The Weekly Sift

In this week’s Sift:

• It Gets Uglier. Charges of terrorism, socialism, baby-killing, and vote fraud are starting to lead to violence. Does anybody think we’re going to be one big happy family again after this is over? Plus some humorous responses to it all.
• Endorsements. Obama’s getting some interesting ones from places like the Chicago Tribune and the Houston Chronicle. And Colin Powell.
• More on Vote Fraud and Vote Supression. Only one is a genuine threat to American democracy.
• Short Notes. Want to carve a Barack-o-Lantern?

Instead of substantive proposals for dealing with our country’s problems the McCain campaign has treated swing-state voters to this robocall:

You need to know that Barack Obama has worked closely with domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, whose organization bombed the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon, a judge’s home, and killed Americans.

Robocalls are an especially insidious way to run a negative campaign. Because they go by so quickly, they’re very easy to mishear. So while the sentence above is defensible in a word-for-word way — a decade ago Obama worked with a guy who decades before that had worked with some other guys who died when their bomb went off by mistake  — many voters will hear something else: that Obama was involved (and maybe is still involved) in terrorist bombings that kill people.

Senator Susan Collins, co-chair of the McCain campaign in Maine, asked McCain to stop the robocalls, saying “These kind of tactics have no place in Maine politics.” When Fox News’ Chris Wallace asked the candidate if he would stop the calls, McCain responded, “Of course not.”

And the hits just keep coming. Now Obama is a “socialist” and a new robocall claims that Obama voted to deny medical care to babies. 

Rule #1 in a Karl-Rove-style campaign is: Never defend; always attack. So when confronted with this and his other punches-below-the-belt, McCain has been demanding that Obama repudiate a statement by Rep. John Lewis, a hero of the Civil Rights movement. In the third debate, McCain claimed that Lewis “made allegations that Sarah Palin and I were somehow associated with the worst chapter in American history, segregation, deaths of children in church bombings, George Wallace.”

One way to spot spin: Spinners characterize a statement instead of quoting it. Lewis in fact made the very apt point that it’s dangerous to create “an atmosphere of hate” because you don’t know how far other people will take it. “George Wallace never threw a bomb. He never fired a gun.” But he stirred up the kind of people who did. That’s what Lewis accused McCain and Palin of doing — not of being segregationists, bombing churches, or killing children.

And people are getting stirred up. A man in the Cincinnati suburb of Fairfield has hung an Obama effigy in his yard as a bizarre Halloween display. A local reporter was assaulted at a Palin rally in North Carolina. Another Palin crowd in Florida shouted racial insults at a black sound man in the press area. ACORN offices have been vandalized in Boston and Seattle. Sunday a woman at a BBQ restaurant in North Carolina yelled at Obama himself “socialist, socialist, socialist — get out of here”. Also in North Carolina, tires on 30 cars were slashed outside an Obama rally. A California Republican newsletter printed an image of Obama on a food stamp together with watermelon, ribs, and fried chicken. A black Obama supporter in Arizona had swastikas and McCain slogans painted on his restaurant — including “no niggers 4 president“.

Al Jazeera reporter Casey Kaufman (yes, Al Jazeera covers America) interviewed people attending a Palin rally in rural Ohio and filmed statements like these:

• “I’m afraid if [Obama] wins, the blacks will take over.”
• “He must support terrorists.”
• “Obama and his wife, I’m concerned that they could be anti-white and that he might hide that.”
• “He thinks us white people are trash.”

McCain, meanwhile, says that he is proud of the people who attend his rallies. The assaulted Greensboro reporter comments:

After today I’m wondering — and this is just wondering at this point — whether Republicans aren’t in some respect giving their supporters license for this sort of crap. If the story you peddle is that your guys are the good guys and all those who stand against them are the bad guys, and the “liberal media” is in that second column, might there be a message there — even if it is one that is misconstrued and carried to stupid extreme in some cases?

What Republicans really are telling their supporters is that Obama and other Democrats aren’t loyal Americans. Friday, Minnesota Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann was pushing an Obama-is-anti-American line on Hardball when host Chris Matthews pointed out that Obama is a U. S. senator. How many other people in Congress, he wondered, did Bachmann suspect of being anti-American? Bachmann left the door open: “I wish the American media would take a great look at the views of the people in Congress and find out: Are they pro-America or anti-America?” (Bachmann’s opponent has gotten $650,000 in contributions since.)

Sarah Palin says she likes to visit “the pro-America areas of this great nation.” (Numbers wonk Nate Silver analyzes the places Palin goes and notes that they are also the white parts of America.) And McCain surrogate Nancy Pfotenhauer said that McCain has support in “real Virginia” as opposed to the suburban northern areas of the state.

Actually, the McCain campaign is just making explicit something Republicans have been doing for years — denouncing parts of the United States. John Kerry wasn’t just a liberal, he was a “Massachusetts” liberal. Nancy Pelosi has “San Francisco values”. Democrats quite literally never do this. Bush is just a conservative; there’s no special invective in him being a “Texas” conservative. Places like Utah are never going to vote Democratic, but you never hear a Democrat say “Utah” with a sneer.

Emptywheel points out that this ugliness is not going to go away after the election. If you really believe that your country has been taken over by a vote-stealing, terrorist-loving, baby-killing, socialist revolutionary, are you just going to nod peaceably and go along? John Lewis is right: Bad things will come of this.

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In case you think any of this stuff is new, here’s a clip from 1954, where Senator Joseph McCarthy says that legendary newsman Edward R. Murrow “as far back as 20 years ago was engaged in propaganda for Communist causes. Now Mr. Murrow by his own admission was a member of the IWW, the Industrial Workers of the World, a terrorist organization cited as subversive.”

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Keeping a sense of humor, some Obama supporter has spliced the McCain robocall into a scene from “The Matrix”. Neo’s terror is exactly what the call seems to ask for, and he has some very appropriate reactions: “How do you know all this?” and “This is insane.”

American Prospect’s Ezra Klein compares McCain’s guilt-by-association tactics to those the Penguin used when he debated Batman: “Whenever you have seen Batman, who is he with? Criminals!”

Onion News Network goes “Beyond the Facts” to tell us about an 8-year-old girl who sells cookies and lemonade to finance her anti-McCain attack ad. The adorably precocious blond says: “You can make a lie sound like the truth if you say it over and over again.” And ONN’s anchor comments proudly: “I’m sure we will be seeing horrible things from that little girl in the future.”

This video imagines what goes on in McCain strategy sessions.

Hayden Panettiere (the indestructible cheerleader from “Heroes”) makes a tongue-in-cheek McCain commercial (rated R for language). “He’s just like George Bush, except older and with a worse temper.” And this Women For McCain video is equally satirical, but with more bite. “I promise to let the government tell me what to do with my body if I get raped.” This video is related, but it’s not funny at all: a teen-ager who got pregnant after a rape tells Governor Palin that girls in her situation should have a choice.

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With two weeks to go in the campaign, newspapers have started making endorsements. No surprise that the Boston Globe went for Obama, and while the Washington Post was not a sure thing, that was no great shock either.

The interesting endorsements, however, came from newspapers like the Chicago Tribune, which has never before endorsed a Democrat for president. (“Is that chill coming from hell?” comments one reader on the Trib’s web site. “Do I see porcine aviation outside my window??”) The L. A. Times also hasn’t endorsed a Democratic presidential candidate in its long history — until now. The Houston Chronicle and the Salt Lake Tribune are red-state papers that endorsed Bush in 2004 — both are for Obama this year.

Vice presidential candidates rarely make a significant impression on editorial boards, but Interestingly Sarah Palin did — a negative impression. The Salt Lake Tribune’s take is typical: “More than any single factor, McCain’s bad judgment in choosing the inarticulate, insular and ethically challenged Palin disqualifies him for the presidency.” If you just can’t get enough of such sentiments, Daily Kos collects them from nine major newspapers.

The big endorsement news of the weekend wasn’t a newspaper, it was Colin Powell. Sunday on Meet the Press, Powell made a sweeping statement of the reasons to pick Obama over McCain. And it’s way past time somebody made Powell’s point about the Obama’s-a-Muslim smear: What if he were? “We have got to stop polarizing ourselves in this way,” Powell said.

Damn straight. Islam is a religion, and we have freedom of religion in America. Would we blithely accept people saying “He’s a Jew” in the tone of voice that people are saying “Obama’s a Muslim”? What if his middle name sounded Jewish — Menachem or Moshe — rather than Arab like Hussein? Would we tolerate speakers using it as a taunt?

Predictably, Republicans immediately turned Powell’s endorsement into a racial thing. Asked about the endorsement’s impact, George Will went straight into: “It seems to me if we had the tools to measure, we’d find that Barack Obama gets two votes because he’s black for every one he loses because he’s black.” And Rush Limbaugh put it like this: “I am now researching [Powell’s] past endorsements to see if I can find all the inexperienced, very liberal, white candidates he has endorsed.”

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This week we started to get some appropriate perspective on the fraud/suppression problem. John McCain has already laid the groundwork for claiming fraud if he loses Florida. And in the third debate, McCain made the ludicrous claim that vote-registration group ACORN is “now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy.”

Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick examines that claim and concludes: “Large-scale, co-ordinated vote-stealing doesn’t happen.” AP’s Fact Check comes to a similar conclusion: Some ACORN registrations are fake — that always happens when you have a voter registration drive — but “in alleging voter fraud, McCain goes too far.”

Lithwick quotes Barnard College political science professor Lori Minnite, who explains the relative sizes of the voter fraud and voter suppression problems.

From 2002 to 2005 only one person was found guilty of registration
fraud. Twenty people were found guilty of voting while ineligible and five people were found guilty of voting more than once. That’s 26 criminal voters — voters who vote twice, impersonate other people, vote without being a resident — the voters that Republicans warn about. Meanwhile thousands of people are getting turned away at the polls.

Several people, including the Obama campaign, House Judiciary Committee Chair John Conyers, former Justice Department voting-rights official Gerry Hebert, and fired U.S. attorney David Iglesias started pointing out the similarities between the vote-fraud investigation of ACORN and the kind of politicized and politically-timed investigations that were at the root of the U.S. attorneys’ scandal. Igelisias: “Based on what I saw in 2004 and 2006, it’s a scare tactic.”

In related news, the Supreme Court over-ruled a lower court ruling that would have forced Ohio to make available the names of 200,000 newly registered voters (out of 600,000 new voters total) whose registrations in some way differ from other state databases. All 200,000 would have been vulnerable to challenge at the polls, usually because some state database has a typographical error, or one database includes a middle initial and another leaves it out. (One voter with such a database mis-match is McCain’s buddy Joe the Plumber.) How these mismatches might lead to illegitimate votes being cast is a mystery, but forcing 200,000 Ohio voters to cast provisional ballots might lead to post-election litigation that would make Florida 2000 look tame.

Here’s the nub of the issue: If newly registered Ohio voters (most of whom are Democrats) become convinced that they’ll be hassled at the polls and their votes may not count, many may decide not to bother. That’s the whole point. The fewer people vote, the better it is for Republicans.

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Oh, and here’s another robocall: This one from the Ohio Republican Party warning people about the Democrats’ plan to “rig the election.”

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This is what a crowd of 100,000 people looks like. Not in Berlin, in St. Louis.

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538’s Sean Quinn relates a hilarious story about an Obama canvasser in Washington, Pennsylvania. I suspect it’s an urban legend, because I sort of remember hearing something similar during one of Jesse Jackson’s campaigns, but why ruin it?

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If you think a Barack-o-Lantern would just be the coolest thing to have on your porch for Halloween, check out Yes We Carve.

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What if our campaigns were comedy laugh-offs rather than smear-fests? You’ve probably seen clips from this already, but Obama and McCain were each very funny at the white-tie Al Smith Dinner in New York. McCain explained why he refered to Obama as “that one” at the debate, and said that Obama also had a pet name for him: George Bush. And Obama observed that from the doorstep of the Waldorf Astoria (where the dinner was held) “you can see all the way to the Russian Tea Room.”

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Josh Marshall explains one obscure bit of blogger slang: When reporters or pundits bend over backwards to give McCain the benefit of the doubt — like explaining how distressed the honorable McCain must be by the reprehensible tone of his own campaign — they are said to be “on the tire swing“. His post includes video of the original tire-swinging pundit.

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Remember how government spying on overseas phone calls was only aimed at terrorists? Well, maybe not. ABC’s Nightline reports on NSA whistleblowers’ accounts of listening in to ordinary people’s phone sex calls and all sorts of other things. Surprised? That’s one reason why the Founders were so down on the idea of unchecked, unaccountable power: It never turns out well.

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Slate’s Linda Hirshman discusses why we might not want pregnant 17-year-olds to keep their babies.

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Remember the Office of Legal Counsel in the Justice Department? They’re the folks who interpret the law for the rest of the executive branch — the ones who said that the Convention Against Torture doesn’t really mean anything. Now they’re saying that laws that specifically ban groups who get government funding from hiring by religion — they don’t really mean anything either. Every bad thing conservatives say about the Supreme Court is true in spades (and in secret) about the Bush OLC. They make the laws say whatever they want.

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One snowy winter in Chicago, my friends and I realized we were all perversely rooting to break the snowfall record. One guy explained, “Nobody wants to live through the second worst winter in history.” Well, this year the federal government had the biggest budget deficit in history. Enjoy.

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In case you missed it, here’s McCain putting air quotes around “health of the mother” during the third debate.

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If you want some substance in your Sift rather than just politics, I sincerely apologize. I’m getting increasingly obsessed as Election Day closes in, and I hope to recover shortly thereafter. Here’s a helping of substance to tide you over: The Washington Post analyzes what really went wrong with the market meltdown. And Washington Monthly does a one-stop summary of all the major issues. Seriously.

In this week’s Sift:

• The Economy: No Quick Fix. The $700 billion bailout has been passed, but the world’s stock markets are still plummeting.
• This Week in Sarah. Do debates get graded on a curve? And I wonder if she knows that her closing Reagan quote was from his denunciation of Medicare.
• Short Notes. We’re still losing soldiers in two wars. Polling is trickier than it looks. Apologies to Tom Paxton. Identity is not policy. The Bill Ayers innuendo. Using the Bible to argue for same-sex marriage. And more.

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Anyone who was expecting the markets to turn around instantly after the $700 billion financial bailout (or “rescue” or whatever you want to call it) became law … well, that’s not what’s happening. European and Asian markets open before Wall Street, and most lost 6-8% today. (Russia was down 15% when they closed the market early.) The Dow broke below 10,000 — a level it first achieved in 1999.

It’s hard to assess what’s responsible for what, because the bailout is not the only financial news. We found out that the U.S. economy lost more than 150,000 jobs in September, bringing 2008’s job losses to 750,000. Banks are failing in Europe too, and the EU has not come together on a strategy for dealing with it.

In general, I think the mainstream media has done a bad job of explaining how the problems of the banks and the stock market affect ordinary people. So I’ll try. The underlying purpose of a money-and-banking system is to make sure that people cooperate economically. When the system fails, sensible cooperation fails with it. At the the height of the Depression for example, you had coal miners going hungry because the mines couldn’t find buyers for their coal. Meanwhile, farmers were burning corn to stay warm, because they also couldn’t find buyers. Any idiot could see that burning coal and eating corn made more sense. But to act on that insight, the idiot would need capital, and the capital system was broken.

That level of dysfunction is still a long way off. But there have been some worrisome signs pointing in that direction. Unfortunately, you have to learn some financial terminology to talk about those signs. The system by which big organizations borrow money to smooth out their cash flow is called the commercial paper market. It’s been shrinking. Another measure of the problem is the London Interbank Offered Rate (usually known by its acronym LIBOR). LIBOR is the interest rate that banks charge each other for short-term loans. Ordinarily, LIBOR is pretty close to the rate on short-term treasury bills, because banks consider other banks to be almost as credit-worthy as the U.S. government. The gap between LIBOR and the treasury rate is called the T-bill/EuroDollar (TED) spread. It’s usually small. Early in 2007 it was less than half a percent. Recently it’s been close to 4%.

Translation: Banks don’t even trust other banks to pay them back. So why should they trust you or your business?

The upshot is that when, say, Sears decides to build up its inventory for Christmas — that’s harder to do now. And the problem doesn’t just affect businesses. The State of California asked the federal government for $7 billion loan Friday, because (according to its treasurer) California “has been locked out of the credit markets for the past ten days.” Massachusetts made a similar request. If they don’t get it, paychecks may start bouncing. “Payments for teachers’ salaries, nursing homes, law enforcement and every other state-funded service would stop or be significantly delayed,” the California treasurer warned.

Think about that. The problem isn’t that teachers, nurses, and cops are no longer needed, or even that California’s residents are unwilling to pay for their services. (The spending has already been approved by the political process.) It’s just a question of getting the money from here to there. That’s what is locking up. Once such a lock-up starts, it propagates. Suppose you’re a business with state contracts; maybe you supply food to a UCLA cafeteria. You know the state still wants your services, and you know that (ultimately) the state is good for the money. It would make perfect economic sense to borrow to keep paying your workers until the state comes through. But borrow from who? And if you can’t borrow, then what happens to your suppliers, or to the people who were expecting your workers to pay their bills?

That’s what the bailout is about — getting money flowing again. It was never expected to fix the underlying economic problems. Instead, it is supposed to be like the shock paddles that restart a patient’s heart. The shock doesn’t cure whatever was wrong to begin with, but now the patient may live long enough for the doctors to figure something out.

If real economic reasons — overbuilding, competition from other markets, diminishing resources, and so forth — cause stocks to fall, businesses to go broke, and people to lose their jobs … well, that’s capitalism. The business cycle repeats about once a decade, and eventually things turn around. But if stuff is crashing because nobody trusts anybody else … that’s a political problem. And it needs a political solution.

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The Wonk Room has one of those proverbial thousand-word pictures: A graph of the national debt relative to the size of the economy. The graph declines from World War II all the way to the advent of Ronald Reagan, when it shoots up. It declines again during the Clinton years, then shoots up again under Bush. Moral: If you worry about the national debt, you don’t want another Republican administration.

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In trying to understand all the debates about regulation, I’ve been leaning on a sports analogy: In a game like football, you’ve got players, you’ve got referees, and you’ve got a committee that meets in the off-season to figure out if the rules need to change. (Non-fans may not realize this, but the NFL’s rules are subtly different each season.)

To Soviet-style economic planners, all the running, passing, and tackling is secondary. They want the rules committee to decide who’s going to win and the referees to implement those decisions.

Free-market fundamentalists, on the other hand, claim that all we need are players. They argue that players’ salaries ultimately depend on the health of the sport and the fans’ faith in the integrity of the plays, so we should trust the players to make their own rules and referee their own games.

But a sensible person understands that these are three different roles, and they’re all necessary. We need players (businessmen, workers, consumers etc.) to make the plays. We need referees (SEC, FDIC, etc.) to figure out what happened and to enforce the rules. And we need a rules committee (policy makers in the administration and Congress) to look at the results and figure out how the game needs to change. We need all three, and we need to keep each from encroaching on the turf of the others.

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As I explained last week, in the Republican alternate universe the financial crisis was caused by excessive government regulation and intervention: Regulations pushed banks to lend to minorities, and quasi-government companies like Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac went crazy. This explanation distracts attention from things like the rule-change exempting the big investment banks from capital requirements, and the government’s failure to regulate “the shadow banking system” of hedge funds, non-bank mortgage lenders, etc. If Fannie and Freddy were the whole problem, bailing them out would have solved everything. Instead, we’re looking at a similar problem developing around credit card debt and car loans, both of which were also a basis for complicated derivative investment vehicles.

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Money Meltdown is a one-stop site for making sense of the financial crisis.

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Humor never goes broke. Here somebody puts financial institutions into a elimination bracket, like the NCAA basketball tournament. The Joker critiques the bailout. Jon Stewart notices how similar Bush’s bailout speech was to his Iraq speech, and recognizes John McCain as “the only man who can impulsively over-react to something ten days old.” Scott Bateman annotates another Bush economic speech.

Some humor is unintentional. Here is a three-year-old post from the right-wing blog PowerLine, ridiculing Paul Krugman’s crazy notion that there is a housing bubble or that people should worry about it popping: “No matter how well the economy performs, Krugman’s bitter vendetta against the Bush administration requires him to hunt for the black lining in a sky full of silvery clouds.”

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Sarah’s big event this week was her debate with Joe Biden on Thursday. How she did depends on what you expected. Graded on the curve established by her Katie Couric interview, she got an A, maybe even an A+. She continues to look like a student taking an oral exam, but this time she was a good student: She had responses — though not always answers — to every question, she supported her points with relevant “facts”, and she never had long periods where she said nothing or strung words together incoherently.

If you had just dropped in from Mars and knew nothing about the build-up to the debate, though, you would think Biden won. (Polls agree.) He was generally sharper, and he did a better job putting forward his campaign’s central message (that McCain has been wrong about Iraq from the beginning and wants to continue Bush’s policies on the economy, while Obama offers a new direction on both). He also took better advantage of the short-answer format, which the McCain campaign had negotiated to protect Palin from extended follow-up questions. Biden always knew when the format was going to give him the last word on a question, so he closed with strong statements that left Palin no chance to respond. Palin did not appear to be strategizing on that level.

Palin was by far the folksier of the two, peppering her responses with colloquialisms (like doggone and you betcha) and facial expressions (like winks) that you don’t usually see in a national debate. I can’t tell how well this played. Neither could conservative columnist Kathleen Parker, who clearly was turned off by it, but expected less educated people to eat it up. (Her fellow National Review columnist Rich Lowry did eat it up, but he sounds more like he’s reacting to a lap dance than to a political gesture.) I wonder how many people agree with comedian Elon James White (at about the 1:50 mark of Episode 9 of This Week in Blackness):

Why do people like this folksy nonsense? I don’t want my president, I don’t want my vice president, I don’t want anyone who has any power over me being folksy. OK? I don’t need to have a beer with you for me to feel comfortable with you running the government. Personally, if I could see myself having a beer with you, I’m probably not going to vote for you. It’s the opposite of what I want, OK? My friends, I drink with them all the time, I wouldn’t trust them with keys to my apartment.

I grew up in a working-class Midwestern area, where people sound like Larry Bird, use expressions like dumber than a box of rocks, pronounce our nation’s capital Worshington (the way McCain does), and talk about nuke-you-ler weapons (as Palin and Bush do). But I also was taught that you don’t do folksy in public, because people will think that your family is stupid. I don’t know if that taboo is still in force, but I imagine that at least a few older working-class folks were cringing as much as the educated elite were.

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Remember Palin’s debate claim that she pushed Alaska to divest its investments in Sudan? I don’t know why I’m surprised that it’s not true.

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Palin ended the debate with a moving quote from Ronald Reagan, warning that we could end up telling our children’s children “what it once was like in America when men were free.” I imagine such a future often in this Age of Cheney, but do you know what great threat to American freedom Reagan was warning us against? Medicare.

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Palin: “It’s time that normal Joe Six-Pack American is finally represented in the position of vice presidency.”

Wall Street Journal columnist and ex-Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan: “This left me trying to imagine Abe Lincoln saying he represents ‘backwoods types’.”

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The Palins released their 2007 tax returns Friday. Mr. and Mrs. Six-Pack made $166,000 in 2007 and gave a whopping $2,500 of it to charity. And they didn’t declare the $17,000 in travel per diem the State of Alaska pays her when she works at home.

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Palin is suffering collateral damage from the McCain/Letterman feud. And Tina Fey is still doing a Palin impression for SNL. I especially love the part where she brings out a flute for the talent portion of the debate.

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Not only can’t reporters talk to Palin, they can’t talk to people at Palin rallies either.

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The Troopergate report is scheduled to come out Friday. The McCain campaign, having lost at all lower levels, is going to the Alaska Supreme Court to block it. If the federal Supremes wind up getting involved, it will be time to talk about Bush v. Gore again. Meanwhile, some Palin associates have realized that subpoenas actually mean something and have decided to testify. The First Dude, however, is still defying the law.

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In September, 25 coalition soldiers (all Americans) died in Iraq, and 37 in Afghanistan. American military deaths in Iraq are fairly stable: the last few months have seen 25, 23, 13, 29, and 19 after a spike to 52 in April. After the spring of 2007, when deaths were regularly over 100 a month, the American people seem not to notice 20-some deaths. The 37 in Afghanistan (equally invisible) is down from an all-time monthly high of 46 in August. After nine months of 2008, we’ve already lost more coalition troops in Afghanistan (236) than we did in all of 2007 (232).

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If you obsess over the daily or weekly fluctuations in the polls the way I do, this is a calm-down message: Take a look at the demographic data at the very end of the 9/29 ABC/WashingtonPost poll. What you’ll see is that the demographics of the sample fluctuate in totally implausible ways. So, for example, the number of married people in the sample has been trending steadily upwards, from 53% in mid-June to 64% in the latest poll. It was 60% just a week before. Did 4% of registered voters really get married in the last week of September? (Were you invited? I wasn’t.) The percentage of white people was also up 5% that week. (So take a bow, all of you who have been phone-banking to convince people that they’re white.) Maybe the week-to-week support for Obama or McCain fluctuates for similar reasons, whatever they are.

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Correction from two weeks ago: I was right that Arlo Guthrie sang “I’m Changing My Name to Chrysler” but Tom Paxton wrote it. To make up for this mistake, here’s Paxton’s Vietnam classic “Lyndon Johnson Told the Nation” which he updated in 2007 to “George W Told the Nation“. You know, a medley of Paxton songs could make a pretty good history of the last 40 years.

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Matt Yglesias notices something that’s been bugging me about McCain: He consistently substitutes identity for policy. For example, he says: “I know the veterans. I know them well. And I know that they know that I’ll take care of them.” Does that mean his policies back that up? No. Ditto for Palin and families with special needs. Is she pushing some particular program or policy change that will benefit those families? Of course not.

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The Right keeps saying that the media won’t look into Obama’s relationship to ex-Weatherman Bill Ayers. Well, the New York Times just did, and found nothing remarkable. Obama and Ayers were politically active Democrats in Chicago, so they ran into each other from time to time. A thousand words later, the story ends.

Here’s why baseless innuendo is such a popular political tactic: If there’s no story to cover, you can usually count on the media not to cover it. (We never hear about all the reporters who investigate something and come back to their editors with nothing.) Then you can rail about how the biased media is hiding some horrible scandal. So I guess we should be grateful that this time the Times wasted a thousand words to verify that there really is nothing to say.

To repeat a point I’ve made before, the way you tell a real issue from a fake one is to ask: “What is the accusation?” Look at Troopergate, for example. There, the accusation is simple: Sarah Palin fired Alaska’s public safety commissioner because he wouldn’t help her pursue her personal vendetta against her sister’s ex-husband. Respectable people are willing to stand up in public and make that charge, which has a true-or-false answer. But in the Obama/Ayers or Obama/Rezko attacks, you’ll search in vain for anything so direct. Obama has “connections” or “associations” that are “suspicious”. It never gets any more specific than that.

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Rolling Stone has a devastating retelling of John McCain’s life story. The L.A. Times also takes a look behind the myth. Apparently McCain destroyed more American planes than enemy planes.

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I’ve been warning for months that McCain’s budget ideas only work if “entitlement reform” means massive cuts in programs like Medicare. The Wall Street Journal is starting to agree with me.

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If you’re not watching Rachel Maddow’s new show on MSNBC, you’re missing out.

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Here’s how you use the Bible in an ad for same-sex marriage.

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33 pastors participated in a civil disobedience action sponsored by the conservative Alliance Defense Fund: In defiance of a 1954 law about the tax-exemption of churches, the pastors endorsed candidates from the pulpit on September 28. I can’t verify that they all endorsed McCain, but that seems to be the trend.

In this week’s Sift:

• The Bailout: Kwai Me a River. Here’s how you know that you’ve made it into the ruling class: Your privileges are so intertwined with the workings of society that any threat to you is a threat to everybody.
• This Week in Sarah. Keeping up with Sarah Palin is like watching the soaps or the OJ trial. I’m not proud of it, but I can’t stop.
• Short Notes. Donald Luskin’s bad timing. Pakistan will shoot at us to defend the Taliban. A few conservatives are going for Obama. And an interesting article on race.

While I’ve been trying to figure out the proposed bailout of our financial system, I’ve been thinking about a bridge. No, not the Brooklyn Bridge. Not the Bridge to Nowhere. Not the newly re-opened bridge in Minneapolis, the one that collapsed last summer. Not even the symbolic Bridge to the 21st Century that President Clinton promised us in 1996. (Which is still unbuilt, as best I can tell. We remain on the ever-more-barren shores of the Age of Reagan, the promise of a new era still off in the mists somewhere.)

Instead, I keep thinking about the Bridge on the River Kwai. If it’s been a while since you’ve seen that classic film, the conflict begins when the Japanese try to make British POWs build a bridge for the strategically important Burma Railway. The ranking British officer (Alec Guinness) takes a principled, idealistic stand: the Geneva Conventions forbid forcing captured officers to do manual labor. In other words: Enslave the enlisted men all you want, but if officers have to get sweaty, the laws of war lose all their meaning and civilization collapses.

You see, that’s what it really means to belong to the ruling class: Your position and privilege is so interconnected with the machinery of society that any threat to one is a threat to the other. That’s what’s happening now. It’s unfortunate — but not an emergency — if an economic downturn causes middle-class people lose their jobs and homes, or if nobody can pay for little Susie’s liver transplant. But if Merrill Lynch or Fannie Mae or AIG are about to go bankrupt, on the other hand, civilization is at stake. Money is no object. The government has to step in or there will be cannibalism in the streets by Thursday evening.

It would be sad enough if this were just Wall Street propaganda. But the really sad thing is that it’s very close to being true.

Great Depression 101. To see why it’s nearly true, you need to understand something simple but profound about economics. When people in a primitive economy save, they save some physical thing. Their savings is a pile of grain or firewood or some other good that will be consumed in the future rather than now. But in a modern economy, people save money, and no actual goods are put aside for the future. So, for example, when the workers at an auto plant save, no cars are set aside. Instead, the banking system loans the workers’ money to people who want cars, so that all the cars produced now can be sold now. In a modern economy, production and consumption are always equal — no goods are “saved”.

That happens on a global scale, and the banking system serves as a big match-maker between producers and consumers. When it works, which it does most of the time, it allows production and consumption to match up at a high level. That’s what we mean by prosperity.

But the system is vulnerable to what we used to call a panic (until Herbert Hoover decided that a depression sounded less scary). In a panic, everybody’s net worth is changing so fast that nobody is sure who can be trusted to pay. So banks stop lending, consumers stop consuming, and everybody tries to save at the same time. In a primitive economy, they really could all cut consumption and save at the same time: Grain and firewood would pile up all over until folks realized there was plenty. But the modern economy doesn’t have any capacity to stockpile actual goods, and services can’t be stored at all. So instead, we have to close factories and lay off workers. Businesses go bankrupt and their debts don’t get paid. And that just makes the problem worse. It creates more fear and more uncertainty about who can be trusted to pay.

In a panic, in other words, production and consumption can’t match up at a high level, so they have to match up at a lower level. And that process of moving downward produces more panic. Production keeps dropping in a vain attempt to catch up with dropping consumption.

OK, that’s the Great Depression in a nutshell. Since then, we’ve actually become more dependent on the banking system. Now we have just-in-time production, where goods move freely because businesses all have lines of credit that give their suppliers confidence. What do you think would happen if all those lines of credit suddenly vanished? Well, at every step between the iron mine in Minnesota and your local car lot, each business would have to wait for a check to clear before they delivered the goods. It could work — it used to work — but the transition would be really ugly.

The Bailout Plan. That’s why economists are just about unanimous is saying that the government has to do something when a panic starts in the financial markets. Now we get to what the government should do.

You can think of a panic like a big-city fire: the Chicago fire of 1871 or the London fire of 1666, say. The response has to come on two different time-scales. First you have to put the fire out as fast as you can. And then you need a thoughtful process of rebuilding, where you figure out what went wrong and how it’s not going to happen again.

This is when it would be really nice to have faith in our government. If we trusted that our government was both competent and had our best interests at heart, then we could give it vast temporary authority to put out the fire, trusting that the more thoughtful rebuild-and-reform process would happen later.

The bailout plan that Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke have put together looks just like that. It gives the Treasury Secretary $700 billion to handle as he sees fit. The bill proposed to Congress authorizes him to purchase mortgage-backed securities from any financial institution headquartered in the U.S. at any price he thinks appropriate. It exempts him from any rules about who he can hire or what duties he can contract out. And it says that his actions can’t be reviewed “by any court of law or any administrative agency”.

As I read it, Paulson could hire some relatives to perform unspecified duties, pay them the $700 billion, and close up shop. (Probably he could be tried for malfeasance and sent to jail or something, but I don’t see how we’d get the money back.) Short of that, he could pay exorbitant prices for worthless securities, essentially piping money straight from the taxpayer to Citicorp or Morgan Stanley. And then he could take a high-paying job at Citicorp or Morgan Stanley. It would all be perfectly legal.

And when will we get around to that thoughtful restructuring of the financial system, so that this never happens again? The bill doesn’t say.

I hate to be this cynical, especially when I understand the importance of doing something quickly. But I saw what happened to the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) that Congress passed quickly after 9/11. The Bush administration read it as broadly as possible, as an authorization to attack any country, tap any phone, and lock up anyone it cared to designate as an enemy combatant for as long as it thought necessary. And I saw how the administration low-balled the costs of the Iraq War and kept coming back for more money after we were committed.

What the Blogs Are Saying. A lot of people have been writing about the plan. One of the best analyses I’ve seen is by investment banker Yves Smith on a blog called Naked Capitalism. She fleshes out a point that Nouriel Roubini has been making for almost two years: There’s a difference between a liquidity crisis and an insolvency crisis. (Quick summary: If you’re driving a Mercedes and have no cash for the tolls, you’re in a liquidity crisis. But if the balance on your car loan is more than the Mercedes is worth, you’re in an insolvency crisis.) The government can end a liquidity crisis just by guaranteeing loans, so that firms have time to sell off their assets at reasonable prices. But the only way to end an insolvency crisis is for somebody to eat the loss. Is that what the $700 billion is for? Nobody will say.

Paul Krugman makes a similar point. Daily Kos’ New Deal Democrat pulls together a bunch of commentary. The best sound bite is by Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont: “If a company is too big to fail, it is too big to exist. We need to determine which companies fall in this category and then break them up.”

Politics. The most worrisome question is whether the administration will play politics with this. The plan as written could be a very bad deal for the taxpayer. (I have to say could, because Paulson could also exercise all that power responsibly. Who knows?) We could do better. For example, the government could authorize a detailed audit of the major financial institutions, force them to mark down their mortgage-backed securities to a reasonable value, and then provide capital to bring the firms back to solvency in exchange for stock. If the economy recovers and the institutions prosper, the government could get the taxpayers’ money back by selling the stock, and maybe even make a profit.

But if Congress balks at this bad deal, it risks looking like a dysfunctional institution that can’t take the action we need to save our economy from meltdown. If it puts together a better deal, Bush might threaten a veto and blame Democrats for the impasse. That sounds ridiculous, but it’s exactly what happens every time Congress tries to put conditions on approving more money for the Iraq War.

Down the line, if the Democrats buckle and approve the deal, the Obama administration (insh’allah) could be saddled with a monstrous debt not of its own making. “See,” the Republicans will say when Obama tries to exercise some fiscal responsibility, “I told you Obama would raise taxes.” The payout of hundreds of billions to investment bankers could trigger a fiscal crisis that (Republicans would claim) can only be solved by “entitlement reform” — cuts in Social Security and Medicare.

The public needs to understand that this crisis — just like Reagan’s savings-and-loan disaster —  is the natural result of the conservative philosophy of big business and small government. (Devilstower lays out the history, including the role played by McCain adviser Phil Gramm.) Conservatives have been running against government regulation for decades and arguing that business needs to be free to innovate and be creative. Well, there’s a limit to the virtue of deregulation. We’re in this mess because financial firms innovated and used their creativity, and government stood by and watched.

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Arlo Guthrie’s response to the Chrysler bail-out — “I’m Changing My Name to Chrysler“– is relevant again. The same basic idea is at BuyMyShitPile.com. And Nathan Kottke cc’s the NYT on his letter to Secretary Paulson: “My student loans are too big and it is hurting the economy. Can I have a bailout, please? I need $92,000. Thanks.”

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17% of Americans still approve of the way President Bush has handled the economy. Who are these people? Are they a danger to themselves or others?

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McCain thinks the deregulation of financial markets is a model for how to handle health care:

Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation.

Corporate innovation without government regulation — what could possibly go wrong with that?

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Sarah Palin has become like the OJ trial. I complain about how much attention she gets even as I keep watching it. And like every good soap opera, each day brings just enough new information to keep me tuning in. Here’s a summary.

The big news this week was that Todd Palin, under his powers as First Dude, has decided that he can ignore a subpoena from the Alaska legislature. This violates some little-known provision known as “the law”, so the legislature could charge him with contempt ($500 fine and six months in jail). But they don’t come back into session until after the election, so who cares?

Some bloggers have suggested that the legislative council that launched the investigation (unanimously, 14-0, with ten Republican votes) should go ahead and find him in contempt, and argue in court that when the legislature delegated subpoena power it also delegated the power to enforce a subpoena. (I can think of a state trooper who might be willing to make the arrest.) In other words, if the McCain campaign is going to court with novel legal theories to shut down this investigation, why not strike back with novel legal theories to keep it going?

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Supposedly Troopergate isn’t about Palin’s ex-brother-in-law at all. But when Sean Hannity brought up the investigation, she started talking about what a bad guy her ex-brother-in-law is. So, this isn’t about him, but it’s justified because he’s a jerk.

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As I predicted two weeks ago, there’s a balancing reaction to the evangelicals’ excitement about Palin, and she’s starting to hurt the ticket. Her approval numbers are plunging.

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The Anchorage Daily News is annoyed that big-city lawyers from the McCain campaign are running their state government.

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She lied about not using the teleprompter at the convention.

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She lied about consulting the kids before accepting the nomination.

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James Fallows on her interview with Charles Gibson:

What Sarah Palin revealed is that she has not been interested enough in world affairs to become minimally conversant with the issues. Many people in our great land might have difficulty defining the “Bush Doctrine” exactly. But not to recognize the name, as obviously was the case for Palin, indicates not a failure of last-minute cramming but a lack of attention to any foreign-policy discussion whatsoever in the last seven years.

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One of the reasons people give for supporting Palin is that “she’s like me”. Salon has a story that points out the fallacy of thinking that because she’s like you, she’ll do good things for you: As mayor of Wasilla, she did a bad job taking care of Lake Lucille, the lake her own home sits next to. So until you see her endorse an actual policy, don’t jump to the conclusion that she’d be good for women or middle-class people or parents of special-needs kids or families with pregnant teen-agers or anybody else.

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The Bad Timing Award for 2008 goes to McCain adviser Donald Luskin. A week ago Sunday, the day before Lehman’s bankruptcy knocked over a series of financial dominoes, Lusking had a column “Quit Doling Out that Bad-Economy Line” in the Washington Post.

Things today just aren’t that bad. Sure, there are trouble spots in the economy, as the government takeover of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and jitters about Wall Street firm Lehman Brothers, amply demonstrate. And unemployment figures are up a bit, too. None of this, however, is cause for depression — or exaggerated Depression comparisons.

“Jitters” — I love that.

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Boyd Reed wrote a very thoughtful article on race. He begins with an experience from his days as a black high school chess player: His East St. Louis high school team was playing at a high school in a well-to-do white suburb, and when he wandered away from the tournament area (as I used to do at chess tournaments) he was stopped by a white security guard, who marched him to the office and began calling the police. (That never happened to me.)

OK, I’m sure a lot of African-Americans have a story like that, but it’s interesting where Reed goes from there: He thinks about how that one incident shaped his stereotype of whites. And he relates this insight about stereotypes to his experiences canvassing for Obama.

many people are experiencing a fundamental disconnect when they try to process Barack Obama. That disconnect is related to the images they see on the news, in movies, on ESPN, and on the streets where they live.  I think Joe and Jane Six-Pack are suspicious of Obama – despite the fine-tooth comb that’s been taken to his life – because they haven’t ever really *seen* anyone like him.

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Some people are starting to see the light. For Elizabeth Drew, author of the glowing 2002 biography Citizen McCain, McCain’s caving in to Bush on torture was the final straw:

This was further evidence that the former free-spirited, supposedly principled, maverick was morphing into just another panderer – to Bush and the Republican Party’s conservative base.

For self-described conservative editor Wick Allison, Obama is “thoughtful, pragmatic, and prudent” while “today it is so-called conservatives who are cemented to political programs when they clearly don’t work.” (His example: tax cuts.) And he is obviously nostalgic for the days when conservatives knew what they were trying to conserve: “It gives me comfort just to think that after eight years of George W.
Bush we will have a president who has actually read the Federalist
Papers.”

Retiring Republican Congressman Wayne Gilchrest agrees.

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ShadowSD collects everything you need to know about Obama.

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So the Taliban can attack Afghanistan from bases in Pakistan — and if we chase them back there, the Pakistani army will shoot at us.

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What kind of a wacko would write this? Oh, right, that was me.

Without spending cuts (which both candidates promise but neither has specified) both plans increase the deficit: Obama by $3.4 trillion and McCain by $5.0 trillion over ten years.