coordinated thugs?

ACORN's offices in both Boston and Seattle were vandalized on the same day. Is this just a coincidence? Or is it evidence of a coordinated effort to intimidate the organization?

Wouldn't that be worth an FBI/Justice investigation?

Supreme Court nixes GOP effort to cloud the vote in Ohio

Now we see why it was important to elect Democrats into lower-profile positions like Secretaries of State. It took a Democrat, a Democrat with guts, to push back against the GOP machine and win one for the voters.

Evolution!

Courtesy reddit.

Thought for the day

Would a corporate board put a communist in charge of its company?

Then what sense does it make to put an anti-government conservative in charge of the government?

Lewis Black

"If we're the greatest country on Earth, maybe we can have the greatest government."

I'm in love.

Subtlety is not a McCain strength

Why have the McCain's attempts to play to nativist tendencies failed:

What went wrong with McCain’s attacks? The audience’s shouted slurs ruined the classical Republican approach of plausibly deniable racism. Imagine if at the old boy's country club someone said, “Well, I’m not sure the Cohens would fit in here.” Wink wink. And his buddy responded, “Oh yeah. You mean because they’re Jews, right?” It ruins the ruse, like the sitcom stooge who asks “Hey, why are you kicking me under the table?”

The Southern Strategy was always predicated on the idea that you never make the racism and nativism explicit. This was necessary because there are a large percentage of Republicans who don't want anything to do with racists even though they like the general policy approach of their party. They had to be made to feel comfortable with the party despite its veiled appeals to the cockroach set.

That's why the Trent Lott story blew up several years back and that's why the McCain attacks of the last few days have failed. Both were examples of the uglier side of the GOP strategy coming out into the light. McCain's strategy may have succeeded with the group it was designed to win over. But the ugliness of it was so obvious that it turned off those who don't want to have anything to do with the "off with his head" crowd.

Obama is going down!

Looks like the Republicans have their general election version of the whitey tape.

(aside: What the f*ck is African Press International? I never heard of them until today and now the wingnutosphere is on them like they are pure gold.)

Obama haters for Obama

Amazing:

54 year-old white male, voted Kerry '04, Bush '00, Dole '96, hunter, NASCAR fan...hard for Obama said: "I'm gonna hate him the minute I vote for him. He's gonna be a bad president. But I won't ever vote for another god-damn Republican. I want the government to take over all of Wall Street and bankers and the car companies and Wal-Mart run this county like we used to when Reagan was President."

Part of me wonders if we want people like this voting for Obama. Just how out of it do you have to be to think that Reagan was for taking over Wall Street? But then another part of me thinks, the more the merrier.

How in the world do Republicans win in an atmosphere like this? I just don't know.

Yet, I refuse to jinx it and will continue to say, at best, that I am cautiously optimistic.

Doing the Swap

The emerging Republican talking point on the financial crisis is that it was primarily caused by bad loans being given to poorer people (at the instigation of ACORN) and then those loans were badly managed by Fannie-Mae and Freddy-Mac so that their stink factor was obscured from viewing by the rest of the financial industry. Then, when the housing bubble popped, all those loans came due and the poor bankers got flushed down the toilet.

While its true that the junk mortgages were the proximate needle that broke this camel's back, they are a woefully incomplete explanation of what happened. Where it is incomplete is very telling. The one piece that is missing is the Credit Default Swap.

Now, I don't pretend to really understand the nature of these complex financial instruments (aside: for an amusing exchange on this see John Cole), but what limited knowledge I have of them is that they were essentially an unregulated form of insurance. The bankers spreading these bad mortgages around weren't entirely stupid. They knew these things gave off a bad odor. So much so that many of them weren't willing to buy into the housing market frenzy. So other bankers decided to sweeten the pot by essentially assuring other bankers that they needn't be afraid that the mortgage market would go bust (that there would be a "credit default") because all they would have to do was to buy a Credit Default Swap (a way of swapping the risk) that would essentially guarantee them some return on their investment, even if the original investment went down the toilet.

Fears calmed, investors went out and starting buying, slicing, dicing, mixing, matching and then reselling those bad mortgages. All with the reassurance that they didn't have to care about the odor coming off them because, "Hey! I'll still make money even if they go bad! Just not as much."

The problem, of course, was that these swaps would only work so long as only a small number of people ever claimed them. It was when the mortgage market as a whole crapped out that there was, in essence, a run on the swaps. And suddenly all the banks and insurance companies (such as AIG) that were backing them didn't have the money to meet the demand.

And that's where the whole system collapsed.

It is said that the credit market is frozen, in part, because of a lack of trust. The Credit Default Swaps appear to be the reason for that lack of trust. And who can blame them?

Here's the point that I don't think is being emphasized enough: The swaps are the main reason we are in this mess. With these vapor promises in hand, bankers went out and accelerated the slicing and dicing of the crap mortgages. In other words, if the financial industry hadn't created these swaps, fewer people would have risked their money on the crap and we would never have gotten where we are today.

I've heard estimates that the size of the CDS sludgepile is on the order of $70 TRILLION dollars. That is several times the size of the entire U.S. economy! And we have the wizards who created the swaps to thank for it.

Don't let them distract you with the bad behavior in the mortgage market. Don't let them blame this on ACORN. Know where the real blame lies and watch your wallet.

Great Catch

Eric Kleefeld notes something of significance in the newest CVS/NYT poll: more voters think McCain would raise their taxes.

Read that again.

Voters think the Republican nominee is more likely to raise their taxes than the Democratic nominee.

Wow!

The core Republican talking point is that they are always better for voters when it comes to taxes. This is an even bigger talking point than their professed profficiency at foreign policy (i.e., war).

You know things are bad when....

Is this campaign more negative?

I think Byron York over at The Corner brings up a good point.

That 30 percent figure [percentage in a New York Times Poll who said that this campaign was more negative than past campaigns -- chris] is lower than this point in 2004, when 41 percent said the campaign was more negative than previous years.  At this point in 1992, 34 percent said the campaign was more negative.  And at this point in 1988, 47 percent said it was more negative.

Assessing the negativity of a campaign is not a science. There are several variations on the questions. For instance, is the total volume of negativity higher? Or are the negative attacks, by themselves, more vicious than previous attacks? Or is it just a matter of percentages (100% of McCain ads of late have been negative). I think that the negativity of this campaign, especially coming from the McCain side, ranks high on the viciousness scale and the percentage scale. But the volume of the attacks doesn't quite seem as bad as in past years.

I also think that there is another aspect to how we rate negativity: how effective is the negative campaigning against our favorite candidate?

When Gore and Kerry were on the ropes in 2000 and 2004, the negative attacks from the Republicans seemed really bad. But the McCain attacks, while more vicious in character, also seem pathetic. They bounce of Obama and strike back at McCain. Which almost makes them kind of fun to watch.

Fun in a sickening way.

So, yes, I think McCain's attacks are more negative than in past years, but I also think this campaign has resolved to one that will be decided on issues more than negativity. So the overall negativity rating just feels lower.

Behold the glory...

of Upside Down Dogs!

Just in time for Halloween

palinaspresident.com

Be nice to bankers?

Let me second this post by Ian Welsh.

A lot of people have yet to catch up to the new reality. It appears Chuck Schumer is one of them. He still thinks we have to coddle bank execs in order to persuade them to do what needs to be done. To paraphrase Ian, "F*ck that! They'll do it or they will be shown the exit."

Frankly, I think they should be shown the exit anyway. Letting them keep their jobs is far more "incentive" than they deserve.

There's something broken in the wingnut mind

I confess that, in writing my previous pieces on Peak Wingnuttery, I didn't read to much into the latest bit of wingnut porn making the rounds because it really wasn't relevant to my point. Furthermore, I didn't care to give said porn anymore exposure than was absolutely necessary. Because of that, I missed the worst aspect of this story. The wingnuts are up in arms over a story that, if it panned out, suggests that Obama was a victim of child sexual abuse.  But the wingnuts are promoting it as if it tells us something negative about Obama's character.

The Agitator has a nice summary of the garbage.

Family Values

The most bizarre aspect of this story is not that the guy named his new born daughter after McCain and Palin (though that is kind of weird). The most bizarre aspect is that he didn't even tell his wife that he was going to change the name on the birth certificate. I know that a lot of Republicans subscribe to the "man is the head of the household", but really...

I wouldn't even consider buying a new DVD player without talking with my wife first. But then I'm a squishy liberal.

(hat tip John Cole)

Different Kinds of Chess

More here.

God, if you don't make McCain win then you are a pussy

No. Seriously. The pastor who gave the invocation at a McCain rally actually told God that he needs to make sure McCain wins if he doesn't want to be viewed as lesser than other gods.

It takes some balls to question God's manhood.

McCain's ACORN

Marc Ambinder has more on McCain's involvedment with ACORN, including video.

Its clear that the Republicans are settling on using ACORN as a scapegoat, not only for the meltdown in the financial system, but also for what appears to be their imminent destruction at the polls in three weeks. Unfortunately, this scapegoating may just work as long as strong Democrats (hello Sen. Obama?) are unwilling to step forward and hit back.

I have no personal experience with ACORN, but from what I've read it sounds like they do good work helping low income neighborhoods organize and improve their condition. I guess that's good enough reason for the GOP to hate them.

(btw, I imagine that if McCain goes down to defeat, the GOP will use his involvement with ACRON as another explanation for his failure.)

Maddow shows how it is done

Watch this video and learn. Rachel Maddow had David Frum, former Bush speechwriter (he coined to phrase "Axis of Evil") on her show last night. While Frum makes all the appropriate clucking noises about how awful the rhetoric coming from the McCain campaign is, he attempts to offset that by slipping in a subtle suggestion that Democrats are also to blame when they use sarcasm when responding to Republicans (such as Maddow does on occasion).

Rachel is no dummy. She picked up on what he was doing and stops her planned questions in favor of a calm refutation of Frum's false equivalency. And you can see that Frum doesn't know how to respond. He gets quiet, he hems and haws, he blinks a lot, he looks to the side as if ashamed. He makes a few good trooper attempts to get off the ropes, but he never quite succeeds.

What is doubly impressive about Maddow's performance is that she never once raised her voice during the exchange (Bill O'Reilly would have been shreaking). She just calmly called bullshit on the idea that sarcasm is somehow comparable to calling Obama a "pal of terrorists". Maddow understands that it is this myth of equivalency that allows journalists and "serious" political operatives like Frum to avoid confronting the ugliness that Republicans promote. As long as they can say that both sides do it equally then they are freed from responsibility when reporting on it.

Maddow won't accept that and neither should we.

(hmmm. For some reason the video embedding is working. Here's the link instead).

More on Peak Wingnuttery

Tim F. says that John Cole's original Peak Wingnut thesis is wrong because a crushing defeat will just make the wingnuts want to try harder. I agree, but I don't think that's the important question. The important question is will the wingnuts have the same unfettered channel to feed their bile into the mainstream that they used so effectively in the past. Will they be able to bog down a President Obama with faux scandal after faux scandal in the same way they did President Clinton?

That remains to be seen, but I am hopeful. There is an infrastructure of left-leaning media that can counter much of that bile. That infrastructure simply didn't exist in 1992 (or 2000). And the American people, after eight years of Bush, may just be inured to the crap.

We can hope.

Fire them

Ian Welsh has a good suggestion: if you want to show you are serious about cleaning up the financial mess we are in the first thing you should do is fire the people who ran the banks that got us into this mess in the first place.

The New Silent Majority

Kyle E. Moore discusses the possible emergence of a new silent majority that actually thirsts for a more serious politics and views the social core of the Republican party as today's equivalent to the "dirty f*cking hippies" of the original hippie era.

Also recommended: Nixonland by Rick Perlstein

Peak Wingnut

John Cole proposes and then quickly withdraws the theory that we have achieved Peak Wingnut, which I take to mean that point in which wingnut bloviation about Democrats is no longer taken seriously by virtue of the fact that it is wingnuttery. He proposed it first because he saw, via memeorandum, the spread through the wingnuttosphere of new attempts to smear Obama that came and went with the rapidity of a humingbirds wingbeat. He withdrew it when he saw some new story about Obama being involved in gay pedophilia rearing its ugly head.

I think he was to quick to withdraw it. For, as I said, I take Peak Winguttery to be that point in which wingnuttery just doesn't have the ability to automatically leak into the mainstream media like it used to. Time was all you had to do was get an Instapundit to link to a smear and it was almost certain it would spread like gangrene into the mainstream bloodstream within a matter of days.

But we've built up a good regime of immunities to that kind of crap. So the ability for this stuff to spread has been seriously hampered. And the harder it is to spread the harder the wingnuts try to spread even more outrageous crap. Which just builds up even more immunities.

So the failure of wingnuttery is not a factor of whether they will find new crap to spew. It is whether that crap spreads beyond its (rapidly shrinking) sphere of influence.

McCain to Kristol: Your Fired

Looks like the McCain campaign has decided that firing Kristol is the better approach.

McCain and ACORN: For it before he was against it

Ooops

Just a suggestion

Maybe the McCain campaign should fire Bill Kristol?

Hmmmm

He was from the Middle-East after all. Mighty suspicious if you ask me.

Fight The Smears

Last Summer, as the general election campaign was ramping up, the Obama campaign made a controversial decision in how to address the persistent rumors swirling around their candidate. Rather than take the usual approach of simply denying them or not addressing them, they launched a website, FightTheSmears, that deliberately placed ALL of the rumors in one place where they could be conveniently browsed. They then included concise refutations of each of the rumors (call it the Snopes approach).

As I said, a lot of people seemed to think this was really stupid. But this article at boston.com suggests that it may have worked and that the science backs up this approach.

Quote of Yesterday

(Because I missed it when it was Today) from Kung Fu Monkey:

Modern American Conservatives have sunk to the intellectual and emotional level of the guy who thinks the stripper really likes him.