnist Kathleen Parker, National Review Online

Parker has thrown in the tiara, and calls for Palin to step aside for the love of her country and good of her party:

Palin’s recent interviews with Charles Gibson, Sean Hannity, and now Katie Couric have all revealed an attractive, earnest, confident candidate. Who Is Clearly Out Of Her League.

No one hates saying that more than I do. Like so many women, I’ve been pulling for Palin, wishing her the best, hoping she will perform brilliantly. I’ve also noticed that I watch her interviews with the held breath of an anxious parent, my finger poised over the mute button in case it gets too painful. Unfortunately, it often does. My cringe reflex is exhausted.

What Do You Say?

Paulson: "Drop your opposition! Now! You have no chance of escape! Come forward with the $700 billion! If you wish to save your economy! This is your last warning! The choice is yours!"

Colonel Trautman: "What do you say John?"

Rambo: [loading his gun] "Fuck 'em!"

What Have They Got That I Ain't Got? - Part 2

The Times of London has it straight from recent studies, that a person's positions on hot-button political issues "can be predicted accurately from the way their bodies respond to frightening stimuli."

The results, which are published in the journal Science, revealed significant differences in both responses, which corresponded with people’s political views. Those with “markedly lower physical sensitivity to sudden noises and threatening visual images” tended to support liberal positions, while those with strong responses tended to be more conservative.

This would fit with the hypothesis that people who have more fearful responses to perceived threats are more likely to be conservative, while those who have weaker responses develop more liberal views.

I have noticed an obsession with fear for some time now among leading conservatives. Weakness, especially showing weakness or fear is a cardinal sin. The world is a tough place, goes the thinking. So you'd better grow up quick and grow up mean, so your fists get hard and your wits get keen (a political philosophy with all the sophistication of "A Boy Named Sue"). Thus, the Bush/Cheney/Rove/Palin obsession with not "blinking" or "cutting and running," with issuing belligerent statements and making John Kerry seem "French," etc. It is a projection of their own weakness, something I was getting at (less scientifically than Science magazine) with this post from last week.

Been there? Done that?

"Losing your job is more than a state of mind. It means staring at the ceiling and wondering how in God's name am I going to pay the mortgage payment and not lose my house. It means looking at your pregnant wife saying how in God's name am I going to come up with the thousands of dollars just for a normal birth, and God forbid I have a premature child that's going to cost me $250,000 ... Ladies and gentlemen, it's not a state of mind. It's a loss of dignity. It's a loss of respect, the loss of more than just your economic well being." - Joe Biden, this week in MI. (19:25)

A record to run on

From Andrew Sullivan, 53% of Americans favor a ban on torture.

A new survey of global public opinion [PDF] reveals the appalling truth. Americans are now among the people on earth most supportive of government's torturing prisoners. The United States is in the same public opinion ballpark as some of the most disgusting regimes on the planet:

Support for the unequivocal position was highest in Spain (82%), Great Britain (82%) and France (82%), followed by Mexico (73%), China (66%), the Palestinian territories (66%), Poland (62%), Indonesia (61%), and the Ukraine (59%). In five countries either modest majorities or pluralities support a ban on all torture: Azerbaijan (54%), Egypt (54%), the United States (53%), Russia (49%), and Iran (43%). South Koreans are divided.

Biker for Obama

I stopped by the local Obama HQ yesterday to drop off the name of a volunteer who wanted to be on the e-mail list. A big biker with arms like hams walked in, smiling broadly. He was on his way home to Yancey County after his ride and had seen the Obama sign. He just had to stop in, he said.

At first, he said, he wasn't so sure about Obama (being a black man, and all). But he started listening to him and realized he was the man. Let's hope there are many more like him at home.

Conservative patriotism

We stopped for a half gallon of milk last night while walking home after eating cheap Mexican. My wife chit-chatted with the store manager and lamented the early appearance of Halloween candy.

“It all comes from China,” he explained. They have to order it early. It comes in shipping containers, and since the warehouse isn’t air conditioned, they end up with it in stores early to prevent it from melting. Christmas merchandise, too, comes from China and must be ordered early.

Sarah said it was a shame that we didn’t put more Americans to work in factories making it here instead of sending our money to a “communist” country. It seems like, for the cost of shipping, we could pay Americans to do it.

“We couldn’t get people to show up,” the manager explained, “and they expect too much money even before they prove what they can do.” On the other hand, Hispanics are hard workers, he observed. They’ll do anything you ask them. But they’re illegal. If we could just make them legal...

Let’s recap. All flag-pin rhetoric to the contrary:

• Americans workers aren’t the best, most competitive workers in the world.
• Americans workers are slothful and greedy.
• The immigration issue is about the legal risks for employers hiring illegals.
• Illegal workers are more desirable than American workers because they work hard, come cheap, and do what they’re told.

Conservative patriotism.

What Have They Got That I Ain't Got?

A guy I once worked with fancied himself quite the stud. Trim, he wore a combed-back, black mullet. In his cubical he kept photos of himself water skiing barefoot. He made guttural noises in his throat when women walked by his cube. He also made extra money on weekends as a male strip-o-gram. But walk by his desk and lisp, “Hey, sailor. How’s it hanging?” and he would jump right out of his skin, fists clenched.

Thong riding up there a little, cowboy?

Those obsessed with displays of manliness are sometimes, like the Cowardly Lion, deeply unsure of their own. The thing liberals never seem to grasp is that for leading conservatives and neocons these electoral contests are not about issues or what is best for the country. They are about seeing which dog can pee highest on the tree. Power is like heroin, and the only thing that keeps what they fear most at bay - and it is not liberals.

One word from Obama would set the neocons and their enablers into crimson-faced spasms of rage: COWARDS. Far more than al Qaida, the thing they fear most, the thing they cannot face in themselves nor abide in others is weakness. Weakness is unpardonable. It is why they take such delight in tactics meant to emasculate their rivals. Find an opportunity to drop the C-bomb and watch their heads explode.

Push the button, Barack.

Type, Baby, Type

Tom Friedman was just on Meet the Press, hawking his new book in his usual full-of-himself way. He said that the next, great revolution beyond the IT revolution will be the the ET revolution: Energy Technology.

We'll need a mix of technologies going forward, including oil (as everyone agrees). The GOP's mistake is placing oil at the center of their energy "plan." When the GOP convention exploded in chants of "Drill, Baby, Drill," he said, imagine how the Chinese, Venezuelans and Saudis would have responded had they been sitting in a sky box.

Conventioneers might as well have been chanting, "IBM Selectric Typewriters! IBM Selectric Typewriters!"

At the Fair

I walked the Hendersonville, NC Apple Festival parade route today beside Democratic senatorial candidate, Kay Hagan, and her daughter, and behind Congressman Heath Shuler, who walked carrying his daughter (at least part of the way). I've done the parade before, but this time I saw no "thumbs down" or scowls, and the only "boo" was kidding from somebody's friend. Still, I noticed that there was a good bit of applause heading into downtown. It tapered off and got quiet in the thicker crowds in the middle of Main St. Then the applause picked up again as we headed out of downtown. The folks on the fringes tended to look less well-to-do.

On the way back up the parade route, I got my first-ever glimpse of Sen. Elizabeth Dole. She was with Republican gubernatorial candidate, Pat McCrory, riding high above the street on a colorful float.

We walked. They rode.

Smears? You ain't seen nothin' yet!

Republican Group Releases Radio Ads Exposing Obama As A Radical

"We released these eye-opening ads," said the chairman of the National Black Republican Association (NBRA), Frances Rice, "because the 2008 election will be about character and judgment, and Senator Barack Obama's actions and record show that he is not fit to be our next president." Rice stated that the ads will be aired on radio stations which target African Americans, particularly in battleground states. )

Video, billboards, radio.

Chasing Spamalot

"THIS DEFINITELY WARRANTS LOOKING INTO."

Dr. Danielle Allen's investigation into e-propaganda, in a profile Saturday by the WaPo:

"What I've come to realize is, the labor of generating an e-mail smear is divided and distributed amongst parties whose identities are secret even to each other," she says. A first group of people published articles that created the basis for the attack. A second group recirculated the claims from those articles without ever having been asked to do so. "No one coordinates the roles," Allen said. Instead the participants swim toward their goal like a school of fish -- moving on their own, but also in unison.

Obama's campaign, for better or worse, is writing the manual on combating this new asymmetrical guerrilla warfare. Obama has not shied away from the rumors -- he mentions them frequently. "Before I begin," he told a pro-Israel group this month, "I want to say that I know some provocative e-mails have been circulating throughout Jewish communities across the country. . . . They're filled with tall tales and dire warnings about a certain candidate for president. And all I want to say is -- let me know if you see this guy named Barack Obama, because he sounds pretty frightening."

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

We are the microgeneration

A new government report to be released Monday mirrors a Conservative Party policy announced six months ago advocating "a decentralised energy revolution," according to The Independent of London.

The government-backed report, to be published tomorrow, says that, with changed policies, the number of British homes producing their own clean energy could multiply to one million – about one in every three – within 12 years.

These would produce enough power to replace five large nuclear power stations, tellingly at about the same time as the first of the much-touted new generation of reactors is likely to come on stream.

[. . .]

The 130-page report . . . has been produced by a consultancy, Element Energy, after a wide-ranging survey of public attitudes on installing household renewable energy systems. It has been financed, and steered by, 14 official and other bodies including DBERR, the official Energy Savings Trust, five regional development agencies, British Gas, the Micropower Council and the Ashden Trust.

After some hemming and hawing over energy policy in Britain, including entertaining building more nuclear stations and reducing support for microgeneration that leaves Britain well behind the rest of Europe, the report may offer a change of direction:

The report offers a very different future, as do the Tories, who see microgeneration as central to their philosophy of redirecting power to individuals. David Cameron sees "decentralised energy" as "a key part of our political vision, energy for the post-bureaucratic age". He believes microgeneration could make Britain, and individual communities, "self-sufficient in energy".

Post-bureaucratic? Decentralized? Self-sufficient? What kind of conservatives are they growing over there? Real conservatives know that the only way to cheaper gas and more freedom is drilling, drilling and more drilling. Clearly, British conservatives are a looney bunch of DFHs. Call Bill O'Reilly to have them arrested.

When was the last time you heard "lily-livered"?

Sir Simon Jenkins, writing for the Sunday Times of London, declares al Qaeda beneath the dignity of James Bond:

Oh do pay attention, 007, this enemy simply isn’t worthy of you.

Jenkins traces our need for a great enemy and laments that al Qaeda simply doesn't measure up to Cold War-inspired villains of the Bond books.

But the histrionics of the neocons, Bush and Blair has been a boon to this ragtag troop, Jenkins says, inflating al Qaeda "into a body of fiendish efficiency and global strength. Its cells had to be everywhere, its influence titanic, its fanaticism superhuman." They all but painted bin Laden with a mechanical hand and a white cat.

The West has not curbed Al-Qaeda.

The movement has been honoured by Blair, the neocons and the military industrial complex as the global antithesis to the once-vaunted new world order. Never can so wretched an outfit have been awarded so vast a dignity.

Al-Qaeda is thus an Orwellian classic, a necessary enemy. As portrayed by Philip Bobbitt in his new book, Terror and Consent, it is the ultimate Smersh, terrorist without aim or purpose, secretive, fanatical and blessed with an awesome arsenal on the brink of going chemical, biological and nuclear. Its alleged goal is to create mayhem as a prelude to some notional world theocracy.

Now if the loutish Yanks at Halliburton would just deliver that new Mach 2 jetpack, Bond could kick some Islamofascist butt . . . after a few, quick hands of Baccarat.

Jenkins concludes,

What I cannot do is join the pessimists in claiming that western civilisation is so enfeebled by immorality, as the Bishop of Rochester implied last week, as to be structurally vulnerable to bomb explosions, devoid as they are of any political programme or local support. Because a terrorist claims to attack western culture does not make the claim plausible. Conrad’s terrorist was equally grandiloquent in his demented ambition. This is childish fear-mongering.

I have more faith in western democracy than the lily-livered neocons. I believe in the robustness of its institutions, its traditions and its liberal outlook. They beat the real threat of communist totalitarianism. Nothing on the present horizon is remotely comparable to that. I rather agree with the St Petersburg comrades. That some people need the emotional prop of a Great Satan does not make Satan any more real.

Lily-livered, yet. All things old are new again.

Chairman Mao, Inc. is watching you

File it under "free markets and free people go hand in hand."

Naomi Klein writes, in her current Rolling Stone piece that China's new surveillance infrastructure, Golden Shield, is almost ready to protect China's "market Stalinism."

This is how this Golden Shield will work: Chinese citizens will be watched around the clock through networked CCTV cameras and remote monitoring of computers. They will be listened to on their phone calls, monitored by digital voice-recognition technologies. Their Internet access will be aggressively limited through the country's notorious system of online controls known as the "Great Firewall." Their movements will be tracked through national ID cards with scannable computer chips and photos that are instantly uploaded to police databases and linked to their holder's personal data. This is the most important element of all: linking all these tools together in a massive, searchable database of names, photos, residency information, work history and biometric data. When Golden Shield is finished, there will be a photo in those databases for every person in China: 1.3 billion faces.

Golden Shield (which Klein dubs Police State 2.0) must be inducing surveillance envy among higher-ups in the Bush administration, both for its domestic spying and profit potential. Former Bush CIA chief, George Tenet, is already on the board of Connecticut-based L-1 Identity Solutions, the biometrics firm vying for the contract to supply China with the technology for Police State 2.0. Supplying police-state technology to China is probably illegal under U.S. law, Klein notes, and has been since shortly after the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989.

U.S. business consultant, Stephen Herrington, a former military-intelligence lieutenant colonel, tells Klein that what he's seeing in China scares the hell out of him.

"I can guarantee you that there are people in the Bush administration who are studying the use of surveillance technologies being developed here and have at least skeletal plans to implement them at home," he says. "We can already see it in New York with CCTV cameras. Once you have the cameras in place, you have the infrastructure for a powerful tracking system. I'm worried about what this will mean if the U.S. government goes totalitarian and starts employing these technologies more than they are already. I'm worried about the threat this poses to American democracy."

Herrington pauses. "George W. Bush," he adds, "would do what they are doing here in a heartbeat if he could."

If he hasn't already. "Ready for export to a neighborhood near you," Klein quips.

What’s more ironic is how this new Homeland Security industry isn’t some poster child for free-market capitalist innovation, but constitutes another kind of arms industry. Companies like L-1 Identity Solutions developed their technology using taxpayer dollars. Their principle clients are government agencies funded with taxpayer dollars. And their efforts at getting around export restrictions so they can sell these new "arms" to a lucrative Chinese market are defended by a growing Homeland Security industry lobby funded, again, with taxpayer dollars.

Klein observes,

The global homeland-security business is now worth an estimated $200 billion — more than Hollywood and the music industry combined. Any sector of that size inevitably takes on its own momentum. New markets must be found — which, in the Big Brother business, means an endless procession of new enemies and new emergencies: crime, immigration, terrorism.

Homeland Security player General Electric controls major media in this country and Cisco Systems, a supplier of security hardware to China, is a sponsor of television's 24. For both, fear is their business. Maintaining it makes business sense.

In a sidebar, Klein considers what China's security apparatus means for us.

"... they're becoming more like us and we're becoming more like them. I think this urge to know as much as possible about what people are saying and writing and doing, this is something the police around the world share. They generally want as much information about people as possible. The way I put it in the piece is that there seems to be this global middle ground emerging, not to say that we are like China now, but you do have a glimpse of catching the future and of course it's the future that we've imagined many, many times in every Hollywood movie."

Smile.