The upside of Sarah Palin

is that she's certain to boost the ratings of 30 Rock this season.

Outside of The McLaughlin Group, it's the only program on television worth watching.

Bye-bye!

town hall

So I listened to the debate last night over the radio rather than watch it. Interesting difference, because to my mind the result of the whole thing was pretty much a-pox-on-both-their-houses. Open up the papers this morning, though, and everybody's calling it for Obama. Very like Kennedy/Nixon in 1960.

Palin's greatest hits

Heading into the VP debate tomorrow night, this makes for a nice recapitulation:



(Of course, she won't end up doing all that badly in the debate. There'll be no opportunity for cross-talk or follow-up, and each question will get a wafer-thin 90-second-soundbyte of an answer. She'll platitude her way through the questions she can't answer, and steer everything else into attacks on Obama/Biden which will leave Joe [a] picking up too many pieces, and [b] unable to fire back at her, as doing so would make him look mean.)


Well. My real reason for chipping in with this post tonight is Couric's question: can you name a non-Roe Supreme Court ruling you disagree with? And Palin can't think of any - good grief. How about the ruling that Dick Cheney gets to keep secret all his deliberations in forming our national energy policy? How about Bush v. Gore?

Of course Mrs. Palin wouldn't take my side on those. So, how about Hamdan v. Rumsfeld? That's the one where our nine largely conservative justices came back saying: You know, Bush Administration, if you're going to snatch up people all around the world, torture them, and incarcerate them for the rest of their lives, then you need to do a little pro forma here. Set up a kangaroo court, announce the reason you're holding these guys, and give 'em an opportunity to claim innocence before routing them back into Bagram, Camp Delta, or one of your east-European CIA black sites. Please? Just for appearances. You're making us look bad.

Now: you know Sarah Palin opposes that. Or she would, if she had heard of it.

But she hasn't heard of it. It's in none of the magazines she reads (you know - all of them?).

--Well then, how about she just names the freaking Dred Scott case? Having completed a middle school education, this Supreme Court decision should ring a bell for her, yes?

And it fits, because what Palin did say was (to paraphrase): "in Ameerica's lahng history, ah, er, you knoohw, Katie, there arr lahts of tiymes peeple might disagreee with the coourt - and the tiymes Iye maeght disagree with 'em arr the tiymes they decided somethin' thaat it's the staeetes' rayght too deecide."

Like - the Dred Scott case. Wherein the Supreme Court argued against the right of the state (territory) of Illinois to emancipate a slave within its borders - because that would undercut the slaveowner's property rights. Talk about judicial activism - and violation of states' rights! This is exactly the sort of thing you would think Sarah Palin should oppose.

But who knows? Maybe she's pro-slavery.

She is a big Bible booster, after all.

Swing states swung?

A post-first-debate Quinnipiac poll released today:

Florida:
Obama: 51
McCain: 43

Pennsylvania:
Obama: 54
McCain: 39

Ohio:
Obama: 50
McCain: 42

But here's the clincher. Peter Brown, the poll's Assistant Director:

"It is difficult to find a modern competitive presidential race that has swung ... so quickly and so sharply this late in the campaign ... McCain has his work cut out for him if he is to win the presidency and there does not appear to be a role model for such a comeback in the last half century."

(...With the usual caveats that the election's a month away, other polls' results vary, and there could always be another 9-11. You never know.)


Post-script: Don't you think it's interesting that only now, as the polls seem to be giving a solid indication that Obama may win this thing with or without their help, that only today does Bill Clinton hit a campaign stop and make a convincing performance on Barack's behalf?

(Oh, no, I would never imply the Clintons would prefer he just lose. But now that he isn't, they sure seem more interested in getting on his good side.)

Post-post-script: Thanks to Jim to directing me to this bit of silliness.

Doomed to repeat

So... five years ago we decided to ignore what we as a nation had learned from painful experience, and repeat our involvement in Vietnam.

This year, we've decided to go in for a redo of the Great Depression.

Next year - it's the Civil War all over again, baby.

How long till this is happening in Cedar Rapids?

Or wherever.

CEO murdered by mob of sacked Indian workers.

What goes up

Well. McCain does seem to be slipping this week. He's had a number of odd gaffes - "the fundamentals of our economy are sound" is just the start of it. Somehow (ie, raw confusion?) he plans as president to refuse meeting with the Prime Minister of Spain. And he was against government regulation of our financial markets before he was for it. He was against bailing out AIG before he was for it. And this week we hear he's opposed to excessive CEO pay, which he (a) would have no control over as president, and (b) he's long benefited from in the form of campaign contributions. But in an effort to stay consistent on this anti-corporate-fat-cats issue he just discovered Monday afternoon, McCain has banished one of his chief campaign surrogates, former Hewlett-Packard CEO and $42-million-golden-parachute-recipient Carly Fiorina. To be fair, however, he didn't ban Ms. Fiona for being a "corporate fat cat", but rather for sticking her foot in her mouth on MSNBC Tuesday and saying neither Palin nor McCain is competent to perform the kind of bang-up management job she herself did at HP (ie, its stock value halved during the time she served there).

[And good riddance. Fiorina was a formidable talking head - she quite beat the crap out of Obama's surrogate Claire McCaskill last Sunday on This Week.]

And so as McCain flounders around looking for a public way to address the financial crisis, Obama is doing a reasonable-to-mediocre job of the same - which in relative terms isn't half bad. In all, he seems to be effecting a very calm, cool reovertaking of McCain from behind this week, as the Palin bubble deflates rather than bursts.

To be sure, Obama isn't delivering the kind of bash-'em-upside-the-head-with-violent-rhetoric sort of thing that would make me personally happy. But then again he would never have gotten where he is in life if he had anything like my personal rhetorical preferences (bombast and semicolons).

The first debate's a week from tomorrow. We'll have learned a lot more about how things are settling in by then.